Of course, I am aware that I am overdoing it a bit here, but I believe that I am still not misrepresenting the poetic truth of the matter, which has precisely to do with the raising of common speech to the power of art. ‘Och’ strikes a note of grief and wisdom which the poem as a whole elaborates and orchestrates. It is what Nadezhda Mandelstam called ‘the nugget of harmony’ and the guarantee of Burns’s genius as a poet of the Scots and English tongues, for ‘och’, like ‘wee’, also belongs north of that Berwick/ Bundoran line where the language of Shakespeare and the Bible meets the language of Dunbar and the ballads and where new poetic combinations and new departures are still going on.
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The language missing in those areas nowadays is, of course, Gaelic, whether of the Scots or Irish variety, yet I have always taken it to be a promising fact that the expression ‘och’ lies every bit as deep in the Irish larynx as in the Ulster Scots. Twenty-five years ago, for example, when I was trying to coax a few lyric shoots out of the political compost heap of Northern Ireland, I wrote a poem called ‘Broagh’ which could just as well have been entitled ‘Och’. Its immediate subject was my recollection of an outlying part of our farm in the townland of Broagh on the banks of the River Moyola in Co. Derry, but its purpose was to bring the three languages I’ve just mentioned – Irish, Elizabethan English and Ulster Scots – into some kind of creative intercourse and alignment and to intimate thereby the possibility of some new intercourse and alignment among the cultural and political heritages which these three languages represent in Northern Ireland.
I very much wanted to affirm the rights of the Irish language to be recognized as part of that Ulster mix, to correct the official, east-of-Bann emphasis on the province’s ur-languages as Ulster Scots and Elizabethan English. None of this appeared, however, in the story the poem told: instead, it was meant to be implicit in the way it sounded, in the vocabulary and voicing of the lines, in the way the poem tapped into the shorthand and coding that are constantly operating beneath the first level of Ulster speech. Ultimately, it all came down to the ability to say Broagh, to pronounce that last gh as it is pronounced in the place itself. The poem, in other words, was just one tiny move in that big campaign of our times which aims to take cultural authority back to the local ground, to reverse the colonising process by making the underprivileged speech the normative standard. Whitehall ministers would have called the place Broa, but they would have been wrong. Their pronunciation, for once, would have been no sign of entitlement; on the contrary, it would have revealed a certain incapacity. But everyone native to Northern Ireland, Protestant or Catholic, Planter or Gael, whatever their separate myths of linguistic exile from Irish or Ulster Scots – every one of them could say Broagh, every one was fitted to dwell in at least phonetic amity with the other. I wanted to suggest, therefore, that the foundations of a desirable common language were to be sought at this first level of utterance.
I think, in other words, that we can prefigure a future by reimagining our pasts. In poetry, however, this prefiguring is venturesome and suggestive, more like a melodic promise than a social programme. It is not like the blueprint for a better world which might spring from the mind of a social engineer. Rather, it arises from the cravings of the spirit as expressed in language, in all of those patiences and impatiences which language embodies. I wish, therefore, that in those days when I was studying The Ambleside Book of Verse in my English class, somebody had told me to look at another poem which we would eventually meet in our Irish class and to compare it with Burns’s poem to the evicted mouse. This other poem was ‘An Bunnán Buí’ by the Irish language poet, Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, a native of Ulster who followed, according to his most recent editors, ‘the career of rake poet’, who died three years before Burns was born and whose work is ‘marked by a rare humanity’ and a ‘finely-judged blend of pathos and humour’.
Mac Giolla Ghunna was a significant presence to me in my midteens when I was beginning to be able to read and feel my way into poetry in the Irish language. Significant because he was a northern voice and part of a group of Ulster poets whose work, like Burns’s, was sustained by a long and learned literary tradition; but this once privileged tradition subsisted in the poets’ time as part of a culture that was oral, rural and more and more dislodged from its previous high cultural authority. Mac Giolla Ghunna and his older brothers in the art – Seamus Dall Mac Cuarta and Art Mac Cumhaigh, for example – still retained something of the techne and the status of bardic poets, but the Gaelic order which once supported the bardic schools had been shattered over the seventeenth century, beginning with Elizabeth’s decisive campaign against Hugh O’Neill, continuing with the Cromwellian depredations and culminating in the Williamite defeat of the Stuart cause at Derry, Aughrim and the Boyne. One of the consequences of these defeats was loss of patronage by the poets, but Brodsky’s law applied to them as well, in that their biographies were also present in the way they sounded. Their words and intonations belonged to an Ulster Irish in which I felt completely at home, since it was the Ulster version of the language that had been taught in Derry. Consequently, when I read Mac Cuarta’s ‘Failte do’n Ean’ or Mac Cumhaigh’s ‘Ur Chill Ui Chreagain’ or Mac Giolla Ghunna’s ‘An Bunnán Buí’, I experienced something of that domestic familiarity I had known when I first read ‘To a Mouse’. In fact, what I experienced in the work of these northern Gaels was what John Hewitt reported experiencing in the work of ‘The Rhyming Weavers’, those local bards of the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries who wrote in the Ulster Scots vernacular: ‘some feeling that, for better or worse, they were my own people …’, a feeling issuing from a susceptibility ‘in stanza, couplet or turn of phrase, [to] some sense of the humanity that was in them’.
Like everything else in Ulster, the reading of poetry can quickly devolve into an aspect of identity politics, but it would be far more rewarding to read ‘An Bunnán Buí’ alongside ‘To a Mouse’ as a purely literary exercise. In the Irish poem, the rake poet is in mourning because he has just discovered the carcass of a bird frozen into the ice of a winter lake, and this awakens a mood of foreboding, a fear that his addiction to drink will be the end of him. The bird is a mighty one, a yellow bittern, and the tragedy and omen of its death come home to the poet all the more forcefully because its very name – bunnán buí, yellow bittern – echoes his own name, Cathal Buí – Yellow or Fair-haired Cahal or Charles. As in the Burns poem, there is an increasing convergence, as the stanzas proceed, between the tender and the tragic aspects of the situation, a sense of fatal link between the poet exposed to poverty and danger and the creature foraging for dear life until the day of its death; just as there is also the same huge sense of proportion, a cosmic perspective within which the man and the mouse or the man and the bird end up as big or as small as each other by the conclusion of the poem. The third and fourth stanzas go like this:
I am saddened, bittern, and broken-hearted
To find you in scrags in the rushy tufts,
And the big rats scampering down the ratpaths
To wake your carcass and have their fun.
If you had got word to me in time, bird,
That you were in trouble and craved a sup,
I’d have struck the fetters off those loch waters
And have wet your thrapple with the blow I struck.
Your common birds do not concern me,
The blackbird, say, or the thrush or crane,
But the yellow bittern, my heartsome namesake
With my looks and locks, he’s the one I mourn.
Constantly he was drinking, drinking,
And by all accounts I am just the same,
But every drop I get I’ll down it
For fear I might get my death from drouth.
(translation by Seamus Heaney)
And here are those stanzas in the original:
A bhonnáin óig, is é mo mhíle brón
thú bheith romham i mease na dto
m,
is na lucha móra ag triall chun do thorraimh
ag déanamh spóirt is pléisiúr ann;
dá gcuirfeá scéala in am fá mo déinse
go raibh tú i ngheibheann nó i mbroid fá dheoch,
do bhrisfinn béim ar an loch sin Vesey
a fhliuchfadh do bhéal is do chorp isteach.
Ni hé bhur n-éanlaith atá mise ag éagnach,
an lon, an smaolach, ná an chorr ghlas –
ach mo bhonnán buí lán den chroí,
is gur cosúil liom féin é ina ghné is a dhath;
bhíodh sé choíche ag síoról na dí,
agus deir na daoine go mbím mar sin seal,
is níl deor dá bhfaighead nach ligfead síos
ar eagla go bhfaighinnse bás den tart.
Needless to say, it’s another source of satisfaction to me that och reappears at the phonetic centre of this poem in the word loch and the word deoch – which happens to mean ‘drink’ in Irish. It functions like a signal broadcast forward into Broaghville, and points towards a future that is implicit in the mutually pronounceable elements of the speech of Planter and Gael. Even if we grant the deeply binary nature of Ulster thinking about language and culture, we can still try to establish a plane of regard from which to inspect the recalcitrant elements of the situation and reposition ourselves in relation to them. And that plane, I believe, can be reliably projected from poems and poetry. I wish, as I said earlier, that somebody had asked me years ago, ‘Have you ever noticed how the note deepens in those two poems by Burns and Mac Giolla Ghunna? How poems that might have been merely affecting get closer to something tragic? How their given note arrives out of the literary tradition but ends up in the place that Ted Hughes calls the place of “ultimate suffering and decision in us”?’ Moreover, I wish all this not because I believe the reading of the two poems would have helped me into some better civic posture, some higher commitment to the notion of diversity, for example; instead, I wish it because, to quote Joseph Brodsky once more, good poetry is a tonic and defence against that which is the final enemy, namely ‘the vulgarity of the human heart’.
None of us wants fake consolation in the face of real problems. None of us wants Disney when what we need is Dante. But in discovering a similar sense of vulnerability and sympathy in Burns and Mac Giolla Ghunna, and in recognizing that their art speech not only inhabits a similar literary and linguistic middle state but is also capable of prospecting the deeper levels of their poetic being, 1 believe one is doing more than merely introducing a feel-good factor, some corollary of the old Ulster saw that there are faults on both sides. Poetry operates more opulently than that. The terms of its understanding are not dictated by the circumstances that pertain but are commensurate with the poet’s intellectual and imaginative wavelength. Those rats in the Irish poem, for example, for all of their anthropomorphic jollity, are every bit as far from Disneyland as Burns’s mouse. I feel, indeed, that they could have escaped from Villon or that they might return from the bittern’s wake to join up with the ‘rattons’ Burns hears squeaking under the rigging of the thatch in his poem ‘The Vision’. They’re a bit macabre and a bit macaronic, archetypal and vernacular all at once, and as such they (and the poem which they inhabit) belong equally to the parish and the universe.
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This phrase, ‘the parish and the universe’, is the title of an essay by Patrick Kavanagh. In it, Kavanagh is concerned with the way the local can be winnowed by the boundless and set free within it, the way poetry can create conditions where ‘the word for family/ is also the word for departure’. And it is this very transformation which concerns me in this essay. I want to do more than state the obvious truth that Burns’s poetry is particularly congenial to natives of Ulster, whatever their allegiance, not only because of a common language, but also because of a shared feeling of embattledness. Obviously, poetry is a domestic art and finds its most telling reach within the acoustic of its first language and language-group. But I want to affirm a supplementary truth, namely that poems and poets do not become available to their audience on the simple basis of ethnic or linguistic kinship. Burns is a world poet because of his genius, not because of his Scottishness. There is nothing determined about the reach of poetry, either for the writer or the reader of it: it is, as Keats said, a matter of surprise by fine excess, what Robert Frost calls in ‘Birches’ a going above the brim, a getting away from earth awhile in order to come back and begin over.
What produces the art is not the medium, but what is made of it. For example, I am predisposed to like Burns’s ‘The Twa Dogs’ because of its unfoolable, realistic sense on the world, its uncorny, wily humour and its unmitigated sense of justice, but I could say that about Burns’s letters as well; what distinguishes it as a poem is the way it combines reliable tone and technical virtuosity – the pitch of the voice and the musical trueness of it. It is because of a special mixture of intimacy and documentary accuracy in the art speech of the poem that none of the humour is at the expense of the dogs and none of the virtuosity is knowing. And the same is true of the two poems about Poor Mailie, the author’s ‘pet yowe’ that strangled herself at the end of the rope. There is a beautifully limpid quality about the dying words which she wishes to be carried to her master and relayed by him to her family, a quality hard to name, less dewy-eyed than pathos, more sympathetic than irony:
My poor toop-lamb, my son an’ heir,
O, bid him breed him up wi’ care!
An’ if he live to be a beast,
To pit some havins in his breast!
An’ warn him, what I winna name,
To stay content wi’ yowes at hame;
An’ no to rin an’ wear his cloots,
Like ither menseless, graceless brutes.
An’ niest my yowie, silly thing,
Gude keep thee frae a tether string!
O, may thou ne’er forgather up,
Wi’ onie blastet, moorlan toop;
But ay keep mind to moop an’ mell,
Wi sheep o’ credit like thysel!
Even Burns’s humorous rhyming is distinguished by a compensatory emotional fidelity to the subjects which are being made fun of. If you compare what he does with what Byron or Auden do in a similar vein, you find that the pair of them tend to be show-offs, and the more deadpan and one-up their performance is, the better. Burns, on the other hand, retains a certain protecriveness towards those very things which bring out the verbal scamp in him. In ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, for example, the poise of the rhymes in the following famous lines is altogether characteristic:
Nae man can tether time or tide;
The hour approaches Tarn maun ride;
That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
And sic a night he takes the road in,
As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in.
There is something as bountiful about the feeling here as there is about the sense of supply. The words are as kind to Tam as they are kinned to one another. That run of feminine rhymes is carried away with itself, as they would say in Ulster, and cannot quite suppress its relish of its own sportiveness; but neither can it forget the suppressed panic in Tam o’ Shanter’s breast, and it is this double susceptibility in the writing that makes it so beguiling.
Being able to get carried away is, of course, a crucial gift when it comes to poetry. ‘What reasonable man’, Czesław Miłasz asks in his poem ‘Ars Poetica?’, would like to be a city of demons,/ who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,/ and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,/ work at changing his destiny for their convenience?’ And the answer expected here, but not necessarily desired, is Plato’s answer: no reasonable man or woman would want to be susceptible to that kind of visitation. Control freak a poet cannot afford to be, but must, on the contrary, be prepared to go with the flow. And it is out of the submerged quarrel between the reasonable man in Burns and the c
ity of demons which he contained that his best poems arrive. A great number of Burns’s contemporaries thought of those demons as sexual, emissaries from caverns ‘grim an’ sootie’, sent by ‘Auld Hornie … Nick, or Clootie’, but nowadays we have added to their horde the genuises of the different languages that were available to him. Burns, we gratefully realize, opened his door to a great variety of linguistic callers. He gladly let his lips and hands be stolen at one moment by the language of Beattie and Thomson and at the next by the voices of his neighbours. In fact, his subjectivity only became totally available in situations which were performative or, if you prefer Miłosz’s way of thinking, when he was possessed by a spirit. ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is the masterpiece of such possession and performance, but his gift for it is everywhere. The first line or two of each epistle, for example, open the door to different visitors, each one corresponding under the name of Burns but each displaying different potentialities in the pitch and rhythm of his utterance. Who, after all, could shut the door on the agility and genuine accommodation in the voice that addresses Doctor Blacklock?
Wow, but your letter made me vauntie!
And are ye hale, and weel, and cantie?
Finders Keepers Page 41
