As I read yesterday about his funeral with its big, all-star cast of mourners, it occurred to me that Seamus Heaney made a point of criticizing \u201csomething too male and assertive\u201d in the complex but largely transcendent \u201cUnder Ben Bulben,\u201d Yeats\u2019s funeral poem to himself, which concludes with the lines on Yeats’s own headstone. What would Heaney have thought of 80,000 football spectators applauding Heaney as \u201cthe world\u2019s most renowned composer of verse\u201d? In point of fact, it is said to have been an excellent funeral full of humor, tears, and grace notes; but only one poem was read. It occurred to me that, if such things were possible at this late date, Heaney would be the best person to write a poem about his own funeral and burial. A poem like that wouldn\u2019t have the feel of a traditional elegy or eulogy but\u00a0something more befitting such a humble, passionate, and earth-loving soul. Such a poem would be distinct from the high strains about a man\u2019s surpassing destiny that tend to resound over the airwaves. Like his best verse, it would accessibly epitomize his knack for tactile evocation, sinuous rhythms, and recognizing the manifold aches and terrible contradictions of this life. It would include moving memories that only Heaney could evoke, as he did when he recalled his own secret communion with his mother at her funeral in \u201cClearances,\u201d or when he recalled his father in \u201cDigging,\u201d equating the poet\u2019s work with \u201cthe squat pen\u201d with his father\u2019s work doggedly exhuming potatoes with a spade. Reflecting the harsh realities of a pastoral existence, such a poem would be rich in slimy, rifted, dirt-stained observations on the precariousness of life in the midst of its continuance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the day of Heaney\u2019s burial, I was reminded that\u2014as Derek Walcott emphasized in his conversation with his Irish friend and fellow Poet Laureate just last spring at AWP\u2014Heaney generally did not imitate Yeats, the master with whom he is most often compared. Though he was at heart a private poet who remained in touch with his origins as a farmer\u2019s son, Heaney felt an obligation to respond to global events. Still, at no point in his career did Heaney climb up into a Yeatsean heaven or golden Byzantine dome of high art, nor did he pursue the sweep of the Whitmanean sublime. Instead, he painstakingly delved toward a vertical earthbound frontier, where–as when he excavates a multiplex ancient homeland in poems inspired by P.V. Globb\u2019s The Bog People<\/em>–\u201cThe wet centre is bottomless\u201d (\u201cBogland\u201d). He relishes the way each layer of his history \u201chas been camped on before,\u201d and he accepts that the center cannot hold. He admits that, in returning to a land \u201cOf country people \/ Not knowing their tongue,\u201d he \u201cwill feel lost, \/ Unhappy and at home\u201d (\u201cThe Tollund Man\u201d). In these works, there are no pretentions to a mythos<\/em> of reassurance or to a mighty principle of political order underlying everything.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is not to say that Heaney should not be grouped among the political, postcolonial poets\u2014such as Neruda and Milosz\u2014who have produced some of the most interesting work of our age by redefining the sociopolitical center in terms of the \u201cperiphery\u201d of America and Europe. But Heaney remained resistant to slogans, partisanship and propaganda. Only he could address the sanguinary strife of late twentieth\u00a0century Irish history\u2014not to mention ongoing sexism in the West\u2014by anatomizing bodies extracted from the alluvial mud of ancient peat bogs. It is well known that Heaney grew up Irish Catholic in Northern Ireland under British rule. In the poem \u201cPunishment,\u201d he contemplates the naked, peat-tarred body of an Iron Age girl submitted to ritual sacrifice for committing adultery:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I almost love you<\/p>\n but would have cast, I know,<\/p>\n the stones of silence.<\/p>\n I am the artful voyeur\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Heaney has the courage to admit to his own voyeurism and sinfulness, even as he lays claim to deep empathy. At this moment, the poet is simultaneously referring to Catholic women in modern Ireland who have been shaven, stripped, tarred, and chained to railings by the IRA for keeping company with British soldiers. Surprisingly, the speaker does not claim to have sided fully with humane, civilized people who express public outrage at such unspeakable atrocities. He has to admit, after all, that he did nothing to prevent such crimes and is guilty of a subtle kind of treachery with which we are all familiar:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I who have stood dumb<\/p>\n when your betraying sisters,<\/p>\n cauled in tar,<\/p>\n wept by the railings,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n who would connive<\/p>\n in civilized outrage<\/p>\n yet understand the exact<\/p>\n and tribal, intimate revenge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He admits even to having committed pagan, tribal vengeance in his heart. Groups can be more immoral than individuals, but the poet can still speak the truth about political violence by examining how even he has never relinquished his ambivalence. (In \u201cTerminus,\u201d he asks, \u201cIs it any wonder when I thought \/ I would have second thoughts?\u201d; \u201cI grew up in between.\u201d)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As he suggests in his essays and his often-anthologized lecture \u201cFeeling into Words,\u201d Heaney was not unaware that he was influenced as much by Hardy\u2019s grim, unsentimental \u201cregionalism\u201d and even Wordsworth\u2019s intricately nostalgic journeys through his own rural west country as by Yeats\u2019s mid-career interest in the World Soul of Irish art. But, as was the case for Joyce, bringing the present into a significant relation to the past still was always Heaney\u2019s agenda. Heaney himself called this jolt of reapprehension \u201ca returning of the world itself.\u201d It is just that he focused on his relation to local traditions and to the world of his own memories and inner conflicts. In \u201cStation Island\u201d\u2014where he ambitiously merges present and past in the midst of his reworking of canonical myth\u2014he even has the ghost of Joyce challenge him, a version of Dante\u2019s Pilgrim, to \u201ckeep at a tangent\u201d when the circle widens and \u201cswim out on [his] own\u201d to find his own \u201cecho soundings, searches, probes, allurements, \/\/ elver-gleams in the dark\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With these thoughts in mind, I\u2019ll conclude by presenting a Heaney poem entitled \u201cPersonal Helicon\u201d that I used to hand out to students in my poetry writing classes. I offered it as a \u201cHelicon\u201d for them, asking them to follow this example, to write poems about their own \u201cmirrors” and personal source materials. I love the various ways in which this piece presents personal reflection as a source of inspiration:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Personal Helicon<\/p>\n <\/p>\n -for Michael Longley<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a child, they could not keep me from wells<\/p>\n And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.<\/p>\n I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells<\/p>\n Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.<\/p>\n I savoured the rich crash when a bucket<\/p>\n Plummeted down at the end of a rope.<\/p>\n So deep you saw no reflection in it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A shallow one under a dry stone ditch<\/p>\n Fructified like any aquarium.<\/p>\n When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch<\/p>\n A white face hovered over the bottom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Others had echoes, gave back your own call<\/p>\n With a clean new music in it. And one<\/p>\n Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall<\/p>\n Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,<\/p>\n To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring<\/p>\n Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme<\/p>\n To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n