Singing of Skunks and Saints

By Peter Stoler

SWEENEY ASTRAY by Seamus Heaney; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 96 pages; $13.95

A Dublin paper once decided that he was the "bard of the bogs." Robert Lowell took the high road, designating him the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Seamus Heaney (pronounced Hay-knee) finds very little comfort in either encomium. "The first annoys me," he grumbles. "The second makes me uncomfortable."

That is as may be; both labels apply. Heaney is very much a product of Ireland's soil, an element he describes as "black butter/ Melting and opening underfoot." And in a land that has produced enough rhymers to people County Mayo, his is the voice that resonates loudest past the Irish Sea to Britain, America and beyond. Heaney's reputation seems to increase geometrically with every poem, starting back in 1966 with the appearance of his first true verse, "Digging." It announced, as William Butler Yeats announced in one of his own early works, that a vocation was being sought: "Living roots awaken in my head./ But I've no spade to follow.../ Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it."

The digging has thus far unearthed five volumes of poetry, including the bestseller Field Work (1979). Sweeney Astray, to be published next May by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, provides a festival of Heaneyan contradictions. The hero is a modernist ideal: wounded, cunning, lyrical and deranged. His name inescapably recalls T.S. Eliot's Irish vulgarian "Apeneck Sweeney ... among the nightingales." Yet Heaney's man is not a commoner but a king, and he does not merely listen to birds, he becomes one. Sweeney Astray is in fact not an original poem but a brilliant rendition of the 7th century Irish legend Buile Suibne. In it, Mad Sweeney slays an innocent psalmist and is cursed for his great offense by St. Ronan: "It is God's decree/ bare to the world he'll always be." Thereafter, the king loses a battle, a mind and an identity when he is reduced to a pitiable creature, "wind-scourged, stripped/ like a winter tree/ clad in black frost/ and frozen snow." Flailed by the seasons, run to earth by his enemies, Sweeney, in the epic tradition, finally earns redemption through suffering. In this role, says Heaney, he stands both for every man and for the artist, "displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance."

Those words are uttered in a melodic Irish intonation by a man who could have modeled for Eliot's caricature. Currently a poet in residence at Harvard, Heaney is hardly noticed on campus or strolling the Boston waterfront. At 44, he checks in at 5 ft. 10 in. and 200 lbs.; with his shock of thinning gray hair and the thick-fingered hands of a farmer, like his father's and grandfather's before him, he might pass for an immigrant long shoreman or an off-duty officer. But the appearance is what he calls "the great fur coat of attitude." Beneath it is a wary, hypersensitive poet, alive to the nuances of speech and feeling.

In his spartan rooms at Harvard's Adams House, the poet can be persuaded to summon up his youth in County Derry, outside Belfast. "I was one of eight surviving children," he recalls. One of his earliest poems, "MidTerm Break," records the funeral of his young brother, struck by a car and buried in "a four foot box, a foot for every year." Young Seamus might have followed his father into the fields, had he not been introduced as a teen-ager to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Roman Catholic convert who became a priest and master poet. "A verse of his described an old farmyard and talked about 'weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.' Something in that language touched some secret storage of imagery that had been there, in my mind, since my childhood in the outback."

The storage room was thoroughly ransacked after graduation from Queens University in Belfast, where he was a scholarship student. Teaching in a Northern Irish secondary school, writing at night and on weekends, Heaney published two volumes of poetry, Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark. But it was not until 1972 that he reversed the procedure, choosing poetry as his main work and lecturing as a sideline. He also chose to move south, to County Wicklow, a suburb of Dublin, with his wife Marie and their three children. "I felt that by throwing up my job and moving and taking the risk of confronting my own emptiness I had the right to the word poet."

Since that epochal year, the poet has published continuously, contributing criticism to scores of quarterlies, editing others, bringing his admixture of exuberance and melancholia to packed houses at European and American colleges. "I have long insisted that the artist who works within the university system pays his way in society," says Heaney. "There's a strong puritanical streak in me that still believes it."

That streak is well hidden in Heaney's verse, which, like Yeats', mixes the familiar--domestic animals, the aroma of a country afternoon, the benison of a homecoming--with the stuff of legend--myth-haunted Gaelic songs, the discovery of a 1,000-year-old man buried in peat. For Heaney, objects always cast a long shadow: the observation of a skunk, of all animals, brings on a longing for his absent wife: "Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer/ For the black plunge-line nightdress."

No erotic or pastoral turn can long allay the great sorrow of Irish history. Sometimes Heaney confronts it head on, as in "Requiem for the Croppies," composed in memory of the Catholic farm boys who fought the Protestant armies nearly two centuries ago, "on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave," where "terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon." Even these acrimonious lines have not satisfied some Irish nationalists who criticize him for refusing to write anti-British broadsides. Counters Heaney: "The job of the artist is to make works of art, not to be involved in one cause or another."

Nonetheless, he speaks frequently of the broken lives up north, of a cousin killed in the Belfast conflict, of the cycle of poverty and rage. "Bigotry is a fact of life in the north, where I grew up," says Heaney. "But I do not think that killing is the way to correct it."

But those recollections are not enough to quash the spirit of a rooted soul who breaks up his four-month stay at Harvard with frequent trips back to Dublin. There he lives on the same Sandymount Strand where James Joyce's hero Stephen Dedalus began his wanderings in Ulysses. On his return, the Dublin Dedalus can be found at his desk or, more likely, speaking extempore at one of several local watering spots, where he likes to empty "a jar or two" and, when the spirit moves him, break into song. Mindful of such bibulous predecessors as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, he acknowledges, "People expect that of me. And I do not disappoint them."

Heaney is not above making fun of himself, as he did two years ago when he addressed the Fordham University graduation and used his newly granted title of doctor to prescribe "whisky galore" to the school's students. Still, those who expect yet another rollicking Irish boyo will be let down. Heaney believes that "the faking of feeling is a sin against the imagination," and he would rather be mute than imitate some sophomore's idea of a free-versifier. His most salient characteristic at Harvard or Dublin is in fact a cheerful quiet--until an inspiration strikes him. These silences are explained in a long, autobiographical poem, Station Island, in which the ghost of James Joyce stands on a far shore. "Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes," says the exiled writer. "Let go, let fly, forget./ You've listened long enough. Now strike your note." The next voice you hear will be that of Seamus Heaney, a striking poet in every sense of the word. --By Peter Staler