The Year

by Lord Dunsany

Originally published in 1944, "The Year" is an epic poem about Ireland and World War II, filled with the magical imagery that makes Lord Dunsany's work so memorable.

Genres: Poetry

187 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth baron of Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, notable for his work in fantasy published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes hundreds of short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays. Born to one of the oldest titles in the Irish peerage, he lived much of his life at perhaps Ireland's longest-inhabited home, Dunsany Castle near Tara, received an honourary doctorate from Trinity College, and died in Dublin.

Reviews

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Year, published in 1946, following the end of World War II, is Lord Dunsany's sixth of eight volumes of poetry and his second long narrative poem. A Journey, published two years earlier, concerns Dunsany travelling to Greece by a circuitous route around Africa to his appointment as Byron Chair of English Literature at Athens University—and his subsequent flight from Greece, just ahead of the invading German army, retracing his route clockwise around Africa. A Journey and The Year make a kind of duology, where The Year narrates a cycle through time rather than space.

The Year covers 366 days, from June 14, 1944 to June 14, 1945, with one or several verses for every day. Dunsany never specifies the precise location, but presumably he is back on his estate in Ireland. He writes lyrically about the natural environment, the fields, the gardens, the woods, and the hills. The narrative straddles Victory in Europe Day, which came on May 8, 1945.

In A Journey Dunsany tells us he is deliberately writing in the style of Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; in The Year he says he is following the style of Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene. These two long narrative poems by Dunsany are written entirely with these Spenserian stanzas, eight lines of iambic pentameter and a ninth line of iambic hexameter, with the ABABBCBCC rhyming pattern. The Year has 701 stanzas, more than twice as long as A Journey. I find it fascinating that Dunsany chose to use the bygone form of these earlier fantasy narrative poems. Neither A Journey nor The Year is fantasy—though elfland and faery are not far from the surface of both.

Nevertheless, the largest part of The Year is Dunsany's vivid depiction of the evolution of the natural world through the seasons, with accounts of flower, hills, streams, birds, and so on. Dunsany's writing is usually beautiful, and The Year is no exception. Frequently Dunsany personifies natural features, a technique that he has used throughout his writing career, from The Gods of Pegāna onwards. Here are his gnomes, for example:

Last night a gray mist risen from a stream
Floated across the fields, when cocks of hay
Were like large seated gnomes, and still a gleam
Lingered on earth from the departed day.
And owls began to mutter, and a ray
Shone from a young moon faintly, and a sigh
Of Autumn reached us though from far away,
A hint, a threat, a whispered prophecy,
That in a little while the Summer flowers would die.
(June 27)

Dunsany seems to be particularly inspired in this manner by the Autumn scenery. Here are two further examples of Dunsany's personifications in Autumn, from the many from which I could have selected:

Where may be seen a people old and strange,
That half-way between beasts and flowers seem:
All down the pathways of the woods they range
And in the hollows of large trunks they teem,
Mysterious folk, the people of a dream,
For so the toadstools look with their sly faces
Hidden beneath huge hats as though a beam
Of moonlight might be deadly to those races
That haunt decaying stumps and revel in dank places.
(September 25)

Far from the beeches on a level lawn
A sheet of leaves is lying like the dress
Of some bright spirit that had danced till dawn
With the West wind, until in weariness
The wind had fallen, still in his caress
That gleaming robe; but the bright spirit far
Is gone upon her way with streaming tress
Beyond the hills to whisper to a star
(Forgetting that brief dance) where mighty spirits are.
(November 5)

Sometimes the only way Dunsany can express his wonder at the natural world is through the eternal ways of the elves and the fairies, and he then takes flight directly into elfland. For Dunsany elfland is the eternal realm:

Pale blue I saw some distant hills to-day
Look at our fields as from another land.
Those pale-blue distant hills, what share have they
In planning things we thought that we had planned?
Always beyond the fields we understand
There loomed that influence, that elfin blue,
Luring us as though earth were but some strand
Of some immeasurable sea they knew,
Whose dreams we too should dream, whose waters travel through.
(July 16)

The phrase "beyond the fields we understand" recalls "beyond the fields we know" from Dunsany's earlier fantasy. The elf-king in the following stanza certainly reminds us of the King of Elfland and his runes from The King of Elfland's Daughter:

Like palaces of gold the chestnuts stand,
Or many heavens for as many creeds,
Built not far hence, but on solid land;
And every day is seen, by him who heeds,
A new adornment upon shrubs and weeds,
As though some traffic were between lands known
And legendary vales in faery meads
Where an elf-king upon a magic throne
Makes golden leaves with runes written by him alone.
(October 12)

The elves and fairies are one side of The Year. On the other side, the war is nearing a climax. Dunsany's references to the war are sad rather than triumphant. He feels the loss, and he sees Liberty returning to a scarred landscape. A special aspect of Dunsany's situation is that his estate is in Ireland, and Ireland is neutral in the war. Dunsany had served as an officer in the British army in the Boer War and World War I and was in the Home Guard in England early in World War II. Dunsany was certainly not neutral, and here and there in The Year he reacts with sarcasm to Ireland's neutrality.

However, Dunsany's references to the war, and specifically Ireland's neutrality, do not dominate the book. The Year is a story of the natural world, as it exists in Dunsany's imagination, teetering on the edge of elfland, and sometimes slipping over, "beyond the fields we know." Even in his late career, far from the period of his early fantasy short stories and with important mundane issues demanding his attention, elfland is not far from Dunsany's mind. The magic is still there.