The Five Quintets

Micheal O'Siadhail

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781481307116
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity—people and movements—in poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century.

Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy. Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso ), O'Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline—the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology. Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus ("saikus"), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms.

The Five Quintets captivates even as it instructs, exploring the ever-changing flow of ideas and the individuals whose contributions elicited change and reflected their times. The artists, economists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers O'Siadhail features lived complex lives, often full of contradictions. Others, though deeply rooted in their context, transcended their time and place and pointed beyond themselves—even to us and to a time after modernity's reign.

The ancient Horace commended literature that delivered "profit with delight." In The Five Quintets, Micheal O'Siadhail has done just that: he delights us in the present with his artistry, even as he reveals hidden treasures of our past and compels us toward the future.

1

Making

Canto 1

Transitions

(i)

Migrant sandpiper,

Both forager and winger;

Wader in between.

Cervantes, I still see you plagued with debt

And roaming Spain half-beggared by its king;

The Jews now banished, Moors are under threat,

Our Europe’s sovereigns bent on conquering.

You mock all hankering for a courtly love,

The lost and gone of tournament and lance;

Yet in your Rabelais-like push and shove

You hatch Erasmus dreams of tolerance

Between the Middles Ages and your tour

Through plots and greeds of bungling humankind.

In all the giants and windmills you must fight

For twenty years of silence you endure,

Beside flatfooted Sancho’s earthbound mind

Are you still Desiderius’s knight?

Wintering southward,

Wanting the best of both worlds;

Seasoned voyager.

Though injured in Lepanto’s hands-on fight,

Five years I languish in Algiers until

Redeemed; a score then taxman when, despite

Myself, my failures too will grind my mill.

I know the pimps and backstreets of Seville,

The canons, barbers, ladies of the night

Whose stories too I ink out with my quill

When in the end my life and work unite.

Careers that flop or somehow don’t take flight

And each false hope I never could fulfil;

As truth and fiction blend in all I write,

Like interplays of life with God’s own will,

In all the wrongs my errant Don would right,

Forgotten dreams of justice echo still.

Low over water,

Burrowing deep in the sand;

Busy dark-tipped beak.

My namesake, I admire your grit and pluck

When under threat of death you’ll hold your nerve—

How through the years of exile and ill luck,

Your honesty will neither skew nor swerve.

I marvel at such long-term cussedness,

Although you work in rival Vega’s shade,

You trust a story’s open-endedness

And history’s long-hidden accolade.

I know some lives unfold by fluke and chance—

Yet decades hoarding grain and ballasting

Your youth’s mistake and only to finance

Spain’s Philip’s overdrawn warmongering—

How could you house such thoughts of tolerance

And lose your years in propping such a king?

Remembered summer

Traversing Eurasia;

Long-distance flier.

Though sober now, I know I was obsessed

And quit the coop that I both craved and fled

To hover near an era’s watershed;

Look not for this year’s birds in last year’s nest.

Among my vagrants and my dispossessed

All arguments too easily gainsaid,

So I can cure you I amuse instead—

The truest words are spoken still in jest.

My humanist compassion was hard won

In dogged years of hurt I overwrite;

Quixote and Quixana die as one

Beside his weeping squire and acolyte.

Of course you hear what smarts behind the fun;

Cervantes too was once that saddened knight.

(ii)

Array of coverts,

Spangling flared out green-blue eyes;

A peacock’s fantail.

Are you that wanton Jack or Doctor Donne

Or both, becoming every part you play,

A lover chiding the unruly sunne

Or preacher warning all who disobey?

Are you the Catholic boy, your mother’s son

Whose people still would rather die than stray,

Or Protestant believing all are one,

That all may heare, Lord heare us, when wee pray?

The new philosopher whose sun must stay

And bid the passive earth about it runne,

Or wooer whose sun’s motions trace a day

To thwart lovemakings only just begun?

In showy puns, in each fantailed conceit,

Your actor’s role and you conspire to meet.

Cries for attention,

Black-blue flapping and gliding;

A peafowl in flight.

Why can’t you fathom all my reasons why?

My tortured brother gave his chaplain’s name,

Then ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Making
• 2 Dealing
• 3 Steering
• 4 Finding
• 5 Meaning