6 The Clamour of New Light
Posted by Christine on Aug 29, 2014 in Ireland | 11 comments Monday is Labor Day in the US and it seems like the right moment to write about one of my favorite poems, “The Lighthouse” by Vona Groarke, a poem that talks not about the sea, as the title might suggest, but about rural electrification in Ireland, a labor that was only completed on mainland Ireland in 1973 (some of the remote islands had to wait until 2003). I’ve been thinking about this poem lately. Vona Groarke is gaining popularity in the US, but if you don’t know her, she was born in 1964 in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, where the writer Maria Edgeworth spent most her life (1768-1849) managing her father’s extensive estate and writing her many novels and treatises. Groarke was born in the maternity unit of the hospital (now a nursing home) that occupied the Edgeworth family mansion, a fact she commemorated in her 1994 poem “Patronage,” where she writes about Maria’s courageous work of writing: While her sisters stitched bright patterns in a lace-work of pleasantries and chat, she took a clutch of unstrung characters and muddy syllables, and set them in a landscape of her own “Patronage” was my first encounter with Groarke’s work, and the poem meant a lot to me because I had visited that house in the late 1980s, searching for some link to the genius behind Castle Rackrent and the other works. I arrived uninvited in a January downpour, but the nuns running the nursing home took pity on me and invited me in, showing me some bits and pieces from Edgeworth’s day. Maria and her sisters haunted the place for me then as they must have done to Groarke when she wrote this evocative poem, following her interest in houses, the work that happens in them, and the lives, hopes, and dreams of their inhabitants. “The Lighthouse” considers a similar theme, the often forgotten perspective of women—women who work in the home—on important occasions, like the electrification of a rural village—an occasion for celebration for most, but not all. Stella Mews, past CEO of the Yeats Society in Sligo, told me about this poem; she actually recited it to me from memory when I visited the Yeats Museum with students from Agnes Scott in 2012. In the poem the speaker suggests that the story of the occasion is told differently by men and women. The speaker hears a version from one of...read more