Poems I Journey With 18

We turn to literature for many reasons: for comfort, for escapism, for entertainment, to give us insight into life, to educate us, to challenge us and so on and so forth. A turning point for this present reviewer was his discovery of the local library. I remember joining the branch at Charleville Mall in north inner city Dublin when I was seven years of age. It was then that my love of books, for knowledge and for literature in general began. To take out two different books every two weeks was a delight for me and a brief embrace with the wonders of knowledge and indeed of life itself. Umberto Eco has declared in one of his books that the main purpose of literature is to learn how to die.  In my opinion he only took into account one side of the story in that declaration as it is my contention, and indeed, that of many others, that the main purpose of literature is to learn how to live and how to die. Life and death are inextricably linked realities. Poems are in a sense a distillation of prose literature, an intense expression of what is said in a more expanded and expansive way therein.

Carol Ann Duffy

This evening I would like to present the readers with a poem from the pen of another wonderful woman poet, namely, Carol Ann Duffy.  As the Wiki succinctly puts it:  “Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE FRSL (1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position.” See this link: Carol Ann Duffy

This poem works through a fairly standard technique or literary device called “personification,” where Duffy presents us with a feminine version of history, history as an old woman waking up in her bed and coming to realise all that has been done to her. Rather than saying anything more at this stage, let us read and reflect upon the poem:

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand - twigs, stained gloves - 
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved 
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor. 

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy covers some 2000 years of history since the birth of Jesus Christ in this poem and comments on how history, personified as a woman, might feel given the drastic changes that have occurred over those two millennia.  This personification is an effective conceit to get us thinking. The one problem I have with this poem is that perhaps the period covered in too broad a canvas that thereby renders the conceit somewhat too simplistic and consequently somewhat less than effective as a literary device here.  However, the message of the poem is clear:- we humans have really messed up and messed up very badly indeed.

Poems I Journey With 8

Back in the good old days we had to learn many poems off by heart as learning by rote was still in the ascendant in the mid-seventies of the last century. Ireland has given birth to legions of poets, and the author I am celebrating here tonight, one Patrick Kavanagh remarked that at any one time our country could boast of a standing army of some 10,000 poets. W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella and Austin Clarke were the four major Irish poets we studied at school. Tonight I want to discuss Patrick Kavanagh's great poem "Stony Grey Soil" which we studied for our Leaving Certificate.

Patrick Kavanagh

Stony Grey Soil

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards' brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster's back
Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco -
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Commentary

Rare colour photo of Patrick Kavanagh

We all at one time or another have a love-hate relationship with the city,  town, village, townland or countryside where we were born.  We are never happy with our progress in life and we often blame our native place for the singular lack of opportunity it offered us as young people.  We also, of course, blame our family of origin which is naturally enough specifically rooted in our birthplace.  When I studied the Irish Gaelic language we were told that the great Irish Gaelic poet Seán Ó Ríordáin had a propensity to compose compound words or "chomhfhocail" as we called them in that language.  Kavanagh uses a similar technique in his poems by using his own compound or hyphenated words, viz., "clod-conceived," "thick-tongued" and "green-life-conquering." I especially liked, as a youngster studying this poem, Kavanagh's use of the literary devices of personification (where his Monaghan farm home is addressed directly as a person) and apostrophe (addressing someone or something that is simply not there in front of one). Also "Stony Grey Soil" is written in a form somewhat akin to that of the ballad as the poem contains stanzas of four lines each even though Kavanagh does not stick rigidly to the rhyming schemes of the traditional ballad.

However, for me the strongest feature of this poem, as of virtually all of Kavanagh's poetry, is the strength or force of his simple and direct imagery. Such strong imagery is evidenced practically in very line and indeed in the very title which occurs as a repeated line that has the effect of a chorus of lament.  A list of images is always easy to make in any poem by our author: "stony-grey soil," "gay child of my passion," "clod-conceived," "clogged," "stumble,"  "stride of Apollo," the named parts of the plough, "lea-field" and so on.  I shall not bore the reader with listing them for the whole poem as he or she can easily do that for themselves.

This poem is steeped in regret for his lost opportunities as a poet and as a human being since as a young man he dedicated himself to the land rather than to his métier as a poet or as a lover or suitor for young women.  The poem then becomes a lament for his predicament, that is, having wasted his youth.  That sentiment is stated very strongly and bitterly in the following lines packed with clear imagery:

O stony grey soil of Monaghan

You burgled my bank of youth!

I also particularly love the traditional format and nature of this poem.  It was long a tradition in Irish Gaelic poems to list off the names of townlands and towns as in the tradition of the "dindshenchus" as is exemplified in the final stanza.

Again, there are references to religion, God, but not the Church as in the following five lines:

Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses

Or mention the dark fields where

The first gay flight of my lyric

Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

It is the "peasant's prayer" or natural or instinctive spirituality that appeals to Kavanagh. That is at once Pagan Celtic as well as Catholic or Christian.  Then there is the paradox that exists at the very heart of life, namely "dark fields" that might suggest something profoundly ungrounding and unnerving like the "dark night of the soul" and yet it is placed side by side with "the gay flight of his lyric" that somehow was caught up in a peasant's prayer rather than a poet's book of promise.

Finally the line "Dead loves that were born for me" is distinctly depressing and profoundly disturbing.  That the ballad format is used for this poem is also good as it is able to carry the lament and regret from his misspent youth and the lost opportunities he might have had, had he been luckier in life.