October - The Great Hunger

What is October if not the turning of the seasons to sleep? Trees shed their leaves; the harvest is in; the days grow suddenly shorter and colder.  You realize that all the promise of Spring and the lazy horizon of Summer have compressed into the darkening days and the cold sea of Autumn. Donald Hall starts his poem "New Hampshire" with the line "A bear sleeps in a cellarhole . . ." and I am put to mind of the sow finding her nesting place in the abandon farm foundations I used to visit with my grandfather in South Oakfield. Forgotten farms and villages in Aroostook abandoned to the bear, the deer and the woodchuck.  We would go and watch the bears at the dump in the dusk, fattening on human leftovers, pushing their snouts into mayonnaise jars and eating butter wrappers in an embarrassing search for fat to sustain them and their cubs through the long winter to come. Using their great claws to grope through dirty diapers and empty beer bottles; seeking a cast off peel or a smudge of jelly.

So there are lots of poems about Fall.  One of my own I posted in in 2008, "Ice Storm and Getting in Wood" having to do with the closing in of the season after the last of the Summer fairs.  But as I went searching for poems that take place in October, I decided to quote the first part of Patrick Kavanaugh's poem, The Great Hunger.  As I mentioned in a post last year, I first read Patrick Kavanaugh in a collection, Irish Poetry After Yeats edited by Maurice Harmon.  Seamus Heaney says of The Great Hunger in his essay "From Monighan to the Grand Canal" collected in Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968-1978:

"The Great Hunger, first published in 1942 and collected in A Soul for Sale, is Kavanaugh's rage against the dying of the light, a kind of elegy in a country farmyard, informed not by heraldic notions of seasonal decline and mortal dust but by an intimacy with actual clay and a desperate sense that life in the secluded spot is no book of pastoral hours but an enervating round of labor and lethargy . . . . It is not about growing up and away but about growing down and in.  Its symbol is the potato rather than the potato blossom, its elements are water and earth rather than fire and air, its theme is consciousness moulded in and to the dark rather than opening to the light."

To me, the poem evokes rural Maine and the people who live there.  Not in the way that so often Maine is portrayed as some utopia for those seeking a simpler life ("The Way Life Should Be."), but a little like Ireland, a post-colonial land where poverty and desperation stand side by side with the homes of the wealthy.  And it evokes the location of beauty and the sacred, at our feet - even if we don't or can't see it.

The last stanza of Part 1:

The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh,tree sough, duck quack.


For the second and third parts check this Youtube video.  The full first part is printed below.

I
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer.  Who was it promised marriage to himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.
A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.
October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
Maguire watches the drills flattened out
And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by
And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter,
And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
When he laughed over pints of porter
Of how he came free from every net spread
In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head
And pretended to his soul
That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
Where men are spanning across wide furrows.
Lost in the passion that never needs a wife
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.
Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.
Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.
'Move forward the basket and balance it steady
In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,
And straddle the horse,' Maguire calls.
'The wind's over Brannagan's, now that means rain.
Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass -
And that's a job we'll have to do in December,
Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy's ass
Out in my clover? Curse o' God
Where is that dog?.
Never where he's wanted' Maguire grunts and spits
Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.
His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind
And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
When she praised the man who made a field his bride.
Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name.
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
      'O God if I had been wiser!'
That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
He looks, towards his house and haggard. 'O God if I had been wiser!'
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
God's truth is life - even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.
The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
In the gap there's a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
The fools of life bleed if they climb over.
The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.

Some Images from the 2010 Fryeburg Fair