enumerated the humiliations
we always took for granted, but not even he
considered this, I think, a call to action.
Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air
yet nobody felt blamed. He had confirmed us.
When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut
we turned for home and the usual harassment
by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.
II
And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.
Books open in the newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
against the flanks of milking cows were busy
paving and pencilling their first causeways
across the prescribed texts. The paving stones
of quadrangles came next and a grammar
of imperatives, the new age of demands.
They would banish the conditional for ever,
this generation born impervious to
the triumph in our cries of de profundis.
Our faith in winning by enduring most
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.
III
What looks the strongest has outlived its term.
The future lies with what’s affirmed from under.
These things that corroborated us when we dwelt
under the aegis of our stealthy patron,
the guardian angel of passivity,
now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.
I repeat the word ‘stricken’ to myself
and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds
edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.
I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,
the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,
to know there is one among us who never swerved
from all his instincts told him was right action,
who stood his ground in the indicative,
whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.
The Mud Vision
Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns
Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath
The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers
And punks with aerosol sprays held their own
With the best of them. Satellite link-ups
Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports
Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour
And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked
The line between panic and formulae, screentested
Our first native models and the last of the mummers,
Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged
And airy as a man on a springboard
Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive
And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,
Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud
Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,
A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub
Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.
We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun
That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed
Original clay, transfigured and spinning.
And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper
Could never entirely clean off the windscreen,
Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz
Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some
Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads
To be prepared for whatever. Vigils
Began to be kept around puddled gaps,
On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies
And a rota of invalids came and went
On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.
A generation who had seen a sign!
Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light
Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk
Was all about who had seen it and our fear
Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves
Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow
Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat’s back
So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch,
We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test
That would prove us beyond expectation.
We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.
One day it was gone and the east gable
Where its trembling corolla had balanced
Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions
Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss
That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked
The site from every angle, experts
Began their post factum jabber and all of us
Crowded in tight for the big explanations.
Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,
Our one chance to know the incomparable
And dive to a future. What might have been origin
We dissipated in news. The clarified place
Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except
You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us
Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,
Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.
The Disappearing Island
Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
Between its blue hills and those sandless shores
Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,
Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth
And hung our cauldron like a firmament,
The island broke beneath us like a wave.
The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there was vision.
Notes
The pieces included here from Stations were first printed in a pamphlet in Belfast (Ulsterman Publications, 1975); and the extracts from Sweeney Astray are based upon Irish originals in Buile Suibnue. Sweeney’s voice is also present, displaced out of its medieval context, in ‘Sweeney Redivivus’.
‘Station Island’ is set upon an island of that name in Lough Derg in Co. Donegal. For centuries it has been the site of a pilgrimage which involves fasting, praying and going barefoot around the ‘beds’ – stone circles believed to be the remaining foundations of early monastic buildings. Each unit of these penitential exercises is called a ‘station’. William Carleton, who figures in Section II, published a famous account of his experiences on the island in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830–3). The poem by St John of the Cross translated in Section XI is ‘Cantar del alma que se huelga de conoscar a Dios por fe’. (Further annotations to this title poem and to some other poems in the volume are available in Station Island, Faber, 1984.)
S.H.
Index
Act of Union, 1
After a Killing, 1
Afterwards, An, 1
Alphabets, 1
Anahorish, 1
Artist, An, 1
At the Water’s Edge, 1
Badgers, 1
Blackberry-Picking, 1
Bog Oak, 1
Bog Queen, 1
Bogland, 1
Bone Dreams, 1
Broagh, 1
Bye-Child, 1
Casualty, 1
Chekhov on Sakhalin, 1
Clearances, 1
Cleric, The, 1
Cloistered, 1
Constable Calls, A, 1
Death of a Naturalist, 1
Digging, 1
Disappearing Island, The, 1
Dream of Jealousy, A, 1
Drifting Off, 1
Drink of Water, A, 1
England’s Difficulty,
1
Exposure, 1
Field Work (from), 1
First Flight, The, 1
First Kingdom, The, 1
Follower, 1
For Bernard and Jane McCabe, 1
Fosterage, 1
From the Canton of
Expectation, 1
From the Frontier of Writing, 1
From the Republic of Conscience, 1
Funeral Rites, 1
Gifts of Rain, 1
Glanmore Sonnets, 1
Granite Chip, 1
Grauballe Man, The, 1
Guttural Muse, The, 1
Hailstones, 1
Harvest Bow, The, 1
Haw Lantern, The, 1
Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann, A, 1
Hercules and Antaeus, 1
Holly, 1
Incertus, 1
In Illo Tempore, 1
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge, 1
In the Beech, 1
King of the Ditchbacks, The, 1
Kite for Michael and Christopher, A, 1
Limbo, 1
Making Strange, 1
Master, The, 1
Mid-Term Break, 1
Milk Factory, The, 1
Ministry of Fear, 1
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication, 1
Mud Vision, The, 1
Nesting-Ground, 1
New Song, A, 1
Night Drive, 1
North, 1
Old Smoothing Iron, 1
On the Road, 1
Oracle, 1
Other Side, The, 1
Otter, The, 1
Oysters, 1
Peninsula, The, 1
Personal Helicon, 1
Poem, 1
Punishment, 1
Railway Children, The, 1
Relic of Memory, 1
Requiem for the Croppies, 1
Sandstone Keepsake, 1
Scribes, The, 1
Seed Cutters, The, 1
Shelf Life (from), 1
Sibyl, 1
Singer’s House, The, 1
Singing School (from), 1
Skunk, The, 1
Sloe Gin, 1
Song, 1
Spoonbait, The, 1
Station Island, 1
Stations of the West, The, 1
Stone from Delphi, 1
Stone Verdict, The, 1
Strand at Lough Beg, The, 1
Strange Fruit, 1
Summer Home, 1
Summer 1969, 1
Sunlight, 1
Sweeney Astray, 1
Sweeney in Connacht, 1
Sweeney Praises the Trees, 1
Sweeney Redivivus (from), 1
Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig, 1
Sweeney’s Last Poem, 1
Terminus, 1
Thatcher, 1
Tollund Man, The, 1
Toome Road, The, 1
Trial Runs, 1
Triptych, 1
Underground, The, 146
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces, 1
Visitant, 1
Wedding Day, 1
Westering, 1
Whatever You Say Say Nothing (from), 1
Wife’s Tale, The, 1
Wishing Tree, The, 1
Wolfe Tone, 1
This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney’s published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize- winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).
‘His is “close-up” poetry — close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.’ John Banville
‘More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.’ John Carey
‘Heaney’s voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself.’ Helen Vendler
Author biography
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize.
by the same author
poetry
DEATH OF A NATURALIST
DOOR INTO THE DARK
WINTERING OUT
NORTH
FIELD WORK
STATION ISLAND
SWEENEY ASTRAY
SWEENEY’S FLIGHT (with photographs by Rachel Giese)
THE HAW LANTERN
SEEING THINGS
LAMENTS BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI (translated with Stanislaw Baráncazk)
OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996
THE SPIRIT LEVEL
BEOWULF
ELECTRIC LIGHT
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
THE RATTLE BAG (edited with Ted Hughes)
THE SCHOOL BAG (edited with Ted Hughes)
prose
PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968–1978
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE
THE REDRESS OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES
FINDERS KEEPERS: SELECTED PROSE 1971–2001
play
THE CURE AT TROY
THE BURIAL AT THEBES
Copyright
First published in 1990
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74-77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2009
All rights reserved
© Seamus Heaney, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1987
The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978—0—571—25077—6
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.