The Rough Field and The Grafted Tongue of Northern Ireland

Abstract

In 1972 John Montague published his monumental The Rough Field, a long poetic sequence of varying styles and voices called by Derek Mahon « a rich and complex work by the best poet of his generation. » Functioning as much by surprise and sharp juxtaposition a as by coherent thematic development, the poems of The Rough Field examine an upbringing in a rapidly disappearing rural Ulster played out on the disappointing terrain of Irish history, its sad harvests little more than recurring betrayal and division.The guiding metaphor of The Rough Field is the garbh acaidh itself, the name, translated into English, of the hamlet where Montague grew up. Over the course of the sequence, the personally significant title takes on resonant public identification with the dying, politically fractured North, hopelessly sterile and crisscrossed by the fault lines of history. To Montague one of the most telling lines of division partitioning this field is linguistic, the severing of the native Irish tongue and its replacement by the « grafted tongue » of English.A trilingual Catholic born in faraway Brooklyn, raised in rural, divided Ulster, and writing in the English of the colonizer, Montague turns, not surprisingly, to language as a recurring subject and to the multiple resources of linguistic variation as method. In the accumulation of diverse materials that is The Rough Field, he frequently exploits the collage form, throwing different languages, registers, levels of diction, and poetic forms into fruitful collision or cohabitation.In this essay I investigate the way Montague assembles materials of disparate nature - fragments of Irish, the sonnets of Shakespeare, quotations from sources as diverse as a priest's letters or Unionist hate tracts - to give form to the complex, moving evocation of this fractured province of a divided nation, that « harsh landscape that haunts me. »

Keywords

• Irish poetry
• collage