BOOKS
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the ebb-tide/ Unanimous in their silent inquisition." "Tractatus" appends
a corollary to Wittgenstein's dictum, "The world is everything that is the
case." The case
imaginatively,
too, Mahon adds:
Tacitus believed mariners could
hear
The sun sinking into the western sea:
And who would question that titanic roar,
The steam rising wherever the edge may be?
Lovely those sonic leaps from "Tractatus" to "Tacitus" (with the play
between what is "tacit" and what is heard) to "titanic."
Towards the end of Seamus Heaney's graceful and unmannered ver–
sion of Sophocles's
Philoctetes,
entitled
The Cure at Troy
(1991), the self–
pitying hero is admonished, "Stop just licking your wounds. Start seeing
things." Philoctetes, abandoned on his island, claims he's "been in the
afterlife/ For ten years now." A false and self-deluding afterlife, Heaney
suggests. His new and opulent volume
Seeing Things
opens with versions
of the afterlife: a gorgeous translation of the lines from the
Aeneid
about
the golden bough, and a Dantesque encounter with Philip Larkin (as im–
portant a shade for Heaney as for Nemerov) on his final journey, which
turns out to be the "journey back/ Into the heartland of the ordinary."
The poems that follow marshal the afterlife of ordinary things - keepsakes
and talismans - as they take up residence within us. Heaney addresses this
Rilkean subject with his own characteristic grit and tensile awareness. A
ploughed field, a soccer game with "four jackets for four goalposts," the
garden lines pegged out with tight white string- "All these things entered
you/ As if they were both the door and what came through it."
The things of this book are mainly associated with Heaney's father,
just as the folded sheets of his previous collection,
The Haw LAntern,
were
maternal presences. Heaney is preternaturally aware of his parents' afterlife
in him, how every man carries, like Aeneas, his own spent father out of
the fray. There's strength in this recognition, as a haiku for the New Year
makes clear: "Dangerous pavements./ But I face the ice this year/ With
my father's stick" ("1.1.87").
Seeing Things
includes a fine sequence of seven sonnets called
"Glanmore Revisited," harking back to the "opened ground" sonnets in
Field Work .
The sonnet, that most closed of English verse forms, has
always been for Heaney a site for openings, revelations. My favorite is the
seventh, "The Skylight," which begins: "You were the one for skylights.
I opposed/ Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove/ Of pitch pine.
