Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush WoodAuthor(s): Mark RoperSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 12, No. 4 (GEIMHREADH / WINTER2008), pp. 9-14Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660820 .

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Mark Roper

Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood

There is a folk saying recorded in Mark Cocker s Birds Britannica that "Only the

righteous see the kingfisher." As both a birder and a poet, I treasure Cocker's

book?an encyclopedic volume that weaves together both natural history and

the human associations of some three-hundred-and-fifty species?and I par

ticularly treasure this proverb. It is easy to speculate as to why this beautiful say

ing would have come into existence. The kingfisher, with its electric blue back

and head and its coppery-red breast, is the most brightly colored of all birds in

these islands. It is rarely seen, and when it is spotted, usually glimpsed only very

briefly. The most common sighting would be of a small, vivid glint of blue light whizzing low across a lake or river. By the time you can say "Look! Kingfisher!" to your companion, or even to yourself, it will be gone. Its color and brevity always leave a deep impression, a sense of great luck, almost of revelation.

My partner Jane and I moved to Ireland in 1980, when we were in our late twenties. We had been living in Oxford, taken there by the M.Phil. I pursued at

Pembroke College. Oxford is a wonderful city in many ways, but I was keen on birds and wildflowers; Jane loved to walk and liked to paint landscapes. As time went by Jane and I hankered increasingly to live in the countryside, without ever

being able to work out exactly how to do so. Then, when good friends, a couple who lived in Dublin, suggested the four of us might buy a cottage in rural Ire land and move in together, we agreed without a second thought.

In those days, it was still possible to buy an Irish cottage for very little. Our friends found a suitable cottage in the small village of Owning, in South Kilken

ny, near to the borders of Counties Waterford and Tipperary. We came over and lived with them happily for a couple of years before we bought a small cottage of our own some seven miles away, in a townland called Tobernabrone. We have

lived there ever since, nearly half our lives now.

My father had died in 1978, too young; he was only fifty-nine. The follow

ing year, I was offered the chance to do a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexi

co, on a particular aspect of the work of D. H. Lawrence, whom I had been

studying at Oxford. It was an offer I was keen to accept, but when I raised the

prospect with my mother, she asked me directly not to go: she felt she still

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 12:4 (WINTER / GEIMHREADH, 2008), 9-I4




needed my support. My mother was the kind of woman who never talked open

ly about her feelings, so I could well imagine the emotional wrench, the psychic cost, she paid to make such a request. I also knew it meant that she really did

need my support. I felt I had no right to move so far away from her.

But my mother was happy enough about our move to Ireland a year later.

Time had passed; Ireland was closer; and she shared my love of the countryside and the open air, which, indeed, I had inherited from her. She had a strong need

to be outside, in the fresh air, using her body. She loved to walk, to swim, to play tennis, to row. It wasn't a case of her feeling she ought to take exercise. The need

ran much deeper: it was a fundamental part of her nature, something indepen dent, solitary, even wild in her, something that had to go its own way, outside.

Her need to be outside increased after the death of my father. No doubt it

helped her to cope with her grief. Tobernabrone consists of a few dwellings scattered among farmland. The

name, in Irish, means "Well of the Quern." The well is found in the farmer's field

next to us, a small spring rising through the hole in the center of a quern stone

or millstone. Its water was once held to cure diseases of the eye. There are many

springs in the area, and when we first moved here, a lot of the fields were boggy. Herons haunted them, so many that that we called our new home Heron Cot

tage. Many of these fields have been drained now, but there is still always at least

one heron around, somewhere nearby. Other birds, such as snipe, have virtual

ly disappeared. It is years since we heard a cuckoo.

My mother often came over from England to visit us, until old age limited

her mobility. She explored the area thoroughly, on foot and by bicycle. If we were

out at work, she would often walk through the wood opposite our house, Gortrush Wood. It was a walk Jane and I had grown fond of, leading through a

conifer wood, at that time about forty years old. The trees were spread well apart, and there was room for other kinds of trees to grow in between them: oak, ash,

beech, with an understory of rhododendron, elder, hazel.

One day when we got back from work my mother told us, excitedly, that she

had seen a kingfisher on her walk, on a small pool at the edge of the wood. This

pool had no name: it was actually more a long shallow puddle, where rainwa

ter would collect in a hollow between trees. It was murky, and would all but dry out in the summer. It was a long way from any reasonably sized stream. It had

nothing in the way of a bank. It surely could not have contained any fish. I was

quite convinced that she must have been mistaken, and that my mother could

n't possibly have seen a kingfisher there. Over the years that followed, I would

tease her about this, linking it to her general vagueness about the animal king dom. This was a woman, after all, who had only just discovered that elephants didn't eat through their trunks. It became a shared joke between two people

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who didn't find it easy to express their feelings. We'd send each other cards with

kingfishers on them, cuttings from newspapers about the bird. One of us would

pretend suddenly to see the bird, in the most unlikely setting. It was a shared

joke, but it also became a kind of shared tenderness.

In this way, slowly, a kingfisher began to come alive, to appear between us.

At the first poetry reading of mine that my mother was able to attend, at Lon

don's South Bank Centre in 1991,1 saw that she was wearing a medallion with a

kingfisher on it. It was quite a large medallion, made of pewter, on a long metal

chain?ostentatious in its way, and not the sort of thing she wore normally at

all. I appreciated what must have gone into the buying and the wearing of this

medallion. She always wore it whenever she came to readings of mine thereafter, in that way furthering the link between our mutual, mythical kingfisher and

poetry.

A few years after her claimed sighting, Gortrush Wood was cut and replant ed in the modern way, the new young conifers crowded close to each other. Now

that they have grown a bit, it's become impossible to walk there. But, for a few

years before the new trees grew, I continued to do so. One day, I realized that

every time I approached the pool, I was looking for the kingfisher. I was quite sure my mother hadn't seen one?sure that in fact she could not have seen a

kingfisher there?but all the same I was looking for and expecting to see one.

In this way, too, the bird had come alive.

At some point, the line "I've never seen the kingfisher" came into my head.

Poems often start this way for me, a line cropping up, a line with some kind of

ring to it, around which other lines might eventually start to cohere. I didn't

know what to do with this line, but it was there, and one day I discovered that

the word "kingfisher" is linked to the word "halcyon." I knew the phrase "hal

cyon days," days of idyllic happiness or prosperity: my dictionary told me that

"halcyon" came from the Greek word for kingfisher, alkuon or halcuon, from hals meaning sea, and kuon meaning conceiving. I consulted my Brewers Dic

tionary of Phrase and Fable, where I found kuon translated as "to brood on."

Brewer's added, "The ancient Sicilians believed that the kingfisher laid its eggs, and incubated them for fourteen days on the surface of the sea, during which

period, before the winter solstice, the waves were always unruffled."

My father had died some twenty years earlier, and my mother had

mourned him deeply. Suddenly I began to see a connection between the word

"halcyon" and her situation. I saw that "to brood on" could mean both to

breed, to conceive, but also to think deeply about something, often in a melan

choly way. I went on to look up the word in Robert Graves's The Greek Myths, but could not find it in the index. Eventually it occurred to me to look it up under A, where I found Alcyone (underneath Alcyoneus, meaning "mighty

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ass," which I took as a deserved rebuke for my slowness). Graves gives a fuller

version of the story:

Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, and Aegiale. She

married Ceyx of Trachis, son of the Morning Star, and they were so happy in

each other's company that she daringly called herself Hera, and him Zeus. This

naturally vexed the Olympian Zeus and Hera, who let a thunderstorm break over

the ship in which Ceyx was sailing to consult an oracle, and drowned him. His

ghost appeared to Alcyone who, greatly against her will, had stayed behind in

Trachis, whereupon distraught with grief, she leapt into the sea. Some pitying

god transformed them both into kingfishers.

Now, every winter, the hen-kingfisher carries her dead mate with great wail

ing to his burial and then, building a closely compacted nest from the thorns of the sea-needle, launches it on the sea, lays her eggs in it, and hatches out her

chicks. She does all this in the Halcyon Days?the seven which precede the win

ter solstice, and the seven which succeed it?while Aeolus forbids his winds to

sweep across the waters.

I had my poem now, about my mother, a woman who loved the sea, whose

need to swim in it had been heightened by the loss of her husband, a loss she

brooded on. She was still deeply united with him. In another sense of the word

"brood," I had been part, along with my sisters, of her brood. This was the poem:

HALCYON

I've never seen the kingfisher

you claim to have witnessed

on the stand of brackish water

at the edge of our wood.

Years I've been looking.

Not a sign. Wrong habitat

too: no bank for nesting,

indeed no fish. Face it

there was no bird yet

each time I pass I peer into

that gloom and each time

this comes to mind:

a flash of chestnutsapphire.

A small flame brooding on ooze.

Your words made light. Your bright idea. You diving

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through the long years of grief to surface here,

halcyon, incorruptible.

And not one bird but a pair.

My mother died in the autumn of 2007. Over a period of some ten years, she

had been laid low by diabetes and back troubles, and had suffered a series of

small strokes. She had never drunk or smoked, and with all her walking, swim

ming, and other exercise she might have hoped for a longer life and a less pro tracted, less painful ending. She found it very hard indeed to come to terms with

the loss of mobility, and was severely depressed for a number of years. Her soli

tary walks and swims had been her lifeline. There were times when she told me

she just wanted to be dead, to get it all over with. In the end she suffered sever

al falls, and became unable to look after herself. For the last few years of her life

my two sisters and I were able to employ a full-time carer to look after her in her

house, to stave off having to send her to a nursing home. I know that in those

last years of her long decline, she would have been glad to be able to remain at

home?but also that she would have found the constant company difficult to

endure. She would have longed to get out, by herself, for a good walk.

Just before she died, I had seen a deer vanishing into another wood, Murty Walsh's wood, nearer to our house. This small wood faces Gortrush Wood over

a large field. It is a wood of alder and willow, on wet ground. Many of the trees

are thickly coated with lichen and moss, and quite a few are fallen. It's the last

patch of wood left now along this particular stretch of road and, as such, it must

be something of a refuge, a way station, for wild creatures. The deer had most

likely escaped from Kidalton, the large agricultural college some two miles

away, where they keep a deer farm?but it was still a special experience to wit ness it crashing into the trees.

I hadn't seen it again, but early on this year I was walking past the wood, and I realized that I was straining to see the deer, in just the same way that I had

strained for so long to see the kingfisher that my mother couldn't have seen, in Gortrush Wood. I grinned, thinking that now I would have to repeat this new

pattern, looking for the deer every time I passed this spot. At that exact moment, from the edge of the wood, where a small stream runs

under the road, a kingfisher flashed up, swerved left along the road, then veered

right, out across the field, heading toward Gortrush Wood. It was an extraordinary instant, an extraordinary coincidence. The bird

appeared exactly when I had been thinking about my mother and her kingfish er. And, of course, that made it an encounter with her, with her spirit. Then I

realized that she had been right all along. Here was the proof of her claim, a

kingfisher in nearly the same spot. I felt a huge need to tell her, to share the news,

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and then I remembered that she was dead. I stood in the middle of the road and

told her anyway. Since then, I have read that kingfishers roam widely in winter. They can be

found by the sea, and they can be found far away from water, inland. Maybe the

bird I saw lives around here; maybe it was a visitor. I do not know. But the say

ing soon came back to my mind: "Only the righteous see the kingfisher." After unrighteously denying my mother's sighting, I had been given a sec

ond chance. Why I was so sure she hadn't seen one, I don't know. Now I have

learned to try to check my judgement. And I think I understand more deeply now that what we might actually witness is only a tiny fraction of what there is.

I see more deeply how our thinking is formed, has always been formed, by the

world around us. So much passed between my mother and me through the

image of that bird. I wear the punishment for my unrighteousness lightly: con

demned, whenever I pass that wood, to be on the lookout for both deer and

kingfisher; condemned to try to be open to every possibility.

TOBERNABRONE, COUNTY KILKENNY

[email protected]

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Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood