Maiden Street

 

By Michael Hartnett

Full of stolen autumn apples

we watched the tinkers fight it out,

the cause, a woman or a horse.

Games came in their seasons,

horseshoes, bowling, cracking nuts,

Sceilg, marbles – frozen knuckled,

Bonfire Night, the skipping-rope

And small voices on the golden road

At this infant incantation:

        ‘There’s a lady from the mountains

Who she is i cannot tell,

All she wants is gold and silver

And a fine young gentleman’.

 

We could make epics with our coloured chalks

traced in simple rainbows on the road,

or hunt the dreaded crawfish in the weeds

sunk in galleons of glass and rust,

or make unknown incursions on a walk

killing tribes of ragworth that were yellow-browed:

we were such golden children, never to be dust

singing in the street alive and loud:

        ‘There’s a lady from the mountains

Who she is I cannot tell,

All she wants is gold and silver

And a fine young gentleman’.      

 

Commentary:  In the preface to the beautiful, bitter sweet ‘Maiden Street Ballad’, which Hartnett wrote as a Christmas present for his father, Denis Hartnett, in December 1980, he writes:

Everyone has a Maiden Street.  It is the street of strange characters, wits, odd old women and eccentrics; in short the street of youth.

This earlier poem published in 1967 is one of Michael Hartnett’s most romantic, sentimental and nostalgic poems about the street where he was reared as a child in the 1940’s.  It is a poem brimming with childhood games and activities – all outdoors by the way!  The games ‘came in their seasons’, throwing horseshoes, bowling, cracking chestnuts, playing sceilg and then there was street entertainment as they watched ‘the tinkers fight it out’.

Hartnett himself in an article in The Irish Times in the 1970’s explains the games that were played in Maiden Street in his early years:

Old customs survived for a long time.  I played ‘Skeilg’ once a year, chasing unmarried girls with ropes through the street, threatening to take them to Skeilg Mhicíl; I lit bonfires along the street on Bonfire Night; I put pebbles in a toisín (a twisted cone of paper in which shopkeepers sold sweets) and threw it on the road.  If anyone picked it up and opened it, you lost your warts, a pebble for each one in the paper, and the person who picked up the paper took the warts from me of his own free will.

Each stanza comes to an end with a lyrical, lilting skipping-rope incantation.  The poet looks back with nostalgia to a time of childhood innocence and the grinding poverty experienced by all in Lower Maiden Street during the ‘40’s is set aside for a time at least.

While the games and activities mentioned in the first stanza are mainly autumnal, those of the second stanza take place in high summer – similar to Kavanagh’s Canal Bank poems.  Here the children play in the road drawing with coloured chalks on the footpath or fishing for minnows or crayfish in the Arra as it flows down North Quay and continues on parallel to Maiden Street.  They fished using jam-jars or tin cans and they imagined them to be Spanish ‘galleons’ bobbing in the stream.  The imagination of the young children is again highlighted as the young urchins from the ‘golden road’ carry out military-like incursions into the surrounding countryside, with sticks for swords, as they kill ‘tribes of ragworth’, the yellow  perennial weeds which were the bane of every farmer’s life in the country.  The stanza then ends with the beautiful, poignant phrase:

            ‘We were such golden children, never to be dust’

Many poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas, have also romanticised their childhood and maybe its just that human nature has decreed that we look back on our childhood through rose-tinted glasses.  However, our memory is never a good witness: Hartnett’s mood here resembles Dylan Thomas in Fern Hill; childhood is forever remembered as high summer and ‘it was all shining, it was Adam and maiden’.   There is a fairytale, Garden of Eden, ‘Mossbawn kitchen’ element to this poem also with its lilting chorus and his references to the ‘golden road’ in stanza one and the ‘golden children’ in stanza two.

The object of this poem, and also the much longer ‘Maiden Street Ballad’, is to evoke and preserve ‘times past’ and to do so without being too sentimental and maudlin.  Hartnett has said elsewhere that, ‘Maiden Street was no Tír na nÓg’, and he admonishes us that:

Too many of our songs (and poems) gloss over the hardships of the ‘good old  days’ and omit the facts of hunger, bad sanitation and child-neglect.

It is quite obvious that he hasn’t taken his own advice when writing this poem!  He has written eloquently about the hardship and poverty experienced during those early years, particularly in his prose writing where he shows a great aptitude as an incisive and insightful social commentator.  However here in this poem, the poet, now in his twenties, recalls a happy childhood, living in his own imaginative world playing on ‘the golden road’ or along the banks of the Arra River.

  ‘Such golden children never to be dust….’

 

Further Reading:

Check out my take on the etymology of the street namehere