The Columbia History of British Poetry (164 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

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Page 634


I must compose myself in the nerve-centre Of the metropolis and not fidget Although sometimes at night, when the city Has gone to sleep, I keep in touch with it Listening to the warm red water Racing in the sewers of my mother's body Or the moths, soft as eyelids, or the rain Wiping its wet wings on the window-pane.

Here alliteration and assonance are not primarily geared to sensuous meditation. They accentuate the beat (which in this case suggests the rhythms of life itself) and punctuate a declarative, dramatic momentum. The six-line stanza of Michael Longley's "Freeze-Up" hovers between mimesis and declaration. Double rhymes and internal assonances prolong the line, while shifting sentence lengths also help to construct the relations between flux and stasis on which the poem pivots:


The freeze-up annexes the sea even, Putting out over the waves its platform. Let skies fall, the fox's belly cave in This catastrophic shortlived reform Directs to our homes the birds of heaven. They come on farfetched winds to keep us warm.

Critics who disparage the "well-made poem" forget that its compression, its semantic layersthe interplay between rhythm, syntax, and soundset up the conditions for metaphorical or symbolic intensity. In "An Unborn Child" language makes the vital connections between the womb and the worldthe pun on "nerve-centre," the interchange between moths, eyelids, and rain. In "Personal Helicon" the fact that words are also objects of sensory relish helps to release the Jungian echoes that become the poem's subject: ''I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing." The drama of "Freeze-Up" is partly a drama of diction. Longley sets Latin or Greek etymologies or compound adjectives alongside "the fox's belly' in a way that stresses the massing of impersonal forces against the animate and homely.

It is no accident that these poems are partly about form itself, which figures as a container for the unconscious, an organic microcosm, and a problematic "Freeze-Up" of flux: "The bittern whom this different weather / Cupboarded in ice like a specimen." All three poets place art and the artist firmly in the thematic foreground. In
Night Crossing

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Mahon's generally dark vision favors doomed, self-destructive artists"Dowson and Company," Marilyn Monroe, De Quinceyscapegoats for the bourgeois condition. Like Edwin Muir, Mahon perceives Calvinism (which had similar effects in Protestant Ulster) as the enemy of art. But he negotiates this blockage by endowing the artist with an equally extreme sense of mission. "Van Gogh among the Miners" unites the evangelical and the aesthetic: "Setting fierce fire to the eyes / Of sun-flowers and fishing boats.''

Death of a Naturalist
and Heaney's second volume,
Door into the Dark
(1969), celebrate the blacksmith "beating real iron out" and the thatcher's "Midas touch." Longley's heroes and heroines tend to be virtuosi, perfectionists (Fats Waller, Emily Dickinson) who yet must risk chaos and suffer loss of control. Dr. Johnson on the Hebrides "construes himself again." "To Bix Beiderbecke" salutes "The havoc there, and the manoeuvrings!"

Artistic maneuvrings were soon put to the test by political havoc and the dogs of war. A "local row" turned deadly serious. In his poem "Rage for Order" (an ironical allusion to Wallace Stevens's "Idea of Order at Key West") Mahon represents the poet as marginalized by history and poetry as reduced to "An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea." Heaney's
Wintering Out
(1972), Mahon's
Lives
(1972), and Longley's
An Exploded View
(1973) register the "stereophonic nightmare" that began with Unionist repression of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. This led to the arrival of the British army, the campaigns by the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries, direct rule from London, and many deaths. The poets responded according to their differing backgrounds and their different aesthetics.

Frank Ormsby's anthology
The Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles
(1992) proves that there is no single model for the "troubles" poem. Heaney in
Wintering Out
plumbs a more collective unconscious, bringing to light unarticulated aspects of Northern Catholic experience by (as he puts it) "politicizing the terrain" of his earlier poetry. As Heaney's parochial helicon discloses its territorial imperatives, language and place-names turn out to be marked and fissured by history. For example, "A New Song" opposes the Gaelic names Derrygarve and Moyola to the planter names Castledawson and Upperlands. However, perhaps revising the "native mode" adumbrated in John Hewitt's "Once Alien Here," Heaney offers poetry as the ground where languages might meet: "our river tongues must rise . . . /

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To flood, with vowelling embrace, / Demesnes staked out in consonants."

Yet ambiguities ("Problems and cleavages") are not entirely resolved by this conceititself a political allegory. Heaney also seeks "befitting emblems of adversity" (a phrase of Yeats's) through the mythopoeic, iconic, and ritualistic procedures of his collection
North
(1975).
North
is founded on the haunting images in P. V. Glob's
Bog People
, which earlier inspired Heaney's fine poem ''The Tollund Man."

Mahon and Longley also look to their hinterlandswith more dismay. Mahon's poetry continues its critique of the repressions in Protestant culture that generate violence rather than art: "this is your / country, close one eye and be king" ("Ecclesiastes"). "Courtyards in Delft," from
The Hunt by Night
(1982), uses de Hooch's genre paintings to probe what the Protestant housework ethic omits (and thereby permits): "We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin." Yet this culture secretes "A strange child with a taste for verse / While my hard-nosed companions dream of war."

Mahon's poetry transposes the Protestant housing estates of his childhood into a strange "parish," where the mundane ("gardens and washing-lines") may disintegrate into the apocalyptic: "In a tiny stone church / On a desolate headland / A lost tribe is singing 'Abide with me'" ("Nostalgias"). Images of apocalypse internalize the guilts that Mahon associates with his own background. Influenced by Beckett as well as by MacNeice (all three conditioned by Irish Protestantism), Mahon takes upon his poetry the original sin of having been born into historythe human stain. His celebrated poem "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford," from
The Snow Party
(1975), tries to conceive some kind of recovery, beginning: "Even now there are places where a thought might grow . . ." Through the bizarre symbol of mushrooms left "in a foetor of / Vegetable sweat since civil war days," Mahon encompasses a great sweep of historical disaster that cries out for redemption: "Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!"

It is characteristic of Northern Irish poetry to use other wars and cataclysms as direction finders. Longley's poem "Wounds" juxtaposes images from World War I"two pictures from my father's head"with the even more futile casualties of civil war: "Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of / Bullets and Irish beer . . . the Sacred Heart of Jesus / Paralyzed as heavy guns put out / The night-light in a nursery forever." A later poem, "Bog Cotton" from
The Echo Gate
(1979), perceives

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the Ulster impasse through Keith Douglas in World War II remembering Isaac Rosenberg in World War I: "You saw that beyond the thirstier desert flowers / There fell hundreds of thousands of poppy petals."

Longley's particular historical emphasis implies that all Northern Irish poetry can be seen as war poetry, still caught up in the aftermath of European and Irish wars from 1914 to 1945. This perspective, which partly derives from his English parentage, also brings literary and cultural relations between the islands into a focus different from either Hewitt's or Heaney's. Wilfred Owen is relevant to the protest elegies in the sequence "Wreaths"; Edward Thomas to Longley's West of Ireland poems, where the ecological strand in English nature poetry meets the Yeatsian visionary tradition.

Part of MacNeice's legacypart of modernism and modernityis Heraclitean flux. A younger generation of Northern Irish poets, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson (all from Catholic backgrounds) carry flux further into language and form. Concentrated artistic construction has been followed by equally concentratedand equally variousdeconstruction. Paul Muldoon (b. 1951) was the first of these poets to be discussed in deconstructionist or postmodernist terms. However, his poetry lends itself to such readings not so much because it has absorbed international trends, as because it responds both to the absolutism in Northern Irish mentalities, and to the poetry of his seniors.

Muldoon's first two collections,
New Weather
(1973) and
Mules
(1977), involve a bleaker version of rural terrain and rural community than is to be found in early Heaney. Heaney deals with sexual awakening, but not with themes of infidelity, mutual destructiveness between the generations or sexes, and confusion of gender roles. For instance, whereas the father in Heaney's poetry personifies continuity and stability, in Muldoon's the father becomes a fictive point of reference denoting the history, traditions, ties, and authority that the poetry questions. Thus the title poem of
Mules
is a parable of hybridization between the Northern Irish communities:


We had loosed them into one field I watched Sam Parsons and my quick father Tense for the punch below their belts, For what was neither one thing or the other.

The "field" where this problematic birth occurs suggests the contraction

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