edna longley
till the whole tarnished map is stained and torn,
notto be read as pastoral again.^85‘Not to be read as pastoral’—but perhaps to be written as war pastoral. Within the
field of ‘place-name poems’ itself, Heaney’sWintering Out(1972) makes precisely
that transition. Northern Irish poets pick and mix from many traditions of war
poetry, pastoral poetry, and both together, from Tibullus to Thomas and Frost,
from Homer to Douglas, from Marvell to MacNeice. They also mix Irish pastoral
genres: Yeats’s western eclogue, Patrick Kavanagh’s inland georgic. Muldoon recasts
the Irish poem of rural community as a social psychology of conflict.
Poems of the ‘peace process’ years repeatedly seek to expel war from pastoral.
Heaney’s ‘Tollund’ (1994), written just after the IRA ceasefire, revisits the Danish
landscape that, in ‘The Tollund Man’, he had made surrogate for Northern Ireland’s
fratricidal parishes. Now: ‘It could have been a still out of the bright|‘‘Townland of
Peace’’, that poem of dream farms|Outside all contention.’^86 (‘Townland of Peace’
is an idyllic utopian section of John Hewitt’s regionalist poem ‘Freehold’, written
during the Second World War.) But peace is a long haul, and it remains unclear
whether ‘war poetry’ has been stood down. Poems in Heaney’sElectric Light(2001),
Muldoon’sMoy Sand and Gravel(2002), and Longley’sSnow Water(2004) continue
to offer pastoral models (rather than assurances) of peace. Longley’s sonnet ‘War &
Peace’ exploits a Homeric passage in which georgic interrupts epic. The narrative
of Achilles pursuing Hector around the walls of Troy encompasses a flashback to
pastoral domesticity, focused by ‘double well-heads’ ‘Where Trojan housewives and
their pretty daughters|Used to rinse glistening clothes in the good old days,|On
washdays before the Greek soldiers came to Troy’.^87 Longley also maintains double
vision in ‘Edward Thomas’s Poem’, part of an ‘aftermath’ sequence that uses First
World War images to reflect on art, peace, and the arts of peace. The poem does not
resolve the doubts of ‘Bog Cotton’: ‘The nature poet turned into a war poet as if|He
could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.’^88 Muldoon’s ‘Whitethorns’, a parable
of conflict resolution, alludes to Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’ and Kavanagh’s ‘Innocence’
(‘I cannot die|Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges’^89 ). Another doubled
poem, but with a utopian thrust, ‘Whitethorns’ recalls a time when ‘we would tap
paling posts into the ground...|hammering them home then with a sledge...to
keep our oats from|Miller’s barley’.^90 In the second quatrain, rhymed with the
first, the divisive posts become:
(^85) John Hewitt, ‘Postscript’, inThe Collected Poems, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff,
1991), 388.
(^86) Seamus Heaney, ‘Tollund’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber, 1998), 443.
(^87) Michael Longley, ‘War & Peace’, inCollected Poems, 310.
(^88) Longley, ‘Edward Thomas’s Poem’, ibid. 307.
(^89) Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Innocence’, inCollected Poems(London: Allen Lane, 2004), 183.
(^90) Paul Muldoon, ‘Whitethorns’, inMoy Sand and Gravel(London: Faber, 2002), 28.