Stepping Stones

Dennis O'Driscoll's book of interviews with Seamus Heaney is like autobiography to a series of prompts from the interviewer; as such, it's a genre that SH has been practising for years. I read it with the same appetite as for Foster's Yeats or Ann Saddlemeyer's Becoming George. You revisit the sites of Heaney's great achievements: the first publication with Faber, the rush of inspiration that produced the poems in part one of Wintering Out, the Glanmore experiment, and so on.          Besides the awe you feel at the scale of SH's success, there is also a professional, writerly desire to find out how it's done and garner some tips for your own activity in the trade. Many key moments in SH's career have already been well tracked by journalists and commentators, with the result that their reality as moments has been eroded. As you read, once more, an account of the Glanmore period, say, with a desire to share the creative sanctity of that time, you feel at the same time removed by a historical distance; your angle as a reader of the life as history has you looking back at a life which itself was not a looking back, but a looking forward from the present. To put it another way, you are trying to learn to drive by looking through the rear view mirror instead of the windscreen. Stepping Stones has much to offer its readers, including many new photographs from the Heaney family album; SH's poetic followers will also have to remember to put the book down, conquer their envy, and turn back to their own blank pages. 

Spenserscribble

Like Milton after him, Spenser had difficulty with his representations of transcendent things and trying to reconcile aesthetic interest with morality. Milton's Lucifer is well-known as an example: we are supposed to reject him morally although he is of considerable interest aesthetically. The same is the case in The Faerie Queene: in Book I the false Duessa pleads with Night to take a wounded knight down to the Underworld where he may be cured by Aesclepius, another outcast. The description of Night, and the descent into the classical Hades are all superb, but the poetic interest is completely at variance with Spenser's moral format. [Modern cop movies operate on the same ambiguity: sex and violence proliferate within the frame of law and order.]  

   Yeats's introduction to his 1906 edition of Spenser is very perceptive on this: according to WB, in his poetic heart, Spenser belonged to the old chivalric world of Catholic Europe, but his parti pris with the Elizabethan state alienated him ideologically from this undercurrent.

Lots of prompts here too for modern camp: one of the doughty knights is referred to as 'the stout Faerie'; Una, the representative of the true Church, meets a group of woodland fauns and satyrs who begin to worship her; she forbids them this heresy, so instead they 'worship her Asse'. 

Hughes/Heaney

The connection here is nothing new and is well known: poetry of the countryside shorn of all sentimentality, an idiom founded on the physical world, etc. Unlike Heaney, however, Hughes' early work was also declamatory, it announced something, it had an evangelical edge, in a poem like 'Pibroch', for example, from Wodwo. Hughes manages to announce something without losing grip of the object, although the balance here is a fine one. In 'Crow Hill', there is a buoyant descriptive quality as the lines reveal a Yorkshire (?) landscape previously hidden, or only partly recognised. If Hughes' 'arrogance of blood and bone' is absent from Heaney, it has no symbolic register except the landscape objects themselves: 'Pibroch' presents these as the ultimate set of tokens where all - if any - meanings will have to compete henceforth. 

   Any writer's landscape aspires to be his/her set of objects, through which to communicate, but as a poet tends to say something with a content - usually at some level ideological - the great danger is that the objects become blurred in the eagerness to get the argument right. Here rhetoric tends to impair representation. The challenge is to deliver the argument through the objects. Hughes' 'Pibroch' is about as far as the declamatory style can go before it loses focus on its raw material.

   

   

WBY and Spenser

Reading Spenser again this morning in Richard McCabe's Penguin edition of The Shorter Poems, I am struck by how much Yeats was influenced by Spenser's idiom. Old WB ploughed through the whole of Spenser for his edition of the Selected Poems (a nice turn-of-the-century volume with illustrations by Jessica King). Yeats as the occupant of a castle in the west was very much modelling himself on Ed. Sp. The whole discourse about violence and civilisation in The Tower and elsewhere is rooted in Yeats's reading of Spenser and is a commentary on the sixteenth century. Then you have the lament for Robert Gregory as a parallel to Spenser's lament for Philip Sidney, and so on. Yeats names Burke, Swift and others as his antecedants in 'Blood and the Moon', but not Spenser. The cunning old boy didn't mind acknowledging debts to philosophers and politicians, but he wanted to maintain the myth of himself as originator of an Irish tradition, so Spenser was left out. Spenser can hardly be counted as an 'Irish' poet or enlisted on behalf of a national tradition, but his influence on Yeats's middle and late periods draws him into the register.

   Yeats's laments for a lost tradition following the deaths of Synge and Robert Gregory and the marginalisation of Lady Gregory herself are prefigured by Spenser's lament for the passing of Leicester and Sidney, his supporters at court. Spenser's 'Ruines of Time' is the template for many of Yeats's later utterances about the lack of artistic appeciation in modern times and the neglect of the arts. Spenser felt similarly marginalised at court after the death of his patrons and with the predominace of Cecil, Lord Burghley, whom he disliked. 

Mizzling Rain

   In Wintering Out, Heaney writes from a native perspective about Edmund Spenser ('Bog Oak'). The poem suggests that Spenser was alienated from Irish conditions by his acquired classicism. Details of Irish weather abound, including a reference to 'mizzling rain'. 

   Curiously, Spenser knew the word: it occurs in the November eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar. Colin Clout delivers a lament to Dido and then Thenot decides it is time to get going:

Up Colin, up, enough thou morned hast,

Now gynes to mizzle, hye we homeward fast.

This early work of Spenser's is actually very close to the countryside. It abounds in country references, details of nature and the seasons, fragments of folklore, and so on. Although a Londoner, Spenser had experience of the countryside as a student at Cambridge and probably visited his friend Gabriel Harvey in Saffron Walden, a village close to today's Stansted airport. When he left Cambridge he became secretary to the Bishop of Rochester and moved to Kent, where the Calendar was probably written. 

   Compared with this early pastoral poem, the Faerie Queene is more abstract and ideological. Moving to Ireland did not make Spenser a more rural poet: if anything, his isolation from the natives detracted from his earlier affinity with nature and the land. 

O'Bama

After watching his victory speech in Chicago this morning, I too felt that I should work hard to save America

Evils of Colonialism

While searching abebooks for Richard Twiss's Ireland Tour of 1776, I came across this title by a Richard Leo Twiss: 

Five Hundred Years of Bad Haircuts: Understanding God's Heart for First Nations People

The Indians, I suspect, got their revenge when Europeans adopted the mullet.