What’s in a name?

… That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s soliloquy, (II, ii, 44-45), of course and now so clichéed as to need an occasional reference for respectability.

And then there’s the vexed question of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. In English, this is “Northern Ireland”  — though the most northernly part of Ireland is Malin Head, which is in Donegal — and so, in the parlance, paradoxically in the “South”. Nor, of course, is a Northern Irishman exclusively an “Ulsterman” — because Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan are in the ancient province of Ulaidh, but are not in Northern Ireland.

My passport’s green

Even among the northern (missing capital deliberately so — see more on this below) Irish there is no agreement on what one is: British? Irish? Northern Irish? Ulster Scots? When Penguin Books included Seamus Heaney with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, in the The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he was the one who famously objected:

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

He made up for it, though, at Dublin Castle in May 2011.

The People with No Name

That is the title of a fine book by Patrick Griffin, in Malcolm’s view the best account of the Ulster protestant diaspora who occupied and extended the Western frontier of the American colonies. It is subtitled: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

The opening paragraph of that book illustrates the nominal confusions with a variety of names:

BETWEEN 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women journeyed from the Irish province of Ulster to the American colonies. Their migration represented the single largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century. In a first wave beginning in 1718 and cresting in 1729, these people outnumbered all others sailing across the Atlantic, with the notable exception of those bound to the New World in slave ships. By sheer force of numbers, this earliest generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age. Even before they left Ulster, they contributed to the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland, paving the way for an unprecedented extension of English power into the kingdom. They also figured prominently in the British transatlantic trading system by producing linen, one of the most important commodities exchanged throughout the empire. Sailing when they did, Ulster’s Presbyterian migrants played a formative role in the transition from an English to a British Atlantic. Before their migration, Puritans and adventurers leaving England during the seventeenth century for the North American mainland and the Caribbean dominated the transatlantic world. After men and women from Ulster boarded ships for America, the cultural parameters of the Atlantic broadened, as they and thousands of land-hungry voyagers from the labor-rich peripheries of the British Isles sought their fortunes in a vast, underpopulated New World. In America, Ulster’s men and women again had a hand in a number of defining developments of the period, including the displacement of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the extension of the frontier, the growth of ethnic diversity, and the outbreak of religious revivals. In the abstract, therefore, the group contributed to the forces and processes that dwarfed the individual but yoked together disparate regions into a broad Atlantic system.

The editor of Gaelscéal, Ciarán Dunbar, has picked up Griffin’s essential thesis, inverted it, and now puts up a ruminative thread on Slugger O’Toole:

Whilst working on Gaelscéal on Tuesday last I realized that I did not know the correct Irish term for ‘Northern Irish,’ so I quickly checked focal.ie, the ‘National Terminology Database’ for Irish.

That was a fruitless journey for they had no such term, I requested they provide one.

The term was one I have strangely never needed in Irish and I have never thought about it to date.

On the day, we simply used the English term in single speech marks.

That night I heard two terms used on TG4, ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’, agus ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’, both translating into English as  ‘Northern Irish’ but with a subtle difference in meaning in Irish which the English doesn’t capture.

One implies a mere geographical distinction, the other, perhaps, a clear political distinction.

A meaningless distinction for most but one could argue that constitutional  future of the Northern Ireland state rests on this distinction, whether the Northern Irish are ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’ or ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’ at the end of the day.

Malcolm queries whether English cannot capture precisely the distinction between Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh, and Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha by doing what he did above: capitalising or not the “n” of “northern”.

Proconsul

Beyond that, the thread provided Malcolm with a bit of further diversion, the Latin version of wikipedia. Yes, indeed: there is one — even if somewhat abbreviated for the present. And here is its definitive statement on the topic:

Hibernia Septentrionalis, quondam (H)ultonia (Anglice: Northern Ireland, Hibernice: Tuaisceart Éireann) est provincia in Hibernia et Regno Britanniarum. Caput est Belfastium et dux gubernationis est Petrus Robinson; ille est dux factionis civilis qui appellatur Factio Unionistarum Democratica. Successit Reverendum Ioannem Paisley, qui abdicavit in Iunio 2008. Proconsul est Martinus McGuinness. Ille est membrum factionis civilis Sinn Fein (Latine: Nos Ipsi), olim dux Exercitus Republicani Hibernici.

Apart from stroking Malcolm’s self-esteem (that even after half-a-century, his TCD Latin, ever so rusty, can still cope), there were several amusements in that.

One was Máirtín Mag Aonghusa transmogrified from the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland into the far more concise, even poetic, ‘proconsul’. Which instantly directed Malcolm’s butterfly mind to Kipling:

The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart’s desire at price of his heart’s blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations
At the day’s need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against the sea we fear — not man’s award.

The subject there was originally Sir Alfred Milner, who was the British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War. The “Oh, gosh!” thing is, stripping from one context to the other, the elevation of  Máirtín to ‘proconsul’ almost works.

“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”

Moving swiftly on, there is the conceit of Petrus Robinson, dux Factionis Unionistarum Democraticae (3rd declension, feminine: genitive case!). Thus rendering the DUP into Latin gives us the acronym FUD:

generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

In the case of the DUP, precisely.

Browne study

Bishop Michael Browne of Galway would almost qualify as a “not-so-great and not-so-good” had not “Bill” done a previous, and better hatchet-job:

Michael Browne was catholic bishop of Galway in from 1937 to 1976 and seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the church… He was among those who led the hierarchy’s objections toNoël Browne’s mother and child health scheme. He supported a boycott of protestant businesses in Co. Wexford during a dispute over a protestant woman married to a catholic man who refused to educate her children at the local catholic school. He described Trinity College Dublin as “a centre for atheist and communist propaganda”. He forced the segregation of the sexes on Galway beaches. He seemed so perpetually angry that his episcopal signature — “† Michael” – was popularly rendered as “Cross Michael”. He supervised the construction of a grandiose new cathedral in Galway that local wits dubbed the “Taj Micheáil” (pronounced Meehaul).

That post also involves the late Brian Trevaskis, a perverse and interesting character who was a feature of TCD, overlapping Malcolm’s time.

The Fethard-on-Sea business was nasty in the extreme, and contributed mightily to the sectarian prejudices of Northern Protestants well after the original episode. Tim Fanning’s The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott is probably the fullest account. A summary of the main events is on Gareth Russell’s blog.

Anyone of a fair mind (and even other) would surely recognise that Browne was off-piste in oh-so-many ways. Or, “The Irish bishop stands on ceremony and sits on everybody,”as Seán O Faoláin put it. However, let’s pass on all that.

Going through the motions

Once upon a shitty time, when Galway hadn’t made much effort to filter its effluents, that was the experience of swimming in Galway Bay. To be strictly honest, across the city and county, there remain ample opportunities for improving water-quality. In 2007 it was cryptosporidium. In 2008 it was levels of lead. In 2011 it was oily waste. In 2012, e-coli.

Anyway, allegedly Bishop Browne liked to swim. Unencumbered by swimming costume. And to air himself in the Galwegian sunshine thereafter. Doubtless among males of similar disposition. He had a sign put up on the beach at Salthill, prohibiting women therefrom.

Elsewhere Bishop Browne was very much against any mixing of the sexes, even clothed, on beaches:

“Everywhere has changed in my life time”, [Christie Moore] says. “I remember Galway winning three-in-a-row; the Bishop of Galway banning “mixed bathing” — the dirty minded bollocks; Des Kelly and The Capitol being Number 1 in The Irish Charts; when there was only one De Danann; Michael D presenting me with a platinum disc; Moving Hearts falling asunder in St.Patrick’s Hall, and reforming two hours later in The Skeff.”

Out of the strange came forth sweetness

Which isn’t quite how Judges 14:14 has it, nor (as is better known in every British kitchen to the present day) how it appears on the Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin. Yet it has a relevance here.

Bishop Browne’s prurience was the contrarian inspiration for an early Seamus Heaney poem, Girls Bathing, Galway 1965:

The swell foams where they float and crawl,
A catherine-wheel of arm and hand.
Each head bobs curtly as a football.
The yelps are faint here on the strand.

No milk-limbed Venus ever rose
Miraculous on this western shore;
A pirate queen in battle clothes
Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour

Themselves into themselves, the years
Shuttle through space invisibly.
Where crests unfurl like creamy beer
The queen’s clothes melt into the sea

And generations sighing in
The salt suds where the wave has crashed
Labour in fear of flesh and sin
For the time has been accomplished

As through the swallows in swimsuits,
Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed
They wade ashore with skips and shouts.
So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.

That now appears by the Galway Bay Hotel, opposite the beach — still ‘the Ladies’ Beach’ — on the Salthill Promenade, one of half-a-dozen bronze plaques celebrating poems along the Cúirt Literary Trail.

The poem seems  superficially a slight thing, almost a piece of juvenilia. That’s Heaney’s deception: it anticipates so much of what Heaney’s later work would become. It is highly complex in its allusions and, appropriately in this context, in its undertow.

The incident is, on one level, from Marie and Seamus’s honeymoon.

The form is almost a ballad: quatrains of four-stresses to the line. There is the characteristic Heaney conflation of past and present, the classic and the work-a-day: So Venus comes, matter-of-fact. The implied visual references include Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere and St Catherine with her wheel: that, along with in fear of flesh and sin, must imply continuing martyring of women in Browne’s gynophobia.

Strange meeting

There is is the nod to Irish tradition and history: the pirate queen in battle clothes is Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O’Malley/Granuaile/The Sea-Queen of Connacht.

Gráinne, another woman of strength, is depicted in the frontispiece to Anthologia Hibernica, no humble suppliant. She had been summoned  in  September 1593, to Greenwich to  encounter Elizabeth I. The Queen acquiesced with all of Grace’s demands — to the profound disgust of Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connacht, who regarded her as nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years.

All that without the implicit physical sexuality: Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed.

Bishop Browne knew not what he had provoked.

Wish you all adieu

There is a world out there, beyond spats about immigration.

For the next couple of weeks, Malcolm will be elsewhere.

The elsewhere will be via JFK, NYC, DC and Thanksgiving in Noo Joisey.

With luck it will involve substantial sampling of craft ales, book-stores, diners (the US’s gracious gift to international cuisine, and rarely matched), decent music (Mona’s in the East Village is inked into the agenda), a bit of family familiarity, along with the odd novel (real and literary) experience. In there somewhere will be thirst-slaking at  the Old Town Bar  — if only because, one celebrated afternoon, unshorn and weary, sitting beneath the image of Frank McCourt and other worthies, Malcolm was accosted by a pasty and insipid youth and asked was he Famous Seamus.

Redfellow Hovel will be left in full charge of he who answers to the code number of 1690: the password is “No Surrender”. That’s no joke: his name is Ken. He left just that message on the Redfellow answerphone when “The Troubles” were at their height. For months afterwards, there were strange clicks and quiverings whenever anyone else ‘phoned. Can’t think why.

So, this evening, Malcolm has been filling the iPod to get him from here to there and back. Just let’s hope that he doesn’t disgrace himself on AA107 if the iPod spills out Phil Coulter’s Scorn Not His Simplicity — 

Or (as is more likely) Luke Kelly’s angstier rendition:

It cracks him wide open every time. For a good reason.

Rolling the yule log

It’s that time again: the seasonal book lists, “best books of 2010″, “what we read this year”.

So, immediately after signing off that previous post:

Some pretensions to literacy: just like Malcolm

the reality came back to haunt him.

He picked up the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement and started through its Books of the Year (just don’t forget those authoritative capitals). Some sixty-five eminent bods (it says here, and seems to tally), over seven pages, expiate on what turned each one on. There is repetition:

I very much enjoyed and admired Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto)

says A.S.Byatt. Jonathan Bate is more effusive:

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto) is a beautiful piece of writing, mixing family memoir, cultural history, travel narrative and nuanced observation of miniature curiosities (his inherited collection of netsuke) in a style suggestive of Sebald without the gloom.

Among others, Michael Howard (no, not the political one) joins in and goes overboard for this as:

the book, not of the year, but of the decade.

Harrumph! Anyone for navel-gazing, however nuanced, and suspenders for Japanese pouches?

What really gave Malcolm the glooms, Sebaldian or not, was his growing recognition of seemingly how little he had read of such recent worth. He had missed out, among others, on Felipe Fernández-Armemesto’s choice:

the chef Fabio Picchi’s Senza vizi e senza sprechi (Monddadori) — a culinary memoir that makes most British celebrity cooks look like idiots.

Funny that: Malcolm hadn’t realised it needed Italian comparisons to demonstrate so self-evident a truism. Indeed, Malcolm had reached D for Richard Davenport-Hynes and F for Roy Foster before he found points of recognition.

Davenport-Hynes is boosting Graham Robb’s Parisians: An adventure history of Paris. Now, in Maclolm’s ‘umble opinion that really is a juicy read. It’s not just the information and the opinion it provides, there’s the entertainment value on top — delicious pastiche of literary periods and forms. It’s already out in paperback, and deserves to sell in truckloads.

Foster starts where he is best, on the island:

A disastrous year for the Irish economy, but a very good one for Irish poetry. Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain (Faber) was dazzling: full of three-word lines that light up like a flick of a switch, conveying a haunting preoccupation with the borderlands between this world and the next.

Why the past tense (“was dazzling”), Roy? Later on in this catalogue of wonders, Bernard O’Donoghue also gives Famous Shamus a nod. Somewhere between those two, G for Peter Green devotes his three paragraphs to Donna Leon and Commissario Brunetti’s latest Venetian outing (number nineteen, and Malcolm has every one, in sequence, on a garret shelf) in A Question of Belief. Amid all this pretentiousness and log-rolling, Green comes on like a boy scout’s simple good deed in an affected world:

… the stench of the canals in a broiling August carries its miasma of judicial corruption, homophobia (leading to murder), and red tape. Smooth-talking astrologers prey on elderly ladies. While his delightful family cools off on an Alpine vacation, Brunetti himself (reading Marcus Aurelius) is recalled to sweat out the murder investigation and what lies beneath its surface. Leon’s unique mixture of sadly cynical realpolitik and heartfelt moral compassion has never been shown to better effect. She is a truly fine novelist, period, and should be acclaimed as such.

Cheers to that, says Malcolm.

Leon’s spring annual is a treat to be anticipated. Malcolm will have it on pre-order.

Fiction seems in small regard among the stratospheric literati, with an exception for Peter Carey (that regular Booker-listee). Do these great minds at the TES not take time off for faux-simple joys such as Leon? If so, they might then extend to the likes of Philip Kerr and his Bernie Gunther in their diet. Why (excluding the obvious objection of being “popular”), as far as Malcolm can see, did le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor or C.J.Sansom’s Heartstone not make someone’s list?

Clearly, Malcolm knows little about art, but he knows what he likes.

Of pens

One of the small treasures the Lady in Malcolm’s Life recovered from her recently-deceased mother’s house was a pen. The pen that had taken her through Portadown College. That had taken her to and through TCD. A Conway-Stewart pen.

________________________________________________________

Seamus Heaney had one as well. His proud parents bought it for him, as he went off to St Columb’s College:

“Medium”, 14-carat nib,
Three gold bands in the clip-on screw top,
In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin
Pump-action lever
The shop-keeper
Demonstrated…

Let’s hold it there for a moment, and decode.

That poem is also about leaving.

Heaney’s family home was (and famously is) at Mossbawn, in the County Derry. That’s heading out of Magherafelt along the Desertmartin Road. It’s over thirty miles to Derry: too far for a daily commute to and from school. Young Seamus would become a weekly-boarder at St Columb’s, returning home only for weekends.

Heaney would never really return. After St Columb’s came Queen’s, in Belfast. then teacher-training at St Joseph’s, also in Belfast. Back to St Joseph’s as a lecturer. Then a post at Queen’s. His first collection published. He was off to Berkeley, and the world.

So, the pen represents a moment of reflection, of separation, a rite of passage:

time
To look together and away
From our parting…

His relations with home and parents now become more distant, linked by that pen. He writes in:

… longhand
‘Dear’
To them, next day.

One of the frequent questions teacher Malcolm faced from exasperated students to define “poetry’. His shorthand answer was “compressed thought”.

So, consider the hidden depths, the compression of thought, in that one word: longhand. Longing? A long way away? A long time? A long time ago?

The collection is titled Human Chain. Heaney is seeking out his connections, then and now, lost and enduring. That’s also in the poem: the spatulate (spade-shaped) lever for replenishing the ink. That goes all the way back to Heaney’s second collection, and the poem Digging that continues to torment secondary-school students:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

[...]

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

________________________________________________________

Malcolm was not a Conway Stewart man

Either his mother did not love him enough, or she knew what was good for him, or he only went ten miles daily to Fakenham Grammar, or whatever. He got an Osmiroid 65.

With that he has stuck this half-century. For a few years he was unfaithful and fell in love with a Waterman with a calligraphic nib. Sadly, the original Waterman’s went out of business and survive only now via the French JIF company, and at extortionate cost.

Now the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome,
and the addictive keyboard mean
Malcolm can never produce a holograph
to match the genius of Famous Seamus.

Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?*

A moment’s reflection sent Malcolm in search of a poem. He was somewhat disconcerted not immediately to find it.

Let us start with his hunt.

The poem was Seamus Heaney’s Whatever You Say Say Nothing. Now, Malcolm immediately reached for Opened Ground and New Selected Poems, only to find that both included only the shortened versions, which omit the second section.

That of course, raises the issue: why did Heaney’s second thoughts cause him to excise those 28 lines, those seven quatrains?

In this day and age, it is no longer necessary to retain hard-copy texts. Wendy Cope was lamenting this in last Saturday’s Guardian:

My poems are all over the internet. I’ve managed to get them removed from one or two sites that were major offenders, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of sites displaying poems without permission. If I Google the title of one of my poems, it is almost always there somewhere, and I can download it and print it out. I’m sure that this must affect sales of my books. I’ve tried Googling some of Seamus Heaney’s poems, and those of one or two other well-known poets, and it’s the same.

That’s, appropriately and with some feeling, under the headline:

You like my poems? So pay for them.

Malcolm did, Wendy: he promises you.

However, right at that moment he was faced with an immediate need. He ought, by your definition of all that is right and proper, to have spent a fair bit of the day on the no. 134 bus, to and from the Charing Cross Road. Or, of course, he could have waited a few days before Amazon delivered a copy (if Malcolm had known in which book the complete poem would be found).

Instead, he weakened and googled.

Ong passong, so to speak

Has everyone now noted two linguistic discrepancies?

Whatever happened to famous Seamus’s fada? That, strictly, should be his síneadh fada (or what might more widely be recognised as an acute accent, though in Irish it works to lengthen the syllable, not raise the pitch). Malcolm does not believe that the Great Man passed through St Columb’s College without “Séamus” being pressed on him, even in the 1950s, nor that he played under GAA rules for St Malachy’s without some attempt to Hibernicise him. After all, there’s that broadside he dispatched when included in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry:

Be advised, my passport’s green
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast the Queen.

It concluded:

British, no, the name’s not right.
Yours truly, Seamus.

Seamus, let the world note. Not Séamus. That’s presumably not merely to save all those critics and student essayists a small fidget with the keyboard (on a Mac, OPT+e; on a benighted PC, ALT+0233.)

And, used as a verb, should it be “Google” or “google”?

Malcolm! Back to the issue!

Indeed.

Malcolm recalls a 1995 piece by Blake Morrison in The Guardian, including the canard that the Nobel Laureateship :

… like the awards to Sholokov and Pasternak, Milosz and Seifert — here is another “political” Laureateship, given to Heaney in the year which has seen the peace process on Northern Ireland begin in earnest. Within an hour of yesterday’s announcement, the wires were buzzing with stories of Heaney’s alleged keep-everyone-happy chameleon-ism: how, for example, when travelling on the train from Dublin to Belfast he’ll switch brands of whiskies at the border.

That brings Malcolm back to Whatever You Say Say Nothing, because it is an outstanding statement of Heaney’s political standing. Indeed, Blake Morrison, in that same article, recognised:

Under duress to “respond” to contemporary violence, terrorism and military repression, Heaney proved he could do reportage with the best of them :

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite’s a common sound effect.

But he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the results, which violated his deeper, instinctual, feminine muse, and at the end he withdrew, “a wood-kerne escaped from the massacre”.

That brings us to the missing section II. It reads in full:

II.

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite’s a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, ‘The Pope of Rome’s
A happy man this night.’ His flock suspect

In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We’re on the make

As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch’s and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow

When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It’s tempting here to rhyme on ‘labour pangs’
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight

But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn’t need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides ‘little platoons’ are mustering –
The phrase is Cruise O’Brien’s via that great
Backlash, Burke — while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

Having got there, Malcolm feels a frisson of self-satisfaction. Then he tries an exegesis of a particularly convolved text.

He finds the key in those last two lines. The poem starts with the journalists coming to town

… in search of “views
On the Irish thing”.

They obviously need their (political and editorial) masters to determine the “line”. Equally, those students, wrestling with this poem now it is set for “English” public examinations, will need the “line”. Once that is established, reputations can be (and were) and will be made. Grades will be scored. How many, though, appreciate the irony of aere perennius?

It is borrowed from Ode XXX in Book Three of Horace’s Odes:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.

Or, approximately, in English:

I have completed a monument more lasting than brass,
Higher than a royal pile of Pyramids,
That rain’s tooth and North Wind
Cannot destroy, nor numberless
Years and fleeing time.

Whose boast here? The cocky journalists? Or, by inference, Heaney himself (by the 1970s, one of the few who might decode the Horatian tag)? And Heaney, at least, would be aware of Horace’s occasional self-mockery.

This, however, has only started the excavation of literary reference. The “little platoons” (originally in the singular) is ultimately from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

In short, we learn first to love our family, our community, and only then a wider society. Malcolm pauses to muse on the ambiguities of Heaney’s use and implications here.

There is more, though, in Heaney’s comment. He specifically points to Conor Cruise O’Brien, who edited the 1968 Penguin edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and later returned to write the extraordinary “thematic biography of Edmund Burke”, The Great Melody. It is relevant to this poem that Burke’s beginning was in a “mixed” marriage (his mother, Mary Nagle, was Catholic: in 1729, at the worst impact of the Penal Laws, this was not a good start in life). Moreover, RB McDowell , the Great “JD” to all Trinity people, described Burke’s father as “a Catholic who had conformed to the Established Church”. O’Brien, at some length in the Introduction to Great Melody, sees the parallels with is own background.

Inevitably, too, we might hear in Heaney’s hind tit more than an echo of Joyce:

Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Malcolm, though, notes the epigraph to the first chapter of The Great Melody, quoting a letter from sixteen-year-old Burke:

… we live in a world where every one is on the Catch, and the only way to be Safe is to be Silent. Silent in any affair of consequence, and I think it would not be a bad rule for every man to keep within himself what he thinks of others, of himself and of his own Affairs.

Therein, for certain, is the genesis of this poem.

Poets are notorious for meddling with their own work. Yeats did it, but he was as nothing compared to (say) Auden. Heaney was not happy, obviously, with that second section: so it went missing in later collections. Only the numbering of the sections tells us to look for it.

In cutting it he was avoiding a nexus of references, many of which would be lost on the casual reader. He was also being “safe” (in Burke’s terms); and abiding by the spirit of his own title. Blake Morrison’s reference is apt: it is from Exposure, with Heaney migrated to southern security in Wicklow, in December, in the dark and rain:

I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows…

____________________________________________

*Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?

In Connacht Gaelic, “How are you?”; but a strict translation might be: “Which way are you?”

Dee-dee-dum-dum,
de dee-dee-dum-dum…

The BBC website is doing a small piece of self-puffery—and why not?—by wondering:

The Shipping Forecast can be heard four times a day on BBC Radio 4, giving details of conditions in the seas around the UK, Ireland and beyond.

Each broadcast attracts hundreds of thousands of listeners, many of them with no connection to coastal waters – so what is its enduring appeal?

Malcolm notes that this is being done by Kevin Young, Entertainment reporter. The only link to this being “news” is an approximate anniversary:

The broadcast was already part of the Home Service when it was rebranded as Radio 4, 40 years ago this week.

The schedule for the first day of Radio 4, on 30 September 1967, has an entry from 2345 to 2348, describing a “forecast for coastal waters”.

The nearest thing to an explanation for the phenomenon is given by Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4:

“It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English…

“It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.”

The Shipping Forecast has a quite remarkable footprint in popular culture: as wikipedia will explain in full, it has appeared in lyrics by Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, Chumbawamba, British Sea Power and Jethro Tull.

Of greater significance, famous Seamus did for the shipping forecast in number VII of his Glanmore Sonnets sequence, which are central to his 1979 collection Field Work:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

There’s a lot going on here. Heaney had removed to Wicklow from Belfast, north to south, city to countryside. He acknowledges the duality of his own tradition: nodding equally at Paddy Kavanagh‘s sonnet sequence Temptation in Harvest (which marks Kavanagh’s removal from Monaghan to Dublin) and, in Sonnet X, Thomas Wyatt (the pioneer of the English sonnet). There are also references to Joyce (‘inwit’ in Sonnet IX), Shakespeare (inevitably, perhaps) and Wordsworth. The more Malcolm reads those lines, the more antitheses he finds: land and sea, Anglo-Saxon past (‘keel-road, whale-road’) and modern, morning and ‘closedown’, storm and shelter, ‘gale-warning’ and ‘clearing’, the French and the English names. Above all Heaney is reminding himself, then us, of the instabilities of life, particularly of emotional life, which perversely repeat into an eternal pattern of continuity.

Carol Ann Duffy uses the shipping forecast to illustrate and conclude her sonnet, Prayer (a bane in many a GCSE English candidate’s studies, inevitably juxtaposed with George Herbert, from which it borrows):

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Again the contrasts: ‘prayer’ but ‘faithless’, ‘console’ but ‘pain’ and ‘loss’, the anonymous simplicity and distance of ‘Grade 1 piano scales’ with the personal complexity and empathy of ‘the lodger looking out across a Midlands town’. It is held together by two conceits: the metaphor of ‘prayer’ as a natural, non-religious ritual, and the unexpected and ordinary universality of music.

Heaney … Duffy … and the shipping forecast’s appeal, according to Mark Damazer (above), is so “English”. Well, well.

Above all, we all seek a full-stop, a closure to each episode, to each day. And that is the wider signification of the post-midnight shipping forecast. It is a sonorous formula of some 350 words, which follows a ritualistic order. The shipping areas, as they are recited, form a clockwise pattern around the British Isles: the names visualised on a chart following a clock’s hands from 12 o’clock all the way round the face of the dial. It is delivered at dictation speed. It is comforting, especially in the warmth of a bed, while, however briefly, musing on the lot of all poor souls at sea. It is full of marvellous names, real and metaphoric: the mundane rivers (Tyne, Humber, Thames, Shannon) and the islands (Fair Isle, Wight, Lundy) rubbing along with the romantic (Hebrides, Trafalgar, Fitzroy — formerly Finisterre). And for the older contingent (including Malcolm) the mysteries: where did Utsire come from? where did the Minches go? the significance of ‘veering’ versus ‘backing’?

Malcolm’s father was a strict observer of the late shipping forecast, followed by the metronomic repetition of Sailing By, followed by sleep. As he became deafer, so the volume increased: nobody in the house would miss out. Dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee. So that was why Malcolm had it played as the fade-out music at the end of the crematorium service. And why, perhaps, in due course it will see Malcolm out, too.