The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Read online

  The Bould Thady Quill

  PERCY FRENCH

  Shlathery’s Mounted Fut

  JAMES JOYCE

  from Finnegans Wake

  The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  The Streets of Laredo

  CHRISTY MOORE (b.1945)

  Lisdoonvarna

  Acknowledgements

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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF IRISH POETRY

  PATRICK CROTTY is a critic and translator who works as Professor of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He has published articles on many aspects of Irish, Scottish and Welsh writing and is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology appeared in 1995. He is currently editing the definitive Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, the first volume of which will appear in 2013.

  SEAMUS HEANEY was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  In memory of Patrick Crotty (1910–80)

  and Kathleen Burns (1913–94)

  and for Brian, Ronan and Fergal

  Aoibhinn, a leabhráin, do thriall

  Preface

  This is the most comprehensive and confident anthology of Irish poetry yet. The comprehensiveness is due to the inclusion of a much greater selection of work from the earlier periods, the confidence to sureness about the artistic quality and significance of that work and of writing done later, in Irish and English, in the decades since the death of William Butler Yeats. But the anthology also benefits from being compiled at the end of an era which has seen important new developments in the relationship between Ireland and Britain, between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between the unionist and nationalist communities within Northern Ireland itself.

  Patrick Crotty has a scholar’s understanding and an insider’s feel for the complications and rewards of the relationship between the British and the Irish islands, its causes and hurts and consequences. He is totally cognizant of the bitter histories lurking beneath the old familiar binaries – Planter and Gael, Protestant Ascendancy and Hidden Ireland – but a look at the contents list will show that he has an inclusive attitude. Translations of work from Latin, Old Norse and Norman French indicate that Crotty, like Leopold Bloom, takes it for granted that a person’s birth in Ireland (or indeed a translator’s feel for Irish poetry) is sufficient to make Ireland his or her nation.

  Bloom’s nation – ‘the same people living in the same place’ – starts off as those original Gaels whose myths and practices would subsist for centuries in a country that was destined to experience conversion by Christian missionaries, raids and eventual settlement by Viking adventurers, then conquest by Norman barons, annexation by the English crown and, finally, military and cultural defeat of the Gaelic order by that same English power. All of these great events are confronted and given expression in the poems included here, but the poems are not chosen only as commentary on that history. Their imaginative vigour, their technical pleasure in themselves as works, their artistic sufficiency and inner freedom are what earn them their literary place. And when we turn to the work of the nineteenth century and after, that resurgent energy of the writing qua writing becomes an aspect of a wider surge towards political and cultural independence.

  Certainly the ‘Irish’ in Patrick Crotty’s title does not induce in him the kind of anxiety detectable in the introduction to the earlier 1958 Oxford Book of Irish Verse. One of its editors spoke there of Irish poetry in English as ‘a relatively novel art’ and harked back to a phase of Irish history when ‘the only English known by the majority was that minimum necessary to understand an order’. But if such old resentments have disappeared it is still worth remembering that the editor who wrote those words was Donagh MacDonagh, himself a poet and son of the poet-revolutionary Thomas MacDonagh who had been executed a mere forty-two years earlier because of his part in the 1916 Rising. Which is another way of saying that until relatively recently Irish poetry has often been implicated, and has sometimes very deliberately implicated itself, in ‘the national question’.

  When, for example, Yeats declared in 1937 that Gaelic was his national language, but not his mother tongue, he wasn’t just making a fine linguistic distinction: he was clinching the argument that he owed his soul not only to the ‘Irishry’ – the quotation marks were his – but ‘to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake … and to the English language’. He was also detaching himself from the cultural nationalism of the new Irish Free State which his early work had done so much to foster, as well as from the early work of his friend Douglas Hyde, then president of the country, the man who had once written a manifesto on the necessity of ‘de-anglicizing’ Ireland. In similar and equally significant fashion, there was more than word choice involved when half a century later Paul Muldoon translated the title of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem ‘Ceist na Teangan’ not as ‘The Language Question’ but as ‘The Language Issue’, since ‘issue’ implies offspring from an on going intercourse between Irish and English rather than a barren stand-off.

  In the history of Irish poetry, crisis and recuperation are recurrent features. Fifteen hundred years separate the ‘Adze-head’ who appears in the sixth-century poem which opens this anthology from the speaker of ‘Pedigree’, the last poem in the contemporary section, yet those poems are united in at least one respect: each is the utterance of a writer expressing a world in transition, the former poised between pagan / immemorial and Christian / other, the latter between local / domestic to pluralist / diasporic. In the intervening centuries much of the greatest work arises from similar, often far more extreme tensions and contestations: historical and cultural change due to defeat in war, the attendant cycles of dispossession and repossession, loss of language, of standing, of learning, of cohesion at local and national level, loss of physical and psychic security.

  But equally important at every stage of this history is the sufficiency of poetry itself: the immense incantation of Dallán Forgaill’s ‘Amra Colm Cille’, for example, proclaiming the heroic virtue of Colum Cille’s epoch-defining life, the exhilaration and licence of Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court countervailing the oppression of penal laws, the jubilant defiance of Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ at a moment when things in Europe were falling violently apart. Moreover, when viewed in this context, the centuries-long trad ition of bardic poetry can be understood as another case of imagination pressing back again the pressures of reality, a mighty con stancy rather than a hidebound conservatism, and as such it is given proper representation here. Here, too, important emphasis is laid on the the song tradition, revealing how it has long functioned at individual and collective levels as a kind of spiritual survival kit. And the same could be said of the love poetry, ranging from the passion and strictness of early Irish voices – women’s as well as men’s – through the more euphonious styles of folk English and opulent vernacular Irish. Yet as is always the case, it is in the representation of the contemporary scene that the most testing de cisions have to be made about who and what to include (or not) at the end of a millennium and a half of poetic achievement. Inevit ably and understandably many readers, myself among them, will want to contest some of those decisions, but in making them, as elsewhere in the volume, the editor displays bold and independent judgement.

  Patrick Crotty’s anthology richly complements the achievements of the poet-editors Brendan Kennelly, John Montague and Thomas Kinsella in their respective volumes, The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970), The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) and The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), each of which contained translations from work in Irish as well as poetry written originally in English. His book is part of an increasingly successful effort to recupe
rate and reintegrate a literary history, an effort which gained significantly in strength and purpose in the course of the Irish Liter ary Revival. At the end of the nineteenth century, Yeats famously saw Ireland as soft wax, ready to take the imprint of his grand literary and cultural design; at the beginning of the twenty-first, this anthology reveals the depth and riches of the tradition which the arch-poet’s intervention helped to retrieve and which his successors have so thoroughly and variously consolidated.

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  Introduction

  An Ancient Practice

  In 1995 Seamus Heaney became the fourth Irish recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The international visibility of Irish writing in the modern period is a remarkable and continuing phenom enon, all the more so given that the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland share a smaller land mass than South Carolina, with a combined population only slightly larger. The global significance of writing from the island is nothing new, however: it is argued below that in world historical terms the achievement of the early medieval poets represented in section I of this book is at least equal in importance to the work of the sequence of famous writers that runs from Oscar Wilde through John Millington Synge, James Joyce and the Nobel Laureates William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Heaney to Edna O’Brien and Paul Muldoon.

  Grand claims about the antiquity of Irish traditions recur in writings after the Act of Union of 1801, when it seemed the sep arate identity of the smaller of the two main ‘British’ Isles might be extinguished. Thus Horatio, the bewildered, love-struck Englishman who narrates The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the popular post-Union ‘national tale’ by Lady Morgan (1776?–1859), has his prejudices challenged by the heroine’s protestations of the ancient lineage of the music she plays on her harp, a music said to be older than that of the Welsh, the English and more or less all other modern nations. The very ardour with which they are formulated can draw attention to the implausibility of some of the more vivid claims. In 1822 the radical aristocrat Roger O’Connor (1762–1834) published a fantastical narrative called The Chronicles of Eri, being the history of the Gael, Sciot Iber, or Irish people: translated from the original manuscripts in the Phoenician dialect of the Scythian language, which reappeared in 1936 as Six Thousand Years of Gaelic Grandeur – Unearthed.

  This penchant for high rhetoric marred works of genuine scholarship, too. In The Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language (1875), for example, the Irish language revivalist Canon Ulick J. Bourke (1829–87) cloaks the seriousness of his philological enterprise in pomp: ‘The object and aim of the present work is to give a thorough critical account of the language of the Gael, to show its early origin; that it is Aryan, and comes to us down the great stream of migration that had begun to flow westward from the high country between the Tigris and the Indus, even before Abraham went forth out of his country …’

  Yet for all of this, poetry in Ireland is a genuinely ancient cultural practice. Quite how ancient is difficult to determine. Ogham stones bearing witness to the existence of a form of writing and perhaps of Roman influence appear to predate the arrival of Christianity early in the fifth century. The first Irish poets are said to have undertaken composition in dark interiors, but there is no direct trace of their work, as poetry did not become a matter of record until some time after the scribal customs of Christian monks had spread throughout the island and the wider Gaelic world in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries.

  The earliest surviving poetry is strongly Christian in character. The oldest Gaelic verses in the present volume are the selections from Dallán Forgaill’s lament for the missionary monk Colum Cille, dateable (according to most scholars) to the fairly immediate aftermath of its subject’s death on Iona in ad 593 (or 597). The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry opens with the lyric ‘Adze-head’, which affects to stylize an early fifth-century Irishman’s proleptic contempt for bishops and their newfangled religion. (The prolepsis, however, may be fictive: in manuscript ‘Adze-head’ appears within the framework of the late seventh-century Vita Sancti Patricii, a hagiography by the monk Muirchú moccu Macthéni.) A more plausible representation of pagan perspectives is offered by the even later ‘I Invoke the Seven Daughters’, where the Christian elements are difficult to reconcile with the surrounding matter and are most readily understood as interpolations in an earlier, mythological poem.

  The relationship between Christian and non-Christian outlooks in the literature of early Ireland is a vexed question, not least because the great bulk of the writing in the first half a millennium or so of literary production (the period represented in section I) was done by clerics. The filid – a powerful poetic caste trained in schools, and entrusted with legal and linguistic lore as well as other forms of traditional knowledge – were skilled in divination and appear to have been rivals to the clergy during the early years of Irish Christianity. An intervention on their behalf by Colum Cille at Druim Ceat near Derry in 575, in the context of a settlement brokered by the saint between the Ulster and Scottish territories of the Gaels, marked an accommodation between the old ways and the new that would be variously reflected in the literature of the following centuries. Though the schools waned in importance during the great period of Irish missionary Christianity, when they were absorbed into the educational function of the monasteries, they had resumed much of their former status by the twelfth century, and the later poems in section I were written by professional poets rather than clerics.

  The renaissance of the pre-Christian social and cultural primacy of poetry in the 1210–1650 ‘bardic’ period (sections II and III) is remarkable, and it is hardly fanciful to say that there are vestiges of that ancient primacy in the deference and public attention paid to poets and poetry in present-day Ireland. The residual pull of the pre-Christian world was being registered as late as the twelfth century, in the Fionn cycle through the witness of revenants like Oisín (‘The Praise of Fionn’, ‘The Blackbird of Derrycairn’) and Caoilte (‘Caoilte Laments the Passing of the Fianna’), and in the protests of the dispossessed king Sweeney to the cleric Ronan in Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney).

  If an encounter between Christian and pre-Christian values was staged in much of the poetry of early Ireland, however, it was gener ally Christians who were doing the staging. Far from being a testament to the pre-Christian grandeur of the country (as Yeats and other figures of the late nineteenth-century Literary Revival liked to think) the Ulster prose-and-verse saga Táin Bó Cuailnge is pervasively Christian in vision. A clerical redaction (strictly speaking, two clerical redactions) of vernacular materials of unspeci fiable antiquity, the Táin is informed throughout by the thinking of monks who did not merely put their gloss on events but inscribed their patristic values in the core narrative of the chaotic consequences of Queen Medb’s challenge to the masculine order.

  In 1936 the poet Austin Clarke referred to a persistent dichotomy between sex and religion in Irish writing as ‘our native drama of conscience’. Clarke’s comment attempted to cast his own difficulties with the sexual attitudes of the Catholic Church in the light of the conflict between body and spirit that is so marked a feature of early Irish poetry. Many social commentators have seen the puritanical character of twentieth-century Irish Catholicism as a hangover from the need to control reproduction in the aftermath of the Great Famine of the 1840s. For someone as steeped in Old and Middle Irish literature as Clarke was, however, continuities between the ascetic and celibate traditions of the early Gaelic church and the social ambience of the Irish Free State were too striking to ignore.

  Asceticism is a central value of the poetry of section I – celebrated in ‘The Hermit’s Song’, aspired to in ‘Straying Thoughts’, complained of in the agonized outcries of Sweeney. The magnificent tenth-century monologue ‘Lament of Baoi, the Nun of Beare Island’ internalizes the war against the body, while ‘St Brigit’s Housewarming’ wittily employs alcoholic indulgence as a metaphor for self-denial. If the spir
it / body opposition of the early period is recalled in the twentieth century in Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and the work of Paul Durcan, and, more self-consciously, in that of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Clarke himself, the libertarian and occasionally anti-clerical posing of the dichotomy in the modern and contemporary period (sections VII and VIII) is radically at variance with the orthodoxy of the poetry of section I.

  The beginnings of a more persuasive continuity – one that amounts to a characteristic theme of Irish poetry over nearly fifteen hundred years of verse-making – can be traced to ‘Adze-head’: this concerns neither the contestation between paganism and Christianity per se nor the narrower antagonism between Christian and pre-Christian apprehensions of corporeality that Clarke referred to, but rather the meeting of conflicting world views and of their underlying political power-bases. The clash of two value systems encapsulated in ‘Adze-head’ looks forward not only to the antithesis between Christianity and its antecedents in the Old Irish ‘The Downfall of Heathendom’ and Johannes Scottus Ériug ena’s ‘Homer sang once of his Greeks and his Trojans’ (a Latin repudiation of classical antiquity), but to later conflicts between the perspectives of Gael and Viking, Gael and Anglo-Norman, Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and unionist, and the Irish and English languages.

  Section II opens with a Norman French account of the arrival of Strongbow (Richard de Clare) in Ireland in 1170 and includes Middle English animadversions on Irish mores from a hundred and fifty years later. These early centuries of the long drawn-out conquest of Ireland saw the flourishing of the bardic schools and the consolidation of native poetry in the work of some of the greatest practitioners of strict-metre syllabic verse. The complexities of the political and cultural milieu are illustrated here by the extract from Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh’s ‘Praise of Maurice Fitz Maurice, Earl of Desmond’, which compares the exploits of a fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman lord to those of the god Lugh, thereby tactfully transposing from the literal and historical to the metaphorical and mythological planes the bardic duty to assert a patron’s lengthy Irish pedigree. Though there are many trans-linguistic and trans-sectarian nuances in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this period saw the literature of Ireland split more decisively than ever before along ethnic and religious lines as a consequence of a series of historical cataclysms that brought the bardic tradition to an end, creating the conditions for the replacement of Irish by English as the everyday language of most of the population.