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The poetry of John Montague expresses a profound empathy with people. He examines the themes of suffering, cruelty and disappointment, themes that he himself was familiar with in his personal life, through strikingly evocative language. Montague seeks to understand the world around him by looking at its impact on ordinary people. In poems such as ‘The Cage’ and ‘The Locket’, he examines the lives of his parents and empathises with their realities in a harsh, unforgiving world. The poem ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People’ draws again on the poet’s personal life to paint a vividly descriptive picture of ordinary people living difficult lives. In the poem ‘A Welcoming Party’ Montague shows a deep understanding of human suffering.

John Montague had an extremely difficult childhood marked by poverty and separation. Much of his poetry is an attempt to understand and come to terms with his childhood and in particular, the actions and disappointments of his parents. While there are moments of bitterness towards his parents, the poet is largely concerned with understanding how they were shaped by extreme poverty, which led to lives marked by disappointment and failure. The central figures in both ‘The Cage’ and ‘The Locket’ are victims of life and circumstance, and Montague shows an immense empathy for both parents in these poems. His treatment of his father in ‘The Cage’ evokes a man physically, psychologically and emotionally trapped in a life that he cannot escape. The name itself is a metaphor for this confinement. The poem opens with the matter of fact statement that Montague’s father was ‘the least happy man I have known’, marked by his ‘lost years’ spent working underground in the New York subway. This opening stanza paints a picture of a man who is in a private hell where subway trains ‘shudder the earth’, suggesting a horror to his daily existence.

The poet’s father is a ‘traditional Irishman’ who cannot cope with the disappointments that life has handed him and instead finds solace in the ‘brute oblivion’ of whiskey. The poet is not judgemental here but instead seems to suggest that as a ‘traditional Irishman’ his father does not know any other way to deal with being ‘released from his grille’ into his life of frustration. He has created another cage for himself in the form of alcoholism from which he cannot escape, despite presenting a facade of a man confidently moving through the neighbourhood.

The alliterative ‘m’ sounds where he ‘picked himself up, most mornings to march down the street’ suggest confidence but is actually sad because the reader knows the truth behind the facade.

The tone of the poem changes with the father’s return to Ireland where he seems freed from his prison in the open fields of Garvaghey. There is a sense of ease in the run-on lines as he walks among the ‘hawthorn on the summer / hedges’. This contrasts with his life of isolation and confinement back in New York. However, while the poet can see how being home helps his father, he understands that their relationship has been affected by the years and distance between them and they cannot ‘smile in the shared complicity of a dream’. The allusion to Odysseus and Telemachus creates a sense that the poet’s father is too late to salvage their relationship, as the son has become a man and is now moving on. Instead the father is destined to remain exiled and trapped ‘behind the bars of the small booth’. The poem ends with this sense of hopelessness evoked by the image of the scar ‘beating on his ghostly forehead’ like a death knell. The poet is not angry with his father but his image of his father is of a defeated man brought low by life.

Montague has said that his work is ‘riddled with human pain’ and this is certainly true in the poem ‘The Locket’, which deals with the poet’s troubled relationship with his mother. While this relationship is hugely complex, the poet does feel empathy for his mother’s situation. The poem feels like the poet is processing their relationship without seeking to place blame and he does so through beautiful imagery and striking language. It is a lyrical meditation on the mother/son relationship. The poem opens with a lamenting rhyme for the poet’s mother but it is not immediately celebratory. Instead, the poet states that to the ‘lady who has gone’ the poet was a ‘fertile source of guilt and pain’. This immediately suggests that the poet’s birth was a source of physical and emotional suffering. The poet paints a picture of his ‘double blunder’, not being female and being born in the breach position. This is ‘not readily forgiven’ and suggests that the poet instead of being a source of love was a source of distress to his mother. This does not immediately evoke sympathy for the poet’s mother as much as the picture of the father in ‘The Cage’ does. He is matter of fact about her dismissal of him with the line ‘so you never nursed me’ and ‘then you gave me away’, painting a picture of someone who is emotionally cold. Yet the poet attempts to seek reasons for the way she is and in doing so, paints a more complex picture of a woman who acted out of survival and self preservation. ‘When poverty comes through the door / love flies up the chimney’, was his mother’s favourite saying and this suggests that the mother could not afford financially or emotionally to love the son she knew she would have to give up because of their impoverished circumstances.

As the poet begins to address his mother as ‘you’ instead of ‘she’, the picture of her becomes more sympathetic and the reader begins to understand that her life was filled with the sorrow of a broken marriage and the disappointment of being once ‘lovely Molly, the belle of your small town’, now firmly in a ‘cocoon of pain’. The stark simile of her ‘wild, young days’ ending up ‘mournful and chill / as the constant rain’ shows how the poet understands the way in which his mother has had to become hardened to sentiment and love because of the disappointments in her life.

The poet does not shy away from stating the harsh reality of his mother’s abandonment of him and his sense of hurt is palpable especially when she attempts to do it again when he is an adult. He has courted her ‘like a young man’ and perhaps this reminds her of his father and their failed relationship so that she turns him away because she is ‘resigned to being alone’ and cannot deal with being hurt again. Yet, there is a sense that he understands her ‘harsh logic’ no matter how brutal is it for both of them.

The final stanza bears out the idea that his rejection as a baby was an act of love and as an adult was an act of self- preservation, as he discovers after his mother’s death that she carried an oval locket with a picture of him in it. There is a sense of forgiveness and empathy in this stanza for a complicated but ultimately loving woman.

Montague draws on his memories of seeing a news reel in the cinema as a teenager of the Nazi concentration camps to evoke a picture of human suffering and to question the capacity of people to hurt others in ‘A Welcoming Party’. The title alludes to a happy occasion until the German subtitle is translated as ‘How could it happen?’ bringing a more sinister element to the poem. The poet then creates a picture of horror as he describes the ‘almost shades’ of emaciated Jewish camp survivors he was faced with on his trip to the cinema. The people are described in animalistic terms, suggesting how they have been debased and degraded in the concentration camps. They are ‘nests of bodies like hatching eggs’, having lost their individuality in their suffering. They are dying in human heaps on the ground. They ‘flickered insect like’ and are described as fragmented body parts — ‘hands and legs’, a ‘mouth’ and ‘bones’. The survivors are almost sub-human. The second stanza makes clear that many of them are children who have been raised on an education of terror and fear ‘conjugating the verb ‘to die’.’ This innocence and horror is further spelled out as the survivors try to cry out and the cry is both ‘terrible’ and ‘shy’ coming from a ‘mouth like a burnt glove’. They are too weak and defeated to ask for help. The simile of ‘hands bleak as begging bowls’ hammers home the image of powerlessness and the poet acknowledges that compassion seems ‘small change’ to give the survivors.

Montague ruminates on the viewers of the newsreel being the ‘protectors’ of these walking skeletons and yet feeling that they have little to give because of the overwhelming nature of the horror in front of them. Their ‘parochial brand of innocence’ suggests that they cannot comprehend such horror outside of their own local experiences and they are essentially helpless in the face of the plight.

The poet recognises how it was easy to go home to ‘kick a football through the air’, returning to his innocent life perhaps because Northern Ireland was not directly involved in the war; they were at ‘the periphery of incident.’ Yet he learned from the newsreel the ‘meaning of total war’ and the poem is essentially a call to show compassion to ensure the ‘doves of mercy’ do not falter in the face of human suffering.

Montague’s poem ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People’ paints an affecting portrait of a community of people from Montague’s childhood that were integral to the development of his identity. The old people, like prehistoric standing stones, were an important part of the local landscape to a young Montague and his empathy for these people shines through in the poem.

The reader is first introduced to Jamie MacCrystal who sang ‘a broken song without tune, without words’. He seems contented yet the broken song suggests he may have had troubles in his life, perhaps mental health issues or loneliness. He gave the poet money on pension day and ‘fed kindly crusts to winter birds’, which suggests his own empathy with animals and people around him. The stark image of his ‘mattress and money box torn’ suggests that the poet feels his ending was undignified and unwarranted for such a kindly man.

The poet creates sympathy for characters that seem unlikeable, like Maggie Owens who is surrounded by animals and is described in such terms. She is a ‘fanged chronicler’ of the town’s gossip. Yet even though she is seen as ‘a witch’ in the eyes of the poet, he still recognises that her need to ‘deride’ was because of her loneliness and unhappiness. She is to be pitied rather than feared. Montague sees the tragedy in the situation of the Nialls who were unable to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings where ‘heather bells bloomed’ and a ‘muddy sun shone’. They are consigned to a life of shadows and darkness, living on handouts from the State. Mary Moore too is drawn as a sad figure whose ‘bag-apron and boots’ and reputation for ‘fierceness’ hides a soft nature with a love for romantic novels. There is sadness in the image of her dreaming of ‘gypsy love rites, by firelight sealed’. The poet brings these people to life. The reader sees Wild Billy Eagleson as an aggressive man swinging his ‘blackthorn’ at taunting kids and yet that image is transformed by the simple image of him being ‘forsaken’ by both creeds, not accepted by either Catholics or Protestants.

Montague shows through his creative use of language that humans are more complex and more real, and in doing this he shows his own profound empathy for people.