Wild as tinkers and groomed to an eyelash,
And light of foot as a champion featherweight
Prance on the top of the morning.
They walk the ring, so glossy and delicate
Each you’d think was a porcelain masterpiece
Come to life at the touch of a raindrop,
Tossing its mane and its halter.
The shy, the bold, the demure and the whinnier,
Grey, black, piebald, roans, palominos
Parade their charms for the tweedy, the quite un-
susceptible hearts of the judges.
Now and again at the flick of an instinct,
As if they’d take off like a fieldful of rooks, they will
Fidget and fret for the pasture they know, and
The devil take all this competing.
The light is going, the porter is flowing,
The field a ruin of paper and straw.
Step neatly home now, unprized or rosetted,
You proud Connemara ponies.
Harebells over Mannin Bay
Half moon of moon-pale sand.
Sea stirs in midnight blue.
Looking across to the Twelve Pins
The singular harebells stand.
The sky’s all azure. Eye
To eye with them upon
Cropped grass, I note the harebells give
Faint echoes of the sky.
For such a Lilliput host
To pit their colours against
Peacock of sea and mountain seems
Impertinence at least.
These summer commonplaces,
Seen close enough, confound
A league of brilliant waves, and dance
On the grave mountain faces.
Harebells, keep your arresting
Pose by the strand. I like
These gestures of the ephemeral
Against the everlasting.
At Old Head, Co. Mayo
In a fisherman’s hat and a macintosh
He potters along the hotel drive;
Croagh Patrick1 is far beyond him now the locust
Has stripped his years of green.
Midges like clouds of memory nag
The drooped head. Fish are rising
Under his hat. He stops against the view.
All is a brushwork vision, a wash
Of new-laid colour. They come alive –
Fuchsia, grass, rock. The mist, which had unfocused
Mountain and bay, is clean
Forgot, and gone the lumpish sag
Of cloud epitomizing
Our ennui. Storms have blown the sky to blue.
He stops, but less to admire the view
Than to catch breath maybe. Pure gold,
Emerald, violet, ultramarine are blazing
From earth and sea: out there
Croagh Patrick stands uncapped for him.
The old man, shuffling by,
Recalls a rod lost, a dead girl’s caress.
Can youthful ecstasies renew
Themselves in blood that has blown so cold?
Nature’s more merciful: gently unloosing
His hold upon each care
And human tie, her fingers dim
All lights which held his eye,
And ease him on the last lap to nothingness.
1 Croagh Patrick: the Holy Mountain.
Croagh: pronounced cro’.
Sailing from Cleggan
Never will I forget it –
Beating out through Cleggan Bay
Towards Inishbofin, how
The shadow lay between us,
An invisible shadow
All but severing us lay
Athwart the Galway hooker.
Sea-room won, turning to port
Round Rossadillisk Point I
Slacken the sheet. Atlantic
Breeze abeam, ahead sun’s eye
Opening, we skirt past reefs
And islands – Friar, Cruagh,
Orney, Eeshal, Inishturk.
Porpoises cartwheeling through
Inshore water, boom creaking,
Spray asperging; and sunlight
Transforming to a lime-green
Laughter the lipcurling of
Each morose wave as they burst
On reefs fanged for a shipwreck.
Miracle sun, dispelling
That worst shadow! Salt and sun,
Our wounds’ cautery! And how,
Havened, healed, oh lightened of
The shadow, we stepped ashore
On to our recaptured love –
Never could I forget it.
Ballintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo1
‘The Abbey that refused to die’
At the head of Lough Carra the royal abbey stands
Huge as two tithe-barns: much immortal grain
In its safe keeping, you might say, is stored.
Masons and carpenters have roofed and floored
That shell wherein a church not built with hands
For seven hundred and fifty years had grown.
I dare not quite say we were led here, driving
Through drifts of clobbering rainstorm (my own natal
Ballintubber is half Ireland away).
Yet, greeted by those walls of peregrine grey,
It felt like something more than the mere arriving
Of two sight-seers. Call it a destination.
Founded (1216) by Cathal O’Conor,
King of Connacht, the holy place was sacked by
Cromwellian louts, starved by the Penal Laws;
Yet all these troubled years, without a pause,
The Mass upheld God’s glory, to the honour
Of Irishmen. So much for guidebook fact.
* * *
A seventeenth century crucifix, austere
Stonework will take the eye: the heart conceives
In the pure light from wall to whitewashed wall
An unseen presence, formed by the faith of all
The dead who age to age had worshipped here,
Kneeling on grass along the rootless nave.
And what is faith? The man who walks a high wire,
Eyes fixed ahead, believing that strong nets
Are spread below – the Hands which will sustain
Each fall and nerve him to climb up again.
Surefoot or stumbler, veteran or tiro,
It could be we are all God’s acrobats.
Broaden the high wire now into a bridge
Where Christian men still meet over the fell
Abyss, and walk together: they should cling
Brothers in faith, not wranglers arguing
Each step and slip of the way. Such true religion
Renew this abbey of St Patrick’s well!
Up-end the bridge. It makes a ladder now
Between mankind and the timeless, limitless Presence,
Angels ascending or descending it
On His quick errands. See this ladder’s foot
Firm-planted here, where men murmur and bow
Like the Lough Carra reed-beds in obeisance.
1 We had gone to this remote place as sightseers. To our astonishment, the priest recognized CDL, and immediately asked him to write a poem which could be sold to raise funds for the Abbey.
An Ancestor
Seen once on a family tree, now lost,
Jane Eyre, of Eyrescourt, County Galway.
All I get from the name is a passionate
Prudish lady, crossed
In love, then happy-ended. Jane,
My Jane – while a boy called Patrick Prunty
Dug potatoes in County Down –
Lived upon her demesne.
No governess, an heiress she.
Well, knowing nothing of her – not even
The road to razed or shuttered Eyrescourt –
Like Charlotte I am free
To create a Jane. I give her a score
>
Of rowdy brothers and sisters, a hunting
Father, a gossipy mother, routs,
Flirtings and flames galore.
Pedigree mares, harp, scandal, new
Recipes fill the hours. I see her
Flitting towards an unclouded future
Down a damp avenue.
Were she alive, I know what would please
Her still – the traditional Anglo-Irish
Pastime of playing hide-and-seek
Among their family trees.
Goldsmith outside Trinity
There he stands, my ancestor, back turned
On Trinity, with his friend Edmund Burke
And others of the Anglo-Irish genius –
Poet, naturalist, historian, hack.
The statue glosses over his uncouth figure,
The pock-marked face, the clownish tongue and mien:
It can say nothing of his unstaunchable charity,
But does full justice to the lack of chin.
Little esteemed by the grave and grey-faced college,
He fiddled his way through Europe, was enrolled
Among the London literates: a deserted
Village brought forth a citizen of the world.
His period and the Anglo-Irish reticence
Kept sentiment unsicklied and unfurred:
Good sense, plain style, a moralist could distinguish
Fine shades from the ignoble to the absurd.
Dublin they flew, the wild geese of Irish culture.
They fly it still: the curdled elegance,
The dirt, the cod, new hucksters, old heroics,
Look better viewed from a remoter stance.
Here from his shadow I note the buses grumbling
On to Rathmines, Stillorgan, Terenure –
Names he’d have known – and think of the arterial
Through-way between us. I would like to be sure
Long-distance genes do more than merely connect us.
But I, a provincial too, an expatriate son
Of Ireland, have nothing of that compulsive gambler,
Nothing of the inspired simpleton.
Yet, as if to an heirloom given a child and long
Unvalued, I at last have returned to him
With gratefuller recognition, get from his shadow
A wordless welcome, a sense of being brought home.
The Whispering Roots
Roots are for holding on, and holding dear.
Mine, like a child’s milk teeth, came gently away
From Ireland at the close of my second year.
Is it second childhood now – that I overhear
Them whisper across a lifetime as if from yesterday?
We have had blood enough and talk of blood,
These sixty years. Exiles are two a penny
And race a rancid word; a meaningless word
For the Anglo-Irish: a flighty cuckoo brood
Foisted on alien nests, they knew much pride and many
Falls. But still my roots go whispering on
Like rain on a soft day. Whatever lies
Beneath their cadence I could not disown:
An Irish stranger’s voice, its tang and tone,
Recalls a family language I thrill to recognize.
All the melodious places only seen
On a schoolboy’s map – Kinsale, Meath, Connemara:
Writers – Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Sheridan:
Fighters, from Vinegar Hill to Stephen’s Green:
The Sidhe1, saints, scholars, rakes of Mallow, kings of Tara: –
Were background music to my ignorant youth.
Now on a rising wind louder it swells
From the lonely hills of Laois. What can a birth-
Place mean, its features comely or uncouth,
To a long-rootless man? Yet still the place compels.
We Anglo-Irish and the memory of us
Are thinning out. Bad landlords some, some good,
But never of a land rightfully ours,
We hunted, fished, swore by our ancestors,
Till we were ripped like parasite growth from native wood.
And still the land compels me; not ancestral
Ghosts, nor regret for childhood’s fabled charms,
But a rare peacefulness, consoling, festal,
As if the old religion we oppressed all
Those years folded the stray within a father’s arms.
The modern age has passed this island by
And it’s the peace of death her revenants find?
Harsh Dublin wit, peasant vivacity
Are here to give your shallow claims the lie.
Perhaps in such soil only the heart’s long roots will bind –
Even, transplanted, quiveringly respond
To their first parent earth. Here God is taken
For granted, time like a well-tutored hound
Brought to man’s heel, and ghosting underground
Something flows to the exile from what has been forsaken.
In age, body swept on, mind crawls upstream
Toward the source; not thinking to find there
Visions or fairy gold – what old men dream
Is pure restatement of the original theme,
A sense of rootedness, a source held near and dear.
1 Sidhe: pronounced She.
People of the faery mound (found in Irish mythology and W. B. Yeats).
PART TWO
Some Beautiful Morning
‘One can’t tell whether there won’t be a tide to catch, some beautiful morning.’
T. H. WHITE
Yes, for the young these expectations charm
There are sealed sailing-orders; but they dream
A cabined breath into the favouring breeze
Kisses a moveless hull alive, will bear
It on to some landfall, no matter where –
The Golden Gate or the Hesperides.
Anchored, they feel the ground-swell of an ocean
Stirring their topmasts with the old illusion
That a horizon can be reached. In pride
Unregimentable as a cross-sea
Lightly they float on pure expectancy.
Some morning now we sail upon the tide.
Wharves, cranes, the lighthouse in a sleep-haze glide
Past them, the landmark spires of home recede,
Glittering waves look like a diadem.
The winds are willing, and the deep is ours
Who chose the very time to weigh the bowers.
How could they know it was the tide caught them?
* * *
Older, they wake one dawn and are appalled,
Rusting in estuary or safely shoaled,
By the impression made on those deep waters.
What most sustained has left a residue
Of cartons, peelings, all such galley spew,
And great loves shrunk to half-submerged french letters.
Sometimes they doubt if ever they left this harbour.
Squalls, calms, the withering wake, frayed ropes and dapper
Refits have thinned back to a dream, dispersed
Like a Spice Island’s breath. Who largely tramped
The oceans, to a rotting hulk they’re cramped –
Nothing to show for this long toil but waste.
It will come soon – one more spring tide to lift
Us off; the lighthouse and the spire shall drift
Vaguely astern, while distant hammering dies on
The ear. Fortunate they who now can read
Their sailing orders as a firm God-speed,
This voyage reaches you beyond the horizon.
A Skull Picked Clean
Blank walls, dead grates, obliterated pages –
Vacancy filled up the house.
Nothing remains of the outward shows,
The inner rages.
Picture collection, trophies, library �
��
All that entranced, endorsed, enslaved –
With gimcrack ornaments have achieved
Nonentity.
How can I even know what it held most precious,
Its meaning lost, its love consumed?
Silence now where the cool brain hummed:
Where fire was, ashes.
How neatly those rough-tongued removal men
Have done the job. This useless key
They left us when they had earned their pay –
A skull, picked clean.
All Souls’ Night
A hairy ghost, sent packing or appeased
By dances, drums, and troughs of gore.
A suave but fleshless ancestor
Honoured with fireworks at the birthday feast.
Safe in a harped and houried paradise:
Pitchforked to some exemplary hell:
Trooping through fields of asphodel:
Returned to nature’s stock in a new guise –
For the cool corpse, impassive in its shroud,
Such goings-on we have conceived.
Born to injustice we believed
That underground or above the parting cloud
Pure justice reigns … Seraphs may bear a wreath
Past the unseeing mourner: he
In euphemism and ceremony
Buries awhile the body of his own death.
* * *
All Souls’ Night. Soon closing time will clear
A space for silence, last cars climb towards Kent
Throbbing like wind-torn snatches of lament.
Où sont des morts les phrases familières?
And where the dead? Like sun-warmed stones they keep
A little while their touch upon the living,
Remind us of their giving and forgiving,
Then, their fingers loosening, they sleep.
All that uneloquent congress of the shade
Speak through our truisms only, or they’re crass
And mutinous like children in disgrace:
In clear or code no signal is relayed.
Who can know death, till he has dared to shave
His own corpse, rubbed his nose in his own noisome
Decay? Oh sweet breath, dancing minds and lissome
Bodies I’ve met with journeying to the grave!
It’s they I want beside me – lovers, friends,
Prospective ghosts; not wind-blown atomies,
Dismantled bones, dissolving memories.
Complete Poems Page 49
