Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  DOCK

  Its green flowers attract only the wind But a red vein may irrigate the leaf

  And blossom into blush or birthmark Or a remedy for the nettle's sting,

  ORCHID

  The tuber absorbs summer and winter, Its own ugly shape, twisted arms and legs, A recollection of the heart, one artery Sprouting upwards to support a flower.

  These verses are not Longley at his most effulgent, but for that very reason I test my contention against them and find it holds true. The direct sexual analogies are there in drawn skirts, blushes and birthmarks, but the associations in corollas dangling, arteries sprouting upwards to support a flower and little fingers in thimbles and fingerstalls make us feel like lowering our eyes in the presence of these specimens rather than spy upon their little arousals. Yet it is not simply the imagery and the submerged tissue of association that constitute the eroticism of the lines; it is the intent, close-up numbering and savouring of each tiny identifying mark, the cherishing and lingering name laid upon the thing itself.

  All this is even more richly evident when we turn to Longley's more fully orchestrated writings; his recent book The Echo Gate is full of opulent, classical love poems, one of the best of which is 'The Linen Industry'. By now it is superfluous for me to spell out the connections between the private flax and linen of this poem and the public flax and linen which had been the basis of Belfast's industrial power and its intransigent male-fisted politics, both of which refused the feminine element symbolized by the land of Ireland itself. Again, it is superfluous to insist that Longley has in mind no political allegory of the sort I am sketching, but nevertheless a reading of the poem is possible which sees it as the internalization and affirmation of those feminine powers repressed by man's, and in particular the Ulsterman's, adaptation to conditions in the industrial world:

  Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen And laying our handfuls in the peaty water

  To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks That recall the skirts of an invisible dancer,

  We become a part of the linen industry And follow its processes to the grubby town Where fields are compacted into window-boxes And there is little room among the big machines.

  But even in our attic under the skylight We make love on a bleach green, the whole meadow Draped with material turning white in the sun As though snow reluctant to melt were our attire.

  What's passion but a battering of stubborn stalks, Then a gentle combing out of fibres like hair And a weaving of these into christening robes, Into garments for a marriage or funeral?

  Since it's like a bereavement once the labour's done To find ourselves last workers in a dying trade, Let flax be our matchmaker, our undertaker, The provider of sheets for whatever the bed—

  And be shy of your breasts in the presence of death, Say that you look more beautiful in linen Wearing white petticoats, the bow on your bodice A butterfly attending the embroidered flowers.

  That sense of history viewed from a great distance which we found in Mahon is in this poem too; and that rendering of the world down to a precipitate of language, typical of Muldoon, is also at work here, but more candidly, for Longley is more trusting of the first innocent blush of the word itself, more susceptible to its purely phonetic body. Here Edward Thomas's English naming poems rather than Joyce's riddling Irish prose are the sponsoring presence from the literary tradition, a sponsorship with just as much political significance as we want to assign it.

  To go back to the terms with which I began this lecture and revise them slightly, we might say that Longley's poems are symbolic

  FINDERS K E E I' E R S / '44

  dissolutions. Like Faustus in his last hour wishing to be dispersed into the smallest creatures and phenomena in the face of the terror of death, Longley's imagination runs to hide in the multiple details of the natural world. Rapture is imaged by him as the escape of a flock of pigeons from their basket, and the old Elizabethan usage of 'death' as a word for sexual climax comes into play when we find Longley eroticizing even the dissolution of the body after death, in poems like 'Obsequies' and 'Oliver Plunkett'.

  I want to end this consideration of the way the energies in Northern Ireland have been transposed or displaced into poetry by looking at Longley's poem 'Self-Heal', from a sequence called 'Mayo Monologues'. Mayo is, of course, in the west, not the north of Ireland, and Longley did not set out to write a poem 'relevant' to the Troubles—which is all to the good. 'Self-Heal' is the name of a flower, and naming it appeases the character in the monologue, a woman who was sexually molested by a mongoloid neighbour, somebody stunted in body and spirit, whose reach out towards beauty and fulfilment brought the full brutal weight of his community's prejudices down upon him; and that violence bred a new violence within himself.

  I wanted to teach him the names of flowers, Self-heal and centaury; on the long acre Where cattle never graze, bog asphodel. Could I love someone so gone in the head And, as they say, was I leading him on? He'd slept in the cot until he was twelve Because of his babyish ways, I suppose, Or the lack of a bed: hadn't his father Gambled away all but rushy pasture? His skull seemed to be hammered like a wedge Into his shoulders, and his back was hunched, Which gave him an almost scholarly air. But he couldn't remember the things I taught: Each name would hover above its flower Like a butterfly unable to alight. That day I pulled a cuckoo-pint apart

  Place and Displacement / 1 4 5

  To release the giddy insects from their cell.

  Gently he slipped his hand between my thighs.

  I wasn't frightened; and still I don't know why,

  But I ran from him in tears to tell them.

  I heard how every day for one whole week

  He was flogged with a blackthorn, then tethered

  In the hayfield. I might have been the cow

  Whose tail he would later dock with shears,

  And he the ram tangled in barbed wire

  That he stoned to death when they set him free.

  As the voice of the woman in this poem recounts her part in the violence for which she is innocently responsible, she begins to gain some detachment from her own suffering and to comprehend the role she played in the larger story. She can see that she was implicated, if unwittingly, in the savage turn of events and does not seek to excuse herself. Her learning process might therefore be analogous to the learning process forced upon poets by events in Northern Ireland. Although in no way personally responsible for the violence that occurred, they comprehend its causes and effects and have been inclined to make their poetry a process of self-healing, neither deliberately provocative nor culpably detached.

  The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh

  In 1939, the year that Patrick Kavanagh arrived in Dublin, an aunt of mine planted a chestnut in a jam jar. When it began to sprout she broke the jar, made a hole and transplanted the thing under a hedge in front of the house. Over the years, the seedling shot up into a young tree that rose taller and taller above the boxwood hedge. And over the years I came to identify my own life with the life of the chestnut tree.

  This was because everybody remembered and constantly repeated the fact that it had been planted the year I was born; also because I was something of a favourite with that particular aunt, so her affection came to be symbolized in the tree; and also perhaps because the chestnut was the one significant thing that grew as I grew. The rest of the trees and hedges round the house were all mature and appeared therefore like given features of the world: the chestnut tree, on the other hand, was young and was watched in much the same way as the other children and myself were watched and commented upon—fondly, frankly and unrelentingly.

  When I was in my early teens, the family moved away from that house, and the new owners of the place eventually cut down every tree around the yard and the lane and the garden, including the chestnut tree. We deplored all that, of course, but life went on satisfactorily enough where we resettled, and for years I gave no particular
thought to the place we had left or to my tree which had been felled. Then, all of a sudden, a couple of years ago, I began to think of the space where the tree had been or would have been. In my mind's eye I saw it as a kind of luminous emptiness, a warp and waver of light, and once again, in a way that I find hard to define, I began to identify with that space just as years before I had identified with the young tree.

  Except that this time it was not so much a matter of attaching oneself to a living symbol of being rooted in the native ground; it

  The Placeless Heaven

  1 4 7

  was more a matter of preparing to be uprooted, to be spirited away into some transparent yet indigenous afterlife. The new place was all idea, if you like; it was generated out of my experience of the old place but it was not a topographical location. It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a heavenly place.

  I am going to suggest here an analogy between the first tree and the last tree as I have just described them and the early and late poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. I also want to talk about that poetry in terms of my earliest and latest responses to it. And I hope that what emerges will be not just a personal record but some kind of generally true account of the nature of Patrick Kavanagh's essential poems.

  Briefly, then, I would suggest that the early Kavanagh poem starts up like my childhood tree in its home ground; it is supplied with a strong physical presence and is full of the recognitions which existed between the poet and his place; it is symbolic of affections rooted in a community life and has behind it an imagination which is not yet weaned from its origin, an attached rather than a detached faculty, one which lives, to use Kavanagh's own metaphor, in a fog. Many of those early poems do indeed celebrate the place as heavenly, many more are disappointed that it is not as heavenly as it could or should be, but all of the early Monaghan poetry gives the place credit for existing, assists at its real topographical presence, dwells upon it and accepts it as the definitive locus of the given world.

  The horizons of the little fields and hills, whether they are gloomy and constricting or radiant and enhancing, are sensed as the horizons of consciousness. Within those horizons, however, the poet who utters the poems is alive and well as a sharp critical intelligence. He knows that the Monaghan world is not the whole world, yet it is the only one for him, the one which he embosses solidly and intimately into the words of poems. We might say that Kavanagh is pervious to this world's spirit more than it is pervious to his spirit. When the Big Forth of Rocksavage is mentioned, or

  Cassidy's Hanging Hill, the reader senses immediately that these are places in the actual countryside which are pressing constantly into memory. In this early period, the experienced physical reality of Monaghan life imposes itself upon the poet's consciousness so that he necessarily composes himself, his poetic identity and his poems in relation to that encircling horizon of given experience.

  In the poetry of Kavanagh's later period, embodied first in 'Epic' and then, in the late 1950s, in the Canal Bank Sonnets, a definite change is perceptible. We might say that now the world is more pervious to his vision than he is pervious to the world. When he writes about places now, they are luminous spaces within his mind. They have been evacuated of their status as background, as documentary geography, and exist instead as transfigured images, sites where the mind projects its own force. In this later poetry, place is included within the horizon of Kavanagh's mind rather than the other way around. The country he visits is inside himself:

  I do not know what age I am,

  I am no mortal age;

  I know nothing of women,

  Nothing of cities,

  I cannot die

  Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

  ('Innocence')

  At the edge of consciousness in a late poem such as this, we encounter the white light of meditation; at the edge of consciousness in the early poems, the familiar world stretches reliably away. At the conclusion of poems like 'Spraying the Potatoes' and 'A Christmas Childhood', self is absorbed by scene:

  And poet lost to potato-fields, Remembering the lime and copper smell Of the spraying barrels he is not lost Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.

  An opposite process, however, is at work at the conclusion of 'Canal Bank Walk'. Here the speaker's presence does not disperse itself in a dying fall, nor does the circumference of circumstances crowd out the perceiving centre. Even though the voice is asking to be 'enraptuied', there is no hint of passivity. The rhythm heaves up strongly, bespeaking the mind's adequacy to the task of making this place—or any place—into an 'important place'. Pretending to be the world's servant, Kavanagh is actually engaged in the process of world mastery:

  O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, Feed the gaping need to my sense, give me ad lib To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

  Similarly, in the pivotal sonnet 'Epic', even though the poem gives the stage over to two Monaghan farmers and successfully sets Ballyrush and Gortin in balance against Munich, it is not saying that the farmers and the Monaghan region are important in themselves. They are made important only by the light of the mind which is now playing upon them. It is a poem more in praise of Kavanagh's idea of Homer than in praise of Kavanagh's home.

  'Epic' appeared in the volume called Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, published in i960 and reprinted three times within the next year. My own copy is one of the fourth impression, and I have dated it 3 July 1963. I did not have many copies of books by living poets at that time, and it is hard now to retrieve the sense of being on the outside of things, far away from 'the City of Kings/Where art music, letters are the real thing'. Belfast at that time had no literary publishers, no poetry readings, no sense of a literary identity. In 1962, while a student at St Joseph's College of Education, I had done an extended essay on the history of literary magazines in Ulster, as though I were already seeking a basis for faith in the possibility of our cultural existence as Northern, Irish and essentially

  ourselves. It comes as something of a shock nowadays to remember that during four years as an undergraduate in the Queen's University English Department I had not ever been taught by an Irish or an Ulster voice. I had, however, heard Louis MacNeice read his poems there and in 1963 had also listened to Thomas Kinsella read from his second volume, Downstream, and from earlier work. Eventually, I got my hands on Robin Skelton's anthology Six Irish Poets; on the first edition of John Montague's Poisoned Lands, with its irrigating and confirming poem, 'The Water Carrier'; on Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry, where I encountered the work of Ted Hughes and R. S. Thomas. All of these things were animating, as were occasional trips to Dublin, where I managed to pick up that emblem of Ireland's quickening poetic life, The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, and to read in it the strong lines of Richard Murphy's 'The Cleggan Disaster'. Meanwhile, my headmaster, Michael McLaverty, himself a Monaghan man by birth but with a far gentler sensibility than Kavanagh's, lent me his copy of A Soul for Sale and so introduced me, at the age of twenty-three, to The Great Hunger.

  Everything, at that time, was needy and hopeful and inchoate. I had had four poems accepted for publication, two by the Belfast Telegraph, one by The Irish Times and one by The Kilkenny Magazine, but still, like Keats in Yeats's image, I was like a child with his nose pressed to a sweetshop window, gazing from behind a barrier at the tempting mysteries beyond. And then came this revelation and confirmation of reading Kavanagh. When I discovered 'Spraying the Potatoes' in the old Oxford Book of Irish Terse, I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately—but which I had always considered to be below or beyond books—being presented in a book. The barrels of blue potato spray which had stood in my own childhood like holidays of pure colour in an otherwise grey field-life�
��there they were, standing their ground in print. And there too was the word 'headland', which I guessed was to Kavanagh as local a word as 'headrig' was to me. Here too was the strange stillness and heat and solitude of the sunlit fields, the inexplicable melancholy of distant work-sounds, all caught in a language that was both familiar and odd:

  The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.

  And it was the same with 'A Christmas Childhood'. Once again, in the other life of print, I came upon the unregarded data of the life I had lived. Potato-pits with rime on them, guttery gaps, iced-over puddles being crunched, cows being milked, a child nicking the doorpost with a penknife and so on. What was being experienced was not some hygienic and self-aware pleasure of the text but a primitive delight in finding world become word.

  I had been hungry for this kind of thing without knowing what it was I was hungering after. For example, when I graduated in 1961, I had bought Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems. I did take pleasure in that work, especially in the hard-faced tenderness of something like 'Postscript from Iceland'; I recognized his warm and clinkered spirit, yet I still remained at a reader's distance. MacNeice did not throw the switch that sends writing energy sizzling into a hitherto unwriting system. When I opened his book, I still came up against the window-pane of literature. His poems arose from a mind-stuff and existed in a cultural setting which were at one remove from me and what I came from. I envied them, of course, their security in the big world of history and poetry which happened out there, far beyond the world of state scholarships, the Gaelic Athletic Association, October devotions, the Clancy Brothers, buckets and egg-boxes where I had had my being. I envied them, but I was not taken over by them the way I was taken over by Kavanagh.

  At this point, it is necessary to make one thing clear. I am not affirming here the superiority of the rural over the urban/ suburban as a subject for poetry, nor am I out to sponsor deprivation at the expense of cultivation. I am not insinuating that one domain of experience is more intrinsically poetical or more ethnically desirable than another. I am trying to record exactly the sensations of one reader, from a comparatively bookless background, who came into contact with some of the established poetic voices in Ireland in the early 1960s. Needless to say, I am aware of a certain partisan strain in the criticism of Irish poetry, deriving from