Posts Tagged Seamus Heaney

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased wasSweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, when was not as simple as just “googling” a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in one of old  composition book I always used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works whenever I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

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.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

* * * * * * * * * *

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

This is one of Heaney’s first poems and in it we see so much that we have come to associate with him: sounds, themes, and that remarkable ear. There are few poets that are as delightful to read out-loud, or at least, few late 20th Century ones.

In Heaney we find the DNA of Yeats and Auden mixed with something earthier (Patrick Kavanaugh at his best). While Yeats and Auden have little of the the working class, the earthy, the common place in their language, perspective, or subject matter (something almost always a part of the best American poetry) , Heaney along with Ted Hughes, “rediscovered” the earth and earthliness and brought it back to British Isles poetry.

_____

As an avid collector of quotes and lines of poetry, I often find myself with unattributed lines and mis-attributed quotes. The internet, though efficient in locating and aggregating information, is not, of course, of much help in clearing up issues of accurate attribution.

But to be honest with you, if the quote is good, I really do not care. What matters to me is that the line is good. And so on hump-day of the first full week of May, here are some quotes I have collected from various sources over the years.

Let me know if there are any you especially like… or that you know are indeed misattributed. Thanks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

“Know what you are talking about.”  ~John Paul II

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” ~P.B. Shelley

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same” ~Thomas Merton

“The desire to write grows with writing.” ~Erasmus

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  ~John Paul II

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”  ~Samuel Johnson

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”  ~Amy Lowell

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Your library is your paradise.”  ~Erasmus

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” ~Seamus Heaney

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ~Henry James

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~Marcel Proust

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope…. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.” ~Seamus Heaney

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~Henry James

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”  ~W.H. Auden

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ~Marcel Proust

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”  ~T.S. Eliot

“Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”  ~John Paul II

____

This is the fourth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus.

That is what makes this volume of essays by three great, non-American poets, so interesting. For American poets, Frost resides in our very bones, like the sounds of  rivers, and highways, and wind in trees, and the voices of American birds and American words spoken in coffee shops and local bars and across fences at harvest time.

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott are three of the finest contemporary world poets. The essays that form Homage to Robert Frost have their root in a seminar that was done on Frost at College International de Philosophie in Paris. In Paris – the most self-consciously unAmerican of all cities – three non-American poets discussed Frost and his poetry. The result is wonderful.

While American readers and poets always approach Frost from the inside… Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott, by necessity, come to Frost from without. This enables them to hear him in a way an American reader cannot. This, ultimately, is the greatest value of Homage to Robert Frost.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover of the book, I first read Homage to Robert Frost in late fall of 1996. In the fall of 1996, we were no longer living in our little house in St. Paul but would have just moved into suburban Bloomington. I would still have been freelancing as a writer and editor of training materials and bible studies. During the days I would have been doing the at-home dad thing, and on some evenings I would have been working at a telemarketing job. I would have been reading Homage to Robert Frost during toddler nap times and while sitting in a cube waiting for inbound-sales calls to come in. As I have said elsewhere, the words of Brodsky, Heany and Walcott – and the the lines of Robert Frost – would have been helping me to keep my sanity, as poetry has always done for me.

Opening now the book, I read some lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago.

“When a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which its’ been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, lay down this or that law – something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed bu unchanged by that encounter, returns to his in or cottage, finds his friends and family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Wheras when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up…. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason” paraphrasing Auden’s essay on Frost)

“With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason”)

“Frost believed… that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness.” (cf. Heaney’s essay “Above the Brim”)

“Why is the favorite figure of American patriotism not paternal but avuncular? Because uncles are wiser than fathers.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“Frost is an autocratic poet rather than a democratic poet.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“… Yeats told Pound that A Boy’s Will was “the best poetry written in America for a long time.’ The judgement seems right.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“For interior recitation, usually of complete poems, not only of lines or stanzas, Frost and Yeats, for their rhythms and design, are the most memorable poets of the century.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its beligerance or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true, time’s conqueror, not time’s servant.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

As so often happens, Frost’s stature in American literature has diminished over time. It is more a “taking for granted” I think than a re-assessment. It is easy to take Frost for granted in the same way that it is easy to take for granted Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Sometimes it takes outsiders to remind us of what is most essential and best about America. Homage to Robert Frost accomplishes this beautifully,

____

This is the second book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” The first book reviewed in this series was Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88 by Donald Hall. 

Seamus Heaney’s strength as a critic is his ear… his remarkable ear. It is what makes him our greatest living poet. Where Donald Hall (in Poetry and Ambition, and all his prose work for that matter) excels at explaining the writing life and how poems are written, Heaney in The Government of the Tongue (and all his essay work) excels… better than any poet I know other than Brodsky… at telling us how a poem works and which poems and poets do it best. Ultimately, you read Heaney’s essays because you want to know who and what you should be reading next.

According to my usual notes on the inside front cover, I first read The Government of the Tongue in the spring of 1989. That spring I was still a year away from turning 30 and a just a summer away from getting married. In those days, I lived in the Midway area of St. Paul and worked as an editor in downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading The Government of the Tongue then on the 16A bus that follows the long course of University Ave. from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading it on sleepy mornings on my way to work and hot afternoons on my way back. I would have been reading it on long weekends with Sue and quiet Sunday afternoons. Heaney and his ideas about poetry and poets would have bookended my days and my weeks.

Opening now the volume, I look at lines I highlighted and notes I made all those years ago about poets like Mandelstam, Lowell, Kavanaugh, Plath, Yeats, Auden, and Brodsky. I realize reading the lines and notes how much Heaney has influenced me: the poets I have read, the poems I most admire, my way of looking at how poems work… or should work.

“We might say that Kavanaugh is pervious to this world’s spirit more than it is pervious to his spirit.” (cf. essay “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanaugh”)

“He assumes that art is a power and to be visited by it is to be endangered, but also he knows that works of art endanger nobody else, that they are benign.” (cf. essay “The Murmur of Malvern”)

“…annihilation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is futile – annihillation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is victorious.” (cf. essay “The Fully Exposed Poem”)

“Richard Ellmann’s statement of the Yeatsian case finally applicable…’If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do conciously, and all men do in their degree.’” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“Here is the great paradox of poetry and the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless…. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited.” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being… Auden’s lines… are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times.” (cf. essay “Sounding Auden”)

“[Lowell’s] mentors were… New Critics driven by a passion to pluck out the last secret of any poem by unearthing, if necessary, its seventh ambiguity.” (cf. essay “Lowell’s Command”)

“I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained, or a least a fullness of self-possession denied Sylvia Plath.” (cf. essay “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath”)

Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue contains the usual variety of occasional essays, book introductions, and book reviews you would expect a famous poet to write. Most of the book, however, consists of essay adaptations from a series of lectures Heaney originally gave to university students and faculty. Heaney’s prose fits that venue quite well. His is not the lyrical prose of Hall. Not the kind of prose you would immediately associate with the writer of Field Work and Station Island. It is the careful and considered work of one who has seriously studied poetry and poets… of one who truly knows and understands poetry from the inside out.

Heaney has a remarkable ear and a remarkable intellect. Because of that, The Government of the Tongue is a remarkable book.

____

old fence (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

When I was in junior high, I worked for awhile for an elderly rancher and his wife who lived a couple of miles outside of town on a very small ranch. Along with the small herd of cattle you would expect on a Montana ranch, they also kept chickens and rabbits, and one milk cow that that they milked by hand. On days I worked there, they fed me. A staple of the meal was ice-cold, fresh milk with globules of fat still floating in it, which I loved.

They had a big garden behind the house that I would help to plant and weed, and a small field that they would hay for the beef cows, the milk cow, and two mules. They used the mules to plow, move stumps, to pull the hay wagon, and to plow the garden.

One spring, after hooking up the plow and the mules, the rancher turned to me. “You want to give it a try?” I had walked behind and next to him before. He had explained the process and so I was excited to give it a try. It was hard work and my shoulders and back hurt like hell. He walked next to me while I worked, giving advice, saying nothing critical about my crooked furrows and uneven depths. Later, after driving me back home, he must have re-plowed the part of the field that I did that afternoon because two weeks later when he picked me up to help him with fence work, that part of the field looked the same as the rest: furrows straight as a ruler, deep and black.

The first time I read “Follower” by Seamus Heaney, I thought of that day I tried my own hand (and shoulder) at plowing and those long-ago summer days working at an old-time ranch. Heaney’s poem, of course, is about much more than that. The fact that it is about following behind his father who is doing the plowing is indication enough of that.

The language and images of “Follower” are yet another example of why Heaney is our greatest living poet. Its resonant reminiscence is true to the best Heaney poem.

Enjoy!

Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

_____

Poet Paul Muldoon uses a number of unconventional devices to create some unconventional poetry: archaic language, unusual rhyme schemes, “mashing” together two completely different things to create something new.

In “Tell,” Muldoon is much more straight-forward than that… he does “mash” together William Tell and American Indians but his rhyme scheme is more a “slant” rhyme than an unusual one per se.

Muldoon, who was born in Northern Ireland, borrows heavily on childhood memories in many of his best poems. He does it in a much different way though than his fellow Northern Ireland poet, Seamus Heaney. In my mind, I have always thought of Muldoon as an Irish Theodore Roethke: darker, edgier. It may simply be that I read a lot of Muldoon and Roethke at the same time and so they have morphed together in my mind over the years.

Muldoon is admittedly not the most natural choice for a Sunday morning poet… and “Tell” is not the most Sunday morning of poems. And yet on another dreary-cold January morning… it seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Tell

He opens the scullery door, and a sudden rush
of wind, as raw as raw,
brushes past him as he himself will brush
past the stacks of straw

that stood in earlier for Crow
or Comanche tepees hung with scalps
but tonight past muster, row upon row,
for the foothills of the Alps.

He opens the door of the peeling-shed
just as one of the apple-peelers
(one of almost a score
of red-cheeked men who pare

and core
the red-cheeked apples for a few spare
shillings) mutters something about “bloodshed”
and the “peelers.”

The red-cheeked men put down their knives
at one and the same
moment. All but his father, who somehow connives
to close one eye as if taking aim

or holding back a tear,
and shoots him a glance
he might take, as it whizzes past his ear,
for a Crow, or a Comanche, lance

hurled through the Tilley-lit
gloom of the peeling-shed,
when he hears what must be an apple split
above his head.

____

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
~ Seamus Heaney

In “Death of a Naturalist” Seamus Heaney’s gifts as a poet are clearly on display: the clashing consonants, the onomatopoeia, the wonderful attention to detail, the evocative reminiscing. These are what make Heaney one of the greatest poets of our time.

I like reading Heaney in the cold of winter. Some of his best poems feature spring or summer memories. When you read a poem like “Death of a Naturalist” your own reminiscences of childhood mix and mingle with his. That is the nature of a great poem, it draw us in… and then draws out from us: emotion, memory, thoughts, wonder.

Enjoy!

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

____

Seamus Heaney

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased was Sweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, it was not as simple as just googling a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in an old  composition book I used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works when I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

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.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

_____