"That Blank Mouth": Secrecy, Shibboleths, and Silence in Northern Irish Poetry

The poetry of contemporary Northern Ireland has been among the most highly praised and widely read of any in English since the emergence in the 1960s of the generation of writers that includes Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. All are complex, allusive poets who have achieved popular readerships despite the presence in their work of much that resists being easily understood by readers who stand outside their poetry's densely local, mythic, and, on occasion, private references. This aspect of their style is particularly evident in the work of writers such as John Montague, Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson, whose roots lie as much in the Gaelic as in the English-language tradition. Writing on the proliferation of "cloaked references to Gaelic culture or Irish history" in modern Irish writing in English, Dillon Johnston identifies "two kinds of unstated or suppressed references":

first, those omissions introduced to frustrate a colonial auditor and convey secrets to a primary audience, and, second, those omissions introduced into a song or story when the fuller context is lost over time or simply dropped because in a place as small as Ireland everyone knows the plot. ¹

Johnston contrasts this secretiveness with English models such as Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads,with its commitment to a pellucid colloquial register, and Philip Larkin's aversion to poems decked out in the arcana of what he disparagingly calls the "myth-kitty." Possible roots for this cultural opposition can be found, Johnston reminds us, in Counter Reformation habits of secrecy or equivocation, conferring poems with the metaphorical equivalents of "priests' holes [and] secret rooms" in which to conceal their deeper meanings. ² In a contemporary context, these habits take on new resonances as historical themes and memories combine with the self-consciously Modernist techniques of Heaney's place-name poems or Carson's fantastical cityscapes of Belfast in the Troubles. In these poems, secrecy and indirection become both subject and means, as the poet attempts to satisfy the impulse to flee the brutality of a violently divided society, while simultaneously realizing that there is no escape and that the signs and symbols of division are coded into the most apparently innocuous subjects. All language teems with dangerous possibility, needing the corrective example of silence to keep it in its place; "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," Heaney famously instructs himself in the title of a poem from the second section of North. The value of silence is trumpeted, even as the silence is breached in the selfsame act. In "The Stone Verdict," for instance, we read of the poet's recently dead taciturn father:

It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.
He will expect more than words in the ultimate court
He relied on through a lifetime's speechlessness. ³

In commemoration of the dead man, "Somebody will break [the silence] at last to say, 'Here/ His spirit lingers,' and will have said too much" (Heaney, p. 17). In repeating the speaker's lapse into speech, Heaney pointedly flouts the code of manly silence which he professes. The poem, that is to say, calculatedly tropes rather than literally upholds its suspicion of speech. In many different ways, Heaney and other Northern Irish poets deploy strategies of silence, secrecy, private reference, and tribal shibboleth rather than "blabb[ing] out."

Although these strategies may superficially appear to work against self-expression, in reality they can yield up unsuspected layers of meaning in the most unusual ways. The precedents for this in Irish literary tradition are as frequently comic as they are elegiac or tragic. Confronted with a section devoted to the Irish language in The Best of Myles, a miscellany of the Ulster novelistFlann O'Brien aka Myles na gCopaleen's columns for The Irish Times, non-Gaelic-speaking readers may be tempted to move along swiftly to the next chapter...