In the open windows of this cross-Bronx spring, the smell of the sun hitting bricks brings me back to boyhood in the bright life of hedges and stoops. Cue today’s mass-bells and wrens and old men’s hearsay, the papers at McLean luncheonettes set for time travel. The Post shows a 4-train barreling into capital letters – ‘KNIFE HORROR ON SUBWAY’ – like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The Irish Echo headlines the inquest for the 1971 Ballymurphy massacre, and I recall the old NORAID posters I’ve seen unchanged in pubs since I was a teenager. The world rewinds with me. It’s a day staged to learn that former Sinn Féin activist, Richard Behal, is donating a trove of writing from Long Kesh to Ruan O’Donnell, a University of Limerick historian, that includes ‘The Greatest Hell,’ an unpublished poem by Bobby Sands. It’s in his poems that Sands’ iconographies regain dimension, staging fraught negotiations between lyric, political, and physical selfhood.
During the Easter Rising, Yeats viewed the poetic force of republicanism with what Daniel Mulhall calls his characteristic ‘foreboding and two-mindedness.’ He was a poet with a ‘sense of knowing how things would appear to people after the event.’ His poems’ speakers, in turn, often staged a catlike lyric distance from his political subjects. ‘Easter, 1916,’ for example, concludes with these lines:
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Consider the caginess of Yeats’s ‘I’ alongside Pádraig Pearse’s delivery of the Easter Proclamation at the Dublin GPO. ‘In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood,’ Pearse began, ‘Ireland, through us, summons her children.’ What does Yeats want us to make of 1916’s ‘terrible beauty?’ What’s the moral valence of ‘utter’ change to names like Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, and MacBride? Yeats, in both senses of the word, pens the interpretive problem into verse. Pearse, on the other hand, stakes himself as a quasi-poetic ‘I’ of verse ‘in the name of God’ and ‘through us.’ He asserts a lyrical right to speak as much as a framework for understanding political action.
It’s not a pedantic comparison, the political Yeats and poetical Pearse. Talking about the Proclamation in terms of a poem’s ‘Lyric I’ – or ‘We’ in this instance – acknowledges the fact that the Easter Rising was uniquely a ‘Poets’ Revolution.’ Both Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh were accomplished versifiers. Connolly dabbled. According to the Irish-language poet, Louis De Paor, Pearse’s own literary trajectories, cut short by his execution, had promised ‘a sophisticated model for a new literature in Irish that would [have] reestablish[ed] a living connection with the pre-colonial Gaelic past while resuming its relationship with contemporary Europe, bypassing the monolithic influence of English.’
To be sure, a great deal of Irish verse during the 1910s and 1920s, univocal ‘in the intensity and wrath of [its] invective,’ lacked the rhetorical nuance of Yeats’ Modernism. But even pure partisan expressions relied on complex poetic situations. An invocation to cut the throats ‘of the English dogs / who shot our Irish leaders!’ could be repurposed for ‘the dirty louts / that shot our brave Free Staters!’ but only because of their shared preface: ‘Oh Lord above, / send down a dove / with beak as sharp as razors.’ It’s the image’s hard turn that sparks, here, like something from Ted Hughes’s Crow, more than its use ‘confirming people in their already existing attitudes.’ To crib De Paor’s phrasing, the ‘living connection’ is between the sprung poetic conceit, the murder-dove in this instance, and the vocative act that proclaims the presence of mind and ‘I.’ Formally speaking, this friction’s what lends the ‘confirming’ slogans and situations of republican poems something like the force of rite. Their lyric speakers invoke the ‘Indignant Muse’ to become visible as its intercessors.
It’s the reason so many of Sands’ poems are more tuned to the ear than the page. They require a voice for full ignition, echoing the figure of the marcach duaine, or ‘poem rider,’ who recited verse in the Irish Dán Díreach style. A ballad like ‘Back Home in Derry,’ for example, swings the pendulum toward formal and rhetorical confirmations that readers anticipate – regular rhyme, refrains, penal transportation, republicanism. That’s its purpose. ‘The political imperative for poetry,’ Seán Hewitt remarks, ‘was for Sands the key criterion against which all contemporary verse was to be held accountable.’ For the ‘Blanket Men’ of the H-Blocks, it was also a visceral proclamation and habitual reconfirmation of life-and-death solidarities. At the same time, prison writing at Long Kesh and Armagh was often heartbreakingly intimate and idiosyncratic. Sands’ prose Prison Diary, which recounts the first 17 days of his hunger strike, retains its resonance partly because it unveils the several men that young men are at once. ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world,’ Sands begins, ‘and may God have mercy on my soul.’ A voice at full ignition.
On the 40th anniversary of his death, ‘Hell’ makes the edges of Sands’ life visible because it, too, is an analogous ‘trembling world’ of formal in-betweenness. The Irish Times has transcribed the poem in its entirety here. Pause, read it; read it, now you’re back.
You felt the extended length of each line. In Sands’ corpus, it’s threshold architecture between poem and prose, ballad and journal. In Irish, ‘threshold’ is tairseach, from which we get tairseachúil, or ‘liminal.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, in turn, gives us ‘life at the Irish border’ as its example for the second meaning of ‘liminal’ as ‘the transitional or intermediate between two states, situations, etc.’ It’s the kind of semantic echoing that happens in ‘The Greatest Hell,’ where sonic elements thread older patterns of Irish-language poetry into English vernacular. The poem’s a borderland of forms and metaphors with overlapping signage.
The Times breaks Sands’ lines before their natural ends to fit screen space. I wouldn’t belabor this accident as a metaphor for the Hunger Strike, but it does remind us of a vital point about how Sands’ poems came to be on the page in the first place. H-Block prisoners wrote in Bible margins and on walls, toilet paper scraps, cigarette papers that could be easily folded and smuggled.
It’s a clever intellectual exercise for a poet like Wordsworth to analogize poetic form and cloistering in a sonnet like ‘Nuns Fret Not,’ but physical page space was a real formal constraint for Sands’ expression. Even in Long Kesh prison writing, where the words become miniscule to fit the literal edges of scraps and margins, there’s an aesthetic principle of friction between physical contortion and full lyric expression. To read ‘Hell’s’ long lines as written, end-rhyme to end-rhyme, is to both exhaust ourselves of breath with the poem’s speaker and resist the physical realities of confinement on confessional speech. To the extent that the physical page blurred the relationship with conceptual form, it also elided the living writer with the lyric convention of the poem’s ‘I.’ Sands, for example, who lamented that ‘the Men of Art have lost their heart,’ wrote his poems ‘with the refill of a Biro pen which he kept hidden inside his body.’
In a limited sense, approach Sands’ ‘Hell’ as a reversal of the poetic distancing in Yeats’ ‘1916.’ In the latter, a ‘Lyric I’ tries to contain and order uncertainties – the meaning of 3rd-person identities, ‘utter’ changes, ‘terrible beauty’ being birthed – through the formal decision to ‘write it out in verse.’ In the rendered H-Block scrap-page of ‘Hell,’ Sands’ ‘Lyric I’ asserts itself, Pearse-like, ‘in the name of God and the dead generations.’ Yeats claims an observational speaking authority. Sands’ speaker makes ‘terrible beauty’ the 1st-person confessional space, both literal and rhetorical, of the ‘threshold.’
Perhaps it’s helpful to think of Yeats’ and Sands’ lyric speakers contesting over that word, threshold. Yeats had his own sense. It’s the setting of a 1904 verse play called The King’s Threshold. In the play, a poet named Seanchan protests the injustice of his lord, King Guaire. Seanchan’s mode of protest is troscud, a custom of fasting against grievance that ‘gave an individual of lower social standing a temporary position of moral and legal power over a more privileged individual’ under Ireland’s Brehon Law. One wonders what Yeats’ mature political verse would look like with Seanchan as a Lyric I, rather than a voice in a manageable chorus in a manageable tragedy, distanced by myth. In ‘The Greatest Hell,’ one does not wonder what troscud sounds like when a living man and his Lyric I lay claim to each other’s voices.
‘Life,’ Yeats speculates in The King’s Threshold, ‘is a long preparation for something that never happens.’ On 10 March 1981, Bobby Sands wrote in his diary that ‘tomorrow is the eleventh day and there is a long way to go. Someone should write a poem of the tribulations of a hunger striker. I would like to, but how could I finish it.’ There’s no question mark in Sands’ diary. It asks with Yeats-like philosophical certitude, a historical ‘long view.’ ‘The Greatest Hell,’ however, reminds us that how speech finishes is also a question of who claims authority to speak and make it mean in the first place, in a small space.
