Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
What caused Wordsworth to proclaim of the sonnets: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet”)? Or led Emerson to proclaim “Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?” (quoted in Schoenbaum, 314)? While scholars have frequently inveighed against this view, the identification of the speaker of the sonnets with Shakespeare himself recurs time and again—it rallies legions of South Hamptonians against Pembrokians and transforms the identities of “Mr. W.H.,” “the rival poet” and “dark lady” into the literary equivalent of King Tut’s tomb. And yet, as scholars frequently point out, we have no firm external evidence linking Shakespeare to the speaker—and the poems themselves appear consciously stripped of external markers. The identification arises then from something within the text itself—a set of persuasive “reality effects” that demand critical attention, whether built in by Shakespeare to create the illusion of a real speaker, the result of speaking from personal experience, or some mix of the two. In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler argues, “No sufficient description exists in the critical literature of how Shakespeare makes his speaker “real” (18). I agree and hope to shed light on some of the ways in which the sonnets create a speaker who feels “real”.
Vendler surveys several of the sequence’s reality effects in a section worth repeating. She lists: Temporal (the formation of several “’panels’ of time” that imply the speaker’s continued existence and memory), Emotional (the use of “sharply conflicting moods with respect to the same topic” (19)), Semantic (the deft switching between “compartments of discourse” like economics, theology, and medicine (19)), Conceptual (the inclusion of “many incompatible models of existence… even within the same poem” (20)), Philosophical (in which the speaker rejects “received ideas” (20) and cultural norms), Perceptual (the consistent grounding of abstractions in real, perceptible things), and Dramatic (in which the speaker responds to an antagonist and states their position using indirect discourse (21)). Yet Vendler has left out a vital reality effect that has bewitched and bewildered readers: Aporia. Aporia, from the Greek “aporos” meaning “without passage,” is a constant presence in a text without a clean narrative trail. Yet the holes and irresolvable riddles of the sonnets, far from rendering the text alien or incomprehensible, create the sense of a speaker living outside of the text.
The text is riddled with Aporia—and they provoke a litany of questions. What are we to make of the ‘procreation sonnets’ and their sense of difference from the rest of the sequence? How do we account for the poetically-inferior, octosyllabic sonnet 145, or its apparent play on Anne Hathaway’s name in the last two lines? Or the inclusion of sonnet 146—the only sonnet unambiguously religious and lacking a love object? How to explain sonnets 153 and 154, which end the sequence with an elaboration on a six-line epigram by Marianus Scholasticus? At least sonnet 20, a site of endless contestation, has a sense of in-placeness—something of the glad fit of jigsaw piece—which these other sonnets lack. We will examine the problematic poems in greater detail and attempt to answer how they create the sense of a “real” speaker.
The ‘procreation’ or ‘marriage sonnets’, 1 through 17, form a unit that feels substantially different from the ensuing sequence. Their repetition of the argument for procreation, their reliance on rhetorical flourish, and their rebuttal by later sonnets offering art as an alternative avenue for immortality suggest that the poem are commissioned or extrinsically motivated in some way. The sense of an economic or social motive for the poems outside of the text creates the appearance that the speaker exists outside the text as well. He engages in an economic or social context outside and unmentioned by the poems that we must intuit, as we must intuit him. The compositional structure of the ‘procreation sonnets’ also suggests a real speaker. Vendler argues that the first sonnet serves as an index: “Such a wide sweep [of key words and themes in sonnet 1] leads me to think that the sonnet may have been deliberately composed late, as a “preface” to the others. The sonnet can be seen, in sum, as an index to the rest of the sonnets” (47). Even if we take only the first two lines: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,” we encounter intertwined themes of beauty and fairness, the speaker’s attachment to and privileging of beauty, and the axiomatic need for “increase”. We also encounter the image of the rose. The poem, then, appears to be written after the others and inserted to prepare us for what is next. If we accept Vendler’s argument, then the narrator is not tied within the sequence, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, but above it. The sequence does not imply a speaker so much as it does a poet sensitive to its needs, fortifying it in some areas, rearranging in others.
Sonnet 145 is contentious. Critics have argued that Shakespeare did not write it, or that even if he did it does not belong in the sequence (Booth, 500-1). More recent criticism contends that it is an early work, suggested by its stylistic weakness and its play on Anne Hathaway’s name in the couplet: “I hate, from hate away she threw / And saved my life saying not you” (lines 13-14) (italics mine) (Gurr, 223). The poem is one of the few to tie the speaker to the real-world Shakespeare, complicating the concept of a completely independent speaker. The poem is also clearly novice work; for instance the final quatrain, the most consciously poetic:
I hate she altered with an end,
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heav’n to hell is flown away. (lines 9-12)
The night to day simile falls flat and mixing the metaphor with the “fiend” does not quicken the image. The poem’s threefold repetition of “I hate” also creates the sense that it won’t arrive. Where the speaker later packs three concepts of the human experience of time into three quatrains (see sonnet 60), this poem struggles to complete a sentence. As Gurr suggests, “It is an anemic poem” (222). Yet, remarkably, the inconsistent quality creates a more realistic speaker—one who has early poems—creating the sense of temporality and progress not only in the narrative of the sequence but in the development of the poet. We begin to see that “reality” arises when the distance between the speaker and the poems widens—as Seamus Heaney once wrote, there is “distance in his head” (Heaney, “St. Kevin and the Blackbird). A sequence gives the poet the rare ability to create an expectation, such as the regularity in quality, tone, form, and content in sonnets 18 to 125, and then disturb that expectation as the poet does again in sonnet 146.
Sonnet 146 strikes at a tangent. The poem lands on the discussion of love and earthly beauty firmly like a blow:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
. . . . . . . . these rebel pow’rs that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store:
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
The poem jets out of orbit of the “sweet boy”, the “dark mistress”, beauty, and the rose, threatening to leave behind all those “hours of dross” for spiritual concerns. The poem demonstrates a flexibility and diversity of thought, similar to Vendler’s idea of the Conceptual effect. It also departs from the concerns of the sequence, unlike other model sequences. In Astrophil and Stella, Stella functions as the locus point of every poem—the title promises as much—and the sequence progresses through an orderly, if vague, narrative.[1] In contrast, 146 flares out from the sequence, leaving behind homes of all sorts: the body, the mansion, and the earth, while leveling them all through simile. Even while it rebukes the body, the poem still locates the speaker within it—this consciousness of the speaker’s life inside a body reinforces the sense of his corporeality and reality. The poem succeeds in granting the speaker a physical and spiritual depth—one that is arguably undermined in the final two sonnets.
Sonnets 153 and 154 create, perhaps, the most striking Aporia reality effect. They signal an abrupt shift in tone and register from the ringing condemnation of the ‘dark lady’ at the end of 152: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie” (13-14). Sonnet 153 appears oblivious of the preceding poem and launches right into an extension of a Greek epigram: “Cupid laid by his brand, and fell asleep; / A maid of Dian’s this advantage found” (153.1-2). Critics have sought both to discredit the poem and remove it from the sequence (Booth, 533) and more recently to link the poem to the sequence and explain its presence. Booth elaborates the bawdy references and the suggestions of venereal disease (“a seething bath which yet men prove / Against strange maladies a sovereign cure” (153.7-8)), which figure earlier in the ‘dark lady’ sequence, for example the couplet of 141: “Only my plague thus far I count my gain, / That she that makes me sin, awards me pain” (13-14). The two poems certainly carry forward themes and concerns of the earlier poems and this seems enough to merit and describe their inclusion for Booth. Burrow attempts to explain the shift by comparing it to other sonnet sequences with similar moments: an Ode in Daniel’s Delia, an anacreontic ode in Barnfield’s Cynthia (1595), and the ‘Anacreontics’ in Spenser’s Amoretti (Burrow, 686). In the other sequences, the odes or anacreontics are labeled and set apart, much like a curtain during intermission, while in Shakespeare’s Sonnets there go undifferentiated. Similar shifts in contemporary sonnet sequences render the decision a little less perplexing intellectually, but it makes it no less jarring as a reader, nor does it detract from the Aporia effect. If anything, we imagine a speaker engaged with contemporary poetry, again existing outside the text. Vendler, in contrast, appears unfazed by the shift:
The very triviality and ancientness of these little myths… cool down the deep oaths of the rhetorically fevered lyric poems. The representative mythical I of 153 and 154 is far from the historical dramatis persona who could urge the young man to get a son, or could watch a woman playing the virginals. Comic distance is thereby gained on the realm of Eros and even on its enem, Diana. The poems de-Christianize the sequence. (649)
Vendler’s argument for the separate I of the final two poems is precise and correct. The poems do not sustain a consistent I—we are forced to imagine the speaker outside of the text as a poet and arranger detached from the “mythical I”. This notion is uncomfortable—we would rather not distinguish between Shakespeare and the poet implied by the text, yet to miss the distinction is mental sloth, wish fulfilment, or poor scholarship. As for Vendler’s explination of the final two poems as an attempt to “de-Christianize the sequence” (649), the wry tone undermines the Greek gods as much as it does the “deep oaths”—Cupid cannot stop “the ending doom” (55.12). The final two sonnets exist to display the poet’s range and end on a witty note. They might also signal the speaker’s independence and battle with venereal disease.
We are left with outlines. The text generates a figure outside of itself—the figure of an author: one who who can navigate and fill the sequence; who has developed as a poet over time; who lives in a body and frets for his soul; and who can create new speakers. It is no wonder then that countless critics have choosen to scribble the name Shakespeare between the outlines of that figure. Yet I believe a more conscientous path of criticism is available. Once we recognize how the sonnets create the figure of the author, we can begin to ask who that figure is free from the endless, distracting battles of Shakespearian biography. We can free the Sonnets from that burden. We can free ourselves from the constant, guilty practice of remaking Shakespeare in our own image.s
Works Cited
Gurr, Andrew. “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145.” Willyshakes.com. reprinted from Essays in Criticism, 21 (1971), 221-6. Web. 28 January 2010.
Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Place, 1977. Print.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.
Wordsworth, William. “Scorn Not the Sonnet.” Wordsworth, William. 1888. Complete Poetical Works. Bartleby.com. n.d. Web. 30 January 2010.
Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives: New Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.
[1] The one interesting moment that I would term an
Aporia reality effect occurs in the eighth song in which the narrator switches from 3
rd to 1
st person. There is no easy explination, and thus, it feels human, the
I attracts greater depth.
Posted: August 6th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Heaney, Ireland, My Best Work, Poetic Criticism, yeats | 1 Comment »
I wrote the following essay during a month in Ireland with support from a James W. Meyer Grant and under the supervision of Professor Jay Parini. Thank you to everyone who made this project possible.
Yeats has his Tower; Heaney his bog and birthplace: Mossbawn. The places have expanded with their writing beyond the boundaries of a physical site. The spaces are now multitudinous, functioning simultaneously, uneasily, almost combustibly as literary symbol and real-world place. Yeats and Heaney also define these places to define themselves and it is thus useful to view and examine them in order to understand the poets themselves.
The words themselves reveal something of the poets, and their different stylistic concerns. “Tower,” wears its distinguished roots like robes: the Latin turris, the old English torr, the old French tour; it is fastidiously European.[1] “Tower” demands enunciation, elocution, much like the formal, metrical march of Yeats’s poetry. “Bog” is a word with give, with roots deep in Irish and Scottish Gaelic: bogach, from bog meaning soft.[2] Time has left the word virtually unchanged, just as Heaney’s poetry seeks to save and elegize. Beyond the texture and history of the words, there also exists a relationship between the poet’s chosen symbol and the poet’s style. Yeats’s poetry is strict, formal, with lines interlocking like bricks, an occasional ray of visionary light passing through the windows. Heaney’s poetry absorbs its surrounding influences, the many testaments of violence and grace, and carefully preserves them. Yet despite the history-tamped ground, the bog retains its shape and self-effacing surface; the language is always Heaney’s own; the poem typically hiding something deep. I would like to compare the two master poets, their places and symbols, and supplement their vision of place with the work of other Irish poets. I will also briefly foray into my experience at Thoor Ballylee and Mossbawn in my attempts to wrest poetry from place and place from poetry. Does poetry arise out of a place or does it create a sense of place? Which direction does the meaning move?
I would like to begin, like so much Anglo-Irish poetic criticism, with Thoor Ballylee, as it reflects my experience with place and poem in Ireland. Yeats’s poems provided my first conduit to the Tower:
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground[3]
I wished to see if the Tower held its ground still; if the characters remained in the mind confronted by the letters etched in the metal. What does it mean to publish, “To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee,” intoning, “And may these characters remain / when all is ruin once again”[4]? The characters have moved from their place on the metal board to printed text and now to tourist websites. Which is most permanent? The characters are self-conscious of their own myth-making potential, but don’t bother to specify it they refer to themselves (“these characters”) or to the reproducible letters (“these characters”). In the poems, the Tower forms a locus of poetic activity; it is a space where the soul manifests itself and summons the self; it is a redoubt and political lookout post peering out over “that dead young soldier in his blood”[5]; it is a calling out place filled with the potential for echo and projection; and it is a complex symbol, one of Yeats’s “Befitting emblems of adversity”[6].
I took a sideways step towards the physical tower when, while visiting the National Library in Dublin, I came across a first edition of The Tower. Gold relief on the green cover projects an image of the restored Norman Tower and its thatched cottage, and then reflected in the water the tower rises up again upside down, moving into imagined space. Here stood the manifestation of many of Yeats’s poetic goals: to recreate a new world and new ways of seeing through art and to create symbols strong enough to bear the weight of their own reflection.
The final step was more personal—visiting the Tower itself, coming to grips with its stoniness, it’s invitation and inaccessibility. When I visited the Tower, it was closed for the winter. I was made conscious again of my status as outsider, an American trying to sense the connection between a poem and place given a substantial historical, cultural, social displacement. The places have clearly changed over time, the quickening of Celtic Tiger economic growth, and the commercialization and Travel-channelification of the Irish poetic tradition. As I looked into the river, I could make out the murky reflection of half the Tower, disturbed by current and raindrops. It was a far cry from the perfect green and gold reflection offered, even promised, by the cover of The Tower. No man ever stares in the same river twice, I thought. Yet while some of the image and reflection is lost or changed, I felt no sense of disappointment. I also had to wonder if Yeats’s himself could see the whole Tower reflected in the water, perhaps he knew some secret angle, or could look down from that great height, or perhaps the cover, like much of his poetry, sprung from the artistic imagination, his desire to form a tower as much from air and breath as from stone.
Richard Ellman suggests that the power of Yeats’s art arises in part from his willingness to question it.[7] It is Yeats’s special ability to move from despair and coming doom to glad grace all while retaining artistic command. Consider the last two stanzas of “A Dialogue of Soul and Self,” which move from life as “A blind man battering blind men,” to the assertion, “We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest.”[8] Or his undercutting of the Tower in “Blood and Moon,”: “In mockery I have set / A powerful emblem up,”[9] only to reassert the Tower in the second section of the poem:
I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;
Yeats never quits questioning his emblems, yet he stands by them; he never loses his power to declare and poeticize. As the passage suggests, the Tower is also steeped in Yeats’s own hermeneutics: his theory of gyres, the rise and fall of civilization, the power of dream, vision, and word. The Tower then becomes a symbol with an affirmative, mystical force, one that can be relied on or summoned even after Yeats leaves it—he only inhabited the Tower on and off over nine years before old age and bad health took their toll. The poet, then, can access the Tower across space and time, a fact that attests to its existence as written space extending over and above its physical existence.
Heaney, too, must be approached on his turf: his thatched, farmland home of Mossbawn and the peaty Irish bog. Recalling Mossbawn, his place of birth, Heaney writes,
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.[10]
It is characteristically Heaney in its insistence on the real thing: pump, bucket, griddle, stove, his aunt’s busy hands. In Stepping Stones, Heaney calls the bread making “as much a rite as a job”[11] and he is well within the cave of ritual at this point. The pump is abstracted, grabbed and ratcheted further by Heaney in his essay “Mossbawn” where the word “omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world,” is repeated “until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door.”[12] A bucket of well water appears again in his Nobel acceptance speech—reverberating with the influences of the outside world, the radio, and the passing lorry.[13] Heaney and his poetry remain tied to his birthplace, yet despite the poem’s pastoral calmness, there are literary pyrotechnics as well: the sun is anthropomorphized as standing, then transformed into a griddle which we see “cooling / against the wall,” before the wall is transfigured in the magical absence between stanzas into “the wall // of each long afternoon.”
We sense that like that magical absence between stanzas, “the sunlit absence” of the first line has a part to play. Absence in Heaney’s poetry is always substantial. In his article, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh,” Heaney writes about a chestnut tree planted at the time of his birth and associated with him by his family. Later it is dug up, and still later, he imagines the space left behind as “a kind of luminous emptiness, a warp and waver of lights,” he writes, “I began to identify with that space just as years before I had identified with the young tree…It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a heavenly place.”[14]
It was an absence made familiar by my quest to find Mossbawn, using the map provided in Stepping Stones as my guide, yet while I do not doubt the validity of the dots, judging their exact distance proved difficult—was it one farm or the next? There were no signs or monuments. There was also the displacement of time—Heaney evokes an “ahistorical, presexual”[15] Mossbawn with thatched roof, and “no running water, no inside toilets.”[16] I saw modernity—paved road, a roadside littered with Kentucky Fried Chicken wrappers and modern farm equipment. Dennis O’Driscoll later told me that Heaney has not revisited Mossbawn since childhood, and I could see how he might fear that sense of loss and displacement.[17] Yet the place had not lost its charm, at least for an American used to agribusiness firms with the latest mega-machines trolling identical square plots. The plots were irregular, springing no doubt by a history of marriage, inheritance, and trade. Stone walls rose up to mark the “Terminus” of each field, fields that rose and fell with the land. It had its romance. And Heaney created an absence there too: the absence of the British soldier-interrogator, Sten gun leveled, the coal lorry chunking by, the water pump speaking its low music. Over the reality of the discarded wrappers, the traffic, was a reality imagined through Heaney’s verse. He was the scop weaving vision and history with his verse, creating the placeless heaven.
This sense of poetic absence, of coming up against the imagined in the real world, is corroborated by Padraic Fallon, an Irish poet born in Athenry fifteen miles from the Tower, in his poems about Yeats and the Tower. In his poem, “Yeats at Athenry Perhaps,” he imagines Yeats waiting for the train at Gort when he was still a “jerseyed fellow driving out the cows.”[18] Fallon defensively compares the medieval walls and towers around Athenry with Thoor Ballylee (“We had our tower too”). He repudiates and admires Yeats’s disregard for the parochial: “What would he think / Of our outcropping sheds, the architecture / Of the very necessary animal?” Yet ultimately Yeats is feather-footed, absent, rather than reading with Fallon, or touring the town’s walls with him, Fallon imagines Yeats:
No, he’d have sat down by the line and waited
Melting his bits of ore or watched the sky
Jolt from the saltmills of the Atlantic over
A town that died so often of the rain;
Why muddy a feathered foot when a great house waited
Over in Coole among the trees.
Fallon imagines Yeats as an absence, retreating into his poetry, “his bits of ore.” Yet his poetic persona is so strong that it can be summoned back, viewed, interrogated. Yeats once said himself, “After a person dies he does not realize that he is dead.”[19] Yeats creates a placeless persona, allowing Fallon to re-imagine him despite his absence. In addition to his sense of loss of Yeats himself, Fallon haunts the Tower and is haunted by it. In the poem, “Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee,” he writes of Yeats and his retreat,
Somewhere a man will touch his image and burn
Like a candle before it. What happened here
In this ruined place of water and drowned corn
May still be here.[20]
Once again, we are shocked by the power of image, the use of transformative figurative language, and the presence of absence. Yeats’s poetry works on Fallon until it transfigures his native country. Later in the poem, Fallon emerges from the Tower, but his natural life, his good-natured conversation about the price of wool, is no longer redemptive, “I could beat a policeman, bawl in a square, do gaol / For something silly. And what avails it?”[21] The perspective on human misery offered by Yeats and the high vantage point of the Tower reduce all to despair. Fallon’s poetry testifies to the power of poetry to write over a place, even one’s own birthplace, the power to grant that place a warren of meaning accessible to future visitors, poets, even tourists. Yet as Yeats’s sense of loss and despair work on Fallon, there is the sense that it is not all loss—the Tower invites more poetry, it welcome Fallon’s work, growing deeper in its associations. As Billy Collins wrote, “the trouble with poetry is / that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”[22] Yet the creative vortex reaches even further than the physical Tower itself—it reaches into the concept of the Tower and the poet. Yeats created the notion of the hermit poet locked away from the world, his own protagonist. He created a concept and persona that would be exploited by later poets like Robinson Jeffers a world away in California. Jeffers built Tor House and Hawk Tower in sunny Carmel-by-the-Sea, proving the placelessness of the Tower. Put quite simply: should Thoor Ballylee crumble, the idea of the Tower would still exist.
To understand Seamus Heaney as a poet of place, we must first we must recognize his debt to Patrick Kavanagh who first opened the ground of parochial Ireland. In Stepping Stones, Heaney explains that Kavangh gave him permission to write the local, to emphasize the parochial over the provincial.[23] The best example is the famous poem, “Epic,” in which Kavanagh issues a manifesto, or perhaps it would be more correct to call it a declaration of independence for County Monaghan:
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’.
That was the year of the Munich both. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.[24]
What a blaze of confidence! Kavanagh is declaring rights, even to the point of callousness (“the Munich bother”), but the physicality of the shirtless McCabe, the firmness of the “blue cast-steel,” ultimately endorse Kavanagh’s declaration. In “Epic,” the poet is elevated to the position of a God, a maker of truth, a position with deep ties into Irish tradition where the scop’s word could define and redefine history.[25] In Heaney’s poem, “Station Island,” the mercurial Joyce echoes the validating force of Homer’s ghost in “Epic”. Heaney’s imagined Joyce spurs him, challenges him flatly, square-eyed. He urges Heaney to sound “signatures on your own frequency, / echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,”[26] advice that manifests itself in the Bog poems.
Heaney’s Bog poems are clearly on his own frequency, they arise out of the local and parochial that Kavanagh has given credence. By reading poems like “Bogland,” “Bog Queen,” “The Grauballe Man,” “Punishment,” “Tollund,” and “The Tollund Man in Springtime” we can chart a conscious evolution in the poet’s relationship to his place—Heaney is entering the peat, assuming the heather mantle of authority. Politics and place have always proved inescapable to Heaney. As a Catholic student, teacher, and poet in Northern Ireland amidst “the Troubles,” there was no escaping poetry as political response, even apolitical poetry (if such a thing is possible) proved political in its evasion. “Bogland” marks the beginning of Heaney’s fascination with the bog, evoking the peat, great firs, and the excavations of elk and bog butter. It is the first plumbing of an endless resource—and the poem ends prophetically: “The wet centre is bottomless.”[27] In North, Heaney re-harnesses the bog to address political troubles in Ulster. With “Punishment” in particular, Heaney draws a connection between the sacrificial peat-bog girl and women tarred and feathered for their relationships with British soldiers and police officers:
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.[28]
Heaney uses the bog to signal his association with the Nationalists and ancient “tribal” Ireland, yet Heaney’s stance is never simple or without a complicated sympathy. Hinted at with the “almost love” he feels for the peat-bog girl, Heaney’s association with the preserved victims of the bog has deepened over time. The growing empathy is clear when juxtaposing “The Tollund Man” of 1972 with “The Tollund Man in Springtime” published in 2006. The narrative voice shifts from Heaney writing as himself to him entering the Tollund Man’s “bronze-buffed” head.[29] Heaney journeys from the resolution: “Some day I will go to Aarhus / to see his peat-brown head,”[30] in “The Tollund Man,” to the otherworldly perspective of the preserved man himself in the later poem that somehow skirts between a universality and tribal specificity:
I knew that dead weight in joint and sinew
Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied
At my buried ear, and the levered sod
Got lifted up; then once I felt the air
I was like turned turf in the breath of God,
Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,
And on the last, all told, unatrophied.[31]
Heaney becomes the sod-man, and begins in the earth with the Tollund body. Words like, “slid,” “soughed,” and “turned turf,” grant the poem an earthy physicality. Then Heaney also exploits Christian mythology to stage a bog resurrection—the Tollund man is successfully displaced from the bog to rise up and lives among us. In the end Heaney arrives at the same universality and grandeur of prophetic Yeats with Cuchulain but, much like the title poem of “District and Circle,” he arrives at that meaning by entering, exiting, and transcending the ground. He is digging, excavating, ultimately becoming the ground itself.
I would like to end by returning to Seamus Heaney’s concept of a “placeless heaven,”—the notion of a substance, joy, and appreciation rooted in the absence of the thing itself, but for that absence, accessible everywhere. Yeats repeatedly demonstrated his ability to reach back to the Tower after leaving it to retrieve its power as emblem. Heaney writes Mossbawn despite decades of estrangement from it, and pens “The Tollund Man,” after reading about him in a book. The greatness of these poets then is their ability to take a place, estrange it, and deliver it fresh through language, to take a place from the world and return it, deeper, accessible anywhere, to take the real world and make a placeless heaven.
[1]
Oxford English Dictionary [database online], s.v. “Tower,” 2009.
[2]
Oxford English Dictionary [database online], s.v. “Bog,” 2009.
[3] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: II. My House” in
The Poems, 2
nd ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 205.
[4] W.B. Yeats, “To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee”
The Poems, 193.
[5] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: VI. The Stare’s Nest by My Window” in
The Poems, 209.
[6] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: II. My House” in
The Poems, 206.
[7] Richard Ellman,
Yeats: the Man and the Masks (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999).
[8] W.B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” in
The Poems, 240.
[9] W.B. Yeats, “Blood and the Moon” in
The Poems, 241.
[10] Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” in
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 93.
[11] Dennis O’Driscoll
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2008), 172.
[12] Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn” in
Finder’s Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 3.
[13] Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry: Nobel Lecture” in
Opened Ground, 415.
[14] Seamus Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh” in
Finder’s Keepers, 146.
[15] Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry” in
Opened Ground, 415.
[16] Dennis O’Driscoll, 11.
[17] Dennis O’Driscoll interview, 3 February 2009.
[18] Padraic Fallon, “Yeats at Athonry, Perhaps” in
Collected Poems, ed. Brian Fallon (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1990), 112.
[19] Harold Bloom,
Yeats, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 268.
[20] Padraic Fallon, “Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee” in
Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pierce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 651-2.
[21] Ibid., 652.
[22] Billy Collins, “The Trouble with Poetry” on http://www.edutopia.org/trouble-poetry
[23] Dennis O’Driscoll, 81, 192, 332.
[24] Patrick Kavanaugh, “Epic” in
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, et al., (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 929.
[25] Declan Kiberd, interview with myself, 28 January 2009.
[26] Seamus Heaney, “Station Island” in
Opened Ground, 245.
[27] Seamus Heaney, “Bogland” in
Opened Ground, 41.
[28] Seamus Heaney, “Punishment” in
Opened Ground, 112-113.
[29] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” in
District and Circle, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 55.
[30] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man” in
Opened Ground, 62.
[31] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man at Springtime” in
District and Circle, 54.
