Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  its forefront is the pursuit of the logic of its own metaphors growing with the mushrooms in the shed of an old estate that had been abandoned by an Irish ascendancy family after independence. But what gives the poem its sorrow and insight is the long perspective, an intimacy with the clay-floored foetor of the shed kept in mind and in focus from a point of detached compassion, in another world of freedom, light and efficiency. To reduce the mushrooms' lives and appetites to counters for the frustrations and desolations of lives in Northern Ireland is, of course, one of those political readings which is perfectly applicable, but we recognize that this allegorical approach ties the poem too neatly into its place. The amplitude of its effects, its vault-filling resonance depend upon its displaced perspective. Those rooted helplessly in place plead with the capable uprooted visitor, be he poet or photographer. Mahon, the poet of metropolitan allusion, of ironical and cultivated manners, is being shadowed by his unlived life among the familiar shades of Belfast. Do not turn your back on us, do not disdain our graceless stifled destiny, keep faith with your origins, do not desert, speak for us: the mushrooms are the voices of belonging, but they could not have been heard so compellingly if Mahon had not created the whispering gallery of absence not just by moving out of Ireland but by evolving out of solidarity into irony and compassion. And, needless to say, into solitude. These poems of the voice from beyond are beamed back out of a condition of silence and Zen-like stillness, an eternity in love with the products of time. They tenderly evoke the great solace of the natural world and also the great wounds we make in it and ourselves. 'Ovid in Tomis', for example, begins with a merry and ecologically indignant identification of the Roman poet with his alienated contemporary:

  What coarse god

  Was the gear-box in the rain

  Beside the road?

  What nereid the unsinkable Hair conditioner Knocking the icy rocks?

  They stare me out With the chaste gravity And feral pride

  Of noble savages

  Set down

  On an alien shore.

  It is so long

  Since my own transformation

  Into a stone,

  I often forget

  That there was a time

  Before my name

  Was mud in the mouths

  Of the Danube,

  A dirty word in Rome.

  Imagine Byron banished

  To Botany Bay

  Or Wilde to Dawson City

  And you have some idea

  How it is for me

  On the shores of the Black Sea.

  Baudelaire's albatross poet, inept upon the deck, mocked by the callous sailors, has nothing on this one, so self-aware and self-mocking, so posthumous to himself, so sceptical of the very effort of poetry that he can say:

  I Have exchanged belief For documentation.

  The Muse is somewhere

  Eke, not here

  By this frozen lake—

  Or, if here, then I am

  Not poet enough

  To make the connection.

  Are we truly alone

  With our physics and myths,

  The stars no more

  Than glittering dust,

  With no one there

  To hear our choral odes?

  If so, we can start To ignore the silence Of infinite space

  And concentrate instead

  On the infinity

  Under our very noses—

  The cry at the heart Of the artichoke, The gaiety of atoms.

  Better to contemplate The blank page And leave it blank

  Than modify

  Its substance by

  So much as a pen-stroke.

  Woven of wood-nymphs,

  It speaks volumes

  No one will ever write.

  I incline my head

  To its candour

  And weep for our exile.

  Again, this escapes beyond dramatic monologue and disguised autobiography into contemplation on the nature of artistic satisfac-

  FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 3 4

  tion itself; by the end the poem is abjuring language in a language that offers us that deeply formal sensation of tensions resolved. The speaker laments his exile in such a way that we would not have him rehabilitated. The wound he suffers is to his and our advantage: the local conditions that lie at the roots of the poet's consciousness have been transposed into a symbol.

  I don't want to reduce Derek Mahon's poems to this single theme of alienated distance, for his work also abounds in poems where the social voice is up and away on the back of Pegasus, cutting a dash through the usual life of back-kitchens and bar counters, but I would insist that I am not forcing his work to fit a thesis. It is present in all his books, this dominant mood of being on the outside (where one has laboured spiritually to arrive) only to end up looking back nostalgically at what one knows are well nigh intolerable conditions on the inside. It is treated in a number of his best poems, which dwell upon the sufferings of those he called in an early poem 'the unreconciled in their metaphysical pain'. These poems of the displaced consciousness are as rinsed of political and ethnic solidarity as a haiku by Basho, but their purely poetic achievement is further enriched when we view them against Mahon's own political and ethnic background.

  We might say that in order for any place to be credible for Mahon, it has to be re-imagined in the light of other places. In the language of Star Trek, it has to be beamed up so that it can be dependably beamed down. Thus, the civil beauty of Penshurst Place, the home of the Sidney family, is evoked by Mahon in terms of the blandishments of Renaissance poetry, music and manners. Nevertheless, while Mahon prizes and yearns for these arcadian harmonies, his mind is haunted by other, more disturbing images. Sir Philip Sidney is one dream, all gilded valour and English patriotic aura, but another dream associated with Penshurst Place is Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, leader in the last Irish war against Elizabeth's armies. The line 'The Spanish ships around Kinsale' refers to the Battle of Kinsale, where Hugh O'Neill, arch-traitor in the eyes of the English, jhe Great O'Neill in the eyes of the Irish, was finally defeated. In other words, the courtliness evoked by the verse and symbolized by Penshurst Place is only one part of the

  poem's life. Its underlife, its shadow elsewhere, is the Ulster of hill-forts, cattle-raids and rain-sodden gallowglasses where Hugh O'Neill was born and to which, after eight years of being fostered at Penshurst Place in the care of Sir Henry Sidney, he returned. 'Penshurst Place', then, contains Mahon's sense of bilocation, culturally in love with the Surrey countryside, where he was living with his family when this poem was written, but domestically and politically entangled with the country of his first nurture:

  The bright drop quivering on a thorn

  In the rich silence after rain,

  Lute music from the orchard aisles,

  The paths ablaze with daffodils,

  Intrigue and venery in the air

  A Vombre des jeunesfilles enfleurs,

  The iron hand and the velvet glove—

  Come live with me and be my love.

  A pearl face, numinously bright, Shining in silence of the night, A muffled crash of smouldering logs, Bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs, The Spanish ships around Kinsale, The screech owl and the nightingale, The falcon and the turtle dove— Come live with me and be my love.

  Instances of this sort could be multiplied. In a poem about leaving Surrey to return to North Antrim, Mahon imagines himself turning into a tree in an English parkland, 'as if I belonged here too', but he is destined to identify with a very different native bush, a windswept thorn on a high northern clifftop,

  With nothing to recommend it But its harsh tenacity Between the blinding windows And the forests of the sea,

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  As if its very existence Were a reason to continue.

  Crone, crow, scarecrow, Its worn fingers scrabbling At a torn sky, it stands On the edge of everything Like a burnt-out angel Raising peti
tionary hands.

  The petitionary hands of the tree, like the pleading throats of the mushrooms, call upon the poet to identify with 'everything that is the case', in this case his native landscape with all its threshing historical plights. But in a poem called 'Tractatus', which takes off in its first line from a proposition of Wittgenstein's, Mahon insists on the freedom to invent his own case:

  'The world is everything that is the case' From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face; Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.

  The world, though, is also so much more— Everything that is the case imaginatively Tacitus believed mariners could hear The sun sinking into the western sea; And who would question that titanic roar, The steam rising wherever the edge may be?

  This poem is not in itself as deeply imagined as others I could quote, but it does voice the Mahon approach in quite explicit terms. The imagined hiss and boil of the sun in the sea does not involve a denial of the cosmological facts of the matter; rather, it restores us to a pristine encounter with the cosmos. In a similar way, Mahon's displaced angle of vision is not a Nelson-like ploy to avoid seeing what he prefers not to see but a way of focusing

  afresh. For all his imaginative ubiquity, his poems enforce the truth he settles upon in the last stanza of a poem called, with stunning plainness, 'A Garage in Co. Cork':

  But we are in one place and one place only, One of the milestones of earth-residence Unique in each particular, the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense— Not in the hope of a resplendent future But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.

  E. M. Cioran has written: 'Some peoples propose themselves as divine problems: can we believe in ourselves?' 'Certainly not', Paul Muldoon answers, in the Irish context. But it is a negative delivered with a smile which suggests otherwise. In the world of Mul-doon's poetry, the reader finds himself in the middle of that old story where the protagonist is faced with two informants, one who always tells the truth and one who always tells lies. The problem, then, is to formulate the question which will elicit an answer from either one that can be reliably decoded. To put it another way, Muldoon's poems do not offer us answers but keep us alive in the middle of the question. And the very question of whether or not this imaginative habit is to be related to his native place and its double-life is posed, obliquely of course, in his short and typically enigmatic poem called 'Blemish':

  Were it indeed an accident of birth That she looks on the gentle earth And the seemingly gentle sky Through one brown, and one blue eye.

  The mood of this is neither indicative nor interrogative but conditional. The understood complete sentence goes, 'It would be a blemish, were it indeed . . . etc.', but we cannot be sure that it is an accident of birth and hence a hereditary blemish. It might also be a gift of vision, a mark of divine favour, an astonishing boon of be-

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  ing able to see through things as they seem, like the seemingly gentle sky, to things as they are, whatever they are. The poem suggests, indirectly, that the imaginative gifts of Northern Irish writers should not be linked too sociologically to the blemished life of their country. It wanders in and out of the mind like an unremarked soothsayer who drops a remark that flowers with possibility after he has drifted off. And we are still left wondering when we find a character in Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude with just the blemish that Muldoon describes here: so is this a literary allusion or an archetypal image? All three, Muldoon might well answer from behind the screen of his language.

  Language is Muldoon's resolving element, his quick-change gear, his vehicle for getaway. James Joyce, who could invest the very names of punctuation marks with historical riddles when he addressed his people as 'Laities and gentes, full-stoppers and semi-colonials', the Joyce of Finnegans Wake who melted time and place into a plasm of rhythms and word-roots, puns and tunes, a slide-show of Freudian slips for the Jungian typesetter, this Joyce would recognize the verbal opportunism of Muldoon as a form of native kenning, a Northern doubling, a kind of daedal fiddling to keep the home fires burning. For example, the protagonist of his long poem 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants' is a character called Gallogly Gallogly's name is related to a previous Muldoon character called Golightly, and also to the Gallowglass warriors of Gaelic Ulster and to the Sioux braves of the Oglala tribe; and he appears in a tale as odd as any one of the Ingoldsby legends. By such verbal means Muldoon makes the stuff of Ulster news headlines—explosions, killings, American aid for the IRA, covert operations of all kinds—the stuff that dreams are made on. All these things which are so much taken for granted that they tend to be thrust to the back of the mind 'in real life' are taken over by Muldoon as the elements of a violent and resourceful fantasy; and by this very relegation to 'fiction' they achieve once again a deadly and unnerving prominence. The old alibis of heritage, tradition, folklore, Planter and Gael, and a whole literature and discourse posited on these distinctions (including poems by his contemporaries), are rifled for tropes and allusions until, within the fiction of

  the poem, they themselves are imputed with fictional status. By masquerading as a story that is as innocent of high seriousness as an Irish joke, Muldoon's 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants' effects what the apostle of high seriousness sought from the serious artist, a criticism of life.

  I realize that I am affirming rather than demonstrating all this, but the poem in question is too long to take up in any detail. Indeed, Muldoon's poetry works so much at a symbolic level, by means of parallels, implications, sleights of word, hints and hedg-ings, that even the shortest lyric may call forth pages of elucidation, or perhaps one should say collusion, 'elucidation' being a word that would imply a meaning too simply and righteously produced from the hat of a poem that might just produce another meaning from up its sleeve.

  The poet as conjuror, then, a dab hand at turning tables and spinning yarns, not above innuendo and not without punitive designs upon his audience. Yet the acerbity of Muldoon's intelligence is constantly sweetened by humour and by the natural rhythmic drift of his writing, and nowhere more so than in the self-cancelling narrative of 'Lunch with Pancho Villa', a poem that addresses itself to the relations between 'life' and 'art' as experienced by a poet-protagonist during a certain 'famous revolution' which occurs, to some extent, in 'a back yard'. The poet-narrator is accused by a 'celebrated pamphleteer':

  'Look, son. Just look around you. People are getting themselves killed Left, right and centre While you do what? Write rondeaux? There's more to living in this country Than stars, horses, pigs and trees, Not that you'd guess it from your poems. Do you never listen to the news?'

  The poet's response to all this arises from a conviction not unlike Patrick Kavanagh's conviction that for a writer there is nothing as doomed as the important thing, no subject as negligible as the sub-

  ject with the news-headline status. His narrative is designed to make the words 'famous' and 'celebrated' ring hollow, yet the narrative itself ('All made up as I went along') turns out to be as unreliable as the adjectives:

  My celebrated pamphleteer!

  Of course, I gave it all away

  With those preposterous titles.

  The Bloody Rose? The Dream and the Drums?

  The three-day-wonder of the flowering plum!

  Or was I desperately wishing

  To have been their other co-author,

  Or, at least, to own a first edition

  Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles?

  The flicker of self-doubt in these last four lines gives back to the pamphleteer some of the credence which the whole poem takes away from him, and Muldoon very justly ends with a note of puzzlement, though not without a strong implicit endorsement of the idea that the proper concern of art is with the naming of things rather than with the espousal of causes:

  What should I say to this callow youth Who learned to write
last winter— One of those correspondence courses— And who's coming to lunch to-day? He'll be rambling on, no doubt, About pigs and trees, stars and horses.

  If in the Muldoon world we are faced with the liar and the truth teller, searching for the right question, in the poetry of Michael Longley we are with lovers in the dark during a power-failure. It is one of the urban myths that there is a perceptible rise in the birthrate after such a breakdown of services. The couples turn from home life to love life, the delights of touch becoming a natural compensation for the loss of the usual distractions. We

  recognize the pattern of behaviour as completely credible, the most obvious and delicious in the circumstances.

  It is in the light of this parable of the dark that Longley's characteristic erotic music is to be heard. Longley's poetry is often the poetry of direct amorous address, its dramatic voice the voice of indolent and occasionally deliquescent reverie, its subject the whole matter of sexual daydream. But even when the poem is ostensibly about landscape or seascape, about flora and fauna, mythological figures or musical instruments, the intonation of the verse is seductive, its melody allaying and cajoling, its typical mood one of tender insinuation and possibility.

  Longley's poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover's finger wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae. The names for the parts of the body reappear constantly, and even when it is not a body but a flower or a weed that is being touched upon, the contact between the world and the language is lipbrushing or stealthily caressing. As if the back of a hand that has gone to the floor to lift a napkin strayed against the warm limb of a neighbour. Here, almost at random, is a short sequence called 'Botany':

  DUCKWEED

  Afloat on their own reflection, these leaves, With roots that reach only part of the way, Will fall asleep at the end of summer, Draw in their skirts and sink to the bottom.

  FOXGLOVE

  Though the corolla dangles upside down, Nothing ever falls out, neither nectar Nor loosening pollen grains: a thimble, Stall for the little finger and the bee.