Seamus Heaney - Quotations (1/5): Poetry

“Digging”: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests: snug as a gun. // Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down // Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away / Stooping in rhythm through potato drills / Where he was digging. [// ...] By God the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man. // [... ] But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. // Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” (Death of a Naturalist, Faber 1966, [p.3]; rep. in Opened Ground (Faber 1998), pp.3-4; see full-text version in RICORSO Library, as attached.) [Note: The poem is printed, read and interpreted on the BBC GCSE “Bitesize” website - online; accessed 18.03.2014].

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“Personal Helicon” (ded. to Michael Longley): ‘As a child, they could not keep me from wells / And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. / I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. // One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. / I savoured the rich crash when a bucket / Plummeted down at the end of a rope. / So deep you saw no reflection in it. // A shallow one under a dry stone ditch / Fructified like any aquarium. / When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch / A white face hovered over the bottom. // Others had echoes, gave back your own call / With a clean new music in it. And one / Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall / Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. // Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, / To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring / Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ (Death of A Naturalist, London: Faber & Faber 1966, p.57 [final poem]; New Selected Poems 1966-1987, London: Faber & Faber 1990, p.9; also given on WWW Heaney Page. )

“The Peninsula”: ‘When you have nothing more to say, just drive / For a day all round the peninsula. / The sky is tall as over a runway. / The without marks so you will not arrive // But pass through, though always skirting landfall. / At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill, / The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable / And you’re in the dark again. Now recall the glazed foreshore and silhouetted log, / That rock where breakers shredded into rags, / The leggy birds stilted on their own legs, / Islands riding themselves out into the fog // And drive back home, still with nothing to say / Except that now you will uncode all landscapes / By this: things founded clean on their own shapes, / Water and ground in their extremity.’ (New Selected Poems 1966-1987, 1990, p.11; quoted in Conor Doris, UG Essay, UUC 2003; note the relation to Heaney’s interest in John Montague’s remarks on the landscape as ‘a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read’: “The Sense of Place”, Preoccupations, 1980, p.131-49; 132.)

“Gallarus Oratory”: ‘You can still feel the community packs / This palace; it’s like going into a turfstack, / A core of old dark walled up with stone / A yard thick. When you’re in it alone / You might have dropped, a reduced creature / To the heart of the globe. No worshipper / Would leap up to his God off this floor.’ (Quoted in Eileen Battersby, ‘Dingle’s Beautiful Enigma’, in The Irish Times, 16 June 2001.)

“Toome”: ‘My mouth holds round the soft blastings, / Toome, Toome / As under the dislodged // Slab of the tongue / I push the into a souterrain / Prospecting what new // In a hundred centuries // Loam, flint, musket-balls, / Fragmented aware,/Torcs and fishbones / Till I am sleeved in.’ (Quoted by Mark Hughes, UG Essay, UUC 2002.)

“Scaffolding”

Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.

—From Death of a Naturalist (1966); rep. in Opened Ground (1998).

Note: There is a YouTube recording of Heaney reading this poem for Faber in NY - online; accessed 15.07.2018.) It is also features as a mural in The Home Place (Bellaghy, Co. Londonderry).

“Death of a Naturalist”: ‘All year the flax-dam festered in the heart / Of the townland; green and heavy-headed / Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. / Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. / Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles / Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. [//...//] Then one hot day when fields were rank / With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs / Invaded the flax-dam; [.../] The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat / Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. / I sickened, turned and ran. The great slime kings / Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.’ (In Death of a Naturalist, Faber 1966; rep. in Opened Ground, Faber 1998, pp.5-6; for full text version, see RICORSO Library, as attached.) [A copy is available on Heaney page of Emory University’s Beck Library page on the Belfast Group of Northern Irish Poets [online].

“Bogland” (ded. T. P. Flanagan): ‘We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening - / Everywhere the eye concedes to / Encrouching horizon, // Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye / Of a tarn. Our unfenced country / Is bog that keeps crusting / Between the sights of the sun. // They’ve taken the skeleton / Of the Great Irish Elk / Out of the peat, set it up / An astounding crate full of air. // Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years / Was recovered salty and white. / The ground itself is kind, black butter // Melting and opening underfoot, / Missing its last definition / By millions of years. / They’ll never dig coal here, // Only the waterlogged trunks / Of great firs, soft as pulp. / Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards, // Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before. / The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless.’ (Door into the Dark, 1969; New Selected Poems 1966-1987, 1990, p.17; also given on WWW Heaney Internet Page.) [See page-format version, attached.]

Cf.: ‘the fish full of fish like a bog full of turf’, in “Raftery’s Killeadan”, after Antoine Raftery, in Éire-Ireland, Fall/Winter 1996, pp.9-10, p.10.

“The Tollund Man”: ‘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 / Should come to me, driving, / Saying the names //Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, / Watching the pointing hands / Of country people, / Not knowing their tongue. // Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home.’ (from Wintering Out, p.47; given on the WWW Heaney Page; see print-version, attached.)

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“Punishment”: ‘I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front. // It blows her nipples / to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging / of her ribs. // I can see her drowned / body in the bog / the weighing stone, / the floating rods and boughs. // Under which at first / she was a barked sapling / that is dug up / oak-bone, brain-firkin: // her shaved heard / like a stubble of black corn, / her blindfold of soiled bandage, / her noose a ring // to store / the memories of love. / Little adulteress, before they punished you // you were flaxen-haired, / undernourished, and your / tar-black face was beautiful. / My poor scapegoat, // I almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence. / I am the artful voyeur // of your brain’s exposed / and darkened combs, / your muscles’ webbing and all your numbered bones: // I who have stood dumb / when your betraying sisters, / cauled in tar, wept by the railings, // who would connive / in civilised outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.’ (North, 1975, p.38; rep. in Selected Poems, 1990, pp.71-72; Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, 1998, pp.117-18.)

“Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” for Mary Heaney [his mother], I: “Sunlight”: ‘There was a sunlit absence. /The helmeted pump in the yard / heated its iron, / watter honeyed // in the slung bucket / and the sun stood / like a griddle cooling / against the wall // of each long afternoon. / So, her hand scuffled / over the bakeboard, / the reddening stove // sent its plaque of heat / against her where she stood / in a floury apron / by the window. // Now she dusts the board / with a goose’s wing, / now sits, broad-lapped, / with whitening nails [8] // and measling shins: / here is a space / again, the scone rising / to the tick of two clocks. // And here is love / like a tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin.’ (North, London: Faber & Faber 1975 , pp.8-9; rep. in Opened Ground, London: Faber & Faber 1998, p.93-94.) [For Heaney’s remarks in interview on the origin of the poem, see “Mossbawn” in Notes, infra; also more extended remarks in the article of the same title under Heaney > Quotations > Prose - infra.]

“Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” for Mary Heaney, II: “The Seed Cutters”: ‘They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel, / You’ll know them if I can get them true. / They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle/ Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through. / They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill / Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes / Buried under that straw. With time to kill / They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes / Lazily halving each root that falls apart / In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam, / And, at the centre, a dark watermark. / O calendar customs! Under the broom / Yellowing over them, compose the frieze / With all of us there, our anonymities.’ (from North, p.10; rep. in Opened Ground, Poems 1966-1996, Faber 1998, p.93-95; p.95.)

“North”: ‘I return to a long strand, / the hammered curve of a bay, / and found only the secular / powers of the Atlantic thundering. // I faced the unmagical / invitation of Iceland, / the pathetic colonies / of Greenland, and suddenly // those fabulous raiders, / those lying in Orkney and Dublin / measured against / their long swords rusting, // those in the solid / belly of stone ships, / those hacked and glinting / in the gravel of thawed streams // were ocean-deafened voices / warning me, lifted again / in violence and epiphany. / The longship’s swimming tongue // was buoyant with hindsight - / it said Thor’s hammer swung / to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, / the hatreds and behind-backs / of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, / memory, incubating, the spilled blood. // It said, “Lie down / in the word-hoard, burrow / the coil and gleam / of your furrowed brain. // Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis / in the long foraw / but no cascade of light. // Keep your eye clear / as the bleb of the icicle, / trust the feel of what nubbed treasure / your hands have known.”’ (from North, 1972 [q.p.; rep. in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, 1998, pp.100-01.)

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“Glanmore Sonnets” [for Ann Saddlemyer / ‘our heartiest welcomer’] I: Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. / The mildest February for twenty years / Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound / Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. / Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. / Now the good life could be to cross a field / And art a paradigm of earth new from the late / Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. / Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense / And am quickened with a redolence / Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. / Wait the ... Breasting the mist, in sower’s aprons, / My ghosts come striding into their spring stations. / The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.’ (Field Work, 1979; rep. in Opened Ground, 1998, pp.163ff.)

II: ‘[...] Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore / And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise / A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter / That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: / Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, / Each verse returning like the plough turned round.’ [End.]

III: ‘[...] I had said earlier, “I won’t relapse / From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us too. / Dorothy and William -” She interrupts: / “You’re not going to compare us two ...?”/ Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze / refeshes and relents. Is cadences.’

IX: ‘[...] What is my apology for poetry? / The empty briar is swishing / When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face / Haunsts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.’

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“Fosterling” [epigraph: ‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’]: ‘At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness - / Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails. / The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness / Still more in place when mirrored in canals. / I can’t remember never having known / The immanent hydraulics of a land / Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone. / My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind. // Heaviness of being. And poetry / Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens. / 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.’ (In Seeing Things, 1991, p.50; rep. in Opened Ground (1998), p.357; quoted [in part] in Sarah Broom, review of John Mole, For the Moment, in Times Literary Supplement, 8 June 2001, p.25.)

Note David Wheatley, reviewing new collection by Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin, in TLS, 6 Sept. 2002, writes: ‘Seamus Heaney had to wait until he was “nearly fifty / to credit marvels”, according to Seeing Things’.

The Music of What Happens - vide

“Song”

A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes. There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.

—in Field Work (1976), p.56.

[ Listen to Heaney reading “Song” at Internet Poetry Archive - online. ]

Note: Finn Mac Cool [Mac Cumhall] once challenged the members of his Fianna to name the finest music in the world by his peers. One suggests the music of the lark over Dingle Bay, another the laughter of a young woman and a third, the bellowing of a stag. “No”, replies Finn. The finest music is “the music of what happens.” The original of the story is to be found in Macgnímartha Find [The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn]. The Irish writer James Stephens gave an English version of the legend in Irish Fairy Tales (1920) - citing the cuckoo on the highest tree, the clash of spear against shield in battle, the belling of a stag across water, the baying of hounds, the song of the lark, the laugher of a girl.  [See Imbasbooks - online; accessed 2001.2023.]

In a variant telling, the warrior Finn mac Cumaill is questioned by a druid who asked him what is the most beautiful music in the world. “Is it the waves of the sea crashing against the Cliffs of Moher? Is it the sound of the skylark rising over the Dingle Peninsula at dawn? Is it the sound of a butterfly hovering above daffodils on the Aran Isles in the springtime?” “No,” says Finn. “Well, what is it then?” Finn answers, “It is the music of what happens.” (See Bridget Haggarty, “The Music of What Happens”, Irish Culture and Customs - online; accessed 20.01.2023.)

Note: The Music of What Happens (2019), a TV-movie directed by Alan Low, is the title of a ‘major feature-length film about the life and work of Seamus Heaney’ comprised of interviews with and readings Heaney’s widow Marie and three children (Michael, Christopher and Catherine) along with his surviving brothers Hugh, Charlie and Colm. The first viewing was held at The Home Place on 29 Nov. 2019 and the film was broadcast on BBC2 on the following night (30th Nov.) The film was produced DoubleBand Films in association with Lone Star Productions for BBC Arts, BBC2, and BBC NI made with funding from Northern Ireland Screen. It was produced by Dermot Lavery and Martin Rosenbaum with Michael Hewitt as the Executive Producer.

The Music of What Happens (Arthur Levin Bks. Feb. 2019) is also the title of a novel by Bill Konigsberg recounting the ‘burgeoning relationship between high-schoolers Max and Jordan and how they overcome their inner demons.’ The book purportedly addresses the themes of ‘consent, toxic masculinity and acknowledging trauma’. It is listed in Amazon and also in Social Justice Books - online. [20.01.2023.]

See also Rebecca Nicholson, reviewing The Music of What Happens (film), in The Guardian 30 Nov. 2019) - That lovely title is from Song. In archive footage - and there are a lot of great interviews plundered here - ‘Heaney recalls taking it from the answer Fionn MacCool gave when asked about the best music in the world. “So I used it as the basis for a little declaration about poetry,” he explains casually, as if it were that easy. [...] His wife, Marie, to whom he was married for more than 50 years, reads “Wedding Day”. Its first line is, “I am afraid.” “Not the happiest wedding poem,” she smiles. She remembers one year that he had forgotten to get her a Christmas present. Instead, he wrote out all the love poems he had written to her, by hand, in a single notebook. From that, she reads “Scaffolding”, the camera lingering on his script. It is read, she notes, at practically every wedding in Ireland.’ (See also Noli Timere - infra.)

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“Traditions”: ‘[…] Mac Morris, gallivanting / round the Globe, whinged / to courtier and groundling / who had heard of tell us // as going very bare / of learning, as wild hares, / as anatomies of death: / “What ish my nation?” // And sensibly, though so much / later, the wandering Bloom / replied, “Ireland”, said Bloom, / “I was born here. Ireland.”’ (Quoted in Laura P. Zuntini di Izarra, Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths: [ ... ] New Synthesis in the Novels of John Banville, SF: Internat. Scholars Publ. 1999, p.17.)

Further: ‘You’ll understand I draw the line / At being robbed of what is mine, / My patris, my deep design / To be at home / In my own place and dwell within /  Its proper name  […]’ (being Heaney’s responds to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry ; Field Pamphl. No. 2; rep. in Seamus Deane, ed., Ireland’s Field Day, London: Hutchinson 1985, p.26.)

Note: The broadside was inspired by his inclusion in an anthology of Contemporary British Verse edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. Later, when offered the British poet laureateship, Heaney remarked: ‘I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the palace once upon a time [...] it’s just that the basis of my imagination, the basis of the cultural starting point, is off-centre.’ (Quoted by Jamie Smyth in obituary notice by in Financial Times, 30 Aug. 2013 [5 p.m. edition].)

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Further: ‘Ulster was British, but with no rights on / The English lyric: all around us, though / We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear’. (“The Ministry of Fear”; quoted in Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney, Bridgend: Seren Books [rev. edn. 1994, p.101.)

Further: ‘In the next room / His nightmares grafted to the palace wall - / Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn / Jewelled in the blood of his own children, / Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips / Over the world. Also, that holmgang / Where two berserks club each other to death / for honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking. // He painted with his fists and elbows / The stained cap of his heart, as history charged.’ (Quoted by Paddy Wentworth, Irish Times, March 1996).

See also “Fosterage” / for Michael McLaverty - being Part 5 of “Singing School” (North, 1979) - under McLaverty, as infra. For listing of the contents of North, see under Works, supra.

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“The Frontier of Writing”
The tightness and the nilness round that space when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration-- a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient.	So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk. And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed, as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armor-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
1987; given on Readings in Contemporary Poetry website (with soundtrack) - online; accessed 25.10.2017)

“Mint”, ‘It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles / Growing wild at the gables of the house / Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles: / Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice. / But to be fair, it also spelt promise / And newness in the back yard of our life / As if something callow yet tenacious / Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife. // The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday / Mornings when the mint was cut and loved: / My last things will be the first things slipping from me. / Yet let all things go free that have survived. // Let the smell of mint go heady and defenceless / Like inmates liberated from that yard. / Like the disregarded ones we turned against / Because we’d failed them in our disregard.’ (The Spirit Level, 1996, p.6.; rep. in Opened Ground, 1998, p.396.)

“The Diviner”: ‘Unfussed, the pluck cam sharp as a sting, / the rod jerked down with precise convulsions / Spring water suddeny broadcasting / through a green aerial its secret stations.’

“A New Song”: ‘But now our river tongues must rise / From licking deep in native haunts / To flood, with vowelling embrace, / Demesnes staked out in consonants’. (Quoted in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.50.)

Hind tit: ‘Long sucking the hind tit / cold as a witch’s and hard to swallow / Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit: / the liberal papist note is hollow.’ (Included in Padraic Fiacc, ed., The Wearing of the Green; later as part of Wintering Out.)

“Funeral Rites”: ‘Now as news comes in / of each neighbourly murder / we pine for ceremony / customary rhythms … / I would restore / / the great chambers of the Boyne, prepare a sepulchre […] Quiet as a serpent / in its grassy boulevard / the procession drags its tail / out of the Gap of the North / as its head already enters / the megalithic doorway.’ (?North, 1975)

“Triptych”: ‘[T]here they were, as if our memory hatched them, / As if the unquiet walked again: / Two young men with rifles on the hill, / Profane and bracing as their instruments.’ (Field Work, 1979, q.p.)

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“The Flight Path”: ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’ - ‘Of I do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’ (The Spirit Level, 1996, q.p.) [The foregoing four quotations given in Eileen Battersby, ‘The poet as inner emigré’, review of Opened Ground, in The Irish Times, 10 Oct. 1998.)

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“A Kite for Michael and Christopher”: ‘[...] My friend says that the human soul / is about the weight of a snipe, / yet the soul at anchor there, / the strings that sags and ascends, / weights like a furrow assumed into heaven. / Before the kite plunges down into the wood / and this line goes useless / take it in your hands, boys, and feel / the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief. / You were born fit for it. / Stand in here in front of me / and take the strain.’ (From Station Island, 1984, rep. in Opened Ground, 1998, pp.231-32; here 231.) [See further remarks under T. R. Henn, infra.]

See also ...

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“Seeing Things”: ‘[…] it was as if I looked from another boat / Sailing through air, far up, and could see / How riskily we fared into the morning, / And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.’ [16; II:] ‘Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin Word / Is perfect for the carved stone of water / Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees / … And yet in that utter visibility / The stone’s alive with what’s invisible: Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off, / The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself. / All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps, / And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered / Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.’ (In Seeing Things, 1991, p.16-17.) [See longer extract - as attached.]

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Note that the cottage had been first lent and then sold to the Heaneys by Ann Saddlemyer, the Canadian Synge scholar - who had work done on it by John Stewart, then a young architect with Scott, Walker & Tallon.

“Lightenings”

viii

The annals say that 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.

—From “Squarings”, in Seeing Things (1991); rep. in Opened Ground (1996), p.364; quoted in Gerry Condon, That’s How the Light Gets In [blog, 3.09.2013; accessed 24.04.2014.]

“Squarings”

xl

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe Encountering the ancient dampish feel Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even. Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould Around the terra cotta water-crock. Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience To all its shifting tenses. A half-door Opening directly into starlight. Out of that earth house I inherited A stack of singular, cold memory-weights To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

—From Seeing Things (1991), rep. in Collected Poems (1988-2013), p.51.

xli

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before I knew river shallows or river pleasures I knew the ore of longing in those words. The places I go back to have not failed But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley, I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling The very currents memory is composed of, Everything accumulated ever As I took squarings from the top of bridges Of the banks of self at evening. Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash. Crumbled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

—From Seeing Things (1991), rep. in Collected Poems (1988-2013), p.51.

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“Dante Among the Giants” (A Translation of the Inferno, Canto XXXI)’: ‘Again I felt the last of Virgil’s tongue / My cheeks burned red; but, in a flash, he smeared / his gentle verbal ointment on the sting’ [&c.], with lines such as ‘Yin twa maghogani gazpaighp boke !’, and ‘My guide then turned to him: “Hey, head-the-ball”, stick to your trumpet; give it a good blast / when you feel your temper coming to the boil, // instead of that incessant blah, blah, blah!’ - [all ending:] ‘But gently - in the deepest pit of Hell, / where Lucifer and Judas are held fast - / He stooped and set us down, and then propelled // himself erect again, like some titanic mast.’] (Times Literary Supplement, 29 Sept. 2000, p.28.)

Heaney reads with others incl. Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley, at opening night of Poetry International 2000 Fest., Purcell Room, South Bank, London, Friday 6 Oct. [2000].

“Horace and Thunder’ (after Horace, Odes, 1, 34): ‘Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter / Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head / Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now, / He galloped his thunder-cart and his horses // Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth / And the clogged underneath, the River Styx, / The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. / Anything can happen, the tallest things // Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked esteemed. Stropped-beak Fortune / Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing off // Crests for sport, letting them drop wherever. // Ground gives. The heavens’ weight / Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid, / Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. / Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.’ (in The Irish Times, 17 Nov. 2001, Weekend, p.8.)

Note, the same printed with minor variations in Times Literary Supplement (18 Jan. 2002, p.40), viz: ‘Hook-beaked Fortune’ for ‘Stropped-beak Fortune’ and ‘fire-spores darken day’ for ‘fire-spores boil away’.

“Testimony”, in The Irish Times (16 March 2002) [Weekend]: ‘We were killing pigs when the Yanks arrived. A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood / Outside the slaughter house. From the main road / They would have heard the screaming. / Then hear it stop and had a view of us / In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill. / Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching / Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps. / Sunburnt hands and arms. Unnamed, in step, / Hosting for Normandy. // Not that we knew then / Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters / As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’ Note: The poem was also printed in “Three War Poems”, with others by Saadi Youssef and Michael Casey, in The Guardian ([Sat.] 15 Feb. 2003.)

“Arion” [poem], in The Irish Times, 3 Feb. 2000): ‘We are all very hard at it in the boat ... Then turbulent / Sudden wind, a maelstrom; / The helmsman and the sailors perished. / Only I, still singing, washed / Ashore by the long sea-swell, sing on / A mystery to my poet self, / And sage and sound beneath the rock shelf / Have spread my wet clothes in the sun’ .

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The Burial at Thebes (2004) [chorus]: “Love leads the good astray, / Plays havoc in heart and home; / You, love, here and now / In this tormented house / Are letting madness loose.” (Quoted in Neil Corcoran, review, in The Guardian, 1 May 2004.)

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“Testimony: The Ajax Incident” [adapted from Sophocles’ Ajax]: ‘“Lamps had gone out, the late sentries dozed, / When something just came over him. He rose / And rigged for action, lifted down / His two-edged slashing sword, a bedside weapon / He kept like a second bedmate, then slipped outside / Far more nimbly than you’d have expected / For a man his size, with that night-mirroring / Blade in hand, aloft. Anything / I said meant nothing to him, mere / Wife-babble, ignored the same as ever, / Even though this time there was no attack / Being sounded, no command. // Then he was back, / In through the tent door like a conquering drover / With his captives on a rope: bull calf, heifer, / Milk cows, rams and ewes, the very sheepdogs. / How long he’d rampaged through their pens and paddocks / Or why he was herding them I couldn’t tell / Until the butchering started. I can still / Hear the slosh of innards, piss and muck. / Some he beheaded with a single stroke / Down through the neck bone, some he wrestled flat, / Legs and belly up, and cut their throats, / For all the spurted dung and kicks and horn-toss. / Some that he tied and tortured like prisoners / Slit by slit, hamstring and lip and ear, / Just bled to death, hoofs beating at a chair. // At last there came a lull, then a tirade / Against those chiefs he thought he’d left for dead / On the floor behind him, once comrades, men of honour, / But now reviled; he stood by the tent door / Bellowing hate and havoc and their names. / Then, bloody-spoored and raving, in he comes, / Returning to his senses bit by bit, / And starts to butt the tent-pole, going quiet / As he climbs and slips and struggles through a mess / Of entrails splattered and opened carcasses. / And so for a long while he just lay there dumb, / Dragging his nails and fingers for a comb / Through his slathered hair, breathing like a beast / Slack-mouthed and winded. But came round at last, / Risen off all fours to overbear, / Turning on me to explain the massacre, / So I told him what I think he knew he’d done. // Then Ajax raised his voice in lamentation, / At bay now and in disproof of his rule / That warriors didn’t weep, they weren’t old women - / But soon his head-back, harrowing wail / Turned to the long deep moaning of a bull. // Slumped, slow motioned, he is in there still, / Ensconced on a pile of slaughtered meat and offal, / Lowing to himself. Something gathers head / And is going to happen. We must pay him heed. / Nothing is over, only overdue. / A friend should go to him. One, friends, of you.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Nov. 2004; online.)

“The Tollund Man in Springtime” (2005): ‘My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground. / My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid. / My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand / And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed / As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed / To mould me to itself and it to me / Between when I was buried and unburied. / Between what happened and was meant to be. / On show for years while all that lay in wait / Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned. / Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone / The harrow turned up when the crop was sown. / Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind And remember moony water in a rut. / ... / Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable / Solid standing and readiness to wait, / These I learned from. I stood by in the wet, / My head as washy as a head of kale, / Shedding water like the flanks and tail / Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot / In trampled mud, bringing their heavyweight / Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle. / Of another world, unlearnable, and so / To be lived by, whatever it was I knew / Came back to me. Newfound contrariness. / In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues / Of wired, far-faced smilers, I stood off, / Bulrush, head in the air, far from its long lough.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 29 April 2005, p.4.)

“District and Circle” (2006) - title poem: ‘Tunes from a tin whistle underground / Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down / To where I knew I was always going to find / My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side, / His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me / In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid, / Or not just yet, since both were out to see / For ourselves. [....] And so by night and by day to be transported / Through galleried earth with them, the only  relict / Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward, / Reflecting in a window mirror-backed / By blasted weeping rock-walls. / Flicker-lit.’

“The Blackbird of Glanmore”: ‘On the grass when I arrive, / Filling the stillness with life, / But ready to scare off / At the very first wrong move. / In the ivy when I leave. // It’s you, blackbird, I love. // I park, pause, take heed. / Breathe. Just breathe and sit / And lines I once translated / Come back: “I want away / To the house of death, to my father // Under the low clay roof.” // And I think of one gone to him, / A little stillness dancer - / Haunter-son, lost brother - / Cavorting through the yard, / So glad to see me home, // My homesick first term over. // And think of a neighbour’s words / Long after the accident: / “Yon bird on the shed roof, / Up on the ridge for weeks - / I said nothing at the time // But I never liked yon bird.” // The automatic lock / Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic / Is shortlived, for a second / I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself, / A shadow on raked gravel // In front of my house of life. // Hedge-hop, I am absolute / For you, your ready talkback, / Your each stand-offish comeback, / Your picky, nervy goldbeak - / On the grass when I arrive, // In the ivy when I leave.’ (From District & Circle, 2006)]

“Saw Music”: ‘[...] it reminds me of [...] a wet night / In Belfast, around Christmas, when the man / Who played the saw inside the paddled doorway / Of a downtown shop, [...] Started to draw his bow across the blade. / [...] Like the saw’s greased teeth his bow caressed and crossed / Back across unharmed. ‘The art of oil painting - / Daubs fixed on canvas - is a paltry thing / Compared with what cries out to be expressed,’ // The poet said, who lies this god-beamed day / Coffined in Krakow, as out of this world now / As the untranscendent music of the saw / He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw / And would not have renounced, however paltry.’ (District and Circle, 2006, p.50.)

[Note that the Czeslaw Milosz is the poet referred to - being the recipient of the dedication of the triptych “Out of This World”, of which this poem is the third component.]

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“Höfn” (in District and Circle, 2006): ‘The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt. / What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt / Comes wallowing across the delta flats / And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move? / I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above, / Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff, / And feared its coldness that still seemed enough / To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath, / Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth / And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.’ (p.53; also printed in The Irish Times, 31 March 2007, p.3 where the collection is announced as a recipient of The Irish Times Poetry Now Award Committee for best the new book of 2006.)

“Banks of a Canal”: ‘Say “canal” and there’s that final vowel / Towing silence with it, slowing time / To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam / Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still. / The stunted concrete mocks the classical. / Water says, “My place here is in dream, / In quiet good standing. Like a sleeping stream, / Come rain or sullen shine I’m peaceable.” / Stretched to the horizon, placid ploughland, / The sky not truly bright or overcast: / I know that clay, the damp and dirt of it, / The coolth along the bank, the grassy zest / Of verges, the path not narrow but still straight / Where soul could mind itself or stray beyond.’

Note: The above poem, which Heaney completed ten days before his death, explores a painting of a canal made in c.1872 by Gustave Caillebotte and appears in an anthology issued by Gallery Press to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland in 2015. Other contributors to the collection include John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Dennis O’Driscoll (also posthum.), Patricia Scanlan, and Colm Tóibín. The anthology was edited by Janet McLean, NGI Curator of European Art 1850-1950. (See The Guardian, 3 Oct. 1014 - online.)