In February 1980 Donald Davie published two poems side by side in the San Francisco journal Inquiry and coupled them beneath the caption, ‘English in Ireland’. The caption is subtle, because it refers, I think, to language as well as to people and history. The collocation of the two poems, one written eight years later than the other, marks and defines a significant phase in the English poet's dialogue with Ireland, its people, landscape, historical remains, literary traditions, its tragic politics. This dialogue which has, over twenty-five years, been mostly tender and contemplative, has once or twice taken on the violence and rudeness of a lover's quarrel. The first of these two poems, ‘1969, Ireland of the Bombers’, is the most dramatic of these collisions. I took personal offence when it appeared in the Irish Times of that year, and as I am curiously implicated in the genesis of the second, reconciliatory poem, ‘1977, Near Mullingar’, I think I may explain some of the passion and complexity that lies behind both literary utterances. To understand that psychological relation is to glimpse not only the Irish dimension to the poet's consciousness but to apprehend something of how he encounters experience.

To begin with, the title of the first poem travesties a self-gratulatory Irish cliché—‘Ireland of the Welcomes’; the offences that follow in the body of the text are elaborate and subtle in ways that only an Irish reader—especially an Irish reader of Davie—could properly appreciate:

Blackbird of Derrycairn,
Sing no more for me.
Wet fields of Dromahair
No more I’ll see
Nor, Manorhamilton,
Break through a hazelwood
In tufted Leitrim ever.
That’s gone for good.
Dublin, young manhood's ground,
Never more I’ll roam;
Stiffly I call my strayed
Affections home.
Blackbird of Derrycairn,
Irish song, farewell.
Bombed innocents could not
Sing half so well.
Green Leinster, do not weep
For me, since we must part;
Dry eyes I pledge to thee
And empty heart.

The poem is in a traditional Irish genre, the lament for exile, whose popular ballad form is echoed in the line ‘Never more I’ll roam’ which could be lifted from one of a hundred songs of emigration. Its more venerable ancestor, the song of self-exile, goes back to early Irish Christian poetry, specifically in this case I suspect to St Columba's lament on leaving Ireland for Iona:

There is a grey eye
That will look back on Erin:
It shall never see again
The men and women of Erin.
I stretch my glance across the brine
From firm oaken planks:
Many are the tears of my soft grey eye
As I look back upon Erin.(1)

Every phrase and cadence of Davie's poem is witness to his strenuous involvement in the Irish scene during his residence in Dublin during the 1950s. Its metre is adapted with great ease from an Irish bardic form, and it employs tactfully a range of sonal devices which the poet probably derived in the first place from Austin Clarke, and which are far more operative in Davie's middle and later poetry than critics seem to acknowledge. Though in the present instance there are not strictly six syllables in the first and third lines of each stanza, and five in the second and fourth, that pattern is sufficiently established in the first quatrain and approximated in the others to assure an educated Irish eye that the metre he is using is based on an Irish syllabic model.² This form employs assonance as an acceptable alternative to rhyme—Derrycairn/Dromahair—and involves a pattern of internal assonantal echoes with the end rhymes: ‘me’ / ‘fields’ / ‘see’. The form, the rhythm, the conventional epithets ‘tufted Leitrim’, ‘Green Leinster’—with their personalizing of the Irish landscape (‘the pleasant land of Ireland’) are adapted with apparent innocence from Gaelic poetry, and then coldly thrown into counterpoint against the particularity of phrase and sudden enjambment which ram home the reproach at the ends of stanzas three and four. It is cruel strategy and it does not end there.

The injury is compounded by the invocation of the ‘Blackbird of Derrycairn’, one of Austin Clarke's most splendid poems, a radiant version of the medieval nature lyric from that same body of Irish poetry, The Colloquy of the Old Men, from which Yeats quarried ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, and which dramatises the disputes between the old pagan values represented by Oisin and those of the new religion represented by St Patrick. A glance at Clarke's first stanza establishes a sense of Davie's designs, prosodic and satirical:

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

Donald Davie was the first—he may still be the only—non-Irish poet to recognize and benefit from Clarke's astonishing metrical inventiveness, his adaptation of Gaelic metres to English verse. The melodic variety of that single stanza involves not just the subtle assonance of ‘brighter’ and ‘nightfall’ and the reversed echo of ‘bough top’ with ‘cup now’ but a whole web of delicate correspondences: ‘whistling’ with ‘listen’, ‘shadow’ with ‘matins’ with ‘Patric’, the serpentine progress of the diphthong in ‘bough’—like a Celtic design—down to ‘hour-bell’ and ‘sound’ in the last line. This lyric appeared in Clarke's Ancient Lights which Davie reviewed in Irish Writing of Spring 1956 when he was a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, his ‘young manhood's ground’.

His review, regarded since as a watershed in the revival of Clarke's reputation, shows an acute awareness of what Clarke was about—despite Davie's lack of Irish. He draws attention to Clarke's ‘use of a device traditional in poetry in Irish, of interlacing assonance and—a corollary of that—rhyming off the beat’ which in Clarke ‘changes the pivotal movement of the lyric stanza’ and which, if the poems were better known, ‘could be a momentous innovation in the whole tradition of Anglo-American verse’. I hope to show that these prosodic patterns begin to enter Davie's own poetry—with interesting selectivity—in A Winter Talent published the following year, and eventually to show how the English poet gleefully out Clarkes Clarke in that hilarious tour de force, ‘Commodore Barry’. For the moment, however, I cite the review to establish how well the poet knew the literary coin he was dealing in when he issued ‘Ireland of the Bombers’.

The poem seemed to raise so many other interesting questions involving the relation between man and poet, poet and subject matter, technique and literary convention. How serious was the vow and the interdict? Could an urbane, modern English poet assume the voice and idiom of a traditional Irish satirist to indict a whole people? Perhaps there was a persona somewhere at work? After all were not the universities everywhere teaching that a poem was really an arrangement of words on a page? Could the poet who had written so vividly and affectionately of Glendalough, the Corrib, the waterfall at Powerscourt, Sutton Strand, the Boyne, and of Meath in May actually forswear—even figuratively—these places which had once so animated his vision and language? If so what were the possible consequences to his own sensibility? And surely the poet who had written that chilling and prophetic poem on the Orange Parade in ‘Belfast on a Sunday Afternoon’ must understand better than most those ‘passionate intensities’ which his own ancestors, the English Protestant dissenters had helped to build into Irish history over the centuries. Through all of my ruminations, however, there was a nagging acknowledgment that this particular English poet had, uniquely, somehow earned the right to talk to us like that. That his emotions were deeply engaged and that above all his poem—so curiously wrought of intimacy and rejection—was a great deal more than an arrangement of words on a page. (If I seem to be making too much of my own feelings—which may not after all be very representative—it should be recalled that Irish people north and south were just then sick with anguish at the escalating atrocity on both sides of what seemed an insoluble conflict and of the simplistic judgments of many outside commentators. Poetic reproofs from Englishmen in California were not especially appreciated.) However, when I became Associate Director of the Yeats International Summer School at Sligo six years later, my first invitation was to Donald Davie to lecture there the following August. I don’t recall in what terms I referred to his poem, but it was that reference which persuaded him to come. And there was, of course, no doubt about the seriousness of his former interdict, nor indeed, I suspect, about the relief with which he absolved himself from it. The second poem records his feelings as he returns from Sligo across the same landscape that he had laid ‘Under this private ban’.

The poetic convention is the same as in the former poem, but there is a wry nod to Yeats's Jack the Journeyman—and perhaps to all those tinkers with their tin cans and soldering irons that he had met in Synge, or in the flesh on the Irish roads of the fifties—in the poet's self-image:

I thought: a travelling man
                    Will come and go, here now
And gone tomorrow, and
                    He cannot keep a vow.
Forworn, coming to Sligo
                              To mend my battered past,
I thought: it must be true;
                    The soldier cannot last.

The stanzas that follow are startling for a writer who has been so unequivocal in his hatred of violence, and in his suspicion of those who had used art to condone or glamorise atrocity:

But, dear friends, I could weep.
                    Is it the bombs have made
Old lesions knit, old chills
                    Warm, and old ghosts be laid?
Atrociously, such changes
                    The winning gentleness
Gentler still, and even
                    The poets not so reckless.

The interpenetration of technique and feeling is just as effective as when he wanted to register the force of indignation. We note how much the mood of questioning compunction is assisted by the whisper of those vowel correspondences, ‘dear’ / ‘weep’ / ‘lesions’, settling on the emotive words in the first stanza; and the truly ‘articulate energy’ of the quiet verbs through the last three lines. Nor is there doubt of the balance and tension achieved in the next stanza between that powerful, two-edged adverb ‘atrociously’ as it resonates against ‘gentleness’ and ‘reckless’—a perfect Clarkean chime with assonance augmented by consonance off the beat.³

The final stanzas provide another kind of balance. What looks at first glance merely an unfavourable, and perhaps conciliatory, comparison of England with Ireland—which of course it is primarily—may perhaps be more deeply interpreted as an act of faith in the heart's affections amid the very pessimism through which Davie in his public voice interprets the contemporary world. Meeting old friends has ‘mended’ his battered ‘past’. Ireland of the Bombers has become—if the phrase is bearable—Ireland of the Welcomes. Again the Yeats connection provides a comparison and a contrast. The contempt that Yeats felt for ‘this foul world in its decline and fall’ is shared in part by Davie; but the English poet has no apocalyptic system of destruction and renewal to console him; nor would he have any truck, I suspect, with an impersonal, and to that extent irresponsible, posture of ‘tragic joy’ at the ‘irrational streams of blood’ or the mire of cultural barbarism that threaten reason and order. It is with dismay that the second poem acknowledges that violence and atrocity can and do intensify love and friendship, perhaps by bringing out the tears of things—‘dear friends, I could weep’. It is a distraught recognition of something that his Dissenting Christianity may have implanted in him at an earlier time—that out of evil can come good, atrociously. That amid the clashing armies on the darkling plain we can still, as communities as well as individuals, be ‘true / To one another’. Or so it seems for the two climactic stanzas before the scope widens and the mood resolves itself in that poised ambiguity of the final line.

I have begun with these two poems, and written in such a personal—and what may well appear self-indulgent—way because I believe that the poems and their motivations exemplify so many features of Donald Davie's stance and sensibility. The first is quite simply that he means what he says; if he is occasionally obscure he is never evasive. I think he writes to change men's hearts. The second is that he is seldom for long a mere tourist in his adopted cultures—a ‘travelling man’ is the very antithesis of a tourist. He has the curiosity, the concern and at times the necessary bad manners to get involved, to test cultural difference, to savour atmosphere, to criticise and react and accuse. Thus his remarkable ‘sense of place’ is seldom merely descriptive, though on the surface it sometimes seems so, as in the grossly deceptive ‘The Wearing of the Green’ where I certainly would have been lost without the political hint in the title. I am sure this holds true for his North American poems, lyrical, narrative and historical as well as for his Irish ones. The third is the protean suppleness with which his technique adjusts and changes to meet different thematic and emotional challenges.

The final feature is his stubborn fight for reason and civilisation against certain forms of violence and mass passions—what his urbane Augustans would have derided as Enthusiasm. He identifies this Dionysiac adversary more readily, and deals with it more assuredly, in its North American manifestations,

a mass public, swayed by it knows not what, capable of responding only to the grosser stimuli, at once fickle and predictable, exacting as only the undirected can be. … And the 1960s, that hideous decade, showed what was involved: the arts of literature were enlisted on the side of all that was insane and suicidal, without order and without proportion. Charles Olson in his last years was appalled by the stoned and bombed out zombies who flocked to hear him read and lecture.⁴

Davie's integrity, rigour and strength is never more manifest than in his defiance and denunciation of this cultural rabble, just as his tact and magnanimity is never more eloquent than in his superb poem on Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy.

With Ireland it was different. Dublin was a peaceful and relaxed city in the fifties and Davie loved it. The young poet was sufficiently exercised trying to introduce modern critical methods to his students and to the far less educable ranks of Dublin's critical literati. Indeed it could be said that Denis Donoghue at University College, Dublin, and Donald Davie at Trinity, in that decade dragged Irish literary study into the modern age. I recall the unexampled spectacle of undergraduates, myself among them, moving back and forth between the universities as one or other of these two happened to be lecturing. Sectarian tension in Northern Ireland seemed comfortably below the surface, though it emerged sporadically as a theme in the work of Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rogers. But it was in his Dublin years that his first volume, Brides of Reason, was published. And in the midst of that elegant, classical book, this Dionysian force erupts in a poem deceptively titled ‘Belfast on a Sunday Afternoon’.

It is difficult to determine how deliberate its placing in the volume is—I suspect Davie takes a Yeatsean care with the arrangement of poems within a volume—but I recall the shock of coming upon it in a first consecutive reading as being rather like the shock administered to the poet and his companion when they stumbled on the Orange Parade. The first ‘Irish’ poem in the volume ‘Demi-Exile. Howth’ was an urbane discussion of English identity abroad wherein the poet declined overt commitment to either country, ‘Hands acknowledging no allegiance, / Gloved for good against brutal chance’ exploiting a possible ambiguity on the phrase ‘for good’. Four poems on there was a tranquil mood piece on the Boyne which seemed quite innocent of any reference to the political connotations of that river. Next there was a brutal short poem,‘Thyestes’, about the persistence of mythic enormities in everyday life. Then with extraordinary vividness and violence the air was full of bands, ‘Sashes and bearskins in the afternoon’:

And first of all we tried to laugh it off,
Acting bemusement in the grimy sun;
But stayed to worry where we came to scoff,
As loud contingents followed, one by one.
Pipe bands, flute bands, brass bands and silver bands,
Presbyter's pibroch and the deacon's serge,
Came stamping where the iron Mænad stands,
Victoria, glum upon a grassy verge.
Some brawny striplings sprawled upon the lawn;
No man is really crippled by his hates.
Yet I remembered with a sudden scorn
Those ‘passionate intensities’ of Yeats.

The form is neoclassical; the metre, iambic; the tone, civilised incomprehension: in the Augustan echoes of ‘scoff’ and ‘scorn’ one has the sense of the eighteenth century suddenly confronted with and embarrassed by the archaic fervour of the Cromwellians. Yet the Maenad Victoria may well echo the infanticidal women of the Thyestes myth, and there may be fear as well as scorn in the invocation of Yeats's apocalyptic reading of signs and portents and a terror to come. An added eeriness is perhaps in the technical precision with which the poet, an heir as well as a scholar of the Dissenting tradition, picks out ‘Presbyter's pibroch and the deacon's serge’.

What is certain is that one poem later he is looking with less than rapture at ‘The Evangelist’ and his ‘mobile features of Dissent’; in ‘An English Revenant’ he is at pains to locate himself elaborately in the golden mean, the temperate zone of the human condition, before launching on two sombre and scrupulous meditations on the atrocities of his time. In the first ‘Hawkshead and Dachau in a Christmas Glass’ he pronounces: ‘At Dachau Yeats and Rilke died’; and in ‘Eight Years After’ he enunciates a view of art and violence from which he is really to deviate very little for the rest of his career:

For fearsome issues, being squarely faced,
Grow fearsomely familiar. To name
Is to acknowledge. To acquire the taste
Comes on the heels of honouring the claim.
‘Let nothing human be outside my range.’
Yet horrors named make exorcisms fail:
A thought once entertained is never strange,
But who forgets the face ‘beyond the pale’?

The position thus set out in measured antithesis lights the slow-burning fuse that sets off the explosion of outrage fourteen years later in ‘Ireland of the Bombers’; which in turn leads to the self-questioning, reappraisal and reconciliation eight years further on in ‘Near Mullingar’. The progress also entails a pilgrimage from Augustan pentameter to Gaelic cross-rhyme, from Enlightenment directness to Celtic intricacy, as if to demonstrate not just the need for answerable style but also the complexity and hazard of being ‘English in Ireland’.

It falls outside my brief to consider more than one side of the astonishing rhythmic change and liberation that invests Davie's next volume, A Winter Talent. His criticism of the previous years points clearly to the example—I think this a much safer word than ‘influence’ when speaking of such a deliberate artist as Davie—of Pound and Stevens, though whoever may have mediated such remarkable lyric achievements as ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and ‘The Wind at Penistone’ has been elided without trace in the originality of the performance. Most of the poems in the England section of the book adhere, though with greater flexibility, to the Augustan iambic. But the five poems that make up the Ireland suite have clearly absorbed the example of Clarke. ‘The Priory of St Saviour, Glendalough’ takes the fight into Clarke country, the medieval, monastic world of the Irish Romanesque which constitutes so much of the Irish poet's symbolic landscapes, and ‘North Dublin’ fastens—though this is no doubt fortuitous—on a part of the city often explored by Clarke, not least in Ancient Lights. ‘North Dublin’, is subtly continuous both with the ‘Dissenter’ theme of the earlier, English poems and ‘Belfast on a Sunday Afternoon’. I give the poem in full to emphasize the consistency of its rhythmic method:

St George's, Hardwicke Street,
Is charming in the Church of Ireland fashion:
The best of Geneva, the best of Lambeth
Aesthetically speaking
In its sumptuously sober
Interior, meet.
A continuous gallery, clear glass in the windows
An elegant conventicle
In the Ionian order
What dissenter with taste
But would turn, on these terms
Episcopalian?
‘Dissenter’ and ‘tasteful’ are contradictions
In terms, perhaps, and my fathers
Would ride again to the Boyne
Or with scythes to Sedgemoor, or splinter
The charming fanlights in this charming slum
By their lights, rightly.

The only two iambic lines in the structure are the second and the penultimate, and the poem owes much of its force to that deliberate and ironic symmetry. One has to look harder—ideally read aloud—to discover the prosodic pattern of the rest. But if one begins with the cadence which ‘Episcopalian’ makes with ‘taste’ and the assonance of ‘contradictions’ with ‘splinter’ the secret of the poem's undeniable melody becomes clear. If it were mere verbal music the game would not be worth the candle, and an admirer of Alexander Pope would hardly settle for less than the sound becoming an echo to the sense. Thus the first of these echoes is bland and funny, the second disputatious and violent. Having taken the hint, therefore, one becomes more conscious of the assonance that dominates the first stanza, winding its way through ‘Street’, ‘Geneva’, ‘speaking’, ‘Interior’, ‘meet’. In the supporting correspondences of ‘Hardwicke’, ‘charming’, ‘fashion’ and ‘Lambeth’ the sound and the sense enter into remarkable alliance. The alliterations, also an integral part of the Gaelic prosody, reinforce the pattern throughout the three stanzas.

In the second, the sound effects are even more elaborate, beginning with the frank internal harmonies of the first line through the intricate accords of ‘elegant’, ‘conventicle’, ‘dissenter’, ‘term’. In the last stanza ‘Dissenter’ and ‘Sedgemoor’ form an alliance of sound and sense similar to the Anglican locutions of stanza one. The vigorous beat of ‘ride’, ‘scythes’, ‘fanlights’, ‘lights’, ‘rightly’ gives us the yeoman Dissenters on the move to a music of lumination, fervour and righteousness.

The historical implication is finely complex, as is the poet's personal psychology. The Boyne has lost its pastoral innocence. It was the defeat of the Catholic cause by William of Orange there in 1689 that was being celebrated by the marchers who had made Davie shudder in the earlier poem. As he stands amid the cool elegance of this Anglican church in Dublin he realizes the multiple ironies of his own identity. The neutrality of ‘Demi-Exile. Howth’ is no longer easy. I would go so far as to say that in this poem we see the first maturity of a historical imagination in Davie's poetry. And by this I don’t mean an imagination that can handle historical themes, or deal in the history of ideas or exploit the possibilities of genealogy or myth—we have already seen him do these things well—but an imagination which enables the poet to locate himself meaningfully in time and space so as to feel and witness to the complexities that have shaped his consciousness of the world. This historical imagination expands throughout his later work, especially in The Forests of Lithuania, A Sequence for Francis Parkman, the Epistles to Eva Hesse, ‘Trevenen’,‘Vancouver’ and ‘Commodore Barry’ where it goes riotously on shore-leave.

It is clear that the essence of this Gaelic prosody is verbal interweave. The poet in English takes it from there and makes his own of it. Generations of Anglo-Irish poets have experimented with it, notably Callanan, Larminie, MacDonagh—who wrote a book on it and entitled it the ‘Irish mode’—contemporary Irish poets such as Farren, Montague and Kinsella. Apart from the last two I suspect that these names are unknown to most readers of the present article. Some of these writers attempted to take over the Gaelic syllabic mode radically into English. The curious may wish to look at Austin Clarke's ‘The Scholar’ to see a sample of the result. Successful experiments in radical formal translation into English are more rare than successes with strict terza rima in English. It is significant that Davie himself has brought off such a coup in ‘The Year 1812’. It is also characteristic of him that in one of his most illuminating essays on Yeats, ‘Yeats, the Master of a Trade’,⁵ he confines himself to matters of technique. And in giving such attention to his metrics here I am encouraged by the fact that in his ‘Modern Masters’ book on Pound he devotes almost one third of the text to a discussion of the great poet's prosody.

What is most impressive about Davie's use of the Irish mode is his selectivity in employing it, and the apparent ease with which he can adapt and vary it. Two further examples from A Winter Talent help to make the point. ‘The Wearing of the Green’ is a poem that broods passionately on the Irish landscape through three still, symmetrical stanzas, as if waiting for the scene to deliver up the heart of its mystery. The stillness, the stasis, is achieved by means of a recurrent phrase which is not so much a refrain as an incantation, a sort of druidic summoning, and by means of the verbal interweave which the subject obviously calls for. The mystery reveals itself in historical, even political terms in this, its last stanza:

Imagination, Irish avatar,
Aches in the spring's heart and in mine, the stranger's
In Meath in May. But to believe there are
Unchanging Springs endangers,
By that fast dye, the earth;
So blood-red green the season,
It never changes
In Meath in May.

Without worrying the life out of a poem that so obviously wishes to keep its counsel, one might offer as thematic annotation the fact that in the early years of the century Yeats, A. E. and others more nationalistically minded had been looking for a Celtic avatar or saviour, that the Easter Rising had behind it a doctrine of blood sacrifice—the ‘green earth will be warmed by the blood of martyrs’—that green is the national colour, that the poem's title is also that of a nationalist ballad. What is more to our purpose is the sonal pattern that guarantees the slowness of the pace and impels us into harmony with the poet's mood. It derives primarily from the vowel sounds in the refrain, ‘Meath’ and ‘May’. The more dominant is the latter, occupying heavily the positions of metrical stress—‘Imagination’, ‘Aches’, ‘stranger's’, ‘Unchanging’, ‘endangers’, ‘changes’, ‘May’; the other acts as a sort of descant on the melody in ‘Meath’, ‘believe’, ‘green’, ‘season’, ‘Meath’. There is no poem like this in the Gaelic tradition, either in the stressed or syllabic metres. There is nothing quite like it in Clarke either. And it is possible that there are technically similar poems in modern English that owe nothing to Irish metrics. Yet I must record my conviction that much of its effectiveness derives from a way with rhymes and assonances that Davie adapted from an Irish source. Such provenance can be more firmly claimed and demonstrated in the second example.

‘The Priory of St Saviour, Glendalough’ is a cunning blend of Gaelic assonance and the metaphysical conceit. It begins with a technical formulation from a guidebook:

A carving on the jamb of an embrasure,
‘Two birds affronted with a human head
Between their beaks' is said to be
‘Uncertain in its significance but
A widely known design.’ I’m not surprised.

The assurance with which the quotations are accommodated to the metrical form deserves almost more attention than sound effects, though the internal rhyme of ‘head’ with ‘said’ is worth noting. The second stanza is remarkable for its accurate and particular sense of the scene—anyone who has been to Glendalough will receive a shock of recognition—also for the kinetic power of the verbs which is sustained into the final stanza, enforcing the sense of search and mystery that arises from the static enigmas of the opening stanza. Here, unhampered by the language of the guidebook, Davie can deploy the Celtic mysteries of his prosody, in a stanza of rare texture.

For the guidebook cheats: the green road it advises
In fact misled; and a ring of trees
Screened in the end the level knoll on which
St Saviour's, like a ruin on a raft,
Surged through the silence.

The tonic vowel sound with which the first line opens in ‘guidebook’ consolidates its authority in ‘advises’ at the end, goes underground to announce its re-emergence in ‘like’ and closes the sequence—like the serpent's tail in a Celtic design—in ‘silence’ at the end. Its junior partner weaves its path through ‘cheats’ and ‘green’, ‘trees’ and ‘screened’. The drama of the last two lines is then shrewdly reinforced by the emphatic alliterations. I allow the final stanza to speak for itself:

I burst through brambles, apprehensively
Crossed an enormous meadow. I was there.
Could holy ground be such a foreign place?
I climbed the wall, and shivered. There flew out
Two birds affronted by my human face.

There is a temptation to end on that image of the poet, facing the strangeness of a foreign place, sensing the old paganness beneath the equally exotic monasticism of the ‘holy ground’, yet determined to follow his hunch through to the end. But for the sake of completeness two points need briefly to be made. The first concerns Davie's use of his Gaelic prosody in poems unconnected with his Irish experience, the second is a mandatory glance at ‘Commodore Barry’, the last poem in his collected edition of 1972.

In the first place it is important to note that he often encounters Irish themes without recourse to Irish metres. ‘The Waterfall at Powerscourt’ employs an impressive range of rhythmic devices, assonance, dissonance, alliteration, without suggesting an Irish model other than Joyce's metamorphic dog on Sandymount Strand in the Proteus episode in Ulysses. But its real counterpart is Davie's ‘The Wind at Penistone’. Similarly the two ‘Dublin Georgian’ poems and ‘Killala’ are highly successful poems which sit securely within an English metrical tradition.

But Events and Wisdoms, so instinct with a sense of place, so determined upon atmosphere and stasis, so struck with the strangeness of America, seems constantly to demand the effects of muted rhythm and covert echo that this syllabic verse can deliver. ‘New York in August’ deploys the rhyme off the beat with striking effect:

Clammy, electric, torrid,
The nights bring relief
At the latitude of Madrid.
Never the stir of a leaf
Any night, as we went
Back, the children asleep,
To our bed in a loaned apartment,
Although I thought a deep …

In ‘Cypress Avenue’, ‘Humanly Speaking’, ‘The Feeders’, ‘Love and the Times’, ‘Across the Bay’, ‘Agave in the West’, ‘Viper-Man’ and ‘In Chopin's Garden’ the same device is used without drawing attention to itself; assonance is as frequent as rhyme, blank endings are quietly reinforced by occult internal echoes, a sense of freedom from the tyranny of rhyme is reinforced by a subtle web of correspondences which control emphasis in a new variety of ways. Sometimes these effects, when they become visible, are intrinsically striking. The first stanza of ‘Viper-Man’ is marvelously textured:

Will it be one of those
Forever summers?
Will the terrace stone
Expand, unseal
Aromas, and let slip
Out of the cell of its granulations
Some mid-Victorian courtship?

It was inevitable, however, that Davie would test his virtuosity against the master himself, Austin Clarke. This he does in ‘Commodore Barry’, a poem which decides to take literally the assertion that Barry was ‘Father of the American Navy’. As background it is worth remembering that the Gaelic poet Owen Roe O’Sullivan, invoked in Davie's first line, had written a poem in English called ‘Rodney's Glory’ which Davie had included in his Augustan Lyric. O’Sullivan had sailed with Rodney and had hoped to buy himself out with his eulogy of the admiral. Davie's poem subsumes some of O’Sullivan's style, but his real model, and perhaps target, is Clarke. I suspect that these lines from Clarke's ‘Song of the Books’ may have been the English poet's point of departure:

Lightly, Red head O Sullivan
Who fought with Rodney, jolly jacktar
Too much at sea, thin as a marlin
                              Spike, came and went,
Poet, schoolmaster, parish clerk.
He drank his Bible money at Mass time
A moll upon his knee, bare arsed.

This is not an extreme example of Clarke's virtuosity with metrical exercise. In more extreme examples one has the impression of the meaning trying to hold on to the sound like a man trying to control a powerful fire hose. The temptation to add double entendre to vocallic antiphony is hardly resistable, and the result is often one of exquisite irresponsibility. Davie's third stanza is a fair sample of his skill with the idiom:

A flurry of whitecaps off
The capes of the Delaware!
Barry, the Irish stud,
Has fathered the entire
American navy! Tories
Ashore pore over the stud-book,
Looking in vain for the mare,
Sovran, whom Jolly Roger
Of Wexford or Kildare
Claims in unnatural congress
He has made big with frigates.

His last is nonsense brought close to the pitch of genius:

‘My sovereign,’
said saucy
Jack Barry, meaning Congress;
And yes, it’s true, outside
The untried, unstable recess
Of the classroom, every one has one:
A sovereign—general issue,
Like the identity-disc,
The prophylactic, the iron
Rations. Irony fails us,
Butters no parsnips, brails
No sail on a ship of the line.

It is perhaps the best note of all on which to end a discussion of Davie's relation with Ireland, evincing as it does a sense of earned and intimate ease with its subject, delighting in its feeling for history and literary tradition, elated by the intricacies of language, which alone can make such themes and interests speak in the idiom of poetry.

Notes

1. See 1,000 Years of Irish Poetry, Kathleen Hoaglund (ed.) (New York: Devin-Adair 1947) p. 101.

2. The actual Irish metre involved is called ‘freslige ar dechnaid’; its Gaelic intricacies are described in Kuno Meyed, A Primer of Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1909) p. 23.

3. This device in Clarke's theory ‘takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme’ with the result that ‘lovely and neglected words are advances to the tonic place and divide their echoes.’ See Austin Clarke, Collected Poems (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1974) p. 574.

4. Articulate Energy, postscript to 1976 edition, p. xiv.

5. The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, p. 125.