“I trust contrariness. I simply rebelled at being commanded.” — Seamus Heaney

It’s his birthday today.

Jean and I went to visit Siobhan in Ireland. Siobhan was in school, so while she was in classes Jean and I rented a car and drove across the country to Galway, and other Western points. On the way, we pulled off the road to go visit Clonmacnoise, a crumbling monastery by a river. We had gone there as kids. It was November, so there was nobody there but us. We wandered around in the frosty air, along the slopes with tilting lichened Celtic crosses as tall as we were and taller. The river there is low, the ground merging into the water, so the sky is reflected in often dizzying and strange ways. It’s a magical place.

There is a legend about Clonmacnoise. During the medieval era, when it was a working monastery filled with monks, a ship floated by in the air. It stopped above the monastery while the monks were at prayer. The anchor was caught below, and a sailor slid down the rope to free it. He lay there, gasping. The monks helped him back up the rope, and the ship floated off in the air.

If you go to Clonmacnoise, and you see the effects of light and water and air – how up is down and down is up – you can see how such a legend would be born.

Or … maybe it’s not a legend at all. Maybe it really happened.

When I came home to the States, I told Dad about our trip to Ireland, and I mentioned our magical stop-off at Clonmacnoise and how good it was to see it again after all those years. I told him how quiet it was, and how, on that wintry day, it was easy to imagine a ship floating by in the air.

Dad got up and went to his bookshelf. He pulled down a book. He always knew exactly where the right book was. He flipped through it until he found what he wanted.

Then he read out loud to me Seamus Heaney’s stunning poem:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Every collection of Seamus Heaney’s work that I own, the poems, the essays, were given to me by my father. When I read Heaney’s poems, I hear my Dad’s voice.

One of his most powerful poems:

Casualty

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’

III

I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse…
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The Screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

I love this piece on Seamus Heaney by Sven Birkets, written when Heaney died. Read the whole thing:

Auden wrote of the moment of Yeats’s death that ‘he became his admirers’, and I had the strongest feeling just then of what he meant. I conjured all at once, if this is possible, the idea, the emotional image, of all of those who knew and loved Seamus, or knew and loved his work — or both — and I felt inside the ghostly trace of a circuitry. That in this one moment all over the world, and of course most densely in Ireland, in Dublin, and most overwhelmingly on his own home ground in Sandymount, this same shock of incomprehension — not yet bereavement — was being registered. I pictured one person after another, dozens perhaps, and these were only the people who I knew who had a connection. Of course there were hundreds, many hundreds more.

When I drove down to the general store the next morning to get The New York Times and The Boston Globe, that sense was confirmed. There was massive front-page coverage everywhere — the biggest I’d ever seen for the death of a writer.

Here is Heaney’s first major poem. It is a declaration of self, of independence. Its words shiver with importance and newness, with the radical feeling of a young man carving out his own path. Dangerous, for reasons emotional, familial, cultural, political.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

I went and heard Heaney read at NYU once. It was part of a poetry seminar, not a public lecture. I sat in the back. There weren’t that many people there, amazingly. It was the students and a couple of outsiders like me. He stood up front, with his white hair a wild nimbus around his head, and the way he spoke – the cadences but also his use of language – his storytelling gifts, his sense of seriousness but not lugubriousness, always leavened with a sense of humor … I went up afterwards and had him sign my copy of Opened Ground (given to me by Dad).

If you haven’t read it, take a moment – take 20 minutes – unplug – and read Heaney’s Nobel Prize Lecture.

Here are some of the things I’ve written about Heaney:

On his collection Death of a Naturalist.

On his collection Door Into the Dark.

On his collection Wintering Out.

On his collection North.

On his collection Oopened Ground.

I wrote a series of essays too, about his GORGEOUS essay collection The Redress of Poetry.

I miss him still.

“I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.” — Seamus Heaney

 
 
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