So what chance had Kitty the Hare against all that? Our Boys appeared regularly, a cultural antidote with official home backing, healthy as a Christian Brother on a winter morning, the first step towards Ireland’s Own. Cultural debilitations! I preferred the japes of Ginger Nutt, the wheezes of Smith of the Lower Fourth, the swish of gowns, the mortar-board and the head’s study to the homely toils of Murphy among the birettas. It would take Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger to get over that surrender.
My first literary frisson, however, came on home ground. There was an Irish history lesson at school which was in reality a reading of myths and legends. A textbook with large type and heavy Celticized illustrations dealt with the matter of Ireland from the Tuatha De Danaan to the Norman Invasion. I can still see Brian Boru with his sword held like a cross reviewing the troops at Clontarf. But the real imaginative mark was made with a story of the Dagda, a dream of harp music and light, confronting and defeating Balor of the Evil Eye on the dark fortress of Tory Island. Cuchullain and Ferdia also sank deep, those images of wounds bathed on the green rushes and armour clattering in the ford.
Yet all of that yielded to the melodrama of Blind Pew and Billy Bones, Long John and Ben Gunn. Treasure Island we read at school also and it was a prelude to the first book I remember owning and cherishing: there it was on the table one Christmas morning, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. I was a Jacobite for life after that day. Instinctively I knew that the world of the penal rock and the redcoats – that oleograph to the faith of our fathers – was implicit in the scenery of that story. To this day, my heart lifts to the first sentence of it: ‘I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house….’
As a boarder at St Columb’s College I did the Maurice Walsh circuit – Blackcock’s Feather remains with me as an atmosphere, a sense of bogs and woods – but again it was a course book that stuck its imagery deepest. When I read in Lorna Doone how John Ridd stripped the muscle off Carver Doone’s arm like a string of pith off an orange I was well on the road to epiphanies. Not that I didn’t stray into the imperial realms of Biggles or the baloney of the William stories. But it is only those books with a touch of poetry in them that I can remember – all coming to a head when, in my last summer holiday from school, I sat up all night to finish Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.
I missed Pooh Bear. I can’t remember owning a selection of Grimm or Andersen. I read Alice in Wonderland at the university. But what odds? Didn’t Vinny Hunter keep me in wonderland with his stones of Tarzan:
‘When he jumps down off a tree
Tarzan shakes the world.’
So Vinny Hunter would tell me
On the road to the school.
I had forgotten for years
Words so seismic and plain
That would come like rocked waters,
Possible again.
3 Rhymes
A few months ago I remembered a rhyme that we used to chant on the way to school. I know now that it is about initiation but as I trailed along the Lagan’s Road on my way to Anahorish School it was something that was good for a laugh:
‘Are your praties dry
And are they fit for digging?’
‘Put in your spade and try,’
Says Dirty-Faced McGuigan.
I suppose I must have been about eight or nine years old when those lines stuck in my memory. They constitute a kind of poetry, not very respectable perhaps, but very much alive on the lips of that group of schoolboys, or ‘scholars’, as the older people were inclined to call us. McGuigan was probably related to a stern old character called Ned McGuigan who travelled the roads with a menacing blackthorn stick. He came from a district called Ballymacquigan – The Quigan, for short – and he turned up in another rhyme:
Neddy McGuigan,
He pissed in the Quigan;
The Quigan was hot
So he pissed in the pot;
The pot was too high
So he pissed in the sky;
Hell to your soul, Neddy McGuigan,
For pissing so high.
And there were other chants, scurrilous and sectarian, that we used to fling at one another:
Up the long ladder and down the short rope
To hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope.
To which the answer was:
Splitter splatter holy water
Scatter the Paypishes every one
If that won’t do
We’ll cut them in two
And give them a touch of the
Red, white and blue.
To which the answer was:
Red, white and blue
Should be torn up in two
And sent to the devil
At half-past two.
Green, white and yellow
Is a decent fellow.
Another one which was completely nonsensical still pleases me:
One fine October’s morning September last July
The moon lay thick upon the ground, the mud shone in the sky.
I stepped into a tramcar to take me across the sea,
I asked the conductor to punch my ticket and he punched my eye for me.
I fell in love with an Irish girl, she sang me an Irish dance,
She lived in Tipperary, just a few miles out of France.
Her house it was a round one, the front was at the back,
It stood alone between two more and it was whitewashed black.
We weren’t forced to get these lines by heart. They just seemed to spring up in our mind and trip off the tongue spontaneously so that our parents would say ‘If it was your prayers, you wouldn’t learn them as fast.’
There were other poems, of course, that we were forced to learn by heart. I am amazed to realize that at the age of eleven I was spouting great passages of Byron and Keats by rote until the zinc roof of the Nissen hut that served for our schoolhouse (the previous school had been cleared during the war to make room for an aerodrome) rang to the half-understood magnificence of:
There was a sound of revelry by night
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
The music rose with its voluptuous swell …
I also knew the whole of Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ but the only line that was luminous then was ‘To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees’, because my uncle had a small orchard where the old apple trees were sleeved in a soft green moss. And I had a vague satisfaction from ‘the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows’, which would have been complete if it had been ‘midges’ mourning among the ‘sallies’.
The literary language, the civilized utterance from the classic canon of English poetry, was a kind of force-feeding. It did not delight us by reflecting our experience; it did not re-echo our own speech in formal and surprising arrangements. Poetry lessons, in fact, where rather like catechism lessons: official inculcations of hallowed formulae that were somehow expected to stand us in good stead in the adult life that stretched out ahead. Both lessons did indeed introduce us to the gorgeousness of the polysyllable, and as far as we were concerned there was little to choose between the music with ‘its voluptuous swell’ and the ‘solemnization of marriage within forbidden degrees of consanguinity’. In each case we were overawed by the dimensions of the sound.
There was a third category of verse which I encountered at this time, halfway between the roadside rhymes and the school poetry (or ‘poertry’): a form known to us as ‘the recitation’. When relations visited or a children’s party was held at home, I would be called upon to recite. Sometimes it would be an Irish patriotic ballad:
At length, brave Michael Dwyer, you and your trusty men
Were hunted o’er the mountain and tracked into the glen.
Sleep not, but watch and listen, keep ready blade and ball,
For the soldiers know you hide this night in the Glen of Wild Imall.
Sometimes, a western narrative by Robert Service:
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon.
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a ragtime tune.
Back of the bar at a solo game sat Dangerous Dan McGrew
And watching his luck was his light o’love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
While this kind of stuff did not possess the lure of forbidden words like ‘piss’ and ‘hell to your soul’, it was not encumbered by the solemn incomprehensibility of Byron and Keats. It gave verse, however humble, a place in the life of the home, made it one of the ordinary rituals of life.
‘Omphalos’: BBC Radio 4, 1978; ‘Reading’: Education Times, 1973; ‘Rhymes’: G. Summerfield (ed.), Worlds (Penguin, 1974)
from Feeling into Words
I intend to retrace some paths into what William Wordsworth called in The Prelude ‘the hiding places’:
The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.
Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants.
‘Digging’, in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me, although there are a couple of lines in it that have more of the theatricality of the gunslinger than the self-absorption of the digger. I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to ‘dabble in verses’. This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. The facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me a kind of insouciance and a kind of confidence. I didn’t care who thought what about it: somehow, it had surprised me by coming out with a stance and an idea that I would stand over:
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
As I say, I wrote it down years ago; yet perhaps I should say that I dug it up, because I have come to realize that it was laid down in me years before that even. The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter and that was simply a matter of almost proverbial common sense. On the road to and from school, people used to ask you what class you were in and how many slaps you’d got that day and invariably they ended up with an exhortation to keep studying because ‘learning’s easy carried’ and ‘the pen’s lighter than the spade’. And the poem does no more than allow that bud of wisdom to exfoliate, although the significant point in this context is that at the time of writing I was not aware of the proverbial structure at the back of my mind. Nor was I aware that the poem was an enactment of yet another digging metaphor that came back to me years later. This was the rhyme we used to chant on the road to school, though, as I have said before, we were not fully aware of what we were dealing with:
‘Are your praties dry
And are they fit for digging?’
‘Put in your spade and try,’
Says Dirty-Faced McGuigan.
There digging becomes a sexual metaphor, an emblem of initiation, like putting your hand into the bush or robbing the nest, one of the various natural analogies for uncovering and touching the hidden thing. I now believe that the ‘Digging’ poem had for me the force of an initiation: the confidence I mentioned arose from a sense that perhaps I could do this poetry thing too, and having experienced the excitement and release of it once, I was doomed to look for it again and again.
I don’t want to overload ‘Digging’ with too much significance. It is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem, but it is interesting as an example – and not just as an example of what one reviewer called ‘mud-caked fingers in Russell Square’, for I don’t think that the subject-matter has any particular virtue in itself – it is interesting as an example of what we call ‘finding a voice’.
Finding a voice means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for a poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet’s natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the lines he is making up.
How, then, do you find it? In practice, you hear it coming from somebody else, you hear something in another writer’s sounds that flows in through your ear and enters the echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous system in such a way that your reaction will be, ‘Ah, I wish I had said that, in that particular way.’ This other writer, in fact, has spoken something essential to you, something you recognize instinctively as a true sounding of aspects of yourself and your experience. And your first steps as a writer will be to imitate, consciously or unconsciously, those sounds that flowed in, that in-fluence.
One of the writers who influenced me in this way was Gerard Manley Hopkins. The result of reading Hopkins at school was the desire to write, and when I first put pen to paper at university, what flowed out was what had flowed in, the bumpy alliterating music, the reporting sounds and ricochetting consonants typical of Hopkins’s verse. I remember lines from a piece called ‘October Thought’ in which some frail bucolic images foundered under the chainmail of the pastiche:
Starling thatch-watches, and sudden swallow
Straight breaks to mud-nest, home-rest rafter
Up past dry dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter
Ghosting the roof of bog-oak, turf-sod and rods of willow …
and then there was ‘heaven-hue, plum-blue and gorse-pricked with gold’ and ‘a trickling tinkle of bells well in the fold’.
Looking back on it, I believe there was a connection, not obvious at the time but, on reflection, real enough, between the heavily accented consonantal noise of Hopkins’s poetic voice, and the peculiar regional characteristics of a Northern Ireland accent. The late W. R. Rodgers, another poet much lured by alliteration, said in his poem ‘The Character of Ireland’ that the people from his (and my) part of the world were
an abrupt people
who like the spiky consonants of speech
and think the soft ones cissy; who dig
the k and t in orchestra, detect sin
in sinfonia, get a kick out of
tin-cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk,
anything that gives or takes attack
like Micks, Teagues, tinkers’ gets, Vatican.
It is true that the Ulster accent is generally a staccato consonantal one. Our tongue strikes the tangent of the consonant rather more than it rolls the circle of the vowel – Rodgers also spoke of ‘the round gift of the gab in southern mouths’. It is energetic, angular, hard-edged, and it may be because of this affinity between my first accent and Hopkins’s oddity that those first verses turned out as
they did.
I couldn’t say, of course, that I had found a voice but I had found a game. I knew the thing was only word-play, and I hadn’t even the guts to put my name to it. I called myself Incertus, uncertain, a shy soul fretting and all that. I was in love with words themselves, but had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping stone in your life. Those verses were what we might call ‘trial-pieces’, little stiff inept designs in imitation of the master’s fluent interlacing patterns, heavy-handed clues to the whole craft.
I was getting my first sense of crafting words and for one reason or another, words as bearers of history and mystery began to invite me. Maybe it began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling in the early part of the century. Maybe it began with the exotic listing on the wireless dial: Stuttgart, Leipzig, Oslo, Hilversum. Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry in our household: Tower of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted. None of these things were consciously savoured at the time but I think the fact that I still recall them with ease, and can delight in them as verbal music, means that they were bedding the ear with a kind of linguistic hardcore that could be built on some day.
Finders Keepers Page 2