‘As long as the language will live’ — Michael Longley
by Dr. Adam Hanna
‘I get down on my knees, and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son’. This closing couplet from Michael’s Longley’s 1994 poem ‘Ceasefire’ has rung down the decades since its composition. It was published days after the IRA ceasefire of that year, and has come to be nearly as closely associated with its historic turning point as W. B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’. These two poems can be seen as bookends to the twentieth century in Ireland: from Yeats’s heralding of the birth of a terrible beauty, to Longley’s perfectly-tuned meditation on death, grief, and aftermath.
‘Ceasefire’ became a major element in Longley’s reputation as a war poet but, as he said, this was just one strand of his work. ‘I hope by the time I die,’ he reflected in The Guardian in 2004, ‘my work will look like four really long poems; a very long love poem, a very long meditation on war and death, a very long nature poem and a playful poem on the art of poetry.’ It is a measure of how successfully he fulfilled his own vision for his life’s work that this statement provides one of the most useful ways to view his entire poetic output. This is a vast body of work that includes more than five decades of full-length collections of original poetry, from No Continuing City in 1969 to The Slain Birds in 2022.
At the centre of that strand of his work which he characterised as ‘a very long love poem’ is his wife Edna Longley, a professor of literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, whom he met when they were both students at Trinity College Dublin. They celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary the month before his death.
‘I hope by the time I die,’ he reflected in The Guardian in 2004, ‘my work will look like four really long poems; a very long love poem, a very long meditation on war and death, a very long nature poem and a playful poem on the art of poetry.’
At the heart of his ‘very long nature poem’ is his locus amoenus, Carrigskeewaun. This is a sea-bordered two-kilometre-square wilderness in west County Mayo that he first came to in 1970, and regularly returned to for the rest of his life. Carrigskeewaun is one of those landscapes that Yeats had in mind when he wrote that the Irish imagination is formed by ‘great spaces of windy light’. It is sandy and overlooked by mountains, home to grasses and fuchsia plants, haunted by birds, foxes, and otters. All these elements have taken on parallel lives in Longley’s poetry. Like Yeats’s valley that his fathers called their home, or Heaney’s Bellaghy, or Kavanagh’s Inniskeen, Longley’s Carrigskeewaun is a classic ground for readers of Irish poetry. Far from being an escapist location during the Troubles, it was a landscape that he saw in the light of northern fires. In his poems, the sound of the sea’s waves carries echoes of thunderous destruction further north.
Longley was raised in suburban Belfast, one of twin sons of English emigrants who arrived in the 1920s. His father’s experiences on the Western Front during the First World War haunted Longley’s poetry, attuning him to the long after-echoes of bloodshed and atrocity. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution before studying Classics at Trinity. He returned to Belfast to spend a long career as literature officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, a job in which he encountered occasional threats to his life during the worst years of violence. Of the phenomenal Northern-born triumvirate that consisted of him and his lifelong friends Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, he was the last survivor, and the only one who remained in Belfast. The city showed its appreciation by making him a Freeman in 2015, a distinction he held alongside a Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and a T. S. Eliot Prize.
An image of him that might endure is a photograph of him sharing a scarf with Seamus Heaney, and his life and work are reminders that the binary oppositions that long deformed life in Northern Ireland might be recast. That said, it would be easy to mischaracterise him as a halo-bearing suffering poet, sad chronicler of troubled times. In fact, his work resists end-points and conclusions that might situate it comfortably in any category. So much of what he wrote, especially in his lifelong ‘playful poem on the art of poetry’, is strange, discordant and mischievous – and his oeuvre is the richer for it.
In this, the work is like the man: those who met him will remember a gentle and melodic Belfast voice that belied an ebullient love of fun and divilment. He was the exemplary product of a culture where talking about poetry over a pint – fluently, entertainingly, honestly, with both mockery and love – has been raised to the level of an art form. I had the privilege of listening to him in full flow a few times, and they were all memorable occasions.
In this, the work is like the man: those who met him will remember a gentle and melodic Belfast voice that belied an ebullient love of fun and divilment
He leaves behind a body of both poetry and prose which can be immediately appreciated for its beauty, and whose implications are worth dwelling on. Take this from his under-appreciated autobiographical work, Tuppenny Stung (1994): ‘In Ulster, cultural apartheid is sustained to their mutual impoverishment by both communities. W. R. Rodgers referred to the “creative wave of self-consciousness” which can result from a confluence of cultures.’ His belief in the creative potential of cultural encounter undergirds his poems of theoxenia – a Greek term made of the words for ‘god’ and ‘stranger’.
This concept is at the centre of his poem ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (The Ghost Orchid, 1995), in which an old couple are rewarded for entertaining Zeus when he comes to their cottage in disguise as an itinerant in need of shelter. He localised theoxenia in Carrigskeewaun in his poem ‘Arrival’ (Snow Water, 2004). In this short work, he pictures swans, those symbols of Zeus, arriving in the sky after their long migration over the ocean. This poem has a beautiful simplicity, yet the idea of the god-swans as the Other, as the migrants who might bring beauty and redemption so long as we have the eyes to see them, and the hearts to welcome them, runs through it as a powerful unwritten theme. In Longley, the myths of ancient Greece, with their freight of necessary wisdom, found a noble modern inheritor. It is one of the many reasons that his poetry will live, as he was fond of saying of the poetry of others he admired, as long as the language will live.
