No Regrets - Winter 2019 Issuu 24 - On Reading Seamus Heaney

No Regrets Journal

On Reading Seamus Heaney Winter 2019 Issue 24 


No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the exploration of being and meaning.

Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer, collage artist claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster Submissions are by invitation of the editor Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page No Regrets Journal, haikus poems and photographs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal 

Seamus Heaney Memories meter rhyme Assonance, consonance Ireland North and South Textured words for ear and tongue Medieval story teller takes to the page Entrained with an ever present church Liturgy for all occasions sweetened In the infinite forgiveness of confession Heartfelt rosaries and prayers Encompass the small farm girdled By a county road just steps away From the thatched roof house door Thatch covered kitchen, sitting room Plough horse sounds in the stall Beyond the bedroom’s slat board bed Where dreams coalesce with sly Dangerous rats in the ceilings In the chthonic darkness Shared by the barn but salvation Among sunlit dusty shafts 

Seamus Heaney Boyhood Inquisitive Irish Catholic boy among Aromatics of hay horses and pigs The small farm split by trains A rushing steaming express Carries strangers to unseen places Fills the air with acrid smoke Interrupts the medieval pace Of rural life before electricity Before the tragedy of Christianity’s Infinitely blood soaked Irish politics Insistent bells call believers Medieval villages knew the hour By the ever egalitarian bells Whose tolling encompassed Faith in the Mass woven across Day to day life fulfilled With confession and communion A sacralized cosmos established A thread through Sundays Saints’ days A life of images framed by voices In liturgical songs and stories In Irish tales myths and fairies In endless shared rhythmic recitation

His Father From his perch on his father’s shoulders Lifelong skills inherent in straight furrows Understood as the horse turned again Skills not meant for him but observed And preserved in pen and ink imagined Among the pages of a lifetime

Seamus Heaney’s Sensibility This brief essay is based on Interviews found on the internet and from reading Stepping Stones, the exchange with Dennis O’ Driscoll which serves as a literary biography for Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney was a writer, a poet, a story teller and a singer. He continually participated in readings and theatrical performances.

He opens channels to memory that encompass the founding emotions and experiences of his childhood. These channels continue to resonate throughout his life and work. The heartfelt foundations of the past provide fodder for poems across the decades. Catholicism brought a sense of inward wonder and the vivid possibility of redemption. He continued throughout his life to respect his rural Catholic faith. His education and calling to be a poet led him to include in the poetry, a classics inspired sensibility as well as a commitment to translations including Beowulf and the Aeneid: Book VI among others.

He interviewed Jorge Luis Borges and undoubtedly was familiar with Borges take on translation. His own view was that “You can legislate to your heart’s content about how translation should be done, but the practice is going to ignore or outflank the theories.” Borges believed that each translation was a new work that should be considered on its own merits.

He was deeply read in Irish and English literature and very fond of James Joyce. He described Joyce’s “Ulysses” as, “…a documentary sound track of the volubility, rascality and humor and vindictiveness of Dublin.” He knew that great writers called out to other writers.

The world of his adulthood was not sacralized like rural Ireland where he spent his childhood. The church offered structure and forgiveness through the mass and confession. There was always a sense of place in the care taking required day to day of the farm, a sense of season, planting, harvesting and, most importantly, a sense of family. He describes his childhood state of being, “The soul was like a little white handkerchief constrained , you would stain it with sin…a sense of the whole universe governed by a deity, a divine attention being not just to the whole universe, but to yourself. You were a little drop of water in the ocean…nevertheless you were being watched over in terms of care and vigilance.”

When he was going away to school, one of his relatives said, “The pen is lighter than the spade.” He talked about his soft hands and the work that his father could do that he was not destined or attuned to seek, “My father regarded speech as a form of affectation.”

Although no longer a practicing Catholic, he continued to respect, resonate with and explore his rural roots, family and the Irish Catholic tradition. He rued the loss of innocence, “We knew love, but it wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.”

He chose not to involve himself in the complexities of Irish politics, but he was a devoted humanist in his approach to Ireland and the world. He believed that the universe was drenched in radiance that could be recognized through an expansiveness of our consciousness. He also understood that this sanctity of time and place has been undermined by capitalism with its insatiable desire to commodify the earth and its inhabitants.

Early on he received permission from Ted Hughes and Patrick Kavanagh to write about and take pride in his rural childhood of pigs, mud and farming smells. He also understood and embraced the menacing imagination that accompanied darkness, shadows and scuttling noises from the rats in the walls, ceilings and barns. He could hear them from his bed.

He was committed to “…write honestly in terms of the subject…your attitudes… who and what you are, honesty in terms of your makings, in terms of art that it is not faked up, that it belongs as a true imaginative response and isn’t generated out of will, but arises out of something deeply lodged in yourself.” Poems come “almost always from some memory…a living gift of presence.”

Writing could be shared by writer and reader, a common ground, a sense of being in this life, in this world. Great writers call to other great writers and readers.

By nature, as a child and as a man, he was insightful about himself and others.

He was hopeful about possibilities. Optimism is a belief that all will be well. Hope is a belief in possibility and working toward it, Hope does not assume all will turn out well, but is nonetheless pursued. He believed in love, the love of friends, family and romantic love as well, “Love situates you alright.”

He saw the worst of the Irish question which so often has descended in to violence, “I have a set of dispositions and affections a desire as far as possible to conduct myself honestly.” He refused to become a political tool for any political group, “I haven’t been a spokesman for any cause…”

Seamus Heaney In His Own Words Seamus Heaney from Stepping Stones, a book length work capturing several years of conversations in person and in writing with Dennis O’Driscoll.

“What I was after, even I wasn’t clear about it at the time, was a way of making the central tradition of English poetry which we’d absorbed in college and University, absorb our own particular experience.”

On being Irish Catholic in Northern Ireland and teaching in America, ”That historically aware, hard bitten eastern European aesthetic meant more to me in the 1980s as a precaution against the ahistorical, hedonistic aesthetic that I was encountering in America,” On Bruegel’s influence on his poetry, “I always felt at home with his scenes—the hayfield, the peasant wedding, the hunters in the snow, children’s games. Things looming large and at the same time being pinned down in the smallest detail.

Birds on a winter tree. The stitching of a cod piece.” “…if a poem is any good, you can repeat it to yourself as if it were written by somebody else The completedness frees your form and it from you. You can read and reread it without feeling self-indulgent: whatever it was in you that started the writing has got beyond you. The unwritten poem is always going to be entangled with your own business, part of your accident and incoherence—which is what drive you to write. But once the poem gets written, it, in a manner of speaking, is none of your business.” “in a good poetry reading—good for you, the poet that is—you retrieve some of the quickening that you got when you first wrote the thing. The surprise and gratitude are with you again for a moment—the old sense of having been supplied with the words you needed to summon. You have an obligation as a poet not to betray the reality of that. You have been mysteriously recompensed by the words and you owe some fidelity to the mystery.”

Haiku Stimulated By Reading Seamus Heaney night’s dreams left behind doorway opens to the sky infinitely blue the road has promise many twists and turns whisper over the next hill search for a bucket black berries suddenly ripe fingers dipped in wine listen carefully every wind holds a message rain’s washed words falling like a flock of words narrative soared in the wind diving and coasting green ends in darkness trees reflected in the pond lake maidens watch us climbing railless stairs the rooks unroofed tower calls whispers old secrets in uncle’s bedroom old picture’s wall paper square show brighter florals the dead’s soft voices barely heard among dark winds testing cottage walls forgotten story tragic memory reborn thought suddenly maimed night’s curtain descends the encroaching horizon replaced by starlight