Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  But there was more to it than ‘the break-up of Britain’. Take, for example, the way Hewitt employs the word ‘my’ in relation to the remembered horses, in a usage that is as tender as it is possessive. There’s a sense that something intimate and precious is at stake: some illumination has been received from the almost otherworldly reality of the animals, so there is definite disappointment at the end when the poem moves from the psychic to the physical plane of reality:

  Years after

  in a London hotel in the grey dawn

  a serious man concerned with certain duties,

  I heard again the metal clatter of hooves staccato

  and hurriedly rose to catch a glimpse of my horses,

  but the pace and beat were utterly different:

  I saw by the men astride these were the King’s horses

  going about the King’s business, never mine.

  That ‘my’, in fact, connects the poem to another linguistic terminal in D. H. Lawrence’s poem, ‘Snake’, where Lawrence recognizes that when he turns on a snake and drives it violently away from his water-trough in the heat of the Sicilian afternoon, he is also turning on some deep instinctive part of himself and driving it underground. In a way similar to Lawrence, Hewitt concedes that the civic part of him, the socially formed ‘serious man concerned with certain duties’, is a disguise, a kind of false self, and that his real allegiance is to a ‘pace and beat’ that are ‘utterly different’, namely, the pace and the beat he knows and obeys as a poet. And this is why Hewitt is right to make a strong claim for the importance of ‘intimations, imaginative realizations, epiphanies’ as not the worst things to rely upon when facing life and its future in what he called ‘our bitter hate-riven island’. What a poet can establish in the act of writing a poem is something a reader can get from the completed work, that is, a realization that as persons and as peoples we can get farther into ourselves and farther out of ourselves than we might have expected; and this is one of the ways that poetry helps things forward.

  *

  A poem that comes out ahead will often have crept up from behind. This is certainly what happens in ‘Symposium’, a recent sonnet by Paul Muldoon, whose title probably mocks the earnest business of seminars on the past, present and future of Northern Ireland’s troubles. At the same time, the title is remembering that the original Greek symposium was a gathering where men met in order to drink and talk, and where in all likelihood they then proceeded to get well and truly drunk and to talk nonsense. The poem, at any rate, creeps up from behind and comes out ahead. You can read it as a one-off joke, but there’s more to it than that. Its verbal fooling, its wrongfooting and doubletaking remind us how fed up we have all become listening to the same old stories and the same old arguments repeated and repeated. It tells us that not only do we want more truth than we usually get, but that we deserve more and should be capable of getting through to it. It is fed up with all the typical contrarinesses and absurdities that sectarian and ideological intransigence can induce: come to think of it, it might just as easily have been called ‘The Stormont Assembly’:

  You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it hold

  its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.

  Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold

  One good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.

  A bird in the hand is better than no bread.

  To have your cake is to pay Paul.

  Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.

  For want of a nail the sky might fall.

  People in glass houses can’t see the wood

  For the new broom. Rome wasn’t built between two stools.

  Empty vessels wait for no man.

  A hair of the dog is a friend indeed.

  There’s no fool like the fool who’s shot his bolt.

  There’s no smoke after the horse is gone.

  Here for certain is another poet who can take the word out of two different mouths. This poem would roll its eyes and kick its heels at too earnest a discussion of British and Irish, Scots and Gaelic, Highland and Lowland; but it is nevertheless clued into the realities and deadly consequences of all that and angrily aware that the music of what happens in the usual life will always have to be faced. But, says the poem, maybe it’s better to outface it, to think again, to miss a beat and skip a step, to get into a new stride and call a new tune.

  I have a dread of pious words like diversity but I believe in what they stand for, so I might note here that when Ted Hughes and I came to edit an anthology called The School Bag, a title that meant to mean what it said, one of the things we had in mind was to insist on the diverse and deep traditions that operate through and sustain for good the poetry written in Ireland, England, Scotland and in Wales. At the time I had not read Professor Hugh Kearney’s study entitled The British Isles, A History of Four Nations, but our editorial principles were consonant with Kearney’s approach. His book is an attempt to examine ‘the interaction of the various major cultures of the British Isles from the Roman period onwards’ and it was written ‘in the belief that it is only by adopting a Britannic approach that historians can make sense of the particular segment in which they may be primarily interested, whether it be “England”, “Ireland”, “Scotland”, “Wales”, Cornwall or the Isle of Man.’ This is simple, sensible and relevant. In a context where the word ‘British’ might function like a political reminder, a mnemonic for past invasions and coercions, there is a wonderful originality, in all senses, about employing instead the word ‘Britannic’, ‘Britannic’ works more like a cultural wake-up call and gestures not only towards the cultural past but also towards an imaginable future. Without insistence or contention, ‘Britannic’ is a reminder of much that the term ‘British’ managed to occlude. ‘Britannic’ allows equal status on the island of Britain to Celt and Saxon, to Scoti and Cymri, to Maldon and Tintagel, to Beowulf and the Gododdin, and so it begins to repair some of the damage done by the imperial, othering power of ‘British’. In fact, one way of describing the era of devolution is to think of it as the moment when Britain went Britannic, a phenomenon which tends incidentally to hiberniorize Hibernia.

  To go back, however, to The School Bag. It is not arranged on chronological or national or thematic lines, but sets out to instruct by juxtaposition. So, for example, translated extracts from Brian Merriman’s comic masterpiece ‘The Midnight Court’ (which was written in Irish in 1780) follow Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’ Shanter’, published ten years later in 1790. Lady Gregory’s translation of the traditional song ‘Donal Og’ precedes the Border ballad of ‘The Demon Lover’ and follows one of the great set pieces of early literature in Scots, Cresseid’s Lament from Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-century ‘Testament of Cresseid’.

  I could go on about these contents, and will, for just a little longer. Kuno Meyer’s translation of a quatrain about a wild night on the Irish Sea that will keep the Vikings away from the coast is set between an imaginative account of one such Viking raid by the twentieth-century Orkney poet George MacKay Brown and a translation of the eighteenth-century Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair’s extraordinary poem in Scots Gaelic called ‘Clanranald’s Galley’, about an epic sea-crossing from the Western Isles to Carrickfergus. ‘Dover Beach’ with its expression of disappointment at the decline of Christian belief follows James Kearney’s translation of the early Irish poem called ‘Adze Head’ which is essentially an expression of disappointment at the arrival of Christianity. And the anthology begins with Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ so that its first line is ‘That civilization may not sink’ and it ends with a song from a masque by John Dryden, so that the last two lines go, ‘Tis well an old age is out/ And time to begin a new.’

  *

  In the post-colonial phase of our criticism and cultural studies, we have heard much about ‘the other’, but perhaps the moment of the through-other should now be proclaimed, if only because it
seems to have arrived. Translation, among other things, has seen to that. Irish-language poets were probably aware for the past half-century of the achievement of Sorley Maclean in Scots Gaelic, but the publication of Canongate’s dual-language edition, including the poet’s own English versions, has helped to canonize Maclean in the new through-otherness of English and other nation languages. It disturbed a number of tidy Irish assumptions, north and south, to discover that this Gaelic-speaking Free Presbyterian from Raasay and Skye, a passionate Socialist whose heroes included James Connolly, had fought with equally passionate conviction as a British soldier in the Western Desert and had written about the heroism of the common Tommy. I think it is only fair to say that in Ireland the native speaker would be presumed to be Catholic and would certainly not be expected to enlist, never mind eulogize the British soldier. Nor is the stereotype of the Irish poet from the Gaeltacht very likely to be confirmed by the life and work of Cathal O’Searcaigh, whose exploration of his homosexuality in ‘the first official language’ wrongfoots many of the old expectations.

  A similar wrongfooting, or perhaps I should say rightifying, of expectations has happened in the case of the translations by Paul Muldoon of the poems of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. In Ireland for decades we were exercised by a problematic ceist na teangan or language question that concerned itself with the contesting claims of Irish and English to be the right language of the country. Through the collaboration of these two poets, what was problematic has become productive, even arguably reproductive: when Muldoon translated ceist na teangan as ‘the language issue’ – issue having associations not only of new life springing from an old source but of a handout of provisions or equipment that you make the best of – when he translated the title in this way, new thinking was being bred out of the original words and it seemed as if the two languages were wanting to indulge in the old clandestine pleasures of ‘touching tongues’. And Muldoon has further compounded the through-otherness by giving the 1998 Clarendon Lectures on English Literature under the title To Ireland I and then taking his Oxford audience through an A to Ζ of Irish writing from Amergin to Zozimus.

  It would be coy of me, I suppose, not to take some account here of my own bit of translation from the Anglo-Saxon and the desire I had to complicate things by doing it. Working on Buile Suibhne was one thing, and an expected thing from somebody with my background, but taking on Beowulf was a move away from translation as an expected manifestation of Ulster identity politics. I take Beowulf to be a poem which is also about facing up to silent things accumulated within a consciousness. What gives it imaginative potency and makes it so much more than a digest of the lore and practices of Scandinavian warrior culture in the late Iron Age is a brooding sense of what the Anglo-Saxon language calls wyrd. This wyrd or fate is a silent thing that is ominously present, lying in wait in every life, a challenge that should be faced and that probably can’t be shirked. People know it in what Hamlet would call their ‘prophetic soul’, and its presence at the climax of Beowulf is recognized once the dragon has been disturbed in his underground vault and becomes the deadly threat that the old king must face.

  I first encountered Beowulf over forty years ago when I was studying for a degree in English Language and Literature in Queen’s University and there are those who would argue that this was in fact a degree of separation from my proper cultural inheritance and that in translating the poem which I studied I am exhibiting all the symptoms of the colonial subject. I can understand what such commentators are saying, but I could also see what I myself was doing. I knew what a through-other venture the whole thing would have to be, but was happy enough to say, so, so be it. Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland. Let it function in the world in the same way as the Venerable Bede tells us that books from Ireland functioned within the Britannic and Hibernian context of his times in the eighth century. Ireland, he tells us, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is far more favoured than Britain by its mild and healthy climate, and goes on:

  There are no reptiles, and no snake can exist there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything on this isle confers immunity to poison and I have often seen that folk suffering from snakebite have drunk water in which scrapings of the leaves off books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling.

  One of Bede’s editors suggests that this may be an example of the author’s po-faced humour, and that Bede is here giving a merely ironical credence to a tall tale that must have been in common circulation among the monks and scribes of Northumbria. Either way, it is an example of a writer calling upon a fiction in order to cope with differences between two islands linked and separated in various degrees by history and geography, language and culture. As such, it prefigures much of the work that would be done by Irish poets in the coming times and much that will continue to be done.

  Lecture, Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, February 2001

  PART III

  Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems

  Always inclined to the brisk definition, W. H. Auden once declared that poetry was memorable speech. The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith prompt one to revise that: poetry is memorable voice. The unknown quantity in my response to the book was the memory of the poet’s own performance of her verse, her voice pitching between querulousness and keening, her quizzical presence at once inviting the audience to yield her their affection and keeping them at bay with a quick irony. She seemed to combine elements of Gretel and of the witch, to be vulnerable and capable, a kind of Home Counties sean bhean bhocht, with a hag’s wisdom and a girl’s wide-eyed curiosity. She chanted her poems artfully off-key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience: an embarrassed party-piece by a child half-way between tears and giggles, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso.

  This raises the whole question of poetry for the eye versus poetry for the ear. Perhaps the versus is an overstatement, yet there are poets whose work is enhanced and amplified in its power to move once we know the characteristic tone and rhythm and texture of the poet’s physical voice. The grave inward melodies of Wallace Stevens become more available if we happen to have heard that Caedmon recording of him reading ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. Similarly, Robert Frost’s words are enlivened by any memory of his switchback pacing, the hard and fluent contours of his accent. And I am sure that Coleridge’s excitement on first hearing Wordsworth read was as much a matter of how the poem sounded as of what it intended.

  But in the case of Stevie Smith, it is not simply a matter of extra gratification from the poems on the page if we happen to have heard her. It is the whole question of the relationship between a speaking voice, a literary voice (or style) and a style of speech shared by and typical of a certain social and cultural grouping. In other words, it is essential to bring to the appreciation of these poems an ear aware of the longueurs and acerbities, the nuanced understatements and tactical intonations of educated middle-class English speech. The element this work survives in is a disenchanted gentility, and while I can imagine, for example, the Reverend Ian Paisley making a fine job of Yeats’s ‘Under Ben Bulben’, I cannot imagine Stevie Smith’s idiosyncratic rhythms and metres surviving the hammer-and-tongue of that vigorous North Antrim emphasis.

  One is tempted to use words like ‘fey’, ‘arch’ and ‘dotty’ when faced with these five hundred and seventy pages and yet such adjectives sell Stevie Smith’s work short. These odd syncopated melancholy poems are haunted by the primitive and compelling music of ballad and nursery rhyme, but it has been transposed by a sophisticated and slightly cosseted poetic ear into a still, sad, drawing-room music of humanity:

  He said no word of her to us

  Nor we of her to him,

  But oh it saddened us to see

  How wan he grew and thin
.

  We said: She eats him day and night

  And draws the blood from him,

  We did not know but said we thought

  This was why he grew thin.

  There is variety and inventiveness, much humour and understanding, and a constant poignancy. Her gift was to create a peculiar emotional weather between the words, a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled, as in the much anthologized ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, or in this one, taken almost at random:

  I always remember your beautiful flowers

  And the beautiful kimono you wore

  When you sat on the couch

  With that tigerish crouch

  And told me you loved me no more.

  What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind

  All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.

  Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad

  The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

  Stevie Smith reminds you of two Lears: the old king come to knowledge and gentleness through suffering, and the old comic poet Edward veering off into nonsense. I suppose in the end the adjective has to be ‘eccentric’. She looks at the world with a mental squint, there is a disconcerting wobble in the mirror she holds up to nature.

  Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting – her concerns were central ones, her compassion genuine and her vision almost tragic. Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express. There is a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A. A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson.