Eilean Ni Chuilleanain leaves her reader with such a heavy load to ponder in her poem. For this very reason, the poem is one powerful read!

The Words Collide

The scribe objects. You can’t put it like that,

I can’t write that. But the client

is a tough small woman forty years old.

She insists. She needs her letter

to open out full of pleated revolving silk

and the soft lobes of her ears

where she flaunts those thin silver wires.

She wants to tell her dream to the only one

who will get the drift. How she saw their children lying

every one dressed out in their simplest fears. They glowed,

the shape of their sentence outlined in sea green.

Among those beloved exiles

one sighed happy, as a curtain

lightened and the grammar changed, and the wall

showed pure white in the shape of a bird’s wing.

But when she whispered it to the scribe he frowned

and she saw she had got it wrong, she had come

to a place where they all spoke the one language:

it rose up before her like a quay wall

draped in sable weeds. He said,

You can’t put those words into your letter.

It will weigh too heavy, it will cost too much,

it will break the strap of the postman’s bag,

it will crack his collarbone. The bridges

are all so bad now, with that weight to shift

he’s bound to stumble. He’ll never make it alive.

This poem is by Cork-born, Dublin-based poet and scholar Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and comes from her powerful recent collection, The Boys of Bluehill.

A Brief Analysis and Critique <https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/28/poem-of-the-week-the-words-collide-eilean-ni-chuilleanain>

"It begins with an apparently documentary scene between 'the scribe' and his female client. The title scribe suggests other times, other customs, and the definite article might signal his official standing – the scribe, not just anyone. He is immediately recognisable as the universal jobsworth, narrow of mind and blunt of speech. 'You can’t put it like that,' he says dogmatically. This tells us enough, for the moment. His client, “a tough small woman', may be one of many, but her descriptive singling out might indicate that she looks a little different from the others around her. She is clearly someone we’d call 'a survivor'; she’s 'tough', but there’s no conflict between her toughness – which a more sophisticated woman might conceal – and the residual femininity of 'those thin silver wires' in her pierced ears. Her self-presentation has an unselfconscious wholeness, and her boldness is underlined by strong verbs: 'she insists', 'she flaunts'.

"The antagonism presented in the first stanza seems metonymic. The two people might be personifications, beautifully 'real' though their representation is. The poem does not mention a specific location or period, and so a multitude of collisions plays into the interpretation: native and immigrant; state and individual; colonist and colonised; rule-keeper versus innovator; bureaucrat versus poet.

"With the woman’s explanation of what she wants – or, as the poem more significantly says, needs – we enter her mind, although she never speaks directly. And the diction flowers. The image of a letter that will 'open out full of pleated revolving silk / and the soft lobes of her ears' is lovely, mysterious and almost unguardedly sexual. Words are both art and body parts; they can re-create movement and texture. Poetry indeed. The intended message must be a love letter, so personal and so richly designed as to present the physical woman to her husband or lover: it will almost perform a surrogate sex act. Her language tells us that this unletter’d woman has a full imaginative vocabulary. Like the humble, silent folk in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, whose talents might have been those of the poet Milton, this woman – given the right opportunities – might have been the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

"We go on to discover how very close the woman is to the intended recipient of her letter, and how much metaphorical 'weight' she is placing on language. She not only wants to show her desire for the man in question, but also wants to impart a dream she has had – about their children. He is her closest reader, 'the only one who will get the drift'. It seems that the woman has left her country and her lover, perhaps some time ago. They share the same language, although he can read and she cannot. The children may be with her, or dispersed; that they’ve become objects of intense dreaming suggests their absence.

"So the purpose of the letter shifts: sexual dreaminess gives way to the nightmare image of 'how she saw their children lying / every one dressed out in their simplest fears'. The children in her dream have died violently – murdered, or lost at sea (a pun on 'drift' may have been indicated).

"'Dressed out' suggests bodies displayed, the limbs and faces expressing terrible final moments. And yet 'they glowed, / the shape of their sentence outlined in sea green.' The description reminds us of the woman’s artistry through language. This is a dream, with its own strange transformations, but again it raises the question as to whether we’re in a predominantly metaphorical or literal setting; whether the dream is fantasy, or memory, or even prophecy. The word 'sentence' adds ambiguity. Pursuing the bad dream into a sweet vision of contentment, the narrator tells us that of the 'beloved exiles' a single 'one sighed happy'.

"Here, the imagery is of a new dawn: the curtain lightens and the wall, an image that will reappear menacingly later on in the poem, shows white and wing-like, a symbol of a liberation. Again, there are linguistic implications: 'The grammar changed'. Language in The Words Collide may represent, among other dissonances, the absolute poles of an exile’s experience, assimilation and alienation. Yet there’s a strong sense that language, if it excludes the particularity of their experience, may shut out even the voices that speak it.

"The woman’s 'whispered' messages have offered the scribe an act of great trust, but he rebuffs her, and the rebuff is internalised: 'She saw she had got it wrong.' Now, the problem is not that any language is “foreign” but that it is conceived as monolithic. The scribe’s response is a wordless frown, followed by a string of objections. Anaphora adds the poundage, as he predicts a string of accumulating disasters: 'It will break the strap on the post-bag, / it will crack his collarbone.' (The poet makes sure we plainly hear that 'crack' in the internal pararhyme with 'break'.) Ultimately, the letter’s weight will kill. These may be ludicrous, cynically invented excuses, but they are presented with conviction.

"Does the scribe momentarily become human and attempt a semi-apology with the phrase 'the bridges are so bad now'? The failure of the bridges may be his fault, if attributable to the deadly power of that super-language, which earlier 'rose up … like a quay wall / draped in sable weeds'. Is the scribe right, at least metaphorically, that some words have more meaning than can be borne – women’s words, perhaps, the sensuous explicitness and luxuriance of l’écriture féminine?

"The poem’s own freight seems ultimately political. An allusive but clean-cut narrative, it may be formed out of the broken bridges of diaspora and occupation. Words collide when one group of people has the power to circumscribe the utterance of another. And yet the heavy flowerings of metaphor are not easily suppressed. The prediction about the postman – 'he’ll never make it alive' – might not merely come from a stock of false excuses. Perhaps, despite their differences, the postman, the silenced woman and the scribe are trapped together in this bleakest of situations."