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

Commonweal, May 17, 1996 by Suzanne Keen

In his 1991 volume of poems, Seeing Things, Heaney describes such a close encounter with the marvelous, in the sequence "Lightenings":

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.

In this vision proximate and tangible world and other-world overlap, but the elements themselves, air and water, cannot be translated. The abbot wisely sees that the crewman must be helped back into his own "real" world up there in the air, and that the monks must not attempt to capture or arrest the materials of the vision, except in the words of the annals and the poem. The crewman and monks reach into the region uncannily shared by their world and the otherworld, a boundary-zone in which air and water are at once "known and strange," while the swans of "Postscript" move comfortably on either side of the boundary between air and water, and help us to imagine the next step in the experience of in-betweenness: hearts open, off-guard, and blown through by the same elements that make the ocean wild and light the slate-grey lake. Though he will not reassure us about where we are when we are passed through and passing by, Heaney generously invites us along to share his revisiting and reinventing of air, light, water, swans.

This is not a solitary's journey. The fact that we can over-hear a conversation with Yeats in this poem from the forthcoming volume The Spirit Level reminds us that the intimacy of the lyric poem comes not only from the gesture of speaker to reader, but from being allowed in, temporarily, to the poet's library. We hear what he has read, and how he reads and (as Harold Bloom would show us) misreads it. Strong poets, according to Bloom, misread one another in order to clear imaginative space for themselves and their own work. While it seems to me that Heaney employs in his poetry only the cagey and crafted sort of allusion, I know no more creative and critical a misquoter of others' lines than Seamus Heaney the teacher. Listening to him lecture on twenteith-century British and Irish poets, I have heard him inadvertently improve lines of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.

Introducing the late James Merrill, author of The Changing Light at Sandover, Heaney emended the title of this magnificent book to Shifting Light at Sandover. Merrill cringed, but shifting light...not bad! Of course, anyone who learns by heart a vast amount of poetry and recites from memory will occasionally misplace or elide a word, and I know few poets who wouldn't be willing to risk misquotation to have Heaney think of their work what he feels about a poem by Thomas Wyatt: "I often say it just for the sheer elation of the poem itself."