The surprise of poetry

[Guest]

One of my household tasks is that of fireman. I imagine it's a dying art but one which connects me to my childhood where I learned the skills which have earned me the soubriquet of 'One Match'. It's a dirty business all the same and hardly the stuff of fine thoughts prior to the welcoming and warming glow of a good fire in the weather we know so well.
Today I carried out my usual duties, and, in front of a roaring fire I opened my Seamus Heaney (Human Chain) at the next page:

Slack

I

Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal
The lorryman would lug in open bags
And vent into a corner,

A sullen pile
But soft to the shovel, accommodating
As the clattered coal was not.

In days when life prepared for rainy days
It lay there, slumped and waiting
To dampen down and lengthen out

The fire, a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame.

II

The sound it made
More to me
Than an allegory.

*Slack schlock
Scuttle scuffle
Shak-shak.*

And those words -
'Bank the fire' -
Every bit as solid as

The cindery skull
Formed when its tarry
Coral cooled.

III

Out in the rain,
Sent for it
Again

Stand in the unlit
Coalhouse door
And take in

Its violet blet,
Its wet sand weight,
Remembering it

Tipped and slushed
*Catharsis*
From the bag.



* The words between the **, should be in italics.

I have a question - later.

[french frank]

For me it's chopping wood for kindling, so perhaps Robert Frost's Two Tramps in Mudtime:

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

I learned from watching my grandfather chopping wood - one big "chump' which was the chopping block and the axe splitting pieces of wood into smaller and smaller pieces until they're the right thickness for sticks.

[Chris Newman]

As a child I lived in the Sussex Weald. At the end of our road was St. Leonard's Forest which stretched for miles to the North, East and South. Here we often hunted in vain for St. Leonard's dragon upon our wheeled metal steeds. The forest streams were and still are riddled with dams and their Hammer Ponds which drove the hammers and bellows of the iron foundries which cast cannons and balls for the Royal Navy. These foundries were fired by the charcoal made from the lesser branches of oaks whose trunks had built thousands of ships and stately homes, barns and hovels.

One day we thought we smelt a forest fire and urgently tracked down the source of the smoke. We found instead an old sun-burnt, wrinkled man seated beneath a tarpaulin by a mound of earth: a real charcoal burner.

The charcoal burner has tales to tell.
He lives in the forest, alone in the forest,
He sits in the forest, alone in the forest,
And rabbits come up and they give him good morning,
And rabbits come up and say, 'Beautiful morning',
And the moon swings clear of the tall black trees,
And owls fly over and wish him good night.
Quietly over to wish him good night.

His fire was only about twenty miles from "The Hundred Acre Wood" in the Ashdown Forest where AA Milne described such a man in "Now We Are Six"

[salymap]

Three lovely poems. Thanks for those.

[PatrickOD]

Agreed salymap, and for my part you are most welcome.

Thank you ff and Chris for the memories and the poems.

The surprise for me, in my choice, was firstly, the serendipity of the coming across of the poem just after having gone through all the mundane motions of firelighting ; and secondly, the raising of the humble slack, and by extension the whole business of the fire, to a level beyond my own imagination. Too late now, of course - Seamus Heaney has beaten me to it once again! (That's irony)

My question is about the word 'catharsis'. I took it to be an onomatopoeic word in the context of the poem; but I can't satisfactorily account for its use in the context of the poet's experience, unless it is an attempt to reconcile the present with an aspect or incident of his childhood. In the light of much of his poetry I think that might be so. Any help with this?

I'm also continually surprised at what you can find on Google.

http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-latest-news/2009/10/13/poem-created-during-slack-time-in-hospital-61634-24917779/

[french frank]

Catharsis is 'purification', aside from the literary usage. Purging. Does that connect with pouring out this dark, dirty substance? Or the casting off of the heavy weight?

I found this comment in a review: "One of the motifs in this collection is the felt weight in heavy lifting, so a bag of slack being “Tipped and slushed” has a certain thematic role to play; yet it can also take dramatic verbal turns, to both “Catharsis” and “a violet blet”, where two different vocabularies are brought to bear, one with a classical literary pedigree, the other from the obscurer regions of English (“blet”, from bletting, seems to be the first mark of inward decomposition on fruit). Both words work in the context of Heaney’s poem (where onomatopoeia is also in play), with their not quite matching promises of emptying and of decay. "

[PatrickOD]

Thank you, ff. Review noted, plus a few other googled items. I am not yet finished reading Human Chain, and indeed with the additional information I now have I find I need to re-read nearly all the volumes. But, enough of this! Next thing I'll be getting out Book 6 of the Aeneid, which was a set book in my time, and Heaney's. I'm not still at school! HE never left - he continues to be the model student.

But, whereas I took 'violet blet' to be a vivid description of the colour of the slack as it lies lit by the limited light, I still feel that the 'catharsis' is thematically linked to his human chains.
'Out in the rain
Sent for it
Again.'
A mean complaint of long ago coming back to niggle him?

Yes, I shall correct my misspelling.

[salymap]

I wish Iknew a suitable poem for this thread but it awakened memories of the important business of cleaning and clearing the firegrate, particularly on Christmas morning.I usually slept on a large sofa in the lounge,guests having my bedroom, my father would creep into the room to set and light the fire as quietly as possible and I would pretend to be still asleep. The kitchen boiler would be left on, stoked with 'slack' to provide hot water for all. How quickly we forget the mundane routines of keeping warm, within the lifetime of the elderly.

[Eudaimonia]

Catharsis is 'purification', aside from the literary usage. Purging. Does that connect with pouring out this dark, dirty substance? Or the casting off of the heavy weight?

Well, for Aristotle, the end of a tragedy is a katharsis (purgation, cleansing) of the tragic emotions of pity and fear. "Violet blet" and "slumped and waiting/To dampen down" seem to enhance this tragic sense of decay, foreboding, and loss. There's something symbolic and depressingly final about a fire being put out this way, isn't there? Tragic...cathartic. "The sound it made/More to me/Than an allegory" points to a view of life where everything is dark, pitiful and scary and then suddenly it's over. That's what I got from it, at any rate.

[french frank]

I'd agree that it isn't a joyful poem of childhood, but I don't see it as tragic or pitiful.

Slack was put on the fire to keep it burning longer, ideal for poorer folk because it was cheaper and it extended the life of the fire. It didn't need to be stoked up extravagantly with expensive coal which burned away more quickly. As it says at the end of the first section:

... a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame.

It's a bit mournful and evokes poverty though. I share Patrick's curiosity over the sense of 'catharsis' here. Doesn't Aristotle's meaning imply the artificial ridding oneself of uncomfortable emotions. You can engage with them safely ('enjoy' them?) because they are no more 'real' than the drama.



[Not entirely off-topic: I remember 'nutty slack' in my childhood - coal dust with small lumps of coal to lighten it a bit. There's a parliamentary debate (scanned from Hansard - don't bother to report typos as they don't have the resources, they say, to correct individual mistakes like 'coal-winter' and 'to' for 'too'), dating from 1953:

"Mr. Lloyd: I am myself a user of nutty slack, and in my opinion it is useful, particularly in this cold weather, to eke out supplies of ordinary coal. "]

[PatrickOD]

Ah! Sir Gerald Nabarro! No nutty slacker he!
Nutty slack would not have been the pile in Heaney's coal house - 'Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal' - and whatever the economic status of some users of nutty slack in the fifties, it was not poverty that motivated his family to make use of this 'keeper of the flame'; frugality, good management, utility, efficiency - not poverty. A dampened down fire could/can be revived, and the heated slack soon bursts into flame with the application of a probing poker. The flame is literally 'kept' for future use and a well banked fire will last a long time - overnight if required.
I don't find the poem mournful at all. Wistful, maybe. Heaney relishes his memories, loves the remembered ones, but relocates the 'then' in 'now', reinterprets incidents in the light of passing time. It's easy enough to identify with his early memories and to recognise the culture that produced him, at least for me, but it requires enormous effort to try to appreciate what his expanding experience has made of it all. Is 'catharsis' at the centre of all his seeking?

[french frank]

I suppose it was the word 'sullen' and the evocation of the rain and unlit coalhouse which suggested something uninviting and mournful to me. But I'll go with 'wistful'.

Agree that Heaney's family may have been frugal ('days when life prepared for rainy days') rather than poor (and I forgot the additional point that coal was rationed at the time and 'nutty slack' wasn't). What's the date of Heaney's poem? Later, I suppose?

[PatrickOD]

'Slack' appeared as a poem card and poster poem from Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, ( who commissioned it ) 2009. Acknowledgements, Human Chain, 2010.

[french frank]

'Slack' appeared as a poem card and poster poem from Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, ( who commissioned it ) 2009. Acknowledgements, Human Chain, 2010.

I realised afterwards I'd asked the wrong question. I meant when would this childhood have been - before or after 1953 and what I remembered. Looking at his DoB (1939), I'd guess late 40s/early 50s.

[PatrickOD]

He went to boarding school in 1950/1, from which time his childhood would have petered out. Yet some of his 'home' poems relate to that period when he was away at school, one of the most memorable being Mid-Term Break.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems/12698