war pastorals IV APastoralPeace?
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If war and pastoral cannot always avoid oxymoron, peace and pastoral conversely
attract. Of course, most war poems are peace poems too; but the balance tilts
when ‘home’ comes home. The original anti-war poem, Tibullusi.x,identifies
‘peace’ with farm life: ‘I would like peace to be my partner on the farm,|Peace
personified: oxen under the curved yoke;|Compost for the vines, grape-juice
turning into wine...’.^81 In reaching for pastoral images, ‘end of war’ or ‘aftermath’
poems affirm pastoral’s return. In Gurney’s ‘The Valley Farm’ a ‘weapon’ is
productively used by a wood-chopper who ‘moves with such grace peace works an
act through him;|Those echoes thud and leave a deeper peace’.^82 Of course, there
are also Gurney’s perpetually interrupted georgics. And Blunden’s poem on ‘The
Rebuilding of Ypres’ contrasts false and true memorial uses of pastoral: the official
‘mild desire Arcadian’ as against the claims of dead soldiers, which powerfully revise
Shelley and Brooke:
but I
Am in the soil and sap, and in the becks and conduits
My blood is flowing, and my sigh of consummation
Is the wind in the rampart trees.^83The ‘war pastoral’ of Northern Ireland since 1969 is a huge topic. Fran Brearton
suggests its complexity when she begins her discussion of First World War
allusion in Seamus Heaney’sField Work(1979) by noting that ‘field works’ is
a military term. She counters the view that Heaney has scaled down his vision
by showing that ‘[his] field is also a field of war from which respite is gained
only with difficulty’.^84 Indeed, Heaney’s ambiguous title might be a synonym
for‘warpastoral’,‘warpastoral’asynonymforNorthernIreland.Theconflict
exemplifies the territorial imperative of any civil war—war on ‘home’ ground—at
work within a predominantly rural area. And this war, like the cultural codes it
engages, derives from land history bound up with archipelagic and European wars.
‘City’ poetry of the ‘Troubles’ does not exhibit notably different dynamics. In 1950
John Hewitt published a poem celebrating ‘Ulster Names’. In 1984 he wrote a
‘Postscript’:
Now with compulsive resonance they toll:
Banbridge, Ballykelly, Darkley, Crossmaglen,
summoning pity, anger and despair,
by grief of kin, by hate of murderous men(^81) ‘Peace’, trans. Longley, in Longley,Collected Poems, 134–5.
(^82) Gurney, ‘The Valley Farm’, inCollected Poems, 67.
(^83) Blunden, ‘The Rebuilding of Ypres’, inUndertones of War, 274.
(^84) Brearton,Great War in Irish Poetry, 243.