They shake when the winds roar
Old bones upon the mountain shake.
In this final appearance of Thoor Ballylee in Yeats’s poetry, it stands fast and Yeats stands by it. Both tower and poet stand, as Macbeth and Macbeth’s castle once stood, suspended in art time, ratified by prophetic utterance. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth’s sense of inviolable sanctuary was based on oracles delivered to him when the witches prophesied that he would be safe until Birnam Wood should come to Dunsinane. Yeats, on the other hand, had written his own oracles to himself and created a fortified space within the rooms of many powerfully vaulted stanzas. But just as the witches equivocated and the world as a wood of trees moved unthinkably to dislodge Macbeth, so in the end the Yeatsian keep of tragic commitment and loyalty is assailed by mutinous doubts about the ultimate value of what there is to keep. Nevertheless, the Yeatsian drama ends with the poet as Macbeth, still pacing the battlements, just acknowledging the tremor on the fringes of Birnam but refusing to allow his chivalric countenance to quail. The tower as emblem of adversity, as the place of writing, has taken on a final aspect as icon of the absurd.
2 Thomas Kinsella
If Paul Muldoon has rewritten the Yeatsian immram and punished the longing and complaint of The Wanderings of Oisin with his prodigiously knowledgeable longer poems such as ‘Immram’ itself and ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, it is Thomas Kinsella, his senior by some twenty-odd years, who has engaged the mature Yeats’s compulsion to be in love and to love what vanishes. Since the late sixties, this deeply responsible poet has been absorbed in a slowly purposeful, heroically undeflected work of personal and national inquisition. From his early, formal and syntactically compact poems of the 1950s, when he defined his purpose as the quest for honesty in love and art, to his more recent, open-weave, semi-expressionist explorations of the roots of consciousness, the muscle tone of Kinsella’s poetry has always been in perfect order. The subject of much of his work is found in the ever-present wash of acedia and inanition round the edges of a life or a purpose, yet the pitch of the work is antithetically intense and capable.
Two short poems from different periods of his career will be enough to show how Kinsella’s technical and imaginative processes have developed. The first is from a sequence of tightly rhymed and strictly argued epigrams, entitled Moralities, which appeared in 1960. The sequence has four divisions subtitled, with challenging bareness, Faith, Love, Death and Song. Half-way through, between the emblem poems on love and those on death, comes this quotation, out of series, entitled ‘Interlude’:
Love’s doubts enrich my words; I stroke them out.
To each felicity, once. He must progress
Who fabricates a path, though all about
Death, Woman, Spring, repeat their first success.
To encounter ‘Death, Woman, Spring’, especially in this capitalized state, is to be reminded of Robert Graves’s grammar of poetic myth, The White Goddess; there Graves elaborates his conviction that there is one theme, one story and one story only, behind true poems, since they all recount some episode in the eternal struggle between the god of the waxing year and the god of the waning year for the hand of the goddess. This is another way of expressing what Yeats was seeking to give shape to in his model of reality as two interpenetrating cones or gyres, the one waning to an apex where the other waxes to a base. It is also another aspect of the cornucopia developing its image out of its negative in the empty shell. Kinsella comes through as a poet helplessly burdened with all the recognitions that these schemes hold up to the mind’s eye for contemplation.
The first line of his ‘Interlude’ keeps the ball of meaning in the air, fleetly bouncing back off the wall of one possibility to the opposite wall, to and fro across a definitely placed caesura. ‘Love’s doubts enrich my words; I stroke them out.’ So does he stroke out the words or does he stroke out the doubts? If he strokes out the doubts and keeps the enriched words, there is no honesty either in the words or in the love. If he strokes out the words, there is no honest acknowledgement that love’s doubts are the corollary of love’s enrichments. It is a bind from which he would not be released because of an imposed discipline of understanding. The voice of that discipline is the true voice of Kinsella’s muse; in the contexts of sexual and domestic love, biological and spiritual survival, physical and psychological exhaustions and renewals – all of which Kinsella takes for granted as what he calls simply ‘the ordeal’ – this muse speaks the same command over and over again throughout Kinsella’s poetry. Deeper, she says. Further. Don’t repose in the first resolution of your predicament. That resolution too is a predicament. What more? ‘Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.’ Forge on. Fabricate the path.
Love’s doubts enrich my words; I stroke them out.
To each felicity, once. He must progress
Who fabricates a path, though all about
Death, Woman, Spring, repeat their first success.
The formal ancestry of ‘Interlude’ may include the Auden of ‘Death of a Tyrant’ and the epigrammatic side of Pope and Donne and Jonson. But the formal ancestry of the later short poem which I quote below goes back to early Irish glosses, those brief rhapsodies of the scribe in the margin as he turns from the illumination of the Latin of Holy Writ to make free in the Old Irish vernacular. Often these verses catch a glimpse of a creature – a blackbird or a seal or a cat – or of a joyful moment in the wood. The radiance of a God filled and divinely ordained nature is implicit in each little pleasure-spurt from the hermit’s pen. In Kinsella’s gloss, on the other hand, a post-Darwinian nature instructs the self in the necessity for constant self-digestion: this is a necessary condition of self-creation, a law of psychic life that is discernible analogically at the extremes of the biological survival. The poem is entitled ‘Leaf-Eater’:
On a shrub in the heart of the garden,
On an outer leaf, a grub twists
Half its body, a tendril,
This way and that in blind
Space: no leaf or twig
Anywhere in reach; then gropes
Back on itself and begins
To eat its own leaf.
This appeared in Kinsella’s volume, Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968). In that book, he was negotiating his transition from an earlier poetry that had been informed by the regular strains of the English poetic line and operated within an English tradition of meditative or witty poems of definite closure. Nightwalker moved towards a different poetry of the open, modernist, Poundian sort, responsive and ongoing, disinclined to the sedateness of traditional stanzaic articulation, content to be fluid and fragmented, yet never mistaking the randomness of this method for permission to slacken the intellectual grip. The more open Kinsella’s poetry becomes formally, the more insistent and integrated becomes its obsession with ‘the theme’. His recoil from the entropic conditions of the modern Irish scene into the nutrient original deposits of early Irish legendary matter finds its analogue in the leaf-eater’s recoil as a solution to its predicament. ‘I feed upon it still, as you see,’ he declares in another context. In yet another, the grub’s energies that waved with exploratory zeal on the edge of a leaf are mirrored as an image of questing, founding consciousness: ‘A maggot of the possible / wriggled out of the spine / into the brain.’
These lines are taken from ‘Finistère,’ a poem in Kinsella’s strong late manner. In it, Kinsella deliberately embarks upon the mythic method of Pound’s early cantos, where psychic and literary faring forth is commingled with the venturings of Homeric and Ovidian heroes. In Kinsella’s case, the mythic history of Ireland, as told in the early part of The Book of Invasions, provides the wave on which his individual poetic voice can row along. In particular, Kinsella fixes on the arrival in Ireland of the sons of Mil, the supplanters not only of the Formorian denizens but also of the Tuatha de Danaan. Along with Mil and his people there arrives, as the voice of their collective wisdom and purpose, the bard Amergin, ur-po
et of the island of Ireland. Through the reappropriation of Amergin’s old lines, Kinsella once again rehearses the motif of renewal at the point of exhaustion: the tremor of development arrives involuntarily out of the detritus of a previous life: ‘A maggot of the possible / wriggled out of the spine / into the brain.’ This is an image of the stirred power experienced by Amergin when he set foot on the land and spoke the prophetic lines which Kinsella appropriates in order to transmit a feeling of his own empowerment. This new capacity for accommodating (within the ordering principle of the archetype) both the data of the contemporary and the poet’s own autobiographical projects has vastly extended Kinsella’s poetic scope and produced a body of work that marks an important stage in the evolution not just of Irish poetry but of modern poetry in English.
The peculiar modernity of it has much to do with the enforcement of a recognition which Ellmann pointed to in Yeats – that nothingness could be pregnant as well as empty. This recognition is orchestrated fully in a strange poem called ‘Hen Woman’, the anecdotal base of which is quickly stated. In a local farmyard, on a still, sunlit afternoon, a child watches with eye-popping, almost erotic fascination as an egg begins to be laid by a hen. The thing is played in slow motion; the egg appears in the sphincter, the woman of the house rushes to catch it, misses, the egg falls and breaks on an iron grating, spills down into the sewage, is wasted, gone, lost, like seed that falls on barren ground, like spilled potential, obliterated possibility, whatever. Yet just as the fall of a sparrow is to the heavenly father a matter of infinite concern, to be cherished throughout all eternity, so the fall of an egg places absolute demands upon poetic imagination and tests its ability to plump the shell with its own ghostly plenitude:
I feed upon it still, as you see;
there is no end to that which,
not understood, may yet be noted
and hoarded in the imagination,
in the yolk of one’s being, so to speak,
there to undergo its (quite animal) growth,
dividing blindly,
twitching, packed with will,
searching in its own tissue
for the structure
in which it may wake.
Something that had – clenched
in its cave – not been
now was: an egg of being.
Through what seemed a whole year it fell
– as it still falls, for me,
solid and light, the red gold beating
in its silvery womb,
alive as the yolk and white
of my eye; as it will continue
to fall, probably, until I die,
through the vast indifferent spaces
with which I am empty.
‘I only know things seem and are not good,’ says Kinsella, in the first line of ‘Nightwalker’. And in the last, ‘I think this is the Sea of Disappointment.’ And he once confessed, in relation to his annual moves between a home in Dublin and a professorship at Temple University in Philadelphia, that while he found it more and more necessary to return to Ireland, he also found it less and less rewarding. All this is of a piece with the extremity and exactions that characterize his poetic achievement. Indeed, when Yeats declared ‘Those men that in their writings are most wise / Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts’, he was giving us a way of reading Kinsella, a poet who has discovered a completely satisfactory form for his dissatisfactions and sense of incompleteness.
This is not the place to explicate the coherence of Kinsella’s oeuvre. Suffice it to say that he has ingested loss– of a literature in the Irish language, of a political vision in post-Independence Ireland, of all that time robs from the original resources of the individual psyche – and has remembered it in an art that has the effect of restitution. The place of waste, the place of renewal and the place of writing have become co-terminous within his poetry – and nowhere more luminously than in the concluding lines of ‘His Father’s Hands’. This poem recounts, among other things, how the child poet used to hammer into a wooden block little nails which his cobbler-grandfather used for shoe repairs; in the end, even these unregarded trivia are made to swarm with larval possibility, retrieved by memory and hatched into a second life by the intent imagination:
Extraordinary … The big block – I found it
years afterward in a corner of the yard
in sunlight after rain
and stood it up, wet and black:
it turned under my hands, an axis
of light flashing down its length,
and the wood’s soft flesh broke open,
countless little nails
squirming and dropping out of it.
This delicacy and vigour of notation is essential to Kinsella’s poetry, as is the amplification of suggestion that occurs when we connect those squirming nails with ‘a maggot of the possible’, and a grub that twists and gropes back on itself. Each poetic occasion in this œuvre is situated within a deliberated perspective. One is aware of a strong objective intellect and an indignant sensibility cleaving to a purpose that is intensely personal and yet is proffered as a standard and a reminder. Kinsella is, in fact, the representative Irish poet in that his career manifests the oath-bound, unrewarded plight of the comitatus in Yeats’s black tower. In his work, we can watch the ancient correspondence between the nation’s possibilities and the imagination of its poet – represented originally by the Milesian bard Amergin – discover itself again in a modern drama of self-knowledge and self-testing.
The Place of Writing (Scholars Press, University of Georgia, 1989)
Edwin Muir
In Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography some of the most evocative passages recall moments of great serenity experienced by the poet during his childhood on Orkney. One brief recollection of what it was like in the cradle goes as follows: ‘I was lying in some room watching a beam of slanting light in which dusty, bright motes slowly danced and turned, while a low murmuring went on somewhere, possibly the humming of flies.’ After childhood, as he confesses a few lines further on, that sense of a slow unending dance, ‘the sense of deep and solid peace’ came back to him only in dreams. And so, not unexpectedly, it is dream states that underlie and are induced by his most characteristic poems. Muir’s level best involves access to a far-off, slightly somnambulist plane of consciousness, in poems where the reader is gratified by the entranced atmosphere but also a little unnerved by the eerie placidity of it all. This kind of effect, which I shall illustrate presently, is what I call his level best; but his very best combines the lucent presentation of such states with a simultaneous apprehension of menace.
Again, an early moment in An Autobiography provides a clue to these more complex and commanding achievements. He tells how he felt terror on hearing of the death of a farmer who used to bring him sweets in his snuff-lined pockets, and then goes on:
In a child’s mind there is at moments a divination of a hidden tragedy taking place around him, that tragedy being the life which he will not live for some years still, though it is there, invisible to him, already.
This apprehension of broken harmonies, of the entry of contradiction into life, is what we expect from the highest art, and we expect it precisely as it is manifested here – not as a great accumulation of negative data, not as an assault by the bad evidence, but as an intuited, endangering pressure of reality, a true weighing of things as they are dreaded against things as they are desired. The odd thing about Muir as a twentieth-century poet is that he had more than enough experience of his own to tilt the scales towards a negative reading of the human condition but he nevertheless maintained his innate, positive disposition. His critics have properly resisted him when the thrust of his poetic uplift too easily overwhelms the actual gravity of the lived conditions; but it must be acknowledged that without his habitual distancing, his way of incorporating abstract joy and pondered sorrows, Muir could never have established the peculiar balance between substance and sonorousness which distinguis
hes his finest work.
To read a poem like ‘Merlin’, however, from his 1937 volume, Journeys and Places, is to find him working at his level best:
Ο Merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam’s finger
Across the meadow and the wave?
Or a runner who’ll outrun
Man’s long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
And Time locked in his tower?
The needle on the scale trembles deliciously here. On one side, the balance inclines to whimsicality and wish-fulfilment, the kind of hygienic never-never land that Walt Disney could film without the slightest adaptation and market as something indistinguishable from his own kind of product. All the elements of escapist fantasy are there: magicians, bowers, brides, towers. Yet the usualness of these things is fleetingly renewed by the unusualness of the imagining. ‘To hang the apple on the tree’, for example, has an unexceptionable allegorical significance but as a phrase it possesses a simplicity and unexpected clarity that give it the buoyancy and superficies of language-life which distinguishes poetry. The same is true of the second line, ‘Deep in the diamond of the day’, and also of the penultimate one, ‘The day wreathed in its mound of snow’. These incline the balance away from whimsical fantasy towards something more human and poignant; so even if the poem does not expose us to what Robert Frost called the ‘desert places between stars’, it does at least intimate a receptivity to ‘the still, sad music of humanity’. And it does so by the liturgical, unhurriable procession of vowels in a line like ‘Deep in the diamond of the day’.
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