Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  to storerooms in the gables

  for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

  All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

  swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

  is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

  the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

  among the wild jagged rocks,

  is of an apparent translucence

  like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

  growing on their shoreward walls.

  The big fish tubs are completely lined

  with layers of beautiful herring scales

  and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

  with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

  with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

  Up on the little slope behind the houses,

  set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

  is an ancient wooden capstan,

  cracked, with two long bleached handles

  and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

  where the ironwork has rusted.

  The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

  He was a friend of my grandfather.

  We talk of the decline in the population

  and of codfish and herring

  while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

  There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

  He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

  from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

  the blade of which is almost worn away.

  Down at the water's edge, at the place

  where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

  descending into the water, thin silver

  tree trunks are laid horizontally

  across the gray stones, down and down

  at intervals of four or five feet.

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  element bearable to no mortal,

  to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

  I have seen here evening after evening.

  He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

  like me a believer in total immersion,

  so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

  I also sang 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God'.

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  He stood up in the water and regarded me

  steadily, moving his head a little.

  Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

  almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

  as if it were against his better judgment.

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,

  the dignified tall firs begin.

  Bluish, associating with their shadows,

  a million Christmas trees stand

  waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

  above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

  I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

  slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

  icily free above the stones,

  above the stones and then the world.

  If you should dip your hand in,

  your wrist would ache immediately,

  your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

  as if the water were a transmutation of fire

  that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

  If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

  then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating and then with powerful sure-ness actually taking the leap. For about two-thirds of the poem the restraining, self-abnega,ting, completely attentive manners of the writing keep us alive to the surfaces of a world: the note is colloquial if tending towards the finical, the scenery is chaste, beloved

  and ancestral. Grandfather was here. Yet this old world is still being made new again by the sequins of herring scales, the sprinkle of grass and the small iridescent flies. Typically, detail by detail, by the layering of one observation upon another, by readings taken at different levels and from different angles, a world is brought into being. There is a feeling of ordered scrutiny, of a securely positioned observer turning a gaze now to the sea, now to the fish barrels, now to the old man. And the voice that tells us about it all is self-possessed but not self-centred, full of discreet and intelligent instruction, of the desire to witness exactly. The voice is neither breathless nor detached; it is thoroughly plenished, like the sea 'swelling slowly as if considering spilling over', and then, thrill-ingly, halfway through, it does spill over:

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  element bearable to no mortal,

  to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly . . .

  Just a minute ago I said that the habit of observation did not promise any irruption of the visionary. Yet here it is, a rhythmic heave which suggests that something other is about to happen—although not immediately. The colloquial note creeps back, and the temptation to inspired utterance is rebuked by the seal who arrives partly like a messenger from another world, partly like a deadpan comedian of water. Even so, he is a sign which initiates a wonder as he dives back into the deep region where the poem will follow, wooed with perfect timing into the mysterious. Looking at the world of the surface, after all, is not only against the better judgement of a seal; it is finally also against the better judgement of the poet.

  It is not that the poet breaks faith with the observed world, the world of human attachment, grandfathers, Lucky Strikes and Christmas trees. But it is a different, estranging and fearful element which ultimately fascinates her: the world of meditated meaning, of a knowledge-need which sets human beings apart from seals and herrings, and sets the poet in her solitude apart from her grandfather and the old man, this poet enduring the cold

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 2 o 6

  sea-light of her own wyrd and her own mortality. Her scientific impulse is suddenly jumped back to its root in pre-Socratic awe, and water stares her in the face as the original solution:

  If you should dip your hand in,

  your wrist would ache immediately,

  your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

  as if the water were a transmutation of fire

  that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

  If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

  then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  This writing still bears a recognizable resemblance to the simple propositions of the geography textbook. There is no sentence which does not possess a similar clarity and unchallengeability. Yet since these concluding lines are poetry, not geography, they have a dream truth as well as a daylight truth about them; they are as hallucinatory as they are accurate. They also possess that sine qua non of all lyric utterance, a completely persuasive inner cadence which is deeply intimate with the laden water of full tide. The lines are inhabited by certain profoundly true tones, which, as Robert Frost put it, 'were before words were, living in the cave of the mouth', and they do what poetry most essentially does: they fortify our inclination t
o credit promptings of our intuitive being. They help us to say in the first recesses of ourselves, in the shyest, pre-social part of our nature, 'Yes, I know something like that too. Yes, that's right; thank you for putting words on it and making it more or less official.' And thus the government of the tongue gains our votes, and Anna Swjr's proclamation (which at first may have sounded a bit overstated) comes true in the sensation of reading even a poet as shy of bardic presumption as Elizabeth Bishop:

  A poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subconscious.

  In conclusion, I want now to offer two further texts for meditation. The first is from T. S. Eliot. Forty-four years ago, in October 1942, in wartime London, when he w r as at work on 'Little Gid-ding', Eliot wrote in a letter to E. Martin Browne:

  In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified activity—especially as there is never any certainty that the whole thing won't have to be scrapped. And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless.

  Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity; they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.

  I am thinking of Jesus' writing as it is recorded in Chapter Eight of John's Gospel, my second and concluding text:

  And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

  They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

  Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

  This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

  So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

  And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

  And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

  When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?

  She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

  The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, 'Now a solution will take place'; it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

  This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest moments it would attempt, in Yeats's phrase, to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Yet even then its function is not essentially supplicatory or transitive. Poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.

  from Sounding Auden

  Auden was hungering for a form. In his unformed needs and impulses he was rehearsing the scenario which Martin Buber outlines in I and Thou:

  This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises.

  That is actually a firm account of what in experience is elusive and tenebrous; and in its conception of power streaming out and the work arising as the primary word is spoken, it represents a way of acknowledging the kind of governing power to which the young Auden's tongue gained access when acts of his being issued in his own words, those entirely compelling, if estranged and estranging words of his famous earliest poems.

  This new lyric was dominated by a somewhat impersonal pronoun which enclosed much that was fabulous, passional and occasionally obscure. Its manifestations were an T or 'we' or 'you' that could arrest, confuse and inspect the reader all at once. He or she seemed to have been set down in the middle of a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned rapidly around, unblindfolded, ordered to march and to make sense of every ominous thing encountered from there on. The new poem turned the reader into an accomplice, unaccountably bound to the poem's presiding voice by an insinuation that they shared a knowledge which might be either shameful or subversive. In Samuel Hynes's terms, it presented an alternative world. Even Eliot's openings, startling as they were,

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  could not equal Auden's for defamiliarizing abruptness. Eliot still pushed the poem out with the current of rhythmic expectation, the words sailed off relatively unhampered towards attainable syntactical or scenic or narrative destinations:

  Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky . . .

  All right, then. Let's go.

  April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring . . .

  OK. Keep talking. What else was bothering you?

  Here I am, an old man in a dry month Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

  Sure, Granpa! Of course you are.

  Auden's openings, on the other hand, were launched against the flow. The craft itself felt shipshape, but its motion seemed unpredictable, it started in mid-pitch and wobbled:

  Who stands, the crux left of the watershed, On the wet road between the chafing grass . . .

  Between grass? What do you mean? Where is this anyway?

  Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings, Walking together in the windless orchard . . .

  Taller what? Whose orchard where?

  These famous early poems gave me enormous trouble when I was an undergraduate. Confident teachers spoke of Geoffrey Grigson's advice to Thirties poets to 'Report well. Begin with objects and

  events.' These poets were socially concerned, we were told; they were tempted by communism, wanted to open some negotiation with popular culture and to include the furniture of the modern technological world in their lyrics. Fine. This was okay for the nude giant girls behind Spender's pylons and the knockabout farce of Louis MacNeice's 'Bagpipe Music'. But Auden was supposed to be the main man, so where did all this lecture-note stuff get you when in the solitude of your room you faced the staccato imperatives of a passage like this:

  Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,

  Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:

  This land, cut off, will not communicate,

  Be no accessory content to one

  Aimless for faces rather there than here.

  Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,

  They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind

  Arriving driven from the ignorant sea

  To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm

  Where sap unbaffled rises, being spring;

  But seldom this.
Near you, taller than grass,

  Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.

  My teachers had used the word 'telegraphese', so I assumed I was in its presence here, the enigma and abruptness of the thing suggesting as much the actual chattering of a machine relaying signals as the condensed idiom of a decoded, printed message. So, all right, telegraphese. Yet to what end? I felt excluded. I had indeed been blindfolded and turned around, only to find myself daunted by a landscape that both convinced me and shrugged me off.

  It would have been better had those teachers been in a position to quote what Geoffrey Grigson wrote four decades later, in the volume of memorial tributes edited by Stephen Spender. There, talking about the first poem of Auden's which he had encountered, one never to be republished, Grigson spoke of its having arisen out of an 'Englishness' until then unexpressed or not isolated in a poem:

  In the poem, he [Auden] saw the blood trail which had dripped from Grendel after his arm and shoulder had been ripped off by Beowulf. The blood shone, was phosphorescent on the grass ... It was as if Auden ... had given imaginative place and 'reality' to something exploited for the Examination Schools, yet rooted in the English origins.

  Grigson also spoke of 'assonances and alliterations coming together to make a new verbal actuality as it might be of rock or quartz', which is precisely what this slab of verse felt like to me when I first encountered it, and why I still rejoice in it. It is responses and formulations such as Grigson's, which have little to say about the young poet's shifting allegiances to Marx and Freud, that are the ones which count for most in the long poetic run, because they are the most sensitive to the art of language . . .

  A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being. The rhythmic disjunctions in Auden's lines, the correspondingly fractured elements of narrative or argument, are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times. 'The Watershed' is, according to Edward Mendelson's introduction to The English Auden, the earliest of the poems preserved in the standard Collected Poems, and reads in places as if a landslide had happened while the lines were being formed or a slippage had occurred between mind and page: