AIDAN ROONEY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD

This piece first appeared in Boston Irish Magazine, Volume 1, Number 2 (Summer 2020), p. 10.

In 1938, the year before he died, preeminent Irish poet William Butler Yeats spelled out in his valedictory poem “Under Ben Bulben” explicit instructions for the epitaph he wished to have cut into the slab of local limestone that would mark his grave:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by.

Ironically, given that his intention was to turn on its head the Roman entreaty of Sta viator—“Halt, traveler”—commonly found on roadside graves in old Italy, Yeats’s stoic directive has become a summons to his legion of admiring readers and other literary tourists to do just the opposite of what he commanded. Located in Drumcliff churchyard in County Sligo, his grave is probably the most frequently visited in all of Ireland. A couple of years ago I made the pilgrimage there myself . . . and not for the first time.

Will the grave of Seamus Heaney, the only other Irish poet whose popularity and name recognition rival Yeats’s, likewise become a must-see tourist site?  Born in 1939, the year that Yeats died, Heaney emerged as a promising poet in the mid-1960s then rose to prominence in the 1970s and to fame in the ’80s.  In 1995 he was awarded, like Yeats before him, the Nobel Prize for literature, the judges honoring him for his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”  He died in late August of 2013 and was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in his home village of Bellaghy in south County Derry.  Thanks to the opening in 2016 of The Homeplace, a former Royal Ulster Constabulary police station in Bellaghy converted into an arts centre dedicated to his writing and his life, Heaney’s final resting place may indeed become a destination.  I visited his grave in 2016 to pay my respects to a writer and a man whom I have admired greatly since first encountering his poetry in 1978, before he had become “famous Seamus.”

I was reminded of that visit recently when I read a particularly fine poem included in Go There (MadHat Press), a rich new volume by County Monaghan native Aidan Rooney.  The author of two previous books of poems, Day Release (2000) and Tightrope (2007), Rooney is a longtime resident of Massachusetts, where he teaches at Thayer Academy in Braintree.  An unabashed admirer of Heaney, Rooney not only traveled to Dublin for his funeral but also followed his funeral cortège northward to Bellaghy for his interment. His experience in the cemetery prompted a poem that he titled simply “In a Country Churchyard.”

For seasoned readers of poetry, that title will call to mind Thomas Gray’s iconic “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” from 1751, a somber meditation on human mortality.  “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” Gray intones in the opening stanza, “The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, / The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”  As Heaney’s friend and fellow Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz once wrote in a poem, “One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.” Composed not in Gray’s precisely measured and strictly rhymed quatrains (32 of them, no less) but in four supple blank verse six-line stanzas, Rooney’s poem is likewise built to carry its thematic weight, and it is built to last.

While dedicated to the memory of Seamus Heaney, Rooney’s poem actually has at its focal center the aging unnamed gravedigger in St. Mary’s cemetery whose son, also a gravedigger, confides in the poet that Heaney’s burial will be his father’s last day on the job: “We want him to go out on a high note,” the son explains.  But this is unbeknownst to the father: “We haven’t told him yet, the son disclosed, / but will when all the fuss is over.”  The attuned reader might recognize that Rooney himself is recognizing common ground (as it were) between the recently deceased poet and the elder gravedigger. This is hinted at in the first stanza when, describing how the younger gravedigger stood with “his right foot on the left lug of a spade,” Rooney makes a deft allusion via that word “lug” to Heaney’s most famous poem, “Digging,” the first poem in his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist (1966).  In that poem of succession from father to son, Heaney remembers with a precise eye how adeptly his “old man” handled a spade to dig potatoes on the family farm: “The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft / Against the inside of the knee was levered firmly.”  Rooney’s Heaney-esque deploying of the Ulster dialect word “fornenst” in the second stanza—in this context meaning “alongside” or “near”—offers another linguistic link between the poet and the senior gravedigger: “His father sat fornenst the opened plot, / on a stone wall the sun going down lit up.”

By the third stanza, Rooney becomes more explicit in equating the two men when, suddenly seeing the father from the perspective of the son who will carry on the family operation of helping to bury the dead, he casts the soon-to-be-retired gravedigger as a stand-in for Heaney:

His father’s hair, as the poet’s used to, glowed

in a sudden, sideways burst of sunshine.

Magnesium burning. And would not let up

no matter the light. Or the light dying.

To his credit, however, Rooney resists any temptation to follow Heaney’s lead, which famously involved transforming the farm implements of his forefathers—the spade for digging spuds, the sleán for cutting turf—into a metaphor: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”  (Yeats used a similar trope in his poem “Pardon, old fathers,” apologizing that “I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.”)

Rooney’s poem ends instead with a striking description of how the son fills in the poet’s grave by tipping from a mechanized digger’s bucket a load of shingle scooped and transported from Lough Neagh, which figures so prominently in Heaney’s poetry.  (Aptly, with a surface area of more than 150 square miles, Lough Neagh touches on five of the six counties of Heaney’s native Northern Ireland.)  The gravel cascading “like the wall of a waterfall,” the speaker in the poem—ostensibly Rooney himself—watches the son as “He watched his father through its thinning veil / get up to get the shovel and the rake.”  Still unaware that this will be his final burial, unaware of “the sun going down” on his undertaking, of “the light dying” on his shock of white hair, the older man persists, as did Heaney with his pen, in taking up the trusty tools of his trade.

In mid-August of 2015, a little less than two years after Seamus Heaney’s death, the wooden cross that temporarily marked his grave was replaced by a simple headstone of Kilkenny blue limestone inscribed with words from his poem “The Gravel Walks”: WALK ON AIR AGAINST YOUR BETTER JUDGEMENT.  Heaney once explained that line in an interview: “My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down.  I think it had to do with a sense that the marvellous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry.”  Less a directive than an invitation, his epitaph may prove as much of a summons to readers to visit Bellaghy as Yeats’s is to visit Drumcliff.  And a summons to visit his poetry as well.

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.