‘A Thread to the Afterlife’ - Textiles and the Otherworld in Irish Poetry: Yeats, Boland, Heaney and Meehan

Abstract

This essay explores fabric, clothing and textile motifs in Irish poetry concerned with the relationship between this life and the afterlife. It intersplices readings of poems by W.B.Yeats, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney and Paula Meehan which acknowledge the fact that doubleness of presence and absence is integral to all human lives, and which are alert to the fact that this same duality is already embedded in man’s engagement with cloth. The essay argues that Irish poetry attends to the dense physicality, immediacy and depth texture of textile materials, as a key image complex allowing negotiation of significant loss, including the task of reconstructing life’s meaning following bereavement. Therefore, the essay explores how a concern with texture, processing, feeling and mood is facilitated in a special way through the haptic power of fabric symbolism in Irish elegiac poetry. It proposes that by mediating the theme of afterlife as a space which allows us to imagine multiple alternative lives in the here-and-now, fabric imagery as deployed by Irish poets challenges us to accept both our losses in this world and our on-going potential for life-renewal.