“I want to throw myself on the public street without caring
For anything but the prayering that the earth offers…”

Patrick Kavanagh

Quoted in, Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh, A Biography, ( London: Gill and MacMillan, 2001), p. 367.

Language acts like an umbilical cord, one that connects the outer and inner world: a device that allows us to know and to name our feelings and thus reveal our normally unobserved inner self. I regard the availability of the rooted, vernacular inherent in Scots, or Ulster-Scots as a gift, a bonus that is given to me as someone whose native language is English, but an English that has been coloured by its close relationship with the many language-influences alive in Northern Ireland. The accent is both distinctive and rich, emerging as it does from what is a linguistic richness bestowed by three dialects: Anglo Irish, Hiberno-Irish and Ulster Scots. Within the region, certain areas ( Belfast , Derry and the Glens of Antrim) display distinctive speech patterns and sounds. While this is a gift it is one that comes with pitfalls as well as benefits. There might, for example, be a short-lived benefit in the distinctiveness of ‘unusual’ words, a kind of quirky attractiveness. Certain words can be seductive, in addition to being useful: for instance, the Scots word for weep is ‘greet’; in ‘greeting’, the long vowel sound mirrors the sound of an anguished call.

I am not interested in using the vernacular as a nationalistic or political instrument or as a way of creating a persona (as, in another context Housman might be said to do). For me, the potency of a word like ‘glar’ lies in its capacity to locate and place the speaker (the voice in the poem ‑ not always and not necessarily the writer) ­ in relation to a cultural background.

At some deeper level, and with appropriate cognate words, used in a sympathetic way, language acts as an umbilical cord leading directly to a source of meanings and significances:

On Cavehill, that house of fame,

Hoar frost and ice are laid thick,

And upon every flat surface

A son or mother has chiselled

The bare facts and the full name

Of one more departed one –

Bloodless, for he gave his blood,

But full in memory, and remembered,

Thrappled and inhumed here

(Given these icy mouths)

Kept and cried over, until kissed

By the sun’s merciful breath…²

Cave Hill (Ben Madigan), a high and once wild plateau of land topped by an entrenched ringfort that overlooks the industrial city of Belfast, is strongly associated with the events of 1798: Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell and others held an important meeting here in 1795 – the site is marked on Cave Hill – at which they took an oath to introduce democratic reform into Ireland. It is linked also with later and, indeed, contemporary activities. The poem used the Scots word ‘thrapple’ and in the line I want it both to localise the depicted act of violence (strangulation) and distance the act of killing – ‘thrapple and inhume’ through the choice of language. The words cause the reader momentarily to delay over the meaning of the line in a way that strangle and bury would not and to consider the mechanics of the deed. To thrapple, a term commonly used in the Braid Valley when I was a child, means to strangle and is associated with the strangulation of animals. This, in an icy place, further distances the act from the warm, everyday world of ordinary human affairs. Further, the use of the words, rooted in Ulster Scots, invites the reader to question that particular culture’s precise role in relation to voices of radicalism and dissent.

Nuances in meanings are important and many vernacular words are rich in particularity. Take these lines in ‘Her Farmyard’, a poem about the daily life of a farmer’s wife. She crosses the farm yard (‘twenty or more times a day’) and hears:

The strib of milk

Drawn down by her husband’s hands³

The Ulster word ‘strib’ means to draw down the last remaining amount of milk from a cow’s udder. Stribbing into a bucket results in a thin, sharp and almost slashing sound as opposed to the fuller and long drawn out sound coming from a full udder. This is the only reference in the poem to the woman’s husband, yet from this we can imagine a man who is careful of his resources, a man focused in a somehow narrow way, detached in a life of patient labour, as his wife ‘walks alone’.⁴

Childhood is where time and place most cogently meet and where words and images are perhaps most fully imbued with colour, power and significance: for a child the strib of milk hits the bottom of an empty bucket at ear level. I have written:

I remember

stepping off the stone,

I remember, now, that I saw myself

lifting it

holding it, poised

high above their world

of knowing I could drop it, or not drop it

and of knowing that I knew that

I remember remembering all of those, these, things.

And yet,

the child of time,

he is standing there

always.

in my memory,

always

standing there,

his arms raised,

the stone poised,

the weight, a real knowledge

on his skin, in his hands.

Forever,

foregrounded,

Among bluebells,

in birdsong,

in sunshine.⁵

In his essay ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, DH Lawrence says: ‘Nothing is more difficult to determine than what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and teaching’. Lawrence was born in the midlands of England within a non-conformist community where he attended Sunday School and worshipped in a Congregational chapel. The singing and the attention to words that he experienced there had a profound effect on the man and the writer. He goes on, ‘To me the word Galilee had a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee ! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.’⁶

Lawrence makes as much of the glory that is the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible as I do, for this is the language I imbibed in church, at Sunday School (where verses and entire chapters of the Bible had to be learned by heart) and at school where each day began with what was termed Religious Study. One of my favourite readings, learned by rote, was from Isaiah 53:5; in its beautifully presented control, balance, movement, tone and music it is quite typical of his use of language: ‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes were we healed.’ Then, in church meetings, the intermingling of the spoken word and the written text was the basis for the preacher’s often-dramatic exposition. In this, the invitation was to read the text continually, follow the preacher’s exposition and reasoning and then accept or reject, agree or disagree, with his argument. In both cases, in Sunday School and in the church meetings, the text was examined and its sense drawn out, like a cockle from its shell.

A number of positive aspects of my linguistic heritage appear when I consider the question of my cultural influences as they have been mediated through a rural, non-conformist/Presbyterian, Protestant upbringing. This community is commonly thought to be characterised by its self-reliant outlook, combined with a lack of deference to external rank; this characteristic might be traced back to the free enterprise colonisation of Antrim and Down (and, later, Tyrone, Coleraine/Derry, Armagh, Fermanagh, Donegal and parts of Cavan) by Scots and north of England Presbyterian settlers. In this society a number of things stood out: the importance attached to self-governance of the various congregations, linked together with their ability to ‘hire and fire’ their ministers of religion; the reliance on the democracy of community-appointed lay preachers; the whiff of fatalism inherent in Calvinism; the oddly unshakeable self-confidence, that could appear as stiff-necked obstinacy, encouraged by the concept of a “chosen people”, the “people of God”, being “saved” through grace. The result of all this was an air of exclusiveness. This exclusiveness was often exercised, even within the congregation itself, where an individual, or even an entire family, might be expelled if they were deemed to have offended in a radical or basic manner against the doctrines or disciplines of the congregation. The internal dynamic of this kind of social and community ordering is interesting, as is the dynamic of its relationship with the outside world. I wrote of my own experience of such a world in this poem:

Outside, the wind mounted

in what might become a tempest, but

no!

we would not impose untruths

by such conceits

we who knew the power of the word,

we who knew what was what.

In obeisance to the gusty breeze

the trees kow-towed their heads

I could see their dumb-show, through the canvas

bobbing as ducks do on water, all in a row

out there, where the terrain is rough

out there, where frontiers are treacherous.⁷

There is a strong sense in this form of Protestantism that worship is both spiritual and intellectual: ‘They that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth ‘⁸ (my emphasis). This was the world of my childhood, a place where sense (through a rational analysis of word and text) and sensibility (the emotional, feeling-based singing of hymns and psalms) were transmitted though a distinct culture of worship.⁹ After referring to Terence Brown’s discussion of the nature and role of metrical psalms in Presbyterianism. Patrick Loughlan describes it this way in The People of Ireland :

…[metrical psalms] were peculiarly appropriate for a settler people to take as their spiritual and aesthetic staple. Their blend of agrarian, pastoral imagery with the rhetoric of warfare and survival amidst ungodly enemies must have provided the Presbyterian settlers with an interpretative myth of their own experience in the fertile valleys of their promised land, wrestled from the Canaanites.¹⁰

I remember singing, ‘Stand up, ‘Stand up for Jesus, ye Soldiers of the King’ and ‘Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, Let me Hide Myself in Thee.’ I can empathise with Loughrey’s sentiment: ‘They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.’¹¹I have attempted to register that experience in poetry:

Until I was fifteen

I went every seventh day

Summer and winter

Together with relations and neighbours

To Sunday-school

In a field defended Church.

At one time a tall cousin

Taught me, then sometime later

A young butcher from the town.

An iron, pot-bellied stove

Stood in the absolute centre of the room,

Its black girth subverted

By a rising flush and blush

When the heat really got up.

One framed text

Violated the emptiness

Behind the place

Where the preacher stood

During the evening meeting.

There was no chart to map out

High days or holy days.

There was no bell

To bring us in,

There was no organ

To lift us up,

There was no glass cunningly

To strain and map the pigments

That fell along the wooden

Floor that draped

Across the rows of hard-backed chairs,

Light washing the walls,

Illuminating the message

Black on white printed,

Nailed up there, a clear warning

That Christ died to save the world.

All about, the long siege holds.¹²

I am not a linguist so what I have to say about language is no more than the observations of one who uses words to make poems and to conduct the commerce of daily life. I am not able to discuss it in terms of stylistics, grammar, lexicon or phonetics – only in what might be called an intuitive response to words and language, seen as raw materials.

When I was a child I lived in a variety of worlds (to take Lawrence ‘s use of the word ‘world’ as opposed to ‘place’ though I lived in a real enough place, also). These worlds were language constructs. I read books and comics and lived in numerous worlds of the imagination. I listened to my family and neighbours talk in the house, in the yard, in the fields where they spoke of weather, crops, the price of cattle, gossip about some neighbour. Above all, I listened to the radio and to words from London , Belfast and Athlone. I went to school, to the classroom and the schoolyard and listened to my teacher’s interpretation of Received Pronouncation inside the walls and to my school friends’ County Antrim accents in the schoolyard. I had access to, not one language, but to a symphony of sounds, words, nuances and meanings.

The presence of Ulster-Scots phonetics, sounds and words upon my consciousness constituted another world. In all of this I might hear the phrase “I took tea and lay down upon the ground” spoken in a variety of ways. From London the accent would be such as to have “I” rhyming with “pie”, “tea” with “sea”, “down” with “gown” and “ground” with “found”. My Scottish radio world and my mid-County Antrim language constructs were different; here I moved easily and quickly from Ulster Scots dialect and pronunciations to Hiberno-English and back again. I might rhyme “ha” with “hay” and “ground” with “found”. From Athlone I could hear echoes of “down” in “sound” and “ground” in “sound”. Beyond this is the cadence, the rhythmical arrangement that arises naturally and organically out of the way an everyday, spoken language is delivered and how that changes from place to place. So, we might have the sentence “I took tea and lay down upon the ground” given in Received Pronunciation as “I took tea/ and lay down upon the ground”; in Ulster Scots pronunciation as, “I took tea/ and lay down/ upon the ground”. In Ulster Scots pronunciation the internal rhymes of “tay” and “lay”, “doon” and “groun”, go together with the two breaks in the line. Hiberno-English pronunciation seems to me to fall somewhere between the precision and clarity of diction associated with the Standard English version and the ascending and descending modulation of the Ulster Scots. ¹³

This rich and complex armoury of sounds, shapes and variety of phrasing, has obvious implications for the making of poetry. Synge, for example, deliberately chose to make use of a language that was not his own, but one that allowed him a romantic freedom to explore his experience and write about the lives of island and rural people. I have never felt the need or desire to write in dialect, though I use rooted words and admire the work of the weaver poets and that of folk poets such as WF Marshall. For me, it would seem too much like the artificial construction of an identity, for language is intimately bound up with a sense of self. I am happy to be able to “root” a poem by using one word that, to return to that obstetrical image again, secures it to a place of nourishment. ¹⁴

Had fashioned in hot ice the spray forenenst Glenarm

A silver dish, a big cisheen of fish

Thrives there in the black glair of Balor’s eye…¹⁵

Roy Foster speaks of Hubert Butler’s frequent use of the word ‘angle’ and then of his ‘distinct but carefully angled claim on Irishness ‘. Foster presents this as an insight into Butler’s construction of a personal identity, one that took into account his ancestry, his own position and the political and cultural context in which he lived. I tend to have recourse to words such as “boundary”, “frontier”, “march”, “barrier”. No doubt this reveals an attempt to create a carefully angled claim on some form of identity. In terms of language, I have had no interest in using language to create for myself or others anything like a programmed identity. I view language, as used in poetry, as the material of mediation between initial experience and the presentation of that experience in ways that communicate something of its significance. This has to do with expression of identity in terms of who one is; and this in turn has to do with the construction of an individual’s autobiographical memory and how that relates to the tribe’s cultural memory. The resulting dynamic seems to be where creativity is rooted and where the imagination can feed. Finding an angle on who or what one is seems to be a much more mechanical if pragmatic affair.

In Ireland , sooner or later, some of us arrive, individually, sometimes collectively, at a crossroads: and it is a junction haunted by some ghastly old ghosts. One can bed down there – or one can choose to take this or that of the various roads on offer. In making my choice I have taken a road that had led me to attempt to explore human experience in ways that touch on the spiritual and the universal, while eschewing the formal aspects of the various established religions available in Northern Ireland, or in Ireland as a whole.

In its pure form Protestantism is not a religion for the faint-hearted, or even the half-hearted. At its heart lies the ambiguity, indeed the mystery, of a personal relationship (exemplified in the life of Martin Luther) between an eternal, omnipotent God whose will is unbending and the frail individual human being whose conscience is his own to do with what he will but who must make a choice – God or Satan, good or evil, hell or heaven, salvation or damnation. There is nothing in between the given extremes; one must face God, face to face and say yes or no. Is it any wonder then that the fundamentalist Protestant is not inclined towards compromise when engaged in earthly negotiations? Having said this, it is useful to remember that Protestant identity and Protestant faith are not necessarily the same thing.

Salvation stems from faith and grace and mercy but man has a rational mind and a conscience to be exercised. This is the paradox at the heart of Protestantism, because it demands that man must engage in total obedience to God. This, of course, in practice, leads to a societal polarity between those who have been saved by grace (and who are the children of God) and those who have not and are not saved and are damned for all eternity. This stance provides, surely, the most inclusive/exclusive situation possible. To complicate matters, while a person may not be saved by his or her own effort but only Christ’s redemptive grace he or she may be known as saved through works (by their works shall ye know them). I have tried in a short story to come to terms with this complicated cultural texturing:

‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘that it’s come on well.’

I knew he meant his farm. It lay at our feet, the fields regular and neat, the clump of buildings well painted I knew, but dark silhouettes now, sitting solid in the centre of the holding.

‘Yes, you’ve made great changes to it. How long have you been here now?’

‘Eighteen years,’ he replied.

We were silent, for a bit, looking at it all. Then he turned, quite suddenly, to face me.

‘How are you fixed with God?’ he asked.

It was as if he had put his hand, uninvited, on my naked flesh. I felt myself grow cold all over; my tongue seemed to freeze in my mouth. We stood there under the moon, in silence, looking at each other, he waiting for a reply, with the big yellow orb of the moon suspended just over and behind his right shoulder, its light, I knew, painting my face. I found, I couldn’t speak.

‘That’s fine,’ he said, motioning with his right hand towards the fields and the neat farm, ‘but what shall it profit a man…?’ He left the unfinished question hanging in silence between us, I found myself silently finishing it, as he had intended I should. I felt trapped and vulnerable and somehow answerable, as if this man were God’s reaper, licensed to garner my soul; and to tell the truth, I felt a bit guilty, with feeling I thought I’d escaped from years before tapped so easily.

‘Have you made your peace with God?’

This time the question was put more gently, and was oddly seductive. The change in his tone broke the spell and I found voice in evasion, with a childish,

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have to know,’ he said, and he placed a heavy emphasis on the last word. ‘To know yourself is the eleventh commandment. You have to know the dark places of your nature before you can conquer it.’ He gestured again towards the farm. ‘Like I conquered the land, like your and my forefathers conquered this land, and their own base desires. To know yourself as God knows you, that is it.’

During this speech I had composed myself. Now as we looked at each other and then I spoke in a voice that I suppose must have been over-loud, ‘John, leave me be.’

As he did. He was neither apologetic nor angry, but turned away to look at the stars. I knew what he was thinking. I had seen in his darkened eyes, in that instant before he moved, how he saw me as one of the damned, falling into the jaws of his dreadful hell, or rather not me but my soul, for the individual who stood beside him had, for him, no reality or significance. Or perhaps those dark eyes mirrored more than the moon’s cold light… ¹⁶

The Protestant Reformation may be thought of as a significant benchmark in the progress of European affairs. It stands between the Renaissance (with Pagan, Hellenistic as well as Christian influences) and the twenty-first century’s apparent dismissal of Christianity. Searching for a conceptual and spiritual ancestry, I have been assisted by the ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ dimensions to my childhood. The first provided a heritage of linkages into a humanistic, secular, non-conformist, critical, radical or dissenting tradition. I believe that this has enabled me to eschew the narrow, reactionary politics that exist in my home place. The secular example has, as it were, energised my mind and led to an attempt to find expression of my need for some kind of personal ownership of a spiritual dimension to life through an awareness of the natural world.

I am by no means alone in pursuing such a journey: there lives in human beings an impulse to engage fully with, and to know and understand the underpinnings of, experience. I can give as a conscious example of this characteristic the following verse written by a now completely forgotten nineteenth century Co. Antrim poet:

I would build with words as they built with stanes

Who built cathedrals lang ago;

In the darkness of painful years would lay

Thought’s firm foundations braid and low.

I would choose me words for an iron pow’r,

Or a virtue of texture, or noble form,

As they chose who builded in stane to brave

The centuries’ striving of sun and storm.

I would dig in the mines of the auld auld tongues

For words that are precious; for words most fair,

That hold in them beauty of thought enshrin’d,

While sentence to sentence should knit in strength

As courses by mason most truly laid.

And the dim clere-story, the painted pane,

High column, strang buttress, plain rough-cut wall,

And gape of the devil-shap’d gargoyle grin

Should find their true counterparts, one and all.

So upward this structure of words should rise,

The plan clear showing – yet much conceal’d

Should rest to be known of the heart that knows,

To eye of the seer to be reveal’d.

And crowning the work at its highest attain,

Like the cross of the spire on its golden rod,

Some word of the spirit should stand out clear

To carry the soul-eye up to God.¹⁷

Bibliography

1. Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh; A Biography , ( London : Gill and MacMillan, 2001), p. 367.

2. ‘Beyond Cavehill’ Walking the Marches , op. cit., p. 72.

3. Sam Burnside, ‘Her Farmyard’, Walking the Marches , p. 72.

4. Idem.

5. Sam Burnside, ‘On Being a Witness to Being a God in Olympia ‘, A Will to Remember , op. cit., p. 24.

6. DH Lawrence, ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, Lawrence on Education , Joy and Raymond Williams, eds., (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 225.

7. Sam Burnside, ‘The Safety of Being Chosen’, A Will to Remember , op. cit., p. 20.

8. John 4:24.

9. Note: the root of the word culture is ‘cult’, worship.

10. Patrick Loughrey, ‘The Scots’, The People of Ireland , (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1999), p. 225.

11. Ibid. p. 226.

12. Sam Burnside, ‘Crammer’, The Cathedral , op. cit., p. 21.

13. The movement of a line from the anonymous ‘The Twa Corbies’ comes to mind: ‘Whar sall we gang and dine the day?’ It conveys a piercing focus that is achieved through the combination of spelling, diction and cadence.

14. To put the matter in another way: I did not have to seek to create a “common culture”, for it was there inside my head, one house with different rooms, all equal and each one integral to the whole. (For example, there was a common culture in music with Scottish dance music, Irish traditional music and English folk song all holding equal measure and with American popular music overriding all.) As a child I was not aware of internal or external frontiers between the “worlds” or the dialects: indeed, I was hardly aware of the dialects (only of a desire among teachers to ensure that proper, standard English be used). I believe now that Hiberno-English is the frontier town where Scots-Irish, Gaelic and English meet. In the sixties, when I was a teenager, the feeling that a common culture existed was one my generation developed with some energy.

15. Sam Burnside, ‘Van Gogh in the Glens’, Walking the Marches , op. cit., p.55.

16. Sam Burnside, ‘John Colvin’s Profession’, Review, September/October, 1988.

17. John Stevenson, Pat McCarty of Antrim, a Farmer; His Rhymes , (London: Edward Arnold, 1903), p. 351.