Under the broom …
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.
‘The Seed Cutters’ (N, xi)
From being a frieze of symbolic figures representative of the matter of Ireland, Clarke’s poetry became a series of rapid probes and sketches which were symptomatic of what was the matter with Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY, ‘A tale of two islands:
reflections on the Irish Literary Revival’3
To move from ‘the matter of Ireland’ to ‘what was the matter with Ireland’ – Heaney’s summary of the change in the poetry of Austin Clarke – could as well describe his own development. In Heaney’s early work ‘symbolic figures’, such as those in ‘The Seed Cutters’, stand for the poet’s recognition of the immemorial nature of the work done on the family farm, which he is intent on perpetuating in language. Because such figures are anonymous, his poetic voice will also be anonymous: he will speak both about and for those whose names are lost to history.
The particularity conferred by one’s proper name is of interest to Heaney, too, and will play its role in his poetry when he turns from anonymity to historic specificity – writing as an adult man of a particular place in a particular time. But his child-self is almost anonymous, and many of the poems of childhood treat (in ample and beautiful ways) experiences that could be those of any child growing up on a farm and watching the daily and seasonal rituals such as churning or haymaking. Through his childhood recollections, Heaney attains an almost anonymous manner, and these recollections form the central group of his first two books, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969). Yet anonymity is not usually the first choice of a young poet, and to comprehend this initial choice of writerly identity we might enquire what Heaney’s other choices of identity as a speaker might have been.
Those who grow up with an awareness of words very soon tabulate the anonymous group-names under which others denominate them – in Heaney’s case, ‘Catholics’, ‘farmers’, ‘Northern Irish’. These group-names exist beyond one’s first, familial, child-name (‘Seamus’); beyond the family name (‘the Heaneys’); beyond one’s surname in formal use at school (‘Heaney’). Heaney’s poetry notes each of these identities as it is inscribed. As the child hides in the hollow trunk of a tree, he hears the family calling his first name, seeking him out:
Hide in the hollow trunk
of the willow tree,
its listening familiar,
until, as usual, they
cuckoo your name
across the fields.
You can hear them
draw the poles of stiles
as they approach
calling you out.
The family summons, announcing the claims of home, disturbs the child’s anonymous crouching in the ‘secret nest’ of nature (‘Mossbawn’, P, 17), where he is more a tree-spirit than a human child: he becomes a
small mouth and ear
in a woody cleft,
lobe and larynx
of the mossy places.
[‘Oracle’, WO, 28]
In a later poem, ‘Alphabets’, the child’s recognition that he is more than ‘Seamus’, that he is one of a circle of kin sharing his surname, closes the narrative: after the plastering of his childhood house is finished the boy, not yet of school age, watches with a
wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.
[‘Alphabets’, HL, 3]
Still later, in secondary school, there is a moment of adolescent confusion when a priest asks the boy-student (normally called ‘Heaney’) what his name is (meaning his first name): the boy, flustered, replies automatically, and receives in turn a wry acknowledgement:
‘What’s your name, Heaney?’
‘Heaney, Father.’
‘Fair
Enough.’
[N, 58]
Then, as a young university student, heading home in his car after an evening out with a girl, the poet is stopped and interrogated by police at a road-block. He gives his personal and familial name instead of the full name expected by the police who, in reply, challenge him:
policemen
Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round
The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing
The muzzle of a sten-gun in my eye:
‘What’s your name, driver?’
‘Seamus …’
Seamus?
[‘Singing School’, I, N, 58]
The police in Ulster, normally Protestant, were not friendly to anyone with the ‘Catholic’ name of Seamus (the Irish version of ‘James’), but the innocence of the poet’s reply shows that he still identifies himself as the person his friends and family know.
All these identities, and more, enter into the voice that becomes that of a poet. How, then, should the poet write? As a child and family member (‘Seamus’)? As an individual adult with a singular identity (‘Seamus Heaney’)? Or should he write more anonymously: as a representative of the rural (by contrast to the urban) population? As someone who is culturally Irish, attached to a historical and anthropological identity that predates, in its beginnings, the Christianization of the country? Or as a ‘Catholic’, a spokesperson for an ethnic group sharing a certain culture (of which one strand is the childhood practice of Catholicism that may well be abandoned in adult life)? As an English speaker, reader and writer? Or as a transmitter of an Irish literary tradition? Perhaps as a European, or even (like Yeats in his latter years) as a world poet? Or, rather, should the poet be content to write as an anonymous moral perceiver – setting aside, as far as possible, the local ideological assumptions acquired through family and education? These are – as Heaney said in the Foreword to the 1980 Preoccupations, his first collection of essays – central questions: ‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’ (P, 11) Yet Heaney knew that such questions could not be answered by looking to the opinions of others: he made that clear by quoting, as epigraph to those early essays, the following sentences, written by Yeats in 1905:
If I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not ‘Is that exactly what I think and feel?’ but ‘How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?’ And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root.
[P, 14]
If, then, Heaney is to write about any of the several groups to which he belongs (or to which he is assigned by others), he vows not to be intimidated by what those groups think of him and his work – what the priests might want to find; what the relatives may say, what Ulster Protestants would approve; what fellow-poets hope to hear; what predecessors advise. This vow is one all poets must take, and one which is always very difficult to keep; but it becomes particularly hard when the claims of affection and solidarity attempt to establish confines around what can be said and written. The first lecture in Heaney’s 1995 collection of essays, The Redress of Poetry, contemplates those pressures, weighted by the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January of 1972; but for the moment we are in the 1960s, the ‘Troubles’ have not yet reached their 1972 exacerbations, and Heaney has written two books: Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, which I am treating as his books of ‘anonymities’.
The way of life of his father’s rural family, as Heaney has remarked, differed little from medieval custom: and in ‘Anahorish’ his neighbours become indistinguishable from their Neolithic ancestors:
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
[WO, 16]
One has, of course, already moved far away from one’s family if one can see them as ‘those mound-dwellers’; and Heaney’s commemorative lyrics on the longstanding farm-practices of his family, his neighbours and his ancestors (hand scything; digging potatoes; dealing at cattle fairs; retting flax in a flax dam; thatching; churning; carrying water from a pump shared by several families) are testaments to his first, preservational instincts. He makes himself into an anthropologist of his own culture, and testifies, in each poem, to his profound attachment to the practice described while not concealing his present detachment from rural life. The early ‘poems of anonymity’ are always elegiac: Heaney will not write from ‘inside’ or from a present-tense perspective, as though he were still living in the archaic culture he describes.
The eloquent poem ‘Thatcher’ – which I will take as my example of functional anonymity, though ‘The Seed Cutters’ or ‘The Forge’ would do as well – begins as though the coming of the thatcher were an ordinary affair (as indeed it was, when his work was part of the usual maintenance of a house):
Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,
Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Everything in this stanza might be said by any one of the inhabitants of the cottage. But by the last stanza Heaney’s ‘outsideness’ is quietly present in the closing reference to ‘them’ – not ‘us’. It is also present in the ‘educated’ vocabulary (of heraldry in ‘couchant’, of mythology in ‘Midas’) that the poet brings to bear in order to exalt the medieval form of the thatcher, and in the Keatsian metaphorical turn (‘honeycomb’, ‘stubble patch’) by which he gathers the thatched roof into the storehouse of English pastoral:
Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.
[DD, 20]
For the reader who notices literary form, the ‘outsideness’ is already present in Heaney’s choice here of the stately pentameter quatrain – a variant (in its rhymed couplets) of the alternately rhymed stanza known in prosody as the ‘heroic quatrain’. Such a ceremonious stanza helps to monumentalize the thatcher into a lone survivor from the artisanal days of the guilds. Like the ploughman, the blacksmith, the eel-fishers in ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’, or the family thawing the frozen pump by setting ropes of wheatstraw aflame (‘Rite of Spring’), the thatcher does not realize his own imminent obsolescence. But Heaney does: and though one of these poems (‘The Wife’s Tale’) is Breughelesque in its portrayal of the threshers taking their midday meal in the fields, the presence of a threshing-machine brings the industrial world into this scene, which otherwise might be drawn from a medieval book of hours.
By choosing as his subject anonymous rural labourers, the young poet erects a memorial to the generations of forgotten men and women whose names are lost, whose graves bear no tombstones, and whose lives are registered in no chronicle. Soon even the tools they used will be found only in museums, and the movements they made in wielding them will be utterly lost. It is immensely important to Heaney to note down those expert movements – like an anthropologist inventing a notation for an unrecorded dance – lest they vanish unregistered. So in ‘Follower’ his father at the plough is described moment by moment, with a piety not only filial but generational:
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
[DN, 12]
Heaney is not uncritical of rural life. Potato-diggers are followed as they pass by on a headland, gathering the crop as they go: ‘Processional stooping through the turf / Recurs mindlessly as autumn’ (‘At a Potato Digging’, DN, 18). Here and in ‘Follower’, as in ‘Thatcher’, each vignette of anonymous labour has its distancing moment: ‘I wanted to grow up and plough,’ says the adult poet remembering his child-self: and the characterization of the potato-diggers’ movement as a pre-ordained ‘processional’ liturgy, coupled with the critique of its ‘mindless’ recurrence, makes that poem too an elegiac one, representing a life which the poet does not want to follow, could not follow, but none the less recognizes as forever a part of his inner landscape.
If writing about labourers engaged in archaic occupations is one way for a modern poet to submerge his own adult identity in anonymity, another way is to leave his own historical moment, to speak as an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ from another era. Heaney’s early political poem, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, offers in its title a reply to Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’. It imagines that the Croppies – crop-haired Irish footsoldiers of 1798, carrying their food in their pockets, who were killed by the English army at the battle of Vinegar Hill in County Wexford – can posthumously speak out to tell their tale. Though the poem has been called (by Neil Corcoran) a ‘dramatic monologue’, it does not take the characteristically social form of the Browning monologue (which is always addressed to one or more people in the same room as its living speaker). Heaney’s poem is, rather, a self-epitaph by the Croppies, spoken to anyone who has ears to hear:
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The Croppies die ‘shaking scythes at cannon’: ‘They buried us without shroud or coffin / And in August the barley grew up out of the grave’ (DD, 24). The resurrection-motif makes the Croppies resemble a vegetation-god. The poet’s piety writes for them – creates for them to speak – the epitaph that their lack of funeral rites or a gravestone denied them.
‘Requiem for the Croppies’ is an anomalous sonnet, adding to its three Shakespearean quatrains a couplet that prolongs the rhymes of the last quatrain instead of introducing a new rhyme-sound: ababcdcdefefef. Heaney’s surprising choice of the sonnet – that European court form – for his epitaph for an Irish peasant army has formal meaning: it affirms that the old aristocratic genres have life in them yet, and may be translated into poems defending rural values. (Heaney’s experimentation with the sonnet continues throughout his writing life.)
Perhaps the most usual way poets devise to be anonymous is to turn to myth and legend (whether classical, Christian or folk-derived), and Heaney takes this path as well. In a rather self-conscious early poem called ‘Undine’ he writes in the voice of the water-nymph as she recollects her liberation from the earth by the man who ‘slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silt / To give me right of way in my own drains’ (DD, 26). Though the sexual analogy becomes strained (‘He dug a spade deep in my flank / And took me to him. I swallowed his trench’), the poem announces Heaney’s interest in assuming (as in ‘The Wife’s Tale’, ‘Mother’, ‘Limbo’, ‘Shore Woman’ and elsewhere) a special type of anonymity: what it might mean to imagine oneself inside a woman’s experience. In this regard, Heaney makes use of folktale as well, summoning up the legend of the capture of a mermaid (‘Maighdean Mara’) to account for a woman’s suicide. Christian legend also attracts Heaney, and in his retelling of St Francis’s sermon to the birds, he announces, by describing Francis’s means, an aspect of his own literary resolve: ‘His argument true, his tone light’ (‘St Francis and the Birds’, DN, 40). The gods, goddesses, nymphs and naiads of classical pastoral do not, finally, become useful to Heaney; and he does not make a practice of writing from within a female sensibility. But he will eventually make notable use – in writing ‘anonymously’ – of Greek and Latin historical myth (Mycenae; Romulus and Remus) in The Spirit Level (1996).
And still another form of anonymity can be gained when the poet becomes wholly a perceptual observer – one with no history, no ethnicity, no religion, no family. This is the form of anonymity that Heaney has, in the long run, found most rewarding. It shows up early in ‘The Peninsula’. More than a sonnet, less than a narrative, this important poem (written in four irregular quatrains with embraced rhymes) is chiefly a meditation on the purifying power, for human beings, of the primary senses and of memory founded in the senses. It deserves to be quoted in full as an example of Heaney’s early reliance on the perceptual as a never-to-be-forgotten standard of veracity and plain speech. The poem has three parts: the first, a day’s drive around the peninsula; the second, the night drive returning home remembering the day’s sights; the third, a vow taken. The motive for the drive is writer’s block, perhaps a symptom of emotional distress or fear:
When you have nothing to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land 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.
[DD, 21]
The first scanning of the peninsula is very general (a ‘tall’ sky, a land ‘without marks’, sea, hill, ploughed field, whitewashed cottage). On the dark drive home, the poet takes an inventory of what he has (perhaps unconsciously) internally registered as significant How did the foreshore look? As if it had been glazed – luminous, smooth. What broke the horizon line? A silhouetted log, out of place, far from where it fell. What did the breakers look like? Like a bolt of white cloth being shredded into rags by the rock And what was strange about the way the sea-birds walked? They moved with the awkward gait of one on stilts – but their stilts are their own legs. And, finally, How did the island appear when the fog moved in? The swirl of fog made the offshore islands seem to move of their own volition out into the ocean.
That is the driver’s visual and mental and emotional harvest – what won’t be lost of the day’s experience. This reservoir of images that struck home (as we know because they called up metaphors for themselves – glazing, a profiled silhouette, rags, stilts, riding) is a treasury of ‘things founded clean on their own shapes’. But it is not solely this lesson of exactness that the poet takes home with him from perceptions brought to clear outline and emotionally inscribed: it is also the lesson of peninsular remoteness, where water and ground meet in their outermost reach, without distraction.
I will be emphasizing, throughout this book, Heaney’s recourse to ‘second thoughts’, and this is an occasion when they can be clearly seen, since Heaney much later ‘rewrites’ ‘The Peninsula’ in ‘Postscript’, the poem that closes The Spirit Level (1996). ‘Postscript’ is another sixteen-line image of a drive, this time ‘out west / Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore’. It is not writer’s block that now afflicts the poet, but rather the tendency of the preoccupied middle-aged heart to shield itself against feeling. Heaney here gratefully pays homage to the sheer power of perception itself – how much it sees in a glimpse, in a glance – how many objects and shades it absorbs at once, how breathtaking the conjunction of world and senses can be, breaking open the shut door of the heart. The poem is perhaps a distant descendant of Hopkins’s ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’:
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wánting; whích two, whén they ónce méet,
The héart réars wíngs bóld and bolder,
And hurls for him, oh half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
But Heaney’s poem, caught between the rush of a moment’s pure visual satisfaction and the frustration of its transience, goes beyond the ecstatic to a definition of selfhood so fugitive as to be insubstantial. The self is ‘a hurry through which … things pass’, nothing more. Itself unfounded, it can hardly hope to ‘found things’ in the way the younger self thought to do.
The ecstatic moment in ‘Postscript’, like that in ‘Peninsula’, is made up of simple components: wind, light, ocean, an inland lake, stones and swans. (In a nod to Yeats’s Coole, Heaney rhymes ‘stones’ and ‘swans’, but his swans are not paired, ‘lover by lover’, as Yeats’s were: they are, if beautiful, also communal and practical.) Every day at this shore there is wind, light, ocean, the lake, the swans. But not every day do they lap into synergy, as they do at this moment,
when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
This passage could serve as an index to Heaney’s sensibility in his fifties. The wild is not forsaken, but it is, like the swans, sometimes ‘earthed’. The beautiful is no more alien to the poet than it ever was, but the ordinary must also play its role: the swans are ‘headstrong’ and ‘busy’. The best moments of all are the ones when the wild and the settled parts of being do not forget each other, when the ocean is the partner of the lake, and when wind and light, strength and clarity, contest for presence. (I have allegorized for explicitness; but the poem itself refrains from allegorizing, and keeps the illusion of reportage.)
And then the ecstatic moment is gone; or you are gone; and nothing is retrievable: ‘Useless to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly.’ But the precious sensation of full receptivity has returned for an unforgettable instant in which one’s heart has been again as open to feeling as it was in youth:
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
[SL, 70]
Perhaps the one thing that all human beings have in common is sense-perception: and there are many shores around the world where such buffetings of wind and light can be experienced. There is no way of knowing whether the author of this poem is male or female, old or young, Catholic or Protestant, Northern or Southern Irish, a city-dweller or a country-dweller. This form of anonymity – in which elusive states of feeling are caught in a descriptive gestalt which powerfully renders them available to others – is one often practised by Wordsworth, whose example can be felt in Heaney, though the Wordsworthian legacy has been powerfully altered through Heaney’s deliberately casual and modern diction.
In his early work even the personal Heaney is often almost anonymous. As he tells us in ‘Stations’ (SP, 59), his first poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’ – as though he were as yet uncertain what his signature would be – and the youthful books contain a generic child as much as an individual one. This child is terrified of the rats in the barn and on the river-bank; he looks at his image in wells, and watches the cow in calf and the trout in the stream; he misses an old horse who has died; he gathers blackberries and is disturbed when they rot; he is fascinated by the water-diviner and the blacksmith, and by the servicing of the cow by the bull. To this extent, a broad and generalized pastoral directive governs the early self-portraits. Yet in several poems the idiosyncratic rises through the general, and these are, justly, the poems that have been much anthologized. They include ‘Digging’, ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘Personal Helicon’, ‘Relic of Memory’, ‘Anahorish’, ‘Oracle’ and ‘The Other Side’. Heaney included all of these in his Selected Poems. What makes them more individual than many others in his first three books?
In ‘Oracle’ it is the announcement of the poetic vocation: the generalized pastoral child would not have thought of himself in retrospect as ‘the lobe and larynx / of the leafy places’. The sheer peculiarity of these two lines, in which a person is reduced, by synecdoche, to two biological parts – an earlobe and a voice-box – draws the portrait of the child in a way that the more generic poems do not. In ‘Digging’ the child who carried a bottle of milk to his turf-digging grandfather, and who picked potatoes spaded out of their drills by his father, has to believe, now that he has become a man, that his pen is a digging instrument too:
I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
[DN, 2]
The disturbing thing about ‘Digging’ is that the Irish Catholic child grew up between the offers of two instruments: the spade and the gun. ‘Choose,’ said two opposing voices from his culture: ‘Inherit the farm,’ said agricultural tradition; ‘Take up arms,’ said Republican militarism. And indeed the poet’s first thought had been to measure, so to speak, the pen against the sword: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun’ (DN, I). This is to conceive of writing as, like war, politics by other means. It is significant that in this – the first poem in his first book – Heaney rejects the concept of writing as aggression, and chooses the spade as his final analogue for his pen: the pen will serve as an instrument of exploration and excavation, yielding warmth (like his grandfather’s turf for fires) and nourishment (like his father’s potatoes).
But it is not only in the child as future poet (as in Oracle’, ‘Digging’ and ‘Personal Helicon’) that we find something non-generic about the boy of Heaney’s childhood poems. Like Wordsworth’s boy of Winander, this is a child who thinks more than the usual pastoral child does. It is the intellectual shock of the revision of his initial knowledge of sex that sets the child of ‘Death of a Naturalist’ – the title poem of Heaney’s first book – aswarm with inchoate feelings of curiosity, terror and disgust. The innocent schoolteacher version of sex (phrased in the naive voice of the child retelling his school day) sets the scene:
Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn.
But then, with the advent of pre-adolescence, the real frogs come; and all the force of this child’s unusual sensibility projects itself on the (blameless) frogs croaking their spring mating-songs in the festering flax-dam. In Heaney’s most virtuosic moment of sound in Death of a Naturalist, the frogs’ sexual noises awaken self-lacerating shame in the boy, as the smear of ‘frogspawn’ contaminates innocence:
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods: their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
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.
[DN, 3–4]
Thus ‘dies’ the dutiful child who used to like watching frogspawn turn into tadpoles, and who believed the teacher’s sanitized version of the deepest propulsion of animate life. Heaney turned loose all his thickest and most resonant orchestration (‘cocked’, ‘hopped’, ‘plop’; ‘pulsed’, ‘blunt’, ‘clutch’) for this adolescent cartoon-version of sexual desire: neither Wordsworth nor Keats nor Hopkins would have quite acknowledged that their stylistic inventions could be put to such a brutal use. Idyllic pastoral has been exploded by those mud-grenades, the frogs, and the consistency of finish in the more anonymous poems of rural piety has been grossly disturbed by the intrusion of introspective sexuality.
The most individualized of the first-person speakers in Heaney’s childhood poems is the adolescent boy who narrates ‘Mid-Term Break’; his four-year-old brother has been killed in an accident, and he has been called home from school for the wake and funeral. But though a neighbour (‘big Jim Evans’) is named, the speaker and the dead four-year-old are not. The wake; of the child is in part described in ritualized post-Joycean terms:
I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’,
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest
Away at school….
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
[DN, 15]
What is least Joycean and most Heaneyesque about the poem is the portrait of the poet’s mother – not idealized or swooning in her sorrow in Joycean fashion, she is upright and contained, even though overmastered by emotion: ‘My mother held my hand / In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.’ That brief passage is an index of how soon Heaney broke free of Joycean unreality with respect to women, and how well his own adjectival gift served him: the conflict between ‘angry’ and ‘sighs’, and the violently suppressed tears stifled under ‘tearless’ are all part of the power of the line. The adolescent boy whose awareness makes the mother’s inscape unforgettable is the differentiated speaker who rises above stereotype and anonymity.
If the anonymous nature of farm labour and the generic perception of the anonymous rural child animate Heaney’s relatively idyllic first two books, his third book, Wintering Out (1972), takes up anonymity with a different and new sharpness, exposing the raw underside of rural ‘decency’, and investigating the plight of women in a sexually repressive culture. In ‘Limbo’ a newborn baby, never christened and therefore never given a name, is drowned by its shamed mother and dragged up by fishermen; in ‘Bye-Child’ a nameless half-grown illegitimate child, incapable of speech, is recovered from the henhouse where his mother had confined him since his birth. For such poems, which silently reprove the pieties condemning sexuality outside marriage, Heaney abandoned the broad and placid pentameter that had served him well for poems about churning and thatching and dowsing, ‘turning instead to lines that are short, sharp, taciturn and, for all their pity, ‘cold’ and ‘lunar’:
Now limbo will be
A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.
[WO, 70]
(According to a medieval Catholic doctrine, once powerful but now discarded, the souls of unbaptized children could not enter heaven but were thought to be consigned to a place called Limbo – from the Latin limbus, ‘border’ – where they were denied the beatific vision, just as their bodies were denied burial in consecrated ground.) Heaney’s identification with the suffering mother of the ‘small one thrown back / To the waters’ appears in his description of her freezing wrists as she held the baby underwater (an action euphemized as ‘Ducking him tenderly’):
I’m sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly
Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.
And would it have been better to let the baby live – only, perhaps, to be confined like the ‘Bye-Child’ of the neighbouring poem, the ‘little henhouse boy’ whose photo, says the poet, is ‘still / Glimpsed like a rodent / On the floor of my mind’? Fed on scraps morning and evening through a trapdoor, the henhouse boy sheds ‘unchristened tears’, and now, freed, transmits silently
a remote mime
Of something beyond patience,
Your gaping wordless proof
Of lunar distances
Travelled beyond love.
[WO, 71–2]
The ghost of rhyme is present in these harsh narrow-lined poems (as the last quoted stanza reveals), but often Heaney is willing to allow several lines to go by with nothing but the occasional alliteration to bind his stanzas together phonetically. By turning his gaze from the abundances and confirming rituals of family life to a dark and cruel underside of the culture he was bred in, and by directing his gaze away from artisanry and agriculture to illegitimacy and intimidated women, Heaney admitted – in a characteristic enquiry into facets of his culture that were taken for granted – longstanding ‘anonymities’ that were other than benevolent.
But Wintering Out also found a different sort of anonymity that was to prove immeasurably productive for Heaney: this was the archaeological anonymity of the buried bodies known to the poet from a book by a Danish archaeologist. P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (published by Faber in 1969), described bodies of murder victims from the Iron Age preserved in peat bogs in Denmark. The book had an immediate and riveting effect on Heaney: ‘The unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles’ (P, 57–8). This provoked in him ‘a vow to go on pilgrimage’ to see the body known as ‘the Tollund Man’, accompanied by a feeling that ‘unless I was deeply in earnest about what I was saying, I was simply invoking dangers for myself’ (P, 58):
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 nearby …
I will stand a long time….
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
[WO, 47–8]
‘The Tollund Man’ makes perhaps too explicit the equation of the medieval corpse and those of ‘four young brothers’ murdered in the early 1920s by the auxiliary police force, the B Specials. The brothers were dragged by a train, their ‘tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers’ (WO, 48). Balked by the impossibility of writing of the ‘sectarian murders’ (as they are called in Ireland) of the late sixties and early seventies in the journalistic terms in which they had already been described by reporters and rumour, Heaney turned to the bog bodies as images of slaughter rising to view after centuries of secrecy. Their anonymity gave him an imaginative scope he would have been unwilling to assume in a literal retelling of local assassinations. The bog bodies also persuaded him that ritual killing had been a feature of Northern tribal culture in a wide geographical swath: that immediate history alone did not begin to explain the recrudescence of violence in Northern Ireland.
Second Thoughts
The largely benevolent picture of anonymous rural pieties – from the churning of butter (‘Churning Day’) to the family rosary (‘The Other Side’) – in Heaney’s first three books is rethought in Station Island (1984) where, in ‘The First Kingdom’ (from the sequence ‘Sweeney Redivivus’), the anonymities are re-explored, this time in a savage self-correction by which early idealizations are brought sharply down to earth:
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle….
They were two-faced and accommodating.
And seed, breed and generation still
they are holding on, every bit
as pious and exacting and demeaned.
[SI, 101]
The voice of Sweeney – liberated from social constraint by having been changed to a bird – allows remarks Heaney does not utter elsewhere. Of course the most acerbic of these observations concern himself rather than his family: he, after all, was the one who exalted an ordinary farmstead into a ‘royal’ kingdom, and cattle-dealer relatives into ‘nobles’. The violence of the poet’s reaction in the last stanza of ‘The First Kingdom’ is his revenge on his own previous enhancement of reality.
And a second revisionary poem, ‘In the Beech’ (SI, 100), looks back to another time when the youthful poet ensconced himself in a tree; but he is no longer purely sequestered in nature as the innocent ‘lobe and larynx / of the mossy places’. Now the tree is a boundary between the farm (‘the bullocks’ covert’) and the larger world (‘the concrete road’), and the boy – entering adolescence – experiences two new sensations as he hides in the tree. The first is his aesthetic reaction to the decorativeness of ivy twining around the tree: it reminds him of the leafy decoration on Greek columns:
The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
over the grain: was it bark or masonry?
The second sensation arises because the tree has a new function as a place of sexual privacy ‘where the school-leaver discovered peace / to touch himself’. The tree is also a lookout on a wider world: the boy sees (it is wartime, and British tanks and planes are based in Ulster) ‘the pilot with his goggles back [come] in / so low I could see the cockpit rivets’. Summed up, it is ‘My tree of knowledge’, where war for the first time disturbed the rural scene, and where the intertwining strands of adolescent consciousness – perceptual, social, aesthetic, sexual – find a location to make each others’ acquaintance. The nostalgic idyll of the pre-social, pre-sexual ‘secret nest’ is now distant, judged by the ampler second thoughts of a fuller world.
These more individualized reflections in ‘The First Kingdom’ and ‘In the Beech’ reveal the constraints exercised on lyric when the poet resolves to speak in a purely anonymous (and often nostalgic) voice as the perpetuator in language of an archaic culture soon to disappear. It was inevitable that a wider social world should intrude on Heaney’s pastoral: but it should not be forgotten that his early pastoral was not always idyllic (the croaking frogs, the rats in the barn, the ‘stink’ in the house on churning day, the weariness of the pregnant young farm wife in ‘Mother’, the illegitimate children of Wintering Out) and that his early eloquence was not reserved for the beautiful alone. To that degree, even his anonymities bore witness to a sharp and idiosyncratic observer silently arranging their tableaux and friezes.