Writing about the difficulties of marriage the other day (beginning a 45-part series), my colleague Medb Ruane remarked that Art Ui Laoghaire's widow became a poet after he died, and not only because she had to raise their children alone: "a good marriage may well be a triumph of will over feeling, or indeed of feeling over sense".
This is a bit hard to figure out, but the implication seems to be that Art's widow, Eibhlin, not only had to make a few bob by whatever means she could, but that she needed to celebrate her marriage in poetry to convince her it had been successful.
This is questionable. It is clear enough from her famous Caoineadh for Art that Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill had a fiery nature, and no doubt there were rows aplenty between these two passionate people. Also, of course, it was no joke for Eibhlin to be left with two young wans, and pregnant into the bargain. But it was a fine and aisy life (at least until the children arrived) that Eibhlin recalled in her lament, from the day she ran away from home to be with her beloved: And never was sorry/You had parlours painted/rooms decked out/the oven reddened/and loaves made up/roasts on spits/ and cattle slaughtered/I slept in duck-down/till noontime came/or later if I liked (as Thomas Kinsella translated it).
So much, incidentally, for any notions that might exist about the downtrodden Irish wife of two centuries ago (though of course these people belonged in effect to the Irish aristocracy). You would have thought that with a set-up like that, and before tax individualisation had ever been thought of, Eibhlin would have been left in comfortable financial circumstances.
As for the emotional consequences, if there were counsellors around in the days of Eibhlin after the death of her husband Art, they would no doubt have encouraged her poetry-writing as a useful means of soothing her pain, releasing her anger, praising her beloved ("a fine bed-mate you were") and expressing her grief. But it would have taken a brave soul to point out that she was also assuaging what she perceived as her own guilt in letting him charge off furiously on his horse (as he regularly did) to stir up trouble and put his life and his family's future in mortal danger. "I am leaving our home and may never return," were Art's last prophetic words to Eibhlin, but as she said herself, "I made nothing of his talk/for he often spoke so." In other words, she didn't listen to him.
I think that is a fair analysis of the whole sad business. Why I didn't get into the marriage counselling racket myself before the points went sky-high I will never know.
With regard to poetic laments for a deceased lover, the shoe was on the other foot for Thomas Hardy. The eminent writer's first wife, Emma, died in 1912, when Hardy was already involved with Florence Dugdale, whom he married less than two years later. The next thing we know, out he comes with Satires of Circumstance, a series of poems which the eminent critic John Carey selected last year as one of his books of the century and described as having "no match in English as articulations of bereavement".
What are we to make of this? Here is a man (Hardy) who has been involved in an unhappy marriage. He has by all accounts made his first wife's life a misery through neglect. In his late 60s, while Emma lies dying, he takes up with a woman 35 years his junior. When his wife dies, he marries the mistress (creating a vacancy). And then - almost straight away - he publishes a book of poetry expressing his triumph in the supremacy of his love for the shamefully neglected Emma, and hers for him.
Love? He writes that each moment they shared was worth all of eternity: It filled but a minute. But was there ever/A time of such quality, since or before?
In your dreams, Tom, in your dreams.
In the substantial volume of poetry written in tribute to a deceased spouse, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters must figure large. But these striking poems, written to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath, were published only yesterday, so to speak, and a mere two-year hiatus is not long enough to allow for a truly considered opinion of their worth, especially when the controversy over the relationship they refer to still rages as unpleasantly as ever.
We must be fair, but careful too. That much is owed to Hughes and Plath. You won't catch this column using the cringeworthy headline which one British Sunday newspaper ran when the poems were published: Now We Know He Loved Sylvia.
Even if he did.
bglacken@irish-times.ie