I slept in broken stages and woke to find one of my favorite poets has died: Seamus Heaney.
He may very well have been the first living poet I followed. Certainly he's the first whose collections I remember buying, starting with The Haw Lantern (1987) for its title poem. It was my first week at Brandeis; I found his Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 in the university bookstore, skimmed a few pages and was seized. I didn't buy it: I used it as a guide as I tracked down the original collections in used copies and then the new ones as they came out. I brought Electric Light (2001) straight home from the Harvard Coop to my Brandeis class on Vergil because of the "Bann Valley Eclogue" and "Glanmore Eclogue," a pair of classical shout-outs assimilating the Latin poet into Irish history and Heaney's own family's future. (That paper was my writing sample for Yale. I'd forgotten until now.) When I TA'd a course on the Odyssey at Yale, I used Bloomsday as an excuse to introduce Station Island (1984) into the curriculum: coming last in a procession of ghosts from the poet's past and Ireland's, James Joyce stands like Vergil in Heaney's Inferno, Teiresias at the end of the νέκυια. (That was a lecture, so I never sent it anywhere.) For ventriloquizing the dead, though, I might have loved best his poems of bog bodies, collected in North (1975). Beautiful, unsettling, as curious and bone-conscious as archaeology. Years later, it turned out I'd heard an excerpt from one of them at the Museum of Science in 1994. And seems to weep the black river of himself . . . It scared me at the time.
Of course he was an influence. He thought about words the same way I did: the weight of them as much as their sound, their tactile values and heft in the hand, their testing on teeth and tongue. I bought his Sweeney Astray (1983) for the way he wrote about trees. I loved his autumn and his ocean, his smells of salt and ground. He might be one of the reasons I started to write poetry that first winter at Brandeis, along with T.S. Eliot and his terrible juvenilia—I know I can trace his past participles in some of my early work. I never read much of his prose, or his translations. Both of his versions of classical plays failed for me.
He diffused for me as he got older; I liked him best when he wrote about things themselves, not their abstractions. I return most often to North through The Haw Lantern, the poems that touch bone as well as evocation. There was still, in every collection, even Human Chain (2010), something where I'd think all right, that's the price of admission right there. When I inherited a bunch of old issues of Persephone, I kept the one with the "Sonnet from Hellas" that hadn't been reprinted in Electric Light. I would have liked to see another collection from him, just to find out what that one thing in it worth keeping was.
Failing that, I can finish the poem I was working on last night before I had to sleep. It will not be because of him, any more than it will be because of Yeats or H.D. or Le Guin or Catullus or Rika Lesser, but it won't be entirely separate, either. Everyone figures out how to be a poet from their own conversations in the underworld, sometimes with people who are very much alive. Then they're not. You come aboveground. When you look back over your shoulder, they're where you left them, not fading into anything except their own words.
The Haw Lantern
The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.
But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.
He may very well have been the first living poet I followed. Certainly he's the first whose collections I remember buying, starting with The Haw Lantern (1987) for its title poem. It was my first week at Brandeis; I found his Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 in the university bookstore, skimmed a few pages and was seized. I didn't buy it: I used it as a guide as I tracked down the original collections in used copies and then the new ones as they came out. I brought Electric Light (2001) straight home from the Harvard Coop to my Brandeis class on Vergil because of the "Bann Valley Eclogue" and "Glanmore Eclogue," a pair of classical shout-outs assimilating the Latin poet into Irish history and Heaney's own family's future. (That paper was my writing sample for Yale. I'd forgotten until now.) When I TA'd a course on the Odyssey at Yale, I used Bloomsday as an excuse to introduce Station Island (1984) into the curriculum: coming last in a procession of ghosts from the poet's past and Ireland's, James Joyce stands like Vergil in Heaney's Inferno, Teiresias at the end of the νέκυια. (That was a lecture, so I never sent it anywhere.) For ventriloquizing the dead, though, I might have loved best his poems of bog bodies, collected in North (1975). Beautiful, unsettling, as curious and bone-conscious as archaeology. Years later, it turned out I'd heard an excerpt from one of them at the Museum of Science in 1994. And seems to weep the black river of himself . . . It scared me at the time.
Of course he was an influence. He thought about words the same way I did: the weight of them as much as their sound, their tactile values and heft in the hand, their testing on teeth and tongue. I bought his Sweeney Astray (1983) for the way he wrote about trees. I loved his autumn and his ocean, his smells of salt and ground. He might be one of the reasons I started to write poetry that first winter at Brandeis, along with T.S. Eliot and his terrible juvenilia—I know I can trace his past participles in some of my early work. I never read much of his prose, or his translations. Both of his versions of classical plays failed for me.
He diffused for me as he got older; I liked him best when he wrote about things themselves, not their abstractions. I return most often to North through The Haw Lantern, the poems that touch bone as well as evocation. There was still, in every collection, even Human Chain (2010), something where I'd think all right, that's the price of admission right there. When I inherited a bunch of old issues of Persephone, I kept the one with the "Sonnet from Hellas" that hadn't been reprinted in Electric Light. I would have liked to see another collection from him, just to find out what that one thing in it worth keeping was.
Failing that, I can finish the poem I was working on last night before I had to sleep. It will not be because of him, any more than it will be because of Yeats or H.D. or Le Guin or Catullus or Rika Lesser, but it won't be entirely separate, either. Everyone figures out how to be a poet from their own conversations in the underworld, sometimes with people who are very much alive. Then they're not. You come aboveground. When you look back over your shoulder, they're where you left them, not fading into anything except their own words.
The Haw Lantern
The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.
But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}