Seamus Heaney

I was the sort of child who found more satisfying relationships in books than in real life, on the whole—and certainly more rewarding understandings of reality in books than in the social world I inhabited. I got vicarious satisfaction, for instance, from the power Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames had in their lives—how they were free to act out of their own understandings of the world.

As an adult I have received great pleasure and affirmation from the writer–reader relationship in poetry and from the depths and variations of perception and insight that poetry can make possible. Seamus Heaney was coming into his own as an internationally recognized poet just as I was initiating my own academic career in literature. I had the honest pleasure of meeting Heaney several times, once sitting next to him and conversing (as he later put it in his typically concrete way) “on the cusp of that formal horse-shoe bend at lunch.”¹

Seamus Heaney was an unpretentious man who lived in a very sensual world. His poetry is anchored in imagery and metaphor to a greater extent than for most poets. For Heaney, a “spirit level” (for instance) is not only the thing itself (what we call here a carpenter's level), but also the intangible concept the words evoke. I learned most of what I appreciate in metaphor from his poetry.

Heaney's poetry is mostly simple on the surface and very deep--comprehensible because anchored in the everyday images of this world, to which both poet and reader can respond sensually, via the five senses in the imagination. Simplicity in literature is mostly derided, especially in poetry, by academics. It is an achievement most poets and academics could never approach and thus dismiss.

But it gives hope to those who can accept it and see into it—hope that we tortured, bifurcated bags of flesh and bones and blood and brains can live with meaning, metaphorically, with our feet planted in the ground of our origins and our heads swaying in the passing winds of ideas. Seamus Heaney wrote two poems about the mythical character Antaeus², son of Gaia, who could not be killed as long as he maintained contact with his mother Earth, “cradled in the dark that wombed me / And nurtured in every artery / Like a small hillock.” It is only Hercules who can defeat Antaeus, Hercules who

. . . lifts his arms

in a remorseless V

. . . lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,

a sleeping giant,

pap for the dispossessed.

I gather some hope from this ending, despite its apparent agony of loss for those of us who are not “sky-born and royal,” like Hercules, son of Zeus, nursed by Hera. Heaney specifies that despite Hercules' triumph, Antaeus is not dead but sleeping, thus revising the myth that has Hercules smother Antaeus by breaking his ribs while he is elevated.

I cannot help but feel that we are becoming the dispossessed, that we are dispossessing ourselves from our native, physical world. Like Heaney's Antaeus, though, I hope we are just sleeping and that we will escape one day the very powerful grasp of the abstract realm and understand the vital necessity of our relationship with the natural world—not only for our own continuance as a species in this world but also for our ability to see and share through metaphor the greater values and meanings that emanate from this world. It is our “pap” and always will be.

With the death of Seamus Heaney this past week, we have lost a spiritual companion, a truly alert and hopeful soul, who loved this awful, aweful world. Thankfully, we can still be nourished with his words.

1Personal letter.

2The first and third quotes to follow are from the poem “Antaeus,” the second from the poem “Hercules and Antaeus,” both from the volume North (1975).