Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

  And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

  We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,

  Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

  Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

  And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

  View but his picture in this tragic glass,

  And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

  And then we were off:

  Then sit thou down, divine Zenocrate;

  And here we crown thee Queen of Persia,

  And all the kingdoms and dominions

  That late the power of Tamburlaine subdu’d.

  As Juno, when the giants were suppress’d,

  That darted mountains at her brother Jove,

  So looks my love, shadowing in her brows

  Triumphs and trophies for my victories;

  Or as Latona’s daughter, bent to arms,

  Adding more courage to my conquering mind.

  To gratify the sweet Zenocrate,

  Egyptians, Moors, and men of Asia,

  From Barbary unto the Western India,

  Shall pay a yearly tribute to thy sire;

  And from the bounds of Afric to the banks

  Of Ganges shall his mighty arm extend.

  It was impossible not to be carried away by the sheer rhetorical power of this work, and difficult not to share the headiness of the English Renaissance moment as it declared itself in the untrammelled climb of Marlowe’s verse. And even though I have learned to place this poetry’s expansionist drive in the context of nascent English imperialism, I am still grateful for the enlargements it offered, the soaring orchestration, the roll-call of place names and of figures from classical mythology. It was a fundamentally pleasurable experience that need not be reneged on for the sake of any subsequent political correctness.

  Ought I to have been less ready to be carried away? Maybe I should have been taught to beware of the military push of the thing, and been reminded that this English pentameter marched in step with the invading English armies of the late Tudor period – those who in the 1580s and 1590s were systematically preparing the conquest of Gaelic Ireland and the future plantation of Ulster in the 1620s. Yet the movement of the lines was so heady and the rhetoric so thrilling that the temptation to go with it proved irresistible. What I want to do here, therefore, is to find a way of reaffirming the value and rights of Marlowe’s poetry in our own post-colonial time. When resistance to works from the canonical ‘centre’ has replaced formal appreciation as the predominant approach to literary study, it is necessary to find a way of treating the marvellously aspiring note of his work as something more than a set of discourses to be unmasked. When the word ‘humanist’ has become almost a term of abuse, it is necessary to consider whether we would want to have Marlowe’s whole keyboard of classical reference demeaned. Surely it is still possible to take cognizance of the unpredictable artistic excellence of Marlowe’s plays and poems while acknowledging that they are bound up with a particular moment of English history, and are thereby implicated with the late-Tudor project of national consolidation at home and colonization abroad. There’s no doubt, for example, that an up-to-the-minute commentator would be inclined to regard the Virgilian longueurs of Marlowe’s early play Dido Queen of Carthage as a covert endorsement of the expeditionary drives beginning to take shape in late-sixteenth-century England. Aeneas’s mission to found a new Troy, from which he is not to be deflected by the power and distraction of love itself, undoubtedly corroborates in imaginative terms the historical effort that would soon go into the founding of a New England and a London Derry.

  Obviously, then, when I re-read Edward II for this lecture, I was not only aware of the way it could be adapted by British filmmaker Derek Jarman as a liberationist masquerade, and turned into a contemporary parable about the suppression of homosexual love. I was also conscious of the banishment to Ireland of Gaveston, the King’s favourite, as something more than a shift of plot. Inevitably, in the present intellectual climate, it was hard not to read in Gaveston’s relegation to the status of non-person an equal relegation of Ireland to the status of non-place. By its inclusion within the realm of English influence, late-medieval Ireland had become at once an annexe of the civil conquerors and the locus of a barbarism that had to be held at bay. One of the accusations against King Edward, after all, was that

  The wild O’Neill, with swarms of Irish kerns

  Lives uncontrolled within the English pale.

  This wild O’Neill was not the one whose rebellious armies would later drive Edmund Spenser off his 3,000-acre estate in County Cork, an estate which Spenser took over round about the time of the play’s production in London, and which had been confiscated from the Irish Earl of Desmond in the aftermath of the recent English campaign in Munster. When Spenser settled in Kilcolman, it was in a country almost depopulated by slaughter and famine. Within the previous half-year an estimated 30,000 men, women and children had perished; Spenser himself, indeed, when acting as secretary to Lord Grey, had witnessed massacre on a large and systematic scale at Smerwick Harbour, where 600 Spaniards and Irish had been butchered. And, needless to say, it was also at Smerwick that Sir Walter Raleigh had performed as one of Queen Elizabeth’s captains was expected to and, in the words of the old Spenser Handbook, ‘had done rough work for Lord Grey’.

  We have been forced to cast a suspicious eye on the pretensions of Renaissance humanism by having its sacred texts placed in the context of their authors’ participation in such brutally oppressive escapades; we have been rightly instructed about the ways that native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure’, and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. One has to allow for the fact that, in the words of Ezra Pound:

  the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radio activity, a force transfusing, welding and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion. You may make what image you like.

  Pound’s image does not preclude art’s implication in the structures and shifts of power at any given moment, but it does suggest a salubrious role for it within the body politic; and another image which the Czech poet Miroslav Holub uses about theatre may also be adduced here. Holub sees the function of drama, and so by extension the function of poetry and of the arts in general, as being analogous to that of the immunity system within the human body. Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

  This reminding, this work of immunity building, is effected by intrinsically artistic means, for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically ‘above the brim’, beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of what affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact and
effort of articulation itself. And this is why I want to focus my remarks upon Marlowe with a consideration of his utterly delightful poem ‘Hero and Leander’, a work happily in love with its own inventions, written at the height of the young master’s powers, a work which exercises itself entirely within the playhouse of erotic narrative in the tradition of the Latin poet Ovid, but which remains responsive to and transformative of the real pains of love as they are experienced in ‘the house in earnest’.

  The story of Leander’s love for Hero was told by the Greek poet Musaeus and Marlowe’s version takes off from the Greek original, although it famously does not tell the whole story. It was left incomplete at his death, but its incompleteness is not the only-reason why Marlowe’s poem is generally agreed to be a late work. George Chapman may have rounded out the first 800-odd lines of the narrative, yet his longer and graver treatment of the second half of the story is really no more mature than Marlowe’s treatment of the first half. It’s just that Marlowe’s lines are without that earnestness which we too automatically associate with the word ‘mature’. Everything in the early stages of the romance suited his gifts – Leander’s physical beauty and erotic susceptibility, Hero’s delicious combination of chastity and sexuality, Leander’s swimming to Hero across the Hellespont and their first rapturous love-making. Chapman then took up the post-coital consequences of it all: Leander’s return to Abydos where the goddess Ceremony appears to him and constrains him to due marriage with Hero, Hero’s turmoil and eventual preparation for their wedding, and finally, after several digressions and postponements, the climactic incident of Leander’s drowning and Hero’s sacrificing of herself for love. In Chapman’s words:

  She fell on her love’s bosom, hugg’d it fast

  And with Leander’s name she breathed her last.

  Neptune for pity in his arms did take them,

  Flung them into the air, and did awake them

  Like two sweet-birds, surnamed th’ Acanthides,

  Which we call thistle-warps, that near no seas

  Dare ever come, but still in couples fly

  And feed on thistle-tops, to testify

  The hardness of their first life in their last:

  The first in thorns of love, and sorrows past.

  In the poem as we have it, it is Marlowe who presents the account of the couple’s first life when Hero appears as ‘Venus’ nun’ and Leander is her infatuated slave, yet it is hard to find any intimation of the thorn and thistle side of things in Marlowe’s version of their situation. What we get instead in the first two sestiads is a rapturous, permissive atmosphere, a tír na n-óg where the line between playfulness and transgression is at first confused and then suspended until all the inner partitions of the psyche have been opened. Bisexual cajolement, an indulgent recognition of the predatory within the amatory, a gift for transforming the louche and the lax into a nice stylistic decorum – it all goes to prove that Marlowe does indeed deserve the title, ‘forward wit’, though not in the damning sense in which the Chorus applied the term to Doctor Faustus.

  Here, for example, is Marlowe’s description of the décor in Venus’s temple at Sestos:

  Of crystal shining fair the pavement was;

  The town of Sestos called it Venus glass.

  There might you see the gods in sundry shapes

  Committing heady riots, incest, rapes:

  For know that underneath this radiant floor

  Was Danae’s statue in a brazen tower,

  Jove slyly stealing from his sister’s bed

  To dally with Idalian Ganymede,

  Or for his love Europa bellowing loud

  Or tumbling with the rainbow in a cloud;

  Blood-quaffing Mars, heaving the iron net

  Which limping Vulcan and his cyclops set;

  Love kindling fire, to burn such towns as Troy;

  Sylvanus weeping for the lovely boy

  That now is turned into a cypress tree,

  Under whose shade the wood gods love to be.

  It would be hard to remain a nun of any sort, never mind a nun of Venus, in such an environment; and so indeed it proves to be in Hero’s case. But this catalogue of amatory exploits only shows Marlowe limbering up. The poem goes on to deal more delicately and deliciously with the whole matter of sexual attraction and in this regard ‘Hero and Leander’ is a boldly liberating work; in it the language of desire, the limits of the possible and the inventions of imagination combine to give a supple and mature image of human life. It is comic in tone but not gullible in perception. It abandons the tragic and heroic pitch of the plays but still manages to keep faith with their project of going over the top. The poetry of ‘Hero and Leander’ is less sonorous than that of Tamburlaine, less shot through by dread and lament than that of Doctor Faustus. As other commentators have pointed out, it is nearer to the note of Gaveston’s infatuated daydreams in Edward II, and truer thereby to the hedonistic and homoerotic impulses that seem to have been so powerful an element in Marlowe’s own sensibility.

  In ‘Hero and Leander’ all his energy and subversiveness seem to get transformed into relish and artifice. He beguiles rather than confronts. Take, for instance, lines from the very start of the poem, which begin by describing the extraordinarily ingenious workmanship that adorned Hero’s footwear, and then go on to elaborate their own erotic daydreams. They are typical of a persistent and very attractive note in Marlowe’s writing:

  Buskins of shells all silvered used she,

  And branched with blushing coral to the knee,

  Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,

  Such as the world would wonder to behold:

  Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,

  Which as she went would chirrup through the bills.

  Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined,

  And looking in her face was strooken blind.

  But this is true, so like was one the other,

  As he imagined Hero was his mother;

  And oftentimes into her bosom flew,

  About her naked neck his bare arms threw,

  And laid his childish head upon her breast,

  And with still panting rocked, there took his rest.

  So lovely fair was Hero, Venus’ nun.

  Admittedly, this ‘rhetoric of enticement’ is a very fine development of Marlowe’s art. His suppler, almost Chaucerian way with the line is obviously linked to his early translation of Ovid’s Amores, done while he was a student. These episodes from the Imperial Roman vie de bohème are virtuoso work, and deserve far more attention than they tend to get. They have wiliness and sexiness and scholastic panache, and would be as much at home among the cleveralites of James Joyce’s university wits in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as they must have been among the scholars of sixteenth-century Cambridge. But when we come to the art of ‘Hero and Leander’, we are closer to the world of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, to the hithering-thithering whims of a self-possessed mind, a mind that knows both the penalties of life and its invitations, one closer to the spirit of carnival than to the shock tactics of agitprop.

  Marlowe’s Pegasus has bolted free of the five-act harness and sports himself in a manner at once strenuous and unconstrained. The digressions and ornamental effects which the Ovidian genre more or less requires turn out to be ideal romping spaces. This poetry is in great fettle. It is nimble yet it is by no means lightweight: if you break into its path, you’ll come up against enough observation and premeditated meaning to knock you sideways. Just consider, for example, how solidly the images of stripped athletes and gold ingots contribute to the crucial momentum of these famous lines, a momentum that gives the final couplet its irresistible proverbial clinch:

  It lies not in our power to love or hate,

  For will in us is overruled by fate.

  When two are stripped, long ere the course begin

  We wish that one should lose, the other win;

  And one especially do we aff
ect

  Of two gold ingots like in each respect.

  The reason no man knows: let it suffice,

  What we behold is censured by our eyes.

  Where both deliberate, the love is slight;

  Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

  The verse here is like a thick cable being paid out wittily by an intelligence that is nevertheless the very opposite of thick-witted. In fact, I am reminded of Joseph Brodsky’s remarks about intonation in poetry, which appear in his recent introduction to the work of Aleksandr Kushner: ‘In a poem,’ Brodsky writes, ‘the testimony to spiritual tension is intonation; or, more accurately, intonation in a poem – and not in a poem only – stands for the motion of the soul.’ The motion of the soul, then, in ‘Hero and Leander’ is forward towards liberation and beatitude, but it is a motion countered by an implicit acknowledgement of repression and constraint. This dialectic is expressed formally by the co-existence of a supple voice within a strict metrical pattern, and tonally by a note that is modulating constantly between the scampish and the plangent.

  The maturity I commended earlier is present not as moral gravitas but as a fully attained artistic mastery, the casual technical virtuosity of the poetry being the equivalent of a happy inner freedom in the poet. Marlowe is involved here in a show-off performance, operating with real spontaneity and affection, in control of far greater range of expression than he was at the beginning of his stage career. Obviously, as I’ve remarked already, the intonation of ‘Hero and Leander’ is not as ominous or stricken as the great scenes of Doctor Faustus, yet it does issue from a kind of seasoned knowledge that is almost unshockable, certainly undupable, but still not altogether disenchanted. Its psychological realism insists that too much should not be expected from people, or from life in general, while its artistic virtuosity insists that too much is the least we should expect. The poem is at one and the same time a structure of sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not, a tongue-in-cheek love story and an intimation of a far more generous and desirable way of being alive in the world.