‘Snow reluctant to melt’: the alchemy of the imagination in Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen
Industry’.
Creating gold from dust has always been an alchemist’s art, a transformation which Carl Jung called
the liberation of spirit from ‘the darkness of matter’. Confinement, freedom - these are the polarities
of both the emotional and political worlds we inhabit, shaping the revolutions and reversals which
imagination can discover out of its own strange power. Even Time can be made to stand still - not
static, but celebrating its own continuous present, where snow never melts, but the sun can shine. In
an attic ‘under the skylight’, it is possible to ‘make love on a bleach green, the whole meadow/Draped
with material turning white in the sun’. It is, the lover says, ‘As though snow reluctant to melt were
our attire’. Desire and possibility meet in the pristine world of Michael Longley’s poem ‘The Linen
Industry’, where the reality of the meadow is vivid, emphatically ‘whole’. The voice too is assured.
But the scene turns on the words ‘as though’: there is no meadow, and there is no snow. The lovers
live in the ‘grubby town’, where the faceless linen industry, acting as oppressor with its ‘big
machines’, has just been relegated in language to the realm of the prosaic. In its place, as Cselaw
Milosz writes in his poem ‘Ars Poetica’, ‘a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in
us/...as if a tiger had sprung out/and stood in the light, lashing his tail.’
The image of snow might alert us to the fact that the lyrical attic world and its meadow may be
fragile. But speaking of the power of the imagination, Seamus Heaney describes the way in which
‘the inner energy takes the measure of the outer circumstances and wins a kind of freedom against
it... is not oppressed’1. This is a dynamic central to Longley’s poem, which enacts the tension
between these energies, inner and outer, and attempts a resolution through the creation of an imagined
place, an objective correlative where psychic transformation can take place. In this way the art of
poetry itself becomes the third, and animating, element in the drama, through which the meadow in
Longley’s poem really can be a place withdrawn from the oppressions of daily life. The energy, as
‘compacted’ as the fields pressed into window boxes, becomes a kind of poetic time bomb.
In Longley’s poem the speaker moving from field to factory observes with a quiet resignation that
‘We become a part of the linen industry’, but this incorporation of one thing into another also contains
its own liberation. Nothing is fixed. Already in the first stanza there are hints of latent energies, the
stooks imagined as ‘the skirts of invisible dancers’. The hands at work ‘in the peaty water’ touch
something elemental and sensual, hinting at movements beneath the surface in a world where
dimensions are shifting. By a poetic process mirroring that of the linen ‘processes’ (no longer
funereal, as suggested by the use of that word in the second stanza), the lovers in Longley’s poem
come alive in the expansiveness of their ‘bleach meadow’, redeeming the real field of the first stanza
with its ‘fallen’ flowers. Here they experience all the wild intensity of the ‘battering of stubborn
stalks’, an image heightened by its onomatopoeic and alliterative physicality, and the ‘gentle combing
out of fibres like hair’, a change in rhythm which creates the tender erotic mood of the third stanza.
In this atmosphere linen itself is transformed. The ultimate shape-shifter, it turns from flax to sheet,
from meadow to undergarment, is personified both as ‘matchmaker’ and ‘undertaker’. But here
Longley’s darker echo touches on an image already present in the first stanza, of flax stems rotted ‘to
the bone’, and weaves a conceit in which the poet gently undresses the facts, drawing a subtle
attention to the rhythm of bodies, both in their lovemaking and in their mortality. In this metaphysical
layering of language, linen is as woven into life as life is woven of the work of hands - for love, for

birth, and death. Similarly, the linen petticoats of the final stanza of Longley’s poem capture and
substantiate with their embroidery the lost ‘blue flowers’ of the first stanza, with their echo of Novalis
and the redeeming power of imaginative possibility. The little bow becomes a butterfly, symbol of
Psyche, where the alliteration of ‘breasts’, ‘beautiful’, ‘bow’, ‘bodice’, and ‘butterfly’ also sounds a
lyrical counterpoint to the darker resonance of ‘death’ at the end of the first line of that last stanza.
There is a return to the imperative address to flax. It is not death, but linen that will ‘say’, have the
final word, in its animated poetic form, not the dehumanising force of its industrial manufacture. In
the world of the ‘bleach meadow’, something new has been made.
Here we see what Edna Longley has described as Longley’s ‘precise care for the poetic act’2, where
the patterning of language allows for a very distinctive kind of redressing after the lovemaking, not
just into petticoats, but into a redress of meaning. For Seamus Heaney too this alchemy expands the
scene beyond the personal pleasure it invokes, into a public and national event, addressing both ‘the
private flax and linen of this poem and the public flax and linen which had been the basis of Belfast’s
industrial power and its intransigent male-fisted politics, both of which refused the feminine element
symbolized by the land of Ireland itself’3. For Heaney, ‘a reading of the poem is possible which sees it
as the internalization and affirmation of those feminine powers repressed by man’s, and in particular
the Ulsterman’s adaptation to conditions in the industrial factory world’4.
Within this larger possibility Longley protects the alchemy of the private moment even as he
connects it to others in acts of lyrical elegance. Echoes and resonance abound in the careful placing of
words. In the ‘compacted’ window boxes there is an echo of George Herbert’s ‘Vertue’5, ‘where
sweets compacted lie’, preserved in a way, like virtue, that ‘never dies’. In the metaphysical conceit of
the meadow bedroom of Longley’s poem, with its ‘snow reluctant to melt’, stands the confidence of
John Donne’s creation for his lovers of an ‘every where’, with even that universal power, the sun,
now being commanded: ‘This bed thy centre is, these walls thy spheare’6. It is Longley’s gift to reach
into these resonances and use them, unexpectedly, to suggest the presence of that inner energy which
‘takes the measure of the outer circumstances and wins a kind of freedom against it’ (Heaney). Even
snow can be made, in an act of poetic resistance, to be more powerful than the sun.
Lesley Sharpe

1 Desert Island Discs: Seamus Heaney, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 19 November 1989, 12.15 pm.
2 Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 275. See also Michael Longley: ‘Emily Dickinson, I
think of you / Wakening early each morning to write, / Dressing with care for the act of poetry.’ Collected
Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 5.
3 Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement’ in Finders Keepers, (Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 130-1.
4 Ibid.
5 The Metaphysical Poets, ed. by Helen Gardner (Penguin, 1986), p. 128.
6 Ibid. p.61