Ivan Vuković : A walk through Necropolis – Thomas Kinsella's “Nightwalker“

 

A word or two about Thomas Kinsella

 

 

Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928. He was educated at University College Dublin. He worked as a civil servant from 1948. until retiring from the senior position in Department of Finance in 1965, when he started teaching at University of Southern Illinois ( 1965 – 1970 ) and, later on, at Temple University, Philadelphia ( where he taught for more than 20 years ). Nowadays he lives in county Wicklow. He writes poetry and also translates from the Gaelic. His published works are:

 

“Nightwalker“

The poem “Nightwalker“ is a part of Thomas Kinsella's collection of poems “Nightwalker and Other Poems, published in 1969. It is a longer poem, divided into three parts plus a brief introduction. The verse of the poem is free, with lines of unequal lenght, often specifically distributed on the page. It is an imagistic, modernist poem which speaks about Ireland, its unhealthy state of mind and traumatised history and the human beings which are forced and destined to live in it. It also speaks about the role of art in such society. In the following essay I will analise the poem part by part. Lets start with the introductory part:

 

Introduction – Entering the sepulchre

The poem starts with a quotation of Sir Thomas Browne from his work “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial“ : “The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been“. This quotation serves as an intertext, helping us to understand better the Kinsella's poem and its meaning. “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk“ , is a work published in 1658 by Sir Thomas Browne. Its subject was the discovery of a Bronze Age urn burial in Norfolk. Inspired by this discovery, Browne in his work delivers, first, a careful description of the antiquties found and then gives a careful survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware. Besides that, Browne also discusses man's struggles with mortality, and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in this world and the next, producing “an extended funerary meditation tinged with melancholia“. He deals with time and eternity, the transience of mortal fame, and our feeble attempts to cope with the certainty of death. With this in mind, we easily notice parallels between Browne's Hydriotaphia and Kinsella's Nightwalker. Just as Browne deals with analysing the burial urns and examines the questions concerning human life, death and psyche, the same does Thomas Kinsella, by turning Dublin into a great tomb, called Necropolis , the city of the living dead, through which he deals with the same questions about life and its meaning and purpose. The main character in the poem is the nightwalker , a troubled individual taking a midnight walk through the city streets whose atmosphere resembles the one of a sepulchre. Browne was, because of his profound subject matter and linguistic superiority, admired by many great authors, such as Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Virginia Woolf, who once called him “a strange preacher… a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations“. That statement again reminded me of Kinsella, whose introductory verses are also spoken by a voice of a “strange preacher“, following the Browne tradition:

 

“Mindful of the

shambles of the day

But mindful, under the

blood's drowsy humming,

Of the will that gropes for

structure – nonetheless

Not unmindful of

the madness without,

The madness within ( the

book of reason slammed

Open, slammed shut )

we presume to say:“

 

As you are probably aware, this ending “we presume to say“ is taken from the Christian mass, it is a part of the sermon which precedes the praying of Father Ours. By using that quote Kinsella draws parallels between Father Ours and his poem, telling us that “Nightwalker“ is a prayer as well, but a special prayer of the living dead, who also have the need to express themselves and be heard, who have the need to pray for their life and internal peace, while they dwell in the horrible Necropolis. The nightwalker, a poor creature who romes the shadowy streets of Dublin devours the sad and messy Irish reality, and through the power of poetry tries to give structure and purpose to a seemingy senseless and chaotic world, where nothing is as it should be. Lets follow him.

Part I – The walk of the dead

 

The first part of the poem starts with the sentence “I only know things seem and are not good.“ With such opening Kinsella's nightwalker takes us into an unstable, uncertain world where nothing is as it seems on the surface. That world is unhealthy, full of chimeras and illusions and ghosts from the past which haunt the unrestfull nightwalker ( as well as the other inhabitants of the city ) while he is taking a midnight walk through the ghostly streets of a Dublin suburb and also the dark alleys and submerged layers of his own subconcioussness. The world Kinsella builds is a rather bizarre and surrealistic one, in which the space plays a very important role and the human beings are troubled, dissapointed and unhappy individuals that turned into zombies. This motif of a human being as living dead is present throughout the poem. The man is represented as a phantasm, whose body is shadowy and weak, an apparition whose dreams are shattered and who finds it difficult to find any comfort in this world. Man is reduced to a mere scary skeleton with a brain, which moves aimlessly and mechanically under the eery lamplight of a Dublin suburb, accompanied by the fantastic dance of shadows and the smell of the near-by gardens.

It can be said that Kinsella, following the modernist tradition, creates imagistic poetry. He uses a collage of images, very vivid and concrete, in order to create a suffocating and tense atmosfere of the midnight walk. For example, the whole scene of the walk is overwieved by “voiceless moron moon“, “a mask of dismay“, who “hangs, like a fat skull, or the pearl knob of a pendulum at the outermost reach of its swing“. The moon looks menacing, evoking images of screams at a bloody battlefield, which are hidden in the night's silence, and the city lighted by this moon is nothing but „depths of torture“, „the dark area“ with „the mark of Cain“. Dublin is represented as a dark space, where brother kills brother, a „Necropolis“ in whose „laboratory“ human beings have become mere apparitions, “buried alive“, with “blank eyes“, sitting in their living-rooms, entranced and hypnotised by television, which is filling their brains up with emptiness and nothingness, brainwashing them until they fall asleep, tired from their pointless and empty lives. “Surely we can never die, sick spirits…“, says the nightwalker, hoping that the cure for the sickess of human soul exists and is somewhere, possibly, in the afterlife. But for now the only thing he can do is continue his midnight walk, “a vagabond tethered“. The adjective tethered is very significant here, „tether“ meaning „to tie an animal to a post so that it cannot move very far“. The nightwalker cannot escape this horrible place, he is captured in it, he can only walk to some certain limits, but can never be fully free. He is a zombie just as the rest of the people he sees during his walk.

His life is a pitifull routine, in which humans live like robots, struggling to find the meaning and reason for getting up every morning, for going to work. Here Kinsella gives a sharp critique of Irish economic policies in its transitional period ( so-called Productive Investment ) and the Irish government which is inviting foreign investors to invest money in Ireland, selling them Irish property and cultural values, all for the presumable sake of Ireland, while the Irish „work, or overwork, with mixed motives or none“, for nothing and become more and more frustrated and exasperated. ( Through a flash-back we see the nightwalker at his day job, working in some office, probably a bank, serving the German investors. He is one of the many who feel invisible, like he does not even exists. ) In that kind of surrounding human being and his/her individualism is destined to deteriorate, and one becomes just “Shadow-flesh…claimed by pattern still living,/ Linked into constellations with their dead…“.

The first part of the poem ends with an enigmatic tale about the “Wedding Group: The Groom, the Best Man, the Fox, and their three ladies“. It is a very good example of Kinsella's modernist tendencies and the unability to fully decode his poetry, whose meaning is very fluctuating ( instances of this pop up throughout the poem ). This tale abruptly cuts into the nightwalker's midnight walk and leaves little or no possibility for explanation of its' concrete meaning, especially for someone who is not Irish ( it could be some complex metaphor about Irish history or politics, but it remains completely unaccesible to me ).

 

Part II – The tower of art / The dying language

 

 

The second part of the poem takes us back to the nightwalker's wanderings. The opening sentence “The human taste grows faint.“ indicates to us the sudden disappearance of the human element and the nightwalker is left alone with himself and the space which surrounds him. The space plays an extremely important role in the psychologisation of the nightwalker and the inhabitants of Dublin a.k.a. Necropolis. Both internal emotions of the nightwalker and the whole Irish history and trauma are inscribed in architecture and the scenery. The nightwalker himself is just another artefact, moving slowly, while his “bones obey/ The sighing of the tide“ of the near-by sea. In the windless night whose „rich darkness“ is “alive with signals“, two things occupy the nightwalker's attention:

The first and the most important is Joyce's Martello tower. It is a tower into which are inscribed several things. Martello towers are small defensive forts built by the British Empire during the 19th century, from the time of the Napoleonic Wars onwards, so they carry a reminder of the British occupation of Ireland , which is one of the greatest Irish traumas. But the far stronger connotation is that this is the Martello tower in Sandycove, Dún Laoghaire , in which James Joyce lived. Stephen Dedalus ( who also took a famous walk around Dublin ) lives in this tower with his friend Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Known as the James Joyce Tower , it is now a museum dedicated to Joyce. In that tower the ghost of James Joyce still lives and slowly he starts to materialise in front of the nightwalker. First, “through the smell of saeweed, a spectral stink of horse/ And rider's sweat” reach him, scarying him. Later on, after the nightwalker invokes the great poet (“Watcher in the tower, be with me now…”), Joyce emerges from the sea as a rider on a horse. Although it is not explicitly stated in the text that the rider is James Joyce himself, we can deduct that from nightwalker's comments about him, calling him “Father of Authors” and “the sunhusband”, which is Joyce's very own coin phrase from Finnegan's Wake (“Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again.”, Finnegan's Wake, part 4, episode 15, page 627 ).

Then the rider “climbs the dark to his mansion in the sky, to take his place/ In the influential circle” of other great artists. From there the nightwalker sees him as a foxhunter, followed by hunting dogs, which in a pack follow their master's command. This could be interpreted as a metaphor of an artist among the crowd of ordinary people, leading them with his/hers works of art, but of course it is yet another locus in Kinsella's poem which escapes full interpretation. Nevertheless, great art remains the the prayer of the opressed, the only way one can be remembered in a positive way in this ghastly town of a traumatised country, the only way to inscribe something worthwhile in the space and architecture of Necropolis, the only way to overcome the futility of life in this city of the dead.

The second thing that captures the nightwalker's attention, after the foxhunter vanishes, are the discarded newspapers in the ditch, which bring him back to the grim Irish reality. Their headlines point out the important issues that occupy Ireland at that time: “THE ARCHBISHOP ON MARRIAGE / NEW MOVES TO RESTORE THE LANGUAGE / THE NEW IRELAND”. The influence of church, religious conflicts and the dual language issue are definitely the most burning problems in Ireland on its way to create this new Ireland the newspapers are talking about. Kinsella is a writer who deals with the language issue very often in his poetry. During the English occupation of Ireland , Gaelic was replaced by English, but after the Republic was reinstated, there was a growing tendency to revive Gaelic in schools. However, Irish public didn't react too well to that proposition. Kinsella is well known for translating old Gaelic myths and legends and he is saddened by the fact that the Gaelic, the Irish mother tongue is dying. What follows is the nightwalker's critique of authorities and National Schools, which, under English influence, “try to conquer/ the Irish national spirit, at the same time/ Exterminating what they called our ‘jargon'/ - The Irish language; in which Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget/ And Saint Columcille taught and prayed!” We can feel Kinsella's anger and disappointment in that line. As opposed to National Schools nightwalker mentions the Christian Brothers schools, founded by the Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice, which fougth for Irish freedom, language and country.

That meditations about language and education stir the nightwalker's memories, who, in a kind of stream of concioussness, ponders about the poor state of Ireland , which is torn with religious hostility, British tyranny and hystorical traumas, such as the great famine. To him, the Blessed Virgin, looks like ”young Victoria” and a “green snake wriggles under her heel / Beside a vase of tulips”, which are the symbol of protestantism, and there's obviously no comfort in Christianity for him, because it is way to polliticised and burdened with hatred. Meanwhile, the sea whispers: “Eire, Eire …is there none / To hear? Is all lost?”. The saddness overcomes the nightwalker, he realises that the beautifull Gaelic language and culture are pretty much defeated, although they are not completely gone, because they remain deeply woven into the Irish spirit, but, nevertheless, they will never regain the splendour they had in the past. The Gaelic spirit still lives in nature, the glimpses of it can be felt in the wind, the sea, the moon, which during the night lament this sad state of Ireland and the loss of Gaelic language, which carries with itself a specific Gealic image of the world, now replaced by this horrible world of the living dead. “A dying language echoes / across a century's silence”, as our nightwalker slowly heads home, saddened and silent.

The end of part two shows us another modernist characteristic of Kinsella's writing. I've already mentioned that his poetry is imagistic. That kind of writing goes hand to hand with a technique Kinsella uses throughout this poem, and that is that his verses resemble movie shots. He uses short, precise images which resemble the director's notes in a screenplay. This is emphasised by specific distribution of the words on the paper, which often imitate the fade-ins and fade-outs of the movie montage. The end of the second part shows it perfectly:

“A dying language echoes

Across a century's silence.

It is time,

Lost soul, I turned for home.

Sad music steals

Over the scene.

Hesitant, cogitating, exit.”

 

With the final word “exit”, we can visualise the nightwalker disappearing from the shot, fading-in to darkness at the end of a scene, closing perfectly the second part of the poem and allowing the third part to begin.

 

Part III – The Sea of Disappointment

 

 

In the third and the last part of the poem, the nightwalker heads home, where his wife is waiting for him. Eventhough Kinsella connects “home“ with “beauty“, human relations in Necropolis are far from perfect. People are alienated from one another, and the nightwalker's vision of love is just that of a state where “from change to change, / Understanding may be gathered“. On his return the sad “moon of dismay“ still overlooks him. The moon has great importance in Irish mythology, it causes magical things to happen and is believed to have great influence on human beings. To our nightwaker, the moon is a she, “a Virgin most pure“, who looks upon the sad Necropolis with a sad smile, lighting the horrors and wounds that are too deep to be cured. The nightwalker invokes the powerfull moon, he calls her “Hatcher of peoples“, praying to her and giving himself to her completely. Under her light he succeeds in finding some comfort and the reason not to despair, eventhough living in such a horrible place. There must be a reason for all this long-lasting suffering of his people and he feels it, eventhough this reason remains unknown and he can only intuitively feel it exists and that there is hope for human beings after all. “There are times it is all a part of a meaningfull drama / That begins in the gray mists of antiquity / And reaches through the years to unknown goals / in the concioussness of man, which is very soothing.“ Kinsella is excellent in describing the magical-like scenery of the moon-lit Necropolis. He uses synesthesia for descriptions, matching together images from different sensory fields, as is seen in the following paragraph:

„A wind sighs. The pool

Shivers: the tide at the turn. Odour of lamplight,

Sour soil, the sea bed, passes like a ghost

-- The hem of her invisible garment.“

 

Under this magical surroundings, our nightwalker comes to the end of his walk. He is tired and resignated, there's nothing he can do about it, nothing he can change, he can only hope for some relief in the uncertain future. He looks at the city of the dead where he lives and the shadows which inhabit it, where “massed human wills“ live near the “vivid ghost sea“, and he has to accept it and carry on, although in his emptiness and confusion the sour taste of dissapointment, felt by many before him, remains. “I think it is the Sea of Disappointment“, says the nightwalker and disappears. Fades to black. The poem ends. But, in spite of this melancholical, sad and pessimistic ending, nightwalker's account of his midnight walk stands as a brilliant work of art, that will stand the test of time, as an invaluable glimpse in the troubled Irish psyche.

 

Bibliography

 

•  Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology , The Blackstaff Press, 1995. ( the part about Thomas Kinsella, pg. 159. )

•  Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia - Urn Burial; Or, A Discourse Of The Sepulchral Urns Lately Found In Norfolk , http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm

•  www.wikipedia.org ( entries: Thomas Kinsella, Sir Thomas Browne, Martello Tower, Edmund Ignatius Rice )