Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually taking the leap. For about two-thirds of the poem the restraining, self-abnegating, completely attentive manners of the writing keep us alive to the surfaces of a world: the note is colloquial if tending towards the finical, the scenery is chaste, beloved and ancestral. Grandfather was here. Yet this old world is still being made new again by the sequins of herring scales, the sprinkle of grass and the small iridescent flies. Typically, detail by detail, by the layering of one observation upon another, by readings taken at different levels and from different angles, a world is brought into being. There is a feeling of ordered scrutiny, of a securely positioned observer turning a gaze now to the sea, now to the fish barrels, now to the old man. And the voice that tells us about it all is self-possessed but not self-centred, full of discreet and intelligent instruction, of the desire to witness exactly. The voice is neither breathless nor detached; it is thoroughly plenished, like the sea ‘swelling slowly as if considering spilling over’, and then, thrillingly, half-way through, it does spill over:

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  element bearable to no mortal,

  to fish and to seals … One seal particularly

  Just a minute ago I said that the habit of observation did not promise any irruption of the visionary. Yet here it is, a rhythmic heave which suggests that something other is about to happen – although not immediately. The colloquial note creeps back and the temptation to inspired utterance is rebuked by the seal who arrives partly like a messenger from another world, partly like a dead-pan comedian of water. Even so, he is a sign which initiates a wonder as he dives back into the deep region where the poem will follow, wooed with perfect timing into the mysterious. Looking at the world of the surface, after all, is not only against the better judgement of a seal; it is finally also against the better judgement of the poet.

  It is not that the poet breaks faith with the observed world, the world of human attachment, grandfathers, Lucky Strikes and Christmas trees. But it is a different, estranging and fearful element which ultimately fascinates her: the world of meditated meaning, of a knowledge-need which sets human beings apart from seals and herrings, and sets the poet in her solitude apart from her grandfather and the old man, this poet enduring the cold sea-light of her own wyrd and her own mortality. Her scientific impulse is suddenly jumped back to its root in pre-Socratic awe, and water stares her in the face as the original solution:

  If you should dip your hand in,

  your wrist would ache immediately,

  your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

  as if the water were a transmutation of fire

  that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

  If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

  then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  This writing still bears a recognizable resemblance to the simple propositions of the geography text-book. There is no sentence which does not possess a similar clarity and unchallengeability. Yet since these concluding lines are poetry, not geography, they have a dream truth as well as a daylight truth about them, they are as hallucinatory as they are accurate. They also possess that sine qua non of all lyric utterance, a completely persuasive inner cadence which is deeply intimate with the laden water of full tide. The lines are inhabited by certain profoundly true tones, which as Robert Frost put it, ‘were before words were, living in the cave of the mouth’, and they do what poetry most essentially does: they fortify our inclination to credit promptings of our intuitive being. They help us to say in the first recesses of ourselves, in the shyest, presocial part of our nature, ‘Yes, I know something like that too. Yes, that’s right; thank you for putting words on it and making it more or less official.’ And thus the government of the tongue gains our votes, and Anna Swir’s proclamation (which at first may have sounded a bit overstated) comes true in the sensation of reading even a poet as shy of bardic presumption as Elizabeth Bishop:

  A poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subconscious.

  In conclusion, I want now to offer two further texts for meditation. The first is from T. S. Eliot. Forty-four years ago, in October 1942, in wartime London, when he was at work on ‘Little Gidding’, Eliot wrote in a letter to E. Martin Browne:

  In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified activity – especially as there is never any certainty that the whole thing won’t have to be scrapped. And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless.

  Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.

  I am thinking of Jesus’ writing as it is recorded in Chapter Eight of John’s Gospel, my second and concluding text:

  And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

  They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

  Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

  This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

  So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

  And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

  And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

  When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?

  She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

  The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, ‘Now a solution will take place’, it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

  This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest moments it would attempt, in Yeats’s phrase, to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Yet even then its function is not essentially supplicatory or transitive. Poetry is more a threshold than a
path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.

  T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (i)‚ University of Kent, 1986

  from Sounding Auden

  Auden was hungering for a form. In his unformed needs and impulses he was rehearsing the scenario which Martin Buber outlines in I and Thou:

  This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises.

  That is actually a firm account of what in experience is elusive and tenebrous; and in its conception of power streaming out and the work arising as the primary word is spoken, it represents a way of acknowledging the kind of governing power to which the young Auden’s tongue gained access when acts of his being issued in his own words, those entirely compelling, if estranged and estranging words of his famous earliest poems.

  This new lyric was dominated by a somewhat impersonal pronoun which enclosed much that was fabulous, passional and occasionally obscure. Its manifestations were an ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘you’ that could arrest, confuse and inspect the reader all at once. He or she seemed to have been set down in the middle of a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned rapidly around, unblindfolded, ordered to march and to make sense of every ominous thing encountered from there on. The new poem turned the reader into an accomplice, unaccountably bound to the poem’s presiding voice by an insinuation that they shared a knowledge which might be either shameful or subversive. In Samuel Hynes’s terms, it presented an alternative world. Even Eliot’s openings, startling as they were, could not equal Auden’s for defamiliarizing abruptness. Eliot still pushed the poem out with the current of rhythmic expectation, the words sailed off relatively unhampered towards attainable syntactical or scenic or narrative destinations.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky …

  All right, then. Let’s go.

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring …

  OK. Keep talking. What else

  was bothering you?

  Here I am, an old man in a dry month

  Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

  Sure, granpa! Ο course you are.

  Auden’s openings, on the other hand, were launched against the flow. The craft itself felt shipshape, but its motion seemed unpredictable, it started in mid-pitch and wobbled:

  Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,

  On the wet road between the chafing grass …

  Between grass? What do you

  mean? Where is this anyway?

  Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,

  Walking together in the windless orchard …

  Taller what? Whose orchard

  where?

  These famous early poems gave me enormous trouble when I was an undergraduate. Confident teachers spoke of Geoffrey Grigson’s advice to Thirties poets to ‘Report well. Begin with objects and events.’ These poets were socially concerned, we were told; they were tempted by communism, wanted to open some negotiation with popular culture, and to include the furniture of the modern technological world in their lyrics. Fine. This was OK for the nude giant girls behind Spender’s pylons and the knockabout farce of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’. But Auden was supposed to be the main man, so where did all this lecture-note stuff get you when in the solitude of your room you faced the staccato imperatives of a passage like this:

  Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,

  Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:

  This land, cut off, will not communicate,

  Be no accessory content to one

  Aimless for faces rather there than here.

  Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,

  They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind

  Arriving driven from the ignorant sea

  To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm

  Where sap unbaffled rises, being spring;

  But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass,

  Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.

  My teachers had used the word ‘telegraphese’, so I assumed I was in its presence here, the enigma and abruptness of the thing suggesting as much the actual chattering of a machine relaying signals as the condensed idiom of a decoded, printed message. So, all right, telegraphese. Yet to what end? I felt excluded. I had indeed been blindfolded and turned around only to find myself daunted by a landscape that both convinced me and shrugged me off.

  It would have been better had those teachers been in a position to quote what Geoffrey Grigson wrote four decades later, in the volume of memorial tributes edited by Stephen Spender. There, talking about the first poem of Auden’s which he had encountered, one never to be republished, Grigson spoke of its having arisen out of an ‘Englishness’ until then unexpressed or not isolated in a poem.

  In the poem, he [Auden] saw the blood trail which had dripped from Grendel after his arm and shoulder had been ripped off by Beowulf. The blood shone, was phosphorescent on the grass … It was as if Auden … had given imaginative place and ‘reality’ to something exploited for the Examination Schools, yet rooted in the English origins.

  Grigson also spoke of ‘assonances and alliterations coming together to make a new verbal actuality as it might be of rock or quartz’, which is precisely what this slab of verse felt like to me when I first encountered it, and why I still rejoice in it. It is responses and formulations such as Grigson’s, which have little to say about the young poet’s shifting allegiances to Marx and Freud, that are the ones which count for most in the long poetic run, because they are the most sensitive to the art of language.

  A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being. The rhythmic disjunctions in Auden’s lines, the correspondingly fractured elements of narrative or argument, are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times. ‘The Watershed’ is, according to Edward Mendelson’s introduction to The English Auden, the earliest of the poems preserved in the standard Collected Poems, and reads in places as if a landslide had happened while the lines were being formed or a slippage had occurred between mind and page:

  This land, cut off, will not communicate,

  Be no accessory content to one

  Aimless for faces rather there than here.

  What bothered and excluded me when I read this as an undergraduate still excludes me but bothers me no more. The difference is that I am now content that Auden should practise such resistance to the reader’s expectations; I take pleasure in its opacity and am ready to accept its obscurity – even if it is wilful – as a symptom of this poet’s deliberate insistence upon the distance between art and life. This is not to say that there is no relation between art and life but to insist, as Lazarus in bliss insisted to Dives in torment, that a gulf does exist….

  The usual poem keeps faith with the way we talk at the table, even more with the way we have heard other poems talk to us before. ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed, / Vega conspicuous overhead / In the windless nights of June’. Yes, yes, we think; more, more; it’s lovely, keep it coming. The melody allays anxiety, the oceanic feeling of womb-oneness stirs, joy fills the spirit’s vault like the after-echo of a choir in a cathedral:

  That later we, though parted then,

  May still recall these evenings when

  Fear gave his watch no look;

  The lion griefs loped from the shade
>
  And on our knees their muzzles laid,

  And Death put down his book.

  This exemplifies the hymn-singing effect of poetry, its action as a dissolver of differences, and so long as it operates in this mode, poetry functions to produce a sensation of at-homeness and trust in the world. The individual poem may address particular occasions of distress such as a death or a civil war or a recognition of the sad fact of betrayal between lovers, but as long as its tune plays into the prepared expectations of our ear and our nature, as long as desire is not disallowed or allowed if only to be disappointed, then the poem’s effect will be to offer a sense of possible consolation. It is perhaps because of Auden’s susceptibility to this tremblingly delicious power of poetry that he constantly warns against it. ‘In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.’

  Auden, however, practised more enchantment than this pronouncement would suggest, so it is no wonder that he was impelled to keep the critical heckler alive in himself. After the mid-1930s, the iambic melodies and traditional formal obedience of his poems – the skilful rather than sensual deployment of Anglo-Saxon metre in The Age of Anxiety, for example – would certainly suggest a weakening of his original refusal of the conventional musics, and a consequent weakening of the newness and otherness of his contribution to the resources, if not to the supply, of poetry itself. As he matured, he may have regretted the scampishness with which he played around in his younger days when, as Christopher Isherwood reports,

  He was very lazy. He hated polishing and making corrections. If I didn’t like a poem, he threw it away and wrote another. If I liked one line, he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way whole poems were constructed which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or sense. This is the simple explanation of much of Auden’s celebrated obscurity.