I decided recently I should be reading more Seamus Heaney. I’d read his Beowulf translation years ago (more about that below), and come across anthologized poems I’d liked. So I sat down with his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Actually, I listened to his reading of the poems before I read them. He’s got a number of themes, beginning with boyhood experience, often as it is connected to and repeated in another form by adult experience. Irish history—particularly the Troubles and the potato famine of the late 1840s called the Great Hunger—are also themes, along with the nuances of adult love, the invisible ties that bind us to each other and our homelands, and, always nature and work.
In the title poem, the budding naturalist steals frogspawn from a flax-dam—a pond used to soak and soften flax—to watch the tadpoles appear in jars at school and home. When the adult frogs invade the flax-dam, the boy is repulsed and runs, convinced their arrival is vengeance for his stealing of the frogspawn. “The Barn” explores childish fears: in the half-lighted barn the speaker as a boy sees “the two-lugged sacks” of wheat and the farm implements like weapons; at night he recreates the scene with bats, rats’ eyes in the corners, birds dive-bombing him, and the sacks, “like great blind rats.” He confronts some of these fears in “The Advancement of Learning,” facing down his fear of rats at an embankment and a bridge. Here one of Heaney’s word-talents is his skill with verbs: the rat that “slimed out of the water,” while another was “nimbling / Up the far bank.” His rhymes are very often slant. In “Blackberry-Picking,” a sudden return to full rhyme at the end helps punch up an ending about the way the blackberries always start to ferment and grow fungus after picking:
It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
In “The Early Purges,” a child’s horror at the drowning of kittens turns as he grows to jaded recognition that “on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.” The turning of the generations is another theme. The first poem is “Digging,” describing the speaker’s father’s and grandfather’s skill at cutting turf or digging potatoes, and the speaker’s realization that his is a different talent:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
“Follower” is a generational turn-about: the boy followed, stumbling, his father’s ploughing. Now it is his father “who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.”
“Mid-Term Break,” in unrhymed couplets, describes a real experience of Heaney’s. The older brother recounts his going home from school for his brother’s funeral. The details are matter-of-fact until we get to the last line: his brother is in “a four foot box, a foot for every year.” In “Dawn Shoot,” the speaker and a friend go out to shoot rabbits, and the metaphors of their approach to their spot are all of hunting and shooting: “The rails scored a bull’s eye into the eye / of a bridge,” “a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.” Heaney begins with a stanza of unrhymed lines of varying length, then one of pentameters and tetrameters, then another irregular one, and one like the second to conclude.
Several poems either directly or indirectly invoke the past. In one, he expands some comments in Cecil Woodham-Smith’s history of the Great Hunger about an English ship’s commander refusing to relieve a boatful of starving Irishmen. In “At a Potato Digging,” Heaney parallels a modern potato harvest, where mechanical diggers break up the mounds of a potato planting, and workers gather the potatoes and move them to a pit, to the potato famine of 1845-49. The connecting phrase links the appearance of the potatoes, “live skulls, blind eyed” to the more literal sense of starved people when it is repeated. A more indirect reference, this time to the Troubles, is the description, in “Docker,” of a dock worker in a Belfast pub, with his attitudes and prejudices about religion, work, and family: “That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-- / Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.”
Some are poems of exquisite observation with nothing else needed. Heaney describes turkeys at a butcher’s, churning day, getting a cow in calf out of a “byre”—a cow barn—or uses an extended metaphor of gunnery to show us a trout targeting seeds and moths on the surface of a stream and his swift movement underwater.
Near the end of the book is a group of love poems. “Twice Shy,’ in triplet stanzas rhymed abcbdb, is about two not-young, not-first-love people sussing out each other’s feelings delicately on a walk:
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.
“Valediction” uses a nautical metaphor (“Until you resume command / Self is in mutiny”) in a poem about the distress of the speaker at the absence of his lover from the house. Heaney addresses a poem to his wife Marie about her pregnancy with their first child. And in “Honeymoon Flight,” he muses about the beginnings of voyages, “Travellers, at this point, can only trust.”
The collection ends with “Personal Helicon,” a poem that came to be one of Heaney’s most frequently anthologized works. His childish love for old wells that might give back your image in the water or be too deep and dark to do so, but have echoes instead, he ties in at the end to Echo and Narcissus, and concludes: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
I listened to Seamus Heaney’s reading of his own translation of Beowulf when I was still teaching, which informs these notes. I had not yet read the translation, so the experience was good for emphasizing the oral/aural aspects of the poem and of the translation. There are some Irishisms in it: “That was one good king” is the way Heaney translates “þæt wæs god cyning” and I had no idea what Heaney’s half line “to bed in the bothies” meant without looking it up.
In listening, the elegiac tone is evident from the beginning, and we are very conscious that the poem starts with Scyld being sent off in a burial boat; “nobody knows for certain who salvaged that load,” says the poet, and compares this sending-off with Scyld’s being a foundling as a baby. And it is sad too, when we get down through Beow and Healfdene and finally Hrothgar, who wants to build this great hall just to make people happy, to realize that his wish is doomed. He wants to furnish the best place in the world for people to eat and drink and for the king to dispense gifts, “not the common land or people’s lives,” but rings and cups and standards and swords—and the wish is wholly good, to make people warm and happy and drunk and replete with gifts—but it can’t be: there is a force that will prevent this purely good impulse from coming to be or remaining, whether it is the resentful outcast Grendel or the family rivalry that the poet just hints will eventually burn Heorot to the ground.
Grendel is a kind of Malvolio type; he’s unhappy that people are having a good time. Where do these evil things come from? This is one of the questions that Beowulf raises. “The monsters and evil things that contended with God” seems to be the answer, Cain’s brothers, the spawn of an evil act, brother against brother. Grendel is an outcast because he opposes the desire of people to congregate, share, and be happy.
For several reasons I had been reluctant to assign Beowulf in our Senior Seminar, designed to fill in gaps in English majors’ reading. I had assigned it only once in the eight or ten times I’d taught the course. Heaney’s translation changed my mind. One of my reasons was a prejudice I inherited from the man who taught me the poem in my Old English grad class, Fred Rebsamen, who did the Rinehart prose translation Beowulf Is My Name. Rebsamen’s attitude was that the poem ought to be read in the original; failing that, a prose translation could be read faster and understood better than a verse translation that couldn’t really capture much of what makes Anglo-Saxon heroic verse work, anyway. Heaney conveys a lot of how the stress and the alliteration of the original work, but he never sacrifices sense to get a line that is “accurate” because he knows that accuracy to a standard that only exists in a different language isn’t possible.
When Beowulf decides to go help Hrothgar nobody tries to stop him. They encourage the doughty warrior to go and distinguish himself. When he arrives the sentry says “who are you?” Beowulf says he owes allegiance to Hygelac and that he is the son of Egtheow. The sentry is not surprised at the resolve of Beowulf and his men to help Horthgar. The impulse comes straight out of a value system that is understandable to him. Also interesting is the fact that he believes them, and he doesn’t have difficulty distinguishing between raiders, whom it is his duty as sentry to watch out for, and friends, even though they also are unknown armed men approaching his coastal watch. Apparently, you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. Hrothgar, it turns out, knows Beowulf, knew him when he was much younger, knew his father Edgtheow, and from Hrothgar we find out that Beowulf has the reputation of having the strength of thirty men in his handgrasp.
There’s a kind of give and take in the warrior’s view of taking hold of one’s fate. In the formal boast the warrior says I’m going to do this and do that, but he also says “Gæ½a wyrd swa hio scel”—fate goes always as it must.
Beowulf first decides he will not use a sword in fighting Grendel, and then we learn, when his followers take out swords, that swords are useless against Grendel. The hero’s resolve is empowering. Odysseus resolves to go fight Circe, even though he’s been told she’s a sorceress. Once he resolves, Hermes appears to tell him how to do it and give divine aid.
My students had to be taught about tone. Left to themselves they made one distinction in tone, between seriousness and sarcasm. They had to be instructed in gradations of tone. This is something that ought to be attempted in readings for the composition classes.
The story that is told by the scop at the celebration of Beowulf’s triumph over Grendel is about Finn and Hengest—is there a connection with the Hengest in the Hamlet story? and is there a thematic connection with Beowulf’s story?
Heaney leaves out our introduction to Unferth, but he includes Unferth’s gift of a sword, Hrunting, to Beowulf. What does it mean that you can fight evil out in the open, on the benches of the mead-hall, but to encounter evil’s mother you have to dive into the airless deeps of the mere? And are we supposed to believe that Beowulf just stops breathing for the best part of a day?
In fact Beowulf has to use Grendel’s mother’s own sword against her, the sword he finds in her armory. He cuts off her head. They go back bearing Grendel’s head. They find Ascheri’s head; he cuts off Grendel’s mother’s head, but they come back with Grendel’s head.
There’s no scop singing a story in Hrothgar’s hall after the defeat of Grendel’s mother; the celebration we hear about is back in Geatland in Hygelac’s hall. We hear about Ungeld and about rivalries and feuds and we wonder about how these connect with Beowulf’s story. As Beowulf tells the story of his defeat of Grendel to Hygelac, we hear for the first time about Grendel’s dragonskin pouch or bag into which he stuffs the men he carries off.
Hrothgar’s prediction comes true: Hygelac’s heir is cut down in battle, and the kingdom goes to Beowulf. Beowulf rules well for fifty years, but you know there’s always a dragon in the dark, biding his time.
Beowulf vows to fight the dragon, telling his men that this is his fight. He fights and is losing. Meanwhile his captain, Wiglaf, makes a speech to his men that is much like Sarpedon’s exhortation to Glaucus in Book 12 of the Iliad. Beowulf’s sword Nӕgling snaps in this fight; Beowulf is too strong for iron swords and keeps breaking them.
This poet talks about his authority in a way that Homer does not: I have heard, so it was told to me, and so on. Beowulf says he was not fortunate enough to have had a son and heir; we don’t know whether he has a queen or not—is Beowulf a bachelor king?
The treasure is won, bought and paid for with Beowulf’s death. Wiglaf and Beowulf together stab the dragon and kill him, and we learn that Wiglaf is the last of the Wægmundings; apparently, he’s not going to have any children either. Wiglaf talks about the recent history of the Geats and how the peaceful reign of Beowulf is coming to an end and there’s going to be strife; all the neighbors are going to come in.
I don’t know whether Heaney has deliberately downplayed the Christian references in the poem, but it looks as if those sections don’t really talk about eternal life, however much they talk about God or Christ. Even with the Christian overlay, the value system comes through in which it is glory that lasts. Glory is achieved by the hero and recorded by the poet, rewarded during one’s lifetime by gifts, but it is what lives after one rather than one’s spirit; that is the main value that is asserted by the poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment