Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing: Metaphor and Subject

Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing: Metaphor and SubjectAuthor(s): Terence BrownSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1978), pp. 7-21Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477198 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 22:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to IrishUniversity Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.198 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 22:40:18 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=eup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477198?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Terence Brown

Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing:

Metaphor and Subject

In Ireland the countryside is often taken as the imagination's

proper territory. A reader of Irish literature soon becomes accus

tomed to that literature's conventions as it confirms the primary Irish reality as rural, as a life of savage or pastoral possibilities in a

land of clay, rain, water, bog, rock, seascape and cloudscape. So

Bryan McMahon, in an otherwise excellent essay (published in

1973) entitled "Place and People into Poetry", which sought to

assess the "impact of Ireland as a whole on the poetic mind" and

to consider "the influence of the Irish environment in terms of

person and place" on poetry, could almost entirely neglect the

city as part of "Ireland as a whole" and as an influence on the

Irish imagination. In this he was perhaps unconsciously reflecting the degree to which literature in Ireland finds its centre of gravity in the countryside, away from the urban centres where most of

the country's inhabitants now live.

The poetry of Yeats is instructive in this matter. Implicit

throughout is the assumption that Irish reality, at its most authen

tic, is rural, anti-industrial, spiritually remote from the life of the

town or city. From early poems like "The Madness of King Goll" and "The Man who Dreamed of Fairyland" to the late Crazy Jane sequence, town and city are rejected in favour of wild landscapes,

regions of wind, wood, rain, rock and sky. For Yeats, the glory of his friends and confederates was that they loved

bare hills and stunted trees

And were the last to choose the settled ground,2

("Hound Voice")

dismissing the life of the town with its ". . . scientific dramatists, our naturalists of the stage, who have thought it possible to be like

the greatest, and yet to cast aside even the poor persiflage of the

comedians, and to write in the impersonal language that has come,

1. Bryan MacMahon, "Place and People into Poetry" in Sean Lucy (editor), Irish

Poets in English (Mercier Press: Cork and Dublin, 1973), p. 60.

2. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Macmillan: London, 1961), p. 385.

7



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

not out of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of necess

ities of commerce, of Parliament, of Board School, of hurried

journeys by rail." Those of Yeats's poems which are set in

Dublin reinforce his assertion of the primacy of Irish rural life as a creative force in the national being. For example, the Dublin

poems in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and in

Responsibilities (1914) set many figures ? Maud Gonne, John

Synge, the patriot dead, Parnell, the poet himself ? against the

squalid mediocrity and stresses of the city, associating each of them with images of elemental, natural or rural realities. So the

poet, sick with the fascination of what's difficult, worn down by ''Theatre business, management of men", swears

before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.4

The patriots of "September 1913" are associated with the wild

geese as they "spread/The grey wing upon every tide;"5 a friend whose work has come to nothing is counselled to "Be secret and

exult," "Amid a place of stone."6 In each of these poems per sonal and national authenticity must be sought not in the city but in the solitary, lonely places of the countryside.

Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light, where "all are in God's eye" and

There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot, A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

("Paudeen")

"To A Shade" (in Responsibilities) suggests that the city and

its life can perhaps be transformed by the forces which have their

source outside the city's bounds. In this poem the poet addresses

the ghost of Parnell:

3. W.B. Yeats, "The Well of the Saints" in Essays and Introduction (Macmillan:

London, 1961), p. 301.

4. op. cit., p. 104.

5. op. cit., p. 120.

6. op. cit., p. 122.

7. op. cit., p. 122.

8



DUBLIN IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY WRITING

If you have revisited the town, thin Shade, Whether to look upon your monument

(I wonder if the builder has been paid) Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent To drink of that salt breath out of the sea

When grey gulls flit about instead of men, And the gaunt houses put on majesty: Let these content you and be gone again; For they are at their old tricks yet.8

Here, despite the vulgar philistinism of a mob that destroyed Parnell and which is now determined to spurn Hugh Lane's mag

nanimity, the city is momentarily transformed by the evening light and by a purgative wind from the sea, allowing for a moment of

austere drama (note "grey gulls", "gaunt houses") and possibly an earnest of the future:

Go, unquiet wanderer,

The time for you to taste of that salt breath And listen at the corners has not come.

Though Parnell is now "safer in the tomb", it may not always be

so.

"Easter 1916" is the poem where the transformation of the city is no momentary trick of evening light. Rather the poem in its

troubled, meditative development celebrates an absolute trans

formation of a city from apparent comic irrelevance to a tragic

centrality in the drama of a nation's regeneration. But note the

imagery of the third stanza, the imagery of stream, birds, cloud,

horse, moor-hen, with the stone "in the midst of all". So familiar are these properties from earlier and later poems by Yeats that few

readers note the peculiarity of introducing images from the

Irish countryside into this poem on an urban uprising. It is as if

poet and reader share an unconscious assumption, that the forces

manifesting themselves in the Dublin streets have their origin far beyond the city itself. The poem is an ambivalent recognition of the extraordinary dynamism present in Irish life, that can

transform the very city itself. Where it once seemed appropriate to wear mere motley amid the images of decadence and decay, now green can suitably be worn; all is changed utterly.

8. op. cit., p. 123.

9




Thereafter Dublin could not be easily dismissed from Yeats's

imagination, for it was a place where a sacred drama had found a stage. In "Parnell's Funeral", in a bitterly disturbed reflection on the disasters of the post-Treaty period in Ireland, Yeats can

recall an earlier moment when even under O'Connell's (the "Great

Comedian's") tomb a more vital, darker energy revealed itself in

the Glasnevin cemetery as Parnell was laid to rest. By the forces

glimpsed that Dublin day, Yeats can take the measure of a

distressful present:

Had de Val?ra eaten Parnell's heart No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day, No civil rancour torn the land apart.

Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell's heart, the land's

Imagination had been satisfied, Or lacking that, government in such hands,

O'Higgins its sole statesman had not died.9

At the last, Yeats finds in a Dublin picture gallery "the images of thirty years", the images of an Ireland "the poets have imagined terrible and gay." For Yeats it is as if he has come to a hallowed

place, a place made holy by what he and friends in their know

ledge of "deep-rooted things" have wrought:

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that

Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. We three alone in modern times had brought

Everything down to that sole test again, Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.10

("The Municipal Gallery Revisited")

James Joyce feared contact with the Irish soil. In A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen records in his journal:

John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west

of Ireland. (European and Asiatic papers please copy.) He told

us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man

9. op. cit., p. 320.

10. op. cit., p. 369.

10




had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan

spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man

sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said: ?

Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end

of the world. I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him

I must struggle all through this night till day come, till

he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till . . .

Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.

Here Stephen, almost at the moment of his departure from

Ireland, is repelled and horrified by the forces that generated both

the Gaelic revival and the Anglo-Irish literary movement, (his old

man is pure Synge, speaks pure Kiltartanese). But Joyce, Stephen's creator, had his revenge on both their houses in Ulysses when he

made epic of a petit-bourgeois Dublin world they would both have

sought to exclude in their definitions of the essential Irishry. Bloom gives his answer to the Citizen, while the exuberant,

democratic, comic potential of Dublin's life and language are made

manifest as ample refutation of the Yeatsian vision of a contemp tible Paudeen in shop.

For the aristocratic Yeats, the national life of Ireland was so

regenerative that it could take men away from their city "counter or desk among grey/Eighteenth-century houses"1^ to place them

on chivalric and tragic stage. For Joyce in his humanism, the comic everydayness of the European city he both loved and hated

would absorb whatever local fanaticism might attempt to foist

upon it as it would be sustained by all that was genuine in the

national being. For each, in different ways, Dublin is an element

in a debate about the nature of Irish life.

Later Irish writers have continued this debate, employing Dublin as something more than a setting for their work, as a

subject which allows them to reflect on the nature of the Irish mind and imagination, to ponder the national being. For writers

in the twenties and thirties the world of lower-middle and working class Dublin, the world of tenement and brothel (what one Irish critic in the twenties called "the matted and slimy jungle of

Ulysses") could be evoked in radical opposition to those who

11. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Faber: London, 1964),

pp. 251-52.

12. op cit., p. 202.

13. J.W. Good, The Irish Statesman, III: 17 (3 January 1925), 534-35.

11




found the new Irish state properly enhanced by a verse and prose that ignored the city and the State's moral character protected

by a literature that turned away from much social reality.

O'Casey's tenement world, contrasted sharply against a back

ground of Irish patriotic rhetoric, is well known. Less well known

is O'Flaherty's Dublin in a novel such as The Puritan (1932), where a crazed young man driven by religious mania and a quest for public morality (O'Flaherty deliberately makes him a member

of a Catholic vigilance association) commits a ghastly murder only to find himself condemned to a pilgrimage to a Dublin version of

the lower depths. O'Flaherty here defiantly takes us to a Dublin

that flies in the face of the Free State's official demeanour.

Arm in arm, they lurched through the lane, along a narrow, broken pavement. Then they turned into a wider street that was excessively dirty and almost completely flooded, so that

refuse cans had become unmoored and were carried along the

channels, their contents spilt and floating on the filthy tide.

'This is Kane's' she said, trying to drag him through the

door of a public-house that stood at the corner of the lane.

But he suddenly resisted her.

Tn there?' he asked in horror.

The bar was full to the door. A thick cloud of human breath

and tobacco smoke made the light so dim that the people were hardly discernible. Only a face, or a woman's naked arm

protruding gaunt and dirty from a shawl, stood out here and

there, as if unsustained in gloomy space and ghoulishly dismembered. The horror of the faces, on each of which

disease and debauchery had put monstrous constructions, harried into activity his old fear of sin, so that he drew back

like a beast at the door of a slaughter house.

Other writers of the early decades of independence chose by contrast to challenge the cultural orthodoxies of the new state, not by exaggerating Dublin's seamier side but by celebrating the

city's nobility. There are such moments in Gogarty's poetry and

sustained passages in his prose, for example in As I was Going Down Sackville Street, which evoke a city of eighteenth-century

gallantry and pride. In a similar mode is Donagh McDonagh's "Dublin Made Me":

14. L?am O'Flaherty, The Puntan (Lythway Press; Bath, 1973), p. 255.

12




Dublin made me and no little town

With the country closing in on its streets

The cattle walking proudly on its pavements The jobbers the gombeenmen and the cheats

I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land, The evil that grows from it and the good, But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city, Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.

The countryside is not rejected by the poet, but neither can the

city in its distinctiveness be denied.

Other writers have seen in Dublin not an urban distinctiveness

which must be admitted to a modern Irish self-understanding but an essentially Irish capacity, reminiscent of the powers of the

countryside, to absorb change without fundamental disturbance. For Louis MacNeice in 1939, the random images of the city suggested a timeless receptivity in which alien and native were

absorbed in the city's own being. MacNeice's poem "Dublin" is

the first in a five-poem sequence entitled "The Closing Album",

dealing with a holiday visit to Ireland. The other four poems of

the sequence are set in an Irish countryside that seems timeless and self-absorbed, untroubled by the threats of war that are

daily broadcast from Europe. Dublin in the first poem shares

this self-absorbing imperviousness to change. The city has ab

sorbed invasions and administrations, claiming them all for herself:

She is not an Irish town

And she is not English, Historic with guns and vermin

And the cold renown

Of a fragment of Church latin

Of an oratorical phrase.

Fort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxon

Augustan capital Of a Gaelic nation,

Appropriating all

The alien brought . . .16

15. Donagh MacDonagh, The Hungry Grass (Faber: London, 1947), p. 19.

16. The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber: London, 1966), p. 186.

13




This sense of Dublin recurs in the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

Heaney in a much more developed way than MacNeice has estab

lished in his last two books (Wintering Out and North) a view of

Irish reality as an indestructible capacity to absorb. The nation

is seen as a rich complex compost of traditions, influences,

movements, historic events received into the national being and

the history of Dublin is a part of that process, whilst her own

history exhibits the process at work. So the poem "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces" in North is a glimpse of the Danish past from our

confused present which consolingly suggests continuity, Dublin's

powers of creative acceptance.

Like a long sword

sheathed in its moisting burial clays the keel stuck fast

in the slip of the bank, its clinker-built hull

spined and plosive as Dublin.

And now we reach in

for shards of the vertebrae

the ribs of hurdle the mother-wet caches

?

and for this trial piece incised by a child, a longship, a buoyant

migrant line.17

In reflecting on these literary treatments of Dublin we have

noted how some of them seem to emerge chiefly from a desire

to employ the city as a cultural metaphor. We have also noted

that aspects of Yeats's and Joyce's treatments of the city suggest a participation in the same Irish cultural debate. What we have

not yet considered is the possibility of a literary treatment of

Dublin which seeks to be something more than a metaphor in

Irish cultural politics, and certainly something more than a mere

background or setting for work expressing an essentially non

1 7. Scamus Heaney, North (Faber: London, 1975), pp. 22-23.

14




urban consciousness. For this Joyce must provide the text, for it

is in his work that we see the possibility most comprehensively realized.

Thomas Kinsella provides some useful insights on this matter.

In a paper entitled "The Irish Writer", delivered in New York in

1966, Kinsella pondered on the differing ways Yeats and Joyce related to Irish reality. He argued there that Yeats was isolated

by choice from modern Irish consciousness.

He refuses to come to terms with the real shaping vitality of

Ireland where he sees it exists; to take the tradition in any other way would have been to write for Daniel O'Connell's

children, for De Valera and Paudeen at his greasy till . . ,18

Joyce, by contrast, while he rejects "the shamrock lumpen

proletariat, the eloquent and conniving and mean-spirited tribe

of Dan," does not avert his gaze from them to turn to an

imaginary, mythic conception of the national being that realizes

itself in moments of heroic drama, or in any other way:

Daniel O'Connell or De Valera or Paudeen do not deter him

from his work; they are his subjects.20

Kinsella further notes that in admitting these subjects as proper for the Irish writer Joyce admits the city:

The filthy modern tide does not run only in Ireland, of course, and Joyce's art of continuity is done with a difference: he

simultaneously revives the Irish tradition and admits the

modern world. It is symptomatic that for Corkery's third

force, the Land, Joyce substitutes the City. He makes up all

the arrears at once.

What this means is that the twentieth-century Irish writer can now

turn to Dublin for his material, secure in the knowledge that Joyce did not have to develop an idealised version of Ireland's national

18. In Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and The Irish Writer (Dolmen Press:

Dublin, 1970), p. 62.

19. ibid., pp. 64-65.

20. ibid., p. 65.

21. ibid. Kinsella is referring here to Corkery's identification of three central forces in Irish literature in his book Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature.

15




being to allow Dublin significant entry to Irish literature; nor did

Joyce write of the city merely in response to cultural and political

pressures which may only be of local interest. In fact, he wrote

of Irish human experience as he found it, discovering these matters

of more than local concern.

So Ulysses quite obviously does so much more than answer the

Citizen and his compatriots; and the important thing for sub

sequent Irish writers is that it was through attention to the details

of Irish urban reality that Joyce managed his illuminating explora tions of the family romance, sexuality, colonialism, mass society and the growth of an artist's mind. In Ulysses, Dublin is not

merely the setting for these explorations but the very stuff from

which they are woven. City, theme and the writer's consciousness are a seamless garment.

Joyce's achievement both liberates and challenges. It liberates

through its demonstration that a central preoccupation with the

city can be proper for the Irish artist. It liberates as it breaks down

the categories of much Irish debate, allowing for example a much

greater emphasis on sexuality than is customary in Irish thought,

diminishing the significance of the land. But his work challenges since it proposes no simple thematic programment testifies rather

to the radical re-interpretative powers of any genuinely original

literary imagining. Certain twentieth-century writers have responded to the Joycean

challenge, attempting to make Dublin not simply a backdrop to

their work or an element in a cultural debate but the stuff of

original vision. Thomas Kinsella's poem "Nighwalker" provides an example. Joyce himself is appropriately invoked as ghostly instructor and mentor as the poet wrestles with anger, frustration,

bitterness and racial pain whilst walking the night streets of the

city:

Watcher in the tower, be with me now

At your parapet, above the glare of the lamps. Turn your milky spectacles on the sea

Unblinking; cock your ear.22

The poem renders the city as a nightmare of squat, monstrous,

heavy presences, distastefully organic, implying bestiality, a stag nant corruption. For Kinsella, these images embody his sense of

22. Thomas Kinsella, Nightwalker and Other Poems (Dolmen Press: Dublin, 1968), p. 63.

16




the Irish Republic's spiritual desuetude, but the poet is not

content to leave it at that. The poem is also an individual struggle; an effort to achieve balance and a sense of structure in the face of

palpable chaos. The sense of anguished, stern responsibility is

impressive. The poet has resolutely confronted the wearying forces

in the psyche and in society that threaten an ordered conscious

ness. "Nightwalker", therefore, is by no means only a statement

about Ireland's political health but an oppressive recreation of a

mind's insecure struggle against the overwhelming tides of

depression and the weight of disappointment in the context of a

modern city. Indeed this, not the accuracy or otherwise of its

political or cultural judgements, is what one remembers as its

primary quality. Of other writers who had sought to meet the Joycean challenge

one would wish to advert to Patrick Kavanagh, who evokes in his

poetry a Dublin of vicious philistinism in which the poet achieves a personal transcendence, where the nastiness of the city is em

phasised to provide an adquate measure of the poet's spirituality,

endowing his eventual passivity with a kind of heroism:

Yet he found out at last the nature and the cause

Of what was and is and he no more wanted

To avoid the ludicrous cheer, the sick applause ?

The sword of satire in his hand became blunted, And for the insincere city He f?lt a profound pity.

("The Hero")23

One would wish to touch on Myles na gCopaleen's Dublin with its

seedy pr?tentions, unworthy object of an exacting satiric brilliance, where the work seems only a partial release from the frustration

and fury of ambitions unrealisable in a context of cultural

stagnation.

But the writer who provides the most pertinent texts for the

argument of this essay is the poet Austin Clarke. In Clarke's later

poetry, from Ancient Lights (1955) on, Dublin is the primary world of the poet's imagining. Robert F. Garratt has noted this and written well of Clarke's city poetry, suggesting that Clarke was influenced by Joyce to attend to the details of the city, with a scrupulous exactness. He claims with justice that

23. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (MacGibbon and Kee: London, 1964), p. 142.

17




This practice is unique in modern Irish poetry and established Clarke as a forerunner to the very recent work by Irish poets. He is the first Irish poet of the twentieth century to take as his master not Yeats but Joyce, and to place Dublin at the heart of his work.24

Garratt senses that Clarke does more than make Dublin a setting for his poetry: he recognises Dublin serves Clarke as a metaphor in Irish cultural debate.

Thus with Clarke's use of the city as a metaphor, we are

presented with the Dublin of the past as an idealized rep resentation of an expression of culture, and the present

Dublin which is a corruption of culture and civilization.25

Garratt is correct and helpful here only as far as he goes. Clarke

is certainly a poet who addressed himself to the contemporary condition of Ireland, and he does so in poem after poem of comm

itted anger; the city is cauterized by the scalpel of his rational

passion. But what is so interesting about Clarke's later work is that

he does more than use Dublin as a cultural metaphor. He writes

out of an urban consciousness in which the city is both taken for

granted and made the stuff of a real confrontation with his own

Irish experience and with the forces at work in Irish society. In

this sense Clarke has truly learnt his master's lesson.

Clarke's remarkable poem "Mnemosyne Lay in Dust" (1966), published on the poet's seventieth birthday, supplies a compelling

example. The poem is a re-creation of the experience of a mental

breakdown which resulted in loss of memory and identity. In the

poem, Maurice Devane is received into a Dublin asylum, where he slowly recovers. The poem's first stanzas describe Devane's

journey by taxi through the city to the hospital. The city is a

nightmare from which Devane feels deep alienation:

Maurice Devane

Watched from the taxi window in vain

National stir and gaiety

Beyond himself: St. Patrick's Day, The spike-ends of the Blue Coat school,

24. "Austin Clarke in Transition", Irish University Review, IV: 1 (Spring 1974), 106.

25. ibid., p. 110.

18




Georgian houses, ribald gloom

Rag-shadowed by gaslight, quiet pavements

Moon-waiting in Blackhall Place.26

A sense of deranged disgust with the city world predominates in these stanzas; it seems appropriate therefore in the following stanzas that Devane 's insanity should manifest itself in dreams

of urban and industrial horror.

Drugged in the dark, delirious, In vision Maurice saw, heard, struggle

Of men and women, shouting, groans. In an accident at Westland Row,

Two locomotives with mangle of wheel-spokes,

Colliding: up-scatter of smoke, steel, Above: the gong of ambulances.

Below, the quietly boiling hiss

Of steam, the winter-sleet of glances, The quiet boiling of pistons.27

Two aspects of the city affect Devane most: the drunken gaiety of Dublin ("Dublin swayed,/Drenching, drowning the shamrock:

unsaintly/Mirth") and the violence of machine and man.

The crowds were stumbling backward, Barefooted cry of 'Murder* scurried.

Police batoned eyesight into blackness.

In his sickness, at moments of despair, the city penetrates his

consciousness.

T am alone, now,

Lost in myself in a mysterious Darkness, the victim in a story.' Far whistle of a train, the voice of steam.

Evil was peering through the peep-hole.'

Some nights he lies awake listening to the sounds of the city,

26. Austin Clarke, Collected Poems (Dolmen Press: Dublin, 1974), p. 327.

27. ibid., p. 328.

28. ibid., p. 329.

29. ibid., p. 335.

19




imagining a strange night-walk through the streets with the echo

of his own alienated, insecure identity.

Maurice would stray through the back streets

By shuttered windows, shadowy Railway Station, by gas-lamps, iron railings, Down Constitution Hill. Discreetly Concealed in every cornerstone

Under the arches, Echo resided,

Ready to answer him. Side by side,

Stepping together, the pair roamed.

The turning point for Devane comes when a dish of strawberries

stimulates an almost exhausted zest for life, and the concluding sections of the poem recount his gradual restoration to sanity and harmony with his surroundings.

The conclusion is one of the finest things in Clarke's work.

A mind re-discovers itself and is re-born to a world it had rejected. But most important, that world is the city of the poet's childhood, still discernible in contemporary Dublin. He is back where he

belongs and the powers of evil and destruction are not absolute.

He heard an engine whistle, Piffle away in the distance.31

The end is a moment of exhilarated acceptance.

Rememorised, Maurice Devane

Went out, his future in every vein,

.Upon that site

Of shares and dividends in sight Of Watling Street and the Cornmarket, At Number One in Thomas Street

Shone in the days of the ballad-sheet, The house in which his mother was born.32

In "Mnemosyne Lay in Dust", Clarke took the city for granted, and unselfconsciously employed metaphors drawn from its life

30. ibid., p. 343.

31. ibid., p. 351.

32. ibid., pp. 351-52.

20




to fashion an absorbing realisation of the experience of mental

breakdown and recovery. Such a poem demonstrates how the city can fully penetrate an Irish poetic imagination. In it, as in Joyce's

work, we can see how Irish urban reality can serve as matter for an art attentive to the demands of contemporary individual

experience.

21



Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing: Metaphor and Subject

Documents

Transcript of Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing: Metaphor and Subject