August 11th to October 3rd
This was supposed to be a weekly thing....right.
But I chose to read some of Seamus Heaney's books from my collection, and I went underground for a while. So that I actually get something written, I'm going to "cheat" a bit: at least it feels like cheating. I will write a collage of observations. Which is sometimes how Heaney writes poetry, though he is much better at it than I am.
i.
Seamus Heaney is one of the few authors whom I regret is dead.
Mostly I prefer dead authors. Dead people cannot post their opinions anywhere on the internet (that may change with AI, I suppose). I will never awkwardly drop in on them trying to be "relevant". Dead people are mysterious, whether their audience likes it or not, or whether the deceased person themselves was at peace with becoming mystery. Dead authors leave behind their writing, an artifact. We may feel possessive or antagonistic toward their artifacts. With great self-confidence (or arrogance) we may try to claim or reject them for our times, our moment. But they remain both real and remote in a way that cannot be explained away.
Mystery gives the dead author dignity. It is dignified to belong to something other than the frenetic present with its abrupt electric pulses of attention. It is dignified to belong to the past.
All this is true of Seamus Heaney. He does belong to the past: the 20th century/early 21st century world he lived in as well as the historical and literary worlds he inhabits mentally. His poems are full of references to lifeways, physical spaces and sensory impressions that are anything but universal. His classical education is also far from universal anymore.
But I could wish that Seamus Heaney was still alive in the world. He wrote about some of the darkest aspects of human nature and experience. He did not exactly comfort and he certainly didn’t justify. But he was not cynical either. When you read his poetry, you feel the realness of things, their complexity, their ambiguity. Maybe you see a glimmer of redemption (but he isn’t doing the work for you).
The world really just seemed a more decent place when Seamus Heaney was in it. It was easier to believe in poetry, for one thing. Even just a little bit.
ii.
Without really trying, I worked sort of backwards when I was re-reading Seamus Heaney. I started with his last collection of poetry, Human Chain, from 2010. This book was published four years after Heaney had a stroke, and he wasn't far from the end of his life (2013). He was aware of this I think, though very much alive at the same time. You can hear him considering mortality and a life now mostly lived. When I first read Human Chain, I was in a very different space. I was a bride, and future-focused. It was one of those blessed states where you feel that all the threads of life have come together to form a perfect tapestry. The past, the future, pain, loss, uncertainty: even when acknowledged they lie lightly on your mind, and the faces of those more experienced glow in the moment with a reflected, re-discovered innocence.
Of course, it doesn't last exactly like that. There always a thread in the tapestry that comes loose, that snags. Within two years of my wedding, one of the young guests died in a tragic accident. Within five, my own father would pass away after a brief, agonizing illness. Within a year, I would enter my own valley of the shadow dealing with infertility. Reading through Human Chain with these memories (and many, many others) the poems that hit hardest are those about illness and recovery.
One of the most tender of these:
......
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
.....
As a bit of internet reading will tell you, if you don't recognize the scene, the poem references the healing of the paralytic by Jesus in Mark 2. But of course it is from the perspective of "those ones who had known him all along." Their care and attention (and determination to get their friend to the right place where he can be healed) is identified as a miracle. Anyone who has been ill or helpless, can sense the appreciation of the miracle of love and connection that Heaney acknowledges here. Our dreams of self-actualization, of independence, of endless optimizing - even when seemingly realized - dissolve into the reality that we rely on each other in our frailty. And once the shock wears off, in the realization that loss is the constant, not the exception, well, somewhere in between the waves of grief, one can feel something like a return to sanity.
iii.
I took District and Circle with me on a summer walk to a nearby reservoir. Seated on a bench, surrounded by trees and shrubs, I could glimpse the lake busy with gulls and ducks. The city hummed behind me in muffled automotive sounds. Closer, just across the water, came the intermittent whistle of a steam train, as it chugged around and around a historical park.
The poems in District and Circle (2006) are probably the least personally relatable of the Heaney poems I read. They focus on specific historical moments; on the physical labour and danger of jobs that I have no experience of; and on people from Heaney's decades-ago youth, in what was basically another world.
What is relatable: the need to grasp, to capture an impression tangibly. Reading about firemen or farm labour or blacksmithing, you may feel something of the presence of the person, not just an observation. As the product of a softer and sillier age, I think of the "Find someone who looks at you the way" memes.
Find someone who looks at you the way....Seamus Heaney looks at everything.
.....
Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift
With BREEN in scarlet lacquer on its spread
Fantailing brim,
Tinctures of sweat and hair oil
In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs
Beneath the crown—
Or better say the crest, for crest it is—
Steel ridge, leather-trimmed, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,
Tipped with a little clasp of beaten copper…
Emblazoned with the number 17, and on my shelf
Like a trophy, like “headgear
Of the tribe,” as O’Grady called it
In right heroic mood that afternoon
When the fireman poet presented it to me
As “the visiting fireman,” twenty years ago—
As if I were up to it, as if I had
Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,
His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass
And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof
Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man
Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.
.....
How Seamus Heaney inspires me is to have faith in my own powers of observation. Searching the internet for copies of Heaney's poems, I of course also encounter much analysis (and I am sort of adding to it here, I suppose). But each poem is mainly a witness to the power of noticing who and where you are in your own skin, in your own moment. It's the opposite of waiting to be entertained, of having a screen take you someplace else. Even if Heaney is describing something in past rural Ireland, it does not feel like watching a documentary with a soothing professional voice over. This is not nostalgia.
What if there was a truth out there that only you could find out, by paying attention? Perhaps not a truth for everybody, but one for you, now? Maybe the next poem you read, or book, will change you on a way you can never know unless you bring absolutely everything in your consciousness to it. Your five senses, the stories of ancestors five generations back (what you can intuit if you don’t know) your memories from five years old, the last five people you spoke to…
Something like that. This is one of the challenges of reading these poems.
iv
I ended with the book "Electric Light." Many poems in this collection give me a surge of pure delight every time I read them.
Bann Valley Eclogue
POET
Bann Valley Muses, give us a song worth singing,
Something that rises like the curtain in
Those words And it came to pass or In the beginning.
Help me to please my hedge-schoolmaster Virgil
And the child that's due. Maybe, heavens, sing
Better times for her and her generation.
VIRGIL
Here are my words you'll have to find a place for:
Carmen, ordo, nascitur, saeculum, gens.
Their gist in your tongue and province should be clear
Even at this stage. Poetry, order, the times,
The nation, wrong and renewal, then an infant birth
And a flooding away of all the old miasma.
Whatever stains you, you rubbed it into yourselves,
Earth mark, birth mark, mould like the bloodied mould
On Romulus's ditch-back. But when the waters break
Bann's stream will overflow, the old markings
Will avail no more to keep east bank from west.
The valley will be washed like a new baby.
POET
Pacatum orbem: your words are too much nearly.
Even 'orb' by itself. What on earth could match it?
And then, last month, at noon-eclipse, wind dropped.
A millenial chill, birdless and dark, prepared.
A firstness steadied, a lastness, a born awareness.
As name dawned into knowledge: I saw the orb.
VIRGIL
Eclipses won't be for this child. The cool she'll know
Will be the pram hood over her vestal head.
Big dog daisies will get fanked up in the spokes.
She'll lie on summer evenings listening to
A chug and slug going on in the milking parlour.
Let her never hear close gunfire or explosions.
POET
Why do I remember St. Patrick's mornings,
Being sent by my mother to the railway line
For the little trefoil, untouchable almost, the shamrock
With its twining, binding, creepery, tough, thin roots
All over the place, in the stones between the sleepers.
Dew-scales shook off the leaves. Tear ducts asperging.
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 big round bales.
Planet earth like a teething ring suspended
Hangs from its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner.
Cows are let out. They're sluicing the milk-house floor.
-Page 12, Electric Light, 2001, Seamus Heaney
I love the playfulness of this poem, the way particular detail is wound in with existential contemplation. It could be fun to get into the analysis, starting with looking up all the Latin phrases and references which I do not know off by heart. I don't necessarily have an urge to do this every time I read it though, nor to explain them away. What I like best is the way all the lines run off my tongue, the way they feel like speaking a blessing. I read it and I think, everything is beautiful, but especially the things Heaney has noticed, but also everything.
In another poem, "Known World," Heaney asks the question I chose as the title of this piece: "How does the made-up get into the real?" He replies with: "Ask me an easier one!" It is a question I ask myself though, especially when thinking about poems or stories that I have continued to read all my life. The best literature does enter "the real," perhaps even seeming more real than what we call "reality." I think Seamus Heaney does answer that question, in all his body of work. The made-up (poetry? mythology? history?) gets into "the real" when you carry it with you, when you observe closely and understand how stories and experiences speak to each other. That is the lasting impression that Seamus Heaney leaves on me: how possible it is to be intensely, memorably, painfully and gloriously alive, connected with surprising tendrils of story to other humans.
An older piece of writing I did on Seamus Heaney:
