The Lammas Hireling (the poem)

The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig was described in Poetry Ireland Review as differing from many other poems in the book of the same name because of its "sustained ambiguity and sense of (strange) reality". Poems are sometimes rather like jokes in that if you don't get them the
first time then no amount of explanation will convince you that they're
any good. So all I'll do here is to point out some of the poem's features
and provide some background information for those who found the poem too strange.

Features

Form -
4 stanzas of 6 lines, each line about 10cm long!
Syllable count 9/9/10/9/10/9 and 9/11/10/12/12/12 for the 1st 2 stanzas - no
fixed pattern. Counting beats is no more rewarding. Stanza breaks don't
quite match paragraph breaks.

Genre -
Dark Hardy-esque fable? Certainly it's in a mode where we need to think
more in terms of narrative than of sound effects.

Diction -
Except perhaps for "Yields doubled" the style of language and choice of
words is consistent. Some of the phrases are not current

"Lammas" - 1st August harvest festival

"elf-shot" - ill due to the agency of elves

"leather horns" - fake horns? perhaps a cow pretending
to be a bull? In the singular the horn would more likely be an instrument.
"a wee brown cow with two leather horns" is an Irish riddle, meaning "hare".

"To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, the wisdom runs, muckle
care". muckle (or mickle) means "much", the commonest usage being
"many a little makes a mickle". Dictionaries mention "go with the hare",
etc, but I've no idea what "go into the hare" means. A poetry book by
Jocelyn Brooke has a poem called 'The Song of Isobell Gowdie' which has the
lines 'I shall go into a hare,/With sorrow and sighing and mickle care/And I shall go in the Devil's name/ Til I come home again'.
In a folklore dictionary it says that eating hare makes one melancholy,
and that hares have a reputation for being sexless or for changing their
gender annually or for being transformed witches.

"struck so cheap" means "struck so cheap a bargain"

"casting ball" meaning "casting shot for shotguns"? - maybe "silver
bullets" to ward off evil spirits. "casting ball from ... my days here"
sounds odd. Where is "here"? Farm? Church? Earth?

"I knew him a warlock" means "I realised he was a warlock" (assuming
his wife's form?)

"His top lip gathered" (hare lip?)

"I levelled and blew the small hour through his heart".
The small hour is the darkest time of night? So he levelled his
gun and shot darkness into the hireling's heart? Could the 'small
hour' be something to do with rifle sights looking like a small clock?
"The moon came out" - of the big hole in the body?

Imagery -
There's some heightened language to synchronise with emotional peaks.
The images are drawn from a simpl(ish) rural existence.

Allusions -
I read that 'the poem was inspired by a tale of witchcraft and magic heard
on a walk in Northern Ireland, and is brimming with Duhig's fantastic range
of sources, from Ben Jonson's "Sad Shepherd" to "The Allensford Pursuit of
Witches", a seventeenth century chant from the North of England.'

I skimmed through descriptions of 'Sad Shepherd' but found little of use.
It was probably Jonson's last play and it wasn't published in his lifetime.
In it Jonson "boldly strikes out to produce a truly English pastoral play,
suppressing satire and symbolism, and for Arcadia with its shadowy shepherds
as main characters he substitutes Sherwood Forest with Maid Marian and
Robin Hood and his merry men; instead of the satyr of conventional
pastoral tradition he introduces Maudlin the Witch and Puck-Hairy."

I think in this poem the allusions don't need to be identified and
followed-up. The author got ideas from other works but the poem is self-
contained.

Plot -
- Paragraph 1 - A farmer hires a farmhand at a fair. It turns out to be a bargain
- Paragraph 2 - The farmer's a widower. Woken in the night he thinks the
  farmhand is a warlock
- Paragraph 3 - When the farmer shoots the warlock it changes into something
  else - a hare? a fox?
- Paragraph 4 - He disposes of the body. He melts down his money.
  His herd falls ill. He goes to
  confession often. The reader/listener is in
  fact a priest.
This is the most obvious reading, but it does leave some details unexplained.
- What is the "company" mentioned in the 1st stanza?
- Why does he become so guilt-ridden? Wasn't it right to kill the warlock?
Perhaps, as with a whodunit, the explanation that first comes to mind
may not be the right
one. Perhaps the narrator's gone a bit potty. A widower isolated in his
farmyard succumbed to the young flesh (the company that knows when not to
talk), hallucinating either during the attack, or retrospectively. The
transformation of the corpse (the moulding over, etc) wasn't sudden and
magical but took weeks. In his guilt he neglects his herd and goes to
confession each hour.

Or perhaps the hireling was having an affair with the wife, her "torn voice"
being her cries of joy.

The conspiracy theory and the Old Boys' Network

Some background may help to dispel notions that it's all a conspiracy
by academics.

Ian Duhig's "The Lammas Hireling" won the

2000 Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition (3000 pounds, I think).
Many thousands of anonymous entries. It took judges Lavinia Greenlaw,
Ian McMillan, Don Paterson and Chair Germaine Greer less than three hours
to select the winner. He won the National Poetry Competition in 1987 too!

2001 Tolman Cunard Prize for best single poem (1000 pounds, judges included
Michael Donaghy and the Poetry Society's Christina Patterson). Entries
were not anonymous.

Duhig was described by Carol Ann Duffy as "the most original poet of his
generation". Born in 1954 in London of Irish Catholic parents, he now lives
in Leeds. He isn't an academic (he used to work in housing) though
he's been teaching creative writing lately.

In "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry" (Salt, 2003) Andrew
Duncan suggested that he's better than (though following in the footsteps of)
Muldoon. He says that "The linguistic register behind all of them is that of
the hedge-school [using] ... traces of Gaelic idiom ... flowers of bardic rhetoric,
traces of Catholic, pre-literate features such as stress on argument, feats of
memory, quick exchanges and readiness of wit" (p.274)

Why did it win?

I can see how it could easily survive the first phase of judging - the title
makes one curious. The subject matter's a change - a period piece.
Across the four stanzas, the changes of mood and tone are
dramatic. And the narrative is carefully controlled. There's a
clever hinge in the middle of the poem ("To go into the hare...") - the
proverb is poetic in sound, which contrasts with the prose rhythms
elsewhere.

Why is it difficult?

I.A. Richards in "Practical Criticism" (London, 1929) identified some
reasons why readers misunderstand poems. Amongst them are

Lack of Knowledge - This is a dialect poem; perhaps the
dialect is old too. Some meanings aren't even in multi-volume dictionaries,
so I think a glossary would have been appropriate.

Stock responses and doctrinal adhesions - The line-breaks
tempt the reader to find meaning in them. Also the layout of the piece as
a poem encourages the reader to adopt poetic criteria where perhaps
prose ones might be more appropriate.

The poet however might be forgiven for presenting the piece as he did -
glossaries are frowned upon, and prose competitions are few and far
between.

littleworkpage