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.

(RE)VISITING MICHAEL HARTNETT, 1941-1999

This piece first appeared in The Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2000), p. 27.

Most of my direct personal contact with poet Michael Hartnett, who died last October at the sadly young age of 58, happened during a two-week period about seven months before his death. First I received an utterly unexpected phonecall from the man himself at 7:15 one morning, an oddly delayed reaction (or so it seemed) to an article of mine that included discussion of his poetry; I had sent the piece to him as a courtesy sixteen months earlier, but as it turns out, he had moved house shortly before I mailed it, and (better late than not at all, I suppose) the packet had just caught up with him. Then, a day or so later, a brief note from him arrived in the mail; obviously written before the phonecall, it closed: “If you’re still alive, drop me a line.” I did so shortly, concluding hopefully by echoing the promise he had exacted from me on the telephone that I would visit him the next time I traveled to Dublin: “Someday we shall meet, I’m sure. . . .”

Alas, we never did meet; nor did we communicate further after that quick exchange of comments and compliments. But when I heard of Hartnett’s death, I felt his loss almost as if I had known him personally for years—and, in a sense, I did know him peculiarly well. In fact, Hartnett entered my life by way of a non-encounter with him that has teased my imagination for more than two decades. The place was Tralee, Co. Kerry, the time the autumn of 1978. As bad luck would have it, I learned the morning after from the landlady in my B&B that a poet had entered a pub in the town the night before and commenced to recite poems in Irish for whatever pittance the patrons deigned to toss his way. The poet was Michael Hartnett (a.k.a. Micheál Ó hAirtnéide), and I knew just enough about him to understand that he was fulfilling in deed as well as in word the promise he had made in evoking and invoking his literary ancestors in the bold title poem of his 1975 volume A Farewell to English, re-issued earlier that year by Gallery Press:

00000But I will not see
00000great men go down
00000who walked in rags
00000from town to town
00000finding English a necessary sin
00000the perfect language to sell pigs in.

00000I have made my choice
00000and leave with little weeping:
00000I have come with meagre voice
00000to court the language of my people.

At once an iconoclast and a throwback, Hartnett aspired to realize the not-quite-paradox of both breaking with convention and embracing tradition. He aspired to reconcile, through a commitment to writing exclusively in Irish, the two halves of what Thomas Kinsella has called “the divided mind” of the modern Irish poet writing in English who hears across the silence of the vacuum-like nineteenth century the resonance of more than a thousand years of poetry written in Irish. As Kinsella described this condition in 1973: “I recognize that I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself.”

Eventually, Hartnett had second thoughts about his decision to write only in Irish—perhaps in due course, for as fellow poet Eamon Grennan observes in “Wrestling with Hartnett,” his fine essay included in the special Irish issue of The Southern Review in 1995, the trajectory of his work resembles “a journey that starts, stops, starts again, doubles back on itself, pursues false paths, tries different approaches, feels its way into the clear, and presses deliberately and forcefully ahead.” Many of the landmarks and the milestones of that journey are represented in his Selected & New Poems (published in 1994 by Gallery Press in Ireland and by Wake Forest University Press in America), a satisfying introduction to a poet who, while at times daunting to read both for the vicissitudes of his thematic and stylistic emphases and for the intensity and the density of his acute lyric sensibility, yet consistently rewards the reader attentive to the subtleties and the complexities of his poetic vision.

Hearing of Michael Hartnett’s death, I turned respectfully toward that volume—toward the autobiographical darkness of “A Small Farm” (“All the perversions of the soul / I learnt on a small farm”), the uncompromising social commentary of “The Retreat of Ita Cagney” (Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” with the sexual stakes raised by its woman’s point of view), the formal elegance of “A Visit to Castletown House” (remarkable for the poet’s Yeats-like command of its eight-line stanza), the existential angst of the artist in “The Naked Surgeon” (“hope died out and left me there, / a naked surgeon, my patient dead”). In many ways that volume in its entirety testifies to the closing verse of “The Poet as Mastercraftsman”: “To poets peace poetry never yields.” Just as persuasively, it testifies to the authority of Hartnett’s Yeats-countering exhortation (a crafty sonnet, no less) omitted from Selected & New Poems but included in his dual-language volume A Necklace of Wrens in 1987:

00000DÁN PRÁTA

00000Inniu chuir mé mo dhánta,
00000aoileach, scian, scealláin:
00000an pháirc mo phár bán,
00000an rámhainn mo pheann.

00000Tiocfaidh na gasa ina ndideanna glasa
00000ceann ar cheann,
00000tiocfaidh an bláth bán is croí ina lár
00000mar sheile ón ngrian.

00000A dhalta, ná bí díomhaoin
00000ach bailigh do threalamh le chéile
00000mar táid filí na tíre
00000ag atreabhadh úir na hÉireann
00000is fágfar tusa I do bhochtán
00000gan phráta, gan dán.

00000POTATO POEM

00000Today I planted poems—
00000dung, knife, seed:
00000a field my page,
00000my pen a spade.

00000Green nipples will come
00000one by one,
00000white flowers, their centres,
00000like spits from the sun.

00000Learners—no longer idle,
00000but gather your implements
00000for all of Ireland’s poets
00000replough the Irish earth
00000and you will be bereft
00000of potatoes and verse.

With hindsight, I think that it is the spirit of that poem, a more distilled form of the spirit informing “A Farewell to English,” that has teased me for the past twenty-odd years that I have been (for the most part casually) visiting and revisiting Hartnett’s poetry: its expression of the poet’s heartfelt belief in—and his own cultivation of—the restorative power of enduring poetry. Surely this is the spirit that provoked what appears to have been the principal enterprise of the last fifteen years of Hartnett’s life and career—his recuperation by way of masterful translation of a trio of so-called “dispossessed” poets from the other side of that “great rift” that he, like Kinsella, gazed across. More limited in its compass than Kinsella and Seán Ó Tuama’s anthology An Duanaire (1981) and less “exotic” in its subject matter than Seamus Heaney’s celebrated Sweeney Astray (1983), Hartnett’s cumulative body of poems by seventeenth-century poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Pádraigín Haicéad and early eighteenth-century poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille yet stands within the larger corpus of his work as a major legacy in itself to the furtherance of the Irish poetic tradition: “Irish poets learn your trade,” indeed!

Ultimately, then—perhaps even inevitably—when I heard of Michael Hartnett’s death I found myself drawn to his translations of Ó Bruadair in particular (published by Gallery as O Bruadair in 1985). For so much of what Hartnett evidently sought in his determined symbolic gesture of bidding farewell to English in the mid-1970s seems to be embedded in the artistic rigor and the thematic integrity that he clearly associates with his fellow native (putative, at least) of Newcastle West, Co. Limerick. Introduced to Ó Bruadair’s work in 1954, when he was thirteen years old, Hartnett has admitted that before long this file, this professional poet of the old Gaelic social order, became “the symbol of what I wanted to be.” Not surprisingly, his selections from the three-volume Irish Texts Society edition of his precursor’s verse focus almost exclusively on the downward spiral of the presence—and the practice—of poetry in Irish society during the politically and culturally turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. As his version of “Is Urchra Cléibh” (a lament written after the departure in 1692 of many of the Irish chieftains) reflects, Hartnett identifies especially with Ó Bruadair’s perspective as beleaguered guardian of a noble art:

00000To see the art of poetry lost
00000with those who honoured it with thought—
00000its true form lowered to a silly chant,
00000sought after by the dilettante.

Hartnett has observed of Ó Bruadair: “He was concerned with culture.” So too was his translator. Taking down from the bookshelf my dog-eared, pencil-marked copy of O Bruadair in the wake of Hartnett’s death, and remembering how twenty-one years earlier I had been so taken with the idea of a latter-day poet so literally keeping the faith of his literary forebears as Hartnett reportedly did in that pub in Tralee, I found the opening stanza (or rann) of the opening poem of that volume, a poem originally composed for the children of poet Cúchonnacht Ó Dalaigh (who died in 1642), an altogether apt epitaph for the life and the career of Michael Hartnett himself:

00000Bereft of its great poets
00000our old world’s in darkness.
00000The orphans of those masters
00000offer answers that lack sharpness.