SOURCE: A review of Station Island, in The New Yorker, Vol. LXI, No. 31, September 23, 1985, pp. 108, 111-12, 114-16.

[In the following excerpt, Vendler examines the major themes of Heaney's Station Island.]

Station Island, also known as St. Patrick's Purgatory, is an island in Lough Derg, in northwest Ireland. It has been a site of pilgrimage for centuries; tradition says that St. Patrick once fasted and prayed there. The island gives its name to Seamus Heaney's purgatorial new collection, containing five years' work—Station Island. The book reflects the disquiet of an uprooted life—one of successive dislocations. Heaney's life began in Castledawson, in Northern Ireland; he was educated at St. Columb's College, in Derry, and then at Queen's University, Belfast (where he later taught); he moved in 1972 to the Republic of Ireland, first to Wicklow and later to Dublin, free-lancing and teaching. A stint of teaching at Berkeley, from 1970 to 1971, began his acquaintance with the United States; now he is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and divides his time between Cambridge and Dublin. Though these dislocations and uprootings have been voluntary, they could not be without effect, and the title poem of the new volume reviews, in a series of memorial encounters, the "stations" of Heaney's life—especially that of his adolescence, hitherto scanted in his work. The poet moves amid a cloud of ghosts, familial, sexual, and professional. Some are admonitory, some reproachful, some encouraging. These spirits appear and disappear after the manner of Dante's purgatorial shades, as the fiction of the poem brings Heaney as one penitent among a crowd of pilgrims to Station Island, where he stays for the obligatory three-day ritual—fasting, sleeping in a dormitory, attending services at the basilica, walking barefoot round the circular stone "beds," or foundations of ruined monastic beehive cells. The difference between Heaney and the other penitents is that he is no longer a believer. One of the shades, a young priest, accuses him:

"The last look"—traditionally taken before dying—is not quite what Heaney is up to in this sequence, but he certainly uses the twelve "cantos" of the poem to look back at many of his dead: Simon Sweeney, an old "Sabbathbreaker" from Heaney's childhood; the Irish writer William Carleton (1794-1869), who after he became a Protestant wrote "The Lough Derg Pilgrim," satirizing Catholic superstition; the twentieth-century poet Patrick Kavanagh, who also wrote a poem about the Lough Derg pilgrimage; an invalid relative who died young; the young priest, dead after a few years in the foreign missions; two schoolmasters; the little girl Heaney first felt love for; a college friend shot in his shop by terrorists; an archeologist friend who died young; a cousin murdered by Protestants; an executed Catholic terrorist; a monk who prescribed as penance a translation from John of the Cross; James Joyce. All these characters (with the exception of the invalid young relative) speak to Heaney, and the poem offers a polyphony of admonitions, ranging from the trite ("When you're on the road/give lifts to people, you'll always learn something") to the eloquent—Joyce's advice to the hesitant poet:

"That subject people stuff is a cod's game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea."

More striking than the attributed voices is Heaney's own self-portrait, full of a Chaucerian irony overpainted with Dantesque earnestness. In Station Island, Heaney is sometimes (as with Joyce) the abashed apprentice, sometimes (as with his murdered cousin) the guilty survivor, sometimes the penitent turning on himself with hallucinatory self-laceration:

Though the narrative armature of Station Island is almost staidly conventional—borrowed from Dante, even down to his traditional words for the appearance and fading of ghosts—the writing often moves out, as in the passage I have just quoted, to the limits of description. Heaney has always had extraordinary descriptive powers—dangerous ones; conscious of the rich, lulling seductions of his early verse, he experiments here in resourceful and daring ways with both the maximizing and the minimizing of description. The dream passage about the corrupt polyp interrupts lushness with the surgical slash of the shed breast; the same typical self-correction can be seen in a passage where William Carleton plays the surgical role interrupting the dreamy language of the poet:

"The alders in the hedge," I said "mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,
old jampots in a drain clogged up with mud—"
But now Carleton was interrupting:

"All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds—
another life that cleans our element.

We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace."
He turned on his heel when he was saying this

and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

This small sample will do to show why Heaney's lines are not corrupted by pure linguistic revel—as Dylan Thomas's often were, their simpler phonetic indulgence unchecked by astringency. Heaney works, in Yeats' phrase to "articulate sweet sounds together" in ways not cloying to the ear, often restraining his delight in the unforeseen coincidences of language, sometimes allowing the delight to break loose. Under the influence of Lowell, Heaney pruned his young luxuriance severely in some of the poems of Field Work (1979). The rapturous lyricism of the early poetry, though neverlost, adapted itself to a worldlier tone, released in Station Island into mordant vignettes of Irish social life. Here Heaney describes the ordination of the young priest and his visits back to the parish from the missions:

The village round sketched here would be familiar to anyone raised in Ireland. Heaney's satiric phrases—"fawning relish," "holy mascot"—defamiliarize the pieties; the sharpness of his eye is matched in such places by sharpness of tongue. A brave exactness in saying the socially unsayable appears in Heaney's epigrammatic summation of the society of his youth. Though the nostalgia for his "first kingdom"—so evident in his earliest poems—is still present, he has added an adult judgment on the deficiencies of its people:

They were two-faced and accommodating.
And seed, breed and generation still
They are holding on, every bit
as pious and exacting and demeaned.

The five adjectives and the four nouns in this passage hold on to their places in the lines as if they were sentinels guarding a fort. They cannot be budged (as anyone can discover by trying to put "two-faced" in the place of "demeaned," or "generation" in the place of "seed"). The words act out the tenaciousness of the Catholics of Northern Ireland, surviving in spite of being—necessarily—"twofaced and accommodating." When words fit together in this embedded way, they make a harsh poetry far from the softer verse of Heaney's youth. It is a poetry aiming not at liquidity but at the solidity of the mason's courses.

At the same time, Heaney's native tendernesses, beautifully realized, ornament his pages. In a typical passage, Heaney as a boy sits in a beech tree, where "the very ivy/ puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers/over the grain." In this short spill of words, there are no obvious beauties of alliteration, assonance, rhyming; instead, there is the pure discovery of language adequate to the combination of ivy and bole. What is the right verb for the way ivy moves over a tree trunk? What is the right word for baby ivy leaves? What are the words for their shape and edges? "Its milk-tooth frills and tapers" becomes the reflexive object of the oddly transitive verb "puzzled" as the ivy instinctively plots out its new route and puts out its young delicate sprays and tendrils at the same time. A poet can find such words only by analogy with his own inner life; he feels what it is like when consciousness or perception leafs itself out along a new puzzling path. When he needs a word for the ivy, it comes from his own kinesthetic awareness of the body. Everywhere, Heaney's inner life gives life to outer life, attaching to it the felt inner coursings of physical and mental existence.

In one ars poetica, "The King of the Ditchbacks," Heaney describes this uncertain and tentative effort of the poet to track down his inner stirrings and translate them into words that are at the same time adequate for his perception of the external world. The poet, says Heaney, feels his ghostly other—his phenomenological self, one might say—making a track, an unintelligible code, "a dark morse along the bank;" the poet follows:

A prose poem continues the relationship:

Like a priest being ordained, Heaney is vested for the calling of poet in a mysteriously beautiful poem that attempts to exemplify the paradoxical total naturalness and total social estrangement of the office of the poet. He recounts the day of his "sense of election," when he was camouflaged and taken bird hunting:

When I was taken aside that day
I had the sense of election:

they dressed my head in a fishnet
and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

so my vision was a bird's
at the heart of a thicket

and I spoke as I moved
like a voice from a shaking bush.

That day, the hunters catch no birds, but Heaney is urged to return in the fall, "when the gundogs can hardly retrieve/what's brought down." The poet realizes he will return, but not to hunt; rather, he will return in spirit, as a watcher, a disguised Keatsian icon of the harvest:

The echo of the Gospel confirms the depth of the election. The elegiac richness of the language argues the aristocracy of the poet's calling, but the memory of the stealthy self, "a denless mover" living in his senses, argues also for the intimacy of this aristocracy with the biological origins of all social forms.

The allusion to the Gospel recurs in the last poem of Station Island—"On the Road"—where Heaney recalls "that track through corn/ where the rich young man/ asked his question—/ Master, what must I/ do to be saved?" In raising this ultimate question, Heaney asks what all the self-born must ask: If the gods of the parental hearth, the altars of the local church, the teachers of the native schools do not suffice as guardians and mentors, then where is one to turn? This is the central outcry of Heaney's book, and it leads him first into the affronting encounters with family, school, and church which fill the long title poem. But after that it ushers him into a strange and unpopulated realm, which one can only call the space of writing. The refusal of the social plenum leaves the artist empty, but his kingdom becomes the entire scope of consciousness. The significant word "empty" recurs several times in this volume, notably in "On the Road":

In my hands
like a wrested trophy,
the empty round
of the steering wheel.

The end of the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic struggle to discard false gods seems to be a far-stretching emptiness, but it is one in which the steering wheel is in one's own hands, a prize of victory.

"On the Road," seeking a solution to its sense of bewilderment and depletion, drives itself, finally, to a rock wall incised with a prehistoric carving. There it halts, observing the first, ancient human testimony to the power and strength of form—a form that takes its own inspiration from the contours of its rock matrix:

There a drinking deer
is cut into rock,
its haunch and neck
rise with the contours,

the incised outline
curves to a strained
expectant muzzle
and a nostril flared

at a dried-up source.

The poet would "meditate/that stone-faced vigil" of the drinking deer

until the long dumbfounded
spirit broke cover
to raise a dust
in the font of exhaustion.

"Dumbfounded" is one of the words in this volume (others are "bewildered," "defensive," "evasion," "guilty," "complaisant," and "emptied") which convey the many confusions and fears undergone by any independent mind in defining and defending its own solitude. Against these self-doubts—arising from the social disobedience so necessary for art but so disturbing to the hitherto obedient—are set various phrases of clarity and self-fortification. Some are sensual—"hands at night/ dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast." Others are experiential—"we are earthworms of the earth, and all that/ has gone through us is what will be our trace." Still others are aesthetic. In his tribute to Hardy, "The Birthplace," for example, Heaney remembers how as a boy he found in Hardy a writer describing the life he himself was living on an Irish farm. The shock of that first perceived correspondence between life and art closes Heaney's homage:

Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?

We come back emptied…

Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light

for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass

verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.

Poems like "The Birthplace" record, as I have said, private moments of sustenance in the wilderness of middle life. This wilderness necessarily includes for Heaney the state of his country, and there are many direct, and some indirect, references here to Heaney's troubled relation to the insoluble events in Northern Ireland. The dangers of propaganda and of loyalties unmediated by intelligence haunt any writer born into historical crisis. Heaney quotes Czeslaw Milosz's "Native Realm": "I was stretched between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history." The contemplation of a motionless point—as one pole of the artist's duty—is reflected here in Heaney's ascetic translation, in the Station Island sequence, of a poem by John of the Cross on the dark night of the soul; the command to participate actively in history is reflected in the terse and committed poem "Chekhov on Sakhalin," based on a fragment of Chekhov's life. In the poem, Chekhov drains a last glass of Moscow cognac after travelling thousands of miles from Moscow, through Siberia, to the island of Sakhalin, between Russia and Japan; the island is a Russian prison colony, and Chekhov is paying his "debt to medicine" by investigating the penal conditions. He forces himself to watch floggings and then leaves to write about them, "to try for the right tone—not tract, not thesis." Chekhov's predicament is that of any poet trying to write about historical conditions, but the deeper truth of the poem appears in the closing lines, in which Chekhov's own origin ("born, you may say, under the counter") compels him to his present expiatory inquiry, and to a perpetual identification with the convicts:

For the last twenty years, each of Heaney's books—from Death of a Naturalist (1966) through Station Island—has exhibited an experimental advance on its predecessors. Without losing his early sensual depth and sympathy, Heaney has added social and political dimensions to his writing. In assimilating the mythical and organic voice of Door Into the Dark (1969) to the compelled social voice of Wintering Out (1972), with its epigraph on "the new camp for the internees," Heaney assumed a civic relation to his larger society—a position consolidated in North (1975), one of the few unforgettable single volumes published in English since the modernist era. In Field Work, the formality of Heaney's earlier prosody relaxed into a deft and unassuming phrasal and conversational line—a stylistic consequence of letting the political and social dimensions of life in Northern Ireland invade his adolescent world of nests, aeries, and immemorial agricultural rituals. "I remember writing a letter to Brian Friel just after North was published," Heaney once remarked, "saying I no longer wanted a door into the dark—I want a door into the light…. I really wanted to come back to be able to use the first person singular to mean me and my lifetime."

It is this completed voice that speaks in Station Island. When a poet remakes his voice, everything already said has to be said over, in the new, more adequate tonality and diction. The imagination, as long as it remains alive, never ceases to reconsider and to rewrite the past; its poems are circumscribed by the potential adventures of the voice. If a poetic voice lacks volatility and modulation, it cannot be convincing in dramas of volatility and modulation; if it lacks a public dimension, it cannot enunciate public life; if it is wanting in inwardness, it cannot convey private intensity. To attempt a new complexity of voice is to create future possibilities for one's past; and in this volume Heaney has in effect rescanned his past, using the accomplished and complicated voice of his fifth decade. The earliest voice, the limited one inherited from ancestors, will "have to be unlearned":

even though from there on everything
is going to be learning.

So the twine unwinds and loosely widens
backward through areas that forwarded
understandings of all I would undertake

Heaney's present voice benefits from his recent work on Sweeney Astray (1984), a translation of a medieval Irish poem, "Buile Suibhne," in which Sweeney, an Irish king, is cursed by the priest Ronan, who turns him into a bird. Sweeney's dour and lively voice from the trees is blended with Heaney's own in the group of poems making up the third part of the Station Island volume, a sequence called "Sweeney Redivivus." These poems form a dry and almost peremptory autobiography, stunningly different from the warm-fleshed account given in Heaney's early books.

It is difficult to choose among the Sweeney poems, since they so illuminate each other. For a view of Heaney's current hard poetic, one would have to quote his poem on Cézanne, called simply "An Artist":

I love the thought of his anger.
His obstinacy against the rock, his coercion
of the substance from green apples.

The way he was a dog barking
at the image of himself barking.
And his hatred of his own embrace
of working as the only thing that worked.

For an impression of Sweeney's tart spite—a tone perhaps impossible for Heaney in propria persona—one would have to read Sweeney's hatred for the Cleric who, bringing Christianity to Ireland, robbed him of his native ground:

If he had stuck to his own
cramp-jawed abbesses and intoners
dibbling round the enclosure,

his Latin and blather of love,
his parchments and scheming
in letters shipped over water—

but no, he overbore
with his unctions and orders,
he had to get in on the ground.

If one wanted to see Heaney's first moments as a modern writer, the old rural life left behind, one would quote "Sweeney Redivivus," the ironically dissolving title poem of the sequence:

The fine-edged precision of naming in these poems—the line of the hedges thin as penwork, the hard paths and sharp-ridged houses—has become for Heaney the ethic under which he works. He has written more than once about the "cool" temperature of early Irish verse, contrasting it with the warmer and rounder tones of English poetry; his current effort seems to be directed toward retaining the spareness and chill of the early Irish tonality while not forgoing altogether what he has called "those somewhat hedonistic impulses towards the satisfactions of aural and formal play out of which poems arise."

The "aural and formal play" in these poems is satisfyingly subtle. In "The First Gloss," for instance—the fourline poem opening the Sweeney sequence—the formal decisions are very modest: the rhymes are slant; the second couplet is composed of lines shorter than those of the first. But these formal moves stand for the two themes of the poem—disobedience and independence. Heaney imagines in this quatrain the first scribe who decided to violate a vellum margin with a thought of his own about the sacred word that he was copying:

Take hold of the shaft of the pen.
Subscribe to the first step taken
from a justified line
into the margin.

In one of his first poems, "Digging," Heaney had imagined his pen as a spade, and had made the work of writing poetry strictly analogous, in the mental sphere, to the physical work of planting and harvesting. This comforting fiction has been supplanted in "The First Gloss" by a recognition of the inherent outlawry and heterodoxy in writing—what it entails in the way of departure from socially justified limits and from the self-sufficient sacred word.

Readers who know Heaney's autobiography in verse from previous books will want to retrace it in this verbally firm and assured but psychologically beset and uncertain midlife recapitulation. Those interested in the social history of Ireland can find here Heaney's visceral account of how things stand, and will notice especially the horrifying record of killings in the title poem, as well as Sweeney's tragicomic satire on cultural life in Ireland. (The mots justes for personal and public life, past and present, seem to come to Heaney with the unforced sureness of instinct.) For me, it is not chiefly the autobiography or the cultural history—though each is accurate with a poet's accuracy—that draws me to this book. Rather, it is a poetic handling of language so variable that almost any word, image, or turn of phrase might appear at any moment. In a typical moment, Sweeney gibes at the monks writing in the scriptorium:

Under the rumps of lettering
they herded myopic angers.
Resentment seeded in the uncurling
fernheads of their capitals.

Rumps and fernheads, herding and seeding, capitals and angers, resentment and myopia—these words from medicine, ethics, husbandry, botany, chirography, psychology jostle each other for position. (Of course, there would be no pleasure in this if the words did not embody as well the metaphorical animus by which Sweeney turns the intellectual scribes into thick-witted herdsmen, demeans their art to a venomous proliferation.) Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself. The two tones he generally avoids—on principle, I imagine, and by temperament—are the prophetic and the denunciatory, those standbye of political poetry. It is arresting to find a poetry so conscious of cultural and social facts which nonetheless remains chiefly a poetry of awareness, observation, and sorrow.