Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 Part 4

We are moving from what other people saw to what Yeats himself envisaged. I have said enough, I think, about the outer man and what he intended, so it is time to consider the inwardness of the poems instead of the outwardness of the stance.

Yet the poetry is cast in a form that is as ear-catching as the man was eye-catching, and as a writer, one is awed by the achieved and masterful tones of that deliberately pitched voice, its bare cla.s.sic shapes, its ability to modulate from emotional climax to wise reflection, its ultimate truth to life. Nevertheless, the finally exemplary moments are those when this powerful artistic control is vulnerable to the pain or pathos of life itself.

But I have to say something about why I put the question-mark after the t.i.tle of this lecture. 'Yeats as an Example' was the t.i.tle of an appreciative but not ecstatic essay that W. H. Auden wrote in 1940, so my new punctuation is partly a way of referring back to Auden's t.i.tle. But it is also meant to acknowledge the orthodox notion that a very great poet can be a very bad influence on other poets. What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfactions of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transfusion of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all, he reminds you that art is intended, that is is part of the creative push of civilization itself: from 'Adam's Curse' to 'Vacillation' and on until the last poems, his work not only explicitly proclaims the reality of the poetic vocation but convinces by the deep note of cert.i.tude registered in the proclamation itself.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught Begin the preparation for your death And from the fortieth winter by that thought Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought, And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

('Vacillation') Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild, From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose; I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on; Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

('Malachi Stilt-Jack') But it is not this vaunting of the special claims of art and the artist that is finally to be saluted. Rather, it is Yeats's large-minded, whole-hearted a.s.sent to the natural cycles of living and dying, his acknowledgement that the 'masterful images' which compel the a.s.sent of artist and audience alike are dependent upon the 'foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart', the humility of his artistic mastery before the mystery of life and death. There are several poems where this tenderness towards life and its uncompletedness is at odds with and tending to gain sway over the consolations of the artificial work. The tumultuousness and repose of a poem like 'Sailing to Byzantium' comes to mind, although there the equilibrium between the golden bird of art and the tattered scarecrow of life is just held, as it is held and held in mind, contemplated and celebrated in 'Among School Children'. I am thinking, however, of quieter poems, more intimate, less deliberately orchestrated pieces, such as 'What Then?': All this happier dreams came true- A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, Poets and Wits about him drew; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

'The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'

And the challenge of Plato's ghost is matched and picked up in that other uncharacteristically introspective poem, 'The Man and the Echo', where the Echo mocks the Man and where the voice of conscience and remorse opposes itself to the artistic choice that the old man has lived out all his life; this voice of conscience which asks 'Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot' is finally symbolized in the anguished cry of a rabbit: But hush for I have lost the theme, Its joy or might seem but a dream.

Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought.

I want to finish with two poems, one of which sets the dissatisfied poet in the midst of civil war, the other of which sets the violent hero in the middle of the dead. They ask, indirectly, about the purpose of art in the midst of life and by their movements, their images, their musics they make palpable a truth which Yeats was at first only able to affirm abstractly, in those words which he borrowed from Coventry Patmore: 'The end of art is peace.'

The first is from 'Meditations in Time of Civil War': The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Here the great fur coat of att.i.tude is laid aside, the domineering intellect and the equestrian profile, all of which gain him a power elsewhere, all laid aside. What we have is a deeply instinctive yet intellectually a.s.sented-to idea of nature in her benign and nurturant aspect as the proper first principle of life and living. The maternal is apprehended, intimated and warmly cherished and we are reminded, much as Shakespeare might remind us, of the warm eggs in the nest shaking at the impact of an explosion. The stare at Yeats's window and the temple-haunting martlet in Macbeth's castle are messengers of grace.

And if the maternal instincts are the first, perhaps they call us back at the very end also. Yeats lies under Ben Bulben, in Drumcliff Churchyard, under that dominant promontory which I like to think of as the father projected into the landscape, and there is perhaps something too male and a.s.sertive about the poem that bears the mountain's name and stands at the end of the Collected Poems. If I had my choice I would make the end of that book more exemplary by putting a kinder poem last, one in which the affirmative wilful violent man, whether he be artist or hero, the poet Yeats or the headhunter Cuchulain, must merge his domineering voice into the common voice of the living and the dead, mingle his heroism with the cowardice of his kind, lay his grey head upon the ashy breast of death.

I would end with 'Cuchulain Comforted', a poem which Yeats wrote within two weeks of his death, one in which his cunning as a deliberate maker and his wisdom as an intuitive thinker find a rich and strange conclusiveness. It is written in terza rima, the metre of Dante's Commedia, the only time Yeats used the form, but the proper time, when he was preparing his own death by imagining Cuchulain's descent among the shades. We witness here a strange ritual of surrender, a rite of pa.s.sage from life into death, but a rite whose meaning is subsumed into song, into the otherness of art. It is a poem deeply at one with the weak and the strong of this earth, full of a motherly kindness towards life, but also unflinching in its belief in the propriety and beauty of life transcended into art, song, words. The language of the poem hallows the things of this world-eyes, branches, linen, shrouds, arms, needles, trees, all are strangely chaste in the context-yet the figure the poem makes is out of this world: Cuchulain Comforted A man that had six mortal wounds, a man Violent and famous, strode among the dead; Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority Among those bird-like things came, and let fall A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three Came creeping up because the man was still.

And thereupon that linen-carrier said: 'Your life can grow much sweeter if you will 'Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud; Mainly because of what we only know The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

'We thread the needles' eyes, and all we do All must together do.' That done, the man Took up the nearest and began to sew.

'Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told our character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain 'Or driven from home and left to die in fear.'

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words, Though all was done in common as before; They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Lecture given to General Studies Department, University of Surrey, 1978

From Monaghan to the Grand Ca.n.a.l

The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh 'I have never been much considered by the English critics'-in the first sentence of Kavanagh's 'Author's Note' to the Collected Poems (1964) it is hard to separate the bitterness from the boldness of 'not caring'. It was written towards the end of his career when he was sure, as I am, that he had contributed originally and significantly to the Irish literary tradition, not only in his poetry and his novel, Tarry Flynn (1948), but also in his attempts to redefine the idea of that tradition.

Matters of audience and tradition are important in discussing Kavanagh. How do we 'place' him? It will not do to haul the academic net and mention peasant poets like John Clare or Stephen Duck. The poetry of these men is a bonus in an already abundant poetic tradition; their achievements can be displayed and cherished like corn dollies, adornments, lovely signals of the total harvest. Their consciousness could hold on to the rungs of established norms, there was a standard accent against which their dialect could be evaluated. And if the English parallels are unrewarding, it is almost equally difficult to posit an Irish lineage. Kavanagh's proper idiom is free from the intonations typical of the Revival poets. His imagination has not been tutored to 'sweeten Ireland's wrong', his ear has not been programmed to retrieve in English the lost music of verse in Irish. The 'matter of Ireland', mythic, historical or literary, forms no significant part of his material. There are a few Yeatsian noises-'why should I lament the wind'-in Plowman (1936), but in general the uncertain voice of that first book and the authoritative voice of The Great Hunger (1942) cannot be derived from the conventional notes of previous modern Irish poetry. What we have is something new, authentic and liberating. There is what I would call an artesian quality about his best work because for the first time since Brian Merriman's poetry in Irish at the end of the eighteenth century and William Carleton's novels in the nineteenth, a hard buried life that subsisted beyond the feel of middle-cla.s.s novelists and romantic nationalist poets, a life denuded of 'folk' and picturesque elements, found its expression. And in expressing that life in The Great Hunger and in Tarry Flynn Kavanagh forged not so much a conscience as a consciousness for the great majority of his countrymen, crossing the pieties of a rural Catholic sensibility with the non serviam of his original personality, raising the inhibited energies of a subculture to the power of a cultural resource.

Much of his authority and oddity derive from the fact that he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere. At its most expressive, his voice has the air of bursting a long battened-down silence. It comes on with news in the first line-'Clay is the word and clay is the flesh', 'I have lived in important places'-and it keeps on urgently and ebulliently to the last. It never settles itself into self-regard; it doesn't preen itself in felicities; it has a spoken rather than a written note-which means that when unsuccessful it sounds more like blather than bad verse-and it runs with a lovely jaunty confidence against its metrical norm. In his Self Portrait (1964) Kavanagh imagined himself jumping ditches with a load of white flour on his back, and this could be an image for the kind of risky buoyancy his best work achieves, a completely different kind of discipline from Austin Clarke's 'loading himself with golden chains and trying to escape'. Kavanagh is closer to the tightrope walker than the escape artist. There is, we might say, more technique than craft in his work, real technique which is, in his own words, 'a spiritual quality, a condition of mind, or an ability to invoke a particular condition of mind ... a method of getting at life', but his technique has to be continuously renewed, as if previous achievements and failures added up to nothing in the way of self-knowledge or self-criticism of his own capacities as a maker. There is very little 'parna.s.sian' in Kavanagh, very little sense of his deploying for a second time round technical discoveries originally made while delivering a poem of the first intensity out of its labour.

To begin, then, with the first such poem we meet in the Collected Poems, 'Inniskeen Road, July Evening': The bicycles go by in twos and threes- There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night, And there's a half-talk code of mysteries And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.

Half-past eight and there is not a spot Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown That might turn out a man or woman, not A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

O Alexander Selkirk knew the plight Of being king and government and nation.

A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

The t.i.tle names place and time, which is all-important in the world of early Kavanagh. Loved places are important places, and the right names 's.n.a.t.c.h out of time the pa.s.sionate transitory'. Inniskeen is the poet's birthplace where he lived on the family farm for more than thirty years, and it would seem that this poem comes towards the end of his sojourn for although it contemplates the scene in the present, there is a feeling of valediction about it. By the end, the experience has almost attained the status of memory, a regal distance intervenes, and impatience vies with affection in the ambiguous 'blooming'. The poet's stance becomes Wordsworth's over Tintern Abbey, attached by present feelings but conscious that the real value of the moment lies in its potential flowering, its blooming, in the imagination. Indeed, the poem could carry a Wordsworth subt.i.tle, 'or, Solitude'.

There are two solitudes, the solitude of the road and the solitude of the poet, and the road's is an objective correlative of the poet's. The second quatrain has a curious double effect: the road has become still, there is neither sound nor shadow, and yet the negatives of 'no shadow thrown' and 'not a footfall' do not entirely rob the scene of its life. The power of the negated phrases, 'turn out a man or woman' and (especially) 'a footfall tapping secrecies of stone', works against the solitude and establishes a ghostly populous atmosphere, and this prepares us for the poet's double-edged feelings in the sestet of being at once marooned and in possession. I suppose the basic theme of the poem is the penalty of consciousness, the unease generated when a milieu becomes material. It is a love poem to a place written towards the end of the affair and it is also one of the earliest and most successful of Kavanagh's many poems about the nature of the poetic life. I have dwelt on it in some detail in order to show something that I believe even Kavanagh's admirers do not sufficiently realize, that he is a technician of considerable suppleness. I take great pleasure in that 'not' at the end of the seventh line, for example: the bag of flour has almost toppled him but that 'not' does not unbalance, it lands us instead on the lovely thawing floe of 'A footfall tapping secrecies of stone'.

Of course it would be wrong to insist too strongly on Kavanagh as a weaver of verbal textures. There is a feeling of prospector's luck-which may be deliberately achieved, but I don't think so-about many of his best effects. We need only compare the nice lift of a Kavanagh stanza with its inspired wobble, from 'A Christmas Childhood': Ca.s.siopeia was over Ca.s.sidy's hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes rode across The horizon-the Three Wise Kings with lines by a wordsmith like Hopkins: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

to see that the att.i.tudes towards form and language are completely different. Hopkins is a maker, Kavanagh a taker of verses, a grabber of them. He is not so much interested in the inscape of things as in their instress. He is, as it were, the Van Gogh rather than the Cezanne of Monaghan. The 'ineluctible modality of the visible' does not seek to transpose itself into aural or verbal patterning. The poem is more a conductor than a crucible. It seeks 'weightlessness'-a quality he praised in one of his own stanzas-rather than density: which is not to say that it abjures the concrete. On the contrary, the poetry is most successful when it is earthed in the actual where 'the light that might be mystic or a fraud' can strike and be contained.

Which brings us back to Plowman. I have seen this book described as Georgian but the lyrics are closer to Blake's Songs of Innocence than to any such attending to natural surfaces. Most of them aspire to visionary statement-statement, not evocation or description-as in 'To a Child', the first stanza of which was the one that pleased its author by its 'weightlessness': Child do not go Into the dark places of the soul, For there the grey wolves whine, The lean grey wolves.

I have been down Among the unholy ones who tear Beauty's white robe and clothe her In rags of prayer.

Child there is light somewhere Under a star, Sometime it will be for you A window that looks Inward to G.o.d.

Well, maybe so. But the whole thing's weightless enough to float past you. The trouble is that romantic cliches like 'dark places of the soul' and 'Beauty's white robe' may be counters for genuine insight but we miss the experience even if we get the meaning. Yet implicit in the 'I' of the poem, in this man who has come through (whatever), this seer in the pristine sense, is the 'comic' Kavanagh of the later poems. The persona in most of these apprentice pieces has a notion of 'the main purpose/Which is to be/Pa.s.sive, observing with a steady eye'. In the last stanza of 'To a Blackbird', for example, the wise pa.s.siveness of the Ca.n.a.l Bank sonnets is rehea.r.s.ed: We dream as Earth's sad children Go slowly by Pleading for our conversion With the Most High.

But it is only when this ethereal literary voice incarnates itself in the imagery of the actual world that its messages of transcendence become credible. When the poet stands at the centre of his world, speaking as king or exile, instead of meting and mincing out his voice through the ventriloquist's doll of a mystical exquisite, he does indeed 'find a star-lovely art/In the dark sod.'

Those lines could stand as commentary on the much anthologized lyrics of Kavanagh's early Monaghan period, of which 'Shancoduff', 'A Christmas Childhood', 'Spraying the Potatoes' and the verses 'from Tarry Flynn' are the most outstanding. All of these make the home territory 'a theme for kings', 'part of no earthly estate', turn the black hills into 'Alps'. Their kingmaking explorations make possible the regal authority of the later 'Epic' which is their magnificent coda and represents Kavanagh's comprehension of his early achievement. They give body to the a.s.sertion in 'Art McCooey' that poetry is shaped 'awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb', a womb which is the equivalent of what he called elsewhere 'the unconscious fog'. What we have in these poems are matter-of-fact landscapes, literally presented, but contemplated from such a point of view and with such intensity that they become 'a prospect of the mind'. They are not poems about 'roots'-The Green Fool (1938), his first autobiography where he mediates between his audience and his territory with a knowing sociological wink, has more of that kind of self-consciousness-any more than Wordsworth's 'spots of time' in The Prelude are about 'roots': their concern is, indeed, the growth of a poet's mind.

It is significant the way the word 'poet' keeps turning up in these poems, used with certainty, to dramatize the speaker in an absolute way. 'A poet' owns the hungry hills of Shancoduff, a 'poet' is lost to potato-fields in the spraying poem, a 'child-poet' picks out letters in 'A Christmas Childhood', and on each occasion the word slews the poem towards a resolution. If we compare such usages, and the 'poet' of 'Inniskeen Road', with earlier Plowman lyrics-'O pagan poet you/And I are one' ('To a Blackbird') and 'Her name was poet's grief' ('Mary')-we can see a new authority and boldness. There he was a postulant, full of uninitiated piety towards the office, now he has taken orders, has ordained himself and stands up in Monaghan as the celebrant of his own mysteries. The word is used as the sign of the imagination, a fiat and an amen. Kavanagh's Monaghan is his pastoral care in the sacerdotal as much as in the literary sense.

Yet his destiny was to become a mendicant rather than a parish priest, called from his 'important places' in Monaghan to consecrate new ground for himself on the banks of the Grand Ca.n.a.l in Dublin, to end up, not like his own 'Father Mat', 'a part of the place,/Natural as a round stone in a gra.s.s field', but as an embittered guru. Tarry Flynn (1948) is his delightful realization of the call to leave, the pivot and centre of Kavanagh's work, an autobiographical fiction full of affection for and impatience with his parish. This book brings to fruition the valediction to 'every blooming thing' promised in 'Inniskeen Road' and in it Kavanagh achieves his first and fullest articulation of his comic vision, that view from Parna.s.sus which was the one sustaining myth or doctrine he forged completely for himself. Towards the end of the novel there is an account of Tarry retreating to his upstairs room to compose verse, which is at once an account of the novel's genesis and an explication of Kavanagh's subsequent insistence on the poet's detachment, his duty merely 'to state the position': This corner was his Parna.s.sus, the constant point above time. Winter and summer since his early boyhood he had sat here and the lumps of candle-grease on the scaly table of the old machine told a story ...

The net of earthly intrigue could not catch him here. He was on a level with the horizon-and it was a level on which there was laughter. Looking down at his own misfortunes he thought them funny now. From this height he could even see himself losing his temper with the Finnegans and the Carlins and hating his neighbours and he moved the figures on the landscape, made them speak, and was filled with joy in his own power.

Still, despite this celebration of detachment, much of Kavanagh's poetry is born out of a quarrel between 'the grip of the little fields' and 'the City of Kings/Where art, music, letters are the real things'. In A Soul for Sale (1947), besides the lyrics of unconscious joy, there are poems of greater emotional complexity, more sombre in tone, more meditative than lyric, the best of which are 'Bluebells for Love' and 'Advent', poems which attempt to renew in the face of experience an insouciance that has been diminished and endangered by too much 'tasting and testing'. And there is a sonnet sequence-how often, by the way, Kavanagh finds the discipline of this form a releasing one-called 'Temptation in Harvest' where the last four sections beautifully and wistfully annotate what the poet was later to describe somewhat melodramatically as 'the worst mistake of my life', his move to Dublin in 1939. This was in retrospect: in the verse, his departure appears as simple obedience to his muse: Now I turn Away from the ricks, the sheds, the cabbage garden, The stones of the street, the thrush song in the tree, The potato-pits, the flaggers in the swamp; From the country heart that hardly learned to harden, From the spotlight of an old-fashioned kitchen lamp I go to follow her who winked at me.

Kavanagh's most celebrated poem, however, is about a man who did not follow the hints of his imagination. The Great Hunger, first published in 1942 and collected in A Soul for Sale, is Kavanagh's rage against the dying of the light, a kind of elegy in a country farmyard, informed not by heraldic notions of seasonal decline and mortal dust but by an intimacy with actual clay and a desperate sense that life in the secluded spot is no book of pastoral hours but an enervating round of labour and lethargy. The poem comes across initially with great doc.u.mentary force, so that one might be inclined to agree with Kavanagh's characterization of it as being 'concerned with the woes of the poor' as the whole story, but that is only part of the truth, though admittedly the larger part of it.

Nevertheless, the art of the poem is replete with fulfilments and insights for which the protagonist is famished. It is written in a voice urgent and opulent as 'the mill-race heavy with the Lammas floods curving over the weir', (weightiness rather than weightlessness is the virtue here), in a verse that can 'invoke a particular condition of mind' and discovers 'a method of getting at life'. It is the nearest Kavanagh ever gets to a grand style, one that seeks not a continuous decorum but a mixture of modes, of high and low, to accommodate his double perspective, the tragic and the emerging comic. It modulates from open to stanzaic forms, and manages to differentiate nicely between the authentic direct speech of the characters and its own narrative voice which is a selection and heightening of that very speech. Kavanagh's technical achievement here is to find an Irish note that is not dependent on backward looks towards the Irish tradition, not an artful retrieval of poetic strategies from another tongue but a ritualistic drawing out of patterns of run and stress in the English language as it is spoken in Ireland. It is as if the 'stony grey soil of Monaghan' suddenly became vocal. 'Clay is the word and clay is the flesh.'

The poem is the obverse of Kavanagh's bildungsroman, Tarry Flynn. It is not about growing up and away but about growing down and in. Its symbol is the potato rather than the potato blossom, its elements are water and earth rather than fire and air, its theme is consciousness moulded in and to the dark rather than opening to the light. It is significant, for example, how Stephen Dedalus's metaphor of nets ('When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets') is repeated and revised in Kavanagh's presentation of Patrick Maguire: The drills slipped by and the days slipped by And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter, And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland When he laughed over pints of porter Of how he came free from every net spread In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head ...

The nets that Maguire eludes are those very experiences whose reality Stephen Dedalus goes 'to encounter for the millionth time'. Maguire's running free of the world's halter involves an evasion of those chances 'to err, to fall' which Stephen embraces. His 'knowing head' looks out from under the meshes of family and church ties. Where Stephen disobeyed his mother and defied her pious devotion, fearful of the deleterious 'chemistry' that such obeisance might set up in his soul, Maguire succ.u.mbs to 'the lie that is a woman's screen/Around a conscience where soft thighs are spread'. When she told him to 'go to Ma.s.s and pray and confess your sins/And you'll have all the luck', 'her son took it as literal truth'. His s.e.xual timidity is continuously related to his failure to achieve any fullness of personality: when he 'makes the field his bride' he settles for 'that metaphysical land/Where flesh was a thought more spiritual than music'.

But not only does the poem refract the Joycean motif, it consciously rejects the Yeatsian 'dream of the n.o.ble and the beggarman'. It is a rebuke to the idea of the peasant as n.o.ble savage and a dramatization of what its author called 'the usual barbaric life of the Irish country poor'. Against the paternalistic magnificence of John Synge, I, and Augusta Gregory thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything, Antaeus-like, grew strong -against this we must set Section XII of the Kavanagh poem which answers it with a vision of 'the peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable', 'a sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die'.

Yet while these twists help us to see The Great Hunger's place in modern Irish literature, what gives it its essential impetus is not the literary context but its appet.i.te for the living realities of Patrick Maguire's world, and the feeling generated by the disparity between Maguire's and Kavanagh's response to that world. What would be present to Maguire as work and weather, for example, are transformed by the poetry into matters of love and celebration: The fields were bleached white, The wooden tubs full of water Were white in the winds That blew through Brannagan's Gap on their way from Siberia; The cows on the gra.s.sless heights Followed the hay that had wings- The February fodder that hung itself on the black branches Of the hilltop hedge.

A man stood beside a potato-pit And clapped his arms And pranced on the crisp roots And shouted to warm himself.

In the words of a later poem, 'naming these things is the love-act and its pledge', and despite the poem's overt anatomy of barrenness, there is a conjugal relationship between its language and its world which conveys a sense of abundance. If Maguire's satisfaction is to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e over the ashes, Kavanagh's is to allow the imagination to roam studlike in the cold fields. The poem acc.u.mulates a number of incidents in which the fallow/fertile and the repression/fulfilment contrasts are dramatized, and simultaneously it establishes the prevailing atmosphere of futility in which these incidents occur: A wonderful night, we had. Duffy's place Is very convenient. Is that a ghost or a tree?

And so they go home with dragging feet And their voices rumble like lade carts.

And they are happy as the dead or sleeping ...

I should have led that ace of hearts.

If Maguire is blamed, he is also explained-'the poet merely states the position'-and the position is that Maguire's soul is never born. The self he achieves is one dressed to fit the constricting circ.u.mstances of home, community and church. His s.e.xuality is dammed or leaked at the hearth or harnessed to 'probe in the insensitive hair' of the potato crop; his sense of wonder is calloused by habit so he misses the chance to find 'health and wealth and love' in 'bits and pieces of Everyday'; the pinnacle of his intellectual ambitions is determined by the community, to rise to a 'professorship' like the pig-gelder Nallon whose knowledge was amazing.

'A treble, full multiple odds ... That's flat porter ...

My turnips are destroyed with the blackguardly crows...'

and his religious sensibilities atrophy, to be replaced by 'an old judge's pose:/Respectability and righteousness'.

But there is no condescension in this. It is a loving portrait which Kavanagh was to reject because 'it lacks the n.o.bility and repose of poetry'. It is true that there are strident moments, especially at the end when The hungry fiend Screams the apocalypse of clay In every corner of this land, yet I do not feel that the apostrophizing of the Imagination at the beginning and the end involves a loss of repose. One can see that the poem's fundamentally tragic note is subsumed into the comic vision of Tarry Flynn and that it is a step on the way to that vision, yet if The Great Hunger did not exist, a greater hunger would, the hunger of a culture for its own image and expression. It is a poem of its own place and time, transposing the griefs of the past-its t.i.tle conventionally refers to the Great Famine of the 1840s-into the distress of the present, as significant in the Irish context as Hardy's novels were in the English, socially committed but also committed to a larger, more numinous concept of love whose function he decreed was not to look back but 'to look on'.

While the phrase 'socially committed' would have been repellent to Kavanagh, it does remind us that he was a child of the thirties, as depressed and more repressed in Ireland than elsewhere. And while he abjured, in his prose of the 1950s and 1960s, any 'messianic impulse', he was always as concerned in his own way as Yeats was about 'unity of culture' and 'unity of being'. His acute sense of the need to discriminate between 'parochial' and 'provincial' mentalities, his reaction against the romantic nationalist revival of Synge and Yeats as 'a thorough-going English-bred lie', his refusal to allow social and religious differences within the country to be glossed over in a souped-up 'buckleppin' idiom, his almost Arnoldian concern for touchstones of excellence-Ulysses, Moby d.i.c.k-and his search for an art that would be an Olympian 'criticism of life', all this surfaces in his essays from an overall concern for the 'quality of life' in the country, especially the literary life: I am beginning to think there may be such a thing as a Celtic mind which lives on no sustained diet, but on day-to-day journalism. On reflection, I begin to see that this unfaith is not local to Ireland. Yeats, for all his emphasis on Ireland, was the last great Victorian poet. His work was born within the safety of that large, smug, certain world where no one questioned how much was being taken for granted.

Whatever be the reason, it appears to me that we cannot go on much longer without finding an underlying faith upon which to build our world of letters.

Because of their absence of faith, the anger of men like O'Connor and O'Casey is worthless and even pitiful. ('Poetry and Pietism') The essays of the 1950s and the 1960s are full of such sweeping remarks. In Dublin he seems to have been pulled in two directions: to be the poet as outsider, as parishioner of Monaghan-and the criticism in Kavanagh's Weekly (1952) as well as the satire in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960) is generated by this desire to be on the one hand the parochial precursor in provincial Dublin; yet on the other hand, there is an implicit wish to be a parishioner of Ireland, to be the poet as integral part of a whole parochial culture. Much of what he says is a plea for an ideal national culture but it is premised on the rejection of nationality as a category in cultural life. In Dublin his Monaghan sceptre becomes a forked stick, that only occasionally works as a divining rod, as on the banks of the Grand Ca.n.a.l or in the environs of 'The Hospital'. In the end he finds himself at bay in that new parish which he called his 'Pembrokeshire', a domain that was again 'part of no earthly estate', centring on Baggot Street Bridge. Over and over again he reverts to his experience of a poetic rebirth in these surroundings: I have been thinking of making my grove on the banks of the Grand Ca.n.a.l near Baggot Street Bridge where in recent days I rediscovered my roots. My hegira was to the Grand Ca.n.a.l bank where again I saw the beauty of water and green gra.s.s and the magic of light. It was the same emotion I had known when I stood on a sharp slope in Monaghan ...

It should be said that this shift or tremor that released his new sense of his powers was occasioned by considerable emotional and physical distress. In 1952 he had been the victim of a notorious profile in a magazine called The Leader and had later conducted an unsuccessful libel action against the magazine, during which his cross-questioning in the witness-box became something of a spectator sport for Dubliners. That was in 1954 and shortly afterwards he underwent an operation for lung cancer. So the Parna.s.sian calm which he conjures in these first redemptive sonnets represents both aesthetic and spiritual resourcefulness: I learned, I learned-when one might be inclined To think, too late, you cannot recover your losses- I learned something of the nature of G.o.d's mind, Not the abstract Creator but He who caresses The daily and nightly earth; He who refuses To take failure for an answer till again and again is worn.

('Miss Universe') Still, despite the generous epiphanies represented by the best work of his last decade, Kavanagh's face inclines to set like Maguire's in a judicial pose. Despite the accuracy and serious implications of his critical apercus, despite the continuous vaunting of the comic point of view, the overall impression to be got from reading the second half of the Collected Poems is of a man who knows he can do the real thing but much of the time straining and failing. He should not simply be taken at his own word on the superiority of his comic vision, the supremacy of 'not caring' as a philosophy of life. When it serves as a myth for entrancement, for Franciscan acceptance, and approaches the condition of charity, as it does in the Ca.n.a.l Bank sonnets and in meditations like 'Intimate Parna.s.sus'; or when it is guaranteed by the purgatorial experiences on which it is based as in 'The Hospital', 'Miss Universe', 'Prelude', 'Auditors in', 'If Ever You Go to Dublin Town' and in a song like 'On Raglan Road'; or when it is offered as a poetic with the rhythmic heave of 'Yellow Vestment'-then Kavanagh is 'embodying' rather than 'knowing' the truth of it, and the old sense of a man at once marooned and in possession, impatient and in love, pervades the verse, and the verse itself is supplied with energy from below and beyond its occasion.

But too often the doctrine that 'poetry is a mystical thing and a dangerous thing' was used as a petrified stick to beat the world with. Too much of the satire in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling remains doggerel ensnared in the environment which it purports to disdain. The pleasures to be derived from 'Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle' or 'The Christmas Mummers' are those of a ringside seat at a c.o.c.kpit where the fight is lively but untidy and ends without a kill. And as for squibs like 'Irish Stew', 'Spring Day', 'Who Killed James Joyce?' and 'Portrait of the Artist', they simply represent an inelegant opportunism: Did you get money For your Joycean knowledge?

I got a scholarship To Trinity College.

I made the pilgrimage In the Bloomsday swelter From the Martello Tower To the cabby's shelter.

('Who Killed James Joyce?') If my memory is right, one of the best-known photographs of Kavanagh is with Brian O'Nolan on a Bloomsday outing.

Paradoxically, such poems contribute to an idea of the poet that Kavanagh was at pains to disa.s.sociate himself from in his essay on 'The Irish Tradition': 'One of the Irish ideas of the poet is of the uproarious clown. I have hardly ever heard an Irish admirer of Gaelic or any other poetry speaking of the poet that he didn't give the impression that he thought it all a great joke.' Unfortunately, Kavanagh's spirited living out of his idea of the autocracy of the personality often furnished fuel for such an att.i.tude, and a performance like 'Sensational Disclosures! (Kavanagh Tells All)' treads a very dangerous line between exploiting and excoriating it. When he formulated the mood of such regenerative poems as 'Ca.n.a.l Bank Walk' into the desire 'to play a true note on a dead slack string' he too often ended up, as the Collected Poems end up, 'In Blinking Blankness', making an aesthetic out of self-pity, formally cornered, so that doggerel seemed the only appropriate mode for an exploration of the self, a form not very conducive to 'n.o.bility and repose'.

Kavanagh's achievement lies in the valency of a body of individual poems which establish the purity, authority and authenticity of his voice rather than in any plotted c.u.mulative force of the opus as a whole. It could be said of him (as Thomas Kinsella has said of Austin Clarke) that his Selected Poems would be the marvellous book, more cogent and coherent than the Collected. If I feel that the man who suffered was not fully recompensed by the man who created, Kavanagh felt it too. Without myth, without masters, 'No System, no Plan', he lived from hand to mouth and unceremoniously where Yeats-and Sidney-fed deliberately and ritually, in the heart's rag-and-bone shop. And one might say that when he had consumed the roughage of his Monaghan experience, he ate his heart out.

Reprinted from Two Decades of Irish Writing, ed. Douglas Dunn, Carcanet Press, 1975

The Sense of Place

I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension: this tension and the poetry it produces are what I want to discuss. I want to consider how the different senses of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, and of specific places on our island, have affected poets over these last hundred years.

I might have begun the exploration much further back, of course, because in Irish poetry there is a whole genre of writing called dinnseanchas, poems and tales which relate the original meanings of place names and const.i.tute a form of mythological etymology. An early epic like the Tain bo Cuailgne is full of incidental dinnseanchas, insofar as it connects various incidents on the journey of the Connacht armies from Cruachan to Carlingford with the names of places as we now know them, or at least as they were known in the Gaelic past. Ardee, for example, the town in Co. Louth. In Irish, Ardee means Ferdia's Ford, and it was at this point (at a ford on the River Fane) that Cuchullain and Ferdia, brothers in arms in their youth, fought their great single combat by day and tended each other's wounds by night until Cuchullain slew Ferdia with his magical weapon, the gae bolga. It is a story that would have been current in everybody's mind when Irish was the lingua franca and it is still one of the best known and best loved legends in the Ulster cycle. So the place name, Ardee, succinctly marries the legendary and the local.

It now requires some small degree of learning to know this about Ardee. We have to retrieve the underlay of Gaelic legend in order to read the full meaning of the name and to flesh out the topographical record with its human accretions. The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague's words, is a ma.n.u.script which we have lost the skill to read. When we go as tourists to Donegal or Connemara or Kerry we go with at best an aesthetic eye, comforting ourselves with the picturesqueness of it all or rejoicing in the fact that it is unspoiled. We will have little felt knowledge of the place, little enough of a sense of wonder or a sense of tradition. Tory Island, Knocknarea, Slieve Patrick, all of them deeply steeped in a.s.sociations from the older culture, will not stir us beyond a visual pleasure unless that culture means something to us, unless the features of the landscape are a mode of communion with a something other than themselves, a something to which we ourselves still feel we might belong.

On the other hand, as we pa.s.s south along the coast from Tory to Knocknarea, we go through the village of Drumcliff and under Ben Bulben, we skirt Lissadell and Innisfree. All of these places now live in the imagination, all of them stir us to responses other than the merely visual, all of them are instinct with the spirit of a poet and his poetry. Irrespective of our creed or politics, irrespective of what culture or subculture may have coloured our individual sensibilities, our imaginations a.s.sent to the stimulus of the names, our sense of the place is enhanced, our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country but of a country of the mind is cemented. It is this feeling, a.s.senting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that const.i.tutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.

That metaphor of marriage can lead us a bit further in our exploration, insofar as marriage is something that for centuries survived in the realms of the sacred, but now is thought about and sometimes survives in the realm of the secular. Similarly with our sense, or-better still-our sensing of place. It was once more or less sacred. The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only thirty years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of place as it was experienced in the older dispensation. As I walked to school, I saw Lough Beg from Mulholland's Brae, and the spire of Church Island rose out of the trees. On Church Island Sunday in September, there was a pilgrimage out to the island, because St. Patrick was supposed to have prayed there, and prayed with such intensity that he branded the shape of his knee into a stone in the old churchyard. The rainwater that collected in that stone, of course, had healing powers, and the thorn bush beside it was pennanted with the rags used by those who rubbed their warts and sores in that water. Then on a clear day, out in the Antrim hills beyond Lough Beg, I could see the unmistakable hump of Slemish, the mountain where the youthful Patrick had tended sheep. That legend, and the ringing ascetic triumph of the lines in his Confession where he talks about rising in the frosts of winter to pray to his Christian G.o.d, all combined to give Slemish a nimbus of its own, and made it more potent in the mind's eye than Slieve Gallon, a bigger, closer mountain that we faced on the road home from school, and which took its aura from our song 'Slieve Gallon's Braes'. On Aughrim Hill, between the school and the lough, somebody had found an old sword, deemed to be a Viking sword, since we knew those almost legendary people had sailed the Bann a thousand years before; and on a shelf in the master's room there was a bit of wood that had been turned to stone by the action of the waters of Lough Neagh.

There, if you like, was the foundation for a marvellous or a magical view of the world, a foundation that sustained a diminished structure of lore and superst.i.tion and half-pagan, half-Christian thought and practice. Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word in religare, to bind fast. The single thorn-tree bound us to a notion of the potent world of fairies, and when my father cut such a thorn, retribution was seen to follow inexorably when the horse bolted in harness, broke its leg and had to be destroyed. The green rushes bound us to the beneficent spirit of St. Brigid: cut on Brigid's Eve, the first of February, they were worked into Brigid's crosses that would deck the rooms and outhouses for the rest of the year. Indeed, one of my most cherished and in some way mysterious memories is of an old neighbour of ours called Annie Devlin sitting in the middle of a floor strewn with green rushes, a kind of local sybil, plaiting the rushes and plaiting all of us into that ritualized way of life.

Then on May Eve, the b.u.t.tercups and ladysmock appeared on the windowsills in obedience to some rite, and during the month of May the pagan G.o.ddess became the Virgin Mary and May flowers had to be gathered for her altar on the chest-of-drawers in the bedroom, so that the primroses and the celandines also wound us into the sacral and were wound into it in their turn. Late summer, and my father plaited harvest bows from the new corn and wore them in his lapel. Hallowe'en, and the turnip, that homely and densely factual root, became a root of some kind of evil as the candle blazed in it from a gatepost in the dark. At the fireside then, the talk of old times when cows were blinked and men met the devil in the shape of a goat or heard him as a tinkle of chains on the road after dark, or saw him, or powers of some sort, in lights dancing in spots where no lights should be. Such naming of examples is a pleasure to me, and that is, I believe, itself an earnest of the power of place.

But of course it wasn't just the old religion that exhaled its fragrances in that place. The more recent sectarian varieties were also intimately bound up with different locales. The red, white and blue flagpost at the Hillhead, for example, was a totem that possessed all the force of a holy mountain, and the green chestnut tree that flourished at the entrance to the Gaelic Athletic a.s.sociation grounds was more abundantly green from being the eminence where the tricolour was flown illicitly at Easter or on sports days. Even Annie Devlin's rich and overgrown garden, with its shooting leeks and roofings of rhubarb leaves, even that natural earth was tinctured with the worst aspects of our faiths, insofar as that lovely flower, Sweet William, became suspect in the imagination from its connection with William of Orange, the king we sent to h.e.l.l regularly up the long ladder and down the short rope.

All this was actual, all of it was part of the ordinary round if only a part of it, but all of it has by now a familiar literary ring to it. And if it has, that is partly due to a new found pride in our own places that flourished suddenly in the late nineteenth century and resulted in a new literature, a revived interest in folklore, a movement to revive the Irish language, and in general a determination to found or re-found a native tradition. At a time when the spirit of the age was becoming increasingly scientific and secular, when Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough was seeking to banish the mystery from the old faiths and standardize and anatomize the old places, Yeats and his friends embarked upon a deliberately counter-cultural movement to reinstate the fairies, to make the world more magical than materialistic, and to elude the social and political interpretations of society in favour of a legendary and literary vision of race.

Although it has long been fashionable to smile indulgently at the Celtic Twilight, it has to be remembered that the movement was the beginning of a discovery of confidence in our own ground, in our place, in our speech, English and Irish. And it seems to me undeniable that Yeats's sense of the otherness of his Sligo places led him to seek for a language and an imagery other than the ones which were available to him in the aesthetic modes of literary London.

He had, of course, a double purpose. One, to restore a body of old legends and folk beliefs that would bind the people of the Irish place to the body of their world, in much the way that I have suggested the name Ardee meshes the old saga with the Ardee man's sense of who he is and where he is. Yeats in this way would have commended the remark made by Carson McCullers, that to know who you are, you have to have a place to come from. But his other purpose was to supplement this restored sense of historical place with a new set of a.s.sociations that would accrue when a modern Irish literature, rooted in its own region and using its own speech, would enter the imaginations of his countrymen. And the cla.s.sic moment in this endeavour was his meeting with Synge, in a hotel in Paris, the young Synge in search of la vie de boheme, struggling with the idioms of decadence, whom Yeats sent west to express the life of Aran, in the language of the tribe. At that moment a new country of the mind was conceived in English, the west that the poets imagined, full of tragic fishermen and poetic peasants.