'Wounds', Michael Longley (Critical Essay‪)‬

Until the publication of 'Ceasefire' in 1994, 'Wounds' was probably the best-known and most celebrated of Michael Longley's poems: it is frequently anthologized, an habitual critical touchstone in discussion of his work, and enshrined as a 'set text' on the Republic of Ireland's School Leaving Certificate. Although there are other factors at play, in the case of both 'Wounds' and 'Ceasefire', one reason for the unusual degree of attention given to the poems may be their overt engagement with a turbulent political history. Both poems, as with W. B. Yeats's controversial Easter 1916 elegies, reverberate beyond the particular context of their production, but are, nonetheless, deeply implicated in the historical memory of that context. 'Wounds' emerges from a point in Northern Ireland's history, and literary history, when the Troubles and, correspondingly, media demands for its already high-profile poets to write a 'public' and 'responsible' Troubles poetry--were at their height. Written in May 1972, and collected in Longley's second book, An Exploded View (1973), it responds, more directly than any other of his poems, to atrocities in the early 1970s that were, in their different ways, definitive moments in the history of the Troubles. The first is the IRA shooting of three Scottish soldiers on 6 March 1971--the teenage brothers John and Joseph McCaig, and twenty-three-year-old Dougald McCaughey. Lured from a bar in the centre of Belfast, they were killed on a mountain road outside the city. The second is the murder of Sydney Agnew on 18 January 1972, a bus conductor and father of three who was shot at his home the day before he was due to appear as a witness in a court-case. Behind these two explicit commemorations lies a more oblique allusion in the poem ('heavy guns put out / The night-light in a nursery for ever ...') to Patrick Rooney, the nine-year-old killed by an RUC tracer bullet on 14 August 1969 as he lay in bed in the family flat in Divis Tower. (1) On one level, and given the media frenzy surrounding Northern Ireland's politics and its poetry in the 1970s, the poem's very topicality accounts for its habitual citation in reviews of Longley's work through the 1970s and 1980s (the reception of Heaney's 'Casualty' is comparable in this regard). In a 1973 Observer review Peter Porter claims 'Wounds' as 'a poem which political and religious fanatics' should read, 'in case they have forgotten what an equaliser murder is', the first of many comments on the poem which suggest its potential as a force for good in troubled times. (2) For others, it is a poem which answers the demand that poetry finds an 'adequate response' to violence, if only by exposing the inadequacy of the terms on which such demands are made. (3) It is also taken to exemplify a change in Longley's oeuvre, from the stylized and personal stance of his first book to the more expansive and public voice adopted in the second, at a time when the Troubles, as Douglas Dunn observed, were 'an experience against which poetic technique (let alone imagination) had to contend in ways which to most of us are hardly imaginable'. (4)