12
Like a convalescent, I took the hand stretched down from the jetty, sensed again an alien comfort as I stepped on ground
to find the helping hand still gripping mine, 5 fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain
for the tall man in step at my side seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush upon his ash plant,2 his eyes fixed straight ahead.
10 Then I knew him in the flesh out there on the tarmac' among the cars, blacktop surface wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
1. Station Island is a sequence of dream encounters with familiar ghosts, set on Station Island on Lough Derg in Co. Donegal. The island is also known as St. Patrick's Purgatory because of a tradition that Patrick was the first to establish the penitential vigil of fasting and praying which still constitutes the basis of the three-day pilgrimage. Each unit of the contemporary pilgrim's exercises is called a 'station,' and a large part of each station involves walking barefoot and praying round the 'beds,' stone circles which are said to be the remains of early medieval monastic cells [Heaney's note]. In this last section of the poem, the familiar ghost is that of Heaney's countryman James Joyce. Cf. the stanza form and encounter with a ghost in
T. S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding.' 2. Walking stick made of ash, like the one carried by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. (See the opening paragraphs of 'Proteus,' p. 2200.) Joyce was almost blind.
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283 2 / SEAMUS HEANEY
i 5His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers3 came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's, cunning,4 narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket 20with his stick, saying, 'Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite. What you must do must be done on your own so get back in harness. The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night 25 dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don't be so earnest, 30let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.5 Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.' It was as if I had stepped free into space alone with nothing that I had not known already. Raindrops blew in my face 35as I came to. 'Old father, mother's son, there is a moment in Stephen's diary for April the thirteenth, a revelation set among my stars?that one entry has been a sort of password in my ears, the collect of a new epiphany,6 40 the Feast of the Holy Tundish.'7 'Who cares,' he jeered, 'any more? The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires, 45a waste of time for somebody your age. That subject0 people stuff is a cod's0 game, infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage. colonized /fool's
3. The Anna Livia Piurabelle episode of Finnegatis Wake (p. 2239) resounds with the names of many rivers. 4. 'The only arms I allow myself to use?silence, exile, and cunning' (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). 5. As worn by penitents in biblical times and later. 6. Manifestation of a superhuman being, as of the infant Jesus to the Magi (Matthew 2). In the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany is January 6. 'Epiphany' was also Joyce's term for the 'sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing.' 'Collect': short prayer assigned to a particular day.
7. See the end of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Yoitng Man [Heaney's note]: '13 April: That tundish [funnel] has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!'
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CLEARANCES / 283 3
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 50 with signatures on your own frequency, echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams8 in the dark of the whole sea.' The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly
55 the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.
1984
Clearances
in memoriam M.K.H.,1 1911-1984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the higgest coal hlock split If you got the grain and hammer angled right.
The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, 5 Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,
Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black.
1
io A cobble thrown a hundred years ago Keeps coming at me, the first stone Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow.2 The pony jerks and the riot's on. She's crouched low in the trap
15 Running the gauntlet that first Sunday Down the brae? to Mass at a panicked gallop. stee-p slope He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'3
Call her The Convert'. 'The Exogamous4 Bride'. Anyhow, it is a genre piece 20 Inherited on my mother's side
8. Gleams as of young eels. Lundy knew that Derry (or Londonderry) would be 1. Margaret Kathleen Heaney, the poet's mother. invaded by the English, but failed to prepare ade2. Heaney's Protestant great-grandmother mar-quate defenses. ried a Catholic. 4. Married outside the group. 3. I.e., traitor. In 1688 the Irish colonel
