Seamus Heaney

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Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear; Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved Vale to which, erelong, I was transplanted ... —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH , The Prelude He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians. — W. B. YEATS , Autobiographies 1. The Ministry of Fear for Seamus Deane Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived In important places. The lonely scarp Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted For six years, overlooked your Bogside. I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack, The throttle of the hare. In the first week I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat The biscuits left to sweeten my exile. I threw them over the fence one night In September 1951 When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road Were amber in the fog. It was an act Of stealth. Then Belfast, and then Berkeley. Here’s two on’s are sophisticated, Dabbling in verses till they have become A life: from bulky envelopes arriving In vacation time to slim volumes Despatched `with the author’s compliments’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine Of your exercise book, bewildered me— Vowels and ideas bandied free As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores. I tried to write about the sycamores And innovated a South Derry rhyme With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled. Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Were walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution. Have our accents Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak As well as students from the Protestant schools.’ Remember that stuff? Inferiority Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on. ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’ ‘Heaney, Father.’ ‘Fair Enough.’ On my first day, the leather strap Went epileptic in the Big Study, Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads, But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life Was not so bad, shying as usual. On long vacations, then, I came to life In the kissing seat of an Austin 16 Parked at a gable, the engine running, My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders, A light left burning for her in the kitchen. And heading back for home, the summer’s Freedom dwindling night by night, the air All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye: ‘What’s your name, driver?’ ‘Seamus ...’ Seamus? They once read my letters at a roadblock And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics, ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand. Ulster was British, but with no rights on The English lyric: all around us, though We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear. 2. A Constable Calls His bicycle stood at the window-sill, The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher Skirting the front mudguard, Its fat black handlegrips Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’ Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back, The pedal treads hanging relieved Of the boot of the law. His cap was upside down On the floor, next his chair. The line of its pressure ran like a bevel In his slightly sweating hair. He had unstrapped The heavy ledger, and my father Was making tillage returns In acres, roods, and perches. Arithmetic and fear. I sat staring at the polished holster With its buttoned flap, the braid cord Looped into the revolver butt. ‘Any other root crops? Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’ ‘No.’ But was there not a line Of turnips where the seed ran out In the potato field? I assumed Small guilts and sat Imagining the black hole in the barracks. He stood up, shifted the baton-case Farther round on his belt, Closed the domesday book, Fitted his cap back with two hands, And looked at me as he said goodbye. A shadow bobbed in the window. He was snapping the carrier spring Over the ledger. His boot pushed off And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked. 3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966 The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder Grossly there between his chin and his knees. He is raised up by what he buckles under. Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers Are granted passage through the nodding crowd, It is the drums preside, like giant tumours. To every cocked ear, expert in its greed, His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’. The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood. The air is pounding like a stethoscope. 4. Summer 1969 While the Constabulary covered the mob Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid. Each afternoon, in the casserole heat Of the flat, as I sweated my way through The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket Rose like the reek off a flax-dam. At night on the balcony, gules of wine, A sense of children in their dark corners, Old women in black shawls near open windows, The air a canyon rivering in Spanish. We talked our way home over starlit plains Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters. ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ Another conjured Lorca from his hill. We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports On the television, celebrities Arrived from where the real thing still happened. I retreated to the cool of the Prado. Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’ Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted And knapsacked military, the efficient Rake of the fusillade. In the next room, His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall— Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn Jewelled in the blood of his own children, Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips Over the world. Also, that holmgang Where two berserks club each other to death For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking. He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished The stained cape of his heart as history charged. 5. Fosterage for Michael McLaverty ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way. Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield—I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked

I returned to a long strand, the hammered curve of a bay, and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering. I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship’s swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight— it said Thor’s hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behind-backs of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood. It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.’

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying— He had always taken funerals in his stride— And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; 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.

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root. His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place. Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose? And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby, but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails, hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.

For Ann Saddlemyer, our heartiest welcomer I Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons, My ghosts come striding into their spring stations. The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows. II Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch— ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’ Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain Remembered what the mallet tapped to know. Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round. III This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake (So much, too much) consorted at twilight. It was all crepuscular and iambic. Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house, Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air) Were careful under larch and May-green spruce. I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to. Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts: ‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’ Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze Refreshes and relents. Is cadences. IV I used to lie with an ear to the line For that way, they said, there should come a sound Escaping ahead, an iron tune Of flange and piston pitched along the ground, But I never heard that. Always, instead, Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away Lifted over the woods. The head Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear. Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook Silently across our drinking water (As they are shaking now across my heart) And vanished into where they seemed to start. V Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older. And elderberry I have learned to call it. I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal, Its berries a swart caviar of shot, A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple. Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine. Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ And felt another’s texture quick on mine. So, etymologist of roots and graftings, I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush. VI He lived there in the unsayable lights. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights. ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over With perfect mist and peaceful absences’— Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice And raced his bike across the Moyola River. A man we never saw. But in that winter Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow Kept the country bright as a studio, In a cold where things might crystallize or founder, His story quickened us, a wild white goose Heard after dark above the drifted house. VII 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. VIII Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops At body heat and lush with omen Spattering dark on the hatchet iron. This morning when a magpie with jerky steps Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood I thought of dew on armour and carrion. What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road? How deep into the woodpile sat the toad? What welters through this dark hush on the crops? Do you remember that pension in Les Landes Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked A mongol in her lap, to little songs? Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking. My all of you birchwood in lightning. IX Outside the kitchen window a black rat Sways on the briar like infected fruit: ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not Imagining things. Go you out to it.’ Did we come to the wilderness for this? We have our burnished bay tree at the gate, Classical, hung with the reek of silage From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit. Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay, Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing— What is my apology for poetry? The empty briar is swishing When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass. X I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal On turf banks under blankets, with our faces Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle, Pallid as the dripping sapling birches. Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate. Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found. Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out Like breathing effigies on a raised ground. And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?— Our first night years ago in that hotel When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us towards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our separateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst, into nimble Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and hammer angled right. The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black. 1 A cobble thrown a hundred years ago Keeps coming at me, the first stone Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow. The pony jerks and the riot's on. She's crouched low in the trap Running the gauntlet that first Sunday Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop. He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!' Call her 'The Convert'. 'The Exogamous Bride'. Anyhow, it is a genre piece Inherited on my mother's side And mine to dispose with now she's gone. Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone. 2 Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone. The china cups were very white and big— An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug. The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone Were present and correct. In case it run, The butter must be kept out of the sun. And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair. Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir. It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?' And they sit down in the shining room together. 3 When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the whole rest of our lives. 4 Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words 'beyond her'.Bertold Brek. She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary. With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay. 5 The cool that came off sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks. 6 In the first flush of the Easter holidays The ceremonies during Holy Week Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase. The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next To each other up there near the front Of the packed church, we would follow the text And rubrics for the blessing of the font. As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. . . Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on. The water mixed with chrism and with oil. Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride: Day and night my tears have been my bread. 7 In the last minutes he said more to her Almost than in all their life together. 'You'll be in New Row on Monday night And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?' His head was bent down to her propped-up head. She could not hear but we were overjoyed. He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open. High cries were felled and a pure change happened. 8 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 become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations I He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole-kept breadwinner dole-kept breadwinner A person who brings in money through "dole": financial help or welfare from the state. But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling sidling Not calling attention to one’s self, unobtrusive tact, His fisherman’s quick eye And turned observant back. Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug tobacco plug “Tobacco pressed into a flat oblong cake or stick” (OED), which needs to be cut up and separated before smoking And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals Provisionals In 1969 the IRA (Irish Republican Army) split into two groups: the “provisionals” and the “officials”: “At the Army Convention of 1969 the militarists broke away over the issue of abstention and formed the provisional IRA, which became the dominant grouping, while the remainder became known as the officials” . But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry. PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, / BOGSIDE NIL “Paras” is short for “Parachute Regiment.” According to A New Dictionary of Irish History from 1800, “On 30 January 1972 thirteen people were shot dead and seventeen injured within thirty minutes by British soldiers of the Parachute Regiment in the Bogside area of Derry” , BOGSIDE NIL PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, / BOGSIDE NIL “Paras” is short for “Parachute Regiment.” According to A New Dictionary of Irish History from 1800, “On 30 January 1972 thirteen people were shot dead and seventeen injured within thirty minutes by British soldiers of the Parachute Regiment in the Bogside area of Derry” . That Wednesday Everyone held His breath and trembled. II It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown surplice and soutane surplice and soutane A priest’s garments, the loose vestment (surplice) over the close-fitting one (soutane); by association, a priest : Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring. But he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved. I see him as he turned In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash. He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe’s complicity? ‘Now, you’re supposed to be An educated man,’ I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me The right answer to that one.’ III I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling Shoaling Crowding and moving together as a group, like schools of fish out of his lane To the respectable Purring of the hearse... They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine, The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat, The Screw purling Screw purling “Screw” is short for “screw propeller;” “purling” describes the motion of the propeller and swirling water , turning Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise Dispraise Opposite of praise, disparage, make little of the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond... Dawn-sniffing revenant revenant In Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, Heaney described a fishing trip with Louis O’Neill and another person using this word: “The shine of morning light on the lough had an otherworldly quality, it reminded me of the dawn scene in Hamlet, when the ghost fades on the crowing of the cock – so in ‘Casualty’ Louis then turns into a ‘dawn-sniffing revenant’” , Plodder Plodder “One who works slowly and laboriously; a persevering toiler, a drudge” (Century Dictionary) through midnight rain, Question me again.