Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry - 6

A formal choice is never simply formal.

- Seams Heaney

In this concluding column on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, I wish to focus on the topic of auditory imagination. This indeed opens a useful window on to the symbolic world of Heaney’s poetry, and it is also a phenomenon that should be of great relevance and interest to aspiring poets writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English. Every so often I get manuscripts of poetry, in Sinhala and in English, and I am asked my opinion on them. Some of them contain interesting experiences, innovative turns of phrase, a display of commendable poetic imagination.; however, many of them do not add up to memorable poetry, one reason for this being the inadequate attention paid to questions of form, meter, rhythm, phonetics. A poem can rise as a vibrant linguistic construct only if the auditory imagination contributes significantly to that propulsive effort. Heaney, in his poetry, often displayed the power of the auditory imagination without resorting to showy bravura performances.

Poets are in the business of transforming the world into word. In this effort, the role of the auditory imagination cannot be overstated. T.S. Eliot, in a classic essay, observed that auditory imagination, is ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word, sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back…..fusing the most ancient and most civilized mentalities…’In addition, Heaney says, the auditory imagination serves ‘to unite readers and poet and poem in an experience of enlargement.’ Similarly, Robert frost referred to the original cadencing of poetry as ‘the sound of sense’, and valued it as the pre-condition of poetry. As Heaney said, ‘the melodies of individual poems had to re-enact this sound before they could be heard as given and inevitable.’

The centrality of sound in poetry has been commented upon not only by writers and literary scholars; thinkers of various stripes have recognized the salience of sound as a primary and constitutive feature of poetic communication. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche said, every language displays its own specific musicality, and went on to assert, ‘every language has its rhythm, its scansion, its harmony, its breath, its vital, almost biological equilibrium, its own metabolism.’ If that is indeed the case, poets should make a special effort to capitalize on these distinguishing traits by paying meticulous attention to questions of meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance alliteration etc.

Similarly, the eminent post-modern thinker Julia Kristeva talks about the semiotic in poetry as opposed to the symbolic. For her the semiotic connotes power of pre-verbal signs, prosody, musicality, as a deep resource of verbal communication. It is almost an articulation of an unconscious process. Seamus Heaney has recognized the importance of phonetics in the weave of the poetic experience. He was keenly alert to the complex equations and interactions between sound and sense; it was in this spirit that he sought to invest his poetry with vibrancy by drawing on Irish metrical patterns. Heaney was deeply interested in the music of poetry. He once remarked that, ‘what interests me is the relationship between the almost physiological operation of a poet composing and the music of the finished poem.’

Seamus Heaney was able to secure subtle effects through the deft manipulation of rhyme, assonance, alliteration etc. For example, in the following passage from the poem ‘Casualty’, we observe the way he promotes a self-reflective frame of mind through sonic manipulations, through disorienting rhyming (too/curfew, held/trembled).

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too;
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Everything held
His breath, and trembled.

That Heaney was deeply conscious of these effects of rhyme is borne out by the fact that in his comments on other poets he drew the attention of readers to these devices. For example, commenting on this passage of poetry of Yeats he focuses on the functionality of rhyme.

Up there some hawk or owl has struck
Dropping out of the sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out
And its cry distracts my thought.

Here, focusing on the final rhyme which yokes crying out and thought, Heaney says that the imperfection of the rhyme enacts the contrastive conjunction of the project of civilization represented by thought and pain and death of the rabbit signified by the rabbits crying out.

Heaney paid close attention to technique, not as a means of dazzling readers by daring high-wire acts, but as a conscious strategy for extending the meaning of the poem. As he observed, ‘technique, as I would define it involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of meter, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves a definition of his stance towards life. ’He went on to state that what is important is the whole creative effort geared to bringing ‘the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form.’ Here, there is a valuable lesson for all of us who write poetry, whether it be in Sinhala, Tamil or English.

Heaney paid scrupulous attention to the sound of words, and how they become an echo of meaning. For example in the following passage, the easy conjunction of sensuous words with a set of abstractions generates an inner tension which propels the poem forward.

Clods and buds in a little dust-up
The dribbled pile accruing under it

Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through

Or does the choice itself create the value/

Here conjunction of sensuous words such as clods – buds – dust – dribbles with words leaning towards abstraction such as ‘which would be better’ – ‘choice’ – ‘create’ – ‘value’ serve to secure the special effect I referred to earlier.

Seamus Heaney is extremely sensitive to the sounds of poetry and how they inform the verbal texture of poems. He attains interesting results through imaginative confrontations. Let us consider the following passage

After the hot brewery of gland, cud and udder
Cool porous earthenware fermented the buttermilk

Here the rapidly syncopated beats of 'gland, cud and udder' contrast sharply with the more liquid 'cool porous earthenware' This kind of representational strategy is commonly found in Heaney's poetry, and one which should inspire us as well.

Heaney is well aware of the complexities of poetic strategies. As he once remarked, 'the function of language in much modern poetry, and in much poetry admired by moderns is to talk about itself to itself.

The poem is a complex word, a linguistic exploration whose tracks melt as it maps its own progress......it is the sense of poetry as ineluctably itself and not some other thing that posits for modern poets.' Speaking of Yeats, he pointed out how in his poetry , 'we are constantly aware of the intentness on structure, and the affirmative drive of thought running under the music, of which the music is the clear-tongued pealing.' Rhythmic adventurousness can very often a virtue in poetry; reading some of the English poetry written by younger poets in Sri Lanka one wishes for a greater inventiveness in this sphere. Heaney paid very close attention to the workings of the rhythm in poetry.

Writing on Auden's poetry, he said that, 'a new rhythm, after all, is a new given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being. The rhythmic disjunctions in Auden's lines, the correspondingly fractured elements of narrative arguments, are awakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times.' Similarly, rhythmic movements in our poetry should intuit the contours and pulsations of our own culture.

Heaney is constantly alert to the double nature of poetry. One the one hand, as he says, 'poetry could be regarded as magical incantation, fundamentally a mater of sound and the power of sound to bind our minds and bodies apprehensions within an acoustic complex'; on the other hand, 'poetry is a matter of making wise and true meanings, of commanding our emotional assent by the intelligent disposition and inquisition of human experience.'

How, most of the time, Heaney succeeds in bring about a fruitful union between this dual nature of poetry is something that we need to study very carefully.

Heaney as a path-breaking poet was not satisfied with following the beaten track. He wanted to strike out in new directions. Although he deployed the sonnet form and traditional English meters, he was also was keen to extend their discursive boundaries. As he himself once commented, 'I thought that music the melodious grace of the English iambic line, was some kind of affront...... that it needed to be wrecked.' It is indeed in that sprit that he made use of 'terza rima', a form popularized by the celebrated Italian poet Dante, to usher in a new tonality to English poetry.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Clearly, Seamus Heaney has given a great deal of thought to the inter-animations between phonetics and feeling, phonetics and verbal texture.

Phonetics, for him, was not merely an aspect of style or a disposition of the poet's basic nature; it was also a redemptive force inextricably connected with the vision of the poet.

The sound of sense was supremely important in his understanding of poetry as a way of knowledge-production; to use a high-sounding phrase, it was a part of his aesthetic epistemology. That is why he often stressed the importance of tone as a guide to poetic meaning.

As he remarked, 'tone is the inner life of a language, a secret spirit at play behind or at odds with what is being said and how it is being structured in syntax and figure of speech.' the tone of a poem and its music are mutually constitutive.

According to Heaney, 'by poetic I mean the technical means, the more or less describable effects of language and form by which we a certain tonality is effected and maintained.' I think we in Sri Lanka can learn a great deal from Heaney's poetry regarding the interplay of sound, tone, verbal texture and vision. It is through this interplay that the many-sided and complex unity that is the poem takes shape.

What this discussion clearly points to is the importance of phonetics in poetry and the instructive ways in which Heaney approached this subject. As he reflected, 'it is obvious that poetry's answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of meter, and syntax, of tone and musical trueness.' As a great admirer of Hopkins, he frequently made use of onomatopoeia ('slap' and 'plop') and consonantal densities, but always as a way of extending the reach of meaning.

Aspiring poets in Sri Lankan writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English can profit immensely by studying carefully the writings of Seamus Heaney. Gunadasa Amarasekera, for the last five decades, has been calling attention to the important of phonetics in poetry. Unfortunately, many failed to understand the true import of his admonitions, and sadly discussions of Sinhala poetry dwindled into a sterile debate between the relative merits of meter and free verse.

What Amarasekera was foregrounding was a topic for more profound and of deep relevance to poetry. He was highlighting the nature and significance of the auditory imagination in poetry. In his own writings, he demonstrated this with supreme cogency .Sarachchandra, too, displayed the power of this truth in his creative and critical writings. What this journey into Seamus Heaney's body of writing emphasizes is the fact that the auditory imagination in poetry should be accorded a place of centrality. The phonetic texture of a poem serves to communicate to the discerning reader the complex burden of its own becoming.

As I have been stressing throughout this column, the interplay of sound and sense merits sustained analysis .When we pause to examine the Sanskrit tradition, for example, (a tradition close to us), we see how Jayadeva in 'Gitagovinda', in some of his stanzas, was able to forge an exquisite union between sound and sense; in others, he allowed the stanzas to collapse under their own weight of gratuitous phonetic exuberance.

I chose to devote the last six columns to a discussion of Seamus Heaney's poetry in terms of the potential lessons he can offer us - Sri Lankan writers and readers - because I felt it would be a constructive exercise. Heaney is not too well-known among the educated lay readers in Sri Lanka, and my interpretation of his poetry, and the features selected for interpretation, were guided by that broad pedagogic imperative.

We can profit greatly by decoding the way that the sound of sense echoes through the symbolic weave of his poetic world. As with all poets, Heaney has his share of deficiencies and blind spots and critics have not been coy about articulating them. However, on balance, he is a poet who deserves to be accorded the highest respect .We can do this by studying his craft carefully and seeking to learn from it wherever we can.