146
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
who now atone perhaps upon this bed
for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the
Purgatorio
and saccharined my death with morning dew.'
Heaney has written as if being a writer, let alone a successful Irish
writer writing in English, is tantamount
to
being a deserter, not least be–
cause one's allegiance is necessarily to the "country of the mind" and a
larger non-partisan community.
But Heaney has movingly explored the problem of the poet's need
to be faithful to and protective of his inner freedom in the essays col–
lected in
The Government oj the TOllgue.
There he decisively defends the
"imagination as a shaping spirit which it is wrong to disobey." "Station
Island" itself is a pilgrimage to this conclusion, with Heaney continually
facing the wrong way or blocking the other, traditional, pilgrims, as he
is stopped by his own private station masters.
It
is, famously, Joyce,
whom he has tell him that "You may lose more of yourself than you re–
deem/ doing the decent thing"; since
Station Island
Heaney has steered
away from the shoals of political engagement. He also seems finished, for
the time being, with his long mining of the tribal properties of language.
But if Joyce gave him his push, the examples of the Eastern
Europeans, Milosz, Herbert, Holub, and Popa especially, all of whom he
wrote about in
The Government oj the Tonglle,
gave him the navigational
chart he used in much of his next book of poems,
The Haw Lantern,
written at roughly the same time as
The Government oj the Tongue.
Some
of the uncharacteristic strategies he borrows are allegory and parable, the
indicative mood, the use of abstract words, a temperate, even tone.
Although "Parable Island," "From the Republic of Conscience," "From
the Land of the Unspoken," "A Shooting Script," and "From the
Canton of Expectation" may be successful by their own lights, with their
dispassionate lack of affect they hardly bear comparison to the full-bod–
ied, full-throated, full-hearted poems of Heaney's which preceded them.
Instead, I find the route to
Seeing Things
in "Clearances," the sonnet
sequence for Heaney's mother, which seems
to
me the heart of
The Haw
Lantern,
and in "The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanaugh,"
the first essay in
The Government oj the Tongue.
Both "Clearances" and
"The Placeless Heaven" contain an anecdote which becomes a metaphor
for Heaney's (and Kavanaugh's) poetic. Heaney's aunt had planted a
chestnut the year of his birth; the tree became associated, in his mind as
in others, with himself: "the chestnut was the one significant thing that
grew as I grew." Sometime after his family moved from that house, new
owners cut down the tree.
In
"Clearances," written after his mother's
