Michael Longley died in Belfast on 22nd January, at the age of 85. During a career spanning more than half a century, he had composed some of the finest short lyrics in English, addressing a wide variety of themes, from the birds and flowers of Ireland’s west coast to the First World War, the Shoah and the 30 years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.
Longley described himself as a “poetic conservative” and he took every opportunity to acknowledge his poetic forebears. Among the poets he loved most was Edward Thomas, who was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in April 1917. The last section of Longley’s “Edward Thomas’s Poem” reads in full:
The nature poet turned into a war poet, as if
He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.
This is both gently humorous and perceptive—the apparent ease with which Thomas moved from writing about nature to writing about the war is indeed remarkable. And the word “rub” is important; not only does it lend tactile reality to a poem that might otherwise have seemed somewhat abstract, but it also evokes Hamlet’s “Ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…”
Both Thomas and Longley were deeply modest, well aware of how little poetry could do to change the world. Nevertheless, they both held to a belief in a poet’s social responsibility. A well-known poem by Thomas ends with his evocation of an owl’s voice: “Speaking for all who lay under the stars, / Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.” And one of Longley’s best-known poems about the Troubles is titled “The Ice Cream Man”. Longley has described a letter he received from the mother of this murdered ice-cream seller as like “all the good reviews I’ve ever had in my life, rolled into one letter by a woman who probably wasn’t a great poetry reader”.
Another of Longley’s finest poems is “Prayer”:
In our country they are desecrating churches.
May the rain that pours in pour into the font.
Because no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place,
May snow lie on the altar like an altar cloth.
Longley has often said that he sees his nature poetry and his overtly political poetry as inseparable. In an interview, he said: “My nature writing is my most political. In my Mayo poems I am not trying to escape from political violence. I want the light from Carrigskeewaun to irradiate the northern darkness.” In “Prayer”, even more than in his evocations of the birds and flowers of County Mayo, he subtly affirms his faith in nature’s healing power. Longley’s poem “The Poets” begins with a direct quote from another of his favourite poets, John Clare: “Poets love nature and themselves are love.”
Longley has described himself as a “sentimental atheist”. He is, in fact, notably unsentimental. His best-known poem, “Ceasefire”, has been widely praised, but its tough-mindedness has not always been noticed. Rather than being a plea for forgiveness, it is a plea for correct and pragmatic action. The poem needs to be quoted in full:
“Ceasefire”
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
“I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
Reconciliation begins not with a change of heart, but with a decision to “do what must be done”. Priam does not, initially, act sincerely. He does not kiss Achilles’s hand because he forgives him, but because he understands that there is no other way for him to recover his son’s desecrated body. Nevertheless, Priam’s startling appearance in Achilles’s tent leads to a true change of heart in Achilles—and so to a true reconciliation. Correct action comes first; feelings follow. This is not a sentimental view of the world; it is, rather, Confucian. Interestingly, my friend and editor, Edwin Frank, has just written to me: “I was describing Longley the other day as the closest thing in English I knew to a Chinese poet. Curiously one might even say that of his Homeric poems.”
Longley evidently enjoyed a long and fruitful marriage to the critic Edna Longley, who shares his love of Edward Thomas and has edited Thomas’s Collected Poems. The second stanza of Longley’s “Fifty Years”, a quiet celebration of their Golden Wedding, reads:
You have pointed out, like a snail’s shell
Or a curlew feather or mermaid’s purse,
The right word, silences and syllables
Audible at the water’s windy edge.
Longley has also written wise and delicate poems to and about his children and grandchildren. The most poignant of his family-orientated poems, however, are about father-son relationships. In this, too, he seems Confucian.
Longley is clearly haunted by his father’s memories of the First World War; he returns to them again and again. Relationships between fathers and sons are, of course, central to “Ceasefire”. And one of the most affecting of Longley’s condensations of passages from Homer is “Laertes”. Odysseus has that day returned to Ithaca, but has yet to make his presence known. His father, Laertes, is old, feeble and deeply depressed. Odysseus questions him about the island for some time, until Laertes realises who he his. The poem, a single sentence of 18 lines, ends:
Until Laertes recognised his son and, weak at the knees,
Dizzy, flung his arms around the neck of great Odysseus
Who drew the old man fainting to his breast and held him there
And cradled like driftwood the bones of his dwindling father.
