Essay: Tomas Unger

Tomas Unger lives and works in New York. His poetry has appeared in the Threepenny Review.

 

LISTENING NOW AGAIN: ON SEAMUS HEANEY

It is now two years since Seamus Heaney died. To certain of his younger readers—say, those who might have discovered “Digging” in a high school class, and gone further, until they couldn’t “remember never having known” the ground this poet opened, and made familiar, and made loved—this loss was the first of its kind. It is all too easy to say that the death of a poet should change nothing about his poems and the relationship his readers have to them; that, if anything, such a poet’s persistence in living voice brings into focus the final insignificance of his being among us. The person (we are meant, on this argument, to realize) was never the source of the poems’ power.

Nobody who has read his Heaney could accept this account, with its denial of just the sorts of human nuances to which the poet strove, with such tough-minded tenderness, to sensitize us. Auden’s great elegy on Yeats, naturally much quoted in the weeks after Heaney’s death, presses forward the somewhat mournful faith that the poet “became his admirers,” but to say so risks eliding the complex negotiations that continue to occur between the remembering and the remembered, the admiring and the admired. The latter, we may well feel, becomes only and ever himself, continuing to possess the memory with perfect autonomy. Who better prepared us to recognize and even celebrate this condition—of simultaneous apartness and possession, of a held silence we can almost believe bespeaks connection—than Heaney himself, at the close of the sequence “Clearances,” written in memory of his mother:

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush became a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for

“O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?”: so Heaney’s great predecessor, toward the close of “Among School Children.” Yeats’s aim there was to make us feel with unaccustomed force the unanswerability of his question; it was to show us the folly of attending to anything less than the totality of whatever great blossomers and dancers come before us. How perfectly like Heaney, then, that at a moment of equally visionary reverie, he should manage—in pointed defiance of Yeats’s example—to grant some portion of his prayerful attention to the actual, and to hold in mind that single “coeval / Chestnut from a jam jar,” a small thing of this earth that disappeared (“deep-planted and long gone”) in giving rise to the decked tree, just as now that tree has disappeared in giving rise to something much richer than absence.

Heaney was brave enough to risk the word “soul”—and great enough to make us believe it—but he makes no show of consoling himself or his reader in the face of grievous, still grievous, loss. Nowhere is this more clear than in the heartbreaking way that penultimate line goes on: “forever / Silent.” A mournfully attached humanity has intruded, as if to silence once and for all the claims of transcendence. And yet such is his own greatness of soul that Heaney finds, “beyond silence” itself, that greatest of stays against despair: something to listen for.

“Listen now again”: whether at the close of the first poem in The Spirit Level, perhaps Heaney’s greatest individual collection, or elsewhere, the poet was always telling us to listen—and giving us cause to. Unusual for a poet whose work lacks exactly nothing for life on the page, the “voice” of this poet—perhaps more so than with any other writer in recent memory—seems entirely bound up with the voice of the man. Tenderness, richness, plainness, earnest force: press your ear to the closed door of a Heaney reading (to revise Frost’s discussion of so-called sentence-sounds) and odds are you still would have managed to hear these things. Not for nothing does the radio figure prominently in Heaney’s celebrated Nobel lecture. It was this herald of electric modernity, entering the self-described “den-life” of the Heaney family in rural Ireland, that gave young Seamus an education in the myriad fascinations of the human voice. He writes of thrilling to place-names intoned with easy gravity by BBC announcers, at a time when such joy could still go unshadowed by mature political awareness. But if Heaney’s listening necessarily became “more deliberate” in time, this is not to say it ever became less enchanted. The entirely grown-up Heaney of, say, “The Glanmore Sonnets” is every bit kin to the boy of the Nobel address, no less attuned to the claims of the sonorous. True to his former self, he finds cause for poetry in the simple forecast uttered by some radioed teller of weather. Few poems take such joy in—and so irresistibly invite—recitation. What other excuse does this poem make for its existence? What other excuse does it need to?

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

“I said out loud”: this is Heaney to the life, equal parts unembarassable rapture and gentle self-satire. Heaney wrote elsewhere of his father’s “old disdain of sweet talk and excuses” (and, so too, of the “fear of inadequacy” that led his mother to willfully “mispronounce words beyond her.”) It is just possible to detect here an inherited note of discomfort at the level of preciousness or affectation that might lead us to luxuriate in the recitation of the odd word for the benefit of no one but ourselves. And yet, and yet—this is the same Heaney who was always quoting, and never less than approvingly, Frost’s line in “Birches” about filling a cup “to the brim, and even above the brim.” Heaney saw Frost’s simple figure of joy-in-excess as capturing something central about the appeal of poetry. Perhaps we could say, then, that just as he tells his sons in one of his best known poems to stand in for him and take the earthly strain for which they were born (“A Kite for Michael and Christopher”), here he charges his readers to take upon themselves his selfsame joy in recitation. Especially with the poet gone, to say “I said out loud” out loud is to have the plainly mysterious sense of becoming a stand-in for Heaney’s Anyman. He has put only two words in quotes, but how can we not hear him saying the whole poem aloud to the end, the words of that last rapt list deepening and clearing in their own right? We say them with him. The whole poem might be read as Heaney’s way of making us know that we ourselves were born fit for such joy as he felt.

It was always Heaney’s way, besides, to take only the most selfless delight in the sheer fact of saying or song. Again and again, and once in these very words, he’d come in with a “raise it again, man,” a winningly unaffected variation on Yeats’s own injunction to Irish poets as he neared his end: “Sing whatever is well made.” To return now to such moments of un-self-assuming delight in other singers, and other song, is to find an air of valediction the poems hadn’t known they possessed. “Strange,” Heaney wrote, “how things in the offing, once they’re sensed, / Convert to things foreknown.” The sense of a kind of fond and sad foreknowing seems nowhere more invited an imposition than in “At the Wellhead.” It is hard now to read Heaney’s deeply felt tribute—written in love of his wife, in memory of a neighbor, and in contemplation of the art all three, in the broadest sense, humanly share—and not to read it as some kind of goodbye. To do so is of course to read against both conscious intent and chronology; the poem, after all, appears in a late but not a last collection. But the Heaney who played so masterfully with tensile shifts within individual poems; who celebrated poetry for its capacity to muddy temporal sequence, turning “time up and over”; and who, toward the end, invoked that moment in the “Four Quartets” in which Eliot sees the past “transfigured, in another pattern”— this Heaney would seem pretty steadfastly to open his own work up to anti-chronological readings. To revisit “At the Wellhead” is to find that Heaney’s death, changing exactly nothing about the poems, has changed them utterly:

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
As you always do, are like a local road
We’ve known every turn of in the past —
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood
Looking and listening until a car
Would come and go and leave you lonelier
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour
Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.
Her notes came out to us like hoisted water
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead
Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician
Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.
Night water glittering in the light of day.
But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.
She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille
In books like books wallpaper patterns come in.
Her hands were active and her eyes were full
Of open darkness and a watery shine.

She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’
Whoever or whatever. Being with her
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure
You didn’t notice happening. When I read
A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,
‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’

In the almost mournful case it makes for the ungainsayable apartness that attends artistic making—for the way artistic expression at once transcendently manifests and tragically effaces personal presence—the poem beautifully engages the question of the poet and the person. “Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran”: Heaney’s wife, as if cast among the inspired blind, is by her singing carried away from the world of immediate human intimacies to the very source of song. For all the undeniable triumph of this transformation, she is—by just such means, and like the neighbor in whose company Heaney comes to see her—“cut off” (again, the phrase evokes Milton). It is the impression of this ineluctable distance that inspires, we sense, just the determined tenderness of Heaney’s address, repeated dears and all. And how has Heaney’s death changed the poem? A limitless spiritual distance is made literal, final: who but Heaney himself does his wife seem, now, to wait for? A sort of prophetic melancholy seems to underlie the assurance that a car, any and every car, “would come and go and leave you lonelier / than you had been to begin with.” By such slight-absolute transformations as death effects, would has become will.

If I’ve suggested that in the case of the sonnet from “Clearances,” this dread alertness to the final isolation of consciousness is counterbalanced by a visionary sense of undiminished connection, the same is true here. Here the sense of connection arises not only from Heaney’s living tenderness toward his wife and, in turn, his sometime neighbor, but also from the Frostian feats of association by which his poem extends itself—out past the initial object of its attention and (so too) out to its audience. The figure of Marie Heaney ravels out to and reveals that of Rosie Keenan; through Keenan we come to the bottomless well of Heaney’s whole poetry—and to the lived supra-reality, the brightness visible, it engenders for all readers; but engenders, perhaps most concretely and poignantly, in the case of Keenan. The poem Heaney remembers reading to her can be none other than the lesser known but more bewitching of his early ars poeticas, “Personal Helicon”:

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

[…]

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

To follow “At the Wellhead” out and back to “Personal Helicon” is to arrive less at an end than a beginning. It is to know the first poem for the first time. It is to realize only more fully that that final note of neighborly deference from Heaney—his hushed, awkward, but finally awed respect for the way in which such everyday utterance as his poetry elicits might prove equal to, and in time take its place within, that very poetry—is at the same time an assertion of continued poetic presence, of Heaney’s “being here for good in every sense.” Even his acts of listening set themselves somehow echoing, turn to speech.

No one has ever been under the illusion that great poets make good neighbors. So is it only some obscure sentimentality that compels us to feel that Heaney was “also just” ours? There are vanishingly rare “withdrawn musicians” whose voices we go on knowing. Almost none who—by that unalienating majesty which calls us, through the wave cry and the wind cry, back to poetry—seem to know us by our own.