Austin Clarke

Austin Clarke Poems

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
...

Austin Clarke Biography

Austin Clarke (May 9, 1896–March 19, 1974) was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke's main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigour with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish language poetry when writing in English. Effectively, this meant writing English verse based not so much on metre as on complex patterns of assonance, consonance, and half rhyme. Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said "I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free." Early career Clarke's early poetry clearly shows the influence of Yeats. His first book, The Vengeance of Fionn was a long narrative poem retelling an Ossianic legend. It met with critical acclaim and, unusually for a first book of poetry, went to a second edition. Between this and the 1938 collection Night and Morning, Clarke published a number of collections, all of which, to one extent or another, can be seen as being written in the shadow of Yeats. There was, however, one significant difference; unlike the older poet, Clarke was a Catholic, and themes of guilt and repentance run through this early work. Theatre years Between 1938 and 1955, Clarke published no new lyric or narrative poetry. He was co-founder of the Lyric Theatre Company and wrote a number of verse plays for them. He also worked as a journalist and had a weekly poetry programme on RTÉ radio. It seems likely that he also experienced some kind of personal crisis during this time and this had significant consequences for his later poetry. Return to poetry Clarke returned to the publishing with the 1955 collection Ancient Lights, and was to continuing writing and publishing prolifically for the rest of his life. Although he continued to use the same Gaelic-derived technical means, this late poetry is markedly different from the earlier work. Many of the poems he then wrote were satires of the Irish church and state, while others were sensual celebrations of human sexuality, free of the guilt of the earlier poems. He also published the intensely personal Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, which is a poem sequence detailing the fictional Maurice Devanes's nervous breakdown and subsequent recovery. Clarke also came to admire the work of more avant-garde poets as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda, both of whom he wrote poems about. A number of the late long poems, such as, for instance, the 1971 Tiresias, show the effects of reading these poets in their looser formal structures. Clarke set up the Bridge Press to publish his own work, which allowed him the freedom to publish work that many mainstream Irish publishers of the time might have been reluctant to handle. His Collected Poems was published in 1974 and a Selected Poems in 1976. Other writings In addition to some twenty volumes of poetry and numerous plays, Clarke published three novels: The Bright Temptation (1932), The Singing Men at Cashel (1936), and The Sun Dances at Easter (1952). All of these were banned by the Irish Censorship Board. He also published two volumes of memoirs, Twice Round the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds (1968) and a number of scattered critical essays and book reviews. While all of these prose writings are of interest, Clarke's reputation rests firmly on his poetry.)

The Best Poem Of Austin Clarke

The Blackbird Of Derrycairn

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway.
He found the forest track, he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,
Why men must welcome in the daylight.

He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shouts of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! That song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.


Submitted by Kitty

Austin Clarke Comments

Bill Watkins 10 March 2014

Should be more poems by Mr. Clarke posted online

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