Love and Dublin
In need of a little extra love and inspiration this February? Discover the passion of Irish poets for Valentine’s Day.
Some things seem to concentrate time. Discovering new places, or revisiting beloved favourites create those moments where time, for a moment, stands still, becoming a vivid thing that can always be revisited in the mind. So too does falling in love.
Poetry can catch those memories and wrap them up for us, to return to again whenever we need them.
Irish poetry has a proud champion in the new President of the United States of America. In his final pre-inauguration speech, Joe Biden told a rapt audience that his fondness for quoting Irish poets wasn’t just because he was Irish, but “because they’re the best poets in the world…” So, with St Valentine’s Day in mind, we’ve opened our books and turned to some of the most memorable Irish love poetry.
Perhaps the most famously “Dublin” of love poems is on Raglan Road, by Patrick Kavanagh. Next time you come to the city, walk the Grand Canal to join Kavanagh’s statue on his bench by the bridge at Wilton Terrace. There you can muse on the ways in which love holds you in its grasp, for better or for worse! “On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue…” Later, Luke Kelly famously put music to the words for one of The Dubliners’ best known songs.
Raglan Road itself is not a very exciting place, unless you happen to live – or have fallen in love there, which tells you all you need to know about the power of both poetry, and of love.
Irish love poetry is a wonderful journey, and has lines for all loves moods and marvels. You may be missing the delights of the flowing talk in an Irish bar, or beguiling stories swapped between friends old and new, but you can find echoes of that magic, wherever you find yourself in poetry.
Austin Clarke and Seamus Heaney found ways to celebrate love’s more restful emotions. Take lines such as Austin Clarke’s “they say her beauty / was music in the mouth…” from The Planter’s Daughter, where the poet, thinking of his beloved says, “And O she was the Sunday / In every week,” which is such a gorgeous way of imagining the warm peace of fulfilling love.
Meanwhile, in Scaffolding, Seamus Heaney is beguiled by the quiet emotional security of a lasting love: “So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be / Old bridges breaking between you and me / Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall / Confident that we have built our wall.”
Love, of course, is made of many contrasts, and Eavan Boland opens up its mythic power in her poem, simply titled, Love, as she recalls an apartment she shared with her husband – “We had a view. And we discovered there / love had the feather and muscle of wings / and had come to live with us, / a brother of fire and air.”
Louis MacNeice, who wrote “I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city,” also thought beautifully about love. Anyone who has ever felt the world melt away as they sit across from their beloved in a café will find a friend in Meeting Point, while those coming to new love later in life can take All Over Again to themselves, with lines such as “The years we had not met forget themselves in this / One kiss…”
Most famous as a novelist, James Joyce wrote poetry – until he abandoned the practice in the early 1930s. So musical are the love poems in his collection, Chamber Music, that they have inspired composers, including, most recently an entire album by artists from Mercury Rev, to Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo. Still, you could argue that Joyce’s acclaimed short story collection, Dubliners, is actually his best love poem to the city of his birth, and what could be more poetic, or lovely than this line in the final story in the book, his masterpiece, The Dead? “Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”
We have loved spending time with the words of Ireland’s poets, but in the end, we realised that you can’t get much more perfectly poetic than W.B. Yeats and, when it comes to Yeats and love, you’re utterly spoiled for choice. For those who dream of enduring love, When You are Old is pure joy. Then there’s A Poet to his Beloved to conjure with, because who could resist the thought of “I bring you with reverent hands/ the books of my numberless dreams…”?
But we love the yearning beauty of He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven so much that we couldn’t help bringing you the entire poem here, our Valentine’s day present to you…
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
When you’re travelling to The Merrion again, don’t forget to visit MoLI, the Museum of Literature Ireland, just around the corner on St Stephen’s Green – and the National Library, another gem, a short stroll away on Kildare Street. You’ll also find all the latest in Irish Poetry at Poetry Ireland. Take a look at The Merrion Culture Club for Special Guest tickets and more. We look forward to seeing you soon.
