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

Commonweal, May 17, 1996 by Suzanne Keen

Amemorable performer of his own poems, Heaney carries on the important tradition of reading aloud. The Harvard Poetry Room at Lamont Library has made available a tape of Heaney reading not only his own work, but poems by the fifteenth-century Scots poet Dunbar, by Thomas Wyatt, Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. Only two, Yeats and Hardy, lived into the age of sound recordings, so we have no "authentic" voice to confute the versions we hear in our heads. (For those who have not had the opportunity to hear Heaney's voice, I'm pleased to say that Farrar, Straus and Giroux is issuing The Spirit Level in a special edition with an audiotape of the poet reading.) Interspersed with anecdotes about those who introduced him to the poems, and with brief comments on why and how they are meaningful to Heaney, the Poetry Room tape captures some of what makes Seamus Heaney such a wonderful teacher. His reading of Walter Raleigh's admonitory poem to his son, the "pretty knave" of the sonnet, is worth the price of the two cassettes:

Three things there be that prosper up apace

And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,

But on a day, they meet all in one place,

And when they meet, they one another mar;

And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.

The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;

The weed is that which strings the hangman's bag;

The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.

Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,

Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot;

It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray

We part not with thee at this meeting day.

Though I know that Raleigh's Elizabethan English was a different accent entirely, I hear this lyric now in Heaney's voice. Perhaps coincidentally, this sonnet was also one of Robert Frost's favorites to recite, and Frost, like Heaney, honored the discipline of formal verse, even as he took the line in the direction of the colloquial. Frost famously commented that writing without form was like playing tennis with the net down. Heaney's metaphor takes us back to his scene of the monks in the oratory at Clonmacnoise: "Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body" ("Crediting Poetry"). In this version of the story, no abbot intervenes to free the ship, for the crewman descending the rope must be the poet, adjusting the tension between the captured craft and the anchor, and entering the marvelous as he goes.

As the Nobel prize reminds us, Heaney's sojourns in the academy have not impeded his true work. In the past decade he has published three superb volumes of poetry: The Haw Lantern (1987), containing the breathtaking sonnet sequence "Clearances"; Seeing Things (1991), reviewed in Commonweal (February 26, 1993); and the aforementioned new collection, The Spirit Level. In addition, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978-87 appeared in 1988, a play, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, in 1991, and the lectures Heaney delivered during his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford came out last year as the collection The Redress of Poetry. His moving Nobel lecture, "Crediting Poetry," published in the New Republic (December 25, 1995), should not be omitted, for here Heaney articulates the credo of his vocation: "I credit poetry," he says, "both for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's center and its circumference....I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase."