National Poetry Month: Seamus Heaney

This is for my dad.

Seeing Things

I

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.
Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.
One by one we were being handed down
Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied
Scaresomely every time. We sat tight
On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,
Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking
Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank
And seemed they might ship water any minute.
The sea was very calm but even so,
When the engine kicked and our ferryman
Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,
I panicked at the shiftiness and heft
Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us —
That quick response and buoyancy and swim —
Kept me in agony. All the time
As we went sailing evenly across
The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,
It was as if I looked from another boat
Sailing through the air, far up, and could see
How riskily we fared into the morning,
And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

II

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the facade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

III

Once upon a time my undrowned father
Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray
Potatoes in a field on the riverbank
And wouldn’t bring me with him. The horse-sprayer
Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might
Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I
Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones
At a bird on the shed roof, as much for
The clatter of the stones as anything,
But when he came back, I was inside the house
And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed
And daunted, strange without his hat,
His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.
When he was turning on the riverbank,
The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched
Cart and sprayer and everything off balance
Si the whole rig went over into a deep
Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel
And tackle, all tumbling off the world,
And the hat already merrily swept along
The quieter reaches. That afternoon
I saw him face to face, he came to me
With his damp footprints out of the river,
And there was nothing between us there
That might not still be happily ever after.

“Heaney’s model is not Joyce and not the great Irish Tain. It is Auden, who teaches that the poet’s tasks are making, judging and knowing. The making starts for Heaney in inadvertent politics. In 1974 he spoke of the Republican street rhymes he learned at Anahorish school, full of resistance and Irish patriotism. He was forced to memorize Byron and Keats. He loved to hear Wordsworth’s characters but he could not speak their accents aloud. He got over his schooling. He was touched deeply by Hopkins, by Frost and Roethke, by Patrick Kavanagh. Later he was knocked rather off course by the power of Lowell’s poems and by Lowell’s presence in Ireland. His approach to the present and its recurrences is generally through analogues – ghosts, bog people, childhood – the past lighting and alighting on the prsent. It is a deeply conservative aesthetic. ‘Beware of “literary emotion,” ‘, he saus, and it is of Wordsworth, the poet of The Prelude that he reminds us. The particularity of the early poems with their dependence on mimetic sound, their attempt to get close to the rural world, ensured his popularity.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“A great writer within any culture changes everythign. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce and Ireland fifty years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and charged.” — Seamus Heaney

“My sensibility was formed by the dolorous murmurings of the rosary, and the generally Marian quality of devotion. The reality that was addressed was maternal, and the posture was one of supplication.” — Seamus Heaney to John Haffenden

“English, the argument runs, is a language imposed on Ireland; it is historically and semantically inimical to Heaney’s Irish Catholic experience. It is colored by Protestantism, it excludes whole registers of feeling, it ironizes attitudes that are close to Heaney’s heart. What are the ‘exclusive civilities’? What hegemony can a language exercise through literature? To what extent is a language we are born to, which our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born to, imposed, to what extent is it given? Imposition is on the first and sometimes the second generation: then the people get hold of their language; they alter it, infiltrate it, make spaces in it, possess it. Stephen Dedalus in the famous ‘tundish’ scene in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a witness to the difference of dialect between the English mentor and the Irish youth. He doesn’t wish he spoke Irish instead of English. He is stating a fact: that languages in different usage develop different valencies. He resents hearing his form of the language patronized by one who imagines his version is superior. Heaney’s and Brathwaite’s stance is now a commonplace, a form of rhetoric that can be adapted to various causes. Language is subvertible, however, and poetry has been and remains a means of subversion. But only if, as in Hill, it is reified, only if the poem is in and against its language. The subtle redress of such poetry is for the reader rather than the audience.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“I was never caught up by [TS] Eliot, never taken over and shown to myself by his work, my ear never pulled outside in by what it heard in him. Numerous readers have testified to this sudden kind of conversion, when the whole being is flushed by a great stroke of poetry, and this did indeed happen to me when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins.” — Seamus Heaney

“For some novelists – Hardy and Lawrence, for example – verse offers itself as a medium for extending and refining apprehensions that their prose fiction has failed to render altogether satisfactorily. There are poems by Hardy and Lawrence which we would be inclined to keep in preference to certain parts of their novels. The same, however, cannot be said of Joyce. Sure, the poems are well tuned and well turned; there is a technical fastidiousness about them, a tough of elegy and pathos. But their chief interest is that they were written by Joyce, their chief surprise the surprise of contrast with other parts of the oeuvre. This stanza from ‘Ecce Puer’ could be by Francis Ludwidge:

Of the dark past
A child is born,
With joy and grief
My heart is torn

There is a conventional touch to this, a kind of rehearsed tenderness that recalls a Celtic Twilight poem ilke Padraic Colum’s ‘O men from the fields’. The heavy end-stopping of the lines, the regular metre, the candid rhymes – it is an unexpectedly unsophisticated performance from an artist who at the same time was splitting the linguistic atom in Finnegans Wake.

If I seem to be doing Joyce down, he can stand it, because he himself set the standard by which he must be judged. The great poetry of the opening chapter of Ulysses, for example, amplifies and rhapsodizes the world with an unlooked-for accuracy and transport. It gives the spirit freedom to range in an element that is as linguistic as it is airy and watery, and when the poems are compared with writing that feels so natural, spacious, and unstoppably alive, they are seen to be what Yeats said the earliest of them were – the work of a man ‘who is practising his instrument, taking pleasure at the mere handling of the stops’.

Perhaps that is the way for us to take pleasure in them – at a slight aesthetic distance, with a connoisseur’s awareness. And that, in fact, seems to be the way Joyce himself appreciated poetry. Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, like Joyce in real life, loves the songs of the Elizabethans, the mournful and melodious rhythms of Nashe and Dowland and Shakespeare’s songs. It is poetry as the handmaiden of music, as evocation, invitation to dream.”
— Seamus Heaney

“Let me quote my hero, Milosz: ‘Poetry below a certain level of awareness does not interest me.’ I think there’s a problem with political poetry that is howling that it’s aware.” — Seamus Heaney