Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.
‘Field of Vision’ [ST, 22]
If the imaginative importance of a non-phenomenal place ‘utterly empty, utterly a source’ (‘Station Island’ III ; ‘Clearances’ 8) was Heaney’s point of origin for The Haw Lantern, then a strange new return to the phenomenal world – but from an almost posthumous perspective – is the point of origin for Seeing Things. In the theory-poem of the volume (which retells a story taken from the Irish annals) the transcendent and the real become defined as the obverse and reverse of a single perception. Just as an angel’s world would seem miraculous to us, so our world would seem miraculous to a heavenly person – it would, for him, represent the wholly other, the imagined, the hitherto-inconceivable. Can we, as human beings, begin to think of our phenomenal surroundings in this way – as a continuing revelation of the miraculous? This is to reverse the religious practice of ‘lifting up’ one’s eyes to an idealized and transcendent space; it is to find ultimate value in what we can here behold. The poem ‘The annals say’ is number viii of Heaney’s forty-eight-poem sequence called ‘Squarings’ (poems ‘square’ in shape, five beats wide and twelves lines long):
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed
back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
[ST, 62]
The poem’s two realms represent (according to Heaney in his essay ‘Frontiers of Writing’) ‘two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; … the frontier between them is there for the crossing’ (RP, 203). The poem implies that just as it would be death for the man from heaven to remain in the thicker air of earth, so it would be equally fatal to human beings to attempt to breathe for any length of time the rarefied air of the transcendent. We may ascend to it for a short glimpse of the marvellous, but we must then return to the phenomenal world. The same point is made by Heaney’s epigraph and epilogue to Seeing Things: the first is his translation of The Aeneid’s passage on the golden bough – which allows one to pass into the Underworld and then return – and the second is his translation of Charon’s refusal, in The Inferno, to take the living Dante into his ship of death.
Not even the vacancy of death can destroy for Heaney the beauty of uninhabited nature. His eye and ear and palate respond as ardently as ever to its sights and sounds and tastes. That is the first import of the title Seeing Things – re-inspecting the phenomenal world in the aftermath of death – but the second is a quasi-visionary insight, or numinous frisson, ‘seeing things’ with Wordsworthian imagination. Because landscape is for Heaney a powerful repository of memory, many ‘Squarings’ represent returns as a conscious adult to some scene from youth:
Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,
The silence-forder and the definite
Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.
[ST, 69]
The ghostliness of the writer himself in these return-poems marks them as different from his earlier representations of childhood, ‘When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed’ (ST, 32). Now, the self-consciousness of writing and the presence of death cannot be evaded or overlooked. It is for this reason that the landscapes and home-scapes of ‘Squarings’ are ‘airy’ rather than ‘laden’, static rather than dynamic, ‘distanced’ rather than proximate, made to resemble stills rather than moving pictures. Early in ‘Squarings’ Heaney recalls how Hardy, ‘at parties in renowned old age’, sometimes ‘imagined himself a ghost / And circulated with that new perspective’ (ST, 61). The airiness of Seeing Things occurs because Heaney is contemplating the physical through the scrim of extinction.
That is the given of the book: What does the phenomenal world look like contemplated through eyes made intensely perceptive by unignorable annihilation? Such a given entails an alteration of style: not the rich sensuality of Death of a Naturalist, not the historicized thickness of the bog poems, not the epic-derived Viking sparenesses of North, not the parabolic folk-quality of The Haw Lantern, but rather an almost Shaker simplicity of the actual. It is, however, an actual that cannot be touched: the scrim prevents touching. Nor can it be tasted, like the oysters of Field Work. It cannot be sexual. It depends chiefly on what used to be called the ‘higher’ or ‘theoretical’ senses of sight and hearing, those which make contact with their objects without touching them.
Heaney is concerned here with our immaterial extrapolations from the material – the physical arc of a pitchfork extended in imagination, pretended boundaries marked only by ‘four jackets for four goalposts’, or
the imaginary line straight down
A field of grazing, to be ploughed open
From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod
Stuck in the other.
[ST, 9]
These imagined grids and lines are the latitude and longitude lines (as Stevens spoke of them in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’) by which mentality orders the world. They become more visible to the poet as ghostly returner than they were to him as first-time encounterer.
Of course such a self-aware book must also contain a nostalgia for first-order experience. This is most acutely felt in ‘The Pulse’ (part 2 of ‘Three Drawings’). ‘The pulse of the cast line / entering water’ is evoked as the fleetest version of the tactile (‘smaller in your hand / than the remembered heartbeat / of a bird’), and then to touch evanescent is added touch resistant:
Then, after all of that
runaway give, you were glad
when you reeled in and found
yourself strung, heel-tip
to rod-tip, into the river’s
steady purchase and thrum.
[ST, 11]
But now, by the time of Seeing Things, there can be no prospect of one’s resumption into the unthinking thrum of the living current. It is as though a portcullis had dropped between Heaney and materiality: he sees the world, he relishes it, he responds to it – but
He felt at one with space
unroofed and obvious –
surprised in his empty arms.
[ST, 12]
‘Unroofed’ is in fact the word which generates the first of the ‘Squarings’, as the poet brilliantly abstracts – in the image of the many derelict roofless cottages found in Ireland – what it is to find oneself alone in the family house after the deaths of one’s parents. Though at first the poem’s shivering beggar-surrogate leads Heaney to summon up the Christian fiction of the ‘particular judgement’ – when one is judged, alone, exposed to the gaze of God, after death – he discards that fiction for the truth: ‘there is no next-time-round’. What one is faced with in the ruined family house, says Heaney’s final line, is ‘Unroofed scope’ (‘scope’ being a word of emptiness remembered from ‘The Cleric’ in Sweeney Redivivus):
Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.
So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into –
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.
And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.
And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.
[ST, 55]
Disturbingly antithetical terms – brilliancies, beggar; light, silhouette; bare, bright – prepare the reader for the central image of chilly reflection, which is no longer the family hearth with the warmth of first-order fire, but rather the inhuman but beautiful cloud-life reflected in the second-order puddle of reflection. One cannot deny the beauty of the free drift of the unsouled clouds, but the puddle refuses to be transparent to the spiritual. A flood of resigned negations follows – Nothing, nothing, not, no next-time – but is checked by ‘scope’ and ‘wind’. ‘Le vent se lève; il faut tenter de vivre,’ says Valéry in ‘Le Cimetière Marin’, in a parallel refusal of the death-temptation.
If, earlier, Heaney’s aim was to pull language as close as possible to the thing itself – so that a bog poem sounded boggy or a Viking-ship poem sounded lithe – he now contemplates an aesthetic in which the medium would be far from the thing represented. The theoretical formulation of this aesthetic appears in his title-poem ‘Seeing Things’, in which he describes a medieval baptism of Jesus carved in stone on the façade of a European cathedral. Nothing could be more unlike real water than the ‘hard and thin and sinuous’ lines that symbolize the river in which Jesus stands:
Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
Is there, the poem asks, a mode of representation which would be not literal but hieroglyphic, as the carved lines in stone are symbolic of, rather than mimetic of, liquid? If so – if the merest indices can summon up in the beholder’s mind all the properties of water – then perhaps all the chiaroscuro of mimetic representation can be made to occur within a ‘stony’ art: for see, this is what happens as we look at the stone:
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.
The poet urges himself to trust the comparable ‘utter visibility’ of language – in ‘lines hard and thin and sinuous’ – and to believe that his reader can supply the implications. He concludes by averring that there can be – in poetry as in Egyptian writing – a symbolic ‘hieroglyph for life itself’, faithful to the ‘zig-zag’ complexity of its object.
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.
[ST, 17]
Seeing Things is, then, a book of symbolic and indicative hieroglyphs – thè unroofed wallstead, the carved river – rather than a representational book such as Station Island. Yet it draws its hieroglyphs from the material world, and does not insert them into parables in the manner of The Haw Lantern. It is interested in a mode of vision focused by – but not on – damage: its exemplary figure is therefore Heaney’s Aunt Mary in her wheelchair, who can look only on the unchanging scene outside the house, seeing always ‘The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain, / The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain’. Her uncomplaining steadfastness makes vision itself compelling, like a view focused by being barred by a gate:
you could see
Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.
[ST, 22]
All of Seeing Things is ‘focused and drawn in by what barred the way’: the hollow of absence brings out presence, in the plainest and most explicit language. Once again we encounter ‘things founded clean on their own shapes’, but they are no longer shapes of primary sense experience, nor yet of second-order retrievals of memory, as in ‘The Peninsula’ (DD, 21), but rather shapes of third-order symbolic abstraction – as if only abstraction were strong enough to act as a counter to the annihilating force of death that erases senses and memory alike.
I should pause to say that the backlash from his venture into abstraction sends Heaney spinning into the primary materiality of dirt and sex, yet even these cannot resist the abstracting impulse. Dirt is made magical by ‘Wheels within Wheels’, where the child who will grow up to be the poet moves his bicycle to a mud-hole; upside down, with its saddle and handlebars submerged, it sends up by its turning wheels a shower of silt:
The world-refreshing and immersed back wheel
Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes
And showered me in my own regenerate clays.
For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit.
Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped.
[ST, 47]
With the terminal snapping of the chain here, and the disappearance of the ‘nimbus’, Heaney bids farewell to his most ambitious wish – to join the domain of mud with the domain of vision. Earlier, in The Haw Lantern, the parable-poem ‘The Mud Vision’ had projected such a conjunction, in which there appeared
Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud
Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,
A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub
Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.
[HL, 48]
Although the Hamlet-word ‘sullied’ and the transcendent word ‘lucent’ strive for a balance both complementary and adversative, the spectators were not equal to the vision, and so it disappeared.
But by the time of Seeing Things mud has hardened from its nimbus-gaiety into a quarried cliff-face looming over water – Heaney’s new hieroglyph of the world governed by the intractable laws of physical necessity. The question now is not how to reconcile the sullied flesh with the lucent soul, but how – in ‘Squarings’ × – to reconcile the water of the diaphanous virtual with the rock of the massive material:
Ultimate
Fathomableness, ultimate
Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile
What was diaphanous there with what was massive?
[ST, 64]
The imagination must work to set mobility of mind against the immobility of the inhuman.
If mud cannot prevail against death, then perhaps sex can? The potent and Pan-like figure of ‘the rope man’, demonstrating his wares at the fair, appears (in ‘Squarings’ xviii) to challenge, with his virility, the tamer lives of the local farmers: in the end, they do not take up his challenge, and he must dismantle his magic. Sunset falls on the fair-day and the rope-man concedes his own ending; the free swaggerer of sex is, when last seen, emptied of his aura. The poem that began with the ‘foul-mouthed god of hemp come down to rut’ ends with ‘his powerlessness once the fair-hill emptied’ (ST, 74). The mud-vision, the rut-vision – both seem reprieves from despair, but they cannot be made permanent.
In Seeing Things almost every hieroglyph inscribes within itself its own annihilation: ‘The places I go back to have not failed / But will not last’ (ST, 101). The violence of the Second World War is dissolved into ‘newsreel bomb-hits, as harmless as dust-puffs’ (ST, 76). Even the sturdy parental house, after the poet’s father dies of cancer, becomes an X-ray of itself, as it too takes on the quality of abstraction into paradigm:
The house that he had planned
‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know,’
A paradigm of rigour and correction,
Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,
Stood firmer than ever for its own idea
Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.
[ST, 91]
In the light of such a passage, we can see that each hieroglyph is to ‘stand for its own idea’, and that abstraction itself, in these hieroglyphs, is a ‘rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit’. One could say that the hieroglyphic poems, in their plainness of diction (not necessarily accompanied by plainness of structure or of imagination), represent an aesthetic of which Patrick Heaney might not be ashamed. Heaney aims at ‘an art that knows its mind’, ‘unfussy and believable’ (ST, 97).
Because Seeing Things is a book so pervaded by extinction, its hieroglyphs of what remains – recreating moments of fullness of feeling – are particularly striking. The last of these returns to ‘water and ground in their extremity’ (as in ‘The Peninsula’ in Door into the Dark) and foreshadows ‘Postscript’ in The Spirit Level, where ‘the wind / And the light are working off each other’. It too records a glittering epiphany:
When light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried
And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the pointed poles,
That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.
[ST, 108]
That elusive river light (chillier than Wordsworth’s) is one that is hoped for rather than attained. Its shiver is ecstatic but wintry. By contrast, ‘Squaring’ xxiv, Heaney’s hymn to natural sufficiency, records the ever-present potential of the senses for a fuller happiness. Although this ‘Squaring’ is the single most tranquil point in Seeing Things, it begins, significantly, with the word ‘Deserted’, making the seaside landscape non-social. The solitary view offers nothing but itself, an equilibrium of air and ocean. Here, the minatory ‘rock’ of the quarry-face (‘Squarings’ x) has miniaturized itself into a little litter of hard material substances – cockles, bottle-glass, shell-debris, a bit of sandstone. In Heaney’s wish for emblematic stillness there is almost no sound, and no sudden flashing of light. Instead, the hieroglyphic world simply is:
Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.
Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic
The moorings barely stirred in, very slight
Clucking of the swell against boat boards.
Perfected vision: cockle minarets
Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle glass,
Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.
Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.
[ST, 80]
The sign of happiness here is Heaney’s return to the fanciful in the ‘cockle minarets’ and ‘reddened bud of sandstone’. There is an elated elaboration of grammar as well, as the poet suspends his perceptions on a visible string of past participles – deserted, clarified, perfected, consigned, known – and an equally visible string of concrete and abstract nouns: stone, wall, masonry, silence, fullness, shimmer, Atlantic, moorings, clucking, swell, boards, vision, minarets, glass, debris, bud, sandstone, air, ocean, antecedents, apposition, omnipresence, equilibrium, brim. No one could fail to notice the see-saw between the most material nouns (stone, boards, glass) and the most evanescent ones (shimmer, equilibrium). Even the adjectives, in this poem of stillness, are mostly solid nouns pressed into adjectival service: harbour, boat, cockle, bottle, shell. One feels oneself to be fully in the presence of the material harbour scene – masonry, boat, stone – and equally in the presence of its felt aura – one of fullness, shimmer, equilibrium. All the elements of language, too, are in balance, the Latinate ‘clarified and dormant’ weighing against the Anglo-Saxon ‘swell against boat boards’. In the final sway of immaterial air against material water, each becomes ‘antecedent’ to the other, and neither takes priority. Air and ocean are then placed in a further Latinate ‘apposition’ with three extraordinary nouns – ‘Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim’ – the first theological, the second scientific, the third emotional. The first and second are Latinate, as befits their learned derivation, the third Anglo-Saxon, as befits its primacy of emotion: and the easy ‘slippage’ by which – ‘-brium’ drops off its Latinate ‘u’ and becomes the Middle-English sensual ‘brim’ is the sign of ecstatic sufficiency in the present.
But – it should be said once more – this ecstatic sufficiency happens less within the flesh than within the mind: within a still and deserted moment vision is ‘perfected’, and air and ocean are ‘known’ in their reciprocity. The dynamic life of flesh would break this perfection – and so this poem of thanksgiving too is, like all ‘perfected’ things, a hieroglyph of death.
The anguish of the knowledge of death in Seeing Things is usually expressed in deliberately muted ways. But it can be seen explicitly in two ‘bookends’ of ‘Squarings’, one of which (xii) represents the good thief – whose death is imminent – and the other (xxxiv) a soldier bound for Vietnam – whose potential death makes him seem like a revenant. Though the excruciating suffering of the thief stands to be alleviated through Christ’s promise – ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise’ – it is the suffering that dominates Heaney’s almost surreal description of the good thief’s death-agony, as he scans ‘empty space’ where heaven should be:
paint him on Christ’s right hand, on a promontory
Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems
Untranslatable into the bliss
Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,
By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain.
[ST, 66]
If the crucified thief stands for the intolerable knowledge of the physical pain of dying, then the bleached face of the soldier stands for what one learns on the other side of death, its emptying of human experience. Heaney saw the soldier on the airport bus in California:
The face I see that all falls short of since
Passes down an aisle: I share the bus
From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley
With one other passenger, who’s dropped
At the Treasure Island military base
Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,
He could have been one of the newly dead come
back,
Unsurprisable but still disappointed,
Having to bear his farmboy self again,
His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.
[ST, 92]
So too must Heaney return to ‘bear his farmboy self again’, with only his ‘otherworldly brow’ to mark the passage he has undergone through his parents’ deaths. Everything is so ‘normal’ – the airport, the bus, the passenger being dropped off. Yet once the dead are admitted into consciousness, the ‘otherworldly brow’ is the result, borne like an uninterpretable sign – comparable to Hawthorne’s minister’s black veil – among one’s fellows.
It was a great surprise to many of Heaney’s readers – fresh from the archaeological rites of North, the actual Irish persons and contemporary events of ‘Station Island’ and the political parables of The Haw Lantern – to come upon the abstract, unmythologized and mostly unpolitical hieroglyphs of Seeing Things. The volume proves the degree to which, for a poet, a new sense of life must generate a new style. In ‘a time marked by assent and by hiatus’ (ST, 70) – the suspended time of recognition rather than action – the poet makes an inventory of what will bear holding on to. ‘Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.’ Instead of the first-order quiver of sensation, or the elegiac replay of second-order memory, he will enunciate the third-order clarity of adult acknowledgement in language:
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.
[ST, 56]
Such a passage has the sternness of a vow. Yet Heaney can re-do the airiness of the third-order symbolic in an ironic comic mode as well:
You are free as the lookout,
That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog,
Who declared by the time that he had got himself
down
The actual ship had been stolen away from beneath him.
[ST, 29]
The symbolic style – by contrast to the first-order mimetic style, or the second-order memorial style – acknowledges in every moment that the actual ship (and even the remembered ship) has been stolen away by time. If the ship has not been lifted up onto a symbolic plane – that is, made into art – it will die with the death of those who remember it. Re-imagined, however, it may last some time.
The powerful effort of re-imagining everything – not representing it mimerically as it happened; not representing it embalmed by memory; but representing it on an abstract and symbolic plane that presents itself as such – this is the strenuousness that underlies the hieroglyphs of Seeing Things. The virtue of such writing is that it records what is precious without tethering it to a limited personal place and a brief human lifetime. The poet sacrifices himself – as autobiographical persona, as narrator of his own era, as a person representing his class or ethnic group – in order to see things in the most basic terms of all, life symbolized and verbalized in the full knowledge of annihilation.
Almost every human being sees his parents predecease him; all adult children feel the ‘unroofed’ quality of that pang. Rather than dwell on violent death (as in North or ‘Station Island’), let me, the poet says, see purely the co-presence always and everywhere of life and death ‘known as antecedents / Of each other’. If the stasis, hiatus and stillness of this knowledge permeate Seeing Things, as they do; if spirit is in the ascendancy over matter; if speculation supervenes over certainty; then Heaney has honoured the shock and rupture of death as it deserves to be honoured. He has written a new chapter in the history of elegy, forgoing (for the most part) both the mournful conventions of lament and the transcendent conventions of apotheosis. Instead he stops time, looking for, and hoping to find, ‘the portent / In each setting’ (ST, 75). Yes, the poems are incidentally Irish – referring to Lough Neagh or Clonmacnoise or Coleraine or Yeats – but they are not either politically or ethnically ‘Irish’. As almost posthumous poems, they reject such transient categories, which fall below (or lie above) the plane of present urgency, where the only thing that matters is the underlying law of relation between life and acknowledged death. As the Aeneas of the epigraph comes back from Hades, as the Dante of the epilogue comes back from Hell, so Heaney will come back – but not unchanged – in The Spirit Level.
And how does one write of primary experience again after having survived the chill of internalized extinction? One cannot forever bear one’s ‘otherworldly’ brow; but original verdancy is not resumable. In ‘The Walk’ Heaney reexamines marriage as it appears under the sign of the charred. In the past there were excursions into pastoral paradises: ‘Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her’, with the river-bed ‘Gravelly, shallowy, summery with pools’. But in the present of primary experience the picture is ‘a negative this time, in dazzle-dark’:
Smudge and pallor where we make out you and me,
The selves we struggled with and struggled out of,
Two shades who have consumed each other’s fire,
Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe.
Yet though husband and wife are still alive, and capable of angrily searing and singeing, they are also strangely ghostlike. Resembling the shades that speak to Dante, they ‘seem like wisps of enervated air, / After-waves, feathery ether-shifts’. It is not, however, their destiny to remain static in this disembodied state: they are, to their own surprise,
apt still to rekindle suddenly
If we find along the way charred grass and sticks
And an old fire-fragrance lingering on,
Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue …
The inexplicable resurgence of primary first-order desire amid the exacerbations of death’s third-order reflections is too primal to be analysed: it can merely be testified to. It leaves the couple ‘none the wiser, just better primed / To speed the plough again and feed the flame’ (SL, 63–4). Yet the diction of the sexual – ‘fragrance … / Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue’ – has regenerated itself, one aspect of that directly sensual ‘Hosannah ex infernis’ (SL, 3) that Heaney cannot help uttering.