Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001 Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  for Dennis O'Driscoll and Julie O'Callaghan

  Contents / v i i i

  from Sounding Auden 209

  Lowell's Command 220

  from The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath 238

  The Place of Writing 253

  1. On W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee 253

  2. On Thomas Kinsella 262 Edwin Muir 269

  from The Redress of Poetry 281

  from Extending the Alphabet: Christopher Marlowe 286

  John Clare's Prog 300

  A Torchlight Procession of One: Hugh MacDiarmid 319

  from Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas 339 Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

  and Philip Larkin 343

  from Counting to a Hundred: Elizabeth Bishop 361

  Burns's Art Speech 378 Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times:

  The Irish Poet and Britain 396

  III

  Stevie Smith's Collected Poems 419

  Joyce's Poetry 422

  Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar 425

  Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile 429

  Norman MacCaig, 1910—1996 433

  Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996 437

  On Ted Hughes's 'Littleblood' 441

  Secular and Millennial Milosz 444

  FOREWORD

  This book reprints work extracted from Preoccupations (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1988), The Redress of Poetry (1995) and The Place of Writing (Scholars Press, 1989), a volume containing the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature given at Emory University in 1988. Also included are several pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books. A number of these were done since 1995, but I have also taken the opportunity to include material that might have appeared, had the circumstances been different, in earlier collections. 'Learning from Eliot' and 'Edwin Muir', for example, date from 1988—1989, the year The Government of the Tongue was published, but they still did not appear in The Redress of Poetry, because that book was made up solely of lectures given when I was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. On the other hand, 'Place and Displacement' (1984) has for years enjoyed a separate life as a pamphlet, but now seems to belong in this more general reckoning. Revisions have been made in almost all of the previously uncollected work; in pieces reprinted from the earlier collections, abridgements and a few revisions have also been made.

  On the playground the phrase 'finders keepers' probably still expresses glee and stakes a claim, so in that sense it can apply as well to the experience of a reader of poetry: the first encounter with work that excites and connects will induce in the reader a similar urge to celebrate and take possession of it. My title is therefore an acknowledgement that many of these essays have their origins in such moments. Mostly they are appreciations, reports on the good of poetry itself, attempts to 'keep' it and to say why it is worth keeping. They are also, of course, testimonies to the fact that poets themselves are finders and keepers, that their vocation is to look after art and life by being discoverers and custodians of the unlooked for.

  The book has the same shape as Preoccupations. There is an autobiographical or topical slant to the first section; in the second, the work has a more specifically literary focus and deals mostly with the achievement of individual authors; and the third section is a kind of kite-tail, a stringing out of miscellaneous pieces that for all their brevity retain, I hope, a certain interest.

  Some words I wrote in the Foreword to Preoccupations still apply to what is going on in the following pages: 'The essays selected here are held together by searches for answers to central preoccupying questions: How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?'

  I have to thank my editor at Faber, Paul Keegan, for proposing the idea of the book and for his informed interest in what it might contain. Obviously, the non-appearance here of previously collected work doesn't mean that it has been repudiated. I found it difficult, for example, to decide between the early, comparatively relaxed 'Yeats as an Example?' and a later, more soberly considered 'Introduction' that appeared first in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and was reprinted in Faber's paperback selection of Yeats (2000). The contents list could have been longer, could have been shorter. As it stands, the book records some of the ways one poet answered poetry's call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line.

  S.H., January 2002

  Mossbawn

  OMPHALOS

  I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is County Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toome-bridge, the American troops manoeuvre in the fields along the road, but all of that great historical action does not disturb the rhythms of the yard. There the pump stands, a slender, iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle, painted a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then another as the man pumped and pumped, the plunger slugging up and down, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

  I do not know what age I was when I got lost in the pea-drills in a field behind the house, but it is a half-dream to me, and I've heard about it so often that I may even be imagining it. Yet, by now, I have imagined it so long and so often that I know what it was like: a green web, a caul of veined light, a tangle of rods and pods, stalks and tendrils, full of assuaging earth and leaf smell, a sunlit lair. I'm sitting as if just wakened from a winter sleep and gradually become aware of voices, coming closer, calling my name, and for no reason at all I have begun to weep.

  All children want to crouch in their secret nests. I loved the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  boxwood hedge in the front of the house, the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre; but especially I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse's collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life, looking out on the familiar yard as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness. Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you. In that tight cleft, you sensed the embrace of light and branches, you were a little Atlas shouldering it all, a little Cerunnos pivoting a world of antlers.

  The world grew. Mossbawn, the first place, widened. There was what we called the Sandy Loaning, a sanded pathway between old hedges leading in off the road, first among fields and then through a small bog, to a remote farmhouse. It was a silky, fragrant world there, and for the first few hundred yards you were safe enough. The sides of the lane were banks of earth topped with broom and ferns, quilted with moss and primroses. Behind the broom, in the rich grass, cattle munched reassuringly. Rabbits occasionally broke cover and ran a
head of you in a flurry of dry sand. There were wrens and goldfinches. But gradually those lush and definite fields gave way to scraggy marshland. Birch trees stood up to their pale shins in swamps. The ferns thickened above you. Scuffles in old leaves made you nervous and always you dared yourself to pass the badger's sett, a wound of fresh mould in an overgrown ditch where the old brock had gone to earth. Around that badger's hole there hung a field of dangerous force. This was the realm of bogeys. We'd heard about a mystery man who haunted the fringes of the bog here, we talked about mankeepers and mosscheepers, creatures uncatalogued by any naturalist, but none the less real for that. What was a mosscheeper, anyway, if not the soft, malicious sound the word itself made, a siren of collapsing sibilants coaxing you out towards bog pools lidded with innocent grass, quicksands and quagmires? They were all there and spreading

  out over a low, birch-screened apron of land towards the shores of Lough Beg.

  That was the moss, forbidden ground. Two families lived at the heart of it, and a recluse, called Tom Tipping, whom we never saw, but in the morning on the road to school we watched his smoke rising from a clump of trees, and spoke his name between us until it was synonymous with mystery man, with unexpected scuttlings in the hedge, with footsteps slushing through long grass.

  To this day, green wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even glimpsed from a car or a train, possess an immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated.

  Beyond the moss spread the narrow reaches of Lough Beg, and in the centre of Lough Beg lay Church Island, a spire rising out of its yew trees, a local mecca. St Patrick, they said, had fasted and prayed there fifteen hundred years before. The old graveyard was shoulder-high with meadowsweet and cow parsley, overhung with thick, unmolested yew trees, and, somehow, those yews fetched me away to Agincourt and Crecy, where the English archers' bows, I knew, had been made of yew also. All I could ever manage for my bows were tapering shoots of ash or willow from a hedge along the stackyard, but even so, to have cut a bough from that silent compound on Church Island would have been a violation too treacherous to contemplate.

  If Lough Beg marked one limit of the imagination's nesting ground, Slieve Gallon marked another. Slieve Gallon is a small mountain that lies in the opposite direction, taking the eye out over grazing and ploughed ground and the distant woods of Moy-ola Park, out over Grove Hill and Back Park and Castledawson. This side of the country was the peopled, communal side, the land

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  of haycock and corn-stook, of fence and gate, milk-cans at the end of lanes and auction notices on gate pillars. Dogs barked from farm to farm. Sheds gaped at the roadside, bulging with fodder. Behind and across it went the railway, and the noise that hangs over it constantly is the heavy shunting of an engine at Castledawson station.

  I have a sense of air, of lift and light, when this comes back to me. Light dancing off the shallows of the River Moyola, shifting in eddies on the glaucous whirlpool. Light changing on the mountain itself, that stood like a barometer of moods, now blue and hazy, now green and close up. Light above the spires, away at Magherafelt. Light frothing among the bluebells on Grove Hill. And the lift of the air is resonant, too, with vigorous musics. A summer evening carries the fervent and melancholy strain of hymn-singing from a gospel hall among the fields, and the hawthorn blooms and the soft white patens of the elderflower hang dolorous in the hedges. Or the rattle of Orange drums from Aughrim Hill sets the heart alert and watchful as a hare.

  For if this was the country of community, it was also the realm of division. Like the rabbit pads that loop across grazing, and tunnel the soft growths under ripening corn, the lines of sectarian antagonism and affiliation followed the boundaries of the land. In the names of its fields and townlands, in their mixture of Scots and Irish and English etymologies, this side of the country was redolent of the histories of its owners. Broagh, the Long Rigs, Bell's Hill; Brian's Field, the Round Meadow, the Demesne; each name was a kind of love made to each acre. And saying the names like this distances the places, turns them into what Wordsworth once called a prospect of the mind. They lie deep, like some script indelibly written into the nervous system.

  I always remember the pleasure I had in digging the black earth in our garden and finding, a foot below the surface, a pale seam of sand. I remember, too, men coming to sink the shaft of the pump and digging through that seam of sand down into the bronze riches of the gravel that soon began to puddle with the spring water. That pump'marked an original descent into earth, sand, gravel, water. It centred and staked the imagination, made its foundation the foundation of the omphalos itself. So I find it alto-

  gether appropriate that an old superstition ratifies this hankering for the underground side of things. It is a superstition associated with the Heaney name. In Gaelic times, the family were involved with ecclesiastical affairs in the diocese of Derry, and had some kind of rights to the stewardship of a monastic site at Banagher in the north of the county. There is a St Muredach O'Heney associated with the old church at Banagher; and there is also a belief that sand lifted from the ground at Banagher has beneficent, even magical, properties—if it is lifted from the site by one of the Heaney family name. Throw sand that a Heaney has lifted after a man going into court, and he will win his case. Throw it after your team as they go out on the pitch, and they will win the game.

  READING

  When I was learning to read, towards the end of 1945, the most important books in the house were the ration books—the pink clothes coupons and the green 'points' for sweets and groceries. There wasn't much reading done apart from the deaths column of the Irish Weekly and the auctions page of the Northern Constitution. 'I am instructed by the representatives of the late John James Halferty, Drumanee . . .' My father lay on the sofa and rehearsed the acres, roods and perches of arable and meadow land in a formal tone and with a certain enlargement of the spirit.

  On a shelf, behind a screen and too high to be reached anyhow, there were four or five mouldering volumes that may have belonged to my Aunt Susan from her days in Orange's Academy, but they remained closed books to me. The first glimpse I have of myself reading on my own is one of those orphaned memories, a moment without context that will always stay with me. It is a book from the school library—a padlocked box that was opened more or less as a favour—involving explorers in cork helmets and 'savages', with illustrations of war canoes on a jungle river. The oil lamp is lit and a neighbour called Hugh Bates is interrupting me. 'Boys, oh, boys! This Seamus fellow is a great scholar. What book are you in now, son?' And my father is likely wringing what he can from

  the moment with 'He's as bad as Pat McGuckin this minute.' Pat McGuckin was a notorious bachelor farmer—a cousin of ours— who was said to burn his scone like King Alfred every time he lifted a book. Years later, when Death of a Naturalist was published, the greatest commendation at home was 'Lord knows Pat would fairly have enjoyed this.'

  Of course, there were always religious magazines like The Far

  East and the Alessenge) Pudsy Ryan in the children's corner of

  the former was the grown-ups' idea of a side-splitting turn, but even then I found his misspellings a bit heavy-handed. Far better were the technicolor splendours of Korky the Cat and Big Eggo in The Dandy and The Beano. The front pages of these comics opened like magic casements on Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty, Hungry Horace, Keyhole Kate, Julius Sneezer and Jimmy and his Magic Patch and probably constituted my first sense of the invitations of fiction. They were passed round at school, usually fairly tatter
ed, but every now and again my mother brought a new one from Castledawson, without a fold in it, its primary colours blazing with excitements to come. Occasionally, also, an American comic— all colour from beginning to end—arrived from the American air-base nearby, with Li'l Abner, Ferdinand and Blondie speaking a language that even Pat McGuckin did not know.

  There was a resistance to buying new comics in our house, not out of any educational nicety, but because of a combination of two attitudes: that they were a catch-penny and that somehow they were the thin end of the wedge, that if you let them into the house the next step was The Empire News, Thompson's Weekly, Tit-Bits and The News of the World. Nevertheless, I ended up persuading my mother to place a regular order for The Champion, a higher-class comic altogether, featuring a Biggles-rides-again figure called Rockfist Rogan and Ginger Nutt ('the boy who takes the bis-cake', in South Derry parlance) and Colwyn Dane, the sleuth. With The Champion I entered the barter market for The Rover, The Hotspur, The Wizard and any other pulp the presses of old England could deliver. I skimmed through all those 'ain'ts' and 'cors' and 'yoicks' and 'blimeys', and skimmed away contented.

  So what chance had Kitty the Hare against all that? Our Boys

  appeared regularly, a cultural antidote with official home backing, healthy as a Christian Brother on a winter morning, the first step towards Ireland's Own. Cultural debilitations! I preferred the japes of Ginger Nutt, the wheezes of Smith of the Lower Fourth, the swish of gowns, the mortarboard and the head's study to the homely toils of Murphy among the birettas. It would take Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Kavanagh's The Great Hunger to get over that surrender.

  My first literary frisson, however, came on home ground. There was an Irish history lesson at school which was in reality a reading of myths and legends. A textbook with large type and heavy Celticized illustrations dealt with the matter of Ireland from the Tuatha De Danaan to the Norman Invasion. I can still see Brian Boru with his sword held like a cross reviewing the troops at Clontarf. But the real imaginative mark was made with a story of the Dagda, a dream of harp music and light, confronting and defeating Balor of the Evil Eye on the dark fortress of Tory Island. Cuchulain and Ferdia also sank deep, those images of wounds bathed on the green rushes and armour clattering in the ford.