‘The Flight of One Small Soul has Tipped the Scale’: Parental Grief in Modern and Contemporary Irish Poetry of Child Death

This essay explores how, in Irish poetry of parental bereavement, child death variously is confronted, conceded, recalibrated and countervailed – often all within the same poem. Probing the paradoxes inherent in faith and art when brought to bear on this devastating life circumstance, modern and contemporary Irish poetry interrogates the role of both otherworld-belief and of the formally achieved poem in reshaping the meaning of such loss. Irish poetry intimates that bereaved parents’ complex and culturally situated sense of alienation is an experience which – once adequately acknowledged – can be combined with hope. Thus, drawing upon a wide range of Irish poems, the essay argues that this poetry dynamically witnesses both to the overwhelming void of meaning which follows upon child death, and to the possibility (however tentatively claimable) of such loss being redeemed. Highlighting the fact that for bereaved parents, acute consciousness of the child’s present absence often leads towards openness to the child’s absent presence, Irish poetry shows that a parent’s expression of unanswerable longing for their missing child can validly coincide with their affirmation of continuing bonds with the deceased. In this light, the essay attends to the recuperative role of surrealistic imagination in Irish poetry of parental bereavement, further exploring how this poetry recognises both division and vital relationship between bereaved parents and their wider community.