The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words

6. ‘Warding off an Epitaph’: Had I a thousand lives

6 ‘Warding off an Epitaph’: Had I a thousand lives CONOR CARVILLE 117 Questions of names and naming loom large in Medbh McGuckian’s collection Had I aThousand Lives (2003): the act of naming as a mode of control, as a means of change and renewal, and as a token of possession.1 Most of all, however, naming appears in these poems as a practice of remembrance. In this sense one could argue that behind McGuckian’s collection there remains one exemplary poem:W.B.Yeats’s great work of naming, remembrance and renewal,‘Easter 1916’.AsYeats puts it there:‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart / O, when may it suffice? / That is heaven’s part, our part / to murmur name upon name / As a mother names her child’.2 Of course,Yeats’s poem is itself an example of such murmured remembrance , particularly in its closing litany of those who were executed:‘I write it out in a verse: MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse.’3 And yet the poem is also something more, or something less, than that intimate , oral term ‘murmuring’ might suggest. For it is also a strident, rhetorical text, something implacably written and inscribed. It has, that is to say, the considered calm of the epitaph, as well as the keening quality of the lament, the stolidity of a monument, as well as the immediate, transfiguring power of performative speech. Indeed, the tension between these two aspects is part of the poem’s powerful inner dynamic. And, as we shall see, this same tension between the oral and the written, the formal and the personal , the constative and the performative, is very much present in Had I a Thousand Lives. One of the more deceptively immediate poems in the collection, ‘A Religion ofWriting’, concentrates on a gravestone, or on some sort of commemorative structure: Despite the thicket, the writing is set low, half-empty lines with ivy leaves and fruits acting as punctuation. such unsteady capitals, the backward S, the L with its foot slanting sharply downwards, the B with detached loops, a G consisting of two opposing curves, a Q with an extended tail taken up inside, a long palm-like Y.There are cuts reinforcing the heads and the forking of the uprights, letters of smaller size placed inside others [. . .] a death’s head carved with a human head inside it.4 It seems clear from the references to the ‘thicket’ that has grown upon or around it that this gravestone has not been raised recently.There is also the strong implication that its letters are fashioned in an archaic, dated way (the ‘long palm-like / Y’), while the decorative embellishments of ‘ivy leaves and fruits’ might again suggest a relatively old grave.The headstone also seems to have been weathered to the extent that the lines written upon it are ‘halfempty ’, and it is this sense of emptiness that the poem will concentrate upon, restricting itself to a description of the grave’s appearance, and leaving the reader to conjecture as to the identity of its occupant. At the same time, while doing all this, the poem is careful to insist, again and again, on the placing and act of inscription, on the physical incision of the tombstone. Significantly, however, the resulting capitals are referred to as ‘unsteady’, ‘slanting’, ‘detached’ and ‘opposed’. What is more, the way in which the poem lists fragmented letters to create a kind of rebus, leaving us to infer the possible name or epitaph on the tomb, suggests a degree of imaginative freedom, of interpretation on the part of both the narrator and the reader. In this sense, ‘A Religion of Writing’ delicately balances those two aspects of ‘Easter 1916’ referred to earlier: the formal permanence of inscription , as against the intimacy of personal interpretation and remembrance. The ambiguity and balance between marmoreal immutability and human agency are beautifully conveyed in the final image of the human head inside the death’s head carved. In contrast to these reservations about naming, many, if not most, of the titles in McGuckian’s collection explicitly invoke the proper name of a person or place:‘Slieve Gallion’,‘Cathal’sVoice’,‘The Flower ofTullahogue’, ‘The Garryduff Bird’, to list but some. Many others metaphorically christen 118 Conor Carville a person or place: ‘The Chimney Boys’, ‘The Mule Path’, ‘The Sleeping Room...