Cenotaphs of snow: memory, remembrance, and the poetry of Michael Longley

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Notes

I am grateful to Justin Quinn and Colin Graham for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

The text on the obelisk reads: ‘This memorial is dedicated to the men and women of the Orange Institution worldwide, who at the call of King and Country left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of man by the path of duty and self sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that their names be not forgotten.’

Michael Longley, ‘A Monument to Bad Taste’, Belfast Telegraph, 16 July 1997: reprinted in The Twelfth: What it Means to Me, ed. Gordon Lucy and Elaine McClure (Ulster Society Publications, 1997), pp. 102–103.

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 93.

Longley, The Twelfth, ed. Lucy and McLure, p. 102.

Michael Longley, ‘Say Not Soft Things’, in Remembrance, ed. Gordon Lucy and Elaine McClure (Ulster Society Publications, 1997), pp. 121–122.

Lawrence Binyon, ‘For the Fallen’, The Times, 21 September 1914: reprinted in Minds at War, ed. David Roberts (Saxon Books, 1996), p. 56.

Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (Penguin, 1994), p. 7.

Adrian Forty, ‘Introduction’, in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler (Berg, 1999), p. 2.

This may be understood both literally—in terms of decay—or spiritually—the soul departing the body. It has a particular resonance in the Western Front cemeteries where the headstones don't necessarily mark a grave, but record the loss of a body, somewhere ‘near this spot’.

See Richard Crownshaw, ‘Holocaust Memorial’, ⟨http://www.sas.ac.uk/irs⟩. His observations are made specifically in relation to Holocaust memorials, where there has been an increasing self‐consciousness about the issues, although the point may be seen to apply in other contexts. See also information at ⟨http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/memorials2.html⟩ and ⟨http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/artdim.87z.htm⟩.

Edwin Lutyens, quoted in Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 107.

Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 105.

Dyer, The Missing of the Somme, pp. 126–127.

The Art of Forgetting, ed. Forty and Kuchler, p. 6.

The Art of Forgetting, pp. 6–7.

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Bantam Press, 1989), p. 396. David Harvey writes ‘if it is true that time is always memorialised not as flow, but as memories of experienced places and spaces, then history must indeed give way to poetry, time to space, as the fundamental material of social expression’. See The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990), p. 218.

Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 192.

W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, 21 December [1936], in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (Rupert Hart‐Davis, 1954), p. 874.

See Winter, Sites of Memory, pp. 86–90.

William Knight, ‘Preface’, in Pro Patria et Rege: Poems on War, its Characteristics and Results (J. J. Bennett, 1915), p. v.

Knight, Pro Patria et Rege, pp. xv–xvi.

‘An Interview with Michael Longley’, by Dermot Healy, Southern Review vol. 31, no. 3 (July 1995), p. 560.

Michael Longley, ‘Wounds’, in An Exploded View (Victor Gollancz, 1973), pp. 40–41. I am grateful to Michael Longley for permission to quote ‘Wounds’ and ‘The Ice‐cream man’.

Wilfred Owen, ‘To Siegfried Sassoon’, 10 October 1918, in Selected Letters, ed. John Bell (Open University Press, 1998), p. 352.

Thomas McCarthy, ‘Northern Voices’, review of The Echo Gate, Irish Times, 9 February 1980, p. 13.

Quoted in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Forty and Kuchler, p. 1.

David Lowenthal notes the ‘close etymological connection of amnesia with amnesty’ (see The Art of Forgetting, p. xi). Longley's insistence that ‘amnesty does not mean amnesia’ does not necessarily contradict the point, if one accepts the process of remembering as a simultaneous process of forgetting.

Jean Rousset, quoted in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967), translated by Alan Bass (Routledge, 2001), p. 28.

Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 28–29.

Michael Longley, ‘The Ice‐cream Man’, in Gorse Fires (Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 49.

Michael Longley, ‘A Tongue at Play’, in How Poets Work, ed. Tony Curtis (Seren, 1996), pp. 114, 115.

Michael Longley, ‘The Ghost Orchid’, in The Ghost Orchid (Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 52.

Michael Longley, interview with the author, 25 May 2003.

Michael Longley, interview with the author, 25 May 2003.

Originally collected in The Weather in Japan (Jonathan Cape, 2000), p. 26.

The Weather in Japan, p. 23.