University of St.

Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

"When Ireland Was Still under a Spell": The Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Author(s): Donna L. Potts
Source: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 52-70
Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)
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 Donna L. Potts

Was StillUnder a Spell":

"When Ireland
The PoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

In the SouthernReview's 1995 special issue on contemporary Irish poetry and

criticism,a recurring theme is thewoman poet's continued efforts to focus
attentionon the place ofwomen in Irish culture. That efforthas often entailed
rejectingthe traditional iconography employed bymale poets in favorof incor
poratingwomen as symbol?Mother Ireland,Queen Medbh, Grainne O'Mal
ley,theHag of Beare?and imaginatively restoring their presence to the Irish
a or conversation featuring
landscape.The SouthernReview includes "comhr?"
McGuckian and Ni Dhomhnaill, inwhich both discuss their relation to land
scape, to language, and to the worldview of Irish mythology. McGuckian
attempts to characterize thehuman relation to the natural world in the poetry
ofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill:

What I find most valuable and authentic isNuala's relationship to nature. Nature

ispartof thisPlatonic idealforHeaney and others,butNuala istheonlypoet in

the world, except for Tsvetaeva... who has the same dynamism and the same

feelingofbeing at onewith theworld.Not an observerof itbut having it...

a microcosm, so that when you talk about the sky or the sea or a tree or
being

vegetation, you've been inside it or it's been inside you. The whole reciprocity
there is very, very different from Yeats's "When my arms wrap you round I press/

My heart upon the loveliness" of the world.... We are the world that the poem
is celebrating, but we are also the poem and we are also the celebration.1

Declan Kiberd's InventingIreland discusses theway inwhich postcolonial

writers have deemed itnecessary to reject classic realism in order to distance
themselves from the standards bywhich their countries' colonizers had desig
nated them as "other."Citing Salman Rushdie's search for a form thatwould
"allow themiraculous and themundane to coexist at the same level,"Kiberd
examines how writers of the Irish LiteraryRevival sought to find this form by
drawing on Irish folkloreand religious beliefs, as well as how writers like Joyce

. Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ni

Dhomhnai?, "Comhr?, with a Foreword and Afterword by Laura
O'Connor" The Southern Review, 31,3 (July,1995), 599,

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/lRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, J12 (sUMMER/SAMHREADH, 52~70

2003),

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 ThePoetryofNualaNi Dhomhnaill

gradually shiftedfrom classic realism to portrayalsof amore subjective reality2

Stephen Slemon argues that the formal technique ofmagical realism,which
characteristicallymixes the fantastic and the realistic,allows for the creation of
works that encode within themselves "a residuum of resistance toward the
imperial center and its totalizing systemsof generic classification."3
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's rendering of nature,with its emphasis on the reci

procity of landscape and self,human and animal, sacred andmundane, fantas

tic and realistic,may be viewed as an attempt to revive theCeltic worldview as
reflected in Irish poetry thatpredates English colonization. By privileging that
traditional Irishworldview, Ni DhomhnailTs poetry implicitlychallenges the
colonizer's worldview. Her poetry tacitlyassumes not only that Ireland is far
more than the sum of the natural resources extractedfor centuriesby itscolo
nizers, but also that the Irishworldview comprehendsmore than theWestern
one, with its emphasis on the rational and on a rigiddistinction between the
objective and subjective.
By returning to ancient Celtic traditions?which embody a close relation
between woman and land portrayed in the figure of the all-powerful earth
mother?Ni Dhomhnaillsimultaneously reclaims power forwomen. Justas
postcolonial writers invitetheir readers to look beneath the surfaceof thepower
structure, Ni Dhomhnaill continually reminds us that there ismore to the
feminine than meets the eye. Thus, Ni Dhomhnaill's gender as well as her
nationality figure into her persistent claim that the subjective reality of her
poetry is as valid as the ostensibly "objective" realityof classic realism.4
Moreover, Ni Dhomhnaill's decision towrite and publish in IrishGaelic is
integral to her effortto convey the simultaneous existence of the other-world
ly and theworldly, because she contends that the differencebetween the Irish
language and the English language underscores thedisparitybetween preeolo
nial Irish and postcolonial Britishworldviews. In particular, her allusions to
instances of shape-shifting or transformation in Irish folkloreand mythology
are themeans bywhich she taps the transformativepower of the Irish oral tra

2. Modern Nation
Declan Kib?rel, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the (London: Vintage, 1996),

p.339.
as Post-Colonial Discourse" inMagical Realism: Theory,
3. Stephen Slemon, "Magic Realism
B. Frais {Durham: Duke University Press,
History, Community, ed. Louis Parkinson Zamora, Wendy
1995)? *498.
4. Ni Dhomhnaill's focus on the subjective by no means implies that her poetry has only private

relevance, as Harry Clifton assertswhen he unfavorably compares the poetry of both McGuckian
and Ni Dhomhnaill with that of her male counterparts as "grounded in private rather than collec
tive experience." Harry Clifton, "Real and SyntheticWhiskey: A Generation of Irish Poets, 1975-85"
inNew Imh Writing, editor? (Place?: Publisher", Date?), p. 245.Gifton's assertion is a common way
of arguing for the innate superiority ofmale poets.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

dition inorder to convey theneed formore fundamental transformations in the

Western worldview.5

Seamus Heaney characterizes pre-Christian Ireland as a timewhen "the land

a of
scapewas sacramental, instinctwith signs, implying system realitybeyond
thevisible realities."6Even early IrishChristianitymaintained the belief in "the
seamlessness of sacred and secular spheres,"incorporating Ireland's holy wells,
itsecclesiastical rituals.7The Irishnature
springs,sacredmounds, and hills into
Seamus Heaney as "poems and
writing genre called dinnseanchas, defined by
taleswhich relate the originalmeanings of place names and constitute a form
ofmythological etymology,"embody such a worldview.8
In her article on dinn$eanchas} subtitled "The Naming of High or Holy
Places,"Ni Dhomhnaill writes, "I believe thata renewed interestin dinnseanchas
may enable us to share our love and admiration and wonder of the land of Ire
land and can cater in an imaginativeway for the need ofmany for a place to
belong to so thatwe may love and cherish it rather thanmerely killing each
otherover it."9Inher own poems about nature,Ni Dhomhnaill draws not only
on rich layersof associations in dinnseanchas to explain the origins of theplaces
she encounters,she also applies theworldview reflected in them to transform
figurativelyher contemporary landscape: its seemingly objective features?
standingstones,burialmounds, hills, springs,and bogs?thereby acquire spir
itual resonance.Kenneth Jackson'sobservation, in his Studies in Early Celtic
Nature Poetry, about the relation between nature and human nature in early
Celtic nature poetry, furtherdescribesNi Dhomhnaill's approach:

5. Whenever possible I have attempted to distinguish folklore frommythology, but the distinc
tion is problematic. As JamesMacKillop suggests in his Dictionary
ofCelticMythology, Northrop
Frye's narrow definition ofmyth as "a story inwhich some of the chief characters are gods" often
givesway to a broader definition denoting "those episodes or stories handed down within a culture
that are continually retold or referred to for their resonant
meaning." JamesMacKillop, Dictionary
ofCelticMythobgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xvii-xviii. Moreover, characters, sit
uations, and animals described in folklore often have mythological
origins and associations.
6. Patricia Haberstroh, Women Creating Women:
Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 132.
7. Haberstroh, p. 133.
8. Haberstroh, pp. 131-32.
9. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "Dinnseanchas: The
Naming ofHigh or Holy Places," in The Geography
of Identity (Ann Arbon University ofMichigan Press, 1996), p. 432. Ni Dhomhnaill seeks only an
imaginative reclamation of the landscape. She cites the terrible consequences of the actual recla
mation demanded by the adherents of cultural nationalism, with its territorial
emphasis on "the
numinosiry of place, the values of blood and soil," since the break-up of the Soviet Union, for
instance.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Nt Dhomhnaill

Hermit poems and theelegiesand earlyFenianpoems, thebest in

earlyCeltic
nature poetry, are concerned most
vitally with the singer's own reactions to his

surroundings; not with a about the various

making descriptive catalogue things
he sees,butwith tellingus how he feelsabout themand how
theyharmoniseor
clash with his own particular mood ... in the best of Irish and Welsh nature

poetry, it is the emotion, not the sun, thatmatters.10

Ni DhomhnahTs effortto portray a world inwhich the subjectivematters as

much or more than objective reality echoes theworldview of ancient Irish
poetry. It also continually remindsus that,contraryto the colonizerworldview,
the Irish landscape is not merely a repositoryof resources to be exploited;
rather, it is imbued with the potential for insightsinto selfand culture.
"
Ni Dhomhnaill uses Irish folklore, as in "DrivingWest as a means of
reestablishing Irish identity,and therebycountering the ravages ofAngliciza
tion, and this is a well-established practice. Sean O'Sullivan writes that the
movement for a national literature"uncorked thenative folklorebottled in the
Irish tongue. . . Who
. would know the national culture ofmodern Ireland
must be aware ofher folkloreand folklorists"u In "AgTiom?int Siar" ("Driving
West"), Ni Dhomhnaill describes a drive across theDingle Peninsula, a region
resonant with folkloric salience:

Tve crossed the Conor Pass a thousand times

ifTve gone once, yet each time it unveils
new stories, revelations clear tome

as rocks along the road, as actual

as words articulated.12

As Ni Dhomhnaill recollects the folkloreassociated with theDingle Peninsula,

she draws on the collective subjectivityfrom which that folklore emerged?a
world that cannot be substantiated,but thatnonetheless provides a kind of
truth just as indispensable as the truthof the "real"? objectivelyverifiable?
world. Furthermore, the "rocks along the road"might well allude to ogham
stones. These boundary markers aremore prevalent on theDingle Peninsula

10. Kenneth Jackson, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1935), p. 80.

v.
11. Folktales of Ireland, ed. Sean O'Suliivan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p.
O'Sullivan observes that, in the nineteenth W?de, in a long essay on "The American
century,Lady
"
Irish linked Irish folklore with Irish nationalism, chronicled thewrongs wreaked on Ireland by
con
Elizabeth I, Cromwell, and William III that culminated in the bitter uprising of 1798, and
demned English education policy, which leftIrish people ignorant of their own history and tradi
tions. Folktales of Ireland, p. xv.
12. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Pharaoh's Daughter (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1990), p. 133;here
after cited parenthetically, thus: (PD133). Translated byMichael Coady.

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 ThePoetryofNuda Ni Dhomhnaill

than elsewhere,and theyoftenbear thename ofDuibhne, a local Celtic goddess

and ancestress of the people of this region.13 Like many Celtic goddesses,
Duibhne was closely associatedwith the land, and thought to bring itprotection
Thus, the physical featuresof the landscape are imbuedwith spir
and fertility.
itualand imaginative significance.
"DrivingWest" mentions placenames?Loch Geal, Cnoc?n ?ag?ir, and
Dun an ?ir?all ofwhich allude to Irishwords for features of the landscape?
lake, hill or mountain, and fort, respectively?as well as to Irish folklore.
receive scant attention in
Although the placenames Ni Dhomhnaill mentions
Loch Geal, in Ni
history texts, they have undeniable cultural significance.
Dhomhnaill's poem, was reputedly the home of a monster known as "An
Carabuneail" (The Carbuncle) because her outer skinwas coveredwith jewels
and shellsthatwould shine and glisten,lightingup thenight skyas far as the eye
could see.She showed herselfeveryseventhyear, appearing almost invariablyon
Christmas Night, lighting the countryside so brigh?y that people could see
well enough to count all the sheep and goats.14
Dun an ?ir was originally an IronAge promontory fort,within which an
invasion forceof about six hundred Spaniards and Italians built another fort
in 1580.They came to support theCatholic Irish against the Protestant Eng
lish,who successfullybombarded the fortfrom land and sea, and then slaugh
tered all survivors, includingmany local inhabitants. Folk memory of the
massacre is so strong that amemorial was erected on the site in 1980.15Dun
an ?ir means "Fort ofGold" in Irish.That name refers to the legend of buried
treasureby a member of a family of chieftains once prominent in County
Wexford in the thirteenth century.The legendary "gold" turned out to be
nothingmore than igneous rocks that contained a variety ofminerals, but no
trace of gold or silver.Left by an Elizabethan explorer, theywere incorporat
ed into a fort,as Ni Dhomhnaill recalls.16"Gaineamh Shuraic" ("Quicksand")

similarly incorporates relics of folklore with those of reality, as when Ni

Dhomhnaill describes the narrator's psyche as a dark cave repletewith bog
holes and hollows:

Down there there's ancient wood and bogdeal:

the Fianna's bones are there at rest

MacKillop, p. 92. Dingle isknown as Corca Dhuibhne in Irish.

13-
14. Aonghus ? Caoirnh, "The Carbuncle Legend.'* http://kerr7.local.ie/content/51340.shtjn/litera
ture/general. September 15,2003.
15. Simon O'Faolain, "The Archaeology of the Dingle Peninsula. "http:/www.iol.ie/~rainbow/

archaeology.html. September 15,2003.

16. PatrickWyse Jackson [?], "The
Geology of Kerry" (Tralee: Kerry County Museum).

. -fi

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

with rustless swords?and a drowned

girl,
a noose around her neck.17

According to Irish legend, theFianna were a third-century

band ofwarriors
chargedwith defending Ireland fromforeign invasion.The drowned girl,on the
other hand, was a real person whose corpsewas recovered froma bog. Her his
torymay be found in P.V. Glob's Bog People, which chronicles the recoveryof
hundreds of IronAge people frombogs inDenmark, and is the inspiration for
Seamus Heaney's North. Glob describes a young girlwith a band over her eyes
and a noose around her neck,who had apparentlybeen drowned by theweight
of a big stone and birch branches placed upon her body.During theCeltic Iron
Age?the four centuries before Christ?the goddess Nerthus towhom these
victims were sacrificed is associated with matriarchal Celtic religion.18Ni
Dhomhnaill has acknowledged her reading ofHeaney, and her poem may also
allude to his well-known poem "Punishment."Describing a girlwho was recov
a
ered froma bog with noose around her neck, perhaps as punishment foradul
tery,"Punishment" iswidely considered Heaneys commentaryon theabuse of
Catholic girlswho dated British soldiers during the "Troubles."Bymelding two
seemingly disparate visions of reality?the world of ancient religion,today rel
?
egated to the seemingly innocuous categories ofmyth, folklore,and legend
and the objectively verifiableworld of anthropology,Ni Dhomhnaill suggests
that these realms deserve equal status.The former is theproduct of a prescien
tificworldview espoused by theGaelic-speaking Irish,while the latterrelic, the
maybe seen as theproduct of the scientificrev
object of archaeological study,
? theEnglish.
olution, and of the conquerors
Moreover, Ni DhomhnailTs act of resistance to imperialism extends to the
entireWestern tradition,which she argues has evolved in such a way as to be
inadequate?a "total sham"?because ithas emphasized rational discourse to
the exclusion ofmyth. Ni Dhomhnaill regardsmyth as

a basic, fundamental structuring of our reality, a narrative that we place on the

chaos of sensation tomake sense of our lives. The myth of the end ofmyth-mak
cut
ing is theworstmyth of all; itmeans thattheunconscioushas been finally
off and is irretrievable.19

Ni Dhomhnaill, thus, concentrates her literaryeffortson rendering the images

and beliefs associated with the Irish otherworld.Of her poetry, she states: "I

17. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems l Rogha Danta, trans.Michael Hartnett (Dublin: Raven
Arts Press, 1988), p. 85,*hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: {RD 85).
18. P.V. Glob, The BogPeople: Iron-AgeMan Preserved (New York: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 74-75?

113-19.
19. "Comhr?" The Southern Review, 604.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

don't want to be limited by a restriction against mixing of realms, Imean

itwas very hard... ."20In other
Shakespeare did the same thing.But afterBacon
words,whereas Shakespeare would freely incorporate otherworldly beings into
his plays, afterthe scientificrevolutionwriters became increasingly reluctant to
include in"serious"work thesebeings thathad no basis in reality.InNi Dhomh
nailTswriting, the otherworldlyrealm is accessed byway of the siala, the fairies,
for itwas at the fairymound?at the intersectionof the "real" world and the
otherworld,the temporal realm and the imaginative realm?that thepotential
forself-recoveryismade possible.Ni Dhomhnaill's poetry evokes images of "an
immortaldwelling place wherein themost expressive urgings and forms of
individual selfhoodmay residewithout political restrictionor fear of cultural
displacement."21
In the longpoem "Loch a' D?in" ("The Lay of Loughadoon"), Ni Dhomh
naill's childrenask her to tellthem folktaleswhile out on awalk.When she does,
she transformstheirsense of realityuntil theybegin to feel theycan actually see
"the giants,monks, and theKnights of theRed Branch [jostling] each other on
one bench." She accomplishes this transformationof the landscape by recalling
thefolk significanceof itscomponents. The Loughadoon Valley featuresmany
ancient archaeological monuments and cooking sites dating from the Bronze
Age and figuring in early Irish literature.22
Ni Dhomhnaill accomplishes this
transformationby recalling the time

When Irelandwas stillundera spell

and everysheephad twoheads forsooth
and beforethe Inexhaustible
Cow had beenmilked intothe sieve
and oak-treesgrewin theBigBog
where the Fianna went in chase of deer...23

This world of myth and folklore is characterized by abundance and inex

haustibility,much as the Irish otherworld was traditionally described. The
"Inexhaustible Cow" to which Ni Dhomhnaill refers,Glas Ghailbhlann, was
reputed in Irish folklore tohave an inexhaustible supply ofmilk that signified
prosperity.24Oak trees,sacred to theCelts, once flourished in Ireland but were
cutdown by theEnglish,
particularlyduring theElizabethan era. The poet then

20. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill,

"Adaptations and Transformations: An Interview with Deborah
McWiliams Consalvo," Studies, 83 (Autumn, i994)> 33 ?
21. Deborah McWilliams Consalvo, "The
Lingual Ideal in the Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill,"
?ire-Ireland, 30,2 (1995), 158.
22. Simon O'Faolain, "The "
Archaeology of theDingle Peninsula
23. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, trans.Paul Muldoon Winston-Salem:
( Wake For
estUniversity Press, 1992), p. 65; hereafter cite
parenthetically thus: (AC 65).
24. MacKillop, p. 224.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

refers to a megalithic tomb or burial-mound next to an ancient

cooking pit,
ostensiblywhere Fionn and theFianna bathed and cooked theirmeals. Her allu
sions to Celtic religion and folklore return the reader imaginatively to an era
prior to English colonization, and also prior to the scientificrevolution, a time
when magical transformationwould stillhave been deemed possible.25
Ni Dhomhnaill s obvious mixing of real and mythical animals?the horn
less deer, the stag ofmany tines, the red-eared hound, thewild ox, theboar, the
wolf in itsden, the griffin,and an array of birds?alerts the reader to theper
vasiveness and value ofmyth: all of the animals shementions have strongasso
ciations with the otherworld. Otherworldly deer, and stagswith extra antlers,
occur frequently in Irishmythology.Moreover, the stags role in thevernacular
tradition is largely that of an otherworld animal, "luring the living into the
realms of the gods, or facilitatingthe fulfilmentof some prophecy by allowing
itselfto be hunted and eaten,no doubt, like theotherworldpigs, to riseup alive
and whole afterwards"26 In Irish tradition, animals with red ears, like
Ni DhomhnailPs hound, were associated with the Irishotherworld. The boar
a
figures in Irishmythology as prognostic animal. The literatureis fullof refer
ences tobeings metamorphosed inpig form,to pigs' otherworldorigins, and "to

great supernatural otherworld pigs which bring a trailof death and disaster
behind them."27Celtic tribal godswere sometimes conceived of asmanifesting
themselves as wolves, and one tribe in Ireland even claimed descent from
wolves.28 In Celtic culture as inmany others,birdswere invariablyassociated
with the otherworld. By the time thenarrator's tale is told, the childrenhave so
fullycome to identifywith the charactersof folkloreandmyth that theyunder
stand thebirds' language:

Butwe saw ahead of us thered-leggedchough

and the stonechat
andwe'd listenedto themloud and longenough
tounderstandwhat theravenssaid. (AC 69)

In Irish folklore, ravens invariablyappear inprophetic roles. Future events

were frequentlydivined from the flightand cries of ravens,and certainpeople
were believed to have the "language of thebirds," tounderstand the speech of

features a trans
25- Ni Dhomhnaill's poem "BloddewedcT {PD116), translated by JohnMontague,
formation motif involving themagical oak and alludes to the
Welsh story inwhich Gwediion and

Math use the flower of the oak to fashion the beautiful Blodewedd.
26. Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 338.

27. Ross, pp. 313-16.
28. Ross, p. 341.

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 ThePoetryofNualaNiDhomhnaill

with them.29 Because ravens were also asso

ravens and carry on conversations
ciatedwith the otherworldly the children's newly discovered ability to under
stand them isby association a new-found ability to perceive nature as a unity of
seen and unseen forces aswell as tobecome active participants in theworld of
inexhaustible variety of thisworld
mythology. Furthermore, the apparently
atteststo the inexhaustibilityof the imagination in itseffortto envision a world
notes that "evidence from all areas of
prior to English conquest. MacKillop
Celtic culture,from the ancient to all thevernaculars, demonstrates a belief in
lifematerially surviving the expiration of the body."30By inviting readers to
envisionan otherworld that isparallel to their"real"world, Ni Dhomhnaill like
wise beckons them to expand theirconcept of postcolonial Ireland.
In such poems as "Carriag na bhFiach" ("AtRaven's Rock") Ni Dhomhnaill
ravens to imbue an ostensibly
again relieson the alleged prophetic power of
ordinaryplace with magical significance.All of the components of the land
Wort in a cleft"
scape, from"themagic ringof the rapids" to "a sprigof St. John's
to "the graceful birch that gleams and the ever-verdant holly" (AC 49), are
infusedwith themagical properties traditionally assigned in Irish folklore to
certainbodies ofwater, herbs, plants, and trees.Ni Dhomhnaill continues: "I
shakea hawthorn and itteems /haws, a couple ofwhich I eat in lieu /of the fil
bert /eaten by the Salmon ofKnowledge" (AC 50). E?f?s> the "salmon ofwis
dom," isbelieved to be one of the forms adopted by the otherworld god, and
many legends referto the sacred salmon. Finn McCool traditionally obtained
his supernaturalwisdom by sucking the thumb he had burntwhen cooking the
salmon of Linn F?ic. The salmon is also frequently featured in tales of trans
formation.Anne Ross notes that"in two Irish contexts a severedhead speaks on
theoccasion of a salmon being cooked and divided up among those present."31
Both the salmon and the troutare associated frequentlywith wells and springs,
and a traditional belief in the otherworldly knowledge and wisdom of the
salmon and trout is stressedthroughoutearly Irish literatures.Ni Dhomhna?Ts
conclusion suggests that her recollection of this story of transformation has
effectedher own imaginative transformation:
I pressmy cheek
to therock.I composemyself.All at once I'm delivered
fromdanger,earth-bound,able tohold in check
themonsters of the imagination,thedemons of theair. (AC 51)
Ni Dhomhna?Ts presence at Raven's Rock, her
figurative act of eating the
salmon, and finally,her identificationwith the subjective aspects of the land

%$. Ross, p. 257*

30. MacKillop, p.317.
31. Ross, p. 351.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

scape, are themeans bywhich shewards off thedestructive forces around her.
By drawing on the collective imagination, thepoet succeeds indispelling private
delusions. That a simple encounterwith nature becomes themeans bywhich
Ni Dhomhnaill "compose [s]" herself?finds innerpeace and creates herself?
and wards off "monsters of the imagination" appears ironic to a modern sensi
bility inclined to regard such "earth-bound" beliefs as themere superstitions?
"monsters of imagination." It suggests that one's very identity is formed,
nurtured, and secured by just such subjective aspects of the landscape, as hap
pens in "An Ras" ("The Race"). There, Ni DhomhnailTs road trip through the
small towns ofwestern Ireland provides an occasion to explore Irish landmarks
of folkloric import (RD139).
The "crazy pigs in the Fenian cycle"are treacherous,transformedotherworld
animals, whose purpose is apparently to lead theFenian warriors to some oth
erworld abode. The favoritefood of the pigs, the acorn, is thefruit of themost
venerated of Celtic trees, the oak, which must have increased pigs' otherworld
associations.32 In her rearviewmirror,Ni Dhomhnaill's narrator sees "sun glow
ing red behind [her] on thehorizon, a vast blazing crimson sphere like theheart
of theGreat Cow of the Smith-God when shewas milked through a sieve, the
blood dripping as in a holy picture."Her experience leads her towonder, "when
Deirdre saw the calf's blood on the snow did iteverdawn on herwhat the raven
was?"33 According to legend, the raven foretells
Deirdre's fate:Conor Mac Nessa
ordered Deirdre's loverNaoise killed, capturedDeirdre, and forcedher to sub
mit to him. She committed suicide by dashing her head on a rock.Animal
blood was used forpurposes of divination, and ravenswere regarded as birds of
ill omen, so the calf's blood and the raven are a particularly ominous combi
nation. Furthermore, theM?rr?gan, the greatgoddesswho reputedlypossessed
the power of transformation,appears throughout theUlster and mythological
over thebattle field,foretellingslaughter,and
cycles, often as a raven hovering
later feeding on the slain.34
A reference to the Irish greatmother, Ollmh?thairMh?r, concludes "The
Race" (RD 141).The ancient Irishbelieved thatover and above the localmoth
er goddesses, therewere evenmore powerfulmothers?the nurturers of the
with the earth,
gods themselves. The Great Mother was invariablyassociated
and in another poem, simply entitled "Ollmh?thairMh?r," Ni Dhomhnaill
reminds the reader of the environmental and personal consequences of failing
to revere theGreat Mother:

32. Ross, p. 321.

33- Ross, pp. 243> 255.
34. Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the
Morrigan toCathleen niHoulihan

(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991), pp. 23-24.

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 ThePoetryofNualaNi Dhomhnaill

The fringeofyour cloak ison thehorizon:

us in your great-coat of clay,
you will wrap
with kisses,drenchedwith bittertears
we'll be extinguished
of acid rain?our own home-brewed rain. (RD 59)

Ni Dhomhnaill frequently alludes to Celtic goddesses in order to address

in particular, Irish
contemporary Irish issues, including gender relations and,
women's virtual exclusion from the process of nation building. Yet Ni Dhomh
naill suggests that our modern sensibility is at fault here, and invites us to
return to amuch older way of thinking of the female: "The strengthderived
frombonding to the 'earthenergies' is awoman's natural inheritance, although
social and religious authoritieshave conspired to discourage women from such
earthlyaffinities."35The Hag of Beara is associated with a whole group of god
desses inCeltic beliefwhose attributesmaybe found in Sheelah-na-Gig, R?is?n
Dubh, Cathleen niHoulihan, and others?who were feared and deified because
theyheld thepower of lifeand death. Finally, "Hag Energy" isNi Dhomhnaill's
termforwhat writing in Irishprovides: "Irish in the Irish context is the language
of theMothers, because everythingthathas been done towomen had been done
to Irish. Ithas been marginalised, its status has been taken from it, ithas been
reduced to the language of small farmersand fishermen, yet ithas survived."36

Ni Dhornhnaill's decision towrite and publish in IrishGaelic, which grows out

of the need to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of the otherworldly
and theworldly, likewisepermits her to recreate a Celtic sensibility that implic
itlychallenges theEnglish worldview. Ni Dhomhnaill contends that the differ
ence between the Irish language and theEnglish language underscores this dis
tinctionbetween pre- and post-scientific cultures:

Irishdealswith theworld in a narrative,non-conceptualway,which isnot the

same at all as a non-intellectual it just means that whereas
way conceptual
thoughtexercisedonlythe intelligence,
narrativeformsof thoughtexercisethe
heart and the imagination,and otherparts of thehuman organismbeside the
purely intellectual. For instance, Irish has a whole attitude to an saol eile*, the
or'theOtherWorld5which is totallyimpossibleto translateinto
preternatural
English,where the post-Enlightenmentlanguage has a built-in prejudice
against it.37

35- M. Louise Cannon, "The Extraordinary within theOrdinary: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill" South Atlantic Review, 60,2 (May, 1995), 34.
36. Rebecca Wilson, Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and IrishWomen Poets
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), p. 154.
37. McWilliams-Consalvo (1995), 160.

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 ThePoetryof
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

Deborah McWilliams writes thatNi Dhomhnaill "is ardent in her conviction

that 'one of the few genuinely alternativecultural strandsnow [is] the Irish lan
guage tradition,"5because, as Ni Dhomhnaill observes, "'the Irish language
didn't go through theRenaissance... [or] theReformation... [or] theEnlight
enment ... [or] theVictorian era. [Rather] it fell out of history/"38Thus, the
Irish language itselfembodies a culture, an alternativeway of seeing theworld
and of representing reality.
In the poem titled"Ceist an Teangan" ("The Language Issue"), fromwhich
the title of her third collection of poetry, Pharaoh's Daughter, is taken,Ni
Dhomhnaill finds an analogy forher effortto save the Irish language in theExo
dus storyofMoses and theBulrushes:

I placemy hope on thewater

in thislittleboat
of the language, the way a body might put an infant...

Not knowingwhere itmight end up;

in the lap,perhaps,
of somePharaoh'sdaughter. (PD155)

The biblical story ofMoses and the Bulrushes takes place when the Israelites
were in bondage to the Egyptians. The effortofMoses's sister to protect her
brother ultimately preserved not only her brother,but also an entirepeople
throughMoses's effortsto lead the Israelitesout of Egypt. Beyond that, itpre
served an entire culture, a way of life,a tradition?whose influencewas ulti

mately felt around theworld.

Similarly,Ni Dhomhnaill's purpose is to preserve Irish culture by preserv
a
ing itsfolklore and language, and, in turn,shehas smallhope that this culture
will have an influence on a world view. She relies on Irish language and Irish
folklore in an effortto retrieve something essential to both; a vision of reality,
a worldview, thathas been lost Discussing the double vision or "metaphysical
clash" produced when the colonization imposes a foreign language on an
text"reca
indigenous population, Stephen Slemon writes thatthepostcolonial
a dialectical within a dialectic between 'codes of
pitulates struggle language,
recognition' inherentwithin the inheritedlanguage and those imagined,Utopi
an, and future-oriented codes thataspire toward a language of expressive,local
realism, and a set of 'original relations'with theworld."39
Ni Dhomhnaill's poem "Aubade" expresses thisdialectical strugglenot just
because itsoriginal Irish isplaced oppositeMichael Longley's English translation

38. McWil?iams-Consa?vo (1995), 148.

39- Slemon, p. 411.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

"
of it,but because Ni Dhomhnaill carefullyreshapes the aubade, or "dawn song
to reflectan Irish settingand worldview.
importedfrommedieval France
It's all the same tomorning what it dawns on?

On thebickeringof jackdawsin leafytrees;

On thatdandy fromthewetiands, thegreenmallard's
on moorhen
Stylishglissandoamong reeds; the
Whose white petticoatflickersaround theboghole;
On the oystercatcher on tiptoe at low tide.

?
It's all the same to the sun what it rises on

On thewindows inhouses inGeorgian squares;

On bees swarmingtoblitz suburbangardens;
On youngcouplesyawninginunison before
They do itagain;on dew likesweator tears
On lilies and roses; on your bare shoulders.

But it isn't the same to us that night-time

Runs out; that we must make do with today's

Happenings, and stoopand somehowglue together

The sillylittleshardsof our lives,so that
Our childrencandrinkwaterfrombrokenbowls,
Not from cuppedhands. It isn'tthe same at all. (PD149)

Unlike JohnDonne's "The Sun Rising," probably thebest-known aubade in

English, inwhich the lover'sworld is depicted as a universe so complete in
itselfthat thenatural elements outside hiswindow seem irrelevant and annoy
ing,Ni Dhomhnaill's "Aubade" ismuch more circumspect. Rather than depict
ing the lovers as the center of the universe, Ni Dhomhnaill depicts them as
merely part of the natural setting,amid jackdaws, mallards, moorhens, and
oystercatchers.As in the traditional aubade, the sun is coming up and the lovers
are inbed together,"yawning inunison before theydo it again."Yet there is an
?
underlying tension in thispoem that is not usually found in an aubade the
the ?
"blitz" and then there is she tells us, that
"bickering," the responsibility,
we have for our children,which JohnDonne would no doubt consider out of

place in a lovepoem. InNi Dhomhnaill's version of the aubade, lilies and roses
are notmerely idealized components in a description of a woman's beauty, but
areworthy of observation in theirown
right.The parents' only legacy for their
children isbroken bowls?reflecting the brokenness of Irish tradition in terms
of language, culture, and religion,
Yet,Ni Dhomhnaill concludes, it is better to give them broken bowls thanno
bowls at all?better to give them a broken traditionwhich is an amalgamation

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 ThePoetryofNualaNi Dhomhnaill

of Irish English and IrishGaelic, Catholic and Protestant,Celt and Saxon than
to leave them utterlyat themercy of theirown resources.Thus, Ni Dhomhnaill
"aspires not only to call attention to the language issue incontemporary Ireland,
but also to revive,within the Irishphilosophic tradition,thepre-modern belief
in the simultaneous existenceof at leasttwo realmsof being: theworldly or nat
ural, and the otherworldy,or preternatural."40Ni Dhomhnaill contends that

The Gaeltacht languageI grewup with fellout of historybeforetheEnlighten

ment, and before many other things, including Victorian
prudishness_Nor
has Irisha prejudiceagainst theotherworld.
You talkabout theotherworldin
Irish and it's an intellectually credible attitude.41

Through her use of Irish as amedium forpoetic discourse, Ni Dhomhnaill

may insiston the enduring presence of the otherworldly in the contemporary
world. Her frequent reliance on folktalesandmotifs from Irish involvingtrans
formation or shape-shiftingfromhuman to animal or otherworldlyform serve
to remind the reader of the inseparable relation between the human and the
otherworldliness of animals. Thus, as James MacKillop suggests,shape-shifting
represents thepossibility of spiritualmigration and "thehappy afterlife
becomes
Anne Ross notes that shape-shiftingbrings ani
concurrent with mortal life."42
mals and humans "into a continual juxtaposition, theirshapes and character
istics continuously merging and separating in themythological legends."43
Through the motif of transformation,Ni Dhomhnaill problematizes the
dichotomy of subject and object, nature and self,and insteadasserts theirinter
relationship, even their inseparability.Ni Dhomhnaill's poetry relieson trans
formations to convey that"thewhole ofWestern discourse is ripe for transfor
mation and is transformable." Born out of dire need to cope with terrible
situations, shape-shifting legends implythat theonly hope for salvation is rad
ical transformation.Bo Almqvist writes:

The once all but universal belief in transformation and enchantment forms the

core of innumerable popular narratives. In a wide range of these we also meet

etc.,which are donned as they
with skins, hides, cloaks, feathercoats by magicians
transform themselves into animals or cast over antagonists they want to turn

intowild beastsor birds.Equally common isthemotif thatcertainzoomorphic

be enchanted humans
or semi-zoomorphic beings?whether expressly stated to
or not?are able to remove their animal coats and take on human shape.44

40. McWill?ams-Consalvo (i995)> 148?

41. "Comhr?" The Southern Review, 602.
42. Mackillop, p. 317.
43. Ross, p. 55.
and Marriages: Seamus Heaney's 'Maighdean Mara' and Nuala
44. Bo Almqvist, "Of Mermaids
Ni Dhomhnaill's 'AnMhaighdean Mara B?aloideas, 58 (1990)? 1.

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 ThePoetryofNuala Ni Dhomhnaill

water horses,
Ni Dhomhnaill's shape-shifters include ravens, hare, deer,
about mermaids ?
hounds, hags, hawks, and mermaids. Her poems creatures
sea and land and between two of and
caught between ways being?natural
condition. Mermaid folk
supernatural?are emblematic of themodern Irish
lore is,of course, prevalent infishing communities on islands?and in Ireland
it is associated with theGaeltacht, which, because of its remoteness, was less
influencedby British culture and language, and thuswidely regarded as more
Irish thanother regions. In folklore,mermaids were trickedbymortal men into
some article of themermaid's
leavingbehind theirsea lives; themen would hide
or a cloak?in order to prevent their return to the sea.
clothing?usually a cap
Susan Urquhart's novelAway uses themermaid figure,and itsassociations with
sea culture,as a symbol forpostcolonial Ireland.When theprotagonist, alleged

ly a formermermaid, emigrates from her homeland to Canada during the

Famine, her desperate need to get back to thewater ultimately results in her
death. Because theycome froma differentrealm thanhumans, Ni Dhomhnaill's
mermaids operate under totallydifferentsets of principles and have strikingly
differentperspectives and concepts of reality.
In "AnMhuruch san Ospid?al" ("The Mermaid in the Labour Ward"),
Ni Dhomhnaill equates thehuman realmwith mortality and pain,mindful that
thecurse of Evewas to sufferlabor pains. Likewise, she connects themermaid's
realmwith prelapsarian tranquility.After themermaid is forced to join the
mortal realm,Ni Dhomhnaill writes that,"It's littlewonder / in the longmonths
that followed, /as her instepflattened /and her arches dropped, / ifher mind
wentwith them."45In "AnMhaighdean Mheara" ("TheMermaid"), Ni Dhomh
naill writes from themermaid's perspective:

Though I've got a fishe [sic]tale

I'm not unbeautiful;

my hair is longand yellow

and there's a shine from my scales

you won't see on landlocked women.

Their eyesare likethe stones
but look intotheseeyesofmine
and youwill see thesturgeon
and youwill seefine seals
gambollinginmy pupils.

Not withoutpain have I landed;

I broke
thenatural law {RD 53)

45- Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "AnMhuruch san Oispid?aT ("The Mermaid in the Labour Ward"), The
Southern Review, 31,3 (July,1995), 441.

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 ThePoetryofNuda Ni Dhomhnaill

Whereas themermaid forgoes immortalityby

breaking thenatural law?relin
quishing her natural form for a mortal form?she maintains a kind of percep
tionwhich mortals lack,but which she is confident she can provide for them.
Ni Dhomhnaill therebyexpresses her intentiontoofferthe same kind of vision
to her readers.

Ni Dhomhnaill's "AnMhuruch agus Focaii Airithe" ("The Mermaid and

Certain Words") relies on the image of themermaid to
depict an inversionof
contemporary power relations in Ireland.The poem featuresa menacing Irish
schoolmaster who makes the learning of Irish a kind of punishment, but who
isultimately revealed to be "the fictitious creation of a deceptivemermaid,...
used to camouflage a deeper knowledge of Irish folklore than any taught in
schools."46Although Ni Dhornhnaill's mermaid denies any knowledge of the
sea, "life under thewave," or "those superstitions,"her deceptions are ultimate
ly exposed:
In theDepartment of IrishFolklorethereisa full
manuscript,
from theSchoolsCompilation,writteninherhand,writteninwater
a
with quill pen, on a tassel of seaweed as
parchment.47

Whereas mermaids have traditionallybeen portrayed as victims ofmortal men,

and students portrayed as victims of thebullying schoolmaster, thismermaid
student ultimately prevails. Furthermore, she does so with lines "written in
water," certainly an apt description of theoral tradition,which isfluid enough
to accommodate a variety of tellers.Significantly, Ni Dhomhnaill suggests the
oral tradition prevails against the seemingly stronger and more permanent
written tradition.
In "NaMurucha agus an Litriocht" ("TheMerfolk and theWrittenWord"),
Ni Dhomhnaill again associates mermaids with the oral tradition,describing
themerfolk "literate in theirown fish tongue,"whose "Island School" is"closed
down /by theDepartment of Dried-Out Islands /back in the '50s."48Their
inparticu
plight is emblematic of that of Irish-speaking islanders?recalling,
lar,the evacuation of the Blaskets?and indeed of the plight of all Irish speak
ers. Ni Dhomhnaill writes, "They never took to the pen / or cultivated the
native prose text"?suggesting thather own use of the Irish oral tradition is an

Politics of the Classroom/* in Critical Essays on Seamus

46. Lucy McDiarmid, "Heaney and the
Heaney, ed. Robert F. Garratt (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), * 9?Unpublished translation by
"
Michael Durkan. See also Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "AnMhuruch agus Focaii Airithe: A New Poem
The Irish Reporter, 11 (1993), 13.
The IrishReporter, 11
47. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "AnMhuruch agus Focaii Arithe: A New Poem,"
(i993)> 13.
and theWrittenWord"),
48. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, ?(NaMur?cha agus an Litriocht" ("The Merfolk
The Southern Review, 31,3 (July,1995)? 44*?

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 ThePoetryofNuda Ni Dhomhnaill

act of defiance that enables her and her readers to inhabit imaginatively this
folkloric realm.
In "Deora Duibhshl?ibhe" ("Dora Dooley"), Ni Dhomhnaill anticipates an
encounterwith thebanshee Dora Dooley "with her cloak of astrakhan /and a
"The little,old, local lady,"who is obvi
lap-dog under her oxtereen" (AC 47)?
of the legendarybanshee. The banshee, from
ously a modern transformation
ban (bean), awoman, and shee (sidhe) a fairy,follows families,prophesying the
deaths of theirmembers with her terriblewails.49 The keen (caoine), the funer
al cryof thepeasantry, is said to be an imitationof her cry.When more than one
banshee ispresent, and theywail and sing in chorus, theydo so for the death of
some holy or great one,50Ni Dhomhnaill's juxtaposition of the details of con
the presence of the
temporary Irish lifewith those of Irish folklore suggests
details of Irish life.It suggests also
extraordinaryeven in the seeminglyordinary
that folklore's origins lie in the embellishment on, extrapolations from, and
enrichmentof private, ordinary experience.
In "AnB?d S?" ("The Fairy Boat"), Ni Dhomhnaill alludes to the legend that
formsthebasis for thefilmThe Legend ofRoan Inish: fairieswho can transform
themselves into seals.While picking dulse, threewomen see the fairies "go
a elders advise them to
through a place so narrow only sealmight pass." The
head home and say theRosary, "for this same vision had often come / to peo
ple out on the sea."Ni Dhomhnaill thus encapsulates Christianity's traditional
response toCeltic religion?imposing itsown rituals and myths in an effortto
eradicate all traces of Celtic ones. Ni Dhomhnaillconcludes the poem as she
started itby noting that therewere "threewho'd seen and threewho hadn't /the
men rowing fordear life /with theirblue jerkins and red bonnets /putting in
Women's Cliff" (AC 63). Those lines imply that theworldview reflected in
at the
the encounter is just as likelyto be as valid as theChristian worldview imposed
on it.As in other poems, the red bonnets signifythemen's association with the
Celtic otherworld.
Likewise, "The Lay of Loughadoon," commented on earlier, also alludes to
a famous transformation?when Aiofe, the cruel stepmother of the children of
Lir, transformsthem into swans:

And I picked a tuftofwild thyme,

'theherb of theson of theKing of theCloaks',
so thememory wouldn't dim
of thespellcastby the lough.

49? MacKillop, p. 30.

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 ThePoetryofNualaNi Dhotnhnaili

Because now, at evening, on a tributary

of the Scoraid four swans move?
Fionnuala and her brothers three?
while below us, from the valley-mouth,

come hound voices, and the view-halloo

not of no,
shepherds,
but Fionn and theFianna huntinghighand low
forthatelusive,hornlessdoe. (AC 71)

Ni Dhomhnaill here alludes to the children of Lir, transformed into swans

by a cruel stepmother,and in effectexiled to thewater fornine hundred years.

The legend has been used by Tynan, Yeats, and others,as a covert commentary
on Ireland under English domination. That Ni Dhomhnaill substitutes the
characters of folklore andmyth for the"real" inhabitantsof the landscape?the
children of Lir rather than real swans, Finn and the Fianna rather than shep
herds?suggests how vital the folk vision remains for her. "The Lay of

Loughadoon" suggests the power of orally transmittedfolklore to transform

one's perception of reality,aswell as the importance of the poet in channelling
the folk vision, this time via thewrittenword, to new generations of readers.
Moreover, Ni Dhomhnaill's most recent collection The Water Horse (2000)
returns to the legend of the children of Lir in twopoems "The Tragic Legend of
the Children of Lir" and "Fionnuala (afterher change)". The lattermakes an
explicit connection between the swans' transformationand English coloniza
tion, as well as between landscape and language:

Although our human voice remains

To enchant the hearers,

Our mind, our sense, our sweet music

And even our Gaelic tongue remains,

What would I not give
To be freefrom thecurse,
The dread lawswe obey,
That took our natural shape away
And gave us theblood and shapeofbirds.50

The 1995 conversation in the SouthernReview betweenMcGuckian and Ni

Dhomhnaill explores the common assumption thatNi Dhomhnaill is preoc
To thatassumption Ni Dhomh
cupied with earth, sexuality,and the irrational.
naill responds: "I am formarrying the logicalwith the non-rational" and for

50. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, The Water Horse Winston-Salem:

( Wake Forest University Press, 2000),

pp.113,116,

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 M Dhomhnaill
ThePoetryofNuala

4 ."51Atransformation in itself,
combining male' energywith 'female' energy...
that combination suggests that Ni Dhomhna?Ts many poems about and

embodying transformation
are themeans bywhich she implores her readers to
consider comprehensive transformations in their views of theworld and them

selves in it. In an essay in IrishWriters and Religion (oooo), Nl Dhomhnaill

recounts aWest Kerry tale "Mis and Dubh Ruis" as a "Parable of Psychic Trans
formation." Mis losesher sanitywith griefafterher father theking dies, but she
is restoredby theharperDubh Ruis. Ni Dhomhnaill emphasizes the cultural sig
nificance ofMis's healing as a kind of transformation.Continuing to tell and
heed tales inwhich transformationisdeemed possible consistutes themeans by
which we may avoid capitulating to rationalist empiricism and to the inbuilt
worldview of theEnglish language. Ultimately, Ni Dhomhnaill asserts, telling
and listeningto tales about transformationhelps "break us out of the dominant
patriarchal ethos of the age."52
^ KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY

51. "Comhr?," The Southern Review, p. 602.

"
52. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation in Irish

Writers and Religion, ed. RobertWelch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, oooo), p. 117.

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