Seamus Heaney: A Partial Indulgence : THE HAW LANTERN <i> by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $12.95; 51 pp.) </i>

Seamus Heaney’s admirers, who are legion, will welcome his new book warmly and will find in it much to admire. It is a characteristic book, both in its virtues and its defects. The virtues are considerable. Heaney commands a rich and various word-hoard, taking contagious delight in its multitude of shapes and sounds, and he has had from the beginning a gift for the accurate and vivid phrase. He enjoys the power of rime and meter and is capable of using them with effect. He is learned, ambitious and prolific. And the personality displayed in his work is an appealing one--sympathetic, shrewd, generous, observant and inclined to piety.

But the defects are serious and of long standing, and they seem to have gone largely unnoticed. One is reluctant, in the face of extravagant and nearly universal praise, to register a dissent, however mild. Yet opposition, in the form of honest criticism, would be true friendship. I think that Heaney’s publisher and reviewers do him no service by speaking of him as “great” and “flawless” and comparing him to W. B. Yeats. This is sheer puffery, and grotesquely inflated. He is not yet in Philip Larkin’s class. He is a gifted, serious, hard-working writer, clearly capable of growth, and nothing stunts a writer’s growth like indiscriminate adulation.

Let me address a few of his faults and give examples. Heaney has always had a weakness for the odd and fancy word where a plain one would do as well or better, as in “The Mud Vision,” where “a light fuzz/Accrued in the hair and eyebrows”--the connotations of accrued seem out of place; I can see no good reason for avoiding a simple verb like grew or thickened . Happily, this habit is not so prevalent here as in the earlier books.

He seems also to have moderated an old indulgence in the merely musical and decorative (what Thomas Hardy called “the jewelled line” and dismissed as effeminate) that has sometimes made his poems appear less interested in their subjects than in their own manners and mannerisms. In “The Haw Lantern,” his packed Lowellian line, dense with consonants and quantities, has thinned out considerably. But there are still passages that strike me as underfelt and overwritten. For example:

These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

the guardian angel of passivity,

now sink a fang of meance in my shoulder.

The chief defect of this work, as of his previous books, is what I can only call a failure of technique (or craft, as Heaney would have it), an amateurish awkwardness truly surprising in a poet so fluent, inventive and self-assured. Much of the art of poetry lies in setting the sentences aright, in laying them, as it were, among the lines, and it is here that one may find Heaney wanting, especially when he tries to sustain a strict form, as in the opening of “Song of the Bullets,” in common measure:

I watched a long time in the yard

The usual stars, the still

And seemly planets, lantern-bright

Above our darkened hill.

And then a star that moved, I thought,

For something moved indeed

Up from behind the massed skyline

At ardent silent speed . . .

The thing turns out to be a tracer bullet, which sings, among other things,

Our guilt was accidental. Blame,

Blame because you must.

Then blame young men for semen or

Blame the moon for moondust.

One scarcely knows where to begin, whether with the rhetoric and padding (seemly, ardent, etc) or with the uncertain, strained--for rimes, or worse yet, the off-rime of must with the unstressed syllable of moondust --for me, the effect is bathetic and comical.

But the most disturbing aspect of his prosody is the alternation between metrical and non-metrical verse, as if they were interchangeable musics. This happens in many poems, old and new. If he begins in meter, he is bound to interrupt, unpredictably and at will, with a line or a passage that once could not fairly call vers libre , just broken meter. If he begins “free,” he will feel free to introduce a string of pentameters. Likewise with the rime scheme, if any: in the same poem there may be, in no particular order, full rime, no rime, slant rime, off rime, assonance and so on. In some poems it is hard to tell if he means to rime or not. I have come across this sort of thing a good deal lately among the younger Americans, this dropping in and out of meter as casually as if it were a neighborhood bar. This may be imitation of Robert Lowell’s dubious practice, but I suspect they do it by accident, not hearing either the meter or the breaking of it.

Heaney is a resourceful and sophisticated poet and, I have no doubt, knows very well what he is doing. Why he does it, I have no idea. To my ear, it is almost always a disagreeable sensation. If John Donne deserved hanging for not keeping of the accent, what shall Heaney’s penalty be? Certainly he cannot be held personally responsible for a crisis in versification that has been deepening for more than a century, but a poet who aspires to greatness must certainly confront it. Ezra Pound, some 80 years ago: “Technique is the test of a man’s sincerity.”

Having said all these sour things, I must say also that I liked very well a number of poems in “The Haw Lantern,” among them “The Stone Verdict,” “A Daylight Art,” the perhaps over-romantic title poem, and a little elegy for Robert Fitzgerald with its ingenious yet touching Homeric figure.

But this thin sheaf has been fleshed out with numerous weaker pieces, like the poems spoken from imaginary islands, cantons and republics, which the publisher calls “exercises in an allegorical mode” and which strike at least one reader as talky and posturing, in a verse sometimes free and sometimes blank but always loose, the kind of exercises that produce an impressive display of bulk but little strength or power.

In his vigorous and exciting version of the medieval “Buile Suibhne,” where he had a clear dramatic line to follow and could not easily wander off into rhetoric and ornament, Heaney was often at his best, and his best is very fine indeed. If he ever consistently achieves that kind of concentration and simplicity in his original work, he may very well turn out to be as good a poet as he is said to be. He has achieved it from time to time. In “The Haw Lantern,” in an otherwise uneven sequence in memory of his mother, you will find this rough-hewn sonnet, limpid and intensely absorbed and fully realized:

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.