As Michael Parker claims, “In the Irish psyche, ancestry is a potent force, steadying the individual, and shaping his or her sense of identity.” (Parker 4) Beyond the general or perhaps even commonplace nature of the second part of the sentence, the choice of the word
“ancestry” is remarkable: it manages to compress almost infinitely broad contexts into the essentially personal aspect of the historical dimension expressed by the word. Twentieth-century Irish history, by virtue of its complicated nature, presses down heavily on the life of the individual, often turning private lives into the matrix of historical events, the “ancestry” of a single person thus easily widens into the context of communal historical affairs, leading to the conclusion of the inseparability of personal and communal dimensions in the life of the individual.
Father figures feature significantly in the work of several contemporary Irish poets.
This general phenomenon suggests the importance of the historical dimension in the project of handling experience and it also indicates the necessary anchoring of the poetic persona in the comfortably narrow ground of familial relations. Fathers appear as exemplary characters for some poets and as tyrants for others, and in each case there are profound emotions involved in the relation between fathers and sons. The imperfection of such relations is acknowledged in certain cases yet filial respect is maintained even in strained situations, though such situations are usually seen from a retrospective point of view, through the filter of memory, when the father is no longer alive and can thus fully be possessed for interpretation by the surviving son.
4.2.1.1.SEAMUS HEANEY: FARMER
Seamus Heaney treats his father’s figure in a tight- lipped yet in many ways a revelatory manner. The father is a Northern Catholic farmer and a regular cattle-dealer – a person with many ties, literal as well as metaphorical, to the land itself. The humble social position is carried by a fitting human character, the father of Heaney as he is represented in poems is a silent expert of his profession, a person belonging to an older and more traditional world yet an excellent representative of that.
The early poem “Digging,” though essentially the poet’s determination to pursue an intellectual career which is to be understood as in line with the earlier family occupations related to the soil, evokes the figure of the father – he is in fact the apropos of the poem. The sound of the father digging below the window of the room where the persona is engaged in the act of writing the poem recalls memories of a not so distant childhood, with the recollected young self of the speaker sharing the father’s daily agricultural routine, and with one more generational shift into the past, the turf cutter grandfather is also made to appear.
The praise for the father is tight- lipped but reflects an honestly deep respect for the elder family member, just as it is the case with the grandfather expressed amply by the confidential
“old man” (Heaney 1966, 1) address of both of them.
“Follower” describes the father as an “expert” (Heaney 1966, 12) of his occupation.
The poem recalls those moments when the young speaker followed him during ploughing, causing more trouble than being a help to the older man. The example of the father fills the boy with pride and the wish that he would do the same when he grows up too, “All I ever did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm” (ibid), and this is the pattern that is supposed to continue in the future as well. The closing stanza, however, redirects the course of life and poem:
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling Behind me, and will not go away. (ibid)
The young boy’s being a “nuisance” is over, the shift from Simple Past to Simple Present implies no continuity in this state. It is the father now who has become the follower, and the locking of this idea into the same stanza with the earlier “nuisance” presence of the boy indicates the change of the father’s image in the eyes of the son.
“Ancestral Photograph” recalls another aspect of the father’s life, that of his participation in cattle- fairs. Just as the passing of time renders the father’s heroic expertise of agricultural work an elegiac experience, the poem’s recording of the passing of the cattle- fairs posits the father as the inhabitant of a lost world. The photograph displays the father’s uncle yet the focus quickly shifts unto the father’s figure, with the speaker recollecting an episode twenty years earlier when he escorted the father to one of the fairs to witness the skills of his father in bargaining. The speaker’s observation extends not only to the fairs but to the change in the father’s figure when the fairs stop, closing down a period in the father’s life as well as in the history of the rural farming class.
“The Harvest Bow” is a later revisiting the father through the image of a “frail device”
(Heaney 1979, 58) and the father’s mastery of preparing that object. The process of making the harvest bow comes to be seen as an artistic activity, in a certain way a complement to Heaney’s early attempt of establishing his own place in the history of the family despite his radical break with the tradition of making a living out of the land. The medium of this art of the harvest bow is “wheat that does not rust / But brightens” (ibid), a ‘material’ more perishable than many others yet still possessing a mysterious vitality as it is at the same time a food crop, bringing about a rather complex union of art and life. The finished product is likewise a magic one as it is capable of evoking memories of past intimacy of father and son, wordless yet still profound and deeply moving. The general conclusion, “the end of art is peace” (ibid), answers Keats’s urn in its tentative reconfiguration of the context of art not undisturbed by the ongoing conflict.
Though the father’s figure does not receive more in terms of address than the pronoun
“you,” the very simplicity of this tells more than would be told by any lavish litany of praise.
The magic of the harvest bow is the magic of its maker, the object gains its power from the father’s expertise which is all the more significant if the hands that made it are seen as “Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks” (ibid).
Heaney’s vision captures the figure of the father in his natural environment of farm life. Words are rarely uttered between father and son yet the relation merits the adjective
‘intimate’ as Heaney’s portraits focus on details which require close communion to observe
and appreciate. In Heaney’s world these seemingly trivial and insignificant moments can possess the power of preservation and they offer a lasting monument to his father’s character.
4.2.1.2.MICHAEL LONGLEY: SOLDIER
Michael Longley’s father, though by profession a “commercial traveller and then professional charity fundraiser, who served in both World Wars” (Peacock and Devine xi), is commemorated in a number of poems which evoke a world of conflict rather than that of peace: almost exclusively the father’s figure is treated in poems which recall his participation in the First World War. The father’s participation in the war renders him an emblematic figure of what violence can do to people, whatever the historical context may be. The father was not only exposed to the direct experience of the clash of opposing forces but was wounded in the war, and these wounds were later blamed for his sufferings from cancer which finally cost his life, turning him into a “belated casualty” (M. Longley 1985, 86).
The figure of the soldier-father intertwines personal and public aspects in a rather explicit way. The public aspect is a distant First World War universe which perhaps allows Longley a comfortable objective correlative in addressing the contemporary resurgence of violence and liberates him from the obligations of the strict faithfulness to detail as well as from the pressures of taking sides in the conflict. On a more personal level the fact that Longley depicts his father against the background of the trenches suggests a somewhat troubled relationship between the poet and his father. No peaceful family circle is introduced, the father is removed into the hostile world of the war and his sole companions are fellow soldiers or easy women ‘courted’ after the end of the war.
Longley’s first collection of poems, No Continuing City, dates from the time before the recent Troubles erupted yet it already addresses the father’s figure in a poem entitled “In Memoriam.” The project is that of commemoration through imaginative reconstruction;
despite the formal indications of the title the poem descends into the familiar and informal, recalling such events from the life of the father which would normally look awkward in a poem of this kind.
The poem opens with an apostrophe, neit her too formal nor informal, to re-vitalise the father and to turn him into a kind of book to be read by the speaker. This self-consciously established parallel with a book has its origin in the speaker’s project of reconstructing the father’s life in recollected words of the old man. The second stanza evokes Hamlet through
the phrase “in my mind’s eye” (M. Longley 1985, 48), as the ghostly sight of the trenches is conjured. The horrors of the war are briefly envisioned and the image of the father with “kilt, harmonica and gun” (ibid) floats before the speaker, with an ironic remark which readjusts the picture: the nineteen-year-old youngster “joined the London Scottish by mistake” (ibid) after taking the wrong queue, without the slightest idea about the global conflict. The crucial moment of the war is exclusively personal in its scope in the account: the young man is wounded by “shrapnel shards that sliced your [the father’s] testicle.” (ibid) This is the moment that potentially determines history, as such an injury could erase the future of the family, just as the “most unlikely son” (ibid) remarks; however, there is a miraculous preservation of the generative department of the man as the simile of the memory indicates:
“As your voice now is locked inside my head, / I yet was held secure, waiting my turn.” (ibid)
“Finally, that lousy war was over” (M. Longley 1985, 49) and the new beginning is paradoxically marked by the father’s desperate grasping of the past before the war – the injury drives him to seek proof that he is still capable of carnal love. The ‘adventures’ in France are juxtaposed with the ‘afterlife’ of the wounds: “In my twentieth year your old wounds woke / As cancer.” (ibid) The events of the father’s life between the end of the war and his fatal illness are not considered, and the striking putting side by side of the past and present boldly creates a simple cause and effect relationship between the war injury and the final illness of the man. With the ‘rejuvenation’ of the war memorial a former companion is brought back into the household: “Death was a visitor who hung about, / Strewing the house with pills and bandages, / Till he chose to put your spirit out.” (ibid)
The father thus becomes a belated casualty of the war, and this bridging of past and present fetches from the lost world those occasional companions who served the wounded soldier’s eager craving for evidence of his physical fullness. The father’s death reunites him with these forgotten figures and the speaker witnesses their transformation from oblique
“girls,” “Their souls again on hire,” into “lost wives as recreated brides” (ibid). These women come parading in front of the persona, they “Take shape before me, materialise” (ibid), as if they were part of, together with Death in the previous stanza, a mediaeval morality play, standing for perhaps the Seven Deadly Sins – this dimension can offer a tentative happy conclusion to the poem, suggesting the general optimism of the pattern of the morality tradition, with the central character always being rewarded by redemption and salvation.
The poem captures some aspects of the father figure which are at best ambivalent in their general assessment: a young man enlisting for the war in the wrong queue and the turbulent post-war ‘love life’ leave a somewhat strange impression of the man, especially in
the light of the fact that no other information is provided about him. Yet the speaker’s affection is never questioned as the haunting imagery of war and passion indicates a closely sympathetic understanding of the father’s situation. The form of the poem also contributes to this sense of coming to an understanding – from occasional rhymes to an elaborately constructed final stanza there is a progress through phases just like a mission in exploration, indicating the success of the imaginative construction of a memorial to the father promised or hoped for in the title of the poem.
“Wounds” also evokes the father though this time the occasion is different: the poem dates from the time when the Troubles were already underway and the father’s situation as a
“belated casualty” (M. Longley 1985, 86) renders him a companion to victims of contemporary violence. The closeness to a person suffering from the effects of violence enables Longley to forge a persona with an adequate perspective to address the present conflict: the father’s figure lends authority to the poet to speak about the violence of the contemporary world.
The poem begins with two images recollected, strangely enough, by the son, from the
“father’s head” (ibid). One is the Protestant war-cry pair of “‘Fuck the Pope!’ / ‘No surrender!’” (ibid); these are uttered in a peculiar situation – this time the occasion of war would mean an adequate context yet the location of the Somme renders the utterances absurdly out of place. Fierce war- logic dictates the scream of a “boy about to die” (ibid) demanding that the others “‘Give’em one for the Shankill!’”(ibid); this is as much senseless in this place as the preceding cries, indicating the displacement of an internal conflict. The other image is a memory of the grandfather, the father’s father, the “London-Scottish padre” (ibid), with the addition that “My father followed him for fifty years” (ibid), indicating a peaceful family context in sharp contrast to the first image. These recollected pictures are placed into a radically new light by the declaration of the father’s status as the belated casualty of the old war and this transformation is the proper introduction to the contemporary reference of the poem as far as violence is concerned: the second part of the poem is an imaginary funeral in which side by side with the father are laid the recent victims of senseless conflict, each exacting outrage in his turn.
The title of the poem works on several levels and the introduction of the father’s character serves the poet’s purpose of seeking a position from which his comments have the authority of insight. The father is only one of the characters treated in the poem yet his relation to the speaker is the proper basis for a public utterance to be made in the context of the present conflict. The actual wounds of the father become the figurative wounds of the
son, the never healing inflammation of absence, and on a different level, the post-First World War partition of Ireland is the political “wound” which, just as with the poet’s father, after a time tear open and bring forth a deadly confrontation.
The third section of the poem “Wreaths” is “The Linen Workers.” The central image of the poem is “a set of dentures” (M. Longley 1985, 149), connecting the figure of the father with the recently massacred ten linen workers one of whom had false teeth. The father’s character is evoked in the context already established in earlier poems, he is the belated casualty of violence; this time it is the memory of his false teeth that conjure his figure and there are only superficial physical details of his person. Once again, the image of the father gives license to the persona to speak about violence in a public context. The poem’s opening image of “Christ’s teeth ascended with him into heaven” (ibid) serves the establishing the victim-status as well as that of a ‘normal’ state in which people and their teeth form an indivisible unit. The separation expressed in the idea of the false teeth suggests some form of violence done; it is implicit in the father’s figure but explicit in those of the workers as the list of their belongings indicates. The religious connotations of “the bread, the wine” (ibid) intimate the idea of redemption for the victims and the relatively peaceful picture of the persona’s preparing the spectacles, money and the false teeth for the father’s funeral close the poem on the note of tentative hope.
The father’s figure makes occasional reappearances in later collections of Longley as well, almost exclusively in the context of his participation in the war. A number of short poems in The Weather in Japan illustrate this use of the father image. “The Moustache”
centres on the figure of Edward Thomas and the moustache he grew, just to lead to a parallel with the father, a commander of young soldiers who “shaved only once a week / And some not at all” (M. Longley 2000, 24). “The Choughs” starts from a different point yet arrives at the father all the same: the apropos is a group of birds seen above a cliff face. The claws of the birds “recall my father // Telling me how the raw recruits would clutch / Their ‘courting tackle’ under heavy fire.” (M. Longley 2000, 25) The picture of the soldiers trying to save their masculinity in turn recalls the father’s war injury already commemorated in “In Memoriam,” thus the concentration on such an image indicates a subtle manipulation of the poetic material.
The only poem that suggests a perhaps more personal perspective is “January 12, 1996.” This is a poem inspired by the birthday of the father yet as he is no longer alive, the occasion is a tentative one:
He would have been a hundred today, my father, So I write to him in the trenches and describe How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember
And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside. (M. Longley 2000, 25)
The conditional form immediately sets the poem on a purely imaginary level. The subject of the persona’s writing in his imaginary letter is a curiously implicating one: it is the father himself reading the son’s words about what he is doing in that moment of reading the letter.
This doubling of the imagined action indicates a wilful recreation of the father’s figure and the belief in the power of words to embody reality as it is also reflected in the performative “I write” – the location and the time gap contrast strongly with the normal usage of the Present Simple Tense to produce that surrealistic atmosphere which is often characteristic of Longley’s poetic world.
Longley’s father remains, in spite of all the apparent familiarity, partly an enigmatic character. A person who ended up in the war by mistake and was seriously injured there awakens sympathy yet the speaker’s account of the hasty and hectic love life of the father after the war is a reminder of the complexity of the character. Longley decides to remove the father, for most of the time, from the world of the family to put him in another place and time, thus his father figure, despite his original public occupation and his role as a father, becomes principally a memorial of a soldier.
4.2.1.3.JOHN MONTAGUE: EXILE
John Montague’s relation with his father is complicated by the interconnection of personal and public history. The father figure in this case is an exile, a Northern Republican from County Tyrone. The exile’s choice is New York but the chosen time is the worst possible one, that of the Great Depression, leading the family from a “broken province”
(Montague 1995, 41) to a “Brooklyn slum” (ibid). The destination is the birthplace of the poet, just to launch him into a world no less visited by troubles than the place left behind by the family – the economic difficulties separate family members from each other, the mother returns with the children to the North. The family is further scattered by the separation of the youngest son, the future poet himself, from the other children and the mother, by being sent to
the old home of the father to be reared by aunts. The family is reunited years later but by that time the children are already adults and the lost time cannot be recovered, though it comes to be partially redeemed in the poems dealing with the father (and with the mother as well).
The reconstruction of the father is at once a recreation and a repossession of the man;
together with the attempt of coming to terms with the bitter experience of motherly rejection the poems may be understood as an act of compensation for the lack of a proper family circle in the formative years of the poet. The relation between father and son is uneasy at the beginning and the poet’s progress from the inherited blood ties leads through tentative acquaintance to some kind of intimacy.
The ‘journey’ begins with a short poem in the “Home Again” section of The Rough Field; the title page of the section opens with a programmatic piece as far as the opening stance of father and son is concerned:
Lost in our separate work
We meet at dusk in a narrow lane.
I press back against a tree To let him pass, but he brakes Against our double loneliness
With: ‘So you’re home again.’ (Montague 1995, 7)
The short poem definitely reveals more than it asserts about the two adults who belong to the same family yet do not know how to respond to the other’s presence. The setting is carefully chosen to embody this uneasy relation: it is a narrow lane in dusk, little light and physical proximity, which renders their meeting unavoidable. Though the son attempts to evade the encounter by pressing “back against a tree,” the father’s reaction is also seen as violent in his braking “Against” their “double loneliness.” The subsequent act of the father is yet another instance of violence – “braking” turns into ‘breaking’ the silence, thus moving forward as opposed to the pressing back of the son. The father’s words offer an ambivalent conclusion to this short piece as much depends on the meaning of “home” in the context of a scattered Northern Catholic family.
The section “The Fault” is dedicated to the memory of the father. The first poem of the section, “Stele for a Northern Republican” is intended as a memorial, though it is carved into words rather than perishable stone. In Hamlet-like manner the increasingly frequent visits of the ghost of the father induce the son to conduct a reconstruction of his father’s story,
however limited his knowledge of that story might be. The father’s Republican allegiances involved him “in / the holy war to restore our country” (Montague 1995, 40); despite the son’s respectful stance the Republican rhetoric is swiftly overwritten by a more objective perspective to reveal the actual nature of this ‘holiness’ – the war involved missions “to smoke / an absentee’s mansion, concoct / ambushes” (ibid). The conflict becomes tangible when an accident lands a wounded policeman on the kitchen floor of the family; the alibi is quickly provided for the father in his own words, throwing more light on the irrational nature of this war:
‘Locals were rarely used for jobs:
orders of the Dublin organizer,
shot afterwards, by his own side.’ (ibid)
The past, however, is not entirely forgotten despite the years intruding between the events and their recollection:
A generation later, the only sign Of your parochial struggle was When the plough rooted rusty guns, Dull bayonets, in some rushy glen For us to play with. (ibid)
The suggestions of the passage are more than embarrassing as war and peace are juxtaposed in the images of “rusty guns” and “glen” and as agricultural work yields a different kind of crop than the usually expected one as it is old weapons that come to be unearthed. The idea of the new incarnation of these weapons as toys for children is no less troubling: the inherent violence of the Northern community is traced back to this ‘education’ of the children. The speaker accepts this as an explanation for the father’s decision to leave the country:
… But what if you have no country to set before Christ, only a broken province? No parades, fierce medals, will mark Tyrone’s re-birth, betrayed by both South and North;