How Seamus Heaney Became a Poet of Happiness

 

Subscribe

How Seamus Heaney Became a Poet of Happiness

Stephanie BurtOctober 03, 2019

A 1996 portrait of Seamus Heaney.

Photograph by Franck Ferville / Agence VU / Redux

As Seamus Heaney’s job and reputation became secure, he began to share with his readers confidence, lightness, and the ability to stay pleased.

Seamus Heaney was real. Were he a fictional character, however, we likely would call him unrealistic, his life story and his career too good to be true. Like Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, but perhaps with fewer missteps and regrets, Heaney became the sort of modern poet whose best-known phrases circulate without attribution. At least four books are called, after Heaney’s “Song,” “The Music of What Happens”; Joe Biden and Bill Clinton have repeatedly quoted Heaney’s optimistic lines about peace in Northern Ireland, where “hope and history rhyme.” When casual readers of poetry think about Heaney, his Irishness, his charisma, his connection to thousands of years of poetic tradition (as shown by his translation of “Beowulf”), and his irenic political attitudes first come to mind.

But Heaney was also a poet of private life, and the happiest such poet among the accomplished writers of his generation. A new book, “100 Poems”—a short, career-spanning selection—completes a project that Heaney began during his lifetime. Compiled by Heaney’s “immediate family,” with a preface by his daughter Catherine, it highlights his work as a poet of friendship and family, of careful and long-felt affiliation, not only to land and language but to the people who stayed with him throughout the decades. Some of the poems are what classical musicians call warhorses, work many readers will know; others—especially the late work, and the work on domestic themes—surface parts of his talent that Americans, in particular, may not have yet seen.

Born, in 1939, into a Catholic farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney grew up attached to his surroundings, to local terrain and to the folk life around it, where “my father worked with a horse-plough.” He also took to Latin and to English literature, especially poetry, before and during his time at Queen’s University, in Belfast, where he would start to teach and to write his first books. The poems in “Death of a Naturalist” (1966) and “Door Into the Dark” (1969) delved into the sensory experience of language, vowel by consonant, likening their sounds to parts of the land. His “Personal Helicon”—the well of the Muses—was “A shallow one under a dry stone ditch / Fructified like any aquarium.” Irish language, as well as Irish land, informed such early poems as “Anahorish” and “Broagh,” whose weedy riverbank “ended almost / suddenly, like that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage.” (The poem concludes on its own soft “G,” too.)

This early Heaney found in fields and bogs unanswerable questions about the flaws in humankind: “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet center is bottomless.” He also wrote about romantic love, at once awkward and lovely, as in “Wedding Day,” a poem that ought to be far better known: “When I went to the Gents / There was a skewered heart / And a legend of love. Let me / Sleep on your breast to the airport.” The poem bears in its four unsturdy quatrains the kind of uncertainty that might face a man who knows whom he wants to marry, but not what marriage may entail: “I am afraid,” he writes.

By the turn of the nineteen-seventies, many critics in Britain and in Ireland saw Heaney as the leading poetic talent of his generation. As such, he was expected—he may have expected himself—to react to the spread of violence in Northern Ireland in the early part of that decade. In poems and in never-reprinted newspaper prose, Heaney chronicled his region’s self-divisions as they turned openly bloody, the state more repressive, the I.R.A. and U.D.F. daily threats. He could not stay there, once he had a choice. In 1972, he, his wife, Marie, and their children moved south across the border, to County Wicklow, where he wrote the taut, politically charged poems of “North” (1975). It is a book that smolders with frustration, a book whose author sees no way out for Belfast and Derry, nor for the warring forces—solidarity, independence, piety, skepticism, family loyalty—within him. Its best-known poems find metaphors for the Northern Irish conflict in acid-preserved Iron Age corpses unearthed from a Danish bog. “The Grauballe Man” “lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep // the black river of himself.”

To move from the Heaney of “North” to the later Heaney is to see a figure finding his feet, gaining distance from problems he could not solve. It is also to see a newly fluent poet of pentameters, with their successive melodic ebb and swell. Wicklow gets the spotlight in “Field Work” (1979), with its “Glanmore Sonnets” celebrating the Heaneys’ new home, where the “inner emigré” could make poetry freely: there “vowels ploughed into other, opened ground / Each verse returning like the plough turned round.” Heaney writes, “I said out loud, ‘A haven.’ ” The familial context of “100 Poems” suggests that the Glanmore location was not only a way for Heaney to escape sectarian strife but also, perhaps primarily, a literally safer place for his family. The claim is not new, but the emphasis might be.

In 1979, and again from 1982 to 1995, Heaney taught at Harvard, usually for one term per year. “Alphabets,” one of his few poems set there, looks back on his journey around the globe as if he were an astronaut: “from his small window / The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, / The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O.” The moves never made him American, but they did widen his scope, attending to the allegorical burden and to the wisdom he found in Czeslaw Milosz and other Continental writers. He could now pen dispatches “From the Republic of Conscience,” whose “embassies . . . were everywhere / but operated independently / and no ambassador would ever be relieved.” The subtle hexameter on that last line—one beat beyond the blank-verse norm—suggests the burden on the now established poet, above and beyond the standard of his art.

This Heaney had many duties—to Harvard, to Irish culture—but he remained most committed, perhaps, to the people in his life. “The Wishing Tree,” a beautiful, seemingly slight nine-line monody, commemorates his laconic, generous mother—“I thought of her as the wishing tree that died / And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven.” “Clearances” remembers their life together: “I was all hers as we peeled potatoes . . . In the last minutes he said more to her / Almost than in all their life together.” One could see the Heaney of the nineteen-eighties straining, not for total independence but for more freedom than he had given himself, in life and art, so far. The sequence “Station Island,” from 1985, put advice in the mouth of James Joyce: “don’t be so earnest, / so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes . . . You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.”

And then—his children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure—Heaney decided to write about happiness. “Walk on air against your better judgment,” one of the poems from “The Spirit Level” (1996) suggests. The poet had already moved from earth and water to fire and heat, and then over water again, across the Atlantic. Now he became a poet of air: one who wanted to share with his readers not so much extravagance as confidence, lightness, the ability to stay pleased. A sonnet concludes: “So long for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.” More than once he imagined himself in a “boat / Sailing through air.”

It is this later, happier Heaney who comes into his own in his family’s idiosyncratic selection. Almost buoyant, occasionally repetitive, surprised by himself at least as often as he surprised readers, this Heaney remained self-conscious, revisiting and answering earlier verse. “The Conway Stewart” is a fancy pen, the first the poet owned, and the sharp-lined, short-lined poem of that name returns to a three-way comparison in “Digging” (the first poem in his first book), between spade and pen and gun. But the later Heaney saw in himself not a ploughman but a craftsman: he even had a vision of “the journeyman tailor who was my antecedent,” who “licks the thread and licks and sweeps it through / Then takes his time.”

In 1995, the Nobel Prize confirmed Heaney as a symbol both for poetry and for Irishness. He seemed to enjoy playing the part. He made more anthologies, translated “Beowulf,” and named a sonnet sequence for a London-tube line, “District and Circle,” merging English urbanity with rural Irish memory and melody: “Tunes from a tin whistle underground.” He also paid homage to a delightful, anonymous, far too little-known Middle English poem usually called “A Complaint Against Blacksmiths.” In the original, an unknown scribe complains that the neighboring smiths have kept him awake by working through the night: “Swarthy-smocked smiths, smattered with smoke / Drive me to death with the din of their dents” (in my modern English translation).

Heaney had fun with that poem and brought it to the Ireland he remembered, in a poem called “Midnight Anvil.” Heaney’s neighborhood blacksmith, “Barney Devlin,” strikes his “twelve blows . . . for the millennium,” heard as far away as Edmonton, and echoing the medieval past. When Devlin passed away, aged ninety-six, in 2016, the Irish Times headline read “Blacksmith immortalized by Seamus Heaney has died.” Like “Wedding Day,” “Midnight Anvil” is the kind of poem brought to new attention by this selection; it, too, emphasizes Heaney’s attachment to the domestic—his wish to celebrate, and his hopes for a good night’s sleep.

If the late poems were slighter, or less ambitious, they were also gifts: they might be “bridal / And usual and useful at births and deaths,” no bad ambition for a poet who had already accomplished more than most poets dream. Heaney’s last collections seemed newly aware of death—not death in general but the particular deaths of family and friends. And they succeeded also in dramatizing continuance—and joy. Even the seemingly rewardless aspects of age could become likable, with the right analogy. A very late poem called “In the Attic” compares mild memory loss and lessened physical capacity to “the lightheadedness / Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging.” “Miracle,” a title that does not court so much as it embraces the sentimental, amounts to a kind of gentle thank you to people who knew him, replacing faith in the divine with faith in them: “Not the one who takes up his bed and walks / But the ones who have known him all along / And carry him in.” What seems to be his last completed poem records a toddler’s first dance, or first walks: “Your bare foot on the floor / Keeps me in step.” Here, too—as “100 Poems” emphasizes, for any of his admirers who have not noticed—Heaney remained a poet of attachments. In life and in death, he would not work alone.

An earlier version of this piece misstated the publication date of “The Spirit Level.”

Stephanie Burt, a professor of English at Harvard, has written several books of literary criticism and poetry, including “After Callimachus,”