Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  These are the words of someone surprised by 'a hunger in himself to be more serious', although there is nothing in the poem which the happy atheist could not accept. Yet in the 'angels' simile and in the generally choral tone of the whole thing, Larkin opens stops that he usually keeps muted and it is precisely these stops which prove vital to the power and reach of his work.

  'Deceptions', for example, depends upon a bright, still centre for its essential poetic power. The image of a window rises to take in the facts of grief, to hold them at bay and in focus. The violated girl's mind lies open 'like a drawer of knives', and most of the first stanza registers the dead-still sensitivity of the gleaming blades and the changing moods of the afternoon light. What we used to consider in our Christian Doctrine classes under the heading of 'the mystery of suffering' becomes actual in the combined sensations of absolute repose and trauma, made substantial in images which draw us into raw identification with the girl:

  The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief Worry of wheels along the street outside Where bridal London bows the other way, And light, unanswerable and tall and wide, Forbids the scar to heal, and drives Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

  It is this light-filled dilation at the heart of the poem which transposes it from lament to comprehension and prepares the way for the sharp irony of the concluding lines. I have no doubt that Larkin would have repudiated any suggestion that the beauty of the lines I have quoted is meant to soften the pain, as I have no doubt he would also have repudiated the Pedlar's advice to Wordsworth in 'The Ruined Cottage' where, having told of the long sufferings of Margaret, he bids the poet 'be wise and cheerful'. And yet the Pedlar's advice arises from his apprehension of 'an

  image of tranquillity' which works in much the same way as the Larkin passage:

  those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear grass on the wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er.

  It is the authenticity of this moment of pacification which to some extent guarantees the Pedlar's optimism; in a similar way the blank tenderness at the heart of Larkin's poem takes it beyond irony and bitterness, though all the while keeping it short of facile consolation: 'I would not dare/Console you if I could'.

  Since Larkin is a poet as explicit as he is evocative, it is no surprise to find him coining terms that exactly describe the kind of effect I am talking about: 'Here', the first poem in The Whitsun Weddings, ends by defining it as a sense of 'unfenced existence' and by supplying the experience that underwrites that spacious abstraction:

  Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

  It is a conclusion that recalls the conclusion of Joyce's 'The Dead'—and indeed Dubliners is a book very close to the spirit of Larkin, whose collected work would fit happily under the title Englanders. These concluding lines constitute an epiphany, an escape from the 'scrupulous meanness' of the disillusioned intelligence, and we need only compare 'Here' with 'Show Saturday', another poem that seeks^its form by an accumulation of detail, to see how vital to the success of 'Here' is this gesture towards a realm beyond the social and historical. 'Show Saturday' remains

  encumbered in naturalistic data, and while its conclusion beautifully expresses a nostalgic patriotism which is also an important part of this poet's make-up, the note achieved is less one of plangent vision, more a matter of liturgical wishfulness: 'Let it always be so.'

  'If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water'—but he could make use of 'Here' as well; and 'Solar'; and 'High Windows'; and 'The Explosion'; and 'Water', the poem from which the lines are taken. It is true that the jaunty tone of these lines, and the downbeat vocabulary later in the poem involving 'sousing,/A furious devout drench', are indicative of Larkin's unease with the commission he has imagined for himself. But just as 'Solar' and 'Here' yield up occasions where 'unfenced existence' can, without embarrassment to the sceptical man, find space to reveal its pure invitations, so too 'Water' escapes from its man-of-the-world nonchalance into a final stanza which is held like a natural monstrance above the socially defensive idiom of the rest of the poem:

  And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly.

  The minute light makes its presence felt in Larkin's poetry, he cannot resist the romantic poet in himself who must respond with pleasure and alacrity, exclaiming, as it were, 'Already with thee!' The effects are various but they are all extraordinary, from the throw-away surprises of 'a street/Of blinding windscreens' or 'the differently-swung stars' or 'that high-builded cloud / Moving at summer's pace', to the soprano delights of this stanza from 'An Arundel Tomb':

  Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

  Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came,

  —and from that restraint to the manic spasm in this, from 'Livings, IF:

  Guarded by brilliance

  I set plate and spoon,

  And after, divining-cards.

  Lit shelved liners

  Grope like mad worlds westward.

  Light, so powerfully associated with joyous affirmation, is even made to serve a ruthlessly geriatric vision of things in 'The Old Fools':

  Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting.

  And it is refracted even more unexpectedly at the end of 'High Windows' when one kind of brightness, the brightness of belief in liberation and amelioration, falls from the air which immediately fills with a different, infinitely neutral splendour:

  And immediately

  Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

  All these moments spring from the deepest strata of Larkin's poetic self, and they are connected with another kind of mood that pervades his work and wjiich could be called Elysian: I am thinking in particular of poems like 'At Grass', 'MCMXIV, 'How Distant' and, most recently, 'The Explosion'. To borrow Geoffrey Hill's

  borrowing from Coleridge, these are visions of 'the spiritual, Platonic old England', the light in them honeyed by attachment to a dream world that will not be denied because it is at the foundation of the poet's sensibility. It is the light that was on Langland's Malvern, 'in summer season, when soft was the sun', at once local and timeless. In 'The Explosion' the field full of folk has become a coalfield, and something Larkin shares with his miners 'breaks ancestrally . . . into / Regenerate union':

  The dead go on before us, they

  Are sitting in God's house in comfort,

  We shall see them face to face —

  Plain as lettering in the chapels It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion

  Larger than in life thev managed— Gold as on a coin, or walking Somehow from the sun towards them,

  One showing the eggs unbroken.

  If Philip Larkin had ever composed his version of The Divine Comedy, he would probably have discovered himself not in a dark wood but in a railway tunnel halfway on a journey down England. His inferno proper might have occurred before dawn, as a death-haunted aubade, whence he would have emerged into the lighted room inside the head of an old fool, and then his purgatorial ascent would have been up through the 'lucent comb' of some hospital building where men in hired boxes stared out at a wind-tousled sky. We have no doubt about his ability to recount the troubles of such souls who walk the rising ground of 'extinction's alp'. His disillusioned compassion for them has been celebrated, and his need to keep numbering their griefs has occasionally drawn forth protests that he narrowed the possibilities of life so much that the who
le earth became a hospital. I want to suggest that Larkin also had it in him to write his own version of the Paradiso. It might

  well have amounted to no more than an acknowledgement of the need to imagine 'such attics cleared of me, such absences'; nevertheless, in the poems he wrote there was enough reach and longing to show that he did not completely settle for that well-known bargain offer, 'a poetry of lowered sights and patently diminished expectations'.

  Atlas of Civilization

  At the very end of his life, Socrates' response to his recurring dream, which had instructed him to 'practise the art', was to begin to put the fables of Aesop into verse. It was, of course, entirely in character for the philosopher to be attracted to fictions whose a priori function was to expose the shape of things, and it was proper that even this slight brush with the art of poetry should involve an element of didacticism. But imagine what the poems of Socrates would have been like if, instead of doing adaptations, he had composed original work during those hours before he took the poison. It is unlikely that he would have broken up his lines to weep; indeed, it is likely that he would not only have obeyed Yeats's injunction on this score but that he would have produced an oeuvre sufficient to confound the master's claim that 'The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work.'

  It would be an exaggeration to say that the work of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert could pass as a substitute for such an ideal poetry of reality. Yet in the exactions of its logic, the temperance of its tone and the extremity and equanimity of its recognitions, it does resemble what a twentieth-century poetic version of the examined life might be. Admittedly, in all that follows here, it is an English translation rather than the Polish original which is being praised or pondered, but what convinces one of the universal resource of Herbert's writing is just this ability which it possesses to lean, without toppling, well beyond the plumb of its native language.

  Herbert himself, however, is deeply attracted to that which does not lean but which 'trusts geometry, simple numerical rule, the wisdom of the square, balance and weight'. He rejoices in the discovery that 'Greek architecture originated in the sun' and that 'Greek architects knew the art of measuring with shadows. The north-south axis was marked by the shortest shadow cast by the

  sun's zenith. The problem was to trace the perpendicular, the holy east-west direction.' Hence the splendid utility of Pythagoras's theorem, and the justice of Herbert's observation that 'the architects of the Doric temples were less concerned with beauty than with the chiselling of the world's order into stone.'

  These quotations come from the second essay in Barbarian in the Garden, a collection of ten meditations on art and history which masquerade as 'travel writings' in so far as nine of them are occasioned by visits to specific places, including Lascaux, Sicily, Aries, Orvieto, Siena, Chartres and the various resting places of the paintings of Piero della Francesca. A tenth one also begins and ends at a single pungent site, the scorched earth of an island in the Seine where on 18 March 1314 Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Order of the Templars, was burned at the stake along with Geoffroi de Charney and thirty-six brothers of their order. Yet this section of the book also travels to a domain with which Herbert is already too familiar: the domain of tyranny, with its police supervision, mass arrests, tortures, self-inculpations, purges and eradications, all those methods which already in the fourteenth century had begun to 'enrich the repertoire of power'.

  Luckily, the poet's capacity for admiration is more than equal to his perception of the atrocious, and Barbarian in the Garden is an ironical title. This 'barbarian' who makes his pilgrimage to the sacred places is steeped in the culture and history of classical and medieval Europe. Admittedly, there is situated at the centre of his consciousness a large burnt-out zone inscribed 'what we have learned in modern times and must never forget even though we need hardly dwell upon it', but even so, this very consciousness can still muster a sustaining half-trust in man as a civilizer and keeper of civilizations. The book is full of lines which sing out in the highest registers of intellectual rapture. In Paestum, 'Greek temples live under the golden sun of geometry'. In Orvieto, to enter the cathedral is a surprise, 'so much does the facade differ from the interior—as though the gate of life full of birds and colours led into a cold, austere^eternity'. In the presence of a Piero della Francesca: 'He is . .* . like a figurative painter who has passed through a cubist phase.' In the presence of Piero's Death of Adam

  in Arezzo: 'The entire scene appears Hellenic, as though the Old Testament were composed by Aeschylus.'

  But Herbert never gets too carried away. The ground-hugging sturdiness which he recognizes and cherishes in archaic buildings has its analogue in his own down-to-earthness. His love of 'the quiet chanting of the air and the immense planes' does not extend so far as to constitute a betrayal of the human subject, in thrall to gravity and history. His imagination is slightly less skyworthy than that of his great compatriot Czeslaw Milosz, who has nevertheless recognized in the younger poet a kindred spirit and as long ago as 1968 translated, with Peter Dale Scott, the now reissued Selected Poems. Deliciously susceptible as he is to the 'lucidus ordo —an eternal order of light and balance'—in the work of Piero, Herbert is still greatly pleasured by the density and miscellany of things he finds in a book by Piero's contemporary, the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti:

  Despite its classical structure, technical subjects are mixed with anecdotes and trivia. We may read about foundations, building-sites, bricklaying, doorknobs, wheels, axes, levers, hacks, and how to 'exterminate and destroy snakes, mosquitoes, bed-bugs, fleas, mice, moths and other importunate night creatures'.

  Clearly, although he quotes Berenson elsewhere, Herbert would be equally at home with a builder. He is very much the poet of a workers' republic in so far as he possesses a natural affinity with those whose eyes narrow in order to effect an operation or a calculation rather than to study a refinement. Discussing the self-portrait of Luca Signorelli which that painter entered in The Coming of the Anti-Christ (in the duomo at Orvieto) alongside a portrait of his master, Fra Angelico, Herbert makes a distinction between the two men. He discerns how Signorelli's eyes 'are fixed upon reality . . . Beside him, Fra Angelico dressed in a cassock gazes inwards. Two glances: one visionary, the other observant.' It is a distinction which suggests an equivalent division within the poet, deriving from the co-existence within his own deepest self of two conflicting strains. These were identified by A. Alvarez in his

  introduction to the original 1968 volume as the tender-minded and the tough-minded, and it is some such crossing of a natural readiness to consent upon an instinctive suspicion which constitutes the peculiar fibre of Herbert's mind and art.

  All through Barbarian in the Garden, the tender-minded, desiring side of his nature is limpidly, felicitously engaged. In a church in a Tuscan village where 'there is hardly room enough for a coffin', he encounters a Madonna. 'She wears a simple, high-waisted dress open from breast to knees. Her left hand rests on a hip, a country bridesmaid's gesture; her right hand touches her belly but without a trace of licentiousness.' In a similar fashion, as he reports his ascent of the tower of Senlis Cathedral, the writing unreels like a skein long stored in the cupboard of the senses. 'Patches of lichen, grass between the stones, and bright yellow flowers'; then, high up on a gallery, an 'especially beautiful Eve. Coarse-grained, big-eyed and plump. A heavy plait of hair falls on her wide, warm back.'

  Writing of this sort, which ensures, in Neruda's words, that 'the reality of the world should not be underprized', is valuable in itself, but what reinforces Herbert's contribution and takes it far beyond being just another accomplished printout of a cultivated man's impressions is his sceptical historical sense of the world and its unreliability. He is thus as appreciative of the unfinished part of Siena Cathedral and as unastonished by it as he is entranced by what is exquisitely finished: 'The majestic plan remained unfulfilled, interrupted by the Black Dea
th and errors in construction.' The elegance of that particular zeugma should not blind us to its outrage; the point is that Herbert is constantly wincing in the jaws of a pincer created by the mutually indifferent intersection of art and suffering. Long habituation to this crux has bred in him a tone which is neither vindictive against art nor occluded to pain. It predisposes him to quote Cicero on the colonies of Sicily as 'an ornamental band sewn on to the rough cloth of barbarian lands, a golden band that was frequently stained with blood'. And it enables him to strike his own jocund, unnerving sentgnces, like this one about the Baglioni family of Perugia: 'They were vengeful and cruel, though refined enough to slaughter their enemies on beautiful summer evenings.'

  Once more, this comes from his essay on Piero della Francesca, and it is in writing about this beloved painter that Herbert articulates most clearly the things we would want to say about himself as an artist: 'The harmonized background and the principle of tranquillity', 'the rule of the demon of perspective', the viewing of the world as 'through a pane of ice', an 'epic impassiveness', a quality which is 'impersonal, supra-individual'. All these phrases apply, at one time or another, to Herbert's poetry and help to adumbrate the shapes of his 'tough-mindedness'. Yet they should not be taken to suggest any culpable detachment or abstraction. The impassiveness, the perspective, the impersonality, the tranquillity, all derive from his unblindable stare at the facts of pain, the recurrence of injustice and catastrophe; but they derive also from a deep love for the whole Western tradition of religion, literature and art, which have remained open to him as a spiritual resource, helping him to stand his ground. Herbert is as familiar as any twentieth-century writer with the hollow men and has seen more broken columns with his eyes than most literary people have seen in their imaginations, but this does not end up in a collapse of his trust in the humanist endeavour. On the contrary, it summons back to mind the whole dimensions of that endeavour and enforces it once more upon your awareness for the great boon which it is (not was), something we may have thought of as vestigial before we began reading these books but which, by the time we have finished, stands before our understanding once again like 'a cathedral in the wilderness'.