A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  Neither trees nor poets were completely eliminated, however, nor did the un-European mindset vanish entirely. Sir Henry Sidney had declared open season on poets in 1566: “whosoever could take a rhymer . . . should spoil him and have his goods,” says an account by the contemporaneous historian Thomas Churchyard. After giving an account of poets who were robbed and beaten by some Englishmen, he concludes that the “rhymers swore to rhyme these gentlemen to death, but as yet, God be thanked, they have taken no hurt for punishing such disordered people.” Because the Irish poets often composed work to praise and spur on a lord’s military feats, they were seen as propagandists, and their work was sometimes translated into English rather as the CIA used to decode Soviet communiqués. Spenser himself had some poems translated out of sheer curiosity and grudgingly admitted they had literary if not moral merit. The man who appears to have been the last wandering Gaelic poet didn’t survive into independence, but his memory did.

  Lady Gregory, the Anglo-Irish friend of Yeats and nationalism, wrote in 1901 about encountering old women in the workhouse in Gort, County Clare. They were arguing about the relative merits of the poets they had known in their childhood, including Blind Raftery, who had died sixty years earlier, not long before the Famine. Another person, whose father had known Raftery, told her, “He was someway gifted, and people were afraid of him. I was often told by men that gave him a lift in their car when they overtook him now and again, that if he asked their name, they wouldn’t give it, for fear he might put it in a song.” He played a fiddle and wandered the roads of western Ireland, according to the accounts, a blind man who could compose songs, curses, and praises with equal facility, and his curses were feared as much as poets’ curses had been in pre-Tudor times. One of Raftery’s is said to have “with ered up a bush.” But, concluded Lady Gregory, “It is not easy to judge of the quality of Raftery’s poems. Some of them have probably been lost altogether; some are written out in copy-books by peasants who had kept them in their memory, but, some of these books have been destroyed, and some have been taken to America by emigrants.” So in 1901 a faint fringe of the forests remained, and a fading memory of the old poets, while a new crop of poets was beginning to serve the political purposes that had been part of pre-Tudor Irish tradition.

  What is most peculiar about the war against the poets and trees in Tudorera Ireland is the close involvement of the two greatest English poets of the age, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Sidney was an aristocrat whose father—the one who declared open season on poets—had been Lord Deputy of Ireland. Sir Philip used to come over and spend summers with his parents, was involved in his father’s political work, and later, when he became a courtier and diplomat for Elizabeth I, carried out missions in Ireland himself. Spenser, two years older than Sidney and the son of a ropemaker, rose in the world through a benevolent acquaintance and his own intelligence; he went over to Ireland in 1580 as a secretary, secured an estate at Kilcolman in northern County Cork, and immediately became unpopular with the neighbors. When Sir Walter Raleigh visited Spenser in 1589, the castle was surrounded with woods “of matchless height”; a few years later only bare fields surrounded the castle. Kilcolman had been the family seat of Desmond, and when rebellion broke out again in 1598, its usurper was a target. The castle was burnt, Spenser and his family barely escaped with their lives, and he died a few months later in London.

  Or perhaps what is most peculiar about the war against the poets is that the English poetry of that time celebrates the pastoral. Most literally, the pastoral is about pastures—that is, about shepherds tending their flocks—and the pastoral poets’ shepherd usually takes advantage of his leisurely wandering and watching to compose poetry. In the pastoral genre lies the origin of the modern aesthetic appreciation of landscape. Theoretically, then, a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.

  There’s a continuing argument about when the Golden Age was. For a while in the 1980s, some rather New Age feminism located it in the agricultural matriarchies of the ancient Near East and portrayed these societies as humane, stable, balanced, sane, and possessed of a lot of other earnest virtues. The Men’s Movement in this decade has often pinned the Golden Age on the more ancient hunting and gathering societies that are still far from vanished and has tried to relive it themselves—thus the ruckus over their appropriations of Native American cultural practices such as vision quests and drumming. A fine case can be made that agriculture is when finding something to eat became drudgery, because hunters, gatherers, and pastoral herders all have interesting, unpredictable, roving pursuits. After all tilling the soil is the sentence meted out to Adam and Eve when they’re expelled from their own Golden Age in Eden. For much of European history, a highly formalized version has been located in a fictious Arcadia, where the life of outdoor simplicity, wandering, leisure, lovemaking, and songmaking is summed up as pastoral, a word with the same root as pasture. The pastoral originated as a Greek genre in pre-Christian times when Theocritus located his goat-herd songs in Arcadia, one of the most backward, roughest parts of Greece; Virgil further refined the genre into an idyll of more intellectual shepherds and a more idealized Arcadia; and the genre throve in continental Europe before Sidney and Spenser made it English.

  Sidney himself composed the first great English prose fiction, a fanciful romance called The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia which celebrates the elements of an aristocratic pastoral (he had also drafted, but never finished, a defense of his father’s Irish regime titled A Discourse on Irish Affairs). Spenser rose to fame with his Shepheardes Calendar, a twelve-poem cycle of pastorals, and spent much of the rest of his life on The Faerie Queene, a masterpiece even more unwieldy than Sideny’s Arcadia and as rife with celebrations of the archaic and the rustic. Fairyland and King Arthur were themselves, like many of the more specific elements of Spenser’s hybrid poem, largely Celtic inventions, though The Faerie Queene also drew on classical mythology and Christian allegory. All these elements were put to work as part of a nationalist paean to Elizabeth herself, legitimizing the upstart Welsh Tudors as descendants of Arthur and symbolically marrying Elizabeth to her kingdom and its mythological past. In the Arcadia and the Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser and Sidney were laying the groundwork for the great English pastoral tradition, which has been central to that country’s literature ever since, up through Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows at the very least.

  At the same time they were ensuring the impossibility of an Irish pastoral. (I realized during my trip that even walking tours were about an English, a Wordsworthian, idea of landscape and leisure, and had little to do with the relationship between people and land in Ireland; historically, Irish walks tend to be beggars’ and nomads’ circuits, flights and forced marches, displaced people’s wanderings, all the unpastoral reasons and rhythms of movement; hillwalking, as mountain hikes and climbs are called, seems to be a relatively new minority occupation.) In 1994 the literary critic Terry Eagleton wondered at the absence of landscape from Irish poetry and concluded, “It would seem probable that a landscape traced through with the historical scars of famine, deprivation and dispossession can never present itself to human perception with quite the rococo charm of a Keats, the sublimity of a Wordsworth or the assured sense of proprietorship of an Austen.” Even Milton’s great pastoral elegy Lycidas, written a generation after Spenser, mourns for Edward King, who drowned in the Irish Sea on his way to join his father, John King, who was growing rich off the confiscated lands of Irish monasteries: the English pastoral seems often explicitly tied to the Irish antipastoral.

  In paintings and poetry, the pastoral depicts a landscape where no clear boundary lies between nature and culture, the domesticated and the wild, between work and play; most typically, the shepherds pipe or converse in the shade of a tree while their flocks graze. Virgil imagined it as an explicit refuge from war and politics. Much as the Iri
sh landscape was stripped of trees, so its natives were stripped of that margin of time and plenty in which the pastoral is possible. Irish poetry specializes in the antipastoral. Swift wrote a biting one in 1729, less than a century and a half after Spenser and Sidney had established the pastoral in English. Though his “A Pastoral Dialogue” owes something to his own bitterly antiromantic vision, it owes more to the Ireland around him. In it the nymph and swain who usually bear classical names are servants called Dermot and Sheelah, and they converse while uprooting weeds from between the stones of a courtyard, rather than while watching a flock. Literally tearing up the organic landscape with small knives, they protest their love for each other in terms that themselves reveal poverty and degradation:

  My love to Sheelah is more firmly fixt

  Than strongest Weeds that grow these Stones betwixt

  says Dermot; and Sheelah finds a weed to use as her analogy too:

  My love for gentle Dermot faster grows

  Than yon tall Dock, that rises to thy Nose.

  Poverty, sweat, lice, torn clothes, sharp stones, and liaisons with other partners occupy the rest of their pastoral dialogue. The pretty flowers and foliage of pastoral poetry have become weeds in this poem, just as they had become the shamrocks and watercress the starving Irish devoured, and the exported barrel staves and ship timbers. Pastoral imagery gone sour appears in another poem of Swift’s written the same year, on the drying up of St. Patrick’s well, a poem about “the Pastors of thy rav’nous Breed / Who come to fleece the Flocks, and not to feed,” which features invasions by plagues of frogs, insects, vermin, and a tyrant “with his rav’nous Band,” who “Drains all thy Lakes of Fish, of Fruits thy Land.” The landscape is literally being devoured from abroad, and the harmonious abundance and benign stewardship of the pastoral have become the famine of the natives and the ravenousness of the rest, a world gone awry. Swift makes it clear that in damning the English one need not celebrate the Irish.

  Forty years after Swift’s antipastoral, another Anglo-Irish poet, Oliver Goldsmith, wrote a far more genteel and famous poem, The Deserted Village. It portrays what is widely believed to be his childhood village of Lissoy in County Longford, fictionalized as Auburn, “loveliest village of the plain,” though it is usually used to illustrate English enclosure acts rather than Irish ones. Usually seen as a melancholic and mellow poem, it describes a traveler returned to the scene of his youth, where he had hoped to retire, and in places it is as stinging a lesson in economic consequences as Swift’s poems. Both people and buildings have vanished, for the village has been uprooted to create sheep pastures for another landlord—a widespread practice in boThengland and Ireland at the time.

  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

  Where wealth accumulates, and men decay

  declares Goldsmith after delicate evocations of the vanished community, and soon thereafter,

  Sweet Auburn! parent of the blissful hour,

  Thy glades forlorn confess the tyrant’s power.

  He concludes with a prescient scene of uprooted peasants forced to emigrate to North America. Swift himself had condemned this practice of turning agricultural land back to grazing, eliminating “the Livelyhood of a Hundred People” for a single grazier’s benefit, and compares the graziers to Scythians. And with the comparison, we are back where the Irish pastoral started: with Spenser comparing the unconquered pastoralist Irish to the nomadic herder Scythians. This time around, however, the indigenous population had been weaned of the free-roaming life of pastoralists and turned into the poor tethered tillers of the fields (mostly potato fields) displaced by the very herds that had once been theirs, herds that no longer supported pastoral culture but foreign wealth. No longer mobile in the leisurely circuits of pastoralists, they would become mobile on the one-way routes of emigrants and exiles; like Goldsmith’s traveler, they cannot return.

  Even so otherwise lyrical a poet as Thomas Moore was moved to write the sarcastic “A Pastoral Ballad by John Bull,” in which the five million bullets sent to Ireland in 1827 to suppress dissent are framed as a love gift from masculine England to a feminine Erin. Admittedly, a kind of pastoralism—the romance of the past and the peasant—comes from some of the Anglo-Irish poets of the Celtic revival such as Yeats and the later writers pursuing the official myth of noble peasants. Their sense of place and culture seems to have been a necessary underpinning for the new nationalism, but they evade the questions poets from Swift to the present pose, and their legacy lies more in postcards of “real Ireland” than contemporary poetry (though Yeats’s “Ancestral Houses” of 1923, an uneasy poem about privilege, ends The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Poetry). The antipastoral continues through Irish literature, which excoriates the rustic life as thoroughly as English literature celebrates it, or at least describes it in clear-eyed unromantic terms—like Synge’s turn-of-the-century plays about the harsh life of Aran islanders and Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem about an isolated farmer, The Great Hunger. Written during the Second World War, Kavanagh’s account of the dreary routine and unfulfilled desire of a bachelor farmer named Paddy Maguire is an epic of uneventfulness and spiritual famine. A long passage specifically mocks the romanticized peasant Yeats and tourists envision:

  The peasant has no worries;

  In his little lyrical fields

  He ploughs and sows;

  He eats fresh food . . .

  His heart is pure,

  His mind is clear,

  He can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah talked—

  The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives.

  The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:—

  But his protagonist’s mind is complicated, containing “The hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought” and the exclamation, “Oh Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows forever.”

  Ireland fractures the unity of Europe, the notion of whiteness, the Atlantic divide, and from it the cracks in the citadels of culture can be seen too. Spenser and Sidney, the poets of the pastoral, become the founders of an antipastoral, and the shadow of their political lives lies across their artistic merit. Not all English poets would be so compromised: Shelley, for example, came to Dublin as a boy of nineteen, long before his scenic tour of Killarney, and handed out tracts he wrote calling for an Irish revolution, a foolish but honorable act. Though the English poems were taught to me as milestones on the road to civilization, it is no longer clear which way they lead. The exquisite poetry of Spenser’s masterpiece The Faerie Queene is inextricably linked to his brutal prose A View on the Present State of Ireland. Even one of his biographers refers to the two as a pair (though one was unavoidable, the other nonexistent, in my English literature classes). Should the magical trees he celebrated in the poem be weighed against the trees he uprooted in County Cork? Can one have the latter without the former, since Ireland’s lack of a landscape tradition is rooted in its scarred landscape? Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?

  This is where the conflict between New Age and Native communities arose in recent years, over the depoliticized extraction of culture—though such depoliticizing views had already been established as literary scholarship. It was against this divide that poets became politicians in Ireland at the turn of the century, reviving language, folklore, mythology (including a romanticized version of peasantry and land), and the political function of poetry, watering the old roots and milking the old wounds.

  11

  The Circulation of the Blood

  The giantess got off the train as I got off the bus in Ennis, in a nondescript station near a housing development, proudly announced by a pair of
gateposts on which lifesize German shepherds sprawled, glazed in the pastel colors of china teacups. In other parts of the world, the animals might have been fierce, like Chinese lions or French griffins, but these guardian figures were almost asleep in a scene of stultifying peace. We were the only two stopping there, and she asked me in an American voice which way it was to town. The giantess had small slanting eyes and creamy skin and though she couldn’t have been more than six feet tall, she was as massive as she was beautiful, with the kind of heroic scale that used to be called Junoesque. I felt quite a stick by her side as I led her where I suspected the town lay. We ended up traveling together for a little while, with that freemasonry of the road with which people fall in with each other and part far more casually than they do in fixed circumstances, where there might be consequences.

  The giantess told me about herself, about her home in a part of our country as arid and expansive as Ireland was compressed and wet, about her marriage, her mother, and her grandmother. She had that sheltered quality fewer and fewer women will have, naive, tender, vague, like a sleepwalker who wandered through the world as though she were still cushioned in amniotic fluid. She was my age and, with the leisure her husband’s income provided, still deciding what to do with her life. She had left a family party on the continent to come to Ireland by herself and sketch and muse about it. We found a place to stay, got rid of our bags, and walked more, through the dreamy town of Ennis, with its slow shallow river full of green water weeds and swans and its ruined church and the rest of its buildings set at odd angles seeming neither particularly new nor old, the town where, in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom’s father committed suicide. For all her height the giantess was a slow walker, and she always trailed a step or two behind me.