Meehan's Stanzas and the Irish Lyric After Yeats

Of the 374 numbered lyrics in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, there are 234 poems that are divided into more than one stanza. Of those 234, in only three are there instances of non-coincidence between the end of a stanza and a grammatical stop or pause. In the third part of "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" the second quatrain runs on to the third, even though there is a syntactical pause between the two stanzas:

As though I had been undoneBy Homer's Paragon

Who never gave the burning town a thought

(172).

The second part of "The Tower" stages a dramatic break between two of its octaves:

Hanrahan rose in frenzy thereAnd followed up those baying creatures towards—

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!

(196).

And the last, and most intriguing, instance of the Yeatsian enjambed stanza occurs in "Cuchulain Comforted," where the demands of the terza rima (the lone occurrence of the form in Yeats's Collected Poems) result in the only case in Yeats of true inter-stanzaic enjambment:

A shroud that seemed to have authorityAmong those bird-like things came, and let fallA bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and threeCame creeping up because the man was still.And thereupon that linen-carrier said'Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud'

(332).

There is another enjambed stanza several stanzas later, and "Cuchulain Comforted" stands as the only poem in Yeats's canon in which one would have to forgo a pause in between stanzas in order to render the syntactical sense of the lines.

That a key aspect of Yeats's style is the concurrence of the end of a stanza and the end of a sentence is not news, and has been remarked upon by critics from Hugh Kenner to Helen Vendler to Peter McDonald. Often read as an aesthetic analogy to Yeats's insistence on order and authority, especially in the latter part of his career, this basic formal principle has had an intriguing afterlife in Irish poetry since Yeats.¹ To state it perhaps a bit too sweepingly: Irish poets after Yeats have tended to adhere to either one or the other of Yeats's dual formal engine. A good number of poets from Northern Ireland have kept the stanza as the organizing grid for their poetry. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon have maintained the stanza as the fundamental unit of composition throughout their careers, and so have more formally audacious poets like Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. This adherence to the stanza can also be seen in the work of younger poets from the North like Alan Gillis and Sinéad Morrissey. Though it doesn't necessarily apply to every poem that these poets have written, for the most part their poems tend to fall into stanzas of the same length, whether they are the shapely and intricate stanzas of early Longley and Mahon, the incisive quatrains that dominate Heaney's North, Muldoon's insistent re-torquing of the sonnet, or the long-lined couplets featured in Carson's First Language or Opera Et Cetera. The movements of the sentence, for these poets, are subjugated to the recurring stanza-shape.

It could be said that many of the poets in the Republic of Ireland employ the opposite strategy, that of subjugating the length and shape of the stanza to the structure of syntax and the flow of sentences. Even this binary, though, is untenable, since there are plenty of poems by Northern poets (especially Heaney) that are made from long, verse-paragraph-like stanzas of varying length, as well as plenty of poems by writers from the Republic (especially Eavan Boland) that are paradigms of stanzaic regularity.

Yeats aimed for an absolute coincidence between the stanza and the sentences. Irish poets in the second part of the century, in response to Yeats as well as the legacies of modernist experimentation and those of the well-made English lyric, have generally disrupted the stability of the one while maintaining the coherence of the other. On the one hand we could adduce the stark tercets that characterize many of the poems from Boland's In Her Own Image or the rambunctious sonnets that constitute Muldoon's "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants." On the other, we could note the slow-burn of Kinsella's poems of the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose uneven, oblique stanzas are often determined by sentence boundaries. There are fewer examples in recent Irish writing of poems that experiment with stanzas and sentences at the same time, readjusting the shape of both simultaneously. Paula Meehan's body of poetry includes a cache of poems that undertake such experiments, and they constitute a significant intervention into the formal possibilities of contemporary lyric poetry as well the aesthetic ideologies that have subtended Irish poetry since Yeats.

In his crucial essay, "The End of the Poem," Giorgio Agamben begins by noting that poetry lives in the "schism" or "disjunction" between language as a semiotic event and a semantic event, which he calls at various times "the tension and difference (and hence interference) between sound and sense," "the opposition between metrical segmentation and semantic segmentation," or the difference between the "semantic, global unit" and the "metrical, partial unit" (109, 111). This initial positing leads to an argument about the impossibility of a poem's ending, considering that poetry itself lives in the constitutive tension that would be necessarily halted when a poem "ends." Agamben pays close attention to rhymes in medieval Italian verse, especially in Dante's works, but his general theorization of poetry as a continuous series of tensions and disjunctions between lines and stanzas on the one hand ("metrical segmentation") and phrases and sentences on the other ("semantic segmentation") is quite valuable. Enjambment, as the site of interference between the semiotic and the semantic, becomes a basic condition of poetry. For Yeats, enjambment was generally an intrastanzaic feature, and a poem like "Cuchulain Comforted" is so oddly powerful in part because it breaks one of the formal premises upon which so many of his other major poems are based. As part of the modernist project to, in Ezra Pound's words, compose poetry "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome," the resources of enjambment became decoupled from those of meter and prosody (3). For poets like William Carlos Williams, or Pound himself, enjambment became a spatial, visual, or musical property of poetry more than a metrical one, a crux of so-called "vers libre," while W. H. Auden and then Philip Larkin and The Movement poets reasserted the traditional forms and meters of English poetry. Irish poetry has always sat uneasily among these various transatlantic debates.

One of the reasons for this uneasiness is that Irish poetry often experiments from within the frame of the lyric rather than eschewing it altogether. If many North American and English experimental poets have worked to push Agamben's enabling condition for poetry—the interference between the semiotic and the semantic—to its breaking point, then Irish poetry has reworked that condition from the inside. One sort of experimentation is explosive while the other is implosive. Though there are of course a number of Irish poets whose experiments resemble North American or Continental models, e.g., Samuel Beckett, Catherine Walsh, and Trevor Joyce, this other sort of Irish experimental poetry is submerged within the textures of lyric form. Considering the Yeatsian inheritance, finding new ways of moving within stanzas and from stanza to stanza was something of an imperative for contemporary Irish poets. And just as Irish poets' reconfigurations of the lyric "I" constitute a set of experiments that look different from those of the Language Poets, so does their interrogation of the substance and shape of the lyric stanza proceed according to a different set of criteria. Rethinking the relationship between the stanza and the sentence and revitalizing the ways in which lyric shapes can be distributed on the page have been vital concerns for Irish poets in the past seventy years, and are deeply connected to the social and political matters that these poets investigate.

Though Meehan's stanzaic experiments are not entirely explainable in terms of her ongoing critique of gender ideologies in Ireland, it is the case that the particular form—the stanza that is both variable and enjambed—is also utilized by the major women poets in Ireland: Eavan Boland in some of her most polemically powerful poems; Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin in some of her more oblique narratives; and Medbh McGuckian in some of her hermetic lyrics. One major critical debate among Irish feminist scholars has been over the relationship between progressive politics and poetic styles, and the work of these three poets has been the major site on which such debates have taken place. This argument usually pits Boland's accessible, representative poetry, with its coherent, stable, and authoritative lyric "I" against the more fragmented and elusive styles of Ní Chuilleanáin and McGuckian.² Introducing Meehan's work into the argument helps to clarify and revise some of its stakes. Even as Meehan shares stylistic and compositional tendencies with these Irish poets, her work diverges from that of Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin, and McGuckian in productive ways, some of which can be seen in the pressures that she puts on traditional stanza forms.

In Meehan's six major volumes of poetry, there are two basic types of poems: those written in verse paragraphs in which the end of the stanza generally coincides with the end of a sentence, and those written in shorter, recurring stanzas. Some of her more well-known poems fall into the first sort, such as "Buying Winkles," "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks," "She-Who-Walks-Among-the-People," or the recent "At Shelling Hill," and tend to either tell stories (as in "Buying Winkles") or present monologues (as in "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks"). The majority of the second sort are poems in regularly shaped stanzas, whether they are couplets ("Child Burial," "Take a breath. Hold it. Let it go," "Thunder in the House"); tercets ("No Go Area," "Reading the Sky," "The Man who was Marked by Winter," "Etch"); quatrains ("Rag Trade," "Dharmakaya," "Three Love Songs"); quintets ("The Leaving," "Two Buck Tim from Timbuctoo," "The View from Under the Table"); or sestets ("Not Your Muse"). Fixed forms like the villanelle ("Song," "Quitting the Bars") or sestina ("Caesarean Section In A Belfast Street") appear less frequently, although the sonnet has become much more prominent in Dharmakaya and, especially, Painting Rain, which contains fourteen such poems. This long catalogue is meant to show that Meehan has worked in a good number of poetic forms in her career, which has made for an enabling eclecticism. Both the "well-made" poem that typifies much of the Irish tradition and the more loosely shaped poem that is indebted to contemporary American poetics are represented in her body of work. Her most recent volume, Painting Rain, contains sonnets and other poems in traditional stanzas, as well as a number of poems—such as "Death of a Field," "Peter, Uncle," "Hannah, Grandmother," or "When I Was a Girl"—that resemble texts by Gary Snyder or Adrienne Rich more than Eavan Boland or Seamus Heaney.

At the intersection between these two types of poems, Meehan has worked in a third type, one which either uses regular stanzas but offsets the unfolding of sentences from the periodicity of the stanzas or which incorporates stanzas of alternate or uneven lengths so as to highlight disjunctions between the two. In both cases, enjambment becomes the crucial mechanism by which to show the fluctuations between the motions of the stanzas and the countering motions of the sentences. By counter pointing sentences and stanzas, such shapes scramble the usual figure-ground ratios that have dominated modern Irish poetry. At various moments figure is becoming ground and ground is becoming figure. Yeats mapped the poetic figures (sentences) on to the poetic ground (stanzas) precisely. Poets after Yeats have tended to set either stanzas or sentences as the ground and treat the other as the fluctuating figure. The kind of Meehan poem that I'm interested in describing here refuses to allow figure and ground to stay still. In such poems, recurrent stanza shapes are shot through with sentences that upset the stanzaic consistency, as in "Ard Fheis," from The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, or, mixed stanza shapes force a redistribution of the sentences within them, as in "Lullaby," from the same volume.

The stanzaic pattern of "Lullaby" consists of two three-line stanzas followed by a two-line stanza, and the pattern is repeated three times. There is a sentence break at the end of each two-line unit, so that this poem in nine stanzas falls into three sentences. However, there is a clear syntactical break at the end of the first tercet in each unit, so that the two tercets are syntactically independent and interlocked (and spatially distinguished) at once:

My sister is sleepingand makes small murmursas she turns in a dream

she is swinging a childunder the shade ofa lilac tree blooming

in a garden in springtimemy sister is sleeping

(The Man Who Was Marked by Winter 38)

This three-part, one-sentence unit also contains three distinct syntactical units (one per stanza) that are not marked except by way of stanza breaks. The stanzas are enjambed, in that we can read straight through them without any pauses and render the syntax of the sentences. But working against this visual enjambment is a counter-enjambment in which we register the syntactical pauses that each stanza's final line allows, as well as the alternate pauses available throughout the unit that offer different configurations. Additionally, the two tercets each constitute a complete sentence, though unmarked, and a reader could work against the cues of the page and pause before reaching the two-line stanza, in which case that unit ("in a garden in springtime/my sister is sleeping") seems like a new beginning, although one quickly cut short by the period at the end of the stanza. This new beginning repeats the opening, and the envelope structure provides a mode of internal closure upset by the various syncopations happening at the local level, as well as by the fact that the poem goes on for another six stanzas. Such locally metamorphic architectures are, to my mind, of intense interest. They redeploy lyric structures and, from the inside of the form, renovate the form's possibilities. Most importantly, they don't lend themselves to a single reading. Registering the various parastanzas and embedded sentences that are available within the surface forms is crucial to the point of the poem. A reader should hear the alternate channels inscribed within the "Lullaby," and recognize these channels as simultaneously open to reading. By allowing neither sentence nor stanza to become the consistent ground of the poem, Meehan produces a site of reading that is actually several sites, concurrent with, but not reducible to, each other.

In certain respects, this aspect of Meehan's practice has been guided by earlier mixed stanza poems by Eavan Boland. In her 1980 collection, In Her Own Image, the characteristic short-lined poems, such as "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," "Solitary," "Menses," and "Making Up," are sometimes arranged in irregular stanzas, a practice that recurs in Night Feed (1982) and The Journey (1987). However, they have quite a different effect in Boland's work than in Meehan's. Boland's asymmetrical stanzas often function to isolate or emphasize significant moments, or to enact the thematic freight of the poems in which they occur. In a poem such as "Menses," the pacing and placement of lines and stanzas reinforces the semantic force of the lines:

They are street-walkers,lesbians,nuns.I am not one of them

and how they'd pity menow as dusk encroachesand she comes

looking for her looking-glass.

(103)

Though the speaker differentiates herself from the street-walker, the lesbian, and the nun ("I am not one of them"), the form of the poem enforces the speaker's connection to those figures. Just as they are isolated in their own lines, so is the speaker in hers. "[A]nd how they'd pity me" is placed so as to separate the speaker from the rest of the world (the other figures, "dusk," "she") of the poem, which has the contradictory effect of identifying the speaker with the aforementioned marginalized social types. In this way the poem's distribution on the page does what the poem says (isolated figures are "isolated" on the page) and also subtly undercuts what the poems says (isolated figures, by being isolated together, are placed in relation to one another). A similar kind of structure can be seen in one of Boland's signature poems, "Mise Éire," where the variable stanzas signal the resistance of the speaker to the patriarchal and colonial ideologies that have defined the nation and the state, and of her refusal to "go back to it" (An Origin 156). The often jarring stanza breaks in "Mise Éire" replicate the "kind[s] of scar[s]" that the speaker surfaces and critiques, whether based on gender, class, or language (157).³ The large-scale project of Boland's poetry is to carve a space for women to speak as subjects within what she has recently called "the toxic lyric" of the largely male Irish literary tradition (Domestic Violence 72). Her various stanza shapes often function as tactical forms within that project, crystalizing its arguments and "concretizing" its stakes. Meehan's experiments in variable stanzas in part derive from Boland's, but to quite different ends and effects.

In a short poem like Meehan's "The rain makes one word . . ." collected in Pillow Talk, the predominant couplet structure is offset immediately by the isolation of the first line:

The rain makes one word

for the woman when they quarrel.It falls on the city.

Her boots let inbut they got her through the winter.

The rain makes one word that dropsin the silence when it stopsand the window weepsbeads—each a convex mirror

of the room whereshe's polishing her boots.

Loss: the rain made.Loss. She stares

at the bootsthat have got her through the winter.

(70)

The opening line, set off by itself from the run of couplets that make up the rest of the poem, is actually paired with itself, as it also stands as the title. In Shakespeare's Sonnets or Dickinson's corpus, for example, the first line also often serves as the working title of the poem, either in critical parlance or in reference material, but that first line usually doesn't appear twice on the page where the poem appears (for Dickinson and Shakespeare, numbers function as titles as well). In other poems that meld the title and the first line, such as Marianne Moore's "The Fish," the first line is placed in the title position on the page, which leads immediately into the poem's second line. Meehan's poem does something different. By repeating the first line of the poem (as title and as first line), Meehan essentially creates a false couplet that is both self-identical and self-estranged. The rain's "one word" occurs twice.

The formal dialectic between one-ness and two-ness modeled by the couplet structure is enforced by the metonymic/metaphoric chains that enact the poem's many substitutions and transformations. The "convex mirror" at the poem's center serves as the structural analogue for the entire poem. Both reflecting and transforming, the mirror governs the poem's movements, turning rain into word into tears ("weeps") into "beads" into "a convex mirror" into "loss," shifting the signification of "they" in the second line, and effecting the synechdochic slip from the woman to her boots. The poem's repeated motifs are morphed in the "convex mirror" of its form. As in "Lullaby," the varied repetitions, altered both by their environment and their emplacement within lines and stanzas, foreclose simple, single readings. Conditioned initially to treat "The rain makes one word" as an isolated unit, we have to continually revise as we move down the page, first connecting it to the woman for whom it is made, then to the silence into which it drops, and then into the "loss" that is its final product: "Loss: the rain made." This line, a kind of inversion of the first, is sheltered from the rest of the poem—set off in a sentence and enclosed by "Loss" and "Loss"—while also signaling the women's own manifold loss, which is romantic ("when they quarrel"), existential ("she stares"), and economic ("her boots let in"). Neither sentence nor stanza is allowed to occupy steady ground as each becomes the shifting figure for the other in the poem's distorting formal mirror.

"Coda: Payne's Grey," the final poem in Painting Rain, is one of the most recent additions to the set of Meehan's poems that experiment with the variable, enjambed stanza. And it can be read as an amalgam of the two poems that I have discussed so far. Like "Lullaby" it has a regular pattern of variation, consisting of five one-line stanzas and five two-line stanzas in alternation. And like "The rain makes one word" it employs the short-line, short-stanza form in order to think through the relationship of the lyric "I" and the world outside. Unlike either of these poems, however, the poem's fifteen lines occur over one looping sentence. Eschewing punctuation until the poem's final stop, "Coda: Payne's Grey"manages to cross-hatch the semantic and semiotic in order to force their imbrications and disjunctions to the surface. Its title referring to a dark grey hue that is produced by combining a blue and a black and named for a nineteenth-century British painter and art teacher, "Coda: Payne's Grey" immediately situates the speaker in a position both quotidian and ambiguous:

I am trying to paint rain

day after dayI go out into it

drizzle, shower, downpour

but not yet the exactspring rain

warm and heavy and slow

each dropdistinct & perfect

that I wait for

by this water's edgewhere some leaf of memorywill come down with the flood

the river in spatebroadening out to the sea.

(96)

The stark form of the poem resembles a core-sample of rain, the singularity of the drops, "distinct & perfect," scumbled by the incessance of the storm. Many of the lines are detachable, and could be isolated by pauses before and after: "I am trying to paint rain," "drizzle, shower, downpour," "spring rain," "each drop."However, like a rainstorm, whose individual drops are only recognizable in the aggregate, these phrases also can be read as continually enjambed, and a few of the lines require a reader to enjamb in order to render the syntax: "but not yet the exact," "that I wait for." Trying to paint rain turns out to be impossible for several reasons: rain cannot be the surface on which painting happens (the ground of the painterly ground), nor can paint adequately be the represented figure of painting. Whether in "drizzle, shower, [or] downpour," the painted rain could never be rendered "each drop/distinct & perfect." Its motion, its transience, and its substance all work against it being represented. When it is in its cloud, it isn't yet rain. When it is in the air, as rain, it is near inapprehensible. When it makes landfall, it is no longer rain; it is water in a puddle, or reservoir, or hand. The poem registers such impossibilities: it is "trying to paint rain," "wait[ing] for" "each drop" while it is itself among the drops ("I go out into it").

Against the usual notion of the Romantic, lyric "I" whose unimpeded gaze allows it full access to what is to be represented, the speaker in this poem is embedded in the scene and can get nothing like purchase on it. As the poem shifts into the future tense toward the end, the productive limitations of the speaker's position "by this water's edge" is figured in the single "leaf of memory" (which is also the poem and the page) that will be somehow graspable in the flooding river as it heads to the sea. Meehan's rescoring of Wordsworth's dictum—to make a poem from the tranquil recollection after the "spontaneous overflow" ("the river in spate")—is also a subtle revision of it (Wordsworth 611). The single leaf, like the rain drop, will not be available "distinct & perfect," but rather is constituted by the flood on which it travels and in which it is overwhelmed by water. "Painting rain" becomes the necessary, impossible activity that will ceaselessly limn its own shifting ground while trying to get a bead on an object ("rain") and a color ("Payne's Grey," which is also "pain's grey") that refuse to settle into singularity or stability. The stanzas that compose this poem register the impossibility of this task by way of their syncopations. The interlocked phrases that constitute the sentence, detached from and dependent on one another, reveal the mutual embedding of syntax and stanza. This doesn't signify a collapse back into aesthetic autonomy disguised as an organic unity, but rather surfaces the multiple incommensurabilities from which lyric poems are constructed.

I can imagine two immediate objections to the above readings (and more that might not be as immediate). First, it could be said that my account of this aspect of Meehan's poetry is deeply, damagingly formalist. That in paying attention to some of the micro-structures of the poems, I have failed to think about the broader themes and stakes of her work. However, if we think of poetry as having larger themes and stakes, then most often they will be most powerfully produced through the intricacies of their forms. Meehan's variable stanzas, and the lyric positionings that occur within them, themselves evince an abiding interest in relationality and, more specifically, in the social. As many of the essays in this issue show, Meehan's poetry is fundamentally concerned with matters of class relations, economic justice, environmental degradation, and gender equality. Many of her strongest poems forward such concerns by way of powerful narratives, striking scenarios, or haunting monologues. These same concerns are manifested in Meehan's work at the level of the line, of the phrase, and of the stanza. Her ongoing attention to learning "to live with dodgy matter" is often most vivid within the local textures of lyric form(The Man Who Was Marked by Winter 58). These local textures reveal what Theodor Adorno has called "the paradox specific to the lyric work," which is that such subjective utterances can be "socially motivated behind the author's back" as "the subjective expression of a social antagonism" (43, 45). The lyric, occurring within the objective medium of language, cannot simply resist the social as though from the outside, but must critique it from within its own contours, and must do the work of resisting its own form from the inside of that form. The second objection would be that while this reading is all well and good for the small group of Meehan poems that I've chosen to highlight, the fact is that many of her poems do not fall into such patterns or proceed in such ways. Though many of the readings here are applicable to Meehan's longer narrative poems or her poems in regular stanzas, for the most part this critique would be true. Many of Meehan's poems are constructed along quite different lines than those I've highlighted. But, it is often the poems that elude the main currents of the corpus that are both illustrative counterexamples and crucial in their own right. Just as that oddly enjambing poem in terza rima, powerfully idiosyncratic compared to the monumental architectures that surround it, sits like a leaf among stones at the end of Yeats's final work.