SOURCE: A review of Seeing Things, in The Yale Review, Vol. 80, Nos. 1-2, 1992, pp. 236-54.

Seamus Heaney's poems have earned a host of literary awards and about as much public celebration as is likely for any poet in our time. A native of Northern Ireland, a man of great personal charm, wit, eloquence in speech, and probity, Heaney has attracted (he attention of journalists in this country and around the world. His work has been embraced by academic critics, taught in schools and universities, and made the object of Ph.D. dissertations.

Nevertheless, he is a wonderful poet, one of the best writing, as his new book Seeing Things demonstrates anew. The book also provides a comparison of poetry's dual presence—immediate and yet of the past, of the earth and of the air, of the voice and of the mind—in the work of these three younger Americans and in poems by a European of Heaney's generation.

The two mighty roots of this volume are familiar to Heaney's readers. One is the talismanic force of objects: the often humble implements and artifacts, pitchfork, settlebed, coping-stone, biretta, school-bag, made sacramental by their human meaning and by Heaney's luminous see ing of them. "Secure / The bastion of sensation," says a poem early in the extraordinary sequence "Squarings," "Do not water / Into language. Do not waver in it." Related to these often domestic objects is the second root, which is reverent memory, in this book frequently elegiac. There are extremely touching, indelible poems in memory of the poet's father and of several friends.

As he has done before, Heaney frames the volume with translations, a passage from Canto III of the Inferno at the end and fifty lines from the Aeneid as a prefatory poem. In the Aeneid passage, the hero asks the Cumaean Sibyl for passage to the Underworld so that he can look again into the face of his dead father. The Sibyl tells Aeneas that to return living from the realm of death he must pluck the golden bough from the sacred grove—" And when it is plucked," says Heaney's version, "A second one always grows in its place, golden again." And in the closing lines of his preface:

These lines invoke the ancient spirit of poetry, straightforwardly and confidently.

Then, in the first poem of the volume proper, the ghost of the poet Larkin—" a nine-to-five man who had seen poetry"—surprises the living poet on a city street, and the shade quotes Dante, a passage where at nightfall when all other creatures rest the poet goes forth to his duty. Though Heaney enjoys the incongruity between the rush-hour buses and Larkin's "Still my old self Ready to knock one back," his connection to the old line of poetry is largely one of congruity. This fact is visible in the distinctive, polishedthorn texture of Heaney's language; it is partly a matter of cultural setting, a setting where poetry's place is less of an open question than in America, more assuredly a place resembling one that it always had.

It has been Heaney's genius to invoke the heroic perspective for the most immediate and personal kinds of experience. Every mode of narrative or image seems available and readily modulated from one kind of eloquence, one scale, to the next. In the title poem, rendering what could have been a small family anecdote, the closing section begins "Once upon a time my undrowned father / Walked into our yard." The father has had a close call in the river, after a minor disagreement with the child. Heaney in the final passage returns to the note of the opening "once upon a time":

This is a remarkably subtle ending, full of strong but understated emotional color: rueful and ironic about the realities between father and son. Because we have read the opening Aeneid passage a few pages before, and then an elegy for the father's own father, the moment, when the two look on one another's face is also part of an epic pattern.

Leaving Dante and Virgil aside, consider the many Heaney poems where, just as archaic language overlaps with the language of crafts or farming or region (James Joyce's "feast of the Holy Tundish"), the folklore and figures of his experience overlap with mythology ("Squarings," xviii):

Like a foul-mouthed god of hemp come down to rut,
The rope-man stumped about and praised new rope
With talk of how thick it was, or how long and strong,

And how you could take it into your own hand
And feel it. His perfect, tight-bound wares
Made a circle round him….

In another poem of the sequence,

Other poems describe the feeling of an eelskin bracelet putting water-wheel strength into your shoulder, or the ritual entering of a new life through a girdle of straw rope on St. Brigid's Day, one sequence for men, one for women:

The open they came into by these moves
Stood opener, hoops came off the world,
They could feel the February air

Still soft above their heads and imagine
The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings
Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

This is a world in which the centaur of the past is a few steps closer than for the young Americans, and not only for the colloquial Halliday but for Mitchell as well. The folklore is only one token of a setting in which the contradictions between the art's history and its present are less sharp, less open-ended.

No judgment of value is implied by seeing this difference of kind. Exactly because the scope and power of Heaney's poems are well established, it is worth noting that like other European poets he is in some ways closer to the literature and language of the past, and to the folk beliefs of the past, than many American poets are likely to be.

This idea represents only one strain in Heaney's work, a strain that reminds me of two other poems. One is Czeslaw Milosz's "Bypassing Rue Descartes," in which the poet remembers streaming into Paris as the capital of the world, and of "the universal," in the time between the wars, along with other young people from "Jassy and Kolivar, Wilno and Bucharest, Saigon and Marrakesh." "Soon enough, their peers were seizing power / in order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas," while the city goes on pursuing its worldly nature. At the end of the poem, Milosz returns to the idea of folk beliefs:

As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly:
How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.

And what I have met with in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.

The immense force of Milosz's lifework is related to the stretch from his classical education, the beliefs of his province, the great world of his youth, to his experience of the war and its aftermath, the poet clinging to the thread of poetry through that maze of disillusion, catastrophe, and faith. This force is relevant to Heaney's cultural situation, and to the American one as well: the scale of the Milosz poem helps show the difference in the situations.

The other poem I am reminded of is Alan Shapiro's "Mud Dancing," which I have quoted already. Reading Heaney's masterful deployment of his vocabulary of rut and wares, grow fleet and psychopomp, fray and flare, and unhindered goldfinch, I thought of the moment when Shapiro, in his poem of the bewildered ghosts of the tortured touching the immovable cast-off garments at Woodstock, giving voice to the dead, reaches for an archaic word:

Was this some new phase of their affliction?
The effect of some yet new device?
To make them go on dreaming, even now,
some version of themselves so long accustomed
to their torment that they confused
torment with exaltation, mud with light?

Frau History, they asked, is this the final
reaving of what we loved well…?

Reaving (spelled differently in Faulkner's title): plundering, robbing, tearing apart, or carrying away. It seems an appropriate term for addressing Frau History. The archaism gives the thrown-off clothing more meaning, in a moment that is part of a continuum with the poems of Milosz and Heaney, suggesting that there is a question, a question about the place of memory in the present, that all true poetry, in one way or another, presents to its readers.