I find the first line of this poem rather arresting but also teasingly ambiguous. What is it that Seamus Heaney is surprised at – the fact that Larkin’s shade appears to him at all or the fact that it quotes Dante? Given Larkin’s record with foreign languages (‘Do you read much foreign poetry, Mr Larkin?’ ‘Foreign poetry? No!’) my money is on the latter. Though of course this carefully cultivated philistinism could just have been part of Larkin’s self-protective façade, his understandable distrust of critics and academics who know everything about poetry except how to write it, and Heaney could be gently poking fun at that façade. Anyway, it is a generous and perceptive tribute from one poet to another who had indeed celebrated ‘the heartland of the ordinary’ but who had not always been so generous in return (I believe Larkin’s private name for Heaney was the Bogman).

The Journey Back

Larkin’s shade surprised me. He quoted Dante:

‘Daylight was going and the umber air
Soothing every creature on the earth,
Freeing them from their labours everywhere.

I alone was girding myself to face
the ordeal of my journey and my duty’
And not a thing had changed, as rush-hour buses

Bore the drained and laden through the city.
I might have been a wise king setting out
Under the Christmas lights – except that

It felt more like the forewarned journey back
Into the heartland of the ordinary.
Still my old self. Ready to knock one back.

A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.

Seamus Heaney

Philip Larkin famously claimed that the ‘myth kitty’ was exhausted, meaning that it was time to give up writing poems that relied on the convenient shorthand of tropes from a shared  classical culture, and one can see that for him this was a necessary part of his literary program of reclaiming poetry for the common reader by rooting it in the accessible ordinary. But centuries of shared tradition are not so easily put aside, and in the right hands, and used in the right way, the myth kitty can still retain much of its old potency. As in this densely woven poem by Seamus Heaney, where we have allusions to Orpheus and Eurydice (‘damned if I look back’), Pan chasing the nymph Syrinx (‘a fleet god gaining/Upon you turned to a reed’), the Persephone myth (the scattered trail of stanza two) and just for good measure a reference to Hansel and Gretel from Germanic folktale.

But these allusions do not supplant the basic human story here, merely add a layer of resonance to it, and that story appears to be one of regret for a more innocent time of young love, and an apprehension that the poet’s wife and marriage have suffered too much from his divided loyalties. Nothing is made explicit, and yet I think the poem can be seen as echoing the reproach that Heaney puts in the mouth of his wife in another poem, ‘An Afterwards’: ‘You left us first, and then those books, behind’.

The result, as so often with Heaney, is a poem finely balanced and finely expressed. It is true that a reader unfamiliar with Orpheus and Eurydice, Pan and Persephone, and possibly these days even Hansel and Gretel, will miss out on a dimension of the poem and may feel excluded by it, but others will enjoy having the echoes stirred for them. Larkin may not have approved, but Heaney too was a reclaimer.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tense as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is not, I think, a difficult poet, unlike, say, his contemporary Geoffrey Hill who chose to guard his word-hoard with dragons of impassable obscurity. But Heaney did select his words very carefully, and that care merits close attention, as in this poem expressing his feelings of resentment at the presence in his countryside of what to him were after all, regardless of what his political sympathies might be, soldiers of an occupying power. That ‘omphalos’, for example – the omphalos (Greek for navel) was a stone at Delphi that in Greek lore had been placed there by Zeus to mark the centre of the world, and is here used by Heaney as a quietly defiant symbol of the farmland on which his own being was centred, and which is here evoked with a bleakly beautiful precision. I am also fascinated by his choice of the word ‘warbling’ in the second line. Quite right for the sound of heavy tyres, but I just wonder also whether Seamus also had in mind some association with the warble fly, a parasitic fly that burrows under the skin of cattle and lays its eggs – maybe he was thinking of these foreign invaders as resembling such parasites, burrowing under the skin of his countryside? Of course, it is easy to get carried away with this kind of thing – when I was young there was a critical work very much in vogue called ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’, which one reviewer tartly dismissed as carrying the remarkable thesis that the more ways there were to misunderstand a poem, the better it was. Anyway, to the poem….

The Toome Road

One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

Seamus Heaney

This poem, which is part of a longer sequence, is a good illustration of Seamus Heaney’s gift for moving from the private and particular memory or observation to a moving statement of the universal. The unnamed ‘them’ in the third line are, of course, his parents, who are brought to the mind of a convalescent Heaney by the sound of a boiler starting up – I guess we all have particular sounds that trigger memories of childhood, we lived on a hill and mine would be the sound of the wind on autumn nights, hooting and snuffling outside the house like an invisible animal trying to find a way in.

Grove Hill

Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them

In summer season, as it must have been,
And the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,

Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt’s four spires in the distance.

Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation
About a love that’s proved by steady gazing
Not at each other but in the same direction.

Seamus Heaney

No doubt we all have our favourite Seamus Heaney collections (and while ‘Collected Poems’ are very satisfying and serviceable, is there not an excitement that a ‘Collected’ can never quite replace about reading a poet’s collections as they come out?). For me, it has to be ‘Field Work’, which I think shows the poet in his prime, in full relish of his mastery. This week’s choice is a relatively simple lyric from that collection, compared with some of the complex and demanding (but very satisfying) poems that it contains. I have to say that I’m not too sure about the image in the first line. It seems to me that a girl would need to be wearing an awful lot of lipstick in a lot of unusual places to look anything like the berry-laden rowan trees I’ve seen. But I do like the second stanza. Appropriately for an Irish poem, the last line echoes the answer given by the legendary hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, who when asked what he thought was the best music of all said ‘The music of what happens’.

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Seamus Heaney

165

I have had more than one poet friend of normally sound judgment who has not taken to Seamus Heaney at all, dismissing him as dull. People are entitled to their tastes, but this puzzles me. Yes, a poem like the following may not be at all flashy, but is it not, at a deep level, quietly satisfying? And is not that image of the swans in line eight the kind of thing that marks out a true maker? It is proper in this trade of ours to resist hype and to question consensus, but one must also allow for the possibility that sometimes just because everybody says that something is good, it doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

A comet has been much in the news this week as the remarkable Rosetta probe makes its successful landing. Maybe those immemorial loners from the outer dark don’t figure in poetry as much as they should, but here’s a poem where one does make a beautiful (and deeply resonant) appearance. I have wondered if Heaney had a specific comet in mind: maybe comet Kohoutek that brightened our skies for a while in 1973. For those who missed it, the good news is that it will be back in about 75000 years.

Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

Seamus Heaney

So we have lost Seamus Heaney, and that’s a loss indeed. He was very good at Being A Poet, but more to the point, and the two don’t always go together, he was also very good at being a poet. It’s hard to pick out a single poem to represent him from so accomplished an oeuvre, but I have always felt that this one shows his Dantesque intensity of vision coupled with an empathy not always so characteristic of the great Italian.

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I’m sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of her cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.

Seamus Heaney

The Guttural Muse

Late summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk—the slimy tench
Once called the “doctor fish” because his slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Seamus Heaney

The most successful poet of modern times caught in a mood of vulnerability and alienation, wishing he could lay down his bardship and just go with the flow as one of the crowd. One is tempted to say ‘Forget it, Seamus, you’d be bored rigid in two minutes’, but whatever one’s scepticism towards the sentiment that muscular, sensuous language of his is, as ever, a delight.