I think the writers of my generation saw their very emergence as writers as a part of the leaven. The fact that a literary action was afoot was in itself a new political condition and the writers did not feel the need to address themselves to the specific questions of politics because they assumed that the subtleties and tolerances of their art were precisely what they had to contribute to the coarseness and intolerances of the public life. When Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons and myself were having our first books published, Paisley was already in full sectarian cry and, indeed, Northern Ireland’s cabinet ministers regularly massaged the atavisms and bigotries of Orangemen on the Twelfth of July. Nothing needed to be exposed: rather, it seemed that conditions had to be outstripped and it is probably true to say that the idea of poetry was itself that higher ideal to which the poets unconsciously had turned in order to survive in the demeaning conditions, demeaned by resentment in the case of the Nationalists, by embarrassment at least and guilt at best in the case of the Unionists. In fact, that passage from Jung which I quoted earlier does fit the typical if not fully self-conscious position of the Ulster poet in the sixties:
One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect … which regards the affect as an object.
In our case, we might apply Jung’s term ‘the affect’ to the particular exacerbations attendant on being a native of Northern Ireland, since this ‘affect’ means a disturbance, a warp in the emotional glass which is in danger of narrowing the range of the mind’s responses to the terms of the disturbance itself, refracting everything through the warp. Things had advanced when this ‘affect’ was observed by a new consciousness that perceived it to be the result of different history, heritages, cultural identity, traditions, call it what you will. These words provided a perspective on the surge of disruptive feelings which sprang too readily in the collective life, rebellious on the Nationalist minority side, overbearing and punitive on the majority side, those unindividuated frictions of day-to-day social and political experience.
For a moment, the discovery and deployment of this language allowed us to talk of Planters and Gaels, rather than Protestants and Catholics, to speak of different heritages rather than launch accusations and suspicions at one another, to speak of history rather than the skullduggery of the local government. It was a palliative, true in its way, salutary in that it shifted the discourse into a more self-diagnosing frame of reference, but as everyone including the poets knew, not true enough. To locate the roots of one’s identity in the ethnic and liturgical habits of one’s group might be all very well, but for the group to confine the range of one’s growth, to have one’s sympathies determined and one’s responses programmed by it was patently another form of entrapment. The only reliable release for the poet was the appeasement of the achieved poem. In that liberated moment, when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments. It is this deeper psychological compulsion which lies behind the typical concern of Northern Irish poets with style, with formal finish, with linguistic relish and play. They knew the truth of Yeats’s affirmation that the ‘rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, / The sentimentalist himself, while art / Is but a vision of reality.’ In other words, both topographically and artistically, they knew their place, and it is no accident that Paul Muldoon’s first pamphlet, published in Belfast in 1971, was called, in fact, Knowing my Place, a punning title which is at once humble and arrogant, slyly allusive to what was expected of the minority to which he belonged and genuinely in sympathy with the idea that everything had its place – art, love, politics, local affections, cultural heritage and, for that matter, the place where a word doubles its meaning or where a line ends on the page.
That is the first point I want to emphasize: the profound relation here between poetic technique and historical situation. It is a superficial response to the work of Northern Irish poets to conceive of their lyric stances as evasions of the actual conditions. Their concern with poetry itself wears well when we place it beside the protest poetry of the sixties: the density of their verbal worlds has held up, the purely poetic force of the words is the guarantee of a commitment which need not apologize for not taking up the cudgels since it is raising a baton to attune discords which the cudgels are creating. To attune it within the pit of their own consciousness, of course, not in the arena of dustbin lids and shoot-to-kill operations.
The second point to insist on is that the idea of poetry as a symbolic resolution of opposing truths, the idea of the poem as having its existence in a realm separate from the discourse of politics, does not absolve it or the poet from political responsibility. Nobody is going to advocate an ivory tower address for the poet nor a holier-than-thou attitude. Yet ‘pure’ poetry is perfectly justifiable in earshot of the car bomb and it can imply a politics, depending on the nature of the poetry. A poetry of hermetic wit, of riddles and slips and self-mocking ironies, may appear culpably miniaturist or fastidious to the activist with his microphone at the street corner, and yet such poetry may be exercising in its inaudible way a fierce disdain of the activist’s message, or a distressed sympathy with it. But the reading of those political implications is in itself a political activity, separate from the processes that produced the poems, an extension or projection from the artistic endeavour which is not obliged to have any intention beyond its own proper completion.
The poet is stretched between politics and transcendence, and is often displaced from a confidence in a single position by his disposition to be affected by all positions, negatively rather than positively capable. This, and the complexity of the present conditions, may go some way to explain the large number of poems in which the Northern Irish writer views the world from a great spatial or temporal distance, the number of poems imagined from beyond the grave, from the perspective of mythological or historically remote characters: Derek Mahon’s ‘An Image from Beckett’ is an amplification of earlier soliloquies from the other side, by forgers, cowards, tramps, artists, all rehearsing their fates in a note both wry and plangent. This kind of poem culminates in the beautifully orchestrated ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, where it is not just a single life that is given voice, but a whole Lethe full of doomed generations and tribes, whispering their unfulfilment and perplexed hopes in a trickle of masonry, pleading for a hearing in the great soft gestures of mushroom-growths that strain from the dark towards a guiding star of light in the keyhole:
A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like trifflds, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
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 naive labours have been in vain!’
This is about the need to live and be known, the need for selfhood, recognition in the eye of God and the eye of
the world, and its music is cello and homesick. A great sense of historical cycles, of injustice and catastrophe, looms at the back of the poem’s mind. At its forefront is the pursuit of the logic of its own metaphors growing with the mushrooms in the shed of an old estate that had been abandoned by an Irish ascendancy family after independence. But what gives the poem its sorrow and insight is the long perspective, an intimacy with the clay-floored foetor of the shed kept in mind and in focus from a point of detached compassion, in another world of freedom, light and efficiency. To reduce the mushrooms’ lives and appetites to counters for the frustrations and desolations of lives in Northern Ireland is, of course, one of those political readings which is perfectly applicable, but we recognize that this allegorical approach ties the poem too neatly into its place. The amplitude of its effects, its vault-filling resonance depend upon its displaced perspective. Those rooted helplessly in place plead with the capable uprooted visitor, be he poet or photographer. Mahon, the poet of metropolitan allusion, of ironical and cultivated manners, is being shadowed by his unlived life among the familiar shades of Belfast. Do not turn your back on us, do not disdain our graceless stifled destiny, keep faith with your origins, do not desert, speak for us: the mushrooms are the voices of belonging but they could not have been heard so compellingly if Mahon had not created the whispering gallery of absence not just by moving out of Ireland but by evolving out of solidarity into irony and compassion. And, needless to say, into solitude. These poems of the voice from beyond are beamed back out of a condition of silence and Zen-like stillness, an eternity in love with the products of time. They tenderly evoke the great solace of the natural world and also the great wounds we make in it and ourselves. ‘Ovid in Tomis’, for example, begins with a merry and ecologically indignant identification of the Roman poet with his alienated contemporary:
What coarse god
Was the gear-box in the rain
Beside the road?
What nereid the unsinkable
Hair conditioner
Knocking the icy rocks?
They stare me out
With the chaste gravity
And feral pride
Of noble savages
Set down
On an alien shore.
It is so long
Since my own transformation
Into a stone,
I often forget
That there was a time
Before my name
Was mud in the mouths
Of the Danube,
A dirty word in Rome.
Imagine Byron banished
To Botany Bay
Or Wilde to Dawson City
And you have some idea
How it is for me
On the shores of the Black Sea.
Baudelaire’s albatross poet, inept upon the deck, mocked by the callous sailors, has nothing on this one, so self-aware and self-mocking, so posthumous to himself, so sceptical of the very effort of poetry that he can say:
I
Have exchanged belief
For documentation.
The Muse is somewhere
Else, not here
By this frozen lake –
Or, if here, then I am
Not poet enough
To make the connection.
Are we truly alone
With our physics and myth
The stars no more
Than glittering dust,
With no one there
To hear our choral odes?
If so, we can start
To ignore the silence
Of infinite space
And concentrate instead
On the infinity
Under our very noses –
The cry at the heart
Of the artichoke,
The gaiety of atoms.
Better to contemplate
The blank page
And leave it blank
Than modify
Its substance by
So much as a pen-stroke.
Woven of wood-nymphs,
It speaks volumes
No one will ever write.
I incline my head
To its candour
And weep for our exile.
Again, this escapes beyond dramatic monologue and disguised autobiography into contemplation on the nature of artistic satisfaction itself; by the end the poem is abjuring language in a language that offers us that deeply formal sensation of tensions resolved. The speaker laments his exile in such a way that we would not have him rehabilitated. The wound he suffers is to his and our advantage: the local conditions that lie at the roots of the poet’s consciousness have been transposed into a symbol.
I don’t want to reduce Derek Mahon’s poems to this single theme of alienated distance, for his work also abounds in poems where the social voice is up and away on the back of Pegasus, cutting a dash through the usual life of back-kitchens and bar counters, but I would insist that I am not forcing his work to fit a thesis. It is present in all his books, this dominant mood of being on the outside (where one has laboured spiritually to arrive) only to end up looking back nostalgically at what one knows are well nigh intolerable conditions on the inside. It is treated in a number of his best poems, which dwell upon the sufferings of those he called in an early poem ‘the unreconciled in their metaphysical pain’. These poems of the displaced consciousness are as rinsed of political and ethnic solidarity as a haiku by Bashō, but their purely poetic achievement is further enriched when we view them against Mahon’s own political and ethnic background.
We might say that in order for any place to be credible for Mahon, it has to be reimagined in the light of other places. In the language of Star Trek, it has to be beamed up so that it can be dependably beamed down. Thus, the civil beauty of Penshurst Place, the home of the Sidney family, is evoked by Mahon in terms of the blandishments of Renaissance poetry, music and manners. Nevertheless while Mahon prizes and yearns for these arcadian harmonies, his mind is haunted by other more disturbing images. Sir Philip Sidney is one dream, all gilded valour and English patriotic aura, but another dream associated with Penshurst Place is Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, leader in the last Irish war against Elizabeth’s armies. The line ‘The Spanish ships around Kinsale’ refers to the Battle of Kinsale where Hugh O’Neill, arch-traitor in the eyes of the English, the Great O’Neill in the eyes of the Irish, was finally defeated. In other words, the courtliness evoked by the verse and symbolized by Penshurst Place is only one part of the poem’s life. Its underlife, its shadow elsewhere, is the Ulster of hill-forts, cattle-raids, and rain-sodden gallowglasses where Hugh O’Neill was born and to which, after eight years of being fostered at Penshurst Place in the care of Sir Henry Sidney, he returned. ‘Penshurst Place’, then, contains Mahon’s sense of bilocation, culturally in love with the Surrey countryside where he was living with his family when this poem was written, but domestically and politically entangled with the country of his first nurture.
The bright drop quivering on a thorn
In the rich silence after rain,
Lute music from the orchard aisles,
The paths ablaze with daffodils,
Intrigue and venery in the air
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs,
The iron hand and the velvet glove –
Come live with me and be my love.
A pearl face, numinously bright,
Shining in silence of the night,
A muffled crash of smouldering logs,
Bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs,
The Spanish ships around Kinsale,
The screech owl and the nightingale,
The falcon and the turtle dove –
Come live with me and be my love.
Instances of this sort could be multiplied. In a poem about leaving Surrey to return to North Antrim, Mahon imagines himself turning into a tree in an English parkland, ‘as if I belonged here too’ but he is destined to identify with a very diffe
rent native bush, a windswept thorn on a high northern clifftop,
With nothing to recommend it
But its harsh tenacity
Between the blinding windows
And the forests of the sea,
As if its very existence
Were a reason to continue.
Crone, crow, scarecrow,
Its worn fingers scrabbling
At a torn sky, it stands
On the edge of everything
Like a burnt-out angel
Raising petitionary hands.
The petitionary hands of the tree, like the pleading throats of the mushrooms, call upon the poet to identify with ‘everything that is the case’, in this case his native landscape with all its threshing historical plights. But in a poem called ‘Tractatus’, which takes off in its first line from a proposition of Wittgenstein’s, Mahon insists on the freedom to invent his own case:
‘The world is everything that is the case’
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face;
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.
The world, though, is also so much more –
Everything that is the case imaginatively.
Tacitus believed mariners could hear
The sun sinking into the western sea;
And who would question that titanic roar.
The steam rising wherever the edge may be?
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