The first line of the poem announces leitmotifs which will be a preoccupation of its wider context, the acoustic landscape of The Rough Field. ‘My uncle played the fiddle’ — a plain enough statement, but according in its iambic beat to the first bar of a traditional reel. It makes a neat musical contrast to the flowery ‘more elegantly the violin’, a phrase which we can imagine spoken in a genteel Received Pronunciation. Etymologically, it is probable that both words are from Latin vitula, a stringed instrument, from Vitula, the goddess of joy and victory, hence vitulari, ‘to celebrate joyfully’. The English words have different registers. They are, in a sense, translations of each other; and translation, both in the sense of ‘to remove to another place’ and ‘to render into another language’ is at the heart of The Rough Field, itself a translation of the place name Garvaghey, garbh achaidh, ‘a rough field’. Achaidh is a Northern variant of achadh; and I note that Ó Dónaill’s Irish Dictionary cites Cúig Achadh Uisnigh, ‘the five fields of Uisneach, the five fifths of Ireland’. We think of that iconic Republican song, ‘Four Green Fields’. A severed tongue of politics lurks behind the name.
‘He knew “The Morning Star” and “O’Neill’s Lament”’: one tune is a joyous reel, the other not. Later on, the poem entitled ‘Lament for the O’Neills’ brings the music explicitly into politics, or politics into music, evoking ‘burnt houses, pillaged farms, / a province in flames’. We begin to see the fiddle left in the rafters in another light. Traditionally, guns were hidden in the rafters. There is, indeed, a reel known as ‘The Gun in the Thatch’; and usually we do not think that fiddles rust, but guns do. In other words, the poem begins to acquire ‘the symbolic depth-charge of music’, as Montague has it later on in the volume.
If The Rough Field can be thought of as a musical composition, it is not so much symphony as fugue — a word which applies both to ‘continuously shifting melodic fragments that remain, in the “tune” sense, perpetually unfinished’, as Glenn Gould has it, and to an amnesiac state in which the sufferer loses his identity and takes on another. I well remember the impact that Montague’s book had on me when it first appeared in 1972. In its ambitious patterning, its bricolage of quotations set as marginalia to the poems, its obsessive circling around themes of exile and identity, its concern with language and music, it seemed like a more urgent retelling of The Waste Land: modernist in scope and method, but shot through with personal anxiety and grief for the loss of a cultural hinterland.
At the time I was only beginning to write seriously. In the same year I published my first pamphlet, The Insular Celts, whose title poem Montague would later include in The Faber Book of Irish Verse. In retrospect, I can now acknowledge the influence of The Rough Field on other books of mine, most obviously perhaps in Belfast Confetti; and more latterly if more obliquely in For All We Know, which uses the Glenn Gould quote above as one of its epigraphs.
‘So succession passes, through strangest hands.’