504
PARTISAN REVIEW
This is Heaney's equivalent of Yeats's tirades against "this most
unmannerly town," the fulminations of
Responsibilities,
the famous
injunction to "Scorn the sort now growing up / All out of shape from
toe to top, / Their unremembering hearts and heads / Base-born
products of base beds." Speaking for his compatriots on both sides of
the border, Heaney acknowledges that they have not become "the in–
domitable Irishry" Yeats had wished for. But where Yeats is rant and
rhetoric (the quarrel with others), Heaney is gentle irony and cir–
cumspection, knowing from the first that words can send the mob in–
to the street, that language can condemn as well as pardon. He
posits his own versions of the peasantry and the hard-riding
aristocracy.
For Heaney, as for all the Irish, the glory of poetry resides not
so much in the story itself as in the telling of it. And in
The Haw
Lantern,
every line tells, is an adventure in the language to match the
excitement of one's first reading of Geoffrey Hill's
King Log
or
Tenebrae,
or Yeats's
Responsibilities.
The poet who can declare that
"Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth. / The script grows bare
and Merovingian" as easily as he can conjure "Nipple and hive , bite–
lumps, / small acorns of the almost pleasurable," or identify with
"soft-eyed calves of the dew , / Astonished and assumed into fluores–
cence" clearly has considerable technical resources at his command,
and can employ them without straining for effect. Nor is he in
danger of losing his vo ice, degenerating into self-parody , or lapsing
into silence.
Yet, for all his fl ashes of virtuosic brilliance, Heaney's intent is
not to dazzle us but to bring us back into the world, to return us to
ourselves. As his compatriot Michael Longley has observed ,
"Because a poet is someone for whom no experience is complete until
he has written about it, most poems are elegies." This can be taken
as a central tenet for Heaney as well, and not only in the abstract.
The heart of
The Haw Lantern
is not dominated by political
allegories; rather, it is a series of eight sonnets, "Clearances," in
memory of his mother that reveal Heaney most vulnerable and at
home. And as pendants to these we have "In Memoriam: Robert
Fitzgerald" and "The Summer of Lost Rachel" which, as well as "The
Stone Verdict," "The Old Team," "The Milk Factory," and "A
Postcard from Iceland," reaffirm his fundamental affinity with the
plainspoken pastoral of Edward Thomas, in whose poems also words
enter the sense of touch.
The Haw Lantern
is not necessarily the book
