Not only did I read ‘The Trout’ while a student at Saint Patrick’s College, Armagh, which was the same school John Montague had himself attended, but I read it under the spell of Jerry Hicks, one of the same teachers who had taught Montague to read poetry only twenty years earlier.
I recognized, even then, something of the long tradition of Irish nature poetry to which ‘The Trout’ belonged and in which Hicks was so immersed. Indeed, a trout appears in Irish literature as early as a seventh-century poem, surfacing there as iasc brecc, the speckled or spotted fish. The term breac-Ghaeltacht would have been one with which Hicks was all too familiar since it refers to the speckled or spotted geographical areas in which Gaelic- and English-speakers were interspersed. One such ‘brackish’ area where the salt-water had almost been displaced by the fresh was in County Tyrone, not far from where Montague had lived as a child, and where Hicks had collected songs from some of the last native Gaelic speakers in Northern Ireland. Montague refers to this phenomenon in ‘A Lost Tradition’:
The last Gaelic speaker in the parish
When I stammered my school Irish
One Sunday after mass, crinkled
A rusty litany of praise:
Tá an Ghaeilge againn arís.
In this same poem, Montague refers to having gone to primary ‘school / In the Glen of the Hazels’, a reference to the Tyrone place name Glencull, or Gleann Chuill. Another ‘hazel wood’ in the vicinity of Coole, County Galway, comes to mind, complete with the stream in which Aengus ‘caught a little silver trout’ that would shortly become ‘a glimmering girl’:
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass.
The ‘hand’ of ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ reaches for the ‘hands’ of ‘The Trout’, while ‘dappled’ is picked up in ‘stipple’. Other than the perfect rhyme on ‘hands’ itself, there’s only one full rhyme in ‘The Trout’. The far-flung, perhaps unconscious, rhyme on ‘stipple’ and ‘ripple’ brings to mind ‘nipple’, a word one might associate with the erotic ‘glimmering girl’ in Yeats.
Another Yeatsian echo is ‘bodiless’. It’s a term Yeats uses in ‘The Symbolic System’, an essay on Blake in which he describes how a poem begins with a ‘bodiless mood’ which then becomes a ‘surging thought’ before emerging as a ‘thing’. I think Montague is alluding directly to Yeats when he describes how the trout ‘surged with visible pleasure’, while the thingness of ‘The Trout’ also puts Montague directly in touch with his other early example, William Carlos Williams, and his mantra of ‘no ideas but in things’. Though I used the word ‘erotic’ earlier, I should modify that to ‘autoerotic’, since what enters the speaker’s ‘own enlarged / Shape, which rode on the water’ turns out to be his own ‘thing’, the word having been used by everyone from Chaucer through Shakespeare to the autoerotically-gifted boys in the class in Saint Patrick’s College, to refer to the ‘penis’. The underlying sexuality of the poem probably deserves an essay in itself, particularly since the lines ‘the two palms crossed in a cage / Under the lightly pulsing gills’ summons not only a literary father (the bard of Lough Gill) but Montague’s actual father, who just happens to be the subject of a poem entitled ‘The Cage’, in which the son describes his subway-worker father ‘released from his grille / in the Clark Street I.R.T.’ and connects the ‘pulse’ of ‘The Trout’ with ‘the mark of an old car / accident beating on his / ghostly forehead’.