AT GLENDALOUGH . . .

Yesterday felt like the climax of our time together in Ireland: for pretty much everyone in our entourage, the visit to Joyce’s Tower—the omphalos!—was the culmination of everything we had engaged with since our first class back at UMass Boston on May 29th.  The literary event in the pub afterward extended the Joycean moment by bringing us into contact with living writers who, no less than Joyce a century ago, write very much out of their own time and their own place.  Today took us into another realm . . .

Like our pilgrimage to Newgrange (via Monasterboice and Mellifont), our trip to Glendalough in Co. Wicklow (about an hour south of Dublin by bus) transported us back in time—in this case to the 6th century when the monastic settlement in this pastoral setting was founded by St. Kevin.  The current site preserves a number of ancient buildings, including a round tower dating probably to the 10th century.  Most of the buildings still standing date to no later than the 12th century.

While our visit to this site was intended mostly to extend our appreciation of Ireland’s deep and rich cultural history, there was also a literary dimension, as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has written an evocative poem involving the legend of “St. Kevin and the Blackbird.”  In “Crediting Poetry,” his Nobel address, Heaney describes the poem’s inspiration:

It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Some of our entourage hiked through the dripping woods to the site of “St. Kevin’s Cell” to stand among the few remaining stones of his prayer hut.  That site is now marked with a plaque and a sculpture depicting the legend that Heaney gave poetic voice to.

I happened to have my iPad with me and so read Heaney’s poem aloud to the assembled members of our class—an apt way, I think, to cap our Irish experience together:

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

        *

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.