Why John Kelly chose this poem
Why a third-person complaint directed at a bird most of us hear with gratitude and affection? The answer, of course, is to be found in the pain of lost love – or, more accurately, the memory of good sex. The curlew reminds Yeats of “passion-dimmed eyes”, and not for the first time his lover’s hair becomes the star turn. Perhaps the final line is just a rather grand way of saying what we all say when things go wrong in love and happiness, when we petulantly want to shoot whatever happens to pass as the messenger – even a curlew. But in the folklore familiar to Yeats the curlew foretold a death, so we forgive him for what might seem, at first, a cranky attack on a blameless bird. Yeats is thinking about love and sex and death. And, in the absence of anything else of consequence, aren’t we all?
John Kelly’s From Out of the City was shortlisted as Irish Novel of the Year at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards
He reproves the Curlew
O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
