The Power of Poetry
Voices of Irish Tradition
While the power of poetry has been recognised and cherished in many cultures, it is possibly in Ireland that it has been most impactful both as an instrument of great beauty and great resistance.
Amongst all the poverty, violence and strife, Ireland birthed some of the world’s most celebrated poets.
Apart from the inspirational beauty of the land itself, the poetry has long been part of everyday life of Irish people. As Seamus Heaney explained:
“Poetry certainly is more part of everyday life in Ireland. Whether you’re in the middle-class drawing room in Ballsbridge, or at the back end of a pub after a party late at night, the common culture is for people to do something, and quite often they sing, and quite often they will recite poems.’’
Or as Eavan Boland put it:
‘’The Irish people have no fear of the poet, they don’t fear that the poet is some exempt invention of educated or elite classes. They’re the person who wrote the invective, they’re the person who wrote the wedding poem, they’re the person who came to the christening. They’re the companion of the life of the people.’’
It could be said that to read the poets of Ireland is to sense the beating heart of that society. In Heaney’s words: ‘’The sense of what your calling means as a poet has always been strong in Ireland.’’
History tells us that since ancient times, Ireland’s poets have wielded great power. Poets or bards were the members of nobility. They were significant figures in society, every chieftain had his bard who accompanied him. It was believed their satirical verses could bring disease, destruction, even death. Should you wish for some misfortune to befall your neighbour, what you do is approach your local poet and offer a reward in exchange for a venomous verse! Bards composed poetry in their heads in the darkened room or cell, memorizing as they went. Their poems were created in Ireland’s native language — Gaelic.
But more than eight centuries of domination by the British who were mostly Protestant, nearly overwhelmed Irish cultural identity, which was primarily Catholic. Catholics were not allowed to buy land, or vote, or hold public office. British tried to impose their religion and culture on the Irish. But they could not wipe out the folktales and poems that had been sung for centuries. I think Boland described it best when she said:
‘’What stayed with the Irish were the portable arts, the fugitive arts, the arts that stay with the people in dark times, and those are things you could recite, stories you can tell, poems you can remember, something a mother can tell her daughter. So, if you take the idea of arts that belong to a people in a dark time, then you get a very, very potent view of what arts mean and what poetry means.’’
While the Irish kept their voice alive, they had to do it with what was to them a foreign language — English. It is perhaps for that reason that I developed deep love and appreciation for Ireland literature and poetry especially. They took the language that humiliated them and told their story in it. Made it tell their story. Having experienced, albeit on a small personal scale, what it feels to be in a linguistic exile — I have the utmost admiration for that.
Boland spoke of her own struggles in An Irish Childhood in England: 1951
… let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said — “You’re not in Ireland now.”
However, up until the early 20th century, Irish literature was almost non-existent, as the world looked to England for great literature. That changed with William Butler Yeats, who drew from Celtic mythology to unleash a distinctive Irish voice. This earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1922, making him the first Irish recipient. Yeats demonstrated that Irish poetry need not be deferential to British poetry. He carved out a place for Irish poetry in world literature, even though, according to many, as a member of the Protestant upper class, he wrote about an imagined, idealised Ireland, as if from a distance. Or in the words of Paul Muldoon:
“Yeats’ position was always that of the man on a horse, looking down on the peasantry.”
The man most credited with liberating Irish poetry from Yeats’s legacy was Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh hailed from the farmsteads of County Monaghan, poor and with little education. But unlike Yeats’s romanticised view of the countryside, Kavanagh’s poetry spoke authentically about the harshness and drudgery of farm life, which he knew intimately. Kavanagh understood what ploughing a field looks, smells and feels like. One of his poems that I love the most tells the story of two Irish farmers fighting over the boundary line between their land, at the outset of the Second World War:
Epic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting “Damn your soul!”
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
“Here is the march along these iron stones.”
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Kavanagh, it is said, freed a new generation of poets who found their inspiration in the Ireland emerging in their midst. One of those poets was Seamus Heaney, who, like Yeats, is a Nobel laureate, and, like Kavanagh looked to the rural farms and fields of his childhood for inspiration.
About his poem Digging, Seamus says: ‘’When I was a youngster going to school, the old people along the road would say: ‘The pen is a lot lighter than the spade young fellow!’ So this poem I called ‘’Digging’’ is basically an expanded version of that truth.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
As it happened, where I grew up in Croatia, the old people along the road, including my own grandparents, said much the same thing!
Apart from poverty and political struggles, Irish poets addressed the dominance of the Catholic Church and its hold on Irish society. In 1984, Ireland was scandalised by the tragic story of Ann Lovett, a young girl living in the small farm town of Granard, who became pregnant out of wedlock in a village where she simply couldn’t have told anyone. At that time in Ireland, girls in Ann Lovett’s situation had no options. Contraception, abortion, and even divorce were all illegal. On a freezing January day, Ann Lovett went into labour. She walked out to a hillside shrine near her village and gave birth beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary. Both she and the baby died.
The poem The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks by Paula Meehan tells Ann’s story from the statue’s point of view:
On a night like this I remember the child
who came with fifteen summers to her name,
and she lay down alone at my feet
without midwife or doctor or friend to hold her hand
and she pushed her secret out into the night,
far from the town tucked up in little scandals,
bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,
and though she cried out to me in extremis
I did not move,
I didn’t lift a finger to help her,
I didn’t intercede with heaven,
nor whisper the charmed word in God’s ear.
On a night like this, I number the days to the solstice
and the turn back to the light.
O sun,
centre of our foolish dance,
burning heart of stone,
molten mother of us all,
hear me and have pity.
This poem and Ann’s story break my heart today, as they did when I first discovered them, many years ago.
But the poem helped shatter the silence that had surrounded taboo subjects in Ireland’s socially conservative society. Other poems pushed the discourse further, making it possible in Ireland to talk about things like birth out of wedlock, abortion, contraception, and divorce. Ireland today is a completely different place than it was in the 1980s. In the 1990s, both divorce and contraception became legal, and in some cases, even abortion is allowed. The country elected its first woman president in 1990, and eight years later, Catholics and Protestants signed the Good Friday Agreement — a roadmap towards peace.
Throughout these huge changes, Ireland’s poets used the power of their words to help shape and understand their country. It is perhaps one of the main reasons why so much fine poetry came and continues to come out of Ireland. There seems to be a strong trust in poetry by a significant number of people who believe that poetry is an important part of the culture, part of the inheritance. They are the ones who cherish it, guard it and keep it, and in doing so, demonstrate to us all that, despite all the technology and doomsday prophecies, poetry remains the heart of humanity.
In the words of a contemporary Irish poet I admire: “This might be one of the functions of poetry—to remake God when God is unmade, to use the imagination to bring a God who could be seen as a constant force of liberation, hope, and purpose into the brokenness of living. To use language for this purpose.”
