Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

  All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose

  Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;

  I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;

  Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

  ‘High Talk’

  But it is not this vaunting of the special claims of art and the artist that is finally to be saluted. Rather, it is Yeats’s large-minded, whole-hearted assent to the natural cycles of living and dying, his acknowledgement that the ‘masterful images’ which compel the assent of artist and audience alike are dependent upon the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’, the humility of his artistic mastery before the mystery of life and death. There are several poems where this tenderness towards life and its uncompletedness is at odds with and tending to gain sway over the consolations of the artificial work. The tumultuousness and repose of a poem like ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ come to mind, although there the equilibrium between the golden bird of art and the tattered scarecrow of life is just held, as it is held and held in mind, contemplated and celebrated in ‘Among School Children’. I am thinking, however, of quieter poems, more intimate, less deliberately orchestrated pieces, such as ‘What Then?’:

  All his happier dreams came true –

  A small old house, wife, daughter, son,

  Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,

  Poets and Wits about him drew;

  ‘What then? sang Plato’s ghost.‘ What then?’

  ‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,

  ‘According to my boyish plan;

  Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,

  Something to perfection brought’;

  But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’

  And the challenge of Plato’s ghost is matched and picked up in that other uncharacteristically introspective poem, ‘The Man and the Echo’, where the Echo mocks the Man and where the voice of conscience and remorse opposes itself to the artistic choice that the old man has lived out all his life; this voice of conscience which asks ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot’ is finally symbolized in the anguished cry of a rabbit:

  But hush for I have lost the theme,

  Its joy or night seem but a dream.

  Up there some hawk or owl has struck

  Dropping out of sky or rock,

  A stricken rabbit is crying out

  And its cry distracts my thought.

  I want to finish with two poems, one of which sets the dissatisfied poet in the midst of civil war, the other of which sets the violent hero in the middle of the dead. They ask, indirectly, about the purpose of art in the midst of life and by their movements, their images, their musics they make palpable a truth which Yeats was at first only able to affirm abstractly, in those words which he borrowed from Coventry Patmore: ‘The end of art is peace.’

  The first is from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’:

  The bees build in the crevices

  Of loosening masonry, and there

  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

  My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We are closed in, and the key is turned

  On our uncertainty; somewhere

  A man is killed, or a house burned,

  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  A barricade of stone or of wood;

  Some fourteen days of civil war;

  Last night they trundled down the road

  That dead young soldier in his blood:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,

  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;

  More substance in our enmities

  Than in our love; Ο honey-bees,

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  Here the great fur coat of attitude is laid aside, the domineering intellect and the equestrian profile, all of which gain him a power elsewhere, all laid aside. What we have is a deeply instinctive yet intellectually assented-to idea of nature in her benign and nurturant aspect as the proper first principle of life and living. The maternal is apprehended, intimated and warmly cherished and we are reminded, much as Shakespeare might remind us, of the warm eggs in the nest shaking at the impact of an explosion. The stare at Yeats’s window and the temple-haunting martlet in Macbeth’s castle are messengers of grace.

  And if the maternal instincts are the first, perhaps they call us back at the very end also. Yeats lies under Ben Bulben, in Drumcliff Churchyard, under that dominant promontory which I like to think of as the father projected into the landscape, and there is perhaps something too male and assertive about the poem that bears the mountain’s name and stands at the end of the Collected Poems. If I had my choice I would make the end of that book more exemplary by putting a kinder poem last, one in which the affirmative wilful violent man, whether he be artist or hero, the poet Yeats or the headhunter Cuchulain, must merge his domineering voice into the common voice of the living and the dead, mingle his heroism with the cowardice of his kind, lay his grey head upon the ashy breast of death.

  I would end with ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, a poem which Yeats wrote within two weeks of his death, one in which his cunning as a deliberate maker and his wisdom as an intuitive thinker find a rich and strange conclusiveness. It is written in terza rima, the metre of Dante’s Commedia, the only time Yeats used the form, but the proper time, when he was preparing his own death by imagining Cuchulain’s descent among the shades. We witness here a strange ritual of surrender, a rite of passage from life into death, but a rite whose meaning is subsumed into song, into the otherness of art. It is a poem deeply at one with the weak and the strong of this earth, full of a motherly kindness towards life, but also unflinching in its belief in the propriety and beauty of life transcended into art, song, words. The language of the poem hallows the things of this world – eyes, branches, linen, shrouds, arms, needles, trees, all are strangely chaste in the context – yet the figure the poem makes is out of this world:

  Cuchulain Comforted

  A man that had six mortal wounds, a man

  Violent and famous, strode among the dead;

  Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

  Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head

  Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree

  As though to mediate on wounds and blood.

  A Shroud that seemed to have authority

  Among those bird-like things came, and let fall

  A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three

  Came creeping up because the man was still.

  And thereupon that linen-carrier said:

  ‘Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

  ‘Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;

  Mainly because of what we only know

  The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

  ‘We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do

  All must together do.’ That done, the man

  Took up the nearest and began to sew.

  ‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can,

  But first you must be told our character:

  Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

  ‘Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’

  They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,

  Though all was done in common as before;

  They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

  Lecture, University of Surrey, 1978

  Place and Displacement:

  Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland

  In his introduction to Jung’s psychology, Anthony Storr gives an account of a case that bears closely upon the situation of the poet in Northern Ireland or anywh
ere else, for that matter:

  Jung describes how some of his patients, faced with what appeared to be an insoluble conflict, solved it by ‘outgrowing’ it, by developing a ‘new level of consciousness’. He writes: ‘Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms but faded out when faced with new and stronger life urge.’

  The attainment of this new level of psychological development includes a certain degree of ‘… detachment from one’s emotions. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say “I know that I suffer.”’

  All this, Storr is the first to admit, is very general. No example is given by Jung of the ‘insoluble problem’ which must be outgrown or resolved at a symbolic level but, had he sought one, Jung might have found in Wordsworth’s Prelude a working model for that evolution of a higher consciousness in response to an apparently intolerable conflict. The last books of the poem worry and circle and ruminate in an effort to discover what had happened to him in the 1790s when Wordsworth’s passion for liberty and human regeneration, awakened by the outbreak of the French Revolution, came into conflict with other essential elements in his make-up founded upon the land and love of England. When England declared war on Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticipated intensity which he sought to allay first by addressing himself to the higher reality of Godwin’s philosophy and, when that failed, by recourse to a renewed and deepened myth of nature and the human heart. But the crisis itself is described with dramatic and anecdotal power:

  And now the strength of Britain was put forth

  In league with the confederated host;

  Not in my single self alone I found,

  But in the minds of all ingenious youth,

  Change and subversion from this hour. No shock

  Given to my moral nature had I known

  Down to that very moment – neither lapse

  Nor turn of sentiment – that might be named

  A revolution, save at this one time:

  All else was progress on the self-same path

  On which with a diversity of pace

  I had been travelling; this, a stride at once

  Into another region. True it is,

  ’Twas not concealed with what ungracious eyes

  Our native rulers from the very first

  Had looked upon regenerated France;

  Nor had I doubted that this day would come –

  But in such contemplation I had thought

  Of general interest only, beyond this

  Had never once foretasted the event.

  Now I had other business, for I felt

  The ravage of this most unnatural strife

  In my own heart; there it lay like a weight,

  At enmity with all the tenderest springs

  Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze

  Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree

  Of my beloved country – nor had wished

  For happier fortune than to wither there –

  Now from my pleasant station was cut off,

  And tossed about in whirlwinds. I rejoiced,

  Yes, afterwards, truth painful to record,

  Exulted in the triumph of my soul

  When Englishmen by thousands were o’erthrown,

  Left without glory on the field, or driven,

  Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief –

  Grief call it not,’twas any thing but that –

  A conflict of sensations without name,

  Of which he only who may love the sight

  Of a village steeple as I do can judge,

  When in the congregation, bending all

  To their great Father, prayers were offered up

  Or praises for our country’s victories,

  And, ’mid the simple worshippers perchance

  I only, like an uninvited guest

  Whom no one owned, sate silent – shall I add,

  Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come!

  The Prelude (1805), Book X, 229–74

  The good place where Wordsworth had been nurtured and to which his habitual feelings were most naturally attuned has become, for the revolutionary poet, the wrong place. Life, where he is situated, is not as he wants it to be. He is displaced from his own affections by a vision of the good located elsewhere. His political, utopian aspirations displace him from the beloved actuality of his surroundings so that his instinctive being and his appetitive intelligence are knocked out of alignment. He feels like a traitor among those he knows and loves. To be true to one part of himself, he must betray another part. The inner state of man is thus shaken and the shock waves in the consciousness reflect the upheavals in the surrounding world. Indeed, the whole passage is like a textbook illustration of another of Jung’s underlying notions, namely, that the trauma of individual consciousness is likely to be an aspect of forces at work in the collective life, past or present, since, for Jung, Hamlet’s exclamation ‘O my prophetic soul’ has the force of a truism.

  It is another truism that the achievement of a work of art is salutary in these circumstances, and we can easily see how the composition of The Prelude was, in itself, part of the symbolic resolution of a lived conflict. Wordsworth admits an inner dialogue between those inclinations and hopes which landed him at the impasse he describes. The poem is diagnostic, therapeutic and didactic all at once. It throws, in a prefiguration of modernist procedures, ‘the nerves, as ’twere, in patterns on a screen’. It obeys the modern demand for psychological realism and while it often conducts its investigations in a diction that is ornate and elevated, it does go in fear of abstractions, concentrating instead upon the story of feelings and aspirations within an individual life, at a certain place and a certain time. Wordsworth’s case is symptomatic of the historical moment, but it is not paraded as being representative: the pressure of the poem’s occasion launches it beyond allegory and exemplum. Its principle of development and its structural and rhetorical life are to be found not in any designs he has upon a readership, not in self-exculpation or self-dramatization, but in the autonomous habits of the poet’s mind and practice. The ‘I’ of the poem is at the eye of the storm within the ‘I’ of the poet.

  The extreme of this kind of writing was to come more than a hundred years later, in The Waste Land, another work where the expression of an acute personal predicament can be read as expression of the age, and one which enforced a new way of reading poetry. It taught us to sound the image for its cultural and psychological import, to ponder the allusion for its critical rather than its decorative weight, and to look for the poet’s imaginative signature in the texture of the work, to listen in for the intrinsic poetry rather than look out for its explicit meaning. The Waste Land, we now know almost too patly, is the resolution at a symbolic level of conflicts within the consciousness of the poet, but we are free to read it as a refraction of pressures in the world of post-war Europe, because we have absorbed Jung’s insights quite naturally into our way of thinking about art.

  Like the disaffected Wordsworth, the Northern Irish writers I wish to discuss take the strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness simultaneously, and at times their procedures are every bit as cautious and oysterish as those of Eliot. They belong to a place that is patently riven by notions of belonging to other places. Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind. The Nationalist will wince at the Union Jack and ‘God Save the Queen’ as tokens of his place in the world, he will withhold assent from the solidarities implicit in those emblems rather as Wordsworth withheld assent from the congregation�
��s prayers for the success of the English armies. Yet, like Wordsworth among his patriotic neighbours, the northern Nationalist conducts his daily social life among Unionist neighbours for whom those same emblems have pious and passionate force, and to whom his nationalist principles, his hope for a different flag and different anthem, are as traitorous as Wordsworth’s revolutionary sympathies. The fountainhead of the Unionist’s myth springs in the Crown of England but he must stand his ground on the island of Ireland. The fountainhead of the Nationalist’s myth lies in the idea of an integral Ireland, but he too lives in an exile from his ideal place. Nevertheless, while he has to concede that he is a citizen of the British state, the Nationalist can take comfort in the physical fact of his presence upon the partitioned Irish island, just as the Unionist can take comfort in the political reality of the United Kingdom even if he must concede that Ireland is his geographical home.

  The condition is chronic and quotidian and not necessarily terminal. It was fully at work in the collective life of Northern Ireland long before the present disruptions occurred. Indeed, it was more radically internalized within the Ulster personality during the years of quiet, and the typically reticent response of many Northern Irish writers to the violent conditions of the last fifteen years has much to do with this very internalization. Like other members of the population, the poets knew the score. Sectarian division, gerrymandering by the majority, discrimination in jobs and housing, all that was recognized as deplorable, and by the mid-sixties I think it would be fair to say that there were nascent attitudes in younger sections of the population, Nationalist, Republican and Unionist, which promised some shift in the shape of things to come. I do not mean that the Unionist Establishment would easily or willingly have changed its ways, but with a more active and vocal Civil Rights movement at work and a less blatantly triumphalist generation of Unionist politicians emerging, an evolution towards a better, juster, internal balance might have been expected to begin.