4.

Summer 1969

1. While the Constabulary covered the mob

2. Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
3. Only the bullying sun of Madrid.
4. Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
5. Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
6. The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
7. Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.
8. At night on the balcony, gules of wine,
9. A sense of children in their dark corners,
10. Old women in black shawls near open windows,
11. The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.
12. We talked our way home over starlit plains
13. Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil
14. Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

15. Go back, one said, try to touch the people.

16. Another conjured Lorca from his hill.
17. We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports
18. On the television, celebrities
19. Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

20. I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

21. Goyas Shootings of the Third of May
22. Covered a wallthe thrown-up arms
23. And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
24. And knapsacked military, the efficient
25. Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,
26. His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall
27. Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn
28. Jewelled in the blood of his own children,
29. Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips
30. Over the world. Also, that holmgang
31. Where two berserks club each other to death
32. For honours sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.
33. He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
34. The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

How does the poet express their feelings about art?

How does the poet present tone?
 Digging

1. Between my finger and my thumb

2. The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.

3. Under my window, a clean rasping sound

4. When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
5. My father, digging. I look down

6. Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

7. Bends low, comes up twenty years away
8. Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
9. Where he was digging.

10. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

11. Against the inside knee was levered firmly
12. .He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
13. To scatter new potatoes that we picked
14. Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

15. By God the old man could handle a spade.

16. Just like his old man.

17. My grandfather cut more turf in a day

18. Than any other man on Toner's bog.
19. Once I carried him milk in a bottle
20. Corked sloppily with paper.
21. He straightened up
22. To drink it, then fell to right away

23. Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

24. Over his s houlder, going down and down
25. For the good turf. Digging.

26. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
27. Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
28. Through living roots awaken in my head.
29. But I've no spade to follow men like them.

30. Between my finger and my thumb

31. The squat pen rests.
32. I'll dig with it.

Comment on the writers feelings about family.

How does the writer use structure to portray their message?

Death of a Naturalist

1. All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

2. Of the townland; green and heavy headed
3. Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
4. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
5. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
6. Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
7. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
8. But best of all was the warm thick slobber
9. Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
10. In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
11. I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
12. Specks to range on window sills at home,
13. On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
14. The fattening dots burst, into nimble
15. Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
16. The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
17. And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
18. Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
19. Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
20. For they were yellow in the sun and brown
21. In rain.

22. Then one hot day when fields were rank

23. With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
24. Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
25. To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
26. Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
27. Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
28. On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
29. The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
30. Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
31. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
32. Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
33. That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

How does the writer present adolescence?

Comment on the writers use of sound.
Exposure

1 Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...
2 Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
3 Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
4 Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
5 But nothing happens.

6 Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.

7 Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
8 Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
9 Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
10 What are we doing here?

11 The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow ...

12 We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
13 Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
14 Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
15 But nothing happens.

16 Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

17 Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
18 With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,
19 We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
20 But nothing happens.

21 Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces--
22 We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare,
snow-dazed,
23 Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
24 Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
25 Is it that we are dying?

26 Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed
27 With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
28 For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
29 Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed--
30 We turn back to our dying.

31 Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

32 Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
33 For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
34 Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
35 For love of God seems dying.

36 To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

37 Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
38 The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
39 Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
40 But nothing happens.

How does the poet use language to convey his thoughts about war?
How is structure used to reflect the main themes/ideas in the poem?
Mental Cases

1. Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

2. Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
3. Drooping tongues from jays that slob their relish,
4. Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?
5. Stroke on stroke of pain,- but what slow panic,
6. Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
7. Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms
8. Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
9. Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

10. -These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
11. Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
12. Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
13. Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
14. Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
15. Always they must see these things and hear them,
16. Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
17. Carnage incomparable, and human squander
18. Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

19. Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

20. Back into their brains, because on their sense
21. Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
22. Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
23. -Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
24. Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
25. -Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
26. Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
27. Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
28. Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Comment on the writers use of structure.

Comment on the writers ideas about war.
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo

1. I, too, saw God through mud

2. The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
3. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
4. And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

5. Merry it was to laugh there

6. Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
7. For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
8. Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

9. I, too, have dropped off fear

10. Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
11. And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear,
12. Past the entanglement where hopes lie strewn;

13. And witnessed exhultation

14. Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
15. Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
16. Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul.

17. I have made fellowships

18. Untold of happy lovers in old song.
19. For love is not the binding of fair lips
20. With the soft silk of eyes that look and long.

21. By joy, whose ribbon slips,

22. But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;
23. Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
24. Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

25. I have perceived much beauty

26. In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
27. Heard music in the silentness of duty;
28. Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

29. Nevertheless, except you share

30. With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
31. Whose world is but a trembling of a flare
32. And heaven but a highway for a shell,

33. You shall not hear their mirth:

34. You shall not come to think them well content
35. By any jest of mine. These men are worth
36. Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

Comment on the writers tone in the poem.

What is the writers message about war?