This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far.
There is, I think, a small anthology to be made of writing that responds to the coming of the tractor, and the change it brought to rural life by suddenly turning the horse “into something ornamental”, as the farmer and author Adrian Bell wrote in 1939. Edwin Muir’s “The Horses” would have to be in it:
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
Another candidate would be Heaney’s first poem published beyond student journals, “Tractors”, which appeared in the Belfast Telegraph on 24th November 1962. It observes the ungainly machines as they “gargle / Sadly, astraddle unfolding furrows” (the editors note that “gargle” was a verb Heaney liked to apply to tractors), and ends:
Do not ignore then
The melancholy spouts of tractors
That have never been broken in
And inspire no fear.
From the same early period, there’s also a sonically rich poem evoking the dealings of a farmer’s fair — “notes are crumpled / And crammed deep, the deal sealed with porter and gambles” — which ends:
Tractor fumes have not killed the sheep-reek,
And among these shepherds cheques are suspect.
There’s another uncollected piece here that would be perfect for another small anthology I’d like to read: poems about coins. “A Keen for the Coins” first appeared in 2001 in response to the introduction of the Euro as a currency. It laments the passing of the animal designs that were introduced for Irish coinage by a committee chaired by W.B. Yeats in the 1920s. With a characteristic Heaney flourish, the conclusion of the roll call squeezes the plant-meaning out of “mint” by coupling it with “field”:
O henny penny! O horsed half-crown!
O florin salmon! O farthing wren!
O hare! O hound! O snipe! O bull!
O mint of field and flood, farewell!
One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound
Griffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.
What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:
Dr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”
As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”
There are always going to be oversights in an annotated edition of this scale (over 500 pages of notes and commentary for almost 700 pages of poems). But there is one particularly curious slip here. In 2020, the critic Erica McAlpine published an acclaimed book called The Poet’s Mistake, which included a chapter inspired by the fact that Heaney’s poem “Wordsworth’s Skates” puts the Lake poet on the wrong lake:
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.
McAlpine comments:
As readers of The Prelude may remember, it was almost certainly Esthwaite Water, near Hawkshead, where he went to school, on which Wordsworth skated as a child, not the much larger Windermere, which is farther afield and rarely freezes. […] Esthwaite—a small and relatively shallow lake—was frequently covered with ice, often for several weeks during winter.
So it is surprising to see the editors of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, who draw widely on Heaney scholarship, repeat the confusion in their note:
In a letter to Coleridge, 24 December 1799, Wordsworth writes that he has obtained a pair of ice skates and will use them the next day […] to skate on frozen Lake Windermere and “give [his] body to the wind”.
But there’s a twist, because the letter cited actually suggests that Heaney, his editors and McAlpine have all missed a lake. Heaney saw the dusty skates on display in the museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere — and Wordsworth was writing to Coleridge shortly after moving into the same house. The letter ends by comparing the state of the ice on the lake at Grasmere with that of neighbouring Rydal Water:
The [Grasmere] ice had been so thin that the wind had broken it up, and most likely driven it to the outlet of the lake. Rydale is covered with ice, clear as polished steel, I have procured a pair of skates and tomorrow mean to give my body to the wind, — not however without reasonable caution.
Wordsworth’s intention “to give my body to the wind” on Rydal echoes the extraordinary lines about visionary dizziness in childhood from the 1799 version of The Prelude. Presumably it was the rhythmic memory of this passage’s iambic pentameter — and perhaps also the associative suggestion of the word “wind” — which led Heaney to the longer lake name (“the reel of them on frozen Windermere”). Here is Wordsworth:
… and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.
At the very end of The Poems of Seamus Heaney are twenty-five unpublished poems discovered among his draft papers. The first of them, “At Yeats’s Grave”, ends:
… under Ben Bulben in the August rain
One grave is much like others: suddenly there
I feared the trade itself might be all vain.
As the editors remark, this was written in August 1964 after visiting the churchyard in Drumcliffe, Sligo, and “expresses an early uncertainty about the whole poetic enterprise relatively rare in [Heaney’s] writing”. It alludes to Yeats’ late poem “Under Ben Bulben”, the last three lines of which are carved on the Drumcliffe gravestone (“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by!”), and which also commands: “Irish poets learn your trade”. If Heaney felt doubt in August 1964, though, he soon found a counterweight of determination, because in the same month he wrote “Digging”, the poem that would open his debut volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), by asserting his “trade”. And this too seems to have lines from “Under Ben Bulben” behind it. Compare Yeats’ vision of death giving rise to life —
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscle strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
— with the end of Heaney’s poem on turning from his strong, turf-cutting ancestors to the life of the mind:
… the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
NOTES
I wrote about Edwin Muir, horses and tractors here:
And I wrote about poets and coins here:
I’m intrigued by Heaney’s “relatively rare” “uncertainty about the whole poetic enterprise”; a late poet-friend of mine, Evangeline Paterson, was in a car going around Ireland on some arts-body-sponsored poetic jolly; there was a lull in the conversation, and, out of the blue, Heaney piped up with “I don’t know why they make such a fuss about me; I’m quite a minor poet, really”.
An absorbing first glance inside the mighty tome. Must go reread Christopher Ricks on errors in poems (Keats’s ‘stout Cortez’ staring at the Pacific etc), but I wonder how inclined to be censorious about these things we are these days. I think a basic rule of thumb applies though. Is the poem correctable without palpable damage, or does the text intrinsically depend on the error? Among the other mistakes I’m aware of in Heaney are the premise of the early poem ‘Docker’ – that the man in the pub is a bitter old sectarian Protestant, when in reality it seems dockers’ jobs were sufficiently low status for it to be an almost exclusively Catholic profession. Another occurs in ‘The Loose Box’, in which mention is made of the Cork village Bealnablath. Michael Collins was assassinated there in 1922, and many Irish people assume its name derives from the Irish word for flower, ‘bláth’. It doesn’t; it’s from ‘blá’, ‘pastureland’. If it was flowers, the name would be ‘Béal na mbláth’ (genitive plural; pedantic, sorry). Heaney goes for the flowers option, and then riffs on it too: ‘Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath, /At the Pass of Flowers, the Blossom Gap, his own /Bloom-drifted, soft Avernus mouth…’
*Quite* significant errors then, though ones a reader might easily enough pass over without noticing. Still comfortably short of the ‘new’ Samuel Beckett poem once published by John Calder that turned out to be a couple of stanzas from Browning’s ‘Epilogue to Asolando’, which Beckett had copied without comment into a notebook. Thankfully the edition was never reprinted. Matthew Sweeney used to say that both parts of his name were misprinted on the cover of his first book, which you’d think would be a return-to-printer misdemeanour, but I’ve never been able to establish the truth of this tale… Though these last two examples weren’t of course the poets’ fault.