"Customary rhythms": Seamus Heaney and the rite of poetry

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2001 by Bolton, Jonathan

Once again, "Triptych" attests to the versatility of the station poem. In this instance, the ritualistic steps occur at the end instead of the beginning of the rite (steps that normally initiate the pilgrimage here serve to end it), and instead of being transported back to a remote past, Heaney returns to a recent event, the march at Newry in protest of the Bloody Sunday massacre. The poem returns to incidents that Heaney had failed to consecrate in verse as they occurred, not in a distant past but during his own lifetime. The line, "How we crept before we walked," is especially revealing about Heaney's poetic response to political crises, as the contemplative, reflective procedure of the station poem redirects the more volatile impulses that instigated the poem.

III

Over the past decade, Heaney's work, in volumes such as The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1995), has entered a new phase in which personal recollections, often nostalgic preoccupations with his own past, have supplanted the broader national and historical concerns of his early to mid career. In these volumes, generally, Heaney has tended to focus on the numinous and mnemonic qualities of individual objects, odd ordinary things such as thimbles, hailstones, a sofa, a swing, jackets and footballs, pitchforks and schoolbags-anything with associations potent enough to reconstitute a submerged past. Although Heaney's focus has changed, his exploration of personal memory represents a new form of digging, with the station poem providing a formal demarcation of mnemonic processes. As he writes in "The Poet's Chair," the poem is "a ploughshare that turns time up and over" (SL 57). Heaney's excavation of personal history, as in his poetic rites, is performed in three stages. First, the sight of a numinous object (i.e. "seeing things") opens a door into the past. This opening into the past prompts a mental pilgrimage-whether it be a journey to the underworld or the proverbial stroll down memory lane-that terminates in a return journey. The cycle is completed as the poet climbs to light or is roused from a trance with a cache of memories and a newfound awareness of personal history, "a revelation of the self to the self" (Preoccupations 54), and of the atemporal existence of objects and people.

Heaney has come to view memory and the space-time continuum in terms of the relation between absence and presence, and he has come to acknowledge that certain things, presences that exist in the here and now, uncover or disclose absences that exist in past time. In this sense, in his later verse, certain phenomenal objects, provided that one really sees them and apprehends their numinous potential, serve as passports to an otherwise inaccessible underworld of buried memories. Two poems from The Haw Lantern serve to illustrate Heaney's notion of memory as a stockpile of absences that can be retrieved via a presence. In "Hailstones," Heaney confides, "I make this [poem] now / out of the melt of the real thing / smarting into its absence" (SP 241). The sting of hailstones in the present involuntarily triggers a sensation not felt for forty years, what Heaney describes as "the truest foretaste of your aftermath" (SP 242). A similar idea appears in sonnet 8 from "Clearances," a moving elegy to his mother in which Heaney registers a desire to circle the empty space that used to contain a chestnut tree, planted on his birthday but chopped down when the farm changed hands. The tree's existence, however, is preserved in the poet's memory, its absence "A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for" (SP 253). For Heaney, then, what is lost is never irretrievable, but rather exists on an immaterial plane, a "spirit level," that can be recovered, reincorporated via a three-- part process of remembrance.