Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

I kend it still your wee bit jauntie

  Wad bring ye to:

  Lord send you ay as weel’s I want ye,

  And then ye’ll do –

  And who could have guessed that such a jongleur of the vernacular could reappear and be equally convincing in the role of minstrel boy addressing the master minstrel, James Lapraik?

  While briers an’ woodbines budding green,

  An’ Paitricks scraichan loud at e’en,

  An’ morning Poosie whiddan seen,

  Inspire my Muse,

  This freedom, in an unknown frien’,

  I pray excuse.

  Even the songs, perhaps most of all the songs, required a surrender of the Burns who sat down to breakfast (as Yeats would have called him) to the Burns who had been reborn as the melody of inwardness:

  Had we never lov’d sae kindly,

  Had we never lov’d sae blindly!

  Never met – or never parted,

  We had ne’er been broken hearted. –

  Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!

  Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!

  Thine be ilka joy and treasure,

  Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure! –

  Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!

  Ae fareweel, Alas, for ever:

  Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,

  Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.

  The drama is one that is played out in every poet between the social self and a deeper self which is the locus of ‘the ultimate suffering and decision in us’, and I have to confess that when I began rereading Burns for this essay, I did so with a prejudice … From my memories of the poems that I knew, and particularly those in the Standard Habbie metre, I had got it into my head that the social self had been given too much of an upper hand. I remembered the Burns stanza as one which set its cap rather too winsomely at the reader; but in fact Burns’s deep poetic self inheres in something much bigger and older and more ballad-fastened, so to speak, something as intimately laid down in himself as the insinuation and stealth of both his humour and his sexuality. The potency of his songs is in itself enough to prove how surely he could find his way into a sort of original knowledge, but that feeling of broaching the race’s oldest survival-truths is present everywhere. One of my own favourite instances comes in the meeting of the poet with Death in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’, in particular the recognition that Death too has to survive by the sweat of his brow, that he’s one of the toilers, that it is an achievement for him too simply to keep going:

  ‘Weel, weel!’ says I, ‘a bargain be’t;

  ‘Come, gies your hand, an’ sae we’re gree’t;

  ‘We’ll ease our shanks an’ tak a seat,

  ‘Come, gies your news!

  ‘This while ye hae been mony a gate,

  ‘At mony a house.’

  ‘Ay, ay!’ quo’ he, an’ shook his head,

  ‘It’s e’en a lang, lang time indeed

  ‘Sin’ I began to nick the thread,

  ‘An’ choke the breath:

  ‘Folk maun do something for their bread,

  ‘An’ sae maun Death.’

  The access to world-sorrow comes in the intonation, the sound of sense in that concluding cadence. The utterance matches the contours of immemorial utterances made to the same effect. To call it folk wisdom or proverbial truth is to rob it of its specific emotional gravity within the dramatized setting. Death is a neighbour recognized on the road. He doesn’t, for example, cut the thread of life but nicks it, and in that acutely refreshing and totally unshowy vernacular touch, Burns gives a glimpse of the other, more intimate power that he so often broaches. So I want to end by quoting and commenting briefly upon a poem whose subject is, in fact, the poet’s middle state not just between Belles Lettres and Braid Scots, or between Ayr and Edinburgh, or between ‘Ça ira’ and ‘God Save the King’, but between the vocation of poet and the behaviour of a reasonable man, between the call to open the doors of one’s life to the daimonic and prophetic soul and have one’s destiny changed by it, between that choice and the temptation to keep the doors closed and the self securely under social and domestic lock and key. Whether to be the cotter or Saint Paul, as it were. Here, therefore, beginning with the second stanza, is the opening of ‘The Vision’:

  The Thresher’s weary flingin tree

  The lee-lang day had tir’d me;

  And when the Day had clos’d his e’e,

  Far i’ the West,

  Ben i’ the Spence, right pensivelie,

  I gaed to rest.

  There, lanely, by the ingle-cheek,

  I sat and ey’d the spewing reek,

  That fill’d, wi’ hoast-provoking smeek,

  The auld, clay biggin;

  And heard the restless rations squeak

  About the riggin.

  All in this mottie, misty clime,

  I backward mus’d on wasted time,

  How I had spent my youthfu’ prime,

  An’ done nae-thing,

  But stringing blethers up in rhyme

  For fools to sing.

  Had I to guid advice but harket,

  I might, by this, hae led a market,

  Or strutted in a Bank and clarket

  My Cash-Account;

  While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket,

  Is a’ th’ amount.

  I started, mutt’ring blockhead! coof!

  And heav’d on high my wauket loof,

  To swear by a’ yon starry roof,

  Or some rash aith,

  That I, henceforth, would be rhyme-proof

  Till my last breath –

  When click! the string the snick did draw;

  And jee! the door gaed to the wa’;

  And by my ingle-lowe I saw,

  Now bleezan bright,

  A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw,

  Come full in sight.

  Ye need na doubt, I held my whisht;

  The infant aith, half-form’d was crusht;

  I glower’d as eerie ’s I’d been dusht,

  In some wild glen;

  When sweet, like modest Worth, she blusht,

  And stepped ben.

  Green, slender, leaf-clad Holly-boughs

  Were twisted, gracefu’, round her brows,

  I took her for some SCOTTISH MUSE

  By that same token;

  And come to stop those restless vows,

  Would soon been broken.

  This is Burns’s aisling, and its transcultural allegiance to the Gaelic heritage in Scotland is made clear by his calling each section of it a duan, a term he found in Macpherson and which is simply the word for a poem in Irish and Scots Gaelic. The aisling genre had immense popularity in Ireland during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although in her Irish setting the Muse was politicized into an image of the maiden Hibernia, a Hibernia Tacta, as it were, violated by and in thrall to the heretic English invader. So the genre’s primal function as a vehicle for the myth of access to poetic power got submerged as it became more and more a manifestation of the Jacobite strain in Irish politics during those decades when the Irish Gaels were left without leadership or a plan for resurgence. But the Art MacCumhaigh who wrote an aisling about a maiden coming to kiss him awake at dawn in the churchyard at Killycraggan would surely have recognized the commingling of the erotic with the local and the national in Burns’s lines. And the sexually-entranced Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose dawn visitor once took him ‘in her armes long and smale’ and ‘Therewithal sweteley did [him] kiss/ And softely said, dere hert, howe like you this?’, Wyatt too would have smiled with a delicious remembrance ‘When click! the string the snick did draw;/ And jee! the door gaed to the wa’ …

  And yet it is not the ancient thematic respectability of ‘The Vision’ which makes it such a credible poetic event. There are, of course, echoes of the Muses singing to the farmer Hesiod, of Dante about to give up in the middle of his journey and being saved by Beatr
ice, and of the White Goddess whose presence Robert Graves would have recognized immediately in the lines that I’ve just quoted. But this poem is not simply a case of an archetype being selected from the myth kitty: the personal expense of Burns’s poetic vocation is embodied deeply in its speech and drama. The initiate’s fear of the divine call, the poet’s temptation to go easy on himself: these are indeed part of the story the poem tells, but they are also present in the way it sounds. The reluctance (call it the relochtance) to face the next move, the desire to let the harp pass, to do a Caedmon and substitute the business of the daytime self for the dreamwork – all this comes through and comes true in the words themselves. And so too does the miraculous lightening and alleviation of that mood as a brightness comes from the air and everything that is viscous and sluggish yields miraculously to something far more lightsome and visionary. When I read ‘The Thresher’s weary flingin tree/ The lee-lang day had tir’d me’, the limberness of the flail travels fleetly up my arm only to meet the actual drudgery of farmwork coming leadenly down; but when ‘click! the string the snick did draw’, I know that ‘the next bright bolt’ has fallen and I come through the reasonable man’s demurrals every time. So, even though a part of me will always agree with Miłosz’s admonition at the end of his ‘Ars Poetica?’ that ‘poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,/ under unbearable duress and only with the hope/ that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument’, I am still nevertheless persuaded that Burns did right to let his door go to the wall and that he did not fail the Muse or us or himself as one of poetry’s chosen instruments.

  Robert Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, Edinburgh University Press, 1997

  Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain

  Fifty years ago the Northern Irish poet W. R. Rodgers published a poem called ‘Armagh’ that begins:

  There is a through-otherness about Armagh

  Of tower and steeple,

  Up on the hill are the arguing graves of the kings

  And below are the people.

  Rodgers was then working as a BBC producer in London, but up until a few years before he had served as the Presbyterian minister in the rural parish of Loughgall. There were several reasons why he moved from being in charge of a meeting house in Co. Armagh to being in charge of a microphone in a studio in Broadcasting House, but a central factor was his discovery of himself as a poet. In 1938 his friend John Hewitt, who had been writing verse since he was a teenager, lent Rodgers some books by contemporary poets and the results were seismic. The explanation of what happened was given by Rodgers in his own inimitable way years afterwards, when he was revisiting the Loughgall manse and meeting house. On that occasion, the story goes, a former parishioner asked him why somebody so naturally gifted as a pastor and a preacher, so much at home in the pulpit and with the people, had abandoned the ministry. ‘Ah well, you know,’ Rodgers is supposed to have replied, ‘too many books spoil the cloth.’

  Finding the right expression by wrongfooting the language like that is one way of escaping the bind of the usual; indeed it is the principal path into poetry and it became a recognizable feature of Rodgers’s style. ‘I had a tongue in both my parents’ cheeks,’ he would write later,

  Could take the word out of two different mouths.

  His father he associated with the indigenous Irish stock and his mother with his Scottish planter ancestry, but he chose, he says,

  my father’s slower way of talk

  That had the native tint of wonder in it

  To soften it; though my mother tongue,

  Scots, raucous, quick, followed it hard

  With hints of glottal stops.

  I am Ulster, my people an abrupt people

  Who like the spiky consonants of speech

  And think the soft ones cissy …

  And I, born to the purple passage,

  Was heir to all that Adamnation

  And hand-me-down of doom.

  I begin with Rodgers and his situation because the way he presents himself is emblematic of a condition I want to explore in my remarks these. One very capable part of Rodgers, the day job part of him, let’s call it, the part that was professional and career-making, that part was connected up with the world of official culture and books in London and the BBC; but as well as the day-job part of him there was also what we might call the ‘return room’ part, the return room being not only the room farthest away from the front door in those terrace houses that Rodgers knew in his childhood in Belfast, but also the name of a radio programme where he evoked that childhood with typical brio. ‘There was a halo of hills round me from the start,’ the narrator of the broadcast declares, and when he and his family went out in the countryside, ‘the duck twirled like a stick on the stream, each gay cloud was off on its own, the very clod sang.’ So Rodgers in this self-placing passage again associates something original in himself with the lyrical element in the Irish countryside, that had, like his father’s speech, the native tint of wonder in it. And if you add the halo of hills to that native tint, you have something vestigially Catholic also. But equally present in the return room at the back of his head was the Scottish inheritance, everything from the Adamnation of the Lowland Covenanters to the Unionist determination that marked the solemn leaguing and covenanting of the Ulster Volunteers in 1912 against Home Rule and Rome Rule. Even as the narrator celebrates the pristine scenery of the countryside, he is longing to be back in the city for the Twelfth of July:

  There would be a bonfire in our back street that night. It would light up the roses of the wallpaper of the return room. It would flicker on the picture of Robbie Burns. It would glimmer on the tallboy with its deep drawers full of treasures – a black silk topper … a copy of the Solemn League and Covenant, a Volunteer hat that looked like a cowboy’s.

  So: where I am heading with all this should be clear enough by now. I am trying to suggest that in the triangulation of Rodgers’s understanding of himself between London, Loughgall and the Lowlands, in that three-sided map of his inner being that he provided with its three cardinal points, in all of that there is something analogous to the triple heritage of Irish, Scottish and English traditions that compound and complicate the cultural and political life of contemporary Ulster. For Rodgers, it wasn’t a question of the otherness of any one part of his inheritance, more a recognition of the through-otherness of all of them. ‘Through-other’ is a compound in common use in Ulster, meaning physically untidy or mentally confused, and appropriately enough it echoes the Irish-language expression, tri na cheile, meaning things mixed up among themselves, like the cultural and historical mix-up that the poet acknowledges, a bit too winsomely perhaps, in the last two stanzas of ‘Armagh’:

  Through-other is its history, of Celt and Dane,

  Norman and Saxon,

  Who ruled the place and sounded the gamut of fame

  From cow-horn to klaxon.

  There is through-otherness about Armagh

  Delightful to me,

  Up on the hill are the graves of the garrulous kings

  Who at last can agree.

  The Irish for Armagh is Ard Mhacha, meaning the heights of Macha, and the garrulous kings are presumably those who once upon a time occupied the legendary royal seat of Emain Macha, home of King Conor and the Red Branch Knights, although they must include as well all those warring lords of the great Gaelic families of Ulster, those O’Neills and O’Donnells and Maguires whose descendants continued to hold sway until the Flight of the Earls in 1607. But obviously, more recent and more rancorous battles between the house of Orange and the house of Stuart are being alluded to in that concluding cadence: ‘Up on the hill are the graves of the garrulous kings/Who at last can agree’. The problem is that the dying fall has the effect of settling the argument a bit too quickly and too amicably; it dodges very nimbly past the dangers, so I don’t find that it provides the momentary stay against confusion which Robert Frost sa
id a poem should provide and be; the conclusion is more like an evasion, more like saying ‘There are faults on both sides’ – the old palliative catchphrase that has got Northern Ireland people through embarrassing situations for years and at the same time got them nowhere.

  All the same, a certain amount of evasion is understandable in such a through-other situation. I remember, for example, a moment in Belfast early on in the Troubles, some time in 1970, when I myself hesitated to face the full force of the sectarian circumstances. I was living then on the wrong side of Lisburn Road, socially speaking, since Lisburn Road was a thoroughfare that divided a wedge of middle-class and university-related housing from a largely working-class barrio that grew more and more boisterous as it ran down, in more senses than one, to its loyalist limit, a district known locally as The Village. The Village in those days was no place for somebody called Seamus and I wasn’t often to be seen there, but I did frequent a lock-up fish-and-chip shop just round the corner from us, on the outer edge of what was still strongly loyalist territory. Anyhow, one night there was a new assistant behind the counter, a young English girl who happened to recognize my face because she’d seen me the night before on some television arts show. ‘Oh,’ she cried, as she lashed on the salt and vinegar, ‘I saw you on the box last night, didn’t I? Aren’t you the Irish poet?’ And before I could answer, the owner of the shop turned from her tasks at the boiling oil and corrected her. ‘Not at all, dear. He’s like the rest of us, a British subject living in Ulster! God,’ she went on, addressing me and rolling an eye behind the innocent mainlander’s back, ‘wouldn’t it sicken you! Having to listen to that. Irish poet!’ And Irish and all as I was, I’m afraid I hesitated to contradict her.