Untitled

 paul volsik

rewriting of the Cuchulain story to the ‘people of Kiltartan’.^15 Itwas also important
that, as Declan Kiberd remarked, the story of Cuchulain had the immense advantage
of having taken place in a past that ‘was sufficiently remote to be tractable to present
agendas...to a period before splits into sectarian and political turbulence’.^16 It is
this mythic territorial base and space that served poets like Montague and Heaney
well when they came to look at the military violence that was so massively present
in the Troubles, and it is in the territorial nature of the story that one finds the
origin of certaintopoithat link the sacrifice of the hero to regeneration in a way
thatThe Golden Boughhad suggested and that Heaney reinvests. This articulation
of the political and the geographical is striking in the period’s renewed interest in
dinnseanchas, but it is evident above all in the remarkable work of John Montague,
a poet who is an exile returned. It is symptomatic that Montague, notably in his
influential collectionThe Rough Field, resurrects an ancestral landscape, marked by
‘communal loss’,^17 and ends in the violent world of ‘A New Siege’, where he finds it
possible to use Cuchulain to ‘ground’ his analysis of the sectarian violence—only
this time the Protestants become the warrior figures:

a black Cuchulain

bellowing against

the Scarlet Whore

twin races petrified

the volcanic ash

of religious hatred.^18

Much could and should be said about this remarkable sequence and this particular
passage. For, as in Heaney, we find here a structuring articulation of place poems,
poems that describe rural communities, and poems that deal with violence. But,
for both poets, things have changed since the nineteenth century, in that the
dream of a period before conflict has become even more distant and mysterious
while, in the lines quoted, the use of the word ‘races’ to qualify the two linked
communities—a word which, in the late twentieth century, cannot but have
disturbing echoes—renders the idea of a possible community of Catholics and
Protestants even more problematic. Take, for example, ‘Old Mythologies’, a poem
from an earlier collection,Poisoned Lands(1961), written before the outbreak of
the Troubles in Ulster, in which at last ‘all proud deeds [are] done’:

a whole dormitory of heroes turn over,

Regretting their butchers’ days.

This valley cradles their archaic madness

(^15) This example is interesting in that it raises the complex problem of the articulation (here by a
writer of Protestant origin) of the ‘parochial’ and the ‘national’. 16
17 Declan Kiberd,Irish Classics(London: Granta, 2000), 401.
John Montague, ‘The Rough Field’, inThe Rough Field 1961–71(Dublin: Dolmen, 1974), 39.
(^18) Montague, ‘A New Siege’, ibid. 74. The lineation could be seen here as figuring a divide.