Death of a Naturalist: R.I.P. Seamus Heaney

heany imageHow do you make mischief with grace?  Touch the heart with a glancing blow?  Find the moral in the menial, the dark in the star, the light in the abyss?  These were among the hard-won gifts of Seamus Heaney, a natural poet who knew that artifice and discipline were no less crucial for those born to the laurels.  Add to these qualities the “wild strength” Heaney’s translation of Beowulf ascribes to Grendel, but in Heaney that wildness (necessary, Frost wrote, to have a poem) was always honeyed with courtesy and a strong Catholic sense of ceremony.  Which is not to say the man’s fierceness of intent and practice never showed.

Now we will be inundated with elegies, many of them eloquent, all of them inadequate to lessen the loss of Heaney, dead at seventy-four.  I am tempted to claim that Heaney was the greatest poet of our age, but such a stance would likely invite contention, and who can say so soon how any river or stone or lark song will weather?  I’ll settle for saying that he has been for me the most nourishing and sustaining poet of the last half century, his originality and mastery of the craft, his structures and improvisations, over and again providing the necessary language to fuel me as a reader and writer.

Two months ago or fifteen weeks or six days ago I might have divined that I should pick up Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996) and read it through, muzzle to scut, so it is, in part, sheer sentiment that just now I should decide to begin that regimen with a shadowed glee, then venture again into the later books to relive those poems of beauty, consequence, lilting or rough music and conscience, earth and air, Ariel and Caliban at once, and at times Mercutio, and the Lear of the fifth act.  I’ll do it slow but steady and listen to the tapes of him reading, and I’ll be, once again, a better man for it.

In “The Forge,” written in the sixties, Heaney begins with “All I know is a door into the dark.”  In the farrier’s world “the speaker” (that prevalent, recognizable voice of young Heaney) knows the beauty of process, “the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,” as well as the “fantail of sparks/ Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.”  His mind’s eye is on the blacksmith, forceful and artful, but it’s clear that he also understands that all makers “expend [themselves] in shape and music.”  The sonnet is too visceral and focused on the gritty reality of physical labor to present a simple equation, and too suggestive, Hephaestus/Vulcan both invited into our associations.  Still, it’s a small and instructive introduction to Heaney’s project to be both earthy and worldly, as well as canny.  Readers learn pretty early that the humility of “All I know” has to be looked into, as what follows reveals that the speaker knows much more than the door and even what’s behind it, including the sparks and the genius loci.  He knows the light inside that darkness, and Heaney went on to bring us with him as he discovered all the shadows and glimmers of the language in his word hoard, which was considerable, and managed with a vitality which will not fade so long as we have an appetite for the hard work of reading him and the sometimes shocking, sometimes genial shining reward.  Yeats told us that “the worst are full of passionate intensity,” but Heaney’s legacy is the testimony that some of the best are filled with the same, and that is the justification of our mirth and passion and hope.

I am tempted to construct a kind of funeral pyre for Heaney, just to help me imagine the gods of the classical texts and the God of the Beowulf poet are paying close attention and that the human and divine ceremonies still matter.  Heofon rece swealg, wrote that Anglo-Saxon poet.  In Heaney’s straightforward translation, “Heaven swallowed the smoke.”  And may his fine self be with the blessed five days before the devil knows he’s dead.

R. T. Smith 9/1/13


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.