Yves Bonnefoy’s sequence ‘La maison natale’ begins with the statement: ‘Je m’éveillai, c’était la maison natale’, and in the following sections he repeats this moment of waking in the house where he was born. We keep returning to childhood for our various reasons — psychoanalysis, art, public justification, nostalgia. It is both a source and resource. It is protean in that it changes its demeanour, shading and outlines each time we go back to it. We make it say what we want it to say, not what it would tell us, on each occasion. As a subject for poetry it is particularly treacherous, because when we return to it we are more likely to encounter Wordsworth than our younger selves, a stylized view of early events, rather than the events themselves. Poetic structures can sometimes seem too willingly to hand, the epiphanies prefabricated and suspect.
John Montague’s ‘The Water Carrier’ is a report from the poet’s rural childhood, from pre-industrial Ireland, a country without running water, television and electricity, a country which imposed daily rhythms and natural encounters that are rare today. It would seem to guarantee some kind of authenticity (that is, if one finds the present somehow inauthentic). What is engaging about the poem is that it refuses hackneyed consolations; that it insists that the water, and indeed the whole experience, is ‘fictive’, and, with the final image of water running through the child’s hands, that it is also ungraspable, unusable. Granted, the ‘halfs’ of the penultimate line are straight out of Wordsworth, and some of the other diction suggests authenticity, but phrases like ‘pure thing’ and ‘living source’ are curiously vacant of meaning, and all we are left with at the poem’s end is the poet uncertain as to how such experience might be slotted into larger structures (perhaps structures of autobiography and the nation, as evidenced in Montague’s other work). The speaker might indeed physically ‘feel’ the water at the end, but he also tells us that this immediate sense experience is not true: it is invented, created, fabricated, ‘fictive’. As that last word sends beautiful suggestions rippling outwards through the stylized scene (for he has stylized the scene, despite his assertion to the contrary), we can observe other freedoms as they offer themselves to the poet. It is an exhilarating moment.