war pastorals maxed-out, multilayered whitethorns, affording us a broader, deeper shade
thanwe ever decently hoped to know
so far-fetched does it seem, so far-flung from the hedge
under which we now sit down to parley.Pastoral, like all poetry, can only offer symbols or templates, whether it figures
peace as ‘dream farms’; as resumed wine making or wood chopping or laundry; as a
flourishing laurel or multilayered whitethorn; as conversation (‘parley’) or poetry.
Perhaps what links such natural/rural images of peace, or of ‘civilisation’ as war’s
true ‘opposite’,^91 is the desire to bring human faculties or energies into a lost balance,
to reinstate the earthly ‘Horn of Plenty’. But, like earlier peace pastoral, Northern
Irish versions know that war forgotten is war renewed. And, despite violence having
largely ceased, aspects of the ‘peace process’ can be construed as war by other
means. Three poems in the collections cited above revisit Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue
(overlaid by Yeats’s ‘Prayer’), and thus highlight the utopian dimension of eclogue
as a mode of political thought. The protective-visionary poem about a child is a
peculiarly urgent way of imagining the future. Longley’s ‘The Leveret’, Heaney’s
‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ and Muldoon’s ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse’ all involve
babies and mention prams.
In ‘The Leveret’, a western eclogue, reminders of violence linger. The poet’s
visiting grandson is hailed as ‘little hoplite’,^92 his pram called a ‘chariot’, and the
landscape contains a stoat with ‘a shrew in his mouth’. But such reminders are
set within a mainly peaceable kingdom of cultivation, wild nature, and young
creatures. This finally pivots, not on Yeats’s ceremonious unity, but on a more
humbly reflexive symbol that befits a ‘cottage’: ‘I have picked wild flowers for
you, scabious|And centaury in a jam-jar of water|That will bend and magnify the
daylight.’ Heaney’sElectric Lightcontains three deliberate ‘eclogues’, all of which
end on an upbeat pastoral note. ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, a dialogue between ‘Poet’
and ‘Virgil’, loosely based on the Fourth Eclogue and set in mid-Ulster, evinces
a powerful sense of millennial occasion. Virgil prophesies ‘a flooding away of all
the old miasma’: a prophecy given weight by the rhythms of the Poet’s messianic
conclusion:
Child on the way, it won’t be long until
You land among us. Your mother’s showing signs,
Out for her sunset walk among big round bales.
Planet earth like a teething ring suspended
Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner.
Cows are let out. They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.^93(^91) Michael Longley’s poem ‘All of these People’ begins: ‘Who was it who suggested that the opposite
of war 92 |Is not so much peace as civilisation?’ (inCollected Poems, 253).
93 Longley, ‘The Leveret’, in Ibid. 327.
Heaney, ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, inElectric Light(London: Faber, 2001), 11–12.