roderick watson
its flame and smoke,
itssparks and the screaming of its inmates,
while house upon house is rent
and collapses in a gust of smoke?
And who to night are beseeching
Death to come quickly in all their tongues,
or are struggling among stones and beams,
crying in frenzy for help, and are not heard?
Who to-night is paying
the old accustomed tax of common blood?^58The rhetorical formality of this Gaelic utterance gives an added power to the
poet’s vision, although he explained that the unusual metre of ‘Bisearta’ was taken
from a medieval Italian poem by the Dominican reformer and radical preacher
Savonarola—a man whose beliefs took him to his own fiery stake. Hay saw no
end to such suffering, and in ‘Truaighe na h-Eorpa’/‘Europe’s Piteous Plight’ he`
imagined all of Europe in similar straits, with ‘ancient carvings...split and stained
with gore’.^59
For what is perhaps his most outspoken condemnation of what the modern world
had come to, Hay turned to English. The title ‘Esta Selva Selvaggia’ (‘This Savage
Wood’) echoes lines from Canto 1 of Dante’sInferno:‘Ah,howpainfulitisto
speak|of this wood, so savage and harsh and brutal,|and the very thought of which
rekindles my fear.’^60 The poem switches metres constantly, using couplets, Dante’s
tercets, full rhyme, half-rhyme, and a polyphony of other languages to invoke a
vision of global hatred and suffering in a terrible succession of rhythmic vignettes:
The swaying landmines lingering down
between Duntochter and the moon
madeScotlandandtheworldone.
At last we found a civilisation
common to Europe and our nation,
siren, blast, disintegration.
The house has buried sister, mother.
Sheer chance—a direct hit. Another
near Bou Arada buried brother.ˆ
None was left, and no one mourned.
The telegram has been returned
undelivered, scrapped and burned.
·······
Chopping sticks below the prickly pears;
turban, hook nose, cheeks hollow with his years.
He drew his lips back, said: ‘There comes a day(^58) Hay, ‘Bisearta’, ibid. 177.
(^59) Hay, ‘Truaighe na h-Eorpa’/‘Europe’s Piteous Plight’, ibid. 215. ́
(^60) See Byrne’s editorial notes, ibid. ii. 158.