How perilous is it to choose
not to love the life we’re shown?
‘The Badgers’ (FW, 26)
Seamus Heaney’s poetry returns repeatedly to questions of identity and vocation: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What life have I chosen?’ I have already mentioned some of Heaney’s early answers to these questions, both plural (‘I am a descendant of agricultural workers’; ‘I am Irish’) and singular (‘I am a husband’; ‘I am a son’). In this chapter I want to treat Heaney’s self-definition through single persons not himself, persons who serve as alterities (that is, opposites) or alter egos (people he might have become). My chief text for this purpose will be Heaney’s long autobiographical poem-of-alter-egos, ‘Station Island’, but I will begin with earlier, and end with later, poems.
For a young poet like Heaney, born into a life-pattern he knows he must leave, the first imperative psychological task is to define his own selfhood. And a tempting (but finally unrewarding) path to self-definition is to delineate one’s ethnic and aesthetic and ethical opposites. In Seamus Heaney’s case, this undertaking resulted in four relatively early portraits of ‘the other side’ – one of Northern Ireland’s many euphemisms for the gulf between Catholics and Protestants. Two of these poems – ‘Docker’ in Death of a Naturalist and ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966’ in North (neither included in the Selected Poems) – are hard, cartoon-like renditions ‘from the outside’ of Protestants. Both were written in the sixties, while Heaney was in his twenties; both show the unmistakable aggressiveness of a young man struggling for his own place in society, but also a curious flicker of sympathy, even for these culturally defined alterities.
In ‘Docker’ a Protestant shipyard worker (not, in fact, a docker; the dockers were generally Catholic, and the name was a mistake on Heaney’s part) is defined in terms appropriated from his work. He is someone a Catholic would not want to meet at night on a dark street:
There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry’s crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips’ vice.
That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic –
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.
[DN, 28]
The aesthetic that defines the docker – one composed of jutting machinery, steel plating, sledgehammer and fist, clamp and vice – is as far as conceivable from the aesthetic of receptivity and yielding that Heaney espoused from the beginning of his work, and expressed in 1974 in ‘Feeling into Words’: ‘The crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or a theme or a phrase’ (P, 49).
The second repudiatory poem sketching ‘the other side’ (‘Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966’) concerns the July marching season in Ulster, which celebrates the Protestant victory over James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. In Heaney’s 1966 poem ‘It is the drums preside, like giant tumours’, with their stentorian aesthetic (N, [1975] 68). Yet in each of these two stereotyping poems Heaney cannot keep entirely aloof from his Protestant opposites. In the first, he draws the docker into another stereotype, this time a pre-Reformation unifying one: ‘He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross’; and in the second, the marcher bearing the Unionist drum is felt to be oppressed and wounded by it: ‘He is raised up by what he buckles under. /… The pigskin’s scourged until his knuckles bleed.’ These moments of sympathy would not appear in the usual propaganda poem; yet they are not enough to enable Heaney to identify entirely with the worker or the drummer. The poems, because they originate in stereotype, are unsatisfying, in spite of their brilliant phrases.
A far more confident vignette, treating the uneasiness of even cordial relations between the two ‘sides’, is offered among Heaney’s poems-in-prose that make up the sequence ‘Stations’ (1975). In ‘Trial Runs’ we find ourselves at the close of the Second World War; a Protestant neighbour, now demobilized, drops by (but does not enter) the Heaneys’ house with a present for the poet’s father:
In a khaki shirt and brass-buckled belt, a demobbed neighbour leaned against our jamb. My father jingled silver deep in both pockets and laughed when the big clicking rosary beads were produced.
‘Did they make a papish of you over there?’
‘Oh, damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s dresser when his back was turned.’
‘You could harness a donkey with them.’
Their laughter sailed above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs over a territory.
[SP, 45]
In this Joycean epiphany the stereotypes are still present – the half-military British dress of the neighbour, the hands-in-pockets stance of the farmer, the worn sectarian joking exchanged between them – but something else ‘dips and lifts’ in the passage – the fact that the Protestant neighbour has thought of Patrick Heaney when he was away at war, that he has brought back as a gift not something he himself would like, but something he thought the recipient would like – a rosary, and a generously big one. The two men will not be able to go farther into amiability than their awkward joking; but the son hails it none the less as the marking out of an intermediate territory where Catholic and Protestant might feel neighbourly good will for each other rather than enmity.
Comparable ‘territory’ of rapprochement is canvassed in ‘The Other Side’, a 1972 three-part sequence in which each poem clusters round a remark made by the Heaneys’ white-haired and ‘patriarchal’ Protestant neighbour. In the first part he criticizes the Heaneys’ land: ‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground.’ In the second, he criticizes their religion: ‘Your side of the house, I believe, / hardly rule by the book at all.’ But in the third, he cannot help himself from being drawn into the Heaney hearthside: at evening he courteously (and embarrassedly) lingers outside the house till they have finished the family prayers, and then knocks:
‘A right-looking night,’
he might say, ‘I was dandering by and
says I, I might as well call.’
Under such different (and confusing) aspects, the young poet-to-be perceives the local incarnation of ‘the other side’. The neighbour appears sometimes, as in part I, a forbidding superior, with ‘his fabulous, biblical dismissal’ of the Heaney acres; sometimes, as in part II, a figure of mockery among the Heaneys (‘For days we would rehearse / each patriarchal dictum’); and sometimes, as in part III, merely a fellow-creature feeling estranged in the murmur of the unfamiliar rosary he hears being recited behind the Heaney door. In the evening vignette, which we see as on a stage divided in two by the cottage door, the Heaneys pray inside the lighted room at the left while the neighbour lingers in the dark at the right. The adult poet is now, at the close of the poem, the silent presence monitoring his own response to this allegorical tableau of the separation between one’s own side and ‘the other side’:
But now I stand behind him
in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.
He puts a hand in a pocket
or taps a little tune with the blackthorn
shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger’s
weeping.
Should I slip away, I wonder,
or go up and touch his shoulder
and talk about the weather
or the price of grass-seed?
[WO, 36]
The silent proximity in the dark, the wavering query, the impulse to touch, are gestures that the younger poet would not have been capable of in the poems of the docker or the drummer. To realize how strange Catholic prayers would sound to a Protestant (‘the rosary was dragging / mournfully on in the kitchen’); to understand the embarrassment in the neighbour’s pause in the dark of the yard; to regret the stringently circumscribed form that talk between the two ‘sides’ must take (weather, crops) – all of this arises from Heaney’s enlarged adult capacity for empathy. The mere complexity of the neighbour – which requires the three quotations, the three-part poem, in order to be represented in the round – suggests a marked advance in representational fidelity over the more stereotypical portraits of docker and drummer. A faceted, many-sided portrait – of the sort Heaney would later undertake in representing his mother in ‘Clearances’ – is here granted to someone outside the poet’s ethnic group. And the poet’s final question is one that Protestants of good will, it is intimated, might equally be posing to themselves: Are even superficial and conventional interactions (such as talk about ‘the weather / or the price of grass-seed’) preferable to a frozen and excluding cultural silence? Since connection holds the climactic position in Heaney’s poem, it is intimated that the poet would rather touch (albeit briefly) and converse (albeit in the most ritualized way), than ‘slip away’ without making contact.
Heaney’s wish to draw Protestant alterity into the scope of his portraiture is visible in two further poems of Wintering Out. The first (‘The Wool Trade’) is constructed on alterity, contrasting the phrase ‘the wool trade’, as it resonates richly in the mouth of Heaney’s English interlocutor, with Heaney’s own resistant sense of Protestant oppression – even to bloodshed – of Catholics: ‘I must talk of tweed, / A stiff cloth with flecks like blood.’ This simple opposition allies the poem to ‘Docker’ and ‘Orange Drums’; but tucked within these opening and closing brackets we find Heaney’s nostalgia for ‘a language of waterwheels, / A lost syntax of looms and spindles’, bringing Protestant artisanry in the wool trade into the orbit of all the lost skills of which the poet is the elegist (WO, 37). The other, more accomplished poem of ‘the other side’ (‘Linen Town’) contemplates Belfast in 1786, twelve years before the hanging of the Protestant rebel Henry Joy McCracken, leader of the United Irishmen in the Ulster insurrection of 1798. The narration zigzags back and forth between the pristine and untroubled Belfast seen in a 1786 print of its High Street and the divided Belfast where, twelve years later, ‘they hanged young McCracken’. As the poet, in imagination, enters the serene atmosphere of the print, he foretells what will destroy it:
This lownecked belle and tricorned fop
Still flourish undisturbed
By the swinging tongue of his body.
At the close of the poem, the poet wishes with all his heart that in 1798 things had taken a different turn, that ‘reasonable light’ had prevailed over political savagery:
It’s twenty to four
On one of the last afternoons
Of reasonable light.
Smell the tidal Lagan:
Take a last turn
In the tang of possibility.
[WO, 38]
The discretion and reserve of its close place this poem within the tradition of the ‘pen and ink, water tint’ of the eighteenth-century print, paying homage to its ‘reasonable’ formal poise. Only the ‘swinging tongue’ of McCracken’s body leans in from the future to shadow the Enlightenment elegance of the scene. Yet the poem suggests that just as this ‘civic print’ was changed in one (disastrous) direction, so perhaps a reverse ‘unfreezing’ of the present murderous scene might be accomplished, and ‘reasonable light’ might once again be the light in which daily life is lived. After all, the ‘tang of possibility’ is always available.
As Heaney grows older he no longer sees moral usefulness in focusing on alterity as such (though he returns to the kindness of a Protestant neighbour in ‘An Ulster Twilight’ in Station Island). Rather, the murdered victims – as civil rights marches and police reactions decline into undercover terrorism on both sides – haunt him more profoundly than political opposition or sectarian culture. The victims become increasingly a collective set of spectres (see Heaney’s ‘second thoughts’ in ‘Damson’ (1996), treated at the end of this chapter). Moral enquiry no longer seems pursuable through investigation of ‘the other side’: it is more profitable to look to one’s own character and sympathies, and test those for adequacy and breadth. Consequently, it is persons who resemble himself in some way, alter egos who are leading lives he might have led, or encountering a fate he might have encountered, who now begin to serve Heaney better as figures of self-definition.
From the beginning Heaney had looked to sympathetic alter egos in order to explain to himself his own position and function. At first these alter egos, as we have seen, were usually agriculturally timeless ones, collective workers or single artisans: the seed-cutters, the thatcher, the blacksmith, the digger. But Heaney also sought out, in other poems, specifically historicized alter egos, such as the Croppies who, not forsaking their militant principles, became in death unconscious bearers of resurrective nourishment. Then, in Wintering Out, with increasing sociological awareness, Heaney focuses, through the old servant ‘boy’, on the inferior social status of Catholics in the North:
Old work-whore, slave-blood,
who stepped fair-hills
under each bidder’s eye
and kept your patience
and your counsel, how
you draw me into
your trail.
[WO, 17]
In the same volume Heaney, feeling the impotence of the poet in modern society, assumes the garb of ‘the last mummer’ ignored by a family watching television, ‘the luminous screen in the corner’ (WO, 18). Heaney appears to accept, in the marginalization of thatcher and blacksmith, servant ‘boy’ and mummer, the increasing social obsolescence of the poet’s art and service. These alter egos – though useful to the young Heaney – represent a dead end, and do not propose any alternative modern role for the poet.
Heaney’s alter ego in North, as we have seen, was that of the comparative archaeologist, digging back past the early modern period to prehistoric times in order to propose an explanation for contemporary violence. From this remote perspective Heaney gained (as he implied retrospectively in 1980 when speaking of John Synge) an imaginative purchase comparable to that which Synge had discovered in his Aran experience:
He had found a power-point, he was grafted to a tree that had roots touching the rock bottom, he had put on the armour of authentic pre-Christian vision which was a salvation from the fallen world of Unionism and Nationalism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglo and Irish, Celtic and Saxon – all those bedevilling abstractions and circumstances.7
Synge died before he had to invent a counter-myth to Aran; but Heaney, after his move to the Republic, could not continue (as Field Work amply demonstrates) with North’s metaphor of self-as-archaeologist. As squarely as he has ever faced any change, Heaney examined – in the poem ‘Exposure’ on the last page of North – his new position, one which removed him from the Ulster Troubles not in time (as his archaeological alter ego had done) but in space, consigning him to a still unspecified role as observer of the North from the Republic.
In ‘Exposure’ Heaney once more recalls words of Edmund Spenser’s – From A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) – which he himself had quoted earlier in ‘Bog Oak’ and in his prose piece ‘Belfast’ (both published in 1972). In Cork Spenser had seen starving wood-kernes (Irish soldiers driven to the hills by the English army) come out of hiding in search of food: ‘Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not carry them. They looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.’8 In order to define himself adequately in ‘Exposure’, Heaney borrows from several available models. From the Irish past he takes the role of sequestered wood-kerne; from the classical past the figure of the exiled Ovid writing his Black Sea Tristia; and from the recent past the (Russian) role of ‘inner émigré’. At the same time he rejects two other roles – that of internee (as a political activist) and that of informer (as spy or double agent). Such a set of self-delineating figures testifies strongly to Heaney’s need, as he leaves the North, for re-invented metaphors of his own position. No one of these analogies is entirely comprehensive: and the naked questions and doubts of ‘Exposure’ – intensified by the ‘drops and let-downs’ of the feminine endings of so many of its lines – cannot be resolved. The poet fears that he has elected the wrong life-role, and in consequence will have missed (in the strong masculine rhyme of the end) ‘the comet’s pulsing rose’:
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
…
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.
[N, 72–3]
These lines, justly ranked among Heaney’s most powerful, gain their strength from their multiple self-images, the rapid sorting of self against almost any available ‘other’ – the friends who offer so many different ‘colours’ of advice, the enemies who hammer with hatred, the gossips commenting maliciously, even the far-focused Keatsian comet.
Earlier Heaney had looked to myth for an alter ego – to the story of Hercules and Antaeus. The 1966 poem ‘Antaeus’, which, though printed in North, properly belongs in Door into the Dark, is sympathetic to Antaeus, who was refreshed in strength whenever he touched the earth. Only at the end of this youthful poem does Antaeus envisage a destroyer who might ‘plan, lifting me off the earth, / My elevation, my fall’ (N, 12). In a caustic example of Heaney’s ‘second thoughts’, the poem ‘Hercules and Antaeus’ – written in the seventies after the renewed outbreak of political conflict – transforms the defeated Antaeus into ‘a sleeping giant’ who may (so popular legend has it) once more awaken and triumph. ‘Pap for the dispossessed,’ comments Heaney bitterly, thinking of the way the oppressed batten on myths of ultimate victory:
Hercules lifts his arms
in a remorseless V,
his triumph unassailed
by the powers he has shaken
and lifts and banks Antaeus
high as a profiled ridge,
a sleeping giant,
pap for the dispossessed.
[N, 53]
To adopt the defeated Antaeus as an alter ego – as Heaney had done in 1966 – is to condemn oneself to a lifetime of nostalgia for a vanished heroic past, living in ‘a dream of loss and origins’. In 1975, conceding the victory to Hercules, Heaney resolutely says goodbye to Antaeus:
The cradling dark,
the river-veins, the secret gullies
of his strength,
the hatching grounds
of cave and souterrain,
he has bequeathed it all
to elegists. Balor will die
and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.
[N, 52–3]
By bidding farewell to the chthonic elegiac myth of Antaeus, by finding something to praise in the ‘spur of light’ in ‘the challenger’s intelligence’, Heaney opened himself to the more authentic – if more dubious and shifting – figures animating ‘Exposure’ – figures of exile, of flight, of sequestration and, above all, of second thoughts, ‘weighing and weighing’, as he says, ‘my responsible tristia’.
In Field Work Heaney had essayed yet another form of alter ego – one not human but animal. This resulted in one of his most successful poems in that book, the numinous presence-poem ‘The Badgers’. The poet, addressing himself, imagines the invisible but sensed badger as a revenant compounded of the murdered and the murderer:
When the badger glimmered away
into another garden
you stood, half-lit with whiskey,
sensing you had disturbed
some soft returning.
The murdered dead,
you thought.
But could it not have been
some violent shattered boy
nosing out what got mislaid
between the cradle and the explosion,
evenings when windows stood open
and the compost smoked down the backs?
[FW, 25]
‘What got mislaid’ was the violent boy’s soul, stunted and distorted in the life that led him to become a terrorist blown up in his own explosion. That life had begun on a farm not unlike Heaney’s own, in a cottage with a compost pile ‘down the backs’. Neither the poet nor his alter ego, the ‘violent shattered boy’, chose to follow the rural life to which they had been bred: and the poet’s comparison of himself with the young terrorist leads to the great question which, with its image of that animal alter ego, the badger, closes the poem on an insistent rhyme:
How perilous is it to choose
not to love the life we’re shown?
His sturdy dirty body
and interloping grovel.
The intelligence in his bone.
The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders
that could have been my own.
[FW, 26]
The liberation afforded by using an animal as an alter ego is one that recurs when Heaney reinvents himself as a bird, the King Sweeney of Middle Irish legend.
It is from Heaney’s metaphors of flight and exile that this bird-self of Sweeney – one of Heaney’s most successful alter egos – will arise. Sweeney, the king who went mad at the battle of Moira (AD 637) and, cursed by St Ronan, was transformed into a bird, is the hero of the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne (‘The Madness of Sweeney’), which Heaney had begun to translate just after moving to Wick-low. He eventually published the translation as Sweeney Astray in 1983 (between Field Work in 1979 and Station Island in 1984). The poem – a third-person prose narrative interspersed with poems in Sweeney’s first-person voice – is, in Heaney’s words of introduction, ‘a primer of lyric genres – laments, dialogues, litanies, rhapsodies, curses’ (SA, unpaged front matter), and for that reason alone, appealed to Heaney; but its truest value for him appeared in what the translation stimulated – a suite of twenty original poems called ‘Sweeney Redivivus’, printed in Station Island.
Many of these poems are only tenuously connected to actual events in the Middle Irish narrative, but the fiction affords Heaney a strikingly new and hard-edged voice. I will come to this winged, exiled and ‘mad’ symbolic alter ego – and to its terse and ironic poems – at the end of this chapter, but will look first at the many realist alter egos visible in Heaney’s long autobiographical narrative, ‘Station Island’, in which he revisits, no longer as a believer, a famous site of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, the island in Lough Derg in Donegal to which he had come as a pilgrim in his youth (and where hundreds of people yearly arrive to fast, pray and undertake penitential exercises). In the Dantesque fiction of the poem the ghosts of Heaney’s past come crowding thick and fast around him in twelve episodes, which Heaney composes in forms varying from blank verse to his closing terza rima in homage to Dante.
There are many ways to approach ‘Station Island’ – a poem full of persons, incidents and reflections. It has not been read as a collection of lives the poet might have led, but I have always seen its dramatis personae as a series of alter egos – men whose lives the poet, under other circumstances, might have found himself living. Within Heaney’s family culture three choices of life might have seemed plausible ones for the eldest son: to inherit and maintain the farm; to become a priest; or to become a schoolmaster. Heaney begins by rejecting the first (see ‘Digging’) and (if we assume the usual Catholic suggestions to talented students) the second. He decides at first to train as a teacher. Yet the lives chosen by – or forced on – other men and writers of (especially Northern) Ireland remain as parallel existences in the poet’s consciousness. Like the glossy young priest of IV or the monk of XI, Heaney could have found himself in religious life – at the missions or in Europe. Like Simon Sweeney (the tinker of childhood memory who erupts into section I), the poet is a ‘Sabbath-breaker’, but he turns away from Catholic observance out of intellectual conviction rather than outlawry. Though, like the nineteenth-century writer William Carleton of II, he leaves Catholicism, unlike Carleton he does not become a Protestant. Like the chemist William Strathearn (remembered by the poet as a member of his football team), killed by gunmen pretending to seek medicine for a sick child (VII), Heaney could have been caught in a sectarian ambush; like his archaeologist friend who died at thirty-two of heart disease (VIII), he might, given bad luck, have died early; like his cousin Colum McCartney (VIII), Heaney could have been the victim of an arbitrary sectarian killing. Like the hit-man and hunger-striker of IX (based on Francis Hughes of Bellaghy, whose family had known the Heaneys), the poet could have – had he been brought up differently – joined the many young men of his neighbourhood who became members of the IRA. Finally, he both does and does not choose ‘exile’: like Joyce (XII), he leaves his birthplace, but unlike Joyce, he remains in Ireland.
I should add that although female presences in Heaney’s life appear in two sections of ‘Station Island’ (his Aunt Agnes who died young in III, and the young girl with whom the poet ‘played houses’ in VI), these figures do not speak, do not become interlocutors of the poet as do the male figures in the poem. The female presences were – according to the poet in conversation – later additions to what first presented itself as an all-male poem. In the Ireland of Heaney’s youth a young man’s eyes were trained, in the search for his future, on male models; and in spite of the two interpolations of the feminine (and their respective symbolizing of the dolorous and the erotic), the poem both implicitly and explicitly asks, again and again, the question of male vocation. ‘If you did not follow my path’ (the young priest might ask), ‘why not?’ ‘If you are like me’ (a writer such as Joyce might say), ‘why are you still in Ireland?’ ‘If you write poetry’ (a victim might cry), ‘what good is it to me?’
In the comprehensive range of characterization and narration in ‘Station Island’ Heaney’s dramatic powers (reflecting the moral choices offered him) display a steady strength. Carleton’s bite and anger and self-contempt –
hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of their politics –
[SI, 65]
are made to seem normal in the aura of corpses and bigotry. And while there might seem to be balm in the obsequious social approval offered a new priest – ‘ “Father” pronounced with a fawning relish, / the sunlit tears of parents being blessed’ (SI, 69) – the poem, in the mutually critical colloquy between priest and poet, harrowingly turns to the priest’s own horror at life in the foreign missions:
‘The rain forest,’ he said,
‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted
only a couple of years. Bare-breasted
women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.
I rotted like a pear. I sweated masses …’
[SI, 69]
If the priest is repelled by his posting in the tropics, the poet is repelled by the earlier parish welcome to the seminarian:
a clerical student home for the summer
doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.
Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.
Something in them would be ratified
when they saw you at the door in your black suit,
arriving like some sort of holy mascot.
[SI, 70]
The young priest, in return, making the implicit comparison between the vocations of priest and poet (both of them seeking some viable sanction for life), retorts accusingly:
‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here
but the same thing? What possessed you?
I at least was young and unaware
that what I thought was chosen was convention.
But all this you were clear of you walked into
over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.’
[SI, 70]
After repeated explicit and implicit testings of the poet’s own choices and fortunes compared with that of predecessors, mentors, friends and acquaintances, the question of the purpose of Heaney’s luck – still to be alive, still to be able to exercise the vocation of poetry – is posed in its most hostile form by the poet’s ambushed cousin, who reproves him for the way the poet reacted to his murder, both in life and in the elegiac compunction of ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ (Field Work):
‘You were there with poets when you got the word
and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and
blood
was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.
They showed more agitation at the news
than you did….
You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly, you …
for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio
and saccharined my death with morning dew.’
[SI, 82–3]
This – though placed in the mouth of his cousin – is the most vindictive and guilty of Heaney’s ‘second thoughts’ about his own writing, as it indicts the genre of elegy itself – with its historical commitment to consolation and apotheosis – if it ‘whitewashes’ the brute fact of murder and ‘saccharines’ the total annihilation of death.
All but one of the alter egos met by the poet in his Dantesque encounters are from Northern Ireland. The single exception to the rule is James Joyce – summoned up in XII because neither of the Northern writers – Carleton and Kavanagh – can give Heaney the advice he now needs to hear, Joycean advice of ‘silence, exile, and cunning’. In IX the poet had burst out in an unnaturally explicit and explosive passage of disgust, repudiating his identity and origins, and despairing even of his power to revolt:
‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.
I hate where I was born, hate everything
That made me biddable and unforthcoming.’
…
As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.
As if the eddy could reform the pool.
[SI, 85–6]
One might have expected that Heaney, as a poet, would here have looked to Yeats as an example to hearten him. But the cultural problems faced by the Anglo-Irish Yeats do not closely resemble those encountered by Heaney, and the poet turns instead to the writer whose experience more nearly approximated his own. In the last vocational colloquy of ‘Station Island’ Joyce, the most potent of these alter egos, mordantly sets die poet free from his nationalist anxieties and his familial inhibitions:
The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
a waste of time for somebody your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.
You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’
[SI, 93–4]
Though Joyce speaks in a language (‘echo soundings … allurements, / elver-gleams’) more Heaney’s than his own, Joyce’s relation to his Irish subject matter – one of intimacy paired with detachment, of affection modulated by scorn, of absorbed tradition stimulating radical invention – offers more to Heaney than the example of any other Irish alter ego.
‘Station Island’, in its testing of the poet’s vocation against that of other actual lived lives, brought Heaney firmly into the domain of the demotic. The spellbound trance of isolated child-contemplation, the oracular dark of the silent Iron Age bodies, and the domestic sequestration of Glanmore have all been banished by the crowding and voluble personages of Heaney’s past. It is as though, by means of the voices of victims and writers in ‘Station Island’, Heaney’s vocation has become clarified. He cannot neglect these present visitants who haunt his mind: he cannot retire into fantasies of being a marginalized servant or mummer. He must actively regard the present crisis, must let the contemporary victims ‘speak for themselves’ in ordinary colloquial English through his (often abashed) mediation, yet must retain an intellectual and moral independence – symbolized by the work of Joyce – which resists the deflection and deformation of art by either politics or pity.
The obligation to be faithful to historical circumstance (of real lives, of real deaths) freights the poem with detail, forbids it (except in the translation of John of the Cross found in XI) the ‘short swallow-flights of song’ (Tennyson) most congenial to the lyric. It must have come as a real relief to Heaney, after the long sustained work of ‘Station Island’, to compose the brief, alert and barbed poems of ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ – to take up a new alter ego, the vigilant and tart Sweeney, whose bird’s-eye view inspires lyric poems as satiric and acerbic as any Heaney has ever written, while also providing new forms of lyric solace.
From ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ I have already quoted ‘The First Kingdom’, Heaney’s second look at his family history, and ‘In the Beech’, his second look at his tree-house, as well as the poem that closes the sequence – the eloquent ‘On the Road’, which finds its rest in contemplating the deer-carving in the cave of Lascaux. In the Sweeney poems we are allowed to see Heaney coming awake to a second life in the Irish Republic, determined to go back again to re-scan his past. In a Yeatsian image he unwinds the winding path of that ball of twine, his consciousness, following its clue until he is back in the cottage of his boyhood, listening to his parents’ ‘sex-pruned and unfurtherable / moss-talk’ – talk which he will have to unlearn so as to devise his own proper and poetic language. Heaney (as Sweeney) makes his first flight away from those in his homeland who come to stun him with stones, who pronounce him ‘a feeder off battlefields’; he recalls in another poem how the awakening to sex (‘the bark of the vixen in heat’) ‘broke the ice of demure / and examplary stars’, and liberated him imaginatively from his ‘old clandestine / pre-Copernican night’. As Christianity begins to thrive in archaic Ireland, paganism (in the form of Sweeney) is marginalized, until Ronan finally, by cursing Sweeney, changes him into a bird. But Sweeney finds in the metamorphosis an unexpected profit:
History that planted its standards
on his gables and spires
ousted me to the marches
of skulking and whingeing.
Or did I desert?
Give him his due, in the end
he opened my path to a kingdom
of such scope and neuter allegiance
my emptiness reigns at its whim.
[SI, 107–8]
What is ‘neuter’, however, at first feels ‘empty’ to Sweeney the former king, used as he is to the heavy tethers of place and role. The investigation of ‘emptiness’ and ‘neutrality’ will become of increasing importance to Heaney in future books: for now, it is enough to notice the new language – scope, neuter, emptiness, whim – provoked by his move south. From his eyrie Sweeney, in a fine flight of medievalism, rails in ‘The Scribes’ against the narcissism and backbiting of the writers of his kingdom:
I never warmed to them.
If they were excellent they were petulant
and jaggy as the holly tree
they rendered down for ink.
And if I never belonged among them,
They could never deny me my place.
Under the rumps of lettering
they herded myopic angers.
Resentment seeded in the uncurling
fernheads of their capitals.
It is unusual for Heaney to let loose such anger, even when justified; he does it here more in defence of literature than in defence of himself. He closes with this défi to the scribes justifiably uttered by Sweeney (the composer of all the beautiful lyrics of Buile Suibhne): ‘Let them remember this not inconsiderable / contribution to their jealous art’ (SI, III).
The attraction of ‘The Scribes’ – besides its firmness, its satire and its irony – lies in its confident reproof of the scribes in their own linguistic and pictorial languages. One can hear the scrape of Anglo-Saxon in ‘jaggy’ and ‘holly’ and ‘rumps’ and ‘herded’ and ‘angers’; one can see the hint of Irish pictorial convention in ‘the uncurling / fernheads’; one senses the Latinity of ‘lettering’ and ‘resentment’ and ‘capitals’. Sweeney’s closing boast is deliberately made in scribal orotundity: they are not to ignore ‘this not inconsiderable / contribution to their jealous art’. Con-siderable (cum plus sidus, ‘constellation’) implies the assemblage of elements into a constellated whole, as in Buile Suibhne; con-tribution (cum plus tribuere, ‘to grant’, from tribus, ‘tribe’) asserts, by summoning Sweeney’s blood-link with the scribes, that they cannot repudiate him or his addition to their tribal literature; jealous (zelosus, from zelos, ‘zeal’) hints that what was once zeal in them has turned into its bad etymological descendant, jealousy. Heaney’s etymological tuning-fork always rings true in such moments.
Just as, among the shorter poems of Station Island, Heaney’s chosen example is the Chekhov who is able both to savour cognac and to ‘shadow a convict guide through Sakhalin’ (SI, 18–19), so the mentor-figure of ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ is Cézanne (‘An Artist’), whose spare art – with its modernist resistance to both the luxurious chiaroscuro of Renaissance painting and the opulent trompe-l’oeil of conventional still-life – stands, in Heaney’s eyes, as an ideal. Through Cézanne, Heaney warns himself away not only from aesthetic lapses into sentiment or excessive decorativeness but also from the moral lapse of attention to the opinion of others. Cézanne licenses the justified anger of the artist against whatever would corrupt art:
I love the thought of his anger.
His obstinacy against the rock, his coercion
of the substance from green apples …
the vulgarity of expecting ever
gratitude or admiration, which
would mean a stealing from him.
[SI, 116]
In spite of the bracing quality of the new ideals – scope, neutrality, emptiness, whim, anger, obstinacy, coercion, fortitude – which Heaney by means of ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ calls to his own attention, the old ideals of his upbringing hover with an obstinacy of their own, and refuse to be jettisoned entirely. In the most clipped, dry and impeccable of all the Sweeney poems, the poet contemplates a collection of pictures he cannot bear to throw away, calling them by the exalted name of ‘The Old Icons’. There are three of them. One is an etching of a patriot in jail, condemned to be executed, his ‘sentenced face’ illuminated; one is an oleograph of a clandestine outdoor mass in penal times, the congregation soon to be undone by the arrival of British soldiers; and the third is a drawing of a 1798 revolutionary committee soon to be betrayed by one of its members, ‘neat-cuffs, third from left, at rear’. It is the informer whom the poet finds ‘more compelling than the rest of them’: he is the one who chose ‘not to love the life [he was] shown’ (‘The Badgers’), bringing himself to rack and others to ruin. Though treachery, like murder, will out, its results, diffused through history, remain for ever incalculable, ‘inestimable’:
Why, when it was all over, did I hold on to them?
A patriot with folded arms in a shaft of light:
the barred cell window and his sentenced face
are the only bright spots in the little etching.
An oleograph of snowy hills, the outlawed priest’s
red vestments, with the redcoats toiling closer
and the lookout coming like a fox across the gaps.
And the old committee of the sedition-mongers,
so well turned out in their clasped brogues and
waistcoats,
the legend of their names an informer’s list
prepared by neat-cuffs, third from left, at rear,
more compelling than the rest of them,
pivoting an action that was his rack
and others’ ruin, the very rhythm of his name
a register of dear-bought treacheries
grown transparent now, and inestimable.
[SI, 117]
The means of ‘The Old Icons’ are concision, variation and understatement. Each of the powerful ‘old icons’ is described in a few lines; and each is a clear picture; yet the namelessness of the figures depicted – emphasized by the contrast with the ‘names’ on the ‘informer’s list’ – suggests that in the Northern Irish scene there has always been a patriot; always a huddled Catholic minority; always a traitor. The poet cannot throw the old icons away because they are not outdated: everything has altered but nothing has changed. Heaney here forsakes group anonymities not for archetypes, as in the case of the bog people, but for avatars; yesterday Robert Emmet, today Bobby Sands; yesterday the huddled crowd at mass, today the huddled crowd at the civil rights march; yesterday ‘neat-cuffs’ (according to Heaney, one Leonard McNally of the United Irishmen), today – who?
Heaney’s visual focus has never been sharper. In the second stanza ‘light’, ‘window’ and ‘bright’ put a shaft of illumination into each line, while in the third stanza, the two antithetical spots of red – the priest’s red vestments and the redcoats – point up the ideological contrast as the menacing present tense of visual art keeps the soldiers toiling closer and the lookout perpetually coming. The fourth stanza begins in the same visual crispness, with the generic clasped brogues and waistcoats, and with ‘neat-cuffs’ himself geometrically situated in the grid of the group. But a second movement in the poem – one that concerns itself with the invisible – now begins to replace the visual one. This new motif is at first unobtrusively inserted between the waistcoats and ‘neat-cuffs, third from left, at rear’. The first invisible object we are privy to is the secret ‘informer’s list’. The first invisible action we become aware of is neat-cuffs’s already-accomplished ‘prepar[ing]’ of that list, his ‘dear-bought treacheries’. The next invisible event hidden in the icon is the future ‘ruin’ of the other members of the committee. And the next is the verdict of history, as the traitor’s list becomes ‘legend’, as ‘the very rhythm of his name’ becomes synonymous with the register of betrayals.
All these ‘invisibles’ are of course now ‘transparent’. That is the usual outcome of the historical record. But how to judge consequences? The very diffuseness of cause passing into effect – the spreading ripple of catastrophe – vexes judgement. The poem ends with the trope of ineffability, the gesture which says, ‘Words here fail.’ And on the pivoting double ‘now’ – backward to ‘transparent’ and forward to ‘inestimable’ – the poem balances.
This passage from the visibilia of history to its invisibilia – from facts to consequences – is now what is most important to Heaney. Each of the old icons resonates with cultural consequence (though the moral is drawn only with respect to the third). Representation shades into aura, as fact subserves meditation. Heaney’s poetry has never been more confident than in this instance, in which it hovers between the visual iconic (pictured but nameless), the historical (named and registered, but not iconic) and the ‘auratic’ – the felt, the legendary, the inestimable. All of these are important to the poet; and his poetry is most fulfilled when, as here, they find a way to coexist with presence and power. The alter ego of Sweeney gave Heaney the scope and freedom to write such eloquent and convincing poems. And, in their abstraction from the personal testimonies of ‘Station Island’, they form a bridge to Heaney’s allegorical ventures in The Haw Lantern.
Second Thoughts
The continual carnage in Northern Ireland (visible in all the victims and terrorists of Station Island), together with his own removal to the Republic, compelled Heaney to gather representative alter egos – mythical, historical, contemporary, even animal – against whom and through whom to define his own being and function. As I said above, ‘sides’ become less important to Heaney than the sheer mounting body-count of his murdered fellows everywhere in the world, and the definitive image of that crowd of victims finally appears in mass-form in the poem ‘Damson’, published in The Spirit Level (1996).
‘Damson’ begins as the child-Heaney first sees a bleeding wound: he has been watching, with admiration, a bricklayer constructing a wall, with his sharp-edged trowel dipping and gleaming. Next to the bricklayer is his lunchbag, and the child notices a ‘damson stain / That seeped through his packed lunch’ from the bruised fruit inside. Suddenly, the man makes a false move and scrapes his knuckles; he holds his right hand, exuding blood, aloft, and the watching child takes from the blood a shock the poet’s memory now resuscitates: the
Wound that [he] saw
In glutinous colour fifty years ago …
Is weeping with the held-at-arm’s length dead
From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.
[SL, 15]
At this memory, the thronging dead, always just at the edge of consciousness, emerge from their invisibility, summoned by the libation of the bricklayer’s blood. They threaten to overwhelm the poet and his alter ego, the wounded ‘trowel-wielder’:
Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood
Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed,
And some of them still rigged in bloody gear.
The insurgent bloody ghosts threaten to usurp the poet’s imagination to the exclusion of everything else.
Heaney’s understandable first reaction, remembering Odysseus (who with the libation of blood from the throat of a sacrificed lamb called shades from the dead), is to ask the bricklayer to help him to drive the ghosts back to Hades – that is, back to the conjectured blood-smeared place of their murder, the lurid region of the poet’s imagination whence they came:
Drive them back to the doorstep or the road
Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot
Nausea and last gasp of dear life.
Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off
Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out
With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat
Of the sacrificial lamb.
This is anyone’s initial response to horrors rising up in nightmare or recollection: a forcible repression. But Heaney’s second thought – which ends the poem by recalling the workman before he became emblematical of blood, when he was merely a man wielding his trowel and waiting to eat the damsons he had brought from home – enables the poet to repatriate the ghosts not to the instant of their murder (which is, after all, only the closing instant of their history) but rather to the better, earlier and more human days of their life at home. Do not follow the example of Odysseus in your dealings with the ghosts, says the poet (to himself as much as to the bricklayer):
But not like him –
Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board –
Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,
The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,
Jam ladled thick and streaming down the sunlight.
[SL, 16]
In lieu of exorcism, or of maintaining the ghosts in their status as victims, the poet chooses to reinstall the ghosts into ordinariness – as his brothers, not haunters. The sunlit kitchen scene of ‘Damson’ recalls Heaney’s luminous memories in ‘Sunlight’ of his Aunt Mary Heaney baking bread in the peaceful kitchen at Mossbawn. Heaney had set ‘Sunlight’ and ‘The Seed Cutters’ (with which I began this book) as the dedicatory poems to North in order to counter the blood-violence there: the two dedicatory poems show people living ordinary lives in peaceful and coherent ways. ‘The Seed Cutters’ was a group portrait; but ‘Sunlight’ – an incomparable poem of the idyllic within the straitened – conveys a child’s silent happiness inspired by adult love:
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
die 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 whitened nails
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.
[N, 8–9]
This exquisite genre-piece – in which the Vermeer-like glimpses of the anonymous woman who stands over her bakeboard at the window or sits waiting for the oven to heat are framed in front by ‘a sunlit absence’ and in back by ‘a space again’ while the scone rises in the empty kitchen – explains, in the last stanza, its deeply peaceful balance by the almost invisible gleam of love which is the source of the honeyed sunlit warmth of the poem. It is with a pang that one re-reads ‘Sunlight’ after the much later ‘Damson’, for now, into the Dutch light of idyll, there has come the streaming red of adult blood. The lurid red is transformed, it is true, into the ‘wine-dark taste of home’ by the alchemy of the damson jam-making: even red can be re-sanctified into the harmless activity of human beings absorbed in the dailiness of home. But that the red should ever have had to enter the sunlit sanctuary of the childhood kitchen, even if to be alchemized, is the scar the imagination cannot help but bear.
And although Heaney’s surrogate ‘trowel-wielder, woundie’ harks back to the earlier artisanal alter egos of the poet’s childhood, the artisanal scene itself has now become (in the opening lines of ‘Damson’) ‘Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood / On the bricklayer’s knuckles’. The new heraldry must contain not only the thatcher ‘couchant’ on his completed roof but also the bricklayer done in Keatsian ‘gules’ – another stylization of blood. It is by such means that Heaney’s imagination re-thinks itself. His successive layering – in this case, of experience (jam-making) on earlier experience (breadmaking); of art (‘Damson’) on experience (bricklaying); and of art (‘Damson’) on art (‘Sunlight’) – makes each of his poems resonate with others that both precede and follow it. In adjuring his bricklayer alter ego against confining both the victims and himself in the atmosphere of blood and victimage, Heaney is warning himself against being seduced into the pornography of violence (a seduction too often visible in contemporary ‘poetry of witness’, especially that written by bystanders who are not themselves subject to the violence of which they write).