at half eleven in the Mutton Lane in, I am fire, slaughter, dead starlings by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Close Reading
The lure of self destruction and the warnings of birds
This week’s poem is at half eleven in the Mutton Lane in, I am fire, slaughter, dead starlings by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Before I begin I have a suggestion, try to find a copy of the poem somewhere so that you can read along.
Many poets have a talent for evoking a place or scene. Some can do it with vivid accuracy, others with wonderful broad strokes capturing the general sense or feeling. Then there are poets like Doireann Ní Ghríofa who can do all this and more. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is capable of evoking a time, to such a degree that her reader feels as though they may as well be transported back there.
Ní Ghríofa’s poetry and prose cover a few core topics, key among them are History, Irish Identity, Motherhood and the Female experience. All of this combined with her great love of language and the mutability inherent within it has created poetry that is all at once striking and haunting in equal measure.
Her earlier collections of poetry Résheoid, Dúlasair were written completely as Gaeilge or in Irish. She has even gone as far as to translate her own work into english. It's clear that her strong links to Irish language and culture have shaped much of her work.
In the collection this episode's poem is taken from, to star the dark, readers encounter several poems that lament the difficult history of Ireland and the suffering of its people. Rather than languishing in misery though, this recognition imbues a frenetic energy that sometimes borders on outrage. There's a good deal of that same passion in this poem.
When asked why she focuses so often on history and memory, Ní Ghríofa replied:
‘’To grow up and live...in a place like Ireland is to be confronted regularly with the facts of our history, with the ruins, with the brokenness and those sharp edges, with the ways people have tried to tell our history and the coherence they’ve tried to mold from it, and the ways in which we can question that inherited history and make our own sense of it’’1
The way she describes it here, Ireland’s past seems almost impossible to ignore with it’s jagged edges. At the same time she recognises just how many times it's been interpreted but even then the act of doing so is essential in understanding a modern Ireland.
Indeed in this poem, Ireland’s past, often dramatic as it is, is only ever a breath away.
This proximity to the past is exhibited in the first section I’ve chosen to analyse:
Though this pub is crammed
with laughter, I feel your stare.
It burns.
If you continue,
I'll tell you of 1622
when a lightning cloud
shadowed this city,
flinging sparks on thatch
that pulsed to flame.
People stumbled over each other
through laneways, clutching children
to their chests, weeping, afraid,
while fire bloomed along the paths
where they ran, and fell,
and ran.
There’s an everyday scene shown to us as readers, one that belongs firmly to the present day. The speaker, someone we can assume to be Doireann Ní Ghríofa herself, is the object of attention, possibly from a man. Her reaction to that attention is mixed at best as the rest of the poem will reveal.
The use of the phrase it burns in the first few lines, ignites a mounting tension that will persist for the entire poem.
We know exactly where the poem is set thanks to the title of the poem; at half eleven in the Mutton Lane in, I am fire, slaughter, dead starlings. The Mutton Lane Inn is a famous pub in Cork. It is noted for its longevity as a business, claiming the title of Cork's oldest pub.2
This love of the past makes it clear to the reader why it is allowed to consume the poem from the mention of the date 1622. From there a narrative of fear and destruction is weaved, one that matches the promise of burning in the opening lines. Here portents and flame fuse together to create a breathing tapestry of history. The almost spell-like quality of the long title is enhanced and we are shown just what type of poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa is.
This poem is based on an actual historical event in Cork Cities history. Ní Ghríofa learned of it in a local atlas3 but a digital copy of it can be found online. Here is an extract from the account detailing the tragedy:
‘’the Cloudes over the Cittie began to ga∣ther thicke, which caused such a darknes in their houses, that they were amazed to behold so sodaine a darkenes. These darke Cloudes seemed to Muster together, and
''to descend by degrees nearer to the Cittie. Whilest the Inhabitants stood thus won∣dering at the extraordinary darkenes, sud∣denly they heard a terrible clappe of thun∣der; And at the same instant they saw a dreadfull lightning, with flames of fire breake out of the Cloudes, and fall vpon the Cittie at the same instant, at the East end, and the highest part of the Cittie. At that very place where the Stares beganne their Battell, and where they first fell downe, being killed in the fight; There the fire first began with horrible flames: which the Inhabitants of the West and lower part of the Cittie beholding, they began hastily to run towardes the East part where the fire began. They were not runne halfe the way, when as they heard a woefull cry of fire behinde them, for the West part was also set on fire. Be∣twixt two fires, being amazed and con∣founded, not knowing what to doe, the flames of fire raged also extreamely in the middest of the houses on both sides of the streete. Albeit, they had great aboundance of water neare at hand, there was no meanes to be had, nor any endevour to be vsed to quench the flames. For the fire was so sodaine, the flames so hot, and ra∣ging, that there was no possibilitie to come neare them. For the fire which fal∣leth from Heaven is vnquencheable, and rageth with that violent heate, as may not be endured. ''4
What we've heard is a description of pandemonium. It is helped by the grand language of the time. It's not hard to see why a poet would be moved by such a scene. As a moment of history it is little remembered today and takes a good deal of digging to find. For me, it's interesting that such a major event in the lives of those people could have faded so much. Then again the fact that it’s lurking just beneath the surface is proof enough that it hasn’t faded completely.
One question remains: Why would Doireann Ní Ghríofa choose to make a poem of this historical moment? The answer is in the next section:
After the fire,
those who survived spoke
of the omen of a fortnight before,
when two murmurations of starlings
clashed in the sky, flinging themselves
at each other, high and wild,
until small corpses thumped into gutters
and ripped wings cobbled the streets,
leaving the paths all bird-bloodied
all blush and trembling. For hours,
those birds' tiny magnet-hearts jerked
toward each other, as though
they couldn't help themselves
in shiver and grasp and shatter,
their bodies swooning and falling,
Calamity gives way to witchcraft in this next section. The use of the supernatural is nothing new in Irish Poetry, especially that written by women, and Ní Ghríofa is very up front about being influenced by the likes of Paula Meehan5
Starlings are the central imagery here and the bizarre congregation or murmuration of them that was observed before the fire in 1622.
Here the language takes on a relentless, frenetic pace. Verbs like clashed, flinging , thumped, jerked and shatter make the poem incredibly kinetic. The reader is made to feel as if they are witnessing the bizarre mass death of the birds.
In the midst of all this movement and energy a truline of inevitability is established.
There is one key sequence that does that:
For hours,
those birds' tiny magnet-hearts jerked
toward each other, as though
they couldn't help themselves
in shiver and grasp and shatter,
The terrible magnetism described here is at once beautiful and grotesque and it is through this imagery we can begin to piece together the true meaning of the poem.
If we interpret the stare at the beginning of the poem as one of desire, then all of these historical testaments and strange omens become a warning tale of sorts. A lesson that not all attraction is positive, some can be a raging fire that burn all around them. They are in every sense self destructive, much like the murmuration described here.
The starlings are a wonderfully apt image for the poem on a number of levels. Firstly, the fragility they are described as possessing can easily be applied to humans. The small corpses, ripped wings and falling swooning nature of these small creatures mimic the frail way we are left when we’ve chosen poorly in love.
On another more literal level the starling is a mimicking bird.6 They incorporate small sounds from their environment into their birdsong and over time and as flocks of starlings expand over the years different snippets other starlings songs are incorporated in turn. In that way ancient sounds can survive in fragments through generations. Dorieann Ní Ghríofa explains it far better than I do so here she is in an interview in 2019 doing just that:
‘‘The other thing that struck me as you were speaking, one of the recurrent motifs that came to me as I was considering next in their many iterations, was starlings. We have so many starlings here. Those little speckled birds…. it’s impossible for me to consider a starling without listening closely to their songs because they mimic so beautifully. As you know, over generations, they absorb the sounds that they hear, the environmental sounds, the noises that punctuate their days, and their excellent mimics. They weave those sounds into the text of their songs. Then there’s these just joyous bursts of song where sometimes, if you’re listening to a group of starlings, you’d think, “Did I just recognize a car alarm in what they’re saying?” It’s so interesting. Oftentimes, what I find very moving is in Ireland, you’ll often happen upon a little cluster of ruined houses that may have been abandoned during the famine in the 19th century and there will always be starlings around. I find it intensely moving to listen to the starlings there because over generations, they learn and internalize the sounds that are there. You know when they will be mimicking sounds that were made by people who were long gone from those dwellings’’
The moving quality of the starlings that Ní Ghríofa, has been captured and relayed beautifully in this poem.
The third and final reason starlings are such a perfect choice for his poem is revealed in the final section:
falling into each other
- a thousand small deaths.
except, listen,
in those days,
they didn't call them starlings,
they called them stares.
So, you see, I will say, stares spark fires
that cannot be quenched, stares cause
children to weep, clutched tight to chests.
Turn away,
I will say.
Find someone else.
In these final lines wordplay and the mutability of language are in motion; two hallmarks of Ní Ghríofas work.
There are the thousand small literal deaths of the birds. However, when translated to French, le petit mort, it means the sobering moment where we experience ''the brief loss or weakening of consciousness".7 In a much more modern context though, it's used to reference either an orgasm or the moment directly after it, once more a sobering force. If we take all these layers of meaning, what we are met with is love and death in an intense fashion. It serves to heighten the wary way in which this poet regards desire.
As I’ve previously mentioned in this episode, Doireann ní Ghríofa is a bi lingual poet, one who writes in both Irish and English. On top of that she translates her own work. It’s no great revelation than that she has a huge appreciation for the flexibility and versatility of language. That appreciation reveals itself in the final lines where she explains a unique change in language over time:
in those days,
they didn't call them starlings,
they called them stares.
And so the very stare that started this poem has been given brand new meaning. From the seed of that linguistic change comes a flurry of wordplay, one that gives the poem a wonderful sense of cyclical completion:
So, you see, I will say, stares spark fires
that cannot be quenched, stares cause
children to weep, clutched tight to chests.
There is an intensely ominous quality to these words. At the same time a recognition of the power that simple actions like stares can cause in the hearts of others. The fire she is speaking of is one of pure desire. It’s interesting to note that these three lines run longer than all the rest of the poem and so could be seen as the fire reaching fever pitch, the same fire that was lit in the first stanza and has burned throughout.
If that’s true than the final three short lines
Turn away,
I will say.
Find someone else.
The shortest of the whole poem, are definitely the quenching of it. These three lines brim with defiance and self determination. They stand in direct opposition to the inevitability of the rest of the poem. The magnetism and relentless destructive energy of this attraction is told firmly where to go. In asserting themselves through these words the speaker seems to bring the loop and echo of history to a definitive close and in doing so takes all the power herself.
So why this poem? This poem is one that focuses on some of the overlooked things in life. In a very literal sense, there are forgotten historical events of a place we find ourselves in, the unspoken pull of desire but, perhaps more importantly, the small, quiet victories like avoiding something we know might end in disaster. In this poem all these things are honoured.
Further to that Doireann Ní Ghríofa manages to honour so much of the tradition of her country and the style of poetry in which she is writing. Her work touches on so many things from obscure history to feminist identity and a deep appreciation for things that may have been lost. All of these are referenced in this very poem. While it’s not unusual for an Irish poet to honour what came before Doireann Ní Ghríofa does so in a way that allows modern issues their place within them.
Critic Maya. C. Popa put it best when she wrote about new irish poets saying:
These poets confront old subjects in a renewed capacity, recasting myths of transformation and pondering both global and personal politics in a world driven by technology. They show an appreciation for tradition that, rather than creating superficial echoes, demonstrates daring, playful appropriation, and purposeful departure from their sources8
This poem by Doireann Ní Ghríofa does exactly the same.
What’s your reading of the poem? I’d like to point out, as always, that this is my interpretation and as such very much up for debate. If you’d like to talk to me about it you can reach me in a few ways. Send me an email at wordsthatburnpodcast@gmail.com, you can find my website www.wordsthatburnpodcast.com where you’ll also find the shownotes for this episode complete with references. If none of that suits you I’m on instagram, just search Words that Burn Podcast, you can find helpful study guides and bonus content there too.
Sassen, Rhian. “History Is the Throbbing Pulse: An Interview with Doireann Ní Ghríofa.” The Paris Review, 2021. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/06/02/history-is-the-throbbing-pulse-an-interview-with-doireann-ni-ghriofa/.
“Historic Cork City Pub: English Market Cork: The Mutton LANE INN.” Cork Heritage Pubs. Cork Heritage Pubs. Accessed September 22, 2021. https://www.corkheritagepubs.com/pubs/the-mutton-lane/.
Ghríofa Ní Doireann. “Notes.” Essay. In To Star the Dark, 69. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2021.
Bourne, Nicholas, and Thomas Archer. A Relation of the Most Lamentable Burning of the Cittie of Corke. London, England: John Dawson, 1622. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a19341.0001.001.
Arts Council. “Doireann Ní GHRÍOFA.” Doireann Ní Ghríofa | The Arts Council | An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Arts Council of Ireland, 2020. https://www.artscouncil.ie/Interviews/Literature/Doireann-Ni-Ghriofa/.
Feare, Chris (1996). "Studies of West Palearctic Birds: 196. Common starling Sturnus vulgaris". British Birds. 89 (12): 549–568.
"petite mort". Oxford English Dictionary (Third ed.). Oxford University Press. 2005. Retrieved 26 September 2021
Popa, Maya C. “Forever Writing from Ireland by Maya C. Popa.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70257/forever-writing-from-ireland.