Seamus Heaney: Tools, Words, Heaven
In this issue, a friend buys a pickaxe and I listen to many poems. The result of this coincidence is a continuation of the essay-in-progress—working title On Expression—that I began with a look at some movies and continued with a consideration of painting, prose, and the past. This time, I’m writing about Seamus Heaney’s verse, and while it is the fifth part of the longer essay, I suspect it stands perfectly well on its own—so much so that I am devoting the entire newsletter to it. That makes this it considerably shorter than these mailings have been of late, but—since there are lots of Heaney’s lines to savor, and my connecting commentary is highly concentrated—I hope it will be satisfying enough. In addition to the verse and prose, several striking artworks offer a visual complement to the imagery and ideas the words carry.
The art is by Ellen Wiener, whose work can be found in the collections of The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, The Smithsonian, Yale University, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Albright-Knox Museum, and other institutions as well as in the holdings of many private collectors. Her website is ellenwiener.com and she can found on Instagram @ellenwienerart. I am grateful to Ellen for permission to use her artwork here.
ON EXPRESSION
5 :: Tools :: The lives of the poets are not all inspiration.
“What,” James Parker asks at the outset of his review of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, “is the opposite of poetry?”
What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?
It’s “Stuff,” Parker italically answers:
Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. . . . The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.
The stuff—“the bog of unfulfilled intentions” in the poet’s own phrase—is the foreground of Heaney’s correspondence, while poetry rears its lovely head from time to time on the horizon, or can be spotted like a brightly feathered bird in the branches of a distant tree. We read apology after apology for not responding sooner as he fields queries from friends and strangers about manuscripts or volumes of verse in the making, regrets his unavailabilities or sets up future dates with colleagues and publishers in a flurry of tentativities, expends his words on endless arrangements for broadcasts and interviews and lectures and the occasional piece of commissioned prose, with periodic bursts of family news—marriage! births!—coloring the correspondence like rainbows against the drab of days.
Meanwhile, underneath all the stuff, poems—twelve collections, to say nothing of the eloquent fruits of his talent for translation—idled toward expression, the lines swimming into his ken from deep wells of imagining. The letters strike me as one long offering to the gods of procrastination, a kind of busy worship to keep the poet near enough to church to catch grace when it glints through the dim stained glass of ordinary time, concentrating its light in a higher language.
Other poets called out to Muses, Heaney invoked tools. The method announced itself in “Digging,” the very first poem in his initial collection, Death of a Naturalist:
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging.
With the spade, the poet marks an edge in experiences he follows back through generations:
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. . . .
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
“I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” Heaney laments. Yet he holds another implement that has its own incisive energy, at whose point he concludes this invocation of his career—standing his ground in the indicative, to summon a phrase he conjured decades later—with confidence that the hoped-for work would one day come:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
“Just by pulling a plane from his tool chest,” Jeff Taylor writes in Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry, “my first employer opened up entire worlds for me to explore. Words had long been tools to me, but now I touched rosewood and hornbeam, brass and bevel gears, tangible lovely things in my hand. It was inevitable that I would write about them someday.” Heaney would write not only about tools, but with them, even as they occupied the hands of others, from the rod of “The Diviner” in that first book—
Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tight by the arms of the V:
Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck
Of water . . .
to the bricklayer’s trowel in the next to last (from “To Mick Joyce in Heaven,” District and Circle)—
The weight of the trowel,
That’s what surprised me.
You’d lift its lozenge-shaped
Blade in the air
To sever a brick
In a flash, and then twirl it
Fondly and lightly.
It’s as if Heaney reached for such tangible things to cut through the stuff his letters inventoried, clearing a space to set his pen to verse. One could compile a small Homeric catalogue from the tools that live within his lines—anvil, billhook, pitchfork, poker, scuttle, tongs, gravel-rake, scythe, side-arm, sledge, turnip-snedder—or revel in how Heaney rhapsodizes their use:
The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane
At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.
(from “An Ulster Twilight”)
“Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl”: the “clean rasping sound” evoked by his father’s spade is everywhere in Heaney’s verse. His voice itself is like a hand tool, sturdy but lithe in application, graceful in use and marked by it, cleaving burred words into lines that are musical but too alert to their individual sounds to be euphonious.
In “North,” the title poem of his fourth collection, he finds a compass that offers counsel:
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.’
The sound he fashions from his storehouse of vocabulary treats whatever it handles with “the rough porous language of touch,” caressing but not smoothing out the inconsistencies that identify it. No other modern poet writing in English has given such independent weight—gravity even—to individual (and, for that matter, often compound) words. In Heaney’s verses, their rugged surfaces and mere edges—their heft—abut their companions in a line like stones set in a wall.
Aptly, when I visited the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland a few years ago, the first display that caught my eye as I entered the exhibition space was the “Word-Hoard,” a mobile dangling elemental components of Heaney’s poetic art from the ceiling, each on its own rectangular white placard: ashplant and bog-burst, docken and dun, lachtar and loaning, glar, turf, and benn, dailigone, croagh, flax-dam, tongue-and-groove. It was pleasing to see them taking star turns, validated in their singular identities, dangling in thin air although mined from the ground of labor and the sense of mouthbound speech.
Shaped by nature and native use, they are fit for verse that describes truths and consequences, wonderings:
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 . . .
(from “Glanmore Sonnets, II”)
Heaney’s poems connive with his pen, holding words in a focus that extends their reach beyond local utterance because of their setting, spelling experience in every sense if we’re keen enough to respond to their demands and dispense with the conveniences of understanding our device-distracted attention craves.
Tools, words: instruments of apprehension in the right hands—and eyes, like those of the young Seamus, with his
. . . wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.
(from “Alphabets”)
My friend Ellen Wiener told me a few months ago that she’d acquired a pickaxe. I was surprised to learn this, but only for a moment, for her paintings and drawings abound with rocks and minerals, even fossils. The pictures and scroll books she creates are like archaeological digs into the history of knowledge and seeing, culture and attention—of way-finding and its instruments: observatories, lighthouses, telescopes, manuscripts and other avatars of reading are hidden in her works like relics of the reverence our vision has lost. I could see she might want a pickaxe to sit for her, so to speak, or to stand in a corner of her studio as a talisman.
Around the time I heard about her pickaxe, I began listening to Heaney’s reading of his collected poems. From the start—the spadework of “Digging”—Ellen’s art lived inside my hearing as a more than coincidental accompaniment to Heaney’s voice, because her imagery seems excavated as much as rendered in paint or inscribed on paper or etching plate, just as Heaney’s lines feel hewn from earth and stone.
And language, too:
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen
to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
(from “Bone Dreams”)
For more than twelve hours across several weeks I traversed his life’s work by ear, listening each morning as I drove or walked, often revisiting each day’s progress at night on pages to track the poems’ paths.
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
(from “Glanmore Sonnets, II”)
Measuring expression as it takes form, as sturdy as ploughs but more mysterious, the lines can stir like dowsing sticks—“hunting the pluck” of meaning, “suddenly broadcasting its secret stations”—or cut the turf of life to give it definition.
“Hewn”—as the OED reminds us and Seamus Heaney surely knew—was an early English form of “heaven.” If the etymological reach exceeds our grasp, that’s what the word-hoard’s for: digging in it we find our way, divining sense that shapes our meanings, rough-hew them how we will.