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Feeling into Words
Seamus Heaney ***** I intend to retrace some paths into what William Wordsworth called in The Prelude ‘the hiding places’. The hiding places of my power Sèem open; I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all, and I would give, While yet we may, as far as words can give, A substance and a life to what I feel: I would enshrine the spirit of the past For future restoration. Implicit in those lines is a view of poetry which I think is implicit in the few poems I have written that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. ‘Digging’, in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me, although there are a couple of lines in it that have more of the theatricality of the gunslinger than the self-absorption of the digger. I wrote it in the summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to ‘dabble in verses’. This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life. The facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me a kind of insouciance and a kind of confidence. I didn’t care [p. 42] who thought what about it: somehow, it had surprised me by coming out with a stance and an idea that I would stand over:
- (^) Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), 41-60.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. 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. As I say, I wrote it down years ago; yet perhaps I should say that I dug it up, because I have come to realize that it was laid down in me years before that even. The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter and that was simply a matter of almost proverbial common sense. As a child on the road to and from school, people used to ask you what class you were in and how many slaps you’d got that day and invariably they ended up with an exhortation to keep studying because ‘learning’s easy carried’ and ‘the pen’s lighter than the spade’. And the poem does no more than allow that bud of wisdom to exfoliate, although the significant point in this context is that at the time of writing I was not aware of the proverbial structure at the back of my mind. Nor was I aware that the poem was an enactment of yet another digging metaphor that came back to me years later. This was the rhyme we used to chant on the road to school, though, as I have said before, we were not fully aware of what we were dealing with: ‘Are your parties dry And are they fit for digging?’ ‘Put in your spade and try,’ Says Dirty-Faced McGuigan. There digging becomes a sexual metaphor, an emblem of initiation, like putting your hand into the bush or robbing the nest, one of the various natural analogies for uncovering and touching the hidden thing. I now believe that the ‘Digging’ poem had for me the force of an initiation: the confidence I mentioned arose from a sense that perhaps I could do this poetry thing too, [p. 43] and having experienced the excitement and release of it once, I was doomed to look for it again and again. I don’t want to overload ‘Digging’ with too much significance. It is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem, but it is interesting as an example—and not just
One of the writers who influenced me in this way was Gerard Manley Hopkins. The result of reading Hopkins at school was the desire to write, and when I first put pen to paper at university, what flowed out was what had flowed in, the bumpy alliterating music, the reporting sounds and ricochetting consonants typical of Hopkins’s verse. I remember lines from a piece called ‘October Thought’ in which some frail bucolic images foundered under the chainmail of the pastiche: Starling thatch-watches, and sudden swallow Straight breaks to mud-nest, home-rest rafter Up past dry dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter Ghosting the roof of bog-oak, turf-sod and rods of willow... and then there was ‘heaven-hue, plumb-bee and gorse-pricked with gold’ and ‘a trickling tinkle of bells well in the fold’. Looking back on it, I believe there was a connection, not obvious at the time but, on reflection, real enough, between the heavily accented consonantal noise of Hopkins’s poetic voice, and the peculiar regional characteristics of a Northern Ireland accent. The late W. R. Rodgers, another poet much lured by alliteration, said in his poem ‘The Character of Ireland’ that the people from his (and my) part of the word were an abrupt people who like the spiky consonants of speech and think the soft ones cissy; who dig the k and t in orchestra, detect sin [p. 45] in sinfonia, get a kick out of tin-cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk, anything that gives or takes attack like Micks, Teagues, tinker’s gets, Vatican. It is true that the Ulster accent is generally a staccato consonantal one. Our tongue strikes the tangent of the consonant rather more than it rolls the circle of the vowel—Rodgers also spoke of ‘the round gift of the gab in southern mouths’. It is energetic, angular, hard-edged, and it may be because of this affinity between my dialect and Hopkins’s oddity that those first verses turned out as they did. I couldn’t say, of course, that I had found a voice but I had found a game. I knew the thing was only word-play, and I hadn’t even the guts to put my name to it. I called myself Incertus , uncertain, a shy soul fretting and all that. I was in love
with words themselves, but had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping stone in your life. Those verses were what we might call ‘trial-pieces’, little stiff inept designs in imitation of the master’s fluent interlacing patterns, heavy-handed clues to the whole craft. I was getting my first sense of crafting words and for one reason or another, words as bearers of history and mystery began to invite me. Maybe it began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling in the early part of the century. Maybe it began with the exotic listing on the wireless dial: Stuttgart, Leipzig, Oslo, Hilversum. Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry in our household: Tower of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted. None of these things were consciously savoured at the time but I think the fact that I still recall them with ease, and can delight in them as verbal music, means that they were bedding the ear with a kind of linguistic hardcore that could be built on some day. [p. 46] That was the unconscious bedding, but poetry involves a conscious savouring of words also. This came by way of reading poetry itself, and being required to learn pieces by heart, phrases even, like Keats’s, from ‘Lamia’: and his vessel now Grated the quaystone with her brazen prow, or Wordsworth’s: All shod with steel, We hiss’d along the polished ice, or Tennyson’s: Old yew, which graspest at the stones That name the underlying dread, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapped about the bones.
his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea, something intended, complete.’ It is indeed conceivable that a poet could have a real technique and a wobbly craft—I think this was true of Alun Lewis and Patrick Kavanagh—but more often it is a case of a sure enough craft and a failure of technique. And if I were asked for a figure who represents pure technique, I would say a water diviner. You can’t learn the craft of dowsing or divining—it is a gift for being in touch with what is there, hidden and real, a gift for mediating between the latent resource and the commodity [p. 48] that wants it current and released. As Sir Philip Sidney notes in his Apologie for Poetry : ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates , which is as much as a Diviner.. .’ The poem was written simply to allay an excitement and to name an experience, and at the same time to give the excitement and the experience a small perpetuum mobile in language itself. I quote it here, not for its own technique but for the image of technique contained in it. The diviner resembles the poet in his function of making contact with what lies hidden, and in his ability to make palpable what was sensed or raised. The Diviner Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick That he held tight by the arms of the V: Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck Of water, nervous, but professionally Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. The rod jerked with precise convulsions, Spring water suddenly broadcasting Through a green hazel its secret stations.
The bystanders would ask to have a try. He handed them the rod without a word. It lay dead in their grasp till nonchalantly He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred. What I had taken as matter of fact as a youngster became a matter of wonder in memory. When I look at the thing now I am pleased that it ends with a verb, ‘stirred’, the heart of the mystery; and I am glad that ‘stirred’ chimes with ‘word’, bringing the two functions of vates into the one sound. Technique is what allows that first stirring of the mind round a word or an image or a memory to grow towards articulation: articulation not necessarily in terms of argument or explication but in terms of its own potential for harmonious self-reproduction. The seminal excitement has to be granted conditions in which, in Hopkins’s words, it ‘selves, goes itself... crying/What I do is me, for that I came.’ Technique ensures that the first gleam attains its proper effulgence. And I don’t just mean a felicity in the choice of words to flesh the [p. 49] theme—that is a problem also but it is not so critical. A poem can survive stylistic blemishes but it cannot survive a still-birth. The crucial action is pre- verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or a theme or a phrase. Robert Frost put it this way: ‘a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.’ As far as I am concerned, technique is more vitally and sensitively connected with that first activity where the ‘lump in the throat’ finds ‘the thought’ than with ‘the thought’ finding ‘the words’. That first emergence involves the divining, vatic, oracular function; the second, the making function. To say, as Auden did, that a poem is a ‘verbal contraption’ is to keep one or two tricks up your sleeve. Traditionally an oracle speaks in riddles, yielding its truths in disguise, offering its insights cunningly. And in the practice of poetry, there is a corresponding occasion of disguise, a protean, chameleon moment when the lump in the throat takes protective colouring in the new element of thought. One of the best documented occasions in the canon of English poetry, as far as this process is concerned, is a poem that survived in spite of its blemish. In fact, the blemish has earned it a peculiar fame: High on a mountain’s highest ridge, Where oft the stormy winter gale Cuts like a scythe, while through the clouds
1800—‘cannot I by some invention make this thorn permanently an impressive object?’—probably tones down an instinctive, instantaneous recognition into a rational procedure. The technical triumph was to discover a means of allowing his slightly abnormal, slightly numinous vision of the thorn to ‘deal out its being’. What he did to turn ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence’ of that moment into ‘something intended, complete’ was to find, in Yeats’s language, a mask. The poem as we have it is a ballad in which the speaker is a garrulous superstitious man, a sea captain, according to Wordsworth, who connects the thorn with murder and distress. For Wordsworth’s own apprehension of the tree, he instinctively recognized, was basically superstitious: it was a standing over, a survival in his own sensibility of a [p. 51] magical way of responding to the natural world, of reading phenomena as signs, occurrences requiring divination. And in order to dramatize this, to transpose the awakened appetites in his consciousness into the satisfactions of a finished thing, he needed his ‘objective correlative’. To make the thorn ‘permanently an impressive object’, images and ideas from different parts of his conscious and unconscious mind were attracted by almost magnetic power. The thorn in its new, wind-tossed aspect had become a field of force. Into this field were drawn memories of what the ballads call ‘the cruel mother’ who murders her own baby: She leaned her back against a thorn All around the loney-o And there her little babe was born Down by the greenwood side-o is how a surviving version runs in Ireland. But there have always been variations on this pattern of the woman who kills her baby and buries it. And the ballads are also full of briars and roses and thorns growing out of graves in symbolic token of the life and death of the buried one. So in Wordsworth’s imagination the thorn grew into a symbol of tragic, feverish death, and to voice this the ballad mode came naturally; he donned the traditional mask of the tale-teller, legitimately credulous entering and enacting a convention. The poem itself is a rapid and strange foray where Wordsworth discovered a way of turning the ‘lump in the throat’ into a ‘thought’, discovered a set of images, cadences and sounds that amplified his original visionary excitement into ‘a redundant energy/Vexing its own creation’:
And some had sworn an oath that she Should be to public justice brought; And for the little infant’s bones With spades they would have sought. But then the beauteous hill of moss Before their eyes began to stir; And for full fifty yards around The grass it shook upon the ground. ‘The Thorn’ is a nicely documented example of feeling getting into words, in ways that paralleled much in my own experience; [p. 52] although I must say that it is hard to discriminate between feeling getting into words and words turning into feeling, and it is only on posthumous occasions like this that the distinction arises. Moreover, it is dangerous for a writer to become too self-conscious about his own processes: to name them too definitively may have the effect of confining them to what is named. A poem always has elements of accidents about it, which can be made the subject of inquest afterwards, but there is always a risk in conducting your own inquest: you might begin to believe the coroner in yourself rather than put your trust in the man in you who is capable of the accident. Robert Graves’s ‘Dance of Words’ puts this delightfully: To make them move, you should start from lightning And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance Or so-called chance for its bright emergence Once lightning interpenetrates the dance. Grant them their own traditional steps and postures But see they dance it out again and again Until only lightning is left to puzzle over— The choreography plain and the theme plain. What we are engaged upon here is a way of seeing that turns the lightning into ‘the visible discharge of electricity between cloud and cloud or between cloud and ground’ rather than its own puzzling, brilliant self. There is nearly always an element of the bold from the blue about a poem’s origin. When I called my second book Door into the Dark I intended to gesture towards this idea of poetry as a point of entry into the buried life of the feelings or as a point of exit for it. Words themselves are doors; Janus is to a certain extent their deity, looking back to a ramification of roots and associations and
Gratefully, dispersing myself for love Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain— But once he knew my welcome, I alone [p. 54] Could give him subtle increase and reflection. He explored me so completely, each limb Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him. I once said it was a myth about agriculture, about the way water is tamed and humanized when streams become irrigation canals, when water becomes involved with seed. And maybe that is as good an explanation as any. The paraphrasable extensions of a poem can be as protean as possible as long as its element remain firm. Words can allow you that two-faced approach also. They stand smiling at the audience’s way of reading them and winking back at the poet’s way of using them. Behind this, of course, there is a good bit of symbolist theory. Yet in practice, you proceed by your own experience of what it is to write what you consider a successful poem. You survive in your own esteem not by the corroboration of theory but by the trust in certain moments of satisfaction which you know intuitively to be moments of extension. You are confirmed by the visitation of the last poem and threatened by the elusiveness of the next one, and the best moments are those when your mind seems to implode and words and images rush of their own accord into the vortex. Which happened to me once when the line ‘We have no prairies’ drifted into my head at bedtime, and loosened a fall of images that constitute the poem ‘Bogland’, the last one in Door into the Dark. I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly because it is a landscape that ha s a strange assuaging effect on me, one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We used to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an elk had been taken out of a bog nearby and a few of our neighbours had got their photographs in the paper, peering out across its antlers. So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was ‘found in a bog’. Moreover, since memory was the faculty that supplied me with the first quickening of my own poetry, I had a tentative unrealized need to make a
congruence between memory and bogland and, for the want of a better [p. 55] word, our national consciousness. And it all released itself after ‘We have no prairies.. .’—but we have bogs. At that time I was teaching modern literature in Queen’s University, Belfast, and had been reading about the frontier and the west as an important myth in the American consciousness, so I set up—or rather, laid down—the bog as an answering Irish myth. I wrote it quickly the next morning, having slept on my excitement, and revised it on the hoof, from line to line, as it came: We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening— Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. They’ve taken the skeleton Of the great Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate full of air. Butter sunk under More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white. The ground itself is kind, black butter Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definition By millions of years. They’ll never dig coal here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of great firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, Every layer they strip Seems camped on before.
is an indigenous territorial numen, a tutelar of the whole island, call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever; and her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar resident in a palace in London. What we have is the tail-end of a struggle in a province between territorial piety and imperial power. Now I realize that this idiom is remote from the agnostic world of economic interest whose iron hand operates in the velvet glove of ‘talks between elected representatives’, and remote from the political manoeuvres of power- sharing; but it is not remote from the psychology of the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing, and not remote from the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant. The question, as ever, is ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?’ And my answer is, by offering ‘befitting emblems of adversity’. Some of the emblems I found in a book that was published in English translation, appositely, the year the killing started, in 1969. And again appositely, it was entitled The Bog People. It was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. The author, P. V. Glob, argues convincingly that a number of these, and in particular the Tollund Man, whose head is now preserved near Aarhus in the museum at Silkeburg, were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring. Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for that cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni Houlihan, this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past [p. 58] and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles. When I wrote this poem, I had a completely new sensation, one of fear. It was a vow to go on pilgrimage and I felt as it came to me —and again it came quickly—that unless I was deeply in earnest about what I was saying, I was simply invoking dangers for myself. It is called ‘The Tollund Man’: I Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country nearby Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time. Bridegroom to the goddess, She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint’s kept body, Trove of the turfcutters’ Honeycombed workings. Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus. II I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.
for Yeats and many others an attempt to define and interpret the present by bringing it into significant relationship with the past, and I believe that effort in our present circumstances has to be urgently renewed. But here we stray from the realm of technique into the realm of tradition: to forge a poem is one thing, to forge the uncreated conscience of the race, as Stephen Dedalus put it, is quite another and places daunting pressures and responsibilities on anyone who would risk the name of poet. Lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature, October 1974
