paul volsik
poem is that it does not in fact question the epic as the epic of war; in some ways,
itdemocratizes Yeats’s construction, taking martial violence from the mythical
(Troy) not just to Ireland (Ballyrush) but to Northern Ireland (Gortin), yet still
accepting that one ‘family’ can, and perhaps should, wish to ‘damn the soul’ of the
other and that this desire can be the iron foundation stone of significant poetry.
But it was precisely from Northern Ireland that a counter-voice was to appear, a
voice that would criticize the fascination with this model and serve as a reference
point for many of the younger (especially Protestant) poets of the Troubles. That
voice was Louis MacNeice. In a famous passage describing his own ambivalent
fascination with Ireland, he characterizes it as a place where one man’s hope is
The other man’s damnation:
Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope
And God Save—as you prefer—the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,
The born martyr and the gallant ninny;
The grocer drunk with the drum,
The land-owner shot in his bed.^8It is this reticence about an ‘epic’ world of ambushes, about the epic hero turned
grocer or the grocer turned epic hero, drunk on the rhythms of the drum, a world
where only the ‘born martyr’ and the ‘gallant ninny’ can really feel at home that
will resurrect again with the coming of the Troubles in a dialogue with the national
if not nationalist Yeatsian tradition.
Hesitations?
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••At the heart of the epic is the manifestation of a community united, without hesita-
tion, against a ‘foreign’ threat. This community, however one names it—tribe, clan,
or nation—finds in the epic that which reaffirms gallantry and the meaningfulness
of martyrdom, imposes a shared ethical framework, and bestows on the epic poet,
as spokesman, an assured place in its heart, in so far as it is he who makes sense
of violent and tragic conflicts, records whatit considers its formative events, and
eulogizes and memorializes its heroes. In so far as this is true, then a poet like Derek
Mahon is emblematically an anti-epic poet, a poet whose sense of belonging is
limited in the extreme, whose sense of isolation, exile, and solitude is fundamental,
whose only nostalgia—and an ironic nostalgia at that—is for the small vulnerable
communities in the desolate landscape they inhabit.
(^8) Louis MacNeice,Autumn Journal,inCollected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007),
138.