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Seamus Heaney – Nobel Lecture
CREDITING POETRYNobel Lecture, December 7, 1995
by
SEAMUS HEANEYDublin, Ireland
When I first
encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that
I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a
guest of the Swedish
Academy and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of,
such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply
beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest
child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded
together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and
lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and
intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an
intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds
of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the
sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We
took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees,
mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line
one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in
the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension
between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and
impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our
scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the
surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and
in utter silence.
But it was not only the earth that shook
for us: the air around and above us was alive and signalling too.
When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire
attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept,
in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right
on into the innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium
of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC
newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex
machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom,
transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the
kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice,
the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.
We could
pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the local accents of
our parents, and in the resonant English tones of the newsreader the
names of bombers and of cities bombed, of war fronts and army
divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of prisoners taken, of
casualties suffered and advances made; and always, of course, we
would pick up too those other, solemn and oddly bracing words, "the
enemy" and "the allies". But even so, none of the news of these
world-spasms entered me as terror. If there was something ominous in
the newscaster's tones, there was something torpid about our
understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something
culpable about such political ignorance in that time and place,
there was something positive about the security I inhabited as a
result of it.
The wartime, in other words, was
pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its
way. Then as the years went on and my listening became more
deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear
closer to the wireless speaker. But it was still not the news that
interested me; what I was after was the thrill of story, such as a
detective serial about a British special agent called Dick Barton or
perhaps a radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns's adventure
tales about an RAF flying ace called giggles. Now that the other
children were older and there was so much going on in the kitchen, I
had to get close to the actual radio set in order to concentrate my
hearing, and in that intent proximity to the dial I grew familiar
with the names of foreign stations, with Leipzig and Oslo and
Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with Stockholm.
I also
got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial
hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of
London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what
was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and
sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the
wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the
wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival -
whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping
stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has
brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here
feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is
why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of
walking on air.
*
I credit poetry for making this
space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I
wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be
listening) to "walk on air against your better judgement". But I
credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the
impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the
poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across
the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we
can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order
which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and
prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both
for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid
and restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its
circumference, between the child gazing at the word "Stockholm" on
the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he
meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it
because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its
truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
*
To begin with, I wanted that truth to
life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the
poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it
stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a
schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of
the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I
loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations
which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully
know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's
accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much
the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of
accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and
always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New
Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new
century's barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of
Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's
and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I
encountered further reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and
responsibility - to say what happens, to "pity the planet," to be
"not concerned with Poetry."
This temperamental disposition
towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are
was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought
up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even
though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century. No
place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism,
no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of
rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of
having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them,
and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against
them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting the
opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens
and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline
inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and
fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot.
And these more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal
to grant the poet any more license than any other citizen; and they
were further induced by having to conduct oneself as a poet in a
situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A
public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of
political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving
groups.
In such circumstances, the mind still longs to
repose in what Samuel Johnson once called with superb confidence
"the stability of truth", even as it recognizes the destabilizing
nature of its own operations and enquiries. Without needing to be
theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is
the site of variously contending discourses. The child in the
bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish
home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while
picking up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that
child was already being schooled for the complexities of his adult
predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among
promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political,
metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and,
taken all together, simply impossible. So it was that I found myself
in the mid-nineteen seventies in another small house, this time in
Co. Wicklow south of Dublin, with a young family of my own and a
slightly less imposing radio set, listening to the rain in the trees
and to the news of bombings closer to home-not only those by the
Provisional IRA in Belfast but equally atrocious assaults in Dublin
by loyalist paramilitaries from the north. Feeling puny in my
predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's
fate in the 1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my
noncombatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly
sweetnatured school friend had been interned without trial because
he was suspected of having been involved in a political killing.
What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape
from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without
anxiety or apology. In a poem called "Exposure" I wrote then:
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk
through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of
autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His
gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
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
absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner
émigré, a 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.
(from North)
In one of the poems
best known to students in my generation, a poem which could be said
to have taken the nutrients of the symbolist movement and made them
available in capsule form, the American poet Archibald MacLeish
affirmed that "A poem should be equal to/not true." As a defiant
statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant,
this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a
deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably
right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played
upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the
surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which
unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the
electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper
rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in
Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear,
enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna
Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to
it. And this is the want I too was experiencing in those far more
protected circumstances in Co. Wicklow when I wrote the lines I have
just quoted, a need for poetry that would merit the definition of it
I gave a few moments ago, as an order "true to the impact of
external reality and ... sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's
being."
*
The external reality and inner dynamic of
happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were
symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change
nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been
long overdue. It should have come early, as the result of the
ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties, but that was
not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating got
hatched out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in oneself
was impelled to deplore the atrocious nature of the IRA's campaign
of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in oneself was
appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on occasions like
Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority citizen in oneself, the
one who had grown up conscious that his group was distrusted and
discriminated against in all kinds of official and unofficial ways,
this citizen's perception was at one with the poetic truth of the
situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland were ever
really to flourish, change had to take place. But that citizen's
perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the
very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change
was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have
to be based.
Nevertheless, until the British government
caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers
after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could
still hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was
promising with what was destructive and do what W.B.
Yeats had tried to do half a century before, namely, "to hold in
a single thought reality and justice." After 1974, however, for the
twenty long years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994,
such a hope proved impossible. The violence from below was then
productive of nothing but a retaliatory violence from above, the
dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality,
and people settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit-
waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that were
the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic suffering and
sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
*
One of the most harrowing moments in the
whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came
when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening
in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the
van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one
of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you,
step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one
exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been
that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry
out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man
out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the
IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught
between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward.
Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the
relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of
the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a
signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need
know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for
the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his
temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on
those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant
terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the
thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that
Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left
behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember,
for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend
who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been
involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that
even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future
to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new
potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent
way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was
like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the
scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must
envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The
birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which
that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand
gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and
so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism
and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon
the effort which it calls forth to confront it. We are rightly in
awe of the torsions in the poetry of Paul Celan and rightly
enamoured of the suspiring voice in Samuel
Beckett because these are evidence that art can rise to the
occasion and somehow be the corollary of Celan's stricken destiny as
Holocaust survivor and Beckett's demure heroism as a member of the
French Resistance. Likewise, we are rightly suspicious of that which
gives too much consolation in these circumstances; the very
extremity of our late twentieth century knowledge puts much of our
cultural heritage to an extreme test. Only the very stupid or the
very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of
civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears
no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual
predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel
and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face
of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature
with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too
positive in the work of art.
Which is why for years I was
bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some
dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to
bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself
incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by
his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture.
Blowing up sparks for meagre heat. Forgetting faith, straining
towards good works. Attending insufficiently to the diamond
absolutes, among which must be counted the sufficiency of that which
is absolutely imagined. Then finally and happily, and not in
obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in
despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try
to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as
well as for the murderous. And once again I shall try to represent
the import of that changed orientation with a story out of Ireland.
This is a story about another monk holding himself up
valiantly in the posture of endurance. It is said that once upon a
time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form
of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we
lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most
wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as
Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand
for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of
eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a
tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love
the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for
hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the
eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if
subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process
and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a
reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow
up to that which we stored up as we grew.
*
St. Kevin's story is, as I say, a story
out of Ireland. But it strikes me that it could equally well come
out of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do
not mean merely to consign it to a typology of folktales, or to
dispute its value by questioning its culture bound status within a
multi-cultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness and its
travel-worthiness have to do with its local setting. I can, of
course, imagine it being deconstructed nowadays as a paradigm of
colonialism, with Kevin figuring as the benign imperialist (or the
missionary in the wake of the imperialist), the one who intervenes
and appropriates the indigenous life and interferes with its
pristine ecology. And I have to admit that there is indeed an irony
that it was such a one who recorded and preserved this instance of
the true beauty of the Irish heritage: Kevin's story, after all,
appears in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, one of the Normans
who invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, one whom the
Irish-language annalist Geoffrey Keating would call, five hundred
years later, "the bull of the herd of those who wrote the false
history of Ireland." But even so, I still cannot persuade myself
that this manifestation of early Christian civilization should be
construed all that simply as a way into whatever is exploitative or
barbaric in our history, past and present. The whole conception
strikes me rather as being another example of the kind of work I saw
a few weeks ago in the small museum in Sparta, on the morning before
the news of this year's Nobel Prize in literature was announced.
This was art which sprang from a cult very different from
the faith espoused by St. Kevin. Yet in it there was a
representation of a roosted bird and an entranced beast and a
self-enrapturing man, except that this time the man was Orpheus and
the rapture came from music rather than prayer. The work itself was
a small carved relief and I could not help making a sketch of it;
but neither could I help copying out the information typed on the
card which accompanied and identified the exhibit. The image moved
me because of its antiquity and durability, but the description on
the card moved me also because it gave a name and credence to that
which I see myself as having been engaged upon for the past three
decades: "Votive panel", the identification card said, "possibly set
up to Orpheus by local poet. Local work of the Hellenistic period."
*
Once again, I hope I am not being
sentimental or simply fetishizing - as we have learnt to say - the
local. I wish instead to suggest that images and stories of the kind
I am invoking here do function as bearers of value. The century has
witnessed the defeat of Nazism by force of arms; but the erosion of
the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things, by the sheer
persistence, beneath the imposed ideological conformity, of cultural
values and psychic resistances of a kind that these stories and
images enshrine. Even if we have learned to be rightly and deeply
fearful of elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any
nation into normative and exclusivist systems, even if we have
terrible proof that pride in an ethnic and religious heritage can
quickly degrade into the fascistic, our vigilance on that score
should not displace our love and trust in the good of the indigenous
per se. On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and
travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the
possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every
tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious
political space. In spite of devastating and repeated acts of
massacre, assassination and extirpation, the huge acts of faith
which have marked the new relations between Palestinians and
Israelis, Africans and Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have
come down in Europe and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires
a hope that new possibility can still open up in Ireland as well.
The crux of that problem involves an ongoing partition of the island
between British and Irish jurisdictions, and an equally persistent
partition of the affections in Northern Ireland between the British
and Irish heritages; but surely every dweller in the country must
hope that the governments involved in its governance can devise
institutions which will allow that partition to become a bit more
like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile
give-and-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future
where the vitality that flowed in the beginning from those bracing
words "enemy" and "allies" might finally derive from a less binary
and altogether less binding vocabulary.
*
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this
platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland was emerging from the
throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels
of a war of independence fought against the British. The struggle
that ensued had been brief enough; it was over by May, 1923, some
seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody,
savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate
the terms of politics within the twenty-six independent counties of
Ireland, that part of the island known first of all as the Irish
Free State and then subsequently as the Republic of Ireland.
Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of
independence in his Nobel speech. Nobody understood better than he
the connection between the construction or destruction of state
institutions and the founding or foundering of cultural life, but on
this occasion he chose to talk instead about the Irish Dramatic
Movement. His story was about the creative purpose of that movement
and its historic good fortune in having not only his own genius to
sponsor it, but also the genius of his friends John Millington Synge
and Lady Augusta Gregory. He came to Sweden to tell the world that
the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the
transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of
guerrilla armies; and his boast in that elevated prose was
essentially the same as the one he would make in verse more than a
decade later in his poem "The Municipal Gallery Revisited". There
Yeats presents himself amongst the portraits and heroic narrative
paintings which celebrate the events and personalities of recent
history and all of a sudden realizes that something truly
epoch-making has occurred: " 'This is not', I say,/'The dead Ireland
of my youth, but an Ireland/The poets have imagined, terrible and
gay.' " And the poem concludes with two of the most quoted lines of
his entire oeuvre:
Think where man's glory most begins and
ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
And yet, expansive and thrilling as these lines
are, they are an instance of poetry flourishing itself rather than
proving itself, they are the poet's lap of honour, and in this
respect if in no other they resemble what I am doing in this
lecture. In fact, I should quote here on my own behalf some other
words from the poem: "You that would judge me, do not judge
alone/This book or that." Instead, I ask you to do what Yeats asked
his audience to do and think of the achievement of Irish poets and
dramatists and novelists over the past forty years, among whom I am
proud to count great friends. In literary matters, Ezra Pound
advised against accepting the opinion of those "who haven't
themselves produced notable work," and it is advice I have been
privileged to follow, since it is the good opinion of notable
workers and not just those in my own country-that has fortified my
endeavour since I began to write in Belfast more than thirty years
ago. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish
contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Yeats, however, was
by no means all flourish. To the credit of poetry in our century
there must surely be entered in any reckoning his two great
sequences of poems entitled "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and
"Meditations in Time of Civil War", the latter of which contains the
famous lyric about the bird's nest at his window, where a starling
or stare had built in a crevice of the old wall. The poet was living
then in a Norman tower which had been very much a part of the
military history of the country in earlier and equally troubled
times, and as his thoughts turned upon the irony of civilizations
being consolidated by violent and powerful conquerors who end up
commissioning the artists and the architects, he began to associate
the sight of a mother bird feeding its young with the image of the
honey bee, an image deeply lodged in poetic tradition and always
suggestive of the ideal of an industrious, harmonious, nurturing
commonwealth:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening
masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My
wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of
the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our
uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet
no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of
the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen
days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That
dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house
of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The
heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our
enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the
empty house of the stare.
I have heard this poem
repeated often, in whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the
past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded
towards life itself as St. Kevin was and as tough-minded about what
happens in and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will
happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are
going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it
also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of
sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies
the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of
extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that
will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to
harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for
sweetness and trust.
It is a proof that poetry can be equal
to and true at the same time, an example of that completely adequate
poetry which the Russian woman sought from Anna Akhmatova and which
William Wordsworth produced at a corresponding moment of historical
crisis and personal dismay almost exactly two hundred years ago.
*
When the bard Demodocus sings of the fall
of Troy and of the slaughter that accompanied it, Odysseus weeps and
Homer says that his tears were like the tears of a wife on a
battlefield weeping for the death of a fallen husband. His epic
simile continues:
At the sight of the man panting and dying
there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels
the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into
slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but
no more piteous than Odysseus' tears,
cloaked as they were, now,
from the company.
Even to-day, three thousand years
later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary
savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing
immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels
of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still
bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the
woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image
has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about
the intolerable.
But there is another kind of adequacy which
is specific to Iyric poetry. This has to do with the "temple inside
our hearing" which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is
an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness
of speech articulation," from the resolution and independence which
the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the
energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy
generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do
with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. In fact, in
lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth
within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this
note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul
Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this
which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive
voice behind all the other informing voices.
Which is a way
of saying that I have never quite climbed down from the arm of that
sofa. I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to
the world history and world-sorrow behind it. But the thing uttered
by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what
is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am
in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability
conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds. As if the
ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a reformation of
itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.
I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find
it, for example, in the repetition of that refrain of Yeats's, "Come
build in the empty house of the stare," with its tone of
supplication, its pivots of strength in the words "build" and
"house" and its acknowledgement of dissolution in the word "empty".
I find it also in the triangle of forces held in equilibrium by the
triple rhyme of "fantasies" and "enmities" and "honey-bees", and in
the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as a given form within the
language. Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once
a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous
gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal
in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does
what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of
our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the
unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly
exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to
poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to
poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our
consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness
all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and
gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are
creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable
human being.
From Les
Prix Nobel 1995. |
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