The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Read online

  The failure of the late sixteenth-century rebellion of the northern chiefs; the Plantation of Ulster; the departure of many of the aristocratic Gaelic families to the courts of Counter-Reformation Europe; the defeat of the Confederacy that had held most of the country in the Catholic interest from 1641 to 1649; the ferocious military campaign led by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50; the severity of the subsequent ‘settlement’; the loss of the last remaining elements of the Catholic leadership caste after the end of the Williamite wars in 1691; the institutionalized denial of religious, economic and political rights to the majority Catholic population: all of these elements combine to lend an apocalyptic intensity to much of the Irish-language poetry of the period. Unsurprisingly, that poetry displays unprecedented bitterness in its delineation of relations between Gael and Gall (‘foreigner’). Verse in English, meanwhile, almost exclusively the product of the new ‘Protestant nation’, grows in quantity and competence and is for the most part urbane and untroubled by the degradation that surrounded its making.

  The contours of modern Ireland are already recognizable by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Though most of the population would continue to use Irish rather than English for decades after the Act of Union, English had already supplanted the older language as the medium of serious verse. If the contestation between Gael and Gall was more than ever a subject of poetry, the focus had become retrospective. There is a high degree of romanticization in the approach to the Irish past of Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson and other poets represented in section V, and their work of imaginative retrieval frequently takes the form of translation (the earliest versions of Gaelic poems used in this book come from nineteenth-century writers).

  The poetic engagement with the distant past ushered in by Ferguson intensifies in the Revival period (section VI), when it intersects with the gathering momentum of nationalist politics. Mediation of the Gaelic tradition is central to the poetry of Austin Clarke in the early years of independence (section VII), and the backward look is sustained in anglophone verse, in tones variously of realism, nostalgia and irony, up to the contemporary era (section VIII). One of the more remarkable developments in the poetry of our own day is the meeting between oral culture and modernity facilitated by the deployment of Gaelic folklore in the service of an egalitarian feminist politics in the resurgent Irish of the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

  Another theme that emerges from a survey of the long history of poetry in Ireland is the land. ‘Lament of Baoi, the Nun of Beare Island’ is partly to be understood as the testimony of a naturalized sovereignty goddess. Hence the nun – returned to the temporal sphere and no longer protectress of the territory – mourns her separation from the timeless persistence of the land, figured in male terms:

  To all the old I bear good will

  Except wide-pastured Feven

  Whose mane though as old as mine

  Is sunbright still and golden.

  Feven’s Stone of the Kings has been battered

  By winter’s storms time out of mind

  But like the Fort of Ronan’s in Bregon

  Its face is youthful, still unlined.

  (Feven – or Femen – and Bregon are north Munster place names.)

  The trope of the sovereignty goddess whose marriage to the king assures the land’s well-being underlies the much later aisling (‘vision’) poetry of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (‘The Glamoured’), Art Mac Cumhaigh (‘The Churchyard of Creggan’) and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (‘A Magic Mist’). In these and related Jacobite poems and songs, the speaker encounters a beautiful maiden suffering the advances of a lout (or louts) identified with varying degrees of explicitness as representatives of the Protestant British succession; her overseas betrothed, the Stuart Pretender, is helpless to defend her. The figure of the young woman conflates territory and nation – land and Ireland.

  Brian Merriman’s comic masterpiece Cúirt an Mheán-Oiche (The Midnight Court) – the last major poem written in Irish before the tradition spluttered back to life in the twentieth century – opens with a parodic aisling. The poem’s eponymous tribunal on the miseries of Merriman’s native territory of East Clare is presided over by Aoibheall, an otherworld queen who can be seen as a late, very vivid embodiment of the sovereignty goddess. The Midnight Court is unusual in Gaelic tradition in seeming to respond to an English-language text, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, the other long work represented entire in section III. ‘Ill fares the land’, the leitmotif of Goldsmith’s idealizing portrait of vanishing rural simplicities, takes on additional resonance when heard in the context of Irish poetry’s age-old concern with territory. The theme recurs in Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, a book-length verse narrative on post-Famine land agitation and the early stages of the challenge to landlordism that eventually resulted in the redistribution of the estates (most of them dating from the plantations of the colonial period) via the Wyndham Act of 1903.

  In 1942 yet another agrarian long poem, Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, offered a glum rebuff to the idealization of rural Ireland in the drama of the Abbey Theatre and the political rhetoric of Éamon de Valera (1882–1975); significantly, it did so from the point of view of a poet sprung from the class of small (‘peasant’) proprietors who were the principal beneficiaries of the settlement of the land question. In the mid- and later twentieth century the ancient antagonism between Planter (an explicitly territorial term) and Gael cast a darker shadow over Ulster than Ireland’s other three provinces (to say the least). Land is the central focus of two incisive Northern Irish treatments of continuing sectarian division, John Hewitt’s historical allegory ‘The Colony’ and ‘Broagh’, Seamus Heaney’s bravura lyric of linguistic excavation.

  Poetry and Women

  A striking feature of verse in the Gaelic tradition – and one that helps identify a major tendency (if not a theme) in Irish poetry more broadly – is an openness to women’s perspectives and experience. In the literature of early medieval Ireland this was countered by a strain of misogyny, evident for example in the Táin and the starkly patriarchal ‘Instructions of King Cormac mac Airt’. Nevertheless, section I is alive with female voices – those of Eve, the mothers of the massacred Innocents, St Ite, St Brigit, Créide, Liadan, the battle goddess Morrígan, Gráinne and Baoi. Except for Eve and Morrígan, all the women are portrayed sympathetically and some of these poems were probably female in authorship. The scholar Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha has argued that Baoi’s lament was composed by Digde, a tenth-century ‘penitent spouse’ (a woman who retreated to a convent on suffering widowhood or a succession of widowhoods). The seventh-century Liadan and her tragically rejected lover Cuirithir are strongly held by tradition to have been poets, and though the solitary surviving quatrain attributed to Liadan is not the tenth-century poem spoken by her persona in section I, the attribution suggests that in Ireland poetic compos ition by women is almost as old as poetry itself.

  Gormlaith (d.947), who features centrally in section II, became a penitent spouse after the death of her third husband Niall Glúndub in 919. The extant verse that can confidently be ascribed to her is fragmentary, and the five monologues included here were written up to half a millennium after her death. (Tradition can operate somewhat like an eternal present in the Gaelic world – thus the suite of lyrics in section VII by another female poet, Máire Mhac an tSaoi – one of the leading figures in the contem porary revival of poetry in Irish – ventriloquizes its exploration of a mid-twentieth-century love affair through the character of the historical Máire Ní Ógáin, the proverbially foolish lover of the eighteenth-century poet Donnchadh Rua Mac Con Mara.)

  It is notable that two of the Gormlaith monologues (‘At Niall’s Grave’ and ‘3 × 30, 9 × 9’) draw attention to the speaker’s status as a poet. ‘Icham of Irlaunde’, one of the oldest English poems associated with the country, is (like so many poems in Irish) spoken by a woman. In the early 1600s Brighid Chill Da
ra, an aristocrat of mixed Irish and English lineage, could engage in self-assured poetic banter with the most renowned professional poet of her day in a manner suggestive of intimacy alike with the privileges and technical intricacies of bardic verse, and with the love of teasing paradox in Renaissance English poetry that was being brought to a new level of outrageousness in the contemporary work of John Donne (see her ‘Response to Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa’s Poem’). Long before the emergence of Restoration and ‘Enlightenment’ female poets like ‘Philo-Philippa’ and Dorothea Dubois, women were writing poetry of the highest sophistication in Ireland. Indeed, if we count Digde as the author of ‘Lament of Baoi’ and accept the suggestion of some scholars that there are traces of Gormlaith’s originals in the later monologues spoken in her name, female-authored works can be said to appear in all nine sections of this anthology. Such sustained productivity by women is unusual in western Europe.

  Women are prominent in popular as well as high literary art in Ireland. Anonymous folk songs first in Irish (‘Donal Óg’, ‘My Grief on the Sea’ and ‘Shule Aroon’), then in English (‘My Love is Like the Sun’, ‘I Know My Love’ and ‘The Butcher Boy’), are as hospitable to female perspectives as the Old and Middle Irish materials of section I, and identified women songwriters feature in sections IV and IX. In Gaelic culture, the public lamentation of the dead fell to women. Irish anthologies customarily include Éibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century keen ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’, a poem which, while of considerable power, is more generic and conventional than is often appreciated. In section V I have instead chosen a later example that shows the female poetic art of keening still vibrant in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  It would be unfair to discuss women and poetry in Ireland without mentioning Charlotte Brooke (c.1740–93), whose dual-language Reliques of Irish Poetry appeared in 1789. Though her English renditions are too mannered for inclusion here (translations rarely have a lifespan of more than two centuries), her antho logy not only provided the most remarkable Irish contribution to the vogue for literary antiquarianism associated with Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) in Scotland and Thomas Percy (1729–1811) in England, but also prefigured the nineteenth-century poetic rapprochement between Gaelic and Anglo-Ireland.

  The characteristic cross-gendering of the early period is not maintained at the same frequency in later centuries, although male-authored poems featuring women’s voices have continued to be written. The most celebrated and controversial of these is undoubtedly the semi-dramatic The Midnight Court, which has been condemned for indulging male fantasies, but also praised for re cognizing female desire. If Jonathan Swift can be convicted of class as well as gender condescension in ‘Mary the Cook-Maid’s Letter to Dr Sheridan’, later English-language poets have been as compassionate as the early Irish lyricists in their delineations of feminine subjectivity. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ferguson’s ‘Deirdre’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach’, William Larminie’s Fand, James Stephens’s ‘The Red-haired Man’s Wife’ and Padraic Colum’s ‘The Poor Girl’s Meditation’ are all works by poets deeply engaged with Gaelic tradition. Only Ferguson’s and Larminie’s poems are past-centred, ‘Celtic’ pieces; the other two protest against poverty and patriarchy in contemporary urban and rural settings respectively. Austin Clarke’s ‘Martha Blake at Fifty-one’ deserves mention in this context as a fiercely engagé third-person portrait of the last days of a lower-middle-class Dublin spinster oppressed alike by her piety and its manipulation by the agents of a powerful institutionalized church.

  Two harrowing poems in section VIII cross gender lines in the opposite direction to give intimate second-person portraits of male psychology in extremis. Medbh McGuckian’s ‘Monody for Aghas’ dwells on the bodily suffering endured by Thomas Ashe, a hunger-striking republican leader killed by forcible feeding in 1917, while Rita Ann Higgins’s ‘Black Dog in My Docs Day’ charts the suicidal depression of a young man in 1990s Galway.

  The Art of Poetry

  The survival of learning in Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire was in considerable measure due to Irish monks like Johannes Scottus Ériugena and Sedulius Scottus, whose perilous journeys across inhospitable continental terrain are memorialized in the latter’s Latin lyric ‘Safe Arrival’, and to countless of their unnamed colleagues. Among them were the authors of the many Old Irish poems that have come down to us as marginal inscriptions on illuminated Latin manuscripts created in Irish monasteries in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. While the poetic attainment of the clerical scribes has its part in a much larger Irish contribution to early medieval culture, the imaginative and technical daring of the poems themselves makes that attainment perhaps the greatest and most historically signifi-cant of the country’s many achievements in literature. The novelist Flann O’Brien (1911–66) wrote of the ‘steel-pen exactness’ of the monks’ quill-inscribed lyrics, and Seamus Heaney has drawn attention to the extraordinary luminosity of their rendering of the nat ural environment, their ‘sudden apprehension of the world as light’. Old Irish poets introduced a major innovation that verse from the Anglo-Saxon world would not catch up with for centuries: theirs were the first art poems anywhere to use end-rhyme, a procedure they appear to have adapted from Latin hymnody. The debt would be handsomely repaid in the distinctively Irish rhyme patterns of such Latin hymns as Cú Chuimne’s eighth-century ‘Let us sing daily’, the oldest known hymn to the Virgin.

  One of the most noteworthy features of the early poetry is its awareness of itself as writing, its sense not only of its own textuality but of the processes – simultaneously joyful and exacting – that went into its making. Poem after poem calls attention to the act of composition and to the material contexts alike of writing and reading. Thus, in section I we see an anonymous monk ‘writing out of doors’, and hear Colum Cille complain of the physical demands of the scribal life. Posthumous tributes by Dallán Forgaill and Beccán the Hermit praise the saint because he ‘wove the word’ and because he owned books. Secular and public life, too, held poetry in explicit esteem: King Cormac’s ‘instructions’ list ‘silence during recitals’ as a key virtue. Even clerical poets who wrote in Latin rather than Irish are at their most animated when discussing the nature and scope of their art, ‘Hibernicus Exul’ striving to reconcile the idea of poetic immortality with the need to praise God, and Ériugena countering Graeco-Roman aesthetics with a Christian theory of poetry.

  The most extended meditation in Irish tradition on the nature of the poetic impulse is to be found in Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), a twelfth-century account in prose and verse of the madness that overtook Sweeney at the Battle of Mag Rath (637) as a result of the curse of St Ronan, whose psalter he had thrown into a lake. Sweeney flies from perch to perch in Ireland and Scotland, living off berries and alternately cursing his condition and praising the landscape in a series of impassioned lyrics. The persistent linking of Sweeney’s loss of his kingdom (territory again!) to the fluency of his art led the poet Robert Graves (1895–1985) to describe Buile Shuibhne in The White Goddess (1948) as ‘the most ruthless and bitter description in all European literature of an obsessed poet’s predicament’.

  With the rise of bardic verse in the thirteenth century, poetry became even more conscious of its own artistry and cultural eminence. Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh’s address to the Blessed Virgin is among the most fervent and ambitious of the many religious poems in this book. Yet it is not the work of a clergyman but of a professional poet so worldly that he killed a retainer who insulted him – and, as a consequence, was forced to make his career in the service of Scottish rather than Irish lords. Ó Dálaigh praises the Trinity and Mary as the ultimate aristocratic patrons, to whom he offers his services free of charge:

  O Trinity, O gentle Mary,

  every glory passes but yours.

  Hear my poem, O Four Persons,

  please offer no gold as reward.

  His ‘well
-wrought verse’, he insists, has a special sincerity: ‘I say the truth, in poetry.’

  More than a century later, Tadhg Óg Ó hUigínn’s elegy for his brother and fellow poet Fearghal Rua asserts the dead man’s importance by presenting poetry itself as the primary casualty of his death:

  Poetry is daunted.

  A stave of the barrel is smashed

  And the wall of learning broken.

  (‘A School of Poetry Closes’)

  The catalogue of consequences of the bard’s impending demise in the anonymous verses on the last illness of Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa (d.1612) builds to the climactic identification of poetry as his soon-to-be-widowed spouse. The elevated status of poetry is illustrated again by Lochlainn Óg Ó Dálaigh, whose ‘Praise for the Young O’Briens’ pays its greatest compliment when it says that the boys are assured of lasting fame because they are friends of poets. In an extravagant defence of the bardic prerogative, Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe’s thirteenth-century ‘A Response to a Threat against Poetry’ directs the magisterial eulogistic resources of the tradition to the praise of the art itself.