Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  FIND E K S K E E V E R S

  the larger work of the community as a whole, and the spirit of our age is sympathetic to that democratic urge.

  It is less than sympathetic, however, to the next stance we find the poet adopting. Twenty years after the Irish Theosophist interview in October 1893, in his poem 'September 1913', Yeats's style had evolved a tone for detaching rather than attaching himself, for saying T rather than 'we'. By then, Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. We are in the presence of a poet in his late forties, the Abbey Theatre manager, scorner of middle-class piety and philistinism, mythologizer of aristocratic ceremony and grace. We are in the presence of a man who believes that the redistribution of the Coole Park estate among its tenants would be a step back, not a step forward, in the life of the country. A man stung into superb attitudes by the rude handling meted out to J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and by the refusal of I )ublin Corporation to provide a gallery for Hugh Lane's collection of Impressionist pictures. All that. An Anglo-Irish Protestant deeply at odds with the mind of Irish Catholic society. A man who is remaking himself, finding a style for resisting his environment rather than a style that would co-opt it, at that thrilling stage of development which he calls, in 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul', 'the finished man among his enemies'. And that poem goes on to ask about this man among his enemies:

  How in the name of Heaven can he escape

  That defiling and disfigured shape

  The mirror of malicious eyes

  Casts upon his eyes until at last

  He thinks that shape must be his shape?

  So I want our next image of Yeats to be one that the malicious eyes of George Moore cast into shape when he came to write his classic autobiographical account of the Irish Literary Revival in Hail and Farewell. Though 'malicious' is perhaps too severe an adjective. Many of Moore's most quotable jabs at the romantic figure of the poet are more suggestiye of affection than of a desire to afflict, as when he describes hrs laugh as a caw, 'the most melancholy thing in the world', or when he presents a bedraggled Yeats on the mar-

  gins of Coole Lake looking like an old umbrella left behind after a picnic. Moore's book is finally more of a testimony to Yeats's genius than a worrier of it, sustained and elaborate in its ironies, corrective, accurate in its own way. The following passage occurs after Moore has given his account of the Lane controversy and has reported the text of his own lecture on the Impressionists, a lecture delivered for the edification of the reluctant burghers:

  As soon as the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a temper, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he spoke the words, the middle classes, one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the strange belief that none but titled and carriage-folk could appreciate pictures . . .

  We have sacrificed our lives for Art; but you, what have you done? What sacrifices have you made? he asked, and everybody began to search his memory for the sacrifices that Yeats had made, asking himself in what prison Yeats had languished, what rags he had worn, what broken victuals he had eaten. As far as anybody could remember, he had always lived very comfortably, sitting down invariably to regular meals, and the old green cloak that was in keeping with his profession of romantic poet he had exchanged for the magnificent fur coat which distracted our attention from what he was saying, so opulently did it cover the back of the chair out of which he had risen . . .

  The conscious theatricality of this Yeats, the studied haughtiness, the affectation—this kind of thing has often put people off. This is

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 1 4

  the Willie Yeats whom his contemporaries could not altogether take seriously because he was getting out of their reach, the Yeats whom Maud Gonne called 'Silly Willie' and whom W. H. Auden also called 'silly', in his 1939 elegy: 'You were silly like us, your gift survived it all.' But in setting the silliness in relation to the gift, Auden went to the heart of the matter—survival. What Moore presents us with is a picture of Yeats exercising that intransigence which I praised earlier, that protectiveness of his imaginative springs, so that the gift would survive. He donned the mantle— or perhaps one should say the fur coat—of the aristocrat so that he might express a vision of a communal and personal life that was ample, generous, harmonious, fulfilled and enhancing. The reactionary politics implied by Yeats's admiration of the Coole Park milieu are innocent in the original sense of that word, not nocent, not hurtful. What is more to the point is the way his experience of that benign, paternalistic regime and of Lady Gregory's personal strengths as conserver of folk culture and choreographer of artistic talent issued in a poetry whose very music is a guarantee of its humane munificence. The silliness of the behaviour is continuous with the sumptuousness of the poetry of the middle period. Yeats's attack upon his own middle class really springs out of disappointment: why aren't they taking the lead culturally now that they are in the lead economically? Of course Moore is right to say he belongs to them, and of course Yeats's pretensions looked ridiculous to his contemporaries. But this was his method of signifying his refusal to 'serve that in which he no longer believed'.

  When Joyce rebelled, he left by the Holyhead boat and created his drama by making a fictional character called Stephen Dedalus point up and repeat the terms of his revolt. When Yeats rebelled, he remained—Joyce scorned such 'a treacherous instinct for adaptability'—but he still made a new W B. Yeats to tread the streets and stage of Dublin, a character who was almost as much a work of imagination as Stephen Dedalus. In order to fly the philistinism of his own class and the pious ignorance of another creed, Yeats remade himself, associated himself with cold, disdainful figures, of whom Charles Stewart Parnell was the archetype and 'The Fisher-

  man' was a pattern. The solitude, the will towards excellence, the courage, the self-conscious turning away from that in which he no longer believes, which is Dublin life, and turning towards that which he trusts, which is an image or dream—all the drama and integrity of his poem 'The Fisherman' depend to a large extent upon that other drama which George Moore so delightedly observed and reported:

  Maybe a twelvemonth since

  Suddenly I began,

  In scorn of this audience,

  Imagining a man,

  And his sun-freckled face,

  And grey Connemara cloth.

  Climbing up to a place

  Where stone is dark under froth,

  And the down-turn of his wrist

  When the flies drop in the stream;

  A man who does not exist,

  A man who is but a dream;

  And cried, 'Before I am old

  I shall have written him one

  Poem maybe as cold

  And passionate as the dawn.'

  We are moving from what other people saw to what Yeats himself envisaged. I have said enough, I think, about the outer man and what he intended, so it is time to consider the inwardness of the poems instead of the outwardness of the stance.

  Yet the poetry is cast in a form that is as ear-catching as the man was eye-catching, and as a writer, one is awed by the achieved and masterful tones of that deliberately pitched voice, its bare classic shapes, its ability to modulate from emotional climax to wise reflection, its ultimate truth to life. Nevertheless, the finally exemplary moments are those when this powerful artistic control is vulnerable to the pain or pathos of life itself.

  But I have to say something about why I put the question mark
/>   FINDERS KEEPERS

  after the title of this lecture. 'Yeats as an Example' was the title of an appreciative but not ecstatic essay that W. H. Auden wrote in 1940, so my new punctuation is partly a way of referring back to Auden's title. But it is also meant to acknowledge the orthodox notion that a very great poet can be a very bad influence on other poets. What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfactions of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transfusion of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all, he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself: from 'Adam's Curse' to 'Vacillation' and on until the last poems, his work not only explicitly proclaims the reality of the poetic vocation but convinces by the deep note of certitude registered in the proclamation itself.

  No longer in Lethean foliage caught

  Begin the preparation for your death

  And from the fortieth winter by that thought

  Test every work of intellect or faith,

  And everything that your own hands have wrought,

  And call those works extravagance of breath

  That are not suited for such men as come

  Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

  ('Vacillation')

  Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild, From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child. All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose

  Yeats as an Example? / 1 1 7

  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, wholehearted 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 gorgeously 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

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 1 8

  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;

  Yeats as an Example? / 1 1 9

  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; O 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 nurtur-ant 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 Drum-cliff 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.

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  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 meditate 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 look 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.

  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 anywhere 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.'