W2A-004 Rhyming weavers-0.txt
CHAPTER 5

A Sense of Place: Landscape and Locality in the Work of the Rhyming Weavers

by Ivan Herbison

Throughout the period from 1750 to 1850, the century during which the weaver poets of Antrim and Down produced the greater part of their work, Ulster remained a predominantly rural society. The population continued to increase until the Great Famine of 1846-48 reversed this trend, ushering in a period of rural depopulation. The Rhyming Weavers were born into this agricultural environment; many continued to maintain smallholdings to supplement their income from weaving. Given this context, one could be forgiven for assuming that traditional themes of life in the countryside, of landscape and locality, of nature and environment would feature prominently in the work of these poets. However, there is no coherent or well-defined tradition of landscape poetry to be found in the Rhyming Weavers. Few of them seem to have analysed their experience of rural life and landscape as comprehensively as one might have expected from poets who were acknowledged and proclaimed as bards of their native townlands. What one does find in the work of the most prominent, such as James Orr of Ballycarry and David Herbison of Dunclug, is a deep attachment to the notion of community and a sense of local identity.

Yet this sense of place which is so evident in their work is merely one aspect of a much more complex and ambivalent relationship to the land. There is a danger of exaggerating the extent to which the Rhyming Weavers identified themselves with their localities, or of misrepresenting the concept of local identity as a wholly positive allegiance. In reality there was a constant tension in the lives and writings of the weaver poets between the sense of place and the experience of displacement. They were not immune to the forces of economic and social change which were transforming Ulster from an agrarian to an industrial society, nor could they avoid the effects of the political transformation which led to the decline and eventual collapse of the radical dissenting tradition.

The experience of displacement manifested itself in several ways. The most obvious was the process of urbanisation, which had a profound impact on the lives of several rural bards. The case histories of two, Andrew McKenzie of Dunover and Thomas Beggs of Ballyclare, will serve to illustrate the fate of many of their contemporaries.
Andrew McKenzie was born near the village of Dunover, County Down in 1780. He was the second son of a smallholder who worked hard to provide his family with a modest education. According to the poet John Fullarton, 'in his fourteenth year McKenzie was apprenticed to the trade of linen-weaving.... He followed this branch of occupation for many years, and his best and happiest days were passed on the loom'. Like so any of his fellow-weavers, he developed a passionate interest in poetry, which offered an escape from the tedium of work. In the Preface to his first volume, he wrote: 'I found poetry a sweet walk for the imagination'. In the same Preface he also comments on the constraints of his economic situation, referring to himself as one 'whose feelings have been too frequently wrung by the hard hand of poverty' (p.8). Despite many hardships he continued to write poetry and became a regular contributor to the Belfast Newsletter. Encouraged by the Ballymena printer and bookseller George Dugan, his first collection, Poems and Songs on Different Subjects, appeared in 1810. According to David Herbison, this publication earned him the not inconsiderable sum of 200 pounds, with which he built a cottage. 'Mount Gaelus', named after his pseudonym as a contributor to the Belfast Newsletter, and also acquired a fishing boat. In the midst of this apparent security two disasters were to underline the precarious condition of human happiness. His fishing boat was wrecked and McKenzie barely escaped drowning. Then, as a consequence of a dispute over his lease, he was evicted from his cottage. He was forced to seek employment in Belfast and held a succession of poorly paid jobs. Despite these trying circumstances he continued to write poetry, but was unable to publish another collection, The Masonic Chaplet and Other Poems, until 1832, 22 years after his first volume. Unfortunately it failed to revive his fortunes. Fullarton paints a distressing picture of his final years:
"His eyes were somewhat sunk, mild and tranquil; and possessed of little fire or determination. He bore all the appearance of a man of seventy, although then sixteen years under that age, his voice was slow, subdued, and broken."

McKenzie died a pauper in 1839, and was buried in Shankill graveyard. A fellow poet, William McComb, erected a headstone to his memory.

Not surprisingly, McKenzie's use of landscape reflects his experience. He has a nostalgic regard for his native countryside, made the more poignant by his sense of irrevocable loss. Nowhere are these feelings more eloquently expressed than in his poem 'Gannaway Burn':

The spot whare the earliest May-flowers I gathered, On memory's vista I mark wi'delight: The bank whare I watched till the nestlings were feathered An' wept when I found they had a' ta'en their flight: That pool where the quick fleeting minnows pursuing, I waded, nor wist how the time glided by; That nook where I lingered the green rushes pu'ing, Till gloaming' had spread her dark veil o'er the sky.... The dark grove o' pine which its margin o'erhaded, Fond memory will cherish while life warms by breast; There often ere sorrow my bosom invaded, I strayed wi' blithe comrades, in innocence blest. But that grove is laid low, an' my comrades so cheery, Are gane to that country whence nane can return: While some who survive wander heartless an' weary. Like me, far awa' frae the Gannaway Burn!

The experience of Thomas Beggs in many respects parallels that of McKenzie, and confirms the pattern of misery which could so easily befall a rural poet driven to the city out of economic necessity. Beggs, born at Glenwherry, County Antrim, in 1789, was the son of a farm labourer. As a boy he went to sea for a brief period and was shipwrecked off Rathlin Island, an experience which diminished somewhat the attractions of the seafaring life. He then sought employment in the bleachworks of Richaf Bell at Ballyclare. During his time there he published his first volume, Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse (1819). He was promised a more rewarding position in Belfast but it failed to materialise. During an unsettled period Beggs undertook a walking tour of North Antrim and did not find regular employment again until 1825, when he obtained a position in a bleachworks in Belfast. Once again he lost his job and, unable to support his family, was forced to return to his mother's home. He was constantly in and out of work during the 1840s. He died at the age of 58 in the typhus epidemic of 1847.

Another important cause of displacement was emigration. There were many poets amongst the great exodus of emigrants from Ireland during the nineteenth century. James McHenry of Larne (1785-1845, John Smyth of Ballymena (1783-1854), and Henry McD Flecher of Moneyrea (1827-c.1909) all left for America. David Herbison of Dunclug emigrated to Quebec in 1827 but was shipwrecked and returned home to Ballymena. Yet his three brothers and all but one of his children joined the exodus.

It is evident from these brief biographical sketches that for most rural poets displacement and dispossession were the experiences which formed their attitudes to concepts of place, landscape and identity. John Hewitt's assertion that 'a poet of the folk was emphatically a poet of a place' needs careful qualification. That sense of place so conspicuously valued by Hewitt cannot be taken for granted. When it is successfully achieved, as in the case of Orr and Herbison, we must attempt an explanation and analysis.

James Orr of Ballycarry achieves a distinctive sense of place in his poetry with a comparatively restrained use of description. There are, admittedly, several encomia of his native Ballycarry, where he lived throughout his life, apart from a brief sojourn in America, where he had fled after the failure of the 1798 Rebellion. Yet Orr's sense of place owes more to his use of language than to his use of landscape. His vigorous, unselfconscious use of the vernacular Ulster-Scots dialect in his work creates a vivid sense of locality. In his dialect poems style and subject-matter are perfectly matched. They speak of a whole community: the language, the landscape and the people are united in a single vision of their identity.

Orr's technique is well illustrated by a poem such as 'To the Potatoe'.

Waeworth the proud prelatic pack, Wha Point an' Pratoes downa tak! Whit them galore, an' whyles a plack Ta mek' me frisky, I'll fen, an' barley freely lack - Except in whisky. What wad poor deels on bogs an' braes. Whase dear Cot-Tacks nae meal can raise; Wha ne'er tase butter, beef or cheese, Nor pit new clais on; While a' they mak' can har'ly please Some rack-rent messon.... The weel-pair't peasants, kempin', set ye; The weak wee boys, sho'el, weed, an' pat ye; The auld guid men thy apples get any Seedlin's to raise; An' on sow'n-seeves the lasses grate ye, To starch their claes. (Collected Poems, pp. 56-59)

This poem characteristically condenses the whole life of his community into a series of vivid scenes. The potato becomes a focus for his real subject, an invocation of rural life: planting, harvesting, loading carts, starching clothes, eating 'creesht scons' and champ. Orr's appeal is to shared experience. 'The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial' similarly depends for its success on it qualities of homeliness, its intimate domestic references, its characteristic ambivalence towards the customs of the wake:

Cou'd he whose limbs they decently hae stretch'd, The Followers o' freets awake an' mark, What wad he think o' them, he oft beseeched To be mair wise than mind sic notions dark? To bare the shelves o' plates they fa' to wark; Before the looking-glass a claith they cast; An' if a clock were here, nae ear might hark Her still'd han's tell how hours and moments pass'd; Ignorance bred sic pranks, an' custom gars them last. (Collected Poems, p. 263)

Orr's highly developed sense of place and sense of language may be seen as both his strength and his weakness. In addressing his own locality Orr cannot address a wider audience outside his own locality. There is a price to be paid for his faithfulness to the idea of community and shared experience.

The work of Thomas Beggs provides an interesting contrast to that of James Orr. Though Beggs was capable of writing strong dialect verse, as in 'The Auld Wife's Address to her Spinning Wheel', he is nevertheless defensive about his use of Ulster Scots, and evidently feels the need to justify himself against the accusation of literary imitation:

Should the reader of the following effusions suppose, that in some parts the Author has imitated the Scottish Dialect, he would wish to correct the idea by alleging that he has written in his own style - in the language of his native glen - not constrained but spontaneous as the lispings of our first speech.

Beggs'removal to Belfast and the subsequent periods of unsettlement and unemployment meant that he lacked that strong sense of local identity which was the basis of Orr's poetry. So Beggs looks for a substitute landscape to replace the locality which he conspicuously lacks. He finds one in the only landscape fully accessible to him, that of poetic convention. In his eyes Rathlin Island is transformed into a mysterious place of romantic wildness, where the lone bard meditates on the sea:

The crimson flush of eve had shed. O'er heat-cowl'd Carey's wizard head. The grey goat bounded o'er the waste. To shun the traveller's path in haste; On pinions fleet of hoary blue, In ether far the heron flew - The wind was hushed - the clouds away, And nature looked as glad and gay As if an angel's smile had been With all its brightness o'er the scene; When from that desert, dark and wild, A lonely, musing, minstrel child Stood gazing on the Celtic sea. As if spell-bound so rapt was he; And dreaming in poetic vein. Saw paradise in bloom again. (The Poetical Works of Thomas Beggs, pp.99-100)

Here Beggs is seeking a reversion to the landscape of Eden, and attempts to find security in some prelapsarian poetic paradise. His desire for escapism is understandable, given the circumstances of his own experience as a rural poet deprived of his native landscape by urbanisation and economic imperative. Beggs'use of the pastoral can thus be seen as an expression of and a response to displacement.

The experience of David Herbison, The Bard of Dunclug, complements that of Orr and Beggs. Like Orr, he spent nearly all his life in one place, and thus possesses a strong sense of local identity. Like Beggs, he found it more and more difficult to express that identity. The displacement experienced by Herbison was of cultural and linguistic nature. Questions of cultural identity are raised in his early works as the attempts to discover a distinctive voice. His first two volumes, The Fate of M'Quillan and O'Neill's Daughter (1841) and Midnight Musings (1848), are exploratory works in which he tries his hand at a number of poetic styles. Not surprisingly, these volumes reveal a sometimes confused eclecticism rather than a comfortable sense of belonging. Herbison's poem 'The Rowantree' resembles Beggs''Rathlin'. It is a naive attempt to transplant an English topographical poem to a local setting. The following extract demonstrates the unconvincing result:

Now oh now old Killyfleugh! Breaks upon the enraptured view; Lying on the green hill side, Robbed of all its power and pride, See it sinking in decay, All its splendour is away. On its melancholy walls Every night the owlet calls. And the bat in safety sleeps, Where the mantling ivy keeps Free from winter's withering power Fragments of the ancient tower (SW, p.14)
