the speaker sets up expectations only to undermine them, as in the first
stanza with the flood that never comes.
In order to create some foundation or anchor, the woman
provides a delimited space for the man and so conjures a ëgreen fieldí.
This could be connected with representation of Ireland as four green
fields and with stereotypes of Ireland as a pastoral landscape where
there are also ëdry stone wallsí. Yet unlike Seamus Heaneyís North,
there is nothing specifically Irish about Berkeleyís poetic territory.^38
The woman creates a blank green place in which to house the man and
this is a place bearing no specific location or name. The poetic
subjects are given identity in the poem less in terms of space and more
in terms of narrative or time. The poem undermines the notion that
identity is given to the subject by space and place, as the poetic ëIí is
identified only in relation to narratives it can tell and in her/his
communicative relation to other subjects. It is not the nation-state that
gives the poetic subject identity and autonomy but her narrative
relation to the ëotherí.
What is troubling about the space created within the poem is that
it has ëno way in or outí which suggests an enclosed space. As
language offers the possibility of narrative, naming or identity, it
situates the subject in relation to alterity but also encloses it. As in
Levinas, language exposes the subject to alterity. It also provides the
ability to name and enclose the subject within a fictive space of
knowledge or belonging. Like the walled green field conjured within
the poem, language has no real exit. In ëThe Servant and her Masterí
(1966) Levinas asks of language: ëIs it possible to get out of this circle
otherwise than by expressing the impossibility of getting out of it, by
expressing the inexpressible? Is not poetry, of itself, the Exit?í^39 He
also asks:
Is an exit possible or on the contrary is even the light that seems to illuminate
this abode artificial, and does our consciousness of the situation become lost in
the same interminable game played by language without leading to any cogito?
Poetic language will break through the wall whilst preserving itself against the38 Cf. Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out and North, Selected Poems 1965–1975
(London: Faber, 1980).
39 Hand, ed., Levinas Reader, p,152.