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The shadow-hinge swings unpredictably and the light's blanked out
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.
no subject
I did stick with Opened Ground--with few exceptions I read poetry proselike, even Paradise Lost's enjambments, unless I really make myself slow down--but it was still a revelation. Met him once briefly when he came to speak and, afterwards, swept up the nearby grad students and tried to take us to a pub, only to be told that he had another engagement that'd slipped his mind. The attempt was the sweeter because he'd meant to be kind to a certain professor's students and had thought us to be them; the prof didn't have thesis students at that point, though we'd certainly taken classes from him.
no subject
May he journey well, with his lantern.
Nine
no subject
He wrote a good underworld. I imagine he will.
no subject
A couple of years ago, I was coming into the Lit & Phil as a group was coming out, and one among 'em was m'friend Sean O'Brien; and he said "Chaz, how are you doing? Do you know Seamus...?"
And no, I didn't; but he'd been one of my touchstones for thirty years or more, and I got to shake his hand and swap a word or two. He seemed tiny, and tired, a little frail and utterly charming.
no subject
I'm glad you have that memory of him.
no subject
All that falls will rise again, and all that, but damn.
no subject
I wasn't used to living poets for years! It wasn't that I thought you had to be dead to be one; I just read everyone in Latin and the nineteenth, mid-twentieth century at best. And now that I have them walking in the world all around me, it's very strange when they go away.
no subject
I much appreciate your thoughts, and the reminder of "The Haw Lantern" as well.
I signed the book of condolences for Séamus Heaney last night in New York--I'd thought it would be long since packed away and sent across the ocean, but I was in my old department building and went upstairs to the gents' because the one belowstairs was in use, and there it was. I'd not intended to write in Irish, but by the time I realised I was I'd already written a sentence and a half, so I kept on with it. He appreciated the language, so I expect he'll understand, and someday in the future I suppose this will show some scholar or other that Ulster dialect was used in Greater New York during the first quarter of the century. I did sign my legal name, rather than the Irish form I sometimes use.
*Speaking of which, at some point I'll have to ask you about the etiquette of leaving stones on graves.