Inspiration and Narrative in the Short Poem

Abstract

A prose fiction works by a sequential logic to a conclusion that resolves the issues its narrative has raised. So do narrative poems, but even short poems do something similar. Traditionally ‘inspiration’ has been the word for what the lyric poet starts with. In Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence’, the sequence was only gradually established, and the meaning of the poem is radically affected by what comes first and last. Seamus Heaney’s poem beginning ‘The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise’ ends with a line which suffuses back through the poem by a kind of retrospective inspiration. Paul Muldoon’s poem ‘Something Else’ denies revelation altogether at the end: ‘which made me think of something else again’—but he does not say what. Finally, Bernard O’Donoghue explores some of his own poems that tell received stories and behave structurally like any narrative, but with devices particular to the lyric.