One day he came back with news
of a white strand that ran for miles.
They sped there and broke out into the sea:
the delicious cool of it, the blue-green deep.
When evening came they trailed back tired,
talking and not talking.
That night there was no night;
the sky held its blue, so light
they could have walked
for miles and miles unguided.
They did not sleep, there was no need –
instead they sat and watched
like children at a window
with all the summer left to play.
****
This week’s poem is an extract from a book-length version of the old Irish legend Deirdre of the Sorrows, recently published by Scottish poet and novelist Kenneth Steven. Untitled like all the poems that make up his narrative, this one describes a moment of fine unclouded happiness for the lovers, Naoise and Deirdre. They have fled from Ireland to Argyll, so that Deirdre may escape her fate of marriage to the King of Emain Macha, Conchobar.
The epic tale has been much reimagined and it was charged with new political resonance by the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance. The Scottish contribution has been smaller, if not negligible. This interesting essay explores the origins and migrations of the legend, and includes a picturesque but helpful map.
Steven has simplified the Deirdre plot, skilfully paring away its complex epic paraphernalia to find the kernel of an archetypal love story. This story is also a poem of place; it might be said to have gained a third major player besides Deirdre and Naoise: Argyll, the author’s current home. The lovers’ refuge in the pristine landscape and seascape evoked is temporary. Deirdre’s loss of her native land – Ireland – is less the focus than her departure from Scotland. But the emphasis is not, I think, a political one. There’s little direct sense of competing nationalisms, and (spoiler alert!) the lovers’ recapture and betrayal are filtered through the emotional suffering entailed.
The chosen poem, while not part of the plot development, is central in the evocation of place and atmosphere. Steven employs a variety of un-rhymed lyric structures in the book, always subtly capturing an episode’s theme and scene: the couplets here appropriately suggest the open but linear space of the “white strand” and the couple’s freedom to play, within limits. The diction is simple and mostly evades the figurative, with plain, essential colour-words (white, blue-green, blue) and powerful verbs (sped, broke out, trailed). The lovers’ pleasure resists language. In the third couplet, they come back “talking and not talking” – a perfect evocation of communication at its most intimate, when it has little or nothing to do with the exchange of information, or where the information exchanged is so perfectly shared and known, it doesn’t count as such.
The northern summer night, which is almost a white night, takes them outside time, or so they imagine. The fourth stanza repeats “night” and adds the rhyming word “light”, enacting a kind of chronological telescoping. That sharp new soundeffect in an otherwise unrhymed poem might have been intrusive, but it’s oddly melodic, a moment of breaking into song. It’s helped by being embedded in similar “I” sounds, perhaps: miles, tired, unguided.
The lovers’ possession of all this liberty extends throughout the poem: they resemble, in the end, “children at a window/ with all the summer left to play”. Kenneth Steven’s achievement is how well he harmonises the story with contemporary sensibilities, writing with a grace and freshness that preserve some sense of origins. We seem to be close to the start of human time while the constant, quiet chime of contemporary familiarity still sounds. Steven’s emphasis on the tenderness of the lovers, truanting from a judgmental society into untroubled nature, makes theirs feel like a modern love, laced with some sweet fantasy of endless holiday. As a free-standing poem, it can also form a shimmery mirage of the perfect summer as it dissolves into the nostalgia of late August. The nights are drawing in …
- Deirdre of the Sorrows by Kenneth Steven is published by Polygon (£8.99, paperback)