scrutinizing instead the wellsprings of collective identity, the ambivalences of individual response to history.
An Irishman writing in the language of the British Empire, he has translated Gaelic poetry and renewed specifically Irish traditions, such as the aisling, or vision poem, but he is also steeped in the English literary canon, drawing on British poetry from Beowulf (his prize-winning translation appears in volume 1 of this anthology) to the works of William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ted Hughes. Straddling in his verse a multiplicity of divisions, transubstantiating crisscross feelings into unex
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pected images and intricate sonorities, Heaney has been embraced by popular audiences for his accessible style and yet also admired by poets and academic critics for his lyric subtlety and rigorous technique.
Formally, his poetry ranges from strenuous free verse?the clipped lines and unrhymed quatrains of the bog poems?to more traditional forms, such as the modified terza rima of 'Station Island' and the sonnet sequence 'Clearances.' His poems are earthy and matter-of-fact, saturated with the physical textures, sights, smells, and sounds of farm life, and they are also visionary, lit up by hope and spirit, enacting penitential pilgrimages and unbridled imaginings. That Heaney's poetry is both earthbound and airborne, free and formed, public and private helps explain why he is seen by many as the most gifted English-language poet of his generation.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 5 My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills1 Where he was digging.
10 The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
15 By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf2 in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle
20 Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging.
25 The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them.
1. Small furrows in which seeds are sown. 2. Slabs of peat that, when dried, are a common domestic fuel in Ireland.
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THE GRAUBALLE MAN / 2825
Between my finger and my thumb 30 The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.
1966
The Forge
All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks
5 Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music,
io Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
1969
The Grauballe Man1
As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep
5 the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
io His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, 15 his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.
1. A body exhumed from a Danish bog and photographed in P. V. Glob's book The Bog People.
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The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent
20 of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.
25 Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose?
And his rusted hair,
