Renowned Irish academic Maurice Harmon, for many years professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD, was a frequent contributor to Studies about contemporary Irish poetry and died last October. The below extract is from an article he wrote in 1983 on the recent poetry of Thomas Kinsella. Kinsella, was one of the most highly regarded Irish poets in the late 20th century. Harmon pays particular attention to Kinsella as a nature poet. Intriguingly, in this essay Harmon identifies a connection between Kinsella’s poetry and what he calls “Taoist perception”, which sees “a stillness at the heart of nature” and “…mysterious correspondences within it”: “The universe itself is a living organism, its woods and rivers infused with a mysterious spirit, its rocks and mountains endowed with a life-force”. Kinsella himself died in December 2021 at the age of 93, only two years before Harmon.
Maurice Harmon, ‘The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (1972-83)’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 285 (Spring, 1983), 57-66. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30090492
The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (1972-83)
Down on the water. . . at eye level. . . in the little light remaining overhead. . . the mayfly passed in a loose drift, thick and frail, a hatch slow with sex, separate morsels trailing their slack filaments, olive, pale evening dun, imagoes, unseen eggs dropping from the air, subimagoes, the river filled with their nymphs ascending and excited trout.
The taoist idea of nature might serve as an allegory for Thomas Kinsella’s idea of a poem, for while it would be far-fetched to discuss ‘Tao and Unfitness/At Inistiogue on the River Nore’ as an expression of the ideal poetic response, the taoist perception of nature and Kinsella’s understanding of how a poem works are analagous. Taoists feel a stillness at the heart of nature and apprehend mysterious correspondences within it. The universe itself is a living organism, its woods and rivers infused with a mysterious spirit, its rocks and mountains endowed with a life-force. To perceive the stillness they say one must cultivate stillness. Kinsella’s poem is a parable of taoist perception, underline sequence of quiet directives, such as ‘Move, if you move, like water’. The subject is delicate, the means recalcitrant. One constant is the distinction made between ordinary observation and intuitive communion. The attractive casualness of the former, a relaxed noting of place and people, is subtly offset by the gentle quietism of the latter. More directly, within the same pattern, the disruptions of history yield to intelligent inaction. Within each section of the poem the two kinds of response contribute with growing certitude to the profounder nature of the second until in the lines quoted above there is a fusion of sensibility with the natural phenomena. The final image of the man in the boat completes the vision of oneness with nature:
The flat cot’s long body slid past effortless
as a fish, sinewing from side to side,
as he passed us and vanished.
The Inistiogue poem appears in Song of the Night and Other Poems (1978) in which the title poem is a more comprehensive treatment of a similar theme. Based on a description of a family scene at Carraroe in Co. Galway, it illuminates the correspondences within man and nature and concludes with an eerie sense of the power within nature. The strategy again involves a faithful delineation of specific detail. Central to this naturalist’s accuracy is the attentive consciousness that notes the whole landscape, feels and sees and responds to its components, including the actual force within the movements of water and cloud:
At night time,
in the wind, at that place,
the water-wash lapped at itself under the rocks
and withdrew rustling down the invisible grains.The ocean worked in dark masses in the bay
and applied long leverage at the shore.
With a similar intensity of perception he notes the activities of his children:
Splashes and clear voices echoed
as the spoons and knives were dug down
and enamel plates scooped under water
into the sand, and scraped and rinsed.
The myriad flickerings of sand-eels, the excited responses of the children, the blaze of the lamp are part of a sequence of similar images. Through a fine net of correspondences a process that Kinsella analyses with clinical precision in A Technical Supplement, no. 11, the poem pulsates with an animated mirroring effect. The dynamic intensity of its descriptive accuracy vividly discloses the multiple energies of a setting in which ocean, sky and people are brought into creative communion. The spectacular ending, in which exclamation, wonder, the sense of tears at the heart of things, are openly manifested, convey a climax of feelings that rise naturally from the setting. Had the poem failed to create the setting’s capacity to arouse such feeling, the ending would be denied its emotional validity. The hurtling violence that tears through the scene is a poignant reminder of darkness, of forces beyond our control that make our deepest experiences of natural beauty, and of artistic achievement, both joyous and sad. This recognition of positive and negative force is made possible in this setting. Denied in the pent up pressure of the city in the ‘Philadelphia’ section, it is made possible in ‘Carraroe’ through the interaction of its elements.
The bay – every inlet – lifted
and glittered toward us in articulated light.
The land, a pitch black stage
of boulder shapes and scalps of heaped weed,
inhaled.A part of the mass
grated and tore, cranking harshly,
and detached and struggled upward
and beat past us along the rocks,
bat black, heron slow.
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