Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  remarks by Samuel Beckett in the 1930s and developed most notably by Anthony Cronin. This criticism regards the vogue for poetry based on images from a country background as a derogation of literary responsibility and some sort of negative Irish feedback. It is also deliberately polemical and might be worth taking up in another context; for the moment, however, I want to keep the focus personal and look at what Kavanagh has meant to one reader, over a period of a couple of decades.

  Kavanagh's genius had achieved single-handedly what I and my grammar-schooled, arts-degreed generation were badly in need of—a poetry that linked the small farm life which had produced us to the slim-volume world we were now supposed to be fit for. He brought us back to what we came from. So it was natural that, to begin with, we overvalued the subject-matter of the poetry at the expense of its salutary creative spirit. In the 1960s I was still more susceptible to the pathos and familiarity of the matter of Kavanagh's poetry than I was alert to the liberation and subversiveness of its manner. Instead of divesting me of my first life, it confirmed that life by giving it an image. I do not mean by that that when I read The Great Hunger I felt proud to have known people similar to Patrick Maguire or felt that their ethos had been vindicated. It is more that one felt less alone and marginal as a product of that world now that it had found its expression in a work which was regarded not just as part of a national culture but as a contribution to the world's store of true poems.

  Kavanagh gave you permission to dwell without cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life. Over the border, into a Northern Ireland dominated by the noticeably English accents of the local BBC, he broadcast a voice that would not be cowed into accents other than its own. Without being in the slightest way political in its intentions, Kavanagh's poetry did have political effect. Whether he wanted it or not, his achievement was inevitably co-opted, north and south, into the general current of feeling which flowed from and sustained ideas of national identity, cultural otherness from Britain and the dream of a literature with a manner and a matter resistant- to the central Englishness of the dominant tradition. No admirer of the Irish Literary Revival, Kavanagh was

  The Placeless Heaven / 1 5 3

  read initially and almost entirely in light of the Revival writers' ambitions for a native literature.

  So there I was, in 1963, with my new copy of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, in the grip of those cultural and political pieties which Kavanagh, all unknown to me, had spent the last fifteen years or so repudiating. I could feel completely at home with a poem like 'Shancoduff—which dated from the 1930s anyhow, as did 'To the Man after the Harrow'—and with 'Kerr's Ass' and 'Ante-Natal Dream'; their imagery, after all, was continuous with the lyric poetry of the 1940s, those Monaghan rhapsodies I had known from the Oxford Book of Irish Verse. This was the country poet at home with his country subjects and we were all ready for that. At the time, I responded to the direct force of these later works but did not immediately recognize their visionary intent, their full spiritual daring.

  To go back to our original parable, I still assumed Kavanagh to be writing about the tree which was actually in the ground when he had in fact passed on to write about the tree which he held in mind. Even a deceptively direct poem like 'In Memory of My Mother' reveals the change; this does indeed contain a catalogue of actual memories of the woman as she was, and is bound to a true-life Monaghan by its images of cattle and fair days, yet all these solidly based phenomena are transformed by a shimmer of inner reality. The poem says two things at once: mother is historically gone, mother is a visionary presence forever:

  I do not think of you lying in the wet clay Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see You walking down a lane among the poplars On your way to the station, or happily

  Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday— You meet me and you say: 'Don't forget to see about the cattle—' Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

  Though this is a relatively simple—and sentimentally threatened—manifestation of the change of focus from outer to inner

  reality, it does have something of that 'weightlessness' which Kav-anagh came to seek as an alternative to the weightiness of the poetic substance in, say, The Great Hunger. It is silkier and more sinuous than the gravid, powerful roughcast of lines like:

  Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

  Where potato gatherers like mechanized scarecrows move

  Along the sidefall of a hill, Maguire and his men.

  And yet, because of its rural content, 'In Memory of My Mother' can almost pass itself off as a poem in the earlier mode. Which could not be said of lines like these, the final stanza of 'Auditors In':

  From the sour soil of a town where all roots canker

  I turn away to where the Self reposes

  The placeless Heaven that's under all our noses

  Where we're shut off from all the barren anger

  No time for self-pitying melodrama

  A million Instincts know no other uses

  Than all day long to feed and charm the Muses

  Till they become pure positive. O hunger

  Where all have mouths of desire and none

  Is willing to be eaten; I am so glad

  To come accidentally upon

  My self at the end of a tortuous road

  And have learned with surprise that God

  Unworshipped withers to the Futile One.

  The Self, mentioned twice in those fourteen lines, is being declared the poetic arena and the poetic subject. What is important now is not so much that the world is there to be celebrated, more that the poet is at hand to proceed with the celebration. And this 'celebration' is not just a limp abstraction, a matter of religiose uplift and fine feelings. It is an altogether non-literary act, connected with what the poet began to think of as his 'comic' point of view, an abandonment of a life in order to find more abundant life.

  We might say that lyric celebration was to Kavanagh what

  witty expression was to Oscar Wilde—in the beginning, a matter of temperament, a habit of style, a disposition of the artist's fundamental nature, but, in the end, a matter of redemptive force, a resource that maintained the artist's inner freedom in the face of worldly disappointments, an infrangible dignity. While both of them had an admitted appetite for success, neither could bear the warm breath of success once it offered itself; in order to find their lives again after what they instinctively sensed as a dangerous brush with spiritual enslavement to the group, they had to break with the terms of the group's values; they had to lose themselves. Wilde joking about wallpaper in his Paris hotel and Kavanagh walking the fields of Inniskeen, after his lung cancer operation and his traumatic libel action, are like men in a wise and unassertive afterlife.

  There is enormous vigour in the new-found 'comic' conviction of the poet that he must divest himself of convictions, come to experience with the pure readiness which an angel brings to the activity of witnessing reality:

  Away, away away on wings like Joyce's

  Mother Earth is putting my brand new clothes in order

  Praying, she says, that I no more ignore her

  Yellow buttons she found in fields at bargain prices.

  Kelly's Big Bush for a button-hole. Surprises

  In every pocket—the stream at Connolly's corner

  Myself at Annavackey on Armagh border

  Or calm and collected in a calving crisis.

  Not sad at all as I float away away

  With Mother keeping me to the vernacular.

  I have a home to return to now. O blessing

  For the Beturn in Departure. Somewhere to stay

  Doesn't matter. What is distressing

  Is walking eagerly to go nowhere in particular.

  'Walking eagerly' belonged to the old world of ego; now he is in the new world, where, like the lilies of the field, he considers not his raiment or what he will put on—Mother Earth, after all, is

  putting his brand-new clothes in order. Where
Kavanagh had once painted Monaghan like a Millet, with a thick and faithful pigment in which men rose from the puddled ground, all wattled in potato mould, he now paints like a Chagall, afloat above his native domain, airborne in the midst of his own dream place rather than earthbound in a literal field. Or perhaps it would be even truer to say that the later, regenerated poet in Kavanagh does not paint at all, but draws.

  Painting, after all, involves one in a more laboured relationship with a subject—or at least in a more conscious and immersed relationship with a medium—than drawing does. Drawing is closer to the pure moment of perception. The blanknesses which the line travels through in a drawing are not evidence of any incapacity on the artist's part to fill them in. They attest rather to an absolute and all-absorbing need within the line itself to keep on the move. And it is exactly that self-propulsion and airy career of drawing, that mood of buoyancy, that sense of sufficiency in the discovery of a direction rather than any sense of anxiety about the need for a destination, it is this kind of certitude and nonchalance which distinguishes the best of Kavanagh's later work also.

  This, then, is truly creative writing. It does arise from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but the overflow is not a reactive response to some stimulus in the world out there. Instead, it is a spurt of abundance from a source within, and it spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self. This is what Kavanagh is talking about in the poem 'Prelude' when he abjures satire, which is a reactive art, an 'unfruitful prayer', and embraces instead the deeper, autonomous and ecstatic art of love itself:

  But satire is unfruitful prayer,

  Only wild shoots of pity there,

  And you must go inland and be

  Lost in compassion's ecstasy,

  Where suffering soars in a summer air—

  The millstone has become a star.

  When I read those lines in 1963, I took to their rhythm and was grateful for their skilful way with an octosyllabic metre. But I was

  too much in love with poetry that painted the world in a thick linguistic pigment to relish fully the line-drawing that was inscribing itself so lightly and freely here. I was still more susceptible to the heavy tarpaulin of the verse of The Great Hunger than to the rinsed streamers that fly in the clear subjective breeze of 'Prelude'. I have learned to value this poetry of inner freedom very highly. It is an example of self-conquest, a style discovered to express this poet's unique response to his universal ordinariness, a way of re-establishing the authenticity of personal experience and surviving as a credible being. So I would now wish to revise a sentence which I wrote ten years ago. I said then that when Kavanagh had consumed the roughage of his Monaghan experience, he ate his heart out. I believe now that it would be truer to say that when he had consumed the roughage of his early Monaghan experience, he had cleared a space where, in Yeats's words, 'The soul recovers radical innocence,/And learns at last that it is self-delighting,/ Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,/And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will.' If the price of this learning was too often, in poetic terms, a wilful doggerel, writing which exercised a vindictiveness against the artfulness of art, the rewards of it were a number of poems so full of pure self-possession in the face of death and waste that they prompt that deepest of responses, which the archaic torso of Apollo prompted in Rilke. These poems, with their grievously earned simplicity, make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading, and which Rilke expressed in a single, simple command: 'You must change your life.'

  The Main of Light

  E. M. Forster once said that he envisaged A Passage to India as a book with a hole in the middle of it. Some poems are like that too. They have openings at their centre which take the reader through and beyond. Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, for example:

  Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

  So do our minutes hasten to their end;

  Each changing place with that which goes before,

  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

  Nativity, once in the main of light,

  Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,

  Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,

  And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

  Something visionary happens there in the fifth line. 'Nativity', an abstract noun housed in a wavering body of sound, sets up a warning tremor just before the mind's eye gets dazzled by 'the main of light', and for a split second we are in the world of the Paradiso. The rest of the poem lives melodiously in a world of discourse, but it is this unpredictable strike into the realm of sheer being that marks the sonnet with Shakespeare's extravagant genius.

  In so far as it is a poem alert to the sadness of life's changes but haunted too by a longing for some adjacent 'pure serene', the sonnet rehearses in miniature the whole poignant score of Philip Larkin's poetry. With Larkin, we respond constantly to the melody of intelligence, to a verse that is as much commentary as it is presentation, and it is this encounter between a compassionate, un-foolable mind and its own predicaments—which we are forced to recognize as our predicaments too—that gives his poetry its first appeal. Yet while Larkin is exemplary in the way he sifts the conditions of contemporary life, refuses alibis and pushes conscious-

  The Main of Light / 1 5 9

  ness towards an exposed condition that is neither cynicism nor despair, there survives in him a repining for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance. When that repining finds expression, something opens and moments occur which deserve to be called visionary. Because he is suspicious of any easy consolation, he is sparing of such moments, yet when they come they stream into the discursive and exacting world of his poetry with such trustworthy force that they call for attention.

  In his introduction to the reissue of The North Ship, Larkin recalls a merry and instructive occasion during the period of his infatuation with Yeats: 'I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast out remorse, so great a sweetness flows into the breast. . . , "It's not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness." But then Bruce Montgomery had known Charles Williams.' Larkin tells the anecdote to illustrate his early surrender to Yeats's music and also to commend the anti-Romantic, morally sensitive attitude which Montgomery was advocating and which would eventually issue in his conversion to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Yet it also illustrates that appetite for sweetness flowing into the breast, for the sensation of revelation, which never deserted him. The exchange between Montgomery and himself prefigures the shape of the unsettled quarrel, which would be conducted all through the mature poetry, between vision and experience. And if it is that anti-heroic, chastening, humanist voice which is allowed most of the good lines throughout the later poetry, the rebukes it delivers cannot altogether banish the Yeatsian need for a flow of sweetness.

  That sweetness flows into the poetry most reliably as a stream of light. In fact, there is something Yeatsian in the way that Larkin, in High Windows, places his sun poem immediately opposite and in answer to his moon poem: 'Sad Steps' and 'Solar' face each other on the opened page like the two halves of his poetic personality in dialogue. In 'Sad Steps', the wary intelligence is tempted by a moment of lunar glamour. The renaissance moon of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sails close, and the invitation to yield to the 'enormous yes' that love should evoke is potent, even for a man who has just taken a piss:

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 6 O

  I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

  Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

  His vulnerability to desire and hope is transmitted in the Ten-nysonian cadence of that last line and a half, but immediately the delved brow tightens—'There's something laughable about this'— only to be tempted again by a dream of fullness, this time in the symbolist transports of language itself—'O wolves of memory, im-mensements!' He finally comes out, of cou
rse, with a definite, end-stopped 'No'. He refuses to allow the temptations of melody to chloroform the exactions of his common sense. Truth wins over beauty by a few points, and while the appeal of the poem lies in its unconsoled clarity about the seasons of ageing, our nature still tends to run to fill that symbolist hole in the middle.

  However, the large yearnings that are kept firmly in their rational place in 'Sad Steps' are given scope to 'climb and return like angels' in 'Solar'. This is frankly a prayer, a hymn to the sun, releasing a generosity that is in no way attenuated when we look twice and find that what is being praised could be as phallic as it is solar. Where the moon is 'preposterous and separate,/Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!', described in the language of the ironical, emotionally defensive man, the sun is a 'lion face', 'an origin', a 'petalled head of flames', 'unclosing like a hand', all of them phrases of the utmost candid feeling. The poem is unexpected and daring, close to the pulse of primitive poetry, unprotected by any sleight of tone or persona. Here Larkin is bold to stand uncovered in the main of light, far from the hatless one who took off his cycle clips in awkward reverence:

  Coined there among

  Lonely horizontals

  You exist operdy.

  Our needs hourly

  Climb and return like angels.

  Unclosing like a hand, You give forever.