Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  And their Englands of the mind might be correspondingly characterized. Hughes's is a primeval landscape where stones cry out and horizons endure, where the elements inhabit the mind with a religious force, where the pebble dreams 'it is the foetus of

  God', 'where the staring angels go through', 'where all the stars bow down', where, with appropriately pre-Socratic force, water lies 'at the bottom of all things / utterly worn out utterly clear'. It is England as King Lear's heath, which now becomes a Yorkshire moor where sheep and foxes and hawks persuade 'unaccommodated man' that he is a poor bare forked thing, kinned not in a chain but on a plane of being with the animals themselves. There are monoliths and lintels. The air is menaced by God's voice in the wind, by demonic protean crow-shapes; and the poet is a wanderer among the ruins, cut off by catastrophe from consolation and philosophy. Hill's England, on the other hand, is more hospitable to the human presence. The monoliths make way for the keeps and chantries, if also for the beheading block. The heath's loneliness is kept at bay by the natural magic of the grove and the intellectual force of the scholar's cell. The poet is not a wanderer but a clerk or perhaps an illuminator or one of a guild of masters: he is in possession of a history rather than a mythology; he has a learned rather than an oral tradition. There are wars, but there are also dynasties, ideas of inheritance and order, possibilities for the 'true governaunce of England'. His elegies are not laments for the irrevocable dispersal of the comitatus and the ring-giver in the hall but solemn requiems for Plantagenet kings, whose murderous wars are set in a great pattern, to be understood only when 'the sea/Across daubed rocks evacuates its dead'. And Larkin's England similarly reflects features from the period that his language is hived off. His trees and flowers and grasses are neither animistic nor hallowed by half-remembered druidic lore; they are emblems of mutabilitie. Behind them lies the sensibility of troubadour and courtier. 'Cut grass lies frail;/Brief is the breath/Mown stalks exhale'; his landscape is dominated neither by the untamed heath nor by the totemistic architectures of spire and battlement but by the civic prospects, by roofs and gardens and prospects where urban and pastoral visions interact as 'postal districts packed like squares of wheat'. The poet is no longer a bardic remnant nor an initiate in curious learning nor a jealous master of the secrets of a craft; he is a humane and civilized member of the customs service or the civil service or, indeed, the library service. The moon is no longer his

  white goddess but his poetic property, to be image rather than icon: 'high and preposterous and separate', she watches over unfenced existence, over fulfilment's desolate attic, over an England of department stores, canals and floatings of industrial froth, explosions in mines, effigies in churches, secretaries in offices; and she hauls tides of life where only one ship is worth celebration, not a Golden Hind or a Victory, but a 'black- / Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back/A huge and birdless silence'.

  Hughes's sensibility is pagan in the original sense: he is a haunter of the pagus, a heath-dweller, a heathen; he moves by instinct in the thickets beyond the urbs; he is neither urban nor urbane. His poetry is as redolent of the lair as it is of the library. The very titles of his books are casts made into the outback of our animal recognitions. Lupercal, a word infested with wolfish stinks yet returning to an origin in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: 'You all did see that on the Lupercal/I thrice presented him a kingly crown.' Yet the word passes back through Shakespeare into the Lupercal, a cave below the western corner of the Palatine Hill in Rome; and the Lupercal was also the festival held on 15 February when, after the sacrifice of goats and a dog, youths dressed only in girdles made from the skins of these victims ran about the bounds of the Palatine city, striking those whom they met, especially women, with strips of goatskin. It was a fertility rite, and it was also a ritual beating of the bounds of the city, and in a way Hughes's language is just this also. Its sensuous fetch, its redolence of blood and gland and grass and water, recalled English poetry in the 1950s from a too suburban aversion of attention to the elemental; and the poems beat the bounds of a hidden England in streams and trees, on moors and in byres. Hughes appeared like Poor Tom on the heath, a civilized man tasting and testing the primitive facts; he appeared as 'Wodwo', a nosing wild man of the woods. The volume Wodwo appeared in 1967 and carried as its epigraph a quotation from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and that deliberate affiliation is instructive. Like the art of Gawain, Hughes's art is one of clear outline and inner richness. His diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, marking and carving out fast, definite shapes; but within those shapes, mysteries

  and rituals are hinted at. They are circles within which he conjures up presences.

  Hughes's vigour has much to do with this matter of consonants that take the measure of his vowels like calipers, or stud the line like rivets. 'Everything is inheriting everything', as he says in one of his poems, and what he has inherited through Shakespeare and John Webster and Hopkins and Lawrence is something of that primary life of stress which is the quick of the English poetic matter. His consonants are the Norsemen, the Normans, the Roundheads in the world of his vocables, hacking and hedging and hammering down the abundance and luxury and possible lasciviousness of the vowels. T imagine this midnight moment's forest'—the first line of the well-known 'The Thought Fox'—is hushed, but it is a hush achieved by the quelling, battening-down action of the ra's and d's and fs: I iMagine this MiDnighT MoMenT's foresT Hughes's aspiration in these early poems is to command all the elements, to bring them within the jurisdiction of his authoritarian voice. And in 'The Thought Fox' the thing at the beginning of the poem which lives beyond his jurisdiction is characteristically fluid and vowelling and sibilant: 'Something else is alive' whispers of a presence not yet accounted for, a presence that is granted its full vowel music as its epiphany—'Something more near /Though deeper within darkness/Is entering the loneliness.' It is granted this dilation of its mystery before it is conjured into the possession of the poet-warden, the vowel-keeper; and its final emergence in the fully sounded i's and es of 'an eye,/A widening deepening greenness' is gradually mastered by the braking action of 'brilliantly, concentratedly' and by the shooting of the monosyllabic consonantal bolts in the last stanza:

  Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

  Next a poem whose subject might be expected to woo the tender pious vowels from a poet rather than the disciplining consonants. About a 'Fern':

  Here is the fern's frond, unfurling a gesture . . .

  The first line is an Anglo-Saxon line, four stresses, three of them picked out by alliteration; and although the frosty grip of those/'s thaws out, the fern is still subsumed into images of control and discipline and regal authority:

  And, among them, the fern

  Dances gravely, like the plume

  Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,

  Into his own kingdom.

  But of course we recognize that Hughes's 'Thistles' are vegetation more kindred to his spirit than the pliant fern. And when he turns his attention to them, they become reincarnations of the Norsemen:

  Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes, their salt-bleached hair,

  The snow's stupefied anvils in rows,

  Bringing their envy,

  The slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep sheen of the water-globe.

  These are The Warriors of the North' as Hughes imagines them, resurrected in all their arctic mail 'into the iron arteries of Calvin', and into 'Thistles'. The thistles are emblems of the Hughes voice as I hear it, born of an original vigour, fighting back over the same ground; and it is not insignificant that in this poem Hughes himself presents the thistles as images of a fundamental speech, uttering itself in gutturals from behind the sloped arms of consonants:

  Every one a revengeful burst

  Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
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  Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

  From the underground stain of a decayed Viking. They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects. Every one manages a plume of blood.

  Then they grow grey, like men.

  Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

  Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

  The gutturals of dialects, which Hughes here connects with the Nordic stratum of English speech, he pronounces in another place to be the germinal secret of his own voice. In an interview published in the London Magazine in January 1971 he said:

  I grew up in West Yorkshire. They have a very distinctive dialect there. Whatever other speech you grow into, presumably your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom, . . . it's your childhood self there inside the dialect and that is possibly your real self or the core of it . . . Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse. And in the case of the West Yorkshire dialect, of course, it connects you directly and in your most intimate self to Middle English poetry.

  In other words, he finds that the original grain of his speech is a chip off the old block and that his work need not be a new planting but a new bud on an old bough. What other poet would have the boldness to entitle a collection fFbdwo? Yet Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its beautiful alliterating and illuminated form, its interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythic life, is probably closer in spirit to Hughes's poetry than Hughes's poetry is to that of his English contemporaries. Everything inherits everything—and Hughes is the rightful heir to this alliterative tradition, and to the cleaving simplicity of the Border ballad, which he elevates to the status of touchstone later in that same interview. He says that he started writing again in 1955:

  The poems that set me off were odd pieces by Shapiro, Lowell, Merwin, Wilbur and Crowe Ransom. Crowe Ransom was the one

  who gave me a model I felt I could use. He helped me get my words into focus . . . But this whole business of influences is mysterious . . . And after all the campaigns to make it new you're stuck with the fact that some of the Scots Border ballads still cut a deeper groove than anything written in the last forty years. Influences just seem to make it more and more unlikely that a poet will write what he alone could write.

  What Hughes alone could write depended for its release on the discovery of a way to undam the energies of the dialect, to get a stomping ground for that inner freedom, to get that childhood self a disguise to roam at large in. Freedom and naturalness and homeliness are positives in Hughes's critical vocabulary, and they are linked with both the authenticity of individual poets and the genius of the language itself. Speaking of Keith Douglas in 1964, Hughes could have been speaking of himself; of the way his language and his imagination alerted themselves when the hunt for the poem in the adult world became synonymous with the hunt for the animal in the world of childhood, the world of dialect:

  The impression is of a sudden mobilizing of the poet's will, a clearing of his vision, as if from sitting considering possibilities and impossibilities he stood up to act. Pictures of things no longer interest him much: he wants their substance, their nature and their consequences in life. At once, and quite suddenly, his mind is whole . . . He is a renovator of language. It is not that he uses words in jolting combinations, or with titanic extravagance, or curious precision. His triumph is in the way he renews the simplicity of ordinary talk . . . The music that goes along with this ... is the natural path of such confident, candid thinking ... A utility general purpose style that combines a colloquial prose readiness with poetic breadth, a ritual intensity of music with clear direct feeling, and yet in the end is nothing but casual speech.

  This combination of ritual intensity, prose readiness, direct feeling and casual speech can be discovered likewise in the best poems of

  Lupercal, because in The Hawk in the Rain and indeed in much of Wodwo and Crow, we are often in the presence of that titanic extravagance Hughes mentions, speech not so much mobilizing and standing up to act as flexing and straining until it verges on the grotesque. But in poems like 'Pike', 'Hawk Roosting', 'The Bull Moses' and 'An Otter' we get this confident, speedy, hammer-and-tongs proficiency. And in this poem from Wodwo, called 'Pibroch', a poem uniquely Hughesian in its very title, fetching energy and ancestry from what is beyond the pale and beneath the surface, we have the elements of the Scottish piper's ceol mor, the high style, implicit in words like 'dead', 'heaven', 'universe', 'aeon', 'angels' and in phrases like 'the foetus of God', 'the stars bow down'—a phrase which cunningly makes its cast and raises Blake in the pool of the ear. We have elements of this high style, ritual intensity, whatever you want to call it; and we have also the 'prose readiness', the 'casual speech' of 'bored', 'hangs on', 'lets up', 'tryout' and the workaday cadences of 'Over the stone rushes the wind' and 'her mind's gone completely'. The landscape of the poem is one that the Anglo-Saxon wanderer or seafarer would be completely at home in:

  The sea cries with its meaningless voice Treating alike its dead and its living, Probably bored with the appearance of heaven After so many millions of nights without sleep, Without purpose, without self-deception.

  Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned Like nothing in the Universe. Created for black sleep. Or growing Conscious of the sun's red spot occasionally, Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.

  Over the stone rushes the wind

  Able to mingle with nothing,

  Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.

  Or turns, as if the stone's mind came feeling

  A fantasy of directions.

  FINDERS KEEPERS / go

  Drinking the sea and eating the rock

  A tree struggles to make leaves—

  An old woman fallen from space

  Unprepared for these conditions.

  She hangs on, because her mind's gone completely.

  Minute after minute, aeon after aeon, Nothing lets up or develops. And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout. This is where the staring angels go through. This is where all the stars bow down.

  Hughes attempts to make vocal the inner life, the simple being-thereness, 'the substance, nature and consequences in life' of sea, stone, wind and tree. Blake's pebble and tiger are shadowy presences in the background, as are the landscapes of Anglo-Saxon poetry. And the whole thing is founded on rock, that rock which Hughes presented in his autobiographical essay as his birthstone, holding his emergence in place just as his headstone will hold his decease:

  This was the memento mundi over my birth: my spiritual midwife at the time and my godfather ever since—or one of my godfathers. From my first day it watched. If it couldn't see me direct, a towering gloom over my pram, it watched me through a species of periscope: that is, by infiltrating the very light of my room with its particular shadow. From my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley, the cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence.

  I quote this piece because it links the childhood core with the adult opus, because that rock is the equivalent in his poetic landscape of dialect in his poetic speech. The rock persists, survives, sustains, endures and informs his imagination, just as it is the bedrock of the language upon which Hughes founds his version of survival and endurance. +

  Englands of the Mind / g 1

  Stone and rock figure prominently in the world of Geoffrey Hill's poetry also, but Hill's imagination is not content to grant the mineral world the absolute sway that Hughes allows it. He is not the suppliant chanting to the megalith, but rather the mason dressing it. Hill also beats the bounds of an England, his own native West Midlands, beheld as a medieval England facing into the Celtic mysteries of Wales and out towards the military and ecclesiastical splendours of Europe. His Mercian Hymns names his territory Mercia and masks his imagination under the figure of King Offa, builder of Offa's dyke between England and Wales, builder as well as beater of the boundaries. Hill's celebration of Mercia has a double focus: one a child's-eye v
iew, close to the common earth, the hoard of history; and the other the historian's and scholar's eye, inquisitive of meaning, bringing time past to bear on time present and vice versa. But the writing itself is by no means abstract and philosophical. Hill addresses the language, as I say, like a mason addressing a block, not unlike his own mason in Hymn XXIV:

  Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord's retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.

  Where best to stand 0 Easter sunrays catch the oblique face of Adam scrumping through leaves; pale spree of evangelists and, there, a cross Christ mumming child Adam out of Hell