"The Weather in Japan": Tact and Tension in Michael Longley's New Elegies

"The Weather in Japan": Tact and Tension in Michael Longley's New ElegiesAuthor(s): Ruth LingSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2002), pp. 286-302Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504910 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 06:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to IrishUniversity Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.24 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:56:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=eup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504910?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Ruth Ling

The Weather in Japan: Tact and Tension in Michael

Longley's New Elegies

Michael Longley's recent elegies strike a painstaking balance between

loss and gain. Their taut, paradoxical interplay between wound and

balm builds upon the even-handed response his work has always made to death. As early as 'Wounds' of An Exploded View ?

Longley's very first elegy for specified victims of the Troubles ? the combination

of remedial vision and insurmountable pathos already creates a

distinct quality of tact. Longley's hallmark of discretion is already considerable thanks too to this poem's deliberate hovering over and

self-conscious manipulation of its own material. Its opening, 'Here are

two pictures from my father's head ? /I have kept them like secrets

until now', and then further tampering ? T bury.. .1 throw in.. .also' ?

draws attention to the artist's intrepid control.1 Such control ensures

that 'Wounds' is not just an elegy but becomes a tentative and

measured enquiry into the appropriateness of elegy as a form. The

'Lucifer' included in its inventory succeeds, for instance, in lighting the

elegy's celestial fire while simultaneously keeping the terrorist's

devilry in focus. Then, deliberately, but not irresponsibly, sanitizing what the murdering 'shivering boy' has done, Longley's sibilant, hushed sound pattern

? 'carpet-slippers

... shot ... television ...

supper dishes' ? draws a deep concluding line of pathos from this

terrorist to the bereaved: T think 'Sorry Missus' was what he said'.

What the volume's lyric 'Irish Poetry' terms 'the dialects of silence'

manage then, both to resonate with, and yet at the same time, soothe

loss. Reminders of how eternally open the wound will be, already

accompany any rites of healing Longley offers. It is the prayer that is

both barely and emphatically uttered through the poet's sudden

intervention ? T think' ? that particularly makes 'Wounds' the

'subtle, devious, ornamental, clever' poem W. H, Auden had recom

mended in time of conflict'.2

1. Michael Longley, 'Wounds', Poems 1963-1983 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1991),

p. 86. Subsequent references to this volume will be incorporated in the text.

2. Quoted in 'The Embarrassed Imagination', unpublished lecture by Longley on

post-war poetry, The Michael Longley Papers, Special Collections Dept, Woodruff

Library, Emory University, Atlanta, box 25, folder 5.

286



THE WEATHER IN JAPAN

Again, the strategies Longley employs in 'The Linen Workers' of The

Echo Gate allow him to approach the miracle announced at its

beginning. They lead him to his own moderated and modest version of

the visionary and memorable brilliance of that opening resurrection

blaze through which 'Christ's teeth ascended with him into heaven'

(Poems 1963-1983, p. 149). Only such restraint would satisfy an artist so

continually reticent to issue any easy salve to his grieving community. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews's celebration of the 'deeply moving image of

art's reversal' he believes crowns 'The Linen Workers' fails to take into account the doubt Longley deliberately injects through a string of first

person verbs ? T am blinded . .. Before I can

bury ... I must'.3 As in

'Wounds', it is the self-conscious presence of the artist that primarily achieves the equilibrium. Longley is reluctant to 'bury' through elegy until he can find a 'balance' as taut and paradoxical as that between resurrection and suffering such as Christ ?

already a kind of master

builder at this point in Longley's work ? is seen to undergo in the first

stanza. Because he believes in the potentially restorative powers of art,

Longley's identity as a sceptic and pagan always has to be qualified by his role as a dedicated priest of the muses.

Disclaiming the very wisdom they actually go on to evince, like these

earlier elegies, the particularly unassuming poems of The Weather in

Japan continue to wonder 'How do you sew the night?' They again ask ? often explicitly

? what type of art might best heal yet best stay true

to the pain. Producing the considerable feeling and empathy of his

work, the two-fold bind of this conundrum means that Longley always has to balance any compulsion to intervene with a humble and self

conscious honouring of the dead and the grief of the left-behind. Each

frequently pastoral act of consolation is accompanied, then, by an

acknowledgement of the extreme difficulty art has in delivering that

consolation. Like Sextus Propertius, his 'soul-mate', who would 'join

estranged lovers again' given that 'the healing power of [his] words is

not slight', Longley's classicist impulse propels his elegies toward

restoration, while at the same time, his compassion renders them

tentative, expectant meditations valuing each iota of loss.4

Substantiating what Peter Sacks diagnoses as 'the unusual degree of

self-consciousness' in the elegy form, first-person verbs ? T only know',' I tried', T couldn't' ? continue to punctuate the elegies of The

3. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, 'Conflict, Violence and "The Fundamental

Interrelatedness of all Things" in the Poetry of Michael Longley', The Poetry of Michael Longley, edited and translated by Alan J. Peacock and Kathleen Devine

(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000), p. 87.

4. Sextus Propertius, Elegies, edited and translated by G.P Good (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 75.

287



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Weather in Japan with a paradoxical sense of dissatisfaction.5 For all his own 'desires' Longley 'cannot make consoling fictions come true'.6

Darkening the centre of the quilt woven by The Weather in Japan, 'The

Evening Star' resonates with such strain. As a by-product of the poem's considerable tact, art seems to become irreconcilable with loss:

The day we buried your two years and two months

So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:

A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,

The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat And brings the wean back home to her mammy7

The equivocal poise of Longley's two-stanza sentence is matched by the poem's diction. Through a process of repetition, alliteration, and

most persuasively, through the interruption of dialect, the literary balm

of the Sappho fragment into which the pain eases seems to revert

unavoidably back to the inconsolable loss of the chief mourner at the

funeral, the child's mother. However much it might appear to spare the

mourner's feelings, the severe economy of that first line, safely

enclosing the loss in all its magnitude, simultaneously concentrates the

grief being voiced on behalf of the family. The endlessly yearning heartbreak of the most impracticable of verbs, 'brings back ...

brings ...

brings' ? itself Northern dialect for the less ardent 'takes' ?

culminating, with the syntax, in 'And brings the wean back home to its

mammy', leaves the poem reverberating as much with the continual

discourse of mourning as with the Sappho 'flower' itself. So while the

placement of the 'epigram' in the second stanza ensures that

structurally consolation overlays loss, as the Greek prefix epi meaning 'on' or 'above' prescribes, at the same time, loss overwhelms this

comfort by re-invoking the pathos of Catherine's 'two years and two

months'. Echoing the ambivalent use of that crucial word 'Lucifer' in

'Wounds', having lit the celestial fire, Longley's version of pastoral

elegy seems to want to bedim it. The 'epigram' star and the 'mammy' at 'home' are bound close by alliteration yet for Longley

5. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 1.

6. W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: The John

Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 9.

7. Michael Longley, 'The Evening Star', The Weather in Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), p. 33. Subsequent references to this volume will be incorporated in the text.

288




simultaneously lie unnegotiable 'galaxies' apart. '[D]ay' itself,

continuing to resonate along the passage between 'dayligone' and

'daybreak', has been irrevocably broken by the girl's premature death.

So, as close relative of the epitaph and elegy, Sappho's 'epigram' both can and cannot reinstate life. Again and again, through the ambiguity of language and phonology, Longley proffers solace while recognizing that this solace, like an elegy itself, always comes too late. It is this

exceedingly thin line between elegist as mourner and elegist as

comforter, as explored in these new elegies, that augments the already considerable tact of Longley's elegies. Such absence of any easy

imaginative transcendence concurs with the ever-precarious state of

ceasefire in Northern Ireland and the immeasurable backlog of

suffering it distils. Like the snowdrop's tentative and momentary

borrowing of the light from an ancient fragment, the 'concentration' of

grief encapsulated in the volume's lyric 'At Poll Salach' by the 'spring gentian shivering at our feet' provokes, fittingly, only a faltering prayer for some 'fragment from some future unimagined sky' (The Weather in

Japan, p. 17). In its combination of beauty and pain, Longley's equitable version of

elegy finds a way of allowing the response to loss to exist, however

tortuously, alongside the source of that response ? the loss itself.

Negotiating such balance inevitably broadens the self-reflexive

dimension of Longley's already highly self-conscious poetics. In the

succinct, metaphorical store of a neatly symmetrical quatrain, 'The

Blackthorn' levels the flowering of art with the withering of life in a

tortuous relationship extending to the entire volume:

A bouquet for my fifties, these flowers without leaves Like Easter snow, hailstones clustering at dayligone

?

From the difficult thicket a walking stick in bloom, then

Astringency, the blackthorn and its smoky plum. (The Weather in Japan, p. 60)

With dead friends and poet either ending or moving towards the

twilight of their lives, The Blackthorn' draws a characteristically thin

line between subject and art. It affirms that where life falters, poetry seems to flourish, fully acknowledging, however unassumingly, that

such an exchange has provided the lamenting, ageing poet with

something upon which to lean. Yet, as if wondering like John Donne

how he can 'consent the world is dead/While yet this muse lives?'8,

Longley's gratitude for what is 'given' poetically 'From the difficult

8. John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971),

p. 269.

289




thicket' is tempered by the continual need to evaluate this onerous gift of 'a walking stick in bloom' ? a burden that, as I will suggest, will

ultimately force the volume to reconfigure the parameters of elegy towards its close.

Analysing the inhospitable conditions in which 'the blackthorn winter'

ironically blooms, William Cobbett diagnoses the relentless tide of

bereavement that flows throughout Longley's productive 'fifties': 'It is a remarkable fact that there is always, that is every year of our lives, a

spell of cold and angry weather just at the time this hardy little tree is in bloom.'9 Given the delicate design of his last two volumes, Gorse Fires

and The Ghost Orchid, that interlace pairs and small groups of

'clustering' couplets and stanzas, the elegy has certainly become in

Longley's hands a primarily self-perpetuating form. Such productivity imitates the never-endingness of the mourning process itself as

identified by grief theorists. In his efforts to confer some sort of eternal

life by loading up 'Fruit that never runs out... grape cluster on grape cluster' as 'The Garden' recounts, it is as if the poet-mourner can but

keep tending, as agents of that immortality, his handfuls of starry words (The Weather in Japan, p. 63). Besides the procreative conno

tations of his 'tumescent, effervescent7 'flowering' in the Ghost Orchid

lyric of that name, the very palpable generation of one poem from

another of, say, 'In the Iliad' from 'A flowering' appears somewhat to

appease, then, Longley's dread of mortality. Since his dead, like the

'ship of death' he figures for his parents in 'Headstone', continue to

come 'ashore with its cargo of sand', each utterance on their behalf

demands further utterance.10 In the book's all-encompassing 'flawless

version' of each volume's 'quilt', each poem's patch ?

incomplete on

its own ? reaches out to the embrace of another. Because like George Moore's 'white birds of recollections' Longley's poems seem to appear

only immediately to re-enter the darkness, more must continually and

immediately be fashioned to 'take the place of those that have left and

are leaving'.11

Since The Weather in Japan, then, registers not greater acceptance but

conversely, an increased fear of the dark, Longley needs to work even

more assiduously to blanket his world from the night. Applying such

colour to death corresponds to what Longley termed in a reading of

'An Amish Rug' from Gorse Fires the Tightness of artefact' against a

'severity of lifestyle'. Whereas The Ghost Orchid closes by wistfully

9. Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), pp. 197-8.

10. Michael Longley, 'Headstone7, The Ghost Orchid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995),

p. 49. Subsequent references to this volume will be incorporated in the text.

11. Michael Longley, Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (Belfast: Lagan Press,

1994), p. 12.

290




regretting its unreadiness for the journey beyond, the subsequent

elegy-filled volume of The Weather in Japan opens with a carpe diem

fervency, and so with the passionate defiance of mortality that in part

prompts it. However intimate and quiet, its elegies can therefore be

read as posthumous 'hoofprints/[s]plashes of light, divots kicked out

of the darkness .. / (The Weather in Japan, p. 1). Rather as Edward

Thomas's blackbird sings amid the isolated landscape of 'Adlestrop',

Longley's work continually struggles, then, to resist the 'blackthorn'

paradigm. Somehow, the softly sibilant 'Easter snow' of an art aspiring to no less than new life must manage to sing alongside the poem's

obliterating string of dissonant fricatives.

Longley's particular sense of responsibility such as initially

compelled him to speak on behalf of the dead and the bereft fulfils the sense of 'moral bind' or of 'obligation' denoted by the etymology of

'[a]stringency' ? the word upon which 'The Blackthorn' tilts. This role

elicits a well-considered poetic discretion from Longley. First, the

ongoing struggle of grieving each loss in all its intransigence requires, as I have suggested, an equally provisional, open-ended art-form.

Longley is always careful to avoid any firm sense of closure that might

imply that consolation does not require much effort. Representing a

'broken' circle, each diamond in his patchwork reaches out towards, rather than assumes, the definitive elegy. Thus Longley best mirrors the

difficulty and inconclusiveness of the mourning process itself. Then, with its ambiguous, indeterminate syntax on the one hand, and

conversational or prayer-like as opposed to ceremonial form on the

other, the typical Longley elegy gravitates, like 'An Evening Star', as

much towards the funeral rites of the grieving ? the threnody

? as to

the epitaph. The rueful, even apologetic, elegist who admits along the course of the funeral procession of 'Headstone' that 'The headstone for

my parents' grave .. ./I have imagined only' always distrusts any

straightforward memorial. Accordingly, the 'bouquet' Longley only ever seems to half-deliver is always shaded and, as 'The Blackthorn'

recognizes, 'without leaves'.

Indeed, the blackthorn's temporary flowering is always tainted with

apprehension of the hard, bitter sloe beyond, in all its contrasting ashen

'[a]stringency'. With the far-reaching roots of this telling noun further

denoting how the remedial act of binding and drawing together might

paradoxically make things contract, Longley's reparative poetic bloom is

merely a contingent, provisional craft. That the art of elegy ineluctably and ironically brings life's end more closely into focus is mirrored in 'The

Blackthorn' by the attenuation of the poem itself. As suggested by the

title poem of The Ghost Orchid, whatever Longley singles out for

preservation and commemoration he only 'bruises ... into darkness'

under his elegiac ambidextrous hands (The Ghost Orchid, p. 52).

291




Yet, in comparison with 'A Touch' say, where the blossoming 'and'

dying are perfectly balanced, as is more usual with Longley's own Irish

'touch', the conjunction 'then' invests the lyric 'Blackthorn' with a rare

hint of narrative (The Weather in Japan, p. 6, p. 60). Succeeded by the

'blackthorn, its smoky plum', Longley's 'flowers without leaves' here

concentrate a new, rather more tragic tone. Certainly this latest 'self

elegy' distils and further darkens the title poem of Gorse Fires. Whereas

earlier 'Gorse fires ... smoking' are continually rekindled by the

sporadic blossoming of the 'primroses .. ./And celandines and white

may and gorse flowers' of early spring, as the accretive conjunction 'and' underlines/ conversely, the blossom at 'dayligone' hardens into its

'smoky plum'.12 Its part-rhyme seems to reduce, rather than merely alter

it. By embracing others' and his own mortality, Longley tastes more

fully on his creative tongue the acrid decay that undermines, as much as fuels, the transformative act. As suggested by Cobbett's early

memories of eating the sloe when his 'tongue clove to the roof of [his] mouth and [his] lips were pretty nearly glued together.. /, the ultimate

produce of such an astringent 'beyond the powers of alum' might be the

quiescence of artistic silence. In its attempt to light the passage between

the light and the dark, the coinciding of the 'blackthorn' with the

poem's actual compression suggests paradoxically that elegy brings closer that darkness. While it never quite succumbs to the silence,

Longley's work tends to imply that elegy can do little more than

temporarily bridge the gap between life and death. Despite their often

very personalized exclusivity, as indicated in the nomenclature of a pair of titles such as 'Maureen Murphy's Window' and 'Bjorn Olinder's

Pictures', the visions which the elegist provides the aggrieved are

always as momentary as they might be renewable.

The pair of 'pre-mortem' poems with which Longley closes the final

agonised 'yawn' into death for his mother-in-law in The Weather in

Japan might serve as a blueprint for such short-lived stay. Writing about, and through, the approach of absence, the contemporary elegist takes very seriously Wordsworth's counsel to be 'affected more than

other men by absent things as if they were present'.13 Indeed the poetic

spirit of the Romantic, like Longley's elegy itself, both fills and

acknowledges the void in 'The Daffodils', the first of the

characteristically ambiguous pair of poems. Having been partly

replenished, though, the equally gold-imbued complement to 'The

Daffodils', 'The Mustard Tin', immediately proceeds to empty 'the

available space'. It is from such meticulous order and placement that

12. Michael Longley, 'Gorse Fires', Gorse Fires (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1991),

p. 10.

13. Quoted in Sacks, The English Elegy, p. xi.

292




much of Longley's even-handed tact comes. 'The Mustard Tin' would

appear at first to place '[f]or a few seconds' the vibrancy of a setting sun

between the ailing woman and the night (The Weather in Japan, p. 37).

Developing the dusk imagery so intrinsic to the liminal landscape of

Gorse Fires, Longley finds himself watching again the 'magnificent recession of farewell' Wilfred Owen sees as the 'round mouth's crimson

deepen[s] as it fell,/Like a sun, in his last deep hour'.14 Yet Longley's

particularly post-modern poem goes on, however, to render content and

form all but indistinguishable when the deftly-realized failing of the

light seems to herald an accompanying failure of creativity. The space of

the poem quite literally dwindles along with the time left for comfort

and, more obliquely, for atonement. At the very point Longley manages to 'recover' such a role on behalf of the trinity of three children, death

appears to render the poem as anomalous as their child status. Any

implicit hope of Christian comfort is concurrently and subtly thwarted.

In playing out the disappearance of life's last ounce of zest, the

cumulatively simple, almost catechismal, repetitions of the three

children's three stanzas inexorably condense and enervate the piquancy of language itself. Such shrinking is analogous to the Japanese

'diminishing boxes' Longley uses to emblematize the dwindling of life

in The Ghost Orchid. Despite Longley's attempt to close the wide chasms

of loss in 'The Mustard Tin', appropriately the poem's haunting assonance sounding the nothingness of death, paradoxically only

widens by the last line. Through its reiteration of the most open sound in the language

? 'close'/'yawn'/

'hoke' / 'objects' /'oval' /'strokes' /'holds' / 'Sorry' / 'focus' /'total' / 'oval' ?

Longley's fitting death song 'without/sharp edges' is

expressive not only of oblivion, but of the new helplessness of the left

behind artist staring at 'complete absence'. As opposed, then, to evoking

'presence in the space of an absence', which Sacks diagnoses as typical in Renaissance elegy, Longley not only confronts, but actually evokes

the absence. Although the comfort so urgently sought finds some

utterance through the volume's characteristic agency of conversation ?

'There. There', and Tm sorry' ? when the darkness of death actually

arrives, the volte-face of the last line simultaneously signals the 'total

absence' of this very comfort. The blend of zest and hollowness held in

the 'mustard tin' discreetly enacts the paradoxical nature of elegy as an

easeful but, ultimately, only fleeting accessory to death.

The poet's conspicuous presence in pre-mortem elegies such as 'The

Mustard Tin' makes Longley's work as preoccupied with how to write

14. Wilfred Owen, 'I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell', The Bloodaxe

Book of 20th Century Poetry, edited by Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000),

p. 99.

293




about death as with death itself. The dying and the dead become muse

as well as subject. Compared with negotiating the dark encroaching about his own family, the hints gleaned from 'Bjorn Olinder's Pictures' are inevitably more objective:

I have learned about dying by looking at two pictures Bjorn Olinder needed to look at when he was dying: A girl whose features are obscured by the fall of her hair

Planting a flower,

And a seascape: beyond the headland

A glimpse of immaculate sand that awaits our footprints.

(The Weather in Japan, p. 41)

Added to Longley's especially equivocal syntax and effective use of

line breaks, here, the uncharacteristic device of the skipped line

distinguishes at once between artistic gain and the loss-laden process of leave-taking. This unique gap between the elegy '[planting a

flower' and the empty 'sea-scape' not only tactfully withholds the

promise of consolation until death, but conversely, and more

disturbingly, suggests in its immutable blankness how the gap may never be filled. The ability of this poetic planting to reconstitute the

'obscured' features of the dead is further undermined by the sorrow of

departure sketched into the second picture. The increasingly tenuous

human signifiers ?

'hair ... headland ... footprints'

? are not

assimilated into the poem but, rather, are carried out far beyond this

poem's 'available space'. Although the artist hopes he might engrave the footsteps on the sand, the white space at the heart of 'Bjorn

Olinder's Pictures' ? replicating the white garden left by the 'snow

shoes' of the 'snow poet' in the accompanying elegy for Maureen

Murphy ? reminds us how ultimately the 'immaculate' beach will,

like 'The Strand' of MacNeice, carry no sign 'of face and feet when

visitors have gone home'.15

On the opposite page, this white patch meets with further meditation in'An Elegy':

After thirty years I remember the rusty scythe That summarised in the thatch the deserted village,

And the anchor painted silver so that between showers

Between Hoy and Stromness it reflected the sunshine.

Now that the anchor catches the light on the ocean floor.

The scythe too is gleaming in some underwater room.


15. Louis MacNeice, 'The Strand', Selected Poems, edited by Michael Longley (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 105.

294




Here the space between the lines not only symbolizes the gaps between

the regenerative 'sunshine' of the poem but, like the spaces in the two

accompanying elegies, obliquely envisions 'the deserted village' death

leaves behind. The steady pendulum of its elegiacs swings this lament

back and forth between its two claims: the compensatory 'anchor' of

memory, and the 'scythe' of inexorable loss. Unavailable as yet in Bjorn Olinder's pre-mortem 'pictures', elegy can now be fortified by the long

'thirty years' during which it might mellow like the peace settling on

'the ruined village' and upon the 'sunshine'. Added to the poem's

retrospective stance, the syntactical suspension in the inversions of

each of the first two couplets enacts time itself, which Longley makes as crucial here to elegy as it is to the processes of mourning. The long difficult journey of the dead from the sudden obscurity of the ocean

floor to the rooftops of the 'ideal village' puts paid to any idea that

elegy, like words of comfort following a death, might immediately console. Only years later might 'elegy', like the lost life it

commemorates, begin to shine.

However, the crucially ambiguous verb 'summarised' suggests that, while elegy might eventually produce compensatory emblems of

absence, its meaning can only continue to ramify with the pathos of

eternal loss. While it may be beautiful, the scythe of elegy is

simultaneously 'rusty'. Arising from the depths of experience, any act

of transmutation it might make, derives ironically from light working on desuetude. While growing like a 'flower', poetry about death, as the

early poem 'Emily Dickinson' formulates, can only swell then in grief,

'gradual as rust' (Poems 1963-1983, p. 22). This increasing disparity between life and death, between the immediate aftermath and the

longevity of loss, is registered by the poem's phonology. Echoing with

mournful sibilance, the 'rusty scythe' that 'summarised' almost

manages to overwhelm any consolation of light reinstated in the final

couplet. Once more, gain and loss sit uneasily side by side.

As might befit though the concluding utterance of Out of the Cold ?

the chapbook published alongside, and incorporated into The Weather

in Japan ? the balance tilts in 'The Diamond' towards gain.16 Through

this poem's one sentence, the exultant alliterative string of 'beacon ...

birdlime ... blaze ... brain' ? contrasting notably with the dominant

sibilance of 'An Elegy' ? celebrates the ability of the 'artistic touch' to

compensate momentarily in the darkness (The Weather in Japan, p. 49). The 'diamond/On Rusty's forehead concentrates the light' (my

emphasis). Uniquely this poem's radiant 'diamond' configures the

circular potential of the volume's more usually waning 'diamond

16. Out of the Cold (Belfast: Abbey Press, 1999).

295




pattern' between sunrise and sunset as is drawn in 'The Sunburst' for

instance.

Given the ongoing demands and tensions of Northern Ireland's 'Peace Process', it is especially apt that many of Longley's elegies should constitute ongoing conversations and prayers rather than final

tributes. Like each phrase of the title poem of his lament-filled

chapbook, Broken Dishes, they continue to intone 'hour after hour'.17

This intermediary mode is dictated, as it were, by the dead themselves.

Propertius's Cornelia, for instance, asks in Longley's early version, that

'when you talk to secret dreams of me,/Utter each word as though I

might reply'.18 Indeed, the expansive run-on lines of Longley's translation of "ichigo-ichie' as 'one life/One meeting', as though each encounter were once-in-a/Lifetime' in 'Birds & Flowers', renders each

conversation some kind of gradual yet perpetual leave-taking (The Weather in Japan, p. 64). Every farewell is a potential elegy. Longley's

frequent use of the vocative 'not only palliates the solitude of the

bereaved', as Sacks diagnoses, but also 'grips the reader, as though he too were being continually addressed'.19

'The Snow Leopard' curls its particularly intricate and layered

design around the singular experience of a 'one and only conversation'

(The Weather in Japan, p. 35). From the outset, the poet's direct address

and disclaimer, T couldn't recommend to you', releases a vein of irony

whereby the realm beyond life is both imagined and denied. In the same way the conditions of The Weather in Japan are both pervasively

envisaged yet physically distant throughout the volume. Paradoxically, Fiona might only be brought back to life in the very place the poet neither wants her to go nor can visit himself. Thus, compromising

pastoral elegy, Longley both fulfils its rite of housing his dead, while

concurrently leaving them to wander in the 'ideal village' of the poem.

Elegy begins to exist, as the volume's epigraph posits, somewhere

between the 'night-cap' mountain and the living 'townland'. So

although it may aspire towards immortality, 'The Snow-Leopard' also

denies eternal rest by making Fiona a distinctly homeless 'stalking

leopard'. Such a paradox contains echoes of Donne's quandary over his

'Funeral Elegy' for Elizabeth Drury:

And can she, who no longer would be she,

Being such a tabernacle, stoop to be

In paper wrapped; or, when she would not lie

In such a house, dwell in an elegy?20

17. Broken Dishes (Belfast: Abbey Press, 1998), p. 18.

18. Typescript of 'Cornelia', The Michael Longley Papers, box 7, folder 5.

19. Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 96.

20. Donne, The Complete English Poems, p. 283.

296




As the opening lyric of The Ghost Orchid had already established, when

mortality is met and shaped by 'Form' ? the poem's title ? 'love

poems; elegies' can only ever provide, Longley similarly suggests,

temporary 'make-shift shelter[s]' that are inexorably full of absence

(The Ghost Orchid, p. 1). Due to its mirroring, self-reflexive component, the two-way

exchange of a conversational elegy might, however, prove capable of

narrowing the gap between the living and the dead. Like the flowers

laid around the homestead of Baucis and Philemon in his Ghost Orchid

version of the Ovid, Longley's metamorphic bouquet of 'tinfoil' in 'The

Snow Leopard' is not only able to 'foil' and make more brilliant, the

hunted cat, but might serve as a counterfoil to the 'snowfall' of death. The reflective property of Longley's tinfoil-wrapped 'bouquet' suggests a reciprocity of exchange between the poem and the poem's

subject, tactfully bridging any potential gap between the claims of his art and how well the elegist might have known the dead. Certainly

Longley fully honours Donne's equation in his 'Funeral Elegy': 'But

what we give to thee, thou gav'st to us'. More tangibly, and consolingly, the parallel conversational form of 'A Sprig of Bay' endows the dead

with a graceful ability from beyond the grave to 'appear[s] ... to

accept' (The Weather in Japan, p. 10). As well as remaining inconclusive, the 'last/Conversation' of elegy

might even mark, moreover, some sort of end to mourning. In the case

of the letter 'January 12, 1996', Longley both communicates with an

imaginary Western Front and, like many mourners, emulates talk itself

with such a letter to the dead:

He would have been a hundred today, my father, So I write to him in the trenches and describe

How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside.


The final act of this elegy to 'describe' might at least, the half-rhyme reiterates, allow something to be 'laid aside'. Obtaining, as it were, his

father's permission to set 'aside' the elegy on his particular behalf, the letter forms a pact, then, between the dead and the living to cease from sorrow. Yet at the same time, this particularly self-reflexive form

expresses a mutual appreciation of how elegy can, at its finest, achieve a paradoxical sense of living repose. Replicating the 'turf-sod in the

ashes to save an ember' in 'A Bed of leaves' of The Ghost Orchid where

Odysseus prepares his body for sleep as if for death, this slender elegy

glows brilliantly into the annals of eternity (The Ghost Orchid, p. 33). Furthermore, the intimacy of spoken diction and its provisional tone

297




undermine the fairly ceremonial and ritual shape of 'The Snow

Leopard'. Again any easy movement from lament to consolation, more

normally afforded by pastoral, is withheld. What might be seen here as

an accumulation of fragments matches both the disorganization of the

mourning mind, and the shape of real conversation. Yet when Longley turns ever so subtly from the 'you' ?f Fiona tp that of the reader, by the

end, the art of elegy comes up against the reality that the only conversation that can really take place, is, finally, miserably one-sided.

As W. David Shaw asks in his study Elegy and Paradox, 'If the dead are

forever dead and inert, how can they hear what we say?'21 Yet despite the self-doubt so bound up with Longley's lamenting,

these fragments do coalesce into memorial by the final distich. Here, the initially startling choice of the leopard as commemoration might be

explained in part by Longley's readiness to get animals into his poems. Yet, just as the 'one and only conversation' prompts and becomes, as

'The Altar Cloth' assumes, the 'last/ Conversation' of the elegy itself, so

too, the only signifier readily associated with Fiona ? the cat ?

becomes the poem's semi-divine, consolatory figure. In the same way as talking might bring solace to trouble, the discordant alliteration,

echoing the fatal 'car' accident that ended her 'career[ed]', love of her

'cat' and her 'conversation', is appeased by the harmonious and

sibilant 'stalking on soft paws among the clouds'. Through elegy, the

violently interrupted act of 'talking' is cleverly contained and

transformed in the coda's eternal silence of 'stalking'. 'The Snow Leopard' illustrates how Longley's latest work continues

to derive its intimate figurative language from his earliest love poems. The rhetorical, gently alliterative questions of 'The Design', 'And the

quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?', have already been

answered in this miniature's pivotal central line (The Weather in Japan,

p. 45). That they are to be made up of wedding garment 'stitches and

the shadows cast by stitches' conclusively identifies the abiding tension

of Longley's work as being that between love and death. Whether 'we

undress for sleep or love', as 'The Linen Industry' recommends, it is

always the same linguistic 'rug' that Longley spreads out. Yet just as

earlier love poems appear to interrupt elegies, recently lament appears to be overtaking eulogy in Longley's work. In 'Pale Butterwort', for

example, the poet's vision, so early in the volume, is clouded by a

precipitous, ever-present grief.

From the outset of course, Longley has always been conscious that

love's time is brief, sharing the haunting sense of the inevitability of

death that hovers over the work of Propertius who laments 'for soon

21. Shaw, Elegy and Paradox, p. 9.

298




the long night comes for you, and daylight will never come back'.22 In

the great self-elegy a young 'model wife' makes from beyond her

husband's establishment and the grave, Longley's uncollected version

of Propertius's 'Cornelia' moves from consideration of the home to the

'ship of death' that awaits us all. His vestigial draft, 'Images from

Propertius', inaugurates the hearth as the place in his poetry that

kindles both love and death: 'Reddening the fireside/The marriage bed

and coffin'. Longley's characteristically invisible line between husband

and poet contributes greatly to 'The Snow Leopard', which, respecting the volume's sustained juxtaposition of weddings and funerals, should

also be read as something of a posthumous marriage song. Through his

intimate conversational tone, Longley tactfully proffers, yet at the same

time, barely offers, this young woman a posthumous love poem. Fiona's extra-worldly marriage with 'fair-haired Rhadamanthus' ? the

God of the underworld ? is handled with particular discretion when

the poem only half-reunites the dead with her broken self in the

'Elysian Fields'. Here, the poet tells her 'you would still be you, your

body'. Longley had learnt from Homer 'how intimately the sense of

personal identity was associated with the sense of bodily existence' to

the extent that Homer's word for 'self was the same as that for 'body'.23 When the enjambement of 'your body/[t]emperature' disturbs and

denies this very self-hood, Longley underlines the incorporeality of the

after-world. Just as the dead hover and disappear between the lines of

Longley's elegies, this incorporeality mirrors the heartbreaking

meeting he depicts in 'Anticleia' between Odysseus and his mother in

Hades, where the dead 'vanishes' through the arms of the living.

Similarly, however much the stridently repeated denial '[n]o' that

attacks each line emphatically denies the wintry conditions of death ?

'No snowfall... No cold spells ... No wreaths ... No snowman'

? it

also places her beyond the normal conditions of a woman's expected

life-span. Fiona is denied the alternating 'cold spells or cloudbursts' of

human existence. At their very best, Longley's elegies are so full of

paradox that, as here, the very words of consolation simultaneously shoulder the full weight of the loss. Again, because destiny has been so

cruelly 'controlled', as the alliterative order of the 'snow fall ... cold

spells ... cloudbursts' emphasizes, the potential of marriage has been

denied. As love poet, Longley cannot but address this intrinsic part of

the tragedy. Replicating those on the lovers' 'bedroom' windows in

'The Linen Industry', Fiona's 'frost flowers' are as much elegiac images of unrealized love as of childhood. Again, however, any sense of

22. Propertius, Elegies, p. 127.

23. Longley points this out in Thought for the Day', typescript of a radio broadcast on

Homer, The Michael Longley Papers, box 31.

299




idealized pastoral that might arise from Fiona's poetic 'marriage' is

deliberately mitigated by Longley's initial disclaimer, T couldn't

recommend'.

The 'snowman' that stands as a memorial to Fiona's unfulfilled

childhood is perhaps another unrealized symbol of marriage since,

standing in the frozen garden of love, it mirrors Maureen Murphy's 'snow poet' in the succinctly elegant marriage elegy of the volume.

Marriage certainly continues to be the axis of the imaginative

community of Longley's latest work. As Homer taught him from the

outset, 'there is nothing better or finer when two people of one heart

and mind keep house as man and wife, a grief to their enemies, and a

joy to their friends, and their reputation spreads far and wide'. This

privileging of marriage compels Longley to try to re-house 'broken'

couples in the 'ideal village' of elegy. Despite the division of the grave, 'Maureen Murphy's Window' achieves something of 'the tenderness

and purity of the domestic relationships' in The Odyssey by which

Longley has been continually inspired.24 Through its ongoing domestic

rites, it manages, in part, to reunite a widow with her dead husband.

One of the poet's most grave, intimate, and intrepid openings, 'Because' ? used for instance to begin 'Ghetto' in Gorse Fires ? confers

a sense of in medias res appropriate to an utterance made in the midst of

grief and in the midst of Longley's 'continuing city' of widowhood (The Weather in Japan, p. 41) Elegies are, as Longley so tactfully grasps, as

much for the left-behind as for the dead. Again, indeed, Longley's self

conscious qualifier, T imagine', draws attention to elegy's artificial and

merely temporary ability to reunite. Reminiscent of the four line

epigraph-cum-epitaph to Gorse Fires that brings his dead parents

momentarily together before making then 'vanish', the 'tracks' of a

marriage elegy can still ultimately only keep a couple apart. That marriage might continue at some level through widowhood is,

however, simultaneously suggested first by the doubling device of the

elegiac distichs. Like a living couple, one line of a pair answers the

other and, like those bird-tracks in his parents' epitaph, a language

'symmetrically printed' suggests the dialogue of love. What Longley has designated as 'the caretaking form ... a temporary address

between more permanent lodgings' creates here an ambiguous sense of

homelessness within a larger sense of containment.25

Then, drawing from his earlier poetry's tendency to link the

temporal and the spiritual through a MacNeicean merging of indoors

24. Longley reads this passage and makes these comments in the same 'Thought for the Day' programme.

25. Longley, in the introduction to Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems (Manchester: Phoenix Pamphlet Poets, 1968), p. 2.

300




and outdoors, the double design of the widow's 'big window', and of

the poem's new still-life arrangement, brings together the home and

the loss-laden snow garden. Drafts of 'View', the early eighties love

poem where Longley would join the 'open air' with the 'stained glass window' had already accommodated the trappings of elegy within the

house of marriage. Longley's reparative needle has always wanted to

reincorporate the lost elements of home through the brilliant but fragile agency of glassware and, certainly, The Weather in Japan continues to

build each stanza like 'A habitat of mirrors and stained glass windows/As though their flowering time might last forever'.26 Yet

with the husband irrevocably gone, the last vision of him remaining

firmly outside in 'Maureen Murphy's Window' interrupts the pattern of secure, closed couplets. Like 'The Mustard Tin', this petering out of

Longley's prayer of persuasion coincides with the contraction of the

widow's expanded vision back to the garden's snowy space. Again,

resembling the footprints in 'Bjorn Olinder's Pictures', the poem's two

step elegiacs literally lay down spiritual inscriptions they 'and the

animals leave', while at the same time, its 'snow shoes' wipe them out

at the end. As much as it succeeds in opening up the window, each

distich's single thought successively works against the next to close the

vision. This self-reflexive formula has built upon a line from Alun

Lewis's marriage elegy, 'Goodbye' ? 'Our footprints leave a track

across the snow' ? which has left marks on Longley's work as early as

'Persephone' of No Continuing City.27 Empathising so closely with

Lewis departing from his wife for war, or with the dead husband of

Maureen Murphy, it is Longley himself who is the ultimate 'snow

poet'. Involuntarily staying with loss, he can but stamp the silence of

death into the rhythmic 'feet' of his poem. So rather than merely aiming to ease a grief as raw, say, as widow

hood, the 'window' Longley paints for Maureen Murphy, then, actually goes a long way to defining it. Indeed, the arrangement of this

particular poem beside 'Broken Dishes' in the chapbook manages, if

anything, tactfully to concentrate and extend the loss. While elegy, like

the dead, can move in and out preserving, 'without breaking a thing',

conversely, it is also an inevitably fractured form as the line breaks

between the distichs and the 'dishes' of 'keep/sakes' make abundantly clear. Stepping gingerly in and out of the home, the poem itself moves

agonizingly with its dead between consolation and loss. Like the

transcendent yet sombre Chartres blue permeating and disturbing the

late interiors of Pierre Bonnard ? to which he acknowledges his debt

26. Draft version of "Glass Flowers7 (Gorse Fires, p. 24), first called 'Marriage', The

Michael Longley Papers, box 7.

27. Alun Lewis, 'Goodbye', The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry, p. 191.

301




? Longley makes his elegiac brushstrokes both transfigure and

transfix the dead.

Inevitably, however, the continual encounter with this impassable crossroads of 'death's chalky intersection' calls for a new direction both

in The Weather in Japan and beyond for Longley. Deliberating between

the double design of these two stanzas of 'The Level Crossing', Longley expresses exhaustion with the relentless elegizing process that has

actually produced most of the volume: T want to go home' (The Weather

in Japan, p. 48). As something of a measure of how Longley has not

simply exhausted but has conversely managed to extend and resolve some of the tensions of his poetics, the closing section of the volume

turns elegy into self-elegy. The self-reflective process of this form is a

natural development of the elegiac love poems where, again and again, for Longley, 'to have turned away from everything to one face is to find

oneself face to face with everything'.28 As Tennyson implies in a

cancelled section of In Memoriam, to have loved and lost is to have lost

the self too:

So friend, when first I look'd upon your face

Our thought gave answer each to each, so true ?

Opposed mirrors each reflecting each.29

As Longley's new cache of self-elegies stresses, each elegy has

inevitably been a reckoning for him, a twin, with himself. Like 'Leaving Atlanta', which augurs the rebirth of the imagination in 'the small

hours' of any remaining poems, these lyrics prove richly regenerative (The Weather in Japan, p. 49). Promising a completely new chapter in the

story of Michael Longley's work, they counter melancholy with a

tender leave-taking that not only stretches towards final repose but

ensures the survival of poetry.

28. Longley, quoting from Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day in The Poetry Book

Society Bulletin', Christmas, 1979.

29. Quoted in Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 351.

302



"The Weather in Japan": Tact and Tension in Michael Longley's New Elegies

Documents

Transcript of "The Weather in Japan": Tact and Tension in Michael Longley's New Elegies