In Honor of St. Patrick’s Day:  

here’s to Ireland’s favorite son

My favorite poet to teach was for many years Seamus Heaney. His poetry was almost always focused on his Irish cultural heritage whether it was about the land and the countryside, Ireland’s Viking history, the Troubles, his own family or the bogs.  In an interview with Charlie Rose, Heaney described American history as wide; when one thinks America, one thinks of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, but Ireland’s history, he said, is vertical, deep down.  That idea is reflected in many different ways in his writing.  Perhaps his most famous poem (and the first he ever published) is “Digging,” in which he talks about his farmer father (“ 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”), and his grandfather, who “cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner's bog.”  Family and heritage are associated with the act of digging.  Heaney, himself, rejects this way of life, confessing, “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.”  Thus, he mines his memories of his childhood to create his verse.

Heaney’s bog series fascinates me the most because I had never heard of “bog bodies” – Iron Age people preserved like they died last week in the peat bogs of Northern Europe – until I read Heaney.  In “Bog Queen,” he assumes the voice of an ancient royal person, her rest interrupted by the slice of a farmer’s shovel:

I lay waiting     

between turf-face and demesne wall,

between heathery levels

and glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille    

for the creeping influences:

dawn suns groped over my head

and cooled at my feet,

through my fabrics and skins

the seeps of winter digested me,   

the illiterate roots

pondered and died

in the cavings

of stomach and socket.

I lay waiting     

on the gravel bottom,

my brain darkening,

a jar of spawn

fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.    

Bruised berries under my nails,

the vital hoard reducing

in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,

gemstones dropped     

in the peat floe

like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier

wrinkling, dyed weaves

and Phoenician stitchwork   

retted on my breasts’

soft moraines.

I knew winter cold

like the nuzzle of fjords

at my thighs—     

the soaked fledge, the heavy

swaddle of hides.

My skull hibernated

in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.    

I was barbered

and stripped 

by a turf-cutter’s spade

who veiled me again

and packed comb softly    

between the stone jambs

at my head and my feet.

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.

The plait of my hair,

a slimy birth-cord     

of bog, had been cut

and I rose from the dark,

hacked bone, skull-ware,

frayed stitches, tufts,

small gleams on the bank.   

Again, history is found through the act of digging in the land.  

One of my favorite Heaney poems, like “Digging,” speaks to his boyhood, the idea of going deep within the earth, and the act of writing poetry.  “Personal Helicon” – the title refers to Mt. Helicon in ancient Greece, the home of the muses – gives us the youthful Heaney peering down into wells, around the countryside, a metaphor here for memories. In some, he sees partial reflections of himself, in others long roots and soft mulch.  He speaks of loving “the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells/ Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.”  In the last stanza, Heaney connects this memories to his poetry: “Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,/ To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring/ Is beneath all adult dignity. /I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” 

Heaney died in 2013 and in his later years, you could see him looking back down those wells of memory with perhaps some lamentation.  One of my other favorites is “In the Attic,” in which Heaney uses allusions to Treasure Island to connect childhood memories and old age. 

i

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees

Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out

Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals-

And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

Appears to rise again. . . “But he was dead enough,”

The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

ii

A birch tree planted twenty years ago

Comes between the Irish Sea and me

At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy

Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

iii

Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears,

His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier

For the matinee I’ve just come back from.

“And Isaac Hands,” he asks.  “Was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name awaver, too,

His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

iv

As I age and blank on names,

As my uncertainty on stairs

Is more and more the lightheadedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

As the memorable bottoms out

Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still

That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

Heaney explained in the Rose interview that the Irish view poetry very differently from Americans. Poems are printed in The Irish Times, he said.  The prime minister would be reading his poetry.  What a lovely thought, particularly in these dark times.  We could do with a little less tweeting and a little more poetry.