SEAMUS HEANEY
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ventive expressionist scenes reminiscent of those which Virgil and
Dante encounter in
The Divine Comedy.
In the
Inferno,
pilgrim and
guide proceed among shades in thrall to the fates of which they have
become the archetypes, in much the same way as Eliot's poem pro–
ceeds upon the eerie flood of its own inventiveness. But in the
Quartets,
Eliot has been born again out of the romance of symbolism
into the stricter exactions of
philosophia
and religious tradition. The
inspired, spontaneous, essentially lyric tongue has been replaced as
governor by an organ that functions more like a sorrowful
grand
seigneur,
meditatively, authoritatively, yet just a little wistfully aware
of its lost vitality and insouciance.
That vitality and insouciance of lyric poetry, its relish of its
own inventiveness, its pleasuring strain, always comes under threat
when poetry remembers that its self-gratification must be perceived
as a kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its own imperfec–
tions, pains and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its quaran–
tine? Should it not put the governors on its joy and moralize its
song? Should it, as Austin Clarke said in another context, take the
clapper from the bell of rhyme? Should it go as far in self-denial as
Zbigniew Herbert's poem "A Knocker" seems to want it to go? This
translation, in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, was
originally published in 1968:
There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities
it's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheads
my imagination
is a piece of board
my sale instrument
is a wooden stick
I strike the board
it answers me
yes-yes
no-no
for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
