Transcript
Page 1: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

Irish Jesuit Province

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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Page 2: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 3: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 4: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 5: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 6: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 7: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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Page 8: Lest We Forget Alice Furlong

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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