Stillness at the Heart of Things

In his early collections, beginning with “Death of a Naturalist” in 1966, Seamus Heaney explored memories of childhood and evoked the landscape of his upbringing in the nNorth of Ireland, finding rhythms of continuity in the working lives of farmers and rural craftsmen. He continues to do so.

The convulsions of sectarian violence in the 1970s dragged him into the public arena. In “North,” his fourth collection, published in 1975, he created powerful poetry out of the struggle to respond without rhetoric, to speak for the human spirit rather than a political cause. The search for an adequate language took him further into the realms of archeology and myth. In later collections, these layers of concern have developed and broadened. The echoes of the prehistoric past, classical mythology and Celtic mysticism have been sounded without any loss of immediacy: Heaney’s capacity for capturing sensory experience is undiminished.

In “Electric Light,” his 11th collection, Heaney travels widely-through Greece, Spain and Yugoslavia as well as Ireland, his own past and among writers he reveres-in search of origins. There are moments of illumination; some literal, as in the poem that gives the collection its title; some literary, including an adolescent encounter with Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles’; many in response to the apparently ordinary transactions of the world. There is an account, both comic and triumphant, of Heaney’s tasting of the Castalian Spring on Mt. Parnassus, a site sacred to the muses, in defiance of the thunder-faced curator.

In a collection that brims with joy, there is also a powerful, elegiac feeling, as Heaney honors the memory of a variety of old friends and fellow poets in dedications, quotations and anecdotes. There is a sense of urgency here, a desire to recall and acknowledge while there is still time, and there is a feeling in the longer pieces of the need to expand what the lyric poem can accommodate.

In In “‘Bann Valley Eclogue,” in his newest collection, “Electric Light,” Heaney creates a dialogue between Virgil and a modern poet who is soon to be a father. There is an easy familiarity between the poets, speaking across two millenniums in the same accents and with same sense of nature’s abundance. Virgil utters prophecies for the unborn child: “Eclipses won’t be for this child. The cool she’ll know/Will be the pram hood over her vestal head./Big dog daisies will get fanked up in the spokes.” The sense of childbirth as both an utterly ordinary event and an earth-shaking miracle is suggested by the poet’s words to his child-to-be: “Planet earth like a teething ring suspended/Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner./Cows are let out. They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.”

Birth is at the heart also of “Out of the Bag,” a poem that builds on the childish misapprehension that it is the doctor who brings new babies to the house. The poem begins with the simple assertion that “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.” The source of this confusion we learn only in the final lines of the poem, as his mother “opens her eyes, then lapses back/Into a faraway smile,” asking “In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,/’And what do you think/Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all/When I was asleep?” ’

Within the same poem, we are taken on a journey of interconnected narratives-of the doctor’s visits to the house, of the poet as teenager in Lourdes, carrying the thurible in an open-air procession, of a trip as an adult to the ancient sanatorium at Epidaurus. These memories are linked by the idea of healing as an epiphany, an encounter with the god.

Doctor Kerlin comes alive as a character, vividly recognizable and down-to-earth, washing “Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his/In the scullery basin.” The suggestion of the professional probing of the obstetrician in the word “nosy,” tightly sandwiched by rhyme, is as close as we get to the real business of these home visits. The childish observer has a strong sense of the man’s status, “as he toweled hard and fast,/Then held his arms out suddenly behind him/To be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat.”

We are given a sharp glimpse of the upstairs room where the expectant mother waits: “a whiff/Of disinfectant, a Dutch interior gleam/Of waistcoat satin and highlights on the forceps.” The childish imagination provides the rest. The doctor is a magician whose bag was “empty for all to see,” a “hypnotist,” a sinister Dr. Frankenstein, constructing babies out of “little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts/Strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling-/A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock/A bit like the rosebud in his button hole.”

Years later, “hatless and groggy” in the dizzying heat of Epidaurus, the poet finds these images resurfacing in his mind. Nearly fainting, as he bends to pull a bunch of medicinal grass, he hallucinates Dr. Kerlin, experiencing in his imagination his own beginning at the doctor’s hands, described in language that suggests both the doctor’s imagined power and the real process of birth:

... And then as he dipped and laved

In the generous suds again, miraculum:

The baby bits all came together swimming

Into his soapy big hygienic hands

And I myself came to, blinded with sweat,

Blinking and shaky in the windless light.

*

This rich, capacious poem is characteristic of the longer pieces in this volume, taking us through an unexpected range of places and times, to explore ideas of birth and rebirth and of the mysteries of medicinal power, before returning us to the point at which we began.

In “The Clothes Shrine,” the sweetness of early married life is captured in the image of female clothing hung up to dry, “Light white muslin blouses.... Or a nylon slip in the shine/Of its own electricity.” In a tone of affectionate humor, Heaney incorporates the legend of the medieval Irish St. Brigid and turns this ordinary domestic sight into an object of veneration. In these drying clothes he sees:

The damp and slump and unfair

Drag of the workaday

Made light of and got through

As usual, brilliantly.

The simplicity of these lines is deceptive. The alliterative monosyllables and the dragging of the first line into the second suggest both the literal weight of wet washing and the emotional dullness of the work. After the play on “light,” the easy colloquial meaning of the final word, which might be applied conversationally to any action well done, is here enlivened by the association with sunshine and religious worship, its literal meaning rediscovered and enhanced.

The beauty of the scene in “Ballynahinch Lake” is a force that astounds and elevates the human spirit. The poem recounts a brief stop, during a Sunday morning drive, to look at the lake: “So we stopped and parked in the spring-cleaning light/Of Connemara on a Sunday morning.” The conversational tone of that opening, the suggestion of a context of narrative or negotiation, and the easy way its natural spoken rhythm stretches and inhabits the blank verse allows the intensity of the poem to creep up on us.

As they watch the reflection of the scene, “the utter mountain mirrored in the lake/Entered us like a wedge knocked sweetly home/Into core timber.” The visual similarity of the reflected mountain to a wedge is the least part of that simile’s force. More significant is the sense that the watcher is as much a part of the natural scene as the timber and the feeling of an assault that has the sweetness of a time-honored act of skill. Too far off to be heard, two water birds splash on the lake before taking off in “big sure sweeps and dips.”

The profound impact that this scene and these birds have had on the couple in their car is conveyed through the precise description of physical behavior.

Yet something in us had unhoused itself

At the sight of them, so that when she bent

To turn the key she only half-turned it

And spoke, as it were, directly to the windscreen,

In profile and in thought, the wheel at arm’s length,

Averring that this time, yes, it had indeed

Been useful to stop; then inclined her driver’s brow

Which shook a little as the ignition fired.

*

Heaney’s status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats is already well established. “Electric Light” is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things, like the perch in the Bann River “on hold/In the everything flows and steady go of the world.”