Richard Murphy

Seals at High Island

The calamity of seals begins with jaws.

Born in caverns that reverberate

With endless malice of the sea’s tongue

Clacking on shingle, they learn to bark back

In fear and sadness and celebration.

The ocean’s mouth opens forty feet wide

And closes on a morsel of their rock.

Swayed by the thrust and backfall of the tide,

A dappled grey bull and a brindled cow

Copulate in the green water of a cove.

I watch from a cliff-top, trying not to move.

Sometimes they sink and merge into black shoals;

Then rise for air, his muzzle on her neck,

Their winged feet intertwined as a fishtail.

She opens her fierce mouth like a scarlet flower

Full of white seeds; she holds it open long

At the sunburst in the music of their loving;

And cries a little. But I must remember

How far their feelings are from mine marooned.

If there are tears at this holy ceremony

Theirs are caused by brine and mine by breeze.

When the great bull withdraws his rod, it glows

Like a carnelian candle set in jade.

The cow ripples ashore to feed her calf;

While an old rival, eyeing the deed with hate,

Swims to attack the tired triumphant god.

They rear their heads above the boiling surf,

Their terrible jaws open, jetting blood.

At nightfall they haul out, and mourn the drowned,

Playing to the sea sadly their last quartet,

An improvised requiem that ravishes

Reason, while ripping scale up like a net:

Brings pity trembling down the rocky spine

Of headlands, till the bitter ocean’s tongue

Swells in their cove, and smothers their sweet song.

*

Double Negative

(for Tony White)

You were standing on the quay

Wondering who was the stranger on the mailboat

While I was on the mailboat

Wondering who was the stranger on the quay

*

Natural Son

Before the spectacled professor snipped

The cord, I heard your birth-cry flood the ward,

And lowered your mother’s tortured head, and wept.

The house you’d left would need to be restored.

No worse pain could be borne, to bear the joy

Of seeing you come in a slow dive from the womb,

Pushed from your fluid home, pronounced ‘a boy’.

You’ll never find so well equipped a room.

No house we build could hope to satisfy

Every small need, now that you’ve made this move

To share our loneliness, much as we try

Our vocal skill to wall you round with love.

This day you crave so little, we so much

For you to live, who need our merest touch.

'Richard Murphy's verse is classical in a way that demonstrates what the classical strengths really are. It combines a high music with simplicity, force and directness in dealing with the world of action. He has the gift of epic objectivity: behind his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history… I don’t know of any other contemporary poet who has so redeemed the classical manner. Every line is unique and wrought, somehow organic, yet the whole thing is simple. The plainest statements have an almost plastic life and solidarity. And the final effect is of a formal beautifully sustained music of essentials. This kind of poetry, which is nowadays so terribly difficult to write, reminds us that poems too must take their final test of health in the world of action.' – Ted Hughes.

‘One of the truly great things about Richard Murphy’s Collected Poems is just how alive the book is to the west of Ireland: its history and people, the landscape, customs and folkways of making a living (as Murphy did) from the sea. But it is not as pastoral that these poems really live; the western islands and the terrain become austere emblematic presences, dramatising an intense struggle for personal and cultural identity. Traversing this geography of the mind, Murphy auspiciously reinvented in The Battle of Aughrim(1968) an historical frieze of war and conflict in the late 17th century spliced through with images drawn, almost cinematically, from 20th-century Ireland… Richard Murphy is an intriguingly available poet and, like those of Robert Graves, his poems have all the bright music of great love songs.’ – Gerald Dawe, Irish Times.