Opened Ground Read online

  ‘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

  from Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  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

  Seeing Things

  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,
r />   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.