Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

  Making all thought impossible but how

  And where and when I shall myself die.

  Arid interrogation: yet the dread

  Of dying, and being dead,

  Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

  One could go on praising the technical aspects of this poem, such as the rhyming of ‘vision’ with ‘indecision’, a piece of undercutting that is characteristically Larkinesque in its implicit refusal of the spiritual upbeat of Yeats’s rhymes. Instead of any further detailed commentary, however, I shall confine myself to the observation that this, for me, is the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality and denies the Deity’s immemorial attribute of infinite personal concern. Moreover, no matter how much or how little readers may at the outset be in sympathy with these views, they still arrive at the poem’s conclusion a little surprised at how far it has carried them on the lip of its rhetorical wave. It leaves them like unwary-surfers hung over a great emptiness, transported further into the void than they might have expected to go. It arrives at a place where, in Yeats’s words, ‘cold winds blow across our hands, upon our faces, the thermometer falls.’

  Yeats, however, considered these things to be symptoms not of absence but of the ecstatic presence of the supernatural. Writing near the end of his life, in ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, Yeats told of his aspiration to a form of utterance in which imagination would be ‘carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice’. Which ice, needless to say, was the antithesis of the stuff to be found under the mortuary slabs. It represented not so much a frigid exhaustion as an ultimate attainment. It was an analogue of that cold heaven where it ‘seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice’; an analogue also of Yeats’s rejection of the body heat of the pathetic and the subjective in art, for his embrace of the dramatic and the heroic, his determination to establish the crystalline standards of poetic imagination as normative for the level at which people should live. For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death, ‘carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.’ He wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalize the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art. Where Larkin was all for human beings huddling together in kindness, like refugees from the injustice of the skies, Yeats was all for flourish and theatrical challenge. Larkin might declare:

  Courage is no good:

  It means not scaring others. Being brave

  Lets no one off the grave.

  Death is no different whined at than withstood.

  Yeats absolutely disagreed. ‘No actress’, he maintained, ‘has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing.’ Which amounts to saying that death withstood is indeed very different from death whined at; and that it is up to poets and actresses to continue to withstand.

  So we must imagine Yeats as the reader in eternity who resists Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, high poetic achievement though it may be; and resists it for the same reason as Czesław Miłosz, who, having conceded the integrity of ‘Aubade’ as a work that copes with the eternal subject of death ‘in a manner corresponding to the sensibility of the second half of the twentieth century’, goes on to protest:

  And yet the poem leaves me not only dissatisfied but indignant, and I wonder why myself. Perhaps we forget too easily the centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science and science-inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on the other? Perhaps the author of the poem went over to the side of the adversary and his ratiocination strikes me as a betrayal? For, after all, death in the poem is endowed with the supreme authority of Law and universal necessity, while man is reduced to nothing, to a bundle of perceptions, or even less, to an interchangeable statistical unit. But poetry by its very essence has always been on the side of life. Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time, and it has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.

  Still, when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all the odds. For all its heartbreaking truths and beauties, ‘Aubade’ reneges on what Yeats called the ‘spiritual intellect’s great work’.

  This phrase comes from Yeats’s poem ‘The Man and the Echo’, with which I am going to conclude. In it, the theme so playfully treated by Holub in the lines I read at the beginning is orchestrated into something far more sombre and vigorous. Both poets present their characters at death’s door, but whereas Holub’s spunky surrealist affirms his faith in life with a whimsical vision of horses making love, Yeats’s seer endures a more strenuous ordeal and is rewarded with a vision of reality that is at once more demanding and more fulfilling. Indeed, what ‘The Man and the Echo’ implies is something that I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures: namely, that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ the ‘profane perfection of mankind’.

  In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. The truly creative writer, by interposing his or her perception and expression, will transfigure the conditions and effect thereby what I have been calling ‘the redress of poetry’. The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. Indeed, Beckett is a very clear example of a writer who is Larkin’s equal in not flinching from the ultimate bleakness of things, but who then goes on to do something positive with the bleakness. For it is not the apparent pessimism of Beckett’s world-view that constitutes his poetic genius: his excellence resides in his working out a routine in the playhouse of his art which is both true to the depressing goings-on in the house of actuality and – more important – a transformation of them. It is because of his transformative way with language, his mixture of word-play and merciless humour, that Beckett the writer has life and has it more abundantly than the conditions endured by Beckett the citizen might seem to warrant.

  We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work in this most original and illuminating poetry is the mind’s capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity. Which is why I turn in conclusion to ‘The Man and the Echo’, a poem where human consciousness is up against the cliff-face of mystery, confronted with the limitations of human existence itself. Here the consciousness of the poet is in full possession of both its creative impulse and its limiting knowledge. The knowledge is limiting because it concedes that pain n
ecessarily accompanies the cycles of life, and that failure and hurt – hurt to oneself and to others – persist disablingly behind even the most successful career. Yet in the poem the spirit’s impulse still remains creative and obeys the human compulsion to do that ‘great work’ of spiritual intellect.

  The situation of the man in ‘The Man and the Echo’ is that of somebody in extremis, somebody who wants to make his soul, to bring himself to wholeness, to bring his mind and being into congruence with the divine mind and being. He therefore goes to consult the oracle, not at Delphi, but in a glen on the side of Knocknarea in County Sligo, at a place called Alt; but this rock face does not issue any message from the gods – all it does is give back an echo. And what the echo communicates, of course, is the man’s own most extreme and exhausted recognitions. The echo marks the limits of the mind’s operations even as it calls the mind forth to its utmost exertions, and the strenuousness of this dialectic issues in a poem that is as shadowed by death as Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ but is far more vital and undaunted. ‘The Man and the Echo’ tries to make sense of historical existence within a bloodstained natural world and an indifferent universe. It was written near the end of Yeats’s life, when he was reviewing his involvement with the historical events in Ireland over a previous half-century: events such as the founding of the Abbey Theatre and its political impact in the lead-up to the 1916 Rising; the Irish War of Independence and the destruction of many of the big houses belonging to the Anglo-Irish gentry; and other, more private, guilt-inducing events, such as the nervous breakdown of a young poet and dancer, Margot Collis, with whom Yeats felt himself half-culpably implicated:

  The Man and the Echo

  Man

  In a cleft that’s christened Alt

  Under broken stone I halt

  At the bottom of a pit

  That broad noon has never lit,

  And shout a secret to the stone.

  All that I have said and done,

  Now that I am old and ill,

  Turns into a question till

  I lie awake night after night

  And never get the answers right.

  Did that play of mine send out

  Certain men the English shot?

  Did words of mine put too great strain

  On that woman’s reeling brain?

  Could my spoken words have checked

  That whereby a house lay wrecked?

  And all seems evil until I

  Sleepless would lie down and die.

  Echo

  Lie down and die.

  Man

  That were to shirk

  The spiritual intellect’s great work,

  And shirk it in vain. There is no release

  In a bodkin or disease,

  Nor can there be a work so great

  As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.

  While man can still his body keep

  Wine or love drug him to sleep,

  Waking he thanks the Lord that he

  Has body and its stupidity,

  But body gone he sleeps no more,

  And till his intellect grows sure

  That all’s arranged in one clear view

  Pursues the thoughts that I pursue,

  Then stands in judgement on his soul,

  And, all work done, dismisses all

  Out of intellect and sight

  And sinks at last into the night.

  Echo

  Into the night.

  Man

  Ο Rocky Voice,

  Shall we in that great night rejoice?

  What do we know but that we face

  One another in this place?

  But hush, for I have lost the theme

  Its joy or night seem but a dream;

  Up there some hawk or owl has struck

  Dropping out of sky or rock,

  A stricken rabbit is crying out.

  And its cry distracts my thought.

  This is a far cry from the experience of illumination and visitation that Yeats wrote about in ‘The Cold Heaven’: here he is not so much riddled with light as with dark. And much, much more could be said about the poem – about, for example, the resilience of the man and the vigour of the metre in face of the echo’s intransigence. I shall confine myself, however, to one detailed comment and one brief concluding reflection. The detail is the final rhyme, which yokes together the words ‘crying out’ and ‘thought’. It is not a perfect rhyme, nor should it be, for there is no perfect fit between the project of civilization represented by thought and the facts of pain and death represented by the rabbit’s ‘crying out’. What holds the crying out and the thought together is a consciousness which persists in trying to make sense of a world where suffering and violence are more evidently set to prevail than the virtue of being ‘kind’. The rhyme – and the poem in general – not only tell of that which the spirit must endure; they also show how it must endure, by pitting human resource against the recalcitrant and the inhuman, by pitting the positive effort of mind against the desolations of natural and historical violence, by making ‘rejoice’ answer back to the voice from the rock, whatever it says:

  Ο Rocky Voice,

  Shall we in that great night rejoice?

  What do we know but that we face

  One another in this place?

  But hush, for I have lost the theme

  Its joy or night seem but a dream;

  Up there some hawk or owl has struck

  Dropping out of sky or rock,

  A stricken rabbit is crying out.

  And its cry distracts my thought.

  There is a strong sense, at the conclusion of this poem, that the mind’s options are still open, that the mind’s constructs are still vital and reliable, even though its functions may for the moment be suspended. Where Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ ended in entrapment, ‘The Man and the Echo’ has preserved a freedom, and manages to pronounce a final Yes. And the Yes is valuable because we can say of it what Karl Barth said of the enormous Yes at the centre of Mozart’s music, that it has weight and significance because it overpowers and contains a No. Yeats’s poetry, in other words, gives credence to the idea that courage is some good; it shows how the wilful and unabashed activity of poetry itself is a manifestation of ‘joy’ and a redressal, in so far as it fortifies the spirit against assaults from outside and temptations from within – temptations such as the one contained in Larkin’s attractively defeatist proposition that ‘Death is no different whined at than withstood’.

  Oxford Lectures, April 1990; W. D. Thomas Lecture, University of Swansea, January 1993

  from Counting to a Hundred: Elizabeth Bishop

  There is nothing spectacular about Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, even though there is always something transformative about it. One has a sense of justice being done to the facts of a situation even as the situation is being re-imagined into poetry. She never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of her subjects. For example, in one of her two sestinas – the one she calls, with typical plain-spokenness, ‘Sestina’ – the six end-words have a thoroughly domestic provenance and in the first instance they seem all set to keep the poem within comforting emotional bounds. House, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears. They imply a little drama of youth and age, even perhaps of instruction and correction. A Victorian genre piece, almost. A decorous domestic interior, at any rate, in terms both of the setting and of the emotions. The end-words, at one level, do keep bringing to mind a conventional home situation where we would naturally expect to find a father and a mother as well as a child and a grandparent. But gradually and insistently a second realization is forced into consciousness by the inexorable formal recurrences within the poem itself. Gradually, the repetition of grandmother and child and house alerts us to the significant absence from this house of a father and a mother:

  September rain falls on the house.

  In the failing light, the old grandmother

  sits in the k
itchen with the child

  beside the Little Marvel Stove,

  reading the jokes from the almanac,

  laughing and talking to hide her tears.

  She thinks that her equinoctial tears

  and the rain that beats on the roof of the house

  were both foretold by the almanac,

  but only known to a grandmother.

  The iron kettle sings on the stove.

  She cuts some bread and says to the child,

  It’s time for tea now; but the child

  is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears

  dance like mad on the hot black stove,

  the way the rain must dance on the house.

  Tidying up, the old grandmother

  hangs up the clever almanac

  on its string. Birdlike, the almanac

  hovers half open above the child,

  hovers above the old grandmother

  and her teacup full of dark brown tears.

  She shivers and says she thinks the house

  feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

  It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

  I know what I know, says the almanac.

  With crayons the child draws a rigid house

  and a winding pathway. Then the child

  puts in a man with buttons like tears

  and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

  But secretly, while the grandmother

  busies herself about the stove,

  the little moons fall down like tears

  from between the pages of the almanac

  into the flower bed the child

  has carefully placed in the front of the house.

  Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

  The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove