"Still persuade us to rejoice"
During this final phase of the VIFF, I had the good fortune to see Alan Gilsenan's The Yellow Bittern (2009), an Irish film about the life and times of Liam Clancy. Liam was the last survivor of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, an Irish folksinging group that was an international sensation in the late sixties.
The youngest Clancy, who narrated the film, lived just long enough to see it finished. A performing balladeer and a philosopher-poet in the Irish tradition, he was a lovely presence on screen. The director interwove Liam's narration with historic film and stills that gave context and wholeness to the heyday of the Clancy Brothers.
With one anecdote, Liam captured the flavour of his rural Irish childhood with "one foot in the Middle Ages." Too nervous for many days to perform the daily poetry lines of memory work in class, he finally overcame his stage fright and delivered a heartfelt rendition of Tennyson's Ulysses that brought tears to his teacher's eyes.
Keeping the boy back after class, Brother Rossiter asked him what he planned to do with his life. Young Liam said his mother wanted him to be a priest and his father thought he should be an insurance salesman. "My boy, you should be on the stage," the teacher said.
Some sixty years later, Liam Clancy once more evoked audience emotion by sonorously quoting Tennyson's memorable final lines, ending "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."
I recalled my long-forgotten teenage wall, with its hand-lettered lines from the same poem, which seemed to beckon me towards my own life: "There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail."
From the other end of his life, Liam Clancy looked back on the culture of the twentieth century. He spoke of World War II in which his older brothers served.
And he spoke of the racism that stopped both blacks and whites from attending a series of civil rights benefits the Clancys launched on the eastern seaboard of the US. Few Blacks would go to see Whitey, and many whites, Irish-Americans included, refused to attend performances of "Nigger-lovers," he said.
"When will they every learn?" Liam sang the immortal lines of Pete Seeger, and then adapted them, as folksingers will, "When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?"
Alan Gilsenan was in the room to talk about the making of the film and answer questions. He spoke about sensing the presence of the spirits of Liam's dead brothers and Tommy Makem each time the film was screened. This occasion was particularly poignant, as it was the first showing since Liam's death. Of course his spirit was evoked.
Saying that he himself had a streak of the Irish melancholy, Gilsenan joked that Liam was looking down saying "Never mind the sentimental nonsense, just get on with it."
But I could relate. From my Celtic or Anglo-Saxon or Viking forbears, I too have inherited a melancholic tendency, accentuated perhaps by the early and constant exposure to the tragic ballads that were so prominent in the sixties music, soul sustenance of my youth.
Most likely it was this streak in my character that got me thinking as I left the theatre with a friend of similar age. Our generation was educated in the rhymed and metred poetry of the eras that preceded ours. We were followers of the ballads of the sixties, both traditional and composed.
When we are gone, will anyone still remember and love the poetic exhortation made by W.H. Auden as he addressed the soul of his departed fellow poet W. B. Yeats?
"With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice."