`Herd melodies are sweet, but those unherd are sweeter." It may seem flippant to greet history with a play upon John Keats's lines, but language itself seems to have gained a new friskiness through the signing of the inter-party agreement yesterday. Even the term "party rules" loses a bit of sectarian weight and begins to suggest something more innocent and celebratory. By devising a set of structures and a form of words which have the potential to release all sides from their political and historical entrapment, Senator Mitchell, the Taoiseach, Prime Minister Blair and all the talks participants have done something evolutionary.
If revolution is the kicking down of a rotten door, evolution is more like pushing the stone from the mouth of the tomb. There is an Easter energy about it, a sense of arrival rather than wreckage, and what is nonpareil about the new conditions is the promise they offer of a new covenant between people living in this country. For once, and at long last, the language of the Bible can be appropriated by those with a vision of the future rather than those who sing the battle hymns of the past.
Herd melodies are what the opponents of the process have offered all along and will continue to offer. The Rev Ian Paisley and the Rev William McCrea of the DUP have tried to turn constituencies into congregations, and have had more appetite all along for apocalypse rather than for the process of negotiation. They promise to do their best between now and May 22nd to have the agreement rejected by those whom they call the people of Ulster - by which they mean loyalists and unionists.
What the agreement does, however, is to offer the possibility of a northern Irish world where that hitherto coded phrase would actually mean what it says: from now on, "the people of Ulster" is going to have to include the nationalist and republican minority as well. If a North-South Council and an assembly at Stormont acceptable to all can be established, the minority will finally escape from a state where their "Ulsterness" was a "Britishness" forced upon them and become instead a shared attribute. Ulster will remain a site of contention, politically and culturally, but at least the contenders will have assented to play on the same pitch and by agreed rules.
It was good to watch David Trimble rise to the occasion with some style and force in his brief statement to the press after the plenary session, and to hear him take the long view of the past in talking about historical and political relations which have developed between the British and the Irish islands in the course of a millennium. The "third strand" British-Irish Council suddenly meant something. As did the phrase "totality of relations".
I thought, for example, of the complexities, religious and cultural, that might be recognised and the extensions that might be suggested if the achievement of Sorley Maclean, a Gaelic-speaking, free Presbyterian, socialist, ex-British soldier poet of the Western Scottish Isles, were to be studied in Ulster schools as well as the works of Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt. Not to mention the predicament of Francis Ledwidge.
One of the reassuring things about the whole process is the feeling that an action - in the tragic, dramatic sense - has been completed. In fact, what came to mind yesterday afternoon as I watched John Hume make his concluding remarks was Louis MacNeice's notion that Ireland is a place where a person might live to see the consequences of one particular action. Hume, who had been a figure of some charisma when he was a student two years ahead of me at St Columb's College, has seen things through in a moving and courageous way. In the course of the last 30 years, he suffered contumely from republicans in Derry, from unionists and loyalists and from elements in the Dublin media, but even when he sounded exhausted, he stood his ground in principle and conviction, so there is this added sense of aesthetic as well as political completion about what has been agreed.
Still, even the best disposed unionist cannot be expected to have any such satisfaction at the turn events have taken. Unionist opposition to the document will equally derive from principle and conviction, and what will make acceptance of the new situation so cruelly testing for them is Sinn Fein's inclusion in the democratic fold, since in the unionist mind Sinn Fein is to blame for the devastation which the IRA wrought on the economic and social life of the province - "their" province - over the past 30 years. Terrible things done in the name of Ireland (and yes, of Ulster too) have put a darkness over the lives of individuals, families and communities. For too many people alive in the North, on both sides, it is never going to be a case of "calm of mind, all passion spent".
Everybody has to contend with what Thomas Davis called "felt history". Revisionists have created new perspectives (and contentions) and generations of gifted Northern poets have let the linguistic cat out of the sectarian bag, setting it free in the great street carnival of "protholics and catestants," but in Drumcree and on the Lower Ormeau Road, neither the victories of creative spirit nor the dodges of post-modernism are going to have much immediate effect. And yet it is at the level of creative spirit, in the realm of glimpsed potential rather than intransigent solidarity, that the future takes shape. Indeed, what happened yesterday gives reassuring substance to that rather elevated sentiment. In the solemn mood at the end of the plenary session, Gerry Adams's invocation of the spirit of the United Irishmen even sounded as if it might not be a turn-off for their deradicalized descendants.
"Our island is full of comfortless noises," I wrote in the mid-1970s, in a poem that began in shock at the killing of the British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart Biggs, and ended with a recollection of British army helicopters hovering over the protest march at Newry a few years earlier, on the Sunday following Bloody Sunday. The line was a bitter echo of one spoken by Caliban in The Tempest, Shakespeare's late play of reconciliation and transcendence, and was intended to imply a deadly contrast between the sounds of violent destruction on the island of Ireland and the melodies of fulfilment that coursed through the air on Prospero's island.
In the play the malformed and maltreated Caliban reveals his susceptibility to the sweetness of music, but in those days the visionary mood of his famous speech felt like a mockery of what people in the North were experiencing in their daily lives. "The isle," Caliban says, "is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs/That give delight and hurt not." What is epoch-making about the document agreed at Castle Buildings yesterday is the fact that it just might be instrumental in turning this delightful, unhurting music into the as yet unheard music of the future.