In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • ‘A Breather Before We Must Go On’?
  • Josie O’Donoghue (bio)
Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry by John Dennison. Oxford University Press, 2015. £55. ISBN 9 7801 9873 9197

The annals say: when the monks of ClonmacnoiseWere all at prayers inside the oratoryA ship appeared above them in the air…

John Dennison opens his study of Heaney’s prose poetics with ‘Lightenings viii’ (‘The annals say’), the poem with which Heaney ended his final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1993. Taken from Heaney’s eighth collection, Seeing Things (1991), it functions, Dennison tells us, as ‘a hermeneutical touchstone’ for poet and critics alike, and provides ‘a summative note on [Heaney’s] mature preoccupation with an ideal poetry, its distinct workings and relationship to the world, what throughout his developing prose oeuvre he appeals to as poetry’s adequacy’ (p.1; emphasis original).

In the poem, a crewman struggles to release his ship’s anchor when it catches in the monastery’s altar rails, but ‘in vain’; and the abbot, recognising that the man ‘can’t bear our life here and will drown’, urges the monks to help him. It ends: [End Page 281]

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed backOut of the marvellous as he had known it.

In the Oxford lecture, Heaney said that ‘implicit’ in this poem was something he wanted to ‘affirm’ in the lecture series: that ‘within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic’, ‘that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing’.1 It is, he explained in a lecture delivered in 1990 which also ended with the poem, ‘about a floating world which proceeds about its own business and yet remains subject to the downward drag of the actual, historical world’ and serves as a warning that ‘if we confine the creature of our imagination too long within the element of our civic and domestic lives, we are likely to stifle them’.2

All of this Dennison quotes, but his own interspersed commentary on the poem reads more into it than is warranted: Heaney’s ‘two orders of knowledge’ are reformulated as ‘the heavenly and the humdrum’; the ship’s relation to the inhabitants of Clonmacnoise is of ‘a heavenly mystery breaking into quotidian existence’; and the poem’s ‘sacerdotal coordinates’ are invoked (pp. 1–2). The monastery as setting is significant, of course, but Heaney takes pains to describe the two realms evoked in humanist terms: the two orders of knowledge are ‘the poetic’ and ‘the practical’, and ‘the creature of our imagination’ is contrasted with ‘our civic or domestic lives’. The distinction between poetry and reality – between ‘the actual world’ and the poet’s ‘artistic world’ (terms used by Heaney in 1978) – is clear; this is the ‘dualistic opposition’ that Dennison describes throughout this book.3 But the ship’s world in ‘The annals say’ is not a version of a Christian heaven, as Dennison hints, not a ‘momentary, accidental instance of heaven coming down and leaving a numinous afterglow of the marvellous’ (p. 6). In fact, the poem ends with the crewman escaping ‘Out of the marvellous, as he had known it’ (my emphasis): it is our ‘actual, historical world’ that is marvellous to him.

The theologising language in Dennison’s discussion of this poem is symptomatic of the book’s overarching thesis: that Heaney’s view of Christian doctrines as ‘fictional constructs’ (p.105) allows him to construct a secularised poetics out of their terms. ‘[W]hat must not be lost sight of’, [End Page 282] Dennison argues, ‘is that Heaney’s trust in poetry is extensively imitative of Christian doctrine which, it is assumed, is now defunct’ (p. 9). But it is as if he cannot resist the opportunity, when it arises, to make Heaney’s poetics appear more explicitly religious than this would suggest. Dennison claims that Heaney’s ‘post-Christian’, ‘secularised’, ‘transcendental humanist’ poetics is constructed out of his abandoned religious faith, and that his prose and poetry from the early 1990s...

pdf

Share