Then there is Larkin, the coiner of compounds-which we may choose to call Hopkinsian or even perhaps, briefly, Shakespearean-who writes of "some lonely rain-ceased midsummer evening", of "light unanswerable and tall and wide", of "the million-petalled flower of being here", of "thin continuous dreaming" and "wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers".
And to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, there is the seaside-postcard Larkin, as true to the streak of vulgarity in the civilization as he is sensitive to its most delicious refinements: "Get stewed:/Books are a load of c.r.a.p." Or get this disfigurement of a poster of a bathing beauty: Huge t.i.ts and a fissured crotch Were scored well in, and the s.p.a.ce Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s.
And then, elsewhere, They f.u.c.k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
And again, in "Sad Steps": Groping back to bed after a p.i.s.s I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon"s cleanliness.
But despite the p.i.s.s, and the sn.i.g.g.e.r of the demotic in all of these places, that t.i.tle, "Sad Steps", reminds us that Larkin is solicitous for his Sidney also. He too returns to origins and brings something back, although he does not return to "roots". He puts inverted commas round his "roots", in fact. His childhood, he says, was a forgotten boredom. He sees England from train windows, fleeting past and away. He is urban modern man, the insular Englishman, responding to the tones of his own clan, ill at ease when out of his environment. He is a poet, indeed, of composed and tempered English nationalism, and his voice is the not untrue, not unkind voice of post-war England, where the cloth cap and the royal crown have both lost some of their potent symbolism, and the categorical, socially defining functions of the working-cla.s.s accent and the aristocratic drawl have almost been eroded. Larkin"s tones are mannerly but not exquisite, well-bred but not mealy-mouthed. If his England and his English are not as deep as Hughes"s or as solemn as Hill"s, they are nevertheless dearly beloved, and during his sojourn in Belfast in the late fifties, he gave thanks, by implication, for the nurture that he receives by living among his own. The speech, the customs, the inst.i.tutions of England are, in the words of another English poet, domiciled in Ireland, "wife to his creating thought". That was Hopkins in Dublin in the 1880s, sensing that his individual talent was being divorced from his tradition. Here is Larkin remembering the domicile in Belfast in the 1950s: Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognised, we were in touch.
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker"s cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable.
Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Larkin"s England of the mind is in many ways continuous with the England of Rupert Brooke"s "Grantchester" and Edward Thomas"s "Adlestrop", an England of customs and inst.i.tutions, industrial and domestic, but also an England whose pastoral hinterland is threatened by the very success of those inst.i.tutions. Houses and roads and factories mean that a certain England is "Going, Going": It seems, just now, To be happening so very fast; Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow That it isn"t going to last, That before I snuff it, the whole Boiling will be bricked in Except for the tourist parts- First slum of Europe: a role It won"t be so hard to win, With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There"ll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres.
I think that sense of an ending has driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins, has made them look in, rather than up, to England. The loss of imperial power, the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has led to a new sense of the shires, a new valuing of the native English experience. Donald Davie, for example, has published a book of poems, with that very t.i.tle, The Shires, which attempts to annex to his imagination by personal memory or historical meditation or literary connections, each shire of England. It is a book at once intimate and exclusive, a topography of love and impatience, and it is yet another symptom that English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England. I have simply presumed to share in that exploration through the medium which England has, for better or worse, impressed upon us all, the English language itself.
The Beckman Lecture, given at the University of California, Berkeley, May 1976
III.
In the Country of Convention.
English Pastoral Verse1.
"Pastoral" is a term that has been extended by usage until its original meaning has been largely eroded. For example, I have occasionally talked of the countryside where we live in Wicklow as being pastoral rather than rural, trying to impose notions of a beautified landscape on the word, in order to keep "rural" for the unselfconscious face of raggle-taggle farmland. And we have been hearing about Hardy and Hemingway as writers of pastoral novels, which seems a satisfactory categorization. Originally, of course, the word means "of or pertaining to shepherds or their occupation" and hence "a poem, play, etc, in which the life of shepherds is portrayed, often in conventional manner: also extended to works dealing with country life generally."
The editors of The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse have stayed within the limits set by the dictionary, and have confined themselves, in their choice of verse from the Romantic period and later, to those "works dealing with country life" which refract the pastoral convention as it manifests itself in the English poetic tradition from the late sixteenth until the eighteenth century. Consequently, there is a relatively small showing of nineteenth-century work, and only three poems by writers who can be considered modern: one each by Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. The bulk of the work comes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the editors end their introduction with a sentence that drops like a portcullis: The Pastoral vision might still have life elsewhere-in the Third World, or in North America perhaps-where there are still occasional frontiers to confront the regulating effect of urban development; but now and in England, the Pastoral, occasional twitches notwithstanding, is a lifeless form, of service only to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages, "modernized to a high standard".
The anthology, then, could be subt.i.tled "the rise and fall of the pastoral convention in England". It is a packed and well-groomed book, not so much a region to wander in as an estate to be guided through, and John Barrell and John Bull are always intent on being a little ahead of us, to make sure that we see the ground from their point of view. They divide the book into seven sections, each with its separate introduction, which means that we are given a brief history of the form in seven short chapters, dealing consecutively with "The Elizabethan Pastoral", "The Pastoral Drama", "The Seventeenth-Century Pastoral", "Augustan Pastoral", "Whigs and Post-Augustans", "Some Versions of Anti-Pastoral", and "Romantics and Victorians".
Through all this, the editors" approach is consistent to the point of being, in the end, constricting. They insist that the pastoral vision is, at base, a false vision, positing a simplistic, unhistorical relationship between the ruling landowning cla.s.s-the poet"s patrons and often the poet himself-and the workers of the land; as such its function is to mystify and to obscure the harshness of actual social and economic organization.
This is the approach elaborated by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City and to a certain extent this book is a companion volume to Mr. Williams"s, incorporating most of the texts he refers to and underlining or extending his discussion of them. Now this sociological filleting of the convention is a bracing corrective to an over-literary savouring of it as a matter of cla.s.sical imitation and allusion, but it nevertheless entails a certain attenuation of response, so that consideration of the selected poems as made things, as self-delighting buds on the old bough of a tradition, is much curtailed. The Marxist broom sweeps the poetic enterprise clean of those somewhat hedonistic impulses towards the satisfactions of aural and formal play out of which poems arise, whether they aspire to delineate or to obfuscate "things as they are".
In spite of the a.s.sent which their thesis earns, and grat.i.tude for the abundance of material with which it is ill.u.s.trated, the value of the book seems to me to be lessened by the editors" decision not to print translations of Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, Mantuan, Marot-those informing, influencing voices that were "modified in the guts of the living". While there was indeed mystification (a word I am reluctant to regard as altogether pejorative in poetry) of economic and social realities in Renaissance and eighteenth-century pastoral, there was surely also the purely literary ambition to provide a poetry in English that would adorn and cla.s.sicize the native literature. Spenser, Milton, Pope and Thomson were as automatically conscious of the cla.s.sical penumbra behind their own efforts as most of today"s students are unconscious of it, and since this book is likely to attain textbook status it is a pity that the ancient hinterland, the perspectives backward, are withheld.
We begin, therefore, in the middle of things English, with Barnabe Googe, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh and Drayton. It is impossible to miss the note both of exhilaration and consolidation in this work as English poetry vaults into the saddle of the Mediterranean Pegasus and harnesses him to Cuddys and Hobbinols and heighos and roundelays. It is hard, for example, to separate the tang of folksong from the whiff of the cla.s.sics in "Come live with me and be my love". The editors take cognizance of this conventional vision of the period as a takeover move on humanism by the vernacular with a nice discussion of Spenser"s "attempt to find an English Doric" in The Shepheardes Calendar, two sections of which are included. Here they note the way the language at one time, in its homely guise, points to an image of recognizable rural reality, and at another, in its "higher" modes, tends towards masquerade. Such disjunctions are symptomatic of the conflict explored by the anthology as a whole, between pastoral as realistic observation and pastoral as artificial mode.
As the editors point out in the beginning, a similar conflict presents itself in the Eden myth which, together with the cla.s.sical dream of the Golden Age, lies behind most versions of pastoral. Eden was a garden, an image of harmony between man and nature; it was a place where the owners of the land were the workers of the land, for whom the very land itself worked and produced of its own accord. Yet while the Genesis story gives shape to this persistent dream of paradise (and, by transference, utopia), it also acknowledges the world outside the garden as a place of thorns which man enters in sorrow, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Hence the idealized landscape with contented figures, the garden, the harmonious estate, all the recurring features of the convention, are sanctioned by the race"s nostalgia; yet they misrepresent the quotidian actualities of the world man inhabits outside Eden, and in the end beget a form of anti-pastoral in which sweat and pain and deprivation are acknowledged.
Nostalgic dream versus contemporary reality, propertied interests versus the labourer"s lot-variations on these themes occur all through the book. Spenser, for example, finally opts for the enamelled world, the dream of an aristocratic English Arcadia, which finds expression in his idealization of Sir Philip Sidney who becomes, in Astrophel, "a gentle shepherd borne in Arcady", and who is represented in Book VI of The Faerie Queene first as the chivalrous Sir Calidore and then as Sir Calidore turned shepherd: Which Calidore perceiving, thought it best To chaunge the manner of his loftie looke; And doffing his bright armes himselfe addrest In shepheards weed; and in his hand he tooke Instead of steele-head speare, a shepheards hooke.
But the editors, in the introductory pa.s.sage to these Elizabethan poems, have already done some enamel-stripping: We can see fairly clearly here the Golden Age being relocated in the myth of the recent feudal past.... the first act of the masquerade is followed by a second, as the courtier disguises himself next as a shepherd. The world thus created-in The Faerie Queene and in the poems from the Arcadia-has far more to do with the dream of an old social order than with that of a prehistoric Golden Age.
This gilding of the age just past is a persistent feature of the poems in the anthology-one thinks immediately of The Deserted Village-and it is a strategy by which the disagreeable encroachments of the present are evaded and disagreeable facts in the past elided. When, early in the seventeenth century, Jonson celebrates Penshurst, the house which had been the home of Sir Philip Sidney and so, in a sense, the birthplace of English pastoral, he envisages it as the microcosm of patronage and paternalism. The estate, moreover, is Edenic in its apparently automatic productiveness and harmonious social relationships. But Jonson also acknowledges it as exceptional and, by implicitly indicting the bourgeois individualism of the times, condones the feudal structures of the past and mystifies the economic organization of the present: The blushing apricot, and wooly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
And though thy walls be of the countrey stone, They are rear"d with no mans ruine, no mans grone, There"s none, that dwell about them, wish them downe; But all come in, the farmer and the clowne.
Jonson"s poem is echoed bitterly by the last poem in the anthology, Yeats"s "Ancestral Houses", but it also points the way to a more equable and bourgeois mode, where the Virgilian shepherd disappears to have his place taken by the Horatian farmer. The convention of high artificiality at once expires and is apotheosized in the seventeenth century in "Lycidas", while in Marvell"s "The Garden", the new poetry of retreat mutates naturally out of the old idealized landscape: The Garden is a world within the world and not a separation from it; it is a state of individual harmony that has no geographical placement, and is not to be achieved by the labour of men as conventionally understood. The traditional oppositions of pastoral are reconciled in Marvell"s "happy Garden-state", and the Golden Age is relocated in the world of puritan individualism.
While the pastoral idiom and nomenclature rea.s.serted themselves to some cynical purpose after the Restoration, it was the neo-cla.s.sicism of the eighteenth century that gave the more conventional expressions of the form a new lease of life and in the end inevitably bred the anti-pastoral. The debate, as Pope expressed it in his "Discourse on Pastoral Poetry", about whether "we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then (in the Golden Age) to have been" was actively renewed. Joseph Addison commended the naturalism of Ambrose Philips who had "given a new life, and a more natural beauty to this way of writing by subst.i.tuting in the place of these antiquated fables, the superst.i.tious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country", although Philips"s Colinets and Cuddys, in their intonation, manner and matter, are still obviously the invention of an urban literary man. There is a more robust and realistic grip on country matters in John Gay"s eclogue on "The Birth of the Squire" which ends with a vision of his death: Methinks I see him in his hall appear, Where the long table floats in clammy beer, "Midst mugs and gla.s.ses shatter"d o"er the floor, Dead-drunk his servile crew supinely snore; Triumphant, o"er the prostrate brutes he stands, The mighty b.u.mper trembles in his hands; Boldly he drinks, and like his glorious Sires, In copious gulps of potent ale expires.
By 1720, Astrophel was turning in his grave. But some of the most enjoyable, if not exactly deft writing in this Augustan section comes in the attempts at a native georgic, such as John Philips"s "Cyder", more diction than drink: Now prepare Materials for thy Mill, a study Post Cylindric, to support the Grinder"s Weight Excessive, and a flexile Sallow" entrench"d.
Rounding, capacious of the juicy Hord.
Nor must thou not be mindful of thy Press Long e"er the Vintage; but with timely Care Shave the Goat"s s.h.a.ggy Beard, least thou too late, In vain should"st seek a Strainer, to dispart, The husky, terrene Dregs, from purer Must.
Two-and-a-half centuries later, this is as unintentionally funny as the squibs by Swift and Richard Jago designed to ridicule a too naive urban version of the country.
Thomson"s "The Seasons", of course, is central to any consideration of English pastoral verse. It is not a nostalgic poem, because Thomson"s Golden Age is contemporary England as after-image of Augustan Rome, a Golden Age characterized not by the absence of labour but by its successful organization. "The owners of the land that Thomson describes are content to live by the sweat of someone else"s brow, if not their own." But Thomson maintains a crucial synthesis of two att.i.tudes to nature which in the course of the century tend to separate into divergent forms of expression. There is, on the one hand, his sublime celebration of nature"s untamed prodigality in the tropics, where paradisal abundance and absence of human cultivation const.i.tute a positive value; on the other hand, there is his commendation of progressive agricultural England, where it is the processes and rewards of labour and the subdued and humanized face of nature that generate the fervent rhetoric. From the first strain of sensibility comes the poetry of the solitary in the unspoiled landscape, a contemplative romantic kind, very different from the Horatian "happy the man" school: it is represented later in the anthology by extracts from Wordsworth"s "The Excursion", Beattie"s "The Minstrel", Sh.e.l.ley"s "Epipsychidion", and others. From the second there continued the English georgic-Dyer"s "Fleece", Grainger"s "Sugar-Cane" and Christopher Smart"s "Hop Garden", the latter containing such rousing advice to gentlemen-farmers as this specification for a foreman: One thing remains unsung, a man of faith And long experience, in whose thund"ring voice Lives hoa.r.s.e authority, potent to quell The frequent frays of the tumultuous crew.
He shall preside o"er all thy hopland store, Severe dictator!
Still, Stephen Duck"s reaction to just such a prop of the economy makes refreshing reading: He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day; He swears we"ve idled half our Time away; "Why look ye, Rogues, d"ye think that this will do?
"Your Neighbours thrash as much again as you."
Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools, To drown the hated Names, of Rogues and Fools.
But wanting these, we just like School-boys look, When angry Masters view the blotted Book: They cry, "their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;"
We, "the Corn threshes bad, "twas cut too green".
With Duck, Crabbe and Clare there emerges the voice that the editors have been waiting to hear, a voice protesting on behalf of the agricultural labourer, who no longer appears as jocund swain or abstract Industry but as a hard-driven human being. It is a voice that has some trouble with its accent-Duck"s natural country vigour is soon smoothed out and co-opted by the conventional diction of the period-and it was the unique achievement of John Clare to make vocal the regional and particular, to achieve a buoyant and authentic lyric utterance at the meeting-point between social realism and conventional romanticism. His "Lament of Swordy Well", printed here, must be one of the best poems of its century.
This anthology is at once an introduction to pastoral and a revisionary reading of it, and I have given little idea of the way it provides a context for the more celebrated examples of the kind. It is a book definitely worth doing and worth having. A sense of the old validity of the pastoral and of its diminution of force in the nineteenth century emerges until one almost agrees with the editors" brisk dismissal of its further possibilities.
Yet I wonder if the story ends as quickly as all that. Obviously, we are unlikely to find new poems about shepherds that will engage us as fully as "Lycidas", but surely the potent dreaming of a Golden Age or the counter-cultural celebration of simpler life-styles or the nostalgic projection of the garden on childhood are still occasionally continuous with the tradition as it is presented here. If Hopkins"s "Harry Ploughman" gets in, what about Edward Thomas"s "Lob" or Edwin Muir"s "The Horses" or Hugh MacDiarmid"s "Island Funeral"? I can see a case against MacNeice"s eclogues, yet they do represent the form as an enabling resource; but is Housman not a definite candidate for inclusion, if only as arch-mystifier? Is the work of David Jones, in pieces like "The Sleeping Lord", or "The Tutelar of the Place", not a version of pastoral, based on a visionary nostalgia for an early British Golden Age? It is true that Irish writing was outside the field of reference, but in this area such seminal texts as Synge"s Aran Islands (prose, granted) and Patrick Kavanagh"s The Great Hunger, pastoral and anti-pastoral respectively, are not to be regarded just as "occasional twitches". And more recently we have had John Montague"s The Rough Field. Or are these latter works held at bay in the term "frontier pastoral"?
The Times Literary Supplement, 1975
The G.o.d in the Tree
Early Irish Nature Poetry Early Irish nature poems have been praised and translated often. Their unique cleanliness of line has been commented on. The tang and clarity of a pristine world full of woods and water and birdsong seems to be present in the words. Little jabs of delight in the elemental are communicated by them in a note that is hard to describe. Perhaps Wordsworth"s phrase "surprised by joy" comes near to catching the way some of them combine suddenness and richness-certainly it would do as a t.i.tle for these eight lines, twenty-two syllables in all, which have etched themselves in the memory of generations, and in English usually go under the t.i.tle "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough".
The small bird let a chirp from its beak: I heard woodnotes, whin- gold, sudden.
The Lagan blackbird!
In its precision and suggestiveness, this art has been compared with the art of the j.a.panese haiku. Bash"s frog plopping into its pool in seventeeth-century j.a.pan makes no more durable or exact music than Belfast"s blackbird clearing its throat over the lough almost a thousand years earlier.
Equally memorable, compact and concrete are the lines beginning scel lem duib, lines that have all the brightness and hardness of a raindrop winking on a thorn. The poem shows us how exactly Flann O"Brien characterized early Irish verse-craft when he spoke about its "steel-pen exactness", and this is what he was intent on catching in his version, where the authentic chill of winter and the bittersweet weather of a northern autumn pierce into the marrow of the quatrains: Here"s a song- stags give tongue winter snows summer goes High cold blow sun is low brief his day seas give spray Fern clumps redden shapes are hidden wildgeese raise wonted cries.
Cold now girds wings of birds icy time- that"s my rhyme.
I can think of only a few poets in English whose words give us the sharp tooth of winter anywhere as incisively as that: the medieval poet of Gawain and the Green Knight managed it beautifully, and so did Shakespeare, and Thomas Hardy. That line in King Lear-"still through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind"-has the frisson of the bare and shivering flesh about it, but a touch like that is unusual in English verse. It almost seems that since the Norman Conquest, the temperature of the English language has been subtly raised by a warm front coming up from the Mediterranean. But the Irish language did not undergo the same Romance influences and indeed early Irish nature poetry registers certain sensations and makes a springwater music out of certain feelings in a way unmatched in any other European language. Kuno Meyer, the pioneering scholar and translator of Celtic languages, alluded to this distinctive feature when he wrote: "These poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the world. To seek out and watch and love Nature, in its tiniest phenomena as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as the Celt." And Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson expanded upon that perception in his delightful anthology A Celtic Miscellany: Comparing these poems with the medieval European lyric is like comparing the emotions of an imaginative adolescent who has just grown to realize the beauty of nature, with those of an old man who has been familiar with it for a lifetime and no longer is able to think of it except in literary terms ... The truth is that in its earlier period Celtic literature did not belong at all to the common culture of the rest of Europe; nor did it ever become more than partly influenced by it.
On the margin of a ninth-century ma.n.u.script, from the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, we get another glimpse of nature through the rinsed eyes of Celtic Christianity: A wall of forest looms above and sweetly the blackbird sings; all the birds make melody over me and my books and things.
There sings to me the cuckoo from bush-citadels in grey hood.
G.o.d"s doom! May the Lord protect me writing well, under the great wood.
This poem has been called "The Scribe in the Woods" and in it we can see the imagination taking its colouring from two very different elements. On the one hand, there is the pagus, the pagan wilderness, green, full-throated, unrestrained; on the other hand there is the lined book, the Christian disciplina, the sense of a spiritual principle and a religious calling that transcends the almost carnal lushness of nature itself. The writer is as much hermit as scribe, and it is within this anchorite tradition of the early Irish church that early Irish nature poetry develops. Moreover, P. H. Henry in his learned and thrilling study of The Early English and Celtic Lyric links this praise poetry with another kind of poem which is its corollary and opposite, a kind we might characterize as penitential poetry. Both spring from a way of life at once simple and ascetic, the tensions of asceticism finding voice in the penitential verse, and the cheerier nature lyrics springing from the solitary"s direct experience of the changing seasons.
These two strains are often dramatized vividly in the later Fenian poetry when St. Patrick, the newly arrived missionary who comes along to disrupt the old heroic order, argues with Oisin, the unregenerate natural man. Patrick praises the cloister with its music of ma.s.sbell and plainsong, Oisin catalogues the more full-blooded and noisier joys of the hunt or the battle. In Irish, a whole system of such poems had been elaborated by the thirteenth century, and continued to develop in subsequent centuries, when a convention of celebrating specific places also emerged. This love of place and lamentation against exile from a cherished territory is another typical strain in the Celtic sensibility, and one poem will here have to represent the whole extensive genre. I choose Oisin"s praise of Ben Bulben, translated by K. H. Jackson from a fifteenth or sixteenth-century original, partly because it is an early appearance in literature of the mountain which W. B. Yeats was to impose upon the imagination of the modern world by his own famous celebration of its dominant presence in the Sligo landscape. The "son of Calpurnius" is, of course, St. Patrick: Benn Boilbin that is sad to-day, peak that was shapely and best of form, at that time, son of Calpurnius, it was lovely to be upon its crest.
Many were the dogs and the ghillies, the cry of the bugle and the hound, and the mighty heroes that were upon your rampart, O high peak of the contests.
It was haunted by cranes in the night and heath-fowl on its moors, with the tuning of small birds it was delightful to be listening to them.
The cry of the hounds in its glens, the wonderful echo, and each of the Fiana with lovely dogs on the leash.
Many in the woods were the gleaners from the fair women of the Fiana, its berries of sweet taste, raspberries and blackberries.
Mellow purple blaeberries, tender cress and cuckoo-flower; and the curly-haired fair-headed maidens, sweet was the sound of their singing....
We were on this hill seven companies of the Fiana; to-night my friends are few, and is not my tale pitiful to you.
Scholars might cla.s.sify this as an elegiac poem as much as a poem of place and it does indeed have a backward look which gives it a more modern tone, a more alienated stance; but in the first flush of the hermit poetry six or seven centuries before this poem was written, it is not to the tears of things but the joy, the lifting eye and heart, that we respond. We are nearer the first world in that first poetry, nearer to the innocent eye and tongue of Adam as he named the creatures. These next stanzas, for example, come from a poem put into the mouth of a seventh-century anchorite from Connacht called Marbhan: even this literal version conveys the exhilaration of the feeling.
An excellent spring, a cup of n.o.ble water to drink; watercresses sprout, yew berries, ivy bushes as big as a man.
Tame swine lie down around it, goats, boars, wild swine, grazing deer, a badger"s brood ...
A bush of rowan, black sloes of the dark blackthorn; plenty of food, acorns, spare berries, pennywort, milk.
A clutch of eggs, honey, produce of wild onions, G.o.d has sent it; sweet apples, red whortleberries, crowberries ...
A heavy bowlful, goodly hazel nuts, early young corn, brown acorns, manes of briars, fine sweet tangle ...
Though you delight in your own enjoyments, greater than all wealth, for my part I am grateful for what is given me from my dear Christ.
And so it goes on, the hermit"s rhapsody, full of the primeval energies of the druid"s grove. And that word "druid", of course, calls up a world older and darker and greener than the world of early Christian Ireland, although some authorities would have it that the role of the file, the official poet in historic times, was continuous with the role of the druid in archaic times. I like that possibility a lot because the root of the word "druid" is related to doire, the oak grove, and through that the poet is connected with the mysteries of the grove, and the poetic imagination is linked with the barbaric life of the wood, with Oisin rather than with Patrick.
And this is where I turn to my t.i.tle, the G.o.d in the tree. Poetry of any power is always deeper than its declared meaning. The secret between the words, the binding element, is often a psychic force that is elusive, archaic and only half-apprehended by maker and audience. For example, in the context of monasticism, the G.o.d of my t.i.tle would be the Christian deity, the giver of life, sustainer of nature, creator Father and redeemer Son. But there was another G.o.d in the tree, impalpable perhaps but still indigenous, less doctrinally defined than the G.o.d of the monasteries but more intuitively apprehended. The powers of the Celtic otherworld hovered there. Ian Finlay, in his Introduction to Celtic Art, has noted that it was not until the Romans dominated Gaul and reduced it to a province that the Gaulish or Celtic G.o.ds were reduced to the likenesses of living men and women; before that, the deities remained shrouded in the living matrices of stones and trees, immanent in the natural world. Indeed, when we think of all the taboos and awe surrounding the fairy thorn in the Irish countryside until very recently, and of the pilgrimages which still go on in places to the ancient holy wells, there is no problem about acknowledging the reality of Finlay"s statements. So I want to suggest that this early poetry is sustained by a deep unconscious affiliation to the old mysteries of the grove, even while ardently proclaiming its fidelity to the new religion. After all, there is no reason why literature should not bear these traces as well as the architecture: the old religion kept budding out on the roofs of cathedrals all over Europe, in the shape of those roof-bosses which art historians call "green men" or "foliate heads", human faces growing out of and into leaves and acorns and branches.
And those green men remind me of another foliate head, another wood-lover and tree-hugger, a picker of herbs and drinker from wells: I am thinking, of course, of Mad Sweeney, who is the hero of a sequence of poems that bears his name, and who was at once the enemy and the captive of the monastic tradition. In the story, Sweeney is a petty king who is cursed by St. Ronan to be turned into a bird and live a life of expiation exposed to the hardships and delights of the seasons until, at the end, he is retrieved for the church by St. Moling who records his history and his poems. One of these poems is clearly very old, continuous with archaic lore, but rendered literary and dainty by long familiarity. This is Sweeney"s praise of the trees themselves, another paean to nature"s abundance, another thanksgiving, another testimony to the nimbus of the woods in the Celtic imagination.
The bushy leafy oaktree is highest in the wood, the forking shooting hazel has nests of hazel-nut.
The alder is my darling, all thornless in the gap, some milk of human kindness coursing in its sap.
The blackthorn is a jaggy creel stippled with dark sloes, green watercress is thatch on wells where the drinking blackbird goes.
Sweetest of the leafy stalks, the vetches strew the pathway, the oyster-gra.s.s is my delight and the wild strawberry.
Ever-generous apple-trees rain big showers when shaken; scarlet berries clot like blood on mountain rowan.
Briars curl in sideways, arch a stickle back, draw blood, and curl up innocent to sneak the next attack.
The yew tree in each churchyard wraps night in its dark hood.
Ivy is a shadowy genius of the wood.
Holly rears its windbreak, a door in winter"s face; life-blood on a spear-shaft darkens the grain of ash.
Birch tree, smooth and blessed, delicious to the breeze, high twigs plait and crown it the queen of trees.
The aspen pales and whispers, hesitates: a thousand frightened scuts race in its leaves.
But what disturbs me more than anything is an oak rod, always testing its thong.
That is only one of Sweeney"s innumerable outbursts where his imagination is beautifully entangled with the vegetation and the weathers and animals of the countryside, and it will have to stand for scores of similar poems from the sixth to the sixteenth century, all of them attesting to the G.o.d in the tree as a source of poetic inspiration.
I have not given an inclusive catalogue of the poems. Anybody interested will find much help and pleasure in the works of Robin Flower, Kuno Meyer, K. H. Jackson, Gerard Murphy, Frank O"Connor and David Greene, James Carney; in anthologies of Irish verse by John Montague and Brendan Kennelly; and in surveys of the Celtic world by writers such as Nora Chadwick, Myles Dillon and Alwyn Rhys. I have confined myself to poems that have had an enhancing effect on my own imagination and have simply tried to account for the peculiar nature of that effect. And I want to end with a moment which, I feel, is relevant to all that I have been considering, a moment that was a kind of small epiphany. This was eleven years ago, at Gallarus Oratory, on the Dingle Peninsula, in Co. Kerry, an early Christian, dry-stone oratory, about the size of a large turf-stack. Inside, in the dark of the stone, it feels as if you are sustaining a great pressure, bowing under like the generations of monks who must have bowed down in meditation and reparation on that floor. I felt the weight of Christianity in all its rebuking aspects, its calls to self-denial and self-abnegation, its humbling of the proud flesh and insolent spirit. But coming out of the cold heart of the stone, into the sunlight and the dazzle of gra.s.s and sea, I felt a lift in my heart, a surge towards happiness that must have been experienced over and over again by those monks as they crossed that same threshold centuries ago. This surge towards praise, this sudden apprehension of the world as light, as illumination, this is what remains central to our first nature poetry and makes it a unique inheritance.
Radio Telefis Eireann, 1978