New Selected Poems (1988-2013)

by Seamus Heaney

  That could have been excitement or the death-throes

  Turned into lift-off, big sure sweeps and dips

  Above the water – no rafter-skimming souls

  Translating in and out of the house of life

  But air-heavers, far heavier than the air.

  Yet something in us had unhoused itself

  At the sight of them, so that when she bent

  To turn the key she only half-turned it

  And spoke, as it were, directly to the windscreen,

  In profile and in thought, the wheel at arm’s length,

  Averring that this time, yes, it had indeed

  Been useful to stop; then inclined her driver’s brow

  Which shook a little as the ignition fired.

  The Clothes Shrine

  It was a whole new sweetness

  In the early days to find

  Light white muslin blouses

  On a see-through nylon line

  Drip-drying in the bathroom

  Or a nylon slip in the shine

  Of its own electricity –

  As if St Brigid once more

  Had rigged up a ray of sun

  Like the one she’d strung on air

  To dry her own cloak on

  (Hard-pressed Brigid, so

  Unstoppably on the go) –

  The damp and slump and unfair

  Drag of the workaday

  Made light of and got through

  As usual, brilliantly.

  Glanmore Eclogue

  MYLES

  A house and ground. And your own bay tree as well

  And time to yourself. You’ve landed on your feet.

  If you can’t write now, when will you ever write?

  POET

  A woman changed my life. Call her Augusta

  Because we arrived in August, and from now on

  This month’s baled hay and blackberries and combines

  Will spell Augusta’s bounty.

  MYLES

  Outsiders own

  The country nowadays, but even so

  I don’t begrudge you. You’re Augusta’s tenant

  And that’s enough. She has every right,

  Maybe more right than most, to her quarter acre.

  She knows the big glen inside out, and everything

  Meliboeus ever wrote about it,

  All the tramps he met tramping the roads

  And all he picked up, listening in a loft

  To servant girls colloguing in the kitchen.

  Talk about changed lives! Those were the days –

  Land Commissions making tenants owners,

  Empire taking note at last too late …

  But now with all this money coming in

  And peace being talked up, the boot’s on the other foot.

  First it was Meliboeus’ people

  Went to the wall, now it will be us.

  Small farmers here are priced out of the market.

  POET

  Backs to the wall and empty pockets: Meliboeus

  Was never happier than when he was on the road

  With people on their uppers. Loneliness

  Was his passport through the world. Midge-angels

  On the face of water, the first drop before thunder,

  A stranger on a wild night, out in the rain falling.

  His spirit lives for me in things like that.

  MYLES

  Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man.

  No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage

  Nor blisters on your hand nor weather-worries.

  POET

  Meliboeus would have called me ‘Mr Honey’.

  MYLES

  Our old language that Meliboeus learnt

  Has lovely songs. What about putting words

  On one of them, words that the rest of us

  Can understand, and singing it here and now?

  POET

  I have this summer song for the glen and you:

  Early summer, cuckoo cuckoos,

  Welcome, summer is what he sings.

  Heather breathes on soft bog-pillows.

  Bog-cotton bows to moorland wind.

  The deer’s heart skips a beat; he startles.

  The sea’s tide fills, it rests, it runs.

  Season of the drowsy ocean.

  Tufts of yellow-blossoming whins.

  Bogbanks shine like ravens’ wings.

  The cuckoo keeps on calling Welcome.

  The speckled fish jumps; and the strong

  Warrior is up and running.

  A little nippy chirpy fellow

  Hits the highest note there is;

  The lark sings out his clear tidings.

  Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

  Sonnets from Hellas

  1 Into Arcadia

  It was opulence and amen on the mountain road.

  Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer

  Who’d worked in Melbourne once and now trained water

  Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed

  Known in Hellas, probably, since Hesiod –

  That was the least of it. When we crossed the border

  From Argos into Arcadia, and farther

  Into Arcadia, a lorry load

  Of apples had burst open on the road

  So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them

  But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered,

  Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd

  With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,

  Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.

  2 Conkers

  All along the dank, sunk, rock-floored lane

  To the acropolis in Sparta, we couldn’t help

  Tramping on burst shells and crunching down

  The high-gloss horse-chestnuts. I thought of kelp

  And foals’ hooves, bladderwort, dubbed leather

  As I bent to gather them, a hint of ordure

  Coming and going off their tainted pith.

  Cyclopic stone on each side of the path.

  Rings of defence. Breached walls. The looted conkers

  Gravid in my satchel, swinging nicely.

  Then a daylight moon appeared behind Dimitri

  As he sketched and squared his shoulders like a centaur’s

  And nodded, nodded, nodded towards the spouses,

  Heard but not seen behind much thick acanthus.

  3 Pylos

  Barbounia schooled below the balcony –

  Shadows on shelving sand in sandy Pylos.

  Wave-clip and flirt, tide-slap and flop and flow:

  I woke to the world there like Telemachos,

  Young again in the whitewashed light of morning

  That flashed on the ceiling like an early warning

  From myself to be more myself in the mast-bending

  Marine breeze, to key the understanding

  To that image of the bow strung as a lyre

  Robert Fitzgerald spoke of: Harvard Nestor,

  Sponsor and host, translator of all Homer,

  His wasted face in profile, ceiling-staring

  As he schooled me in the course, not yet past caring,

  Scanning the offing. Far-seeing shadower.

  4 The Augean Stables

  My favourite bas-relief: Athene showing

  Heracles where to broach the river bank

  With a nod of her high helmet, her staff sunk

  In the exact spot, the Alpheus flowing

  Out of its course into the deep dung strata

  Of King Augeas’ reeking yard and stables.

  Sweet dissolutions from the water tables,

  Blocked doors and packed floors deluging like gutters …

  And it was there in Olympia, down among green willows,

  The lustral wash and run of river shallows,

  That we heard of Sean Brown’s murder in the grounds

  Of
Bellaghy GAA Club. And imagined

  Hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt

  In the car park where his athlete’s blood ran cold.

  5 Castalian Spring

  Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers

  Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.

  This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters

  Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate

  That much to myself and be the poet

  Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff –

  But the inner water sanctum was roped off

  When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,

  And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!

  So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,

  The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,

  Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless

  Anger draining away, on terraces

  Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

  6 Desfina

  Mount Parnassus placid on the skyline:

  Slieve na mBard, Knock Filiocht, Ben Duan.

  We gaelicized new names for Poetry Hill

  As we wolfed down horta, tarama and houmos

  At sunset in the farmyard, drinking ouzos,

  Pretending not to hear the Delphic squeal

  Of the streel-haired cailleach in the scullery.

  Then it was time to head into Desfina

  To allow them to sedate her. And so retsina,

  Anchovies, squid, dolmades, french fries even.

  My head was light, I was hyper, boozed, borean

  As we bowled back down towards the olive plain,

  Siren-tyred and manic on the horn

  Round hairpin bends looped like boustrophedon.

  Vitruviana

  for Felim Egan

  In the deep pool at Portstewart, I waded in

  Up to the chest, then stood there half-suspended

  Like Vitruvian man, both legs wide apart,

  Both arms out buoyant to the fingertips,

  Oxter-cogged on water.

  My head was light,

  My backbone plumb, my boy-nipples bisected

  And tickled by the steel-zip cold meniscus.

  *

  On the hard scrabble of the junior football pitch

  Where Leo Day, the college ‘drillie’, bounced

  And counted and kept us all in line

  In front of the wooden horse – ‘One! Two! In! Out!’ –

  We upped and downed and scissored arms and legs

  And spread ourselves on the wind’s cross, felt our palms

  As tautly strung as Francis of Assisi’s

  In Giotto’s mural, where angelic neon

  Zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata.

  *

  On Sandymount Strand I can connect

  Some bits and pieces. My seaside whirligig.

  The cardinal points. The grey matter of sand

  And sky. And a light that is down to earth

  Beginning to fan out and open up.

  Audenesque

  in memory of Joseph Brodsky

  Joseph, yes, you know the beat.

  Wystan Auden’s metric feet

  Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,

  Laying William Yeats to rest.

  Therefore, Joseph, on this day,

  Yeats’s anniversary,

  (Double-crossed and death-marched date,

  January twenty-eight),

  Its measured ways I tread again

  Quatrain by constrained quatrain,

  Meting grief and reason out

  As you said a poem ought.

  Trochee, trochee, falling: thus

  Grief and metre order us.

  Repetition is the rule,

  Spins on lines we learnt at school.

  Repetition, too, of cold

  In the poet and the world,

  Dublin Airport locked in frost,

  Rigor mortis in your breast.

  Ice no axe or book will break,

  No Horatian ode unlock,

  No poetic foot imprint,

  Quatrain shift or couplet dint,

  Ice of Archangelic strength,

  Ice of this hard two-faced month,

  Ice like Dante’s in deep hell

  Makes your heart a frozen well.

  Pepper vodka you produced

  Once in Western Massachusetts

  With the reading due to start

  Warmed my spirits and my heart

  But no vodka, cold or hot,

  Aquavit or uisquebaugh

  Brings the blood back to your cheeks

  Or the colour to your jokes,

  Politically incorrect

  Jokes involving sex and sect,

  Everything against the grain,

  Drinking, smoking like a train.

  In a train in Finland we

  Talked last summer happily,

  Swapping manuscripts and quips,

  Both of us like cracking whips

  Sharpened up and making free,

  Heading west for Tampere

  (West that meant for you, of course,

  Lenin’s train-trip in reverse).

  Nevermore that wild speed-read,

  Nevermore your tilted head

  Like a deck where mind took off

  With a mind-flash and a laugh,

  Nevermore that rush to pun

  Or to hurry through all yon

  Jammed enjambements piling up

  As you went above the top,

  Nose in air, foot to the floor,

  Revving English like a car

  You hijacked when you robbed its bank

  (Russian was your reserve tank).

  Worshipped language can’t undo

  Damage time has done to you:

  Even your peremptory trust

  In words alone here bites the dust.

  Dust-cakes, still – see Gilgamesh –

  Feed the dead. So be their guest.

  Do again what Auden said

  Good poets do: bite, break their bread.

  To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert

  You were one of those from the back of the north wind

  Whom Apollo favoured and would keep going back to

  In the winter season. And among your people you

  Remained his herald whenever he’d departed

  And the land was silent and summer’s promise thwarted.

  You learnt the lyre from him and kept it tuned.

  Bodies and Souls

  1 In the Afterlife

  It will be like following Jim Logue, the caretaker,

  As he goes to sweep our hair off that classroom floor

  Where the school barber set up once a fortnight,

  Falling into step as he does his rounds,

  Glimmerman of dorms and silent landings,

  Of the refectory with its solid, crest-marked delph,

  The ground-floor corridor, the laundry pile

  And boots tagged for the cobbler. Was that your name

  On a label? Were you a body or a soul?

  2 Nights of ’57

  It wasn’t asphodel but mown grass

  We practised on each night after night prayers

  When we lapped the college front lawn in bare feet,

  Heel-bone and heart-thud, open-mouthed for summer.

  The older I get, the quicker and the closer

  I hear those labouring breaths and feel the coolth.

  3 The Bereaved

  Set apart. First out down the aisle

  Like brides. Or those boys who were permitted

  To leave the study early for music practice –

  Privileged and unenvied, left alone

  In the four bare walls to face the exercise,

  Eyes shut, shoulders straight back, cold hands out

  Above the keys. And then the savagery

  Of the piano music’s music going wrong.

&nb
sp; from Electric Light

  Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sybilline English.

  Splashes between a ship and dock, to which,

  Animula, I would come alive in time

  As ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough

  Towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train,

  The very ‘there-you-are-and-where-are-you?’

  Of poetry itself. Backs of houses

  Like the back of hers, meat-safes and mangles

  In the railway-facing yards of fleeting England,

  An allotment scarecrow among patted rigs,

  Then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance,

  Fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

  To Southwark too I came,

  From tube-mouth into sunlight,

  Moyola-breath by Thames’s ‘straunge stronde’.

  A Shiver

  The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,

  Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast

  As shields in a testudo, spine and waist

  A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage;

  The way its iron head planted the sledge

  Unyieldingly as a club-footed last;

  The way you had to heft and then half-rest

  Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage

  About to be let fly: does it do you good

  To have known it in your bones, directable,

  Withholdable at will,

  A first blow that could make air of a wall,