A POET OF THE THRESHOLD

By Paul Gray

PEOPLE SUPPOSEDLY IN THE KNOW have been saying for years that Irish poet Seamus Heaney would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, people said the same thing about Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, illustrious authors and notorious nonwinners. Against that background, the Swedish Academy's selection of Heaney, announced last week, qualifies as something of a surprise: the laurel went to someone widely seen as deserving it.

The Academy likes to invest some geopolitical significance in its literature awards, and the current peace talks in Northern Ireland seem to have influenced this year's decision. Among the reasons cited for choosing Heaney: "As an Irish Catholic, he has concerned himself with analysis of violence in Northern Ireland--with the express reservation that he wants to avoid the conventional terms."

That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thoroughly purged his language of the commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote. From his first published volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), onward, he has produced intense, lyrical works that seem suspended between contradictions--life and death, joy and grief, memory and loss. His imagery is radical, in the true, etymological sense of that word: "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."

Such sensations were Heaney's birthright. The oldest of nine children, he was raised on Mossbawn, the family farm some 30 miles northwest of Belfast. A Protestant estate adjoined the Catholic Heaneys' land. "I was symbolically placed," he said later, "between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between 'the demesne' and 'the bog.' The demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken; the bog was rushy and treacherous, no place for children."

Heaney left the farm to study English at Queen's University of Belfast, and then to teach. As his poetry began to attract attention and praise, a succession of academic posts beckoned; between 1989 and 1994, he was both the professor of poetry at Oxford and the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. And he attracted hordes of acolytes and admirers along the way, a bearish, affable bard equally at ease in faculty room or pub.

But his childhood farm--his grounding in the earth--has never left Heaney or his poems: "As a child, they could not keep me from wells/ And old pumps with buckets and windlasses." His recurring metaphor for the act of writing poetry is digging, into the past, into the literal Irish bogs where old friends and enemies lie buried and preserved.

This long, archaeological perspective has drawn some criticism over the years from Catholic partisans in the struggle over Northern Ireland, who felt that Heaney was insufficiently engaged in the tumultuous here and now. His move to Dublin, capital of the Irish Republic, in 1972 also proved controversial. But Heaney has written quite movingly about the carnage wrought by hatred in his native land. In "Casualty," he portrays the death of a Catholic friend who went to a Protestant pub in spite of warnings that a wing of the Irish Republican Army planned to bomb it: "He had gone miles away/ For he drank like a fish." After the explosion: "How culpable was he/ That last night when he broke/ Our tribe's complicity?" The question is both wrenching and outside the parameters of normal political debate. Death and suffering cannot be countered by polemics; the best thing to be said--a fair definition of poetry--is whatever pays tribute to human complexities.

The intensity of Heaney's poetry stems largely from a Roman Catholic temperament that has been baffled by doubt. "My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension," he once told an interviewer. "But then there's the reality: there's no heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised and no personal God." Or, as he writes in one poem, "Just the old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round." Readers of Heaney--or, for that matter, of Dante or of T.S. Eliot--are free to disagree with his beliefs or the lack thereof. What no one can deny is the power of the words he has found to bridge the disjunctions of his life and faith. As he wrote in "The Harvest Bow," "The end of art is peace."