Hartnett bid "A Farewell to English" in 1975, in the course of which he derided Yeats for his use of token Gaelic phrases gleaned from Aogán Ó Rathaille:
Our commis-chefs attend and learn the trade,
bemoan the scraps of Gaelic that they know:
add to a simple Anglo-Saxon stock
Cuchulainn's marrow-bones to marinate,
a dash of Ó Rathaille simmered slow,
a glass of University hic-haec-hoc:
sniff and stand back and proudly offer you
the celebrated Anglo-Irish stew.15
Hartnett's retreat into Irish-language poetry (in which he never quite emulated the quality of his English work) lasted almost a decade, during which he discovered that it may not be a question of a writer choosing a language, so much as a case of the language choosing to work out its characteristic genius through a writer.
For his part, Thomas Kinsella saved himself this detour, when he announced that Irish no longer had the intellectual subtlety or density of reference to sustain a modern sensibility:
To write in Irish instead of English would mean the loss of contact with my own present – abandonment of the language I was bred in for one I believe to be dying. It would also mean forfeiting a certain possible scope of language; for English has a greater scope than an Irish which is not able to handle all the affairs of my life.16
In view of the high order of Kinsella's achievement in English, this was hardly a surprising conclusion: yet it must not be generalized, for the work of Seán Ó Ríordáin attests that Irish is still a language calibrated to certain kinds of modern sensibility. Anyway, the idea of a necessary choice between languages and traditions may seem excessively melodramatic, given the fact that Hopkins and Eliot were among the strongest influences on Ó Ríordáin. Stronger than either of these, however, was the imprint of Joyce.
Ó Ríordáin's mind was saturated with the symbols of the Roman Catholicism which he had decided to reject; and, like Joyce, he put the repudiated terminology of theology to use in evolving a personal aesthetic theory. If Joyce spoke of epiphanies as moments of sudden spiritual manifestation, Ó Ríordáin wrote of the beo-gheit which leaves a person fé ghné eile (under a different aspect). If Joyce annexed the Eucharist for his epicleti, Ó Ríordáin stole the notion of Faoistin (confession) and Peaca (sin), reworking these words until they became aesthetic terms. Joyces surrender to "the whatness of a thing" was recapitulated in Ó Ríordáin's desire to achieve "instress" with his objects. For Ó Ríordáin in his poems, I becomes Thou and every opposite is revealed to be a double – male blends with female; the poet with his anima; and Ó Ríordáin's Gaelic poems may also be seen as an experiment with the English poetic tradition.
There are moments when creation for this poet is indistinguishable from the process of pillaging English, in much the same way as the anthropophagus writers of Latin America in the 1920s cannibalized Spanish:
A Ghaeilge im pheannsa
Do shinsear ar chaillís?
An teanga bhocht thabhartha
Gan sloinne tú, a theanga?
An leatsa na briathra
Nuair a dheinimse peaca?
Nuair is rúnmhar mo chroíse
An tusa a thostann?17
O Gaelic in my pen
Have you lost your ancestry?
Are you a poor illegitimate,
Without a surname, O Language.
Are the verbs yours
When I commit a sin?
When my heart is secret,
Is it you who are quiet?
The poet who began by writing sprung rhythms in imitation of Hopkins finally concedes that his ideas are often stolen from the very language which he seeks to escape:
Ag súrac atáirse
Ón striapach allúrach
Is sínim chugat smaointe
A ghoideas-sa uaithi.18
You are escaping from
The foreign harlot
And I proffer to you the ideas
Which I stole from her.
The chauvinism underlying the word "harlot" might offend many; but in general terms, the lines are a graphic illustration of the cultural trap described by Daniel Corkery as facing every Irish schoolchild in the 1920s and 1930s: a reading in English literature which, instead of sharpening the child's focus on a neighbourhood, actually distracts from it. Ó Ríordáins poems bear palpable traces of his reading of Hopkins, Eliot and Wordsworth. In such a context, Daniel Corkery's attack on "the want of native moulds" in Anglo-Irish writing seems faintly ludicrous, especially in view of his recommendation of the Irish language as the natural remedy for such a lack. The diagnosis offered by Corkery had been astute when he said of the aspiring poet that "his education provides him with an alien medium through which he is henceforth to look at his native land".19 But Corkery's mistake had been to believe that Irish was, by some mysterious privilege, immune to the incursions of international culture and modern thought. Ó Ríordáin suffered from no such delusion.
Nor did he suffer from Kinsella's syndrome. Far from feeling disabled by a "divided mind", he took that as a postulate and proceeded to use Irish in a brilliant diagnosis of the split condition. He particularly praised those thinkers – Corkery included – who had managed to reinterpret Gaelic voices for modernity:
Gur thit anuas
De phlimp ar urlár gallda an lae seo
Eoghan béal binn,
Aindrias Mac Craith, Seán Clarach, Aodhgán,
Cith filí.20
Until there fell down
With a bang onto the foreign floor of our times
Eoghan of the sweet mouth,
Aindrias Mac Craith, Scan Clárach, Aodhgán,
A shower of poets.
Kinsella was less sure that tradition could be so easily translated. All he could discern around him was an almighty mess, the wreckage of history. With Beckett, however, he shared the bleak consolation of being able to diagnose the mess as such, before going on to accommodate it in exact forms, which derived as much from early Irish literature (especially the Book of Invasions) as from contemporary psychology and anthropology. If the Book of Invasions posited the Irish experience as one of violent, wrenching assimilations, the intellectual structure provided by Jung and Teilhard de Chardin helped Kinsella to create a sense of order in a world which might otherwise have seemed hopeless. What he said of Joyce was also true of his own achievement: that he took the fragments of Irish experience and somehow found a language in which they could be depicted. He shared Joyces sense that man is educated most fully by sin, illness and suffering: that one must first go wrong in order to gain some inkling of how later one might go right. Kinsella is, in the words of Seamus Heaney, "the poet who affirms an Irish modernity, particularly in his treatment of psychic material which is utterly Irish Catholic".21
That achievement, though hard-won, remains ever-precarious in a land where politics looms around every corner and where "the politics of the last atrocity" can jeopardize the equilibrium of even the foremost poet. The coarseness of Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, a response to the killing of thirteen civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday 1972, was a reminder of the difficulty of writing poems that are political but, for all that, nonetheless poems.
Of the many talented poets to emerge from Northern Ireland in the period, Seamus Heaney appears to have faced that challenge with notable poise, though for some years after the eruption of violence in 1968, he was forced to "make statements in prose about why he wasn't making them in verse".22 The attempt underlying Heaney's early work is the same as that made by Kinsella: to translate the violence of the past into the culture of the future. This is never easy and the poet is repeatedly astonished by the way in which violence insinuates itself into even the most everyday activities. The farm of his childhood thus becomes a colony in which unwanted kittens are purged, and the urge is to mock attempts by self-deceiving town-dwellers to convert such carnage into pretty pastoral:
Still, living displaces false
sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, "Bloody pups." It make sense:
"Prevention of cruelty" talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.23
In Heaney's first book, the naturalist dies but death is not yet unnatural; though written by a member of the nationalist minority in the North, that last line has an ominous ring to it. Years were to pass before the artist directly addressed the political violence. However, there is a sense in which the relation between violence and social ritual was always his theme, something acknowledged in "The Betrothal of Cave-hill":
Gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill
And the profiled basalt maintains its stare
South: proud, protestant and northern and male.
Adam untouched, before the shock of gender.
They still shoot here for luck over a bridegroom:
The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love's hideouts, her pods and broom,
They fired above my car the ritual gun.24
Heaney developed an aesthetic in which the hard, masculine consonants of Protestant English culture "bulled" the softer, feminine words of Gaelic tradition. In the 1960s, at a time when the Lemass/ O'Neill courtship promised much and free trade was instituted between Ireland and England, his implication appeared to be that only a fully Anglo-Irish fusion might produce a single, workable language.25 In other words, what remained a brutal conflict at the level of politics might somehow be resolved at the level of culture. Hence the fetishizing of childhood landscapes which gave an almost pornographic quality to many of Heaney's poems about south Derry, a place in which land is reduced to mere symbol (as in Gaelic dinnsheanchas). The part in such poems is loved in the name of the whole, and made to exist at the level of an image rather than for what it truly is.
Yet there is in Heaney's writing a developed ethical sense which causes him constantly to question his own evasions. So, in one poem, when the IRA tars and feathers a woman for fraternizing with British soldiers, he is reminded not only of a parallel case of a Danish woman sacrificed to the land in an ancient fertility rite but also of the more accusing parallel between the IRA and himself, since both are guilty of reducing woman to cultural totem. "Punishment" is as much about pornography as about violence, because pornography is another zone where violence and culture overlap. The poem admits that the logical consummation of the pornographic imagination is death:
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs . . .
I am the artful voyeur
of your brains exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.26
The bog in Heaney's mythos preserves not just bodies but consciousness. Every layer, "camped on before", tells its own history in the form of geography, and so the adulteress is paradoxically preserved by the sheer weight of all that culture, all that layered earth which suffocated her. The poet partakes of that duplicity, on the one hand sympathizing with her plight and even worshipping her as a saint, while on the other hand repeating his characteristic sin of fetishizing the beaded nipples like a cheap voyeur, and a voyeur, moreover, whose sin is traceable to his art, being perhaps as great an outrage as his connivance in the tribal revenge.
The bog-myth has the effect of distancing contemporary violence. Some might feel that this is done to come to terms with the strange fact that readers, inured to newspaper photographs of daily atrocity, can feel more for the ancient than the modern victim; others would contend that it is done because feelings about contemporary violence are too pressing for control and so need the objective correlative of a victim of a sacrificial cult. With such distancing comes aestheticization and a seductive conceptual cliché, as the old stereotypes of the "bog Irish" are reasserted with an unexampled complexity. Denis Donoghue has defended the bog-poems as providing a necessary consolation, a reminder that, however terrible, the current violence has its part in a wider Norm European cycle, releasing minds from the immediate experience to the comfort of "hearing that there is a deeper, truer life going on beneath the bombing and murders and torture".27 The danger is that the violence may seem to have been sanitized and even prettified by art. To guard against it, "Punishment" returns in its closing sequence to current outrages, which refuse to be contained by the mythological structure devised for them. There is in Heaney a real scruple which saves his poems, despite their frequent winsomeness, from becoming too pleased with themselves or with the conclusions they propose. There is also another scruple, a recognition that while the moral community must condemn exponents of violence, the artistic community must try to understand its authenticity and its roots.
The fear is that simple, rudimentary souls will foolishly conclude that to understand violence is to connive in apologizing for it. Interestingly, Heaney uses the word "connive" with the phrase "civilized outrage" to indicate his sense that there are no easy solutions to the poetic, as well as the political, problems posed. Despite this, as Ireland's most celebrated poet, "famous Seamus" has been expected, whenever he appears on television, to dispense political wisdom. He has answered the charge of being "soft on the IRA" by signing the book of condolences at the British Embassy after the murder of Ambassador Ewart-Biggs in 1976: but such gestures have merely prompted critics like the socialist politician Jim Kemmy to say that the poet would have made a fine Fianna Fáil town-councillor.
However, the worst that can be said against Heaney always turns out to have been said already of himself by the artist within the poems. So in the ironically-tided "Exposure", he accuses himself of ambivalence, of a two-facedness masquerading as artistic even-handedness. This poem was written in a period after he had resigned his lectureship in Belfast. He had taken up residence in the woods of County Wicklow, rather in the manner of Sweeney, that northern king who fled from the madness of battle to seek a different kind of exposure – to nature, to the poetic quarrel with the self rather than the political quarrel with others:
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.28
Again, there is ambiguity, for "wood-kerne" was the very term used by English officers for those Irish rebels and rapparees who sought protection in the woods. The guilt at having, in other poems, dignified deeds done by men of action is qualified here by a guilt at not being a man of action himself.
In Station Island, his sixth volume, published in 1984, Heaney finally tired of his own pose of scrupulous neutrality and intermittent empathy, opting instead to offer absolute, unqualified empathy to all, smiters and smitten. Here he achieved a different, more complex kind of even-handedness. At various points in the tide-poem all Northern voices are allowed to speak; and the poet no longer professes to speak for or even to them. Instead, they talk at him, accusing him of giving too much relief by his winsome images, of soothing the pain by describing it too beautifully. His shot cousin sees the poet as little better than a traitor
, who turns his sordid death into another shapely poem:
You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.
You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly you . . .
(who) saccharined my death with morning dew.29
The artist who had most fully explored the points of intersection between poetry and violence before Heaney was, of course, Synge. His Pegeen discovered how large was the gap between poetry and dirty deeds. Synge's own answer to the aestheticization of violence (which he found in Yeats's writing) was to sharpen rather than soften the focus on that brutality. He went even further, insisting that poetry must become brutal again if it were ever to recover its full humanity. The saccharine of morning dew and Celtic mist must be removed from the "skinny shee", and winsomeness seen for the temptation that it was.
That is also the point to which Heaney came in Station Island, a book whose poems are as raw and open as a wound, a book which rejects the distancing frame of the bog poems for a more immediate messiness. The landscapes in it are filled with a technology only half-subsumed back into the earth. In the midst of such jaggedness and indecision, the author becomes a kind of self-critical Christy Mahon, ashamed of his facility with words:
And there I was, incredible to myself
among people far too eager to believe me
and my story, even if it happened to be true.30
Heaney's self-image as a poet has never been as high as one might expect of a best-selling, much-prized author: perhaps this is because his work has achieved awesome complexity and mass popularity in ways which would leave anyone, especially a poet, suspicious. He has at various times likened himself to Hamlet the Dane, hand-wringing over graves, dithering, blathering: but like Synge, that other expert on handling skulls, he knows that art is carrion, a barbarian's booty steeped in a violence which it must nevertheless somehow seem to deplore. As he writes in "The First Flight":
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