Weigh thy words in a balance

P. J. Kavanagh

THE REDRESS OF POETRY

by Seamus Heaney Faber, £14.99, pp. 196 There is a luminosity about this book which justifies its rather mysterious title. It sets out to show that although poetry can rarely take sides in any practically useful way, nevertheless, in a complex and diverse fashion, it can 'redress' spiritual (and there- fore, by extension, political) imbalances. Twice in the opening chapter — these arc lectures given at Oxford during Heaney's recent occupation of the Chair of Poetry he quotes the mystic, Simone Weil:

If we know in what way society is unbal- anced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale . . . . Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin.

Weil is talking of the transcendent, and Heaney, with care, guarding his flanks, makes the same claim for poetry, because it is larger than fact but tied to fact, contains the imagined 'within the gravitational pull of the actual'.

He is seldom as abstract as that, is at his best when getting down to cases, close- reading poems, and casting his own coloured phrases as accurately and attrac- tively as an inspired fisherman plopping his fly. It might be best to begin this book near the end — you sense him getting into his stride and growing in rapport with his audi- ence as the terms pass — begin with 'Joy and Night' in which he contrasts the atti- tudes to death of Philip Larkin and W. B. Yeats. He detects in Larkin a refusal of balance, an absence of 'redress'; he won- ders 'whether Larkin's famous rejection of Yeats's more romantic stance has not been too long and too readily approved of.

He prints Larkin's famously gloomy `Aubade' which begins, 'I work all day and get half-drunk at night', and which ends, `Postmen like doctors go from house to house'; he admiringly grants how it carries surprised readers 'on the lip of its rhetori- cal wave . . . leaves them like unwary surfers hung over a great emptiness' and focuses on these lines:

Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than with- stood.

Yeats absolutely disagreed. 'No actress,' he maintained, 'has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra; even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing.' Which amounts to saying that death with- stood is indeed very different from death whined at; and that it is up to poets and actresses to continue to withstand. Of course Larkin knew 'the imagination's stalemate between the death-mask of nihilism and the fixed smile of a pre-booked place in par- adise', but Yeats's world is larger because, like the music of Mozart, its Yes has 'weight and significance because it overpowers and contains a No'.

The 'redress' that Heaney is after. This is inspiriting stuff, so are the scattered phrases, exact and glittering: Dylan Thomas (admired), 'toiling in the element of language like a person in a mudbath.' In `Do not go gentle' Heaney hears 'the child poet in Thomas comforting the old ham he had become. The green fuse addressing the burnt-out case.'

This is wit, but at nobody's expense; Heaney reveres the poem. Oscar Wilde's (admired) Ballad of Reading Gaol contains lapses which Wilde intended as the cry of Marsyas but sound like 'the strings of Man- tovani'. John Clare's 'random swoop upon the momentary — its casually perfect close- ups on raindrops'. He compares Marlowe's `Hero and Leander' to James Joyce -

the hithering-withering of a self-possessed mind . . the lukewarm place that Leander slips into under the bedclothes was probably never warmed again in exactly the right way until Molly Bloom jingled the bedsprings more than 300 years later.

Heaney knows, of course, that Marlowe's verse is connected with — in a sense derived from — 'the context of nascent English imperialism'. As a part-time academic in the States he is aware of the sour opposition to the canon represented by a student quoted by Marilyn Butler, insisting that his generation 'could not jus- tify the study of a culture which had done so much damage'. As an Irishman Heaney knows this. Both Edmund Spencer and Sir Walter Raleigh were involved in a mas- sacre in Ireland that shocked Europe. However, he insists that imaginative litera- ture, despite these 'desperately overdue correctives . . . cannot be read simply and solely as a function of an oppres- sive discourse, or as reprehensible mask- ing.'

He plumps first for what Wordsworth called 'the grand primary principle of pleasure', and relishes unabashed the note of Marlowe 'that is modulating con- stantly between the scampish and the plan- gent'.

That 'scampish' is delightful. Oxford was lucky to have him, so are we. Public opin- ion is not always wrong: Heaney was elect- ed early to stardom, 'Seamus Famous' he became, and remains. It is almost miracu- lous to have someone of influence among us who remains so sweetly just, and so undulled.