THE STATE OF POETRY
503
mg as signposts, Heaney the former hedge-school master is once
again the "inner emigre" in all troubled and self-divided cities:
Belfast, Berlin, Prague, Szczecin. In "From Parable Island":
To find out where he stands the traveller
has to keep listening- since there is no map
which draws the line he knows he must have
crossed.
The island is not the quaint resort visited by tourists who bring the
trappings of their own lives with them; it is a wary - and
weary - place where "fork-tongued natives keep repeating / prophe–
cies they pretend not to believe" and "where (some day) / they are go–
ing to start to mine the ore of truth."
The poet's own wariness, his refusal to endorse or to placate
those who would manipulate language to achieve power, becomes
increasingly evident as one reads further in this collection. Heaney is
clearly not only the poet of "romantic Ireland ," as some of his critics
within and without Ireland have accused him of being; he is, while
not denying his Yeatsian inheritance, with Milosz and Kundera and
Orwell, also a realist who knows that a corrupted language corrupts
those who would use it. It is not so odd a stance in a country where
people still remember that their original language contained no
words denoting abstractions. In "From the Land of the Unspoken"
he asserts that:
Our unspoken assumptions have the force
of revelation . How else could we know
that whoever is the first of us to seek
assent and votes in a rich democracy
will be the last of us and have killed our
language?
While in "From the Canton of Expectation" he charges that:
They would banish the conditional for ever,
this generation born impervious to
the triumph in our cries of
de profundis.
Our faith in winning by enduring most
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.
