Brendan Kennelly


EXPLORING Fragments


The title of this melancholy poem about the ending of an important relationship is well chosen. The word ‘fragment’ is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, a fragment can be defined as a small part broken off or separated from something, or an isolated or incomplete part of something. As a verb, to fragment something means to break it into pieces. All of these meanings perfectly describe the devastation of a marriage breakdown and show how expert Kennelly is at choosing words with powerful connotations, particularly in his titles.


Kennelly married Peggy O’Brien, an American academic, in 1969, but their marriage ended in 1981, and this may well have been the inspiration for this poem. However, as with virtually all of Kennelly’s poems, there is a universality to this poem that makes it easy for anyone who has gone through a similar experience to relate to it.


The poem begins with a rhetorical question: ‘What had he to say to her now?’ There is a sense of defeat in this opening line, and this sets the tone for the rest of the poem. There is also a sense of loss, akin to a bereavement. He has lost the woman he loved, not because she has died, but because the love between them has gone: ‘Where was the woman he believed he had known/ In a street, out walking, by the sea,/ In bed, working, dancing, loving the sun// And saying so, always for the first time?’ The verbs in these lines show all the different memories he is recalling, and all the contexts in which he knew his lover.


When the poet asks: ‘Who was this stranger with the graven face?’ he may be talking about the woman he once loved, a stranger to him now. By ‘graven’, Kennelly may mean her face is serious or sad, or it may seem emotionless and unfeeling, like a graven or carved image. Perhaps he means his own face, and how in grief it looks like a stranger’s face or a mask. He goes back to the start of the relationship and ponders their reasons for making a life together: ‘What led to the dreaming-up of a home?’


The poet moves from reflecting upon the woman he has lost, to the relationship breakdown and, finally, to the subject of the poem – a man of sixty, trying to deal with such a profound loss: ‘And what was he, at sixty?’ When a couple marry, they think it will be forever. Now, he is sixty years old, alone, and, he realises, getting older: ‘Who was// That man lifting the blackthorn stick/ With the knobbed top from its place/ At the side of the fire, quietly dying?’ The image of an ageing man with a blackthorn walking stick is a pathetic one. The phrase ‘quietly dying’ may refer to the fire dwindling into embers, but it may also refer to the man himself and, if so, it is simply heartbreaking.


The final stanza of the poem contains vivid imagery: ‘He listened to his own steps in the walk/ Past the reedy mud where plover rose/ And scattered, black fragments, crying.’ It is also intensely lonely. He can hear his own footsteps disturbing the birds. They fly away in groups, like black clouds, crying out distress calls to warn others of danger. However, it is hard not to think of the ‘black fragments’ of this man’s hopes and dreams. Perhaps as he walks, he too is crying.


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL


243


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