Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition

Donna L. Potts

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826219435
• eBook ISBN: 9780826272690
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

In Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations of Ireland; and, more recently, a means for conveying environmentalism's more complex understanding of the value of nature.

Potts traces the pastoral back to its origins in the work of Theocritus of Syracuse in the third century and plots its evolution due to cultural changes. While all pastoral poems share certain generic traits, Potts makes clear that pastorals are shaped by social and historical contexts, and Irish pastorals in particular were influenced by Ireland's unique relationship with the land, language, and industrialization due to England's colonization.

For her discussion, Potts has chosen six poets who have written significant collections of pastoral poetry and whose work is in dialogue with both the pastoral tradition and other contemporary pastoral poets. Three poets are men—John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley—while three are women—Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Five are English-language authors, while the sixth—Ní Dhomhnaill—writes in Irish. Additionally, some of the poets hail from the Republic, while others originate from Northern Ireland. Potts contends that while both Irish Republic and Northern Irish poets respond to a shared history of British colonization in their pastorals, the 1921 partition of the country caused the pastoral tradition to evolve differently on either side of the border, primarily because of the North's more rapid industrialization; its more heavily Protestant population, whose response to environmentalism was somewhat different than that of the Republic's predominantly Catholic population; as well the greater impact of the world wars and the Irish Troubles.

In an important distinction from other studies of Irish poetry, Potts moves beyond the influence of history and politics on contemporary Irish pastoral poetry to consider the relatively recent influence of ecology. Contemporary Irish poets often rely on the motif of the pastoral retreat to highlight various environmental threats to those retreats—whether they be high-rises, motorways, global warming, or acid rain. Potts concludes by speculating on the future of pastoral in contemporary Irish poetry through her examination of more recent poets—including Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan—as well as other genres such as film, drama, and fiction.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

A Lost Pastoral Rhythm

The Poetry of John Montague

Antoinette Quinn describes John Montague as “a pastoral poet manqué, an elegist pining for the stability of lost rural rituals,” observing that even the village pub in his first collection, The Rough Field (1972), is named “The Last Sheaf.” “‘The Last Straw,’” she quips, “might have been more apt,” because Montague's poetry is redolent with nostalgia for a lost world.¹ Although Montague himself has expressed suspicion of the idealizing tendencies of pastoral, he has acknowledged the potential of pastoral to address wider issues, most pointedly in his analysis of Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village,” included in his edited collection, The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, where he observes that “the pastoral clichés of eighteenth-century poetry are being used to a very definite artistic purpose, the evocation of a ‘Golden Age’ of rural life. Auburn is not a particular, but a universal village of the plain, a pastoral Eden evoking the essence of every Virgilian eclogue and Horatian retreat: it even has special climatic privileges.”²

Montague's discussion of Goldsmith's pastoral as a vehicle by which he makes “one of the first statements of a great modern theme, the erosion of traditional values and natural rhythms in a commercial society” provides a template for reading Montague's own pastoral poetry.³

Montague's essay demonstrates how the destruction of Auburn signifies the destruction of many things: “the narrator's childhood and his dreams of escape and peaceful retirement … ‘rural virtues,’ ‘all the connexions of kindred’ in the family unit, ‘spontaneous joys’ as opposed to unnatural artifice, virginal innocence, and, finally, poetry itself, even perhaps religion.”⁴ Finding a parallel between Goldsmith's approach and that of the agrarians in Ireland or America, Montague contends that for all of them, the “rural virtues” are actually the root virtues of the good society, and the virtues that pastoral promotes are no less relevant for his own time and place.⁵ Montague's argument is perhaps influenced by the intersection of nationalist rhetoric with his own personal history: his father's IRA involvement during the 1920s, which prompted the family's move to New York, included firebranding the house of an absentee landlord, a popular ploy of agrarians since the eighteenth century to assert Ireland's prior claim to the land.⁶ Terence Brown, in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (cited by Montague in The Figure in the Cave), writes of the poets of Montague's father's era, who “celebrated a version of Irish pastoral, where rural life was a condition of virtue in as much as it remained an expression of an ancient civilization, uncontaminated by commercialism and progress. In so doing they helped to confirm Irish society in a belief that rural life constituted an essential element of an unchanging Irish identity.”⁷ Montague describes his father as having played a part in the “Holy War” to restore “our country,” and at least in his early volumes, Montague provides a version of pastoral that reads as a continuation of these efforts to assert the primacy of the landscape and rural life as a means of restoring that which was lost in the process of colonization.

Montague's contention that “the fall of Auburn is the fall of a whole social order”⁸ illuminates his descriptions in his first collection, The Rough Field (1972), of the country village where he was raised, Garvaghey. The word comes from the Gaelic Garbh acaidh, which translates as “the rough field,” thereby evoking not only the terrain but the rough, uncertain political history of Montague's Northern Ireland. Garvaghey's name is a particularly apt reminder of the Troubles because of the Protestant Orange Order's insistence on following the old line of its annual march down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road to commemorate William of Orange's victory over Irish Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne, which has in turn annually provoked Catholic resistance. Just as Goldsmith's descriptions of the land's dispossession in “The Deserted Village,” invite comparison with Virgil, so do Montague's. Writing against the specific backdrop of the Irish civil war and the troubles that followed, Montague alludes to ancient struggles over land, nevertheless attuned to the consolation to be found in it.

He opens the collection with an epigraph from the Afghan that relies on a farming metaphor to respond to the sorrow of war:

I had never known sorrow,

Now it is a field I have inherited, and I till it.

Like Ireland, Afghanistan was occupied for years by the British (who were finally defeated there in 1921), endured a period of civil war as a result of ethnic and religious conflict, and ultimately lost much of its population as a result of territorial conflict when the country of Pakistan was formed.

Following the “Afghan” passage is an epigraph from the Greek poet George Sephiris, who witnessed Turkish takeover of his birthplace, Smyrna:

The Greeks say it was the Turks who burned down

Smyrna. The Turks say it was the Greeks.

Who will

discover the truth?

The wrong has been committed.

The important thing is who will redeem it?

The seemingly endless territorial conflicts of Turks and Greeks parallel the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Montague's Northern Ireland: both conflicts began centuries ago, the Greco-Turkish conflict originating with the arrival of Turkish nomads in the Byzantine empire in the eleventh century, and the Northern Irish with the arrival of the Normans in the twelfth century but intensifying with the settlement of the Ulster Plantation. Both have their roots in religion, the Greco-Turkish stemming from conflicts between Muslims and Christians; the Northern Irish, between Protestants and Catholics. The burning of Smyrna to which the passage refers occurred in 1922, the same year that the Irish civil war began.⁹ Finally, Montague quotes a passage that locates the heart of the conflict in a specific town, much as Montague locates his own chronicle in the village of Garvaghey thereby registering the repercussions of a series of violent upheavals in Northern Ireland. Like the poetry originating from the Greco-Turkish conflict, Montague's poetry represents a quest to “discover the truth,” rejecting the impulse to perpetuate the conflict in favor of seeking redemption through art. The convention of proffering rural labor as a panacea for war and a metaphor for poetic composition dates back to classical pastoral poetry: Virgil's Georgics depicts the farmer's sickle ultimately prevailing over the weapons of war it uncovers, and the poem's figurative labor presumably accomplishes the same goal.

Montague's preface to the book recalls the time in the early 1960s when he received a prize for a poem he had written, “Like Dolmens Round My Childhood,” which he describes reading in the assembly rooms of the Presbyterian church in Belfast, “a drab Victorian building in the heart of the city.” “Presbyterian” and “Victorian” represent obvious contrasts with Montague's own Irish Catholic nationalist identity: the largest denomination in Ulster, traditionally anti-Catholic Presbyterians formed their first Northern Irish presbytery with chaplains of a Scottish army that had arrived to crush the rising of 1641¹⁰ and continue to be largely Unionist. The sound of “the rumble of drums” outside as Orangemen prepared for their annual parade on July 12, a date recalling the final defeat of the Catholics at the Boyne in 1690, contrasts with the rhythm and harmony of the poem he reads. His reading of the poem in this setting rife with conflict leads him to consider the broader implications of the conflict he had been born into:

Bumping down towards Tyrone a few days later by bus, I had a kind of vision, in the medieval sense, of my home area, the unhappiness of its historical destiny…. Although as the Ulster crisis broke [in 1969], I felt as if I had been stirring a witch's cauldron, I never thought of the poem as tethered to any particular set of events…. Experience of agitations in Paris [1968] and Berkeley [1965] taught me that the violence of disputing factions is more than a local phenomenon. But one must start from home—so the poem begins where I began myself, with a Catholic family in Garvaghey, in the county of Tyrone, in the province of Ulster.

Montague's “vision, in the medieval sense” might well allude to the Irish aisling, or vision poem, a form that originated in the Middle Ages and became a popular means of addressing Ireland's political destiny. Yet it also recalls the medieval Piers Plowman, whose May Day vision on Malvern Hill of a “fair field full of folk” is a metaphor for the fate of the world, a vision presumably permitted by his rural occupation and simple, humble persona much as, in the Gospels, shepherds were the first to learn of the birth of Christ. Montague's sense of his own region's historical destiny likewise seems contingent on his capacity for empathy with rural ways. Piers and his pilgrims must plough the field in order to arrive at truth, and Montague's vicarious redemption of the land via poetic composition requires the figurative act of ploughing through a rough field.

Montague's description of Belfast, by contrast, is heavy with urban, industrial imagery of iron and brick:

Catching a bus at Victoria Station,

Brood over a wilderness of cinemas and shops

Victorian red-brick villas, framed with aerials….

Throughout the passage are legacies of the colonial enterprise: a station, and indeed an era, named for the English queen who reigned at the height of British imperial domination; the iron bleakness of Belfast, the British industrial city and northern capital, which was to be cut off from the agrarian republic as a result of the Irish civil war; the “wilderness” of cinemas, shops, and Victorian villas framed by aerials—a modern cityscape that evokes the postlapsarian wilderness into which Eve and Adam must wander.

Only upon his departure from Belfast does he get a glimpse of landscape seemingly untouched by the forces of modernity, the “dour, despoiled inheritance” that recalls that of fallen humanity banished from Eden:

A fringe of trees affords some ease at last

From all this dour, despoiled inheritance …

Interspersed in Montague's account of homecoming is a chronicle of the Northern Irish Troubles, beginning with the arrival of Lord Mountjoy in Omagh, whose victory at Kinsale, County Cork, in 1601 led to the conquest of Ireland by English forces. Hugh O'Neill, whose clan had established a fortress in Omagh and ruled the ancient province of Ulster until the seventeenth century, was Lord Mountjoy's next target. Rather than invading Ulster to destroy O'Neill, the English strengthened their forces and began raiding Ulster to destroy crops, hoping to starve O'Neill into submission or a premature attack. Although O'Neill attacked again, he was finally defeated by Lord Mountjoy in Omagh in 1602. O'Neill signed the Mellifont treaty against his will in 1603, effectively permitting him to keep his land while adopting English law and shedding his Irish title, marking defeat for Gaelic Northern Ireland.¹¹

Even today a townland near Omagh is called Mountjoy, and Montague is well aware of the landscape's association with defeat. Significantly, in his travels across Ireland, Montague finds a friendly face only upon reaching the end of the Pale—the region in and around Dublin over which the English traditionally had jurisdiction:

End of a Pale, beginning of O'Neill—

Before a stranger turned a friendly face….

Yet his refusal to romanticize it, to reduce it to a series of abstractions, is indicated by his rejection of either the Romantic sublime or easy allegory in favor of particular details of the landscape itself:

No Wordsworthian dream enchants me here

With glint of glacial corrie, totemic mountain,

But merging low hills and gravel streams,

Oozy blackness of bog-banks, tough upland grass;

Rough Field in the Gaelic and rightly named

As setting for a mode of life that passes on:

Harsh landscape that haunts me,

Well and stone, in the bleak moors of dream,

With all my circling a failure to return.

His recollections of childhood in Garvaghey, where his “first mornings” were “fresh as Eden … like first kiss,” are grounded in the Edenic imagery of the Christian pastoral tradition.

In this rural world, he is able to “assume old ways,” to make a figurative return to childhood and innocence.

Delving further into the past, he looks at a silvered daguerreotype of his grandfather, country lawyer, hedge schoolmaster, rustic gentleman. When, sixty years later, his succession was broken and his descendants scattered to Australia and the United States, the house in Ireland fell into decay and registered the changes wrought by modernity: “the wide hearth with its cauldron shrank to a coal-fired stove / And tiled stone.” The cauldron, which Montague had mentioned in his preface (referring to his own poems as stirring a witch's cauldron), is associated in Irish mythology with plenty and the powers of resuscitation—rather like the cornucopia of classical tradition. Dagda's cauldron, brought from the north to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, “was reputedly always full of broth, and no one ever went from it unsatisfied.”¹² Given the cauldron's association with wisdom, inspiration, rebirth, and the power to raise the dead, its shrinkage to a coal stove symbolizes the demise of indigenous Celtic culture and its imaginative and religious traditions in exchange for dependence on England, as well as on its industrial products, emblematized by the coal stove. Hence, Montague associates the loss of this childhood world with the loss of the old religion, as well as with the loss of traditional values. Dagda's cauldron, from which nobody went away unsatisfied, has been replaced by a coal stove that continually must be replenished by a people who are thereby continually reminded of their lack of self-sufficiency and their inability to be satisfied with what they have.

The next stanza, “The Country Fiddler,” describes Montague's uncle, who played the fiddle at barn and crossroads dances until he left for the New World, when he left his fiddle in the rafters, never again to play it. Montague's description of the end of the music—“a rural art stilled in the discord of Brooklyn”—implicates urbanization and immigration as culprits responsible for silencing the music and thereby suppressing a culture. As young Montague witnesses the gradual deterioration of the fiddle, his country relat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague
• Chapter 2: “The God in the Tree”: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition
• Chapter 3: “Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place”: Michael Longley's Environmental Elegies
• Chapter 4: Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land: Eavan Boland's Suburban Pastoral
• Chapter 5: “In My Handerkerchief of a Garden” Medbh McGuckian's Miniature Pastoral Retreats
• Chapter 6: “When Ireland Was Still under a Spell”: Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
• Conclusion: The Future of Pastoral
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index