austin clarke and gaelic poetic tradition

Austin Clarke and Gaelic Poetic TraditionAuthor(s): Robert WelchSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. 41-51Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477020 .

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Robert Welch

Austin Clarke and Gaelic Poetic Tradition1

Perhaps the main achievement of Austin Clarke's many-faceted career

lies in his reconstruction of the tone, quality and variety of the Gaelic

poetic voice in English. His work stands as an assertion of the continuity

of Irish poetic tradition, in that he opens up all sorts of emotional and

intellectual channels between different Gaelic pasts and the English-speaking Irish present. Like many other modern poets, most of his imaginative energy

has concentrated on making the past significant

? "capable

of signifying

for now," as David Jones has said. What Ferguson said of Petrie's work

could be applied to Clarke: he has made it more possible to "live back in

the land we live in;" the contours of the "field of retrospective enjoyment"

Ferguson also spoke of are clearer for his work.2 Clarke's past, like that

of P?trie and Ferguson, is Irish, but it is a past of many worlds, not just

periods, full of richness, colour, life and variety. In a sense, all of Clarke's work can be seen as translation, in that his verse

re-enacts in living English forms the craft and temper of Gaelic poetry. In the more

specific sense, howrever, versions of Irish poems of various

periods can be found scattered throughout his work. Generally speaking, these can

hardly be called translations in any strict sense, since they perform

a descant on the themes and patterns of the Irish original, yet they do have

a reference to an actual poem in another language. They are what Dryden

would call "imitations", where the translator is free "to run division on the

ground-work as he

pleases."3 Yet these descants are

extraordinarily vivid

representations of the imaginative impression the original made on Clarke, so that the Irish poem out of which they grewr reverberates or shimmers

through them. Translation here, as often in Mangan, becomes an intense

kind of literary criticism, so that the reader's sense of the original and its

context is enriched through Clarke's treatment of it. The play As the Crow

Flies contains the following lyric chanted by the Blackbird of Derrycairn,

1 This essay was written at the University of Ife in Nigeria. Understandably, libraries here are

not very well stocked with Irish and Anglo-Irish literature, and the range of reference is

somewhat narrower than it might be.

2 Samuel Ferguson, "The Dublin Penny Journal" in Dublin University Magazine, January

1840, p. 116.

3 "Preface to Ovid's Epistles" in James Kinsley (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), I, 182.

41



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

while perched on the antler of the Stag of Leiterlone :

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top Is whistling and the sun is brighter

Than God's own shadow in the cup now!

Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins

Will sound, Patrie, as well at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water

Fionn heard my melody in Norway. He found the forest track, he brought back

This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,

Why men must welcome in the daylight.4

This grows out of one of the Ossianic lays, but in the Irish it is Oisin who

sings, not the bird. The following quatrains find a variety of echoes in

Clarke:

Binn sin a luin Doire an Chairn!

ni chuala m? i n-aird san bhith

ce?l ba binne n? do che?l

agus t? fa bhun do nid.

I gcrich Lochlann na sreabh ngorm fuair mac Cumhaill na ngcorn ndearg an t-?an do-ch? sibh a-nois

ag sin a sg?al doit go dearbh.5

Clarke makes very free with his original; he decorates it, elaborates it, chases it with light and music. Nevertheless, certain important relationships obtain between the Irish poem and the daring English version. Firstly, Clarke's language reflects that of the Irish. The heavily-weighted con

sonants in the first line of the original, which open out into the broad vowels

of the second, find an echo in Clarke's opening lines, where the p's hold a

tension which is released in the second line. Also, Clarke's criss-crossing

prosody recreates the effect (though not the detail ? Sigerson's more

conservative, less exciting translation does that) of the meshed flow of the

original quatrains. It gives an impression of the high panoply of bardic

effect, and its expressive possibilities, to the modern ear.

4 Clarke, Collected Plays (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963), pp. 177, 178.

5 T. F, O'Rahilly (ed.), Measgra Danta 1 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1927), pp. 37, 38.

42



GAELIC POETIC TRADITION

More importantly, however, Clarke's imitation bears what might be

called a contrapuntal relationship to the original, in that Clarke brings to

the Irish poem something of the same kind of decorative impulse as the

Irish poet brought to his subject-matter. The Gaelic poet wTeaves orna

mental patterns around and about the song of the bird: Clarke weaves

patterns about the impression the Gaelic poet leaves him with. For both, ornament (so often the bane of Irish verse) is all-important. Clarke takes

the impression of clarity created by the simple statements of the original and gives it actual light:

... the sun is brighter

Than* God's own shadow in the cup now!

Here Clarke illuminates die Irish text in every sense of the word, although no light is mentioned in the original. That this kind of illumination could

go on forever, and that it may court a certain unreality

is wittily and

ironically suggested in the play from which the lyric comes. As the Crow

Flies takes place during a bitter, stormy night, so the Blackbird's sunlight is purely imaginary. When he finishes chanting the lay, the Eagle of Knock

asks him if he has ever seen a night like this in all his life. The Blackbird

replies:

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top Is whistling and the sun is whiter

Than God's own shoulder in the cup now!

Forget the hour-bell . . .

At which point the Crow of Achill interrupts;

O that bird

Will drive me foolish. Late and soon

More grace notes but the self-same tune!

This decorative, ornamental impulse runs throughout Clarke's verse, and

it is not at all the same thing as description, although it includes it:

Then comes a young thrush, so

virginal, she might

Have hurried out of the honeysuckle light, Still variegated by the mottling shade, Could I but count each brindle, spice-brown spot, Or find, in cut-glass, the silver-topped pepper-pot That speckled her and daintified such white, Castor of cinnamon.6

* Clarke, Flight to Africa (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963), p. 35.

43




In his attention to the ornamental in verse, Clarke belongs to the main

stream of Gaelic poetic tradition. Eochaidh ? He?dhusa, writing in the

early part of the seventeenth century, spoke of composition as "dorchacht

na ngr?s snoighthe", "the obscurity of carven ornament".7

Irish poetry frequently tends to ornament emotion in concrete terms and

to dramatise it in human terms. Often the ornamental and dramatic strains

run together, and when the concrete is eschewed, as in many of the eighteenth

-century aislingi^ the verse inclines to rhetoric. Only rarely does Clarke

forsake the concrete; his ornamentation is so full of substance that he

frequently has no space for the luxury of a relaxed syntax. His verse,

bristling with verbs, strains to include as much actual fact, historical and

contemporary, as possible. Unquestionably, he shares that taste for "facts"

put down in "strict not dry detail", which Ferguson praised in P?trie in

the article referred to already.8 In his later verse, especially, he ornaments

emotion with strict fact and closely-observed detail, yoked together in a

metrical texture astonishing in its discipline, swiftness and freedom. The

following conjures up a gallery of seventeenth-century Irish monks who

lived and wrote on the Continent:

Archbishop Conry, learned prelate And Jansenist, was spreading hell-fire

While Father Wadding plotted, when Charles fell, For years in Louvain.

There Brother Francis of Armagh Was penning De Prosodia

Hibernica, short line and stanza

Hard to explain. Mac Aingil lanterned in a dark volume

The soul in pain: All Belgium shone on Gothic column

Through leaded pane. Monks laboured at printing press, selected

Type for a Gaelic or Latin text

Our poets stumbled to the next

Mud cabin through rain.9

7 Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), p. 128.

8 Samuel Ferguson, op. cit., p. 117.

9 Clarke, Flight to Africa, p. 102.

44




This comes from "The Song of the Books", which is loosely based on the

nineteenth-century Tom?s Rua ? S?illeabh?in's "Amhr?n na Leabhar".

Clarke's descant (even further removed from the original than Dryden's

"imitation") converts the Irish into a lament for the latter end of Gaelic

culture. The music, derived from ? S?illeabh?in's Gaelic stanza, is packed with facts, events and personalities. At one point, having briefly sketched the

exploits of Eoghan Rua O S?illeabh?in, he brilliantly evokes the world of

the eighteenth-century aisling (which Eoghan Rua perfected in one

direction) in a single stanza which also captures the flow and fall of accented

Gaelic verse:

At dawn, in a wood of sorrel, branchy

Dew-droppy, where sunlight gilded sapling And silvered holly, or by the bank

Of Brosna, Moy, Our poets

saw a woman smiling.

Her tresses, bright as celandine, Could not conceal her pure white side,

Was she from Troy ?

Or was she Venus whose fondled breast

Could never cloy?10

The volume Pilgrimage (1929) contains another variation on the aisling form.

Ornament has been spoken of and reference has been made to ?He?dhusa's

phrase "dorchacht na ngr?s snoighthe". In the same poem (which is a

lament for the downfall of the bardic order), O He?dhusa, writing of

the traditional poetic standards which no longer obtain speaks of

foirceadal bhfaobhrach ffrithir

i.e. ? a

sharp-edged, energetic exhortation.11

The word "frithir" means "energetic". Clarke's verse brims with imaginative and intellectual energy, an energy scarcely contained by the highly-worked

prosody. P?draig?n Haic?ad, writing, not long after ? He?dhusa, in

praise of the verse of Mathghamhain O h-Ifearn?in, uses this same word

"frithir" in the compound "frithirbhriosg". It is probable, then, that the

word had recognised poetic applications. Haic?ad's thickly adjectival

praise of O h-Ifearn?in's verse could almost be a description of Clarke's:

?< ibid, p. 99.

11 Bergin, op..cit.

45




frithirbhriosg fuadrach fuaimcheart frasach glan fior

iongantach uamach uaigneach aigeantach ? . . .12

[it is] excitingly energetic, active, exactly-sounding,

showery, clear, true,

wonderful, alliterative, solitary, intellectual.

Clarke's boundless energy can be seen in the way he prods words into

new shapes (bringing to mind the bardic penchant for compounds):

Early each morning, Martha Blake

Walked, angeling the road, To Mass in the Church of the Three Patrons.

Sanctuary lamp glowed And the clerk halo'ed the candles

On the High Altar. She knelt

Illumined.13

He can bring such effects as these off without, generally speaking, forsaking a craving for colloquial speech, which he satisfies in a highly condensed and

vigorous syntax which is also remarkably free:

To every star you see,

Add stripe. The lion has been skinned:

Was hers a new whip for tradelets ? Come back, Poor Twenty-Sixer. Live on lack.14

The moral and emotional vitality of his attacks on contemporary Irish

society, for its departures from and perversions of what is natural and

traditional, bring to mind the pride and sense of social responsibility of the

Gaelic satirist with his assured and active concern for balance, order and

naturalness. The strength of Clarke's satirical verse derives from the moral

and intellectual stamina with which he anatomizes the public and political facts of present-day Ireland,

But Clarke's verse is "frithirbhriosg" (to use Haicead's term) chiefly in

its rhythmic adventurousness and in its ceaseless prosodie invention, both

of which exhibit a thoroughly Gaelic and traditional sense of the subtleties

of metrical patterns and their variations.

13 M?ire n? Cheallach?in (ed.), Fil?ocht Ph?draig?n Hak?ad (Dublin: An Cl?chmhar, 1962), 1.37.


14 ibid, p. 15.

46




In Flight to Africa, Clarke has an imitation of Carolan's "Mabel Kelly". Carolan's chief interest as a poet lies in his rhythmic complexity, his almost

breathless metrical tricks. Hardiman, describing it, speaks of "the rapidity of his turns; his abrupt changes and terminations, so unexpected yet so

pleasing," and remarks on "the difficulty of adapting English verse, in any variation of metre"15 to its complicated rhythmic modulations. In Carolan's

verse, the patterns once established, are immediately disturbed, so the

rhythmic shapes constantly change:

Cib? a mb?adh s? i nd?n do

A l?mh dheas f h?ghail faoi n-a ceann, Is deimhin Horn n?rbh eagal b?s d?

Go br?th n? n-a bheo bheith tinn.

A ch?l deas na mbachall f?inneach fionn, A chum mar an eala is gile 'sn?mh ar a' tuinn,

Gr?dh agus sp?is gach gasraidh, M?ibhle sh?imh Ni Cheallaigh,

Dead is deise leagadh i n-?rus a cinn.16

Such restless rhythmic energy is, as Hardiman pointed out, difficult to

render in English. George Sigerson, in his Bards of the Gael and Gall, made

an attempt to reproduce the irregular metre, and, although he does catch

the general rhythmic contour, the quality of surprise, the sudden hastenings and pauses which the Irish has, fail him:

Whenever Fate may favour

To have his right hand 'neath thy head, For all his life, he never

Will think of death or danger dread.

O head of the beauteous curling hair!

O breast like the swimming swan so fair!

Love and hope of Lover

All the island over, Fairest maid is Mabel, here and everywhere!17

Clarke revels in the rhythmic irregularity. His version, impatient of repro

duction, goes beyond Carolan in rhythmic energy, although the Irish is the

16 James Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy (London:-, 1831), I, 105, 106.

lQ R?is n? ?g?in, Duanaire Gaeilge (Dublin: Comhlucht Oideachais na hEireann, 1921?30), II, 55.

17 George Sigerson, Bards of the Gael and Gall (London: T. F. Unwin, 1897), pp. 256, 257.

47




ground-work on which he "runs division". In fact, Clarke's version, once

again, gives a very good impression of the aural and imaginative effect of

Carolan's rhythms in the original. Here it could also be said that he

improves upon the original, in that he frets the complex rhythmic patterns with vivid and glowing detail, lacking in Carolan's fairly conventional

praisings. Once again he illuminates, incidentally taking a non-literal hint

from Sigerson's last line, but making much more of it:

Lucky the husband

Who puts his hand beneath her head.

They kiss without scandal

Happiest two near feather-bed.

He sees the tumble of brown hair

Unplait, the breasts, pointed and bare

When nightdress shows

From dimple to toe-nail, All Mabel glowing in it, here, there, everywhere.18

In his autobiography, Twice Round the Black Church, Clarke says that

Sigerson taught him a good deal about "the subtle art of our formal

poetry",19 Also, A Penny in the Clouds gives an account of the time he

spent in Connacht with F. R. Higgins, where they both came into actual

contact with the folk poetry and songs they would already be familiar with

in the translations of Hyde, Sigerson, P. J. Mac Call and Padraic Colum, and in the original verse of Colum and Joseph Campbell, both strongly under the spell of the folk traditions of Connacht and Ulster.20 In Clarke, the learned and folk traditions combined in a fresh and startling synthesis

which drew together the self-conscious craftmanship and delicate ornamen

tation of the bardic poetry (the "subtle art") with the looser imaginative and rhythmic structures of folk poetry. The combination can be seen

working in the following early poem from The Cattledrive in Connaught:

The red Armada of the sun burned down

From Magheraroarty, melodians played The Waves of Tory and the young girls sat

Upon the knees of men. I took my sup, I kissed the mouth beside me and forgot

My sorrow on the cold dark tide.21


19 Clarke, Twice Round the Black Church (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 169.

20 Clarke, A Penny in the Clouds (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 116-23.

21 Clarke, The Cattledrive in Connaught (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 10.

48




The last lines have the melancholy and recklessness of many a Connacht

folk song; the chording of broacl vowel and rich consonant in the assonance

of the opening lines calls to mind the musical power of eighteenth-century accented verse; while the muted echoes of "sat", "sup", "forgot", suggest

the carefully ordered consonantal rhyme-groups of bardic poetry where

p and t do in fact rhyme.22 In the following lines from "The Loss of Strength" Clarke recalls those

early days in the West of Ireland:

Lost prosody restrained us. Summit

Showed valleys, reaffbresting, The Fianna, leaf-veined, among them.23

Certainly it is true that the prosody he fashioned imposed a discipline, and

Clarke shares a good deal of the bardic delight in highly-worked, self

conscious craft. His verse constantly draws attention to its own

technique,

often for ironic or comic effect, but it rarely degenerates into ostentation.

The loving attentiveness he brings to

questions of word-craft can be seen

in the notes to his poems. In the following note on the effects of assonance

and cross-rime, for example, he speaks of these devices almost as if they had a life and activity of their own, which suggests a comparison with the

early Irish grammarians and metrists, who often invested their sch?mas

with something like the vitality of personality and the dignity of genealogy :24

Assonance . . . takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme. . . . The

natural lack of double rhymes in English leads to an avoidance of

words of more than one syllable

at the end of the lyric line. . . .

But by cross-rhymes or

vowel-rhyming, separately, one or more of

the syllables of longer words, on or off accent, the difficulty may be

turned: lovely and neglected words are advanced to the tonic place

and divide their echoes.25

This discipline, however, like all true discipline, not only restrained; it also

freed him to a new music capable of delicacy and vigour, ornament and

passion. The new bindings became the ligaments necessary to free move

22 See Eleanor Knott, Introduction to Irish Syllabic Poetry of the Period 1200-1600 (Cork and

Dublin: Cork University Press, 1928).

23 Clarke, Later Poems (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1961), p. 63.

24 See Thurneysen's review of Calder's edition of Auraicept na n?ces, quoted in Frank O'Connor, The Backward Look (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 9.

25 Clarke, Later Poems, p. 89.

49




ment. It freed him from the pressures of contemporary English style (a

perennial problem for the Irish poet) and supplied an alternative to Yeats's

huge and perhaps for younger men suffocating talent.

Clarke brings into English the bardic stress on craft: vowel and consonant

are handled in his verse with the Gaelic sense of a variety of echoes and

concords. The wayward curvings throw new words into metrical relief, and the meanings of those words are enriched by the quality of musical

deliberateness with which Clarke places them in the fresh shape:

Grey holdings of rain

Had grown less with the fields, As we came to that holy place Where hail and honey meet.

O Clonmacnoise was crossed

With light: those cloistered scholars, Whose knowledge of the gospel

Is cast as metal in pure voices,

Were all rejoicing daily, And cunning hands, with cold and jewels

Brought chalices to flame.26

The word "metal" in the above, to take but one example from a stanza

which could furnish many, is invested with an exquisite deliberateness, which carries worlds of association, by the half-rhyme with "gospel" and by

the firmness of the echoing t's and the liquid quality of the clustered l's.

The firmness and fluidity of this description of "cloistered scholars"

suggests the assured, delicate and complex tracery of medieval Irish

illumination, and with it the whole era of Celtic Romanesque. As Eleanor Knott says, the bardic attention to craft and ornamental verse

patterns

. . . can accompany genuine feeling and even be quickened by it. It need not be a bar to

expression and is often a stimulus.27

In Clarke, as in any true poet, craft and feeling are inseparable; what

distinguishes his verse, however, and what links it with classical Irish verse

is the degree of deliberate and explicit attention he brings to metre. This

acts not only

as a stimulus to expression and feeling, it also acts as an

intellectual catalyst. His verse is "aigeantach", to use Haic?ad's word.

ibid, p. 3.

27 Eleanor Knott, Irish Classical Poetry (Dublin: At the Sign of the Three Candles, 1957),

p. 18.

50




In "The Jest" he writes:

Half spirit, the older

I am, the bolder, Yet add for a jest That you may think, Not beat your breast, Invisible ink.28

Certainly, poems like "The Hippophagi" demand something of the

elaborate attention in unravelling syntax and thought as, say, the poems of

Tadhg Dal? ? h-Uiginn do, and like ? h-Uiginn, although the logical connections in the thought may be invisible, Clarke rarely eschews the

concrete. There is always something to chew on, although it may take some

time to realise what you have between your teeth:

Up-to-date infant, rubbered, wheeled out, I kicked up heels, soon took to them, Learned the first premise of a race

Now lost in space. I was immortal,

Yea, so important that monks pursued me, Similitudes of bygone ages. Bodikin rages to be itself

When bookshelf fills with catechism.

The pubic schism makes Latin hoarser, Scholastics coarsen the ignorants, Sew up their pants. Single idea

Has circumscribed us, lyre'd Judea.29

Clarke's verse, then, incorporates a good deal of the mode, manner, and

spirit of Gaelic verse; arid, although he did draw considerable inspiration from the Irish Renaissance, his work binds modern Irish verse in English to the Gaelic tradition with a thoroughness, completeness and freedom

which Hyde, for all his scholarship and, sweetness, and Yeats, for all his

vast strength and beauty, did not quite do. He has done more than fill a

gap; he has restored a voice and given it the substantiality of flowered

stone.


t0 Clarke, Later Poems, p. 82.

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austin clarke and gaelic poetic tradition

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