[A. E. Stallings]

I had talked a little bit about Heaney's sestina, "Two Lories," in the Poetry of Public Events thread. Heaney works both in controlled free verse, and in form. He comes in for a lot of criticism from various camps--for not addressing political issues of Northern Island, or for addressing them. And getting the Nobel probably makes one something of a target. He is capable of descending into self-parody, and of writing precious poems about poetry (a genre best avoided by most people). But when he is on top of his game, he's hard to beat. His gorgeous slant rimes are, to me, part of a Celtic and old Anglo Saxon tradition--with the focus on consonants (I think of alliterative verse, for instance)--as opposed to pure rime, with its attention to vowels, which seems to me more courtly and Norman--I think of Richard Wilbur.

Here is one I particularly like, from <u>The Spirit Level</u> (1996) Faber & Faber:

Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by A. E. Stallings:


Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

This is a query to ask for information about the poem. I haven't read Heaney so I am not familar with his themes. This poem consists of the reflections of an old man who finds his memories of the past invoked by the discovery of a mint plant. (The mint plant also reminds him that there is a vibrant youthful world happening beyond the narrowing grounds of his own home.) My question is about the last stanza. What exactly is being said here? Are the inmates liberated in that yard previous occupants of the house that have died? His parents? Are the disregarded ones parents who are ignored by their children? Or are the liberated inmates children who have left home and the disregarded ones children ingored by their parents growing almost as strangers in their own home? Or is it all about something else? Or am I not to be so inquisitive---should I merely sit back and enjoy his technique?

ewrgall

[A. E. Stallings]

Actually, a very good question. I'd have to say that this is probably not very typical of Heaney and his themes... But one of the things I like about this poem is the curious ending. I take the "yard" at the end and "inmates" to be images from prison--the disregarded, in that case, the poor and downtrodden who might turn to crime, who would more likely end up in jail (and this might have another twist, in Ireland). Not to make too much of it--the poem is still about the mint as well--that thrives and gives its blessings in spite of total neglect.

[wendy v]

Alicia, thanks for bringing Heaney to the forum. Don't think I've seen him mentioned on Erato before, and wondered why. This poem you've posted is very fine. Here's another from the same book that always gets me.


The Gravel Walks

River gravel. In the beginning, that.
High summer, and the angler's motorbike
Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight
Whose ghost we'd lately questioned: 'Any luck?'

As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts
Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.
The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits
Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water
Where minnows schooled that we scared when we
played --
An eternity that ended once a tractor
Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

And cement mixers began to come to life
And men in dungarees, like captive shades,
Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if
The Pharaoh's brickyards burned inside their heads.

`

Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.
Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.
Its plain, champing song against the shovel
Soundtests and sandblasts words like 'honest worth'.

Beautiful in or out of the river,
The kingdom of gravel was inside you too --
Deep down, far back, clear water running over
Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady
As you went stooping with your barrow full
Into an absolution of the body,
The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

So walk on air against your better judgment
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called 'The Gravel Walks' that conjures
green.



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited September 19, 2001).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

THE HAW LANTERN has eight sonnets under the title, "Clearances," all elegiac, all employing slant rime. Here's a sample.

3

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives --
Never closer the rest of our lives.


Bob

[A. E. Stallings]

Wendy and Bob--thanks for posting these.

Wendy, I particularly love the rimes in this--gravel/shovel; barrow full/ marrow feel. Wonderful.

Bob, I sometimes like his sonnets less than his other lyrics, but I do like that one. This one feels almost accentual rather than accentual/syllabic--I get five beats most lines, but often with the beats rubbing shoulders--with a lot of prepositions promoted. He does, though, often throw what look like tetrameters into the mix. It would be interested to hear him read them aloud.

There is a poem I like a lot that I simply cannot find--it is a little lyric, called, I think, "The Pump." I think it is from one of the earlier books. <u>North</u>, perhaps? But it is not, for some reason, collected in <u>Opened Ground</u>. I'd be very grateful if someone would post it here. Thanks.

[Tom]

.

[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

Alicia, is this the one?

She came every morning to draw water
Like an old bat staggering up the field:
The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled,
Announced her. I recall
Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.
Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable
It fell back through her window and would lie
Into the water set out on the table.
Where I have dipped to drink again, to be
Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,
"Remember the giver," fading off the lip.

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks so much, Bob--

Unfortunately, no, that isn't the one, alas (ain't I difficult?)-but a good guess--and a lovely example!

The one I mean is, I think, actually called "The Pump". It isn't in "The Haw Lantern" or "Field", which I have both, or "The Spirit Level", any of the selected/collecteds. I THINK it might be in North. Anyone?

[Tom]

this one?

For Mary Heaney

I. SUNLIGHT

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

by Seamus Heaney
From "North", 1975