Monthly Archives: August 2024

Week 618: Egan O Rahilly, by James Stephens

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This quirky lament was composed by the Irish poet Egan O’Rahilly (1670-1726), or to give his name in the more Irish spelling Aodhagán (or Aogán) Ó Rathaille. Not to be confused with The O’Rahilly, Michael O’Rahilly, the subject of a poem by W.B.Yeats, who was a leader of the Irish Volunteers killed in the Easter Rising in 1916.

Egan was the last of his kind, an ollamh, a professional poet trained in a bardic school, who made his living by travelling between the houses of Irish chieftains, where he was treated with great honour. This is of course hard for a poet of today to imagine: when I was small and was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I vacillated between being a tramp and being a poet, and it is hard to say which prospect appalled my elders more.

But O’Rahilly was unfortunate to live at a time of huge social changes, that included the Battle of the Boyne which ended the hopes of the Stuart dynasty and led to the repression of the Irish language and the death of the bardic tradition. He was to end as an embittered destitute, who never gave up on his dreams of a restored Ireland, expressed in the ‘aisling’ or vision genre of poetry which he pioneered, in which such politically dangerous aspirations are disguised as a love poem to a beautiful woman.

Egan O Rahilly
(translated from the Irish by James Stephens)

Here in a distant place I hold my tongue;
I am O Rahilly!

When I was young,
Who now am young no more,
I did not eat things picked up from the shore:
The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
At even-tide have got into my dish!

The great, where are they now! The great had said –
This is not seemly! Bring to him instead
That which serves his and serves our dignity –
And that was done.

I am O Rahilly!
Here in a distant place he holds his tongue;
Who once said all his say, when he was young!

Week 617: Ye Who Enter In, by Jamie McKendrick

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I have an uneasy relationship with Dante, at the same time admiring and a little
repulsed, though I readily concede that he is, as Sam Gamgee felt about elves, ‘a
bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak’. I think this piece by poet and
translator Jamie McKendrick (b. 1955) is a miniature tour de force in how it
captures the way in which Dante manages simultaneously to alienate yet compel.

Ye Who Enter In
(after Antonio Machado)

To plumb the depths of hell and meet
ministers, saladins and scholars,
Marilyn Monroe and Cleopatra,
the latter naked as the day they died:
to give audience where you please
and where you don’t to curl your lip
or deftly rabbit-punch a kidney
sure that your arm is power-assisted.
To be steered about by someone who just
happens to be Virgil, and you like his poems.
to write as a chisel writes on rock
so every phrase you write resounds forever:
ABANDON ALL HOPE… You first.
No really I insist please after you.

Jamie McKendrick

Week 616: The Most of It, by Robert Frost

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This poem appears in Robert Frost’s 1942 collection ‘A Witness Tree’, and for me is one of the finest poems in that collection, which I think is the last to show his lyric gift at full strength. It came after a period in which Frost had suffered a number of tragic losses in his life: the death of his daughter Marjorie in 1934, his wife’s death in 1938, and then the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, and perhaps as a result it is informed by disillusionment and loneliness, and by an absence of consolation no longer to be found in the natural world, that the poet now sees as at best indifferent, at worst disturbingly alien and even dangerous. The image of the great buck at the end has something elemental, indeed almost demonic about it, and certainly it has no interest in communicating with the wistful observer.

Despite the reference to the universe in the first line it is clear that Frost was really talking about man on earth, but with the recent SETI initiative and the discovery of ever more exoplanets one can see the poem as having acquired an additional resonance since it was written. If there is indeed alien life out there, will it do us any good to find out, or will it be just as incommunicable and set on its own purposes as the great buck?

The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush – and that was all.

Robert Frost

Week 615: The Persistence of Memory, by John Burnside

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John Burnside (1955-2024) was a very prolific Scottish writer who died this May. Though principally a poet he produced works of fiction, essays, reviews and also a prize-winning memoir. His is a very congenial voice, though I do sometimes feel, as with so much contemporary poetry, that his work could have done with a bit more shaping, being ever mindful of Frost’s pithy but slightly too sweeping condemnation of free verse: ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. But when Burnside gets it right, as here, he combines exactitude with a haunting music that more than compensates for any lack of formality.

The Persistence of Memory

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

– Kenny and Marek, the Corrigans, Alex McClure –
mothers and sisters calling them home for tea

from kitchens fogged with steam and buttered toast,
broth on the hot plate, ham hough and yellow lentils.

Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left,
and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone,

the animals watching, the older gods
couched in the shadows.

Decades ago, I suppose,
though I cannot be sure.

I have waited here, under the stars,
for the longest time.

John Burnside

Week 614: Acceptance, by David Sutton

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My wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary next week, making fifty-eight in all, of which over the years I have managed to remember fifty-seven. Which is surely a pretty impressive record, though you wouldn’t think so to hear some people go on about it. So, this week I offer one of my own poems on the subject of long-married love, which I wrote a while back, but which I am glad to say is still just as applicable.

Acceptance

We stop at the garden centre for tea and cake,
Our time our own now, all the children gone,
And you talk to another couple at the next table
While I half-drowse in late October sun,
Answering your smiles on cue, but thinking
This is not me, not yet, or not today:
I am not ready for the small contentments,
Though what I want instead is hard to say.

Our forty years again, of toil and trial?
Indeed, if strength came with them to endure
All that love asks, the given and the taken,
But we have come where only loss is sure,
So I must learn new lines, an awkward actor
Who thought to have no part in age’s play.
Rehearse me, then, in love’s last role, acceptance.
Above all, till the final curtain, stay.

David Sutton