Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  ('Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum' dust in the eyes, on clawing wings, and lips)

  Not only must English be kept up here, with its 'spree' and 'scrumping' and 'mumming', but Latin and learning must be kept up too. The mannered rhetoric of these pieces is a kind of verbal architecture, a grave and sturdy English Romanesque. The native undergrowth, both vegetative and verbal, that barbaric scrollwork of fern and ivy, is set against the tympanum and chancel-arch, against the weighty elegance of imperial Latin. The overall pat-

  tern of his language is an extension and a deliberate exploitation of the linguistic effect in Shakespeare's famous 'The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red,' where the polysyllabic flourish of 'multitudinous' and 'incarnadine' is both set off and undercut by the monosyllabic plainness of 'making the green one red', where the Latinate and the local also go hand in glove. There is in Hill something of Stephen Dedalus's hyperconscious-ness of words as physical sensations, as sounds to be plumbed, as weights on the tongue. Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub. I imagine Hill as indulging in a morose linguistic delectation, dwelling on the potential of each word with much the same slow relish as Leopold Bloom dwells on the thought of his kidney. And in Mercian Hymns, in fact, Hill's procedure resembles Joyce's not only in this linguistic deliberation and self-consciousness. For all his references to the 'precedent provided by the Latin prose-hymns or canticles of the early Christian Church', what these hymns celebrate is the 'ineluctable modality of the audible', as well as the visible, and the form that celebration takes reminds one of the Joycean epiphany, which is a prose poem in effect. And it is not only within the form of the individual pieces that he follows the Joycean example; in the overall organization of the Hymns, he does what Joyce did in Ulysses, confounding modern autobiographical material with literary and historical matter drawn from the past. Offa's story makes contemporary landscape and experience live in the rich shadows of a tradition.

  To go back to Hymn XXIV, the occasion, the engendering moment, seems to involve the contemplation of a carved pediment— a tympanum is the carved area between the lintel of a door and the arch above it—which exhibits a set of scenes: one of Eden, one of some kind of harrowing of hell; and the scenes are supervised by images of the evangelists. And this cryptic, compressed mode of presentation in which a few figures on stone can call upon the whole body of Christian doctrines and mythology resembles the compression of the piece itself. The carving reminds him of the carver, a master-mason—and the relevant note reads: 'For the association of Compostela with West Midlands sculpture of the

  twelfth century I am indebted to G. Zarnecki, Later English Romanesque Sculpture, London (1953).' This mason is 'itinerant'—a word used in its precise Latin sense, yet when applied to a travelling craftsman, that pristine sense seems to foreshadow its present narrowed meaning of tinker, a travelling tinsmith, a whitesmith. In the first phrases the Latinate predominates, for this is a ritual progress, an itinerary 'through numerous domains, of his lord's retinue', to Compostela. Even the proper name flaps out its music like some banner there. But when he gets home, he is momentarily cut down from his grand tour importance to his homely size, in the simple 'Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia'; but now the poet/observer of the carving has caught something of the sense of occasion and borrowed something of the mason's excitement. Yet he does not 'see in the mind's eye', like Hamlet, but 'envisages' him, the verb being properly liturgical, 'intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils . . .' A tympanum, of course, is also a drum, and the verb 'to pester' manages a rich synaesthetic effect; the stone is made to cackle like a kettledrum as the chisel hits it. But 'pester' is more interesting still. Its primary meaning, from the original Latin root, pastorium, means to hobble a horse, and it was used in 1685 to mean 'crowding persons in or into'. So the mason hobbles and herds and crowds in warrior and lion, dragon coils, tendrils of the stony vine; and this interlacing and entanglement of motifs is also the method of the poem.

  In fact, we can see the method more clearly if we put the poem in its proper context, which is in the middle of a group of three entitled Opus Anglicanum. Once again the note is helpful:

  ' Opus Anglicanuni ': the term is properly applicable to English embroidery of the period An 1250—1350, though the craft was already famous some centuries earlier ... I have, with considerable impropriety, extended the term to apply to English Romanesque sculpture and to utilitarian metal-work of the nineteenth century.

  The entanglement, the interlacing, is now that of embroidery, and this first poem, I suggest, brings together womanly figures from

  Hill's childhood memory with the ghostly procession of needle-workers from the medieval castles and convents:

  XXIII

  In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into this sublunary world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled by needles: the silver veining, the gold leaf, voluted grape-vine, masterworks of treacherous thread.

  They trudged out of the dark, scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm. They munched cold bacon. The lamps grew plump with oily reliable light.

  Again, the liturgical and Latinate of the first paragraph are abraded and rebutted by the literal and local weight of 'scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm'—the boots being, I take it, the boots of labourers involved in this never-ending Opus Anglicanum, from agricultural origins to industrial developments. And in order just to clinch the thing, consider the third piece, where the 'utilitarian metal-work' in which his grandmother was involved is contemplated in a perspective that includes medieval embroidress and mason, and a certain 'transcendence' enters the making of wire nails:

  xxv

  Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

  The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust—

  not to be shaken by -posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

  Englands of the Mind / g 5

  Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

  Ruskin's eightieth letter reflects eloquently and plangently on the injustice of the master-and-servant situation, on the exploitation of labour, on the demeaning work in a nail forge. The Mayor of Birmingham took him to a house where two women were at work, labouring, as he says, with ancient Vulcanian skill:

  So wrought they,—the English matron and maid;—so it was their darg to labour from morning to evening—seven to seven—by the furnace side—the winds of summer fanning the blast of it.

  He goes on to compute that the woman and the husband earn altogether £55 a year with which to feed and clothe themselves and their six children, to reproach the luxury of the mill-owning class and to compare the wives of industrialists contemplating Burne-Jones's picture of Venus's mirror 'with these, their sisters, who had only, for Venus's mirror, a heap of ashes; compassed about with no forget-me-nots, but with all the forgetfulness in the world'.

  It seems to me here that Hill is celebrating his own indomitable Englishry, casting his mind on other days, singing a clan beaten into the clay and ashes and linking their patience, their sustaining energy, with the glory of England. The 'quick forge', after all, may be what its origin in Shakespeare's Henry V declares it to be, 'the quick forge and working house of thought', but it is surely also the 'random grim forge' of Felix Randal, the farrier. The image shifts between various points and embroiders a new opus anglicanum in this intended and allusive poem. And the point of the
embroidering needle, of course, is darg, that chip off the Anglo-Saxon block, meaning 'a day's work, or the task of a day'.

  Mercian Hymns shows Hill in full command of his voice. Much as the stiff and corbelled rhetoric of earlier work like 'Funeral Music' and 'Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings' stands up and will stand up, it is only when this rhetoric becomes a press tightening on and squeezing out of the language the vigour of

  common speech, the essential Anglo-Saxon juices, it is only then that the poetry attains this final refreshed and refreshing quality: then he has, in the words of another piece, accrued a 'golden and stinking blaze'.

  Finally, to come to Larkin, where what accrues in the language is not a 'golden and stinking blaze', not the rank and fermenting composts of philology and history, but the bright senses of words worn clean in literate conversation. In Larkin's language as in his vision of water, 'any angled light . . . congregate[s] endlessly' There is a gap in Larkin between the perceiver and the thing perceived, a refusal to melt through long perspectives, an obstinate insistence that the poet is neither a race memory nor a myth-kitty nor a mason but a real man in a real place. The cadences and vocabulary of his poems are tuned to a rational music. It would seem that he has deliberately curtailed his gift for evocation, for resonance, for symbolistyrissofzs. He turned from Yeats to Hardy as his master. He never followed the Lawrencian success of his early poem 'Wedding Wind', which ends with a kind of biblical swoon, an image of fulfilled lovers 'kneeling like cattle by all generous waters'. He rebukes romantic aspiration and afflatus with a scrupulous meanness. If he sees the moon, he sees it while groping back to bed after a piss. If he is forced to cry out 'O wolves of memory, immensements', he is also forced to recognize that he is past all that swaddling of sentiment, even if it is 'for others, undiminished, somewhere'. 'Undiminished'—the word, with its hovering balance between attenuated possibilities and the possibility of amplitude, is typical. And Christopher Ricks has pointed out how often negatives operate in Larkin's best lines. Lovers talking in bed, for example, discover it ever more difficult

  to find Words at once true and kind, Or not, untrue and not unkind.

  His tongue moves hesitantly, precisely, honestly, among ironies and negatives. He is the poet of rational light, a light that has its own

  luminous beauty but which has also the effect of exposing clearly the truths which it touches. Larkin speaks neither a dialect nor a pulpit language; there are no 'hectoring large scale verses' in his three books, nor is there the stubbly intimacy of 'oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke' which he nostalgically annotates among the miners. His language would have pleased those Tudor and Augustan guardians who wanted to polish and beautify their speech, to smooth it for art. What we hear is a stripped standard English voice, a voice indeed with a unique break and remorseful tone, but a voice that leads back neither to the thumping beat of Anglo-Saxon nor to the Gregorian chant of the Middle Ages. Its ancestry begins, in fact, when the Middle Ages are turning secular and plays begin to take their place beside the Mass as a form of communal telling and knowing. In the first few lines of Larkin's poem 'Money', for example, I think I hear the cadences of Everyman, the querulous tones of Riches reproaching the hero:

  Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

  'Why do you let me lie here wastefully? I am all you never had of goods and sex.

  You could get them still just by writing a few cheques.'

  Those end-stopped lines, sliding down to rhymed conclusions, suggest the beginning of that period out of which Larkin's style arises. After Everyman, there is Skelton, a commonsensical wobble of rhyme, a humorous wisdom, a practical lyricism:

  Oh, no one can deny

  That Arnold is less selfish than I.

  He married a wife to stop her getting away

  Now she's there all day, . . .

  There is as well the Cavalier Larkin, the maker of songs, where the conversational note and the dainty disciplines of a metrical form are in beautiful equilibrium:

  Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Last year is dead, they seem to say. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  Even in that short space, by the way, one can see the peculiar Larkin fusion of parsimony and abundance—the gorgeousness of 'unresting castles', the poignant sweetness of 'afresh, afresh' are held in check by the quotidian 'Last year is dead'. Yet it is by refusing to pull out the full stops, or by almost refusing, that Larkin achieves his own brand of negative capability.

  As well as the Cavalier Larkin, there is a late Augustan Larkin, the poet of decorous melancholy moods, of twilit propriety and shadowy melody. His poem about superannuated racehorses, for example, entitled 'At Grass', could well be subtitled 'An Elegy in a Country Paddock'. Behind the trees where the horses shelter, there could well rise the spire of Stoke Poges church; and behind the smooth numbers of wind distressing the tails and manes, there is the donnish exactitude of tresses being Stressed:

  The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in Till wind distresses tail and mane . . .

  And when, at the conclusion of the poem, 'the groom and the groom's boy/With bridles in the evening come', their footsteps surely echo the ploughman homeward plodding his weary way.

  There is, moreover, a Tennysonian Larkin and a Hardyesque Larkin. There is even, powerfully, an Imagist Larkin:

  There is an evening coming in

  Across the fields, one never seen before,

  That lights no lamps.

  Silken it seems at a distance, yet

  When it is drawn up over the knees and breast

  It brings no comfort.

  Where has the tree gone, that locked Earth to the sky? What is under my hands, That I cannot feel?

  What loads my hands down?

  Then there is Larkin the coiner of compounds—which we may choose to call Hopkinsian or even perhaps, briefly, Shakespearean—who writes of 'some lonely rain-ceased midsummer evening', of 'light unanswerable and tall and wide', of 'the million-petalled flower of being here', of 'thin continuous dreaming' and 'wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers'.

  And to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, there is the seaside-postcard Larkin, as true to the streak of vulgarity in the civilization as he is sensitive to its most delicious refinements: 'Get stew r ed: / Books are a load of crap.' Or get this disfigurement of a poster of a bathing beauty:

  Huge tits and a fissured crotch Were scored well in, and the space Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous cock and balls.

  And then, elsewhere,

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

  And again, in 'Sad Steps':

  Groping back to bed after a piss

  I part thick curtains, and am startled by

  The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

  FINDERS KEEPERS / lOO

  But despite the piss, and the snigger of the demotic in all of these places, that title, 'Sad Steps', reminds us that Larkin is solicitous for his Sidney also. He too returns to origins and brings something back, although he does not return to 'roots'. He puts inverted commas round his 'roots', in fact. His childhood, he says, was a forgotten boredom. He sees England from train windows, fleeting past and away. He is urban modern man, the insular Englishman, responding to the tones of his own clan, ill at ease when out of his environment. He is a poet, indeed, of composed and tempered English nationalism, and his voice is the not untrue, not unkind voice of postwar England, where the cloth cap and the royal crown have both lost some of their potent symbolism and the categorical, socially defining functions of the working-class accent and the aristocratic drawl have almost been eroded. Larkin's tones are mannerly but not exquisite, well-bred but not mealy-mouthed. If his England and his English are not as deep as Hughes's or as solemn as Hill's, they are nevertheless dearly beloved, and during his sojourn in Belfa
st in the late 1950s, he gave thanks, by implication, for the nurture that he receives by living among his own. The speech, the customs, the institutions of England are, in the words of another English poet, domiciled in Ireland, 'wife to his creating thought'. That was Hopkins in Dublin in the 1880s, sensing that his individual talent was being divorced from his tradition. Here is Larkin remembering the domicile in Belfast in the 1950s:

  Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

  Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable.

  Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments

  Englands of the Mind / 1 o 1

  It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

  Larkin's England of the mind is in many ways continuous w T ith the England of Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester' and Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', an England of customs and institutions, industrial and domestic, but also an England w T hose pastoral hinterland is threatened by the very success of those institutions. Houses and roads and factories mean that a certain England is 'Going, Going':

  It seems, just now, To be happening so very fast; Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow That it isn't going to last,

  That before I snuff it, the whole Boiling will be bricked in Except for the tourist parts— First slum of Europe: a role It won't be so hard to win, With a cast of crooks and tarts.

  And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There'll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres.