Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  The dead go on before us, they

  Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,

  We shall see them face to face –

  Plain as lettering in the chapels

  It was said, and for a second

  Wives saw men of the explosion

  Larger than in life they managed –

  Gold as on a coin, or walking

  Somehow from the sun towards them,

  One showing the eggs unbroken.

  If Philip Larkin had ever composed his version of The Divine Comedy he would probably have discovered himself not in a dark wood but in a railway tunnel half-way on a journey down England. His inferno proper might have occurred before dawn, as a death-haunted aubade, whence he would have emerged into the lighted room inside the head of an old fool, and then his purgatorial ascent would have been up through the ‘lucent comb’ of some hospital building where men in hired boxes stared out at a wind-tousled sky. We have no doubt about his ability to recount the troubles of such souls who walk the rising ground of ‘extinction’s alp’. His disillusioned compassion for them has been celebrated and his need to keep numbering their griefs has occasionally drawn forth protests that he narrowed the possibilities of life so much that the whole earth became a hospital. I want to suggest that Larkin also had it in him to write his own version of the Paradiso. It might well have amounted to no more than an acknowledgement of the need to imagine ‘such attics cleared of me, such absences’; nevertheless, in the poems he wrote there was enough reach and longing to show that he did not completely settle for that well-known bargain offer, ‘a poetry of lowered sights and patently diminished expectations’.

  A. Thwaire, ed., Larkin at Sixty (Faber, 1982)

  Atlas of Civilization

  At the very end of his life, Socrates’ response to his recurring dream, which had instructed him to ‘practise the art’, was to begin to put the fables of Aesop into verse. It was, of course, entirely in character for the philosopher to be attracted to fictions whose a priori function was to expose the shape of things, and it was proper that even this slight brush with the art of poetry should involve an element of didacticism. But imagine what the poems of Socrates would have been like if, instead of doing adaptations, he had composed original work during those hours before he took the poison. It is unlikely that he would have broken up his lines to weep; indeed, it is likely that he would not only have obeyed Yeats’s injunction on this score, but that he would have produced an œuvre sufficient to confound the master’s claim that ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work’.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that the work of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert could pass as a substitute for such an ideal poetry of reality. Yet in the exactions of its logic, the temperance of its tone, and the extremity and equanimity of its recognitions, it does resemble what a twentieth-century poetic version of the examined life might be. Admittedly, in all that follows here, it is an English translation rather than the Polish original which is being praised or pondered, but what convinces one of the universal resource of Herbert’s writing is just this ability which it possesses to lean, without toppling, well beyond the plumb of its native language.

  Herbert himself, however, is deeply attracted to that which does not lean but which ‘trusts geometry, simple numerical rule, the wisdom of the square, balance and weight’. He rejoices in the discovery that ‘Greek architecture originated in the sun’ and that ‘Greek architects knew the art of measuring with shadows. The north—south axis was marked by the shortest shadow cast by the sun’s zenith. The problem was to trace the perpendicular, the holy east–west direction.’ Hence the splendid utility of Pythagoras’ theorem, and the justice of Herbert’s observation that ‘the architects of the Doric temples were less concerned with beauty than with the chiselling of the world’s order into stone’.

  These quotations come from the second essay in Barbarian in the Garden, a collection of ten meditations on art and history which masquerade as ‘travel writings’ in so far as nine of them are occasioned by visits to specific places, including Lascaux, Sicily, Arles, Orvieto, Siena, Chartres, and the various resting places of the paintings of Piero della Francesca. A tenth one also begins and ends at a single pungent site, the scorched earth of an island in the Seine where on 18 March 1314, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Order of the Templars, was burned at the stake along with Geoffroi de Charney and thirty-six brothers of their order. Yet this section of the book also travels to a domain with which Herbert is already too familiar: the domain of tyranny, with its police precision, mass arrests, tortures, self-inculpations, purges, and eradications, all those methods which already in the fourteenth century had begun to ‘enrich the repertoire of power’.

  Luckily, the poet’s capacity for admiration is more than equal to his perception of the atrocious, and Barbarian in the Garden is an ironical title. This ‘barbarian’ who makes his pilgrimage to the sacred places is steeped in the culture and history of classical and medieval Europe. Admittedly, there is situated at the centre of his consciousness a large burnt-out zone inscribed ‘what we have learned in modern times and must never forget even though we need hardly dwell upon it’, but even so, this consciousness can still muster a sustaining half-trust in man as a civilizer and keeper of civilizations. The book is full of lines which sing out in the highest registers of intellectual rapture. In Paestum, ‘Greek temples live under the golden sun of geometry’. In Orvieto, to enter the cathedral is a surprise, ‘so much does the façade differ from the interior – as though the gate of life full of birds and colours led into a cold, austere eternity’. In the presence of a Piero della Francesca: ‘He is … like a figurative painter who has passed through a cubist phase.’ In the presence of Piero’s Death of Adam in Arezzo: ‘The entire scene appears Hellenic, as though the Old Testament were composed by Aeschylus.’

  But Herbert never gets too carried away. The ground-hugging sturdiness which he recognizes and cherishes in archaic buildings has its analogue in his own down-to-earthness. His love of ‘the quiet chanting of the air and the immense planes’ does not extend so far as to constitute a betrayal of the human subject, in thrall to gravity and history. His imagination is slightly less skyworthy than that of his great compatriot Czesław Miłosz, who has nevertheless recognized in the younger poet a kindred spirit and as long ago as 1968 translated, with Peter Dale Scott, the now reissued Selected Poems. Deliciously susceptible as he is to the ‘lucidus ordo – an eternal order of light and balance’ in the work of Piero, Herbert is still greatly pleasured by the density and miscellany of things he finds in a book by Piero’s contemporary, the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti:

  Despite its classical structure, technical subjects are mixed with anecdotes and trivia. We may read about foundations, building-sites, bricklaying, doorknobs, wheels, axes, levers, hacks, and how to ‘exterminate and destroy snakes, mosquitoes, bed-bugs, fleas, mice, moths and other importunate night creatures’.

  Clearly, although he quotes Berenson elsewhere, Herbert would be equally at home with a builder. He is very much the poet of a workers’ republic in so far as he possesses a natural affinity with those whose eyes narrow in order to effect an operation or a calculation rather than to study a refinement. Discussing the self-portrait of Luca Signorelli which that painter entered in The Coming of the Anti-Christ (in the duomo at Orvieto) alongside a portrait of his master, Fra Angelico, Herbert makes a distinction between the two men. He discerns how Signorelli’s eyes ‘are fixed upon reality … Beside him, Fra Angelico dressed in a cassock gazes inwards. Two glances: one visionary, the other observant.’ It is a distinction which suggests an equivalent division within the poet, deriving from the co-existence within his own deepest self of two conflicting strains. These were identified by A. Alvarez in his introduction to the original 1968 volume as the tender-minded and the tough-minded, and it is some such crossing of a natural readiness to consent upon an inst
inctive suspicion which constitutes the peculiar fibre of Herbert’s mind and art.

  All through Barbarian in the Garden, the tender-minded, desiring side of his nature is limpidly, felicitously engaged. In a church in a Tuscan village where ‘there is hardly room enough for a coffin’, he encounters a Madonna. ‘She wears a simple, high-waisted dress open from breast to knees. Her left hand rests on a hip, a country bridesmaid’s gesture; her right hand touches her belly but without a trace of licentiousness.’ In a similar fashion, as he reports his ascent of the tower of Senlis Cathedral, the writing unreels like a skein long stored in the cupboard of the senses. ‘Patches of lichen, grass between the stones, and bright yellow flowers’; then, high up on a gallery, an ‘especially beautiful Eve. Coarse-grained, big-eyed and plump. A heavy plait of hair falls on her wide, warm back.’

  Writing of this sort which ensures, in Neruda’s words, that ‘the reality of the world should not be underprized’, is valuable in itself, but what reinforces Herbert’s contribution and takes it far beyond being just another accomplished print-out of a cultivated man’s impressions is his sceptical historical sense of the world and its unreliability. He is thus as appreciative of the unfinished part of Siena Cathedral and as unastonished by it as he is entranced by what is exquisitely finished: ‘The majestic plan remained unfulfilled, interrupted by the Black Death and errors in construction.’ The elegance of that particular zeugma should not blind us to its outrage; the point is that Herbert is constantly wincing in the jaws of a pincer created by the mutually indifferent intersection of art and suffering. Long habituation to this crux has bred in him a tone which is neither vindictive against art nor occluded to pain. It predisposes him to quote Cicero on the colonies of Sicily as ‘an ornamental band sewn on to the rough cloth of barbarian lands, a golden band that was frequently stained with blood’. And it enables him to strike his own jocund, unnerving sentences, like this one about the Baglioni family of Perugia: ‘They were vengeful and cruel, though refined enough to slaughter their enemies on beautiful summer evenings.’

  Once more, this comes from his essay on Piero della Francesca, and it is in writing about this beloved painter that Herbert articulates most clearly the things we would want to say about himself as an artist: ‘The harmonized background and the principle of tranquillity’, ‘the rule of the demon of perspective’, the viewing of the world as ‘through a pane of ice’, an ‘epic impassiveness’, a quality which is ‘impersonal, supra-individual’. All these phrases apply, at one time or another, to Herbert’s poetry and help to adumbrate the shapes of his ‘tough-mindedness’. Yet they should not be taken to suggest any culpable detachment or abstraction. The impassiveness, the perspective, the impersonality, the tranquillity, all derive from his unblindable stare at the facts of pain, the recurrence of injustice and catastrophe; but they derive also from a deep love for the whole Western tradition of religion, literature, and art, which have remained open to him as a spiritual resource, helping him to stand his ground. Herbert is as familiar as any twentieth-century writer with the hollow men and has seen more broken columns with his eyes than most literary people have seen in their imaginations, but this does not end up in a collapse of his trust in the humanist endeavour. On the contrary, it summons back to mind the whole dimensions of that endeavour and enforces it once more upon your awareness for the great boon which it is (not was), something we may have thought of as vestigial before we began reading these books but which, by the time we have finished, stands before our understanding once again like ‘a cathedral in the wilderness’.

  Barbarian in the Garden was first published in Polish in 1962 and is consequently the work of a much younger man (Herbert was born in 1924) than the one who wrote the poems of Report from the Besieged City. But the grave, laconic, instructive prose, translated with such fine regard for cadence and concision by Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders, is recognizably the work of the same writer. It would be wrong to say that in the meantime Herbert has matured, since from the beginning the look he turned upon experience was penetrating, judicial, and absolutely in earnest; but it could be said that he has grown even more secure in his self-possession and now begins to resemble an old judge who has developed the benevolent aspect of a daydreamer while retaining all the readiness and spring of a crouched lion. Where the poems of the reissued Selected Poems carry within themselves the battened-down energy and enforced caution of the situation from which they arose in Poland in the 1950s, the poems of the latest volume allow themselves a much greater latitude of voice. They are physically longer, less impacted, more social and genial in tone. They occur within a certain spaciousness, in an atmosphere of winnowed comprehension. One thinks again of the lucidus ordo, of that ‘golden sun of geometry’; yet because of the body heat of the new poetry, its warm breath which keeps stirring the feather of our instinctive nature, one thinks also of Herbert’s eloquent valediction to the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne:

  I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the abyss of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity …

  The road opened to the Greek temples and the Gothic cathedrals. I walked towards them feeling the warm touch of the Lascaux painter on my palm.

  It is no wonder, therefore, that Mr Cogito, the poet’s alibi/alias/persona/ventriloquist’s doll/permissive correlative, should be so stubbornly attached to the senses of sight and touch. In the second section of ‘Eschatological Forebodings of Mr Cogito’, after Herbert’s several musings about his ultimate fate – ‘probably he will sweep / the great square of Purgatory’ – he imagines him taking courses in the eradication of earthly habits. And yet, in spite of these angelic debriefing sessions, Mr Cogito

  continues to see

  a pine on a mountain slope

  dawn’s seven candlesticks

  a blue-veined stone

  he will yield to all tortures

  gentle persuasions

  but to the end he will defend

  the magnificent sensation of pain

  and a few weathered images

  on the bottom of the burned-out eye

  3

  who knows

  perhaps he will manage

  to convince the angels

  he is incapable

  of heavenly

  service

  and they will permit him to return

  by an overgrown path

  at the shore of a white sea

  to the cave of the beginning

  The poles of the beginning and the end are crossing and at the very moment when he strains to imagine himself at the shimmering circumference of the imaginable, Mr Cogito finds himself collapsing back into the palpable centre. Yet all this is lightened of its possible portentousness because it is happening not to ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’ but to Mr Cogito. Mr Cogito operates sometimes like a cartoon character, a cosmic Don Quixote or matchstick Sisyphus; sometimes like a discreet convention whereby the full frontal of the autobiographical ‘I’ is veiled. It is in this latter role that he is responsible for one of the book’s most unforgettable poems, ‘Mr Cogito – The Return’, which, along with ‘The Abandoned’, ‘Mr Cogito’s Soul’, and the title poem, strikes an unusually intimate and elegiac note.

  Mostly, however, Mr Cogito figures as a stand-in for experimental, undaunted Homo sapiens, or, to be more exact, as a representative of the most courageous, well-disposed, and unremittingly intelligent members of the species. The poems where he fulfils this function are no less truly pitched and sure of their step than the ones I have just mentioned; in fact, they are more brilliant as intellectual reconnaissance and more deadly as political resistance; they are on the offensive, and to read them is to put oneself through the mill of Herbert’s own personal selection process, to be tested for one’s comprehension of the necessity of
refusal, one’s ultimate gumption and awareness. This poetry is far more than ‘dissident’; it gives no consolation to papmongers or propagandists of whatever stripe. Its whole intent is to devastate those arrangements which are offered as truth by power’s window-dressers everywhere. It can hear the screech of the fighter bomber behind the righteous huffing of the official spokesman, yet it is not content with just an exposé or an indictment. Herbert always wants to probe past official versions of collective experience into the final ring of the individual’s perception and endurance. He does so in order to discover whether that inner citadel of human being is a selfish bolt hole or an attentive listening post. To put it another way, he would not be all that interested in discovering the black box after the crash, since he would far prefer to be able to monitor the courage and conscience of each passenger during the minutes before it. Thus, in their introduction, John and Bogdana Carpenter quote him as follows:

  You understand I had words in abundance to express my rebellion and protest. I might have written something of this sort: ‘O you cursed, damned people, so and sos, you kill innocent people, wait and a just punishment will fall on you’. I didn’t say this because I wanted to bestow a broader dimension on the specific, individual, experienced situation, or rather, to show its deeper, general human perspectives.