In 1991 I spent a fortnight at the Yeats Summer School, a prize for a Writers’ Week competition. I didn’t know what to expect. Beforehand I re-read the Red Hanrahan poems, with occasional glances forward to Crazy Jane. I wasn’t disappointed when I met Sligo’s gathering of American and European Yeatsians who ran séances when the pubs shut and seemed minded to believe in fairies.
Every morning, though, I would struggle up from the youth hostel to Brian John’s class on Thomas Kinsella and John Montague, poets I’d read carefully that year in Galway. The poem that most caught my attention then was ‘The Wild Dog Rose’. Its story and images could not have been further from the summer school’s carefree night-time activities, although it too was informed differently by Yeats’s example, by that sense of responsibility and public address which drives the book in which it found its home, The Rough Field.
It is a big poem and combines many different elements of Irish poetry: it begins with the cailleach, and a sense of that national tradition, that ‘heavy greenness’ with which Montague has always engaged. He has argued with that tradition from the start, and here he refuses the usual images associated with the hag, stage-managing instead the realistic coming-to-life of that archetype in the poet’s old neighbour. But the poem is not just a note on earlier literature. Its strong narrative leads its readers into images of violence and sex which are still shocking now, ‘Leda and the Swan’ filtered into The Great Hunger, the verbs brutally effective as the neighbour ‘rummages’ the old woman’s body.
But the poem is more than an indictment of Dev’s Ireland and when it breaks off meditatively, ‘The only true madness is loneliness, / the monotonous voice in the skull / that never stops’, it lights up the woman’s character from a larger, human perspective. And how do we read the complicated irony of her protest: ‘I prayed / to the Blessed Virgin herself / for help and after a time / broke his grip’?
The poem avoids any predictable or party finish, and closes instead with the delicately sexual, loving and musical description of the dog rose, ‘at the tip of a / slender, tangled, arching branch’, ‘that weak flower’ with which the poem aims to restore the woman, as it also extends to its readers a greater sense of what an Irish poem could do.