Hidden away in the shadows of the 9th century is a poet called Scottus, also known as Sedulius the Younger. He was Irish born. He worked as a scholar and poet in Liège. He was a noted translator of the Psalter. Maybe more interesting than any of that is the fact he also wrote letters, many of them, jewelled with small stories of the sorrows of Irish exiles in Europe, of which he was one.
Inevitably he's now a ghost, existing only in fragments and hard-to-find translations. His century inhabits the darkest part of the Dark Ages. It was certainly a time of poetry: in High German, in Old English, in Old Irish. Pangur Ban was written at this time. All the same, a poet like Scottus is hard to find and hard to follow.
Yet reading about him, something does get hauled up beside his name, a bright flash, a catch of celebration. The person who pulls it out of the shadows is Helen Waddell, the luminous scholar of medieval poetry. In 1929 she translated a volume of this poetry and called it simply Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. One of these, written by Scottus, is called Easter Sunday.
The poem is short, just 10 lines long. In the bilingual edition, the Latin squires the English, a foursquare piece of church dialect. But in Waddell’s hands the poem breaks free. It begins with a religious reference: “Last night did Christ the Sun rise from the dark/ The mystic harvest of the fields of God.” It ends with a couplet:.
O father of thy folk, be thine by right
The Easter joy, the threshold of the light.
Occasionally I think back to myself reading that couplet when I was a student. And how little I understood it. How little I was able to locate that visionary reference, that “threshold of light”.
If anything, I fixed the poem firmly in its past, convinced it was best to leave it stranded there: a small gleam like something from an exhausted star.
Growing up, Easter was an occasion in our house that existed without being explained. My father and mother were observant but not devout. Easter came and went with church visits, social visits, April sunshine or driving rain at the end of March. The event was mixed in with conversations on the weather, on travel, on the length of a sermon, on the need to look at the garden.
What’s more, I noticed as a child, with some curiosity, that no one ever knew exactly when it was. Come late February someone was sure to say, when is Easter?
For myself, if I thought about Easter it all, it was fixed to my consciousness, categorised there in some outlandish way as a sort of birthday party of faith: something that could be changed and reinvented but passingly. Something to put aside the next day, starred with a few memories, but largely absent of meaning.
Which is where I might well have left it. I moved away from childhood thinking of Easter as a season with secular joys, in which people spoke of new lamb and children waited for chocolate. I felt no absence, no want of anything in that definition. And yet later, grown past the indifferences of youth, with small children of my own, something did shift. A world rising from winter darkness, the concepts of renewal, the liturgy of the Easter Vigil, with the cadences and claims of the Exsultet, all gave me pause. And yet in the end it was poetry and not piety that changed my thinking. Somewhere, right about then, I reread Patrick Kavanagh's Great Hunger.
The poem – which I never think is read often enough – follows the survival and inward awareness of its main character, Patrick Maguire. He is a countryman, on a small farm in Monaghan. Almost everything has eluded him as the poem begins – happiness, sexual fulfilment, marriage, children, peace of mind. Clay is the word and clay is the flesh is the sharp-tongued opening line. The braiding together of a wasted life and an unforgiving landscape are at the centre of the work.
The poem takes a relentlessly dark view of Maguire’s experience. It moves forward with a powerful, musical pessimism, never lifting its language or the reader’s eyes from the sense of human waste.
Nor is it just Maguire. The men working with him, the men working beyond in other fields – they are all subject to the harshness of the life and the despair of its outcome.
But then, suddenly in section three, the poem swerves. It is March. The weather is still cold. The fields are still unyielding. The poem locates the season: a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk. But all of a sudden the weather, the cold, the enclosure lift for a brief, piercing moment of vision. Suddenly it is Easter:
From every second hill a neighbour watches
With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.
Soon enough after I reread those lines I began to look at Scottus’s couplet again, with his reference to Easter as a threshold of light. But this time I no longer weighed the phrase as merely a stranded gleam, an eccentric signal from a separate time.
Both references now joined up for me and pointed in the same direction. Kavanagh’s heart-lifting lines, Scottus’s quicksilver phrase seemed to insist that no occasion can exist and continue merely by being observed or repeated. They also have to be imagined. That therein lies the renewal and our responsibility. And so the poet from the 9th century and the one from the 20th can be seen offering their language to the event, celebrating exactly the same occasion we do, with a clarity we are always at risk of losing.
Eavan Boland's latest work is A Woman Without A Country (Carcanet)
