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Lest We Forget Alice FurlongAuthor(s): Arthur LittleSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 75, No. 886 (Apr., 1947), pp. 137-143Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515632 .
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Lest We Forget Alice Furlong By Arthur Little, S.J.
ALICE
FURLONG'S death last year was almost unnoticed by the
general public except for a
memorable article by Miss Kathleen
O'Brennan in the Irish Press. Yet even that delightful article was more
of a tribute to her personality and her
family than to her work. And it is not too much to claim that between
the death of Yeatp and her own she
had a mastery of pure lyric song
unequalled by any other Irish poet. Seamus O'Sullivan, who resembles her
so much in one of his moods, may have
a wider range of sympathy, but has not equal consistency of quality ; and
for effortless singing no one else
springs to mind as her rival.
Undoubtedly a quality in her, that
is one sign of the authentic singer, had
something to do with her neglect. She was always content with a small
audience. She published her only
volume, Roses and Rue, in 1899
before her powers had reached their
full development. Thereafter her
poems appeared, sometimes at long
intervals, chiefly in The Irish
Monthly and (later) in the Irish
Press. After 1916, when she devoted
herself to the study of Irish, her Eng lish poems became very few indeed.
Such occasional publication does not
make for wide and enduring recogni
tion, and I fear that Miss O'Brennan
exaggerates a little when she calls her one of the best-known writers of her
time, though most certainly she
deserved to be one.
But though she was content to lack
due recognition it is not for those who have cherished her work to acquiesce.
Especially ought this magazine to
express its appreciation of a con
tributor who, notwithstanding that Yeats and Wilde and Belioc and
Michael Field were also contributors, must be called one of its greatest.
And it would be fitting if the maga zine whose editor, Fr. Matt Russell, first introduced her genius to the
public should now do something to save her, or rather her country, from
the loss of acquaintance with her
inspiring mind.
There is also a personal reason
(there are two, but I need only men
tion one) why this article is being written. When, at the very end of
the first World War, I became a
young undergraduate and began to
form tentative standards of artistic
beauty she was almost the first poet whom I discovered for myself. Any
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138 THE IRISH MONTHLY
number of The Irish Monthly that
contained her work was worth reading from cover to cover ; those that did
not seemed to ask for the punishment of my indifference. Tp that extent
had hero-worship then warped my
judgement of others. But now that
the ardours consequent upon the dis
covery of an exceptional mind by a
very young person have passed, I still
find in her that strain of wild and
irrepressible melody that then awoke
my senses to the splendour of what
they perceived. And gratitude for
the music with which her poems then
filled my imagination for days at a
time now prompts me to defend them
from oblivion.
At that time I was living within the
local circle of her influence. Rath
far nham Castle, where I lived (then the headquarters of The Irish
Monthly), stood almost on the banks
of the Dodder ; and the waters that
passed our house had passed hers at
Tallaght only a couple of hours be
fore. The Furlong country was in
fact the hinterland to the suburb in
which I had spent my whole life until
then. And perhaps the sense of
kindred was helped by this nativity to
a common countryside as it certainly was helped by the undeviating piety that was discernible in her poems as
well as in the aspirations of my un
fledged ideals. I well remember the
thrill with which I read in The Monthly her prose description of
Ethna Carbery reciting her poems in
the family circle at Tallaght. That scene seemed a picture of the ideal of Irish culture, with her generous father
and his daughters keeping open house for the young enthusiasts of the new
National Literary Society. Enlighten ment there meant firm and clear-cut
convictions and loyalty to them ; it
meant vision. Now it means know
ledge of other people's convictions
and rejection of them all ; it means
groping. But if ever true enlighten ment existed it was in such people as
the Furlongs. Wrote Alice :
Why do I look for a house on the
shifting sands,
By the whirlpool9s eddy? On the Commons of God is my house,
beyond m caring-lands,
Strong-built and steady ; When the night falls my folks will
stretch out their hands ;
My hands are ready.
It is not suggested in this article
that Alice Furlong was the greatest Irish poet of her time. It is suggested that she was supreme in one essential
quality of a poet, in the spontaneous
impulse to sing, to celebrate her hopes and desires, her fortunes and mis
fortunes in arresting imagery and
rhythm. This impulse sprang from
her intense awareness of her ideals
and of the things around her. Her own simple aesthetic theory (that
prose is the language of intelligence,
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LEST WE FORGET ALICE FVRLONG 139
poetry of emotion) must have served
particularly well to explain her great est gift to herself. For emotion de
mands expression as mere thought
does not. But her spontaneity,
though she may have paid for it by not allowing herself to think as deeply as she could, ensured that she wrote
directly from her heart, that in all her
work she was passionately sincere.
Add to that that she had a perfect command of the means of expressing
herself clearly in musical verse and we
can almost define her quality in terms of the lyric itself. For the spon taneous expression of experience in
musical verse can stand for a defini
tion of lyric, and when the spon
taneity is most unreflective, for a
definition of pure song. Always such work communicates to the reader the
poet's own vivid awareness of life.
And Alice Furlong's work does arouse
in her readers a magical revival of the
power to see vividly the things she saw. It procures for him the re
covery of his childhood's realisation of the beauty and excitement of ordin
ary things. The specific effect of
poetry, its magic, is well exemplified in her evocation in us of wonder at
ordinary things. She can even make
poetry out of a ditch, as in these lines from A March Song :
Rain water in the dykes h clear as amber glass ; It feedeth the tall spikes
Of the high, green grass.
However, all that is true of a hun
dred other poets with the gift of song, and it is the acid test of a critic to
distinguish and express the personal arid incommunicable characteristics of
the writer whom he is considering. This test I cannot here pass. Alice
Furlong, just because she could have
been held up as the ideal of an Irish woman of cultured sensibility, betrays no marked peculiarities in her poetry.
Yet she can be classified. Perhaps the words that I have already applied to her best distinguish her class. I have remarked on her undeviating
piety, meaning piety in the Roman sense as an observance of traditional
loyalties, not only to religion, but to
fatherland and family. Not many of
her poems are primarily religious, yet
in all her work the Catholic Faith
reveals itself as the background of all
her thoughts. On the other hand, she is constantly declaring with chival rous indignation the injustice of her
country's state. The Caoine for Owen Roe brings these two loyalties together. Technically this poem is a
great achievement for its metre and
its stripped, spare style. Especially to
be noted is her masterly use of the
internal rhyme, not like Rossetti's
(from whom, perhaps, she borrowed the device) to produce a haze of
sound, but to add impetus to a surg
ing metre. The last two stanzas are
enough for illustration :
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140 THE IRISH MONTHLY
Weird and wild is the wail of woman,
Humbled the head of the haughty Roman.
Dark the omen and dark the vision, In deep derision outlaughs the
foeman.
Chant the death-chant, O friars grey! House the Chief in the holy clay!
Moon, hide away! Be blind, 0 Sun!
Christ and country are slain to-day.
Some of her poems are about her
personal life. There are hints in
them of some tragic disappointment. It may have been some such acquaint
ance with sorrow that gave her so
virile an acceptance of the fact of suf
fering. For she was too truthful
ever to refuse to recognise what once
she liad found true. The happy end
ing was not for her inevitable. Arti
ficial mannerisms she employed,
though rarely, but she was far from
sentimental, and those mannerisms do
not offend when we realise that she
relied on them in no measure to gain
her effects. And at times she could
write as grimly as the old ballad
writers :
I was sleepless on my pillow when I
heard the dead man calling, The dead man that lies drowned
at the bottom of the sea.
Westward away, in glooms of grey, I
saw the dim moon falling; Now I must rise and go to him,
the dead who calls on me.
And thus she begins her poem on the same theme as Catullus's famous frag
ment :
Love of you and hate of you Tears my very heart in two; As you please me or displease So I burn and so 1 freeze.
All but two of these quotations have been taken from the volume that she published in 1899. In that vol
ume, charming as it is throughout, her touch is more hesitant than in her
later work and, where insight fails
her, she has recourse to fanciful ex
planations of things and wishful
thinking. At that time the poems contributed to The Irish Monthly
by her sister Mary (who died young, a martyr to charity) showed even
greater promise than hers. But
thereafter Alice's mind became clearer
and more resolute, and her poetry,
without losing any of its allure, took on a
passionate emphasis that was
moving in the literal sense of startling men into thought, perhaps into
action. Miss O'Brennan tells us
that she believed that her poetry had
helped to keep resistance alive after
1916. I cannot find any of these
gallant songs of defiance in The
Irish Monthly. But there are
occasional outbursts of their spirit, as in the Heine-like touch of unyield
ing mockery with which she concludes
Dusk in the Cornfield. This poem commemorates a conversation with a
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LEST WE FORGET ALICE FURLONG 141
We will be merry till the moon goes
down,
Smother all awkward questions that
might smart us ;
Nothing shall part us?till we get to
town.
There is also a scathing poem on
the European War of 1914. It was
characteristic of her vigorous charity that that tragedy moved her to indig nation, not lamentation. The poem
ends with the denunciation :
God is not German nor English. The earth is the Lord's,
He sowed not for burnings, nor
planted His garden for staves, His breath on the clay was not
breathed for the triumph of
swords,
He made not His image to lie in the
young men's graves.
But when her subject was natural
bereavement, for which no one was to
blame, she could mourn with irresis
tible tenderness, as in these lines on
the death of Michael Breathnach :
Though wild and sweet
Is the wind of spring And wild and sweet
The wild birds sing, And the heart is music
In all things young? But my grief is the silence
Of the Golden Tongue.
I cannot resist adding to this an
young Englishman and shows what
she might have done in epistolary style. The following stanzas are not
consecutive in the original :
And here the dark, the wind, and the
hush?the sound
Of dead leaves dropping slowly to the
ground,
Whispering "
It once was Spring, but
now, alas.
We pass into the shadow, and are not
found ".
For we were all discoursing of that
tale
Of Omar Khayyam; and, in an Irish
vale,
Dreamed of the fragrance of the Rose
of Sharon, And heard in Erin the Persian
nightingale.
When all the days of all the worlds are told,
And we may bide together in one fold, Solving the secret of the rose's colour, And the moon9s pallor, and the sun9s
blinding gold;
And why were Jew and Scythian, bond and free?
And why were Gael and Saxon, you and me?
And why the blossom of every bough must wither,
And every river seek the bitter sea?
Now let us laugh, because we may not
frown ;
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142 THE IRISH MONTHLY
other quotation in an apparently light, almost flippant, manner reminis cent of Browning, that disguises a pro found emotion which unmasks itself at
the song's end. Note the effect of
vitality produced by the scheme of
interlinked rhymes. As in the flight of a goldfinch, the movement seems to
dip only to be whipped into another
upward swoop by the immanent
vigour of the poem. The internal
rhyme (of which I have quoted many
examples) was not her only original metrical device.
Herein is writ, In Runic characters mystic and
strange,
A life and the uttermost woe of it.
Beyond my range To read? That's the point. If I
state your case
What will you give me in exchange?
Let me read your face?
Just to prove how rapidly I will do it, Then fit you in here in time and place.
My last quotation is one of pure enchantment, solemn, serene, sonor
ous. It is from the poem entitled
VirgiVs Fields of Sleep.
I see them in a slumbrous light o' sun, Not ample to the air, but one by one
Golden and small, and all sides girt about
By cypresses that keep world's-dole shut out?
As Night, bespelled upon the brink of heaven,
Should sentinel the courts of lasting even?
Clothed in darkness those, the guards that keep
Inviolate the Golden Fields of Sleep.
Yea, they lift shadowy shields against Old Time
In a still place where never a voice
shall chime, Nor ever sound the hum o' the pilfer
ing hours
That thieve the honey from our buds and flowers.
I think I am right in saying that the title-phrase of this poem is not
from Virgil at all but from Words
worth's great line : " The winds
blow to me from the fields of sleep ".
(And is it not significant that Alice
Furlong's work so often evokes spon
taneous comparison with that of the
greatest poets?) But Alice Furlong has hardly any memorable single lines.
What one remembers of her is a mood
carried by music, almost what one
remembers of music itself. But to
read even any couple of stanzas by her
is to find oneself throughout in the
company of spiritual beauty. In one essential quality, therefore,
of lyric poetry, its singing quality, Alice Furlong was for some years
supreme amongst the living poets of
this country. And in the technical characteristics of her singing quality,
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LEST WE FORGET ALICE FURLONG 143
her spontaneous metrical inventive
ness and command of rhyme-pattern,
it is hard to think of anyone who was
her superior at any time. Add that
she crystallised in her work a mind
that was near in character to our
traditional ideal of spiritual culture,
strongly Catholic, strongly Irish, 46
true to the kindred points of
heaven and home ", and few will deny that she has a claim on our remem
brance. She was <6
a true poet, one
of a small band "
; it is no matter at
present whether she was a great
poet.
There is some talk of collecting her
poems written since 1900 and publish
ing them in a posthumous volume.
This should certainly be done. She
deserves it and we need it. We
need it especially now when the gener ous causes for which she stood seem
to attract fewer adherents than when
they were threatened with persecution and defended as our heritage by her
pen.
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