Some years ago I attended a celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday at what had originally been intended as a standard reading
The programme was altered to accommodate the performance of well known Heaney poems by over a dozen international poets, including Rita Ann Dufy, Robert Pinsky and Thomas Venclova, a friend of Joseph Brodsky, who read Midterm Break in Lithuanian.
A limited edition poem, of whose existence I was unaware, signed by Heaney, was distributed to the audience. It would subsequently resurface toward the end of what became his last collection, Human Chain, some years later.
It almost, but for the presence of A Kite for Aibhin, bookends the volume.
It is called In The Attic.
In the poem, the poet who would soon in his seventieth year, who had survived a stroke but who had witnessed the felling of great oaks among his poetic fraternity – Brodsky, Hughes, Milosz – is in a reflective, even philosophical mood.
But he is not down beat.
Looking back for a moment, in the book Stepping Stones, over five hundred pages of interviews with his friend and poet, Denis O Driscoll, another of Heaney’s contemporaries who pre-deceased him, Heaney often revisits his friendship with Ted Hughes, a huge influence both as a writer and a person.
I would wager that Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist wouldn’t be the book it became without the influence of Hughes’s much earlier Hawk in the Rain.
I drown in the drumming plough land, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave…
It sounds like Heaney, but it is Hughes.
What Faber and Faber saw in Hughes in 1957, it saw in Heaney in 1966. Hughes, writing in the raw and sparse vernacular of his upbringing, immersed himself in whatever he chose to write about, in a manner that the previous generation of Faber poets, Spender, Auden, Larkin and Eliot, chose not to.
In The Though Fox, his most famous poem of the time, Hughes becomes the fox he imagines.
Heaney was drawn early to Hughes for much the same reason that he preferred Kavanagh over Yeats, the spoken force of his words, or to paraphrase Philip Hobsbaum, the ability to roughen up his lines.
In The Early Purges, Heaney was able to write
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
Soft paws scraping like mad.
Decades later, and having survived cancer, Hughes visited Heaney out of the blue at his home in Dublin facing the sea, when he was adding a four side extension to his house.
Anything that tends towards the octagonal, remarked Hughes, makes your house a tower.
In Yeats poem, The Tower, the poet uses the image to wrestle with the challenges of ageing.
Poetic allusion aside, the soothsaying quality of the remark didn’t diminish Heaney’s superstitious feeling that Hughes was having a last look around. He died four months later.
With Human Chain, in retrospect, I get the feeling that Heaney may have been having a last look around. Others suspected he was preparing a clearing.
In the Attic has Heaney contemplating the present in his writing den, ‘a man marooned in his own loft’, an image he easily connects with the childhood recollection of Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, aloft in the cross trees of Hispaniola.
The poem has the virtues of Heaney as a poet writing with the skill of an artist gifted at chiaroscuro. Instead of concealing, the shadow reveals, but the reader is ever mindful of the in corporeality of light and shade.
In The Attic is a twelve stanza poem of instant clarity, in which Heaney is walking the corridors of memory, opening doors as he goes along,
‘ghost footing of what was then the terra firma of hallway linoleum’
It moves steadily toward an Epiphany that never materialises.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
It is somewhat devoid of, without weakening the poem, or indenturing it to the ordinary, the dramatic denouement of the poem which follows, A Kite for Aibhin, which rushes to conclusion in seven lines of almost equal metrical length, the beat quickening the pace
my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and—separate, elate—
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
The kite taking off after the string breaks is the severing of the umbilical chord. Heaney ends the final poem in his final collection with the ultimate affirmation of life.
Whether a young boy aloft in cross trees, or an elderly man flying a kite, the boy in a man’s world, the man in a child’s world, life is coming full circle for the poet who, nevertheless, in poems of outstanding quality throughout Human Chain, is like an astronaut defying gravity.
When you combine the determination of the poet of In The Attic not to be sidelined by the minor issue of temporary obfuscation, As I age and blank on names, with the poet in A Kite for Aibhin, who is invigorated by the sensation of release, of the consequence of the relentlessness of change, we can see in practice what Heaney meant in his Nobel address when he memorably described poetry as an ark of the covenant between language and sensation.
Something else though is at work in the unsettled recesses of Heaney’s smithy throughout Human Chain. Time is rewinding. Shadows are receding. Memories are becoming interchangeable. Poetry is never less than a portal to another way of seeing things.
We have been told that the past is another country: they do things differently there.
With In the Attic and other poems in Human Chain, Heaney is mindful of the need to, in his own words, to continuously rise to the occasion, and despite the contra-flow of senescence, maintain the stamina that has served him well. In other words, he is by no means a spent force.
Earlier, in another poem in Human Chain, Heaney paints a vision of memory and the past, bereft of the heartbeat of the here and the now. It is at once a perfect metaphor of the difference between the living and the dead, and the futility of looking back.
The narrator in the poem, The door was open and the house was dark, is like the traveller in Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, so that the past Heaney visits, is like
A midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield, in late summer.
Human Chain opens with a short poem, Had I not been awake, what I see as a clarion call to arms, a reminder to the poet to be vigilant, to be cognisant of the fact that mere decoration of words is not enough. The challenge remains to extend the fixed relations between words.
Almost forty years after writing Digging,
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it
Paetry remains transformative for the poet:
We can make the connection with the ambitious young poet in Digging with the elder Heaney’s view of himself in A Kite for Aibhin, so that the hand, which held the pen, is now like a spindle, unspooling.
Unspooling is an angler’s word: the fly line is allowed to drift over the deeper pool, for better bounty for he who waits.
However, back to that opening poem
Had I not Been awake
An autumnal wind has shredded a tree outside Heaney’s bedroom, a wind as excitable as the vixen in Ted Hughes The Though Fox, a wind as feral as the cat in Thomas Kinsella’s Another September.
In Had I Not Been Awake, Heaney is sentinel, like the fisherman with one eye on his bait, another on the sky above. He tells us that
Had I not been awake, I would have missed it.
Missed what? The wind that rose and whirled. And what is the wind?
The answer is in Shelley’s O Wild West Wind, which he describes as ‘thou breath of autumn’s being’
Heaney is as focused as Hughes and Shelley and Kinsella. The intuition is acute. He is, informing the reader in the first poem in the collection:
Alive and ticking like an electric fence.
We know from a passage in Stepping Stones that Heaney shared Hughes belief that one should write poetry early in the morning while the door to the dream world was still open.
So for Heaney, the actual writing of a poem, its conception, is the process of decoding the encrypted code.
Long before Human Chain, before the deaths of his contemporaries, before the Nobel Prize, Heaney wrote: when language does more than enough, it opts for the condition of over life, and rebels at limit.
On rereading Human Chain recently, I have come to the conclusion that Seamus Heaney is, to paraphrase himself, true to the impact of external reality and .sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being
