[s] and accumulates in a dry, monotonous and therefore oppressive [claustrophobic] way’, nothing at all stands forth, for modern man, as holy and so, in particular, the names of the gods fail to do so” (Young, 2001: 90). In an age where human beings treat one another as “consumers” and “human resources”, Heidegger turns for salvation to poets, “the authentic few who, remembering the past, are truly alive to the desolation of the present” (Young, 2001: 74). McGuckian’s poem constitutes a concise gloss on, and affirmative restatement of, Heidegger’s thesis; it is a poetic manifesto, a deeply serious avowal of poetry’s role and power, and one that upholds the belief that in “poetic meaning […] we experience the ‘self-secluding’ in things, the infinitude, the unfathomability, the ‘secret’ life that belongs to every being”, that “in its naming the holy shows itself” (Young, 2001: 104.

The two stanzas cited above envisage poetry as “the deepest revelation of what is” and project a way of breaking free from “the grip of technologically oriented thinking” (Pattison, 2000: 162), and are written in answer to a question posed in the preceding stanza:

[/fusion_builder_row_inner]

[t]he appearing of the infinite relation as a unified whole remains denied to us” (2000: 202). Caught within “this destiny of denial”, the poet asks “to where could we step back”? Heidegger’s answer is enigmatic: “Into the awaiting reserve. This is at the same time the supposing which thinks in advance. Such reserve anticipates what is coming, in that it attempts to experience what is present” (2000: 202). To understand what the German philosopher means here, and to comprehend the role that he conceives poetry as playing, we must look more closely at the quotations that McGuckian uses in the second stanza which both diagnose the ills of modern society and offer a prescription:

It is the center of the whole infinite relation. It is pure destiny itself. What is uncanny encircles the globe now that destiny strikes the men of this age directly, not only through a ringing out of its voices. Destiny approaches man silently – a mysterious kind of stillness. Thus, he is still unable to correspond to this destiny of denial. Rather, he evades it through his more and more hopeless attempts to master technology with his mortal will.As soon as we trouble ourselves to reflect on this, a supposition arises: the ordering of a joint may hold sway within the power of that provocation, that is, within the absolute, essential domination of modern technology, from which and through which the whole in-finite relation joints itself into its fourfoldedness. Only with the greatest difficulty can we hear the silent voice of this joining. For in preparation for this listening, we must first learn again to hear an older saying, in which the once great destiny of Greece rang out. (2000: 202-3, emphases added)

To counteract a world that is led by a nihilistic, yet all-encompassing, belief in the primacy of scientific technology, Heidegger proposes art (Dichtung) as a means of illuminating the ordinary, of ripping “us for a time out of the ordinary into another world” (Inwood, 1997: 111). Championing this poetic use of language, he contends that “[b]eauty is truth experienced in a Greek way, namely, the unconcealing of what comes to presence by its own power, of φύσις that nature in which and from which the Greeks lived” and that art “as the pointing that allows the appearance of what is invisible, is the highest kind of showing” (2000: 185, 186). “For Greek thought,” says Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, “the essence of knowing consists in alētheia, that is, in the revealing of beings” (1993: 184), and it is poetic language that acts as the mode of unconcealment, a projective saying, “a bringing forth of beings in that it brings forth what is present as such out of concealment and specifically into the unconcealment of its appearance” (1993: 184). As a title, then, “The Self-concealing” refers directly to that “older saying” in which “the once great destiny of Greece rang out”, echoing as it does Heraclitus’ Fragment 54 which declares: “The joint that denies its appearance is of a stronger ruling than the one that comes to appearance” (Heraclitus in Heidegger, 2000: 203). Glossing this phrase, Heidegger states that it intimates how “we must experience all Greek beings, nature, men, human works, and the divinity; everything visible in terms of the invisible – everything sayable in terms of the unsayable – everything which appears in terms of the self-concealing” (2000: 206-7). Thus, the title not only meta-poetically alludes to the self-concealment that consequentially arises from McGuckian’s strategic arrangement of intertexts within her poems, it also refers directly to the Heideggarian notion that “[p]oetry is the saying of the unconcealment of beings” (2000: 198). When she cites Heidegger as saying that “the name flows from the naming”, she is thus referring to the idea that naming “unveils, reveals”, that poetry is a “showing that discloses what and how something is to be experienced and preserved in its presence” (2000: 215). Hence, quoting directly from Hölderlin’s “Greece”, she is able to contend that, with the poet as mediator between man and the gods, “more willingly / beauty dwells on earth” (Hölderlin in Heidegger, 2000: 204).

 

[….] In the month of March, / When day and night are equal” (Hölderlin in Heidegger, 2000: 103). “March” in this context refers to the beginning of the Greek festivals, or holidays in the original sense of “holy-days”. On a “Feier-tag”, says Heidegger, “we ‘step into the … intimation of the wonder (Wunder) that around us a world worlds all, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things and we ourselves are’” (Heidegger cited in Young, 2001: 86). Yet everything is held in a liminal stasis in the poem at this point: March is the transitional month, promising “the reconciliation between the harshness and sternness of winter and the ease and force of summer” (Heidegger, 2000: 132); nature (Φύσις) is depicted as “an emerging and an arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present” (Heidegger, 2000: 79). Nature may be awake, becoming light, but she is said to be “awake in the manner of mourning”. Mourning, argues Heidegger, “withdraws from everything into the memory of one thing only. The remembrance of mourning remains near to what has been taken from it and seems to be distant” (2000: 77). What is being mourned, or remembered, is the presence of the gods (or rather, their present distance). Using the present continuous tense and a clever enjambment, McGuckian’s text balances transition with stasis: nature is “in mourning / becoming light”. This sense is reinforced by representing day and night as being equal. So how can the world emerge fully from its darkness, from its mourning?

The “northeast wind”, significant, of course, due to McGuckian’s domicile in Belfast, is said to be “the wind […] which in the poet’s homeland brightens up ‘the air’ […] and extends gaiety into the distance” (Heidegger, 2000: 109). The pervasive imagery of brightening is all-important here since, being alienated from the “holy ‘fire’”, man’s task in a modern world characterised by spiritual destitution is said to be “the opposite of the Greeks’”, that is, “to recover the ‘fire’” (Young 2001: 97). Who exactly can achieve such a task? The answer is, unsurprisingly, the poets. The northeast wind is said to set the mariners in Hölderlin’s “Remembrance” on their travels, and these sailors are read by Heidegger as figures of the poet: “They say the holy. They must therefore know the heavenly bodies and be masters in reading the quarters of the sky” (Heidegger, 2000: 111). To where are these poets-mariners voyaging, and what draws them there? In fact, their journey to a foreign land is, in essence, a homecoming. “In this preference for the northeast,” says Heidegger, “there reigns the love for the experience of thefiery spirit in the foreign land. The love for what is not like home, purely for the sake of becoming at home in what is one’s own, is the essential law of destiny by which the poet is sent into the foundation of the history of the ‘fatherland’” (Heidegger, 2000: 111-2). Such a statement makes for uncomfortable reading given Heidegger’s past affiliation with the German fascist regime in the 1930s, but when he says, commenting on Hölderlin’s text, that the northeast wind “‘calls’ the poets to find themselves in the destiny of their historical being”, it does not pertain to matters solelyDeutsch; rather, it is a further call for poets to act as mediators between the gods and man.

The journey, simultaneously to a foreign land and homeward, is neatly suggested in stanza three of McGuckian’s poem:

[/fusion_builder_row_inner]

[Mercer-Taylor, 2000: 52]); and spiritually, since she has experienced that which isunheimlich. “‘The year’”, says Heidegger, “houses those times we call the seasons”, and at this juncture we have moved to Spring: “the brightening light is the first ‘angel of the year’” (2000: 36). The figure of the angel is appropriate here given that McGuckian’s collection, The Book of the Angel, is an examination of the role played by angels in religion and literature. In Greek, “messenger” can be translated as “angel”, and this also links him to Hermes, the god of the paths and Heidegger’s god of hermeneutics.5 The poet in McGuckian’s text has journeyed over the paths towards home, only with the aid of the messenger. As Heidegger comments with reference to Hölderlin’s “The Ister”, “the paths name the transition for passing over to the other side. Not without wings may … one cross over from the side of the foreign to the side of home” (2000: 134). Those “wings” belong to the angel which appears here in the form of “the brightening light”, glossed by Heidegger as “the first ‘angel of the year’” (2000: 36). The “three-in-one sign” not only connotes three exemplars within a single text – Heidegger-Mercer-Taylor-Taplin or Hölderlin-Hesiod-Mendelsshon – but also refers to the necessary conjunction of earth, light and god which brings gaiety to the poet: “The joyful one and the joyful messengers of the brightening, father aether, and the angel of the house (the earth), and the angel of the year (light), cannot accomplish anything by themselves. Indeed, among all those who dwell within the orbit of gaiety, these three-in-one are loved the most by those who rejoice” (2000: 38). The “sign” may also refer to that which signifies the god’s presence. Writing to a friend prior to his final journey to France, Hölderlin tells of his joy at beholding the symbol of heavenly fire: “I am pleased as when in the summer ‘the old holy father with calm hand shakes the holy lightning flashes out of the red clouds’. For among all that I can see of God, this sign has become my chosen one’” (Heidegger, 2000: 61).

In “Four Voices without an Instrument”, the poet self-reflexively comments on the influence on her of her exemplars: having been in “conversation” with them, they become her “stained-glass voice”. They have become her muses, her visiting angels, and they help her affirm her own belief in poetic language (in the Heideggarian sense). Man’s being, for the German philosopher, “is grounded in language”; however, he argues, “this actually occurs in conversation” and “since language has authentically come to pass in conversation”, the gods are said to “have come to expression and a world has appeared” (2000: 57). The stanza in which McGuckian mentions this “conversation” is made up of quotations which speak of enabling influences. The first extract comes from Taplin’s essay which talks of how the lives of Homer and Hesiod “may have overlapped”, how they may have been contemporaries and may have participated “in the same poetic occasions” (2000: 27). The second refers to Mendelssohn’s “advocacy of older music”, particularly in his 1838 series of four “Historical Concerts”. During the second of these concerts, which closed with Hayden’s “Farewell” Symphony, “the musicians actually blew out their candles and left the stage one by one” (Mercer-Taylor, 2000: 141). The third extract also comes from Mercer-Taylor’s biography, referring to Mendelssohn’s self-quotation in his Italian Symphony in which “the sunburst of winds with which the piece begins is lifted more or less directly from a colouristic wash early in the ‘Prosperous Voyage’ [an earlier piece]’” (2000: 117). Appropriately, the stanza as a whole constitutes a plea for influence: while her exemplars’ work has been completed and may be rooted in the past, she asks for the musicians “to blow for me”. The sound produced is a curious hybrid of the melancholic and the uplifting: she asks for the cheerful “sunburst of winds” to be played on “the lowest strings”, referring here to the second movement scherzo from Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F-minor from 1847 which features the “cheerless, dark-hued trio (the cello, viola and second violin spend nearly the entirety of the trio on their lowest strings)” (Mercer-Taylor, 2000: 202). That double-edged sound is apt given that the earth in her final stanza is described as both “brightening” and “endangered”: while poets like McGuckian may act as messengers of the gods to affirm the “fourfold unity”, the earth is still in thrall to their “destiny of denial”.

Perhaps the foregoing analyses of McGuckian’s texts confirm that her poetry is “obscure” since the references are all unattributed and it requires scholarly effort to trace the allusions. However, what cannot be denied is that there is a clear rationale behind these poems and that they constitute not only intense negotiations with past art, but also a deeply felt belief in the primacy (and efficacy) of poetry in the modern world. Such analyses ought to prompt critics to look more closely at McGuckian’s texts and perhaps read them in light of Heidegger’s philosophy.