Wayward Bound: Religion in Irish American Poetry

Wayward Bound: Religion in Irish American Poetry Daniel Tobin (bio) In what is the first recorded notable Irish American poem, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” George Berkeley (1685–1753)1 opines on “the heavenly flame” he envisions will surely animate “the golden age” of the arts and on learning that will flourish in the New World, “not such as Europe breeds in her decay” (3). Bishop Berkeley’s brief stint in Rhode Island must have prompted the philosopher’s visionary gleam— “westward the course of empire takes its way”—though, the heavenly flame he invokes in his poem conjures more a retrospect of Milton’s epic ambitions [End Page 193] than the future poets he dimly perceives on the widening American horizon (4). By further contrast, witnessing a sense of place at once more local and belatedly indigenous than Berkeley’s cosmopolitanism, Seamus Heaney accentuates a very different elemental awareness of religion’s relation to the poet’s work: “There, if you like, was the foundation for a marvelous or a magical view of the world…. Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word religare, to bind fast.”2 Heaney, of course, is referring to his own home place of Mossbawn, Derry, Northern Ireland, and it is this deep religious awareness of being bound to place that so informs his poetry, especially his early poetry. Most critics distinguish his from much of the Irish American sensibility in the art. “We have no prairies / to slice a big sun at evening – / everywhere the eye concedes to / encroaching horizon,” he writes in “Bogland.”3 Heaney spent considerable time in the United States, and wrote poems reflective of his times in the afterglow of Berkeley’s early prospect, though true to his own sense of place those poems tend to incline always to the rich depths of Ireland’s encroaching horizon however far he ventures beyond, whether to Malibu, Berkeley, Harvard, or Greece. They appear, in short, bound to the place of origin religiously in the etymological sense of that word. Conversely, when we survey the substantial store of Irish American poetry for religious concerns and feeling, we find inevitably a shift away from binding ties to being bound in the inverse sense—a gravitation away from the roots in favor of routes, the homonym signaling a turn from the homeward to the wayward. Such a turn from the religiously binding ties to place is perhaps not surprising when one considers the historical, social, political, and economic circumstances which pressed so many Irish to emigrate throughout the nineteenth century. Centuries of British colonial rule, the effects of anti-Catholic Penal Laws, the catastrophe of the Great Famine and its aftermath all contributed to the diaspora. What one finds among the significant Irish American poets of the time for whom religious concerns surface is a range of responses from the nostalgic to the morally urgent. Padraigh O’Heigeartaigh’s (1871–1936) “My Sorrow Doncha” exemplifies the emigrant’s outpouring of hopeless grief for the child he left behind, a father’s caoine across the Atlantic. Near its end, the poem envisions an alternate time line in which the loss finds an impossible redress, only to conclude with a Job-like accommodation to reality: “but the One who framed us of clay on earth has not so ordered” (68). There is something of Synge’s Nora in Riders to the Sea in O’Heigeartaigh’s stoic accommodation to God’s providence that transplants the ancient binding ties of religion to the hard reality of the New World. Thomas Branagan’s (1774–1843) abolitionist epic, “Avenia,” portrays by contrast the hypocrisy [End Page 194] of religious faith when it binds itself to the human exploitation of slavery in self-justifying greed: “But Christians ever reap a dire delight / In thirst for money, and in lust of fight. / Curst gold! How high will daring Christians rise, / In ev’ry guilt, to gain the fleeting prize” (17). John Boyle O’Reilly (1844–1892), the most important Irish American poet of his day, offers a more religiously visionary take on...