Seamus Heaney and modern Sri Lankan poetry - 2

Last week I opened a discussion related to the importance and relevance of the work of the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney to modern Sri Lankan poetry. I sought to focus on his skilful and imaginative use of the pastoral mode to communicate many-layered and complex human experiences. As the pastoral mode has been deployed with varying degrees of success by Sinhala, Tamil and English poets in Sri Lanka, I thought it would be useful to make that the point of departure for my observations on Heaney's poetry.

Seamus Heaney, once remarked that, 'one of the first functions of a poem, after all, is to satisfy a need in the poet. The achievement of a sufficient form and the release of a self-given music have a justifying effect within his life, and if the horizons inside which that life is being lived are menacing, the need for the steadying gift of finished art becomes all the more urgent,' This statement by Heaney enables us to enter understandingly into the complex thought-worlds concretized in his pastoral poems.

Let us examine one of his early poems - 'Digging'. This is indeed one of my favorite poems by Heaney

This poem explores an experience that has a deep resonance for Sri Lankan poets and readers. Seamus Heaney's father and grandfather were farmers; he, however, resolved to be a writer. This generated a sense of guilt, anxiety, a feeling of betrayal as well as a beckoning challenge.

This complex of emotions breathe in the poem with remarkable cogency, The poet observes from upstairs his father digging below; this breeds memories of him digging potatoes in the past, and further into the past, his grandfather digging the land. The poem opens in a confident tone with clear implications for modern troubled times in Ireland.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

We see the poet sitting at his desk with the pen 'snug as a gun'. In his hand the stated correlation between pen and gun carries unmistakable overtones for the conflicts and tensions in Ireland.

In the second stanza, we get a clear picture of the immediate scene.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into a gravelly ground

My father, digging. I look down.

The next stanza gives a deeper historical perspective to the situation.

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging

Later on in the poem, the steam of memory unlocked by his father digging gives rise to even more distant remembrances,

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

The long line of farmers and their labor are gratefully acknowledged and commemorated. The poem ends with the poet caught in the cross-fire of emotions engendered by his inability to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and the need to carve out a path of his own.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts in the edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like him.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

The governing trope in the poem, it seems to me, is the correlation established between the pen and the spade. This is a typical Heaney moment of creative fusion; it allows the poet to throw into sharp relief the conjunctions and disjunctions between manual labor and mental labor, exterior world and interior world, tradition and change and nature and culture. Although the poem bears traces of the work of the British poet Ted Hughes (Heaney was a great admirer of Hughes), the poem is clearly his own, and carries his distinctive voice.

The rhetorical strategies contained in the poem, in many ways, enact its theme. The poem captures the nature of manual labor in the sound of the words as well as through its syntactic roughness as exemplified in sentences without verbs. The idea of writing is pivotal to the meaning of the poem. His pen, as stated in the last line, is committed to digging like the spade. This, of course, carries metaphorical meanings of excavations into tradition. The notion of digging into the collective unconscious carries Jungian resonances as well. The language medium summoned by Heaney also offers a sharp contrast between the hard and soft. In the following stanza, the hard words

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging

contrast with the softness radiated by the following stanza.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts on the edge.

The alliterations and other sound effects in these lines turn into a memorable speech-act, reminding us that in god poetry auditory reverberations can uncover deeper layers of meaning. In a symbolic way, this serves to contrast the duality of the poet as peasant boy and sophisticated poet. What is clearly evident is that Heaney has given much thought to meticulous organization of his poem - something all poets need to pay attention to. Henry Hart, an astute commentator on Heaney's poetry says that, 'Heaney deploys the pastoral mode to document his own coming-of-age as a poet, his difficult dying away from an idealized mother (Mother Nature, Mother Ireland, and his actual mother) in order to gain the independence needed to write.'

This statement has a deep relevance to the poem ‘Digging’ that we have been considering. The last stanza seems to be suggesting that writing poetry is its own vindication.

Frank Kermode, a highly respected critic of literature has remarked that pastoral poetry rises from a sharp divergence between two distinct modes of life, the rustic and the urban. In ‘Digging’ as well as in other pastoral poems, Seamus Heaney has sharpened this antithesis to secure some of his most memorable poetic effects. The formal structures of his poems make visible his thematic preoccupations. These are areas in which aspiring Sri Lankan poets can learn a great deal.

The second facet of Seamus Heaney’s poetry that I wish to highlight in terms of its potential for impact on emerging poets in Sri Lanka is the way in which he has captured his voice. A mark of any good poet in any language is his or her ability to project a distinct voice. This is not as easy as it sounds. The projection of one’s distinct voice is closely connected to the way language is handled, forms shaped, visions projected and the distinctive modes in which the poet apprehends the legibilities of visible and invisible worlds. Seamus Heaney, even in his very early works, was able to realize his voce. The poem ‘Digging’ that I quoted earlier is one such work, and it captures remarkably well his unique voice. When we examine modern Sinhala poetry, the writings of Gunadasa Amarasekera, Siri Gunasinghe Monica Ruwanpathirana stand out because they were able to fashion that voice early in their careers in ‘Bhava Geetha’, ‘Mas Le Nati Ata’ and ‘Tahanam Desayakin’ respectively. In the case of Sri Lankan poetry in English, Patrick Fernando accomplished this with conviction.

Finding one’s voice, then, is an essential prerequisite for poetic achievement. Seamus Heaney realized the importance of this fact very early in his career. Although he was influenced by distinguished poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Patrick Kavanagh, he was able to assimilate these diverse influences unobtrusively into his own poetic blood-stream. .Heaney remarked that, ‘finding a voice means that you can get your own feelings into your own words and then your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet’s natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of he lines he is making up.’ He goes on to assert that the poetic voice is like the poet’s signature. According to him, voice is ‘like a fingerprint possessing a constant and unique signature that can, like a fingerprint, be recorded and employed for identification.’

A poet’s voice is vitally connected with his selfhood. The idea of self is inseparably connected to one’s behavioral environment, and according to the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, we attain selfhood under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which human beings give form, order, point and direction to their lives. Hence the role of culture and sedimented history is vital to the understanding of selfhood. Jacques Lacan the post-modern psychoanalyst, pointed out the constitutive role of language in the formation of self. What these different formulations signify is the fact that the concept of self has to be understood in terms of a number of important variables. A poet does not merely reflect his selfhood in his writings. He recreates it in the process of writing. In the engagement of the poet’s self and the poem, in the creation of a poem, self-projection as well as self- erasure alternatively plays a significant role. It is the interplay of these two phenomena that makes the poet’s voice such a vital aspect of the poetic experience. Let us examine this question of poetic voice and selfhood in relation to a poem by Seamus Heaney – ‘Personal Helicon’. This is a poem that can be regarded as an allegory of the emergence of the poem and the self of the poet; it focuses on the nature and significance of poetic inspiration. It manifests the poet’s instinct for weight and self-reflection.

The basic situation of the poem is one which a Sri Lankan reader would have little difficulty in identifying with. The poem opens with a child, who is fascinated with wells, peering into one. The poet succeeds in investing this seemingly banal experience with deeper layers of meaning related to poetic inspiration and subjectivity; how the value of a poem resides in the way that it seeks to initiate a confrontation between the poet and himself is vividly enforced in this poem.

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dark moss

The vividly realized circumstantial detail adds to the drama of the situation.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

A savored the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

The first four stanzas of this poem tell us about the different wells in whose vicinity the poet played as a child. The last stanza brings into focus designedly themes of poetic inspiration and self-exploration that engage the poet deeply.

Now, to pry into roots to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity, I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

The word helicon in the title refers to a Greek mountain that was regarded as the mythic home of the Muses; it is also a musical instrument. The poet, in the very title, is gesturing towards underlining the importance of inspiration and the way inspiration functions The poet asserts that ‘I rhyme/To see myself.’ A rhyme can be regarded as a purposive echo, and rhyming signifies a facet of poetic creativity. The poet is also desirous of setting ‘the darkness echoing’; what he is underlining here is the complex intersections of poetic imagination, cultural consciousness, individual sensibility, and literary creation echoing each other to produce a complex field of interrogation. Heaney once remarked that the poem engages the ‘hidden core of the self.’ This is precisely what happens in this poem.

Earlier I alluded to the importance of projecting once voice in poetry. In both these poems that I have discussed, we see how the poet has succeeded in that effort. Here is a learnable moment for emergent Sri Lankan poets. The poet, true to the pastoral tradition, engages the sense of place; the voice inflects place, place inflects voce. The poem lives in a series of expanding concentric circles of meaning that deal with issues of selfhood, place, voice, poetics. The way Greek ideas of Helicon, Narcissus, Echo are invoked is important in this regard. The technique of the poet is equally important, and one from which we can learn a great deal. The complex of visual, auditory and tactile imagery, as well as the use of rhyme, merit close analysis. Rhyme has a way of calling attention to the correspondences between signifiers which has the effect of establishing dynamic relationships among signifieds. This is clearly discernible in this poem.

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Personal Helicon’, then, is a poem that dramatizes an experience that is not too distant from us, and in the process, is able to bring out a wealth of situated insights and newer pathways of thought. This specific production of textuality by Heaney deserves the closest attention of aspiring poets writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English in Sri Lanka.

(to be continued)