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PARTISAN REVIEW
A Poetic Conscience
SEEING THINGS. By SealTlus Heaney.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $19.00.
SELECTED POEMS. By SealTlus Heaney.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $30.00.
Seamus Heaney has long been praised for the textured "thingness" of
his poetry.
If
poets have a ruling clement, earth has been his.
In
1976, af–
ter Heaney's fourth book,
North,
came out, Robert Fitzgerald noted
that Heaney fulfills, as Yeats himself did not, Yeats's dictum in "The
Municipal Gallery Revisited," that "All we did, all that we said or sung/
must come from contact with the soil."
In
" North, " Heaney's poetic
conscience, in the form of the "longship's swimming tongue," counseled
him to "trust the feel of what nubbed treasure/ your hands have
known." This image of "nubbed treasure" could stand for much of
Heaney's poetry. His early work, from the farm and country poems of
Death oj a Naturalist
and
Door into the Dark,
to the bog poems of
North,
was tactile in its preoccupations and its language. "Gleaning the unsaid
off the palpable" ("The Harvest Bow,"
Field Work) ,
has been one of the
trademarks of Heaney's work. More than most, he has been capable of
embodying linguistic sensuality, and the grounding of emotion in a vi–
brant object. Characteristically, in "Mossbawn," from
North,
love is ex–
pressed, and contained, in "a tinsmith's scoop/ sunk past its gleam/ in the
meal-bin." Heaney's word sounds can chafe the tongue; the rawness
heightens our pleasure . One feels one's mouth working to produce the
closed, close, dense sounds, the encompassing soft vowels, the muscled,
brawny, or sometimes sharp consonants. One needs to be limber to man–
age some of it.
With
Seeing Things,
Heaney's most recent book, a geological shift
has occurred, as if the ground beneath his feet, and ours, had opened,
and there is no ground, not even the bog, with its "bottomless wet cen–
tre." The poems no longer have the sense of being secreted and pulled
up from the dark deep; neither, like the first poems, are they rough and
abrading, stubbled, sandpapery. Instead, they flow. The language is freer,
with an inner clarity, bright glints, sun glan cing off water, the spirit
forming and reforming in the current. The palpable has given way to the
impalpable.
Whereas in "Song"
(Fieldwork),
Heaney wrote joyfully of "the mo–
ment when the bird sings very close/ To the music of what happens," in
Seeing Things
that moment has soured, and its music become a matter for
regret: "And poetry/ Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens"
(" Fosterling"). Instead , he looks for "what the reach/ Of sense despairs
of as it fails to reach it,! Especially the thwarted sense of touch" ("A
