'"A Juggler's Trick'": The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice

Abstract

'"A Juggler's Trick'":The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice Cody D. Jarman Countless recollections and historical accounts of 1940s Ireland cite Eamon de Valera's 1943 St. Patrick's Day speech, in which he envisions the country as "the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit."1 The parochial exceptionalism of this vision is deeply entrenched in anxieties regarding the young nation's relationship to a burgeoning global order—or, to put it more aptly, a global disorder—manifested by World War II. De Valera's Ireland was a natural offspring of the more Arnoldian currents of the Irish Literary Revival's anticolonial pastoral aesthetic, which envisioned Ireland as organic, rustic, and rooted, a peasant nation of priestly farmers set adrift in a world marred by the materialism and exploitation of industrial capitalism and imperialism. For de Valera, this narrative had a politically expedient sentimental and populist appeal. Ireland is not only posited as spiritually elevated over the rest of the world, but also unified through a shared imaginary experience of the pastoral space; the nation and neutrality are embedded in individual notions of sanctity and a life lived in touch with the land. Political machinations aside, this imagined Ireland had a discernible impact on the poetry of place written by two of the most significant Irish poets of the war era, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice. In a dialogue with the political pastoralism of the young nation, Kavanagh and MacNeice tap into divergent elements of the poetic pastoral. Kavanagh tends to align himself with de Valera's vision by embracing pastoralism's stark binaries; MacNeice's poetry troubles the positions of the Irish government, focusing on the pastoral's dialectical qualities and the interdependence and interpenetration of seemingly distinct places and ideas. It is no surprise that Kavanagh and MacNeice have divergent approaches to the wartime pastoral. Simon Workman, writing in Irish Culture and Wartime [End Page 65] Europe (2015), observes that the overwhelming differences between the two Irishmen's biographies and characterizations as literary figures have led them to be "seen as occupying opposite ends of a poetic spectrum."2 This can be attributed to their resonances with two of the most prominent archetypes of the modern artist. Kavanagh seems the perfect type for the parochial figure, firmly enmeshed in his native land and struggling against the cultural conformity and pretensions of mid-twentieth century Ireland. MacNeice is the urbane exile with an elite English education, musing on home, homelessness, and modern politics. In this sense, the two poets are united by their difference; both are engaged, as Alan Gillis writes, in "negotiating with modernism," even though they attempt their negotiations from fundamentally different social and cultural vantage points.3 World War II provides a useful shared experience for understanding these two dissimilar Irish writers who, according to Workman, were drawn "into closer alignment than might have been expected."4 One way this aesthetic alignment manifested itself was a shared turn to the pastoral tradition, and the often-nebulous pastoral border in particular, to articulate the wartime experience in neutral Ireland. In general, the pastoral is defined as literature that presents an idealized vision of the countryside and the supposedly simpler form of life that goes on there. The pastoral was, from its very beginnings in the work of Classical poets like Theocritus, an urban form that depicted the countryside as an unspoiled alternative to urban life. This escape was epitomized in Virgil's imaginary rural region, Arcadia. His Arcadia is a paradise of rural beauty and simple life in tune with the seasons. The pastoral tradition, however, frequently pushes back against its own simplicity. In its incessant assertion of binaries between the rural and the urban, or simple and complex, modes of life, the pastoral contains a constant acknowledgment of its own undoing. Judith Haber argues the pastoral is a mode that works "insistently against itself … from the beginning of the genre, presence, continuity, and consolation have been seen as related to—indeed as dependent on—absence, discontinuity, and...