English 150
ryanxue
Class3andClass4.pptxCarrying the Songs,’ by Moya Cannon
for Tríona and Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill
Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs Frank Harte
It was always those with little else to carry who carried the songs to Babylon, to the Mississippi – some of these last possessed less than nothing did not own their own bodies yet, three centuries later, deep rhythms from Africa, stowed in their hearts, their bones, carry the world’s songs.
For those who left my county, girls from Downings and the Rosses who followed herring boats north to Shetland
gutting the sea’s silver as they went or boys from Ranafast and Horn Head who took the Derry boat, who slept over a rope in a bothy, songs were their souls’ currency the pure metal of their hearts,
to be exchanged for other gold, other songs which rang out true and bright when flung down upon the deal boards of their days.
From Carrying the Songs, Carcanet Press, 2007
Requiem For The Croppies
by Seamus Heaney
The pockets of our great coats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.
Digging
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Punishment, by Seamus Heaney
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
From Clearances, by Seamus Heaney
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
5
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
7
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
'You'll be in New Row on Monday night
And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad
When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
Clearances, contd.
7
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
'You'll be in New Row on Monday night
And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad
When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
Seamus Heaney, Key points
The specific Northern Irish political social and cultural context—’Poetry out of the Troubles’
Agriculture and the uses of Pastoral—and ecological writing-- in Ireland ‘ Digging’
‘Whatever you say say nothing:’ What is a poet’s political duty? On whose behalf does the poet speak? The uses of history and historical memory ‘Requiem for the Croppies’
Poetry: language of private feeling or political statement, or both? ‘Digging’
Complex political allegory; the uses of prehistory; a very strange kind of love poem; the male gaze; political gestures in poetry. Scapegoating . ‘Punishment’
Intensely personal; Escaping the political?how to write an elegy: ‘Clearances’.
Ireland’s most recent Nobel Prizewinner in Literature
Eavan Boland: Key Points
Irish women writers in a male-dominated literary landscape
Eavan Boland and the anti-heroic tradition. The question: how can I take the myths that have been constructed (by men) to tell me about my identity, and turn them into stories that empower me? ‘Mise Eire’
Revising the Yeats Poem ‘The song of the Wandering Aengus’. ‘The Woman Who Turns herself into a Fish’. Symbols and realities
The song of the mother of the emigrant daughters: is it good, or not, to lose your land, your ‘imagined community?’ Politics and the personal. How a mother loves her daughters.
‘The Lost land’
Considering the loss of identity by emigrants: what happens to an emigrant’s nation-granted identity when she leaves her home country? For Boland, as a woman burdened by national identities given to Idealized Irish women, this is both terrible, and an opportunity. ‘The Emigrant Irish’
The Woman Who Turns Herself Into a Fish, by Eavan Boland
Unpod the bag, the seed.
Slap the flanks back. Flatten
paps. Make finny scaled
and chill the slack and dimple
of the rump. Pout the mouth,
brow the eyes and now and now
eclipse in these hips, these loins
the moon, the blood flux.
It’s done. I turn, I flab upward
.
blub-lipped, hipless and I am
sexless, shed of ecstasy,
a pale
swimmer, sequin-skinned,
pearling eggs
screamlessly in seaweed.
It’s what
I set my heart on. Yet
ruddering and muscling in the sunless tons
of new freedoms, still I feel
a chill pull, a brightening, a light, a light,
and how in my loomy cold, my greens,
still she moons in me.
The Emigrant Irish by Eavan Boland
Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:
they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
‘The Lost Land’. By Eavan Boland
I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground:
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.
So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.
Now they are grown up and far away
and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:
Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:
At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.
I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
The Lost Land, contd.
