John Montague (19292016)

16 / 12 / 2016

John Montague

John Montague

born in Brooklyn
sent back to Ireland at the age of 4 to live with his
aunt on the family farm in County Tyrone,
Northern Ireland
lived in exile in America (the 1950s) and in Paris
(the 1960s)
returned to Ireland in 1972, settled in Cork,
then moved to France again

John Montague

dual cultural perspective

sensitivity to the tortured history of his nation
articulated in his two most successful
volumes:
T he Rough Field (1972) and A Slow Dance
(1975)

John Montague

on his own sense of place:

I had moved from one of the most advanced areas
of the 20th century, New York, back to one of the
more 19th century ways of life. These
contrasts were implanted in me. When I came
down south I moved to the Irish Free State, which
again, was a different world.

John Montague

confusion about place

exploring the already nagging question of Irish
identity

compared to Kavanagh

addressing the rural and local

a religious sense of the local and the past

John Montague

The Rough Field (1972)

- the most direct response to the history of the
island and the renewed outbreak of violence in the
North in 1969
drew constantly on his sense of place
attempted to create a structure that would explain
the complex questions of identity and origins

John Montague

a spatial dimension emphasised

not in terms of physical environment but as part
of the human affective world
the land as a recurring motif in Irish
literature

John Montague

The long poem consisting of ten sections

and the epilogue:
1) Home Again; 2) The Leaping Fire; 3) The Bread
God; 4) A Severed Head; 5) The Fault; 6) A Good
Night; 7) Hymn to the New Omagh Road; 8)
Patriotic Suite; 9) A New Siege; 10) The Wild Dog
Rose

John Montague

the poem dealing with:

Montagues upbringing in the house of his aunt;
the history of the Irish people; his republican
father; the nationalist dreams of his country; the
outbreak of violence in the North, and the
destruction of the countryside by modernizing
engineering work

John Montague

t he use of history running through the poem

implies a sense of loss, both his own loss, and his
communitys loss
conscious of his own role as the voice of a
community expressing its loss
the psychological quest behind the complete
poem in the beginning:

John Montague

from the opening section, Home Again:

I assume old ways of walk and work
So easily, yet feel the sadness of return
To what seems still, though changing.

Harsh landscape that haunts me,

Well and stone, in the bleak moors of dream.
With all my circling a failure to return.

John Montague

returning imaginatively to the old farm and

countryside in order to recover a sense of
identity and cultural meaning
h is own family history colliding with Irish history
an attempt to reconstruct a lost world
remaking Garvaghey (the Anglicization of the
Gaelic place-name which means a rough
field)

from The Rough Field

All around, shards of a lost tradition:
From the Rough Field I went to school
In the Glen of the Hazels. Close by
Was the bishopric of the Golden Stone;
The cairn of Carleton's homesick poem.
Scattered over the hills, tribal
And placenames, uncultivated pearls.
No rock or ruin, dun or dolmen
But showed memory defying cruelty
Through an image-encrusted name.

from The Rough Field

The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the fingertips of instinct.
The last Gaelic speaker in the parish
When I stammered my school Irish
One Sunday after mass, crinkled
A rusty litany of praise:
Ta an Ghaeilge againn aris ...

John Montague

t he idea of tradition essential to the poems

purpose
t o read the landscape and recall its Irish names =
attempt to bridge the gapped, discontinuous
condition of Irish culture
h istory and culture absorbed by the landscape,
preserved there by the old language, which
signifies location

from The Rough Field

the image of the grafted tongue

the alien English language that the Irish were
forced to learn:
An Irish
Child weeps at school
Repeating its English.

...

from The Rough Field

...
Toslurandstumble
Inshame
thealteredsyllables
ofyourownname:
...
Incabin
andfield,theystill
speaktheoldtongue.
Youmaygreetnoone.

from The Rough Field

Togrow
asecondtongue,as
harshahumiliation
astwicetobeborn.
Decadeslater
thatchildsgrandchilds
speechstumblesoverlost
syllablesofanoldorder.

John Montague

Thomas Kinsella on not feeling fully at home

in the English language:

In all of this I recognize a great inheritance and,

simultaneously, a great loss. The inheritance is certainly
mine, but only at enormous removes across a centurys
silence and through the exchange of worlds. The greatness
of the loss is measured not only by the substance of Irish
literature itself, but also by the intensity with which we
know it was shared; ...

John Montague

... it has an air of continuity and shared history

which is precisely what is missing from Irish
literature, in English or Irish, in the 19th century
and today. I recognize I stand on one side of a
great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in
myself. It is a matter of people and places as well
as writing of coming from a broken and
uprooted family, of being drawn to those who
share my origins and finding that we cannot share
our lives.

John Montague

Brian Friels playTranslations (1980)

describing how, once the English have
replaced Gaelic with anglicized names,
every member of the parish starts to
lose his or her way
the enforced translation of Gaelic placenames providing a dramatic metaphor for
the Anglo-Irish historical reationship

John Montague

From the Epilogue:

A changing rural pattern means clack
Of tractor for horse, sentinel shape
Of silo, hum of milking machines:
The same from Ulster to the Ukraine.
...

John Montague
Our finally lost dream of man at home
in a rural setting! A giant hand
as we pass by, reaches down
to grasp the fields we gazed upon.
Harsh landscape that haunts me,
well and stone, in the bleak moors of dream
with all my circling a failure to return
to what is already going
going
GONE

John Montague

recognizing the changes which have

destroyed the pastoral rituals of the
landscape
t he traditional pastoral resource for poetry,
man at home / in a rural setting is passing into
a bleak economic future
t he tone of this recognition is consonant with
the harshness of the landscape itself

John Montague

...a valid translation of the local (Garvaghey) into

the universal (The Rough Field)...
Montague has not only found tradition but also,
through its extension and use, the possibility of
continuity
his rough field, may be the victim of 20th century
progress, but through poetic effort has achieved a
symbolic significance impervious to change