Poetic Mumblings on Life, Love, and Loneliness

ÓRLAITH NÍ RUAIDH

The ‘home’ as we know it has taken on many life forms by way of various literary representations throughout recent centuries. Jane Austen wrote of the home as the hub of all connections, the seedling for love, and the energetic core of daily activity. Similarly, Louisa May Alcott utilised it as a setting for change and sisterhood, of which many young women still today grow from and develop. F. Scott Fitzgerald presented the home as a milieu of longing for his characters, abounded in ostentatious glamour and romance, but always tragically out of reach.

Indeed, when I speak of the home and its meanings, there are many. The home of family, of domesticity, of love, of life, of death, of secrets, of strife, of isolation, of movement. Emily Brontë’s home, much like the setting of her sole novel Wuthering Heights, was found in the moors, in nature, and in the company of her beloved sister Anne, and within the fantasy worlds they shared and participated in (such as the world of Gondal). In essence, it was both a tangible and imaginative home.

Extract from: Love, We’re Going Home Now (Pablo Neruda)

Love, we’re going home now,

Where the vines clamber over the trellis:

Even before you, the summer will arrive,

On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.

The influences and crossovers of one’s home-life and surroundings have long played a part in the construction of the home within its literary representations, offering room for analysis, comparison, interpretation, and indeed, an insight into the human qualities and vulnerabilities of the greatest of writers and poets.

Extract from: Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin (Patrick Kavanagh)

Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges

And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy

And other far-flung towns mythologies.

O commemorate me with no hero-courageous

Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

In more recent literature, the idea of one’s home and the experience of ‘unbelonging’ has further come into our understanding of home, time, and place. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth traversed the struggles of one’s place at ‘home’ through migration, racism, and a multi-cultural London. Diasporic literature, like Smith’s and Amamanda Adichie’s Americanah, have helped us in understanding the home and its complex and infinite meanings, which are expanding within our current society.

Clearances III (Seamus Heaney)

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

For many great writers, the home has been a solitary thing, one where their reclusiveness flourished along with their stories. The multi-faceted layers of the home, I argue, is captured in its most revealing and inspiring light through time’s greatest poets. In their selectiveness, their preciseness, the home is unmasked as their literary and poetic core.

Extract from: I Learned – at Least – what Home Could Be, #944 (Emily Dickinson)

This seems a Home—

And Home is not—

But what that Place could be—

Afflicts me—as a Setting Sun—

Where Dawn—knows how to be—

The poetic passages throughout this article exemplify, while perhaps romanticised, the poetic constructions of home in life, love, and loneliness. Neruda’s home is a blissful romantic love, nomadic, and forever in motion. His home moves where she moves. I am drawn to Kavanagh’s kinship with memorial, his undying loyalty to the Dublin canals, and the grandeur of locality, subtlety, and friendship with his city. With Heaney, while much of his poetry in relation to home is political and amidst a tumultuous backdrop, Clearances is a homely punch to the gut, always successful in moving me with its depiction of deep maternal love and the nature of a home through life and death, the palpable feeling of learning how to say goodbye.

With Dickinson, take what you will. In rhymes and rhythms, her poetry has always stood out to me as wickedly smart and screamingly witty, but there is, like with many others, a deep loneliness. An observational narrative, on the outside forever looking in (or in her case, out her bedroom window). But home, in all its afflicting mannerisms, has made itself known to her. After all, it is what we make of it, in literature, in poetry, and in life.