Michael Longley: Series / Collections / Collected Works

Series / Collections / Collected Works

A Hundred Doors is an elegiac collection in which Longley reflects on advancing age, the death of friends and the youngest and oldest members of his family. Some poems can be read as valedictory (e.g. ‘The New Winds’, 3). The themes of animals, birds, the environment and the specifics of place (especially Carrigskeewaun) serve to domesticate the contexts in which the poet explores emotion and sensibility, but invocation of  classical figures and myths as activators and carriers of the metaphors that he evokes is still part of his poetics. The ways in which he draws these links are sometimes more pliable than in his previous work, more elusive and fleeting and less embedded in the formal structure of the poem.

There are 66 poems in this collection, of which 9 have clear classical connections.

The collection also contains a number of poems that do not have clear classical allusions but which address directly themes that elsewhere in Longley’s work are introduced and explored through reworking of episodes from Homer and other classical texts (see below for list of those  HD poems and brief comments).

In HD there is one extended treatment of an episode in classical myth, Cygnus, in which there is also close poetic allusion to Yeats. The title poem ‘A Hundred Doors’ has deeply embedded allusions to the sculptor as agent that bring Longley into dialogue with Yeats and Kavanagh and which also overturn assumptions about how an ancient sculptor’s art is mediated into the present. So it seems that in this collection Longley is turning to classical referents in order to create multi-directional conversations.   Well-known figures from antiquity are used in ‘Old Soldiers’ to probe the fears of old age that Longley and his father share.  Other poems have smaller emblematic allusions. Longley follows the practice of his previous work in ensuring that allusions to ancient mythology, figures and texts are largely self-explanatory; the exceptions are in the more complex poem ‘A Hundred Doors’ and ‘Cygnus’,  which can be read on a number of different planes.

This collection includes several poems that do not overtly use classical material but which resonate with themes that in Longley’s poetry as a whole are frequently addressed with or through classical allusion:

In ‘Bee Orchard’ (HD, 16), the image of the ‘Byzantine path’ is given an initial capital letter, visually communicating that the allusion is not just to the metaphorical use of the term but also located historically and spatially.

In HD there are also a number of poems that connect directly with the theme of World War W1 that pervades Longley’s work. Some of these leap about temporally and spatially. For example ‘A Gust) (HD, 33) uses Longley’s visit to the Edward Thomas field note-book archive in the New York Public Library to link the death  of Pope John Paul and Longley’s celebration of the 70^th birthday of his friend Eddie Linden (‘a priest of the muses too’). Other poems in HD with WW1 contexts or allusions are ‘Gunner Longley’ (36), ‘Bumf’ (37),  ‘Citations’ (38) and its bitterly satirical epilogue ‘High Wood’ (38), and ‘Into Battle’ (39), but all of these address WW1 directly without using classical texts to distance or explore Longley’s response.