Opened Ground

by Seamus Heaney

  In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.

  Which is a way of saying that I have never quite climbed down from the arm of that sofa. I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it. But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, in the sense that the effort is to repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds. As if the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a reformation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.

  I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find it, for example, in the repetition of that refrain of Yeats’s, ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare’, with its tone of supplication, its pivots of strength in the words ‘build’ and ‘house’ and its acknowledgement of dissolution in the word ‘empty’. I find it also in the triangle of forces held in equilibrium by the triple rhyme of ‘fantasies’ and ‘enmities’ and ‘honey-bees’, and in the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as a given form within the language. Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats’s work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are credit able, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

  Index of Titles

  Act of Union 1

  After a Killing 1

  Afterwards, An 1

  Alphabets 1

  Anahorish 1

  Antaeus 1

  Artist, An 1

  At Banagher 1

  At the Water’s Edge 1

  At the Wellhead 1

  August Night, An 1

  ‘Aye’ 1

  Backward Look, The 1

  Badgers 1

  Bait 1

  Bann Clay 1

  Barn, The 1

  Bat on the Road, A 1

  Beyond Sargasso 1

  Birthplace, The 1

  Blackberry-Picking 1

  Bog Oak 1

  Bog Queen 1

  Bogland 1

  Bone Dreams 1

  Broagh 1

  Bye-Child 1

  Call, A 1

  Cassandra 1

  Casualty 1

  Changes 1

  Chekhov on Sakhalin 1

  Churning Day 1

  Clearances 1

  Cleric, The 1

  Cloistered 1

  Constable Calls, A 1

  Cot, The 1

  Crossings 1

  Damson 1

  Death of a Naturalist 1

  Digging 1

  Disappearing Island, The 1

  Diviner, The 1

  Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also, A 1

  Dream of Jealousy, A 1

  Drifting Off 1

  Drink of Water, A 1

  England’s Difficulty 1

  Errand, The 1

  Exposure 1

  Field of Vision 1

  Field Work 1

  Fireside 1

  First Flight, The 1

  First Gloss, The 1

  First Kingdom, The 1

  Flight Path, The, from 1

  Fodder 1

  Follower 1

  For Bernard and Jane McCabe 1

  Forge, The 1

  Fosterage 1

  Fosterling 1

  From the Canton of Expectation 1

  From the Frontier of Writing 1

  From the Republic of Conscience 1

  Funeral Rites 1

  Gifts of Rain 1

  Given Note, The 1

  Glanmore Revisited, from 1

  Glanmore Sonnets 1

  Golden Bough, The 1

  Good-night 1

  Granite Chip 1

  Grauballe Man, The 1

  Gravel Walks, The 1

  Grotus and Coventina 1

  Guttural Muse, The 1

  Hailstones 1

  Harvest Bow, The 1

  Haw Lantern, The 1

  Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann, A 1

  Hercules and Antaeus 1

  Hermit, The 1

  His Dawn Vision 1

  His Reverie of Water 1

  Holly 1

  In Illo Tempore 1

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge 1

  In the Beech 1

  Incertus 1

  July 1

  Keeping Going 1

  King of the Ditchbacks, The 1

  Kinship 1

  Kite for Michael and Christopher, A 1

  Land 1

  Leavings 1

  Lifting 1

  Lightenings 1

  Limbo 1

  Lough Neagh Sequence, A 1

  Lustral Sonnet 1

  Making Strange 1

  Man and Boy 1

  Markings 1

  Master, The 1

  Mid-Term Break 1

  Milk Factory, The 1

  Ministry of Fear, The 1

  Mint 1

  Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication 1

  Mother of the Groom 1

  Mud Vision, The 1

  Mycenae Lookout 1

  Names of the Hare, The 1

  Nerthus 1

  Nesting-Ground 1

  New Song, A 1

  Night Drive 1

  Nights, The 1

  North 1

  Old Icons, The 1

  Old Smoothing Iron 1

  On the Road 1

  Oracle 1

  Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966 1

  Other Side, The 1

  Otter, The 1

  Outlaw, The 1

  Oysters 1

  Peninsula, The 1

  Personal Helicon 1

  Pillowed Head, A 1

  Pitchfork, The 1

  Plantation, The 1

  Poem 1

  ‘Poet’s Chair’ 1

  Postscript 1

  Punishment 1

  Railway Children, The 1

  Rain Stick, The 1

  Relic of Memory 1

  Requiem for the Croppies 1

  Return, The 1

  Riddle, The 1

  Royal Prospect, A 1

  St Kevin and the Blackbird 1

  Sandstone Keepsake 1

  Scrabble 1

  Scribes, The 1

  Seed Cutters, The 1

  Seeing Things 1

  Serenades 1

  Servant Boy 1

  Setting 1

  Settings 1

  Settle Bed, The 1

  Sheelagh na Gig 1

  Shelf Life, from 1

  Shore Woman 1

  Sibyl 1

  Singer’s House, The 1

  Skunk, The 1

  Skylight, The 1

  Sloe Gin 1

  Sofa in the Forties, A 1

  Song 1

  Spoonbait, The 1

  Squarings 1

  Station Island 1

  Stations of the West, The 1

  Stone from Delphi 1

  Stone Verdict, The 1

  Strand, The 1

  Strand at Lough Beg, The 1

&nbs
p; Strange Fruit 1

  Summer 1969 1

  Summer Home 1

  Sunlight 1

  Sweeney in Flight 1

  Sweeney Redivivus 1

  Sweeney Redivivus, from 1

  Swing, The 1

  Terminus 1

  Thatcher 1

  Tinder 1

  Tollund 1

  Tollund Man, The 1

  Toome 1

  Toome Road, The 1

  Transgression, A 1

  Trial Runs 1

  Triptych 1

  Two Lorries 1

  Two Stick Drawings 1

  Ugolino 1

  Underground, The 1

  Undine 1

  Up the Shore 1

  Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces 1

  Villanelle for an Anniversary 1

  Vision 1

  Visitant 1

  Voices from Lemnos 1

  Walk, The 1

  Wanderer, The 1

  Watchman’s War, The 1

  Wedding Day 1

  Weighing In 1

  Westering 1

  Whatever You Say Say Nothing, from 1

  Wheels within Wheels 1

  Whinlands 1

  Whitby-sur-Moyola 1

  Widgeon 1

  Wife’s Tale, The 1

  Wishing Tree, The 1

  Wolfe Tone 1

  Index of First Lines

  A boat that did not rock or wobble once 1

  A carter’s trophy 1

  A cobble thrown a hundred years ago 1

  A gland agitating 1

  A hurry of bell-notes 1

  A latch lifting, an edged den of light 1

  A line goes out of sight and out of mind 1

  A rowan like a lipsticked girl 1

  A shadow his father makes with joined hands 1

  A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze 1

  A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard 1

  A stagger in air 1

  A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast 1

  Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar 1

  All gone into the world of light? Perhaps 1

  All I know is a door into the dark 1

  All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling 1

  All through that Sunday afternoon 1

  All year round the whin 1

  All year the flax-dam festered in the heart 1

  Always there would be stories of lights 1

  An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward 1

  And lightening? One meaning of that 1

  And some time make the time to drive out west 1

  And strike this scene in gold too, in relief 1

  And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird 1

  And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley 1

  Angling shadows of itself are what 1

  Any point in that wood 1

  As a child, they could not keep me from wells 1

  As he prowled the rim of his clearing 1

  As if a trespasser 1

  As if he had been poured 1

  As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope 1

  As you came with me in silence 1

  As you plaited the harvest bow 1

  At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness 1

  At Troy, at Athens, what I most dearly 1

  Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold 1

  Be literal a moment. Recollect 1

  Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning 1

  Between my finger and my thumb 1

  Big voices in the womanless kitchen 1

  Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped 1

  Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back 1

  Breaking and entering: from early on 1

  Caedmon too I was lucky to have known 1

  ‘Catch the old one first’ 1

  Choose one set of tracks and track a hare 1

  Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace 1

  Claire O’Reilly used her granny’s stick 1

  Cloudburst and steady downpour now 1

  Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick 1

  ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal 1

  Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone 1

  Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea 1

  Everything flows. Even a solid man 1

  Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina 1

  Fear of affectation made her affect 1

  Fingertips just tipping you would send you 1

  Fishermen at Ballyshannon 1

  For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat 1

  For certain ones what was written may come true 1

  Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom 1

  Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her 1

  Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood 1

  Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert 1

  He dwelt in himself 1

  He is wintering out 1

  He lived there in the unsayable lights 1

  He slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silt 1

  He would drink by himself 1

  Heather and kesh and turf-stacks reappear 1

  Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd 1

  Hide in the hollow trunk 1

  His bicycle stood at the window-sill 1

  His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable 1

  ‘Hold on, ‘ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him’ 1

  Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind 1

  I am afraid 1

  I can feel the tug 1

  I dreamt we slept on a moss in Donegal 1

  I had come to the edge of the water 1

  I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent 1

  I heard new words prayed at cows 1

  I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife 1

  I lay waiting 1

  I love the thought of his anger 1

  I met a girl from Derrygarve 1

  (I misremembered. He went down on all fours) 1

  I moved like a double agent among the big concepts 1

  I never warmed to them 1

  I returned to a long strand 1

  I sat all morning in the college sick bay 1

  I shouldered a kind of manhood 1

  I sit under Rand McNally’s 1

  I stepped it, perch by perch 1

  I stirred wet sand and gathered myself 1

  I stood between them 1

  I thought of her as the wishing tree that died 1

  I thought of walking round and round a space 1

  I used to lie with an ear to the line 1

  I was a lookout posted and forgotten 1

  I was four but I turned four hundred maybe 1

  I was parked on a high road, listening 1

  I went disguised in it 1

  I’m writing this just after an encounter 1

  In a semicircle we toed the line 1

  In famous poems by the sage Han Shan 1

  In ponds, drains, dead canals 1

  In the first flush of the Easter holidays 1

  In the last minutes he said more to her 1

  Inishbofin on a Sunday morning 1

  It could be a jaw-bone 1

  It had been badly shot 1

  It is a kind of chalky russet 1

  It is December in Wicklow 1

  It kept treading air 1

  It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles 1

  It rained when it should have snowed 1

  It was more sleepwalk than spasm 1

  It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes 1

  Kelly’s kept an unlicensed bull, well away 1

  Kinned by hieroglyphic 1

  Labourers pedalling at ease 1

  Lamps dawdle in the field at midnight 1

  Late August, given heavy rain and sun 1

  Late summer, and at midnight 1

  Leaving the white glow of filling stations 1

  Light as a ski
ff, manoeuvrable 1

  Light was calloused in the leaded panes 1

  Like a convalescent, I took the hand 1

  Love, I shall perfect for you the child 1

  Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl 1

  Memory as a building or a city 1

  Mountain air from the mountain up behind 1

  Morning stir in the hostel. A pot 1

  ‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach’ 1

  My cheek was hit and hit 1

  My father worked with a horse-plough 1

  My mouth holds round 1

  My ‘place of clear water’ 1

  My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge 1

  No such thing 1

  Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one 1

  Often I watched her lift it 1

  On Devenish I heard a snipe 1

  On my first night in the Gaeltacht 1

  On St Brigid’s Day the new life could be entered 1

  On the day of their excursion up the Thames 1

  On the most westerly Blasket 1

  ‘On you go now! Run, son, like the devil’ 1

  Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep 1

  Once we presumed to found ourselves for good 1

  One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf 1

  One morning early I met armoured cars 1

  Or, as we said 1

  Our shells clacked on the plates 1

  Outside the kitchen window a black rat 1

  Overhang of grass and seedling birch 1

  Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone 1

  River gravel. In the beginning, that 1

  Riverback, the long rigs 1

  Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in 1

  Running water never disappointed 1

  Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before 1

  Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch 1

  Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe 1

  Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek 1