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looks forward to in Heaney- bold, supple rhythms, slant rhymes,
and a rich commingling of the colloquial and metaphoric. "The Birth–
place," set at Thomas Hardy's home, is especially striking. Juxtaposed
to Hardy's spartan solitude, "the deal table where he wrote, so small
and plain,lthe single bed a dream of discipline," poet and wife, likened
to one "of his troubled pairs," end up in the nearby woods:
where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,
and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house .
On their return, the familiarities of home become "unstacked iron
weights/afloat among galaxies." The earlier, tense division between
artistic and domestic callings is healed, just as art and reality unite in
the poem's conclusion - Heaney wondrously recalls staying up all
night to finish
The Return
of
the Native,
and how his own world returned
to him afterward:
The corncrake in the aftergrass
verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.
His own life survives comparison, is confirmed as source, "verified."
Other poems in Part One reassert Heaney's guilt as artist in war–
torn Ireland, a frequent theme since his volume,
North.
In "Sand–
stone Keepsake," he alludes to the
Inferno
to convict himself of virtual
connivance with the British, portraying himself as a beachcomber in
sight of a camp for IRA prisoners, luxuriating in a "free state of image
and allusion," a self-imposed exile from the Northern strife, resident
of the so-called Irish "Free State" (the Republic), an aesthete "not
about to set times wrong or right ." In other poems, the burden is not
so much to act politically as to speak for his unspoken-for peasant
countrymen. This is beautifully rendered in "The Loaning" where
wind in the hedges becomes "the limbo of lost words" flown "from
raftered sheds and crossroadslfrom the shelter of gable ends and
turned-up carts." In one of those loving descriptions at which Heaney
