Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

  ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

  I am all you never had of goods and sex.

  You could get them still just by writing a few cheques.’

  Those endstopping lines, sliding down to rhymed conclusions, suggest the beginning of that period out of which Larkin’s style arises. After Everyman, there is Skelton, a common-sensical wobble of rhyme, a humorous wisdom, a practical lyricism:

  Oh, no one can deny

  That Arnold is less selfish than I.

  He married a wife to stop her getting away

  Now she’s there all day,…

  There is as well the Cavalier Larkin, the maker of songs, where the conversational note and the dainty disciplines of a metrical form are in beautiful equilibrium:

  Yet still the unresting castles thresh

  In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Last year is dead, they seem to say.

  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  Even in that short space, by the way, one can see the peculiar Larkin fusion of parsimony and abundance – the gorgeousness of ‘unresting castles’, the poignant sweetness of ‘afresh, afresh’ are held in check by the quotidian ‘last year is dead’. Yet it is by refusing to pull out the full stops, or by almost refusing, that Larkin achieves his own brand of negative capability.

  As well as the Cavalier Larkin, there is a late Augustan Larkin, the poet of decorous melancholy moods, of twilit propriety and shadowy melody. His poem about superannuated racehorses, for example, entitled ‘At Grass’, could well be subtitled, ‘An Elegy in a Country Paddock’. Behind the trees where the horses shelter there could well rise the spire of Stoke Poges church; and behind the smooth numbers of wind distressing the tails and manes, there is the donnish exactitude of tresses being distressed:

  The eye can hardly pick them out

  From the cold shade they shelter in

  Till wind distresses tail and mane …

  And when, at the conclusion of the poem, ‘the groom and the groom’s boy / With bridles in the evening come,’ their footsteps surely echo the ploughman homeward plodding his weary way.

  There is, moreover, a Tennysonian Larkin and a Hardyesque Larkin. There is even, powerfully, an Imagist Larkin:

  There is an evening coming in

  Across the fields, one never seen before,

  That lights no lamps.

  Silken it seems at a distance, yet

  When it is drawn up over the knees and breast

  It brings no comfort.

  Where has the tree gone, that locked

  Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,

  That I cannot feel?

  What loads my hands down?

  Then there is Larkin, the coiner of compounds – whom we may choose to call Hopkinsian or even perhaps, briefly, Shakespearean – who writes of ‘some lonely rain-ceased midsummer evening’, of ‘light unanswerable and tall and wide’, of ‘the millon-petalled flower of being here’, of ‘thin continuous dreaming’ and ‘wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers’.

  And to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, there is the seaside-postcard Larkin, as true to the streak of vulgarity in the civilization as he is sensitive to its most delicious refinements: ‘Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap.’ Or get this disfigurement of a poster of a bathing beauty:

  Huge tits and a fissured crotch

  Were scored well in, and the space

  Between her legs held scrawls

  That set her fairly astride

  A tuberous cock and balls.

  And then, elsewhere,

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  And again, in ‘Sad Steps’:

  Groping back to bed after a piss

  I part thick curtains, and am startled by

  The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

  But despite the piss, and the snigger of the demotic in all of these places, that title, ‘Sad Steps’, reminds us that Larkin is solicitous for his Sidney also. He too returns to origins and brings something back, although he does not return to ‘roots’. He put inverted commas round his ‘roots’, in fact. His childhood, he says, was a forgotten boredom. He sees England from train windows, fleeting past and away. He is urban modern man, the insular Englishman, responding to the tones of his own clan, ill at ease when out of his environment. He is a poet, indeed, of composed and tempered English nationalism, and his voice is the not untrue, not unkind voice of post-war England, where the cloth cap and the royal crown have both lost some of their potent symbolism, and the categorical, socially defining functions of the working-class accent and the aristocratic drawl have almost been eroded. Larkin’s tones are mannerly but not exquisite, well-bred but not mealy-mouthed. If his England and his English are not as deep as Hughes’s or as solemn as Hill’s, they are nevertheless dearly beloved, and during his sojourn in Belfast in the late fifties, he gave thanks, by implication, for the nurture that he receives by living among his own. The speech, the customs, the institutions of England are, in the words of another English poet, domiciled in Ireland, ‘wife to his creating thought’. That was Hopkins in Dublin in the 1880s, sensing that his individual talent was being divorced from his tradition. Here is Larkin remembering the domicile in Belfast in the 1950s:

  Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,

  Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,

  Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:

  Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

  Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint

  Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,

  The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, went

  To prove me separate, not unworkable.

  Living in England has no such excuse:

  These are my customs and establishments

  It would be much more serious to refuse.

  Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

  Larkin’s England of the mind is in many ways continuous with the England of Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ and Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, an England of customs and institutions, industrial and domestic, but also an England whose pastoral hinterland is threatened by the very success of those institutions. Houses and roads and factories mean that a certain England is ‘Going, Going’:

  It seems, just now,

  To be happening so very fast;

  Despite all the land left free

  For the first time I feel somehow

  That it isn’t going to last,

  That before I snuff it, the whole

  Boiling will be bricked in

  Except for the tourist parts –

  First slum of Europe: a role

  It won’t be so hard to win,

  With a cast of crooks and tarts.

  And that will be England gone,

  The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

  The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

  There’ll be books; it will linger on

  In galleries; but all that remains

  For us will be concrete and tyres.

  I think that sense of an ending has driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins, has made them look in, rather than up, to England. The loss of imperial power, the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has led to a new sense of the shires, a new valuing of the native English experience. Donald Davie, for example, has published a book of poems, with that very title, The Shires, which attempts to annex to his imagination by personal memory or historical meditation or literary connections, each shire of England. It is a book at once intimate and exclusive, a topography of love and impatience, and it is yet another symptom that English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England, but
what is the matter with England. I have simply presumed to share in that exploration through the medium which England has, for better or worse, impressed upon us all, the English language itself.

  Beckman Lecture, University of California, Berkeley, May 1976

  Yeats as an Example?

  A writer’s dedication to his art can often entail some kind of hurt for those who live near and dear to him. Robert Lowell in the final poem of The Dolphin used the word ‘plotting’ to describe something that is questionable in the artistic enterprise:

  I have sat and listened to too many

  words of the collaborating muse,

  and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

  not avoiding injury to others,

  not avoiding injury to myself –

  to ask compassion … this book, half-fiction,

  an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting –

  my eyes have seen what my hand did.

  If there is more than a hint of self-accusation in that last line, there is a strong ring of triumph in it as well, and when Robert Lowell died I remember some of us toyed with it as a possible epitaph for him: it seemed to catch the combination of pride and vulnerability that lay at the roots of his poetic voice.

  It would have made a much more rueful tombstone verse than Yeats’s:

  Cast a cold eye

  On life, on death.

  Horseman, pass by.

  Where Yeats’s eye is cold, Lowell’s is warm though by no means wet, sympathetic to the imperfections of living, the eye of a pedestrian rather than the eye of an equestrian. Where Yeats’s last poems sang their faith in art and turned in scorn from ‘the sort now growing up’, Lowell’s final work hesitated, and his trust in fictions seemed to waver:

  Epilogue

  Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme –

  why are they no help to me now

  I want to make

  something imagined, not recalled?…

  Yet why not say what happened?

  Pray for the grace of accuracy

  Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

  stealing like the tide across a map

  to his girl solid with yearning.

  We are poor passing facts,

  warned by that to give

  each figure in the photograph

  his living name.

  ‘Accuracy’ seems a modest aim, even when it is as richly managed as it is here. Lowell abjures the sublime, that realm where his rhetoric often penetrated, and seeks instead the low-key consolations of the quotidian. He is almost, in Yeats’s words, ‘content to live’.

  Yeats would never have been ‘content to live’ merely, because that would have meant throwing words away, throwing gesture away, throwing away possibilities for drama and transcendence. From the beginning of his career he emphasized and realized the otherness of art from life, dream from action, and by the end he moved within his mode of vision as within some invisible ring of influence and defence, some bullet-proof glass of the spirit, exclusive as Caesar in his tent, absorbed as a long-legged fly on the stream.

  Whatever Yeats intends us to understand by ‘Long-legged Fly’, we cannot miss the confidence that drives it forward and the energy that underlies it, an energy that exhilarates in the faith that artistic process has some kind of absolute validity. There is a kind of vitreous finish on the work itself that deflects all other truths except its own. Art can outface history, the imagination can disdain happenings once it has incubated and mastered the secret behind happenings. In fact, we can sense a violence, an implacable element in the artistic drive as Yeats envisages and embodies it. The ‘yellow eyed hawk of the mind’ and the ‘ancient, glittering eyes’ of the Chinamen in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and the ‘cold eye’ of the tomb-inspecting horseman are all suggestive of sinister appetites. If the act of mind in the artist has all the intentness and amorousness and every bit as much of the submerged aggression of the act of love, then it can be maintained that Yeats’s artistic imagination was often in a condition that can only be properly described as priapic.

  Is this, then, exemplary? Do we altogether assent to the samurai stare and certainty of ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death’? Do we say yes to this high-stepping tread? Can we afford to disdain the life that goes on messily and cantankerously? How, in other words, do we regard Yeats’s affirmation that the man who sits down to breakfast is a ‘bundle of accident and incoherence’ and that the man reborn in his poem is ‘something intended, complete’?

  Personally, I find much to admire in the intransigence of the stance, as I find much to commend and imitate in the two things that Yeats was so often determined to set at loggerheads, his life and his work:

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  Perfection of the life or of the work

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

  What is finally admirable is the way his life and his work are not separate but make a continuum, the way the courage of his vision did not confine itself to rhetorics but issued in actions. Unlike Wallace Stevens, for example, that other great apologist of the imagination, Yeats bore the implications of his romanticism into action: he propagandized, speechified, fund-raised, administered and politicked in the world of telegrams and anger, all on behalf of the world of vision. His poetry was not just a matter of printed books making their way in a world of literate readers and critics; it was rather the fine flower of his efforts to live as forthrightly as he could in the world of illiterates and politicians. Beside the ringing antithesis of ‘The Choice’ we must set this other recognition:

  A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry, the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living and those who come after him have a right to know it. Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet’s life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man; that it is no little thing to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one’s own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it … to give one’s own life as well as one’s words (which are so much nearer to one’s soul) to the criticism of the world.

  I admire the way that Yeats took on the world on his own terms, defined the areas where he would negotiate and where he would not; the way he never accepted the terms of another’s argument but propounded his own. I assume that this peremptoriness, this apparent arrogance, is exemplary in an artist, that it is proper and even necessary for him to insist on his own language, his own vision, his own terms of reference. This will often seem like irresponsibility or affectation, sometimes like callousness, but from the artist’s point of view it is an act of integrity, or an act of cunning to protect the integrity.

  All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen’s terms, let him call the tune and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

  ‘Well,’ we might say, ‘when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stones about fairies from the servants in his grandparents’ house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of identity for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world-view of
the country people. It was a conscious counter-cultural act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.’ To which the citizen replies, ‘Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.’

  Yeats would not have thanked us for explaining him apologetically. He would want us to affirm him with all the elaborate obstinacy with which he affirmed himself. So for entertainment and instruction, I wish to observe him in action as a young poet, and then as an established poet and public figure; and in each case I hope to make clear what I consider to have been exemplary in his bearing.

  *

  The Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very title is enough to raise the ghosts of the nineties, carried an interview with Mr W. B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D. N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs:

  A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr W. B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.

  In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.