In part, the genius of language is in its ability to redress the injustices of scale. While we may be absolutely certain we are at the center of it all, poetry can invert perception neatly and with deadly invisible swiftness, revealing that all along we have merely been on the outside, looking in. Redressing the injustices of fortune and righting the angles of perception to fix various wrongs, and distort the light correctly, is the ability of the poet.
Seamus Heaney is a genius, and was Irish. He was born poised between his father’s rural Gaelic provinciality, and his mother’s modern urban Ulster sensibility. He is a master of sight and sound, of ear and the feel of the syllable, with the annoyingly adroit facility that so many Irish poets possess.
This will not be the last time I revisit his imaginary as so rarely have such a feel and a deftness for English has coexisted with his rhythmic sense of possibility. There is a rooted expansion in his verse, coming through the ground, that one perceives in the shape of his lines and in the sound of his phrases. One cannot “transcend” as Heaney does (deftly, effortlessly) without first being fully grounded, in the sense of being “run aground,” as a boat is run up on a shore and moored: one must be fully stuck, yet only temporarily; one must also be a creature that knows the expanse of the oceanic empyrean, and how easy it is to become lost, yet must be stilled, for the time of our singing.
I will call attention to several examples of his facility with leaving the ground in excerpts from the poem “Lightenings,” specifically the first poem, followed by the sixth, seventh, and the delicious eighth, all from the larger work Seeing Things (aptly boat-covered in my edition). I clip from longer works at my own peril, and yet one must imagine me reading the entirety of the work consecutively to myself alone (an endeavor well worth the effort). Have especial compassion for where our friend Thomas Hardy makes his appearance.
Please read them all to yourself, aloud:
From “Lightenings” I Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep A beggar shivering in silhouette. So the particular judgment might be set: Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into-- Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams. And after the commanded journey, what? Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown. A gazing out from far away, alone. And it is not particular at all, Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round. Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind. ... VI Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep, Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead And lay down flat among their dainty shins. In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space He experimented with infinity. His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting For sky to make it sing the prefect pitch Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused In the fleece-hustle was the original Of a ripple that would travel eighty years Outward from there, to be the same ripple Inside him at its last circumference. VII (I misremembered. He went down on all fours, Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze. Hardy sought the creatures face to face, Their witless eyes and liability To panic made him feel less alone, Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment Over him, perfectly known and sure. And then the flock's dismay went swimming on Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections He'd know at parties in renowned old age When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost And circulated with that new perspective.) VIII The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. 'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,' The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it. (Seamus Heaney, 1991)
You will hear much to marvel at, but attend closely at three things:
“...there is no next-time-round. / Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.” Barbaric perfect consolation, delivered in an anapest that must be scaled like a ladder and a wafting set of dactyls eddying like hair around one’s cheeks. One may consider disagreement with the bard on several particular points as regard the soul.
“And then the flock's dismay went swimming on / Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections / He'd know at parties in renowned old age” How elegantly the poet spills air and altitude, and plunges us into those gatherings of such tedious acquaintance, where the milling of our social milieus butts against us as the blind and blameless heads of Hardy’s sheep.
“Out of the marvellous as he had known it.” I defy you to read these unrhymed tercets and not find yourself amazed. They make me emotional each time I read them. Perhaps you also wonder if you are the monks circulating aloft, or whether it is you at prayers in the oratory, about to hear an anchor run aground.