Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  poems throughout the volume which sweep the strings of Polish national memory. If I have been less attentive to this domestic witnessing function of the book than I might have been, it is not because I undervalue that function of Herbert's poetry. On the contrary, it is precisely because I am convinced of its obdurate worth on the home front that I feel free to elaborate in the luxurious margin. Anyhow, John and Bogdana Carpenter have annotated the relevant dates and names so that the reader is kept alert to the allusions and connections which provide the book's oblique discharge of political energy As well as providing this editorial service, they seem to have managed the task of translating well; I had no sense of their coming between me and the poem's first life, no sense of their having interfered.

  Zbigniew Herbert is a poet with all the strengths of an Antaeus, yet he finally emerges more like the figure of an Atlas. Refreshed time and again by being thrown back upon his native earth, standing his ground determinedly in the local plight, he nevertheless shoulders the whole sky and scope of human dignity and responsibility. These various translations leave no doubt about the essential function which his work performs, that of keeping a trustworthy poetic canopy, if not a perfect heaven, above our vulnerable heads.

  from Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet

  T. S. Eliot's work is haunted by the shade of Dante, and nowhere more tellingly than in the second section of 'Little Gidding'. This part of Four Quartets is set in the dawn, in wartime London, a modern dream vision, concerned to some extent with strictly literary matters but ultimately involved with the universal sorrows and penalties of living and ageing. The poet exchanges intense but oddly formal words with 'a familiar compound ghost' and the section ends like this:

  'From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'

  The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.

  The phrase 'the blowing of the horn' operates in the same way that the word 'forlorn' operates in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'. It tolls us back to our sole selves. It is bleaker than Keats's word because the world outside Eliot's poem is even bleaker than the world outside Keats's 'Ode'. 'The blowing of the horn' is, in fact, the sounding of the 'all clear' at the end of an air raid, and it recalls us to Eliot's historical situation when he was composing the poem and doing his duty as an air-raid warden during the London Blitz. Indeed, the strange lines at the beginning of the section about 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue' which passes 'below the horizon of his homing' and the image of 'three districts whence the smoke arose' are also documentary of the historical moment, in so far as they suggest the bomber's withdrawal and the burning city after the raid.

  Yet to talk like this about blitz and bombers and air raids and

  Dante and the Modern Poet / 1 8 5

  burning cities is out of keeping with the mood and intent of the poetry. That poetry, like the poetry of Keats's 'Ode', is at a third remove from the local, historical moment and is suspended in the ether of a contemplative mind. The language conducts us away from what is contingent; it is mimetic not of the cold morning cityscape but of the calescent imagination. We can say, as a matter of literary fact, that the lines are more haunted by the flocks of Dante's terza rima than by the squadrons of Hitler's Luftwaffe.

  We can also say that the language of the poem is more affected by Eliot's idea of Dante's language than it is by the actual sounds and idioms of those Londoners among whom Eliot lived and over whom he was watching during his 'dead patrol'. The lines have something of the quality which Eliot ascribes to Dante in his 1929 essay on the poet:

  Dante's universality is not solely a personal matter. The Italian language, and especially the Italian language in Dante's age, gains much by being the product of universal Latin. There is something much more local about the languages in which Shakespeare and Racine had to express themselves . . . Medieval Latin tended to concentrate on what men of various races and lands could think together. Some of the character of this universal language seems to me to inhere in Dante's Florentine speech; and the localization ('Florentine' speech) seems if anything to emphasize the universality, because it cuts across the modern division of nationality.

  In a similar way, the language of the 'Little Gidding' passage seeks for things which 'men of various races and lands could think together'; it tends to eschew the local, the intimate, the word which reeks of particular cultural attachments, and opts instead for words like 'unappeased and peregrine'; 'impelled', 'expiring', 'conscious impotence', 'laceration', 're-enactment', 'exercise of virtue', 'exasperated', 'valediction'. Indeed, at its most primitive and dialect moment, the moment in the animal heat of the byre at milking time, it interposes the smooth and decorous and monosyllabic noun 'pail', as if to distance us from the raucous and parochial energies of the usual 'bucket'.

  All this, of course, reinforces one of our perennial expectations from art, that it deliver what Sir Philip Sidney called a 'golden world' to defy the 'brazen world' of nature, that it offer us ideal melodies which transcend and to some extent rebuke the world of sensual music. This hankering for a purely delineated realm of wisdom and beauty sometimes asks literature to climb the stair of transcendence and give us images free from the rag-and-bone-shop reek of time and place. Such an ambition is best served by a language which gives the illusion of an authority and a purity beyond dialect and tribe, and it is Eliot's achievement in his Dantean stanzas to create just such an illusion of oracular authority by the hypnotic deployment of a vocabulary that is highly Latinate.

  The essay on Dante was written six years after the appearance of The Waste Land, a poem which arose from personal breakdown and a vision of decline and disintegration in the Europe that was once called Christendom. By the 1940s, however, Eliot was composing his soul rather than rendering images of its decomposition. His critical concerns were less with the strictly verbal and technical aspects of poetry, more with the philosophical and religious significances which could be drawn from it and relied upon. The essay on Dante, in fact, ends up as an essay about conversion, and understandably so, since at the time the intellectual mystery man fiom Missouri was mutating into the English vestryman. In the essay Eliot is concerned, among other things, with Dante's concentration upon states of purgation and beatitude, his allegorical method, his system of beliefs, even his love of pageantry (corresponding to 'the serious pageants of royalty, of the Church, of military funerals'), and these concerns are symptomatic of his own concerns in 1929. He ends with an evocation of the world of the Vita Nuova, of the necessary attempt, 'as difficult and hard as rebirth', to enter it, and bows out with the declaration that 'there is almost a definite moment of acceptance when the New Life begins'.

  It is curious that this born-again Anglican and monarchist did not make more of the political Dante, the dreamer of a world obedient to the spiritual authority of an uncorrupt Papacy and under the sway of a just emperor, where, without bitterness or compromise, Christ and Caesar would be hand in glove. But perhaps we

  are meant to deduce this Dante from that praise of 'universal language', the Tuscan speech which transcended its local habitation because of its roots in classical and ecclesiastical Latin. Eliot's joy in praising this lucid European instrument springs from his joy in a writer who speaks not just as himself but as 'the whole mind of Europe'. By contrast, poets of other European tongues, because they work further from the pure Latin source, are condemned to a more opaque idiom and a less than central relevance.

  To clinch this argument, Eliot takes those lines of Shakespeare's where Duncan is introduced to Macbeth's castle, lines full of air and light, and contrasts them with the opening lines of the Commedia. More is lost, he maintains, in translating Shakespeare than in translating Dante. 'How can a foreigner find words to convey in his own language just that combination of intelligibility and remoteness that we get in
many phrases of Shakespeare?'

  This guest of summer The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved masonry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate.

  Agreed. This English is erotic and feels for warmer and quicker nubs and joints of speech, and as it forages its voice cannot quite maintain its civil blandishment but lapses into a muttering urgency in 'jutty' and 'buttress', rather like an excited Mellors slipping into dialect. The poetry, in other words, is to a large extent in the phonetics, in the way the English words waft and disseminate their associations, the flitting of the swallow being airily present in phrases like 'they most breed and haunt' and 'The air is delicate', while the looming stone architecture is conjured by the minatory solidity of terms like 'masonry' and 'buttress'.

  Yet if we look at the opening lines of Dante's poem again, we might ask ourselves if the Italian is so essentially different in its

  operation. Eliot would have us take this as a clean lexical exercise, devoid of any local self-consciousness, and indeed the ghosts of first-declension Latin nouns stand in the open doors of the Italian vowels like sponsors of the much sought universality:

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.

  ''Nostra vita i una selva oscura l la diritta via: we are in earshot not only of the Vatican but also of the Capitol; and out of that common murmur one voice begins to emerge, the voice of Virgil, a prophetic figure in the medieval mind, the pagan precursor of the Christian dispensation, the poet who had envisaged in an eclogue the world of allegory and encyclical in which Dante had his being. As the great poet of the Latin language, Virgil can walk naturally out of the roots of this Tuscan speech, a figure of completely exemplary force. Virgil comes to Dante, in fact, as Dante comes to Eliot, a master, a guide and authority, offering release from the toils and snares of the self, from the diserta, the wasteland. Ladies and leopards begin to appear in Eliot's poems of the late 1920s; the hushed and fragrant possibilities of a heavenly order which we hear in Canto 2 of the Inferno are overheard in sections 2 and 4 of Ash-Wednesday, the soul's journey as outlined by Marco Lombardo in Canto 16 of the Purgatorio is rehearsed in 'Animula'.

  It is a moment of crisis, of turning towards and of turning away, when the converting Eliot begins to envy the coherence and certitude, the theological, philosophical and linguistic harmonies available to his great predecessor. Shakespeare he admires, yes, but does not envy. Shakespeare's venturesome, humanist genius, his Elizabethan capacity for provisional and glamorous accommodations between faiths and doubts, his opportunistic dash through the high world of speculation and policy, still fresh from the folk-speech and hedge school of the shires, all this disruptive, unaligned cognition and explorativeness is by now, for Eliot, suspect. It is the symptom of a breakdown which, during his own lifetime,

  Dante and the Modern Poet / 1 8 g

  had come out of potential and into the historical convulsion of World War I and its disillusioned aftermath.

  But when he makes Dante's confident and classically ratified language bear an almost allegorical force, he does less than justice to the untamed and thoroughly parochial elements which it possesses. To listen to Eliot, one would almost be led to forget that Dante's great literary contribution was to write in the vernacular and thereby to give the usual language its head:

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  che la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura

  esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

  che nel pensier rinova la paura!

  "Smarrita? The Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary gives 'smar-rire, to mislay; to lose; to mislead; to bewilder', yet each of these English equivalents strikes me as less particular, less urgently local than the Italian word, which has all the force of dirt hitting a windscreen. Eliot underplays the swarming, mobbish element in the Italian, which can be just as "selvaggia e aspra e forte' as the dark wood itself. Say those first two adjectives aloud and then decide whether they call up the refined urbs or the rough-spoken rus. "Selva selvaggia is as barbarous as Hopkins, "aspra e forte' less suggestive of the composure of the classics than of the struggle with the undergrowth. Dante may be writing about a mid-life crisis within the terms of the allegory, but he is also writing about panic, that terror we experience in the presence of the god Pan, numen of the woods.

  Eliot was re-creating Dante in his own image. He had always taken what he needed from the work, and at this stage what he needed was a way of confirming himself as a poet ready to submit his intelligence and sensibility to a framework of beliefs which were inherited and communal. The poet of distress had come to stress the need for acceptance. The poet who earlier in his career could inhabit the phantasmagoria of Canto 3 of the Inferno, that

  region populated by hollow men, flibbertigibbets blown about after wheeling contradictory standards, whispering together in quiet and meaningless voices, that poet would now be reborn as the alien judging figure who walks among them, the thoroughly human presence who casts a shadow and displaces water when he steps into Charon's boat.

  It is instructive to compare Dante's influence upon The Waste Land and upon the poem published nearly twenty years later. In the earlier work, the Commedia provided Eliot with a theatre of dreams and gave permission for the symbolist arbitrariness of oneiric passages such as the famous ending of 'The Burial of the Dead', a scene which provides a striking contrast with the London passage in 'Little Gidding'. The influence of the Inferno is found not just in the famous echo of the line from Canto 3 about the great multitude of the dead, nor in the shocking confrontation with Stetson, a revenant from the sinister past. It is also to be found in the sense of bewilderment and somnambulism, of being caught in a flow of energies that go their predestined and doomed ways, of losing direction in a foggy populous drift:

  Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout?'

  Here Dante was actually giving Eliot the freedom to surrender to the promptings of his own unconscious, and the language is more allied to the Shakespearean-local-associative than to the Latinate-

  Dante and the Modern Poet / 1 g 1

  classical-canonical. For the moment, the imagination is in thrall to romantic expressionism, bewildered on the flood of its own inventiveness.

  Twenty years later, things have changed. In the 'Little Gidding' scene, the consecutive thought, the covenant between verse and argument, the tone of gravity and seniority all reflect a rebirth out of the romance of symbolism into the stricter disciplines of philosophia and religious orthodoxy. The definitive Dante of the 1929 essay and the definitive Eliot of Four Quartets have established a mutually fortifying alliance. The Dante whom Eliot now prefers and expounds walks in the aura of cultural history and representativeness. He is a figure in whom the commentaries on the Commedia are implicit; he stands for the thoroughly hierarchical world of scholastic thought, an imagined standard against which the relativity and agnosticism of the present can be judged. For all his talk about Dante's visual imagination—an imagination which sees visions—Eliot's ultimate attraction is to the way Dante could turn values and judgements into poetry, the way the figure of the poet as thinker and teacher merged into the figure of the poet as expresser of a universal myth that could unify the abundance of the inner world and the confusion of the outer. The
re is a stern and didactic profile to this Dante, and as Eliot embraces a religious faith he turns towards that profile and would re-create it in his own work.

  During the 1930s, while Eliot was putting the finishing touches to his classical monument, an image of Dante as seer and repository of tradition, another poet was busy identifying Dante not with the inheritance of culture but with the processes of nature, making him a precursor of the experimental and unnerving poetry of Arthur Rimbaud rather than an heir to the Virgilian gravitas. Osip Mandelstam's Dante is the most eager, the most inspiring, the most delightfully approachable re-creation we could hope for, and what I want to do next is to indulge in what Mandelstam says Dante indulges in, 'an orgy of quotations'. These all come from his indispensable essay 'Conversation about Dante', never published in

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 9 2

  Russia in his lifetime but available in English translation in The Complete Prose and Letters of Osip Mandelstam. The quotations are not in the order in which they appear in the essay, which is a tumultuous affair anyhow, but I have arranged them to give a contrast to Eliot and to suggest the unpredictable intuitive nature of Mandelstam's genius:

  For how many centuries have people been talking and writing about Dante as if he had expressed his thoughts directly on official paper? . . . Dante is discussed as if he had the completed whole before his eyes even before he had begun work and as if he had utilized the technique of moulage, first casting in plaster, then in bronze.

  The process of creating this poem's form transcends our conceptions of literary invention and composition. It would be more correct to recognize instinct as its guiding principle . . . Only through metaphor is it possible to find a concrete sign to represent the instinct for form creation by which Dante accumulated and poured forth his terza rima.