The Centrality of Identity in Irish Poetry Since the Nineteenth Century

The Centrality of Identity in Irish Poetry Since the Nineteenth Century

 

Ipatia Koumoundouros Apostolides

 

 

 

Introduction

The centrality of place, religion, and identity in Irish poetry have been written about in Iiterature. The primary focus of this paper will be on the centrality of identity in Irish poetry. More specifically, this paper will cover five Irish poets since the nineteenth century who have used the following approaches to represent centrality of identity in their poems: ancestors, birthplace, land, Irish language, history, symbolism, metaphors, and mythology. In addition, Irish identity in poetry can be real or imagined; it can be either an external or internal focus. These five Irish poets that will be studied are: William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John F. Deane, and Cathal O Searcaigh. 

 

Yeats

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin in 1865 to John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfan (Duane, 1997; Brown, 1999). His father, a barrister, abandoned his profession and moved his family to London to become an artist but had difficulty providing for the expanding family. Yeats spent his youth between London and Sligo, his mother’s country home. He grew up as a Protestant with the Irish revolting against the British (Finneran). In addition, his poetry and written works garnered him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

During the time of Yeats (up to the 1890s), the Irish peasant was tagged as “Paddy,” a comic Irish buffoon due to their post-famine emigration into the English slums (Hirsch 1119). The Irish Literary Revival, which focused on reviving the Celtic heritage through Gaelic dialect, revolved around Yeats’s writing. In 1893, Yeats published The Celtic Twilight, which consisted of lore and recollections from the West of Ireland, and its poem “Into the Twilight” gave the revival its nickname; and it tried to change the “Paddy” image into a “natural” aristocrat by idealizing them (1120). Although Yeatsliked to idealize and romanticize the Irish past, this romanticizing of the “peasant” was not necessarily the truth, because Yeats didn’t really know them, since much of his life was spent in Sligo, Dublin, or in Coole Park. 

Yeats’s personal poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” was published in 1888 and in the style of the Celtic Revival. This three-stanza rhyming poem reads in a lyrical fashion. Here, the speaker creates an imagined place, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” (line 1) (Finneran 13). The “free” in Innisfree suggests to the reader that this place symbolizes freedom. The speaker says, “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow” (line 5). Here, Innisfree not only symbolizes freedom, but a place of peace, a refuge from the daily troubles of living in the city. However, according to Gearoid Denver, the original Irish version of Innisfree is Inis Fraoigh, which exists in the real world and means “Island of Heather” and not “Island of Freedom” (Denver 107). This shift in language, from Irish to English, as written in Brian Friel’s Translations, leads to a sense of physical and cultural loss (qtd., in Denvir 107). Yet by adding transliteration to the poem, Yeats was able to apply an idealistic allusion to freedom; at the time of the poem, Ireland was not freed from Britain. This idealization of an Irish location is a recurring theme in Yeats’s works.

Another poem by Yeats, “A Woman Homer sung,” uses mythology to identify with Ireland and refers to Helen of Troy in Homer’s Iliad. In Greek mythology, Helen was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. The daughter of Zeus and Leda, Helen married King Menelaus of Sparta, but was abducted by Paris of Troy when Menelaus was away. The Trojan War and Paris’s death reunited her with her husband. The woman in this poem is a metaphor for Ireland.

In “A Woman Homer sung,” the speaker begins by describing the men that drew near her, just as they did in Homer’s time, and as a result, the speaker “shook with hate and fear,” (line 4) if any of these men held her dear (Finneran 10). This showed how deep his feelings were for her. The woman could also represent Ireland, and the men that drew near her could represent Britain. At the same time, the speaker says that it is wrong if men pass her by “with an indifferent eye.” (line 7), because he has validated her beauty in his mind, and feels she is too beautiful for people to ignore her or be indifferent to her. The speaker again refers to Ireland by saying, “For she had fiery blood / When I was young” (lines 15-16), and he continues with “And trod so sweetly proud / As ‘twere upon a cloud” (lines 17-18). These contrasting images, where she first has “fiery blood” (line 15), denoting Ireland’s tempestuous past, followed by her being “sweetly proud” (line 17) and walking upon “a cloud” (18), give an idealistic and romantic view, and places Ireland on a pedestal. The speaker ends the poem with, “A woman Homer sang / That life and letters seem / But a heroic dream.” (lines 19-21). The words “life and letters” (line 20) denote the speaker’s mortality and his writing.

According to Kitishat, because Yeats came of Anglo-Irish class, the critics refuted his nationalism and accused him of not applying politics in his literature because of his hybrid origins (Kitishat 485). Yeats resisted pressure from Irish patriots to use his poetry as a political weapon, because he did not see himself as a spokesman for anyone but himself (Kitishat 487). This debate about Yeats’s nationalism being from hybrid stock (Anglo-Irish), where he was divided between Britain and Ireland, continued for a long time. The Irish critic Daniel Corkery, in his 1931 book Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature noted that Yeats’s Anglo-Irish literature failed to give voice to the Irish Catholic experience through its religion, nationalism, and the land (qtd. in Allison 61-62). 

Yeats’s national poems have been analogous to resistance poetry, where he writes about Irish historical moments. Yet, at the same time, he has continually changed his position and successive views on revolution (Allison 65). 

One of Yeats’s poems, “Easter, 1916,” depicts the Easter Uprising in 1916 between Ireland and Britain (Finneran 77-78). During this time, Britain was also fighting in World War I. Although the Easter uprising was unsuccessful, and sixteen of the Irish republican leaders were executed for treason, this was a turning point in Ireland’s history with Britain. In Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” poem, the speaker begins with “I have met them at close of day/Coming with vivid faces,” (lines 1-2). The speaker observes the different faces of the revolutionaries. The speaker greets the people with “polite meaningless words” (line 6) and describes the telling of tales “Around the fire at the club,” (line 12). Yet, things have changed, “All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.” (lines 15-16). This “terrible beauty” refers to the Easter 1916 uprising and the subsequent execution of its leaders. “Terrible” represents the lives that have been lost, and “beauty” is the freedom to be won from Britain. The speaker brings them together with “Hearts with one purpose alone” (line 41) which refers to their unified front to fight the British. The quick and sudden movements of preparing for war are delineated with these images: “From cloud to tumbling cloud/ Minute by minute they change” (lines 47-48); “A horse-hoof slides on the brim” (lne50); “The long-legged moor-hens dive” (line 53). By focusing on a “horse-hoof” (line 50), the speaker refers to Ireland’s past, where there were no cars, but horses.

The speaker reflects on “When sleep at last has come/On limbs that had run wild” (lines 63-64) and wonders if they are asleep due to their running fast, and due to “nightfall” (line 65). The speaker then confirms that it is not sleep due to nighttime, but due to death, “No, no, not night but death; /Was it needless death after all?” (lines 67-68). This alerts the reader of the consequences of the uprising. Sixteen republican leaders were executed for treason as a result of this uprising. The speaker lists some of the executed leaders by name: “MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse” (lines 75-76). 

Another poem by Yeats that reflects upon the Easter 1916 uprising is “Sixteen Dead Men” (Finneran). Here, the speaker dwells even more about the uprising, focusing on “O but we talked at large before/The sixteen men were shot” (lines 1-2). This showed that time passed before the leaders were executed, or shot by the British. It also shows that the speaker is a part of this event by stating “but we talked” (line 1). Here, Yeats is not passive, but involved somehow with the uprising. The speaker continues with “You say that we should still the land/Till Germany’s overcome;” (lines 7-8). This shows that they were making decisions on whether or not to continue the revolution against Britain, or wait until the end of World War I. The speaker, realizing that the leaders, or the decision makers, are dead and could not give their opinion or argue the matter, says “But who is there to argue that” (line 9). 

 

Heaney

Another poet who uses centrality of Irish identity in his poetry is Seamus Heaney. Born in 1939 in Northern Ireland, he grew up in a Catholic family and lived on a farm (Heaney). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry. The British wanted to make him Poet Laureate of Britain (per Dr. Frazier), but Heaney refused because his Irish identity was important to him. According to Eugene O’Brien, director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies, because of the complex nature of Irish identity, Seamus Heaney designed a visual image called “quincunx” to try and explain it (O’Brien). It consists of a diamond shape with five towers that embody different manifestations of Irish identity, as previously mentioned. The five towers include the following: native Irish tradition, the Protestant tradition, colonizing English tradition, Celtic revival tradition, and the modernist approach. By doing this, Heaney deconstructs the complex Anglo-Irish, Irish-English, British-Irish, and Irish-English relations (O’Brien).

A significant aspect of the Irish identity was the role that the past played in their lives. According to the May 18, 2020 lecture by Dr. Frazier, the Irish were cultivating potato crops but the British were confiscating them, leaving the Irish to be hungry. Hirsch states, “The overwhelming squalor and poverty in the West during the horrible years of the famine also led English writers to conclude that the Irish existed on a lower rung of the Darwinian ladder” (1119).

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” refers to his Irish past and was originally published in Death of a Naturalist in 1966 and later in 100 Poems (Heaney 3-4). The poem describes the speaker looking out his window and seeing his father digging in the flowerbeds. The speaker contemplates that twenty years ago, his father and grandfather both dug for potatoes, and how he has broken that tradition by writing instead of digging. I will show how the dominant theme in “Digging,” which demonstrates the act of digging, is linked to the speaker’s Irish past, or roots, where years of famine and growing potatoes was an integral part of that life

Heaney’s poem “Digging,” written in first person point-of-view, gives the impression of being a personal poem (Heaney 3-4). It begins with the first stanza consisting of two eight-syllable rhyming lines followed by the second stanza consisting of two ten-syllable rhyming lines and one eight-syllable rhyming line. The third stanza consists of four lines, and here the pattern changes from traditional rhyme to nonrhyming verse. This nonrhyming verse with varying syllabic meters, including iambic pentameter, continues until the end; with five lines in the fourth stanza, two lines in the fifth stanza, seven lines in the sixth stanza, four lines in the eighth stanza, and three lines in the last stanza. Essentially, the speaker has begun with traditional rhyming verse in the first 5 lines and switches to modern, non-rhyming verse for the rest of the poem.

The speaker’s inactive stance is evident here: “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun,” and he is just sitting there (lines 1-2). According to Adam Goes, the speaker “is preparing to write, or perhaps, is unable to write and is merely sitting dumbstruck as he attempts to” (2). Another form of inactivity is shown in the “squat pen,” which suggest that his pen is squatting, or doing nothing, just like he is. 

The physical act of digging commences with the speaker’s father. The speaker looks out the window and goes into minute detail about the process of his father digging among the flower beds (lines 5-6), and then he reminisces twenty years ago when his father dug potatoes: “Bends low, comes up twenty years away/Stooping in rhythm through potato drills/ Where he was digging” (lines 7-9). Line 7 gives a smooth transition from the present moment to twenty years into the past. The majority of the poem focuses on the digging done by his father and grandfather, denoting two generations of diggers. This shows a time in Irish history where digging potatoes was a way of life and a way to feed the family.

The speaker also plays a role in his familial past; he assisted in some part of this digging process. For example, the speaker mentions that he picked new potatoes along with others, presumably his siblings: “To scatter new potatoes that we picked/Loving their cool hardness in our hands” (lines 13-14). According to Adam Goes, editor of the Hog Creek Review, a literary journal of the Ohio State University at Lima, the speaker “is at the center of action,” and he identifies himself as being a member of a group by using the word “we”(1). In addition, the speaker mentions: “Once I carried him milk in a bottle/ Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up/ To drink it, then fell to right away” (lines 19-21. This act of taking milk to his grandfather symbolizes a feminine, supportive role. It also means that what his grandfather was doing probably was too difficult a task for the speaker, who must have been a young child at the time. Yet the speaker participated in an indirect way by bringing milk to his grandfather. 

The title in Heaney’s poem is significant because the act of digging could be symbolic of the past. By referring to “twenty years” away (line 7), the speaker guides the reader to reflect upon his past, as if he were digging into it. In addition, using similar words, through metaphor, is a good way to show double meanings and denote symbolism. In the following phrases: “I look down,” (line 5), “Bends low” (line 7), and “going down and down” (line 23), may symbolically refer to how the British looked down on the Irish. Also, the speaker’s father’s and grandfather’s hard manual labor in the past represented Ireland’s past. According to Dr. Frazier in his May 25, 2020 lecture, no matter the religion, everyone was digging in Northern Ireland. The speaker confirms this by stating, “My grandfather cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner’s bog” (lines 17-18).

The “roots” in the following phrase: “Through living roots awaken in my head”  (line 27), can refer to the speaker’s familial roots. There are the roots from the flowers and potatoes, and then there are the living familial roots in the speaker’s head. 

Equating the Irish past with poverty is witnessed in the “coarse boot” (line 10) which portrays an old boot that is not shiny or new, but a boot of a hardworking man who has used it often in his work. Also, the bottle that was “Corked sloppily with paper” (line  20) reveals that there is no cork, which may have been lost or misplaced, but a substitute cork made of paper. Milk, readily available from the cow, was the food of the poor. These well-chosen and well-placed words give rich detail to the “Digging” poem, bringing the reader into the speaker’s humble Irish past, and making it real for them. Poems like this, that deal directly with the Irish past, help piece together the true Irish man’s identity.

The ending lines of the poem brings it to a full circle as the speaker reminds us again of the squat pen and how he will “dig with it” (line 31). In essence, there are two different ways to earn a living through digging, either through the physical process of digging, or through digging with the mind and pen. By tying into the Irish past with the digging of potatoes, the speaker reminds us that the act of digging is not always an activity reserved for flowerbeds, but was useful at one time for making a living and feeding the poor. The speaker also reveals how he now has a choice to dig with his pen rather than with the lowly spade, and through this, reminds us that his father and grandfather did not have that option during their poverty-stricken Irish lives.

Heaney has also used mythology and the underground station in his poetry to refer to his Irish past. According to Dr. Frazier’s June 1, 2020 lecture, the four-stanza poem “The Underground” by Seamus Heaney, is about his honeymoon with Marie, his wife (Heaney 78). The title “The Underground” signifies the underground station and is a reference to the underworld, or death, with mythical nuances. At the same time, the underground station can also refer to a physical and psychical way of being transported back home (Denvir). The poem begins with the speaker saying, “There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, / You in your going-away coat speeding ahead” (lines 1-2). The married couple are in the underground station, and the speaker is talking about chasing his wife, “And me, me then like a fleet god gaining/Upon you before you turned to a reed” (line 3). This reference to a “god” hints at Greek mythology where Pan chased the nymph Syrinx before she became a reed. In the third stanza, the speaker reveals the true love interest: “Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms” (line 9). This poem is about Heaney’s honeymoon with his wife Marie, and their “mooning around” (line 9), or playing around, caused them to be late for the concert at Albert Hall, as seen here, “Between the Underground and the Albert Hall” (line 8). 

This poem also symbolizes the loss of love as seen in the Orpheus story, where Orpheus’s rescue of his wife Eurydice from Hades, fails after he looks back, and she returns to Hades never to be seen again. It ends with, “For your step following and damned if I look back” (line 16). This signifies that the speaker is not looking back like Orpheus did, because he does not want to lose his wife. This “…damned if I look back” (line 16) can also symbolize the speaker not looking back on his Irish past which he loves, but because of its dark history, he will not look back.

According to Gearoid Denvir, “Poetry is… the act of recreating in the imagination the absent landscape of the home place….not only in its physical features of bog and hill but also in frequent incantation of its place names” (Denvir 126). Since the 1960s, much of Irish poetry focuses on place and identity defined by unbroken tradition (Denvir 128).

Boland

An Irish poet that uses imagination to recreate Irish identity in her poems is Eavan Boland. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, on September 24, 1944. Her father was the Irish Ambassador to Britain and then to the United Nations, and her mother was an artist. Boland spent most of her time between London and Dublin, and in the 1990s, moved to America where she taught at Stanford. Thus, she did not grow up in Ireland’s countryside as did Yeats and Heaney. Boland began writing poetry at a young age and published her first poetry book while at Trinity College (Randolph xxii). Since then, she has authored more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. Before her time, women poets were excluded from history books (Cousy 4). Irish history rarely addressed women’s experiences, and in its poetry, women’s daily, domestic lives were kept from view (Burns 217). Boland was acutely aware of this, and her poetry book, A Woman Without a Countryresulted from the feeling that she had no connection to the women in Ireland’s past, because nothing had been written about them or by them (Randolph). Ireland’s history and poetry had been dominated by men. Therefore, she relied on her imagination to fill in the missing pieces of the Irish woman’s past. 

Boland approached her poems through the eyes and heart of a woman. She wrote what she knew, including motherhood, womanhood, nurturance, the tasks women did, the clothing women wore, and life in suburbia. Sheila Conbay believes that as a female poet, Boland’s strategy was not to abandon the existing structures, but to transfigure the traditional poetic images so that they accommodated the female experience (qtd. in Cousy 5). According to David Ward, Boland was willing to test herself and her writing, and she continually reinvented her writing, from a stripped-down verse to a more expansive verse (Ward). Boland found that by creating “dailiness” or the plain things that made up most people’s existences, she could create a new vision of history (Eavan Boland). 

A verse poem by Boland in A Woman Without A Country, titled “An Irish Georgic,” refers to the conflict between progress and the rustic land just outside Dublin (Boland, 54-56). The word “georgic” is defined as being “a poem about agriculture” by the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Here, the speaker goes into the past “before I was born” (line 4) and discusses how the Dublin government “flooded the Liffey valley years ago/to make a dam, water pouring” (line 1-2). The speaker imagines those years as “During the years of greed/of taking and dissembling,/that was the story that came back, the one I remembered.” (lines 5-7). In those days, the change that occurred, by building the dam, was a result of greed, of doing anything for money, and the people didn’t care enough to resist it. By stating “the one I remembered” the speaker clarifies that she has not taken this story from the history books but from her memory. 

The speaker next refers to the classics “Listen, who reads the classics? And who cares/whether a georgic works or what Virgil said/or whether its meaning now remains good:” (lines 8-10). Here, the speaker questions if people read the past works of the classics and refers to Virgil’s georgic works. Virgil, a Roman poet, wrote a poem in 29 BCE titled “The Georgics” which describes the agriculture and nature of the land in great detail (Virgil). The speaker questions if the meaning of “georgic” (line 9) “remains good” (line 10), and confirms that it is by saying “let it be the down to earth and literal,/sifting, critical and absolute devotion to a way of life.” (lines 17-18). This “devotion to a way of life” of agriculture existed for thousands of years before technology and industry stepped in.

From reviewing the past, the speaker now shifts to the present, and states “And now imagine a valley:/a tea-time clock, a silhouette of sycamores/a blue saucer beside its cup.” (lines 23-25). The valley does not exist anymore, yet through the use of language, the speaker makes it live. By using the word “imagine” (line 23), the speaker also lets the reader know she is imagining how it could have been. Like a filmmaker, the speaker zooms in to the valley, then the clock and the sycamores, and finally to the cup and saucer. The cup and saucer represent a cozy home life, where a cup of tea brings warmth and familiarity. The cup and saucer are also fragile and can be broken easily. The “blue” in the “blue saucer” (line 25) could symbolize the blue sky.

By italicizing the words “sluice”(line 30) which means a water channel with a gate through which water passes through (Wikipedia),  “dam” (line 30) which means holding the water back, and “progress” (line 31) which means building the dam and not standing in the way of progress, the speaker uses the sequence of these words to parallel the progression that occurred during that time in the past. However, farmers fled, leaving behind “ghost estates” (line 27). The progress of building the dam, intended to control the waters, did the opposite to the farmers’ lives, and had ironically “drowned” the blue saucer, which was a “daily implement” (line 38). Here, Boland emphasizes how progress has disrupted the daily lives of the Irish farmers living in that area, all the way to their cups and saucers. This recurring theme of disruption and change in her poems expands Boland’s ability to identify with the Irish past, even through the use of her imagination. 

Like Heaney and Yeats, Eavan Boland also used mythology to identify with Ireland’s past. In Boland’s poem “Eurydice Speaks” from her book A Woman Without a Country, she touches upon the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the son of Apollo, who is a poet and musician (Boland 18-19). The seven-stanza poem is written in verse and is told through Eurydice’s perspective, as compared to Orpheus’s viewpoint in Heaney’s “The Underground” (Heaney). The Greek myth is about Orpheus, Eurydice’s beloved, where she dies and goes to the underworld. Here, the underworld is a metaphor of the Irish past. Orpheus, out of his love for her, tries to bring her back to earth through his music. The condition by Hades is not met, where Orpheus is told not to look back at Eurydice during the journey, and he loses her again. The underlying themes in Orpheus and Eurydice’s story are love, death, and the loss of love. 

In the poem, “Eurydice Speaks,” the speaker begins with “How will I know you in the underworld?/How will we find each other? (lines 1-2). The title alerts the reader that Eurydice is speaking to Orpheus; she is in the underworld and wonders how she will find him. The speaker then takes the reader through Eurydice’s experience in the physical world as she recounts living this earthly life by using concrete images such as “skies,” “stars”, “tides,” “ditches,” “river,” “frost,” and “dusk.” These are not available in the underworld. 

A sense of nostalgia creeps into the poem when the speaker says, “On the shore of a river written and rewritten/As elegy, epic, epode.” (lines 9-10). The “river” is a topic that has been written about many times throughout the ages; it is constant, and has been used as an elegy, an epic, or an epode. These three “e” words also form an alliteration in the poem. 

In the physical earth, the speaker says, “Our skies littered with actual stars/Practical tides in our bay-” (lines 4-5). This reference to the land is another form of Irish identity. Comparing these earthly images to that of the underworld, or death, the speaker asks the question, “What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?” (line 6). There are no skies or stars in the underworld, nor rivers or ditches, and it is lonely there. Also, the speaker is lonely without her love. The reference to Orpheus’s music is shown clearly in the fifth stanza, “The plainspoken music of recognition” (line 17). In this line, Orpheus’s music in the underworld would be a way of identifying Orpheus’s presence. In addition, recognition in the poem could also mean recognition of a person, a thing, or a season. 

Different forms of love are woven throughout the poem (love for Orpheus, love for husband, love for Ireland), and the speaker talks as if she is having a conversation with her love interest. The reader sees this through the speaker’s questions: “How will we find each other?” (line 2), and “Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?” (line 11). She is waiting for Orpheus to come and get her. In the last line, “I would know you anywhere” (line 22), the speaker’s words convince the reader that she is in love with Orpheus, no matter what form he takes, as seen here, “As a shadow became a stride/And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight,” (lines 20-21). This poem gives the reader a sense of hope, showing us how Eurydice believes that Orpheus will succeed in taking her back to earth. This poem also symbolizes Boland’s love for her spouse as well as her faith in his love for her, and it can also reflect her love for Ireland. Another consideration is that Orpheus’s looking back could represent Boland’s looking back on her Irish past. Her message could be for the reader not to look back to their Irish past (the underworld) or they will lose it. In addition, no matter what change occurs in Ireland, the speaker states “I would know you anywhere” (line 22).

The concept of returning home and finding change is the theme in another verse poem by Boland titled “Nostalgia” from her book A Woman Without a Country (Boland 16-17). Filled with enjambment coursing through the poem, the speaker begins with “When the cobbler shop closed in our village/with a hand-written note in the window/and an apology” (lines 1-3), it alerts the reader that the shop has closed. Instead of focusing on its closing, the speaker, using the “I” in the poem, emphasizes the “etymology” (line 8) behind the word “cobbler.” This focus on language has been Boland’s strength in reclaiming Ireland through “the local rhythms and constructs of language” (Burns 222). The speaker goes on to confirm this, by saying “As if the origin of a word we used/without thinking could help us deal/with what we were about to lose/without thinking” (lines 12-15). In addition, the speaker shifts from “I” to “we” and according to Dr. Frazier in his June 8, 2020 lecture, the speaker is cultivating “mindfulness so as not to suffer steep losses.” 

The speaker then wanders into the past and says, “where I saw a woman standing,/years ago, her paired shoes/in her hands and already/I was placing them in some ideal/river village” (19-23). The speaker brings her version of the imagined past to the reader, sharing how it would have been for a woman in Ireland to be in the shop, holding a pair of shoes to give to the cobbler. This woman could have been her grandmother. By mentioning “ideal river village,” the speaker suggests how this event, through her imagination, could have taken place in Ireland’s past. 

In another of Boland’s verse poems, “Art of Empire,” the speaker questions her familial past, and the past of the women of Ireland (Boland 29-30). The speaker begins on a personal note, “If no one in my family ever spoke of it,/ if no one handed down/what it was to be born to power/and married in a poor country.” (lines 1-4). Here, the speaker has nothing from her Irish past to reflect upon. No one from her family has remembered anything from their past. The speaker then moves away from the personal tone and focuses on the Irish women of the past, “If no one ever mentioned how a woman was,/what she did/what she never did again,/when she lived in a dying Empire.” (lines 9-12). Again, the speaker reflects on the Irish women of the past and how nothing had been written about them. The speaker refers to Britain as “a dying Empire” (line 12); at one time, Britain had been an empire and had a strong hold on Ireland (and other countries) until the twentieth century, after which Ireland became a free country.

Both Boland and Heaney have used the underworld, love, and Greek mythology (Orpheus and Eurydice) in some of their poems. W.B. Yeats also used Greek mythology and love, particularly in his early poems. One difference, however, between his early poems and Boland’s and Heaney’s poems were that they were written in the traditional form that employed rhyme and metric patterns; both Boland and Heaney, born decades later, wrote modern poetry that did not include these rhyming patterns. Another difference between Yeats and Boland and Heaney was that Yeats did not write about the underground or Orpheus. Instead, he concentrated on Homer’s Helen of Troy, as seen in his Green Helmet and Other Poems, “A Woman Homer sung,” and “No Second Troy” (Finneran 10-11). To Yeats, Maud Gonne’s beauty could only be compared to Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy could also be a metaphor for Ireland.

Similarities observed in Boland’s, Heaney’s and Yeats’s poems in this paper show the contextual themes of mythology, love, and loss. The underground and mythical themes in Boland’s and Heaney’s poems could also be a connection between Ireland’s past and its present. However, in Boland’s poem “Eurydice Speaks,” the point-of-view is that of a woman (Eurydice), whereas Yeats’s and Heaney’s poems are written from a point-of-view of a man. This difference is subtle and yet notable. Boland had adapted her writing to the canonical Irish poems of the past, but in her own way, had paved the way for women poets. 

 

Deane

Another twentieth century Irish poet is John F. Deane who was born in 1943 on Achill Island, the largest of the Irish isles and situated on the west coast of Ireland. His father worked in the dole office and his mother was a teacher. Trained to become a priest, Deane became a teacher instead. Besides writing poetry, he founded the organization Poetry Ireland, The Poetry Ireland Review, and Dedalus Press. In 1996, he became Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry. Several of Deane’s poems, like “Harbour: Achill Island,” are influenced by his birthplace, Achill Island. Also, his spirituality and religious beliefs are observed in many of his poems, such as “Bead after Bead,” “Carnival of the Animals,” and “Words of the Unknown Soldier” (Deane). Vacillating between faith and doubt, and emphasizing spirituality, Deane’s poems have been compared to Yeats’s spiritual preference to Blavatsky’s theosophy in the 1890s, to Irish fairy lore in the Sligo, and to his wife’s spiritual automatic writing (Rafferty 337). Heaney also considered himself religious, but not to the extent of Deane, and one of his poems that showed this was “Station Island” in the 1984 collection of that name (Rafferty 338).

Similar to poems by Yeats, Heaney, and Boland, Deane’s poem “The Colliery” from his book Snow Falling on Chestnut Hills: New and Selected Poems, touches upon the past, mythology, and the underworld (Deane 105). The speaker begins with “They closed the colliery, putting full-/stop/to a dark page. They had gone down/into black earth” (lines 1-4). The colliery is a coal mine, and the miners’ work is done underground, which represents the underworld and the past. Here, the colliery is closed. It no longer is used. The speaker compares the tools used by the miners to those used for writing, “Their slender picks/were fashioned like those delicately/nibbed pens/with which we scratched our first/letters onto slates” (lines 7-12). Similar to Heaney’s poem “Digging” which compared his pen to his father’s and grandfather’s digging with shovels, the speaker in this poem compares the pens used in school to the coal miners’ picks which are used to dig for coal. 

The speaker says this about the coal miners, “On their foreheads, fixed, a third eye” (line 13-14). The third eye has been known to be used for intuition, in which it can see things before they happen. With the darkness dulling the coal miners’ senses, the speaker suggests that the third eye can help them “see” or feel their way around the dark mines. The speaker also compares the coal miners to mythological figures, as seen here “Aeneas, Dante, Hercules, went down/anticipating/certain return but these, like/Orpheus, found themselves/doubtful of success” (lines 15-19). Aeneas, a mythical Trojan prince, fought in the Trojan war and went down to the underground to visit his father; Dante in the Divine Comedy goes to Hell (underground) to rescue his beloved Beatrice; and Hercules whose father was Zeus, endured many trials in order to become immortal and one of them was to go underground and kidnap Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded Hades’ gates. Orpheus was another mythical character who went to Hades to retrieve his beloved Eurydice but was unsuccessful. As in the other Irish poet’s poems that mention the underworld in this paper, the mythological characters in Deane’s poem also pertain to the underworld. As mentioned before, the underworld represents Ireland’s dark past and Irish identity. It is evident here, when the speaker says, “They planted dynamite, like seeds,/the mountain/rumbling in sudden pain, and some/Apologized each time.” (lines 25-28) that the planted dynamite symbolizes the violence in Irish history from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which originated in the 1900s to fight Britain.

In Deane’s verse poem “Fantasy in White,” the speaker describes a meadow on Achill Island, and begins with “Over the brimming acres of wild/meadow/the white butterflies, in a silent/storm” (lines 1-4) (Deane 41). Here, he is describing a meadow filled with white butterflies flying around in a “silent storm” on Achill Island, Deane’s birthplace. This reference to the meadow evokes a pastoral feeling of land and nature. The white butterflies symbolize white angels. The word “white” also signifies purity and goodness. He compares the butterflies to “our fractured time and world-/space” (lines 8-9) which somehow represents our weaknesses and broken world, where the mating dance of the butterflies is “rejoiced in a moment of purest/wonder” (lines 12-13). The reference to religion is observed in the following passage “where sin abounds there grace/abounds the more” (lines 14-15). In this sinful world, Deane envisions grace, or forgiveness, as seen in the butterfly dance, which counters sin and is an occasion to “rejoice.”
 The speaker notes that this dance of the white butterflies during the day now changes into night time, “By evening, absence had settled on/the meadow” (lines 16-17) and silence ensues. The speaker now shifts to the night “imperceptibly the fall had come/and we turned once more towards/the dark” (lines 22-24). The poem begins with a pureness from the white butterflies in a meadow, and enters the dark realm which is linked to “the fall” (line 22). The linking of the darkness to “the fall” can symbolize the fallen angel and the underworld, as seen in Heaney’s (The Underground) and Boland’s (Eurydice Speaks) poems, where the underworld is dark and symbolizes Ireland’s past. However, the speaker finishes the poem on a lighter note “the white soul weighted in its winter/boots” (lines 24-25). Again, the white represents purity and goodness, and although it is weighted down by the temporary “winter boots,” soon it will be spring, and winter will have fled. 

 

Searcaigh

Cathal O Searcaigh is a modern Irish language poet born July 12, 1956 in a hill farm at the foot of Mount Errigal, in Donegal County. He writes Irish poetry in his Irish tongue. He often compares living in the “soulless city” to his rustic hometown of Caiseal na gCorr and has identified more with his hometown than the city. Searcaigh has said “the whole idea of home is a vitally important thing to my work. I only discovered this when…I went off to London…and became aware that I was in an alien environment…of not having a face, of not having a name, of not having a place and I realized that all of these were here” (Poetry).

From a viewpoint of a returning emigrant, Searcaigh’s poem, translated by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, “Here at Caiseal na gCorr station” takes place in a station in Caiseal na gCorr which serves as an entry point to his hometown in northwestern Ireland (Denvir 127). In this personal poem, filled with enjambment, the speaker begins with “Here at Caiseal na gCorr Station/I discovered my hidden island,/my refuge, my sanctuary” (lines1-3) (Poetry). His love for his hometown is evident here; it is his “refuge” (line 3) and “sanctuary” (line 3). A place he can call home. The speaker continues with “Here I feel permanence/as I look at the territory of my people” (lines 6-7).The speaker identifies with the place and “my people” (line 7). The speaker then imagines the past “around the foot of Errigal/where they’ve settled/for more than three hundred years” (lines 8-10). He imagines its history and its people “three hundred years” (line 10) ago. This looking back in time is similar to Heaney’s “Digging,” Boland’s “Nostalgia,” and Deane’s “Colliery.” The sense of continuity from the past to the present identifies the poet’s wish for expressing their Irish identity. Also, Searcaigh’s imagining the past is similar to Boland’s use of imagination to create Ireland’s past.

The speaker continues with “Here before me, open/like a book/is this countryside now” (lines 13-15). He is viewing the area and comparing it to an open book, one that is accessible and available to him. He continues with this theme of a “book” in the next few lines, “This is the poem-book of my people,/the manuscript they toiled at/with the ink of their sweat” (line 19-21). Like in Heaney’s “Digging” poem, the speaker compares their hard work to writing, as seen in the “ink of their sweat” (line 21). The speaker continues, “Here every enclosed field is like a verse/in the great poem of land reclamation” (lines 22-23). These two opposite worlds, one of toil and hard work, which produces crops, and one of writing, which produces a poem-book, are joined here as one. They both serve the same purpose, and that’s to continue their Irish identity. The speaker shifts to himself and how he feels, “Here I feel the worth of poetry/I feel my raison d’etre and importance as a person/as I become the pulse of my people’s heart” (lines 31-33). The love for poetry is not embraced in every culture as in Ireland. Poetry is an integral part of the Irish identity, and has become an expression of its soul and spirit.

Many more Irish poets than listed here have captured the centrality of Irish identity in their works, but due to time constraints and the scope of this paper, they have not been included. In these poems covered in this paper, the majority of them were written in English. Searcaigh’s poems, on the other hand, were originally written in Irish, and had to be translated into English. So the question comes up as to “Who is reading these poems?” The poems written in the Irish language speak in the language of Ireland. This brings a sense of authenticity to the poems and Irish identity, and the Irish people can identify with these poems. However, by translating them into English, the identity of Ireland is established even more throughout the world. Here is an island, with its own language, producing literature. These translations expand the audience and allow the poems to be read not only by the Irish, but by English-speaking countries. 

 

Conclusion

The five Irish poets in this paper, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John F. Deane, and Cathal O Searcaigh, all used, in some form or another,  mythology, language, land, imagination, nostalgia, and Ireland’s historical events to write poetry that is infused with Irish identity. Yet each poet had a particular uniqueness that stood out from the others; W.B.Yeats romanticized and idealized Ireland; Seamus Heaney understood the complexities of Ireland’s past, and used a “slanted” approach to the truth by inventing the “quincunx” which didn’t have political or religious undertones; Eavan Boland focused on the women of Ireland, imagining their past and recreating the “dailiness” of their lives; John F. Deane’s religious education brought spirituality into his poems; where “sin” and “grace” interchanged; Cathal O Searcaigh’s writing in the Irish language reveals Irish pride while his comparison of the “soulless city” to his rural hometown reveals his love for Ireland’s rural past.

Also, by covering several different topics within the theme of centrality of identity, these Irish poets were able to share their complex Irish identity with the world.

 

 

 

References

 

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