The Lost Heifer by Austin Clarke: Poem and Meaning

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This week I picked a powerful poem by Austin Clarke titled The Lost Heifer. This poem was published in 1925, in The Cattledrive in Connaught, and it was a time when Ireland’s nationalism was under threat.nbsp; In the poem The Lost Heifer, Clarke writes about Ireland at the time of the Civil War. And if you did not know, a heifer is (in farming) a cow that has not borne a calf or has borne only one calf. But I am sure the mention in this poem has a deeper meaning. 

I really like Austin Clarke’s poems, they seem so simple, but you can tell there is a whole world of meaning behind them. Just like in the poem I recently shared by Clarke, The Planters Daughter. 

This poem, ‘The Lost Heifer,’ comes in at number 36 on the top 100 Irish poems list.

Enjoy this wonderful Irish poem, 

The Lost Heifer by Austin Clarke

When the black herds of the rain were grazing

Austin Clarke published The Lost Heifer in The Cattledrive in Connaught and Other Poems in 1925. In a note he later wrote that it came from a time when Irish national idealism had gone into eclipse, around the bitter years of the Civil War.

The heifer is not really a cow. Jacobite poets writing in Irish used a heifer or cow as a secret name for Ireland, and Clarke borrows that old code. The speaker remembers her in a wet, misty western landscape, where she seems to come and go like the weather.

The poem is full of soft sound, with rhymes and near rhymes chiming across the lines. Its closing image of mist and rain is so memorable that the critic Patrick Crotty believes Philip Larkin echoed it at the end of The Whitsun Weddings.

You will find the full poem in Collected Poems by Austin Clarke, edited by R. Dardis Clarke (Carcanet Press, 2008).

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