BOOKS
481
riveting. Yet one can't help in the end but feel the pilgrim's journey
contrived, programmatic. And one also begins to weary of Heaney's
obsessive guilt. Fortunately, the poems tell us, he has wearied of it
too. The last few sections of "Station Island" and Part Three of the
book constitute a purposeful departure.
Heaney is wisely cautious in announcing this poetic self-trans–
formation. Berating himself at the end of Section IX of the poem, he
bemoans the possibilities of change: "As if the cairnstone could defy
the cairn.lAs if the eddy could reform the pool." Yet he finds a mov–
ing image offaith on which to conclude that section: "Then I thought
of the tribe whose dances never fail.lFor they keep dancing till they
sight the deer." The cycle's final say goes to the shade of Joyce who
dismisses Heaney's pilgrimage and lectures, "Don't be so earnest."
Now that "the English language/belongs to us," Joyce declares:
it's time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency.
"Let go/let fly," Joyce insists (under Heaney's pen).
Heaney takes this last advice to himselfliterally as he casts the fi–
nal part of the book in the voice of the condemned bird-man Sweeney.
Damned, crazed, but lyrically released, Sweeney is a kind of Lear,
exposed, pushed to the limits of his voice, or Orpheus after he's looked
back, maddened, free of illusions and earthly bonds. "I am haggard,
womanless,land cut off from music," Sweeney describes himself in
Heaney's translation of the medieval tale,
Sweeney Astray.
In his in–
troduction to it, Heaney makes clear his affinity to the bird-man:
"Insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty,
assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as
an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the
constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligations."
These poems in Part Three, written as glosses while Heaney
worked on his translation, answer the struggles of "Station Island."
Shorter-lined, unbridled lyrics of "neuter allegiance," they are among
the best in the book. In a number of poems, he is explicit about his
new, freed stance as writer, and he captures well the pain of his isola–
tion. In a heartrending echo of the original tale, "Sweeney's Return"
shows the poet flying to the sill of his bedroom window to discover
his wife's desertion:
