Hot in the Smithy Of Irish Poetry

When Robert Frost was given an honorary degree at Oxford University a few years ago, he stopped in Ireland to receive the same honor from the University of Ireland. Frost met Austin Clarke, earlier a very promising Irish poet who, through too many years of personal anguish, had lost his touch. But Frost was anxious to talk with Clarke, and taking him aside, they spent several hours together, Clarke later said that Frost asked him what kind of verse he wrote and uncertain of the proper answer he blurted out. "I load myself with chains and try to get out of them."

"Good lord!" exclaimed Frost, "you can't have many readers." In fact, Clarke's readership was never impressive and rarely extended beyond the shores of his homeland. Yet until his death last year at the age of 78. Austin Clarke had claim to the grandest title of the richest language in the world: Ireland's greatest living poet. It was not a claim that went unchallenged, for some maintain that Thomas Kinsella had and continues to hold the title hands down. But since W.B. Yeats's death in 1939, Clarke was Ireland's unofficial poet laureate. The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (Oxford University Press, 568 pp., $20.00) celebrates the recognition of Clarke's poetry that came so slowly during his life.

Clarke's poetry was the first to present faithfully in English the traditions of Irish Folklore and the intensity of Gaelic verse forms. Before him, Yeats and James Stephens--and even earlier in the 19th century, James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson--had attempted to revive in literature the traditions that had so long been suppressed during the English occupation. But while these earlier poets--Yeats especially--had helped create a profoundly nationalistic poetry for Irish writers, Clarke was the first to complete the task: he brought ancient Irish mythological themes to life in the same exciting way Robert Fitzgerald has brought the Iliad to modern English readers.

Austin Clarke's poetry is divided here into the three major periods of his life. The publication in 1917 of his first long poem, "The Vengeance of Fionn" set the mood for his early narratives based on the saga cycles of ancient Ireland. These include the Fiannaigheacht, a series of stories about Fionn MacChumhall and his young, unmarried, Fenian warriors, 2000-year-old stories that were lost to the mainstream of Irish consciousness but survived and multiplied among the peasantry; and the Ulster cycle, another series whose central epic, the Tain, relates the deeds of the mighty hero, Cuchulain, and the fights between king Conchobor's Ulster and other regions of Ireland.

"The Vengeance of Fionn," is the story of Grainne, the betrothed of Fionn, and how after she elopes with Diarmuid, Flonn wreaks his savage vengeance upon them. The poem begins with the same engulfing lyrical rhythms that were to characterize much of Clarke's earlier poetry; their sense of grace and music--especially when heard on recordings with Clarke's thick brogue--is perhaps the best this century has yet to offer, combining the rhythms of the symbolist tradition with the sharper forms of the imagists. When Fionn first learns that the two lovers have escaped, for instance. Clarke uses swift lines and the fierce play of light and dark to depict Fionn's tormented rage:

In shadowy corners--through tapestries night airs.

Whistled and waned--outside the torches tore

The night with windy flame--the frightened mares

And foals whinnied--hounds bayed their hunger--at last

With shouts, toss of torchlights, swept in a blast

Through clouds of stampeded dust, lashurged

The stallions screamed, the shuddering chariots creaked

Madder than mountain oakboughs stormfully wreaked

And the parched axles rumbling in the naves

Grew hot as when their hammered bronze was forged

Loud on the hissing anvils, stripped of flame.

So down the roads of Temair the Fianna came

Charioteered in thundering; bloodhounds

Sniffed, fanged the wind and then in mighty bounds

Sprang at the throat of night...

But Clarke could not sustain this early poetry for very long. His next books were uneven, tending to lapse into long ethereal movements that seemed only a parody of Yeats and his forerunners in the symbolist tradition. These years of his life were also the most frustrating for Clarke, for after a three-year English professorship at University College Dublin, he was kicked out for marrying outside the Church. Clarke's marriage went sour all too soon, and his instability--perhaps a byproduct of the tension between his staunch Catholic upbringing and what he called his "little acts of curiosity about myself and others which had been set down by Freud"--led him into exile from Ireland and in and out of institutions for the rest of his life. In 1936, after returning to Ireland, Clarke wrote a poem called "Six Sanichles," and here we can see, in the rejection of his earlier life, the renewal of his craft: TO JAMES STEPHENS Now that the iron shoe hangs by the nail Once more and nobody has cared a damn. Stick to the last of the leprechaun--I, too, Have meddled with the anvil of our trade... THE TALES OF IRELAND The thousand tales of Ireland sink. I leave Unfinished what I had begun nor count As gain the youthful frenzy of those years;

In Night and Morning (1938), Clarke turned to the raging forge of his own mind. Hot in the smithy of Irish poetry, he began a new mode heavily influenced by modernist poets. His elongated narrative lines turned to the crisp, dry style of poets like Auden--nouns are used as verbs, sentences are elipsed and inverted. In the very earliest of these poems, Clarke subtly reveals a kind of tormented agnosticism, as in this poem about the crucifixion of Christ: An open mind disturbs the soul, And in disdain I turn my back Upon the sun that makes a show Of half the world, yet still deny The pain that lives within the past, The flame sinking upon the spike, Darkness that man must dread at last.

But Clarke could not avoid the pratfall of his controversial modern poetry. His allusions became increasingly personal and localized, to the point where personal questions of doctrine are superseded by vicious attacks on papal pronouncements he read about in the Irish Times (these annotated articles read like parodies of T.S. Eliot), and the policies of the Irish Church-State.

In one poem, a bitter satire on the suppression in Irish newspapers of a Vatican study on dangers for missionaries in the remoter regions of the world, there are glimpses of an extremely clever man who must hide in too narrow topics: These scholars are modestly selective, Who say our nuns in Africa, Fearful of blackmen yelling 'Ya!', Tearing off starches, heavy drape, Can take an oral contraceptive, An hour or two before the rape, How will they know dread time or place. That leaves the soul still full of grace? Better to wear Dutch cap or wad And after their debauching, use Syringe or douche away abuse, Without a sin, trusting in God, Argument on the Seventh Hill, Clarke attacks again and again with his vile

Clarke attacks again and again with his vile pen, but the subjects of his wit seem trivial: physical punishment in the (mostly Catholic) schools of Ireland, the poor treatment of orphans, the collusion between Irish missionaries and Irish businessmen in poor countries. But what finally comes through in reading several of these poems is a deep commitment to the people of his country and a hatred of the hypocrisies of religion as it is still practiced in Ireland today. His later poetry suffers from its topicality, and it will probably not endure the tests of time and place, but somehow Clarke almost manages to convince us that universal themes of passion and sacrifice, of doubt and insincerity, can be rooted in words that live in the particular.

Toward the end of his life Clarke once again wrote a long narrative poem based on old Irish myths and legends. In "The Healing of Mis" he turns an 18th century tale of a wild woman tamed by music and sex into a more graphic love poem of seduction. But no longer content with the ancient ways. Clarke adds the woman's dreams to reveal the hot flames of her mind:

High tiers of oars from the Mediterranean were dipping whiteness In blueness. Ships swept from archipelagoes

Into surds of sound. Hundreds of buclers lightened

Through a conflagatory storm: "Stromboli!" "Stromboli!"

Look-outs were calling down from a red hail of cinders.

Here again is the same rich early poetry, not quite as exciting overall, but in its control, Clarke avoids the earlier inability to sustain such a voice.

In his memoirs, Clarke tells of a portrait of Shakespeare that had eyes like the Mona Lisa: wherever he went in the small, dark attic room where it hung, the eyes would follow him. At first he was deathly afraid of the portrait, but eventually its fearful mystery began to overcome him. It would draw him out of his bed in the middle of the night and as he walked up the stairs a fight would begin between what he called his will and his imagination. Clarke said that his will and his imagination. Clarke said that his will usually won out, that he would return to the comfort of his sheets. And this same kind of tension can be seen in his collected poems. The dark fiery imagination of his early and final poems conflict with his middle works, the secure defensive posture of his satires--an appropriate conflict for Yeats's legitimate heir.