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

Green, blue, yellow and red God is down in the swamps and marshes Sensational as April and almost incredible the flowering of our catharsis. (Kavanagh 159)

The seventeenth-century emblematists were searching nature, like Hopkins and Kavanagh after them, for something that is already there, namely God. And though Heaney is "not what you'd call a pious Catholic" (Haffenden 60), and his emblems are Jungian as much as Christian, his poetry still aims at the natural spirituality of a past age when it was believed that God had hidden hieroglyphics and riddles in his creation for his creatures to seek out. At one extreme Heaney's emblems carry a totally implicit spiritual charge: "The wet centre is bottomless" (DD 56). Alternatively, the emblematic tradition manifests itself, as in "Old Pewter," in a modern version of "metaphysical" wit. "The Riddle," for instance, recalls poems by Herbert or Traherne, with its whimsical, punning title (it concerns a garden sieve or riddle). Its argument is unmistakably, if elusively, theological: "Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? / Or does the choice itself create the value" (HL 51). Some may feel that in this case the poet has mistaken facile whimsy for spiritual questioning. In "The Spoonbait" he achieves more gravity by affecting the tones of an archaic sermon:

So a new similitude is given us And we say: The soul may be compared

Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case . . .

It is "a toy of light / Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing" (HL 21). In the seventeenth century this subject would have been developed into an explicit allegory of God angling for souls. In Heaney's poem the spiritual message is conveyed by an impressionistic image of the spoon flashing upstream. But the impulse is the same: to see sermons in hedges and streams.

The more visionary vein of The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things is a natural development of this emblematic manner. In "parables about crossing from the domain of the matter-of-fact into the domain of the imagined," Heaney explores "the way consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality" (RP xiii). Thus a wintry haw "burning" in a hedge becomes a "litty" spiritual symbol, as it

takes the roaming shape of Diogenes with his lantern, seeking one just man; so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw he holds up at eye-level on its twig. (HL 7)

And in "Wheels within Wheels" the poet gains a "grip. . . on things" from the spinning wheel of an upturned bicycle, "as if belief / Caught up and spun the objects of belief / Into an orbit coterminous with longing" (ST 46-7). Even in this secular context what the poet learns from things is still a distinctly theological "belief."

Eclectically adventurous as Larkin was in genre and form, it is inevitable that he too should, on occasion, have written poems in the emblematic vein. He even composed iconic poems, with a similar patterning to the wings and altars of the seventeenth century, though in his case the effect is "preserved" in rhyme and syntax, rather than imposed by typography. "As Bad as a Mile" with its aaa bbb rhyme scheme and single-sentence structure, makes a comic little emblem out of the poet's lack of a "grip on things." The "shied core" misses the basket, and "failure" spreads "back up the arm" in a weird slow-motion reversal, ending with "the apple unbitten in the palm" (CP 125). A more elaborate pattern underlies "Wires," where the second stanza winds back the rhyme of the first: abcd dcba. The young steers recoil from the electric shock (both d rhymes are the same word, wires, as though a two-strand electric fence straddled the middle of the poem), and find themselves forever trapped behind the "fences" of their "senses" (the a rhymes).