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  Though I be as I am to-night,

  there was a time

  when my strength was not feeble

  over a land that was not bad

  On splendid steeds,

  in life without sorrow,

  in my auspicious kingship

  I was a good, great king.

  In 1972, however, I was in no mood to follow the drab, old-fashioned lead of this kind of thing. It became a much more jacked-up performance altogether:

  Though I am Lazarus,

  there was a time

  when I dressed in purple

  and they fed from my hand.

  I was a good king,

  the tide of my affairs

  was rising, the world

  was the bit in my horse’s mouth.

  Robert Lowell’s example was operative here. His trick of heightening the sense by boosting the diction and planting new metaphors into the circuit was not lost on me. Nor was his unabashed readiness to subdue the otherness of the original to his own autobiographical neediness. I began to inflate myself and my situation into Sweeney’s, to make analogies between the early medieval Ulsterman who rocketed out of the north as a result of vehement squabbles there among the petty dynasties, and this poet from Co. Derry who had only recently come south to Co. Wicklow for purposes of retreat and composure. It all contributed to a velocity that was its own reward. I cuffed the original with a brusqueness and familiarity that had not been earned but that gave me immense satisfaction. I was using Buile Suibhne as a trampoline. I should have been showing it off but instead it was being pressed into service to show me off.

  Naturally, I did not feel this from day to day as I went baling through the stanzas. But I did have a nagging sense that the freedoms being exercised were not going to yield an integrated work. Riff by riff, it felt good, but there was no sense, as the pages piled up, of ‘thoughts long knitted to a single thought’. I had wanted the pressure and accumulating oneness which is the reward – and justification – of a sustained writing; what I was getting was a series of lyric highs, exciting enough in themselves but not gathering force between themselves. Nevertheless, since my primary aim had become the completion of a version of the whole text, I forged ahead until that goal was achieved. Then I simply went flat, fell into a kind of post-composition tristesse. I knew that it would all have to be done over again but I had not the stamina or the relish necessary for a fresh start.

  I cannot remember when I got the idea that the stanzas should be recast in a more hard-edged, pointed way; that they should have the definition of hedges in a winter sunset; that they should be colder, more articulated; should be tuned to a bleaker note; should be more constricted and ascetic; more obedient to the metrical containments and battened-down verbal procedures of the Irish itself. At any rate, it was while I was spending a month on Long Island in 1979, after my first semester at Harvard, that I suddenly started one morning to reshape stanzas from scratch, rhyming them and keeping my eyes as much to the left, on the Irish, as to the right, on O’Keefe’s unnerving trot.

  It was this closer inspection of the thickets of the Irish that made the second stint a different kind of engagement. Instead of the energy being generated by hurry and boldness, a certain intensity gathered through the steadier, more lexically concentrated gaze at individual words. Instead of the rhythmic principle being one of lanky, enjambed propulsion, the lines hurdling along for fear they might seize up, the unit of composition now became the quatrain itself and the metrical pattern became more end-stopped and boxed in.

  The eight lines I quoted earlier sounded now both more literal and more limited within the stanza-shape:

  Far other than to-night,

  far different my plight

  the times when with firm hand

  I ruled over a good land.

  Prospering, smiled upon,

  curbing some great-steed,

  I rode high, on the full tide

  of good luck and kingship.

  I still tried to get a self-igniting life between the words but kept them flintier and more niggardly than before. My favourite instance of the new asceticism comes at Section 73, where Sweeney praises the setting of a little monastery at Alternan. O’Keefe gives the place its Irish name and renders the relevant stanza as follows:

  Cliff of Farannan, abode of saints,

  with many fair hazels and nuts,

  swift cold water

  rushing down its side.

  In my original handling of this, I took fire at the possibility of making the saintliness of the place more resplendent than either the original poet or the unflashy O’Keefe would have dreamed of:

  O the tabernacle of the hazel wood

  on the cliff of Farannan,

  and the cataract glittering

  like the stem of a chalice!

  Seven years later, the gilding came off and the exclamation was at least minus its ‘O’:

  Sainted cliff at Alternan,

  nut grove, hazel wood!

  Cold quick sweeps of water

  fall down the cliff-side.

  III

  It is nine years since those lines were written, and sixteen since they were done in the freer register, so what I am doing here is recreating the feel of the writing experience rather than giving a report on the details of the procedure. Yet that feel is the sine qua non: the guarantee of the life of the thing. For in spite of the real enough influence of the cultural and political contexts I referred to earlier, the true anxiety and the true motivations of writing are much more inward, much more to do with freshets that start unexpectedly in moments of intent concentration and hope. Literary translation – or version-making or imitation or refraction or whatever one should call the linguistic carry-over that is mediated through a crib – is still an aesthetic activity. It has as much to do with form-feeling as with sense-giving, and unless the translator experiences the almost muscular sensation that rewards successful original composition, it is unlikely that the results of the text-labour will have life of its own.

  The closer, line by line, stanza by stanza, end-stopped, obedient, literal approach finally yielded more. I had a sense of accumulation rather than of truancy – a different satisfaction, not necessarily superior but more consoling in the execution of a long piece of composition. I had also forgotten about the political extensions that were originally intended. In fact, by the time Sweeney Astray appeared, I had got fed up with my own mournful bondings to the ‘matter of Ulster’ and valued more the otherness of Buile Suibhne as a poem from beyond. If, in the beginning, I was somewhat surprised that I had taken on the translation at all, in the end I was grateful to feel still somewhat estranged from what I had made of it. In fact, it was only after the translation had been completed for the second time and I had earned that familiarity which I had originally arrogated – it was only then that the work yielded its full reward. The freedom and peremptoriness which I had exercised prematurely returned in a burst of confidence and I produced the speedy poems included in Station Island under the general title of ‘Sweeney Redivivus’. The identification I had made previously between the green man and the rural child was admitted and even exulted in. ‘Sweeney’ was unreservedly rhymed with ‘Heaney’:

  Give him his due, in the end

  he opened my path to a kingdom

  of such scope and neuter allegiance

  my emptiness reigns at its whim.

  (‘Sweeney and the Cleric’)

  Poetry Ireland Review, Spring 1989

  On Poetry and Professing

  I

  I have spent much of my life teaching, at very different levels. I began in the early 1960s in St Thomas’s Secondary Intermediate School in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast, in front of a class of deprived and disaffected adolescent boys, many of whom would end up a decade later as active members of the provisional IRA. I proceeded from there to work in a teacher training college, also in Belfast, and to spend time trying to persuade student teachers of th
e value of imaginative literature and other kinds of creative play in the educational process; I went on to lecture on poetry in Queen’s University, and ended up in more recent years as a poet in residence at Harvard. In each of these places, members of the audience differed widely in literary awareness, and in the degree of their assent to the idea that poetry was a subject worth discussing at all; I have known both the heckling of the have-nots in St Thomas’s and the nods and gleams of the granny glasses in Harvard Hall; in each case there was a desire, repressed in the Belfast context but altogether ardent in Cambridge, a desire to have the worth and meaning of the art confirmed. What was at stake was the credibility of this honoured but hard to define category of human achievement called poetry. Even in Ballymurphy, those boys excluded by their social and cultural background from any contact with literary verse and disposed to regard it as some kind of fancy affectation, even they were curious despite their resistance. There were plenty of influences at work to make them shy away: peer pressure, the macho conventions of the playground in a boys’ school, a working-class shyness in the face of anything that smacked of middle-class pretension, but even so, the mystery of the thing interested them and every now and again during those English classes something steadied and came into focus: for a concentrated moment the words they were attending to made sense and went home as only poetry can.

  Another thing that happened during those English classes is also worth recalling. About once a week, and always unexpectedly, the headmaster of the school would suddenly appear at the classroom door. Mr McLaverty was a short-story writer of real distinction but he was also compulsively a teacher. He was meant to be in his headmaster’s office all day, administering, but instead he prowled the corridors in his tweed suit and polished brogues, seeking whom he might interrupt in order to get in a bit of the actual school-mastering that he missed so much. ‘Right, boys,’ he would exclaim as he hurried across the floor to claim the boys for his own. And then, ‘Right, Mr Heaney!’ in order to relieve me of responsibility for them, or rather to appoint me as his straight man in a double act which rarely varied. ‘Mr Heaney,’ he would continue, ‘are they working hard for you?’ ‘Yes, Mr MacLaverty,’ I would answer. ‘And are you doing any poetry with them?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I would reply, ‘I am indeed.’ ‘And are you seeing any improvement in them at all?’ To which the correct answer was, ‘Of course I am.’ And then, climactically, he would turn his attention very deliberately from the class to me and enquire, ‘Mr Heaney, when you look at the photograph of a rugby team in the newspaper, don’t you always know immediately from the look of the players’ faces which ones of them have studied poetry?’ And dutifully, unfailingly, I would answer, ‘Yes, Mr McLaverty, I do know,’ and McLaverty would nod triumphantly and turn back toward the desks. ‘There you are now, boys,’ he’d say. ‘Work hard and don’t end up down there with the rest of them, measuring the length of your spits at some street corner! Right, Mr Heaney!’ And away he would go in all his peremptory vigour, as memorable and problematical as poetry itself.

  When I say problematical, all I mean is that poetry cannot be proved in the way a theorem can. McLaverty could only manage to get away with his proposition that poetry changed people perceptibly for the better because I was ready to connive with him. And anyhow, the boys in the class knew that the whole thing was a masquerade. But it is precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies and fantastic scenarios that can draw us out and bring us close to ourselves. The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are or might be. In fact, Mr McLaverty’s caricature of the humanizing power of poetry was tempting as well as comic because it was drawing upon two and a half millennia of western aesthetic and educational theory. From Plato to the present, from the Athenian academy to the parent-teacher meeting at your local primary school, there has been an ongoing debate about the place and the point and the choice of imaginative writing in the curriculum, and about the relevance of such material to the formation of the good citizen’s sensibility and behaviour. In fact, McLaverty’s performance was in itself a kind of parody or exaggeration of one of the central ideas of this humanist tradition, the idea that there is an essential connection between the good and the beautiful, and that the study of the beautiful is actively conducive to virtue. This particular defence of the value of art was disastrously weakened in the last century, of course, by the historical fact of the Holocaust: what good is a devotion to and an appreciation of the beautiful, the question goes, if some of the most cultivated people in a most cultivated nation could authorize mass killings and attend a Mozart concert on the same evening? Yet if it is a delusion and a danger to expect poetry and music to do too much, it is a diminishment of them and a derogation to ignore what they can do.

  What they can do is testified to not only by Mr McLaverty but also by Shakespeare’s Caliban. In The Tempest, Caliban’s description of the effect that Ariel’s music produces in him could be read as a kind of paean to the effect of poetry itself. You remember the lines: Caliban is telling Stephano and Trinculo not to be worried about the mysterious tune that is coming out the sky above them and says:

  Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,

  That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again.

  ‘Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not’: that, as a description of the good of poetry and of literature in general, will do. It is not required that the experience of the sounds change Caliban into another kind of creature, or that it have a carryover effect upon his behaviour. The good of literature and of music is first and foremost in the thing itself and their first principle is that which William Wordsworth called in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure’, the kind of pleasure about which the language itself prompts us to say, ‘It did me good.’

  So: one function of university chairs such as the one we are here to inaugurate this evening is to promote the experience of that particular good. One function of the holder of such a chair is to enter the university in much the same way as Mr McLaverty entered my classroom, to use the occasion in such a way as to reinforce a belief in the fundamental purpose of ‘the spiritual intellect’s great work’.

  II

  The essential professing that poets do usually comes about at moments of crisis in their lives; what they have to say about problems they endure or resolve gets expressed first in terms which are personal and urgent, and then these ad hoc formulations about the art or the life become familiar points of reference, and may even attain the force of prescriptions.

  Take Keats’s famous letter to his brother George, the one where he simplifies his vision of the poetic destiny to a parable about the education of an intelligence into a soul: a school is needed and that school is the world of pain. This sacred text arose unpredictably from Keats’s own desperate need to square his essentially celebratory temperament with what he perceived to be the awful conditions. Or take Osip Mandelstam’s head-lightening faith that the poet is ‘a stealer of air’, and is therefore never a ‘worker’ in the sense officially demanded by the state, but works only in the sense that lacemakers work to make a design that is ‘air, perforations and truancy’, or bakers of doughnuts work to produce the antic hole rather than the worthy dough. Mandelstam’s reckless brilliance is a profession of poetry’s freedom which outstrips anything that is ever likely to be said on a podium; and, of course, it came at a correspondingly higher cost than the usual orthodoxies of the academy.

  Nevertheless if poetry is to be professed within the educational system, it makes sense that this should be done occasionally by the poets themselves; as long as they recognize the fundamental difference between their function as educators and their function as arti
sts, no harm need be done and a lot of good may even flow from their involvement. And anyhow, like everything else in the area of teaching, success will depend more upon the temperament of the poet–professor and his or her capacity to involve the student than upon any innate genius or acquired wisdom. Teaching is as much a mystery as it is a technique, and the aura of the person, his or her intellectual radiance or general trustworthiness, is going to have as much to do with the poet–professor’s impact as the size of the reputation or the intrinsic quality of the poetry itself.

  The great advantage a poet has is the fact that he or she is likely to possess a credible personal language – and obviously by this I don’t mean colourful ‘poetic’ speech. I mean rather that there will be no gap between the professional idiom and the personal recognitions: the way the poet speaks in the corner of a bar gossiping about the faults and strengths of a poem that has just appeared in The Irish Times will tend to be the way he speaks to students in the lecture room. Characteristically, there will be a professional attention to the technical aspects of the work combined with a more down-to-earth recognition that poetry is part of the usual life and an expectation that a poet or a poem should embody a certain amount of gumption and horse-sense. Furthermore, in spite of what might be generally assumed, poets are likely to be hard on fancy stuff, on soft-focus ‘feeling’ and hyped-up rhetoric; they know the dangers of archness and inflation and self-deception to which their ventures are prone and they are predisposed to be on the lookout for these flaws in the writing of others if not in their own.