Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry -1

I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. - Seamus Heaney

In a sense, this title is somewhat misleading; Seamus Heaney, to the best of my knowledge, has had very little impact on poetry written in Sinhala, Tamil and English in Sri Lanka. However, in another sense, that is precisely the point - Heaney is the kind of poet who can act as a galvanizing force on emerging Sri Lankan poets because he clearly shares with them many of the preoccupying problems, cultural dilemmas, complexities of colonial history and the challenging compunctions of linguistic experimentations. In the next few columns, I plan to discuss the poetry of Seamus Heaney in relation to the ways in which it can fecundate the imaginations of local poets and offer us invigorating paths of rediscovery. Hence, these observations of mine are animated by a prospective, as opposed to a retrospective, sprit of inquiry.

Last week, in one of my classes, I was discussing the problematic of representations of race and ethnicity in art and literature. A student made the point that these representations can occur at various levels of ascending complexity and that in Seamus Heaney’s case, he was able to use etymological histories of words and pronunciations of words to bring to the surface certain occluded racial differentiations and dislocations ushered in by colonial domination. I thought he made a good point; having been an admirer of Heaney’s writings for many years, I knew exactly what the student was driving at.

Seamus Heaney is one of the leading poets in the world. Some have made the bold claim that he is the finest poet writing in English today. Robert Lowell said that he is ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats.’ Heaney has been honoured with numerous awards and accolades including the Nobel Prize in 1995 and the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2006. He is an extremely popular poet. Normally, in most countries poetry books do not sell too well; however, the case of Heaney’s books of poetry, they sell in the remarkably assuring five figures. This is indeed a rare phenomenon in the world of letters.

Heaney was born in 1939 in a farmhouse in North Ireland. The rural milieu forms a very important part of his poetry. In 1957 he was admitted to the Queens University of Belfast, and he graduated with a first class honours. During this period he began to feel the anxieties generated by contradictory pulls, which were later transmuted into memorable poetry.

He sought to harmonize, not always successfully, the demands of a sophisticated literary education and the allure of inherited culture, In 1967, Heaney published his major book of poems, ‘Death of a Naturalist’, that won immediate critical acclaim for him. Since then he has been publishing both poetry and prose works that are of an exceptionally high order. Among his volumes of poetry are ‘Wintering out (1972), North (1975), Fieldwork (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), District and Circle (2006) and ‘Human Chain (2010) .As I stated earlier, his books are extremely popular and they add up to over sixty five percent of sales of living poets in Britain.

In the next few columns what I intend to do is to point out certain areas in which Seamus Heaney can be a guiding light for modern poets in Sri Lanka writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English. One of the defining features of Heaney’s poetry is his lyricism; here he focuses on how in lyric poetry ‘our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

’The function of lyric is not narrative or drama but, in the words of the distinguished critic Helen Vendler, ‘to present, adequately and truthfully, through the means of temporally prolonged symbolic form, the private mind and heart caught in the events of a geographical place and a historical epoch.’ According to her, Heaney has accomplished that for himself, his country and his time, while extending the literary legacies upon which they depend. In doing so, he has been able to rejuvenate the English of Irish poetry.

One of Heaney’s indubitable strengths is to expand the visionary, syntactic, tonal, rhythmic range of the English lyric. As he himself remarked, ‘in Ireland at the moment I would see the necessity, since I’m not involved in the tradition of the English lyric, to take the English lyric and make it eat stuff that it has never eaten before…..like all the messy and, it would seem, incomprehensible obsessions in the North, and make it still an English lyric.’

It seems to me, the real strength of Heaney has to be located in his immense capacity for lyrical exploration of the complex conjunctions and disjunctions between Irish and English cultures.

When examining the lyrical impulse of Heaney, it becomes evident that it has been channelled aggressively and fruitfully towards pastoral poetry. Seamus Heaney’s pastoral poems are outstanding for what they have achieved and the directions for growth that they indicate.

Here indeed is an area that we in Sri Lanka can draw upon productively, as many poets writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English have been fascinated by the pastoral tradition. In the case of traditional Sinhala literature while the classical ‘Gi’ poets buried themselves under the imperatives of artificial ornamentation, the Sandesha poets and folk poets displayed the invigorating power of pastoral poetry. In works such as Selalihini Sandeshaya, Gira Sandeshaya and Hansa Sandeshaya, one sees the emergence of pastoral poetry in its full authenticity carrying cultural echoes and topographical meanings that lend them vibrancy.

In the case of modern Sinhala poetry, while Colombo poets such as Alwis Perera, Meemana Prematilake, Kudaligama were not unaware of the western tradition of pastoral poetry, and at times even sought to draw on it, their understanding of it was superficial and failed carry a ring of authority.

It is only a poet like Wimalaratne Kumaragama, who was able, in some of his poems, to infuse the pastoral genre with the density of local experience, drawing on his experiences in the North Western Province as a District Revenue Officer.

The poet who has demonstrated convincingly the possibilities of the pastoral form is Gunadasa Amarsekera. His path-breaking collection of poems ‘Bhava Geetha’ contains some of the finest pastoral poems in Sinhala such as ‘Unduvap Avilla’ and ‘Andura Ape Duka Nivavi.’

The genre pf pastoral poetry has taken on different visages in different cultures guided by the necessities of language, topographical variations and cultural values. In the Western tradition, the idea of pastoral poetry makes its triumphant appearance in Greek culture, followed by Roman culture and developed variously in different European cultures. If we consider the English tradition, we see how in the hands of poets as diverse as Spencer, Milton, Pope, Marvell, Arnold, Clare they received specific inflections.

The popular poem by Christopher Marlowe, titled ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love; captures the essence and dynamism of early pastoral poetry. The centrality of shepherds, the inter -animation of the urban and natural words and the lyrical impulse are clearly evident.

Come live with me

and be my love

And we will all the

pleasures prove

That valleys, groves,

hills and fields,

Woods or steepy

mountain yields

What is interesting about Seamus Heaney’s pastoral poetry is his uncanny ability to infuse it with a charge and vibrancy, weight of meaning, that succeeded, in many ways, in transforming the genre.

He was able to incorporate into his pastoral poems some of his most urgent themes related to social dissension, cultural dislocation, political antagonisms, and thereby extend the discursive range of the genre. The disciplining power of the genre enabled him to treat some of the troubling political events without forfeiting the heart-beat of poetry. He was able to interfuse the actual and the symbolic, literal and allegorical, political and philological, which served to enhance the power of pastoral poetry as well.

To my mind, one of the important lessons that Seamus Heaney can teach us is that though human beings constitute a part of nature, obeying the demands of the cycles of growth and decay, human beings are also fully aware of the fact that they can transcend the vicissitudes of time and the interdictions of mortality. The well-fashioned, well-articulated, pastoral poem becomes an emblem of that potentiality. Heaney’s pastoral poems, then, are full of interesting possibilities that we can follow with a sense of adventure and of course with profit.

The pastoral is a genre in literature that portrays life of shepherds, usually in an idealized and romanticized setting, with an eye on sophisticated urban audiences. This conjunction of rural beauty and urban taste is discernible as far back as Virgil and Theocritus. However, over the decades and centuries, the pastoral mode extended itself in interesting ways in terms of thematic content and tonal range. A decisive point in the English tradition was the emergence of John Clare (1793-1864). Although conventional wisdom prefers to regard him as a versifying naturalist, he was in fact a complex writer who conjoined pastoral and anti-pastoral elements judiciously to capture the contours, topographical and emotional, of a rapidly changing society. Heaney clearly has been influenced by the attempts of John Clare; in fact, one of the finest essays that I have read on Clare is by Heaney that is collected in his book of prose, ‘The Redress of Poetry.’

The pastoral mode, as it has been configured in our poetic tradition, is one that has inspired many Sri Lankan poets. I referred earlier to Gunadasa Amarasekera’s writings. Analogously, I find in the Tamil poetry of a poet like Sillaiyoor Selvarajan , and the English poetry of say, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha and Jean Arasanayagam (‘Primeval Forests’, ‘Death in the Afternoon’) an imaginative re-deployment of the pastoral mode, investing it with contemporary resonances. Hence, it is wise to begin an analysis of Heaney’s poetry and the way it could inspire us by considering his use of this mode.

In this regard, I wish to call attention to what I consider are a number of distinguishing features in his writings that have a bearing on our own endeavours. First, Heaney combines the imperatives of the pastoral mode and his personal biography in complex ways. He makes the pastoral genre into a mirror of his existential transitions. Second, he combines, in the way that Clare did, pastoral and anti-pastoral elements to produce a many-sided unity. What I mean by this is his success in interfusing the rural splendor associated with the pastoral mode with the harsh realities and demanding exigencies of Irish agricultural life such as miseries of labour, famine, natural calamities, social decay and so on.. Third, Heaney broaches political themes through this form deftly, and this allows him to articulate his anger and anguish without allowing them to break out in open rebellion. The pastoral mode exercises a restraining hand.

Fourth he balances the conflicting demands of freedom and responsibility, within the matrix of his poetry, with commendable ingenuity.

As a poet and a citizen he has taken upon himself the burden of freedom; he anatomizes poetically certain contradictory compunctions of freedoms and responsibilities and his pastoral poetry is the richer for it.

Fifth, Heaney is able to invest his pastoral poems with certain redemptive desires in that he is able to introduce new values and perspectives. The engagement with tensions and anxieties and arriving at a set of affirmative values opens the door for this redemption. In his pastoral poems, belief and unbelief face each other in tense proximity. Sixth, Heaney converts some of his pastoral poems, as they focus on the process of verse-making itself, into allegories of poetry itself. Seventh, he succeeds in making the pastoral mode a site of resistance – linguistic, cultural and political resistance. All these are facets of Heaney’s work that should stir great interest among emergent Sri Lankan poets. I will illustrate these points with convincing examples in future columns.

The relationship that Seamus Heaney establishes in many of his poems between poetry and agriculture is indeed important for us in Sri Lanka. In a poem like ‘Digging (one of my favorites), the author has succeeded in bringing this out cogently.

The inter-animation between poetry and farming is a theme that one comes across frequently in Sinhala and Tamil poetry. In lines such as, ’vowels ploughed into other’ ( typical of Heaney) this relationship is compactly and vividly brought to life.

It is interesting to note that that the term verse’, which originates from the Latin ‘versus’ signifies both a line of poetry and the turn carved out by the plough in the field.

(to be continued)