Tuesday, November 3, 2015

#307




I’ve been laboring for awhile now to determine who the Irish monk with “horns of solid mire” might actually be. I conclude that I don’t know and I will never know. Somebody will explain it to me someday, maybe, and I’ll slap my forehead. But I doubt it. “Horns of solid mire” is such an odd phrase anyway. I don’t think it has to mean anything. It’s mainly there to rhyme with “fire” I’m fairly certain. In fact I’d bet on it. A reader might take it to actually mean something figurative, like the potato famine, or a real person, like Oliver Cromwell, which is a possibility. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that somehow, the Irish people have suffered. Rapacious English powerful people stole their lands, oppressed their Catholic religion, found many novel ways to rob, murder and humiliate the Irish. When millions starved to death due to the potato blight, some English weren’t all that overly concerned about that. When they gained their independence from Great Britain, the crown kept that Northern segment because there were a few too many of the English/Protestant persuasion still there. Much woe came of that. There’s more.

But the Irish endure. “The Irish sky remained fitful & wide / with clouds bright as fire.” It just keeps steady and burning Irish in spite of the historical grand aristocratic English thefts, pillage and famine. Anyway, the poem straightens out in the last two stanzas, moving past the obscure references this poet seems to get a kick out of, and gets to its point. The Irish have suffered, but they endure. Irishly enduring. Green and singing yet.

For an American, that’s an odd thing. Italy, France, Germany—we understand them a bit better. They have deeper roots than us too, but have changed so much that they’re newer. Revolutions, conquerings, coalescences, these have changed them in profound ways. Their assessments of who they are are younger. Ireland, because it was poor and downtrodden, out of the center of the action and out of the limelight, retains an older character, B. claims. America, by comparison is rosy-cheeked and brand spankin’ new. How does one break into this bedrock of a culture even just to find a house? You don’t. You remember that the Irish are also friendly and welcoming. You let them do that for you.

I suspect that Adrienne is Adrienne Rich, who was a great poet in her own right, of course, and who said of B.: “The English (American) language. Who knows entirely what it is? Maybe two men in this decade, Bob Dylan, John Berryman.” Yes, that’s her. Ensconced in solid, long-suffering Ireland, B. looks back to America and to her for support, but knows something else. This place, Ireland, in its solidity and oldness, has bred literary lions: Yeats, Swift, Joyce. He is not of that caliber. And he gets one other thing. They were men. People. They lived actual lives, lives that were from the place they were from. They were attached to Ireland. More than that, they were of Ireland. That was the source of their greatness. They wrote from their attachment to the history, land, people, and thus the grounded, embodied language of Ireland was all theirs, their birthright. As an American, his is an ungrounded language. He certainly didn’t write the language of Oklahoma, not the language of Brooklyn or of Minnesota, but he wrote an insubstantial, flighty, violent polyglot American mélange of a language, the language of Bessie Smith and Shakespeare, of Elmer Fudd and William Butler Yeats, all scumbled together, fragmented, full of loud cracking collisions. His was not an earthy language, not the language of a grounded oldness, and it was not gentle. That’s the lack he’s giving form to in this poem. In humility—an inflected humility to be sure, since there’s always that undertone of contemptible ironic fawning when he does something like this—he bows down to the gravitas that rises in powerful but soft and confident Irish tones from the surroundings he finds himself merely perched upon lightly. He’ll never approach that gravitas as an American, and it’s sobering. Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty—they’re Americans who wrote in a place-borne American language. But that’s not B.’s mode. This poem is written not from anything like an ancient national solidity, but from nervousness, anxiety, fear, sorrow, and transatlantic radio waves. (More calmly than at other times, perhaps, but still…) Also, from wonder at finding himself in the midst of something utterly what he was not.

1 comment:

  1. I love parts of the language in this DS, similar to the previous. More fluid, more Dylan Thomas-like. Maybe, being in the midst of Ireland, he couldn't help himself.

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