Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Sonnets to Edmund Spenser

As if setting a standard, you wrote Elizabeth on a strand in Munster. Those nine letters were enough against the waves spreading their foamy ruff.

I

A man I used to teach, a great surfer who has done the waves off Smerwick Harbour gave me this jawbone from the massacre. I have it in front of me as a challenge, to suggest two teeth remaining along a honeycomb, a worn alabaster flange. Metaphors, no problem. Molars are stones to step over the stream of time, the bone is an obol under the thumb for Charon— journeyman stuff! This does not tell how he cursed in his last Italian; his panic came too late to be read back from the bone, and yet this must be where my English starts, this remnant of a garrison poleaxed.

II

An update from Italy: just last week we had taken a twisting, climbing road up to the pass at about four thousand feet. Woodland gave way to rock and the blue air of the Apennines. Crickets were milling heat. Had those been goats or sheep in the clearing? On the way back down, traffic had to stop, and three herdsmen delivered the answer with shouts and whistles above a tinkling flock of mountain sheep in a stream across our path. In a moment, it was over— cars moved on, the herd was back in the cover of groves where all those shepherds ever do is talk in the tradition that launched you.

III

The next time I discover you asleep at your desk, slumped over the Aeneid, with the page open at strife in Latium— the fort at Smerwick all over again, authentic, ancient terror attended by that distant screeching and beseeching still in your head as you took up your pen to commend the justice of proceedings.

You keep this ploy of service forever through contrived, neat allegorical wars in your obsessive realms of faerie. Your havoc couldn’t come from a god’s caprice unless that god were your doctrinal self too eager to release the dogs of horror.

IV

We have horses in the fields below the house swishing the tail of an uneventful afternoon among the thistles, as you must have known. On windy days, when everything’s beaten down they assemble as their own monument, rumps to the wind—as we say tóin le gaoth. I wonder if they suffered your stricture, if you told the children to turn away as mare and stallion tussled rampant before coupling repeatedly where May blossom thrived, as if Jove’s “lusty hed” came down to earth at your managed hedge and then in epic metre galloped off among your sheep, scattering the flock.

V

He pluckt a bough, out of whose rift there cameSmall drops of gory blood, that trickled down the same.

The tree was not merely literary even if you were reworking Virgil. You were also a settler under siege from wolves and thieves in a wild Munster wood. So your cherished classical tradition was revised by Ireland’s unsettled condition. Diana’s quiver could not hold Aherlow against the treat of insurgent arrows.

Thus emboldened, I set a winter sun to strike the panel of the kitchen door in our new house. If the angle is low, you find red deal is true to its colour. Five years ago I discovered the knot glowing bright red at the thinnest cut.

VI

If watching trees could make them grow, these saplings would be dominant oaks by now to protect our house from the westerlies. The readers of the skies told us the signs, but we still built here despite the warnings about wet winters and more severe storms. How could you have thought the North wouldn’t rise up? Late July, the Severn has spread into the fields, the Avon has risen, islanding the towns, and pubs are ruined where they sang your sweet Thames. I take a break to look after my plantations and see that the stems are safe from hares. The winter nights here...