Poetry

This interview with Seamus Heaney appeared in The Economist in June 1991. We are reproducing it this week to accompany our obituary of Mr Heaney, who died on August 30th.

Seamus Heaney is one of the best known and most widely read of modem poets. His latest collection of poems, "Seeing Things", has been both praised and damned: the Spectator has called it "a glass precipice without toehold". In con­versation recently, he explained himself to The Economist.

You were raised a Catholic in County Derry, one of nine children, and your father was a cattle dealer. Were words re­vered in your household?

Not in any conscious way at all, no. There was no self-consciousness about the use of language. But there was an unself­conscious relish of excellence in it. I wouldn't say this was particular to the fam­ily. It was common to a kind of rural sub­culture—remarks made were reported. It wasn't the felicity of adjectives that was rel­ished, more the aptness and succinctness and usually slightly elegant cruelty of the remarks.

Your father, who died five years ago, is evoked very vividly in this new collec­tion—and yet you seem to be circling his memory somewhat warily. How would you describe your relationship with him?

For the first ten or 12 years of my life it was uncomplicated but distant. In my teens it was not hostile, but it was definitely complicated... It was just that he was com­pletely wordless...

You mean he was taciturn...

Yes, he was, but he was not a sour person at all. He was simply in terror of misrepre­senting things by speaking of them. In a sense I think he believed—he never ex­pressed this, but all his activity bore witness to such a belief—that to speak a thing out, to confess it, to name it, in some way disabled it.

Time and again in your new collection you begin by describing the very simple, almost thoughtless, excitements of childhood and adolescence—fishing, playing football, sliding on ice—and then they are weighed in the mind and seem to take on a totally different kind of significance.

You describe very exactly the desire I would have for a reader—this suspension in an element that is hallucinatory; that is both weightless and weighty. The idea of free fall. The idea of that buoyancy in the spacecraft, of getting light and at the same time retaining a relationship with gravity... One of the earliest poems I wrote in the collection, "Fosterling", in­cludes the words, "me waiting until I was nearly 50 to credit marvels", and that too is about things going up, lifting and lightening, in spite of sluggish surroundings. In my first book, "Death of a Naturalist", the whole effort of the writing was to so­lidify the thing in language, block it out, make it embossed, until it be­came a kind of language braille of sorts... In this case, I think you could say I was trying to call it in... not to make it insubstantial, but to do something akin to beam­ing it up, like in "Star Trek".

There is not much politics in this book, but there is a more generalised eschewal of violence, particularly at the end of "The Pitchfork".

That poem and one other, "The Ashplant", were the earliest poems written and I worked on them in CountyDerry, in the house where my father was dying. It contains an image of space which I meant to be silent and eerie—but it could, as you say, be sinister and aggressive. The pitchfork becomes a sort of missile— as well as everything else. But I wanted to bring the pitchfork through even that, you know. The last stanza is quite explicit. It says: let's keep going to another set of ex­periences. The opening hand is meant to be an image of unclenching and generosity... as Czeslaw Milosz says, "Open the clenched fist of the past." Hard to do.

The other poem that has political pos­sibilities, this time more explicit, is "The Settle Bed". A settle bed is a very heavy thing, a very Ulster, rural thing, a burdensomely heavy inheritance. But you don't have to be utterly burdened. There are ways of han­dling this, you know.

The book contains a very affectionate sequence of poems about Glanmore, your home in the country—the second time you've written about the house.

The house came back to me—quite unex­pectedly. When we lived in it first [after leav­ing Belfast in the early 1970s] we were only tenants, and it was a moment of our lives which was provisional and temporary any­way. There was that sense of being in transi­tion, at the edge, feeling slightly menaced and slightly free, more than slightly free.

The relationship with Glanmore is com­pletely different now. I got into a good situa­tion in terms of breadwinning, in terms of parent-and-citizen life. I'd go four months to the States, able to earn my keep there, and come back home. But by being between an apartment in HarvardUniversity and a family home in Dublin, and the family house getting constantly invaded by tele­phone calls, the balance of where I was— you know: was I in America? Was I in Dub­lin?—became upset. I found the needles wa­vering, you know. And when I was able to get to Glanmore, I found true north again. I felt completely in place. I felt secure. I felt I had a starting point and an ending point.

I'd like to ask you about the poem in which you're addressing questions to Yeats's ghost, the one that begins, "Where does spirit live?"

It began completely whimsically. All these 12-line poems were written swiftly. They were like plunges in. They were... experimental, always, almost al­ways, and a number of them didn't survive their own experiments. The poem ad­dressed to Yeats ends with the line: "What's the use of a held note or held line/That can­not be assailed for reassurance?" And I think that is one of the functions of a certain kind of art—form, the abstract, the platonic type, the thing, the original and last shape, all this is a necessity, and we want it to be there. We want it to withstand our scepticisms, you know. And some of the sat­isfactions that a Yeats poem gives include the feeling of being empowered and thrilled by all that. It's like getting on a bronze horse, almost of becoming a bronze horse­man. Yeats's music is overbearing in that way and resonantly so. And you want to—another part of you, the flesh and blood part of you wants to—refuse that, but it will sustain, it will survive all refusals.

Does it worry you that some re­gard you as an ambassador for po­etry, as a type of representative English-language poet? Can you cope with this?

It is indeed an anxiety. I mean I hadn't anticipated or envisaged the amount of representative status or eye-catching profile that, for exam­ple, the Oxford professorship would yield. I had a strong sense of previ­ous Oxford professors being there—but not actually being noticed. You know, it was a nice skyline further away, but it wasn't a hill in the fore­ground. And I suddenly feel that it has been foregrounded, you know... but at the same time it's not an area where I want to wear my heart on my sleeve or have my heart bleed or indeed to plead about it.

What is your own apology for poetry? What is poetry good for?

To quote my friend Derek Ma­hon, they keep the colours new. They rinse things...

What sort of things?

Well, first of all rinse the words, yes. But also perhaps rinse—and hang out again on the line—values, values of freedom of spirit and play, but also values which are fundamental to the cul­ture, the myth values of the culture... You see, I think poetry's also domestic. It lives within certain cultural borders. It can tran­scend them, it can broadcast beyond them, but its first life is within its language borders and then maybe within a certain domain of that language... The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is some­body like Yeats or Whitman—these are pub­lic value-founders. Then you can put beside Whitman in 19th-century America Emily Dickinson, who is a reconstitutor of an in­ner metaphysic for human creatures… The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. It means being vigilant in the public realm. But you can go further still and say that po­etry tries to help you to be a truer, purer, wholer being, you know. This doesn't mean that each poem has to be something like El­iot's "Four Quartets"... It can mean a haiku such as "Twilight/ Farmer pointing the way/ With a radish". You suddenly see the world renewed.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they par­take of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. And it's that timeless delighting, the timeless rightness of a little thing or the resonant rightness of a bigger thing—that's what it can do. Let a blind up for a moment.

You've talked about the public role of poetry, but you have also said that poetry can't afford—as it did in the 19th century—to indulge in exhortation any more.

Yes. That is true, I was talking about the suspicion that Irish poets in particular had had induced in them by the scoldings of Pat­rick Kavanagh against a national theme. And Kavanagh said: there's nothing as damned as the important thing. But then there was also the caution that came upon us in the late 1960s, early 1970s because of the collusion between high national rheto­ric and possibly low, dangerous activities—the IRA and so on... The appetite for utter­ing a big truth shouldn't be altogether re­buked, you know. But how is it to be ut­tered? That is the question.

To go back to the present collection, you seem to use bigger words than you've ever dared use before—soul and spirit, for example. There is one line in particular where the soul is hung out like a white ...

…handkerchief, which, in a sense, goes back to the very beginnings of religious instruction, to the school catechism, where the innocent soul was a white handker­chief—and then sin came along like a stain of soot or a piece of tar and the soul had to be cleansed at confession. It was pretty coarse stuff... I think that those primary images retain—as Wordsworth would have said—a vivifying force, but they can also be con­stricting—in a subliminal way—right throughout your life. And that poem was a discovery of a delight in realising that eter­nal life is credible, you know... One associ­ated it, first of all, with a mystery, and it was, in the first world. The religious language was entirely radiant and mysterious—but it was unquestioned. Then you come to the detached, self-secularising period, and you say: eternal life? It's all language, you know. There's no afterlife. There's no paved floor of heaven. The seraphim aren't there.

And then, suddenly, you say: well, wait! Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. And that's what there is. And our care in a green age, so to speak, in an age that's conscious of the ravages that have been done to the planet, the sacred value is actu­ally eternal life. So that language is perfectly proper. It can be used again. It can be re­vived. It's not necessarily a mystifying lan­guage. It's a purifying language. And I sup­pose that's what I would like to do... This was not an ambition, but it is a kind of apo­logia for using words like soul and spirit. You want them to... yes, to be available, to purify possibilities again.