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

20 PÉTER DOLMÁNYOS are sharply contrasted with the atmosphere of the Spanish Civil War (the subtitle of the poem is Killed in Spain, 27.2.37, aged 22)\ I Minutes before a bullet hits you in the forehead There is a lull in the machine-gun fire, time to pick From the dust a bunch of olives, time to squeeze them, To understand the groans and screams and big abstractions By saying quietly 'Even the olives are bleeding'. II Buried among the roots of that olive tree, you are Wood and fruit and the skylight its branches make Through which to read as they accumulate for ever The poems you go on not wridng in the tree's shadow As it circles the fallen olives and the olive-stones.

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5 Longley juxtaposes the horrible scene of the bullet hitting the forehead with the moment of silence and peace preceding it, and the squeezed olives become analogous with the wounded person as both are 'bleeding'. The second section is reminiscent of Wordsworth's Lucy, who also becomes one with the natural world after her death, 'Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees'

—the young vicdm of Longley's poem is now the 'Wood and fruit and the skylight'. * Schelling considered mythology as the essential condition and primary material of all art;

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6 'for Keats myth was of the same imaginative order as the poet's knowledge,'

1' and Blake went as far as the attempt at creating a private mythology. These ideas clearly indicate the preoccupation of the Romantics with myth, based on the conviction that the experience contained in and communicated by myths is fundamental to humanity. Modernism returned to this conviction

—T. S. Eliot's view of 1

5 Longley, M. Gorse Fires. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1991, p. 48. 1

6 Schelling, quoted in Péter, A. Koppant szivárvány. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1996, p. 88. 1

7 Kermode, p. 9.