The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry
Laurence Perrine
That a poem may have varying interpretations is a critical commonplace. That all
interpretations of a poem are equally valid is a critical heresy, but one which perennially
makes its reappearance in the classroom. “Why can’t a poem mean anything that a reader
sees in it?” asks the student. “Why isn’t one person’s interpretation of a poem as good as
anyone else’s?” According to his theory the poem is like an ink blot in a Rorschach
personality test. There are no correct or incorrect readings: there are only readings which
differ more or less widely from a statistical norm.
This theory is one that poets themselves have sometimes seemed to lend support
to T.S. Eliot, in response to conjectures about the meanings of his poems, has replied, “If
it suits you that way, then that is all right with me.” Yeats once wrote to a friend: “I shall
not trouble to make the meaning clear- a clear, vivid story of a strange sort is enough.
The meaning maybe different with everyone.” But one is not really quarreling with Eliot
or Yeats in challenging this point of view. Eliot, as a critic dealing with the poetry of
others, has been constantly concerned with determining precise meanings. No poet,
however, likes to be caught in the predicament of having to explain his own poems. He
cannot say, “What I really meant was…” without admitting failure, or without saying
something different (and usually much less) than what his poem said. And in doing so, he
gives this diminished reading the stamp of his own authority. “A writer,” E. A. Robinson
once told an interviewer, “should not be his own interpreter.” It is significant that Yeats
was quite willing to write, for an anthology, a comment on one of his poems so long as
the comment did not appear over his own name. “If an author interprets a poem of his
own,” e explained to the editor, “he limits its suggestibility.” The poet is eager to be
understood. But whereas the comments of a critic may raise the curtain on a reader’s
understanding of a poem, the poet’s own comments drop the curtain. We must therefore
not mistake the defensive gestures of a poet like Yeats or Eliot for a declaration of his
critical theory.
In this paper, accordingly, I wish, not to advance any new proposition, but only to
reassert the accepted critical principle that for any given poem there are correct and
incorrect readings, and to illustrate the process by which the correctness of a reading may
be proved or disproved. For logical proof, though not experimental proof, is at least as
possible in the interpretation of poetry as it is, say, in a court of law.
The criteria used for judging any interpretation of a poem are two: (1) A correct
interpretation, if the poem is a successful one, must be able to account satisfactorily for
any detail it is wrong. Of several interpretations, the best is that which most fully explains
the details of the poem without itself being contradicted by any detail. (2) If more than
one interpretation satisfactorily accounts for all the details of the poem, the best is that
which is most economical, i.e. which relies on the fewest assumptions not grounded in
the poem itself. Thomas Huxley illustrates this principle of judgments in a different area
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in one of his essays. If, he says, on coming downstairs in the morning we find our
silverware missing, the window open, the mark of a dirty hand on the window frame, and
the impress of a hobnailed boot on the gravel outside, we logically conclude that the
silverware has been stolen by a human thief. It is possible, of course, that the silverware
was taken by a monkey and that a man with dirty hands and hobnailed boots looked in
the window afterwards; but this explanation is far less probable, for, though it too
accounts for all the facts, its rests on too many additional assumptions. It is, as we would
say, too “farfetched.”
These two criteria, I ask you to notice, are not different from those we bring to the
judgment of a new scientific hypothesis. Of such we ask (1) that it satisfactorily account
for as many as possible of the known facts without being contradicted by any fact. (2)
That it be the simplest or most economical of alternative ways of accounting for these
facts.
PROBLEMS IN INTERPRETATION
Let me illustrate by presenting two problems in interpretation. The first is an untitled
poem by Emily Dickinson:
Where ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then- the wharf is still.
The second consists of a pair of poems, one by Walt Whitman, the other by
Herman Melville. The poem by Whitman appeared in his volume of Civil War poems,
Drum-Taps. Melville, who was Whitman’s almost exact contemporary, also published a
book of war poems (Battle-Pieces), though the following poem did not appear in it. I ask
you with the Dickinson poem merely to decide what it is about; with the Whitman and
Melville poems, to determine the principal difference between them.
An Army Corps on the March
With its clod of skirmishers in advance,
With now the sound of a single shot snapping
Like a whip, and now an irregular volley,
The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense
Brigades press on,
Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun- the
Dust- cover’d men,
In columns rise and falls to the undulations of the
Ground,
With artillery interspers’d- the wheels rumble,
The horses sweat,
As the army corps advances
-Walt Whitman
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The Night-March
With banners furled, and clarions mute,
An army passes in the night;
And beaming speaks and helms salute
The dark with bright.
In silence deep the legions stream,
With open ranks, in order true;
Over boundless plains they stream and gleamNo chief in view!
Afar, in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all the shining host
His mandate sends.
-Herman Melville
Several years ago I presented the Emily Dickinson poem to a number of students and
colleagues and discovered that not one of them interpreted the poem as I did. Almost
universally they read the poem as being descriptive of a scene in a garden or meadow. A
consensus of their interpretations runs as follows:
Tall purple flowers (iris?) stand above the daffodils and are tossed in the breeze.
Bees and butterflies (“fantastic sailors”) mingle with the flowers. The wind stops,
and then the garden is still.
Beside this let me place the interpretation which I hope to prove the correct one:
The poem is a description of a sunset. The “ships of purple” are clouds. The “seas
of daffodil” are skies colored golden by the setting sun. The “fantastic sailors” are the
shifting colors of the sunset, like old-fashioned seamen dressed in gorgeous garments of
many colors brought from exotic lands. The sun sinks and the wharf (the earth where the
sun set- the scene of this colorful activity) is still.
How do we demonstrate the “sunset” reading to be correct and the “garden” reading to be
incorrect? By some such argument as this:
“Ships of purple” is a more apt metaphor for clouds than for flowers, both as to
size and to motion (we often speak of clouds as “sailing”). “Daffodil” would normally be
in the plural if it referred to flowers rather than to color: why would not the poet say “On
a sea of daffodils”? “Mingle” fits better than the intertwining colors of the sunset than it
does the behavior of bees, which mingle with flowers perhaps but not, except in the hive,
with each other (and the flowers here are “seas”). The “garden” reading provides no
literal meaning for “wharf.” The “garden” reading, to explain why the wharf becomes
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“still,” demands the additional assumption that the wind stops (why should it? And would
the bees and butterflies stops their activity if it did?); the disappearance of the sun, in
contrast, is inevitable and implicit in the sunset image. Finally, the luxuriance of
imagination manifested in the poem is the more natural consequence of looking at clouds
and sunset sky than at flowers. We look at clouds and see all sorts of things- ships,
castles, animals, landscape- but it takes some straining to conjure up a scene such as this
one from a garden.
The “garden” reading is therefore incorrect because it fails to account for some
details in the poem (the wharf), because it is contradicted by some details (the singular
use of “daffodil”). Because it explains some details less satisfactorily than the “sunset”
reading (“ships of purple,” “mingle”), and finally because it rests on assumptions not
grounded in the poem itself (the wind stops). The “sunset” reading explains all these
details satisfactorily.
Ordinarily we have only the internal evidence of the poem itself on which to rest
an interpretation. In this instance, as I discovered some time after the incident related,
there is external proof also of the “sunset” reading. The poem was first published in 1891
under the title “Sunset.”
Though this title was editorially supplied by T. W. Higginson after Emily’s death,
its correctness is established by two other poems in which the poet uses substantially the
same imagery (yellow and purple, sea and ships). One poem itself contains the word
“sunset”; the other was entitled “Sunset” by the poet in a letter to a friend
The Whitman-Melville problem I presented more recently as a theme assignment
to an Honor section in freshman English. Again I received not a single correct solution. I
should confess at the outset, however that I am guilty of having planted a false clue. The
false clue lies in the information that Melville wrote a book of poems about the Civil
War- perfectly true, of course, but totally irrelevant. This poem is not about the Civil
War, as is manifest from “spears and helms”- items not stocked by civil War
quartermasters. More important, this poem is not about war at all. The main difference
between this poem and Whitman’s is that Whitman’s is about an army corps on the
march; Melville’s is about the stars.
My freshmen immediately identified this subject matter when I wrote the Melville
poem on the board and circled five words: “beaming,” “bright,” “gleam,” “twinkling,”
“shining.” The five words together form a constellation whose reference, once the pattern
is recognized, is almost immediately clear. That “twinkling” modifies “distance” and that
“shining” modifies “host” provides additional confirmation. The phrase “host of heaven”
is used extensively for stars in the Bible.
From this starting point the proof proceeds with logical rigor: (1) The close
repetition of “beaming,” “bright,” “gleam,” “twinkling,” and “shining,” immediately
suggests stars. (2) The setting is night. (3) The poem emphasizes the silence of the
procession, which moves” in silence deep” and “ with clarions mute.” (NO actual army,
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of course, no matter how secret its movements, is ever quite so stealthy. In Whitman’s
poem “the wheels rumble,” as indeed wheels do.) (4) The poem also emphasizes the idea
of infinite space: the army marches “over boundless plains”; its leader is “Afar, in
twinkling distance lost.” (5) The army marches “With open ranks in order true”- a
formation more star like than military. No actual legions ever “stream” in perfect order:
but the stars keep an eternally fixed but open relation to each other. (6) Finally, no
commander of this army is in view- a situation especially unusual in an army proceeding
in perfect order. Indeed, the “army” interpretations cannot explain this detail without
assumptions grounded outside the poem.
The real difficulty of interpreting the Melville poem is not simply descriptive, as
Whitman is, but philosophical. As I read it, the poem poses the question of the existence
of God. No God is observable in the heavens (which are silent), yet the stars follow an
“order true,” and legends (e.g. the Bible) tell us that God orders them. These stories
however, are indeed “legends,” i.e. they are of doubtful authenticity; and even if they be
true, the God they speak of is “afar, in twinkling distance lost,” not in daily confrontation
of man or nature. One hundred years earlier a poet writing on this theme would have
declared without hesitation that “The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament
showeth his handiwork”; Melville ends his poem with a question of a doubt. In the
nineteenth century the argument from design had been shattered.
If a poem, then, does have a determinable meaning- if, in the interpretation of
poetry, we can’t say that “anything goes”- why does the opposite theory so often arise? Is
it because of some false analogy drawn with music or abstract art? Perhaps. But, first of
all, it arises because, within limits, there is truth in it. A poem- in fact, any pattern of
words- defines an area of meaning, no more. Any interpretation is acceptable which lies
within that area. The word “ horse” may be justifiably call up in reader’s mind the image
of a black, a roan, or a white horse; a stallion, a mare, or a gelding; even a wooden
sawhorse, a human “workhorse,” or a female “clotheshorse.” But as soon as the word is
combined with another, say, “roan,” the area of meaning is drastically reduced. It can still
be stallion, mare, or gelding; but it cannot be a white or black horse, a “sawhorse,” or
“clotheshorse.” Further expansions of the context limit the meanings still further. But
even without context the word cannot mean cow.
In poetry, context may function to expand meaning as well as to limit it. Words in
poetry thus have richer meanings than in prose- they may exhibit purposeful ambiguitiesbut the meanings are still confined to a certain area. With a poem like Whitman’s that
area is fairly narrowly circumscribed. The reader may legitimately see a Northern or
Southern army (if he knows nothing of Whitman’s life): in fact, if the poem is removed
from its context in Drum-Taps he may legitimately see a Revolutionary War army: but in
no case may he interpret the poem as being about stars.
THE PROBLEM OF SYMBOLS
The areas of greatest meaning are created by symbolical poems. “A symbol,”
writes John Ciardi, “is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripple in all directions,
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and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears?” True. But
even a symbol does not have unlimited meaning. The pool in which the rock is dropped
has borders. A symbol in literature is made up of words which, by the way they are used,
have acquired a sometimes tremendously increased area of meaning. To switch from
Ciardi’s figure, we may envision such a symbol as a powerful beam of light flashed out
into the darkness by a searchlight from point on earth. The cone of light is the area of
meaning. Its point is precise and easily located. But its base fades out into the
atmosphere. Its meanings are therefore almost infinite. But they are not unlimited. They
must be found. At whatever distance from the apex, within the circumference of the cone.
By the very nature of the case the process of proof or demonstration with
symbolic literature is more difficult than with nonsymbolic, just as complex logical
problems are more difficult than the simple ones by which logicans demonstrate their
principles. Scholars will continue to debate the meanings of the “white whale” in MobyDick for years to come. Their argument, however, has meaning. Some interpretations do
make more sense than others. More than one meaning may be valid, but not just any
meaning can be. The white whale is not an ink blot, not even a white ink blot.
Let me illustrate with a poem by William Blake:
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm.
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The essential difference between a metaphor and a literary symbol is that a metaphor
means something else than what it is, a literary symbol means something more than what
it is. In the words of Robert Penn Warren, a symbol “partakes of the reality which it
renders intelligible”: in the words of E. E. Stoll, a symbol “means what it says and
another thing besides.” If we use I. A, Richards’ terms: vehicle and tenor for the two
things equated by a metaphor, we must say that with a symbol the vehicle is part of the
tenor. The vehicle in this case is not like one of those long trucks we see on the highways
carrying automobiles from manufacturer to dealer; t is more like a new automobile filled
with presents at Christmas time in which the automobile is part of the gift. Melville’s
“Night-March” is not really about an army at all: Blake’s poem is about a rose and a
cankerworm.
But Blake’s poem is so richly organized that the rose and the worm refuse to
remain a rose and a worm. The phrase “dark secret love” is too strong to be confined to
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the feeding of the worm on the rose; “thy bed of crimson joy” suggests much more than
the rose bed which it literally denotes. The powerful connotations of these phrases added
to those of “sick,” “invisible,” “night,” and “howling storm,” and combined with the
capitalization of “Rose” and the personification of the flower, force the reader to seek for
additional meanings. Almost immediately the Rose suggests a maiden and the worm her
secret lover; but these meanings in turn suggest still broader meanings as the cone of light
broadens. The poem has been read by different readers as referring to the destruction of
joyous physical love by jealousy, deceit, concealment, or the possessive instinct; of
innocence by experience; of humanity by Satan; of imagination and joy by analytic
reason; of life by death.
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Seamus Heaney
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The Forge
Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
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From The Frontier Of Writing
Seamus Heaney
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover,
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road
past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
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A Kite for Michael and Christopher
Seamus Heaney
All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.
I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
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Personal Helicon
Seamus Heaney
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 dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
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.
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Digging
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
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My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
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Follower
Seamus Heaney
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
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Mid-Term Break
Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying-He had always taken funerals in his stride-And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
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Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
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The Barn
Seamus Heaney
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.
The musty dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.
A scythe's edge, a clean spade, a pitch-fork's prongs:
Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.
Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs
And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.
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Exposure
Seamus Heaney
It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.
A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,
And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conductive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
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Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.
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Man and Boy
Seamus Heaney
I
‘Catch the old one first’
(My father’s joke was also old, and heavy
And predictable). ‘Then the young ones
Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’
On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time
Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted
And so our spirits must be lightly checked.
Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!
Blessed be the detachment of dumb love
In that broad-backed, low-set man
Who feared debt all his life, but now and then
Could make a splash like the salmon he said was
‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.
II
In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped
Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves
A mower leans forever on his scythe.
He has mown himself to the centre of the field
And stands in a final perfect ring
Of sunlit stubble.
‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says
(He said it to my father who told me),
‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’
My father is a barefoot boy with news,
Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks
On the afternoon of his own father’s death.
The open, black half of the half-door waits.
I feel much heat and hurry in the air.
I feel his legs and quick heels far away.
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And strange as my own—when he will piggyback me
At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,
Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.
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The Rain Stick
Seamus Heaney
Up-end the rain stick what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk
Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly
And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,
Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
The glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Upend the stick again. What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.
Who cares if all the music that transpires
Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.
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A Call
Seamus Heaney
‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.’
So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also…
Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums…
And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.
Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.
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1995 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Seamus Heaney
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would
ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy
and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just
beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was
the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the
three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was
more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an
intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the
stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the
kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the
trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back
from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical,
pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible
and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every
time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple
delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.
But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and
signalling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached
to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a hole bored in the
corner of the kitchen window, right on into the innards of our wireless set where a little
pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC
newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we
could hear in our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults
in the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic,
piercing signalling of morse code.
We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the local accents of our
parents, and in the resonant English tones of the newsreader the names of bombers and of
cities bombed, of war fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of
prisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; and always, of course, we
would pick up too those other, solemn and oddly bracing words, "the enemy" and "the
allies". But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. If there
was something ominous in the newscaster's tones, there was something torpid about our
25
understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something culpable about such
political ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive about the security
I inhabited as a result of it.
The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Prehistorical in its way. Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate,
I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
But it was still not the news that interested me; what I was after was the thrill of story,
such as a detective serial about a British special agent called Dick Barton or perhaps a
radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns's adventure tales about an RAF flying ace
called Biggles. Now that the other children were older and there was so much going on in
the kitchen, I had to get close to the actual radio set in order to concentrate my hearing,
and in that intent proximity to the dial I grew familiar with the names of foreign stations,
with Leipzig and Oslo and Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with Stockholm.
I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round
from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even
though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the
gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the
wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of
language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life
turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has
brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space
station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself
the luxury of walking on air.
*
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a
line I wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to
"walk on air against your better judgement". But I credit it ultimately because poetry can
make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of
the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that
scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we
stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and
prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for
being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's
centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word "Stockholm" on the
26
face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most
privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its
truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
*
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced
most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood
in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a schoolboy, I loved John
Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the covenant between language and
sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his
exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I
knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily downto-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a
different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and
always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament
sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later again,
in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert
Lowell's and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further
reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to "pity
the planet," to be "not concerned with Poetry."
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as
they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in
Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for
the past quarter of a century. No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and
realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or
extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes
through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself
against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting the opulence and
extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting
insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings
and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these
more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to grant the poet any more
license than any other citizen; and they were further induced by having to conduct oneself
as a poet in a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A public
expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously
approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
27
In such circumstances, the mind still longs to repose in what Samuel Johnson once called
with superb confidence "the stability of truth", even as it recognizes the destabilizing
nature of its own operations and enquiries. Without needing to be theoretically instructed,
consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. The
child in the bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home
and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up from behind both the
signals of some other distress, that child was already being schooled for the complexities
of his adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings
variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical,
post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible. So it was that I found myself in
the mid-nineteen seventies in another small house, this time in Co. Wicklow south of
Dublin, with a young family of my own and a slightly less imposing radio set, listening to
the rain in the trees and to the news of bombings closer to home-not only those by the
Provisional IRA in Belfast but equally atrocious assaults in Dublin by loyalist
paramilitaries from the north. Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic
logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the 1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my
noncombatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweetnatured school
friend had been interned without trial because he was suspected of having been involved
in a political killing. What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape
from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology. In
a poem called "Exposure" I wrote then:
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
28
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.
(from North)
In one of the poems best known to students in my generation, a poem which could be said
to have taken the nutrients of the symbolist movement and made them available in
capsule form, the American poet Archibald MacLeish affirmed that "A poem should be
equal to/not true." As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it
slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters,
when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only
a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want
the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the
picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to
its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad,
standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's
regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could
be equal to it. And this is the want I too was experiencing in those far more protected
29
circumstances in Co. Wicklow when I wrote the lines I have just quoted, a need for
poetry that would merit the definition of it I gave a few moments ago, as an order "true to
the impact of external reality and ... sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being."
*
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968
and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change
nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue. It should
have come early, as the result of the ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties,
but that was not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating got hatched
out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in oneself was impelled to deplore the
atrocious nature of the IRA's campaign of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in
oneself was appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on occasions like Bloody
Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority citizen in oneself, the one who had grown up
conscious that his group was distrusted and discriminated against in all kinds of official
and unofficial ways, this citizen's perception was at one with the poetic truth of the
situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland were ever really to flourish,
change had to take place. But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in
recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change
was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Nevertheless, until the British government caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster
loyalist workers after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could
still hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was promising with what
was destructive and do what W.B. Yeats had tried to do half a century before, namely, "to
hold in a single thought reality and justice." After 1974, however, for the twenty long
years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved impossible.
The violence from below was then productive of nothing but a retaliatory violence from
above, the dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and people
settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit- waste, of hardening attitudes and
narrowing possibilities that were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic
suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
*
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in
Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January
evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van
30
ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked
executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened,
this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must
have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-fortat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been
presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for
him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then,
the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter
evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and
squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know
what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the
line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the
gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant
terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an
abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after
the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself
with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon
suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking
that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born,
breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked,
that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It
was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both
inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was
only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that
terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the
gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of
what happens.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make
us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious
confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it. We are rightly in awe of
the torsions in the poetry of Paul Celan and rightly enamoured of the suspiring voice in
Samuel Beckett because these are evidence that art can rise to the occasion and somehow
be the corollary of Celan's stricken destiny as Holocaust survivor and Beckett's demure
31
heroism as a member of the French Resistance. Likewise, we are rightly suspicious of
that which gives too much consolation in these circumstances; the very extremity of our
late twentieth century knowledge puts much of our cultural heritage to an extreme test.
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the
documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less
real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the
actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots
on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much
constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.
Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his priedieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his
portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or
redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the
posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat. Forgetting faith, straining towards good
works. Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which must be counted
the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined. Then finally and happily, and not in
obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in despite of them, I
straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and
imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous. And once again I shall try to
represent the import of that changed orientation with a story out of Ireland.
This is a story about another monk holding himself up valiantly in the posture of
endurance. It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched
out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we lived
in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats
in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his
outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs
in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with
pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin
stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the
eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense,
at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a
signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to
that which we stored up as we grew.
*
32
St. Kevin's story is, as I say, a story out of Ireland. But it strikes me that it could equally
well come out of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do not mean
merely to consign it to a typology of folktales, or to dispute its value by questioning its
culture bound status within a multi-cultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness
and its travel-worthiness have to do with its local setting. I can, of course, imagine it
being deconstructed nowadays as a paradigm of colonialism, with Kevin figuring as the
benign imperialist (or the missionary in the wake of the imperialist), the one who
intervenes and appropriates the indigenous life and interferes with its pristine ecology.
And I have to admit that there is indeed an irony that it was such a one who recorded and
preserved this instance of the true beauty of the Irish heritage: Kevin's story, after all,
appears in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, one of the Normans who invaded Ireland
in the twelfth century, one whom the Irish-language annalist Geoffrey Keating would
call, five hundred years later, "the bull of the herd of those who wrote the false history of
Ireland." But even so, I still cannot persuade myself that this manifestation of early
Christian civilization should be construed all that simply as a way into whatever is
exploitative or barbaric in our history, past and present. The whole conception strikes me
rather as being another example of the kind of work I saw a few weeks ago in the small
museum in Sparta, on the morning before the news of this year's Nobel Prize in literature
was announced.
This was art which sprang from a cult very different from the faith espoused by St.
Kevin. Yet in it there was a representation of a roosted bird and an entranced beast and a
self-enrapturing man, except that this time the man was Orpheus and the rapture came
from music rather than prayer. The work itself was a small carved relief and I could not
help making a sketch of it; but neither could I help copying out the information typed on
the card which accompanied and identified the exhibit. The image moved me because of
its antiquity and durability, but the description on the card moved me also because it gave
a name and credence to that which I see myself as having been engaged upon for the past
three decades: "Votive panel", the identification card said, "possibly set up to Orpheus by
local poet. Local work of the Hellenistic period."
*
Once again, I hope I am not being sentimental or simply fetishizing - as we have learnt to
say - the local. I wish instead to suggest that images and stories of the kind I am invoking
here do function as bearers of value. The century has witnessed the defeat of Nazism by
force of arms; but the erosion of the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things, by
the sheer persistence, beneath the imposed ideological conformity, of cultural values and
33
psychic resistances of a kind that these stories and images enshrine. Even if we have
learned to be rightly and deeply fearful of elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms
of any nation into normative and exclusivist systems, even if we have terrible proof that
pride in an ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic, our
vigilance on that score should not displace our love and trust in the good of the
indigenous per se. On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of
such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the
validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious
political space. In spite of devastating and repeated acts of massacre, assassination and
extirpation, the huge acts of faith which have marked the new relations between
Palestinians and Israelis, Africans and Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have come
down in Europe and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires a hope that new
possibility can still open up in Ireland as well. The crux of that problem involves an
ongoing partition of the island between British and Irish jurisdictions, and an equally
persistent partition of the affections in Northern Ireland between the British and Irish
heritages; but surely every dweller in the country must hope that the governments
involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition to
become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile giveand-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that
flowed in the beginning from those bracing words "enemy" and "allies" might finally
derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary.
*
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland
was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels
of a war of independence fought against the British. The struggle that ensued had been
brief enough; it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to
Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would
dictate the terms of politics within the twenty-six independent counties of Ireland, that
part of the island known first of all as the Irish Free State and then subsequently as the
Republic of Ireland.
Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence in his Nobel speech.
Nobody understood better than he the connection between the construction or destruction
of state institutions and the founding or foundering of cultural life, but on this occasion he
chose to talk instead about the Irish Dramatic Movement. His story was about the
creative purpose of that movement and its historic good fortune in having not only his
34
own genius to sponsor it, but also the genius of his friends John Millington Synge and
Lady Augusta Gregory. He came to Sweden to tell the world that the local work of poets
and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times
as the ambushes of guerrilla armies; and his boast in that elevated prose was essentially
the same as the one he would make in verse more than a decade later in his poem "The
Municipal Gallery Revisited". There Yeats presents himself amongst the portraits and
heroic narrative paintings which celebrate the events and personalities of recent history
and all of a sudden realizes that something truly epoch-making has occurred: " 'This is
not', I say,/'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland/The poets have imagined,
terrible and gay.' " And the poem concludes with two of the most quoted lines of his
entire oeuvre:
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
And yet, expansive and thrilling as these lines are, they are an instance of poetry
flourishing itself rather than proving itself, they are the poet's lap of honour, and in this
respect if in no other they resemble what I am doing in this lecture. In fact, I should quote
here on my own behalf some other words from the poem: "You that would judge me, do
not judge alone/This book or that." Instead, I ask you to do what Yeats asked his
audience to do and think of the achievement of Irish poets and dramatists and novelists
over the past forty years, among whom I am proud to count great friends. In literary
matters, Ezra Pound advised against accepting the opinion of those "who haven't
themselves produced notable work," and it is advice I have been privileged to follow,
since it is the good opinion of notable workers and not just those in my own country-that
has fortified my endeavour since I began to write in Belfast more than thirty years ago.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Yeats, however, was by no means all flourish. To the credit of poetry in our century there
must surely be entered in any reckoning his two great sequences of poems entitled
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War", the latter of
which contains the famous lyric about the bird's nest at his window, where a starling or
stare had built in a crevice of the old wall. The poet was living then in a Norman tower
which had been very much a part of the military history of the country in earlier and
equally troubled times, and as his thoughts turned upon the irony of civilizations being
consolidated by violent and powerful conquerors who end up commissioning the artists
and the architects, he began to associate the sight of a mother bird feeding its young with
the image of the honey bee, an image deeply lodged in poetic tradition and always
suggestive of the ideal of an industrious, harmonious, nurturing commonwealth:
35
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the
past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life itself as St.
Kevin was and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer. It knows
that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are
going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality
the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living
creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of
extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and
retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it
denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.
It is a proof that poetry can be equal to and true at the same time, an example of that
completely adequate poetry which the Russian woman sought from Anna Akhmatova and
36
which William Wordsworth produced at a corresponding moment of historical crisis and
personal dismay almost exactly two hundred years ago.
*
When the bard Demodocus sings of the fall of Troy and of the slaughter that
accompanied it, Odysseus weeps and Homer says that his tears were like the tears of a
wife on a battlefield weeping for the death of a fallen husband. His epic simile continues:
At the sight of the man panting and dying there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but no more piteous than Odysseus' tears,
cloaked as they were, now, from the company.
Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of
contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune,
familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and
the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear
shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has
that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable.
But there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do
with the "temple inside our hearing" which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is
an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness of speech
articulation," from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem
sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion,
with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do
with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness
becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the
unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson
and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps
the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing
voices.
Which is a way of saying that I have never quite climbed down from the arm of that sofa.
I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and
37
world-sorrow behind it. But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not
quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am
in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically
satisfying order of sounds. As if the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a
reformation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.
I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find it, for example, in the repetition
of that refrain of Yeats's, "Come build in the empty house of the stare," with its tone of
supplication, its pivots of strength in the words "build" and "house" and its
acknowledgement of dissolution in the word "empty". I find it also in the triangle of
forces held in equilibrium by the triple rhyme of "fantasies" and "enmities" and "honeybees", and in the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as a given form within the
language. Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a
steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and
whatever is centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does
what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic
nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which
that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to
poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the
power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the
evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and
gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they,
too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel
Foundation], Stockholm, 1996
38
Sylvia Plath
39
Mirror
Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
40
Face Lift
Sylvia Plath
You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.
They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.
For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.
Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.
41
Sow
Sylvia Plath
God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid
In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.
But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door
To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
With a penny slot
For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling
In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,
Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise –
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies
Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk
Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must
Thus wholly engross
The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
Helmed, in cuirass,
42
Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
By a grisly-bristled
Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.
But our farmer whistled,
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
And the green-copse-castled
Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
Slowly, grunt
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape
A monument
Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
Made lean Lent
Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
Proceeded to swill
The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.
43
Morning Song
Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
44
Spinster
Sylvia Plath
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the bird's irregular babel
And the leaves' litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.
How she longed for winter then!Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
And heart's frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.
But here - a burgeoning
Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motleyA treason not to be borne. Let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.
45
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.
46
Stillborn
Sylvia Plath
These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.
They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air -It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.
47
You’re
Sylvia Plath
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark, as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
48
The Goring
Sylvia Plath
Arena dust rusted by four bulls' blood to a dull redness,
The afternoon at a bad end under the crowd's truculence,
The ritual death each time botched among dropped capes, ill-judged
stabs,
The strongest will seemed a will towards ceremony. Obese, darkFaced in his rich yellows, tassels, pompons, braid, the picador
Rode out against the fifth bull to brace his pike and slowly bear
Down deep into the bent bull-neck. Cumbrous routine, not artwork.
Instinct for art began with the bull's horn lofting in the mob's
Hush a lumped man-shape. The whole act formal, fluent as a dance.
Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth's grossness.
49
Whiteness I Remember
Sylvia Plath
Whiteness being what I remember
About Sam: whiteness and the great run
He gave me. I've gone nowhere since but
Going's been tame deviation. White,
Not of heraldic stallions: off-white
Of the stable horse whose history's
Humdrum, unexceptionable, his
Tried sobriety hiring him out
To novices and to the timid.
Yet the dapple toning his white down
To safe gray never grayed his temper.
I see him one-tracked, stubborn, white horse,
First horse under me, high as the roofs,
His neat trot pitching my tense poise up,
Unsettling the steady-rooted green
Of country hedgerows and cow pastures
To a giddy jog. Then for ill will
Or to try me he suddenly set
Green grass streaming, houses a river
Of pale fronts, straw thatchings, the hard road
An anvil, hooves four hammers to jolt
Me off into their space of beating,
50
Stirrups undone, and decorum. And
Wouldn't slow for the hauled reins, his name,
Or shouts of walkers: crossroad traffic
Stalling curbside at his oncoming,
The world subdued to his run of it.
I hung on his neck. Resoluteness
Simplified me: a rider, riding
Hung out over the hazard, over hooves
Loud on earth's bedrock. Almost thrown, not
Thrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colors
Spinning to still in his one whiteness.
51
Mushrooms
Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
52
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
53
Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it---A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?---The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
54
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot –
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
55
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash --You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
56
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
57
Point Shirley
Sylvia Plath
From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison
The shingle booms, bickering under
The sea's collapse.
Snowcakes break and welter. This year
The gritted wave leaps
The seawall and drops onto a bier
Of quahog chips,
Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten
In my grandmother's sand yard. She is dead,
Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
Kept house against
What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
Squall waves once danced
Ship timbers in through the cellar window;
A thresh-tailed, lanced
Shark littered in the geranium bed --Such collusion of mulish elements
She wore her broom straws to the nub.
Twenty years out
Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab
Stucco socket
The purple egg-stones: from Great Head's knob
To the filled-in Gut
The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.
Nobody wintering now behind
The planked-up windows where she set
Her wheat loaves
And apple cakes to cool. What is it
Survives, grieves
So, over this battered, obstinate spit
Of gravel? The waves'
Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,
58
Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
A labor of love, and that labor lost.
Steadily the sea
Eats at Point Shirley. She died blessed,
And I come by
Bones, only bones, pawed and tossed,
A dog-faced sea.
The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.
I would get from these dry-papped stones
The milk your love instilled in them.
The black ducks dive.
And though your graciousness might stream,
And I contrive,
Grandmother, stones are nothing of home
To that spumiest dove.
Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.
59
Black Rook in Rainy Weather
Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then -Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant
60
Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
61
Daddy
Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time -Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
62
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You -Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
63
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two -The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
64
Two Sisters of Persephone
Sylvia Plath
Two girls there are : within the house
One sits; the other, without.
Daylong a duet of shade and light
Plays between these.
In her dark wainscoted room
The first works problems on
A mathematical machine.
Dry ticks mark time
As she calculates each sum.
At this barren enterprise
Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes,
Root-pale her meager frame.
Bronzed as earth, the second lies,
Hearing ticks blown gold
Like pollen on bright air. Lulled
Near a bed of poppies,
She sees how their red silk flare
Of petaled blood
Burns open to the sun's blade.
On that green altar
5
10
15
20
Freely become sun's bride, the latter
Grows quick with seed.
Grass-couched in her labor's pride,
She bears a king. Turned bitter
And sallow as any lemon,
The other, wry virgin to the last,
Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,
Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.
25
65
Spider
Sylvia Plath
Anansi, black busybody of the folktales,
You scuttle out on impulse
Blunt in self-interest
As a sledge hammer, as a man’s bunched fist,
Yet of devils the cleverest
To get your carousals told:
You spun the cosmic web: you squint from center field.
Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin,
Notable robber baron,
Behind a goatherd’s hut:
Near his small Stonehenge above the ants’ route,
One-third ant-size, a leggy spot,
He tripped an ant with a rope
Scarcely visible. About and about the slope
Of his redoubt he ran his nimble filament,
Each time round winding that ant
Tighter to the cocoon
Already veiling the gray spool of stone
From which coils, caught ants waved legs in
Torpid warning, or lay still
And suffered their livelier fellows to struggle.
Then briskly scaled his altar tiered with tethered ants,
Nodding in a somnolence
Appalling to witness,
To the barbarous outlook, from there chose
His next martyr to the gross cause
Of concupiscence. Once more
With black alacrity bound round his prisoner.
66
The ants—a file of comers, a file of goers—
Persevered on a set course
No scruple could disrupt,
Obeying orders of instinct till swept
Off-stage and infamously wrapped
Up by a spry black deus
Ex machina. Nor did they seem deterred by this.
67