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 paul volsik

discussions of Northern Irish poetry) that nationality is not the space of identity
andthe distinct, but an extraordinary hybrid space with roots in history and also in
history as it is rewritten in many different aesthetic productions. The poetic is mixed
with the massively prosaic, an Irished English ‘Bard’ in dialogue with the patriotic
melodramas of the profoundly opportunist Boucicault (Arrah na Pogue), but also
incorporating the irrevocably foreign as central to Irishness. Thus that which is of
antiquity is linked to that which is of no antiquity at all. It is politically a mix of
the tribal, the monarchic, the republican and the imperial, a vision that will enforce
gender roles not only for men, but also for women, who are contained in the role
of the virginally pure (the opposite of Molly Bloom or of the ‘New Woman’ of
the novelThe Woman who Did) in a nostalgically mythical incarnation of national
identity, embodied as the beautiful, eroticized, and death-haunted Dark Rosaleen:

‘O, the Erne shall run red,

With redundance of blood,

The earth shall rock beneath our tread,

And flames wrap hill and wood,

And gun-peal, and slogan-cry

Wake many a glen serene,

Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!’^4

Continuities

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But Joyce’s frontal attack (or that of others like Beckett), did not, of course, stop
the continued deployment of and high valuation placed on the epic. For worse
and for better—one thinks of David Jones’s powerful reworking ofY Gododdinas
intertext for hisIn Parenthesisor Walcott’sOmeros—the epic paradigm survives a
period that had experienced the trauma of the First World War. Though Yeats did
not totally share Pearse’s fascination with thepurifying sacrificial nature of war, he
nevertheless saw in the heroic warrior a pillar of a future renewed Ireland. One has
only to look atThe Green Helmet, which ends with the election of Cuchulain as the
champion of Ireland for his possession of the following epic qualities:

And I choose the laughing lip

That shall not turn from laughing, whatever rise or fall;

The heart that grows no bitterer although betrayed by all;

The hand that loves to scatter; the life like a gambler’s throw.^5

(^4) James Clarence Mangan, ‘Dark Rosaleen’, in Thomas Kinsella (ed.),The New Oxford Book of Irish
Verse 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 275.
W. B. Yeats,The Green Helmet,inThe Collected Plays(London: Macmillan, 1953), 243.