Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would

expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Seen from the viewpoint

of man, who always lies in the interval between past and future, time is not a

continuum, a flow of interrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the

point where ëheí stands [Ö]^16

Arendt goes back to St. Augustine to argue that understandings of
time move from the past history of a life instantaneously through to a
futurity in the ëafter-lifeí and that the present moment is thereby
eclipsed.^17
Arendtís definition of the relation between past and future is
useful for our understanding of Lloydís reading of ëEaster 1916.í In
his analysis of this poem Lloyd argues for an ambivalence existing at
the heart of Yeatsís ënational literatureí which lies in the ambiguity of
the poetís relationship to tradition; a word which implies a continuity
between past and future. Lloyd demonstrates how this continuity is
disrupted and the role of the poet is questionable. He identifies a
tension in Yeatsís poem:

The tension subsists metaphorically between the symbolic ëstoneí and the

continuing ëliving streamí that it troubles; the question posed is the relation

between the singular moment in which the nation is founded or constituted and

the future history of the citizens it brings into being. Yeats represents the

relationship as one of trouble and of anxious, obsessive rememoration.

Lloyd concludes that far from offering ëaesthetic reconciliationí,
Yeatsís poetry writes a rupture ëthat threatened to displace himí.^18

16 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought,
(London: Faber, 1958), pp.10ñ11. Arendt appears in the epigraph to Richard
Kearneyís Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Dublin: Wolfhound
1988): ëThe appeal to thought arises in the odd in-between period which
sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians
but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval
in time which is altogether determined by things which are no longer and by
things which are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once
that they may contain the moment of truth.í
17 Cf. Thomas Dochertyís discussion of St Augustine in John Donne Undone,
(London: Methuen, 1986), p.96. Although he provides no reference, Docherty
is referring to Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), pp.519ñ20.
18 Lloyd, pp.71ñ4.