Seamus Heaney: Poet of Tension or Poet of Conviction?

Seamus Heaney: Poet of Tension or Poet of Conviction?Author(s): Tim HancockSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1999), pp. 358-375Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484824 .

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Tim Hancock

Seamus Heaney: Poet of Tension or

Poet of Conviction?

In the first chapter of her book on modern poets from Northern Ireland, Clair Wills notes that "the opposition between the drive towards poetic

'responsibility' to the political situation, and the desire for poetic 'freedom' lies at the root of almost all discussions of Northern Irish

poetry".1 It is hardly surprising that Wills finds her best example of this

critical orthodoxy in the reception of a volume by Seamus Heaney (pp. 28-37). Elmer Andrews unearthed the same root when, in his preface to

a collection of essays on the poet, he noted that "the central question"

they addressed was "the way in which Heaney seeks to resolve the

tension between his sense of a historical situation and the demands of

his own imagination".2 Aside from its primacy as a motivating factor, such 'tension' has also

been consistently regarded as the major source of strength in Heaney's work. In his own monograph on the poet, Andrews argues that Heaney's best writing emerges from the "dialectical relationship established

between the claims of the public world on the one hand, and a private vision [...] on the other". Elsewhere, Ian Hamilton has described

Heaney's oeuvre as a "moving drama of discomfiture, of trying to

reconcile the 'magic' aspects of his calling with [...] the 'duties' of the

tribal bard"; and Douglas Dunn, having noted that this writer's central concern was with "the frustrated relationship between lyricism and

politics", has suggested that "qualms and hand-writings [...] are, in

poetry, honourable".3

Heaney's own comments have also encouraged us to regard these

difficult relationships as central to his achievement. From the conflict

between 'Art and Life' or 'Song and Suffering' examined in the essay that introduces The Government of the Tongue, to the troubled relationship

between "two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and poetic",4 examined in the essay that concludes The Redress of Poetry,

1. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 13.

2. Elmer Andrews (editor), Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 6.

3. Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 120; Ian Hamilton, "Excusez-moi", London Review of Books, 1

October 1987, p. 10; Douglas Dunn, "Heaney Agonistes", in Seamus Heaney, edited

by Harold Bloom (New Haven: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p. 153, p. 157. 4. Seamus Heaney, "Frontiers of Writing", The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London

and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 203.

358



SEAMUS HEANEY: POET OF TENSION OR POET OF CONVICTION?

his prose is consistently shaped by such dialectic. In the face of such an

authorised consensus, it might seem presumptuous to question whether

Heaney's most convincing poetry does actually emerge, to borrow Yeats's

formulation, from an argument with himself, or more specifically from

the argument between a sociopolitical conscience and the artistic

imperative. However, a small number of Heaney's more perceptive critics have

been asking such questions since the mid nineteen eighties. The fact that a number of these essays have recently been reprinted in Michael Allen's

collection of "Contemporary Critical Essays" on Heaney suggests that more commentators are now wondering if the Nobel laureate's stock is

perhaps a little inflated and due for a correction.5 This essay argues neither for the defence nor the prosecution; instead, it is intended to

locate more accurately where Heaney's strengths and weaknesses lie.

Having demonstrated that shortcomings in Heaney's poetry consistently accompany his attempts to deal with ethical tension, I want to feel for

the pulse that quickens the poetry, suggesting firstly that its attributes are most often to be found in moments of artistic conviction, and secondly that a more genuine tension can often be detected within such moments:

that between the innocent Romantic who has continuing faith that new

dimensions can be penetrated or realised, and the Sceptic whose

experience leads him to suspect that the transcendent will, by definition,

always escape us.

Perhaps more enhghtening than all of the abstract binaries used by

Heaney in his prose was a brief moment in an interview when he betrayed doubts as to their ultimate usefulness and validity. Momentarily turning the tables on Rand Brandes, Heaney asked "What is the relationship

between pleasure and truth?" When Brandes questioned whether one

has to choose between the two, Heaney replied "No, of course not, I am

setting them up far too strongly in opposition".6 If one occasionally comes

away from Heaney's essays with similar reservations, then the limitations

of his abstract dichotomies are frequently compounded by bias within

these dichotomies. Heaney clearly aspires to transcend the oppositions that frequently offer him a first grasp on his subject matter: the conflict

between 'Art and Life', for example, eventually gives way to "Jung's

5. See especially David Lloyd, "'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and the

Poetics of Identity" (first published in 1985); also Patricia Coughlan," 'Bog Queens' The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney"

(first published in 1991); and Richard Kirkland, "Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus

Heaney" (first published 1994) in Seamus Heaney: Contemporary Critical Essays, edited

by Michael Allen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 6. "Seamus Heaney: An Interview", with Rand Brandes, Salmagundi, 80 (Fall 1988)

pp. 4-21; p. 5.

359



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

thesis that an insoluble conflict is overcome by outgrowing it".7 But Mary Kinzie is right to sense that this poet consistently views one half of each

binary pejoratively,8 and this can undermine the dialectical basis of his

criticism. To take another example from his prose, whilst Heaney may detect an "unsettled quarrel [...] between vision and experience" in the

poetry of Philip Larkin (The Government of the Tongue, p. 16), the latter forms little more than a dark back cloth to his essay, upon which the

jewels of the English poet's more transcendent moments are set to sparkle. Where Larkin's "Show Saturday" is considered to fail because

"encumbered in naturalistic data", the poem "Here" is considered a

success thanks to its concluding "gesture towards a realm beyond the

social and historical" (ibid., p. 19). It is not difficult to detect a similar bias in Heaney's poetry. Even Ian

Hamilton, who ? we will recall ? admires this poet's work as an

ongoing struggle "to reconcile the 'magic' aspects of his calling with

[...] the 'duties' of the tribal bard", concludes in the same essay that

"whenever he has had to make the choice he has always chosen to

safeguard the 'mystery' of his vocation". The problem with this is that it seems unlikely that the reader will feel genuinely discomfited when s/ he knows where the poet's ultimate sympathies lie. As far as 'tension'

goes, it is hard to feel particularly tense when one knows which side is

going to win the argument. The absence of genuine ethical tension in Heaney's poetry can be felt

most acutely at points where this tension is supposedly at its most acute, in the poems "Oysters" (Field Work) and "Away from it All" (Station

Island) for example. Though belonging to different volumes, these beg to be seen as a pair: they are linked by stanzaic form, imagery, and by the picture they offer of a poet who ? to use another of Heaney's formulae ? is "stretched between politics and transcendence".9 They also share weaknesses that are generated by this opposition.

We see "the historical world" vying with a "perspective beyond

history"10 in the successive stanzas of "Oysters":

Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water.

7. Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other

Critical Writings (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. xxii. Future references

will be incorporated in the text

8. Mary Kinzie, "Deeper than Dedared", Salmagundi, 80 (Fall 1988), pp. 22-57 (p. 31). 9. Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (Grasmere: Trustees

of Dove Cottage, 1985), p. 8.

10. Heaney, "Envies and Identifications", Irish University Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1985),

pp. 5-19 (p. 18).

360




Alive and violated

They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean. Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast

Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friendship, Laying down a

perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge

The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken

me all into verb, pure verb.11

A narrator who first savours a simple pleasure, and also savours the

playful conceit with which he describes that pleasure, finds its flavour

tainted when his word plays introduces a more serious undercurrent of

sexual transgression. With that "philandering sigh" Heaney gestures to

his own earlier poem "Ocean's Love to Ireland", an allegory on the

conquest of Ireland and the Irish language by the English.12 The

experience of political history has forced itself onto the innocence of an

idyllic scene, its penetration of a lovers' feast hammered home by "ripped and shucked" ? words only the odd vowel and consonant away from

describing a rape act itself. Pleasure may return in the domestic imagery of the third stanza, but truth raises its ugly head once more in the fourth

when the poet recalls how oysters symbolised the "glut of privilege"

enjoyed by a violent and exploitative colonial power.

Having granted conscience and indulgence two stanzas each to make

their case, Heaney appears to give the verdict to the former when he

recognises that historical knowledge prevents us from placing complete trust in transcendent ideals such as "poetry or freedom". However, this

final judgement is more ambiguous than it might at first appear. We

should note two things: firstly, the narrator's anger is ultimately directed

not at the horrors of colonial or sexual exploitation, but at the fact that

such horrors have distracted him from his contemplation of "the clear

light"; secondly, though the poem has supposedly been staked out as a

11. Heaney, Field Work (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 11.

12. Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 46-7.

361




field of tension, 'poetry' is finally offered as an approximate synonym for transcendence. Although the message of its concluding lines is hard

to pin down, a poem that ends with a writer quickened "all into verb,

pure verb" speaks more of new artistic convictions than of continuing doubts. Implicitly, at least, Heaney's instinctual bias towards the

hedonistic ultimately gains the upper hand.

A similarly doubtful 'tension' underlies "Away from it All", a poem which addresses the troubled relationship between "politics and

transcendence" by alluding to a writer who worked in a totalitarian state:

A cold steel fork

pried the tank water and forked up a lobster: articulated twigs,

a rainy stone

the colour of sunk munitions.

In full view of the strand, the sea wind spitting on the big window,

we plunged and reddened it, then sat for hours in conclave

over the last of the claws.

It was twilight, twilight, twilight as the questions hopped and rooted.

It was oarsmen's backs and oars

hauled against and lifting. And more power to us, my friend,

hard at it over the dregs, laying in in earnest

as the sea darkens

and whitens and darkens

and quotations start to rise

like rehearsed alibis:

J was stretched between contemplation

of a motionless point and the command to participate

actively in history.

Actively? What do you mean?' The light at the rim of the sea is rendered down to a fine

graduation, somewhere between

balance and inanition.

And I still cannot clear my head of lives in their element on the cobbled floor of that tank and the hampered one, out of water,

fortified and bewildered.13

13. Heaney, Station Island (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 16-17.

362




The fifth stanza of this poem constitutes Heaney's clearest poetic

expression of the two influences that compete for authority over his

tongue: when the imagery of timeless contemplation is juxtaposed against the "command to participate/ actively in history" we recognise a

concise formulation of the by now familiar debate. We also, however,

recognise a familiar inclination towards artistic autonomy when the first

line of the following stanza throws only the second of Czeslaw Milosz's

vying influences into doubt:

I was stretched between contemplation

of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history.

Actively? What do you mean?'

The sceptical voice of reason speaks here on behalf of 'art', not on behalf

of'life'.

Abstraction is, however, more of a problem than bias in this poem. The abstract nature of the debate may reflect another conscious debt to

the Polish writer: in his essay "The Impact of Translation", Heaney

expresses surprise at his enjoyment of a Milosz poem that was "full of

abstractions" (The Government of the Tongue, p. 37). The Irish poet sug

gested in 1979 that he had perhaps taken Pound's maxim "'Go in fear of

abstraction' [...] too literally for a long time"; but one would perhaps concur more wholeheartedly with his following comment:

Whatever poetic success I've had has come from staying within the

realm of my own imaginative country and my own voice, which is

not an abstract thinking voice at all.14

"Away from it All" begins with some poetically successful descriptions of a lobster as "articulated twigs, a rainy stone/ the colour of sunk

munitions", the latter image tipping us off to its potential further

significance in the context of the Troubles. However, whilst the lobster

heats up, the debate fails to warm the collars of Heaney's readership because we are party not to its substance but only its form ("questions",

"laying in in earnest", "quotations", "alibis"). As if on the wrong side of

the restaurant's "big window", readers go through the initially diverting but ultimately frustrating experience of seeing the gestures but hearing no details about specific events. When the quotation rises, it rises out of

nothing. We are left with the impression not of a tension defined but of

14. John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London and Boston: Faber and

Faber, 1981), pp. 57-75 (p. 69).

363




one that has been refined out of existence. Such lack of substance puts a

considerable amount of pressure on Heaney's poor crustacean, clearly intended only as a stand-in but ? in the absence of any authoritative

tenor ? finding itself totally out of its depth in a leading role.15

On the evidence provided by "Oysters" and "Away from it All" one

would have to concur with David Lloyd's observation that "the

contradictions between the ethical and aesthetic elements" in Heaney's

poetry "are easily resolved by the subjugation of the former to the latter".

However, whilst the "delusory moral conflicts" in his writing lead Lloyd to dismiss him as a "minor Irish poet" who has been elevated beyond

his station,16 I want to first suggest that Heaney begins to confirm his

status as a major writer when more authentic and compelling sources of

inspiration exposed such conflicts as delusory, or force them out of the

picture altogether. Heaney's poetry may dwell on ethical dilemmas, but

it is quickened by aesthetic convictions.

These convictions were not to gain clear ascendancy until the

publication of Seeing Things in 1991, but their origins can be traced in an

important poem that has ? wrongly, I believe ? since been celebrated

primarily as an example of its author's "qualms and hand-writings":

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.

15. See Paul Muldoon, "Sweaney Peregraine", London Review of Books, 1-14 November

1984, pp. 20-2 (p. 22). Lobsters seem much more at home in Muldoon's poetry ? for

example, "Something Else", Meeting The British (London and Boston: Faber and Faber,

1987), p. 33.

16. In Allen (editor), Seamus Heaney: Contemporary Critical Essays, pp. 155-84 (p. 174,

p. 156, p. 180.

364




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 emigre, 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.17

As James Simmons notes in his boisterous essay "The Trouble with

Seamus", "Exposure" is the poem "all reviewers agree to admire".18 What

they have agreed to admire is a poem of "anguished dialectic", one

informed by the tension that has been regarded as central to Heaney's success. They adrnire the 'politically correct' image of a writer "weighing and weighing" his "responsible tristia", a term that links Heaney to Ovid

and Osip Mandelstam, both of whom had time enough whilst in exile to

contemplate the "rival claims of [...] poetry and political account

ability".19 The poetic self-portrait that Heaney offers in "Exposure" certainly

reflects his struggle to define a coherent artistic identity in the face of

sociopolitical pressures:

I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

17. Heaney, "Exposure", North, pp. 72-3.

18. In Andrews (editor), pp. 39-66.

19. Edna Longley, in Tony Curtis (editor), The Art of Seamus Heaney (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985), p. 91; Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London and Boston: Faber

and Faber, 1986), p. 123. See also pp. 124-25, and Andrew Waterman, "The Best Way Out Is Always Through", in Andrews (editor), pp. 11-38 (p. 21).

365




Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows.

Though he would avoid the sort of direct political action represented by the "internee" and the "informer", the very presence of such loaded

words acknowledges the pressure of contemporary events. The same

might be said of the phrase "escaped from the massacre", which suggests detachment but also serves to draw our attention to the terrible escalation

of violence in Ulster during 1972. An escape from the "massacre" does not amount to an escape from political identity or responsibilities: when

Heaney describes himself as an "inner emigre", alluding to a label that

Stalin used to stigmatise Mandelstam, he aligns himself with a dissident

poet whose "inner freedom" constituted a political stand against a

repressive power.20 The poet who feels "every wind that blows" is not

simply forsaking the political for the natural world; rather he is

recognising that momentous political events are taking place just over

the horizon: the line has been borrowed from Yeats's "Meditations in

Time of Civil War".

In the eyes of his detractors, Heaney's move south finally offered a

clear display of his natural sympathies, and in this light the 'exposure' seems to be of the writer's political colours. But this word also has

photographic connotations: an 'exposure' may be to some source of light as well as to the winds of political change. It is the "comet that was lost"

that sheds this alternative light on the poem. Unfortunately, the

significance of this comet has also been somewhat lost on commentators.

Critics have been acutely sensitive to reverberations from events in the

north, to coded indications of political identity in "Exposure", but have

failed to recognise the influence of a claim that might have the potential to rival that which politics has on the poet. To do this, we need to look

towards the comet.

The first thing to say is that Heaney has a real comet in mind here:

Kohoutek, discovered in March 1973, reached its closest approach to the

sun in December of that year. The excitement of new discovery was tinged with anticlimax when the brilliancy of the comet failed to match

expectations; both feelings can be sensed in Heaney's second stanza:

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,

Those million tons of light Like a

glimmer of haws and rose-hips.

20. See Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p. 72, pp. 83-4.

366




But how does the glimmering presence of this comet affect our under

standing of the poem? Neil Corcoran is not alone in placing it unequivocally on the 'politics'

side of Heaney's dichotomy: he concludes that the poem conveys

Heaney's anxiety "about missing a major historical moment" due to his move away from the focus of the Troubles.21 More precisely, the comet

that failed to five up to its billing represents the lost hopes of students who marched for civil rights at the end of the 1960s. But then again,

perhaps its description as a "pulsing rose" should lead us to identify this historical moment as the rise of a new Irish nation?22 Having already felt "every wind that blows", though, should we not return first to Yeats's

"Meditations in lime of Civil War", where the "symbolic rose" speaks more of individual defiance, of artistic and aristocratic autonomy? Or

following Heaney's gesture to the life and work of Osip Mandelstam,

perhaps we should instead recall this writer's "famous attack on the

symbolist rose" in his essay "On the Nature of the Word"?23 Is the comet

therefore an elusive deceiver?

There is a problem here. When the comet is combined with that most

widely referential of poetic symbols, the rose, its signifying potential is

increased to the extent that ? like a prophecy from the Delphic oracle

?it can be interpreted in as many different ways as there are interpreters. James Simmons's candid reaction to the end of "Exposure" might at first seem less than helpful, but it is nevertheless closer to our reading

experience:

When the comet symbol is clinched at the end as his big missed

opportunity, the reader has no idea what Jack Horner has missed.

He has stuck in his thumb and found no plums at all.

Or rather so many potential plums that he doesn't know which one to

pull out first.

We might get a little nearer the truth by first acknowledging that

ambiguity has been consciously built into this symbol. It is ? to use

Heaney's word ? a "portent", and as such indicates the possibility of

momentous yet unspecified events, rather than representing any

particular event itself. It is not a crystal ball, holding within it specific visions of the future, but a wishing star, a vehicle for aspirations that

holds only a sense of potential. Rather than restricting this comet to an

21. Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p. 32. Maurice Harmon offers a similar interpretation in

his essay, '"We Pine for Ceremony': Ritual and Reality in the Poetry of Seamus

Heaney", in Andrews (editor), pp. 67-86 (p. 85). 22. For the political significance of Heaney's rose imagery, see F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and

Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 89.

23. See Heaney, Government of the Tongue, pp. 71-88 (p. 78).

367




historical or political orbit, it is more useful to see it as following what

Heaney will later describe as "an orbit coterminous with longing".24 In

so far as it cuts across all historically and politically delineated borders

(presumably it is ? albeit faintly ? visible in both Belfast and Dublin),

it is a sign of that which transcends politics; coming as it does literally from the Tteavens', it provides evidence of an alternative dimension that

is still, to a great extent, beyond human experience and comprehension. But can this faint sign really be said to exert authority over the

downcast writer portrayed in "Exposure"? Surely images of "dripping alders" and "falling stars" reflect a fundamental spirit of 'gravitas' rather

than enlightenment? To appreciate the new aesthetic conviction behind

this poem it is essential to draw a distinction between the writer in

"Exposure" and the writer of "Exposure", for they are different characters.

The former, distracted by the political 'sparks' that flew after his move

south, is focused on ethical doubts, his "responsible tristia"; the latter

recognises that he may have got things out of perspective, that these

sparks are not really the burning issue, being of little significance

compared to the comet's "million tons of fight". The poet portrayed in

"Exposure" has missed the transcendent sign; the portrayer knows he

has missed this sign, hinting that we might expect a change of focus in

the future.

Our understanding of "Exposure" is significantly altered when we

make this distinction between character and author. For example, we

can suddenly hear two voices in the following stanza:

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

The first two lines are spoken by a Heaney weighed down by thoughts of political responsibility and accountability; the second two betray the

impatient tones of one who now has little time for such tortured self

examination. Those quick-fire questions are less searching than impatient; the stanza is as much critique as it is reflection of the prickings of a

sociopolitical conscience. Further evidence of the gap between writer

and character emerges when Heaney the writer leaves a tell-tale

etymological mark on his textual alter-ego by describing him as now

grown "long-haired" (the Greek origin of the word 'comet'). A poet who

has grown Tong-haired' is one whose new identity is being formed by

thoughts of transcendence rather than defined by events on the ground.

"Exposure", widely acknowledged as a key poem in Heaney's oeuvre,

should therefore be regarded as much as a farewell to tristia as it is tristia

24. Heaney, "Wheels Within Wheels", Seeing Things (London and Boston: Faber and

Faber, 1991), p. 46.

368




itself, hinting at a new resolution as it reflects on a period of tension.

Whilst this last piece in North gestures to the sociopolitical concerns that

form the most significant motivation behind the work that preceded it, the image of a missed comet offers a coded indication of the more

transcendent influences that were gradually to gain authority over

sociohistorical obligations in Heaney's subsequent volumes:

The book ends up in Wicklow in December '73. It's in some ways the book all books were leading to. You end up with nothing but

your vocation, with words and your own free choice [...] I'm not

interested in my poetry canvassing public events deliberately any more. I would like to write poems of myself at this age. Poems, so

far, have been fuelled by a world that is gone or a world that is too much with us?public events. Just through accident [...] I've ended

up with myself, and I have to start there, you know.25

This was the major turning point in Seamus Heaney's creative life. A

writer whose verse had been strongly affected by 'public events' was

becoming responsive to the more private, enigmatic sources of inspiration that he associates with his 'vocation'. The religious overtone here should

not be missed: Heaney had elsewhere described his first period of

residence at Glanmore, County Wicklow as one of "confirmation",

suggesting to John Haffenden that he "consecrated" himself at that point,

sensing "a new conviction, a new dimension".26 It may not be entirely clear what (or even where) this "new dimension" actually is, but spiritual

tenninology conveys the importance that the poet attaches to his change of priorities, as well as something of their nature.

The light of "Exposure" is, however, still only "a glimmer"; if this

poem reflects the dawn of a new source of inspiration, then readers had

to wait until the publication of Seeing Things in 1991 for its ascendancy.

Heaney once suggested that the poet, "stretched between politics and

transcendence", will inevitably be "displaced from a confidence in a

single position by his disposition to be affected by all positions".27 What

surprised many commentators was the apparent "confidence in a single

position" that could be detected throughout Seeing Things.28 Where

revelatory moments once vied with social and political influences for

Heaney's attention, the poet's thoughts would now appear to be devoted

25. Heaney, "The North: Silent Awareness", interview with Monie Begley, in Begley, Rambles in Ireland (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair Co., 1977), pp. 159-70, p. 169.

26. Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 60, p. 65.

27. Heaney, Place and Displacement, p. 8.

28. Michael Hofmann, for example, suggested that Seeing Things offers a "departure in

style, tone and purpose" that takes its author "to a set of poetic positions that are the

very opposite of those with which he started out a generation ago" (London Review

of Books, 15 August 1991, pp. 14-15); Lachlan Mackinnon found "an astonishing

imaginative freedom" in the new volume (TLS, 7 June 1991, p. 28).

369




almost exclusively to "mysteries" (p. 1), to matters of the "spirit" (p. 66,

p. 78) and the "soul" (p. 77, p. 84, p. 85).29 It is not simply that more

emphasis was being placed on the transcendent half of his equation; the

political half appeared to have dropped out of the equation altogether. This presents something of a problem for critics who have continued

to celebrate Heaney primarily as a poet of tension, for if you believe his

major claim on our attention lies in his handling of the debate between

sociopolitical responsibilities and artistic imperatives, then the sudden

absence of this struggle appears to create a vacuum. However, as I have

argued that Heaney's most convincing poetry rarely emerges from the

dialectic between politics and transcendence, the absence of one side of

this debate does not necessarily introduce shortcomings; indeed, it may have distinctly positive implications, as we might now expect fewer of

the "delusory moral conflicts" that so irritate David Lloyd.30 It is "time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten" in Seeing Things. The

burden of ethical tension is relieved, and the transcendent light ?

characteristically elusive and oblique in "Exposure", "Oysters" and

"Away from it All" ? reaches its zenith. Drawing on the gospels for his

imagery in "The Skylight" (p. 37), for example, the poet pictures himself

baptised in a flash flood of blinding daylight:

You were the one for skylights. I opposed Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there, it was all hutch and hatch. The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant

Sky entered and held surprise wide open. For days I felt like an inhabitant Of that house where the man sick of the palsy Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Thanks to a radical roof alteration, Glanmore ? once the site of an artistic

struggle that was to result in the first, tentative expressions of a new

artistic belief?has now become the locus amoenus for miraculous healing, a site for the explicit proclamation of faith.

29. Page references to Heaney, Seeing Things, will be incorporated in the text.

30. Lloyd, "'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity", p. 156.

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I would, however, like to end this essay by clouding a little this glowing

image of the poet of conviction, because although the "delusory moral

conflicts" may have been excised from Heaney's poetry in Seeing Things, not all tension has been dispelled. As a truce was called in the phony war between "politics and transcendence", so a more genuine conflict

emerged, one that has ? in truth ? always been present in this author's

work. It is the conflict between innocence and experience; between

romanticism and scepticism; between faith in poetry as divination, and

doubt brought on by the experience of writing poems that fail to divine.

Such tension can be sensed, for example, in the dual perspective

operating in Seeing Things. There is more to the poetry of this book than

meets the eye of the child whose vision it so frequently draws upon for

inspiration. When we look a little closer we notice that, behind the youth who experiences momentary fusions of "clear truths and mysteries", there lurks an adult who is seeking to re-experience these moments.

Heaney may reach back to the magical territories he often stumbled into

during his childhood, but his poetry belongs to a very different space, one perhaps best summed up by the poet himself (indebted to Matthew

Arnold) as the "bemused, abstracted distance intervening between the

sweetening energy of the original place and the consciousness that's

getting back to it, looking for sweetness".31

Heaney delineates this poignant space most clearly in "A Royal

Prospect" (p. 40). As he recalls an "excursion up the Thames/ To

Hampton Court", the distance between the older couple and their

younger selves seems great enough for the poet to use the third person:

And here are the photographs. Head to one side, In her sleeveless blouse, one bare shoulder high

And one arm loose, a bird with a dropped wing Surprised in cover. He looks at you straight,

Assailable, enamoured, full of vows,

Young dauphin in the once-upon-a-time.

That last phrase indicates that we are viewing an inaccessible, fairy-tale land, until the Proustian 'consciousness' makes an attempt to get back

to this 'original place':

No more photographs, however, now

We are present there as the smell of grass

And suntan oil, standing like their sixth sense Behind them at the entrance to the maze,

Heartbroken for no reason, willing them

To dare it to the centre they are lost for ...

31. Brandes, p. 20.

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In such moments we sense the presence of an older person returning to a scene within his own memory, and recognise another dimension

moving behind that occupied by the ardent youth. The tone of "A Royal Prospect" is characteristic of that which, more

and more frequently, accompanies this poet's contemplation of his own

past, for the innocent surprise and pleasure of Heaney the Younger is

constantly qualified by the ruminations of Heaney the Elder in Seeing

Things. The "ghost of W.B." ? for whom the author of "Settings" xxii

(p. 78) sets some tricky questions ? would recognise the double

perspective operating on events related in the long "Squarings" sequence: there is the "momentary wonder" experienced by the schoolchild, and

yet there is also the wondering of a fifty-year-old public man, his smile

more one of reflection than of joy Sometimes this man is well hidden. The narrator of "Settings" xiv

(p. 70) seems so completely absorbed in his sensory perceptions of the

world around him that he has momentarily disembarked from the

passage of mortality, entering "time that was extra, unforeseen and free"

("Markings", p. 8):

One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.

I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,

Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dogbarks, trainer planes

Cutting and modulating and drawing off. Heat wavered on the immaculate line

And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,

Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

Witnessed itself already taking place In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

Though the afternoon is not specified, memories of dogs barking and

"the heavy shunting of an engine at Castledawson station"32 enable us

to trace it back to Heaney's early youth, and Station Island's "The Railway Children" offers a precedent for childhood viewed as a repository of

visionary innocence:

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

32. Related in "Mossbawn", Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London and Boston:

Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 20.

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Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.33

The author of "Squarings" finds such a magical perspective very much

"worth knowing", but that opening "one afternoon" is not too far

removed from fairy-tale 'the once-upon-a-time' of "A Royal Prospect". This time is marked by "hiatus": the older Heaney knows that the next

train will be along soon to disrupt the child's out-of-time experience. Just as the train's presence is to be inferred from the railway lines, we

can infer the adult's perspective from the first line of the poem, which

gestures towards one of Coleridge's letters:

The poet is dead in me ? my imagination (or rather the somewhat

that had been imaginative) lies, like a cold snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by!

? I was once a volume of Gold Leaf, rising and riding

on every breath

of Fancy ? but I have beaten myself back into weight and density,

and now I sink in quicksilver, year, remain squat and square on the

earth.34

Once again, we find that there is more to the poetry of Seeing Things than meets the eye of the innocent child.

The most convincing poems in Seeing Things strike a balance between

faith and doubt, poems such as the final two in "Squarings" (xlvii,

p. 107; xlviii, p. 108), whose imagery allows us to connect them to

"Oysters" and "Away from it All". Like these earlier seascapes, the

transcendent dimension here makes its presence felt through the medium

of light; unlike "Oysters" and "Away from it All", however, there are no

longer any influences from the land to interfere with the lookout's

contemplation of the mysterious horizon:

The visible sea at a distance from the shore

Or beyond the anchoring grounds Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled The eye that scanned it. But once you turned your back on it, your back

Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's. Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt

Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated

33. Heaney, Station Island, p. 45.

34. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, six vols

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), H, p. 714.

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As if a lambent troop that exercised On the borders of your vision had withdrawn Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

Our undistracted focus hardly results in enlightenment or a sense of

repletion here, though. There is still no 'repose' to be found in the light that flickers "at the rim of the sea"; rather a tantalising lack of revelation

only makes the search more compelling. The absence of worldly pressures does, however, result in a distinct change of tone. Instead of straining to

achieve a clarified perspective, Heaney seems now almost to be engaged in a playground game: the magical "lambent troop" creeps up on him

whilst his back is turned, only to evanesce when he attempts to track its manoeuvres.

As the lookout is tantalised, so the poet expertly tantalises us. With

its playful tone, lack of rhyme, inconsistent line lengths and matter-of

fact diction, "Squarings" xlvii may leave at first the impression of notes

that still await working up into the finished article. But there is

improvisatory craft here: those conspicuously end-stopped short lines

leave blank spaces that the eye cannot help but stray into before it turns

back to the next line; like the poet, we are drawn into the emptiness a

little beyond familiar territory, and our straying reflects sensations

experienced by the narrator. The capitalised conjunction at the head of

line six makes this seem a natural turning point for the poem, the point where the reasoning 'adult' voice might be expected to begin to assert

itself. But instead of elaborating on, or drawing conclusions from, what

has gone before, Heaney's next line intensifies the sense of wondering:

Argus's hundred eyes were transferred to the peacock's tail by the sea

god Hermes; consequently they provide a good foil for the iridescence on the borders of the poet's vision. Another delaying technique is used

in the following two lines:

Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt

Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated

A tentative rhythm and an internal rhyme help to build the suspense, but the resolution that seems promised by that hanging eighth line ending fails to materialise. Indefatigable emptiness persists, and is indeed now

reinforced by the poet's nagging sense that something has escaped him.

A similar sensation had, of course, been behind the self-questioning of "Exposure". But the author of Seeing Things has his eyes fixed in the

right direction, and when faced with shortfall now experiences the almost

pleasurable sensation of being teased. The mortal may once again fail to

achieve full congress with the divine, but he now derives ? and accords ? considerable gratification by devoting all of his attention to foreplay.

A child's amusing game finally gives way to an adult's abstract musing at the beginning of the last poem of "Squarings" (p. 108):

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Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed, Convert to things foreknown; And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through. Seventh heaven may be The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

At any rate, when light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silver lame shivered on the Bann Out in mid-channel between the painted poles, That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.

The 'cold philosophy' of the first half of this poem may hardly grab our

attention, but it makes the charms of the second half all the more

seductive. After the end stops and faltering rhythms of stanza two, we

can sense a poet shifting up through the gears in stanza three, creating a

quickened atmosphere in which he introduces the beguiling image of

water filmed with shivering "silver lame" ? a line which momentarily makes the Bann seem fit for Keats's tremulous "naiad of the rivers", Lamia. This sensual image bears comparison with the finest Heaney has

produced, and the fact that such light breaks over him at first seems to

confirm the revelatory messages elsewhere in Seeing Things: this is the

work of a poet who has not only seen the light, but has himself been

bathed in it. However, a degree of tension remains, for this magical moment "on the road beyond Coleraine" is only an analogy for revelation.

Light broke over Heaney, but he still awaits a time when he will be truly

enlightened. Far from confirming his escape into a bright world of visions,

then, the poem confirms that such a world continues to escape this writer.

Heaney may be committed to the contemplation of transcendent forces; but it remains to be seen whether his future poetry will convincingly channel these forces or just be about them.

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Seamus Heaney: Poet of Tension or Poet of Conviction?

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