Sherry Chandler

Hearing Seamus Heaney

All the legendary Irish charm embodied.

If poets could get encores, Seamus Heaney would have had one yesterday evening at the Margaret I. King library at the University of Kentucky. The applause rolled like a flood stream breaking a dam, releasing energy that had been pent up. But we did not get an encore. Only a return to the podium to acknowledge our accolade with bowed head.

Our energies were pent because Mr. Heaney had asked us to hold our applause, remarking that, if you cheered a poem you particularly admired, you would then feel obliged to cheer the other so as not to seem rude. So just wait until the end, he said, “unless,” in a murmured aside, “you’re just overcome completely.”

We were overcome completely twice. Once by an early poem, “Mid-Term Break,” on the death of his four-year-old brother:

…
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
and candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

(You must read the whole thing to feel the full impact, but I did not applaud this poem. It would have been like applauding a eulogy.) And once for a translation from his new collection, District and Circle (Faber & Faber, 2006). In the translated poem, an ancient Irish poet instructs a blacksmith on how to make a shovel, the tool this particular poet used to earn his living. I can’t give you a taste of that one. The supply of signed copies on sale by Joseph-Beth disappeared long before I got near them. Mr. Heaney seems to love craftsmen, though, people who work with their hands, and so he did read “Thatcher” because, he said, we had one in the audience. By name or trade was not made clear, though I’m not sure we’re heavy on thatched roofs here in Kentucky.

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
…

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

He opened with the poem “Digging” because, he said, he always does. It is as though he wants to establish both his connection and his disconnection with the Irish stereotype:

…
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

…
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

The occasion of this reading in the Special Collections library was the opening of an exhibit of the four Irish Nobel laureates: W. B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. To be in such august company, said Mr. Heaney, was both ennobling and a bit intimidating. To get over that, he would give us his favorite quote from the other three. Here they are, as I remember them:

Yeats: “You can disprove Hegel but you can’t disprove the Song of Sixpence.”

(By which I assume he meant “Sing a song of sixpence/Pocket full of rye.”)

Shaw: Mr. Shaw went to dinner at a fancy hotel, the name of which escaped me. Upon his arrival, he was approached by the maitre d’ who said, “Mr. Shaw, what would you like the orchestra to play while you dine?”

Answered Mr. Shaw, “Dominoes.”

Beckett: “Birth was the death of me.”

Mr. Heaney kept an SRO crowd on the edges of their seats (or on their feet) for nearly an hour. I was literally on the edge of mine because the size of the crowd made it necessary for our party of four to share three chairs. People were spilling out into the halls. Students had been bused in from Berea College.

I did not get my copy of Beowulf signed. Although Mr. Heaney was accessible, he was not signing. He was deeply engaged in conversation with members of the crowd at the reception afterwards, and I had nothing to say to him really except maybe “Gosh!” So our group went on our way to gather at a coffeeshop and talk it over among ourselves.

Mr. Heaney had all the presence and charisma you could expect from a Nobel Laureate. I am not a person given to fandom. I admire the work of many artists and stars in various fields, but I’ve never been one to mistake the person for the work. And I know there must be times when Seamus Heaney is just a white-haired old man alone with a “squat pen” and his losses. But when he took the podium at Margaret King library, the whole room felt his power.

It profanes my essay a bit to say this but I can’t resist: We have certain bullying politicians in the United States now who would do well to take a lesson from Mr. Heaney about the true nature of power. It comes from within and is carried with grace, generosity, and humility.

Mr. Heaney spoke of the responsibility recognition brings, especially to an Irishman who has lived in the time of the Troubles. I had not thought before that, with the prize and the fame, comes also a public exposure that may fall heavy on the shoulders of a poet, especially the poet of a troubled people. He read us this poem:

Exposure

…
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond abolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

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