An Appraisal Capturing Rhythms of Nature in Poems By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: August 30, 2013 Facebook Twitter Google+ Save E-mail Share Print Reprints In his Nobel acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney said that he prized the sort of poem that provides not just “a surprising variation played upon the world,” but “a retuning of the world itself” — delivering a visceral surprise, “like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.” Enlarge This Image Joe Wrinn/Harvard University, via Reuters Seamus Heaney at Harvard University in 1995. ArtsBeat Another Kind of Music The singer and songwriter Paul Simon admires the musicality of Seamus Heaney, who died on Friday. Related Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74 (August 31, 2013) ArtsBeat: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Journey Into the Wideness of Language’ (August 30, 2013) Enlarge This Image Steve Pyke/Getty Images Mr. Heaney in 1995. He said his work was “a journey where each point of arrival” has “turned out to be a steppingstone rather than a destination.” That was very much a description of his finest work: poetry that used the magic of language and sound to capture the particularities of a time and place — Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th century — while jolting us into a reapprehension of the human condition. Whether he was writing about his family’s farm and the unforgiving world of nature in his earliest poems or, later on, about an Ireland ravaged by the violence of the Troubles, Mr. Heaney possessed an uncommon ability to glean “the unsaid off the palpable,” to capture in words the relationship between the individual and the wider world, the “mind’s center and its circumference.” His verse is musical, sensuous and tactile, by turns pungent and aching — rich with the sinuous sounds that made him an heir to Hopkins and Stevens, and an acute awareness of the physical world that underscored his affinities with Hardy and Frost. Mr. Heaney once observed that writing for him was “a journey where each point of arrival” has “turned out to be a steppingstone rather than a destination.” And regardless of a poem’s immediate subject matter — nature, myth or contemporary Ireland — there are continuities in his work: an awareness of mortality and the precariousness of life, and an appreciation of the virtues of “keeping going,” whether he is referring to a farmer persevering in the arduous work of wresting a living from the rocky land, or people trying to cope, daily, with the violence that escalated in Northern Ireland during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Always, the thrum of history vibrates close beneath the surface: the “skull-capped ground” of Ireland is part of Europe’s bloody history, the same as the peat bogs, which recur in Heaney’s poems, holding in their alluvial mud the bodies of people felled by strife and murder and ritual sacrifice in ancient times. Even in the early poems in “Death of a Naturalist” (1966) and “Door Into the Dark” (1969), death and decay make appearances as part of nature’s seasonal orbit. In one poem, he writes of “gross-bellied frogs” sitting “poised like mud grenades,” and in another, of “a rat-gray fungus” creeping over a fresh cache of fruit, portending rot and decay. In “Turkeys Observed,” he writes: “But a turkey cowers in death. Pull his neck, pluck him, and look — He is just another poor forked thing, A skin bag plumped with inky putty.” Such early poems memorialize the farm world where Mr. Heaney grew up, capturing its day-to-day rhythms and the “physical, creaturely existence” he led as a child, acutely aware of the sounds of life around him: “rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house.” Sometimes, Mr. Heaney would draw connections between himself and his family: in the famous poem “Digging,” he compares his father’s work with a spade to his own work with a pen, exhuming long-lost “living roots” that “awaken in my head.” In the 1970s, in works like “North” (1975) and “Field Work” (1979), Mr. Heaney began to deal more explicitly with the situation in Northern Ireland. Pastoral imagery began to give way to images of “armored cars” and “machine-gun posts” and “a point-blank teatime bullet.” “The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974,” he said in his Nobel Speech, “were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless.” “For the minority living there, change had been long overdue,” he said, adding that “the eggs of danger which were always incubating got hatched out very quickly.” In a poem with a classical setting in “The Spirit Level” (1996), there is a horrific image of “bodies raining down like tattered meat”; in another, hopes of a cessation offer the dream of a private life free from the shadow of the tribe. In many later poems, there was a re-embrace of ordinary life: a return of sorts to the world of his nature poems, but with a sense of hard-won acceptance. Mr. Heaney was always re-examining the relationship between the personal and the public, and he avoided the “diamond absolutes” of partisanship, continually questioning the role of the poet — trying to absorb the shocks of 20th-century history, while remaining true to the inner promptings of his imagination. In “Station Island” (1984) — a dazzling reworking of Dante, set on an Irish island known for centuries as a place of religious pilgrimage — all the themes of Heaney’s work come together in an orchestral whole. Here, the present, past and myth merge and overlap, and the competing claims on an artist emerge in the form of ghosts: literary ghosts, ghosts from the poet’s own past and ghosts from Ireland’s past: a young priest “glossy as a blackbird” and a shopkeeper cousin shot in the head, who “trembled like a heat wave and faded.” Near the end, the ghost of James Joyce appears as a spiritual guide, exhorting the poet to write for the joy of it, and going on to say: “... Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency, echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.”
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 06:02:15 +0000
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