A friend of mine, Nollaig, once lived in an old, little, storied house in Galway, in a terraced street off Eyre Square. Most of the space in the downstairs room was composed of a cavernous fireplace, original to the house: it still had its swinging iron rod on which generations of kettles had boiled. The first time I visited her there, she said, casual as anything: ‘Watch out for the cat.’ Nollaig did not have a cat. She was talking about the ghost black cat that sometimes pulsed out of nothing and sat by her huge fireplace when it was alive with light. I loved the way she took for granted both the occasional presence of the ethereal cat, and the expectation that I would also do so.
‘Hearth Song’ is such an engaging poem because, like that spirit cat, it’s about both what’s present and what’s absent. And what you must then imagine exists in the undefined space between these two, and the catalyst they create together.
Never named as a cricket, the ‘it’ that lived under a large hearthstone in the kitchen of the Nialls’ cottage when John Montague was a child reminds people that it is there when it sporadically breaks into ‘constant, compelling praise’. Any sound that comes from underneath carries with it a subliminal suggestion of the place where people are laid when dead. Silenced voices. Absent presences. Times past. Like a ratchet of memory, the cricket’s urgent song from his hidden place makes the room quiet as people harken to the ‘solitary, complusive song / Composed for no one’. Composed for no one, but heard by those who listen.
Firesides, with their endlessly original shapeshifting of flames, are places where we all dream. They are portals to the imagination. To memory. Every new fireside we sit beside in our lives is a visceral recreation of something always both new and familiar. Boy and man, the poet has watched fires; many in the company of people who are now a ‘blind, ghostly audience’. The fire and the hearthside anchor him to something both essentially vital and lost forever.
Like John Montague wondering if he once saw when a boy a ‘minute, manic cellist, / scraping the shape of itself’ in a flagstone crack, for years I watched out for Nollaig’s cat. Late at night, once, I thought I glimpsed a feline shadow on the hearth. What did I see? I’m not sure. But I know by now just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
This is the kinetic energy of ‘Hearth Song’: that tantalizing sensation of knowing you have once experienced something important, without knowing why it was so. And so, you continue to search for that eponymous ‘it’ again. Until, unbidden, happiness comes marvellously and insistently creaking to us, ‘throbbing and trembling in darkness’, even when we have almost forgotten it exists.