Poem of the week: A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

The Guardian

28-07-2025

A Hundred Doors
God! I'm lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.
Supervised by a xenophobic
Sacristan, I plant in dusty sand
Names and faces that follow me
As far as windows in the floor:
Marble stumps aching through glass
For their pagan temple, the warm
Inwardness Praxiteles brought out.
The intelligence of stone.
The sacristan who picks my flame-
Flowers and blows them out, only minutes
Old, knows I am watching and he
Doesn't care as he shortens my lives.
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and died on 22 January this year. This short obituary conveys something of the range of his achievements, and suggests the sociability that was an additional gift and a vital dimension of the vocation as he lived it.
A Hundred Doors is the title of his 2011 collection dedicated to fellow Belfast poet, Frank Ormsby. Much of it is set in the west of Ireland townland, Carrigskeewaun, the ecological matrix of Longley's later work. In 2010, Longley estimated that a third of all his poems had been inspired by the townland and places nearby.
Longley's regular stays in Carrigskeewaun were far from retreats into isolation. The poems grown there are as sociable as pastoral in spirit. Nature is cherished, but animals sighted and wildflowers identified open imaginative doors through which human individuals step, children, grandchildren, friends, always ready in the poet's mind for the conversations, or possibilities of conversation, that crystallise into poems.
The title-poem of A Hundred Doors is exceptionally silent. On the Greek island of Paros, Panagia Ekatontapiliani (also known as the Church of the Hundred Doors) becomes in the poem an un-social space that encloses the speaker in his own solitude. The mood is abrasive from the start: 'God! I'm lighting candles again, still / The sentimental atheist.' The exclamation 'God!' here might be an ironical summoning of the Almighty as witness or the mild curse of everyday grumbling: either way, that 'still / The sentimental atheist' has a distancing, melancholy-humorous effect. It may even remind readers of the harsh honesty of the Welsh clergyman-poet RS Thomas: although Thomas wasn't an atheist he wrote plentifully of his relationship with God as an exchange of absences or disappointments.
Longley in this Church of a Hundred Doors seeks the homing ritual of 'family names' that are themselves 'a kind of prayer or poem'. We're reminded of his particular art of poetic 'listing' – often combining mourner and celebrant. In A Hundred Doors he doesn't get far with naming names. The second stanza seems to begin with the slamming of a door as he finds himself 'Supervised / by a xenophobic sacristan'. There's no evidence in the poem that the intruder is 'xenophobic'. The term may have been comic exaggeration, but it seems in earnest, an expression of anger. At this point, A Hundred Doors resembles an eloquent contribution to that old poetic genre, the complaint.
Complaints are often addressed to the person or object complained of, whether a betraying lover or an empty purse. The anger here at first is murmured by the speaker only to himself. This inoculates the tone against humour, and ensures that longing and hurt are predominant. The emotions are shared only when the poet looks through 'the windows in the floor' and sees 'marble stumps aching through glass / For their pagan temple, the warm / Inwardness Praxiteles brought out, / The intelligence of stone.' This restorative and beautifully balanced stanza refers to the remains of the Greek temple, possibly dedicated to Demeter, over which the church was built. The word 'stumps' evokes the hauntingly broken-armed statue of Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, attributed to Praxiteles and at the same time sets shivering another of those eco-connective threads in the collection, the moving handful of short war poems it contains, such as Citation, where the poet's father receives the Military Cross 'for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty'. His would be one of the names the poet wished to recall. The candles themselves become 'names and faces', following the poet as he kneels to 'the windows in the floor'.
In the last stanza anger rises to the surface, and its effect is to draw the reader in as witness. Figurative power increases: the 'flame-flowers' suggest an instant of return to the townland, and a newly threatened pastoral, as the sacristan, knowing he's watched and not caring, 'blows them out, only minutes / Old'. Perhaps the sacristan symbolises Anthropocene man, maker of war on the environment, maker of wars that shatter civilian families, babies and children. The anger and even disgust at the casual inhumanity is a reminder that Longley was always a consummate poet of witness in the Belfast of the Troubles.
The line-breaks are impeccable. In the penultimate line, the stress asserts plain fact: 'He knows I am watching.' The subsequent enjambment allows a heavy, angry stress to fall on the negative: 'and he / doesn't care as he shortens my lives.' It's impossible to stand outside this judgment, and not to understand it as a voiced demand on the conscience of contemporary hearers and readers. You can hear Longley read it here.