Trinity 2014 (Vol LXXVII, No. 6, pp 6-16)

W. H. Auden, Michael Longley, and
Poetry as Citizenship in Northern Ireland

Richard Rankin Russell

Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a city where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and peace,
And pent-up feelings their release....

W. H. Auden, “New Year Letter.”
Collected Poems, 242.

W. H. Auden’s desire, evinced above, to be instructed in “the civil art” to make a locally grounded community—his Just City, where peace and “pent-up feelings” might flourish—suggests how poetry might sonically imagine harmonious order. It might seem strange to begin an essay on the vexed topic of literature’s response to the recent violence of Northern Ireland by invoking the English poet Auden, who later became an American citizen, but Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” written after the death of the greatest poet in the twentieth century, perfectly captures the problems and possibilities for writers confronted with violence and expected (often unfairly) to make a contribution to its amelioration. In the crucial second stanza, Auden’s speaker states flatly, “Poetry makes nothing happen....” Too many critics and poets have taken that to be some sort of final statement in that poem, but the phrase is not even the end of the sentence. Immediately following the colon after the phrase in question, the sentence continues: “it survives / In the valley of its making . . . / flows on south / . . . / . . . it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth” (1991, 248). Auden takes special pains to convey poetry’s capacity for survival—beyond the death of Yeats, beyond suffering—and its essential orality. Further, Auden’s “elegy” largely neglects the tripartite structure that the genre of elegy, beginning with Milton’s “Lycidas” in 1637, has displayed: lament, praise, and consolation. Instead, Yeats’s passing is repeatedly imaged as underwhelming; he is not given an encomium but brought down to our level (“You were silly like us”); and the consolation offered takes the form of Yeats teaching us “to rejoice” and “how to praise” (248, 248, 249). Auden’s elegy, then, praises poetry, its survival, and its ability to maintain a space wherein we might chant songs out of our suffering: “Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress...” (249).

Singing songs about suffering in the midst of violence exemplifies the work of many of the best writers from Northern Ireland, who lived through horrible years of conflict in which fellow human beings visited the most personal and intimate pain upon each other. Many commentators date the beginning of that violence to the savage attack by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (a heavily Protestant police force) on mostly Catholic civil rights marchers in the city of Derry/Londonderry on October 5, 1968, but the roots of the animosity go back much further, to the early 1600s, when King James I “planted” a series of English and Scottish Protestants in the northeastern part of Ireland in order to break the Gaelic civilization there. These “planters” dislocated the local Catholics from their land and that part of Ireland became majority-Protestant. In 1920, Northern Ireland was set up, in which six of the counties in the northeastern part of Ireland stayed British; in 1921, the remaining twenty-six counties on the island became part of the new Irish state. From 1922 to 1972, the Northern Irish state was run by Protestants who often discriminated against Catholics in employment, housing, and education. The Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was founded in the late 1960s as a civil disobedience movement modeled on its American predecessor that had worked to attain civil rights for black Americans in the southern United States and elsewhere. But after the violence meted out to civil rights marchers in 1968 and afterward, conditions quickly deteriorated. The British Army was brought in to protect Catholics from violent Protestants (loyalists) who feared the civil rights marches would lead eventually to Northern Ireland’s incorporation into the Irish Free State. Their counterparts, known as Republicans, then resorted to defending Catholics, but some of these self-styled defenders became part of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and began attacking British Army soldiers and others. Bombings and murders became common, particularly in the poorer, working-class areas of the province’s capital, Belfast, but also in Derry/Londonderry and in the smaller cities and towns. The “Troubles” lasted for at least thirty years, and over 3,500 people were killed before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which set up a power-sharing executive between Catholic and Protestant leaders.

Writers such as the poet Michael Longley (1939–), the poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), the playwright Stewart Parker (1941–1988), the poet Derek Mahon (1941–), and the novelist and short-story writer Bernard MacLaverty (1942–) have each maintained in various subtle ways a space in their imaginative work for dwelling on the terrible violence in the province, yet each has also offered songs that might teach us to rejoice and praise not in spite of suffering but because of it. Each has suggested how even if poetry (or literature generally) literally makes nothing happen, it nonetheless connects us to each other by virtue of its survival, and in the process, may yet change entrenched perceptions and attitudes and melt frozen hatreds. But that wished-for change cannot be poetry’s aim; if so, it founders and collapses as a work of art, becoming too dependent on public opinion, the weather in the streets. Only through its own deep integrity to and for itself can the best art—in Northern Ireland or anywhere—have a chance of imagining change.

Auden modeled the best kind of poetic citizenship possible for such writers in his insistence that we recognize our uniqueness and evince our acceptance of responsibility to each other through reaching out in word and deed. Heaney recognized Auden’s privileging of citizenship when he linked the poet and his embrace of all that is civilized to Northern Ireland and the potentially ameliorative role of art there:

There is a story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening. “Tell us this,” he said, “are yez Unionists or are yez not?” At the centre of Auden’s work, an equally categorical question is implicit: “Tell us this, are yez civilized or are yez not?” For while it is true that his feelings quickened in the presence of the desolate and worn-out and primitive, the counter-truth holds also: the human achievements of art, manners, social intercourse, just government, are all that are worth living for. (1976, 21)

Elsewhere, Heaney has affirmed this contention about not only Auden’s privileging of upholding civilization as the basis for his poetry, but also for poetry in general’s necessity of doing this as well: He points out that the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky once remarked “something Auden-like in its simple clarity and conviction. Human beings, he said, are put on earth to create civilization. And if we accept that definition of our human raison d’être, then we will admit that in a century when inhumanity was never far to seek, the poets have been true to that purpose, and have indeed proved central to it” (1999, 7). If, for Auden, “The process of poetic composition is a work of civilizing. A barbaric horde of emotions which cannot rule themselves are transformed into a just, loving, and self-ruling polis,” then poetry models what the Just City might eventually become (2010, 65). At the same time, as Auden is quick to point out, “The degree of justice and self-rule possible in a poem is very much higher than in any historical political society. Every good poem is very nearly a Utopia” (65). Such is also the case for the carefully arranged verbal worlds of Michael Longley, as we will see: Longley can only control the rich possibilities inherent in the world of the poem and hold it up as a model of civilization that society will likely never fully follow, even though he persists in that hope.

The dangers of writing imaginative literature during a conflict such as the recent one in Northern Ireland are manifold; perhaps the most disturbing possibility has been the many breathlessly voyeuristic or angry novels, lyrics, dramas, or short stories that have been composed too close to the moment. Even a critic who has long counseled disinterest through art, Denis Donoghue, has sympathetically invoked Thomas Kinsella’s vociferous poem, “Butcher’s Dozen,” written almost immediately after the publication of the Widgery Report, a British tribunal that exonerated the British Army soldiers who killed thirteen unarmed Catholic civil rights protestors (a fourteenth later died from his wounds) during what became known as “Bloody Sunday” on January 30, 1972, and Brian Friel’s drama The Freedom of the City (1973), written soon after Bloody Sunday. Donoghue points out Kinsella’s and Friel’s “insistence upon unmediated rage,” and further observes, drawing on Auden’s memorable phrase from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “It is natural for a writer to resent, on such a violent occasion, the admonition that his art is bound to be indirect in its effect and slow to act upon its cause. That poetry makes nothing happen is normally a tolerable fact; but there are occasions on which a poet feels that he must respond to one act with another similar in character and force” (1986, 187; my emphasis). Well. The price paid is high for such anger; as even Donoghue admits, these works have a certain “crudity,” a contention that is borne out by Kinsella’s own remarks on the poem: “One changed one’s standards, chose the doggerel route, and charged.... The poem was finished, printed[,] and published within a week of the publication of the Widgery Report, and I believe it had the effect I wanted, ‘unhelpful’ though I am sure it was” (1979, 142). Moreover, there are some scenes of documentary immediacy in Friel’s play that make it seem too much in certain moments like reportage, although The Freedom of the City rises above such moments to imagine for his disparate Catholic protestors, trapped in the Derry Guildhall while surrounded by the waiting British Army, a temporary community of freedom, separate from the republican rhetoric that renders them instant martyrs and from the British imperialist rhetoric that figures them as terrorists.

Overly propagandistic art that asks no sacrifice from its audience and imagines a tidy return to peace after conflict can recoil against its artists and lead the outcast members of society to reject that fellowship. Auden has offered a very powerful objection to the type of art that pushes too hard, too fast for personal or societal change through the speech of Antonio in his 1944 work The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Antonio adamantly refuses to join Prospero’s created social order of peace and prosperity through his resumption of his dukedom. By purposely isolating himself “outside / Your circle,” he ensures that “the will to charm is still there”  (1991, 411). He believes strongly that Prospero will be led to rely upon his magical art that he renounces at the end of Shakespeare’s play in order to coerce him into behaving properly and strongly resists such a development. Thus, he concludes his speech by memorably chanting,

Your all is partial, Prospero;
            My will is all my own:
 Your need to love shall never know
 Me: I am I, Antonio,
             By choice myself alone. (412)

Anyone familiar with the shop-worn phrases of the conflict in Northern Ireland—such as Sinn Féin’s motto, “Ourselves alone”—will recognize in Antonio’s intransigence a simultaneous desire to be recognized even while maintaining a rhetorical and real distance from a polis they feel is irredeemably stained, in the case of Northern Ireland by British imperial policy stretching back hundreds of years. Auden’s Prospero, whose dukedom has been usurped by Antonio, makes matters worse when he maintains about his brother’s betrayal, “both of us know / That both were in the wrong, and neither need be sorry...” (407). By neglecting his statecraft in favor of the dark arts, Prospero certainly left a power vacuum that his brother filled; at the same time, he posits that they should not work through a process of forgiveness, a potentially fatal mistake for the harmonious future of his realm, as Auden’s memorable commentary suggests. How can literature address the notion of community on the page and more broadly? Can it create community? Can literature lead to conversations whereby such deep hurts such as those visited on each other by the citizens of Northern Ireland for several decades be aired or even healed? That is, how can literature fully be true to itself and imagine a commonweal where sectarianism is exposed and suffering addressed, where we might glimpse singing, praising, or rejoicing?

Michael Longley’s entire career offers some tentative answers to these questions. Born in a middle-class Protestant household (his parents were Church of Ireland) in south Belfast, Longley began early to see how disturbing were the divisions built into Northern Irish society. In his autobiography, Tuppenny Stung, he points out that:

Belfast’s more prosperous citizens have usually been careful to separate themselves from the ghettoes of the bellicose working classes. An odd exception is the Lisburn Road which runs south from the city centre. Intermittently for about three miles, workers’ tiny two-up-and-two-down houses squint across the road at the ­drawing-rooms of dentists, doctors, solicitors: on the right, as you drive towards Lisburn gardenless shadowy streets; on the left rhododendrons and rose bushes. Belfast laid bare, an exposed artery. (1994, 25)

Dwelling in a liminal space between the posher middle-class homes such as the one occupied by his family and those of his poorer Protestant neighbors accustomed him to class difference and sectarianism from an early age. His ­working-class Protestant friends from school, Herbie Smith and John McCluskey, “shared with me their mythology which was mostly concerned about Roman Catholics. Did I know why Taigs crossed themselves? What dark practices lurked behind confession and Mass? Didn’t the nuns kidnap little girls and imprison them behind the suspiciously high walls of the big convent at the top of the Ormeau Road?” (26). Worse, he was shown “pamphlets which purported to describe Catholic atrocities from the twenties and thirties. Every page carried blurred photographs of victims who, it was claimed, had been tortured and mutilated, their brains or hearts cut out, their genitals chopped off” (27). Despite being steeped early on in such suspicious and hateful attitudes, Longley has emerged as an ambassador of poetry, a man who has committed his life to overcoming such sectarianism as has long been practiced in Northern Ireland through portraying ordinary acts of kindness and charity in memorably wrought lines that have often been invoked in public by politicians and others who seek to articulate solutions to the deep-rooted problem of religious and cultural hatred in the province.

In his introduction to the stirring 1971 anthology, Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, a publication sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland after Longley had begun working there the previous year, he turns to Auden to address the vexed issue of art’s relationship to life. After surveying a series of literary works that warned about the possibility of Northern Ireland’s slide into civil war in the previous decades, Longley muses, “Warnings generally go unheeded. Art seldom changes things. Two wise lines from W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter provide at least an alibi: ‘Art is not Life, and cannot be / A midwife to Society’” (1971, 9). Such a statement agrees almost exactly with Auden’s statement from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” that “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but intriguingly, just as Auden’s line continues to express that poetry survives, Longley goes on to hold that the poet has another job besides witnessing, that of celebrating normal human life. To wit, he posits that “the artist has other duties to perform apart from his painful role as a Cassandra. He has a duty to celebrate life in all its aspects, to commemorate normal human activities. Art is itself a normal human activity. The more normal it appears in the eyes of the artist and his audience, the more potent a force it becomes” (9). In the midst of the Northern Irish Troubles, normality was in high demand, a desideratum of many. Glenn Patterson’s recent screenplay, Good Vibrations, about the Belfast punk-record shop owner and producer Terry Hooley indicates just how important it was for the arts to have an outlet in war-torn Belfast like his shop of the same name became. Within its confines, youths and teenagers and young adults could buy and sell records and dream of making it big. Because Good Vibrations established an oasis of normality in the midst of conflict, it became a potent force for human community where Catholic and Protestant youths who might never have met otherwise could gather.

The artist who attends to normality can make a difference, as Longley further believes: “the artist is in fact uniquely qualified to demonstrate how both our cultures can define themselves by a profound and patient scrutiny of each other: ‘“...all real unity commences / In consciousness of differences’” (1971, 9). Longley is again quoting Auden’s “New Year Letter.” These lines appear very late in that long narrative poem, after Auden’s demoralizing discussion of the pervasive and ineluctable power of evil in the world. The section under consideration even begins, “Our news is seldom good: the heart, / As ZOLA said, must always start / The day by swallowing its toad / Of failure and disgust” (1991, 241). And yet, if we fix our eyes steadily on each other and recognize our real differences, some unity might emerge, as Auden suggests and Longley later would, following Auden’s lead. Auden’s couplet that Longley cites is followed by his imprecation to us to practice something like agape love based on our uniqueness: “We need to love all since we are / Each a unique particular / That is no giant, god, or dwarf, / But one odd human isomorph...” (241). Celebrating normality and commemorating uniqueness in the human, animal, and plant worlds drive Longley’s considerable oeuvre, which appeared in his Collected Poems (2007), and which has now been enhanced by the considerable charms of his 2011 volume, A Hundred Doors. In what follows, I attend to particular poems from Collected Poems and A Hundred Doors that show Longley at the height of his poetic powers of citizenship, demonstrating how such poetry in all its fragility and commemorative force point toward the type of society—Auden’s Just City held together by agape love—that Northern Ireland might yet have a chance of becoming.

In July, 2012, I invited Longley to give a poetry reading at the Corrymeela Community when I was there with other American faculty for a Lilly Seminar on “Teaching Peace and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice in Northern Ireland.” I knew him from my time spent living in Belfast on a dissertation fellowship from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the spring of 2000, and I have written often on his poetry over the years in articles and in my book, Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (Notre Dame, 2010). Longley read carefully and quietly from some of his most famous poems and included a healthy sampling of the new ones from A Hundred Doors. Throughout his reading, his dignity and respectful tone echoed such values in his poetry. As he read in our location perched high atop the edge of the North Antrim coast, I was reminded of his principled insistence in an interview about his interest in civilization and ceremony and how we should actively protect fragility in all its forms:

the opposite of war is custom, customs, and civilization. Civilization is custom and manners and ceremony, the things that Yeats says in “A Prayer for My Daughter”.... I think we can judge a culture by how it deals with the vulnerable, those creatures and those people who are indeed less fortunate than we are, children and animals.... So I’m thinking of civilization as much more than the word that’s derived from the Latin, civis, meaning “citizen.” I think we should be citizens of the whole world, as well as citizens within our societies” (2004, 61).

The care with which Longley read his poetry that evening reflects the care he believes we should take of those less fortunate: animals, children, the environment.

That care is displayed throughout the pages of Collected Poems and A Hundred Doors in poems such as those set in his adopted townland of  Carrigskeewaun, a tiny community in the western part of County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. Carrigskeewaun epitomizes all of Longley’s concerns about fragility and interrelatedness and our obligation as citizens to know uniqueness and protect it. Poems about this townland not only exemplify Longley’s commitments toward preserving nature in all its variety, but by extension, his desire to conserve and promote human community in war-torn neighborhoods in Northern Ireland that still suffer from segregation in housing and education. In one of his recent Ireland Professor of Poetry lectures, “The West,” Longley argues, “In the Mayo poems I am not writing about a cosy community. Nor do I dwell among the calls of waterbirds and the psychedelic blaze of summer flowers to escape from Ulster’s political violence. I want light from Carrigskeewaun to irradiate the northern confusion” (2010, 15). Longley thus rejects Carrigskeewaun as an idyllic pastoral space, an untouched Eden, remote from the pressing concerns of the outer world. That place too is blemished, bruised, and violent and yet in it he finds reasons to delight and rejoice and wants to infuse the troubled North with its light. He recalls being surprised “to find that one third of my poems are set in south-west Mayo. This is thanks to David Cabot, the great Irish ornithologist, who allows me to stay in his remote cottage and open my mind to the endless intricacies of the landscape and the Atlantic weather” (7). Being receptive to such ecological profundity and complexity has enabled Longley to develop a nimbleness of mind and outlook that has stood him in good stead to write poems about the fraught situation in Northern Ireland from the perspective of his poetic ideal of citizenship first modeled to him by Auden.

Many of Longley’s Carrigskeewaun poems seem satisfied to iterate lovingly particular flora and fauna and thus to inscribe them in our minds; the procedure of using such catalogs has also helped him commemorate many victims of the Troubles. In one of his most famous poems, “The Ice-cream Man,” originally collected in Gorse Fires (1991), he recites the names of a series of wildflowers from the Burren area of western Ireland, a micro-climate composed of karst limestone with flowers typical of both alpine and subtropical regions as an intricate oral wreath to adorn the memory of the man who served in the ice-cream shop on the Lisburn Road in Belfast:

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butterscotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
 I 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. (1991, 192)

As he has remarked, “I mean that catalogue to go on forever, like a prayer. The murder of the ice-cream man violates all nature. The poem is also, partly, an elegy for the flowers themselves, which are under increasing threat” (2010, 16). Note how the particularity of the two lists—ice cream flavors and flowers—also lovingly, uniquely rejects the vague evil of “They” who “murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road.” The recitation of flavors and flowers cannot undo the murder, but it can reawaken us to wonder in the midst of senseless murder and further, lead us to want to preserve all that wonder around us that Longley found that day in the Burren. As I have argued elsewhere about this stunning poem, attending closely to its rhythms and its horizontal lists of flavors and flowers “creates a comforting, meandering litany of sorts that effectively elegizes the man in his rhythmic, unhurried recitation of ice cream flavors, although this comfort may well be fleeting...” (Russell 2010, 137). Because Longley believes that “Poetry’s origins are in ceremony. Poetry commemorates,” this poem enacts his theory of poetic citizenship grounded in naming and ritual (Longley 2003, 305).

On April 6, 2011, Longley extended the elegizing effect of “The Ice-cream Man” to Ronan Kerr, a Catholic member of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who had just been killed by breakaway members of the former Irish Republican Army opposed to the peace process in the province. The PSNI, formerly a redoubt of Protestantism, has slowly welcomed more Catholics to the force since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and Kerr’s murder was meant to frighten Catholics and members of the nationalist community from joining. On the same day Kerr was buried, Longley spoke at a book launch for Robert Thompson’s and John Faulkner’s A Natural History of Ulster. Obviously moved by Kerr’s murder, he remarked, “On the day of Ronan Kerr’s funeral I would like to read a poem of mine called ‘The Ice-cream Man’” (2011, “A Natural History...,” 26). After stating, “I mean that catalogue to go on forever, like a prayer,” he quickly added, “The banal thugs who murdered Ronan Kerr and the ice-cream man violate everything that the intellectual effort of this book represents” (27).

An insistence on the banality of evil is also a favorite theme of Auden, and this insistence itself stemmed from his Augustinian conviction that “evil is a deprivation of goodness, especially in the human soul” (Schuler 2013, 48). Stephen Schuler points out that such an Augustinian view “implies that all humans have the capacity to commit great evils, and that the eradication of evil is not as simple as redistributing the means of production or undergoing psychotherapy” (38). For instance, in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden opens by pointing out how the “Old Masters,” painters like Pieter Breughel the Elder, four of whose works inspired the poem, knew that suffering “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...” (1991, 179). And in “The Shield of Achilles,” written in 1952 after the atrocities of World War Two, Auden’s portrayal of evil’s banality is horrifying in its flatness and blankness: “A plain without a feature, bare and brown, / No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, / Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down” (596). In such a barren landscape, “A crowd of ordinary decent folk” watches “As three pale figures were led forth and bound / To three posts driven upright in the ground” (597; my emphasis). A contemporary recasting of the Crucifixion, this scene chillingly indicts “ordinary” members of society for not helping their fellow man; such scenes, preceded as they are by “An unintelligible multitude, / A million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign” also recall the Nazi stormtroopers who carried out the Holocaust. Worst of all in its banality, perhaps, is Auden’s image of “A ragged urchin” who takes on faith “That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,” because he’d “never heard / Of any worlds where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept” (598). The very ineluctability and repeated occurrences of such acts renders them especially sinister.

Just as Auden did, Longley sets normal acts of kindness and goodness over against banal acts of evil, perhaps most movingly in two of his best and most well-known poems, “Ceasefire” and “All of These People.” The stately sonnet “Ceasefire” moves along at a dawdling pace, instantiating order and ceremony to the meeting between Achilles and Priam in the midst of a stoppage in the Trojan War. Longley’s poem recreates an intimate world of male camaraderie across battle lines where “one could weep because another wept,” in contrast to Auden’s bleakscape of isolation in “The Shield of Achilles” where there is “No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood.” So Priam “curled up at his [Achilles’] feet and / Wept with him until their sadness filled the building” (Longley 2007, 225). Achilles, who has killed Hector, Priam’s son, takes the “corpse into his own hands” and “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” (225). Achilles’ respect for Hector’s body and his surviving elderly father contrast his martial prowess on the battlefield, but the poem suggests that such ritualistic acts are not only proper but required for civilized people. Most wrenchingly, the sonnet concludes with a couplet that imagines Priam’s actions earlier: “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son” (225). This poem, printed in The Irish Times during a period in 1994 when the Irish Republican Army was contemplating a ceasefire that they soon took up, suggests both how hardened warriors might come together through civilizing actions, and, ominously, that just as the Greeks and Trojans would fight on after the lull that followed Hector’s death, so too would republican and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. Indeed they did. But “Ceasefire” inserted itself into that lull and created a space for poetry—its survival, “A way of happening, a mouth.” Without insisting that poetry makes things happen, “Ceasefire” captures a tender yet horrible moment between two proud fighters convinced their cause is right, gently suggesting that articulating grief together and charitably prostrating oneself to one’s sworn enemy might be first steps toward creating a civilized community.

“All of These People” perhaps most fully captures Longley’s commitment to a poetry that upholds civilization in the best sense of the word:

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilization? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister,
And our ice-cream man whose continuing requiem
Is the twenty-one flavours children have by heart.
 Our cobbler mends shoes for everybody; our butcher
 Blends into his best sausages leeks, garlic, honey;
Our cornershop sells everything from bread to kindling.
Who can bring peace to people who are not civilized?
All of these people, dead or alive, are civilized. (253)

Each instance or incident in the poem features connection across potential divides: faith, generations, party. The bountiful, overflowing nature of such human gestures is signaled by the open arms of the Methodist minister, the ongoing recitation of the ice cream flavors, the welcoming cobbler, the butcher’s flavorful homemade sausages, the cornershop’s catering to everyone. One is reminded here of Auden’s interest in agape love, which stands over against the banality of evil in such poems as “Musée des Beaux Arts” and “The Shield of Achilles.” Auden eventually came to “recognize that real acts of charity are mundane, unremarkable, and anticlimactic” (Schuler 136). Similarly, the charitable, civilizing, ceremonial gestures of the citizens in Longley’s “All of These People” stand firmly against the dehumanizing murders by nameless thugs of lovely individuals in Northern Ireland that Longley revivifies and reincorporates into his memorable last line, a community of the living and the dead, civilized and civilizing by virtue of their openness and human decency.

More recently, in several poems from A Hundred Doors, Longley again returns to the western landscape of Carrigskeewaun that he explored in many past poems, including “The Ice-cream Man,” to confirm how we are bound together with animals and plants into a community of citizens anchored in an abundant, but imperiled environment. For instance, in “The Holly Bush,” a poem in memory of Dorothy Molloy, he recalls:

Frosty Carrigskeewaun. I am breaking ice
Along the salt marsh’s soggy margins
And scaring fieldfares out of the holly bush
And redwings, their consorts, chestnut-brown
Flashing one way, chestnut-red another,
Fragments of the January dawn-light
That Killary focuses on the islands
Before it clears the shoulder of Mweelrea. (2011, A Hundred Door, 33)

The poem itself quickly becomes “decorated” with the browns and reds and greens of the birds and holly bush in the dawn light by his paratactic lines. These birds also “radiate apricot from within,” another consolatory color for the poet who finds out about his friend’s death that same day and who finally muses upon her life and poetry as the sun begins to peep over the horizon: “Golden plovers—a hundred or more—turn / And give back dawn-light from their undersides. / The edge of the dune wears a fiery fringe” (33). The echoes from Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” with its bright morning springing and his “Windhover” propel this from a merely elegiac poem to one that meditates upon eternity through establishing local landmarks—Carrigskeewaun, Killary, the mountain Mweelrea—and the “citizens” of that landscape, the birds, the holly bush. The flutters of color in the morning light suggest an ordered world, yet also convey that the natural world is always capable of surprise. Furthermore and more important to understanding Longley’s poetry about the conflicts of World War One and the Troubles, the temporary beauties of this time and place are rendered all the more beautiful for their fleetingness. As he has remarked about this lovely but desolate terrain, “The bones of the landscape make me feel in my own bones how provisional dwelling and home are” (2010, 15).

At times, various landscapes interpenetrate in the poetry, as in “Volunteer” and “Into Battle.” The four-line “Volunteer” is narrated from the point of view of “The old gamekeeper,” who “could recall a young groundsman / Leaving Ballynahinch to cycle to Galway / And on to the Western Front, his red / Neckerchief like a necklace of poppies” (2011, A Hundred Door, 55). Thus, the Connemara region of County Galway in western Ireland is sutured onto the wounded landscapes of World War One, whose most memorable symbol was the bright red poppy that grew even in the mud of the trenches in that desolation. In the lovely two-line poem, “Into Battle,” which runs in its entirety, “The Hampshires march into battle with bare knees. / Full of shrapnel holes are the leaves on the trees,” the exposed knees of the Hampshire regiment are congruent with the bullet-riddled leaves (58).

The only poem directly about the sectarianism in Northern Ireland collected in A Hundred Doors is “The Poker,” dedicated to the province’s now-deceased Protestant playwright Sam Thompson, whose play Over the Bridge (1960) challenged Protestant bigotry toward Catholics, particularly in the all-Protestant Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast where tens of thousands of men worked building the Titanic and other ships in the twentieth century. Catholic men who tried to cross the bridge to the shipyard were hit with “Belfast confetti,” a mixture of iron bolts, nuts, and other debris; they were beaten and insulted. In this poem, Longley offers a poker to Thompson that his twin Peter made the “brass handle for” (43). Again resorting to a litany of names, Longley terms Thompson “Shipwright, playwright and trade unionist, / Old Decency’s philosopher, our own / Diogenes” and praises him for opening “a way over the bridge / For Jews and gypsies, all refugees, // Persons displaced by our bigoted / Hometown” (43). He imagines Thompson stepping out for a curtain call at a theater, and finally offers, “There’s a Brasso bottle in my toolkit. / Shall I polish my brother’s poker? / It’s precious, Sam. It belongs to you” (43). The durability of the poker along with its shiny brass handle combine into an image of lasting decorum for this dramatist, an exemplar of the type of citizen Northern Ireland should applaud. Longley’s body of work repeatedly and quietly insists that we see each other as the unique creations we were meant to be, reveling in each other’s differences, while conducting the hard work of healing cultural, political, and religious wounds. The civilizing power of his poetry leads us into ceremonial recognitions of each other and has ensured poetry’s survival, its “way of happening.” It also just may have helped create the rhetorical conditions for our own survival as a human community.

I wrote Longley after his reading to us at Corrymeela, thanking him for it, and he wrote me back on August 2, 2012, saying,

Dear Richard,

I thought the evening went well. I felt terribly tired at the end and was dreading the long drive home in the dark—which is why I withdrew without the usual embraces. Anyway, please consider yourself symbolically hugged. (“Email from Michael Longley,” August 2, 2012)

As usual, Longley manages to evoke his concern for others through such messages. I was touched by his words and realized how courageous it was for him to have driven up to Corrymeela as he battles gout to recite his poems to us in his soft Belfast accent. In his care for words and for creating community, Longley has shepherded both poetry and people through a dark time when it seemed like literature and life were no longer valued. In the process, he has shown how poetry can help create community through the ritual, charitable acts that we are all capable of.

Although Longley does not share Auden’s marked interest in the orthodox tenets of historical Christianity, he has remarked on his interest in writing religious poetry, noting,

I’m anti-clerical, full stop. And I’m also an atheist, or certainly an agnostic. The spiritual part of life has got to be do-it-yourself. However, I am interested in what it could mean to write religious poetry, particularly at the end of this godawful century.... [F]or me, poetry is my way of making sense of life and of the world, and of celebrating it. I like Horace’s phrase, “Priest of the Muses.” The poet must never forget that in other societies he’s the shaman and the witchdoctor whose rhythmic intonations of words stop an outbreak of measles or help to end the drought. There’s a magical dimension to poetry, which is why I hate to see it confined to an agenda. (1999, 10)

Longley’s poetry, like Auden’s before him, is religious in the best sense of the word, deriving from its Latin root “religare,” meaning “to bind fast or connect.” By connecting disparate individuals, animals, and even plants in a radical community of respect and appreciation, Michael Longley teaches us all that we carry each other into the future through our choice to act charitably as citizens of the world.

 

Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English at Baylor University and the author of Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (Notre Dame 2010).

 

Works Cited

Collected Poems. Edward Mendelson, ed. New York: Vintage, 1991.

W. H. Auden: Prose, Vol. IV, 1956–1962. Edward Mendelson, ed.: 63–66. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 [1948].

We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society: 182–94. New York: Knopf, 1986.

The Threepenny Review, Vol. 79 (Autumn 1999): 6–7.

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems. Hibernia (October 8, 1976): 21.

Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978: 135–59. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1986 [1979].

A Hundred Doors. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2011.

A Natural History of Ulster by Robert Thompson and John Foster. Ulster Museum, Belfast, April 6, 2011. Typescript.

Collected Poems. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2007.

Five Points, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2004): 56–71.

Colby Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 2003): 294–308.

Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books, Vol. 28 (March 1999): 9–10.

Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters. Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994.

Gorse Fires. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1991.

Causeway: The Arts in Ulster: 7–9. Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971.

Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010.

The Augustinian Theology of W. H. Auden. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013.