This poem is not in itself as deeply imagined as others I could quote, but it does voice the Mahon approach in quite explicit terms. The imagined hiss and boil of the sun in the sea does not involve a denial of the cosmological facts of the matter; rather, it restores us to a pristine encounter with the cosmos. In a similar way, Mahon’s displaced angle of vision is not a Nelson-like ploy to avoid seeing what he prefers not to see but a way of focusing afresh. For all his imaginative ubiquity, his poems enforce the truth he settles upon in the last stanza of a poem called, with stunning plainness, ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’:
But we are in one place and one place only,
One of the milestones of earth-residence
Unique in each particular, the thinly
Peopled hinterland serenely tense –
Not in the hope of a resplendent future
But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.
Ε. Μ. Cioran has written: ‘Some peoples propose themselves as divine problems: can we believe in ourselves?’ ‘Certainly not,’ Paul Muldoon answers, in the Irish context. But it is a negative delivered with a smile which suggests otherwise. In the world of Muldoon’s poetry, the reader finds himself in the middle of that old story where the protagonist is faced with two informants, one who always tells the truth and one who always tells lies. The problem then is to formulate the question which will elicit an answer from either one that can be reliably decoded. To put it another way, Muldoon’s poems do not offer us answers but keep us alive in the middle of the question. And the very question of whether or not this imaginative habit is to be related to his native place and its double-life is posed, obliquely of course, in his short and typically enigmatic poem called ‘Blemish’:
Were it indeed an accident of birth
That she looks on the gentle earth
And the seemingly gentle sky
Through one brown, and one blue eye.
Typically, the mood of this is neither indicative nor interrogative, but conditional. The understood complete sentence goes: ‘It would be a blemish, were it indeed … etc.’ but we cannot be sure that it is an accident of birth and hence a hereditary blemish. It might also be a gift of vision, a mark of divine favour, an astonishing boon of being able to see through things as they seem, like the seemingly gentle sky, to things as they are, whatever they are. The poem suggests, indirectly, that the imaginative gifts of Northern Irish writers should not be linked too sociologically to the blemished life of their country. It wanders in and out of the mind like an unremarked soothsayer who drops a remark that flowers with possibility after he has drifted off. And we are still left wondering when we find a character in Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude with just the blemish that Muldoon describes here: so is this a literary allusion or an archetypal image? All three, Muldoon might well answer from behind the screen of his language.
Language is Muldoon’s resolving element, his quick-change gear, his vehicle for get-away. James Joyce, who could invest the very names of punctuation marks with historical riddles when he addressed his people as ‘Laities and gentes, full-stoppers and semi colonials’, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake who melted time and place into a plasm of rhythms and word-roots, puns and tunes, a slide-show of Freudian slips for the Jungian typesetter, this Joyce would recognize the verbal opportunism of Muldoon as a form of native kenning, a northern doubling, a kind of daedal fiddling to keep the home fires burning. For example, the protagonist of his long poem, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, is a character called Gallogly. Gallogly’s name is related to a previous Muldoon character called Golightly, and also to the Gallowglass warriors of Gaelic Ulster and to the Sioux braves of the Oglala tribe; and he appears in a tale as odd as any one of the Ingoldsby legends. By such verbal means Muldoon makes the stuff of Ulster news headlines – explosions, killings, American aid for the IRA, covert operations of all kinds – the stuff that dreams are made on. All these things which are so much taken for granted that they tend to be thrust to the back of the mind ‘in real life’ are taken over by Muldoon as the elements of a violent and resourceful fantasy; and by this very relegation to ‘fiction’ they achieve once again a deadly and unnerving prominence. The old alibis of heritage, tradition, folklore, Planter and Gael, and a whole literature and discourse posited on these distinctions (including poems by his contemporaries) are rifled for tropes and allusions until, within the fiction of the poem, they themselves are imputed with fictional status. By masquerading as a story that is as innocent of high seriousness as an Irish joke, Muldoon’s ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ effects what the apostle of high seriousness sought from the serious artist, a criticism of life.
I realize that I am affirming rather than demonstrating all this, but the poem in question is too long to take up in any detail. Indeed, Muldoon’s poetry works so much at a symbolic level, by means of parallels, implications, sleights of word, hints and hedgings, that even the shortest lyric may call forth pages of elucidation, or perhaps one should say collusion, elucidation being a word that would imply a meaning too simply and righteously produced from the hat of a poem that might just produce another meaning from up its sleeve.
The poet as conjuror, then, a dab hand at turning tables and spinning yarns, not above innuendo and not without punitive designs upon his audience. Yet the acerbity of Muldoon’s intelligence is constantly sweetened by humour and by the natural rhythmic drift of his writing, and nowhere more so than in the self-cancelling narrative of ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’, a poem that addresses itself to the relations between ‘life’ and ‘art’ as experienced by a poet-protagonist during a certain ‘famous revolution’ which occurs, to some extent, in ‘a back yard’. The poet-narrator is accused by a ‘celebrated pamphleteer’:
‘Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There’s more to living in this country
Than stars, horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you’d guess it from your poems.
Do you never listen to the news?’
The poet’s response to all this arises from a conviction not unlike Patrick Kavanagh’s conviction that for a writer there is nothing as doomed as the important thing, no subject as negligible as the subject with the news-headline status. His narrative is designed to make the words ‘famous’ and ‘celebrated’ ring hollow, yet the narrative itself (‘All made up as I went along’) turns out to be as unreliable as the adjectives:
My celebrated pamphleteer!
Of course, I gave it all away
With those preposterous titles.
The Bloody Rose? The Dream and the Drums?
The three-day-wonder of the flowering plum!
Or was I desperately wishing
To have been their other co-author,
Or, at least, to own a first edition
Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles?
The flicker of self-doubt in these last four lines gives back to the pamphleteer some of the credence which the whole poem takes away from him, and Muldoon very justly ends with a note of puzzlement, though not without a strong implicit endorsement of the idea that the proper concern of art is with the naming of things rather than with the espousal of causes:
What should I say to this callow youth
Who learned to write last winter –
One of those correspondence courses –
And who’s coming to lunch to-day?
He’ll be rambling on, no doubt,
About pigs and trees, stars and horses.
If, in the Muldoon world, we are faced with the liar and truthteller, searching for the right question, in the poetry of Michael Longley, we are with lovers in the dark during a power-failure. It is one of the urban myths that there is a recognizable rise in the birthrate after such a breakdown of services. The couples turn from home life to love life, the delights of touch becoming a natural compensa
tion for the loss of the usual distractions. We recognize the pattern of behaviour as completely credible, the most obvious and delicious in the circumstances.
It is in the light of this parable of the dark that Longley’s characteristic erotic music is to be heard. Longley’s poetry is often the poetry of direct amorous address, its dramatic voice the voice of indolent and occasionally deliquescent reverie, its subject the whole matter of sexual daydream. But even when the poem is ostensibly about landscape or seascape, about flora and fauna, mythological figures or musical instruments, the intonation of the verse is seductive, its melody allaying and cajoling, its typical mood one of tender insinuation and possibility.
Longley’s poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover’s finger wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae. The names for the parts of the body reappear constantly and even when it is not a body but a flower or a weed that is being touched upon, the contact between the world and the language is lipbrushing or stealthily caressing. As if the back of a hand that has gone to the floor to lift a napkin strayed against the warm limb of a neighbour. Here, almost at random, is a short sequence called ‘Botany’:
Duckweed
Afloat on their own reflection, these leaves,
With roots that reach only part of the way,
Will fall asleep at the end of summer,
Draw in their skirts and sink to the bottom.
Foxglove
Though the corolla dangles upside down,
Nothing ever falls out, neither nectar
Nor loosening pollen grains: a thimble,
Stall for the little finger and the bee.
Dock
Its green flowers attract only the wind
But a red vein may irrigate the leaf
And blossom into blush or birthmark
Or a remedy for the nettle’s sting.
Orchid
The tuber absorbs summer and winter,
Its own ugly shape, twisted arms and legs,
A recollection of the heart, one artery
Sprouting upwards to support a flower.
These verses are not Longley at his most effulgent, but for that very reason I test my contention against them and find it holds true. The direct sexual analogies are there in drawn skirts, blushes and birthmarks, but the associations in corollas dangling, arteries sprouting upwards to support a flower and little fingers in thimbles and fingerstalls make us feel like lowering our eyes in the presence of these specimens rather than spy upon their little arousals. Yet it is not simply the imagery and the submerged tissue of association that constitute the eroticism of the lines: it is the intent, close-up numbering and savouring of each tiny identifying mark, the cherishing and lingering name laid upon the thing itself.
All this is even more richly evident when we turn to Longley’s more fully orchestrated writings; his recent book, The Echo Gate, is full of opulent, classical love poems, one of the best of which is ‘The Linen Industry’. By now it is superfluous for me to spell out the connections between the private flax and linen of this poem and the public flax and linen which had been the basis of Belfast’s industrial power and its intransigent male-fisted politics, both of which refused the feminine element symbolized by the land of Ireland itself. Again, it is superfluous to insist that Longley has in mind no political allegory of the sort I am sketching, but a reading of the poem is nevertheless possible which sees it as the internalization and affirmation of those feminine powers repressed by man’s, and in particular the Ulsterman’s, adaptation to conditions in the industrial factory world:
Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen
And laying our handfuls in the peaty water
To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks
That recall the skirts of an invisible dancer,
We become a part of the linen industry
And follow its processes to the grubby town
Where fields are compacted into window-boxes
And there is little room among the big machines.
But even in our attic under the skylight
We make love on a bleach green, the whole meadow
Draped with material turning white in the sun
As though snow reluctant to melt were our attire.
What’s passion but a battering of stubborn stalks,
Then a gentle combing out of fibres like hair
And a weaving of these into christening robes,
Into garments for a marriage or funeral?
Since it’s like a bereavement once the labour’s done
To find ourselves last workers in a dying trade,
Let flax be our matchmaker, our undertaker,
The provider of sheets for whatever the bed –
And be shy of your breasts in the presence of death,
Say that you look more beautiful in linen
Wearing white petticoats, the bow on your bodice
A butterfly attending the embroidered flowers.
That sense of history viewed from a great distance which we found in Mahon is in this poem too; and that rendering of the world down to a precipitate of language, typical of Muldoon, is also at work here, but more candidly, for Longley is more trusting of the first innocent blush of the word itself, more susceptible to its purely phonetic body. Here Edward Thomas’s English naming poems rather than Joyce’s riddling Irish prose are the sponsoring presence from the literary tradition, a sponsorship with just as much political significance as we want to assign it.
To go back to the terms with which I began this lecture and revise them slightly, we might say that Longley’s poems are symbolic dissolutions. Like Faustus in his last hour wishing to be dispersed into the smallest creatures and phenomena in the face of the terror of death, Longley’s imagination runs to hide in the multiple details of the natural world. Rapture is imaged by him as the escape of a flock of pigeons from their basket, and the old Elizabethan usage of death as a word for sexual climax comes into play when we find Longley eroticizing even the dissolution of the body after death, in poems like ‘Obsequies’ and ‘Oliver Plunkett’.
I want to end this consideration of the way the energies in Northern Ireland have been transposed or displaced into poetry by looking at Longley’s poem ‘Self-heal’, from a sequence called ‘Mayo Monologues’. Mayo is, of course, in the west, not the north of Ireland, and Longley did not set out to write a poem ‘relevant’ to the Troubles – which is all to the good. ‘Self-heal’ is the name of a flower and naming it appeases the character in the monologue, a woman who was sexually molested by a mongoloid neighbour, somebody stunted in body and spirit, whose reach out towards beauty and fulfilment brought the full brutal weight of his community’s prejudices down upon him; and that violence bred a new violence within himself.
I wanted to teach him the names of flowers,
Self-heal and centaury; on the long acre
Where cattle never graze, bog asphodel.
Could I love someone so gone in the head
And, as they say, was I leading him on?
He’d slept in the cot until he was twelve
Because of his babyish ways, I suppose,
Or the lack of a bed: hadn’t his father
Gambled away all but rushy pasture?
His skull seemed to be hammered like a wedge
Into his shoulders, and his back was hunched,
Which gave him an almost scholarly air.
But he couldn’t remember the things I taught:
Each name would hover above its flower
Like a butterfly unable to alight.
That day I pulled a cuckoo-pint apart
To release the giddy insects from their cell.
Gently he slipped his hand between my thighs.
I wasn’t frightened; and still I don’t know why,
But I ran from him in tears to tell them.
I heard how every day for one whole week
&n
bsp; He was flogged with a blackthorn, then tethered
In the hayfield. I might have been the cow
Whose tail he would later dock with shears,
And he the ram tangled in barbed wire
That he stoned to death when they set him free.
As the voice of the woman in this poem recounts her part in the violence for which she is innocently responsible, she begins to gain some detachment from her own suffering and to comprehend the role she played in the larger story. She can see that she was implicated, if unwittingly, in the savage turn of events and does not seek to excuse herself. Her learning process might therefore be analogous to the action of the learning process forced upon poets by events in Northern Ireland. Although in no way personally responsible for the violence that occurred, they comprehend its causes and effects and have been inclined to make their poetry a process of self-healing, neither deliberately provocative nor culpably detached.
Pete Laver Memorial Lecture, Grasmere, August 1984
The Placeless Heaven:
Another Look at Kavanagh
In 1939, the year that Patrick Kavanagh arrived in Dublin, an aunt of mine planted a chestnut in a jam jar. When it began to sprout she broke the jar, made a hole and transplanted the thing under a hedge in front of the house. Over the years, the seedling shot up into a young tree that rose taller and taller above the boxwood hedge. And over the years I came to identify my own life with the life of the chestnut tree.
This was because everybody remembered and constantly repeated the fact that it had been planted the year I was born; also because I was something of a favourite with that particular aunt, so her affection came to be symbolized in the tree; and also perhaps because the chestnut was the one significant thing that grew as I grew. The rest of the trees and hedges round the house were all mature and appeared therefore like given features of the world: the chestnut tree, on the other hand, was young and was watched in much the same way as the other children and myself were watched and commented upon – fondly, frankly and unrelentingly.
Finders Keepers Page 15
