Marvellous Grass
There you were in your purple vestments
half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest
under your linen alb and chasuble and stole:
and when you saw my face in the crowd
for Holy Communion
the consecrated host fell from your fingers.
I felt shame, I never
mentioned it once,
my lips were sealed.
But still it lurked in my heart
like a thorn under mud, and it
worked itself in so deep and sheer
it nearly killed me.
Next thing then, I was laid up in bed.
Consultants came in their hundreds,
doctors and brothers and priests,
but I baffled them all: I was
incurable, they left me for dead.
So out you go, men,
out with the spades and the scythes,
the hooks and shovels and hoes.
Tackle the rubble,
cut back the bushes, clear off the rubbish,
the sappy growth, the whole straggle and mess
that infests my green unfortunate field.
And there where the sacred wafer fell
you will discover
in the middle of the shooting weeds
a clump of miraculous grass.
The priest will have to come then
with his delicate fingers, and lift the host
And bring it to me and put it on my tongue.
Where it will melt, and I will rise in the bed
as fit and well as the youngster I used to be.
“Féir Suaithinseach” exemplifies Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s method of addressing issues of women’s and cultural identity by rewriting folklore and myth from a female perspective.
Taking its cue from an Irish folk story titled “The Boy Who Became Pope,” the poem—consisting of six sections of from four to seven irregular lines each (occasionally end-rhymed in the Irish original)—gives a voice to a marginal female character, endowing her with allegorical significance. The poem’s speaker addresses a priest who, years ago, caused her mysterious illness by dropping the “blessed host” during her Holy Communion.
Since then the girl’s lips have been “locked,” suggesting her refusal to eat or speak. Apparently, she has been suffering from anorexia, a disorder that expresses her shame at having occasioned the dropping of the host: “I—I said nothing. / I was ashamed.” The priest’s confusion when seeing her face hints at sexual attraction, while the image of a “mud-thorn” penetrating the girl’s “insides” suggests physical penetration, even rape.
Accordingly, by refusing to eat, the girl attempts to arrest her sexual development, which she blames for her failed communion. She can be cured only if the local men find the host, hidden under “a patch of marvellous grass,” so that the priest may resume the interrupted ritual.
On a metaphorical level, the image suggests that the status of women needs to be restored by those who diminished it in the first place: the representatives of patriarchy (the men) and Catholicism (the priest). Another noteworthy aspect is the metaphorical connection between the girl and the land. The speaker’s hope to “sit up in the bed / as healthy as [she] was when young” evokes the nationalist myth of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the old woman symbolic of Ireland who regains her youth when young men sacrifice their lives for her.
This myth was employed most famously in William Butler Yeats’s play Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902) and has been deeply influential in 20th-century Irish literature. References to “the rank growth, the dust, the misery / that grows on my tragic grassland” imply that anorexia has infected not only the girl but Ireland itself, since a culture denying women’s sexuality withers just like a girl denying her bodily needs. In a country deprived of the earth mother’s gifts of prosperity, all that is left to grow on the “tragic grassland” are “misery” and “useless plants.”
Thus, instead of sending men out to die, the girl instructs them to retrieve the “marvellous grass” symbolic of fertility and life. In this respect she is reminiscent of the Celtic fertility goddesses whom Ní Dhomhnaill revives in many of her poems. The poet thus effectively blends her revision of folklore and myth with her exploration of the metaphorical and sociopsychological implications of the modern disease anorexia, relating both to contemporary issues of female and cultural identity.
Bibliography
Bourke, Angela. “Fairies and Anorexia: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘Amazing Grass’.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium XIII. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 1995, 25–38.
Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. “Marvellous Grass.” In Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta. 1986. Translated by Michael Hartnett. Dublin: Raven Arts, 1993, 75.
Categories: British Literature, Irish Literature, Literature, World Literature