"Perch"
The next two
poems, "Perch" and "Lupins,"
carry forward the importance of that setting by
examining representative animals and plants
inhabiting it. Both say something more about the
experience that once was possible where the Bann
flowed through Toomebridge.
These poems, like
"At Toomebridge," are shapely thought.
Heaney works hard to make the form and the
imagery of his poems compatible with a
thought--with a "theme," as we once
said in English classes when we could infer
generalizations about the condition of humanity
from poems more blithely than we would today.
"Perch" here is touching, however
obliquely, on an ancient thought. Heraclitus said
it about 500 years before Christ: "You
cannot step twice in the same river." Being
is not static but dynamic: it is always a
becoming.
The poem catches
this thought of the fluidity of experience in the
final image of the river in the poem's concluding
line:
In the
everything flows and steady go of the world.
But even this
final image cannot say with total certainty that
the world is all flux: it has a "steady
go." This compels us to go back and consider
the perch of the poem before acquiescing totally
in the Heraclitean idea of becoming.
The fish, after
all, are the essential image. They occupy a
remarkably steady place in a "finland"
universe that has a "water-roof" above
and a "bottom." The perch
"hang" and "hold" and are
"adoze" in that universe that the poet
saw way back when and that he can still see now.
The breath of a thought from Parmenides,
Heraclitus's opposite, comes to the reader's mind
as he pictures the perch "runty and
ready" and holding their own. For
Parmenides, change was an illusion of the senses;
an unchanging material substance composed the
universe. The perch as they emerge from these
lines look like the same old "muscle and
slur."
The poem of
course is not a philosophical discourse. It has
no need to resolve these contradictory breaths of
philosophical thought one way or the other. The
transience of this boyhood scene and its
permanence play together; they give the reader a
sense of the scene of Toomebridge. We are in the
presence of opposites that combine to make the
whole thing visible, credible--and, after many
years, still accessible.
The stanzaic
arrangement of the poem is five pairs of
five-stress lines--iambic pentameter. The labored
approximation of the rhymes of these couplets
formally renders the sense of being in the
presence of oppositional forces that somehow come
together. But they come together imperfectly, not
with the complete resolution that out-and-out
rhymes would suggest. "River/waver,"
"ready/body," "pass/adoze,"
"slur/air," "hold/world"--the
rhyming secures the thought of the poem in a
steadiness. However, it is a steadiness
repetitively weak and uncertain; but it has
lasted through the years sufficiently to matter
to the poet even now. Something seems to be
holding in Toomebridge, but Heaney
carefully--tastefully?--does not blurt it out. He
allows the perch image to say as much as it can
say about the permanence of his old boyhood
haunt.
lupins
"Lupins"
That impression
of something holding through long years comes
even more emphatically in the third poem of the
book, "Lupins." The first line makes
that unmistakable:
They
stood. And stood for something. Just by
standing.
These light
purplish blue plants were waiting "there/
For sure." They were "unbending"
and "stood their ground." They would
"never balk." All this emphasis on a
plant image that never dies at the old home turf
suggests an enduring substantial reality (as
opposed to an ever-changing stream). But here too
the lupins, like the perch, do not suggest mere
stasis. Although they were the very picture of
solid permanence, their seed packets made them
"erotics of the future."
But this is not
merely a still-life picture of lupins in that
setting from the past, presumably at Toomebridge.
Having allowed the lupins to suggest both
solidity and generativity, the poem moves toward
an important conclusion (literally as the last
line of the poem) about the poet's relationship
to the plants:
And none
of this surpassed our understanding.
We see here the
high modern vision, so different from the current
postmodern refusal to connect the dots of a
problematic universe. It was possible, the poem
allows us to think, for a person to have a
significant experience with lupins. It could be
an experience that hinted at meaning about the
way the person and the lupins occupied the world.
In a place like Toomebridge, the simple things of
the plant world--like the simple things of the
fish world--connected their observer to the
(ordered?) complexity of the whole world. The
poem authorizes this broad conceptual reach when
in the first stanza it establishes a
twenty-four-hour, or universal, role for the
lupins: they are
Rose-fingered
dawn's and navy midnight's flower.
If the poet had
expressed this theme bluntly, he would have
risked sentimentality or irrelevance in the mind
of a reader today. Heaney again avoids making a
broad and banal generalization by committing
himself to the prophylactic of demanding form.
"Lupins" is a total of twelve lines. It
contains three four-line stanzas, measured in
standard iambic pentameter. As in
"Perch," the reader faces the tension
and challenge of approximate rhymes. Each of the
three stanzas is regularly rhymed a-b-a-b.
Heaney's choices of rhyming words are interesting
and fitting, I think, to a reader accustomed to
the indirect approach of the modern mind to the
absolute truth lurking somewhere under the things
of the senses. They tell the reader in that
characteristically diffident manner that
connections occur. The rhymes in the first and
second stanzas illustrate:
"standing/unbending,"
"there/flower,"
"azure/future,"
"promise/purchase."
While the poem
advances generality with the utmost caution,
while it hues to the particular details about the
plants, it not only makes that broad concluding
statement ("And none of this
surpassed our understanding") but
prepares the reader for it in the two preceding
stanzas. In the first line of the poem, we learn
straightway that the lupins "stood for
something." The second stanza, after dealing
with the "seed packets" and
"spires" of the plants, goes to a wide
focus to take in the "erotics of
the future" and the whole of sky
and earth. The lupins are
Lip-brush
of the blue and earth's deep purchase.
By the time the
reader finishes these first three poems of the
book--"At Toomebridge,"
"Perch," and "Lupins"--he
knows something of where the poems will be taking
him and what kind of vehicle will be available.
known
"Known
World"
The poems of
course go far from Ireland, and they do not all
dwell on the country scene. Some show Heaney the
professional poet tooling here and there at
certain points of his career, drinking and
talking and reading poetry with peers in far
places. "Known World" (22) shows the
poet at a Balkan poetry festival in '78. The poem
concerns itself with the jarring contrast between
the known world of the poet from Ireland and the
unknown world into which the festival's
invitation has drawn him. His adventures in a
wayward taxi en route to read poems "at a
cement factory in the mountains" constitute
the central dramatic action of the poem.
Heaney dates the
poem May 1999, assuring that we will read it as
an old emotional experience recollected in
tranquillity. It is longer than the poems
examined above: it runs six pages and breaks out
into seven uneven sections, all of them written
in blank verse. We have here an apparent
miscellany of reflections--some lifted in direct
quotes from the poet's old travel notebook. The
poem recalls the poet's fellow poets, a Russian,
an Italian, a "Finnish Hamlet," a
German, a Dane. It recalls the backwardness of
life in Belgrade. The poet reports leaving his
"known world" when he saw Muslims
wearing fezzes. Masses of people were moving in
long refugee lines (the people had rehearsed well
by the time of the Kosovo atrocities of our
time). Doorsteps were daubed "Serb
house"--marking the endless enmities of the
Balkans, commissar rule to the contrary
notwithstanding. The poet and his fellow poets
saw pilgrim streams of people (it was not clear
to me whether they were different from the
refugees mentioned earlier) going to memorialize
the General Strike and to celebrate Greek
Orthodox Madonna's Day. The two contrasting
belief systems thus paraded in front of them.
Why this
miscellany of poet's memories?
Much of memory is
miscellaneous. A poet taking the backward view
can employ his artistic equipment to make a
pastiche that suggests something significant.
Older poets are in position to write like vacuum
cleaners--to suck up old threads and scraps and
ball them up in a single bag of meaning. The
"bag" in this instance is a
recollection of pervasive tragedy:
That old
sense of a tragedy going on
Uncomprehended,
at the very edge
Of the
usual, it never left me once....
The poet could
not comprehend the varieties of tragedy observed
on this festival junket because, presumably, his
own Irish tragedies, far away, were somehow
different from those in this unknown world.
Comrades-for-a-day with his fellow poets, he
nevertheless could not enter into their
allegories, their sad experiences of political
terror. As the avant-garde Dane said to him,
You are a
south. Your bogs were summer bogs.
Written long
after the end of the Cold War in a period now
being heralded as the age of
"globalizing" interdependency, this
poem may still connect with current political
interest as we await the trial of Milosevic for
crimes that are classically Balkan. But it was
probably not Heaney's intention to arouse such
current interest. The sense of tragedy that he
found was of the most persistent sort, capable of
flourishing under communist or Christian
conditions--or any human conditions in worlds
known and unknown.
Predictably,
Heaney finishes the poem with a neat craftsman's
flourish. When it opened, the poem quoted the
crazy taxi driver taking the poet into the
unknown world:
"Nema
problema!"
In the end, safe
aboard a Lufthansa plane, smoking a cigarette,
sipping wine, and listening to music on the
headphones, the poet repeats the phrase to
himself--no problem.
All
systems go.
gael
"The
Gaeltacht"
This sonnet
expresses the yearning for a youthful past that
takes its shape in memory from the pals the poet
"gabbled" with then. The poet wishes to
re-join his friends again in 1960 back in
Rosguill, which, presumably, lies in the
Gaeltacht--an Irish-speaking rural area. Barlo
would be alive again, and the others (Paddy Joe,
Chips Rafferty, Dicky) would be talking Irish
with the poet. And their girlfriends would
re-appear too. The "people we are now"
would hear what the people they were then were
saying in Irish. Heaney concludes the poem with a
conceit inspired by Dante. If the poet indeed
could have his wish, his sonnet, like one by
Dante,
Could be
the wildtrack of our gabble above the sea.
I take this to
suggest that the sonnet would be the vehicle for
bringing past life and present life together. Art
serves conscious life by enhancing it, by turning
the "gabble" of Irish into a
permanence. Like much in this book, the thought
is a familiar one from our cultural tradition;
but it gathers some fresh air about it because of
Heaney's carefully expressive diction.
on
"On His Work
in the English Tongue"
The poem is in
memory of Ted Hughes. Heaney collaborated with
Hughes in editing an anthology of poems, The
School Bag, published in 1997, a year
or so before Hughes died of cancer. It was a kind
of history of English language poetry and of
poetry written in England, Wales, Scotland, and
Ireland--the Celtic regions. He collaborated with
Hughes also in 1982 on The Rattle Bag,
an anthology for children.
Source:
© Claas Kazzer 2000 http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes.htm
The history of
language in the British Isles, going back to the
bardic tradition of the Celts, from whom he
claimed patronage, motivated Hughes.
Source:
Ann Skea: http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Default.html
Heaney's memorial
to Hughes focuses upon the power of poetic
language to negotiate with the otherwise
unexpressible things of the soul. Heaney alludes
to the transformative power of coming out of the
"upper room"
To fret no
more and walk abroad confirmed.
He wants to show
the connection between Hughes's use of language
(and perhaps any such bardic poet) and the
analogous experience of religious insight
contained in the story of the disciples with
Jesus in the upper room before the Crucifixion.
The main business
of the poem is to examine, as a memorial to
Hughes, poetry's ability to deal with the theme
of "passive suffering"--of
"hurt-in-hiding." Heaney undertakes
this examination by retelling a tale that
presumably Hughes told one night walking with the
poet--a walk that took on a hellish feeling from
the wailing of a nearby power station.
The tale deals
with King Hrethel's plight. His son accidentally
killed his older brother, leaving the King to
punish his son under the prevailing customs. The
poet re-words the tale of the old King's
suffering as his son's body swings on the
gallows. The poem renders the unrelievable woe
and grief felt by the father of the slayer and
the slain in a separate section that employs the
heroic four-stress line of the Old English
familiar to us in the Beowulf text. The other
sections of the poem are in blank verse. The form
is just right to convey indirectly the King's
feeling of doom without saying the things of the
soul "not to be said."
The doom felt by
Ted Hughes when his wife Sylvia Plath killed
herself in his absence went unsaid for nearly all
his life. It was not until 1998, not long before
his death, that poetry allowed him to speak in Birthday
Letters. The ending of Heaney's poem
refers to poetry as
a tribute
paid
By what we
have been true to. A thing allowed.
Heaney nowhere in
his poem refers to Plath. For me, nonetheless,
she is in the poem everywhere. That is, what I
know of Hughes's "griefs endured"
expands the story of King Hrethel's griefs; and
the King's story cycles around to bear the
unspoken significance of Hughes's story.
Soul has
its scruples.
So does Heaney's
elegiac mode. This unsentimental, tough, knotty
poem aptly memorializes Ted Hughes.
electric
"Electric
Light"
You find the
title poem at the end of this book. It is in
three parts.
The first one
evokes the first house where as a child the poet
saw electric light. It vividly and selectively
recalls details of the poet weeping at the
strange home of an old woman, where she left the
electric light burning, hoping it would comfort
him (it did not).
The second part
follows the poet, presumably growing up, by ferry
and train from Belfast Lough to the Thames. It
joins with the first part through the image of
the sound of waters. At the end of the first
part, the old woman, perhaps the poet's
grandmother, speaks to him under the electric
light in sibilant sounds that resemble
"cavern waters/ Lapping a boatslip." As
the second part starts, he associates her lisping
sounds in retrospect with prophecy ("Eddy of
sybilline English.") That shifts the scene
to the ship and dock that lead to the train down
to the Thames. There the poet, presumably
embarking on his life's journey, emerges
"from tube-mouth into sunlight."
The third and
final part of the poem revisits the old woman in
her "fur-lined felt slippers unzipped."
It depicts the poet as a boy experimenting with
the switch for the overhead light in her house
and with the illuminated radio dial. The World
War II blackout is in force. The poet remembers
again not only her slippers but her dirty, hard
fingernail with which the poem opens.
...it must
still keep
Among
beads and vertebrae in the Derry ground.
I suppose Heaney
saw in this poem a representation of his
trajectory from unhappy childhood to the
"Cloth of Gold" waiting at the start of
his career. Heaney's Celtic origins may call him
to a bardic role, giving prophetic voice to the
tribe. He may see in this personal narrative the
representative experience of the whole, the
journey from the nurturing enclosure through the
light to the challenge of adulthood.
But I confess
that the images of the poem do not work for me
with any special felicity. And the theme of
growing up and going forth, though admittedly
handled wholly with concrete details, seems
commonplace. Because Heaney chose this to be the
title of the whole book, I tried to discover its
special significance, but feel that I failed.
This sense of
failed discovery clung like a not unpleasant
aftertaste to this book of poems. The poems
certainly are not the productions of youthful
exuberance. But they open onto an aging
sensibility that takes strength from the act of
remembering as well as from that which it
remembers. For a reader standing near the same
place in the march of years, the poems widen
familiar prospects. Occasionally, owing to the
texture of Heaney's remembered experience and to
the craft that appropriates that experience, they
confer the unrestrained surprise one feels when
he confronts a poem that is really working.
end
of 3. Some of Heaney's poems in operation
end
of essay review
1.
The backward view of life