I bought a second-hand copy of Tides as an undergraduate, more for its physical beauty than any full comprehension, never dreaming I might one day meet its author. Knowing little of my own tides, or the mystery of being a woman, I found this poem among others there fascinating, informative, sensitive to the female viewpoint. I had no idea how to write about being a woman or relating to one. It seemed a daring outspokenness for an Irish Catholic voice then, a step beyond Kavanagh, more in the realistic vein of McGahern or Moore, more sympathetic than Joyce. Dated in a way now, I still find the broken verse form encapsulating twin opposed attitudes to the feminine body tender, sensuous, brutal and passionate, as Montague so often is in his wide range of exquisite love poems.
I once attended a poetry reading by Seamus Heaney where he came under attack for having the women in his poems ‘always up to their oxters in flour’. While this could not be levelled at Montague, his women, for they are numerous, tend rather to be spreadeagled in hotel bedrooms, though more romantically than Muldoon’s. In this longish meditation, the woman is isolated, a nude model, subject to the phallic gaze and penetration of ‘an army of pencils’. She is also a bait or fish-quarry, a favourite trope of Montague’s, to be goaded into the net of the drawings and equally of the poem itself. Her body, as so frequently in his poetry, is compared to the natural world of plants of which her forced smile is the blossom.
I believe that something of this poem must have entered the title poem of my own first volume, The Flower Master, and indeed the title poem of Drawing Ballerinas. The first section of the poem could apply to a male body as much as a female, although there is a softness and grace that suggest the feminine. Everything is safely under the control of the eye and mind until without warning, as the imagery takes off into caves and pools, the sexual arousal of the viewer warms to the possibility that this exposed nakedness is a harvest actually available. He uses the word ‘love’ as a synonym for sex, then in brackets describes the guilty lust and sin-obsessed wrestlings of a Hopkins or mediaeval scribe.
The tides of the poem then revert, as after orgasm, to a repeat of the initial calm contemplation, pondering the internal mental state of the paid worker, her acceptance and financial necessity. Here her body is discussed more intimately as if, from within the woman herself, the poet succeeds in entering the living reality of the female body with its history of suffering, its scars and stitches, a highly unusual capacity for empathy that Montague demonstrates elsewhere. There is a more physiological emphasis here which acknowledges the ever-threatening presence of death.
The mood darkens once again to a rhetorical questioning of the morality of looking at a woman in this way, where she becomes food and drink like a Eucharist. He criticizes the negative effect of modern dress reshaping and denying the fertility of the traditional womb, reducing women to mechanical clones of themselves. There seems to me a rural self-consciousness here in his juxtaposition of the words ‘brassiere’ and ‘arse’, not used satirically but perfectly seriously. He sails close to the shore of political offensiveness for a contemporary audience, were it not for the immediate follow-up of reverence given to ‘the mother lode’. Montague’s poems are among the most lucid and honest in their praise and appraisal of women, because of his deep and total appreciation of his mother, his strange upbringing which he details so accurately.
This is an achievement of self-scrutiny as much as of voyeurism. The passive muse triumphs spiritually over the freezing paralysis of her stark circumstances to resist final or total capture by anyone. The pun in ‘tired’ hints that she manages to protect and even to clothe herself ‘as when in silks my Julia goes’ in defiance of exhaustion. Despite its old-fashioned air, this particular poem remains for me a life class, teaching the sadness and economy of what might still be called the flesh.