Fancy to spend 51 minutes of your time on listening to a dead man?
Ah, come on, just do it. Seamus Heaney is not really dead.
See ... hear for yourself.
You can close your eyes, or below following his words black on white.
And now open your hearts.
Crediting Poetry
When I first encountered the name of the
city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it,
never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the
Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome
was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception.
In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an
ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in
the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a
kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and
intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an
intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night
sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled
with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the
other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain
in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along
the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it
in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical,
pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we
were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that
stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train
made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple
delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.
But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around
and above us was alive and signalling too. When a wind stirred in
the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached to the
topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a
hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the
innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles
and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC
newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex
machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom,
transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in
the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every
voice, the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.
We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the
local accents of our parents, and in the resonant English tones
of the newsreader the names of bombers and of cities bombed, of
war fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of
prisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; and
always, of course, we would pick up too those other, solemn and
oddly bracing words, "the enemy" and "the allies". But even so,
none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. If
there was something ominous in the newscaster's tones, there was
something torpid about our understanding of what was at stake;
and if there was something culpable about such political
ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive
about the security I inhabited as a result of it.
The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me.
Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way. Then as the years
went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up
on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless
speaker. But it was still not the news that interested me; what I
was after was the thrill of story, such as a detective serial
about a British special agent called Dick Barton or perhaps a
radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns's adventure tales
about an RAF flying ace called Biggles. Now that the other
children were older and there was so much going on in the
kitchen, I had to get close to the actual radio set in order to
concentrate my hearing, and in that intent proximity to the dial
I grew familiar with the names of foreign stations, with Leipzig
and Oslo and Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with
Stockholm.
I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as
the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the
intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did
not understand what was being said in those first encounters with
the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already
begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in
turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey
where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's
life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination,
and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured
spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station
than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am
permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.
*
I credit poetry for making this space-walk
possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I wrote
fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be
listening) to "walk on air against your better judgement". But I
credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to
the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws
of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled
out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An
order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as
we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the
intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry,
in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for
making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the
mind's centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at
the word "Stockholm" on the face of the radio dial and the man
facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most
privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in
our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense
of that phrase.
*
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life
to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the
poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world
it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even
as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an
ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an
adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of
his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an
ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert
Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness;
and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find
a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which
I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred
Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and
absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later
again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in
the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced
confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further
reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility -
to say what happens, to "pity the planet," to be "not concerned
with Poetry."
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest
and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the
experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland
and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out
of it for the past quarter of a century. No place in the world
prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place
considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of
rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of
having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them,
and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself
against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting
the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace
Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the
crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked
lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary
strangeness of Eliot. And these
more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to
grant the poet any more license than any other citizen; and they
were further induced by having to conduct oneself as a poet in a
situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A
public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but
of political positions variously approvable by mutually
disapproving groups.
In such circumstances, the mind still longs to repose in what
Samuel Johnson once called with superb confidence "the stability
of truth", even as it recognizes the destabilizing nature of its
own operations and enquiries. Without needing to be theoretically
instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of
variously contending discourses. The child in the bedroom,
listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home
and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking
up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that
child was already being schooled for the complexities of his
adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate
among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral,
political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical,
post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible. So it
was that I found myself in the mid-nineteen seventies in another
small house, this time in Co. Wicklow south of Dublin, with a
young family of my own and a slightly less imposing radio set,
listening to the rain in the trees and to the news of bombings
closer to home-not only those by the Provisional IRA in Belfast
but equally atrocious assaults in Dublin by loyalist
paramilitaries from the north. Feeling puny in my predicaments as
I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the
1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my noncombatant status
when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweetnatured
school friend had been interned without trial because he was
suspected of having been involved in a political killing. What I
was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape from
the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without
anxiety or apology. In a poem called "Exposure" I wrote then:
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.
(from North)
In one of the poems best known to students
in my generation, a poem which could be said to have taken the
nutrients of the symbolist movement and made them available in
capsule form, the American poet Archibald MacLeish affirmed that
"A poem should be equal to/not true." As a defiant statement of
poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is
both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper
need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably
right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation
played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We
want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which
unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the
electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its
proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue
in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for
fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet
Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be
equal to it. And this is the want I too was experiencing in those
far more protected circumstances in Co. Wicklow when I wrote the
lines I have just quoted, a need for poetry that would merit the
definition of it I gave a few moments ago, as an order "true to
the impact of external reality and ... sensitive to the inner
laws of the poet's being."
*
The external reality and inner dynamic of
happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were
symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change
nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been
long overdue. It should have come early, as the result of the
ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties, but that
was not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating
got hatched out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in
oneself was impelled to deplore the atrocious nature of the IRA's
campaign of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in
oneself was appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on
occasions like Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority
citizen in oneself, the one who had grown up conscious that his
group was distrusted and discriminated against in all kinds of
official and unofficial ways, this citizen's perception was at
one with the poetic truth of the situation in recognizing that if
life in Northern Ireland were ever really to flourish, change had
to take place. But that citizen's perception was also at one with
the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by
which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust
upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Nevertheless, until the British government caved in to the
strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers after the
Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could still
hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was
promising with what was destructive and do what W.B. Yeats had tried to do half a
century before, namely, "to hold in a single thought reality and
justice." After 1974, however, for the twenty long years between
then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved
impossible. The violence from below was then productive of
nothing but a retaliatory violence from above, the dream of
justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and
people settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit-
waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that
were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic
suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
*
One of the most harrowing moments in the
whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland
came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January
evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the
occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side
of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them,
"Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this
particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so
the presumption must have been that the masked men were
Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat
sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who
would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all
its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between
dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward.
Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in
the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the
hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and
squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray
you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in
vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead
of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away
as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for
these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of
the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the
thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that
Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left
behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I
remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about
that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of
having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by
thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be
helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and
liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to
say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the
right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold,
a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which
human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was
only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the
contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside
when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that
followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of
the music of what happens.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and
our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon
the effort which it calls forth to confront it. We are rightly in
awe of the torsions in the poetry of Paul Celan and rightly
enamoured of the suspiring voice in Samuel Beckett because these are
evidence that art can rise to the occasion and somehow be the
corollary of Celan's stricken destiny as Holocaust survivor and
Beckett's demure heroism as a member of the French Resistance.
Likewise, we are rightly suspicious of that which gives too much
consolation in these circumstances; the very extremity of our
late twentieth century knowledge puts much of our cultural
heritage to an extreme test. Only the very stupid or the very
deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of
civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and
tears no less real for being very remote. And when this
intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of
Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other
wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not
only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential
but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.
Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk
bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his
understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of
the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or
redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule
to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for
meagre heat. Forgetting faith, straining towards good works.
Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which
must be counted the sufficiency of that which is absolutely
imagined. Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the
dolorous circumstances of my native place but in despite of them,
I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space
in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for
the murderous. And once again I shall try to represent the import
of that changed orientation with a story out of Ireland.
This is a story about another monk holding himself up valiantly
in the posture of endurance. It is said that once upon a time St.
Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a
cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we
lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the
most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country.
Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his
outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon
it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if
it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and
constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great
and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights
and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the
fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common
sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed
ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to
that which we stored up as we grew.
*
St. Kevin's story is, as I say, a story out
of Ireland. But it strikes me that it could equally well come out
of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do
not mean merely to consign it to a typology of folktales, or to
dispute its value by questioning its culture bound status within
a multi-cultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness
and its travel-worthiness have to do with its local setting. I
can, of course, imagine it being deconstructed nowadays as a
paradigm of colonialism, with Kevin figuring as the benign
imperialist (or the missionary in the wake of the imperialist),
the one who intervenes and appropriates the indigenous life and
interferes with its pristine ecology. And I have to admit that
there is indeed an irony that it was such a one who recorded and
preserved this instance of the true beauty of the Irish heritage:
Kevin's story, after all, appears in the writings of Giraldus
Cambrensis, one of the Normans who invaded Ireland in the twelfth
century, one whom the Irish-language annalist Geoffrey Keating
would call, five hundred years later, "the bull of the herd of
those who wrote the false history of Ireland." But even so, I
still cannot persuade myself that this manifestation of early
Christian civilization should be construed all that simply as a
way into whatever is exploitative or barbaric in our history,
past and present. The whole conception strikes me rather as being
another example of the kind of work I saw a few weeks ago in the
small museum in Sparta, on the morning before the news of this
year's Nobel Prize in literature was announced.
This was art which sprang from a cult very different from the
faith espoused by St. Kevin. Yet in it there was a representation
of a roosted bird and an entranced beast and a self-enrapturing
man, except that this time the man was Orpheus and the rapture
came from music rather than prayer. The work itself was a small
carved relief and I could not help making a sketch of it; but
neither could I help copying out the information typed on the
card which accompanied and identified the exhibit. The image
moved me because of its antiquity and durability, but the
description on the card moved me also because it gave a name and
credence to that which I see myself as having been engaged upon
for the past three decades: "Votive panel", the identification
card said, "possibly set up to Orpheus by local poet. Local work
of the Hellenistic period."
*
Once again, I hope I am not being
sentimental or simply fetishizing - as we have learnt to say -
the local. I wish instead to suggest that images and stories of
the kind I am invoking here do function as bearers of value. The
century has witnessed the defeat of Nazism by force of arms; but
the erosion of the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things,
by the sheer persistence, beneath the imposed ideological
conformity, of cultural values and psychic resistances of a kind
that these stories and images enshrine. Even if we have learned
to be rightly and deeply fearful of elevating the cultural forms
and conservatisms of any nation into normative and exclusivist
systems, even if we have terrible proof that pride in an ethnic
and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic,
our vigilance on that score should not displace our love and
trust in the good of the indigenous per se. On the contrary, a
trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good
should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where
respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the
creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space. In
spite of devastating and repeated acts of massacre, assassination
and extirpation, the huge acts of faith which have marked the new
relations between Palestinians and Israelis, Africans and
Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have come down in Europe
and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires a hope that new
possibility can still open up in Ireland as well. The crux of
that problem involves an ongoing partition of the island between
British and Irish jurisdictions, and an equally persistent
partition of the affections in Northern Ireland between the
British and Irish heritages; but surely every dweller in the
country must hope that the governments involved in its governance
can devise institutions which will allow that partition to become
a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing
for agile give-and-take, for encounter and contending,
prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the
beginning from those bracing words "enemy" and "allies" might
finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding
vocabulary.
*
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this
platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland was emerging from
the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the
heels of a war of independence fought against the British. The
struggle that ensued had been brief enough; it was over by May,
1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it
was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it
would dictate the terms of politics within the twenty-six
independent counties of Ireland, that part of the island known
first of all as the Irish Free State and then subsequently as the
Republic of Ireland.
Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence
in his Nobel speech. Nobody understood better than he the
connection between the construction or destruction of state
institutions and the founding or foundering of cultural life, but
on this occasion he chose to talk instead about the Irish
Dramatic Movement. His story was about the creative purpose of
that movement and its historic good fortune in having not only
his own genius to sponsor it, but also the genius of his friends
John Millington Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory. He came to Sweden
to tell the world that the local work of poets and dramatists had
been as important to the transformation of his native place and
times as the ambushes of guerrilla armies; and his boast in that
elevated prose was essentially the same as the one he would make
in verse more than a decade later in his poem "The Municipal
Gallery Revisited". There Yeats presents himself amongst the
portraits and heroic narrative paintings which celebrate the
events and personalities of recent history and all of a sudden
realizes that something truly epoch-making has occurred: " 'This
is not', I say,/'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland/The
poets have imagined, terrible and gay.' " And the poem concludes
with two of the most quoted lines of his entire oeuvre:
Think where man's glory most begins and
ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
And yet, expansive and thrilling as these
lines are, they are an instance of poetry flourishing itself
rather than proving itself, they are the poet's lap of honour,
and in this respect if in no other they resemble what I am doing
in this lecture. In fact, I should quote here on my own behalf
some other words from the poem: "You that would judge me, do not
judge alone/This book or that." Instead, I ask you to do what
Yeats asked his audience to do and think of the achievement of
Irish poets and dramatists and novelists over the past forty
years, among whom I am proud to count great friends. In literary
matters, Ezra Pound advised against accepting the opinion of
those "who haven't themselves produced notable work," and it is
advice I have been privileged to follow, since it is the good
opinion of notable workers and not just those in my own
country-that has fortified my endeavour since I began to write in
Belfast more than thirty years ago. The Ireland I now inhabit is
one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Yeats, however, was by no means all flourish. To the credit of
poetry in our century there must surely be entered in any
reckoning his two great sequences of poems entitled "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War", the
latter of which contains the famous lyric about the bird's nest
at his window, where a starling or stare had built in a crevice
of the old wall. The poet was living then in a Norman tower which
had been very much a part of the military history of the country
in earlier and equally troubled times, and as his thoughts turned
upon the irony of civilizations being consolidated by violent and
powerful conquerors who end up commissioning the artists and the
architects, he began to associate the sight of a mother bird
feeding its young with the image of the honey bee, an image
deeply lodged in poetic tradition and always suggestive of the
ideal of an industrious, harmonious, nurturing commonwealth:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
I have heard this poem repeated often, in
whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the past twenty-five
years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life
itself as St. Kevin was and as tough-minded about what happens in
and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will happen
again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going
to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it
also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality
of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It
satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences
at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth
telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand,
the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its
own yearnings for sweetness and trust.
It is a proof that poetry can be equal to and true at the same
time, an example of that completely adequate poetry which the
Russian woman sought from Anna Akhmatova and which William
Wordsworth produced at a corresponding moment of historical
crisis and personal dismay almost exactly two hundred years
ago.
*
When the bard Demodocus sings of the fall
of Troy and of the slaughter that accompanied it, Odysseus weeps
and Homer says that his tears were like the tears of a wife on a
battlefield weeping for the death of a fallen husband. His epic
simile continues:
At the sight of the man panting and dying
there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but no more piteous than Odysseus' tears,
cloaked as they were, now, from the company.
Even to-day, three thousand years later, as
we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary
savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing
immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old
newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image
can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear
shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and
translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which
answers all that we know about the intolerable.
But there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric
poetry. This has to do with the "temple inside our hearing" which
the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy
deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness of speech
articulation," from the resolution and independence which the
entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the
energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the
buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as
it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a
ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the
unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most
extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its
most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear
straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the
other informing voices.
Which is a way of saying that I have never quite climbed down
from the arm of that sofa. I may have grown more attentive to the
news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind
it. But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is
still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more
reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining
towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a
musically satisfying order of sounds. As if the ripple at its
widest desired to be verified by a reformation of itself, to be
drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.
I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find it,
for example, in the repetition of that refrain of Yeats's, "Come
build in the empty house of the stare," with its tone of
supplication, its pivots of strength in the words "build" and
"house" and its acknowledgement of dissolution in the word
"empty". I find it also in the triangle of forces held in
equilibrium by the triple rhyme of "fantasies" and "enmities" and
"honey-bees", and in the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as
a given form within the language. Poetic form is both the ship
and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying,
allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is
centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body. And it
is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry
always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature
while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the
world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the
poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the
thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the
power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of
its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around
it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of
values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in
so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human
being.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1996