One of the Venerators Seamus Heaney 1939–2013

At the time of his death on August 30, Seamus Heaney occupied a position in Irish culture comparable to that of Kenji Miyazawa in the Showa Period of Japan or Robert Frost in mid-twentieth-century America. In the words of his countryman Colm Toibin, Heaney was “not merely a central figure in the literary life of Ireland, but in its emotional life, its dream life, its real life.” And he was also a distinguished member of the international literary community, numbering among his peers and friends fellow Nobel laureates Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky. Yet, for all his renown, Heaney never lost touch with his roots in the village of Bellaghy in rural Co. Derry. And though he could anticipate an appreciative worldwide audience for whatever he might choose to write, his characteristic stance was less assertive than receptive. A lifelong literary pilgrim, he brought an attitude of humility to the acts of listening and reading. And though he became a venerable presence in the Republic of Letters, he remained, in his own phrase, “one of the venerators.”

By his own account the first and most primal object of Heaney’s veneration was the world of sound, to which he responded with uncommon attention. In “Crediting Poetry,” his Nobel address, he recalls the sounds of his “pre-reflective,” “pre-linguistic” early childhood: rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, and the “night sounds” of a horse in the stable beyond a bedroom wall. And from first to last Heaney’s lyric poems are replete with sounds deeply experienced and fondly remembered. In one characteristic instance Heaney recalls his “blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced” neighbor, who played the piano all day in her bedroom: her notes “came out to [him] like hoisted water / Raveling off a bucket at the wellhead.”

Out of this early sensitivity to sound grew Heaney’s love for the textures and vocables of language, be they the throaty syllables of Irish, the consonantal music of Anglo-Saxon, the guttural dialects of Ulster, or the sonorities of church Latin. In January 1984 I was fortunate to have a number of informal wide-ranging conversations with Heaney, during which he imitated the scraping call of the corncrake, the oratorical splendor of Andrei Voznesensky reciting “I Am Goya,” and, most memorably, the subtly inflected accents of Northern Ireland, starting with Belfast and traveling west of the Bann. The effortless precision demonstrated in those impressions can also be heard in Heaney’s mature poetic voice, which ranges in diction from the scrupulously Latinate (“my timid circumspect involvement”) to the earthily Germanic (“Slack schlock. / Scuttle scuffle. / Shak-shak”). In the latter case Heaney’s conspicuous use of assonance, alliteration, and spondaic rhythms fortifies his images and meanings, their sound precisely equal to their sense. In “Westering” he observes “cars stilled outside still churches, / Bikes tilting to a wall”; and in “Mycenae Lookout” he reports a watchman’s harrowing dream: “I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford, / Of bodies raining down like tattered meat.” At such moments Heaney’s lines seem as selfreflexive as they are mimetic. It’s as if they were intently and empathically listening to themselves.

Heaney’s acute ear for the sounds of the world and the resonances of language also informed his practical criticism, which I for one have savored as much as his poetry. At once inclusive and highly selective in their choice of subjects, Heaney’s essays and reviews are distinguished by their acute perceptions and their undisguised regard for the work under scrutiny. During one of the conversations to which I earlier alluded, I mentioned a wellknown British poet whose work I was reading at the time. “He’s written some beautiful poems,” Heaney allowed, “but I haven’t written about him because his poems have never moved me.” He went on to say that the poems in question “lacked the duende,” Garcia Lorca’s term for a poem’s animating force. Better to write nothing, Heaney seemed to feel, than to comment on work that did not deeply engage...