From the Frontier of Writing -- Seamus Heaney

Guest poem submitted by Janice:

(Poem #1806) From the Frontier of Writing The tightness and the nilness round that space when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration -- a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient. So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk. And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed, as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armor-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen. -- Seamus Heaney

Another favourite of mine. Exquisity Heaney: compact, compressed,
beautifully simple yet spiralling with meaning upon meaning. Here an
unfortunately commonplace event - a road check - is compared to the act of
writing, or perhaps the struggle of the act of writing. Again fraught with
tension, "pure interrogation", the poem captures the mood, the silent
watchfulness of a politically unstable area. There are various
interpretations of this poem and I personally find it difficult to pinpoint
what the Frontier of Writing is -- is it a space (mental or physical), an
idea or the act of writing itself? When I reach the last few lines however,
it doesn't even seem to matter -- "out between / the posted soldiers flowing
and receding / like tree shadows into the polished windscreen". It is an
image that is startling and stays with me.

Hope you enjoy it!

An Ulster Twilight -- Seamus Heaney

Guest poem submitted by Janice:

(Poem #1793) An Ulster Twilight 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. A mile away it was taking shape, The hulk of a toy battleship, As waterbuckets iced and frost Hardened the quiet on roof and post. Where is he now? There were fifteen years between us two That night I strained to hear the bells Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal Into our lane, get off at the gable, Steady his Raleigh bicycle Against the whitewash, stand to make sure The house was quiet, knock at the door And hand his parcel to a peering woman: `I suppose you thought I was never coming.' Eric, tonight I saw it all Like shadows on your workshop wall, Smelled wood shavings under the bench, Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench In my soft hand, then stood at the road To watch your wavering tail-light fade And knew that if we met again In an Ulster twilight we would begin And end whatever we might say In a speech all toys and carpentry, A doorstep courtesy to shun Your father's uniform and gun, But -- now that I have said it out -- Maybe none the worse for that. -- Seamus Heaney

This is one of my favourite Heaney poems -- simple, beautiful, so
atmospheric. Okay, a little background on Ulster. Ulster is one of the
provinces of Ireland and makes up Northern Ireland which is part of The
United Kingdom (except for three counties which are part of The Republic of
Ireland). The majority of the population, the Unionists, wish to remain
under The United Kingdom stamp while a minority, the Nationalists, long for
a United Ireland. The conflict of course, arises from the fact that the
former are predominantly Protestant and the latter are mainly Catholics.
Political unrest was at its worst during 1968-1994, violence stemming from
the wish to end British presence in the area launched by the Provisional
IRA, resisted by the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. (For a
far more detailed account check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster)

This state of being neither here nor there, of an uneasy silence, of
brooding heaviness is beautifully captured in Ulster Twilight, the title
encompassing the situation and feelings of a people who fight for freedom
and identity. Heaney begins with fragmented images, small images, like
little pictures that flash through a window. A work-shop where anything
could be in the process of being made -- a bomb? a weapon? But it is
Christmas Eve and Eric Dawson is making a toy battleship -- but a battleship
all the same. The frosty evening images reflect the sombre, cold
relationships.

Then we realise that it is a flashback. It is a Christmas Eve of fifteen
years ago, a surreptious evening unmarked by the season's cheer and
brightness. It is steeped in an atmosphere of surveillance, the cautiously
peering woman, the little boy watching with a monkey wrench in hand ...
while the man does something as simple as deliver a present. The dim hope
held at the end is that perhaps if they ever met again, there could be some
sort of dialogue (note: a 'speech', not even a conversation) and not a mere
doorstep courtesy.

I love the fact that the movement of the poem spirals as we reach the end.
Beginning with sharp, small images the feeling at the end is of something
larger, looming, something that envelopes and permeates. The underlying
violence, tension is like a gun that's trained on you, waiting to go off.

Hope you enjoy the poem!

Regards
Janice.

The Railway Children -- Seamus Heaney

Guest poem submitted by Tim Cooper:

(Poem #1547) The Railway Children When we climbed the slopes of the cutting We were eye-level with the white cups Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. Like lovely freehand they curved for miles East and miles west beyond us, sagging Under their burden of swallows. We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle. -- Seamus Heaney

Your villanelle by Heaney the other day made me think of this almost-sonnet.
The more I read it, the more I find in it. The title immediately makes you
think of the film and all those images of carefree childhood. The final line
perfectly balances the two long "ee" sounds around the long "eye". These
open vowel sounds, which here express freedom, and the religious image of
the eye of a needle (never exactly equated to the entrance to heaven in the
gospels, but the relationship is there to anyone raised in a christian
household) give an exhilarating ending.

If you now go back to the rest of the poem, you notice the bubbling sounds -
"cl - imbed", "sl - opes" "cu - ps", "lo-vely", "sw - allows" "words"
"worth". Indeed, all the stressed vowel sounds are short. And then there is
the open "a" of "scaled", right at the moment of epiphany, the first time
that vowel sound is stressed.

Perfect,

Tim.

Villanelle for an Anniversary -- Seamus Heaney

Guest poem submitted by VG:

(Poem #1515) Villanelle for an Anniversary A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard, The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon, The books stood open and the gates unbarred. The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred. The future was a verb in hibernation. A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard. Before the classic style, before the clapboard, All through the small hours of an origin, The books stood open and the gate unbarred. Night passage of a migratory bird. Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard. Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen? The books stood open and the gate unbarred. Begin again where frosts and tests were hard. Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard, The books stand open and the gates unbarred. -- Seamus Heaney

I love villanelles, and this one is no exception. Apparently written to
commemorate Harvard University's 350th birthday, it has a very special
secretiveness about it, as though someone is whispering it quietly in one's
ear. I don't think the villanelle form is as well used as in some other
villanelles on your site (in particular 'Miranda' by W. H. Auden and 'Do Not
Go Gentle' by Dylan Thomas) but every time I read this poem, it makes me
want to go and carpe the diem. But it's not so much the central idea of the
poem as the little details that endear it to me. All alone in the night, no
one else awake, listening to the almost silence of a bird flying overhead...
why does it seem like heresy that Seamus Heaney read this poem aloud to a
large gathering of people at Harvard's 350th anniversary?

VG

Blackberry-picking -- Seamus Heaney

Guest poem submitted by Aamir Ansari:

(Poem #934) Blackberry-picking Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -- Seamus Heaney

In a lecture given to students at Oxford University, Seamus Heaney compared
the writing of poetry to the creation of a labyrinth, one that mirrors the
gruesome contortions our own world assumes at times. The difference is,
however, that the poet's labyrinth, the poem, has the power to restore us,
to reset the balance.

Heaney displays those restorative powers wonderfully in this poem. The
arrival of joy and the subsequent convulsive preparations to capture every
last drop of it ("...with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots") are honest to the
rich sensations of childhood experience. The poem itself is laden with
strange rich fruit, sweet clammy experience ready to be tasted and stored.
This, finally, is art true to life.

Aamir.

[Minstrels Links]

Poems by Seamus Heaney:
Poem #61, Song
Poem #883, Personal Helicon
Poem #934, Blackberry-picking

Poems on related topics:
Poem #827, Strawberries -- Edwin Morgan
Poem #274, This Is Just To Say  -- William Carlos Williams
Poem #377, Loveliest of trees, the cherry now  -- A. E. Housman
Poem #430, Wild Asters  -- Sara Teasdale
Poem #417, Thistles  -- Ted Hughes
Poem #63, Daffodils  -- William Wordsworth

Personal Helicon -- Seamus Heaney

Our apologies for the irregular service over the last few days; both Martin
and myself have been rather busy with the Real World.

(Poem #883) Personal Helicon As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. 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. -- Seamus Heaney

[Notes]

"Personal Helicon" first appeared in "Eleven Poems", published in 1965.
The poem is dedicated to Michael Longley, a contemporary of Heaney's at
Philip Hobsbaum's poetry workshop in Belfast.
Mt. Helicon in Greece is said to be the home of the Muses, nine sister
goddesses in Greek mythology presiding over song and poetry and the arts and
sciences.

[Commentary]

Seamus Heaney has always been fascinated with the earth, with the quality of
earthiness. His poems are invariably dense and muddy, clumps of murky
adjectives and plodding nouns pulling the reader into a world full of 'the
smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss'. Even his titles reflect this
preoccupation, from "Bogland" (the very first poem in his very first
collection), to his justly celebrated (if somewhat unsettling) masterpiece,
"Death of a Naturalist".

Unfortunately, this predilection is not a very fashionable one - indeed, I
can't help but shudder at some of the imagery in "Naturalist" - which is
perhaps why Heaney chose to expand on it in today's poem. As the title makes
clear, this is a poem about poetic inspiration: Heaney's Muse is a gritty,
plodding, deliberate creature, more Caliban than Ariel. A perfectly
legitimate choice (if it can be called a choice at all), and one which sets
his poetry apart, and gives it distinction.

[Links]

[broken link] http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney/heaney.bio.html is a biography which
delves quite deeply into Heaney's themes and poetic development; here's an
extract which talks about today's poem:

"Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the 'dark drop'
into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells
of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands
and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry.
This serves as his glimpse into places where 'there is no reflection', but
only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting 'the darkness echoing'. "
        -- [broken link] http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney/heaney.bio.html

Surprisingly for a poet of his stature, Heaney has featured only once on the
Minstrels. The lovely "Song" can be read at poem #61, along with the EB
bio, critical assessment, and some external links.

thomas.

Song -- Seamus Heaney

(Poem #61) Song A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes. There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens. -- Seamus Heaney

This delicately lovely poem has always reminded me of a haiku - there is the
same ethereal yet etching-precise economy, the wealth and evocativeness of
the images, with every word worth a thousand pictures. The interweaving of
images and music captures the very essence of poetry, lending the poem a
self-referentiality that is no less real for being unstated.

Glossary:

immortelle [alien sense]
  imOrtel. [Fr. (short for fleur immortelle), fem. of immortel immortal.]
  A name for various composite flowers of papery texture (esp. Helichrysum
  orientale, and other species of Helichrysum, Xeranthemum, etc.) which
  retain their colour after being dried. -- OED

Biographical Notes:

  b. April 13, 1939, near Castledàwson, County Londonderry, N.Ire.

  in full SEAMUS JUSTIN HEANEY, Irish poet whose work is notable for its
  evocation of events in Irish history and its allusions to Irish myth. He
  received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

  Heaney's first poetry collection was the prizewinning Death of a
  Naturalist (1966). In this book and Door into the Dark (1969), he wrote in
  a traditional style about a passing way of life--that of domestic rural
  life in Northern Ireland. In Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), he
  began to encompass such subjects as the violence in Northern Ireland and
  contemporary Irish experience, though he continued to view his subjects
  through a mythic and mystical filter. Among the later volumes that reflect
  Heaney's honed and deceptively simple style are Field Work (1979), Station
  Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), and Seeing Things (1991). His
  Selected Poems, 1966-1987 also was published in 1991. The Spirit Level
  (1996) concerns the notion of centredness and balance in both the natural
  and the spiritual senses.

  Heaney also wrote essays on poetry and poets, including such figures as
  William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Lowell. Some of
  these essays appeared in Preoccupations: Selected Prose,A collection of his lectures at Oxford was published as The Redress of
  Poetry (1995). The Cure at Troy (1991) is Heaney's version of Sophocles'
  Philoctetes, and a later volume, The Midnight Verdict (1993), contains
  translations of selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and from Cúirt an
  mheadhon oidhche (The Midnight Court), a work by the 18th-century Irish
  writer Brian Merriman.
        -- EB

Assessment:

  1995 Nobel Laureate in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical
  depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
          -- The Nobel Foundation

  Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since
  Yeats." Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is
  undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell
  by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaneyboppers" attend his
  readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be
  seen throughout his work, but most especially in his first two volumes,
  where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets,
  especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and
  even Dante have played important roles in his development.
  [...]
  Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned
  either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or
  taken to task for remaining aloof from it. Nevertheless, some of his most
  convincing elegies deal with friends and family he has lost to the
  Troubles. "Casualty," a poem about a Catholic friend murdered by a bomb
  set by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in a Protestant pub, gives us
  another look at the tribal warfare in Northern Ireland. His questioning of
  his friend's responsibility for his own death realizes the ambiguous
  nature, the muddling of right and wrong, that grips Northern Ireland
  today. And yet, what is important is not placing blame, but the
  recognition of what remains to those who live, memories and sadness.

  It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet,
  concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. That
  conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note
  minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. "Song"
  demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and
  "Personal Helicon," this short lyric attends to his own imagination.
  His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to
  the world around him and the details of language make this poem a
  small success.
  [...]
  Heaney's work is filled with images of death and dying, and yet it is also
  firmly rooted in the life of this world. His tender elegies about friends
  and family members who have died serve many purposes: they mourn great
  losses, celebrate those who have gone before us, and recall the solace
  that remains to us, our memories. When asked recently about his abiding
  interest in memorializing the people of his life, he replied, "The elegaic
  Heaney? There's nothing else."

        -- Joe Pellegrino, excerpted from
        <[broken link] http://metalab.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/heaney/heaney.bio.html>
        (and do go and read the whole thing)

Websites of interest:
  <[broken link] http://educeth.ethz.ch/english/readinglist/heaney,seamus.html> - highly
  recommended, along with all its links.

m.