Saturday, September 20, 2014

Ní Chuilleanáin - Themes


Memory

Memory and the process of remembering features in many Ní Chuilleanáin poems including: The Bend in the Road, On Lacking the Killer Instinct and Kilcash.

The Bend in the Road focuses on how memory connects with specific places and how these places can assume personal significance over time.  Every time the poet passes a particular ‘bend in the road’ she remembers her child was ‘sick one day on the way to the lake’ and how the family associated that place with that event ever since.

On Lacking the Killer Instinct demonstrates the process of memory, how one thought can spark off a memory and another and another. A picture in the paper sparks off the memory of the time when her father was dying in hospital and then she thinks of her father as a young man.

Kilcash pays tribute to a heroic figure from Irish history, Lady Iveagh, and places emphasis on the importance of remembering those who have died.
 
Love

To Niall Woods is a vibrant celebration of romantic love that fervently believes in ‘happily ever after’.  In this poem Ní Chuilleanáin depicts an idealised, magical vision of love by referencing traditional folk tales.  She advises her son and his bride to have courage as they start out on the adventure of marriage together:

Leave behind the places that you knew:
All that you leave behind you will find once more.

Street deals with love in a more ambiguous way. In it a man falls in love with the butcher’s daughter who he watches passing by in the street. It appears to be a one sided attraction in that we do not get the butcher’s daughter’s perspective. 

The dark side of love is hinted at when he follows her home one day and sees her bloody footmarks on the stairs.  The reader is left guessing as to the outcome.

History

On Lacking the Killer Instinct deals with a violent period in Irish history which Ní Chuilleanáin’s father took active part – The War of Independence.  She describes how he was chased by ‘a lorry-load of soldiers’, the Black and Tans, a notoriously ruthless force, on one particular occasion and thankful evaded capture. She criticises the need for such violence saying he ‘like the hare should never have been coursed.’

Kilcash details the suffering endured by the Irish people as a consequence of colonialism.  The suppression of religion and theft of natural resources: ‘What will we do now for timber?’ left the people poor and struggling for identity. Leaders were exiled leaving the people unprotected. The poet depicts the scene in apocalyptic terms:

Mist hangs low on the branches
No sunlight can sweep aside,
Darkness falls among daylight
And the streams are all run dry;


Lucina Shynning in the Silence of the Night references Cromwell who was responsible for a violent and chaotic invasion of Ireland in 1649. She describes the dark moments of history as: ‘the waves of darkness’ behind her.

Death

Death and Engines focuses on the inevitability of death in all our lives. Each of us will encounter a moment when we are ‘Cornered’ by death and will have no way to escape.  Some might survive encounters with death and feel ‘relief’ but they cannot escape it forever.  A time will come when it will be ‘too late to stop’.

On Lacking the Killer Instinct deals with the very real death of her father and her struggle to deal with having to watch him die.  She reveals that she ‘ran away’ to avoid the pain of seeing him suffer but felt guilty and eventually returned. She also addresses the thrill experienced by human and animal alike in evading death at the hands of a hunter quoting her father as saying he never felt ‘Such gladness’ as when he escaped the Black and Tans.


Kilcash is an elegy for Lady Iveagh who contributed so much to her local community when alive and whose absence was strongly lamented.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - to Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovskaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009


In Brief

Niall Woods is Ní Chuilleanáin’s son and Xenya Ostrovskaia was the woman he married in September 2009.  Ní Chuilleanáin wrote the poem to commemorate their wedding and give her blessing to their marriage.

In the poem she references many different folk tales both Irish and Russian and also the Book of Ruth from the Bible.  These stories all deal with people starting out on adventurous journeys and, to varying degrees, feature ‘happily ever after’ endings. The poet’s message is that one has to take risks and persevere to earn the good things in life, especially love.

Stanza by Stanza

The poem opens with a direct address to the couple about to be wed. She says that when they ‘both see the same star/ Pitching its tent on the point of the steeple’ it will be time for their journey together to begin. 

The folk tale references

  • The Red Ettin – a tale about three sons setting out on journeys – each one is given the choice to take a full loaf and their mother’s curse or half a loaf and their mother’s blessing.  Only the youngest son makes the latter choice and he succeeds in marrying a beautiful princess.
  • Sleeping Beauty – the familiar folktale of a cursed princess rescued by a courageous prince.
  • The Firebird – a Russian folktale about an emperor whose golden apples are being stolen at night-time. The emperor commands his sons to find out who the thief is and only the youngest son succeeds. He sets out on journey to catch the culprit, the firebird, and eventually succeeds and marries a beautiful princess.
  • The King of Ireland’s Son and the Enchanter’s Daughter – the story of a prince who loses a wager to an enchanter and has to complete the tasks set by him. Eventually he succeeds marries the enchanter’s daughter!

The Book of Ruth:

The final story she references is the Book of Ruth from the Bible. Ruth was a Moabite who travelled far away from home to marry an Israelite.  After her husband died Ruth remained loyal to her mother-in-law Naomi saying ‘whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’ She eventual married again largely as a result of her loyalty to Naomi and lives happily ever after.

All of these references encourage courage in the face being far away from home.  Niall and Xenya’s marriage is seen as the start of a great adventure and she tells them not to be afraid to ‘leave behind the places’ that they know.  The stories from their respective cultures will keep them connected to home: ‘All that you leave behind you will find once more.’ 



The Book of Ruth showing Ruth’s relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi.



Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - Lucina Schynning in the Silence of the Night


Title

The unusual title of this poem comes from the first line of The Birth of Antichrist by William Dunbar a 15th century Scottish poet. His poem uses the setting of a dream to depict a gruesome battle between good and evil. Ní Chuilleanáin may have recalled the line when she saw the moon shining ‘in the silence of the night’; Lucina comes from the Latin for ‘light’ and is very similar to the Latin term for the moon: ‘luna’.

In Brief

This poem recounts a night spent sleeping in a ruined old chapel without the comforts of modern civilisation. The poet details her ‘up close’ encounter with nature and the memories and thoughts the experience brings up for her.

Stanza by Stanza

The poem starts with an image of a clear starry sky with the poet underneath reading a book by candlelight. She describes herself as being ‘without roast meat or music/
Strong drink or a shield from the air’, a description which conjures up images of a medieval feasting hall.

Despite having to wash in cold bog water and having bats for company she ‘slept safely’, feeling secure and relaxed in this natural environment.

In the third stanza the mood alters:

Behind me the waves of darkness lay, the plague

Of mice, plague of beetles

Crawling out of the spines of books,

The word ‘plague’, which is repeated three times, hints at times of mass death and destruction. The ‘waves of darkness’ ‘behind’ her seem to refer to terrible events from the past. She mentions Cromwell hinting at the violence and devastation his forces brought to Ireland in the 17th century.

Plague shadowing pale faces with clay

The disease of the moon gone astray.

‘Pale faces’ shadowed ‘with clay’ might refer to mass burials of plague victims and ‘the disease of the moon gone astray’ hints at the old term for mental illness, lunacy, which comes from the Latin for moon.

The atmosphere of gloom does not last long in the poem, however, as she asserts: ‘In the desert I relaxed, amazed’.  She is in awe of the beauty of nature which, for her, is a very positive and heartening presence.

Sheepdogs embraced me; the grasshopper

Returned with lark and bee.

There a sense of growth and renewal, of nature overcoming the challenges of the past. She spots a hare ‘absorbed, sitting still/ 
In the middle of the track’, a line which echoes the opening of On Lacking the Killer Instinct and may show this was from the same period in her life. She concludes the poem with the uplifting line: ‘I heard/ Again the chirp in the stream running’ implying that life is in continuous motion and constantly renews itself despite humanity’s moments of war and destruction.

Language

Imagery

The poem is full of striking natural imagery including:
  • The sky: ‘Moon shining in silence of  night/ The heaven being all full of stars.’
  • The bog water: ‘it was orange, channelled down bogs/ Dipped between cresses’.
  • Dark imagery: ‘beetles/ Crawling out of the spines of books’.

Assonance
  • ‘shining in silence of the night’
  • ‘Plague shadowing pale faces with clay’.

Alliteration

  • Plague shadowing pale faces’


Figurative Language

Stanza 4 consists of an arresting simile comparing her awe to that of the animals in the mosaic when they first saw the sky through a hole in the roof:

amazed
/ As the mosaic beasts on the chapel floor

When Cromwell had departed, and they saw

The sky growing through a hole in the roof.