Irish Poetry – a short selection

William Butler Yeats: ’The Lake Isle of Innisfree’; ’Easter 1916’Louis MacNeice: ’Belfast’; Autumn Journal XVIPatrick Kavanagh: ’Epic’John Montague: ’Like Dolmens Round My Childhood’Brenadan Kennelly: ’My Dark Fathers’; ’Points of view’; ’The Celtic Twilight’Paul Durcan: ’Ireland 1972’; ’Going Home to Mayo, 1949’Seamus Heaney: ’Bogland’; ’Anahorish’ Derek Mahon: ’Spring in Belfast’; ’The Snow Party’; ’A Garage in Co. Cork’Michael Longley: ’Ceasefire’; ’The Ice-cream Man’Paul Muldoon: ’Why Brownlee Left’

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATSThe Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Easter 1916

I have met them at close of dayComing with vivid facesFrom counter or desk among greyEighteenth-century houses.I have passed with a nod of the headOr polite meaningless words,Or have lingered awhile and saidPolite meaningless words,And thought before I had doneO[a mocking tale or a gibeTo please a companionAround the fire at the club,Being certain that they and IBut lived where motley is worn:All changed. changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spentIn ignorant good-will,Her nights in argumentUntil her voice grew shrill.What voice more sweet than hersWhen, young and beautiful,She rode to harriers?This man had kept a schoolAnd rode our wingéd horse;This other his helper and friendWas coming into his force;He might have won fame in the end,So sensitive his nature seemed,So daring and sweet his thought.This other man I had dreamedÁ drunken, vainglorious lout.He had done most bitter wrongTo some who are near my heart,Yet I number him in the song;He, too, has resigned his partIn the casual comedy;He, too, has been changed in his turn,Transformed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose aloneThrough summer and winter seemEnchanted to a stoneTo trouble the living stream.The horse that comes from the road'The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,Minute by minute they change;.A shadow of cloud on the streamChanges minute by minute;A horse-hoof slides on the brim,And a horse plashes within itThe long-legged moor-hens dive,And hens to moor-cocks call;Minute by minute they live:The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrificeCan make a stone o[ the heart.O when may it suffice?That is Heaven's part, our partTo murmur name upon name'As a mother names her childWhen sleep at last has comeon limbs that had run wild.What is it but nightfallNo, no, not night but death;Was it needless death after ail?For England may keep faithFor all that is done and said.We know their dream; enoughTo know they dreamed and are dead;And what if excess o[loveBewildered them till they died?I write it out in a verse -MacDonagh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and PearseNow and in time to be,Wherever green is worn,Are changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

LOUIS MACNEICEBelfast

Autumn Journal: XVI

PATRICK KAVANAGHEpic

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 most 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.

JOHN MONTAGUELike dolmens round my childhood, the old people

Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.

Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself,A broken song without tune, without words;He tipped me a penny every pension day,Fed kindly crusts to winter birds.When he died his cottage was robbed,Mattress and money box torn and searched.Only the corpse they didn't disturb.

Maggie Owens was surrounded by animals,A mongrel bitch and shivering pups,Even in her bedroom a she-goat cried.She was a well of gossip defiled,Fanged chronicler of a whole countryside:Reputed a witch, all I could findWas her lonely need to deride.

The Nialls lived along a mountain laneWhere heather bells bloomed, clumps of foxglove.All were blind, with Blind Pension and Wireless,Dead eyes serpent-flicked as one enteredTo shelter from a downpour of mountain rain.Crickets chirped under the rocking hearthstoneUntil the muddy sun shone out again.

Mary Moore lived in a crumbling gatehouse,Famous as Pisa for its leaning gable.Bag-apron and boots, she tramped the fieldsDriving lean cattle from a miry stable.A by-word for fierceness, she fell asleepOver love stories, Red Star and Red Circle,Dreamed of gypsy love rites, by firelight sealed.

Wild Billy Eagleson married a Catholic servant girlWhen all his Loyal family passed on:We danced round him shouting "To Hell with King Billy,"And dodged from the arc of his flailing blackthorn.Forsaken by both creeds, he showed little concernUntil the Orange drums banged past in the summerAnd bowler and sash aggressively shone.

Curate and doctor trudged to attend them,Through knee-deep snow, through summer heat,From main road to lane to broken path,Gulping the mountain air with painful breath.Sometimes they were found by neighbours,Silent keepers of a smokeless hearth,Suddenly cast in the mould of death.

Ancient Ireland, indeed! I was reared by her bedside, The rune and the chant, evil eye and averted head, Fomorian fierceness of family and local feud.Gaunt figures of fear and of friendliness, For years they trespassed on my dreams, Until once, in a standing circle of stones, I felt their shadows pass

Into that dark permanence of ancient forms.

BRENDAN KENNELLY My Dark Fathers

My dark fathers lived the intolerable day Committed always to the night of wrong,Stiffened at the hearthstone, the woman lay, Perished feet nailed to her man's breastbone.Grim houses beckoned in the swelling gloom Of Munster fields where the Atlantic nightFettered the child within the pit of doom,And everywhere a going down of light.

And yet upon the sandy Kerry shoreThe woman once had danced at ebbing tideBecause she loved flute music - and still more Because a lady wondered at the prideOf one so humble. That was long beforeThe green plant withered by an evil chance;When winds of hunger howled at every door She heard the music dwindle and forgot the dance

Such mercy as the wolf receives was hers Whose dance became a rhythm in a grave, Achieved beneath the thorny savage furzeThat yellowed fiercely in a mountain cave.Immune to pity, she, whose crime was love, Crouched, shivered, searched the threatening sky,Discovered ready signs, compelled to moveHer to her innocent appalling cry

Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay Unknown, and could not understandThe giant grief that trampled night and day, The awful absence moping through the land.Upon the headland, the encroaching seaLeft sand that hardened after tides of Spring,No dancing feet disturbed its symmetryAnd those who loved good music ceased to sing

Since every moment of the clockAccumulates to form a final name,Since I am come of Kerry clay and rock, I celebrate the darkness and the shameThat could compel a man to turn his face Against the wall, withdrawn from light so strong

And undeceiving, spancelled in a placeOf unapplauding hands and broken song.

The Celtic Twilight

Now in the Celtic twilight, decrepit whores Prowl warily along the Grand CanalIn whose rank waters bloated corpses float,A dog and cat that carne to a bad end.The whores don't notice; perfumed bargainers Prepare to prey on men prepared to preyOn them and others. Hot scavengersAre victims, though they confidently strutAnd wait for Dublin's Casanovas to appear – Poor furtive bastards with the goods in hand.

And in the twilight now, a shrill whore shrieksAt one stiff client who's cheated her,'Misther! If you come back again,You'lI get a shaggin' steel comb through the chest.Then gathering what's left of dignity,Preparing once again to cast an eyeOn passing prospects, she strolIs besideThe dark infested waters whereInflated carcassesGo floating by into the nightOf lurid women and predatory menWho must inflict but cannot shareEach other's pain.

Points of View

A neighbour said De Valera was As straight as Christ,As spiritually strong.The man in the next house said ‘Twas a great pityHe wasn't crucified as young.

PAUL DURCANGoing Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949

Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of DublinMy father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,The rexine seat of red leatherette,And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.'Daddy, Daddy,' I cried, 'Pass out the moon,'But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.Each town we passed through was another milestoneAnd their names were magic passwords into eternity:Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,And my father's mother's house, all oil-lamps and women,And my bedroom over the public bar below,And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:Life's seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rentBy their screeches and bellowings. And in the eveningsI walked with my father in the high grass down by the riverTalking with him - an unheard-of thing in the city.

But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflankedThan the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:Back down along the canal we chugged into the cityAnd each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic-lights,And blocks after blocks of so-called 'new' tenements -Thousands of crosses of loneliness plantedIn the narrowing grave of the life of the father;In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy's childhood.

Ireland 1972

Next to the grave of my beloved grandmother The grave of my first love, murdered by my brother.

SEAMUS HEANEYBogland

For F. T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairiesTo slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crustingBetween the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elkout of the peat, set it upAn astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk underMore than a hundred yearsWas recovered salty and white.The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definitionBy millions of years.They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks Of great firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they stripSeems camped on before.The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

Anahorish

My ‘place of clear water’,the first hill in the worldwhere springs washed into the shiny grass

and darkened cobblesin the bed of the lane.Anahorish, soft gradientof consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lampsswung through the yardson winter evenings.With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellersgo waist-deep in mistto break the light iceat wells and dunghills.

DEREK MAHON Spring in Belfast

Walking among my own this windy morningIn a tide of sunlight between shower and shower,I resume my old conspiracy with the wetStone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart.Once more, as before, I remember not to forget.

There is a perverse pride in being on the sideOf the fallen angels and refusing to get up.We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hillAt the top of every street, for there it is,Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible –

But yield instead to the humorous formulae,The spurious mystery in the knowing nod;Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade,Rehearsing our astute salvations underThe cold gaze of a sanctimonious God.

One part of my mind must learn to know its place.The things that happen in the kitchen housesAnd echoing back streets of this desperate cityShould engage more than my casual interest,Exact more interest than my casual pity.

The Snow Party(for Louis Asekoff)

Basho, comingTo the city of Nagoya,Is asked to a snow party.There is a tinkling of chinaAnd tea into china;There are introductions.Then everyoneCrowds to the windowTo watch the falling snow.Snow is falling on NagoyaAnd farther southOn the tiles of Kyoto.Eastward, beyond Irago,It is fallingLike leaves on the cold sea.Elsewhere they are burningWitches and hereticsIn the boiling squares,Thousands have died since dawnIn the serviceOf barbarous kings;But there is silenceIn the houses of NagoyaAnd the hills of Ise.

A Garage in Co. Cork

Surely you paused at this roadside oasisIn your nomadic youth, and saw the moundOf never-used cement, the curious faces,The soft-drink ads and the uneven groundRainbowed with oily puddles, where a snailHad scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail.

Like a frontier store-front in an old westernIt might have nothing behind it but thin air,Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron,Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire,A cabbage white fluttering in the soddenSilence of an untended kitchen garden –

Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a darkInterior echoing with the cries of children.Here in this quiet Corner of Co. Cork

A family ate, slept, and watched the rainDance clean and cobalt the exhausted gritSo that the mind shrank from the glare of it.

Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood?Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home,Remembering the old pumps where they stood,Antique now, squirting juice into a chromeLagonda or a dung-caked tractor whileA cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile.

Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the backGave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first fewShadowy yards of an overgrown cart track,Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew –Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard,Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird.

Left to itself, the functional will castA death-bed glow of picturesque abandon.The intact antiquities of the recent past,Dropped from the retail catalogues, return.To the materials that gave rise to themAnd shine with a late sacramental gleam.

A god who spent the night here once rewardedNatural courtesy with eternal life –Changing to petrol pumps, that they be sparedFor ever there, an old man and his wife.The virgin who escaped his dark designSanctions the townland from her prickly shrine.

We might be anywhere but are in one place only,One of the milestones of earth-residenceUnique in each particular, the thinlyPeopled. hinterland serenely tense –Not in the hope of a resplendent futureBut with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.

MICHAEL LONGLEYCeasefire

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake, Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

When they had eaten together, it pleased them both To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might, Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

'I get down on my knees and do what must be done And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'

The Ice-Cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:You would rhyme off the flavours. That was beforeThey murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn RoadAnd you bought carnations to lay outside his shop. I named for you all the wild flowers of the BurrenI had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch, Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

PAUL MULDOONWhy Brownlee Left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.