Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition

Chapter 3: “Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place ” : Michael Longley’s Environmental Elegies

Chapter 3 “Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place” Michael Longley’s Environmental Elegies In an interview with Fran Brearton, then a student at the University of Durham, Michael Longley was asked to discuss the closing lines of his book The Ghost Orchid: “Love poems, elegies: I am losing my place. / Elegies come between you and my face.” Longley quips that while Fran is at the stage in her life for going to weddings, he has arrived at the stage for going to funerals , and thus he is writing more and more elegies.1 Yet even Longley’s first collected poem, “Epithalamion,” is richly elegiac, suffused with the awareness that everything is dying: in the midst of this wedding song, Longley reminds his bride that even the darkness is growing elderly, the flowers are withering . . . the stars dissolved, Amalgamated in a glare, which last night were revolved Discreetly round us.2 The poem demonstrates how quickly life moves from aubade to elegy— from the lovers’ arrogant certainty that the stars, and even the sun itself, orbit around them, to the awareness that all—including the lovers themselves—will die. The couple that had been “rendered royal” by the moths seeking light n 75 76 Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition in their room will someday be gone, and he hopes that at least all these dying things will “when we rise, be seen with dawn / As remnant yet part raiment still, / Like flags that linger on the sky when king and queen are gone.” While a classics student at Trinity College, Longley was particularly interested in the Roman love elegists,3 and his early poetry is influenced by Latin elegy, especially Catullus and Sextus Propertius.4 Longley’s first collected poem is also self-consciously pastoral in its rendering of the tension between rural and urban worlds: the silence and tranquility of the couple’s garden, with its folded flowers, contrasts with the “loudly reprobate” train, which “shoots from silence into silence.” Pastoral and elegy have long been complementary literary forms,5 and Longley’s employment of them has been regarded as the means by which he conveys his attitude toward violence in Northern Ireland, which grows out of his philosophy of life in general—epitomized in his poem “According to Pythagoras” as “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”6 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews suggests that Longley’s entire aesthetic has been specifically designed to manifest this idea of interconnectedness: In a context of social conflict and violence, this Whitmanesque idea of the unity of all creation can have a powerfully steadying and reassuring effect. As a tenet of faith it can help ensure against demoralization and defeat, as it can against dogmatism and partisanship. . . . In . . . “According to Pythagoras,” a free working of a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the theme is the flux of life. The idea of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” is presented in biological and physical terms, as a basic fact of life: life is generated out of the putrefaction of death, the shore-crab’s claw grows into a scorpion, worms into butterflies, germs into grogs, larvae into bees, eggs into birds, rotting spines into snakes; hyenas change sex, chameleons change colour, lynxes’ urine becomes stones. Formally, the notion of universal interconnectedness is acted out in the links that Longley establishes with Pythagoras and Ovid, in the fusion of classical and contemporary worlds.7 While Longley’s emphasis on interconnectedness obviously suggests an alternative to Northern Ireland’s legacy of sectarian violence, his frequent references to biological interconnectedness suggest that along with his need to traverse social, cultural, and political boundaries is the need to challenge the boundaries traditionally posited between the self and nature. In an interview with Jody Allen-Randolph, Longley has stated that “the most urgent political problems are ecological: how we share the planet with the plants and the other animals. My nature writing is my most political.”8 Asked in the same interview to describe the distance between the poet and nature, Longley confidently replies, “None. The poet is part of nature. Language is part of nature.”9 77 Michael Longley’s Environmental Elegies Notably, the science of ecology is also grounded in the interconnectedness of all things. Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory explains that in the ecological model of the living world, “there are no absolutely discrete entities and no absolute dividing lines between...