He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
Seamus Heaney
2 comments:
"Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again."
That is genius! Did you notice it is a haiku. Surely not a coincidence.
It is one of the cleverest ways of using a haiku that I have seen. I like the form, but I always get a feeling that it is trying too hard to be 'zen', to be pithy yet significant. It seems to work here because it does not really draw attention to itself, so carefully has it been placed. And yet you never get the feeling that the poem has been crafted. The lines seem like they belong there, like they could not be substituted.
'Revenant', a word that I've always felt perhaps too self-conscious to use; here it finds its place amid the familiar-unfamiliar 'dawn-sniffing'. And "question me again"; poignant but also startlingly bereft of sentimentality, that bane of the elegiac poem. I think it's very important for anyone setting out to write poems such as this to excise from their minds all traces of form and propriety, because any mode of thought that proceeds in an orderly fashion will always find itself impeded by social abstractions (such as sentimentality, such as banality, such as 'there are no words to describe what i'm feeling'). Heaney here of course displays a great affinity for exactly the opposite tendency, displays a determination to show and not tell. Whatever feeling exists in the poem arises from the beautifully structured and yet retrospectively inevitable sentences, like "everyone held his breath and trembled" (that sentence would have been unremarkable and maybe also unsalvageable without the 'his' instead of the obvious "their".) like "raise a weathered thumb", like "in his still knowable face". Heaney to me represents everything I have come to believe about the power of the specific to conjure within us the sorts of emotions that make us recognizably human; reaffirms to me that we can only recreate our humanity by returning to the specific, to what was the present tense.
I agree with your haiku obs. I think many haikus suffer from a problem similar to sentences such as the one below:
"The past can always be repudiated."
(I jotted this down a long while ago, when I was perhaps thinking of a quarrel I had with Sue.)
Today I return to it in puzzlement. Whatever could I have meant? Haikus that want to say 'something' might knock against a similar inability to become meaningful within the syllabic restrictions of the form; sounding 'Zen' is a definite symptom of such a degeneracy into abstraction.
On the other hand, there is always
the specific to turn to ( :-) ):
(From a haiku poet at the time of his death):
"Pampas grass, now dry,
once bent this way
and that.
"
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