{"id":858,"date":"2015-08-18T14:05:46","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T18:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/?page_id=858"},"modified":"2015-08-18T14:06:36","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T18:06:36","slug":"essay-tomas-unger","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/essay-tomas-unger\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay: Tomas Unger"},"content":{"rendered":"
Tomas Unger lives and works in New York. His poetry has appeared in the Threepenny Review<\/em>.<\/span><\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

LISTENING NOW AGAIN: ON SEAMUS HEANEY<\/h1>\n

It is now two years since Seamus Heaney died. To certain of his younger readers\u2014say, those who might have discovered \u201cDigging\u201d in a high school class, and gone further, until they couldn\u2019t \u201cremember never having known\u201d the ground this poet opened, and made familiar, and made loved\u2014this loss was the first of its kind. It is all too easy to say that the death of a poet should change nothing about his poems and the relationship his readers have to them; that, if anything, such a poet\u2019s persistence in living voice brings into focus the final insignificance of his being among us. The person (we are meant, on this argument, to realize) was never the source of the poems\u2019 power.<\/p>\n

Nobody who has read his Heaney could accept this account, with its denial of just the sorts of human nuances to which the poet strove, with such tough-minded tenderness, to sensitize us. Auden\u2019s great elegy on Yeats, naturally much quoted in the weeks after Heaney\u2019s death, presses forward the somewhat mournful faith that the poet \u201cbecame his admirers,\u201d but to say so risks eliding the complex negotiations that continue to occur between the remembering and the remembered, the admiring and the admired. The latter, we may well feel, becomes only and ever himself, continuing to possess the memory with perfect autonomy. Who better prepared us to recognize and even celebrate this condition\u2014of simultaneous apartness and possession, of a held silence we can almost believe bespeaks connection\u2014than Heaney himself, at the close of the sequence \u201cClearances,\u201d written in memory of his mother:<\/p>\n

I thought of walking round and round a space
\nUtterly empty, utterly a source
\nWhere the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
\nIn our front hedge above the wallflowers.
\nThe white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
\nI heard the hatchet’s differentiated
\nAccurate cut, the crack, the sigh
\nAnd collapse of what luxuriated
\nThrough the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
\nDeep-planted and long gone, my coeval
\nChestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
\nIts heft and hush became a bright nowhere,
\nA soul ramifying and forever
\nSilent, beyond silence listened for<\/p>\n

\u201cO chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, \/ Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?\u201d: so Heaney\u2019s great predecessor, toward the close of \u201cAmong School Children.\u201d Yeats\u2019s aim there was to make us feel with unaccustomed force the unanswerability of his question; it was to show us the folly of attending to anything less than the totality of whatever great blossomers and dancers come before us. How perfectly like Heaney, then, that at a moment of equally visionary reverie, he should manage\u2014in pointed defiance of Yeats\u2019s example\u2014to grant some portion of his prayerful attention to the actual, and to hold in mind that single \u201ccoeval \/ Chestnut from a jam jar,\u201d a small thing of this earth that disappeared (\u201cdeep-planted and long gone\u201d) in giving rise to the decked tree, just as now that tree has disappeared in giving rise to something much richer than absence.<\/p>\n

Heaney was brave enough to risk the word \u201csoul\u201d\u2014and great enough to make us believe it\u2014but he makes no show of consoling himself or his reader in the face of grievous, still<\/em> grievous, loss. Nowhere is this more clear than in the heartbreaking way that penultimate line goes on: \u201cforever \/ Silent.\u201d A mournfully attached humanity has intruded, as if to silence once and for all the claims of transcendence. And yet such is his own greatness of soul that Heaney finds, \u201cbeyond silence\u201d itself, that greatest of stays against despair: something to listen for.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen now again\u201d: whether at the close of the first poem in The Spirit Level<\/em>, perhaps Heaney\u2019s greatest individual collection, or elsewhere, the poet was always telling us to listen\u2014and giving us cause to. Unusual for a poet whose work lacks exactly nothing for life on the page, the \u201cvoice\u201d of this poet\u2014perhaps more so than with any other writer in recent memory\u2014seems entirely bound up with the voice of the man. Tenderness, richness, plainness, earnest force: press your ear to the closed door of a Heaney reading (to revise Frost\u2019s discussion of so-called sentence-sounds) and odds are you still would have managed to hear these things. Not for nothing does the radio figure prominently in Heaney\u2019s celebrated Nobel lecture. It was this herald of electric modernity, entering the self-described \u201cden-life\u201d of the Heaney family in rural Ireland, that gave young Seamus an education in the myriad fascinations of the human voice. He writes of thrilling to place-names intoned with easy gravity by BBC announcers, at a time when such joy could still go unshadowed by mature political awareness. But if Heaney\u2019s listening necessarily became \u201cmore deliberate\u201d in time, this is not to say it ever became less enchanted. The entirely grown-up Heaney of, say, \u201cThe Glanmore Sonnets\u201d is every bit kin to the boy of the Nobel address, no less attuned to the claims of the sonorous. True to his former self, he finds cause for poetry in the simple forecast uttered by some radioed teller of weather. Few poems take such joy in\u2014and so irresistibly invite\u2014recitation. What other excuse does this poem make for its existence? What other excuse does it need to?<\/p>\n

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
\nGreen, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
\nConjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
\nCollapse into a sibilant penumbra.
\nMidnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
\nOf eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
\nTheir wind-compounded keen behind the baize
\nAnd drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
\nL\u2019Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle H\u00e9l\u00e8ne
\nNursed their bright names this morning in the bay
\nThat toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
\nAnd actual, I said out loud, \u2018A haven,\u2019
\nThe word deepening, clearing, like the sky
\nElsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said out loud\u201d: this is Heaney to the life, equal parts unembarassable rapture and gentle self-satire. Heaney wrote elsewhere of his father\u2019s \u201cold disdain of sweet talk and excuses\u201d (and, so too, of the \u201cfear of inadequacy\u201d that led his mother to willfully \u201cmispronounce words beyond her.\u201d) It is just possible to detect here an inherited note of discomfort at the level of preciousness or affectation that might lead us to luxuriate in the recitation of the odd word for the benefit of no one but ourselves. And yet, and yet\u2014this is the same Heaney who was always quoting, and never less than approvingly, Frost\u2019s line in \u201cBirches\u201d about filling a cup \u201cto the brim, and even above the brim.\u201d Heaney saw Frost\u2019s simple figure of joy-in-excess as capturing something central about the appeal of poetry. Perhaps we could say, then, that just as he tells his sons in one of his best known poems to stand in for him and take the earthly strain for which they were born (\u201cA Kite for Michael and Christopher\u201d), here he charges his readers to take upon themselves his selfsame joy in recitation. Especially with the poet gone, to say \u201cI said out loud\u201d out loud is to have the plainly mysterious sense of becoming a stand-in for Heaney\u2019s Anyman. He has put only two words in quotes, but how can we not hear him saying the whole poem aloud to the end, the words of that last rapt list deepening and clearing in their own right? We say them with him. The whole poem might be read as Heaney\u2019s way of making us know that we ourselves were born fit for such joy as he<\/em> felt.<\/p>\n

It was always Heaney\u2019s way, besides, to take only the most selfless delight in the sheer fact of saying or song. Again and again, and once in these very words, he\u2019d come in with a \u201craise it again, man,\u201d a winningly unaffected variation on Yeats\u2019s own injunction to Irish poets as he neared his end: \u201cSing whatever is well made.\u201d To return now to such moments of un-self-assuming delight in other singers, and other song, is to find an air of valediction the poems hadn\u2019t known they possessed. \u201cStrange,\u201d Heaney wrote, \u201chow things in the offing, once they\u2019re sensed, \/ Convert to things foreknown.\u201d The sense of a kind of fond and sad foreknowing seems nowhere more invited an imposition than in \u201cAt the Wellhead.\u201d It is hard now to read Heaney\u2019s deeply felt tribute\u2014written in love of his wife, in memory of a neighbor, and in contemplation of the art all three, in the broadest sense, humanly share\u2014and not to read it as some kind of goodbye. To do so is of course to read against both conscious intent and chronology; the poem, after all, appears in a late but not a last collection. But the Heaney who played so masterfully with tensile shifts within individual poems; who celebrated poetry for its capacity to muddy temporal sequence, turning \u201ctime up and over\u201d; and who, toward the end, invoked that moment in the \u201cFour Quartets\u201d in which Eliot sees the past \u201ctransfigured, in another pattern\u201d\u2014 this Heaney would seem pretty steadfastly to open his own work up to anti-chronological readings. To revisit \u201cAt the Wellhead\u201d is to find that Heaney\u2019s death, changing exactly nothing about the poems, has changed them utterly:<\/p>\n

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
\nAs you always do, are like a local road
\nWe’ve known every turn of in the past —
\nThat midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood
\nLooking and listening until a car
\nWould come and go and leave you lonelier
\nThan you had been to begin with. So, sing on,
\nDear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,<\/p>\n

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
\nArdent and cut off like our blind neighbour
\nWho played the piano all day in her bedroom.
\nHer notes came out to us like hoisted water
\nRavelling off a bucket at the wellhead
\nWhere next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.<\/p>\n

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician
\nWas like a silver vein in heavy clay.
\nNight water glittering in the light of day.
\nBut also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.
\nShe touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille
\nIn books like books wallpaper patterns come in.
\nHer hands were active and her eyes were full
\nOf open darkness and a watery shine.<\/p>\n

She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’
\nWhoever or whatever. Being with her
\nWas intimate and helpful, like a cure
\nYou didn’t notice happening. When I read
\nA poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,
\n‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’<\/p>\n

In the almost mournful case it makes for the ungainsayable apartness that attends artistic making\u2014for the way artistic expression at once transcendently manifests and tragically effaces personal presence\u2014the poem beautifully engages the question of the poet and the person. \u201cDear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran\u201d: Heaney\u2019s wife, as if cast among the inspired blind, is by her singing carried away from the world of immediate human intimacies to the very source of song. For all the undeniable triumph of this transformation, she is\u2014by just such means, and like the neighbor in whose company Heaney comes to see her\u2014\u201ccut off\u201d (again, the phrase evokes Milton). It is the impression of this ineluctable distance that inspires, we sense, just the determined tenderness of Heaney\u2019s address, repeated dears<\/em> and all. And how has Heaney\u2019s death changed the poem? A limitless spiritual distance is made literal, final: who but Heaney himself does his wife seem, now, to wait for? A sort of prophetic melancholy seems to underlie the assurance that a car, any and every car, \u201cwould come and go and leave you lonelier \/ than you had been to begin with.\u201d By such slight-absolute transformations as death effects, would<\/em> has become will<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019ve suggested that in the case of the sonnet from \u201cClearances,\u201d this dread alertness to the final isolation of consciousness is counterbalanced by a visionary sense of undiminished connection, the same is true here. Here the sense of connection arises not only from Heaney\u2019s living tenderness toward his wife and, in turn, his sometime neighbor, but also from the Frostian feats of association by which his poem extends itself\u2014out past the initial object of its attention and (so too) out to its audience. The figure of Marie Heaney ravels out to and reveals that of Rosie Keenan; through Keenan we come to the bottomless well of Heaney\u2019s whole poetry\u2014and to the lived supra-reality, the brightness visible, it engenders for all readers; but engenders, perhaps most concretely and poignantly, in the case of Keenan. The poem Heaney remembers reading to her can be none other than the lesser known but more bewitching of his early ars poeticas<\/em>, \u201cPersonal Helicon\u201d:<\/p>\n

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
\nAnd old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
\nI loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
\nOf waterweed, fungus and dank moss.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
\nTo stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
\nIs beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
\nTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.<\/p>\n

To follow \u201cAt the Wellhead\u201d out and back to \u201cPersonal Helicon\u201d is to arrive less at an end than a beginning. It is to know the first poem for the first time. It is to realize only more fully that that final note of neighborly deference from Heaney\u2014his hushed, awkward, but finally awed respect for the way in which such everyday utterance as his poetry elicits might prove equal to, and in time take its place within<\/em>, that very poetry\u2014is at the same time an assertion of continued poetic presence, of Heaney\u2019s \u201cbeing here for good in every sense.\u201d Even his acts of listening set themselves somehow echoing, turn to speech.<\/p>\n

No one has ever been under the illusion that great poets make good neighbors. So is it only some obscure sentimentality that compels us to feel that Heaney was \u201calso just\u201d ours? There are vanishingly rare \u201cwithdrawn musicians\u201d whose voices we go on knowing. Almost none who\u2014by that unalienating majesty which calls us, through the wave cry and the wind cry, back to poetry\u2014seem to know us by our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomas Unger lives and works in New York. His poetry has appeared in the Threepenny Review.   LISTENING NOW AGAIN: ON SEAMUS HEANEY It is now two years since Seamus Heaney died. To certain of his younger readers\u2014say, those who might have discovered \u201cDigging\u201d in a high school class, and gone further, until they couldn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8422,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":17,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":866,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/858\/revisions\/866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}