“TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960
by
Jessica Lynn Pannell
B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1999
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
The Department of English of the School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
2011
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
This dissertation was presented
by
Jessica Lynn Pannell
It was defended on
April 20, 2011
and approved by
Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, Department of English
Troy Boone, Associate Professor, Department of English
Barbara McCloskey, Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Dissertation Director: James F. Knapp, Senior Associate Dean, School of Art and
Sciences and Professor, Department of English
ii
“TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960
Jessica Lynn Pannell, Ph.D.
University of Pittsburgh, 2011
The dissertation provides a survey of poetry in largely critically neglected decades of Irish
literature, arguing that the poetry of Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Austin
Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Blanaid Salkeld represents a crucial phase in the development of
Irish poetry. In the first three chapters I argue that Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and
Samuel Beckett develop a uniquely Irish form of modernism that sits uneasily with both Irish
and Continental traditions, examines the horrors of modern war, and in the case of Beckett,
proposes a form of humanism based on the physiology of the body that radically departs from
Enlightenment models. The Kavanagh chapter examines his reclamation and reformation of the
Irish bardic tradition of pastoral dystopianism and Kavanagh’s attempts at a new poetic based in
anti-Pauline, post-institutionalized Christianity. The fifth chapter explores Clarke’s reanimation
of technical aspects of pre-eighteenth-century Irish poetry and, despite his public anti-Yeatsian
statements, argues that his poetry both carries on and develops the Revivalist project. The
Salkeld chapter proposes that Irish feminism operates in the poetry of this period in ways that
both undermine and support the projects of Salkeld’s male counterparts.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………………...
v
I.
“QUAKING SOD:” WRITING OUT OF THE REVIVAL AND INTO MODERN
IRELAND ……………………………………………………………………………
1
II.
MODERNISM “NOW:” DENIS DEVLIN ………………………………………….
32
III.
WAR POET AND MODERNIST: THOMAS MACGREEVY ……………………… 69
IV.
SAMUEL BECKETT: THE PROFANE AND RADICAL HUMANISM …………. . 97
V.
“GOD’S TRUTH IS LIFE:” PATRICK KAVANAGH ……………………………… 125
VI.
FLOWERED STONE: THE POETRY OF AUSTIN CLARKE ……………………... 162
VII.
INSIDE THE FOX’S COVERT: BLANAID SALKELD ……………………………. 194
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………………. 227
iv
PREFACE
My father was the first writer I knew. There is nothing I can say that could fully acknowledge the
hand he had in what was to become my career and indeed, my first love—reading and talking to
others about poetry. From both my parents, who threw away not a single novel they read in
college (and thus made them all available for me to find and read) I received the best preparation
for the life I now lead.
From Bucknell University I wish to thank Harold Schweizer, who taught me that the most
important question is not how but why; John Rickard, who introduced me to Joyce and Irish
literature; and Ghislaine MacDayter, who convinced me that even as an undergraduate I had
something worth saying.
At the University of Pittsburgh there are too many people to properly thank, but I must insist
upon thanking my committee for its gentle but persistent pressure and the attending patience this
process requires. To all of my professors, to Jim Knapp, Troy Boone, Colin MacCabe, Shalini
Puri, Marah Gubar, John Twining, Paul Bove, and Ronald Judy, I offer thanks for asking more of
me than I thought could possibly give, and for giving me the support I needed to meet such lofty
expectations.
v
I want to offer profound thanks to the late Eric Clarke, who found in me a fellow lover of
Theodor Adorno and saw fit to phone me with an invitation to study with him and his colleagues
at Pitt. His incisive and often troubling questions were among the first to challenge me to dig
deeper, cast more widely, and to love more fully as a scholar.
I could not have made it through the last few months of writing without my faithful posse, Jane
Austen’s Fight Club, for reading and moral support. Special thanks must go to Ali Patterson,
who cleared her schedule for ten days to ask me hard questions that ultimately led me to
finishing, finally. Robin Clarke, Oliver Khan and Richard Parent deserve recognition and
heartfelt thanks for years of anchoring whenever I threatened to become unmoored.
I wish to thank Alex Davis for his excellent reading suggestions and well-timed encouragement.
The greatest proportion of my gratitude, however, goes to Jude Pannell, who has waited nine
years for this day, who put his own dreams on hold to support mine, and whose ability
differentiate between a roman and italicized period allows me to present my work to the world
without embarrassment.
It is not easy to share your parents with their work. Sam, this dissertation is as much yours as
mine. I cannot wait to see your own dreams unfold.
vi
“QUAKING SOD:” WRITING OUT OF THE REVIVAL AND INTO MODERN IRELAND
Water wears
The stone away
And out of the river
The arc-lamp rays and the
Wind weave
Try to weave
Something or other
From flight and water.
-from “Liffey Bridge,” Denis Devlin
The Irish self . . . was a project: and its characteristic text was a process,
unfinished, fragmenting.
Each artist [Synge, Yeats, Beckett, Joyce] had, strictly speaking, no predicate;
and so the text had no time other than that of its enunciation.
-Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
The swans on the leaden coloured water
Look like hostile ghosts
Of kings
Who resent our presence.
Are they not right?
How should we
Whose hearts are with the dead
Come here
And not die?
-“Winter,” Thomas MacGreevy
1
In 1998, just three years after his Nobel Prize in literature, Seamus Heaney published a
large selection of his poetry entitled Opened Ground. Heaney explains his choice to include his
Nobel lecture, “Crediting Poetry,” by observing that “the ground covered in the lecture is ground
originally opened by the poems which here proceed it” (“Author’s Note”). One of his earliest
(and certainly the most famous) poems, “Digging,” conflates the act of writing with the act of
breaking ground and bridges the intellectual and cultural natures of Heaney’s profession with the
material nature of his father’s and grandfather’s turf-cutting.
Although Heaney claims ground-opening on the part of his own poetry, it is worth asking
what opened the ground for his poetry. Who, in other words, makes his poetry—and the poetry
that has come out of Ireland for in last fifty years—possible? Heaney credits Yeats heavily in his
lecture, as well he should, but it is as if he skipped to his grandfather without regard for his father
(and in both “Digging” and the lecture, his mothers and grandmothers). Though Heaney has
mentioned the influence of Patrick Kavanagh in other places, Kavanagh’s absence here is
conspicuous given both the ubiquity of Heaney’s engagements with the soil in his poetry and the
metaphors of earth and field figured in the book’s title and opening poem (“Digging”). In some
ways Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem “The Great Hunger” describes not just the cultural and
literary situation of Ireland in the mid-twentieth century but the critical one surrounding this
period. Long considered a fallow time in Irish literature, I argue instead that these decades carry
Irish poetry from its first to second revivals through the darkening of the Celtic Twilight into
Celtic Night, the development of a robust Irish literary response to modernism(s), and the
increasing international orientation of Irish poetry as a consequence of chosen and forced exile.
Heaney has more to gain from his mid-century predecessors, however, than dystopian
pastoralism. Heaney largely credits Yeats for mastery of the kind of poetry that unapologetically
2
acknowledges both real violence and the compassionate, life-affirming response it can engender,
but it was the mid-century poets who carried this impulse through to the contemporary era. In his
1995 Nobel Lecture, Heaney describes Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War:” “It knows
that the massacre will happen again on the roadside . . .; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze
of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures” (428).
Heaney’s continued description could also apply to MacGreevy’s war poetry, or Clarke’s poems
in the voices of women, or Beckett’s pessimism laced with tenderness:
It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of
extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth-telling that will be hard and
retributive, and on the other hand the need not to harden the mind to a point where
it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust. It is a proof that poetry can be
equal to and true at the same time . . . (428)
Kavanagh is not, of course, the sole link between Yeats and those who come after, and
though he is the most well-known of mid-twentieth-century Irish poets, he was only one of many
scratching their ways into the hard-packed ground of stale and outmoded forms of cultural
nationalism, native resistance to innovation, and the lack of a large and enthusiastic reading
public in Ireland. In the grand critical narrative of Irish literature Yeats’ genius is followed by the
necessary exile of Joyce (with the exception of a few novelists) and picked up again after the
economic revitalizations of the 1960s; but this narrative misses entire decades of important
development in Irish poetry that would lay the foundation—or to disrupt the foundation that had
already been laid—for the poetry of our contemporary era.
3
In his 1902 essay “What is ‘Popular Poetry?’” Yeats 1 reconstructs the origin of his
conception of what we have come to know as the Irish Literary Revival or Renaissance. By the
time of the essay’s writing the Revival was well underway, and despite Yeats’ choice of words it
had flowered under the hands of many. Remembering his days in the Young Ireland Society, a
group of intellectuals concerned with the preservation of traditional Irish culture, such as it could
have been recalled or reinvented, Yeats admits that although “most” of the Irish balladists of the
time “wrote badly;” “such romance clung about them” that they moved him more than the works
of Shelley and Spenser. It was this incongruity Yeats thought should be remedied. He recalls
thinking
‘If somebody could make a style which would not be an English style and yet
would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him, and
we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland. If these poets,
who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the ballad-books with their
verses, had a good tradition they would write beautifully and move everybody as
they move me . . . If they had something else to write about besides political
opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people like
1
In positing the Irish Literary Revival as the point of departure for the poets I study, I want to make it clear
that Yeats’ relationship to the Revival was complex. In many ways Yeats hi mself grew out of a nd a way from the
Revival to wards a more modernist a esthetic—to what e xtent he can b e r ead as a modernist i s a major p oint o f
critical c ontention—and I ag ree with S tan S mith t hat t he overly s trict cr itical d ivision between Y eats a nd J oyce
ignores t he e xtent t o which Yeats d econstructs t he very myth t hat e nergizes his p oetry a nd the R evival i tself.
Although the poets I study take a conscious stance against Yeatsian aesthetics, Yeats himself begins the process that
undoes the Revival.
4
Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find it easier to get a
style.’ Then with a deliberateness that still surprises me . . . I set to work to find a
style and things to write about that the ballad-writers might be the better. (Yeats
363-4)
At work here are two different impulses: to answer to the current conundrum, that of an inferior
contemporary Irish poetic, lies both in the past and in the reinvention or reanimation of that past;
and to intentionally draft a tradition from which all future Irish literature would emanate. What is
missing is a sense of the present: what kind of poetic allows for rigorous engagement with the
Ireland of now? If recovery and transformation are directed only toward a bright, utopian future,
and not to what Ireland is, how can such a poetic survive? That is, when the reality on the ground
resembles something quite different from what the Revival has asked writers to envision—a
culturally unified Ireland continuous with previous periods—in what capacity can the poet who
writes about that messy ground be heard? What could replace the initial fervor of “the teeming
delight that would re-create the world” (Yeats Synge 8) as decades of poverty, war, and
continued disagreement about the nature of true Irishness wore on?
Although the poets of this period do not write in the Revivalist mode as Yeats conceives
of it above, there are a number of Revival features that persist, albeit in somewhat changed
forms, through the middle decades and into contemporary poetry. The strongest of these strains
is the Revivalist attempt to “humanize” the Gael, or to recover him from the embarrassing and
inaccurate portrayals common in English circles of the time that became known under the term
“stage Irishman.” In his well-known work on the preeminent playwright of the time, Yeats
praises J.M. Synge’s careful reproduction of dialect (“Synge” 31) which Daniel Corkery, for
whom the term “Anglo-Irish” was an oxymoron, echoes.
5
1931, the beginning of the last decade of Yeats’s life and the last gasps of the Revival’s
energies, brought the publication of Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. In it Corkery
argues that Anglo-Irish literature, aside from a few brief moments during times of national crisis,
has not become truly national, truly Irish (3), not only because the majority of Revivalists are
from the Ascendency class—that class of Irish-born, Protestant people descended from
colonizing English and Scottish settlers—and therefore cannot authentically write from an Irish
perspective, but because the market for Irish literature is (at the time of his writing)
overwhelmingly English and American. In contrast to American and Russian writers, for
example, who retain a national identity even in exile, and for whom a native audience exists,
Anglo-Irish writers, many of them expatriates, find themselves writing to those who know only
the Ireland of popular foreign imagination. “The typical expatriate writer continues to find his
matter in Irish life; his choice of it, however, and his treatment of it when chosen, are to a greater
or less extent imposed upon him by alien considerations” (5). For this reason Corkery distrusts
expatriate poets, among them MacGreevy and Clarke (though Clarke was to spend only 15 years
outside of Ireland). To Corkery, the abandonment of Irish ground is the expatriate’s key mistake
(19).
But Synge gives Corkery hope that a truly “Irish” literature can emerge even from an
Anglo-Irish tradition, if it manages to come up from the ground; for Corkery, this is both literal
and figurative ground. In Synge’s case, a willingness to rebirth himself in native Irish life
allowed him to write true Irish literature. “. . . he, an Ascendency man, went into the huts of the
people and lived with them” (Corkery 27). Synge’s extensive, first-hand research into the
customs and dialects of western Irish people, many of whom still spoke Irish Gaelic as their first
6
tongue, allowed Synge to fashion complex, multifaceted Irish characters who, in Corkery’s
estimation, were truly representative of native Irish life.
Corkery’s definition of “true” Irishness as rural, Catholic, and Irish-speaking is
hopelessly narrow, particularly in light of the social realities of 20th-century Ireland. The
majority of people living in Ireland were both native-born and English-speaking, urban life was
very much alive in Dublin, and the presence of a uniquely Irish Christianity permeated both
Catholic and Protestant traditions. According to Corkery’s own criteria, moreover, the emerging
poetic of the mid-20th century in Ireland was indeed a national poetry, though perhaps in more
fraught ways than Corkery preferred. “The three great forces” of “the Irish national being,” he
writes, are “I. The Religious Consciousness of the People; II. Irish Nationalism; and III. The
Land” (19). Irish nationalism is the weakest of the three ways that Irish poetry of this period
conforms to Corkery’s guidelines, if only because too tenacious a commitment to Irish
nationalism (of the sort that had wide currency at the time) might well have stifled its ability to
freely embrace the other two. If, for example, Kavanagh had been too careful to create a rural
ideal consistent with popular forms of nationalism, particularly those celebrated by Revival
writers, he might not have been able to explore the multiple shades of significance of the Land in
The Great Hunger. That the poem served as a precursor to poems like John Montague’s The
Rough Field is the direct consequence of its refusal to see the land as a one-dimensional ideal;
indeed, as pastoral as Seamus Heaney’s poems can be, Kavanagh’s darkness is woven in.
Consider, for example, the sixth section of Heaney’s “Kinship,” where “mother ground” is a
murderess:
Our mother ground
is sour with the blood
7
of her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts. (lines 66-72)
Between the end of Irish Literary Revival and the beginning of the era of prosperity
thought to be ushered in by the policies of Whitaker and Lemass, Irish life was marked by
political neutrality, cultural insularity, and social and religious conservatism. Most scholars agree
that the conditions created by censorship policies, poverty, and governmental resistance to
foreign cultural exchange made it nearly impossible for cultural expression to flourish as it had
during the Revival years. These three decades are widely considered to be a period of cultural
stagnation, in which the only Irish literature worthy of critical attention, aside from the last
works of Yeats, was written outside of Ireland (i.e., that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett).
Terence Brown, writing about the 1930s, laments that “that intellectual and imaginative stirring
which had once stimulated Edward Martyn to affirm that ‘the sceptre of intelligence has passed
from London to Dublin’ had now ended. Dublin was a place to leave” (Brown 155). He contrasts
the deadness of Dublin with the vibrancy of Paris, to which many Irish authors had flocked. He
describes a scene bereft of literary experimentation (154) and a literature that “could be
redeemed only if a proper concern with nationality was combined with an acceptance of the
riches of European culture” against Irish provincialism (156). Brown’s outlook is not all gloom
and doom, however; he does recognize the importance of modernist poets Devlin, Brian Coffey,
and MacGreevy (156). Brown also notes the increase in readership of library books during the
8
war years (166). He is hardly optimistic, however; his general thesis is that good writing in midcentury Ireland was the exception rather than the rule. John Banville writes in more dire tones
about the general cultural situation in the 1950s from his own memory of the period. Ireland was
a “demilitarized state in which the lives of the citizens were to be controlled not by a system of
coercive force and secret policing, but by a kind of applied spiritual paralysis maintained by an
unofficial federation between the Catholic clergy, the judiciary and the civil service” (Banville
26). Many books on contemporary Irish poetry begin with despair over the lack of a lively
culture of poetry prior to the time of Lemass before moving on to celebrate more contemporary
poetry.
The generally accepted thesis has its detractors. Among them are a majority of the
essayists included in The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s. The essayists call into question not
only the assumption that the 1950s were marked by cultural stagnation, but also the belief that
the structural reasons normally blamed for this situation (censorship, isolationism, and Catholic
conservatism) prohibited cultural activity such as the writing of good literature. Brian Fallon, for
instance, argues that Ireland was not as isolated culturally, nor was there as much resistance to
modern art as has been argued. He cites the annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art in Dublin, a
showcase for new art, started in 1943, as an example (Fallon 36). He writes of a public highly
engaged in foreign affairs (40) and increasingly hostile towards the constraints of the Catholic
Church (35). Fallon also argues that Ireland had no more censorship during this period than other
European countries (33), which challenges the widely accepted thesis that Ireland’s censorship
was largely responsible for its lack of vigorous cultural production. Fallon does not mention
poetry at length in his essay, but does mention the revitalization of the visual arts, journalism,
and broadcasting. In addition, Fallon ends the essay by describing the 1950s as a transitional
9
time that would lead into what is thought to be the rebirth of Irish literature in the 1960s and
1970s. This thesis leaves the previous two decades in the dark and assumes that the 1950s were
years of awakening, not of a continuation of artistic viability. Fallon shares similar thoughts on
the entire period in his book, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960.
The degree to which Irish life was characterized by stagnation is not a settled matter;
more important, though, is that the idea of cultural stagnation, isolation, and confinement
became a highly salient problem for Irish poets of this period. However else mid-twentiethcentury Irish poetry varies in terms of style and theme, every body of poetry under study in this
project explores both the literary and societal implications of ideology which begot confinement
and stagnation. To some, like Devlin, who carefully considers all available forms of expression,
including both Irish and continental literary forms, there is no viable way forward; MacGreevy’s
response is resignation. Others, though, see possibility not in new literary forms per se but in a
reconceptualization of the discourses provided by the very same institutions and traditions they
reject. Kavanagh imagines a new kind of post-Pauline Christianity which creates room for life
and growth; Beckett compels his readers to attend to the biological realities of real bodies in time
to assert a new kind of humanism; Clarke reinvigorates select conventions of seventeenthcentury Irish Gaelic poetry in ways that speak to new realities of Irish life; and Salkeld’s robust
optimism emphasizes the inherent freedom of the soul, regardless of the confinement of body
and mind.
Denis Devlin’s poem “Liffey Bridge” asks what, aside from the Revival, had Ireland to
offer a poet in mid-century but an eroded sense of cultural identity (“water wears the stone
away”) and of leave-taking (“flight”)? In some ways erosion and migration are more honest
(non)materials for poetry because they acknowledge fragmentation of the cultural body.
10
MacGreevy’s poetry, in dealing with war and uncertain national and cultural identity, hangs on
this sense of brokenness without, it seems, much of a desire for wholeness, whereas Devlin’s
nostalgically yearns for it; like Yeats Devlin draws energy from past traditions, and like Eliot this
tradition consists of classical poetry, Greek, Roman, and Irish, but he holds out no hope for a
neoclassical revival in Irish poetry. His poetry is continually in mourning. MacGreevy’s is postmourning, having abandoned—at least expressly—the quest for a suitable literary aesthetic. Irish
modernist poetry, then, was an expression of lack and disappointment more than an attempt at a
new wave of poetry for Ireland. Yet what does emerge from this period is startlingly appropriate
to the time and cultural circumstances. Devlin and MacGreevy may write with a sense of failure
but the aesthetic that characterizes their poetry begs for its place in the history of modernism. It
reflects an ambivalence over available aesthetic strategies that, in its amplification of certain
features of European modernism specific to its own aesthetic predicament, contributes to the
already multifaceted nature of mid-century modernism.
Gerald Dawe articulates Irish modernist responses to the pressures of the past by
formulating it in terms of their commitment to poetry itself.
We encounter . . . a sense of critical distance between them, their writing and ‘the’
tradition; and the life of the intelligence, to which Seamus Deane alludes, is seen
as an imaginative source of their poetry.
He laments the critical impulse to appeal to the heavily-laid tradition that precedes mid-century
poets, which
was mainly established by Yeats and we continue, even if in reaction, to accept
the terms of reference he laid down. This is a pedagogical consolation . . . . What
it ignores is the fundamental act of self-definition which every poet must
11
experience and the imaginative, critical and political distance this act may
involve, between his or her self and the poetic tradition present at the time he or
she was writing. Often this tradition will be seen as broken, inadequate, stultifying
and the poet looks elsewhere to discover, not so much that which is new, but
rather other forms and ideals which have meaning for him. I think this act of selfdefinition and the artistic consciousness which goes with it . . . implicates them in
a reworking of the tradition, in the creation of an imaginative space beyond it.
(Dawe, Absence 120-1).
Dawe correctly diagnoses the poet’s predicament, but we might take exception in the study of
Devlin and MacGreevy in particular (because here Dawe speaks of Kinsella as well) to his sense
of a creative response; rather we might speak of it as a negative response, as an expression of
lack more than a commitment to something particular. In addition, while it is commonplace to
read mid-century Irish poets in terms of the ‘elsewhere’ Dawe describes, MacGreevy, and Devlin
in particular, do not end up wholly embracing continental styles any more than they accepted
Revivalist ones. Instead of the “creative imaginative space beyond” tradition, the poetry that
emerges from this period writes around an absence—the absence of an aesthetic model adequate
to the social and cultural moment—in ways that defy attempts at categorization. A rejection of
Yeats is not necessarily an embrace of Joyce, and an uneasiness with available aesthetic
strategies does not necessarily mean the creation of an entirely new school. While stylistically
there is not much to link Devlin and MacGreevy the ground of desire (or post-desire, in
MacGreevy’s case) and despair is common to both. Irish modernists did write poetry out of a
genuine attempt to engage the questions and realities of mid-century Ireland and Europe. They
12
did not, however, as Dawe argues here, do so out of a desire for “self-definition;” the self
undergoes a modernist unraveling here just as in modernism everywhere.
What Dawe gets right, however, is the “absence of influence,” which is the essay’s title,
and the sense of distance a reader of Devlin’s encounters, which Dawe reads in the context of
Devlin’s life as an ex-patriot: “His poems . . . are often set in exotic climates and unusual settings
but running through them there is a perpetual sense of distance, of not being fixed in one native
place but feeling free of it” (Dawe Absence 132). I would argue that this sense of distance comes
across aesthetically as well as geographically, for both Devlin and MacGreevy; and that
“freedom” might be better described as “discomfort,” as neither poet is able to be “free” of the
Revival simply by virtue of his discomfort with it. Brian Coffey writes about Devlin as a “Poet
of Distance,” similarly arguing for a freedom associated with, in this case, distance from native
politics even when the subject matter is local (“The Tomb of Michael Collins”): “Devlin, who
well knew what role Plato’s ideal state would have imposed on poets, understood very well that
to aim at poems—he would not have allowed that a man or woman can decide to, undertake to,
write a poem—implies a freedom that neither reasons of state nor policing power can be
permitted to restrain or constrain” (Coffey Distance 141). One might substitute the policing
power of tradition here, especially as deValera’s rhetoric indeed intended to advance it. Again,
though, “freedom,” which Coffey formulates as “reserve, placing a man at a distance from
others,” does not give way to something “new” any more than it dismantles the hegemony of the
“old.” Instead one might define freedom in this case as Beckett does in his analysis of Devlin’s
Intercessions: “The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has
nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, any more than
the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and ‘stellar excrement.’ Art is the sun,
13
moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind” (Beckett Notes 94).In other words, these poets
were free in the sense that they were willing to throw themselves out of the “world” and into the
universe, having found the world, poetically (and for MacGreevy, literally), uninhabitable.
Irish poets were not unique in their ambivalence; Valentine Cunningham has described
the thirties in general as a decade of what he calls the “anxiety of influence” (Cunningham 11).
Though he speaks specifically of English and Russian writing it is clear that Irish writers were in
the same predicament, and indeed the whole of Europe can be said to have plunged into a state of
similar anxiety. Adorno recognizes this principle as fundamental to modern art, but extends it
past anxiety over specific traditions to a reworking of the very concept of tradition. “Tradition
itself, as a medium of historic movement, depends essentially on economic and social structures
and is qualitatively transformed along with them. The attitude of contemporary art toward
tradition, usually reviled as a loss of tradition, is predicated on the inner transformation of the
category of tradition itself” (Adorno 20-21). In this light the hand-wringing of a frustrated
Devlin, as we shall see, seems less Hamletesque and more appropriate to the movements of
history: a recent world war in which Irish citizens participated as individuals—or as Brits—
rather than as Irishmen; radical political realignments within Ireland over relatively short
interval; and a tension between the desire for economic prosperity through trade and for
isolationism in service of cultural preservation. 2 A culture which was experiencing a crisis over
tradition would certainly produce a poetry that did the same.
It is important at the outset to define the parameters of study as they relate to the teetering
body of work that attempts to define modernism while acknowledging the diversity of, and
2
For a m ore de tailed di scussion of these c ultural te nsions, s ee T erence B rown’s Ireland: a Social and
Cultural History, 1922-2002. London: Harper Perennial, 2004.
14
contradictions in, modernisms as they emerge in different cultural and temporal spaces. We
might begin with Erich Auerbach’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s “The Brown Stocking,” where
he defines modernism in terms of a “multipersonal representation of consciousness,” (Auerbach
536) in the place of a unified subjective aiming at an objective reality. In Auerbach’s
formulation, this ‘reality’ is already fragmented due to the rapidly changing nature of modern
life, and he praises modernism’s “disintegration and dissolution of external realities for a richer
and more essential interpretation of them” (Auerbach 545). MacGreevy’s war poetry is a
stunning example of the ways some literary modernisms resist an assimilation of consciousness
and a comprehensive interpretation of external events. In the same vein, Andrew Ross asserts
that “any history of modernist poetry” should address “the whole series of successive modernist
attempts to eliminate subjectivity from poetic form and language in order to establish a discourse
that is assumed to be more authentic or ‘true’ to our experience of the natural world” (Ross xv).
Devlin’s and MacGreevy’s rejection of their poetic inheritances (even when such hand-medowns were modernisms themselves) and engagement with timely subject matter (such as
modern warfare) echoes this quest for authenticity and truth-telling. And yet while some
modernisms sought to reassert the revelatory language of poetry as the path to truth, as did Laura
Riding Jackson, 3 Devlin and MacGreevy remained skeptical that such a path ultimately led
anywhere at all.
Both poets were in this way “modernist mourners” as described by Patricia Rae, who
rejects the characterization of modernist writers as irresponsibly isolationist:
3
See Jerome McGann’s Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1993.
15
The imperative to find an ethically satisfactory response to loss, whether through
resisting the closure of mourning or seeking the alternative of irrational
forgiveness, drives various experiments regarded as signatures of modernist
poetry: notably, the quest for substitutes for conceptual language and regular
syntax, the self-conscious assumption of personae that articulate feeling
indirectly, and the rendering of agonized inner dialogue. The famously “split,”
sometimes manifold modernist subject, speaking indirectly and ironically through
objective correlatives and multiple personae, becomes a figure haunted by
Derridean specters, and thus one whose losses cannot be assimilated by the status
quo. . . . When set against the background of discourses of public mourning that
reinforce injustice and sow the conditions for future grieving, however, by
denying personhood to many of the lost, or by encouraging nationalism,
militarism, and retribution, these strategies do not seem irresponsible retreats into
privacy and madness, but rather conscientious objections, or refusals to participate
in excitable speech. (Rae 38)
Irish modernist poets wrote in a culture for which a specifically nationalist status quo hung
thickly over its literature, and so the experience of a war poet and a diplomat contemplating the
rapid changes of both Europe and Ireland—most of them to the detriment of living things—
contradicted it at every turn. And yet their flight from the status quo, physically and poetically,
does not as Rae observes, constitute desertion, but can be interpreted as reasonable—even when
not reasoned—responses to what had become intolerable.
Of course all of this writing was taking place at a crucial moment in the formation of
Irish national identity, a time in which Irish cultural nationalism asserted itself as the leading
16
producer and regulator of cultural capital. Though the project of the Revival, at least as far as
Yeats was concerned, was not to create a smooth-surfaced, unidimensional sense of Irishness
(Kiberd 119)—which perhaps is a strategy appropriate to having been regarded by a ruling
power as such—cultural nationalism as a larger movement sought to simplify Irish identity.
Mid-twentieth century Irish poetry grappled with Modernism (Modernism as a movement
defined by a set of styles and strategies; and modernism as a set of responses to modernization)
both as it took shape in Europe and in its implications for literature in Ireland. Two factors made
Modernism problematic for Irish poets: first, industrialization came late to Ireland compared to
neighboring countries; and second, the lack of a robust native market for Irish literature
precluded significant and widely-read discussions about literary innovation (aside from the
possible moral and political dangers of innovation as an import). In many ways literary
exploration of Modernism came late to Ireland, which contributed to the peculiarity of the Irish
response. Because of their remove from the centers of continental literary modernisms, and
because of the width of the “Modernism” umbrella under which many modernisms operate, Irish
poets of this period produced a set of exploratory refusals in their interrogations of style and
poetic form. In addition, they wrote in a climate of political upheaval which exacerbated the
pitch of conversations about the nature of Irishness. The focus of the Revival had been to both
revive and reinvent a sense of Irishness through art that would, some hoped, revive and reinvent
the Irish themselves; but though this work came during a time of political strife, its energy
clearly flagged after the onset of the Civil War. Yeats’ later poetry moves toward Modernism in
more outward-looking ways than his earlier, more Celtocentric poetry, but it would take the
poets who came after him to fully engage Modernism and Irish literature’s relationship to it.
17
Criticism of Irish poetry of this period often attempts to fit the poets into existing literary
categories. MacGreevy and Devlin have long been assumed the “modernists” by virtue of the
experimental nature of their poetry, while Clarke and Kavanagh, as “anti-Yeatsians,” are too
conventional in form to be seriously considered as modernists, as if not being a “modernist” at
that time was synonymous with not writing good or serious poetry. Salkeld falls into the
sometimes-anthologized “woman-poet” category, with the occasional reference to her peripheral
relationship with modernism.
The problem with these attempts at categorization is that they treat the Irish poets of this
period as a priori secondary to their continental counterparts. Studies normally situate the
individual poets (or two at a time, rarely) in relation to either already-famous Irish prose (notably
Joyce), to Yeats and the Literary Revival, which pre-dates this period by decades, or continental
and American poetry of the same period. The poets are rarely read together, in relation to one
another, and when they do, the larger critical framework is inevitably an already-established
literary tradition. When this kind of positioning gives way, however, to reading practices which
take into consideration a whole body of poetry, the room that would otherwise have used up for
either cries for the legitimization of the poetry, or claims that the poetry is quite good because it
adheres to certain already-established criteria can give way to serious, comprehensive close
reading that must form the foundation for any detailed consideration of the poetry of this period
as a whole. Second, the features of the poetry that are common only to the body of Irish poetry of
this period emerge and become clear. If the poetry is only studied in relation to other poetry
which has only some cultural background in common, those cultural realities which are unique to
Ireland—Civil War, partition, late industrialization, non-participation in WWII, the peculiar
relationship between Church and state in Ireland, to name only a fraction of them—will be
18
missed. For that poetry which speaks in plain terms about such cultural realities, as “The Great
Hunger,” more serious criticism exists; yet the centrality of cultural hunger in that particular case
so overwhelms the attention of critics that subtler but no less powerful critiques of religiosity and
more importantly, the urging for its transformations, are overlooked. When this poetry is read in
relation to poetry of the same cultural context, other features of poetry contemporary to it sheds
light on those aspects of the poetry that would otherwise remain in the shadows. To return to the
role of spirituality and religion in Kavanagh’s most famous poem, for example, treatments of the
same in Devlin’s and Clarke’s poetry is instructive; attention to what is obvious in their work
brings to light what is subtle in his. But it need not be even that difficult in Kavanagh’s case: his
own “Lough Derg” poem, when read next to the “Great Hunger” and Devlin’s “Lough Derg”
poem, provides a substantial portion of that illumination.
The solution to the problem of underreading is not to insist that Irish poetry of this period
is equal or superior to continental and American poetry of the same time period; it is to take it
seriously through careful reading that considers both its unique cultural context and the way it
functions as a teeming but interrelated whole. The hard-to-miss optimism in Salkeld’s writing
makes it easier to notice the subtler attempts at the creation of a new set of terms for cultural life
in Ireland as they are carefully developed in Beckett, Kavanagh, and Clarke; and recognition of
the profound tone of resignation in MacGreevy’s poetry tempers Salkeld’s enthusiasm so that the
complexities of her optimism become apparent. Next to other modernist literature of the period,
Beckett’s poetry hardly seems crass, but read in the context of an Irish climate of silence about
the body and the absence of crude bodily functions in other Irish poetry of this period (excepting
MacGreevy, for whom dead and dying bodies are at the forefront), his insistence upon excreting
19
and aging bodies becomes an indictment of a certain kind of humanism and an advancement of
another.
The other major advantage of this kind of reading, which treats an historic period of a
particular geographic and cultural location (inasmuch as cultures are sites of meaning) as the
ground from which a particular body of work emerges, especially when that work is varied in
style, theme and approach, is that those contexts in which individual poets have previously been
awkwardly placed start themselves to change. The best example of the transformative power of
adjacency is the extent to which these poets unravel and multiply the term “modernism.”
Devlin’s tendency to amass modernist strategies into uneasy collectives within single poems
(“Now” and “Communication from the Eiffel Tower”) emphasizes the diversity of modernism to
the extent that “modernism” as a term that could coherently describe a literary movement starts
to unravel, particularly because Devlin so mercilessly unarms each modernism he represents.
Salkeld’s poetry disrupts modernism in a different way by juxtaposing conventionality in poetic
form with the breezy integration of details of modern life (trams, taxis, radios). Clarke’s poetry
emphasizes the power of tradition and primitive energy to a much greater extent than that
champion of the wedding of tradition and modernism, T.S Eliot ever did; but the result is a
poetry that moves forward to engage the issues of modern life. The question of whether or not
individual poets in this study qualify as “modernist” is less important than the challenge they
pose to modernism itself. Of course the concept of modernisms as a plural is hardly new; there is
a good deal of writing on non-continental and American forms of modernism that challenges and
disrupts the term as it came to be solidified and domesticated during its heyday in mid-century.
There are a number of reasons the Irish challenge to the unity of modernism is significant,
however. First, Ireland’s ambivalent position as both a colonized subaltern country and as an
20
emerging first-world country moving into the world economy means that it does not fit into
existing categories in relation to modernism and the continent/America, which means that the
danger is to dismiss it as either a contributor to first-world modernism or as a disruptive force to
it. Second, the poetry of this period, with all its ambivalence toward modernism, was written
simultaneously to the solidification of modernism. This simultaneity not only adds a potential
explanation to its lack of readership—as its challenges to modernism as a unified entity would
hardly be taken seriously as modernism—but undermines the notion that there ever was unity in
the concept of modernism in the first place. Third-world challenges to first-world modernisms
would come much later leading up to, accompanying, and flourishing after the revolutions
starting in the early 1960s; the Irish challenge comes earlier.
But why does this challenge to the unity of modernism on the part of Irish poetry take
place? It is true that Devlin, MacGreevy, and Beckett spent enough time on the continent to
naturally be participants in the literary scenes there, but more powerful than that (and
acknowledging that some poets of the period stayed in Ireland and those who did not wrote about
Ireland) is the fact that these poets were already writing against notions of monolith and
definition. The overwhelming cultural tone, set primarily by public officials and outspoken
operatives of the Irish Church was, as we have previously discussed, one of isolation, unyielding
traditionalism, and insularity. One of the thorniest tasks for Irish poets of this period was to write
themselves out of a culture of stagnation borne of staling nationalist rhetoric and wariness toward
modernization and innovation. Critics disagree about the effectiveness of censorship in silencing
innovative voices and blocking out corrupting foreign influences, but every poet in this study
treats the discourse of cultural protectionism as a potent force with potentially repressive
consequences. Each poet offers hers or his own remedy for such circumstances under which
21
writing had to take place; Clarke finds new possibilities in older forms of Irish poetry, Kavanagh
asserts a revitalizing spirituality, Beckett and MacGreevy demand the reader to attend to human
bodies, Salkeld champions the soul, and Devlin values a deep sense of belief free from
dogmatism. The extent to which these assertions can be thought of as “modernist,” particularly
because modernism as we know it in this era of criticism has been domesticated for some time, is
less important than considering the ways mid-century Irish poetry resists anti-modernizing
impulses without resorting to literary fundamentalism in the other direction. The poets’ strenuous
efforts against this stultifying tone make their challenges to a unified modernism all the more
robust, because their work takes on the very concept of ideology, from the narrow definition of
womanhood in Salkeld to Devlin’s objections to fascism and unified literary movements in one
single poem, to Clarke’s and Kavanagh’s disgust with the Irish Church.
Theirs was the kind of response, however, that did not closely resemble movements in
other countries and cultural contexts against ideology; despite its vigor, Irish poetry of this
period insists upon keeping the valuable energies that go into the forming of ideology, and in no
way is this more apparent than the concept of spirituality and belief. All of the poets in this
study, in fact, with the exception perhaps of MacGreevy and Devlin (who nevertheless value
belief) offer belief as a possible antidote to ideology. All insist, however, that belief should take
a form unshackled from religiosity and focus on the dynamism already present in Irish forms of
spirituality. For Clarke and Devlin this means recalling periods in Irish history during which the
passions ignited by belief had not yet been snuffed out by a ubiquitously institutionalized
Church; for Clarke in particular it meant a time when both Christian and pagan energies
combined to form a dynamic form of Irish spirituality, the threads of which still run through the
fabric of contemporary Irish culture. For Salkeld, belief and spirituality reorient the individual
22
toward her own soul to begin the process of unshackling oneself from the constraints of life as a
woman in conservative Ireland.
Similarly, the persistence of the importance of Irish soil was reclaimed by these poets as
that which existed outside and beyond the boundaries of the field. 4 MacGreevey places Irish
landscape in the context of the continental battlefields of World War I to disengage the
conflation of soil with home. In this way he refigures landscape as an open field for the surface
play of possibility (such as a reimagining of “home” as a concept). Salkeld’s urban, suburban,
and rural movements (coastal and inland) via tram and taxi in her poetry, while providing rich
description of both natural phenomena and modern innovations, reinvents Irish land as varied:
backward- and forward-looking, old and new, confining and transportative. Susan Schreibman
writes about the mistaken notion that late twentieth-century Irish women poets were the first to
penetrate a male-dominated literary machine and chronicles acts of intentional exclusion (from
the 1970s on) of mid-century Irish women poets from important publications (310). Reading the
poem by Rhoda Coghill I briefly discuss in the Salkeld chapter, Schriebman notes that “For
many of these women protagonists . . . the landscape is a place of silences, entrapment, and
domestic violence” (319). Salkeld and her female contemporaries, writing from a specific and
underrepresented subject position, transform the concept of landscape in ways that are important
for women poets to follow. Mebh Muckian, for example, makes ample use of landscape imagery
to work through layered enclosures from womb to subject/object relationships.
4
The field as a co ncept in post-independence Ireland stressed the confined nature of Irish identity, in that
that field contained the Irish self.
23
This willingness to keep the remnants of those ideas and energies that had hardened into
ideologies played an important role in the history of Irish poetry insofar as mid-century Irish
poetry made possible the continuation of Irish poetry as a unique form of cultural expression. For
poets of this period simply to have destroyed those energies would have insisted that poets of the
1960s and beyond would have had to argue for their recovery rather than insisting on innovations
of their own. We might think, for instance, how the poetry of Ciaran Carson, whose poetry in
The Twelfth of Never (2001) moves back and forth between Ireland and Japan, benefits from the
complexity the concept of home takes on in mid-century poetry. In Carson’s poetry it is not
simply a case of increasingly internationalized poetry but of a multiplied (and abstracted) sense
of home space already explored by MacGreevy. Or consider Eavan Boland’s depictions of
suburban life from the perspective of a woman who both writes and raises children, ground that
had already been opened by Salkeld.
One of the difficulties with a study of Irish modernism in poetry is the paucity of the
body of work available for study. Though MacGreevy’s Poems is among the best of mid-century
modernist poetry, it is the only volume of poetry MacGreevy ever published; he was more
productive as an art critic than as a poet. Similarly, Devlin published only three volumes of
poetry during his lifetime, much of which was spent as a successful diplomat. More famous than
the other two, Beckett produced very little poetry. Indeed it may be Beckett himself who has
given the most attention and respect to the Irish modernist poets of the 1930s. His essay, “Recent
Irish Poetry” praises MacGreevy’s work as an example of what was best in Irish poetry of the
day.
Another difficulty seems to lie in misplaced emphasis. Even Gerald Dawe, in “The Rest
in Silence: Devlin, Coffey, and MacGreevy,” who correctly observes that “the emphasis falls
24
upon the personality of a poet instead of where it rightly belongs—with the poetry” spends
almost the entirety of his essay’s MacGreevy section on biographical analysis. Certainly
biography has its place in literary scholarship, but when it serves mainly to legitimize poets for a
skeptical audience instead of offering sound criticism to the same purpose, it is to the detriment
of the poets’ advancement.
A third difficulty emerges from the tendency to overlook individual artists’ achievements
when they do not constitute a “movement” as such and the culture does not appear to reflect or
support their efforts. The main culprit behind this dismissal is Terence Brown, whose use of
Eugene’s Linn’s “four characteristics of modernist art forms”(Brown 31) to argue for the
absence of true modernism in mid-twentieth-century Ireland passes over the poetry of Devlin and
MacGreevy with hardly a glance. Both poets engage in a high degree of “Aesthetic SelfConsciousness or Self-Reflexiveness,” in which the world of the poem is ruptured frequently by
the self-conscious poet; both employ “Simultaneity, Juxtaposition, or ‘Montage;’” both are
poetries of “Paradox, Ambiguity, and Uncertainty;” and, at least in MacGreevy’s poetry, in an
attempt to create the distance necessary for the contemplation of the realities of world war,
engage in “Dehumanization.” Irish modernism scores the weakest on the stylistic elements of
this list, but not to the degree that their contributions to the larger world of modernism should be
rejected out of hand. If that were the case a number of other modernists would have to be left
behind as well. Brown’s dismissal of MacGreevy, in his essay for Patricia Coughlan and Alex’s
Davis collection on Irish modernist poetry of the 1930s, rests solely on an essay MacGreevy
writes on Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which he finds unremarkable, and not on a reading of
MacGreevy’s poetry. In addition Brown lumps all the poets in the period together, using Austin
Clarke’s rejection of the Revival (whose complex relationship with modernism Brown outlines)
25
as proof that “disillusioned, post-revolutionary literary Ireland seems to have thrown out the
modernist baby with the Romantic bathwater of the Literary Revival.” The most he will allow is
that “the 1930s [produced] only a few writers, like genetic sports, who wrote in varying degrees
of awareness of the Revival’s former originality or of modernism’s revolution of the word”
(Brown 38). Such an account cannot possibly have seriously considered the modernist poetry of
Devlin and MacGreevy. In Brown’s cultural history of the period, Ireland: A Social and Cultural
History 1922-2001, the blame goes largely to the strong religious conservatism of the period.
Tim Armstrong cautions against this kind of analysis, noting that similar cultural strictures were
strong in other European countries at the time without resulting in the absence of experimental
modernism (Armstrong 46). Armstrong himself stops short of claiming modernism for Ireland
whole-heartedly, however, primarily because of what he reads as MacGreevy’s movement
toward a “true Catholic collectivity” and retention of the lyric voice (Armstrong 56). Brown’s
and Armstrong’s analyses raise the question of whether or not modernist texts must adhere to all
(not just most, which would certainly qualify Devlin and MacGreevy) central tenets of European
modernism to be worthy of inclusion into the highly respected modernist canon. The implication
seems to be that not having boldly led a large and convincing experimental movement in Ireland,
the modernist poetry of mid-twentieth-century Ireland is a lesser modernism than its counterparts
in Europe. Most arguments of this sort leave Beckett out completely as if he were not Irish at all
and could simply be excised from the discussion.
I contend that for Irish modernists, both inherited native and continental styles were
inadequate to engage with the current historical and social circumstances, including the unique
role of Ireland in WWI, questions of nationalism and national identity surrounding Irish
26
independence, and rapid social change; and that the resulting poetry is an important addition to
the histories of both Irish poetry and literary modernism.
D.H. Lawrence, a contemporary of the poets I examine in the dissertation, writes
But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the
immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no
consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering,
intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round,
consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished
tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates
unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and
yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. If we try
to fix the living tissue, as the biologists fix it with formation, we have only a
hardened bit of the past, the bygone life under our observation. . . .The seething
poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting gems of the
before and after. In its quivering momentaneity it surpasses the crystalline, pearlhard jewels, the poems of the eternities. Do not ask for the qualities of the
unfading timeless gems. Ask for the whiteness which is the seethe of mud, ask for
that incipient putrescence which is the skies falling, ask for the never-pausing,
never-ceasing life itself. (Lawrence)
Though much of Lawrence’s discussion concerns free verse (like that of Walt Whitman), his
celebration of immediacy in poetry speaks powerfully to the predicament of mid-century poets in
Ireland. Poets wrote after the Revival was spent, of course, and though it was diverse in style and
subject matter, and does not constitute anything like a coherent movement, poetry in mid-
27
twentieth-century Ireland—the last decade of Yeats’s life to the dawn of the economic and
cultural revitalization of 1960s—is a poetry which, to a large extent, recognizes and
contemplates Ireland’s present. Nowhere is this presentness more pronounced than in
Kavanagh’s Great Hunger, a poem that both contemplates the failures of a cultural idealism that
leads to stagnation and death and, I argue, proposes a way to engender growth and nurture
possibility. In service of an ideal of growth over cultural withering, Kavanagh presents a version
of Christianity that departs sharply from the Pauline Church of his day but nevertheless comes
out of an intimate knowledge of the alternative versions of spirituality already present in the Irish
peasant culture in which Kavanagh was brought up.
Blanaid Salkeld’s poetry is perhaps the most overtly “present” of all the poetry in this
examination, not only because she so deftly incorporates artifacts of modern life in it (trams,
cabs, radios, washing machines, typewriters) but because she gives voice to the movements of
particularly lived life in a particular time: the female Irish sometimes-expatriate poet, perhaps
never to be read, writing through and out of tangled identities. In Salkeld we find some of the
first examples of the presence of non-Western images in Irish poetry, which would find its way
into the culturally polyglot poems of the late 20th-century poets Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon,
and others. Certainly there was eastern mystical influence in the poetry that came out of the
Revival-era Theosophical Societies, but there is a difference between a stylistic inspiration and
the presence, in Salkeld’s case, of specific cultural practices and artifacts.
Perhaps, though, Irish poets of this period were most present in the way Lawrence
imagines not for a lack of poetic structure—Salkeld writes almost exclusively in sonnets, after
all, and Clarke makes ample use of 17th-century Gaelic poetic conventions—but because their
writing goes in such disparate directions. Not only is there no school or movement to speak of,
28
but the scholar is at pains to find stylistic or thematic similarities between poets. Even the
“modernists” (Devlin, MacGreevy, and Beckett), as critics have reluctantly grouped them, could
be said to belong to one group only by virtue of the fact that they all engage with modernism on
some level. Devlin, for instance, experiments with both modernist and classical styles and finds
them all wanting, while MacGreevy explores themes of alienation and homelessness and Beckett
attempts to remake our idea of what it means to be human in the world. As for the others, there is
even less consistency, from the reinvented myths of Clarke to the sometimes feminist sonnets of
Salkeld to the bitter soil-scratching (with hope) of Kavanagh. This variousness among poets (and
in many cases, particularly Salkeld’s, among the poems of just one poet) is appropriate to an
emerging sense of Irish identity following centuries of invasion, colonization, civil war, and
continual sectarian conflict; to a country accustomed to cultural hybridity through exile,
emigration, war, and settlement; and, on an international level, to a time for which nearly every
decade brought fresh political alignments and social movements. For Irish poetry of the middle
years to have formed one school (or indeed for even one school to have formed!) would have
necessitated a sense of how Irish literature, and Ireland and the world should be rather than what
it was: various and tumultuous.
There is one notable exception to this presentness in mid-century poetry, and that is the
persistence of the classical ideal. Most of the poets of this period, but primarily Clarke and
Devlin, maintain a kind of nostalgia for an poetic era—one that neither of them lived through,
but merely experienced through the pages of other writers—, the features of which, if it were
available to the modern writer, could address the concerns of the present day. Alas, it could not
be so; but the one poet who failed to recognize the incongruity of classicism with modern Ireland
still managed to transform classical ideals, specifically the use of myth, into tools which could
29
produce a culturally relevant poetry. Indeed it was the aim of many Revivalists to make the old
myths fresh and new, and to humanize mythic figures, but it was Clarke who made these figures
truly contemporary in some cases and approaching revolutionarily so—as in his writing of
mythic Irish women—in others.
Mid-twentieth-century Irish poetry departs from Revival-era poetry in three distinct
ways: the presence in much of the poetry of either a Catholic sensibility and spirituality or, at the
very least, a deep engagement with the notion of belief; lack of anxiety about cultural
preservation; and ambivalence about the processes of modernization. In addition, its
identification as “Anglo-Irish” poetry begins to reflect the language of the poetry more than the
identity of the poet. Because the Revival’s energies could not sustain its aims, and because it so
quickly became outmoded, something more flexible, probative, and relevant took its place; and
in doing so, mid-century poetry enabled the rich flowering of later decades. Indeed what has
come to pass in the last seventy years is something quite like what Yeats had envisioned: a
national poetry (in both English and Irish) rooted in the cultural experience of Irish people.
Contemporary Irish poetry is perhaps more complex than Yeats could have imagined,
particularly in the variousness of the signifier “Irish,” and it is mid-century poetry that allows it
to be so.
In other words, what mid-century poetry did for contemporary poetry was to disallow the
sort of hardening that comes with the forced, premature molding of a national culture that is in
the midst of waves of upheaval. Certainly Yeats’s vision for a national poetry did not involve a
stagnant definition of Irishness; his was, in fact, highly resistant to polarizing nationalist
impulses. But despite his wishes, political expediencies, particularly those of Eamon de Valera,
encouraged the hardening of the Revivalist vision. Were it not for the poets who wrote with great
30
difficulty, both in terms of reception and financial reward, in mid-century, this hardening might
have killed Irish poetry altogether. Mid-century Irish poetry carries with it those aspects of
Revivalism which could survive and altered what was untenable, and in doing so laid the
groundwork for what was to come.
Mid-twentieth-century Irish poetry stands as a body of literature worthy of serious critical
engagement. Poets of this period wrote in the immediate aftermath of a civil and a world war,
and wrote through another world war. They wrote as citizens and representatives (as in Denis
Devlin, the career diplomat) of a newly configured small nation; they both contributed to and
departed from European literary modernism; they took on thorny matters of Church, State and
belief without falling prey to polarization or oversimplification; they were homebodies (Patrick
Kavanagh, Austin Clarke) and exiles (Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett) and AngloIrish hybrids (Blanaid Salkeld). They kept open the painful wounds of cultural rupture and
national identity crisis, and in doing so, created a poetry that spoke powerfully about the
struggles of the middle decades.
31
-MODERNISM “NOW:” DENIS DEVLIN
In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Margorie Perloff sees modernism as responding to the
dilemma of how to articulate the relationship between the world of the poet and the world of
objects. One way to respond to this problem, as Baudelaire did, is to create a stable poetic world
with internal organization that offers an antidote to an increasingly chaotic and disconnected
reality. “Every image contributes to the sense of mystery and artifice, thus pointing to a stable
and coherent center” (Perloff Indeterminacy 65). For example, Wallace Stevens’ poetry advances
the idea of poetic wholeness as the panacea to an era without belief that makes its own truths in
its stead (Perloff Dance 3). 5 But although the overarching imperative of Baudelaire and Stevens
is similar, Baudelaire’s work (and subsequently Eliot’s) disrupts some elements of form, notably
syntax and verse form, while Stevens prefers conventional, recognizable forms.
Against Baudelaire and Stevens Perloff posits Rimbaud and Pound as preferable
alternatives in the response to modernist dilemmas. Unlike Baudelaire, Rimbaud’s “poetic of
indeterminacy” offers no organizing principle for its symbols, preferring the materiality of the
5
I s hould b e cl ear h ere t hat Perloff i s writing specifically o f t he criticism surrounding S tevens’ work
(Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Helen Vendler, Frank Kermode and others), though those of Stevens’ own words that
she includes support the critical apparatus.
32
words themselves (Perloff Indeterminacy 55, 58) and their interplay on the surface of the poem.
Perloff chooses Rimbaud’s star descendant, John Ashbery, to illustrate the Rimbaudian poetic.
His “These Laucustrine Cities”
blocks out all attempts to rationalize its imagery, to make it conform to a coherent
pattern. In Ashbery’s verbal landscape, fragmented images appear one by one—
cities, sky, swans, tapering branches, violent sea, mountain—without coalescing
into a symbolic network. (10)
The images in Ashbery’s poem create, in his words for the poetry of Gertrude Stein, an “‘open
field of narrative possibilities’” (11). The subject, which in the poetry of Stevens and Eliot might
be relied upon to control these images, becomes merely another object in this field. Thus subject
and object collapse, as the world of images itself, devoid of that “stable and coherent symbolic
center” is all that the poem offers. The images come from within, as if the poet is trying to
convey what it feels like to be those things, rather than an “I” experiencing their effects (61). In
Ashbery as in Rimbaud, the modernist anxiety over the relationship between self and world is
resolved as a dissolution of self; and its corollary, the relationship between poetry and world, is
resolved as the dissolution of the world, or at least the obliteration of its importance to the poem.
“The symbolic evocations generated by words on the page are no longer grounded in a coherent
discourse, so that it becomes impossible to decide which of these associations are relevant and
which are not” (18). In other words, the world exists, and the poem exists, but there is no
determinate correspondence between them. Indeterminacy is not to be confused with elitism,
however; even Eliot, whose references were obscure, nevertheless referred to real things, and
organized those real things according to a (highly esoteric, highly specialized) symbolic structure
33
(13). Neither is indeterminacy synonymous with a retreat into poetry as an escape from the “real”
world for which high modernists are so famous. Rather
Art becomes play, endlessly frustrating our longing for certainty . . . poetic texts
like “These Lacustrine Cities” or “Ping” [Beckett] derive force from their refusal
to “mean” in conventional ways . . . to use, as does Ashbery, shifting pronouns
and false causal connectives is itself an implicit commentary on the nature of
identity and causality. (34)
“Identity and causality” are “eal” and need not be addressed through a realist correspondence
between subject and object.
Devlin’s early First Poems (1930) struggles between a nostalgia for classical poetry and,
like MacGreevy, a skepticism about the ability of any kind of poetry to address fundamental
questions about life and death that arose out of modernization, war, and Irish ambivalence
surrounding cultural identity. Indeterminancy, which in Devlin’s poetry is his self-aware and
performative refusal to adhere consistently to one style, marks this collection as modernist in
both local (Irish) and broader (continental) ways. The collection heaves back and forth between
styles and evaluations of styles, becoming progressively less “determinant.”
“O Paltry Melancholy” laments the passing of an almost instinctual classical passion.
Mary of Magdalen, Orpheus, and Deirdre are joined by a lioness who has lost her cubs. In a
poem that laments the loss of a style of mourning drawn from three classical traditions—
medieval Christian, Greco-Roman mythical, and Irish Gaelic—Devlin’s last stanza presents the
alternative to the richness and passion of classical tradition, which as we will see in the
collection’s “Now,” is emblematic of the aesthetic vapidity of Devlin’s age.
O paltry melancholy,
34
dragging a songless boredom through sunless and stormless days
images firing his brain of never accomplished tasks
disarming smile of humility hiding coward delays
on tiptoe in dreams beside action, sophister strutting in masks
of laughter, of child-like pagan of curl-lipped polished doubt,
a timid traveler trailing slow steps and about
considering which route he shall take at the crossing of ways. (lines 29-36)
Not so the mourning of the Magdalene, whose “savage exultation” (6) is a stranger to doubt; nor
Orpheus, whose sorrow “was the silver sorrow of the poets’/ that bends o’er its own pain
embracingly” (13-14), the antithesis of paltry melancholy’s timidity. Compare this deflated
Hamlet to Deirdre, who
drank voluptuously
the hot and wrathful blood of Naoise, her slain Lord.
Fierce was her sorrow; measured ecstasy
swaying her golden-fleshed body
from warm throat poured the keen.(15-19)
The style of mourning Devlin values here is rooted in devotion, fearlessly embracing the reality
of death and reveling in its richness. Devlin’s reference to the “child-like pagan of curl-lipped
polished doubt” is not posited here as an argument for a specifically religious devotion but an
unqualified commitment to an object of desire, even through that object’s death—indeed,
particularly after the death. Instead the sophister’s life is “stormless.” The poem itself ends on
the sophister without the poet having made a determination about which direction to take his
poem. Had he been fully committed to classical forms of mourning, might he have returned to
35
them for a final stanza? And yet the poem is an elegy. The classical tradition, as we will see in
“Now,” is no longer fully available to the contemporary poet. No wonder it ends with the bored,
spineless sophister—to do otherwise would be to pretend that classicism were still viable.
“Before Lepanto: The Turkish Admiral Speaks to His Fleet” follows as an attempt to tap
into the classical sensibility but fails; each stanza ends incompletely, sometimes abruptly
(“That’s Christian canon crackling. Do you hear” [26]) and sometimes trailing off (“and laggard
day that sprawls/ where aftermath of sluggard foam/ crawls” [6-8]). The admiral tries five times
in five short numeraled sections mocking the epic. But the admiral is no longer a young hero and
he cannot get up the steam to carry the poem. His calls to action (“Old watch-dogs half-asleep . .
. come, put on youth again” [14; 24]) fail to inspire the kind of blood-red passion Devlin
celebrates in “Melancholy.” It ends with a too-trite benediction for the poem’s earlier angst:
“Come, brother ships, be comforted, for see/In benediction of your travailed years/The evening
spreads fair sunlight on your sails” (49-51)
“Adam’s House” reflects Devlin’s disappointment over the death of classical tradition in
ways that echo MacGreevy’s musings on the limitations of language. Here the conflict is not
between kinds of poetry but between poetry and dogmatism, which confirms the extra-religious
sense of devotion in “Melancholy.” In a formal strategy he will employ again in “Now,” Devlin
counters a main poetic text with a subordinate rhyming text, set in italics marginally to the plain
type. The marginal text is fragments of and finally full versions of poems distilling Church
teachings into easy-to-remember verses for children. The first one mocks the classical tradition
in its declension of “stink” (“Stinkarum, stankarum, buck” [6]) and in subsequent iterations the
Scholasticism (“The old Scholastics say” [16; 23]) that would have been part of Devlin’s
religious training with the Jesuits. The Scholastic emphasis on dialectic is at work in this poem,
36
as in “Melancholy,” with the juxtaposition of poetry with dogmatic verse, though no new thing is
made of their interplay. In the end neither the speaker’s excessively poetic musings, as in
The forest’s full of murmurings and streams,
The pool’s black wavelets creamed with froth reluce,
Beneath blue numerous leaves cold moonlight streams
On moss-embedded gleaming limbs diffuse
Of sleeping hamadryads mist with fauns,
Brown Pan yawns, mutters, drops his flute and snores.
The gods are playing on eternal lawns
But kindly mortals sleep on fronded floors. (7-14)
nor the simplistic dogmatism of the rhyming verses can aid the speaker in understanding life and
death. In the first half of the poem, poetry is an escape for the speaker, an Eden in which to avoid
the harsher truths of the rhymes. In the latter half, however, the speaker can no longer ignore
these truths as he ages and then dies (“The years slipped from my shoulders/ Like life from a
new-born spirit” [42; 43]). Although death allows him once again to escape the “crapulous faces
of my evil deeds” (46) it is not attended by explanation, but is pure light without enlightenment.
“This is the bright-fired hostel/After the tenebrous journey” (53-4) but “as when/Just men are
gathered quiet in a room/And silence slowly throbs with souls; so silence/Impregnate throbbed
with consciousness of us” (60-3). The silence is filled, again not with understanding but art:
“Your hair was round my eyes/ The grisping silence filled/With light notes soft as milk/Of
hundred harps and flutes” (64-7). The speaker is resigned to the futility of the whole exercise as
he becomes not dead speaker but live poet, writing, “I’ve had my lesson again; I might have
37
known/Love is no talisman to the mystery” (72-3) where “love” is the music and poetry that we
use to fill in the silences that theology cannot.
The end of the poem seems to suggest an alternative to both art and dogmatism as ways
of understanding the mysteries of life and death and sheds some light into what Devlin might
have considered a reasonable alternative to writing: “Experience teaches, you know” (81).
Devlin’s own biography certainly affirms the need for “experience” as he lived the majority of
his days not as a professional poet but gathering “experiences” from extensive travel. Surely the
cosmopolitan nature of modernism creeps into his poetry here as a counter to Irish nativism, but
Devlin never develops the thought. Curiously the line appears in the same italicized and
marginalized text as the rhymes, as if it were part of one. But although “experience teaches”
hardly matches the authoritarian tone of the verses, the ending sneers “you know” as if to show
up the poet for an idiot to think that anything would sufficiently replace experience as a path to
knowledge and wisdom. Devlin does not follow up on the thought in this poem or the others in
the collection; experience cannot be transposed; and so as an aesthetic strategy, it is unviable.
This last line draws a distinction between the “experience” of romanticism, where the basis for
poetic understanding is what we perceive directly through our senses, and experience as the
accumulation of personally experienced events and moments. The latter is both an accretion of
sensory experiences and has a social, instead of isolationist, component. Experience in this sense
is the personal in the context of the social, which in this poem relates to the theological world
view of the parenthetical speaker. The last line of “Adam’s House” rejects the Romantic notion
of experience in favor of the socially-inflected one. But because Devlin gives the parenthetical
speaker the sneer of “you know,” and because he has already set that voice apart as one of
unyielding—and ineffectual—dogmatism; and because the more romantic sections of the poem
38
read as out of touch with real life in comparison; Devlin’s poem rejects both senses of
“experience” as the basis for a relevant poetry. What the poet dismisses is easier to discern here
than what he would find acceptable, though a reader might be tempted to read his favored
alternative as realism. As we see in “Now,” however, Devlin will discard realism is just as
insufficient as either romanticism or dogmatic religiousity.
In “Now” Devlin sounds the death knell for Western poetry, not just as an inherited
aesthetic but in all its current forms. John Keats’s Grecian Urn becomes the symbol of an
aesthetic that has long outlived its relevance.
The Urn of the Occident is filled
And the blue-flamed serpent is coiled around its base,
And Pallas’ bird, fixed in the sepia sky
Moveless as marble, spreads her iris wings.
Patient and proud mirroring of reality;
Arrogant gathering of sense and movement and passion
To interpret to men the profoundest soul of a man
Disgust and tire like a long drawn-out farewell
The Good no longer enfevers the sons of Plato,
Pure white and azure sky
The Hymn to Beauty is no longer chanted
Dull cold and ivory Aphrodite. (1-12)
In Keats’s urn, all of the images are fixed, but the artist is able to suggest motion. There is a
balance or interplay between the belatedness of art and its timelessness. In Devlin’s rendering,
there is only belatedness, as the sky takes on the sepia hue of old photographs. Athena is not just
39
etched in marble but takes on its motionless properties. The negative space in Keats’s urn is gone
in Devlin’s, unavailable to be filled by new, inspired material. The Urn of the Occident stands
for realist styles (“patient and proud mirroring of reality”) that have nothing left to do; and so it
no longer ‘sings’ in the way it does in Keats’s poem: “The Good no longer enfevers the sons of
Plato . . . The Hymn to Beauty is no longer chanted.” What is chanted instead is the little
rhyming ditty in italics between the lines of the main polemic in the second and third sections.
As it weaves in and out of the clichéd images in section III, it serves to emphasize their triviality,
as if rhyming ditties and poetic commonplaces were interchangeable. But the sub-poem also
mocks the lines of the main poem, as “What’s beauty, truth, life, love, what’s me?” (40) is
followed by the more practical “Can we get there?” (41) The approaches in sections II and III
are no more effective than the sub-poem in addressing the present. Devlin levels the poetic
playing field in this way. Devlin creates a cast of speakers who represent various forms of poetic
expression in the poem, a strategy that will come into full bloom in “Communication from the
Eiffel Tower.” If we consider the multiplicity of voices here, particularly in their roles as
interlocutors for poetic styles, we must note a tension with the poem’s theme of immobility. For
if the styles Devlin dismisses here were truly dead, could they continue to speak in his own
poetry?
Devlin continues his mockery of Occidental art and its demise in the second section,
which consists of a list of tired, clichéd images that read as if the poet closed his eyes and
pointed to random lines from a beloved anthology. The first few lines bring to mind Irish poetic
commonplaces,
Eternally emerald pastures of Ireland; English lanes winding
Onery, two-ery.
40
Through smothering blossom; old book shops in Paris;
Ziccary zan
Larks singing in Sussex and Deridre’s now bloodless lips. (13-17)
and continues with general Western European ones (“Vines in Avignon” [19], “Honor redeemed
through war” [21], and “sweet things of home” [23]). These are the things, he suggests, that fill
the urn. They are once-fresh images that have become stale, and there is nothing more to be done
than to copy them endlessly. By mixing Irish, English, and continental clichés Devlin places the
problem with all of Europe, not just Ireland.
Even so-called new approaches, which have not been around long enough to become
stale, are bunk according to Devlin. The third section reads as a mockery of new schools popping
up in Europe meant to dismantle the conventional poetic of stanza two.
Oner-ery, Twoeery
Ziccary zan. . .
Let us be Anarchists by all means
How many miles is it
Dethrone the Verb and the Substantive
To Babylon.
Roses do not smell sweeter than beans
Babylon.
Hail to the Holy Adjective!
Three-score and ten.
What’s beauty, truth, life, love, what’s me?
Can we get there? (30-41)
41
Destroy form; disrupt semantic structure; delink sign and referent; rearrange the hierarchy of
parts of speech; question old ideals; to Devlin, it doesn’t matter. None of the approaches he lists
can stave off the inevitable, which is the urn’s demise in the fourth section. Symbolism
especially, which makes an appearance in the first stanza of this section, is unable to save
Western art from its end, and in fact acts as the death knell itself. “The Urn of the Occident is
filled/And waits for the Embalmer. . . . The Green moon and the mauve sun dead in the sepia
sky/And the orange grass attend the Embalmer” (54-5; 59-60). Symbolism does not offer any
new life for Western art; its images are interchangeable with the old ones. As etchings, their
color cannot make them new. 6
The figure of the Embalmer, which echoes “O Paltry Melancholy,” emphasizes Devlin’s
all-encompassing critique of Western art. He is “smooth-paced, urbane” (61), the opposite of the
stereotyped backwards Irish peasant who gets most of the blame for the lack of growth in Irish
culture and poetry. The Embalmer is in fact modern European culture; he has “resigned hands”
(62) and is therefore not interested in growth or change, though he may appear to be (as
embalmers color the faces of the dead). The Embalmer is “vague, decadent” (67). When the poet
instructs “Let him go” (69), he is resigned; there is no way to keep the Embalmer from being
“hypnotised” by the “wooden hobby horses” (76). The hobby horses are those poetic schools
mocked in section II, or other movements that come to nothing: “Roundabout roundabout
roundabout round” (77) as main poem begins to take on the sing-songy quality of the sub-poem.
6
In s ome ways D evlin’s “Now” ca n b e r ead as if t old i n the voice o f t he a ngel from Walter B enjamin’s
Theses on the Philosophy of History. I n “Now,” d ead p oetic ap proaches p ile u p at the s peaker’s feet, a nd h e is
unable—as is Devlin, ultimately—to face away from them. The speaker of “Now” is pushed toward the future, like
Benjamin’s Angel of History, with his back to it.
42
“Now” emphasizes the extent to which Devlin was skeptical of any lingering Revivalist
sense that there was a poetic that could carry Ireland (or Europe, for that matter) into the next
phase of its history. In “Lough Derg” from the collection of the same name (1946), Devlin
explores the efficacy of Irish discourses of religious tradition for the present moment, and
unsurprisingly finds them coming up short. The poem, however, unlike “Now” is less scathing
and has lost the mocking tone. It is an almost tender engagement with the role of religious
tradition in Irish life from which even the speaker cannot fully extricate himself. In this way the
poem complicates a commonplace division of Irish poetry in mid-century as either pro- or antiRevivalist. The poem’s tone is critical but sympathetic, its speaker conflicted.
“Lough Derg” begins with a straightforward commentary on the belatedness of religious
pilgrimage, as “glad invalids on penitential feet/Walk the Lord’s majesty like their village street”
(5-6). The irony of invalids on a pilgrimage emphasizes the ineffective and wheel-spinning
nature of Irish-Catholic religiosity as well as its lapse into the commonplace. Devlin includes a
modest cross-section of Irish society in this most conventional pilgrimage: they are “the poor in
spirit” (1), or those too void of their own will to assert anything but penitence, “the jobbers with
their whiskey-angered eyes” (2), or the working-class with all its (stereotypical) vice, “the pink
bank-clerks” (3) of the upper classes, and of course “the tip-hat papal counts” (3) at the very top
of the social ladder. The “drab, kind women” (4) add pious, obedient Irish women to the picture.
The traditional narrative is that “with mullioned Europe shattered, this Northwest,/Rude-sainted
island would pray it whole again,” 7 returning the favor of Patrick 8 (6-7). But the speaker is
7
The notion t hat I reland’s c ultural a nd spiritual r iches ca n be called upon to r escue the rest o f t he W est
from repeated threats to its continuity has continued well into our own time, most notably with the 1995 publication
of the popular book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.
43
skeptical of this claim. Europe’s tragedies, despite religious determinism, are misfortunes, “the
sacred bane of God’s chance” (9-10). Devlin takes the sacredness of God and applies it to the
very tragedies God has wrought. Already he is calling the religious narrative into question. In a
revisionist look at the story upon which all future stories of Ireland’s engagement with the rest of
Europe the speaker asks, “were they [Europeans] this kind?” (12) The exchange (the gift of
Christianity for the gift of cultural repair) is hardly equal in the speaker’s mind; Patrick is both
“thief and saint” (12), both culture-bringer and culture-stealer. On the balance sheet nothing
should be owed. The Irish, the speaker implies, give beyond what is due.
But what the Irish have to offer, Devlin’s speaker insists, is a hollow, ineffectual set of
rituals, form without content, which mirrors the concerns he expresses for symbolism in a wider
European context in “Now.” As Alex Davis notes, in his reading of “Lough Derg,”
A high modernist detachment from praxis, as evinced in the elevation of formal
devices to fill a space once occupied by social content, finds a spiritual corollary
in a prayer the religious significance of which has gone, leaving only its ‘form’ as
solace (Davis 65).
Devlin describes the same inevitable progression of primitive fire into soulless institution that
Giambattista Vico 9 narrates, for what will become clearer as the poem continues is Devlin’s
positive valuation of belief without religiosity (which Kavanagh, Clarke, Beckett, Salkeld, and to
a certain extent, MacGreevy, all share); belief was the energy behind whatever growth was
8
My reference here is to the fact that Patrick was not native to Ireland but rather came as a missionary from
9
See Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
England.
Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984.
44
possible, whatever primitive connection to life as it was lived on the ground and not according to
outmoded ideals and abstracted poetic forms better suited to other times and cultural contexts.
Man’s gradual wisdom take
Firefly instinct dreamed out into law;
The prophet’s jeweled kingdom down at hell
Fires no Augustine here. Inert, they kneel;
All is simple and symbol in their world,
The incomprehended rendered fabulous. (15-20)
The progression of a dynamic, instinctual connection to the divine into the “inert” institutions of
religiosity has its corollary in poetry as well, as Devlin demonstrates in his own poem. The third
stanza begins with modest scene-setting: “Low rocks, a few weasels, lake/Like a field of burnt
gorse; the rooks caw” (13-14). The burnt gorse ties the imagery to the “firefly instinct” just two
lines after, and the poem transitions into polemic. Devlin thus demonstrates the movement from
poetic or religious inspiration to institution. How much more exciting is it to forget about
hedging in the lively origins of poetry and religion to revel in sin: “Sin teases life whose natural
fruits withheld/ Sour the deprived nor bloom for timely loss” (21-2)? The loss is profound and
constitutes what Davis identifies as “the problematic relationship between signifier and signified,
signified and referent” (Davis 65). The inevitable shift of emphasis from signified to signifier
constitutes the lifespan of any inspired movement, and in this poem it is, to contradict Davis
(who argues that in the collection Devlin puts it in “religious rather than poetic terms” (Davis 65)
the lifespan of both Irish Catholicism and the contemporaneous poetic movements. As if on cue
the poem swings into an impassioned bout of romantic nostalgia.
. . . the Temple trumpets
45
Cascaded down Thy sunny pavilions of air,
The scroll-tongued priests, the galvanic strumpets,
All clash and stridency gloomed upon Thy stair;
The Pharisees, the exalted boy their power
Sensually psalmed in Thee, their coming hour! (25-30)
Devlin’s choice of archaic language foregrounds the belatedness of the style. It is appropriate
here because the style coincides (poetically, if not chronologically) with the recalling of a more
impassioned moment in the spiritual life of a people. The language feels old-fashioned here,
surrounded by the more subdued language of the rest of the poem. But the fact of its
conspicuousness should not be confused with mockery. The speaker’s nostalgia is sincere. The
poem’s next stanzas describe (albeit in more toned-down language) a highly spiritual, preChristian Ireland where “Christ the Centaur in two natures whole,/ With fable and proverb
joinered body and soul” (53-4) works against the “spirit bureaucracy” (60) which is “doughed in
dogma” (66). Much of the remainder of the poem laments this loss: “Hell is to know our natural
empire used/Wrong, by mind’s moulting, brute divinities./ The vanishing tiger’s saved, his blood
transfused” (80-2).
The result of the loss, at least in religious terms, is that God has left the premises. “We
pray to ourself” (109), the speaker says, “The metal moon, unspent/Virgin eternity sleeping in
the mind,/Excites the form of prayer without content” (109-111). Curiously, though, the poem
never lapses into cynicism. The last line retains some of that original fire so missed by the
speaker. Until this line nothing more than a passive observer of the hollow religiosity he
describes, the speaker kneels alongside the pilgrims.
Whitehorn lightens, delicate and blind,
46
The negro mountain, and so, knelt on her sod,
This woman beside me murmuring My God! My God! (112-14).
Whitehorn, or Finnbhennach, the bull from the Ulster Cycle who fights the bull of queen Mebh,
here loses his rage. The only power the pre-Christian myths have in the present is to shade the
backdrop against the present action. The last line of the poem is in present progressive,
suggesting that the empty ritual is ongoing. The form has outlived the content. But the life that
remains is a half-life; it is “a Virgin eternity” rather than something that is continually renewed.
If we can assume the speaker as poet, the poem’s double focus on poetic and religious
practice fuses here. This fusing is not simply Devlin’s careful closing of the field of images to
complete the poem in New Critic fashion, but an intensification of feeling. This is no detached
account of the erosion of religion and poetry as in “Now;” it is a highly personal account with
human consequences. If Devlin were to leave the speaker out of the final line the woman would
remain the pitied pilgrim and the speaker above critique. Instead the speaker as poet is a fellow
pilgrim, himself implicated in the tired practice of empty ritual. The poet continues to write even
though he cannot find a revitalizing aesthetic just as the woman continues to cry out to a God
who is no longer there. So although Devlin writes in what Davis describes as “precisely the
coherent, closed structure Perloff identifies in the poetry of Eliot and others: an autotelic
construct of ambivalent, but not indeterminate, meaning that is the hallmark of the New Critical
‘verbal icon’” (Davis 58); he nevertheless recognizes its limitations. Peggy O’Brien allows for
greater nuance of effect in Devlin’s use of language, where, “depending on how you hold it up to
the light, can display the corrugated, broken surface of modernism or the smooth unity of
symbol” (O’Brien 110). Thus Devlin’s language is able to express both the reality of the
brokenness of modern life and the longing for a return to wholeness, no matter how impossible.
47
Intercessions follows First Poems as an elaboration of the problems of tradition. Devlin
focuses on cultural decay, interrogating culturally significant structures first as emblems of
decline (as in “Liffey Bridge”) and then sites of potential, but ultimately impossible, rebirth. It
begins with “Alembic,” an elegy for the state of a culture gone stagnant, in which “This
stilllblowing wind springs/No rain no rain enmeshing/Multiple infant feet of aspirant winds” (24). “Stillblowing” is too close to “stillborn” to ignore heavy allusions to impotence and infertility
and the “Cloistral lashes shut on folded cheeks” (6) reinforces a sense of barrenness borne of
isolation. There’s still a bit of hope here, though: the speaker consoles himself that
The wind may unwax my summer, let the
Accountant suspend work, wipe his misty glasses
The wind pads almost noiseless like a cat
Do not reject its suave caresses, Heart. (10-12)
That hope is soon buried in the poems that follow.
“Death and Her Beasts, Ignoble Beasts” introduces Death (ultimate, not metaphorical) to
remind us that cultural death is no small thing. Against the soothing entreaties of friends to
accept death (“Now your currupt[sic] sweet pleading through my friends/Smoothes me like
cambric on an infant’s flesh” [12-13]), and crippled by his own faltering resolve (“Unexplained
tears suddenly blur my courage/And desert movements in the breast shaking/The forts I built so
well already ravaged” [16-18]) the speaker renews his call to arms against it: “Yet, Sacker of
crumbling towns, I will not agree/To the proposal of peace you made to my friends” (26-7). Is
this Devlin’s call to arms against the death-knell of a culture, both Irish and continental? The last
stanza seems to confirm his commitment.
Attack me in the dark, I’ll extreme fear
48
With the first of all landscapes given its eyes
In the frantic group of naked man and horse;
With the cheering of shredded men in losts [sic] forts
And to go on with, the length of today and tomorrow,
The evidence that lifting needles make the cloth. (28-33)
Devlin holds out some hope for the possibilities of poetry in his reference to knitting, though one
wonders, especially as vultures circle above the poem (“They would feed sick life on the
smashed mouths of the weak/Whose nostrils death has plugged with stale love-smells” [4-5]) if
what the poet fashions will ultimately be a winding-cloth.
“Windtacker Windjamming” shifts the tone significantly, as if the speaker has reached
the limits of despair in “Death.” The playfulness of the poem is startling after “Death;” by way of
explanation Devlin begins,
I really don’t know what to think
As the wise cat said to the kind
When big with proverb
But if it’s proper
To get my bearings
At least I’m aware of
My sky changing its costume all day long. (1-7)
The last two lines foreshadow the intentionally shifting strategies of “Communication from the
Eiffel Tower” later in the collection, including the poet’s awareness of the shifting boundaries of
his art; in that poem Devlin will “change [his] costume,” to the point of ventriloquism, as a way
of foregrounding his own anxieties over the fragile connection between art and life.
49
“Liffey Bridge” articulates the poet’s frustration over available modes of expression in
ways that recall First Poems and sheds the lighter tone of “Windtacker.” This time his
dissatisfaction with the Irish aesthetic inheritance centers on Dublin’s symbolic bridge. As in
“Lough Derg” and to some extent “O Paltry Melancholy,” “Liffey Bridge” bemoans the rote life
of parade-goers who have lost the original passion of their cultural exercises. The lines are short,
as if the walkers must take breaths to rest between them: “Trailing behind/Tired poses/ How they
all/Fulfill their station!” (5-8). The speaker’s amazement at their complacency is the only energy
apparent in the stanza, which is so sapped that exclamation marks barely raise the pitch to a
murmur. Like “Lough Derg,” “station” conflates religious and cultural stagnation, but this time
the speaker has divorced himself from the parade. There is no nostalgia for ritual here,
particularly as it has been emptied of all passion and energy. The executioner of “Now” returns
as the bridge, which plays “assassin” (11), killing the hopes and desires of youth:
In limp doorways
They try out their heaven
They grind at love
With gritted kisses
Then eyes re-opened
Behold slack flesh
Such an assassin
Such a world! (33-40)
Devlin’s bridge in some ways stands for form—specifically as an architectural witness to and
repository for culture—and as in “Communication” (“content is hollow and vile it will remain/to
suffer branding from tools, the senses’ servants” [“Communication” 246-7]), the content
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available to fill it is emptiness itself. Devlin’s poem articulates the dilemma of the Irish poetry in
mid-century: how does one write between cultural erosion (“water”) and migration (“flight”)?
How can a substantive poetry emerge from forms that no longer take the shapes of their worlds?
Devlin’s poetry is not keen to create new bridges but to show up the old ones for what they can
no longer do; this is not a Big House aesthetic, mourning, however ambivalently, a lost order
(unless, of course, that order is classical). Erosion is inevitable, and what is lost is not pined for.
It is simply, not sadly, no longer of service, and there is nothing available to take its place.
“Communication from the Eiffel Tower” is in many ways about limitation, whether the
“lamplight drips reluctantly over the windowsill” or the waves are “stifled at each birth, sucked
back/Into the marine mass” (Devlin 98-9). The first stanza sets a tone of instability and
uncertainty.
In the court darkness breathes heavily like a woman in labour
Starlight hammers at wary roofs always at bay
Always at bay the houses carry their boatloads of sleepers
Through celestial channels of darkness upset with nightmare
Shying at the shallows of that feeble light, moon, that ally of day. (1-5)
Night is not rest but a preparation for day, active, disturbing, and unsafe. So far, though, the
scene is coherent and recognizable; instability, as in “darkness upset with nightmare” has a
shape. In the next stanza, and indeed the rest of the poem, however, Devlin’s scenes quickly
become less and less mappable until, while the semantic structure remains largely intact, the
symbolic center disintegrates, only to resurface later in the poem as the semantic structure
disintegrates. In this way Devlin’s use of indeterminacy—in which symbol can no longer reliably
point in one specific direction—undermines the stability of the connections between art and life;
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and in doing so, Devlin’s poem is free to interrogate the limits of representation in ways that
implicate cultural discourses which have an impact on real lives.
“Communication” is both playful and deadly serious; although its ‘geography’ is
symbolic, though not always in a symbolist way, its consequences are real. And while its
speaking subject is consistent in identity—he is male, European, prophetic—it is unstable in
voice (where dreams provide space for alternatives). The poem is just as uneasy with forms of
modernism, in some ways acting as a sampler for various modernist schools and techniques.
Alex Davis has detailed these explorations, identifying Futurist, Surrealist, and early modernist
impulses which Devlin then summarily undoes. For example, his representation of the Eiffel
Tower “recall[ing] the immoderate, excessive poetic generated by the Futurists’ seduction at the
hands of technological modernity” becomes a Marxist critique of the tower as alienation from the
labor that produced it: “The ‘embittered’ boy and girl reinforce the poem’s oblique critique of a
society dominated by exchange relations” (Davis 31-2). Devlin’s poetry turns on itself just as the
woman’s misspeaking of Gobineau’s name; the ideas in the poem are constantly ‘transmuted’
(Davis 33).
But the poem does more than sample poetic styles. It engages them (sometimes
exultantly, sometimes with repulsion) to get at the problems of art and ideology by way of a
contemplation of the nature of representation. “Communication” tackles the physically largest,
most culturally intense locus of meaning of the 1930s, launching Devlin’s poetry from Ireland,
land of small round towers, to Continental Europe, where the Eiffel Tower rose over (and into) a
cultural crisis. The poem is not an abandonment of the home country but rather an opening out.
Taken with the entire collection, which weaves in and out of Ireland, “Communication”
articulates an anxiety that echoes the Irish poet’s problem—that of the inadequacy of available
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structures of representation and meaning to violently changing cultural landscapes—and enlarges
it to encompass the whole of the Western world. Aside from the title which locates the tower in
France (and after the title the “Eiffel” drops out completely—the tower becomes an emblem for
all of Europe, not just France), there are few other references specific to countries within Europe.
“America” and “Buenos Aires” are mentioned as points in a dreamscape but do not situate the
poem in a specific location. In doing so the poem distills the project into a series of related
questions: What is the nature of ideology? How should art respond to it? What do art and
ideology have in common? How does representation work, and where does it fail? In asking
these questions Devlin’s poem becomes a critique of a cultural moment that indicts both
ideology and representation as potentially destructive and pathological.
The poem roughly follows a series of transitions from day night and back to day, sleeping
into waking into dreaming into waking again. Devlin inverts traditional constellations of light
and darkness by assigning self-delusion to the day (“The world’s blatant glare merely hoods
us/From dissolute mortal violence” [226-27]) and clarity to night (“Night O Clearer than the
day/Because the objects of love are visible” [292-93]). Meanwhile states of wakefulness and
dreaming allow the speaker to take on voices he would not have otherwise been afforded by the
difficult to locate but consistent writerly voice. The lack of a physical geography, aside from the
entirely vertical tower, allows Devlin to create an image-scape in which mind-states stand in for
locales and changes in light constitute movement and transition. In some ways this kind of
fabricated world is appropriate to the exploration of intellectual fabrication in the form of fascist
ideologies; the poem’s series of maskings and revelations turn a mirror onto the nature of
ideology while seriously questioning its own ability to tell the truth.
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The poem specifically addresses fascism but its analysis could be applied to any form of
ideology, including aesthetic ones. He introduces fascism with reference to Gobineau, the
nineteenth-century author of “An Essay on the Inequality of the Races” to whom twentiethcentury fascists, including Hitler, looked for scholarly legitimation. Immediately, though, Devlin
foregrounds his concerns with appropriation and representation through the woman’s
mispronunciation of Gobineau to the great consternation of the speaker (“GOBINEAU it is why
will you keep on saying GOBITHAU?/How can you help, you cannot get the words right” [7576]). 10 Nevertheless the speaker attempts to recreate Gobineau’s ideas through a spokeswoman
who in turn tries to render the oppression of large swaths of society both eloquent and inevitable,
and asks the speaker to merely look away if it makes him uncomfortable:
“Whereas” she states “fortune and misfortune construct existence
For the fairer sifting of history
To the more fortune of our children’s children
And whereas it is expedient to have heaven, of dark locality doubtless,
Made of distracted eyes the beacon while the hands bought off
In major labour nurse the treasury
Of the minority most virtuous
So, for that this misery of the many is necessary
Avert your countenance while my tribal groups of combat
In a terse putsch strike elsewhere for your sake
Besides our misery’s mental, take this girl” (32-42, quotation marks in original)
10
Both Alex D avis a nd J .C.C. M ays see t he ad dition o f t he G erman suffix—which r enders t he word
meaningless—as a reflection of German misappropriation of French ideas.
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The woman’s distillation of Gobineau’s arguments emphasizes the extent to which they (or their
interpretation) require that one “avert[s]” one’s “countenance” and that heaven be “made of
distracted eyes” so that the horrific consequences of “nurs[ing] the treasury/Of the minority most
virtuous” can exist out of sight (“elsewhere”). The fascist imagination, in order to maintain its
sense of all-encompassing order, must ask its adherents to ignore marginal disruptions—mainly
here the presence of conscience—and separate itself from the realm of the body (“this misery of
the many is necessary;” “Besides our misery’s mental”). In doing so it both affirms its absolute
power and admits to the necessity of will for its maintenance. The speaker rejects the argument
and the offer of bodily consolation in the form of a girl-prize (“Well no, I must say,” asserting
his own will), and in the next stanza accuses the fascist follower of a lack of will herself:
“GOBINEAU has enpimped you, you have all gone dame/With feathers and cooing curves as if I
had made you/Keep off poisoner of seed pretty flint-flanks/Pivot of a fan of showgirls with a
slow lilt to their hips” (45-48). These lines are doubly insulting to a hyper-masculine, heavily
patriarchal ideology. They denigrate even the high sense of temptation introduced early in the
third stanza where Gobineau is the Satan to the speaker’s Christ, though able to offer nothing
like glittering kingdoms: “Once from a balcony set at eagle height/He showed me air that first
poured brown like glue/And then clotted rigid with human nerves” (23-25).
In the middle of stanza four, after he has mocked and feminized fascism, the speaker
pauses here to reflect on whether or not he should be delving into the realm of politics in the first
place. In the penultimate line of the stanza he falters: “Will I come? But it is absurd, a
bookworm, now, Will I mind my business?” (49) What business does the poet have of engaging
the politics of the day? If he does, is he merely answering the siren call of the “showgirls” he
derides in the stanza’s earlier lines? But in the last line we see that the work pursues him: “Yes I
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know let me alone your only words are insane” (50). He doubts his involvement in two
directions; it may not be right to engage politics in the first place, and in any case he would
rather be left alone.
The wish to retreat continues into the next stanza, which begins with the evasive “Let’s
have breakfast now to pretend it’s morning,” but it quickly becomes apparent that what he
desires is not possible: “No, the bell corrodes the silence cover my mouth.” Still, if he cannot
make it morning he will try to make the night tolerable through the rest of the stanza. “Gentle
when I am sleeping breathe girl O summer twilight/The fireflies of your gentle thoughts through
my gnarled thorntree nerves/Smile through my eyelids soothing as a shaded lamp.” In the stanza
that follows he abruptly corrects himself, despite his refusals in stanza three, for giving into the
temptation of retreat. Invoking the language of biblical rebuke he reminds himself of the
seriousness of the cultural moment, then moves into a damning critique of modern Europe’s
situation:
Let her not take thee with her eyelids
Let her not bemuse thee with her tongue
All the legends of love are unavailing
All the hawthorn of breasts is comfortless
All the periods of eloquence cannot smother
The monosyllables of these unwilling unbelievers
Scuffling for a foothold
Prayer choked in their throats
By puffs of irondust of their subsiding works
The prefects of society stare with taut eyes
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Try not to hear the exact drumtaps at their years
The imagined representation of distant barbaric invasions
A snap as of jaws breaking, the windbiffed empire buildings
Crack snap apart, become felled pines
Hesitating into their preying shadows
All the bearers of further tidings dry up such as docked ships
All the squadrons of bladed flight
Humiliated, are black beetles so crass in bulk they
Cannot be said to creep but lurch. (56-74)
I quote at length because this stanza offers in the clearest terms the parameters of his diagnosis in
ways that transcend a narrow critique of fascism and extend to encompass a cultural situation of
which fascism is merely a symptom. Here Devlin levels a modernist critique: a lack of belief
(“unwilling unbelievers/Scuffling for a foothold/Prayer choked in their throats”), the dangers of
industry and its broken promise of eternal life (“Prayer choked in their throats/By puffs of
irondust of their subsiding works”), the excesses of empire coming home to roost (“A snap as of
jaws breaking, the windbiffed empire buildings/ Crack snap apart, become felled pines”), and the
failure of military might (“All the squadrons of bladed flight/ Humiliated, are black beetles so
crass in bulk they/ Cannot be said to creep but lurch”) are horrors that no one, not even a
“bookworm” can or should ignore.
From here Devlin turns to fascism itself, which in the speaker’s mind has been posited by
its proponents—described as the old guard, who despite “banking on the privileges of age” (83)
should be “courtmartial[ed]” (89)—as the solution to the problems of modern society. The tone
becomes prophetic, channeling Marxism, as he warns of blowback from the margins: “The
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lidded anger of the oppressed/ Stutters through chinks; and it may detonate!” (95-6) Preformalized, primitive energies threaten the institutions fascism relies upon for control; and
Devlin’s wedding of non-political fascisms, which function to sterilize these energies, and
Fascism emphasizes the extent to which Devlin (and others) worried about the real political and
humanitarian consequences of insisting upon empty formalism.
Moving to a ventriloquization of Futurism, the tower now appears for the first time as the
“humming” (104) center around which the entire poem whips, “mounted on guard among the
clouds” (105). It is at this point that Devlin turns to problems of representation and weaves them
in with problems of political excess and the dangerous claims—for both art and social practice—
of wholeness and self-evidence. The tone becomes bold and triumphant, celebrating the tower
which is “bound in the steel necessity/ Of its own girders Time to one end willing/ Time which is
patience of man and hope of birth” (107-9). The speaker weds the tower’s capacity to centralize
meaning with fascism’s total consumption. “Unhappiness is easily shed/ When any act can be
fitted, even at command/ As of simple recruits from their knees rising” (110-12). Devlin speaks
throughout his poetry of the need for passion and belief, but finds it here misappropriated, as
Yeats describes in “The Second Coming,” where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/
Are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats lines 7-8). Devlin’s speaker jumps back and forth
between embracing the promises of Futurism, which parallel those of fascism, and offering
stinging critiques. Having fallen prey once again to the wooings of Gobineau, he asks, “Who
then has drugged me?” (125) and attests to the strictures of fascism: “GOBINEAU you would
close me/ In a circle of no thoroughfare” (130-1). This is the same speaker whose hesitations at
the beginning of the poem indicated the desire for the freedom to be left out of such matters; and
having realized he could not be left out, is trapped.
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Devlin returns to a Marxist critique and the modernist contention between individual and
mass politics. Other than the mention of “hordes” of oppressed people, the poem has centered
around the speaker’s individual experience of fascist ideology; now in the middle of the poem he
realizes the limits of his isolation. “Their suffering looks faked and is not so,/ And mine to them,
but wrong” (137-8). The hordes have become so dehumanized that the speaker cannot readily
(without intellectualizing) read their pain, and they cannot read his; and this unintelligibility
prevents the speaker from being part of the community. Frustrated by the inscrutability of those
who are suffering, and feeling that the common experience of suffering should make them equal
(“Our opposite provinces in thought are leveled” [141]), all he wants to do is write about the
oppressed—but all he can write about is Gobineau. Again at the end of the stanza he is re-taken
by the Futurist impulse, which seems like a necessity in the face of such division. “And living in
the worse of each, we must invest/ A third power a mechanic ambassador of our best and most/
A leap in the dark from this instant to the next . . . Imperious actual, I have no means/ Of
gathering you away from you/ Unless I fall back on my voracious tower” (145-7; 149-151). By
identifying the impulse toward Futurism (with the tower as its ultimate symbol) as the same as
that which leads a society to accept fascism—the need to create order, meaning, and a sense of
happiness, no matter how false—Devlin’s critique becomes all-encompassing, and like the best
of his other poems (and those of MacGreevy’s as well), the poem is as much about the limits and
dangers of representation as it is about a culture headed to a hell much worse than the one it is
trying to escape.
The speaker flirts with symbolism briefly (“I might fly to the Sassanian empire and
mould in the margin/ Like an old train among the gay weeds of sidetrack” [154-5]), recalling
“Now,” earlier in the collection, in which symbolism signals the end of art itself; Devlin’s
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reference to his earlier treatment of symbolism brings the experimentation with representation to
an end in this poem. Because art, having come to its end in symbolism (in Devlin’s formulation),
can no longer act as a viable conduit of expression and meaning, the poem has nowhere else to
go but to the tyranny of the symbol, emptied of reference. It is at this moment that the speaker
falls headlong into tower-worship. Significantly, it is now capitalized and the submission is total:
“Tower O my subduer Tower my tyrant” (159). Both masculinized and feminized (as tyrant and
subduer but also having girders that are “lovable they are like nubile girls bending” [161]) the
Tower is fused and whole-seeming and the speaker is satisfied. “Smiles risen goldfish through
currents of dreaming, tower girded and pliant” (163). Having been seduced once again, the
speaker abandons his post as the lonely writer to join the masses from whom he has previously
been alienated. “I am by my acceptance reassured/ Saying I come! As if a voice asked Will you
come? . . . Moving with the Amazon’s muted thunder and the crushed/ humming of its song its
birds/ To find its place in the sea” (166-67; 169-70).
Michael Tratner writes against critical tendencies to regard modernism as the assertion of
an individual identity self-alienated by non-realist styles against mass identity. Instead he sees
modernism as moving toward collectivism in a way that reflects rather than resists modern
political movements, marking its departure from nineteenth-century individualism through
experimentation. “Many of the experimental features of modernist texts may be understood as
efforts by authors to disrupt their own conscious personalities (and the conscious personalities of
their readers) in order to reveal and perhaps alter the socially structured mentality hidden inside
each person’s unconscious” (Tratner 3). The alternation in “Communication” between states of
waking and sleeping suggests an attempt to unravel the unconscious of the individual poet
negotiating isolation and collective will. Just as he joins the masses in stanza sixteen, the speaker
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admits to the inevitability of the capitulation’s origins: “And now I know my mind I’ll sleep it
off/ I slip on the greased keel of sleep into the cove/ Whose water cuffs my temples with
plectrum taps” (171-73). Devlin returns to the maritime imagery of the first stanza, in which
“houses carry their boatloads of sleepers,” align social collectivity with the unconscious state of
sleep and the wiping out of individual will with water. But the task of “Communication” is not to
“engage with that invisible stream [the social medium], to reveal and alter it . . . to speak the
language of the mass unconscious” thereby “breaking free of the Western metaphysics of
individuals and distinct objects” (Tratner 9). Instead the poem swings between expressions of
individual isolation and collectivism, finding both unsatisfactory positions to occupy in the face
of real political circumstances. In the face of fascism and other all-consuming ideologies,
individualism is both irresponsible and impossible, but collectivism is deadly.
When the speaker wakes to find himself “pushing streams of water” (174) rather than
getting caught up in them, he returns again to the sort of individualism that requires a reassertion
and retaking of the poem’s geography. The world has the definable size of a table “such as one
teaches at, breaks bread, drinks wine” (176), and unlike a nebulous sea has a mappable, even
curtained, surface. “The four horizons are hung with a filmy curtain” (177). The speaker is no
longer a passive participant but a kind of god. “My hands that sweep/ The lingering matchflares
of the talked-out day/ Are looked upon as celebrating bonfires” (183-5). The central political
figure is no longer Gobineau but Babeuf, a father of socialism and equality who the speaker
channels. Subjectivity is now, in a way that splits the difference between a lonely individualism
and a dangerous mass identity, an interplay of identities and their reflections. The speaker
claims—or rather declaims, as he takes on the role of an orating leader—“that I BABEUF/
BABEUF and I mixed like the play of mirrors/ Make table rase ready for primary needs” (188-
61
90). This reorganization of the poem’s geography, from one in which the speaker stands engulfed
in the world of symbols and ideologies larger than himself to one where the world spreads out at
the his feet, allows the poem to explore the consequences of spatial configurations of identity and
social organization. In the Gobineau sections of the poem, one central figure draws all life and
energy to himself, and the people are left hungry and oppressed. Babeuf, on the other hand,
represents an opening out and a mutual receptivity.
Their mouth’s tense bows relieve them, releasing fingers
Their eyes bulge like gates opening
Of fortresses at morning full of prisoners
Insisting on promised deliverance. (191-94)
But abundance in this case requires the beneficence of a paternal figure. The reader’s relief at the
hope of food for the hungry is dashed in the same stanza by the parallel operations of the worlds
according to Gobineau and Babeuf; the consequence of both of these socio-spatial arrangements
is the total dependence of the many on the few.
The tower returns in the last third of the poem as a “strong swimmer” that “breasts the
clouds” (195). Again the tower both embodies and advocates for self-evidence as a balm for the
“skies anxious with rain and dreary furrows” (197). This time it answers the poem’s unease with
the masses’ dependence on the few by asserting an essentialism it now applies to the individual.
And before men become dignified
Being not such as light but passes through
By accident like prisms that depend
On a stray hand
But rather their idea operative in them like health
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Interluminant with their perfect each. (198-203)
Again what is offered as an alternative, no matter how beautifully phrased and ethically
attractive, is merely another version of the tendency toward essentialism (here having rejected
chance as a legitimate force) as a response to constantly changing modern realities. By the end of
the stanza hyper-individualism has merged with the fascist will, recalling Gobineau’s wild-armed
spokeswoman of the third stanza: “Therefore let us bare our hold, let us/ Offer our passion to the
tentacular sadist/ There is just one chance we dare not miss our chance” (207-9). The urgency of
the line drives the stanza’s alternating tones of high-flying hopefulness and desperation and
reflects what Devlin might regard as a dangerous cultural urgency.
Devlin lambastes the tendency to regard this urgency as benign in the next stanza in
which a town
where the passages of tenderness
Are so impulsive and so expert
That the charmed inhabitants moving
With the light-sprung southwest wind’s annunciation
Provoke milk-drowsy earth to flower everywhere (211-15)
is merely another socio-spatial construct that thinly masks the effects of an all-encompassing
ideology. Even as the poem’s language invites the reader to revel in the town’s abundance,
beauty, and kindness, the speaker asks “Will untraced echoes not bewilder sounds?/ And light
twitch like the wing of a drying bird?” (216-17) The poem, which until now has affirmed the
clear-headedness of the day against the delusions of the dream world, now cautions against the
blindingness of light.
For that its inhabitants fine-limbed and content
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Strut in a day blind from its own glare . . . the security of day is precipitous
The world’s blatant glare merely hoods us
From dissolute mortal violence. (221-22; 225-27)
This town is more than just another example of a dangerous essentialism; it begins to
acknowledge that there is no airless ideology, and that in turn makes the claims of fascism—and
the other forms of essentialism explored in the poem—not just ethically problematic but
practically impossible.
It is at this moment, when Devlin has made clear the weaknesses of essentialist
ideologies, that he returns to problems of representation. Devlin’s poetics of indeterminacy
dissolve the previously well-defined relationship between art and life (a move Rimbaud and
Pound, according to Perloff, also make), as a way of reasserting the dangers of determinancy
itself. Because Intercessions appears in the midst of what was to many the frightening real-world
consequences (in Russia and Germany particularly) of determinist philosophies, the poem has an
urgency and immediacy that demands the importance of attending to modes of representation.
The tower re-emerges not as a strong central repository of meaning and cultural strength but as
nothing more than ornamentation. Devlin extends the analysis of the previous stanza when he
refers to the tower as “that snowy steel town” (230) and asks “What can it offer/ More than the
pretty tinkling of snowy steel?” (234-5) The tower that has asserted itself, and been asserted, as
the paragon of strength and self-evidence is, like the real Eiffel Tower, easily dismantled.
“Anything will dislocate the riveting” (236), he writes; its function as a cultural symbol is
physical and structural. It gives shape and structure to life, especially as a refuge or resource or
when other means of understanding have been found wanting (“Summoned when the trestleblether texts of poverty are irrelevant” [233]). But the tower is not able to handle every
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contingency; not embitterment (“A boy embittered when summer rain smells fresh on hot limbs”
[237]), desire (“Desire trapped in a girl’s wet hair breathes” [238]), the anonymity of modern life
(“Or a bored mechanic polishing and he mutters/ Caught by sight of his face in one of a million
rollers” [239-40]), disenchantment (“Or the bewilderment of the strong and fair covertly noting/
A beloved forehead suave as styles of maize becoming/ Restless and stained” [241-3]) or
dislocation and pained longing (“Or no news yet from emigrant sons” [244]). In other words,
nothing that the era in which Devlin writes the poem has to offer the poet can be served by an
aesthetic that relies upon trusted, immoveable symbols. The time for transparent and
recognizable representation is gone; and for those who would accuse the poet of merely stressing
content over form he turns the usual relationship inside out: “Content is hollow and vile it will
remain/ To suffer branding from tools, the senses’ servants” (246). Branding is the process of
being named, labeled, and given a form. But the form is not adequate and cannot hold
everything; merely, it can be beautiful (“What can it offer/ More than the pretty tinkling of
snowy steel?” [234]). The uselessness of art is that it can do nothing about poverty, desire, and
despair. This is where Devlin’s poem becomes European in a way that is applicable to Ireland (as
emigrant sons are mentioned), whose round towers have become a symbol for the strength,
endurance, and continuity of Irish culture: he asks, what are the limitations of our towers?
Meanwhile, life goes on (“the unnoticed jungle rain of duration patters” [249]), and the
tendency to reach for a tower remains (“Anything we know too well or not,/ The worm of
anguish in the innocent heart,/ Anything will startle again that voice/ Shrouded in the stone
dream of doom” [251-4]). “Jungle rain” works against the idea in stanza 18 that selfdetermination rather than chance is what defines us; here it is the wildness of the persistence of
the passage of time that escapes our sorry attempts at representation, and is perhaps ironically the
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only thing that is true and reliable. Even so, the poet/speaker understands that our compulsion to
erect towers is inescapably bound up in language. This time, when the speaker allows himself to
become seduced by the tower again in stanza 22, it is with acknowledgment of the tower’s
limitations as a symbol. “Tower that support my view erect/ Firm beneath my picture of you,
stand” (257-58). The almost tender stanza recasts the role as both crucial and limited.
Not long ago we are fragile, in need of precept.
Tower, graph of the mind and hand
How the hand has embraced the mind in you!
Graceful result of faith right by a hair’s breadth
Mounting resolution of awry steel
Be my exemplar of the hero
Who grasps his strength with bolts, obeys and only seems to sway
When the bad weathers drive. (264-71)
The difference between the tower-worship of previous stanzas and this one is that it is heroworship, not god-worship. Heroes are not only flawed, but invented, existing not for and by
themselves but inside of language. The tower is nothing more than what we ourselves are; and its
importance lies not in its perfection but in its (imperfect) solidity and materiality. It can provide
what an all-encompassing ideology promises and cannot deliver: the wedding of form and
content in the figure of the hero, whose “mind and hand” are one with its “graph” of the same.
As the poem begins to draw to a close, the “jungle rain” returns in the fecundity and
relentlessness of time, and as the sun has set in the previous stanza, we are in darkness once
again. “I am crowded round by the speechless amoeba-night/ Massed silkworms nuclear of
centuries/ Days after and days after to-morrow” (272-74). In contrast to the deceitfulness of
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daytime in stanza 19, the night is “clearer than the day/ Because the objects of love are visible”
(292-93). If the night in some ways stands in for the unconscious, in and out of which the
speaker drifts through the course of the poem, here the poet inverts the usual association between
the ‘reality’ of consciousness and the fantasy-like realm of the unconscious. Here the
unconscious is to be trusted because desire is not rationalized or sublimated but is apparent. And
lest he be accused of advocating isolationism, this unconscious is collective. Though the stanza
begins with the singular first-person pronoun, he continues in the plural: “Wombed in your
cathedrals let us watch” (279); “Teach us the acid experience of the dead” (285); Drug the tigers
of desire that prowl at large/ That in tranquility gradual our value flower” (288-9; emphasis
added). The insistence on a communal unconscious follows the orientation of the poem towards
collective cultural tendencies. This is not an examination of individual responses to modernity
but cultural ones (which include extreme individualism).
Despite some settling on the nature of representation—that the best of art is living,
dynamic, flawed, and always in language—and the affirmation of the wellspring of the
unconscious (reclaimed from its association with the individual and extended to the collective),
in keeping with much of Devlin’s poetry, “Communication from the Eiffel Tower” ends
pessimistically. “The people look for new commands, uncertain” (294); they do not seek answers
or understanding, but desiring being told what to do, wish for the tyrannies against which the
poem cautions. And so the poet is “made to speak” (297) with an unpleasant prophesy:
“The losses that I count will be unpleasant
On the hither side of light for a long time
Your looks will not leap
The excited escarpments of colour
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Nor the broken geometry of shape
You will lend no more to laughter
There will be no grief each for his own grief
But only narrow beds and milk and bread” (298-305, quotation marks in original)
In the coming disaster even the ability to process loss—grief—will be denied, and only the barest
of human necessities will be available. Is this the speaker’s prophecy of the end of art (with no
“excited escarpments of colour/ nor the broken geometry of shape”)? Is the implication that the
cultural tendency toward tyranny, essentialism, and all-consuming ideology will be the death of
art? Certainly other of Devlin’s poetry (particularly “Now”) makes this interpretation enticing.
But taken in its entirety, the poem stands primarily as an impassioned engagement with dire
cultural and political issues that the poet would like to, but cannot, ignore; what makes
“Communication from the Eiffel Tower” compelling is not just its timeliness but its indictment
of the state of art along with the expected judgments of fascism and ideology. Its brilliance is the
continuity it sees between a culture and its forms of representation, and the complexity of the
interplay between the two.
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WAR POET AND MODERNIST: THOMAS MACGREEVY
Thomas MacGreevy is better known as a friend to Eliot and Joyce than as a serious
modernist poet. In terms of the volume of his work, he is indeed a minor poet. His stylistically
and thematically diverse Poems experiments with a diversity of modernist strategies and in doing
so multiplies notions of modernism. An examination of Poems attests to the importance of this
poetry to the study of Irish poetry and European modernisms in mid-century. A study of
MacGreevy’s poetry also challenges a commonly held notion that Ireland in mid-century was
culturally isolated. MacGreevy’s Collected Poems is thematically concerned with the Irishman’s
connection to the rest of Europe (chiefly in the figure of the World War I soldier) and
stylistically linked, though with its own valence, to the modernisms of mid-century continental
Europe and England. I will be looking at the Collected Poems for the benefit of a few errant
poems that were not included in his only complete volume.
MacGreevy’s poetry simultaneously rejects the notion that poetry can “do” anything, or
indeed, say anything, and posits that very rejection as a legitimate, and even ethical response to
the world of his time. Significantly, his rejection of a hyper-nationalist aesthetic does not signal
either the end of poetry or of nationalism. When the speaker of “The Six Who Were Hanged”
asks “Why am I here?” (19) the question is the point and the speaker makes no attempt at an
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answer. Instead, as the poem closes, the speaker chooses ritual over understanding when in
response to the last question of the poem (“what, these seven hundred years,/ Has Ireland had to
do/ With the morning star?”) he joins the mourners in a Hail Mary. MacGreevy’s recourse to
religious ritual recalls Eliot. In his essay on MacGreevy, Beckett describes poetry as “prayer”
and praises MacGreevy for seeing it as such. This “prayer” is “no more (no less) than an act of
recognition. And, even a wink” (Beckett 68). The wink is the joke MacGreevy makes and
Beckett gets, which is that of a poet writing for poetry’s sake, to paraphrase the invective of the
time. How then can Terence Brown claim that “in Ireland impulses which elsewhere can find
expression in reactionary modernist stances and polemics were channeled into nationalist feeling
and the exposition of its sustaining ideology” (Brown 41)? Would this claim not require that
MacGreevy be a “man of action” and not a man whose poetry is an “act of recognition?”
And yet MacGreevy was a nationalist and a commitment to Ireland is evident in his
poetry. Modernism in Ireland did not mean the wholesale rejection of nationalism; MacGreevy is
one of those poets who managed to engage with nationalism without slipping into nationalist
ideology, as so many coattail Revivalists did. Mays argues that MacGreevy
believed what is incontrovertible, that Irish experience is unique, but he was
tolerant enough to realize that other nations could claim the same prerogative on
their own behalf and his sense of the Irish mind was not something to be imposed
on the Irish people. His idea of national identity took other national identities into
account and welcomed their fructifying influence. He differs from many other
modernist writers in that he thought in nationalist terms; he differs from many
Irish nationalist in the selflessness and range of his extra-national sympathies.
(Mays 111)
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MacGreevy was able, in other words, to write with a mind to the cultural plurality that
characterizes mid-century European modernism while recognizing the coherence and importance
of distinct national identities. Unlike Eliot, who found the ideal of nationalism in past and nonEuropean cultural idioms and eschewed its current expressions, MacGreevy saw no need to draw
on tribal or mythic models to confront the thorny issues of national identity that Ireland struggled
with in the years immediately following independence. In a turn away from the Revivalist mode
of inscribing Irish identity as essentially provincial, MacGreevy “wrote against the background
of the idea of a nation, not a province, and in relation to other national cultures” (Mays 123).
MacGreevy shows his distaste for provincializing images in “The Six Who Were
Hanged,” in which he is preoccupied with the naked form by which the hanging takes place. The
poem is concerned with how many are to be hanged and at what time; the characters are reduced
to their functions within the transaction. Here again MacGreevy turns them into colors: green,
white, and gold, the colors of Ireland, but stripped of cultural and political meaning. These are
colors borrowed from the palette of the provincial Irish poet, but emptied of their
representational significance. It is as if Yeats’s curse from the “My Descendents” section of
“Meditations in Time of Civil War” has come to pass:
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky. (Yeats 94, lines 13-16 )
All the careful work that Yeats has done to perfect the symbols of an Irish culture that will
sustain it through the difficulties of civil war is being undone in the work of Thomas
MacGreevy, but it is not, as Yeats’ poem would have it, because of “too much business with the
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passing hour,/ Through too much play, or marriage with a fool” (Yeats 11-12) but because the
poets are no longer adequate to the task. The distinction between a national identity based on
provincialism and that which relates to other national cultures is crucial here: the storehouse of
aesthetic material Yeats intends to pass on is rooted in local lore that has been nationalized, as
opposed to that which, being fully national, can be in conversation with other national cultural
idioms. What makes an aesthetic structure fully national in this way? And why is a cultural
identity based on provincialism so poorly suited to survive the upheavals of political change?
The changing demands of the present mean that the storehouse of images, myths and stories must
constantly be revitalized in order to engage with the present in any meaningful way. But the
climate of mid-century Ireland did not allow for the kind of continual renewal a vibrant poetic
tradition required. The focus of public personalities (notably, Eamon deValera in his radio
addresses) on the old ideals, complete with worn-out symbols and images of a mythical Gaelic
past made it difficult for anyone who wished to keep up with the demands of the present to write
and work in Ireland. Difficult, surely, but not impossible; and for poets like MacGreevy, the
challenge was not only to find a suitable language in which to engage with the present but to
show up the old language for its inadequacies. If Terence Brown finds a lack of innovation in the
poetry of the Thirties and Forties he is missing the extent to which poets were grappling with
these very frustrations in interesting, and even innovative ways. MacGreevy’s use of the images
of war and the nationally displaced soldier (as well as displaced artists, diplomats, and political
figures) works to signal the frustration of a poet rejecting language that is no longer adequate and
trying to create his own. What results is a poetry that is made of the poet’s colossal failure on
both fronts, and in the process a truly modernist aesthetic is born. In the space between the dying
promises of the Celtic Twilight and those of a hopeful Europe plunged into disillusionment and
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despair MacGreevy writes as an Irish poet coming to grips with the place of the Irish poet, and
Irish poetry as Irish, in the world. This is the kind of poetry that is (ironically, in its utter
failure 11) finally adequate to the task of engaging with the present. What else could speak to the
confusions of a country emerging from civil war still split geographically, politically, and
culturally? What could address a cultural identity crisis better than an aesthetic constantly in
doubt of itself? While the likes of deValera preached the importance of maintaining the old
figures and images of provincialism, Irish modernist poets like MacGreevy (along with Devlin
and Beckett, as we shall see) engaged with the crises of the present with an aesthetic language
that could actually address it. That their work was not recognized is unsurprising given the
rhetorical power of the (significantly watered-down) inheritors of a Revivalist aesthetic. What
was appropriate to the founding of a nation free from foreign rule was inappropriate to the
aftermath, but no one who wielded political and cultural power was saying so. Those who were
worked in unappreciated silence or gained acclaim elsewhere.
Elsewhere, of course, was Europe, and there the aesthetics of alienation, despair, and the
failure of representation was critically acceptable. Perhaps more established nations could rest
easily in their identities as such and could focus on the questions that matters like the dangers of
technology, the changing role of the Church, and the devastation of war posed. Ireland dealt with
these issues, too, and it so happened that addressing them through poetic modernism also became
a way to address the unique (to Western Europe of the early twentieth century) situation of a
country emerging from centuries of outside rule. But Irish modernist poets broke the rules: they
11
The ‘failure’ I refer to here is negative: MacGreevy does not come up with a new set of images to fill the
void left by the inadequacies of the Revivalist ones. The irony is that this failure is in itself an aesthetic language that
is up to the task of engaging with the present.
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were supposed to talk explicitly about Irishness and do so through the aesthetic established by
the Revival. And they were certainly not to dabble in European experimentation. Such audacity
would earn them poor readership in their own country and consequently no domestic livelihood
to speak of. It is a myth that all Irish poets hated Ireland and could not wait to leave—perhaps
Joyce comes erroneously to stand for all Irish writers in this way. Devlin found lucrative work as
a diplomat, which necessarily involved travel outside of Ireland. Despite their physical
displacements they were all fully engaged in the transformation of the Irish aesthetic.
MacGreevy’s war poems both exemplify and wrestle with Modernism while negotiating
its relation to Ireland specifically and Europe generally. In Poems, 12 the figure of the soldier
becomes the personification of alienation, emptiness, impotence, and displacement. Although the
recurring figure is not specifically identified as Irish, it does bring to mind MacGreevy’s own
conflicted experience as a nationalist Irishman fighting as a British soldier in World War I. The
majority of the characters that show up in Poems, whether or not they are soldiers, are separated
from their countries of origin, often dying and being buried in foreign soil (as in “De Civitate
Hominum,” “Golder’s Green,” “Aodh Ruadh O’Domhnaill,” and “Gloria de Carlos V”). In
“Golder’s Green,” MacGreevy’s reference to poet Heinrich Heine, a Jew who moved between
cultures uneasily as Protestant convert, amplifies the sense of displacement evoked by the
soldiers in the poem who are buried in foreign places. In fact, Jim Haughey argues that “all of
MacGreevy’s poems are essentially war poems” for this reason (Haughey 214).
12
I refer here to the Poems rather than the later Collected Poems to emphasize MacGreevy’s, rather than
the editor’s, craft. The only change to the later version is the addition of five poems throughout the volume. When I
make an observation, for instance as it relates to the order of the poems or the repetition of certain images, that could
just as easily be made of the earlier version as the later, I will continue this practice.
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Allyson Booth has written about the gulf in English life between civilian and combatant
experiences of World War I; the soldier is in the alienated position of one whose wholly physical
(or corpsed 13) experience of war is not articulatable in the “abstract vocabulary of patriotism”
that he found “ludicrous and infuriating” (Booth 22). For Booth, the inadequacy of the language
of “home” prompted many soldiers to draft their own accounts of WWI which created alternate
spaces that became a kind of new home: “veterans’ accounts of the war may be understood as
effecting a reclamation of home” (Booth 22). While MacGreevy’s poetry is not an account of the
war as such it can be read as an articulation of the gulf between language and experience that
World War I amplified by the difference in experience between those at home and those sent to
war. But the “home” that MacGreevy’s poetry creates is not recognizable to the tradition that
precedes it; it is not translatable into the green fields and Celtic myths of a Revivalist aesthetic. It
is at once alien to an accepted sense of “Irishness” and in its rejection of it, more resonant with
the lived experience of Irishness in the interwar period. This timely sense of Irishness—one of
post-independence ambivalence over national identity and the decline of traditional cultic
structures (the loosening of the Church’s authority)—resonates with (but does not mirror) similar
concerns in continental Europe. MacGreevy’s modernism rests in its ability to articulate what is
shared between Irish and European experiences of alienation and the demands of poetry in light
of social and cultural upheaval.
In “Golder’s Green” MacGreevy’s speaker addresses the foreign-buried Irish soldier: “In
death you will not miss/ Our earth or the rain from our low gray skies” (lines 2-3). MacGreevy’s
use of the inclusive pronoun “our” emphasizes the loss of a particular community every bit as
13
I r efer here to common strategies in war poetry which make speakers o ut o f dead bodies as a way to
emphasize that corpses are more alienating to home discourses of patriotism than mere corporeality.
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much as the personal alienation of a soldier who dies and is buried far from home; and the “low
gray skies” makes this loss specifically Irish. This is chief among the modernist dilemmas in
MacGreevy’s writing: the tension between nationalism and internationalism, not just as a
political choice but the felt experience of a person struggling between competing centers.
MacGreevy’s personal position was doubly complex, as a person who fought under the flag of
his country’s occupier (in nationalist terms) in order to offer support for other small nations
under similar conditions.
John Jordan makes the case all too simplistically when he says that “MacGreevy satisfied
our subconscious yearning for the ideal of a thoroughly Europeanised Irishman” (Jordan 12).
Jordan’s readings find too much harmony between MacGreevy’s Irishness and Europeanness.
“Subconscious yearning” for a place in the world is closer to the point; the displaced man in
MacGreevy’s poetry, however, is at times beyond desire. He is, in fact, emptied of it; ultimately
the speakers of these poems will occupy and stay in the space between desire and attainment in
an act of resignation, as the home space is no longer available to them. The soldiers in “Golder’s
Green” are not even identified as men, but corpses, who “in death . . . will not miss” their
country of origin. The dilemma is in this sense not a choice. MacGreevy’s world is one in which
circumstance, not will, determines where a body falls and where it is laid to rest. He makes the
point in “Homage to Louis IX:”
One o’clock!
And ‘tis suddenly wild.
The dry wind
Catches the dust
And, like a child,
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Whirls it purposelessly
High in the air;
Twists the branches of trees
Into harmless symbolisms;
Blows the papers from the table by my window
Round the room
In a chaste bacchanale. (1-12)
The sense of alienation of the soldier in the poem who has left his country to die in another is the
point, not the determination of whether or not one should be loyal to Ireland primarily or join the
rest of Europe. Here the classic metaphor of the wind as fate becomes chance instead, as it whirls
“purposelessly.” The symbolisms—anything that would attach meaning to the circumstance of
his death—are “harmless,” which in a time of war has particularly poignancy for a man whose
prime purpose is to do harm. Action is not effective, as the “chaste bacchanale” comes to
nothing. The actions of the soldier in the second stanza are completely without consequence.
A young man
Who, all to-day
And all last night,
And yesterday,
Moved, waking, through heaven,
Passing silver star
After silver star,
Clustered silver stars,
And gold suns,
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Is sleeping now
On dark earth again. (13-23)
MacGreevy’s world is one in which ashes return to ashes (as in “Golder’s Green,” where the
corpse goes “to some place like this/ To be turned into a little ashes” [lines 4-5]). The man’s
whole life—“all to-day/And all last night,/And yesterday”—of action, indicated by the motion of
his steps, leads him to back to where he started. He dies as a young man whose impotence echoes
the “chaste bacchanale” of the previous stanza; the repetition of “silver stars” indicates that he
will not live to be immortalized. He will not last into his silver (or golden) years, and his efforts
will not make him a celebrity of any stripe. He will simply return to the earth.
Appropriately, the poem ends with a pointed critique of one of Ireland’s silver stars (or
“golden suns”), W.B. Yeats. “W.B., turned man of action, said: ‘MacGreevy,/ ‘It is very hard to
like men of action.’/ In sleep do they meet Thee face to face?” (33-35). The poem is now a
modernist response to Yeats’ engagement of Irish politics in poetry. The actions of individuals
amount to nothing, and neither does art. “Men of action” are soldiers and poets but no matter;
their fate is the same. Yeats’ eternally vexing dilemma over whether poetry belongs only to itself
or has an obligation to participate in the political life of a culture is here put to rest: the poet, like
the soldier, affects nothing. The collection begins in “Nocturne” with a declaration of this view
of poetry. Then entire short poem reads,
I labour in a barren place
Alone, self-conscious, frightened, blundering;
Far away, stars wheeling in space,
About my feet earth voices whispering.
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Again MacGreevy speaks simultaneously of the work of poetry and the life of a soldier. The
epigraph, “To Geoffrey England Taylor, 2nd Lieutenant, R.F.A. ‘Died of Wounds’” reads as if it
were culled from a newspaper obituary. The soldier is an everyman and a no-man. The poem’s
subject is doubled, as the “I” might also be read as the poet, whose ego and work is of no
consequence (hence the “barren place”). Its position at the opening of Poems announces that the
volume will thematically address death in war but also the futility of the act of creation. The
choice is not a mere matter of convenience, though MacGreevy would certainly have found
themes and images from his own life easy to incorporate. What better choice to work out the
implications of the horrors and alienations of modern life than the figure of the soldier, dying for
essentially nothing, cold and lonely on foreign soil? What set of images could have better served
a poet who addresses the failures of representation than those that speak to the utter
meaninglessness of the ideals that lead countries to war? The soldier becomes engulfed in the
field of objects; coming in as an individual hero, he finds himself erased by the randomness and
senselessness of war. He dies not because of something but as just another something (and for
MacGreevy, always on foreign soil, completely disconnected from any native, or sensible,
structures of meaning). The figure of the soldier works in two directions for MacGreevy. On the
one hand it provides an aesthetic language for the general discourse of loss, alienation, failure,
and impotence. But it also parallels the experience of a poet who sets out to represent and
preserve the ideals of his culture and finds himself stranded on foreign soil without a home
country, as it were (in terms of a set of images and ideas suitable to the present situation), and
unrecognized as a true Irish poet. 14 As Haughey puts it, “MacGreevy is one of the first Irish
14
I d on’t mean to o ffer a s implistic o ne-to-one co rrespondence with M acGreevy’s o wn l ife b ut to
emphasize the extent to which the figure of the soldier as MacGreevy writes him provides a l anguage in which to
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poets to make use of distinct images and icons from the Great War to illustrate the ongoing
tensions in an Irish state searching for self-definition yet uncomfortable with certain strands of its
narrative past” (Haughey 222). The doubling of the subject in “Nocturne” sets up the relationship
as it will be borne out in the rest of the collection.
MacGreevy’s painting-inspired techniques, which reflect his work as an art critic, serve
to elaborate the subject’s predicament in ways that his Irish poetic tradition did not afford.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his best-known war poem, “De Civitate Hominum.” It
begins
The morning sky glitters
Winter blue.
The earth is snow-white,
With the gleam snow-white answers to sunlight,
Save where shell-holes are new,
Black spots in the whiteness— (1-6)
MacGreevy then labels the picture in its own stanza, “A Matisse ensemble” (7). This is not a
simplistic landscape poem in which a death will be mourned. Just as the reader prepares for a
tribute, the poem becomes impersonal, a representation emptied of sentiment. The “whitened tree
stumps” (8) are crassly placed next to “white bones” (10). Again the soldier will not live on even
in memory. “Those who live between wars may not know/ But we who die between peaces/
Whether we die or not” (16-18). The world is turned upside-down as “’Tis still life that lives/
Not quick life” (25-6). The poem demonstrates this principal by its strange preoccupation with
the images of death over death itself. “There are the fleece-white flowers of death/ That unfold
talk about the situation of being Irish (and a poet) in mid-century.
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themselves prettily/ About an airman” (27-9). The airman will be shot down in the poem, but the
speaker is more concerned about the aesthetics of the scene. The only spot of color (black and
white as essentially colorless) in the poem comes at the moment of his death, but here again the
color itself becomes the subject and not the airman. “And he streams down/ Into the white,/ A
delicate flame,/ A stroke of orange in the morning’s dress” (40-3). The airman has been left
behind for the image of his death; and if the reader expects that image to possess a dignity
worthy of a soldier’s death, he is disappointed to find that it instead belongs to the world of
fashion. Earlier in the poem two empty spaces, a lake and a crater near which many soldiers have
died, are similarly reduced to being “like the silver shoes of a model” (13). The silver in the
shoes brings to mind the silver stars of “Homage to Louis IX,” though here silver is cheap and
stands not for longevity but for meaningless embellishment. The silver shoes of the model in “De
Civitate Hominum” cheapen the stars in “Homage to Louis IX,” further mocking the man of
action who expects something to come of his efforts.
This shift of focus from death to aesthetics is evidence of the influence of Mallarmé, who
insists that “the artist must ‘describe not the object itself, but the effect it produces’” (Pilling 25),
as opposed to poetry that would produce effects through objects themselves. In this case the
effect is the “stroke of orange;” the poem cannot be said to be “about” an airman’s death,
specifically, but only to be engaged in some way with it. It is more about the images that the
airman’s death brings to mind. This reading is at odds with that of J.C.C. Mays, for whom the
poem addresses the ultimate failure of art.
“De Civitate Hominum” is about the horror created by man and his inability to
respond to it adequately—a failure which reflects his nature and is the condition
of his relation to God . . . As a poem of reaction in MacGreevy’s sense,
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registering the attempt to translate life into art, ‘De Civitate’ is finally awkward
and inadequate. The experience it describes draws a conventional response from
the sergeant and a too-pat counter-response from the speaker, the witty line-break
giving away his callowness, and this is the point. It is as much about limitation as
achievement about the state of humanity and the inability of art to transcend
nature. (Mays 116)
What Mays does not take into account is that the poem does not communicate any sort of desire.
Nothing in the poem indicates that the poet is disappointed with the images available to him and
poetry’s ability to adequately represent the airman’s death. What makes MacGreevy a modernist
is precisely this lack of concern with whether or not art can make anything of life what so ever.
The poem is only “awkward and inadequate” if the reader expects it to do justice to, or provide a
proper and dignified representation of, a soldier’s death. As if to anticipate a reading like Mays’s,
MacGreevy makes a sort of joke at the end of the poem.
My sergeant says, very low, ‘Holy God!
‘Tis a fearful death.’
Holy God makes no reply
Yet. (44-7)
MacGreevy here is making less of a statement about the limitations of art and more about the
ridiculousness of the question itself. One representation is just as worthless as the next, whether
it pretends to be adequate or not. Besides, to be adequate or even to try is not the point in the
poem. The representation is not, as Mays would have it, any sort of “attempt.” The poem
happens because of, not for, the airman’s death.
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Alex Davis attributes MacGreevy’s modernism in this sense to a break with realist
strategies:
MacGreevy’s modernism, fully cognisant of the psychological and social effects
of the Great War, seeks to avoid the shortcomings of both ‘realism’ and
aestheticism. Without belittling the horror of MacGreevy’s experiences during the
war, the impossibility of adequately representing it in its totality is at one with the
general predicament of modernist writers (including Yeats) disabused of realist
aspirations . . . The war, in other words, is an event that throws into relief a more
diffuse sense of a crisis in the representational capacity of art . . . . (Davis 22)
MacGreevy’s use of non-realist painting techniques (or more aptly, his gestural brush-strokes)
navigates this boundary between realism and aestheticism by acknowledging the ultimate
inadequacy of any approach when faced with world war.
That MacGreevy studied painting professionally is especially noticeable in his poetry’s
similitude to the WWI-era painting of Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Paul and
John Nash, Stanley Spenser, Gilbert Spenser, Eric Kennington, and C.R.W. Nevinson. Samuel
Hynes has described six features of these painters’ work which find their corollaries in
MacGreevy’s poetry: space derationalized and defamiliarized with impossible vantage points and
a background that disappears or disintegrates; no habitable forms; no natural forms; human
figures which are absent, distorted, or mechanized; no visible spectator; and no familiarity with
English (or in this case, Irish, as the home territory) landscape (Hynes 196). The principles of
war painting are disfigurement, danger, desolation, ruin, and chaos (200). “It is though the war
had annihilated Nature, and with it the whole tradition of Romantic landscape,” (196) Hynes
writes; the paintings were “more like elegies for the death of landscape” (199). The relation of
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man and nature has fundamentally changed. “Natural beauty and natural benevolence have
withdrawn from the ravaged scene; and man is no longer secure and at ease there.” Nature
becomes an absence which is replaced by war, and war marks the end of beauty to the extent that
the embrace of ugliness becomes a kind of truth-telling (201). MacGreevy’s “Autumn, 1922” is
the shortest and most exemplary of the war poems which employ these techniques: “The sun
burns out,/ The world withers/ And time grows afraid of the triumph of time.” Here we have no
habitable structures, as the world itself cannot support life; natural forms distorted (or withered);
no home landscape with which to be familiar; no human figures; and the deregularization of
time, which in its self-doubt stands in for the missing subject or spectator.
Although “Golder’s Green” and “De Civitate Hominum” specifically invoke the Great
War, their treatment of landscape in relation to warfare is quite different. While “Golder’s
Green” is more conventional in its treatment of landscape, “De Civitate,” as we have seen, takes
a different turn. In it MacGreevy mocks the classic landscape painting by distorting its elements:
the whiteness of purity and life becomes the whiteness of bones; his ‘canvas’ of sorts cannot
support life (“’Tis still life that lives,/ Not quick life”) but becomes rather the runway for a series
of disembodied wardrobe pieces (“Zillebeke Lake and Hooge,/ Ice gray, gleam differently,/ Like
the silver shoes of the model; “There are fleece-white flowers of death/ That unfold themselves
prettily/ About an airman”; “And he streams down/ Into the white/ A delicate flame,/ A stroke of
orange in the morning’s dress”). Departing a bit from Hynes’ painters, MacGreevy does write in
two spectators. The first is the poem’s speaker, but he quickly becomes a mere pretty thing in the
fashion show’s grim inventory whose life-like qualities are embellishments.
And, what with my sensations
And my spick and span subaltern’s uniform,
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I might be the famous brass monkey,
The nature morte accessory. (“De Civitate” 25-8)
The second spectator, the speaker’s sergeant, interjects a living presence in this uninhabitable
place by explicitly acknowledging human loss; and yet he must say it “very low” as if it were
engulfed in the sterility of the scene.
As the title of the poem suggests, “Autumn, 1922” could easily have been written in
response to the Irish situation; indeed, although it does not address WWI, it brings the same
techniques to bear on the Irish civil war. Similarly, in “The Six Who Were Hanged,” MacGreevy
simultaneously invokes a European sense of modernist alienation and despair and lambastes the
tired Irish appeal to long-dead symbols of cultural continuity. The very first line contains the
poem’s major aesthetic distortion. “The sky turns limpid green”—as opposed to bright, active,
patriotic Irish green—and continues with its bitter criticism of nationalism and the attending
human cost:
it will not be time, Not for silver and gold,
Not with green,
Till they all have dropped home,
Till gaol bells all have clanged,
Till all six will be hanging
In green, white and gold,
In a premature Easter. (13-19)
MacGreevy’s choice of “limpid” plays on the synchrony between the word’s suggestion of
serenity and clarity and its reminder of the limp bodies of the six, countering a bright, patriotic
green to one that asks for contemplation rather than celebration. Or, differently, MacGreevy
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reads the Irish emphasis of the Easter story on the necessity of death rather than the promise of
resurrection, which is absent from the poem save a vague gesture toward a historical fulfillment
hardly worth its cost. And who is there to witness this tragedy? Only “The white-faced stars”
(31) who are “silent,/ Silent the pale sky” (31-2) and the speaker who calls his own role into
question (“Why am I here?” [43]) and who has been emptied of the capacity for an appropriately
human emotional response to the loss of life.
Tired of sorrow,
I go from the hanged,
From the women,
I go from the hanging;
Scarcely moved by the thought of the two to be hanged (53-7)
The speaker’s alienation is not total here—he, along with the women who “perhaps” “have
Easters” (41) (modernist alienation is apparently gendered) participates in a spiritually
communal moment as he says in the last line of the poem, “Pray for us” (59). Despite the fact
that the speaker asks in the penultimate stanza, “What, these seven hundred years,/ Has Ireland
had to do/ With the morning star?” (60-2) he nevertheless spiritualizes the moment, if only as a
last resort. Still, there is no hope in the poem, no promise of mending or of new life, and as in his
other poems, little desire left either. As he writes in “Gloria de Carlos V,” “My rose of Tralee
turned gray in its life/ A tombstone gray,/ Unimpearled” (15-17).
MacGreevy’s Irish landscape becomes a space for lament in a poem that thematically has
nothing to do with war but still bemoans Ireland’s cultural bankruptcy. In “Homage to Jack
Yeats” the landscape is familiarly Irish, but less idealistically than its former self.
I thought how this land, so desolate,
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Long, long ago was rich in living,
More reckless, consciously, in strife,
More conscious daring-delicate
In love. (8-12)
The tower, that symbol of ancient Irish strength celebrated by Yeats and complicated by Joyce,
becomes bent (13). It is only a visual effect produced by the speaker driving past at a high rate of
speed, but it becomes a metaphor still, and reminds us of the shadow of war even in a poem not
explicitly about it.
The gold years
of Limerick life
Might be but consecrated
Lie,
Heroic lives
So often merely meant
The brave stupidity of soldiers,
The proud stupidity of soldiers’ wives. (19-26)
Here he reevaluates all of Ireland’s ‘proud’ history, so that the wistful lamentation of the first
stanza is undone. There is no truly heroic past to which to return. It has all been warfare and the
lie of heroicism. Similarly, in “Gloria de Carlos V,” the lie of return is personal for a soldier who
finds Ireland changed.
When we come back from first death
To our second life here
It is no longer the same Christianity . . .
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Here ‘twas scarlet and black,
Green and black,
Starch white streaked with cadaver black. (1-3; 9-11)
“De Civitate” approaches modernist experimentation regarding landscape, but pales in
comparison to MacGreevy’s Dali-esque “Homage to Hieromymus Bosch.” Here again human
figures are present but disfigured
A woman with no face walked into the light;
A boy, in a brown-tree norfolk suit,
Holding on
Without hands
To her seeming skirt .(1-5)
and, ghostlike, ambiguously neither living nor dead:
And the shadowy figures began to stir
When one I had thought dead
Filmed slowly out of his great effigy on a tomb near by
And they all shuddered. (20-3)
Unlike the blankly rural landscape of other poems in the collection, this one is set at Trinity
College, moving urbanity and the Protestant tradition into the foreground rather than the rurality
and Catholicism of nationalist rhetoric. Trinity and Dublin are still iconic Irish images, however,
and MacGreevy intends to extend the pall over them as well, as if no version of Irishness is safe
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from the end of beauty as the result of war 15. MacGreevy announces the poem’s relation both to
painting and to a specific kind of aesthetic in its title, which refers to the fifteenth-century Dutch
painter known for his depiction of the disembodied, the monstrous and the fallen. In third
painting of Bosch’s triptych, “Garden of Earthly Delights,” nude human figures in hell are
tortured by animal-like monsters with exaggerated features. MacGreevy’s setting is an urban hell
15
Although the poem does not specifically name war as a theme, the Irish Civil War is its impetus, at least
in terms of its drafting. Susan Schreibmann’s notes on the poem excerpt a l etter in which MacGreevy explains the
biographical origins of the poem:
When I was a student a number of us, 17 in all I think, who were ex-British officers asked
the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin to send an appeal on our behalf for the reprieve of a student
of the National University who was captured in an ambush and condemned to be hanged. It was
believed he had been tortured by the Black and Tans and our appeal was that he be reprieved only
long enough for it to be verified that he had British justice and not torture. Only two or three of the
signatories were nationalists. But the Provost refused to have anything to do with the appeal and
Kevin B arry was hanged. W e were t he i nhabitants of t he nursery in t he poem. J ohn B ernard the
nursery governor, etc. The well of Saint Patrick is in the grounds of Trinity College, Dublin which
used before the Reformation or up to Elizabethan times to be the Abbey of All Hallows.
The relation between the poem and its biographical origins rests in repression signaled by the horrific. Not
only i s na ture e xceeding t he b ounds o f a n urban c ontainer ( curiously p unctured b y e scape va lves i n t he s ewer
drains—the bi ological c an b oth be c leansed a nd c ontaminate t hrough t he same c hannels), b ut i n M acGreevy’s
commentary, t he s courge o f domination e xtends t o h uman i nteractions a s well. T he nursery governor silences t he
effigy that emerges to speak to the faceless woman, squelching any life he might have left. “Say nothing, I say, say
nothing, say nothing!/ And he who had seemed to be coming to life/ Gasped,/ Began hysterically, to laugh and cry,/
And, with a gesture of impotent and half-petulant despair,/ Filmed back into his effigy again.”
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in which already-dead but suffering humans are tortured by rats, as nature in the urban context
becomes violent, repressive, and menacing.
Then, from the drains,
Small sewage rats slid out.
They numbered hundreds of hundreds, tens, thousands . . .
The woman with no face gave a cry and collapsed.
The rats danced on her
And on the wriggling words
Smirking. (42-4; 52-5)
The remainder of MacGreevy’s Poems deals conventionally with landscape. “Homage to
Marcel Proust,” MacGreevy’s love-poem to the richness of Proustian images, whose densely
described objects are so weighty with meaning, creates a landscape that is natural, undistorted,
familiar, and with normal perspective. “The sea gleamed deep blue in the sunlight/ Through the
different greens of the trees” (1-2). At the end of the poem the characters are dead but “the waves
still are singing.” The diversity of MacGreevy’s poetic in the collection illustrates both the
complexity of modern life independent of and entangled with the battlefield, and the large field
of possible modernist responses. Consider the contrast between a poem like “Homage to
Hieronymus Bosch” with its faceless and limbless half-dead, overrun with rats, and “Gioconda,”
MacGreevy’s homage to the Mona Lisa, whose whole text I quote here:
The hillsides were of rushing, silvered water,
Down,
And around,
And all across,
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And about the white, gleaming tree-trunks,
Far as sensitive eyesight could see,
On both sides of the valley,
And beyond,
Everywhere,
The silvered swirling water!
The clouds,
Blue-gray
Lined with pink
And edged with silver,
Meditated.
The sun did not rise or set
Not being interested in the activities of politicians.
White manes tossed like spray.
Bluish snakes slid
Into the dissolution of a smile.
“Gioconda” takes a high modernist approach that recalls Yeats’ “Politics” or “Lake Isle of
Inisfree” and reflects his reverence for Leonardo da Vinci, who MacGreevy regarded as a
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fundamentally medieval, rather than Renassiance, painter. 16 This sort of poem, along with its
immediate predecessor on the page, the short “Giorgionismo”
In the darkness
I close my eyes
To the German sadism on the screen
And the recessionalist lovers
Around me.
I recede too, Alone.
voices the desire to escape the horror of the present age, in “Gioconda” through nostalgia for a
classical aesthetic (which we will also see to a greater degree in Devlin’s poetry) and in both,
through the high modernist desire to recede from war and politics into the realm of art alone 17. In
“Gioconda” white and silver are here, after “De Civitate,” restored to their luminous lifeaffirming associations. The world of the poem is inhabitable.
“Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence” engages high modernism through demonstration
rather than rhetoric. Landscape is neither conventional nor distorted; spatially the poem is realist,
but its features here do not function as emblems of nation, culture, and religion, as was typical
for Irish treatments of landscape. It is instead the vehicle for an aesthetic (wishing to be) stripped
16
MacGreevy, Thomas. “Leonardo da Vinci” in The Capuchin Annual. Dublin. 1953-54. pp.135-154.
17
High modernism cannot be reduced t he desire for escape, however much outdated scholarship would
have it so. In this case I merely refer to one impulse in high modernism that becomes rather complex in poetry like
that of Eliot and Pound.
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of time and human reference; the “I” stands outside the poem as if it were a painting hanging on
the wall. In its entirety:
Fortunate
Being inarticulate,
The alps
Rise
In ice
To heights
Of large stars
And little;
To courts
Beneath other courts
With walls of white starlight.
They have stars for pavements,
The valley is an area,
And I a servant,
A servant of sevants,
Of metaphysical bereavements,
Staring up
Out of the gloom.
I see no immaculate feet on those pavements,
No winged forms,
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Foreshortened,
As by Reubens or Domenichino,
Plashing the silvery air,
Hear no cars,
Elijah’s or Apollo’s
Dashing about
Up there.
I see alps, ice, stars and white starlight
In a dry, high silence.
Between “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch” and this poem we see the transition from an aesthetic
that returns to a pre-modern fear of nature (of which rats and disease serve as reminders in
industrialized times) to one that sublimates, or silences, this fear while simultaneously allowing
it to “speak” through that very silence. “If the language of nature is mute,” Adorno writes in the
“Natural Beauty” portion of his Aesthetics, “art seeks to make this muteness eloquent” (Adorno
78), and indeed we find MacGreevy attempting to negotiate his admiration for the “spoken”
eloquence of Renaissance painting with his modernist sense of the failures of language and
representation after large-scale warfare. The result is “Nocturne,” which imitates natural beauty
in its desire for (“dry, high”) silence (Adorno 69) and in its elevation of the object to primacy
ahead of the subject (71) who here is relegated to the position as a “servant of servants.” Still, the
speaker limits the scope of the picture that despite the subject’s loss of status is determined by
his gaze. And the speaker’s tight control over the images in the poem, including its express
prohibitions (“I see no immaculate feet on those pavements,/ No winged forms . . . hear no
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cars”), emphasizes the degree to which the speaker uses the problems of silence and speaking to
seek consolation from the horrors of modern life MacGreevy has articulated in other poems. The
single statement of desire in the opening line of the poem, “Fortunate,” in some ways contradicts
MacGreevy’s seeming lack of desire in other poems in which despair is unmediated by any hope
of an alternative. Of course the “alternative” posited here—a silence only achievable by the
already “inarticulate”—is, like all other objects of desire in MacGreevy’s poems, entirely
unreachable. Still, its contemplation is some kind of desperate consolation, as the speaker
contrasts the Alps’ lack of imperative to speak to his own position as a slave-poet: “And I a
servant,/ A servant of servants/ Of metaphysical bereavements.”
The poem’s function is not, however, to provide comfort but to assert a kind of aesthetic
that, while far from matching the ability of the Alps to speak through being, nevertheless might
at least match the demands of the present. There is a rich irony in the notion that MacGreevy’s
creation of an ahistorical landscape ‘painting’ should speak to the moving, living present better
than, say, a more realist depiction of Irish culutural realities. Does the poem’s uninhabited city
represent what art (as human artiface) might look like if it were able, in Adorno’s formulation,
“with human means to realize the language of what is not human. . . ;” and does “Nocturne of the
Self-Evident Presence,” in its acknowledgement that “the language of nature is mute” make “this
muteness eloquent” (Adorno 78)? If modern warfare, which laps at the edges of “Presence” in its
revisiting of European landscapes which are sites of conflict in other poems, occasions the return
of the primitive fear of nature, is nature’s own response—silence—also possible for an art made
of language? What is appealing to the speaker about the Alps is that they constitute an
architecture of self-evidence; humanly fantasized ornamentation (“immaculate feet,” “winged
forms” “cars,/Elijah’s or Apollo’s”) is dispensable, unnecessary, distracting. However much
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MacGreevy admired Baroque painting the structure of natural beauty is what he aims for in his
time, so that the ideal poem mirrors the self-evidence of nature. “What in artworks is structured,
gapless, resting in itself, is an afterimage of the silence that is the single medium through which
nature speaks” (Adorno 74).
To the extent that it appeals to silence and the end of language, “Presence,” recalling
Patricia Rae’s words on melancholia, constitutes “an ethically satisfactory response to loss” on
MacGreevy’s part, one that acknowledges the incongruity of even the aesthetics he most admired
(classical and Renaissance painting) with the demands placed on a poet writing after a world war
and in a time of considerable political and social upheaval. Silence does not attempt to remake a
nation with nationalist rhetoric, does not insist on a fabricated and ultimately untenable
continuity with tradition, does not reclaim images of horror, loss, alienation, and displacement to
affirm the publicly celebrated narrative of necessary conflict. “Presence” does not achieve this
silence—it can’t—but does provide, in the strong, short lines of the first stanza, the sparseness of
its images, and in its systematic dismissal of anything baroque, silence’s melancholic
architecture.
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SAMUEL BECKETT: THE PROFANE AND RADICAL HUMANISM
For poets of this period, Ireland-as-home/origin is a powerful and problematic concept.
Conventional cultural-nationalist discourses of mid-twentieth-century Ireland—particularly those
regularly advanced by public officials—posit Ireland (as a physical, spiritual, and metaphorical
space) as the birthplace for all “good” Irish things. As we see especially in MacGreevy’s poetry,
historical circumstances such as Irish citizens’ involvement with WWI serve to challenge this
notion of secure origins; before the others’ time, however, the Civil War does something similar
for Yeats. I see the poetry of this period as continuing the work of interrogating the notion of
origins in ways that generate multiple and more inclusive versions of Irishness. Beckett (and
Joyce, in prose) is (are) especially helpful on this last point, as physical distance from Ireland in
the form of voluntary exile coupled with Irish subject matter creates space for complex notions
of Irishness to emerge.
Beckett’s poetry is not only entirely devoid of nostalgia but works against notions of
origin; Beckett is not a romantic modernist. Beckett’s speaker in his only full collection of this
period, Echo’s Bones (1935), more or less accepts as inevitable and unavoidable the states of
wandering, homelessness, and impending death. His is not a poetry of longing for either literal
past or bygone era (as in Devlin and, to a large extent, Clarke), but one of living—and dying—in
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the present. When the speaker—who remains more or less consistent throughout the collection,
however unusual this is for Beckett’s work—does look back it is to unshroud origins to the point
that they are indistinguishable from the corruptions and perversions of the present. In other
words, Beckett unravels time in Echo’s Bones in ways that collapse present and past into one
sustained experience of suffering. Like Clarke and Kavanagh, Beckett finds his poetic personae
in the state of walking and wandering; but unlike them wandering and exclusion are not foils for
home and are not imbued with the longing for it; in this sense he is closest to MacGreevy, though
Beckett goes further in his explorations of rootlessness. Although Beckett’s poetry is similar to
MacGreevy’s in that the home space is not available for return, in Beckett home is never the holy
space in the first place. MacGreevy’s nostalgia does not lie as heavily as that of the others but it
acknowledges the home that once was; for Beckett home is no better or worse than wandering.
Therefore to the question of cultural famine Beckett seems to answer that we have always been
hungry.
Beckett’s poetry is obsessed with ideas of exile, wandering, and exclusion. His speaker in
Echo’s Bones constantly negotiates the problem of writing about and for a cultural moment from
a space outside it. Although the poetry in this collection takes place almost exclusively within
Ireland, the speaker walks, literally in “Enueg I,” the first poem of Echo’s Bones, around the
edge of the island, water lapping at his feet, upsetting its borders. Unlike Kavanagh, however,
who both celebrates and minds his exclusion with expressions of longing for belongingness,
Beckett revels in his status as a poet outside (as an expatriate as well as an unconventional poet).
In Beckett’s poetry, the energies which would have been directed toward an anxiety over a home
space are redirected toward real physical bodies from which actual life is lived. His is a kind of
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realism turned on its head, where sounds and smells—particularly ones that Irish poetry of this
era avoided—take the place of photographic faithfulness to life as it is lived.
It is in fact this flaunting of his refusal to conform his poetry to the social conventions of
mid-twentieth-century Ireland that brings Beckett most fully into sympathy with his audience; he
suggests that rather than bringing us together, social mores surrounding the body serve rather to
buffer both our understanding of life as it is actually lived and our ability to relate to one another
as human beings. Beckett’s profanity is no mere childish rebellion but rather the assertion of a
radical humanism based on a flesh-and-blood notion of shared experience. Though his poetry
challenges the Victorian mores of mid-twentieth-century Ireland in its saturation with sexual
imagery and bodily functions and fluids (which made it impossible to publish within Ireland),
these excesses do not stand as remedies for a repressed culture; but the acknowledgement of the
body does argue for a pointedly unromantic alternative to Victorianism. To Kavanagh the
bleeding Christ and the suffering ploughman and to Clarke the sexually freed woman are
emblems of the celebration and holiness of the body as paths to a more potent spirituality. For
Beckett, the body is nothing more than itself, and in this way his is the most thoroughly humanist
poetry of this period.
Despite the large body of criticism on Beckett’s prose and plays, very little attention has
been paid to his poetry outside of Lawrence Harvey’s exhaustive readings. The reason for this
oversight may have to do with the fact that poetry accounts for very little of his output, similar,
for example, to how Thomas Hardy is known mainly as a novelist and not as a poet; it may also
be that studies of his poetry have not yet taken place in the context of Irish poetry of the time, so
that those features of the poetry that become most salient when viewing him next to Devlin,
MacGreevy and the others might be visible to critics who are unfamiliar with the his lesser-
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known contemporaries. In his essay on Beckett’s poetry, Roger Little warns against limiting the
study of Beckett’s work to genre, offering Waiting for Godot, in its emphasis on the irrelevance
of plot compared to the rhythmic and phonetic quality of language, as an example of the ways all
of Beckett’s work is, in a sense, poetry. Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller concur,
describing Beckett’s poetic devices not as separate characteristics but “nuances of a living
motion” (Jacobsen and Mueller 36) that forms Beckett’s entire works as a kind of magnum opus,
or one large poem (Jacobsen and Mueller 45). Moreover, as with the other poets in this study,
relatively little has been written on Beckett’s poetry, outside of Lawrence Harvey’s long and
detailed study, compared to the novels and plays. Aside from Harvey, high praise of his poems is
infrequent. John Pilling finds “Beckett’s early poems in English . . . uncomfortable reading”
(Pilling 15) and Whoroscope as “too clever for its own good” (Pilling 187); John Fletcher
dismisses Whoroscope as “little more than prose monologue chopped into lines of unequal
length” with “lame puns” imitative of Joyce and adds, “in spite of its wit, the whole poem gives a
frivolous impression; genuine poetic richness is lacking, for paradox, esotericism and verbal
gymnastics take its place” (Fletcher 26). Never mind that “poetic richness,” especially in its
twentieth-century form, is often marked by “paradox, esotericism and verbal gymnastics,” and
that given the horrors of the mid-century Europe inside which he wrote, such poetry might make
the reader uncomfortable indeed. Fortunately the body of criticism about Beckett’s poetry takes
his poetics seriously, and what has been written through his poetry as a way to get to the novels
and plays has merit applied to the poetry alone.
Like Louis MacNeice, Beckett was Irish-born but spent considerable time elsewhere: but
Ireland for Beckett, if one were to take even a cursory glance over his works, is originating, part
of the landscape of youth and the launching point from which more important things would
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come. In the context of other modern poets who called Ireland home, the concerns that are
unique to Ireland (particularly the notion of cultural famine) and those shared with the continent
(the modernist crisis of the subject, the role of tradition in modernity, the dangers of ideology)
run through Beckett’s poetry as well. The difference between Beckett’s distrust of language and
aesthetics and his aesthetic of failure and Devlin’s and MacGreevy’s is that Beckett’s
preoccupation with aging and impending death, like Proust’s, offers a geography of mourning
rather than a hollow keening. The title Echo’s Bones attests to that focus on the anatomy of
mourning and failure (the echo as belated, and therefore failed, speech). Beckett reads the notion
of failure through the phenomenon of physical decline and death and the experience of being
outcast. This mapping of the body and its exposure to the elements merges questions of language
with more basic ones of existence; and what it means to be human inside a culture that authorizes
one’s humanity and effaces it in the same gesture.
Beckett’s writing on Proust offers the best articulation of this geographic orientation. In
this small book, Beckett formulates the predicament of the modern subject in terms of time and
space, often as that of time operating as space. “Yesterday is not a milestone that has been
passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us,
heavy and dangerous” (Beckett Proust 3). While part of the self, the past is also an object that is
the result of the inevitable decomposition of time and life. “The individual is in a constant
process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish,
pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicolored
by the phenomena of its hours” (Beckett Proust 4-5). In this matrix the self is merely a shell, a
place where speech ricochets as in an echo chamber.
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In Proust, for Beckett, the subject is simultaneously in a constant state of striving and
decrepitude: “but what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his
desire. The subject has died—and perhaps many times—on the way” (Beckett Proust 3). The
subject encounters the object as banal and the desire is consequently unquenched. The object is
not merely object, then, but a subject itself. “We are faced by the problem of an object whose
mobility is not merely a function of the subject’s, but independent and personal: two separate and
immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation. So that whatever the object, our
thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable” (Beckett Proust 6-7). Thus life, both for subject
and object, is motion; and though “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all
time, but takes place every day” (Beckett Proust 8), the spiral of time is a downward one.
Beckett’s essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” intended as a meditation on Joyce’s
“Work in Progress,” carefully parses out the possible ways to approach circularity in relation to
time. Linearity is not the only alternative. Time can be cyclical and spherical (Beckett Dante
253)—endlessly repeating births, maturations, deaths, and rebirths, as in Vico and Joyce—or it
can be progressive and theological or “conical,” implying culmination, as in Bruno and Dante
(Beckett Dante 244 and 253). In Joyce, drawing from this Vicean construct, form and content
fuse. “Here form is content, content is form” (Beckett Dante 248). There is nothing to come from
and nothing to go to. Vico’s Providence “is not divine enough to do without the cooperation of
Humanity” (Beckett Dante 248). Beckett’s evaluation of Joyce’s acceptance of the Vicean
construct is both praiseful and cynical. On the one hand, “Work in Progress” is “direct
expression—pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentleman, it is
because you are too decadent to receive it.” (Beckett Dante 248). On the other hand, what is the
point of all this direct expression which needs no Divine to long for? “And no more than this;
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neither prize nor penalty; simply a series of stimulants to enable the kitten to catch its tail”
(Beckett Dante 253). This penultimate line to an essay on other writers becomes at last the
expression of Beckett’s own formulation of time, in which time, as in Vico and Joyce, is
spherical, but also highly suspicious of anything approaching the ontological. Josephine
Jacobsen and William R. Mueller write that Beckett’s universal protagonist, which they have
named “Q,”
lacks, and craves, a center of significance, a raison d’être which will render
endurable, or at least comprehensible, the horrifying manifestations which
compose its existence. It is the sense of an intolerable deprivation, an irreparable
absence, which haunts Q . . . the universe cannot produce a Caesar [or a God] but
only a grotesque and constricted parody . . . the dark night of the soul without the
Deity. (Jacobsen and Mueller 23-24)
Harvey’s reading of “Sanies I” explicates Beckett’s theme of end-less (where “end”
indicates both purpose and terminus) circularity. Our first clue is in the first line of the poem,
whose “sweet showers” references Chaucer and therefore pilgrimage. But this is not, of course, a
satisfactory journey. “With whatever trust of panic we went out/ with so much shall we return.”
The pilgrimage has not enlightened the pilgrim. This poem about Beckett’s own origins (“I was
born with a pop with the green of the larches”) pokes fun at nostalgia, where his desire for the
past is essentially to not-be or pre-be: “ah to back in the caul now with no trusts/ no fingers no
spoilt love” (14-15). But this beginning is an end. “The cord has been cut, and the circle in space
is a fiction. Only the straight, descending line of a man’s days is real” (Harvey 148) and thus the
speaker of the poem resolves not to renew it. “Refusing to perpetuate the pain that is life, he
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renounces his love and the ineluctable social cycle that continues man’s misery” (Harvey 148).
Beckett is “cinched to death in a filthy slicker.”
In my reading Beckett’s focus here is not so much the impossibility of return but the
rejection of the very notion of pure origins. Beckett’s chosen setting is also the ground for an
ongoing debate about the nature of origins in terms of Irish national identity (was it continuous
with a classical Gaelic past? Was the revival of the Irish Gaelic language necessary to rescue that
continuity? What was the difference between recovery and reinvention?). In a geographically
wider sense Beckett’s rejection of origins speaks to high Modernist appeals to tradition in
contrasts with other modernisms As in “Serena II,” where the malevolent instincts of his dog
lead to the abandonment of her puppies, the speaker imagines his birth in terms that emphasize
the pain and mess of birth, focusing of course on the barely containable fluids that accompany it.
oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork
...
back the shadows lengthen the sycamores are sobbing
to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy
buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work
for the midwife he is gory
for the proud parent he washes down a gob of gladness (23; 26-30)
Beckett mixes clichés and fragments of the clichés of childbirth (“roly-poly,” “spanking boy,”
“proud parent”) with references to pain—physical and psychic—and unappealing, usuallyignored fluids. The cork becomes perhaps a mucous plug and not part of a celebratory bottle of
champagne; the “fizz” shows up a few lines later to slake the thirst of the mother (or the
midwife, as the line endings make ambiguous), not to signal the end of the process after the baby
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has been carefully washed. When the boy is born he becomes, grammatically, the fluid that
“washes down a glob of gladness,” again calling mucous to mind. Beckett’s use of assonance
brings the reader’s attention back to the “gory” of the previous line, so that “gladness” is
overwhelmed by mucosal and placental excess; and the short ‘o’ sound in “gobs” stretches out
the sorrow of “sycamores sobbing.” The repeated “oh”s call to mind the moans of labor and
relate to the longer ‘o’ sounds and the Os of “roly-poly” and “gory.” Beckett’s use of
corresponding vowels and consonants allows words that would normally be at odds to merge into
odd terms that spoil the sanctity of a normally poetically whitewashed event. The consonant ‘g’
brings together “gory,” “gobs,” and “gladness;” ‘s’ recurs in “larches,” “sycamores,” and
“spanking;” ‘p’ connects the “proud parent” and “roly-poly” to “pain” and “spanking.” Birth is
not pure, it is gory, and associated not with the perfection of new life but, as the title suggests, a
wound. 18 Elsewhere in Echo’s Bones spring comes, as it does in “Enueg II” as a perverse
beginning associated with poison (see discussion below), and in “Serena I” with “phlox”(3) but
also “dead fish adrift” (5) and “gods/ pressed down and bleeding” (6-7).
Beckett’s compression of normally contradictory terms through assonance and
consonance compresses time as well; for if the past is as gory and corrupt as the present there is
no conceptual gap between the two, and the time that has passed between them loses its meaning.
The speaker of “Sanies I” technically recalls his birth upon his “brief prodigality” (34), but the
description of his birth is every bit as nasty as that of his corrupt young-adult self.
good as gold now in the prime after a brief prodigality
yea and suave
suave urbane beyond good and evil
18
Ackerley and Gontarski identify the term “sanies” as “a morbid discharge from infection or wound.”
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biding my time without rancour you may take your oath
distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of these fauns these smart nymphs
clipped like a pederast as to one trouser-end
sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild Woodbine
cinched to death in a filthy slicker (34-41)
Beckett profanes the convention of the golden boy who returns to his country home from a life of
success in the city; ‘city slicker’ becomes “filthy slicker,” and the “suave and urbane” young
man is compared to a “pederast,” a particularly distasteful reference in a poem about a child’s
birth. The image of the speaker “sucking” on a cigarette recalls the nursing of the newborn (see
line 32, “beestings” or colostrum). If there is a sense of circularity in the poem, it is pointless
one; either the point of origin was never pure in the first place or the experience that comes with
the only-forward trajectory of age inalterably colors the way the speaker understands the nature
of origin. If the latter is true then it is not very different from the former. In either case the only
purpose time serves is to bring one closer to death; even then, the difference between youth and
age has collapsed.
“Serena II” makes similar moves to “Sanies I,” only this time birth is a memory within a
dream, and the mother is the speaker’s dog, twitching with what the speaker imagines to be a
birthing nightmare. The mention of larches in lines 30 and 51 refers back to “Sanies I,” but
“Serena II” is directed more toward the theme of abandonment than “Sanies I,” which at least
briefly mentioned a parent’s care, no matter how attenuated. In “Serena II” the troubled return to
origins is corrupted not only by the acknowledgement of the attending pain (“she thinks she is
dying” in lines 15 and 26) but by the nature of return, which takes the form of nightmare rather
than happy homecoming. Here, too, there is no point in return: “there is no going back on/ a rout
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of tracks and streams fleeing to the sea” (30-31); “with whatever trust of panic we went out/ with
so much shall we return” (35-36). Beckett collapses time through the short-circuitry of epilepsy
(as the poem begins, in a one-line stanza, “this clonic earth”)—which suggests a random
electrical storm instead of a well-ordered progression—and simultaneous presence of the speaker
as witness to the dream in the present and the presence of the past within in the dream. The poem
complicates this layering of moments by switching the speaker’s voice from that of narrator of
the dog’s dream to one of her pups in stanza five, so that the speaker is simultaneously on the
inside and outside of the dream, all the while superimposing his own birth narrative.
For all the unhappiness of “Sanies I,” “Serena II” outdoes it with violence. The “clonic
earth” of the first line gives way to the back-and-forth wrench of the second stanza.
see-saw she is blurred in sleep
she is fat half dead the rest is free-wheeling
part the black shag the pelt
is ashen woad
snarl and howl in the wood wake all the birds
hound the harlots out of the ferns
this damfool twilight threshing in the brake
bleating to be bloodied
this crapulent hush
tear its heart out (2-11)
“See-saw” signals the back-and-forth movement as physical and literal, so that when we
encounter “part the black shag the pelt/ is ashen woad” and “crapulent hush,” they are more than
contradictions. They dramatize the violence that permeates everything, down to the dog’s skin
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and into even quiet spaces. Against the notion of birth as resonate and harmonious with a
balanced, natural world, the dog crashes through the birds and ferns to find a place to deliver her
pups, to “tear its heart out.” Though the dog searches for a safety—both a safe place to deliver
and an escape from the violence of her own body—there are no safe spaces. In the panic of her
flight the dog drives out the vulnerable (birds) and the outcast (harlots), with which she herself
can identify; her search for safety cancels itself out and she is left with nowhere to turn. Harvey
notes that the birth takes place in the evening as the light moves west—from which the Kerry
Blue Terrier orginates—so that the dog’s escape is into the death (94). Beckett’s reversal of the
correspondences between light/life and darkness/death resonates with Austin Clarke’s reversals
in “The Young Woman of Beare” from Pilgrimage and the entire collection Night and Morning.
The world turns on itself and we are left with no refuge.
Even in the violence of the dog’s search she is the ignorant victim of nature; all she
knows is that she “thinks she is dying,” and in her failure to understand what is happening to her
she is also “ashamed” (26), and it is this shame that compels her to victimize the next generation.
In a reference to the very first mother, suggesting that the legacy of shame and abandonment
runs to the very beginning of human life, the dog, “like a woman making to cover her breasts/. . .
left me” (33-34). But it is an Irish shame as well, to which the references to Croagh Patrick (18),
the “islands of glory” (19), the various Irish place-names in the poem, and the “hag” 19 in which
she “drops her young” in line 23. And of course the dog herself hails from Kerry in the west of
Ireland. Beckett artfully fuses panic and shame here, both as inherent conditions of living, and
19
Literally here “hag” refers t o t he hallucinatory state between s leep and wakefulness, which would be
consistent with references to epilepsy in the poem, though the hag of Irish folklore comes to mind as well.
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simultaneously, of dying. His use of a dog here instead of a human woman giving birth
emphasizes the primal, instinctual, bodily nature of birth.
In this sense Beckett’s notions of time directly relate to his separation of the subject from
its beingness, or its humanity, so that his writing settles on neither religious nor secular notions
of raison d’être. This is not to say that his writing lacks an ethic. Far from it: Beckett’s
experimentations with language directly engage cultural constructs that, at least in part through
language, dehumanize us already. Writing about Beckett’s rejection of the figural in his
collection of short prose pieces, Fizzles, Shira Wolosky remarks,
if the human element is missing, it is the language we use that is responsible for
the abdication—a language for which we must, in turn, take responsibility. In
Beckett, our human worlds are exposed as fundamentally linguistic. It is through
our uses of language that we define the world we inhabit. Beckett’s work offers,
that is, an anatomy of discourse as the condition in which we live our lives and,
above all, realize our values. (Wolosky 54-55)
Jacobsen and Mueller read Beckett’s work as a poetry of empathy (Jacobsen and Mueller
35) without moral law (11). In the poetry empathy is often cloaked—or rather, exposed—in the
profane. In “Malacoda,” from Echo’s Bones, the space between the undertaker’s man’s
dispassionate task (measuring the body of the speaker’s father for a coffin) and the sacredness of
mourning erupts with the undertaker’s fart. The poem allows for several attempts at evasion or
avoidance: first the undertaker’s man “impassible behind his scutal bowler,” as he evades death
behind the office of the undertaker symbolized by his hat; then the son’s attempt to hide the
man’s indiscretion from his mother, whose mourning he is trying to protect:
find the weeds engage their attention
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hear she must see she need not
...
to cover
to be sure cover cover all over
your targe allows me to hold your sulphur (13-14; 19-21)
and the poem’s wide circle around the death itself. The fart threatens these evasions with the
biological. The undertaker’s man is no mere functionary, but a body with processes—processes
he is incapable of suppressing even in his office—common to all human bodies. The mother’s
sacred space of mourning depends upon her husband being something other than a body, and
despite the son’s desperate need to protect her from this reality, “hear she must see she must.” It
is not just the fact of the father’s death that must be accepted, but that death, like the fart, is a
reminder of the simple biological fact that the basis of our humanity is flesh, not spirit. Thus
Beckett posits a radical humanism based not on political or religious authorization but in
biology, and particularly in bodies’ common experience of suffering. That suffering can be
physical or psychic; in “Malacoda” the breaking of the sacred space for both the speaker and his
mother is the cause of considerable pain. At first it seems that the speaker is only interested in
protecting himself from the reality of his father’s body, but at the end of the poem we find the
protest. “hear she must see she must/ all aboard all souls half-mast aye aye” and after a stanza
break, “nay.” Harvey describes this moment as the “tension between revolt and resignation” that
characterizes much of Beckett’s writing (Harvey 110). Beckett’s empathy (Harvey argues that
compassion in “Malacoda” is not just artistically useful but central) lies in this tension, at the
nexus between bodies and the recognition, or rejection, of ourselves as bodies. He does this
without a moral law that would require bodies to point beyond themselves to a divine or a polity.
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In order to appeal to moral law bodies must also have souls or house citizens. Bodies as bodies is
the most basic (and only) form of a community based on empathy—in all other forms of
community there is something that would disqualify someone. When bodies exist as bodies, not
even dead bodies 20 are exempt.
Beckett’s radical humanism has consequences for the subject as well, for if the subject is
primarily a body its raison d’être evaporates. This does not, however, arrest the subject’s
movement or empty it of desire, especially as the subject’s unmet desires create Dantean
suffering. Suffering is the central fact of the subject’s existence. “Q is torn . . . between two
forces: the lusting after nothingness and the voice, distant, unintelligible, pitiless, which prevents
his sinking into the void so desperately desired” (Jacobsen and Mueller 7). Q’s greatest desire is
to disappear, but he is dogged by a voice that insists he continue. The opening poem of Echo’s
Bones, “Enueg I,” which finds the speaker taking a walk, sets the whole collection in motion;
nearly half of the poems—“Sanies I,” “Serena I,” “Serena II,” “Serena III,” function as
perambulatory meditations of one kind or another. In these poems every step is either motivated
by or characterized by the subject’s psychiatric suffering in which the mind functions as part of
the body. In “Enueg I” the speaker begins his walk at the site of physical suffering, the
“Portobello Private Nursing Home” where he is “tired of my darling’s red sputum.” Once again
Beckett’s choice of “sputum” over another softer, less crude term brings the body and its
biological realities into immediate focus, and emphasizes the revulsion that drives the speaker
out of the hospital and into his walk. Beckett weds the physical and mental suffering in the
second stanza:
20
Poetry written about and by soldiers in WWI also engages the discourse of bodies as bodies in this way,
as in a number of cases dead bodies become both speakers and subjects.
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my skull sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind
bites like a dog against its chastisement. (12-15)
However, as Harvey details in his reading, there is no possible escape from suffering. The
landscape takes on the tenor of the speaker’s hopeless mood, turning a usually brilliant, fresh,
green Ireland into a repulsive deathscape.
the world opening up to the south
across a travesty of champaign to the mountains
and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green
manuring the night fungus
and the mind annulled
wrecked in wind. (24-29)
The speaker’s walk is circular, leading back to where he started and with no sense of escape or
release from suffering. As the vitality runs out of both speaker and landscape,
little by little, each encounter with the outer world adds to the evidence that flight is futile. There
is no escape from the universal plight of which the red sputum of his dying darling is only one
among innumerable symptoms . . . we begin to realize that his trip through space is a metaphor
that figures a segment of the declining trajectory of a human existence propelled through a brief
stretch of time toward the tomb (Harvey 136-7) .
Revulsion is a useless impulse to the speaker, who cannot use it as the impetus or excuse
for the abandonment of someone who suffers in an attempt to alleviate his own suffering. If the
recognition of the unglamorous aspects of human suffering can lead to essential community
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based on the commonality of bodies, it also produces a flight response in the speaker. But
Beckett gives the speaker no choice but to identify with the suffering of bodies, whether it be the
“child fidgeting at the gate” (38) who “‘got put out,’” (44) the “lamentable family of grey
verminous hens,/ perishing out in the sunk field, trembling, half asleep, against the closed door
of a shed,/ with no means of roosting” (51-54) or “a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road,/
remotely pucking the gate of his field” (63-4). The speaker’s flight is voluntary, while the hens’
and the goat’s are not; but there is no difference for Beckett. To live outside, by choice or by
expulsion, is to suffer; but in this land of exile a more essential form of relation is possible, one
that is devoid of complex social rules (as in the football game) and confinement (as in the
animals’ enclosures).
Beckett’s empathy therefore differs from Devlin’s and MacGreevy’s, which are based on
a sympathy for ritual, because it appeals directly to the person whose body participates in the
ritual. Beckett’s speakers do not kneel, even in sympathy, with the faithful as MacGreevy’s “The
Six Who Were Hanged,” and do not turn the recognition of the (however empty) need for
religious observance into a longing for a past poetic, as in Devlin’s “Lough Derg.” Beckett’s
poetry is profane rather than nostalgic. Unlike Yeats, who wishes that he “were young again/
And held her in my arms” (Yeats 151, lines 11-12), Beckett’s engagement with aging and
decrepitude is not backward-looking; it acknowledges the reality of decay without the cushion of
nostalgia. In “Echo’s Bones” Beckett widens the scope of decline to include mind as body,
regarding all things as modalities of the biological. In it “sense and nonsense run/ taken by the
maggots for what they are.” Beckett profanes the sacristy of the intellectual in the first line of the
poem with his reference to the “asylum” which is “under my tread all this day;” that is,
inescapable, always present. Through the collection the asylum refers to a hospital for the
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physically ill but the additional cultural meaning of asylum as mental hospital is powerful here.
The mental hospital is one of the few places in which the mind is acknowledged as a function of
the body, where it is as subject to disease and decline as the rest of the body. Again, though, the
poem does not express longing and despair but rather a sense of relief that all is passing. The
lines “their muffled revels as the flesh falls/ breaking without fear or favour wind” recall the
earlier “Malacoda,” which in our reading above posits breaking wind as an assertion of the
biological as a disruption to meaning-making in the face of death. In “Echo’s Bones” the body
and mind are free from both social conventions (favour) and the fear which is an inevitable
byproduct of the longing inherent in mourning. Melancholia here instead acknowledges the total
dominion, and total release, of death. Biology dictates the hegemony of decline, decay, and
death.
Whoroscope, Beckett’s deadly funny poem about Descartes, nicely illustrates his
preoccupation with decay, not necessarily just as the accepted wear of time on a person permitted
by circumstance to grow old but also as the premature ending of a young life. The poem’s
speaking subject, a farcical Descartes, is arrogantly frustrated by the serving of an egg just
beyond its perfect ripeness. The poem begins, “What’s that?/ An egg?/ By the brothers Boot it
stinks fresh. Give it to Gillot.” Beckett’s notes indicate that Descartes “liked his omelet made of
eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is
disgusting.” The egg is not even recognizable as such to Descartes at this stage. Its window of
worth as an object of desire for Descartes has passed before it has the chance to become anything
but potential life; the time of its ripeness is not synchronized with the time of Descartes’ hunger.
“Two lashed ovaries with prosticiutto?/ How long did she womb it, the feathery one?/ Three days
and four nights?” Not only is the egg not to fulfill its potential destiny as the satiation of
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Descartes’ hunger or as a chicken who might continue the cycle of life, but the circumstances of
its conception—prosciutto becomes prosticiutto—are suspect. It is not worthy of his
consideration. “Give it to Gillot.” (Beckett’s notes: “Descartes passed on the easier problems in
analytic geometry to his valet Gillot.”) The speaker’s contempt masks darker circumstances,
however; the speaker does indeed yearn and mourn for the loss of potential life in the form of his
deceased daughter, 21 as indicated by significant tone change further on.
And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus!
What an exfoliation!
Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!
My one child
scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood. ()
This egg has a name; the prostitute is housed in a parlour; what was “lashed” is now “flayed.”
The speaker’s attitude is violently ambivalent, at once demonstrating a longing for the thing lost
through mourning and a thorough rejection of it. Beckett finds nothing to admire in these
extremes. Descartes is a ridiculous figure.
In Harvey’s detailed explication of Descartes references, however, we see Beckett’s
assertions of the biological as all-encompassing. Descartes disputed the scholastic claim that the
sacrament continues to exist without the substance to which it was attached; the sacrament to
Descartes, as a “surface,” is only an extension of substance, not independent of it. Everything is
21
Lawrence H arvey co nfirms the b iographical nature o f t his r eference o n p ages 2 0-21. However, S hira
Wolosky cautions that while the reader should not dismiss Beckett’s allusions, uncovering them nevertheless does
not ‘ unlock’ his poe ms, a s they often r esist id entification, s ystematization, a nd d irect correspondence with t heir
supposed referents. Fittingly she writes that they “never permit proper footnotes” (Wolosky 66).
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substance to Descartes, including our sense impressions (Harvey 26). Beckett calls the sacrament
to mind in “watery Beaune,” or water and wine, and “stale cubes of Hovis,” or bread (Harvey
27).
“Enueg II” plays an interesting role in Echo’s Bones in that it specifically references the
Irish struggle for independence (specifically, mentions of “congress” [20], O’Connell bridge
[22], and “the overtone” [27], which with the others suggests Wolfe Tone, one of 1798’s
martyrs) whereas the rest of the poems, while always localized, do not engage the subject of Irish
politics. Beckett’s aim is not to make a bold political statement here, but to interrogate the role of
the individual subject in history, particularly in the futility of his efforts and the ensuing
weariness. The poem’s use of “the face,” which is both “too late to darken the sky” (6) and “too
late to brighten the sky” (28) three times over its 29 lines emphasizes the humanity of the
individual acting in the midst of heavily anthologized history and makes him anonymous by
refusing to name him directly. Beckett does give him a voice, and the speaker of the other poems
here becomes one with the historical figures he mentions.
sweating like Judas
tired of dying
tired of policemen
feet in marmalade
perspiring profusely
heart in marmalade
smoke more fruit
the old heart the old heart
breaking outside congress (12-20)
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The hero here, to whom we are introduced to in the previous stanza as the suffering Christ
attended to by Veronica, is anything but heroic; he is tired and heartbroken, not convinced of the
effectiveness of his efforts, and in the reference to Judas, not entirely sure whose cause he is
advancing. The hero is both Christ and Judas, but whose side he is on is not important, because
“the face” is too late to either darken or brighten the sky. The poem’s work is not so much to
repeat the tired trope of the individual’s futility in the face of historical forces as, through its
focus on the weariness of the body and the doubt on the part of the hero-identified speaker, to
place the human into a troubled relationship with sanctioned history. Beckett’s use of “the face”
denies the official record of a holy, martyred body to bury, mourn, and own, and his questioning
of the hero’s motives and surety undermines the mythos of the martyr. Beckett here both
universalizes and individualizes the martyr; he is “tired of dying,” as if the same figure dies over
and over, but the descriptions of suffering also read as intimate confessions of disillusionment.
The Christ/Judas/Wolfe Tone figure would rather be left alone than continue to serve history as a
symbol of either good or evil. Beckett profanes the Christ figure in the fourth stanza, where the
speaker demands that Veronica (which in the poem is not capitalized) “give us a wipe for the
love of Jesus” (11), which taken with the entire collection in mind points to not just to
perspiration but to defecation. In the second half of the fifth stanza—the first half of which is the
expression of the hero’s weariness—Beckett profanes the cause of the specifically Irish
nationalist hero in a move MacGreevy also makes in “The Six Who Were Hanged” by turning
the patriotic Irish green into “tulips” (24) that are “shining round the corner like an anthrax” (25).
Irishness, in its nationalist, separatist manifestation, is a poison. Beckett profanes both heroworship and the causes for which heroes are deployed in order to bring the focus to the physical,
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bodily humanity of the individual in history without allowing his suffering to become of service
to ideology.
Beckett’s poetry could not properly be labeled “realist” in a photographic sense, but in
the sense that it invites—demands—that we not look away from elemental human experiences,
particularly those which remind us of the abyss on either side of existence. The poetry presents
the reader with an almost hyper-realist aesthetic, one that is in direct contradiction to the
prevailing social mores of mid-twentieth-century Ireland. To speak of childbirth, the sexual
encounters of youth, and the ravages of death in terms that refuse to bury them in symbology and
to collapse the process of moving through life into one long, painful process of fluid
consumption and expression is to demand that humans are made of nothing but bodies and to
reject that idea that our commonality is based on anything else.
Throughout Echo’s Bones Beckett’s most bald engagements with the profane are in his
treatment of sexuality. There are no married lovers here, as there are in Clarke, and unlike
Clarke’s, the poetry is not erotic. Unaccompanied by social sanctioning and ritual, sexuality is
another fluid-producing human process unavoidably wedded to the messy beginnings of life and
death. In addition to the frequent references to sex in poems dedicated to other themes, “Alba,”
“Dortmunder,” “Sanies II,” and “Serena III” focus on sexual encounters, the possibility of sex, or
the desire for it.
“Dortmunder” relates most closely of all the poems to Beckett’s writing on Proust. In it
an encounter with a prostitute (“she stands before me in the bright stall” [5] and she is a “bawd”
[13]) of Asian descent (“thin K’in music,” [4] “jade splinters,” [6] “the eyes the eyes black to the
plagal east” [8]) produces not fulfillment but the death of desire itself.
Then, as a scroll, folded,
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and the glory of her dissolution enlarged
in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.
Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd
puts her lute away. (10-14)
Beckett reverses the heterosexual act by making her enlarge inside the male speaker, instead of
the other way around, but dissolves her in the same act, thus replicating the Proustian
disappearance of the love-object at the moment of possession. Although the poem taken as a
whole engages in crass essentialism of eastern women as objects available for use by western
men, this moment does elide the speaker’s attempt at possession and begins to dismantle her
status as an object. In Proust, Beckett defines the resistance of the object to possession:
We are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility is not merely a function
of the subject’s, but independent and personal: two separate and immanent
dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation. So that whatever the object,
our thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable. (6-7; emphasis added); all
that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might
be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability. (41)
The prostitute in “Dortmunder” does not exist in “time and space,” at least as is allowed by the
poem’s representation, until the end at which point it is clear that her will—asserted by the
putting away of the lute—defines her as an impermeable individual. The subject’s will, by which
it is defined as a subject, shrivels away as he becomes a “mard,” or turd. Beckett’s Proust does
not explore the specifically feminist implications of his argument, but in this poem we can see
how it is borne out an otherwise typically patriarchal encounter between a man and a prostitute.
Her identity as an Asian prostitute emphasizes her subaltern status but also keeps Beckett’s
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conceptions of the body at the forefront. Taken together, the prostitute’s dual representational
functions assert the physical body as the site of irreducibility and impermeability. And this, in
the end, is what makes us human: the point at which we are not available for use as objects is the
point of our ethical commonality.
“Sanies II” engages Beckett’s preoccupation with shame in its relation to sexuality and
the body, and this time it is the speaker (male) who becomes the victim of violence. It is the most
graphic of the sexual poems. Again the speaker is in a house of ill repute, but this time the
encounter is broadly social and not confined to that between client and prostitute. It is a raucous
scene, and the gleeful speaker in the beginning revels in filth.
there was a happy land
the American Bar
in Rue Mouffetard
there were red eggs there
I have a dirty I say henorrhoids
coming from the bath
the steam the delight of the sherbet
the chagrin of the old skinnymalinks
slouching happy body
loose in my stinking old suit
sailing slouching up to Puvis the gauntlet of tulips
lash lash me with yaller tulips I will let down
my stinking old trousers
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This opening consists of onomatopoeic lovemaking, where the ‘s’ sound in “slouching” (twice
repeated, and surely cognizant of Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming”) inflects the
pleasures of “steam” and “sherbet” with drowsiness and bolsters the laziness of “loose,” which
also comes as the first word in line ten, which provides a contrast with the erections of “Serena
III.” The speaker’s mispronunciation of “hennoroids” and “yaller” for ‘yellow’ suggests
drunkenness. The poem does not recover the sexual encounter for a higher spiritual purpose or to
emphasize the virility of the speaker—the opposite, in fact—but rather shamelessly flaunts the
profane in the same breath as references to well-regarded high romantic painter Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes and again to Dante. The result is a wanton rejection of the respectability of highly
aestheticized and romanticized sexuality and also the denigration of art, in a respectable
bourgeois sense of the term, itself. Harvey reads this ludicrous merger of life and literature, in
which the most unappetizing things are made into poetry, along with the poem’s title.
“Alba” is the least graphic of the sexual poems but the most profane. The poem functions
in two directions, one that reads the sheet as that on a lover’s bed and one that reads it as Christ’s
burial shroud. The poem resists partial quotation, so I will reproduce it in its entirety here:
before morning you shall be here
and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries
and the branded moon
beyond the white plane of music
that you shall establish here before morning
grave suave singing silk
stoop to the black firmament of areca
rain on the bamboos flower of smoke alley of willows
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who though you stoop with fingers of compassion
to endorse the dust
shall not add to your bounty
whose beauty shall be a sheet before me
a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems
so that there is no sun and no unveiling
and no host
only I and then the sheet
and bulk dead.
Beckett foregrounds his preoccupation with Dante and introduces his theological interests in the
second line. The language is not, as in the collection’s other poems, directly descriptive of the
body; in fact only the body’s wrapping is here, and the fingers in the second half are instruments
of grace rather than titillation. Instead the language creates an obscuring aestheticism, where the
moon is “branded,” or named, and the sky is a “black firmament of areca.” Everything in the
natural world is qualified, described, metaphorized. But what does all this artistry amount to?
The second half of the poem suggests that for all its beauty, the ability to wrap the world in
description ultimately does nothing. Here Beckett is most like MacGreevy, for aestheticization
obscures rather than enables. This “tempest of emblems” reveals nothing, performs no
redemption (“no host”) and does not change the fact that the speaker is left alone with a sheet.
Harvey, Ackerley and Gontarski divide “Alba” into three sections: the first, the anticipation of
the lover’s arrival (which Harvey identifies as akin to Beatrice [100]), second, the celebration of
her presence, and third, disappointment and loneliness after the lover has withheld her affections.
While these readings accurately identify the movement of the poem as it echoes the troubadour
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dawn song (Harvey 82), they downplay the extent to which it merges the figures of the lover and
of Christ to the point where the lover practically disappears by the end of the poem, where
references to dust-writing and the shroud overtake the romantic images of the poem’s first half.
But it is not the identification of Christ with the lover that performs the profane in the
poem. It is rather the abdication of the idea that abandonment—either through the death of
Christ, or the spurning of the lover—can produce something akin to redemption. The idea of
abandonment connects the poem closely to “Serena II” and “Sanies I.” In this poem, however,
the abandoner is not responsible for not returning. Resurrection will not be possible despite the
intentions of the Christ/lover. What language obscures in the first half of the poem remains
hidden (“no unveiling”) so that all that remains is the sheet itself, which is nothing but “a
statement of itself.” Though Christ “stoop[s] with fingers of compassion/ to endorse the dust,” or
to make meaningful the crude material of life on earth, nothing will be brought to life (“no
host”). Beckett’s reference to Jesus writing in the dust in the Gospel of John anticipates the
painful exploration of shame in “Serena II.” Though John does not reveal what is written in the
dust, the implication is that language (and in some interpretations, knowledge of others’ sins) in
some way diffuses the anger of the crowd and relieves the adulteress of her shame. In “Alba,”
however, the act of compassion has no redemptory effect. Language—in this case, written
language, or the literary—cannot give new life after condemnation. At this point, the merging of
Christ and lover become confused, and the lover practically disappears. The only trace of her is
in the poem’s tenuous hold on the troubadour dawn song form in the speaker’s dissatisfaction at
the end of the poem and the continued double connotation of the sheet as bed-sheet and Christshroud. In this way Beckett’s poem departs radically from the Christ-as-lover motif in
Kavanagh’s poetry, which desires to do away with the Church as it is but to keep the physical
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Christ as the basis for spiritual life and unity. In Beckett there is no new life, no redemption, and
no resurrection in the physical Christ represented as lover. His is an entirely secular humanism.
The last few lines of “Alba,” in which the sheet turns out to be merely itself and not the
site for the uncovering of miraculous meaning, reassert the collection’s title and short title poem,
“Echo’s Bones,” which I will quote in its entirety:
asylum under my tread all this day
their muffled revels as the flesh falls
breaking without fear or favour wind
the gantelope of sense and nonsense
taken by the maggots for what they are
Here, finally, is a succinct articulation of Beckett’s project in this collection, which is to merge
the notion of the limits of representation with the human body, stripped. It is a geography of the
body, where human bodies are real, physical places which are nothing but themselves: ageing,
decaying bodies, which are “taken by the maggots for what they are.” Beckett’s poems are
bodies, too, in various states of dress. “Echo’s Bones” is the nakedest of them all.
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“GOD’S TRUTH IS LIFE:” PATRICK KAVANAGH
At first blush it seems that all writing in Ireland after Yeats, especially poetry, is an
attempt to wrestle with—and often discard—him. While this notion of struggle is integral to the
problem of influence, it has a particular hold on the poetry of and criticism about mid-twentiethcentury Ireland. One could explain this phenomenon neatly by citing the towering genius of
W.B. Yeats, his success at revivifying ancient Irish myth and culture while simultaneously
ushering in a peculiarly Irish modernism, and an importance that dominated both literary and
political landscapes. Indeed Yeats was and did all these things, and writers did and do have to
contend with his presence.
However, one other cultural preoccupation not looms larger Yeats’ influence. Patrick
Kavanagh’s best known work, his long poem The Great Hunger, is the most direct expression of
the presence and persistence of the Great Famine not only as a discrete historical event but as an
idea that forms a particular vocabulary for, or allegorizes, the cultural situation of 1930s Ireland
between cultural and literary revivals. Allegory operates on two levels in The Great Hunger.
Kavanagh offers a correspondence between the historical-material details of the poem and those
of the Ireland of his time, while the poem uses the same kind of detail toward the manifestation
of a spiritual ideal (related to historical circumstances but unbound by time) already present in
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Irish culture to amplify that ideal. In other words, the poem aims to be as transformative as it is
reflective.
Language of poverty and dispossession was not new to the history of Irish literature, but
the Famine provided additional weight to hunger as a salient feature of Irish life, particularly
when the promises of Revival appeared to wither. Because Yeats was a driving force in the
Revival, and perhaps because of the invidiousness of his personality throughout the many layers
of Irish culture, he became the target for attacks on the arguments and assumptions the Revival
as a whole disseminated. As an emblem of expansiveness and plenty, Yeats’ life and work was
the obvious place to draw a dark line between the ideals of the Revival and what writers like
Kavanagh saw as its hollow underbelly.
The Famine was a presence in Irish history22 well before the Revival got underway, and
in many ways the memory of hunger may have contributed to the Revival’s fuel. But Kavanagh
regards the appeal to myth and tradition in response to hunger as Oedipal and therefore incapable
of producing (and reproducing) the kind of cultural unity and pride based on continuity
Revivalists strove to achieve. To Kavanagh, the Revival’s solution—to reach back into Irish
Celtic myth and make it new for the establishment of a coherent Irish identity—is akin to
Beckett’s endless and downward-spiraling circles, a serpent eating its own tail. Edward Larissey
22
For c omplete d iscussions o f the F amine’s p lace in I rish h istory, lite rature, an d c ulture, see C hristopher
Morash’s Writing the Irish Famine and (as editor) The Hungry Voice: the Poetry of the Irish Famine; C hristine
Kinealy’s The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion; and The Irish Famine: A Documentary by Colin
Tóbín and Diarmaid Ferriter. These critics and historians speak at length about the tendency for forgetting, evasion,
scapegoating, and conventionalizing the Famine on the parts of public officials and writers but attest to the ongoing
desire for information and commemoration on the part of the general public.
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reads Maguire’s mother in The Great Hunger as the “real” Mother Ireland, “sick and a spreader
of sickness” (Larissey 103) and weds this with Kavanagh’s sense of nature’s cycles not as
opportunities for renewal but sterile traps (Larissey 104). Kavanagh’s hints at a sexual
relationship between the bachelor farmer and his domineering mother
Maguire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside
And he was sixty-five (II 1-8)
and frequent references to masturbation (“So Macguire got tired/ Of the no-target gun fired” [II
27-8]; “Pat opened his trousers wide over the ashes/ And dreamt himself to lewd sleepiness” [V
33-4]) and bestiality (“He saw his cattle/ And stroked their flanks in lieu of a wife to handle” [IV
41-2]) support Larrisey’s reading through their emphasis on the sterility of closed circles. The
poem itself moves in relation to the seasons, but in the end nothing has changed for Maguire, his
fields, or the people in his village. The fourth section finds Macguire running circles around his
field after having contemplated sublimation of religious belief to the reign of Time. “He bowed
his head/ And saw a wet weed twined about his toe” (54-5). In the fifth section, would-be
opportunities turn out to be either worthless or not new in the first place. As in Beckett’s poetry,
time passes but does not progress, except toward the death of the individual who does not matter.
“There is no to-morrow;/ No future but only time stretched for the mowing of hay/ Or putting an
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axle in the turf-barrow” (25-7). The absence of a particular mower or axle-putter buries
Maguire’s particularity utterly.
Antoinette Quinn reminds us that the Famine was not referred to as “The Great Hunger”
until the 1960’s, a name that is drawn directly from Kavanagh’s poem, not the other way around
(Quinn 179). Nevertheless references to famine abound in the poem, which is full of torn
clothing, rusty ploughs, and unyielding earth. 23 In the first section the potato and Maguire’s
genitals become metaphors for one another.
Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair. (39-42)
The potato, like Macguire’s prick (“The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows” [I
34]), was supposed to nourish and sustain life but did not. Because of the literal disaster (the
potato blight), food production takes precedence over human reproduction; his mother’s
insistence and his own compulsion to “ma[k]e the field his bride” (I 57) places food security over
generational replication. In other words, mere survival is the enemy of life.
[Macguire] returned to his headlands of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage. (II 29-32)
Indeed, in the fourth section the villagers gather at Mass as “five hundred hearts . . . hungry for
life” (22).
23
Mention of torn clothing is frequent in Famine literature.
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In The Great Hunger, however, rhetorical and poetic performance are often at odds, and
the poem itself does not provide a neat piece of evidence for Kavanagh’s anti-Revivalist
arguments in prose, however much brief treatments of The Great Hunger assume it. It is easy to
skim the poem and slow down only where Kavanagh seems to ask us to in plain, prose-like
moments in which the speaker addresses the reader directly. The first moment comes quickly
when Kavanagh introduces the poem as one would a play, inviting the reader to “watch”
Macguire and the villagers along with him. Here Kavanagh doubts the romantic notion of
peasantry and rurality as wellsprings of poetic energy and meaning.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death?
. . . Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering? (I 4-6; 8-9)
It is Kavanagh’s challenge to poetry: what can imagination do with peasantry that might
resemble the truth of that life and not merely provide tourists with temporary spiritual renewal?
In section XIII Kavanagh is explicit about exploitation of peasantry, where
The world looks on
And talks of the peasant:
The peasant has no worries;
In his little lyrical fields
He plows and sows
...
There is the source from which all cultures rise,
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And all religions,
There is the pool in which the poet dips
And the musician.
...
The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophesy,
The peasant is all virtues (1-5; 18-21; 26-7)
This section along with Kavanagh’s unrelenting details about the hopelessness of the lives of
Maguire and his similarly starved neighbors is likely what Augustine Martin has in mind when
he argues that The Great Hunger is an expression of anger against “the literary tradition that
trivialized [the peasantry’s] pain and humiliation,” particularly “the carefree rural bachelor so
prevalent in the kitchen comedies of [Yeats’] Abbey Theatre” (Martin 25). These figures are
more complex than Martin allows, but Kavanagh’s tendency throughout his career is, rhetorically
anyway, to paint things with rather large brush-strokes.
Against these kinds of arguments and claims for Kavanagh’s antipastoralism as distinct
from Revivalism, Oona Frawley calls Kavanagh’s bluff. She argues that Kavanagh’s writing,
The Great Hunger included, in its emphasis on rural life, landscape, and the natural world,
however complicated with realism, is firmly within the pastoral tradition, and is so “largely
because the Revival had existed to show him how, and because an Irish tradition of pastoral
writing was long in place” (Frawley 83). 24 Although the Revival is responsible for amplifying an
24
While Frawley finds Kavanagh’s inspiration primarily in an already-present Irish poetic, Eamon Grennan
(“American R elations”) cr edits American p oetry, p articularly t hat o f Allen T ate, R obert P enn W arren, W illiam
Carlos W illiams, G ertrude S tein, a nd th e B eat p oets w ith th e e xtent to which K avanagh d eparts f rom h is I rish
predecessors.
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existing pastoral tradition in Ireland, it did not invent it; Fourteenth-century Irish poetry, for
example, marks the move away from an urban-centered nostalgic pastoral that continues to
dominate in the English pastoral. Irish literature of the Middle Ages does not idealize rurality or
nature (Frawley 76), and The Great Hunger, in its engagement with realism and the attempt to
wrest the peasant from its symbolic framework, stands firmly in that tradition (Frawley 87). She
argues further, following Edward Said, that what part of Revivalism did depend on nostalgia and
idealization of rurality was a necessary step of decolonization with a limited shelf life; Yeats
himself, after all, came to regret “The Lake at Inisfree”” (Frawley 78-9).
Frawley’s reading of The Great Hunger gets right Kavanagh’s simultaneously elegant
and biting reinvention of the peasant according to a barer poetic, but misses the extent to which
Kavanagh’s poem still, despite its own rhetorical insistence, 25 engages in the idealization of
nature (of the nostalgic version of pastoralism) and the typification of the peasant. Gregory
Schirmer reads Kavanagh’s engagement with nature as a specific kind of romanticism, one that
separates nature from nation (Schirmer 306) and regards the land in psychological and sexual,
rather than political and economic, terms (301). But although the peasant is no longer the hope of
the nation here, he is a symbol. The Great Hunger is not anti-pastoral; it is rather something
more like a “dystopian” pastoral (or, for Schirmer, “true” romanticism, distinct from
25
The d ifference b etween “rhetorical i nsistence” an d “poetics” here marks K avanagh’s t endency t o t urn
parts (or wholes, in other of his poetry) of poems into miniature podiums for his political and social views. In these
moments (as in the above passage about depictions of the poet) the preaching, as it were, serves no other discernible
purpose poetically, and the speaker’s and poet’s voices are indistinguishable. Such moments would appear to arise
in D evlin’s poe try a s well, but t he pr esence of s trong o pposing v oices pr ovides t he context for t he r eader t o
determine that speaker and poet are distinct.
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romanticization [Schirmer 308]). Like Devlin, MacGreevy, and Beckett, Kavanagh’s poetry,
especially here, is infused with a sense of futility and failure. He recreates the peasant into a
symbol for hopelessness and despair, at most two-dimensional. Although he has inner and outer
lives—the outer attended to solely by those representations the poem opposes (“A man is what’s
written on the label” [IX 15] )—Maguire is the everypeasant here, so the inner lives of all, such
as they have it, are the same.
First, though, The Great Hunger’s use of natural images and even its call for a better
poetic confirms Frawley’s observation that Kavanagh’s poetry is still very much in the pastoral
tradition, but in my reading Kavanagh’s portrayal of the natural world is basically nostalgic; in
the poem’s capacity as manifesto for an insight-driven poetic, nature still serves as the site of
pure inspiration. Kavanagh’s version of the pastoral is neither purely utopian nor dystopian, but
is able to simultaneously present nature, in its unfettered moments, as a wellspring of life and
energy and rural life as potentially deadening. In section IX the speaker contrasts the beauty of
rural life to its drudgery and despair and to the dry religiosity that is the enemy to life elsewhere
in the poem.
Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight,
A narrow slice of divine instruction.
Going along the river at the bend of Sunday
The trout played in the pools of encouragement.
To jump in love though death bait the hook . . .
The yellow buttercups and the bluebells among the whinbushes
On rocks in the middle of ploughing
Was a bright spoke in the wheel
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Of the peasant’s mill. (28-32; 38-41)
In the first section the natural world disallows Maguire to continue in his denial of the dire
mistake he has made at the insistence of his mother.
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar.
God’s truth is life—even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire. (75-9)
In this case “life” consists of the simple, true, natural world, Kavanagh’s nod to the romantic
notion of the sublime in the acceptance of even its “grotesque shapes.” Nature is the heart of
wisdom in The Great Hunger, and Maguire’s inability to listen to it causes the majority of his
suffering. 26 “Nature” also consists of the movements of desire in Maguire’s own body.
Antoinette Quinn observes that in this poem Kavanagh realigns sensuality and sexuality with the
“true” Christianity (emphasizing the carnality of Christ) and sets it against the asceticism of the
Irish Church, which sucks all life from the hearts of the people. To her the poem is a warning of
the return of famine in part as a result of population decline (Quinn 178).
In addition, Kavanagh does not recover the peasant from a state of idealized onedimensionality into a fully-realized human being—or into beings, as it were. Arguably Kavanagh
turns him into something worse. The peasant of The Great Hunger is (still) simple, passive,
26
Of course “Nature” is also implicated in the suffering caused by the actual Famine of the mid-nineteenth
century. In public discourse about the Famine in both Ireland and England the issue of whether it was a natural or
man-made disaster is particularly contentious. For detailed discussions of this debate see Christine Kinealy’s study,
The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion and Christopher Morash’s Writing the Irish Famine.
133
defined by his work, and nearer to animal than human (in section XI, “Illiterate, unknown, and
unknowing” [69]), or in other words, no better than the primitivist image of the peasant he
vocally opposed. Maguire does not have, as O’Brien argues, “a rich inner life;” Maguire has,
despite O’Brien’s insistence, become an emblem. The first section of the poem establishes the
villagers’ lack of will and helplessness against their repressive domestications. “Till the last soul
passively like a bag of wet clay/ Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles/ Where
the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way” (14-16). These are not souls endowed
with particularity and will but things merely part of the earth and no more consequential than it.
Every character in the poem is compared to a domesticated animal: the field workers have
“heavy heads nodding out words as wise/ As the ruminations cows after milking” (V 2-3);
Maguire’s sister is compared to a sow (V 33); in XII Maguire “looked like a bucking suck-calf/
Whose spine was being tickled” (15-16); the peasant of XII “in his little acres is tied . . . Like a
goat tethered to the stump of a tree” (47; 49); In section XI the girls after which Maguire lusts
are “heifer[s] waiting to be nosed by the old bull” (36). Always the peasant is a domesticated
animal, the workhorse of a culture, kept in ignorance and trapped by duty. The fact that
Kavanagh carefully avoids comparing peasants to wild animals brings to light his demarcation
between wild and domesticated nature. Wilderness is life, freedom and inspiration, whereas
beasts and soil under captivity represent repression.
Kavanagh’s peasant is also outside of history, and in this way the poem moves beyond
the simple material correspondence of allegory into the amplification of an ideal unbound by
history. Sections IV and V demonstrate the irrelevance of time to Maguire and his ilk.
April, and no one able to calculate
How far is the harvest. They put down
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The seeds blindly . . .
Tomorrow is Wednesday—who cares? (IV 1-3; 5)
and the previously-quoted “There is no to-morrow;/ No future but only time stretched for the
mowing of the hay/ Or putting an axle in the turf-barrow.” Christ’s coming is perpetually
suspended in this endless purgatory:
Somebody is coming over the metal railway bridge
And his hob-nailed boots on the arches sound like a gong
Calling men awake.
But the bridge is too narrow—
The men lift their heads a moment. That was only John,
So they dream on. (V 9-13)
The peasant relates to time only in that it passes in spite of him and acts upon him in his aging
and decay. This is dystopian pastoralism: the peasant is not the wellspring of poetry but he is also
still not the master of his own destiny. He is a perpetual victim unable to alter his fate.
He gave himself another year,
Something was bound to happen before then—
The circle would break down
And he would curve the new one to his own will . . .
The poor peasant talking to himself in a stable door—
An ignorant peasant deep in dung. (IX 1-4; 9-10)
There is also the matter of the extent to which Kavanagh uses the hopeless, helpless peasant to
create a particular aesthetic. If he is not “the pool in which the poet dips,” why does the peasant
as a type figure in Kavanagh’s poetry at all? If it were his aim to undo the pastoral completely
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Maguire would be peculiar and Kavanagh would not have taken such great pains to make him
representative in a way that exacerbates rather than rails against primitivism (contrary to Quinn
180). Kavanagh’s peasant is no better at undoing the stage Irishman than is Yeats’ (or
Kavanagh’s rhetorical idea of Yeats’), and he is no less guilty of using a stylized type to further
his poetic goals. In fact, the speaker asks us to look to this miserable peasant for a kind of
inspiration toward a Sermon-on-the-Mount simplicity.
And in the end who shall rest in truth’s high peace?
Or whose is the world now, even now?
O let us kneel where the blind ploughman kneels
And learn to live without despairing
In a mud-walled space. (XI 65-9)
Maguire has made a grave (in more ways than one) mistake in failing to marry and submitting to
the demands of his Field-Mother-Wife, but the poem offers an alternative that does in fact
idealize the peasant; Kavanagh’s achievement is in highlighting the peasant’s suffering, but he
still clings to an ideal that requires the man who knows the soil to fulfill. In Maguire’s middle
age we get a glimpse of this happy peasant.
One day he saw a daisy and he thought it
Reminded him of his childhood . . .
He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man
His share of what the miserly soil and soul
Gives in a season to a ploughman. (XI 73-4; 82-4)
Here he also gives in to the compulsions of his body: “And he cried for his own loss one late
night on the pillow” (XI 85). Pure images of nature, untamed and incidental, spur these moments
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for Maguire. And despite the speaker’s repeated expressions of the hopelessness of Maguire’s
situation, he muses that
Maybe [Maguire] will be born again, a bird of an angel’s conceit
To sing the gospel of life
To a music as flightily tangent
As a tune on an oboe
And the serious look of the fields will have changed to the leer of a hobo
Swaggering celestially home to his three wishes granted. (XIV 54-9)
Maguire could only be reborn as the freest and wildest of animals and of humans, the bird and
the vagabond. 27
Although The Great Hunger is Kavanagh’s best-known and best-crafted poem, the
fullness of his reimagined poetic comes in his other long poem, “Lough Derg.” Here, on the
ground most fertile for the shifting of cultural and poetic frameworks, the ancient pilgrimage of
Lough Derg, Kavanagh confirms and expands upon the themes and arguments of The Great
Hunger. At Lough Derg the struggles between domestication and freedom, institutionalized
Christianity and fertile spirituality, the poetic and spiritual practice of Paul versus that of the
27
What i s t he value, t hen, o f K avanagh’s c ontribution t o t he c onversation a bout t he p lace o f p easantry i n
Irish poetry, and what is the relative strength of his actual contribution to his assumed contribution? If Revivalism’s
rhetorical influence was as great or greater from that of its complex and ever-evolving positions, what hope might
we have that the complexities of Kavanagh’s oeuvre have survived into influence? On the one hand, Ireland’s bestregarded contemporary poet, Seamus Heaney, credits Kavanagh for making possible the break with Yeats that was
necessary for subsequent poets; on the other, H eaney’s o wn poetry works with the i mage of the p oet Kavanagh
creates. These questions deserve more detailed study; hopefully this analysis will act as a launching point.
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Christ of the Gospels play out in ways that allow Kavanagh to formulate his agenda for Irish
poetry. Lough Derg is, after all, where “All Ireland’s Patricks were present” (line 420). In the
end, this intentionality and sense of direction forward is what distinguishes Kavanagh from
Devlin and MacGreevy, whose preoccupation with failure and longing for pure expression do not
make it all the way to a new style; and from Beckett, whose style was more of a departure from
the traditions of Irish poetry than the others, but whose particular stated agenda for Irish poetry
was less legible to the development of Irish poetry after it, possibly in part because Kavanagh
stayed in Ireland while Beckett wrote in Paris. 28 This is not necessarily to diminish the actual
influence of the others on Irish poetry, but to highlight Kavanagh’s force as part of the rhetoric
that came to shape later poetry, in addition to its purely (if it could be so) poetic influence.
“Lough Derg” also clearly demonstrates the dangers of lumping Kavanagh’s work into the antiRevivalist camp without acknowledging the complicated ways it both affirms and departs from
the Revival aesthetic; it is revisionist, not revolutionary.
In The Great Hunger we saw peasants reduced to comparisons with domesticated animals
and how this identification diminishes their ability to stand as free, peculiar individuals who live
in time. Kavanagh continues his concern with domesticity in “Lough Derg,” expanding it to
pertain to the institutionalization of Christianity as it has come to be expressed in Irish culture.
He begins, as in The Great Hunger, by describing the pilgrims as being “like hens to roost” (44)
and echoes the sense of repression in agriculture when he compares the Leitrim man’s face to “a
flooded hay-field” (76). But domestication is not merely oppressive; as a process it is violent,
literally life-taking. In The Great Hunger Maguire unwittingly participates in land-rape:
28
Kavanagh was intentionally visible in the literary community, often notoriously, which would have put
his readers in more consistent touch with his rather forcefully stated opinions on literature and politics.
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The twisting sod rolls over on her back—
The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.
No worry on Maguire’s mind that day
Except that he forgot to bring his matches. (III 16-19)
On Lough Derg the domestications are just as perilous. When the speaker carefully peels the
beauty of physical love from the monstrous consequences of exercising that love in concert with
power in his discussion of the delicate matter of the priest’s sexual abuse of a young girl, his
language specifically invokes agricultural oppression.
Three times finds all
The notes of body’s madrigal
‘Twas a failing otherwise . . .
A convent girl knowing
Nothing of earth sowing. (156-8; 151-2)
The sin to Kavanagh is not in pleasure-taking but in conversion from the purity and freedom that
childhood represents (in the lingering 19th-century sense) to an adult domestication through sex.
Similarly, in the next stanza the red-haired man sees a girl who is “something from the
unconverted kingdom” (171) as opposed to the “Holy Biddy/ with a rat-trap on her diddy” (16970). The “Holy Biddy” is domesticated by convent; the girl is available for domestication
through sex. Thus far unprotected by civilization (“The masonry’s down” [180]), the red-haired
man “saw from the unpeopled country into a town” (183). Similarly, the old Leitrim man’s own
servility has its origins of sexual control.
I can tell you
What I am. Servant girls bred my servility:
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When I stoop
It is my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother
Each one being called in to spread—
‘Wider with your legs,’ the master of the house said . . .
[I] Show the cowardice of the man whose mothers were whored
By five generations of capitalist and lord. (424-30; 437-8)
Cathleen Ni Houlihan has nary a chance here. She will become either the property of the Church
or of a husband; and the language of settlement here makes the situation broadly Irish. When had
it a chance to become the bird of Maguire’s wishes? Men are victims, too; the pedant professorlike Robert is doomed to miss the freshness of spontaneity in favor of a dry, mathematically
predictable world view. “The delicate precise immediacy/ That sees a flower half a foot away/
He could not learn” (274-6).
Domestication is both internally and externally wrought, as the lovely virgin maiden is
settled and the old hag, here the nun or “Holy Biddy” is enclosed inside the walls of the Irish
Church. Kavanagh’s sense of unnatural stricture, though, extends beyond the Church and Ireland
in his insistent situating of the poem in time during WWII. “All happened on Lough Derg as it is
written/ In June nineteen forty-two/ When the Germans were fighting outside Rostov” (618-20).
Kavanagh rejects a patriotic passion for war, dismissing its meaning as anything but trivial.
When they lived in Time they knew
What men killed each other for—
Was it something different in the spelling
of a useless law? (547-50)
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People who do not live in time are people whose individuality, spontaneity, and passion have
been enlisted to become part of the masonry of collective organization, a role that asks them to
die for something that is already dead: the law.
Kavanagh’s alternative to domestication is its opposite, and his articulation of it requires
him to redefine Christian, and Irish Christian spirituality. To begin with, though, Kavanagh takes
a page out of the Revivalist playbook and allows Ireland’s pagan origins, like those St. Patrick
(in one version) saw fit to incorporate into a uniquely Irish. Through the poem animist depictions
of the sun and moon portray them as living beings, not just as heavenly bodies but as characters
with eyes whose Platonic rays literally and figuratively shed light on Lough Derg. In the
beginning of the poem love is associated with sunlight. “Love-sunlit is an enchanter in June’s
hours/ And flowers and light” (8-9). But not everyone sees wilderness as love; “These to
shopkeepers and small lawyers/ Are heresies up beauty’s sleeve” (9-10). The sun shows up again
during one of the most spiritually ecstatic moments of the pilgrimage. “‘I renounce the World,’ a
young woman cried/ Her breasts stood high in the pagan sun” (93-4). At the moment of hers and
the other pilgrims’ greatest vulnerability the “pagan sun” stands ready to illuminate their ecstasy,
but they are trapped in ritual. “They rejected one by one/ The music of Time’s choir” (96-7).
Later “the Evening Star/ Looked into Purgatory whimsically” (213-14). Nighttime is also
illuminated by the playful moon, who “sailed in . . . that he might make/ Queer faces in the
stained-glass windows” (250; 251-2) and asks, “why should the sun/ Have all the fun?” (252-3)
The biblical association of the evening star with Christ is significant, and in it lies the primary
conflict of the poem. As in The Great Hunger, “Lough Derg” privileges the untamed physical
world and locates the purest form of Christianity within it, contrasting it to the strangled
Christianity Lough Derg both represents and resists. Kavanagh’s early poetry demonstrates his
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sustained preoccupation with the closeness between the natural world and Christ as body. In
“March,” he writes,
The trees were in suspense,
Listening with an intense
Anxiety for the Word
That in the Beginning stirred
The dark-branched Tree
Of Humanity. (lines 1-6)
In “Lough Derg,” at the moment the penitents are renouncing the world the speaker chooses to
emphasize their physicality in the breasts of the girl and the obesity of the lawyer. That
Kavanagh is attempting to realign spirituality with sexuality (the breasts) and satiety (obesity) at
the very moment the penitents are to renounce them is clear. The pilgrims renounce the world
three times, just as Peter denies Christ. Kavanagh does not leave the association between Christ
and the physical world in doubt. Although the red-haired man “skimmed the sentiment of every
pool of experience” (line 136) (a decidedly un-poetic disengagement), “Christ sometimes bleeds
in the museum” (140). This reminds the reader of Kavanagh’s contempt for the preservation of
old ways at the expense of a dynamic life. He “came to Lough Derg to please the superstition . . .
Yet he alone went out with Jesus fishing” (142; 144). The use of “Jesus” instead of Christ
emphasizes the Christ of the gospels as opposed to the later Christ, interpreted by Paul to become
emblematic of a religion.
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Indeed it is the war 29 between Pauline Christianity and that of the gospels that contains
Kavanagh’s central argument and reveals his alternative to the famine of Irish culture and
spirituality. While it is true that in his essays and public statements of the nonfictional sort were
expressly contemptuous of Yeats and his Revivalist project, Kavanagh’s real target is Paul. For
him the Jesus of the gospels is the origin of true Christian spirituality, while Paul represents the
dead, institutionalized spirituality of the Irish Church.
Was that St Paul
Riding his ass down a lane in Donegal?
Christ was lately dead,
Men were afraid
With a new fear, the fear
Of death. (312-17)
Not only is Paul incorrect, but his denial of the flesh is blasphemous. The Church is built on
Paul, not Christ.
Don’t ask for life,’ the monk said.
29
“Tension” is the c onventional te rm for c ritics a t moments s uch a s t hese, b ut K avanagh’s i nsistence o n
foregrounding W WII in a p oem th at h as nothing lite rally to d o w ith it makes ‘ tension’ a weak d escriptor f or a
conflict whose consequences are for Kavanagh a matter o f life and death, both literally and spiritually. He writes,
“Lough Derg overwhelmed the individual imagination/ And the personal tragedy./ Only God thinks of the dying
sparrow/ In the middle of a war.” Two stanzas later, after a contemplation of “The C ommunion of Saints” as “a
Communion of individuals,” Kavanagh makes his first explicit reference to WWII. These sentiments regarding the
individual l ife as more i mportant t han historical ev ent ar e ech oed i n t he l ater p oem “Beyond t he H eadlines,” i n
which the poet “knew that [the wings of geese] would outwear the wings of war,/ And a man’s simple thoughts
outlive the day’s loud lying.”
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‘If you meet her
Be easy with your affection;
She’s a traitor
To those who love too much.’ (370-4)
The true God, the one Kavanagh pleads with Irish Christians to accept, is deeply invested in the
actual, individual lives of people. This is, incidentally, also Kavanagh’s notion of poetry as
rooted in the local, the parochial, and the particular.
The ex-monk, farmer and the girl
Melted in the crowd
Where only God, the poet,
Followed with interest till he found
Their secret, and constructed from
The chaos of its fire
A reasonable document. (341-8)
An earlier poem, “Christmas, 1939,” makes explicit the relationship between Kavanagh’s
conception of an ideal poetic and the person of Christ. Addressing Christ he writes, “All that is
poet in me/ is the dream I dreamed of your Childhood/ And the dream You dreamed of me”
(lines 2-4). What Kavanagh is calling for in “Lough Derg” and throughout his work is something
that is actually originary in both Catholicism and Protestantism but is quickly institutionalized
and sublimated in both. The path to God is through the self, through an embrace of the physical
self and its place within creation, not its denial. The Church is the ultimate form of domestication
against ‘natural’ Christian spirituality. Paul is the author of theology; Christ is author of faith.
True to the gospels, denial of the flesh, as Peter’s denial of Christ in his most physically
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vulnerable moment, is sin. What Kavanagh seeks, ultimately, is a materialist, poetic spirituality,
and he wants it for Ireland; without it will come what he calls in The Great Hunger, the
“apocalypse of clay” (XIV line 76).
Kavanagh’s speaker in “Lough Derg” is less pessimistic than the speaker of The Great
Hunger. In the first place he conceives of Lough Derg as a neutral space capable of holding,
expressing, and promoting a number of different spiritual and cultural agendas, and it is in places
such as these that he sees the greatest potential for renewal. Lough Derg’s over-determined
ambiguity is fertile ground for what Kavanagh calls “half-pilgrims” (line 35), and it is in their
ambiguity that new growth will occur. The representative half-pilgrim of “Lough Derg” is
suspended (he stands in the poem literally between houses and the lake) between nature (which
stands for true spirituality and poetry) and civilization (domestication, the Church). Towards the
beginning of the poem it is the half-pilgrim who notices the flaw in the statue of St Patrick. The
shamrock in his hand is missing, and the onlooker attributes it not to weather or age but to a
mistake on the artist’s part. The half-pilgrim is doubtful, even about poetry—he is the red-haired
man who “skimmed the sentiment of every pool of experience/ And talked heresy lightly from
distances” (136-7) essentially unable to commit to poetry—and less sure about things than the
speaker whose romantic leanings would prescribe a new poetic to cure Ireland’s cultural ills. The
loss of the shamrock is a loss of Irishness, and the poet is to blame. Could it be that Revivalists
and Young Irelanders merely pasted the shamrock on, but that its adherence was fleeting? The
half-pilgrim is wary. This is the same man—the red-haired one—whose conflicted thoughts
about Aggie Meehan opens up the ground for the peeling away of abstinence from spirituality.
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Ultimately, the poem is optimistic about the possibilities Lough Derg holds in spite of its
potential for further oppression. The pilgrims will be changed by Lough Derg, achieving a
freedom from mundanity into the ecstasy of God/nature that will persist after they return home.
When he will walk again in Muckno Street
He’ll hear from the kitchens of fair-day eating houses
In the after-bargain carouses
News from a country beyond the range of birds. (70-3)
In other words, he will learn from the shafts of light and spontaneously-growing flowers of
Lough Derg to find freedom and spirituality not just in the wildness of nature but in the wildness
of human nature.
Both Devlin and Kavanagh wrote Lough Derg poems at around the same time which
differ significantly in style and tone. Devlin’s is lofty, high-minded, regularly versed, and
nostalgically archaic in language. His characters are mere types without individuation, and the
poet remains at a distance from them until the very end. Kavanagh’s poem, at almost three times
the length of Devlin’s, is markedly more vernacular and less condensed. He names and identifies
with his characters, and while still marked by social class, they have rich inner lives and widely
varying relationships with Lough Derg. Both poets, however, write Lough Derg poems in
response to world war and home angst. A sense of absence and longing motivates Devlin and
Kavanagh to posit alternatives to the sort of thinking that leads to political conflict and cultural
famine.
Devlin’s wish, as he expresses it across his entire oeuvre, 30 is to (impossibly) return to a
sort of classical aesthetic, which the poem’s language, particularly in its plethora of classical
30
See this dissertation’s chapter on Devlin for a full discussion of his favoring of a classical aesthetic.
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continental allusions, amply demonstrates. Although classicism is not Kavanagh’s priority—least
of all in this poem, whose heroes are Patrick and Lough Derg’s caretaker, John Flood—both he
and Devlin long for a more dynamic, passionate cultural aesthetic, one that embraces the body
instead of denying it and privileges imagination over obligation. Devlin’s poem laments that
“dearth puffed positive in the stance of duty/ With which these pilgrims would propitiate/ Their
fears;” and a glance at stained glass reminds him of a time when “Christ the Centaur, in two
natures whole,/ With fable and proverb joinered body and soul.” Like Kavanagh, Devlin weds
the privileging of the corporeal body with Christ’s body in an attempt to offer an aesthetic that, if
not specifically Christian in terms of the institution of the Irish Church, is nevertheless imbued
with a sense of literally experienced belief. For Kavanagh, there is the possibility of
‘unconverting’ Irish Christianity:
But something from the unconverted kingdom,
The beauty that has turned
Convention into forests
Where Adam wanders deranged with half a memory. (170-3)
This turning away from cultural famine toward a rich, imaginative engagement with life
has relevance beyond Ireland, as both poets’ explicit references to WWII attest. Both poets are
concerned with the destruction of community war exacts and articulate its remedy as an attempt
toward wholeness, no matter how impossible to achieve. 31 For Devlin it is more specifically
about belief (“With mullioned Europe shattered, this Northwest,/ Rude-sainted island would pray
it whole again”), but for both it comes down to passionate engagement as opposed to passivity,
31
In Devlin’s poem the impossibility of true wholeness is explicit. “Not all/ The men of God nor the priests
of mankind/ Can mend or explain the good and broke,/ not one Generous with love prove communion.”
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which is assisted by institutionalization. In Devlin’s poem, “Ours, passive, for man’s gradual
wisdom take/ Firefly instinct dreamed out into law;/ The prophets’ jeweled kingdom down at
hell/ Fires no Augustine here. Inert, they kneel.” Kavanagh’s poem calls for a recognition of
actual, particular, common bodies, the “unwritten spaces between the lines” as opposed to “ideas
in the contemplative cloister.” His answer is love.
A man throws himself prostrate
And God lies down beside him like a woman
Consoling the hysteria of her lover
That sighs his passion emptily; ‘The next time, love, you shall faint in me.’ 32
(365-9)
God as lover is not a new trope but it is foreign to a culture of institutionally mediated belief, as
Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, and Kavanagh suggests, the rest of Europe, demonstrates.
Devlin’s and Kavanagh’s disdain for institution is specifically related to its facilitation of
passivity. In no time was lack of engagement more relevant than Ireland in World War II, and
the poets were not alone in their response. Clair Wills carefully documents Irish writers’ concern
with Irish neutrality in the war, citing extensive documentary about WWII , which she has
labeled a “wartime literary renaissance” (Wills 13). Contrary to the general critical opinion that
the arts reflected a more generic cultural famine of ideas and energy, Wills argues that “the war
proved a turning point for . . . a self-confident modern Irish writing in English. The grumbles
about intellectual stagnation were, paradoxically, evidence of the energy and dynamism which
32
In the earlier poem, “Pilgrims,” though they come to seek life, knowledge, and vision, what the pilgrims
find is “love, love, love . . . / Love that is Christ green walking from the summer headlands/ To His scarecrow cross
in the turnip-ground.”
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was resisting that stagnation” (Wills 13) and discusses a variety of creative material (Sean
O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Mary Lavin, James Joyce and Louis MacNeice) as support.
Kavanagh’s Lough Derg poem, which was written after his own visit to the island for the
purposes of publishing an essay about it, documents the pilgrims’ interest in the war, despite
their physical distance from it. “Then there was war, the slang, the contemporary touch/ The
ideologies of the daily papers” (lines 356-7). Devlin and Kavanagh do not necessarily equate
political neutrality with cultural passivity, and indeed Wills’ book offers ample evidence for the
difference. Neither poem specifically addresses political neutrality, suggesting instead that
passivity instead overwhelms something as trivial as a question over political engagement. What
will save Ireland, and Europe, for both Devlin and Kavanagh is a passionate, imaginative
engagement with life unmediated by cultural institutions, and attentive to individual experience
and imbued with a sense of belief. Steven Matthews traces this desire for a return to belief—
pagan or otherwise—in Yeats (Matthews 4), whose interest in Celtic pagan religious practice is
well known.
Kavanagh’s other main concern through the duration of his poetry through mid-century
was the tension between the longing for a sense of community—indeed, the necessity of
community as a humanizing and stabilizing force—and the inevitable, but also necessary, sense
of separation a poet experiences. 33 Kavanagh’s early poetry frequently laments his alienation
33
See B rendan K ennelly’s es say , “ Patrick K avanagh” for g eneral co mments o n K avanagh’s s ense o f
detachment and never belonging; Gregory Schimer’s writing on Kavanagh in Out of What Began: A History of Irish
Poetry in English, p. 308; and Peggy O’Brien’s comments on the “communal value of the Church” (130) in Writing
Lough Derg.
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from those around him. In “Inniskeen Road: July Evening,” while everyone else is at the dance,
the poet has the road to himself.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation
. . . A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing. (lines 9-10; 13-4)
Similarly, in “April Dusk,” he describes observing
An unmusical ploughboy whistles down the lane,
Not worried at all about the fate of Europe,
While I sit here feeling the subtle pain
That every silenced poet has endured. (lines 14-17)
Here he alludes to the general situation of the poet in Ireland at the time, where at least at this
juncture in his career, there were few opportunities for expression beyond the echoes of his own
walls. Indeed Kavanagh laments his calling as a poet, as “The Irony of It” complains:
It was not right
That my mind should have echoed life’s overtones,
That I should have seen a flower
Petalled in mighty power. (lines 15-18)
Nevertheless, in “Snail,” the poet as self retreats from the reader intentionally.
You are lost.
You can merely chase the silver I have let
Fall from my purse
you follow silver
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And not follow me. (lines 13-17)
But Kavanagh the poet also feels a sense of tenderness for the community in which he
came up as ploughman and poet and maintains committed to its life-giving powers. In the poetry
community and place are often one and the same. In “Monaghan Hills,” the poet’s very identity
is that of the place that bore him. “O Monaghan hills, when is writ your story,/ A carbon-copy
will unfold my being” (lines 18-19). In “Shancoduff” the poet attributes his commitment to a
parochial poetic scope to the “incurious” (line 4) hills themselves; they are his Alps, he says,
barren though they are (8). “Christmas Eve Remembered” expresses the poet’s feelings of
connection to his parishfolk through the person of Christ, despite the feelings of alienation he
more often experiences, though even here the access is through memory. “And memory you have
me spared/ A light to follow them/ Who go to Bethlehem” (28-30).
Kavanagh’s longest work before The Great Hunger and “Lough Derg” was an unfinished
piece, “Why Sorrow?,” a poem that somewhat less successfully explores the priorities of the later
and more fully developed poems. In “Why Sorrow?” Father Mat is a priestly precursor to
Macguire; he is married to the Church rather than the fields, and comes to middle-age with
resignation and premature spiritual death. Father Mat also experiences the split identity of the
poet (of the people but apart from them) in his office as priest. Although he is a man of the
people and of the land that grew him
out of this sour soil [Father Mat’s earthly father] squeezed
The answer to his wife’s wishes;
In steely grass and green rushes
Was woven the vestments of a priest (lines 69-72)
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he is alienated from them both by his Church office and his earthly priesthood. He feels the pull
of the second before the first, as the poem describes his early enrapturement with natural beauty
and human life simply lived and sees in them a spiritual vitality.
But through the dusk window-panes
Looking out where ducks were coming gabbling in
From the frog-croaking bogs at Corofin,
A calf sucking the edge of a tub,
The Evening Star musing in the East,
Behind the house the giggle of girls.
He was a priest
Already. (84-91)
As a child Father Mat lives in in-between spaces, literally a stretch of grass between a road and a
railway, and the hedges he walks through along the road (as opposed to on the road where
common folk travel). A simple clothesline facilitates spiritual contemplation. “He looked at it
through fingers crossed to riddle/ In evening sunlight miracles for men” (105-6). The speaker
describes Father Mat performing his priestly duties while dreaming of more lively matters taking
place outside of the Church. As Father Mat listens to a confession he regards the process as one
of a burning up and putting away of “every stalk/ that grew green in the heart” (215-16). For the
Church’s sake, “All poetry in nature or book/ Must be outcast this night” (229-30). As he moves
into an adult priesthood he continues to find vital spirituality in what precedes the Church,
whether longing for a pagan imagination
Now the priest’s pride
Was a Roman poet’s hearing of the Crucified:
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Apollo’s unbaptized pagan who can show
To simple eyes what Christians never know—
Was it the unspeakable beauty of hell? (4-8)
or contemplating the world before Christianity came along to tame it. In the second stanza Father
Mat imagines
A suddenness of green and light,
And the walls of mud that were spun to spheres
Within the orbit of the road-roller’s wheels;
All that was true before the piteous death of the Cross.
No earth-love was transfigured on that Hill. (12-16)
And later the speaker sounds a warning to Father Mat, who can still recognize that “the trees that
were before the Cross was sawn/ Were worthy to be worshipped” (163-4) and urges him to
“Come draw your wages/ In evening silver, in pure gold at dawn” 34 (164-5).
But Father Mat cannot sustain the revelatory visions of the loveliness of life and nature
and continue to serve the Church in the way his superiors expect him to. At first he hides his
thoughts from his curate, Father Ned, but when faced with praise rather than judgment at the
words of the Bishop, Father Mat succumbs to mounting pressure to abdicate his poetic spirit. As
the Bishop continues the Mass Father Mat thinks
Of his own Confirmation Day . . .
when he first found in clay
The secret of a different Deity written . . .
34
Another poem entitled “Father Mat” appears in this period, a shorter version of “Why Sorrow?” In it the
poet praises the “unbaptized beauty” of “ancient Ireland” and “the smell from the ditches that were not Christian.”
153
Before the sun went down into Drumcatton. (373; 374-6, second ellipsis in
original)
Pride leads his abrupt but anticlimactic transition from priest of earth and Church to priest of
Church merely in words that echo the Lough Derg’s penitents’ denial of the world. “So one dull
day he knelt and struck his breast/ And denied the sun and the earth. And Jesus Christ/ Turned
him round in his path” (382-4). Father Mat confesses his sinfully poetic thoughts to Father Ned,
moving them from imagination into extinction, and with it gives up his vocational distance from
his parishioners.
Now he was with his people, one of them.
What they saw, he saw too,
And nothing more; what they looked at,
and what to them was true, was true
For him. (443-7)
Peggy O’Brien locates Father Mat’s change of heart in empathy rather than pride and the need to
be truly one with the people he serves, a desire Kavanagh, to O’Brien, would have well
understood (O’Brien 140). The poem then describes how a house full of sexually lascivious
women now no longer speaks of the fullness of life to Father Mat. “Their screams were larks by
day and nightingales by night” (398); “But this that was once a miracle is now/ To Father Mat
the abominable symbol of/ The Golden Calf” (422-24). Appropriately he travels to Lough Derg,
a place of “life that was not coming in” (472). There he sees, in an image we will see again in
“Lough Derg,” a young man whose “back was to the sun though he was praying/ For what the
sun has thrown to fools all time” (475-6). It may as well be Father Mat, though the speaker
suggests that the priest knows what he has done.
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Curiously, Christ is not at all the symbol in “Why Sorrow?” that he is in both “Lough
Derg” and The Great Hunger. He instead stands for the Church and institutionalization; the
Virgin Mary is instead the wellspring of unfettered spirituality. Father Mat’s adolescence is
marked by an intense physical and spiritual attraction to Mary, who was far from the staid, pious,
and chaste figure of the modern Church and more like the Mary of the ecstatic medieval mystics.
“She was every girl he knew,/ Nimble-footed, daring too” (126-7). This Mary is not at all a
virgin, but not because she is impure. A girl that reminds him of Mary comes to Father Mat to
confession to reveal her sexual abuse at the hands of a piano teacher. Reestablishing her worth as
a living thing that has not been ruined by the encounter Father Mat tells her, “’My daughter you
are the mystery in the piano’s tune’” (248). And indeed it is in her brokenness—not in her
impurity—that Father Mat sees spiritual vitality. “And through her broken maidenhood/ He saw
the womb of poetry” (251-2). Kavanagh here again establishes literal sexuality as the partner of
spiritual and poetic life.
In contrast, Christ guards the gate between Father Mat and any chance of joy.
Christ was always
Like an old farmer guarding it
From neighboring trespass.
He was a grey, stooped old man of Cavan,
Christ herding a ragged cow in a patch of dry grass. (142-5)
In this poem Mary rather than Christ is synonymous with the vital body. Christ, on the other
hand, does not belong to the world of poetry. “O the wild, fearful happiness of the poet/ Is almost
too great a load for Christ’s shoulders” (233-4). Father Mat wants to follow Mary, who tempts
him through a gorgeous rhododendron, but his religious tradition, or at least that one that Father
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Ned enforces, demands that he follow “Jesus, Jesus,/ The Defeated One” (263-5) who offers
nothing to the Christian but unquenched desire. Why would Kavanagh, whose poetic is at least
repetitive if not consistent in stance, turn to Christ in The Great Hunger and leave the easily
sexualized Mary behind in “Why Sorrow?”? Certainly the figure of Mary would have offered the
heterosexual Maguire some degree of imaginative relief from celibacy, as she did Father Mat.
Women in The Great Hunger are bitter and sexless, where in “Why Sorrow?” they are the
embodiment of life.
In the poetry of the late 1940’s and 1950’s, Kavanagh makes more explicit reference to
the idea of cultural famine brought on by the domesticating effects of Church and government as
peculiarly Irish, and is straightforward about poetry’s ongoing role in revitalization. In
“Pegasus,” where the speaker attempts to sell his soul to the Church, the State, the merchants,
and finally to the “tinkers,” Kavanagh reaffirms the principle that institutional domestication,
particularly that which is caught up in the market, is the enemy to vitality. As soon as the speaker
gives up and lets the soul, who here is allegorized as a horse, go free, it sprouts wings on which
the speaker “may ride him/ Every land my imagination knew” (lines 49-50). Instead, in a few
unpolished and rather didactic poems Kavanagh blasts Ireland for having forgotten to flourish. In
“Memory of Brother Michael,” the speaker compares Ireland’s “always evening” (line 1) and
“always autumn” (6) to England’s grand exploits of the same period and blames it on Ireland’s
fixation on the dead past. “We sailed in puddles of the past/ Chasing the ghost of Brendan’s
mast” (9-10). Similarly, “The Wake of the Books,” a sort of hybird poem/play, dismisses the
excuse of censorship for Ireland’s cultural woes and attributes it instead to lack of conviction,
weak criticism, and an abdication of the better bits of romanticism. Frank O’Connor in
Kavanagh’s mini-play is a Hamlet-figure who confesses his cultural sin:
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The most immoral place of all
Is the middle of the road.
Neutrality
Was our destruction. (162-5)
In “The Paddidad,” whose subtitle is “or, the The Devil as a Patron of Irish Letters,”
Kavanagh depicts the devil as Mediocity—the sexless novels he approves of are more sinful than
the ones full of sex—and places him in charge of the current state of Irish poetry. “Paddy
Conscience,” on the other hand, who the poet identifies variously as Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey
is committed to poetry grounded in place (“‘I’m a Clareman more than Mist’” Paddy Conscience
insists [line 96]) and is therefore mocked and thrown out. That is, of course, until Paddy
Conscience dies, the occasion upon which his persona is ripe for empty memorialization.
All the Paddies rise and hurry
Home to write the inside story
Of their friendship for the late
Genius who was surely great. (163-6)
The later poem “Who Killed James Joyce?” makes the case for Ireland’s mistreatment of its
poets more succinctly, and it is again a matter of domestication.
Who killed James Joyce?
I, said the commentator,
I killed James Joyce
For my graduation.
What weapon was used
To slay the mighty Ulysses?
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The weapon that was used
Was a Harvard thesis. (lines 1-8)
In a less careful parsing of rural domestication and the free delights of country life, as we
saw in The Great Hunger, Kavanagh in this period becomes more and more nostalgic for the
poetic possibilities of peasant life. “Temptation in Harvest” documents his pangs of regret at
leaving the fecund, sexual countryside, where “amoral Autumn gives her soul away/ And every
maidenhead without a fight” in exchange for “five years of pavements” (lines 17-18; 21).
Although he has left the fields that fettered Macguire Kavanagh’s speaker finds that they cannot
be got around. “Could I go/ Over the field to the City of the Kings/ Where art, music, letters are
the real things?/ The stones of the street, the sheds, hedges cried, No” (57-60). Gone is sense we
saw in The Great Hunger the field can be every bit as binding as urban institutions; in nostalgia
Kavanagh appears to have glossed over that earlier revelation. In the 1950’s the poet does return
to his native grounds, at least in the poetry (see “Auditors In,” “Innocence,” “The Defeated,” and
“Kerr’s Ass”), and finds the experience confirms his nostalgia. Although is careful not to dismiss
the quality and importance of Joyce’s work, he does claim in “The Defeated” that O’Casey has
not written anything worth reading since the man left Ireland, and has in general a poor opinion
of exile. Even if Kavanagh had left Ireland, as so many other writers did, the poet in this period
believes that Ireland would never have left him. In “Ante-Natal Dream,”
A clump of nettles cried:
We’ll saturate your pride
Till you are oozing with
The richness of our myth.
For we are all you’ll know
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No matter where you go. (lines 17-22)
Kavanagh almost never ventures into urban spaces in his poetry despite his long-time
residence in cities, but when he does, in “Jungle,” its contrast to his ideal of rurality is plain.
Here is not the wildness of beauty but an unholy, barbaric, frightening foreign wildness which is
opposed to Reason, which reinforces the problematic nature of Kavanagh’s idealization of
peasantry, particularly as it conforms to the conventional division between the authentic Irish
rural and the norally and culturally bankrupt Irish city.
But for all his bitterness and cynicism about the sorry state of Irish letters Kavanagh’s
poetry contains that which the poetry of Devlin, MacGreevy, Beckett and Clarke does not: hope.
Kavanagh’s fervent belief, particularly in the post-WWII poetry, is that poetry will survive, even
flourish, as long as there is a rich and fertile life for the poet to mine. The poet in “The Wake of
the Books” unwittingly predicting what amounts to a second revival of Irish literature in the
1960’s and 1970’s,
I feel as I look that we are waiting for
a new and surprising world that is coming round the turn,
The first years of Christendom. There’s the same air
And the same strange hope exciting a love-sick world. (226-9)
This hope the poet attributes to the fact that
men will always be moved to happiness
By the sun rising or the sun setting or the brown ivy . . .
The song will continue
And the children of the gods whose hearts are humble
Will hear, will hear. (345-6; 357-9)
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Kavanagh’s hope comes mainly from his view of the poet as essentially undomesticated and
uninstitutionalized. Though the poet’s persona may take on the form of caricature for any
number of political and social ends, his poet spirit is beyond the reach of appropriation, as in “A
Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue,” where “in his own city he lives before/ The clay earth was
made, an Adam never born,/ His light unprisoned in a dinner-hour” (lines 40-42). In “The
Paddidad” the devil Mediocrity must keep on his toes because
Already he can see another
Conscience coming on to bother
Ireland with muck and anger,
Ready again to die of hunger,
Condemnatory and uncivil—. (lines 181-5)
In its attempt to privilege a sense of place, however, Kavanagh’s poetry sometimes slips
from nostalgia into another form of Irish myth-making he would have thought well to avoid. Just
as his depiction of the peasant as holder of truth and meaning, despite his public intentions not to
make him so, feeds into long-standing ethnic prejudices, so too does his occasional depiction of
Ireland—more specifically, the rural Ireland of peasant work—as refuge from the conflicts of the
rest of the world. This emphasis on refuge is at odds with his disdain for passivity and lack of
engagement and creeps too close to solipsism. In “October 1943,” a specific reference to WWII,
the poet relishes the rain “on potato pits thatched, on the turf clamps home/ On the roofs of the
byre where the cows are bedded!” (lines 3-4) and almost sighs as he finds it a “corner of peace in
this world of trouble” (8). And in “Peace,” he laments his exile from country life where “peace is
still hawking/ His coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn” (lines 8-9) and asks, “out of
that childhood country what fools climb/ To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?” (14-
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15). Kavanagh wants to have it both ways: a poetic that is based on connected to a real Ireland in
real time, but with a sense of nostalgia that rebuffs its particularity and moves into type.
What separates Kavanagh’s work from that of the modernists is that he is perfectly
comfortable not dealing with the rest of the world; like Yeats, Kavanagh wished to nurture and
perpetuate an aesthetic practice rooted in the actual soil of Ireland. He felt contempt for those
artists who left even when he could recognize the quality of their poetry. Staying in Ireland
meant, however, that Kavanagh’s poetry would more closely follow a rurally-based, romantic,
pastoral tradition instead of the modernist leanings of the exiled poets and writers. The presence
of both conservative—though not reactionary—and progressive—in terms of responsiveness to
foreign influence—poetics is that the poetry of mid-twentieth century Ireland offered a
complexity of influence to later poets; in later decades Ireland would produce both Seamus
Heaney and Ciaran Carson, both Nuala ní Dhomhnaill and Maeve McGuckian.
Yeats’s vision of a truly national literature became in this period far more pluralistic than
perhaps he could have imagined, a phenomenon appropriate to an Ireland that offered so many
different ways of being Irish and being Irish in the world. What connects all of these poetic
approaches, including Yeats’, is that they are all responses to a sense of real and worsening
cultural famine, and whether each poet chooses to stay at home and find life within or seek it
abroad, or both, all of them could not rely upon a comfortably established tradition that
responded well to the circumstances of the historical moment.
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FLOWERED STONE: THE POETRY OF AUSTIN CLARKE
Although responses to the conditions of life and poetry-making in mid-twentieth-century
Ireland vary widely from poet to poet (and in Clarke’s case, collection to collection) the poetry
of Austin Clarke in the 1930s comes closest to that of Patrick Kavanagh. His stylistic approach
differs considerably from Kavanagh’s; it is less vernacular, more engaged with traditions of
Gaelic-language poetry, more disciplined in form, and less transparently rhetorical, particularly
in Clarke’s earlier poetry. But his poetry, as Kavanagh’s, is in its subject matter, tone, and focus,
rigorously Irish. Clarke did not remain in Ireland as did Kavanagh—he was forced to relocate to
London for a decade in order to support his family—but like Joyce, his poetry never emigrated.
In this sense Clarke is more an inheritor of the Revival than any other Irish poet of the midtwentieth-century, particularly in his use of Irish historical material (though from later periods
than that of the Revival writers) and poetic devices from Gaelic bardic poetry. Like Kavanagh,
Clarke’s public protestations against the excesses and decadence of the Revival trivialize the
extent to which his poetry reworked the Revival’s concerns to accomplish, in this writer’s
opinion, what Yeats 35 had in mind when he envisioned a national poetry. The poetry reflects, as
35
Yeats, however, was apparently not o f the same opinion; he pointedly excluded Clarke fro m his (year)
Oxford Book of Irish Verse, for which Clarke reputedly never forgave him.
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Robert F. Garratt argues, Clarke’s “desire to be a thoroughly and distinctively Irish poet” (103)
and Gregory Schirmer concurs (2). Robert Welch goes further when he asserts that Clarke’s
poetry
binds modern Irish verse in English to the Gaelic tradition with a thoroughness,
completeness and freedom which Hyde, for all his scholarship and sweetness, and
Yeats, for all his vast strength and beauty, did not quite do. He has done more
than fill a gap; he has restored a voice and given it the substantiality of flowered
stone. (51)
Clarke, like the other poets of his day, ensured the continuation of Irish poetry, in all of its
diversity and contradiction, during a time in Irish history that offered the most strenuous barriers
to its survival. Clarke’s takes seriously the Revivalist task of lending continuity between past and
present Irish literature while at the same time shaping style and theme to address the cultural
realities of his own era. Like Kavanagh, Devlin, and Salkeld, Clarke ponders the possibilities and
limitations inherent in different forms of spirituality. For Clarke, a turning away from dogma
toward free thought is only the beginning; he will redefine “thought” as a remedy to stagnation
but as distinct from reason.
Having had all of his novels censored in Ireland, and having bitterly acknowledged the
difficulty of making a living in Ireland as a poet, Clarke keenly felt the strictures and oppressions
of Ireland in mid-century, and like his contemporaries, a good deal of his poetry from this period
is directed toward these confines. While Night and Morning (1938) spells out his disenchantment
with the Church’s oppressions more specifically and directly, Pilgrimage (1929) richly
engages—and celebrates—notions of cultural richness and freedom. Both collections assert and
reassert the necessity for—and inevitability of—personal and cultural freedom. While the
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struggle between reason and faith, as many scholars have read it, is a concern of Night and
Morning, its larger function is to continue the assertion of Pilgrimage that freedom is essential to
life—both individually and culturally—and that the costs of that freedom (loss of home,
community, and parish) are entirely too high. Like Kavanagh, Clarke would love nothing more
than to maintain a parish-based culture, but is anguished that in its current form the parish offers
little more than spiritual repression.
In nearly every poem in Pilgrimage the sea plays a central role in the plot or in the
movement of characters and of cultural influence. The sea brings pilgrims to Clonmacnoise in
the title poem; it brings Nial to Gormlai in “The Confession of Queen Gormlai;” brings Deirdre
back to Ireland in “The Cardplayer;” takes the young woman from place to place in “The Young
Woman of Beare;” brings Spanish ships to the shore in “South-Westerly Gale;” and brings the
Church in the form of a woman in “The Marriage Night.” In the other poems—excepting “The
Scholar,” which mentions a river—the sea is always present as part of their settings. “Celibacy”
takes place on an island, “The Planter’s Daughter” takes place “When night stirred at sea” (line
1); and “Aisling” begins
At morning from the coldness of Mount Brandon,
The sail is blowing half-way to the light;
And islands are so small, a man may carry
Their yellow crop in one cart at low tide. (1-4)
These first lines also demonstrate Clarke’s use of wind as inextricably wedded to the sea and
providing the energy for its movement. In all of the poems for which wind and water provide
transport, their presence also signals the arrival of a foreign or subversive element which initiates
both positive and negative change, challenging the notion of freedom as an uncomplicated
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alternative to stricture. In “The Marriage Night,” a woman who “. . . brought/ a blessing from the
Pope” sails in from Spain, where a good number of Irish clergy studied in the early days of Irish
Christianity, is both a harbinger of joy—
Such light was on her cheekbone
And chin—who would not praise
In holy courts of Europe
The wonder of her days? (13-16)
—and of conquest:
But in deceit of smoke
And fire, the spoilers came:
Tower and unmortar’d wall broke
Rich flight to street and gate. (33-36)
The joy of the marriage night gives way to the morning, which finds lying “. . . by her side/
Those heretics” (39-40). In “Southwesterly Gale,” which directly precedes “The Marriage
Night,” natives holed up in their houses to keep from the wind find that it will break their
cultural enclosures in the form of a ship “from Portugal or Spain” (30). Clarke’s language
sharply contrasts the wildness of the wind with the peace and safety of the indoors. In other
places in Clarke’s poetry, wind and water signify freedom; the instability of both terms reflects
the complexity of Clarke’s explorations into notions of freedom. Wind and water have the
potential in all of his poems to bring new life, threats to safety and security, and usually a
combination of the two. The “clang of bar and spike/ Rolling the timbered wine” (9-10) sounds
against the “fire or lighted table” (6). When the weather clears the Claremen find the strange ship
whose description invokes a sense of both foreboding and promise. Though it is imposing (“For
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they had seen a tall ship/ Stand to the sun in flame/ Between the cloud and wave” [25-27]), it
also docks as the weather is clearing, suggesting a peaceful entrance; and as she is “trimming her
golden wicks,” there remains the possibility that the ship brings the potential for enlightenment
as well. Although the feminizing of ships is commonplace, Clarke’s insistence on the feminine
pronoun (“she” instead of “the ships;” “ships” would have created a nice assonance with “wicks”
in the line above) brings to mind the young woman of Beare in the poem just before it.
The woman in “The Young Woman of Beare,” who travels from somewhere in the south
to Ireland, and then to various ports therein, visits both pleasure and corruption on the
parishioners in each location. Against the enclosed nature of religious life the young woman
offers freedom in the form actual sexual trysts and in the fantasies she provokes through her
appearance and reputation. Unlike the men she tempts and the woman who scorn her, who to
escape the wrath of the church must “. . . kneel/ The longer at confession” (48-49) and “. . . keep
from the dance-hall/ And dark side of the road” (90-91) the young woman of Beare is free to
satisfy her fleshly desires whenever she sees fit. Indeed, unlike the churchgoers she is “. . . only
roused/ By horsemen of de Burgo/ That gallop to my house” (8-10). But Clarke’s decision to
make the young woman the speaker of the poem coupled with his rich and gorgeously erotic
descriptions of her lovemaking celebrate rather than condemn her actions. 36
36
See John Goodby’s essay “ ‘The Prouder Counsel of Her Throat:’ Towards a Feminist Reading of Austin
Clarke” for a detailed examination of the ways Clarke’s use of the feminine voice, imagery, and density of language
undermine the masculinity of the Irish poetic. Goodby also sees Clarke’s frequent use of sea imagery as advancing a
specifically feminist k ind o f f reedom. “. . . th at p ulsion ju st b elow t he t hreshold o f meaning which e nters an d
disrupts t he s ymbolic order of language, feels its constraints but ne vertheless manages t o register something o f its
independence” (335).
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See! See, as from a lathe
My polished body turning!
He bares me below the waist
And now blue clothes uncurl
Upon white haunch. I let
The last bright stitch fall down
For him as I lean back,
Straining with longer arms
Above my head to snap
The silver knots of sleep. (70-80)
The young woman proudly invites both the man—who is any man, and not a specific figure,
unlike Gormlai’s lovers—and the reader look at her body, and to look at it lustfully, allowing
both her clothes and arms to bare her. In the first section of the poem, Clarke reverses the
imagery of light and darkness, contrasting the young woman’s “bright temptation” (30) and
“polished body” (71) to the shadows through which churchgoers hurry to pray (lines 1-3)
(Schirmer 36; Timson 63-64). As Maurice Harmon has mentioned, Clarke’s contrast of the blue
clothing and “white haunch” create “a perverse Madonna of the bed” (Harmon 71), which
resonates well with Clarke’s welding of sensuality and spirituality in other poems in this
collection, though Clarke’s tone suggests a sense of delight in the perverseness of welding. In the
poem’s second section light and darkness return to their conventional connotations; now she is
“the dark temptation/ Men know” against the “shining orders/ Of clergy [that] have condemned
me” (200-3). Whereas the first section was unashamedly celebratory, this one communicates
what sounds like remorse on the young woman’s part.
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Then, to a sound of bracelets,
I look down and my locks
Are curtailed on a nape
That leads men into wrong. (156-9)
But, despite this acknowledgement and the exhortation to other young women not to follow her
into her “common ways” (93) in lines 90-100 and 104-7, the young woman of Beare continues to
pursue the fulfillment of her fleshly desires. These brief moments of remorse and warning do not
amount to confession; her freedom—not her lovers’—is more valuable to her than the state of
her eternal soul and worth risking her physical safety in a cultural that condemns her actions.
After she is caught in the arms of a man at daylight she remembers that “My fear was less than
joy/ To gallop from the tide” (130-1). As she describes the flight of her and her lover with
breathless ecstasy, the landscape affirms her choices:
The green land by Lough Corrib
Spoke softly and all day
We followed through a forest
The wet heel of the axe,
Where sunlight had been trestled
In clearing and in gap. (134-40)
Just as sunlight is “trestled,” the young woman’s freedom is curtailed by social convention. In
order to live her life the way she chooses she must constantly be on the move. In this context the
young woman’s apparent remorse becomes more a statement of the cost of freedom, which is a
loss of home, community, and permanency, than genuine regret for herself. These are not
confessions, except in their admission that she has endangered the souls of others. Even her
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warnings to other women to “keep from the dance-hall” (90) and to “be modest in your clothes”
(151) read more like statements of concern for fellow women than arguments against her own
lifestyle, which she continues to describe in enticing terms up to the closing lines of the poem.
Taken in its entirety, the poem’s condemnation comes down not on the young woman’s own
actions but in the rootless life she must lead in order to maintain her freedom. It is possible to
live a life according to one’s own rules and desires, but the cost is great; and the blame lies with
those who would exact that cost. Of course the young woman is also quick to point out the cost
of a life lived within the walls she chooses to evade, between enforced silence (“The men and
women murmur” [213]) and the restraints of marriage, for which “they might pinch and save/
Themselves in lawful pleasure” (88-89).
To Clarke it is a no-win proposition: give up the safety of the community for freedom or
give up freedom for the safety of community, which was particularly potent coming from the
perspective (insomuch as a male poet can speak for women) of the feminine in Irish culture,
whose contradictory representations (the cailin, or fresh young woman and hag, or bitter old one)
make it a rich source of exploration into the contradictions of freedom and confinement. Like
Kavanagh Clarke values uninhibited sexuality against the death-squeeze of the ascetic Irish
Church. Here I disagree with Maurice Harmon, who argues that Clarke “may not want to
celebrate sin” (67); “The Young Woman of Beare” is Clarke’s least abashed celebration of sin,
attenuated by his realistic accounting of its social—more than moral—costs. In addition, though
I agree with Harmon that the poem implicates “an over-rigorous, male-dominated church,” I
would hesitate to argue that “the sinful predicament in which Gormlai and the Young Woman
find themselves is not freely chosen” (72). The young woman is both clearly aware of the
consequences of her actions and willing to enter into them. To my reading, her refusal to become
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a “victim” (72) in the way Harmon defines it above, and also in William Roscelli’s terms (63)—
she evades capture again and again over the course of the poem—is a measure of her freedom,
one that she invents for herself.
But before Clarke delves into the dangers of moral dogmatism he offers an alternative in
the title poem to Pilgrimage. Through its imagery he proposes an acceptance of contradiction
and opposition in order to allow an enriching, Blakean sense of depth to both poem and culture.
“Pilgrimage” is a poem that works beautifully to accomplish the crossing, braiding, and bringing
together of opposites. The pilgrims arrival at Clonmacnoise centers the poem’s theme of poetic
and cultural richness.
Grey holdings of rain
Had grown less with the fields,
As we came to that blessed place
Where hail and honey meet. (12-15)
Here the grey rain contrasts with the (presumably) green fields; and “hail and honey” are not
merely opposites in tone but also references to biblical plagues and blessings, suggesting that
religious life in Ireland is both a blessing and a plague. Clarke’s grey rain is not a
romanticization of wild Irish weather to be appropriated for its confinement to the primitive, but
as in Kavanagh, it signals the darkness inherent in such representations; and as in MacGreevy,
landscape functions to multiply the possibilities of representation. The poem continues with
contrasts of light and darkness, black and white, high and low, pagan and Christian, land and sea,
sound and silence. The poem’s very first line contains the first contrast, where “the far south
glittered/ Behind the grey bearded plains” (1-2). A good deal of scholarship exists on the entire
collection’s exploration of the Celto-Romanesque period of Irish history, particularly in its
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(imagined) weaving together of pagan and Christian practices to create a harmonious society
where art and passion flourish. G. Craig Tapping writes that in Pilgrimage, “art, craft, culture,
language and Godhead are held in bright, holy union” (55) and that “this pre-Norman Ireland has
a religion of its own—a happy combination of Christian idea and pagan vitality” (56). But
Clarke’s use of contrasts goes beyond the veneration of an historical period and invites a
consideration of it as a strategy against fundamentalism.
Clarke’s employment of contrasts in “Pilgrimage” creates an energy and vitality in the
poem that sets the stage for the deprivations of the next poem, “Celibacy,” in which a Paul-like
priest wrestles with temptations of the flesh. In “Pilgrimage,” the vivid image of “cunning hands
with cold and jewels” that “brought chalices to flame” (21-22) invites a passionate response, and
indeed “a sound/ Of wild confession rose” (47-48). “Celibacy,” on the other hand, employs
contrasts not to invite richness but to defeat it in a demonstration of what happens when one
imperative seeks to bury another. Against the “brown isle of Lough Corrib/ When clouds were
bare as branch” (1-2) and “the grey fire of the nettle, (9)” the temptation arrives as “an Angel:/
Dews dripped from those bright feet” (16-17). But instead of allowing the Angel to stay in his
mind, the speaker attempts to vanquish her, as he “wrestled her in hair-shirt” (27). Clarke cannot
help but create beauty even in lines about deprivation, however, and we see that despite the
speaker’s attempt to purge his temptation she remains a vital force in the poem and in his
imagination. In the last stanza
The dragons of the Gospel
Are cast by bell and crook;
But fiery as the frost
Or bladed light, she drew
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The reeds back, when I fought
The arrow-headed airs
That darken on the water. (35-40)
The Angel is winning; no matter how hard the speaker tries to cast her out she will not leave.
Like the young woman of Beare, the speaker’s temptress, though she is only a dream-figure, is
tenacious in her efforts to thwart the boundaries of her freedom. She aggressively seeks to
overcome the speaker’s attempts at maintaining the border between celibacy and wantonness,
acting as “bladed light;” this is truly spiritual warfare, but rather than championing the
boundaries the poem reads as if Clarke were rooting for their dissolution.
Similarly, in “The Confession of Queen Gormlai” Clarke employs contrast to create a
rich and vivid image of the Gormlai’s life and culture and to mitigate the oppressions of rigidity.
The poem describes a rape. Earlier in the poem the queen says that “no man has seen me naked,/
Partaken in my shame” (62-63) which suggests that the encounter with Carroll that she will later
describe is not one of mutual consent.
He drank at posted fires
Where armies had been glutted
And he shrank bars of iron
Whenever his hand shut.
At night was it not lust,
Though I were fast in prayers,
For Carroll with his muscle
To thrust me in black hair? (80-88)
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Gormlai’s descriptions of Carroll are all violent. He is no respecter of women, of the land (“He
cropped the greener land/ To Cashel top” [89-90]), or of the faith of Cormac (“He took/ The
bishop in his chapel/ And wrung the holy mass-book” [90-92]). The poet’s repetition of the short
“u” sound in “glutted,” “shut,” “lust” and “muscle,” words associated with aggression, serve to
strengthen the impact of “thrust” at the end of the stanza. Clarke here qualifies his definition of
freedom. Boundary-crossing is a means to rebel against oppression, not perpetrate it. Consider
Gormlai’s flight from Carroll to join Nial: clearly she is running from convention as well. In
addition to leaving the husband sanctioned by her father, her new lover is “of [Gormlai’s] kin”
(108). The queen’s description of her escape with Nial echoes that of the young woman of
Beare’s.
For drizzling miles we kissed,
We clung to the glistening saddle
On roads that rang and misted
Below us, promised madly
To pray, but in cold heather
We broke the marriage ring,
Under your leathern cloak,
By thoughts that were a sin. (129-36)
Clarke’s repetition of the “s” sound in “drizzle,” “miles,” kissed,” “glistening,” “saddle,”
“misted,” and “promised” in the first part of the stanza softens the encounter and covers the
entire section with drizzle and mist, a contrast to the “hail” (124) from which they escape in the
previous stanza, and to the blunt force of the rape stanza. The second half of the escape stanza
celebrates rather than condemns the lovers’ thwarting of conventional moral constraints for the
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sake of the freedom of love. Here “we broke the marriage ring” (emphasis added), an act that
Gormlai consents, rather than relents, to. Nial’s cloak encloses Gormlai in an act of protection
rather than confinement. Later they will bow to convention by “receiv[ing] the sacraments/
Within the holy week” (47-48), but not before having first allowed their love to flourish where it
is not officially sanctioned. Still, there is a freedom in the queen’s new life because of the love
that borne it; in contrast to Cormac, who “wore the shirt/ Of fire, the shoes of stone” (106-7), her
“days were filled/ With ease” (161-2) until Nial’s death at the hands of “strange blue crowds/
That cry in driven sleet” (178-9). Unlike the young woman of Beare, however, Queen Gormlai
chooses to live alone in poverty after Nial is killed, giving herself up to a life of deprivation
similar to that of Cormac and yet also not willing to part with the vestiges of yet-unfulfilled
desire. “. . . and though I grovel/ As Cormac in true shame,/ I am impure with love” (189-91). In
this poem, hail and honey meet in a story that dramatizes both the need for freedom (here, in
love) and its inevitable costs.
One of these costs, in the world of Clarke’s poetic, is a secure notion of place as a shelter
against loneliness and rootlessness. Kavanagh’s poetry is imbued with a sense of home and
place, whereas Clarke is, as Seamus Heaney has also called himself, a kind of “inner-exile”
(Grennan 151). Clarke’s home spaces are, like MacGreevy’s, unattainable except in dreams (see
Clarke’s “Wandering Men”). Craig Tapping regards Clarke as an “insider,” a native, in contrast
to Protestant, aristocratic, Anglo-Irish Yeats, who came to the traditions about which he wrote
and admired from the “outside,” as it were (17). But this “insider” is not immune to the
possibility of alienation, to which even Kavanagh the homebody can attest. Eamon Grennan
argues that in Pilgrimage, the poet “simply belongs, and speaks out of that clear sense of
belonging. He makes out of his craft a world of which he is a native” (151). The poet may not
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bring attention to his own alienation (except perhaps in the last poem, “Aisling”), as he will do in
Night and Morning, but the underpinnings for it are already in Pilgrimage and the additional
poems in Collected Poems (1936), both of which precede Night and Morning, in the voices of his
restless, fleeing, rootless characters. In addition to the movements of the young woman of Beare,
Queen Gormlai, the pilgrims, and the planter’s daughter, the men in “Wandering Men” (from the
Collected Poems) find a temporary home not in a physical location in a specific community but
in a fleeting vision (a “momentary flame” [7]) of the fused, centaurial figure of a pagan and
Christian Brigid. The vision is complete with tables, food, and ale (which recalls the homey
description of the indoors in “Southwesterly Gale”) and full of light (15). Curiously, though they
“shared” (18) “the food of Eden” (17), each of the men is seated at his own table, which suggests
that the vision is not of a single parish but of a larger cultural ideal that roots them not in place
but in vision. Of course the vision does not stay; the ideal of a beautifully woven Christian and
pagan Ireland cannot not borne out by reality on the ground, which Pilgrimage demonstrates
despite the complex beauty of its world. Still,
we gave praise to that sky-woman
For wayfare and a vision shown
At night to harmless men who have
No parish of their own. (37-40)
The cultural unity for which Devlin, Kavanagh, and Clarke yearn is, as all three work out in their
poetry, not possible to achieve. What Clarke suggests here is that alienation can be tempered by
vision, and that however much the vision is not and never was a reality, vision can offer
momentary sustenance to the lonely poet.
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“Aisling” from Pilgrimage is less satisfying on this count, particularly as the female
object of vision in the seventeenth-century Irish aisling promises hope and renewal; for Clarke
she confuses rather than clarifies, scatters rather than gathers. Here again a wandering man—this
time, alone—comes across a woman who may be, as he guesses, Geraldine (presumably the
Geraldine of Coleridge’s Cristabel), Penelope (“O do you cross/ The blue thread and the crimson
on the framework, At darkfall in a house where nobles throng” [29-31]), or Niav (or Niamh from
Irish mythology). But unlike Brigid, whose identity is transparent and who comes to the men to
willingly welcome them into her sanctuary, this woman works to evade the speaker’s intrusion
by refusing to satisfy the speaker’s curiosities. Instead she answers his questions with a question
about his origins: “But from what bay, uneasy with a shipping/ Breeze, have you come?” (2829). The speaker cannot answer her with any more clarity than she has answered him, because he
hails from nowhere; he is “without praise, without wine, in rich strange lands” (46). The strange
woman is only willing to share a description of the pleasures of her home, but it acts as a tease
rather than the respite of Brigid’s appearance.
“Black and fair strangers leave upon the oar
And there is peace,” she answered. “Companies
Are gathered in the house that I have known;
Claret is on the board and they are pleased
By storytelling. When the turf is redder
And airy packs of wonder have been told,
My women dance to bright steel that is wed,
Starlike, upon the anvil with one stroke. (33-40)
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The woman knows peace, company, and entertainment in her place of origin, and here again is
the description of a rich culture in its hay-day characterized by good literature and craftsmanship,
all things unified “with one stroke.” But these things are distant, and the speaker will not partake
in them, as the men of “Wandering Men” are able to do. Instead her description of hearth and
home sharpens the pitch of the speaker’s loneliness, and causes him to wonder aloud if he is
wander, rootless, forever. The strange woman leaves him with a smile (47) without the
satisfaction of her identity or the promise of someday arriving at his own warm abode. Both the
speaker of “Aisling” and the men of “Wandering Men” wander, but the men do not appear to
seek anything in particular; the poem does not indicate that they desire to arrive anywhere. They
are content with the vision of Brigid that gives them strength to continue, whereas the sad man of
“Aisling” is left alone with his longing. In these two poems Clarke offers the reader two different
approaches to the problems of personal alienation and cultural deprivation: either one can seek
the unity and perfection of a real community at peace with others and itself (and be disappointed
every time) or she can content herself with the vision of the same to sustain her in her inevitable
wanderings. The poems of Pilgrimage argue that the former leads only to sorrow, as in “The
Confession of Queen Gormlai,” whereas the latter, demonstrated beautifully in “The Young
Woman of Beare,” which is not completely without suffering, is at least punctuated by moments
of real freedom and joy.
Like other poets of this period, Clarke’s success lies partially in the depth of his
comprehension of and empathy for human suffering.
This sympathetic understanding of the human condition—the ceaseless quest for
Eden which inevitably leads us to the cloister or the bed, which makes ideals into
abstractions and turns our lust to ashes, which rips away the last veil of our
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illusion and leaves us naked in our weakness—that made Clarke, if not a poet of
the foremost rank, nevertheless a vital one for those of us who could still believe
in sin. (Roscelli 59)
Despite his compulsion to reduce Clarke’s importance (a common theme in earlier criticism
about Clarke), Roscelli recognizes that Clarke’s empathy makes his poetry both universal and
moving for the individual reader. I would argue that this does make Clarke a poet of “the
foremost rank;” that he could, in a culture in which Church and government fostered an
atmosphere of personal and corporate denial and disengagement, develop a poetic that engaged
relentlessly with matters of great personal complexity. Clarke’s voice, and of his
contemporaries, was in many respects the voice of a people for whom a sufficient forum did not
exist for the expression of suffocation, emptiness, doubt, disillusionment, and anger. Empathy in
Clarke’s poetry is a function of the poet’s ability to comprehend the conflicting strands of the
cultural moment and weave them together into a poetic that is both universally modern (though
not “modernist” by critically narrow definitions) and peculiarly Irish. Craig Tapping attributes
the social relevance of Clarke’s poetry to its departure from the romantic impulses of the
Revival. “Writing that is socially relevant and immersed in daily life and common pursuits
requires a keener, more directly shared language than does the chronicle of exiled imagination or
the record of private meditation and experience;” Clarke favored artifact over artifice (25; 27).
While I disagree a disavowal of Romanticism is necessary for a socially germane poetry—after
all, Kavanagh’s dystopian pastoral is as relevant as Clarke’s eschewal of it—Tapping does get
right the balance Clarke strikes in his poetry between the use of imagination (particularly in
Pilgrimage) and grounding in contemporary concerns.
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Night and Morning (1938) is widely regarded as Clarke’s move out of the mythical and
the historic and into the personal battle between his need for spiritual fulfillment and his
continued, but now more vocal, opposition to the Irish Church, particularly in its turning away
from reason at the Council of Trent. Maurice Harmon sees the collection as an expression of
identification with the suffering, flesh-bound Christ (79) and the scholastics whose efforts to
“harmonise the philosophy of Aristotle with the teachings of the Church fathers” (77) come to
naught at Trent (80). In Gregory Schirmer’s reading of “Repentence,” “man inevitably suffers
this kind of anguish because the conflict between faith and reason is fought across an
unbridgeable gulf” (49). Craig Tapping argues that in Night and Morning, “Dogma, standing in
the way of an instinctive humanism, is challenged with . . . a new spiritual candor” (163-4); in
“Penal Law,” “dogma stifles the inspiring vitality of rational inquiry. Faith and knowledge are
now irreconcilable; the latter denies God, the former limits his creation, mankind” (168). Vivian
Mercier formulates the central paradox of Night and Morning: “faith and spirituality both form
part of the emotional life, reason and the suppression of instinct part of the intellectual life” (96).
In his article about Clarke, Séan Lucy argues that Night and Morning is fundamentally about the
conflicts between faith and reason and between desire and guilt (12).
But the focus on the struggle between faith and reason in this collection misses the
distinction the poet makes between reason and what he calls “thought” (and sometimes
substitutes “truth”), which the poetry loosely describes as the free movement of the mind and
heart unhindered by faith or reason. Although in the title poem thought, which under the reign of
the Church “still lives in pain” (18), is more closely identified with reason, in the rest of the
collection it is distinct from reason, which is nothing more than institutionalized thought no
longer driven by a primitive energy. Thought is not only alive but eternal. In “The Lucky Coin”
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the soul “can make make a man afraid/ And yet thought will endure” (3-4). In “The Jewels,”
“ordinary thought prevail[s]/ In all this knocking of the ribs/ And the dead heat of mortal haste”
(9-11); in “Summer Lightning” “every thought at last/ Must stand in our own light/ Forever,
sinning without end” (34-36), which emphasizes both thought’s immortality and its opposition to
institutionalized spirituality. In “Night and Morning,” where “thought still lives in pain” (18)
after the “saints had their day at last” (17), and “Mortal Pride,” the restriction of thought is an
occasion of suffering.
When thought of all our thought has crossed
The mind in pain, God only knows
What we must suffer to be lost,
What soul is called our own.
Before the truth was hid in torment,
With nothing but this mortal pride,
I dreamed of every joy on earth
And shamed the angel at my side. (1-8)
Thought here as in elsewhere is associated with freedom and joy; but to live with thought and
truth is also to suffer in other ways, as Clarke will elaborate in the remainder of the collection.
Clarke’s most sustained engagement with the notion of thought as I articulate it here is in
the oft-cited “The Straying Student,” which again is assumed to be a contemplation of the
conflict between faith and reason. The temptress, after all, arrives in the middle of Mass to draw
the student away. Our first clue is the word “vision” (6) in the first stanza, which recalls the
vision in “Wandering Men” and associates the woman not with hard reason but with inspired
enlightenment. The student describes his training under her care:
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I learned the prouder counsel of her throat,
My mind was growing bold as the light in Greece;
And when in sleep her stirring limbs were shown,
I blessed the noonday rock that knew no tree:
And for an hour the mountain was her throne,
Although her eyes were bright with mockery. (18-23)
She is not merely the light of reason but the stuff of dreams, of vision. The light that the woman
brings is brighter than that which shines in classrooms; and in the next stanza the poet makes it
clear that her influence is separate from that of his training at Salamanca (a place in Spain where
many priests trained before returning to Ireland), which he associates with reason rather than
thought: “They say I was sent back from Salamanca/ And failed in logic, but I wrote her praise/
Nine times upon a college wall in France” (24-26). The freedom she represents is in stark
contrast to the place from which he came. The student, who returns to Ireland a priest, fears that
back in his home country he will lose her influence; like Kavanagh’s Father Mat he understands
well the pressures faced by a spokesman for the Church. At the end of the poem he is still
reveling in the world she has opened to him,
And yet I tremble lest she may deceive me
And leave me in this land, where every woman’s son
Must carry his own coffin and believe,
In dread, all that the clergy teach the young. (30-36)
Ireland and the priesthood, overlaid with death, are enemies to thought; the price the studentturned-priest pays for his affair with thought is that he now understands that he will carry his
own coffin; in an inverted version of what I will discuss at greater length in my reading of
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“Repentance,” thought in the form of this woman brings the student from a state of doomed
childhood to an enlightened adulthood that now allows him to see the chains by which his mind
is threatened to be bound upon his return.
Night and Morning fluctuates between examples of the pain and frustration of hedged
thought, desire, and even faith, and images of wildness and freedom that threaten to undermine
and eventually destroy the institutions which bind us. Although Night and Morning does focus
more sharply on the need for intellectual freedom versus the sexual freedom of Pilgrimage,
sexuality continues to play a role in the collection; in “The Penal Law” it doubles as a
reaffirmation of fleshly freedom and as a metaphor for intellectual freedom. At just four lines it
is the shortest poem in the collection and also its most defiant.
Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find
A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart
All that the clergy banish from the mind,
When hands are joined and head bows in the dark. (1-4)
The burned book references censorship; the title of the poem recalls a time when the practice of
faith was illegal; and the description of stolen moments between lovers reasserts Clarke’s
concerns over the extinction of love under Church rule. The inclusion all three of Clarke’s major
areas of repression—intellectual, spiritual, and physical—come together in this poem not
necessarily to restate his views on them individually but to undermine the very idea of total
repression. Most of Clarke’s poems are pessimistic on this note; a look at the next poem in the
collection, “Her Voice Could Not Be Softer,” in which a woman’s guilty conscience ends a
stolen embrace, is more typical of them. But “The Penal Law” is less interested in the strength of
repression than in the failure of its totality. “Lovers will find/ A hedge-school for themselves and
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learn by heart” (emphasis added). Clarke does not offer here what one could call hope, but he
does attest that for all their attempts to control real human beings, systems of oppression will
always on some level come to failure. Both of Clarke’s mid-century collections hang on that
failure as evidence that life remains despite efforts to stamp it out. In some ways, especially as
“The Penal Law” specifically references censorship, Clarke’s life-remnant is a larger metaphor
for the survival of poetry at this crucial juncture in Ireland’s history. Poets will write lively,
imaginative, socially relevant, well-crafted poetry (though perhaps “in the dark,” published in
small presses or not at all). Similarly, lovers in the nostalgic poem “The Lucky Coin” allow their
love to flourish despite the threats it poses to their standing in the Church.
On Nephin many a knot was tied,
The sweet in tongue made free there,
Lovers forgot on the mountain-side
The stern law of the clergy
That kiss, pinch, squeeze, bug, smack denied,
Forgot the evil, harm
And scandal that comes closer, lying
In one another’s arms. (32-40)
Theirs are marriages sanctioned by nothing but mutual desire and love, and with the mention of
Nephim, pre-Christian social practices.
In “Martha Blake,” a woman’s bodily desire to experience ecstasy cannot be completely
curtailed by the Church’s tight controls on sexual expression. The poet describes Martha’s daily
ritual of partaking of the Eucharist in terms normally reserved for unsanctioned romantic
encounters. Before the town properly wakes up, Martha “dares/ The silence of the street” (3-4).
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“O then her soul/ Makes bold in the arms of sound” (7-8). For her the morning Mass is a stolen
pleasure. In the second stanza the poet cautions that despite her immoderate nature, Martha is
still bound through obedience to the Church. “Her well-taught knees are humble” (10). Then the
Mass begins, and in stanzas three through six Martha partakes in the Eucharist with a sensuality
that directly conflicts with nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperatives for asceticism and
more closely reflects the medieval spiritual sensuality of the feminine mystics.
She trembles for the Son of Man,
While the priest is murmuring
What she can scarcely tell, her heart
Is making such a stir;
But when he picks a particle
And she puts out her tongue,
That joy is the glittering of candles
And benediction sung. (25-32)
Clarke’s use of “t” and “p” sounds through the stanza heightens the sense of urgency and
suggests that Martha’s desires are hard and insistent (particularly when the priest “picks a
particle”) rather than soft and yielding. 37 This fourth stanza marks the height of her ecstasy; in
stanza six Martha falls into a post-coital calm. The entire poem, then, mimics the stolen sexual
encounter, but in placing it in a religious context not only gives Clarke a metaphor that
conveniently criticizes the Church for its sexual asceticism, but lends credibility to the notion of
sensuality as integral to a real, lived faith. And there is nothing the Church can do to repress it;
37
Clarke’s attention to sound, including his use of consonance and assonance, is well established in Clarke
criticism. See Maurice Harmon and Gregory Schirmer in particular.
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“For soul can never be immodest/ Where body may not listen” (47-48). The penultimate stanza
affirms that this is a poem is less about the need to express physical desire (and the desperation
that might lead one to find it in the Church, the very place it is least welcome) than its free
movement inside the experience of faith. Here we also see an undermining of the faith/reason
dichotomy; instead of elevating reason above faith (which critics often mistake for dogmatism,
which is the real target), Clarke frees Martha from both a stifled, conventional faith and the
limits of reason.
The flame in heart is never grieved
That pride and intellect
Were cast below, when God revealed
A heaven for this earth. (53-56)
Here the revelation of a physically present God (which recalls the final line of “Night and
Morning,” “God was made man once more” [36]) becomes a flame in Martha’s heart; the symbol
of the wild, bright light that upsets established norms will recur in two other poems in the
collection (“Summer Lightning” and “The Jewels”) that offer a wildness which cannot be
contained. It is the energy necessary for life itself. Martha goes to daily Mass not out of a sense
of devotion but because “to begin the common day/ She needs a miracle” (57-58).
In contrast to the freedom Martha Blake finds in stolen Eucharistic ecstasy are poems in
Night and Morning which detail the pain that comes from stricture of any kind. Immediately
following “Martha Blake” is “Repentance,” which references Clarke’s childhood experience of
innocence lost described in his memoir The Black Church. In it the priest hearing the seven-yearold’s confession forces Clarke to confess masturbation, a sin for which at that point he had no
knowledge. In a distortion of the Genesis story of the transition from innocence to the knowledge
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of sin, it is the priest that ushers the child into the realm of sin, not the devil. In the first stanza of
“Repentance” the child lives in a world of physical beauty and in it finds both joy and energy for
living.
When I was younger than the soul
That wakes me now at night, I saw
The mortal mind in such a glory—
All knowledge was in Connaught.
I crossed the narrows of earthward light,
The rain, noon-set along the mountain,
And I forgot the scale of thought,
Man’s lamentation, Judgment hour
That hides the sun in the waters. (1-9)
As in Martha Blake the joyful state Clarke describes is between faith and reason, found not in the
conflict between the two but in a third space undictated by the demands of either as expressed in
stifling institutions (the “scale of thought,” the “Judgment hour”). This is a spiritual ecstasy (it is
“such a glory”) based on the earth-bound experience of freedom. But in the second stanza St.
Patrick drives out “a crowd/ Of fiends that roared like cattlemen” (11-12), or the serpents that
doubly represent the devil and the kind of wildness the poet describes in the first stanza. The
figure of the snake in this poem is Clarke’s introduction of the ambivalent nature of wildness; for
here the snake is both associated with the freedom of unmediated earthly joy and the snatcher of
that joy through the actions of the priest. The figure of Patrick also brings to mind the theme of
foreign invasion of Pilgrimage; only this time, as in “The Marriage Night,” the promise of a new
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spirituality quickly becomes an occupation. The joy of the first stanza quickly turns into pain in
the remaining stanzas.
I count the sorrowful mysteries
Of earth before the celebrant
Has turned to wash his mouth in wine
The soul is confined to a holy vessel,
And intellect less than desire.
O I will stay to the last Gospel,
Cupping my heart with prayer:
Knuckle and knee are all we know
When the mind is half despairing.
The mind (“all knowledge was in Connaught” [4]) and spirit, once satisfied in the freedom of the
countryside, are now rent and the speaker must seek refuge in ritual; and unlike Martha Blake, he
has not yet learned to circumvent the institution’s repressions by allowing sensuality to abound
in ritual. The priest’s cutting down of the flesh ensures that for him.
Two poems, “Summer Lightning” and “The Jewels” offer portraits of the unpredictable,
unfettered element of wildness that turns the whole world upside down and backwards. The
“Summer Lightning” is akin to the metaphor of foreign invasion so ubiquitous in Pilgrimage and
present to a certain extent in “Repentance,” but offers both more promise and more potential for
deadliness. Like other of Clarke’s poems (particularly “The Young Woman of Beare”), “Summer
Lightning” is divided into two parts, though not equally. In the first three stanzas, the lightning is
hardly a welcome visitor; to those whose folly it uncovers, it brings devastation. The world turns
on its head as night becomes a perverse version of day.
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The heavens opened. With a scream
The blackman at his night-prayers
Had disappeared in blasphemy,
And iron beds were bared;
Day was unshuttered again,
The elements had lied,
Ashing the faces of mad men
Until God’s likeness died. (1-8)
Clarke’s use of “the heavens” suggests that the lightning is the instrument of God’s wrath; the
blacksmith is possibly quite literally struck by lightning, as he is not merely revealed but
destroyed as well. At first it appears that the lightning’s target as an instrument of God is his
likeness, for the next stanza finds “Napolean took his glittering vault/ To be a looking-glass” (910). The sin is the attempt to exceed earthly limitations and become God, Paradise Lost-style.
Akin to a photo-negative, whereas most of Clarke’s other poetry is expressly about God
becoming man, this half of the poem seem to read as the perversion of the equation—man
becomes God—and the delusion of “mad men.” This reference to madness, along with the iron
beds, which would have been typical in a mental institution, the mention of syphilis (which
causes dementia), cells (12), and the “dormitory” in line 17 point to Clarke’s own stay in a
mental asylum a decade earlier. It also reasserts Clarke’s preoccupation with notions of freedom
and restriction. The patients, including “the unfrocked priest” (28), like Martha Blake and the
lovers in “The Penal Law,” will find a way out of their cells; but the degree of incarceration here
is so extreme that their only option is madness. The indictment of the sin of pride, then, is
overwhelmed by the lightning’s revelation of the dehumanizing effects of extreme restriction. In
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“Summer Lightning” it is not a matter just of hegemonic, cultural limitation but of total physical
control, so that the mental institution becomes a metaphor for its less extreme version in State
and Church. The patient roster crosses socioeconomic lines, as the inmates include an emperor
(Napolean), a nobleman (Lord Mitchell), and both Catholic (Christopher O’Brien) and Protestant
(James Dunn) commoners. The implication is that cultural repression affects the whole social
fabric. Although the lightning reveals the pride of the mad men (at least in Napolean’s case), the
poem is more sympathetic to them, finding their humanity in their likeness to God, not in their
eschewal of it. Clarke’s use of “until” in the last line of the first stanza quoted above—which
indicates that the lightning is an assault meant to kill what the inmates have left of their
humanity—anticipates the second portion of the poem, just two stanzas long, in which the poet
expresses sympathy both for their responses to restriction and the death of their spirituality.
When sleep has shot the bolt and bar,
And reason fails at midnight,
Dreading that every thought at last
Must stand in our own light
Forever, sinning without end:
I pity, in their pride
And agony of wrong, the men
In whom God’s likeness died. (40-48)
Here again the conflict is not between reason and faith, as reason cannot survive the asylum any
better than faith can. Only thought—which is outside of both faith and reason—can go on,
though thought here is a sin, which is appropriate to a place where physical restriction is based,
essentially, on thought-crime. Thought is not only outside faith and reason but enemies to the
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dogmatic versions of each. In this way mental illness presents a challenge both in ways that
threaten Church and State, hence incarceration. If ever there were an ultimate cost for the
exercise of freedom (save for execution), this is it.
But in this the second portion of the poem, lightning represents not indictment but
enlightenment, and not the kind that we associate with the Age of Reason. The penultimate
stanza presents “thought” as story-telling, music, and comedy; lightning reveals not only the
patients’ oppressions but their stolen joy between the bars of their cells.
Flight beyond flight, new stories flashed
Or darkened with affliction
Until the sweet choir of Mount Argus
Was heard at every window,
Was seen in every wing. The blackman
Kept laughing at his night-prayers
For somebody in white had taken
His photograph downstairs. (32-39)
The reference to photography becomes explicit in this stanza, though this time it is a joke: no
longer allowed the distinction of human as made in the image of God, the patient gets to be
created in the image of himself by someone whose clothes make him the photographic opposite
of the blacksmith. The flash of the bulb is akin to the lightning in that it is supposed to be
neutral; it reveals both laughter and laugh-lines. Both lightning and photograph intrude on a
world that its guardians mean no one to see, and reveal the life-taking consequences of mental
and physical incarceration as well as the irrepressible resistance to those limitations. As in “Penal
Laws,” which references censorship, Clarke includes artistic expression as one of those
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irrepressible forms of resistance, so that “Summer Lightning” is not just about mental asylums
and religious repression but also about the survival of art in such circumstances. His poetry was,
after all, written in a period of Irish history known best for its cultural and spiritual oppressions;
Clarke’s own poetry is the laughter and song of the man shackled to his proverbial bed.
“The Jewels,” the last poem Clarke published until Ancient Lights appeared in 1955,
comes right after “Summer Lightning” and addresses a culture’s use of history. Again Clarke
presents a force outside of faith and reason that like the foreign invader can bring both further
repression or freedom, depending on how it arrives and how one uses its power. In this case, that
force is love. Like “Summer Lightning,” love in the beginning of the poem is destructive; but
even in the overzealous act of disassembly it
The crumbling centuries are thrust
In hands that are too frail for them
And we, who squabble with our dust,
Have learned in anguish to dissemble.
Yet taken in the darkest need
Of mind, no faith makes me ashamed.
Whether the breath is foul or sweet
The truth is still the same. (1-8)
Although the sense of the stanza is that the jewels turn to dust, Clarke makes the hands frail
instead of the jewels, which references both human frailty and calls into question the identity of
“dust” in line three. Is it the dust of the “crumbling centuries” or that of the “hands” that handle
them? History in these first lines is both a treasure and curse, both eternal and mortal. Love here
is possessive. We “squabble” over history, fight over our inheritance to the point of taking apart
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what is already barely holding together. Clarke’s own complicated relationship with cultural
inheritance comes through in this poem, and in this period of overt questioning of the aims and
outcomes of the Revival the poem stands as a sharp criticism of the tug-of-war between cultural
nationalists and dystopianists like Kavanagh and Clarke himself (arguably Clarke implicates
himself through the use of the first person plural). Love for one’s history and culture is not the
sin here—for that he cannot be ashamed—but the manner of its expression. The third stanza
presents love in its best form, which is in its ability to transcend the petty uses of its power.
We are undone
Within the winking of an eyelid,
The very heavens are assailed
And there is nothing can be hidden:
Love darts and thunders from the rail. (27-31)
In this stanza love evades religion in the reference to the rail (and in “greed of religion” (26)
earlier in the stanza). Like the lightning in the previous poem in the collection, love reveals
everything. This time love invades the heavens, a reversal of heaven’s assault in “Summer
Lightning.” Again in the last stanza we see love overwhelm both faith and reason, and again
Clarke associates it with youth, as he did in “Repentance.”
The misery of common faith
Was ours before the age of reason.
Hurrying years cannot mistake
The smile for the decaying teeth,
The last confusion of our sense.
But O to think, when I was younger
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And could not tell the difference,
God lay upon this tongue. (32-40)
Clarke’s reference to the Eucharist recalls Martha Blake’s transcendent experience of the Mass
and elevates spirituality—informed by love—to a place outside of the “greed of religion” in the
previous stanza that “makes us old/ Before our time” (26-27). The real opposition in this
collection is not faith and reason but something more like Blake’s Innocence and Experience,
making Clarke one of Blake’s direct descendants. 38 Youth exists in a space that precedes the
categories of faith and reason and is where Clarke’s ideal spirituality—that which is bound by
nothing and carried by love allowed to flourish without restraint—resides. In this poem as in the
others, however, the forces that allow that spirituality to thrive continue to survive after
childhood, though they can be harder to locate within the structures that would limit their
powers. In her discussion of Clarke’s figure of the frustrated lover, Beth Timson sees Clarke as
romantic in a more pedestrian sense of the term. “For always . . . Clarke is the unquenchable
romantic spirit who believes in the existence and the power of love . . .” (69). On a larger scale,
what Clarke’s poems profess is an undying belief in the ability of love, thought, and artistic
expression to survive the oppressions of religious and cultural institutions, despite the high cost
to the individual for following the eternal vision. Clarke’s pessimism cannot overwhelm his own
vision of a flower emerging from a tiny crack in solid stone.
38
A good deal of work has been done on the Blake’s influence on Yeats. Although it is outside of the scope
of th is c hapter, th e r elationship b etween C larke a nd B lake, an d t he question o f h ow m uch Y eats f iltered th at
influence is a topic that deserves further study.
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INSIDE THE FOX’S COVERT: BLANAID SALKELD
May Morton’s 1951 poem “Spindle and Shuttle” recounts a history of Ireland not to be
found elsewhere in literature of the period. Not only does it mark time through industry rather
than politics (or through the politics of Industry), the poem does so exclusively from the
perspective of the women who work in that industry, writing a history of women (“It was my
mother’s cloth, her mother’s too” [line 9]). The poem’s conceptual organization around the
mechanics of weaving—opposing forces as engines of creation—and its alliterative focus on the
physical sounds of weaving foregrounds a sense of perpetual work and activity against the
dominant literary theme of stagnation and famine that dominates the work of male poets of the
mid-twentieth century. Whereas Kavanagh’s Maguire from “The Great Hunger” runs fallow
circles around his field, the women of “Spindle and Shuttle” both witness and fuel the emergence
of modernization in the weaving industry. But Morton’s poem is not a hymn to progress; it also
contains a scathing indictment of the abuses of power that come with technological
advancement. Advances in weaving, according to Morton’s poem, have the potential to both
liberate and enslave female (and child) laborers. In the days of cottage weaving,
The old blind woman with
Her spinning-wheel beside the open door
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Would spin and spin with fingertips with eyes
Matching the spindle’s hunger to her own
Till each was satisfied; but she could feel
The warm sun on her face, the kindly wind
Lay gentle hands upon her faded hair. (51-57)
In the new age of factory weaving—here referring to the Industrial Revolution—workers are free
of the drudgery of cottage-weaving but become “wage slaves”
And women hurry, shapeless in their shawls
In multitudes made nameless, to the mill,
Some young, some old, and many great with child:
All wage slaves of the new industrial age,
All temple vestals of the linen god. (72-76)
But then, as the industry takes hold,
The spinner and the weaver in the mill
Now earn a living and have time to live,
Children whose mothers were half-timers once
Untouchables in factory in school
May learn to play and even play to learn
And think of spindle as a word to spell.
Mill-girls have shed their shawl-caccoons and shine
Brighter than butterflies. (104-111)
Thus “Spindle and Shuttle” is neither traditionalist nor pro-modernization. Its task is not a larger
ideological stance on modernization as better or worse than a traditional rural economy but a
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contemplation of the potentialities—positive and negative—of technological advancement in
industry, weaving back in a traditionalist, timeless notion of dialectics (“Good twined with evil,
evil twined with good” [102]).
Two other female Irish poets of this period, Temple Lane and Rhoda Coghill, also offer
perspectives that differ significantly from male ones of the period. Lane’s “O’Driscoll Courting”
inserts women’s refusals into the narrative of Church-sanctioned frigidity. The poem’s female
protagonist is wedged between a man’s insistence upon marriage and the Church’s insistence
upon purity to the extent that she must decide between the man’s threats of suicide and her own
moral death. Despite the fact that her decision to spurn the man’s advances signals her
submission to the authority of the Church, Temple gives voice to her refusal rather than
presenting it as an inevitability. The speaker of the poem is the male lover, so that his female
object resists possession as both body and symbol. “My mind had her, but her soul was free”
(line 64). The speaker attempts to recover some utility for her actions but can only admit to her
power in the form of a warning:
I, eighty years, tell any lad to-day,
When Faith has left you for lust, have sense!
If you should harm a girl who starts to pray
You’ll never make your soul for pounds or pence—
Virgins in Heaven control great influence. (72-76)
Similarly, the speaker of Coghill’s “Flight” echoes Austin Clarke’s Queen Gormlai in her need
to escape men’s violence and the necessity of boldness in the face of a lack of shelter. Having
avoided the road that makes her feel the “raking of the flesh,/ the harrow of love’s remembered
violence” (45-6),
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today she takes that road in the late afternoon
when already across the bloodshot sky the rooks
are blinking home. She is no longer afraid while
the year lasts, knowing the watchdog daylight
whines in November on a shortened leash.
Blanaid Salkeld is one of the least-read of mid-twentieth-century Irish poets, but
compared to Devlin, MacGreevy, Clarke, Kavanagh, and Beckett, her published poetry is
voluminous in both the number of publications and the length of each. Beginning with Hello,
Eternity (1933), she continued to publish at regular intervals throughout mid-century, with The
Fox’s Covert (1935), A Dubliner (1943), . . .the engine is left running (1937) and Experiment in
Error (1955). Despite her immersion in the cultural life of Ireland as a long-standing actress at
the Abbey, her poetry belies a deep sense of isolation, not only as a woman-poet writing in the
margins of domestic obligation, but as a chronically under-read poet wondering aloud if the tree
she felled would ever be found. Certainly this sense of disconnectedness and alienation makes
her poetry resonant with that of Devlin the cosmopolitan, MacGreevy the returned and broken
soldier, Clarke the scorned outcast, Kavanagh the misunderstood peasant-poet, and Beckett the
exiled ultra-modernist; but Salkeld’s place as a woman and mother in an upper-middle-class
Anglo-Irish marriage during a time in which gender roles were rigidly prescribed in culture and
in law as part of the conservatism following independence (D’Arcy 99-100) puts her at yet
another remove from opportunities for distribution and serious critical reception.
One could argue that, together with Devlin, MacGreevy, and Beckett, Salkeld’s mix of
romanticism, classicism and European-style modernism, along with her use of and wariness of
form, represents a set of peculiarly Irish responses to Modernism. This Irish modernism earns the
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designation by its engagement with the changes of modern life and anxieties over the particular
forms of expression best suited to those changes, but becomes particularly Irish in its refusal to
embrace any one generally-sanctioned approach to the exclusion of others. Certainly no poetry is
completely exclusive in approach, and the best of modernism, high and low, experiments with
different means of expression within the poem. However Irish modernists like Salkeld are more
wary of becoming trapped by artistic isms and less committed to those with which they
experiment. The Fox’s Covert gives voice to this undercurrent of indecision (which becomes
more of a stance itself for all Irish modernists rather than an indication of inconsistency).
Perhaps Salkeld’s oeuvre stands on its own rather than fitting into of the categories that
generally emerge in studies of poetry of this period. Her adherence to form—always the
sonnet—and full embrace of modernization make her alien to the modernist camp; the poetry’s
insistence on the now rather than the past, either historic or mythic, separates it from Revivalism
or the imperatives of rootedness in the neo-classicism and neo-Romanticism of Clarke and
Kavanagh; and it is entirely too hopeful and defiant in tone to sing in the same angst-filled
register as the other poets in this study. Salkeld’s poetry comes closest to that of Austin Clarke in
its preoccupation with the notion of freedom and the beginnings of a robust Irish literary
feminism in poetry, with far less restraint and far more bravado. Her insistence upon possibility
is in concert with a wider contemplation in her work of notions of freedom against the forces of
enclosure. Her poetry resonates with that of Clarke, Devlin, and Kavanagh in its resistance to
stagnation and call for alternative frameworks of life and growth, but hers tackles stagnation in
relation to space and time. Salkeld’s foregrounding of enclosure is expressly feminist and calls
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forth the forms of spatial restraint the speaker suffers as a professional woman also expected to
maintain the physical space which contains her. 39
Clarke and Devlin may have set a number of their poems in cities, but with the exception
perhaps of Devlin’s “Communication from the Eiffel Tower,” neither poet incorporates modern
technology as effortlessly as Salkeld, who regularly includes airplanes, trams, cars, radio, and the
cinema in her poems. Anticipating Eavan Boland, Salkeld’s Ireland is largely suburban rather
than rural; and travel between the city and that suburban home by train not only connects
professional and domestic life but brings modernization to the forefront of her poetry. But
Salkeld is no futurist. Emerging technology is merely part of the physical and cultural landscape
she incorporates. Like Morton’s “Spindle and Shuttle,” in “A Propos of Radio” from . . . the
engine is left running, for instance, the radio itself is morally neutral, to be used either as an
agent of corruption or of cultural continuity. It also stands out as an unusually optimistic poem,
particularly in comparison to those of Salkeld’s contemporaries. The poem takes place in a taxi,
where the driver vocalizes knee-jerk conservative misgivings about recent cultural changes.
Salkeld’s use of language more suited to clergy giving a radio address than a taxi driver chatting
with a passenger reveals her real target.
‘A vulgar decade,’ jerks the driver,
‘Coarse song, lewd dance, and (cold conniver)’
‘The literary realist,’
‘Makes patter, lest a shrug be missed;’
‘Perversion thieving in the pantry,’
39
Salkeld’s interrogations of enclosure put her in good company with contemporary feminist writers such as
Virginia Woolf (particularly in A Room of One’s Own) and Gertude Stein (Tender Buttons).
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‘And blasphemy the speech of gentry.’ (5-10)
But the speaker does not answer pessimism with more pessimism, nor does she engage in a
polarized debate about the evils or promise of progress. Instead she aligns radio with cultural
continuity and preservation, the opposite of those things that driver fears.
Hush, driver. For, one night last week,
There was plain chant, exact and meek,
Where gentle monks with bated breath
Before high mysteries of Faith
Sang clear their Christmas Kyries.
As in Morton’s poem, we see two possibilities for radio here, but the real work of the poem is to
recast the concept of ‘progress’ as something more like possibility, expansiveness, and openness.
Salkeld signals her intention to unclasp usual binaries by opening with the image of snow as
bringing life rather than its usual role as signifier of death and dormancy.
Through the fog our progress is slow:
We know but cannot see the snow
That puts liveliness in the blood
Against this muffled evening’s mood. (1-4)
Similarly, the speaker counters the driver’s lamentations with an altogether different assessment
of the changes of modernization, though with a qualification (“serious men,/ Sincere, devout;
some wrong” [16-17]) that suggests that Salkeld privileges possibility over the good or the
moral, a decidedly secular stance which ironically closes with the speaker’s echoed “Amen.”
These are the good, expansive days—
With growth in them: serious men,
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Sincere, devout; some wrong—what then?—
A live, truth-loving Age.
Amen.
The cold driver twice hums, Amen. (16-21)
In The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove, Lesley
Wheeler discusses female poets who treat the lyric itself as an enclosure (1) and finds the very
notion of enclosure as particularly salient for women who experience the domicile as both prison
and shelter (6) and whose bodies act as real or potential biological enclosures. In this context we
can read Salkeld’s use of the sonnet form as a protective form of concealment.
The appeal of an enclosed mode to these poets lies in its ability to armor: it
creates a walking shelter, enabling each woman to experiment with the voices,
attitudes, and scenes the lyric might contain. Since reticence has been a womanly
virtue, its practice can be a reassuring mask of femininity as well as an evasive
one of androgyny. (Wheeler 11)
Wheeler reads the “elisions of modernism” as akin to “proper female discretion” (8); the tension
between Salkeld’s gender-bending in The Fox’s Covert and its insistence upon the sonnet is not
merely a matter of strict form allowing freed content but perhaps of gaining the reader’s
permission to experiment. Her male counterparts, after all, from Yeats to Pound to Eliot (and to a
lesser extent, Devlin and MacGreevy), could arguably take greater risks in terms of overt formal
experimentation. For Salkeld only social class gave her an edge in publishing; in terms of
nationality and gender her poetry stood headlong against the wind. Kathy D’Arcy, in her article
about Irish women poets of Salkeld’s period briefly details the ways women’s autonomy was
curtailed both culturally and in law, and observes that three of the women she discusses were in
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their 50s—just past child-rearing—before their first works were published (D’Arcy 100). As
Wheeler observes in American poetry, Salkeld’s sonnets remind the reader that for a woman
poet, as opposed to a male poet for whom enclosure acts as a temporary womb to incubate his
poetic achievement, enclosure is permanent (Wheeler 12-13). One might be tempted to read her
use of the sonnet as a pining for classicism, as we find in Devlin and Clarke, but other than one
stanza that memorializes Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (XC), nothing else in her poetry points
us in this direction. Certainly she calls forth Classical mythical figures such as Proteus and
Apollo, but her poetry is more overwhelmingly—and gladly—set in the now.
While Hello, Eternity! heedlessly demands freedom, the intricate weavings of The Fox’s
Covert layer professional responsibility, love, partnership, and motherhood as conditions that
both enable and oppress her desire for freedom. The long poem also presents a nuanced reading
of enclosure in which domicile is both prison and sanctuary, most often at the same time.
Salkeld’s ability to communicate joy and suffocation in the same poem, and indeed in the same
physical spaces, gives voice to the impossible nature of existence as a mother, wife, actor, and
poet in her particular cultural circumstances. In addition the speaker’s identity shifts back and
forth between trapper and trapped, subject and object, penetrator and penetrated, as the title of
the poem suggests; the fox is both hunter and hunted, where the covert is a necessary condition
of being something’s prey. Salkeld amplifies these shifting binaries by including a plethora of
other predator/prey relationships throughout the collection, all to which she aligns herself in
various ways: eagle and mouse, man and trout, human couple and groundhog, cats and birds.
Salkeld is not content, however, to confine her playfulness with notions of enclosure to
her speaker and many objects. The reader, too, is simultaneously constrained by form—she
writes exclusively in sonnets—and frustrated by the promise of structure never fulfilled, despite
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elaborate clues that turn up dead ends. The Fox’s Covert’s opening section consists of seven
stanzas named for the solfège (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si), or notes of the scale. Each stanza
articulates a theme that the reader is invited to look for in the larger work; after all, the notes of
the scale are the building blocks for the symphony. As it happens these themes indeed emerge in
The Fox’s Covert as a whole. The “Ut” stanza, which is addressed to a third party, perhaps the
reader (“Quite stoop your heads down first, before you enter” [5]) describes the fox’s covert, and
her choice of italics and specific reference to the poem’s title becomes an announcement for its
status as topic-stanza for the entire poem. In it the fox’s evolutionary status as predator is
overwhelmed by his condition as prey.
The hid fox needs no guile; he goes forth slinking
From hunger’s lash, when he would dumbly blink—
His cramped limbs, numb—through twisted foliage chink,
Chuckling at death, although from death his shrinking. (1-4)
The fox is not only confined by its hideout—which is the extension of the threat of the hunt—but
by its own body, which Salkeld describes in inwardly-curling terms. The covert creates the
template for the shape of the body and mind to the extent that in order for readers to enter it they
must contort their bodies and psyches in the manner of the fox.
Quite stoop your heads down first, before you enter:
A secret spot, the fox’s covert, greenly veiled;
Leave alert fear of the hunt, like a sheath, empaled
Without, on some thorn-bush that guards his center. (Ut 5-8)
The stanza also signals the poem’s radical departure from romantic notions of enclosure as
womb-like settings for male poetic inspiration, as in Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” in which poetic
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ravishment is a form of acceptable rape. In this poem fear penetrates the covert and there is no
offspring to justify the violation.
And yet The Fox’s Covert breaks out of its own enclosures, as the fox which is so
pathetically described in the “Ut” stanza shape-shifts into a woman whose increasing bravado
leads her to cavalierly declare that she will “play my harp about the ice-world” (LIX 1) Salkeld’s
enduring preoccupation with the kind of freedom characterized by a breaking of temporal bonds
undoes the imagery-structure of her own poem. The deadly nature of what is supposed to be a
place of refuge gives way in the poem to moments of an authentic sense of shelter and
nurturance. The poem expands rather than shrinks as it moves towards an unexpectedly
optimistic end, where the speaker urges her soul to “. . . Rise up, from my spirit’s house!/ Suffice
me, through all season—and my feet will run/ The urgent hill, until the laurelled grave be won—
“ (CLIV 5-7). Similarly, the theme of miscalculation and the disruption of real life by
imagination and memory in the “Re” stanza is both disputed and reaffirmed by opposing stanzas
later in the poem, where at times such a disruption is welcome and at others disturbing. “Mi”
describes the monotony of the daily grind which finds its powerful reflection in later stanzas
about work inside and outside the home but is countered by images of joyful productivity and
rich personal satisfaction. In “Fa” Salkeld sets up the Irish cailin/hag dichotomy as that between
the woman-poet (hag) who is envious of and repulsed by mostly younger women who fully take
on the trappings of femininity, and physical, rather than artistic, engagements with beauty.
Typewriter merry clicks,
crisp paper cheery flicks;
little paper, stiff and hard:
austerity suits a bard—
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young girls wear painted lip,
glow with good fellowship
...
My heart burns in breast:
ere anguish turn to spite,
gulp me, eternal Night! (Fa 1-6)
The pattern continues, and the poem turns out a speaker and protagonist who functions as both a
hag and a woman delighting in the superficial performances of gender, though resentment travels
through the poem and resurfaces whenever a younger, prettier face appears. “Sol” expresses
frustration with men’s contempt for women’s occupations (“I feel mocking flick/ of lids—backanger’s prick—/ towards hearth and private pen” [Sol 7-9]), while the male partner of the
speaker in the poem at large runs the gamut from all-absorbing love-interest to impenetrable
heart to oppressor to keeper of the hearth while the speaker works away from the home, and
other males figures in the poem (the merman, Apollo, Proteus, El Cid, Rodj) function as
fantasies and love-objects for her. The hags return in “La,” though this time they are the targets
of contempt instead of the young girls of “Fa;” already the poem is unraveling its own
declarations. The solfège ends with “Si,” which is the most durable of all the introductory
stanzas in that the condition of writing with virtually no audience emerges again and again in The
Fox’s Covert.
I saw a lone man
swaying his melodeon
at a crossroads;
...
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For long I wondered
at that one man
playing dance-music with none to hear him:
will he sway on, nor step draw near him
any morrow gaily, on the road to Howth? (Si 1-3; 7-11)
Though the melodeon-player is male Salkeld will insist on the particular condition of the artist
with no one to receive her art as specifically feminine, a hazard of the artist in general for certain
but acutely true for the woman poet.
Salkeld’s other, more fluid form of structuring uses the seasons. The imagery of first
thirteen stanzas of the main poem references autumn, with Samhain fires (I) and other mentions
of flame (III, IV), pheasant-hunting (V), bare trees (VI), and “bearded corn” (XIII). Salkeld also
creates a fusion of autumn imagery and a sense of pastness and aging, as the speaker visits a
former residence (VIII) and contemplates the ending of a long-standing rivalry with an elusive
pheasant (V). With stanza fourteen winter comes suddenly as an announcement (“Apollo! Winter
is” [XIV 1]) and lasts through stanza XXV with frigid, colorless imagery (“cold pirate limbs”
[XIV 5]; “chill doubt” [XVI 8] “uncontrolled chill loneliness” [XVIII 4]; “whitewashed stance”
[XIX 4]; “grey-misted, grey sharp cliffs [XXV 1]). A sense of loss, distinct from autumn
pastness in its finality, pervades the Winter stanzas, particularly pertaining to the death of
Salkeld’s brother, Padraic (XVII), but also to the impenetrable barriers to love and intimacy. In
stanza XVI the speaker is “lock[ed] . . . out” (2), and other stanzas speak of loneliness, isolation,
and indifference. In stanza XXVI “brightening swift spring,” the longest of the poem’s seasons,
(6) arrives as clearly as the first winter stanza. The imagery in these stanzas suggests the wetness
and new life of spring (“muddy floor” [XXVII 3]; “Anew their lives begin” [XXXII 7]; “when
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sings/ the robin” [XXXVI 4-5]; “fertile earth” [XL 3]; “rain treads upon the old drought” [XLIII
1]; “woods wild with cuckoo-calls” [LII 4]; “sweet pasturage” [LVI 5]). Stanzas XLI and XXXI
describe miraculous rebirths. The death and isolation of the winter stanzas gives way to a new
sense of life and connection. No longer closed off from her lover, the speaker experiences the
beginnings of reconnection. “A cleft bridge does not part/ Spirits. Your essence sunken into
mine” (XXIX 4-5). The birds, with their “pretty love-converse” (5) in stanza XXXII mirror their
affection. Stanza XLIV calls for forgiveness, and stanza that follows encourages the ‘us’ to
“storm across the void!” (XLV 7). In stanza LIX, however, winter returns as the “ice-world” (1),
dashing the reader’s expectation that spring will lead to summer. Instead the remaining stanzas
move wildly from season to season, as if stuck in a perpetually volatile spring. Rather than
moving into summer, the poem ends with an attempt to wrest itself from its own seasonal (and
therefore, temporal) constraints to move toward something freer.
Rise up, gold prodigy! Deliver, timeless one,
From temporal hopes, from dragons flaring through the boughs
Of dire enchantment! Rise up, from my spirit’s house!
Suffice me, through all seasons—and my feet will run
The urgent hill, until the laurelled grave be won—
Dim on the steep. (CLIV 3-8)
Ultimately a poem that wrestles with notions of enclosure and entrapment and that
transparently expresses the desire for freedom must at least make an attempt to shed its own
formal limitations. Salkeld is no anarchist, however, and the poem that so celebrates moments of
freedom also privileges rootedness and continuity. The poem, after all, and all of her poetry,
doggedly adheres to the eight-line sonnet form with variations only in rhyme. In terms of content
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Salkeld’s speaker both loves and loathes enclosure, so it is fitting that some of the poem’s
structures will stay intact while others will unravel.
More pointedly, Salkeld’s use of myth and mythical structures—as in the blurring of
boundaries between human and spirit worlds and the presence of spirtualized love-objects—
becomes a feminist reworking of the Revivalist recovery of myth. In Salkeld’s renderings the
object of romantic and poetic inspiration, the figure for whom no body exists in time and for
whom no particularities are either present or relevant, is male. 40 At times, as in the beginning
section of The Fox’s Covert and swimming through her other collections, he is the “merman.” In
other places in The Fox’s Covert he is Proteus, god of the sea; others Apollo, Sol, El Cid (a
historical figure Salkeld traps in time), or the mysterious and eastern Rodj. The history of the
relationship of the sea to Irish poetry is a long and complex one, but does not, until Salkeld,
conflict with the prevailing Western notion of water as a feminine element; here, in her
invocation of Proteus as male muse, Salkeld draws upon a neglected strain in classicism wherein
water is the domain of the male, where a male god is as likely to be the source of inspiration as a
female one. In stanza II we see that she not only submerges Proteus as timeless muse but that she
controls when he comes to her as well. “I’ll call, with the birds/ In flickered brightness about
me—cry out: Predict,/ Prophesy now to me” (II 5-7). But the speaker’s relationship with her
male muses does not merely create a reversal in which she now has the same kind of power a
male poet would normally hold. She is acutely aware that she cannot completely disable her
muses and that they still represent a form of potential threat to her as a woman. Even as the
40
As Kathy D’Arcy argues, “This ‘merman’ has been made to play the mute, passive role usually assigned
to female figures in Irish and other poetry of the time” (D’Arcy 109-10).
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speaker runs to the merman for refuge and inspiration (the “La” stanza, in which the merman
provides relief from the old women), she keeps a refuge from them, as in stanza IV.
From the cold and wild merman I have concealed well,
Motherly-wise.
A small flame-holiness, male envy cannot quell.
I feared much for the germ faint-quickening so deep,
And coiled about with day’s coarse circumstance. As sweep
Of furious floods gave tongue, I sighed a wordless spell
Through my Apollo-drunken veins, through my heart’s shell—
Shielding the prize! (IV 1-6)
Not only does the speaker recognize her male muses as potential threats in terms of their
excesses (“furious floods”), but her specific form of protection is that which only a woman can
exercise, that of the womb guarding a fetus. In this case the human fetus becomes her own muse,
the “flame-holiness” to which Proteus and the others can contribute but which does not belong to
them. Salkeld’s sexual metaphor is potent here: the merman is at once a partner in her inspiration
and a threat to it, just as a male partner is both a genetic contributor and, potentially, a threat to
the offspring that remains the sole domain of the female partner while in the womb. Even “male
envy,” or the wish for the male to possess what he has helped create but which is not his to
nurture, can penetrate the womb. The need for refuge from the source of inspiration is present
but far less potent in the male tradition of female muses. Thus Salkeld both recognizes the
persistence of potential male violence even in a reversal and asserts unique female power in the
form of her own muse-womb.
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Salkeld extends this notion of womb-as-power into stanza VIII, transforming the wombspace as one she protects to one that encloses her as well. The stanza describes an older woman
visiting a former home where as a younger woman she performed domestic work for her family,
and here memory becomes another object of protection. The house envelops the speaker’s
identity as home-keeper and as such acts as a sort of time capsule.
Soft slides the bolts. As through a gap in my own heart,
Entering in,
We look about us trembling.
Each thing is a part
Of my own substance, here. Earth floor: my busy feet
Drew in and gave out peace. I make devout retreat:
No word or look profane, no timid guilty start . . .
The Past, an island here and forever—leased to Art—
Oceaned from sin. (VII 1-6)
Significantly, the speaker’s male partner is part of the “we,” so that even in the presence of
potential male violence she allows this intrusion. The earlier stanzas, particularly those in the
poem’s first Spring, make generous use of this “we,” the male half of which is, in contrast to the
male muses, quite in time (in stanzas VII, VIII, and IX, for example, the male partner walks in
the present with the speaker to reminisce about a shared past). In the realm of human
relationships, then, her sanctuary is not as secure as it is in her role as poet. Notice, however, that
the “we” falls away as she describes a place that, while not completely secure, was her domain as
a woman. Her being and materiality merges with that of the house, and the poem has moved
from water (they’ve crossed a bridge to get to the house) to solid earth. To further strengthen the
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sense of woman as site of power and agency the next stanza takes a closer look at the bridge that
takes her to the house. It is “noble, but useless” (IX 5) as “the whole vale has a crowning ridge”
(6) that presumably could be used instead. Here is an object that exists merely for decoration,
and here Salkeld makes it male.
In the following stanzas the speaker whose carefully guarded yet penetrable domain is
inhabited by a male partner becomes preoccupied with making the intrusion go both ways, but as
a continuation of her recognition of the realities of male privilege the speaker finds that there is
no easy way into her partner’s corresponding space. In stanza X she slips out at night—the heavy
presence of the “we” in many of the surrounding stanzas makes her trip more conspicuously
solo—to gather a healing liquid from a “mystic herb” (X 4), taking care not to spill it in yet
another act of protection. In the next stanza she wishes that his sipping of the liquid whose
“essence [is] blent through wine with art” (XI 1), and which here becomes symbolic of home
(“Bear homewards then” [XI 1]) could “cure that hollow intolerant heart” (3), but it is not to be.
She wonders, “What if I keep on playing, through change, true love’s part?/ May I not claim his
comradeship, when spirits start/ Manning death’s ship?” (6-8). What is a declaration of mastery
with her male muses is a question when it comes to her real male partner, and she wonders if age
will help. As if to apologize for the impertinence of demanding equality—in this case
interpenetration—she asks in the next stanza, “Why wish to be his comrade?” (XII 1). She
answers, “It was the stars’ choice” (XII 1). She wouldn’t have chosen him, a “cynic with heart
moth-eaten” (XII 3), and yet the speaker detects something true under the layers of falseness that
form the male partner’s own protection, and what she finds is associated with water. “Past the
stern bones, though, I came on a cold grey flood,/ His untouched spirit” (XII 5-6). But their true
union is only possible with death: “The stars! We shall, at His Voice,/ Over their ashes—knit-up
211
in true equipoise,/ Shine unashamed!” (6-8). Salkeld’s yearning for the time- and spacetranscendent experience (and in this case, transcendence of gender barriers) emerges in this
stanza and recurs frequently through the rest of the poem.
The mention of cynicism in stanza XII is the key to the major content-related difference
between Salkeld’s poetry and that of the other mid-twentieth century Irish poets I discuss. It is
that despite her acknowledgement of the strictures afforded by her social position as a woman,
which expands in her poetry to address the more general, and that shared with her fellow poets,
sense of containment in this period, Salkeld’s speaker in The Fox’s Covert, and the speakers of
her other collections, doggedly refuses to abandon joy in exchange for cynicism. Repeatedly in
The Fox’s Covert Salkeld references the “soul,” and even as she describes enclosures of the
body, heart, and mind, the speaker maintains hope that this free aspect of human experience will
exercise that boundlessness, and that (perhaps more importantly), the changes of modernization
have created opportunities for this freedom to flourish.
Salkeld makes it clear, though, that while modernization provides the potential for
expansiveness, modernism does not necessarily do the same. In this sense she is in concert with
some moments in Devlin’s poetry (particularly in his poem “Now”). In stanza XXXVI Salkeld
specifically indicts modernism for its failure to appreciate beauty, which here she describes as
particularly wedded with a sense of joy.
What darks their eye to beauty? Makes the live heart twist
To mechanism
From splendors? Is it sin, the free-lance armorist—
Disrelishing true beauty’s permanence, when sings
Robin—spills fragrance—for the fly on beacon wings?
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Though Advent gloom, cold air, bare palsied boughs persist—
I cannot tire of those white gulls through the clear mist,
Spruce modernism! (1-8)
To be fair to modernism’s diversity, in this case Salkeld is taking specific aim at the strain of
modernism overly preoccupied, in her opinion, with form (“mechanism”). Salkeld’s
ecclesiastical language with her mention of sin and Advent takes on the cloak of religious
opposition to modernism but in the service of a more secular agenda. Beauty, which “persist[s],”
is akin to faith in its eternal nature (“permanence”). Her mixing of religious language and secular
subject matter, which we saw in “A Propos of Radio” from . . . the engine is left running attacks
her obvious target (here, a specific kind of modernism) while slyly taking aim at another one:
what is truly eternal is beauty and (in other places in the collection), the free soul, and these are
what oppose “spruce modernism,” not the stultifying structures of religion. In this way Salkeld’s
poetry resonates well with Kavanagh’s, for which the beauty of nature offers a panacea for the
deadness of the Church and its effects on rural life, and with MacGreevy’s, for which wilderness
takes on an eternal nature (see “Nocture of the Self-Evident Presence”). It also connects her with
Clarke’s romantic tendencies, though her embrace of modernization conflicts with the retrograde
quality of eighteenth-century European romanticism. In addition, her sense of modernism in this
poem does not aptly describe Yeats’s later modernist-leaning poetry, in that it does not abandon
the “white gulls through the clear mist” for “mechanism.”
When Salkeld’s poet breaks through to comment on its own voice in stanzas CXXXVI
through CXXXIX, the speaker-as-poet foregrounds her refusal to commit to any one poetic style,
a move that brings her into concert with the refusals of her fellow poets. After a series of stanzas
which are increasingly maudlin and transparent the speaker gets sick on her own excesses.
213
Thoughts, no—hysteria, no. Within a noble will’s
Easy control—
Authentic record of the common heart, fulfils
The best of poetry. And who falls short of life’s
Sharp intimacies, pitiful charities and strifes—
Will spin no lasting verse of dream. Failure distils
Heart-killing poison—(so, we must not fail)—that spills
Into the soul.
What makes Salkeld’s poetry resound with so much Irish poetry, however, not just Irish
modernism, is its insistence on a kind of “third way.” Like the Field Day’s creation of a “fifth
province,” 41 Kavanagh’s call for a differently Christocentric faith, and Beckett’s proposal of a
radical form of humanism based in physiology, Salkeld provides a third way for the problem of
the oppressive nature of relationship between men and women: siblinghood. In three places
Salkeld offers the model of the sibling relationship—specifically between brothers and sisters—
as a contrast to the tumultuous and unequal relationship between a woman and her male partner
and even that between the woman and her male muses. The speaker introduces her deceased
brother in stanza XVII.
I loved my brother, Padraic, as one loves one’s kind.
No he-and-she,
While he spun on his tales, and I spoke out my mind.
I loved Padraic, too, for his lofty Dante look—
41
See “Editorial I/Endodermis” of the inaugural issue of Crane Bag in spring of 1977, p. 4. Editors of Crane Bag,
who coined the term in this editorial, were Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hederman. Crane Bag was
instrumental in the Field Day enterprise.
214
Soft Gaelic speech—reverent hand on the printed book.
They buried him in the realm of our western wind. (1-6)
In this stanza Salkeld continues her male/female reversals as she gives the female speaker the
power of expressive, opinionated speech, and her brother the realm of the imagination. She
describes Padraic in feminine terms, with “soft” speech. The speaker and her brother are truly
one, in contrast to Salkeld’s descriptions of marriage. There is no inside and outside in this
stanza, nothing to penetrate or be penetrated, but rather one being with two parts. Salkeld’s
naming is also instructive, as it suggests siblinghood as an alternative to Irish notions of
masculinity and femininity and the relationship between the two. The speaker associates Padraic
with the west, with art, and with Gaelic, all three of which belong to the realm of the passive
Irish female in many nationalist formulations. Salkeld returns to siblinghood in stanza LI, again
calling to mind the specifically Irish nature of the gender binary with images from Ireland’s own
mythology.
She is fair, she is like Lir’s daughter, turned to swan—
Changed by a spell—
Sisterly guarding her brothers when dark tides ran
Harsh with the north wind. Soft the white sheltering wings,
The bosom of pity. Low her young laughter rings—
A little fiercely— (1-6)
While the female swan has “soft” wings, connecting it with conventional femininity, it is also
active and protective, unlike the victimized swan in Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats 102),
pointedly in its role as “fierce” guard of male siblings. Her magical transformation from human
to swan is significant here, too, because it proposes the need for transcendence as well as
215
recasting the role of magic as agent of social transformation rather than a protector of the
existing social order.
Stanza CXIV returns to the oneness of the brother-sister bond and the absence of an
outside to the relationship, but laments that it exists only in the realm of memory and
imagination.
I only knew the you-and-me of you, that sham
Golden but gone.
How do you seem with foes, familiars? Dazed I am,
Guessing you outside memory. To see a fly
Drag crystal wings along your hand delicately,
Linking you to the actual! Wait till I cram
My traits, stiff battered down into one cryptogram,
Dumb as stone! (1-8)
In order to be one with her brother, the speaker must sublimate his actual particularities apart
from her. Though the brother-sister bond is preferable to that between husband and wife, in that
it offers the possibility of true unity, the price of it is the death of the individual. There is also the
danger that the speaker will, in order to preserve the illusion, become guilty of privileging her
own personality over that of her brother. His death (“he-and-she” expilictly recalls the stanza
XVII; and the presence of a fly on a body further references death) creates a void into which the
only thing the speaker has available to fill it is herself. Thus Salkeld points to a danger in the
typical casting of male-female relationships not only in the way it plays out in real marriages but
also, in the absence of living bodies, the danger of its excesses in the world of imagination. As
much as she celebrates it elsewhere in her poetry, she admits here that imagination (and its close
216
partner, memory) is as susceptible to the excesses of personality as are actual human
relationships in real time. Salkeld does not develop this idea to the extent that Beckett does in his
formulation of a radical humanism based on living bodies, but her experiments with alternative
male-female relationships certainly begins to point in that direction. True male-female unity and
equality must happen in real time between real bodies; and because poetry relies on imagination
and memory, it cannot provide this ideal.
Like most of the Irish poets of this period, Salkeld foregrounds the act of writing and her
concerns about its proper execution. But Salkeld is explicit about her own material circumstances
in relation to writing, specifically what it means to write as a woman in a male-dominated
workforce. She addresses everyday conflicts between domestic responsibilities, practical
discomforts associated with moving among men during her routine work day, and larger issues
of audience and readership for someone who knows very well the paltry size of her poetry’s
distribution.
The Fox’s Covert begins, in the “Sol” stanza of the first section, with a description of
how men are both blinded to and contemptuous of the world in which women writers live. After
describing the sightlessness of men she encounters on her commute, the speaker feels “. . .
mocking flick/ of lids—back-anger’s prick—/ towards hearth and private pen” (Sol 7-9), where
the “prick” is an expression of both the speaker’s own contempt for the men and a statement of
the power of the men’s judgment.
In stanza XXII the speaker describes her work in terms of domestic work—weaving—in
ways that both highlight the gap inherent in such a comparison (the loom always produces; the
pen does not) and capture the mindless, empty nature of routine, whether domestic or
intellectual.
217
Four times a day, shuttled to and fro through the town;
From my bed to desk, from desk to bed—and no trace
Leave on day’s loom, nor with cipher of leaf or face
Sign the blank world. (XXII 5-8)
The stanza begins with the speaker’s lament that she has not been able to keep her houseplants, a
collection of herbs, alive, and the implication when coupled with a contemplation on the
monotony of writing is that she has failed in her role as life-giver and sustainer. Salkeld’s
wedding of writer’s block with an act of neglect leading to death both deepens the act of writing
as essential to life and trivializes the upkeep of the beautiful and supplementary. Despite the fact
that weaving is an arguably essential art, the keeping of herbs—and she describes them as
“fragrant”—is not. Is writing essential, like weaving, or merely decorative, as the cultivation of
herbs? The poem makes a case for both, and in doing so gets to the crux of the nature of any art
(domestic, public, or otherwise) as both essential and superfluous. Salkeld’s bringing together of
domestic and intellectual work makes this point possible; certainly there are other ways of
getting to a similar place, as other poets have proved, but Salkeld’s approach elevates domestic
work to the same dually inane and serious level of mind-work.
Stanza XXX contains a familiar moment for a reader of Salkeld, for even as she voices
frustration with writing as a woman in a man’s world she declares her enthusiastic intention to
keep writing.
‘I will praise my wild forebears, nor wish to abate
Passion or pride,
Though these undo me,’ she cried, to men’s silent hate.
‘These I loved, these am. Little wonder, my hope failed—
218
Following to free thought, where their natures prevailed.
I will rush to their spirits from the stroke of Fate!
I will nest with them in Eternity, elate.’
Slowly she died. (1-8)
While it is possible that “men’s hate” is simply the use of the (for the time) universally male
pronoun, her use of ‘men’ in its particularly gendered case in other places in the long poems
allows this stanza to be read as gendered as well. Again Salkeld returns to the idea of oneness,
though here she advances the argument that true unity happens only in death, a claim the speaker
disputes in stanza CXIV. More interestingly, however, is her dogged insistence upon claiming
the male canon as her heritage (I read “these” line three as a reference to both “wild forebears” in
line one and “men’s silent hate” in line three, as though the forebears wish not to be claimed by a
woman) though she has no right to do so as a female writer. It is an act only possible in
proximity to death, of course, because lived, gendered life offers no such possibilities.
But is the woman of stanza XXX truly dead? Has her claim to the male canon cost her
her life? Perhaps not, for in the next stanza a woman rises from her own deathbed.
The Indian wife, stretched stiff upon her funeral pyre,
Wakes out of death!
Even as men stoop to set the readied pile afire,
In saving stir she sighs.
They start back, letting slip
Taper and torch, in mist of smoke, about her dip,
Gently lift up, and bear her faint in death’s attire.
Sudden night falls. They chant on, with the insects’ choir
219
Mixing their breath. (XXXI 1-8)
It is men here who prepare the funeral fire, but the woman awakes to disrupt the ritual. In doing
so she puts them in a position of supplication; the men “dip” to lift her up. The appearance of her
death has already caused them to “stoop;” in the normal course of events, the only possibility of
elevation is in death. But her awakening disrupts the social order as the men now bow before a
live woman. The end of the stanza leaves some doubt as to what happens next. The suddenness
of night falling and the fact that they continue the funeral chant suggests that perhaps despite her
waking they continue with the ritual; although it would be tempting to read the continuation of
the chanting as a song of joy rather than lamentation the sudden presence of night along with the
men’s association with insects—they are animalistic, then—works strongly against such a
reading. The woman can only expect a brief moment of elevation in life, just as the woman of
the previous stanza.
As suddenly as the poem moves from the realm of the purely poetic in stanza XXX to the
briefly Lazarusic death of an Indian woman, it transitions quickly to a situation the speaker-aswriter faces in relation specifically to her role as a working woman.
Even as the moon is risen, she enters in—
Quick, that was cold.
Steps over her dropped litter, half in swoon, to win
Dim-smiling over her infants, who, unknowing loss,
Share not their elders’ triumph, yet are tired and cross,
Being all day motherless! . . . She lets her weak thoughts spin,
Against their fathers’ breast.
Anew their lives begin—
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Cleft from the old! (XXXII 1-8)
The last two lines of the stanza signal both the change in role from working woman to mother
and the sense that this socially new ordering of domestic work, in which the husband takes on
some child-rearing, still depends up the old order (marriage). The stanza’s position immediately
after two stanzas that take up women’s social positioning in a grander sense contextualizes its
particularity. The positioning of the next stanza, in which Salkeld admires the love shared
between two birds and compares it to “true poetry” (XXXIII 6), emphasizes Salkeld’s
ambivalence surrounding the intersection of real social inequities and the satisfying intimacies of
even the most lopsided of relationships. The “old” life from which the new one is “cleft” in
stanza XXXII becomes the wellspring of a rich comparison between an affectionate bird couple
and the relationship between poet and muse. “So, true poetry speaks—/ Faint through the traffic,
to pilgrim whose shy ear seeks—/ Echoed, his vows” (XXXIII 6-8). Thus Salkeld’s poetry sits
uneasily between the yearning for gender equity and the acknowledgment of the poetic
possibilities of the existing, if complex, relations between men and women.
Salkeld’s exploration of the relationships between men and women and its implications
for poetry continues to deepen later in The Fox’s Covert with the image of woman as statue,
possibly drawing from the biblical story of Lot’s wife who is punished for looking back by
turning into a pillar of salt. In several stanzas Salkeld gives the now-statued woman the qualities
of intransigence and of possibility, even in stone, and leads into her informed but dogged
optimism. Salkeld introduces us to this woman, who has been turned to stone by sorrow, in
stanza LXX. She is “solidifying, stirless, without wish or guess” (5), as even her spirit has turned
to stone; and yet she is “entirely [her] own:/ Spirit of stone!” (7-8). The next stanza echoes that
of XXXI as the statue-woman comes to life, but not quite as a living body.
221
You think, you breathe—so now is stone articulate:
How did you brood,
Silt up and petrify, into your statued state?
Noble, it may be—almost terrible: no threat
You veil, nor promises. Acknowledging no debt,
Inheriting no dream: impersonal—a Fate—
Excluding all things else, a sheer self, you negate
Evil and good. (LXXI 1-8)
Salkeld’s woman turns to stone just as she becomes an object; but the very process of
solidifying, of losing the warm particularity that defies objectification, becomes the occasion for
ultimate resistance. She cannot be the site of moralizing, nor the repository for someone else’s
imaginings, nor the reflection of ideals. Although the voice of Salkeld’s speaker in this long
poem remains consistent and there is not as much slippage of subject and object as is typical of
late modernist literature, 42 Salkeld’s direct reference to the female object as the site of de facto
resistance acknowledges resistance as inherent in the very tradition against which the statuewoman pushes. In stanza CX the speaker is herself the statue as she rides the tram past the house
of a man she knows whose curtains are open, she guesses, to “catch our hum” (4), but he cannot
match her ability to remain “joyously” frozen (8), “a mere/ Shadow, my way, my work,” (5-6)
though her true self moves on with the tram (“I still poised there—/ not here—“ [6-7]). To him,
as his object, she is frozen, and therefore impermeable, and able to escape without notice. Here
42
See Salkeld’s Experiment in Error for more experimental poetry along these lines. As Moynagh Sullivan
writes, “The speaker of the poems [in Experiment in Error] dually operates both as the object of modernist poetics,
and as a subject whose presence is dangerous to the practice of the very poetry that she writes” (Sullivan 191).
222
Salkeld’s former object speaks as subject, and in doing so affords her a life in time, though the
former object’s subject perceives her as frozen in it. Salkeld turns the statue inside out in stanzas
CII and CVI to describe (ironically, as a poet) that within the object which no poet can capture
and forms the basis of her bravado.
There is a pale calmness, its poise seems to affright
Time’s to-and-fro:
So built up in serenity, storms cannot slight;
Having so sure relations to its centre—light
Flows in and out of its being, and there is no night.
Made one in shadowy verse, my hearing, touch, and sight
Are dipped in that baptismal font, that constant bright
Stillness of snow. (CII 1-8)
Here again the former object speaks for herself. She is timeless, like the statued woman, but from
within, on her own terms, rather than from without. Her center, as we have seen in earlier
moments in the poem, is something she guards as a woman’s womb guards a fetus; and yet even
that which she guards, figured here as light, is free to come and go as it pleases. It is
simultaneously of her essence but independent of it, and in this sense the model provides another
“third way,” less materially specific than the model of siblingship but more potentially
unsettling. There is the danger that this inner light could become just another strategy for
locating within women the font (and indeed that word appears in line 7 of this stanza) of
inspiration and truth, and Salkeld offers little in the way of a formal challenge aside from these
heavily signposted subject/object switchings. Salkeld’s use of coldness, in the “pale” of the first
line and the snow in the last, reminds the reader that even in its transparency, this self for whom
223
Salkeld speaks still retains the potential for impassiveness. In stanza CVI this protected but free
spirit forms the basis of Salkeld’s notion of true freedom and becomes its declaration.
. . . Through dull interim
Of Time, she sways in tenderness—that out-of-sight
Eternity about her consciousness. Her flight
Threatens the day. (5-8)
Her timelessness (“It is time droops, not I” [CXVI 1]) is not for general consumption but rather
something essential and inviolable, and it guarantees a kind of existential freedom not available
in time, or history. Harnessing this possibility she makes herself rather than being made, as in
stanza CXV.
With the sweet hand of sculpture, from old granite block,
Stubborn, I win
My spirit’s likeness—never his. A craft to mock!
Mirroring self in opaqueness—choosing the first
Hardness, to image love-molten will—and that worst
Hope: to incorporate him, with a hammer’s knock
Into self’s idol. Tempest laugh, moulding my rock—
Beating ME in! (1-8)
The artist is the woman, the object not only herself, which she now creates instead of being
created, a man. Here, though, even man-as-object creates resistance to the artists’s efforts; the
very material she uses, in fact, resists them. Is it poetry, then, that offers real resistance?
Salkeld’s own poetry is far from formally unconventional, and yet at times its content works at
locating and amplifying socially dismantling—and freeing—possibilities of the artistic process.
224
The argument in CXV is clear: that despite his or her best efforts, the poet will always find him
or herself reflected in the poem, and that objectification is impossible. Because of a long western
tradition of women as objects in poetry, Salkeld’s point is a feminist one, and it has implications
for the very nature of representation as it is practiced in western literature. Salkeld more
forcefully acknowledges the object’s inherent resistance than male Irish poets of the time, more
so than Kavanagh’s (flawed) humanization of the Irish peasant, more so even than Clarke, whose
female characters work to disrupt prevailing cultural attitudes surrounding women.
Thus the overarching concern of The Fox’s Covert, of the tension between the need for
both protection and freedom and the role of culturally imposed and self-imposed enclosures in
negotiating those needs, is more than an interesting philosophical and linguistic exercise. It
works to undermine the very foundations of the tradition in which she writes, and the—I use her
term—cavalier tone of the poem, particularly toward the end, reveals her revolutionary
intentions, whether or not, of course, she will actually be read. She moves from this memory of
enclosure:
Ballyrea. A soft new lamb on a rough stone wall,
Fearlessly curled,
Set in contentment. ‘Twas my enclosure, that small
Untidy garden; but down in the valley’s dream,
A man draws up blithe trout from a shadow-swayed stream.
Blooded silver will fade, the light, the curlew-call:
Regret, regret. He stamps his wet boots in my hall—
Owning my world. (XXI 1-8)
225
in which enclosure is both potentially violent and protective, to the declarative stance in stanza
LXII, which throws off the need for protection in defense of freedom.
Henceforth, our quest is clear. Far on, there is no brink.
Outside our fear
Disaster lies not, nor abyss. Cowards, we shrink—
Our craven gesture summons shadows from the woods:
Ancient ancestral terrors hidden, stored where broods
Night-madness. Fear is sin. Step cavalierly. Wink
At harsh desire. There shimmer golden wells for drink,
Set even here. (1-8)
Salkeld resets morality as the difference between fear and boldness rather than good and evil
(which her statue-woman has done away with earlier in the poem), calling on enclosed beings to
give up their nests in favor of “golden wells.”
In the context of the literary mood at the time, which was focused on resistance to the
enclosed nature of Irish political and social life, Salkeld’s poetry reads uncharacteristically bold
and optimistic. Kavanagh’s suggests a new possibility, but not one based on willfulness and
effort. Kavanagh’s poetry moves more toward a way of seeing, Salkeld’s toward an orientation
of mind—fearlessness—that is its own form of action.
226
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