‘Courtyard in Winter’ appeared in A Slow Dance, a book I bought on its publication in 1975, when I was a first-year student at UCC. Montague’s presence in Cork at that time, among others such as Seán Lucy and Thomas McCarthy, brought the actualité of Irish poetry within my reach. The slim new volume from Dolmen/Oxford was proof of the connection between my new locality and the wider world of reputation and approval. (At eighteen I was too unsure of myself to become one of the regulars at Montague’s house, but I did visit once, escorted by Tom McCarthy, the first person I met who had a serious commitment to the craft of poetry.)
The occasion of the poem is a suicide, a lonely denial of so many of the relationships that connect people through trust, sharing and good faith. It also stands full square against the hope with which poetry is made. To attempt to write poetry in response to suicide is to send a probe into a black hole where it may be swallowed before it has any opportunity of sending back a reliable record.
As the writer sets out on this mission in ‘Courtyard in Winter’, he clearly does so with a redemptive purpose, but he is also aware of the challenge he faces. The stakes are high, so the poem begins tentatively, with only a minimal observation, which becomes a refrain: ‘Snow curls in on the cold wind.’ ‘Slowly,’ he writes in terms of cautious self-scrutiny, ‘I push back the door’: the question is whether the act of writing will be adequate to its subject. Although the writer has at his disposal the archetypes of literary tradition and their rhetorical apparatus, the first stanza delays these until line 5, when a Yeatsian ‘minimal fury’ is delivered at the same time as the rhyme ‘alive’ to close the couplet. Then, with the adoption of the refrain — another Yeatsian trope — it is clear that literary form is here determined to make a stand.
The second stanza evokes the stark, elemental struggle of life through the winter with the antiquarian motif of the shield pressing down on a dormant earth. We are then catapulted forward to a modern winter where, on the rebound, the poet plays with time, turning his final farewell with the dead friend into a present tense: ‘The friend whom I have just left / Will be dead, a year from now.’
If some of the devices suggest a debt to Yeats, the undercurrents here are Wordsworthian: memories of his native countryside come to assist him as he demonstrates the endurance of life through bleak conditions. There’s a wonderful, life-affirming exuberance in ‘I plunged through snowdrifts once’, breaking through the solemnity of the piece like the play of children at a wake. The ‘flaring / Hearth’ of the mountain farm where he delivered the news of a dying relative has the intensity of Wuthering Heights, another theatre of survival in harsh circumstances. On his way back, animal tracks in the snow have the mysterious potency of hieroglyphs; their ‘Minute and frail’ characters also operate typographically, as black marks on the white page.
All these affirmations turn on the axis of the poem’s central disclosure in the ninth stanza: ‘So, before dawn, comfort fails.’ At its bleakest moment, however, even here, literacy pulls language back from the brink: the Beckettian touch is unmistakable, as Montague anticipates by several years the searing poignancy of Ohio Impromptu; the details of the suicide during a hard London winter reverberate inevitably to Plath. These associations, I believe, crystallize around the poem and strengthen it.
In the second- and third-last stanzas, the poet attempts a recovery with reference to an outside world to get away from the tragic confinement of the ‘sad / Bedsitting room’. The eye of the solitary writer is on the weather, but still captures in passing the street stalls and the street sweepers, images of ordinary life carrying on through the dark months.
With the end in sight, the writer’s instincts lead him to look for figurative and symbolic elements: the survey of trees and foliage is distilled into the ‘winter wreath’ of the laurel. Here the classical symbol of victory and artistic excellence is attenuated to a memorial tribute, but the sense of a contest is still strong. And finally, as he makes his calm assertion of life and its enduring memories, the poem transforms the snowflake itself into a symbol, ‘fragile/ But intricate as the rose’.
This substantial poem confronts a bleak moment without false rhetoric and even without feigned modesty. A poet in impressive command of tradition manages to pick his way through the debris of memory and association to get to the site of a tragedy. From this position of absolute desolation, where ‘comfort fails’, he recovers a measure of faith in life’s process.