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Chapter 1 A Lost Pastoral Rhythm The Poetry of John Montague Antoinette Quinn describes John Montague as “a pastoral poet manqué, an elegist pining for the stability of lost rural rituals,” observing that even the village pub in his first collection, The Rough Field (1972), is named “The Last Sheaf.” “‘The Last Straw,’” she quips, “might have been more apt,” because Montague’s poetry is redolent with nostalgia for a lost world.1 Although Montague himself has expressed suspicion of the idealizing tendencies of pastoral , he has acknowledged the potential of pastoral to address wider issues, most pointedly in his analysis of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” included in his edited collection, The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, where he observes that “the pastoral clichés of eighteenth-century poetry are being used to a very definite artistic purpose, the evocation of a ‘Golden Age’ of rural life. Auburn is not a particular, but a universal village of the plain, a pastoral Eden evoking the essence of every Virgilian eclogue and Horatian retreat: it even has special climatic privileges.”2 Montague’s discussion of Goldsmith’s pastoral as a vehicle by which he makes “one of the first statements of a great modern theme, the erosion of traditional values and natural rhythms in a commercial society” provides a template for reading Montague’s own pastoral poetry.3 Montague’s essay demonstrates how the destruction of Auburn signifies the destruction of many things: “the narrator’s childhood and his dreams of 19 n 20 Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition escape and peaceful retirement . . . ‘rural virtues,’ ‘all the connexions of kindred ’ in the family unit, ‘spontaneous joys’ as opposed to unnatural artifice, virginal innocence, and, finally, poetry itself, even perhaps religion.”4 Finding a parallel between Goldsmith’s approach and that of the agrarians in Ireland or America, Montague contends that for all of them, the “rural virtues” are actually the root virtues of the good society, and the virtues that pastoral promotes are no less relevant for his own time and place.5 Montague’s argument is perhaps influenced by the intersection of nationalist rhetoric with his own personal history: his father’s IRA involvement during the 1920s, which prompted the family’s move to New York, included firebranding the house of an absentee landlord, a popular ploy of agrarians since the eighteenth century to assert Ireland’s prior claim to the land.6 Terence Brown, in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (cited by Montague in The Figure in the Cave), writes of the poets of Montague’s father’s era, who “celebrated a version of Irish pastoral, where rural life was a condition of virtue in as much as it remained an expression of an ancient civilization, uncontaminated by commercialism and progress. In so doing they helped to confirm Irish society in a belief that rural life constituted an essential element of an unchanging Irish identity.”7 Montague describes his father as having played a part in the “Holy War” to restore “our country,” and at least in his early volumes, Montague provides a version of pastoral that reads as a continuation of these efforts to assert the primacy of the landscape and rural life as a means of restoring that which was lost in the process of colonization. Montague’s contention that “the fall of Auburn is the fall of a whole social order”8 illuminates his descriptions in his first collection, The Rough Field (1972), of the country village where he was raised, Garvaghey. The word comes from the Gaelic Garbh acaidh, which translates as “the rough field,” thereby evoking not only the terrain but the rough, uncertain political history of Montague’s Northern Ireland. Garvaghey’s name is a particularly apt reminder of the Troubles because of the Protestant Orange Order’s insistence on following the old line of its annual march down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road to commemorate William of Orange’s victory over Irish Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne, which has in turn annually provoked Catholic resistance. Just as Goldsmith’s descriptions of the land’s dispossession in “The Deserted Village,” invite comparison with Virgil, so do Montague’s. Writing against the specific backdrop of the Irish civil war and the troubles that followed, Montague alludes to ancient struggles over land, nevertheless attuned to the consolation to be found in it. He opens the collection with an epigraph from the Afghan that relies on a farming metaphor to respond to...

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