Poetry for Students Vol. 10

126 Poetry for Students

Author Biography

Michael Hartnett was born in Newcastle West in

County Limerick, Ireland, in 1943. He attended Na-

tional University of Dublin, graduating in 1962,

and later graduated from Trinity College in Dublin

in 1972. In between, he worked a variety of jobs,

including dishwasher, postman, house painter and

security guard. Already a recognized poet in the

1960s, his Collected Poemswas published in 1970.

With his popularity as a writer, he could have eas-

ily secured a job teaching, but preferred working

for the Irish telephone company. He turned to

teaching, in 1976, the year after A Farewell to Eng-

lish and other Poemswas published.

Along with his numerous collections of poetry,

Hartnett is a respected translator, ranging from a

translation from Old Irish of the ancient tale Hag

of Beareto an edition of the Romancero Gitanoby

Frederico Garcia-Lorca, a Spanish poet who was

executed by the government after the start of

Spain’s civil war in 1936. Lorca’s poetry and his

political commitment served as powerful influ-

ences on Hartnett. Through the 1960s and early 70s,

Hartnett wrote in English, increasingly using Irish

words. The poem “A Farewell to English” marked,

as its title implies, a break away from his use of

the English language in his poetry. After that, he

wrote almost exclusively in Gaelic, often publish-

ing under his Gaelic name, Micheál Ó hAirtnéide,

until he eased back into using English in 1985. He

served as co-editor of the literary magazines Arena

andChoice,and was the poetry editor of the Irish

Timesnewspaper for a short time. He died in

Dublin, where he had lived most of his life, on Oc-

tober 13, 1999.

Poem Text

for Brendan Kennelly

Her eyes were coins of porter and her West

Limerick voice talked velvet in the house:

her hair was black as the glossy fireplace

wearing with grace her Sunday night-dance best.

She cut the froth from glasses with a knife 5

and hammered golden whiskies on the bar

and her mountainy body tripped the gentle

mechanism of verse: the minute interlock

of word and word began, the rhythm formed.

I sunk my hands into tradition 10

sifting the centuries for words. This quiet

excitement was not new: emotion challenged me

to make it sayable. The clichés came

at first, like matchsticks snapping from the world

of work: mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin:^15

they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from

an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,

álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark

unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,

álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs, splinters 20

like axeheads damaging the wheels, clogging

the intricate machine, mánla, séimh,

dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin. Then Pegasus

pulled up, the girth broke and I was flung back

on the gravel of Anglo-Saxon. 25

What was I doing with these foreign words?

I, the polisher of the complex cause,

wizard of grasses and warlock of birds

midnight-oiled in the metric laws?^29

Poem Summary

Lines 1-4:

This poem is set in a pub where the speaker is

watching a serving woman as she prepares drinks

for the customers and talks to them in Gaelic, the

traditional language of Ireland. Her eyes are “coins

of porter”: porter is a very dark, strong beer served

in Irish pubs, so this image makes the woman de-

sirable while blending a reference to beer and

money. Limerick, the city mentioned in the second

line, is a working-class town in the middle of Ire-

land, a port on the river Shannon. Limerick is sur-

rounded by some of Ireland’s most fertile land, and

it is a natural center for local farmers and for sailors

around the world. The fireplace in this pub is

glossy, indicating that it is probably made of inex-

pensive painted steel that has been scrubbed, not

black with caked-on soot. In this humble setting,

the serving woman is wearing her best clothes, the

clothes that she would wear to a dance. The effect

of these first few lines is to present a scene of a

pub and a woman who looks comfortable and neat

in humble circumstances.

Lines 5-9:

Having introduced the bartender and implied

the speaker’s attraction to her, the second part of

the poem puts her into motion. Because beer is car-

bonated and tends to foam when it is poured, she

scrapes the top of glasses, removing excess foam.

In addition, she slams a glass of whiskey on the bar

to knock any sediment in the drink to the bottom,

where it will be left when the glass is drained. These

two mechanical gestures, common to the bar-

tender’s trade, create a swish-and-bang rhythm that

draws the attention of the poem’s speaker to the

A Farewell to English