Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  I was mired in attachment

  until they began to pronounce me

  a feeder off battlefields.31

  i.e. a beneficiary of a violence which he cannot morally support, yet which he can to some degree understand. Conor Cruise O'Brien might contend that this makes him the laureate of the SDLP: and, as a former classmate of John Hume at St. Columb's in Deny, Heaney might respond "so be it". The strain has sometimes shown, especially in his treatment of sexual conquest: but no Irish artist since Synge has given a fuller account of the relation between poetry and violence, and that in a period when such accounts have often been simplified into mere polemics. If some of Heaney's poems are too patently allusive, too obviously destined for the university seminar (as some of his earlier lyrics were for the school anthology), there is a great middle range in his poems which answers the Irish experience in his generation.

  Station Island was at once an audacious self-identification with a "Catholic" tradition of writing (from Carleton through Joyce to Kavanagh) and a call for an honourable discharge from political or tribal affiliation. It ended with the ghost of Joyce urging the poet to "fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency" and to forget the old, accumulated grudges:

  You are raking at dead fires,

  a waste of time for somebody your age.

  That subject people stuff is a cod's game . . .32

  Behind that intimation of freedom lay the example of Sweeney, the king who went mad in battle, threw a saint's book into the lake and fled the North, transformed into a bird aloft over the fields of Ireland, voicing his pain and his pleasure in terse, beautiful poems. With his versions in Sweeney Astray (1983) Heaney had freed himself. It was, arguably, this encounter with a famous old text which liberated him – as it had Synge and Austin Clarke – into zones where he could soar and sing.

  Thereafter Heaney's poems were much less earthed in identifiable locales and less bound by hard-and-fast tides than the earlier work. Now they tended to take off into the sky or across the waters on a voyage into the unknown. That unknown was a dimension in which man could at last become an almost non-human witness of himself. The poet who had once taken up a position in the real world from which he explored analogies of distant metaphor now reversed the process, occupying a world of metaphor from which he could now and then look back upon the real.

  In the title poem of the collection Seeing Things, images of flying and sailing are conflated in a skyship from which the artist looks down on passengers in a boat committed to the risky buoyancy of Inishbofin's waters. It might be an audacious image from Chagall did it not feature, centuries earlier, in The Book of Clonmacnoise. These annals recount how another skyship found its progress halted when its anchor became somehow hooked into the monastery's alar-rail. One of the sailors tried but failed to release the anchor-rope, as Heaney relates in another poem from the volume:

  "This man can't bear our life here and will drown",

  The abbot said, "unless we help him". So

  They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

  Out of the marvellous as he had known it.33

  This poses the central question: which is more miraculous, the mythical or the mundane? The poet may be a little like the sailor, glad to escape drowning in the political waters that left him "mired". To be out of one's familiar element is to be drowned and at the same time enriched by new possibilities for marvel. The everyday world will henceforth seem strange to such a one, who writes as if from beyond the grave; but the sailor's return to the skyship does not signify a total rejection of quotidian things, merely a resolution to see them in a new light.

  After Seeing Things Heaney's poetry veered away from the ideal of portraiture to that of vision, with images that were at once audacious and appropriate:

  His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable,

  When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,

  Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.34

  The canny Northern urge to check soaring fictions against the available facts was still present (a deflating voice in the collection says "be literal a moment"); but the more powerful poems were undeniably those which allowed the everyday to give way to the crepuscular world of the imagination. The choice was no longer seen as between a metaphor and a real thing but – as the sailor found – between one metaphor and another. In the familiar experience of schoolboys playing an increasingly notional game of football in a deepening twilight, the poet read his new condition:

  Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

  As the light died and they kept on playing

  Because by then they were playing in their heads

  And the actual kicked ball came to them

  Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

  Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

  Sounded like effort in another world . . .35

  Like the poet, those players had marked out a celestial pitch, a field of force constructed to rules which at no point purport to compete with mundane reality.

  As Heaney's voice matured, the poet took on an increasingly bardic aura, infusing tight quatrains with a variety of registers. A notable number of elements from Gaelic tradition – especially the lore of place associated with dinnsheanchas – were to be found in his work and in that of many contemporaries. This revived fashion for poetic geography was questioned in the 1980s by the critic Vincent Buckley, who detected in it the old Celticist idea of a people foredoomed by landscape and character to an ineffable melancholy. "We should not read into the geography a sadness produced among the human family by history", he warned: "Ireland is a living testimony to the fact that its own people have absorbed history into geography, events into climate".36 The response of the leading poets to such critiques has been to historicize geography, something which Richard Murphy did as early as The Battle of Aughrim and again in Sailing to an Island, as did John Montague in The Rough Field Heaney, likewise, excavated each layer of soil for evidence from remoter periods, the spade striking always inward and downward by a poet self-cast as archaeologist. Derek Mahon's answer, even more radical, was to present the poet as anthropologist, engaged in a search for some sign of the persistence of the person. Such an approach had the merit of looking forward as well as back, which may account for a certain jauntiness in Mahon's rhythms:

  Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived

  The ideal society which will replace our own.37

  But the underlying trajectory is, for all its eloquence, more gloomy, individual and estranged. He is, of course, a poet of Belfast, but often by way of disavowal:

  One part of my mind must learn to know its place.

  The things that happen in the kitchen houses

  And echoing back-streets of this desperate city

  Should engage more than my casual interest,

  Exact more interest than my casual pity.38

  Mahon's problem is that he never felt that he belonged to a city which he would eventually escape, for as an artist he was destined to take Bohemia rather than Belfast for home:

  Perhaps if I'd stayed behind

  And lived it bomb

  by bomb I might have grown up at last

  And learnt what is meant by home.39

  Yet there is no final evasion of commitment in the gesture: rather a widened embrace which has room for the dead peoples of earlier holocausts. In "A Disused Shed in County Wexford" – perhaps the finest poem written by his generation of Irish artists – the speaker seems to open a door onto those earlier victims imaged now as mushrooms:

  They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way

  To do something, to speak on their behalf

  Or at least not to close the door again.

  Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii.

  "Save us, save us", they seem to say,

  "Let the god not abandon us

  Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

  We too had
our lives to live.

  You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

  Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!"40

  If Mahon has turned from his native city to a wider world, Ciaran Carson has in Belfast Confetti brilliantly mapped the European architectonics of Walter Benjamin onto the streets and suburbs of that very place. He renders the sights and smells with a real intensity, as if photographing the scenes of a crime; but the emotion is suffused with a conclusive tenderness that can come only from intimate knowledge:

  Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire . . .

  I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.41

  As remarkable as the revival in the north has been the recent outpouring of poetry and prose by women writers in the south: if the voices of the northern minority, long repressed, became finally audible, the words of women began to make a similar claim to attention. In an obvious sense, this was a reflection of the re-emergence of the women's movement in the 1970s, following the international success of books like Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics: but at a deeper level it was a repossession by women of energies which had informed the Irish renaissance only to be denied in the new state, energies which some connected back to Celtic ideals of womanhood. Perhaps predictably then, the two foremost women poets of this period worked in Irish, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill. The former was already well established by 1960 as a writer of enviable emotional range, who chronicled the frustrations of women spurned in love by cold-hearted males and who appealed by way of consolation to the image of a self-sufficient Celtic woman.

  The most technically gifted versifier of her time, Máire Mhac an tSaoi achieved a richness and density of language which nobody could hope to rival. Blessed with such gifts, she was enabled to translate major and minor texts from English, French and Spanish into beautiful, idiomatic Irish, a superb reversal of the more usual trajectory, but one which served and enriched the language which she had wrought to such a pitch of intensity. The difficulties faced by her generation of female artists were pithily summed up in her lyric parody of holy-picture prayers of Irish womanhood:

  Cré na Mná Tí

  Coinnibh an teaghlach geal

  Agus an chlann fé smacht,

  Nigh agus sciúr agus glan,

  Cóirigh proinn agus lacht,

  Iompaigh tochta, leag brat,

  Ach, ax nós Sheicheiriseáide,

  Ní mór duit an fhilíocht chomh maith!42

  The Housewife's Credo

  Keep the dwelling bright and clean and the children in order; wash and scour and clean; prepare meal and beverage; turn mattress – spread cloth – but, like Scheherazade, you will need to write poetry also.

  That contemporary condition was also evident in her admission that the strong woman of Celtic mythology was no longer a feasible model in the age of reified bodies in fashion magazines:

  AthDheirdre

  "Ní bhearrfad m'ingne",

  Adúirt sí siúd

  Is do thug cúl don saol

  De dheascaibh an aonlae sin –

  Lena cré

  Ni mhaífinnse,

  Ná mo leithéidse, gaol –

  Cíoraim mo cheann,

  Is cuirim dath fém béal.43

  Another Deirdre

  "I shan't cut my nails",

  That woman said

  And turned her back on life.

  In consequence of that one day

  – With her clay

  I would not claim,

  Nor would my sort claim, kindred –

  I comb my hair

  And put rouge on my lips.

  So wrought and complex were Máire Mhac an tSaoi's lyrics that they drew few translators: quite the opposite was the case with her follower in the next generation, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill. She, too, handled Gaelic tradition in a more subversive fashion than did the English-language poets. They, in turn, went to her work and translated it in order to derive from the experience a sense of greater abandon in the presence of Gaelic material. Her "An Crann" (The Tree) tells of how a fairy-woman, armed with a Black and Decker power-cutter, hacked down a garden tree, and of how the speaker's husband asked whether she would like it if he were to do the same to her. She duly reports his response to the returned fairy-woman:

  "O", ar sise, "that's very interesting".

  Bhí béim ar an very.

  Bhí cling leis an -ing.

  Do labhair sí ana-chiúin.

  Bhuel, b'shin mo lá-sa,

  Pé ar bith sa tsaol é,

  iontaithe bunoscionn.

  Thit an tóin as mo bholg

  is faoi mar a gheobhainn lascadh cic

  nó leacadar sna baotháin

  íon taom anbhainne isteach orm

  a dhein chomh lag san mé

  gurb ar éigin a bhí ardú na méire ionam

  as san go ccann trí lá.

  Murab ionann is an crann

  a dh'fhan ann, slán.44

  Paul Muldoon's version is as unbuttoned as the original:

  "O", says she, "that's very interesting".

  There was a stress on the "very".

  She lingered over the "ing".

  She was remarkably calm and collected.

  These are the times that are in it, so,

  all a bit topsy-turvy.

  The bottom falling out of my belly

  as if I had got a kick up the arse

  or a punch in the kidneys.

  A fainting-fit coming over me

  that took the legs from under me

  and left me so zonked

  I could barely lift a finger

  till Wednesday.

  As for the quince, it was safe and sound

  and still somehow holding its ground.

  Such a treatment is infinitely more satisfying than Ní Dhomhnaill's programmatic assaults on the Sean-Bhean Bhocht of national tradition, an old woman now grown bourgeois, cantankerous and unstoppable:

  is gur ag dul i mínithe is imbréagaí atá gach dream

  dá dtagann: gach seanrá a thagann isteach i mo chloigeann,

  aon rud ach an tseanbhean bhaoth seo a choimeád socair.45

  or in Ciaran Carson's version:

  Folly, I'm saying, gets worse with every generation:

  Anything, every old cliché in the book, anything at all

  To get this old bitch to shut the fuck up.

  These translations from contemporary Irish are very different from the quieter performances of Kinsella or Heaney – as when Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin renders "Fear" (Looking at a Man) as a male striptease:

  Ba chóir go mórfaí tú

  os comhar an tslua,

  go mbronnfaí ort

  craobh is próca óir,

  ba chóir go snoífí tú

  id dhealbh marmair

  ag seasamh romham

  id pheilt is uaireadóir.46

  You're the one they should praise

  In public places,

  The one should be handed

  Trophies and cheques.

  You're the model

  For the artist's hand,

  Standing before me

  In your skin and a wristwatch.

  Writing in Irish, Ní Dhomhnaill might be forgiven a little piety, a certain rumination on the question of a double colonialism: but rather than lament the wrongs of woman, she assumes equality, even superiority to men, with an ease which may have its roots in Celtic traditions. Nevertheless, she is well aware of the precarious nature of such an achievement in a language which may well be dead as a community tongue before she herself passes on: and so she likens her hope to an infant child placed in a basket on the waters:

  féachaint n'fheadaraís

&nb
sp; cá dtabharfadh an sruth é,

  féachaint, dála Mhaoise,

  an bhfóirfifh iníon Fharóinn?47

  only to have it bounce hither and thither,

  not knowing where it might end up;

  in the lap, perhaps,

  of some Pharaoh's daughter.

  Ní Dhomhnaill taught her generation that the best way to protect a tradition is to attack and subvert it. So in "The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish" Eavan Boland offers a clear inversion of the fish-into-girl progress of the image in Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus", while at the same time registering in lines which echo Sylvia Plath just how much strain is involved in any conformity to an image:

  It's done:

  I turn,

  I flab upward

  blub-lipped,

  hipless

  and I am

  sexless

  shed

  of ecstasy,

  a pale

  swimmer

  sequin-skinned,

  pealing eggs

  screamlessly

  in seaweed.

  It's what

  I set my heart on.

  Yet

  ruddering

  and muscling

  in the sunless tons

  of new freedoms

  still

  I feel

  a chill pull,

  a brightening,

  a light, a light

  and how

  in my loomy cold,

  my greens

  still

  she moons

  in me.48

  This is more than a revision of Yeats's lyric, for in it a woman has moved from passivity to self-transformation, from being the object of the poem to becoming its subject. Remaining loyal to the idea of nation, Boland found nevertheless that the fusion of the feminine and the national in previous Irish poetry seemed to simplify both in ways that were unacceptable. Lamenting "the power of nationhood to edit the reality of womanhood", Boland pointed to the fact that the women featured in the work of male Irish poets were "often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status".49

  Though this judgement may overlook the strong, self-willed women who are featured in the poems of Yeats, it is informed by Boland's confession that she wrote her own early work in derived modes, as if she were still the object of it: