‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ terms crucial to Heaney’s understanding of poetry and the world.^22 Bothfigures
witness life and suffering, and both figures remain at their stationsasvisions of
what ‘must come to pass’. Celebrating Yeats’s ‘The Stare’s Nest by my Window’ as
an example of a ‘completely adequate poetry’, Heaney says, in ‘Crediting Poetry’,
that Yeats’s poem ‘is as tender-minded towards life itself as St Kevin was and as
tough-minded towards life itself as Homer’.^23 As the saint loses himself to the
holding action he becomes, he figures less an action than a principle: ‘poetry’s
covenant with life’.^24 In the end, the bird, like the self, is irrelevant; what remains
is the ideal timelessness of love imagined through orasapoemanditsinstant.
Obviously, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’ is not a poem about warper se,butthe
blankness of Kevin’s mind, like a seer’s, models the achievement of an ideal poetry
of radical receptivity capable of encompassing simultaneously in local/Irish and
global/universal dimensions the brutality of the world and the loving-kindness of
the saint.^25 As Heaney says in ‘The Catechism’: ‘Q. and A. come back. They ‘‘formed
my mind’’.|‘‘Who is my neighbour?’’ ‘‘My neighbour is all mankind.’’ ’^26
St Kevin also marks Heaney’s ‘changed orientation’ from one of distrusting to
one of ‘crediting the positive note’.^27 In thears poeticaof his Nobel Lecture, Heaney
speaks of himself and a late twentieth-century reading culture as being
rightly suspicious of that which gives too much consolation...the very extremity of our
late-twentieth-century knowledge puts much of our cultural heritage to an extreme test....
And when this intellectual predisposition coexists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel
and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the
inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not
to credit anything too positive in the work of art.^28
In this discussion he acknowledges his own years of bearing the knowledge of being
‘incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect’—though yearning for just such
an adequacy—until, as he says, ‘finally and happily, and not in obedience to the
dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them, I straightened
up’. This awakening prompts him ‘to try to make space in [his] reckoning and
imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous’.^29 This statement
suggests that Heaney sees his own work for at least the preceding twenty years as
(^22) St Kevin and Homer occupy opposite pans of the scale wherein we might read other antimonies,
including Ireland and elsewhere, the local and the cosmopolitan, now and then. Though at different
points in the career one side may appear more weighty than the other, it is crucial for Heaney’s
poetics that the antimonies exist together, for redress involves keeping them in a state of equilibrium,
suspended in the mind and work of the poet not just together butbecauseof each other.
(^23) Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 464.
(^24) Heaney, ‘Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry’,Critical Inquiry, 7/4 (1981), 650.
(^25) In a statement fundamental to many Irish poets’ thinking about their work, Patrick Kavanagh
decares: ‘Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals’ (Kavanagh,Collected Prose(London:
MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), 283). 26
27 Heaney, ‘The Catechism’, in ‘Ten Glosses’, inElectric Light(London: Faber, 2001), 54.
Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 457.^28 Ibid. 457–8.^29 Ibid. 458.