Speech at the Conferring of the Freedom of the City of Belfast on Michael Longley
Ulster Hall, Belfast, 23rd March 2015
Lord Mayor,
Lord Lieutenant,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The poet Michael Longley is, by any standards, a remarkable man. I need not, in this place and on this occasion, begin to list his many accomplishments in poetry, the garlands and laurels he has rightly gathered for his work over a long, productive and luminous life. The poems speak for themselves — eloquent, precise and passionate, large-hearted, intelligent and above all humane.
It is that humane quality in the life and in the work that, above all else, I wish to salute today.
Cicero employed the term ‘humanitas’ to describe the collection of virtues one finds in a person committed to active public service, and indeed in his work as poet, mentor and public servant of considerable distinction, Michael Longley has embodied this most Roman of qualities. In his poems we find a quiet attentiveness to the vagaries of the human heart, its ambitions, its successes and failures, and above all its capacity for empathy.
Equally, in the course of a distinguished career with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Michael always tactfully endeavoured to curb the tendency of any bureaucracy to obstruct the flowering of that which was most human in those he encouraged. Rather he sought to support and nurture both emerging and fading creativity.
I know that his sense of civic duty, in terms of time, that most precious of resources, must often have appeared to cost him dear as a poet. His duties called him away for a time from obedience to his own poetic imperative, but since his retirement from that formal aspect of his public service we have been gifted with, as it were, a pent up flood of riches from his pen; poems and collections that have immeasurably enriched our lives and our literature — so much so that I am tempted, cautiously, to speculate that in our fallen world, sacrifice to virtue is indeed, sometimes, rewarded.
The grace, civility and accomplishment of Michael Longley’s poetry are rooted, of course, in the strong tradition of John Hewitt, in fidelity towards and love for a strong Ulster identity. They find a new flowering, as everyone knows by now, in a second pulse, his rebirth into the natural world of wonder that is Carrigskeewaun, County Mayo. The poet Theo Dorgan caught this double pulse, in his review of Longley’s collection A Hundred Doors, when he wrote:
“Longley moves like a figure in the Eclogues from pasture to pasture, quiet, unassuming, attentive to small things but raising his head from time to time to look history square in the face.”
Indeed Longley has looked history square in the face, and we are, all of us on the island of Ireland, the better for it. Time and again he has returned to the awful human catastrophe that was the First World War, and to the courage of his father who earned a Military Cross in that bitter conflict. Time and again he has faced the bitter equivocations of war and politics, his eye always on the pitiable casualties and victims. Always, no matter the occasion, he is unflinching in the generous largeness of his sorrow, the amplitude of his reach for forgiveness and understanding. None of us will ever forget the aching simplicity of hurt in his poem “The Ice Cream Man,” and history has already taken his magisterial poem “Ceasefire” to its heart.
Tonight we will have the privilege to hear Michael read “Ceasefire” himself, but if I may, I would like to read just two lines – lines which I have quoted on many occasions – as they express more profoundly than perhaps any others the terrible and beautiful essence of what it is to forgive:
“I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
Here, under the pressure of the historical moment, the classical scholar and the poet of human pity are united in a profoundly human, and humane, register; here, if I might venture to say so, Longley steps into the history he has himself done so much to make possible, and draws the myth to the arena of our contemporary challenges.
There can be no doubt, the Belfast Agreement was a formidable and a considerable achievement on the part of all who laboured to bring it into being. What is perhaps insufficiently noticed is that the political process, which was in the end remarkable for its sophistication and skill, had deep roots in civic society, and especially in the arts. The fact is, with Michael Longley so often in the vanguard, across the island of Ireland, even in the darkest days, poets and painters, musicians, composers, filmmakers and other artists kept up an unbroken conversation, a common commitment to the humane and the decent, a common belief in the constructive and salvific power of the imagination as a human good.
The BBC producer Chris Spurr, in the early 1990s, convened an instructive colloquium on radio entitled “There Is No Border In The Arts” — a proposition both true and challenging. Of course one recognises and one acknowledges the realities of jurisdictions, the conflicting as well as the converging realities of worldviews, of legal, political and economic systems. However, the phrase ‘our common humanity’ is not a hollow phrase, nor is it merely a pious descriptive, to be brandished for a moment as we pursue conflicting imperatives. Embedded in that phrase, ‘our common humanity’, is a profound moral understanding and a profound moral imperative.
Michael Longley, in his work as an arts administrator, in his life as a poet and in his life as a man, has worked without cease to give space and actuality to that moral imperative: that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, above all else, perhaps, with hope.
And, of course, with joy. Time and again in Michael’s poems and in the story of his life we find joy — delight in the companions of his youth, Derek Mahon, Terence Brown and Eavan Boland among them, who still share the adventure with him in the mysteries of poetry and learning; delight, also, in the coming to maturity of so many young poets who have benefited from his encouragement and support.
There is, too, his attentive, I might even say Oriental, joy in the fleeting and transient beauties of nature beyond or outside the human. His grace, his civility and his many accomplishments, however hard-won, have about them an almost indefinable aura of pleasure in life that can scarcely be distinguished from simple gratitude.
If he is all too painfully aware of the lacrimae rerum, Longley is equally conscious of, and grateful for, all that has been gifted to him, most especially in his poetry. I think especially, here, of the love poems to his wife Edna, the peerless scholar who has been his unswerving life’s companion and who has, in her own right, made such a remarkable contribution to the instructed civility of our times.
Today, the great city of Belfast has conferred a signal honour on a great and noble spirit. It is my pleasure to stand here with you and offer to this great poet, as a grace note to the occasion, a garland of laurels from the Republic.
It is right that Michael Longley be honoured, and yours is of the finest and most public kind.
Thank you.