An Irishman's Diary

AS the presidential campaign grew dirtier, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, somebody would raise the poetry issue. No surprise that the somebody was Gay Mitchell. The Fine Gael man is politically descended from a long line of philistines, including Kevin O’Higgins, who established an early precedent for this kind of thing when dismissing as “mostly poetry” the programme of the First Dáil.

But it’s interesting to note a certain defensiveness in the response of Michael D Higgins (no relation to Kevin), the clear target of Mitchell’s warning that voters should not elect a president “to sip champagne and recite poetry”. Most poets would have homed in on the second half of the implied insult. Whereas the Labour man focused on the first, riposting that “for a start”, he had “never liked champagne”.

Perhaps he was acting on legal advice to be circumspect about his past. It’s public knowledge that he was for many years a prominent member of what Patrick Kavanagh called the “standing army” of Irish poets: a body whose numbers, Kavanagh estimated, never fell below 20,000. We also know that Higgins didn’t leave the army in 1974, if ever. But now that the issue has been broached, it’s incumbent upon him to state whether he’s still involved and, if so, in what capacity.

Instead, in yesterday’s news reports, the candidate appeared to be sticking to a carefully worded formula for describing his para-literary past. As our reporter put it: “Mr Higgins said he had four volumes of poetry published. ‘They have all been reviewed, some better than others’, he added.” No doubt his caution is in part born of awareness that public scepticism about this form of literature extends well beyond Fine Gael. The truth is that – speaking of the First Dáil – most Irish people regard poetry in much the same way that they regard political violence. The older stuff is admired as noble and heroic: we learned it in school and it has stood the test of time since.

It’s the modern type we’re queasy about. Unable to understand it, we point to the sales figures as proof that it has no mandate: conveniently ignoring the fact that even Pádraig Pearse’s early poetry was supported only by a militant minority of readers.

Interesting too that Michael D should stress the reviews his collections have received, good and bad. It’s almost as if he believes that critical attention legitimises his poetic activities: even when that attention is negative, like this paper’s 1993 review, which found his language “loose and not quite defined”. Or could it be that his use of the word “review” was calculated to make himself sound more presidential? After all, a big part of a president’s job is to review things: guards of honour, usually. But if this was deliberate, it raises more questions than it answers. If elected president, does Mr Higgins plan to expand the review section? Will he favour looser, less defined guards of honour, rather than the classic format with lines of equal length? And what if the lines speak to him (as one infamously did to Mary Robinson, saying “Here comes big bird”)? Will he feel the urge to speak back? These are just a few of the questions that now need to be answered.

NOT THATGay Mitchell can talk. Or rather, he can talk – and how – but not without resorting to poetic language to express his own presidential qualities. Witness the squabble between his and Mary Davis's camp over who could use the slogan "Pride at home, respect abroad". Conceding defeat in which, Mitchell settled instead for a very similar-sounding phrase (albeit suggesting mastery of chronological rather than spatial dimensions): "Understanding in our past, believing in our future". Both slogans are examples of a figure of speech known as isocolon, wherein an idea is expressed in clauses of similar structure and equal length. A famous three-part example was Caesar's " Veni, Vidi, Vici". And a four-part one was by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who said: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." Which, with some tweaking, would make a good presidential slogan, appealing to all the key demographics.

Unsurprisingly, Higgins’s slogan (“The president who will do us proud”) combines several poetic techniques, including alliteration (president/proud) and internal rhyme (who/will do). If we elide the middle syllable of “president”, it’s also a perfect example of iambic tetrameter, with the unmistakeable dah-dum, dah-dum, dah-dum, dah-dum rhythm found in Emily Dickenson, eg: “Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me”.

By contrast, the slogan Davis and Mitchell both wanted is trochaic rather than iambic, with the stress on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th metrical feet. If it had an 8th syllable – let’s say, “Pride at home, respect in Europe” – it would echo perfectly the dum-dah, dum-dah, dum-dah, dum-dah rhythm of Longfellow’s classic, The Song of Hiawatha.

And it’s curious that it should have been so attractive to rival candidates. But the question of whether this is an example of a general dumming-dah of Irish political slogans, we’ll leave to another day.