‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ Heaney’s ekphrasis offers at once a vision of the past and sad presentiments of the
futureas the self-annihilating ‘berserks’ are ‘greaved in a bog, and sinking’. Though
the berserks in the bog follow from the poem’s earlier references to Ireland’s
violence, Goya’s images resist appropriation to just an examination of the Troubles.
Inhis ‘retreat to the Prado’, Heaney contemplates not only war inIreland but war as a
universal crisis facing the artist or poet. A poem about Ireland and its Troubles, this is
also a poem about war. Yet the final image of the furious and committed artist caught
in the act of creation, his bodily assault upon his medium, shifts attention away
from the artist’s vision, to his plight as the violence of historynecessarilybears down
on him. The poem with its striking final image suggests the cost to the artist of such
necessary receptivity to history; however, the artistper seisnotthetruesubjectofthe
poem. In the image of the artist as matador engaged in adanse macabrewith history’s
inexorable drive we find history, the artist, and the work of art bound into a complex
relationship. The seemingly quixotic gesture of the artist confronting the inexorable
endswithoutthe death of bull or man. This suspension by the poem of both figures
together in a moment of crisis demonstrates the mechanism which Heaney uses to
representandapprehend the relationship of art, the artist, and history.
But what is the purpose of Heaney’s portrayal of the artist’s confrontation with
history? The image concluding ‘Summer 1969’ and the world-view that underlies
it, engage the great question that dogs Heaney’s career as truly a poet of conscience:
what is art’s ‘salubrious effect’ in the world, and how is it achieved?^10 This question
goes beyond the matter of mere representation by poetry of violence, war, or
history, as it claims for poetry a positive or productive role in the real world. The
boldness of this claim, which will underlie Heaney’s formulation of the ‘redress
of poetry’ in the late 1980s, is that it risks sentimentality, facile consolation, or
easy aesthetic remedies for the irremediable. A poetry committed to making a
difference in the world—‘touch[ing] the people’, for example—risks being, at
worst, untrustworthy, given what we know. The offering of something healthful
through art can be earned only by a scrupulous refusal to elide the inconvenient
facts of history’s brutality. Borrowing words from George Seferis, Heaney insists
that poetry must be ‘ ‘‘strong enough to help’’ ’.^11 But, whatisa ‘salubrious effect’?
It is important to note that Heaney reins in his expectations of poetry’s ‘efficacy’;
obviously, as he famously says, ‘no lyric has ever stopped a tank’.^12 Instead, poetry’s
‘efficacy’ lies within its homeopathic power not to deflect the charge or console
in the aftermath of history, but to suspend, albeit momentarily, the pressure of
history’s ever-ongoing assault. The value of a moment of true reflection is not to
be underestimated, for, as Simone Weil says in her seminal essayThe Iliad, or The
Poem of Force, ‘Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice
(^10) Heaney, ‘Frontiers of Writing’,The Redress of Poetry, 191. (^11) George Seferis, quoted ibid.
(^12) Heaney, ‘The Government of the Tongue’, inThe Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot
Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings(London: Faber, 1988), 93.