[In the following essay, Reilly responds to Adrian Frazier's essay on “Irish Poetry after Yeats.”]

The keynote poem in The Literary Review's Winter, 1979, issue on “Irish Poetry after Yeats” is Michael Longley's “On Hearing Irish Spoken.”¹ The poet eavesdrops on a conversation between two fishermen gliding together in their currachs, and hears only “An echo of technical terms, the one I know / Repeating itself at desperate intervals / Like the stepping stones across a river in spate.” Longley, a Belfast Protestant and native speaker of English, feels himself cut off from the drowning echo of Ireland's native language. The central problem elaborated in this collection of essays, interviews, and poems is that of being cut off from one's culture and, therefore, from oneself. John Montague has said in his Introduction to The Book of Irish Verse: “The true condition of Irish poetry in the nineteenth century is … mutilation,” citing as symbolic example the choice offered, in one of Ferguson's ballads, the Lynnot Clan between castration and blindness. This collection's poems by thirteen contemporary Irish poets, interviews with four of them, and introductory essay by guest editor Adrian Frazier make it clear that mutilation—in Montague's gruesome image from The Rough Field “a grafted tongue in a severed head”—is the inescapable inheritance of the Irish poet. Each of the thirteen is engaged in his own way in remembering the past he has been severed from, and in attempting to re-member himself in the brutally divided Irish present.

Irish poets have often used dismemberment, bodily mutilation, as an image not only of the physical brutality the politics of empire have wrought on their island, but also as an image of the excision of national identity. Montague's image obviously refers to the imposition of the English language upon Gaelic speakers as well as to decapitation. Poems as widely separated in time as the 9th-century “Hag of Beare” and “Ireland” by Richard Ryan, a contemporary poet not included in The Literary Review's collection, resonate with a sense of the maiming of the substance of self and nation. When the Hag of Beare, a figure that has become one of the female personifications of Ireland, bitterly laments that

… my right eye has been taken away
As down-payment on heaven's estate;
Likewise the ray in the left
That I may grope to heaven's gate

and concludes that “All is ebb,” we hear behind her complaint against the deprivations of old age the cry of a country which in the 9th century was already being invaded by Norsemen. When Richard Ryan describes Ireland as “that ragged, / leaking raft,” he refers not just to the accidents of geography and geology which have given over so much of the country to bog, but also to the draining away of the substance of the motherland through colonization, famine, emigration.

The first selection of poetry in the collection is excerpted from Thomas Kinsella's A Technical Supplement. Kinsella emigrated from Ireland to America over a decade ago, and he has been strongly influenced by the style and themes of American and English poets. The protests of Eliot and Auden against the technological view of the world as laboratory, of the individual as isolated specimen to be experimented with and discarded, he has made his own. Translator of The Tain, author of the Bloody Sunday poem “Butcher's Dozen,” and founder of the Peppercanister Press in Dublin, Kinsella has remained an Irish poet, but one feeling himself isolated in his Irishness. In his article entitled “The Divided Mind” Kinsella argues, as Adrian Frazier reminds us, that “there was no living tradition out of which Irish writers could rise. The Protestants were cut off from the English tradition by residence; the Roman Catholics were cut off from the Gaelic tradition by the loss of Gaelic as a mother tongue. As a consequence of their rootlessness, the achievements of all Irish poets are solitary.” In A Technical Supplement the calm, objective surgeon's voice divides the body as Kinsella's mind has been divided, raising the horrific question of how much one can be mutilated before integrity is completely destroyed:

It would seem possible to peel the body asunder,
to pick off the muscles and let them
drop away one by one writhing
until you had laid bare
four or five simple bones at most.
Except that at the first violation
the body would rip into pieces and fly apart
with terrible spasms.

The oldest of the contemporary poets whose work is included here, Kinsella may feel isolated, but among the younger poets who have succeeded him this sense of being disconnected from any living tradition has become, in Yeats's words, “the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair,” and out of the struggle with this common obstacle they create their art.

In this art, the concentration on the fact of mutilation is steady, unflinching. Michael Longley's “Oliver Plunkett” meditates on the fate of the 17th-century Catholic archbishop of Armagh, who was convicted of treason and beheaded. The poem is divided into three sections entitled “His Soul,” “His Head,” “His Body.” In the middle section, Plunkett's head is “The specimen suspended in its bottle / At eye level between shelf and shelf.” Seamus Heaney's “A Postcard from North Antrim” updates and makes personal the continuing violence in Ulster. Subtitled “In Memory of Sean Armstrong,” the poem eulogizes a friend whose “candid forehead stopped / A pointblank teatime bullet.” For Seamus Deane, Ulster is the “Middle Kingdom,” a “sleep-fortress” walled off by its peculiar history from both Ireland and England, living a Neanderthal half-life. Eavan Boland, the only woman among the collection's thirteen poets, is familiar with the psychological ploys citizens of the Republic use to maintain the wall between themselves and the violence in the North. As a horse clops by a house in the Dublin suburbs, tearing a rose, a laurel hedge leaf, and a crocus from their life-roots on its way, Boland's persona in “The War Horse,” watching from a window, thinks:

But we, we are safe, our unformed fear
Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care
If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted
Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

But rose petals lie “ribboned across our hedge,” reminders of bloodlettings past and present that will not respect artificial boundaries erected by forced forgetting and negotiated borders.

The poem appears in a footnote to an interview with Boland where she confirms her belief that Southerners cannot dispense with the North. Although Ireland is “a broken, incomplete nation,” as Montague says in his interview, it is an island that somehow yet aspires to nationhood. The achievement of that nationhood, the poets realize, will have to be organic rather than imposed. Derek Mahon, returning to his native Northern Ireland after living for a number of years in England, regrets leaving “The beech, the cedar, the elm, / The mild woods … ” of the Sussex countryside in “Goodbye to the Trees,” but finds

Rooted in stony ground,
A last stubborn growth
Battered by constant rain
And twisted by the sea-wind
With nothing to recommend it
But its brute tenacity …
As if its very existence
Were a reason to continue.

In Longley's “Bog Cotton,” the land itself introduces the possibility of a natural healing of all the mutilation in this “desert flower” which “hangs on by a thread, denser than thistledown. …” Bog cotton suggests “the staunching of wounds,” as if “to make a hospital of the landscape— / Cures and medicines as far as the horizon. …” The legacy of violence has not destroyed hope for regeneration among these poets, least of all in Ulster; eight of the thirteen are “Northern poets.” But they seem aware that they must take root in stony ground, be nurtured by bog if there is to be a full, healthy flowering of Irish poetry in a new and healthy Ireland.

This recognition reveals the reason that Patrick Kavanagh is more beloved by them than William Butler Yeats. Yeats's country of noble peasants, colorful country gentlemen, holy monks, and “lords and ladies gay” carries no valence for them; they would argue that he invented it for his own purposes in the first place. These post-Yeatsians can understand that the master had to invent a nationality for himself from the cultural ruins of 19th-century Ireland—Eavan Boland, for instance, admits to her own sense of “a continuous need to reinvent some kind of Irishness”—but they are content to let him hold his patent. They respect Yeats for his great achievement, as all people enamored of poetry must. They do not feel so overpowered by his achievement, and by his romantically supercilious mask of “indomitable Irishry,” however, as to be driven in reaction into the kind of Gaelic antiquarianism that marks much of Austin Clarke's work. Although they sympathize with Clarke's plight as Yeats's most immediate successor, his reaction of Irishness seems too conscientiously insular to be useful to late 20th-century writers. Not awed by Yeats, these poets tend to think of him “as a funny old uncle who could jump higher than the moon,” one whose spectacular feats have helped them, simply, to learn their trade. But, as a model, they prefer Patrick Kavanagh.

Kavanagh's poetry is admired by his latter-day colleagues as part of a life they respect. Although he wrote some very fine poems, he churned out more than his share of doggerel, as Frazier frankly acknowledges. Nor was he without his own brand of peasant pomposity. Brendan Kennelly's statement in his interview that Kavanagh was always out to capture “the simple reality of a man” is itself an oversimplification. Kavanagh, like Yeats, relied on a set of masks, poetic and personal. But unlike Yeats, who delighted in posing and remained the consummate poseur throughout his life despite what he says about ladders leading back down to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” Kavanagh rejected the masks he had taken up, refusing to gather them into a grand mystical design of feints and flourishes. He repudiated two of his finest works because he felt that they were dishonest. His 1938 autobiography, The Green Fool, he referred to as “a dreadful stage-Irish, so-called autobiography.” He described his powerful long poem on the constructed life of the poor Irish farmer, The Great Hunger, as “far too strong for honesty,” lamenting its humorlessness and its lack of “the nobility and repose of great poetry.” His restless dissatisfaction with the tones and vocabulary he found at hand for his work, with the ways of being Irish the Republic Yeats had helped to shape pressed on him, appeals to this new generation of poets, for they are themselves uncomfortable with definitions of Irish identity passed on to them under what Kavanagh characterized as “the evil aegis of the so-called Irish literary movement.”

Three years before his death, the poet from the knobby hills of County Monaghan talked of “how I had started off with the right simplicity … then ploughed my way through complexities … and come back to where I started.” But a life had been lived in between, and the man at the end of it was not the same man who had flaunted the virtues of being a peasant poet during his early years in Dublin. Since then he had proclaimed “All this stuff about roots in the soil, peasants and balladry” degenerate. The older Kavanagh, the Kavanagh of the two Grand Canal poems, say, is no peasant but a sophisticated poet with an eye for the regenerative power of the ordinary world that is supposed to be the peasant's preserve. The Kavanagh of “Canal Bank Walk” has found a simplicity that survives within complexity, the persistence of nature in the heart of Dublin city:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.

I have dwelt long on the contrast between Yeats and Kavanagh because it has so strongly influenced contemporary Irish poets' interpretations of their vocation. Thomas Kinsella has written: “Yeats stands for the Irish tradition as broken; Joyce stands for it as continuous, or healed—or healing—from its mutilation.” For these contemporary poets, Kavanagh is the poet who stands for the Irish tradition as healing when he evokes Irishness by concentrating on the rough beauty of the Irish landscape, or by celebrating what is most ordinary and therefore most epiphanic in Irish life, as in “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin, ‘Erected to the Memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien’.” Kavanagh himself has become, for poets such as Mahon and Longley, a symbol of the brute tenacity of Irish tradition, a kind of human bog cotton.

But how is this generation of Irish poets to go about its own remembering of Irish tradition, its re-membering quest in a culture that continues to be torn apart by violence? By paying rapt attention to the Irish mundane until it yields what it will of its essence, while at the same time gauging the impact in their own lives of the irretrievability of a large portion of the Irish past.

The roads run in and out
                    About the bridge the people go.
Someone was executed there,
                    (Was it two hundred years ago?)
Is sung of still. But I would sing
                    A roof, a door, a set of bricks,
Because you entered Ireland there
                    One night in nineteen forty-six.
These are the rails your fingers touched
                    Passing to school, the waves below
You dipped your toes in. That is all
                    The history I would want to know,
Were not the waters those that eyes
                    Had flung their final glance upon,
Coursing, untouched and blameless, past the loss
                    Of someone's lover, someone's son.

In the poem above, “A Small Town in Ireland” by Frank Ormsby, happy cataloguing of common things anointed by the beloved's presence, of “a roof, a door, a set of bricks,” of bridge railings and the water beneath, leads inevitably back, over the gap of the last two stanzas bridged by one long sentence, to the historical significance of those things: “the loss / of someone's lover, someone's son.” James Simmons's “At the Post Office,” a chatty poem about the poet's bittersweet liberation from a troubled love affair, engages in a similar calculus of personal and national loss. The poet achieves his ambiguous freedom by making the girl look foolish in public while “far above the Post Office roof / the stars shone still, all that was left / to aspire to.” Patrick Pearse's 1916 proclamation in front of the same Post Office, aspiring to the stars in its intent to return Ireland to its old independence in politics, language, spirit, moved the country decisively into the modern world and gradually into a “Free State” of independence, which Pearse would have criticized as incomplete, without integrity. The last lines of the epilogue to Montague's The Rough Field make explicit the poet's fascination with the matter, the material of Ireland, and his feeling that its ancient spirit will forever elude his grasp:

Harsh landscape that haunts me,
well and stone, in the bleak moors of dream
with all my circling a failure to return
to what is going,
                                        going
                                                            GONE

These poets' perception of the ravages of history as personal deprivation has caused them, in most instances, to reach out to each other, to regard each other as mutual recasters of Irish identity. This is especially true in the North, where standard forms of Irish identity have proved unworkable. Montague's “… going, / going / GONE” brings to mind the disappearing stepping stones of the Irish language in the collection's keynote poem by Michael Longley. “On Hearing Irish Spoken” is dedicated to Longley's younger fellow poet, Ciaran Carson. As editor Frazier tells us, Carson was born in a Roman Catholic, Irish-speaking district in the heart of Protestant Belfast. Both Carson and the Protestant Longley now work for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Carson “organizes concerts of traditional music, festivals of Irish dancing, and generally takes an interest in the survival of such crafts as linen-weaving and bell-casting.” Longley “finds poets jobs and their poems publishers,” and generally sees to it “that some sort of culture flourishes even while lives are lost and buildings destroyed.” And, of course, they both write poems.

Eavan Boland describes in her interview the “collective purpose” she perceives in Ulster from her perspective in the Republic:

Its destructive form is violence; and its constructive form is making an identity which is at the moment the alternative identity to its death. … They [the Ulster poets] are in the presence of such overriding absurdities as the death of children and the violation of homes that they do have, and they have communicated, a common purpose.

In this common purpose, born of a sense of shared loss, a nourishment for and a risk to individual poetic genius, lies one of Ireland's hopes for a future of less hatred in such little room. For her contemporary poets, particularly those from the North, cosmopolitan yet rooted men, in touch with their counterparts in the South and around the world, seem to be delicately, painstakingly cultivating an atmosphere in which no part of their already diverse and exuberant body of work will have to be lost to any Irishman. The Literary Review's sample of that body of work is well chosen, and the commentary on it provocative, so that the reader is caught up in the excitement of a poetry that might yet make something happen.

Note

1. The Literary Review, 22, 2 (Winter, 1979), ed. by Adrian Frazier, pp. 151, Irish Poetry after Yeats Special Issue.