Happy birthday, Seamus Heaney

I went to hear him read at NYU about 10 years ago. We sat in the auditorium at NYU, and the laughter never stopped – it was completely due to his own commentary, his own way. He recited his own poems with no notes, no papers, all memorized, the beautiful lilt of his voice … and after he finished reciting one of his poems, he would immediately start to talk about it, in the most prosaic and amusing way. His personality was what impressed itself upon me. I could fall in love with such a man.

And so, it is his birthday today. For more information on this amazing artist, check out his biography here (that’s on the Nobel Prize site). He won the Nobel Prize in 1995.

His Nobel lecture (also included in his book The Redress of Poetry is astonishing. It’s quite long, but so worth it. I read it years ago, and immediately had to print it out to put into my ‘commonplace book’. It’s beautiful, heartfelt, political, and evocative.

I was brought up with Seamus Heaney’s poems. My dad loved his work, and for Christmas would usually give me one of Heaney’s books – either of his poetry, or of his criticism (which is also phenomenal).

I remember Jean and I returning from Ireland from visiting Siobhan (this was in the late 1990s) and telling my dad about our stop at Clonmacnoise. We had gone there as a family way back when, and we had wanted to see it again. We had pulled off the highway on our way back to Dublin from Galway to walk around Clonmacnoise, and it was great because it was November, so nobody was there, and we shared memories of our first time there, when we all were kids.

The moment Jean and I said the word “Clonmacnoise” to my dad, my dad stood up, walked over to the bookshelf, pulled down a book and read out loud Seamus Heaney’s goosebump-inducing poem about the legend of Clonmacnoise (This is my favorite of Heaney’s poems and whenever I read it silently, I hear it in my dad’s gravelly voice):

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.

Ahhh. God, it never fails to get me. “Out of the marvellous as he had known it.” A strangely sad poem. At least I find it sad. I have had my own experiences of “climbing back out of the marvellous” and it’s always a bit sad.

(I wrote about the Clonmacnoise legend a bit here. But the poem pretty much tells the whole story. I’ll just repeat what I said before: for me, the entirety of Seamus Heaney’s power and magic as a poet is in the last line of that poem. It’s simply breathtaking.)

And lastly, I am going to post his poem “Digging”. It is one of his earlier efforts, but he refers to it often as the moment he really became a poet. It is a poem I have gone to often in the last couple of years, as I have struggled with the drudgery of my manuscript, or the work I need to do to get the damn thing done.

The subject of the poem is a cliche: Son will choose a different path from father – perhaps this choice will not be understood – but son knows he must go his own way. You can feel how young he is in the poem.

But oh, what a lovely and moving poem it is. Yes, Mr. Heaney, you do dig with your pen. You do. And for that I am very grateful.

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.