This week, I decided to pick number 100 from the top Irish poems list. The Irish poem is called All Legendary Obstacles by John Montague. John Montague was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Co Tyrone.
I like this poem as it is about John or some person waiting for his lover to return to the train station. John Montague puts his emotions down on paper very well in this poem, and you can almost feel how nervous he was. I have put my notes on the poem below.
All Legendary Obstacles
by John Montague
All legendary obstacles lay between
Us, the long imaginary plain,
All Legendary Obstacles is a love poem about waiting. The speaker spends a whole day at a railway station in California, drifting between the platform and the bar, while winter rain floods the valleys and the wrong trains keep rolling past.
The obstacles of the title are the huge distances of America: plains, mountains and swollen rivers lying between two lovers. When the right train finally pulls in at midnight, the meeting is almost wordless. Rain, nerves and doubt leave them both lost for words, and a fellow passenger quietly watches them walk off together into the dark.
Montague published the poem in his 1967 collection A Chosen Light. It is one of his best loved love poems and a regular choice in lists of favourite Irish poems.
Read the full poem: All Legendary Obstacles by John Montague at The Gallery Press. You will also find it in Selected Poems 1961-2017 (The Gallery Press).
I hope you enjoyed finding out about this lovely Irish poem. You can subscribe to my weekly dose of Irish here, where I send a new top Irish poem straight to your inbox every week.