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Partitioned memories: TheGreat War in Irish poetryJames P. Haughey aa Teaches English at Anderson College , SouthCarolinaPublished online: 30 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: James P. Haughey (1999) Partitioned memories: The GreatWar in Irish poetry, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 10:2, 181-191, DOI:10.1080/10436929908580241

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Partitioned Memories: The Great Warin Irish Poetry

James P. Haughey

Northern Irish poets are only too aware of the risks involved inaddressing the recent Irish "Troubles" in their work. While most shunthe temptation to respond to the latest atrocity, for poets likeMichael Longley, extreme circumspection has its limits, too. Longleynotes that a poet would be "inhuman if he did not respond to tragicevents in his own community" (qtd. in Ormsby xvii). Yet Longley isonly too aware of poetry's limitations as he continues to be "dumb-founded by the awfulness of our [the Irish] situation" (qtd. in Healy560). He has also been forthright about the consequence of anypoems he has written about the victims of the "Troubles": "I havewritten a few inadequate elegies out of my bewilderment and des-pair. I offer them as wreaths. That is all" (560). Then there is theconcomitant burden of maintaining private fidelity to the whole actof poetry. Yet despite these risks, poets like Longley and SeamusHeaney continue to "search for words and symbols to express thehuman cost of [the Irish] conflict" (Peacock 62). For both poets, theGreat War continues not only to provide ironic historical parallels tothe recent Irish "Troubles," but also to provide an historical backdropas they explore some of the sources of Northern Ireland's recent sec-tarian disturbances.

In Heaney's poem "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge," taken fromhis 1979 collection Field Work, and Longley's poem "Wounds,"taken from his 1973 volume An Exploded View, both poets elegizevictims of the war, and with aid of ironic juxtaposition, examine theconflicting loyalties that motivated over 200,000 Irishmen (Foster471) to serve in the British armed forces during the Great War.

For Heaney, the war provides an opportunity to examine the con-flict between a nationalist, "Celtic, Catholic mythos" and an intrusive

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182 ].P.Haughey

Anglo presence (Parker 175), while Longley, on the other hand,explores the Ulster Protestants' ongoing identity crisis. Of coursefor many unionists there is no identity crisis at all: Ulster is British.But past events teach us that such labels have never been whollyhomogeneous, and Longley's war elegy not only reveals disturbingparallels between past and present violence but also demonstrateshow the past can be "processed by state [and sectarian] ideologies"(E. Longley, The Living Stream 69).

Heaney's elegy for Irish soldier-poet Francis Ledwidge, who waskilled in Flanders in July 1917, laments the loss of a promising poet,but the poem's first five stanzas contain no reference to Ledwidgehimself. Instead, Heaney begins by describing, from childhood mem-ory, the war memorial in the small seaside town of Portstewart. In thepoem's next six stanzas, Heaney imaginatively crosscuts betweenpastoral scenes from his Aunt Mary's childhood and Ledwidge'sBoyne Valley youth to the trenches in the Dardenelles and Flanders:

It's summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girlMy aunt was then, herding on the long acre.Behind a low bush in the DardenellesYou suck stones to make your mouth water.

(lines 33-36)

Then the elegy's final two stanzas address the irony of Ledwidge (anIrish Catholic) serving in a British uniform while his fellow Irishmenfought for their country's independence during Easter week, 1916:

In you, our dead enigma, all the strainsCriss-cross in useless equilibriumAnd as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronzeI hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the BalkansBut miss the twilit note your flute should sound.You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue onesThough all of you consort now underground.

(lines 45-52)

A striking feature of this elegy is how its language reveals histor-ical and cultural references endemic to Irish nationalist ideology.Submerged narrative tensions emerge when Ledwidge's pastoralGaelic "ethos" (Parker 176) is threatened by the intrusion of the GreatWar. Heaney's elegy, then, subscribes to a fairly narrow definitionof Irish ethnicity, for we see Ledwidge's "Celtic, Catholic" pastoralism

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The Great War in Irish Poetry 183

favorably contrasted to a non-Celtic presence which threatens the"native" order.

Stanza seven also contains several of these "Celtic/Catholic" cul-tural referents as it describes Ledwidge's hinterlands:

Where you belonged, among the dolorousAnd lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,Mass rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

(lines 25-28)

The "hill-top raths" associated with Ledwidge's prewar experiencesrecall Ireland's megalithic past, before the arrival of the Normanand Saxon invaders, and the connection between these ancientenclosures and Ledwidge, the bard, reinforces the idea of his mem-bership in a Celtic tribal hegemony. Other images associated withLedwidge's youth, like the "May altar," the "Easter water," and the"Mass-rocks" denote his Catholicism; the "Mass-rocks," in particular,arouse memories of seventeenth-century Irish recusancy when thePenal Code condemned Catholics to worship at remote sites in orderto avoid religious persecution.

In direct conflict with Ledwidge's "Celtic/Catholic" heritage isthe intrusion of the Great War, which infects the bard's "countrified"innocence like a foreign antibody. In contrast to the prewar "literary,sweet-talking poet," we now see the "haunted Catholic face" endur-ing the blistering heat of the Dardenelles before being "rent/Byshrapnel" in Flanders two years later. If the war is perceived as aBritish cause, Ledwidge's death implies that the war is also the des-troyer of the Irish bardic tradition and its Celtic "twilit note." It isthe war that is the enemy of Irish Culture and Refinement.

Heaney's portrayal of Ledwidge's war experiences also sub-scribes to the by now fairly common idea that Irish cultural identitycan be largely defined by the poet's bond to the Irish landscape andthat age-old trope in Irish literature—Mother Ireland. Both Led-widge and Heaney himself discover their emerging sense of self-hood and nationality through female personifications of Ireland,and for both poets, the Great War represents a force that obstructsself-discovery. Yet "the problems of confused identity can partiallybe solved in an identification with Irish landscape" (Brown 210).

That Irish cultural identity is inextricably linked to Irish landscapeis borne out by Heaney's ironic intercutting between Ledwidge's suf-fering on foreign battlefields and the pastoral continuities associated

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184 J.P.Haughey

with Heaney's Aunt Mary. While Ledwidge endures the heat of theDardenelles (and the implied cultural aridities), Aunt Mary, theMother Earth figure, is pictured "herding cows" on the long acre,and when Ledwidge is killed in Flanders, she "still herds cows."Heaney, then, reads the war as a cross-cultural conflict: Ledwidge'sdeath on foreign soil signifies the demise of bardic Ireland, while athome, the Irish pastoral ideal, embodied by Heaney's aunt, enduresas an unceasing rural ritual. Furthermore, Aunt Mary represents inIrish poetry what Patricia Coughlan calls the now familiar "femaleicons of ideal domesticity" which are usually "associated withunmediated naturalness" ("'Bog Queens'" 90).

If Heaney's aunt functions as an unshakable pastoral continuum,for Ledwidge, the hardships of the war are mitigated by romanticfancy; he imagines his "'soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows... '"and perceives Ireland as a Catholic female ego awaiting her recep-tion into nationhood garbed in her "confirmation dress."

Heaney also appears betrothed to this standard nationalist ideal,for he readily admits that for him the "feminine element... involvesthe matter of Ireland" (Preoccupations 34). Not surprisingly, Heaneybelieves the "feminine is associated with the Irish and the Celtic, themasculine with the English and the Anglo-Saxon" (Green 3), and hisAunt Mary's stewardship of the land reveals how the "feminineprinciple" sustains man's "participation in the domestic and reli-gious rituals which give life continuity" (4). If Ledwidge's death inFlanders illustrates the potency of Heaney's image of the dying bardsevered from the very earth that gives him life, as a stand-in forMother Ireland, Heaney's Aunt Mary ultimately symbolizes culturalas well as political affiliation.

While Heaney's war elegy reveals the extent to which nationalistideologies permeate Irish cultural utterance, it also shows how thewar continues to be appropriated in order to consolidate tribal myths.Heaney's final image of Ledwidge interred with all the other "true-blue ones" is a reminder that while a common thread of sufferingunites these former adversaries, any hope of political reconciliationbetween nationalists and unionists depends on whether both sidescan transcend their mutual obsession with their own martyr culture.

Just as Heaney's antiwar statements conceal other political dis-courses which locate the particular (the Irish situation) in theuniversal (the Great War), Michael Longley's treatment of the waralso demonstrates that quite often the best way to approach thepotentially incendiary nature of local cultural and political tensions

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The Great War in Irish Poetry 185

is to locate them within a larger drama. Unlike Heaney, whosepoem can, at times, be easily stereotyped as further evidence ofthe poet's fascination with romantic nationalism, Longley disturbsthe bedrock of contemporary unionist ideology by unearthing someof its paradoxes and half-truths. In "Wounds," the poet disintersthe psychological scar tissue of ethnic and family wounds as heexplores the conflicting loyalties of Ulster Protestants who foughtduring the Great War. Once again, memory of the Great War revealstensions which help explain some of the causes of the recent hostilitiesin Northern Ireland.

The poem consists of two stanzas: the first one recalls the distilledmemories of the poet's father—a survivor of the Ulster Division'ssuicidal charge on July 1,1916:

Here are two pictures from my father's head—I have kept them like secrets until now:First the Ulster Division at the SommeGoing over the top with 'Fuck the Pope!''No Surrender!': a boy about to die,Screaming 'Give 'em one for the Shankill!''Wilder than Gurkhas' were my father's wordsOf admiration and bewilderment.

(lines 1-8)

By now, the price paid for such heroics (the Ulster Division incurred5,500 casualties on the first day of the Somme) has become engravedin Ulster unionist memory (Bardon 455). But Longley's recollectionof his father's war memory unearths other tensions. We are given"two pictures" from his "father's head" which Longley has kept"like secrets until now." A couple of questions go begging here:why has the poet repressed these memories and why the need toreveal them now? Perhaps the "secrets" themselves provide clues.

In an interview with the French journal Les Lettres Nouvelles,Longley discusses the self-divisions within the Ulster Protestantpsyche: "I don't believe that the Ulster problem will ever find asolution until the average Protestant is able to resolve his identityproblem" (qtd. in Brown 206). As we have just seen, these identityproblems are foregrounded in the poem's opening lines as the battlecries of the attack reveal an interesting gallimaufry of antipapist("'Fuck the Pope!'"), loyalist ("'No Surrender!'"), and autarkic('"Give 'em one for the Shankill!'") sentiments. They also imply ahierarchical sense of values which appear absurdly misplaced amidthe larger Armageddon of the Somme.

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286 J. P. Haughty

The sectarian nature of the first slogan, a basic feature of unionistideology, can be traced to a Protestant fear that the Irish Catholicchurch is "in such a position of entrenched power" that it is "able todictate policy to the State on matters which the church considersessential to the maintenance of its position" (Whyte 151).

Of course the fact that the Catholic church enjoyed a privilegedplace in the Irish Free State after the advent of Partition did littleto allay this fear. But unionist ideology also thrives on tribal tri-umphalism—which the annual marching season seems to encourage—by glorifying past military victories. The cry of "'No Surrender'"aptly describes the nature of unionist siege mentality with its com-memorative genuflections to the defiance of the Apprentice Boys ofLondonderry who boldly closed the gates of their city rather thancapitulate to the besieging forces of James II during the Williamitewar of 1690. The third epithet hurled at the German enemy—'"Give'em one for the Shankill'"—signifies a parochial and sectarian iden-tity as the Shankill is a predominantly Protestant enclave in largelyCatholic West Belfast.

What Longley's recollection of his father's war memories illus-trates is how Ulster Protestant identity is often defined by itsresponse to a nationalist culture which it perceives to be exclusivelyCatholic and antipartitionist. But another tension emerges when wecompare Longley's father's memories of the war with his last wordsas he lies dying, still haunted by the "lead traces":

At last, a belated casualty,He said—lead traces flaring till they hurt—'I am dying for King and Country, slowly.'I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.

(lines 14-17)

Just as the old soldier recalls his battle experiences through these sec-tarian slogans, at the end of his life he tries to make sense of the terriblesacrifices by describing them as purely patriotic acts rendered gladlyfor '"King and Country.'" The sectarian nature of his first recollectionof the battle and the imperial allegiances the old soldier utters on hisdeathbed dramatize Ulster Protestantism's shifting loyalties.

In the past, Ulster Protestant loyalty to the British monarchy hasbeen implicitly conditional: as long as the monarch is Protestant,Ulster will be loyal. In fact, there always has been the notion thatUlster is not "bound by the 'will of the British parliament'" (Miller2-3). Indeed, many Ulster Protestants enlisted to fight in the Great

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The Great War in Irish Poetry 187

War because of the implicit understanding that, when the war ended,their efforts would be rewarded by the shelving of any Home Rulelegislation. Consequently Longley's father's deathbed effusionsarguably represent the old soldier's attempt to convince himself thatthe war effort was motivated by a larger sense of British patriotism.It would appear, though, that there were other more regional imper-atives that sent over 2,500 Ulstermen to kingdom-come in a matterof hours on the first day of the Somme offensive.

Perhaps the possibility that the Ulster Volunteer Force, which madeup the nucleus of the Thirty-Sixth Division, might have taken uparms against its own government had Home Rule become a reality isone of the two "secrets" with which men like Longley's father havehad to grapple. The Great War removed the ironic likelihood thatUlster unionists would have to wage war against their own govern-ment in order to remain part of a union that Home Rule threatened todissolve. Therefore, the old soldier's ambiguous allegiances suggestthat "Protestants [continue to remain] more uncertain about theirnational identity than Catholics" (Whyte 245). While most Ulster Catho-lics describe themselves as "Irish," Protestants have been more inclinedto "tack between the labels 'British,' OJlster/ and even 'Irish'" (245).

Clearly the sacrifice on the Somme has become part of Protestant/unionist mythology. Indeed, an impressive wall mural commemor-ating Ulster's Somme sacrifice still adorns the exterior of the UlsterUnionist Party's headquarters in Donegall Street in Belfast. How-ever, Longley's poem ponders the human cost of the Somme's sym-bology as images from the battlefield challenge the sanctification ofblood sacrifice:

Next comes the London-Scottish padreResettling kilts with his swagger-stick,With a stylish backhand and a prayer.Over a landscape of dead buttocksMy father followed him for fifty years.

(lines 9-13)

First of all, the soldiers' deaths are deromanticized: a "London-Scot-tish padre," with an absurd sense of propriety given the carnage ofthe battlefield, steps through the "landscape of dead buttocks,"resettling kilts with his "swagger-stick." Setting aside these necro-philic images of sex-in-death, there is the implication that while thepast can be cosmetically altered (the padre's settling of the kilts),present atrocities have to be confronted. Longley reminds us of our

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188 J. P. Haughty

moral obligation to recognize the truth about violence and how pasthorrors can be sanitized to support tribal ideology.

Another of the poem's subsurface narrative tensions calls intoquestion how this attempt to mold an ethnic identity has evolved.Longley's objective description of the past and present violenceexposes ironies that remind us how violence, telescoped throughhistorical perspective and subjectivity, can be mythicized as part ofthe oral narrative of the tribe. The dates 1690 ("'No Surrender'") and1916 serve as cultural referents to consolidate tribal solidarity, andLongley's blunt description of the war dead and four recent victimsof the "Troubles" raises questions about the whole fabric of an iden-tity whose defining moments are characterized by tribal tub-thump-ing and bloodshed. In an imaginative conceit, the poet buries hisfather alongside these recent victims of Northern Irish violence:

Three teenage soldiers, bellies full ofBullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.A packet of Woodbines I throw in,A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of JesusParalysed as heavy guns put outThe night/light in a nursery for ever;Also a bus conductor's uniform—He collapsed beside carpet slippersWithout a murmur, shot through the headBy a shivering boy who wandered inBefore they could turn the television downOr tidy away the supper dishes.

(lines 21-32)

Even the cultural icons the poet-mourner casts into the figurativegrave reflect the sectarian tensions that color Ulster's Great Warexperience and how it is commemorated. Conflated with the"Woodbines" and "lucifer" (brand names of cigarettes and matchespopular among British troops during the war) is a distinctly Cath-olic icon, a picture of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus." These incon-gruous items suggest that, despite their differences, those beinginterred share one unenviable common denominator: they are allvictims of Irish history, a fact which Heaney's poem also alludes toin its final line as the dead poet Ledwidge and those "true-blue onesall consort now underground."

By examining his father's memory of the war, Longley revealshow the violence in Northern Ireland "originates in a conflict [over]national identities" (Brown 206). He also implies that his father's

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The Great War in Irish Poetry 189

shell-shock may function as a paradigm for an entire community'scultural disorientation, a likelihood which Longley forecasts couldhave serious political implications:

Terrified of Irishness—the cultural ideology of the Free State and thenof the Republic—Unionists have clung to what after 1968 has increas-ingly become known as "the Mainland," and to cultural importation.Those who depend on imports run the risk of themselves beingexports. (Tuppenny Stung 74)

There is also the issue of how the past can be mythologized to servea collective will: like the Easter Rebellion, the Great War's commem-oration has been shaped by "sectarian idioms" (E. Longley, The Liv-ing Stream 69). A good example of this mythologizing would be thelegend that grew up around the Ulster Division's fateful attack onthat July morning in 1916. The story goes that many of the troopsmarched into battle remembering that the date—July 1—was thesame date as the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Years later, one Ulsterveteran recalled, "I don't know why they plaster such incidents onour battle. Nothing was further from my mind than the Boyne onthe Somme" (qtd. in Orr 218).

But such mythical appropriations of the Great War still persist.Memory of the Great War was hijacked once again for political pur-poses when, during the recent stand-off at Drumcree Church nearPortadown, a commemorative service for Ulster's sacrifices at theSomme became the pretext for an ongoing protest over marchingrights as the local Orange lodge continues to insist upon its tradi-tional right to parade down the largely nationalist Garvaghy Road.Once again, history becomes processed to serve present-day polit-ical and sectarian agendas with the result that the memory of themany thousands of Irishmen who fought and died during the FirstWorld War is either distorted by the rhetoric of unionist trium-phalism or erased by nationalist amnesia.

Certainly the last thirty years of bloodshed in Northern Irelandindicate the dangers of creating selective histories, and Heaney's andLongley's poems not only demonstrate how difficult it is to carry"messages from the past to the present" but also "the impossibilityof reading signs of history both in time of war and peace" (Westen-dorp 137). Furthermore, Ledwidge's and Longley's father's inabilityto peg out a homogeneous ethnic identity may in fact be a tentativesign of hope on an island where, as one of Brian Friel's characters(Hugh the pedagogue from Translations) puts it, "Confusion is not

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290 J.P.Haughey

an ignoble condition" (67). The old demarcations of Britishness andIrishness need to be challenged but not replaced by dull conformity.As Longley himself has stated, "Reconciliation does not mean all thecolours of the spectrum running so wetly together that they blurinto muddy uniformity" (Tuppenny Stung 75). Ultimately, though,one can only hope that the war will become a recognition scene inIrish history: one that reminds us of the various strands of Irishidentity which cut across convenient cultural, religious, and politicaldivides. As Irishmen's conflicting motives for fighting in the GreatWar demonstrate, defining Irishness and Britishness was and still isa confusing and perhaps futile exercise. If Irish memory of theGreat War teaches us anything, it is that constricted views of Irishhistory and ethnicity continue to remain at the heart of the "IrishQuestion."

JIM HAUGHEY teaches English at Anderson College in South Carolina. He was the recipient ofthe 1996 Philological Association of the Carolinas' Founders Prize for best essay in British orAmerican Literature and Language. Most recently, his essays on James Joyce, William Trevor,and Sebastian Barry have appeared in Studies in Short Fiction and the Colby Quarterly.

NOTE

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1995 annual meeting of thePhilological Association of the Carolinas and subsequently circulated with selectedconference papers in Postscript 13 (1996).

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