Going 'Digging' with a famous Seamus

The Nobel Prize-winning poet tilts his large, snowy head slightly to his right and attempts to introduce himself. "I know I'm a circumference of something," he says. "I know I must have some sort of center. When you drop a stone, at the beginning there's a little plop, and then, swiftly, gradually, you see it spreading out. You watch it for a while, and then you begin to wonder: are the ripples coming in from the circumference, or going out from the center?"

COURTESY CAROLINE FORBES/FARRAR, STRAUS, AND GIROUX Heaney, sans poetic spectacles.

Seamus Heaney's glasses are squarish Jaguar bifocals, but you are forgiven for supposing they are actually made of poetry. It is the lens through which he sees everything, from his personal development to his native Ireland. At a Jonathan Edwards Master's Tea on Wed., Oct. 25, he tried to tell his story, but it came out a poem instead. "I remember, I took the boards out of the bottom of my cot, and I stepped onto the ground," he said. "It's my first memory." He mentioned this; he did not mention his Nobel. (Finally, someone in the audience asked about it. "It's unspeakable," he said with a grin, and took the next question.) Heaney speaking of himself is like a metaphor for a human life rather than a narrative of one.

"Poetry came like a grace into my life," he said. "At first I was afraid to write it—it belonged to some other dimension or realm." He overcame his fear, he said, and began writing poems heavily influenced by Patrick Kavanaugh and Gerard Manley Hopkins, which were first published by the Belfast Telegraph. Word of his talent spread, and in 1965 he had the surreal experience of being invited to 24 Russell Street, the London office of Faber & Faber publishers, where T.S. Eliot had presided from the 1920s to 1963.

"It was an elsewhere," Heaney said, "an entry into another dimension." And that was when he realized he was not just a man. "That was when my pretextual life ended; you became the textual creature called Seamus Heaney as well as being yourself." You became the author of Death of a Naturalist, and the winner of the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. You were 27.

How appropriate that Heaney speaks of himself in the second person. It is not clear who Seamus Heaney, himself, really is; but the "textual creature," the living poet, is perpetually apparent, and he seems always to be looking sideways at this creature with an attitude of jolly camaraderie. "You have this inchoate inner swirl of stuff, of youness," he said. "And that's one of the uses of art—the youness becoming itness."

Is it a silly cliché to suppose that poets are somehow made of different stuff than ordinary people, that they exist on a different plane, that they see things from a perspective we can't imagine? Heaney's persona is a fully human one—he laughs, he rolls his eyes, he makes exaggerated faces, he peppers his conversation with onomatopoeic plops and whooshes, he presumably puts his pants on one leg at a time. But his persona is only as human as the voice of his poetry, which is perhaps more human than any actual human being.

All poetry, all the time. The politics of Northern Ireland infuse his poetry not as an axe he chooses to grind, but as a part of the landscape, brutal and inevitable. Likewise, he does not abandon the mindset of poetry when he contemplates the political. Asked about the Troubles, the portly man's ruddy face turned grave. He gave a thoughtful account of the peace process, neither despairing nor naïve, then paused. It reminded him of the last line of a poem called "Insensibility," by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen: "The eternal reciprocity of tears."

The poets in Heaney's head jostled for mention, and he gave many of them a turn. On Ted Hughes, to whom Heaney's recent translation of Beowulf is dedicated, and whose reputation for personal cruelty has almost eclipsed his poetic prominence: "There was a rock there. There was a hard place there. But there was also enormous strength, enormous tendresse, and I am not the only one to have found it."

On Dante: "His influence on me wasn't aural or technical. It's a matter of opening up to the world around you—going head-on to the actual."

On fellow Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet: "He seems to me like a 19th-century sage. What I respond to is an intonation and a substance of wisdom, of judgment. It is the voice of someone grave, friendly, and very experienced speaking to you."

But on his own forthcoming book of poems, Heaney was reticent. "If I talk about it, it's like putting a puncture into a tire you're trying to pump up," he said. It wasn't the only time he seemed to feel his textual self might be fragile, might need protection from his human self. Describing the professorship of rhetoric and oratory he held at Harvard for 12 springs, he said, "I was teaching, writing, bewildering, hurrying—doing too many things—risking my poetry by being busy." He looked up at his audience and smiled merrily. "And here I am talking about myself, thinking about how perilous this is."

Around 6 p.m., the Master's Tea ended. At 8 p.m., he was on display again at a reading in Battell Chapel, his soft accent—less lilting than swaying—filling the high-ceilinged church. When the applause there ended, Heaney gamely trotted over to a reception in Calhoun, where rapt students clustered around him, asking questions of such depth that they would be extremely rude if asked of any other new acquaintance—imagine approaching someone at a party and tapping him on the shoulder, and saying, "How do you balance your duty to the words with your duty to the music when you translate a work of poetry?"

Through it all, Heaney was patient, gracious, sweet. He held court, a Harp Lager in one hand and a perpetual dance in his dark eyebrows, treating every query with equal seriousness and respect. To a detailed, rather picky question about the interplay of pagan symbols and Christian ideals in Beowulf, he replied with a profound assessment of the work's original writer: "He can order what he is through Christian shapes, but what he is is what he has inherited." To a rather flippant request that he recite a favorite poem, he tilted his head to the right side, squeezed his eyes shut, and recited "Cuchulain Comforted," Yeats' penultimate poem and only work in terza rima. "If you do terza rima on your deathbed, you're plucking a lot of strings," Heaney said with a chuckle.

The poet's very good humor was exhausting. Where was the brusque intellectual, the aloof metaphysician, the inscrutable mystic? Where, most of all, was the disdainful celebrity, indignant at his lost privacy? But perhaps the burdens of fame are slightly less difficult to bear when nothing you can see is not poetry; and as Heaney spoke to the younger generation—so energetic, so full of warmth—it was as if he saw not a bunch of scrappy, ambitious college students, but an image of youth. He smiled at us with his eyes through the spectacles of his poetry.

"Glanmore Sonnets" III

While Heaney was working on North, his 1975 collection dealing with Northern Ireland, the first two lines of this poem came to him. "I said to myself, `Oh no, that's too sweet, I must stop that," he said. "So I did." It appears in his 1979 book, Field Work. This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit

Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

(I've seen them too from the window of the house,

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

I had said earlier, `I won't relapse

From this strange loneliness I've brought us to.

Dorothy and William—' She interrupts:

`You're not going to compare us two...?'

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

Back to A&E...