Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

[Padraig]

I was to go to Bellaghy earlier this month to hear Winterreise with Alice Coote and Julius Drake. It was to be a recital in the context of Heaney's Door into the Dark, his second volume. The singer, whose performance I was interested to see, cancelled - so I did not bother going. I listened instead to DFD and Gerald Moore. One good thing came out of it - I had prepared a short precis of each song for quick consultation at the recital and it was a useful addition while listening to the CD. I found too that I did not need it as much as I had expected.

When I was in my local bookshop last September I bought Opened Ground - Poems 1966 - 1996 - a too thick paperback uncomfortable to handle; so I neglected it until last week. I read the previously unnoticed Author's Note, and discovered a reference to Stations - not Station Island. Written between his second and fourth volumes and published as a pamphlet in 1975, it was a bit like the coming to light of a mythical jazz cylinder by Buddy Bolden. I had never found a copy of Stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stations_(poetry_collection)

Here is the first 'verse paragraph' - the first for now:

Nesting-Ground

The sandmartins' nests were loopholes of darkness in the riverbank. He could imagine his arm going in to the armpit, sleeved and straitened, but because he had once felt the cold prick of a dead robin's claw and the surprising density of its tiny beak he only gazed.
He heard cheeping far in but because the men had once shown him a rat's nest in the butt of a stack where chaff and powdered cornstalks adhered to the moist pink necks and backs he only listened.
As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence under the ground.

[Padraig]

Here is the first 'verse paragraph' - the first for now:

2

Incertus

I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.
Oh yes, I crept before I walked. The old pseudonym lies there like a mouldering tegument.

Seamus Heaney from Stations 1975

[Padraig]

3

England's Difficulty

I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.
The word 'enemy' had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.
'When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst.'
I was on somebody's shoulder, conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish. Grown-ups lowered their voices and resettled in the kitchen as if tired out after an excursion.
Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens through fretted baize, dry battery, wet battery, capillary wires, domed valves that squeaked and burbled as the dial-hand absolved Stuttgart and Leipzig.
'He's an artist, this Haw Haw. He can fairly leave it into them.'
I lodged with 'the enemies of Ulster', the scullions outside the walls. An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.

4

Trial Runs

WELCOME HOME YE LADS OF THE EIGHTH ARMY
There had to be some defiance in it because it was painted along the demesne wall, a banner headline over the old news of REMEMBER 1690 and NO SURRENDER, a great wingspan of lettering I hurried under with the messages.*
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 across a territory.

* messages - items from the shop (my 'translation')

[Padraig]

5



Cloistered

Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop's ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe's in winter, The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice on an enamelled water-jug with exhilerated self-regard.

[johncorrigan]

5



Cloistered

Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop's ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe's in winter, The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice on an enamelled water-jug with exhilerated self-regard.

Wonderful, Padraig. Thank you!
'The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.' I can feel that gold-barred thickness even now but would never have thought how to express it.
And Heaney is certainly far more eloquent in 'Cloistered' in his description of his proposed Flemish calendar than Andrew Graham Dixon the other night, when AGD described The Limbourg Bothers' 'Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry' in Chantilly on BBC4's 'Art of France' - still it was wonderfully illuminating and Heaney's words had me going back to the programme for another look. It's 10 minutes in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08cgjv7/art-of-france-series-1-1-plus-ca-change

[Padraig]

Thank you John for your response, and for the link which I followed up.
I would agree with you that making the pictures from the given text is much more effective than having them served up to you. The text must of course be of some quality, probably of the standard you 'would never have thought how to express it'. But 'Que sais -je?'

[johncorrigan]

I would agree with you that making the pictures from the given text is much more effective than having them served up to you. The text must of course be of some quality, probably of the standard you 'would never have thought how to express it'. But 'Que sais -je?'

I just wouldn't even have realised it was there to be expressed in the first place, Padraig. That is just one of the delights of Seamus, to capture so simply those things we miss, or perhaps take for granted...or have pushed to the less visited recesses of our spirit. I've been living with 'Cloistered' for most of the day today, and very enjoyable it has been.

[Padraig]

Around the same time as Cloistered Heaney wrote The Seed Cutters. Was he going through an Art appreciation phase?

Mossbawn: Two poems in dedication

for Mary Heaney

(1 Sunlight)


2 The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,
You'll know them if I can get them true.
They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle
Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.
They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill
Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes
Buried under that straw. With time to kill,
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.

from North 1975

[johncorrigan]

Around the same time as Cloistered Heaney wrote The Seed Cutters. Was he going through an Art appreciation phase?

Padraig, maybe Heaney was recognising that Breughel had made those country people that he portrayed immortal; and even back then SH thought that he could make these ordinary country people, and their occupations, last for years to come, frozen in time, yet so alive. I love that last line, 'With all of us there, our anonymities.'

[Padraig]

When 'hope and history rhyme' - a nice quotation anyway. Sometime in the 60s Heaney was part of a cultural, friendship group. They used to meet for various activities, and sometimes it would be in Gweebarra in Donegal in summertime, where one of the group - the singer David Hammond had a holiday home. There was hope then too, pre-'68, and this poem partly reflects the mood of that time.

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.
I see the glittering sound

framed in your window,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Seamus Heaney Field Work 1979

optional extra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwkjFKhmxM

Part 2 to follow.

[johncorrigan]

Thank you, Padraig.

I assume Aeneid VI has come out in paperback as the often enjoyable Nicholas Lezard reviewed it this weekend and did some interesting comparisons in the process.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/07/aeneid-vi-seamus-heaney-review-virgil-epic-underworld

[Padraig]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aeneid-Book-VI-Seamus-Heaney/dp/057132732X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489430550&sr=8-1&keywords=aeneid+heaney

Said to be a tribute to Fr.McGlinchey his Latin teacher...

... which brings me to Part 2.

In this memorial to his friend David Hammond, Heaney combines a dreamlike atmosphere (he said the poem was a dream) with his practice of harking back to themes from the past. I think that The Singer's House (above) written 30 years previously complements and clarifies the following poem.

'The door was open and the house was dark'
in memory of David Hammond

The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

Seamus Heaney Human Chain 2010

[Padraig]

I have over-contributed to this thread. I'll stop now.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I have over-contributed to this thread. I'll stop now.

No you haven't - please don't.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Unless you really want to, of course!