Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Analysis of Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour

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Skunk Hour

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars.   Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

 

Glossary:

hull to hull – the speaker sees the cars as boats, next to one another as if on a river, maybe the river Styx from Greek mythology, associated with the final crossing of the soul?

hill’s skull – a suggestion of Golgotha, or Calvary which was the hill Christ was crucified on.  Both words, Golgotha (from Hebrew) and Calvary (from Latin) translate as ‘skull’.

spar spire – mastlike spire

Tudor Ford – Ford luxury car

 

Commentary

Skunk Hour is a confessional poem written in 1957. It depicts a man at a moment of crisis in his life.  It was the last poem in an important volume of poetry titled Life Studies (1959), one of Lowell’s most influential publications.  This is a dark and thought-provoking poem, with religious anxieties surfacing, and it raises issues that are universal and relevant for us today. The speaker admits to secretly watching lovers in their cars at night and this makes him feel bad. He confesses to being a type of voyeur – a victim of a modern, uncaring, materialistic community, a depressed loner who will resort to spying on young couples for titillation.

The first four verses of Skunk Hour focus on several prominent inhabitants of Nautilus Island, Maine:  the ‘hermit heiress’, the ‘summer millionaire’, and the ‘fairy decorator’. Brief descriptions set the scene until the main protagonist, the sad, lonely speaker, begins his rather pathetic confession.  Lowell once remarked, ‘The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town’.

In fact, as Scott Edward Anderson tells us, ‘he wrote the poem “backwards,” the final stanzas before the opening four, but did it with such seeming ease that the opening reads as almost a laconic warm-up exercise or scene-setter’.  In truth, however, the opening four verses are masterful: the weight of his forthcoming confession weighs so heavily upon him that he delays and obfuscates because of the enormity of it.  Lowell is human, after all.

The scene is set by first introducing the old and frail heiress of the island who is a stickler for tradition, a conservative, a fading aristocrat landowner with a bishop for a son, and ruins for the future.  The poet’s diction reflects this refusal to move on by using the word still twice to emphasize the longevity of her reign. She clings on through the winter, and the sheep go on grazing. Even her farmer (more likely her gardener) is a traditional local administrator (selectman) in the speaker’s own village.

The tone is one of mild desperation at this stage in the poem, the heiress thirsting for a return to the glorious days of old Queen Victoria, when the great and good ruled supreme and everyone knew their place.  Basically, she’s living in the past and as derelict buildings come on the market, she buys them up ‘and lets them fall’, presumably to protect her privacy, as well as to reclaim some semblance of what the place resembled in the previous golden era.

The line, ‘she’s in her dotage’, echoes ‘the world is in its dotage’ from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).  Note the way the poet uses end half-rhyme (slant or near or imperfect rhyme) in cottage/village/dotage which suggests that things are not making full sense, and there is little harmony.  These combine to endorse the idea that on this island things are falling into a state of disrepair, which doesn’t bode well for the future.

Skunk Hour is a free verse poem of eight sestets (six-line stanzas).   There is no set rhyme scheme but there are interesting end rhymes and some internal rhymes that help our understanding.  These sounds, a variation on a theme of ill, are half-rhymes and produce an echo that keeps the reader in touch with the voice of the speaker, alive in a season that is itself ill.  This is illustrated by the demise of ‘our summer millionaire’ who despite putting on a fashionable outward appearance falls ill and dies and his yawl ‘was auctioned off to lobstermen’.   Lowel’s use of words like lost, leap, and auctioned off all point to a person permanently not returning, his boat now belonging to locals who will put it to better use. The stanza ends with the enigmatic line, ‘A red fox stain covers Blue Hill’.  Lowell reassures us that the line ‘was merely meant to describe the rusty reddish colour of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain near where we were living’.

In stanza four the plot thickens, and we are introduced to the “fairy decorator,” actually, “our fairy decorator,” because every summer village from Massachusetts to Bangor, Maine, had one! He appropriates the tools of the local fishing and lobstering trade to decorate the windows of his shop, and would “rather marry,” presumably an heiress, since there’s “no money in his work” and without any prospect of marrying someone of his own sex for at least another half-century. Of course, this was before the arrival of political correctness! Lowell would no doubt be challenged by his characterization here were he writing today. The full-end rhyme fall/awl and half-rhymes cork/work and fairy/marry help tie up this stanza, a near-comic portrayal of a guy making the best out of a sorry situation. Wedlock would seem to be a way out of a life destined for a peculiar kind of sad, island loneliness.  In these four stanzas, Lowell has masterfully built up a vivid portrait of a threadbare New England village and its archetypes.

Stanza five offers us some clues as  to what the poet is wrestling with in his own darkness, his own crisis point: the stanza opens with “One dark night,”  and he ends the stanza with, “My mind’s not right.” ‘One Dark Night’ as well as being a good opening for a scary story told at Halloween also has echoes of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ as depicted by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic monk and poet from the 16th century.  In a talk ‘On Skunk Hour’, Lowell stated,

‘I hoped my readers would remember St John of the Cross’s poem.  My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic.  An existentialist night.’

The speaker’s dark troubled secret is revealed in this stanza, giving the poem its confessional nature.  He climbs into his Ford Tudor sedan and drives up to a quiet graveyard on a hill overlooking the town and he watches the young couples necking in their cars, windows steaming in the late summer night – it is late August, early September. He remembers the anecdote related to him by Elizabeth Bishop of Walt Whitman in his old age being driven by horse and buggy to witness the hillside lovers in a bygone era and imagines the internal satisfaction that that poet felt from seeing young people in love.  Lowell was continually influenced by Elizabeth Bishop’s work and, apparently, the Bishop poem that inspired Lowell’s Skunk Hour and helped unlock his new, freer style, was The Armadillo which was written in Brazil in the mid-fifties at the height of the Cold War. ‘Armadillo is one of your absolutely top poems, your greatest quatrain poem,’ Lowell writes to Bishop late in 1958. ‘I mean it has a wonderful formal-informal grandeur – I see the bomb in it in a delicate way.’  It was originally published in The New Yorker in June of 1957 and she later dedicated the poem to Lowell when it appeared in Questions of Travel in 1965.  Lowell, in turn, dedicated Skunk Hour to Bishop.

So, in stanza five the speaker is revealed to us at last; having ‘hidden’ behind the first four stanzas he finally reveals his dark secret: he has come here to this Golgotha to spy, like some Judas, on couples having sex in their cars:

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

And that line about the graveyard is a powerful hint – it ‘shelves’ or slopes down and so the island’s dead are looking in on this love-making too, just like the speaker. The four dots at the end of this line are poignant and pregnant with possibility. The stanza ends in self-reflection with yet another confession: ‘My mind’s not right’.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker is so close to the cars on the hill he can hear music from one of the radios. He hears snippets of Fats Domino singing “Careless Love,” and this depresses him even further and he realizes he is on a fool’s mission: he won’t find what he is looking for here either. He heads back down the hill, noticing off to his left, that autumn has already arrived on  Blue Hill, and in the fading light, the hill is turning ‘fox red’, as the first trees and the low shrubs start to turn. He admits that his “mind’s not right.” He needs to get home. When he reaches the house, he enters through the back porch so as not to disturb his wife and three-month-old child.

At this point, the speaker feels completely alone, in sharp juxtaposition to the lovers in their cars on the nearby hill.  Some have argued that Lowell was feeling suicidal here, or more likely he was coming to the realization that he was on the verge of another manic episode. (He’d been free of such episodes for three years but in December 1957 he was again admitted to Boston State Hospital).

Ascending the back stairs, he is startled by a noise from the garbage cans behind the house. A mother skunk and her kittens are nosing around in the spilled contents which include a cup of sour cream that the mother skunk jabs her nose into with abandon. Nature comes to his rescue in the form of the instinctive skunk, a mother with her young in tow out looking for food. The speaker seems almost relieved as he watches this family go about their business of surviving in an urban environment, an unnatural one for these animals.

The last two stanzas bring some redemption for the sad speaker, whose meaningless existence in a Maine backwater is put on hold temporarily by the simple act of witnessing a lowly skunk scavenging with her young kittens.

Skunk Hour and the other poems Lowell wrote late in 1957 turned increasingly inward only to emerge into an outward flourish of personal expression that critics came to call “confessional.” The overall tone of Skunk Hour is pessimistic, even depressing – there is an atmosphere of doubt, failure, and poverty of spirit, relieved temporarily by the actions of the courageous if slightly disgusting, skunks.  Only they seem to live brightly in the here and now of Nautilus Island. It’s not a fun place to exist in according to the speaker; there is a sickness pervading, and he seems to be a victim of it, admitting that ‘my mind’s not right’.  He probably sensed another manic bout in the offing and, sure enough, by December 1957 Lowell was again hospitalized due to bipolar disorder, the mental condition then known as “manic depression”.    While bipolar disorder was often a great burden to the writer and his family, it also provided the subject matter for some of Lowell’s most influential poetry, such as Skunk Hour and the other poems included in his prize-winning volume, Life Studies (1959).

References:

Anderson, Scott Edward. The Nautilus of Robert Lowel’s Skunk Hour, in  http://www.svjlit.com/

MECastineSeenfromNautilusIsland1905

Listen to Robert Lowell read Skunk Hour
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

In Memory of Danny Barry – Newcastle West’s Other Poet

Danny Barry 'The Bard of Bothar Buí'
Danny Barry ‘The Bard of Bothar Buí’

Believe it or not, Michael Hartnett is not the only poet to hail from Newcastle West!  There have always been local balladeers and poets who have pandered to their local audience in the town and in the surrounding parishes.  In Hartnett’s brilliant poem Maiden Street Ballad, he mentions two of these troubadours and he takes pride in saying that he intends to hold people to account ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’.  He will, therefore, follow in the illustrious footsteps of Jack Aherne from Lower Maiden Street and Danny Barry who was born in Bothar Buí.  He will be true to them and speak out like they had done in the generation before him.  In the introductory verses of that famous ballad, Hartnett sets out his stall and warns us in advance of what we are to expect from him:

8

Now before you get settled, take a warning from me

for I’ll tell you some things that you won’t like to hear –

we were hungry and poor down in Lower Maiden Street,

a fact I will swear on the Bible.

There were shopkeepers then, quite safe and secure –

seven Masses a week and then shit on the poor;

ye know who I mean, of that I am sure,

and if they like they can sue me for libel.

 

9

They say you should never speak ill of the dead

but a poet must say what is inside his head;

let drapers and bottlers now tremble in dread:

they no longer can pay men slave wages.

Let hucksters and grocers and traders join in

for they all bear the guilt of a terrible sin:

they thought themselves better than their fellow men –

now the nettles grow thick on their gravestones.

10

So come all you employers, beware how you act

for a poet is never afraid of a fact:

your grasping and greed I will always attack

like Aherne and Barry before me.

My targets are only the mean and the proud

and the vandals who try to make dirt of this town,

if their fathers were policemen they’d still feel the clout

of a public exposure in poetry.

Danny Barry was born in Bothar Buí in 1911 and lived his whole life in Newcastle West. He married Margaret (Peig) Sayers from Ferriter’s Quarter, Dunquin, and together, they had four children: Breda, Mary, Kevin and Dennis. Danny worked as a summons server and pound keeper in Newcastle West. He was known to many as the “Sheriff” and to others as the “Bard of Bothar Buí”.

Danny Barry Warrant (1)
Danny Barry’s Warrant of Appointment as Summons Server issued by the Circuit Court Office on 15th August 1955

Michael Hartnett believed that Danny Barry of Newcastle West was an example of the local poet at his best. He lived most of his married life at 46 Assumpta Park, just round the corner from Hartnett’s childhood home. He died in 1973 while still in his early 60s. He is still remembered with a shudder by many of the people targeted by his verse.  In praise of Danny’s poetry, Hartnett has said ‘he mocked the foolish, the vain, the craw thumper, the jack-in-office, and the bogus patriot’.

Danny’s son Kevin and Kevin’s sons, Dan and Graham Barry have done sterling work collecting the remnants of their grandfather’s poems in recent years.  Remember these local poets did not publish their work or expect to have it dissected and analysed in academic circles.  They never considered themselves as professional poets in the first place.  Their songs and ballads were written for local consumption, to be recited in their homes, in local bars, in local ‘rambling houses’, or occasionally given a public performance in The Square.  In a recently unearthed radio documentary entitled ‘Poems Plain’, broadcast by Radio Eireann in 1979 and produced at the time by Donal Flanagan, Michael Hartnett praises the work of these local balladeers and especially the work of Danny Barry:

They seldom publish their work. They write about local events. They’re firmly rooted in 19th-century verse forms. They don’t worry about identity, life, love, or any of the big themes that begin with capital letters. As a result, they’re not accepted by the arbiters of literary taste.

So, if these poets don’t write about the big mainstream issues, ‘life or love’, what do they write about?  In the documentary, Hartnett tells his audience that they concentrate on local issues:

They commemorate hurling matches, football matches, disasters and they usually write badly when dealing with these themes. The ballads they produce are virtually interchangeable. Just a few names need to be changed here and there. But when they deal with humorous themes, or when they satirize, they can be brilliant.

In this, Hartnett suggests they form an unbroken line that stretches back into the Gaelic past, especially into the 18th century. The professional poets even then, such as Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, who was lucky and privileged enough to enjoy the patronage of the Fitzgerald family of Springfield Castle in Broadford, County Limerick, despised these local poets, ‘the sráid éigse, he called them, the street poets’.

Thankfully, due mainly to the intervention of Kevin Barry and his sons Dan and Graham and other members of the family much of his best work has been saved for posterity. Along with his other contemporary, the often notorious, Jack Aherne, only the more salubrious of their sound bites are still retained in people’s memories. Some of their surviving verses are still libelous, but as Hartnett says in the documentary, ‘the trouble with poetry is, no matter how vicious, how scandalous, how libelous, it becomes public property once distributed, whether by word of mouth or slipped under people’s doors early in the morning’.  Hartnett, like Barry and Aherne before him, was wont to deliver verses to his neighbours in this manner on his return to Newcastle West in 1975, especially for those who had recently passed away.  His Epitaph for John Kelly, Blacksmith, and In Memoriam Sheila Hackett are but two such examples of poems written following the death of a friend or neighbour.

Hartnett, who took no prisoners in his role as critic, dismisses some of Danny Barry’s work as weak and overly sentimental:

Like all Irish poets, he was in love with places, and his verses are full of place names. But these poems happen also to be his weakest poems. He fell heavily into an almost cloying sentimentality, made more syrupy by echoes from Robert Service and Thomas Moore.

Barry wrote about local places, Newcastle West, Glenastar, Glenmageen, Rooska Hill, the river Arra but Hartnett tells us that ‘his real strength lay in his satires, or in those poems in which he dealt with people’.

One such poem is The Old School in which he mentions two of the teachers, J.D. Musgrave and George Ambrose, who taught in the old Courtenay School.  Master Musgrave was the principal of the school until his retirement in 1915.  The poem was probably written around 1955 at the time when the old school was demolished to be replaced by the present building in Gortboy.  There are slight echoes of Goldsmith’s The Village Schoolmaster here, but the poem is firmly rooted in the 18th century Anglo Irish ballad tradition, as in such songs as The Limerick Rake.

The Old School

Gone are the days when hearts were young and gay

Gone are the boys from the old school away

Gone are the monks the bright boys and the fool

Gone are the days of the old Courtenay School

If you wander back in memory to the days of long ago

When you were young and happy and worry you did not know

Ducking out to the back alley to play a game of ball

Or trying to jump the highest point of Boody Fitz’s wall

Or mooching in the Majors where the breeze was fresh and cool

And these are the happy memories of the old Courtenay School

 

Gone is J.D. Musgrave a gentleman was he

A student of prognosis he could tell what was to be

‘Twas often said he was severe he made them face the wall

But he was a man of progress he made scholars of them all

And there was Master Ambrose as George he was better known

For nicknames and for wisdom of superiors he had none

There was no one could afford to miss for he had an awful saying

You had better brush it up me boys cause you have sawdust for a brain

He christened many a pupil from his lofty rostrum stool

And no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school.

 

So goodbye old school  memories no more your rooms will ring

Of children’s happy voices and the happy songs they sing

My dear old school you are silent now ’cause they took your heart away

No more the tramp of children’s feet soon you will crumble and decay

But I will not forget you and the happy days of yore

Nor will the boys across the seas in far and foreign shore

Our boyhood terms our boyhood joys a lingering memory

That no time or age can yet blot out in our hearts you will always be

For there are many words when spoken cause a tear to dim their eye

But the saddest little word of all is the simple word Goodbye.

Here Danny Barry uses words and misuses words which only a master of verse in the 18th century could have done.  He uses the lovely expression, “a student of prognosis” to describe Master Musgrave. Interestingly, his son, Maurice Musgrave later married Dolly McMahon who ran a public house where Gearoid Whelan now has his establishment.  She is the Dolly Musgrave that Hartnett immortalises in Maiden Street Ballad:

‘twas in Dolly Musgrave’s I drank my first glass

As is obvious from the poem nicknames have always been synonymous with Newcastle West.  Hartnett, himself, in Maiden Street Ballad, describes the many from the town who had to take the emigrant boat to England and elsewhere:

Off went Smuggy and Eye-Tie and Goose-Eye and Dol,

off went Ratty and Muddy and Squealer and Gull;

then the Bullock and Dando and Gallon were gone,

all looking for work among strangers.

The old men who stayed, time soon thinned their ranks –

like Gogga and Ganzie and Dildo and Sank,

and the Major and Bowler felt death’s icy hand;

old Maiden Street went to the graveyard.

Hartnett himself admitted that the list given in the verse above is only a small sample of the nicknames given to the natives of the town.  The nickname ‘Smuggy’ is interesting – it’s from the Irish smugach, meaning ‘snotty’!

In his notes for that great ballad, Hartnett tells us that, ‘it used to be said that if a stranger walked from Forde’s Corner (now Bourke’s Corner at the top of Maiden Street) he’d have a nickname before he got to Leslie’s Ating House’ (where Richard (Dickie) Liston had his sweet shop).  Also in an article written for The Irish Times on 11th November 1968 entitled ‘Poet’s Progress’, he declared that ‘in small towns in Ireland, unless a man has a nickname (a reputation, good or bad), he hardly exists at all’.

Hartnett himself was simply referred to as ‘The Poet’ and he gave his younger brother John the nickname ‘Wraneen’.  In the Maiden Street Ballad, he refers to his brother Denis as ‘Dinny the Postman’.   Dinny, who has sadly only recently passed away, was also often referred to as ‘Halpin’.  In Danny Barry’s poem The Old School, George Ambrose is credited with giving each student a nickname and, Barry uses the poignant and telling phrase, ‘and no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school’.  I’m sure that this also applied to the teachers!

Hartnett informs us that Barry’s poem, The Christmas Tree, deals with an actual happening. A few men from Maiden Street in Newcastle West decided to erect a Christmas tree in the street. They cut it down in Glenmageen, an area reputed to be haunted by a witch known as Sprid na Barna.  Glenmageen is located about four miles south of Newcastle West and people can now visit the townland as they walk or cycle on the new Limerick Greenway. The stories of Sprid na Barna were well known, and the area near the present-day Barna Gardens was greatly feared by the local people. Indeed, it was said that only a few tough men would go home after dark along the road she haunted. Again Hartnett is fulsome in his praise for the poet:

Danny Barry’s simple evocation of Sprid and her victims is extraordinary.  Not because it is great poetry, but because he does not question the truth of the event at all. By the way, the Silver Dollar Saloon, which is a strange Hollywood, Western-type name, is a pub in Newcastle West, which was then run by the Flynn family, and is now run by the Kelly family.

The poem is called The Christmas Tree. Again I mention Robert Service, and it’s evident in the meter, even the introduction is pure Service.

 The Christmas Tree

A bunch of the boys from Maiden Street, one Wednesday afternoon,

Were drinking and awaiting in the Silver Dollar Saloon,

Waiting for a lorry to convey them to Glenmageen.

And they brought from there a Christmas tree, the finest ever seen.

 

They put it up in splendour, bedecked with fairy lights.

It was a wonderful tree, a beautiful tree, that lightened the darkest night.

Now, the festive season passed away, but this Christmas tree was there to stay.

In time it became the talk of the town, for none of the boys dared take it down.

 

They were stricken with a malady the doctors could not say,

And there is one poor chap who now resides at the back of Shaw’s today.

Now, you have heard of Sprid na Barna, that very naughty dame,

That evil maid of Glenmageen, of the haunting ghostly fame.

 

The clergy had to banish her between the tree and the bark.

No more she would haunt and terrify the neighbours after dark.

Now the moral of this ditty I want you all to know

‘Twas a tree that grew in Glenmageen twenty years ago.

 

Now what I am trying to tell you will cause you all to frown

That the amadáns from Maiden Street have brought auld sprig* to town.

Now when the blackthorn blooms again and the sheepdogs howl at the full of moon

You could meet auld sprig with a glass of gin in the Silver Dollar Saloon.

*Sprid na Barna was sometimes mispronounced locally as Sprig na Barna

This beautiful video has been produced by Danny Barry’s grandson, Dan Barry. The poem is narrated by the poet Michael Hartnett and it is taken from a radio documentary that he did in 1979 for RTE Radio entitled Poems Plain.  The programme was produced by Donal Flanagan. The video contains copyrighted material that is being used for educational purposes under the doctrine of ‘fair use’. The use of this material is not intended to infringe upon the copyright owner’s rights. The material is used here solely for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Danny Barry perhaps wrote a couple of hundred poems, many of them now lost or mouldering in the cupboards of his victims. A handful, between twenty and twenty-five, have been recovered due to the perseverance of Danny’s family, especially his daughter Mary Flanagan, and in recent times by his grandchildren Dan and Graham Barry.

Michael Hartnett believed that the best poem Danny Barry wrote, is a piece called The Eviction. Again, it is based on a natural happening.  It is full of irony and humour, and of course, the elemental Irish hate for landlords, sheriffs, and bailiffs is very evident.

 The Eviction

My name is Peter Shea, my age is fifty-seven.

The old Dock Road was my abode, a station next to heaven.

I was happy as an angel, with my lot I was content,

But I took the drinking porter, and I could not pay the rent.

So now to all good neighbours, a sad tale I must state.

I was forced to go from my bungalow, beside the Sandpit Gate.

 

Tom Hartnett was my landlord, and a damn bad one was he.

I only owed him six years’ rent when he kindly summoned me.

I tried to calm his temper, but I could not calm old Tom,

So to ease the situation, I took in sweet Maggie Nom.

Poor Maggie was so gentle and mild in her debate

That she won my heart and I lost my house beside the Sandpit Gate.

 

It was on a fine September morn, the year was thirty-one,

The sheriff came and flung me out, myself and Maggie Nom.

As he called to his head bailiff, ‘Is there any more to go?’

I said, wait a while your honour, sir, you forgot poor Maggie’s po.

And when he raised the lid off in candour I must state,

I smothered all the neighbours that live around the Sandpit Gate.

 

So now to finish up my rhyme, there’s one thing I must say

About the smiling face and the charming grace of my darling Gurky Shea.

For when the world frowned at me, she did not hesitate

With me to stay, and perhaps to lay, down by the Sandpit Gate.

Hartnett is effusive in his praise for this poem and as already stated he was by nature a very severe critic.  His verdict here is glowing!

If you compare this poem, with the hundreds similar to it, which were written in Munster in the Irish language 200 years ago, it is easy to see the link between, say, Seán Ó Tuama and Danny Barry. The same love of place, of the cherished phrase, of galloping meters and tumbling rhyme, the same disregard for the very thin skins of the fool and of the oppressor, and amazingly enough, they had the same effect.

Danny Barry could frighten his enemies with a threat of public laughter,  and yet he achieved what all poets try to achieve. Because of the earlier efforts of Danny Barry and Jack Aherne, Michael Hartnett was very conscious of his local audience, and when he returned to Newcastle West in the mid-70s he wrote many ribald verses for that audience culminating in the publication of Maiden Street Ballad in 1980.  Like Hartnett, Danny Barry managed to ‘write a few songs for his people’, he was recognized by them as a poet, he could make his people laugh or sing or tremble, and he was well aware of the fragility of his own meagre attempts in verse. He says in one of his little poems, called Remembrance,

And so it will be when he is gone.

Someone will sing of him in song.

Someone will read what he held dear.

But too late for praise he will not hear.

 

References and Links:

“Poems Plain – Danny Barry” was a short radio documentary presented by Michael Hartnett on RTE radio in 1979 and produced by Donal Flanagan.  All quotations in this article come from a transcript of the documentary.  Listen to the full radio documentary by clicking on the link below

https://youtu.be/BcckbNKdYn4?si=9IeX-nx_zwYSCG3I

Listen to Hartnett recite ‘The Eviction’ by Danny Barry with photos added by Dan Barry from Sean Kelly’s collection

https://youtu.be/keIVQW6W9qQ?si=ysm79q64-UXq8LF3

Attached are a few more of Sean Kelly’s photos of Maiden Street taken from here https://ncwoldentimes.com/maiden-street-2/.

You might also like to browse through Michael’s own publication of Maden Street Ballad which you can see here: https://ncwoldentimes.com/maiden-street-ballad-2/

The author is indebted in particular to Dan Barry, grandson of Danny Barry, for invaluable background information in the preparation of this blog post.  The Barry family has done amazing work in collecting the scattered remnants of their grandfather’s life’s work.  They have done us all a great service.

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Jack Aherne’s Supermarket in Lower Maiden Street. Jack was also a coal merchant and he also sold sand and gravel from the sandpit behind the store in what was known as Aherne’s Field – now the location for the Lidl Supermarket and the Scanglo factory. When Jack Aherne closed his supermarket the premises were bought by Tom Moran who carried on an electrical business on the site. Jack’s father, also Jack Aherne is the other noted bard and rhymer whom Hartnett refers to in Maiden Street Ballad – ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’. Photograph by Sean Kelly.
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

A Christmas Childhood by Patrick Kavanagh

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IrishCentral Staff @IrishCentral

A Christmas Childhood

by Patrick Kavanagh

I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

II

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’ –
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

 

From Collected Poems (2004). Edited by Antoinette Quinn, Allen Lane. An imprint of Penguin Books, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

 Commentary

In this, one of Ireland’s most beloved and recognised poems, ‘A Christmas Childhood’,  Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) explores themes of memory, coming of age, and imagination. The poem is set in 1910 and it is a memory poem. We are told that Kavanagh was ‘six Christmases of age’ but the poem also remembers and celebrates the original Christmas event almost two thousand years earlier.  The poet is looking back on the magical and mysterious world of childhood and he is mourning its passing with some regret.

The poet recognises that his childhood was a time when the ordinary seemed extraordinary.  Through figurative language and colourful imagery, he paints a picture of his early childhood and what it meant to be a child in those difficult times.   In line one, we are presented with a factual and accurate description: ‘One side of the potato-pits was white with frost’ and line two is powered with emotion. The tone, the use of repetition and the exclamation mark in ‘How wonderful that was, how wonderful!’ convey wonder and excitement.

Similar to his poem ‘Advent’, this poem uses religion both as a theme and as its main source of imagery. Kavanagh’s spirituality is to the fore and this was very much informed and influenced by traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic theology.  He desires to return to the state of childish innocence when he was six years old and Christmas surely brings out the child in all of us!  Kavanagh’s well-worn theory was that if he could rediscover a world of childhood innocence he would ipso facto become a better poet. Indeed, the poem’s title gives the game away: he describes his childhood as ‘a Christmas childhood’ rather than the more limiting ‘a childhood Christmas’.

Both ‘Advent’ and ‘A Christmas Childhood’, therefore, are very religious poems – religious at a very personal level.  Kavanagh’s feeling is that experience has corrupted him – in ‘Advent’ he tells us that he has ‘tested and tasted too much’ and this has echoes in this poem when he says:

O you Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay

And death the germ within it! 

He wants to bring back the newness that was in the world before things grew stale through over-familiarity.  In ‘Advent’ he lists the mundane things that will inspire him in the New Year: a ‘black slanting Ulster hill’ will be new again; the boring chat of a tedious old man will become wonderful; the whole ordinary, ‘banal’, common world of reality will be renewed; wonderful then will be ‘whins’, ‘bog holes’, ‘cart-tracks’, ‘old stables’. To this list, he now adds ‘potato pits’, ‘paling posts’ and,

The tracks of cattle to a drinking place,

A green stone lying sideways in a ditch …

The poem is in two parts: Part II first appeared in The Bell magazine (December 1940) and Part I was published in The Irish Press (24 December 1943). Part I describes the townland of Mucker in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan, and explores, from an adult’s perspective, how childhood is a time of innocence, an innocence that we inevitably lose. As a child he saw ‘An apple tree/ With its December-glinting fruit’ but just as Eve ate the apple which led to man’s Fall and sinful state, Kavanagh knows that as we leave childhood behind us we lose our innocence. The Garden of Eden is no more; but Christmas is a time when an Eden-like world becomes possible. Adulthood, says Kavanagh, blinds us to the beauty, freshness and innocence of childhood but it can be recaptured occasionally, especially at Christmas time.

Part II of the poem introduces a cast of characters – Kavanagh’s father, his beloved mother, and the neighbours. In Antoinette Quinn’s words ‘Through a series of crisp, lucid images it conjures up the child’s sense of being part of a family and a closely-knit Catholic community’.  Everything is in harmony and the poem is very musical.  We hear his father’s melodeon, the music that came from putting his ear to the paling-post, the music of milking, the screech of the water-hen in the nearby bog, the crunch of feet on the icy potholes along the road and also the sound of the bellows wheel in the country kitchen.  And of course, the beautiful onomatopoeic line ‘I nicked six nicks on the doorpost’ which creates its own marvellous music also. The melodeon calls to the Lennons and Callans and the stars dance to his father’s music. The music unites one place to another and neighbour to neighbour. The imagery of Co. Monaghan blends with imagery from the Biblical account of Christ’s birth: ‘The light of her stable-lamp was a star’ and the ‘three whin bushes’ become ‘the Three Wise Kings’.

The poem sums up his Christmases and the things that made them memorable and precious to him – his father playing the melodeon, his mother milking the cows, the special gift of ‘a white rose’ that he gave to the Virgin and pinned it on her blouse.  He was a real boy – can I say that now? – he notched his age on the doorpost – not six years but ‘six Christmases of age’! 

When all is said and done ‘A Christmas Childhood’ is a chatty little poem that deals with simple things in simple, everyday language.  Yet this seemingly rustic simplicity can be deceptive and underneath it all, there is the constant realisation of the presence of Christ and Christ’s mother – and perhaps all mothers.  After all, the final image is that of a father and mother and child, an ordinary family and the Holy Family.

Little wonder then that at Kavanagh’s funeral in Inniskeen on the 30th of November 1967, Seamus Heaney read ‘A Christmas Childhood’ at his graveside.

Works Cited

Kavanagh, Patrick. Collected Poems. Edited by Antoinette Quinn.  Allen Lane. An imprint of Penguin Books, London, 2004.

Quinn, Antoinette.  Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography. (Second Edition).  Gill Books, 2003.

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Éigse Michael Hartnett 2022

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We are on the final countdown to the Éigse Michael Hartnett Festival for 2022! There is a wide-ranging programme of events between workshops, poetry readings, music, exhibitions, film, book launches, street entertainment, and even a bus tour!

We’ve had some events already with the young people in the town in the schools and the youth organisations.  Colm Keegan has conducted workshops in creative writing in SMI and in Desmond College and the results of their labours will be on view during the Festival weekend. 

Aileen Nix, a local artist, has been working with the local Foróige group in town to produce lanterns for the opening parade.

Edward O’Dwyer also worked with the Foróige group and their poems will be on display around town.

The idea of the Éigse is to recognise Michael Hartnett’s genius and to celebrate his life and his poetry.  As you know he died in 1999 at the age of 58 and there has been an annual Éigse every year since – even during Covid we went online and kept it going. 

This year we are proud to announce that thanks to the generosity of Limerick City and County Council we have been able to increase the value of the annual Michael Hartnett Poetry Award to €8,000 and we are delighted that Eleanor Hooker from Dromineer on the shores of Lough Derg is this year’s deserving winner of the prestigious award.

We received great news yesterday with the confirmation that the recently acquired portrait of Hartnett by Edward McGuire which is now in the City Gallery will be on display in Newcastle West for the opening of this year’s Éigse.

THURSDAY

We kick things off on Thursday the 6th of October at 7.00pm in the Square with a rousing street performance by The Hit Machine Drummers, a kilted brotherhood of rhythmic warriors who enthrall and entertain with dynamic, captivating drumming. They will lead us in a lantern parade with members of the Foroige Youth Club in Newcastle West. The parade will leave the Square and travel down Hartnett’s beloved Maiden Street to the Council Offices down near the Longcourt House Hotel. There this year’s Éigse will be officially opened by the Lord Mayor, Francis Foley who will present this year’s poetry prize to Eleanor Hooker.  Other special guests on the night will be Gerard Stembridge and music from Brian Hartnett.

FRIDAY

On Friday the 7th we begin bright and early with a poetry reading by Eleanor Hooker which takes place upstairs in Marguerites at 11am.

This is followed by lunch with Mark Patrick Hederman former Abbott and Headmaster in Glenstal at 1.00pm at the Desmond Complex, where a light lunch will be served to accompany a reading from Dr. Hederman’s recently published works including Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick.

The evening events at the Longcourt House Hotel start at 6.00pm with a belated book launch that fell victim to Covid in 2020.  Keith McCoy will be reading from his debut novel Hello Larry Barry and from his recently published second novel The Jude Crew.  Both novels are set in Newcastle West although The Jude Crew spreads its wings a bit wider.

At 8pm in The Longcourt House Hotel, we have a fantastic poetry reading by two former Michael Hartnett award winners Kerry Hardie and Peter Sirr who were also our judges this year for the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. The reading will be followed by live music from cellist Núria Vizcaino Estrada from Barcelona and currently studying for her MA in Classical String Performance in UL.

Also on Friday at 8.00pm you can enjoy two film screenings over at the Desmond Complex in partnership with Newcastle West Film Club and Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Based on the novel Foster by Claire Keegan, An Cailín Ciúin, is the acclaimed award -winning Irish-language film that has broken all Irish box office records this year. This will be followed by Seanie Barron: Only in Askeaton, a short film that dips into the life and work of wood artist Seanie Barron and examples of his work will also be on exhibition at the Red Door Gallery throughout the weekend.

SATURDAY

Saturday the 8th begins at the Desmond Complex with the annual Michael Hartnett Memorial Lecture at 11am. This year the lecture is being given by Historian and former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland, Caitriona Crowe. Caitriona will deliver the lecture on: How did Ireland do in its decade of centenaries?  So, the lecture should be very thought-provoking and I’m looking forward to that.

This will be followed at 1.30pm by music and memories of Hartnett from uilleann piper and former RTE producer Peter Browne.  He has some great stories to tell about being on tour with Michael Hartnett back in the 80s.

We are particularly happy this year to be taking the Festival outside NCW  in partnership with the Kileedy Development Association and to acknowledge the wonderful work and community building going on in Raheenagh.  So, at 3 p.m. the Hartnett Bus Tour will depart from the Desmond Complex taking in Camas, home of Michael Hartnett’s grandmother Bridget Halpin, whom he immortalised in his beautiful poem ‘Death of an Irishwoman’.  Then it’s on to the Poet’s Corner at Killeedy Eco-Park and finishing with tea and tunes at the Tigh Cheoil in Ashford. 

Saturday evening’s events will begin with a reading from author Mary Costello at 8.00pm at the Longcourt House. She will be reading from her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), and her two novels Academy Street (2014), and The River Capture (2019) which was shortlisted for many awards.

The reading will be followed by live music from Mick Hanly who needs no introduction to Limerick audiences.   He is one of our foremost singer/songwriters, and of course, Mick was born and reared in Limerick.  We expect a big crowd in The Longcourt House Hotel next Saturday night.

SUNDAY

Salad Sunday is a new addition to the Éigse Michael Hartnett programme for 2022 and celebrates one of Michael Hartnett’s most amusing poems, The Balad of Salad Sunday, which pokes fun at an incident in Newcastle West back in the early 80s.

Salad Sunday is intended as a fun, entertaining event for the community and will take place in the Square, the Red Door Gallery, and the Desmond Complex.  Seamus Hennessy will be the MC for the events in the Square and there should be plenty of buskers and food stalls  – so come along and enjoy the craic – hopefully, the weather holds up!!

Our final two events of the weekend are the launch of two new books:  Gabriel Fitzmaurice is launching the new edition of Farewell to Poetry and Tom Moloney is launching his first collection of short stories called Overcoming the Joy and Other Yearnings.  Both take place at 1.00pm and 1.30pm respectively at the Desmond Complex.

As you can see it’s a full programme with something for everyone young and old, so we hope you can join us over the weekend.

Many of the events are free but some need to be booked on Eventbrite although money will also be taken at the door. Check out our website http://www.eigsemichaelhartnett.ie for up-to-date details of all the events.   

Éigse committee 2022: Vicki Nash, Norma Prendeville, Rachel Lenihan, John Cussen, Rose Liston, Rossa McMahon, Mary Carroll, and Vincent Hanley

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

‘Lint Water’ by Seamus Heaney

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Lint Water

       
by Seamus Heaney

 

The flax was pulled by hand once it ripened,

Bound into tall green pillars with rush bands

And buried underwater, roots upwards.

When the dam was full they loaded stones and sods

On top, then left the whole thing for three weeks

To rot, to stink: a pit of rotten eggs

Could not have generated such a fug

As flax decaying, steaming like a bog,

Wafting its heavy, nauseating fall-out.

As soon as stems had turned to slime and smut

The dam was emptied: men stood waist deep

In the fouled water, with fork and four-pronged grape

Pitching out sheaves like half-gone carcasses.

They spread it dripping, then, flat on the grass

To crisp and dry hard in the summer sun

Until it could be stooked up, stiff as broom

And whistling in the wind.  Toughened to sticks,

The stems were milled, spun, woven into fabrics.

The dam was cleared, poured down into the river

Its poisonous bellyful. “Lint water”

It was called.  Across the stream it swirled brown froth

That scummed clean stone and sickened fish to death;

And if the drains were blocked, it still seeped down,

Filtering unseen contamination.

Putrid currents floated trout to the loch,

Their bellies white as linen tablecloths.

This poem was first published in The Times Literary Supplement on August 5th, 1965.  Despite being a strong contender for inclusion in his first collection, Heaney seems to have opted instead for a very similar poem, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ after which his first collection is named.  The language of the poem, while on the surface appearing to be very matter-of-fact and factual, is loaded with allegorical undertones.  Words used to describe the flax dam, ‘rotten eggs’, ‘stink’, ‘decaying’, ‘poisonous’, ‘unseen contamination’, and ‘putrid currents’, are really intended to describe the dysfunctional nature of politics in the North of Ireland.  Heaney goes into much more detail here in this poem and the rotting flax is weighed down with ‘stones and sods’ which stands for the violence and coercion he has experienced as a young boy and man.

This poem, therefore, is not as innocent as it seems at first reading.  However, it does show early signs of an author who has found a way to illustrate the myriad tensions of his native province before the inevitable meltdown in the late 60s occurred. Unlike other ‘innocent’ poems from his early collections, there is a harsher more jarring approach here in this poem and yet, like much of his earlier poetry, the poem truly reflects his upbringing in Mossbawn and Annahorish. His use of allusion and his reference to the dying rural crafts such as that of the flax farmer, the farrier, the diviner, the ploughman, and his respect for those who worked in the bog is to the fore here also. So, we can see here the germ of an approach that would allow Heaney, in collections such as North and Wintering Out, to explain his unique predicament to an often oblivious and naive world audience.

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                                      The Hands of History by artist Raymie Watson

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

A Small Farm by Michael Hartnett

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A SMALL FARM

By Michael Hartnett

All the perversions of the soul
I learnt on a small farm.
How to do the neighbours harm
by magic, how to hate.
I was abandoned to their tragedies,
minor but unhealing:
bitterness over boggy land,
casual stealing of crops,
venomous cardgames
across swearing tables,
a little music on the road,
a little peace in decrepit stables.
Here were rosarybeads,
a bleeding face,
the glinting doors
that did encase
their cutler needs,
their plates, their knives,
the cracked calendars
of their lives.

I was abandoned to their tragedies
and began to count the birds,
to deduct secrets in the kitchen cold
and to avoid among my nameless weeds
the civil war of that household.

Taken from Collected Poems 2001, Gallery Press – (Collection reprinted 2009)

The ‘small farm’ referred to in this poem is that of his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, formerly Bridget Roche.  According to parish records in Abbeyfeale, she married Michael Halpin from Camas, near Newcastle West, in Abbeyfeale Church on February 28th 1911 in what was, by all accounts, ‘a made match’ between both families and she then came to live in Camas where the Halpins owned a small farm of ten acres three roods and 13 perches.  

This woman, Bridget Halpin, would later wield great influence over her young grandson Michael Hartnett.  Indeed, if we are to believe the poet, she was the one who first affirmed his poetic gift when one day he ran into her kitchen in Camas and told her that a nest of young wrens had alighted on his head.   Her reply to him was, ‘Aha, You’re going to be a poet!’.  Hartnett claimed that he spent much of his early childhood in Bridget Halpin’s cottage in the rural townland of Camas four miles from his home in nearby Newcastle West.   He went on to immortalise this woman in many of his poems but especially in his beautiful poem, ‘Death of an Irishwoman’.  This quiet townland of Camas is seen as central to his development as a poet and maybe in time, this early association with Camas will be given its rightful importance and the little rural townland will vie with Maiden Street or Inchicore as one of Hartnett’s important formative places.  

In subsequent years, Michael Halpin and his wife Bridget had six children, Josie, Mary, Peg, Denis, Bridget (later to be Michael Hartnett’s mother) and Ita.  Unfortunately, Michael Halpin died in September 1920 at the age of 44 approx. having succumbed to pneumonia.  In a heartbreaking twist of fate, his daughter Ita was born seven months later on 23rd March 1921.  Bridget Halpin was now left with the care of her six young children and their ailing grandmother, Johanna.  Johanna Halpin (née Browne) died in Camus on 18th June 1921 aged 80 years of age.

Bridget Halpin’s plight was now stark and the harshness of her existence is often alluded to in her grandson’s poems which feature her.  The cottage which was little more than a three-roomed thatched mud cabin built of stone and yellow mud collapsed around 1926.   The whole family were taken in, in an extraordinary gesture of neighbourliness, by their neighbour Con Kiely until a new cottage was built a short distance away.  The family moved into their new home in 1931 and this is the structure that still stands today.  According to Michael Hartnett this cottage, and especially the mud cabin which preceded it, was renowned as a ‘Rambling House’, a cottage steeped in history, music, song, dance, cardplaying and storytelling.  Hartnett would have us believe that it was from the loft in this cottage that he began to pick up his first words of Irish from his grandmother and her cronies as they gathered to play cards or tell tall tales. (A more detailed genealogy of the Halpin family and the early formative influences on Michael Hartnett can be read here).

The poem ‘A Small Farm’, the first poem of the Collected Poems (2001), creates a delicate balance between description and abstraction.  Students of Hartnett’s poetry should consider studying this poem as one of a series of poems that he wrote celebrating his grandmother, Bridget Halpin and the townland of Camas where she lived.  The most obvious of these poems is ‘Death of an Irishwoman’ which he wrote on the passing of his grandmother in 1965.  Others include, ‘For My Grandmother Bridget Halpin’, and ‘Mrs Halpin and the Lightning’.  Abstractions, clichés, their representation through language, metaphors and the moment where these are drawn into focus, made specific and immediate, are central to these poems. ‘A Small Farm’ is a natural development and shows a more mature, confident and surer treatment of this place than the earlier ‘Camas Road’.

‘Camas Road’, Michael Hartnett’s first published work, appeared in the Limerick Weekly Echo on the 18th of June 1955. He was thirteen. The poem describes in particular detail the rural vista of the West Limerick townland of Camas at evening: ‘A bridge, a stream, a long low hedge, / A cottage thatched with golden straw’ (A Book of Strays 67). Its two eight-line stanzas of alternating rhyme and regular metre contain a litany of natural images, at times idiosyncratically rendered; the ‘timid hare sits in the ditch’, ‘the soft lush hay that grows in fields’. It is a peculiar mix of a poem, apparent images from both the poet’s lived and literary experience placed side by side. It is contentedly denotative, creating a sense of ease and oneness with the natural world. The movement of sunrise to sunset is perpetually peaceful, its colours oils for the young poet’s palette. The ruminative introspective which elevates Kavanagh’s, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, a poem which can be read in useful parallel to ‘Camas Road’, is not present. At the poem’s turn, as ‘Dark shadows fall o’er land so still’, Hartnett’s only thought and action are of flattened description, the creation of ‘this ode’.

‘Camas Road’ then, though essentially a curio which stands outside of Hartnett’s body of work, can be read as a seldom afforded snapshot of Michael Hartnett the poet before he became one.  In contrast, his poem ‘A Small Farm’ shows a marked development in his poetic craft.  It is well recorded and documented, especially by Hartnett himself, that he spent much of his childhood in his grandmother’s smallholding of ‘ten acres three roods and 13 perches’ in rural Camas about four miles outside Newcastle West and about one mile from the now vibrant village of Raheenagh.  Bridget Halpin, his grandmother, lived there with her son, Denis (Dinny Halpin), in what Hartnett describes as a prolonged state of ‘civil war’,

I was abandoned to their tragedies,

Minor but unhealing.

The word ‘abandoned’ here has many undertones and is important for the poet because he repeats the line twice in the poem.  He has told us elsewhere that he was, in effect, ‘fostered out’ by his parents in Maiden Street, Newcastle West to his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, from a young age and spent much of his childhood in her cottage in Camas.  However, there is also the suggestion that while there he was ‘abandoned’ and somewhat neglected as he became an outsider, an unwilling observer in the ‘civil war’ of the household, as Bridget and her son Dinny constantly argued and fought over the minutiae of running a small farm in difficult times in the Ireland of the late 40s and early 50s.

Hartnett saw in his grandmother a remnant of a generation in crisis, still struggling with the precepts of Christianity and still familiar with the ancient beliefs and piseógs of the countryside.  For Hartnett, there is also the added heartache that sees his grandmother struggling to come to terms with a lost language that has been cruelly taken from her. This, therefore, is a totally different place when compared to, for example, Kavanagh’s Inniskeen or Heaney’s Mossbawn.  However, there is underlying paganism here that is absent from Kavanagh’s work.   

For Hartnett, his grandmother represents a generation who lived a life dominated by myth, half-truth, some learning, and limited knowledge of the laws of physics, and therefore, as he points out in ‘Mrs Halpin and the Lightning’,

Her fear was not the simple fear of one

who does not know the source of thunder:

these were the ancient Irish gods

she had deserted for the sake of Christ.

However, Hartnett’s powers of observation and intuition were honed in Camas on Bridget Halpin’s small farm during his frequent visits.    He tells us that he learnt much on that small farm during those lean years in the forties and early fifties, 

All the perversions of the soul

I learnt on a small farm,

how to do the neighbours harm

by magic, how to hate.

The struggle to make a success and eke out a living was a constant struggle and burden.  The begrudgery of neighbours, the ‘bitterness over boggy land’, and the ‘casual stealing of crops’ went side by side with ‘venomous cardgames’, ‘a little music’ and ‘a little peace in decrepit stables’.  The similarities with Kavanagh’s, “The Great Hunger”, are everywhere but Hartnett does not name this place, it is an Everyplace.  The poem is simply titled, “A Small Farm” so there is no Inniskeen, Drummeril, or Black Shanco here but the harshness and brutality of existence, ‘the cracked calendars / of their lives’  in the fifties in Ireland is given a universality even more disturbing than the picture we receive from Kavanagh.  Yet, it is here in Camas that he first becomes aware of his calling as a poet and, like Kavanagh, it was here that ‘The first gay flight of my lyric / Got caught in a peasant’s prayer’. And so, to avoid the normal household squabbles of his grandmother and her son he ‘abandons’ them, turns his back on them, and begins to notice the birds and the weeds and the grasses,

I was abandoned to their tragedies

and began to count the birds,

to deduce secrets in the kitchen cold,

and to avoid among my nameless weeds

the civil war of that household.

In this final stanza, Hartnett makes an explicit link between his awakening as a perceiver of social interactions and moments of poetic beauty, with a growing knowledge and identification with the natural world about him.  The attentive intellect that ‘counts the birds’, has as yet no language to describe or express his experience of the natural world, his ‘nameless weeds’. Still, he is possessive of it, seeing it as distinct from human society which he can describe, yet does not identify with.

Later in, “For My Grandmother, Bridget Halpin”, he again alludes to the wildness, the paganism, the piseógs that surrounded him during his childhood in Camas.  His grandmother’s worldview is almost feral.  She looks to the landscape and the birds for information about the weather or impending events,

A bird’s hover,

seabird, blackbird, or bird of prey,

was rain, or death, or lost cattle.

This poorly educated woman reads the landscape and the skies as one would read a book,

The day’s warning, like red plovers

so etched and small the clouded sky,

was book to you, and true bible.

The picture of the farm is rather etched out in generalisation and aphorism, and through the accordant clichés of petty hatred and ignorance, ‘how to do the neighbours harm / by magic, how to hate’, before Hartnett brings the glass into focus, employing idiosyncratic detail which establishes the world of the poem itself. As already mentioned, the cottage on this small farm was a Rambling House, a house where neighbours gathered to tell stories, play music and card games,

venomous card games

across swearing tables

His early poetry, then, creates a delicate balance between description and abstraction, the actual and the figurative. In this way, Hartnett’s particular subjectivity, his way of seeing, is established. In time it would become his poetic currency. We are invited into the quintessentially old traditional Irish kitchen with its pictures of the Pope, the Sacred Heart, the statue of Our Lady, the Crucifix,

Here were rosary beads,  

a bleeding face,

the glinting doors that did encase their cutler needs,

their plates, their knives, the cracked calendars of their lives

In this poem, therefore, Hartnett is following on from Kavanagh in shining a light into the domestic and interior life of rural dwellers not previously considered worthy of attention.  Bridget Halpin’s ‘small farm’ in Camas may have been small and full of rushes and wild iris but it helped produce one of Ireland’s leading poets of any century.  The influences absorbed in this rural setting, his powers of observation, his knowledge of wildlife and flowers, his ecocentric bias, are impressive and are all-pervasive in his poetry.  Without prejudice, it also has to be said that he demonstrates a deeper knowledge of all local flora and fauna than could be reasonably expected of a ‘townie’ from Maiden Street or Assumpta Park!  

Indeed, Hartnett, the quintessential nature poet, would be delighted to see the magnificent new recently developed Kileedy  Eco Park which has been set up less than a mile from his ‘foster’ home in Camas by the combined efforts of the local community in Kileedy. It is also significant that the visionary developers of this project have included a Poet’s Corner where Hartnett is remembered just a stone’s throw from the small farm of his formative years. Here today’s generation can now come to ‘count the birds’ and the ‘nameless weeds’.

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Éigse 2022 visited the Eco Park in Raheenagh as part of the Hartnett Bus Tour. They were given a great welcome to the park by Jack O’Connor. The photo was taken at the Poet’s Corner. Photo by Dermot Lynch

References

Hanley, Don. ‘The Ecocentric Element in Michael Hartnett’s
Poetry: Referentiality, Authenticity, Place’,  MA in Irish Writing and Film, UCC, 2016.

Hartnett, Michael. Collected Poems, editor Peter Fallon, Gallery Books, 2001.  Reprinted 2009 and 2012.

Hartnett, Michael. A Book of Strays, editor Peter Fallon, Gallery Books, 2002. Reprinted 2015.

The author would also like to acknowledge the voluminous background information received from Joe Dore, Michael Hartnett’s first cousin and inheritor of Bridget Halpin’s ‘small farm’ of ten acres three roods and thirteen perches.
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Ageless Hartnett!

Hartnett by the Bridge in Newcastle West
Michael Hartnett in pensive mood by the River Arra in Newcastle West in the 1970’s. Photo credit to Limerick Leader Photo Archives

 

Poet Michael Hartnett would have been 80 years old on September 18th this year.

He was a native of Newcastle West and was raised among the hustle ands bustle of Lower Maiden Street. In fact, he was a young 58 when he died in 1999.  Each year the people of Newcastle West celebrate his memory at Éigse Michael Hartnett, now in its 21st year.  This year’s event takes place in the town from Thursday 30th September to Saturday October 2nd.

 
 
Remembering Michael Hartnett (1941 – 1999) on the 80th Anniversary of his Birth

By Peter Browne

Many people who knew him and admired his work felt the loss deeply and his creativity lives on richly after him. An old cassette tape which I came across by chance in a cardboard box at home during lockdown brought back particular memories of just one brief period in which I could say I knew him.

This tape contained about 40 minutes of disjointed, poor-quality bits and pieces recordings from a 1985 musical and literary trip to Scotland which we both were on, and it brought back strong and fond thoughts of him even for such a short acquaintance when we were fellow performers touring the Highlands and Western Isles.

The occasion was the annual Turas na bhFilí which was a week-long tour of nightly performances in Gaelic-speaking Scotland organised by Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge. It was a two-way annual process and each year there were return visits to Ireland by a similar group of Scottish writers and artists.

This particular year the Irish travelling group comprised two poets, Áine Ní Ghlinn and Michael Hartnett, a fine singer Cliona Ní Fhlannagáin and myself as uilleann piper. Also travelling as leader, organiser and fear a’tí was Colonel Eoghan Ó Néill, a distinguished Army officer who was by this time Director of An Chomhdháil.

There was a minibus driver whose name is long gone from me and we were a happy group on the road for that week. Sadly, as well as Michael Hartnett, Colonel Ó Néill and Cliona have also left us. For the fairly obvious reason – if there weren’t separate B & B bedrooms on offer – Michael and myself were usually put sharing a room together and we had good conversations – usually on everyday life or the incidental happenings of the tour.

I do recall that he was enthusiastic about folklore and traditions in his own area of West Limerick like dancing and the wrenboys and he also mentioned his respect for Seán Ó Riada.

A printed programme had been prepared in advance of the tour and distributed to the audience at each night’s performance. It contained explanations, translations etc… meaning that the material, including the poetry, would be the same each night. I used to look forward at each performance to hearing the same poems, the same songs – they grew on me.

Cliona sang Úna Bhán, Dónal Óg, Bean Pháidín. Áine had a beautiful poem about a young boy who was lost to cystic fibrosis and of Michael’s poems, I remember two – one for his daughter “Dán do Lara” with the line “…even the bees in the field think you are a flower” and another especially sad, moving one in which he addressed his father, trying to persuade him not to die but to remain on this earth.

I can clearly remember the soft richness of his words and speaking vioce. I used to play ‘Amhrán na Leabhar’ on the pipes nightly out of deference to the literary nature of the occasion.

Michael’s skills and agility in his use of words meant that his humour and wit were a bright feature during the trip – prompted by random events along the way. When we flew out from Dublin, we had an excellent welcoming night in Glasgow and the following morning went to the airport to fly to Stornaway. And there, as we waited for the flight, Michael bought a bottle of Scotch whisky with the bracing brand name of ‘Sheep Dip.’

This unusual drink became something of a recurring conversational theme for the remainder of the tour. He seemed to use the same mug all week for drinking it. I partook a couple of times as well and it tasted ok – I notice that it’s still for sale on the market.

Later that same first day of the tour when we were travelling in the minibus on the dual island of Lewis and Harris, there was some incident with the minibus and a loose goat which I just can’t recall, and then we were brought to an interpretive centre and souvenir shop with a large selection of teddy bears on sale – they occupied all the shelves of one entire wall.

At that evening’s performance Michael began by telling the audience: ”…I’ve had a very trying day, first of all I started off by discovering a drink called Sheep Dip, then I met a goat on a bus and then I narrowly escaped being introduced to 25,000 teddy bears all wearing Harris tweed!”

In another town called Roybridge we were led by a kilted piper into the room and up to the top table in a ceremonial procession. Michael had already said to Áine Ní Ghlinn that his own father had once described the sound of the pipes as like being in a submarine with a flock of sheep, so…this wasn’t a good portent. As we sat down, the piper stepped onto the small stage, which was a concave, parabolic inset into one of the walls of the room.

The sound of the píob mhór was therefore propelled with some force outwards towards us. I watched Michael and I could clearly see his discomfort. He took a beermat, wrote on it and passed it around. Each person smiled as they read it and when it came to me, I saw that he had written: “I’m glad my new false teeth are made of plastic, not china.”

But there was seriousness in all this as well; there could be lengthy silences in the minibus as we travelled along narrow roads, and later that evening in Roybridge as he was reading the poem about his father, there was guffawing from a group of people on barstools at the counter who clearly weren’t there to hear the performance.

The local MC on the night asked them to stop talking or move to another establishment in the town where there would be, as he put it, “…a welcome for all sorts of inane conversation”. They were momentarily silenced but when Michael started again, so did the noise. He simply closed his book, said “is cuma liom…” and left the stage.

His poem about his father was special – for the subject matter, the beauty of the language and the sound of his reading voice. There was a sensitivity, decency and dignity about him and, I think also, a vulnerability.

Although I only ever met him again on one other occasion by chance, it may be the case that a lasting impression and respect for someone can be created over a short time such as this as well as by a lengthy acquaintance.

“…and please, my father, wait a while, there is no singing after death, there is no human sighing – just worlds falling into suns. The universe will be a bride, a necklace of stars on her gown – dancing at every crossroads, tin-whistles spitting music. Father, take your time, hang on. But he didn’t.”

Peter Browne is a piper and a former RTÉ presenter and producer.

Peter Browne at the River Island Hotel - photograph by John Reidy.
Presenter, Peter Browne pictured at the River Island Hotel. Photo by John Reidy 25/10/2019

Browse the 2021 Éigse programme of events here: https://eigsemichaelhartnett.ie/

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

An Analysis of Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Spring-by-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins
 (c) poetryanalysis.com

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Commentary

As we know Hopkins wrote The Terrible Sonnets but here we have one of the best of his ‘bright sonnets’ in which he celebrates the beauty of nature and the glory of God.  Hopkins loved to use the sonnet because he felt it suited his style.  He wrote ‘Spring’ in May 1877 while studying theology in North Wales. ‘Spring’ is a Petrarchan sonnet, consisting of an octet which is primarily descriptive, and a sestet which is typically more reflective. The sonnet can only be described as being quintessential Hopkins.

The octet describes nature and Hopkins’ appreciation of it shines through in his descriptive language. He gives many examples of how beautiful and fresh the world is, such as weeds, birds’ eggs, lambs, blue skies and lush greenery.  Many of Hopkins’ poems read like sermons and homilies and this is not unusual seeing as he was a Jesuit priest.  So we are not surprised, therefore, when he compares the beauty which surrounds him to the Garden of Eden.  The sestet reflects upon the meaning of this wonderful nature. As I said earlier there is always a spiritual dimension to Hopkins’ poetry and in the sestet he reflects on the sorry end of the Garden of Eden and he uses the last lines of the poem to ask God to protect the innocence of spring and also that of young children.

Many of the trademark conventions which define Hopkins’ poetry are to be found in this poem, such as alliteration, assonance, inscape, instress and sprung rhythm.   We are presented with an innovative and technically accomplished poem which is written in a unique and distinctive way. 

It might be important to define some of these concepts because some of them are unique to Hopkins’ poetry:

Inscape: For Hopkins, every single thing in the universe was unique. Everything contained qualities that helped to define that uniqueness, and to distinguish it from all other things. He called this inscape.  Hopkins believed that God was responsible for each unique thing. For him, inscape was the essential essence of each thing, that unique quality that set it apart from everything else.

Instress: Hopkins also believed that each living thing had its own unique energy which was also derived from God.  In the octet of this sonnet, therefore, he tries through language and imagery to capture the instress, the unique energy that defines Spring.

Sprung Rhythm:  Hopkins invented this unique kind of rhythm and used it extensively in his poetry. Basically, Hopkins stresses the important word in a line of poetry and this can be surrounded by any number of unstressed syllables e.g. the line ‘When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush’. 

Octet
Hopkins begins the poem with a very bold statement of his philosophy.   He won’t listen to any debate or argument as he declares with absolute conviction that Spring is the most beautiful season of the year.  He then proceeds to give evidence in support of this contention, by presenting the reader with a series of images, which try to capture both the beauty and vibrancy of Spring.

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

He immediately surprises us by celebrating the beauty of weeds, a type of plant we traditionally frown upon. He uses alliteration and sprung rhythm to capture both the essence (inscape) and energy (instress) of these particular plants.  The word ‘wheel’ causes us to pause as we try to understand what he means.  It may be the way briars and other weeds send out tendrils to curl around other shrubs and plants as they climb or indeed it may be a reference to the cyclical nature of the seasons, each one giving way to the next.

He then describes the thrush in the next few lines. Again he tries to capture for us in words the inscape and instress of the birds as they build their nests and lay their eggs.  The bird’s eggs are compared to the heavens, as Hopkins subtly introduces a spiritual dimension to the poem. There are examples of sensuous imagery in evidence also, while the onomatopoeic “wring” further captures that elusive inscape.  Notice his constant use of alliteration, ‘rinse and wring’.  There is a very clever metaphor in the third line when he compares the speckled thrush’s eggs to the heavens at night.  It nearly would have been easier for him to use the simile, Thrush’s eggs look (like) little low heavens, but he resists the temptation!

He does use a simile in lines four and five when he tries to describe the effect of birdsong on the human ear,

… it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing

Further intense images follow, as Hopkins champions this particular season. We are told “that blue is all in a rush,” as he tries to capture the instress, the energy, that defines that season. The final line, with its rather quaint, colloquial language, is also designed to produce a similar effect.

By the end of the octet, the reader has been swept along by Hopkins in his description of nature. His use of sprung rhythm , coupled with the absence of any full-stops in the entire octet, ensure that the reader is made fully aware of the breathtaking beauty and vitality associated with Spring.

Sestet
The poem becomes much more reflective in the sestet. Hopkins begins by posing a question: What does all of this beauty of nature actually signify?   This rhetorical question signifies the poet’s own confusion and uncertainty.  The reader is invited to slow down and contemplate the answer to this question. Hopkins suggests to us that springtime is an image of what the world would have been like in the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, before the fall of Adam and Eve and the entrance of sin into our world. 

In a series of complex and very theological images, Hopkins manages to suggest what is wrong with the world, provides a vision of the type of world he would like to see, and advocates a return to that time of innocence in Eden Garden. He suggests our loss of innocence by using the image of fruit becoming overripe and decaying.

Traditionally also it must be remembered that May was always linked to Mary the Mother of God – the month of May was Mary’s month.  He proceeds to use different images of innocence to present his image of the world he would like to see, and finally, he advocates a return to that world of innocence.  In my mind’s eye I can see children innocently dancing around the traditional Maypole on an English village green when I read these final lines.  For his English audience there would have been no better representation of childhood innocence!

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   (c) haikudeck.com

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

An Analysis of Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Inversnaid-by-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins
 (c) poemanalysis.com

This darksome burn, horseback brown, 
His rollrock highroad roaring down, 
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam 
Flutes and low to the lake falls home. 

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth 
Turns and twindles over the broth 
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, 
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. 

Degged with dew, dappled with dew, 
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, 
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, 
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. 

What would the world be, once bereft 
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, 
O let them be left, wildness and wet; 
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. 

Commentary

The initial response of a class hearing Hopkins for the first time – in my long experience – can only be described as a kind of muted sniffling, an uneasy shuffling!  Indeed, I am reminded of a scene from Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Van.   In the novel, Darren is studying Hopkins’s poetry for his  Leaving Cert.  He reads one of the poems – probably Inversnaid – and wonders when Tippex had been invented and he concludes, ‘Gerrah Manley Hopkins had definitely been sniffing something.’  Not all students are as negative as Darren but given a chance most conclude that this poetry is old but yet new and surprising.  This difference is what opens the paths to further exploration.  Here we have someone experimenting and stretching the outer limits of language just like a modern rapper would do. 

Inversnaid, while not one of his best poems, shows how he continually explores the possibilities of words.  A good class will enjoy puzzling out the images, rather like trying to solve a cryptic crossword.  There may even be arguments about which sense of ‘comb’ is intended.  However, the average class will need a lot of help with this poem. 

Finally, by way of introduction, this poem does not end with a homily like many of Hopkins’ poems but instead takes on a very modern plea and could have been written in 2021 by any one of a range of eco-warriors from David Attenborough to Greta Thunberg.  However, while the spiritual dimension, so explicitly treated in ‘Spring’ and other poems, may be hidden from the reader, here one senses that it is never far from the poet-priest’s mind.

The poem was written in 1881 while Fr Hopkins, the Jesuit priest, was ministering to his flock in inner city Glasgow.  On one of his rest days he paid a hurried visit to the little village of Inversnaid near the shores of Loch Lomond in the Scottish Highlands and was inspired to write this poem.

The poem was written at the height of the Industrial Revolution in England and Scotland and the poet makes a very prescient and prophetic appeal that such places should not be destroyed forever by man’s search for wealth at any price.  The poet praises the special and irreplaceable beauty of the ‘wetness and wildness’ of the world.

Hopkins wrote the poem at a time when the Industrial Revolution in England was beginning to destroy the countryside.  There was also a counter move by Victorians to set aside areas of great beauty so that people who could afford it could escape to enjoy the beauty of nature.  Victoria herself had her Scottish royal retreat at Balmoral and this is still in use to this day.  Elsewhere places of particular scenic beauty such as the Lake District in England and Killarney in Ireland were making a name for themselves as soothing spa resorts where the rich and famous came to relax and enjoy the restorative power of nature in all its glory and wildness.  Here Hopkins pleads that such places should be spared and were, in fact, essential.  He attempts in the first three stanzas to convince people of the wonder of such areas; this he does by using all his word-power to describe what he sees in an exciting way.  In the final stanza he presents his plea in repetitive and almost desperate terms.

The structure of the poem, unlike its language, is very simple.  The first three stanzas convey a lively and exciting picture in our minds.  The final stanza then is a plea that such beauty be preserved.  Each stanza contains four lines, and each line has four stresses.  Hopkins stresses the important word and this can be surrounded by any number of unstressed syllables.  This unique form of rhyming scheme he called sprung rhythm.

Hopkins is describing a river rushing and roaring down the Scottish hillside to reach Loch Lomond.  The river begins high in the hills and flows powerfully down over the rocks, then eases into lower land and flows gently into the lake.  There are many pools and eddies filled with froth so dark that they suggest despair.  Dew sparkles on the banks beside the river where wild plants grow such as heath and fern and ash trees.  The last stanza is a passionate plea to his fellow man to leave such wildness and beauty alone, and let them survive.

Hopkins language can be difficult because he is constantly experimenting.  In this poem, for instance, he is obviously infatuated by the Scottish accents all around him and we can see this in the continual use of ‘r’ alliterative sounds throughout the poem.  Hopkins tries to capture the inscape and instress of a fast flowing stream in the rural landscape of Inversnaid.  He makes use of a number of important techniques to capture the true essence and energy of the stream such as compound words, sprung rhythm and alliteration to great effect.  He also invents new words, and makes use of local colloquial and dialect words freely. 

To fully appreciate the beauty of the poem you really need to read it aloud in your best Scottish accent!  From the very beginning he sets the scene,

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

These lines suggest the river’s steep rush through the highlands.  The hard vowel sounds convey the rush and roar of the water over the rocks.  The essence and energy of the river (its inscape and instress) is compared in a lovely metaphor to a wild horse careering downhill at great speed.

The final two lines in the first stanza are calmer

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam 
Flutes and low to the lake falls home. 

The poet uses alliteration to suggest a peaceful pool with foam like ‘fleece’ gently circling as in a whirlpool.  ‘Coop’ and ‘comb’, ‘fleece’ and ‘foam’ convey multiple images if we allow them in.  The energy of the river is now ‘cooped up’ in a rockpool and the water gently ‘combs’ over the rocks and falls with lovely sibilant ‘s’ sounds to the lake.

shiny boulders and water stream
Photo by Julia Volk on Pexels.com

In the second stanza the focus switches to these stiller shallow pools.  The ‘fleece’ of stanza one is now a ‘windpuff-bonnet’ of ‘fawn-froth’.  These are lovely examples of compound words made up by the poet to describe the scene before him.  The poet is after all trying to describe or inscape a whirlpool and he invents a new verb to describe the motion of the pool – it ‘twindles’.  This swirling motion produces very ominous, dark emotions in the poet: the pool is now a ‘broth’, a ‘pitchblack’ soup of seething river in flood.  The darkness or shadows of the area also help induce a mood of despair – Hopkins gives it even added importance by giving it a capital ‘D’.  ‘Fell-frowning’ has many layers of meaning.  Again it is a compound word invented for the occasion: Hopkins often uses ‘fell’ in his poetry and usually it means foul or evil.  The stanza is a perfect example of sprung rhythm, a unique Hopkins invention.  (Read the stanza again – out loud – to get a feel for this rhythm).

The focus now switches to the banks of the stream and the abundance of plants and shrubs and trees that exist there.  He uses a very precise set of words to capture the essence, the inscape of the gorge through which this stream is flowing.  It is a glorious description of nature in all its wildness:

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,

Are the groins of the braes that the brook threads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

We get the sense of the river picking up speed again in the first two lines before it slows again before the stanza ends.

In the last stanza, Hopkins uses many words beginning with the letter ‘w’.  This, combined with all the repetition, conveys a mood of anxiety and pleading.  The use of the rhetorical question also gives a sense of his uncertainty.  He ends by issuing an appeal, asking us to preserve the natural landscape. Yet again, one can detect the intensity of the emotion in his pleading and in his poetry.   Hopkins finishes with a rallying cry, almost a call to arms, similar to what Greta Thunberg has done in recent times, in which he champions the natural world and pleads with us to respect it.  That call is now nearly 150 years old and, unfortunately, is more pertinent today than ever before.

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Further Study

You might like to have a read of the following blog which explains the various terms such as ‘inscape’, ‘instress’ and ‘sprung rhythm’ used in the above notes.  Just click on the link.

The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

You might also be interested in the following blogs which analyse particular poems by Hopkins:

Analysis of The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Commentary on Pied Beauty by Hopkins

Listen as Tom O’Bedlam reads Inversnaid

 

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

John Donne and Metaphysical Poetry

John Donne
Portrait of Donne in a great hat by unknown English artist, c1595. © Estate of Lord Lothian.   This is possibly the painting ‘taken in shadows’ to which he refers in his will.

John Donne’s poetry experienced a great resurgence in the Twentieth Century, thanks mainly to T. S. Eliot’s influential essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’  originally published in 1921.  This new found recognition went far in correcting the fact that for the previous two centuries his poetry had been largely overlooked.  Added to this, of course, we must take into account Donne’s own apparent disinterest in his own poems, particularly with regard to their publication.  This disinterest has always been put forward by academics as a reason for this early neglect.  It is well documented that he only published three or four poems in his own lifetime, preferring instead to pass round manuscripts of his work among his friends at the universities and at the Inns of Court.

Ben Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637), the most learned poet of his time, was the closest of such friends.  Like T.S. Eliot many generations later, Jonson left all in no doubt about the admiration he felt for Donne’s poetry; he regarded him as an innovator, ‘the first poet in the world in some things’, and the leader of a new school of poetry in Elizabethan London – this school of poetry has since been called metaphysical poetry.

Donne was certainly not a poet of popular taste.  As far as he was concerned poetry was not for the masses but was an intellectual pursuit where the poet attempted to impress others with his knowledge and education.  He deliberately restricted his audience to those whose education and background equipped them to appreciate a new, more obscure type of poetry.  It is clear that Donne’s poetry shocked his contemporaries just as it still does to this day.  When his poems were first published in 1633, two years after his death, the printer introduced them with a dedication, not to ‘the Readers’ but to ‘the Understanders’.  One can see from this how from the beginning, Donne’s poetry was regarded as being among the most difficult in English literature.

The writers who followed Donne and who were most influenced by his work have since been called the metaphysical poets. This term was of course first used by Dr Samuel Johnston in his famous discussion of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Marvell.  In his Life of Cowley (1779) Johnston observed that ‘about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that might be termed the metaphysical poets’.  Since then the term metaphysical poetry has come to imply a type of poetry that has certain unique characteristics.  Indeed, so widespread has the term become that there is no longer much doubt as to whom we mean when we speak of the metaphysical poets, namely, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Andrew Marvell in particular.

Dr Samuel Johnston’s Life of Cowley did more than establish the term ‘metaphysical poets’; it also contained the first detailed discussion of their works.  Donne’s poetry can be considered in three main groups: the love poetry (The Good Morrow, The Anniversary), the miscellaneous poems and verse letters, and the religious poetry (A Hymn to God the Father, Holy Sonnets), all of which correspond roughly to the early, middle, and later periods of his career.  The first group contains the work for which he is probably best known.  The poetry is remarkable for its realism and its variety, and has all the characteristics by which metaphysical poetry is generally recognised.

What therefore are the main characteristics of the metaphysical poets in general and of Donne in particular? 

What first strikes most readers of metaphysical poetry is its concentration.  Poems in this category tend to be brief and closely woven.  This allows various ideas, words and references to be condensed into groups of short lines, sometimes even into single lines and phrases.  For example, in the opening stanza of The Anniversary, Donne introduces groups of associated images drawn from the royal courts and palaces to suggest the transience of earthly glory:

All kings and all their favourites,

All glory of honours, beauties, wits,

The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,

Is elder by a year now than it was

When thou and I first one another saw.

Everything, he suggests, is subordinate to love, and he describes in detail the intensity of his feelings.  What need has he of kings and princes when they are inconstant and subject to decay?  Even the sun which appears to measure time, is itself subject to destruction, while love has the power to outlive these mortal things.  Behind this opening stanza, therefore, there is intense personal feeling.  This anniversary represents a permanent moment: it is not an anniversary in the ordinary sense, a looking back on something passed.  It is rather an ‘everlasting day’ which is not affected by the passage of time.  So while man’s world and the world of nature are slowly growing old, the persons in the poem enjoy forever the vitality and permanence of love.  To further his argument Donne makes good use of paradox which acts as a sort of clinching device which upholds and strengthens his argument.  The first stanza of The Anniversary ends with an important paradox which expresses the permanence of love in a world of change:

Running it never runs from us away,

But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

The idea that love unites people in a spiritual bond which even transcends death is expressed throughout The Anniversary.

His use of concentration is also very evident in The Good Morrow where we see not only Donne’s love of learning, but also his inclination for using it out of context, applying many references to serve his own purposes in the poem.  The greatest concentration of language is confined to the second stanza.  Man, Donne suggests, is concerned with broadening his physical horizons, but is neglecting to expand his knowledge in a spiritual direction.  Love, in the end, binds all things together and allows man to attain his true destiny.  Suggested in this poem is the idea of the fundamental, and not accidental, limitations of our knowledge.  Science can explain the physical, but not the spiritual universe.  Astronomers may spend their lives studying the heavens but they are always fearful of what they might find.  Similarly, geographical discoveries have brought to man’s attention objects of experience that are not always pleasant (“sharp north”, “declining west”), and the progress of science cannot experiment enough to conquer death (“whatever dies, was not mix’d equally”).  Connected to each of these images is the idea of isolation and lack of real purpose: the lonely astronomer forever watchful, the explorer who spends his life going round the world only to arrive back where he started, the scientist alone in his laboratory making many discoveries, none of which effect the real destiny of mankind.  Donne, therefore, sees the world outside as a symbol of man’s weakness and isolation.  In contrast to this he presents his own rational theory which is itself the result of considerable previous study.  As with The Anniversary, he proposes that the only true art is the art of love which requires knowledge, patience and effort, which overcomes death and prepares man for eternity.

A second characteristic of metaphysical poetry is its vividly dramatic quality, particularly in the opening lines.  Donne’s poetry, in particular, is always, in a special sense, dramatic.  Indeed, all metaphysical poetry springs from the great era of Elizabethan drama dominated, in particular, by Shakespeare.  Donne, we are told, was ‘a great frequenter of plays’ in his youth.  The rhythms of his verse, so misunderstood by many readers, are closer to the ordinary speech found in Shakespeare’s plays than to that of most lyrical poems.  For this reason, Donne’s poems – and those of George Herbert also – are often best considered as dramatic monologues, almost like the soliloquys of an actor on the stage.  Donne specialises in forceful, dramatic openings, e.g. ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’ (Holy Sonnets XIV); ‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we lov’d’ (The Good Morrow); ‘Wilt thou forgive the sin where I begun …’ (A Hymn to God the Father), etc., etc., etc. 

(Probably one of the most daring and dramatic of his opening lines occurs in the sonnet, At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners where he conjures up a marvellous vivid picture of the Last Judgement.  We have to remind ourselves that when this sonnet, often referred to as Holy Sonnet 7, was published in 1633, it was less than 150 years after Columbus had discovered The New World.  Yet here, Donne shows off his new found knowledge that the world is round and yet plays with the old notion that the world was flat and had four corners!)

This dependence on drama leads to a third characteristic of metaphysical poetry which is their constant use of dialogue.  The Good Morrow and The Anniversary depend for their success upon our recognising the presence of an individual speaker involved in each poem.  Indeed, the speakers can even be distinguished by the manner of their speech and by the nature of their arguments.  In the opening lines of The Good Morrow the speaker adopts a very colloquial, unpoetic manner.  He is capable, however, of sudden shifts in attention, and in the second stanza begins to change his tone and emphasis.  The poem suddenly becomes more serious, then very learned in its use of obscure references and peculiar logic, until finally the speaker presents his audience with a definite conclusion:

If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

In contrast to The Good Morrow, Donne’s The Anniversary is much more contemplative.  What is common to both poems is not only their theme but also their resolution: true love is constant because it is essentially a relationship of minds.  What is uncommon, however, is Donne’s presentation.  In The Anniversary the speaker is not so much intent on displaying the great depth of his knowledge as in arguing his ideas with simple wisdom.  Despite the fact that he sometimes appears to be frivolous and insincere, Donne always wished to express universal truths in his poetry.  Like Shakespeare, when he expresses something profound, Donne often does it quite simply.  The subject of universal destruction is one of the central themes in The Anniversary, and the death of princes is used to symbolise it.  Indeed, the references to princes, kings and courtly life bring this poem very close to the underlying theme expressed in nearly all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all of which ‘tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (Richard II, Act III, Sc ii, 155).   The dramatic impact of the opening lines of The Anniversary depends upon the emphasis suggested by the word all:

All kings and all their favourites,

All glory of honours, beauties, wits …

All other things to their destruction draw.

The grandeur of princes must inevitably pass away; kings must live in fear of misfortune, treason and death.  The Anniversary has none of the learned references and peculiar logic of The Good Morrow.  He uses a uniform set of royal images throughout the three stanzas, and details of diction reveal ordinary common nouns.  While The Good Morrow displays a superb use of unpoetic words and references the impact of The Anniversary is less rhetorical and more sincere.

A fourth characteristic of metaphysical poets is their use of Wit.  The word ‘wit’ has undergone a remarkable transformation in modern day English.  Our modern idea of a witty comment or image, even though there may be some original thought, does not do the Elizabethan meaning of the word full justice.  The metaphysical poets like Donne, Herbert, Marvel and Vaughan always tried to present brilliant or arresting lines of poetry which surprise the reader by means of unexpected ideas, expressions or associations.  This tendency led in turn to the development of conceits.  A conceit is a comparison made between things which at first sight seem to have little in common: it is a comparison which is more striking than correct.  There are numerous examples of such far-fetched comparisons to be found in the work of the metaphysical poets.  Indeed, it very easy to agree with Dr Samuel Johnson’s remark that in the work of these poets ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Many of Donne’s best poems depend for their effect on the extensive use of conceits.  The Good Morrow, for example, contains a number of paradoxes which are grouped together in the second stanza: ‘And makes one little room an everywhere’; ‘Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.’  This poem also contains what is perhaps the most well-known and most famous of Donne’s conceits:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres

Without sharp north, without declining west?

Together the lovers make one world, each being as hemisphere.  But unlike the real hemispheres, they suffer no shortcomings; their love undergoes neither misery (‘sharp north’), nor cooling of affection (‘declining west’). 

A fifth characteristic of metaphysical poetry is its striking use of imagery and tone.  The principal advantage of the conceits Donne uses in his poems is the degree of inclusiveness they make possible.  They are a means of bringing into his poetry all his interests, activities and new found knowledge.  No part of his experience is regarded as unworthy of poetic investigation, and he prefers to engage our attention not through expected images and associations, but through unusual ideas and comparisons.  Whatever poetic licence is taken, the general effect is to reinforce, modify and generally heighten the reader’s response to each poem.

The Good Morrow is an excellent example of this method.  The poem begins with a realistic description of a morning bedroom.  The poet is waking up beside his mistress and he therefore uses words and images which suggest sleep (‘snorted’, ‘sleepers’, ‘dream’).  In his initial meditation on love there is a strong emphasis on physical activities (‘wean’d’, ‘sucked’, ‘country pleasures’).  Indeed, the number of words relating to physical activities in Donne’s poetry is always very high.  Here, he freely admits to having mistresses in the past (‘If ever any beauty I did see / Which I desired and got,’) but indicates that the pleasures he experienced with them were inadequate (‘pleasures fancies’).  We can see immediately how this stanza with its strong emphasis on sexual fulfilment must have come as something as a shock to Donne’s friends and contemporaries who were used to a completely different, more refined type of love poetry. 

This first stanza alone, with its sense of openness and honesty Donne dissociates himself from the dominant sixteenth-century tradition of Platonic love.  This poem, in contrast, is aggressively personal and ‘muscular’.  We notice the frequent use of personal pronouns which emphasise the presence of an individual speaker.  The overall tone is personal and enthusiastic.  The three stanzas correspond to three stages of his experience: there is a very definite progression from past to present to future.  In the first stanza he defines reality exclusively in physical terms; the questions are abrupt and present striking images of physical activity. 

The second stanza presents a sudden shift from past to present, and contains examples of Donne’s characteristic choice of imagery.  Whereas the Elizabethans relied on images from Greek and Roman mythology for their love imagery, Donne relies heavily on more ‘modern’ sources such as geography, science, history and philosophy.  In this regard, the imagery of The Good Morrow has always impressed readers with its range and variety.  Indeed, this poem illustrates beautifully the range and variety of metaphysical imagery.  From the ordinary activities of breast-feeding and heavy sleeping, Donne progresses to the more exotic activities of explorers, geographers and philosophers.  However, the sea-discoverers with all their topical glamour and novelty are introduced only to be dismissed as lacking in true exploration compared with the relationship he is describing.  Nevertheless, they continue to be present in the poem and eventually lead to the image of  ‘sharpe north’ and ‘declining west’.

The image at the beginning of the third stanza is a simple presentation of the fact that people gazing into each other’s eyes can see themselves reflected there.  It is made more complicated and more meaningful by the line that leads up to it (‘And true plain hearts do in the faces rest’).

Usually the titles of Donne’s poems generally suggest the central image around which the poem revolves.  Therefore, The Good Morrow deals with awakening and with discovery and we can follow how this basic image of discovery is sustained throughout the poem.  Likewise, the major image suggested by The Anniversary is royal and heraldic.  Groups of words appear in each stanza which relate to kings, princes and courtly life.  Donne’s imagery, especially in his religious sonnets is always striking, and always extends the range and understanding of each poem.

Conclusions

Eliot in his influential essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ refers to the metaphysical poets’ ability to combine disparate kinds of experience and he goes on to say that these poets possess ‘a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’.  Donne’s great achievement, according to Eliot, was to have substituted a natural conversational idiom for a conventional one, carrying out a revolution of the kind ‘which has to occur from time to time … if the English language is to retain its vigour’ (Winny, 52).

With Herbert, Marvel, Vaughan, and the Catholic poet Crashaw, Donne explored the complex relationships between God and man, lover and beloved, time and eternity.  The Metaphysicals used language in a manner as complex as their themes, drawing their comparisons from astronomy, philosophy, theology and natural science, working out their images with a rigorous logic which still to this day demands great alertness from the reader.  At its worst the metaphysical method of writing resulted in what Dr Johnson called ‘heterogeneous ideas …. yoked by violence together’.  At its best, it resulted in the exciting and muscular poetry well represented by the poems mentioned here.

Further Reading

You might also like to read related blog posts by the same author:

An Introduction to Metaphysical Poetry

An Analysis of Some of my Favourite Poems by John Donne

Works Referred to

Shakespeare’s Richard II

Samuel Johnson’s Life of Cowley

Works Cited

T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets“.  First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921.

Winny, J., A Preface to Donne, Longman, 1970.

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