One day I attended a talk given by Frank O’Connor about the famine that happened in Ireland in the nineteenth century and had such a harrowing effect on the Irish character. I was trying, at the time, to write a poem about that history which I had lived with since childhood. During his talk, O’Connor spoke of a traveller’s [Mrs. Ansenath Nicholson’s] description of a woman dancing on the Kerry shore:

This woman who danced before me, was more than fifty, and I do not believe that the daughter of Herodias herself was more gracefulf in her movements, more beautiful in her complexion and symmetry, than was this dark-haired matron of the mountains of Kerry.

This image struck me immediately. The woman was the entire people, capable of spontaneous artistic expression: capable of it, that is, before the famine. But then came the terrible desolation. O’Connor made me aware of Peadar O’Laoghaire’s Mo Sgéal Féin [Peter O’Leary’s My Own Story] where there is the following description of the dead and dying:

You saw them every morning after the night out, stretched in rows, some moving and some very still, with no stir from them. Later people came and lifed those who no longer moved and heaved them into carts and carried them up to a place near Carrigastyra, where a big dep pit was open for them, and thrust them into the pit.

This is ‘the pit of doom’ in my poem. There is a description of a man named Paddy bringing his wife Kate from the workhouse back to his hut: Next day a neighbor came to the hut. He saw the two of them dead and his wife’s feet clasped in Paddy’s bosom as though he were trying to warm them. It would seem that he felt the death agony come on Kate and her legs grow cold. so he put them inside his own shirt to take the chill from them.

In the poem I identify this woman, dead from famine disease, her ‘perished feet nailed to her man’s breastbone,’ with the woman camparable to the daughter of Herodias, dancing on the shore in Kerry. Perhaps the most frightening consequence of famine is described in George Petrie’s collection of The Ancient Music of Ireland - the terrible, unbearable silence. To my mind this meant not only the silence that followed racial suffering akin to what Hitler inflicted on the Jews, but it meant that Ireland became the grave of song. I was witnessing the death of the dance:

This awful, unwonted silence which, during the famine and subsequent years, almost everywhere prevailed, struck more fearfully upon their struck more fearfully upon theirimaginations, as many Irish gentlemen informed me, and gave them a deeper feeling of the desolation with which the country had been visited, than any other circumstance which had forced itself upon their attention.

These images of the pit, the woman, the rows of the dead, the terrible silence, were in my mind after hearing O’Connor’s talk. SHortly afterwards, I was at a wedding and a boy was asked to sing. He did so, but during the song he turned his back on the wedding party. In his averted figure I saw the woman who forgot the dance, the land that rejected its own singers.