Article
At home with Seamus Heaney
Into the light
June 27, 2014
It's extraordinary how much artistic nourishment the poet would go on to draw from such a tiny, ordinary place. He husbanded those few acres with such care that they provided the raw material for an entire world, for the vast and singularly influential corpus we celebrate today.
As readers of poetry we are rightly warned away from biography’s treacherous marshes. We must look, we tell ourselves repeatedly, to the poems themselves rather than to the quirks and accidents of the lives from which they were birthed. However it is a trespass at once both crude and irresistible to suggest that for Heaney the loss of Mossbawn when he was thirteen years old created a vacuum that six decades of imaginative effort were in no small measure designed to fill. It was an uprooting that must have left a terrible sense of dispossession, one amplified by the fact that the Heaneys moved to another farm less than five miles down the road. For the young Heaney, then, paradise was not only lost but remained agonisingly close at hand: in the next parish a mere bike ride away.
And let’s take a brief trip around this all too temporary Eden. Here’s Heaney, in a slightly crackly recording from 1972, looking outward rather than downward as he lists the various ‘townlands’ around the property. And in Ireland, it should be pointed out, the term townland signifies a field or collection of fields rather than any kind of urban settlement. Anahorish: a corruption of the Irish ‘Abhainn an fhíor uisce. Broagh. Mossbawn. Grove Hill. Layers of naming -skeins of Gaelic, Scots, English, even Norse- are draped across the landscape the poet surveys, rendering it a densely textured palimpsest, one whose meaning and very authorship seem destined to be forever at issue. Indeed in the mid-career poem ‘Anahorish’ Heaney provides a memorable ‘reading’ of this contested scenery:
My 'place of clear water,'
the first hill in the world
where springs washed
into the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
This ‘first hill in the world’, we’re told, has a gradient made of consonants, a meadow composed somehow of vowels. It’s a poem that centres on a supple and convulsive metaphor, one in which the very matter of speech becomes the vehicle for comparison, where we see the poet indulge language at its most reflexive and self-pleasuring.
But enough of such semantic gamesmanship. Let’s turn to the stuff of agriculture, to the daily labours of a working farm. Let’s make our way from these outlying fields to Mossbawn’s yards and outbuildings, pausing perhaps only to visit one of the little springs or wells that so fascinated Heaney in his childhood years. Maybe:
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
And it’s around those sheds and barns that Heaney, for my money, comes most truly into his own as a singer of the physical. 2011’s ‘Human Chain’, for instance celebrates the superficially most un-poetic chore of lifting grain sacks onto the back of a lorry:
I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback
The poem wonderfully realises the succouring blankness of the menial, the particular release we find from immersion in an arduous and repetitive task. Twenty years earlier ‘The Pitchfork’ finds him relishing in lavish specifitity the touch and texture of the titular instrument:
He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash
Grown satiny from its own natural polish.
Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.
And if I might be forgiven the inclusion of a personal favourite, ‘The Turnip Snedder’, from 2008’s District and Circle is equally vivid in its depiction of an old device used for the mincing and shredding of turnips so that they emerged as a ‘raw sliced mess / Bucketful by glistering bucketful’. There is something violent and militaristic about this device with its ‘barrel-chested breast-plate / standing guard / on four braced greaves’, with its ‘juiced-up inner blades’. Indeed Heaney has described how the poem stemmed from childhood memoires of young American soldiers that were stationed in Northern Ireland in preparation for the D-Day landings.
Out time together grows short so let’s conclude this all too brief sojourn in the kitchen of the farmhouse itself, with the poem ‘Sunlight’. Here again, in what is surely destined to remain one of his most enduring pieces, Heaney conjures a womb of domesticity, an addictively uteric ambience backlit with the clarity and precision of a Dutch interior. It is also an unparalleled ode to food and nourishment, with water turning to honey, scones rising in the oven, the sun resting like resting like a recently used griddle pan against the cool wall of the sky.
‘Sunlight’ is also significant in its anticipation of what’s been described as the ‘visionary turn’ in Heaney’s later work, a tendency especially evident in his 1991 collection Seeing Things. For in that book we find the poet looking up as if for the first time from the earthy phenomena I‘ve dwelled on today -from meadow-soil, from the mulch of wells- as he permits himself to entertain and enter previously unimagined realms of light and air.
While I have today focused on the intensity of the imaginative bond Heaney maintained with those few original acres at Mossbawn, he should of course by no means be thought of as a ‘local’ writer. Rather he is a poet operating in the great and continuing acoustic of the European literary tradition.
For in the opening pages of Seeing Things Heaney evokes three maximally distant ‘vision quests’ from the canon of the West. Aeneas, the Bronze Age Hero of Virgil’s epic, quests for the Golden Bough; the talismanic MacGuffin necessary if he was to penetrate Hades’ realm and walk safely among the dead. The magi or ‘three wise kings’, a mere millennium later, leaving behind their comfortable eastern kingdoms to be present at the birth of Christ. Dante, after another 1400 years have lapsed, humbly doubts his worthiness for the extraordinary quest to which he has been summoned, declaring ‘I alone was girding myself to face / The ordeal of my journey and my duty’.
The heroes of each journey exhibit an appetite for risk and change, a capacity to forsake long-nested-in psychic comfort zones. They are capable of taking on faith the existence of the marvellous, of some game-changing known unknown and show the willingness –or perhaps even determination- to be among its witnesses. For Heaney, then, their greatest significance lies in how they prefigure or legitimise the ‘visionary turn’ his work takes in Seeing Things and indeed in subsequent collections.
And it is the marvellous, in Seeing Things, that Heaney renders and seeks out. It’s a collection that floats measuredly into air and radiance, one that sees Heaney in poem after poem determined to ‘credit marvels’ to acknowledge the ‘marvellous as he has known it’. It’s a book that gestures toward glimpses and intuitions somehow incompatible with our everyday mechanistic worldview, toward a cautious but profoundly moving atheistic spirituality. It is an orphic portal, a tentative and flickering door into the light.
During the 45th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam we held a special programme honouring the life and work of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. For this occasion Poetry International Ireland editor Billy Ramsell delivered the following speech about Heaney’s childhood home:
Mossbawn is in every respect but one an ordinary Irish farm. Consisting of seven small but contiguous fields, it lies almost equidistant from the villages of Bellaghy and Castledawson. You can find it near the shores of Lough Neagh, in the county known as Derry to one of Northern Ireland’s divided communities, as Londonderry to the other. Seamus Heaney, who grew up there, describes its farmyard thus:
Walk on with the gable of the house on your left and the shed on your right and you’re into the back yard. One side of that is defined by the dwelling house and opposite, on the other side, say fifteen yards away, you have the byre and later on a pig house. The byre was an old structure, a cow house, no windows; cow stalls on your left when you went in . . . Beast smells and manure smells.
It's extraordinary how much artistic nourishment the poet would go on to draw from such a tiny, ordinary place. He husbanded those few acres with such care that they provided the raw material for an entire world, for the vast and singularly influential corpus we celebrate today.
As readers of poetry we are rightly warned away from biography’s treacherous marshes. We must look, we tell ourselves repeatedly, to the poems themselves rather than to the quirks and accidents of the lives from which they were birthed. However it is a trespass at once both crude and irresistible to suggest that for Heaney the loss of Mossbawn when he was thirteen years old created a vacuum that six decades of imaginative effort were in no small measure designed to fill. It was an uprooting that must have left a terrible sense of dispossession, one amplified by the fact that the Heaneys moved to another farm less than five miles down the road. For the young Heaney, then, paradise was not only lost but remained agonisingly close at hand: in the next parish a mere bike ride away.
And let’s take a brief trip around this all too temporary Eden. Here’s Heaney, in a slightly crackly recording from 1972, looking outward rather than downward as he lists the various ‘townlands’ around the property. And in Ireland, it should be pointed out, the term townland signifies a field or collection of fields rather than any kind of urban settlement. Anahorish: a corruption of the Irish ‘Abhainn an fhíor uisce. Broagh. Mossbawn. Grove Hill. Layers of naming -skeins of Gaelic, Scots, English, even Norse- are draped across the landscape the poet surveys, rendering it a densely textured palimpsest, one whose meaning and very authorship seem destined to be forever at issue. Indeed in the mid-career poem ‘Anahorish’ Heaney provides a memorable ‘reading’ of this contested scenery:
My 'place of clear water,'
the first hill in the world
where springs washed
into the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
This ‘first hill in the world’, we’re told, has a gradient made of consonants, a meadow composed somehow of vowels. It’s a poem that centres on a supple and convulsive metaphor, one in which the very matter of speech becomes the vehicle for comparison, where we see the poet indulge language at its most reflexive and self-pleasuring.
But enough of such semantic gamesmanship. Let’s turn to the stuff of agriculture, to the daily labours of a working farm. Let’s make our way from these outlying fields to Mossbawn’s yards and outbuildings, pausing perhaps only to visit one of the little springs or wells that so fascinated Heaney in his childhood years. Maybe:
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
And it’s around those sheds and barns that Heaney, for my money, comes most truly into his own as a singer of the physical. 2011’s ‘Human Chain’, for instance celebrates the superficially most un-poetic chore of lifting grain sacks onto the back of a lorry:
I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback
The poem wonderfully realises the succouring blankness of the menial, the particular release we find from immersion in an arduous and repetitive task. Twenty years earlier ‘The Pitchfork’ finds him relishing in lavish specifitity the touch and texture of the titular instrument:
He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash
Grown satiny from its own natural polish.
Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.
And if I might be forgiven the inclusion of a personal favourite, ‘The Turnip Snedder’, from 2008’s District and Circle is equally vivid in its depiction of an old device used for the mincing and shredding of turnips so that they emerged as a ‘raw sliced mess / Bucketful by glistering bucketful’. There is something violent and militaristic about this device with its ‘barrel-chested breast-plate / standing guard / on four braced greaves’, with its ‘juiced-up inner blades’. Indeed Heaney has described how the poem stemmed from childhood memoires of young American soldiers that were stationed in Northern Ireland in preparation for the D-Day landings.
Out time together grows short so let’s conclude this all too brief sojourn in the kitchen of the farmhouse itself, with the poem ‘Sunlight’. Here again, in what is surely destined to remain one of his most enduring pieces, Heaney conjures a womb of domesticity, an addictively uteric ambience backlit with the clarity and precision of a Dutch interior. It is also an unparalleled ode to food and nourishment, with water turning to honey, scones rising in the oven, the sun resting like resting like a recently used griddle pan against the cool wall of the sky.
‘Sunlight’ is also significant in its anticipation of what’s been described as the ‘visionary turn’ in Heaney’s later work, a tendency especially evident in his 1991 collection Seeing Things. For in that book we find the poet looking up as if for the first time from the earthy phenomena I‘ve dwelled on today -from meadow-soil, from the mulch of wells- as he permits himself to entertain and enter previously unimagined realms of light and air.
While I have today focused on the intensity of the imaginative bond Heaney maintained with those few original acres at Mossbawn, he should of course by no means be thought of as a ‘local’ writer. Rather he is a poet operating in the great and continuing acoustic of the European literary tradition.
For in the opening pages of Seeing Things Heaney evokes three maximally distant ‘vision quests’ from the canon of the West. Aeneas, the Bronze Age Hero of Virgil’s epic, quests for the Golden Bough; the talismanic MacGuffin necessary if he was to penetrate Hades’ realm and walk safely among the dead. The magi or ‘three wise kings’, a mere millennium later, leaving behind their comfortable eastern kingdoms to be present at the birth of Christ. Dante, after another 1400 years have lapsed, humbly doubts his worthiness for the extraordinary quest to which he has been summoned, declaring ‘I alone was girding myself to face / The ordeal of my journey and my duty’.
The heroes of each journey exhibit an appetite for risk and change, a capacity to forsake long-nested-in psychic comfort zones. They are capable of taking on faith the existence of the marvellous, of some game-changing known unknown and show the willingness –or perhaps even determination- to be among its witnesses. For Heaney, then, their greatest significance lies in how they prefigure or legitimise the ‘visionary turn’ his work takes in Seeing Things and indeed in subsequent collections.
And it is the marvellous, in Seeing Things, that Heaney renders and seeks out. It’s a collection that floats measuredly into air and radiance, one that sees Heaney in poem after poem determined to ‘credit marvels’ to acknowledge the ‘marvellous as he has known it’. It’s a book that gestures toward glimpses and intuitions somehow incompatible with our everyday mechanistic worldview, toward a cautious but profoundly moving atheistic spirituality. It is an orphic portal, a tentative and flickering door into the light.
© Billy Ramsell
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