Brendan Kennelly


‘God’s curse on you, Morris/ God’s curse on your treachery’. She tells Morris exactly what he has done by making O’Leary an outlaw; taken a husband and a father away, and caused the child she is pregnant with to die inside her: ‘You swept my man from me/ The man of my children/ Two children play in the house/ A third lives in me// He won’t come alive from me’. Ní Chonaill vacillates (wavers) between intense anger and unbearable grief: ‘My heart’s wound’, and her devastating pain and great love for her husband are evident in every line. She wishes she could have died instead: ‘Why was I not with you/ When you were shot/ That I might take the bullet/ In my own body?’ She heaps praise upon her husband, and, while this is traditional in a keen, there can be no doubt her words are utterly sincere: ‘All I know of a hero/ True man with true heart’.


Some of the simplest lines in this poem are the most affecting. For example: ‘I miss you’. Ní Chonaill seems astonished that everyday life can go on without him, whereas she cannot: ‘The corn is stacked/ The cows are milking/ My heart is a lump of grief’. One of the most moving stanzas uses a simple metaphor to articulate Ní Chonaill’s anguish: ‘I am a locked trunk/ The key is lost/ I must wait till rust/ Devours the screw’. Another poignant stanza describes a vision she had which foresaw the tragedy: ‘In Cork/ I had this vision/ Lying in my bed:/ A glen of withered trees/ A home heart- broken/ Strangled hunting-hounds … And you/ Dying on a hillside’.


As if we were in any doubt about how formidable Ní Chonaill is, we see her resolve not to partake in traditional mourning rites, ‘Jesus Christ knows well/ I’ll wear no cap/ No mourning dress … No grief-signs in my house’, but intends instead to avenge her husband’s death: ‘I’ll cross the sea/ To speak to the King … Morris, because of you/ My man is dead’. There is something fierce and ruthless in Ní Chonaill, and this is clear whenever she speaks to Morris directly: ‘Is there a man in Ireland/ To put a bullet through your head’.


In the final stanza of the poem, Ní Chonaill addresses the women who have gathered to mourn and keen with her: ‘Women, white women of the mill/ I give my love to you/ For the poetry you made/ For Art O’Leary’. Although this poem is very much a love poem, Ní Chonaill allies herself with her fellow women and their collective suffering, as she concludes her astounding, plaintive lament: ‘Deep women-rhythms of blood/ The fiercest and the sweetest/ Since time began/ Singing of this cry I womanmake/ For my man’.


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL


231


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