‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’ its violence taking place in a mythical elsewhere (mythic mornings, for example),
buta text which deals very precisely with home—Belfast, the place that Longley,
unlike many other local poets, never left, the most intimate place, the domestic
subject of much of his work. It is therefore not surprising that one of his most
successful translations/transpositions of Homer is to be found in his reworking
of a passage which follows Odysseus’s homecoming and involves the epic hero’s
‘soiling’ of his most intimate space—his massacre of the suitors and (above all)
the disloyal servant girls, and his implication of his own son in this frenzied act.
The passage is titled ‘The Butchers’, which echoes the name given to a group of
Shankill Loyalists (‘The Shankill Butchers’) who, in the 1970s, were responsible for
the killing of nineteen Catholics. Not only did these assassins kill the Catholics they
had abducted, but they also tortured and mutilated them with butcher’s knives and
axes. Longley is here (with only slight modifications to Homer’s text) describing
a world in which violence is handed down from father to son as an apparently
unrefusable inheritance:
Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood
Fromhischestandcheeksafterdevouringafarmer’sbullock,
Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs
And tables, while Telemachos, the oxherd and the swineherd
Scraped the floor with shovels, and then between the portico
And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women
So none touched the ground with her toes, like long-winged thrushes
Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost,
Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long.
And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard
And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner,
Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant,
Fumigated the house and the outhouses...^14Resurrections?
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We have thus seen that, for these Protestant poets, the notion of community is at
best problematic, that they hesitate (and the same could be shown of a poet like Tom
Paulin)tospeakfororeventobelongtoagroupwhoseoriginstheyrefusetoseeas
heroic, in the way that the Orange Order sees the Battle of the Boyne or the Siege
of Londonderry as ‘epic’ foundational events in the history of their ‘nation’. One
could argue that this is not true, or not as true, for the Catholic poets of Northern
Ireland. For them, the tribe was seen as a microcosm of the nation. This sense of the
importance of community could be one reason why Lady Gregory dedicated her
(^14) Longley, ‘The Butchers’, inCollected Poems, 194.