The problem of memory.

Dillon, Brian

FRAN BREARTON

The Great War in Irish Poetry

Oxford University Press, 2000, $74.00

BETWEEN AUGUST 1914 AND November 1918 on average over twenty Irish soldiers died every day on the Western Front. The controversy over wearing the poppy, the symbol of commemoration, which flares up each November in Ireland--taking on special intensity in 1997 when President McAleese' s inauguration ceremonies fell on Remembrance Day--highlights the divisions persisting for over eighty years regarding how the Great War should be remembered. Irish participation in World War One continues to be viewed through discriminatory political lenses. The Easter Rising complicates, and for many people, even displaces the war on the Western Front in their acts of remembering.

Ireland does not have an anthologized or canonized tradition of Great War literature; but it does have an anthologized canon of Easter Rising literature. The aesthetic canon is closely allied with the victorious political canon. It is difficult to imagine that "the 1916 poets" could mean anyone other than the 1916 rebels, or that any Irish poet on the Western Front in 1916 could usurp the title.

This relative silence by literary voices left more space for "official" voices to dominate Irish responses to the war. The Easter Rising functions for nationalists as their origin myth, simplifying and politicizing the nationalists' response to the Great War. The Somme battle, launched on July 1, 1916, serves unionists' myth-creating purposes as a defining event in "a history of loyalty to the Crown and to Protestantism stretching from the Battle of the Boyne to 1916 (and beyond)." While there is no reason to doubt the Irish soldiers' heroic capabilities, the English military authorities, homicidal in their lack of imagination, sent the soldiers to walk in lines across No Man's Land and directly into German gunfire. "The sheer scale and stupidity of the battle make it lie uneasily in the Ulster Protestant mythology designed to accommodate it. That unease is an indictment not only of the Great War, but also of an inadequate rhetoric and mythology which cannot tolerate what it cannot control." England's failure of political and military leadership, especially during the months of the Somme carnage, remains precisely what is not remembered by those who link the Great War to unionist mythology. No fiction and no poetry of any merit from the war years addresses the issue of unionist participation in the Somme: "if it had been incorporated into literature with any fidelity to the original experience, it would potentially have lost whatever value it might have had politically in Ulster, and if fidelity to the experience had been abandoned, literature would have dwindled to mere unionist propaganda."

Brearton accurately labels the poetic contribution of Thomas Kettle as "slight," and his fellow Irish-born soldier poet Francis Ledwidge's best effort is "Thomas MacDonagh," one of his more than twenty poems on the insurrection at home. Consequently, Brearton avoids extended consideration of their work. In all but one chapter, Brearton locates evidence of the Great War as the subject matter of poets who did not serve, and three of the poets were not even born when the war was fought: Yeats, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. Brearton may be faulted for excessive reliance upon prose (Yeats's A Vision, Graves's The White Goddess, MacNeices's 1941 study of Yeats, essays by Heaney, interviews with Longley) as evidence to define the various poets' aesthetic principles and to substantiate the interpretations of the poetry. But the strengths of this book are considerable: the politically-charged contexts, the historical events immersed in convenient mythologies, in which these six poets created are examined thoughtfully, thoroughly. Also, Brearton's close-reading skills illuminate numerous individual poems. While there never was an Irish equivalent of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg, the collective Irish poetic response to the Great War is a shifting thematic concern crucial to understanding Irish poetry of the past eighty-five years.

If Brearton dealt solely with Yeats's poems specifically about the Great War the chapter on him should be brief: Yeats wrote only a small fistful of such poems. But Brearton attempts to define Yeats's aesthetic in regard to the war, which even judged by the standards of Yeats's criticism, is an especially slippery topic. The label "disingenuous" appropriately defines Yeats's aesthetic motives for rejecting on behalf of the Abbey Theater Sean O'Casey's war play about the homecoming of a disabled soldier, The Silver Tassie, because O'Casey, as Yeats wrote to him, "'never stood'" on Europe's "'battlefields or walked its hospitals.'" And Yeats excluded Owen from his 1936 Oxford anthology of poetry, because Owen stood all too long on the battlefields, walked through too many hospitals, and relied upon pity to interpret his experiences. Owen, in Yeats's opinion, lacked psychological distance from the events he described and chose to emphasize passive suffering as the response most appropriate and admirable for the soldiers in his poems. For Yeats, "the poetry is in the conflict [between poet and unfolding historical events], never in the pity." Yet Yeats's small output of Great War poems demonstrates his reluctance to negotiate that conflict.

The best of the English soldier-poets--Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon--forced their readers to look upon swollen or dismembered corpses, mocked their generals and the politicians and bishops who promoted the war, and declared that those who never set foot in a trench, who never heard the shells flying overhead, could not comprehend the degree of compassion that soldiers felt for one another. Even today, their poems retain an immediacy that should jar readers raised on CNN coverage of various wars. Yeats, of course, never entered a trench, not even imaginatively in his poetry. His most eloquent poem about an Irish soldier literally soars above the fighting on the ground. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is one of four Yeats's poems eulogizing Lady Gregory's son Robert who was shot down over the Italian Front. Yeats dismisses any conventional political motive for Robert Gregory's enlistment, as the first-person speaker claims that for his impoverished Kiltartan countrymen "No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before." As Brearton remarks, "The poem represses any sense that Protestant patriotism towards Ireland could also be, in Gregory, patriotism towards Empire." Yeats avoided raising the conflict many Irishmen faced: to enlist in the British military (John Redmond's position) or to oppose enlistment (Pearse's position), the complicated nationalist split. Yeats takes an aesthetic interest in the beauty of his hero's actions: "A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds." This elegy exposes no corpses, expresses no antagonism towards the officials conducting the war, and, by placing his subject in the cockpit of a single-seat plane Yeats avoids the issue of soldierly camaraderie. "Reprisals," written after the war's end (but held back from publication until 1948), marks a dramatic shift in Yeats's response to the war: Gregory now lies in European soil with 35,000 other Irishmen, "the other cheated dead," their loyalty repaid with scorn. Yeats urges Gregory's ghost to r eturn to his home community and witness the barbarism carried out by the Black and Tans, Gregory's own former war comrades:

Yet rise from your Italian tomb,
Flit to Kiltartan cross and stay
Till certain second thoughts have come

Upon the cause you served, that we
Imagined such a fine affair:
Half-drunk or whole mad soldiery
Are murdering your tenants there.

With his reflection on the "cheated dead," does Yeats accept some personal guilt for the myth-making process that depicted Gregory--and perhaps implicitly other Irish volunteers--as noble and heroic and removed from all political considerations? "That the 'fine affair' was 'imagined' suggests a poetic role in shaping consciousness: by implication, Yeats could be the creative deceiver as well as the victim of deceit."

Brearton acknowledges that the English soldier-poets established "a norm by which other responses can be judged" in equating "war poet" with "anti-war poet"; Yeats's aesthetic principles prohibited him from adhering to this equation. The poems for Gregory rehearse the conflicts that Yeats addresses anew when responding to war on his home soil. Yeats's sequence of Anglo-Irish and Civil War poems, with their reassertion of the first-person speaker voicing conflicts that strain conventional rhetoric, testifies to his unresolved conflicts carried over from the Great War. Yeats "accepts that ideas of progress have been destroyed in the Great War, and proposes instead a progress in reverse, one that works on the premiss that to lose is to gain. ... Loss of hope for Yeats ... is transformed into an element in the dialectical strength of his aesthetic."

The chapter on Graves necessarily foregrounds the theoretical issue of defining a writer's nationality. Brearton agrees with Mahon that it is "'not important except in so far as the writer himself makes it so.'" But did Graves, who was Anglo-Irish on his father's side and German on his mother's (and prior to a brief stay in 1918 while in uniform had visited Ireland only once as an infant and declared a pre-war emotional attachment to both Wales and Germany), ever stress his Irish connection? For evidence, Brearton relies upon The White Goddess and two central post-World War Two poems:

[Graves] represents division between Celt and Teuton united within the English tradition, and it is in these terms that the problem of the divided self is later transformed into a symbolic dialogue between the Muse and history.... Graves seizes upon the "Celtic element"', as others have done before him, because it represents symbolic separation from the England he comes to know and not to love in the Great War. Ireland is conventionally a means of interrogating, perhaps reforming, but certainly contrasting English imperialism.

The war, then, triggers both his good-by to all that conventional English liberalism, and his welcome to a-historical, a-political "Irishness." "'Ireland' functions in his aesthetic as the symbolic realm associated with eroticism, fear, the unknown, that which cannot be controlled, the romantic and the divine. What is remarkable, and for Graves, essential, is how little any of his perceptions of Ireland and 'Irishness' relate to Ireland itself." Traumatized by his war experience, unwilling to compose poems of harsh realism like Owen's, Graves forfeited allegiance to England and championed the "nakedly worn magnificence" of his White Goddess, his inspiration which enabled him "to forget cruelty and past betrayal, / Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall" ("The White Goddess").

Brearton is much intrigued by Graves's resistance to easy categorization according to nationality as well as the Muse-inspired aesthetic that fails to fit any specific category. The confusion Graves generates for canon builders highlights (for Brearton) the limits of the canons (whether English / Irish, Great War / anti-war). Such resistance to conventional categorization also elevates MacNeice's poetic response to the war: "his failure to express fully either English national sentiments or Irish national aspirations (both of which tend towards sentimentality) becomes a creative strength and a political virtue." In describing his Irish childhood in "Carrickfergus," MacNeice emphasized the divisions among Irish people determined in the past. Transported to England at the outbreak of the war, he enters an insulated community immersed in the present: "I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents / Contracted into a puppet world of sons / Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines / And the soldiers with their guns." This final stanza of the poem "suggests unity, simplicity, and an escape from the dark, potentially violent world of Ulster, [but] also dulls the sensory alertness that informed his understanding of the past and grasp of the realities present."

Neither the lengthy "Autumn Journal" (1938), a poem complicated by its Janus-faced view of the two world wars and MacNeice's avoidance of war myths, nor the lengthier "Autumn Sequel" (1953) presents the war dead as heroes, and the latter poem depicts official acts of remembering as meaningless gestures: "London now prepares / Old guys to burn and poppies to remember / Dead soldiers with and soup for the Lord Mayor's / Banquet, all items proper to November." At times, MacNeice's poetic rhetoric echoes the wasteland despair, the emptying out of values, of Eliot; at times, MacNeice is interpreted in regard to the Yeatsian influence. Each poet Brearton discusses is situated as participating in or resisting (and sometimes both) various contexts, including Anglo-Irish, "Auden's school" (in MacNeice's case), the Yeatsian influence, the Owen influence, the view of the Second World War in light of the First and vice-versa, and the efforts by contemporary Northern poets to understand the Troubles through their awarenes s of the Great War.

As inappropriate as it may seem to compare the Great War with its ten million dead and the Troubles with its four thousand dead, striking parallels exist: the attitude toward duration (the sense that it would last forever), the focus in the reports of the violence on the casualty numbers rather than motives for fighting, the lack of "ground" (literal and political) gained by the continuation of the violence, the avoidance of irony in the proclamations of Church-State power linkage expressed by both British Field Commander Douglas Haig (who directed troops at the Somme) and Ian Paisley, and the shared characteristics of the warring sides. Consequently, a certain odd logic draws poets to the Great War in order to understand it and contemporary events in the North. "For Longley, Mahon, and Heaney, addressing the Great War has been, with varying degrees of success, a means of destabilizing reductive histories; for all three, it has involved a break with communal silences, whether Catholic or Protestant." Mahon re mains the least explicit, the most subtle. The speaker of Mahon's "Another Sunday Morning" wakes in a flat in post-World War Two London, enters a park populated by an international crowd, and notes "Old ladies... Who can remember... / Kitchener. Exhausted now / By decades of retrenchment, they / Wait for the rain at close of play." (Kitchener was the British military authority whose calls for enlistment at the start of the war were received enthusiastically, and who prohibited the formation of an all-Irish force, which Redmond had offered.) Brearton unpacks the suggestive depth of one word: "'Retrenchment' operating somewhat maliciously in several different ways--the gradual erosion of the Empire's territory; the decline in individual fortunes; the slowly decreasing numbers of those who do remember--also locates the source of decline in the trenches of the Great War."

A highlight of the chapter on Mahon is Brearton's discussion of "A Kensington Notebook," "a restrained, sometimes ambiguous tribute to three literary figures of pre-war London (Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis)." One thematic issue that this poem addresses--what constitutes an adequate artistic response to war--directs some of Yeats's and Heaney's best poems as well. Mahon says, "Ford set out / His toy soldiers on the / Razed table of art." As Brearton notes, during the war Ford "made an aesthetic compromise... writing commissioned patriotic poetry and prose." Mahon rejects as reductive and nostalgic the view that England enjoyed an era of innocence prior to the convulsions of the war that was unrecoverable after it, as well as the view that the dead, soldiers represent England more profoundly than the soldiers (often shell-shocked) who survived. Ulster's militant Protestants, though, promote an apocalyptic rather than a nostalgic view.

Loyalist nostalgia would be an admission of political and religious defeat: Ulster Protestantism's rhetoric did not shift its ground in the twentieth century because a wistful yearning for a pre-1914 era would imply that the informing principles behind that era--the faith, the union--have disappeared. The past is therefore a continuous present. Contrastingly, in England [nostalgia is] ... symptomatic of a culture which accepts the insecurity and breakdown of the current condition and is thereby able to sentimentalize or idealize a secure past. Apocalypse, in contrast, is the language of insecurity but the product of a culture which resists breakdown, which holds itself "eternally vigilant" on the edge of contemporary chaos.

Both views, Brearton argues, "collapse in, and into, Mahon's poetry." Even the much-anthologized "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford," with its abandoned mushrooms described like trench corpses ("the pale flesh flaking / Into the air that nourished it"), can be read allegorically as a sympathetic treatment of the ways in which war victims, Irish and others, have been manipulated by these conflicting ideologies.

Heaney's "use" of the Great War is more overt and insistent than Mahon's, but, in Brearton's opinion, not always successful. "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge," better known, perhaps, than any of Ledwidge's own poems, "ranges rural, pacifist, and Catholic on one side; Protestant, urban, and militaristic on the other." Ledwidge, a "haunted Catholic" (Heaney's description) is "displaced from the former." It is a convention to oppose war with the pastoral, and Heaney adds associations of Catholic or nationalist traditions to the pastoral, reinforcing a too neat sectarian division. Brearton examines evidence of Great War imagery from Death of a Naturalist through Field Work, often remarking upon the Owen influence as filtered through Ted Hughes. In poem after poem in his first volume, Heaney depicts his Co. Derry home ground as battlefield terrain overrun by rats, where the frogs "[p]oised like mud grenades" ("Death of a Naturalist"). In Brearton's opinion, this landscape in turmoil exceeds and draws attention away f rom the poet's internal struggles that it is meant to represent. But starting with Wintering Out (1972), his first volume written after the Troubles erupted, Heaney's evocation of the Great War explains "Northern Ireland to the outside world at a time when some of the horrors of the Troubles equaled scenes associated with the Great War in their barbarity, their physical and emotional mutilation, if not in their death toll." "No Man's Land," for example, effectively contextualizes the speaker's "crisis of conscience" in Derry visualized with imagery derived from literature of the Great War: "The sense of helplessness characteristic of those caught in the ubiquitous mud of the First World War battlefields relates to the speaker's position as a poet in 'Northern Ireland." Typically, when a reference to the Great War appears it serves to make vivid the present rather than to draw Heaney into the historic conflicts of the teens. In contrast, Brearton credits Longley for illuminating both past and present in his po ems that revive Great War material.

Longley also titled a poem "No Man's Land," written in memory of Isaac Rosenberg, whose body was not recovered and whose "Break of Day in the Trenches" Paul Fussell nominates as the highest achievement of Great War poetry. Longley's poem compactly worries over the poet's role in responding to violence and suggests that even war poetry has been shoved to the margins of culture: "in No Man's Land / What is there to talk, about but difficult poems?" The literal zone between friendly and enemy wire, of wet shellholes and decomposing body parts, combines with the metaphorical zone: "It is the image of war which, perhaps more than any other, still dominates memory in the western world; it is the place where the question 'what is the use or function of poetry?' resurfaced with a new energy and new resonance." Longley answers this question by linking his private effort to recover his father's war experiences. with a public voice that implicitly critiques the ongoing spasms of hatred in his own community. One formal s trategy Longley adopts to achieve such linkage is the ironic counterpointing of separate circumstances: the fragments of memory by which he knows his "Jewish granny," dead at age twenty, and thoughts on Rosenberg ("No Man's Land"); his father at the Somme and recent victims ("Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of / Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone") of incomprehensible violence ("Wounds"); his young:: father nearly buried alive amid shelling, and his father on his deathbed gesturing for a Woodbine ("Last Requests"). "Wounds," Brearton asserts, "expands to include emotional as well as literal wounding, the open wounds of history aggravated in Northern Ireland in the early 1 970s, the wounding of the innocent, the invisible scars left-on society." The second stanza of "Last Requests" connects the forty years between the trenches and a hospital bed: "I thought you blew a kiss before you died, / But the bony fingers that waved to and fro / Were asking for a Woodbine, the last request I Of many soldier s in your company." Brearton labels this poem anti-elegiac: it does "not impose meaning or consolation on the inconsolable and incomprehensible, but instead point[s] up the inadequacy of traditional elegiac resources. [It does], so as a way of finding a voice for, rather than an answer to, grief."

Anyone writing in the last quarter-century about the cultural effect of the war works in the shadow of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, as Brearton acknowledges. Essentially, Fussell mid nothing about Irish writers. Brearton's exposure of a literary response that is belated and typically embedded in poems with multiple, corresponding subjects pushes this body of work out of the shadows and demonstrates that Irish Great War poetry says more about conflicts on the Home Front than the fighting on European soil.

Montana State University-Billin