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

Larkin's poem artfully leads the reader through a series of emotional intensifications. The conversational tone deepens into anxiety as the "bereft" home "withers." The rhetoric becomes grander and more emotive; the home is "A joyous shot at how things ought to be / Long fallen wide." And the poem ends with a dramatized address to the reader:

You can see how it was; Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.(7) (CP 119)

As in Yeats's "Long-legged Fly," the reader is drawn bodily into the scene by an artificial apostrophe. The faintly insistent wording ("You can see how it was; Look. . .") perhaps betrays a histrionic sorrow holding itself back beneath the downbeat tone. Then, with transparent virtuosity, the poem's emotion is distilled into a verbless two-word sentence: "That vase." Larkin's cutlery, stool, and vase are real and tangible enough, but unlike Heaney's pewter, neither their Hopkinsian "thisness" nor their specific social implications are intrinsic to the poem. They stand by metonymy for a universal yearning of the human spirit: the Platonic form of Home-Sweet-Home. Everyone tries to make a home of some kind, whether their vase is Ming or a present from Scarborough.

Where Larkin's poem enacts a familiar human drama, Heaney's poem slowly fills up with detailed visual images until it overflows into moral reflection. In place of Larkin's deceptively detached third-person we have ingenuous personal enthusiasm. Pewter belongs to that kitty of corroborative things ("this turf-face," elderflowers, "slub silk," "hushed air") which merit Heaney's recurrent formula, "I love": "I love unshowy pewter." A list of visually similar substances follows: "solder / that weeps at the touch of a hot iron," and "gloss-barked alder // reflected in the nebulous lid of a pool" (the lid of a tankard presumably recalls the circle of water). The sequence of images here - pewter, solder, alder, lid, pool - is governed by the spontaneous flow of the poet's meditation. The tone becomes more pensive when the poet recalls himself as a boy hiding one misty winter day while his family thought he had drowned. Then in the final stanza the visual description reveals its full spiritual meaning:

Glimmerings are what the soul's composed of. Fogged up challenges, far conscience-glitters And hang-dog, half-truth earnests of true love. And a whole late-flooding thaw of ancestors. (SI 22)

The effect is based on a clever zeugma; both pewter and the soul can "glimmer," be "fogged up" or "glitter." So, the poet is not only celebrating his Irish ancestors through his meditation on pewter. More profoundly and irreducibly, the metal's cloudy, flawed thisness stands for a universal spiritual quality. As Michael Parker says: "The pewter becomes an emblem of the soul and its imperfections" (188).

Parker's epithet points to the poetic tradition to which the spiritual allegory of "Old Pewter" belongs: that of the emblem. Heaney frequently recurs to his seventeenth-century emblematic forerunners. Herbert's "The Pulley" is lovingly analyzed in the first of the Oxford lectures, a line of Vaughan begins "Squarings xliv" (ST 104). Traherne is mentioned in "Hailstones" (HL 14). Like the emblem poems of these writers, "Old Pewter" offers a description of precise physical exactitude which at the same time sustains a transparent spiritual allegory. In Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew," for instance, the "Orient Dew, / Shed from the Bosom of the Morn," stands for the soul, dropped from the "orient" (eastern) sunrise of eternity, into the profane world below, and longs for the Sun (Christ) to "exhale it back" to heaven (Marvell 7). Other seventeenth-century poets make similar spiritual emblems out of a flower (Herbert), a waterfall (Vaughan), or a pond (Traherne). Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" are later variants of this pattern, as are Patrick Kavanagh's brilliant epiphanies: