A Hundred Doors: Enter Past, Present, Future

Although the collection examines several themes true to Longley’s ouvre, including love, war, friendship, nature, and death, Longley creates fluidity between youthful celebration and elegy that resonates throughout the book. Longley expresses thoughts of his own mortality referencing “My final resting place at Dooaghtry” in “The New Window” and “I have imagined my ideal death in Charlie Gaffney’s/Pub in Louisburgh” in “The Lifeboat”. In spite of (or better yet, in simultaneous conjunction to) Longley’s elegiac voice, there echoes the voice of a grandfather eager to introduce his grandchildren to the natural world.

Within A Hundred Doors, Longley crafts six poems, composed for each of his six grandchildren. In “The Leveret”, dedicated to his grandson Benjamin, Longley chronicles Benjamin’s first night in Carrigskeewaun, Longley’s longtime summer home and inspiration for many of his poems. In this poem, a powerfully vulnerable voice emerges connecting grandfather and child. Longley speaks directly to his grandson:

Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the sea,
Little hoplite. Have you been missing it?
I’ll park your chariot by the otters' rock
And carry you over seaweed to the sea.

Despite this intensely personal exchange with his grandson, Longley seamlessly references his classical roots, transforming the boy into a “hoplite” and his stroller a chariot. As a result, Longley not only maintains a thread between this poem and the collection as a whole, but his allusion further strengthens the theme of mortality and transience of time expressed throughout the work.

Illustration by Dominic Mylroie. dominicmylroie.blogspot.com

Not only does Longley illuminate the youth within his own family, he is keen to observe the natural youth around him in the otter cubs, hatchlings, and the leveret. While sharing this natural celebration of new life with his infant grandchild, Longley does not forget mortality lurking in the guise of a hungry stoat or merlin. Immediately after, Longley coos to his grandson, “But don’t be afraid. The leveret breakfasts under the fuscia” as if to postpone nature’s impending order, at least until after breakfast.

Despite the many doors in Longley’s collection, the door to the future, through the lens of his grandchildren is a prevailing motif. Ross Moore of Literary Belfast appropriately comments, "Michael Longley expertly explores the passing of a generation in his latest collection”; however A Hundred Doors is more than the mourning of a past generation, but rather it is proof that poetry can create a liminal space where past, present, and future can dwell simultaneously. Through the lens of the oldest Byzantine church in Greece, Our Lady of a Hundred Doors (namesake of his title poem) Longley conveys the ephemerality of life and thus creates an intensely personal, yet simultaneously universal, collection.  

Michael Longley’s A Hundred Doors is now available in print and as e-book at http://wfupress.wfu.edu/ebooks.php

 Posted by Nicole