Heroes: Seamus Heaney

I first came across Seamus Heaney in my second year university literature text book. I think the first thing that caught my eye was his name. The Irish-ness of it was exotic to me, a student who at that time had only traveled via books and imagination. Then the poem, "Punishment", had slightly lurid content. Nothing like a little luridness for getting a student's attention. (Seamus Heaney is actually significantly less lurid by comparsion than many contemporary poets.) But what caught me for good was Seamus Heaney's voice. He is keenly observant, almost scientific in his precise description of things. But at the same time, he maintains a very present, personal tone.

Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
******
In the poem the "betraying sisters" are Catholic girls who were publicly humiliated by the IRA for dating British soldiers. There were basically tarred and feathered and handcuffed to street railings. Heaney begins by observing the body of the Bronze age "adulteress," and feels pity for the brutal tribal revenge enacted on her for her crime. But then he also notices and comments on his own hypocrisy: he shouldn't act all superior and horrified about the customs of the ancient tribes, because he has witnessed a similar act in his own time, and was complicit in it.

Some people have read this poem as if it is normalizing brutality toward women, but I think that reading is missing the tone of the poem. I hear the poem as self-accusation, in a way: a recongnition that living in an advanced technological civilization hasn't made people's tribal and violent natures disappear. While the poem doesn't outright condemn that events that it describes, the speaker's recognition of what is inside him is somehow more powerful than an outright condemnation would be.

"Punishment" has a lot of the typical qualities of Heaney's poetry: using the past as a lens through which to understand the present; the use of excavation or "digging down" as a metaphor for the search for knowledge or insight; the careful observation and interpretation, or re-interpretation, of artefacts. Sometimes these artifacts are ancient artefacts like the bog bodies, or pieces of Viking carving, or bits of Old English or Latin poetry, but sometimes they are everyday objects:

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon
A kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blow chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of the newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to life a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand here in front of me
and take the strain.

************************
People often tell me that poetry is difficult and complicated and contains meanings that are always hidden for some reason, perhaps because of the malice or madness of the writer. I say: a poem is not like a messy closet where a few useful objects are hidden beneath piles and piles of junk that must be sorted through before anything of worth is discovered. Lots of things in life are exactly like that, but not poetry. A poem is like one of those reusable shopping bags that folds into a space as small as your fist, but can be unfolded to become a tote-bag that carries twenty times its mass. A poem does not take long. A poem weighs very little. You can tuck it into your handbag or pocket, and go about your business without even knowing it's there. No heavy book to haul around. No big expectations to harrow your mind. No nattering person at your ear trying to convince your of this or that or the other thing. When you need the poem, or your little shopping bag, you pull it out and poof! it expands into another form, makes itself ready for what you need at the moment. The real beauty of poetry is it's simplicity, compactness and praticality.

"A Kite for Michael and Christopher," one of my favourite poems ever, is a poem just like that. It is a simple poem: it's about Heaney making a kite with his two sons, Michael and Christopher. He describes the kite in detail, and how they go out on a Sunday afternoon and fly it. Then in stanza four the poem unfurls into a big bag, the kind that carries all sorts of meaning.

The kite becomes a metaphor of the soul. The soul tries to ascend, but is held onto by the person on the other end of the string. Heaney describes this in a variety of ways: flying the kite is plowing a field, it's like trying to pull up an anchor that is caught in a shoal. The feeling is labourous: keeping the soul up in the air, while not letting it fly completely away, is intense work.

In the last stanza Heaney, having apparently got the kite into the air, hands the line to his two boys.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand here in front of me
and take the strain.

Presumably when the kite plunges into the wood, then life will be over. In the meantime, hanging onto it, living life with your soul in the air, is one's life work. "Feel / the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief." Whose grief that is is not totally clear. Perhaps it is the soul's grief: the soul wants to fly higher and higher into the sky, but can only go so far because it is attached to a mortal. Or perhaps it is through grief, the inevitable grief that comes from living, that one begins to feel the presence of the soul. Probably there's something of both meanings in it. The lesson that Heaney passes onto his children is: Don't be afraid of grief. Grief will come, but in the end its presence means you are alive. It means that as a human you strive to reach into the heavens. And you are strong enough to take the pain with the beauty. Indeed, grief is almost a beautiful thing in the poem: "strumming, rooted, long-tailed." It is like the music of a harp, like a firmly rooted tree, like a long-tailed kite flying in the wind. And we can "take the strain:" by holding on to the soul, accepting the grief, we can live fully.

I see this poem as a twin to a "Old Smoothing Iron," a section from "Shelf Life," which again looks at every day artefacts and tells a story about each one. This one, I believe, is about Heaney's mother.

2 Old Smoothing Iron

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

*******

Labour is another theme that comes up in Heaney's poetry, especially physical labour. This poem plays upon the scientific definition of work: to move an object of a certain mass through a certain distance. The work described is not work involving a lot of education or intellectualism, and yet the poem suggests that satisfaction comes from "pulling your weight" and feeling exact and equal to the thing being moved. Whatever the particular task, there's pleasure in feeling equal to it and seeing your actions move something in the world. Even if one's job is not always utterly fascinating, even if there are some dull, repetitive moments, there's a reward in seeing something moved or transformed by one's efforts, however big or small.

Poetry like this is the reason that I often turn to Seamus Heaney as a restorative, or when I need a clear voice to drown out the babble around me. They are the sort of poems that you want to memorize and carry around like a gift, like a piece of life-saving luggage that is as big as a sunset but doesn't weigh even a gram.

As a student, Seamus Heaney also spoke to me because we shared, in a way, a journey into the English language. When he wrote about reading and translating Anglo-Saxon (Old English), the words rang true for me:

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,

the erotic Mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

What Heaney describes here is a journey back through the English language, passing through the stages of Elizabethan (Shakespearean) English, past the influence of the Normans (Middle English) and Latin, back to the Anglo-Saxon roots, to a language that is almost more recognizable to German speakers than modern English speakers. A scop was an Anglo-Saxon poet; the "iron flash of consonants cleaving the line" was the way that scops used alliterative sounds (which is unfortunately rather hard to render in Modern English; but I'll keep my eye out if I find a good example.)

In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found ban hus,

its fire, benches,
wattel and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered for a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair

is a love-next
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move toward the passes.

********

This is incantatory writing; it takes you to a world-between-worlds, as Clarissa Estes would call it. "In the coffered riches of grammar / and declensions / I found ban hus": It might seem odd to think of the study of grammar being liberating; one might think of soaring eagles, floating clouds, or Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto Number 1 as liberating, but not grammar, for goodness' sake. But in Heaney's poetry, it's digging down into the darkness, feeling the the weight of the bone, doing the hard labour that liberates.

And indeed, I experienced this too. Struggling to understand and form Old English grammar freed me and excited my poetic voice, in a way that nothing had previously. There is something about Old English that feels like handling clay, that feels like touching the very bricks and mortar of language itself. I felt the same way when I began learning music: the endless exercises and scales were the opposite of boring, even if I wasn't making music quite yet. It was engendering, astonishing, cosmic, unbelievable except for being more real than anything I could imagine: I was touching the essence of a thing, and its power was coming to me.

Seamus Heaney is interested in the past, but he doesn't write about the past per se, nor is his writing anachronistic. Instead it seems to exist in a place where past and present are equally in the moment.

Child on the way, it won't be long until
You land among us. Your mother's showing signs,
Out for her sunset walk among the big bales.
Planet earth like a teething ring suspended
Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner.
Cows are let out. They're sluicing the milk-house door.

This segment from "Bann Valley Eclogues" has one of my favourite lines ever: "Planet Earth like a teething ring hangs by its world-chain." "World-Chain" is a kenning: an Anglo-Saxon construction that is part metaphor, part riddle. If the Anglo-Saxons knew anything about gravity they might have described it so. But the image of planet earth dangling in space, fragile, beautiful, new, is not an image that any Anglo-Saxon scop would have ever come up with. Only someone of the 20th century, who has seen pictures of Earth as viewed from space, would think of that one. In that one line, the ancient past and present come together in a moment.

In Heaney's poetry one is often aware of the here and the there, and the tension between them. But the tension is not, or not always, the kind that pulls things apart, that is anxious or uncomfortable. Rather, it is like the tension of a violin string: without it, the string would not be in tune, no music would be possible. Perhaps this is another reason I identify with Heaney: I am a naturally "high strung" person, easily brought to a state of tension, who lives about equally in both the "outer" world and the "inner" one. Such a way of being can lead to a lot of anxiety, of wondering where one is, who one is, how it all fits together, how things can ever be unified. But if I switch my thinking, think of tension as something that can be finely tuned, managed, engineered, it becomes something quite different.

Steady under strain and strong through tension
Its feet on both sides but in neither camp
It stands its ground, a span of pure attention
A holding action, the arches and ramp
Steady under strain and strong through tension.

Reading through Seamus Heaney's poetry again, I enjoyed some old favourites, and noticed other poems that I hadn't before. Like all good books, they are a slightly different journey each time. Some poems seemed more personal to me, others seemed more resonant with meanings that I hadn't found the first time. The other part of Seamus Heaney's writing that I enjoy deeply is his writing on other writers. But that's a whole other topic. Finders Keepers, Heaney's collection of essays on other poems who have been significant or inspiring, is one of my most treasured books.

There's not a lot of his prose online, but his Nobel Acceptance speech can be read here, if you would like more of Heaney in his own words.