Entr'acte: sonnets

 If those previous posts were the first Act, and if more are to follow, I need a short diversion.

Something short and snappy. My natural verbosity will not deliver, so I'll still go for the diversion.

I'm not going to explain again the sonnet form. Nor attempt a history of it. I'll just pluck a few petals on the way.

First up, although it had been around in early Italian since the thirteenth century, it didn't arrive in England until the sixteenth.

Usually Sir Thomas Wyatt (as left, by Holbein) and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey get that credit. It says much about mid-sixteenth-century courtly life that both those worthies had flirtations with the headsman's axe. Wyatt was in deep doo-doo through an association with Anne Boleyn which put him in the Tower to witness her end. He was saved by his friendship with Thomas Cromwell (they shared, serially, a mistress, Elizabeth Darrell).

Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, was not so spared. He was a trifle too closely related to the head that wore the crown for comfort; and he had too short a temper for a courtier of Henry Tudor. He became the king's last victim.

I've tried to engage with their sonnets; but never managed to be properly uplifted or enthused.

I'm sure I should rave about Bill Shagspur's efforts. Some we know too well; others have the odour of a sonnet factory (one cannot maintain prime quality over 154 of them). And I've had to teach them too often. Perhaps his best are those almost hidden in Romeo and Juliet (far too good a play to be wasted on the young): the Prologue and the heavily-truncated two tiercets of the Epilogue, but above all the hands motif when the lovers first engage.

My salivation improved with Milton:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones 

Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold ...

Spit it out, man!

Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll’d

Mother with infant down the rocks. 

There! Bet you felt better for that! There's nothing like a piece of invective for clearing the pipes. Some day I must set to discover what incident (apart from a general loathing of Roman Catholicism) prompted Milton's outburst.

Here's another that stuck: Keats gob-smacked On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. The doughty explorers climb a hill, and find themselves facing a vast new Ocean:

... like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Pity it wasn't Cortez: but then 'Vasco Núñez de Balboa' is never going to fit iambic pentameter.

Allow me to cut to the chase.

There are a couple of modern sonnets that work for me. Both are very Irish, but speak to a wider audience. Both of whose authors I remember seeing in Dublin. Heaney, still unpublished but one we knew to watch, was athwart the cobbles of TCD's Front Square, in deep conversation with Michael Longley, and (I believe) with Derek Mahon. One at least was smoking a cigarette.

First of them, Famous Seamus:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux   

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,   

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise   

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize   

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.   

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène   

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay   

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous   

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’   

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky  

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Heaney had withdrawn from the Troubles to Glanmore in the County Wicklow, a few kilometres inland from Wicklow town. I imagine him listening to the  post-midnight Shipping Forecast from the BBC. His sonnet twists back to the very beginnings of early English poetry, and their kennings, those metaphors, of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon verse. Just as the storm drives the French fishing-boats to shelter in the lee of Wicklow, so his home in the Republic is A Haven.

OK: well it works for me.

If that one is good, this is even better: Paddy Kavanagh — who I was taken to observe in McDaid's in Harry Street. The evening was yet young, because Kavanagh was merely hunched and solitary.

Kavanagh exploited the sonnet form, playing fast-and-loose with formal rules — and, as we are about to see, whole rhymes. Many propose Canal Bank Walk as his great achievement. Fair enough, say I, provided you are not being blinded by Hilda Moriarty. 

This one, though, is both simply and grandly, Epic:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Sphere: Related Content

The highs and lows of Irish criminality

The headline and opener caught Malcolm immediately:

Aran Islander stabbed his brother in land row
A 43-year-old Aran islander who cut his brother four times with a fish knife following an ongoing dispute over land was given the benefit ofthe Probation Act ...

Thus Ann Healy heading today's Irish Times HomeNews page, and quite rightly so.

It is one of those tales that would have provided J.M.Synge or Sean O'Casey (or, more recently, Martin McDonagh) with material.

There are two brothers, Mike and John Faherty. Their uncle had willed both his small farms to the younger nephew. Then this gem:

The court was told John Faherty was very unhappy with his uncle's decision to leave both farms to his younger brother and he put his own cattle on to the land. Mike Faherty had put the cattle on to the road on a number of occasions and had told his brother to keep them off his land...
John Faherty told Judge Mary Fahy the assault had a very bad effect on him as he had been attacked by his own brother, who is 15 years his junior, with a knife in his own home.
He admitted he had been aggrieved by the fact their late uncle had left both farms of land to his younger brother even though he had been caring for the uncle for 10 years. "I minded him for 10 years and all I wanted was a bit of thanks but all I got was four stabs of the knife", the victim said.

What need to invent dialogue when it is given for free?

Malcolm knew he had been here before:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Paddy Kavanagh, celebrating the majestic squabbles of the County Monaghan, gives us one of the finest sonnets of the twentieth century in Epic.
___________________________________________________

Meanwhile, the Celtic Tiger's dirty droppings befoul the wider landscape. A couple of pages on, also under HomeNews, comes this:

Irish 'gang wars' exported to Spain - Gilmore
Ireland appears to have exported its "gang wars' to Spain, Labour leader Eamon Gilmore suggested in the Dáil yesterday, in the wake of the murder of a known Dublin drug dealer on the Costa Del Sol on Monday.
The Labour leader, who repeated his comment that 78 murders in 2007 represented the highest number of killings in the State since the Civil War, with the gun murder in Sligo and the attempted murder in Dublin of a well-known criminal.

The essence here is that Paddy Doyle was in a BMW SUV, driven by Gary Hutch, the nephew of another Dublin hood, Gerry "Monk" Hutch. They were on their way to meet a British contact. At the appropriately-named La Cancelada, near Estepona, the BMW was ambushed, crashed and raked with bullets. Doyle and Hutch ran for it; but the attackers shot Doyle twice in the head. The update is that a large cache of cocaine, nigh on €10M worth, has been seized from nearby.

Doyle is the latest casualty in the great North Dublin drugs war.

There are two gangs: the Crumlin lot (the Gavin/Thompson gang, who may or may not be under the wing of old-hand Martin "Viper" Foley) versus the Rattigans of Drimnagh. These are the young, thrusting newcomers, making their mark where once self-effacing Martin "The General" Cahill (cleaned up by the IRA, 1994, but pictured, left) ruled the roost. The cause of this feud seems to go back to 1998, when Declan Gavin was serving an apprenticeship in small-time crime and drug-trafficking. He had his bike and the family car vandalized, thus causing a rupture with the Rattigans.

• Trouble flared in 2001 with the first murder. Declan Gavin had been head of the Crumlin boys. Gavin and a mate were "cutting" a consignment of cocaine in the Holiday Inn, Pearse Street, when the Gardaí raided. Gavin had been caught in a previous raid; and was now suspect of grassing. He was taken out in a stabbing (August 2001). That one is still going through the courts.
• Brian Rattigan (St Patrick's Day, 2002) was badly shot up at his home. A witness (who later recanted) identified "Fat Freddie" Thompson as the gun-man. There was a further gun attack on a Rattigan affiliate, Colm Smith, in May 2002: Smith then refused to talk to the Gardaí. "Fat Freddie" was now in jug (driving offences!, but also for giving a false name and aiding the escape of an arrestee).
  
• To celebrate Brian Rattigan's release from hospital (July 2002), Doyle of the Gavin/Thompson gang shot Joe Rattigan of the Drimnagh mob.
• On 25 January 2004, in the toilet of Gray's pub, Paul Warren of the Crumlin team was shot by two of the Rattigans, a further revenge murder. Brian Rattigan went inside at Portlaoise for drugs and firearms (10 years) and heroin possession (4 years). Apparently, through mobile phones and runners, he still controls his gang.
  
• The next to go (March 2005) was John Roche, a Rattigan dealer. He was shot, allegedly by Darren Geoghegan, one of four of the same team that shot Joe Rattigan.
• 14 April 2005, Terence Dunleavy, a dealer, shot in the head. The motorbike used by the killer belonged to a relative of "Fat Freddie", so this was another Thompson execution.
  
• Then, two for one, Darren Geoghegan and Gavin Byrne were executed, perhaps by their own Crumlin side, but more likely as a reprisal, even on a contract basis.
  
• Doyle struck again, 13 November 2005, shooting John Roche's elder brother, Noël, who has been identified as the Rattigan enforcer.
  
• Late summer, 2006, and two more in quick succession: Wayne Zambra (assumed to be part of the team that killed Paul Warren) buys it: again, this is likely to be an internal job; and Gary Bryan, who was the gunman in the Paul Warren murder, was released from gaol and promptly dealt with in a drive-by killing.
• Then Eddie McCabe, last December, who had been in on the Zambra murder, was (for a change) beaten to death. He may have been stabbed through the eye.
  
• Now Doyle himself.

All in all a messy business. Malcolm is severely doubtful whether he has collected the whole butchery list.

One day, no doubt, an enterprising coach-operator will be offering tours of the North Dublin badlands, visiting all these points of interest. After all, almost everything else in Dublin is up for sale.
___________________________________________________

It all seems a long way away from the domestic disputes of the Arans or of Inniskeen. So which is the "real" Ireland?


Sphere: Related Content

Big
Jim


Our American Cousin's latest posting has nagged at Malcolm for the last day or so. He quotes the lines from Patrick Kavanagh, from the western side of Austin Kelly's statue of Jim Larkin in Dublin's O'Connell Street, close to the General Post Office. Looked at from that side , the statue also stands proudly outline against Clery's Department Store, once owned by William Martin Murphy, leader of the Dublin employers during the 1913 lock-out. Now that's class, that is.





Malcolm instantly expects a correction: wait for it ... Here it comes! "It's Oisín Kelly, dumb skull."

And, indeed he was and is. But he was Austin Kelly while he taught Art at St Columba's College, Rathfarnham in 1956-8, when Malcolm's alter ego was in his class and the same year as Patrick Kelly, Austin's/Oisín's son.

Let's suppress Malcolm's logorrhoeic need to fill every crevice with useless detail. Kavanagh's poem was an elegy, written immediately after Larkin's death (30th January 1947) and it was first published in The Bell for March of that year:

Jim Larkin

Not with public words now can his greatness
Be told to the children, for he was more
Than a labour-agitating orator —
The flashing flaming sword merely bore witness
To the coming of the dawn. ‘Awake and look!
The flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees,
And beyond are not the serf’s grey docks, but seas —
Excitement out of the creator’s poetry book.
When the Full Moon’s in the River the ghost of bread
Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home.
The ships that were dark galleys can become
Pine forests under the winter’s starry plough
And the brown gantries will be the lifted hand
Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’
And thus I hear Jim Larkin shout above
The crowd who wanted him to turn aside
From Reality coming to free them. Terrified
They hid in the clouds of dope and would not move.
They ate the opium of the murderer’s story
In the Sunday newspapers; they stood to stare
Not at a blackbird, but at a millionaire
Whose horses ran for serfdom’s greater glory.
And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin’s gutter,
Until Larkin came along and cried
The call of Freedom and the call of Pride,
And Slavery crept to its hands and knees,
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter
Degradation of their miseries.

Sphere: Related Content