The turf cutter and the nine-to-five man: Heaney, Larkin, and "the spiritual intellect's great work." - poets Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by James Booth

It is this organicist theory which lies behind Heaney's way of treating words themselves as things - as icons of reality rather than signifiers. In "The Singer's House" he says to himself the placename "Gweebarra":

and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite. I see the glittering sound. (FW 27)

Elsewhere "The tawny guttural water" of the Moyola river "spells itself" (WO 25). The poet seeks to plumb a pre-Saussurean depth where words enter "almost the sense of touch" (FW 34) and embody meaning in their very physical form. In the case of the poem "Undine," for example:

It was the dark pool of the sound of the word that first took me: if our auditory imaginations were sufficiently attuned to plumb and sound a vowel, to unite the most primitive and civilized associations, the word "undine," would probably suffice as a poem in itself. (P 52-3)

The intrinsic music of the single word is valued above the contrived music of syntax and meter.

If the word can be seen as an icon, so can the whole poem. This explains many of Heaney's formal experiments. The "skinny quatrains" of North, for instance, devised when Heaney was attempting to "wreck" "the melodious grace of the English iambic line," show Heaney's antisyntactical tendency at its most ruthless. While the traditional lyric stanza is designed for the ear, these stanzas are designed for the eye. The purely visual structuring of the poems becomes apparent if the words are set out as prose:

I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather. I love this turf-face. (N 33)

Developing his digging metaphor, Heaney sees these stanzas as "artesian" wells: "those thin small quatrain poems, they're kind of drills or augers for turning in and they are narrow and long and deep" (qtd. in Randall 16). But, though individual words may generate an instantaneous musical effect ("cheeps," "lisps"), there is no structure of sounds here. The traditional devices for creating such a structure (rhyme, predictable stress-patterns) have been deliberately dispensed with. Even a listener with an excellent ear for poetry. could not guess what length the lines are supposed to be, and might conclude that this is in reality prose-poetry, or possibly approximate pentameters.(6) There is nothing in the meter, the sounds of the words, or their grammatical and syntactical structures to give a clue to Heaney's "narrow and long" lineation:

I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat:

the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather.

I love this turf-face . . .

The drill or auger that appears on the page in this arrangement is as exclusively visual an effect as the wings, altar, or waterfall of the seventeenth-century poets Herbert and Vaughan. This is an extreme case of Heaney's tendency to value the "concrete accomplishment of writing over the evanescence of speech" (Hart 38). Typography generates poetic form.