Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  This was always his impulse, and it is a pleasure to watch his strategies for showing ‘deeper, general human perspectives’ develop. In the Selected Poems, dramatic monologues and adaptations of Greek myth were among his preferred approaches. There can be no more beautiful expression of necessity simultaneously recognized and lamented than the early ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, just as there can be no poem more aghast at those who have power to hurt and who then do hurt than ‘Apollo and Marsyas’. Both works deserve to be quoted in full, but here is the latter, in the translation of Czesław Miłosz:

  The real duel of Apollo

  with Marsyas

  (absolute ear

  versus immense range)

  takes place in the evening

  when as we already know

  the judges

  have awarded victory to the god

  bound tight to a tree

  meticulously stripped of his skin

  Marsyas

  howls

  before the howl reaches his tall ears

  he reposes in the shadow of that howl

  shaken by a shudder of disgust

  Apollo is cleaning his instrument

  only seemingly

  is the voice of Marsyas

  monotonous

  and composed of a single vowel

  Aaa

  in reality

  Marsyas relates

  the inexhaustible wealth

  of his body

  bald mountains of liver

  white ravines of aliment

  rustling forests of lung

  sweet hillocks of muscle

  joints bile blood and shudders

  the wintry wind of bone

  over the salt of memory

  shaken by a shudder of disgust

  Apollo is cleaning his instrument

  now to the chorus

  is joined the backbone of Marsyas

  in principle the same A

  only deeper with the addition of rust

  this is already beyond the endurance

  of the god with nerves of artificial fibre

  along a gravel path

  hedged with box

  the victor departs

  wondering

  whether out of Marsyas’ howling

  there will not some day arise

  a new kind

  of art – let us say – concrete

  suddenly

  at his feet

  falls a petrified nightingale

  he looks back

  and sees

  that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened

  is white

  completely

  About suffering, he was never wrong, this young master. The Polish experience of cruelty lies behind the poem, and when it first appeared it would have had the extra jangle of anti-poetry about it. There is the affront of the subject matter, the flirtation with horror-movie violence, and the conscious avoidance of anything ‘tender-minded’. Yet the triumph of the thing is that while it remains set upon an emotional collision course, it still manages to keep faith with ‘whatever shares / The eternal reciprocity of tears’. Indeed, this is just the poetry which Yeats would have needed to convince him of the complacency of his objection to Wilfred Owen’s work (passive suffering is not a subject for poetry), although, in fact, it is probably only Wilfred Owen (tender-minded) and Yeats (tough-minded) who brought into poetry in English a ‘vision of reality’ the equal of this one. The petrified nightingale, the tree with white hair, the monotonous Aaa of the new art, each of these inventions is as terrible as it is artful, each is uttered from the dry well of an objective voice. The demon of perspective rules while the supra-individual principle reads history through a pane of Francescan ice, tranquilly, impassively, as if the story were chiselled into stone.

  The most celebrated instance of Herbert’s capacity to outface what the stone ordains occurs in his poem ‘Pebble’. Once again, this is an ars poetica, but the world implied by the poem would exclude any discourse that was so fancied-up as to admit a term like ars poetica in the first place. Yet ‘Pebble’ is several steps ahead of satire and even one or two steps beyond the tragic gesture. It is written by a poet who grew up, as it were, under the white-haired tree but who possessed no sense either of the oddity or the election of his birthright. In so far as it accepts the universe with a sort of disappointed relief – as though at the last minute faith were to renege on its boast that it could move mountains and settle back into stoicism – it demonstrates the truth of Patrick Kavanagh’s contention that tragedy is half-born comedy. The poem’s force certainly resides in its impersonality, yet its tone is almost ready to play itself on through into the altogether more lenient weather of personality itself.

  The pebble

  is a perfect creature

  equal to itself

  mindful of its limits

  filled exactly

  with a pebbly meaning

  with a scent which does not remind one of anything

  does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

  its ardour and coldness

  are just and full of dignity

  I feel a heavy remorse

  when I hold it in my hand

  and its noble body

  is permeated by false warmth

  – Pebbles cannot be tamed

  to the end they will look at us

  with a calm and very clear eye

  This has about it all the triumph and completion of the ‘finished man among his enemies’. You wonder where else an art that is so contained and self-verifying can possibly go – until you open Report from the Besieged City. There you discover that the perfect moral health of the earlier poetry was like the hard pure green of the ripening apple: now the core of the thing is less packed with tartness and the whole œuvre seems to mellow and sway on the bough of some tree of unforbidden knowledge.

  There remain, however, traces of the acerbic observer; this, for example, in the poem where Damastes (also known as Procrustes) speaks:

  I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man

  I compared the travellers I caught with this bed

  it was hard to avoid – I admit – stretching limbs cutting legs

  the patients died but the more there were who perished

  the more I was certain my research was right

  the goal was noble progress demands victims

  This voice is stereophonic in that we are listening to it through two speakers, one from the set-up Damastes, the other from the privileged poet, and we always know whose side we are on. We are meant to read the thing exactly as it is laid out for us. We stand with Signorelli at the side of the picture, observantly. We are still, in other words, in the late spring of impersonality. But when we come to the poem on the Emperor Claudius, we are in the summer of fullest personality. It is not that Herbert has grown lax or that any phoney tolerance – understanding all and therefore forgiving all – has infected his attitude. It is more that he has eased his own grimness, as if realizing that the stern brows he turns upon the world merely contribute to the weight of the world’s anxiety instead of lightening it; therefore, he can afford to become more genial personally without becoming one whit less impersonal in his judgements and perceptions. So, in his treatment of ‘The Divine Claudius’, the blood and the executions and the infernal whimsicality are not passed over, yet Herbert ends up speaking for his villain with a less than usually forked tongue:

  I expanded the frontiers of the empire

  by Brittany Mauretania

  and if I recall correctly Thrace

  my death was caused by my wife Agrippina

  and an uncontrollable passion for boletus

  mushrooms – the essence of the forest – became the essence of death

  descendants – remember with proper respect and honour

  at least one merit of the divine Claudius

  I added new signs and sounds to our alphabet

&n
bsp; expanded the limits of speech that is the limits of freedom

  the letters I discovered – beloved daughters – Digamma and Antisigma led my shadow

  as I pursued the path with tottering steps to the dark land of Orkus

  There is more of the inward gaze of Fra Angelico here, and indeed, all through the new book, Herbert’s mind is fixed constantly on last things. Classical and Christian visions of the afterlife are drawn upon time and again, and in ‘Mr Cogito – Notes from the House of the Dead’, we have an opportunity of hearing how the terrible cry of Marsyas sounds in the new acoustic of the later work. Mr Cogito, who lies with his fellows ‘in the depths of the temple of the absurd’, hears there, at ten o’clock in the evening, ‘a voice // masculine / slow / commanding / the rising / of the dead’. The second section of the poem proceeds:

  we called him Adam

  meaning taken from the earth

  at ten in the evening

  when the lights were switched off

  Adam would begin his concert

  to the ears of the profane

  it sounded

  like the howl of a person in fetters

  for us

  an epiphany

  he was

  anointed

  the sacrificial animal

  author of psalms

  he sang

  the inconceivable desert

  the call of the abyss

  the noose on the heights

  Adam’s cry

  was made

  of two or three vowels

  stretched out like ribs on the horizon

  This new Adam has brought us as far as the old Marsyas took us, but now the older Herbert takes up the burden and, in a third section, brings the poem further still:

  after a few concerts

  he fell silent

  the illumination of his voice

  lasted a brief time

  he didn’t redeem

  his followers

  they took Adam away

  or he retreated

  into eternity

  the source

  of the rebellion

  was extinguished

  and perhaps

  only I

  still hear

  the echo

  of his voice

  more and more slender

  quieter

  further and further away

  like music of the spheres

  the harmony of the universe

  so perfect

  it is inaudible.

  Mr Cogito’s being depends upon such cogitations (one remembers his defence of ‘the magnificent sensation of pain’), thought unlike Hamlet in Fortinbras’s elegy, who ‘crunched the air only to vomit’, Mr Cogito’s digestion of the empty spaces is curiously salutary. Reading these poems is a beneficent experience: they amplify immensely Thomas Hardy’s assertion that ‘If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst’. But the end of the book, after such undaunted poems at ‘The Power of Taste’ – ‘Yes taste / in which there are fibres of soul the cartilage of conscience’ – and such tender ones as ‘Lament’, to the memory of his mother – ‘she sails on the bottom of a boat through foamy nebulas’ – after these and the other poems I have mentioned, and many more which I have not, the reader feels the kind of gratitude the gods of Troy must have felt when they saw Aeneas creep from the lurid fires, bearing ancestry on his shoulders and the sacred objects in his hands.

  The book’s true subject is survival of the valid self, of the city, of the good and the beautiful; or rather, the subject is the responsibility of each person to ensure that survival. So it is possible in the end to think that a poet who writes so ethically about the res publica might even be admitted by Plato as first laureate of the ideal republic; though it is also necessary to think that through to the point where this particular poet would be sure to decline the office as a dangerous compromise:

  now as I write these words the advocates of conciliation

  have won the upper hand over the party of inflexibles

  a normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance

  cemeteries grow larger the number of the defenders is smaller

  yet the defence continues it will continue to the end

  and if the City falls but a single man escapes

  he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile

  he will be the City

  we look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death

  worst of all – the face of betrayal

  and only our dreams have not been humiliated

  (1982)

  The title poem, to which these lines form the conclusion, is pivoted at the moment of martial law and will always belong in the annals of patriotic Polish verse. It witnesses new developments and makes old connections within the native story and is only one of several poems throughout the volume which sweep the strings of Polish national memory. If I have been less attentive to this domestic witnessing function of the book than I might have been, it is not because I undervalue that function of Herbert’s poetry. On the contrary, it is precisely because I am convinced of its obdurate worth on the home front that I feel free to elaborate in the luxurious margin. Anyhow, John and Bogdana Carpenter have annotated the relevant dates and names so that the reader is kept alert to the allusions and connections which provide the book’s oblique discharge of political energy. As well as providing this editorial service, they seem to have managed the task of translating well; I had no sense of their coming between me and the poem’s first life, no sense of their having interfered.

  Zbigniew Herbert is a poet with all the strengths of an Antaeus, yet he finally emerges more like the figure of an Atlas. Refreshed time and again by being thrown back upon his native earth, standing his ground determinedly in the local plight, he nevertheless shoulders the whole sky and scope of human dignity and responsibility. These various translations leave no doubt about the essential function which his work performs, that of keeping a trustworthy poetic canopy, if not a perfect heaven, above our vulnerable heads.

  Parnassus, 1986: review of Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden (trans. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders, Carcanet, 1986); Selected Poems (trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, Ecco Press, 1986); Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1986)

  from Envies and Identifications:

  Dante and the Modern Poet

  T. S. Eliot’s work is haunted by the shade of Dante, and nowhere more tellingly than in the second section of ‘Little Gidding’. This part of Four Quartets is set in the dawn, in wartime London, a modern dream vision, shimmering with the promise of revelation, concerned to some extent with strictly literary matters but ultimately involved with the universal sorrows and penalties of living and ageing. The poet exchanges intense but oddly neutral words with ‘a familiar compound ghost’ and the section ends like this:

  From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

  Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

  Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

  The day was breaking. In the disfigured street

  He left me, with a kind of valediction,

  And faded on the blowing of the horn.

  The phrase ‘the blowing of the horn’ operates in the same way that the word ‘forlorn’ operates in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. It tolls us back to our sole selves. It is bleaker than Keats’s word because the world outside Eliot’s poem is even bleaker than the world outside Keats’s ‘Ode.’ ‘The blowing of the horn’ is, in fact, the sounding of the ‘all clear’ at the end of an air-raid, and it recalls us to Eliot’s historical situation when he was composing the poem and doing his duty as an air-raid warden during the London blitz. Indeed, the strange lines at the beginning of the section about ‘the dark dove with the flickering tongue’ which passes ‘below the horizon of his homing’ and the image of ‘three distric
ts whence the smoke arose’ are also documentary of the historical moment, insofar as they suggest the bomber’s withdrawal and the burning city after the raid. Yet to talk like this about blitz and bombers and air-raids and burning cities is out of keeping with the mood and intent of the poetry. That poetry, like the poetry of Keats’s ‘Ode’, is at a third remove from the local historical moment and is suspended in the ether of a contemplative mind. The language conducts us away from what is contingent. It is not mimetic of the cold morning cityscape but of the calescent imagination. We can say, as a matter of literary fact, that the lines are more haunted by the flocks of Dante’s terza rima than by the squadrons of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

  We can also say that the language of the poem is more affected by Eliot’s idea of Dante’s language than it is by the actual sounds and idioms of those Londoners among whom Eliot lived and over whom he was watching during his ‘dead patrol’. The lines have something of the quality which Eliot ascribes to Dante in his 1929 essay on the poet:

  Dante’s universality is not solely a personal matter. The Italian language, and especially the Italian language in Dante’s age, gains much by being the product of universal Latin. There is something much more local about the languages in which Shakespeare and Racine had to express themselves … Medieval Latin tended to concentrate on what men of various races and lands could think together. Some of the character of this universal language seems to me to inhere in Dante’s Florentine speech; and the localization (‘Florentine’ speech) seems if anything to emphasize the universality, because it cuts across the modern division of nationality.