Kinsella's Dublins and the Stone Mother

Abstract

Although awarded the Honorary Freedom of Dublin in 2007 and widely proclaimed as a city-, specifically a Dublin-, poet, Thomas Kinsella departs from modernist post-industrial representations of the city to project a view of Dublin as ‘a separate world with a … feel of the country.’ Into an evolving representation of Dublin, Kinsella imports the dark presences of ancestral females, while in poetic accounts of his later life in Baggot Street and Percy Place, his wife Eleanor joins in association with the poet's mother and other mysterious female figures to represent the urbanization of the Cailleach in her different adaptive emanations. Although represented fleetingly in Kinsella's poetry, the most significant of these figures is the stone mother, the sovereignty figure associated with the Irish landscape.

Keywords:

• cailleach
• urban muse
• Dublin poet
• rural enclaves in city

Notes

 1. Bennett, ‘The Freedom of the City’.

 2. Williams, The Country & the City, 297.

 3. Speeding along the Naas Road in 1903 and probably knowing nothing of the rural pockets he bypasses, James Joyce's narrator in ‘After the Race’ represents Inchicore as a ‘channel of poverty and inaction.’ Joyce, Dubliners, 35.

 4. Kinsella, A Dublin Documentary, 13.

 5. , Collected Poems, 104. Hereafter, page numbers from the Collected Poems (CP) will be cited within parentheses in the text.

 6. MacKillop, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, 364–5; Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 54.

 7. Kinsella's privileges as a Freeman of Dublin, such as pasturage rights on St Stephen's Green, no doubt now in abeyance, nevertheless seem compatible with life in his rural enclave (www.dublincity.ie/your_council/history/).

 8. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 61–2.

 9. Declan Kiberd has described twentieth-century Dublin as a centre of public Georgian squares surrounded by villages. When he asks ‘What is behind this localism?’, to which Kinsella's ‘local watchfulness’ contributes, Kiberd concludes that ‘cities have now grown so large as to seem undesirable. The cult of the local may indeed be a panic reaction to the forces of globalization.’ Kiberd concludes that we are already also mourning a lost sense of locality. Kiberd, The Irish Writer & the World, 300.

10. David Kellogg writes with insight about Kinsella and urban space (‘Kinsella, Geography, History’, 145–70), as Ian Flanagan does about Kinsella and the Enlightenment (‘“Tissues of Order”’).

11. Lehan, The City in Literature, 285.

12. Kellogg, ‘Kinsella, Geography, History’, 161.

13. Heffernan, Wood Quay, 112–13.

14. Kinsella, A Dublin Documentary, 90.

15. John, Reading the Ground, 252; Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 185.

16. For a probing psychoanalytic study of Kinsella's ‘Muse of the Minus’, see Guinn Batten's ‘“The More with Which We Are Connected”’, 212–44.

17. Collins, ‘A Little of What We Have Found’, 135.

18. John, Reading the Ground, 203.

19. Smyth, A Guide to Irish Mythology, 156.

20. Smyth, A Guide to Irish Mythology, 156

21. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 10–11.

22. MacCana, Celtic Mythology, 94.

23. Harmon, ‘From Basin Lane to Old Vienna’, 89.

24. Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 218.

25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 158.