‘The Music of What Happens’

To many, Seamus Heaney is the preeminent Anglophone poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. He’s certainly one of the most celebrated. He was born in County Derry in 1939, and when he died in Dublin in 2013 his death reverberated around the world. It was reported with a huge photograph on the front page of The New York Times—above the fold. “Not even Frank got that!” as a New York cabbie said to a friend of mine.¹ By the time he died Heaney was much more than an Irish poet, more than the “smiling public man” of his Nobel predecessor Yeats’s later years; he had entered the kind of literary stratosphere where one is not only quoted by emperors and presidents but visited by them.

His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber and Faber in 1966 and was followed by eleven other volumes of poetry, as well as collections of literary criticism, anthologies, translations, and verse plays. The past few years have seen a consolidation of his work: The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2023) was followed by The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2024), and last October came The Poems of Seamus Heaney, comprising the collected work and some two hundred uncollected poems. A full-length biography by Fintan O’Toole is in the works. In 1995 Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Is it possible to imagine such a poetic career happening now? In some sense we grew Heaney. His work deepened and developed under the responsiveness of the academy and a larger and not-yet-balkanized reading public. Almost as important as the poetry is the prose: his literary criticism showed him to be as gifted a reader as he was a writer—sagacious, generous, enthusiastic—and the criticism helped form the audience for his work, “creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed,” as Wordsworth said a great poet does. He was a brilliant explicator of poetry from Bishop to Plath, from Zbigniew Herbert to George Herbert; he professed it, in the sense not just of teaching it but of affirming one’s faith in it.

And he was clear-eyed about the importance of putting poetry first, understanding that it was always in danger of being captured by ideologies and had to be defended on its own merits, as he put it in his Oxford lectures, published in 1995:

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world…. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and “silence-breaking” writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense—as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices—is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.

To be fair, it’s not hard to come up with extralinguistic reasons for his own popularity. Books surf, in Hilary Mantel’s phrase, “on the tide of the times,” and Heaney’s life was in many ways emblematic. His work was welcomed as a devolution from the center: the Education Act of 1944 meant that many working-class students from the provinces went to university who would not have otherwise, and after the London/Oxford/Cambridge scrum of public school boys who occupied the poetry world of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (the MacSpaunday beast, for example, as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis were dubbed), there was a widening and shifting outward to the provinces as the grammar school boys appeared—Ted Hughes from Yorkshire, Douglas Dunn from Renfrewshire in Scotland, Heaney from Ulster. (He boarded at St. Columb’s in Derry, alongside such later luminaries as Seamus Deane and John Hume.) Karl Miller, Heaney’s friend and advocate who first published his poems in Britain, in The New Statesman in December 1964, was a grammar school boy from Edinburgh.

As an Irish Catholic raised in Northern Ireland,² Heaney was a beneficiary of the wave of postcolonial studies that inundated universities in the late twentieth century, and as the scholar Edward O’Shea’s fascinating (but thoroughly uncopyedited) recent study Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey lays out, the poet found an exceedingly receptive audience in the New World, and particularly in the powerful Irish American lobby. He gained an influential advocate in the critic Helen Vendler, who helped usher the work to a wider audience. (Vendler, née Hennessy, herself had an Irish American Catholic background.)

And it’s true of course that the advent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland meant that his writing gained automatic gravities—death, history, politics—that could make contemporaneous poetry appear flimsy and merely personal. He made an easy subject for journalists, and not only those who were, as he put it, “in search of ‘views/On the Irish thing.’” The media thrilled to his story and his history (as MacNeice says, “Why do we like being Irish? Partly because/It gives us a hold on the sentimental English”) and to his collegiality and hospitality and humor. He was, as they say, a decent cove, as anyone who knew him knew, and which the recently published letters evidence again and again.³

But—and it’s a big but—these are just favorable winds, and would have meant nothing without the engine of his success, which was his astonishing talent. He had all the gifts. The poems are invariably exceptional, combining surprise with inevitability—tonally, linguistically, musically. They have much at stake and are emotionally communicative. He was for many of us the first poet we read; at school in rural Tyrone we were given Death of a Naturalist to study for the GCSE exam, and a lot of us would say—as he said of Norman MacCaig—he means poetry to me. There is his ability to describe the feel of things in words, the sheer rightness of the physical perception. I can’t peel a potato without thinking of the line about “loving their cool hardness in our hands,” or split logs without hearing “the hatchet’s differentiated/Accurate cut,” or see a swan without thinking of its “headstrong-looking head.” (And why does that line work?) I can’t look out at an airport and not think of the line from “The Peninsula”: “The sky is tall as over a runway.”

His lines both present the world we know and make its objects strange and unfamiliar. The effect is ostranenie, the “making strange” that Heaney himself alludes to in his poem of the same name, and that results in an art which allows us, in Viktor Shklovsky’s famous locution, to “recover the sensation of life.” Over and over I find in his work this ability to simultaneously capture and free. I think of “the bleb of the icicle,” of “athletic sealight,” of “cockle minarets,” or any of the metaphors, for example, in a poem like “The Grauballe Man,” about the millenia-old body of a man found in a bog: the ball of his heel “like a basalt egg,” his chin “a visor/raised above the vent/of his slashed throat,” the “rusted hair,/a mat unlikely/as a foetus’s,” and so on.

Heaney translated his experience of the world into the transcendent, and revealed the transcendental through language. This certainly involves his uncanny descriptive abilities—his early mentor Michael McLaverty’s exhortation (quoting Wallace Stevens) that “Description is revelation!” was never truer than for Heaney—which balance the thrill of recognition with the calm of insight, all couched in a fabulously textured and weighted language.

It also has to do with tone. This varies of course from poem to poem, yet it always projects a coherent and consistent sensibility. As Heaney wrote in a review of an anthology of Irish poetry:

Tone is the inner life of a language, a secret spirit at play behind or at odds with what is being said and how it is being structured in syntax and figures of speech. It has subtly to do with the deepest value system that the group speaking the language is possessed by.

The idea of tone is also intricately tied up with matters of audience, in shared or opposing beliefs, in persuasion or complicity—and though this is obviously not unique to poetry, in poems it achieves its purest form and cuts the reader deepest. Frost thought that’s what poetry is: tone. Certainly the authority of the voice resides in its tone.

With the advent of the Troubles, poetry for Heaney “moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” But that “adequate to our predicament” could also mean adequate to any life-changing event—birth, love, death—and Heaney was aware of and responsive to the need for poetry to bear up and square up to our own lives. Stevens referred to the impulse as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.”

Heaney’s poems seem to possess etymological knowledge that, like an aura, we can feel behind the language. He had a prodigious gift for the deep memory of words, of where they came from, of what stood behind them. Behind the surface of a poem, the etymologies would subtly interact in the ear and in the mind. Then there is the music: an often strong but never cloying weave of sound in the work, of assonance and consonance and delicate rhythm. He had an ear. If style is the consequence of describing something in the way that is most appropriate to it, Heaney found a style that renewed itself again and again, allowing him to explore subjects ranging from the domestic to the mythical, the philological to the political, sometimes all at once. Many Heaney poems operate simultaneously in the various domains of the possible, but they exist initially in the ear. His poems are sensitive (I want to say “to the millionth of a flicker”) to the subtle relationship between sound and sense. He could work assonance up into a strong gauze of sound (to lift a phrase from “Death of a Naturalist”), and one of his signature patternings (also a feature of ancient Irish poetry) involved having internal rhymes in a line. Often this kind of assonance comes in threes, tying together a key pentameter or tetrameter. This is almost always reserved for unshowy, conversational postures, to make the lines feel unforced and natural: “The wet centre is bottomless.” “Once and only once I fired a gun.” “My foul mouth takes it out/On you.” On occasion there’s quadruple assonance: “It steadies me to tell these things.”

Sometimes the apprehension is not just aural but physical. In a late poem, “In Iowa,” the title repeats in the opening of the first line, “In Iowa once,” and the repetition forces you to notice how the mouth works all the way through the vowel sounds from the back to the front. The scale is sounded, and this suggests the ramifying, momentous texture of the small event that precipitates the poem: glimpsing an abandoned farm machine in a field, which then seems emblematic. The moment is made to stand in a kind of permanent light by the all-encompassing sounding. The phrase “in Iowa once” comes back at the end of the poem, returned at a much lower pitch, retuned by loss.

The effect of all of this is to make lines that are hard to get rid of. The work has an undeniable integrity about it: integrity of line, diction, purpose, and moral responsibility. Heaney also understood the ambiguity of the poetic vocation—that poetry, in Paz’s wording, is a “task and a mystery, a pastime and a sacrament, a métier and a passion.” Perhaps the historic centrality of the poet—or filí—to the Irish tradition helped secure both his own sense of vocation and his audience. We seem to need a great poet to come along every once in a while, and they do.

In addition—as the letters attest—he had a deeply felt sense of obligation to the work of being a poet, to reading contemporaries and apprentices and elders, to reviewing and engaging and professing, to giving readings and interviews and lectures, to reaching out, to keeping relations going, to writing letters and writing more letters apologizing for not writing more letters, and to poetry itself, to beginning over and over, to practicing the art again, to facing down the blank page. Those poems frequently make space for the invisible, for the spiritual. In a Heaney poem we’re often temporal animals glimpsing the atemporal eternal. The “wheat that does not rust” of “The Harvest Bow,” say, or watching his father take salt-cured ham from a tea chest in the barn and feeling “that night I owned the piled grain of Egypt./I watched the sentry’s torchlight on the hoard.”

Schooled and raised in Catholicism, Heaney had a fundamentally Christian sensibility founded on the precept that the immortal and the living interact, as God himself was reified in Christ’s flesh and blood. The tack and ambit of his faith again make him a representative generational figure: raised within the faith, he, like Ireland itself, became more secular, though the question of his religious beliefs, as parsed through the poems, would take a book, and indeed it has: Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland (2020), by Kieran Quinlan. He has variously been described as a Catholic, a post-Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, an agnostic, and an atheist, but his work resists those categories. Instead his writing satisfies—to paraphrase Larkin—the hunger to be serious.

He had a talent for, or a habit of, making every translation sound a bit like Heaney, thickening the poetic source language with his own lexicon. But it was a two-way street, and occasionally one can see in a translation the inchoate form of a later Heaney poem or phrasing. Take the opening of Heaney’s 1982 translation of the Romanian Marin Sorescu’s “The First Words”: “The first words got polluted/Like river water in the morning.” It’s hard not to hear the opening of “The Gravel Walks”: “River gravel. In the beginning, that.” And indeed when Heaney eventually collected the translation he placed it alongside “The Gravel Walks” in The Spirit Level (1996). Later in “The First Words,” he writes, “Let everything flow/Up to the four elements,” and one is reminded of the opening of section 27 of “Squarings,” the declaration “Everything flows.”

In Stepping Stones, the book-length interview conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney consistently downplayed his knowledge of the source languages. To produce The Cure at Troy, he claims he used “three main translations…an old-fashioned Loeb version, full of pseudo-Shakespearean diction…a late-nineteenth-century crib [giving] word order and the word-for-word meaning [and] a modern translation by David Grene.” Heaney claims that his initial encounter with the Irish tale Buile Shuibhne, which he translated under the title Sweeney Astray, “was more with the English on the right-hand page of [J.G.] O’Keefe’s edition than with the original on the left.” Translation, however, was a “pleasure and joy” to Heaney, “a form of writing by proxy: you get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start,” and the translations have in the past also served various purposes as surrogate apologia or political analogies. They allowed him to access material that was perhaps too hot to deal with directly.

The general view is that his poetry begins earthbound and ends up sky-directed, and the early poems are indeed concerned with moving downward, digging up the past, seeing the present in the light of what is found there. Death of a Naturalist opened with “Digging,” that “big, coarse-grained navvy of a poem,” as Heaney called it, which was also where, he said, he felt he “had done more than make an arrangement of words”; he had “let down a shaft into real life.”

It is striking how many of his poems involve a journey from one place to another—like Orpheus’s hunt for Eurydice in Hades, or Dante’s passage into the rings of hell, or Heaney and his friends on a civil rights march that he compares to Dante’s “herded shades” who

Many Heaney-objects and Heaney-places concern themselves with “passings over,” with transitions, with “Crossings,” as one sequence is called, with “liminal spaces” (as the graduate students put it): there are wells, pumps, oysters, hailstones, bogs (and bodies and butter and skeleton elks recovered from bogs), the Underground, elegies, caves, twilight, animal worlds coming into contact with the human. Everything at the edge of the luminous, everything walking out into “the showery dark,” as Louis O’Neill, the blown-up subject of his poem “Casualty,” does.

In Irish literature a visit to the other world was common enough to have its own genre, the echtrae. (The immrama, or voyages, of Bran and Máel Dúin are subsets of these.) One of Heaney’s most loved poems, section 8 of “Squarings,” based on an episode from the annals (which he came upon in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s A Celtic Miscellany), tells of a trespasser from another world. A ship appeared above the monks at prayer in the oratory, and its anchor “dragged along behind so deep/It hooked itself into the altar rails.”

Heaney’s work always establishes that “marvellous”: sometimes by locating wonder in the ordinary, by finding “the music of what happens,” but also, as here, by swiveling the viewpoint and locating it in the crewman.⁴ By doing that an empathy enters the reader, situations are reframed, and second thoughts are not only possible but necessary. In a place like Northern Ireland, that kind of poem—that kind of thinking—was a radical and morally powerful force.

And indeed the muck and clabber, the potato drills and flax dams and turf bogs and well holes give way to kites and airships and crow’s nests and flight paths. The lovely last poem in the book, among twenty-five unpublished poems chosen by Heaney’s family, is called “Those Winter Evenings” (a nod perhaps to Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” also a poem of gratitude). “Those Winter Evenings” recalls walking the strand with Marie, Heaney’s wife, watching for “lights of planes coming in above/Howth Head, sailing down the dark.” Looking up makes the poet think

The poem is dated July 12–13, 2013, which makes it one of the last we have of Heaney’s, and in its plain language and direct expression there is a balance being reached, “a kind of settlement,” between earth and sky, between the physical and the metaphysical, between the desire for physicality and the desire for invisibility, for the upward drag. It’s a fitting note for his work to end on.

The commentary included in The Poems of Seamus Heaney is in the main excellent, though it’s apparent that it’s the work of three editors, with sometimes disparate comments and differing styles. The notes are sometimes very detailed, sometimes seemingly geared to schoolchildren (“King Midas turned all he touched into gold”), and other times they’re academically oriented (“The substitution of the voiced dental ð for the alveolar d in some Irish accents is accurately observed”). But they are thorough and companionable, and they offer a terrific introduction to and overview of much of the substantial literary criticism that has appeared on Heaney’s work.

There are moments in the volume’s notes when editorial biases or lacunae may show.⁵ Very occasionally too the editors miss the wood for the trees, providing comprehensive commentary that somehow omits a crucial detail. Section 7 of “Station Island,” in which Heaney meets the ghost of his childhood teammate William Strathearn and writes him an imagined monologue, never strays outside what might be taken as the murdered man’s own idiom yet remains replete with tension and observation and the myriad technical pleasures of rhyme and rhythm. It demonstrates that Heaney’s gift was for narrative as much as lyric:

The murdered man’s ghost goes on to detail the encounter and killing, with Heaney asking forgiveness for the way he has “lived indifferent.” The notes explain:

The figure encountered here is William Strathearn, with whom SH had played Gaelic football. Eugene Kielt [a Magherafelt guesthouse owner who runs Heaney tours] has pointed out, in private correspondence with the editors, that in the Derry Journal of Friday, 8 April 1955, the minor Gaelic Football panel for South Derry includes both W. Strathearn (Bellaghy) and S. Heaney (Castledawson). Strathearn was the proprietor of a chemist’s shop in Ahoghill, Co. Derry, victim of a random sectarian murder on 19 April 1977 for which two members of the UVF, John Weir and Billy McCaughey, were convicted.

The UVF is the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist terrorist group. And the editors’ commentary, as far as it goes, is not wrong, though it doesn’t mention the most shocking fact: Weir and McCaughey were members of another acronymic organization, the RUC, or Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police service of Northern Ireland. The poem has already told us that Heaney played Gaelic with Strathearn (“the one stylist on the team”), and the detail of the newspaper is interesting but superfluous. The fact that the murderers were policemen is the shocking historical and political black hole at the heart of the poem.

By the time Heaney wrote the sequence, the men (members of the “Glenanne gang,” which murdered scores of Catholics in Mid Ulster) had been convicted, as he tells Strathearn (“‘Not that it is any consolation,/but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail’”). And Heaney presses—lightly but definitely—on the revelation of the murderers’ identities. It’s behind his otherwise puzzling question to Strathearn’s shade, “Were they in uniform?” And the speaker’s expression of culpability and guilt in the poem has to be viewed in light of the revealed collusion between the state and the loyalist terrorists: “Forgive the way I have lived indifferent—/forgive my timid circumspect involvement.” (And, as a further point of fact, Ahoghill is in County Antrim, not Derry.)⁶

Historical misrepresentation or mistaken terminology or crucial omission is perhaps to be regretted particularly when it comes to Heaney’s poems, which are emblems of the need for accuracy and precision when presenting life in a politically contested place. As he puts it in “An Open Letter,” written to object to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, “Names were not for negotiation./Right names were the first foundation/For telling truth.” But this book is a massive undertaking, running to over 1,200 pages, and it feels churlish to find fault. It is a wonderful work of scholarship, and these are not major quibbles. I note Heaney follows the lines above with “The audience, all irritation,/Cries ‘Shut your mouth!’”