Heaney first celebrated the natural world which shaped the farming life he was born into, but as he matured he became a nation's chronicler, writes Eileen Battersby
Seamus Heaney with fellow Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996. The picture is taken from an exhibition of portraits of Irish writers running at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, until May 30th. Photograph: John Minihan
A POET STANDS in a pool of light on a darkened stage, addressing his people. It is an image as ancient as literature, the poet as prophet, as truth teller - revered yet often subject to dissent. It is 1996 and Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate, reads Mycenae Lookout, The Flight Path, Tollund, and other works from his ninth collection, The Spirit Level. Poem after poem read in that distinctive accented voice fills the auditorium of the Abbey Theatre; the familiar balance is there; memories evoking the snapshots that make up a life and with them, a salute to Joseph Brodsky and other elegies.Here is a poet revisiting his personal experience, the loves, the losses, while also acknowledging the horrors of his country's tragedy, a tribal conflict as old as is man's habit of using religion as an ugly cudgel. Heaney the artist has celebrated the beauty of the natural elemental world which shaped the farming life he was born into, but as he matured he became a chronicler. The private man yielded to the uneasy witness. Less imperious than Yeats, Heaney, from a different class, a different time, is equally committed to the idea of a poet's responsibility to his people, to the age in which he lives. His territory is familiar, though not without shifts and changes.
Seamus Heaney is ordinary, his story is not. As an artist he was blessed; quickly finding a voice, an audience and international fame. Readers felt the beauty of his traditional, memoir-based lyricism, its haunting vivid and physical grace. So consider the poet as a victim of his own enduring popularity. At home in an Ireland ever ready to snipe, his grumbling denouncers demanded easy rhetoric; but he remained deliberate, independent, no mouthpiece. He explores the centre, never the surface. A Heaney poem is heard as much as read. It is a cohesive experience. The most widely read living poet in the world speaks for himself and to his reader. His language, honed by the sprung rhythms of Hopkins and the sensibility of Frost, is both local and international. The knives were soon sharpened by those in Ireland who accused him of shunning his political duty. But the young pastoralist matured, side stepping two cultures, the country Catholic scholarship boy who attended Queen's, an English university forged in Protestant Belfast. Heaney has never evaded, he has always walked freely. The difference comes from his anger which has been tempered, increasingly rueful, never strident.
REWIND TIME: recreate a Saturday years ago, and a sixth-year English class setting off for a day of lectures. A lone fifth year went with them, me, chuffed at being included. A stocky man with a wonderful soft persuasive voice, messy hair and small benign eyes spoke about The Rape of the Lock. He set the scene; that Georgian tea party did indeed become the siege of Troy. For that fifth year it proved an unforgettable introduction to Seamus Heaney albeit as enthusiastic teacher, rather than as poet. The afternoon light was sharp; it showed up the dust in the lecture theatre. The heat in the room heightened the smell of school uniforms. Still no fly buzzed, no student whispered. Heaney, lively and inspiring, a kindly conspirator, then as now, always knew how to hold a gathering.
That lecture on Alexander Pope sent the lone fifth year rushing off to a book store, not in pursuit of Augustan poetry, but of Heaney's work. The gods must have intervened as a kindly bus conductor accepted an elaborate excuse featuring a lost wallet. The wallet was empty, not lost. No fare was paid that day, but copies of Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark and Wintering Out had been triumphantly stored inside my satchel. Half excited and half wary at such audacity, I wondered would I be able to grasp the meaning of the work. Would it prove elusive? It was a furtive act of daring. There would be no teacher, no exam, just a private adventure, an odyssey into a very specific experience of an Ireland that strangely enough was made accessible thanks to Heaney's mentors: Hopkins and Frost, as well as, of course, Kavanagh and Hughes, Thomas Hardy and John Clare.
Long years and many poems separate that Saturday excursion to a lecture and a bookshop from arrival at a house facing a beach, the sea just a distant line, to interview an older, wiser poet, by then a Nobel Laureate who had held posts at Oxford University and Harvard and received so many awards and honours. Intent not to confuse recognition and celebration with achievement Heaney is unaffected, shrewd, and canny. Not having much luck in locating biscuits, he made sandwiches, nothing fancy, a country man's sandwich stuffed with ham and cheese and enough butter to grease a channel swimmer. The clock ticked in the kitchen that could as easily have been in rural Co Derry instead of a better part of Dublin.
No, Heaney did not need to win the Nobel Prize. It has tested him; could the poet prove bigger than the honour? Time and again he has. Relentless demands for public appearances and commissions have interfered with his own writing, but he has been generous, available, too available for his own health. This artist with the secret of articulating the present and the past has served literature and his culture with a meticulous exactness that has always seemed thoughtful and natural in its expression. His clarity of meaning has increased our understanding. It is an immense contribution, an art which is as communal as it is sophisticated and simple.
From the beginning Heaney's singular empathy was established. He has never been drawn to the confessional; instead it has been the power of memory in forming a consciousness: the landmark moments such as being sent home from boarding school when a younger brother, Christopher, was killed mere yards from the family home.
...I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now.
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year
(from Mid-Term Break)
Many writers recall their coming to their art as if they had been personally summoned, selected by the Magi. Heaney has never been like that; he sees language as sound and meaning, the way a musician would. The key to his sensibility is his sensual response. Yet it was as if it were preordained. Within weeks of the death in France on January 28th, 1939, of one great Irish poet, WB Yeats, another one is born, on April 13th, at Mossbawn farm near Castledawson, Co Derry - and unlike Yeats, not to an artist father, but to a farmer who was never given to speaking all that much. Who says God has no sense of irony? That same irony was gleefully in play when the world knew Heaney had been honoured by a Stockholm committee while he wandered through Greece, Homer's landscape, the birthplace of poetry, oblivious to the prize and its burden awaiting him. Born in the year Yeats died, Heaney won the Nobel Prize 72 years after the earlier poet, a poet he did not read until he was in his 30s. The ironies multiply.
Flashback to Heaney's early days in a little farm house; he was the first of nine children. The first-born is a position of privilege, but it also brings with it something of an element of the experimental. New parents are suddenly joined by a third presence. In Mossbawn he records his first adventure: "I do not know what age I was when I got lost in the pea-drills in a field behind the house, but it is a half dream to me, and I've heard about it so often that I may even be imagining it. Yet, by now, I have imagined it so long and so often that I know what it is like: a green web, a caul of veined light, a tangle of rods and pods, stalks and tendrils, full of assuaging earth and leaf smell, a sunlit lair. I'm sitting as if just wakened from a winter sleep and gradually become aware of voices, coming closer, calling my name, and for no reason at all I have begun to weep."
The family farm of Mossbawn was his first home, he has immortalised its distinct light and life, the busy daily rituals such as making butter.
My mother took first turn, set up rhythms
that slugged and thumped for hours.
Arms ached.
Hands blistered.
Cheeks and clothes were spatteredwith flabby milk.
Where finally gold flecks began to dance.
(from Churning Day)
The farm is his earliest history. The son recalls his father working with a horse-plough, "His shoulders globed like a full sail strung/ Between the shafts and the furrow." In one of Heaney's earliest and most famous poems, Digging, he watches his father at work: "stooping in rhythm through potato drills" as his father before him would have done. But the young poet is aware, even then, that his destiny will follow a different course: "Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."
He was a clever boy, this was soon discovered at Anahorish school and off he went in time on scholarship to St Columb's in Derry city, where literature and Latin were his strengths. University, teaching and eventually, an international literary career beckoned - not the family farm. But the skills he had inherited remain part of him. When he moved to Glanmore in Co Wicklow, by then a husband, a father and a teacher, he impressed the locals by helpfully herding stray cattle he encountered on a narrow road. Old skills endure.
The collections appeared, the reputation grew. There are no shocking tales, no public, superstar tantrums. In 1986 he delivered a fascinating lecture to the RDS; it was entitled The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov's Cognac and a Knocker. In it he recalled his time lecturing at Queen's University: "Part of my function there was to convince students of the power and reality of poetry, and obviously the first World War was a wonderful example of a moment when poets functioned as effective and heroic figures in the life of their times. Owen was against the violence of war, against the massive sacrilegious waste of lives which it involved; he was a natural conscientious objector. And yet, when he actually drilled and led men to death, he was behaving in a way that contravened his personal conscience in order to achieve what he saw as a greater goal, namely the awakening of a general conscience. 'True poets must be truthful.'" Heaney, quoting Owen's comment, added another of the war poet's cautionary reflections: "All a poet can do today is warn." Acknowledging Owen's dilemma Heaney continued: "Owen therefore suffered the strain of performing what most people perceived to be their unquestionable patriotic duty in order to gain the right to question whether it was duty at all." A great writer makes a case for other great writers; Heaney always has, whether it is Owen, or John Clare, or Jan Kochanowski or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which he hailed as apocalyptic.
The classic poets of the English tradition were Heaney's first masters. He would begin to look further east and find kindred in the explosive genius of Joseph Brodsky and a true soulmate in the patriarchal figure of Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who had been born to half-Polish, half-Lithuanian parents in Szetejnie when it was part of Tsarist Russia. Milosz grew up in Vilnius, a melting pot of cultures. He tells his story, that of a Polish boy growing up on the Polish-Russian border, in his haunting autobiographical novel, The Issa Valley. It is a world Heaney understands, he made the pilgrimage to his friend's funeral in Krakow in 2004. It was a grand state occasion. Far more modest was the gathering that met in a tiny Leitrim church for the burial of John McGahern. Heaney sat quietly among the mourners, not as a Nobel Laureate with an oration to deliver, but as a grief stricken comrade in letters.
HIS MUSCULAR TRANSLATION of the 8th eight-century Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf was yet another contribution to literature. In it he balanced the formal and colloquial. His learning is assured and wide ranging, but his intellect always looks to his instinct. It was Seamus Heaney who championed the English translation of Beat Sterchi's powerful Swiss German novel, Blösch, he directed the reader to "the reek and frenzy of the yard-workers' world" and saw the tragedy of a favourite's undignified decline. As poet, teacher, critic, spokesman and as witness, Heaney, a most human and humane voice, has contributed to poetry and literature – to Ireland and the world. If initially not the most likely successor to Yeats as national poet, Heaney's art, robust graciousness and candour have brought honour to the task.
