Elegant house, how well you speak
For the one who fathered me there,
With your sanguine face, your moody provincial charm,
And that Anglo-Irish air
Of living beyond one’s means to keep up
An era beyond repair.
Reticent house in the far Queen’s County,
How much you leave unsaid.
Not a ghost of a hint appears at your placid windows
That she, so youthfully wed,
Who bore me, would move elsewhere very soon
And in four years be dead.
I know that we left you before my seedling
Memory could root and twine
Within you. Perhaps that is why so often I gaze
At your picture, and try to divine
Through it the buried treasure, the lost life –
Reclaim what was yours, and mine.
I put up the curtains for them again
And light a fire in their grate:
I bring the young father and mother to lean above me,
Ignorant, loving, complete:
I ask the questions I never could ask them
Until it was too late.
Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois1
Here is the unremembered gate.
Two asses, a grey and a black,
Have ambled across from the rough lawn
As if they’d been told to greet
The revenant. Trees draw graciously back
As I follow the drive, to unveil
For this drifty wraith, composed and real
The house where he was born.
Nothing is changed from that sixty-year-old
Photograph, except
My father’s young face has been brushed away.
On the steps down which he strolled
With me in his arms, the living are grouped,
And it is my son Sean
Who stands upon the dishevelled lawn
To photograph us today.
I walk through the unremembered house,
Note on the walls each stain
Of damp; then up the spacious stair
As if I would now retrace
My self to the room where it began.
Dust on fine furnishings,
A scent of wood ash – the whole house sings
With an elegiac air.
Its owner is not at home – nor I
Who have no title in it
And no drowned memories to chime
Through its hush. Can piety
Or a long-lost innocence explain it? –
By what prodigious spell,
Sad elegant house, you have made me feel
A ghost before my time?
1 Laois: pronounced Leash. Ballintubbert House was the poet’s birthplace.
Fishguard to Rosslare
From all my childhood voyages back to Ireland
Only two things remembered: gulls afloat
Off Fishguard quay, littering a patch of radiance
Shed by the midnight boat.
And at dawn a low, dun coast shaping to meet me,
An oyster sky opening above Rosslare …
I rub the sleep from my eyes. Gulls pace the moving
Mast-head. We’re almost there.
Gulls white as a dream on the pitch of Fishguard harbour,
Paper cut-outs, birds on a lacquered screen;
The low coastline and the pearl sky of Ireland;
A long sleep in between.
A sleep between two waking dreams – the haven,
The landfall – is how it appears now. The child’s eye,
Unpuzzled, saw plain facts: I catch a glint from
The darkness they’re haunted by.
Golden Age, Monart, Co. Wexford1
There was a land of milk and honey.
Year by year the rectory garden grew
Like a prize bloom my height of summer.
Time was still as the lily ponds. I foreknew
No chance or change to stop me running
Barefoot for ever on the clover’s dew.
Buttermilk brimmed in the cool earthen
Crocks. All day the french-horn phrase of doves
Dripped on my ear, a dulcet burden.
Gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes, like slaves
Presented myriad fruit to my mouth.
In a bliss of pure accepting the child moves.
Hand-to-mouth life at the top of the morning!
Shabby, queer-shaped house – look how your plain
Facts are remembered in gold engraving!
I have watched the dead – my simple-minded kin,
Once bound to a cramped enclave – returning
As myths of an Arcadian demesne.
Hens, beehives, dogs, an ass, the cobbled
Yard live on, brushed with a sunshine glaze.
Thanks to my gaunt, eccentric uncle,
His talkative sister, and the aunt who was
My second mother, from all time’s perishable
Goods I was given these few to keep always.
1 Monart: pronounced Mŏnárt.
The eccentric uncle was the Rev. W. G. Squires.
Avoca, Co. Wicklow
Step down from the bridge.
A spit of grass points
At the confluence.
Tree he sat beneath
Spoiled for souvenirs,
Looks numb as driftwood.
A pretty fellow
In stone broods over
The meeting waters.
His words came alive
But to music’s flow,
Like weeds in water.
I recall my aunt, my second mother,
Singing Tom Moore at the old rectory
Harmonium – The Last Rose of Summer,
She is far from the Land – her contralto
Scoop, the breathy organ, an oil lamp lit.
Words and tune met, flowed together in one
Melodious river. I drift calmly
Between its banks. Sweet vale of Avoca,
She is still young, I a child, and our two
Hearts like thy waters are mingled in peace.
Dublin tradesman’s son,
Byron’s friend, the pet
Of Whig drawing-rooms.
Fêted everywhere,
Everywhere at home,
He sang of exile
And death, tailoring
Country airs to a
Modish elegance.
Let the waters jig
In a light glitter,
So the source run full.
Near Ballyconneely, Co. Galway
i
A stony stretch. Grey boulders
Half-buried in furze and heather,
Purple and gold – Connemara’s
Old bones dressed in colours
Out of a royal past.
Inshore the sea is marbled
And veined with foam. The Twelve Pins
Like thunderclouds hewn from rock
Or gods in a cloudy fable
Loom through an overcast.
The roofless dwellings have grown
Back to the earth they were raised from,
And tune with those primordial
Outcrops of grey stone
Among the furze and the heather.
Where man is dispossessed
Silence fills up his place
Fast as a racing tide.
Little survives of our West
But stone and the moody weather.
ii
Taciturn rocks, the whisht of the Atlantic
The sea-thrift mute above a corpse-white strand
Pray silence for those vanished generations
Who toiled on a hard sea, a harsher land.
Not all the bards harping on ancient wrong
Were half as eloquent as the silence here
Which amplifies the ghostly lamentations
And draws a hundre
d-year-old footfall near.
Preyed on by gombeen men, expropriated
By absentee landlords, driven overseas
Or to mass-burial pits in the great famines,
They left a waste which tourists may call peace.
The living plod to Mass, or gather seaweed
For pigmy fields hacked out from heath and furze –
No eye to spare for the charmed tourist’s view,
No ear to heed the plaint of ancestors.
Winds have rubbed salt into the ruinous homes
Where turf-fires glowed once: waves and seagulls keen
Those mortal wounds. The landscape’s an heroic
Skeleton time’s beaked agents have picked clean.
Land
The boundary stone,
The balk, fence or hedge
Says on one side ‘I own’,
On the other ‘I acknowledge’.
The small farmer carved
His children rations.
He died. The heart was halved,
Quartered, fragmented, apportioned:
To the sons, a share
Of what he’d clung to
By nature, plod and care –
His land, his antique land-hunger.
Many years he ruled,
Many a year sons
Followed him to oat-field,
Pasture, bog, down shaded boreens.
Turf, milk, harvest – he
Grew from earth also
His own identity
Firmed by the seasons’ come-and-go.
Now at last the sons,
Captive though long-fledged,
Own what they envied once –
Right men, the neighbours acknowledge.
Kilmainham Jail: Easter Sunday, 1966
Sunbursts over this execution yard
Mitigate high, harsh walls. A lowly
Black cross marks the deaths we are here to honour,
Relieved by an Easter lily.
Wearing the nineteen-sixteen medal, a few
Veterans and white-haired women recall
The Post Office, Clanwilliam House, the College of Surgeons,
Jacob’s factory – all
Those desperate strongholds caught in a crossfire
Between the English guns
And Dublin’s withering incredulity.
Against the wall where once
Connolly, strapped to a chair, was shot, a platform
Holds movie cameras. They sight
On the guard of honour beneath the tricolor,
An officer with a horseman’s light
And quiet hands, and now the old President
Who, soldierly still in bearing,
Steps out to lay a wreath under the plaque.
As then, no grandiose words, no cheering –
Only a pause in the splatter of Dublin talk,
A whisper of phantom volleys.
How could they know, those men in the sunless cells,
What would flower from their blood and England’s follies?
Their dreams, coming full circle, had punctured upon
The violence that gave them breath and cut them loose.
They bargained on death: death came to keep the bargain.
Pious postcards of men dying in spruce
Green uniforms, angels beckoning them aloft,
Only cheapen their cause. Today they are hailed
As martyrs; but then they bore the ridiculed shame of
Mountebanks in a tragedy which has failed.
And they were neither the one nor the other – simply
Devoted men who, though the odds were stacked
Against them, believed their country’s age-old plight
And the moment gave no option but to act.
Now the leaders, each in his sweating cell,
The future a blind wall and the unwinking
Eyes of firing-squad rifles, pass their time
In letters home, in prayer. Maybe they are thinking
Of Mount Street, the blazing rooftops, the Post Office,
Wrapping that glory round them against the cold
Shadow of death. Who knows the pull and recoil of
A doomed heart?
They are gone as a tale that is told,
The fourteen men. Let them be more than a legend:
Ghost-voices of Kilmainham, claim your due –
This is not yet the Ireland we fought for.
You living, make our Easter dreams come true.
Remembering Con Markievicz1
Child running wild in woods of Lissadell:
Young lady from the Big House, seen
In a flowered dress, gathering wild flowers: Ascendancy queen
Of hunts, house-parties, practical jokes – who could foretell
(Oh fiery shade, impetuous bone)
Where all was regular, self-sufficient, gay
Their lovely hoyden lost in a nation’s heroine?
Laughterless now the sweet demesne,
And the gaunt house looks blank on Sligo Bay
A nest decayed, an eagle flown.
The Paris studio, your playboy Count
Were not enough, nor Castle splendour
And fame of horsemanship. You were the tinder
Waiting a match, a runner tuned for the pistol’s sound,
Impatient shade, long-suffering bone.
In a Balally cottage you found a store
Of Sinn Fein papers. You read – maybe the old sheets can while
The time. The flash lights up a whole
Ireland which you have never known before,
A nest betrayed, its eagles gone.
The road to Connolly and Stephen’s Green
Showed clear. The great heart which defied
Irish prejudice, English snipers, died
A little not to have shared a grave with the fourteen.
Oh fiery shade, intransigent bone!
And when the Treaty emptied the British jails,
A haggard woman returned and Dublin went wild to greet her.
But still it was not enough: an iota
Of compromise, she cried, and the Cause fails.
Nest disarrayed, eagles undone.
Fanatic, bad actress, figure of fun –
She was called each. Ever she dreamed,
Fought, suffered for a losing side, it seemed
(The side which always at last is seen to have won),
Oh fiery shade and unvexed bone.
Remember a heart impulsive, gay and tender,
Still to an ideal Ireland and its real poor alive.
When she died in a pauper bed, in love
All the poor of Dublin rose to lament her
A nest is made, an eagle flown.
1 Markievicz: pronounced Markievitch.
Lament for Michael Collins
Bicycling around Dublin with the ruddy, anonymous face
Of a rural bank clerk, a price-tag on his head,
While a pack of Auxiliaries, informers, Castle spies,
Nosing through snug and lodging, bayed
For the quarry that came and went like a shadow beneath its nose –
That was the Big Fellow, the schoolboy Pimpernel.
Toujours I’audace, steel nerves and narrow shaves,
He loved to wrestle with comrades, he blubbered when they fell.
Homeric heroes thus behaved:
He kept the form. But there’s much more of the tale to tell.
With traitor and trigger-happy Tan he settled accounts.
A martinet for balancing books, he slated
Unready reckoners, looked for no bonuses from chance,
The risks he took being calculated
As a guerilla leader and an adept of finance.
They brought a Treaty. Now came the need to coax or drag
His countrymen to some assured foothold
On the future out of their bitter and atavistic bog.
Spl
it was the nation he would build
And all to do again when the Civil War broke.
Fanaticism and muddle, Ireland wore down his heart
Long before the ambush in County Cork,
Long before a random, maybe a treacherous shot
Stopped it for ever. Do we talk
Of best-forgotten things and an elusive shade?
This country boy grown into a General’s uniform,
Gauntleted hands clasped in determination:
Tempestuous, moody man with the lashing tongue and the warm
Sunbursts of laughter – dare a nation
Forget the genius who rode through storm on storm
To give it birth? You flying columns of ragtag cloud
Stream from the west and weep over the grave
Of him who once dynamic as a powerhouse stood.
For Ireland all he was he gave –
Energy, vision, last of all the great heart’s blood.
Ass in Retirement
Ass
orbits
a firm stake:
each circle round
the last one is stamped
slow and unmomentous
like a tree-trunk’s annual rings.
He does not fancy himself as a tragedian,
a circumference mystic or a treadmill hero,
nor takes he pride in his grey humility.
He is just one more Irish ass
eating his way round the clock,
keeping pace with his own appetite.
Put out to grass, given a yard more rope
each week, he takes time off from what’s under his nose
Only to bray at rain-clouds over the distant bog;
relishes asinine freedom – having to bear
no topple of hay, nor cleeves crammed with turf;
ignorant that he’ll come in time
to the longest tether’s end,
then strangle or accept
that stake. Either way
on the endless
grass one day
he’ll drop
dead.
Beauty Show, Clifden, Co. Galway
They’re come to town from each dot on the compass, they’re
Complete Poems Page 48