Authors: Declan Kiberd
Yet there is in Heaney's writing a developed ethical sense which causes him constantly to question his own evasions. So, in one poem,
when the IRA tars and feathers a woman for fraternizing with British soldiers, he is reminded not only of a parallel case of a Danish woman sacrificed to the land in an ancient fertility rite but also
of
the more accusing parallel between the IRA and himself, since both are guilty of reducing woman to cultural totem.
"Punishment" is as much about pornography as about violence, because pornography is another zone where violence and culture overlap. The poem admits that the logical consummation of the pornographic imagination is death:
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 am the artful voyeur
of your brains 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.
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The
bog in Heaney's
mythos
preserves not just bodies but consciousness. Every layer, "camped on before", tells its own history in the form of geography, and so the adulteress is paradoxically preserved by the sheer weight of all that culture, all that layered earth which suffocated her. The poet partakes of that duplicity, on the one hand sympathizing with
her plight and even worshipping her as a saint, while on the other hand repeating his characteristic sin of fetishizing the beaded nipples like a cheap voyeur, and a voyeur, moreover, whose sin is traceable to his art, being perhaps as great an outrage as his connivance in the tribal revenge.
The bog-myth has the effect of distancing contemporary violence. Some might feel that this is done to come to terms with the strange fact that readers, inured to newspaper photographs of daily atrocity, can feel more for the ancient than the modern victim; others would contend that it is done because feelings about contemporary violence are too pressing for control and so need the objective correlative of a victim of a sacrificial cult. With such distancing comes aestheticization and a seductive conceptual cliché, as the old stereotypes of the "bog Irish" are reasserted with an unexampled complexity. Denis
Donoghue has defended the bog-poems as providing a necessary consolation, a reminder that, however terrible, the current violence has its part in a wider Norm European cycle, releasing minds from the immediate experience to the comfort of "hearing that there is a deeper, truer life going on beneath the bombing and murders and torture".
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The danger is that the violence may seem to have been sanitized and even prettified by art. To guard against it, "Punishment" returns in its closing sequence to current outrages, which refuse to be contained by the mythological structure devised for them. There is in Heaney a real scruple which saves his poems, despite their frequent winsomeness, from becoming too pleased with themselves or with the conclusions they propose. There is also another scruple, a recognition that while the moral community must condemn exponents of violence, the artistic community must try to understand its authenticity and its roots.
The fear is that simple, rudimentary souls will foolishly conclude that to underst
and violence is to connive in apologizing for it. Interestingly, Heaney uses the word "connive" with the phrase "civilized outrage" to indicate his sense that there are no easy solutions to the poetic, as well as the
political, problems posed. Despite this, as Ireland's most celebrated poet, "famous Seamus" has been expected, whenever he appears on television, to dispense political wisdom. He has answered the charge of being "soft on the IRA" by signing the book of condolences at the British Embassy after the murder of Ambassador Ewart-Biggs in 1976: but such gestures have merely prompted critics like the socialist politician
Jim Kemmy to say that the poet would have made a fine Fianna Fáil town-councillor.
However, the worst that can be said against Heaney always turns out
to have been said already of himself by the artist within the poems. So in the ironically-tided
"Exposure", he accuses himself of ambivalence, of a two-facedness masquerading as artistic even-handedness. This poem was written in a period after he had resigned his lectureship in Belfast. He had taken up residence in the woods of County Wicklow, rather in the manner of
Sweeney, that northern king who fled from the madness of battle to seek a different kind of exposure – to nature, to the poetic quarrel with the self rather than the political quarrel with others:
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigré, 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.
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Again, there is ambiguity, for "wood-kerne" was the very term used by English officers for those Irish rebels and rapparees who sought protection in the woods. The guilt at having, in other poems, dignified deeds done by men of action is qualified here by a guilt at not being a man of action himself.
In
Station Island,
his sixth volume, published in 1984, Heaney finally tired of his own pose of scrupulous neutrality and intermittent empathy, opting instead to offer absolute, unqualified empathy to all, smiters and smitten. Here he achieved a different, more complex kind of even-handedness. At various points in the tide-poem all Northern voices are allowed to speak; and the poet no longer professes to speak for or even to them. Instead, they talk at him, accusing him of giving too much relief by his winsome images, of soothing the pain by describing it too beautifully. His shot cousin sees the poet as little better than a traitor, who turns his sordid death into another shapely poem:
You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.
You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly you . . .
(who) saccharined my death with morning dew.
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The artist who had most fully explored the points of intersection between poetry and violence before
Heaney was, of course,
Synge. His Pegeen discovered how large was the gap between poetry and dirty deeds. Synge's own answer to the
aestheticization of violence (which he found in Yeats's writing) was to sharpen rather than soften the focus on that brutality. He went even further, insisting that poetry must become brutal again if it were ever to recover its full humanity. The saccharine of morning dew and Celtic mist must be removed from the "skinny shee", and winsomeness seen for the temptation that it was.
That is also the point to which Heaney came in
Station Island,
a book whose poems are as raw and open as a wound, a book which rejects the distancing frame of the bog poems for a more immediate messiness. The landscapes in it are filled with a technology only half-subsumed back into the earth. In the midst of such jaggedness and indecision, the author becomes a kind of self-critical Christy Mahon, ashamed of his facility with words:
And there I was, incredible to myself
among people far too eager to believe me
and my story, even if it happened to be true.
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Heaney's self-image as a poet has never been as high as one might expect of a best-selling, much-prized author: perhaps this is because his work has achieved awesome complexity and mass popularity in ways which would leave anyone, especially a poet, suspicious. He has at various times likened himself to Hamlet the Dane, hand-wringing over graves, dithering, blathering: but like Synge, that other expert on handling skulls, he knows that art is carrion, a barbarian's booty steeped in a violence which it must nevertheless somehow seem to deplore. As he writes in
"The First Flight":
I was mired in attachment
until they began to pronounce me
a feeder off battlefields.
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i.e. a beneficiary of a violence which he cannot morally support, yet which he can to some degree understand. Conor Cruise O'Brien might contend that this makes him the laureate of the SDLP: and, as a former classmate of John Hume at St. Columb's in Deny,
Heaney might respond "so be it". The strain has sometimes shown, especially in his treatment of sexual conquest: but no Irish artist since Synge has given a fuller account of the relation between poetry and violence, and that in a period when such accounts have often been simplified into mere polemics. If some of Heaney's poems are too patently allusive, too obviously destined for the university seminar (as some of his earlier lyrics were for the school anthology), there is a great middle range in his poems which answers the Irish experience in his generation.
Station Island
was at once an audacious self-identification with a "Catholic" tradition of writing (from Carleton through Joyce to Kavanagh) and a call for an honourable discharge from political or tribal affiliation. It ended with the ghost of Joyce urging the poet to "fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency" and to forget the old, accumulated grudges:
You are raking at dead fires,
a waste of time for somebody your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod's game . . .
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Behind that intimation of freedom lay the example of Sweeney, the king who went mad in battle, threw a saint's book into the lake and fled the North, transformed into a bird aloft over the fields of Ireland, voicing his pain and his pleasure in terse, beautiful poems. With his versions in
Sweeney Astray
(1983) Heaney had freed himself. It was, arguably, this encounter with a famous old text which liberated him – as it had Synge and Austin Clarke – into zones where he could soar and sing.
Thereafter Heaney's poems were much less earthed in identifiable locales and less bound by hard-and-fast tides than the earlier work. Now they tended to take off into the sky or across the waters on a voyage into the unknown. That unknown was a dimension in which man could at last become an almost non-human witness of himself. The poet who had once taken up a position in the real world from which he explored analogies of distant metaphor now reversed the process, occupying a world of metaphor from which he could now and then look back upon the real.
In the title poem of the collection
Seeing Things,
images of flying and sailing are conflated in a skyship from which the artist looks down on passengers in a boat committed to the risky buoyancy of Inishbofin's waters. It might be an audacious image from
Chagall did it not feature, centuries earlier, in
The Book of Clonmacnoise.
These annals recount how another skyship found its progress halted when its anchor became somehow hooked into the monastery's alar-rail. One of the sailors tried but failed to release the anchor-rope, as Heaney relates in another poem from the volume:
"This man can't bear our life here and will drown",
The abbot said, "unless we help him". So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
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This poses the central question: which is more miraculous, the mythical or the mundane? The poet may be a little like the sailor, glad to escape drowning in the political waters that left him "mired". To be out of one's familiar element is to be drowned and at the same time enriched by new possibilities for marvel. The everyday world will henceforth seem strange to such a one, who writes as if from beyond the grave; but the sailor's return to the skyship does not signify a total rejection of quotidian things, merely a resolution to see them in a new light.
After
Seeing Things
Heaney's poetry veered away from the ideal of portraiture to that of vision, with images that were at once audacious and appropriate:
His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable,
When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,
Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.
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The canny Northern urge to check soaring fictions against the available facts was still present (a deflating voice in the collection says "be literal a moment"); but the more powerful poems were undeniably those which allowed the everyday to give way to the crepuscular world of the imagination. The choice was no longer seen as between a metaphor and a real thing but – as the sailor found – between one metaphor and another. In the familiar experience of schoolboys playing an increasingly notional game of football in a deepening twilight, the poet read his new condition:
Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field
As the light died and they kept on playing
Because by then they were playing in their heads
And the actual kicked ball came to them
Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard
Breathing in the dark and skids on grass
Sounded like effort in another world . . .
35
Like the poet, those players had marked out a celestial pitch, a field of force constructed to rules which at no point purport to compete with mundane reality.
As Heaney's voice matured, the poet took on an increasingly
bardic aura, infusing tight quatrains with a variety of registers. A notable number of elements from Gaelic tradition – especially the lore of place associated with
dinnsheanchas –
were to be found in his work and in that of many contemporaries. This revived fashion for poetic geography was questioned in the 1980s by the critic
Vincent Buckley, who detected in it the old Celticist idea of a people foredoomed by landscape and character to an ineffable melancholy. "We should not read into the geography a sadness produced among the human family by history", he warned: "Ireland is a living testimony to the fact that its own people have absorbed history into geography, events into climate".
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The response of the leading poets to such critiques has been to historicize geography, something which Richard Murphy did as early as
The Battle of Aughrim
and again in
Sailing to an Island,
as did John Montague in
The Rough Field
Heaney, likewise, excavated each layer of soil for evidence from remoter periods, the spade striking always inward and downward by a poet self-cast as archaeologist. Derek Mahon's answer, even more radical, was to present the poet as anthropologist, engaged in a search for some sign of the persistence of the person. Such an approach had the merit of looking forward as well as back, which may account for a certain jauntiness in Mahon's rhythms: