The

Hidden World

of Poetry

Unravelling Celtic Mythology

in Contemporary Irish Poetry

ADAM WYETH

Published in 2013 by

Salmon Poetry

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland

Website: www.salmonpoetry.com

Email: info@salmonpoetry.com

Copyright © Adam Wyeth, 2013

This title is also available in Paperback format: ISBN 978-1-908836-56-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover Artwork:

‘The Battle of Moytura’ by Hans Diebschlag – www.diebschlag.com

Cover design: Siobhán Hutson

Salmon Poetry gratefully acknowledges the support of The Arts Council.

For Matthew Geden and Desmond O’Grady

Quiet of the sea or head of the ocean,

Either way home haven.

from ‘Kinsale’ – Desmond O’Grady

Contents

Introduction by Adam Wyeth

Badb by Maurice Riordan

Promise by Leanne O’Sullivan

Westering Home by Bernard O’Donoghue

Well by Paula Meehan

Helmet by Seamus Heaney

The Making of an Irish Goddess by Eavan Boland

The Mayo Accent by Paul Durcan

The Shannon Estuary Welcoming The Fish Accent by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Synge Dying by Derek Mahon

Bean Sidhe by Mary O’Malley

A Mayfly by Paul Muldoon

Dark of the Moon by Patricia Monaghan

The Eagle by Matthew Sweeney

Borders by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Oisíns on Tractors by John Ennis

The Old Ways by Desmond O’Grady

Acknowledgements

About the Author

There was a time when the making of myth wasn’t about the concealing of truth but the revealing of truth, the sort of truth which cannot be accounted for through the discourse of fact… It was the function of myth before the centuries of scientific authority eradicated myth from most of our lives, to grow and evolve and adapt to changing circumstances in life and it was always in the minds of poets that Myth reached its full truth-bearing potential.

PATRICK COTTER

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth – penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.

W.B. YEATS

INTRODUCTION by Adam Wyeth

Mythology is a psychology of antiquity

– JAMES HILLMAN

The main aim for this book is three-fold: firstly, to showcase much of Ireland’s leading contemporary poetry; second, to act as a poetry-primer for people wishing to explore poems in more depth; and thirdly, to take readers on a journey through some of Celtic mythology’s most exciting and popular heroes, gods and folktales.

Despite the long-standing propaganda pedalled by the Romans, that the Celts were backwards and bloodthirsty barbarians, more recent history and archaeological evidence continues to reveal that the ancient Celtic tribes were extremely sophisticated and had a highly advanced oral literary tradition. Academics are also discovering that Celtic mythology has impacted greatly on modern literature. Indeed, it could be argued that without knowledge of mythology, much of the great English language literature would not be understood and appreciated. The Celtic revivalists, such as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge, influenced some of the major movers and shakers of 20th century literature, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence – whose Celtic mythological connotations are still being unravelled by scholars today.

As a small island, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature. In the final quarter of the last century the Irish dominance has come mainly from Ulster, with Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and later Paul Muldoon continuing to push the envelope into the 21st century. In the 20th century Ireland produced three of the most distinctive poets and writers the world has known, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But the tradition of poetry in Ireland has a far more ancient lineage. Its origins lie in the Irish language, one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Western Europe.

The English and Irish are often seen as almost polar-opposites of each other, when in fact both share a common pre-Christian heritage. Before the Romans, Saxons and Normans colonized England, the Britons were very much a Celtic people. Yet compared to Ireland, England is far less informed about its earlier cultural folklore and mythology. The poet, Robert Graves, in his classic book-length essay, The White Goddess, wrote that, ‘English poetic education should, really, begin not with Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin.’ Amergin (pronounced aver-gin), thought to have lived in the sixth century, was Ireland’s first great poet of the Milesians from the early Irish mythological Cycle. The song/poem itself is a shape-shifting invocation which calms a magical storm set up by the Tuatha Dé Dannan (the people of the goddess Danu) who then had control of Ireland.

As well as exploring Celtic mythology, part of the premise for this book was to choose poems that concern themselves with contemporary and personal issues. Indeed many of the poems’ references to Celtic mythology, on first reading, are not so obvious. For example, Heaney’s poem, ‘Helmet,’ is ostensibly about a personal memory and the heroism of the 9/11 fire fighters, but on another level, it touches on Beowulf and the bardic tradition of the Celtic praise poets. Likewise, Paul Durcan’s ‘The Mayo Accent,’ is as much about a difficult father/son relationship as it is about Granuaile, the Pirate Queen; while Patricia Monaghan’s version of the Mad King Sweeney is an archetype of a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This is something found consistently in these poems – a contemporary approach that finds its roots in ancient traditions.

Although the Irish poets of today may owe a great deal to the Celtic revivalists of Yeats’s era, they are also very different. Mythology and folklore is humanity attempting to explain the world to itself. As each generation re-visits these ancient tales, our personal and expanding lives offer fresh interpretations of these age-old myths. Yeats’s focus was embroiled with stirring up a new nationalism for an Ireland coming out of an extended and crushing period of British imperialism. The contemporary poets of today have very different impulses, offering a more personal and 21st century response to the rich bedrock of their cultural heritage.

Leanne O’Sullivan’s first collection, Waiting for my Clothes, was a deeply confessional collection about family relationships and the impact of an eating disorder. Her second collection, Cailleach disguises any confessional references in a sequence of poems about the mythology surrounding the Hag of Beara. While avoiding the tag of the obvious confessional, her approach simultaneously humanizes one of Ireland’s most ancient mythologies.

The allusive and elusive Paul Muldoon, widely considered to be one of the most influential Anglophone poets of his generation, interlaces many of his poems with Celtic references. His 2010 collection, Maggot, includes a multi-layered poem, ‘A May Fly,’ where he uses the legendary birth of Cú Chulainn to explore procreation and life’s inter-relations and connections. While this layering of themes with Celtic mythology is something many Irish poets strive for, it may be unnoticed to readers who are unfamiliar with Celtic mythology.

Though the suddenness and richness of poetry makes an immediate impact on the eye and ear of the reader, there are many intricate workings happening beneath the surface. ‘Language,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson attested, ‘is fossil poetry.’ By getting under the skin of the words we can often gain a deeper understanding of the poem’s meaning. This kind of sensitivity to reading is also the most rewarding. Like sucking an expensive chocolate truffle every word in a poem should be relished to get all the variations of texture and flavour as it melts on the tongue. If it is wolfed down, those textural tangs and textual subtleties are lost, and thus is a full appreciation of the poem.

Poetry is both a window and a mirror onto which we view the world and also see ourselves. My hope is that these close readings will intensify those views. Poems contain multiple meanings and every meaning has elasticity. Every reader brings his or her own personal imagination to a poem. Part of what makes poetry so tantalising is its ability to elude any one meaning or truth.

The word ‘Celt’ itself is shrouded in mystery, believed by some to come from the Greek, ‘Keltoi’, meaning ‘hidden people’ – a reference to their lack of written records perhaps, and tales which were passed down through the generations by the druids and poets who studied long years to commit all their knowledge to memory. The Hidden World of Poetry is then also The Celtic World of Poetry.

Although much is unknown about the ancient Celts, their legacy is still visible all over Ireland, from local traditions and festivals kept alive by communities, such as Wren Day, celebrated on the 26th December, to more official and public displays. During Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011, historic state visit to Ireland, Heaney was one of the few selected guests to be seated at the Monarch’s and President’s table, a nod to the important role poets played in ancient Ireland, where the official poet, file (rhymes with ‘miller’) would always sit beside the Chieftain or High King at banquets. Words were potent magic to the Celts and no words were more potent than those of the poet.

As we explore these ancient tales and traditions, passed down word of mouth for millennia, the hidden world not only comes to light, but we set foot in the imaginations of our ancestors, thus delving further back into our own ancient psyche. If ‘Mythology is a psychology of antiquity,’ then Celtic mythology should be of larger psychological significance as it is formed from our native heritage. Celtic culture is far from a dead or peripheral part of our history; its narratives and traditions stretch far beyond Ireland and are deeply intertwined into the fabric of our daily lives. Christmas, Easter and Halloween – all central features of Western society today – were all major Celtic festivals long before they were taken over and re-branded by Christianity. In this sense, we can all claim a Celtic identity.

1

On the surface simplicity

but the darkest pit in me

it’s pagan poetry.

BJÖRK

Badb by Maurice Riordan

I was walking where the woods begin

with an almost sheer drop to the river

– so that I was eye level with the tops

of nearby trees and higher than the branch

when I came upon the crow sitting there,

so close I could have touched her with a stick.

She was creaturely and unwary, as the wind

bore her away and brought her back.

We shared the same tangy woodland smells

the same malt-pale October sunlight.

Then I must have made a sound,

for she came alert and looked at me.

And in that interval before the legs

could lift her weight from the branch,

as the beak sprang open to deliver

its single rough vowel, she held me off

with a look, with a sudden realignment

of the eyes above the gorping mouth.

It is the look known to legend and folk belief

– though also an attribute useful for a bird

without talons or guile to defend it.

Then she was gone, in a few wing beats

indistinguishable from her fellows wheeling

above the trees, carrying on their business,

neighbourly and otherworldly.

MAURICE RIORDAN was born in Lisgoold, County Cork, 1953, and educated at University College Cork where he later taught. In 2004, he was selected as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets. He is co-editor of the anthologies, Dark Matter: Poems of Space and A Quark For Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science. Riordan believes that poetry is one of the means through which the human impact of science can be registered. ‘One of the things that poetry does,’ he says, ‘is open the doors of perception, or another way of putting it – it increases our stock of available reality, enlarging our capacity to understand and take in things.’

This poem first appeared in a festschrift by Faber in 1995 for Ted Hughes’s sixty-fifth birthday. It was later published in Riordan’s second collection, Floods, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Riordan’s writing is deceptive in that it appears effortless. Michael Glover describes his voice in The Independent as having ‘a measured delivery that never strains after its effects, but lets the words speak for themselves.’

On first reading, this poem may seem not much more than an intense but otherwise straightforward encounter with a crow. But a little scratch beneath the surface of Riordan’s subtle lyricism reveals it is in fact laced with Celtic imagery and folklore. Badb (rhyming with ‘have’) comes from the Irish for the shape-shifting warrior Goddess (hence Riordan’s use of the female gender) in Celtic mythology, who often took the form of a crow (in some interpretations the raven), symbolizing the cycles of life and death, wisdom and inspiration. Sometimes known as Badb Catha (battle crow), she often caused confusion among soldiers to move the tide of battle to her favoured side. Battlefields became known in Ireland as the Land of the Badb.

Birds play a major role in Celtic mythology, figuring as divine emblems and messengers of the gods. In more recent literature we are reminded of one of England’s most renowned poets, Ted Hughes (for whom this poem is written). Hughes reinterpreted the crow in a book-length sequence of poems that is perhaps his most notable work, creating an extensive folk-mythology of his own. In his poems, crow is a kind of man-bird – undergoing various adventures in a dark and disastrous world.

But even without these facts the poem has a ghostly allure that insinuates something more. Riordan opens the poem in a conversational tone. The sound-making of the first line with the ‘W’ alliteration, ‘I was walking where the woods begin,’ has a sense of the elements about it. The ‘W’ sound creating a wind chamber in the mouth as the line is spoken, making us feel we are out there with the poet immediately – ‘eye level with the tops/ of nearby trees’.

The writing becomes alive through the use of all the five senses throughout. First of all there is sight, ‘eye level’. ‘Eye’ is mentioned three times in the poem as is ‘look’. Then touch, ‘so close I could have touched her with a stick’; and ‘woodland smells’, while ‘tangy’ suggests taste, as does the onomatopoeic, ‘gorping mouth.’ ‘Then I must have made a sound’ leads us into the crow’s beak springing ‘open to deliver its single rough vowel’ – before the flapping sound of ‘a few wing beats’. All this rich detail draws us into the piece as if we are there – looking at the crow, so close we actually feel ‘that interval before the legs/ could lift her weight from the branch’.

But another reason for the five senses is to take us to the next level, the sixth sense, which is the power of perception seemingly independent of the five senses. It is to do with our intuition, the sense of hunches and gut reactions, also known as second sight. This occurs when the crow delivers ‘its single rough vowel’. In Celtic mythology, the cry of the crow was often interpreted as the voice of the gods. It also appears when the bird and speaker meet eye to eye (‘the look known to legend and folk belief’.) This extra sensory perception brings all the mythology of Badb together. When Badb took the form of a crow it was taken as a prediction that someone was going to die.

The slowed down, zoomed-in description of the bird, brings us closer, so we become aware of the power of Badb, as she holds him off ‘with a look’. An oblique reference to the strong roles female deities played in Celtic myth. Then ‘in a few wing beats’ we see Badb retreat back to the bird world, becoming an anonymous part of the flock, ‘indistinguishable from her fellows’.

The image of the birds ‘wheeling/ above the trees’ gives a sense that they are part of the heavens. The poet might not just be ‘wheeling’ from the rushing up of the crow, but also subconsciously linking this movement to the Celtic idea of the wheel. The ancient Celts sometimes buried model wheels with corpses as symbols of the sun to light the way of the dead to the otherworld. To the ancient Celts, the Earth was alive and sentient, both matter and consciousness. They venerated all natural phenomena, including water, trees and of course the sun – all of which are mentioned in this poem.

The description of ‘wheeling’ also alludes to Yeats’s lyric poem, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, which explores his life and mortality. As an ardent believer in the occult and a symbolist, Yeats used images to indirectly express mystical ideas. Yeats’s description of the swans, ‘wheeling in great broken rings’, is a symbol of eternity. Ted Hughes was also a great believer in the occult, and that poetry had a form of sorcery and magic about it. The root meaning of file, the Irish name for poet, is ‘to see.’ (The Greek root of ‘poet’ is ‘to make’) The function of the file was not just to celebrate the tribe but to be divine seer as well – hence Riordan’s use of the sixth sense here. In many ancient cultures, poetry and prophecy were said to derive from the same source. This Celtic definition remains at the roots of poetry. Ibsen said, ‘to be a poet is chiefly to see.’

‘Carrying on their business’ alludes to the Crow’s connection with the spirit realms and also hints at a line from Hughes’s first masterpiece, ‘The Thought Fox.’ In the poem, Hughes describes the fox as, ‘coming about its own business.’ It is a poem about writing and being visited by the muse. ‘Carrying on’ is a pun on ‘carrion’: the decaying flesh of dead animals and also the common species of crow. Badb sometimes took the form of a carrion crow, most notably on the shoulder of the mythical warrior, Cú Chulainn, after he died in battle.

The paradoxical last line, ‘neighbourly and otherworldly’ picks up on a previous line, ‘she was creaturely and unwary,’ providing an effective juxtaposition, subtly suggesting the Celtic outlook on life after death, where the otherworld is next door to us. Three years after this poem was published Ted Hughes died, adding another dimension to the crow’s symbol of prediction. Perhaps another spooky foretelling is found in Riordan’s line ‘malt-pale October sunlight’. In poetry, the seasons are often a metaphor for age. (October here can then be seen as Hughes being in the autumn of his years.) Moreover, to the ancient Celts, autumn/winter is when the strength of the gods of darkness and the underworld grew great. Hughes died on October 28th, three days before Samhain, (pronounced ‘Sow’ en’) the eve of the Celtic New Year, the last day of October. Samhain was a time to celebrate the lives of those who had passed on. It is seen as a festival of darkness. The long barrows where dead heroes were buried in pre-Christian Celtic society are also the fairy mounds, which are supposed to open up at Samhain.

As with many pagan and Celtic traditions, it later became amalgamated into Christianity, and is now of course popularly known as Halloween, the Eve of All Saints Day. But many of its rituals and superstitions still survive in rural parts of Britain and Ireland today. Heaney, a close friend of Hughes, said, ‘A good poem goes that little bit further and leaves you walking on air...’ or in this case – ‘wheeling above the trees’.

2

History is the present. That’s why every

generation writes it anew. But what most people

think of as history is its end product, myth.

E. L. DOCTOROW

Promise by Leanne O’Sullivan

The grey sound of rain on the roof,

sound and light splitting on my skin

like flint pieces working me; I am preparing

a place for you, cleaning down the walls

and worktops, making space in the wide rooms,

in the small rooms, doubling things needed.

Roses I found growing around the bridge

I lay on your pillow; though time and love

go round like dancers, in time I won’t be able

to tell your name from mine, to separate

your voice from my voice within this house.

My love I am at the table, waiting.

When you come home my hands shake

like rain breaking on the knotted waves.

The youngest poet included in this book, LEANNE O’SULLIVAN, was born in 1983 and comes from The Beara Peninsula in West Cork. She was winning many of Ireland’s prestigious poetry prizes when nobody knew how young she was. At just eighteen she won The Poetry Ireland National Poetry Competition, and a year later she won the RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam and then the Davoren Hanna Award for Young Emerging Irish Poet. Her first collection, Waiting For My Clothes (Bloodaxe 2004), displayed a maturity far beyond her years. Many of the poems are about suffering from an eating disorder: ‘the famine of the 90s,’ as she calls it in one of her poems. Poet, Billy Collins, summed up her precociousness saying, ‘What is remarkable about Leanne O’Sullivan is not that she is so young – how many of us reach twenty without attempting a poem? – but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young.’

This poem comes from O’Sullivan’s second collection, a book length sequence of poems, called Cailleach (pronounced ‘Cay-lock’) The Hag of Beara (Bloodaxe 2009). The Cailleach, or the Hag means a wise woman, or witch, whose dwelling place is in Western Ireland and Scotland, particularly in the rugged landscape of the Beara Peninsula, County Cork. A large stone sits on the edge of Ballycrovane Harbour, which is said to be the petrified body of the Cailleach. Her presence still attracts visitors who leave various offerings at the rock, and stories about her abound. The Cailleach Beara claims to be one of the oldest living mythological beings associated with Ireland.

An old proverb amongst the Connacht people says that there are three long ages: the age of the yew, the age of the eagle, and the age of the Cailleach Beara. She has lived numerous lives, beginning each life from her stony form and returning to stone in the end. In Scotland, she has a blue face and is known as the ‘blue hag,’ representing winter. She is born old at Samhain (Nov 1st) and grows younger over time until she becomes a beautiful young woman at Bealtaine (May 1st). Munster tradition describes the Hag as the Shaper of the Land who slides down the rocks and rearranges the landscape. After having lived seven lives, she is re-transformed back into rock awaiting her husband, a sea god Manannán Mac Lir associated with sea journeys to the otherworld, to return.

Their love affair is central to O’Sullivan’s narratives as she attempts to throw new light on the Cailleach. O’Sullivan creates a sense of timelessness as she places an ancient myth into a contemporary context where the domestic woman preparing for her lover becomes like a ritual. Her version unravels many of the myths that have shrouded her for millennia, seeking to reinterpret the Cailleach’s true origin. Instead of a sea god, her love is a fisherman. The Cailleach’s metamorphosis from human to stone (and vice versa), rather than taken literally, acts as a metaphor for the transformative power of love.

Soundwise, the AY sound in ‘grey’ and ‘rain’ slows down the first line letting us linger on the image a little longer, while ‘roof’ alliterating with ‘rain’ helps bring both sound and image closer together. The word ‘sound’ is repeated at the beginning of the second line and is coupled with ‘light’. This coupling pattern recurs throughout the poem, the pattern becoming its central motif. Notice as well that all the words so far are monosyllabic – as if each is a raindrop ‘falling on the roof’. Mythologically, the pitter-patter of rain becomes the god’s sea spray, while the ‘grey’ colour of rain subtly arouses the old hag of winter.

The word ‘splitting’ aptly breaks the monosyllables halfway through the second line. The rain metamorphoses, turning towards the erotic, as the rain soaking the roof becomes her ‘skin’. The Cailleach’s stony form is explored in the third line with the image, ‘flint pieces working me’. ‘Flint’ (musically echoing with ‘splitting’ and ‘skin’) creates sparks, producing fire and heat – igniting passion, picking up on the previous word ‘light’. The rock of the Cailleach, exposed on the edge of the harbour, becomes shaped and polished by the elements, the sea-god’s immense force ‘working’ her.

The sparks mark the beginning of home and hearth, with the alliterative ‘preparing a place’ of warmth for her love’s arrival. In Freudian analysis, a house symbolizes the self, ‘Making space in the wide rooms,/ in the small rooms,’ takes us deeper into the poem’s private and erogenous zones. This is a domestic love poem, as the objects (‘roof’, ‘walls’, ‘rooms’, ‘worktops’) demonstrate. The strong verbs suggests a practicality to their love (‘splitting’, ‘working’, ‘preparing’, ‘cleaning’, ‘making’, ‘doubling’.) Even the roses reveal a practical earthiness to the language, ‘found growing around the bridge’.

The poem also follows the fourteen-lined form of a sonnet. The square shape mirroring the room that contains the speaker, where she performs her domestic rituals. Although it ignores the sonnet’s traditional rhyme scheme, it possesses the classical component of an octet and sestet with a volva, or turn. The octet, or the first eight lines, sets up the proposition and is followed by the six lines of the sestet, the sonnet’s resolution. The volva traditionally occurs at the end of the eighth line, marking the beginning of the sestet. The turn in this sonnet arrives halfway through the eighth line, ‘though time and love go round like dancers’. The octet is all about the anticipation of love, (‘preparing/’ ‘cleaning down the walls/’ ‘making space’.) The sestet moves through and beyond the courtship dance of ‘time and love’ into a future tense, ‘in time I won’t be able to tell your name from mine’. (Notice ‘time’ is repeated directly underneath the line, with ‘mine’ chiming in the next.) This devotion picks up on the title, suggesting a ‘Promise’ to each other in marriage.

The fisherman’s arrival creates her metamorphosis from stone to a beautiful young woman, symbolising love’s transformative power. The octet and sestet is a further expansion of the doubling and coupling theme of the poem. The poem is about two becoming one and the language mirrors that. All the way through, the words themselves turn and ‘go round like dancers,’ swaying towards and away from each other, flirting as they chime and half rhyme. For example, the alliterative ‘working’ and ‘worktops’ and the ‘doubling’ of ‘wide rooms and small rooms’.’ Many words are repeated (‘rain’, ‘time’, ‘voice’, ‘love’.) Images in the octet are also coupled: ‘rain on the roof’/ ‘sound and light’ ‘walls and worktops/’ ‘time and love/’. The final summarising also ends with a rhyming couplet, a traditional element to the Shakespearean sonnet.

The repetition of words and sounds suggest the Cailleach repeating her rituals of waiting and longing like the tide coming in and going out; mirroring her mythology.

The opening image of ‘rain’ comes back again in the last line; however this time it is not heard on the roof or felt ‘splitting on her skin’ but is becoming one, ‘breaking on the knotted waves.’ ‘Breaking’ also connects with ‘separate’ and ‘splitting’, these raw and passionate lines give the poem an animalistic earthiness. Mythologically, it echoes the image of the Cailleach as stone ‘breaking’ into human form; perhaps O’Sullivan is alluding to the transition from girlhood to womanhood. (It may also be a forewarning that love can break our hearts, promises can be broken or unfulfilled; later on in the collection her fisherman becomes lost at sea, never to return again.) ‘My hands shake’ again suggests passion, it also echoes back to the crumbling rock when the Cailleach is transformed from the frozen stone of winter and into the beautiful young woman at the beginning of summer with her sea god’s return.

The image of the rain falling in the sea signifies the two melting into each other, as if she has been swallowed into the sea god’s depths. ‘Knotted’ has multiple meaning, referring to the knots in her stomach perhaps, as she sits waiting. It also provides an image of the lovers eternally entwined in a Celtic knot, a recurring theme in Celtic knotwork art. This again connects with the title: the ‘Promise’ to tie the knot. The true origin of this phrase derives from the Celtic/druidic ceremony of hand-fasting, where the husband and wife had their hands bound together with a ceremonial cord, the tying of the knot signifying the completion of the marriage ceremony.

All this is done so subtly and under the radar that cliché or over-sentimentality – as can often be done with love poetry – is avoided. Instead of the myth driving the narrative, the poem is centred on the Cailleach’s human feelings of love and longing. The clever play on words, chiming, rhyming and doubling throughout, echo the meaning of the poem: the timelessness of love being renewed as the seasons change and return and the next generation of lovers is transformed by love’s promise.

3

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

JOAN D. VING

Westering Home by Bernard O’Donoghue

Though you’d be pressed to say exactly where

It first sets in, driving west through Wales

Things start to feel like Ireland. It can’t be

The chapels with their clear grey windows,

Or the buzzards menacing the scooped valleys.

In April, have the blurred blackthorn hedges

Something to do with it? Or possibly

The motorway, which seems to lose its nerve

Mile by mile. The houses, up to a point,

With their masoned gables, each upper window

A raised eyebrow. More, though, than all of this,

It’s the architecture of the spirit;

The old thin ache you thought that you’d forgotten –

More smoke, admittedly, than flame;

Less tears than rain. And the whole business

Neither here nor there, and therefore home.

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE was born in County Cork in 1945. Growing up in rural North Cork, O’Donoghue developed a love for traditional music. At sixteen, after his father died, he left Ireland to live in England where he attended St Bede’s College and became inspired by medieval writers such as Chaucer and Dante. He went on to study Medieval English at Oxford, where he now teaches. These things led to what he calls a deep-rooted interest in linguistics. He links poetry and traditional music, saying, ‘Both are a product of, and a repayment to community.’

A Whitbread Prizewinning poet, in 2008 Faber published O’Donoghue’s Selected Poems. In 2011, his fifth collection, Farmers Cross, was published and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. He has also translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This poem comes from his 1999 collection, Here Nor There, the phrase that appears in the last line of this poem.

‘I remember being very pleased when I came up with the title,’ he says. ‘I thought if ‘neither here not there’ means ‘insignificant’ (as it does idiomatically), then removing the negative ‘neither’ from the front should mean it now means ‘significant’. This subversion of a phrase links to the opening poem from the collection called, Nechtan. Nechtan was a member of the crew in Imram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), an ancient Irish mythological tale, first written down in the eighth century. After their adventures and sojourns to fantastical islands, including the Isle of Women in the otherworld, Nechtan grows ‘homesick for Ireland’.

In O’Donoghue’s version, Nechtan, upon his return to Ireland is not allowed to land. The poem ends with the crew ‘fated / To sail the middle seas, outcast/ Alike from the one shore and the other.’ The Immrama are a class of Old Irish wonder tales concerning a hero’s sea journey to the otherworld, of which Imram Brain is the earliest example. The hero sets out on his voyage for the sake of adventure or to fulfil his destiny, and generally stops on otherworldly islands before reaching his destination. He may or may not be able to return home again. This poem is also part of a voyage and one that shares many parallels with Imram Brain and Nechtan. In this context we can draw mythological symbols that may not otherwise be so overt.

From the opening line, we are immediately in the front seat with the speaker, the word ‘pressed’ suggesting the driver pressing down on the accelerator as he journeys towards home. The closer he gets the more his homesickness wells up, (‘the old thin ache’) surprising him. The physical journey parallels his mental one: asking himself questions, making connections with home. Memories return and the Welsh landmarks begin to resemble Ireland. But the ‘chapels with their clear grey windows’ also differ from the colourful villages of Ireland. He wants the ‘buzzards menacing the scooped valleys’ to remind him of home, yet admits he cannot link them. However ‘have the blurred blackthorn hedges/ Something to do with it?’ The word ‘blurred’ suggests his world becoming indistinct.

The ‘blackthorn’ is embedded in ancient Celtic culture and is one of the trees of the Ogham alphabet, an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the Old Irish language. It is also referred to as the ‘Celtic Tree Alphabet,’ as it ascribes names of trees to the individual letters – sharing similarities to the runic alphabet. In Gaelic poetry, the blackthorn is used as a symbol of female beauty. In Irish folklore, a race of fierce faeries called the lunantishee guarded the blackthorn. On All Hallows Eve or May Day the lunantishee forbade anyone to cut a branch or stick from the blackthorn. Niall Mac Coitir in his book, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and folklore, suggests that the ‘lunantishee’ is the same as the leannan sídhe, a female spirit who seeks the love of men. The leannan sídhe, is generally depicted as a beautiful muse, who offers inspiration to an artist in exchange for love and devotion; however, this frequently results in madness for the artist, as well as premature death. Yeats saw the leannan sídhe as the Dark Muse, an artistic succubus, giving creative gifts in exchange for the artist’s life.

This symbol of female beauty also echoes how Bran came to take his voyage to the otherworld. One day a supernatural lady arrives at Bran’s palace with a silver branch which emits the most beautiful music. She sings to him a poem about the land where the branch had grown. In this otherworld, it is always summer, there is no want of food or water, and no sickness or despair ever touches the perfect people. She tells Bran to voyage to the Land of Women across the sea, and the next day Bran gathers Nechtan and a company of men to do so. These mythological aspects act as a metaphor for the poet as he makes his way back to Ireland.

Just as the ‘blurred blackthorn’ metamorphoses, so too does the rest of the journey. Objects become anthropomorphic, taking on human characteristics. The motorway is personified and ‘seems to lose its nerve,’ suggesting that it may peter out and turn into a boreen like the lanes in Ireland. This pithy image more than imaginatively describes the road through Wales, which literally narrows the closer you get to the Ferry port. It is a ‘transferred epithet’ – a literary term, where the image of the road losing its nerve actually applies to the speaker, suggesting there is some trepidation about what lies ahead. The word ‘nerve’ also symbolizes something sensitive, touching a nerve, as features in the landscape jog the poet’s memory of home.

The houses too, ‘With their masoned gables,’ are symbolic of the sense of displacement, (the conversational ‘up to a point’ makes a very clever pun, as the phrase is also a description for the gables.) There is something familiar yet separate about the houses: ‘each upper window/ A raised eyebrow’. The speaker feels he is being watched which links to the gossip and closed, secretive lives in small communities. Suspicious looks suggest the traveller is an outsider and perhaps not welcome in these parts. Similar to the sentiments expressed in, Nechtan and Bran, the speaker has spent too long out of Ireland and is apprehensive about going back – he may not be welcome anymore.

Then the speaker turns a corner, discovering, ‘more, though than all of this, / It’s the architecture of the spirit’. This oxymoron contains metaphysical aspects. ‘Spirit’ is the non-physical part of the person, but juxtaposed with architecture it suggests something tangible with a complex three-dimensional structure. This ‘architecture of the spirit’ has multiple meaning, alluding to the shared ancient Celtic mythology from Wales and Ireland, linking the otherworld and also referring to the ancients still being visible in the landscape. It also tells us something about the artist, hinting at what G.K. Chesterton once wrote,

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like

a pattern and a type of architecture. It is a thing like the

landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish

to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange

flora and fauna of his own secret planet.

The ‘old thin ache,’ conjures up personal love, homesickness, but also contains cultural references, the narrowing road may also be emblematic of the famine roads and the Irish diaspora. We are reminded though, that like the features that pepper the landscape as we pass through, all this is fleeting. ‘More smoke than flame’, suggests time has blurred the blackthorn; the old flame has almost died out. Will the ‘old thin ache’ increase when he returns or disappear altogether?

In other versions of Imram Brain, Bran and his crew reach Ireland, but the people gathered on the shores do not recognize Nechtan’s name except in their legends. This is because although it felt like a year to the crew in the otherworld, it was in fact many years. While they retained their youth in the Isle of Women, they aged to their chronological age when they returned. The moment Nechtan jumps off the boat onto the land, he immediately turns to smoke and ashes.

Here the subverted phrase from the collection’s title comes in: whether it is ‘neither here nor there’ or ‘here nor there’. The speaker’s feelings of ‘home’ are ambivalent. This is the poem’s paradox, reflecting the reality of migration. Although O’Donoghue describes himself as deeply attached to Ireland, he says he doesn’t feel displaced. ‘I think we are where we are at any given time,’ he says. ‘Interest in the past is interest in how we got here!’ Home is more about how we feel inside rather than where we are originally from.

The journey becomes an unexpected discovery, it ‘sets in’, unwittingly. Although it is a tenuous feeling, (which is compared to, ‘smoke’, ‘fire’, ‘tears’, ‘rain’, all ephemeral), the journey serves to solidify these emotions – finally forming ‘an architecture of the spirit’. The closer the speaker gets to home, the stronger the feelings develop. But the feelings remain ambivalent and ‘blurred’. Going home is both significant (‘Here nor there’) and insignificant, (‘neither here nor there’), as home is also in two places. The play on words and subversion of familiar phrases in this poem, mirrors the concern of re-considering the familiarity of home. The poem also nods to Heaney’s poem, ‘Postscript’ another driving poem where the poet feels between things. Capturing the landscape driving west into County Clare, Heaney senses: ‘You are neither here nor there/ A hurry through which known and strange things pass…’

The power of the journey is also in the title: ‘Westering Home’, ‘Westering’ indicating the movement of the journey, ‘Home’ naming Ireland as that place, with its powerful, emotional symbolism for the poet. ‘Westering Home’ is also the title of a folk ballad, the chorus of which ends with the line, ‘Isle of my heart, my own land’. Ireland is in the speaker’s heart, and therefore with him in any landscape where reminders trigger memories.

Just as the chapels, blackthorns and houses scatter the Welsh landscape, the subtle allusions to Celtic mythology, folklore and music are dotted throughout the poem. These things may not be immediately apparent but they are there in the background like Bran and his crew emerging from the otherworld.

Rhythmically, the poem uses a loose blank verse form, and is driven along with enjambment and caesura. Enjambment occurs where the continuation of a line or thought carries on into the next. This helps give the poem a sense of urgency and flow as it drives along. Caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line usually indicated with punctuation such as a full stop. These stops and starts resemble the speaker on his journey, pausing for thought, changing up and down in gear, turning corners.

Musically, each line is pressed together by the syllables it repeats. The first few lines, set up the music of assonance, (‘pressed’, ‘sets’, ‘west’) and alliteration: ‘where’, ‘west’, and ‘Wales’. The word ‘Wales’ also chimes with ‘feel’ and this echoes in other emotive words, such as ‘Ireland’, ‘chapels’, ‘clear’, ‘April’ and ‘mile by mile.’ The assonant AY sounds are peppered throughout the poem beginning in the first line with ‘say’ then into ‘Wales’, ‘grey’, ‘motorway’ ‘masoned gables’, ‘raised’, ‘ache’, ‘flame’, disappearing into ‘rain’ in the penultimate line. The long O sound slows the journey down, beginning with the first word ‘though’ and echoed in, ‘windows’, ‘motorway’, ‘window’, ‘though’, ‘old’, ‘smoke’, ‘whole’, and ending on the last word ‘home’.

As the speaker drives through the Welsh landscape, the poet tries to find a definition of home, is it no place or every place? There is a sense of someone being aware of his past but also someone who is pressing on, and perhaps getting on, thinking about the future. The west, where the sun sets, represents death and enlightenment in many cultures and religions. The ancient Celts believed that beyond the western sea off the edges of all maps lay the otherworld. However, despite what the landscape evokes, Ireland, in this poem, remains in the mind’s eye of the speaker. We never reach the destination. The poem (‘the whole business’) is all about the journey, in which, as the famous proverb says, it is better to journey hopefully than to arrive.

4

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma;

that is, the sacred lore of priests and people...

and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered

of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.

WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH

Well by Paula Meehan

I know this path by magic not by sight.

Behind me on the hillside the cottage light

is like a star that’s gone astray. The moon

is waning fast, each blade of grass a rune

inscribed by hoarfrost. This path’s well worn.

I lug a bucket by bramble and blossoming blackthorn.

I know this path by magic not by sight.

Next morning when I come home quite unkempt

I cannot tell what happened at the well.

You spurn my explanation of a sex spell

cast by the spirit who guards the source

that boils deep in the belly of the earth,

even when I show you what lies strewn

in my bucket – a golden waning moon,

seven silver stars, our own porch light,

your face at the window staring into the dark.

PAULA MEEHAN was born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives. In 2013 she was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry. She is a tenacious force in Irish poetry. Her voice is at once thick with the mythic and visceral paganism of her ancestors, while also rooted firmly in modern Irish society. Her poetry is a cocktail of the real and fairytale, where legendary heroes walk among the everyday. Her creative mind belongs to the visionary poets of ancient Ireland, believing in the cathartic and healing aspects of language while also confronting darker facets of contemporary urban life in Ireland.

She has published many collections. Her 2009 collection, Painting Rain, (Carcanet Press) explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Many myths surround the sacred wells of Ireland. To the ancient Celts, water was a symbol of life, a source of wisdom, intuition and magic. In this poem everything is cast in a magical Celtic light… so, ‘the cottage light/ is like a star’; the grass: ‘a rune/ inscribed by hoarfrost.’ ‘Runes’ are associated with divination and magic.

At the centre of the poem lies the ‘well’ where the speaker believes some kind of ‘sex spell’ has taken place. Wells have long been places of worship and healing in Celtic societies. There are hundreds of sacred wells scattered throughout Ireland, which are still visited to this day. The ancient Celts attributed their power to the otherworld, the spiritual source of everything. Druids used the wells to promote health and well-being. Water was the domain of the gods of healing, the most associated of which in Ireland is the goddess Brigid, who was later Christianised as St Brigid. It was believed that drinking from these holy waters or bathing in them would bestow power in the form of poetic inspiration, wisdom, or healing. One belief was that brides looked into the waters for inspiration or good luck. Here, the speaker in the poem goes to it by magic and has no words to explain the sex spell.

The ancient Celts were aware of the interconnectedness of all forms of life – they revered all the elements because they knew they sustained all life, so natural springs and wells were considered to be particularly powerful. Subsequently, the Christian settlers, who recognised the power of these places for the pagans, constructed many of their churches and grottoes around these sites.

As well as the Celtic and magical elements in the poem, there is also the erotic at play, most explicitly conveyed in ‘sex spell’. However, there are a number of other erotic undertones beneath the surface with an echo chamber of meaning within the words. In a Celtic context, a small ‘hillside’ is associated with the fertile swelling of the goddess, alluding to sexuality and fertility. The home is symbolic of the self. ‘The cottage light / is like a star that’s gone astray’ indicates that the speaker has stepped out of herself, as if in a dream or spell. ‘The moon… waning fast’ hints at shedding a former or younger self and perhaps implies reaching sexual maturity. To the ancient Celts, the phases of the moon are heavily intertwined with courting, mating and childbirth; a waning moon was considered to be a time to purge negativity or sickness. The moon is also connected to the menstrual cycle. Etymologically, the word ‘menstruation’ is related to ‘moon’. The waning moon may also signify ovulation, which connects to the implication here that the speaker has mysteriously conceived as she returns ‘unkempt’ from the well.

The poem opens like an incantation: ‘I know this path by magic not by sight’ and suggests this is not something outside the speaker, but deep within. The word ‘blade’ symbolizes something sharp, dangerous and phallic. The ‘path is well worn’, suggesting others have come this way before, both literally and metaphorically on the ‘path’ to womanhood. Sacred wells are nearly always associated with wishes, a belief that is still current today. When we throw a coin into a well or fountain for Lady Luck we are following a very ancient tradition. (This connects to the title ‘Well’, suggesting a pun, as in – good health or well-being.)

As well as the blackthorn’s symbolic association of female beauty in Gaelic poetry, (‘blossoming’ being another reference to approaching sexual maturity) in Irish folklore, the blackthorn is often considered unlucky, in contrast to the ‘bramble’ which is thought to be lucky. Thus in the sixth line, when the speaker lugs ‘a bucket by bramble and blossoming blackthorn’, she symbolically walks beside luck and misfortune.

The incantatory refrain, ‘I know this path by magic not by sight’ marks the end of the first half of the poem. And it is here that the rhyme pattern changes. The first half of rhyming couplets are perfect rhymes; after the refrain some of the end-rhyme pattern becomes looser and ‘unkempt’. This is not to do with technical laziness. The word ‘unkempt’ could easily be moved into the next line so ‘quite’ could end-rhyme with ‘sight’. The form mirrors the theme of ‘magic’ over ‘sight’, marking a turn in the poem. Although most of the poem seamlessly uses rhyme, (‘sight’ / ‘light’, ‘moon’ / ‘rune’) the rhymes don’t feel laboured because of the crafty way caesura and enjambment are used, stopping the rhythm with a comma or full stop in the middle of a line and then continuing the sense into the next line.

As we delve further into the roots of words the full meaning of the piece begins to spring forth. The ‘bucket’, now taken from the ‘belly’ of the well, becomes a mirror of the poem (‘belly’ again also alludes to pregnancy). So in the first part, the empty bucket becomes emblematic of not being pregnant yet, when she returns with her bucket full, the suggestion is that she has conceived. The bucket then itself becomes a mini holy well divining the night before within it: ‘a golden waning moon, / seven silver stars, our own porch light’; this also implies that she has another universe growing inside her. The reflection of the ‘face at the window’ shows us her man. The mini reflection of his face may also be an oblique reference to his child growing in the womb; a mini mirrored self. The unexpected final phrase of ‘staring into the dark’ implies he is outside the spell, not wanting to share or believe in the magic perhaps as he spurns her explanation.

The feminine aspects are at the heart of this poem, where creativity and sensitivity to magic contrast the masculine need for a concrete explanation. In a modern context this poem may symbolise a relationship going wrong, a companion not enlightened or experiencing an epiphany as she is. The dark, at the end of the poem also takes us back to the bottom of the well, leading us towards the unconscious, reminding us of the mysterious place where poetry springs from. Many legendary accounts from Ireland tell of how celebrated poets and musicians received their skills as gifts from the spirits at wells. This was their language for the unconscious – that mysterious, dark and magical otherworld under the visible. This is why poetry can have such a profound effect on us, as it reflects our unconscious minds. Just like the ancient Celts, contemporary poets are fully aware of the power of the unconscious and that it is the source of inspiration. The water welling up from the darkness of the earth into the visible and light still makes the perfect metaphor for conception, healing, knowledge and poetic inspiration, which is at the source of this magical poem.

5

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the

primordial, preconscious realm of the mind

which is powerful and chaotic.

Both symbol and myth are ways of

bringing order and form into this chaos..

ROLLO MAY

Helmet by Seamus Heaney

Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift

With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread

Fantailing brim,

Tinctures of sweat and hair oil

In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs

Beneath the crown –

Or better say the crest, for crest it is –

Leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,

Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper…

Bobby Breen’s badged helmet’s on my shelf

These twenty years, ‘the headgear

Of the tribe’, as O’Grady called it

In right heroic mood that afternoon

When the fireman-poet presented it to me

As ‘the visiting fireman’ –

As if I were up to it, as if I had

Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,

His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass

And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof

Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there

Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

SEAMUS HEANEY was born in 1939 in County Derry and died on August 30th 2013 in Dublin. Robert Lowell called him ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats.’ Many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the opinion that he was ‘the greatest poet of our age’. Upon his death, The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’. His last words were made in a text message, to his wife Marie, in Latin, ‘noli timere’ (‘don’t be afraid.’)

This poem comes from his 2006 collection, District and Circle. Many of the poems address new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. The fireman’s helmet was a gift given to Heaney at a poetry reading when he was lecturing at Harvard University. It had been gathering dust on the poet’s shelf for ‘twenty years,’ but in the wake of the September 11th attacks the helmet took on a different resonance and started to speak to the poet. A new life stirs within ‘the withered sponge’ and a world of allusions morphs the ‘fireman’s gift’ into something anciently heroic.

As a poet, Heaney came to maturity at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and is no novice when it comes to responding to tragedy and terrorism. However, rather than confronting the Troubles head on – where the poem is in danger of becoming a mere political slogan – Heaney has been masterful at approaching subjects at an angle, using myth, history and memory to dig deeper into the complex layers of Irish politics. The 2001 attacks saw a different kind of terror, one that affected him not as the Catholic Ulsterman, but as a citizen of the globe in the ‘Republic of Conscience’.

The poem begins with the B sound, ‘Bobby Breen’s.’ Alliterative verse, or head rhyme as it is sometimes known was an important ingredient in Old Irish and Old English verse, and here this poetic device becomes the backdrop to the poem. Notice how B reverberates throughout – bolstering the sprung rhythmic pulse to the piece (‘shock-absorbing webs beneath’/ ‘bud,’/ ‘beaten,’/ ‘rubble bolts out of a burning roof,’/ ‘broke’). Heaney’s poems are always full of music and onomatopoeia, banging and ringing words back to life like a blacksmith beating copper – so when they are read out loud, as all poetry should be, they feel physical.

While Heaney is comfortable using formal rhythms and rhymes, it is his love of finding the mot juste and creating chains of thick textural words that sets his work apart and which has made him so influential. Heaney’s texture and rhythm go hand in hand. The first three stanzas – rich with vivid description of the helmet – also use assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds: ‘tincture’ / ‘withered’ and ‘hair’ / ‘leather’. The feminine endings soften the ear momentarily, leaving us suspended in the air before hammering home with the harder dentals, ‘trimmed’, ‘ridged’, ‘hand-tooled’; giving us the feel of the copper crest being beaten into shape in front of us. The name ‘Bobby Breen’ is echoed rhythmically throughout the poem with a series of anapaests, a metrical foot consisting of two short (or unstressed) syllables followed by one long (or stressed) syllable. (Found in almost every line: ‘Bobby Breen’, ‘fireman’s gift’, ‘on its spread’, ‘withered sponge’, ‘leather-trimmed’, ‘steel-ridged’, ‘on my shelf’, ‘twenty years’, ‘of the tribe’, ‘afternoon’, ‘under it’, ‘shattering glass’, ‘rubble-bolts’, burning roof’, ‘hailed down’, ‘hatchet man’, ‘shield-wall’.) As well as giving a rhythmic structure to the poem, the repeated anapaests highlight and echo back to the plangent ‘Bobby Breen’ who is at the centre of this piece.

As soon as an object appears in poetry, it lends itself to symbolism. As Heaney describes the detail on the helmet, he unearths different layers in his mind and the scrutinized helmet begins to lose its everyday invisibility. The last word in the second stanza, ‘crown’ is an interesting choice, conjuring up royalty and titles; the poet though carefully replaces the word ‘Or better say the crest,’ perhaps so the reader is not confused with referring to a monarchy closer to home, the British Crown. But the ‘crown’ here is far more of yore. Heaney is referring to the ancient Anglo-Saxon kings and Celtic chieftains of Ireland. The professional poet or file in ancient Irish society had an extremely important role. Known as the Celtic praise poets, much of the poetry was made in order to flatter the kings. The file was the recorder of events and celebrated them in honour of the tribe, thus making them the closest person to the king.

This vivid description of the helmet also harks back to one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf, which Heaney translated towards the end of the millennium and was published in 1999, winning the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. In the epic poem the poet describes a gift of the helmet given to Beowulf by King Hrothgar. While some may consider the connection between the Anglo-Saxons and Ireland’s bardic tradition as slight, it is worth noting that in Heaney’s own words on the subject of his translation he sees a common thread. ‘Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland,’ he writes in his essay, ‘Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain’. He continues, ‘Let it function in the world in the same way as the Venerable Bede tells us that books from Ireland functioned within the Britannic and Hibernian contexts of his times in the eighth century.’

The fourth stanza tells us the helmet has been on his shelf for ‘twenty years.’ This echoes a line from ‘Digging’, from Heaney’s groundbreaking debut collection, Death of a Naturalist, published exactly forty years before District and Circle. ‘Digging’ is Heaney’s most famous poem where he recalls his father digging in the potato field. ‘I look down/ Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds/ Bends low, comes up twenty years away.’ ‘Digging’ was Heaney’s declaration to the vocation of poetry – his first ‘maculate conception’, identifying himself as a poet. Choosing the ‘squat pen’ over the spade. Heaney has been digging through the layers of identity, both personally and culturally, ever since.

These aspects are at the heart of ‘Helmet’, a poem like ‘Digging’ that again explores his identity as a poet in a political context. However, this time a poet matured, becoming part of the fellowship of poets, receiving something like a ‘crown.’ (For his work on the front line of poetry, Heaney received The Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 – the highest title for a poet.) This slight return to his debut’s district sees him coming round full circle.

It is also ‘‘the headgear/ Of the tribe’ as O’Grady called it’. The Headgear of The Tribe is the title of Desmond O’Grady’s selected poems. O’Grady is a poet with an appetite for the epic and has translated many works, one of his most important, an ancient Welsh epic covering a great battle, The Gododdin. This poem recalls a time at Harvard University, where O’Grady read Celtic studies and was a Teaching Fellow at the same time that Heaney was also teaching part of the year there. By mentioning O’Grady and his witticism – Heaney is paying homage to a senior hero of verse, and joining in the banter when he says, ‘right heroic,’ a pun on rhetoric, alluding to O’Grady’s poetic style and referring perhaps to Heaney’s own title at the time as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory.

The fifth and sixth stanzas are the only two stanzas not containing the alliterative ‘B,’ the closest our lips get to that is with the ‘P’ in ‘poet’ – sitting smack bang in the middle of the stanza. This effect gives the word ‘poet’ extra impact. Heaney is not one to use the term lightly; to him it is a serious and sacred word, an honoured title – to be used sparingly.

To become a poet in ancient Celtic culture took several years of rigorous training and learning at bardic schools which were scattered all over Medieval Ireland. Both the ‘visiting fireman’ and the ‘fireman-poet,’ become interchangeable echoing the ancient role of the Irish poet. One of the requirements to be in the ancient Celtic warrior band of the Irish Fianna was not just to be a great warrior but also a skilled poet who knew several epics off by heart. Heaney therefore recognises the significance of the title. Just as the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon poets declaimed their poems about battle and bravery – Heaney has dutifully composed this piece as a tribute to the heroism of the 9/11 fire fighters. However, similar to his poetry on the Troubles, Heaney comes at an angle, using the heroic poem Beowulf and the ancient tradition of the Celtic praise poets to approach a subject in a way that is not obvious.

Another play on words hides in the title, ‘Helmet’ – ‘Hell’ and ‘met’ – in other words meeting hell. Hell, synonymous with fire, is something the New York fire fighters knew all too much about the day the Twin Towers collapsed in Lower Manhattan. Hell also conjures up Dante’s, Inferno in which the poet Virgil was the guide through hell and purgatory. The ‘fireman-poet’ is not just a protector and restorer of language but a hero then of the unconscious.

The final descriptions dramatically suggest the fire fighting experience of 9/11, but reads as if it could have come straight out of Beowulf. ‘Fire-thane’s shield’, a ‘thane’ in Anglo-Saxon England was a man ranked by the king as a military nobleman. Similar to the Fianna he fought with a war-board, or a shield. ‘His shoulder-awning’ is also a borrowing from Anglo-Saxon. The line of battle, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, was a shield-wall, and your comrade was called your shoulder companion. The alliteration of ‘hatchet man and hose man’ is also a form of kenning, a compound expression containing metaphorical meaning; widely used in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The last note or hammer on the anvil is ‘broke,’ Bringing us back alliteratively to where we began with ‘Bobby Breen’s.’

This heroic poem pays homage to our native poetic tradition of the poet-warrior being the recorder of ‘interesting times’ and explores how events change and shape our reality. Just as the helmet loses its invisibility through scrutiny, so do the true meanings and sounds of words tell their own story – as they are unearthed like old relics coming up from under layers of opened ground.

6

If you take myth and folklore, and

these things that speak in symbols,

they can be interpreted in so many ways

that although the actual image is clear enough,

the interpretation is infinitely blurred,

a sort of enormous rainbow of every

possible colour you could imagine.

DIANA WYNNE JONES

The Making of an Irish Goddess by Eavan Boland

Ceres went to hell

with no sense of time.

When she looked back

all that she could see was

the arteries of silver in the rock,

the diligence of rivers always at one level,

wheat at one height,

leaves of a single colour,

the same distance in the usual light;

a seasonless, unscarred earth.

But I need time –

my flesh and that history –

to make the same descent:

In my body,

neither young now nor fertile,

and with the marks of childbirth

still on it,

in my gestures –

the way I pin my hair to hide

the stitched, healed blemish of a scar –

must be

an accurate inscription

of that agony:

the failed harvests,

the fields rotting to the horizon,

the children devoured by their mothers

whose souls, they would have said,

went straight to hell,

followed by their own.

There is no other way:

Myth is the wound we leave

in the time we have –

Which in my case is this

March evening

at the foothills of the Dublin mountains,

across which the lights have changed all day,

holding up my hand

sickle-shaped, to my eyes

to pick out

my own daughter from

all the other children in the distance;

her back turned to me.

EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin in 1944, and grew up in London and New York. She is one of the most important poets in contemporary Irish literature. Her experiences as a wife and mother have influenced her to write about the domestic and everyday, which usually provide a frame for political and historical themes. In May 2008, former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in his address to the joint houses of the US Congress, quoted from her poem, ‘The Emigrant Irish’.

Boland began writing and publishing poetry in early 1960s Dublin, in what she calls, a calm, magisterial, eerily unquestioning time. ‘When I look back,’ she says, ‘I see that moment – that mid-century hubristic time – as deeply authoritarian. Young poets were allowed to listen but not to question. They were to be ready to consider the greatness of the past, but not its flaws.’

Through her poetry, Boland has unlearned and sought to redress these traditions. This poem comes from her 1990 collection Outside History, part of a sequence that explores the limited, traditional role of women in Irish history and mythology. In this piece, Boland locates herself within the Irish poetic tradition, imagining her own personal making as an Irish Goddess through the classical mythology of Ceres, bringing classical and Celtic mythology into the present.

Ceres is the Roman equivalent of the Greek Demeter, the earth mother or earth goddess. Ceres ‘went straight to hell’ to rescue her daughter Persephone after Pluto abducted her from the earth. Life came to a standstill as she searched the earth day and night for her lost daughter (‘no sense of time’ picks up on this). Persephone’s time in the underworld is a metaphor for the winter months, and her return to the upper world relates to springtime. Ceres and Persephone parallel the mother and daughter in this poem. The cycle of seasons also represent growing up as the daughter becomes distant from her mother. The line ‘went to hell’, echoes the modern phrase ‘go to hell’, suggesting a dispute between mother and daughter.

From the poem’s descriptions we can see that Ceres’ bountiful world is full of colour. The ‘arteries of silver in the rock,’ is an effective metaphor for rivers and streams, symbolizing the earth as Ceres’ body, which alludes to her own flesh and blood, Persephone. However, ‘the diligence of water always at one level, / wheat at one height,’ suggests a world unchanging, paused in a prelapsarian time. ‘The same distance in the usual light’ becomes symbolic of how female figures are often portrayed.

Musically, the sounds SEE and REES from Ceres are peppered throughout the beginning of the poem. Appearing in the words, ‘sense‘, ‘see’, ‘arteries’, ‘silver’, ‘rivers’, ‘always’, ‘leaves’, ‘same’, right up to ‘seasonless’ where the poem shifts.

In the next part, Boland places herself at the heart of the poem. Everything is in contrast. The music of the words also contrasts the sound of the words at the start, changing into IY and ER vowel sounds (‘time’, ‘history’, ‘my’ ‘neither’, ‘fertile’, ‘childbirth’, ‘gestures’, ‘accurate’, ‘horizon’, ‘mothers’, ‘other’). Although Boland makes ‘the same descent’ to hell as Ceres, Boland needs ‘time -/ my flesh and that history’ (in contrast to Ceres’ ‘no sense of time’, and ‘a seasonless unscarred earth.’) Boland’s ‘neither young now nor fertile’ body maps out a very different world in opposition to Ceres. The ‘marks’, ‘scars’ and ‘agony’ are what shape this warts and all Irish goddess. This is indicative of how the ancient Celts related to their deities. Unlike the Greek and Roman gods, who lived far from human reach, the deities of the Celts were embodied in the natural world around them.

The poet’s body, ‘with the marks of childbirth’, mirrors the land, becoming a metaphor for ‘the failed harvests’ and ‘fields rotting to the horizon’. This image hints at Ireland’s history, to the millions who died of starvation and disease in the Irish famine. Its effects permanently changed Ireland’s landscape on almost every level. Through her ravaged body and the land, the souls of the dead find a voice. This again picks up on the ancient Celts’ belief that the visible, everyday world around them was intermingled with the otherworld. (Sound-wise, ‘harvest’ picks up on the harsher AR sounding words, ‘marks’ and ‘scar’, suggesting that the ‘failed harvests’ have created scars on the Irish psyche.)

This concept of the female body becoming the embodiment of Ireland echoes an old Irish poetic form called aisling, (pronounced ‘ASH-ling’) meaning dream or vision poem, which developed during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Irish language poetry. In an aisling, Ireland appears to the poet in a vision in the form of a woman, often young and beautiful but sometimes old and haggard. This female figure is generally referred to as a Spéirbhean (pronounced ‘spare van’) meaning sky-woman. She laments the current state of the Irish people and predicts an imminent revival of their fortunes. Boland breathes new life into this form.

As well as contrasts, both Ceres and the mother in this poem do have similarities; ‘the children devoured by their mothers’ picks up on Ceres and Persephone. If the earth is Ceres’ body then the underworld must be inside her. The famine of Ireland becomes a living hell and both mothers go there after their children. Ceres then is not so hollow. This connection alludes to Robert Graves’ book of essays, The White Goddess. In the book, Graves argues for the worship of a single goddess under many names, exploring the existence of a European deity, the ‘White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death,’ who lies behind the faces of the goddesses from various European mythologies. Graves also puts forward, that the male-dominant monotheistic God of Judaism and its successors were the cause of the White Goddess’s downfall, and thus the source of much of the modern world’s woe.

The speaker sees, ‘no other way’. We must look within and confront our past. The line hangs momentarily by itself before the anti-heroic rhyming couplet: ‘myth is the wound we leave/ in the time we have’. ‘Time’ is brought back a third time, while the ‘wound we leave’ picks up on ‘flesh and that history’. The word ‘leave’ has multiple meaning, both as what we leave behind in our lives and what we choose to omit from our time and history.

This takes us back to the title of Boland’s sequence. Women have almost always been kept in the back snugs of history. However, unlike the wilting heroines of the classical Greeks, it appears that women played a central role in ancient Celtic culture. Many of the most powerful deities were female. While the roles of women is a hotly contested subject among some Celtic scholars, many believe that ancient Ireland had a matriarchal society, where women governed and played active roles in political, social and religious life. They could be doctors, judges, poets and warriors, and were even known to lead their men into battle. For the ancient Celt, the essence of the universe and all its creativity was female. What finally dismantled this society was the spread of Christianity.

Boland attempts to bring women’s reality to the forefront, conjuring her own personal myth: ‘Which in my case is this’ a ‘March evening’ (giving us a time). ‘The lights have changed all day’. Boland’s world is real and moving. The typical Irish weather is in flux, unlike Ceres who remains in the static world of myth, denying her of humanity and the ability to change and evolve.

The sun in the sky symbolizes the Spéirbhean (the sky-woman). As the sun comes out, Boland holds up her hand ‘sickle-shaped’ to her eyes. The sickle’s semi-circular blade, (an agricultural tool, predominately used for cutting swathes of wheat) makes a powerful image, as she seeks to ‘pick out’ her daughter: (unlike Ceres’ ‘wheat at one height’) the daughter symbolizes the wheat, the new growth in Ireland; a revival in Ireland’s fortunes, a nod to the aisling formula.

But the darker aspects of history still linger. The ‘Dublin mountains’, associated with Celtic gods of the sky, symbolise barriers or obstacles to overcome. The sickle is also a smaller version to the scythe, death’s weapon; picking up on ‘wound’, while ‘all the other children in the distance’ alludes to the Irish offspring - ‘devoured’ by the famine. (In The White Goddess, Graves notes that the image of Ceres reaping with her sickle means castration; carrying resonance here of feminine empowerment.) Similarly, the Greek god, Cronus, often identified with the Roman Saturn, overthrows his father Uranus (the ruler of the universe) by castrating him with his sickle, then devours his own children to overcome a prophesy of his own displacement.

Another theory of Robert Graves’ is that Persephone is not only the younger self of Demeter, but she is in turn also one of three guises of the Triple Goddess – Kore (the youngest, the maiden, signifying green young grain), Persephone (in the middle, the nymph, signifying the ripe grain waiting to be harvested), and Hecate (the eldest of the three, the crone, the harvested grain). Such triple deities are common throughout world mythology and religions. In Celtic mythology, Brigid, who had two sisters of the same name, is considered a triple Goddess. This triple aspect is picked up in the mother and daughter relationship in this poem, with the phases of womanhood, maiden-mother-crone; the young daughter, turning rebellious and becoming a woman.

The poem ends with the image of the daughter’s ‘back turned’ on her mother. Once again, the opposite happens to Ceres. In the end she was able to influence Zeus into making Pluto bring her daughter up from the underworld and Persephone greeted her mother with open arms – and spring returned.

‘Her back turned’ represents a turning around of tradition. The free verse rhythm and irregular shape of the poem, with single lines that splinter off also reflects this. But instead of abandoning history, Boland seeks to find and repossess it. Pulling herself out of Ireland’s dark past, Boland uses mythology as her vehicle and the White Goddess, (the source and embodiment of poetical inspiration) – to speak up for the unsung who have lived outside history.

7

Every culture that has lost myth has lost,

by the same token, its natural healthy creativity.

Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture...

interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The Mayo Accent by Paul Durcan

Have you ever tuned in to the voice of a Mayoman?

In his mouth the English language is Sphagnum moss

Under the bare braceleted feet of a pirate queen:

Syllables are blooms of tentativeness in bog cotton;

Words are bog oak sunk in understatement;

Phrases are bog water in which syllables float

Or in which speakers themselves are found floating face upwards

Or downwards;

Conversations are smudges of bogland under cloudy skies.

Speech in Mayo is a turbary function

To be exercised as a turbary right

With turbary responsibilities

And turbary irresponsibilities.

Peat smoke of silence unfurls over turf fires of language.

A man with a Mayo accent is a stag at bay

Upon a bog rock with rabbits round its hooves.

Why then, Daddy, did you shed

The pricey antlers of your Mayo accent

For the tree-felling voice of a harsh judiciary

Whose secret headquarters were in the Home Counties or High Germany?

Your son has gone back to Mayo to sleep with the island woman

Who talks so much she does not talk at all.

If he does not sleep with her, she will kill him – the pirate queen.

PAUL DURCAN was born in Dublin, in 1944, and studied at University College Cork. In his first Arts exam he was given such poor marks that he had to switch to Archaeology and Medieval history. ‘The poetry don informed me with a benign smile that I did not have a proper understanding of poetry,’ he says.

Durcan has gone on to become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish poetry. He has published numerous collections and won a number of prizes, this poem comes from his 1990 Whitbread Prize-winning collection, Daddy, Daddy. That same year he appeared on a Van Morrison record, giving a unique vocal performance on a song he wrote, ‘In The Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll.’

Durcan’s often bold and hilarious poems invariably take a satirical approach, pointing out the narrowness of Irish life. This quirky, surreal, tragic-comic, erotic and playful piece takes us into the heart of the Mayo accent and thereby into the heart of Ireland. A world of metaphor can be drawn from his colourful descriptions, containing a deeper and darker world beneath the surface. The opening line’s question hooks us in and sets up the playful tone, echoic perhaps of a Celtic riddle, as it appears to address us, the reader. ‘Tuned in’ sets up the premise of the poem, as we tune in (as one would to a radio or television programme) becoming sensitive to the sounds and nuances of the Mayoman. Tune also suggests the musicality and tone of the accent.

The refreshingly musical lines echo the lilting West Country accent of county Mayo, while the vivid imagery becomes more heroic, reminiscent of ancient Celtic poetry. The Mayo accent is soft with ‘sphagnum moss’, ‘bog’, ‘bog oak’, ‘water’ and ‘turf’, all things that are firmly rooted in the peaty West of Ireland landscape.

The sounds of the words themselves are planted in the bog. Through the Mayoman’s accent, ‘the tree-felling voice of a harsh judiciary’ falls away. Joyce said: ‘The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius.’ While the Mayoman is using the ‘English language’ it is more in tune with the Irish language’s rhythms and music, giving it his own expressive, Celtic flair.

Durcan uses the rich imagery of the landscape to unravel the sounds and senses of ‘speech in Mayo’. Taking us line by line through the ‘voice’, ‘mouth’, ‘syllables’, ‘words’, ‘phrases’ and ‘conversations’. The Mayoman’s reassuring repetition of phrases are echoed in the poem, each phrase becoming like a different layer of bog. The whole boggy analogy to the Mayo accent takes us into the roots of language and poetry. To reiterate, what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘language is fossil poetry’. Thus through our tongue we make a very real and direct link to our ancestors.

As Durcan peels away at the ‘syllables’, the imagery takes us layer by layer into the landscape. Through the Mayoman’s accent, we are taken for a mythical trip back in time. Words ‘bloom’ and are alive with ‘sphagnum moss’ – the moss that grows on top of peat bog – with its verdant colour and soft texture. And there standing on top of the moss – and metaphorically on top of the English language – is the rather erotically charged image of the ‘bare braceleted feet of the pirate queen’, providing a striking juxtaposition. ‘Pirate’ conjuring a maverick, rebellion and adventure, ‘queen’ evoking nobility, beauty and power.

But who is this ‘pirate queen’; a random image plucked from the poet’s imagination? She is, in fact, Ireland’s first and greatest known feminist whose life and legend are so entwined that she has become the personification of Ireland herself. Many poets, playwrights, novelists and composers have been inspired by her, often using her as a metaphor for Ireland. (More recently her life has been made into a Broadway musical and is now being adapted into a major film.) Through the Mayo accent, then, Durcan unearths his Celtic roots. The ‘pirate queen’ was Granuaile, sometimes anglicised as Grace O’Malley, (with many other variations, as was common with names during that period.) She lived during the 16th century Tudor conquest of Ireland under Elizabeth I, and was one of the last Irish clan leaders to resist the English conquest of Gaelic Ireland. Her renowned seafaring family controlled routes along the west coast, charging a tax to fishermen and traders.

The alliterative B comes in with the introduction of the pirate queen’s ‘bare braceleted feet’. They are picked up again in ‘syllables are blooms’, ‘bog cotton’, ‘bog oak’ and ‘bog water’; connecting the pirate queen to the landscape. (The various assonant O sounds also connect to the title word ‘Mayo’.) The soundscape of the poem is enhanced by repetition, which has the hypnotic quality of a mantra or chant. Each syllable is like a step taking us deeper into the core of the Mayo accent (‘oak’, ‘sunk’ and ‘cotton’ also pick up on the K sound in ‘queen’).

The Mayoman’s tongue is alive, opening a portal to the ancient Celts. Every body of water had its attendant gods and goddesses, nymphs and spirits. Deep pools of water were considered entrances to the otherworld, which we will come to later. Language too was part of the Celt’s living universe and the poet’s words were magic. ‘Syllables float’ in ‘bog water’, and speakers floating in the river of language entice us into their sentient world.

The ‘speech’ takes us deeper into the ‘turbary function’ of the Mayo accent. ‘Turbary’, meaning a place where turf or peat is cut, sounds as tactile as its definition. Here, we are playfully taken into the local politics and history. The legal term, ‘common of turbary,’ is the ‘turbary right’ to cut turf from common ground or from someone else’s land. This right to take peat would have been particularly important in areas where firewood was scarce.

The poem’s repetition reaches its rhetorical climax with ‘turbary’. Beneath the English language of the Mayoman there is an underworld of ‘understatement’. While the ‘turf fires of language’ may initially paint the cosy image of a traditional oral way of life, there is also an inkling of heated talk and fiery tempers, which is picked up in the second half of the poem. The final layer of language takes us into a ‘Peat smoke of silence’, a subtle intimation to the loss of the Irish language.

In the first line of the second stanza, male sexuality comes to the fore: ‘a man with a Mayo accent is a stag at bay’. The poem moves suddenly from the general to the personal. In the third line it becomes clear that the poem is in fact directed to his ‘daddy’. The mellifluous lines from the first part have been an overture to this. This poem comes from Durcan’s acclaimed collection Daddy, Daddy where many of the poems address their difficult relationship. The phrase ‘at bay’ gives the impression of being trapped or cornered; perhaps signifying a hunt, suggesting the speaker has felt trapped by his father. On a national level it also reminds us of Gaelic rule coming under threat by English colonization.

The speaker then asks the rhetorical question directly of his father, revealing and releasing his pent-up anger while still wrapping his language in resplendent imagery. ‘The pricey antlers’ his father sheds become symbolic of male sexuality and aggression. By forfeiting his Mayo accent, the speaker sees that his father has effectively renounced his Mayoness and Celtic heritage. In Celtic mythology, the stag is a symbol of virility, speed and aggression. (The ‘rabbits round its hooves’ also symbolizes virility.) In Irish and Welsh traditions the stag often entices people into the otherworld. The antlers here become a subconscious talisman against his father.

The strong image of a ‘tree-felling voice of a harsh judiciary’ also has ancient Celtic resonances, alluding to the English settlers, who cut down many of Ireland’s trees to build their ships (picking up on the aforementioned legal term ‘turbary’). Decrying the felling of woodlands was a common theme in Irish language poetry. According to Declan Kiberd, in his book, Inventing Ireland, they were covert statements for, ‘bemoaning the fall of the Gaelic aristocracy, whose evicted leaders often took refuge in the woods.’

The legal term, ‘Judiciary’ also has a personal association, as Durcan’s father worked as a judge in the Dublin circuit court during his childhood. The speaker also makes reference to the ‘Home Counties’, which surround London, where nearly all the traditional country accents and dialects have died out. ‘High Germany’ goes further to the source of English. The Anglo Saxon’s Old English is derived mostly from German. Their colonization of England brought an end to the Celtic languages that would have been spoken in all parts of Britain before.

As the poem reaches its cathartic moment, the speaker refers to himself in the third person, ‘your son has gone back to Mayo’, as if the pain is so acute he must remove himself directly. The speaker symbolically turns his back on his father, and towards his roots ‘to sleep with the island woman’, ‘the pirate queen’. The speaker feels her force through the Mayo accent.

In 1546 Granuaile married the head of the O’Flaherty Clan but when he was killed in battle, she became the head of the O’Flaherty’s as well. She then married another powerful chief, Richard Burke, but divorced him after one year under Brehon law, keeping his title, and his Rockfleet castle near Newport, County Mayo. As England steadily gained control of Ireland, Granuaile came under increasing pressure to surrender to the English crown. An expedition from Galway attacked her castle on Clare Island, so she turned to piracy, blockading the port of Galway and attacking English ships in Galway bay.

In 1593, after the English governor of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham captured Granuaile’s two sons, she set sail for England to speak to Queen Elizabeth face to face. As legend has is it, on meeting the queen, Granuaile refused to bow, stating that she herself was a queen of her land and not a subject of the queen of England. Their discussion was carried out in Latin, as Granuaile spoke no English and Elizabeth spoke no Irish (hence the image at the beginning that, ‘the English language is… Under the bare braceleted feet of the pirate queen’; a subtle allusion to her speaking no English; the language being literally beneath her). Queen Elizabeth admired her pluck as an independent woman and reached a truce. Granuaile was said to be bare foot and dressed as an Irish Chieftain. Like Granuaile, Durcan will not surrender to his father’s laws, his desire to sleep with the pirate queen is a metaphor for wanting to reconnect to his Celtic roots.

His island woman, ‘Who talks so much she does not talk at all’ communicates on a deeper level, almost telepathically. This is part of the poem’s magic realism. It connects back to the ‘Peat smoke of silence’, becoming a symbol for the power of our native heritage where communication is beyond words. The ‘pirate queen’ is also representative of the muse, a goddess of inspiration. This idea of a female embodiment of the muse is prevalent in old Irish folklore and mythology. The image of the inspiring otherworld lady can be traced back to the lore of poet-seers, such as Oisín, (regarded in legend as the greatest poet of Ireland) who fell in love and ran away with the goddess Niamh to Tír na nÓg, The Land of Youth. When Durcan metaphorically goes to ‘sleep with the island woman’, he is surrendering himself to the embodiment of inspiration. Gods save the pirate queen!

8

All deities reside in the human breast.

WILLIAM BLAKE

The Shannon Estuary Welcoming The Fish Accent by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

The leap of the salmon

in darkness,

naked blade

shield of silver.

I am welcoming, full of nets,

inveigling

slippery with seaweed, quiet eddies

and eel-tails.

The fish

is nothing but meat

with very few bones

and very few entrails;

twenty pounds of muscle tauted,

aimed

at its nest in the mossy place.

And I will sing a lullaby

to my lover

wave on wave,

stave upon half-stave,

my phosphorescence as bed-linen under him,

my favourite, whom I, from afar have chosen.

(Translated by the author).

Born in Lancashire in 1952 to Irish parents, NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL moved to Ireland when she was five years old and was brought up in the Dingle Gaeltacht and in Nenagh, County Tipperary. She writes all her poetry in Irish, ‘The language of my soul’ she says. Coming out of a generation of writers when it was deeply unfashionable to write in Irish, Ní Dhomhnaill’s fresh and vivid work turned all that around, revolutionizing how Irish poetry is written. In 1981, Ní Dhomhnaill’s first collection, An Dealg Droighin was published. Since then she has published several collections in Irish and been widely translated into English by many of Ireland’s most prominent poets – including, Michael Hartnett, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and most frequently, Paul Muldoon – winning her international acclaim.

Despite Irish being taught in all Irish schools and being one of the EU official languages, many people today still consider Irish to be a dead language. However, in Ní Dhomhnaill’s hands, it is far from that. Her poems sing out with all the intensity of the modern world, while also encompassing otherworld creatures, gods and goddesses from Celtic mythology. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems pass between this world and the Celtic otherworld as fluently as the tides flow. She has also been a key influence in reclaiming the voice of the Irish woman, often inspired by the powerful women and goddesses from Irish folklore and myth.

This poem is no exception. It is an anthropomorphic, or personification poem, where the poet attributes human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal or object. In this case it is the tongue of the Shannon estuary that speaks. The poem gushes with sexually suggestive undertones as the salmon and Shannon interplay with male and female imagery all the way down the poem, such as the phallic ‘naked blade’, and the female ‘slippery with seaweed, quiet eddies.’ The first line: ‘The leap of the salmon/ in darkness,’ suggests ejaculation. The salmon becomes sperm swimming up the fallopian tubes of the river.

The word ‘inveigling’, meaning to tempt and lure, suggests the Shannon as the ‘welcoming’ temptress. Coming after ‘nets’, you can almost hear the word ‘angling’ inside it. Soundwise, the lines slip and gurgle off the tongue, echoing the lapping water and erotic imagery. The alliteration of the sibilant S, echoes the fish movement and sound of water. ‘Eddies’ is indicative again of Shannon’s nether regions, while ‘eel-tails’ is sperm-like.

Fish in Celtic mythology are tied in with fertility and vitality. In the second stanza, the description of the salmon continues to be erotically suggestive (‘nothing but ‘meat’, ‘bones’). Even the sounds of the words seem to have a slippery life of their own: ‘entrails’ echoes ‘eel-tails’, ‘nest’ echoes and is an anagram of ‘nets’. The long swim of the salmon coursing up river becomes indicative of the sperm’s journey to the ovum and its slim chance of making it. The Salmon’s journey to its ‘nest’ is a rite of passage. The first and second stanza are dominated by the sibilant S sounds, liquid Ls and dental Ds; the S and L sounds echo the water’s swishing movements and the solid Ds are reflective of the salmon’s ‘tauted’ and ‘aimed’ strength swimming up the estuary. This arduous task of the salmon, where all odds are against him, continues the metaphor of birth, of the sperm reaching the ovum.

In the final stanza, the liquid L’s alliteration: ‘I will sing a lullaby/ to my love’ creates a lilting effect in a way that is evocative of Yeats’s line from his famous poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’: ‘I hear lake water lapping’. Lullabies are also what we sing to our newborn; this is about creating a new life. The music then moves into the F and V sounds. Just as the forcing of breath through a constricted passage produces these fricatives, so the salmon reaches into the Shannon’s passage, sealing their coupling. The poem moves from dark to light, like the journey of birth to life, from ‘The leap of the salmon/ in darkness’ at the start, to the light of ‘phosphorescence’ at the end. The repetition and shape of the letter V (appearing in the words: ‘lover’, ‘wave’, ‘stave’, ‘favourite’ and ‘have’) also deepens the female sexual imagery.

‘Stave’ is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces on a sheet of music, each of which represents a different musical pitch. The lines are like waves of sound, picking up on ‘lullaby’ and the waves of water. It can also mean a set of verses or a stanza. Which brings us neatly to another salmon-leap of knowledge. The longest river in Ireland, the Shannon is also one of the chief rivers in Irish Celtic mythology. The Irish of Shannon, Sianon, means sea goddess who is the granddaughter of the sea god, Lir. Originally, Sianon was a beautiful woman who searched for the Well of Knowledge, where the Salmon of Knowledge lived. When she found it, she opened the cover and the water flowed out into a river. Rather than killing her, it transformed her into the river goddess.

Fish are symbols of wisdom in Celtic mythology and the salmon is the wisest of them all. In Ireland the salmon was used as a symbol of strength, wit and intelligence by the ancient seer-poets, not only due to mystical ideas but also due to its nutritional values and ability to swim against rapids and leap over high falls to reach the stream where they spawned. In Dáithí O hOgáin’s book, The Lore of Ireland, he notes that the salmon was so closely identified with human beings that each person was said to have a ‘salmon of life’ in their body.

The most popular Irish legend surrounding the Salmon is the story of the young Fionn Mac Cumhaill who met the druid and poet Finnegas, and studied under him. Finnegas had spent seven years trying to catch the salmon of knowledge, which lived in a pool on the Boyne river. Whoever ate the salmon would gain all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Eventually Finnegas caught it, and told the boy to cook it for him. While cooking it, a bubble appeared on the side of the salmon. Fionn went to pop it, burning his thumb and without thinking, put it in his mouth to cool it. This was enough to imbue him with all of the salmon’s extraordinary powers of strength and insight. Fionn went on to become one of the most powerful and celebrated mythological champions in Celtic mythology.

The salmon of knowledge here is perhaps more the salmon of carnal knowledge. As well as the erotic, birth and mythological implications of this poem, we also come to the issue of language: ‘Ceist Na Teangan’ or ‘The Language Issue’, the title of Ní Dhomhnaill’s most famous poem translated by Paul Muldoon, which begins: ‘I place my hope on the water/ in this little boat/ of the language’. The poem explores Ní Dhomhnaill’s decision not to write in English by likening her poems to a fragile reed boat, such as the one that carried Moses to the Pharaoh’s daughter: ‘not knowing where it might end up’.

This poem, written many years before, can be seen as a pre-text to ‘The Language Issue’. The salmon, inextricably linked to Irish folklore may be seen in this sense to symbolize the Irish language: her ‘favourite’ and ‘chosen’ tongue - swimming against the strong currents of English. Knowing this poem was initially conceived in Irish, adds an extra dimension and invisible background to the words. Like ‘The Language Issue’ this poem is set around water, but instead of a biblical myth, Ní Dhomhnaill chooses the salmon as a metaphor for the ancient beauty and folk-force of her mother tongue.

9

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience,

of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep

in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Synge Dying by Derek Mahon

I didn’t start it exactly but I was among

the first with bike and camera

to visit the wilder shores

of Kerry and Connemara

in search of old reality, stories,

folklore and traditional song.

I even introduced the clock to Aran.

Not real to myself, a sick man fighting for life

in the fey breezes and raw winds,

I was in two minds

about my right to be there

writing up the rough holy ground,

the roads, the ceili

and the hiring fair.

But there in words I found

a living world I couldn’t share;

now from the pillows

my gaze travels

past smoking chimneys to the distant hills

Born in Belfast in 1941, DEREK MAHON is described by his contemporaries as a living classic, a legendary stylist and master craftsman of verse with a profound sense of history and art. Night Crossing, his first collection appeared in 1968, since then he has published poems, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets now at work. He has received numerous awards including Lannan and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2007, Mahon received the David Cohen Prize for recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature.

Along with Heaney and Michael Longley, Mahon emerged during an intense flowering of literary activity in Northern Ireland. While their emergence helped create a renaissance in Northern Ireland literature that is still flourishing, it led to the writers becoming known as ‘Ulster’ or ‘Northern Poets’, labels none of them found helpful at the time. The developing strife of the Troubles in the seventies deepened Mahon’s alienation. Rejecting his roots, Mahon lived abroad for many years, in the UK, America and Canada in order to write. In recent years Mahon has returned to Ireland and has now settled in the historic harbour town of Kinsale, County Cork.

In this poem, from his 2010 collection, An Autumn Wind, Mahon adopts the voice of John Millington Synge (1871-1909). Poet, Gaelic revivalist, and one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights, Synge is best known for his play, The Playboy of the Western World, which famously caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre in 1907.

As the title suggests this poem is about ‘Synge Dying’, contemplating his life and works from (‘the pillows’) his deathbed. Mahon is no stranger to adopting personas in his work. Often choosing famous figures from the past that were misunderstood and lived as outsiders, such as Vincent van Gogh, Ovid and the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who was disgraced after meeting with Hitler.

Using the voice of Synge, Mahon adopts a simple and modest style that glides effortlessly along. But beneath the plain-spokenness there are many back-stage resonances, bringing us closer to Synge’s life, which has echoes of Mahon’s life as well.

The first stanza is seven lines long, the next stanza, six lines and the final one, five. This shortening mirrors the shortening of Synge’s life. The dualities in the poem are also reflective of Synge and suggestive of Mahon. Each stanza is in ‘two minds’ – between old and new, (‘camera’, ‘folklore’) soft and hard, (‘fey’ and ‘raw’) and life and death (‘living world’, ‘distant hills’).

In 1893, Synge left Ireland for Paris with the intention of becoming a writer. He took courses on Celtic studies at The Sorbonne (where Mahon also studied). It was in Paris where Synge had his fateful meeting with Yeats that would change his life. Yeats advised Synge to go to the Aran islands and study the people there. In Yeats’s own words, he said: ‘Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’

A year later, however, Synge contracted Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer, with which he battled with for the rest of his life. Eventually Synge was well enough to visit the Aran islands. He was immediately struck by the place. The Aran people incorporated a pantheistic paganism to their lives and had an extensive knowledge of Celtic mythology that had been handed down orally for generations. However, while Synge was beguiled by the Aran people, he was also aware that his presence, ‘with bike and camera’, would act as a catalyst for change. In spite of the seeming simplicity of the language in the poem, in fact every detail and word has been fastidiously chosen.

As well as the objects carrying their modern connotations they also become individually symbolic. The ‘bike’, suggesting progress, movement and balance is emblematic of Synge’s approach to Irish nationalism. Synge was a pacifist and did not want a part in the violent organisations to gain Irish independence. He decided the best thing he could do for Ireland would be to record and reflect its culture through his writing. Synge was using Ireland’s past to move forward, trying to strike a balance between the old Aran ways and a new nationalistic Ireland. The ‘camera’ becomes a record and also a mirror, capturing Synge’s image of the Aran people. When Synge showed his pictures to the islanders, they said they were seeing themselves for the first time. ‘The clock’ signifies perhaps how free the islanders were, their lives revolving in tune with the cycles of nature, rather than a man-made machination; before Synge they were living out of time and recorded history. The ‘clock’ also becomes a personal hint of Synge’s ill health, being aware of his own time running out.

In an age of free verse, Mahon has been a constant adherer to form. Rhymes and half rhymes weave their way through this poem. The rhymes of ‘there’ and ‘fair’, ‘ground’ and ‘found’ occur with the half-rhymes of ‘camera’ and ‘Connemara’. Other words are rhymed twice then echoed closely with a more subtle rhyme, such as ‘among’, ‘song’ followed by ‘Aran’ in the first stanza; ‘life’, ‘winds’ and ‘minds’ in the second, and ‘pillows’, ‘travels’, ‘hills’ in the third. This mixing of full rhymes, half rhymes against more subtle sound echoes is in keeping with the poem’s contrasts, while taking us deeper into the sounds of the words themselves. For example, the word ‘shores’ (rhyming subtly with ‘stories’) and the word ‘wilder’ before it, is a ghosting of the names Wilde and Shaw, (Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw) two of Ireland’s most famous and celebrated dramatists, whose plays had a strong influence on Synge. Both writers famously explored themes of making their female characters masculine and their male roles feminine. Synge used these ideas of gender bending in his plays, but added another dimension by incorporating Celtic mythology. Many of the characters in Synge’s plays echo Celtic gods and goddesses, exploring the powerful and violent roles women played in ancient Irish society.

The second stanza takes us further into Synge’s life and ideas. Synge was a private, undemonstrative man, Yeats describing him as meditative. ‘Not real to myself,’ picks up on this, while capturing some of Synge’s isolation. Despite removing himself from his own world and finding a ‘living world’ in Aran - where he was warmly welcomed, Synge was still an outsider.

A ‘sick man fighting for life’, doesn’t just allude to Hodgkin’s disease, it also refers to Synge’s struggle for his own personal beliefs in life. At age fourteen after reading Charles Darwin, Synge turned his back on the church, much to the shock of his family. He then rejected his Anglo-Irish heritage as a whole. (This is similar to Mahon who felt alienated by his background, and during the Troubles turned his back on Northern Ireland.) By rejecting his background Synge felt liberated. In his own words, he said, ‘Soon after I relinquished the Kingdom of God, I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland.’

The description of nature and the outside world (‘fey breezes and raw winds’) becomes a metaphor for Synge’s emotions and has many resonances. The word ‘fey’ means having or displaying an otherworldly, or fairylike aspect – giving the impression of vague unworldliness, (‘not real to myself’). But it also has its roots in the supernatural and can mean having clairvoyant powers. Etymologically it comes from Old English meaning ‘fated to die soon’, which carries extra force here with Synge’s lifelong illness. The word ‘raw’ symbolically suggests the Aran people being natural and unprocessed. Politically, it may refer to the ‘raw winds’ of change, at a time when Home Rule was gathering momentum in Ireland. But ‘raw’ is also redolent of how Synge considered literature. Poets such as Yeats were becoming increasingly tired of over-elaborate language for the sake of being poetical. Synge thought poetry should reflect life and therefore should be tough and tender (‘fey’ and ‘raw’). These ideas formed the roots of modernism. In Synge’s preface to his collected poems he says: ‘Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.’

Mahon’s layering is evident throughout this poem. The line ‘I was in two minds’, picks up again on ‘Not real to myself’, alluding to Synge breaking away from his background. The ‘two minds’ also suggests Synge struggling with his identity and his ‘right to be there’ as an upper middle class Anglo-Irish man. But he was also in ‘two minds’ or two tongues speaking both Irish and English, capturing the islanders’ turns of phrase and unique dialect, which he used in his plays. This duality is picked up in the language of his plays, which are praised for their musical and Shakespearean sounding rhythms. However, at the time, when The Playboy was first shown, many nationalists rejected the idea of a drunk, amoral and violent peasantry standing up for Ireland.

‘Writing up’ corresponds with ‘right to be there’, so that it is also ‘write to be there’, and ‘righting up the rough holy ground’ as if the ground is being ripped up and exposed. Ceili, the one Irish word in the poem, is isolated like an island surrounded by a sea of English. This is symbolic of both the Irish language and the Aran island’s isolation and separation from the mainland. It is also indicative of Synge’s solitariness, and of being between things.

It was Synge’s allusion to Cú Chulainn, which caused the hostile Dublin audience to jump up out of their seats. When Cú Chulainn returned to Eamhain Mhacha after battle, a throng of naked females greeted him to soothe his battle-rage. Synge wanted to use this, but of course could not have naked women on stage so he clothed them in undergarments (shifts). It was on the word ‘shifts’ that the riots broke out.

In the third stanza, Synge finds what he has been searching for: ‘in words’ he finds ‘a living world’. It was in the romance of old Ireland where Synge’s imagination could roam free, among the Aran people especially, in their stories and mythology. Living world is also line from Yeats’s poem, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. In the fourth stanza Yeats summarizes Synge:

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

That dying chose the living world for text.

The ‘living world’ becomes the crux of the poem. Death becomes the stimulus for Synge. Life and death are one. The closer Synge came to death – the closer he was to life. During his sick periods, Synge was bed-ridden but he still managed to write lying down, literally ‘from the pillows’. While ‘pillows’ is a soft image, it also has the connotations of being stifled, indicative of Synge’s oppressive background. Again the description of the outside world is a window into Synge’s sentiments.

The final image of ‘the distant hills’ as a symbol of death and the otherworld, takes us back up to the title, ‘Synge Dying’. Here another pun is ghosting in the background. For ‘Synge’ also read ‘sing’, bringing to mind the musicality of the Irish language, which was dying out. Even during Synge’s last days he poured all his energy into writing a new play, Deirdre of The Sorrows, taken again from Celtic Mythology. Synge never completed it, dying just weeks short of his 38th birthday.

Synge’s imagination saw ‘past {the} smoking chimneys’ of the choking modern world and his detractors. But ‘the distant hills’ is also a reference to Synge’s most famous character, Christy Mahon, the anti-hero in The Playboy. In the play, Christy is described as coming from ‘a windy corner of high distant hills.’ Through the allusions, puns and symbols, this poem plays with hiddenness and visibility. These aspects are explored in The Playboy - which resonates again with both Synge and Derek Mahon (the two Mahon’s sharing more than just their surnames). Towards the end of the play Christy seeks to define himself out of his own construction. Both Synge and Derek Mahon, also sought to define themselves beyond their background and the narrow-mindedness of their critics.

Despite those early protestations against Synge’s work, he is now recognised as one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, whose plays shaped and created Irish theatre. Similarly, Mahon’s work has managed to shun any political provincialism, his original poetic voice winning him international acclaim.

Just as Synge finds through words ‘a living world’ so do we find ‘a living world’ in the poem’s words. One of the delights of a good poem is the more you delve the more you discover. W.H. Auden called great art ‘clear thinking about complex feelings.’ Like a ‘clock’, beneath the seamless surface of this poem, hides the intricate and complex mechanics that could only have been made by a technical virtuoso.

10

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.

It is as if I had words instead of fingers,

or fingers at the tip of my words.

My language trembles with desire.

ROLAND BARTHES

Bean Sidhe by Mary O’Malley

She wants you for herself,

will have you, even as your lips

rasp a line across my hips.

When your mouth

whispers its open invocation

it is she who takes it in,

the swell of womb, wound, oh…

she will bleed me dry,

take your seed into her, grow

ripe. I see her cold green eyes

narrow as you enter me. Jealous.

I do not fear sleep in your arms:

I can not win. She will take the words

out of your dead mouth.

MARY O’MALLEY was born in 1954, Connemara, Co. Galway. She studied at University College Galway and now teaches there on an arts administration course. She also taught at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she lived for several years. O’Malley has published several collections with Salmon Poetry. In 2002 Carcanet published her selected poems, The Boning Hall. Her poetry sings with the ancestral cry of place, linked closely to Irish traditional music. Like Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan her poems explore the role of women in history, revisiting and rewriting myths with modern feminine twists.

In this poem, the speaker seemingly mixes that of losing a lover to a ‘jealous’ bean Sídhe, (Irish for fairy woman, pronounced Banshee and often spelled that way) a popular deity from Irish folklore, whose sharp cries and wails are heard when someone close by is about to die. A solitary woman spirit, the bean sídhe traditionally was said to mourn and forewarn those Irish families with the most ancient Celtic lineages.

In some literature the bean sídhe appears to lament a dead leader, usually after the death has occurred and according to age-old convention of Kingship, her sorrow is magnified by the fact that the dead hero was her mystical spouse. However in later folklore and as inter-marriage grew among the old Irish families, hearing the bean sídhe’s keening became a general omen of death. O’Malley gives an added twist to the fairy woman as she appears as a ‘jealous’ woman, a kind of metaphysical femme fatale - getting between the couple beneath the bed sheets.

The first three lines set up the dark sexual tension of this mystical ménage à trois, love triangle. Every carefully chosen word, balanced within the delicate music of this piece is an allusion to love making. The plosive ‘P’ sound in ‘lips’ ‘rasp’ and ‘hips’ underlines a sexual explicitness, while the harsh verb of ‘rasp’ echoes the cry of the bean sídhe. The slow OH sounds in ‘open’ and ‘invocation’ become reflective of an ‘open’ ‘mouth’ and the sounds of sexual bliss. ‘Invocation’ suggesting a summoning of the bean sídhe. In the next line the OH sound is transferred to the long OO sounds in ‘who’ ‘womb’ and ‘wound’.

This poem is a wonderful example of sound and sense working together. Alexander Pope wrote that the ‘sound must seem an echo to the sense’. Robert Frost later echoed this when he talked about the ‘sound of sense’ as poetry’s raison d’être. Here, O’Malley expands on these views, becoming also a sound of the senses. The sound-echoes sensuality is deepened through the physical end-rhymes that move down the poem, such as, ‘lips/hips’, ‘oh/grow’, ‘dry/eyes’.

The ‘mouth’ is central to this piece. The mouth kisses, ‘lips… across the hips’; ‘whispers’ and oohs. It’s also where we draw our breath; symbolizing the ghostly cry of the bean sídhe. ‘It is she who takes it in,’ suggests the bean sídhe taking the words and sounds – while also deepening the more erotic connotations. This supernatural femme fatal is similar to a succubus (a female demon, believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men.) or vampire, ‘she will bleed me dry,/ take your seed into her,’ sucking away the man’s life-force to become ‘ripe’ herself. This relates to the Sídhe-devil who appears often in Irish folklore, the leannan sídhe – the evil fairy-muse, who is both a muse and demon. Leannan sídhe is another one of Ireland’s mythological vampires. The fairy was a beautiful woman who was said to give inspiration to poets and musicians – but at the price of their lives. She would make the artist her lover, sharing with them her intelligence, creativity and magic, but when she left, the men would be so depressed, they would die. The bean sídhe in this poem has more than a warning cry, ‘her cold green eyes’ allude to Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster, first coined in Othello. ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,’ says Iago. ‘It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.’

While sex is on the tip of every word in this poem, it is subtly carried out, beneath the bed-sheets, rather than full frontal. Less becomes more, allowing for other associations to come into play. As ‘he’ enters her there is also an allusion that ‘he’ is entering the world of imagination or the otherworld of the bean sídhe, suggesting again that this is about the visitation of a muse. As with the best poems there is no absolute truth, rather there are many possible meanings which different readers are able to draw from. The fingers at the tip of O’Malley’s words may both stroke and strangle.

Perhaps the death which occurs is not to be taken literally at all. The ‘dead mouth’ can be symbolic of climax, la petite mort, meaning the little death, referring to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the ‘seed’ or life force. ‘She will take the words/ out of your dead mouth.’ For ‘words’ also read seed. And as everything runs to seed, so in the end – like a Freudian analysis – everything slides back to sex. This takes us back to the art of poetry itself and the feeling one gets while reading it. Literary theorist and philosopher, Roland Barthes spoke of la petite mort as the chief objective of reading literature. He metaphorically used the concept to describe the feeling one should get when experiencing great writing. Henry Woudhuysen, Professor of English at University College London, speaks along similar lines. Exploring the sex in Shakespearean Sonnets, Woudhuysen believes that the sonnet itself is a sort of sexual act and that language is a sexual experience. ‘It’s not that words can reproduce the sexual experience of making love,’ he says, ‘But that words are making love in their own way.’

11

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

SIGMUND FREUD

A Mayfly by Paul Muldoon

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein

would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cú Chulainn,

Cú Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear

of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,

his own spear from which he managed to augur

the fate of that part-time cataloguer,

that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush

as its own tumult transcends the thrush,

the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches

from the larch’s lowest branches,

the lowest branches of the larch

that model themselves after a triumphal arch,

a triumphal arch made of the femora

of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

Born in County Armagh in 1951, PAUL MULDOON’S first collection New Weather was published by Faber when he was just twenty-one. In 2002 his collection, The Annals of Chile won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the following year his collection Moy, Sand and Gravel won both the Griffin and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. From 1999 – 2004, Muldoon held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry. Currently he is head of the Creative Writing programme at Princeton University, America, where he now lives. He is also the lyricist and guitarist of a recently formed rock band called Rackett.

Muldoon’s casual use of archaic words, understated wit and punning are the order of the day. When Muldoon first appeared, his sly, allusive voice was often difficult for audiences to grasp. He is credited as being the only poet who can rhyme ‘dog’ with ‘cat’. No other poet is more alive to the ‘linky-lick’ of language as Muldoon. In the words of Cork poet, Pat Cotter, ‘Muldoon eats the full Oxford English Dictionary for breakfast, dinner and tea, not simply to pepper his poems with words of which even the most educated are ignorant, but to get intimate with the etymologies and almost forgotten nuances of even the commonest of words.’

Reading and listening to Muldoon, one is immediately struck by his fresh voice, as if he is gently whispering something especially for you in your ear. While he can certainly be inventive and impish, he is also a strict formalist. Nearly all his poetry rhymes and follows a traditional form.

This poem comes from his 2010 collection, Maggot. The poem is a sonnet, using rhyming couplets, but Muldoon also adds his own constraint. At the end of each couplet, each end-word is repeated and begins the following couplet, creating a kind of relay device. This mirrors the subject of the poem. Repetition and linking similar sounding words has become a popular trait of Muldoon’s. The couplets in this poem imply an erotic coupling, while the pattern and partnering of repeated words suggests that life is all about relationship, repetition and replication.

The word ‘mayfly’ comes from ‘Ephemera’ (because of its short-lived life), which originally comes from the Greek, ‘ephemeros’ that means ‘lasting only a day’. These key words, which open and close the poem, suggest how everything is connected and related. End-rhymes and internal rhymes with word-repetition weave their way through the body of the poem like a DNA spiral.

The first part refers to the conception of Cú Chulainn, Celtic mythology’s most famous and celebrated hero in Ireland. A teenage champion, he is often referred to as ‘the Irish Achilles’ for his short but glorious life. Various stories tell of his birth, death, and other adventures. He is the central character of the epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge or Cattle Raid of Cooley, in which he single-handedly defends the Ulaid against an invasion launched by Queen Medbh of Connacht. When Cú Chulainn becomes enraged in battle, he undergoes a ‘ríastra’ or ‘distortion’, a kind of battle-frenzy which transforms him into an unrecognisable monster who knows neither friend nor foe, similar to The Incredible Hulk.

The most familiar version of Deichtine’s conception of Cú Chulainn is that, while grieving the loss of a foster-son, she drinks some water from which a tiny mayfly passes into her mouth; the creature then becomes Cú Chulainn. Although she was married to Sulatam, the sun-god Lugh is considered to be his father. Robert Graves notes in, The White Goddess, that Lugh was incarnate in Cú Chulainn, flying into Deichtine’s mouth in the form of a mayfly. This is picked up in the third line when Cú Chulainn ‘had it within him’, suggesting both the warrior spirit of Lugh, and also his magical powers of prophesy. Lugh was king of the Tuatha Dé Danann and led them into their second battle called Magh Tuiredh or Moytura, a major saga text of the mythological cycle. Incidentally, Lugh also instituted an event similar to the Olympic games called the Assembly of Talti, which finished on Lughnasadh (1 August), the harvest festival, still celebrated in some parts of Ireland today.

Cú Chulainn was almost undefeatable in battle due to the magical ‘shaft of his own his spear’ which sang for the blood of his enemies. (Lugh’s magical weapon was also a spear.) The spear is a symbol of inspiration and love in poetry, similar to the Cupid’s arrow. John Keats said, writing of his muse and love, Fanny Brawne: ‘…everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’

The poem’s contrast of mythology (Cú Chulainn’s magical conception) and fact (‘the femora/ of a woman… filed under Ephemera’) touches on Cú Chulainn’s mythopoeia, exploring the idea whether mythology is built out of fact or vice versa. Was Cú Chulainn once a living man, who gathered the attributes of gods over time, or was he an ancient deity like Lugh, stripped of some of his divinity to make him more akin to human worshippers?

The word ‘augur’ means a sign or omen that something is about to happen. Originally, in the classical world it referred to a religious official whose main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds; druids also divined the future this way. ‘Augur’ also brings to mind Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist, Hamlet. (Again, both characters die young and by the sword.) In the final act, Hamlet decides to ‘defy augury’, finally taking action by sword-fighting Laertes, knowing ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow…’ In the previous scene Hamlet suggests an augury when he says, ‘The cat will mew and dog will have his day.’ This, by chance, has resonance to Cú Chulainn’s name. As a young child Cú Chulainn first displayed his strength after slaying a fierce guard-dog in self-defence owned by Cullan. In apology to the owner, he promised to guard his gate until the dog was replaced, thus earning the name, Cú Chulainn, meaning ‘Cullan’s Hound’ in Irish.

While ‘fate’ is generally referred to as ‘destiny’ or ‘chance’, its initial meaning comes from ‘the Fates’, (in Greek and Roman mythology) the three goddesses who presided over the birth and life of humans. Celtic gods and goddesses had a similar function. The People of Sídhe (pronounced ‘shee’) from early Irish Celtic mythology, were later referred to as ‘the fair people’, and sometimes called ‘fey’ after ‘the Fates’.

Cú Chulainn was a wild warrior and a great lover. His heart (or ‘the shaft of his own spear’), often led him into sticky situations. Like the mayfly that lives to re-produce, Cú Chulainn’s life is fast-paced and passionate. The druid, Cathbadh prophesied that Cú Chulainn’s life would be short-lived, but also that his name would live on in everyone’s mouth (as the mayfly ‘would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth’.)

The ‘cataloguer’ is the record keeper. In Ireland the cataloguers were the learned poets, the highest ranking of which were called Ollúna (meaning ‘chief poets.’ In modern Irish Ollamh [singular] now refers to a professor in Ireland.) In ancient Ireland, Olluná were walking encyclopaedias, learned in history, chronology, antiquities and the genealogies of Ireland. As the closest person to the king, olluná knew all the rights, etiquette, duties and tributes of the kings of Ireland. Through the ‘cataloguer’, then, even the mayfly ‘transcends the crush’ of time. (In more recent history, Cú Chulainn became the symbol of Irish Republicanism. A bronze sculpture of the dying champion stands in the Dublin GPO, commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916.)

Trailing behind the initial definition of ‘crush’, is its connotation of an intense infatuation, picking up again on Cú Chulainn’s promiscuity and short-life. As with any poem, when reading closely, one must pay particular attention to the etymology of words, but with Muldoon we must be constantly on our toes. These things are not done for mere show, every word serves the purpose of the poem. The word, ‘crush’ comes from Old French via Middle English, meaning ‘gnash teeth’; an oblique reference here to Cú Chulainn’s battle-frenzy. During his monstrous transformation, Cú Chulainn is described as having gnashing teeth that showered sparks.

Keeping in mind the erotic undertone of the piece, we can see that in fact the whole poem is an analogy of reproduction and the continuation of life. The ‘mayfly’, then becomes a seed, or more precisely, a ‘sperm’ ejaculated (‘taking off’) from the phallic ‘spike’ and feminine ‘mullein’ (a type of flower) and entering the womb, (‘mouth’) of Deichtine. The word ‘shaft’ is full of erotic overtones, as is ‘tumult’, carrying the connotations of climax. (It also has the same root meaning as tumescent from tumere, ‘to swell’.) Behind the analogy’s veil, a real birth is being suggested; picking up on an incestuous conception; and the question of whether Cú Chulainn came from history or mythology.

The ‘thrush’, as a divine messenger in Celtic mythology, picks up on ‘augur’. The ‘thrush’ may also refer to the start of the story about Cú Chulainn’s birth, where a flock of birds descends on Emain Macha and eats all the grass. Deichtine and the Ulstermen chase after the birds, which eventually leads to Cú Chulainn’s magical conception. (‘Tipped off’ also becomes a pun on the word ‘tip-off’; receiving a piece of confidential information, alluding to the auguries of birds.)

Continuing the symbolism of reproduction, ‘the larch’s lowest branches’ symbolize the nether regions. (The ‘branches’ also pick up on the family tree, the poet being ‘the cataloguer’ of genealogy.) The larch is essentially a mountain tree. The ‘lowest branches’ meet together a few years after planting: ‘that model themselves after a triumphal arch’. As well as its sexual suggestion, ‘arch’ also means someone who is self-consciously teasing and playful, a nod here to Muldoon’s own mischievous style.

The word ‘arch’ also conjures the entrance to the underworld in Celtic mythology. Here, we pick up again on The People of Sídhe. The underworld was often thought to be in the Sídhe-mounds, or fairy-forts, which archeologically are some of the world’s oldest burial chambers. The largest and best preserved lies in Newgrange, County Meath. The entrance of which is a square archway that is elaborately ornamented with a spiral pattern. As well as the mounds containing the bodies of the deceased, they also housed objects (‘Ephemera’). In some versions of mythology, Newgrange is also where Cú Chulainn was conceived. Etymologically, the word ‘arch’ comes from the word ‘bow’, which relates to ‘femora’, meaning the bone of the thigh or upper hind limb.

This ‘model’ of the ‘femora’ echoes another ancient Irish custom. Evidence shows that the ancient Celts presented models of diseased limbs to deities at various healing shrines, with the idea that the gods and goddesses would heal the limb presented. This diseased limb (‘femora’) picks up on an earlier word ‘thrush’. As well as ‘thrush’ meaning a songbird it is also a common infection that occurs in the female genital area. In another version of Cú Chulainn’s birth, Deichtine’s brother, Conchobar Mac Nessa (the amorous King of the Uliad, who had several wives), is said to be the father of Cú Chulainn after an incestuous union, a further allusion to the mythos of Hamlet, which is concerned with incest.

‘Filed’, (a pun on the Irish for ‘poet’: ‘file’) etymologically comes from Middle English, a verb meaning ‘to string documents on a thread’, relating again to ‘the cataloguer’ and to the DNA thread carrying genetic information.

Here, ‘Ephemera’ is used in its librarian definition: a class of collectable items not originally intended to last for more than a short time, such as tickets, posters, flyers, and cards. These items are often kept as mementoes. This relates to poetry and to the poet who collects scraps of words, notes down odd lines from day to day, then forms them into memorable lines: poems. In this way ‘Ephemera’, the blueprint or seed, lives on. Like the mayfly that lives to reproduce and the promiscuous Cú Chulainn, everything is about reproduction in this poem, mirroring the natural world.

The poem is also ‘taking off’ from another poem by one of the last century’s great poets, Louis MacNeice. Also from Northern Ireland, MacNeice has been a notable influence on Muldoon. His first masterpiece is a poem called ‘Mayfly’. In the poem, MacNeice imagines the mayfly ‘flirting and posturing over the water/ Goes up and down in the lift so many times for fun’. As with Muldoon’s, the poem is erotically charged. The ephemeral nature of the mayfly also links to the fly-by-night aspects of the poetic muse. The goddess of inspiration may be a gift when she comes, but her visits are erratic and (like the mayfly) often short-lived. The mayfly in MacNeice’s poem also remarks: ‘the trouble with us mayflies / Is that we never have the chance to be grown up.’

As well as love, reproduction and the mythological allusions, this poem is about causality (cause and effect). How a tiny mayfly becomes the greatest Irish mythological champion, Cú Chulainn. How his spear can augur great battles. How birds can predict events. How a thrush can cause avalanches. How the larch becomes a triumphal arch. How ‘Ephemera’ is catalogued in a library. How MacNeice’s ‘Mayfly’ feeds into Muldoon’s ‘A Mayfly’. And so on.

Musically, the poem is full of nuanced sounds, echoing the causality motif. The poem begins with the AY sound (‘A Mayfly taking’); ‘mayfly’ and ‘mullein’ alliterate at the beginning and end of the first line. The short UN sound of ‘mullein’ is echoed in the onomatopoeic ‘blunder’ (a relation of the word ‘blind’; ‘love is blind’.) The beginning vowel and consonance sound of ‘Deichtine’ picks up on ‘taking’ from the first line. The IN sound at the end of Deichtine also echoes with the IN sound of ‘mullein’. ‘Mouth’ alliterates with ‘mayfly’ and ‘mullein’, bringing them back before they fade into ‘Cú Chulainn’. The short U sound in ‘blunder’ is echoed through ‘become’ and ‘Cú Chulainn’ - not to mention the slant-rhyming couplet of ‘mullein’ and ‘Cú Chulainn’. All these sound-echoes already and we are only two lines into the poem. The commas, coming at the end of every second line, help break up the rhythm and transfer the weight of words as they are carried into the next line.

At the nucleus of this poem, is the mystery of where small things may lead. Every poem is ‘A Mayfly’, something that may fly to become something great in people’s minds or become lost through the chilly annals of time. Like Cú Chulainn, the poem is conceived from that initial ‘mayfly’ or seed of an idea – a seed that may take off within writers’ and readers’ imaginations in years to come. Just as the DNA of our ancestors lives on inside us, the DNA of MacNeice’s ‘Mayfly’ hovers on through this one. In the words of Wallace Stevens: ‘Things are because of interrelations or interactions.’ This poem, like all good poems, is about poetry itself. Like the suggestion of Cú Chulainn’s incestuous making, metaphor also sleeps around; having to know everything in the biblical sense, or in this case the Celtic mythological one.

12

The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful

ROBERT PENN WARREN

Dark of the Moon by Patricia Monaghan

(From Soldier’s Heart: The Book of Sweeney)

How she changes, my lady queen, how she changes.

When she was fat and fair-faced, I shed my

feathered cloak and ran with wolves beneath her

gleaming glance. How we howled then, how we

howled and ran.

But she grows lean and stern of late. Tonight she is a

somber shadow, darkness on darkness. We have

grown silent, we dwellers in cold forests. I crouch

against the hard bark and hear the yew breathe.

I remember warm heat and song, stone walls hung with

fur, the sweetness of mead. Huge men draping

themselves against pale women. A harper playing slow

airs. Dogs beneath our feet, growling in sleep.

Everything dark with passion and gloom. Everything

dark while fire blazed and candles gleamed on metal.

In this forest, no fire. Only waiting, in cold darkness.

In that time I was a warrior. I fought the darkness.

I demanded light, light, light. I killed for light.

I burned a fat slave alive, to illuminate my halls.

I pressed oil from a silkie, to light my bronze lamps.

Such light deepens shadows. I called for more light,

more light. And the shadows grew and deepened.

Beyond this forest are kings like that. I fear them. They

would plunder the forest for fuel. They would take

this old yew and leave me no Home. They would

steal my lady queen to burn in their braziers.

Then darkness would eat me. Cold would devour me.

I would die naked beneath a blackthorn, keening for

the moon.

Born in 1946, PATRICIA MONAGHAN was raised in Alaska and died in 2012 during the writing of this book after a battle with cancer. She was Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at DePaul University, Chicago, where she taught Irish Studies, joining folklore, mythology and the arts. She is the author of more than sixteen books of non-fiction including The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore and four collections of poetry, two of which are published with Salmon Poetry. Her latest collection, Sanctuary was published posthumously by Salmon in 2013.

While Monaghan was better known as an American writer, she held Irish citizenship and returned to her ancestral homeland annually. Her writing and sensibility permeates with the ancient folklore and mythology of Ireland celebrating the mythic in the ordinary, the spiritual in the mundane, the sensuous in the scientific. She was also a leading figure and pioneer of contemporary women’s spirituality movement. In 2004 she won the Pushcart prize for literature. Her 2003 collection, Homefront, explores the experiences of veterans’ children.

This piece (a War Poetry Contest prizewinner) is the seventh section of a twelve-part sequence called, ‘Soldier’s Heart The Book of Sweeney.’ Sweeney the mad, or Suibhhne Geilt in Irish, is the legendary tale of an Ulster king. (Sometimes attributed to an historical king, believed to have lived in the 7th century CE, who went mad after the battle of mag Rath in 637.) Medieval manuscripts tell the story in a mixture of poetry and prose, where the war-crazed Sweeney roams Ireland, living naked in trees believing he is a bird. Monaghan’s version adopts a similar prose-poem style. The Legend of Mad Sweeney is also sometimes depicted as an allegory, marking the end of paganism, heralding a new era of Christianity.

Many poets have been attracted to Sweeney’s crazed wanderings, most notably, T.S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ and Heaney’s translation ‘Sweeney Astray’. While often portrayed as a figure of the mad artist, less focus has been made on the effect that war had in causing his madness. Monaghan’s version, written at the beginning of the second Gulf war, goes to the heart of the mythology in this way, reproducing Sweeney as an archetype of the serviceman suffering from Soldier’s Heart, also known as shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In her introduction to the poem, Monaghan writes how the reality of a veteran’s life is rarely described in myth and literature:

Mythology depicts the warrior hero who walks forth

unchanged by war’s brutality to reign as a kindly king,

rear children as a devoted father, and love women

as a tender husband… But those who have lived with

returning veterans know that war is not easily forgotten.

A daughter of a Purple Heart veteran of the Korean conflict, Monaghan speaks from direct experience. In the course of Sweeney’s time in the wilderness, living with the natural cycles of day and night, he begins to become harmonized with nature. During his wanderings Sweeney transforms into a bird, shedding his clothes and living among the treetops – taking on the powers of a druid and poet. While it is often suggested that Sweeney’s transformation into a bird was a consequence of his madness, shape-shifting is a common theme in Celtic mythology. Like the magical druids, poets also change one thing into another, using metaphor. By shedding his clothes, Sweeney is revealing his true self, while birds in Celtic mythology are often depicted as messengers from the otherworld.

The first line: ‘How she changes my lady queen,’ displays his poetical propensity of personification while alluding to his own kingship. However, rather than being a leader of war, Sweeney is now king of every blooming thing. This poem is all about change, (the third word in the piece) from the changing phases of the moon, to Sweeney’s transformation into a bird and his changing attitude towards his violent past. Throughout the poem also is the interplay of dark and light, which switches from stanza to stanza.

The poem uses the changing phases and faces of the moon as a device for Sweeney’s state of mind. ‘Fat and fair-faced,’ ‘gleaming glance’, when he was a blood-lusty warrior; to ‘lean and stern of late.’ Shedding his ‘feathered cloak’ and running ‘naked with wolves’ alludes to another transformation. Wolves feature prominently in Celtic mythology. The Irish word for wolf is Mac Tire, meaning literally the Son of the Countryside and has associations with human transformation. In Monaghan’s own Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore she describes the wolf as a creature that could see into the otherworld. Down through the ages, the full moon has strong connotations of transformation – especially into werewolves.

While the moon may appear as a separate deity she is in fact held up as a mirror, Sweeney’s ‘somber shadow’ or alter ego, reflecting his thoughts. This is Sweeney’s dark night of the soul. History is littered with references of madness being linked to cycles of the moon. The word lunacy deriving from the Latin for moon, ‘luna’. As a modern cultural reference, there is an allusion to the English experimental rock band, Pink Floyd, whose eighth studio album, Dark Side of The Moon explores themes of conflict, greed and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by band member Syd Barrett’s descent into madness.

As Sweeney reflects on his violent past he turns inwards to nature, hearing ‘the yew breathe’. He has turned to the forest for healing. The yew tree in ancient Irish law is one of the nobles of the wood and has long been associated with sanctuary. The yew is often best known for its connection with graveyards, where they are widely found beside churches all over Ireland and Britain – often dating back before the settlement of the church. Sweeney, taking refuge in the yews, is the best-known example in ancient Irish literature. During his wanderings he shelters at many yew wood locations, such as Gleann Bolcáin, known to be the place where mad men would reside. Later he shelters in a yew by a well at Ros Comáin and again in a yew by the church at Druim Iarainn. Nature and sanctuary play a key role in Sweeney’s transformation. The ancient Celts believed nature could heal the emotional wreckage of war. Today, with the growing number of soldier’s living with post-traumatic stress disorder, nature-focused therapeutic retreat centres are becoming an increasingly popular form of treatment.

Paradoxically in Irish folklore the yew is also connected with war. Yew was a favourite for making bows and spears. These dual associations of sanctuary and war connects with the goddess of the land, thought of as the land of Ireland itself, who both protected her own living and dead and waged war on her enemies. Numerous poems about the Fianna also refer to Ireland as the land of yew trees.

In the third stanza, Sweeney returns to the memory of light ‘heat and song’ but paradoxically it is in the light and warm setting of ‘fur, the sweetness of mead’ where darkness dwells… ‘Huge men draping themselves against pale women’ signals their depravity and insatiable lust for power. ‘Dogs beneath our feet, growling in sleep’ symbolizes their dominance. Sweeney now sees that ‘everything {was} dark with passion and gloom.’ The ‘pale women’ seem to mirror the moon, becoming the object of his elegy; like the moon they represent his own femininity coming out. The ‘harper playing slow airs’ is another symbol of Ireland.

As a warrior, Sweeney describes how he ‘fought the darkness.’ Demanding ‘light light light. I killed for light.’ Preluding the shocking image: ‘I burned a fat slave alive, to illuminate my halls. I pressed oil from a silkie,’ Sweeney was known to have an insatiable appetite for killing. Legend says that Sweeney resorted to violence whenever crossed. He was a bold and bloody warrior with an addictive relationship to battle. This is the second time that the word ‘fat’ appears corresponding to fits of madness at full moon. ‘Silkie’ (also selkie or selky) refers to the seal people, an enchanted race appearing in Irish, Scottish and Icelandic folklore. Some scholars remark upon the claim of seal ancestry by certain coastal families in Ireland, the Conneelys, Flahertys, MacNamaras, Sullivans, and many families on Achill Island. In Donegal, it was believed that human beings were seals in fur coats.

‘Beyond this forest is kings like that’, displays how the kings’ lust for power and war means they have lost respect for nature. ‘They would steal my lady queen to burn in their braziers’ shows the extent of manic disorder, indicative of the megalomania that has been prevalent in many tyrants throughout history. Sweeney in his madness though, now faces his demons. Just as Sweeney ‘demanded light, light, light’ during his darkest periods, it is by looking at his darkness that he begins to see the light. ‘Light, light light’ is also an allusion to the greatest play about madness, Hamlet (‘Lights, lights, lights.’ Polonius says in Act III Scene II). In the play, the eponymous anti-hero famously employs ‘an antic disposition’ to get to the truth. The theme of light/dark imagery is something Shakespeare used regularly in his work.

When Sweeney lived with light he was a violent warrior, demanding light, ‘killing for light.’ But ‘such light deepens shadows.’ It is often only at moments in our lives when we hit rock bottom that we are faced with our true reality and we become fully human. Monaghan’s spiritual approach to the poem reveals that it is in the dark we really see ourselves for who we are. Sweeney’s suffering has force-fed him with a bitter-dose of reality and here he begins to see what being human is about. Retreating to nature to heal his wounds and purge his sins, Sweeney becomes file, a seer-poet, seeing into the darkness. In the end, we cannot escape our own conscience.

While this poem depicts an ancient legendary Irish king, it has universal truths that are just as important today. Where as Sweeney absconded into the real forests, Monaghan’s father escaped into the wilderness of drink. In a modern context, this version of Sweeney’s crazed wanderings is a metaphor of the serviceman who returns home from war and is unable to settle back to his previous life and becomes homeless. According to a study by researchers at Stanford University on post-traumatic stress disorder, the number of cases is expected to grow beyond 500,000 in the United States alone. In Monaghan’s introduction to the poem, she writes that almost 300,000 veterans from the Vietnam War are homeless; six times the number of American soldiers who died in that conflict. She continues, ‘In total there is something like nineteen million living war veterans, almost two million of them from the first Gulf War. Only those closest to them know whether they awaken in the deep night, screaming from nightmares; whether they are so emotionally cold that their families dissolve; whether they become so abusive that their children are gravely damaged; whether they drink themselves to mask the horror they have lived.’

As long as leaders ‘plunder… for fuel’ and deal with their differences through conflict and bloodshed, mad Sweeney will always live among us, his ‘somber shadow,’ drifting the fringes of society – ‘keening for the moon.’ The final dual image of dark and light is the blackthorn, a symbolic plant of Celtic mythology heavily associated with the otherworld. Here it is Sweeney’s crown of thorns and his shelter from a cruel world. Many poets have written about the blossom and thorn of blackthorn and perhaps here it has a particular fragrance with the old proverb on where to shelter from lightning: ‘Beware of an oak, it draws the stroke; avoid an ash, it counts the flash; creep under the thorn, it can save you from harm.’

Through Monaghan’s personal relationship of living with a war-veteran and her deep knowledge of Celtic mythology, she redresses the naked warrior from art and myth. Sweeney’s keening is a cry to his conscience, alluding to the people he slaughtered. The moon shows the same face but Sweeney in his madness now sees the other side – the dark of the moon.

13

There can be no stronger proof of the

impoverishment of our contemporary culture

than the popular – though profoundly

mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

ROLLO MAY

The Eagle by Matthew Sweeney

My father is writing in Irish.

The English language, with all its facts

will not do. It is too modern.

It is good for plane-crashes, for unemployment,

but not for the unexplained return

of the eagle to Donegal.

He describes the settled pair

in their eyrie on the not-so-high mountain.

He uses an archaic Irish

to describe what used to be, what is again,

though hunters are reluctant

to agree on what will be.

He’s coined a new word

for vigilantes who keep a camera watch

on the foothills. He joins them

when he’s not writing, and when he is.

He writes about giant eggs,

about a whole new strain.

He brings in folklore

and folk-prophecy. He brings in the date

when the last golden eagle

was glimpsed there. The research is new

and dodgy, but the praise

is as old as the eagle.

MATTHEW SWEENEY was born in Donegal in 1952. He is the poetry world’s inimitable, dark fabulist, excavating strange narratives from his unconscious and presenting them like dreams (often nightmares) or short films, which he fuses into terse pieces of verse. His poems, often short and written in block form, act like rune stones – calling up an ancient mystery and magic. He has published numerous collections, including Selected Poems (Cape, 2002). He won the 1987 Cholmondeley Award and has twice been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Although this poem is a bit of a departure from his usual mischievous prickly style (perhaps because it is a personal piece) it still retains his signatory narrative succinctness while at the same time remaining mysterious. As with many of his poems, Sweeney takes a true event and twists it into a modern day or post-modern day fable – turning the everyday into mythology.

In this case, it is the return of the eagle to Donegal. In the mid 1800s, one could have seen a dozen eagles in a day in some places, watching them swoop after hares or grouse from Kerry to Donegal. However, in the latter half of the 19th century, eagles were completely wiped out after years of persecution by sheep farmers, gamekeepers and collectors vying for the eggs. More recently, in 2001 (eleven years after this poem’s publication) a new project got underway to re-introduce the golden eagle in Glenveagh National Park, Co. Donegal.

No bird symbolizes majesty and grandeur quite like the eagle does. Many nations over millennia have adopted it as a symbol of power, from the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt and the Byzantine Empire to the more recent Third Reich and United States of America. But, although the ancient Celts believed the eagle to be one of the oldest creatures, exceeded only by the salmon in wisdom and age, it plays a surprisingly small part in Irish mythology. This suggests why the ‘father is writing in Irish’ – the bird is so old it needs an ancient language to restore it. ‘The English language, with all its facts’ is in opposition to myth so ‘will not do’.

Irish here offers something English cannot. Like the islands, the English and Irish sit side by side but are incongruous to each other and divided by their history. The modern English language in this poem has become associated with the relentless rat race of modern day living, while Irish is perceived as wild and romantic – full of legends, heroes and gods: ‘folklore and folk-prophecy.’ Many Irish poets prefer to write in Irish. The Irish language poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh calls Irish his ‘emotional language’.

The ‘too modern’ English suggests that not all modernization is progress. The speaker associates the English language with, ‘plane-crashes’ and ‘unemployment’, modern terms and ‘facts’ that have become part of the standard in daily life. It is ill-equipped to describe mysteries: ‘the unexplained return/ of the eagle to Donegal’. Notice how the sound of ‘eagle’ actually nests within ‘Donegal.’

Donegal is the largest Gaeltacht area in the country and is seen as a bastion of Gaelic culture. The eagle is as old as the hills or the ‘not-so-high-mountain’, suggesting Ireland and the eagle are one. Sweeney here attempts to create a renewed mystery and mythology. His father goes on to describe ‘the settled pair’ but we are not let into the description. Like the eagles in their eyrie, the Irish is left far away or hidden, perhaps rendering it more powerful by its invisibility; reminding us how we have become cut off from our native mythology.

The second half of the second stanza sees the past, present and the future running alongside each other, (‘what used to be, what is again‘, ‘what will be.’) Everything is connected. Musically, ‘Eyrie’, the nest of the eagles, picks up on the word-music of the long I sounds, (‘My’, ‘writing’, ‘describes’, ‘not-so-high’) subtly keeping us connected to the poem’s key word ‘Irish’. ‘Describe’ hides another word inside, appearing twice in the second stanza. If we split the word we get de and scribe. A scribe historically is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession. This harks back to the early Christian scribes and scholars of Ireland who were writing and creating illuminated manuscripts while Britain was plunged into the Dark Ages. It was the Irish monks who are credited with saving civilisation, re-introducing writing and religion back into Britain and continental Europe after the fall of Rome. De, when placed in front of a verb denotes removal or reversal, which gives a new slant to de-scribe, in the sense of a redress to the traditional Anglo-centric view of history. For too long the truth about the ancient Celts’ culture and mythology has been overlooked, obscured and lost. In more recent years however, through archaeology and various surviving texts, the Celtic tribes are now being recognised as advanced cultures united through the bond of a common linguistic heritage.

The ‘archaic Irish’ suggests only old Irish words will do to describe this ancient bird. Sweeney himself has chosen to write this poem in English, to give us the story second hand, more indirectly; perhaps recognising that appropriate Irish belongs to the eagle. Furthermore, the ‘archaic Irish’ can be seen to be acting like a talisman of ‘what is again’. The ‘hunters’ are the farmers and poachers who don’t want to see the return of the eagle; they represent the ‘modern’ – seeing the past as something that should only be replaced. They see the eagle as a threat and do not recognise its symbolic arrival and ancient connection to Ireland. The ambiguous ‘hunters reluctant to agree on what will be’ suggests that the eagles’ fate is unwritten.

The third stanza perhaps reveals the father is a bit of a poet himself, he has ‘coined a new word’; all poets love to make up new words. (Historically the ancient Celtic poets were the recorders of events.) Unlike ‘unemployment’ associated with English, ‘coined’ implies that Irish is the language of value here. The past runs alongside the present and into the future. The ‘vigilantes’ are the eagles’ protectors, taking the law into their own hands, ‘who keep a camera watch’ for any threat. The father is also a vigilante who ‘joins them/ when he’s not writing, and when he is.’ Suggesting also the father is there through the words that echo on in his writing. The ‘giant eggs’ become a central metaphor for the rebirth of the Irish language, the word giant suggesting something legendary. A ‘whole new strain’ refers to the new generation of Irish speakers who will coin new words and keep alive their Celtic culture (strain also acts as a pun for the struggle involved).

This form of recursion can be likened to a Russian doll, hiding other figures or worlds inside it. Every time you look inside, another doll reveals itself. The eagles nest in their eyrie, the hunters hide behind guns, the vigilantes hide behind a camera, new life hides in the giant eggs, rhymes are internalized within the lines and even words nest within words. The idea of hiding, internalizing and nesting becomes emblematic of the Celts, the word possibly deriving from the Greek Keltoi, meaning ‘the hidden people’. There is also the aspect of father and son who are linked not only through blood, but writing and poetry. The poem becomes a double ode, as the father is writing an ode to the eagle and the son is writing an ode to his father.

As the father coins new words he also adds his bit to ‘folklore/ and folk-prophecy.’ The eagle with its long history as a symbol of power has become the symbol now for the revival of Irish. The father’s ‘research’ has brought about Sweeney’s ‘re-search’ into the eagle’s ‘unexplained return’. It doesn’t matter if it is ‘new and dodgy’, if all the ‘facts’ are not correct; that’s poetic licence. What matters is the praise of the eagles’ return. With the renaissance of the Irish language, Ireland is able to restore something of its pre-Christian and pre-colonized culture.

Sweeney’s father’s praise in Irish can be seen not only as an incantation to protect the eagles, but also as a prayer to restore something of the natural order. Poetry is often seen as a form of prayer and magic, to the ancient Celts, poetry, prayer and spells were interchangeable. Ted Hughes, one of Matthew Sweeney’s biggest influences said that, ‘Poetry is traditionally supposed to be magical... it is one way of making things happen the way you want them to happen’. And like praise, poetry - ‘is as old as the eagle.’

14

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge –

myth is more potent than history –

dreams are more powerful than facts –

hope always triumphs over experience –

laughter is the cure for grief –

love is stronger than death.

ROBERT FULGHUM

Borders by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

For John McCarter

I am driving north to your wake, without a free hand.

I must start at the start, at the white page in my mind.

I no longer own a ribbed corset of rhymes;

I am the witch who stands one-legged, masking one eye.

Passed under the soldier’s lenses at Aughnacloy,

I remember how often you crossed the map in a toil

Of love (like Lir’s daughter driven to the Sea of Moyle

By spells) from Dublin to Portadown or Armagh

to Donegal.

So I leap over lines that are set here to hold and plan

The great global waistline in sober monoglot bands,

I follow the road that follows the lie of the land,

Crossing a stream called fairy water, to come to the

bridge at Strabane.

EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN was born in Cork in 1942. She was educated at University College Cork and The University of Oxford. She now lives in Dublin where she lectures in medieval and renaissance English at Trinity College. She is a founder of the literary magazine Cyphers. Ní Chuilleanáin’s first collection, Acts and Monuments won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1973. Since then she has published many more prize-winning collections, which has made her one of the most important poets of her generation. Her poetry is unique and striking for its lucid imagery and dream-like perception, redolent of Irish myth and folklore. Clair Wills in the TLS writes that her work, ‘thrives on the creepings, rustlings and imperceptible burgeonings of life which are the opposite of sureness and solidity.’

This poem comes from her 2001 collection, The Girl Who Married The Reindeer, and was included in the 2008 publication of her Selected Poems published by Faber and Gallery Press. Her 2010 collection The Sun-Fish was winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

This poem is dedicated to a personal friend, John McCarter, and while the author has personally pointed out to me some of the particular references – such as McCarter’s large ‘waistline’, his wild dashes through the night to get back to his various jobs in Armagh, Derry and Letterkenny, and his tendency to fall in love with people he met along the way – there are wider political and mythological implications written between the lines as well. If, as Robert Frost said, the way to read a poem ‘is in the light of all the other poems ever written,’ we can begin to see many other literary pieces ghosting in the background.

Putting the poet into context also helps unravel some of its hidden world. Ní Chuilleanáin was poetically active during the 1960s and ’70s Troubles in Northern Ireland, and has often used Celtic mythology as a vehicle to approach Irish politics. Her parents were both literary and involved in Irish revolutionary politics. Her father, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, was an academic from University College Cork and a combatant in the Irish War of Independence and her mother was the novelist, Eilís Dillon, whose uncle was Joseph Mary Plunkett, an executed leader of the Easter Rising, whom Paul Muldoon refers to in his fine political poem, ‘Anseo’.

The politically loaded title ‘Borders’ resonates on different levels. There is the border of driving across the Republic to Northern Ireland. Then there is the metaphysical border of life and death, past and present. The poem also borders on Celtic mythology, revolving around Lir and the popular Irish legend, The Children of Lir. Then there are the borders which occur in language and literature; a poem works within the borders of a page and is bordered with stanzas, line-breaks and end-rhyme.

With borders comes the concept of crossing: the crossing from one world to another, from the physical to the spiritual, the ordinary to the extraordinary. The mention of ‘driving without a free hand’ has many connotations. ‘Free’ taken by itself may signify a citizen’s rights and liberty. There is a pun on ‘freehand’, suggesting the speaker is unable to write naturally by hand. She is being forced into ‘lines’ and ‘Borders’ as she drives north. This suggests the poet is being inspired as she drives, but with two hands on the wheel (‘without a free hand’) is unable to write down what she is thinking. Seamus Heaney has commented that driving can often create a kind of semi-hypnotic state – conducive for inspiring new poems. ‘The white page in my mind’ picks up on ‘freehand’ which again picks up on the title and the poet working within the borders of a ‘white page’.

The OR sound of the central word, ‘borders’ is found ghosting in other words throughout the poem (‘north’, ‘corset’, ‘Aughnacloy’ ‘Portadown’, ‘water’). The mention of ‘north’ brings Heaney’s major collection of the same name into view. North was the first of Heaney’s works that directly dealt with the Troubles. Many of the poems drew parallels with past events to explain the problems of Irish society.

The poem also nods to another Northern Irish poet, John Montague, who lectured Ní Chuilleanáin at University College Cork, and his poem ‘Border’ that begins by fondly recollecting journeys back and forth to the North during his childhood, which become more ominous while returning to visit his dying mother as an adult during the Troubles. Some words from Montague’s poem occur in this one, such as, ‘crossed’ ‘Aughnacloy’, ‘love’, ‘Dublin’ and ‘free’. Montague’s poem also mentions water: ‘a lakeside’.

In this way, a word like ‘wake’ cannot be read without resurrecting the most famous ‘wake’ in Irish literature, Joyce’s experimental classic, Finnegans Wake, which some say is a pun on the Irish mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, ‘Finn again is awake’. This reference calls attention a legend of Fionn’s eventual awakening to defend Ireland. More on this later.

From the opening line we are in the front seat of the metaphysical. The fact that the speaker is stripped of the figurative ‘ribbed corset of rhymes’ suggests she can view the situation without constraint. However, with the ‘north’ in sight, the mention of ‘no longer own’ obliquely indicates land ownership disputes. The OR in ‘borders’ is picked up in ‘corsets’, which accentuate the feminine borders of a woman’s shape. But corsets also restrict a woman, (as rhyme can restrict what a poem has to say) and may be seen here more as a symbol of female restriction than female expression, echoing the restrictions encountered when crossing the Northern Ireland borders during the Troubles. Standing ‘one-legged’ picks up again on the restrictive aspects of the political situation in Northern Ireland.

Another border is suggested in the image of the speaker becoming ‘the witch’, which again has wider socially political connotations. Historically, independent women living on the borders of society were often portrayed as witches. ‘Masking one-eye’ also suggests the borders of this world and the otherworld that thin during the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (the original Halloween). Masking the face and wearing disguises were originally ways for blending in with the spirits of the dead and protecting oneself from the evil spirits that could be roaming around.

As well as the borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between here and the otherworld, borders also form a decorative ‘band’ around the edge of something – as rhyme does. As we ‘leap over [the] lines’ we discover there is more than just end-rhyme bordering the poem. The solitary ‘I’, marking the beginning of each line in the first stanza, create their own form, standing their ground like megalithic Ogham stones, or perhaps even mirroring the pot-holed Irish roads. Its repetition gives the poem an incantatory quality like a spell and can be heard in the IY sounding words, peppered throughout the first stanza (‘driving’ ‘white’, ‘rhymes’, ‘mind’, ‘eye’).

Passing across the white border from the first stanza to the second, the speaker crosses the border into Northern Ireland. The suspicious scrutiny of ‘under the ‘soldier’s lenses’, creates a blinkers effect, picking up on political narrow-mindedness, (it also echoes back to the ‘one eye’ of the witch.) ‘Aughnacloy’ is a border town in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Whilst now you can pass through without hindrance, during the ’60s and ’70s when the Troubles were at their worst, crossing could be a treacherous affair, interrupted with British army checkpoints and hostile roadblocks.

The cartographical term ‘map’ gives us a sense of borders and lines scarring the country. As this is a poem with a metaphor to writing poems, it also becomes a map of literary data. And in literature, nearly all roads lead back to the bard of Avon. The first cryptic connection is to the tragic King Lear that ghosts in ‘Lir’. The pagan King Lear is thought to be the namesake of Lir. The speaker recalls how her friend frequently ‘crossed the map’, which is situated close to ‘love’, bringing to mind the famous ‘star crossed lovers’, Romeo and Juliet, who cross the borders of their opposing families to be together. The word ‘toil’ then calls up the witches’ famous spell from Macbeth: ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. The word ‘toil’, disconnected before the next line, is invisibly threaded to ‘trouble’ from Shakespeare’s famous line; hinting at the Irish Troubles without mentioning it. While these connections may appear too insubstantial to mention, it’s worth remembering that this poem also shares many parallels with the aforementioned plays, such as love, magic, political power and death. Therefore as the bard rears his head, we might also be reminded of his own mysterious love sonnets of sexual ambivalence, which have been the cause of much speculation. We are not told for who or why McCarter ‘crossed the map in a toil/ Of love’, but the gaps and parallels to Shakespeare provide some compelling suggestions.

Using brackets to border the mythological, Ní Chuilleanáin compares her friend’s crossing (John McCarter) from the south to North, to ‘Lir’s daughter driven to the Sea of Moyle/ By spells’); the word ‘driven’ strengthening the simile. In Celtic mythology Lir is the sea god. He lost his ascendancy as king of the Tuatha Dé Danann to Bodb Dearg. To assuage Lir, Bodb gave him one of his daughters to marry, Aoibh. She bore him four children (one girl, Fionnuala, and three sons, Aodh, Fiachra and Conn). Aoibh died and, not wanting the children to remain motherless, Bodb sent another of his daughters, Aoife, to marry Lir.

After a time, Aoife grew jealous of the children. In what would now be considered as serious second wife syndrome, she turned the children into swans for 900 years. Despite the children’s transformation they still retained their human minds and power of speech and stuck together. Part of the term of their curse was spending 300 years in the ‘Sea of Moyle’, between Ireland and Scotland.

The Children of Lir is popularly told as a children’s fairytale, but it can also be interpreted as an allegory of English presence in Ireland. The deprivation of Lir’s ascendancy, the cruelty of the stepmother, the exiled children and the 900-year curse, (equal to the length of English rule in Ireland) resonate on a national level. At The Garden of Remembrance, in Dublin (dedicated to all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom) there is a statue of the Children of Lir, symbolizing them as martyrs. The reference to Lir’s daughter also refers to Thomas Moore’s song, ‘Silent O Moyle’ which also uses the children of Lir legend as a political allegory.

Silent, Oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water,

Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose;

While murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter

Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.

When shall the swan, her death-note singing,

Sleep with wings in darkness furl’d?

When shall heav’n its sweet bell ringing,

Call my spirit from this stormy world?

Sadly, Oh Moyle, to thy winter-wave weeping,

Fate bids me languish long ages away;

Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,

Still doth the pure light its dawning delay!

When will that day-star, mildly springing,

Warm our Isle with peace and love?

When shall heav’n, its sweet bell ringing,

Call my spirit to the fields above?

Moore’s song was also cited in Joyce’s groundbreaking novel, Ulysses. Place names have a huge resonance in the history of Ireland. ‘Amargh’ meaning Macha’s Height in Irish is an ancient site of Celtic worship, having links to Lir who lived in a palace on Deadman’s Hill in County Armagh.

In the final stanza, the ‘lines’ represent both the borderlines and the lines of the poem. The image of leaping ‘over lines’ also gives the sense of metaphysically being above, so the poem is also a map which we mentally navigate our way across. Similar to the three witches in Macbeth, the poet is able to defy logic – straddling the borders between reality and the supernatural. ‘Plan’ echoes the word ‘map’ suggesting control; indicative of the British Army’s control of the borders. While the ‘great global waistline’ refers to McCarter’s generous girth, it also suggests seeing the earth from above, and as a spherical whole like a giant eye ball (picking up on the ‘witch’ again ‘masking one eye.’) ‘Waistline’ also suggests measurement, picking up on ‘corset’ and landownership from the first stanza.

‘Monoglot’ means using or speaking one language. In the Republic, road signs are in Irish and English, but in the North signs are in English only. This is one of the first things you notice as you cross the border. ‘Bands’ picks up on ‘waistline’ and has a tinge of the orangemen bands marching along the roads. The phallic ‘road’ picks up on the erotic again, that ‘follows the lie of the land’. ‘Road’ may also be a pun on ‘rood’, meaning a crucifix or cross, which we’ll arrive at soon. Rood is also a former measure of land.

The double entendre of ‘lie of the land’ alludes to McCarter’s assignations but it is also indicative of the Northern Ireland borders and suggests land issues again. It also refers back to The Children of Lir and Aoife’s ‘lie’ and deceit to get rid of the children so that she could have her husband’s attention all to herself. But Aoife was caught for her wickedness and she was punished by Bodb Dearg who transformed her into an air demon forever. ‘Lie’ may also suggest the fairies of the underworld lying low in the ‘fairy water’ and John McCarter in the otherworld.

Here, the recurrence of ‘I’, could also be seen as the Roman numeral, one. Picking up on the other ‘one’ words and images in the poem. Signifying a coded message, or Celtic spell perhaps, like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, (‘Finn again is awake’) for Ireland to come together as ‘one’ nation. The idea of language being a border is fully developed with the appearance of the italicised ‘fairy water’ sign; (picking up on the ‘monoglot’ road signs in Northern Ireland) suggesting a much older Irish name which has been lost.

Today, fairies are visualised as tiny, supernatural winged-beings glowing with light, possessing strange magical powers like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. But before the conversion of Christianity, fairies were praised as deities in Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann later became known as the Fairy-Folk or the Sídhe of Irish Mythology. They are variously believed to be the ancestors, (the invisible race) or spirits of nature that live underground. Many rural Irish people today still treat these areas as sacrosanct.

Soundwise, the liquid L runs through the poem, reflecting the images of water: ‘Sea of Moyle’, ‘fairy water’ and ‘Lir’ - as god of the sea. The surrounding sea is our natural border, as it is the white space around the poem. In the second stanza ‘L’ slips through all the end words: ‘Aughnacloy’, ‘toil’, ‘Moyle’ and ‘Donegal’ echoing the shoreline. The end of Montague’s poem also leans on the liquid L. His poem ends: ‘love fights against death,/ good falters before evil.’ This poem also uses the word ‘love’, and while ‘evil’ is not said it is implied both politically and mythologically.

It could be argued that the assonant rhymes blend into each other within each stanza; (making the rhyme scheme: AAAA, BBBB, CCCC). However, I think an ABBA pattern is more discernable. This is especially visible in stanzas two and three, where ‘toil’/ Moyle’ and ‘bands’/ ‘lands’ are perfect rhymes. The rhymes in the first stanza are more subtle. While it could be argued to rhyme AABB, (with ‘hand’ and ‘mind’ rhyming on the dental D in lines one and two) I think Ní Chuilleanáin, keeping with continuity, is cleverly placing ‘hand’ and ‘eye’ to rhyme as body parts. This cunning device, keeps the word ‘hand’ in our mind, so in the last line – although it doesn’t say it – we see a ‘hand’ ‘masking one eye’. Rhyme is more than just sound patterning, it is also about the mental pictures it creates in our minds, like the Troubles ghosting after ‘toil’. Those mental patterns are part of poetry’s mnemonic qualities, to make the poem easier to remember off by heart. While ‘hand’/ ‘eye’ has no sound pattern, the images here marry perfectly together. We could call this a ‘mind’s eye rhyme.’

‘Strabane’ the last word, is also a loaded place name, another border town that has suffered badly from the Troubles. In Irish it means ‘white strand’ situated where two major rivers meet, picking up on the water element of the poem again and the ‘white page in my mind’. Here Fionn makes his final appearance. Fionn or Finn is actually a nickname meaning ‘white.’ Several legends tell how he gained the nickname when his hair turned prematurely white. White signifies peace, and also picks up on the Irish (green, white and orange) flag. A common interpretation of the Irish flag is that green represents the Irish nationalist tradition, orange represents the Orange tradition, with white representing peace; thus signifying a lasting truce between the ‘Green’ and the ‘Orange’ Ireland.

The word ‘cross’ appearing twice in the poem (’crossed the map’, ‘Crossing the stream’) also carries many resonances. We may think of Christ crucified on the cross, or the Celtic cross, (a cross inside a circle) a common site in Irish graveyards. In cartography, a cross marks a destination or where something important lies, like treasure. The bridge intersecting over ‘a stream called fairy water’ – creates the final cross, marking the spot to a fairy world where the Tuatha Dé Danann lie waiting to wake. Crossing the ‘bridge’ also suggests this poem is about bridging gaps, both in this world and the otherworld.

Finally we have the mythological links of ‘driving north’. When the Tuatha Dé Danann came to Ireland, their otherworldly cities were said to be in the north. But the myths also suggest that the Celtic otherworld could be found anywhere, not just far to the north or beyond the western seas, but within the inner landscape of the mind and heart and so can turn up round the next corner, in the next stanza, or over ‘the bridge at Strabane.’

15

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,

That of race and that of soul,

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

W. B. YEATS

Oisíns on Tractors by John Ennis

It’s not for them, the shitty meniality

of clay; they would grow old of an instant touching it.

Feet on mere earth, they’ll none of it.

Their chosen cab temperature is memorised;

they enjoy the ride; their bums on seats

heated for cold and foggy Tir na nÓg.

Who knows what’s on their mind, linnet,

organics, or the latest decoupling news,

or riparian zones to be stockproofed?

Betrothed to output, lit-up fields at night

who’ll never alight, close a paddock gate.

Mere mortals below them, we look to cereals,

disease control and listen out for bells.

Born in County Westmeath in 1944, JOHN ENNIS was educated at University College Cork and University College, Dublin. Head of School of Humanities at Waterford Institute of Technology, he retired in 2009. In 1975, he was the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award; in 1996 he received the Irish American Cultural Institute Award. Remarkably, he has won the Listowel Open Poetry Competition eleven times. Ennis has published collections with Dedalus Press and Gallery Press and his poetry has appeared in many major anthologies including the groundbreaking Bloodaxe, The New Poetry, and the 2010 Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry.

This poem comes from his thirteenth collection, Goldcrest Falling, in which he harvests moments from his youth, deftly distilling memory into myth. Ennis turns the ordinary sight of tractors in Ireland into the extraordinary legend of Oisín, (pronounced Oh-sheen) a warrior of the Fianna in the Fenian Cycle, regarded in legend as Ireland’s greatest poet.

The image of the person on the tractor has a lineage in poetry. Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas, has a poem called ‘Cynddylan On A Tractor’, which begins:

Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.

Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil,

He’s a new man now, part of the machine,

His nerves of metal and his blood oil.

Ennis’s poem also explores the theme of technology revolutionizing nature and rural life. By providing a mythological vehicle to modern agriculture, Ennis gives a new angle to the legend of Oisín. These are not peasant farmers of yesteryear, but modern men on ultra modern monster machines, who appear above the ordinary folk. Like Thomas’s Cynddylan, age is of no consequence. Put any person on a tractor and old age or mortality is arrested and youth restored.

The poem opens with the ‘shitty meniality/ of clay;’ and ‘the mere earth’ being ‘not for them,’ their minds on higher things. The land is depicted as unpleasant and worthless. The vulgar slang of ‘shitty’ alludes to the human waste, suggesting that the earth is a kind of human wasteland.

The name Oisín is a synonym of youth, literally meaning ‘young dear’ or ‘fawn.’ There is a parallel between the otherworldliness of Oisín and an idealistic youth on speedy tractors, their heads in the sky. Neither is fated to dirty the hand with common labour, or to ‘alight’ and ‘close a paddock gate’ after them. These landless Oisíns allude to the Fianna, the small-band of warriors from Celtic mythology. The Fianna were made up of young nobility who had not yet come into their inheritance of land. In the second stanza, the first line, ‘Their chosen cab temperature is memorized’ is another indication of agricultural modernization. For these young men, farming is not toil and hard labour; they ‘enjoy the ride’. Their ‘bums on seats’ makes another subtle connection of what is beneath them, ‘bums’ linking again to ‘shitty’. ‘Memorised’ also alludes to the Fianna, who, as well as being skilled warriors had to memorize the poems of the bards, which were carefully constructed to educate and to preserve the culture of the people through the generations.

In Oisín’s most famous adventure tale, his good looks and eloquence attract the beautiful fairy woman, Niamh of the Golden Hair, who falls in love with him and steals him away from his human wife, Eibhir. They live in Tír na nÓg, the land of the eternal young. Just as Oisín leaves his earthly life for an eternal place of youth with Niamh, the Oisíns high up on tractors don’t touch the earth and are ‘betrothed to output’ of the land.

The agricultural terms used in the poem, such as ‘linnet’, ‘de-coupling’, ‘riparian’ refer to the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (or REPS). Linnet, on first reading, appears to refer to the bird, a type of finch with a reddish breast and forehead. The linnet has been evoked as a symbol of wisdom in many poems through the ages, including Yeats’s most famous poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: ‘And evening full of the linnet’s wings.’ William Wordsworth argued that the song of the linnet provides more wisdom than books in the third verse of ‘The Tables Turned’:

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There’s more of wisdom in it.

But we are slyly wrong-footed by ‘linnet’ as it is in fact also an acronym for another environmental term, ‘Land Invested in Nature – National Eco-Tillage’ where the main idea is to provide sacrificial crops for wildlife interest. All the agricultural terms in the poem come under the umbrella of the LINNET scheme. ‘Riparian zones’ relates to wetlands adjacent to river and streams that are habitats for flora and fauna which sustain food webs important to a river’s ecosystem. ‘Stockproof,’ usually refers to barbedwire fencing preventing livestock from straying into these places. As well as the environmental connotations, all of these terms are associated with borders, which take us back to the legend of Oisín, who decouples himself from Eibir and his environment to stray beyond the borders to Tír na nÓg.

The so called ‘free verse’ of the poem is in fact scattered with internal assonance rhyme that parallel the ploughing lines of a tractor; touching it’/ ‘none of it’; ‘memorised’/ ‘enjoy the ride’–‘heated for cold’/‘Tír na nÓg.’; ‘fields at night’/ ‘never alight’; ‘mere mortals / cereals.’ And close rhymes such as ‘shitty meniality / clay;’ ‘linnet / organics/’; ‘news / stockproofed’ ‘mortals / cereals / bells’.) Notice as well that the beginning of each stanza sets up a sound-pattern which is echoed similarly at the end of each stanza, creating a verse turn like that of the plough in a field. (Stanza 1: ‘It’s not for them…’ ending with the Shakespearean phrase, ‘…they’ll none of it.’ Stanza 2. ‘Their chosen…’ and ‘…Tír na nÓg’. Stanza 3. ‘Who knows…’ and ‘…stockproofed’. Stanza 4. ‘Betrothed to output…’ and ‘…close a paddock...’ Stanza 5. ‘Mere mortals…’ and ‘…for bells.’

While not sticking to a strict end-rhyme scheme, the poem follows the fourteen line form of a sonnet. The first English sonnets of the 16th Century were all inspired by Petrarch’s theme of love of a woman, which is echoed here by Oisín falling head over heels with an otherworld woman.

But the indomitable ghost of Yeats ‘scorn{ing} the sort now growing up’ haunts much of the poem. Just as the Oisíns on tractors are above the world, there’s a sense that the speaker is looking down, casting ‘a cold eye’ on mankind, in the same way that Yeats does in his poem, ‘Under Ben Bulben’. Yeats’s famous last lines of the poem: ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!’ is inscribed on his gravestone under the Sligo mountain, Ben Bulben, which is steeped in Celtic legend and said to be the dwelling place of the Fianna. The horseman alludes to the Death figure, but with Yeats it more heavily suggests the supernatural horsemen identified with the Irish faeries called Sídhe – who appear at the beginning of ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ where they ‘ride the wintry dawn’. Ennis uses this mythological theme but gives it a 21st century twist turning the horses into tractors. As Oisín returns on his magical steed to Ireland, he doesn’t just return to a race transformed by Christianity; he himself will also be transformed utterly and for the worse.

As legend goes, despite living in a perfect world, Oisín grows increasingly homesick for Ireland and after what appears to be three years decides to return. Niamh gives him a white horse but warns him not to dismount, because if his feet touch the ground he will become instantly old and decrepit. Oisín returns to an Ireland that has changed beyond recognition, this is because while it felt like three years in Tír na nÓg, it was in fact three hundred years. There is a sense that Celtic mythology is in the everyday as the tractors appear out of the ‘cold and foggy Tír na nÓg.’ While Ireland’s landscape has been changed irrevocably by agriculture, the unchanging indistinct ‘foggy’ otherworld of Tír na nÓg is still present.

Oisín however fails to adhere to Niamh’s warning. Patricia Monaghan in her Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Irish Folklore writes that sources differ as to whether Oisín’s saddle gave way, or whether he leaned down to help a beggar; or was he overcome with desire to feel the earth beneath his feet again? In any case, when Oisín touches the ground, his many years instantly come over him. In most versions, Oisín dies and turns to dust, but in some accounts he lives long enough to debate the values of Ireland’s ancient paganism with St Patrick. Rather than being just an ancient Celtic mythological tale then, the legend can also be seen as an allegory of the arrival of Christianity to Ireland in which pagans were converted to the Christian ethos. The pagan tribes would have been attracted to the new Christian religion sweeping Europe, but Oisín, wishing to return to Ireland, symbolizes a desire to return to a pagan Ireland. Ennis uses the economical drive of agriculture to allude to the Christian connection in the legend. The agricultural terms, ‘decoupling news… zones … stockproofed’ suggests the land is seen merely as an economical commodity rather than as a sacred one. The poem becomes an oblique comment on the modern age of agriculture, displaying changing attitudes.

The overriding metaphor in the legend of Oisín is about human frailty and how we all must face our own mortality. When we are young we have little sense of death and think we will live forever but as we get older and death gets closer we become more conscious that we are ‘mere mortals’. In the end, Oisín’s journey through life becomes his journey into death. In this poem, we don’t witness the Oisíns on tractors growing old or returning to earth, but we do see the speaker/ poet contemplate mortality. No longer the young poet/ Oisín, the speaker sees we are all ‘mere mortals’ who ‘look to cereals, / disease control and listen out for bells.’ He is one of Yeats’s ‘old men’ perhaps overtaken by the young who work the ‘lit-up fields all night’.

The poem ends with ordinary country mortals in the fields harkening to bells – the last ironic bell (unheard) that will sound for them, but also by contrast the twice-daily angelus bell that celebrates conception and the human cycle starting over. The physical lines of the poet will be turned over and renewed by next season’s crop.

While it may appear that the links between verse and agriculture are tenuous, their roots are closely intertwined. The word verse in fact is germinated in agriculture, coming from Old English, ‘Fers’ which comes via Latin, ‘versus’ meaning ‘a turn of the plough, a furrow, or a line of writing’, from vertere ‘to turn’. Ennis then, isn’t just turning Irish farmers into legendary heroes, their ploughing tractors become a metaphor for the composition of verse itself. Robert Frost, another poet of the rural everyday, thought ‘poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.’ That is to say, the subjects of poetry should speak of familiar things everyone recognizes, but be uncommon in expression. Like Frost, Ennis sees the metaphorical extensions in the everyday world he encounters. His experiences are the main topics in his poems along with nature, seasons, weather and times of day. Just as the ancient Celts saw the otherworld of ‘foggy Tír na nÓg’ was beyond their field of vision, so poets see the legendary in the everyday, the immortal above the soil and clay.

16

Myth is the hidden part of every story,

the buried part, the region that is still unexplored

because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there.

Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

ITALO CALVINO

The Old Ways by Desmond O’Grady

We grew away from the old ways

familiar to us in childhood and fell

into a black circle of foreign habits.

We forgot the holy wells and places

where people gathered, without clearly

remembering the reason, on certain days; forgot

those old mysterious festivals for the different

seasons like fire-jumping on a summer hill;

ancient practices like blood-letting

on a new threshold and funeral games.

We said they were for superstitious old women

and we aped the ways of the foreigner.

Then we had nothing – neither a past

for precedent nor a future foreseeable.

With the old ways we had some idea

what the year held in store: with their help

we could face and endure it;

we knew a kind of visible security,

the security of a familiar ritual.

Without the old ways we became

loose straws in a black wind.

With what shall we now replace them?

Born in Limerick, in 1935, DESMOND O’GRADY is the most senior poet in this book. Known since the publication of The Dark Edge of Europe (1967) as the ‘Poet O’Grady’, he has been a major force for decades in Irish poetry. He has published twenty collections of his own poems, including, Collected Poems, The Road Taken, 1956 – 1996. In 2001 he published The Wandering Celt, a poetic history of the Celts and Celtic influence. O’Grady is also one of the world’s most prolific and eclectic poetry translators since Ezra Pound – who became a close friend in later life – translating versions from Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Greek and numerous other languages. His eleven books of translations are collected in Trawling Tradition: Translations 1965-1994.

Just as there’s a thread of the ancient Celts running throughout this poem, O’Grady’s quest is to unravel the Celtic thread that runs through European history. Concerned with journeys and origins, both cultural and personal, his poetry bridges the old world of the Celts and the new world of the modernists. ‘Born of a land natural with legend,/ in a backward place…’ he says in his poem ‘Start’. In another poem, ‘Exile from Exile’ he writes, ‘Each depart, returns a search for origin.’ This poem is also about origins. In many ways the poem summarises some of this book’s themes: The old ways of the Celts, its references to myth and folklore and how we now ‘replace them.’

As we move through the poem it appears to be a stream of polarity, shifting between contrasting words, ‘forgot’, ‘remembering’; ‘familiar’, ‘foreign’; ‘past’, ‘future’; ‘ancient’, ‘new’; ‘with’, ‘without’; and the first and last words in the poem, ‘We’ and ‘them’. The first person plural, ‘We’ flashes throughout the poem, the speaker is addressing himself and those ‘familiar’.

The long vowel sounds in the first line, ‘We grew away’ ‘the old ways’, lulls us into a false sense of ‘security’, setting up a slow melancholic mood-music. This is a poem of serious reflection, an elegy of a kind, lamenting the dead, Irish folklore and their rituals. The elegiac mood is emphasized in the third line by the colour (or lack of) and imagery, ‘a black circle of foreign habits.’ While the forecast looks bleak, the abstract and striking turn of phrase evokes a mysterious magic of its own, stirring ‘superstition’ and suspicion of the ‘foreigner’. There’s a sense of foresight to the image too, which is picked up near the end of the poem, ‘loose straws in a black wind.’ The active verbs ‘grew’ and ‘fell’ give the sense of movement, the past tense showing that they are relevant to the notion of time long gone. ‘Childhood’ alludes to growing up, losing innocence, falling from grace perhaps. The placement of ‘fell’ at the end of the line gives the word extra stress and push as it falls off the edge of the line.

In contrast to the ‘black circle’ the old ways conjure purification, heat and evoke passion, ‘holy wells’, ‘mysterious festivals’, ‘fire-jumping’, ‘blood letting’, ‘funeral games’. The reds of ‘fire’ and ‘blood’ suggest the fiery nature of the Celts and a deep connection through ‘blood’ brotherhood. The Celts saw divinity everywhere in the natural world and worshipped in the open air. Rather than build temples their ceremonial sites were on hilltops – where great fires spelled the changing seasons – and at wells, which were honoured for their connection to a supreme goddess. The time of year and courtship ritual of ‘fire-jumping on a summer hill’ indicates that it is one of the four great annual Celtic festivals, beltaine, celebrated on May 1st, marking the beginning of ‘summer’. Beltain is believed to be named after the god of light, Belenus, ‘bel’ meaning ‘bright’, and was associated with bonfires lit before the festival, where many rituals and games including ‘fire-jumping’ would have taken place. The ‘funeral games’ is the last rite in the passage and perhaps is indicative of the death of the old ways.

Despite this deduction, the exact dates of those ‘mysterious festivals’ are kept hidden, ‘…without clearly/ remembering the reason’. Etymologically, ‘without’ comes from the Old English meaning ‘on the outside.’ Like their rituals, the ancient Celts have remained on the outside of recorded history. Although it seems the druids did have knowledge of writing, the ancient Celts honoured the spoken word, passing their history and mythology down word of mouth, so as the Celtic order died their history and knowledge went with them. Historians and archeologists can only guess at what exactly these rites entailed. Here, the once sacred rituals and festivals of the ancient Celts are now undefined and confined to ‘superstitious old women’. This central line of disempowerment is also telling of how traditions change and may be a roundabout reference to the Celts possible matriarchal society.

The second half of the poem returns to the reality, ‘without the old ways…’ There is ‘nothing…’ We are outside in the dark again, without the past we can’t make or imagine the future. The word ‘foreseeable’ echoes the word ‘foresight,’ the ability to see into the dark, referring to the Celtic poets’ gift of prophecy. In the final lines, we see the old ways become even more abstract, ‘a kind of visible security…’ we are blind to those rituals now. The imagery returns from the ‘black circle’ to ‘a black wind’. ‘Loose straw in a black wind…’ echoes the phrase, ‘a straw in the wind’ which is a sign of something that might happen in the future. Here the poet as file offers his own forecast on what happens if we are blind to our own kind. Without the knowledge of our past, the old ways are reduced to superstition, by forgetting ‘the old ways’ we diminish our knowledge and have no meaning.

On this level ‘the black circle’ connects to the Russian avant-garde artist, Kazimir Malevich’s painting ‘Black Circle’. Malevich (1879-1935) became the leading figure of the radical suprematism art movement that focused on using basic geometric shapes such as circles and sqaures. His work, such as ‘Black Circle’ changed the perception of art and became hugely influential in Western culture. The visual artists that followed, such as Mark Rothko continued using basic geometric shapes and primary colours exploring philisophical ideas such as primitivism, adapting patterns from local folklore and mythology. Around this time, Ezra Pound one of the major exponents of modernism promoted imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. Borrowings from primitive art have been important to the development of Modern Art. Like an avant-garde artist, O’Grady has sought to find ever-deeper poetic expressions by excavating through Celtic history.

As well as the cultural significance, the poem also has personal resonance to O’Grady’s own life of leaving Ireland and making his own way in ‘foreign’ lands. At nineteen, due to the oppressive atmosphere of the Catholic church, O’Grady left Ireland in self-exile for Paris in search of la Vie de bohéme, where he quickly established himself within the avant-garde circles, socializing with many of the top 20th century artists, such as Beckett, Sartre and Picasso. Two years later he moved to Rome, where he had a life-changing affair with a countess and met Ezra Pound, becoming his amanuensis. While in Rome, he also met the iconic filmmaker, Federico Fellini, and played himself, as the Irish poet, in Fellini’s classic, La Dolce Vita. In 1964, he was invited to Harvard Univerity by Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman. While he was a Teaching Fellow there O’Grady took his MA. and Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures and comparative studies. His peripatetic life continued, teaching in Iran at the University of Tabriz, and Egypt where he was poet-in-residence at American University, Cairo, and University of Alexandria. In this sense, a rite of passage can be read into the poem, growing away from the ‘familiar’ family of an Irish ‘childhood’ into the ‘foreign habits’ of life abroad.

The black ink of the poem forms its own ‘black circle of foreign habits’ that has grown away from the oral tradition of the ancient Celts. Just as ‘the old ways’ remain hidden and silent in the poem, the final deafening silence resounds after the last line’s question, ‘With what shall we now replace them?’ We fall off the ‘black circle’ of the poem into the silence of the white page and the shared silence of the nameless ‘them’: the ancient Celts. The climactic question also has a personal dimension, alluding to O’Grady’s own search and poetic vocation to replace the old ways with the ‘make it new’ innovation of the poet. Departures, new starts and journeys to far-off places is a hallmark of O’Grady’s poetic output.

While the poem is peppered with contrasts, the block-paragraph form suggests that there is a connection and unity. The lines are not splintered or divided into different stanzas, they are held together as a unified whole. Time and history are interwoven, blurred. The fricative ‘f’, alliteration scattered throughout appears with certain contrasting words that are both ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’. While the meanings contrast each other, the alliteration creates a parallelism, suggesting the ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’ are two sides of the same coin. Like Yin and Yang (literally meaning’ ‘shadow and ‘light’), the unseen (hidden, feminine) and seen (manifest, masculine), interact to form a greater whole.

This flipside of opposites, like ‘old’ and ‘new’, being two sides of the same coin, alludes to Pound’s famous maxim on writing poetry, which still has major currency among poets today: ‘Make it new.’ The ‘it’ in ‘Make it new’ can be seen as the old – what is valuable in the culture of the past. Like Pound, a great deal of O’Grady’s poetry takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion and quotation from older text. He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment that goes back through classical culture and the Celtic past. Because of these themes, some critics judge O’Grady’s style as grand and didactic, but this narrow view misses the wider context of ancient and classical text translation/version fragmentations, which forms the basis of his work.

In the 20th century, the art world became obsessed with innovation, many seeing modernism as a complete break away from the shackles of a conservative and confining past. But this is in many ways misses the point of modernism’s true ideals. In Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and the individual Talent’, he suggests that an artist’s work should be judged not by its novelty or newness, but rather by how the artist handles the tradition he or she inherits. Throughout history, he wrote, the concept of originality referred to the transformation of tradition through an interaction with the past as opposed to the creation of something brand-new. While O’Grady may be out of step with current literary fashions, he is in many ways the true embodiment of modernism. His raison d’être as a poet and scholar has been to bring the ancient past to light and transform it through his own life and sensibility, thus creating a body of work that is highly original. He is the true vocational poet, the ‘wandering Celt’ who, as Stephen Dedalus put it in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, set out to encounter ‘the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ While fashions pass, style remains, to coin a phrase. O’Grady is an Irish poet who has learnt and lived his trade. And here the true trade of art is a trade-off, where the original elements become transformed by the exchange.

Although there is an element of lament for the passing of old traditions, the poem breathes life into them. Literary critic, Harold Bloom says, ‘Strong poems are always omens of resurrection. The dead may or may not return, but their voice comes alive.’ In O’Grady’s quest and final questioning, he makes the old ways new, taking the baton of the seer/file who looks out of the dark and into the light of a new Celtic generation.

Paradoxically then, ‘The Old Ways’ is not about something lost but about something that can be regained. The hidden world of poetry begs us to re-familiarise ourselves with our ancient mythological past and the other world of the imagination; a world beyond the senses that like our knowledge of the ancient Celts is neither quite solid or well defined and yet it has an ever-enhancing effect on the imagination.

Poems are charms that stir creativity, invoke new powers of thinking and bring us back to elements in ourselves at a very deep and primitive level. The Irish Celts, now recognised for saving civilization after the fall of Rome – re-introducing writing, religion and spreading new ideas into Britain and continental Europe during the Dark Ages – continue today, despite centuries of conquest and oppression, to push the envelope of literature. Ireland’s literary impact on the world has been unrivalled not because it creates something out of nothing but because of its active engagement with ancient myth and tradition. By keeping alive its unique heritage of early Irish poetry – its myths and the esteemed position of the bard – Irish poets and writers continue to be at the spearhead.

Acknowledgements

This book was a successful project on Ireland’s crowd funding website, Fundit.ie. My sincere and heartfelt gratitude to all the individuals who gave their support and made this book happen.

Thank you:

John Ablett, Marcus Bale, Martin Barnett, Adam Bickerton, Denise Blake, Helene Cardona, Paul Casey, Sarah Clancy, Marie Coveney, Isobel Creed, Madeleine D’Arcy, Anne Deppe, Peadar Donohoe, Theo Dorgan, Simon Edwards, John Ennis, Alan Garvey, Yvonne Gaule, Laurence Gea, Matthew Geden, Yvonne Gubbins, Caroline Hart, Seamus Heaney, Melanie Holcombe, Eleanor Hooker, Ann Hopewell-Smith, Joseph Horgan, Jessie Lendennie, Limerick Writers’ Centre, Paula Meehan, Eugene McCarthy, Afric McGlinchey, Paula McGlinchey, Susan McKeown, John Mee, Sue Morgan, Michael Murphy, Peter Murphy, Eugene O’Connell, Dennis O’Driscoll, Nessa O’Mahony, Annemarie Neary, Mary Noonan, Bertie Pearce, Jon Prince, Niamh Prior, Damian Punch, Michael Ray, Rosemarie Rowley, Con Ruane, William Ruane, Deirdre Ryan, Martin Shiel, Desmond Swords, Adam Tavel, David Teevan, Adele Ward and Natalie Wyeth.

Many of these essays first appeared in the Southern Star and I would also like to extend my thanks to Perry O’Donovan, Philip O’Regan and Tizzy Slevin.

A special thank you also to Matthew Geden who not only gave his encouragement for this book right from the start but also looked over and gave feedback on all of my work, from the first essay and right to the end during the proof-reading stage. And thank you to Paula McGlinchey, my first pair of eyes and ears who I’d be blind without. Go raibh maith agaibh!

The author also wishes to thank each author and their publishers for their kind permission to re-print these poems in this book:

Eavan Boland, ‘The Making of an Irish Goddess’ from Outside History (Carcanet Press); Paul Durcan, ‘The Mayo Accent’ from Daddy, Daddy (Blackstaff Press); John Ennis, ‘Oisíns on Tractors’ from Goldcrest Falling (Scop Productions); Seamus Heaney ‘Helmet’ from District and Circle (Faber); Derek Mahon, ‘Synge Dying’ from An Autumn Wind (Gallery Books) Paula Meehan, ‘Well’ from Mysteries of the Home (Dedalus Press); Patricia Monaghan ‘Dark of the Moon’ from Soldiers Heart: The Book of Sweeney (Chanting Press); Paul Muldoon, ‘A Mayfly’ from Maggot (Faber); Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Borders’ from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (Gallery Press); Nuala Ní Dhomhnail, ‘The Shannon Estuary’ from Selected Poems (New Island Books); Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Westering Home’ from Here and There (Chatto and Windus); Desmond O’Grady ‘The Old Ways’ from Sing Me Creation (Salzburg); Mary O’Malley, ‘Bean Sídhe’ from The Boning Hall (Carcanet); Leanne O’Sullivan, ‘Promise’ from Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (Bloodaxe); Maurice Riordan, ‘Badb’ from Floods (Faber); Matthew Sweeney ‘The Eagle’ from Selected Poems (Cape).

A final thank you to Hans Diebschlag for the amazing front cover art work, from his painting ‘The Battle of Moytura’ www.diebschlag.com. And to Miriam Logan for her evocative Celtic ink paintings.

About the Author

ADAM WYETH was born in Sussex in 1978 and has lived in County Cork since 2000. His critically acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Silent Music (Salmon Poetry, 2011) was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. He was a runner-up in the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition, a prize-winner in the 2009 Fish International Poetry Competition, commended in the 2012 Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, 2013. His work appears in The Forward Book of Poetry 2012 (Faber, 2011), The Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword, 2010), Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2010) and Something Beginning with P (O’Brien Press, 2004). He has made two films on poetry, A Life in the Day of Desmond O’Grady, first screened at The Cork Film Festival, 2004; and a full length feature, Soundeye: Cork International Poetry Festival, 2005. Wyeth’s debut play Hang Up, produced by Broken Crow, has been staged at many festivals, including the Electric Picnic and the Galway Theatre Festival 2013. A member of Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools Scheme, Wyeth also runs a series of international online creative writing workshops at adamwyeth.com.