Poetry, My Arse
(with apologies to Brendan Kennelly)
You think you know yourself, or that you would by now, and
then, one day, you look about you, and find that you don’t know yourself as
well as you thought. Or perhaps you forget yourself, until one day, out of the
blue, you stumble across a person who seems familiar, and some time later, perhaps
days, or even months, there’s a jolt of recognition, as when you find an old
photograph at the bottom of a drawer, or tucked into a book. In this case, the
moment didn’t quite pass without recognition: there’s a poem on this blog about
the precise moment when I stumbled across her. Lurking behind other people’s
accumulated books she was, when I was clearing out large parts of my life,
without quite knowing that was what was in train. Poems being poems, it says a
minimum, though at the same time, it says several things it once. What it
doesn’t really refer to is poetry, and the significance it has held for me
through my entire life. It comes as somewhat of a surprise that I find myself
engaged in sole soliloquy thus: it should have been obvious, except that my
life got lost in other people’s lives, the way lives do. The lives of husband,
lover, children, and latterly, a thesis. And that parts of me were buried.
Buried alive! you cry. Perhaps so. But I crawled from that wreckage some years
back, got to my feet, and ran for my life. I may just have gotten away with it.
I have used the archaism of “gotten” to annoy my
mother-no-longer-in-law, whom it irritates greatly. I like the way it elides
into the vowel that follows. It reminds me of Italian as spoken by Italians.
The very first poem I remember is 'The Lake Isle of Inisfree'.
I could not say which of my parents had the greater fondness for Yeats; my
father perhaps, though it was my mother taught this poem to me at bedtime, in lieu of bedtime
stories. Strange to still remember so clearly, in my grandparents' house up the
street from where I live now. I could tell you the size of the book, and the
precise colour of the binding….a very deep burgundy, grainy and slightly shiny.
There may have been one cover missing, or perhaps that is a later memory. The
paper was yellowish, heavy, soft to the touch. I was three. I also remember,
from the same time, The Fairies: 'Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen',
though I could only ever recite one verse from memory, which I duly did, on my
first day at school, at the prompting of my proud mama. I have no idea what the
nuns thought, though they knew my father and aunt before me, so perhaps it was
no surprise to them. She was a county scholarship girl; he was the “young
master” for a time at a school in the hills, during the ferociously cold winter
of 1947. He was trouble: the story of why he, unlike her, did not earn a
scholarship is tied up in his huge love of the Irish language, and his stubborn
refusal, in his school-leaving exams, to turn in the stock essay about the
future of the native tongue, instead giving his honest opinion that the powers-that-be
were killing it. So stubborn he was, that he did this not once, but twice,
having astonished his teacher by earning only a pass first time round, and repeating
his exams the following year. Irish being essential for scholarships, of
course, not to mention teacher training. To give you an idea of his competence:
he wrote poetry in Irish, and translated it from English; I am now the somewhat
bemused owner of “Triúr fear I mBád” and “An Dochtuir Jekyll agus
an t-Uasal Hyde” (the pedant in me railed that it was not de hIde), which
of course I have never read. I often wondered what Jerome K. Jerome might have made
of it.
Maybe I would not, could not, commit the rest of the Fairies
to memory, on account of the fate of little Bridget. Seven years gone? No one
would know me when I came back? I approached the bottom of the garden with
caution thereafter. There were definitely fairies, for they left behind satin
dancing-shoes in many shades of pink and purple, beneath the ivy bushes, or so
my neighbour Thomasina told me. I turned up in their garden unexpectedly, just
days after we moved to my grandmother’s, scrambling across the intermediate
hedges. I had to be shown the way back, having covered the vast tracts of
wilderness of two overgrown gardens to get there. A strange and serious child,
I suspect. Yeats in particular painted pictures in my head, that have never gone away. Poetry can be a strongly visual medium.
Getting back to the poetry: it was always there. Perhaps I
ended up spending too many years around people to whom poetry did not matter,
having spent my childhood, teenage years and twenties around people to whom it
mattered very much. My mother was fanatical about Wilde and Shaw, the latter
perhaps as a result of her Carlow connections. And Shakespeare, end to end. We've never gone for half-measures, as a clan. Ah,
we see where this is going: the prose is more her than him. He was an early
Heaney admirer. I remember too, buying him The Haw Lantern as a Christmas
present the year it was published, writing a dedication on the flyleaf, and
presenting it excitedly, only to find that he had already purchased a copy. He
said he did not mind, and was actually happy to have two copies, but I was
disappointed. Now, as a parent, I understand the pleasure of the fact that I
had brought him something he had wanted himself, and the sentimental value of
the second copy, complete with dedication. My copy and his twinned. On the same
shelves, there’s also Louis McNiece, a gift from my mother, I recall, and my
own purchases of Kavanagh, Yeats, Heaney, and Donne, the odd-Englishman-out.
Because, you see, I love how Irish poets write, with internal rhyme, and
assonance and alliteration often taking the place of the straitjacket of rhyme.
Which is not to say that I don’t love Donne too. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone.....I stayed at home mostly, and maybe sometimes saw the whole of the moon. Poetry seems to creep into significant places in my life and
hide there, occasionally shyly peeping out to remind me of its secret
existence. Not-so-secret, when you name your daughter for the child dancing in
the wind. She has lived up to it, a fey and engaging child with a vivid imagination
and a matching sense of the dramatic. And cool, appraising, grey-green eyes
like the sea, and mermaid hair, golden, unexpectedly unlike her mother’s auburn
mane.
Do I own a volume of Hardy? If I don’t, that must be
remedied. I read his melancholy fiction right through, book by book, topping
off a teenage literary education during which I devoured Irish short stories - ah!
but we write them well, the lilt of the colloquial always singing through. My
English literary education came from my landlady’s London bookshelf: Lawrence, Hardy,
and Bates balanced by more risqué texts from Colette and Dorothy Parker. I
can’t remember when I read Madame Bovary. It was later. I disliked her
intensely. A further sojourn in London included frequent trips to Skoob, in
Bloomsbury, very close to the office, where I came by my own copy of Donne’s
poems. I have not even mentioned my Graham Greene habit, another inheritance. I laughed
helplessly aloud on the Tube (a deadly sin for certain) at J.P Dunleavy, and learned
to hate the Beckett trilogy, which made every journey an eternity.
My father read very little other than poetry in the last
decade of his life, in the same way that he seemed to listen to little other
than Mahler, the sublime, in the last weeks of it. I like to think it was
because of the economy and delicate precision of poetry, where one line imparts
five different things, and every word is imbued with layers of meaning. A good
use of time, when it starts to dwindle, and the sand runs lower and faster in
the glass.
When he died, I read at his funeral from the Haw Lantern.
The poem was ‘The Stone Verdict’. In conversation with the author a couple of
years later, I found that the poem was written about his own father. It could equally
have been about my father's father, let alone my father, whom I recall, when I was twenty-four or so, holding out the page to me, to ask me if it reminded me of his own father,
always with hat and walking-stick. It did not: I was still a callow and shallow youth. But
the recollection came poignantly back, after that conversation. Poetry is also about that internal chime of perfect recognition.
I had his tombstone inscribed with a line from Rafteirí an
File, familiar to every Irish schoolchild with ears to hear it: 'Dul siar ar
m’aistir/le sonas mo chroí'. I mistook 'solas' for 'sonas”' for many years, until
finally, I checked the text for the stonemason, at my mother’s prompting. I
blame ET and his heartlight. Because that is what poetry has been to me. It has
warmed and illuminated, though for a while it seems I had forgotten that it has
such power. It’s been a long journey home.
