Loud on the hissing anvils, stripped of flame.

So down the roads of Temair the Fianna came

Charioteered in thundering; bloodhounds

Sniffed, fanged the wind and then in mighty bounds

Sprang at the throat of night...

But Clarke could not sustain this early poetry for very long. His next books were uneven, tending to lapse into long ethereal movements that seemed only a parody of Yeats and his forerunners in the symbolist tradition. These years of his life were also the most frustrating for Clarke, for after a three-year English professorship at University College Dublin, he was kicked out for marrying outside the Church. Clarke's marriage went sour all too soon, and his instability--perhaps a byproduct of the tension between his staunch Catholic upbringing and what he called his "little acts of curiosity about myself and others which had been set down by Freud"--led him into exile from Ireland and in and out of institutions for the rest of his life. In 1936, after returning to Ireland, Clarke wrote a poem called "Six Sanichles," and here we can see, in the rejection of his earlier life, the renewal of his craft: TO JAMES STEPHENS Now that the iron shoe hangs by the nail Once more and nobody has cared a damn. Stick to the last of the leprechaun--I, too, Have meddled with the anvil of our trade... THE TALES OF IRELAND The thousand tales of Ireland sink. I leave Unfinished what I had begun nor count As gain the youthful frenzy of those years;

In Night and Morning (1938), Clarke turned to the raging forge of his own mind. Hot in the smithy of Irish poetry, he began a new mode heavily influenced by modernist poets. His elongated narrative lines turned to the crisp, dry style of poets like Auden--nouns are used as verbs, sentences are elipsed and inverted. In the very earliest of these poems, Clarke subtly reveals a kind of tormented agnosticism, as in this poem about the crucifixion of Christ: An open mind disturbs the soul, And in disdain I turn my back Upon the sun that makes a show Of half the world, yet still deny The pain that lives within the past, The flame sinking upon the spike, Darkness that man must dread at last.

But Clarke could not avoid the pratfall of his controversial modern poetry. His allusions became increasingly personal and localized, to the point where personal questions of doctrine are superseded by vicious attacks on papal pronouncements he read about in the Irish Times (these annotated articles read like parodies of T.S. Eliot), and the policies of the Irish Church-State.

In one poem, a bitter satire on the suppression in Irish newspapers of a Vatican study on dangers for missionaries in the remoter regions of the world, there are glimpses of an extremely clever man who must hide in too narrow topics: These scholars are modestly selective, Who say our nuns in Africa, Fearful of blackmen yelling 'Ya!', Tearing off starches, heavy drape, Can take an oral contraceptive, An hour or two before the rape, How will they know dread time or place. That leaves the soul still full of grace? Better to wear Dutch cap or wad And after their debauching, use Syringe or douche away abuse, Without a sin, trusting in God, Argument on the Seventh Hill, Clarke attacks again and again with his vile

Clarke attacks again and again with his vile pen, but the subjects of his wit seem trivial: physical punishment in the (mostly Catholic) schools of Ireland, the poor treatment of orphans, the collusion between Irish missionaries and Irish businessmen in poor countries. But what finally comes through in reading several of these poems is a deep commitment to the people of his country and a hatred of the hypocrisies of religion as it is still practiced in Ireland today. His later poetry suffers from its topicality, and it will probably not endure the tests of time and place, but somehow Clarke almost manages to convince us that universal themes of passion and sacrifice, of doubt and insincerity, can be rooted in words that live in the particular.

Toward the end of his life Clarke once again wrote a long narrative poem based on old Irish myths and legends. In "The Healing of Mis" he turns an 18th century tale of a wild woman tamed by music and sex into a more graphic love poem of seduction. But no longer content with the ancient ways. Clarke adds the woman's dreams to reveal the hot flames of her mind:

High tiers of oars from the Mediterranean were dipping whiteness In blueness. Ships swept from archipelagoes

Into surds of sound. Hundreds of buclers lightened

Through a conflagatory storm: "Stromboli!" "Stromboli!"

Look-outs were calling down from a red hail of cinders.

Here again is the same rich early poetry, not quite as exciting overall, but in its control, Clarke avoids the earlier inability to sustain such a voice.

In his memoirs, Clarke tells of a portrait of Shakespeare that had eyes like the Mona Lisa: wherever he went in the small, dark attic room where it hung, the eyes would follow him. At first he was deathly afraid of the portrait, but eventually its fearful mystery began to overcome him. It would draw him out of his bed in the middle of the night and as he walked up the stairs a fight would begin between what he called his will and his imagination. Clarke said that his will and his imagination. Clarke said that his will usually won out, that he would return to the comfort of his sheets. And this same kind of tension can be seen in his collected poems. The dark fiery imagination of his early and final poems conflict with his middle works, the secure defensive posture of his satires--an appropriate conflict for Yeats's legitimate heir.