The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Read online

  The songs associated with the 1798 rebellion reveal diverse aspects of that traumatic episode. ‘The Shan Van Vocht’ remains the best known and most politically influential of the many historical typifications of Ireland as a woman, while ‘The Star of Liberty’ expresses the internationalist revolutionary ideology that motivated the leadership of the United Irishmen and a still disputed proportion of their followers. No rebel song has greater pathos than ‘The Croppy Boy’, which circulated in broadsheet form in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection. ‘General Wonder’, a laconic and unforgiving narrative of the events surrounding the abortive French landing in Bantry Bay at the end of 1796 from the perspective of the eventual victors, stakes a formidable claim to being the most reactionary poem in this book.

  James Orr – an Ulster Presbyterian United Irishman who took part in the Battle of Antrim (1798) and then fled to North America – returned to Ireland around the turn of the century and twice applied (without success) to join the yeomanry being raised to counter the threat of Napoleonic invasion. His substitution of British loyalism for Irish separatism was symptomatic of a widespread withdrawal into sectarian safe havens by people of all religions after the rebels’ ideal of uniting ‘Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’ under ‘the common name of Irishman’ broke down in the face of reports (exaggerated by the authorities, according to some commentators) of inter-communal outrage in the main theatre of fighting in Wexford and adjacent counties. Orr retained his radical views on social and economic issues, but relinquished them in relation to the ‘connection with England’, identified by the United Irish leader Wolfe Tone as ‘the never-failing source of all our evils’.

  ‘Donegore Hill’, which provides the signature to section V, can be read as a muted expression of the new Unionist allegiance of the Ulster radicals. One of the few works in Ulster Scots to extend rather than imitate the literary traditions of Lowland Scotland, the poem is an important addition to the series of sardonic celebrations of public festivity that stretches from the fifteenth-century ‘Peblis to the Play’ through the slightly later ‘Christis Kirk on the Grene’ to Robert Fergusson’s ‘Leith Races’ and (just before Orr’s time) Burns’s ‘The Holy Fair’. On 7 June 1798 Orr joined thousands of his fellow rebels on Donegore Hill, a few miles east of Antrim, in preparation for the attack on the town. His poem (included in a volume of his verses published by subscription in 1804) conspicuously stops short of describing the ensuing battle, focusing instead on the cheerful chaos of the gathering and in particular on the timorousness of many of those present. (Less than half of the ten thousand men on the hill are thought to have joined the poet in the fighting.) It is difficult to interpret the poem’s preference for carnivalesque over heroics in terms other than of repudiation of the United Irish enterprise and tacit acceptance of the Act of Union of 1801.

  More generally, however, the Union was met with dismay and even consternation. Section V’s epigraph comes from Thomas Moore’s 1806 verse epistle ‘Corruption’. The vigour and directness with which he denounces the new constitutional arrangements as the final act in the enslavement of Ireland give the lie to caricatures of the leading songwriter of the age as an effete toady. The sense of disempowerment felt by Catholic poets like Moore and James Clarence Mangan was shared by many of their Protestant compat riots, particularly in the south of the country. The Ulster-born Samuel Ferguson embraced the Union, but even his career – as both antiquarian and poet – was based on anxieties about the survival of Irish cultural separateness in the newly combined polity.

  Moore may have been an important player in the drama of English romanticism through his friendship with Lord Byron and other figures, and through the popular success of such works as his now virtually unreadable Oriental verse tale Lalla Rookh (1817), but with the passing of the years his younger contemporary Mangan (whose twentieth-century admirers included James Joyce and W. H. Auden) has come to be seen as Ireland’s greatest romantic writer and as the most important poet the country produced between Merriman and Yeats. The impoverished, green-cloaked and multi-pseudonymous Mangan, who presented many of his original verses as translations from a range of exotic languages, was as much an early poète maudit as a belated romantic. Even when his poems use texts in other languages as their starting point they can transform their sources beyond recognition. The ecstatic nationalist sublime of ‘Dark Rosaleen’ has no prototype in ‘Róisín Dubh’, the gentle eighteenth-century aisling it ‘translates’, while the free-verse narrative ‘Khidder’ is six times longer and far more energetically imagined than ‘Chidher’, a ballad treatment of a similar theme by the German poet Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866). Mangan’s peculiar blend of intensity and abjection takes an autobiographical turn in ‘Twenty Golden Years Ago’ and ‘The Nameless One’. In ‘Siberia’ he conflates psychological and political vistas in a manner consistent with posterity’s view of him as a doomed poet whose sufferings were inseparable from those of his country: in due course he died of malnutrition at the height of the Great Famine.

  Mary Tighe and George Darley are minor tributaries to the mainstream of English romanticism. Tighe’s Psyche was admired by John Keats (1795–1821), whose own erotic poem in Spenserian stanzas, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, seems indebted to the lushly sexual account of Cupid’s visit to Psyche reproduced here. Darley, a depressive mathematician, won notoriety for his harsh reviews of contemporary poetry and drama in the Athenaeum and other periodicals. His antagonists on the London literary scene were quick to identify the exaggerated eloquence of Nepenthe and his blank verse plays as a characteristically Irish vice.

  Hundreds of poems in comic Hiberno-English were published by writers of both Catholic and Protestant origin throughout the nineteenth century, few of them as witty or lacking in condescension as the relatively early example that represents the mode here, Letter V from Moore’s The Fudges in England (1835). Patriotic poems were composed in even greater numbers, most of them lachrymose and conventional. ‘The Irish Wolf’ is atypical in its poise and eschewal of sentimentality. The author, James McCarroll, was a County Longford-born journalist and inventor who in the course of a turbulent career in Canada and the United States gradually shifted his political allegiances from Orangeism to Fenianism: his poem offers a classic statement of Irish nationalism at its most Anglophobic and unreconciled.

  Political commentary could take other forms as well. ‘In Snow’, William Allingham’s sonnet on the doubtful wisdom of the 1878–80 British intervention in Afghanistan, has startling res onance more than a century and a quarter later. Yeats’s omission of Allingham’s name from the list of his literary antecedents – ‘Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ – may have done lasting damage to the reputation of a more serious and ambitious poet than Thomas Davis and a more intellectually alert one than Samuel Ferguson. Although Allingham made his career in London, where he was a member of Tennyson’s circle, his poetry retained a strong Irish focus. If no poet in the book more clearly exemplifies the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, it is a distinction that has done Allingham few favours where his compatriots’ interest in his achievement is concerned.

  This is the first section of the book where the Gaelic material – Antoine Ó Raifteirí’s good-humoured dialogue with the whiskey and the two examples of keening – comes entirely from the folk realm. The terrible price paid by the rural poor in the 1840s for the dismantling of Gaelic social structures and the laissez-faire economic orthodoxies of the day is tallied by Jane Francesca Elgee in ‘A Supplication’, one of the most impassioned of the many poems elicited by the Famine. James Henry is represented by two characteristically vigorous expressions of his atheism. Composition was something of a sideline for Henry, a philanthropic physician who retired early to devote himself to the study of the manuscripts of The Aeneid, in pursuit of which he is said to have crossed the Alps on foot seventeen times.

  The Irish Literary Revival that gives its title to section VI took place against the background of a lar
ger movement of cultural retrieval involving the Irish language, Gaelic games and traditional lore of various kinds. In its first two decades or so, the Revival’s core personnel was drawn from the ranks of a Protestant minority that had been progressively losing its privileges since the Act of Union; its immediate political context was the ongoing shift in power from their ascendancy caste to the majority community. Yeats in 1922 recollected the ‘sudden certainty’ that came upon him in ‘a moment of supernatural insight’ in the late 1880s that ‘Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come’: the implication was that he and his fellow-Revivalists would set their seal on the wax, offering the inchoate Catholic masses cultural and intellectual guidance and thereby saving the emerging nation from the horrors of mercantile modernity, and their own class from oblivion. History refused to cooperate with these plans. Indeed, throughout the period, the expectations of writers kept being confounded by historical developments. From Ferguson’s dramatic monologue on the 1882 Phoenix Park murders at the beginning, to Francis Ledwidge’s two poems of mourning for executed Republican leaders at the end, the section is punctuated by responses to overwhelming political events. The most morally urgent of these is undoubtedly Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, where the Easter Rising and its turbulent aftermath force the poet to subject his ideas about Ireland, social class and even poetry itself to a series of revisions, and in the process to raise his art to a higher register than it had hitherto achieved. (The poem was withheld from publication until October 1920, when it was included in an issue of the New Statesman containing a range of protests against the atrocities authorized by Lloyd George’s administration during the War of Independence. It is followed here by ‘Reprisals’, Yeats’s most explicit denunciation of government policy, which was not made public in the poet’s lifetime.) The intrusion of history cut short the careers of two of the most promising poets of the era: Thomas MacDonagh was killed by a British firing squad in Kilmainham Jail in Dublin in May 1916; his elegist Francis Ledwidge by a German shell at the Second Battle of Ypres fourteen months later.

  History as a thing of the past also features prominently in section VI, in John Todhunter’s troubled meditation on state violence during the agrarian disturbances of the Union period; Emily Lawless’s dramatization of the departure of the last Catholic aristocrats from Munster (‘Clare Coast’) a century earlier; and T. W. Rolleston’s delicate ‘Celtic Twilight’ evocation of the immemorial generations of the Gael in ‘The Dead at Clonmacnois’ (based on a fourteenth-century original). Lawless’s ‘A Retort’ delineates the patrician national feeling shared by many of her rural Anglo-Irish class, a complex loyalty that reconciled love of Ireland and disdain of England with unionist politics.

  Yeats’s recourse in the 1880s and 1890s to what he called ‘Irish scenery’ involved neither an eschewal of non-Irish themes nor, as has been alleged by his detractors, a retreat from the difficulties of living. Each of the Celtic poems at the beginning of the selection from his work here explores an ethical or psychological quandary, and the shift towards a more social idiom in the later pieces marks the deepening of an already robust engagement with the contemporary world rather than a sudden onset of consciousness of it. Where the younger poets of the first decades of the new century are concerned, however, everyday language and settings serve an egalitarian political awareness and a repudiation of the social privilege identified with the Revival in its first phase. (J. M. Synge is something of an exception to this rule, albeit his lyrics are more plain-spoken in their realism and more muscular in their phys icality than any others in the section.) Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Newspaper-Seller’ and the first two James Stephens poems are as attentive to urban deprivation and injustice as the Padraic Colum pieces are to the economic conditions of life in the countryside. A well-nigh socialist sense of the actuality of manual labour is central even to Stephens’s reanimation of the voice of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair.

  The title and epigraph of section VII are taken from ‘Nightwalker’, Thomas Kinsella’s brooding ambulatory poem from 1967 on the eclipsed idealism of the independent Irish state that had come into being forty-five years earlier. The section opens with Yeats’s magisterial ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, an apocalyptic response to the birth in blood of the new constitutional order. Joseph Campbell’s excitement about the Easter Rising in the previous section is countered now by his disillusioned prison poems, written during his incarceration by the Free State government for his Republican sympathies. Austin Clarke’s ‘The Lost Heifer’, also composed during the Civil War, laments the descent of nationalist altruism into fratricidal violence.

  Yet, initially at least, there was a degree of optimism among the literary classes about the possibilities of hard-won statehood. Yeats was appointed by the governing party to the upper house of the new parliament, and threw his energies into such projects as designing the country’s stamps and coinage. His Abbey Theatre became the world’s first nationally subsidized theatre in 1925. If the temper of the five decades covered by the section is to be read through the more politically engaged among the poems, however, it was a period of disgruntlement and disaffiliation. The increasingly theocratic nature of the southern state was illustrated by the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929, which implied that literature itself was an enemy of the people. Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, Clarke’s ‘The Straying Student’ and ‘Penal Law’ and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger protest in different ways against the anti-sexual puritanism of official versions of Irishness. Disaffection was keenest for southern Protestants like Patrick MacDonogh, and half-southern ones like the Belfast-born Louis MacNeice. ‘O, Come to the Land’ and ‘Valediction’ bristle with exasperation and despondency at the emerging character of the new state.

  For Catholics in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, mere disaffection might have seemed like a luxury. (The institutions of the devolved ‘province’ – it comprised about two-thirds of Ulster – had been set up a year before those of the Irish Free State.) Doomed to perpetual opposition in the Stormont parliament, the minority community created by the border faced varying degrees of discrimination at local government level and was occasionally subject to abuse by the security machinery of the statelet. Its grievances were sufficient to keep ancient antagonisms alive and set in train the series of events that led to the outbreak of violence in 1969 which sandwiches the poems of the section between the end of one period of ‘Troubles’ and the beginning of another. John Hewitt’s laying bare of the historic Ulster Protestant siege mentality in ‘The Colony’, from the middle of the period, can be read as a warning to nationalists and others of the consequences of pressuring such a psychology to conform to an identity template it perceives as alien. Derek Mahon’s two poems are not so sympath etic to his community of origin: they identify religious fanaticism and lower-middle-class blandness as the poles between which its values can be defined. A politically divided Tyrone landscape is surveyed in John Montague’s genial ‘What a View’ by a less than independently minded seagull (whose parting gift to the flagpole of the British Legion hut at the end of the poem provides the clue to his fealties). The last three poems mentioned were published shortly before the outbreak of the Troubles. If they cannot be said to have predicted the cataclysm (all sides were taken by surprise by the sudden slide into violence) they attest at least to the capacity of poetry to grapple with underlying political realities.

  Yeats was the first Irish poet since Moore to have a central impact on literature beyond Ireland. His continuing reputation as one of the great poets of the modern world rests on the work he produced in the 1920s and 30s. A remarkable aspect of his achievement was his ability to make Irish subject matter everybody’s business. Of the leading poets of the next generation, only MacNeice made much impression outside Ireland. He is distinguished from his contemporaries Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh and Seán Ó Ríordáin by consistency rather than quality. A higher proportion of his poems retain their interest, perhaps
because, conducting his career from England, he operated in a more economically and psychologically sustaining environment than they did. (None of the three enjoyed anything as grand as a career.) Clarke’s early work furthers the attempt by William Larminie in the late nineteenth century to accommodate Gaelic metrics in English, and measures the tawdriness of the present against the grandeur of a past that fascinates him as much as it did Samuel Ferguson. His later writing sustains such a campaign against the church-state consensus in the South that he has been seen as a dissident writer on the Soviet model. Kavanagh repudiated the past as a resource and wrote in an idiom based on the day-to-day speech of the community at large, with no agonizing over the loss of Gaelic or the ‘foreignness’ of English. His matter-of-fact vernacularism was to have a liberating effect on later poets as disparate as Heaney, Durcan and Muldoon. For Ó Ríordáin, born in an Irish-speaking area of West Cork and ‘educated’ (as he once observed) by tuberculosis, Gaelic had not yet been lost. His lyrics temper a tortured interiority with impish wit, while their idioms and rhythms reflect his reading in anglophone modernism. Along with the poems of Máirtín Ó Direáin and the comparatively traditionalist verse of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, they restored the older language to the forefront of poetry in Ireland for the first time since 1780; a position it retains up to the present.