Shed a tear or two this evening. That was such a terrific documentary and helped show why Heaney is one of our greatest ever writers (that's human race's greatest writers, by the way).
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I watched it, John. Indeed, the bladder was near my eye (or the blether as country folk would say). The whole documentary, lovingly put together, was itself a piece of the music of what happens. Heaney knew how to get us to listen to it. What a lovely family.Comment
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I was phoning a casual acquaintance yesterday - just wanting to know how they were getting on, and, of course, aware of the possibility of hearing alarming news. Silly of me; it was an easy conversation. It caused me to reflect, however, on A Call, a poem by Seamus Heaney, and to wonder if I had 'got' it all on previous readings.
A Call
'Hold on', she said. I'll just run out and get him.
The weather here's so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.'
So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also . . .
Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums . . .
And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.
Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.
from The Spirit Level 1996Comment
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The day I visited Seamus' Homeplace in December 2018 the experience was very memorable, even though the weather was pretty foul. My pal, who was with us that day, sent me a lovely article from last year which reinforced what I had loved about Bellaghy, and indicated some of the things I had missed. We agreed that when we come out the other side of this farrago, we are going back to Bellaghy to see again some of what we saw last time, and take in some of the things we had hoped to see.
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I have not been back for a while - weather, transport and other assorted excuses. The article certainly revised the Bellaghy experience for me too, John. Like yourself I have not gone on the trail provided, which I understand is excellent and conducted by a local friend of the poet and an admirer of his poetry. I liked to go by myself in any case, but lately I have gone off driving longish distances so have ruled myself out of lots of activities. A lucky consequence is that staying at home holds no terrors. I usually go up to the grave at the end of August and I hope to do so again this year, advice permitting. I have my own private chauffeuses.Originally posted by johncorrigan View Post
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Probably heard it before, but last week, Poetry Extra repeated 'North: Catherine Heaney talks about her Father' with Daljit Nagra .
The second half of the programme has Seamus reading poems from 'North' back in the mid-70s. Given the difficulties that many of all faiths and none are facing with funerals across the Countries during the pandemic, these readings seemed to me to give voice to the raw feelings that many are left with at present.Last edited by johncorrigan; 29-05-20, 11:42.Comment
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Listening to the programme had me revisit 'North', something always worth doing, because it remains a thing of wonder. I sometimes find myself wishing that I had discovered this book when it was written, and then worry that I might have misinterpreted it. 'Exposure', the final poem in the book, seems to sum up so wonderfully Heaney's position as a poet at the time.Originally posted by DracoM View Post
Exposure
It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.
A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,
And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
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?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conductive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
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.
Seamus Heaney from 'North'Comment
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John, I was lucky enough to be around, not only at the time he wrote this but also at the times he was writing about That too could be eerie enough. I have one for you - but I have to collect my thoughts such as they are, so if you can bear the waiting I'll declaim at another time. Thanks for the reminder of North . Please note - irony alert all through this post.Comment
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Irony noted, Padraig...look forward to hearing more. By the way, the Radio 4 extra programme still has 8 days to run on the i-player.Originally posted by Padraig View PostComment
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John, I refer to The Ministry of Fear, from North.Originally posted by Padraig View Post
When reading this poem, remember the dedicatee - Seamus Deane. He is present throughout the poem -'we have lived in important places'; 'overlooked your Bogside'; 'Here's two on's are sophisticated'; 'Those poems in longhand...' and more .Deane and Heaney were two literary giants even when Juniors and each fulfilled the high expectations others had for them.
In September 1951 Heaney was a lonely first year and comforted himself by gazing over the back wall of the college at the new world below. In that wall there was a locked door used by college football teams to descend a long flight of steps and make their way to their sports field, opposite the city's Stadium, The Brandywell - also the local dogtrack.
Heaney and Deane both wrote and published poetry. Deane's poems bewildered Heaney - 'vowels and ideas bandied free', while Heaney, attempting to ryme hushed and lulled with pushed and pulled, walked with hobnailed boots 'all over the fine Lawns of elocution'
The theme of fear gradually insinuates itself - first as an awareness of an inferiority complex = Catholics don't speak as well as Protestants. Then, intimidation, in school - 'What's your name, Heaney?' ( Heaney was lucky to get away with his answer). Then the violence -'the leather strap Went epileptic in the Big Study'. The Big Study was the setting for many public terrorist offences to encourage the others Heaney was never the subject, but he got the message. The same practice pertained in classrooms as well. (I know. I was that soldier.) When the summer holidays were nearly over, Heaney, too, experienced 'freedom dwindling night by night'; but not before being stopped by the B-Specials with their crimson flashlamps and sten guns and asked 'What's your name, driver?'
'Seamus...'
Seamus?
With a name like that in those 50s days having your private letters read was probably the worst they would do to any Seamus, but Heaney got a kind of revenge when they came across Deane's ''hieroglyphics, 'Svelte dictions' in a very florid hand."
As often, Heaney switches time frames, here between 1951 and the early Seventies - North was published in 1975 - between a Junior first year and an established poet, with similar higher academic experience to Deane. The Troubles were raging, tensions and fear were high. Was Heaney 'shying as usual' when, after a strong reference to the Unionist bottom line that Ulster was British, he denied their 'rights on the English lyric'?
I'll leave that with you, John. For me, the poem is very largely like going through a photograph album; I recognise so many people and places, share so many feelings, while envying the owner and the photographer. Heaney always reminds me how little I really appreciate those small things I take for granted, never mind when he gets serious.Comment
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Thank you very much for that, Padraig. I went away and had a read about Seamus Deane on the back of your message. Among other things I really enjoyed this comment that he wrote:
It’s Belfast in the late 1950s:
“I think that [Lerner’s - (his teacher, the South African poet and critic, Laurence Lerner)] lessons were silently meant to teach us how to read literary texts in a living way – reminding us that our lives, too, were embroiled with these books. I remember the oddness of seeing Protestant working-class Belfast for the first time: I would cross its most notorious street, Sandy Row, and hear the Saturday-night evangelicals screaming and raving through loudspeakers about Popery and repentance, and pass by the clamorous shops, and smell the sweet aromas from the Erinmore tobacco factory, above the railway bridge, and then return to my rented room in a nearby Catholic neighbourhood, to read Milton and Dickens – whose seventeenth- and nineteenth-century worlds were suddenly coexistent with my own. I knew the bitterness of Protestantism, and its philistine pride, but for the first time I began to sense its magnificence. Lerner brought the streets of Belfast and the poems and novels we read into contact with one another. It was a salutary lesson.”
As you know, the group of six poems that finish 'Heaney's 'North' are called 'Singing School', the first being, of course, 'The Ministry of Fear'. In the introduction to the poems, Heaney quotes Yeats, but first of all Wordsworth: '...and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;' This comes through in those six poems. Heaney seems at all times to be able to fly with these two wings intact; fear, and yet that appreciation of the strange beauty of the everyday which seems to hold him together. In 'A Constable Calls' he is in the house and the fear is palpable as he imagines the undeclared line of turnips where the seed ran out in the potato field...'I assumed small guilts and sat imagining the black hole in the barracks.' And then he takes us back out to the everyday by showing us the Constable's baton case, the snapping of the carrier spring over the ledger and the boot pushing the bicycle off. As you say, Padraig, appreciating those small beauties in life, and I would suggest that few, if any, do it better, and keep reminding us to appreciate them.
A Constable Calls
His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
Skirting the front mudguard,
Its fat black handlegrips
Heating in sunlight, the "spud"
Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,
The pedal treads hanging relieved
Of the boot of the law.
His cap was upside down
On the floor, next his chair.
The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
In his slightly sweating hair.
He had unstrapped
The heavy ledger, and my father
Was making tillage returns
In acres, roods, and perches.
Arithmetic and fear.
I sat staring at the polished holster
With its buttoned flap, the braid cord
Looped into the revolver butt.
"Any other root crops?
Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?"
"No." But was there not a line
Of turnips where the seed ran out
In the potato field? I assumed
Small guilts and sat
Imagining the black hole in the barracks.
He stood up, shifted the baton-case
Further round on his belt,
Closed the domesday book,
Fitted his cap back with two hands,
And looked at me as he said goodbye.
A shadow bobbed in the window.
He was snapping the carrier spring
Over the ledger. His boot pushed off
And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.
Seamus HeaneyComment
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I intend to retrace some paths into what William Wordsworth called in The Prelude 'the hiding places':
The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.
Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as a revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants.
'Digging', in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me, although there are a couple of lines in it that have more the theatricality of the gunslinger than the self-absorption of the digger. I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to 'dabble in verses'. this was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. The facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me a kind of insouciance and a kind of confidence. I didn't care who thought what about it: somehow it had surprised me by coming out with a stance and an idea that I would stand over:
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
Bit I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
As I say, I wrote it down years ago; yet perhaps I should say that I dug it up, because I have come to realise that it was laid down in me years before that even.The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter and that was simply a matter of almost proverbial common sense. On the road to and from school, people used to ask you what class you were in and how many slaps you'd got that day and invariably they ended up with an exhortation to keep studying because 'learning's easy carried' and 'the pen's lighter than the spade'. And the poem does no more than allow that bud of wisdom to exfoliate, although the significant point in this context is that at the time of writing I was not aware of the proverbial structure at the back of my mind....
....I don't want to overload 'Digging' with too much significance. It is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem, but it is interesting as an example - and not just as an example of what one reviewer called 'mud-caked fingers in Russell Square', for I don't think that the subject matter has any particular virtue in itself - it is interesting as an example of what we call 'finding a voice'.
Finding a voice means that you can get your own feelings into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for a poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet's natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the lines he is making up.
How then, do you find it? In practice, you hear it coming from somebody else, you hear something in another writer's sounds that flows in through your ear and enters the echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous system in such a way that your reaction will be, 'Ah, I wish I had said that, in that particular way'. This other writer, in fact, has spoken something essential to you, something you recognise instinctively as a true sounding of aspects of yourself and your experience. And your first steps as a writer will be to imitate, consciously or unconsciously, those sounds that flowed in, that in-fluence.
Seamus Heaney from Feeling into WordsLast edited by Padraig; 29-08-20, 19:34.Comment
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Today is Seamus Heaney's seventh anniversary. RIP *
I chose the previous post, Feeling into Words, as a sample of his prose.
Mint
It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.
But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.
The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be the first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.
Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.
Seamus Heaney from The Spirit Level 1996
* PS It is also my Mother's 67th Anniversary RIPComment
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