Meet The Writer I

Winter 2004 Magazine
MEET THE WRITER

Poet Paula Meehan takes a second look at her poem,
‘Would you jump into my grave as quick?’

I loved my Granny – I spent much of my childhood basking in her unconditional love. She was a strong, humble, generous, kind, ordinary Dubliner. She had a wicked tongue – as salty as a sailor’s one minute, murmuring the Latin responses of the Mass the next. She believed hot toddies the cure for many childhood illnesses: teething, sleeplessness, stuck-indoors-because-of-the-rain-blues. My mother swore that I was cranky coming home from weekends and school holidays in my Granny’s house because I was hungover.

The first trace I have of ‘Would you jump into my grave as quick?’ is a Microsoft Word file that was created on 8th of January 1992. Before it got up onto the screen of my Apple Mac computer no doubt the poem existed in a notebook, or was scrawled on the back of a cigarette packet, or even, given that it’s only 8 lines a beermat, paper napkin, scrap of paper. But that stuff is up in the attic, or in a box in the fuel shed composting away. For it is jottings and notes and half understood fragments of lines and notions and nonsense and snatches from the spoken words of the living and the dead (my Granny in this case), that are the compost out of which the poem grows to a state where it can be finished or abandoned or at least published.

‘Would you jump?’ must be set around an occasion of jealousy, though I have no memory of any actual occasion. My partner, when I ask him can he remember an incident or drama which would have invoked the poem, says he thinks it ‘may’ reflect something that ‘might’ have happened in a Galway bar. And then he laughs. When I came to make the poem, Dublin must have seemed a stronger location. Did I want to protect someone’s identity? – a good enough reason for changing the location of a poem; or did I want to strengthen the tone of my Granny’s vernacular by tying it to Dublin?

Looking at the rhyme scheme I know that at least a portion of my head was occupied with swinging the lines to the rhyme as I made the poem – quick/took, woman/come on, drink/think, tonight/feet. The magic part of a poem is often that very part that can’t be paraphrased, analysed, compared and contrasted, précis-ed or synopsised. The energy of the poem is generated between the spin of the lines, the heft of the words, the flow of the images, the pulse or throb of the rhythm. And the energy is intrinsic to the meaning.

I believe you can read what you like into a poem – within reason. It is yourself you often find reflected in a poem, but if you are to respect the poet you must test your perceptions and your reading against the evidence of the text. I’ve come across a number of interpretations of ‘Would you jump?’ since it was put on the Leaving Certificate curriculum. One textbook remarks that there is an explicit threat of violence in the poem, that the speaker is threatening to kill the redlipped woman who has her eye on the speaker’s man. Is this a misreading?

One student came up to me recently and said the poem was about the suicide threat of the speaker, that the poem says, “If you take this man I will kill myself.” Is this a true reading? I think there is compassion for the redlipped woman in the poem – that if she covets the man who looks so alluring and attractive in the bar through the fog of alcohol, then she must take on the sometimes difficult and complicated burden that love is. Love might kill her, just as the loss of it might kill the speaker. Death is the end of desire, sooner or later.

I may not be the most reliable interpreter of the poem. What I want it to mean and what it actually means may be poles apart. I pick it up like a mirror and look into it like any other reader now, more than ten years after it was written. Your guess is as good as mine. My attention goes to the rhyming of ‘tonight’ with ‘feet’. I don’t particularly like it as a rhyme. I suspect I could have done better. But I lifted my hand and let it stand.

Paula Meehan Dublin October 30th 2003

Would you Jump into My Grave as Quick?

Would you jump into my grave as quick?
my granny would ask when one of us took
her chair by the fire. You woman,
done up to the nines, red lips as a come on,
your breath reeking of drink
and your black eye on my man tonight
in a Dublin bar, think
first of the steep drop, the six dark feet

Paula Meehan’s poem ‘Would you jump into my grave as quick?’ is from the list of prescribed poems for examination in 2004. Paula’s latest collection is Dharmakaya (2000), published by Carcanet. For more information on Paula Meehan, visit the Carcanet website, www.carcanet.co.uk.