brendan corcoran
‘between dread and witness’. Heaney’s elegiac poetics consistently responds in rich
andcomplicated ways to death, including death as a result of historical forces like
war. However, where war is concerned, he is interested not only in mourning loss
or portraying suffering but in tapping, with poetry, a semblance of the survivor’s
impossible knowledge so as to map suffering and death in concert with life.^6 In the
broadest terms, he boldly aims to generate a productive, as opposed to a palliative,
artcapableofassistingat‘thebirthofthefuturewedesire’.^7
Heaney’s art is hardly as dark as Goya’s, but his own poetry since the early 1960s
shares with Goya not only a perturbation by war and death but a much-discussed
sense of artistic responsibility to his own community and a wider world. The image
of the witness to history as a kind of seer is present throughout his work, including
each of his major translation projects, and is central to one of his most important
sequences, ‘Mycenae Lookout’. Yet Heaney’s work connects with the Spaniard’s in
another way: Goya’s visionary supplicant could be a model for Heaney’s St Kevin,
lost in his own extreme ‘posture of endurance’.^8 Though there is no evidence to
suggest that Goya’s supplicant (held in the Prado) seeded Heaney’s imagination in
the years before St Kevin’s emergence in ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’ fromThe Spirit
Level(1996), ‘Summer 1969’, the fourth part of ‘Singing School’ fromNorth(1975),
contains a striking encounter with some of Goya’s other paintings in the Prado at
the very instant the violence in Belfast began to heat up. ‘Summer 1969’ twists itself
around Heaney’s guilt (and relief) atnotbeing present for the outbreak of sectarian
violence. The example of Lorca as poet of the people prior to his murder by Fascists
during the Spanish Civil War haunts the centre of Heaney’s poem. One voice is even
quoted as urging the poet to return home to ‘ ‘‘try to touch the people’’ ’.^9 Fortu-
nately, Heaney ignores this grandiloquent suggestion, though his poetry and prose
regularly acknowledge not only the desire but a pressure to respond to the specific
violence roiling Northern Ireland. Most tellingly, ‘Summer 1969’ depicts Heaney’s
actual response as a ‘retreat’ (at once strategic and spiritual) into the seeming peace
of art. However, the art of the Prado that occupies the lyric gaze is Goya’s, and in par-
ticular, the ‘Shootings of the Third of May’ and the terrifying nightmare paintings:
Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn
Jewelled in the blood of his own children;
Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips
Over the world. Also, that holmgang
Where two berserks club each other to death
For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.
He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.(^6) This is one way of reading Heaney’s idea of redress as a mapping of the ‘labyrinth’ of ‘our given
experience’ (Heaney, ‘The Redress of Poetry’, inThe Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures(London: Faber,
1995), 2).
(^7) Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 457. (^8) Ibid. 458. (^9) Heaney, ‘Summer 1969’, ibid. 140.