480
PARTISAN REVIEW
excels, the mute are seen sitting in a "womanless kitchen" taking "the
twilight as it came/like solemn trees," their pipes "red in their mouths,
the talk come downlto
Aye
and
Aye
again." Heaney's sense of identity
with them is keen:
When you are tired or terrified
your voice slips back into its old first place
and makes the sound your shades make there . ..
These Orphic forays into old first places are typically strained .
In "Making Strange," the poet goes back to his home (rural) territory
with a sophisticated friend and is caught between his native and
learned voices. His compromise:
I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.
To turn back and name is, ironically, to distance and lose.
Heaney's worried looking back, his guilty struggle for his poetic
place and voice, dominates the central twelve-part sequence, "Station
Island." On a pilgrimage to Ireland's fearsome penitential island on
Lough Derg, Heaney proceeds, guideless , and meets his dead, most of
whom either challenge his personal and artistic integrity or harangue
him. Perhaps he should have followed the advice of the first shade he
met, "Sabbath-breaker" Simon Sweeney (a precursor of the liberating
Sweeney of Part Three): "Stay clear of all processions!" What Heaney
really meets here, of course , are his own doubts and regrets from
which he seeks release. The subject of the elegy "The Strand at Lough
Beg" (in the earlier
Field Work)
accuses him of having "saccharined
my death." "You confused evasion and artistic tact," the shade con–
demns . "You whitewashed ugliness and drew/the lovely blinds of the
Purgatorio."
But this self-accusation is a bit indulgent, for what is
Heaney doing here but the same thing, casting his meditations and
elegies into a Dantesque scheme which risks deflecting their raw
emotional centers , absorbing them into a frame which unfortunately
seems more convenient than apt . There are beautiful poems here ;
the elegy to a sectarian murder victim in Section VII is especially
