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282 2 / SEAMUS HEANEY
Corniche1
I work all day and hardly drink at all.2
I can reach down and feel if I'm depressed.
I adore the Creator because I made myself
and a few times a week a wire jags in my chest.
5 The first time, I'd been coming apart all year, weeping, incoherent; cigars had given me up: any road round a cliff edge I'd whimper along in low gear then: cardiac horror. Masking my pulse's calm lub-dub.
It was the victim-sickness. Adrenaline howling in my head, 10 the black dog was my brain. Come to drown me in my breath was energy's black hole, depression, compere0 of master of ceremonies the predawn show when, returned from a pee, you stew and welter in your death.
The rogue space rock is on course to snuff your world,
sure. But go acute, and its oncoming fills your day. 15 The brave die but once? I could go a hundred times a week,
clinging to my pulse with the world's edge inches away.
Laugh, who never shrank around wizened genitals there
or killed themselves to stop dying. The blow that never falls
batters you stupid. Only gradually do
20 you notice a slight scorn in you for what appals.
A self inside self, cool as conscience, one to be erased
in your final night, or faxed, still knows beneath
all the mute grand opera and uncaused effect?
that death which can be imagined is not true death.
1996
1. Coastal road. poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985): 'I work all day, 2. Cf. the opening of 'Aubade,' by the English and get half drunk at night.' SEAMUS HEANEY
b. 1939 Seamus Heaney was born into a Roman Catholic family in predominantly Protestant North Ireland (or Ulster), and he grew up on a farm in County Derry bordered on one side by a stream that marked the frontier with the largely Catholic Irish Republic (or Eire) to the south. He won scholarships first to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school, and then to Queen's University in Belfast. There he became one of an extraordinary group of Northern Irish poets from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, including Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, who read, discussed, and spurred on one another's work. He taught at Queen's University, before moving in 1972 to the Irish Republic, where he became a citizen and full-time writer. He has
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SEAMUS HEANEY / 282 3
been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1995 won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
With 'Digging,' placed appropriately as the first poem of his first book, Heaney defined his territory. He dug into his memory, uncovering first his father and then, going deeper, his grandfather. This idea of poetry as an archaeological process of recovery took on a darker cast after the eruption of internecine violence in Northern Ireland in 1969, culminating in the 1972 Bloody Sunday killing of thirteen Catholic civilians by British paratroopers during a civil rights march in Derry. Across several volumes, especially North (1975), Heaney wrote a series of grim 'bog poems,' about well-preserved Iron Age corpses discovered in the peat of Northern Europe and Ireland. In these poems he sees the bog as a 'memory bank,' or unconscious, that preserves everything thrown into it, including the victims of ritual killings. He views contemporary violence through the lens of ancient myths, sacrifices, and feuds, an oblique approach that gives his poetry about the Troubles an unusual depth and resonance. He had discovered emblems for the violence in Northern Ireland in The Bog People, a book by the Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob, published in translation in 1969, 'the year the killing started.' Heaney wrote of it:
It was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. The author . . . argues convincingly that a number of these, and in particular, the Tollund Man, whose head is now preserved near Aarhus in the museum of Silkeburg, were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the spring. Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for the cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni Houlihan [mythic figure emblematic of Mother Ireland], this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles. ('Feeling into Words')
In the bog poems Heaney reflects on the poet's responsibilities to write about the dead, yet to do so without prettifying or exploiting them. He probes the vexed relations between lyric song and historical suffering, 'beauty and atrocity': the need to be true to his calling as artist, but also to represent the irredeemable carnage of modern political violence?'the actual weight / of each hooded victim / slashed and dumped' ('The Grauballe Man'). The result is a tough-minded witnessing, an ethically scrupulous and self-aware mourning of collective loss and sectarian murder. (For more on the Troubles, see 'Imagining Ireland' at Norton Literature Online.)
Since the late 1970s Heaney has continued to elegize victims of the Troubles, such as his acquaintance Louis O'Neill, in 'Casualty,' as well as more personal losses, such as the natural death of his mother, in 'Clearances.' He has also written poems about domestic love, such as 'The Skunk' and 'The Sharping Stone.' Heaney is thus both a private poet?skillfully kneading grief, love, and wonder into poems about his family and his humble origins?and a public poet, affirming his affinities with the Catholic civil rights movement, which has struggled against British and Protestant domination. Even in his public poetry he refuses slogans, journalistic reportage, and political pieties,
