At the beginning of Derek Mahon’s “Beyond Howth Head,” despite the title, the western coastal areas of Ireland are briefly evoked and a strange communion is described between the human and the natural world: the houses of the “declining west” “collapse”
(Mahon 1999, 52) and fall into the sea, and there is no remedy for these “crumbling shores / of Europe” (ibid), both literal and metaphorical. Though it is a poem from the perspective of Howth, the region of Dublin, the opening of the poem focuses on the western coast with its spectacularly harsh reality becoming emblematic of the inevitability of change and collapse, and by evoking a distant western location it constructs an imaginary bridge between the eastern coast and western one. The physically limited space of an island is thus grasped imaginatively and the insistence on the sea’s gaining ground on the expense of the land endows the place with a melancholic undercurrent.
The early poem “A Day Trip to Donegal” is similarly composed elsewhere and only recollects the scene which is a western location too. In the poem a powerful experience is
reconstructed in a telling location: Donegal is part of ancient Ulster but is not included in modern Northern Ireland. In spite of this, the northwest location of the place receives no extra attention from the speaker. The place, however, is still unlike any other as the hills and the sea have unique colours in the region – though the colours themselves are not unusual, green and grey respectively, their depth is distinctive; this is especially suggestive if the former is seen as emanating life, while the latter is rather thought to swallow it. Details of the landscape come to an end with this very short list of green hills and grey sea; the other items mentioned are only boats and the pier, giving the impression of an extremely simple context for life in that part of the world. The return journey is marked by the absence of that “gale- force wind”
(Mahon 1999, 259) which defines the weather of the coast, and which perhaps keeps the memory vividly alive for the speaker: he is visited by dreams which reflect and echo the eroding power of the sea, threatening villages and harbours as well as the speaker’s own internal world – his final nightmare of being “alone far out at sea / without skill or reassurance” (ibid) indicates that the trip provides a lasting experience for him.
Though Mahon, unlike some other poets, does not consider the West a peculiar place with an outstanding significance, in the poem the location has a profound impression on the speaker, loading his dream with its own images. There is another Mahon poem in which another western location has a similarly lasting effect on the speaker of the poem. “Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.” presents the perfect picture petrified in the memory. The location possesses nearly magic powers as “Re flection in that final sky / Shames vision into simple sight; / Into pure sense, experience.” (Mahon 1999, 29) The scene is conjured in a dream which at the beginning does not make clear whether it is based on actual experience or a simple fantasy; the end of the poem, however, provides the missing piece of information in relation to the basis of the dream: “I clutch the memory still, and I / Have measured everything with it since.” (ibid) This closure would explain much of Mahon’s attitude to place, his oscillations and ambivalences, even perhaps his insistence on locations with unfavourable conditions: the location, an Aran destination, indicates a world in slow decline in spite of its generally acclaimed significance. That the speaker should find in this place an etalon is partly a surprise because of its declining nature – at the same time it indicates the still potent power of the place to yield a profound experience despite contrary expectations.
Mahon’s favourite apocalyptic vision, however, finds a perfect soil in such a place.
The same region is evoked in Seamus Heaney’s early “Lovers on Aran” yet Heaney’s gaze is fixed upon another aspect of the place as the poem employs the old image of the relation between sea and land. The trademark Irish location is brought into a contact with
waves coming “from the Americas” (Heaney 1966, 34), thus an all-encompassing Atlantic dimension is evoked, with a corresponding mutual gesture on part of Aran too, as the island is seen embracing the sea. The weight of the vision is concentrated in the last stanza in which sea and land find themselves mutually complemented by the other, coming to a point of fulfilment in terms of the question of identity: “Did sea define the land or land the sea? / Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision. / Sea broke on land to full identity.” (ibid)
The title would allow for a number of possible meanings in the poem. The generally human reference of lovers can turn the poem into a haunting parallel for love relationships with a strong emphasis on the mutual element. The translation of human terms onto the landscape, however, yields a more encompassing vision, liberating the poem from the constraints of pictorial representation and taking the title in a metaphorical way. Such a reading revises the relation between sea and land along the western coast of Ireland: erosion becomes an integral process of life, hinting at the inevitability of change administered by time and at an acceptance of this general pattern of mutability converging on physical destruction as the analogue of individual life.
The island of the title “Storm on the Island” is not specified beyond the fact that there are no trees on it and hay is equally missing – yet these features strongly suggest a western island. The place appears rather desolate yet it is not without human settlement, since the speaker offers details about homes built on rocks to withstand the hostilities of the weather.
The absence of hay and trees is seen at first as a positive feature since the latter can be especially menacing “in a gale” (Heaney 1966, 38). The lack of trees, however, also means that there is “no natural shelter” (ibid), leaving the inhabitants exposed to the storm. The sea is equally an ambivalent presence – at first “You might think that the sea is company” (ibid) in a comfortable distance but in time of harsh weather it “spits like a tame cat / Turned savage.” (ibid) The principal agent of threat on all such occasions is the wind, bringing the human beings together to wait for its passing. This wind becomes Shelley’s invisible destroyer, and its transcendence opens a new dimension to the place: the wind is “empty air,”
“a huge nothing that we fear.” (ibid) The visible elements, trees and the sea, would impose no such threat as the wind does – they are, at worst, double- faced, though the absence of the former creates a rather problematic situation as it facilitates the unchecked reign of the wind.
The island is not depicted in another context, that of good weather, so the general impression of the place is a one-sided one, with the wind, an invisible and conventionally transcendent element, as the ultimate power ruling it.
“Postrscript” suggests a destination for a drive in County Clare yet within that no precise location is identified. Rather than a journey with a terminal point, it turns out to be a drive-through exercise which the speaker encourages thus it attempts to provide an experience of the flux of life, similarly to the early “The Peninsula,” though that poem has a northern setting. The time is more specified, it is to be taken “In September or October, when the wind / And the light are working off each other” (Heaney 1996, 70). It is at such a time that a curious in-between- ness can be experienced:
the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans (ibid)
The image is one of a dynamic equilibrium as the turbulent sea is contrasted with the slate-grey colour of the lake, yet this monochrome surface is disrupted by and broken up into the turbulence of the unrelaxing swans. The Yeatsean self-enclosed lake-with-swans image is turned into a representation of motion in stillness, an image at once static and dynamic, recalling Wordsworth’s Alpine waterfalls, and thus it intimates a near-transcendental experience. The difficulty of ‘taming’ this vision is also imparted by the speaker, indicating the irrelevance of human desire in such moments: “Useless to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there” (ibid) yet the spectator does not remain unaffected as “big soft buffetings” (ibid) hitting the car “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” (ibid) Like Wordsworth’s spots of time, such moments are food for the imagination as well as they are the custodians of the youthful self, recalling the perception which was once available but is now only occasionally present.
In “Ballynahinch Lake” the Connemara location acquires a special significance on a Sunday morning for the near- vision that awaits the speaker’s company. There is a
“captivating brightness” (Heaney 2000, 26) which makes them stop and which then enters the spectators “like a wedge knocked sweetly home / Into core timber.” (ibid) There is a “pair of waterbirds” (ibid) whose actions they can observe, becoming thus silent and secret participants in the intimate routines of the natural world. The effect of the experience lingers on as they get back into the car: there is a momentary suspension of the normal course of actions: “when she bent / To turn the key she only half- turned it / And spoke, as it were, directly to the windscreen.” (ibid) The words at first do not appear profound yet the
experience itself overwrites whatever might be said on the scene. This poem is yet another instance of the Heaney landscape which defies observation and the human wish to possess sight in an absolute manner: as the speaker indicates in “Postscript” as well, the landscape rema ins outside, an entity insisting on its separateness, which only partially allows its deciphering, thus the promise of the early poem “The Peninsula” comes to be frustrated – the mature Heaney revises the bold assertion of his youthful vision. The natural world, however, is endowed with a significant power though perhaps of a less consoling type: the vision is offered but the limitation of the imagination to fully grasp it is also demonstrated.
John Montague’s landscapes more explicitly involve the temporal dimension than other poets’ approaches. Montague’s frequent attempts to revitalise past experience in the form of returns endow places with a nearly tangible temporal feature: landscapes become indicators and reminders of change by their very permanence in comparison with the experience of the human observer. One instance of this is found in the poem “Bog Royal”
which describes a stop on a northward journey at the Bog of Allen which in turn becomes the Irish landscape par excellence. The persona’s metaphor of “a sea of black peat / our land’s wet matrix” (Montague 1995, 136) erases divisions on the level of landscape, perhaps motivated partly by the central location of the place. The rainy weather, another ubiquitous element, gives way to sunlight after a time, and a near idyllic picture of “some reed- fringed island” (ibid) follows. But just as there is a shift between rain and sunshine, the once familiar world has been replaced by something modern, not necessarily alien but somewhat stranger in the context:
pyramids of turf stored under glistening polythene:
chalk white power stations, cleaned swathes of bog, a carpet sucked clean! (ibid)
The historical heritage offered by the bog functions as a time machine and in a short time the persona is back in the mythical world of the “Great Forests / of Ireland” (ibid) and the “hoarse hunt- / - ing horn of the Fianna.” (ibid) The latter picture is magnified to a strangely active still, yet it is arrested in a late phase of its existence, when it is already in decline and giving way to something different, then new, now equally obsolete:
a marginal civilization shading to the sound of bells in monastic sites, above the still broadening Shannon, or sheltered on some lake- shore or wooded island:
from Derg to Devenish,
Loughs Gowna to Erne. (Montague, 1995 137)
The symbolic location of “Red Island ” is made clear in the first line of the poem which is at once a separate unit: “Time could stop here.” (Montague 1995, 140) The cunning auxiliary liberates the poem in time, doing just what it asserts, merging past with present, and the person’s reflexive consciousness capitalises on this opportunity. The routine actions out of time render anything else irrelevant, the memories attached to the place have enough power to compel the persona to “stretch in the grass” (Montague 1995, 141). As this is a near- idyllic place, “an immense stillness ha ngs / over Red Island” (ibid), yet this stillness acquires a less comforting dimension as the description continues: the stillness is over a “drowned land”
(ibid), a “watery graveyard” (ibid) which is the scene of the death-struggle of a river on “its slow weed-choked way / to swell the Shannon.” (ibid) The pastoral image is disturbed and the utopistic promise of the first line is checked as the persona is reminded of the rift between the timeless and the temporal. Yet Montague does everything to bring the smaller river to a standstill, to reconcile the two; if only temporarily, he manages to arrest time and keep it solid for the spell of the poem, fulfilling the potential in its opening line.
Matthew Sweeney’s western coast possesses immense powers but of a different kind than those found in Mahon’s or Heaney’s poems. The rocky coast becomes what it actually is for those on water: a hazardous place with small traps which very quickly become sources of tragic events. The poem “Where Fishermen Can’t Swim” records a tragedy whose horror is increased by the speaker’s step-by-step technique of describing the situation. The setting is
“the ice-age coast of Donegal” (Sweeney 2002, 28), a rocky and dangerous area, where a lobster-boat gets stuck because of an engine failure. A member of the crew, the youngest, leaps to a rock to give the boat a push, only to recognise that there is no way back to the boat.
At first it is the problem of not being able to jump back; then the immobility of the boat
begins to darken the scene, especially that the engine would not start again. There is neither a rope nor a lifebelt to save him; there is, however, the radio to call for help. As in all classical tragedies a weak light appears to offer only a delaying of the catastrophe: a helicopter would arrive, but only an hour later. This is cruelly put into the proper perspective by the speaker’s announcement of the tide, with high tide due to arrive in forty minutes, overflowing the rock.
The closing juxtaposition locks all the humans present on the scene into a desperate situation:
the lonely victim and the equally isolated crew will have to wait and watch, without being able to change anything, how the tide rises and swallows the stranded one.
The wild and rugged Donegal coastline thus becomes the scene of a horrific experience. The question of the speaker concerns the exact time when the recognition of the inevitable happens; yet the completing of the full picture is done in such a way as to obscure this moment. The situation reflects an old preoccupation on another level too: the tragedy of the young man is also a reminder of the fragility of the human being and a nearly Shakespearean indication of the powerlessness of man in the face of the forces of nature.
Though technology provides a set of comforting devices, they are either unavailable in a crucial situation or too late to arrive to change anything. The “ice-age coast” then plays a fatal trick on these fishermen, taking its revenge on the exploiters of the sea and a rather hostile face of nature is shown.
Thomas Kinsella’s “Ballydavid Pier”, regarded as a “skewed ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”(Jackson 38), is also set in a western coastal location, though a south-western one, with its attention turned toward the sea. The rising of the tide comfortably provides a structural pattern, yet the conclusion is anticlimax rather than culmination since the never-ceasing toil of the water calls the speaker’s attention to “a bag of flesh, / Foetus of goat or sheep” (Kinsella 1996, 56) after meditating on the life- giving potential of the sea. In a highly self-conscious way the explicit offering of “Allegory” (Kinsella 1996, 57) is grabbed: the eternal movement of life is contrasted with this unintelligible failure, and the speaker delivers even an apostrophe to the grotesque form, recognising its stranded neither-life- nor-death status. In the distance bell- notes register the passing of time and the routines of life yet these apparently have nothing to do with the scene; events and actions of the human world are seen as repetitive and insignificant in the moment as the speaker is absorbed in his observation of the foetus, a strange instance of timeless reality amid reminders of a temporal world.
The shore thus becomes a place where visionary meetings may happen, though the situation itself embodies certain ambivalences. The speaker’s contemplation of the constant work of the sea opens an extraordinary dimension as he prepares to receive the vision of the
forming of life in the water. His mission is cut short in a way when he notices the foetus, just to launch himself on a new course by integrating this new element into his pattern. The experience turns into an unexpected one as the recognition that the foetus has gone through neither birth nor death suspends that ‘creature’ in a timeless dimension, thus completing a vision in which a timeless form encounters the temporal world. Kinsella’s fascination with the general pattern of individual existence (cf. Johnston 105-106) explains the tragic nature of such an encounter, and the conclusion of the poem is an interesting twist on the history of such visionary moments: the enlightening experience is essentially tragic. All this happens in an environment which itself is a frontier zone, with the speaker turning his back on the land and facing the sea, thus reversing the usual preferences.
“Song of the Night” begins its far-reaching itinerary in Philadelphia: there an atlas is opened and that transports the speaker to an Irish location with the agency of a memory. The second section of the poem bears the title “Carraroe,” another western location, a place with the memory of an excursion there. There is a longish description of the shore and the water in its never-ceasing work of the waves and the tide, and an account of routine- like actions of an excursion such as tidying up after eating or staring at the ocean from the edge of it. The speaker’s contemplation of the water leads to the recognition of the fact that the shore exists independently of human presence in a kind of timeless world, and that such an excursion is only a temporary intrusion into the life of the shore. The humanising intention is at work, however, as the constant sounds of the ocean become a new music, a song of the night, and the dark immediately comes to life:
The bay – every inlet – lifted
and glittered toward us in articulated light.
The land, a pitch-black stage
of boulder shapes and scalps of heaped weed, inhaled. (Kinsella 1996, 216)
The landscape awakens and comes to life, and the poem subsequently evokes the spirit of Wordsworth and of the Romantic landscape, yet Kinsella’s human figures do not appear as integral parts of nature, the dichotomy of nature and civilisation is maintained.
Legendary history underlines the sense of place in “The Route of the Táin.” The poem traces the events of a car journey which intends to follow the legendary path of the Connacht army; the modern pilgrimage is undertaken to provide a real frame for the legends. Various
modern devices are employed to turn the experiment into a memorable experience yet their initial failure to find what they are searching for shatters the presumed superiority of the modern world. The frustration of the lack of concord between the landscape and the map reduces the human characters to the status of a beast ignorantly existing in the landscape, and this already makes the occasion a memorable one. Everything changes, however, in a moment as a fox runs out of the bracken and shows them the way, facilitating recognition: the concept of the beast of the earlier passage is heavily revised and the subsequent mental processes are elaborately detailed, culminating in the final enlightenment in which the ancient story becomes more than a story, with identifiable reference points in the actual landscape.
The section describing the sight is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s Alpine accounts, especia lly the “gloomy pass” (Kinsella 1996, 125) is an element that would fit the earlier poet’s diction. The modern figures restore something of their dignity by being able to read the sign and follow it; even if maps and books are inadequate, the ability of orientation is still possessed by the speaker and his company. The landscape in sunlight opens up the much awaited enormous panorama, and the picture again recalls the spirit of Wordsworth and through him Milton too – a remarkable perspective: “Before us / the route of the Táin” (ibid).
The conclusion of the poem, however, leads towards a more sobering stance: as they contemplate the land, their gaze wanders “toward these hills that seemed to grow / darker as we drove nearer.”(ibid) The northward itinerary of the Connacht army suggests the hills of the North, with the corresponding hint at the conflict, both the ancient and the modern one; on another level the idea of getting too close to the required destination blocks the proper observation of it, echoing something of Wordsworth’s experience.