A paper by Peter Gebhardt
read to the Spiritual Reading Group at the Carmelite Library on Tuesday the 23rd
of April 2015
There is a sense in which
all Heaney’s poetry is elegiac, in that it celebrates,
rejoices and embraces.
Heaney’s poetry is a sustained series of acts of reciprocity for living,
thankfulness for lives, gratitude for the words that
he could weave together. All
his volumes are sprinkled with poems of dedication.
I want to concentrate on
four elegies. Three of these are European poets who suffered under Eastern
Europe’s repression.
In memoriam Francis Ledwidge
killed in France 31 July
1917
To the Shade of Zbigniew
Herbert
From Out of this World
in memory of Czeslaw Milosz
Audenesque
in memory of Joseph Brodsky
I want to concentrate
initially on Ledwidge. There is a small biography of him by Alice
Curtayne. More specifically there is a small ‘Selected Poems’ introduced by
Seamus Heaney and containing, at the rear, his elegy for Ledwidge. Ledwidge
embodies all the conflicts and complexities of the Irish throughout the 18th,
19th and 20th centuries. Back, also, to the Battle of the
Boyne in 1690.
And, of course, long before
there was the subjugation, the colonization of the country into the anglicized
system of assimilation. No wonder, historically, so many Irish fled to
Australia leaving behind famine and, as they hoped, the rigor mortis of the
monarchy. Sadly the neo-colonists have brought new air to the deadening body.
“In you our dead enigma, all
the strains
Criss-cross in useless
equilibrium.
And as the wind tunes
through this vigilant bronze
I hear again the sure
confusing drum……”
Strains, useless
equilibrium, confusing drum – our dead enigma. A haunted Catholic face pallid
and brave. And so the Easter Rising 1916 – one hundred years next year, and
Ledwidge is in a British uniform as his very compatriots in uniform desecrate
Dublin and murder the Irish leaders.
Lament for Thomas McDonagh
He shall not hear the
bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is
lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter
birds
Above the wailing of the
rain.
Nor shall he know when loud
March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her
fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden
cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves
the moor,
And pastures poor with
greedy weeds,
Perhaps he’ll hear her low
at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant
meads.
(In Barracks)
Francis Ledwidge
It’s when we turn to the
Milosz elegy that we taste Heaney’s ambivalences about the Catholic Church, not
about the spiritual, but the church as an institution which has done
historically so much ill in Ireland and has been as guilty of subjugation and
impoverishment as the English. Heaney was very fixed on the idea of the
individual being capable of and free to make moral choices. You don’t have to
read too many poems to find that imperative. At the same time the saturation of
the Catholic faith upon his growing up is abundant.
“ There was never a scene
when I had it out with
myself or with another.
The loss occurred off-stage.
And yet I cannot
disavow words like
‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’
or ‘communion bread’. They
have an undying
tremor and draw, like well
water far down.”
Heaney loved wells. Who said
it – “Truth lies at the bottom of a well”? Heaney’s poetry is riddled with
ambivalences – historical, cultural, spiritual, personal and domestic.
Resolution is never a formula. It’s all in the reading. Generous man, he takes
you with him in the generosity of the special and unique voice. The digging,
planting, ploughing voice.
“Our road is steaming the
turned up
breath. Now the good life
could be to cross
a field. And art a paradigm
of earth
new from the lathe of
ploughing.”
“Vowels ploughed into other
open ground,
Each verse returning like
the plough turned round.”
He is a participant in the
roll-over of life and devoutly wishes to have other participants if they so
choose.
It is not surprising that
Heaney wrote the elegies for three Europeans – Brodsky, Milosz and Herbert. The
complexities and conflicts, the ambivalences and cross-currents of post-war
European history mirror for Heaney the experiences of Ireland. He says this:
“In the course of this book,
Mandelstam and other poets from
Eastern bloc countries are
often invoked. I keep returning to
them because there is
something in their situation that makes
them attractive to a reader
whose formative experience has been
largely Irish. There is an
unsettled aspect to the different worlds
they inhabit, and one of the
challenges they face is to survive
amphibiously, in the realm
of ‘the times’ and the realm of their
moral and artistic
self-respect, a challenge immediately recognizable
to anyone who has lived with
the awful and demeaning
facts of Northern Ireland’s
history over the last couple of
decades.”
Or is it legitimate to ask:
why write elegies? Loss, of course, is one very good reason, but I think that
there is more to it than that. Think of the great elegies – Lycidas (Milton),
In Memoriam A.H.H. (Tennyson). There is an underlying continuity between the
living and the dead that is animated and preserved. Further Heaney was a
remarkably generous man. I know that having been a recipient of his generosity
as a student (“A” for Poetry Workshop) and a guest in his Strand house.
Then there is, as clear from
the poems chosen, a sense of similitude, a conjoint enterprise, that
characteristic of sympathetic identification with
another’s life and works.
And, above all, the preservation of the continuities of languages and voice. It
is not simply anguish and tears at loss, but also, a celebration of those
elements and values that make living joyous and embracing, and hope to
make death so in its own way.
One of Heaney’s many and
life-asserting attributes is his emphasis on hope, the surprise of hope.
“Faith, hope and charity”. Hope is a very close relative
of faith.
Among the interesting
critical texts to which I have had reference is by
Bernard O’Donoghue:
“On the face of it, these
figures of the ‘unsaid’ and the
Inarticulate sound
paradoxical in a book dedicated to the liberation
of the poetic voice. But
Heaney’s poetic voice is, in a way,
one of Foster’s
‘professional intermediaries’, giving a voice to the
voiceless. After all, what
elegy does is to give voice to the
terminally voiceless. There are
two senses in which this book is
elegiac: first the obvious
one, that it contains some of the finest
elegies in modern English
poetry (in an area, incidentally, where
modern Irish poetry is
particularly strong: for example, Longley,
Muldoon and Michael Davitt);
but the book is elegiac, too, in its
homesickness for Ulster. The
figure of the homesick Ulster poet,
Sweeney, has been in
Heaney’s head throughout the 1970s, and
the translation of his
deracinations will be his next literary project,
Sweeney Astray.
But the poet homesick for
the North is already manifest in a
number of ways in Field
Work: obviously in the vernacular usages
quoted above, all of which
are as foreign to Southern Irish English
as they are to Standard
English. But there is also a celebration of
Ulster consonantalism, of
the kind quoted above from W.R.
Rodgers, especially in the
poem ‘The Singer’s House’, written for
Heaney’s friend David
Hammond, who is one of the best
Contemporary Ulster
folksingers:
When they said Carrickfergus
I could hear
the frosty echo of
saltminers’ picks.”
What Heaney does show and
tell us is that you have to work hard with the pen . A poem is not a
spontaneous overflow. Words have, like lozenges, to be sucked for the very core
of their meaning (grammatical, syntactical and etymological meaning). Shaping
is like sculpting – hammer and tongs. Read “The Forge”, a poem of practical
spirituality, a refutation of historical irrelevance and an acceptance of the
community that has put an end to a blacksmith’s existence.
Heaney is a wonderfully
embracing man who wants us all to be morally responsible and independent
participants and sharers in an egalitarian society. He is, among other things,
the poet of the demos, the Prospero of the kingdom of poetry whose revenge is
directed at those who would deny poetry, relegate it, treat it as irrelevant,
subjugate and deny the moral individuality of the person in the paddock or in
the suburbs. His poetry was for everywhere and everyone not just for you and
me.
Talking of stations, Henry Hart says,
“Where unambiguous assertions of faith issue from
one militarized camp or another, a judicious ‘faults-on-both sides tact’ can be
a politic alternative. Heaney takes an ethical stand against the self-righteous
arrogance that destroys writers as well as nations. His ideal of organic unity
provides a model for a democratic state in which different factions work in
creative proximity, just as contrary sympathies do in his mind and poems. As
the sequence of prose poems crosses back and forth between these differences,
Heaney repeatedly returns on himself, bringing his highest hopes for peaceful
coexistence down to earth for candid analysis and raising his deepest fears and
biases up for lofty moral scrutiny. Doggedly self-reflexive, Heaney in Stations
offers a spiritual and autobiography that amounts to a self-crucifixion. By
stressing natural and supernatural analogues of his artistic development, he
makes his story both biological and biblical and contributes an intriguing
self-portrait to the many-roomed house of autobiographical fiction."
If you’d
like to turn to a poem which is lyrical, pastoral and elegiac, you could do
worse than read the redemptive “At a Potato Digging”. (in Death of a
naturalist) This is an elegy for the victims of the 1845 famine. Or “Requiem for the Croppies” (the Wexford boys
with cropped hair) This latter poem was written to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916. Heaney turns to 1798 as being the
seed bed of the rising. Next year is, of course, the 100th
anniversary. You can still see the bullet holes in Dublin.
Guinness stout
for
Lieutenant Michael Malone,
shot in
Dublin in his home on Anzac Day 1916
When you see the Guinness
boiler-barrel rolling along.
Masquerading as something armoured
and strong,
It is not difficult to know
That desperation always
masks a bravado show.
Easter ushers a new
birth,
Sadly, always after death,
Here death won Michael
Malone
Shot in his home all alone.
I was silenced by the
shadowed plaque on the wall,
It’s only now I can engage
in a puny recall.
Here we, too, remember the
red, white and blue,
As we had once danced to
that tune too,
As our bodies rolled into
the Turkish turf,
Shot down riding a distant,
different surf.
Peter Gebhardt
In preparing for this
offering I have
had regard to the following:
Preoccupations, Selected
Prose 1968-1978,
Seamus Heaney, Farrar Straus
and Giroux,
New York, 1980
Seamus Heaney,
Nell Corcoran, Faber
And Faber, 1986
Finders, Keepers,
Seamus Heaney,
Selected Prose 1971-2001,
Farrar
Straus and Giroux, paperback
2005
Professing Poetry, Seamus
Heaney’s
Poetics,
Michael Cavanagh,
Catholic University of
America Press,
paperback reprint, 2010
Seamus Heaney and the
Language
of Poetry,
Bernard O’ Donoghue,
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994
Seamus Heaney, Poet of
Contrary
Progressions,
Henry Hart,
Syracuse University Press,
New York, 1992
