Alison wrote

>I note, also, that even nasty beasties like Seamus Heaney haven't, in my
>time hanging around here, received such a pasting as the women Chris
>mentioned. Irrespective of what I think of the poets - and a few of them
>I don't know at all - I wonder about that.

I have been pondering this too: Alison is right, fair is fair, error is air.

So I walk over to my shelf of books by the Nobel Prize winner, close my
eyes and open one at random (truthfully I do, right here in Miami,
Florida). I land on the first poem in the sequence "Lightenings" from the
1991 book _Seeing Things_:

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:
bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into--
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.


Before I'm through the third line I'm wondering about it--this beggar, the
shivering is filmic. No doubt "silhouette" is partly of interest to the
poet for its sound-values, by which I mean not just the end-rhyme but the
return to the opening, the tight wrap, and the nudge forward to line four.
It seems the poet will pursue such effects without overtly acknowledging
the conventionality of his image. The beggar would seem to be of less
interest to him than the numinous moment of perception.

After such an opening, what else to do but move via non sequitur--nothing
against those per se-- into the rotund language of inevitability,
causality. There is the beggar, and because there is the beggar glimpsed,
one might "set"--an interesting verb, does it refer to the poem itself I
wonder, indicating that perhaps I am wrong about the level of
self-consciousness here--a particular judgment.

"Wallstead" and "cold hearth"--how quaint suddenly to be among such
words--and then the awkward "rained into." A last line where, like
buffalo, "the soul-free cloud-life"--er, rain--"roams".

Ah, I think, it surely is poetry we're dealing with here. Soon, I think,
the poet will himself be wandering lonely as a cloud. And sure enough

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

Commanded journey? Who is this pilgrim? To risk an unkind paraphrase
again: after the forced march of Life alas nothing special; we are humbly
stumbling on familiar paths, nothing to speak but dumb wonder, melancholy
singular me. But to speak our remote sadness in such tones! The
resonance--"gazing" I tell you! Some maple sugar with that pancake rhyme,
thank you. And in case you are wondering about my pronouns

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-around.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

The poet appears to be thinking in this poem. His glimpse of light wafting
over the poor shivering beggar does not offer much of a view of the beggar
at all but instead the comfort of platitude--life sucks and then we dry.
He would appear to want to link this platitude with "Unroofed scope," with
the very vistas of wisdom perhaps, or the terror of being-outside (it's
windy). A shot of Lysol cleansing the mind.

To be fair this is only the first poem in a sequence. There is much else
in this long poem. Later in the sequence, for instance, we find a story
about a famous poet, just in case we thought such experience, such
recognition, unique to OUR POET. Indeed other poets, faintly comic
creatures, have come to negotiate their hankering after infinity:

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-at, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

In this one crucial or "original" moment in the master's life his head was
an anvil for all the sky to beat upon, and in the resulting recognition of
the "perfect" limits of mere being he gave birth to a "ripple," as of
course he was to throw the stone of his poetry into the worldpond--but now
I am mixing metaphors. Passive poet sky-drubbed among the fold: a shame
rather that the SHEEP didn't kick him in the head to knock him out of his
profound stupor. But I have not lived among sheep; perhaps there is little
kick in "dainty shins".

Being-unto-death painted reverent-sentimental, the oddly dissonant
"fleece-hustle" straining to lift this writing into surprise. The next
poem in the sequence is also about Hardy and does revise this a little.

But Heaney has better moments, yes? No doubt Olds too.

KT








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