paul volsik
quieter heroism of survival, a survival that is ‘human’ but perhaps more profoundly
thesurvival of the ‘humane’ in the face of the abject:
Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.^10One might suggest that a similar sense of ‘gravity’, ‘frailty’, and ‘good faith’
informs the work of Michael Longley. As an ex-Classics scholar, he negotiates
directly with the violence that he witnessed as a resident of Belfast, but also directly
with the poetic tradition of the epic. Longley thus engages with the genre not by
simply imitating or mocking, though his ‘The Parting’—
He: ‘Leave it to the big boys, Andromache.’
‘Hector, my darling husband, och, och,’ she.^11—could be read as just as violent in its attack as Joyce’sUlyssesin its mockery of
the gender specifications which a certain reading of the epic and nationalist conflict
set in place.
By reaching into the heart of the tradition, Longley sets up echoes with his private
life and also the historical situation in which he finds himself as the Protestant son
of an English father who had himself been profoundly marked by his experience of
the First World War. The epic attracts him at several levels, not only thematically
and formally (Longley is interested, for example, in Homer’s articulation of syntax
and line length) but also generically, one instance being the way in which he
negotiates between the tradition of the Latin love elegy (Tibullus or Propertius)
and the classical epic. Thus his historically important translation of Tibullus’s
‘Peace’, with its use of the colloquial—the sort of speech which undercuts the
formalities associated with the epic—relates to his translations of certain episodes
of the great epic texts. In his poem ‘Altera Cithera’, Longley rewrites Propertius
‘in ballpoint pen’, to bring to the ground, not in death but like ‘lovers’, all those
tempted by the ‘dreary|Epics of the muscle-bound’.^12 Yet what is paradoxical
about Longley is that he is obviously enthralled by the epic—if not perhaps by
the ‘muscle-bound’. He has stated that he has ‘snatched from [Homer’s] narrative
flow moments of lyric intensity in which to echo [his] own concerns, both personal
and political’.^13 This suggests that the epic is not, for Longley, an exotic genre,
(^10) Mahon, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, ibid. 80.
(^11) Michael Longley, ‘The Parting’, inCollected Poems(London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 226.
(^12) Longley, ‘Altera Cithera’, ibid. 74.
(^13) Longley, quoted athttp://www.teachnet.ie/ckelly/ceasefire.htm