Seamus Heaney Poems
somnambulant:
Antaeus
When I lie on the ground
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In flights I arrange a fall on the ring
To rub myself with sand
That is operative
As an elixir.I cannot be weaned
Off the earth's long contour, her river-
veins.
Down here in my cave
Girdered with root and rock
I am cradled in the dark that wombed
me
And nurtutred in every artery
Like a small hillock.
Let each new hero come
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas.
He must wrestle with me before pass
Into that realm of fame
Among sky-born and royal:
He may well throw me and renew my
bith
But let him not plan, lifting me off the
earth,
My elevation, my fall.
The Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in
you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by
twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and
cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of
game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with
fine intent
Until your fingers moved
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and
midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and
ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already
homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your
stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by
your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal
dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still
warm.
Casualty
I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
1
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
2
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
The Tollund Man
I Should come to me, driving,
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
From Lightenings
I
Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.
So the particular judgement might be
set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained
into--
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-
life roams.
And after the commanded journey,
what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing
unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.
And it is not particular at all,
3
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-
time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening
wind.
VI
Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty
shins.
In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy
space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil
waiting
For sky to make it sing the prefect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he
caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original
Of a ripple that would travel eighty
years
Outward from there, to be the same
ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.
VII
(I misremembered. He went down on all
fours,
Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-
leaze.
Hardy sought the creatures face to face,
Their witless eyes and liability
To panic made him feel less alone,
Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment
Over him, perfectly known and sure.
And then the flock's dismay went
swimming on
Into the blinks and murmurs and
deflections
He'd know at parties in renowned old
age
When sometimes he imagined himself a
ghost
And circulated with that new
perspective.)
VIII
The annals say: when the monks of
Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so
deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a
standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down
the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and
will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the
man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known
it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/201
0/aug/21/seamus-heaney-human-
chain-review
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
Review
Seamus Heaney's new collection
brilliantly enacts the struggle between
memory and loss, says Colm Tóibín
In the early 1990s Seamus
Heaney began to contemplate how to
deal with time passing and the death of
family and friends. In a lecture, he
contrasted Philip Larkin's
poem "Aubade", in which death comes
as something dark and absolute and life
seems a trembling, fearful preparation
for extinction, with Yeats's "The Cold
Heaven", which allowed a rich dialogue
between the ideas of life as a cornucopia
4
and life as an empty shell. Heaney
saw poetry itself, no matter what its
content or tone, standing against the
dull thought of life as a great emptiness.
"When a poem rhymes," Heaney wrote,
"when a form generates itself, when a
metre provokes consciousness into new
postures, it is already on the side of life.
When a rhyme surprises and extends the
fixed relations between words, that in
itself protests against necessity. When
language does more than enough, as it
does in all achieved poetry, it opts for
the condition of overlife, and rebels at
limit."
In his 1991 collection Seeing Things he
included a poem, "Fosterling", which
seemed like a blueprint for how he
himself might proceed, speaking of a
"heaviness of being" producing "poetry /
Sluggish in the doldrums of what
happens". And then writing of a change
which had come: "Me waiting until I was
nearly fifty / To credit marvels. Like the
tree-clock of tin cans / The tinkers
made. So long for air to brighten, / Time
to be dazzled and the heart to lighten."
The blueprint, however, has turned out
not to open the way for an easy
lightness, or a tone of bright hope, in
Heaney's work, but for a struggle that
his poems would enact and dramatise
between the facts as Larkin presents
them in "Aubade" and the idea, which
Heaney proposes in his essay, that "the
vision of reality which poetry offers
should be transformative, more than
just a printout of the given
circumstances of its time and place".
While his essay clearly comes down on
one side, as does "Fosterling", the poems
themselves have been more hushed in
the presence of mortality, more open to
the idea of loss as something pure. His
poems have offered consolation or
transformation only because they
contain tones and phrases that are
perfectly tuned; they are true to memory
and loss, and thus somehow, at times
miraculously, they offer a vision of what
is beyond them or above them.
In Human Chain, his best single volume
for many years, and one that contains
some of the best poems he has written,
Heaney allows this struggle between
the lacrimae rerum and the
consolations of poetry to have a force
which is satisfying because its result is
so tentative and uncertain. Memory here
can be filled with tones of regret and
even undertones of anguish, but it also
can appear with a sense of hard-won
wonder. There is an active urge to
capture the living breath of things, but
he also allows sorrow into his poems.
He uses a poetic line which sometimes
seems complete and whole in its
rhythm, and at others is stopped short,
held, left hanging. It is as though to
allow the rhythm its full completion
would be untrue to the shape of the
experience that gave rise to the poem,
untrue to the terms of the struggle
between the pure possibility that
language itself can offer and a
knowledge of the sad fixtures which the
grim business of loss can provide.
The verse structure Heaney seems most
at home with here is the one most used
in Seeing Things: it contains four
stanzas of three lines per stanza, a
sonnet without the couplet. This system
offers a sort of looseness, a buoyancy, a
refusal to close and conclude; it means
that the endings of these poems can
have a particular pathos, a holding of
the breath, "gleaning the unsaid off the
palpable", as Heaney has it in his
poem "The Harvest Bow".
At times, despite his effort to be
consoled, it is as though whatever is
being remembered has taken all his
heart for speech. This is most apparent
in an elegy for the Irish singer David
Hammond, which contains four of these
three-line stanzas plus one extra line. It
is the poem where the struggle between
pure lament and the search for comfort
in images seems most intense:
5
The door was open and the house was
dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I
knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it
grew
Backwards and down and out into the
street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out.
If there is a presiding spirit haunting
this book, it is Virgil's Aeneid.
InStepping Stones, his book of
interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll,
Heaney mentions that "there's one
Virgilian journey that has indeed been a
constant presence, and that is Aeneas's
venture into the underworld. The motifs
in Book VI have been in my head for
years – the golden bough, Charon's
barge, the quest to meet the shade of the
father."
Human Chain is a book of shades and
memories, of things whispered, of
journeys into the underworld, of elegies
and translations, of echoes and silences.
It conjures up the ghosts of three
painters – Colin Middleton, Nancy
Wynne-Jones, Derek Hill – who spent
their lives working with Irish light and
Irish weather. The three-part poem
"Chanson d'Aventure", describing a
journey by ambulance after suffering a
stroke, invokes with gentle reverence
John Keats, who wrote in a late poem of
"This living hand, now warm and
capable / of earnest grasping". Heaney
describes:
my once capable
Warm hand, hand that I could not feel
you lift
And lag in yours throughout that
journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull
The most ambitious poem in the book is
an ingenious and moving encounter
with Book VI of the Aeneid, with a
description of finding a used copy of the
book in Belfast and taking it on Route
110 across Northern Ireland
("Cookstown via Toome and
Magharafelt"). Slowly the poem moves
into the underworld ("It was the age of
ghosts"), where it meets, among others,
Louis O'Neill, one of the murdered dead
in the Troubles, who is the subject of
Heaney's earlier poem "Casualty" and
wanders in a world of shady memory to
emerge in a final poem about the birth
of a first grandchild.
Sometimes, it seems, it is enough for
Heaney that he remembers. Throughout
his career there have been poems of
simple evocation and description. His
refusal to sum up or offer meaning is
part of his tact, but his skill at playing
with rhythm, pushing phrases and
images as hard as they will go, offers the
poems an undertone, a gravity, a space
between the words that allows them to
soar or shiver.
There is one poem, "Uncoupled" – a
diptych in memory of his parents – that
has all the placid beauty of a Dutch
painting or a Schubert song. Both parts
of the poem are structured in the
customary four three-line stanzas, both
beginning with the same three words
"Who is this", both offering a single
ghostly image from memory, something
hovering between what is lost and what
has now been found.
The first part describes his mother
carrying a tray of ashes from the house
to the ash-pit; it offers a picture of
immense, distant dignity, allowing the
ashes to be "whitish dust and flakes still
sparkling hot", purely themselves, but
with all the resonance that they can
command besides. The second part is a
picture of his father "not much higher
than the cattle / Working his way
towards me through the pen, / His
ashplant in one hand". The father is thus
captured in an ordinary moment, but he
is "Waving and calling something I
cannot hear" because of
6
all the lowing and roaring, lorries
revving
At the far end of the yard, the dealers
Shouting among themselves

but also, it is implied, because time has

passed and death has intervened. In the
last two lines – the last 20 words of the
poem have each only one stark syllable –
you watch Heaney struggling between
the world of painful fact and something
in his own imaginative spirit which
insists that language used with sombre
tact and care "opts for the condition of
overlife and rebels at limit":

So that his eyes leave mine and I know

The pain of loss before I know the term.

Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn is published by

Penguin.