PLANTING THE POTATOES WITH HARTNETT AND YEATS

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 7 (July 2018), 5.

Some years ago, I shared with a friend a poem by Michael Hartnett that I had recently happened upon.  Published in Hartnett’s bilingual volume A Necklace of Wrens (Gallery Books, 1987), “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is deceptively simple.  Comprising fourteen short lines arranged in two quatrains and a sestet, the poem is self-evidently a sonnet variant.  As such, it might be read as fundamentally subversive—as Hartnett’s covert staking of a claim in the territory of a form intrinsically associated with the British poetic tradition: Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth.  In fact, in that regard the poem is doubly subversive—not only written in the Irish language, it also deconstructs via its curtal lines the more-British-than-the-British iambic pentameter meter widely associated with the sonnet.  Add to that the more-Irish-than-the-Irish subject matter of the potato—that tuber that became inextricably associated with the country’s history after being introduced to the hospitable soil and the temperate climate of Ireland from the New World in the late 1500s—and “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is a pretty full plate of subversion, indeed.

But the friend I shared the poem with, himself an Irish poet of considerable repute, read “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” much differently.  Perhaps suffering from his own anxiety of influence, he wondered frankly how Hartnett had managed, or dared, to write a poem about potatoes on the mud-caked heels of Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s preeminent poetic voice of the past half-century.  Heaney had staked a bold claim on potato fields very early in his career, most famously in “Digging,” the opening poem in his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966.  He remembered with both visual and tactile precision the sensation of working the potato drills behind his father on the family farm in County Derry:

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands. 

Yet as Heaney acknowledged implicitly in “At a Potato Digging,” a poem written around the same time and filled with the imagery of crows and crow-black fields and lines of potato pickers moving between hedges and headlands that echoes the opening lines of Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger,” Kavanagh had already turned over that ground a generation earlier, both in that famous long poem and in various other poems such as “Ploughman,” “The Man After the Harrow,” and “Spraying the Potatoes.”

No doubt Hartnett too would have recognized Kavanagh as a poetic precursor.  Presumably, however, he also knew of an earlier—much earlier—poetic reference to potatoes, in the work of 17th-century Irish-language poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair. Hartnett discovered Ó Bruadair in the early 1950s in the three-volume Irish Texts Society edition of his poems (published between 1910 and 1917) and eventually translated a selection in a volume titled O Bruadair (1985).  A committed student of that poet’s rich body of work, he would not likely have missed the ITS editor’s glossing of the word potáta, from a poem dated 1674-75, as “one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, occurrences of the word in Irish.”  Arguably, then, the relationship between Hartnett’s dan práta and Heaney’s “potato poems”—and, for that matter, Kavanagh’s poems harvested from the “stony grey soil” of his native County Monaghan—is mostly, perhaps totally, incidental.

But its relationship to a poem by William Butler Yeats may be less incidental and may in fact make “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” not just doubly but triply subversive.  In Hartnett’s own translation, the two quatrains that open the poem make transparent the poet’s deployment of metaphor, his indulgence in what Robert Frost calls “the pleasure of ulteriority”—“saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another”:

Today I planted poems—

dung, knife, seed:

a field my page,

my pen a spade.

Green nipples will come

one by one,

white flowers, their centres

like spits from the sun.

But as Paul Fussell observes in his book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, a sonnet operates on a “principle of imbalance,” and when Hartnett’s fourteen-liner makes its “volta,” or “turn,” into its sestet after those opening eight lines, the poem changes direction in just the way that Heaney described so appositely in an essay titled “The Makings of a Music”: “‘Verse’ comes from the Latin versuswhich could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished the furrow and faced back into another.”  Irish poet Eavan Boland elaborates on this effect in an anthology she co-edited titled The Making of a Sonnet: “The octave sets out the problems, the perceptions, the wishes of the poet.  The sestet does something different: it makes a swift, wonderfully compact turn on the hidden meanings of butand yetand wait for a moment.  The sestet answers the octave, but neither politely nor smoothly.  And this simple engine of proposition and rebuttal has allowed the sonnet over centuries, in the hands of very different poets, to replicate over and over again the magic of inner argument.”

In Hartnett’s hands, the “answer” is announced in the abrupt shift from the matter-of-factness of the two preceding quatrains to the decidedly imperative tone of the first line of the sestet:

Learners—no longer idle,

but gather your implements

for all of Ireland’s poets

replough the Irish earth

and you will be bereft

of potatoes and verse.

But that imperative also announces not only its engagement with but also its speaking back to probably the most famous imperative in all of Irish literature, Yeats’s exhortation—essentially his last will and testament directed to his poetic successors—in the penultimate section of his valedictory poem “Under Ben Bulben” written in 1938, the year before he died: “Irish poets, learn your trade / Sing whatever is well made . . .”  In effect, Yeats is imposing his will on the next generation of Irish poets, placing on them a geis, a moral obligation to continue inscribing his particular, and particularly romanticized, vision of Ireland: “Sing the peasantry, and then / Hard-riding country gentlemen, / The holiness of monks, and after / Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter . . .”

In 1966, John Montague, the senior poet of Hartnett’s generation, responded to Yeats in a little essay titled “Living Under Ben Bulben”: “There are times when I wonder if that passage was not composed with malice aforethought.  A friend told me once of interrupting two old men near Belmullet, in order to ask the way, and being shown a path that led onto a sea cliff: is that what Yeats meant by bequeathing us a catalogue of subjects that can now only be legitimately treated in parody?”  Less than a decade later, in his iconic declaration of poetic intention, “A Farewell to English,” Hartnett would add his voice to this complaint, rejecting specifically the influence of “our bugbear Mr. Yeats / who forced us into exile / on islands of bad verse.” 

In “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” Hartnett's response is more oblique but no less dismissive of Yeats’s authority.  Matching imperative with imperative, this poem is an act not just of subversion but also of reclamation of poetic territory.  It is Hartnett’s exhortation to each future generation of Ireland’s poets to replough—and, implicitly, to replant and thus to claim as their own—the metaphorical “crow-black fields” and “stony grey soil” of their precursors.