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Derek Coyle’s Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow (2019) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster (2024) is published in a dual language edition in Tranas, Sweden.
His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Texas Literary Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Orbis, Skylight 47, Assaracus, The High Window and The Stony Thursday Book.
Derek lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s, Ireland.
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The Transformative Power of Form:
a poet’s shaping in Paula Meehan’s ‘My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis’
and Michael Longley’s ‘The Balloon’.
They say we never escape from our parents. There seems to be more than sufficient evidence for this claim amongst Irish poets, particularly our contemporaries. We think of Heaney’s fine poems about his parents: ‘When all the others were away at mass’, about peeling potatoes with his mother; and ‘The Harvest Bow’, about a country walk with his father. And then we have Eavan Boland’s ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’, a poem about the courtship of her parents and the power of an object to help say the unsayable, or at least lead a poet to the writing of the unsaid. In this essay I would like to focus on two fine examples of the parent-poem, Paula Meehan’s ‘My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis’, and Michael Longley’s ‘The Balloon’. I would like to consider the movements of both poet’s shaping imaginations, particularly as revealed in their handling of the powerful articulation and transformational possibilities made available to them through poetic form. What happens when elements of experience encounter the exigencies of artistic shaping; how does experience become art through the means and potentialities achieved through the formal elements of the art form itself? The tool bag of poetry affords many opportunities and possibilities that a resourceful poet can exploit to deepen and enrich the story that they wish to tell.
The first and most significant tool the poet has in her kit is the poetic line which is shaped by rhythm, length, where to break it, and the significance of the blank space at the end of this line. Poetic lines are often contained within stanzas of various types, in the original Italian a term denoting a little room. Which leads us to poetry as a type of architecture (a meaningful metaphor), a building of houses of many or a few rooms, to contain ideas, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, even to develop arguments. Poetry isn’t the only house to experience arguments in its rooms, I’m sure! In Paula Meehan’s ‘My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis’, the stanzas are irregular, varying from a stanza of nine lines at the longest, to a stanza of three lines at the shortest.[1] In keeping with many free verse poems, Meehan’s poem has no set metrical rhythm or pattern guiding her lines, but nevertheless, to achieve a rhythmic pattern at all regularity has to arrive and even in the freest of free verse poems there is a remarkable consistency of length in the poetic line. Unsurprisingly, we find this in Meehan’s poem, where we can see that most of the lines are of a similar length, with the odd stretching out, or drawing in, to achieve an effect such as would happen in human speech, of rushing on with excitement, or holding back in silence or reticence.
Here is the poem:
MY FATHER PERCEIVED AS A VISION OF ST FRANCIS
It was the piebald horse in next door’s garden
frightened me out of a dream
with her dawn whinny. I was back
in the boxroom of the house,
my brother’s room now,
full of ties and sweaters and secrets.
Bottles chinked on the doorstep,
the first bus pulled up to the stop.
The rest of the house slept
except for my father. I heard
him rake the ash from the grate,
plug in the kettle, hum a snatch of a tune.
Then he unlocked the back door
and stepped out into the garden.
Autumn was nearly done, the first frost
whitened the slates of the estate.
He was older than I had reckoned,
his hair completely silver,
and for the first time I saw the stoop
of his shoulder, saw that
his leg was stiff. What’s he at?
So early and still stars in the west?
They came then: birds
of every size, shape, colour; they came
from the hedges and shrubs,
from eaves and garden sheds,
from the industrial estate, outlying fields,
from Dubber Cross they came
and the ditches of the North Road.
The garden was a pandemonium
when my father threw up his hands
and tossed the crumbs to the air. The sun
cleared O’Reilly’s chimney
and he was suddenly radiant,
a perfect vision of St Francis,
made whole, made young again,
in a Finglas garden.
Paula Meehan
Meehan’s opening line establishes much that is important for this lyrically narrative poem. We know we are in a bedroom of a house with neighbour’s next door who own a horse and keep it in the garden – I won’t go so far as to say that we are in a Northside Dublin suburb just yet, but we are. One that might see a horse in the garden of a city estate. It is early morning. Meehan’s first sentence is stretched across three lines. What does this poetic tactic achieve, or give her as a storyteller – why has she bothered telling this tale in poetic form? What can poetic form add to the story? From the off we can see how her line-break adds drama to the voice telling the story. After the short pause that comes with the line-break after ‘garden’, we land on the verb of the sentence, ‘frightened’; due to its placement after the line-break this word takes what we call poetic stress, it receives an extra emphasis – as it is the verb and the major emotion of the opening line, this is appropriate and immediately a tone is established, a speaking voice with its own tonal emphasis appears. And there is a poetic tension established in this second line between the words at the beginning and end of the line: who likes to be ‘frightened’ out of a ‘dream’? Dreams, as opposed to nightmares, are meant to be a pleasant escape from reality. We hear the music of the long vowels in ‘dawn whinny’, and in this onomatopoeic effect, we can hear the piebald horse that has startled and awoken the poet.
We notice the slightly odd choice of leaving part of the next sentence ‘I was back’ out on the end of the line but realize that it is entirely appropriate. It alerts us to the fact that she is back in a place she left quite some time ago. We will discover she has changed, as the family home has changed, and we are readied for the possibility of altered perception that will emerge as the poem’s major concern in due course. Leaving the phrase out on its own like this generates a distinctive tone or emphasis too, a startled recognition. We have the Irish idiom of ‘boxroom’, her ‘brother’s room now/full of ties and sweaters and secrets.’ Her list of three adds dynamism and energy to these items of a boy’s school uniform and clothes, but also the surprise introduction of the more mysterious ‘secrets’ sees the poet shift the emphasis for this third item on her list. ‘Ties’ and ‘sweaters’ are concrete objects, we are certain of what we are dealing with through our senses, but the more abstract ‘secrets’ is altogether more suggestive, human, and open-ended. In this way she alludes to differences between the older sister and her younger brother, differences of age and experience, but also of gender. We have our second onomatopoeic sonic encounter in the beautiful ‘chinked’ as the milk bottles land on the outside doorstep as was the practice in Dublin in the recent past. This word and others like it enhance the sonic texture of the lines and the sense of sonic unity across the poem, as we hear subtle chimes internal to the line scattered randomly in no set or predictable pattern across the poem. Many contemporary poets eschew the pleasures of end-rhyme in favour of internal rhyme, mainly achieved through assonance, consonance, and light alliteration, to not break the spell of a plausible and authentic speaking voice but to still enjoy the pleasures of a subtle music which is such a central feature of the encounter with poetry. In this sense, poetic voice trumps formal patterning in much of contemporary verse. As we say this, we notice the daring of Meehan’s ending three lines in succession with a similar sound: ‘doorstep’, ‘stop’, and ‘slept’. Yes and no, as she plays with the tension achieved between the similarities and differences of ‘step’ and ‘stop’. It’s amazing the difference that one letter can make.
Meehan daringly stretches her next sentence across not only the line-break but the verse break. Not only that, but she also continues her sonic daring by choosing ‘except’, so close in sound to the recent ‘slept’, ‘step’, and ‘stop’. However, this is justified for her exceptional father who now emerges as the true subject of the poem as he is made central by this extraordinary emphasis made possible by the line-break and the verse break. The long pause achieved by these means generates an extra stress on the ‘except for’, as is entirely in keeping with the poem’s concerns. She hears her father at work; we have a second elongated list of three as he goes about his morning routine; and the relish of the third onomatopoeic word of the poem in ‘rake’, with its elongated vowel and harsh ‘k’ suggesting a raking sound as steel meets concrete or brick.
Her father moves out to the garden, and we have a traditional comparison established. He, like the year, is in the autumn of his life. As frost has whitened the slates of the roofs of the estate so has time whitened his hair, it is now ‘completely silver’. We enjoy the pleasurable music of ‘first frost’ and the ‘slates of the estate’. Here we see the poet’s new perception heightened by her being absent for some time and anticipated since the opening of the poem: her father has grown old. Here we are in the centre of the poem. And her most daring formal move is to slow the pace of the poem right down. Meehan achieves this through two strong line-breaks and two rhetorical questions. For the first time she notices his ‘stoop’ and we pause here with the line-break; and then she ‘saw that’, and we pause again, ‘his leg was stiff’. And through this double enjambment Meehan suggests the physical slowing of her father, she suggests through poetic technique something that has registered in his body and she can see with her eyes. This is a fine example of what I have called in an earlier essay estomimopeia. That is, where a formal device or technique in the poem mimics the physical reality of the thing being suggested within the poem. So, the formal pattern here, the run-on or enjambed line, its repetition and extra impact, the double slowing of the pace, suggests the father’s decreased mobility. The movement of the poem’s lines, their slowing, suggests the physical movement of the father as she sees him in the real world. The rhetorical questions underline the slowing of the pace. With these the poem almost comes to a stop or a standstill right here in the heart of the poem, its physical centre. By these means the poet has really emphasized this moment. Her father’s movement has almost come to a stop.
Having slowed the poem right down, Meehan shifts several gears through the next stanza and really ups the pace of the poem in a marked way. Formally speaking, stanza four is a pivotal verse. It is the lift-off to the final revelation in the closing stanzas of the poem. Meehan achieves the change of pace through a listing effect, which also echoes the form of a litany, a type of prayer common in Catholic tradition. We have the subject of the stanza placed in the pivotal position at the end of the line, the birds. Then the list of three, our third list of three in this poem, which now functions like a type of recurrent motif, or at least, the echo of an echo of a rhythm, sonically unifying the poem and helping to hold it together: ‘every size, shape, colour’. Unusually, we have the verb ‘they came’ repeated twice across the stanza, with the second functioning in an inverted way. This might add to the prayer-like feel of the stanza, a faint hint of the archaic formulas of prayers. We have the mild anaphora of the ‘from’ formula repeated four times; the doubles of ‘hedges and shrubs’, ‘eaves and gardens’, opening out on the third to the triple of ‘industrial estate, outlying fields,/from Dubber Cross’. These patterns echo prayers and are rhetorically convincing on our ear. And we end on the single ‘the ditches of the North Road’. This is how the birds arrive at the garden from the very edges of the known world of this community, its intimate familiarity with Dubber Cross and the North Road. And so, from its slowest point, the poem shifts gear through this pivotal transitional stanza, so shaped, so controlled, to prepare to deliver the revelation promised us from the very title of the poem and which we have yet to see but which we have been prepared for. In fact, we are now accelerating towards it at some pace.
The moment arrives, the father, arms outstretched, receives the birds to feed them. We believe the rhetorical exaggeration of the scene; the poem’s unrelenting momentum has guaranteed that. So many birds from so far away (relatively speaking) have heard the call. This poem’s iconic image indicates how poets draw on a cultural reserve, often subconsciously. We know Meehan is a poet of Western Europe, and Catholic Western Europe at that, as she draws on Renaissance inspired images to construct her vision of her father as St Francis in his garden. To clinch the image, we see Meehan shift the register of her diction as she uses the longest multisyllabic word of the poem: ‘pandemonium’. With its Greek origin, it sounds suitably strange, a vehicle for the uncanny, the supernatural. It has its roots in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but it is also a word drawn from the rich vernacular of Dublin speech. This word was not unfamiliar to the lips of Meehan or her parents and grandparents. Still, it is the only word of this length in the poem. And its look and sound are just as important as what it means.
Then we have the confident placement of ‘the sun’ out on a limb of its own, so to speak, as we head into another line-break that runs into a verse break. It is morning, the sun is rising to reveal the father as St Francis haloed in light, as least to us this morning in our poetic imaginations. The drama is suggested through the breaking of the line and the carrying of meaning across the verse break into the next, in the poetic equivalent of the arrival and revelation of the sun. And the man we last saw as greying, stooped, and faltering, slowing down, is now ‘suddenly radiant’. Again, whilst shorter than the ‘pandemonium’ you feel the word ‘radiant’ comes from a different world than the other words in the poem as the poet uses her diction adroitly to suggest the transformation that is happening before her eyes. And the final stroke of formal genius in the poem is the pirouette before the exit, the medial caesura: ‘made whole, made young again’, which, with its symmetrical formal balance, the first ‘made’ before the comma, and the second ‘made’ after the comma, suggests the bodily restoration of the father. He is upright, and almost dancing, the form would suggest. And so, in an instance of estomimopeia, the formal balance of the lines prompts us to believe in the bodily transformation of the father, his transfiguration into a St Francis figure. And all of this, the impossible, the near miraculous, happens in that most denigrated and neglected and overlooked of Dublin communities, the northside suburb Finglas, one of the city’s tougher neighbourhoods. Meehan celebrates her community as she celebrates her father, a man in his place, this place. And poetry can help us see the extraordinary in the most ordinary and underestimated and every day of places.
Paula Meehan’s ‘My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis’ manages to deliver a remarkable vision, one which the poet’s adroit handling of a range of poetic forms makes possible. From the shift in register in the diction at a significant point, the slowing then speeding up of the pace of the poem at a key juncture in the narrative, to the lists of three and the medial caesura, the poet consistently draws on the right technique to achieve her desired effects. In this way, Meehan has sculpted this poem to deliver her vision. Above all else, it is the possibilities of the line, with its rhythm and movement and musicality (its insistent beat), with the possibility made available by line-breaks for emphasis; along with the several rooms of this house, its stanzas, which see the lines stretched across them at nodal points in the story; that help us see how this story has been, artfully and intentionally, controlled and shaped. As her sentences work in tension with the line and stanza shapes, Meehan constructs a voice with tonal emphasises that offer colour and texture to the poem, adding to its plausibility and sophistication.
By way of comparison and contrast we turn to an altogether different poet, one with an altogether different style, and with an altogether different take on his parent, this time his mother. While Meehan’s poem is a celebration of her father, Michael Longley’s ‘The Balloon’ is something of a lament for his mother.[2] She suffered an accident or illness during her life which resulted in a permanent disability. The poem never reveals exactly what happened. Still, despite the dark incident left unspoken at the centre of the poem, Longley manages to achieve something transformational in his poem; also, something purely imagined, but no less powerful for that. On first reading, ‘The Balloon’ might seem relatively unadorned and straightforward. However, a close reading will reveal the artful construction of this poem, an artfulness that has disguised its traces. This type of understatement is a hallmark of Longley’s style.
Here is the poem:
THE BALLOON
You are a child in the dream and not my mother.
I float above your head as in a hot air balloon
that casts no shadow on you looking up at me
and smiling and waving and running without a limp
across the shallow streams and fields of shiny grass
as though there were neither malformation nor pain.
This is the first time ever I have seen you running.
You are a child in the dream and not my mother
which may be why I call out from the balloon to you:
‘jump over the hedges, Connie, jump over the trees.’
Michael Longley
In this relatively short poem of ten lines, Michael Longley repeats one line twice: ‘You are a child in the dream and not my mother’. Remarkably, although the formula of words is the same, this essay will argue that the sentence means something different the second time around. Or, at the very least, takes on a different emotional colouration. The first sentence of the poem is end-stopped, an unusual enough way to open a poem. Missing the forward thrust into the poem of the more commonly used enjambed or run-on first line, Longley’s end-stopped opening takes on a declarative force. This is how it was. Important for any imaginative writing, we know where we are, who’s there, and what’s happening. We are in a dream and the poet is speaking to his mother, but not as he has known her all his life, as his mother, but as a child, prior to his birth, before his existence. This is a dream. After delaying the forward thrusting motion of the run-on line, Longley delivers it as his second line and beyond.
The fact that this second sentence of the poem runs on over five lines and constitutes half of the poem is significant. It is worth noting that this poem of ten lines has just four sentences. Two of the lines are complete end-stopped sentences. We have this sentence of five lines, and a second of three lines. This feature is important to the poem as we will see.
In the second sentence, the longest of the poem, Longley further elaborates on the happening of the dream and he helps us to imagine its dimensions more completely. His poem is one of intimate address to his mother; that intimate ‘you’ which is another characteristic of the Longley style. He tells his mother (and us listeners in on the conversation) that in the dream he is floating above his mother’s head ‘as if’ he is in a hot air balloon. There is something surreal here as this balloon ‘casts no shadow’. Longley’s phrasing is significant, with the hint of a possible double entendre. Even as the balloon literally casts no shadow, there is a foreshadowing of the darkness to come potentially revealed here. This child, his future mother, and Longley and his family were to live under the long shadow of his mother’s illness in the years to come. As the line develops Longley (in the dream) has a clear-eyed aerial view of his mother’s child-like energy and exuberance as she playfully runs across rural fields. Longley’s line with the three dynamic and active verbs skipping across the line runs into the abrupt ‘limp’ at the end of the line. The line is slightly extended, so we must reach out a bit further to hit or take in that delayed ‘limp’. In this way we really feel it, and we must cross a space to meet it as such. After this Longley delivers the most heightened poetic line in the poem. We have the sibilant ‘s’ sounds that suggest the stream. The mother is playfully and blissfully at home in this pastoral landscape. There is a symmetrical beauty to the line, built around the central or medial hinge of the ‘and’. There is a before the ‘and’ and an after the ‘and’. We have the adjective noun combinations either side: ‘shallow streams’ and ‘shiny grass’, united by the ‘sh’ sound and the multiple ‘s’ sounds. And in the formal symmetry, the heightened formal balance and perfection of this line, Longley captures exactly what it is his mother has lost through her disability: balance and proportion. In this way then, this line is another example of estomimopeia. The poet creating through their use of form the exact feeling or sense of what it is they are describing. Here the poem almost physically creates the reality it is conveying. And just as Longley conveys his mother’s agile exuberance in the joy of this line, he brings us to earth in the next one, as we run into the reality of her adult existence, full as it was with ‘malformation’ and ‘pain’. Rather like Meehan in her St Francis poem, we see Longley make a meaningful diction shift at a key juncture in the poem. The multisyllabic ‘malformation’ is no innocent or naïve choice. It is the longest and hardest word to say in the poem. Particularly, we struggle to say it at the end of a long sentence; after the skipping, joyful freedom of the previous two lines we run into this word at the end of the sentence. The word almost physically represents his mother’s stumbling or loss of agility. And with the dark ‘bad’ of ‘mal’, it is an emotionally heavy word too. It is so well chosen for what Longley wishes to represent. In this long sentence at the heart of this poem, we can see how subtly but artfully, Longley has constructed his lines. We see artful deliberation and consideration at work.
After this long sentence, we have a sudden change of pace with the end-stopped seventh line of the poem, but only its third sentence. Again, rather like the opening line of the poem, the effect is one of abruptness and suddenness. Here with a tone of astonishment and amazement. In this dream, here and now, for the first time in his life, the poet has seen his mother running. And now we come to the line that is a repetition of the opening line of the poem; only, this time, it runs on to the finish of the poem over the next two lines. The effect of this is to develop the tone of amazement expressed by the line before it. It is like repeating something you have said, but this time in a tone of amazement or wonder; to express how incredible it is that this is happening. Although Longley repeats the exact formula of words he used in the first line, somehow the meaning and tone has shifted across the few short lines that have happened in between. This is testament to the power of poetry and the human capacity for expressivity in language.
Longley builds towards the ending of his poem with his three-line second longest sentence in the poem. Given the strangeness of the world of the poem, it is a dream after all, one in which the almost miraculous appears to take place, he feels confident in shouting out to his mother: ‘jump over the hedges, Connie, jump over the trees.’ First, he addresses his mother as a person, not his ‘mother’ as such – hence the Connie. But he places her name, unusually, in the middle of the line, not the expected or standard beginning or end. The effect is to mimic the ‘and’ at the centre of the particularly heightened poetic line we heard earlier; and we notice the symmetry of this line, the matching elements before and after the Connie; the ‘jump over’ either side, with the ‘hedges’ matching the ‘trees’ at the end of each part also. Like earlier, this symmetry captures the mother’s once known but now lost agility. In its formal symmetry, with the medial ‘Connie’, this line is a formal replaying of the earlier line, but it also matches its exuberance and freedom and delight. The choice of the dream conceit allows for the cartoon, almost fantasy-like exuberance of the image conjured. Longley, and we his readers, will his mother on to near impossible physical feats, bordering on the fantastical. But we want this to happen, we buy into this wistful willing, and we can see this happening. And here we have the poem’s final climactic instance of estomimopeia. The poem’s closing line mimics the action it describes, as we leap with the opening part of the line and land on the ‘Connie’; and then, having landed, we leap from this ‘Connie’ a second time and clear the trees. In this way, this complex final line performs a couple of functions simultaneously.
‘The Balloon’, on first reading an apparently simple poem, is multi-layered and very skilfully and thoughtfully constructed. The poem negotiates meaningfully the tensions generated between the line and the syntax, between the line and the end-stop. The poem’s diction choices are equally meaningful; its line of heightened poetry doesn’t just generate meaning in what it says, a statement which is equally true of its mirroring final line. In many ways across the poem Longley maximises the potentialities of meaning that poetic form affords. If delivered in a straightforward prose narrative, this poem would lose much of its richness and depth. Quite literally, it wouldn’t mean the same. It is a testament to the artfulness of Longley, the rich dimensions that this poem reveals on close examination, how much dense meaning it expresses across its ten lines.
After reading representative poems by Meehan and Longley closely, we witness at work in both the expressive capabilities of poetic form. The functions and possibilities of the poetic line seem endless. So much expressive power is made possible through this decision to break lines. In putting the line into a position of tension with the syntax, the eventual arrival of the full stop, anticipated and expected, poets have been able to generate innumerable tones of voice and shades of meaning. This is evident in many places in these remarkably different poems. The size and shape of words matter; the effort it takes to say them is as significant as their accepted meaning. And, regarding parents, our relationships with them are as complicated and rich for the poets as they are for the rest of us. There is a sense of his own pain and suffering in Longley’s ‘The Balloon’ as much as there is that of his mother, but something in the art of poetry draws on Longley’s better nature, and his poem captures beautifully and unforgettably a deeply human wish for joy for his mother, even if this is only possible vicariously through the imaginative realm that Longley’s poetry has brough forth and given us access to. And the world, the real world as it were, and our own inner emotional and imaginative worlds, are all the richer and better for that.
[1] Paula Meehan, As If By Magic: Selected Poems (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2020), pp. 71 – 72.
[2] Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Cape Poetry, 2006), p. 183.
The High Window 