Brendan Kennelly: Victors and Victims

Brendan Kennelly: Victors and VictimsAuthor(s): Gerard QuinnSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 9 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 44-54Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735543 .

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Brendan Kennelly: Victors

and Victims

GERARD QUINN

In 1989 Brendan Kennelly told an interviewer that one ofhis pet theories con?

cerns 'the demystifying of literature through finding the man behind the

work'.* On a number of occasions he has invited readers to find recurrent obses?

sions in his poetry, which he says 'returns again and again to the same themes, the same obsessions',2 and in his Selected 1990,* still using the word 'obsession', he goes on to explain that chronology 'is not strictly adhered to because poems

written years apart are often much closer in spirit than poems born very near

each other'. The present essay is an attempt at 'demystifying' the corpus of Ken

nelly's poetry by exploring what seem to be two 'obsessive' clusters: 1) defeat,

being victimised, and masochism, and 2) victory, victimising, and sadism.

Kennelly's early poems show a lot of empathy with victims ? 'The Blind

Man', for instance, or four dumb brothers in 'The Dummies': 'frantic gestures of meaning/

. . . Each reaches to a brother hungrily . . ./ Brothers need each

other, utterly'. 'The man behind the work' may have earned his ability to em

phathise with misery the hard way. The Boats are Home (1980) has a group of

poems about childhood, among which 'Lost' tells how a boy ran away from

home to escape 'the shame or hurt/ Or whatever it was . . . '. We do not need to

know what the hurt was: it was simply too searing for a child's mind, and it has

changed his attitude to life, convincing him that 'the world was not only/ Emp?

ty of love/ But was a vast rat gnawing through concrete/ To find your flesh '. This

has the tone of language that tells the bleak truth.

The child hides in a derelict house: 'You . . . entered a house/ Emptier than

yourself,/ A raw place/ Bleeding . . . ./ Your sanctuary of dark and cold'. And

there follows an interval during which shame and the absence of love burn a

traumatic scar. Then, 'You were found/ And were never the same again. ' Part of

the boy was lost for good that day: he has been given a life sentence:

You are often lost in the darkest place

Tasting the loss that is yours

Alone,

Hearing the voices call and cry come back come out come home . . .

* A Time for Voices. NewcastJc-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.

44



Kennelly 45

? where context and the cold insistent rhythm strip the word 'home' of its

meaning. The boy has gone through a kind of death, and death, a function of

victor and victim, preoccupies Kennelly. In his remarkable long poem Cromwell

(1983) there will be nightmares in which the family murders love: 'From dream

to dream; Hysterical images that scream/ Like frightened pigs . . . ./ A father's

threat; horses' hooves/ Trampling hard on every love'. And 'dear Mummy who

put the knife in/First. [1] sometimes found myselfin the coal-bin,/.. .coal-dust

was my/ Original love .... Mum prodded my belly with the bread-knife/ ... an

inch below my little button'. The traumatised victim tells us: 'it's the scar I like

most in life . . . peek at with some affection'. Masochism is a victim's consola?

tion.

The mixture of personal and archetypal Irish memory in Cromwell suggests that Kennelly's childhood experiences or thought predisposed him to insight into what he perceives as a sado-masochistic country. If traumatic experiences of

shame such as those described in 'Lost' are the poet's own, they would have af?

forded rare sensitivity to pain in others, and sensitivity to the traumatized Irish

national psyche. What has been 'Lost' would rob a child, or nation, of its

necessary myths, its positive self-image. Lack of myth or self-esteem, personal and national, is the theme of'My Dark

Fathers', in which a boy faces the wall when singing at a wedding. When Kennel?

ly saw what the boy was

doing, he knew he had found a symbol for a national

problem. The poem speaks of:

. . . the darkness and the shame

That could compel a man to turn his face

Against the wall, withdrawn from light . . .

spancelled in a place

Of unapplauding hands and broken song.

Kennelly's note to this poem prompts us to see the damaged factor as not just one unfortunate, ashamed or shamed person, but an entire tradition ?

'my

fathers', a benighted tradition ?

'my dark fathers', with a fixation on having been hard done by

? 'committed always to the night of wrong'. Ireland is seen

as a failed entity: famine and the loss of cultural continuity have left it a dispirited

place of'unapplauding hands and broken song'. The Irish can be no more

helped than could the blind, dumb and insane people Kennelly evoked in his

early poems. The Irish as a race are again the theme in 'Shelley in Dublin', which exposes

victim-flaws.in the Irish psyche. At a meeting, Daniel O Connell knows how to

treat a se?ale people who lack self-respect: 'Daniel O Connell spoke first,/ Took

the crowd in his hand./ The Liberator knew his slaves/ Never put a word

wrong'. Shelley then tries to communicate with them but fails: 'What voice will



46 Quinn

rouse them/ From their long sleep of defeat?' He goes on to express his distaste

for Irish indiscipline: he has found in Dublin no Puritan work-ethic, but Joxers: 'Those who talk so much,/ Who are they?/ Thumping in and out, spewing anec?

dotes/ Full of plans and schemes,/ Good-natured, drunk,/ Doing nothing'. As a member of an ailing tribe in a nation nursing

a moribund past, Kennelly had a

problem which he faces in 'The Kiss':

My nine years shook at the words "kiss him".

1 knew the old man was something to my father.

I knew I had to do what my father said

I trembled to the bedroom door . . . He saw me, half-lifted a hand. "Here, boy" he said.

I walked across the bedroom floor

And felt the ice in his hands enter mine.

His eyes were screwed up with sickness, his hair was wet, His tongue hung

.... Every bone

In my body chilled as I bent my head To the smell and feel ofthe sickspittle on his lips. I kissed him ... I drank him into me when I kissed him.

I recognized something of what in him was ending, Of what in me had scarcely begun. He seemed without fear, I think I gave him nothing, He told me

something of what it is to be alone.

Another victim poem, revolting and powerful. And a clear statement ofthe

problem: the old man's strength and feelings are spent, whereas the boy's life is

beginning. If the boy gives himself up to the guilt-driven relationships within

the tribe, the kiss may become a life-commitment to the defeated.

Seen in the general context of Kennelly's poetry, the kiss has brought

something home. The poem is the apologia ofa boy stepping out ofa doomed

tradition, opting for his own survival and independence, leaving victims to their

fate. He is saying that beyond a certain point, one stops kissing the incurably

lonely. And in another poem Kennelly extends this to much in the national

past. In 'The Limerick Train', an observer looks out the window at the

midlands of Ireland and sees that 'Broken castles tower, lost order's monument

. . . But no Phoenix rises from that ruin'. He notes that the ancient furze still

blooms, a simple criterion that 'Separates what must live from what has died'.

The final words ofthe poem declare a stand: 'we must always cherish, and reject, the dead'. The speaker will distance himself from the ruined nation, concern

himself with personal survival.

In 'The Island' 1973, and in Islandman 1976, Kennelly presented a model for

his own and Ireland's survival. The island says, 'my fields . . . have survived a



Kennelly 47

storm. . . ./My fields are not interested/ In suicide or martyrdom'. This island

would be Carrig Island off Kerry, a county that vaunts its independence, calls

itself a kingdom. And Kennelly takes pride in having played for its remarkably fit Darwinian footballers ? the reference to football may seem out of place until it is

noted that Kennelly appointed his Cromwell to be manager of a team called

Drogheda United, suggesting that victory in war as in football is achieved

through b?lier in self and disciplined effort. Kennelly may consider that the Irish

have a lot to learn from County Kerry and from Cromwell. They must cease to

be losers and victims.

The great victimiser is death. If pain and death are God's joke as Kennelly sug?

gests in a poem called 'The Joke' ('I'm a good laugh, good laugh, good laugh./1 will lessen your pain.

. . . the sneer on the lips of God,/ The spit of contempt on

the world'), then we are all victims. And Kennelly suggests that laughter at the

joke is the best defence against absurdity. To flout death's absurdity, go out

laughing to meet it. His protagonists exercise positive thinking on dead female

bodies, finding one attractive in 'A Drowned Girl', kissing another one in

Islandman, and getting into bed for necrophilia with one in a Maloney poem. A

necrophagous ghoul turns up in 'Shelley in Dublin', and is laughed at in

Cromwell. And when the bodies are finally buried, Kennelly's cheerful eye sees

an improvement in the grass. In a poem called 'Grass' a gramineous divinity boasts that all men 'sink beneath me', and then 'climb/ Through me/ Up into

space and time'. In Islandman 'women's hearts fatten the rat. . . . are dead/ To

enrich the grass'. In Love Cry 24 'flowers and grass shove/ upwards from the ac?

tive fertile dead', and song is recycled in 'The Happy Grass', where 'in their final

quiet, the singers lie, the grass . . .

[d]rinking every human cry . . .

flourishing in

green wisdom, green delight'. Kennelly's poetry can laugh

or talk its way out of

victimhood.

But 'corroding silence' ('My Dark Fathers') robs the poet of power. Deathly silence is the great weapon which he begs others not to use on him. In 'May the

Silence Break' we hear the rare hurt tone that we heard in 'Lost', the vulnerable

victim-tone begging the one who holds victorious 'supremacy of silence' to

become vulnerable. He cannot do anything with 'cocksure ice': he wants to see

'bewildered eyes'. This is the poem ofa victim, unique among Kennelly's

poems in its request for 'warmth' from another. In it he claims that 'only gods and graves have a

right' to answer with silence.

This obsessive interest in victors and their victims was already central to the

two novellas Kennelly wrote in the 1960s. The Crooked Cross is set in a village

(representing Ireland) which is harrassed by a relentless sun until the public

water-supply dries up. The only water left comes from the well of Naked Cully, a

victim who has not shown his face since Black-and-Tan soldiers tripped and

whipped him forty years before. Allegorically we are

being told that the only



48 Quinn

water to sustain life in Ireland comes from a source tainted by a shameful vic?

timized past. The allegory is wooden but the story is of interest as an early ver?

sion of Kennelly's Cromwell theme.

We meet an effeminate publican, Goddy O'Girl, frightened by the confident

sex-appeal ofa girl called Sheila, who 'looks at him with burning contempt', because she sees that 'he was one of these men who are born to be kicked

around'. (And Kennelly's Cromwell will say ofthe native Irish: 'Hammer the

vermin born to lose . . . Who love to sigh and weep'.) Masochist that he is, God?

dy 'senses the exquisite agony of her torture' which of course bores Sheila: she

much prefers the crude liberties taken by the other customer, Paddyo, who is

sure of himself. Male-female relations in the book are reduced to a power-game.

According to the narrator 'a sense of certainty is what most people lack'.

Physical strength and sexual prowess take the place of relationship in these

books. And in Kennelly's poetry empathy is often disturbingly short-lived. In a

poem called 'The Moment of Let Live', the narrator, 'the beast/ That turned

your days to fear', has struck his friend and drawn blood. For a moment he feels

'tolerance . .. Altruism born of pain'. But after the altruistic moment, he reverts

to animal dominance.

A potential means of resolving such ambivalence is suggested by a shrewd

comment, from Kennelly's second novel, on the dramatising of physical violence: 'He liked judo because ... it was an acceptable blend of civilization

and brutality': He has indeed a fine sublimation of violence, of rape, in his re?

cent poem 'The Sandwoman' where an islandboy is prompted by great hunger to build a fantasy girl from sand. Kennelly here briefly becomes the victim and

speaks the poem for her ? and of course she says all the things a man's fantasy

sandwoman should say:

After the tide went out this morning The islandboy started to make me out of sand.

How clear and purposeful he was, concentrating On my head, neck, shoulders, breasts, hands, All my body made from sand ofthe sea.

I heard the horizon whisper its awe

When the islandboy stood back and looked at me

Who'd been imagined according to his law.

Then, with the tide on the turn, he touched me

As he'd not touched me in the making. He kissed my face and hands, he loved me then

As the sea returned to witness his ecstasy. I swallowed his sheer seed, my body breaking

Where the raping waves dispersed me into grains again.



Kennelly 49

The sensuous delicacy ofthe language suggests that Kennelly is at his easy best

when his violence is harmless. And better than harmless here, for the dispersal of

the sand sculpture and the disintegration ofthe girl's body after its brief life are

the stuff that islandboy dreams are made on, so that the last lines ofthe poem transcend rape to catch the fragility ofthe sandy fact and the fictive woman. And

even of life.

Fortunately no one suffered when this victim was raped. But although the

violence is doubly fictive, and although the poem is well made, socially it deals in

non-relationship. The persona loves a sand-shape of his own construction; his

woman is a passive sex-object made to a man's specifications. Such a sandwoman

would be an appropriate love-partner for Kennelly's Flynn who would 'never

give a tinker's curse/ What soul was wounded, what body was hurt'. In

September 1990 Kennelly faulted a book of love poems for too many victim

'whines of disappointment' and too few victor 'triumphs' of bedding.3 Rela?

tionship is bound to suffer when there is obsession with victory. For victories, there must be victims. In the poem 'Light' the speaker has

'never seen the sparrow's perfect head' until it was torn by a hawk: 'The flow in

the feathers covering the blood/ In the breast'. Beauty is perceived in the

moment of rip. In the poem 'I See', he utilises the blindness ofa man called

Shanahan. Brief empathy with Shanahan yields the useful image 'hungry thrushes' for blind eyes that dart about with nothing to feed on. It is a good im?

age, but Kennelly gives us a mixed-up metaphor when he goes on to call himself

a thrush feeding on Shanahan: 'Thinking of his darkness/ Is light to me./1 see . .

. / Bits and pieces to feed my emptiness'. Equally disturbing is Love-Cry 30 about

the man who catches three birds in his twig trap-cage, from which he selects the

best one for advancement: 'Two red-hot needles he shoved hard/ Through its

eyes, explaining later that/ A blinded bird will sing a sweeter song.

' These are vic?

tims in the cause of art.

Although Kennelly's victor/victim passages seem to pay homage to Darwin

with the frequent use ofthe word 'survive', there is a direct progression from

Darwin to Nietzsche, and Kennelly prosecutes his philosophy of victors and vic?

tims with Nietzschean relish. The ideas are remarkably similar to those in the

work of Liam O'Flaherty (whose novels Kennelly has called 'bloody

marvellous'), who sat at the feet of Edward Garnett when that publisher was

fascinated by Nietzsche ? Nietzsche's name occurs often in O'Flaherty's work.

Either directly or through his admired O'Flaherty, Kennelly seems to have ab?

sorbed Nietzschean ideas and aspired to emulate superman who 'laughs at all

tragedies'. The O'Flaherty influence would also help to account for Kennelly's

preoccupation with violence in animals.

The surname Kennelly means Wolf-head (Ceann Fhaolaidh) a fact to which he

may allude when in Cromwell he had the Irishman Buffiin say, 'The wolf. . .



50 Quinn

defines me . . . full of him, gorged with wolf. . . sieged by the milling syllables of

my name'. Living up to his name, Kennelly is fascinated by stark aggression, destructive power. The teeth ofthe ferret, for instance, down after rabbits in

'The Feeding Dark', those ofthe 'Black Fox' ('teeth/ White in the light'), the

teeth ofthe Badger ('Fangs tightened in a fierce embrace/ Of vein and sinew') in

'The Grip', or the teeth ofthe wire terrier ('fangs clean as knives') against the rat

in 'That Look'. Such imagery is similar to that of O'Flaherty in whose 'Sport: The Kill', for instance, a boy probes under the rock for a rabbit and then twists a

willow rod until it 'got stuck in the soft fur. ... he saw the dog's red tongue loll?

ing between white fangs. [There was] a low crack as the dog's fangs met through the rabbit's neck'. As in Kennelly, the O'Flaherty fangs belong to a context of

sadistic realism.

The effect of sadism is heightened if it follows preliminary empathy. In Ken?

nelly's well-known poem 'The Stones' we have a moment of warm understan?

ding ofa defenceless old woman, but then the poem focuses on the instinct for

sadistic mob-violence against a stranger. And 'The Pig Killer' is a connoisseur of

ritual violence who prepares for his professional knife-work with a sort of

foreplay:

Tenderly his fingers move

On the flabby neck, seeking the right spot For the knife. Finding it, he leans

Nearer and nearer the waiting throat,

Expert fingers fondling flesh. . . .

he raises the knife,

Begins to trace a line along the throat.

Slowly the line turns red, the first sign Of blood appears, spreads shyly over the skin. The pig

Begins to scream.

'Shyly' is brilliant here. And the word is well used for another of Kennelly's

gallery of violent characters, shy Lar in Love Cry 18, who relates poorly to others

in the public house and needs to leave town each dawn with salivating hounds

for a sadistic fix.

In this world that interests Kennelly, nature does not treat you kindly once

your will to power weakens. There is the case of'The Queen Bee': 'Suddenly she

was old/ And then was lost beneath/ A thousand bodies, stinging her in/

Mutinous ritual of death'. Or Dowling, whose well-trained hounds smell their

owner's confusion and savage him on a day when he loses his '

Mastery'. Love Cry 36 is a fight to the death between two bees. It ends with a victorious repast on the

victim, 'sucking honey from its body, blood from its head'. In Islandman, under

a Stephen Crane canopy of mutual cannibalism where 'the sky/ Was an arena like



Kennelly 51

my own heart. / Creatures ate each other', two who enjoy killing keep each other

company: T stroke the ferret's golden head/ With my right hand. . . ./ My

fingers drink the purpose/ Ofthe golden head'. High marks for representing sadism go to Love Cry 17, with its connoisseurship of coffin-wood and young female skin: 'slim white boards that stretched along the floor,/ Pared and levell?

ed till you could run your hand/ Along each smooth face, tender/ As a girl's

flesh. . . . The coffin that glittered in the sunlight./ In two days, with the girl's

body, it was underground.' Again the preliminary sensitivity. We may be close

to what Kennelly means by 'obsessions'.

The taking of revenge can provide a sort of justification for violence, if not for

sadism. In his poem 'Actaeon', Kennelly describes the violent revenge of Diana

who, when she notices Actaeon watching her during her swim, turns him into a

stag so that he is torn apart by his own hounds. Or Love Cry 28 which shows a

sister engaged in insatiable revenge on all rats for one rat's having bitten and

poisoned her brother: 'In the disciplined cold way that is love . . . On rats she

trapped at all times in a cage,/ Slow, boiling water poured. She kept her rage'. It

was probably this fascination with violent revenge that led Kennelly to

Cromwell' vengeance for the 1641 slaughter of his countrymen. In the course of his work on Cromwell, Kennelly would have thought

a lot

about contemporary violence in Ireland. He produced a book The House that

Jack didn}t Build in which he experimented with republican and loyalist

psychologies. But his most thorough treatment of contemporary republicanism is on the second last page of Cromwell where the narrator presents himself as a

would-be revolutionary who is a victim at heart. He lists the qualities that make

up his political identity: 'I sell subversive papers at a church gate ... I have fed

myself on the bread of hate. /1 am an emigrant in whose brain/ Ireland bleeds and

cannot cease/ To bleed till I come home again. ... I sing tragic songs.

... I am a

home-made bomb, a smuggled gun'. But then there is exposure of republican

victimhood: 'I am that prince of liars. ... I am madly funny,/I'd sell my country for a fist of money.

... I like to whine about identity'. Kennelly is satirising vic?

timhood. And, most importantly, he has found a field where his obsessions will

be creative assets. ? which has not always been the case.

Cromwell has the two usual leading characters. There is Cromwell himself, authoritative victor, overreacting avenger. And there is the antagonist Bufiun, a

devious victim, lazy and ineffectual, Paddy the Irishman. The poem's castiga tionsseem mainly directed at the victim: 'Buffiin, I'll give you a choice ? victim

or martyr?' In the course of Cromwell Kennelly has Irish victimhood show itself in in?

cestuous, and masochistic tendencies. A person called 'Mum' tempts her nar?

rator son into incestuous love with her as perennial girl and as corpse. In a recent

essay, Kennelly applied this word 'incestuous' explicitly to 'Mother Ireland', so



52 Quinn

it may partly mean 'hostile to pluralism'. Irish masochism figures in 'Rosaleen

thumbs out her eyes', ? a deft presentation of Dark Rosaleen, Roisin Dubh.

Again in prose Kennelly has been explicit about Irish suicidal tendencies, 'Sometimes I think [Ireland] prefers to destroy itself. And translating 'The Hag

of Beara', another personification of Ireland, he departs from the Gaelic original to introduce a Plath-like claim about her coming death: 'I'll do it well'.

It should be noted that Kennelly's admired O'Flaherty had the same distaste

for all of these negative personifications of Ireland: 'The disease [of attempting] to unite mysticism with reality manifests itself. . . in the belief that Ireland is . . .

a woman. ... At one moment she is Caitlin Ni Houlihain, at another Roisin

Dubh, at another The Old Woman of Beara. . . . the love ofa mystical woman

like Caitlin Nj Houlihain does untold harm'. And in the same book, A Tourist's

Guide to Ireland, O'Flaherty has the same answer as Kennelly to Ireland's self

destruction: 'Of revolutionary groups, with constructive programmes and with

leaders that are clear-thinking. . . the tourist will see no

sign here.... Yet there is

no country in the world where a Cromwell ... is more needed'.

The mystical negativity of Caitleen Ni Houlihain may also be implicit in Ken?

nelly's Medea, whose vengeance ? on her own farrow ?

parallels the

masochistic overreaction of other victims in Kennelly's work. Medea is like the

girl in his early poem 'Gestures' who with 'her mouth twisted in rage/ Closed

her eyes . . . And stared at her own darkenss'. When the play

was staged in 1989,

Susan Curnow attributed the intensity of her interpretation to Kennelly's text.

Ofthe play's author and director she said, ' He and Roy Yeates see Medea as this

huge black-like rage [but] because of my regard for human life, I don't find

Medea's rage acceptable. People wouldn't talk to me after the show ? there was

uneasiness generated'.4

When Medea's husband victimises her, she does not take Cromwellian

revenge, killing her insulter. She turns on herself masochistically and kills her

children. This is of course a feminist backlash ? Kennelly has claimed that

women have been 'subservient victims' and recommended more ofthe 'ag

gessive energy' of Nell McCafferty. But the play is still too dark and prompts one

to question the man behind the work who was at that time obsessed by Mother

Ireland's self-destructive victimhood. If Medea contains a Cathleen dimension, it would express one of Kennelly's insights into Ireland: suicidal victimhood

seen as victory, as in death from hunger strike. The play ends with the apotheosis ofa woman who takes pride in having killed her children. (Those about to die

could kiss the quiet feet of Cathleen Ni Houlihan.)

Cromwell, on the other hand, does not despair and kill his own. His self

respect and power arise from his God-like self image and his conviction that he

has the seal of religion on his violent work. He claims that his right to kill comes

from God whose instrument he has been, and from whom he derives power



Kennelly 53

over life and death. Kennelly himself has toyed with this self-image. Among his earliest poems there is a

thoroughly Cromwellian one called 'The Birds5, in

which we find him relishing the power to create terror ? 'this terror is a lovely

thing5. With the sun-god watching closely, the poet himself plays at being God: 'Beneath the stare of god5s gold burning eye,/ Two crisp hands clap; a thousand

plover rise5. He calls what he did by the giveaway word ?c miracle5, implying the

the power was divine. But most remarkable in this poem is that the speaker also

sees himself as a military general: 'A startling rout, as of an army driven/ In

broken regiments5. Perhaps a youthful Kennelly has created lovely terror for the

birds and driven them miraculously with his hand-clap. Later on, we will find

General Cromwell producing other lovely terrifying works of God. Kennelly has

things in common with his Cromwell.

So just as Kennelly explored himself and Ireland at the same time in Islandman, he seems to use Cromwell as an ironic vehicle for qualities he values for himself

and recommends for Ireland. Ireland, if it listens to Kennelly's Cromwell, would stop concentrating on its hopeless past, it would discard the victim

mentality of'My Dark Fathers5 and work towards self-confident effectiveness.

In a prose-article, Kennelly hinted that he is a Kerryman turned Dubliner. He

asked, 'Is there any Dub as passionate as the converted culchie [rustic]?5 His

'Dub5 is a victor: 'The Dub ... is a king menaced by subjects who constantly

threaten to surpass and overthrow him5. And like Kennelly's other victors, his

Dub is sadistic, ' there is a really vicious, destructive side to the [Dubliner]5.5 Nor

can it surprise us if Kennelly's Culchie/victim is self-destructive in Medean style ? he quotes Behan's remark about the line between city and country: 'Once

you pass the Red Cow Inn, they tend to ate their young5. So what combination of victor and victim does Kennelly wish for himself, and

Ireland? If his protagonists often go all out like a footballer, for 100% victory, he

has, perhaps, settled for a better match and 51% victory. In 'TheTamer5,areinis used to exercise power over a stallion: 'In his patient hand; Gods of power ply,/

Impartial yet, between the two.... the hand that soon bends power and pride/ To its own will5, in which the God victor exercises power gently over his strong victim. Kennelly projects himself as marginally victorious again in the poem 'Word5 where the Word yields to him and promises, 'I will serve you again and

again/ If you use me, sensing my worth, Master and Slave5. Again, in Cromwell

the surprising and lovely poem 'Stall5 provides a moment of peace half-way

through this violent work. A boy ?

possibly the same boy as in the poem 'Lost' ? finds refuge in a warm byre among tolerant cows. And near the end ofthe

book, a peaceful aspect ofthe poet, his ideal self possibly, seems to be embodied

in two stanzas. In the first of these the narrator takes a trip backwards into an

Eden ofthe mind, following a seldom-travelled 'dirt road in my head, hedges of

thought/ Flowering into haws and fuchsia5. He meets a man called Bat who has



54 Quinn

the wholeness of Yeats's Fisherman. Bat has the practical skill to set traps that

catch foxes, and the artistic skill to play a melodeon so as to follow the killing

with music. He is a guiltless, non-political, unified person. After reflecting on

Bat, the narrator walks on through sea-light to the estuary while speaking with

lyrical humility about life:

. . . sea-light is not the sea

Of which I know so little I can't say Even now, where it is shallow or deep. This could be home, God knows, strange territory, A glimpsed lit strip of sea, shifting

. . .

? in which 'home' is very different from the 'come out come back come home'

place ofthe alienated child in 'Lost'.

The tone ofthe Bat passage is exploratory and sensitive. There are no fixed

truths in it. Coming as it does at the end ofa long, politically problematic Irish

poem called Cromwell, its tone of wonder and honesty and hope sounds like the

tone in which conflicting traditions in a country might address each other.

Two further stanzas finish the book, the first of which is the self-excoriation

for republican posturing. And then in the final stanza, the narrator claims to

have absorbed elements from both sides ofthe Anglo-Irish dichotomy. While in

practice his reason may side with English Cromwell against Gaelic Buffun, it

would seem that theoretically, ideally, he wishes to be half arrogant animus and

half vulnerable anima, half victor and half victim. In the last few lines, the two

conditions which have been discussed separately throughout this essay are

found hyphenated:

my heart, beating its victim-victor blood.

NOTES

1 Interview with Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, 26 June 1989.

2 Sekcted Poems (Riverrun 1969), p. xii.

3 Interview with Kay Hingerty, Irish Times, 4 July 1989. 4 Review of (ed.) John Fuller, The Chatto Book of Love Poetry, Sunday Tribune, 9 September 1990. 5 Introduction to Real Ireland: Peopk and Landscape (Salem House and Appletrec Press, 1984).



Documents

Brendan Kennelly: Victors and Victims