*
‘What is the source of our first suffering?’ the French writer Gaston Bachelard asks and then answers, ‘It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It began in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.’ This quotation I used almost twenty years ago as the epigraph for a pamphlet published in Ireland by Field Day Theatre Company. The title of the pamphlet was ‘An Open Letter’ and it was one of an initial group of three that dealt with the Britification of ‘The Isles’, as Norman Davies calls them. We were looking at the intermingled Irish, English and Scottish inheritances of Ulster, in particular the linguistic inheritances, the other two pamphlets being Seamus Deane’s ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ and Tom Paulin’s ‘A New Look at the Language Question’. Mine was less furious about British impositions than Deane’s, but more disaffected than Paulin’s. It was a verse epistle addressed to Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison in their capacity as editors of the recently published The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, and what I was out to do was to dispute use of the word British as a description of my nationality.
My sense of being Irish was simply a given of my life, something that was with me from the start, something reinforced rather than eroded by the experience of living in a Northern Ireland that insisted that it – and I – was British. Like the rest of the minority, I felt coerced in this regard. Having to take my Jacobite way under the Williamite arches every July was a constant reminder that a settlement had been made, a settlement that was not at all in my favour, and for a long time this definitely had the effect of sharpening a sense of otherness rather than encouraging any notions of through-otherness. Some orientation towards a more tolerant future did occur in the 1960s but all that was long gone. We had escaped from Lord Brookeborough’s sectarian Ulster only to be landed in Margaret Thatcher’s. In the early eighties, we were in the bitter aftermath of dirty protests and hunger strikes, in the middle of the IRA’s campaign, and at that polarized moment, the Morrison and Motion book was published. I had the feeling that if my British audience were not kept apprised of my stand-off with the ‘British’ nomenclature, and indeed if my Unionist readers were not kept reminded of it, I would be guilty of more than evasiveness.
Like all Northern nationalists of my generation, I accumulated silent things within me whenever incidents like the one in the chip shop occurred. And those things accumulated even more problematically in the mid-1960s, when I started to publish poems and began to be included in anthologies with titles like Young Commonwealth Poets and another called Young British Poets. Probably I could have gone on living and hesitating to speak had I gone on living in Northern Ireland, and had the question of British versus Irish loyalties not mutated into the deadly complications of our more or less civil war. There were precedents enough and reasons enough to hold one’s tongue, to shift through the identity gears and be carried along on the conveyor belt of the times and the customary language. And there was still the possibility, even after the violence broke out in 1968, that a more salubrious political climate would evolve in Northern Ireland, a climate which would be helped by compromise and give and take and irony about ethnicity and origins and identity and all that.
Instead, however, things polarized and the sense of possibility atrophied. And in my own life, things changed also. By 1983, my family and I had been resident for eleven years in the Irish republic, although I should emphasize that when we moved, it was not in order to flee the violence but in order that I might take advantage of an offer of a house in Wicklow that was a kind of writer’s retreat; anyhow, there we were, and in order to make a new coherence between where we were living and who and what I was, I had taken out an Irish passport. In fact, when the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry appeared in 1982, I could have said what Hopkins said during his time in Dublin a hundred years earlier, when he described himself as being at ‘a third remove’; I was neither in London nor in Belfast, and spent much of the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I actually composed An Open Letter in the spring of 1983. I remember it more as a moment of solitude than of solidarity. Here, at any rate, are a few stanzas that get to the crux of the naming business
‘Under a common flag,’ said Larkin.
‘Different history,’ said Haughton.
Our own fastidious John Jordan
Raised an eyebrow:
How British were the Ulstermen?
He’d like to know.
Answer: as far as we are part
Of a new commonwealth of art,
Salute with independent heart
And equally
Doff and flourish in your court
Of poesie.
(I’ll stick to I. Forget the we.
As Livy said, it’s pro se quisque,
And Horace was exemplary
At Philippi:
He threw away his shield to be
A naked I).
Still, doubts, you’d think, should not arise
When somebody who publishes
In LRB and TLS,
The Listener –
In other words, whose audience is,
Via Faber,
A British one – is characterized
As British. But don’t be surprised
If I demur, for, be advised,
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.
Custom, Ben Jonson said, is a most sovereign mistress of language, meaning that common usage is what decides the norms and patterns of our ways of speaking. But whatever it is that decides, it is certainly not open letters. If, in the years since it appeared, anthologies covering the same ground as the Motion and Morrison one have included the term Irish or Ireland as well as Britain or British in their titles, that is just another indication that things are moving on. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of the late 1980s which opened up the possibility of new relations between the administrations in London, Dublin and Belfast, the declaration of a cessation of violence by the IRA in 1994, the establishment of a new assembly and the promise of an all-Ireland dimension in the governaunce of Northern Ireland, and then the beginnings of devolution in Britain itself – all these circumstances mean that the coercive element in the British nomenclature has been recognized, and that the ‘equally’ adverb in those lines about doffing and flourishing in the court of poetry has begun to apply in other places as well. Custom, in other words, even in Britain, is bound to acknowledge henceforth an Irish as well as a British dimension of Northern Irish reality – and that is now enough said about that. What I have been describing, after all, is just one further instance of the inherited through-otherness that history is to blame for.
*
We could say, revising Stephen Dedalus, that hegemony was a nightmare from which I was trying to awake, but it would be nearer the mark to say that I was suffering from what might be called the Ledwidge syndrome. It’s one thing to find yourself in a British anthology at the time of an Ulster crisis, but it is something else to find yourself in the British Army at the time of an Irish rebellion. Francis Ledwidge’s at-homeness in the English lyric could not prevent his feeling of out-of-placeness in a British uniform after soldiers wearing that same uniform executed the poet and 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh. Like thousands of other Irish nationalists, Ledwidge had joined up in 1914, at a moment when the Home Rule Bill was on the Statute Book and the British Army, in Ledwidge’s own words, ‘stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilization and I would not have her say that she [Britain] defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.’ At the moment of the Rising, however, it must have seemed to Ledwidge that his courage and his honour had been most cruelly mocked. The Rising began on Easter Monday 24 April, and the previous Thursday Ledwidge, who was at home on sick leave after a devastating retreat march to Salonika, had written to Lord Dunsany: ‘Coming from Southampton on the train, looking on England’s beautiful valleys all white with spring, I thought indeed its
freedom was worth all the blood I’ve seen flow. No wonder England has so many ardent patriots. I would be one of them myself did I not presume to be an Irish patriot.’ A couple of weeks later, while he was still convalescing at Slane, that patriotism was put into great distress and confusion when he heard the news of MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett being sentenced to death in Richmond Barracks, where he had enlisted, and being executed at Arbour Hill. So it is not surprising to find him being court-martialled during this same leave for offensive remarks to a superior officer, drinking more than usual, reporting late for duty, and generally displaying the symptoms of a man under great stress. And another of those Symptoms of stress, of course, was the composition of the poem for which he is best remembered, called simply ‘Thomas MacDonagh’:
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
This poem may at first appear to have little to do with the subject of this lecture: Britain doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight here, but that is only because she, as Ledwidge would have called her, is being repressed. Her idiom, or rather the idiom of English poetry, is being revised in favour of an idiom recommended by the man being elegized. In fact, the poem could equally well have been entitled ‘The Upset Daffodil’ insofar as it shows Ledwidge’s Irish patriotism beginning to reveal itself at a poetic and phonetic level. Given the powerful presence of Wordsworth’s daffodils poem within the acoustic of the English language, the daffodil in this context could be taken as a kind of synecdoche, and the upset within the poet – his disturbed equanimity as a Irishman – is reflected by the subversion of the flower and a reversion to what MacDonagh had called the Irish mode. Thomas MacDonagh’s translation of Cathal Buí MacGiolla Ghunna’s poem ‘An Bunnán Buí’ imitated the assonance and internal rhyme of the original Irish, and Ledwidge is here following MacDonagh’s practice. Take the recurrence of the Ο sounds and the UH sounds in his second stanza, for example – ‘Nor shall he knOW when loud March blOWs/Thro’ slanting snOWs her fanfare shrill/BlOWing to flame the gOlden cUP/ of many an Upset dafFOdil’ – the melody and method of this are clearly under the sway of MacDonagh’s ‘The yellow bittern that never broke OUt/In a drinking bOUt might as well have drUNk./His bOnes are lAIn on the nAked stOne Where he lived alOne like a hermit mONk.’
What I am getting round to saying is that any account of the Irish poet and Britain must get past politics and into poetry itself, and that will involve not only poetry in English, but in Irish, Welsh, Scots and Scots Gaelic, not to mention the work done in what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls ‘nation language’. It is not only a poem’s explicit political concerns and paraphraseable content that need attending to. A précis of the content, for example, takes no account of the literary echoes and allusions which can be fundamental to its poetic energy. In a poem, words, phrases, cadences and images are linked in to systems of affect and signification which elude the précis maker. These under-ear activities, as they might be termed, may well constitute the most important business which the poem is up to and are more a matter of the erotics of language than the politics and polemics of the moment. Which is to say that poetry moves things forward once the poet and the poem get ahead of themselves and find themselves out on their own.
So I want to go on now to a poem by someone who has often been treated more as a cultural witness or as some form of ethnic or anthropological symptom than as a poet per se. The poet is John Hewitt and the poem where he gets out on his own is one he wrote early in the 1970s entitled ‘The King’s Horses’:
After fifty years, nearly, I remember,
living then in a quiet leafy suburb,
waking in the darkness, made aware
of a continuous irregular noise,
and groping to the side window to discover
the shadow-shapes which made that muffled patter
passing across the end of our avenue,
the black trees and streetlights shuttering
a straggle of flowing shadows, endless, of horses.
Gypsies they could have been, or tinkers maybe,
mustering to some hosting of their clans,
or horse-dealers heading their charges to the docks,
timed to miss the day’s traffic and alarms;
a migration the newspapers had not foretold;
some battle’s ragged finish, dream repeated;
the last of an age retreating, withdrawing,
leaving us beggared, bereft
of the proud nodding muzzles, the nervous bodies:
gone from us the dark men with their ancient skills
of saddle and stirrup, or bridle and breeding.
It was an end, I was sure, but an end of what
I never could tell. It was never reported;
but their echoing hooves persisted. Years after,
in a London hotel in the grey dawn
a serious man concerned with certain duties,
I heard again the metal clatter of hooves staccato
and hurriedly rose to catch a glimpse of my horses,
but the pace and beat were utterly different:
I saw by the men astride these were the King’s horses
going about the King’s business, never mine.
As a title, ‘The King’s Horses’ is already full of echo. On the one hand, it connects up with the pageantry and military display of royal parades, of ‘Rule Britannia’ and the Light Brigade. But somewhere in the background there is also the rollick and frolic of ‘Humpty Dumpty’. Hewitt may not have been wanting to call up that particular association, but it is there, as they say, ‘in the language’: ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’ So it might be possible to construct a tendentious argument claiming that Hewitt perceives himself as the shattered Humpty Dumpty in that he is a man divided against himself, a person with all the deep affiliations to British traditions that come with his Ulster planter background, and yet equally a man with a deep desire for regional separateness; one whose sense of social justice wants the minority to receive a better deal but whose philosophic and political disposition would put him out of sympathy with their Catholic faith and long-term nationalist aspirations. And yet to read all that into the title would be to attribute to Hewitt a kind of literary and ideological deliberateness which is absent from this poem. In fact, one reason why I chose this particular poem of Hewitt’s for discussion is that for once Hewitt does not seem to know from the start where exactly he is going. The lines are distinguished by a drowsy sleepwalking movement, and it is this not quite defined, slightly apparitional quality that makes the whole thing so persuasive and attractive. ‘The King’s Horses’ gives credence to the poet’s claim, made in an autobiographical essay in 1972, that ‘My cast of mind is such that I am moved by intuitions, intimations, imaginative realizations, epiphanies …’
‘The King’s Horses’ is basically an epiphany, and an epiphany might be defined as a showing forth in an uncanny light of some reality or truth hitherto insufficiently perceived. In Hewitt’s poem, a memory transports the figure at the window into a state of unusual awareness during which the last-ditch nature of his solitude and individuality as a human being becomes fleetingly present to him. So, although the poem certainly arises out of Hewitt’s complicated feelings as a left-wing Irishman of Planter stock, living in a place that was once a colony and is now a region of Britain, I believe it would be crude to interpret it in a restricted political way, seeing the speaker’s rep
udiation of the King’s horses as an expression of anti-monarchical feeling, but of nothing much else:
I saw by the men astride these were the King’s horses
going about the King’s business, never mine.
There is, admittedly, something of Hewitt’s egalitarianism and Presbyterianism present there, but to my ear what is even more strongly audible is a sense of his calling as a poet.
Even so, ‘The King’s Horses’ is about something more than the poet’s recognition of his solitude and individuality: it surely relates to a crisis in the outside world, which in turn promoted this crisis within the self. A specific political reading is possible even if it is not the whole story. We know, for example, from the notes in Frank Ormsby’s edition of The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Blackstaff Press, 1991, p. 604) that the poem was written in April 1973, which was a time of great constitutional crisis in Northern Ireland. Because of the political upheavals caused first by nonviolent protest and then by a campaign of bombing and shooting, the old order had come to an end. The British government had stepped in to suspend the operations of the parliament at Stormont, the B-Special Constabulary, an arm of the security forces deeply resented by the nationalist minority, had also been suspended and a new power-sharing assembly was being envisaged. Hewitt did not need to be a believer in Unionist supremacy to be deeply affected by all this. If the nationalist minority had a sense of an ending as well as a new sense of opportunity, it was inevitable that an Irishman of Planter stock, however left-wing his sympathies, would be affected at the deepest level by this crack in the institutional and constitutional integrity of his region. So, as I say, there is a sound basis for a specific historical and political interpretation of lines like the following: ‘It was end, I was sure, but an end of what/ I never could tell’, and perhaps even more so of the lines about ‘some battle’s ragged finish, dream-repeated: the last of an age retreating, withdrawing,/ leaving us beggared, bereft’.
Finders Keepers Page 43
