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Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence

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Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, Ireland English Language and Literature 1999 Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence Jonathan Hufstader University of Connecticut Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Hufstader, Jonathan, "Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence" (1999). Literature in English, Ireland. 6. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_ireland/6 IRISH LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND CULTURE Jonathan Allison, General Editor Advisory Board George Bornstein, University of Michigan Elizabeth Butler CuUingford, University of Texas James S. Donnelly Jr., University of "Wisconsin Marianne Elliott, University of Liverpool Roy Foster, Hertford College, Oxford David Lloyd, Scripps College Weldon Thornton, University of North Carolina Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence Jonathan Hufstader THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hufstader, Jonathan, 1939- Tongue of water, teeth of stones : Northern Irish poetry and social violence / Jonathan Hufstader. p. cm.—(Irish literature, history, and culture) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8131-2106-X (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—Northern Ireland—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—Northern Ireland— History—20th century. 3. English poetry—Irish authors— History and criticism. 4. Northern Ireland—In literature. 5. Social problems in literature. 6. Violence in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR8761.H84 1999 821'.914099416—dc21 99-13689 For Janis, Becky, and Susannah CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction 1 2 Seamus Heaney 21 3 Michael Longley 87 4 Derek Mahon 111 5 Paul Muldoon 139 6 Tom Paulin 189 7 Ciaran Carson 219 8 Medbh McGuckian 261 9 Conclusion 287 Notes 295 Bibliography 309 Index 319 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a large debt of thanks to Helen Vendler of Harvard University for helping me start this book, and to Jonathan Allison of the University of Kentucky for helping me to finish it. Lee Jacobus and J.D. O'Hara, my colleagues at the University of Connecticut, read parts of the manuscript and made helpful comments. Thanks to the "Wednesday group" of the University of Connecticut English Department for listening pa- tiently to early segments of the book and for offering unexpected and rewarding insights. Thanks to Robert Cardish, who introduced me to the writings of Heinz Kohut. Thanks to Ellen O'Brien, who helped me to learn about McGuckian, and to all my other fellow students of poetry and friends who have encouraged and assisted me. Joanna Juzwik McDonald brought her unerring eye and unfailing good judgment to the editorial process. Greatest thanks of all to the three to whom this book is dedicated; without them, these pages would still be blank. Citations from Gerald Dawe, The Rest is History (Dublin: The Abbey Press, 1998), are made with per- mission of the author. Citations from Seamus Heaney, "Death of a Natu- ralist," "The Tollund Man," "The Grauballe Man," "Strange Fruit," "Kinship," "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," "Casualty," "Station Island," "Clearance," "The Mud Vision," "Weighing In," "The Flight Path," x • Acknowledgments "Mycenae Lookout," "Tollund," and Crediting Po- etry: The Nobel Lecture (Copyright © 1995 by The Nobel Foundation) are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Aforementioned poems appear in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Copyright © 1990 by Seamus Heaney) and The Spirit Level (Copy- right © 1996 by Seamus Heaney). Citations from "Cauled," "Sweet William," and "The Discharged Soldier" are made with permission of Ulsterman Pub- lications and with the kind permission of the author. Citations from Stations are made with the kind per- mission of the author. Citations from Michael Longley, "Fleance," "Wounds," "The Linen Workers," "Edward Thomas's War Diary," "The War Poets," epigraph to An Ex- ploded View, "Argos," "Ceasefire," are made with the permission of the Wake Forest University Press and the author. "Argos" appears in Gorse Fires, "Ceasefire" appears in Ghost Orchid, and all the others appear in Poems, 1963-1983, published by Wake Forest Univer- sity Press. Citations from Michael Longley, Tupenny Stung, are made with permission of the author. Citations from Derek Mahon, "Ecclesiastes," "Afterlives," "The Snow Party," "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford," "Autobiographies," are from Derek Mahon, Selected Poems, (1991), by permission of Oxford University Press. Citations from "The Hunt by Night" and "Courtyards in Delft" from The Hunt by Night; from "An Bonnan Bui" and "Death in Bangor" from The Yellow Book, with the permission of Wake Forest University Press. Citations from Paul Muldoon, "October, 1950," "Cuba," "Something of a Departure," "Anseo," "Immram," "Why Brownlee Left" from Why Brownlee Left; "Clonfeacle," "Lunch with Pancho Villa," "The Mixed Marriage" are taken from Mules and Other Poems; "A Trifle," "Quoof," "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," "The Frog" from Quoof; "October, 1950," "Cuba," "Something of a Acknowledgments • xi Departure," "Anseo," "Immram," "Why Brownlee Left" from Why Brownlee Left; "Meeting the Brit- ish," "Sushi," "The Soap-Pig," "7, Middagh Street" from Meeting the British, with permission of Wake Forest University Press. Citations from The Prince of the Quotidian are with permission of Wake Forest University Press. Citations from Paul Muldoon, "The Birth," "Sonogram" (The Annals of Chile, Copyright © 1994 by Paul Muldoon) are reprinted by permis- sion of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Citations from Tom Paulin, "The Caravans on Luneburg Heath," "In the Lost Province," "Before History," "The Strange Museum," "The Book of Ju- niper," "Presbyterian Study," "Desertmartin," "Father of History," "Politik," "Of Difference Does it Make," "Now for the Orange Card," "Fivemiletown," "L," are from Tom Paulin, Selected Poems 1972-1990, and are made with permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. Citations from C.K. Williams, "My Mother's Lips" (Selected Poems, Copyright © 1994 by C.K. Williams), are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, Inc. Citations from Ciaran Carson, "Belfast Confetti," "Slate Street School," from The Irish for No; from "Queen's Gambit," "Last Orders," "Jawbox," "Ques- tion Time" from Belfast Confetti; from "Two to Tango," "The Ballad of HMS Belfast," "Ovid: Meta- morphoses, XIII, 576-619" from First Language; from "Zulu" from Opera et Cetera, with the permission of Wake Forest University Press. Citations from Medbh McGuckian, "Venus and the Rain" from Venus and the Rain; from "Captain Lavender," "The Appropriate Moment," "Field Heart," "Elegy for an Irish Speaker," "The Aisling Hat," "Flirting with Saviours," "The Colour Shop," "Dividing the Political Temperature" from Captain Lavender, with the permission of Wake Forest Univer- sity Press. 1 INTRODUCTION In "Clonfeacle," an early poem published in 1973, Paul Muldoon writes of a river where Saint Patrick is said to have washed: "A tongue of water passing / Between teeth of stones."1 Over half a century earlier, Yeats had also written of streams and stones: Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream.2 In Yeats's poem, the stream stood for the vibrant, changing life of nature and art; the stone represented the fixed ideology of those bent on violence to achieve their ends, a menace of fixity and death lurking at the bottom of the stream. Muldoon's lines, although drawn from a poem concerned with religion and sexuality rather than political issues, provide a sense of the language in which North- ern Irish poets since 1966 have responded to the social chaos and violence euphemistically referred to as the Troubles. Yeats saw the stream and said the stone was hidden; in the poem about 1916, social violence still only lurked as a threat to civility and the natu- ral course of life. Muldoon sees stones everywhere and just a tongue of water passing over them. There is no longer anything hidden about rigid ideologies of violence. The living stream of poetic speech now takes the form of a tongue which depends for its utterance on the surrounding teeth of stones. In the late sixties and early seventies, two widely different sets of events occurred in Northern Ireland: an outbreak of social vio- Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones lence and a flowering of fine poetry. Both violence and poetry have continued on their divergent but chronologically parallel courses through the seventies and eighties. One can only hope to see the former die out and the latter continue to prosper by the century's end. No one that I know supposes a causal connection of violence to poetry (still less the other way around); either one could have developed without the other. Yet no one would deny the effect that the Troubles have had on Northern Irish poetry. The problem is to determine exactly what that effect has been, or rather to determine how poetry has most effectively dealt with violence within its artis- tic domain.
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