`I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head." These lines of Yeats spring to mind every time I abandon the frustration of an overheated brain for the relief of a walk. Surrounded by the natural magic of trees, air and water, my imagination floats free, and the lines from The Song of Wandering Aengus capture, as nothing else does, an escape into a world of fantasy and desire, where fish turn to dream lovers, and apples grow on the moon.
As a poet, I know only too well that poems don't always sprout wings and fly. But those that do are immortal. A line or two of poetry can sum up a landscape, a heartbreak, a joy. When I am walking the streets of Dublin, Louis MacNeice does it: "The bare bones of a fanlight/Over a hungry door . . . her seedy elegance,/With her gentle veils of rain/And all her ghosts that walk . . . And the sun comes up in the morning/Like barley-sugar on the water" (from Dublin). Pondering the darker side of human relationships, Oscar Wilde speaks out of his misery and compassion in Reading Gaol: "Yet each man that the Irish word for poet - file - also means "seer."
Good poetry is sensual, and the sounds of lines from poems in Irish live evocatively in the memory. There's the poignant ending of Sean Mac Fheorais's M'Uncal - the finality of the grave-digger's shovel: "Ag sluaistiu cre ar a chonair". Or there's the excitement of a lover's touch - "caithnini ar mo chroiceann" - in Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's Blodewedd: "Oiread is barra do mheire a bhualadh orm/is blathaim."
The best poems leave us with our uncertainty, unable to make simple judgments.
"I am going back into war," writes Medbh McGuckian in The Albert Chain, in response to the end of the IRA's first ceasefire: "Like a dead man/attached to the soil that covers him,/I have fallen where no judgement can touch me."
She questions her own "unjust pursuit of justice" - as Seamus Heaney's powerful 1975 collection, North, questioned the way we look at victims of violence: a mixture of "outrage" and understanding by "artful voyeurs" who too easily begin to revere a martyr. Such poetry, by not seeking to nail things down, can let our complexities breathe. "And there was peace because the sea is blind," writes Brendan Kennelly in Cromwell of how only the sea will accept Cromwell's body, without judgement or outrage. How that line ambushes me, bringing tears to my eyes. And Yeats on the absurd contradictions of love: "For love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement;/For nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent."
We have a rich tradition of poetry, back through the compelling lament of Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill for her murdered husband (Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire), to the anonymous poet who satirises the snooty woman with her three cows (Bean na dTri mBo), the medieval lays of Mad Sweeney, the playful Pangur Ban, the elemental Song of Amergin and the archetypal Hag of Beare.
Irish poets roamed the land, singing for their supper (as in Blind Raftery's famous line "Is mise Rafteiri, an file"), or protesting at native Irish civilisation crushed by English colonists: "Our land, our shelter, our woods and our level ways/are pawned for a penny by a crew from the land of Dover" (Aogan O Rathaille, translated by Thomas Kinsella). Irish poets published anonymous and passionate nationalist verses (like Oscar Wilde's mother, pen-name Speranza, a best-seller in her day); or, like Francis Ledwidge, died young in the Great War ("Even the roses spilt on youth's red mouth/Will soon blow down the road all roses go").
Irish poets have chosen as their subjects the romance of a secret, far-flung meeting (John Montague's All Legendary Obstacles) or the symbolic resonance of mushrooms surviving in the dark (Derek Mahon's On a Disused Shed in Co. Wexford). Titles run through the mind, fondled like a well-used deck of cards: The Yellow Bittern, The Mid- night Court, Stony Grey Soil, Any Woman, The Lady's Dressing Room.
Memory is selective, clinging to that which feels true. Poems, whether rhymed in the old oral way of remembering, or written down as free verse, repeat themselves in our consciousness because they express something changeless about who we are. All good poetry does this, but there is something special about that which is our own, summing up our history and identity, our sense of place, in voices more numerous and rich than any other nation of our size can claim.
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