‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’ As once, on an impossibly epic morning,
Itupheld their savage stride:
To bagpiped battle marching,
Wolfhounds, lean as models,
At their urgent heels.^19This poem is not as dense as those in the later collection, but it involves precisely
an emblematic negotiation with ‘Old Mythologies’. Though the text contains
manifest ironies (like Longley, it sees the heroes as ‘butchers’, as the victims of
‘archaic madness’), the major thrust (unlike Longley) is nostalgic, in that the poem
articulatesheroismandhedonism(‘prouddeeds’),Celticwar(‘bagpipedbattle’)and
nation, with the ‘Wolfhounds, lean as models’. InUlyssesthe Patriot is accompanied
by what the narrator calls ‘a bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen’ that ‘let a grouse
out of him would give you the creeps’.^20 The emblem of the ‘grousing’ nation in
Ulyssesis as fallen as its owner. In Montague’s poem the wolfhound, as emblem
of Irishness (though the Irish wolfhound has a more problematic history than it
would seem), has apparently found a new life. Those that accompany the heroes are
‘lean as models’ with a subtle play on ‘models’—both iconically fashionable and a
template for a certain mode of being. But above all it is the ‘impossibly epic morning’
that fascinates—because, over and above its stereotypical articulation of origins
(morning) and epic warfare, one cannot be sure whether or not the ‘impossibly’
is to be read negatively (as ‘infuriatingly’), mythologically (as ‘unbelievably’), or
critically (as ‘in a way that could not have occurred’), or as all three.
The negotiation with the epic continues in Montague’s work and undergoes an
interesting modification, perhaps as the ethics of the nationalist cause are challenged
when the bombings begin. This might explain the uncertainties of a text likeASlow
Dance(1975), which contains poems bordering on the pietistically propagandist
like ‘Falls Funeral’, but others which suggest a drawing back, like ‘Hero’s Portion’.
This is a problem which will confront all those who feel a certain fascination with
the heroization of conflict and have a strong sense of ‘community’. Such a poet is
Seamus Heaney.
From the very beginning, one could argue that Heaney’s position (and text) was
infinitely more complex than Montague’s, his work always a subtly dialogic space in
which a multitude of languages and intertexts oppose each other and articulate in
surprising ways. His ability to function at the frontier between such different poles
in carefully weighted binary oppositions (fascination and horror, for example) and
to create texts that hybridize subtly different traditions means that one has to be
particularly careful when analysing any one of these poles in isolation. The tropism
towards the epic, which perhaps counterweighs his tropism towards certain Catholic
traditions—for example, Marian devotion—allows Heaney to play pagan against
(^19) Montague, ‘Old Mythologies’, inPoisoned Lands(Dublin: Dolmen, 1961), 22.
(^20) Joyce,Ulysses, 242–3.