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.
