The fourth poem “ Summer 1969” continues Seamus Heaney’s exploration of the effects of violence in “Singing School.” It’s a quite remarkable statement of the guilt that a young person might well feel while watching riots in his home country while he is studying abroad:

from Singing School

Summer 1969

While the Constabulary covered the mob
Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
Only the bullying sun of Madrid.
Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.
At night on the balcony, gules of wine,
A sense of children in their dark corners,
Old women in black shawls near open windows,
The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.
We talked our way home over starlit plains
Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil
Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’
Another conjured Lorca from his hill.
We sat through death counts and bullfight reports
On the television, celebrities
Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.
Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’
Covered a wall-the thrown-up arms
And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
And knapsacked military, the efficient
Rake of the fusillade. In the next room
His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall-
Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,
Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips
Over the world. Also, that holmgang
Where two berserks club each other to death
For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

While parts of this poem seem quite clear, other parts are greatly enhanced by the remarkable instant access of the internet. The irony of “I was suffering/ Only the bullying sun of Madrid” while others are dying at homes seems straightforward but effective. And, yet, despite his absence from the violence, his feelings about the violence somehow seem reinforced by his own evironment where women and children hide in the shadows far from the “Guardia Civil.” Death counts from the riots are intermingled with “bullfight reports,” as human deaths mix with the ceremonial death of the bulls demanded by a “civilized” country.

Even in the relative shelter of the Spanish Museum the narrator is reminded of violence and death, man’s inhumanity to his own. Goya’s “Shootings of the Third of May” may well be a more direct reminder of the riots in Ireland, but the image of Saturn eating his own child is a more vivid insight into the savage nature of mankind, all reminiscent of even earlier violence when primitive men in Denmark killed each other in ceremonial combat.

Perhaps even more poignant than “Summer 1969” is Heaney’s “Punishment” describing a maiden apparently sacrificed or punished in an earlier time.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Now, if the truth be known, I’m not sure I would have had anywhere near the same feeling from seeing this exhibit that Heaney describes in this poem. When I see mummies, it’s difficult for me even to imagine them as ever having been alive, much less imagine the moment of their death.

However, this poem effectively puts us into the imaginative position of watching someone being executed for having committed adultery, a sin any of us might be tempted into committing. (Coincidentally this reminds me of Mike Golby’s recent entry on a woman in Africa being condemned to being stoned to death for committing adultery.) Heaney forces us to ask what kind of people could strip a beautiful flaxen-haired girl, shave half her head, blindfold her, put a noose around her neck and drown her by tying rocks to her and throwing her into a bog for committing adultery?

Perhaps the most sobering aspect of the poem, though, is the narrator’s admission that he “would have cast, I know,/ the stones of silence,” a quiet admission that, although perhaps he would never have done these things himself, he probably would not have voiced his disagreement if he had been there, for he, like all artists, is merely an “artful voyeur,” and, as such, would have been a fellow conspirator in her death. For he admits to understanding the “tribal, intimate revenge” because it is part of us, part of our DNA, apparently, at least if we are to believe the poet.

Remarkably, in this volume of poems Heanus takes us from an young boy’s un-ease with violence and discrimination to a societal dis-ease of scapegoating certain individuals who do not fit the majority’s standards. Starting with the violence inflicted on a young student by a boarding school and a racist society, Heaney moves on the analyze the very nature of such violence, and, like William Golding in Lord of the Flies, finds the cause of such violence lies at the very heart of darkness, the human heart.

At times I suspect my love of Yeats’ poetry makes it difficult for me to fully appreciate other Irish poets because too often I end up trying to compare their poetry to that of Yeats’ poetry.

In Selected Poems 1966-1987 Seamus Heaney, like Yeats, often refers to classic Irish literature. For instance, one section of the selected poems is entitled “Sweeney Astray” and is Heaney’s version of the medieval Irish Buile Shuibhne, a major text in the Irish literary canon. It is the tale of Sweeney, who having crossed St Rónán is cursed by him. I suppose one day I am going to have to force myself to read this, but the truth is that, having read more mythology than I cared to, I have little desire to read the romanticized history of Ireland. The truth is that for many Americans these poems will seem unapproachable and irrelevant. And, yes, this seems to be the same Sweeney that appears in T.S. Eliot’s poems, certainly another reason to resist it.

In reality, though, Heaney reminds me more of Thomas Hardy or James Wright than he does W.B. Yeats, though he is a much more “classical” poet than either Hardy or Wright, often preferring to develop his ideas through the use of classical allusions rather than simple, straightforward imagery.

For instance, the poem “Personal Helicon” is much easier to understand if you realize that “helicon” refers to “A mountain in B[oe]otia, in Greece, supposed by the Greeks to be the residence of Apollo and the Muses.” It doesn’t help that when I first looked up the word that Encarta, as well as others, defined it as “a large bass tuba that encircles the player’s body, used in marching bands.” Needless to say, this definition is likely to lead to further confusion, not enlightenment.

Personal Helicon

For Michael Longley

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 mule
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

It also probably helps if you’re aware that “In Christian symbolism the well falls within the group of ideas associated with the concept of life as a pilgrimage, and signifies salvation” and “the act of drawing water from a well is – like fishing -symbolic of drawing out and upwards the numinous contents of the deeps” according to A Dictionary of Symbols. Somewhat reminiscent of Theodore Roethke’s early poems, Heaney, too, sees “fungus” and “a rat slapped across my reflection.” So, even in childhood the poet sought to probe the depths of the dark side of his nature. Since it’s not “dignified” to peer self-consciously into wells as an adult, the poet now uses his “rhyme,” his poetry, to explore himself as reflected in the darkness of human nature.

“The Ministry of Fear” gives the reader further insight into Heaney’s empathy with those who have suffered in life:

from Singing School

1. The Ministry of Fear

For Seamus Deane

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
In important places. The lonely scarp
Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted
For six years, overlooked your Bogside.
I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
The throttle of the hare. In the first week
I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road
Were amber in the fog. It was an act
Of stealth.

Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,
Dabbling in verses till they have become
A life: from bulky envelopes arriving
In vacation time to slim volumes
Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.
Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine
Of your exercise book, bewildered me-
Vowels and ideas bandied free
As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.
I tried to write about the sycamores
And innovated a South Derry rhyme
With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.
Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain
Were walking, by God, all over the fine
Lawns of elocution.
Have our accents
Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak
As well as students from the Protestant schools.’
Remember that stuff? Inferiority
Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.
‘What’s your name, Heaney?’
‘Heaney, Father.’
‘Fair
Enough.’

On my first day, the leather strap
Went epileptic in the Big Study,
Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,
But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life
Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life
In the kissing seat of an Austin 16
Parked at a gable, the engine running,
My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,
A light left burning for her in the kitchen.
And heading back for home, the summer’s
Freedom dwindling night by night, the air
All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen
Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round
The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing
The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:
‘What’s your name, driver?’
‘Seamus . .
Seamus?
They once read my letters at a roadblock
And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,
‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.
Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

Though personally I cannot imagine anything much worse than being sent off to a boarding school as a child, how much worse it must have been to be sent off to a school where you are viewed as inferior and to suffer further persecution because of your religion when you’re sent home for the summer. There’s certainly irony in using the quote form Patrick Kavanagh, the Monaghan poet, that “we have lived/ In important places.” Usually it’s soldiers that are “billeted,” not young boys. And what parent could ever imagine that “biscuits” could ever compensate for a sense of being “exiled.”

It seems that the narrator’s only true friend was equally alienated and even then they were cut off from each other, forced to communicate through their poetry sent back and forth to each other. His friend was bold and outspoken, bewildering the narrator, who wrote romantic descriptions of nature, only to have them stomped upon by “those hobnailed boots,” an obvious reference to Nazi Germany.

Forced into exile by his parents, the narrator even seems forced to deny his own feelings, writing home that “a boarder’s life/ Was not so bad” even while “the leather strap/ Went epileptic.”

Returning home for a romantic interlude with a young lass, the narrator is confronted by Protestant policeman who crowd “round/ The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing/ The muzzle of a Sten gun” stuck in his eye.

No wonder the boys call this place the “ministry of fear,” and no wonder Heaney exhibits such sympathy with the downtrodden in his book of poems.