Deirdre wed and other poems — Key Ideas to Explore

Voices and Their Listeners

The framing device of Deirdre Wed is unusual: the poet is a listener, not a narrator. He stands on the “Hill of Time” and hears voices from “chanter’s mounds”—burial sites where song persists. Fintan is “elder than yews, the too old for tears”; Cir lies “under the pole”; Urmael speaks from the west. These are not characters in the Deirdre story but witnesses who transmit it.

Trench gives each speaker a distinct tone. Fintan’s voice is ceremonial and detailed, cataloguing the wedding preparations with a kind of grim abundance. Later speakers, to judge from the table of contents, include Cir and Urmael, though their excerpts are not provided. The effect is choral: the legend is refracted through multiple, age-separated consciousnesses. A first-time reader should attend to who is speaking at each section break, as the poem’s meaning depends on the interplay of these remote, almost geological perspectives.

The Weight of Objects and Places

Trench’s verse in Deirdre Wed lingers on material things: the “beam-work in its dome of forest trunks,” the “webs and brews and dyes and broideries” taught to Deirdre, the “slaughter blithe / Of sheep and boar, of badger and of stag.” These lists do not merely decorate; they establish a world where status and ritual are expressed through goods and labor. The kingly house is built of actual trees; the wedding is measured in butchered animals.

Place-names function similarly. “Dun Tulcha, the yews’ shores,” “Assaroe,” “Eman”—each carries a weight of association that Trench does not explain. The reader is placed inside a geography that is named but not mapped, as if the poem assumes familiarity with Irish legendary topography. This can be disorienting, but it also creates a sense of depth: the landscape is dense with prior story.

Shorter Poems: Observation and Abstraction

The collection’s second half contains lyrics on varied subjects: a silver birch in St. James’s Park, a man digging, a shell, a winter song. The Ode on a Silver Birch is the longest, and it shows Trench’s method in miniature. The tree is described with precise natural detail—“a grassy mound / Moving with tufted shadows,” “the peel’d bole of its planes”—but the poem quickly moves toward personification and metaphysical address. The birch is a “still silver Spirit,” a “Dream-daughter of the silences of turf.”

Trench asks whether the same “hymn” that shaped the tree also shaped the poet, and whether the tree’s beauty and his song “conspire.” This is not nature poetry in the descriptive mode; it is a meditation on creation and perception, with the tree as a kind of mirror. The shorter pieces, such as “The Man Digging” or “Schiehallion,” tend to anchor their abstractions in a single, concentrated image—a spade, a mountain—before expanding into reflection.

Archaic Diction and Metrical Variety

Trench’s language in both the title poem and the lyrics is deliberately old-fashioned. He uses “thou,” “thee,” “doth,” “hath,” and inversions such as “Hearest not tread of mine.” In Deirdre Wed, the syntax can be knotty: “Of sheep and goats and of the stintless food / That should be poured out to his beggary / By Connachar.” The effect is ritualistic, as if the poem were being chanted rather than spoken.

Metrically, Trench is flexible. The title poem uses a loose iambic pentameter with frequent enjambment, while the Ode on a Silver Birch shifts between shorter and longer lines, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not. The “Song for the Funeral of a Boy” and “Come, let us make love deathless” are more regular. A reader encountering these poems for the first time should be prepared for a voice that is not conversational but ceremonial, and for a syntax that rewards slow reading.

The excerpts from Deirdre Wed break off before the story reaches its crisis, and the shorter poems are represented only in part. A first reader should treat the title poem as a dramatic fragment, not a complete narrative, and listen for how each chanter’s voice differs. In the lyrics, watch for the way Trench moves from a sharp observation—a birch in a park, a shell on a beach—to a speculative, almost philosophical turn. The collection rewards patience with its textures, but it does not offer easy entry.

Reading Trench’s Deirdre, I kept thinking how those voices, singing across centuries, felt like something I’d once heard in a quieter room. There’s a particular ache in his lines, a longing that isn’t quite named. It reminded me of the gentle, persistent pulse in Love Songs — Inside the Classic, as if both books were simply overheard, not written.