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Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised? All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised. (Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan) In an interview granted in 2011, on the occasion of the publication of A Hundred Doors, Michael Longley expressed the wish that his work would ultimately "look like four really long poems, a very long love poem, a very long meditation on war and death, a very long nature poem and a playful poem on the art of poetry". Using the plant image, he wanted "the strands both to entwine with each other, and every now and again to emerge as separate" (Moore). Indeed, if nature, love and life are major aspects which intertwine sometimes inextricably so, in a kind of "Noah's ark" (Brown 2002: 92), violence and war have also pervaded his poetry since he began writing. As he himself acknowledged, "the two World Wars were part of [his] family's history before they became part of [his] imaginative landscape" (Brown: 94). Longley's approach is underlined by the fact that everything is interconnected and this, to quote Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, is what characterizes "Longley's aesthetic" expressed through "his use of metaphor, his techniques of fusion, juxtaposition and parallelism, his fluid handling of time, place and identity, his self-conscious intertextuality" (Kennedy-Andrews 2000: 74-75). The collection published under the title A Hundred Doors in 2011, is composed of sixtysix poems ranging from two lines up to fortyfour. The title of the book refers to "Our Lady of a Hundred Doors" on the island of Paros, considered to be the oldest Byzantine Church in Greece, which the poet had visited during his sojourns in that part of the Aegean Sea, and which he calls his "muse" (15) in an eponymous poem contained in the collection. This paper aims at showing that while A Hundred Doors contains most of the characteristics of Longley's earlier poetry it evinces a somewhat lighter utterance. If the tone has become simpler and maybe more insouciant, there is still a deep awareness of the fragility of nature and life. My analysis will follow three main themes that in fact are interlinked and echo each other: war and more particularly the First World War, then life and its corollary death in the shape of the poet's human environment and finally the context of nature which the poet has found in the west of Ireland. I. The No Man's Land of War Michael Longley's father is a recurring figure in his poetry and many of his son's poems celebrate his courage in the trenches during the First World War. These poems are often associated with evocations of poets such as Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, the so-called "war poets", who fought in Northern France and some of whom died in action there. Moreover, the two World Wars and his reading of the war poets framed Longley's view of the "Troubles" in his native country, in so far as they have given him a perspective on the violence which more generally pervades his poetry. In 2013, Longley edited a selection of poems by Robert Graves. The phrase included in the title of this article ("and all that") partly refers to Graves's autobiography, Good-Bye to All That, published in 1929. In this work, its author relates his memories of World War I, more precisely the battle of Loos and the Battle of the Somme in which he took part as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and during which he had mistakenly been declared as killed in action. As a matter of fact, Graves, "more than was the case with the other war poets", did not make an indictment of the war but, to quote Longley, "professed an open-faced, almost naive regimental loyalty". Graves's poetry has been an important source of inspiration and a model, confining to veneration as Longley recalled in the same introduction: "Graves lays down the law majestically [...]. Yet his line is flexible, at times improvisatory, jazzy even". Michael Longley acknowledges the importance of Graves's prose work previously mentioned on his own evolution and also the fact that Graves's portrayal of "the psychic quagmire" of the trenches echoed what he remembered of his father's infrequent recollections. …

The Great War and All That in A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley