Faultlines, limits, transgressions: a theme-cluster in late twentieth-century Irish poetry

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Robert Welch

   Lines of history
   lines of power ...

   Lines of defiance
   lines of discord
   under Walker's arm
   brisk with guns
   British soldiers
   patrol the walls
   the gates between
   Ulster Catholic
   Ulster Protestant....

   Lines of loss
   lines of energy ...

John Montague, The Rough Field

These are the incantatory openings of various strophes in John Montague's The Rough Field, taken from the section of that sombre poem called "A New Siege" (1974:74,77). Looking back now, nearly thirty years after it was written, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that much Irish poetry since 1972 has taken a kind of inner direction, an urgent prompting, from Montague's fierce but elegant analysis of the reemerging Troubles in Ireland in that intensely orchestrated long work. The volume is a formal meditation that brings together history, memory, politics, the cascade of events as they unfold in the disparity of crisis, biography, and family history. Montague's poem creates the "rough field" of living history by means of an individual conscience trying to negotiate its terrain, which is on the one hand as familiar as a townland, but on the other as strange and terrifying as the places and landscapes of nightmare. In its nervous syntax, its curt lines stripped down to a kind of bardic economy, The Rough Field registers the reopening of old wounds, old faultlines in the Irish psyche, while recognizing too that these cuts and tears are not unconnected to other fissures and cracks opening up in Europe and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s:

   streets of Berlin
   Paris, Chicago
   seismic waves
   zig-zagging through
   a faulty world (1974:76)

It is one of the achievements of Montague's poem that these broader issues of political and social fissure are integrated into a series of biographical and familial explorations, so that the genealogy of public rifts and disruptions is given a personal and intimate stress, a felt interiority. The faultline is not only between different communities in Northern Ireland, between North and South, Ireland and Britain, Teague and Prod; it is also within communities, within families, within the Montagues themselves whose townland is the Rough Field of the title, Garvaghey (Mod. Ir. Garbh Achadh, literally 'rough field'). And it runs, this fault, from father to son, from James Montague, estranged from his Tyrone family while he works behind a grille in the New York subway, to John Montague, who grows up to be very like his father, "the least happy / man I have known" (1974:47). This is candidly, bravely recorded in "The Fault":

   When I am angry, sick or tired
   The line on my forehead pulses,
   The line on my left temple
   Opened by an old car accident.
   My father had the same scar
   In the same place, as if
   The fault ran through
   Us both: anger, impatience,
   A stress born of violence. (1974:45)

Montague goes on remorselessly to describe the kind of sound a wound makes, this time the historical wound of the defeat of Irish civilization in the century following Kinsale:

   Who knows
   the sound a wound makes?
   Scar tissue
   can rend, the old hurt
   tear open as
   the torso of the fiddle
   groans to
   carry the tune ... (1974:46)

The consciousness of loss, the avid and tormenting awareness of it, rises up in bitterness, accusation, anger, and hatred. Montague owns up to the lot in verse dignified but also shocking in its candor:

   This bitterness
   I inherit from my father, the
   swarm of blood
   to the brain, the vomit surge
   of race hatred,
   the victim seeing the oppressor ... (1974:46)

This is what erupted during the Civil Rights March to Burntollet; on Bloody Sunday in January 1972; and in more recent times, before the cease-fires, at Greysteel. It was at Greysteel on Halloween 1993 that Robert Torrens McKnight from Macosquin, with others, walked into the Rising Sun overlooking Lough Foyle, said "Trick or Treat?" and sprayed the bar with automatic tire, killing 13 people. It is what awoke at Drumcree in summer 1996, when the lines "of history" and "of power" stood off against each other, the Orange Order insisting that it follow the old line of its march down a road that (eerily) is called the Garvaghey (i.e., 'Rough Field') Road. Right down to 2002 David Trimble was still, drearily, attacking nationalists and republicans, while Gerry Adams accused Trimble of trying to wreck the peace process. Meanwhile a kind of standoff still persists at Drumcree, and the Orange Order still waits to march down the road called after the rough field.

The tense and brilliant force of Montague's 1972 poem entered into the fissure opening in Irish life again after more than forty years of uneasy but relatively stable peace. The poem's sinuous movement back and forth between public and private carried authority because its attention never wavered; its morality convinced because it worked as testimony and record, rather than accusation; and the chastity of its diction was a kind of earnest of its clarity and virtue, weighing every syllable. We may say that Montague's writing questioned "the distempered part," in T.S. Eliot's phrase (1963:201), where the distemper was in fact the old wound; he went into the fissure, even re-creating out of historical memory and linguistic genealogy the gaps cut into the tallysticks as a whole people moved across the rift between Irish and English in the nineteenth century. This was not just a scar, a cut; Montague's image for this change was the "severed head" trying to speak. Although the lines are familiar, it is worth quoting them again, so ablaze are they with shame: