Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)

Péter Dolmányos: An Outline of the Relationship Between Romanticism and Contemporary Irish Poetry

ROMANTICISM AND CON TEMPORARY IRISH POETRY 19 The wind that blows these words to you bangs nightly off the black-and-blue Atlantic, hammering in haste dark doors of the declining west whose rock-built houses year by year collapse, whose strong sons disappear (no homespun cottage industries' embroidered cloths will patch up these lost townlands on the crumbling shores of Europe).

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n The coasts of Ireland are the scenes of destruction, the tide eating the land away, houses falling into the sea

—and these areas are at the same time the 'crumbling shores / of Europe', signalling perhaps more than a change of the physical environment, as Europe is also a cultural term. The richly alliterative music of the lines makes the vision even more haunting and the scene even darker. Michael Longley escapes to Mayo from the violence. He is extremely fond of the lush world of the countryside and the vegetation plays an important role in his poetry: names of plants of various kinds feature significantly in his poems. Plants may act as 'instruments' of redemption in time of violence, as in the poem 'Finding a Remedy': Sprinkle the dust from a mushroom or chew The white end of a rush, apply the juice From fern roots, stems of burdocks, dandelions, Then cover the wound with cuckoo-sorrel Or sphagnum moss, bringing together verse And herb, plant and prayer to stop the bleeding.

1

4 Specimens of plants are used here explicitiy for curing, and the last two lines indicate the kinship between curative plants and poetry. In another short poem, 'In Memory of Charles Donnelly', botany is represented by the olive tree. The Biblical resonances of the olive tree 1

3 Mahon, p. 44. 1

4 Longley, M. Poems 1963-1983. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1986, p. 159.