‘These poems find – in the dowser’s gift and the child’s perception of the world – images of the marvellous that are also wonderfully grounded … Heaney is a poet who deserves to be read in entirety.’ Jamie McKendrick, Independent on Sunday
‘Virtuosity and truth, the one useless without the other, are the hallmarks of these poems … In the Nobel lecture he commends the achievement of Yeats, whose work does what the necessary poetry does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. It is a fair account of what he himself has done.’ Frank Kermode, Sunday Times
‘There are many sorts of poems here: love poems, family poems, farm poems, metaphysical poems, his ancient-grave poems, the medieval-modern outcasting king poems his Sweeniad … It’s good to find fully represented the ones which tell you there is a civil war going on, which tell you about a divided community.’ Karl Miller, Observer
SEAMUS HEANEY
Opened Ground
POEMS 1966–1996
for Marie
Author’s Note
This book contains a greater number of poems than would usually appear in a Selected Poems, fewer than would make up a Collected: it belongs somewhere between the two categories.
I have taken the opportunity to include a very few poems not printed in previous volumes and made a short sequence of extracts from The Cure at Troy (1990), my version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. In similar fashion, ‘Sweeney In Flight’ is made up of sections from Sweeney Astray (1983), a translation of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne, which tells of the penitential life led by Sweeney after he was cursed and turned into a wild flying creature by St Ronan at the Battle of Moira.
Stations was published as a pamphlet by Ulsterman Publications in 1975. The first pieces were written in Berkeley in 1970.
‘Station Island’ is a sequence of dream encounters set on an island in Co. Donegal where, since medieval times, pilgrims have gone to perform the prescribed penitential exercises (or ‘stations’).
‘Villanelle for an Anniversary’ was written to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College in 1636. ‘Alphabets’ was the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1984.
I have included ‘Crediting Poetry’ as an Afterword. This seemed to make sense, since the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it.
S.H.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Digging
Death of a Naturalist
The Barn
Blackberry-Picking
Churning Day
Follower
Mid-Term Break
The Diviner
Poem
Personal Helicon
Antaeus (1966)
from Door into the Dark (1969)
The Outlaw
The Forge
Thatcher
The Peninsula
Requiem for the Croppies
Undine
The Wife’s Tale
Night Drive
Relic of Memory
A Lough Neagh Sequence
The Given Note
Whinlands
The Plantation
Bann Clay
Bogland
from Wintering Out (1972)
Fodder
Bog Oak
Anahorish
Servant Boy
Land
Gifts of Rain
Toome
Broagh
Oracle
The Backward Look
A New Song
The Other Side
Tinder (from A Northern Hoard)
The Tollund Man
Nerthus
Wedding Day
Mother of the Groom
Summer Home
Serenades
Shore Woman
Limbo
Bye-Child
Good-night
Fireside
Westering
from Stations (1975)
Nesting-Ground
July
England’s Difficulty
Visitant
Trial Runs
The Wanderer
Cloistered
The Stations of the West
Incertus
from North (1975)
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
1 Sunlight
2 The Seed Cutters
Funeral Rites
North
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
Bone Dreams
Bog Queen
The Grauballe Man
Punishment
Strange Fruit
Kinship
Act of Union
Hercules and Antaeus
Singing School
1 The Ministry of Fear
2 A Constable Calls
3 Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966
4 Summer 1969
5 Fosterage
6 Exposure
from Field Work (1979)
Oysters
Triptych
After a Killing
Sibyl
At the Water’s Edge
The Toome Road
A Drink of Water
The Strand at Lough Beg
Casualty
Badgers
The Singer’s House
The Guttural Muse
Glanmore Sonnets
An Afterwards
The Otter
The Skunk
A Dream of Jealousy
Field Work
Song
Leavings
The Harvest Bow
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
Ugolino
from Sweeney Astray (1983)
Sweeney in Flight 1913
The Names of the Hare (1981)
from Station Island (1984)
The Underground
Sloe Gin
Chekhov on Sakhalin
Sandstone Keepsake
from Shelf Life
Granite Chip
Old Smoothing Iron
Stone from Delphi
Making Strange
The Birthplace
Changes
A Bat on the Road
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
The Railway Children
Widgeon
Sheelagh na Gig
‘Aye’ (from The Loaning)
The King of the Ditchbacks
Station Island
from Sweeney Redivivus
The First Gloss
Sweeney Redivivus
In the Beech
The First Kingdom
The First Flight
Drifting Off
The Cleric
The Hermit
The Master
The Scribes
Holly
An Artist
The Old Icons
In Illo Tempore
On the Road
Villanelle for an Anniversary (1986)
from The Haw Lantern (1987)
For Bernard and Jane McCabe
Alphabets
Terminus
From the Frontier of Writing
The Haw Lantern
From the Republic of Conscience
Hailstones
The Stone Verdict
The Spoonbait
Clearances
The Milk Factory
The Wishing Tree
Grotus and Coventina
Wolfe Tone
From the Canton of Expect
ation
The Mud Vision
The Disappearing Island
The Riddle
from The Cure at Troy (1990)
Voices from Lemnos
from Seeing Things (1991)
The Golden Bough
Markings
Man and Boy
An August Night
Field of Vision
The Pitchfork
The Settle Bed
from Glanmore Revisited
A Pillowed Head
A Royal Prospect
Wheels within Wheels
Fosterling
from Squarings
Lightenings
Settings
Crossings
Squarings
A Transgression (1994)
from The Spirit Level (1996)
The Rain Stick
Mint
A Sofa in the Forties
Keeping Going
Two Lorries
Damson
Weighing In
St Kevin and the Blackbird
from The Flight Path
Mycenae Lookout
The Gravel Walks
Whitby-sur-Moyola
‘Poet’s Chair’
The Swing
Two Stick Drawings
A Call
The Errand
A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also
The Strand
The Walk
At the Wellhead
At Banagher
Tollund
Postscript
Crediting Poetry (1995)
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Copyright
Poems 1966–1996
from DEATH OF A NATURALIST (1966)
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, 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.
Death of a Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy-headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
The Barn
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
The musty dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe’s edge, a clean spade, a pitchfork’s prongs:
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs
And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard –
And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.
Blackberry-Picking
for Philip Hobsbaum
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
Churning Day
A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast,
hardened gradually on top of the four crocks
that stood, large pottery bombs, in the small pantry.
After the hot brewery of gland, cud and udder,
cool porous earthenware fermented the buttermilk
for churning day, when the hooped churn was scoured
with plumping kettles and the busy scrubber
echoed daintily on the seasoned wood.
It stood then, purified, on the flagged kitchen floor.
Out came the four crocks, spilled their heavy lip
of cream, their white insides, into the sterile churn.
The staff, like a great whiskey-muddler fashioned
in deal wood, was plunged in, the lid fitted.
My mother took first turn, set up rhythms
that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached.
Hands blistered. Cheeks and clothes were spattered
with flabby milk.
Where finally gold flecks
began to dance. They poured hot water then,
sterilized a birchwood bowl
and little corrugated butter-spades.
Their short stroke quickened, suddenly
a yellow curd was weighting the churned-up white,
heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight
that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer,
heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.
The house would stink long after churning day,
acrid as a sulphur mine. The empty crocks
were ranged along the wall again, the butter
in soft printed slabs was piled on pantry shelves.
And in the house we moved with gravid ease,
our brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns,
the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk,
the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.