Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs

In a 1996 essay called “A Tongue at Play,” Michael Longley recalls the short poems of rhyming couplets included in his first volume of poetry, No Continuing City (1969), as “closed circuits”: “They had about them the air of ‘end of the road’ rather than ‘en route,’ and enjoyed already the brevity of epitaphs.”¹ For a poet now renowned for his elegies, the poem as epitaph might not seem an odd place to begin, and indeed, some among Longley’s critics have used the two terms interchangeably.² Yet, explicitly epitaphic verse—poems that thematically consider the epitaph or pay homage to writers of epitaphs, as well as these “epitaphic” couplets—has a dominant presence in Longley’s publications before 1970, a presence that gives specific poetic form to an increasingly prevalent concern among established Irish poets about the fractured and isolated state of contemporary Irish poetry.

Longley’s epitaphic poems are experiments in the silencing and disconnecting capacities of language, expressing most fully Longley’s sense of his first collection as a self-reflexive preoccupation “with form . . . exploring its capacities to control and its tendencies to disintegrate” (TAP 112). What Longley describes as a purely formal concern with disintegration, however, resonates more expansively as a meditation on the imperfections and ambitions of Irish poetry as Ireland hovered on the brink of political crisis. Longley’s early interest in the epitaph emerged as a response to the aesthetic pressures of Irish national discord, and in particular to the ways in which poetry should—or should not—seek to write across and erase the violence of such fundamental cultural rifts. A theory of the epitaph emerges from Longley’s own analyses and revisions of his epitaphic poetry, one that both parallels changing ideas about the politics of Irish poetry and elaborates in complex formal terms a political agenda that engages with, but ultimately rejects, lingual discontinuity as the precondition for writing modern Irish poetry. The formal ambiguities of several of Longley’s epitaphic couplet poems express Longley’s authentic, if soon abandoned, desire to find poetic form for the static and disconnected sensibility that constitutes one vision of Irish poetic identity.

Longley’s early couplets, those poems with the “brevity of epitaphs,” were first printed by Phoenix Pamphlet Poet Press in 1968 as a separate collection called Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems, and later included in No Continuing City (1969).³ His comments about the couplets in “A Tongue at Play” are lifted almost verbatim from his introduction to Secret Marriages, which—as the only analytical introduction Longley has written to one of his own collections—suggests that Longley registered the difference of these poems as a lack: the act of writing an introduction indicates he perceived a demand for supplementation and a failure in the poems’ independent efforts at communication. The retrospective “A Tongue at Play” remembers all of No Continuing City as a preoccupation with formal disintegration.⁴ The introduction to Secret Marriages sees this smaller collection as the more immediate culmination of the same preoccupation: the short, rhymed couplets of most of its poems are “tiny units, reduced stanzas, circuits which are almost closed, relying more on their own interrelationships than would the usual cursive and open-ended kind.”

Although shifts in the order of phrasing between earlier introduction and later essay turn our attention from the couplet poems in particular to their impact on Longley’s later career, both link the “brevity of epitaphs” to the inevitability of a subsequent “blank page and silence”; in the introduction, the silence is a melancholic “dead silence.” Longley’s introduction to Secret Marriages attempts to speak over that silence, but it inscribes an intrinsic relationship between morbidity and form in the language it uses to fill the gaps left by these poems. The couplets, he tells us, are the result of “murderous deletion,” gestures of “dead silence,” marked by “brevity,” about “extremes of experience or remote notions,” and conveying to Longley “definite warnings about [his] future.”⁵

In describing the relationship between silence, brevity, and the “preoccupation with form” as epitaphic, Longley hints at a...