An Amish Rug

Project

An Amish Rug

As if a one-roomed schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
And the children silhouettes in a snowy field,

I bring you this patchwork like a smallholding
Where I served as the hired boy behind the harrow,
Its threads the colour of cantaloupe and cherry
Securing hay bales, corn cobs, tobacco leaves.

You may hang it on the wall, a cathedral window,
Or lay it out on the floor beside our bed
So that whenever we undress for sleep or love
We shall step over it as over a flowerbed.

Poetry

Michael Longley said:

I still think that love poetry is of crucial importance, it seems to me to be at the centre of the enterprise. Here is a poem about a rug I brought back from America and it's on our bedroom floor.

Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is famous for the communities of Amish folk who live and farm there. This severe Protestant sect eschews all modern inventions and contraptions, happily doing without fridges, TVs, radios, electric light. They travel in horse-drawn buggies, and wear exceptionally plain, old-fashioned clothes, often black. They are brilliant farmers who don’t ruin the soil with heavy machinery and chemicals. The Amish also sell to tourists lovely quilts and rugs which in their rainbow-burst colours contrast disturbingly with the austere appearance of their makers. Although I could never join their religion, I admire these people. Their way of life is a reprimand to our present-day lust for possessions, our greedy destruction of this beautiful planet.

In my last four collections there are several poems about domestic artefacts (mainly quilts) from the last century and further back. Although they were intended for everyday use, sometimes these quilts turned out to be artistic masterpieces. In most cases we don’t know who the quilters were. My quilt poems (and my Amish rug poem) are a way of celebrating these modest anonymous geniuses (mainly women), and casting the light of imagination on to heads bowed in concentration at a kitchen table. They spent long evenings with needle and thread, between household chores, and in the midst of familial hubbub. In their designs and patterns they reflected their lives as farmers, their religious festivals, the seasons, the countryside.

...the love poem is the most important thing I do - the hub of the wheel is love - love of a person, love of Ireland, love of Japan or Italy, love of music.

...the tensions between the freedom of the long sentence playing against the tight form.

When I was in Lancaster County in the 1980's, I bought an Amish rug as a gift for my wife. I wrote a poem about it some time later, a love poem which is in a way almost religious. There is something devout about making anything well. The Amish rug maker who pieced together our rug out of rags all those years ago now lights up our lives every day. He really has created for us a cathedral window.

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

All art is to a greater or lesser extent improvisatory, conjuring something out of nothing - a quilt out of trimmings and leftovers, a radiantly coloured rug out of a pile of old rags.

I suppose that my love poetry is addressed to what I grandiosely call the female principle...

Generally I approach love poetry as another way of looking at the wide world. The "you" and "I" are like two posts holding up a clothes-line. Any image can be hung out there to dry - everything except your dirty washing.

My concerns continue to be Eros and Thanatos, the traditional subject-matter of the lyric.

Clarifying the Poem

• This is a love poem in which the Amish rug takes on a subtle and symbolic significance. It is not only a gift to his wife but it is also a celebration of love, peace and domestic happiness.

• The poem moves from the stark, austere black ("clothes") and white ("snowy") images of the first stanza to the more colourful sensuous images of the cantaloupe and cherry and flowerbeds in the later stanzas.

• The simplicity of the Amish way of life is first endorsed and then expanded upon.

• The poem moves from black clothes through black underclothes to a state of undress.

• The poem, like the rug, is a patchwork of colourful strands and delicately embroidered imagery.

Comparing Poems

• This poem contrasts with many of the other poems in the virtues it cherishes: love, peace, work, gentility and domestic grace.

• Its celebration of a non-violent peole, the Amish, contrasts with the exploration of sexual violence in Self-heal and political violence in Wounds and Wreaths.

• The celebration of domesticity is also evident in Carrigskeewaun, particularly the section entitled "The Wall".

For more information on comparing poems, go to the Comparative Themes page.

Questions on the Poem

Click on the pen to go to questions on the poem.

Click on the book to go to questions on the poet.

Click on the computer to go the interactive quiz.

© All poems remain the copyright of Michael Longley

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