Wormley

But the bird called ‘Manx Shearwater’ is clearly the metaphor embodiment of flight. Not just flying but flight as in to flee . This bird, colored like a penguin, glides on wind currents - particularly on the west coast of Ireland and is seen at the Cliffs of Moher. But it also is the one Irish inhabitant that flies to America and eventually returns. Clearly, this is the flight of the poem. Famine ships left Cobh (pronounced cove) where a church on the hill adjacent that harbor was the last thing seen as the ships went seaward south then westward. That church has an immensely tall narrow steeple. It is the last thing seen before just sea. This is what the Irish immigrants retell, the eclipse of that steeple. The beginning of emptiness. The Manx flying a parallel route takes pity and appeals to God on their behalf. But this is a trip on ‘ruah’, the biblical breath of God. In the same context is the reference to that one place where God is to be found - not in whirlwinds, nor earthquakes, nor floods but in the ‘small still voice’. The small still voice is a very clear biblical term for the voice and presence of God. Many interpret it as meaning that God is not found in external things but in a small still voice - or inner voice - conscience. A deep abiding faith is the brace to the external forces. The bird messenger of God news as Holy Ghost or Noah’s bird of landfall or any and all of several bird - water stories all come together in this poem. The clues are clear. By the way, Clear is an island just before the Fastnet lighthouse - last island before the deep Atlantic thence to the Americas. White Martyrs are exiles, often religious order related, whose isolation is that not that of isolation in a deserted place but within the confines of a foreign people. So what story do they tell in that new place? What of their great fall from their native land? Nothing. Silence. The ‘great silence’ is a term for the absolutely fascinating failure of the Irish to commemorate and acknowledge the horror of the famine and the deeds which compounded it. Unlike Jews whose reaction was ‘never again’ and whose long tradition is recollection of their history as a people - good or bad - the Irish have acquired a mass amnesia. It has taken a brigade of historians to even begin to ferret the bounds of the events that ought, by way of the recent times, be fresh in the minds of all.