The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion [1st ed.] 9783030532413, 9783030532420

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxvi
Introduction: The Modern Irish Sonnet (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 1-23
Art and Artifice (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 25-67
Sonnet Sequences (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 69-112
Conversation (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 113-156
The Domestic (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 157-189
The Amatory Sonnet (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 191-214
Conclusion (Tara Guissin-Stubbs)....Pages 215-232
Back Matter ....Pages 233-256

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

The Modern Irish Sonnet Revision and Rebellion Tara Guissin-Stubbs

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

Series Editors Claire A. Culleton Department of English Kent State University Kent, OH, USA Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s focus on Irish and Irish American literature and culture contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747

Tara Guissin-Stubbs

The Modern Irish Sonnet Revision and Rebellion

Tara Guissin-Stubbs Department for Continuing Education and Kellogg College University of Oxford Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-030-53241-3 ISBN 978-3-030-53242-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Elly Godfroy/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Avshi and Arke. I love you all of it.

Preface: What Is a Sonnet?

To ask whether a given modern poem counts as a sonnet—to ask the question in modern terms—is to ask what we learn by calling it one.1

The last twenty years have seen a profusion of publications on the sonnet, of which the majority have been anthologies accompanied by Prefaces that aim to define just what a ‘sonnet’ might mean now and what it has meant historically. These anthologies include Don Paterson’s 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (1999); Phillis Levin’s The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (2001); Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch’s The Making of a Sonnet (2008); Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s The Art of the Sonnet (2010); and Jeff Hilson’s The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (2010), which sets about dismantling some of the structural and thematic assumptions of the form. Almost all of these anthologies provide a potted history of the sonnet form, with all agreeing that it developed first in the middle of the thirteenth century in Italy, and that, in the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, brought it to England. At this stage, the octet and sestet pattern of the ‘Italian’ sonnet (8 lines followed by 6), which put emphasis on the volta (or turn) between lines 8 and 9, or thereabouts, was replaced by the ‘English’ sonnet’s emphasis on the concluding couplet, so that this sonnet more often divided into three quatrains and a closing pair. This device, according to Burt and Mikics, gave Wyatt’s sonnets in particular ‘an epigrammatic sting’,2 and

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for Surrey, in John Fuller’s mind, acted as a ‘confessed epitaph’, making ‘good use of the last-minute turn’.3 In the Italian tradition, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) and Dante (Dante Alighieri, 1265– 1321) are credited with honing the form but are not its originators; in the English tradition, Shakespeare fulfils a similar function. Levin states that ‘by the time Petrarch and Shakespeare met the sonnet, each in his own era, the form was already prevalent, an excessively imitated fashion. Their names are thereby associated with specific patterns that they perfected but did not themselves invent’.4 The story of the sonnet, then, is difficult to pin down to a particular poet or to a particular moment. In A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet , Gertrude White and Joan Rosen claim that the first ‘legitimate’ sonnet was composed by the thirteenth-century Tuscan poet Fra Guittone d’Arezzo ‘in the form now familiar as the “Italian” sonnet’.5 More often, the lawyer Giacomo da Lentini is credited as having ‘invented’ the sonnet—‘[s]ome time in the mid 1230s, at the Sicilian Court of Emperor Frederick II’, as A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth put it.6 Michael Spiller notes that Lentini was the emperor’s notary and legal assistant, and that he composed 25 sonnets with distinct rhyming patterns, either abab abab cde cde or abab abab ccd ccd.7 Nevertheless, even these early sonnets often avoided the same rules that they appeared to have established; as White and Rosen point out, these poets were never ‘the purists some English and American critics of a later day supposed; and variations, especially in the rhymes of the sestet, were common’.8 Here lies the crux when thinking about the sonnet: the further back we go, the more rather than fewer the exceptions we find to any rules that we all think we know. Therefore, where Levin sums up the sonnet as ‘a monument of praise, a field of play, a chamber of sudden change’,9 we find this summary couched in the language of alteration, the form refusing to satisfy its own epigram. Some address this issue by claiming that there is a ‘basic’ sonnet against which other sonnets are written and measured. Spiller uses this notion to set up a system of ‘variations’: [T]here is by custom a basic or simple sonnet, of which the others are variations; it has proportion, being in eight and six, and extension, being in ten- or eleven-syllable lines, and duration, having fourteen of them. Any poem which infringes one of these parameters will remind us of a sonnet quite closely; a poem which infringes two will be difficult to accommodate,

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but we will probably try to establish some procedure to account for the deformation; and a poem which infringes all three will not be recognisable as a sonnet at all, and we will regard it as something else unless there is a contextual pressure.10

It might be tempting to use Spiller’s system as a template for evaluating sonnets; it is certainly more practical than Burt and Mikics’s thesis that ‘[t]o ask whether a given modern poem counts as a sonnet […] is to ask what we learn by calling it one’.11 And other anthologists seem to agree that poets need to learn the rules in order to break them; Don Paterson notes, for example, that ‘every really good sonnet seems to ignore at least one of the so-called “rules” governing the form’. Putting aesthetic judgement at the centre of his assessment, Paterson claims that ‘a great sonnet […] will often surprise you by doing at least one thing it’s not supposed to do. Though we should remember that the poet had to learn the “rules” before they could deliberately break one of them’.12 On the other hand, the rather militaristic language of Spiller’s claim (‘infringes’, ‘parameters’), with its connotations of mutation (‘deformation’), points to a judicial demarcation of the form. Paterson remarks on this tendency when he notes that, ‘[a]ll we can say with any certainty is that sonnets often demonstrate certain characteristics. But these characteristics are frequently described as if they were laws’.13 Yet Paterson’s evaluations of sonnets see him passing judgement on their quality according to a mysterious system that balances a sonnet’s tendencies towards conformity and rebellion. Such apparent contradictions have accompanied the sonnet from its origins to the present day. What, then, does a sonnet look like? Paterson has one basic requirement for including a ‘sonnet’ in his anthology: that it has fourteen lines. This is the ‘only qualification for entry’. At the same time, though, as Paterson notes: ‘if people can tell you one thing about a sonnet, they’ll tell you it’s a fourteen-line poem. But poets will tell you that a fourteen-line poem isn’t necessarily a sonnet’.14 Burt and Mikics consider the history of the term itself, noting that ‘[b]y 1800 the word “sonnet”, in English, had come to mean, almost always, a fourteen-line poem in pentameter divided by rhyme into units of 8 and 6 (Italian or Petrarchan) or into 4,4,4, and 2 (Shakespearean or English)’. Before 1800, however, the situation wasn’t so clear: as Burt and Mikics put it, ‘though “sonnet” had its modern meaning, and its fourteen-line norm, for some Renaissance writers, others applied the word to short songlike poems’. This helps to

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explain why, ‘[t]hough a posthumous collection of [John] Donne’s lyric poems was entitled Songs and Sonets [sic], none of the poems in it counts as a sonnet by modern definitions’.15 Meanwhile for Spiller, the sonnet is a ‘prescribed’ form, of which its fourteen lines are an integral component. ‘Identity is formal, not thematic, as it is in the tragedy or ode’, he argues, because the poem ‘must finish after fourteen lines. The poet may choose to write another one, of course, as often as he or she likes, but the poem itself ends at a point not controlled by the author’s will’.16 If we turn our attention away from the fourteen-line appearance of the sonnet to focus instead on the volta (or ‘turn’), the situation becomes more complicated still. White and Rosen place the ‘thematic’ at the centre of their reading of the sonnet, which for them is identified by turns in poetic posture or argument: turns that might come in the expected space between line 8 or 9 of the ‘Italian’ sonnet, or in the closing epigram of the ‘English’ sonnet, or in other places entirely. Indeed, they go so far as to assert that ‘[t]he fact is that neither rhyme pattern nor length nor metre, as such, but rather internal principles of intellectual and emotional structure identify the sonnet’.17 As if in agreement, Burt and Mikics suggest that central to our modern understanding of the form is ‘the further twist that Shakespearean form often puts in the last two lines’.18 John Fuller meanwhile argues that as ‘[t]he essence of the sonnet’s form is the unequal relationship between octave and sestet’, this ‘is of far greater significance than the fact that there are fourteen lines in the sonnet’.19 In The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet (2000), Morton D. Richs analyses how and why a shift occurs around the expected location of the turn, in order to show that while ‘[t]here is no one correct reading of a sonnet [,] there are some incorrect readings’.20 Again, we find the language of judgement and legitimacy creeping in. The opening, startling lines of David Wheatley’s poem ‘Sonnet’ (2006) suggest that, at least in contemporary terms, a sonnet can (and will) be about anything: stretch pants hubcaps breakbeat loan shark

cashback pound shop store card tailfin souped-up Escort ringtone dole day cheques cashed small change rat boys bag snatched21

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Yet the list-like accumulation of items in Wheatley’s almost obstinately rhythmical trochaic lines suggests a larger exploration: a development of a conceit (or several conceits) that builds up an impression of a particular lifestyle and tells the story of a particular life (or lives). We might even go so far as to say that Wheatley’s ‘Sonnet’ foregrounds the notion of the conceit, which Burt and Mikics define as ‘a series of striking, governing images’.22 Is it, then, that contemporary sonnets have moved far away from their early themes and purposes; or that there is still a singularity of purpose at the core of every sonnet; or, even, that our assumptions of this same singularity are shaped by a lack of historical awareness? Burt and Mikics make several attempts to characterise sonnets thematically: as those concerning ‘romantic or erotic love’ (amatory sonnets); as ‘poems that mourn or commemorate a dead person’ (elegiac sonnets); those that draw ‘on the pastoral tradition’; and those that urge ‘connections between the sonnet and the classical past’.23 Others are keen to stress the thematic (if not formal) inclusiveness of the sonnet; Spiller, for example, contends that ‘[s]onnets are all alike in form; but they can be, and were, used to talk about anything at all’.24 Even Burt and Mikics qualify their earlier claim by describing how, having written almost 500 sonnets by the end of his life (in 1850), Wordsworth had shaped the sonnet into ‘a default form into which poets could pour almost anything’.25 Little surprise, then, that Wheatley’s contemporary sonnet ‘Sonnet’ appears to enact a debate between an exclusive, inherited formal tradition and a looser thematic inclusivity. Tonally, too, the sonnet encompasses its own apparent paradoxes. Its chequered history—as a form that had its zenith in the Early Modern period, with around 4000 sonnets being composed in England between 1580 and 1600 alone26 —sees the sonnet moving between the confessional and the courtly (in Eavan Boland’s mind the sonnet ‘bent to empires and loitered in courts’27 ), and between private love and public passion. The poet and courtier Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (1591) has long been associated with the court of Elizabeth I and the attendant ‘cult of Gloriana’, which as Roy C. Strong points out ‘was skilfully created to buttress public order’ and ‘to replace the preReformation externals of religion, the cult of the Virgin and saints with their attendant images, processions, ceremonies and secular rejoicing’.28 It is unsurprising, then, that Sidney’s sonnet sequence, with its series of conceits praising secular love, would have appealed to Elizabeth I’s court. In comparison Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), composer of what

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is now known as the ‘Spenserian’ sonnet (a twist on the ‘English’ sonnet (commonly abab cdcd efef gg ) in abab bcbc cdcd ee 29 ), was made Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Arthur Lord Grey, in 1580. For him, then, poetry and politics were always entwined: a factor that, we will see, often troubles and challenges modern and contemporary Irish poets when they come to grapple with the sonnet form. Burt and Mikics also underline the importance, in the mid-seventeenth century, of John Milton’s satirical and political sonnets to a wider understanding of the contexts of the form, arguing that Milton’s sonnets showed how the form ‘could be serious, or satirical, or self-mocking; it could set the standard for a national language; could exult, or cast itself down’.30 The sonnet, then, is (and has been for some centuries) a place of thematic, tonal and contextual disagreement—a place for debate, a place for discussion, a place for argument and even a place for indecision. Consequentially, the history of the sonnet becomes the history of these debates; the form is a marker of both its own history and of wider histories. When we ask what the sonnet is about, then, we might be tempted to say that it is about its own history; this is why we find so many sonnets on sonnets, but also why we find so many modern and contemporary sonnets engaging with the present moment in either professed or assumed relation to the past. As Burt and Mikics summarise it, ‘[b]ecause we recognize the sonnet now—faster than we recognize any other form—as an inherited form, one with a history, the sonnet form works especially well when a poet wants to remind us that the present is surprisingly like the past’.31 This is a lot of pressure to put on a mere fourteen lines (or thereabouts); no wonder, then, that the sonnet can often ‘cast itself down’ under the weight of its thematic, contextual or interpretative burdens. Is the sonnet a visual form, and oral form, or a written form? Poets and critics tend to agree that the term ‘sonnet’ is derived from the Italian for ‘little song’ (‘sonetto’, later ‘sonnetto’); the Oxford English Dictionary additionally traces the term to the Anglo-Norman and Middle French ‘sonet’ (and then ‘sonnet’), meaning ‘song’ or ‘sung melody’.32 It also gives two early uses of the term in English: the first as a ‘song, tune or ballad; (also) music’ from the late fourteenth century; and the second as a ‘poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically written in iambic pentameter, and usually having a single theme’, crediting its first use to around the middle of the sixteenth century.33 However, when one starts to tell the story of how this term became associated with the form that we now recognise as ‘the

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sonnet’, there is little consensus to be found. The OED acknowledges, for example, that ‘the more general use of the word’—to mean ‘[a]ny short poem or piece of verse; (in early use) esp. a lyrical love poem’—‘appears to have been very common in the late sixteenth and early to mid seventeenth centuries’.34 In 101 Sonnets, Paterson hedges his bets, contending that while the form had its roots in song, its shape on the page gives it a visually pleasing appearance that somehow replicates the, often mystical, harmonies of music. Therefore, while on the one hand the fact that the sonnet arrived ‘already broken up into quatrains and two tercets’ ‘tells us something about its genealogy’, as ‘it was most likely borrowed or adapted from existing popular song-form’, on the other: ‘[a]s poetry moved slowly off the tongue and onto the page, the visual appeal of an approximately square field of black text on a sheet of white paper must have been impossible to resist’. Paterson even contends that the sonnet is ‘a small square poem. It presents both poet and the reader with a vivid symmetry that is the perfect emblem of the unity of meaning a sonnet seeks to embody’.35 Others view the transition from the oral to the visual as not so straightforward. In so doing, they incorporate two further aspects of the form: as something spoken, but also as something that is recorded, or written down. For Cousins and Howarth, the fact that the sonnet form was ‘invented’ by a lawyer is integral to our understanding. ‘From its legal beginnings’, they contend, ‘the sonnet brought together music, desire, and the arguing of a case, through the turn or volta, which allows the sonnet to state more than one point of view, change its mind and adapt an interlocutor’s’.36 Yet, like sonneteers themselves, critics use the form to draw out what they find most interesting: be its apparent ‘square’ appearance on the page; its connection with the legal world; or its relation to song-form (several, for example, emphasise the formal relationship between the octave of the Italian sonnet and the strambotto, an Italian peasant form37 ). Still others upturn this by using the lyrical qualities of the sonnet to emphasise its difference from music, so that it can embody the qualities both of sound (deriving from the ‘sonic’ roots of the term) and of silence, the latter echoing its written characteristics. For Amy Billone, nineteenth-century women poets were drawn to the sonnet because it could encapsulate these apparent contradictions, allowing them to mediate between private and public realms and means of expression: ‘the double function of sonnets, and, by extension, of all lyric poems’, she claims, is that they are at once ‘soundless and harmonic “little songs”’.

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Sonneteers like Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett, and Christina Rossetti, Billone argues, explored the sonnet form in order ‘to posit both muteness and volubility through style and theme’.38 Therefore, the sonnet comes to represent microcosmically the challenges and assertions of the lyric. But if the sonnet is a historical form, and a record of that history, then its written-ness is central to our modern inheritance and understanding. Burts and Mikics note that because ‘writers of sonnets learn, pre-eminently, from other writers of sonnets’, it follows that ‘even the strangest contemporary sonnet draws on, and works with, the form in all its variety, with all its available ties to the past’. The sonnet might be a poet’s poem, then, but it’s also a reader’s poem—with the poet acting in both roles simultaneously. It is the written element of the form, according to some, that lends the sonnet both its popularity and its notoriety; Burt and Mikics put this most forcefully, contending that throughout history the sonnet ‘was no song. It was asymmetrical, suited to meditative logic rather than music. The troubadours sang their poems; the sonneteer composed his for private enjoyment’.39 The sonnet certainly retains to the present day the potential to be both public and private. What should we look for when encountering the sonnet in English? Perhaps what gives the sonnet its essence is its own capacity to contain apparent oppositions: at every level of scrutiny, the sonnet enacts its own dialogue with itself and with other sonnets, poems, and voices. Levin asserts that even the debate about ‘symmetry’ governing the sonnet form is part of this structure of opposition: Whatever its outward appearance, by virtue of its infrastructure the sonnet is symmetrical. Opposition resides in its form the way load and support contend in a great building. Being dialectical, the sonnet is divided by nature: its patterns of division multiply perspective and meaning.40

The sonnet, in its contained but expansive form, in its inclusive but exclusive theme, in its private application and (often) public performance, encapsulates the contrarieties of poetry, which in turn aim to reflect the contrarieties of life beyond the poem. The ‘meaning’ of the sonnet, then, is that there is never one meaning either to a sonnet or (analogously and representatively) to a poem. It is perhaps unsurprising that Paterson claims of the sonnet that it ‘might be one of the greatest achievements of human

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ingenuity’;41 the sonnet both encapsulates and celebrates the contrarieties of human existence, reflected through and by a form that represents poetry at its most concise and concentrated. ∗ ∗ ∗ When we move into the ‘modern’ age of the sonnet—loosely defined in this study as the turn of the twentieth century to the present—we need to consider the continued abundance of the form, while being sure to avoid narrow or confining readings. Whereas on the one hand Burt and Mikics contend that ‘[t]he sonnet has more varieties, and more readers, today than ever before’, on the other they note that while ‘its contemporary versions are self-consciously traditional’, ‘others’ are ‘decidedly impure’.42 Any critical assessment of the modern sonnet will need to understand that the poem under scrutiny might include either of these features—or incorporate both simultaneously. At the same time, because of the twisting and uncertain history of the sonnet, a contemporary critic needs to be aware of the impossibility of knowing how a poet might have first encountered it; of tracing a particular sonnet to a particular tradition, or to a thematic or formal arrangement. This book, therefore, agrees with Burt and Mikics that: It is simply not true that all modern sonneteers look back to Petrarch, to Petrarchanism, and to anti-Petrarchanism, or that they must choose between putatively English echoes of Shakespeare and putatively Italian, hence ‘foreign’ forms. Nor is it true that the twentieth-century sonnet is, of its nature, more personal than other lyric forms.43

The present study, with its focus on Irish sonnets written from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, will be particularly attuned to notions of national genealogy within the sonnet form. However, it will also be open to the idea that a poet might not choose to adopt a particular form but might come across it by accident; or even that she/he might discover and adopt a form for reasons that exceed the assumptions made about ‘English echoes of Shakespeare’ or ‘“foreign” forms’ (this latter phrase resounding with the question of just what might constitute the ‘foreign’ within Irish poetry). The time is right for a stocktaking of the Irish sonnet, not only because, as Alan Gillis has pointed out, Ireland has seen a ‘proliferation’ of the form ‘in the latter half of the twentieth century and onwards’—so that

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‘[r]ecent Irish poetry’ has become ‘saturated with sonnets’44 —but also because Irish writers’ manipulation of the form tells a complex and fascinating story of the ways in which the Irish poetic tradition has been refashioned over that same period. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish writers have leapt on the sonnet form because its contrarieties and contradictions enable them to work through the contrarieties and contradictions of Irish poetic identity. Much more needs to be said on the Irish sonnet, both to stake a claim for a sonnet tradition that is distinctly, and sometimes provocatively, ‘Irish’, and to fill in the gaps in the story. Gillis’s essay ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’ (2012) is certainly a valuable starting point, and like him I use the term ‘modern Irish sonnet’ to refer to the period since the renaissance of the Irish sonnet with W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh up to the present day (as Gillis points out, ‘one finds few sonnets before Yeats’).45 And the early sonnets of Louis MacNeice are worthy of mention too: his ‘Sunday Morning’ (1933) is one of the most anthologised sonnets of modern Irish poetry.46 Helen Vendler has carried out some careful close readings of Yeats’s sonnets and almost-sonnets in His Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form.47 Tom Walker has taken up Gillis’s mantle, in stressing the significance of Paul Muldoon’s contribution to the modern Irish sonnet, to carry out some excellent work on the influence of Shakespeare’s sonnets on Paul Muldoon’s prodigious output, in relation to Heaney’s sonnets in particular.48 Thirty years ago, Ronald Marken discussed in detail ‘the political implications of the Irish appropriation of a form long associated with English literature’, with emphasis placed on Heaney’s and Muldoon’s political sonnets of the 1970s and 1980s.49 Indeed, as the present study will show, several critics have given sustained attention to Heaney’s use of the sonnet form. Focusing his lens wider, Stephen Regan’s recent study The Sonnet (2019) includes a chapter on ‘The Irish sonnet’, including readings of Yeats, Kavanagh, Heaney, Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and Eavan Boland, and offering a brief historical timeline.50 But there is much left to do: to discuss the inheritances of the Irish sonnet from Yeats, Kavanagh, and MacNeice as well as from British, French, and Italian sonneteers; to suggest some useful thematic approaches to reading some of the many sonnets to come out of Ireland over the last century; to argue for the place of non-political, or more politically nuanced, appropriations of the sonnet form within contemporary Irish poetry; and, most importantly, to give equal space to the many and varied sonnets written by Irish women.

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It is the complexity, contrariety and opposition of the sonnet form that appeals to modern Irish poets. I claimed earlier that the sonnet form is a marker of both its own history and of wider histories. Despite, or perhaps even because of, its inheritance from English and Italian traditions, the sonnet within Irish poetry becomes a marker of wider debates about what constitutes ‘Irishness’ in Ireland and beyond. And the Irish sonneteer manipulates the inherited contrarieties of the sonnet to make surprising claims about modern poetry and modernity in general. The Irish sonnet, therefore, becomes a place for argument and debate; and a locale for revision and rebellion, for anecdote and anarchy. Oxford, UK

Tara Guissin-Stubbs

Notes 1. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 22. 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 16. 4. Phillis Levin (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (London and New York: Penguin, 2001), p. xxv. 5. Gertrude M. White and Joan G. Rosen, A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (New York: Scribner, 1972), p. 1. 6. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 1. 7. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 13: ‘da Lentino’ is sometimes spelled ‘da Lentini’. 8. White and Rosen, A Moment’s Monument, p. 1. 9. Levin, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, p. xxv. 10. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, pp. ix–x. 11. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 2. 12. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), p. xii. 13. Ibid., p. xi. 14. Ibid., p. xii; p. xi. 15. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 16; p. 15; p. 16. 16. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, p. 2. 17. White and Rosen, A Moment’s Monument, p. 2. 18. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 3.

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19. Fuller, The Sonnet, p. 2. 20. Morton D. Rich, The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), p. 7. 21. David Wheatley, ‘Sonnet’, in Mocker (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2006), p. 26, ll.1–4. 22. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 12. 23. Ibid., p. 3. 24. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, pp. ix–x. 25. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 17. 26. Ibid., p. 12. 27. Eavan Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, in Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (eds.), The Making of a Sonnet (New York and London: Norton 2008), pp. 43–48 (p. 45). 28. Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 16. 29. Hirsch and Boland provide a useful breakdown of the sonnet form in English in ‘The Sonnet in Summary’, The Making of a Sonnet, p. 49; they do not, however, discuss the Spenserian form. 30. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 5. 31. Ibid., p. 25. 32. See OED online (www.oed.com) ‘sonnet’, n., etymology. 33. OED online, ‘sonnet’, definitions 1 and 2. 34. OED online, ‘sonnet’, definition 3; and note to definition 2. 35. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, pp. xvi–xvii; p. xvi; p. xvi. 36. Cousins and Howarth, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, p. 1. 37. Burt and Mikics claim that the ‘octave was borrowed from the strambotto’ (The Art of the Sonnet, p. 7); while Cousins and Howarth note that ‘by way of its early affinity to the strambotto [the sonnet] bears kinship to the epigram’ (The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, p. 1). 38. Amy C. Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2007), pp. 11, 6. 39. Burts and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 3; p. 4; p.7. 40. Levin, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, p. xxv. 41. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, p. xxvii. 42. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 5. 43. Ibid., p. 20. 44. Gillis, Alan, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 567–587 (p. 567). 45. Ibid., p. 567. 46. MacNeice’s ‘Sunday Morning’ appears in Paterson’s 101 Sonnets, p. 94; and in Hirsch and Boland’s The Making of a Sonnet, p. 215.

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47. See Helen Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition: Yeats at Sonnets’, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–181. 48. See Tom Walker, ‘“an inconstant stay”: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Nicholas Taylor-Collins and Stanley van der Ziel (eds.), Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 49–70. 49. Ronald Marken, ‘Paul Muldoon’s “Juggling a Red-Hot Half-Brick in an Old Sock”: Poets in Ireland Renovate the English-Language Sonnet’, ÉireIreland 24.1 (Spring 1989): 79–91 (79). 50. See Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Chapter 4, pp. 158–219.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a labour of love, not least because I got married, and had a child, while I was conceiving and writing it. I have to thank my wonderful husband, Dr. Avshalom Guissin-Stubbs, for discussing the finer points of the sonnet with me, and for his unending patience and kindness; and my beautiful son Arye, for being a good sleeper and letting Mummy write her book around his naps. In this time of uncertainty and change, I want also to thank my amazing parents, and my fiercely intelligent brother, for their continued stoicism and humour: I admire them very much. I am very lucky to have great, supportive friends, but I want particularly to thank Dr. Francis Leneghan, who reminded me of Kavanagh’s brilliant sonnets all those years ago; Clare Mackenzie, for showing far more interest in my work than any friend should; Rory Melough, for the chats about poetry; and Níamh Simpson, who reminds me always to look for the humour in things. Lastly, Jane Haigh provided countless cups of tea, brilliant conversation and (most importantly) babysitting when I needed a chance to think. I taught a class on ‘The Sonnet’ at my Department, Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education (OUDCE), in 2017. My wonderful, challenging students helped formulate lots of the ideas that have ended up in this book. Dr. Ben Keatinge, a fine sonneteer himself, encouraged my thoughts on the Irish sonnet by publishing my essay on Richard Murphy in Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy

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(Cork UP, 2019). Thanks are due to the English Faculty and the Humanities Division at Oxford University, the Rothermere American Institute, and Liz Sanders and Ingrid Locatelli of OUDCE, for helping me access funding for the project, including the REF Strategic Support Fund, the Returning Carers’ Fund and the OUDCE Research Fund. I would like to thank my colleagues at OUDCE and Kellogg College, and particularly Drs. Sandie Byrne and Ben Grant, and Professor Jonathan Michie, for their professionalism and kindness. Thanks to the generosity of Jim and Kate Blankenship, I was able to work on early drafts of the book in the South of France. Finally, gratitude and admiration go to my brilliant research assistant, Dr. Hannah Simpson, for her eye for detail, endless patience and forensic mind. Many thanks go to the following publishers, journals, agents and authors for permission to reproduce material in the book: to Cork University Press for republication of material from my book chapter, ‘What price stone? Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone’, in Ben Keatinge (ed.), Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (2019); to the Poetry Ireland Review for excerpts from Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, David Wheatley, ‘From Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan’, and Richard Murphy, ‘Extract: Transgressing into Poetry’ and ‘Excerpt: Notes for Sonnets’; to Mary O’Malley for extracts from O’Malley, ‘The Pearl Sonnet’, from Asylum Road (2001); to Bernard O’Donoghue for extracts from O’Donoghue, ‘The Potato-Gatherers’, from Outliving (2003); to the Four Courts Press, for permission to cite from Richard Nugent, Cynthia, ed. Angela Lynch (2010); to Andrew McNeillie of the Clutag Press, for permission to cite from Richard Murphy, In Search of Poetry (2017) and from Alan Gillis, The Green Rose (2010); to Iggy McGovern for extracts from McGovern, A Mystic Dream of 4 (2013); to David Higham Associates for extracts from Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (Faber, 2007); to Syracuse University Press for extracts from ‘Interview’ with Brendan Kennelly by R. Pine, in James P. Myers Jr. (ed.), Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Literary Supplement (1999); to the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency for excerpts from Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Penguin, 2005) and for selections from Patrick Kavanagh’s archival materials at University College Dublin; to Anne Haverty, for permission to cite from Anthony Cronin, The End of the Modern World (New Island Books, 2016), The End of the Modern World (Raven Arts Press, 1989), Collected Poems (New Island Books, 2004), and A Question of Modernity

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(Secker and Walburg, 1966); to Bloodaxe Books, for permission to cite from Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2017), Richard Murphy, The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952–2012 (2013), and Brendan Kennelly, Cromwell (2007); to the University College Dublin Press, for excerpts from Harry Clifton, Ireland and its Elsewheres (2015); to Salmon Poetry, for extracts from ‘Interview with Ciaran Carson’ from In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (2002); to Faber and Faber Ltd., for permission to print from Marianne Moore, Complete Poems, ed. Clive Driver (1984), Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (2003), Brian Friel, Translations (1981), Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), and T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in Collected Poems, 1909– 1962 (2002); to Colin Smythe, Ltd., for extracts from Lady Gregory, ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, in Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After, ed. Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe (1987); and to Enitharmon Editions Ltd. for excerpts from Paul Muldoon, ‘Le Flanneur’ and ‘Pip and Magwitch’ from Songs and Sonnets (2012). Permission to quote from W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, courtesy of A P Watt at United Agents on behalf of Caitriona Yeats. Selections from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto and Windus are reproduced by permission of Random House Group Ltd.©2011. Extracts from The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Blackstaff Press, 1991), are reproduced by permission of Blackstaff Press on behalf of the Estate of John Hewitt. Excerpts from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney. Copyright ©2006 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Excerpts from Opened Ground: Poems 1966– 1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright ©1998. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ‘Heroic’: Copyright © 1998 by Eavan Boland; ‘Woman Posing’: Copyright © 1980 by Eavan Boland; ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’: Copyright © 1980 by Eavan Boland; ‘Growing Up’: Copyright © 1987 by Eavan Boland, from NEW COLLECTED POEMS by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. With thanks to Carcanet Press for processing the following permissions: Eavan Boland, from New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005); Mary O’Malley, from The Boning Hall (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002); Paula Meehan, from Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2009); and Sinéad Morrissey, from The State of the Prisons (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005) and Parallax (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2013).

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Many thanks to Peter Fallon, Director of The Gallery Press (www. gallerypress.com), for processing the following permissions. Extracts from Mocker (2006) by David Wheatley reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Misery Hill (2000) by David Wheatley reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Selected Poems 1982–2004 (2004) by Peter Sirr reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from The Rooms (2010) by Peter Sirr reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from The Brazen Serpent (1994) by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001) by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from The Second Voyage (1986) by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Booterstown (1994) by Frank McGuinness reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from New and Selected Poems (1991) by Michael Hartnett reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press. Extracts from Collected Poems (2001) by Michael Hartnett reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press. Extracts from Other People’s Houses (1999) by Vona Groarke reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Flight (2002) by Vona Groarke reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Dolmen Hill (1977) by John Ennis reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. Extracts from Selected Poems (2001) by Ciaran Carson reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press. Extracts from The Twelfth of Never (1998) by Ciaran Carson reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press. Extracts from For All We Know (2008) by Ciaran Carson reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press. Extracts from Here Comes the Night (2010) by Alan Gillis reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press.

Contents

1

Introduction: The Modern Irish Sonnet 1.1 The Sonnet and the ‘Irish’ Writer 1.2 Revision and Rebellion

1 8 13

2

Art 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

and Artifice The Sonnet as Sonnet Writing, Speaking, and ‘the Language Issue’ ‘Nothing Beside Remains’: Architectural Sonnets The ‘Sonnet Houses’ of Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone 2.5 ‘Hereness’ and ‘Thisness’ in Ekphrastic Sonnets 2.6 Conclusion: Art, Artlessness and Artifice

25 27 32 37

Sonnet Sequences 3.1 Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ Sonnet Cycle 3.2 Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets 3.3 Anthony Cronin’s The End of the Modern World 3.4 Conclusion: ‘Psychic Space’ and ‘Slight Returns’ in Sequences from Cronin to Muldoon

69 74 79 89

Conversation 4.1 Ciaran Carson, Edmund Spenser, and The Twelfth of Never

113

3

4

41 49 56

98

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4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Mary O’Malley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and male voices Ventriloquism: Paul Muldoon and Brendan Kennelly Dialogue: Leontia Flynn and Paul Muldoon Conclusion: Speaking to Others

125 132 139 147

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The 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Domestic Nosy Neighbours and Uninvited Guests The Domestic and the Everyday ‘Local Rows’: The Politics of the Domestic Conclusion: The Familiar and the Strange

157 159 169 174 183

6

The Amatory Sonnet 6.1 My Funny Valentine: Intimacy and Humour in the Sonnets of Paula Meehan 6.2 The ‘Passionate Transitory’: Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know (2008) 6.3 Conclusion: Desire, Sex and History

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Conclusion 7.1 The Sonnet’s Insufficiency 7.2 ‘In All the Mayhem’: a Chronology for the Modern Irish Sonnet?

191 195 201 207 215 215 223

Bibliography

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Index

245

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Modern Irish Sonnet

I waver between poles of order and disorder, needing and loving both, trying to keep a precarious balance in a conflicted life. The sonnet may seem a tomb on which I try to carve words that sing of love and the desire to make it last. […] The sonnet confesses a limited faith in words written as epitaphs that may achieve, not immortality, but a resurrection of the love they express each time they are read.1

Mayo-born poet Richard Murphy’s extended commentary on the composition of his fifty-sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985) offers useful metaphors for the practice of sonnet-writing. Though Murphy’s stance tends to be more subjective, more autobiographically nuanced, than others’, his claims are analogous to theirs. For instance, in the introduction to their anthology The Making of a Sonnet (2008), Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland describe the sonnet through a series of opposing factors: ‘[t]here is a sense of permanence and fragility, of spaciousness and constriction, about the sonnet form’.2 Some go so far as to claim that these apparently opposing ‘poles’ within the sonnet render it the form most representative of poetry in general. The poet and critic Jeff Hilson claims that he began to write sonnets out of his own ‘opposition’ to a form that has become, over time, ‘virtually a synecdoche for the poetic tradition itself, its most venerable and enduring object’. The hearing of ‘vulnerable’ behind ‘venerable’ is telling, as Hilson describes the desire

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_1

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of experimental poets to challenge the sonnet’s apparently ‘hegemonic’ dominance of poetic culture.3 Murphy’s claim that ‘[t]he sonnet may seem a tomb on which I try to carve words that sing of love and the desire to make it last’ sounds a note of fatalism that has echoed through the sonnet at least since P. B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Shelley’s poem embeds a proclamation, carved on the ‘pedestal’ of a ‘shattered’ statue of a long-forgotten king, within a larger narrative concerning the arrogance of the artist who believes he might ‘last’: ‘“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”’.4 Is Murphy’s almost-hopeful poet a fool? His evocation of ‘Ozymandias’ hints that this could be a possibility, both through ‘carving’ words upon a silent ‘tomb’ in a desperate bid to be heard, to make something ‘last’, and in the knowledge that by writing sonnets, he is stepping on hallowed ground. Murphy describes this position as ‘being no more than a poetic handyman, to adapt a structure perfected by consummate sonneteers’,5 so that throughout his commentary, ‘the sonnet’ appears to attain its own identity and power. In his essay ‘My Own Acquaintance’, meanwhile, Edward Hirsch claims of the sonnet that, ‘it worked on me before I worked on it’, noting: ‘[t]here was a kind of submission in it—a coping mechanism—that consoled me’.6 There is a tussle of wills between ‘the sonnet’ and the poet, to which the poet, eventually, acquiesces. But it is not the form alone that holds the power; it is the tradition, too. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth claim that ‘[t]oday the sonnet is probably the most widely read, taught, practised and written-about of lyrical forms’,7 but its most frequently-evoked models are white, western, and male—Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spenser, Wordsworth and Shelley to name a few. This state of play encapsulates the sonnet’s freedom and its restraints. Indeed, while Cousins and Howarth celebrate the form’s flexibility—claiming that it ‘has survived so long and across so many different cultures and audiences’ because ‘its internal checks and balances provide ready encouragement for anyone wanting to remake it in a manner more suitable to themselves’—they still acknowledge the ‘formal constraints’ of the sonnet, and its typical ‘association with sexual desire’.8 Though she has not given much attention to the sonnet form in particular, Lucy Collins has considered at length the position of contemporary women poets within the Irish tradition. In her book Contemporary Irish Women Poets , which focuses on ‘issues of tradition and innovation’ within the work of poets including Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Catherine Walsh and

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Vona Groake, Collins notes: ‘[i]n light of the evolving role for women in Irish culture, their poetic mediation of the past is of considerable significance. It has also deepened our scrutiny of the relationship between the politics of writing and its forms’. This ‘poetic mediation’ involves an engagement with temporal and textual history. As Collins argues, ‘[a]ll these women acknowledge poetic precursors and their work engages with earlier poems—their own and the work of others—in ways that constitute acts of textual memory’.9 Collins’s arguments interlace with Amy Billone’s in her study of the nineteenth-century women’s sonnet in England. Arguing that ‘poets enter and exit the canon for reasons more complex than their gender alone’, Billone concedes nevertheless that poets such as Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett and Christina Rossetti ‘have suffered if not from the absence of recognition than from unfortunate acts of critical misrecognition’.10 Putting the pieces back together requires a creative engagement with the past, acknowledging that gender tells just one part of a complex narrative. The present study focuses on what might be termed the modern Irish poetic tradition—moving from around 1900 to the present day, and book-ended by W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh, and Paul Muldoon, Richard Murphy, and David Wheatley, as well as women poets Leontia Flynn, Paula Meehan, Vona Groarke and Mary O’Malley. In focusing on these writers’ use of the sonnet, in correspondence with past and present practitioners, it is fruitful to consider the ways in which sonnets perform ‘acts of textual memory’ in their formal and thematic responses to the sonnet tradition. This enables a consideration of the two ‘poles’ of sonnet criticism: the first, that it connotes ‘order’; and the second, that the challenge to this order propels the modern writer towards innovation. Wherever we discover innovation within contemporary responses to the sonnet we almost always encounter simultaneously a reverence for the form. Debates about ‘sincerity’ have raged within the sonnet in English at least since the mid-seventeenth century, when it fell out of vogue thanks to its perceived performative qualities. Joseph Phelan demonstrates how advocates of the sonnet in the early 1800s tried to reshape it as an ‘organic’ form: As a conventional and arbitrary form it runs counter to the prevailing belief in the necessity of an organic connection between form and content, leading to a series of attempts to ‘organicise’ the form and demonstrate its

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indissoluble connection with certain stages of mind and feeling. Again, as a form proverbial for its insincerity it seems to conflict with the very strong post-romantic emphasis on sincerity as a criterion of poetic value, and the result of this conflict is a sustained endeavour to position the sonnet as the most sincere and personal of poetic forms[.]11

For someone like Murphy, the sonnet needs to be understood (or refashioned) as ‘the most sincere and personal of poetic forms’, in order that it can provide words that act as a substitute to the ‘faith’ that one used to find elsewhere. ‘With experience of disorder, the destruction of beautiful buildings, and the decay of religious belief’, he notes, ‘the sonnet confesses a limited faith in words written as epitaphs that may achieve, not immortality, but a resurrection of the love they express each time they are read’.12 Modernist poets professionalised the idea that a poem could be both ‘arbitrary’ and authentic: poems can be ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, as Marianne Moore recorded in ‘Poetry’.13 Comparably, Murphy’s ‘Friary’ sonnet ends with an epitaph that itself echoes Philip Larkin’s closing lines from ‘An Arundel Tomb’— ‘An almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love’14 —in underlining the uncertain relationship between ‘words’ and ‘truth’: Here, too, buried in rhyme, lovers lie dead, Engraved in words that live each time they’re read.15

The ‘insincerity’ of a poem’s construction does not necessarily run counter to the ‘real’ ideas it contains; but at the same time we know that language, too, is a written art(ifice). Written while Murphy was composing what he termed his ‘sonnet houses’ for The Price of Stone, whereby each sonnet takes on the voice of a specific building, it is perhaps unsurprising that his commentary implies that the heavily constructed, carefully-patterned words of a sonnet might function as a stand-in for ‘beautiful buildings’.16 Nevertheless, it does tell us something of his ‘faith’ in the obduracy of the sonnet structure. While this faith is ‘limited’, it is still desired. Murphy’s semi-articulated desire is that by engaging in a dialogue with other sonnets that also ‘express’ ‘love’ in some way or another, they will revive and renew each other with each reading. Murphy constantly returns to two dominant themes, which complement his structural analogies. The first is his focus on the writtenness of the form, as ‘a tomb on which I try to carve words’, or ‘words

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written as epitaphs’.17 This draws our attention to the self-consciousness of the form, a topic of some preoccupation for poets and critics. The second is an overwrought ‘faith’ in the sonnet as a poem that has ‘love’ at its centre. Cousins and Howarth claim that, ‘[e]very modern sonnet becomes partly a sonnet about sonnets, because its very use calls attention to the poet’s explicit procedural choices, an effect amplified by the poets from non-white and non-English backgrounds making a statement about just what their language can do to the sonnet too’.18 The latter half of this claim holds relevance for Irish poets, and particularly for those who write entirely or partly in Irish Gaelic;19 the first half, conversely, calls for a more general consideration of the ‘procedural choices’ that govern a poet’s decision to write a sonnet. Stressing the need for a critical reassessment of the sonnet, Cousins and Howarth note the resurgence of the form’s popularity within recent years. Indeed, they suggest that its ‘surprising reappearance among today’s most experimental poets’ is testament to ‘how well the sonnet suits the avant-garde principle that art be an intervention in the discourse about art, rather than simply lyric self-expression’.20 If we took this idea and ran with it, however, we might be tempted to consider as sonnets only those poems that declare themselves as such— either through a minute attention to form or structure, or through a meta-poetic discourse on sonnet-writing; but this would risk limiting our reading of those poems and dismissing more experimental versions of the form. Such issues are compounded by those poems that use the word ‘sonnet’ in their titles or descriptions. Of course, as Heather Dubrow concedes in a careful study of the sonnet and the lyric mode, ‘writers may use that first label playfully or polemically or just mischievously’.21 For example, Paul Muldoon’s boldly titled collection Songs and Sonnets from 2012 consists of a series of 14-line poems, some without the obvious characteristics of a formal sonnet, alongside a selection of song lyrics.22 Muldoon’s collection has precedence in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets [sic] from 1633, a posthumous arrangement of poems of which none would be described as a sonnet now.23 Then again, to settle on a workable definition might be a dangerous game. Dubrow suggests that definitions ‘suffer from the common tendency to make the texts that one studies oneself normative, whether out of ignorance of other writings or an agenda for establishing a special status for the texts and periods on which one works’.24

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Don Paterson, writing at the turn of the Millennium, claims that ‘[i]f anything, the sonnet has flourished in this century, to the extent that it has become a quite unremarkable part of the contemporary poet’s armoury’; for him, its recent resurgence in popularity is anything but surprising. Such arguments are in their own way confronting, asking us on the one hand to notice the ‘normative’ expectations and readings of the sonnet which underline its ‘unremarkable’ status a poem that, according to Paterson, ‘almost every major twentieth-century poet has written’;25 and on the other to appreciate that it is a historical form that avant-gardists have manipulated in order to make interventions into the relationship between art and its present and past moments. In an Irish context, too, the sonnet may move between these two apparent opposites, often in the same poem, in order to ask larger questions about the relationship between poetry, history and (national) identity. In terms of what we might call a ‘normative’ theme or expectation for a sonnet, one of these is certainly love—whether this is expressed through longing, desire, admiration, or simply through what Murphy describes as ‘faith’: be this is in a person, a building, or the poem itself. Yet if we were to define a sonnet as a 14-line poem that is preoccupied with love, in some or all of its various forms—and if we then stretched this definition to include poems that position themselves as ‘anti-love sonnets’—this would still leave out a host of poems. While Cousins and Howarth note of the sonnet that ‘[i]t has always had aspirational connotations’, such as ‘hoping to woo a lover, to form inchoate feelings into something more resolved’, what they stress is the way that it allows the sonneteer to work something out in words. Comparing the sonnet to the epigram—a more positive analogy than Murphy’s description of sonnets as ‘words written as epitaphs’—they claim that the sonnet ‘unites the ideas of brevity and of saying much in little: of fashioning microcosms or miniature heterocosms’.26 And yet, even taking into account a broader definition of the sonnet as a rhetorical working-out of a problem, or a conceit, or an emotion, this still emphasises the importance of that working out, of that need to express what has been insufficiently articulated previously. Like Murphy’s hope for his sonnets that there might be a ‘resurrection of the love they express each time they are read’, the implication of Cousins and Howarth’s claim that the sonnet ‘say[s] much in little’ ascribes importance to the thing it has to say. Nevertheless, some brilliant sonnets by Irish writers over the past century have delighted in the bathetic—in the

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idea that the sonnet form might be a place for anti-climax, for nothing being worked out. Or they might describe an instance of nothing really happening at all. We might consider, for example, Paul Muldoon’s 14-line poem ‘A Trifle’, which describes the speaker’s attempts, on hearing a bomb alert in his office building in Belfast, to move past a woman holding a trifle.27 Though of course the poem wobbles with possible plays on the idea of a trifle—asking whether it is the repetitious bomb alert, rather than the dessert itself, which has become ‘trifling’—it nevertheless positions the moment of not-happening, of being stuck in a rather mundane present, at the centre of the poem. Meanwhile, Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Hospital’ luxuriates in the limbo of a hospital ward, and delights in what the speaker describes later in the same poem as the ‘passionate transitory’: A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row, Plain concrete, wash basins—an art lover’s woe, Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored. But nothing whatever is by love debarred, The common and banal her heat can know. The corridor led to a stairway and below Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.28

The structural pressures of the sonnet work well to shape the direction and form of the poem, in that they draw out some of its ironies both through the liberal sprinkling of the term ‘love’, and through the bringing together of facetious end-rhymes (‘ward’/ ‘snored’, ‘debarred’/ ‘yard’): it’s not often that we find a ‘gravelled yard’ being touted as promising an ‘inexhaustible adventure’, or a description of a person falling ‘in love with the functional ward / Of a chest hospital’. But the thematic challenges, the love of the ‘banal’ expressed here, mean that Kavanagh opens up space for a new kind of sonnet, both anecdotal and profound. It has become commonplace to claim that the sonnet offers up a way of inscribing the momentary with a sort of timeless power; Hirsch and Boland, for instance, proffer Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s line ‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument’, from his prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, as an illustration of their contention that ‘[e]very great sonnet is a moment’s monument to the form itself’.29 Yet the ‘monumental’ element of this description seems rather aggrandising in comparison with Kavanagh’s desire, expressed in another sonnet, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, to ‘wallow in

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the habitual, the banal’ and to make poetry out of this.30 In both ‘The Hospital’ and ‘Canal Bank Walk’, the sonnet offers up an ‘inexhaustible adventure’, but in both cases Kavanagh has become adventurous with the form itself in order to do so. This does not mean, however, that such adventures have no purpose. In discussing his idea of ‘play’ within the contemporary sonnet, Muldoon describes his ‘accidental’ encounters with the sonnet form, noting that: ‘[t]he serendipitous aspect of writing that [W. H.] Auden refers to as “pure accident” may be no more accidental than play, and no less productive’.31 Muldoon clearly perceives something ‘productive’ within his own use and manipulation of the form; Alan Gillis has gone so far as to claim that ‘most conspicuously of all’ Irish poets, ‘Muldoon has predominated over this phenomenon’.32 The present study will demonstrate the importance of Muldoon’s ‘play’ with the sonnet, showing how his experiments with the form range from the domestic and anecdotal—in poems such as ‘Quoof’, describing the Muldoons’ ‘family word’ for a hot water bottle33 —to those with a political sting, like ‘The Sightseers’, where the ‘O’ of a new roundabout that the family journeys to see becomes, by the last line, the mark of a pistol on his uncle’s forehead;34 and, further, to self-consciously literary poems like ‘Le Flanneur’, dedicated to Flann O’Brien and enacting its own intertextual conversations.35 In each of these poems, Muldoon plays with the shape and structure of the sonnet form: experimenting with the ‘Italian’ sonnet form in ‘Quoof’, for example, by offering an octet and a sestet but arranging each stanza into a long sentence, with rhymes arriving as if by accident; and using an apparently hybrid form in ‘The Sightseers’, with two four-line stanzas followed by two three-line stanzas, and the last stanza offering an endrhyme between lines 12 and 14 (‘Rome’ and ‘home’) as if to echo the roundabout direction of the sonnet’s narrative. Therefore, while a poet may come accidentally to a sonnet, what results may be more ‘productive’, or enduring, than what emerges from the pen of an apparently more serious sonneteer. Such apparent contradictions are integral to our understanding of the modern Irish sonnet.

1.1

The Sonnet and the ‘Irish’ Writer

Where Hirsch and Boland argue that ‘the sonnet is both the most traditional and the most experimental of forms’, noting that ‘it is also highly controversial’, they are attuned to its possible cultural and even political

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implications.36 Boland, as an Irish poet and a woman poet too, first met the form with resistance, recalling how: I wanted to belong to Irish poetry; I wanted Irish poetry to belong to me. The sonnet, I believed, could have no role in that. I had read it at school and resisted writing it. I was sure it was un-Irish, un-local, too courtly for a new republic; too finished to ever find a new beginning in the literature I was trying to understand.

Extending the analogy further, Boland claims: ‘I was sure the flourishing, musical industry of British sonnet-making—as I saw it, a factory of epigram, couplet, summary—must have been a sideshow of empire’. She adds, ‘I was equally sure it could never come to Ireland—to a new country, tense at the memory of its struggle with a larger one. Let alone to an untried and doubting Irish poet’.37 What is telling about Boland’s language here is not just the passion of her initial resistance to a form that felt so alien to her, so dominant and imperial, but the language of that ‘struggle’, that ‘resistance’. Lucy Collins has described ‘Boland’s persistent, yet questioning, location of herself in an Irish cultural tradition’—particularly as an Irish woman who spent a large proportion of her formative years in England. Collins notes, indeed, that in Boland’s writing ‘the relationship between creativity and literary tradition assumes an enduring importance’, so perhaps it comes no surprise that this is what she should stress in her writing on the sonnet. This also underlines what Collins terms elsewhere ‘the deliberate nature’ of Boland’s ‘construction of ethical and political questions’.38 The questions that Boland asks of the sonnet are no exception. Together, Boland and Hirsch describe their anthology, somewhat militaristically, as ‘a close-up of a single form—the extraordinary history of which is best shown through the poets who encountered and deployed it over time’.39 Even where the poet in question is not Irish—as is the case with the American Edward Hirsch—the tackling of the sonnet form raises similar questions. Hirsch considers the sonnet as something that might be solid, or concrete—an entity that enjoys a material, or even physical, existence. It is ‘an obsessive form—compact, expansive—that travels remarkably well’. He adds: There must be something hardwired into its machinery—a heartbeat, a pulse—that keeps it breathing. How many times over the decades has it

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been pronounced dead and then somehow revitalised, deconstructed, and then constructed again, refashioned, remade? It darkens and then lightens again.

In Hirsch’s mind, the sonnet functions almost as the poet’s poem, because the poet must master it in order to succeed. For him, the sonnet is something weasel-like, almost wily; ‘it is conducive to calculation and experimentation—a closed form that keeps on opening up’.40 It is, therefore, the poet’s role to meet the sonnet head-on—to rise to its challenge. For Irish poets, these examples seem initially to offer particularly fecund metaphors; we don’t have to look too far to find parallels between an apparent compliance with the ‘imperial’ form of the sonnet and a willed resistance to the more traditional expectations of the same form. But surely it is too convenient to assert that the political implications of the sonnet—its to-ing and fro-ing in the modern Irish tradition between rebellion and restraint, between tradition and innovation—and its tantalising invitation to the ambitious poet, render it an ideal form? Not all Irish poets have risen joyfully to the challenge, or used the form without protest. Speaking with considerable fervour, Greg Delanty describes using the sonnet form as ‘appropriate appropriation’: for him, the sonnet is ‘a statement of implied complicity, which is mostly concealed within the poem’s construct, as it is mostly concealed within the construct of our lives’.41 Something dangerous is implied through Irish poets’ use of, or submission to, the sonnet form whenever they use it without thinking. Irish poets can certainly create at once distinct and delicate examples of ‘appropriate appropriation’: consider, for example, the Wordsworthian echoes, and gentle ‘talking back to the English sonnet’,42 of Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets , which he later described, in conversation with Dennis O’Driscoll, as ‘mocking the too literary nature of the reality’ that his poems had initially sought to describe.43 We might also think of the nosy neighbours of Vona Groarke’s collection Other People’s Houses (1999), in sonnets that acknowledge and delight in their transgressions with a lightness of touch and a subtle humour.44 Both examples demonstrate the varied and complex reasons that Irish poets employ the sonnet form, which are often far from Delanty’s manifest and obstreperous insinuations. Few Irish writers ‘appropriate’ their writing too readily, and nor do they fail to question, often within their sonnets, the implications of such appropriation. At the same time, these poems acknowledge that

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if, as Delanty implies, our life might be a construct, then so too might the poetry that reflects it; and this constructed-ness might actually be apposite rather than inappropriate. Moreover, that these poets acknowledge the actuality of often uncomfortable literary inheritances allows for a more subtle and shifting approach to defining what a national and, more specifically, an ‘Irish’ poetic tradition might be. A main preoccupation with this study is to test the limits of formal, structural, cultural and national boundaries. How far, for example, can a sonnet be pushed until it is no longer a sonnet? And how far can the idea of the ‘Irish sonnet’ be stretched until morphs into something else—an ‘English’ sonnet perhaps, or a Wordsworthian sonnet, or even a Spenserian one? And do these questions even continue to hold water within contemporary culture? One the one side are figures such as Boland and Delanty, stressing the need to see formal and thematic choices as political; on the other, there is a more open-ended, inclusive kind of thinking. Peggy O’Brien, in selecting poetry for The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, argues that: ‘Ireland is too small and poetry too greedy to allow such clean binaries as men-and-women, Protestant-and-Catholic, to stand in practice. All the circles overlap; each remains a circle’.45 In recent years, poets, editors, anthologists and critics have begun to express, more vocally than ever, the idea that the English tradition may be part of that circle. The Shakespearean sonnet offers a pertinent example. For Rosemarie Rowley, author of several collections dominated by Shakespearean sonnets—and most notably, her sequence The Puzzle Factory, which she describes as a ‘collection of crowns of sonnets’ (1984/2007)—the sonnet form reminds her of her Irish childhood: ‘My father was a traditional music fiddle player so the soarings and repetitions came naturally to me and seemed to ask for meaning’.46 Meanwhile, in 2016, Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann published On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, an anthology that published Shakespeare’s sonnets alongside responses written by contemporary poets in their ‘own form and style’;47 several of the poets, including Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Longley, Nick Laird, and Paul Muldoon, are from the island of Ireland, while others are drawn from other parts of the UK (Scottish poets Don Paterson and Douglas Dunn also feature). Such responses reflect what Tom Walker has described as ‘the contemporary ubiquity across the Anglophone poetic realm of this particular lyric form, Shakespearean or otherwise’. Irish poets do not simply write ‘Shakespearean sonnets’ now as a political response, then, or as a comment on

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or exercise in ‘appropriate appropriation’, but rather because, as Walker puts it, ‘the Irish sonnet has partly become a mutating arena in which the limits of identity, form and the poetic itself have come to be explored’.48 What this study aims to show is that the very essence of the sonnet form, and its potential as a ‘mutating arena’, lend it the flexibility to work through the complexities of Irish identity, affiliation and appropriation. There are countless examples within Irish cultural history of such complexities; consider, for example, Heaney’s famous comment on Louis MacNeice from 1990: ‘by his English domicile and his civil learning [MacNeice] is an aspect of Spenser, by his ancestral and affectionate links with Connemara an aspect of Yeats and by his mythic and European consciousness an aspect of Joyce’. Yet at the same time MacNeice represents, for Heaney, the sole figure who can offer him ‘a way in and a way out’ of the English and Irish imagination.49 It is no accident that Heaney makes specific mention of Edmund Spenser here, as he is at once a provocative model for Irish sonnet-making, a hate figure within political history, and an unavoidable figure within Anglo-Irish culture. Cultural inclusiveness needs to be met with caution, however. As Gillis points out, ‘[w]hile the rise and the rise of the Irish sonnet would seem to signify a broadly positive cultural narrative, it might be equally the case […] that it is more ironically symptomatic of a massive cultural anxiety’; in other words, Irish poets might use, abuse and misuse the sonnet form as a means of expressing the contrarieties of poetic and personal life. In still other examples, the form appears to have found the poet through accidental encounters on the page, rather than through active appropriation. Nevertheless, the growth in popularity of the form within Ireland appears to have heralded a sea change. As Gillis concludes: [W]e should respect how the sonnet has quietly and subtly reconnected Irish culture to international literary culture, especially Britain’s, without any element of cultural cringe or overweening cultural exceptionalism. Indeed, the Irish sonnet has brought riches. In concluding her argument about Yeats’s sonnets, Helen Vendler imagines Yeats explaining to English readers that, in Ireland, the sonnet was a site for experiment because it was not, as in England, a site of cultural memory. Well, it’s both now.50

This study will take Gillis’s concluding statement as a challenge to investigate further: to see how contemporary poets, looking back over the history of the sonnet, but also across to each other, have written sonnets

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that combine what might be termed ‘textual memory’—inheritances from reading and education—with responses to their more recent ‘cultural memory’ of a developing and expanding form. The result is a proliferation of works abundant in their variety of forms, interests and themes: revising and reshaping the form while working with, around, and sometimes even against, its internal contrarieties.

1.2

Revision and Rebellion

In this study of the modern Irish sonnet, I offer a series of thematic and formal readings—suggestive rather than exhaustive, and inevitably overlapping. Throughout, I use the adjective ‘Irish’ to refer to poets who were born on the island of Ireland broadly conceived, or who made Ireland their main domicile; and I will therefore include Irish Catholic, AngloIrish and Northern Irish (Protestant and Catholic) poets where using the term ‘Irish’ helps elucidate a formal, thematic or contextual reading of their poetry. Building upon critical arguments surrounding the sonnet form, and focusing on its contradictions and contrarieties, each chapter will explore how these arguments extend to the thematic, tonal and structural preoccupations of modern Irish sonnets. In each instance, the sonnet both acts as a marker of a broader poetic tradition by engaging with other sonnets throughout history, and refashions our understanding of what an ‘Irish’ sonnet might mean, or be. This is not to say, of course, that ‘Irishness’ is a professed preoccupation of all of these sonnets, but rather that by virtue of their very existence as sonnets they are making wider claims about the relationship between Irish poetry and other traditions. In each case, the sonnets discussed either revise or rebel against the assertions of the sonnet form, or do both at the same time, so that, by reshaping the form through its very interaction with tradition, the ‘Irish sonnet’ emerges as a distinct entity. There is both art and artifice to writing sonnets. Sonneteers must simultaneously give due attention to its history and effectiveness as a form and understand its very construction on the page where—at the very least—the 14-line structure, or turn, or a combination of both determines the shape of the poem. Mutlu Blasing asserts that one ‘has to be able to argue why a certain kind of thought is most suitable for a sonnet’,51 while Burt and Mikics trace the self-consciousness of the form to its first emergence in thirteenth-century Italy: ‘[t]he arrival of the sonnet’, they argue, ‘marks an inward turn in Italian poetry; lyric purifies itself, and becomes

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a reflection on reflection’, so that ‘lyric verse has become a way of talking to oneself’.52 Sonnets, then, have always performed an uncertain balance between art and artifice, with these two apparent opposites boomeranging back and forth. Within the modern Irish sonnet, such meta-poetic questions manifest in a variety of ways: in poems that extend the sonnet-as-sonnet metaphor, or that consider the play between form and content in the sonnet, or that question its formal assumptions by foregrounding structural metaphors; or, finally, that use an actual work of visual art as a springboard for an ekphrastic response. ‘Art and Artifice’, then, is the subject and preoccupation of the second chapter. Some sonnets, such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Studying the Language’,53 and Michael Hartnett’s Thirteen Sonnets ,54 consider the wider implications of language within Irish writers’ use of the sonnet form. Others spin off D. G. Rossetti’s memorable phrase ‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument’ to ask whether architectural imagery in these poems helps deconstruct or reconstruct the ‘monumental’.55 In such poems, and most notably in Richard Murphy’s sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985), the architectural becomes a way of considering the hegemonic, political and even phallic implications of the form, and of presenting new constructions. A discrete response to the relationship between art and artifice emerges in a handful of ekphrastic Irish sonnets, such as Bernard O’Donoghue’s ‘The Potato-Gatherers’, based on George (Æ) Russell’s painting of the same name;56 and several sonnets by Boland, including ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, which interrogate the relationship between artist, subject and viewer.57 Other contemporary poets, such as Groarke and Wheatley, extend the contemplation of the ‘visual’ even further in their imagistic sonnets ‘Oranges’ and ‘Sonnet’, which upturn formal assumptions.58 Another apparent place of opposition within the sonnet is its identification as either a lyric or a narrative mode, linked to its association alternatively with restraint or expression. Discussing the sonnet form in particular, Phillis Levin contends that ‘[t]hematically and structurally, this tension plays itself out in the relationship between a fixed formal pattern and the endless flow of feeling’.59 How might the internal structure of the sonnet reflect and comment upon this relationship? On the one hand, as Michael Spiller puts it, the sonnet ‘is certainly too short for narration’.60 On the other, the principles of argument in the sonnet extend it beyond the lyrical: as White and Rosen argue, it is ‘more logical in structure, more precise in thought, more concise and unified in both substance

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and design than the ordinary lyric’.61 Yeats’s sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ extends this idea as far as the epic, telling apparently the entire story of the Trojan War and the ensuing cycles of human failure, strength and frailty within its 14-line framework.62 Within modern Irish poetry, sonneteers confront and debate these issues through their use of sonnet sequences and cycles, the focus of Chapter 3. Although sequences have been noticed within criticism, they have rarely received critical attention—with critics choosing to focus instead on individual sonnets. Drawing in the main from Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets (2017),63 Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ cycle (2007),64 Anthony Cronin’s The End of the Modern World (1989–2016), and Paul Muldoon’s shorter sequence ‘The Bangle: Slight Return’ (1998), this chapter will demonstrate how the conflict between the lyrical and the narrative is rehearsed within sequences as a whole. In so doing, it will explore the ways in which individual sonnets and the sequences that contain them engage with, convey and contain experiences of time and memory. Does the speaker of a sequence change from one poem to another, or is the creator the same throughout? And what of its intended audience? Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti sonnet cycle (1595), almost a drama in verse, appears to describe his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle;65 Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), meanwhile, makes the conversation between the ‘I’ (Astrophil) and his love explicit in its title. Yet in the modern age, the uses and implications of such conversations widen further and further—both in sonnet sequences and in individual sonnets. The fourth chapter, on ‘Conversation’, considers the relationship between speaker and audience in a range of individual sonnets by Irish writers. These sonnets include those that speak as if in a confessional to an imagined audience, such as Kavanagh’s unruly, unapologetic ‘Canal Bank’ sonnets;66 and those that speak to another actual person—such as Leontia Flynn’s sonnets to popular and cultural figures in her collection Drives (2008),67 or Muldoon’s ‘Le Flanneur’, to Flann O’Brien.68 There are further sonnets, too, such as Muldoon’s ‘Pip and Magwitch’, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Angel in the Stone’,69 which ventriloquise a real, fictionalised or even imaginary speaker in relation to an intended audience within an individual poem. Such poems provide an interesting counterpoint to the extended characterisations of Brendan Kennelly’s Cromwell sequence (1983), a heady and often excoriating mixture of sonnets and other forms.70

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But there are also sonnets that, through intertextual allusion, enact more subtle conversations with an earlier poet in the place of the imagined audience. Textual history plays an important role here, where the writer of the newer work harks back, whether declaredly or with more subtlety, to earlier models. Gender politics lie behind Mary O’Malley’s sonnet ‘The Boning Hall’, which cites Adrienne Rich but alludes implicitly to Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest .71 Elsewhere, O’Malley’s sonnet ‘Finis’ alludes to Yeats’s poem ‘When You Are Old’:72 though not itself a sonnet, Yeats’s poem functions both as a semi-autobiographical update and a ‘free imitation’ of Pierre de Ronsard’s sixteenth-century sonnet ‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’.73 Irish sonnet-makers also allude, vocally and demonstrably, to each other. For example, Ciaran Carson’s sonnet ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ calls to, and then condenses, Kavanagh’s earlier poem ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ in an outrageous act of textual plunder.74 Such sonnets begin to build up a dialogue around the idea of the ‘Irish sonnet’—and of the ‘Irish women’s sonnet’ as well. Lucy Collins notes ‘the importance of sustained close reading in exploring the unique and considered engagement of each poet with private and public pasts’,75 and this will be a central tenet of this study, which views the sonnet as a place where the public and private merge. For some critics, this merging is central to the sonnet’s relatively recent appeal to women poets—with the eighteenth-century English poet Charlotte Smith being their most prominent predecessor. Sometimes, however, critics offer simplistic, gendered readings of the form; for instance Burt and Mikics claim that the sonnet might be viewed as ‘a domestic form, small-scale, fit for times of peace, for light verse, and for women’.76 Although they offer this description as only one example of the sonnet’s many uses, their implied association of women with ‘peace’, the ‘domestic’ and ‘light verse’ is potentially limiting. Yet ‘domestic’ is a term that might be applied to a range of sonnets within the modern Irish tradition—both problematically and as a way of considering the relationship between the local, the everyday and, more literally, the poetry of the home. Gaston Bachelard discusses in The Poetics of Space how ‘[t]hrough poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house’,77 while the Italian word ‘stanza’ is itself linked etymologically to the word for ‘room’.78 Chapter 5, therefore, considers instances where poets use this connection to think about rooms and domesticity. The opening section focuses particularly on

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a selection of sonnets from Groarke’s collection Other People’s Houses ,79 in comparison with Peter Sirr’s similarly-preoccupied sonnet sequence ‘The Rooms’ and its linked sonnets ‘House for Sale’ and ‘The Names of the Houses’.80 In doing so, it tests the limits of critical and creative associations between ‘domesticity’ and (women’s) ‘light verse’, and between the house and the home. In modern Irish poetry, the domestic space functions as a microcosm for larger questions about the human condition—and sonnets are no exception. Here everyday places, locations and events act as a springboard for broader musings. For Boland, it was Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’, with its celebration of the ‘local row’ of Homer’s Iliad and, in turn, the fight between the Duffys and the McCabes, that opened up thematic space for the sonnet and brought it out of the court.81 Chapter 5, then, extends its contemplation of the ‘domestic’ to demonstrate how the ‘local’ can be interpreted as a contemplation of the everyday—in sonnets such as Heaney’s ‘When the others were away at Mass’ (‘Clearances, III’),82 Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘Home Birth’, Sirr’s ‘In the Graveyard’,83 James Simmons’s ‘The Publican’84 and Kavanagh’s ‘The Hospital’. The final focus of this fifth chapter is on sonnets that engage politically with the local, echoing the ‘local row’ of Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ but extending this contemplation to wider political contexts, and in particular the Northern Irish Troubles. Such sonnets often use the local and domestic as a way of increasing the pathos of a political situation. Discomfort is employed to dramatic effect in John Hewitt’s ‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’, which opens with a vivid picture of ‘Shielded, vague soldiers, visored, crouched alert’,85 and in the localised nostalgia of Tom Paulin’s ‘In the Lost Province’.86 Other sonnets offer a quiet contemplation of a political moment, such as Heaney’s ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ and John Ennis’s ‘The Croppy Boy’, written in conversation with it.87 These poems can be seen to locate the sonnet within a politically fraught locale—but one in which the ‘local row’ takes on many connotations. Another possible implication of a ‘local row’, and another site for a ‘domestic’, might be in the sonnet’s depictions of amatory or sexual relations, the subject of the final chapter. Don Paterson notes that while ‘the sonnet has almost become synonymous with the love poem in the popular imagination’, ‘things were never this straightforward’;88 indeed Joseph Phelan suggests that ‘[b]ecause it necessarily implies some view of the nature of the relationship between men and women, the amatory sonnet becomes particularly contentious’.89 When we turn to the sonnets

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of modern and contemporary Irish women and men, the situation is suitably complex. Therefore, Chapter 6, ‘Amatory’, considers the idea of the sonnet as love poem from a variety of challenging and confronting angles, focusing in particular on several sonnets from Paula Meehan’s collection Painting Rain (2009), which explore different types of relationships in different forms.90 Meehan’s poems—like Muldoon’s sonnet ‘Lag’ from Hay (1998), which parallels the claustrophobic lives of conjoined twins with a transatlantic couple in a failing relationship91 —suggest that almost anything can be a subject for a sonnet, and even a love sonnet. Ciaran Carson’s daring and experimental sonnet sequence For All We Know, set against the backdrop of the Northern Irish Troubles, and told ‘in the recent past’,92 wishes to control and shape time in manifold ways. Each of these sonnets explores Kavanagh’s idea of the ‘passionate transitory’,93 which appears to be a guiding principle for many amatory sonnets in the Irish tradition. Writing on sonnet sequences in particular, Hirsch and Boland note that they ‘revise—and rebel against—old ones’.94 In this book, I argue that these two principles govern the modern Irish sonnet more generally. Irish sonneteers understand that the form itself is riddled with contrarieties, and they harness this as way to think about identity and expression—in personal, poetic, national and transnational terms. In so doing, they both revise existing forms and themes and rebel against them for reasons that are as varied as the sonnets themselves.

Notes 1. Richard Murphy, In Search of Poetry (Thame: Clutag Press, 2017), p. 73. 2. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (eds.), The Making of a Sonnet (New York and London: Norton, 2008), p. 51. 3. Jeff Hilson, in Paul Muldoon, Meg Tyler and Jeff Hilson, ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, ed. Peter Howarth, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 6–24 (p. 12). 4. See P. B. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1108, ll.9, 4, 10–11. 5. Murphy, In Search of Poetry, p. 155. 6. Hirsch, ‘My Own Acquaintance’, The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 39–43 (p. 39).

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7. Cousins and Howarth, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, pp. 1–5 (p. 4). 8. Ibid., pp. 2–4. 9. Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), pp. 1, 3. 10. Amy C. Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 2007), p. 6. 11. Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 2. 12. Murphy, In Search of Poetry, p. 73. 13. See Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’, longer version, in Complete Poems, ed. Clive Driver (London: Faber, 1987), p. 267. 14. Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 116–117, ll.35–36. 15. Murphy, ‘Friary’, The Price of Stone, The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952– 2012 (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2013), pp. 176–226 (p. 224), ll.13–14. 16. Murphy uses the term ‘sonnet houses’ to describe the poems. See Murphy, ‘Extract: Transgressing into Poetry’, Poetry Ireland Review, 107 (September 2012), 26–33. 17. Murphy, In Search of Poetry, p. 73. 18. Cousins and Howarth, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, p. 3. 19. Although the focus of this study is on Irish poetry written in the English language, it will discuss the sonnets of poets, such as Michael Hartnett, who write as dual-language poets. This decision is due to a consideration of the availability of sonnets written in Irish Gaelic (of which there appear to be small numbers), and to a focus on the use of a form within Irish poetry, which has been inherited at least in part from the English tradition. 20. Cousins and Howarth, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, p. 4. 21. Heather Dubrow, ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, pp. 25–45 (p. 28). 22. Paul Muldoon, Songs and Sonnets (London: Enitharmon, 2012). 23. See Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 15. 24. Dubrow, ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, p. 29. 25. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), pp. xiii, xv. 26. Cousins and Howarth, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, pp. 1, 2. 27. Paul Muldoon, ‘A Trifle’, Poems, 1968–1998 (London: Faber, 2001), p. 120. 28. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, in Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London: Penguin 2005), p. 217, ll.14, 1–8.

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29. See Hirsch and Boland, The Making of a Sonnet, p. 59, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, in The Making of a Sonnet, p. 64, l.1. 30. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, Collected Poems, p. 224, l.3. 31. Paul Muldoon, in ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, p. 11. Muldoon cites W. H. Auden in his essay ‘A Literary Transference’, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, ed. Edward Mendelson, in 3 volumes (London: Faber and Faber, 1996–), Vol. II: 1938–1948 (2002), p. 48. 32. Alan Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 567–587 (p. 568). 33. Muldoon, ‘Quoof’, Poems, 1968–1998, p. 112. 34. Muldoon, ‘The Sightseers’, Poems, 1968–1998, p. 110. 35. Muldoon, ‘Le Flanneur’, Songs and Sonnets, p. 20. 36. Hirsch and Boland, ‘Editors’ Note’, The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 35–36 (p. 36). 37. Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, pp. 43–44. 38. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, pp. 23, 26, 27. 39. Hirsch and Boland, The Making of a Sonnet, p. 35. 40. Hirsch, ‘My Own Acquaintance’, in The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 39–43 (pp. 39, 40). 41. Greg Delanty and Paul McLoughlin, ‘An Interview with Greg Delanty’, The Poetry Ireland Review, 90 (2007), 23–29. 42. Meg Tyler, in ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, p. 6, claims that when Heaney ‘sat down to compose the Glanmore Sonnets ’, he ‘composed them as a sequence that in essence talked back to the English sonnet’. 43. Seamus Heaney, quoted in Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2008), p. 162. 44. See Vona Groarke, Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999). This collection is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. 45. Peggy O’Brien, ‘Preface’ to the First Edition, The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2nd ed; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2011), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 46. Rosemarie Rowley, email conversation with Tara Stubbs, 31 January 2020; see also Rowley, The Puzzle Factory (originally titled Message in a Pill Bottle) (1987; first published 2004), Representative Poetry Online: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/puzzle-factory. 47. Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2016), p. xiii.

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48. Tom Walker, ‘“an inconstant stay”: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. Nicholas Taylor-Collins and Stanley van der Ziel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 49–70 (pp. 49, 50). 49. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber, 1990), p. 200. 50. Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, p. 587. Gillis cites Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 181. 51. Mutlu Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 23. 52. Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet pp. 7, 8. 53. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Studying the Language’, The Brazen Serpent (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), p. 47. 54. Michael Hartnett, Thirteen Sonnets, in Collected Poems, ed. Peter Fallon (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2001), pp. 79–91. 55. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, the Making of a Sonnet, p. 64, l.1. 56. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘The Potato-Gatherers’ (on the painting by George Russell Æ), Outliving (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 34. 57. Boland, ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 114. 58. See Groarke, ‘Oranges’, Flight (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2002), p. 26; Wheatley, ‘Sonnet’, Mocker (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2006), p. 23, ll.1–4. 59. Phillis Levin (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (London and New York: Penguin, 2001), p. xxv. 60. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 4. 61. Gertrude M. White and Joan G. Rosen, A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (New York: Scribner, 1972), p. 2. 62. W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, The Major Works, p. 112. 63. Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2017). 64. Heaney, ‘District and Circle’, in District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), pp. 17–19. 65. See William Clarence Johnson, Spenser’s Amoretti: Analogies of Love (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), p. 13. 66. See Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’, Collected Poems, pp. 224, 227. 67. All of these poems can be found in Flynn, Drives: ‘Dorothy Parker’, p. 31; ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’, p. 32; ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, p. 33; and ‘Elizabeth Bishop’, p. 34. See also discussions in Chapter 4. 68. Muldoon, ‘Le Flanneur’, Songs and Sonnets, p. 20.

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69. See Muldoon, ‘Pip and Magwitch’, Songs and Sonnets, p. 12; Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The Angel in the Stone’, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2001), p. 15. 70. See Brendan Kennelly, Cromwell (first published 1983; Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987). 71. See Mary O’Malley, ‘The Boning Hall’, The Boning Hall (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 14. O’Malley cites Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’, The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 101–103. 72. Mary O’Malley, ‘Finis’, The Boning Hall, p. 48. 73. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, The Major Works, p. 21; see also Larrissy’s note to the poem on p. 490, which describes the poem as a ‘free imitation’ of Ronsard’s original. 74. Ciaran Carson, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, The Twelfth of Never (WinstonSalem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1998), p. 85. Certain of Carson’s lines and phrases—such as ‘Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue,/The Arran Banners wearing white’ (ll.2–3)—are a direct steal from Kavanagh’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’: Kavanagh, Collected Poems, pp. 36–37, and especially ll.7–8. 75. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, p. 4. 76. Burt and Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 21. 77. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 6. 78. Dubrow discusses this connection in ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, p. 36. 79. See Vona Groarke, Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999), contents page. 80. See Peter Sirr, ‘The Rooms’ (sonnet sequence), and ‘House for Sale’, The Rooms (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2014), pp. 24–57, p. 14; and ‘The Names of the Houses’, Selected Poems (1982–2004) (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2004), p. 32. 81. See Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, Collected Poems, p. 184, l.14; Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, p. 44. 82. Heaney, ‘When All the Others Were Away at Mass’ (Clearances, III), in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber 1998), p. 309. 83. Peter Sirr, ‘In the Graveyard’, Selected Poems, p. 92. 84. James Simmons, ‘The Publican’, The Long Summer Still to Come (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1973), p. 19. 85. John Hewitt, ‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’, The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1991), p. 176, l.1. 86. Tom Paulin, ‘In the Lost Province’, The Strange Museum (London: Faber, 1980), p. 16.

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87. Heaney, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, Opened Ground, p. 22; John Ennis, ‘The Croppy Boy’, Dolmen Hill (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1977), p. 14. 88. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, p. xiii. 89. Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet, p. 6. 90. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009). 91. Muldoon, ‘Lag’, Hay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 26. 92. See Ciaran Carson, For All We Know (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008), blurb, back cover. 93. See Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, l.14. 94. Hirsch and Boland, ‘The Making of a Sonnet: A Formal Introduction’, The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 51–54 (p. 54).

CHAPTER 2

Art and Artifice

There is both art and artifice to writing sonnets. Sonneteers must simultaneously give due attention to the sonnet’s history and effectiveness as a form, and understand its very construction on the page, where the 14line structure, or turn, or a combination of both, determines the poem’s shape. Sonneteers often foreground the artifice of the process of writing, in relation to the idea of the ‘art’ that the form both promises and denies the sonneteer. But ‘art’ can be at once a discursive theme and a meta-poetic idea. Sonneteers borrow from the platitudes of poets such as D. G. Rossetti, with his contention, from his prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, that ‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument’.1 But where Hirsch and Boland claim that ‘[e]very great sonnet is a moment’s monument to the form itself’, they do not acknowledge how such a ‘monument’ may be enacting its own simultaneous process of dismantling. Mutlu Blasing notes: The standard critical procedure affirms a hierarchy and accounts for particular forms on the grounds of their suitability for what the poem is saying. One accounts for the choice of a sonnet, for example, by showing how this form fits a particular content, assuming that the author knew what he wanted to say and chose the best means to that end. But a poem is a metaleptic figure and one needs to work without prioritizing content [.]2

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_2

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More simply put, once the ideas or words behind the poem become concretised into the ‘metaleptic figure’ of the sonnet, the apparent authenticity of the connection between form and content becomes lost as the ‘content’ assumes a lower position on the implied poetic hierarchy. Form, then, wins out, echoing Joseph Phelan’s contention that the sonnet is a ‘conventional and arbitrary form’ that ‘necessarily runs counter to the prevailing belief in the necessity of an organic connection between form and content’ within lyric poetry.3 Phelan is writing on the nineteenth-century sonnet here, and his comments echo the concerns of John Keats, who in a sonnet of 1819—‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d’—warned other sonneteers of the importance of skilful manipulation of the form.4 In this same sonnet Keats offers, according to Fiona Stafford, ‘a unique variation on the traditional sonnet schemes’; rhyming abc abd cab cdede, it is ‘explicitly concerned with its own form’.5 Writing at the turn of the Millennium, Don Paterson takes this contemplation further, to note that manipulating form, and rhyme in particular, can be dangerous as well as pleasurable. ‘Rhyme always unifies sense, and can make sense out of nonsense’, he argues; ‘it can trick a logic from the shadows where one would have not otherwise have existed’.6 For Burt and Mikics, such tricks are inherent to the sonnet form, which from its arrival in thirteenth-century Italy ‘marks an inward turn within Italian poetry’, whereby ‘lyric purifies itself, and becomes a reflection on reflection’. For them, the pattern within the Petrarchan sonnet of ‘two closed quatrains’ of abba abba, followed by a sestet ‘often rhyming cde cde, cd cd cd, or cd ed cd’, gives a sensation of openness, so that ‘lyric verse has become a way of talking to oneself’.7 Thinking of the potential tricks of metre, we are reminded of Seamus Heaney’s half-celebrating, half-mocking line from his Glanmore Sonnets — ‘It was all crepuscular and iambic.’—which is neither iambic nor written in pentameter.8 In this particular sonnet (III), Heaney imagines his ‘I’ and his companion being compared to ‘Dorothy and William [Wordsworth]’, evoking a specific, pointedly British, tradition of sonnet-making. Yet the sonnet ends eventually on a dull note, with a non-sentence that draws attention to the artifice of the poetic process: ‘Refreshes and relents. Is cadences’ (l.14). Phillis Levin notes, as if highlighting both the idiomatic naturalness and metrical awkwardness of this conclusion, that ‘[t]he metrical limit of the iambic pentameter line contributes to the paradox of the sonnet, where formal structures elicit spontaneous gestures, artifice produces colloquial rhythm, and inherited patterns summon idiomatic

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speech’.9 ‘Artifice’, then, becomes a potential repository for artlessness, just as an acknowledgement of artistry can lead to a sometimes uncomfortable awareness of the lack of an ‘organic connection between form and content’, to borrow Phelan’s phrasing. At the same time, however, poets continue to write sonnets, and readers to read them, at least in part because they fancy that such a connection might exist. Poet-critic Paterson acknowledges this: ‘[u]nity of meaning is something that is impossible to represent in any sustained, linear, complex utterance—but it’s what, crazily, our human poetry tries to do. So a sonnet is a paradox, a little squared circle, a mandala that invites our meditation’. For Paterson, a sonnet ‘invites’ such ‘meditation’ because we want to believe that such a ‘unity of meaning’ is possible, if only for the duration of our reading.10 We are reminded of Heaney’s Nobel Prize lecture, ‘Crediting Poetry’, in which he acknowledges that ‘poetry can make an order […] true to the impact of external reality and […] sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being’.11 Our appreciation of sonnets can come as much from what Paterson terms the ‘rightness ’ of the sonnet pattern as from an awareness of the way a sonnet might challenge its own assumptions.12 When we focus on modern Irish sonnets in particular, we see all of these ideas in conflict. These sonnets express a desire to revise, and rebel against, a form that is itself conflicted: straddling the line between sincerity and insincerity, naivety and self-awareness, and art, artlessness and artifice. For Irish poets, such directional decisions are tinged with an awareness of their poetry’s place on a national and international stage—and, furthermore, of how these poems might, therefore, be read.

2.1

The Sonnet as Sonnet

Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now, …………………………………………………………… That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.13

A sonnet announcing itself as a ‘sonnet’ is nothing new. Yet what Louis MacNeice’s ‘Sunday Morning’ (1933) tells us is that the ‘selfcontainment’ of the sonnet might be part of a process that enshrines ‘eternity’ within form. It is up to us as readers and poets to observe the

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goings-on of an average Sunday morning; to ‘concentrate on this Now’, in order to ‘abstract this day’; and to harden these thoughts into form by rendering that particular morning symbolic: ‘mak[ing] it to the week of time’, and marking out, therefore, a ‘sonnet self-contained in rhyme’. Interestingly, the lack of enjambment between lines 9 and 10 (ending ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’) makes it unclear whether the ‘small eternity’ is ‘this day’, the ‘week of time’, or the ‘sonnet’ itself; or whether it represents all three at once. It is significant that the poem consists of seven pairs of rhyming couplets, a form MacNeice favours in other sonnets such as ‘Trains in the Distance’ (1926) and ‘Spring Voices’ (1933);14 yet in ‘Sunday Morning’ this numbering takes on additional significance, as when we add to this an awareness of his manipulation of heptameter and his interest in ‘mak[ing] it to the week of time’, we can begin to read into the sonnet form a marking-out of seven days through the patterns of the poem. ‘Sunday Morning’ displays a particularity of attention to the act (and art) of sonnet-writing that plays on the interrelation between ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’ in marking out the progress of a 14-line poem, so that one morning comes to represent a week. Its over-long lines are interesting in this regard: wavering between hexameters and heptameters, the poem takes longer to make its point than the urge for ‘self-containment’ would imply, drawing our attention towards the difficulties of aligning form and content. Or perhaps something more complicated still is at play. The closing couplet suggests that although the ‘self-containment’ of the sonnet is desirable, it cannot be achieved thanks to the ‘deadening’ effects of time. Here, the ‘skulls’ mouths’ of the dead ‘will not tire’— To tell how there is no music or movement which secures Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures. (ll.13–14)

The self-containment of the closing rhyme offers as much solace as a coffin, reframing the ‘small eternity’ of earlier in the poem so that the sonnet becomes instead a metonym for death, with endurance as its handmaiden. The fragment that closes the poem suggests that these ideas are interchangeable: as if the poet has also expired with the 14 lines of the sonnet. The metrical patters of earlier in the poem give way to lines which struggle to retain any sense of metre and instead appear to be marking out syllables (line 13 has 14 syllables, while the last line gives up at 13). We

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can find similarities with the conclusion of the third of Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets , with both poets seemingly acquiescing to the need to finish the poetic line, to relent to the pressures of the form. In the case of Heaney’s line, the syllables pull up abruptly with the end of the iambic pentameter line—‘Refreshes and relents. Is cadences’.15 Conversely, MacNeice’s line falls short and expires early. For MacNeice, the ‘music or movement’ symbolised by the possibility of the poem itself, as well as the activities described within it— piano-playing, car-tinkering and church bells pealing—provide a buffer against the never-ending progress of time towards death; but their ‘selfcontainment’ in rhyme is as artificial as it is apparently artless. To write a sonnet might be to enshrine ‘a small eternity’, but to do so is also to suggest a possibility of escape where there is none. For MacNeice, as the son of a Church of Ireland Rector,16 there might be deeper reasons for contemplating the act of contemplation itself on a Sunday morning; nevertheless, this suggestion of thematic as well as formal hypocrisy within the sonnet has wider resonances within modern Irish poetry, both mapping out a separate cultural space and questioning this territorialising tendency. In ‘Writing’, an early poem by Co. Wexford-born Anthony Cronin, the art of sonnet-writing becomes entangled in a cultural process that memorialises a troubled art through a painstaking attention to detail. The sonnet begins with a metaphor that suggests that the ‘speech’ of a poem might risk the ‘happiness’ and completion that silence can bring: Our happiness is easily wronged by speech, Being complete like silence, globed like summer, Without extension in regret or wish.17

Like MacNeice’s ‘Sunday Morning’, which turns on itself with a ‘But listen’ in line 11, diverting our attention to the deadening sound of church bells, Cronin’s ‘And’ (sometimes read as ‘But’18 ), beginning the closing couplet, urges in a moment of uncertainty: ‘And all our search for words is one assertion: / You would forgive me if I could explain’ (ll.13–14). Like ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Writing’ suggests that the apparent self-containment of poetry, exemplified here by a meticulously crafted, almost-rhyming, almost-pentameter sonnet, is dishonest in its inability to find the right words or to fully explain their meaning.

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Cronin’s sonnet recalls Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’, which reveals the dishonesty of a written testimonial to an unloving relationship between an earl and a countess, this time found on an inscription on a tomb. […] The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.19

There are echoes throughout Cronin’s poem, too, of Marianne Moore’s 14-line poem ‘Silence’, which claims: ‘The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint’.20 It is ironic that Moore’s lines are attributed to a specific instance of overheard speech, so that even when a poem tries to assert the importance of silence, words still get in the way. We are reminded, also, of Frank McGuinness’s sonnet ‘Sister Anne Breslin’ (1994), whose titular nun tries ‘to remember when there was silence’, as ‘Noise is a world away from nuisance’, finding comfort only in the place between ‘sleep and dream’.21 Evoking Larkin and Moore and prefacing McGuinness, Cronin’s ‘Writing’ points out that— […] in those moments when we can imagine The almost perfect, nearly true, we keep The words away from it, content with knowledge, Naming it only as we fall asleep.22

Is the promise of ‘restraint’ as an alternative to silence, then, the poet’s get-out clause? If a poet offers a semblance of ‘restraint’ in his or her verse, is this as ‘almost true’—or, in Cronin’s words, ‘almost perfect, nearly true’—as the instinct to keep silent (as sleep, or as the tomb) might have been? Or is it more that the poet cannot help but express such imaginings in the very ‘words’ from which they have tried to keep away? Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets offer on first reading a more playful response to these kinds of questions, with the concluding couplet to sonnet II describing ‘Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, / Each verse returning like the plough turned round’.23 The poems stake a claim to their existence by creating a natural relationship between agricultural and poetic metaphors, the plough turning with the ‘turn’ of the

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verse. Indeed, the borrowing of the phrase ‘Opened Ground’ for the title of Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966–1996 suggests an easy employment of fertile metaphors to satisfy the poetic imagination. However, behind Heaney’s 10-sonnet sequence, which was first published in 1979, lies an awareness of what it might mean to be seen as writing poetry for writing’s sake, and evoking a pastoral mode just because, particularly against the tense political backdrop of the 1970s. In Stepping Stones: Interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll (2008), Heaney notes the overlaps between the composition of these poems and his political poems for North (1975): [B]efore North appeared, I was already writing the first of those Glanmore Sonnets that would only come out five years later. I had started them in May or June 1974, a year before I saw any review of North. I’m sure about the date because in May 1974 I went to Grasmere to spend three or four days getting to know Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and the surrounding district for a TV programme; it was immediately afterwards that the first sonnet was written—the one beginning ‘This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake …’. I remember wondering, what the hell is all this iambic pentameter doing in my life? There’s even a line mocking the too literary nature of the reality of Wicklow that evening—cuckoos and corncrakes, you know, in the merry month of May: ‘It was all crepuscular and iambic.’24

In an interview taking place some 35 years after the writing of his Glanmore Sonnets , Heaney might be embarrassed by his earlier earnestness, and by how at odds these poems might seem with the serious work of North. His emphasis on the apparently ‘mocking’ tone of the earlier sonnets certainly bats away any potential criticism of levity or disloyalty. Thomas O’Grady claims of the Glanmore Sonnets that ‘collectively’ they ‘give complex expression to Heaney’s waxing and waning self-doubt’ about his ‘retreat’ from strife-torn Belfast to pastoral County Wicklow in 1972, but notes that this ambivalence is resolved through Heaney’s awareness of the sonnet’s own sonnet-ness: Individually, the poems explore that thematic complexity with a subtlety that reveals the poet’s heightened awareness of the potential of the sonnet’s very form to help him arrive at a ‘rational’ resolution of his ambivalence about his artistic vocation.25

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Whether or not this ‘ambivalence’ is fully resolved, it is certain that not only the ‘vowels’ of the Glanmore Sonnets , but also their formal and thematic paradoxes, turn on each other like Heaney’s ‘plough turned round’. The sonnets are suffused with a sometimes mocking, occasionally painful, awareness that Heaney’s speaker cannot be compared with ‘Dorothy and William’, because for an Irish sonneteer allegiances cannot be forged, nor comparisons made, lightly—and there is a whole other sonnet tradition that can never be ignored.

2.2

Writing, Speaking, and ‘the Language Issue’

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Irish sonnets have stretched further the metapoetic conceit in their contemplation of the act of writing, so that ‘writing’ becomes a synonym for a ‘speech’ that is often fraught with cultural or political tensions or questions. Thirteen Sonnets (1968), written in English by dual-language poet Michael Hartnett during a period of considerable political foment, plays with ideas of sound and silence to explore what might be dubbed ‘The Language Issue’ following Paul Muldoon’s translation of the title of one of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems, ‘Ceist na Teangan’ (Ní Dhomhnaill, unlike Hartnett, never writes poems in English but asks other poets to translate them from Irish Gaelic).26 Hartnett’s short sequence combines religious and biblical allusions with classical allusion and myth to reveal a speaker—a shadowy ‘I’ narrator—who doubts the solaces and comforts of poetry and the imagination, even as he appears to celebrate them: The word is brain, made flesh to hold debate. The very cells of hunger saying yes: but the poem is the heart, incarnate.27

Here, the subtle play with rhyme means we could read these lines in two different ways: if according to the verse form (abab cdc efef gfg ), ‘incarnate’ rhymes with ‘debate’, then we consider the tussle between the ‘debating’ brain and the ‘incarnate’ heart of the poem, sounding back to ‘brain’ and then allowing that to win over. However, if ‘incarnate’ rhymes instead with its previous word, ‘heart’, then perhaps the ‘heart’ has won over the head. The poem veers between the ‘brain’ and the ‘heart’, with

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the intricacies of rhyme scheme—alternately instinctive and contrived— bearing this out. Although Hartnett does not write countless sonnets in English, those he does write make playful use of form, often rhyming intricately. For example, his earlier sonnet beginning ‘I have exhausted the delighted rage’ uses the rhyme scheme abcabc bd edc edc to ponder, selfconsciously, how ‘Small birds, small poems, are not immortal’.28 From a similar period, Hartnett’s sequence of sixteen poems, Anatomy of a Cliché, contains three loosely conceived sonnets of two stanzas of seven lines each: although metrically uneven, they make some use of end-rhyme and repetition.29 Returning to Thirteen Sonnets , we can see how Hartnett employs such subtle formal experiments to open up a discussion about the relationship between form and content, the prosaic and the ‘magical’, and speech and silence, within Irish poetry. Sonnet 9, which begins ‘I saw magic on a green country road–’, sees the ‘old woman’ of the sonnet’s narrative become a Kathleen Ni Houlihan figure, hypnotic in her linguistic command: Some incantation from her canyoned mouth, Irish, English, blew frost along the ground, and even though the wind was from the south the ash-leaves froze without an ash-leaf sound.30

Formally, the poem builds upon an ‘English’ foundation—using pentameter lines and, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, playing with seven rhyming sounds—but departs from this to play with metre and rhyme. In the closing lines, quoted above, the iambic pentameter is interrupted in line 12 by the trochees of ‘Irish, English’, and by the use of punctuation to slow the whole down. The incantatory rhyme scheme of the sonnet, meanwhile, running aa bcde bcde fgfg, is both intricately layered and doubles back on itself (perhaps in a faint echo of Spenser’s interlocking sonnet pattern abab bcbc cdcd ee). Moreover, it uses a rhyming couplet in the opening lines of the poem, rather than at the end as in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Though harking back to a more ‘English’ form, the poem speaks in its own ‘Irish’ voice to echo the conceit of the sonnet’s turn: that an ‘incantation’ can be as powerful as a canyon, but can also have its effect in silence as much as sound. This effect is enhanced by an intricate formal structure that is so (nearly) familiar that it is (almost) unheard.

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More recently, Belfast poet Alan Gillis’s unrhymed iambic pentameter sonnet ‘Memory’ (2010) has considered poetry in terms of the traditional conceit of the muse, as a poet—addressed as ‘You’—‘wait[s] to see what comes and nothing comes’ in order to begin to write.31 Though the poem concludes that ‘Nothing happens’ (l.14), the luxurious images that we have encountered in the meantime, and their surprising collocations—such as where ‘scalded / white bungalow walls burst with corallita’ (ll.4–5)—imply that through waiting in beautiful, stimulating surroundings for something to happen on the page, many things have happened within the poet’s viewpoint. In this the poem shares affinities with Ben Keatinge’s sonnet ‘Demir Kapija’ (2019), which begins with a statement of linguistic defeat as his speaker addresses his imposing subject: ‘Impossible to wreathe you here in words’. Yet the poem unfolds in a luxuriant description of fecund possibility, so that the ‘I’ resolves to ‘find a way of dwelling nowhere else / ripening in this field of vines’.32 In Gillis’s ‘Eloquence’, in the same collection as ‘Memory’, he voices a subtle response to the ‘language issues’ raised in earlier sonnets by Heaney and Hartnett—using a bird’s flight to consider the relationship between inspiration, ‘speech’ and craft in sonnet-writing. Like Keatinge, whose gaze turns to a vulture’s flight, Gillis alights on a gannet: Who would not speak, in their quieter fancies, as a gannet coasts the blue—to rise, halt without breaking wing, and kamikaze downward at breakneck speed, break the salt water surface, plunge with dead-eyed accuracy the ice-shock deep, then splash to resurface with a glittered life writhing in the beak— who would not lip such a sentence?33

The conceit here is so daring as to be almost facetious; in choosing to describe the gannet’s flight the speaker both pays homage to its beauty and admires the linguistic dexterity that facilitates this admiration. It is significant that the description of the flight is encased in punctuation, so that the main thrust of this opening ‘sentence’ is ‘Who would not speak […] who would not lip such a sentence?’, and not the achievements of the gannet itself. We recall Hartnett’s line ‘Small birds, small poems, are not immortal’, in a sonnet that concludes, ‘there is no time now for my dream of hawks’.34 Gillis’s quiet celebrations suggest instead that there might never be such a time, so ‘now’ is as good a time as ever. The poem

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becomes a statement of expressing oneself not through silence, nor even through restraint, but because a poet can ‘speak’, even ‘in their quieter fancies’. Though the speaker envies the easy elegance of the gannet’s flight, and though the turn of the poem (l.9) imagines the speaker aiming to reproduce this elegance only to fail to achieve such heights of beauty and ease, we are still left with the idea that the poet has created the very ‘sentences’ that we read before us, and which enable the extraordinary qualities of the gannet’s flight to be communicated. This daring is emphasised by the subtle use of colloquial Hiberno-English, with the verb ‘lip’ meaning ‘to utter; to sing’, or even to ‘pronounce with the lips only; to murmur softly’: so that his speaker is singing just as a bird might, but in a language and inflection of his choosing.35 There might be wider questions raised here about vocal authority: so that the poem—which begins ‘Who would not speak [?]’, and ends ‘who would not lip [?]’—makes its own, murmuring, claim for self-expression. The gendered implications of such a question find their way into Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s 14-line poem ‘Studying the Language’ (1994), which describes a Sunday cliff walk, performed ritualistically by the speaker, during which ‘hermits’ emerge from their ‘holes’ and ‘begin to talk after a while’. Ní Chuilleanáin’s speaker, an eavesdropper on these hermits’ conversations, imagines herself a near stranger to their performance: I listen to their accents, they are not all From this island, not all old, Not even, I think, all masculine. ……………………………………………… I call this my work, these decades and stations— Because, without these, I would be a stranger here.36

‘Studying the Language’ extends the speech-as-writing conceit in further subtle ways, with ‘language’ reconfigured not simply as speech but as ‘accents’. We are unsure whether the ‘I’ is at risk of being ‘a stranger here’ because of her (implied) gender, or because she is not part of the ‘talk’ that she takes no active part in. It is important that the hermits’ ‘accents’ are described as not ‘all masculine’, with the hesitation implied by ‘I think’ as well as the surprise conveyed by the idea that some of these

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accents might be their opposite. Meanwhile, the speaker’s ‘work’ is allied not just with writing and recording this ‘talk’ in verse but also with a religious ritual—thanks to the allusions to the Rosary (of which there are five ‘decades’), and to the ‘stations’ of the Cross (of which there are 14). Such imagery recalls the fact that, traditionally at least, the ‘hermit’ was a Christian recluse.37 Though the poem has only loose formal links to a traditional sonnet, the allusion to the numbers of ‘stations’ highlights that this is a 14-line poem; moreover, the reference to ‘work’ within a poem that has as a loose iambic pentameter of five beats per line urges an uncertain connection between the speaker’s ritual Sunday performance and the performance of poetry writing. Indeed, the direct allusion to ‘Sundays’ and the subtle numerical patterning implied by the references to Catholic ritual recall MacNeice’s ‘Sunday Morning’, with its own rituals of performance through ecclesiastical iconography. Not all sonnets written by Irish writers directly conceive ‘The Language’, as Ní Chuilleanáin terms it, as the Irish Gaelic language. Even in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem, the idea of language is linked to a place that might be a cliff edge in Ireland or might in fact be no place at all; what matters more is the position of the poetic speaker who is reduced to a silent observer of the proceedings, trying to decode the hermits’ ‘accents’ in order to avoid ‘being a stranger here’. This reimagines what Brian Friel describes, in his 1980 play Translations , as the ‘privacies’ of ‘the language of the tribe’, where the ‘private core’ of the Irish Gaelic language is ‘hermetic’,38 echoing however faintly Ní Chuilleanáin’s obsession with the figure of the ‘hermit’.39 Though ‘hermit’ and ‘hermetic’ have little in common etymologically, both images conjure up the idea of a coded world unfriendly to strangers, and the OED offers instances of literature confusing ‘hermetic’ as ‘hermitic’ in seeking expression for this kind of idea.40 Interestingly, Ní Chuilleanáin’s speaker in ‘Studying the Language’ might already know the language of the Donegal Irish—in The Second Voyage she describes a ‘spiked Donegal hermit’, suggesting that the conversations here might be taking place in the Gaeltacht.41 ‘Accents’ might remain indecipherable, then, even when a language is largely understood. In each example, the poet uses the sonnet form as a backdrop to question, assert, but also undermine the position of the poet/speaker in relation to word use both at the surface level of language

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and at the level of poetic authority. In ‘Studying the Language’ in particular, the implication that Ní Chuilleanáin’s speaker needs to ‘work’ to challenge her perceived ‘strangeness’ hints that it is her position as poet that she is questioning too.

2.3

‘Nothing Beside Remains’: Architectural Sonnets

[…] I can tell my mind, show all the small parlours, all the wide rooms: façades much rebuilt on and hid behind dilapidated sheds and family tombs.42

In Irish sonnets that deal specifically with questions of language and speech, poets have considered questions of authority about who, how and why one should speak, with such questions incorporating issues of gender as well as nationality and, more locally, accent. But each poet is also aware of their sonnets’ existence as 14-line poems whose foundations are constructed, but often shakily so. In the above lines from Hartnett’s Thirteen Sonnets , the ‘mind’ of the ‘I’ is portrayed as a fabrication that emerges through the construction of verse: although it appears to be made up of ‘small parlours’ and ‘wide rooms’, it is instead a collection of ‘façades much rebuilt on’—of ‘dilapidated sheds and family tombs’. The sonnet’s constructedness might reflect the desire for order within the poet’s mind—but it neither tells, nor shows, the full story. Many sonnets contain actual and metaphorical buildings, the poet often presented as the sculptor, the builder or the craftsman. For some poets and critics, this offers solace. According to Eavan Boland, ‘the sonnet is a form of true power—malleable, nomadic, humane’, and ‘can travel to any situation and to any uncertainty and offer its marvellous interior architecture to shelter the moment’; here, then, the sonnet even precedes the sculpting of its new version.43 Comparatively, for Richard Murphy the act of writing sonnets renders him ‘a poetic handyman’, who wishes to ‘adapt a structure perfected by consummate sonneteers’.44 For other Irish poets, nothing so monumental is afoot; instead, their sonnets focus on ‘dilapidated sheds’ or other commonplace structures. P. B. Shelley’s 1818 sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ might be seen as foundational to such ideas, being perhaps the most famous example of a poem

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simultaneously undermining and supporting itself through a complex contemplation of monumental failure: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.’45

There are numerous elements at play here, which challenge the structural assumptions of the sonnet form. First, the mainly regular iambic pentameter is contested immediately by the rhyme scheme. It as if Shelley has taken the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet—abab cdcd efef gg —and the rhyme scheme of a Spenserian sonnet—abab bcbc cdcd ee— and discovered a strange hybrid of the two: abab acdc ede fef . However, there is no concluding couplet to the poem, with the structure of the last lines having more in common with the octave/sestet pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet—which tends to run abbaabba cdecde. Moreover, although there is a thematic volta after line 8—with line 9 announcing ‘And on the pedestal, these words appear’—the rhyme scheme is disruptive of a clean break, with line 10 (‘Kings’) calling back to line 7 (‘things’). This unusual and encircling scheme evokes simultaneously both immortality and claustrophobia. The poem’s embedded narratives mount a second challenge to the ‘true power’ of the sonnet. The ‘I’ of the speaker is immediately displaced by the traveller, who tells of the broken statue standing in the desert; then another narrative takes over from line 9, as the traveller reads out the declaration of Ozymandias from the ‘pedestal’. Yet there is also the narrative of the sculptor of the statue and his interpretation of Ozymandias’s character and ‘visage’ (l.4). The associations between these characters become dizzyingly complex. Is the poet, like the sculptor, someone who

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‘stamps’ on the ‘lifeless’ page his own interpretation of events? Is the sculptor responsible for writing, or at least reporting, the words on the pedestal—and therefore is he, like Ozymandias, worthy of mockery? Who is this ‘traveller’ and where is this ‘antique land’? Could this latter be itself a fiction, or a construct of the poet’s imagination? Most importantly, is the poem the ‘colossal Wreck’ of something that, like Ozymandias’s initial vision, is far greater than the final outcome on the printed page? Or is it the one thing that outlives them all—poet, traveller, sculptor and Ozymandias alike? Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn alludes directly to ‘Ozymandias’ in her 10-line poem ‘Washington’ (2008), which juxtaposes lines from ‘Ozymandias’ (‘I met a traveller […] from an antique land’) with a contemplation of the Washington Monument in D.C.; meanwhile, its gauche visitors, and the security guards from The White House, ‘men with walkie-talkies’, echo the layered narrative devices of Shelley’s sonnet.46 Peter Mackay contends that contemporary Northern Irish poets ‘negotiate, undermine, and compete with Romantic texts and poets’. His discussion of ‘Washington’ follows suit, focusing also on the national and gender politics at play in Flynn’s use of ‘Ozymandias’: The United States is cast as the latest in the line of ephemeral (though at the time apparently omnipotent) regimes; more importantly, the perspective of cultural tourism—the ‘rapid tourist mode’—which the poem adopts is also implicated and undermined. Shelley’s poem is itself a monument to achievement which has—within the poem—fractured: given the pattern of impermanence, the perspective of Flynn’s poem is itself exposed as being temporary or ephemeral—its authority will also fade.47

Mackay’s analysis does not take fully into account the self-undermining nature of Shelley’s sonnet, which implies that Shelley’s own poetic authority might fade. It might have noted, too, how the deliberate fragmentation in Flynn’s poem—with the italicised sections of ‘Ozymandias’ inserted as if they were, too, from an ‘antique land’—comments on contemporary attitudes towards poetry, which Flynn’s self-invasions into her poem suggest she might even share. It is useful to consider how Flynn’s poem breaks down the structure of Shelley’s sonnet. The formal continuum between the two poems—where the sonnet structure is an absent presence behind ‘Washington’—offers an alternative, poetic, chronology. ‘Washington’, not only because of

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its famous predecessor, but also because of its own formal qualities, is haunted by the presence of a sonnet that is now being remembered by a later poet. Direct quotation and thematic allusion are enhanced by a formal pattern that moves in and out of iambic pentameters and employs playful end-rhymes, as well as syntactical parallels (such as ‘boundless’ marking a trochaic beat in each poem),48 all of which appear to owe something to Shelley’s original. Therefore, we are left with the impression that Flynn’s ‘Washington’ owes more to ‘Ozymandias’—and, in turn, George Washington to King Ozymandias—than the poem’s apparent desecrations imply. Eamon Grennan’s sonnet ‘Shed’ (1998) responds to Shelley’s poem in more subtle ways,49 hinting at an association between the found objects of ‘Ozymandias’—the ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’, the ‘shattered visage’ and the ‘pedestal’50 —and the semi-abandoned ‘woodshed’ of the poem’s title. It also expands on the play between structural metaphors and metaphorical structures that ‘Ozymandias’ takes delight in. Flynn’s ‘Washington’ alludes to structures in its use of ‘mausoleum’ and ‘stone’,51 but its more hidden metaphors concern the structural assumptions of the sonnet form; Grennan, in contrast, focuses on an actual structure and uses a loose sonnet form to prop it up. Therefore, the once-abandoned site of his poem proves to be cautiously regenerative, as it describes how a previously unnoticed ‘peach tree’ has grown in place of the titular shed.52 The poem leads us to consider the relationship between man-made and natural forms. The shed, the garage and the ‘ghost of the roof’ (l.14) contrast with the ‘weeds, chokecherry’ and ‘wild rose brambles’ (ll.5, 6). Meanwhile, the meandering narrative and the odd word order allow for an uncertainty within the structure of ‘Shed’ that, like the peach tree’s effect on the shed itself, both supports and undermines the structure of the poem. In both ‘Ozymandias’ and ‘Shed’, the poet plays on the apparent structural stability of the sonnet form to raise questions about the relationships between man-made constructions and man-made verse. In Grennan’s poem, the speaker is a largely passive observer of a change that has taken place in the natural world to counteract the effects of the previous destruction of the title building. Therefore, the sonnet shape, however loosely felt here—the lines run closer to hexameter then pentameter, and there is only one full end-rhyme in the poem53 —acts as a bolster, holding this moment of restoration in place before something else happens to

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change the situation once again. Likewise the bragging words of Ozymandias’s pedestal, now no more than a hollow claim, imply that the words of the poem might too lose their resonances, despite being bolstered by the sonnet form. What ‘Ozymandias’ asks, and what such ‘architectural’ sonnets attempt likewise to tackle, is what ‘remains’ of poems after their creators are gone. In some ways, employing the sonnet form allows for the structure itself to act as a ballast. It has history behind it, and in front of it. Is it, then, a fiction that (to return to Boland’s comment) the sonnet will ‘offer its interior architecture to shelter the moment’?54 The sonnet might offer its architecture to the poet, but this does not mean that the moment will be sheltered successfully, or that it will continue to be sheltered; and neither does it mean that this offering will not be taken away, or challenged or dismantled. To quote ‘Ozymandias’, in a world in which ‘Nothing beside remains’,55 a poem might leave behind nothing but traces in the sand; or the form itself might lose its currency, and be left out in the cold within no one to find or interpret it.

2.4

The ‘Sonnet Houses’ of Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone56

What building tuned your ear for poetry?57

Rarely are the architectural elements of the sonnet dealt with so concretely, or so actively foregrounded, as in the structural metaphors and metaphorical structures of the ‘sonnet houses’ of Richard Murphy’s sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985). Indeed, for Murphy, as he put it in a 2013 interview, writing The Price of Stone was enabling. Here he could ‘transmute […] remembered experience into urns of poetry’, inspired as he was by a ‘mantra’ of Yeats—‘hammer your thoughts into unity’.58 The sonnets of The Price of Stone become as much about the structures themselves—as living monuments and monuments of verse— as a channel for the Anglo-Irish Murphy’s own conflicting inheritances, so that each sonnet functions instead (as he puts it himself) as a ‘rock that gives shape to a waterfall’.59 The Price of Stone asks that it be taken on its own terms; it appears simultaneously to create its own tradition and to extend the parameters of the existing traditions out of which it writes. It is both subjective

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and transgressive, through its decision to borrow from and hew together traditions that others might view as inherently opposed. In a persuasive reading of Murphy’s ‘Pat Cloherty’s Version of The Maisie’, Bernard O’Donoghue views Murphy’s yoking together of traditions as essential to his unique poetic voice: ‘[t]he subject-matter of all this is Irish and local, but the language and the poetics belong to English’.60 Murphy’s notes for The Price of Stone are (self-) exposing of the pitfalls and pratfalls concerned with writing a sonnet sequence and particularly with writing an Anglo-Irish one. Murphy is aware, sometimes painfully so, of the paradoxes inherent in creating something for oneself which writes out of two traditions that each encompass their own practices, rules and customs. But a poet can explore the paradoxes of the sonnet to mirror and reflect their own complex identity. Murphy notes himself on ‘Writing The Battle of Aughrim’, that ‘[a]s a renegade from a Protestant family that I loved, I wished the poem to unite my divided self in our divided country in a sequence faithful to the disunity of both’.61 Murphy’s pained wordiness recalls what Edna Longley critiques in the poem itself as ‘the labourpangs of his syntax’.62 But a sonnet sequence, containing a unifying form that becomes unfaithful through its very insistence upon that unity, might (just) be up to the job. Murphy explains the geneses of The Price of Stone, describing the poems as works which move ‘from the flagellating Celtic hermits to the extortionate mine owner’ while acknowledging the over-reaching ambition of such an aim.63 Throughout, however, is an awareness that while ‘poetry can be creative archaeology that discovers and uses verbal roots’, it is ‘not above the risk of succumbing to fashion or linguistic vandalism’.64 The ‘sonnet houses’ of The Price of Stone enable Murphy to contrive an imaginary landscape that enacts a complicated relationship with the outside world. Moreover, this outside world consists not only of real structures, but also of memories and experiences that are filtered through Murphy’s subjective responses. Meanwhile, the apparent objectivity of the Shakespearean sonnet structure allows for mediation between the personal and the universal. Murphy tried to explain this process in an interview with The Spectator: By making the persona of each sonnet the spirit of that house or structure, I found I was better able to transmute the mud of remembered experience into urns of poetry, monuments, ruins, and lesser structures as ancient in design as a wattle tent, voices that had influenced my life—some of which

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were voices of my conscience arising from the past and admonishing me for my faults, while avoiding the hazards and avowals of confessional verse.65

This last phrase is telling, as throughout his notes for the sonnet sequence Murphy is preoccupied with producing something autobiographical yet which avoids the expected solipsistic element; he wishes to move away from what Longley identifies in his poetry as ‘the sense of isolated imaginations, seeking on various levels for structures in which to lodge themselves’.66 On first reading, The Price of Stone seems to literalise Longley’s metaphor, by providing both ‘structures’ and ‘lodgings’ for Murphy’s conflicted thoughts and loyalties. However, in ‘Transgressing into Poetry’, his notes for The Price of Stone, Murphy explains how the ‘sonnet houses’ function as metonyms for actual buildings that pre-date his own concerns, as if the buildings themselves are seeking him out. The poems have each a ‘different persona emanating from a building associated with my life’, as Murphy explains, so that it is the building which comes before the ‘persona’ and the poem.67 But the set-up is more complicated still, as at the moment that the poem and the building converge, they immediately and necessarily diverge because ‘the poem, unlike the monument from which it speaks, must, of course, have an inner life’.68 The stories of the ‘sonnet houses’ are separate from those of the poet himself, as they are also separate from the actual buildings from which they emanate; therefore, the buildings continue to live their own lives. The two sonnets from The Price of Stone that Murphy refers to as the ‘Wellington sonnets’—‘Wellington Testimonial’ and ‘Wellington College’—and their linked sonnet, ‘Nelson’s Pillar’, bring to the fore the problems of Anglo-Irish inheritance, and the literalising of the structural desire identified by Longley. In his preparatory notes, Murphy asks: Have all possible cadences been tried and exhausted in the sonnet? … ask this question in the Wellington sonnets … are you square-bashing in rhymed metrical verse … constrained by the left right left right of the metre and the rhyme, the platoons of polished boots on parade? Trace the connection, if there is one, between the sonnet as a love poem perfected by Petrarch and Shakespeare immortalising the beloved … and the Wellington Testimonial, constructed to immortalise the saviour of the nation, the victor of Waterloo, the Iron Duke … so precise, wellproportioned and banal … but from some angles epical … cold calculation put it there … to stand high and indifferent over the Phoenix Park …

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where Thomas Henry Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish were murdered by the Invincibles in 1882 … and where, last summer, a nurse who had gone to the park to sunbathe was tortured and murdered by a man later found to be staying in a Dalkey penthouse belonging to the Attorney General.69

We can see the notes unravelling as Murphy muses further on the layers of hypocrisy generated from just one structural creation, the ‘Wellington Testimonial’. Similarly, the ‘Wellington sonnets’ and ‘Nelson’s Pillar’ give voice to the ‘cold calculation’ of the colonial project and the ‘epical’ possibilities of monumental verse—despite Murphy’s concern that ‘all possible cadences’ may have been ‘tried and exhausted in the sonnet’. A similar suspicion is expressed in the opening lines of ‘Wellington College’, during which the poem unfurls almost despite itself: Fear makes you lock out more than you include By tackling my red brick with Shakespeare’s form Of love poem, barracked here and ridiculed By hearty boys, drilled to my square-toed norm.70

The voice seems to ask whether a ‘love poem’ should be appropriated— ‘barracked’ and bashed around in the schoolroom—to an environment that rules more by fear than by love. But Murphy shelters a moment just as he leaves it exposed; we are reading this story in a sonnet, after all, and a sonnet that is not (or is not obviously) about love. We are left wondering whether the ‘square-toed norm’ belongs to the parading boots of the student-soldiers on parade in their militaristic college, or to the defiant angles of the red brick school; or if it refers to the versifying of the knowing poet himself—the fearful ‘you’ who has been institutionalised to create forever rhymed and regularly metred sonnets. Yet of course the learning and acquisition of ‘Shakespeare’s form’ can be linked back to an Irish education, as well as to the drilling that appears to be going into Murphy’s institutionalised speaker within his English public school. Rosemarie Rowley, an Irish poet who writes often in Shakespearean sonnets, describes how her ‘interest in the sonnet, particularly the Shakespearean sonnet, grew out of exposure to Irish music and its refrains as [she] was growing up; it seemed a point was being made after each quatrain’.71 In one of her collections, Girls of the Globe (2015), which contains many Shakespearean sonnets—the opening 13

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of which are voiced by female characters from Shakespeare’s plays72 — Rowley describes Irish ‘bards’ as ‘Rhymesters exact with consonants and vowel’.73 Yet this Shakespearean sonnet attributes such pedantry not to Shakespeare but to Ireland and, by association, to another Anglo-Irish poet. Its title ‘Mad Ireland Hurt Me, Too’ is a direct reference to W. H. Auden’s scathing critique of Yeats, ‘mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, in his complex, uncertain elegy ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939).74 Rowley’s sonnet, like Murphy’s, questions lines of affiliation and identity against a ‘melange’ of educational and cultural influences—so that its poets come to see ‘both apposite and opposite as true’.75 Wordplay is central to our understanding of Murphy’s negotiation of the ‘apposite’ and the ‘opposite’ in his sonnets. Does something work because it sounds right, he asks, or might it merely be an accident of design? Elsewhere in his notes to the ‘Wellington sonnets’, Murphy muses how ‘a sonnet in the Duke’s laconic tone of voice might send up the absurd illusion of immortality in verse or in stone’.76 This feeds through to the concluding couplet of ‘Wellington Testimonial’, in which the monument half brags, half despairs: ‘My sole point in this evergreen oak aisle / Is to maintain a clean laconic style’.77 Of course the last line is a sort of joke, in that it cleanly answers its preceding line with a perfect rhyme and in a perfect iambic pentameter. But at the same time, something is not quite right. Throughout the poem, words seem misused as if, like the ‘Testimonial’ itself, things are out of place: here we get ‘aisle’ instead of ‘Isle’ (and ‘evergreen […] aisle’ rather than ‘Emerald Isle’). Likewise the phallic monument is characterised as ‘Needling my native sky over Phoenix Park’, ‘obelis[ing] the victory of wit’ (ll.1, 2), so that nouns used usually for aggressive structures (needle and obelisk) are turned into verbs in an assertion of imperial power that is slightly misplaced. In his notes, Murphy states: ‘[t]he poem might develop the ambiguity implied by the verb “obelize” [sic] … the critical mark must grow into self-criticism … which is also a reflection on where and how I stand … with an English voice in Ireland now’.78 So it is not the unabashed self-aggrandising of Ozymandias with which we are presented, but something more ambiguous, where the ‘Testimonial’ itself becomes an uncertain and self-critical witness. Unfortunately, this leads to a fear that, like Wellington, he should not be speaking at all. Yet Murphy and Shelley, like Petrarch and Shakespeare before them, have taken the time to construct such monuments of verse: ones that

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might outlive, or might have outlived already, the erections and characters they describe. This situation generates its own stories that, in their complexities and contrarieties, are ripe for poetry. Standing side-by-side within The Price of Stone, ‘Nelson’s Pillar’ and ‘Wellington Testimonial’ contain within their titles an inscribed social and political history. Joseph Sendry sees these two sonnets as forming part of an opening to the sequence that ‘communicates sterility, mainly through phallic structures ineffectually flaunted’.79 Within these poems ‘ineffectual flaunting’ is performed by out of place British structures tethered to Dublin to give voice to a now diminished past. ‘Nelson’s Pillar’ contains a further irony. By the time of composition, the monument had been blown up: by Irish Republicans, in 1966, around the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. So the poem becomes a remembering and re-rendering of the pillar and of Nelson before it, as the closing couplet opines: Dismasted and dismissed, without much choice, Having lost my touch, I’ll raise my chiselled voice.80

The poem, like ‘Ozymandias’, contains the echoes and relics of the sculptors’ (and builders’) work, resounding through the ‘chiselled voice’ of Nelson atop his ‘Pillar’ and also through the ‘good masons’ who ‘carved my four / Sea victories in granite’ (ll.9–10). It is not merely the ‘Pillar’ that is talking here, but instead a kind of double ventriloquising is taking place, whereby the ‘Pillar’ conveys Nelson’s thoughts at the same time as the poem-persona is giving voice to Murphy’s own concerns about the legacy of British imperialism in Dublin. In ‘Nelson’s Pillar’, Admiral Nelson appears to have been reincarnated as the pillar itself; but Murphy’s characterisation adds further complications to Nelson’s narrative. Rather than being proud of his achievement, ‘Nelson’ wonders at his own displacement, and at the potentially cruel ramifications of this erection to him: My duty done, I rose as a Doric column Far from at home, planted to reach the sky; A huge stake in the crossed heart of a glum Garrison city overlooked by my blind eye. (ll.1–4)

The story being told is not as simple as Sendry’s suggestion that these particular sonnets ‘proclaim the lost potency of imperial power now

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spent’.81 This ‘lost potency’ is felt, certainly, in the flattening answering rhyme of ‘glum’ to ‘column’, which swiftly dispenses Nelson’s erection. Yet Nelson, sitting atop his pillar, is aware of this too, commenting on the ridiculousness of the endeavour, and expressing dissatisfaction at having to spend his days in this ‘glum / Garrison city’. His self-aware mocking of his own inadequacies (‘overlooked by my blind eye’) is extended in the following lines, which deflate the overblown assertions of the naval anthem ‘Rule, Britannia!’ to offer a bathetic portrayal of Nelson’s figure as ‘One-armed on a cold square abacus to rule / The waves’ (ll.5–6). But while Murphy does not ask us to mock so blindly Nelson’s aggrandisements, thanks to his own pillar’s embarrassments, neither does he want us to forget Nelson’s achievements. For in almost the same breath in which we are asked to wonder, with the turn of the sonnet, ‘Who cares, now [?]’ (l.9), we are also reminded of the naval ‘victories’ commemorated in inscriptions on the pillar. For a brief moment Nelson might be Ozymandias, but he is given none of that king’s swagger: instead, he is ‘Dismasted and dismissed’ (l.13), and the reader feels some sympathy for him. It leads us to ask whether, when in the poem the destruction of the pillar is enacted—‘the blast wore / Red, white and blue in a flash of puerile skill’ (ll.11–12)—this latter might be Nelson’s own self-analysis. He knows, and has known all along, that his is a pillar of salt. Through the writing and construction of The Price of Stone, Murphy is able to bring apparent hypocrisies to bear, to see how they play out within the overall structure of the sonnet sequence and through the autobiographical ventriloquising of the ‘sonnet houses’ themselves. Critics have complained that The Price of Stone lacks an overarching, consistent narrative to bring all the poems together, but the fact that the sequence nearly buckles under its own shaky foundations is surely the point. And this structural near-buckling reflects Murphy’s own personal doubts and selfconcealments as an Anglo-Irish poet trying to come to terms with his past by setting up home in rural Ireland. When Murphy tells us that he wrote The Price of Stone between April 1981 and 1983 ‘at an isolated house on Mullen’s Hill in Killiney’,82 he is (painfully) aware of the irony that he is able to buy houses in order to write about other ones or indeed to have the leisure time to write at all. In his notes on ‘Writing The Battle of Aughrim’, which was first published in 1968, Murphy comments on the ‘absurdity of pretentious ancestral claims’ of Irish people from all backgrounds, as if predicting his preoccupation in The Price of Stone with the

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absurd pretentiousness of putting down one’s roots in a country whose very soil is contested. Thus while at the same time that Murphy stakes his claim on the land he loves, he is also aware of the attendant ironies that are raised by his doing so. Simultaneously, he needs to work out where he fits within the broader scheme of things: A question uppermost in all Irish minds in our agricultural past—who owns the land?—occurred to me so strongly that I took an envelope from the pocket of my donkey jacket and wrote those words, in case I might forget them[.]83

In this scene, Murphy casts himself as slightly absurd—not only because he is part observer, part Irishman, but also because of his status as poet. For what is most clear from this scene is his awareness of the poetic posture: he re-makes the scene as he recounts it, while his taking down of notes tells us that he needs to work this stuff out into poetry. Murphy discusses ‘guilt’ as a drive for writing The Battle of Aughrim— in 1968, he tells us, he ‘was trying to examine my army heritage and my guilt in not having served in the war that was brought to an end by the bomb on Hiroshima on my 18th birthday’.84 By 1983, while writing The Price of Stone, this ‘guilt’ has become connected to an uneasy inheritance of land, places and buildings; yet, as we have seen in Murphy’s manipulation of the sonnet form, this is channelled into a highly self-aware, both painful and playful, verse. It is not quite the case, then, that as Longley puts it, ‘[i]n seeking a “truly Irish” identity Murphy also seeks absolution from Ascendancy guilts’.85 Christopher Ricks argues that although poetry seeks to indulge in an ‘evocation of atonement as a finality’, the form can never really answer the desire to atone, or to be at one: the two ‘are finally irreconcilable, tonally and totally’, because ultimately ‘there can be no atonement of atonement and at-one-ment’.86 The poem that places this acknowledgement at its centre, the sonnet that results from such selfaware seeking, takes on this burden. Murphy’s ‘guilts’, therefore, might not be simply political, but might also acknowledge the atonement that perhaps all poets seek: one that is sometimes contrived, often circuitous, and even, occasionally, hypocritical.

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‘Hereness’ and ‘Thisness’ in Ekphrastic Sonnets

In each of the sonnets discussed so far, poets have explored art or artifice in terms of the potential for metaphor to both uphold and undermine the art and artifice of the sonnet form. However, in a handful of modern Irish sonnets, poets have adopted a more literal approach by responding directly to a work of visual art, and in so doing exploring the relationships between source and poem. Heather Dubrow has pointed out a connection between the sonnet and ekphrastic art, in that both forms often ‘play on’ the implications of ‘here’ and ‘this ’.87 ‘Ekphrasis’ derives from the Latin and the Greek for ‘recount’, ‘describe’ and also ‘tell’ or ‘explain’,88 offering analogies for the constructed world of the sonnet form. This suggests potential temporal and spatial connections between the acts of viewing an artwork, responding to it, and then framing this response into a sonnet. Michael Longley’s sonnet ‘Sitting for Eddie’, written in memory of the Irish painter Edward McGuire (1932–1986), describes the tiny, subtle changes that occur in painter and sitter during the act of portrait painting, recounted in the closing line: ‘Me turning into a still life whose eyes are blue’.89 Therefore, the painting comes to life while the poem slowly unfolds. At the other end of the scale, Yeats’s dynamic sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1923), which has a host of possible visual sources, makes for a slippery, but potentially useful, model for later ekphrastic sonnets within Irish poetry.90 By foregrounding the ambiguous connection between various representations of the mythological story within art, but remaining elusive as to the poem’s actual referents, Yeats confronts within his poem the relationship between seen, heard and written sources. This situation is complicated by the fact that ‘Leda and the Swan’ went through different drafts and was published in different contexts. It first appeared in the US periodical The Dial in June 1924 (Æ having rejected it for publication in the Irish Statesman),91 and later, entitled ‘Leda’, became an introductory poem to Book V (‘Dove or Swan’) of the second version of Yeats’s esoteric prose work A Vision (1937).92 Yeats also tells how his reasons for writing the poem changed during its drafting. First it was begun as a response to a request by ‘the editor of a political magazine’; later, however, Yeats’s ‘fancy began to play with Leda and the Swan for metaphor’, so much that ‘bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it’.93

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Giorgio Melchiori’s The Whole Mystery of Art (1960) conducts wideranging investigations into the sources of a handful of Yeats’s poems, including ‘Leda and the Swan’. He suggests that there might not be just one visual source to such a complex sonnet, positing instead that Yeats only came across second- or third-hand visual representations of the Leda myth when thinking about, and later writing, ‘Leda and the Swan’: for example, on reading about Michelangelo’s lost version from c.1530, and Leonardo’s lost paintings from c.1503–1510 in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873).94 This issue complicates the more common view that Michelangelo’s ‘Leda’ is ‘the main figurative source’. But Melchiori offers up still more complex patterns of association: Edmund Spenser’s allusion to a Leda myth through his description of a tapestry in The Faerie Queene (1590); scenes depicting Leda in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream or The Dream of Poliphilus, 1499); and even an illustration in William Blake’s Jerusalem from his epic Milton (1804–1808), which ‘represents a naked female figure, sitting or kneeling in a pond, with wings on her shoulders and a swan’s long neck and head’.95 Elizabeth Cullingford notes of ‘Leda and the Swan’ that it ‘can be approached formally as a revisionist love sonnet, historically as a liberal intervention in the dispute about censorship in post-Treaty Ireland, [and] literally as a poem about rape’; significantly, ‘we cannot make a tidy separation between a positive historical reading and a hostile feminist one’.96 Some of the most contested lines of ‘Leda and the Swan’ are those that imply that Leda reached orgasm during the rape by Zeus in swan form: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.97

Whether we read this as a possible contortion of the mutual affection implied by Leonardo’s imagery of Leda and the Swan in contrast to Michelangelo’s more violent encounter,98 or whether we instead read through Yeats’s lines a troubling politics that suggests the need for rupture to instigate wholesale change, the implications for women (and women poets) are clear. As Helen Vendler puts it, ‘[o]ne cannot separate the shudder of orgasm from the engendering in the womb’; what implications does this have for poetic creation too?99

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Reinforcing the complex and violent visual imagery of ‘Leda and the Swan’ is the confusing and sometimes stumbling syntax, which appears particularly in the closing couplet: ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ (ll.13–14). Discussing these lines in particular, Nicholas Grene notes that: [t]he poet speaks here from outside the poem in a present that looks back to the rape of Leda, not only with a knowledge of that mythical moment in its imagined momentariness, but as it is representative of any and all such epochal occasions.100

What Grene’s analysis implies, but doesn’t quite say, is that different types of ‘knowledge’ are at stake here—whether this is the ‘knowledge’ of Zeus and Leda in the poem; or of the poet or the readers outside of it. This is because the relationship between ‘here’ and ‘this’ is constantly, sometimes disturbingly, shifting inside and outside of the poem. A prominent Irish woman poet who makes pointed use of the ekphrastic model, complicating and questioning the relationship between ‘here’ and ‘this’, is Eavan Boland. As we have seen, Boland is in some ways an advocate of the sonnet form, viewing it as a source of ‘true power’, with an ability to enshrine the moment. But she also acknowledges that when first starting out as a poet she had ‘wanted to belong to Irish poetry; I wanted Irish poetry to belong to me. The sonnet, I believed, could have no role in that’. Added to the apparent formal and imperial restraints of the form—she describes having considered it as a ‘sideshow of Empire’101 —is her awareness of the sonnet as originated and shaped largely by male writers. Consequently, her sonnets often bend and stretch formal possibilities. For example, ‘Ghost Stories’ and ‘Legends’, both 14-line poems, which read like elegant prose formed into a poem, bear little formal relation to the sonnet’s traditions of end-rhyme and iambic pentameter.102 Meanwhile, three poems of Boland’s from the 1980s—‘Woman Posing’, ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’ and ‘Growing Up’—employ ekphrasis to the service of what appears initially to be a more formal sonnet pattern, negotiating not only the relationships between ‘here’ and ‘this’ between poem and source but also the potential gender and power dynamics that such relationships might contain. In these three sonnets, Boland chooses two drawings, and one painting, of female figures as viewed through the male gaze. In ‘Woman Posing, after the painting “Mrs. Badham” by Ingres’, Boland focuses on

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a graphite drawing, ‘Mrs. Charles Badham’, by the French painter JeanAuguste Dominique Ingres from 1816.103 The poem concentrates on the depiction of the drawing’s subject, recalling the Mona-Lisa ‘smirk’ of the sitter: She smirks uneasily at what she’s shirking— sitting on this chair in silly clothes, posing in a truancy of frills. There’s no repose in her broad knees. The shawl she shoulders just upholsters her. She holds the open book like pantry keys.104

In this sonnet, as in her other two ekphrastic poems, Boland makes use of the present continuous—felt here in ‘shirking’ but also in line 1, ‘She is a housekeeping. A spring cleaning.’—in order to imagine a dynamic behind, before and after the apparent moment captured in the artwork: the poet looks past the surface impressions of the presented image. In her poem, Boland imagines Mrs. Badham as having been interrupted in her housework and posing ‘uneasily’ for this picture, wearing ‘silly clothes’ that contrast with the practical realities of her everyday life. Despite the attempts of artist and dress to conceal these realities, they are denoted nevertheless by the sitter’s ‘broad knees’ that never take ‘repose’; by her ‘shoulders’ that feel uncomfortable in a shawl; and by her awkwardness at holding a book instead of ‘pantry keys’. Boland makes clever use of the contrivances of the sonnet form to enforce this contrast between artifice and reality. The iambic pentameter of the last two lines seems particularly forced, speaking to the sitter’s own desire to be getting on with things, while the singing end-rhyme between ‘knees’ and ‘keys’ (ll.12, 14) harks back to another contrived end-rhyme between ‘dressing table’ and ‘hardly able’ earlier in the poem (ll.5, 6). We wonder why the sitter is ‘posing’ thus, how long she has had to hold this pose for, what has led up to this period of ‘sitting’; and why the artist wishes, but perhaps fails, to conceal the woman’s domestic life from our gaze. The poem’s title ‘Woman Posing’ is significant: we sense the forced performance of ‘posing’ within Boland’s response to the original drawing. This recalls the gender politics of Christina Rossetti’s sonnet ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (1856), with its description of the female sitter for a Pre-Raphaelite artist who ‘looks out from all his canvases’ with just ‘One face’, ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’.105

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Boland’s sonnet ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, appearing originally in the same collection as ‘Woman Posing’ (Night Feed, 1980), responds to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1888 painting ‘The Grape Pickers at Lunch’ (‘Le repas des vendangeuses’), a depiction of four women grape pickers, and a child, resting under a tree during their lunch break.106 The title suggests a different critical and temporal relation between poem and visual source from ‘Woman Posing’, as ‘On’ implies that the poem will be a more immediately responsive commentary on Renoir’s painting. Bernard O’Donoghue makes comparable use of a painting in his 14line poem ‘The Potato-Gatherers (on the painting by George Russell Æ)’, which also uses the present continuous and, like Boland’s poem, begins in media res, capturing the moment of looking at the agricultural figures in Russell’s original, who ‘know what they’re doing at the worst of times’.107 Boland’s sonnet begins similarly, with the use of the present continuous reflecting both the moment of looking at the painting itself, and the glorious dynamism of Renoir’s brushstrokes, which capture the movements of the women even when they are resting.108 Yet Boland’s first line contrasts with the self-knowledge conveyed by O’Donoghue’s women potato-gatherers who are seen as ‘unpraying desperadoes / on home ground’.109 Instead, Boland suggests that Renoir might not be telling us the full story: They seem to be what they are harvesting: rumps, elbows, hips clustering plumply in the sun; a fuss of shines wining from the ovals of their elbows. The brush plucks them from a tied vine. Such roundness, such a round vintage of circles, such a work of pure spheres! Flesh and shadow mesh inside each other.110

The scene, on first looking (and first reading), is idyllic, the women seeming ‘to be what they are harvesting’ in the rosy roundness of their complexions and full bodies, the ‘shines / wining from the ovals of their elbows’ like grapes leaking their intoxicating juice, and the feeling that the artist’s own ‘brush’ has plucked these juicy delights from a ‘tied vine’ in order for the viewer to admire them. The internal assonance (‘clustering / plumply’, ‘shines / wining’, ‘tied vine’, ‘Flesh’ and

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‘mesh’), and the ‘mesh’ of enjambment and repetition (‘vine’ / ‘vintage’, ‘roundness’, ‘round’), reflect the obvious ‘work’ of ‘roundness’ of Renoir’s brushstrokes. The contrived beauties of the poem dissemble as they enchant. They tell us to look closer, to notice that the grape pickers ‘seem to be what they are harvesting’ (l.1), because that is what Renoir’s impressionistic brushstrokes have implied. In order to confront this impression, Boland employs the turn of the sonnet (at l.9) to focus in on one of the figures in Renoir’s painting, a woman who appears to be asleep. Internal rhyme is replaced by pronoun repetition, and each line contains discrete sentences: But not this one: this red-headed woman. Her skirt’s a wave gathered to the weather. Her eyes are closed. Her hands are loosening. Her ears are fisted in a dozed listening. She dreams of stoves, raked leaves, plums. When she wakes summer will be over. (ll.9–14)

Like the ‘Mrs. Badham’ of the previous sonnet, a ‘swept, tidied, empty, kept woman’ whose domestic physicality belies the ‘truancy of frills’ that surround her,111 the ‘red-headed woman’ of this poem snoozes apparently in defiance of the summer scene. In her mind it is autumn, a time when she will no longer be picking grapes. The repetition of ‘Her’ is significant, as both Mrs. Badham and ‘this’ unnamed woman are given internal lives so that the poet can re-present a scene depicted originally through the male gaze. The deliberate subversion of the sonnet form— whereby Boland creates a sonnet of intricate beauty only to twist it into something more prosaic and direct—enhances the sense that this poem is in conversation with Renoir’s painting and with itself. Interestingly, Boland’s poem frames the opening eight lines with the ‘hereness’ of the present continuous in the moment of looking and begins the closing six lines with an emphatic repetition of ‘this’. The observer might be looking at the painting ‘here’ (in the gallery), but it is ‘this red-headed woman’ who really interests her. The shift in focus reframes the narrative of woman observed by male artist—and wrests the individual sonnet from a collective, canonical, (mostly) male tradition. If ‘Woman Posing’ was written ‘after’ Ingres’s drawing, and ‘The Grape Pickers’ was written ‘on’ Renoir’s painting, then Boland’s third ekphrastic sonnet, ‘Growing Up’—from the slightly later collection The

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Journey (1987)—is notable for implying a looser connection between visual source and final poem in its subtitle: ‘from Renoir’s drawing “Girlhood”’.112 Although it begins in a similar ‘this’ mode to the commentary in the previous poems, Boland’s poem soon pans out to a wider contemplation of ‘womanhood’ and what it might mean for the two hatted figures in Renoir’s drawing ‘Girlhood’ (c.1890).113 It is a poem drawn ‘from’ the original, rather than ‘after’ or ‘on’ it. As if to reflect this, the use of the sonnet form is looser than in the two previous poems, with the opening octet giving the sense that its impressions, as in Renoir’s drawing, have been hastily sketched: Their two heads, hatted, bowed, mooning above their waist-high tides of hair pair hopes. This is the haul and full of fantasy: full-skirted girls, a canvas blued and empty with the view of unschemed space and the anaemic quick of the pencil picking out dreams brooding them with womanhood.114

There is both an excitement and a caution to these lines. The dynamic movement of the verbs (‘mooning’, ‘picking’, ‘brooding’), combined with the use of breathless enjambment and the arrangements of lines as if in gasping conversation, suggest that the ‘girls’ are on the verge of new adventures; this accords with the ‘tides of hair’ which ‘pair hopes’, and the idea of ‘unschemed space’. There is an innocence to such optimism, but there is a naivety too; Boland’s emphatic use of ‘This’ in ‘This is the haul and full / of fantasy’ pulls us away from the delights of the scene being described—as we wonder whose ‘fantasy’ and ‘hopes’ these are. The gesticulation to the ‘anaemic / quick of the pencil’ points to something less wholesome, implying that the artist’s sketches are drawing out these girls’ inevitable maturity (and maternity) before they are ready, by ‘brooding them with womanhood’. The closing sestet of ‘Growing Up’ brings out this more sinister undertone, to contemplate more fully the likely fate of these girls, despite their opening ‘hopes’:

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They face the future. If only they knew! There in the distance, bonnetted, round as the hairline of a child— indefinite and infinite with hope— is the horizon, is the past and all they look forward to is memory. (ll.9–14)

As with Boland’s previous ekphrastic sonnets, we end up in a different place from where we began. Despite the dynamism and the potential of the scene described in the opening lines, we are presented with a more static reality: where the horizon itself is ‘bonnetted’ in an uncanny moment of self-revelation and self-containment. The girls’ ‘future’ is either to give birth or to progress further into a ‘womanhood’ that takes them away from the ‘Girlhood’ that Renoir’s drawing idealises. The ‘horizon’ does not show the ‘future’, then, but instead represents ‘the past’ in that their lives are already written for them; meanwhile ‘all / they look forward to is memory’ because this hopeful moment of anticipation, unbeknownst to them, might be as good as things ever get. Renoir’s drawing and Boland’s poem frame the girls in this moment—but where Renoir’s is a celebration, a naïve impression generated by ‘fantasy’, Boland’s sonnet describes their colourless reality. As if in confrontation of both Yeats’s ‘fancy’ and Renoir’s ‘fantasy’, Boland’s foregrounding, and subsequent deconstruction, of an idealised gaze in her three ekphrastic sonnets anatomises a misogynistic way of looking, which we might have taken for granted, so as to suggest new approaches towards artistic and poetic subjects. In so doing, she risks her poems buckling under the pressure: in ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’ in particular, the prose-like ending takes considerable risks in belying and undermining the beauties of the early part of the poem. But Boland also helps forge a new aesthetic that confronts the often fraught relationship between ‘here’ and ‘this’ not only within original works of art, often with female subjects, but also in the poems that are written ‘after’ them.

2.6

Conclusion: Art, Artlessness and Artifice

Sonnets, perhaps more than other forms of poetry, reflect on their own making and their own being.115 All of the sonnets discussed in this chapter have confronted the shifting, complicated, and sometimes fraught relationship between art

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and artifice in the sonnet in challenging and enlightening ways. This practice might be traced back to sonneteers such as Keats and Shelley, but from the very beginning the sonnet’s form has lent it the possibility of turning (in) on itself with the volta. In some ways, the sonnet has come to symbolise the constraints apparently imposed by poetic form, so that it stands in metonymical relation to poetry as a whole. Moreover, as Stephen Regan points out above, the sonnet form has become something of a testing ground for self-reflective experiment. Within Irish poetry, we have seen how twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets have taken up the mantle of MacNeice, Shelley, Wordsworth, Yeats and others by both celebrating and undermining the form in their deliberate confrontation of the relationship between artlessness and artfulness in the sonnet’s construction on the page. These questions have implications for Irish poetry written in English; but they also reflect wider issues about poetic affiliation and authority. If we turn the discussion towards the present moment, we can see how poets have extended the meta-poetic conceit so far as to explore the visual possibilities of the sonnet form on the printed page. Though such poetic experiments within Irish poetry might be read as a further extension of the formal and thematic deconstructions that underline Boland’s ekphrastic sonnets, or that risk undermining Murphy’s own pained sonnet-making, individual poets’ decisions might not be governed by questions of national identity or affiliation. In 2008 Jeff Hilson brought out The Reality Street Book of Sonnets , a ‘groundbreaking anthology’, which ‘stretched, decomposed and reconstructed the venerable form’.116 This claim speaks to a desire to challenge what has been upheld as ‘venerable’ within sonnets and poetry more generally. Singling out Boland and Hirsch’s anthology The Making of a Sonnet (2008) in particular, Hilson even goes so far as to contend that the reason that anthologists continue to prescribe to relatively narrow definitions of the sonnet form—such as ‘14 lines, octave and sestet, rhyming couplet, volta, etc.’—is so as to avoid ‘destroying its integrity’. Moreover, for most anthologists, Hilson claims, ‘[t]o disturb the sonnet’s form too radically’ is ‘not just to disturb the sonnet itself, or the sonnet tradition, but to endanger the foundations of the wider poetic tradition’.117 Unhelpfully, Hilson does not offer a practical alternative, acknowledging that ‘some of the poems’ in the anthology ‘are not sonnets at all’ (p. 17). For Hilson, definitions of the ‘sonnet’ have been so ‘stretched, decomposed and reconstructed’ as to render the term almost meaningless.

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Yet Hilson, and others, still employ the term ‘sonnet’ in such anthologies—and would not compile such works if the form did not continue to fascinate and confound. Peggy O’Brien notes in her introduction to The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011) that the poets (and poems) in the anthology ‘subvert every preconception about what it means to be at once a woman and Irish, or even occasionally what it means to be a poem’.118 Irish-born Manchester resident Vona Groarke is an intriguing example; indeed, she has noted, during an interview about living abroad as an Irish writer, that ‘I can’t imagine I would be considered, ever, as an English poet, but I’m not sure such distinctions matter much to anyone but me, and barely even to me’.119 Groarke makes extensive, playful use of the sonnet form—and most notably in her collection Other People’s Houses (1999), which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. But in ‘Oranges’ (2002) she stretches the sonnet form even further, challenging us to read vertically and horizontally: Say you approach home from work The light is on and the blind to watch the shape against your home. to a high shelf. if he turned his Your daughter you did not write. two oranges between corners Your life shines The keys blaze

your house in winter or in from the shops. in your living room still up. So you stop your family makes Your lover reaches He could see you head your way. reads some words Your son juggles or is in flight of the room. without you. in your palm.120

Lucy Collins suggests that ‘Oranges’ is ‘a poem that engages directly with the representation of boundaries’, so that the poem ‘itself enacts the uneasy emotional drifts in lines that part in the centre and shift to each side’.121 The poem appears, at first, to be selecting its own arrangement on the page. Yet, on looking more closely at the shape of the poem, it becomes unclear whether the poem has itself ‘parted’ and ‘shifted’, or if it has instead suffered a rupture, with the uneven beginnings of the second half of each line contrasting with the rigid left- and right-justification of the bookending words.

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This push and pull between line beginnings, middles and ends reflects visually the struggle between the characters described within the poem— ‘you’, ‘your family’, ‘Your lover’ and ‘Your daughter’—so that the words themselves grapple for the reader’s attention. Considering the poem as a sonnet, or a ‘stretched’ sonnet, to borrow Hilson’s phrase, extends this power struggle to ponder more fully the question of textual authority; who or what controls the way we write, the way we place words on the page, and the way we read? Groarke’s lines, ‘Your daughter reads some words / you did not write’ (ll.9–10), act as a kind of volta; from this moment we see the scene running away from the speaker, so that she realises that ‘Your life shines without you’ (l.13). This repetition of the second person pronoun emphasises the unwanted separation of the ‘I’ of the poet/speaker and the ‘you’ of the mother imagined within the domestic scene described. The poem suffers an internal rupture, with the self-proclaimed ‘writer’ unable to create a whole that reassembles together her disparate selves. What began as the contemplation of a cosy domestic scene becomes a meditation on how we might be excluded even from our own life stories. Touching on this topic, Collins notes that within the poem ‘[t]he separateness that enables the speaker to look at her family from a distance, yet closely, also creates apparently contradictory feelings of belonging and being excluded’; these feelings might be ‘separated as one moment is from the next’.122 Though this commentary touches on the visual separation of the words on the page, Collins does not note the potential of seeing the poem as a ruptured sonnet. The poet/speaker is excluded from the family she observes not just because she isn’t part of the internal domestic scene, but because the medium through which she chooses to depict her family—the sonnet, itself a metonym for wider poetic questions—already marks her as an outsider. Therefore, when the speaker remarks ‘you stop / to watch the shape your family makes / against your home’ (ll.4– 6), we see the poet ‘shape’ this immediately into form. Nevertheless, her daughter will continue to read ‘some words / you did not write’ (ll.9– 10) and the son to juggle oranges aimlessly. Though her children and her poetry are both the fruits of her labours, her life will continue to shine ‘without her’ as her domestic life goes on ‘without’ her poetic self—and there continues to be a marked separation between the two. The keys ‘blaze’ in her ‘palm’, as the final line brings the speaker to a burning realisation of her own domestic reality.

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In ‘Sonnet’ (2006), Irish poet and critic David Wheatley draws attention to the kinds of questions Hilson raises concerning the definition and parameters of the form, while using the assumptions of the sonnet to mark a contrast between the poetic and the everyday.123 The poem’s first appearance, in the volume Mocker, is notable for rubbing alongside other experimental poems: ‘Numerology’ (1998) is a sonnet playing on the remarks made by James Joyce in ‘The City of [the] Tribes’ about a ‘cartographer’ obsessed with patterns of 14;124 the title poem, ‘Mocker’, is a three-line poem with each line broken in three, and with a companion version in Irish Gaelic, ‘Magadh’, on the same page;125 and ‘Whalebone Haiku’ is made up of 10 stanzas, each of which consists of a haiku.126 However, ‘Sonnet’ is perhaps the most experimental of all, in that we might not have identified the poem as a sonnet should the title had not drawn this to our attention. The poem proceeds in four columns of single nouns, compound nouns and compound adjectives, which construct a trochaic tetrameter rhythm that drives its 14 lines: stretch pants hubcaps

cashback tailfin

pound shop souped-up

store card Escort

---------------------------------------------------------------------chat shows hard life

pig out fuck life

hard stuff fuck off

hard case now please (ll.1–2, 13–14)

Interviewing Wheatley, Peter Sirr notes of this poem that it is ‘grotesquely funny’, and then Wheatley compares describes the collection’s sense of humour as ‘self-conscious grotesquery’.127 In contrast with Groarke’s excluded poet/narrator, Wheatley’s ‘Sonnet’ mocks the aspirations of the poet who tries to form everyday experience into language. But ‘grotesquery’ extends past humour, not only to the uncomfortable and often surprising interplay of words on the page, depending on how you read them—Sirr takes particular umbrage at Wheatley’s insinuation of the ‘brain dead Leeds fan’ (l.8)—but also to the scenarios that are played out within the bitty narrative of the story. For example, a micro-narrative of a ‘spiked drink’ and an unplanned pregnancy at ‘sixteen’ (l.10) suggest that there is a fine line between comedy and cruelty in the poetic line as in everyday life.

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What Wheatley’s ‘Sonnet’ tells us is that the sonnet needs to be ‘stretched’ in order to accommodate the bittiness of life as it is often experienced; but at the same time, a sonnet both can and can’t encapsulate the ‘grotesquery’ of a mundane existence. The poem seems undecided about whether it is cruel to even try to place such random, arbitrary, occurrences into the arrangement of the sonnet form, which instead attributes an accretive, logical order to things. Do we smirk at the clever transitions between ‘knocked up’, ‘knocked out’, ‘well gone’ and ‘all gone’ (l.11) because the poem asks us to notice its linguistic dexterity, or does this smirking come from a place of discomfort or uncertainty? The 14 lines and linked impressions of the poem give lie to the real events narrated by implying that there is rhyme or reason to them. At the same time, however, the sonnet functions as a record of those stories and gives voice to such experiences. In all of the sonnets discussed in this chapter, poets have foregrounded an awareness of the form in all its arbitrariness as a way of both commenting on the suitability of form to subject, and asking questions about the sonnet’s ability to bolster either itself or the stories that it aims to contain and control. In Groarke’s and Wheatley’s contemporary sonnets, the form is stretched so far as to be nearly coming apart at the seams, while in neither is there an obvious ‘Irish’ element. Nevertheless, both build on a tradition of sonnet-making that is itself inherently contradictory—taking pleasure in the artfulness of the form, while dismantling its internal and structural artifices and contradictions. Both, too, extend a tradition that manipulates the contrarieties of the sonnet form to ask larger questions about the limitations of expression, and the abilities of a form to both represent and inhibit an understanding of poetic and personal identity. In some ways, however, even the artifice offers some comfort. The hermetic closing-off of the sonnet from the outside world might offer some solace to the poet-as-Ozymandias, seeking constantly to create a poetry of (self-) importance in a world that seems increasingly to be leaving them behind.

Notes 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, in The Making of a Sonnet, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (New York and London: Norton, 2008), p. 64, l.1.

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2. Mutlu Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 22–23. 3. Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 2. 4. John Keats, ‘If by Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain’d’, in The Making of a Sonnet, p. 63, l.1. Fiona Stafford notes that Keats composed the poem in May 1819: see Fiona Stafford, Reading Romantic Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 190. 5. Stafford, Reading Romantic Poetry, p. 101. 6. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), p. xxv. Italics Paterson’s own. 7. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), pp. 7, 8. 8. Seamus Heaney, ‘III’, from Glanmore Sonnets, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 163–172 (165), l.3. 9. Phillis Levin (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (London and New York: Penguin, 2001), p. xxvi. 10. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, p. xvi. On p. xxv, Paterson claims that a line of iambic pentameter takes about 3 seconds to read, and therefore that 14 lines correspond roughly to an ‘instant’ in our brain. 11. Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1995, rept. in Opened Ground, pp. 447–467 (p. 449). 12. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, p. xx. Italics Paterson’s own. 13. Louis MacNeice, ‘Sunday Morning, May 1933’, in Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), p. 23, ll.5, 9–10. 14. MacNeice, ‘Trains in the Distance’, Collected Poems, p. 3; ‘Spring Voices’, Collected Poems, p. 20. 15. Heaney, Glanmore Sonnets, III, l.14. 16. Michael Longley summarises MacNeice’s biography in his Introduction to MacNeice’s Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1988), pp. xiii–xxiii (p. xiii). 17. Anthony Cronin, ‘Writing’, Collected Poems (Dublin: New Island, 2004), p. 4, ll.1–3. 18. See, for example, Cronin reading the poem for a recording at University College Dublin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jtRiL_7qS4. ‘And’ is replaced by ‘But’ at the beginning of l.13 (around 2m, 45s). 19. Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 116–117, ll.37–42. 20. Marianne Moore, ‘Silence’, in Complete Poems, ed. Clive Driver (London: Faber, 1984), p. 91, ll.11–12. The ‘Note’ to the poem, on p. 276, attributes the beginning of this spoken passage to a ‘Miss A. M. Homans’.

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21. Frank McGuinness, ‘Sister Anne Breslin’, Booterstown (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), p. 17, ll.8, 9, 7. 22. Cronin, ‘Writing’, ll.5–8. 23. Heaney, ‘II’, from Glanmore Sonnets, Opened Ground, p. 164, ll.13–14. 24. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2008), pp. 162–163. Ellipses in the original. 25. Thomas O’Grady, ‘The Art of Heaney’s Sonnets’, Dalhousie Review, 80 (Autumn 2000), 351–364 (356). 26. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Ceist na Teangan’/‘The Language Issue’ (translation by Paul Muldoon), Pharaoh’s Daughter (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2007), pp. 154–155. 27. Michael Hartnett, ‘5’, from Thirteen Sonnets, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Fallon (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2001), pp. 79–91, ll.12–14. 28. Hartnett, ‘I Have Exhausted the Delighted Range’, Collected Poems, p. 36, ll.12–14. 29. Hartnett, Anatomy of a Cliché, Collected Poems, pp. 62–78; for the ‘sonnets’ in this sequence see numbers 1, 5, and 6. 30. Hartnett, ‘9’, from Thirteen Sonnets, Collected Poems, p. 87, ll.1, 11–14. 31. Alan Gillis, ‘Memory,’ Here Comes the Night (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2010), p. 64, l.1. 32. Ben Keatinge, ‘Demir Kapija’, Flare 12 (Summer, 2019), n.p.. Demir Kapija is a town in Northern Macedonia, very close to the Demir Kapija Gorge; see https://www.macedonia-timeless.com/eng/cities_ and_regions/cities/demir-kapija/. 33. Gillis, ‘Eloquence’, Here Comes the Night, p. 50, ll.1–8. 34. Hartnett, ‘I Have Exhausted the Delighted Range’, ll.12, 14. 35. ‘Lip’ (v.), OED online (www.oed.com), definitions 2a and 2b. 36. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Studying the Language’, The Brazen Serpent (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), p. 47, ll.1, 5, 6–8, 13–14. 37. The OED gives the earliest definition of ‘hermit’ as ‘One who from religious motives has retired into solitary life; esp. one of the early Christian recluses’; ‘hermit’, n. (www.oed.com). 38. See Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber, 1981), pp. 48, 98. 39. See, for example, Ní Chuilleanáin, in The Second Voyage, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1986), which includes three references to ‘hermits’: in ‘6. Voyagers’ (p. 19), and twice in the sonnet ‘Celibates’ (p. 53). 40. OED online (www.oed.com), ‘hermitic’, adj. 41. See Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘6. Voyagers’, from The Second Voyage, l.6. 42. Hartnett, ‘5.’, from Thirteen Sonnets, p. 83, ll.1–4. 43. Eavan Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, in The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 39–48 (p. 48).

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44. Richard Murphy, In Search of Poetry (Thame: Clutag Press, 2017), p. 155. 45. P. B. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, whole poem, version from The Examiner No. 524 (11 January 1818), 24, collected in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), p. 849. 46. Leontia Flynn, ‘Washington’, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 29, ll.1, 2, 10. 47. Peter Mackay, ‘Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry and Romanticism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Allan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 297–308 (pp. 300, 307). Mackay cites l.3 of Flynn’s poem. 48. See Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, l.13; c.f. Flynn, ‘Washington’, l.8. 49. Eamon Grennan, ‘Shed’, Relations: New and Selected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1998), p. 146. 50. See Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, ll.2, 4, 9. 51. See Flynn, ‘Washington’, ll.5, 6. 52. Grennan, ‘Shed’, l.6. 53. This occurs between ‘light’ and ‘midnight’ (ll.9, 11). 54. Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, p. 48. 55. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, l.12. 56. Some of the material for this section has been published elsewhere; see Tara Stubbs, ‘What price stone? The shaping of inheritance into form in Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone sonnet sequence’, in Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy, ed. Ben Keatinge (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), pp. 203–221. Murphy uses the term ‘sonnet houses’ (both with and without a hyphen) throughout his notes for The Price of Stone. 57. Murphy, ‘Canterbury Cathedral’, The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952–2012 (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2013), p. 199, l.1. 58. J. P. O’Malley, ‘Interview with a Poet: Richard Murphy, an Old Spectator Hand’, The Spectator, 10 September 2013, https://blogs.spectator.co. uk/2013/09/interview-with-a-poet-richard-murphy-an-old-spectatorhand. Yeats writes in the essay ‘If I Were Four-and-Twenty’ (1919), ‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half asleep: “Hammer your thoughts into unity”’. See Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 263–280 (p. 263). 59. Murphy, The Kick: A Life Among Writers (London: Granta, 2003), p. 336. 60. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Critique of “Pat Cloherty’s Version of The Maisie”’, in Murphy, The Pleasure Ground, p. 276. 61. Murphy, ‘Writing The Battle of Aughrim’, The Pleasure Ground, p. 258.

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62. Longley, Searching the Darkness: Richard Murphy, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague and James Simmons’, in Two Decades of Irish Writing, ed. Douglas Dunn (Cheadle Hulme, 1975), pp. 118–153 (p. 131). 63. Murphy, In Search of Poetry, p. 113. 64. Ibid., p. 93. 65. J. P. O’Malley, ‘Interview with a Poet’. 66. Longley, ‘Searching the Darkness’, p. 123. 67. Murphy, ‘Extract: Transgressing into Poetry’, Poetry Ireland Review, 107 (September 2012), 26–33 (26). 68. Murphy, ‘Excerpt: Notes for Sonnets’, Poetry Ireland Review, 104 (October 2011), 92–104 (102). 69. Ibid., p. 101. Ellipses in the original. 70. Murphy, ‘Wellington College’, The Pleasure Ground, p. 205, ll.1–4. 71. Rosemarie Rowley, email exchange with Tara Stubbs, 30 January 2020. 72. Rowley, Girls of the Globe (Dublin: Arlen House, 2015). The 13 opening sonnets are titled ‘Viola’, ‘Rosalind’, ‘Portia’, ‘Perdita’, ‘Ophelia’, ‘Miranda’, ‘Lady Macbeth’, ‘Juliet’, ‘Isabella’, ‘Hermione’, ‘Desdemona’, ‘Cordelia’ and ‘Cleopatra’ (pp. 13–25). 73. Rowley, ‘Mad Ireland Hurt Me, Too’, Girls of the Globe, p. 58, ll.4, 5. 74. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1979), pp. 80–83, l.34. 75. Rowley, ‘Mad Ireland Hurt Me, Too’, l.11. 76. Murphy, ‘Excerpt: Notes for Sonnets’, p. 102. 77. Murphy, ‘Wellington Testimonial’, The Pleasure Ground, p. 181, ll.13– 14. 78. Murphy, ‘Excerpt: Notes for Sonnets’, p. 103. 79. Joseph Sendry, ‘The Poet as Builder: Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone, Irish University Review, 15.1 (Spring 1985), 38–49 (41). 80. Murphy, ‘Nelson’s Pillar’, The Pleasure Ground, p. 180, ll.13–14. 81. Sendry, ‘The Poet as Builder’, p. 41. 82. Murphy, ‘Extract: Transgressing into Poetry’, p. 26. 83. Murphy, ‘Writing The Battle of Aughrim’, pp. 257, 255. 84. Ibid., p. 257. 85. See Longley, ‘Searching the Darkness’, p. 127. 86. Christopher Ricks, ‘At-One-Ment’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 319–355 (p. 321). 87. Heather Dubrow, ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) pp. 25–45 (p. 28). 88. OED online (www.oed.com), ‘Ekphrasis’, n., etymology. 89. Michael Longley, ‘Sitting for Eddie (in memory of Edward McGuire)’, The Ghost Orchid (1995), rept. Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 198.

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90. W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112. 91. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘Four Poems’, The Dial (June 1924), 493– 501 (495). 92. See Yeats, ‘Leda’, A Vision and Related Writings, ed. A Norman Jeffares (London: Arena, 1990), p. 259. 93. Yeats, ‘Author’s Note’ to ‘Four Poems’, The Dial (June 1924), 493. 94. Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Works of W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 137–139. Pater’s The Renaissance was first titled The Renaissance: Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and later The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 95. Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art, pp. 139, 133, 133–137, 143. 96. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘Yeats and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 167–184 (p. 181). 97. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ll.9–11. 98. Compare, for example, the digital reproductions at https://www.leonar dodavinci.net/leda-and-the-swan.jsp and https://www.nationalgallery. org.uk/paintings/after-michelangelo-leda-and-the-swan. 99. Helen Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition: Yeats at Sonnets’, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–181 (p. 176). 100. Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 143. 101. Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, pp. 48, 43, 44. 102. See Boland, ‘Ghost Stories’ and ‘Legends’, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), pp. 196, 229. 103. The drawing is part of the Armand Hammer Collection of Art at the National Gallery of Washington, US; see https://www.nga.gov/collec tion/art-object-page.74184.html. 104. Boland, ‘Woman Posing’, New Collected Poems, p. 110, ll.9–14. 105. Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, in Jan Marsh (ed.), Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 71, ll.1, 14. 106. Boland, ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, New Collected Poems, p. 114. 107. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘The Potato-Gatherers’, Outliving (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 34, l.1. 108. See Marcella Guerrero, ‘Where Are They Now? Renoir’s “Grape Pickers at Lunch”’, 7 November 2016, including a digital reproduction, https://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2016/11/where-are-they-now-renoirsgrape-pickers-at-lunch.

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109. O’Donoghue, ‘The Potato-Gatherers’, ll.2–3. For a digital reproduction of Russell’s painting, see https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-pot ato-gatherers-122752. 110. Boland, ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, ll.1–8. 111. Boland, ‘Woman Posing’, ll.2, 11. 112. Boland, ‘Growing Up’, New Collected Poems, pp. 144–145. 113. For a digital reproduction of the drawing, see https://www.artsy.net/ artwork/pierre-auguste-renoir-girlhood. 114. Boland, ‘Growing Up’, ll.1–8. 115. Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 14. 116. See blurb to The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, ed. Jeff Hilson (St Leonards on Sea: Reality Street, 2008). 117. Hilson, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, p. 10. 118. O’Brien, introduction to Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, p. xxxiv. 119. Vona Groarke interviewed as part of an article on Irish poets living abroad, ‘What daffodils were to Wordsworth, drains and backstreet pubs are to me’, by Rosita Boland, Irish Times, 12 March 2011, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-daffodils-wereto-wordsworth-drains-and-backstreet-pubs-are-to-me-1.570730. 120. Groarke, ‘Oranges’, Flight (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 2002), p. 26. 121. Lucy Collins, ‘Architectural metaphors: representations of the house in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke’, in Scott Brewster and Michael Parker (eds.), Irish Literature Since 1990: Diverse Voices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 142–159 (p. 152). 122. Ibid., p. 152. 123. David Wheatley, ‘Sonnet’, Mocker (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006), p. 23. 124. Wheatley, ‘Numerology’, Mocker, p. 35. Wheatley refers to Joyce’s article ‘La città delle tribù; Ricordi italiani in un porto irlandese’ (‘The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port’), an article on the city of Galway published in the Picollo, 12 August 1912. 125. Wheatley, ‘Mocker’ and ‘Magadh’, Mocker, p. 49. 126. Wheatley, ‘Whalebone Haiku’, Mocker, pp. 53–54. Each haiku is made up of 3 lines with 5+7+5 syllables, to make up 17. 127. Peter Sirr, interview with David Wheatley, graph magazine online, 12 July 2013, https://graphmagazine.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/ david-wheatley/.

CHAPTER 3

Sonnet Sequences

[P]oetry is largely the art of saying things once and once only.1 The sonnet pre-emptively solves two problems: proportion and extension.2

The above claims, made by Don Paterson and Michael Spiller respectively, encapsulate a critical disjunction concerning whether the sonnet should be identified more closely with a lyric or a narrative mode, linked to its association with either restraint or expression. On the one hand, as Spiller puts it, the sonnet ‘is certainly too short for narration: a sonnet can present a narrated event, but it must be highly compressed if anything at all is to be said about it’.3 Yet, as he claims above, ‘extension’ is one of the ‘pre-emptive’ principles of the sonnet structure, at least gesturing towards its narrative potential. For Paterson meanwhile, ‘14 unbroken lines is the human limit of sustainable lyric brilliance’, allowing the poet to say things ‘once and once only’. But Paterson’s description—which is also dismissive of ‘the idea of a pithy summary’ within the sonnet’s concluding couplet thanks to the fact that ‘a poem already is the art of pithy summary’4 — is less attentive to the sonnet’s history as a structure which, as Burt and Mikics point out, has ‘from its origins in early thirteenth-century Sicily incorporated courtly sophistication as well as a taste for argument and precise form’.5 Other readings of the form complicate even further this tension between argument and precision; for example, David Mikics introduces © The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_3

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the possibility of a condensed version of epic into his reading of Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’, by noting that ‘Yeats’s lyric starts in media res (“in the middle of things”, a phrase borrowed from Horace’s Ars Poetica describing how epic poetry characteristically begins)’,6 whereas Stephen Regan discusses how its opening phrase (‘A sudden blow’) suggests both ‘the stillness of a painting’ and ‘a forecast of a history that is still going on’.7 Discussing the sonnet form more generally, White and Rosen claim that due to its interest in ‘emotion’ and its objectification of ‘an inner conflict of some kind’, it is ‘dramatic in nature rather than lyric’; indeed, for them, the sonnet is ‘far more logical in structure, more precise in thought, more concise and unified in both substance and design than the ordinary lyric’.8 Phillis Levin, meanwhile, demonstrates how the form’s complicated origins have led to its apparently ‘contradictory’ associations: The poet agrees to follow the rules of the sonnet, but that willing surrender releases creative energy. From its origins […] the sonnet has recorded the unceasing conflict between the law of reason and the law of love, the need to solve a problem that cannot be resolved by an act of will, yet finds its fulfilment, if not its solution, only in the poem. Thematically and structurally, this tension plays itself out in the relationship between a fixed formal pattern and the endless flow of feeling.9

Considering at once the potential for a release of ‘creative energy’ from the formal constraints of the sonnet, and its record of the conflict between ‘reason’ and ‘love’, we can begin to see how and why poets wrote sonnet cycles and sequences. Such forms might offer at least the promise of resolving a problem, if this is expressed repeatedly and from different angles. Regan offers the examples of Dante and Petrarch as poets for whom the sonnet is ‘part of a series or sequence that allows for narrative expansion and makes possible what we now see as psychological exploration or emotional autobiography’.10 For Regan, too, the sonnet sequences of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney—Spenser’s cycle Amoretti (1595), and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), a sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs11 —exemplify ‘the most prolific and inventive sonnet writing of the Elizabethan period’. The late sixteenth century also saw the publication of Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1595), which followed on from the ‘holy sonnets’ of Anne Lok’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), most often credited as the first sequence in English.12 The

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2010 rediscovery and publication of Richard Nugent’s sonnet sequence Cynthia (1604), described as ‘the first sonnet sequence in English by an Irishman’, adds a significant historical document to the narrative, though the fact that there are only two extant copies points to its lack of popularity among its contemporaries.13 Critics of the modern sonnet have tended to consider it as an individual poetic creation, either ignoring sonnet sequences or cycles or silently dismissing them. As Spiller, one of the few to tackle the subject of the sequence, points out: ‘[a]lmost all critics use the term sonnet as a collective noun or adjective to refer both the generality of individual sonnets and the aggregation of them into sequence’, while ‘critics who are actually concerned with sequences tend to discuss them largely as individual sonnets’.14 Aside from Spiller’s The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of its Strategies (1997), which classes sequences as ‘lyrical’, ‘narrative’ and ‘philosophical’, very few critics have attempted to historicise the ‘sonnet sequence’. William Going, writing in 1947, claims that it can be traced to the Victorian period, and that D. G. Rossetti was one of the first to employ it for a subtitle to his House of Life poems from 1881;15 meanwhile, John Holmes positions Rossetti at the centre of a vogue for sonnet sequences in the late Victorian period, arguing that ‘[b]etween 1870 and 1900, the sonnet sequence was the dominant form for complex selfexploration’.16 Spiller, alternatively, suggests that sequences arose ‘out of the invention of the sonnet itself’, while he traces the first usage of the term to an anthology edited by the poet George Gascoigne in 1573.17 Yet Going sees these earlier poems as not sequences per se, as ‘[t]he vast majority of early sonnets in Italian, French, and English are parts of collections or cycles’ authored by several people.18 For Spiller, multiple authorship does not preclude their identification as sequences, as he prefers a working definition of ‘a collection of poems, dominantly sonnets, linked together intentionally by something other than single authorship’.19 However, it is still largely the case that, as Going puts it, the term ‘has been considered either self-explanatory or something of a paradox’.20 Added to the issue of a lack of critical language around the sonnet sequence is the implication, for sonnet-writers, that by writing a sequence they are acting in defiance of the form itself. Although later challenging his own position, Spiller claims in The Development of the Sonnet that the internal structure of the individual sonnet leaves it with little potential as a narrative mode. Therefore, to include several individual sonnets within

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a sonnet sequence (or cycle) would only mean repeatedly encountering this problem: The sonnet extends to 14 lines, providing 140–154 syllables in all. This seems to be rather more, in most modern European vernaculars, than one requires for the simple expression of a feeling or state of mind, but rather less than one would like for a full discussion. […] The proportionality of the sonnet, eight parts to six, works against any kind of simple repetition of an initial point or emotion, since the second part is structurally different from the first, and almost compels some kind of development or analysis.21

If we work through Spiller’s logic, we can begin to see how a sonnet sequence or cycle would challenge the structural and thematic assumptions of the individual sonnet. If a sonnet is to ‘make a point’ about a specific ‘feeling or state of mind’, then that point must be made within the 14 lines of the individual poem; to try to elaborate on such a feeling within the next sonnet in a sequence might be to deny the ‘compression’ of the sonnet. Meanwhile, if the ‘proportionality’ of the individual sonnet indeed works ‘against’ repetition, since by its nature the latter six lines must ‘turn’ in some way on the first eight and so compel ‘some kind of development or analysis’, then the next sonnet in a sequence might risk betraying the work carried out in the previous sonnet by either picking up on this new development or offering a new problem or question. Sonnet sequences, then, can risk undermining the work of an individual sonnet by offering the potential for narrative advancement or development where the individual poem has little space for this. Nevertheless, within contemporary Irish poetry, sonneteers make considerable use of sonnet sequences and sonnet cycles, both as a way to confront and debate the ‘two problems’ of ‘proportion and extension’ within the sonnet,22 and to challenge hegemonic views of the sonnet as a form that should not be tampered with or extended too playfully. Does a sonnet always have to contain the number of syllables Spiller outlines? Must it always turn on and within itself in order to function as a sonnet? Helen Vendler asks in her discussion of Yeats’s sequences, rather than his sonnets,‘[w]hat is the imaginative impulse that wants to create a sequence rather than a single poem?’.23 But the question is pertinent here. For Going, a sequence might reflect ‘a chronological omnium-gatherum’, or a ‘specialized unification’; moreover, reading individual sonnets ‘in the sequence suggested by the poet’ might generate a ‘unity within a larger

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unity’.24 Yet, Irish writers are more likely to manipulate sonnet sequences and cycles to generate stop-start narratives, or to juxtapose themes and patterns—therefore creating an, often uncomfortable, sense of disunity. In Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ sonnet cycle (2006), for instance, the poet parallels a journey on the London Underground with a descent into the underworld, playing on the circularity of the District and Circle Line to suggest the inability of narratives to progress in a linear fashion: here the frustratingly contained and self-reflexive nature of the longer poem becomes part of the story, which leaves us back where we started. At the same time, we have to stretch our definition of what constitutes a ‘sonnet’ to describe ‘District and Circle’ as a sonnet cycle thanks to the individual poems’ formal inconsistencies.25 Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets (2017), meanwhile, announces itself as a sonnet sequence from its very title and consists of 35 more formally recognisable sonnets, mostly set out two to the page. Portobello Sonnets links a forensically anatomical and topographical description of place to individual and collective histories, so that single sonnets brush up against each other to build up an impression of a part of Dublin that is turned towards the present with one foot still in the past. It is fitting that Clifton’s sequence was dated ‘2004–5’ when it was first published as a series of 27 sonnets in Poetry Ireland Review in 2013, and that it appeared in its paperback version as 35 sonnets in 2017.26 Playing similarly on temporal and chronological relationships, Anthony Cronin’s 3000-line sonnet sequence The End of the Modern World, which Cronin reworked over nearly three decades between 1989 and 2016, becomes what the poet has called an ‘elegy for a period of capitalist development’, containing within that description the complicated nuances of the now, and encompassing nostalgia, history and progress. In Cronin’s words, the sequence is ‘as much a celebration of what is past or passing as it is a lament’, and therefore, the stop-start narrative of a sonnet sequence, which is rearranged and reordered over time, might be entirely appropriate for a work caught in a suspended space and time that ‘does not call for us to return to a prior state of being, nor mobilise to advance on a future one’.27 In these cycles and sequences, we find a formal method which explores and expands the internal contrarieties of the individual sonnet, while putting those sonnets to collective use as commentaries on the past, present, future—and the spaces between.

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3.1

Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ Sonnet Cycle

Often, the sonnet makes an occasion crucial, and fixes it to the page. It is predictable yet supple in its application of rules. This formal strength makes something seemingly slight as a lyric poem a work for the ages.28

The tantalising balance between the ‘slight’ and the universal, between the occasional and the ‘crucial’, is, according to Burt and Mikics, what makes it appeal to lyric poets. Meanwhile, Hugh Naughton, in a reflective article on Heaney’s oeuvre, notes that he ‘was always a poet of returning’;29 yet at the same time, as David Wheatley points out, Heaney is also ‘famously a poet of checks and balances, always at pains to see both points of view and reluctant to speak out of turn’.30 Both responses signal why Heaney continues to return to the sonnet, and why the form might appeal to him as a poet who feels compelled continually to explore different angles. The sonnet form, which has embedded within itself its own ability to offer (at least) two (often conflicting) ‘points of view’, arrives kitted out with its own ‘checks and balances’ and speaks rather through the turn than out of it. Describing the sonnets of Heaney’s 2006 collection District and Circle together as ‘some tender, some vaunting, some wary’, Stephen Burt discusses the signposting that contemporary poets carry out when they employ the form: The sonnet can stand in 2010 (far more than it could in 1610 or 1810) for fixed or for inherited forms in general, for history or for literary history, since it is by far the best known fixed form, one of few still in common (and classroom) use. As other parts of pre-modernist literary history recede, the sonnet becomes important as a sign that contemporary poetry has a history, one that includes several centuries and nations.31

Though Burt does not comment specifically upon the ‘District and Circle’ cycle, his analysis is useful in emphasising both the signification of the sonnet form when employed in contemporary poetry, and (conversely) its potential to go unremarked. Burt outlines how the sonnet can become a marker of a history that is ‘contemporary’ because it is knotty and complex: in the case of ‘District and Circle’, this knottiness incorporates classical literary modes; the personal history of an Irish childhood in

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the North; the on-going tensions in Ireland and Britain; and the present looming threat of danger on the London Underground (with the collection having been published in the year after the London bombings of July 2005). Michael Parker’s discussion of the timing of composition of the sonnets of the cycle makes this relation between past and present knottier still, as Parker notes that Heaney revealed that only ‘three of its five sections were composed following these horrific events’, partly because its ‘origins lie in memories of a much earlier time, the summer of 1962 when the Queen’s graduate was employed in London’s Passport Office in Petty France, and travelled regularly on the District Line’. Significantly, Parker concludes that ‘[t]he everyday and estranging impressions the poet evokes derive not just from that one period […], but from multiple experiences over the years on London’s Underground’;32 the element of return embodied both thematically and formally within a sonnet cycle is therefore appropriate to this sense of repeated familiarity and unfamiliarity. Less critical work has been carried out, however, on how Heaney’s use of the sonnet form in both the cycle and in individual poems in the collection enacts formally what Andrew Motion suggests is the thrust of District and Circle as a whole: that it ‘confirms existing loyalties, and remaps old terrains’.33 Meg Tyler has made some persuasive inroads by claiming that ‘[a]rrested motion is what a poem is’, and linking this idea to the ways in which sonnets such as ‘Out of Shot’ and ‘A Shiver’ undercut themselves both thematically and formally. Tyler suggests that in challenging the sonnet form that he had used more comfortably in earlier collections (such as the Glanmore Sonnets of 1974), Heaney finds himself within a state of ‘arrested motion’ in both District and Circle and within the sonnets of his 2010 collection Human Chain.34 But ‘arrested motion’ resonates, too, with the stop-start effect of the ‘District and Circle’ sonnet cycle, putting the reader in mind of the slow, then fast, then slow movement of the underground train itself. None of the above critics has considered how or why Heaney gathers five sonnets together into the circular narrative response of ‘District and Circle’. Those who have discussed Heaney’s use of the sonnet form have tended to remark on the number of individual sonnets within the collection as a whole: while Burt claims that there are 21 individual sonnets, Eugene O’Brien (echoing Tyler) argues that ‘[i]n District and Circle, almost two-thirds of the poems are sonnets or approximate sonnets’.35 This emphasises the difficulty of definition, as it is unclear whether Burt,

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O’Brien and Tyler have broken down longer poems into their constituent (numbered) parts; if we were to do so, assuming that sonnets within longer poems were counted—such as ‘A Chow’ within ‘Senior Infants’, and ‘A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden’ within ‘Home Fires’—we might identify 52 individual poems within the collection,36 of which 17 might be classed as ‘sonnets’ and five as ‘approximate sonnets’.37 This latter phrase is particularly telling, as several of the poems that appear to be sonnets have 14 lines only if we count those lines that are broken in two: the first and last poems of the five-sonnet, titular sonnet cycle work in this way, and the third sonnet is made up of just 13 lines.38 Indeed, the first sonnet of the ‘District and Circle’ cycle places emphasis on the rhymes between its 13 line endings, following the approximate rhyme scheme aabb cdc ede fgg, despite appearing to be 14 lines long. Tyler writes of the sonnet ‘In Iowa’, elsewhere in the same collection, that the ‘outward structure’ belies ‘the irresolution of the content’,39 but in the sonnets of the ‘District and Circle’ cycle this problem is extended so that their external and internal structures can work against each other. ‘District and Circle’, as a sonnet cycle, builds up the sense that—like the people on the subterranean trains, jostling against each other for air— the formal ‘clues’ of the sonnet form are grappling for attention. We are in the presence of sonnets, but these are twisted internally, so that the rhymes can work against the sense; likewise, we are in the presence of a sonnet cycle, but only if we choose to read it as being made up of sonnets in the first place, and if we concede that there is a circularity to what we are reading. On the one hand, we need to have faith in the individual form and the collective structure; on the other, however, and echoing Tyler’s comments on ‘In Iowa’, ‘[t]he frustration of expectation (don’t sonnets always try to work things out?) contributes to the power of feeling, the residual unease’.40 ‘District and Circle’ compels us to continue reading even where each individual sonnet, and its inconsistencies, pulls us up short; but once we have got to the end, we are unsure about both where we started and how far we have come. This is a very different use of the form from Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets , discussed in the previous chapter, with their almost too convenient manipulation of rhyme and metre.41 Though the sonnet offers us a foundation, this soon breaks down. Our inherited knowledge of the form gives us hints on how to read these (often confounding) poems, but it does not help us square the circle. In close reading the sonnets of ‘District and Circle’ both individually and collectively, we also notice their apparent thematic contrarieties.

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Heaney moves between the prosaic and the otherworldly, the passing and the eternal, the now and the recollected. Terence Brown notes that in Heaney’s later collections District and Circle and Human Chain, ‘the phenomenal world is recognised as a dimension replete with very quotidian objects, substantial things’; throughout, too, there is the ‘characteristic’ of ‘[r]eprise’ in these volumes.42 The circularity of a sonnet cycle, both implied and enacted, allows for a microcosmic reprisal that can act as a metonym for the collection itself. Meanwhile, the Underground setting—particularly after the 2005 attacks—lends Heaney access to an almost-underworld, which is both ‘quotidian’ and queasily unknowable. Of course this anticipates Heaney’s own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI (2013), the last project he completed, which enacts its own encounters with the dead.43 The result is a dizzying assemblage of the everyday and the eternal, the crucial and the trivial, with the manipulation of the sonnet form and the sonnet cycle merely adding to our sense of confusion: how can we hold on when we’re not quite sure what our foundations are? In an extended passage of close reading of ‘District and Circle’, Parker comments of the first sonnet how: ‘the narrator describes how he would regularly be greeted with tunes from a tin-whistle, winding their way up and towards him’.44 Parker’s gloss, in its own use of verbs, gestures towards Heaney’s complicated employment of tenses. The opening octet employs a succession of verbs that confuse not just in their placement within one long sentence, but also in their shift in tense. Parker writes, de-coding the complications of these opening lines, that the narrator ‘would regularly be greeted’ by the tin whistle player, but Heaney tells us (perhaps disingenuously) that his narrator ‘was always going to find’ his ‘watcher’ there (ll.3, 4). This is a subtle distinction, but a telling one; there is something ominous in the ‘always’, in its expectation of discovery, and its anticipation of the inevitable encounter. However, the use of the past simple in addition to the past continuous places the narrator (and the reader) in a space in-between: If the narrator ‘always’ finds this as so, then why is this particular occasion remarkable? Indeed, the opening lines—‘Tunes from a tin whistle underground / Curled up’ (ll.1–2)—are curiously disembodied, implying that it might not even be the same tin whistle player each time, or that it might not only be Heaney’s narrator who hears these tunes. As a whole, the sonnet implies that the encounter means more to the narrator than it does to the musician—or, more accurately, that it is the narrator’s interpretation of events that leads to a

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claim of ‘recognition’ between the two. As Parker points out, this sense is picked up later in the cycle ‘at the midway point’ of sonnet three, where Heaney’s persona succumbs to ‘a not untypical flush of guilt’ at having re-pocketed his ‘hot coin’, without giving it to the musician.45 Linguistically, ‘District and Circle’ challenges the reader by employing a range of registers. This is a poem of the ‘quotidian’, to use Brown’s term: it is a place of corridors, coins and escalators; of engines, tiles and tunnels. But it is also a poem that sees Heaney borrow from a more unfamiliar realm: where ‘upstanding’ (l.17) on the Underground is used literally to mean ‘standing up’ and not in the more common, figurative sense of ‘open, honest, or independent bearing; straightforward, downright’;46 where compound adjectives tumble over each other;47 and where certain words are almost, but not quite, recognisable.48 Moreover, as is usual in Heaney’s verse, we find resonances with other works: where in the second sonnet the ‘sunners’ above ground (where we might hear ‘sinners’) are ‘habitués / Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer’ (ll.26–7), recalling the excesses of Hieronymus Bosch’s late fifteenthcentury triptych ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’;49 or where in the third sonnet Heaney predicts his own later collection in describing the ‘crowd’ as ‘half strung / like a human chain’ (ll.30–31). Additionally, the halfdead ‘crowd’ alludes slyly to that ‘crowd’ which ‘flooded over London Bridge’, ‘undone’ by ‘death’, in T. S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land.50 Throughout the cycle, we move—like the motion of the train itself— from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the banal to the remarkable, and from the momentary to the momentous. The confusing use of tenses enables Heaney to conflate the present with the past—so that by the fifth sonnet we see Heaney’s narrator imagining his ‘father’s glazed face’, ‘waning / And craning’ through the reflection of the tube window.51 This leaves the reader unsure whether the narrator sees his father’s face in his own as he ages in the present, or whether he recounts an earlier experience on a similar train, when he was a child. But it is in this closing sonnet, too, that we begin to see why the sonnet cycle is so aptly suited to Heaney’s narrative, which places its narrator and its reader in an uncomfortable subterranean space, in between the now, the recent past, and the past of memories. This reading is strengthened by Heaney’s description of his speaker as a ‘relict’ who is ‘hurtled forward’ into a future at once familiar and unknown (ll.63, 64). As Parker notes of the speaker: ‘[w]hat subverts his “presence” in the present […] is his sense of himself as

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“relict”’. Parker adds: ‘An archaism, the noun embodies and voices difference, separation, value’, through its usage to mean something ‘left over “from a previous age”’, to refer (in linguistics) ‘to a verbal “survival”’, or even ‘to denote a reliquary’.52 Heaney’s speaker, then, is both passive to a creativity that is becoming increasingly monotonous, and unable to assert his own creative individuality. The sparks of his own creativity might be ‘Flicker-lit’ (l.66), but the cycle of repetition and return—enacted throughout ‘District and Circle’ in the use of tense, allusion, register and, significantly, a form that imposes its own cycles of expression and restraint—implies that these sparks might never quite ignite. Therefore, while the ‘District and Circle’ sonnet cycle ‘makes an occasion crucial’ in rendering this journey on the Underground significant in a host of different ways,53 we are left unsure as to whether Heaney finds the effort worthwhile. As individual sonnets both work together and clash against each other within this cycle, so the poet’s creativity enacts its own internal struggles—seemingly unsure whether to strike out on its own or become part of the collective consciousness, making its way, blinking, into the light.

3.2

Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets

Though Harry Clifton eventually published his Portobello Sonnets in book form in 2017, appearing as a sequence of 35, their original date of conception has more in common with Heaney’s District and Circle than we might first realise. The first publication of 27 sonnets (also entitled Portobello Sonnets ), in Poetry Ireland Review (2013), concluded with the note ‘Portobello, November 2004–June 2005’, while Heaney’s collection was published in 2006.54 Nell Regan even goes so far as to claim that the Portobello Sonnets might be traced to ‘a particular six-month period in 2004–5’, signifying ‘a placing of the self in, among many other things, a pre-crash, multicultural Dublin’;55 this ‘placing of the self’ recalls Heaney’s semi-autobiographical narrator painstakingly negotiating contemporary London. In his ‘Foreword’ to a selection of lectures given by Clifton in 2011–2013, Bob Collins notes that in Clifton’s work ‘everyday life is inextricably connected to the arts’,56 while in a review of Portobello Sonnets , Sean O’Brien notes that his poetry ‘is ridden by time and the sense that there is nothing new under the sun except the capacity for seeing the world afresh’.57

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O’Brien’s commentary alludes to one of the main poetic sources for Clifton’s collection, Patrick Kavanagh, whose post-operative sonnets ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘The Hospital’ celebrate spiritual and sexual renewal at the same time that they ‘wallow in the habitual, the banal’, and take sheer delight in the ‘inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard’.58 Indeed, the opening line of sonnet 19 of the Portobello Sonnets , ‘Crunch of a car, in the gravelled yard below’, echoes Kavanagh’s speaker looking out from his hospital window.59 As Michael O’Loughlin puts it, Portobello Sonnets ‘is haunted by another canal bank saunterer and sonneteer who, famously, also began his second act here’; hence, Clifton’s final sonnet in the collection is set ‘near the site of the chest infirmary where Patrick Kavanagh nearly died in 1955, before his canal-bank rebirth’.60 Throughout the Portobello Sonnets we find references and allusions to (among others) Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, William Morris, Whitman, Woolf and Yeats. Nevertheless, both works see Irish poets in their sixties— like Kavanagh before them, in his fifties, a similar age to Clifton when composing the earlier version of the Portobello Sonnets —considering through semi-autobiographical sonnets what defines and shapes creativity and poetic legacy.61 By foregrounding his use of the sonnet form in the title of the sequence, alongside a specific reference to a place familiar to Kavanagh, Clifton is emphasising the importance of his predecessor. Significantly, in the last of his Portobello Sonnets , Clifton both refers to Kavanagh’s own poetic reawakening at the canal-side in sonnets such as ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and alludes to another of Kavanagh’s sonnets from this period, ‘Leaves of Grass’, which itself acknowledges and moves away from another poetic ancestor, Walt Whitman. In ‘Leaves of Grass’, Kavanagh prevaricates between ridiculing his grandiose forebear—‘we nearly made Whitman a poet’—and considering the possibilities that such poets offered to him as a young boy first discovering the powers of poetry: ‘An army of grass blades were at his call, million on million’.62 In Clifton’s sonnet, meanwhile, ‘from Nineteen Fifty-Five’ / To this latest of summers’ refers directly to Kavanagh’s experiences in and after hospital, but also alludes to the first publication of Whitman’s own Leaves of Grass a century before in 1855;63 indeed, its description of ‘The grass that sings / In his ears’ might refer as much to Kavanagh as to Whitman himself.64 Interestingly, Whitman—like Clifton with his Portobello Sonnets —tinkered with Leaves of Grass over a period of time, so that the final version appeared in 1891– 1892.65 Clifton’s ‘second act’ in the Portobello Sonnets might be seen as a

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last acknowledgement of Kavanagh and Whitman—as the final line shifts its gaze from Clifton’s forebears to a canal rat, proposing that they ‘both move on to greater things’.66 O’Loughlin, lingering on the ‘everydayness’ that Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets celebrate and describe, claims that ‘the sonnet is a peculiarly apt form for this endeavour, reflecting the basic, functional and flexible twostorey, red-brick unit prevalent in Portobello’.67 Thus, both poetically and structurally, the form appears to suit Clifton’s evocation of place. As Clifton points out, in a lecture from 2012, it is unsurprising that during a time of sustained dispute about territory, Irish poets should be so keen to mark out their terrain by including highly specific references in their work. At the same time, however, an increasingly liberal attitude towards ‘space’ confers a certain ‘privilege’ upon contemporary Irish poets: ‘there can be few in Irish poetry, north or south’, he argues, ‘who have not been forced to question the privilege underpinning the space of making— the liberal space—made available to us’. Poets therefore find themselves ‘trapped […] in a halfway house between the pull of the local and the need to universalise it’.68 In the same paragraph that he describes Irish poets’ prevarication between these two apparently opposing poles Clifton cites Kavanagh’s famous sonnet ‘Epic’, which conflates the local with the universal in its conclusion, as Homer’s ghost brags: ‘I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance’.69 Being instantly recognisable but also curiously adaptable to specific situations, Clifton’s sonnets also wrestle between these two poles. When we consider the sequence as a whole, this tussle extends to one between the individual and the collective, where individual poems might be seen as jostling for the reader’s (and poet’s) attention. Nell Regan describes Portobello Sonnets as an ‘elegantly constructed sonnet cycle’ and later a ‘beautifully achieved cycle, which yields more and more with every reading’, but elsewhere in the same review she describes it as a ‘sequence’.70 Meanwhile, O’Loughlin insists that it constitutes an ‘astonishing, accomplished, and sometimes virtuoso sequence’.71 Viewed in one way, the distinction between a ‘cycle’ and a ‘sequence’ might be attributed to mere semantics: indeed, Going claims that ‘[f]or all intents and purposes, sonnet sequence is now synonymous with series and cycle of sonnets’.72 However, what Heaney’s foregrounding of the term ‘Circle’ in ‘District and Circle’ implies is that there might be a circularity, a repetitiveness, or a sense of return within a sonnet cycle, which takes it away from the chronological or linear expectations of a more traditional

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sequence structure. Conversely, the conclusion of the Portobello Sonnets , with its determination to ‘move on to greater things’,73 seems to usher in a new beginning, challenging the returning sensibility of the sonnet cycle. Viewing the Portobello Sonnets as a sequence enables a fuller consideration of the relationship between the individual and the collective, the self and other. John Holmes stresses this element within the late Victorian sonnet sequence, noting that they: ‘were characterised, individually and collectively, by attempts to develop a poetry of selfhood. Their preoccupations—religious belief and doubt, sexuality and genderrelations, national allegiance […]—were those of late Victorian identity’. Though Clifton’s sequence is set against a very different background, it is surprising how many of these characteristics it shares: particularly fitting, too, is Holmes’s comment that such sequences were characterised by ‘complex self-exploration’.74 All but one of those sonnets inserted into the later version of the sequence are addressed to, or concern, specific people, places or groups, so that a self-exploration is negotiated through relations with others. Hence, sonnet 7 is subtitled ‘Death of an Editor’, and sonnet 12 ‘to the singer Freddie White’; while sonnet 13 refers to ‘the Noodle House / on Wexford Street’, sonnet 20 describes a certain ‘Dan Sweetman’, who appears to be a friend of speaker, and sonnet 25 focuses on ‘North African gentlemen’. Lastly, sonnet 29 is subtitled ‘For Marina, who cut my hair’, and sonnet 31 ‘The Night Bakery’.75 Significantly, the later version of the sequence also includes a longer poem, ‘Epilogue: William Bates, 1931–2013’, with Bates addressed throughout as ‘Liam’.76 Conversely, the earlier version from Poetry Ireland Review (2013) contains no attributed sonnets at all. The later insertions allow for a fuller negotiation with the locations, immigrant groups, and men and women who make up the streets of contemporary Portobello. Although the vast majority of sonnets from Poetry Ireland Review were re-published in the longer sequence with only silent typographical corrections, one particular change is significant. Sonnet 14 of 27, the middle poem of the earlier version of the sequence, discusses the children sleeping in the terraces of Portobello. The closing six lines begin: Tomorrow, they will inherit the earth I and my shadow leave them—reversible days, The past alive in the present […]77

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In the 2017 version of this sonnet, now number 18 in a sequence of 35 (and therefore positioned likewise at the centre of the sequence), the second line of the three has been changed to ‘You and your shadow leave them—reversible days’.78 This flattening-out of the poetic ‘I’ signals a subtle move away from Kavanagh, whose sonnets ‘The Hospital’, ‘Leaves of Grass’ and ‘Canal Bank Walk’ revel in the delight that a spiritual reawakening gives the speaker—‘give me ad lib / To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech’.79 Additionally, the changes reflect Clifton’s assertion that ‘detachment and anonymity are […] the necessary ground of imagination’.80 ‘Self-exploration’ can be external too. Though Clifton’s narrator remains too autobiographical to be completely ‘detached and anonymous’, these later changes suggest a desire to move towards such imaginative goals. In the Portobello Sonnets , ‘exploration’ is also imagined as geographical and topographical, as the narrator moves through the city. Again this has biographical resonances. Critics have often stressed Clifton’s ‘itinerant career as poet and teacher’, as O’Brien puts it;81 yet, of an earlier collection (The Desert Route, 1992), Clifton noted that despite the ‘fifteen years of travel and experience’ in Africa and Asia collected into that volume, ‘[t]here is always, too, the umbilicus back to Ireland’.82 Clifton touched upon a similar subject in a 2011 lecture, noting that within contemporary poetry written by Irish poets based in Britain and America, Ireland functions as ‘a kind of taproot back to lost human and communal values’.83 In another lecture Clifton cautions against the kind of nationalising tendency that shaped Michael Hartnett’s decision in the mid-1970s to ‘abandon the compromised medium of English’, describing this as ‘apparently ruinous’; and claims that ‘the quest for and consolidation of nationhood’ within Irish poetry has a negative effect in that it ‘defines, limits and obsesses Irish poetry to this day’.84 As if to underline and extend his own wrestling between ‘the pull of the local and the need to universalise it’, in the Portobello Sonnets Clifton juxtaposes sonnets replete with specific topographical references with those that have almost no sense of place at all. For example, in a cluster of sonnets that appear only in the later version (sonnets 12, 13 and 15), and which surround only one from the earlier version (sonnet 14 [originally sonnet 11]), the specificity of location and people in the first facing pair of sonnets is followed by another facing pair that could be located in any modern space. Therefore, sonnet 12, addressed ‘to the singer Freddie White’, refers to ‘Whelan’s, on a typical Tuesday night’ and mentions by

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name several ‘Friends out of rehab’ and on their ‘Second marriages’, while its facing sonnet builds an entire narrative from a glimpse of ‘A woman, arm in sling’ at the ‘Noodle House / On Wexford Street’.85 Conversely, sonnet 14, with faint echoes of Wordsworth, builds from a contemplation of a ‘Rogue narcissus […] / Among the daffodils’ to a consideration of the Romantic sublime; while its facing sonnet (15) juxtaposes this with a world in which though ‘Green things grow / On both sides of the wall’, that ‘wall’ is the ‘little silver screen’ of the computer, and the communication takes place through ‘Skyping, taking calls / And digiting at intervals between’.86 Here, the rural and the urban jostle for our attention. In gathering Clifton’s poems for his 2010 anthology of modern Irish poetry, Wes Davis comments that ‘[h]owever familiar the setting, Clifton would continue to demonstrate his dexterous ability to make all places the place and no place’.87 Nevertheless, as we have seen with the sonnets that Clifton inserted into the 2017 version of the sequence, the addition of specific people and ethnic groups makes this binary more complicated; in diversifying the community that he describes, Clifton is redrawing the boundaries of what a ‘parish’ might mean or be, and considering how far his poems—as ‘minor orders / In the broad church of creation’88 — might fit into this new schema. This allows us to see the epigraph that begins the collection, attributed to Kavanagh—‘In the third age, we are content to be ourselves, however small ’89 —in different ways. Perhaps Clifton sees this ‘smallness’ as having significant resonances for poetry— indeed, in the same section of his Self -Portrait that Clifton cites from, Kavanagh describes how ‘not caring’ about his ‘smallness’ heralded the moment of ‘great daring’ in which he ‘became a poet’.90 Alternatively, Clifton’s epigraph might reflect an acknowledgement, which creeps up on us in middle to old age, of our lack of relevance and importance. It is telling that in this epigraph, Clifton has replaced Kavanagh’s phrase ‘the final simplicity’ with ‘the third age’, which gives a stronger impression of intellectual renewal, having been used since the 1970s to mean ‘the period in life of active retirement’, and also being associated with education.91 Clifton isn’t ready for dotage yet. Returning to a formal and thematic consideration of the sonnet (sequence) more broadly, we can see how the ‘smallness’ and the potential anonymity of the form—in its almost invisible familiarity—might render it a useful tool for negotiating questions of individual and collective creativity as a poet enters his ‘third age’. Meanwhile, by using this most ‘fixed’ and ‘inherited’ of forms to poeticise a specific place,92 Clifton

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can manipulate the sonnet to show how Portobello, as a microcosm of Dublin but also of modern Ireland, both undergoes changes and remains, resolutely, the same. We are reminded of Clifton’s contention that a concept of nationhood ‘defines, limits and obsesses Irish poetry to this day’: as a (self-)limiting and defining form, the sonnet can become a metaphor for the Irish poet’s prevarications between restraint and expression. Unlike Heaney’s loose and complicated interpretation of the sonnet within ‘District and Circle’, Clifton sticks to a recognisable formal pattern throughout his sequence: there is little variation with line lengths, so that lines are rarely anything other than pentameters or hexameters; and the 14 lines appear mostly as one stanza (or ‘room’) on the page, so that each sonnet blocks out a similar amount of space.93 When we add to this the fact that every sonnet but one has 14 lines, we can see how structurally they might evoke the basic, two-storey ‘red-brick unit prevalent in Portobello’ that O’Loughlin describes.94 Finally, though the pattern of end-rhymes shifts from sonnet to sonnet, each poem has a recognisable formal rhyme scheme, therefore recalling its Western, European origins; yet by alluding specifically to Kavanagh Clifton is, as Regan puts it, ‘explicitly writ[ing] himself back into Dublin’.95 In order to understand the prevarications that Clifton’s sequence enacts, it is helpful to return to his lecture from 2011, entitled ‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus’. ‘Detritus’ makes its way into the Portobello Sonnets through seemingly endless lists of places and objects, but also through the things that communities leave behind—their ‘human silt’— and through the layering of cultures that creates a ‘junkshop of religion’, set against ‘a backdrop of old news / And drowned ephemera’.96 In each of these examples, but particularly in the last, which worries that by drowning in such ‘ephemera’ ‘You can go too deep / And never come back from the realm of archetype’,97 we hear echoes of Yeats’s late poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ in which the ‘Circus Animals’ represent archetypes from a life that Yeats’s speaker worries have become no more than cliché. Hence, the poem concludes in a moment of exhaustion, resignation and despair: ‘I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’.98 In his lecture Clifton worries, like Yeats before him, that we might not be able to wade through the ‘detritus’ of the contemporary world in order to find where the ‘realer’ material for poetry lies:

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Rescuing the poem from that detritus […] means ‘a going back to the laws’, as the poet Michael Hartnett puts it, and not merely the laws of verse, but the certainty that some things are truer and realer than others, that an underlying vision is intact, that poetry is there not to mock but to celebrate existence.99

It is important that Clifton couches his ideas not in superlatives but in comparatives: for him, ‘some things are truer and realer’ than others, rather than wholly ‘true’ or completely ‘real’. That these comparatives describe what he terms a ‘certainty’ strikes the listener initially as paradoxical; however, the idea of an ‘underlying vision’ that remains ‘intact’, reflecting poetry’s raison d’être ‘to celebrate existence’, does not suggest a turning back so much as a re-education in the ‘laws’ that have always formed the foundations of poetry. For Clifton, ‘going back to the laws’ does not mean returning to an idealised place where nation and language are one—indeed, as we have already seen, he would criticise Hartnett for doing just this in turning away from English. Therefore, the narrator of the Portobello Sonnets re-makes himself both within, and slightly detached from, a new and changing Dublin that is more international than ‘Irish’. However, it might mean re-educating oneself in how poets shape and define ‘poetry’ itself. That Clifton chooses to do this through the sonnet, a form that itself suggests regularity and rigidity, tells us that he is negotiating how far the formal ‘laws’ of poetry might serve its aim to ‘celebrate of existence’; and that it might require a certain detachment and anonymity to be able to realise poetry’s ‘underlying vision’. It is significant that in quoting Hartnett’s phrase ‘a going back to the laws’ Clifton is actually citing the last line of a sonnet by Hartnett, ‘There will be a talking …’, which rediscovers a place in which ‘art will be art’, and where ‘we will walk the balance of artistry’.100 Hartnett’s is an imagined future as much as a return to the past; and a place monitored, like Clifton’s own place of ‘realer’ and ‘truer’ understanding, by checks and balances. The sonnet form, and a sonnet sequence, might offer both Hartnett and Clifton a ‘balanced’ structure that, having scrutinised the ‘cultural detritus’, can order the various ‘ephemera’ of modern life into something approaching ‘artistry’. At the same time, Clifton’s sequence is not completely without experiment. We noted above how several of the sonnets that were inserted into the 2017 version of the Portobello Sonnets were addressed to, or

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concerned with, specific people; interestingly, it is in those same sonnets that Clifton plays most clearly with the sonnet form. For instance, the only sonnet in the sequence that doesn’t have 14 lines—sonnet 12, which is 13 lines long, and is subtitled ‘to the singer Freddie White’—also employs a looser rhyme scheme than others, separating similar sounds by several lines (‘riot’ / ‘Hiatt’ [ll.2, 7], ‘survives’ / ‘arrives’ [ll.6,10]). The last lines see a rhyming couplet followed by a final line with no partner: […] The universe too Has its supporting acts, in this case you On the human stage. Admissions, no returns.101

Although the narrative implies that ‘Admissions, no returns’ refers to the eventual death of the eponymous singer like others before him (such as ‘Frank Zappa, prostate cancer’ [l.9]) and uses the metaphor of concert tickets to do so, it also frustrates our formal expectations of the sonnet by refusing to give us a rhyme for ‘returns’ and so find our way back. Instead, we are admitted to an unfamiliar place, where our questions remain unanswered. Although this is a wonderful metaphor for the unknowingness of death, a common preoccupation of the sequence, it also hints at the dishonesty of the formal English or Shakespearean sonnet, whose rhyming-couplet conclusion offers us resolution where there might be none. Though this example risks undermining those sonnets (2, 18, 32 and 33) that do end on a clear rhyming couplet—all of which appeared in the 2013 version and are reprinted unchanged in 2017—it does draw our attention to a more subtle, sustained technique in the sequence, where the last line rhymes not with the line before but most often with line 12.102 Meanwhile, most other sonnets see the final line rhymed with earlier endwords, either from lines 9, 10 or (most commonly) 11.103 By noting these various experiments with rhyme, we can see how the poet pushes (sometimes imperceptibly) against the ‘fixed’ or ‘inherited’ form of the sonnet while not fully ignoring those ‘laws’ on which the foundations of the sonnet rests. After all, in all but one sonnet (sonnet 12) we are given a sense of resolution in line 14, as it does (eventually) answer an earlier sound, even if the rhyme patterns vary. Considering stanza shape, the Portobello Sonnets in their 2017 incarnation display some movement towards experiment, as three new sonnets— 7, 25 and 29—break down the solid block of 14 lines found elsewhere

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in the sequence, forming two stanzas of four lines and two of three. Such poems arrest the reader by being at once recognisable as sonnets and seeming atypical in this sequence. A Northern Irish poet who uses this sonnet shape frequently is Paul Muldoon, whose Poems 1968–1998 Clifton reviewed in 2001.104 Like Muldoon’s sonnets from the late 1990s, which are often constructed around seven rhyming sounds, with four devoted to the more formal first eight lines, and three employed more loosely over the second six,105 Clifton’s new sonnets display an increasing playfulness towards rhyming patterns. For instance, sonnet 25 (addressed to ‘North African gentlemen’) works around just five rhyming sounds, loosely conceived, so that the basic rhyme scheme is abba bccb dae ede: this feels as claustrophobic as the world these men inhabit, with their ‘women kept unseen’.106 Sonnet 7, meanwhile, on the ‘Death of an Editor’, takes delight in not giving the departed Editor an appropriate send-off, either thematically or aurally: ‘I sound your last Post / On a silent trumpet, among children’s cries’.107 In terms of experiment, one further sonnet (31) is worthy of mention. This poem, subtitled ‘The Night Bakery’, sees line 9 broken in two, and ends with much a shorter line, followed by an ellipsis. Indeed, the narrative stops almost in media res as the voyeuristic narrator, viewing the bakers at work, notes: ‘I watch it being stirred, the mixing bowl / Of spirit and essence …’.108 Yet the sonnet recollects itself and still contains 14 lines, so that line 9—‘In weightless ecstasy? / Batches cool’—sees an end-rhyme continued from ‘soul’ through to ‘cool’ and ‘bowl’.109 The poem rights itself, so that even the foreshortened concluding line (‘essence’, l.14) recalls ‘incandescence’ (l.11) in its final, dreamy reverie. When considered as a whole, the moving on, moving back and selfenclosing of the sequence’s end-rhymes complicate formally the question of what it might mean to return, and whether this act of returning can absorb both ‘a going back to the laws’ and (as the last line claims) ‘mov[ing] on to greater things’.110 In the same section of his Self Portrait from which Clifton derives his epigraph for the Portobello Sonnets , Kavanagh claims that ‘[t]here are two kinds of simplicity, the simplicity of going away and the simplicity of return. The last is the ultimate in sophistication’.111 Yet both Clifton’s lecture and the sonnet sequence itself seem unsure whether it is enough simply to ‘return’ after being away. The poem’s rhymes, like the sequence’s narrator, appear to ‘go away’ but almost always, eventually, ‘return’—by means circuitous and revealing. Clifton’s manipulation of the sonnet form, and the sequence

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as a whole, points to an indecision concerning whether to contain and control the ‘ephemera’ of modern life, or to embrace its ‘detritus’, finding a place for oneself within it. While the sequence concludes that the figures that haunt the final sonnet—Christ, Kavanagh, Whitman—are free ‘to move on to greater things’, it is not clear if Clifton’s narrator can do the same. Indeed, the entire last line—‘Before they move on to greater things’—is suspended in a moment of not-happening, so that the ‘survivor’ who has ‘come back from the dead’, ‘Haunted’ by those figures from the past and facingoff with ‘the rat hesitating’, might be trapped there forever.112 The final sonnet expresses a desire for this ‘survivor’ that ‘anonymity’ and ‘Powerlessness’ might ‘be his lot’, recalling Clifton’s comment that ‘detachment and anonymity are […] the necessary ground of imagination’.113 Yet the ‘Before’ on which that last line hinges tells us that the narrator-as-poet might not be ready to move onto those ‘greater things’, which might bring peace, or even death, as well as ‘anonymity’ (even Christ is imagined to have ‘lingered here’, unknown, ‘in his unrecorded years’114 ). The will to move on remains, but so too does the need to return.

3.3 Anthony Cronin’s The End of the Modern World Employing language similar to his critique of Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets , O’Loughlin describes Anthony Cronin’s choice of the ‘simple, functional, red-brick unit of the unrhymed sonnet, democratic and direct’ for The End of the Modern World, published in its final version in 2016. O’Loughlin adds that Cronin ‘calls the whole a sonnet sequence, and as the poem progresses it forms an organic whole’.115 Yet the summary belies the complexities of Cronin’s sequence: namely, the dazzling range of references to poets, artists and historical figures; its sometimes off-putting employment of complex vocabulary;116 its fastidiously self-conscious metre (where ‘but I must keep my iambic beat’ doesn’t, quite117 ); and individual words and phrases that both might and might not echo past works. Moreover, while O’Loughlin claims that Cronin ‘makes it cohere’ organically as a sequence, it actually went through considerable re-arrangements between its first publication in 1989 and 2016, a period of nearly 30 years.118 The publication history is more complicated, and longer, still. Some of the sonnets were published in 1982 in 41 Sonnet-Poems 82; but in the ‘Author’s Note’ to this work

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Cronin mentions that still others ‘originally appeared in Poetry Ireland, edited by David Marcus, in 1948’.119 Cronin is slightly inaccurate in his recollection; in fact, a sonnet that would eventually become sonnet 6 of The End of the Modern World (2016) was published under the title ‘Poem’ in Poetry Ireland in October 1950. The final version is only slightly changed from this much earlier version, with the exception of the concluding lines, which shift the focus from the second person to the third.120 The two poems that Cronin did publish in Poetry Ireland in 1948 do not find their way into The End of the Modern World.121 Nevertheless, what the history of the sequence does tell us is that Cronin is content to revise and reshape his material according to his purposes. Looking at the 1989 version of the sequence, we notice that it differs from the 2016 one in terms of arrangement and length. The earlier (1989) consists of 161 sonnets, divided into three parts: I is sonnets 1– 48; II is sonnets 49–95; and III is sonnets 96–161. The 2016 version is divided likewise into three parts: I is sonnets 1–48; II is sonnets 49–97; and III is sonnets 98–179. This constant return and reshaping over half a century recalls a claim that Cronin makes in an essay entitled ‘A Question of Modernity’, that ‘in art, at least there is possibly nothing absolutely new under the sun’; the echoes of O’Brien’s review of Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets imply that Cronin might be similarly attracted to the paradox of stop-starting and continuity—of progress and return—that is at the heart of sonnet sequences.122 In his ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1989 version, which does not appear in 2016, Cronin gives us some guidance to the sequence—which he claims is not intended to ‘cohere’: ‘This is not a long poem but a sequence of short ones, thematically and dramatically related, but not individually always meant to present or reflect a consistent view of things’.123 Cronin’s description debates whether we might associate the sonnet more closely with a lyric or dramatic mode; the blurb on the back of the 1989 version complicates this further by describing the whole as a ‘long lyrical-dramatic sequence’.124 In ‘A Question of Modernity’, Cronin adds still further complexity by claiming that ‘[w]e do not feel as lyrically or dramatically as literature, taken as a full human record, would want us to believe. Our emotions are more complex, more impeded, more desultory than that’.125 Does the ‘drama’ of the long sequence enhance the ‘lyrical’ power of the individual sonnet, then, or is something more complex at play? Cronin seems to prevaricate between relying on the individual sonnet or on the sequence as a whole to convey the complexity of human

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emotions. It is significant that he chooses to use the sonnet form at all, as elsewhere he is not a prolific sonneteer. His Collected Poems, 1950–1973 contains only a handful of sonnets—‘Writing’, ‘Outside’ and ‘Consolation’126 —whereas there are many 16-line poems (divided into 4 stanzas of 4 lines each), and 12-line poems (divided into 3 stanzas of 4 lines each). Meanwhile, a more recent collection The Fall (2010) contains just one, loose-form sonnet ‘Regrets’, while the later Body and Soul (2014) contains no sonnets at all.127 An additional thematic and structural consideration is the volume’s association with the epic mode. Where O’Loughlin remarks upon Cronin’s employment of ‘the unrhymed sonnet’, the adjective draws our attention—however obliquely—to John Milton’s verse epic Paradise Lost (first published in 1667). Milton notes in the opening sentence of his 1668 introduction to Paradise Lost that ‘[t]he Measure is English Heroic Verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin’,128 and the poem proceeds in paragraphs of blank verse, with a measured iambic pentameter. Though Cronin claims of The End of the Modern World that it ‘is not a long poem but a series of short ones’, the blurb on the back cover describes it as a ‘long, ambitious sequence which would represent a poetic view of the psychic history of western civilisation and the stage at which it has arrived today’;129 this shares similarities with the grand claims and scope of Milton’s epic. Significant, too, is the way that Cronin both extrapolates and quotes from Paradise Lost in the opening sonnets to Part II of his sequence, revealing an ambivalence towards his forebear. Indeed, sonnet 50 begins with a mocking character assessment of Milton himself, claiming: And one presumes equality. Of course. Which wouldn’t be like Milton, that’s for sure, Since he’s quite clear about the dominance.130

Yet Cronin gives lines of his poem over to Milton, allowing them to direct his verse: the last four lines of the same sonnet quote from the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost verbatim,131 and the next sonnet deconstructs these same lines: ‘One likes that second yielded: “by him best / Received/yielded”’.132 Viewed from another angle, though, one could argue that Milton’s words are ‘yielded’ to Cronin’s, because the later poet is re-arranging and deconstructing them linguistically, and then reordering them into the sonnet form—a more constrained shape than

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Milton’s verse paragraphs employ. Indeed, this same sonnet (sonnet 51) deconstructs and anatomises Milton’s word choice—‘eased’ to describe ‘The putting off of clothes’, the adjective ‘mysterious’ pertaining to the ‘rites’ of ‘connubial love’, and the use of ‘nor … refused’ to summarise Eve’s reaction to love-making133 —to offer a contemporary response to the inherent misogyny of Milton’s verse. At the same time, however, the apparently heroic figure who begins the sequence enacts his own, often brutal, acts of misogyny, and there are many moments in The End of the Modern World where such attitudes are insufficiently scrutinised. Moreover, there are other, often complex, allusions to ideas of the epic throughout the sequence. For instance, the figure described in the opening sonnets is shaped by a world in which, ‘tempted to transcendence men became / Half-angels, monsters’,134 yet his story is told through an elevated, semi-fictional tone borrowed from Pre-Raphaelite art. Both of these elements come together in sonnet 2, through the Brutish sexuality of this ‘manor / Lord’: Beside what gave him caste, his murderous weapons, The always brave, the honourable one, Sans peur et sans reproche, sought echo, answer From something guiltless, sin-free but still human, A virgin merging in her slender girlhood With all which was appointed to confirm him In his ideal of him.135

The reference to ‘Sans peur et sans reproche’ is both illuminating and obfuscating, as it recalls the French soldier Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (c.1473–1524), who was known as ‘le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’ (the knight without fear or reproach);136 yet Bayard is never mentioned by name, and Cronin gives no indication that the events take place in France. Indeed, the opening line of The End of the Modern World describes ‘The clingy, clayey soils of our wet north’, which the end of the sequence implies might be Ireland or even England.137 Meanwhile, the last lines of the above passage may refer obliquely to D. G. Rossetti’s painting ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1848–1849), Rossetti’s first completed oil painting:138 this allusion carries uncomfortable associations, as the painting essentially depicts a child whose purity is symbolised by the figure of a dove. We are, then, in a place of ‘courtly love’, which is figured alternatively as ‘honour’ and violent defilement: but where that impression is

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gleaned as much from nineteenth-century art, and its implicit misogynies, as from an apparent historical retelling of events. This sense is confirmed in a few sonnets’ time, where we find a further specific reference to Pre-Raphaelite art in the form of ‘The arming and departure of the knights: / A picture by Burne-Jones in Birmingham’:139 this is Panel 2 of the ‘Quest for the Holy Grail Tapestries’ (1895–1896), from the PreRaphaelite art collection at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.140 Cronin’s sonnet (number 9), describing the visual features of the painting through a male gaze, itself concludes ‘Burne-Jones, a man, is painting a male dream’.141 Here, we find allusions to Christina Rossetti’s sonnet ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, so accurate on the politics of the male gaze, with its concluding line: ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’.142 Cronin’s use of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art adds even greater complexity to the texture of his sequence: by adding a visual, ekphrastic element through regarding a specific ‘picture […] in Birmingham’, and in a later sonnet discussing the positive reaction of ‘Lady Burne-Jones’ to one of her husband’s paintings, ‘Cophetua’,143 Cronin mounts further temporal challenges to our reading of the sequence as a whole, which provides a broadly chronological frame of reference but slows down and gathers speed at different moments. Meanwhile, Cronin’s allusions to both D. G. Rossetti—thought to have been the first poet to employ the term ‘sonnet sequence’144 —and to his sister Christina’s single sonnet ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, display a richness of literary and visual allusion that is gilded, like the works of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its own elaborate frames of reference. Throughout the sequence as a whole, but particularly in Part II, Cronin refers both directly and indirectly to European artists, many of them French, as if to extend further this relationship between poetry and painting—and to provide a chronological crux for the narrative. Making such allusions allows him to expand upon a claim made in sonnet 30, a dramatic monologue by an unnamed figure, who concludes, ‘My mob was European, avant-garde’ in defiance of the ‘sad rebellions’ enacted by Irish nationalists.145 Therefore, the final sonnet of Part I (number 48) opens with a description of a painting that seems to evoke Renoir’s ‘Boating at Argenteuil’ (1873)—‘Girls on the river, girls at Argenteuil, / Under the dappling trees in August light’146 —while Part II of the sequence references many European artists and cultural figures. Sonnet 56 offers a biographical summary of the life and work of Paul Gauguin,147 sonnet 62 describes Renoir’s ‘reclining’ nudes, ‘rejoicing in their own fleshy nature’,

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and sonnet 70 takes up this topic again in its description of Henri Matisse’s ‘lovely nudes reclining / In joyous being’.148 Other notable figures in this section include the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862– 1918),149 Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele (1890–1918),150 Italian-French founder of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)151 and the French avant-garde painter and poet Francis Picabia (1879–1953), who progressed through his career from Impressionism to Cubism and then onto Dadaism and Surrealism.152 These points of reference provide a chronological hook to the narrative while offering an alternative viewpoint on what might constitute a ‘psychic history of Western civilisation’ within Irish poetry—and recalling Clifton’s comment that ‘the quest for and consolidation of nationhood’ has a potentially negative effect in that it ‘defines, limits and obsesses Irish poetry to this day’.153 Cronin offers an alternative ‘quest’, moving from the Holy Grail to Surrealism and beyond, which finds its expression in a transnational world of storytelling, art and constant re-fashioning. It is no accident that the last sonnet envisages ‘mak[ing] Manhattan / Rise in resplendence’, as the sequence extends past its own largely pan-European parameters to incorporate further symbols of Western civilisation.154 Yet what might constitute ‘Irishness’, and how this might relate to ideas of England, Europe and beyond, is never quite left behind. Additionally, the shift throughout the narrative between ‘real’ historical figures and periods and imagined characters and landscapes—enacted often at the meeting-places between art and everyday life—makes reading the sequence a dizzying experience, and complicates Cronin’s claim in ‘A Question of Modernity’ that ‘[t]he primary virtue of literature is honesty; its primary purpose is to record’. In the same lecture from 1966, Cronin claims that the ‘modern achievement’ of Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Joyce is ‘a return of psychological precision and a gain in honesty, complexity, wholeness’.155 What space is there for fictional figures, for historical narratives gleaned from art or literature, within this apparent paradigm of ‘honesty’ and ‘wholeness’? To begin to unravel this question, we can consider the ways in which the sequence negotiates Irish political and literary figures; this tells us something about the convergence of ‘honesty’ and ‘reality’ within the sequence and illustrates how far such topics preoccupied Cronin from the sequence’s beginnings in 1950 up until 2016.

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The earliest, and most subtle, allusion to Irish writing comes in sonnet 10, where the Lord of the Manor forces himself upon a countrywoman. Here the description resounds with echoes of the brutishness and power dynamics of Yeats’s sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’: […] the strong thrust driving The head, turned sideways, hair in disarray, Among the rushes of the castle chamber. Looking along the plane of back, the neck bared, Saw just enough of face to savour dominance.156

Here, the bestial metaphors recall those of Yeats’s poem—‘the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill’—while the reference to ‘the rushes of the castle chamber’ evokes Leda’s ‘body, laid in that white rush’.157 The sexual politics, including the allusion to ‘dominance’, not only evoke the problematic tone of Yeats’s earlier sonnet, but also extend the complicated interplay between censure and voyeurism that is at the heart of Cronin’s sequence. In sonnets 30 and 31, subtle references emerge, too, to Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Epic’, with their descriptions of ‘sad rebellions’ being ‘raised / For rural reasons’ and ‘Sad wranglings over scrub and bog’.158 Although in a more literal sense the ‘rebellions’ and ‘wranglings’ refer to the subject(s) of sonnets 29 and 30—namely Robert Emmet, the IRA, and those who fight for the ‘true republic’159 —these phrases also contain echoes of Kavanagh’s poem, in its preoccupation with countryside scuffles staged in ‘Ballyrush and Gortin’, where the Duffys and McCabes argued over ‘who owned / That half a rood of rock’. Although Kavanagh asks of such events, ‘That was the year of the Munich bother. Which / Was most important?’, his conclusion that ‘Gods make their own importance’ suggests that the smallness of a place, or an event, gains significance by virtue of the poetry that retells and shapes it.160 In evoking both Yeats and Kavanagh, Cronin’s sonnets ask once again whether a sonnet (or sequence) might convey successfully the expansiveness of the epic: we might recall Mikics’s comparison between ‘Leda and the Swan’ and Horatian epic,161 while central to Kavanagh’s poem is a reshaping of what ‘epic’ might mean within the 14 lines of the sonnet form. Yet Cronin doesn’t share Kavanagh’s bold confidence. His sonnets, and the sequence as a whole, instead ask wider questions about the relationship between ‘local rows’ (or ‘Sad wranglings’) and the ‘epic’ potential of the poetry that stages them.

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The key to unlocking The End of the Modern World, at least in its final version, might be found in how Cronin’s sequence tackles ‘reality’, and how far this is tapped onto Cronin’s reshaping of what Irish poetry, and literature more widely, might aim to say or do. For a sonnet sequence to convey or, to use Cronin’s term, ‘record’ reality requires paying attention to ‘honesty’: within poetry, this requires shying away from the extremities of verse that embraces too wholeheartedly the heights of the epic, the dramatic or the lyrical.162 Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the writers whom Cronin celebrates most vocally in his essays is associated more closely with prose. In ‘A Question of Modernity’ Cronin commends Joyce for showing how ‘[l]ife is more humiliating; we are meaner; reality is more mundane than most writers in the past have cared to recognise, or at least succeed in suggesting’.163 This echoes what Joyce himself termed his ‘style of scrupulous meanness’ in writing Dubliners , generated by his ‘conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard’.164 In The End of the Modern World, Cronin evokes Whitman’s Leaves of Grass —and Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Leaves of Grass’ in turn—in his description of the ‘shining blades of grass’ that show the hallmark of meddling humanity, in its ‘dumb multitudes’, damaging nature’s delicate equilibrium.165 Comparing these phrases recasts Whitman’s bracketed statement in Song of Myself (from Leaves of Grass ), that ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’, as short-sighted, naïve and self-serving.166 For Cronin, poetry is not prophecy; he entitles an essay on poetry ‘It Means What It Says’, and describes in another essay how P. B. Shelley, Whitman and ‘Swinburne in his republican vein’ are ‘mediocre poets but good (?) prophets’.167 For Cronin, poetry that ‘calls for a resolution in action of a situation is not a poem but, in varying degrees, prophecy, rhetoric or plain fraud’; therefore, Shelley and Swinburne are castigated for their more political, inciting, verses, while Whitman is criticised for his rhetorical self-fashioning. In Cronin’s mind, their poetry is unsuccessful as: When we ask for an illumination of the reality and are offered only an indication of the putative possibility or a reiteration of the ideal […] we find we are in the wrong shop. They share with other poets of the possible, the fact that they are no aid to the sufferer who cannot believe that his circumstances will change. He asks for bread and is given a magic stone. Poetry, by naming it, celebrates what it is.168

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This passage contains faint echoes of Yeats at his most rational, as if veering away from his more visionary poetry: recalling the ‘foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, the shoppers who ‘fumble at a greasy till’ in ‘September 1913’, and Yeats’s wearied critique of the rebels ‘Enchanted to a stone’ in ‘Easter 1916’.169 Cronin employs similar language in The End of the Modern World where various Irish republicans are described as ignoring ‘The river’s ceasing conflict stones’, echoing the French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century who found a false enchantment in reading, as ‘revolution is a bookish pastime’.170 Referencing the Easter Rising, sonnet 17 of The End of the Modern World mocks the bookishness of the scholar and nationalist Eóin MacNeill, who tried to demobilise the Rising only to delay it for one day—leading to his being referred to as ‘that traitor’—with the sonnet concluding: ‘All scholarship is a kind of treason’.171 All of this leaves the reader unsettled. If ‘Poetry’, by naming itself as such, ‘celebrates what it is’; if a poem should not call ‘for a resolution in action of a situation’; or if, as Cronin writes additionally in ‘The Notion of Commitment’ ‘[y]ou can argue with a poem it ceases to be one’, then where does this leave a reader of his sequence?172 Such stands against resolution and argument seem to contradict our understanding of the sonnet form—with its legalistic history, and its rhetorical structure. Further, if poets are dismissed thanks to their oratorical flair and their belief in ‘putative possibility’, while scholars are critiqued for their potentially treasonous belief in the written word, then why should we turn to poetry at all? By considering Cronin’s comment—‘Poetry, by naming it, celebrates what it is’—in comparison with the concluding lines of the entire sequence, we can begin to see how for this poet the haecceity (or ‘thisness’) of poetry is its most profound tool. But blazed upon this rock to make Manhattan Rise in resplendence, such a culmination Of history seen at sunset from the harbour. Meaningless, astonishing and simple.173

Confronting Clifton’s idea that poetry is there ‘not to mock but to celebrate existence’, because an ‘underlying vision is intact’,174 Cronin’s sequence instead celebrates poetry for what it is: a means of ‘making’ and recording an existence that is at once ‘Meaningless, astonishing and

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simple’. Humans have ‘made’ Manhattan just as poets have made verse; but the result is several conflicting things at once, just as poetry might be. We are reminded, here, of Cronin’s description of human emotions as being ‘complex’, ‘impeded’ and ‘desultory’;175 by giving the appearance of simplicity but, in ‘reality’, being far more complex, the poetry that conveys these emotions might therefore incorporate even the often problematic complexities of misogynistic sexuality. It might also allow for a vacillation between art and life, fact and fiction. Indeed, the relationship between the individual sonnet and the sequence as a whole might be analogous to the interactions of an individual emotion and a whole host of emotions. Of course, the relationship of the individual word to the line, or the line to the sonnet, extends this complexity potentially infinitely. The End of the Modern World, when viewed holistically, might therefore be seen as a ‘record’ of the emotions that govern human experience, illuminating a reality that is tapped not onto historical fact or literal ‘truth’ but onto the ways that humans experience emotion. This requires, however, a break with narrower traditions viewing poetry as prophecy, a challenge to views of how sonnets should be employed, the creation of space for an expression of the local, and a new understanding of how, and why, poetry is needed.

3.4 Conclusion: ‘Psychic Space’ and ‘Slight Returns’ in Sequences from Cronin to Muldoon Paul Muldoon makes prolific, if experimental, use of sonnet sequences. The titular opening sequence of Horse Latitudes (2006) contains 19 sonnets, all describing a place beginning with ‘B’;176 while the closing sequence of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, ‘Dirty Data’ (2015), prints 14 lines to each page, with two 4-line stanzas followed by two 3-line stanzas, denoting a sonnet sequence shape.177 Meanwhile, Regan claims that ‘the closing, culminating poem of Muldoon’s collection Quoof ’ (1983), ‘The More a Man Has The More a Man Wants’ is ‘the tour de force in Muldoon’s work, as far as the sonnet form is concerned’. Regan describes the sequence as ‘forty-nine phantasmagorical stanzas’, in which the form ‘buckles and bends, mutates and morphs’.178 One similarly experimental sequence, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, at the back of Hay (1998), has been the subject of much comment, not all of it complimentary—with less commentary on Muldoon’s manipulation of

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the sequence as a whole. John Kerrigan, writing on ‘Paul Muldoon’s transits’, remarks: Muldoon deals with others’ mistakes and his own with a tolerant, though sometimes distressed, humility, willing in verse to demonstrate that, despite the formal guarantees […] that he espouses, there is always the imminence of imperfection.

Kerrigan notes additionally that in Hay, ‘the mid-life crisis about mistakes and how endless it could be to correct them is widespread, even structural, and especially prominent in the concluding sonnet sequence’.179 But if the apparent ‘mistakes’ within this sequence are structural as well as thematic or formal, and if they act in defiance of the potential ‘perfection’ of the sonnet form, then how can we read them in relation to the form itself or to more declaredly serious attempts by Heaney, Clifton, Cronin and others? Such questions are certainly foremost in Clifton’s mind in a rather critical review he writes of Muldoon’s collection Poems 1968–1998, both published in 2001. Muldoon’s ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ comes in for the most severe admonishment, because for Clifton it encompasses most clearly what he describes as Muldoon’s ‘word-wilderness’. Therefore, he asks, rather dramatically: ‘[w]as there no one in all these years, no editor, no critic, to take him gently aside and call a halt?’. He adds: ‘[e]ntertaining some of these texts may be, in a brittle, hollowed-out way, but nothing compensates for their loss of faith in reality’.180 The idea of a ‘loss of faith in reality’ is troubling to Clifton as a poet who, as we have seen, believes that ‘rescuing the poem’ from ‘cultural detritus’ relies on ‘the certainty that some things are truer and realer than others’, and ‘that poetry is there not to mock but to celebrate existence’.181 In a rather damning conclusion to the same review, he adds: ‘Muldoon’s, so far, is a story of optical illusions—longer and longer not being better and better, the US, and various gigantisms, being tinier than the psychic space of Ireland’. Muldoon, in Clifton’s opinion, ‘badly needs, now, in his fiftieth year, with so much magnificent work behind him, to get back to the innocence of his first beginning’. Clifton’s suspicion at Muldoon’s suspected misemployment of his sonnet sequence recalls the balance between precision and extension that informs his own sequence, which is mapped onto the relationship between the local and the universal. It is not necessarily the case, Clifton implies, that in ‘gesturing’ towards such ‘gigantisms’

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as the US Muldoon is providing an expansive ‘psychic space’: in fact what he creates is ‘tinier than the psychic space of Ireland’. Indeed, the idea of a return to ‘the innocence’ of Muldoon’s ‘first beginning’ recalls the conclusion of the Portobello Sonnets in its own return to Kavanagh’s previous renaissance; indeed, Clifton suggests that Muldoon’s ‘earlier lyrics’ were more successful as, in them, ‘the fidelity to the redemptive power of art remains, as ever, at the centre’.182 Kerrigan’s and Clifton’s comments share a preoccupation with age and autobiography: this focus takes Clifton, and to a certain extent Heaney and Cronin too, into a realm where the humanity of the narrative ‘I’ or ‘he’—represented within each sequence by age, or by the passing of time—facilitates a move between the realms of ‘reality’ and ‘art’. Even Kerrigan adopts similar language in attributing Muldoon’s erratic attitudes towards ‘mistakes’ to an unspecified ‘mid-life crisis’, while Clifton reserves greater praise for shorter poems by Muldoon in which he claims that poetry is ‘a pretext for autobiography’.183 This desire to place a semiautobiographical poet at the centre of the narrative risks narrowing the parameters of the sonnet sequence; moreover the vexed narrator of ‘District and Circle’, the peripatetic voyeur of the narrator of the Portobello Sonnets , and even the shifting narrative and dramatic personae of The End of the Modern World, suggest that this semi-fictionalised self is not an easy role to inhabit or negotiate. Thematically, however, Muldoon’s ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ isn’t so far removed from Heaney’s, Clifton’s or Cronin’s sequences: combining the local with the universal, employing a range of allusions and touching on the relationship between the sonnet sequence and the epic mode thanks to its references to The Aeneid. Yet the poem’s narrative voices and personae, like its themes, are more obscured and entangled. John Redmond provides a useful summary of the sequence’s subjects and movements: ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ has three main levels: a series of references to The Aeneid, an imagined voyage of Muldoon’s father to Australia, and a fancy dinner in a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées. With his accustomed smoothness, Muldoon moves between these not-obviously-related three levels. The long poem meditates on the large consequences of single decisions—Aeneas choosing to turn back to Troy, Muldoon’s father choosing (or not choosing) to head for Australia, and Muldoon in the restaurant

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choosing or not choosing to connect with an old flame that he spots there. These three foregrounds become each other’s distant backgrounds.184

Redmond’s emphasis on Muldoon’s own inter-textual allusions to his fiveverse poem ‘The Bangle’, appearing earlier in Hay,185 and his gesture towards ‘Slight Return’ as a fitting phrase that goes back just enough, recall the forward gesture in Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ to his later collection Human Chain; but his analysis does not consider its form at all.186 In her detailed and brilliant study of this poem, which she describes as a ‘series of thirty sonnets’,187 Clair Wills focuses mainly on the sequence’s many returns, and specifically on its allusions to other poets and its intratextual echoes. For Wills, this is linked to the idea of authenticity within the sequence. Indeed, she suggests that the inability of the poet to ‘pay for his meal’ at the end of ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ references the fact that ‘(in American slang) a “muldoon” is a stolen credit card’. This leads her to observe that: the poem, with its extraordinary energy, offers its own answer to the question of whether borrowings from, and entanglements with others really do threaten to erase uniqueness. For a muldoon, we could say, is something stolen. Not only do other poets—Marvell, Virgil, Frost and many others— speak through his lines, but he trades too in the worn-out language of platitude and cliché.

Of course this questions whether not only ‘muldoons’ but also other poems by other poets are, by implication, stolen too; and whether each poet, in adopting a form or structure that is not wholly theirs, is also guilty of ‘platitude and cliché’. This is not to mention the intra-textual allusions within the poem to earlier works, in an act almost of self-plunder: as Wills points out, as the poem progresses, ‘not only do the three narratives become increasingly confused, but it also starts to get mixed up with others part of Hay, turning into other poems, in particular “Errata” and “Symposium”’.188 While the former poem is an extended exercise in self-correction, the latter arranges clichéd aphorisms into a loose sonnet structure.189 Additionally, Wills notes that the longer poem ‘offers a kind of crazed version’ of Muldoon’s earlier sonnet ‘Why Brownlee Left’, expanding particularly on the shorter poem’s ‘concern with fate and possibility, with what had to be and what might have been’.190 We could

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propose, then, that ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ is a sonnet sequence because it returns to, and expands upon, questions that are first raised in earlier sonnets. Yet the many entanglements of the sequence point to a more incidental relationship between content and form. Within ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ individual poems are arranged for the most part into stanzas of 4, 4, 3 and 3 lines, a pattern common to Muldoon’s sonnets, and there is some intricate use of end-rhymes and internal rhymes. Yet knowing that these sound patterns are borrowed from elsewhere in Muldoon’s own corpus—a factor that Wills also discusses in her work on Hay and its many shared end-rhymes—and being conscious that there is very little, if any, metrical arrangement throughout, only increases our feeling that the poem obfuscates the same moments that it purports to reveal. Do such works run the risk, as Wills suggests, of ending up as ‘self-parody’: as ‘muldoons’ of each other?191 When we incorporate Muldoon’s sonnet sequences, as epitomised by ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, into a critical discussion of the use and practice of the form, we cannot help but recall Cronin’s cutting conclusion to one of the sonnets of The End of the Modern World that ‘All scholarship is a kind of treason’.192 Is Muldoon writing in apparent sonnets because he has the dexterity to do so, to goad the reader or critic into considering seriously his use of a form? Or might he be using such form as a way of thinking about the relationship between planning and accident? Discussing ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ in particular, Wills notes that ‘[t]he shifts between the three narratives depend on accidents of language and event—or so Muldoon would have us think’.193 Are Muldoon’s heavily intricate sequences, to which he continues to return, too constructed, too self-referencing, to be mere play? Muldoon’s experiments might appear to have little in common with Clifton’s more profound engagement with the sonnet sequence as a way of ‘celebrating existence’ and expunging ‘cultural detritus’, so as to represent the ‘psychic space of Ireland’ as it negotiates its place within contemporary Europe and the wider world. Clifton’s claims seem a world away from Muldoon’s concluding line of ‘A Bangle: Slight Return’, with its near-nonsensical ‘For “Wooroonooran”, my darlings, read “Wirra Wirra”’, continuing to correct itself to the very end.194 Moreover, in returning (slightly) to earlier poems, Muldoon’s ‘A Bangle (Slight Return)’ enacts its own vicious circle and risks mocking the more solemn efforts of other poets. Yet Muldoon’s repeated returns to the

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sonnet sequence suggest that the form can offer him a way of asking larger questions about the relationship between poetry and art. If the language that we use perpetually undercuts itself, as it does in the closing line to ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, then such returns seem to ask whether poetry can really ‘celebrate existence’, as Clifton would like to believe. Moreover, they cast doubt over whether one poem or sequence, written by one man, can really hope to express or encompass the ‘psychic space of Ireland’, in all its contrarieties. One might argue that a poem or body of work that continues to return (slightly) to itself might, to use Clifton’s term, be ‘truer or realer’ than a poem that declares its own self-importance through structural or thematic certainty. In ‘District and Circle’, the Portobello Sonnets and The End of the Modern World we see the poet-as-narrator trying to exorcise those very demons that Muldoon’s poems lay bare, while holding on with increasingly sweaty palms to a belief in the transformative power of poetry within an alienating world. For Heaney, Clifton and Cronin, the sonnet sequence offers structural and thematic foundations, even if those foundations are shaky; yet for Muldoon such foundations are themselves illusory. What is clear is that, as the sonnet sequence continues to reshape itself, scholarship needs to be sensitive to both more serious and more playful exponents of the form, and so avoid committing its own accidental treasons.

Notes 1. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), p. xxii. 2. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 2. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. Paterson, 101 Sonnets, pp. xxiii, xii. 5. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 6. 6. Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet, p. 266. 7. Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 165; W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112, l.1. 8. Gertrude M. White and Joan G. Rosen, A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (New York, 1972), p. 2. 9. Phillis Levin (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (London and New York: Penguin, 2001), p. xxv. 10. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 7.

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11. See Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 153–211. 12. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 9. ‘Lok’ is also spelled ‘Locke’. 13. Anne Fogarty, ‘Introduction to Richard Nugent’, in Cynthia, ed. Angelina Lynch (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 9–45 (p. 9). 14. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of Its Strategies (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), p. 158. 15. William T. Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, Modern Language Notes, 62.6 (June 1947), 400–402 (400). 16. John Holmes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. ii. 17. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence, p. 4; Spiller identifies this first use of the term ‘sequence’ in George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573; repr. London: Scolar Press, 1970), p. 336. 18. Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, p. 400. 19. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence, p. 16. Speech marks Spiller’s own. 20. Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, p. 400. 21. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, p. 4. 22. Ibid., p. 2. 23. Helen Vendler, ‘The Puzzle of Sequence: Two Political Poems’, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 62–89 (p. 62). 24. Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, p. 401. 25. See Heaney, ‘District and Circle’, District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), pp. 17–19 (p. 19). Throughout, I will use ‘District and Circle’ (in quotation marks) to denote the sonnet cycle, and District and Circle (in italics) to refer to the collection as a whole. 26. See Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, Poetry Ireland Review, No. 109 (April 2013), 29–42 (42); and c.f. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2017). 27. Anthony Cronin, ‘The End of the Modern World, my elegy for our capitalist era’, Irish Times, 29 August 2016. https://www.irishtimes. com/culture/books/anthony-cronin-the-end-of-the-modern-world-myelegy-for-our-capitalist-era-1.2771830. 28. Burt and Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet, p. 5. 29. Hugh Haughton, ‘Seamus Heaney: First and Last Things’, The Irish Review, No.49/50 (Winter–Spring 2014/2015), 194–207 (194). 30. David Wheatley, ‘Orpheus Risen from the Underground’, review of District and Circle, Contemporary Poetry Review. http://www.cprw. com/Wheatley/Heaney.htm.

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31. Stephen Burt, ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 245–266 (255). 32. Michael Parker, ‘Fallout from the Thunder: Poetry and Politics in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle’, Irish Studies Review, 16.4 (November 2008), 369–384 (375). Italics Parker’s. See also notes 51 and 52 on p. 382. 33. Andrew Motion, ‘Digging Deep’, review of District and Circle, The Guardian, 1 April 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/ apr/01/poetry.seamusHeaney1. 34. Meg Tyler, ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, in The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp. 129–148 (p. 135). See also Heaney, ‘Out of Shot’, District and Circle, p. 15; and ‘A Shiver’, District and Circle, p. 5. 35. O’Brien, Introduction, The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances, p. 21. 36. See ‘A Chow’, p. 30, within ‘Senior Infants’ (pp. 29–32); and ‘A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden’, p. 71, within ‘Home Fires’ (pp. 70–71). 37. This count would include the five ‘sonnets’ of ‘District and Circle’, and the six of ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ (pp. 55–57). Though this approach does risk disrupting the collective narrative of these longer poems, it demonstrates how Heaney weaves the sonnet form into longer works, as well as writing full sonnet sequences and cycles. 38. See Heaney, ‘District and Circle’, first sonnet, p. 17; third sonnet, p. 18; and fifth sonnet, p. 19. Counting lines strictly, the whole cycle has only 66 lines, made up of 13+14 +13+14+12 lines. For the purposes of simple reading, I will number the lines sequentially in my discussion, from ll.1–66. 39. Tyler, ‘Image, Feeling and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, p. 131; Tyler discusses ‘In Iowa’, District and Circle, p. 52. 40. Ibid., p. 131. 41. Heaney, Glanmore Sonnets, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London, 1998), pp. 163–172. 42. Terence Brown, ‘Seamus Heaney’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, ed. Gerald Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 268–280 (p. 277). 43. See Heaney, Aeneid VI (London: Faber, 2013). 44. Parker, ‘Fallout from the Thunder’, p. 375. Parker provides a concentrated and confident close reading of ‘District and Circle’ as a whole on pp. 375–377. 45. Parker, ‘Fallout from the Thunder’, p. 376; see also ‘District and Circle’, ll.35–37, l.12.

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46. ‘Upstanding’, adj., 2.b, OED online (www.oed.com). 47. See, for example, ‘all-overing’ (l.22), ‘body-heated’ (l.24), ‘Street-loud’, and ‘herd-quiet’ (l.34). 48. See, for example, ‘purling’ (l.32), ‘whelm’ (l.39), ‘roof-wort’ (l.43), and ‘relict’ (l.64). 49. Bosch’s painting is currently on show at the Prado Museum, Madrid: see https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/thegarden-of-earthly-delights-triptych/02388242-6d6a-4e9e-a992-e1311e ab3609. 50. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 59, ll.62–63. See also Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber, 2010). 51. Heaney, ‘District and Circle’, ll.57–58. 52. Parker, ‘Fallout from the Thunder’, p. 376. Parker’s definitions come from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (5th edition; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Vol. 2, p. 2522. 53. Burt and Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet, p. 5; and see discussions above. 54. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2013), p. 42. 55. Nell Regan, ‘History Lessons’: Review of Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets; Siobhán Campbell, Heat Signature; and Maurice Harmon, Hoops of Holiness, Poetry Ireland Review, No. 122 (August 2017), 56–60 (56). 56. Bob Collins, ‘Foreword’ to Harry Clifton, Ireland and Its Elsewheres (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2015), pp. ix–x (p. ix). 57. Sean O’Brien, ‘Portobello Sonnets by Harry Clifton—Fluent and Humane’, The Guardian, 7 April 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2017/apr/07/portobello-sonnets-harry-Clifton-review. 58. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘The Hospital’, in Collected Poems by Patrick Kavanagh, ed. Antoine Quinn (London: Faber, 2005), p. 224, l.3; and p. 217, l.8. 59. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2017), sonnet 19, p. 27, l.1. All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. 60. Michael O’Loughlin, ‘Portobello Sonnets: A Journey from Experience into Innocence’, Irish Times, 10 June 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/portobello-sonnets-review-a-journey-from-experienceinto-innocence-1.3101804. Kavanagh underwent treatment for lung cancer at the Rialto Hospital, Dublin 8 (now St. James’s Hospital: see http://www.stjames.ie/AboutUs/History/), on 31 March 1955. See also https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1323-patrick-Kavanagh/ 1329-illness-and-rebirth-as-a-poet/. O’Loughlin’s phrase ‘second act’

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62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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refers to Portobello Sonnets (2017), sonnet 11, p. 19, l.1: ‘Who was it said we’re born in the second act?’. Heaney was born in 1939, and so would have been 67 when District and Circle was published in 2006; Clifton was born in 1952, and so would have been 65 on the final publication of the Portobello Sonnets in 2017. On first drafting his Portobello Sonnets, in 2004–2005, Clifton would have been very close in age to Kavanagh following his operation in 1955, as Kavanagh was born in 1904. Kavanagh, ‘Leaves of Grass’, Collected Poems, p. 217, l.12, l.11. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 35, p. 43, ll.5–6. Whitman selfpublished the first edition of Leaves of Grass: see Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, NY: Walt Whitman, 1855). Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 35, ll.11–12. See Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–1892). Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 35, l.14. O’Loughlin, ‘Portobello Sonnets ’. Clifton, ‘The Uncreated Conscience: Europe in Irish Poetry’, Ireland and Its Elsewheres, pp. 17–29 (pp. 24, 21). Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, Collected Poems, p. 184, ll.13–14. Nell Regan, ‘History Lessons’, pp. 56, 57, 56. O’Loughlin, ‘Portobello Sonnets ’. Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, p. 401. Italics Going’s own. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2017), sonnet 35, l.14. Holmes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, p. ii. See Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 7, p. 15; sonnet 12, p. 20; sonnet 13, p. 21, ll.1–2; sonnet 20, p. 28; sonnet 25, p. 33; sonnet 29, p. 37; and sonnet 31, p. 39. The other sonnet not found in the earlier version from Poetry Ireland Review (2013) is sonnet 15, which is preoccupied with the digital age (p. 23). Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 45–46. Ibid., sonnet 14, p. 35, ll.9–11. Ibid., sonnet 18, p. 26, ll.9–11. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, ll.11–12. Clifton, ‘The Uncreated Conscience’, p. 20. Sean O’Brien, ‘Portobello Sonnets by Harry Clifton’. Clifton quoted in Derek Mahon’s Foreword to Clifton, The Desert Route (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1992), p. 9. Clifton, ‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus: Writing the Rustbelt in Britain and Ireland’, Ireland and Its Elsewheres, pp. 1–14 (p. 9). Clifton, ‘The Uncreated Conscience’, pp. 22, 25, 29. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 12, p. 20, ll.4, 7, 8; and sonnet 13, p. 21, ll.2, 1–2.

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86. Ibid., sonnet 14, p. 22, ll.1–2; sonnet 15, p. 23, ll.9–10, ll.6–7. 87. Wes Davis, ‘Harry Clifton’, in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry ed. Wes Davis (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 658–659 (p. 659). Italics Davis’s own. 88. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 20, ll.2–3: this does not appear in the 2013 version. 89. Ibid., p. 8. Italics Clifton’s own. 90. Kavanagh, Self -Portrait (1964), rept. in A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose by Patrick Kavanagh, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003), pp. 313–314. 91. ‘third age’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 92. Stephen Burt, ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, p. 255. 93. The Italian word ‘stanza’ is itself linked etymologically to the word for ‘room’. See Heather Dubrow, ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, pp. 25–45 (p. 36). 94. O’Loughlin, ‘Portobello Sonnets ’. In the 2013 version this is felt more keenly still, in that most sonnets are published two to the page. Sonnet 12, which is only present in the 2017 version, has 13 lines (p. 20). 95. Nell Regan, ‘History Lessons’, p. 56. 96. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 1, p. 9, l.13; sonnet 2, p. 10, l.11; sonnet 33, p. 41, ll.6–7. 97. Ibid., sonnet 33, ll.7–8. 98. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 629–630, ll.39–40. 99. Clifton, ‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus’, p. 12. 100. Michael Hartnett, ‘There Will be a Talking’, in New and Selected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1991), p. 15, ll.14, 12, 5. 101. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 12, ll.11–13. 102. This is employed with sonnets 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28 and 35, while a looser rhyme between ll.12 and 14 is used in sonnets 7 (‘Post’/ ‘tryst’), 9 (‘Terminus’ / ‘discussion’), 25 (‘religion’ / ‘Kitchen’) and 29 (‘forth’ / ‘earth’). See Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, pp. 15, 17, 33 and 37. 103. Clifton rhymes ‘cloud’ with ‘crowd’ (l.9) in sonnet 6; ‘March’ in a halfrhyme with ‘church’ (l.11) in sonnet 14; ‘forced’ with ‘sources’ (l.11) in sonnet 16; ‘shows’ with ‘glows’ (l.11) in sonnet 17; ‘hells’ with ‘else’ (l.10) in sonnet 19; ‘constraints’ with ‘saints’ (l.11) in sonnet 20; ‘cars’ with ‘stars’ (l.11) in sonnet 22; ‘remain’ with ‘rain’ (l.11) in sonnet 26; ‘kings’ with ‘rings’ (l.10) in sonnet 30; ‘essence’ with ‘incandescence’ (l.11) in sonnet 31; and ‘wants’ with ‘truant’ (l.10) in sonnet 34. See Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, pp. 14, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34, 38, 39, 42.

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104. Clifton, ‘Remembering the Redemptive Power of Art’, Review of Paul Muldoon, Poems, 1968–1998, The Irish Times, 26 May 2001. https:// www.irishtimes.com/news/remembering-the-redemptive-power-of-art1.310048. 105. See, for example, Muldoon’s sonnets from Hay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): ‘The Point’ (p. 10), ‘Rainer Maria Rilke: The Unicorn’, (p. 17), ‘Lag’, (p. 26), ‘Symposium’ (p. 27), ‘The Train’ (p. 52), and ‘The Throwback’ (p. 81). 106. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2017), sonnet 25, p. 33, l.6. 107. Ibid., sonnet 7, p. 15, ll.12–13. The poem’s loose rhyme scheme is abba cddc efa gag. 108. Ibid., sonnet 31, p. 39, ll.9, 13–14. Ellipsis in original. 109. Ibid., sonnet 31, ll.7, 9, 13. 110. Ibid., sonnet 35, l.14. 111. Kavanagh, Self -Portrait, pp. 313–314. 112. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (2017), sonnet 35, ll.14, 7, 9, 12. 113. Ibid., ll. 10, 11; c.f. Clifton, ‘The Uncreated Conscience’, p. 20. 114. Clifton, Portobello Sonnets, sonnet 35, ll.2, 1. 115. O’Loughlin, ‘Preface’, Anthony Cronin, The End of the Modern World (Stillorgan: New Island Books, 2016), n.p. 116. See, for instance, ‘stylobate’ and ‘spirochetes’, in Cronin, The End of the Modern World, sonnet 26, p. 14, l.7; sonnet 56, p. 30, l.13. 117. Ibid., sonnet 53, p. 29, l.8. 118. O’Loughlin, ‘Preface’ to The End of the Modern World; see also Cronin, The End of the Modern World (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989). 119. Cronin, ‘Author’s Note’, 41 Sonnet-Poems 82 (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1982), n.p. Cronin was born in 1928, and died in December 2016. 120. See Cronin, ‘Poem’, Poetry Ireland, no. 11, ed. David Marcus (October 1950), 18, l.14: ‘You lay your tired with longing, mortal head’; and The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 6, p. 4, l.14: ‘He lays his tired with longing, mortal head?’ 121. Cronin, ‘On An Old Story’ and ‘Elegy’, Poetry Ireland, no. 7, ed. David Marcus (July 1948), 17. 122. Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, A Question of Modernity (London: Secker and Walburg, 1966), pp. 13–24 (p. 21); c.f. Sean O’Brien, ‘Portobello Sonnets by Harry Clifton’. 123. Cronin, ‘Author’s Note’, in The End of the Modern World (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989), n.p. 124. See Cronin, The End of the Modern World (1989), back cover. 125. Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, pp. 19–20. 126. See Cronin, Collected Poems 1950–1973 (Dublin: New Writers Press, 1973): ‘Writing’, p. 40; ‘Outside’, p. 44; and ‘Consolation’, p. 64.

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127. See Cronin, ‘Regrets’, The Fall (Stillorgan: New Island Books, 2010), p. 4; and Body and Soul (Stillorgan: New Island Books, 2014). 128. John Milton, ‘The Verse’ (note added 1668), Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 3. 129. Cronin, ‘Author’s Note’, The End of the Modern World (1989); c.f. The End of the Modern World (1989), back cover. 130. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 50, p. 27, ll.1–3. 131. ll.4–9 of sonnet 50 quote from Book IV of Paradise Lost, ll.295–301, and ll.308–311, keeping all elements the same except for small typographical differences. See Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Ricks, pp. 86–87. 132. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 51, p. 28, ll.1–2. 133. Ibid., ll.6–7, 9–10, 14. Cronin cites from Book IV of Paradise Lost, ll.739–743. Ellipsis Cronin’s own. See Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Ricks, p. 99. 134. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 3, p. 3, ll.12–13. 135. Ibid., sonnet 2, p.2, ll.1–2; sonnet 5, p. 4, ll.4–9. 136. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Terrail-seigneur-deBayard. 137. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 1, p. 2, l.1. 138. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-the-girlhood-of-maryvirgin-n04872. 139. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 9, p. 6, ll.1–2. 140. http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1907m129/quest-forthe-holy-grail-tapestries-panel-2-the-arming-and-departure-of-the-kni ghts/. 141. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 9, l.14; in sonnet 13, p. 8, we find further references to Edward Burne-Jones’s work and his wife’s alleged responses to it. 142. Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, in Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose, ed. Jan Marsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 71, l.14. 143. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 13, p. 8, ll.1–2. 144. See Going, ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, p. 400. 145. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 30, p. 16, ll.14, 12. 146. Ibid., sonnet 48, p.25, ll.1–2; c.f. Auguste Renoir, ‘Boating at Argenteuil’ (1873), https://www.pierre-auguste-renoir.org/Boating-AtArgenteuil.html. Cronin’s allusions suggest that it might be this painting to which he refers, but both Renoir and Claude Monet created similar paintings on this theme, based in and around Argenteuil, at this time. 147. See Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 56, p. 30. 148. Ibid., sonnet 62, p.33, ll.4–5; sonnet 70, p. 37, ll.1–2. 149. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustav-Klimt.

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150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166.

167.

168. 169.

170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Egon-Schiele. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Filippo-Tommaso-Marinetti. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Picabia. See Cronin, The End of the Modern World (1989), back cover; and Clifton, ‘The Uncreated Conscience’, pp. 25, 29. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 179, p. 93, ll.11– 12. Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, pp. 22, 21. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 10, p. 6, ll.8–12. W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112, ll.3, 7. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 30, ll.12, 12–13; sonnet 31, p. 17, l.2. See Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 29, p. 16; and sonnet 30, l.7. Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, ll.2–3, 9–10, 14. Mikics, in The Art of the Sonnet (2010), p. 266. See Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, pp. 19, 20, 21; and discussions above. Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, p. 20. James Joyce to Grant Richards, May 1906, collected in Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 134. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 33, p. 18, ll.3, 14. See also Kavanagh, ‘Leaves of Grass’ (and discussions above). Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1881–1882 edition), Section 51, l.1326, in Whitman, Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, ed. Ezra Greenspan (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 142–195 (p. 194). Cronin, ‘It Means What It Says’, A Question of Modernity, pp. 36–48; and ‘The Notion of Commitment’, A Question of Modernity, pp. 25–35 (p. 28). Question mark Cronin’s own. Cronin, ‘The Notion of Commitment’, p. 26. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, l.40; ‘September 1913’, The Major Works, p. 51, l.2; and ‘Easter 1916’, The Major Works, pp. 85–87, l.43. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 32, p. 17, l.5; sonnet 41, p. 22, l.14. Ibid., sonnet 17, p. 10, ll.13, 14; see also ‘Eoin [sic] MacNeill’, Dictionary of Irish Biography online (http://dib.cambridge.org). Cronin, ‘The Notion of Commitment’, p. 25. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 179, p. 93, ll.11– 14. Clifton, ‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus’, p. 12.

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175. Cronin, ‘A Question of Modernity’, p. 20. 176. See Paul Muldoon, ‘Horse Latitudes’, in Horse Latitudes (London: Faber, 2006), pp. 3–21; Regan offers a detailed reading of this sequence in The Sonnet, pp. 205–206. 177. Muldoon, ‘Dirty Data’, in One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (London: Faber, 2015), pp. 99–117. 178. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 199. See also Muldoon, ‘The More a Man Has The More a Man Wants’, repr. Poems, 1968–1998, pp. 127–147. 179. John Kerrigan, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling Through After Madoc’, Jacket Magazine, no. 20 (December 2002). http://jacketmag azine.com/20/kerr-muld.html. 180. Clifton, ‘Remembering the Redemptive Power of Art’. 181. Clifton, ‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus’, p. 12. 182. Clifton, ‘Remembering the Redemptive Power of Art’. 183. See Kerrigan, ‘Muldoon’s Transits’; Clifton, ‘Remembering the Redemptive Power of Art’. 184. John Redmond, ‘Auden in Ireland’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 424–441 (p. 438). 185. See Muldoon, ‘The Bangle’, Hay, pp. 13–14. 186. See Heaney in ‘District and Circle’, ll.30–31: half strung / like a human chain’ (and discussions above). 187. Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 186. 188. Ibid., pp. 214, 213. 189. See Muldoon, ‘Errata’, Hay, p. 87; and ‘Symposium’, Hay, p. 27. 190. See Muldoon, ‘Why Brownlee Left’, repr. Poems, 1968–1998, p. 84; and Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 210. 191. Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 186. 192. Cronin, The End of the Modern World (2016), sonnet 17, p. 10, l.14. 193. Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 212. 194. Muldoon, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, Hay, pp. 108–128, sonnet XXX, p. 128, l.14.

CHAPTER 4

Conversation

[B]ecause of its brevity, [the sonnet] will always give an impression of immediacy, as if it proceeded directly and confessionally or conversationally from the speaker, and therefore from the creator of that speaker.1

Though Michael Spiller’s contention that the sonnet ‘always’ gives ‘an impression of immediacy’ could possibly be challenged, the association he makes between the sonnet’s momentariness and its ‘confessional’ or ‘conversational’ qualities is helpful for considering the relationship between ‘speaker’ and audience, and between poet and forebear, within the modern Irish sonnet. Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Canal Bank sonnets’, discussed briefly in the previous chapter, might be read as an unruly, unapologetic riposte to the idea of poetry-as-confession, enacting an ecstatic conversation with an imagined, somewhat eroticised God. But the imagined ‘other’ in poems such as ‘Canal Bank Walk’, which pleads ‘O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web / Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech’,2 also enacts a conversation, which is part confessional, part celebration, with Kavanagh’s forebear Walt Whitman: a poet he dismisses, somewhat disingenuously, with ‘we nearly made Whitman a poet’ in another sonnet, ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1955).3 Kavanagh’s complex attitude towards Whitman as forebear speaks to a practice of evocation that is part anxiety, part competition, part bravado: his dismissal of Whitman as ‘nearly’ but not quite a poet smacks of the kind of aesthetic, often masculinised, jostling that, as Harold Bloom has © The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_4

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famously argued, often ‘governs relations between poets as poets’; indeed, the close reader of such poetry might be advised to bear in mind Bloom’s warning that ‘what gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him’.4 These relations go beyond anxiety, of course, and much has been made of what M. Wynn Thomas has called Kavanagh’s ‘refreshingly irreverent reaction to Æ’s “solemn enthusiasm” for Walt Whitman’.5 This is particularly striking because Æ (George Russell), as editor of the prominent journal The Irish Statesman, was upheld as something of an arbiter of cultural taste. Yet Kavanagh always felt like an outsider; as he recounts in his autobiographical work The Green Fool : ‘I was a peasant and a peasant is a narrow surveyor of generous hearts […] I didn’t like Whitman and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy’.6 However, this apparent dismissal goes deeper. Here Kavanagh is simultaneously acknowledging his own ‘narrow’ response to the generous-hearted Whitman, and dismissing Whitman’s grandstanding role as poet-prophet. In a similar fashion, although Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Epic’ appears to riff on the self-aggrandisement that he discovers in epic poems such as the Iliad or, in more recent memory, Whitman’s Song of Myself , it nevertheless claims for itself an ‘epic’ status that belies its 14 lines. Commenting beautifully on the question of proportion, ‘Epic’ concludes that if Homer can make ‘the Iliad from such / A local row’ then so might Kavanagh.7 The ‘conversation’ between Kavanagh and Whitman in Kavanagh’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ raises questions that might be applied more extensively to modern Irish poets’ use of allusion within their sonnets. Structurally, Kavanagh’s sonnet form, contrasting with Whitman’s freeform, longer poems, suggests that in his mind ‘poetry’ might be more closely associated with precision than with expansion. Kavanagh’s notes for a lecture, in which he cites his ‘Leaves of Grass’, seem to support this view. The lecture notes include a coruscating summary of ‘Palgraves [sic] awful treasury’8 —seen in the opening lines of Kavanagh’s sonnet, which complains: ‘When I was growing up and for many years after / I was led to believe that poems were thin’.9 The notes then discuss the figure of ‘the poet’, and although there are no specific references to Whitman, Kavanagh’s sly asides to ‘the human male, American or otherwise’, who ‘will not accept the small but unique genius that God has’, and the slightly sneering mentions of ‘Middletown or ‘Mainstreet’, imply that he might have in mind that quintessential American poet.10 Kavanagh’s lecture notes claim that poetic ‘abandon’ is not ‘the riotious [sic] bradaccio [sic] which is so

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often associated with the poet’, but rather derives from the ‘confidence, courage and authority’ that the poet needs in order to be ‘abandoned’ to the poetic role that God has determined for him. The poet is not a genius alone, but is made so by God; therefore, to underestimate the significance of God’s involvement—as Whitman does in Song of Myself with its solipsistic asides like ‘(I am large, I contain multitudes)’11 —misses the ‘small but unique genius that God has’. For Kavanagh, to know the significance of oneself, in relation to the gifts God has bestowed upon the individual, is to know one’s poetic identity. Of course Kavanagh, as representative poet, gets all the luck here: not for him the life of the ‘average man’ who will not accept his dull suburban life. Nevertheless, the lecture does offer some insight into Kavanagh’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, where the poetic ‘I’ prevaricates between ridiculing his grandiose forebear—‘we nearly made Whitman a poet’—and considering the possibilities that such poets offered to him as a young boy discovering poetry for the first time: ‘An army of grass blades were at his call, million on million’.12 The young Kavanagh is both suspicious and envious of the unfounded solipsism that engenders such poetry, and of such lines as Whitman forms in the opening of Song of Myself : ‘I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease of observing a spear of summer grass’.13 The easy confidence of Whitman’s poetic ‘I’ is far removed from the exquisite tortures of composition that govern Kavanagh’s shaping of his poems into sonnets in earlier publications as well as in manuscript drafts. Before the celebratory ‘Canal Bank sonnets’ of the mid-1950s, which followed his successful treatment for cancer, Kavanagh’s sonnets had expressed more uncertainty about the relationship between man and God. In certain of these poems, the structure enacts this uncertainty. For example, in a 1938 sonnet ‘In the Same Mood’, first published in The Dublin Magazine, he writes: […] The violin Is not more real than the music played upon it. They told me this—the priests—but I am tired Of loving through the medium of a sonnet I want by man, not God, to be inspired.14

The association between ‘God’ and the ‘medium of a sonnet’ offers up the ‘medium’ as an almost compulsory channel of both inspiration and restraint.

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At the same time however, the drafts to Kavanagh’s sonnets reveal that he often shaped poems that began as something else into the ‘medium of a sonnet’, as if he hadn’t quite exhausted its possibilities. For example, the manuscripts contain a handwritten early version of the eventual sonnet ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’, consisting of its six opening lines: November is come and I still wait for you O nimble-footed nymph who slipped me when I changed you with the power of my will. I sighted you among some silly men And vexed my heart to think how very hollow The winning of a prize like you would be. Who gave15

While the early draft employs an experimental attitude towards metre and rhythm—with the opening line using natural word order and combining dactyls with iambs, and the rhyme scheme being a rather intriguing abc bad—the final poem is far more conventional: November is come and I wait for you still, O nimble-footed nymph who slipped me when I sighted you among some silly men And charged you with the power of my will. Headlong I charged to make a passionate kill, Too easy, far too easy, I cried then, You were not worth one drop from off my pen.16

It would be unfair to claim that there is nothing experimental about the eventual sonnet: though the rhyme scheme follows a rather traditional Petrarchan pattern—abba abba cde cde—the sentences of the poem are so structured that the sense is broken into two sets of seven lines. Nevertheless, the working-out of the sonnet into the Petrarchan form, and the flattening out of the rhythm of the first line into a more consistent dactylic measure, followed by an unchallenging iambic pentameter in the subsequent lines, tell us that Kavanagh’s poem is straining towards conventionality as it evolves. A more subtle example can be found elsewhere in Kavanagh’s archives, where an early version of his intricate sonnet ‘October’, written around the same time as ‘Leaves of Grass’, sees line 7 broken in two, so that the poem appears to begin again:

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The breeze too, even the temperature And pattern of movement is precisely the same As broke my heart for youth passing. Now I am sure Of something. Something will be mine wherever I am.17

This break, emphasising a shift in time between ‘youth passing’ and ‘Now’, is absent in the later version—as if, even within Kavanagh’s later sonnets, which play more consciously with internal rhyme as well as metre, some habits are too difficult to break. Such tussles recall Yeats’s almost-sonnet ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, in which such ‘fascination’— Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.

The fact that Yeats’s poem stops abruptly after 13 lines, in an example of what Helen Vendler calls a ‘Yeatsian sonnet-experiment’,18 gives the implication that the poem is haunted by a perfect 14-line sonnet that hasn’t quite materialised. This is confirmed by the poem’s encircling rhyme scheme (abba cca dda eea), which doesn’t quite resolve in the last line—‘I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt’; here, ‘bolt’ resounds awkwardly with the last word of the first line: ‘difficult’.19 By letting the horse bolt, Yeats has allowed the poem—and its rhyme scheme—to get away from him, in an expression of resigned despair. Such conversations continue to play out within modern and contemporary Irish poetry. As we saw in the previous chapter, the ghost of Patrick Kavanagh haunts Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets (2017)—but other characters, such as J. M. Synge, Yeats and James Joyce, also stalk its pages. In Clifton’s closing sonnet, ‘from Nineteen Fifty-Five’ / To this latest of summers’ refers directly to Kavanagh’s experiences in and after hospital, but also alludes to the first publication of Whitman’s own Leaves of Grass a century before in 1855.20 Meanwhile, Alan Gillis’s sonnet ‘The Green Rose’ (2010) evokes Kavanagh evoking Whitman, in its celebration of a Dublin locale and its sly reference to ‘retreading leaves of grass’ on Dublin’s Greens.21 Allusion, then, is essential to our understanding of the modern Irish sonnet. Textual history informs each reading, whereby the writer of the newer work harks back to earlier

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models, or one speaker speaks to another. Yet poets often rely on sensitive readers to tune into these conversations. They might or might not be fully stated, or even fully realised; and sometimes they are little more than murmurs.

4.1 Ciaran Carson, Edmund Spenser, and The Twelfth of Never Conversations can cross national as well as temporal boundaries, and they can incorporate political comment. A prominent example is Ciaran Carson’s taking on, and taking down, of Edmund Spenser in sonnet form in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ from his ‘hallucinatory’ 77-sonnet sequence The Twelfth of Never (1998),22 where he envisions Spenser as both a sonneteer and as the writer of the notorious text A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596).23 Elisabeth Delattre claims that in this sequence, ‘Carson submits Irish icons and mythical, religious and literary traditions to an ironic re-evaluation, amplified by [an] unusual use of Alexandrines’; the latter, she argues, reflects Carson’s manipulation of the ‘French sonnet’, in such a manner that might (but also might not) reflect a ‘subversive attitude, that of an irreverent son towards English tradition, feeling affinities with the revolutionary ideas promoted by French symbolists who were fans of liberty’.24 Neil Alexander suggests that by drawing ‘extensively upon the Irish ballad tradition for its rhythms, subject-matters, and the titles of individual poems’ within The Twelfth of Never, Carson can explore his ‘interest in the clashing symbols, narratives and myths of Unionist and Nationalist cultures in Ireland’.25 The sonnet form provides an ideal backdrop for such explorations. Spenser is a complicated figure. An English sonneteer, but also a meddler in Irish affairs in his position as secretary to the Lord Chief Deputy of Ireland, and similar roles, from 1580 until his death in 1598, he was even awarded land in Cork as a thanks for his services.26 Writing in the Irish Times in 2003, Carson describes Spenser as an ‘English poet and Elizabethan administrator’ and emphasises his cruelty and condescension towards the Irish: [He] found the Irish to be ‘a barbarous nation’. Only in the case of their bards could he find something to praise, and that grudgingly; ‘I have caused [some of their poems], to be translated unto me, that I might understand them, and surely they savoured of sweet wit and invention,

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but skilled not of the goodly ornaments of poetry. Yet they were sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their own natural devise …’.27

The process by which Spenser’s Iren, in his View of the Present State of Ireland, enables Irish poems ‘to be translated unto me’ tells us something about the politics of poetic revenge that Carson enacts through ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, as he reinterprets Spenser’s own ideas as expressed in his View, but employs Alexandrines, the formal line length of French poetry, to do so. We might recall, too, that Carson’s 77-sonnet collection The Alexandrine Plan from 1998 consists of English-language versions of French sonnets, with the French printed on the facing page, ‘after’ Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Baudelaire. Interestingly, when counted together, the sonnets from The Twelfth of Never and The Alexandrine Plan, both published in 1998, total 154, the number of known sonnets by Shakespeare:28 another subtle move against the Spenserian model of English sonnet-making. Yet the sonnet ‘Le Sonneur’ / ‘The Sonneteer’ from The Alexandrine Plan underlines Carson’s ultimate preference for French, rather than Elizabethan English, sonnet models. Mallarmé’s mood of self-flagellation, underscored in Carson’s translation, is clear in its closing couplet: Mais, un jour, fatigué d’avoir en vain tiré, Ô Satan, j’ôterai la pierre et me pendrai. But one of these fine days, abandoning all hope, I’ll hang myself, O Satan, with the self-same rope.29

Carson’s guttural, slangy update of Mallarmé’s otiose language for a modern audience moves the poem still further away from the ‘pretty flowers’ of Spenser’s verse. Returning to The Twelfth of Never, in his sonnet ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ Carson not only alludes to and borrows from Spenser’s View, but also converses with Marianne Moore’s 1941 poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, which itself makes complex and uncertain use of Spenser’s tract. The shared title is surely Carson’s nod to Moore. Carson’s poem describes the activities of the Irish rebels, as if speaking both through Spenser and Moore: At the drop of a hat they are wont to vanish, Into deep dark woods. Forever on the make, They drink and talk too much. Not all of it is gibberish.30

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These lines recall Spenser’s distrust of the Irish, as expressed in his View, due to their ability to render themselves invisible through clothing and other types of dissemblance. For instance, Spenser’s two speakers—Iren and Eudox—debate the tendency for the Irish to wear mantles, a type of cloak that they use, ‘by reason of the raw cold climate’, for ‘housing, bedding, and clothing’. Iren suggests that he ‘would think it meet to forbid all mantles’ in Ireland as they have come to be used for deception: so that when a ‘thief’, or a ‘rebel’, has carried out his misdeeds, ‘he can, in his mantle, pass through any town or company, being close hooded over his head’—he has been rendered invisible. Thus, Iren surmises that, despite the usefulness of the mantles to the Irish people, ‘the commodity does not countervail the discommodity’.31 This feeds directly into Moore’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ where Moore’s speaker worries of the Irish that ‘Discommodity makes // them invisible; they’ve dis- / appeared’;32 by converting Spenser’s ‘mantle’ into a metaphor for Irish discommodity, she suggests that through stubbornly clinging to their rebellious principles, they are merely hiding—and rendering themselves ultimately invisible. Carson’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ treats the question of clothing with more irreverence than Moore’s poem—note the jokey reference to headwear in the clichéd ‘drop of a hat’ (l.1)—though it seems to borrow from Moore its extended commentary on discommodity and invisibility; the poem makes itself inconvenient, even uncomfortable, in order to subvert Spenser’s tract as well as undermining Spenser as a poet. The rhyme scheme, reflecting a popular form in The Twelfth of Never as a whole, runs abab cdcd efe gfg;33 therefore, the first octave is English or Shakespearean (rather than Spenserian), while the second sestet, divided into two threeline stanzas, seems to be largely Carson’s invention. Then again, the intertwining ‘f’ rhyme, which is located in lines 10 and 13 of most of the poems in the sequence,34 might owe something to the intertwining style of the Spenserian rhyme scheme, which runs abab bcbc cdcd ee. Drawing, seemingly without irony, upon Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as an illustrative point of comparison, Peter Denman notes that the ‘formal instance of duplication’ that Carson often employs in his poetry at the level of subject matter is sometimes ‘extended to become a list (what classical rhetoric would term a catalogue)’. He suggests that if we encountered such a list within prose fiction, ‘[t]his device of almost tautological inclusiveness would amount to over-determination’; however ‘in poetry it has a long lineage as a rhetorical figure that serves primarily for ornamentation’.35

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Critics have often drawn attention to Carson’s ‘long line’ technique, and its various employments; Denman discusses the long lines of Carson’s poem ‘Loaf’ from the sequence Belfast Confetti in relation to listmaking,36 while Julia O. Bert has described how this ‘oft-remarked’ poetic figure, which appears in ‘the vast majority’ of Carson’s poems, ‘makes for prosey, enjambed stanzas’.37 While the sonnet form constrains Carson’s use of this technique—in which, as Bert remarks, lines often carry over into a second when typeset—Carson stretches the loose Alexandrines of The Twelfth of Never to their full capacity, stuffing them with lists and catalogues, and operating on the boundary between prose and poetry. Carson employs many lists throughout the volume, and most extensively in ‘Found’, which comprises a gloriously alphabetic list of the objects that ‘were found on board the foundered Spanish galleon’, with most lines iambic Alexandrines.38 If Carson’s cataloguing in his sequence, and particularly in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, might be read as a nod to Spenser, then it might be even more subversive than it first appears. The opening lines of Carson’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ begin an elaborate discussion of the ‘Irish cloak’ (or ‘mantle’, as Spenser calls it), which in its list-making both celebrates and mocks a verbal dexterity that might or might not be Spenserian in flavour: Rakehelly horseboys, kernes, gallowglasses, carrows, Bards, captains, rapparees, their forward womenfolk, Swords, dice, whiskey, chess, harps, word-hoards, bows and arrows: All are hiding within the foldings of their Irish cloak.39

Several phrases are lifted straight from the pages of Spenser’s View. In fact, this section of Spenser’s View seems to have informed much of Carson’s poem, as well as being the same part of the tract that Carson quotes in the Irish Times . Having rebuked the Irish ‘Kerne’, or light foot soldier, Spenser’s Iren moves onto ‘these rakehelly horseboyes, [who] growing up in knavery and villany, are theire kerne continually supplied and maintained. For having been once brought up an idle horseboy, he will never after fall to labour, but is only made fit for the halter’.40 Next are the ‘Carrowes’ or gamblers: ‘there is another much like, but much more lewd and dishonest; and that is of their carrows, which is a kind of people that wander up and down gentlemen’s houses living only upon

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cards and dice’.41 By encompassing so many of Spenser’s phrases—‘horseboys, kernes, gallowglasses’, ‘dice’ and ‘Swords’42 —into the grammar and syntax of a single sentence of his poem, Carson also enshrouds them. If this cataloguing is Spenserian in flavour, it employs and subverts Spenser’s list-making tendencies in order to expose the ridiculousness of Spenser’s claims of the Irish. The final clause, which takes up all of line 4—‘All are hiding within the foldings of their Irish cloak’—has a pleasing internal rhyme between ‘hiding’ and ‘foldings’, which drives on a jaunty ballad-like rhythm that is a far from the traditional iambic metrics of the English sonnet. Carson’s own linguistic and verbal concealment, here, is multilayered; we understand this when we realise that not all of the phrases hidden within these opening lines are actually from Spenser at all. For instance, ‘rapparees’ (l.2) is a term that was not invented at the time Spenser was writing: referring to ‘an Irish pikeman or irregular soldier’, and used first to refer to ‘one fighting on the Jacobite side during the Williamite war of 1689–1691’, the OED records the first written usage of the term as 1690, long after Spenser’s demise, and suggests that it is an Irish borrowing from the term ‘rapaire’.43 Carson’s ‘rapparees’ in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ do, however, make intra-textual reference to Carson’s sonnet ‘Fear’, also in The Twelfth of Never, where the secondary meaning of ‘rapparee’ as ‘an Irish bandit, robber, or freebooter’ is also in evidence: ‘I fear the drawn pistol of a rapparee’.44 Carson’s playfulness in using a word that Spenser pre-dates, but that has its own problematic associations, recalls his comment in ‘Catmint Tea’, in the same sequence, that ‘I throw the dice / Of rhyme, and rummage through the OED’s delights’.45 Buried within Carson’s cataloguing of the Irish in his opening lines of ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ is that most Heaneyesque of terms, ‘word-hoards’ (l.3), which has its own complex history. The Old English compound term ‘wordhord’ was transliterated and revived for contemporary audiences in works such as Heaney’s translation of Beowulf .46 This has enabled ‘word-hoard’ to be adapted from its original meaning of ‘a store of words’ to become, in later use, ‘the vocabulary of a person, group or language’.47 Though Heaney’s Beowulf came out in 1999, a year after Carson’s The Twelfth of Never, Heaney had already used the term in his poem ‘North’, the titular poem of his 1975 collection. Here, Heaney ventriloquises a Viking longship, its ‘swimming tongue’ ‘buoyant with hindsight’:

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It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. [’]48

Simon Dentith, reading these lines, suggests that the longship’s ‘injunction’— appears to mean advice to draw upon the varied riches that are dormant but possible in the language that Heaney already speaks, bearing with it as it does traces of the Viking past that so marked the ancient history of these islands and specifically the history of English.

Dentith argues that it was not until Beowulf that Heaney was truly able to reconcile the disparate, and apparently divided, elements of his linguistic inheritance (Ulster Scots, English and Gaelic), but here marked the beginnings of a similar attempt, underscoring how ‘Heaney’s “word-hoard” was always-already cut through with historic conflicts’.49 For Carson, as a Northern Irish poet writing The Twelfth of Never at the same time that the Good Friday Agreement was being drawn up between the British and Irish governments and most of the parties of Northern Ireland, the question of ownership of language would have been paramount. Dentith makes the bold claim that ‘despite the extraordinary pantheon of famous names’, and in stark comparison with poetry written in Scots Gaelic, the poets of Northern Ireland have not ‘produced a comparable poetry in a language other than that of Standard English’.50 Yet by enclosing ‘word-hoards’ within the ‘foldings’ of its ‘Irish cloak’, Carson’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ upturns what Dentith describes as problematic ‘questions of diction’ to include Spenserian English, Irish Gaelic and Old English terms within multiple ‘word-hoards’ that might make up the Northern Irish poet’s linguistic arsenal. In Carson’s deployment of such ‘word-hoards’, we find resonances both subtle and subversive and are asked to consider the ways in which poetic language simultaneously conceals and reveals its own spotted history; meanwhile in the poem’s knowing titular nod to Moore we note how Carson has condensed into sonnet form both Spenser’s wordy and often illogical tract and Moore’s 67-line poem. Delattre describes the

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obvious links that ‘occur from poem to poem’ within Carson’s sequence as ‘furtive echoes’.51 ‘Furtive’ is helpful in suggesting that one’s source might be erased partly from view: even if this means—like Carson’s use of Spenser’s text—hiding that source in plain sight. In other poems from The Twelfth of Never, allusions are far more aggressive. For example, Carson’s sonnet ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, also from The Twelfth of Never, calls out to, and then condenses into sonnet form, Patrick Kavanagh’s earlier poem ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ in an outrageous act of textual plunder. Certain of Carson’s lines and phrases—such as ‘Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue, / The Arran Banners wearing white’— are a direct steal from Kavanagh’s poem, with Carson’s sonnet expanding the possible colour symbolism of Kavanagh’s original to include the red, white and blue of the British flag in contrast to the ‘Derry green’ of the rebel.52 While Kavanagh’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ hints at violence below the surface, Carson’s brings such violence into voyeuristic technicolour: I watched him swing in his Derry green for hours and hours, His popping eyes of apoplectic liberty That blindly scanned the blue potato flowers. (ll.12–14)

Carson’s use of exactly the same title for his poem goes further than theft to become a kind of engorgement, implying that the gluttonous violence of the present day might extend to poetry too. But Carson’s sonnet would not exist without its forebear. Delattre argues that Carson’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ is intentionally brutal, ‘mak[ing] use of the images of Kavanagh’s poem but transform[ing] the pastoral tone into a political atrocity with the image of a Derry rebel hanged by fourteen British soldiers in red uniforms’;53 the link between the number of soldiers and the number of lines in Carson’s compressed ‘version’ is surely not accidental. Carson plays a similar numerical trick in the skewed Valentine’s sonnet ‘February Fourteen’ in the same sequence, in which the subject is dismissed with: ‘Fourteen Bloody Marys later you lisped of home’.54 This latter phrase refers in turn to its facing sonnet, ‘The Display Case’, in which the figure of ‘Hibernia’ attacks the poet-speaker: ‘You seem’, she says, ‘to have a problem with the language, Since you’ve abandoned it for lisping English,[’]

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Yet the internal rhyme of ‘lisping English’ tells us that maybe the ‘Turncoat interpreter’ of Carson’s poem finds more pleasure in the language than might be at first acknowledged.55 Carson discussed in a 2002 interview how ‘the world exists in such a way that everything relates to something else’, while pointing to the intentionality of the poet (and reader) in making such things relate: ‘we make it exist in that way, making links all the time, connecting things up, one thing always leading to another’.56 The poet is the observer and enforcer of such verbal and linguistic connections, both voyeuristic and (occasionally) brutal.

4.2 Mary O’Malley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and male voices When we encounter contemporary sonnets by Irish women, the conversations become more complex still, as even the idea of ‘one thing always leading to another’ becomes loaded. In Mary O’Malley’s sonnet ‘Finis’, her (female) speaker offers a riposte to Yeats’s poem ‘When You Are Old’, which is itself an ‘imitation’ of Pierre de Ronsard’s sixteenth-century sonnet ‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’.57 That Ronsard’s sonnet is part of ‘Le Second Livre Des Sonnets Pour Helene’ tells us that the conversations between (male) poet and (female) muse have been on-going and wordy, with each poem leading to the other as the male poet speaks for, and over, his imagined audience.58 In O’Malley’s poem, however, this situation is upturned: the metaphor of poet-as-book running through Yeats’s and Ronsard’s poems is literalised, and the question of who is speaking becomes paramount. Here, an imagined muse—a contemporary update of Maud Gonne or Helene—employs an extended simile to have the last word in the conversation between Ronsard, Yeats and any other (man) who has overestimated the importance of his literature on his muse’s life. ‘Finis’ begins abruptly, its opening phrase a faint rhythmic and oral echo of the beginning of Yeats’s sonnet of sexual violence, ‘Leda and the Swan’ (‘A sudden blow’59 ): Suddenly you’re over like a book or play, your little year, your starring role in my life passed on to someone else. Yes, a book I’ll take from the shelf in years to come […].60

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The references to ‘a book / or play’ can’t help but recall Yeats’s own career, as well as echoing Yeats’s speaker in ‘When You Are Old’ who implores the ageing woman to ‘take down this book’.61 Although Ronsard’s sonnet does not use the word ‘book’, preferring instead ‘mes vers’ (‘my verses’), Yeats has clearly borrowed this idea from Ronsard’s opening stanza, as he imagines Helene, ‘Assise aupres du feu’ (‘Sitting beside the fire’): Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant, Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle. (You will say, full of wonder, as you sing my verses, ‘Ronsard used to celebrate me in the days when I was beautiful’.)62

O’Malley exposes the egocentricity of these lines by having her speaker note, airily, ‘I’ll recall your face vaguely, with distaste / or fondness’ as if, unlike the male poetic forebear who has previously imagined his muse in a future moment of nostalgic regret—in Yeats’s words, ‘Murmur[ing], a little sadly how Love fled’—the present-day woman still hasn’t made up her mind concerning what impression the man has had on her life.63 Brilliantly, too, O’Malley uses the poem as a means of scrutinising the male poets’ obsession with physical attributes by challenging Yeats’s prediction of old age, physical weakness and lost beauty in ‘When You Are Old’, where he imagines the ‘sorrows’ of his muse’s ‘changing face’; and in turn critiquing Ronsard’s depiction of ‘au fouyer une vieille accroupie’ (‘an old woman hunched over the hearth’).64 Instead O’Malley’s speaker has a renewed vigour, expressed with a glee that is vengeful and bordering on heartless: but nothing will give in my chest like the soft creak when the spine, bent back too far, breaks.65

In avowing that ‘nothing will give in my chest’ the speaker promises not to fall foul of mawkish sentimentality or regret, and neither will she be ‘bending down beside the glowing bars’ as Yeats’s speaker imagines.66 Rather, it is the book (or the man as book) that is ‘bent back too far’, whose spine ‘breaks’, and it is the (female) speaker who has the last word. Perhaps surprisingly, O’Malley’s example demonstrates how the relatively strict parameters of the sonnet form can sometimes offer freedom

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to women poets. It is an act of textual revenge, a verbal sparring match, to write back in the same form—and do it better. For others, the form allows them to shake off clichéd associations between women’s verse and what has been termed the ‘confessional’ mode. Mutlu Blasing expands upon this issue in describing the US poet Anne Sexton’s first encounters with the sonnet form: Hearing I. A. Richards describe various sonnet forms on TV, her repeated story goes, she decided she could write one. Poetic forms offer rules, based on the shape of the linguistic code, to shape the materials of the code.

Blasing’s concept of poetry, and the sonnet in particular, as offering ‘an impersonal order for patterning the surfaces’,67 appeals to Sexton as a means of mediating between feeling and language. Yet because to write a sonnet means writing oneself into a poetic tradition, this largely means alluding to male writers, as they form the dominant part of that tradition. Irish women writers have taken on this challenge in different and intriguing ways, to raise larger questions not only about gender politics but also about the politics of national expression. Although it has perhaps become a commonplace to state, as Jeff Hilson does in his 2008 anthology of ‘linguistically innovative’ sonnets, that ‘the sonnet has been a form traditionally dominated by men’, its masculine associations do continue to inform women poets’ responses.68 Indeed, Hilson flags up a debate concerning the phallic or hegemonic implications of the sonnet in an Australian women’s poetry journal, (HOW)ever, from 1990. The issue includes an essay by Annie Finch entitled ‘The Sonnet Re-Figured’ in which Finch ascribes to the ‘structure of the sonnet’ a masculine familiarity that the ‘half-drowned woman’ fears, going on to draw a graphic analogy on the page: ‘—can I do anything to this fire? or just trust it, since I am the small i, the clitoris, and it is the big I, in this i am bic pen driven to meter world now?…’.69 Despite the overblown comparison and the clichéd abuse of ‘penis envy’ in the play between ‘bic’ and ‘pen’, we can perceive nervousness (and playfulness) around the masculine dominances of the sonnet form. In the same issue of (HOW)ever, Susan Roberts accompanies her ‘sound sonnet’ ‘corazon’ [sic] with a selection of ‘working notes’. Here, the ‘sonnet’ appears first to be something natural, which ‘overwhelms’ and ‘overtakes’ her; then it is something ‘[t]o be placed within architecture’, providing ‘[s]tructure in old walls’; then the sonnet (sequence)

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that she envisages becomes ‘a body of language moving beyond the sonnet walls’. This ‘moving beyond’ will be achieved by simultaneously ‘[b]reaking patterns’ and including ‘the worldly, daily, foreign and familiar’; but all of this will still take place within a structure that attracts due to its ‘repetition of order; the basic 14 lines, 10 syllables’.70 The sonnet structure is something that these poets cannot quite, or do not wish to, leave behind. Returning to Irish women’s poetry, we can find many instances of push and pull between a simultaneous ‘attraction’ to the order of the sonnet, and a desire to ‘rupture’ it, in Hilson’s words, as women are writing ‘necessarily inside and against the form’.71 For example, O’Malley’s sonnet ‘The Boning Hall’ anatomises the inside of a coffin ship, quoting as epigram a couplet from the US poet Adrienne Rich: ‘the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth’.72 The sonnet form enables the poet to negotiate between various versions of history, narrative and desire: though the Rich quotation makes us look inside the poem to the internal substance, the ‘wreck’ itself—the ‘Boning Hall’ of the title— is nevertheless the thing that gives structure to the tale. Lucy Collins interprets O’Malley’s use of Rich as an invocation of Rich’s ‘demands to reach the material substance of the past rather than its narrative presence’, whereby the use of coffin ships displays instead a ‘confrontation of what is traumatic in the Irish past’, which in turn ‘acknowledges what is traumatic in the lived present’.73 But the choice of a confessional poet as the ‘voice’ for this poem is surely not accidental, within a form whose structure is associated with a more rigid, masculine kind of verse—so that the various vocal authorities in the sonnet shout over each other, like its dead bodies jostling for attention. Ní Chuilleanáin’s 14-line poem ‘The Angel in the Stone’, meanwhile, employs a range of allusions—to Yeats, Shelley and others—to give voice to ‘the stone the builders / passed over’ and so to consider more profoundly the politics of vocal authority.74 Collins notes of the poem that it dwells on ‘the significance of the act of building itself’, suggesting that ‘[t]his continuing attention to the materiality of stone is an important part of the poet’s investigation of how structures are formed and made’. The allusions are to male poets, and the ‘builders’ of the poem are, presumably, male too—so that other ‘structures’ are dismantled. Collins claims that contemporary Irish women poets are ‘confronted with the notion of the stranger within—with the extent to which their own creative self encompasses opposite perspectives’.75 The sonnet form, both familiar

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and strange, might be seen as a ‘stranger within’ this ‘creative self’, further complicating the politics of allusion. The ‘stranger within’ might be interpreted still further as a literary inheritance which insinuates itself into the verse. In O’Malley’s ‘The Boning Hall’ and Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Angel in the Stone’, allusion offers a way into a wider interrogation of the canonical structures at play within poetic traditions. O’Malley’s ringing evocation of Rich strikes a different note to Ní Chuilleanáin’s allusion to Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ in giving voice to a ‘passed over’ piece of stone, ‘Trampled in the causeway’ as an upturning of the bathetic declamation of Shelley’s king: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’.76 Yet both ‘The Boning Hall’ and ‘The Angel in the Stone’ use ‘bones’ as a way of commenting on inheritances—living and dead, physical and metaphysical—in relation to these allusions. What does it mean for the ‘flesh’ of a poem, like that of the dead of O’Malley’s poem, to be ‘stripped / to the bones’—the lines representing the ‘limbs’ of the dead ‘streaming by’? If we take away pre-existing structures, or competing allusions, are we left with anything but the bare bones of a thought? Both O’Malley and Ní Chuilleanáin ask these questions by using further, specific, words that cannot be stripped clean of their earlier associations. O’Malley’s ‘The Boning Hall’ has unshakeable associations with Shakespeare’s The Tempest , while the form of the poem suggests that there might be a further conversation, in back, with Shakespeare the sonneteer. Another of O’Malley’s sonnets, ‘The Pearl Sonnet’, which describes the breaking of a pearl necklace at a funeral, recalls Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXIV. O’Malley’s closing couplet, describing how the ‘missing pearl’ from a necklace ‘hangs at someone else’s throat now and looks / well enough, like a tear or an unshed moon’,77 recasts the final lines of Shakespeare’s poem: Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds, And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.78

The bathetic conclusion of O’Malley’s ‘The Pearl Sonnet’ resets Shakespeare’s lines, just as the pearl is described as being ‘reset as a pendant’ within the new necklace (l.12). Read as a metaphor for allusion, Shakespeare’s ‘pearl’ might be recast, but its original setting will never be erased. Likewise, it is near impossible to read the second line of O’Malley’s other sonnet ‘The Boning Hall’, with its visualisation of ‘pearls’,

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without hearing ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ sung through the watery vistas of The Tempest : No one goes diving into coffin ships but if they did with the desire for pearls quelled they’d see wonders; limbs streaming by, the rush of blood, oxygen, water, bubbling with the slipstream. Then the flesh stripped to the bones […]79

The story of ‘The Boning Hall’, with its submerged shipwreck, recalls Ariel leading Ferdinand’s shipwreck to safety; and Ariel’s song resounds throughout, with ‘Of his bones are coral made’ heard in the ‘bones’ of line 5, above, and the ‘Bone pipes’ of line 7.80 Structurally speaking, we might describe ‘The Boning Hall’ as an upturned sonnet. It consists of two stanzas, with the first running for six lines and the second for eight in an inversion of a traditional sonnet structure. But this suits the theme of the poem, which focuses resolutely on ‘the thing itself’, and therefore undermines the idea that we reach at an understanding of the ‘thing’ through a rhetorical process of call and response, of question and resolution. Indeed, the ‘phosphorescent shape’ (l.7) of the second stanza emerges as an Ariel-like figure, telling the tale of the watery deaths of those drowned: and the little open-mouthed bone-harp sings not of the names for things you cannot say but the long round call of the thing itself. (ll.12–14)

O’Malley’s poem works with, and then moves away from, the assumptions that come with the story she is telling—so that, to quote Rich once more, the ‘myth’ or ‘story of the wreck’ holds no more appeal than ‘the thing itself’. In so doing, O’Malley creates a sonnet that, to echo Roberts, is both ‘foreign and familiar’. But unlike in Ariel’s song, in which— Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange81

—‘Nothing’ has ‘changed’ here, other than our perspective. The ‘strangeness’ of O’Malley’s poem lies, instead, in the concentration of focus onto ‘The Boning Hall’ itself.

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Like O’Malley’s use of ‘pearls’ in relation to ‘bones’, it is impossible to encounter Ní Chuilleanáin’s extended meditation on ‘stones’ within her sonnet (‘The Angel in the Stone’) without hearing echoes of another poem. Yeats’s contemplation of the ‘stone’ that’s ‘in the midst of it all’, in ‘Easter 1916’, has become an enduring symbol of the stubbornness of Irish nationalist culture.82 The skimming of a ‘stone’ inevitably sends out ripples. Colin Graham has noted the ‘identity-driven criticism of today’, which (often unquestioningly) places the desire for Irish affiliation at the centre of Irish writing, so that ‘Irishness, not just Ireland, has calcified to become the stone in the midst of all Irish criticism’.83 Though Graham’s claim might be overstated in linking Yeats’s insinuation of the wrongheadedness of the Irish rebels in ‘Easter 1916’ with the single-minded pursuit of ‘Irishness’ by critics within their readings of Irish poetry, this ‘stone’ might nevertheless represent, for Irish women poets in particular, the burden of a tradition that until recently has been dominated by cultural authorities and structures that have failed to articulate its full range of voices. Even Carson, as a male poet, but a Northern Irish one, might be sensitive to these pressures; we might have noticed, above, that in his otherwise faithful translation of Mallarmé’s ‘Le Sonneur’ / ‘The Sonneteer’, Carson chooses to translate ‘la pierre’ (‘stone’) as ‘rope’, perhaps to avoid the loaded associations of that term within Irish poetry.84 Yet by giving voice to the ‘thing’, or the ‘stone’, itself, Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Angel in the Stone’ upturns expectations to imagine what this particular stone might have to say.85 The poem urges a reassessment of the hierarchies that determine what we hear, see, and perceive, by suggesting that the ‘bones’ of alternative histories, like the ‘bones’ of O’Malley’s ‘Boning Hall’, might already exist in the structures that are in front of us. We merely need to consider these structures from new perspectives, and to listen out for different stories, and different voices. As a reflection, perhaps, on Collins’s claim that contemporary Irish women poets are ‘confronted with the notion of the stranger within’,86 both ‘The Boning Hall’ and ‘The Angel in the Stone’ demonstrate how a ‘stranger’ can emerge from within an established structure, as if upturning the parlous position of the woman poet. O’Malley’s ‘little open-mouthed bone-harp’ and Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Angel in the Stone’ confront the hegemony of the sonnet structure by emerging as vocal authorities from inside its interior architecture, while challenging and upturning inherited allusions and figures from previous works. The figure of the ‘stranger

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within’ can offer a different perspective from which to dismantle the sonnet form, and re-build it using new structures.

4.3 Ventriloquism: Paul Muldoon and Brendan Kennelly One way in which we could read ‘The Angel in the Stone’ is as an act of poetic ventriloquism, which questions what happens to the politics of vocal authority where it is the structure (rather than the human) who speaks; we might recall, too, the ways in which the ‘sonnet houses’ of Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone offer a wider commentary on the politics of territory, space, and ownership.87 Other contemporary sonnets by Irish poets engage, through acts of direct or indirect ventriloquism, with ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ characters. Paul Muldoon’s disturbing ‘Pip and Magwitch’ cleaves free indirect discourse to a loose sonnet structure to inhabit a ‘real’ al-Qaida terrorist who merges with characters from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations ;88 meanwhile, Brendan Kennelly offers extended characterisations of Oliver Cromwell in his collection Cromwell.89 In a rousing review of Muldoon’s 2012 collection Songs and Sonnets, Maria Johnston notes that the volume moves between poetic and musical moments: ‘it is at the level of form—where end-rhymes become openrimes [sic] at the poem’s pressure points—that the lines blur and fret’. Discussing ‘Pip and Magwitch’ within the volume, Johnston describes it as ‘a split sonnet that hinges on the deployment by al-Qaida terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations to conceal an explosive device in 2010’. She adds: ‘It is perhaps significant that the word “rime” can also mean a “rent, chink or fissure”’.90 Considering the poem’s plays between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ in the figures of al-Awlaki and Pip and Magwitch against the backdrop of a formal scheme that offers fictional coherence, but might be masking a formal or thematic disruption, demonstrates how the story behind the poem becomes a gift to the deft and playful poet. It recalls, too, Muldoon’s own comments on the idea of ‘play’ within the contemporary sonnet, where he notes that: ‘[t]he serendipitous aspect of writing that Auden refers to as “pure accident” may be no more accidental than play, and no less productive’.91 How ‘serendipitous’, then, that as the poem tells us, on encountering the copy of Great Expectations owned by al-Awlaki, the police—

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[…] found his fingerprints on the page—wouldn’t you know?—where Dickens, having put us all in a quandary on the great marshes of Kent, now sets us down with Pip and the leg-ironed convict, Abel Magwitch, Pip forever chained to Magwitch by dint of having brought him a pork pie and file in a little care-package.92

Muldoon’s ‘wouldn’t you know?’ acts as a tongue-in-cheek aside to the gullible reader who, having followed the logic of the first part of the sentence—where the police ‘found’ al-Awlaki’s fingerprints—takes at face value the idea that they would have revealed exactly on what ‘page’ this discovery took place. The storytelling has more in common with a nineteenth-century detective novel by Wilkie Collins than with contemporary terrorist investigations, and the story itself is more evocative of the bungling terrorists of Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), but yet the reader wants to consider the beautiful accident at play. Is it a beautiful accident, similarly, that ‘fingerprints’ almost rhymes with ‘Dickens’, like ‘Kent’ with ‘dint’, and ‘Magwitch’ with ‘package’; or are we merely in thrall to the productive play of the poet? Having capitalised on the reader’s credulity in order to dramatise the story of the encounter between al-Awlaki and the police in the opening octet, Muldoon utilises the closing sestet to merge the figures of terrorist and young Pip in a facetious act of mindreading. Whereas at the opening of the sonnet Muldoon had depicted al-Awlaki leaving ‘a paperback of Great Expectations / all bundled up with a printer-cartridge bomb’ in ‘an effort to distract his victim and throw the police off his scent’ (ll.2–3, 1), by the end of the poem Muldoon has imagined the terrorist frozen in the moment of reading, his fingerprint smudging the page so that the figures of Pip and Magwitch, and al-Awlaki and his imagined co-captive, have fused: For the moment, he’s a seven-year-old whose Christmas Eve’s spent trying to come up with a way to outfox this hard-line neighbour, unshaven, the smell of a Polo Mint not quite masking his breath, his cigar twirling in its unopened sarcophagus like an Egyptian mummy, one dismissive of the chance it will ever come into its inheritance. (ll.9–14)

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In a review of Muldoon’s collection One Thousand Things Worth Knowing , which also contains ‘Pip and Magwitch’, Ní Chuilleanáin discusses Muldoon’s simile of the ‘Egyptian mummy’: The great resource of language is the negative, and that rampant fertility in copious ways of saying, variously, ‘not’ is often the fragile wisp that yokes his airy mismatches. In ‘Pip and Magwitch’ a cigar compared to an Egyptian mummy is ‘of the chance / it will ever come into its inheritance’.93

Unlike Pip, who benefits financially from his encounter with Magwitch in Great Expectations , al-Awlaki will not ‘come into [his] inheritance’ of eternal life as a Jihadi—well, not yet—and the bathetic off-rhyme of ‘chance’ and ‘inheritance’ tells us so. Likewise, the analogy between Pip and Magwitch and al-Awlaki and his co-conspirator is ‘not quite’ right. Formally, even more is happening. The closing sestet recalls the rhyme scheme of the last six lines of an English or Shakespearean sonnet—efef gg —in its near-rhymes of ‘spent’ and ‘mint’, and ‘outfox’ and ‘sarcophagus’, as well as in its closing couplet. In fact, the entire poem recalls a Shakespearean sonnet, with the opening octet following a loose abab cdcd rhyme scheme. But, like the fusion of terrorist with Pip, and imagined cocaptive with Magwitch, the application of form to content seems slightly off-key. Are these, then, examples of the ‘airy mismatches’ that Ní Chuilleanáin claims? Grammatically, too, the last lines are hard to follow, where the liberal use of ‘he’ in lines 8 and 11 gives way to an even more alienating confusion of ‘its’ and ‘one’ in the closing lines. If we following the syntactical logic of Muldoon’s ‘Egyptian mummy’ simile, then it is the ‘sarcophagus’ of the cigar box rather than al-Awlaki himself who, ‘like an Egyptian mummy’, is ‘dismissive of the chance / it will ever come into its inheritance’ (ll.12, 13–14). Is, then, the cigar a potential gift that stands between al-Awlaki and his co-captive, like the food that Pip gives Magwitch in Great Expectations ? But al-Awlaki is trying to ‘outfox’ his ‘hard-line neighbour’ (l.11), rather than help him, and we are unsure whose cigar (or whose breath) it is. Confusingly, too, the reference to ‘sarcophagus’ reminds us how Islamic terrorists often live on the knife-edge of life and death, with the latter being seen as the final reward. Is Muldoon’s poem, then, about reading as much as about telling a story? Is it dangerous to follow an analogy through, to believe too

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quickly the connections that poets make between things—the ‘serendipitous aspect of writing’ that may be no more than play? The shifts within just one poem recall the ways in which subjects move from one poem to another within Carson’s The Twelfth of Never, in an act of ‘not quite’ repetition. For instance, ‘potatoes’ are a metaphor in the startling conclusion of ‘Banners’, with its ‘Fields of corpses plentiful as dug potatoes’, only to become literal potatoes in the opening of the next sonnet ‘Spraying the Potatoes’—‘Knapsack-sprayer on my back, I marched the drills / Of blossoming potatoes’—and then part of an inventory of items (‘raw swedes, potatoes, turnips, barley-seed’) in ‘Paddy’s Knapsack’ in the following poem.94 Writing on Carson, Neal Alexander notes that ‘happenstance conjunctions, affinities, and juxtapositions’ are ‘characteristic of figurative language’; and in Muldoon’s and Carson’s sonnets we can see how sometimes misleading conjunctions and affinities play out at the level of grammar, language and syntax as well as individual word choices. Alexander has suggested that Carson’s sequence as a whole adopts a ‘diverse mimicry and ventriloquism’.95 We might see how the familiar but repetitious nature of the sonnet, both constrained and flexible, might be fruitfully adapted to a task that is at once imitative and experimental. An even more complex type of ventriloquism is practised by Brendan Kennelly in Cromwell (1983), a collection of over 250 poems, most of them sonnets, both formal and loose. The sequence speaks partly through a time-travelling fictional character, described by Kennelly in his introductory ‘Note’ as ‘the poem’s little hero, M. P. G. M. Buffún Esq.’, and partly through Oliver Cromwell, with whom Buffún is ‘hopelessly entangled’.96 John Redmond describes Cromwell , alongside Kennelly’s other ‘“epics”’ The Book of Judas (1991) and Poetry, My Arse (1995), as a ‘vastly inflated’ experiment in ‘ventriloquism’, which is ‘crowded with eloquent and audacious dramatic characters’.97 Some of these—such as Edmund Spenser98 —are given several sonnets of their own, together forming the ‘host of ghosts’ that Buffún foresees in the opening poem: If I ponder on the shadows in the grass I will find Oliver, Mum, The Belly, Ed Spenser down in Cork, the giant, He, a host of ghosts Who see in the living the apprenticed dead [.]99

Buffún’s list here, of ‘Oliver’ (Cromwell) and ‘Ed(mund) Spenser’, together with a fictional ‘giant’, his own mother, and his ‘Belly’—both

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Buffún’s own stomach and an increasingly threatening character of its own as the collection progresses—underscores how Cromwell weaves between historical periods, fictional and ‘real’ characters, and imagined versions of the self. The references to food and corpulence lead to comparisons between Buffún and Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), as unlikely heroes making a peripatetic journey: one sonnet, ‘My Grassy Path’, describes how ‘An old man with a legendary face / […] / Homers me with inherited stories’, in a slant reference to the Odyssey.100 Moreover, the way in which the narrator darts back and forth within his own life, moving back to his conception in the sonnet ‘I Was There’,101 and to the occasion of his birth in the 29-line, not quite double sonnet ‘5½ lbs’—‘I saw myself seeing myself seeing her there / Giving birth to me that oozy night’102 —owes much to the facetious narrative of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by the Anglo-Irish writer Laurence Sterne. Such allusions and conversations, both superficial and submerged, are essential to the fabric of a ‘poem’, as Kennelly terms the collection as a whole, which ‘tries to present the nature and implications of various forms of dream and nightmare, including the nightmare of Irish history’. One part of this ‘nightmare’ is the inability to get things right, or to tell the whole truth, depending on who is telling the story: thus, multiple voices, narratives, timeframes and approaches are essential. Kennelly expands: ‘[t]he method of the poem is imagistic, not chronological. This seemed to be the most effective way to represent a “relationship” that has produced a singularly tragic mess’.103 Similarly, telling the complex story of Irish history means writing through and around its figures, both popular and unpopular, whether Irish, English or somewhere in-between. Spenser or Cromwell might have been English, but they made themselves an indelible part of Irish history and as such they cannot be ignored: they are ‘anti-icons of Irishness which must be negotiated’, as Richard Pine has summarised.104 Kennelly argues in his introductory ‘Note’ to Cromwell : Because of history, an Irish poet, to realise himself, must turn the full attention of his imagination to the English tradition. An English poet committed to the same task need hardly give the smallest thought to things Irish. Every nightmare has its own logic.105

In an interview with Pine in 1999, Kennelly extended this viewpoint so as to explore the most uncomfortable, and unpopular, aspects of the Irish

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literary character. ‘I don’t think any Irishman is complete as an Irishman, imaginatively speaking’, he said; ‘[w]e can’t solve our problems until Catholics become Protestants, and Protestants become Catholics’.106 In the complex ventriloquial layering of Cromwell , we discover that this imaginative inhabiting of character is extended still further to the matter of language—as Kennelly, in Pine’s words, puts ‘before his audience a language which is never entirely comfortable in the Anglophone or Hibernophone ear: a hybrid, stepchild of both learning and ignorance’.107 This recalls Carson’s use of the Heaneyesque term ‘word-hoards’ in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’108 —although the inclusion of the possibility of ‘ignorance’ seems peculiar to Kennelly, who is perhaps more flagrant than other Irish poets in getting things wrong, sometimes wilfully, in his search for poetic honesty. Such contrarieties play out in sonnets like ‘A Language’: I had a language once. I was at home there. Someone murdered it Buried it somewhere. I use different words now Without skill, truly as I can. A man without language Is half a man, if he’s lucky. Sometimes the lost words flare from their grave. Why do I think then of angels. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Powers? I gaze amazed at them from far away. They are starting to dance, they are Shaping themselves into beautiful flowers.109

The unsettling, undecided nature of the poem begins with its title ‘A Language’, the non-committal indefinite article suggesting that this could be about any language in any place. Yet the sonnet is followed by others that are more specific in their references: ‘That Word’, in which that word itself is never mentioned, but is one that ‘“may suggest legends of rocks and fields”’;110 ‘What Use?’, which concludes, fitfully, ‘“That language should have been choked at birth, / To stop it wasting my heart and mind”’;111 and ‘Someone, Somewhere’, which opens, more hopefully, ‘“I do not believe this language is dead”’.112 In each of these, an imagined

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person is talking—as denoted by speech marks from beginning to end— and phrases such as ‘that word’, ‘that language’ and ‘this language’ imply that these are contained monologues specific to one character, and than one language is being discussed. ‘A Language’ is disconcerting for not containing these elements. Formally, it makes uses of the sonnet to forge a hybrid that is part familiar, part experimental. Thematically, there is an obvious turn where words, once lost, ‘flare from their grave’ (l.9). Likewise, there is some evidence of end-rhyme in the rhymes between ‘there’ and ‘somewhere’ (ll.2 and 4); and between ‘Powers ‘and ‘Flowers’ (ll.11 and 14). There is more subtle assonance, too, between ‘grave’, ‘angels’ and ‘away’ in the closing sestet (ll.9, 10 and 12), while the remaining end-word in these six lines— ‘are’—looks back aslant to the ‘there’ and ‘somewhere’ of the opening octet, as well as to ‘flare’ embedded in line 9. Line 12 contains a claustrophobic triple internal rhyme: ‘I gaze amazed at them from far away’. Viewed differently, this could be read as a beguiling iambic pentameter line. On further reading, we notice how such linguistic dexterity is mainly absent from the first stanza, which is instead noticeable for its jaggedness and staccato rhythms. Here, the short contained sentences of the opening two lines give way to the awkward not-quite enjambments of the next six—‘it / Buried it’; ‘now / Without skill’; ‘language’ / ‘Is’ (ll.3–4, 5– 6, 7–8)—which are driven by repetition and light rhymes. These rhymes seem half-hearted, particularly in contrast with the ringing rhyme between ‘Powers’ and ‘flowers’ in the second stanza. The lines feel far from natural, a factor emphasised by the half-hearted attempts to forge either iambic or trochaic metrical patterns which peter out by line 8, with its bathetically prosy rhythm: ‘Is half a man, if he’s lucky’. Repetition, too, is a noticeable feature of the opening stanza: of the 37 words contained within it, ‘I’ appears four times; while ‘it’, ‘A Language’, ‘without’ and ‘man’ are all used twice. The vernacular is guarded, the expression constrained. This builds the impression of a speaker who is not at home in the language he is using and, more significantly, of a language that has little poetic potential. As if to emphasise the opening stanza’s lack of charisma, only two metaphors are employed—‘murdered’ and ‘buried’ (ll.3, 4)—neither of which is ambitious or evocative. The overall effect is to offer a subtle contrast between the two parts of the poem, so that the linguistic simplicity and befuddlement of the

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opening lines give away, after the turn, to something that blossoms eventually into the ‘vengefully beautiful flowers’ that close the poem (l.14). Of course, ‘flowers’ contain the idea of poetry, through the close relationship between ‘poesy’ and ‘posy’ (‘posy’ having once been a variant of ‘poesy’), and with the term for a small bunch of flowers having been used, figuratively, to mean ‘a collection of pleasant poetry or rhetoric’.113 Similarly, the term ‘anthology’ has its roots in ancient Greek to mean a ‘gathering’ of the flowers of verse.114 We are reminded, too, of Cromwell’s puritan ambitions: of his desire to divest language of its poetry, and to remove from the English language its use of ornate, Latinate terms of which Kennelly’s ‘Seraphim’ and ‘Cherubim’, both derived from ecclesiastical Latin, are examples.115 The closing octet of ‘A Language’, with its growing ambition, its blossoming use of internal rhymes, its luxuriousness in the names of angels—and the sheer fact of ‘Seraphim’ and ‘Cherubim’ being the first words in the poem to have more than two syllables (l.10)—shapes itself into a ‘vengefully beautiful flower’ with which to trouble Cromwell’s colonial project. We are reminded of the opening lines of a later sonnet in the collection, ‘A Condition’, which begins: ‘Oliver is a blunt man, / Blunter than any fiddling poet can be’;116 or of the opening line of another, ‘Oliver’s Prophecies’, where Cromwell foretells how ‘“I will be remembered as a killer of language [”]’.117 It is vengefully ironic that ‘A Language’ is expressed through Cromwell’s native tongue of English: ‘a’ language might be Irish Gaelic, but actually the ‘fiddling’ Irish poet might say it better in English. These multiple, particular ironies underscore how, as Irish poems written in English, Kennelly’s ‘flowers’ of verse are multifaceted, telling their own variegated history.

4.4

Dialogue: Leontia Flynn and Paul Muldoon

In Cromwell, Kennelly ventriloquises ‘real’ people from history such as Cromwell and Spenser in order to understand and undermine these controversial figures. Yet most of these poems—such as the paired sonnets ‘Master’ and ‘The Position of Praise’, which give voice to Spenser118 — articulate just one part of an imagined dialogue. As a result, Kennelly’s narrator Buffún is largely silent when such figures speak—although he does express his opinions in other sonnets that are voiced or thought by him. However, other contemporary poets adopt a more dialogic approach, inhabiting the mind of another figure in order to engage in

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a conversation with that person, or to imagine a conversation between subject and reader. Again, the choice of figure is complicated by identity or gender politics. One poet who probes these questions extensively is Leontia Flynn. In a recent thesis, Alexandra Pryce describes the ‘continuing formal turn’ within the poetry of Colette Bryce, Flynn and Sinéad Morrissey. Pryce notes that ‘hybridity allows for a compromise between the traditional forms of poetry and subversive and feminist originality’, and singles out for attention Flynn’s second collection Drives (2008), suggesting that thanks to its 23 sonnets the form ‘defines the collection’.119 While the loose relationship between form and line-length leaves the exact number of ‘formal’ sonnets in Drives up for debate, it is certainly the case that the majority of the identifiable sonnets in Drives focus on literary and popular figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among these are Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; other poems, meanwhile, are more indirect, with their titles ‘Charles Baudelaire’s Mother’, ‘George Orwell’s Death’ and ‘Sylvia Plath’s Sinus Condition’.120 Pryce has described these poems as deceptively simple ‘stubs’, leading on from Flynn’s own description of them as ‘Wikipedia Poems’, or ‘Everything you can fit into a sonnet about somebody’s life’.121 Pryce notes of Flynn’s subjects that they ‘are troubled geniuses, but they represent, in their celebrity, a literary culture. Similarly, the sonnet represents another literary and poetic culture, with all the troubled and troubling examples that precede it in literary history’.122 While this is neatly put, and just as neatly expressed, Pryce does not scrutinise more closely the poems’ internal and external dialogues. In ‘Dorothy Parker’, for instance, the interplay between the ‘You’ of the opening octave and the ‘I’ / ‘My’ of the closing sestet is unclear. In contrast to the clear speech marks in Kennelly’s Cromwell sonnets, the lack of notation here leads to dialogical ambiguity. Though the opening lines address a ‘You’ who resides ‘in a hotel room downtown’ drinking ‘bathtub hooch’, by the turn of the sonnet, in line 9, the narrative has turned to the first person through a cruelly regular iambic pentameter: ‘My Mother died when I was five’.123 Is the whole poem voiced, then, by the famously dry and epigrammatic Parker to an imagined ‘you’, or is the ‘you’ Parker herself, addressed by the poet/speaker? Moreover, if the ‘you’ is Parker, is she also the ‘I’: is this a conversation turned inwards? Or

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is Parker advising half-heartedly other women who aim to be like her— including, perhaps, the poet herself? Though a glance at Wikipedia would tell us that the poem could be read as a creative summary of Parker’s life, the pronoun confusion complicates the politics of (vocal) authority within the sonnet. Moreover, although the mock-Shakespearean couplet ending seems to dismiss the poem as ‘some glib epigram’ (l.13), and to encourage the readers to do so too, we are left wondering whether the woman who famously wrote ‘Men seldom make passes / at girls who wear glasses’ would come up with something so bathetic.124 The colloquial, almost off-hand, nature of ‘Dorothy Parker’ marks a stark contrast with Parker’s own sonnet ‘I Shall Come Back’. Flynn’s ‘Dorothy Parker’ has a loose half-rhyme pattern of abab cdcd efef gg, its Shakespearean form undermined by its dark comedy and off-rhymes.125 In contrast, Parker’s ‘I Shall Come Back’ employs strict iambic pentameter lines and a rhyme pattern that is close to a Spenserian sonnet (abab abab cdcd ee to Spenser’s abab bcbc cdcd ee).126 The first line ends in beautiful polysyllables—‘I shall come back without fanfaronade’ (l.1)—with the sonnet as a whole envisaging the quiet haunting of a cruel ex-lover. Yet the spurned lover expects to be no more than an ‘inexpert’ ghost: Perhaps you will not know that I am near— And that will break my ghostly heart, my dear. (ll.13–14)

Flynn’s version of Parker, as expressed through her dialogical sonnet, suggests how the figure of the poet and the speaker in her poem might be worlds apart: Flynn’s Parker is depressed and drawling, knowing and jaded, while Parker’s speaker in her sonnet is nostalgic and selfquestioning, shadowy and uncertain. Pryce suggests that Flynn’s celebrity poems ‘humanise not to reduce the genius of these precursory figures, but to give them humanity they are not afforded in culture’.127 To illustrate her point, she notes how Flynn’s sonnet to Plath exploits her ‘Sinus Condition’ as an antidote to her ‘gee-whizz, perfect-girl’ image.128 For Pryce, such vulnerabilities and uncertainties might have, in back, the suggestion of an ‘anxiety of female authorship’,129 a reading that perhaps accounts for the poems’ sideways glances to their subjects’ works. Flynn’s sonnet ‘Elizabeth Bishop’, although told completely in the third person and therefore lacking the conversational qualities of some of the other sonnets from Drives , suggests another type of dialogue; it combines an imaginative reading

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of Bishop’s own anxiety with a blatant allusion to Bishop’s works that perhaps bespeaks Flynn’s own competitive anxiety. The closing stanza plays on the theme of Bishop’s famous villanelle ‘One Art’ to conclude that: lost parents, houses: she’ll lose exceptionally well, lover by lover. She even loses her breath.130

Here Flynn performs a sardonic, apathetic, re-writing of ‘One Art’: so that the haunting tone of Bishop’s original, with its lost ‘mother’s watch’ and its ‘three loved houses’,131 is reconceived as an insincere act of poetic performance (‘she’ll lose exceptionally well’). Indeed, the ‘loses her breath’ in the closing line might glance at the moment at the end of Bishop’s ‘One Art’ where she urges herself to continue in a bracketed aside: ‘(Write it!)’.132 Is Flynn, then, mocking the original poem as self-dramatising, or overblown? To add further complexity, the ‘lover by lover’ that begins the final line of ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ is an embedded allusion to the swans of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, which are described as being ‘Unwearied still, lover by lover’. Later in the same stanza of his poem, Yeats extends the play on ‘still’ to suggest something both tranquil and unending, or even unremitting, in the swans’ quest for love and companionship: Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.133

If Flynn’s sonnet ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ enacts a conversation between Flynnas-poet, Bishop-as-poet and Bishop-as-lover, as well as with Yeats and Yeats’s swans, then this conversation is complex, on-going and unresolved. If Yeats’s swans glide noiselessly through the poem, then are we supposed to insinuate that Bishop’s quest for love, as she loses people and places, ‘lover by lover’, is like that of an endlessly circling, but ultimately optimistic swan? Drives itself opens with a quotation from Bishop’s ‘Arrival at Santos’, which is preoccupied with the disappointments of travel, and reflects what the inside flap to Flynn’s collection describes as ‘a book of restless journeys—real and imaginary—interspersed with a series of sonnets on writers’.134 Flynn’s debt to Bishop’s peripatetic lifestyle,

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and to the geographical preoccupations of Bishop’s poetry, runs deeper than her sonnet would perhaps imply. Flynn’s sonnets cannot simply be an attempt to humanise these figures, then, or to question the ‘anxiety of female authorship’, when they also make complex use of literary sources, by men and women, to do so. The two sonnets that follow ‘Dorothy Parker’ in Drives , ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, interrelate the biography and the work in their depictions of these iconic, often notoriously shambolic, figures, with the sonnets facing one another on opposite pages.135 While ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ is less dialogic in flavour, choosing to focus on the notorious director’s leering misogyny and his fear of driving, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ opens with a quotation from Fitzgerald himself, acknowledged by the use of speech marks: ‘“Of course all life is a process of breaking down”’. This is the opening phrase of Fitzgerald’s extended non-fiction essay The Crack-Up, published originally in Esquire in 1936:136 it is notable that the publication is a men’s magazine, as Flynn’s poem focuses on Fitzgerald’s weaknesses for women and cars set against his own writing process. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ enacts a curious dialogue between an implied ‘I’ and a ‘you’ who is addressed, who might be Fitzgerald but also other men who are going down the same route. From the outset, however, and like ‘Dorothy Parker’, it is unclear whether the implied ‘I’ and the addressed ‘you’ are the same person. The poem, like the ‘Crack-Up’ that Fitzgerald’s essay explores, begins to buckle under its own weight. Formally, the block of the opening octet is followed by a crumbling closing sestet that describes Fitzgerald getting a girl drunk and driving a car ‘off the road…’,137 only to take the sonnet for one last spin, moving into the first person plural as it imagines Fitzgerald seemingly halting in his creative process as he writes. With a side reference to the phrase ‘the lost generation’, thought to be coined by Gertrude Stein but popularised by Ernest Hemingway,138 the sonnet concludes: ‘What we were straining for, / Fitzgerald pauses, it was already lost’ (ll.13–14). The examples of ‘Dorothy Parker’, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ and ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ suggest that reading them as Wikipedia ‘stubs’ risks undermining their integrity. That they also find possible resonances with Michael Longley’s facetious sonnets addressed to cultural figures, and written in loose Shakespearean form, adds to their hidden seriousness. In Longley’s ‘Florence Nightingale’ (1979), the nurse who treats

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patients ‘With rustling cuff and starched apron, a soft hand’ is simultaneously sexualised, so that ‘The halo of your lamp’ becomes ‘a brothel’s fanlight’.139 Meanwhile ‘Grace Darling’ (also 1979), a sonnet about the lighthouse keeper’s daughter famed for the rescue of survivors of the doomed ship Forfashire in 1838, is described as having received ‘Fifty pounds from the Queen, proposals of marriage’.140 Flynn’s and Longley’s sonnets, in their desire for salacious gossip, become knowing products of a gradual erosion of values. The sonnet form, at once eminent and instantly recognisable, steadfast and promiscuous, is an appropriate vehicle for such a task. Spiller notes that ‘[t]he sonnet’s lyric voice is a dramatic construct’ and suggests that this element of refraction in the lyric ‘I’ has always been present, as— what seems to us a very modern concern with the way in which voice comes to us in poetry, and personae that are constructed by texts, is really a reworking, or perhaps a recovery, of the dominant late-medieval and Renaissance habit of looking at texts as rhetorical performances; we in the twentieth century are looking from the reader’s side at what these earlier poets would have approached from the writer’s or speaker’s side, namely, what sort of person the text creates by its rhetorical signs.141

In the performances of Kennelly’s Cromwell , as in the sonnets of Flynn’s Drives , we see the idea of person creation writ large, as Kennelly performs dramatic monologues, and Flynn enacts imagined conversations, within what Kennelly’s Spenser describes as the ‘genetic epics’ of his sonnets.142 On the other hand, the poets’ decision to interrogate weaknesses of culture or character within their sonnets means that these poems risk becoming superficial performances of weakness, no more than stubs themselves. A different kind of dialogue is performed by another of Muldoon’s sonnets from Songs and Sonnets , ‘Le Flanneur’, which makes the most of the aural similarity between a title referencing the life and work of Flann O’Brien, and ‘le flâneur’ of nineteenth-century French tradition, derived from Baudelaire, to refer to a ‘lounger or saunterer, an idle “man about town”’.143 But in both Muldoon’s ‘Le Flanneur’ and Flynn’s sonnets to cultural figures, the relationship within that dialogue between the ‘you’ addressed in the poem and the (often silent) ‘I’ or ‘me’ is stubbornly obscured. By imagining different conversations, and using

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‘rhetorical signs’ to build up our impressions of characters, Flynn’s and Muldoon’s sonnets create the ‘person’ of the subject, as well as the person of the poet/speaker, and of the implied reader. If her poems are, as Flynn and Pryce claim,Wikipedia ‘stubs’, then this says something about Flynn’s expectations of why and how people read about cultural figures. Meanwhile, Muldoon’s sonnet unfurls to become about the nature of fandom and asks to what extent the poet might sacrifice artistic integrity to worship at the altar of another. In 2011, the Dublin Review asked writers to respond to Flann O’Brien’s work, one hundred years after his birth, and to comment on its influence on their own; ‘Le Flanneur’ is Muldoon’s contribution.144 The first international Flann O’Brien Conference was held in 2013 to reflect the growing enthusiasms of ‘Flanneurs’ and ‘Mylesians’,145 the latter referring to Myles na gCopaleen, one of the more notorious of O’Brien’s pseudonyms. Confusingly, Flann O’Brien is also a pseudonym, with O’Brien’s ‘real’ name being Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin).146 Maebh Long suggests that ‘the protean identities of O’Nolan’ enabled him to perform constantly a ‘difficult, intriguing slippage between his masks’.147 Sometimes he was also, as Joseph O’Connor puts it, ‘the brilliant undergraduate showing off: providing nonsolutions to nonproblems, smugly deploying unusual words’.148 It is unsurprising that Muldoon, as a lover of linguistic play, writes a poem for O’Brien, although he might also have had in mind similar experiments employed by Austin Clarke in sonnets such as the political satire ‘At the Dáil’ (1968), where ‘Haughey’ becomes ‘hee-haw’ and ‘hawhee’, and where end-rhymes are replaced by near-repetitions, descending almost into nonsense verse.149 The verbal slippage of ‘Le Flanneur’ is particularly pronounced. Here, ‘curates’ go to the ‘Curragh’, a County Kildare racecourse,150 while ‘a pint of plain in a jug’ never ‘had the plain people of Ireland by the jugular’; likewise, ‘the girl on whom you used to dote / is in her dotage’, while ‘The Evening Herald is less than heraldic’.151 Instead of formal end-rhymes, Muldoon employs complex wordplay, so that ‘ordained’ (l.1) is answered in ‘ordinarily’ (l.2), and the ‘also-ran’ that ends line 3 is answered both in ‘Ranelagh’ (l.4) and ‘Curragh’ (l.5). Exhaustively, ‘Curragh’ is in turn answered in ‘extracurricular’ (l.6), and in ‘jugular’ (l.8), which itself looks back to ‘jug’ (l.7). The poem, brilliantly slippery, builds the impression of a character who is equally elusive.

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Muldoon employs the turn of the sonnet to create an imagined dialogue, addressing a ‘you’ who may or may not be O’Brien himself; indeed, the ‘you’ might instead be an O’Brien devotee of the kind that ‘Flanneurs’ epitomise. This leads us to ask whether the ‘Flanneur’ of the title is in fact an O’Brien wannabe, and whether Muldoon might number himself among them. As a result, the closing line suggests that it might be ‘Myles’ the writer who has the last laugh: ‘you can still rely on Myles for a reality check’ (l.14). The sonnet seems to veer between reality and unreality, echoing the surreal flights of fancy of O’Brien’s novels. In places, as we have seen above, the wordplay has been almost more important than the story told. Yet the references to ‘The Flower of Sweet Strabane’ (l.3)—both a traditional song and a horse on whom O’Brien, who was from Strabane himself, might place a bet152 —and to ‘Tim Humphreys’ of Ranelagh’, a pub that O’Brien frequented,153 suggest that the poem is based at least in part on biographical know-how. The submerged reference to horse-racing might be a further nod to O’Brien’s pseudonyms, as ‘na gCopaleen’ means ‘of the little horses or ponies’ in Irish Gaelic, and the bilingual O’Brien exploited this pun often in his letters.154 Muldoon’s final line lets us know, with ‘Myles’ (l.14), that it is the scabrous na gCopaleen he has in mind: ‘Myles’ was notorious for his letters to the Irish Press and for his column Cruiskeen Lawn, published in the Irish Times on and off until his death in 1966. Long describes these letters, which were written under ‘Myles na gCopaleen’ from October 1940 onwards, as ‘fictions that collectively function not simply as extended conversations or literary pranks, but as what one might collectively call an epistolary novel’.155 ‘Myles’ is, then, a fitting subject for Muldoon’s poem, a similarly ‘extended conversation’ that could be taking place in a pub. The ‘spirit grocer’ or publican bookends the poem (ll.1, 13), while the references to an ‘also-ran’ (l.2) and to ‘extracurricular’ ‘activities’ (l.6) hint at hidden, seedier practices; but all this is enmeshed in the kinds of silly wordplay that ‘gross’ and ‘grocer’ epitomise (ll.13, 14).1 Long, writing on O’Brien’s letters, describes them as ‘performances of staged yet chance endeavours, open, unpredictable exchanges that hover on the border between the public and the private’;156 how apposite that ‘Le Flanneur’ chooses O’Brien for its subject. This sonnet—as well as Flynn’s sonnets addressed to cultural figures, and the timetravelling performances of Kennelly’s Cromwell —collides the public with the private, the accidental with the intentional, and the familiar with the unpredictable, within a form that embodies the artlessness and

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contrivances of poetic expression. In so doing, each sonnet risks buckling under the weight of its own performed conversations, whether these are between imagined and real characters, between poet and subject, or between poet and reader. But in so doing, each also asks what constitutes ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, a subject central to modern poetry. The sonnet is the ideal form to work through all of these debates.

4.5

Conclusion: Speaking to Others

In his second of his Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan (1998), David Wheatley gives biographical details of the nineteenth-century Irish poet— his slum-dwelling; the mysterious death of his older brother—before offering a contemplation on poetic anonymity: Of all the masks you donned, which one was you: ‘An Idler’, ‘Peter Puff Secundus’, ‘M. E.’? ‘Selber’, Shakespeare’s ‘Clarence’, all or none? Your self dispersed more than it ever grew, A dizzy paper trail, your fate to be A nation’s anonym, ‘The Nameless One’.157

Here, Wheatley exploits the formal rhyme scheme of his sonnet—in full, abba cddc efg efg —to forge an uncomfortable connection between ‘“M. E.”’ and ‘be’, and to enable ‘“M. E.”’ to follow ‘you’, as if even the rhymes are asking uncomfortable questions about poetic identity. Indeed, the fact that ‘“M. E.”’ follows ‘you’ points to the question of literary antecedence, as Wheatley as poet follows his multi-masked predecessor. Wheatley builds on his and Mangan’s shared role as poet in a later sonnet, where he claims that ‘Unlike mine […] your verse paid; alas, / The only work I’m paid for is … reviews’—the awkward rhythms hinting at the speaker’s own uncertainty about his literary and pecuniary value.158 Poetic competition, and personal judgement, are central to Wheatley’s depiction of Mangan—but so is a frustration at the slipperiness of poetic identity, and the false refuge of anonymity. For, as Wheatley implies, to be ‘A nation’s anonym’ is to be whatever others want you to be—with your ‘dizzy paper trail’ leading to all sorts of conclusions. In her sonnet ‘Reading the Greats’ from The State of the Prisons (2005), Sinéad Morrissey admits to another type of competitiveness, where she takes pleasure at finding weaknesses, or errors, in the work

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of poets who have come before. The speaker admits to choosing other poets’ ‘omnivorous Completes ’ partly for their ‘avoidable mistakes: / Larkin on Empire, say, or Plath on Aunts’.159 It is fitting that these lines rely on an internal rhyme between ‘Plath’ and ‘Aunts’—possible if voiced by Morrissey as a Northern Irish poet but not necessarily by others—to reveal its own ‘avoidable mistake’. This sense is enhanced by the sonnet’s unfamiliar formal patterns. Divided into two stanzas of seven lines, each stanza consists of three pairs of almost-rhyming couplets (such as ‘Completes ’ and ‘mistakes’) followed by a line without a rhyme or a partner—the line ending ‘Aunts’ above, and the last line: ‘Yes, I love them for that’ (l.14). This lends the poem its own ‘loveable’ flaws. Both Wheatley’s Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan and Morrissey’s ‘Reading the Greats’ enact conversations with their literary predecessors, be these direct or indirect. Morrissey’s poem tells us that despite the apparent separation of the work from its author, a reader’s imagination can’t help but visualise a writer at work, making their mistakes, showing their hand. Similarly, the sonnets of Kavanagh, Carson, O’Malley, Ní Chuilleanáin, Flynn and Muldoon work with the sonnet form to enact conversations with literary and cultural, real and imaginary, figures. Of course, to choose to write a sonnet at all presupposes a conversation that will extend back as far as the form itself. In The Art of the Sonnet , Burt and Mikics discuss the Elizabethan sonnet in terms of dramatic performance, as exemplified in particular by Shakespeare’s sonnets, noting that ‘expressing one’s love was a genuine relief, but also a performance […] a series of poetic poses’.160 Though this description of the passionate sonneteer might seem initially a world away from the abrasive tones of Kennelly’s Cromwell , or from the disparaging put-downs of O’Malley’s ‘Finis’, we can see how the performative element of the sonnet form suggests many possibilities. Conversation is itself a type of performance, particularly where one or more speaker is addressed or imagined; likewise, dialogue is performance in miniature. Ventriloquism is characterisation, while allusion is a means of performing a previous poet’s words for a contemporary audience. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, all conversations are an act of love—or, conversely and equally, an act of hate—because, in giving voice to another, a poet is acknowledging their significance or importance. In the schadenfreude of Morrissey’s lines, we see love and competition, pleasure and constraint collide: ‘Is it for their failures that I love them?’,161

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she asks, because to recognise the pain of others, and to see this expressed on the page, is to find understanding too.

Notes 1. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 5–6. 2. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, in Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London, 2005), p. 224, ll.9–10. 3. Kavanagh, ‘Leaves of Grass’, Collected Poems, pp. 217–218, l.12. 4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (first published 1973; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), p. 25. 5. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Whitman in the British Isles’, in Walt Whitman and the World, ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995), pp. 11–70 (p. 18). 6. Kavanagh, The Green Fool (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keefe, 1971), p. 301. 7. Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, Collected Poems, p. 184, ll.13–14. 8. Kavanagh refers here to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, first published by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. In 1991 Christopher Ricks edited a new version, including annotations and details of omissions and inclusions: see Ricks (ed.), The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Whitman was included in a 1954 edition of the collection, with additional poems selected by Cecil Day-Lewis. 9. Kavanagh, ‘Leaves of Grass’, ll.1–2. 10. Patrick Kavanagh Archive, UCD, Dublin, Kav B 7 (21) [Poetry], typed notes for a lecture. Archivists’ notes state: ‘This poem [‘Leaves of Grass’] has been transcribed as part of a lecture (only this page of which has survived)’. 11. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1881–1882 edition), section 51, l.1326, in Whitman, Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, ed. Ezra Greenspan (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 142–195 (p. 194). 12. Kavanagh, ‘Leaves of Grass’, ll.12, 11. 13. Whitman, Song of Myself , section 1, ll.4–5, in Greenspan (ed.), p. 143. 14. Kavanagh, ‘In the Same Mood’, handwritten ms of poem first published in The Dublin Magazine, XIII. 1 (January–March 1938), 2, ll.8–12. Patrick Kavanagh Archive, UCD, Kav A 4, Section 2, 23. Reprinted with few changes in Collected Poems, p. 25. 15. Kavanagh, handwritten early draft of ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’, Patrick Kavanagh Archive, UCD, Kav A4, Section 2, 26.

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16. Kavanagh, ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’, Collected Poems, p. 24, ll.1–7. 17. Kavanagh, typescript of ‘October’, Patrick Kavanagh Archive, UCD, Kav B11 (35), verso. C.f. Kavanagh, ‘October’, Collected Poems, p. 218. 18. Helen Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition: Yeats at Sonnets’, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–181 (p. 162). 19. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 43, ll.2–4, 13, 1. 20. Harry Clifton, Portobello Sonnets (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2017), sonnet 35, p. 43. See also Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, NY: Walt Whitman, 1855). 21. Alan Gillis, ‘The Green Rose’, Section 8, The Green Rose (Thame: Clutag Press, 2010), n.p., l.3; also in Here Comes the Night (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2010), p. 74. 22. Neal Alexander, in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 9, describes Carson’s sonnet sequence as ‘hallucinatory’. 23. Carson, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, The Twelfth of Never (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1998), p. 72. 24. Elisabeth Delattre, ‘“Through the Land of Nod and Wink”: Representations of Ireland in The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson’, Estudios Irlandeses, No. 8 (2013), 12–21 (14, 13). 25. Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, p. 9. 26. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Spenser. 27. Carson, ‘Calling It to Mind, Getting It by Heart’, the Irish Times, 19 July 2003. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/calling-it-to-mind-get ting-it-by-heart-1.366745. Italics and square brackets in the original. Carson quotes from Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596; first published c.1598), ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), where Iren describes the Irish as being ‘now accounted the most barbarous nation in Christendom’ (p. 43), and where he discusses Irish poetry (p. 75). 28. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Methuen, 2010). 29. Carson, ‘The Sonneteer (After Mallarmé)’, in The Alexandrine Plan (1998), collected in Carson, Selected Poems (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2001), pp. 106–107, ll.13–14. Mallarmé’s original adopts a rhyme scheme of abab abab cdd cee, which Carson employs faithfully in his translation. 30. Carson, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 72, ll.12–14. 31. Spenser, View, ed. Renwick, pp. 51–3.

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32. Marianne Moore, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, in Collected Poems, ed. Clive Driver (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 112–114, ll.57–63. 33. Other sonnets in Carson’s sequence employ a more ‘Italian’ form in beginning abba cddc (but still concluding efe gfg ). Italian or Petrarchan sonnets tend to follow the rhyme scheme abba abba cdcdcd or cdecde; Carson might also be following the French model, which tends to adapt the Italian model but with variations in the closing sestet. See, for example, ‘Tib’s Eve’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 13; or ‘The Poppy Battle’, p. 14. 34. The poems ‘Spot the Wallop’ (abab cdcd eee fff ), p. 35; ‘Dancers’ (abba cddc efe fgg ), p. 50; ‘Jarrow’ (abab cdcd efe fgg ), p. 55; ‘Fear’ (abab cddc efe fef ), p. 65; ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ (abba baab ccd ede), p. 85; and the final poem ‘Envoy’ (abba cbbc ded eff ), p. 89, are exceptions, though several of these also have intertwining rhymes in their closing sestet. 35. Peter Denman, ‘Language and the Prosodic Line in Carson’s Poetry’, in Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 28–44 (p. 33). 36. Ibid., p. 33; see also Carson, ‘Loaf’, Ciaran Carson: Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008), pp. 127–129. 37. Julia C. Obert, ‘Sounding the City: Ciaran Carson and the Perpetual Politics of War’, Textual Practice, 26.6 (2012), 1081–1110 (1095). 38. Carson, ‘Found’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 62. 39. Carson, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, ll.1–4. 40. ‘Rakehell’, adj. and n., OED online (www.oed.com). The definition of ‘rakehell’, of which ‘rakehelly’ is a derivative adjective and noun, is ‘an immoral or dissolute person, a scoundrel, a rake’. 41. Spenser, View, ed. Renwick, pp. 75, 76. 42. Eudox describes ‘swords’ as being ‘in the hands of the vulgar’, referring to the Irish people: see Spenser, View, ed. Renwick, p. 12. 43. ‘Rapparee’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 44. See Carson, ‘Fear’, l.5. 45. Carson, ‘Catmint Tea’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 34, ll.3–4. 46. See Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber, 1999). 47. ‘Wordhoard’, n., OED online (www.oed.com) [no hyphen]. 48. Heaney, ‘North’, Opened Ground: Poems, 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 100–101, ll.29–33. 49. Simon Dentith, ‘“All Livin Language is Sacred”: Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands’, in The Oxford Book of Contemporary Irish and British Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 247–265 (p. 258). 50. Ibid., p. 257. 51. Delattre, ‘“Through the Land of Nod and Wink”’, p. 17.

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52. See Carson, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 85, ll.2–3, 12; c.f. Kavanagh’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, Collected Poems, pp. 36–37, and especially ll.7–8. 53. Delattre, ‘“Through the Land of Nod and Wink”’, p. 14. 54. Carson, ‘February Fourteen’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 75, l.12. 55. Carson, ‘The Display Case’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 74, ll.8–9, 11. There is a stanza break between lines 8 and 9. 56. Interview with Ciaran Carson, in John Brown (ed.), In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002), p. 142; cited in Delattre, ‘“Through the Land of Nod and Wink”’, p. 17. 57. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, The Major Works, p. 21; see also Larrissy’s note to the poem on p. 490, which describes the poem as a ‘free imitation’ of Ronsard’s original. 58. Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnet XLIII of ‘Le Second Livre Des Sonnets Pour Helene’ (‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’), in Ronsard, Selected Poems, with a prose translation, introduction and notes by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 53. 59. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, The Major Works, p. 112, l.1. 60. Mary O’Malley, ‘Finis’, The Boning Hall (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 48, ll.1–5. 61. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, l.2. 62. Ronsard, ‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’, ll.2, 3–4, and prose translation. 63. O’Malley, ‘Finis’, ll.11–12; c.f. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, l.10. 64. Ronsard, ‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’, l.11, and prose translation. 65. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, l.8; c.f. O’Malley, ‘Finis’, ll.13–14. 66. Yeats, ‘When You Are Old’, l.9. 67. Mutlu Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 179. 68. Jeff Hilson, Introduction, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (St. Leonards on Sea: RealityStreet, 2008), p. 11. 69. Annie Finch, ‘The Sonnet Transfigured’, (HOW)ever 6.2 (October 1990), https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/ print_archive/alerts1090.html#sonnet. Ellipses and small letters in the original. 70. Susan Roberts, ‘Working Notes’ (for ‘Sound Sonnets’), (HOW)ever 6.2 (October 1990). https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/arc hive/print_archive/sr2rnotes.html. 71. Hilson, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, pp. 12, 13. 72. See O’Malley, ‘The Boning Hall’, The Boning Hall, p. 14. O’Malley cites Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’, in The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp. 101–103. Italics in the original.

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73. Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 104. 74. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The Angel in the Stone’, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2001), p. 15, ll.1–2. 75. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, pp. 129–130; p. 5. 76. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The Angel in the Stone’, l.1; c.f. P. B. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), p. 849, l.11. 77. O’Malley, ‘The Pearl Sonnet’, Asylum Road (Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Poetry, 2001), p. 3, ll.13–14. 78. Shakespeare, Sonnet XXXIV (34), Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 179, ll.13–14. 79. O’Malley, ‘The Boning Hall’, ll.1–5. 80. Ariel’s song, in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II Scene I: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ (l.399); ‘Of his bones are coral made’ (l.398). See William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare Third Series), ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011). 81. Ibid., ll.400–402. 82. See W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 391–4, l.56. 83. Colin Graham, ‘“We Irish”: What Stalks Through Donoghue’s Irish Criticism’, in Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Denis Donoghue, ed. Brian G. Caraher and Robert Mahony (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press 2007), pp. 78–92 (p. 78). 84. See Carson, ‘Le Sonneur’ / ‘The Sonneteer’, l.14 in both versions; and discussions above. 85. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The Angel in the Stone’; see especially ll.1–4, 12–14. 86. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, p. 5. 87. See Richard Murphy, The Price of Stone, rept. The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952–2012 (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2002), pp. 175–226. Murphy uses the term ‘sonnet houses’ (both without a hyphen and with) in the opening Note to The Price of Stone (The Pleasure Ground, p. 176), and throughout In Search of Poetry (Thame: Clutag Press, 2017). 88. Muldoon, ‘Pip and Magwitch’, Songs and Sonnets (London: Enitharmon, 2012), p. 12. See also Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 89. Brendan Kennelly, Cromwell (first published 1983; Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987). 90. Maria Johnston, ‘Songs and Sonnets by Paul Muldoon: Review’, The Guardian, 11 January 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2013/jan/11/songs-and-sonnets-paul-Muldoon-review.

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91. Paul Muldoon, in ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, ed. Peter Howarth, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 6–24 (p. 11). Muldoon cites W. H. Auden in his essay ‘A Literary Transference’, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, ed. Edward Mendelson, in 3 volumes (London: Faber and Faber, 1996–), Vol. II: 1938–1948 (2002), p. 48. 92. Muldoon, ‘Pip and Magwitch’, ll.3–8. 93. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Rousing the Reader’, review of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing by Paul Muldoon, Dublin Review of Books, 1 April 2015. http://www.drb.ie/essays/rousing-the-reader. 94. See Carson, ‘Banners’, The Twelfth of Never, p. 84, l.14; ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ll.1–2; and ‘Paddy’s Knapsack’, p. 86, l.1. 95. Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, pp. 86, 151. 96. Brendan Kennelly, introductory ‘Note’ to Cromwell. 97. John Redmond, ‘Engagements with the Public Sphere in the Work of Paul Durcan and Brendan Kennelly’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 403–418 (p. 410). 98. See, for example, Kennelly, ‘Dedication’, in Cromwell, p. 49; and ‘Master’ and ‘The Position of Praise’, both on p. 81. 99. Kennelly, ‘A Host of Ghosts’, Cromwell, p. 16, ll.4–7. Though this opening poem is not an obvious sonnet, it does consist of 28 lines, with a clear typographical break (and a change in subject) between lines 14 and 15. 100. Kennelly, ‘My Grassy Path’, Cromwell, p. 31. 101. Kennelly, ‘I Was There’, Cromwell, p. 25. 102. Kennelly, ‘5½ lbs’, Cromwell, p. 43, ll.1–2. 103. Kennelly, introductory ‘Note’ to Cromwell. 104. Richard Pine, ‘Brendan Kennelly’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, ed. Gerald Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 254–267 (p. 264). 105. Kennelly, introductory ‘Note’ to Cromwell. 106. R. Pine, ‘Interview’ with Brendan Kennelly, in James P. Myers Jr. (ed.), Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Literary Supplement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 136. 107. Pine, ‘Brendan Kennelly’, p. 262. 108. Carson, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, l.3; and see discussions above. 109. Kennelly, ‘A Language’, Cromwell, p. 39, whole poem. 110. Kennelly, ‘That Word’, Cromwell, p. 40, l.2. 111. Kennelly, ‘What Use?’, Cromwell, p. 40, ll.13–14. 112. Kennelly, ‘Someone, Somewhere’, Cromwell, p. 41, l.1. 113. ‘Posy’, n., OED online (www.oed.com).

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114. The original usage of the term was ‘a treatise on flowers or the growing of flowers’. See ‘anthology’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 115. ‘Seraphim’, n; and ‘cherubim’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 116. Kennelly, ‘A Condition’, Cromwell, p. 93, ll.1–2. 117. Kennelly, ‘Oliver’s Prophecies’, Cromwell, p. 104, l.1. 118. See Kennelly, ‘Master’ and ‘The Position of Praise’, Cromwell, p. 81. 119. Alexandra Rhoanne Pryce, ‘Selective Traditions: Feminism and the Poetry of Colette Bryce, Leontia Flynn and Sinéad Morrissey’, DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014, pp. 13, 191. Accessed via: www.ora. ox.ac.uk. 120. See Leontia Flynn, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), Contents pages, n.p. 121. Pryce, ‘Selective Traditions’, p. 192. Pryce cites Leontia Flynn Reads from Her Poems (Gloucester: Poetry Archive, 2009): Audio. 122. Pryce, ‘Selective Traditions’, p. 191. 123. Flynn, ‘Dorothy Parker’, Drives, p. 31, ll.1, 2, 3, 9. 124. Dorothy Parker, ‘News Item’ (1937), Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 71. 125. Flynn, ‘Dorothy Parker’, ll.2, 4, 6, 8. 126. Dorothy Parker, ‘I Shall Come Back’, Complete Poems, p. 36. 127. Pryce, ‘Selective Traditions’, p. 82. 128. Flynn, ‘Sylvia Plath’s Sinus Condition’, Drives, p. 46, l.1. 129. Pryce, ‘Selective Traditions’, p. 82. 130. Flynn, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’, Drives, p. 34, ll.13–14. 131. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’, in Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), p. 198, ll.10, 11. 132. Ibid., l.19. 133. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, The Major Works, p. 60, ll.19, 22–24. 134. Descriptive blurb, Flynn, Drives, inside flap. See also Bishop, ‘Arrival at Santos’, first published in The New Yorker, 21 June 1952: 24. 135. Flynn, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, Drives, pp. 32, 33. 136. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, originally published in Esquire in the February, March and April issues, 1936; reprinted in Esquire online, 7 March 2017. https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/thecrack-up/. 137. Flynn, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’, l.12; ellipsis in the original. 138. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Generation. 139. Michael Longley, ‘Florence Nightingale’, The Echo Gate (1979), rept. Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 138, ll.1–2, 7. 140. Longley, ‘Grace Darling’, The Echo Gate (1979), rept. Collected Poems, p. 139, ll.1, 4. 141. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 6–7.

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142. See Kennelly, ‘Master’, l.12. 143. ‘Flâneur’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 144. See https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/flann-o-brienour-unluckiest-genius-1.590212. The responses were first published in Dublin Review, 44 (autumn 2011). 145. For example, the webpage of the ‘International Flann O’Brien Society’ notes: ‘It is time for all Flanneurs and Mylesians to exercise their democratic muscle again’. https://www.univie.ac.at/flannobrien2011/ IFOBS.html. 146. See ‘Flann O’Brien, Irish Author’. https://www.britannica.com/biogra phy/Flann-Obrien. 147. Maebh Long, ‘Introduction’, in The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive, 2018), pp. xi–xix (p. xvii). 148. Joseph O’Connor’s response to O’Brien in Dublin Review (autumn 2011), reprinted in the Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/cul ture/tv-radio-web/flann-o-brien-our-unluckiest-genius-1.590212. 149. Austin Clarke, ‘At the Dáil’, from The Echo at Coole and Other Poems (1968), rept. Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 416; see especially ‘crop’ answered in ‘hunting-crop’, ‘farmers’ in ‘far’, ‘thresh’ in ‘threshold’ and, in the concluding couplet, ‘Union Jack’ in ‘Jack-boot’, ll.1–2, 3–4, 10–11, 13–14. 150. Muldoon, ‘Le Flanneur’, Songs and Sonnets, p. 20, l.5; see also http:// www.curragh.ie/. 151. Ibid., ll.7–8, 9–10, 11. 152. See Long (ed.), ‘Flann O’Brien: Chronology’, in Collected Letters, p. xxxiii. 153. Muldoon, ‘Le Flanneur’, l.4; see also http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ Humphrys/tim.ranelagh.html. 154. See, for example, O’Brien’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ letter to The Irish Times of 22 October 1940 (under another pseudonym, Lir O’Connor), in Collected Letters, pp. 98–100, where he describes himself as ‘your little horse-man’ (p. 99, and n. 85, p. 99). 155. Long, ‘Introduction’, Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, p. xxi. 156. Ibid., p. xxii. 157. David Wheatley, Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan, Sonnet 2, Misery Hill (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 2000), p. 16, ll.9–14. 158. Wheatley, Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan, sonnet 5, Misery Hill, p. 16, ll.3–4. 159. Sinéad Morrissey, ‘Reading the Greats’, The State of the Prisons (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 35, ll.5, 6–7. 160. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p. 13. 161. Morrissey, ‘Reading the Greats’, l.1.

CHAPTER 5

The Domestic

Poetry is primarily a commemorative act – one of committing worthwhile events and thoughts and stories to memory: its elegiac tone is so universal and pervasive we’ve almost stopped hearing it.1

Is there space for silence within the sonnet form? Is it the case that, as Don Paterson suggests here, the sonnet has become so ‘universal and pervasive’ that it might fade into the background, making space for a quieter poetic tone? In Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the NineteenthCentury Sonnet, Amy C. Billone argues that the growing familiarity of the sonnet allowed women poets to innovate, by ‘simultaneously posit[ing] both muteness and volubility through style and theme’.2 For Billone, the English poet Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) paved the way for Victorian poets like Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett to write more tempered sonnets. Yet the idea that women’s sonnets fuse the quiet and the loud, the private and the public, has led to more simplistic, gendered readings of the form; for instance Burt and Mikics claim that the sonnet might be viewed as ‘a domestic form, small-scale, fit for times of peace, for light verse, and for women’.3 The association of women with ‘peace’, the ‘domestic’ and ‘light verse’ is potentially limiting. On the other hand, the term ‘domestic’ is useful for considering a range of sonnets within the modern Irish tradition—as a way of tracking the relationship between the local, the everyday, and the home itself. In these instances, the sonnet becomes a place where ‘worthwhile events and thoughts and stories’, to © The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_5

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borrow Paterson’s terms, might occupy the same poetic space: who or what determines what is ‘worthwhile’, however, is a matter for debate. The idea of ‘space’ in what might be termed ‘domestic’ sonnets by modern Irish writers—both male and female—can be understood in the context of poetic space, metaphorical space and literal space. But it also, necessarily, incorporates questions of scale. Imagining the domestic in terms of rooms and houses—where ‘stanza’, as we recall, is connected etymologically to the idea of a ‘room’, so that the poem might be a ‘house’4 —provides useful analogies for scale and proportion within the sonnet. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard focuses on the ways in which the ‘house’ might be imagined: [B]y approaching the house images with care not to break up the solidarity of memory and the imagination, we may hope to make others feel all the psychological elasticity of an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth. Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house.5

What Bachelard urges here is that poets offer a consistent impression of the ‘memory and the imagination’ in order to appeal to ‘others’ to ‘feel’ in turn ‘the psychological elasticity of an image’. For many poets, the spatial relations between house and home, which comment in turn on the communication of memory and imagination, can find analogies in the orderly, but often playfully (re-)constructed, familiarity of the sonnet form. For Joseph Phelan, writing on Wordsworth’s sonnet-making in particular, the constraint of the ‘rooms’ of the sonnet offers something that is almost opposite to ‘psychological elasticity’. Citing Wordsworth’s ‘River Duddon’ sonnets of 1820, Phelan notes: ‘The phrase “narrow room” is one which Wordsworth employs repeatedly in connection with the sonnets’, because ‘[e]ntering the “narrow room” of the sonnet represents a way of sealing himself off from potentially corrupting influences’. For Wordsworth, according to Phelan, the form becomes associated with ‘personal authenticity and political radicalism’, so that ‘he comes to like the “narrow room” of the sonnet too much to ever want to leave it’.6 Wordsworth had employed the phrase in a ‘Prefatory Sonnet’ to a collection of sonnets published in 1807, which begins ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room’, extending the relationship between domesticity, servitude and womanhood. That Wordsworth enjoyed such confines,

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described in the same poem as ‘the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’,7 is underscored by the fact that he had completed some 500 sonnets by his death in 1850.8 This apparently contradictory balance between ‘personal authenticity and political radicalism’, and between ‘elasticity and restraint’, is played out within the modern Irish sonnet—and particularly within those sonnets that might be described as ‘domestic’. Adam Hanna discusses Heaney’s sonnet ‘The Skylight’ from Glanmore Revisited (1991),9 in which the ‘many “o” sounds echo the sense of space and wonder brought about by the opening of a window in the roof of the room where he [Heaney] worked’; Hanna claims that the poem displays a ‘comforting crampedness’ that the sonnet form suits.10 Though such sonnets might take place in rooms, or deal with everyday events, or tell of everyday happenings, this doesn’t always mean that the ‘political’ is excluded from view. In fact, the ‘domestic’ or everyday often becomes a backdrop for political comment and debate. In his recent study The Sonnet, Stephen Regan contends that despite its traditional association with ‘private introspection’, the sonnet form can ‘modulate into public outcry and polemic’; it ‘has always been deeply implicated in politics, and always uneasily preoccupied with power’.11 Little surprise, then, that modern Irish poets have turned increasingly towards the sonnet as a means of mediating between the personal and political, particularly as their particular ‘scanty patch of ground’ automatically reflects wider territorial concerns.

5.1

Nosy Neighbours and Uninvited Guests

In the previous chapter, we saw Lucy Collins’s idea that contemporary Irish women poets are ‘confronted with the notion of the stranger within—with the extent to which their own creative self encompasses opposite perspectives’.12 One example of the ‘stranger within’ might be the figure of the nosy neighbour or uninvited guest, who makes an appearance in a poem or form that is not necessarily their traditional home. This figure also offers a means of scrutinising existing analogies that parallel the sonnet with the ‘house’, as a collection of ‘rooms’. The contemporary woman poet Vona Groarke, as a sonneteer and as a selfdeclared Irish expatriate, offers a way into considering such analogies more closely. Wes Davis notes that ‘[t]he characters in Vona Groarke’s poetry seem always to be thinking about houses’, because ‘[l]ooking at a strange house allows her to try on other lives, letting her imagination

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expand into the shape of the house, its neighbourhood, the relationships that living there would entail’.13 Groarke’s 1999 collection Other People’s Houses applies to its visiting of homes and houses ‘an audacious revisiting of established poetic forms and themes’, as one reviewer puts it. This same reviewer identifies five sonnets in the collection, noting that ‘[i]n poems like “House Plan”, “Home Viewing”, “Folderol”, “House Wine” and “The Haunted House”, the sonnet undergoes a series of successful renovations’.14 An interesting omission is ‘Open House’ which, although a longer poem, begins with a sonnet and is printed on the page following another sonnet (‘House Plan’) as if to emphasise this.15 Collins notes that within Groarke’s work as a whole ‘the representation of the home, and its emotional and aesthetic significance, is a central aspect of the poetic enquiry’.16 Interviewed by the Irish Times , Groarke outlined her reasons for leaving Ireland to live in Manchester and, previously, North Carolina, US: ‘Work. Always work. I’d have stayed if I could have, workwise’. The interviewer, summarising Groarke, notes, Groarke says she writes about the impulse to burrow into a home wherever you find yourself: ‘I write about making a home of a place more than I write about any given place. I write myself into that place, and it’s a calculated act, a way of staking some kind of small claim through the act of words.’

But before we can attribute simplistic, or idealistic, notions of the Irish writer in exile to Groarke’s choice of topic, she adds: ‘I can’t imagine I would be considered, ever, as an English poet, but I’m not sure such distinctions matter much to anyone but me, and barely even to me. If the poet has to make a living, the poem couldn’t give two hoots’.17 Therefore the figure of the nosy neighbour or uninvited guest in Other People’s Houses cannot be reduced to Irish caricature; rather, something more ‘calculated’ might be at play. In Groarke’s ‘house sonnets’ from Other People’s Houses , an interrogation of material structures inspires a wider interrogation of other structures—historical, literary, and domestic—all of which lead back to a consideration of the sonnet form itself. The titles of the poems of the collection as a whole play with ideas of houses and homes, and the boundaries between them. Some evoke holidays and fun—‘The Sandcastle’,

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‘Holiday Home’, ‘The Playhouse’, ‘Outdoors’; some are more literal— ‘Nearer Home’, ‘The Image of the House’, ‘The Empty House’, ‘Other People’s Houses’; and others are more evocative: ‘The Slaughterhouse’, ‘The Dream House’, ‘The Lighthouse’, ‘Lighthouses’. Further poems play with phrases attached to houses: ‘House Style’, ‘House Guest’, ‘House-bound’.18 Among the five sonnets of the collection, with a sixth appended to the beginning of ‘Open House’, only one title sticks out: ‘Folderol’. The others reflect the theme of the collection, with their titles ‘House Plan’, ‘Home Viewing’, ‘House Wine’ and ‘The Haunted House’. The first two sonnets that we encounter in the collection are ‘House Plan’ and the first 14 lines to the longer poem ‘Open House’, both of which are sonnets consisting of seven pairs of rhyming couplets. The opening lines of ‘Open House’ appear to offer the structural comfort of the sonnet, only for the remaining pages of rhyming couplets to come as a surprise, continuing on from the apparently decisive couplet of lines 13–14: I saw myself, permanent, rooted at last with all the aplomb of the propertied class.19

The longer poem actually ends up far from where it started, becoming instead a meditation on a couple that has grown apart, divided by a metaphorical ‘wall’. Of course, the irony here is that the phrase ‘rooted at last’ in line 13 of the longer poem is itself uprooted by the seemingly endless couplets that follow the apparent ending of the opening sonnet. It seems as if the poet doesn’t know where to finish, or even where to begin, so that the longer poem ends up in a place and time before the beginning of the speaker’s romantic story: So that we might meet for the very first time unsurprised by the question of Your place or mine? 20

This unravelling of the familiarity of the sonnet form into a story which digresses so far as to wish to go back in time questions the ideal of ‘permanence’ described at the end of the opening sonnet of the longer poem ‘Open House’, and instead reveals a state of impermanence that finds its ultimate expression in the homelessness of the final question (‘Your place or mine?’). The fact that this phrase is itself a cliché underlines this sense of uprooting.

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The beginning of ‘Open House’ expands on the themes of the sonnet before it, ‘House Plan’, to suggest the movement from one moment to another in the viewing of the plans followed by the viewing of the house. But in both there is a suspicion that the promise of the house is not matched by its actuality—a feeling underlined by the orderliness of the plan itself. Like the rhyming couplets that break down as each poem progresses, the plan is not as perfect as it seems. The opening lines of ‘House Plan’ play on the structure of the sonnet to imply that appearances might be deceptive: A landscaped garden, a façade and a drive, some client’s notion of the ideal place to live, have been composed into a scheme of rooms, and set off with unnecessary trims, prompting words like ‘classical’ or ‘fine’ as delicate responses to such adequate design.21

It might be useful to recall, here, the eerily perfect description at the beginning of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ (1922), where ‘[t]he gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine’.22 On the one hand, if Groarke’s sonnet and its visible structures—the layering of rhyming couplets, the eye-rhyme between ‘drive’ and ‘live’—represent the ‘façade’ of the house described here, or even the ‘plan’ itself, which stands at one remove even from this façade, then they cannot hope to generate a sense of the ‘house’ (or home) within. Like the sheen of Mansfield’s stories, and the too perfect world they describe, if this is all there is, then what, if anything, lies beneath? This particular reading certainly matches the contrived endrhymes, the idea of ‘composing’ something ‘into a scheme of rooms’, and the ‘unnecessary trims’ of the sonnet’s ‘design’. On the other hand, the voyeuristic viewer of these plans seems attracted to the language they use and evoke, however false this might be. We can’t help but consider this apparent mistrust in comparison with the facing poem, ‘Open House’, which tells us through a playful, excitable end-rhyme that the speaker ‘saw something more than mortar and bricks / when she viewed the plans for Number 6’.23 Moreover, the speaker still maintains the rhyming couplet scheme and a regular iambic metrical pattern, as if wanting to keep up despite herself. In this sense, the proliferation of adjectives—‘landscaped’, ‘ideal’, ‘unnecessary’, ‘classical’, ‘fine’,

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‘adequate’—can be seen to illustrate her own confused responses to both the form she uses and the ‘house plan’ she describes. At this point in Groarke’s poem, the nosy neighbour enters. ‘House Plan’ turns after the sixth line, rather than the eighth, in noting the appearance of the ‘figure’ drawn on the lawn as a ‘marker of scale’ in the plan (l.7). This figure might be ‘a proud owner, or an occasional guest’ (l.11), but the concluding couplet offers a more transgressive alternative: Or a villager who, on passing the empty house, has slipped in to choose an overflowing rose. (ll.13–14)

We noted above how one reviewer described Groarke’s ‘audacious revisiting of established poetic forms and themes’ in Other People’s Houses ,24 and when we add to this Collins’s notion of the ‘stranger within’, we find that these ideas ricochet between the poem’s subject matter and its form.25 The half-rhyme between ‘house’ and ‘rose’ generates an uncomfortable, almost bathetic, conclusion that undermines the structural authority of the sonnet and the house plan, so that the ‘figure’ of the rhyme works similarly to the ‘figure’ in the plan who blots the ‘landscape’. This ‘stranger within’ leaves the poem unresolved, as we cannot be certain whether the ‘figure’ is a ‘villager’ transgressing the boundaries of the home, the ‘proud owner’ or ‘occasional guest’, or even the voyeur of the poem. The act of ‘slipping in’ this ‘figure’ speaks to a desire to upturn the ‘design’ of both the plan and the poem itself, and so to disrupt the idea that a plan for a house is the same as a home: the form of the poem comments on the form of the plan, just as the plan comments on the poem. Yet it is the figure of the uninvited guest, the nosy neighbour, who writes herself into the plan (and the poem)—and, in (the) turn, unsettles their foundations. Viewed from a different angle, the uninvited guest might alternatively be a ‘figure’ who upsets the foundations that the speaker has put in place. In the next sonnet, ‘Folderol’, the title’s implication of flimsiness and triviality unravels as it becomes clear that the ‘other person’s house’ of the poem is that of the ‘other’ woman.26 The speaker’s partner’s transgression—which inspires her to find ‘twenty-four / words for nonsense’ to write on his ‘thighs and back’—is emphasised by its bracketed separation from the rest of the poem:

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(the night you came home from her house with some cockand bull story of missed connections and loose ends)27

In this sonnet, the form almost gives lie to the story. The speaker tries to maintain her dignity by clinging to the story she’s telling. Her desire for control, for making sense of ‘nonsense’, resounds through the encircling, but shaky, rhyme scheme abba ccdd effe gg. Even the bracketed ‘fact’ of infidelity takes place across a rhyme, in a declaration that somehow this act of transgression hasn’t upset her form. Yet the hanging, ruptured ‘cock-’ of this aside tells another story entirely, bespeaking a submerged vengeful desire. In both this sonnet and in the next in the collection—‘House Wine’— the form enacts a struggle between the speaker and another (presumably male) figure, with both attempting to assert control over their version of the written word. In ‘Folderol’, the cheating partner eventually has the last word by leaving the speaker’s body covered in the smudges of the increasingly angry words she wrote on him, so that she— woke up to find my own flesh covered with your smudged disgrace while you, of course, had vanished without trace. (ll.12–14)

Meanwhile, in ‘House Wine’ the speaker addresses her partner in terms of his pretentious attitude towards drinking wine, the title acting as a rebuff against this. But again the final couplet tells us that it is unclear quite who has the last laugh: It’s the way you click your full glass against mine and always say: There’s poetry, but here’s wine.28

Earlier in ‘House Wine’ the speaker had chastised her partner for ‘the kind of words you choose’ (l.9). In both poems, language becomes a form of power, intrinsically connected with the written word—whether through inscription, as in the literal writing of the words on the body in ‘Folderol’, or through a notion of what ‘poetry’ might represent, as in ‘House Wine’. In both, too, it seems initially that the speaker’s lover holds the power. Yet the conclusions of ‘Folderol’ and ‘House Wine’ point to a desire to capture what has ‘vanished’, and so to assert the power of poetry in place of love, or sex, or wine. In ‘Folderol’, the lover

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has ‘vanished without trace’ and the words on her body are ‘smudged’ (ll.14, 13); nevertheless, the poem remains to write out the words and tell the story. Likewise in ‘House Wine’ the poet pens a poem to poetry, which smudges out the final claim (‘There’s poetry, but here’s wine’ [l.14]) through the framing of the italicised, meaningless phrase with formal endrhyme. Groarke manages her uninvited guests in ‘Folderol’ and ‘House Wine’—the disappearing lover, his lover, the wine buff—by harnessing the sonnet’s formal powers. Throughout Other People’s Houses is the sense that a house isn’t the same thing as a home; likewise, though the sonnet may represent a house, the poet might not necessarily feel at home within it. Groarke’s final sonnet from Other People’s Houses , ‘The Haunted House’, suggests that although the sonnet, like the story it tells, might be ‘threaded by voices’, these same voices may not make one feel at ease: Think of rooms threaded by voices. Think of home: the typewriter chipping away at the small hours; a stack of ancient newspapers and the scissors surely blunted by this time. ‘Think of home.’29

The resonances between the house and the poem are clear, again— with the ‘rooms threaded by voices’ recalling the ways in which sonnets become haunted by past sonnets, past ideas, past stories and past writers. Similarly, the repetition of ‘Think of home’, with the second occurrence placed, entreatingly, in speech marks, uses a perfect rhyme to underscore the earnestness of the message, but also to remark on the possible lack of efficacy of a form that insists too readily on convenient rhyme. We can’t think of home, or feel at home, just because we are told to. The sonnet concludes wistfully: ‘The time is now / and I will never step into this house again’ (ll.13–14). The finality of the moment as the poem ends in a negative assertion is immediately countered by the last word, ‘again’. Peter Sirr is another Irish poet who is preoccupied with homes, and with the sonnets that house them. Discussing his 2014 collection The Rooms , and its titular sonnet sequence, he displays (like Groarke) an interest in boundaries, whether beginnings, endings, or edges: In the new book, The Rooms , there’s a long sequence again, or a gathering of sonnets which all talk to each other. It’s that Rimbaud sense of a poem never being finished but abandoned. It’s that sense of trying something, of coming at it from another angle.30

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In the same interview, Sirr professes to an interest in sonnets while avoiding the associations that come with employing them by claiming, of the fourteen-liners in The Rooms , that ‘[t]hey’re not proper sonnets. There’s lots of internal rhyme going on, but they’re not really conventional sonnets, they’re fourteen-line poems pretending to be sonnets’. That Sirr describes poems as ‘an artefact built out of language’ in the same paragraph tells us why he might make the connection between almost-sonnets, rooms, and houses.31 One of the almost-sonnets from Sirr’s The Rooms, ‘House for Sale’ (which isn’t part of the titular sequence), concludes, with a near-rhyming closing couplet: open the windows, put the sign on the lawn someone else will come in, sniff the air, begin again.32

This sense of beginning again, combined with the idea of displacement or homelessness, has its roots in what Sirr describes as the ‘continuum of existence’, in which ‘one individual life is never the full story’. These lines remind us that an unlived house, like an unwritten sonnet, is an empty one—while a house that we no longer live in can play tricks on our memory after we’ve gone. Sirr takes a particular interest in cities, as they contain ‘layers and layers of other experiences’, which generate similarly complex memories: ‘[t]he membrane between past and present is very thin and permeable’, because ‘[m]emory is a constant admission of these other lives into the present’.33 Yet houses, and sonnets, can also act in this way, becoming a conduit for memories that can precede or even outlive them. Sirr’s 2013 almost-sonnet sequence ‘Housed Unhoused’, part II of his longer sequence ‘The Rooms’, interweaves the acts of poem-making and home-making, while returning to familiar themes. The first poem, just 13 lines long, ends: […] Robed with home we go from room to room moving with grace, lords of our little universe.34

The self-consciously graceful movement of the internal rhymes and alliteration tells us that Sirr’s speaker is imagining a poet writing himself into a poetic home. The faint echoes of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, where ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of

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Michelangelo’, recall the affectations of cultural savants, ‘lords of [their] little universe’, who have little to offer except their artistic pretensions. Interestingly, the first time this couplet occurs in Eliot’s poem, it is set on its own on lines 13–14, as if to conclude an opening sonnet which, although following no clear metrical pattern, does include end-rhymes.35 ‘Little universes’ are shaped into and voiced by the ‘little songs’ of the sonnet form. The second poem of Sirr’s sequence, which this time has 14 lines, begins: Who could forget the poet’s house, the one he made when he ran out of money and time and what the world couldn’t provide he supplied himself, in verse after verse?36

Here, the idea of a ‘poet’s house’ written ‘in verse after verse’ upturns in intriguing ways the metonymical connection between stanza and poem, and room and house, by making the poem a fictional substitution for a ‘real’ house in the real world. The implication seems to be that if a poet can ‘supply’ a house for ‘himself’, then he will never be truly homeless. At the same time, however, the materialistic implications of ‘money and time’, which suggest that the poet wrote reams and reams of poetry ‘in verse after verse’ just for financial stability, insinuate that poem-building is not always a wholesome endeavour. From then on in ‘Housed Unhoused’, the membrane between ‘poet’s house’ and ‘real’ house becomes ever more permeable, so that an absent house might be an empty poem, and the poet might slip between them, as both engender the same response of fear and anxiety within him. Thus, the closing sestet of the third sonnet announces: This is the absence the house proposes, the emptiness we rush to fill when we enter, eyes darting from corner to corner, until we’ve hammered ourselves into it.37

Here, the faint echoes of Yeats’s famous contention to poets to ‘hammer your thoughts into unity’ underscore the sense that these lines are as much about the poem-as-house as about a literal house that the poem imagines.38 Therefore, ‘rushing to fill’ the ‘absence the house proposes’ begins to resemble writer’s block, with the poet desperate to fill the blank

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page, to ‘hammer themselves’ into the empty space and take up residence within it. Sirr’s sequence is haunted by empty homes and empty spaces—a fear that is grounded in writer’s block, but also by an anxiety about homelessness that is not necessarily about being without a home but about being in the wrong home. If we extend this analogy to writing, this might mean being ‘unhoused’, to use Sirr’s own term, within one’s own poem—as if somehow the poet took the wrong turn while making his verse. It might also lead us to consider the position of the reader, who might not take the cues the poet has left for them. In the fourth almost-sonnet of ‘Housed, Unhoused’, Sirr builds on the idea of a loved one losing their house, and possibly also their memory, to consider the relationship between home and others. Here ‘someone we love’ might also be a reader looking for clues within a poem, but finding none, and feeling suddenly displaced: as someone we love tries to put the key in the door and tries again, and looks back, unhoused at the sudden strangeness of everything there.39

Sonnets are haunted—by the voices of past writers, by the performance of reading and also by the ghosts of what they might have been. The idea of the sonnet as a place at once familiar and strange is illustrated beautifully by the metaphor of the haunted house, visited both by what has come before and what will come after. In a recent trio of sonnets, ‘Ghost’, Seán Hewitt extends this metaphor to see his speaker ghost, and be ghosted by, a troubled man who ends up outside his family home—so much so that the speaker wonders if the man ‘was only me, or a dream of myself’, asking to be ‘allowed back into the cold room of my life’.40 The house, like its sonnet-house, is both haunted and haunting, both inviting and cold. In exploring ideas of homes, homelessness and domesticity, sonnet writers exploit the basic truths of the everyday: people will always need homes to live in, and writers will always need poems to house their imaginations. Groarke, homeless within the masculine, hegemonic sonnet form, can employ metaphors of domesticity in order to haunt its fringes. Meanwhile, Sirr’s almost-sonnets negotiate ideas of homelessness and of being at home; as the sonnets risk breaking down by being nearly, but not quite, sonnets, so does the experimental poet risk being cut adrift, or ‘unhoused’, from the tradition. It is apposite that the third and final

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section of Sirr’s ‘The Rooms’ sequence is titled ‘Drift’, and that its closing (13-line) almost-sonnet ends with a metaphor of watery indecision: I could feel whatever I was drifting out and didn’t stir to call it back, not wanting to flounder continually in the same current.41

By employing domestic topics to play with the sonnet form, Groarke and Sirr find an uncertain home in which they are often aware of ‘the sudden strangeness of everything there’.42 Yet domestic and spatial metaphors also provide a benchmark of normality that enables them to negotiate the murky waters of poetic tradition. The final sonnets prevaricate between attempting something new, risking ‘flounder[ing] continually in the same current’, or riding the crest of the wave that others have formed.

5.2

The Domestic and the Everyday

The examples of Groarke and Sirr have demonstrated how the domestic space can function as a microcosm for larger questions about the place of the poet in the world. Within modern Irish poetry, the symbolism of the ‘domestic’ is extended to the idea of the everyday—familiar places, locations and events act as a springboard for broader musings, and normality can even become fetishised. For Eavan Boland, it was Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’, with its celebration of the ‘local row’ of the Iliad and, in turn, the fight between the Duffys and the McCabes, that opened up thematic space for the sonnet and brought it out of the court.43 Meanwhile, Regan suggests that in one of his earliest sonnets, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, Kavanagh was already celebrating ‘the attractions of the local and ordinary’ through the poem’s ‘boldly alliterative’ celebrations of the dance at ‘Billy Brennan’s barn’.44 Sonnets by Irish poets often harness the ‘local and ordinary’ by focusing on small, everyday locations. Some unsettle the relations between domesticity and the everyday. Sirr’s ‘In the Graveyard’, for example, imagines mundane lives being repeated after death, so that those who have ‘lived and died in the same place’ return home to ‘climb into their beds’ in an almost tedious act of haunting, with ‘whatever was theirs still theirs’.45 Leontia Flynn’s sonnet ‘Poem for Christmas’ employs scatological humour to describe Christmas drinkers who, having been turned out from bars, ‘turn to the wall, and, as one man, start to piss’, but yet, ‘this city’ is the one to which, the speaker says,

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‘I must belong’.46 The promise of a ‘Poem for Christmas’, which recalls something written on a well-meaning but saccharine card, is upturned in Flynn’s brutal yet familial poem. Comparatively, MacNeice’s early sonnet ‘Poussin’, written in loose Petrarchan form as if to ironise the juxtaposition between the elevated and the everyday, responds to a painting by the French Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665),47 known for his sensuous style, in terms of a facetious flight of fancy. ‘In that painting the clouds are like golden tea’ it begins, drawing a parallel between the endless pleasures of tea and paintings, so that ‘we never reach the dregs of the cup’.48 These sonnets challenge our idea of the mundane by celebrating the things we don’t normally notice: so Kavanagh’s speaker remarks upon ‘the couple kissing on an old seat’ in ‘Canal Bank Walk’, after vowing to ‘wallow in the habitual, the banal’;49 or revels in ‘the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard’ in ‘The Hospital’.50 Kavanagh’s language shares similarities with Thomas Kinsella’s surprising focus on ‘the church gravel’ in the opening line to his sonnet ‘Wedding Morning’, though the ‘bright gravel’ of the closing couplet, witnessing the families’ inevitable demise, is more sinister than Kavanagh’s potent ‘gravelled yard’.51 Tom Walker offers a ‘broader conception’ within Irish poetry of the ‘sonnet as yard’,52 drawing upon Muldoon’s sonnet ‘The Yard’—with its facetious coupling: ‘the inexhaustible adventures of a gravelled yard. / What has a bard to do with the poultry yard?’53 Muldoon’s derivative poem, drawing on a wealth of sources from English, Irish and Irish Gaelic traditions, juxtaposes the elevated with the banal, the forced rhyme between lines 12 and 13 (and not, as expected, between 13 and 14) suggesting that the ‘bard’ and the ‘yard’ do not make for a harmonious pairing. The idea of the ‘sonnet as yard’ has much wider implications for what the sonnet might and should contain. Discussing ‘The Hospital’, Regan notes that Kavanagh shows ‘how the quotidian world of the hospital bridge, the gate dented by a lorry, and the seat at the back of a shed are newly perceived and made worthy of poetry’. At the same time, Kavanagh’s voyeurism ignores value judgements, to challenge the very idea that a subject needs to be deemed ‘worthy of poetry’. As Regan puts it: Kavanagh legitimizes the sonnet form for writers in Ireland, granting poets like Heaney the confidence and authority to employ the form for their own local and national interests, and to shape it with the energies and rhythms of their own vernacular speech.54

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Heaney himself remarked that Kavanagh ‘makes us feel that any task, in any place, is an important act, in an important place’,55 thus echoing the famous parting shot of Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’: ‘Gods make their own importance’.56 But what is also clear from Heaney’s comments is a desire to render ‘any task’ or ‘any place’ important within his own poetic worlds. Heaney’s third sonnet from his 1987 sequence Clearances, which is often referred to by its opening line (‘When all the others were away at Mass’), was voted Ireland’s favourite poem of the last 100 years in 2015.57 Dedicated to Heaney’s mother Margaret, with the subtitle ‘In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984’, the eight-sonnet sequence is a revision and extension of ‘the tradition of the elegiac sonnet’, according to Regan. Of the third sonnet, Regan notes how: ‘[a]n ordinary domestic event […] is invested with special significance’. In an extensive, contemplative reading Regan notes how the domestic becomes imbued with religious importance, as Heaney’s recollection of peeling potatoes with his mother, announced by the simple ‘I remembered’, is sparked at her deathbed.58 There is a ‘strange inversion of domestic and sacred rituals in the poem’, Regan observes, ‘so that potato peeling becomes religious and sacramental in its watery element, while the last rites of the Catholic Church take on the semblance of a domestic task’.59 The deathbed rituals of the closing sestet are, indeed, more familiar than the opening memory. The poem opens with a couplet now so familiar that we nearly miss its oddness. Grammatically, the sentence is split into three parts, subdivided by ‘When’, ‘I’ and ‘as’, so that the relation between each isn’t quite clear. Is this a regular, or a one-off, event? When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.60

The comparatively narrow scope offered by the first word, ‘When’, tells us that perhaps a set of circumstances had led to the speaker and his mother being alone on a Sunday morning. Why did they not go ‘away’ to Mass with ‘all the others’? It is the unusually intimate circumstance of the event—‘I was all hers’—that Heaney’s speaker relishes. Discussing another of Heaney’s sonnets for his mother from the same sequence (number II), Bernard O’Donoghue finds an ‘elusive misusage’ in the ‘grammatical status’ of its phrasing, particularly (and like the third sonnet)

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in its use of tense. O’Donoghue suggests that this might be a deliberate method of employing ‘[l]inguistic difference’ to ‘achieve alliance’ between the poetic characters while keeping the reader at bay. For O’Donoghue, this underscores the fact that we are dealing with intimate, ‘special-occasion poems’ within Heaney’s oeuvre.61 To return to the opening lines of ‘When all the others’, we find a surprising collision between ‘Mass’ and ‘potatoes’, containing a ghost of an end-rhyme, while ‘potatoes’ alliteratures pleasingly with ‘peeled’. ‘Potatoes’ is a challenging word, poetically speaking: while its iambic potential is helpful, its three syllables are difficult to cleave into a poetic line, and it lacks obvious rhyming partners. Where other Irish poets use the word, they use it more cautiously: in Carson’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, the speaker ‘marched the drills / Of blossoming potatoes – Kerr’s Pinks in a frivelled blue’, so that ‘blue’ becomes the last word in the line.62 Meanwhile in Kavanagh’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, ‘potatoes’ appear only in compound words such as ‘potato-spray’, ‘potato-stalks’ and ‘potato-field’.63 Conversely, by placing ‘potatoes’ at the end of his second line, Heaney draws attention to it. Potatoes are staunchly, almost tediously, unremarkable; yet they carry wider historical significance. Heaney’s opening sentence speaks of something that is likewise apparently unremarkable but actually unusual in the context of his own experience (a ‘special occasion’), and therefore imbued with its own quiet importance. Another sonnet that upturns the apparent familiarity of the domestic scene, and leads us to ask questions about the relationship between lived and remembered experience, is Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘Home Birth’ from her collection Parallax (2013). The narrative of the sonnet proceeds by viewing the speaker’s experience of giving birth from the perspective of her older child, who is very ill upstairs at the moment her little sister is born. The haziness of the speaker’s memory is reinforced by the poem’s claustrophobic employment of variants of the second person pronoun, a technique that may owe something to John Montague’s sonnet ‘Protest’, which similarly describes the birth of a daughter—though the focus is on the harsh reality of giving birth in hospital: ‘Your cries had stilled, anaesthetized, / and now only her protest was heard’.64 Here, the two female voices—mother and baby—are fused in a brief moment of uncertainly concerning whose ‘cries’ we no longer hear. In Morrissey’s sonnet, however, it is the two sisters who become intricately entwined:

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The night your sister was born in the living-room you lay on your bed, upstairs, unwaking, Cryptosporidium frothing and flourishing through the ransacked terraces of your small intestine so that, come morning, you, your bedding, me, the midwife even, had to be stripped and washed. Your father lifted you up like a torch and carried you off to the hospital.65

Thanks to the drama of the older child’s gastric illness—as signalled by ‘Cryptosporidium’ (l.3)—the ‘Home Birth’ becomes the incidental, almost dull, background to the domestic drama that is taking place upstairs. The suggestion that even the midwife ‘had to be stripped and washed’ implies that the effluence comes both from the by-products of birth and from the seriously ill daughter upstairs, whom the midwife perhaps stepped in to help. Though the sonnet takes a narrative turn in line 9, ‘You came back days later, pale and feverish’, the more startling turn actually arrives in the closing couplet, where the focus shifts to the perspective of the newborn girl, and her limited vision and viewpoint: in the baby’s focus her older sibling is ‘the white dot of the television’ who vanishes ‘before the screen goes dark’ (ll.13, 14), while in her older sister’s perspective she is the ‘black-haired, / tiny, yellow person who’d happened while you slept’ (ll.11–12). The quiet, pinpointed simplicity of the closing metaphor acts as surprising comfort in a poem that has been full of drama, with the interaction between the two young children allowing for an altering of perspective yet again. The children’s disinterest in each other is surprising, until we realise that the potential significance ascribed to that moment is the adult’s, not the child’s. Again, the disruption of expectation allows the apparent everydayness of the domestic scene to be challenged—but not by the unusual experience of giving birth at home. In Heaney’s ‘When all the others’ and Morrissey’s ‘Home Birth’, then, it is the idea of the domestic and the everyday that is challenged, questioning Burt and Mikics’s assumption that the sonnet is ‘a domestic form, small-scale, fit for times of peace’ in surprising and unsettling ways.

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5.3

‘Local Rows’: The Politics of the Domestic

You should never move a wardrobe Downstairs or upstairs. Wardrobes can cause wars, Especially civil wars.66

Frank McGuinness’s facetious opening statement to ‘The Wardrobe’, the concluding sonnet of a 7-sonnet sequence ‘The Age of Reason’, both mocks the ridiculousness of domestic squabbles and notes how quickly such situations can escalate, with ‘war’ sounding through the ‘Wardrobe’ of the title. ‘Civil wars’ might be an inflated parody of domestic-scale disagreements, but such wranglings often begin from the smallest ‘movements’ of things. Comparatively, Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ opens with a statement that might initially seem like bragging, but might also be self-consciously parodic, depending on how we read it: I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided: who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.67

Here, the interpretation depends on how we respond to the use of the comma in the opening line. Are the ‘times / When great events were decided’ also ‘important’, like the ‘places’ Kavanagh mentions? Or are these ‘events’ actually faintly ridiculous, like the ‘pitchfork-armed claims’ over a ‘half a rood of rock’ that the second half of the sentence describes? Then again, these lines make us wonder whether most seemingly ‘great’ or even ‘important’ events were actually foolish, with ‘no-man’s land’ recalling the incremental territorial gains of the First World War. Just as Kavanagh’s ‘Canal Bank Sonnets’ make us question what the stuff of poetry might be and demonstrate how poetry can render anything lovable, so ‘Epic’ makes us consider how language can aggrandise or even concretise the importance of ‘places’ and ‘events’. Language is enabling as well as dangerous. This reading suggests yet another spin on the closing lines of ‘Epic’, which describe the entrance of ‘Homer’s ghost’, coming ‘whispering to my mind’: He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.68

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‘Gods’ here is multifaceted—referring at once to the ‘Gods’ of classical myth; to the self-aggrandising poet ‘making’ their importance through the art of poetry; and, perhaps most dangerously, to the power of language in staking its own claims to significance. Though the poet manipulates language into the form of the poem, after that it floats free. We might recall the closing lines of James Simmons’s Shakespearean sonnet ‘The Publican’, which describe how ‘Power is dangerous. If some wee shit / Tells the police, my father has to pay for it’, so turning on the power that language confers upon another.69 Here, the father publican is a Prospero figure, ultimately reliant on his audience to maintain his freedom. There is power, then, in the language even of ‘local rows’; indeed, Kavanagh’s labelling of his poem as ‘Epic’ tells us that even the small space of the sonnet can become epic in scope if the poet declares it to be so. An early version of ‘Epic’, eventually published in The Bell in 1951, was less assured of its own territorial significance—with the sonnet having an additional two lines as if apologising for the self-importance of the opening octet. The closing sestet and couplet are more apologetic than the opening section, adopting an evaluative questioning that confers more potential power onto the cynical reader: That was the year of the Yalta meeting. Which Was most important? Ours made no news Outside the Rocks of Snara. But I was there And Homer’s ghost came whispering in my doubt And said: ‘I made the Iliad from such A local row—The gods alone are great’ I asked forgiveness for the moment’s sin And walked along the headland of a field.70

Though Kavanagh’s question ‘Which / Was most important?’ does arrive in the later version, the tone in the 1951 version gives more power to the questioning, being followed by the statement ‘Ours made no news’. In the later version, ‘the Yalta meeting’, held at the end of the Second World War in 1945 to discuss the reconstruction of nations damaged or destroyed by Nazi Germany, is changed to ‘the Munich bother’, which refers instead to the events leading up to the Munich Agreement, signed in 1938, which was later reneged upon by Hitler. Regan suggests that ‘[e]ven for allowing for Irish neutrality in the Second World War, “the

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year of the Munich bother” provocatively plays down the importance of the international crisis’;71 additionally, the shift from the end to the beginning of the war is more facetious in that the ultimate ‘importance’ of this event could not have been overstated. Lastly, where in the later version the poet/speaker sets up a parallel between himself and Homer so that the latter confers confidence on the former—‘I inclined / To lose my faith […] / Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind’ (ll.10–12)—here the speaker leaves the consequences of his conversation more open-ended. We are unsure whether the speaker asks ‘forgiveness for the moment’s sin’ for thinking himself ‘great’ like the ‘gods alone’ or, more controversially, for doubting the significance of his poetry and the place of that poetry. The alterations in word choice and form underline how spatial and temporal changes, and the language that describes and occupies this space and time, can have untold importance. Similarly, a small patch of ground can become epic in significance—whether within international wars, ‘local rows’, or the territorial wrangling of national conflict. This challenges the contention that began the contemplation of the ‘domestic’ within the modern Irish sonnet: that it is a theme suited only to peacetime. In fact, political sonnets often use the local and domestic as a way of increasing the discomfort or pathos of a political situation. The threshold between the domestic and the political is felt keenly in Paul Muldoon’s sonnet ‘The Sightseers’, in which a family trip to see a roundabout turns quickly sinister. The opening octet, which sees an old car overloaded with family members, jokes how they ‘had set out’ to visit ‘the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley’.72 The turn comes, appropriately, in line 9, where the initially gentle anecdote told by ‘Uncle Pat’ takes us to far darker places—we learn that his encounter with ‘the B-Specials’ ended with him still having ‘the mark of an O’ on his forehead ‘when he got home’ (ll.2, 9, 14). The ‘O’ of the pistol, evoking the shape of the roundabout, underscores how everything is ultimately interconnected, and that no adventure in Northern Ireland can quite escape the Troubles. The pathos of ‘The Sightseers’ is enhanced by its inclusion in the collection Quoof (1983), in which the titular poem refers to the Muldoon family name for a hot water bottle. The setting of this fourteen-liner is so domestic that it appears almost too familial, embodying what Regan describes as ‘the intimacies and estrangements that language can beget’,73 so that that the strangeness of the poem comes not from the unusual word

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that haunts these lines (‘Quoof’), but from the ‘strange bed’ that the hot water bottle occupies.74 Yet it is the ‘word’, rather than the bottle itself, that Muldoon’s speaker carries through life as a ‘sword’ (l.8), playing on their happily anagrammatic interaction. The weapon-like potential of individual words is borne out in the metaphor that concludes the poem, which tells us that even a made-up word might be underestimated, a ‘shy beast / that has yet to enter the language’ (ll.13–14). There are faint echoes of the conclusion of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, a couplet that comes at the end of a second stanza of 14 lines: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?75

Yeats’s warning, couched within an almost-sonnet of its own, celebrates new beginnings at the same moment that it appears to fear them.76 For Regan, this is the moment in ‘The Second Coming’ when the ‘speaker’s presence’ is ‘made manifest’, so that the poem ‘turns from an opening octave, not towards a resuming sestet, but towards the convulsive birth of an entirely new sonnet’.77 Muldoon’s barely-articulated word is a ‘shy beast’ rather than a ‘rough’ one, but it is also a sly one, like the ‘Quoof’ itself, which haunts but does not quite enter the poem. From a hot water bottle to the ‘Second Coming’, then, but perhaps this is the point; sonnets, like the language that they contain, can creep up on us, make us think about questions of scale and remind us that we don’t quite know when the apparent fripperies or comforts of the domestic will transgress into something more ominous. Muldoon’s ‘A Trifle’, also in Quoof , operates in a similar way. The fourteen-liner opens, anecdotally, in the past perfect continuous—‘I had been meaning to work through lunch / the day before yesterday’—and proceeds to describe the speaker’s attempts, on hearing a bomb alert in his office building in Belfast, to move past a woman holding a trifle.78 The poem wobbles with possible plays on the idea of a trifle—asking whether it is the repetitious bomb alert, rather than the dessert itself, which has become ‘trifling’—and positioning the moment of not-happening, of being stuck in a rather mundane present, at the centre of the poem. That something might happen but might also not happen reminds us of the power of language to unsettle even as it seems familiar. The poem seems haunted by Iago’s aside in Shakespeare’s Othello, where he describes the handkerchief he will leave as ‘proof’ of Desdemona’s infidelity:

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I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin And let him find it. Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs of holy writ. This may do something. The Moor already changes with my poison: Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons Which at the first are scarce found to distaste But with a little art upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur.79

Though there is a literal ‘napkin’ in the scene, Iago’s awareness of the potential of ‘conceits’ to be ‘Dangerous’ tells us that it is the language that surrounds the item, and which Iago will pursue to tragic effect, that turns ‘Trifles light as air’ into ‘confirmations strong’. The transmogrifying effect of such language changes objects, and the words that refer to them, from something that is ‘scarce found to distaste’ into ‘poisons’. Similarly, Muldoon’s trio of sonnets tells us that a small item, such as a hot water bottle or a trifle, can both mean and not mean, and that a traumatic memory can transform a mundane act into a disturbing recollection. Reading Muldoon’s sonnets from Quoof , Regan suggests that they leave us ‘on the very threshold of entry into meaning’;80 Muldoon manipulates the sonnet form so that, like the small words and spaces on which each sonnet turns, the form itself might both mean and not mean. Its potential, and its potential danger, operate at this threshold too. Other sonnets by Northern Irish writers put the actualities of the Troubles front and centre stage, but in so doing they remain attuned to the ways in which violence encroaches on everyday lives. John Hewitt’s sonnet ‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’ opens with a vivid picture of ‘Shielded, vague soldiers, visored, crouched alert’:81 there is a faint echo here of the ‘terrified vague fingers’ of Leda in Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’,82 with both suggestive of a fear of the unknown. Yet Hewitt employs a relatively formal rhyme scheme (abab cdcd effe gg ), almost Shakespearean in its regularity, to underline the unremarkable everydayness of what at first appears to be an abnormal situation. Little surprise, then, that Hewitt’s sonnet unfolds into a jaded description of the repetitions of violence: Night after night this city yields a stage with peak of drama for the pointless day, where shadows offer stature, roles to play, urging the gestures which might purge in rage

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the slights, the wrongs, the long indignities the stubborn core within each heart defies. (ll.9–14)

Hewitt’s closing sestet is surprising for its lack of actual people—though the first stanza contained the ‘vague soldiers’ and the second ‘Lads who at ease had tossed a laughing ball’ (l.5), by the final lines all we have left are ‘shadows’ and ‘gestures’, enhancing the sense that the ‘city’ is a ‘stage’ for a drama that has long lost its human element. Tellingly, there is a further allusion to Yeats in the final line, which employs a cynical and almost cruel inversion of the conclusion of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: ‘I hear it in the deep heart’s core’. Hewitt’s soldiers, shadow puppets on an uncaring stage, are doubly silenced within their own echo chambers, their ‘stubborn cores’ resonating not with the beauty of ‘water lapping with low sounds by the shore’, but instead with the anger of ‘long indignities’. The hazy nostalgia of Yeats’s speaker in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as he stands ‘on the roadway, or on the pavements grey’,83 appears to be a gentle echo in Tom Paulin’s ‘In The Lost Province’ (1980), another sonnet in which an everyday location sparks political comment. Jonathan Huftstader calls Paulin’s poetry from the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘pre-political, in the sense that it expresses feelings about a place, not a rationally drawn set of conclusions as to what is wrong with it and what ought to be done’. Like Hewitt’s ‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’, Paulin’s poem uses a place—this time, the Ormeau Road in south Belfast—as a springboard for a contemplation of the ‘fanatically oppressive rigour of Ulster politics’, as Hufstader calls it.84 The narrator describes ‘a haze of absence’ over Belfast, noting that it seems ‘strange’ that he once ‘lived there’.85 Here, once more, is the word ‘strange’, the adjective that comes to mark the threshold between the familiar and the unfamiliar as everyday places turn into something else. Yet the poem remains ‘pre-political’ in the sense that nothing really happens. Though the sleepiness of the opening octet is challenged by the possibilities of activity in the closing sestet, where ‘men / Are talking politics’ (ll.9–10), we are left unsure whether anyone in this silent, absent town has the energy to take action. Though other sonnets by Irish and Northern Irish poets probe more closely the political resonances of time and place, they still appear to hover on the threshold of action. For instance, Heaney’s ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ offers an elegy for the ‘croppy boys’ of the 1798 rebellion, therefore romanticising political action while avoiding direct incitement of action in the present. Regan discusses the circumstances

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behind Heaney’s composition of the sonnet, with its allusions to the 1798 Rising resonating with the circumstances of its first publication in the collection Door into the Dark in 1969. Regan notes: Heaney confirms that there was a self-consciously subversive design in his use of the sonnet form for a poem celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of 1916 and its roots in the Rebellion of 1798: ‘My poem about the croppies was particularly pleasing to me because it was a sonnet. It was an example, if you like, of an official English-poetry form, but one that incorporated what had been sub-cultural material during my growing-up – ballads about ‘98, and so on. This was a matter of deep political relevance, and it was important that it be acknowledged.’

There is something subversive, outrageous even, in the way Heaney exploits this most ‘English’ of forms, as he sees the sonnet, for a poem that celebrates and even fetishises Irish nationalism. Heaney noted himself, ‘[b]y the mid-Seventies, to recite “Requiem for the Croppies” in Ireland in public would have been taken as a gesture of solidarity for the Provisionals’,86 but his apparent note of surprise seems disingenuous. Heaney’s sonnet contains all of the elements needed for both pathos and recitation. Every phrase takes up one line, as if marking out a marching beat, and there are only three words in the whole sonnet that contain more than two syllables.87 In the opening lines, the speaker— voiced by ‘the ghost of a fallen rebel’, as Regan puts it88 —fuses domestic and militaristic details into his tale so that once again, the everyday becomes a focal point for the ‘local rows’ that are taking place. The emphasis placed on the lack of domestic comforts—‘No kitchens on the run, no striking camp’—reminds us of the unsuitability of the croppies to their role, as they are little more than boys, unable to fend for themselves. When combined with the litotes of ‘A people, hardly marching—on the hike—’,89 where the usually trochaic ‘marching’ is contained within a plodding, halting, iambic pentameter, it is brought home to the reader how ill-suited these apparent rebels are to their task. County Westmeath-born poet John Ennis deals with the same subject matter in his sonnet ‘The Croppy Boy’, which was first published in Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing in 1979. In conversation both with Heaney’s ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ and with the original Rebel song ‘The Croppy Boy’, Ennis plays upon a national knowledge of the song that Leopold Bloom remarks upon in James Joyce’s Ulysses :

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‘They know it all by heart. The thrill they itch for’; they’re ‘all lost in pity for croppy’.90 Ennis’s sonnet challenges such unfocused, collective pathos. Instead, his narrator (a more cynical and bitter version of Heaney’s speaker), is both ‘naïve’ and knowing: On wet cobbles to the sweaty rope, you’ll halo me. Naïve, O yes, my blond teenage hair is styled like the French. I’m not crying. ----------------------------------------------------------Rousing Christ, ladies do with me what they please. While I die, blackbirds sing up the fat-arsed trees.91

The sonnet refers directly to the traditional song ‘The Croppy Boy’, which opens with a description of the birds who ‘did whistle and sweetly sing’, becoming an innocent bystander to the eventual death by hanging of the croppy boy who—like Heaney’s and Ennis’s narrators—is relating his own death: ‘I was mounted on the scaffold high’.92 Yet Ennis’s poem lacks the pastoral beauty of either the original song or Heaney’s version. Ennis’s reference to the ‘blond teenage hair’ of the croppy boy reminds us that the nickname derives from the close-cropped haircut of the rebels, who styled their hair to resemble the French revolutionaries who had inspired their leader, Wolf Tone. Adjectives such as ‘sweaty’ and ‘fat-arsed’ add a pungent, sickly note that is far removed from Heaney’s elegiac tone. While Heaney’s ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ stands as a collective statement of grief for the fallen of the 1798 rebellion, Ennis’s sonnet, like the original song, recounts the experience of one rebel, who was betrayed by his cousin and then denounced by his father; he is given the anonymised label ‘the croppy boy’ following his family’s disavowal. Seán Golden notes how Ennis’s sonnet has ‘discovered again the sense of personal loss and betrayal involved in the earlier version of the song’, while ‘adding a contemporary sense of brutality to the reality of the situation’.93 But Ennis also sexualises the original story by suggesting repeatedly that ‘ladies’ have fetishised the croppy boy’s death (‘ladies do with me what they please’ [l.11]). Though this sense of motherly pity, which spills into something more, might be a sardonic response to the closing couplet of the original song, which describes how ‘all good people who do pass by / Just shed a tear for the croppy boy’, it also builds on the passage from ‘Sirens’ in Joyce’s Ulysses where the same song is sung. Here, the response of the barmaid, Lydia, is heavily euphemistic:

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On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for the croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, repassed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton producing through their sliding ring.94

While Joyce’s passage sees the original ‘croppy boy’, and the song that tells his tale, corrupted by beer and sexuality, Ennis’s sonnet explores the subject of sexual betrayal: From their suite rooms the yogurt mouths of hypocrites Spit me out like bile. No lusty Patrick sucks their tits.95

The women here are part Cleopatra, part snake, feeding on, and then regurgitating, the story of the croppy boy; the visceral rhyme between ‘hypocrites’ and ‘tits’ enforces the sense of disgust and recalls the play on ‘passing’ (going to the toilet) and ‘repast’ (eating) suggested by ‘passed, repassed’ in the passage from Joyce’s ‘Sirens’. The sonnet’s experiments with form and content are equally giddying. The poem appears initially to follow a relatively rigid rhyme scheme (abab cdcd), but it begins to break down as the couplets take over from line 9 (ee ff gg); meanwhile, the lines are long and arduous, with new sentences popping up where they please. Yet the form persists, ending in a final rhyming couplet that strains for conclusion as if willing the boy to finally expire: Mother. It’s cruel. Yeoman bar us any last good-bye. Yesterday I danced, tapped a jig. Noon, see me die. (ll.13–14)

Here, the final twist in the knife comes from the form of the sonnet itself, turning in on its own narrator as the time comes for the boy’s death with the inevitability of the closing rhyme. The poem is as ‘cruel’ as the others who have betrayed this dancing fool. We are reminded of Heaney’s double sonnet ‘Act of Union’, from North (1975), which through ‘imagining the imperial voice of England addressing a heavily pregnant Ireland’, as Regan puts it, becomes ‘an unsettling poem’ by virtue of ‘the collision of despairing vision and aesthetic satisfaction’;96 thus we witness the beautiful cruelty of Ireland’s ‘stretchmarked body, the big pain / That leaves

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you raw, like opened ground, again’.97 It’s an admission Heaney makes, too, in ‘Punishment’, also in North: ‘I am the artful voyeur’.98 Political sonnets, and violent sonnets, see ‘artful voyeurs’ enacting their own wrangles with their despairing, truth-telling selves, their poems becoming contested spaces in turn.

5.4

Conclusion: The Familiar and the Strange

Paula Meehan’s sonnet ‘Single Room with Bath, Edinburgh’, from her 2009 collection Painting Rain, opens with a description that befits the poem’s eerily familiar title. ‘Single Room with Bath’, a phrase so recognisable as to be almost unnoticeable, takes on new connotations in the context of sleeping ‘in a room where someone died’.99 The sonnet proceeds to describe in vivid detail the nightmare the speaker has in this room, but she is eventually woken by an external noise, ‘part human, part wild’ (l.12). The sense of claustrophobia that the poem builds up—which is released only by its closing phrase, once the speaker wakes, ‘refugee from someone else’s death’ (l.14)—is enhanced by the narrow confines of the sonnet form. Recalling Wordsworth’s own preoccupation with the sonnet as a ‘narrow room’, here Meehan uses the regularity of metre to create the impression of an institution, with the room’s ‘narrow bed with polycotton sheets’.100 The familiarity of repetition becomes the very thing to fear: a sensation confirmed by a rigid rhyme scheme (abba cddc efg efg ) that follows its own predetermined path. The enfolding nature of the last two triplets enhances the mounting sense of claustrophobia. A telling word at the beginning of the second stanza, however, is ‘strange’ (‘my face was pied / and strange to me’ [ll.4–5]), and it is a term that occurs with noticeable frequency in sonnets by Irish writers that are set in domestic or familiar places. In ‘Quoof’ Muldoon takes his word for the family water bottle to a ‘strange bed’;101 in ‘Housed, Unhoused’, Sirr describes ‘the sudden strangeness of everything there’ after a house, once occupied, has been emptied;102 and in ‘In The Lost Province’, taken from a collection entitled The Strange Museum, Paulin’s speaker comments: ‘strange I lived there / And walked those streets’.103 In discussing sonnets by Irish writers, Regan notices ‘the strange inversion of domestic and sacred rituals’ in Heaney’s ‘When all the others were away at Mass’, and ‘the intimacies and the estrangements that language can beget’ within Muldoon’s sonnets.104 Domestic sonnets often hover on the threshold between the familiar and the strange, with the potential

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of one to become the other, or even to be substituted for the other. For some Irish poets, this has political resonance as writers write in a language that, while familiar, is not really their own, and in a form that is part of someone else’s tradition. This is in Heaney’s mind when he comments that the sonnet is ‘an official English-poetry form’;105 consider, too, the reluctant form-filler of Leontia Flynn’s sonnet ‘Boxes’, performing a typological act of rebellion: You write ‘Yes Please’ for sex?; and ‘Northern Irish’—‘N. I.’ Which also, privately, stands for ‘N[ot] I[nterested] …’106

Yet, reading Flynn’s conclusion also reminds us to consider the possibility that a poem or poet might be ‘not interested’ in engaging in wider political debate. Just because a writer is Irish or Northern Irish, and just because they’re writing against a background of political or cultural debate, does not mean that they necessarily wish for these elements to enter into their verse. Using that adjective again, Peter Sirr comments beautifully how ‘in a strange way, in Ireland, marginality is almost privileged; marginality is part of the Irish identity’. For him, marginality is potentially dangerous, as its risks becoming fetishised as part of the tradition. This further limits the scope of the poetry that Irish writers can produce. Sirr argues that though ‘poetry is of its nature a form of dissent, an activity on the fringe of consensus’, for me poetry doesn’t necessarily come from a place of dissent as such; it may be there in some way, but it doesn’t proceed from that, it doesn’t start off as a political act in that direct or thought out or coherent kind of way. It’s much more instinctive, emotional, imaginative.107

Modern Irish poetry always runs the risk of being read as political, or as dissenting, whether its politics are foregrounded or obscured. Modern Irish sonnets run the additional risk of being interpreted as writing out of, or against, a tradition that is appropriated by, or even forced upon, the poet. Yet the domestic sonnets of Irish writers show us that ‘local rows’ can extend beyond the political, and that a sonnet-house, like the surprising comforts of Wordsworth’s ‘narrow room’, can offer protection from the outside world as well as commenting on it. Setting a sonnet in a familiar environment allows poets to ask wider questions about the

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marginal place of every poet—as they grapple with the familiar and the strange, writing both inside and outside of the margins of everyday life.

Notes 1. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), p. xvi. 2. Amy C. Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007), p. 6. 3. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 21. 4. Heather Dubrow discusses this connection in ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, in A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 25–45 (p. 36). 5. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. First published 1958; translated Maria Jolas, 1964 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 6. 6. Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 13–14. 7. William Wordsworth, ‘Nuns fret not’, in Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Major Works (first published 1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 286, ll.1, 14. 8. See Burt and Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet, p. 17. 9. Seamus Heaney, ‘7. The Skylight’, Glanmore Revisited, Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 37. 10. Adam Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 52. 11. Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 13. 12. Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 5. 13. Wes Davis, ‘Vona Groarke’, in Wes Davis (ed.), An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 829. 14. Des O’Rawe, ‘Habitations and Odysseys’: review of Other People’s Houses by Vona Groarke; Shelmalier by Medbh McGuckian; Seatown by Conor O’Callaghan; and The Company of Children by James Simmons, The Irish Review, 25 (Winter 1999–Spring 2000), 160–164 (161). 15. See Vona Groarke, ‘Open House’, in Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999), pp. 15, 16. 16. Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 198.

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17. Groarke interviewed as part of an article on Irish poets living abroad, ‘What daffodils were to Wordsworth, drains and backstreet pubs are to me’, by Rosita Boland, Irish Times, 12 March 2011: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-daffodils-wereto-wordsworth-drains-and-backstreet-pubs-are-to-me-1.570730. 18. See Groarke, Other People’s Houses, ‘Contents’ (n.p.). 19. Groarke, ‘Open House’, Other People’s Houses, p. 16, ll.13–14. 20. Ibid., ll.91–92. Italics in the original. 21. Groarke, ‘House Plan’, Other People’s Houses, p. 15, ll.1–6. 22. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’, in Angela Smith (ed.), Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 336–349 (p. 336). 23. Groarke, ‘Open House’, ll.11–12. 24. O’Rawe, ‘Habitations and Odysseys’, p. 161. 25. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, p. 5. 26. ‘Folderol’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 27. Groarke, ‘Folderol’, Other People’s Houses, p. 19, ll.4–5, 7–8. 28. Groarke, ‘House Wine’, Other People’s Houses, p. 26, ll.13–14. Italics in the original. 29. Groarke, ‘The Haunted House’, Other People’s Houses, p. 55, ll.1–4. 30. Peter Sirr interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy, The Poetry Ireland Review, 114 (December 2014), 90–99 (96). What Sirr attributes to Rimbaud is actually a phrase that W. H. Auden attributed to Paul Valéry: ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned’. See W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 2007), ‘Author’s Forewords’, p. xxx. 31. Sirr interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy, p. 97. 32. Sirr, ‘House for Sale’ (for André Frenaud), The Rooms (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2014), p. 14, ll.13–14. 33. Sirr interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy, p. 91. 34. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, Part 2 of The Rooms sequence, The Rooms, pp. 35–43, first poem (p. 35), ll.11–13. 35. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 3–7 (p. 3), ll.13–14. The rhyme scheme of these opening lines is aabccddeefgg hh. 36. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, second poem, p. 36, ll.1–4. 37. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, third poem, p. 37, ll.9–12. 38. Yeats writes in the essay ‘If I Were Four-and-Twenty’, ‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half asleep: “Hammer your thoughts into unity”’. See Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 263–280 (p. 263). 39. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, fourth poem, p. 24, ll.12–14.

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40. Seán Hewitt, ‘Ghost’, Tongues of Fire (London: Vintage Digital Editions, 2020), n.p., ll.37, 39. 41. Sirr, ‘Drift’, part 3 of The Rooms sequence, The Rooms, pp. 44–56, last poem (p. 56), ll.11–13. 42. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, fourth poem, l.14. 43. See Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, in Antoinette Quinn (ed.), Collected Poems (London, 2005), p. 184, l.14; Boland, ‘Discovering the Sonnet’, in Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (eds.), The Making of a Sonnet (New York and London: Norton, 2008), pp. 39–48 (p. 44). 44. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 169. Regan cites Kavanagh, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, Collected Poems, p. 15, l.2. 45. Peter Sirr, ‘In the Graveyard’, Selected Poems (1982–2004) (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2004), p. 92, ll.1, 13, 14. 46. Leontia Flynn, ‘Poem for Christmas’, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 23, ll.6, 9, 11. 47. See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/nicolas-poussin. 48. Louis MacNeice, ‘Poussin’, in Peter McDonald (ed.), Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2007), p. 4. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abab cdcd efg hhf . 49. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, Collected Poems, p. 224, ll.6, 3. 50. Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, ll.14, 8. 51. Thomas Kinsella, ‘Wedding Morning’, rept. in Hirsch and Boland (eds.), The Making of a Sonnet, pp. 250–251, ll.1, 13. 52. Tom Walker, ‘“an inconstant stay”: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Nicholas Taylor-Collins and Stanley van der Ziel (eds.), Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 49–70 (p. 58). 53. Paul Muldoon, ‘The Yard’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 April 1984: 462, ll.12–13. 54. Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 173, 178. 55. Heaney, ‘After the Synge-Song: Seamus Heaney on the Writings of Patrick Kavanagh’, book review, The Listener (13 January 1972), 55–56 (55). 56. Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, l.14. 57. See https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/when-all-the-others-wereaway-at-mass-tops-favourite-poem-poll-1.2135284. 58. Heaney, ‘When All the Others Were Away at Mass’, Clearances III, rept. Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), p. 309, l.12. 59. Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 187, 188, 188. 60. Heaney, ‘When All the Others Were Away at Mass’, ll.1–2. 61. Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 113; and see Heaney, Clearances II, rept. Opened Ground, p. 308.

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62. Ciaran Carson, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, The Twelfth of Never (WinstonSalem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1998), p. 85, ll.1–2. 63. See Kavanagh, ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, Collected Poems, pp. 36–37, ll.1, 5, 9. 64. John Montague, ‘Protest’, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1995), p. 121, ll.9–10. 65. Sinead Morrissey, ‘Home Birth’, Parallax (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013), p. 21, ll.1–8. 66. Frank McGuinness, ‘The Wardrobe’, sonnet 7 of ‘The Age of Reason’, Booterstown (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), pp. 72–78 (p. 78), ll.1–3. 67. Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, ll.1–4. 68. Ibid., ll.12, 13–14. 69. James Simmons, ‘The Publican’, The Long Summer Still to Come (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1973), p. 19, ll.13–14. 70. Kavanagh, typescript of ‘Epic’ for The Bell (November 1951), the Kavanagh Papers, UCD, KAV/B/5 (13), ll.9–16; lack of punctuation as in the original. 71. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 171. 72. Muldoon, ‘The Sightseers’, in Poems, 1968–1998 (London: Faber, 2001), p. 110, ll.3, 7. 73. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 198. 74. Muldoon, ‘Quoof’, Poems, 1968–1998, p. 112, l.3. 75. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Edward Larrissy (ed.), The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 90–91, ll.21–22. Lines 9–22 of the poem are set out as a separate block of 14 lines. 76. Helen Vendler offers an extended reading of ‘The Second Coming’ in terms of what she calls Yeats’s experiments in ‘making the sonnet monstrous’: see Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 170–173. 77. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 164. 78. Muldoon, ‘A Trifle’, Poems, 1968–1998, p. 120, ll.1–2. 79. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson/Arden Shakespeare, 1998), Act 3, Scene 3, ll.324–332 (pp. 229–230). 80. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 199. 81. John Hewitt, ‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’, in Frank Ormsby (ed.), The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1991), p. 176, l.1. 82. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, The Major Works p. 112, l.5. 83. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, The Major Works, pp. 19–20, ll.12, 10, 11.

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84. Jonathan Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 119. 85. Tom Paulin, ‘In the Lost Province’, The Strange Museum (London: Faber, 1980), p. 16, ll.4–5, 2. 86. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 179. Regan quotes from Heaney, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000), pp. 19–20. 87. Heaney, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, Opened Ground, p. 22; see ‘infantry’, ‘Cavalry’, l.9, and ‘Vinegar’, l.10. 88. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 180. 89. Heaney, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, ll.2, 5. 90. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 273, 274. 91. John Ennis, ‘The Croppy Boy’, Dolmen Hill (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1977), p. 515, ll.5–7, 11–12. 92. Seán V. Golden discusses the lyrics to ‘The Croppy Boy’ in ‘Traditional Irish Music in Contemporary Irish Literature’, Mosaic, 12.3 (Spring, 1979), 1–23. 93. Ibid., p. 10. 94. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Johnson, p. 274. 95. Ennis, ‘The Croppy Boy’, ll.9–10. 96. Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 182, 183. 97. Heaney, ‘Act of Union’, Opened Ground, pp. 127–128, second sonnet, ll.13–14. 98. Heaney, ‘Punishment’, Opened Ground, p. 117, l.32. 99. Paula Meehan, ‘Single Room with Bath, Edinburgh’, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), p. 69, l.1. 100. See Wordsworth, ‘Nuns Fret Not’, l.1, and discussions above; c.f. Meehan, ‘Single Room with Bath’, l.2. 101. Muldoon, ‘Quoof’, l.3. 102. Sirr, ‘Housed Unhoused’, l.14. 103. Paulin, ‘In The Lost Province’, ll.2–3. 104. See Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 188, 198. 105. Heaney, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller, pp. 19–20. 106. Leontia Flynn, ‘Boxes’, Drives, p. 22, ll.13–14. Ellipsis in the original. 107. Sirr interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy, p. 90.

CHAPTER 6

The Amatory Sonnet

The sonnet has almost become synonymous with the love poem in the popular imagination; but things were never this straightforward.1

Don Paterson’s comment on what has become known as ‘the amatory sonnet’ suggests that the history of this subcategory is more complicated than one might first expect; moreover, his emphasis on the ‘popular imagination’ implies that the sonnet as a form employed by poets is very different from public perception or received ideas. Ever the traditionalist, John Fuller claims that despite ‘the versatility that its continued use in our post-symbolist age has preserved for it, it should be remembered that its prime original use was as a love lyric’.2 Yet Burt and Mikics contend that although ‘[t]he first well-known sonnets in English, like the bestknown sonnets in Italian and French, concern romantic or erotic love’, this love was ‘both returned and unreturned’, so that even the history of the amatory sonnet is far from straightforward. Indeed, of the roughly 200,000 sonnets that were produced in Europe between 1530 and 1650, they claim, ‘[m]ost were not love poems, but poems of compliment or dedication appended to treatises in law, divinity, or other subjects’.3 Joseph Phelan suggests that the form’s historical association with the ‘patriarchy’ means that its depiction of love and sex has been problematic from its very beginnings. Citing the foundational examples of Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, he notes: © The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_6

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Both its chivalrous elevation of women to the status of unattainable neardivinities (Dante’s Beatrice) and its tendency to objectify the recipient of the poet’s attentions (Petrarch’s Laura) render it complicit with patriarchy in certain obvious ways, and produce on the part of many women poets a desire to subvert or reverse its habitual gender roles and characteristics.

Writing on the nineteenth-century woman poet in particular, Phelan argues that she responds to this challenge by exploiting the sonnet’s ‘association with an interior and often secret life of longing and desire’.4 But when we turn to the sonnets of modern and contemporary Irish poets, both women and men, the situation becomes more complex still; poets exploit and upturn the apparent interiority and secrecy of the form in order to challenge diehard associations between the sonnet and the amatory, as well as reshaping the form according to more personal interests and desires. Derek Mahon’s sonnet ‘Exequy (from the Italian of Petrarch)’ translates or, more accurately, adapts poem 292 of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (‘The Songbook’) (1327–1368), ‘Gli occhi di ch’io parlai sí caldamente’ (‘Those eyes of which so warmly I would speak’), which is written following Laura’s death.5 Canzoniere contains sonnets and other poems written to Laura both before and after her demise, which later editors have divided into ‘Poems written in the lifetime of Madonna Laura’, and ‘Poems written after the death of Madonna Laura’. Linking the death of Laura to the demise of ‘love poetry’, Mahon’s version ends: Now there will be no more love poetry: the vital flow has dried up in the vein and the strings whimper in a minor key.6

The declarative, universal tone of Mahon’s version is a revision of Petrarch’s original, which reflects a personal response to grief. It is unsurprising that Mahon’s poem is entitled ‘Exequy’, referring to funeral or burial rights, as the parallels between grief, death and the end of creativity are central. In contrast, J. G. Nichols’s more literal translation ends: Now here I make an end of songs of love: the flow of my invention has dried up, and I am fit for nothing but to grieve.7

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Mahon notes in his foreword to Echo’s Grove (2013), which contains this sonnet, that he has ‘taken many liberties’ with Petrarch’s original, ‘in the hope that the results will read almost like original poems in English, while allowing their sources to remain audible’.8 Yet Petrarch’s statement that ‘the flow of my invention has dried up’ appears to become something of a challenge to Mahon, who reinvents his forebear’s lines to comment more fully on the relationship between the sonnet, the love poem, creativity and inevitable death. Indeed, through its very inventiveness and its renewal of a centuriesold form, Mahon’s sonnet speaks against its own central claim that ‘Now there will be no more love poetry’ (l.12). Stephen Regan elaborates on this irony, noting that even ‘[t]he whimpering strings in the final line are entirely [Mahon’s] own’, and concluding that: In the moment of carrying out its funeral rites, it shimmers with the possibility of renewal. Even as it turns from love poetry to elegy in a plaintive minor key, it speaks eloquently of the persistence and durability of the sonnet over centuries. In its subtle adaptation of Petrarch, it acknowledges and invigorates the sonnet as a form pre-eminently associated with love and loss, and it reminds us that poems will be born of other poems.9

Mahon’s adaptation of Petrarch’s original, and his reinvention of the poem as ‘Exequy’, emphasise that as long as the form continues to exist, there will never be ‘an end of songs of love’; however, the ability of the sonnet to both enshrine the frailty of human experience and to outlive the individual means that wherever we find an amatory sonnet, death will never be far behind. The amatory sonnets of the modern Irish tradition explore this indelible link between ‘love and loss’, both thematically and structurally, as much to extend, celebrate, renew or cast aside love as to cheat death, or even bring back the dead. Extending the metaphor of creative invention, amatory sonnets also often explore the written as well as the spoken qualities of the form so that they become knowing and self-questioning. Sonnets parallel such considerations with a contemplation of what ‘loss’ might mean—whether this is a loss of a lover, of a relationship, or even of self-confidence. Greg Delanty’s ‘A Common Story’ plays, from its very title onwards, on the cliché of the amatory sonnet. The description of a leave-making couple resolves itself in a Classical metaphor that is part self-conscious poetrymaking, part cynical recollection: ‘I looked back and you are Eurydice

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/ […] Neither of us can do anything to turn you’.10 The confusion of tenses suggests that the attempt at remembering a love story might be as inauthentic as the crafting of verse, an idea underlined by the penultimate word of the sonnet, ‘turn’. Using as metaphor Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus, whom he attempted to sing back from the dead, adds further layers; though Orpheus was successful in bringing her back to life, neither was allowed to look back. Eventually, unable to contain his delight, Orpheus looked back and Eurydice disappeared.11 The ‘Common Story’ of the poem reminds us that this is one of the most popular of the Classical myths and, as such, it will have been told (and used for metaphor) many times over; it also makes us question the sincerity of the roles of Orpheus and Eurydice that the speaker and his past love adopt in the poem. Vona Groarke adopts a more literal response to the idea of ‘writing’ amatory sonnets by describing, in ‘Folderol’, her speaker’s humiliation at being cuckolded confounded by being ‘covered with your smudged disgrace’, having previously written words on her lover’s ‘thighs and back’.12 Groarke literalises and subverts the metaphor of love writing within a sonnet, but might also be making a sly reference to Leda’s ‘thighs caressed / By the dark webs’ in Yeats’s perverse amatory sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’.13 Frank McGuinness takes the voyeuristic love poem even further in the first of his sonnets ‘Four Ways to See Your Lover in Venice’, entitled ‘Bellini’, which uses analogies with visual stimuli in Italian art to describe how ‘A spreadeagled pose makes cocksucking / Easy’;14 or in the profane ‘prayer’ of the sonnet ‘The Comfort of his Body’, where the speakers pray ‘That your kind flesh, your heart, your cock, your wings / Be tender, hard, be mine’.15 The visceral qualities of such sonnets may owe something to Charles Baudelaire, and particularly to the publication of the sonnets of Les Fleurs du Mal , which first appeared in 1857. Regan contends: To Baudelaire must go the credit for having brazenly established a new set of standards for the love sonnet, displacing conventional nineteenthcentury pieties in favour of a love in which ‘teeth and talons are / the fashion’ and in which the heart has become a place of ‘ulcerated passion’.16

Regan also points to Baudelaire’s letter to Armand Fraisse in 1860, in which he discusses the flexibility of the sonnet: ‘everything can fit into the Sonnet, buffoonery, gallantry, passion, dream, philosophic meditation’.17 Love, too, can encompass all of these things.

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Love is understood and interpreted similarly flexibly within the amatory sonnets of the modern Irish tradition. Discussing, and citing, Kavanagh’s ‘The Hospital’ as a critical and creative turning-point, Regan suggests that, following its arrival, ‘[t]he celebrated function of the amatory sonnet is now critically redefined: “For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap, / Snatch out of time the passionate transitory”’.18 Kavanagh’s concluding couplet—itself ‘without claptrap’ in its almost prosy bluntness, its hexameters following a natural rhythm but refusing to bend to the pressures of iambics or end-rhyme—certainly leaves much scope for imitation. And there is much evidence within the modern Irish tradition of amatory sonnets that are prosaic or even apparently unromantic in their celebration of love. But it is perhaps the second part of Kavanagh’s assertion—that ‘we must […] / Snatch out of time the passionate transitory’—which is more useful for a reading of these sonnets, as so many seem preoccupied with containing love and time, both of which are depicted as ‘transitory’. The sonnet form, weighted by its own complex history, acts as a ballast against the fleeting qualities of love and time; but this same history adds its own unavoidable restraints.

6.1 My Funny Valentine: Intimacy and Humour in the Sonnets of Paula Meehan The appeal and the challenges of the amatory sonnet are summed up by Diana Henderson, where she notes that the sonnet ‘is a little poem with a big heart. At its core lie subjectivity and gender’.19 Gender issues have always been at the heart of Dublin-born Paula Meehan’s poetry. In a 2015 interview, Meehan credits Eavan Boland with ‘articulat[ing] some of the underlying issues and tensions around being a woman poet in our time’, and notes that she encountered Boland’s work ‘at a time when I wouldn’t have even bothered sending work out’ thanks to the scarcity of women’s names in literary journals. In Meehan’s amatory sonnets, in which the idea of ‘love’ extends far beyond sexual couplings, her choice of words, which often appear to contain their own secret codes, reflects her perspective that a poem is ‘an event in language that is managed by the maker’.20 The sonnet of Meehan’s that tackles the issue of the amatory sonnet most obviously is ‘Valentine’, in which the speaker tells the story of how her sister found,

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when stripping old wallpaper from the hall in thick black marker writ my name – paula Meehan kiss kiss love love – then yours, enclosed within a heart. An arrow.21

Meehan’s ‘writ’ is a sideways glance to such sonneteers as Shakespeare or Spenser, declaring their love with a flourish of their quill; but what she has written on the wall is neither eloquent nor particularly poetic, in its repetitiveness and lack of harmonious rhythm. The fact that the ‘you’ remains anonymous throughout the poem, in comparison with ‘paula Meehan’, however, refuses the past lover the power or significance of a Beatrice, a Laura or even a Dark Lady. The poem refuses to grant the ex-lover more than this scrawl: they are merely someone who ‘came’ and ‘went’ and ‘came’, ‘first [to] mine, then hers, then mine again’ (ll.11–13). Then again, the use of italics to denote the poet’s name underlines that a name within a poem is no more than a persona, even if that name and the name of the poet are shared. Each lover is partly occluded by the poem’s devices. Yet a contrapuntal story enters, voiced through the intimacy of language and through the formal qualities of the sonnet form, and acting in defiance of Meehan’s stanza-breaking enjambments and apparently circuitous sentences. Perhaps there is still a love story to tell. Despite the apparent chattiness of the poem, we notice that the end-rhymes are regular, and that the patterns are formal, with the rhyme scheme unfurling into a surprising abcd abcd abcd ee. Meanwhile, the memories stirred by the sight of the wallpaper lead to some surprisingly intimate recollections of redecorating with her past lover: the hames we made of the job, woodchip (rough as furze

on the hands) overpainted green, the sound of Dylan in mono (ll.7–10)

A linguistic intimacy appears here too, underscored by the colloquial Irish term ‘hames’, which is used to mean making a mess of something. This use does not even appear in the OED, which instead gives as a definition ‘[t]wo curved pieces of iron or wood forming or attached to the

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collar of a draught horse, to which the traces are attached’.22 Recent discussions have suggested that, ‘it’s all too easy to put the hames on a horse the wrong way up, thus making a complete mess of things’.23 This might explain how the term, thought to be derived from Middle Dutch, became a colloquial Irish expression—but the fact that it is used so naturally within Meehan’s sonnet, that it doesn’t explain itself, is central to the intimacy that her poem demarcates between herself and her past lover. Moreover, the proximity of ‘hames’ and ‘furze’ in the poem, the latter a common term in Ireland (and Irish poetry) for a type of gorse,24 adds to the creation of a familiarity between speaker, remembered other and local audience. Additionally, ‘woodchip’ and ‘Dylan in mono’—the latter referring to a single channel of sound, as opposed to stereo, which has several—transport the poem to a very specific place and time, when the speaker was nineteen. This contributes to the private intimacies of this particular sonnet. Another intimacy enters the poem just as it reaches its conclusion, so that we are left uncertain whether or not the past relationship has been fully put to rest. Here, the speaker imagines the possibility of reliving past memories with her former lover, but claims: Never again. I’d sooner eat my words, the wall they’re written on. I’d sooner die. (ll.13–14)

Yet the irony is that the poet has already revisited the past and has crafted this sonnet as a tribute to it. She has ‘written’ another ode to her past lover, in the form of that most clichéd of love poems, the amatory sonnet, almost despite herself. The end-rhyme of the couplet reinforces this accidental declaration, as it recalls the epigrammatic conclusions of one of Shakespeare’s love sonnets. Through the declaration of non-writing, the claim that she’d ‘sooner die’ than go back there again, the words of the sonnet have turned on their speaker. Therefore, the finished sonnet, with its implied intimacies between the speaker and the imagined ‘you’, becomes a statement of passion if not, exactly, of love. In the same interview in which Meehan discusses the poet as a ‘maker’ who crafts with language, she reveals an anxiety that appears to oppose this stance, confessing that ‘sometimes poor materials made with urgency, the pressure of that, can make an extraordinary poem. Whereas the most worked and manipulated piece made with absolute consciousness of all the possibilities can sometimes actually end up dead’.25 In ‘Valentine’

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an almost subversive delight in the craft of the sonnet appears to work against the speaker’s desire to rid herself of painful memories of a past lover; in other sonnets, however, the craft of writing is foregrounded through the employment of an extended conceit. For example ‘Deadwood’, which could be a companion sonnet for ‘Valentine’—with its similar rhyme scheme (abcd abcd abcd aa) and presence in the same collection—explores, through the metaphor of gardening, whether intimacy is developed or destroyed by a long companionship. The sonnet seems unsure whether its own conceit, like the relationship it describes, has run its course by the close of the final line. As the poem proceeds, describing a couple doing a day’s gardening, the actual act of gardening becomes a metaphor for the toils, discomforts and irritations of a long relationship. Interwoven throughout are symbols that are often found in love poems, but they are upended or pared back: the rose is pruned; pearls, which might more often be associated with oysters, or with delicate gifts of love, become instead ‘my pearls of wisdom, my swinish garden lore’; and ‘cold, naked’ walls appear in place of erotic intimacy.26 Phallic jokes, too, are flattened into something far more prosaic (‘Your tool’s honed edge / whines’, [ll.8–9]), while the partner lays down ‘the law’ rather than his companion (l.10). The gentle humour of the poem speaks of an intimacy that is gained over time—in some places dull and unremarkable, but in others supportive and safe. There is intimacy, too, in the terms that are shared between them: ‘secateurs’ and ‘creeper’; ‘cotoneaster and ‘privet’ (ll.1, 2), the latter aurally close to ‘private’. Yet the sonnet’s title hovers over the poem; we are left unsure whether ‘deadwood’ describes the literal waste from the garden, or if what is left of the relationship is debris too. Therefore, while ‘Valentine’ becomes an amatory sonnet despite itself, ‘Deadwood’ sets out as a sonnet about a living relationship, but its suggestion of monotony implies that this same relationship might be dying out. In Meehan’s amatory sonnets, she demonstrates how any relationship can be a worthy subject for a love poem, as long as this relationship shares a common language. In ‘Valentine’ the past lovers share a vocabulary, a time and a place that is peculiar to them, and which immediately transports the speaker back to that setting; and in ‘Deadwood’ the relationship described functions, if shakily, on the shared companionship of the language of gardening. In another sonnet, ‘Desire Path’, Meehan even manages to turn the hoarding and stealing activities of a local gang into an amatory moment, as the tracks that the gang has worn down come

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to resemble ‘a desire path / on the sward’, ‘umbilical to some object of exotic love’.27 A different type of amatory sonnet appears, again in Painting Rain: Meehan’s ‘A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write (for Seamus Heaney)’.28 The title already tells us that the poem will explore further intimacies—through the use of the familiar name, ‘Wattie’, through the possessive pronoun (‘my’) and through the dedication to Heaney, which tells us that ‘to Read and Write’ in this case probably means reading and writing poetry as well as simple words. Meehan’s deceased ‘Grandfather’ is an absent presence in the sonnet; he seems to be accompanying the speaker as she is ‘Heading towards the National History Museum’ (l.1). Yet she remembers him through the ways in which he has shaped her use of language. Appropriately, Meehan’s speaker is obviously a writer and a reader too, describing what she sees while walking through Merrion Square: I look up: a heaving net of branches, leaf-bare against the pearly sky. There, like a trireme on an opalescent ocean, or some creature of the upper air come down to nest, a cargo with a forest meme, only begotten of gall, of page, of leaflight, of feather. (ll.4–8)

The sonnet is ornate with flowery language and relatively strict in its rhyme scheme (abab cdcd ee ff gg ). The lines sound like an incantation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the unusual words (‘trireme’, ‘gall’, ‘leaflight’) archaic and soporific, pointing to another intimacy, perhaps of the relationship between speaker and grandfather that is now past. Meanwhile, the compound adjective ‘leaf-bare’ could be taken right from the pages of Heaney’s poetry, with his predilection for similar verbal play. We sense both the beauty and the naivety of these lines, of a poet learning to write as she reads. The three similes are laden on top of one another to become almost claustrophobic, and it is only in the following line that we realise, anticlimactically, that the ‘trireme’, the ‘creature’ and the ‘cargo’ are all in service of describing a ‘book’ that can be seen ‘in the high reaches of the oak’ (l.9). But perhaps for Meehan’s speaker the accident of such an occurrence is worthy of wonder. It is useful to consider that in back of the poem is Robert Frost’s sonnet ‘Design’, which describes similarly how its speaker encounters an unusual event. Frost’s poem contemplates the beautiful, yet hellish, collision of ‘dimpled spider, fat and white’ and white moth

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on a ‘white heal-all’: the fact that this particular heal-all flower is white rather than blue, an extraordinary occurrence, enables the spider to entrap the moth.29 Meehan’s sonnet also takes place against a background of white, as her speaker crosses ‘the snowy paths of Merrion Square’, the branches are ‘heaving’ with snow, and the sky is ‘pearly’.30 What both poems contemplate is the accident—whether serendipitous or, in Frost’s case, possibly governed by ‘design of darkness’31 —that led the speaker to encounter the individual scene. Frost’s speaker becomes an unwilling witness to an act of unpreventable cruelty, as the spider snags the moth thanks to the ‘innocent heal-all’ acting as accidental camouflage (l.10); but in Meehan’s case the collision of nature and human action has resulted in her viewing this snowy scene, the book cradled within the branches of an oak. Both sonnets imply that each scene has been created for them to be witness to it; in Meehan’s poem, however, there is a more benign presence at work behind the scenes. The final metaphor of Meehan’s sonnet, in which the speaker becomes fused with book and tree in turn, allows for a Shakespearean flourish in its ringing closing couplet: a rootling cradled again in grandfather’s arms, freed of her history, her spells, her runes, her fading charms? (ll.13–14)

We are reminded of the materiality of book as leaf, as if the book that the speaker has viewed has returned to nature. But the speaker desires, too, that she might be ‘cradled again in her grandfather’s arms’, so that book and speaker become one. But what is a book without words, and what is a tree without leaves? Because the tree is ‘leaf-bare’ (l.4), the book is somehow replacing the leaves with its own, offering its own peculiar shelter. Seán Hewitt’s collection, Tongues of Fire, is bookended by loss and suffering: the first poem, ‘Leaf’, announces, in its opening lines, that ‘woods are forms of grief / grown from the earth’, with the resonances between ‘woods’ and ‘words’ clear throughout this poem and the volume as a whole.32 Both ‘Leaf’ and Meehan’s sonnet use the deep roots and the outstretched branches of the sonnet form to shelter the memory of a loved one—Meehan’s grandfather and, more obliquely, Hewitt’s father— even though they know that the relationship between woods and words, leaves and trees might be little more than an accident of language.

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The ‘Passionate Transitory’: Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know (2008)

[…] though I love you and I know there is no such thing as held time33

To wish to retell from a different perspective is common to amatory sonnets within the modern Irish tradition. In different ways, Meehan’s amatory sonnets desire to turn back time; to begin again; to adopt a different point of view. Likewise, in the above lines, from Seán Hewitt’s sonnet ‘Clock’, a cedar under which the speaker takes respite from the rain becomes a place of ‘held time’ in spite of all the movements of the natural world around him—a place where he can imagine, for a moment, that love can stand still. Looking back in time, Leontia Flynn’s ‘Casablanca, Backwards’, from Drives (2008), asks what might have happened had the story of the film Casablanca (1942) been told in reverse, and from the woman’s perspective.34 Each of these sonnets responds in different ways to what Kavanagh terms in ‘The Hospital’ a desire to ‘Snatch out of time the passionate transitory’.35 Conversely, Paul Muldoon’s sonnet ‘Lag’—which parallels the story of Chang and Eng, the conjoined twins who gave rise to the term ‘Siamese twins’, with the tale of a transatlantic couple, ‘joined at the hip’36 —might be seen as an example of the dispassionate transitory. The triple play of the title, suggesting a lagging relationship and noting ‘the time lag’ between the two lovers (l.8), as well as the inevitable jet lag that follows travelling between North Carolina and Bayswater, London, points to the exhausting effects of intimacy as it stagnates over time. This is underscored in the closing sestet, in which Muldoon tells the story of how a drunken Chang tried to strangle Eng, only for Chang eventually to die first from a stroke, with Eng following him five hours later. The brutally frank description plays on the time difference between London, England and North Carolina, on the East coast of the US, to hint at a relationship that has gone as ‘sickly sour’ as Chang’s breath (l.11). Avshalom Guissin has explored the further twinning behind the paralleled narratives in ‘Lag’, to expose submerged instances of doubling: ‘The conjoined twins moved from Thailand (then Siam), where they were born, to North Carolina in 1839 after gaining their fame as a curiosity. They settled down, married two sisters and became plantation and slave owners’.37

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Though the parallels between the two pairs appear striking, they are in fact conjoined by the mathematical play of Muldoon’s sonnet. The twins moved from Siam to North Carolina; the couple in Muldoon’s present travels between London and North Carolina, though (conveniently) the ‘you’ in London is wrapped in a Siamese flag (l.7). The entire sonnet appears to embark on a flight of fancy to see how far such audacious twinning can be stretched or undermined. Rather than an expected division of the sonnet into two pairs of seven lines, to denote equanimity, Muldoon instead exploits the more traditional octet/sestet pattern. Employing a colloquialism for being drunk, ‘one over the eight’, to describe Chang, just after the turn in line 9, emphasises this structure (here divided into two quatrains and two tercets). This is reinforced by Muldoon’s reference to Eng’s living on ‘for five hours’ in the closing words of the sonnet (l.14), as nine (‘one over the eight’) plus five equals fourteen. Muldoon’s gameplay is underscored by Guissin’s discovery that Eng actually died just three hours after Chang, rather than five.38 Their relationship, like the play of the poet with the reader, and like the sonnet structure itself, is anything but balanced. Another audacious response to the passionate transitory, which similarly explores ideas of doubling and twinning at thematic and structural levels, can be found in Ciaran Carson’s sonnet sequence For All We Know (2008), set against the backdrop of the Northern Irish Troubles, and told ‘in the recent past’.39 The sequence tells the story of a romance of a couple—the man Northern Irish, the woman French—who meet in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast during the 1970s; but the narrative moves haphazardly across time and location, taking in Berlin, Paris and Dresden. An incredibly daring feat of poetic architecture, each sonnet is haunted by its doppelgänger, with the first 35 apparently being retold or replayed by a sonnet with the same title in the second half of the sequence. Neal Alexander describes each sonnet as a ‘non-identical twin’ of its other, with ‘the two halves mirroring and refracting recurrent themes, phrases, and images – a patchwork quilt, footprints in snow, an old watch – in a scintillating play of repetition and difference’.40 Incredibly, this doubling effect is perhaps the least complicated element of the sequence, as perspectives shift throughout so it is not as straightforward as the man telling his side of things in the first half and the woman telling hers in the second. In the double sonnet ‘On the Contrary’ (Part Two), the male protagonist, who we learn later is called ‘Gabriel’ (while she is ‘Miranda […] though some people call me Nina’41 ), claims

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that both of them ‘were brought up to lead double lives’.42 Alexander expands, suggesting that: Carson’s protagonists, Nina and Gabriel, find themselves living ‘double lives’ in more senses than one, not only because both grew up bilingual but also because the unpredictable and not always readily comprehensible course of events in the narrative provides them with frequent occasions to question their own identities, not to mention each other’s.43

The complex arrangements of the sequence allow for all sorts of doublings and multiplications to occur. Some poems are single sonnets in their first iteration and double sonnets or even quadruple in their second, or vice versa; lines from one sonnet appear in others that might, or might not be, their ‘non-identical twin’; and though the main language is English, sometimes the sonnets move into French. Because we know that both protagonists speak French, this adds to the ambiguity concerning who is speaking at any one time. Thematically, too, the plot concerns multiple examples of doublings. As Alexander explains, as the sequence is set in ‘Belfast during the Troubles, post-1968 Paris, and the febrile world of Cold War espionage in Eastern Europe, the text bristles with double agents and aliases, doppelgängers and look-alikes’.44 The sheer experimentation of the sequence is underscored in the sonnet ‘The Fetch’ (Part One), which opens, ominously, ‘To see one’s doppelgänger is an omen of death’.45 Does For All We Know risk its own demise as a consequence of so much thematic, textual, dialogic and linguistic doubling? It is perhaps telling that, in conversation with Elmer KennedyAndrews, Carson described For All We Know as ‘a kind of hall of mirrors with poems reflecting and commenting on others’.46 We also know that, structurally, the sequence has much in common with the arrangement of a musical fugue, which as Alexander puts it contains ‘contrapuntal variations and refrains […] so that images, phrases, and motifs recur repeatedly in different contexts. Additionally, the sequence appears obsessed with the number 7, while single sonnets are broken down into seven pairs of couplets’.47 Therefore, though Carson’s ‘hall of mirrors’ might seem like a haphazard or ridiculous arrangement, with ideas and themes reflecting endlessly and even pointlessly, this arrangement might be intricately ordered and deliberately unsettling, the poet a ringmaster at work.

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This multiple layering of theme, pattern and experimentation with(in) the structures of the form demonstrates how far the amatory sonnet can be stretched without collapsing. Carson’s sonnet sequence is undermined, even corrupted, by other forms such as the fugue and the novel—indeed, the blurb describes how ‘Carson’s novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue’.48 Yet, at its heart, and foundationally too, For All We Know is still a sequence of amatory sonnets, telling the story of a love that, in common with many sonnets within the modern Irish tradition, is overshadowed by death. Sharing similarities with Meehan’s amatory sonnets, For All We Know demonstrates how relationships develop, change—and go back on themselves. From the very beginning, Carson’s sequence demonstrates that even if two people speak the same languages, they might not speak them in the same way. Therefore, the very first sonnet describes how: I was grappling with your language over the wreck of the dining table. The maître d’ was looking at us in a funny way as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.49

On further inspection, we notice that this statement about ‘grappling’ with language appears in an opening poem that is titled ‘Second Time Round’, and that the meal takes place on ‘our anniversary, whether first or last’ (l.2). The lack of clarity over time, and the question of whether this happened once or was repeated (or almost repeated) many times over, underscores the ineffectiveness of language in memorialising or capturing a moment, as well as in ensuring true understanding between individuals. Brilliantly, this is emphasised in the very next sonnet, ‘Hotel del Mar’ (Part One), which describes how one of the couple, ‘abroad and ignorant in / the tongue you heard’, overheard another couple ‘whispering from a dinner table’, and ‘murmuring sweet nothings, you surmised, since it was Greek / to you’. This leads onto a contemplation of whether ‘we two’ might ‘ever / come across like that’.50 Later still, in ‘The Shadow’ (Part Two), a quadruple sonnet of 28 pairs of couplets, the speaker recounts a snippet of conversation: ‘Sometimes I wonder if we speak the same language, I said’.51 By exploiting clichés of miscommunication through language, Carson reminds us that words might be misinterpreted, and

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‘drifts’ not caught, not merely through a misunderstanding of words, but through more complex patterns of interference. The sonnets of For All We Know also use language, through repetition and refrain as well as tense, as a means of avoiding the inevitable death that we realise, towards the end of the sequence, will finish the love story that the sequence tells. The repetitions and refrains of Carson’s sequence delay the progress of the inevitable—the sense that once something is written or recorded, then it has really taken place. In ‘Birthright’, towards the end of Part One, Carson writes, ‘What is written has been written, these the words on the page’;52 but if has not yet been written, then perhaps it hasn’t happened at all. It is not until the penultimate poem of the whole sequence, ‘Je Reviens’ (Part Two), that we learn of one of the demise of one of the lovers.53 The next and final sonnet is entitled ‘Zugzwang’, a German word meaning ‘compulsion to move’ but used commonly in chess to refer to a player who is ‘obliged to move but cannot do so without disadvantage’, and to ‘the disagreeable obligation to make such a move’.54 In the first half of the sequence, ‘Zugzwang’ (Part One) draws analogies between the act of writing and the activities of negotiators in East Berlin, chess masters, litigants and choreographers, to note: so I write these words to find out what will become of you whether you and I will be together in the future.55

The irony of these words is only clear once we realise towards the end of the sequence that they are written in denial of the knowledge that this future will not come. Yet the title hovers over the second iteration of the sonnet, as if the speaker is forced to move to a conclusion despite their desire to continue to replay the same game in endless permutations, denying its ultimate outcome. Therefore, the sonnet’s ‘non-identical twin’ at the close of the sequence concludes, in the obstinacy of the present tense: so I return to the question of those staggered repeats as my memories of you recede into the future.56

The sequence denies the reader, and itself, the satisfaction of a proper ending.

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But Carson’s sequence suggests that there is another reason for not finishing satisfactorily. The poem as a whole enacts a tussle with language—and languages (French, English, German, Spanish)—that is never fully resolved. One of the epigraphs to For All We Know is from Glen Gould, ‘So You Want to Write a Fugue’; it notes how ‘Fugue must perform its frequently stealthy work with continuously shifting melodic fragments that remain, in the “tune” sense, perpetually unfinished’.57 For Carson, a sonnet sequence can also appear ‘perpetually unfinished’, not only because it can end only to begin again, but also because its sonnets can speak to each other as well as to other sonnets, by other poets, which have come before and will come after. Meanwhile, the reliance on ‘so’ to open so many lines of the sonnets indicates that we encounter each poem in media res. Alexander argues that ‘particularly on re-reading, the volume is also uncannily familiar, full of echoes, correspondences, […] not only within itself but also via intertextual reworkings of motifs or preoccupations from Carson’s earlier work’.58 Interlaced with the intricate intratextual and intertextual patterning of For All We Know is a contemplation of the ways in which the act of composition is always unfinished, as words continue to strain for the most harmonious mode of expression, forming part of a continuous process of beginning again. Therefore, Carson’s ‘non-identical twin’ sonnets ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part One and Part Two), in their search for both the right word and the right note, are integral to the sequence. In the first, the woman (‘Nina’), who is a pianist, describes in the opening lines her attempts to play different musical pieces after posing a particular question: Still the interminable wrestle with words and meanings? you said. I’d an idea you were quoting from something.59

In the second version of ‘Le Mot Juste’, the opening lines are similar, but Nina’s dialogue has been absorbed into the narrative, and the question has become a statement: Still the interminable wrestle with words and meanings. Flaubert labouring for days over a single sentence.60

The poem then proceeds to illustrate such ‘labouring’ with examples from musical lore and family history, while returning to motifs that have continued to play through the sequence: quilting, snow, the song Nina’s

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mother used to sing; and, tellingly, ‘The way the bread is full of unrepeatable bubbles / when you pull it apart’ (ll.9–10), a reference right back to the very first poem (‘Second Time Around’ [Part One]), where the couple debate what makes a perfect French loaf.61 ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part Two) concludes by turning in on itself, defeatedly: Still the interminable struggle with words and meanings. These words foundering for now over a single sentence.62

By declaring that ‘These words’ are ‘foundering’, but including the qualifier ‘for now’, Carson both draws attention to the inadequacies of language to convey ‘meanings’ and gives the poem space to breathe. It is ironic that the last line looks like a ‘single sentence’ but lacks a main verb (‘are’), as if Carson is even leaving room for improvement within the very phrase that declares itself to be foundering. The parallels with Flaubert’s ‘labouring’ (l.2) suggest that perhaps all of this often painful effort might be worth it; but they also tell us that the work might never quite be done—that ‘le mot juste’ might never be found. In this, Carson echoes Flaubert’s famous discussion with George Sand in a letter from 1876, concerning whether finding ‘le mot juste’ is ever possible, and takes up an idea that modernist discourse has rendered apocryphal.63 Carson’s poem, like the sequence as a whole, cannot find ‘le mot juste’ and is therefore stuck in a cycle of endless repetition. Yet at the same time, the unfinished, self-repeating nature of the sequence renders it more accurately reflective of a love story, with all its clichés and in-jokes and memories and shared intimacies. The twin sonnets act as a metonym for the whole sequence, each word agonised over only to be agonised over again. The act of labour becomes a labour of love.

6.3

Conclusion: Desire, Sex and History

Other than the intimacies of language, and the use of such intimacies to signal both communication and miscommunication, as well as a desire to trap or contain time and to ‘Snatch out of time the passionate transitory’,64 another quality that the amatory sonnets of the modern Irish tradition share is an interest in what connotes ‘desire’. In Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), Sonnet 72, ‘Desire’ becomes almost an enemy of ‘pure Love’:

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Desire, though thou my old companion art, And oft so clings to my pure Love, that I One from the other scarcely can descry, While each doth blow the fire of my heart; Now from thy fellowship I needs must part;

Though Desire is the speaker’s ‘old companion’, Astrophil ‘needs must part’ from it in order to pursue ‘pure Love’. By the closing lines, however, Desire has become a kind of monster, its greed so all-encompassing that it risks damaging not only love but also art itself: But thou, Desire, because thou would’st have all, Now banished art – but yet, alas, how shall?65

Sidney’s open-ended conclusion, asking ‘yet alas how shall?’, wonders how Astrophil might entirely ‘banish’ Desire to make way for pure love, as Desire has its own attractions. Within modern Irish poetry, desire carries these twin poles of attraction and fear: it can be overwhelming, can threaten even art itself, but it can never be fully banished. Meanwhile, though desire might not always be understood in a sexualised way, it can equally carry erotic charge. For some Irish poets, desire becomes embroiled with a sense of history as well as religious longing. In Kavanagh’s ‘Canal Bank Walk’, the revelatory beauties of the surroundings of the previously ‘banal’ Dublin Canal become a means for celebration that is entwined with amorous desire, sexual love and religious fervour: Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal Pouring redemption for me, that I do The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, Grow with nature again as before I grew.

The poem’s undertones flirt daringly with the idea of doing ‘The will of God’, while the next lines see the speaker acting as a ‘third / Party’ to a ‘couple kissing on an old seat’—the whole company making somewhat unabashed, though unlikely, bedfellows.66 Other poets are less comfortable than Kavanagh with the threesome of desire, sex, and religion. Regan uses the language of desire to discuss Boland’s sonnet ‘Heroic’ (1998), in which a schoolgirl attempts to pray

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to the statue of a patriot. ‘The idea of praying to statues’, he argues, ‘amplifies a strong concern with desire in a sonnet essentially concerned, like much of Boland’s work, with sex and history’.67 Using the monumental associations of the form as backdrop, Boland’s sonnet explores the relationship between sex and religion to acknowledge that when writing a sonnet in Ireland, contexts can never be fully ignored. Therefore, the expectation of Sunday worship strikes a sombre note: Sex and history. And skin and bone. And the oppression of a Sunday afternoon. Bells call the faithful to devotion.68

As in ‘Canal Bank Walk’, the collision of sexuality and religion is unavoidable, though here it is far more uncomfortable. This is underscored by the echoes of the closing lines of Louis MacNeice’s sonnet ‘Sunday Morning’, which likewise depict the ‘oppression’ of religion in terms of ‘the church spire’ whose bells peal out, as ‘skulls’ mouths which will not tire’.69 Both ‘Heroic’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ ask what place there is for someone who is not, in Boland’s words, one of ‘the faithful’, and see religious fervour as a bar to human expression and desire. But where MacNeice’s poem ends in a contemplation of the persistent deadening effect of the church, and its encroachment on everything around it, Boland’s commentary on religion acts as a springboard for something more provocative still. Ostensibly, ‘Heroic’ is a story of a confused schoolgirl who can find neither religious nor political icons from within the patriarchal civic symbols that surround her. The squirming awkwardness of the moment of prayer, or more accurately almost-prayer, contrasts with Kavanagh’s more confident pleasure-taking in watching the ‘couple kissing on an old seat’.70 Yet there is obvious longing in the girl’s savouring of the statue: The patriot was made of drenched stone. His lips were still speaking. The gun He held had just killed someone.71

The contemplation of the patriot’s lips, poised as if ‘still speaking’, results in a near kiss with the girl who is attempting to pray, so that ‘sex and history’ become fused:

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I moved my lips and wondered how the rain would taste if my tongue were made of stone. (ll.11–12)

Therefore, the declaratory closing prayer, ‘Make me a heroine’ (l.14), is double-edged. On the one hand, the knowing older poet is commenting on the way that women are simultaneously ‘ignored and excluded’ in order to explore ‘the troubled process of identity formatting where sexual politics and national politics are not easily reconciled’, as Regan puts it.72 On the other, the younger avatar of the poet is desiring a companionship, a pairing with the patriot, hero to ‘heroine’, in a way that is almost unknowingly erotic. Boland’s sonnet utilises the contrapuntal potential of the sonnet form to explore two ways of telling the same story, with the sonnet turning on the moment that the speaker ‘looked up. And looked at him again’, only for the patriot to stare ‘past [her] without recognition’ (ll.8, 9). To the impressionable adolescent of the poem, rejection becomes a challenge that she hasn’t the emotional tools to fully explore. Both Kavanagh’s ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and Boland’s ‘Heroic’ explore the politics of ‘prayer’ through a desire that is associated simultaneously with religious fervour and sexuality. For Kavanagh, as a middle-aged male poet, this twinning appears to comes easily, as his speaker asks the ‘unworn world’ to ‘give me ad lib / to pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech’.73 Yet he couches the whole in a controlled, regular sonnet whose Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg ) seems to stem any overflow of powerful feelings. Conversely, ‘Heroic’, uttered through the thoughts and words of an adolescent girl, is more subversive than it dares to say. It is no accident that, unlike the immortalised statue, the girl’s tongue is not ‘made of stone’.74 Where Boland’s sonnet opens with a contemplation of ‘Sex and history’, it also makes room for the inevitable encroachment of Irish history and politics into most, if not all, modern Irish poems—even if this is only through the eyes of the reader or critic. It is difficult for poets to write of any pairings without inevitable analogies being inferred with Ireland and Britain, Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Loyalist, North and South. In For All We Know, in a sonnet tellingly entitled ‘Treaty’ (Part One), Carson foregrounds this issue, with his protagonists asking what might happen should they been ‘born as another’:

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in order to encompass the other’s territory – this story we’ve been over so many times, inventing that which we might have been had we been born as another as truly we tell them a name that sounds like one of theirs.75

The awkward collocations and tenses of these lines tell us that encompassing ‘the other’s territory’ would require a complicated linguistic, historical and territorial backtracking. So, too, will a poem entitled ‘Treaty’ written by a Belfast-born poet always carry such connotations. There is acquiescent exhaustion in the phrase ‘this story we’ve been over so many times’, adding further pathos to the repetitions of Carson’s sequence, so that the constant retelling of the love story, something that the speaker does not wish to cease thanks to his desire to memorialise his lover, is accompanied by a far less palatable retelling of the political story of the Troubles. This is made doubly ironic when we recall that the couple first meets in Belfast during the Troubles; having only ‘just exchanged names’ with each other, a bomb goes off ‘at the end of the block’, ‘seven doors down’.76 In Carson’s story, the desire to ‘invent’ alternative lives is linked to a wish to rewrite the past. But this past is at once an individualised history, as epitomised by the intimacies of shared language, and a collective one. For Irish poets, amatory sonnets are burdened by the history and assumptions of the sonnet-as-love-poem, and by the external contexts of Irish politics. In their amatory sonnets and sequences, Carson, Meehan, Muldoon, Kavanagh and Boland stretch the form to shore off the love stories they wish to tell, reinterpreting the ‘passionate transitory’, in the knowledge that poems cannot stave off the passing of time or the encroachment of history. The most that they can aim for is that their sonnets become part of the present, or even that they might ‘recede into the future’.77

Notes 1. Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber, 1999), p. xiii. 2. John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 6. 3. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds.), The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 3.

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4. Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 6–7. 5. Francesca Petrarca (‘Petrarch’), Canzoniere, translated by J. G. Nichols (Manchester: Carcanet: 2000), Poem 292, p. 246. 6. Derek Mahon, ‘Exequy, from the Italian of Petrarch’, Echo’s Grove: Translations (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2013), p. 70, ll. 12–14. 7. Petrarch, Canzoniere, Poem 292, ll.12–14. 8. Mahon, Foreword to Echo’s Grove, pp. 15–18 (p. 15). 9. Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 402. 10. Greg Delanty, ‘A Common Story’, Collected Poems 1986–2006 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p. 11, ll.12, 14. 11. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/Orpheus-Greek-mythology. 12. Vona Groarke, ‘Folderol’, Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999), p. 19, ll.4–5, 7–8. 13. W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112, ll.2–3. 14. Frank McGuinness, ‘Four Ways to See Your Lover in Venice’, ‘1: Bellini’, Booterstown (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), pp. 36–39 (p. 36), ll.9– 10. 15. McGuinness, ‘The Comfort of His Body’, Booterstown, p. 58, ll.12–13. 16. Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 395–396. Regan cites from Poems of Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal, translated by Roy Campbell (London: The Harvill Press, 1954) p. 45. 17. This is Regan’s own translation of Baudelaire’s letters; he cites from Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance I: 1832–1870, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 674–677. See Regan, The Sonnet, p. 395. 18. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 173. Regan quotes from Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, in Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 217, ll.13–14. 19. Diana E. Henderson, ‘The Sonnet, Subjectivity, and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 46–65 (p. 46). 20. Janna Knittel and Paula Meehan, ‘“Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City”: An Interview with Paula Meehan’, New Hibernia Review, 20.1 (Spring/Earrach, 2016), 77–86 (77, 78). The interview took place in April 2015. 21. Meehan, ‘Valentine’, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), p. 60, ll.2–5. 22. ‘Hames’, n.2, OED online (www.oed.com). 23. See https://www.dailyedge.ie/make-a-hames-of-it-saying-3215325-Jan 2017/.

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24. ‘furze’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). The term is thought to be derived from Old English. 25. Knittel and Meehan, ‘“Nature Doesn’t Stop”’, p. 79. 26. Meehan, ‘Deadwood’, Painting Rain, p. 17, ll.2, 14, 5. 27. Meehan, ‘Desire Path’, in Dharmakaya (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), p. 44, ll.12–13, 14. 28. Meehan, ‘A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write (for Seamus Heaney)’, Painting Rain, p. 46. 29. Robert Frost, ‘Design’, in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 275, ll.1, 2. 30. Meehan, ‘A Remembrance’, ll.2, 4, 5. 31. Frost, ‘Design’, l.13. 32. Seán Hewitt, ‘Leaf’, Tongues of Fire (London: Vintage Digital Editions, 2020), n.p., ll.1–2. 33. Hewitt, ‘Clock’, Tongues of Fire, n.p., ll.9–10. 34. Leontia Flynn, ‘Casablanca, Backwards’, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 6. 35. Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, l.14. 36. Paul Muldoon, ‘Lag’, Hay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 26, l.1. 37. Avshalom Guissin, ‘“You Lie, An Ocean to the East”: The Immigrant, the Commuter and the Traveller in Irish-American Poetry’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Tel Aviv, 2018, p. 19. 38. Ibid., p. 19. 39. Ciaran Carson, For All We Know (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008), blurb, back cover. 40. Neal Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 136. 41. Carson, ‘Fall’ (Part Two), For All We Know, p. 85, l.1. 42. Carson, ‘On the Contrary’ (Part Two), For All We Know, pp. 66–7, l.1. 43. Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, p. 137. Both characters speak English and French. 44. Ibid., p. 137. 45. Carson, ‘The Fetch’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 32, l.1. 46. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘For all I know: Ciaran Carson in conversation with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’, in Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays, ed. Kennedy-Andrews (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 13–27 (p. 22). 47. Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, p. 11. 48. Carson, For All We Know, blurb, back cover. 49. Carson, ‘Second Time Round’ (Part One), For All We Know, pp. 15–16, ll.5–8.

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50. Carson, ‘Hotel del Mar’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 17, ll.1–2, 2, 5–6, 6–7. 51. Carson, ‘The Shadow’ (Part Two), For All We Know, pp. 79–81, l.48. 52. Carson, ‘Birthright’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 40, l.10. 53. Carson, ‘Je Reviens’ (Part Two), For All We Know, pp. 109–110. 54. ‘Zugzwang’, n., OED online (www.oed.com). 55. Carson, ‘Zugzwang’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 59, ll.13–14. 56. Carson, ‘Zugzwang’ (Part Two), For All We Know, p. 111, ll.13–14. 57. Carson, epigraph to For All We Know, n.p. Italics in the original. 58. Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, p. 138. 59. Carson, ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 28, ll.1–2. 60. Carson, ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part Two), For All We Know, p. 77, ll.1–2. 61. See Carson, ‘Second Time Round’ (Part One), ll.1–4. 62. Carson, ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part Two), ll.13–14. 63. See Flaubert to George Sand, 1876, collected in Lettres Choisies de Gustave Flaubert, ed. René Dumesnil (Paris: Jacques and René Wittmann, 1947), p. 149. 64. Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’, l.14. 65. Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 72, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 182, ll.1–5, ll.13–14. 66. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, Collected Poems, p. 224, ll.1–4, 5–6. 67. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 217. 68. Eavan Boland, ‘Heroic’, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 269, ll.1–3. 69. Louis MacNeice, ‘Sunday Morning, May 1933’, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), p. 23, ll.10, 11. 70. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, l.6. 71. Boland, ‘Heroic’, ll.6–8. 72. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 217. 73. Kavanagh, ‘Canal Bank Walk’, ll.9, 11–12. 74. Boland, ‘Heroic’, l.12. 75. Carson, ‘Treaty’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 19, ll.11–14. 76. See Carson, ‘Fall’ (Part One), For All We Know, p. 35, ll.1, 8, 6. 77. Carson, ‘Zugzwang’ (Part Two), l.14, and see discussions above.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

7.1

The Sonnet’s Insufficiency

The sonnet has a good claim to be one of the oldest and most useful verse forms in English. Like the engraving or the string quartet it provides simple yet flexible means to a classic artistic end: the expression of as much gravity, substance and lyrical beauty as a deceptively modest form can bear. The form is a minor one, but capable of the greatest things and, like all such forms which potential variety keeps alive, must jealously preserve its true lineaments and their rules.1

In the opening to his 1972 study The Sonnet , reissued in 2018, John Fuller adopts a language of veneration and protection of the form that still holds power.2 The form is ‘useful’, ‘simple yet flexible’ and ‘deceptively modest’; yet it has ‘true lineaments’ and ‘rules’, which can only ‘bear’ so much bending. Next, Fuller claims that ‘it is the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet which is the legitimate form, for it alone recognizes that peculiar imbalance of parts which is its salient characteristic’; however, the English sonnet ‘does something rather different with the form which is not quite as interesting or as subtle’, while ‘[c]ertain other freak varieties […] pay tribute only to the powerful echoes of the form that perversions of it essentially deny’. According to Fuller’s definition of the sonnet, most of the poems discussed in the present study would likely be dismissed as examples of © The Author(s) 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0_7

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what he terms either ‘strokes of brilliant licence’ or ‘the drudgery of persistent misunderstanding’.3 Fuller also refers the reader to Ezra Pound who, writing in an essay first published in 1934, claims that the sonnet ‘marks an ending or at least a decline of metric invention’, and ‘the beginning of the divorce of words and music’; in Pound’s mind, ‘by A.D. 1290 the sonnet is already ceasing to be lyric, it is already the epistle without a tune’.4 Yet it is the written features of such an ‘epistle’ that continue to hold an appeal, both in relation and in contradistinction to its oral potential. Paul Oppenheimer suggests that the sonnet was not intended to be spoken at all, claiming that ‘it is the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended for silent reading’ and is ‘the first lyric of selfconsciousness, or of the self in conflict’.5 We might also think of Helen Vendler’s response to Yeats’s use of the sonnet, where she suggests that what the form ‘meant to Yeats, historically speaking, was verse consciously aware of itself as written not oral’; this, when combined with its associations with the English lyric, ‘compelled from Yeats both his literary allegiance and his nationalist disobedience’.6 To read the sonnet form as Pound does, then, might be to misunderstand its capabilities. Oppenheimer claims that ‘[m]odern thought and literature began with the invention of the sonnet’, linking its flexibility to its appeal.7 Stephen Regan adopts a similarly flexible viewpoint, with his recent study The Sonnet (2019) updating and reframing Fuller’s more constrained perspective. Placing the onus on the reader, Regan contends: In reading sonnets, we need to be alert both to convention (what is clearly tried and tested) and to innovation (what is generally untried and untested), and so it helps to be acquainted with the history and development of the form. Even when they appear to be radically transgressive and disruptive, sonnets are often shaped by ideas and techniques that are already part of the tradition.8

Listening and looking out for the sonnet form has been one of the main approaches of this study, so as to acknowledge how sonnets can often be concealed within longer poems, can merely contain the whisper of the tradition or can alternatively be self-titled as ‘sonnets’ despite sharing few visual similarities. Therefore my approach adds a certain caveat to Regan’s: what use does it serve us in calling a sonnet a ‘sonnet’? Vendler’s take on Yeats is helpful in this regard, with her suggestion that ‘certain poems

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of his are better understood if we consider them as sonnets, even if they appear to be odd or “defective” ones’.9 At a reading and discussion given in January 2018,10 Paul Muldoon— who Alan Gillis claims has ‘predominated over’ the ‘phenomenon’ of the contemporary Irish sonnet11 —heard of the present project and used it as a hook for his reading. ‘Is this a sonnet?’, he would ask, proceeding to scan a poem briefly and then deduce that it might well be. The most effective, or indeed knowingly playful, example was his reading of ‘Symposium’, a poem that is constructed of a series of aphorisms that are begun but not fully resolved: Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.12

Reading out the poem, Muldoon cleverly made it sound like prose: conveying the, often meandering, discussions of an imagined Platonic ‘symposium’ as suggested by the title. Yet on paper, the relationship between the poem and the sonnet form is more obvious: it is constructed of two quatrains and two tercets, and it follows a loose rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efg efg, which is the same as Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’; like Yeats’s sonnet, it updates the Petrarchan form (usually abba abba cde cde) by incorporating a Shakespearean pattern in the ‘alternately rhymed quatrains of its octave’, to cite Vendler.13 The sonnet ‘Lag’, which faces ‘Symposium’ in Hay, also uses this form.14 In ‘Symposium’, Muldoon’s comment on, and repetition of, ‘one good turn’ (l.4) is surely a playful nod to the idea of the volta, yet draws our attention to the fact that there is at least one thematic twist in each line rather than just one in the whole sonnet. Muldoon’s example underscores the difficulty of applying the term ‘sonnet’ to a poem just because it has 14 lines. The poem seems to suggest that the term has as much currency as a cliché, each as apparently meaningless as the other. At the same time, however, Muldoon has taken the care to construct a formal sonnet and has done so throughout his career. Tom Walker has described in detail Muldoon’s prodigious contribution to the modern Irish sonnet, claiming that: ‘[f]rom his second collection Mules (1977) onward, a seemingly compulsive exploration has burgeoned forth, playing out not only in many standalone sonnets but also across longer sequences’,15 and reaching its zenith in Quoof (1983), Hay (2003) and Songs and Sonnets (2012) in particular. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing ,

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from 2015, contains several sonnets and several further almost-sonnets, including ‘Pip and Magwitch’ (which also appeared in Songs and Sonnets ), ‘A Night on the Tiles with J. C Mangan’ (a fourteen-liner split into five sections), ‘Honey’, a sonnet-as-elegy for Buddy Holly, and the closing sequence, ‘Dirty Data’, in which each page contains a long-line sonnet split into two quatrains followed by two tercets.16 Muldoon’s most recent collection, Frolic and Detour (2019), contains ‘1916: The Eoghan Rua Variations’, described as ‘a permutational series of nine near-sonnets, a war song of the Gaelic Irish soldier who took command of the Ulster Confederate Army after the 1641 Rebellion’. Meanwhile Muldoon’s response to the Coronavirus crisis, which was published in the Times Literary Supplement in July 2020, and moves from the US back to Northern Ireland, also comes in the form of a sonnet sequence, ‘Plaguey Hill’, its title a reference to Belfast’s oldest Christian Burial site, the Friar’s Bush Cemetery and Graveyard.17 In a 2012 anthology, Adventures in Form, Tom Chivers uses an analogy conceived by Muldoon—that ‘[f]orm is a straitjacket the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini’—as a springboard for the wider contention that, ‘form is a kind of willing restraint: an instrument of control wielded by the poem against its author’.18 At what point does the poet wrestle back power, or even break free, from the language or form that holds them back? Yet the use of ‘straitjacket’ three times within Muldoon’s analogy also reminds us that words can lose their power through overuse, so that familiarity breeds not contempt exactly, but certainly ennui. Similar questions were raised following the publication of one of the most outrageous and controversial examples of sonneteering from the past century: the American poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore’s 1000-sonnet collection M , published in 1938. Readers and critics reacted mainly with exhaustion to Moore’s outrageous publication project. Moore notes that the sonnets ‘are part of a larger work begun some years ago, still in progress, and which may never be completed’, joking that although ‘the unfinished work comprises some 50,000 sonnets’ at the moment of writing, most of them ‘(the reader may be assured) will never be published’. Moore justifies his decision to adapt the sonnet form, and the sonnet sequence, to what he describes as a ‘growing autobiography’, as follows: They do not pretend to be formal examples of the classic model, nor does the author claim, as some of his friends have insisted, that he has invented a form of his own. The very nature of the work is paradoxical; although the individual units are compressed, the scheme itself is expansive. Since

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it reflects the casual and contradictory elements of life, it is impromptu, informal, even haphazard. It is not a fusion but a diffusion; not fixed, but untameable, unpredictable, explosive.19

For Moore, the sonnet seems to be the most natural form in which to write, combining compression and expansion, the ‘fixed’ and the ‘untameable’. Commenting on Moore’s sonnet-making, Louis Untermeyer notes that ‘[t]he box of fourteen lines is so fixed in his mind that his casual fancies as well as his deeper conclusions are cast in the pattern’.20 Perhaps we might say the same of Muldoon, and his casual questioning of his own poetry. Yet William Carlos Williams, in another commentary on M , provides a different take by separating ‘the sonnet’ from the ‘form’ itself, and suggesting that Moore’s technique is a ‘revelation’. Williams notes: ‘For years I have been stating that the sonnet form is impossible to us, but Moore, by destroying the rigidities of the old form and rescuing the form itself intact […], has succeeded in completely altering my opinion’. He adds: The sonnet, I see now, is not and has never been a form at all in any fixed sense other than that incident upon a certain turn of the mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded: a statement, then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a direct reply, perhaps a variant of the original—but a comeback of one sort or another— which Dante and his contemporaries had formalised for their day and language.

For Williams, Moore has ‘broken through the blinding stupid formality of the thing and gone after the core of it, not of the sonnet, which is nothing, but of the sonnet form which is the gist of the whole matter’. Williams concludes, ‘I hadn’t the alertness of mind which Moore had to realize that it wasn’t the sonnet itself which was at fault in our day but the bad artists who used it’.21 Although Williams does not try to demonstrate how Moore separates the ‘sonnet’ from the ‘form’ in practice, he does imply that it is the hegemony of ‘the sonnet’ as a poetic idea that has often prevented poets from going near it. Within contemporary Irish poetry, there have been similarly experimental exercises to stretch the sonnet form. Iggy McGovern’s A Mystic Dream of 4 (2013) extends Moore’s idea of the sonnet sequence as creative autobiography to recount the life of the Dublin mathematician

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and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865). According to McGovern, Hamilton sent poems to Wordsworth, and favoured writing Petrarchan sonnets; McGovern notes, ‘[t]his suggests that Hamilton’s life might be a fit topic for a sequence of poems, specifically a sequence of sonnets’, and reveals that he has chosen ‘the more narrative-friendly Shakespearean form’. Again, we see an Irish poet turning to Shakespeare’s ‘English’ form thanks to convenience and familiarity. There is numerology at play here, too, reflecting Hamilton’s achievements, as well as McGovern’s own interests in physics: [T]he number four insists on recognition, reflecting [Hamilton’s] discovery of quaternions, four-membered numbers that today underpin spacecraft manipulation and cartoon character tumbling. The number of sonnets in the sequence is equal to the cube of four, and the title A Mystic Dream of 4 is from a line in one of Hamilton’s own sonnets.22

Applying even more complicated numerology, Micheal O’Siadhail’s recent poetic work The Five Quintets (2018) is divided into five sections, each of which is divided into five cantos. The first quintet, entitled ‘Making’, is made up of sonnets and haikus. The first four Cantos of ‘Making’ are each divided into five sections, each of which contains four haikus interspersed with four sonnets; the final Canto is made up of 15 sections, each of which similarly contains four haikus and four sonnets. The remainder of The Five Quintets explores other verse forms. Such complex structures lead us to consider the efficacy of the sonnet form. O’Siadhail takes pains in his introduction to explain his formal choices, noting that: The first quintet, ‘Making’, consists of haikus and sonnets, the great classic forms of the East and the West. The haikus and sonnets alternate in a form I like to call a saiku. The haiku allows a broader impersonal comment. […] The second quintet, ‘Dealing’, and the third quintet, ‘Steering’, are written in forms I devised for them; ‘Dealing’ has certain rhymes, while ‘Steering’ depends on stress. In ‘Steering’, when the people with whom I am engaging speak, italics are used. The fourth quintet, ‘Finding’, is in iambic pentameter and the fifth quintet, ‘Meaning’, is in terza rima.23

Whereas McGovern is content to apply a formal Shakespearean sonnet form to his act of creative biography, O’Siadhail stretches the very limits

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of the sonnet and its capabilities. He interlaces relatively formal sonnets— with many following the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efg efg, like Muldoon’s ‘Symposium’ and Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’—with syllabically stringent haikus. Yet the lack of demarcated breaks between the poems, so that each section of each Canto continues by alternating an italicised haiku with a sonnet, creates a visually hybrid form, which the poet terms a ‘saiku’. This, when added to the fact that each is contained within a Canto, and in turn within a quintet, underscores the work’s far-reaching aspirations. In his Introduction, O’Siadhail notes that though Dante is a model for the work, the ‘tripartite model’ of his Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradis o) was ‘not enough’; at the same time, though the title ‘calls up thoughts of The Four Quartets ’, this too was insufficient. ‘Much as I am taken by Eliot’s poem’, O’Siadhail comments, ‘I always felt it needed a fifth part’.24 Aside from O’Siadhail’s complex structure and vast poetic ambition, leading the blurb of The Five Quintets to claim that it ‘takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century’, the invention of new forms, rhymes and metres to accompany sonnets and haikus implies that the sonnet is not fit, in the poet’s mind, to complete a full stocktaking. Moreover, by combining familiar forms such as the sonnet and haiku with entirely new forms and patterns, The Five Quintets makes it more of a challenge to listen out for the sonnet form, or to understand why it has been used. Understanding why the form has been used is as important as working out why it hasn’t been, particularly when a poet employs a range of sonnets elsewhere. For instance, though Paula Meehan uses the sonnet form to express many different perspectives on love and relationships, one of her most famous and moving poems, ‘Child Burial’ (1991), suggests that some types of love are too complex, and their pain too profound, to be constrained by the confined space of a sonnet. ‘Child Burial’ consists of 16 pairs of unrhymed couplets. In contrast to Meehan’s often enjambed and wordy sonnets,25 the lines are short and punchy, as if the speaker is forcing out the phrases in short breaths. From the brutal reality of the title, we are brought immediately to the harsh light of the first lines: Your coffin looked unreal, fancy as a wedding cake.

I chose your grave clothes with care,26

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Here ‘grave’ evokes the literal grave in which the child is to be buried, but also underscores, when paired with ‘wedding cake’, the outrageous gravity of the situation—a child, and a child’s parent, should not have to endure this. The intimacies of language that appear in Meehan’s amatory sonnets find similar expression in ‘Child Burial’. Yet the sonnet form isn’t employed. The speaker dresses her child in ‘your favourite stripey shirt’, and then notes how ‘I chose a gansy of handspun wool / Warm and fleecy for you’ (ll.4, 8–9). While ‘favourite’ and ‘handspun’ emphasise the care and affection that went into choosing the well-loved clothes, the use of the rarely-used regional term ‘gansy’ to mean a jersey speaks to a further intimacy of language between mother and child.27 This is extended later in the poem when the mother lists different names for her child, such as ‘lamb’, ‘calf’, ‘kind’, ‘nestling’, ‘suckling’ and ‘colt’ (ll.17–19), thus connecting the human and the animal through maternal metaphors. Meehan has discussed how working with and within the stresses of English poetry ‘seems to be instinctive’ in her. ‘I don’t labour too much,’ she adds. Yet the ways in which she connects poetry with motherhood suggest something pre-verbal: Maybe part of poetry, part of this urge to make dance in sound, is to reconnect with those incredibly safe and complex templates laid down before we even emerged onto the planet. So I’m interested in that, in connecting to the mother’s heartbeat.28

The pathos of Meehan’s poem is that the connections between the ‘safe and complex templates’ of the womb and the poem have broken down as the poet tries to convey what it is like to lose and then bury a child. Little surprise, then, that the poem comes in fits and starts; that 14 lines can’t contain all of its emotion; and that the ‘safe’ but perhaps too written and mannered ‘template’ of the sonnet isn’t quite sufficient. ‘Child Burial’ follows on from another, longer, poem, ‘Elegy for a Child’.29 Both poems are suffused with the pain that comes from not being able to keep a child safe, despite the mother’s efforts: in ‘Child Burial’, giving the child a ‘gansy’ to keep them warm because ‘It is so cold down in the dark’ (l.10) is heartbreakingly pointless. The speaker wishes to ‘spin time back’ (l.19), but knows that this is a futile desire; words will not bring the child back either. Perhaps the sonnet is too ‘safe’ for the expression of a pain that goes beyond words to a place ‘rooted deep down’. Both ‘Child Burial’ and ‘Elegy for a Child’ are contained

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within a collection, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, which contains no sonnets at all. Though some poets—like Merrill Moore in M , like Ciaran Carson in For All We Know, or like Anthony Cronin in The End of the Modern World 30 —work through grief and love and pain through the repetitions of extended sonnet sequences, Meehan’s choice not to express her grief through sonnets tells us that, for some poets, the form doesn’t quite match up. One sonnet might be insufficient, but many sonnets might not be suitable either. Therefore, it behoves us both to listen out for the sonnet form when it is there, and to acknowledge its purposefulness when it does appear, so as to consider the possible limitations of a form that has been tried and tested over several centuries. It might not be, quite, that ‘all possible cadences [have] been tried and exhausted in the sonnet’, a suggestion that Richard Murphy makes in his notes for writing his sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985),31 but rather that poets need to be attuned to the sonnet’s insufficiencies: both to allow the form to continue to be explored and celebrated, and to ensure that it doesn’t become stretched beyond recognition, so that it still keeps in touch with its history.

7.2

‘In All the Mayhem’:32 a Chronology for the Modern Irish Sonnet?

In the Preface, I wrote that a focus on sonnets by Irish poets composed between the beginning of the twentieth century and the present would allow me to pay particular attention to notions of national genealogy within the sonnet form. But I also wanted to remain open to the idea that a poet might not choose to adopt a particular form but might come across it by accident; or even that he/she might discover and adopt a form for reasons that exceed assumptions about how Irish poets might use English, or Shakespearean, or even Spenserian forms. Within the modern Irish tradition, a range of influences national and extra-national, contemporary and historical, and encountered through all manners of engagement, make it difficult to construct a picture of chronological development. W. B. Yeats, as a sometime sonneteer, famously dismissed Spenser’s sonnets written ‘[d]uring the last three or four years of his life in Ireland’ as ‘intolerably artificial’.33 But does reading sonnets automatically make them part of one’s literary influences, even if they are dismissed? And what, say, of Michael Longley’s sonnet ‘Autumn’s Tresses’ which, with knowing nods

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to Yeats, utilises a ‘solitary swan’ and an otter, as ‘a glimmer / Among reeds’? While his sonnet is a metaphor for the practice of poetic allusion, its Yeatsian motifs are so predominant that the poem risks becoming an exercise in derivation.34 Though chronology cannot be gleaned merely through allusion and influence, constructing a timeline would risk skating over knotty publication histories. Recent scholarship has brought to light Richard Nugent’s ‘Cynthia containing direfull sonnets, madrigals, and passionate intercourses, describing his repudiate affections expressed in love’s owne language’, first published in 1604, and now described ‘[a]s the first sonnet sequence in English by an Irishman’, so offering a possible place to begin. Yet Anne Fogarty notes that there are only two surviving ‘extant copies’ of the sequence, one in the British Library in London and one in the Huntington Library in California. She remarks, additionally, that although Cynthia is ‘a unique document and of signal cultural and historical importance’, it has ‘unjustly been consigned to oblivion in the manner of many other sonnet sequences that have been deemed to be minor and hence relegated from the canon’.35 The example of Cynthia underscores the difficulties of acquisition and circulation. Fogarty discusses another reason for the volume’s neglect, claiming that ‘the somewhat dubious activity of sonneteering with its penchant for erotic themes and coded meanings leant itself to the guarded reading practices of a select and intimate audience’. Therefore, such pieces of work might have gone underground thanks to aesthetic preferences as well as to moralistic judgements. Moreover, as Fogarty underlines, Nugent’s position as a member of a landowning family in Westmeath, part of ‘the Old English community’, clouds his position as an ‘Irish’ poet, even though he ‘composed poetry in Irish and in English’.36 Similar complications surround the discovery of sonnets written by Lady Gregory. Though central to the Irish literary revival, Gregory’s position as a descendant of a landowning ‘Anglo-Irish’ gentry family from Galway makes her position as a possible influence on later Irish writers uncertain. Moreover, although Gregory, most often thought of as a playwright, composed ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, ‘a sequence of twelve poems that appeared in the Kelmscott edition of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s poetry’, in 1892, they were published under Blunt’s name, and their true authorship was only confirmed in the late 1980s. The sonnets, though published with some changes by Blunt, were bold in telling the story of Gregory and Blunt’s affair, a poorly-kept secret. James Pethica tells us that:

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it was not until the recent release of Blunt’s papers that her clandestine affair with him was revealed, and a manuscript of the poems became available. Showing how extensively they had been altered by Blunt for publication under his own name, the manuscript preserves the sonnet in the form originally written by Lady Gregory in the summer of 1883 as the affair came to an end.37

Pethica, writing in 1987, is assiduous in printing and commenting on Gregory’s sonnets in their original form for the first time, with Blunt’s revised versions alongside; yet as Pethica notes himself, ‘[i]t is unlikely Lady Gregory herself recognized the extent of the revisions, having almost certainly kept no copy of her dangerously confessional work’.38 Though the reinstatement of the poems to Gregory and the rediscovery of Nugent’s early sonnet sequence are of considerable significance to the history of the (Irish) sonnet in general, they are less useful for constructing a chronology of influence within the Irish sonnet, or the Irish women’s sonnet. Moreover, it is difficult to ascertain what modern and contemporary sonneteers might have gleaned from these sonnets, even if they had happened to discover them—as the volumes are themselves derivative. Gregory’s sonnets, beyond their daring subject matter, are almost entirely free of formal innovation—combining a rigid English or Shakespearean form (abab cdcd efef gg ) with a rather wrought iambic pentameter full of emphatic repetitions such as: ‘Wild words I write, wild words of love and pain’.39 Meanwhile, although Nugent expostulates on what we might be tempted to call ‘modern’ themes, such as in Sonnet XI of ‘The Second Part’ of Cynthia where he asks ‘whither runst thou thus mine angry pen? / Whither my bitter and respectlesse rimes?’,40 this foregrounding of the written qualities of the sonnet is as old as the form itself. Another forebear of the Irish sonnet, and of the Irish women’s sonnet, is Dublin-born Mary Tighe (1772–1810), the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman and a Methodist leader, who published Psyche; or, The Legend of Love in 1805. In 1811 her cousin and brother-in-law William Tighe brought out a posthumous publication, Psyche, with Other Poems in 1811, in which 21 of the 39 were sonnets, even though he labelled all of them as ‘sonnets’.41 Yet, as Harriet Kramer Linkin notes, William Tighe’s inclusion of these poems was not sufficient to ensure their critical reputation, as he dismissed them as ‘smaller poems’, which ‘may perhaps stand in need of that indulgence which a posthumous work

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always demands when it did not receive the correction of the author’.42 Adrea McDonnell carries out some careful work to reinstate the ‘Irish’ significance of Tighe’s sonnets, singling out her ‘On Leaving Killarney, August 5, 1800’, which McDonnell points out ‘was composed four days after the Act of Union was passed in the Irish Parliament’.43 However ‘[d]espite the period recognition Tighe’s lyric poems received throughout the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century’, as Linkin puts it, ‘the critical legacy of the preface prevailed’ so that she was ‘esteemed as the author of Psyche, a work admired for its polished craft, and occasionally cited as the author of some minor effusions’. Even though Tighe’s sonnets were rediscovered in the twentieth century, ‘as critics began to rediscover the intellectual and aesthetic capabilities of so many Romantic-era poets women poets’, her inclusion in anthologies instead led to continued associations with ‘English’ rather than Irish poetry.44 Unlike the examples of Nugent, Gregory and Tighe, Austin Clarke’s sonnet ‘The Trial of Robert Emmet’ (1957) benefited from the circumstances of its publication. Discussing the mock-trial of Robert Emmet, the sonnet was lent greater irony after publication, as it was published in the Irish Times in anticipation of an event that ultimately never took place.45 Conversely, John Kells Ingram’s Sonnets and Other Poems (1900; revised 1901) aims in its ‘Prefatory Note’ to move the poems away from Irish nationalist associations and rewrite their early circumstances of journalistic publication. While the sonnets in the collection are relatively conventional,46 with some actually written by the poet’s recently deceased son Thomas Dunbar Ingram, readers linked them by association with the collection’s most politically nuanced (and nationalistic) poem, the ballad ‘The Memory of the Dead’.47 With its daringly open-ended questions like ‘Who dares to speak of Ninety-Eight?’ (l.1), referring to the Wexford Rebellion of 1798, the poem has more in common with P. B. Shelley’s polemical The Masque of Anarchy (1819) than with any of Shelley’s sonnets.48 In his Preface Ingram excuses the patriotism of the poem as youthful exuberance, arguing that because ‘the poem “The Memory of the Dead” was published in the Nation in April, 1843, when I was in my twentieth year’, and during ‘the early period of the so-called Young Irelanders’, it was inspired by a ‘policy’ that ‘though deficient in sanity, was inspired by nobler feelings’. Ingram is at pains to state that although he ‘never was a member of the group’, and the poem was his ‘only contribution to the

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Nation’, he has decided to reprint it here as he is not ‘ashamed of having written it’. For Ingram, the sonnets of the collection differ from ‘The Memory of the Dead’ in ‘character, as in date, from the other pieces of the volume’.49 Yet their political associations would have lingered despite his best efforts. This makes for a fruitful comparison with a better-known Preface, Thomas MacDonagh’s introduction to Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), which Regan suggests first gave permission to Irish poets to explore the possibilities of the sonnet form to include English poetry. Like Ingram’s Preface, MacDonagh’s was completely of its time and has since been recast in the light of political events. Regan argues that ‘MacDonagh’s book was massively influential in showing how English lyric forms might be fused with Irish poetic forms like the aisling (or dream vision) in the creation of a new and distinctive Anglo-Irish poetry’, while upholding John Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as a model for Irish poetry in terms of ‘cultural diversity and inclusivity’.50 Such ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ would have become increasingly difficult to uphold as the twentieth century unfolded. Even MacDonagh’s definition of ‘Anglo-Irish’ seems naïve now: for him, it was a ‘speech’ that keeps ‘in the main the order of English, not of Irish’, yet where ‘the Irish way of emphasis is kept’, instead of a catch-all for people who were of Anglican background or descended from English families. Moreover, MacDonagh’s identification within literature of an ‘Irish Mode—in place of that vague and illogical Celtic Note’—is itself vague and somewhat illogical.51 In his 1996 Introduction to MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland, Gerald Dawe admires MacDonagh’s ‘comprehensive, committed voice’, but remarks upon the ‘terribly irony’ that, by the time of its publication in May 1916, MacDonagh had been executed for his part in the Easter Rising. Rather than disclosing a ‘self-sacrificing patriotic instinct’ and ‘the fatal gene of bloodlust’, MacDonagh’s is instead an ‘airy, naïve and fascinating study’, brimming with a tragically ‘abundant idealism’.52 Writing from Belfast in 1988, in his introduction to Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems, Michael Longley underscores how issues of Irish identification continue to shift according to political contexts. Longley notes how ‘to the Irish [MacNeice] has often seemed an exile, to the English a stranger’, and claims that his ‘Anglo-Irishness has not been properly understood on either side of the Irish Sea’, emphasising the continued slipperiness of the term.53 That ‘Irish’ poems are often judged

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by contexts outside the poets’ control, but that poets can also help shape those contexts, is underscored by Longley’s own sonnet ‘Ceasefire’, which was first published in the Irish Times two days after the IRA ceasefire of 31 August 1994. Although purporting to focus on a ceasing of hostilities during the Trojan Wars, ‘Ceasefire’ creates through the sonnet form what Regan describes as ‘a poetic space for reflection that corresponds with the political function of the ceasefire’.54 Even though its title suggests an impermanent cessation of violence, Longley still turns to myth and storytelling to offer comfort. Dawe describes doing similar, recounting how he first discovered MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland: ‘in the grip of the “Troubles”’, he remarks, ‘there was an intense need […] for those of us who were politically grappling with what was happening to sort out as well what possible role writing could play in all the mayhem’.55 Looking to the sonnet in particular to gauge what possible role it might play ‘in all the mayhem’, the Irish poets discussed in this study have tested its limits and expanded its parameters. Focusing in the main on Tighe’s sonnets, McDonnell has claimed that: The sonnet, with its problem-solving function, works to reconcile the competing ideologies that exist in a hyphenated culture. However, it also offers a form in which the author can construct an individual lyrical subjectivity in which to explore the contradictions inherent in hyphenation.56

Yet what the Irish sonneteers of the past century or so have demonstrated is that while the sonnet appears to offer a ‘problem-solving function’, through its internal structure of octet and sestet, or three quatrains and a couplet, this does not necessarily mean a working-out. Though a sonnet, or a sonnet sequence, literally ends at the close of the fourteenth line, or a multiple thereof, the questions raised within the sonnet often linger far longer. Questions of ‘lyrical subjectivity’ extend far further than ‘hyphenation’, too. What Irish poets grapple with now, as demonstrated through their sonnets, begins with cultural and national associations but always, inevitably, transcends these limits. Irish poems, as well as Irish poets, find their identities under constant review: as Chivers puts it, ‘[i]n any vital literary culture, form must be subject to repeated renewal’.57 Irish sonneteers consider individual and collective questions of selfhood alongside issues of poetic affiliation, sexuality and gender, while constantly

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interrogating the position of the poet within a global world. By using the sonnet form to do so, they know that there will be more questions than there are answers. The sonnet—at once artful and artless, succinct and expansive, spoken and silent, local and universal, timely and timeless—is the perfectly imperfect form to work things through, but not necessarily to work them out.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 1. See Fuller, The Sonnet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Fuller, The Sonnet (1972), p. 1. All references are to this edition. Ezra Pound, ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), pp. 149–200 (pp. 170–171). Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3. Helen Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition: Yeats and Sonnets’, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–181 (p. 147). Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind, p. 3. Stephen Regan, The Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 4–5. Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition’, p. 147. See https://mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/michael-kr%C3%BCger-and-paul-Mul doon-oxford. Alan Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 567–587 (p. 568). Paul Muldoon, ‘Symposium’, Hay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 27, ll.1–4. See W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112; and Vendler, ‘Troubling the Tradition’, p. 174. Muldoon, ‘Lag’, Hay, p. 26. For further discussions of ‘Lag’, see Chapter 6. Tom Walker, ‘“an inconstant stay”: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. Nicholas Taylor-Collins and Stanley van der Ziel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 49–70 (pp. 50–51). See Muldoon, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (London: Faber, 2015): ‘Pip and Magwitch’, p. 21 (and see also discussions of the poem in Chapter 4 of this study); ‘A Night on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan’, p. 32; ‘Honey’, p. 77; and ‘Dirty Data’, pp. 99–117.

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17. Muldoon, Frolic and Detour (London: Faber, 2019): see https://www. paulmuldoonpoetry.com/frolic-and-detour; see also Muldoon, ‘Plaguey Hill’, the Times Literary Supplement, 10 July 2020: https://www.thetls.co.uk/articles/plaguey-hill-original-poem-paul-muldoon/. 18. Tom Chivers, ‘Introduction’, in Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms, Rules and Constraints, ed. T. Chivers (London: Penned in the Margins, 2012), p. 10. Chivers cites Muldoon in the Irish Times, 19 April 2003. 19. Merrill Moore, ‘Statement’, M (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), n.p. 20. Louis Untermeyer, ‘Merrill Moore: A Comment on His “American” Sonnet’, first published in Six Sides to a Man by Merrill Moore (1935), collected in Moore, M , n.p. 21. William Carlos Williams, ‘Merrill Moore’s Sonnets’, first published as a Foreword to Sonnets from New Directions by Merrill Moore (1938), collected in Moore, M , n.p. 22. Iggy McGovern, Preface, A Mystic Dream of 4 (Clonskeagh: Quaternia Press, 2013), pp. 11–13 (p. 11). McGovern is a physicist working at Trinity College Dublin. See http://iggymcgovern.com. 23. Micheal O’Siadhail, ‘Introduction’, The Five Quintets (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), pp. xv–xxii (p. xxii). 24. Ibid., p. xxi. 25. Chapter 6 offers an extended commentary on Meehan’s amatory sonnets from Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009). 26. Paula Meehan, ‘Child Burial’, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1991), pp. 29–30, ll.1–3. 27. ‘Gansey’, n., OED online (www.oed.com); ‘Gansy’ is a variant spelling. ‘Gansy’ is derived not from Jersey but from ‘Guernsey’. 28. Janna Knittel and Paula Meehan, ‘“Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City”: An Interview with Paula Meehan’, New Hibernia Review, 20.1 (Spring/Earrach 2016), 77–86 (85). 29. Meehan, ‘Elegy for a Child’, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, pp. 27–28, ll.25–27. 30. For further discussion of Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know, see Chapter 6; for further discussion of Anthony Cronin’s The End of the Modern World, see Chapter 3. 31. Richard Murphy, ‘Notes for Sonnets’, in In Search of Poetry (Thame: Clutag Press, 2017), p. 136. For further discussions on The Price of Stone, see Chapter 2. 32. Gerald Dawe, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (first published 1916; redesigned edition: Tyone: RELAY Books, 1996), pp. vii–xi (p. vii), and see discussions below.

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33. W. B. Yeats, ‘Edmund Spenser’ (1902), Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 356–383 (p. 362). 34. Michael Longley, ‘Autumn Lady’s Tresses’, The Ghost Orchid (1995), Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 197, ll.1, 2–3. 35. Anne Fogarty, ‘Introduction to Richard Nugent’, in Cynthia, ed. Angelina Lynch (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 9–45 (pp. 9, 10). 36. Ibid., p. 13. 37. James Pethica, commentary on ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’ by Lady Gregory, in Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After, ed. Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987), pp. 98–100; pp. 114–122 (p. 98). 38. Ibid., p. 114. 39. Lady Gregory, ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, repr. Lady Gregory: Fifty Yeats After, pp. 102–113 (with Gregory’s originals on the left-hand side of the page), sonnet XI of XII, p. 112, l.1. 40. Nugent, Cynthia, ‘The Second Part’, Sonnet IX, p. 70, ll.1–2. 41. See Mary Tighe, Psyche, with Other Poems (London: Longman, 2011). Harriet Kramer Linkin offers a detailed overview of the history and critical reception in ‘More than Psyche: The Sonnets of Mary Tighe’, European Romantic Review, 13 (2002), 365–378. 42. William Tighe’s Preface to Psyche, with Other Poems, p. iv, cited in Linkin, ‘More than Psyche’, p. 366. 43. Adrea Marie Rita McDonnell, ‘Being Neither and Both: The Liminal Nationality of Four Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Irish Women Writers, A Study of Genre, Gender and Nation’, unpublished PhD thesis, Auburn University, 2011, p. 137. 44. Linkin, ‘More than Psyche’, p. 369. 45. Austin Clarke, The Trial of Robert Emmet, Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 210, ll.1, 11–12; and see Clarke’s note to the poem, p. 547. 46. Regan notes how politically conservative Ingram’s sonnets are in The Sonnet, p. 159. 47. See John Kells Ingram, ‘The Memory of the Dead’, Sonnets and Other Poems (first published 1900; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1901), pp. 104–106. Consisting of six sections each of one eight-line stanza, the poem alternates between iambic tetrameters and trimeters, and follows a loose abab cdcd rhyme scheme. 48. See P. B. Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), pp. 930–940. 49. Ingram, ‘Prefatory Note’, Sonnets and Other Poems, pp. 5–7 (pp. 6–7). 50. Regan, The Sonnet, p. 158. Regan refers to MacDonagh’s discussion in Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, pp. 4–5. Italics Regan’s own. 51. MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, pp. 8, 4.

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52. Dawe, Introduction, MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, p. ix. 53. Michael Longley, Introduction, Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, ed. Longley (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), pp. xiii–xxiii (xxii). 54. Longley, ‘Ceasefire’, The Ghost Orchid (1995), Collected Poems, p. 225. See also Regan, The Sonnet, pp. 212–213 (p. 213). 55. Dawe, Introduction, MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, p. vii. 56. McDonnell, ‘Being Neither and Both’, p. 28. 57. Chivers, Adventures in Form, p. 15.

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Secondary Texts Alexander, Neil, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). Allen, Gay Wilson and Ed Folsom (eds.), Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (first published 1958; translated Maria Jolas, 1964; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994). Billone, Amy C., Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007). Blasing, Mutlu, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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Going, William T., ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, Modern Language Notes, 62. 6 (June 1947), 400–402. Golden, Seán V., ‘Traditional Irish Music in Contemporary Irish Literature’, Mosaic, 12.3 (Spring 1979), 1–23. Grene, Nicholas, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Guissin, Avshalom, ‘“You Lie, An Ocean to the East”: The Immigrant, the Commuter and the Traveller in Irish-American Poetry’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Tel Aviv, 2018. Hanna, Adam, Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Harmon, Maurice (ed.), Richard Murphy: Poet of Two Traditions (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1978). Haughton, Hugh, ‘Seamus Heaney: First and Last Things’, The Irish Review, No. 49/50 (Winter/Spring 2014/2015), 194–207. Heaney, Seamus, ‘After the Synge-song: Seamus Heaney on the Writings of Patrick Kavanagh’, book review, The Listener (13 January 1972), 55–56. ———, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000). Henderson, Diana E., ‘The Sonnet, Subjectivity, and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 46–65. Holmes, John, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Hufstader, Jonathan, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). Johnson, William Clarence, Spenser’s Amoretti: Analogies of Love (Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990). Johnston, Maria, ‘Songs and Sonnets by Paul Muldoon: Review’, The Guardian, 11 January 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/ jan/11/songs-and-sonnets-paul-muldoon-review. Keatinge, Ben (ed.), Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019). Kelly, John and Marjorie Howes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer (ed.), Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). Kerrigan, John, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling Through After Madoc’, Jacket Magazine, no. 20 (December 2002). http://jacketmagazine.com/20/ kerr-muld.html. Knittel, Janna and Paula Meehan, ‘“Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City”: An Interview with Paula Meehan’, New Hibernia Review, 20.1 (Spring/Earrach 2016), 77–86.

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Index

A Æ (George Russell), 14, 114 aisling/ dream vision, 227 Alexander, Neal, 118, 135, 202, 203, 206 Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing , 150, 154, 213, 214 Arezzo (Fra Guittone d’Arezzo), viii Auden, W.H., 8, 45, 65, 132 ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, 45

B Bachelard, Gaston, 16, 22, 158, 185 The Poetics of Space (1994), 16, 158 Barrett (Browning), Elizabeth, xiv, 3, 157 Baudelaire, Charles, 119, 140, 194 Les Fleurs du Mal , 194 Bell, The, 175 Billone, Amy, xiii, xiv, xviii, 3, 19, 157, 185

Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2007), 157 Bishop, Elizabeth, 140, 142, 143, 155 ‘Arrival at Santos’, 142 ‘One Art’, 142 Blasing, Mutlu, 13, 25, 127 Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (2007), 21, 62, 152 Bloom, Harold, 113, 114 The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), 149 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 224, 225 Boland, Eavan, vii, xi, xvi, 2, 9, 11, 17, 20, 37, 41, 51–57, 64, 66, 169, 195, 208–211 and Edward Hirsch (eds.), 7–9, 18, 25 The Making of a Sonnet (2008), vii, xviii, 1, 18, 20, 23, 57, 63 ‘Ghost Stories’, 51, 66

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53242-0

245

246

INDEX

‘Growing Up: ‘from Renoir’s drawing “Girlhood”’, 51, 54, 55, 67 ‘Heroic’, 208–210, 214 ‘Legends’, 51, 66 ‘On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”’, 14, 21, 51, 53, 56, 66, 67 ‘Woman Posing, after the painting “Mrs. Badham” by Ingres’, 51–54, 66, 67 Bosch, Hieronymus, 78, 105 ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, 78 Brown, Terence, 77, 78 ‘Seamus Heaney’, 105 Bryce, Colette, 140 Burne-Jones, Edward, 93, 110 Burt, Stephen, vii, ix–xii, xiv, xv, 13, 16, 26, 69, 74, 75, 148, 157, 173, 191 The Art of the Sonnet (2010), vii, xvii, xviii, 19, 21, 22, 62, 103, 104, 106, 148, 156, 185, 211 ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, 105, 108

C Carson, Ciaran, xvi, 16, 18, 118–125, 131, 135, 137, 148, 203–207, 211 ‘February Fourteen’, 124, 152 For All We Know, 18, 201–206, 210, 223 ‘Birthright’ (Part One), 205, 214 ‘Hotel del Mar’ (Part One), 204, 214 ‘Je Reviens’ (Part Two), 205, 214 ‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part One), 206, 214

‘Le Mot Juste’ (Part Two), 206, 207, 214 ‘On the Contrary’ (Part Two), 202, 213 ‘Second Time Round’ (Part One), 204, 207, 213, 214 ‘The Fetch’ (Part One), 203, 213 ‘The Shadow’ (Part Two), 204, 214 ‘Treaty’ (Part One), 210, 211, 214 ‘Zugzwang’ (Part One), 205, 214 ‘Zugzwang’ (Part Two), 205, 214 The Alexandrine Plan, 119, 150 ‘Le Sonneur’/‘The Sonneteer’, 119, 131, 153 The Twelfth of Never, 118–124, 135 ‘Banners’, 135, 154 ‘Catmint Tea’, 122, 151 ‘Fear’, 122, 151 ‘Found’, 121, 151 ‘Paddy’s Knapsack’, 135, 154 ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, 118–123, 137, 150, 151, 154 ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, 16, 22, 124, 135, 152, 172, 188 ‘The Display Case’, 124, 152 Chivers, Tom Adventures in Form, 218, 230, 232 Clarke, Austin ‘At the Dáil’, 145, 156 ‘The Trial of Robert Emmet’, 226, 231 Clifton, Harry, 80–86, 88, 89, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103 Portobello Sonnets , 15, 21, 73, 79–83, 85–90, 100, 103, 104, 106–109, 117, 150

INDEX

‘Seriously into Cultural Detritus’, 85, 107, 108, 111, 112 Collins, Lucy, 2, 3, 9, 16, 58, 59, 67, 128, 131, 159, 160, 163 Contemporary Irish Women Poets (2015), 2, 19, 20, 22, 152, 153, 185 Cousins, A.D., viii, xiii, 2, 5, 6 The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2011), xvii, xviii, 19 Crawforth, Hannah On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, 11, 20 Cromwell, Oliver, 132, 135, 136, 139 Cronin, Anthony, 29, 30, 91, 93–100 ‘A Question of Modernity’, 90, 94, 96, 109, 111, 112 Body and Soul , 91, 110 Collected Poems, 1950–1973, 91 41 Sonnet-Poems 82, 89, 109 ‘The Notion of Commitment’, 97, 111 ‘Poem’, 90, 109 The End of the Modern World, 15, 73, 89–92, 95–98, 100, 102–104, 109–112, 223, 230 The Fall , 91 ‘Writing’, 29, 30, 62, 63 ‘Croppy Boy, The’, 180, 181 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 50 ‘Yeats and Gender’, 66 D Daniel, Samuel Delia, 70 Dante (Dante Alighieri), viii, 70, 191 The Divine Comedy, 221 Davis, Wes, 84, 159 An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, 108, 185 Dawe, Gerald, 105, 227, 228, 230, 232

247

Delanty, Greg, 10, 11, 20 ‘A Common Story’, 193, 212 Delattre, Elisabeth, 118, 123, 124 ‘“Through the Land of Nod and Wink”: Representations of Ireland in The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson’, 150–152 Denman, Peter, 120 ‘Language and the Prosodic Line in Carson’s Poetry’, 151 Dentith, Simon, 123 ‘“All Livin Language is Sacred”: Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands’, 151 Dickens, Charles Great Expectations , 132–134, 153 Donne, John Songs and Sonets [sic], x, 5 Drayton, Michael Ideas Mirrour, 70 Dublin Magazine, The, 115 Dublin Review, the, 145 Dubrow, Heather, 5, 49 ‘The sonnet and the lyric mode’, 5, 19, 65 E Eliot, T.S., 80, 94, 167, 221 The Four Quartets , 221 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 166, 186 The Waste Land, 78, 106 Elizabeth Scott-Baumann On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, 20 ‘English’ sonnet, vii, ix, x, xii, 10, 11, 119, 120, 122, 134, 191, 217, 220, 223, 225. See also Shakespeare, Shakespearean sonnet Ennis, John, 181, 182 ‘The Croppy Boy’, 17, 180, 189

248

INDEX

F Finch, Annie, 152 ‘The Sonnet Re-Figured’, 127 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 140, 143 The Crack-Up, 143, 155 Flaubert, Gustave, 206, 207 Flynn, Leontia, 3, 15, 39, 139–146, 148, 184 Drives , 15, 140–144, 201 ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, 143 ‘Boxes’, 184 ‘Casablanca, Backwards’, 201 ‘Dorothy Parker’, 140, 141, 143 ‘Elizabeth Bishop’, 141–143, 155 ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’, 143 ‘Poem for Christmas’, 169, 170, 187 ‘Sylvia Plath’s Sinus Condition’, 140, 141, 155 ‘Washington’, 39, 40, 64 Fogarty, Anne, 224 ‘French’ sonnet, 118, 119, 191 Friel, Brian Translations , 36, 63 Frost, Robert, 199, 200 ‘Design’, 199 Fuller, John, viii, x, xviii, 191, 211, 215, 216, 229 The Sonnet (1972), xvii, 215 G Gascoigne, George, 71, 104 Gauguin, Paul, 93 Giacomo da Lentini, viii Gillis, Alan, xv, xvi, 8, 12, 34, 217 ‘Eloquence’, 34, 63 ‘Memory’, 34, 63 ‘The Green Rose’, 117, 150 ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’ (2012), xvi, xviii, 20, 21, 229

Going, William, 71, 72, 81 ‘The Term Sonnet Sequence’, 104, 107, 110 Golden, Seán, 181 ‘Traditional Irish Music in Contemporary Irish Literature’, 189 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 224–226 ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, 224 Grene, Nicholas, 51 Yeats’s Poetic Codes , 66 Grennan, Eamon, 40 ‘Shed’, 40, 64 Groarke, Vona, 3, 14, 58–61, 67, 159, 160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 186, 194 ‘Oranges’, 14, 21, 58, 67 Other People’s Houses , 10, 17, 20, 22, 58, 160, 163, 165, 186 ‘Folderol’, 160, 161, 163–165, 186, 194, 212 ‘Home Viewing’, 160, 161 ‘House Plan’, 160–163, 186 ‘House Wine’, 160, 161, 164, 165, 186 ‘Open House’, 160–162, 185, 186 ‘The Haunted House’, 160, 161, 165, 186 Guissin, Avshalom, 201, 202 ‘The Immigrant, the Commuter and the Traveller in Irish-American Poetry’, 213 H haiku, 60, 220, 221 Hamilton, William Rowan, 220 Hanna, Adam, 159 Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space, 185 Hartnett, Michael, 19, 21, 32–34, 63, 86

INDEX

Anatomy of a Cliché, 33, 63 ‘I have exhausted the delighted rage’, 33 ‘There will be a talking …’, 86 Thirteen Sonnets , 14, 32, 33, 37 Heaney, Seamus, xvi, 12, 34, 74, 75, 77–79, 99, 100, 103, 122, 123, 170–172, 180, 181, 199 Beowulf , 122, 123 Clearances ‘When all the others were away at Mass’, 17, 22, 171, 173, 187 ‘Crediting Poetry’, 27, 62 District and Circle, 74, 75, 77, 79 ‘A Shiver’, 75 ‘District and Circle’, 15, 21, 73–79, 81, 85, 100, 101, 103–106 ‘In Iowa’, 76 ‘Out of Shot’, 75 Door into the Dark, 180 ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, 17, 23, 179–181, 189 Glanmore Sonnets , 10, 26, 29–32, 62, 75, 76, 105 Human Chain, 75, 77, 101, 106 North, 31, 182, 183 ‘Act of Union’, 182 ‘North’, 122, 151 ‘Punishment’, 183, 189 Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996, 22, 31 ‘The Skylight’ (from Glanmore Revisited), 159, 185 Stepping Stones: Interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll , 20, 31, 63 ‘When the others were away at Mass’ (‘Clearances III’), 17, 183 Hewitt, John

249

‘Bogside, Derry, 1971’, 17, 22, 178, 179, 188 Hewitt, Séan Tongues of Fire, 187, 200, 213 ‘Clock’, 201, 213 ‘Ghost’, 168, 187 ‘Leaf’, 200, 213 Hilson, Jeff, 1, 18, 57–60, 127 The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (2010), vii, 57, 67, 152 Hirsch, Edward, vii, 1, 7–10, 18, 25, 57 ‘My Own Acquaintance’ (2008), 2, 18, 20. See also Boland, Eavan Hitchcock, Alfred, 140 Holmes, John, 71, 82 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, 104, 107 Homer, 174, 176 the Iliad, 17, 81, 114, 169, 174 the Odyssey, 136 Howard, Henry, the Earl of Surrey, vii, viii Howarth, Peter, viii, xiii, 2, 5, 6 The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2011), xvii, xviii, 19 (HOW)ever, 127

I Ingram, John Kells, 227 Sonnets and Other Poems , 226 ‘The Memory of the Dead’, 226, 227, 231 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique, 52, 54 ‘Mrs. Charles Badham’, 52 Irish Times, the, 49, 114, 118, 121, 146, 160, 226, 228 ‘Italian’ sonnet, vii–x, xiii, xv, 8, 191, 215. See also Petrarchan sonnet

250

INDEX

J Johnston, Maria, 132 ‘Songs and Sonnets by Paul Muldoon: Review’, 153 Joyce, James, 12, 60, 80, 94, 96, 117, 182 ‘The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port’, 67 Dubliners , 96 Ulysses , 136, 180, 181, 189 K Kavanagh, Patrick, xvi, 3, 7, 15, 16, 18, 80, 81, 84, 88, 89, 95, 100, 113–117, 124, 148, 170, 171, 174, 175, 195, 208–211 ‘Canal Bank Walk’, 7, 8, 20, 21, 80, 83, 106, 107, 113, 149, 170, 187, 208–210, 214 ‘Epic’, 17, 22, 81, 95, 107, 111, 114, 149, 169, 171, 174, 175, 187, 188 ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, 169, 187 ‘In the Same Mood’, 115, 149 ‘Leaves of Grass’, 80, 83, 96, 107, 113–116, 149 ‘October’, 116 ‘Pursuit of an Ideal’, 116, 150 Self-Portrait , 84, 88, 108, 109 ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, 16, 124, 172 The Green Fool , 114, 149 ‘The Hospital’, 7, 8, 17, 19, 80, 83, 170, 195, 201 Keatinge, Ben, 34 ‘Demir Kapija’, 34, 63 Keats, John, 57 ‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d’, 26, 62 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, 227

Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, 203, 213 Kennelly, Brendan, 132, 136, 137, 139 Cromwell , 15, 135–137, 139, 140, 144, 146, 148 ‘A Condition’, 139, 155 ‘A Language’, 137–139, 154 ‘My Grassy Path’, 136, 154 ‘Oliver’s Prophecies’, 139, 155 ‘Someone, Somewhere’, 137, 154 ‘That Word’, 137, 154 ‘What Use?’, 137, 154 Poetry, My Arse, 135 The Book of Judas , 135 Kerrigan, John, 99, 100 ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling through after Madoc’, 112 Kinsella, Thomas, 65 ‘Wedding Morning’, 170, 187 Klimt, Gustav, 94

L Laird, Nick, 11 Larkin, Philip, 30 ‘An Arundel Tomb’, 4, 19, 29, 62 Levin, Phillis, viii, xiv, 14, 26, 70 The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, vii, xvii, xviii, 21, 62, 103 Linkin, Harriet Kramer, 225, 226 ‘More than Psyche: The Sonnets of Mary Tighe’, 226, 231 Lok, Anne A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, 70 Longley, Edna, 42, 43, 48 Longley, Michael, xvi, 11, 62, 143, 144, 227, 228, 231, 232 ‘Autumn Tresses’, 223

INDEX

‘Ceasefire’, 228, 232 ‘Florence Nightingale’, 143, 155 ‘Grace Darling’, 144, 155 ‘Sitting for Eddie’, 49 Long, Maebh, 145, 146 The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, 156 M MacDonagh, Thomas, 227 Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, 227, 228, 230, 231 Mackay, Peter, 39 ‘Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry and Romanticism’, 64 MacNeice, Louis, xvi, 3, 12, 29, 57, 209, 227 ‘Poussin’, 170, 187 Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley, 227 ‘Spring Voices’, 28 ‘Sunday Morning’, xvi, xviii, 27–29, 36, 62, 209, 214 ‘Trains in the Distance’, 28, 62 MacNeill, Eóin, 97 Mahon, Derek, 192, 193 Echo’s Grove, 193 ‘Exequy (from the Italian of Petrarch)’, 192, 193, 212 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 119, 131 Mansfield, Katherine, 162 ‘The Garden Party’, 162, 186 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 94 Marken, Ronald, xvi ‘Paul Muldoon’s “Juggling a Red-Hot Half-Brick in an Old Sock”:Poets in Ireland Renovate the English-Language Sonnet’, xix Matisse, Henri, 94 McDonnell, Adrea, 226, 228

251

‘Being Neither and Both: The Liminal Nationality of Four Eighteenth-Century AngloIrish Women Writers’, 231, 232 McGovern, Iggy, 220 A Mystic Dream of 4, 219, 220, 230 McGuckian, Medbh, 2, 185 McGuinness, Frank, 30 ‘Four Ways to See Your Lover in Venice’ ‘Bellini’, 194, 212 ‘Sister Anne Breslin’, 30, 63 ‘The Age of Reason’, 188 ‘The Wardrobe’, 174 ‘The Comfort of his Body’, 194 Meehan, Paula, 3, 23, 183, 195–201, 204, 211, 221–223 ‘Desire Path’, 198 Painting Rain, 18 ‘A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write (for Seamus Heaney)’, 199, 213 ‘Deadwood’, 198, 213 ‘Single Room with Bath, Edinburgh’, 183, 189 ‘Valentine’, 195, 197, 198, 212 The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, 223 ‘Child Burial’, 221, 222, 230 ‘Elegy for a Child’, 222, 230 Melchiori, Giorgio The Whole Mystery of Art , 50, 66 Mikics, David, vii, ix–xii, xiv, xv, 13, 16, 26, 69, 74, 95, 148, 157, 173, 191 The Art of the Sonnet (2010), vii, xvii, xviii, 19, 21, 22, 62, 103,

252

INDEX

104, 106, 111, 148, 156, 185, 211 Milton, John, xii, 91, 92 Paradise Lost , 91 Montague, John, 65 ‘Protest’, 172, 188 Moore, Marianne, 30, 119, 120, 123 ‘Poetry’, 4, 19 ‘Silence’, 30, 63 ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, 119, 120 Moore, Merrill, 218, 219, 223 M , 218, 219, 223 Morrissey, Sinéad, 140, 148, 172 Parallax, 172 ‘Home Birth’, 17, 172, 173, 188 ‘Reading the Greats’, 147, 148, 156 Muldoon, Paul, xvi, 3, 8, 11, 32, 88, 98–103, 132–135, 139, 145, 146, 148, 177, 183, 201, 202, 211, 217, 219 Frolic and Detour, 218, 230 Hay, 99, 101, 102 ‘Errata’, 101, 112 ‘Lag’, 18, 23, 201, 213, 217, 229 ‘Symposium’, 101, 217, 221, 229 ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, 15, 98–103, 112 Horse Latitudes , 98, 112 One Thousand Things Worth Knowing , 134, 217 ‘Dirty Data’, 98, 112, 218 Poems 1968–1998, 88, 99 ‘Why Brownlee Left’, 101, 112 Quoof , 178, 217 ‘A Trifle’, 7, 19, 177 ‘Quoof’, 8, 20, 177, 183 ‘The More a Man Has The More a Man Wants’, 98, 112

‘The Sightseers’, 8, 20, 176, 188 Songs and Sonnets , 5, 144, 217 ‘Le Flanneur’, 8, 15, 20, 21, 144, 145, 156 ‘Pip and Magwitch’, 15, 132, 134, 218 ‘The Yard’, 170 Murphy, Richard, 2–4, 6, 37, 43, 45, 47, 48, 57 Pat Cloherty’s Version of The Maisie’ , 42 The Price of Stone, 1, 4, 14, 41–43, 47, 48, 132, 223 ‘Friary’, 4, 19 ‘Nelson’s Pillar’, 43, 44, 46 ‘Wellington College’, 43, 44, 65 ‘Wellington Testimonial’, 43–46, 65 ‘Transgressing into Poetry’, 43 ‘Writing The Battle of Aughrim’ , 42, 47 N Nation, the, 226, 227 Naughton, Hugh, 74 ‘Seamus Heaney: First and Last Things’, 104 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 2, 36, 125, 129, 134, 148 ‘Studying the Language’, 14, 35–37 ‘The Angel in the Stone’, 15, 128, 129, 131, 132, 152, 153 The Second Voyage, 36 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 32, 63 Nugent, Richard, 224–226 Cynthia, 71, 104, 224, 225, 231 O O’Brien, Eugene, 75, 76

INDEX

253

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 105 O’Brien, Flann (Brian O’Nolan/Myles na gCopaleen), 8, 15, 144, 145 O’Brien, Peggy The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011), 11, 20, 58 O’Donoghue, Bernard, 11, 42, 53, 171, 172 ‘The Potato-Gatherers’ (on the painting by George Russell Æ), 14, 53. See also Æ (George Russell) O’Grady, Thomas, 31 ‘The Art of Heaney’s Sonnets’, 63 O’Loughlin, Michael, 81, 85, 89, 91 ‘Portobello Sonnets: A Journey from Experience into Innocence’, 80, 106 O’Malley, Mary, 3, 125, 126, 129–131, 148 ‘Finis’, 16, 22, 125, 148, 152 ‘The Boning Hall’, 16, 22, 128–131, 152 ‘The Pearl Sonnet’, 129, 153 Oppenheimer, Paul, 216 The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet , 229 O’Siadhail, Micheal, 220, 221 The Five Quintets , 220, 221, 230

Paterson, Don, ix, xiii, xiv, 6, 17, 26, 27, 69, 157, 158, 191 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (1999), vii, xiii, xvii, xviii, 19, 23, 62, 103, 185, 211 Paulin, Tom ‘In the Lost Province’, 17, 22, 179, 183, 189 Pethica, James, 224, 225, 231 Petrarchan sonnet, ix, 26, 38, 116, 151, 217, 220. See also ‘Italian’ sonnet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), viii, 2, 43, 45, 70, 191–193 Canzoniere, 192 Phelan, Joseph, 3, 17, 26, 27, 158, 191, 192 The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005), 19, 23, 62, 185, 212 Picabia, Francis, 94 Pine, Richard, 136, 137 ‘Brendan Kennelly’, 154 Poetry Ireland, 90 Poetry Ireland Review, 73, 79, 82 Pound, Ezra, 216, 229 Pre-Raphaelites, 52, 92. See also Burne-Jones, Edward; Rossetti, Christina; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Pryce, Alexandra, 140, 141 ‘Selective Traditions; Feminism and the Poetry of Colette Bryce, Leontia Flynn and Sinéad Morrissey’, 155

P Parker, Dorothy, 140, 141 ‘I Shall Come Back’, 141, 155 Parker, Michael, 75, 77–79 ‘Fallout from the Thunder: Poetry and Politics in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle’, 105

R Redmond, John, 100 ‘Auden in Ireland’, 112 Regan, Nell, 79, 81 ‘History Lessons’, 106–108 Regan, Stephen, xvi, 57, 70, 85, 98, 169–171, 175–180, 182, 183,

254

INDEX

193–195, 208, 210, 216, 227, 228 The Sonnet , xvi, xix, 67, 103, 104, 112, 159, 216 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 53–56, 93 ‘Boating at Argenteuil’, 93, 110 ‘Girlhood’, 55, 56 ‘The Grape Pickers at Lunch’ (‘Le repas des vendangeuses’), 53, 54 Rich, Adrienne, 16, 128, 130 Richs, Morton D. The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet (2000), x, xviii Ricks, Christopher, 48, 65, 149 Rimbaud, Arthur, 119, 186 Roberts, Susan ‘corazon’ [sic], 127, 130, 152 Ronsard, Pierre de, 16, 125, 126 ‘Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille’, 16, 125, 152 Rosen, Joan, viii, x, 14, 70 A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (1972), viii, xvii, 21, 103 Rossetti, Christina, xiv, 3, 52, 93, 157 ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, 52, 66, 93, 110 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 7, 14, 25, 71, 92, 93 ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’, 92 The House of Life, 7, 25, 71 Rowley, Rosemarie, 11, 20, 44, 45, 65 Girls of the Globe, 44, 65 ‘Mad Ireland Hurt Me, Too’, 45, 65 The Puzzle Factory, 11, 20 S Schiele, Egon, 94 Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth

On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, 11 Sendry, Joseph, 46 ‘The Poet as Builder: Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone’, 65 Sexton, Anne, 127 Shakespeare, William, viii, ix, xv, 2, 11, 43–45, 119, 120, 129, 141, 143, 147, 148, 196, 200, 210, 217, 220, 223, 225 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 199 Othello, 177, 188 Shakespearean sonnet, xvi, 11, 33, 38, 42, 44, 45, 87, 134, 175, 197, 220. See also ‘English’ sonnet Sonnet XXXIV, 129, 153 The Tempest , 16, 129, 130 Shelley, P.B., 2, 39, 40, 45, 57, 96, 128, 129, 226 ‘Ozymandias’, 2, 18, 37, 39–41, 64, 129, 153 The Masque of Anarchy, 226, 231 Sidney, Philip, xi, 70, 208 Astrophil and Stella, xi, 15, 70, 104, 207, 214 Simmons, James, 175 ‘The Publican’, 17, 22, 175, 188 Sirr, Peter, 17, 60, 165–169, 184 ‘House for Sale’, 17, 22, 166, 186 ‘In the Graveyard’, 17, 22, 169, 187 ‘The Names of the Houses’, 17, 22 The Rooms , 17, 165, 166, 169 ‘Drift’, 169, 187 ‘Housed Unhoused’, 166–168, 183, 186, 187, 189 ‘The Rooms’, 166 Smith, Charlotte, xiv, 3, 16, 157 Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing , 180

INDEX

Spenser, Edmund, 2, 11, 12, 50, 70, 118–124, 135, 136, 139, 144, 196, 223 Amoretti, 15, 70 A View of the Present State of Ireland, 118–121, 150 Spenserian sonnet, xii, 33, 38, 141 The Faerie Queene, 50, 120 Spiller, Michael, viii–xi, 14, 69, 71, 72, 113, 144 The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (1995), xvii, xviii, 21, 71, 103 The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of its Strategies , 71, 104 Sterne, Laurence, 136 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 136 Swinburne, Algernon, 96 Synge, J.M., 117

T Tighe, Mary, 225, 226, 228 Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, 225 ‘On Leaving Killarney, August 5, 1800’, 226 Psyche, with Other Poems , 225, 231 Tyler, Meg, 75, 76 ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’, 105

U Untermeyer, Louis, 219

V Vendler, Helen, xvi, xix, 12, 21, 50, 66, 72, 104, 117, 150, 188, 216, 217, 229

255

His Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), xvi Virgil, 101 (The) Aeneid, 77, 100

W Walker, Tom, xvi, 11, 12, 170, 217 ‘“an inconstant stay”: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, xix, 21, 187, 229 Walsh, Catherine, 2 Wheatley, David, 3, 14, 60, 61, 74, 147 Mocker, 60 ‘Magadh’, 60, 67 ‘Mocker’, 60 ‘Numerology’, 60, 67 ‘Sonnet’, x, xi, xviii, 14, 60, 61 ‘Whalebone Haiku’, 60, 67 Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan, 147, 148, 156 White, Gertrude, viii, x, 14, 70 A Moment’s Monument: The Development of the Sonnet (1972), viii, xvii, 21, 103 Whitman, Walt, 80, 81, 89, 96, 107, 113–115, 117 Leaves of Grass , 80, 96, 117 Song of Myself , 96, 111, 114, 115, 149 Williams, William Carlos, 219, 230 Wills, Clair, 101, 102 Reading Paul Muldoon, 112 Wordsworth, William, xi, 2, 10, 11, 26, 31, 57, 67, 84, 158, 183–186, 189, 220 ‘Prefatory Sonnet’, 158 ‘River Duddon’ sonnets, 158 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, vii

256

INDEX

Y Yeats, William Butler, xvi, 3, 12, 16, 41, 45, 49, 50, 56, 57, 70, 72, 80, 85, 94, 95, 97, 117, 125, 126, 128, 131, 142, 167, 177, 216, 217, 223, 224 A Vision, 49 ‘Easter 1916’, 97, 131 ‘Leda and the Swan’, 15, 21, 49–51, 66, 70, 95, 103, 111, 125, 152, 178, 188, 194, 212, 217, 221, 229

‘September 1913’, 97 ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, 85, 97, 108 ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, 117, 150 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 179, 188 ‘The Second Coming’, 177, 188 ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, 142, 155 ‘When You Are Old’, 16, 125, 126