The Digger And The Lantern: An Extended Birthday Tribute To Seamus Heaney

        A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
          For and a shrouding sheet;
        O, a pit of clay, for to be made
          For such a guest is meet.
      --- First Clown (or "the First Gravedigger") in Hamlet (5.1.94-97)

      Today In Literature reminds me that today is Seamus Heaney's 66th birthday, he the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and essayist who is, by just about all serious accounts, one of the very, very few Truly Important poets writing in this day and age that is not very conducive to the creation of Great Poets. (Or, to clarify: at least in this age in which a single figure does not tower over the poetic scene in the same ways that Tom Eliot or W.B. Yeats did.)   For those unfamiliar with Heaney, I'd recommend simply getting hold of his Opened Ground, a selected poems edition covering the thirty years between 1966 and 1996, probably the easiest way to witness the scope, intelligence, and lucidity of Heaney's work. (It's worth noting for the uninitiated that Heaney's poetry depends a great deal on various matters of Irish history, matters perhaps not known to most outside of Ireland. This site provides some useful contexts and informations, though I find the the choice of background image rather distracting.)   There's a small sampling of Heaney's poems here for those meeting him for the first time.

      From my own perspective, I find Heaney immensely rewarding-- and very often like a splash of cold, cold water on the face on an already wintry day-- but he's also one of those poets of whom I can honestly say I have no inclinations to imitate him at all.   His voice is rare: unique, steeled, particular sometimes to the point of indiosyncrasy, though seldom to the point of self-indulgence.   He's a poet of the earth in a very different way than Wallace Stevens demanded, Heaney not so much the poet of "significant soil" (to borrow from Mr. Eliot) but of harder stuff, of dirt and clay and rock. He is perhaps our most genuinely archaeological poet, an observation regularly trotted out by those referring to his famous poem "Digging," the first poem of his 1966 volume Death of a Naturalist:

Digging

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.

And it's a fine poem, in many ways a pithy synopsis of Heaney's career entire.   But there's an aloofness to lines like these that remind me why I've no desire to imitate him, in part (perhaps) because to imitate that aloofness would only result in desperately amateurish parody.   Or, more to the point, I suspect I have no spade to follow a man like him.

      Earlier I suggested looking into Opened Ground, but I'd also encourage those of you that take any sort of liking to affinity to read him volume by volume, his individual books determining their own ethical and thematic circlings. The most famous of these volumes is, of course, Station Island, which brings us as close to Irish version of the Dantescan voice as we're ever going to get.   It also features the famous final poem, about the meeting with James Joyce ("[h]is voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers"), a carefully renationalized version of Eliot's terza rima imitation in Little Gidding.   In fact, I'd suggest that perhaps our two best living poets-- Heaney and the American Mark Strand-- should be read in tandem with one another, both imitating Dantescan voices and responding to Eliot in Station Island and Dark Harbor, respectively, though in Strand the presence nearing from the distance isn't Joyce (or Yeats, as in Eliot) but Wallace Stevens, surely one of the angels "fluttering its wings."   It occurs to me that in writing this paragraph I've probably found enough material for a graduate seminar on imitations and intimations of Dante in twentieth-century poetry, a course no one in North America would ever take because it would require reading the Commedia.   (Sigh....)   But check out some of the discussion offered by Heaney himself in this lecture largely about Station Island here; alas, I can't find an online edition of the poem entire for your perusal.

      Neglected, though, is Heaney's 1987 volume The Haw Lantern, a work worth discovering again and again, and perhaps less likely to leave his jejeune readers confused or thinking they're missing essential knowledge.   The poems are primarily about loss and regret, and the volume includes the genuinely moving "Clearances," a memorial poem too long to reproduce here. Instead, or until you can get to a library or a book store, take a look at "The Wishing Tree," one of those few poems of Heaney's, so simple in its structure, that I wish I had written myself:

The Wishing Tree

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,
Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale
Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail
Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved.   I had a vision
Of an airy branch-head rising through the damp cloud,
Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Typing out this poem, I'm struck by what I suspect is the same feeling my friend RK has towards Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, the reluctance to pull too much at the poem's sinews for straining it or subjecting it to unnecessary molestation.   It speaks in a clarity of imagery better left as is than parsed through or yanked at, however appreciatively, like taffy.   I'd only like to point out the brilliance of the opening line, which begins so traditionally in its pastoral romanticism before dashing it with the iamb "that died," two syllables that almost entirely on their own save the poem from cliché. Reminder to poets (and me): Sometimes it takes so little.

      There are two other short lyrics from The Haw Lantern to which I'd like to call your attention, one of which is the taut and shrewd title poem:

The eerie sense of suspicion, maintained because it simply moves on without declaring acquittal, reminds me all too well of the power of the obscured gaze under which one is more disquiet than unnerved.   We've been seen as if through a different kind of glass, but still and even more surely darkly.   One of Heaney's great gifts is his sense of verbal economy, he purchasing incredibly crystalline sensations with so very few words, though never with what might be described as the miserly austerity of some poets.   Heaney's poetry always seems to take into account that there are lay readers out there seeking to be addressed without the befuddling, oracular tendencies common to so many writing about themes similar to his.   It's little wonder why Heaney remains remarkably popular outside of the academy; he speaks with, one might say, a touch of Frost, but with a more secretive, or at least more mysterious, ministry.

      The last poem to which I'd turn your eyes is "In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald," the famous translator of so many Greek classics, including The Iliad and The Odyssey (the former used by my students this year, some of whom may be reading this entry with their eyes rolling like Irish hills).   Fitzgerald died in 1985, a year-and-a-half before The Haw Lantern.

Perhaps Heaney's last line should be applied to himself, so much of Heaney's poetry "perfectly aimed towards the vacant center," so much dragged from the harder and dustier places of the earth and reaching "out of all knowing." Joyce's Stephen Dedalus famously described history as the nightmare from which we are constantly trying to awake, but Heaney's history is very different, and perhaps more haunting for it.   Like layers of clay and earth, it (history) builds upon itself, waiting to be unearthed -- or reearthed, speaking to us from a center associated with place but only vaguely understood.   It speaks back, waiting for the squat pen that rests.   Or, history is the beginning and the end of us, before and after our reduction to detritus and bone, seen from beyond the pith and stone of a haw lantern, stern and scrutinizing.  

      No wonder we flinch: we're never settled, ever uneasy, handful of trembling dust, our perpetual disturbance bred in the bone.   We are the litter, both the offspring and the waste, of Adam, and so too are we the litter of adamah.   We are opened and still-opening ground. And dare we forget it, all we need to do, as Mark Strand might say, is "[j]ust go to the graveyard and ask around."   And once there, few of us have spades to follow a man like Heaney, he holding up, so much better than most, that dire profession of Adam.

      Happy birthday, Seamus.   Many happy returns.

      (And it now occurs to me that I've devoted Gawd-only-knows how long on a post upon which no one will comment. **sigh**   It's the blogger's curse: the amount of response you will get to a post will always, always, always be inversely proportional to the amount of labour and/or effort you put into it. Reminds me why I got so fond of the snarky one-liner.   **sigh, shrug**   Oh well....)