Catching the heart off guard: the generous vision of Seamus Heaney

Commonweal, May 17, 1996 by Suzanne Keen

Seamus Heaney in the college cafeteria line at Harvard: The woman serving holds her scoop aloft. "Pasta or potatoes?" she asks. "Surely, you're joking," says Heaney, and pokes his plate under the sneeze-guard for the potatoes.

In "Digging," the best-known poem of his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Heaney declares his distance from men like his father and grandfather, men who "could handle a spade" and "scatter new potatoes," choosing instead to follow the poet's vocation: "Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it." His successes have carried him far from the Northern Ireland of his childhood, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for part of each year, to Oxford University where he was elected to the post of Professor of Poetry (1989-94), and last year to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. (I am sure I am not the only Commonweal reader who cheered at that news!) But the objects, places, literature, history, and contemporary situation of Ireland remain the poet's home turf.

Justly celebrated as one of the finest poets writing in the English language, Heaney manages with unusual grace the incredibly difficult balancing act required of an international literary figure who simply must find the privacy required for writing. When I was studying at Harvard, people often wrung their hands on behalf of Seamus, as everyone familiarly calls him, even as they counted on him to appear at their colloquia and readings and parties, to remember their names, and (always) to charm. "Can it be good for his poetry?" ran the fretting refrain from this camp, even as others outside the academy expected "Famous Seamus," as they snipingly named him, to spend every waking moment promoting other Irish poets. (He is, indeed, the best known of an outstanding cohort, and not the only heir to Ireland's rich literary tradition.)

Remarkably, Heaney has more than a little of what everyone wants from him, as teacher, cultural ambassador, lecturer, poet. Many others put in positions like Heaney's take refuge in a cover of irascible or absent-minded behavior (and who can blame them?) in order to protect themselves from demands on their time. Heaney's generosity and graciousness pervade all aspects of his public existence, and he is an especially fine teacher of poetry. If you have ever heard him read his poetry aloud, or sought a signature for one of his books, you will know what I mean when I say that he has the gift of creating a feeling of intimacy, as if something particular and valuable has opened up and changed hands between you. This is, of course, the effect of reading a great lyric poem, the thing that makes us feel that we have received a glimpse of something especially true, or a valuable piece of advice about how to move through the world:

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you'll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(from The Spirit Level, 1996)

I love the last sentence of this poem, spilling over three-and-a-half lines back toward the road and the heart, moving from the "earthed lightning" of Heaney's swans (so different from the abstract broken patterns made by Yeats's airborne "Wild Swans at Coole") to the place where the poet and reader share the in-betweenness, motion, and vulnerability to the "big soft buffetings" of wind and wings.

You don't have to be Leda set upon by a god, Heaney's poem tells us, to have your heart caught off guard and blown open. Making "a hurry" the metaphor for the way we live exonerates us for not parking and capturing the scene "more throughly." We are not blamed for being tourists or cityfolk in our car, on Yeats's alienating "roadway, or on the pavements grey" ("The Lake Isle of Innisfree"). At the same time, of course, we needn't stop to "capture" the swans on the lake because the poet has caught them for us, down to their "headstrong-looking heads," in all the possible positions above and below the water. In this nearly allegorical and completely accessible landscape, "known and strange things pass" through us because we are in motion, because we "are neither here nor there." Look at what you see now, and to what it opens in you immediately, the poem instructs, rather than treating the sight of the natural world as something to be stored up like Wordsworth's memories of landscapes, hoarded tranquilizers for treating future afflictions and alienation. You can have it now as long as you are willing to be caught off-guard by the marvellous. As Heaney's recent poetry has more and more frequently attested, there is "space in his reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous" ("Crediting Poetry"), or, as he puts it in the introduction to The Redress of Poetry (1995), for "poems and parables about crossing from the domain fo the matter-of-fact into the domain of the imagined."