As I read yesterday about his funeral with its big, all-star cast of mourners, it occurred to me that Seamus Heaney made a point of criticizing “something too male and assertive” in the complex but largely transcendent “Under Ben Bulben,” Yeats’s funeral poem to himself, which concludes with the lines on Yeats’s own headstone. What would Heaney have thought of 80,000 football spectators applauding Heaney as “the world’s most renowned composer of verse”? In point of fact, it is said to have been an excellent funeral full of humor, tears, and grace notes; but only one poem was read. It occurred to me that, if such things were possible at this late date, Heaney would be the best person to write a poem about his own funeral and burial. A poem like that wouldn’t have the feel of a traditional elegy or eulogy but something more befitting such a humble, passionate, and earth-loving soul. Such a poem would be distinct from the high strains about a man’s surpassing destiny that tend to resound over the airwaves. Like his best verse, it would accessibly epitomize his knack for tactile evocation, sinuous rhythms, and recognizing the manifold aches and terrible contradictions of this life. It would include moving memories that only Heaney could evoke, as he did when he recalled his own secret communion with his mother at her funeral in “Clearances,” or when he recalled his father in “Digging,” equating the poet’s work with “the squat pen” with his father’s work doggedly exhuming potatoes with a spade. Reflecting the harsh realities of a pastoral existence, such a poem would be rich in slimy, rifted, dirt-stained observations on the precariousness of life in the midst of its continuance.
On the day of Heaney’s burial, I was reminded that—as Derek Walcott emphasized in his conversation with his Irish friend and fellow Poet Laureate just last spring at AWP—Heaney generally did not imitate Yeats, the master with whom he is most often compared. Though he was at heart a private poet who remained in touch with his origins as a farmer’s son, Heaney felt an obligation to respond to global events. Still, at no point in his career did Heaney climb up into a Yeatsean heaven or golden Byzantine dome of high art, nor did he pursue the sweep of the Whitmanean sublime. Instead, he painstakingly delved toward a vertical earthbound frontier, where–as when he excavates a multiplex ancient homeland in poems inspired by P.V. Globb’s The Bog People–“The wet centre is bottomless” (“Bogland”). He relishes the way each layer of his history “has been camped on before,” and he accepts that the center cannot hold. He admits that, in returning to a land “Of country people / Not knowing their tongue,” he “will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home” (“The Tollund Man”). In these works, there are no pretentions to a mythos of reassurance or to a mighty principle of political order underlying everything.
This is not to say that Heaney should not be grouped among the political, postcolonial poets—such as Neruda and Milosz—who have produced some of the most interesting work of our age by redefining the sociopolitical center in terms of the “periphery” of America and Europe. But Heaney remained resistant to slogans, partisanship and propaganda. Only he could address the sanguinary strife of late twentieth century Irish history—not to mention ongoing sexism in the West—by anatomizing bodies extracted from the alluvial mud of ancient peat bogs. It is well known that Heaney grew up Irish Catholic in Northern Ireland under British rule. In the poem “Punishment,” he contemplates the naked, peat-tarred body of an Iron Age girl submitted to ritual sacrifice for committing adultery:
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur…
Heaney has the courage to admit to his own voyeurism and sinfulness, even as he lays claim to deep empathy. At this moment, the poet is simultaneously referring to Catholic women in modern Ireland who have been shaven, stripped, tarred, and chained to railings by the IRA for keeping company with British soldiers. Surprisingly, the speaker does not claim to have sided fully with humane, civilized people who express public outrage at such unspeakable atrocities. He has to admit, after all, that he did nothing to prevent such crimes and is guilty of a subtle kind of treachery with which we are all familiar:
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.
He admits even to having committed pagan, tribal vengeance in his heart. Groups can be more immoral than individuals, but the poet can still speak the truth about political violence by examining how even he has never relinquished his ambivalence. (In “Terminus,” he asks, “Is it any wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?”; “I grew up in between.”)
As he suggests in his essays and his often-anthologized lecture “Feeling into Words,” Heaney was not unaware that he was influenced as much by Hardy’s grim, unsentimental “regionalism” and even Wordsworth’s intricately nostalgic journeys through his own rural west country as by Yeats’s mid-career interest in the World Soul of Irish art. But, as was the case for Joyce, bringing the present into a significant relation to the past still was always Heaney’s agenda. Heaney himself called this jolt of reapprehension “a returning of the world itself.” It is just that he focused on his relation to local traditions and to the world of his own memories and inner conflicts. In “Station Island”—where he ambitiously merges present and past in the midst of his reworking of canonical myth—he even has the ghost of Joyce challenge him, a version of Dante’s Pilgrim, to “keep at a tangent” when the circle widens and “swim out on [his] own” to find his own “echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, // elver-gleams in the dark….”
With these thoughts in mind, I’ll conclude by presenting a Heaney poem entitled “Personal Helicon” that I used to hand out to students in my poetry writing classes. I offered it as a “Helicon” for them, asking them to follow this example, to write poems about their own “mirrors” and personal source materials. I love the various ways in which this piece presents personal reflection as a source of inspiration:
Personal Helicon
-for Michael Longley
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
Everything described here—however strewn with heteroclite growths and implements–is also part of a self-portrait. The poem contains echoes of Wordsworth’s boy of Winander, who would call out to owls in the listening dark…that they might answer him. As in the language of Jutland, where the bog people were exhumed, Heaney’s lexicon includes a good number of hardy Anglo-Saxon terms such as “fungus” and “brickyard.” Very few of the rhymes are predictable—and Heaney would of course conclude by rhyming “rhyme” with “slime” and “into some spring” with “echoing.” Anyway, this is the only “Helicon” I know of where a rat can slap across the poet’s reflection and the Olympian “spring” in question is allegedly “beneath all adult dignity”—which of course it is not, because Heaney is simultaneously referring to what draws the gaze of his mind’s eye as he writes, including the “trapped sky” and “darkness” from which the poem emerges, stanza by stanza. This descent, this “dark drop” into the wet earth, is more a resurrection than a burial.
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