brendan corcoran
or prudence.’^13 Forall of Heaney’s efforts to grasp the effect as much as the efficacy
of a poetry thatrespondsto the world in all of its traumas, it is Robert Frost’s simple
yet supremely elegant formulation that Heaney’s art most thoroughly espouses: ‘the
true poem’ is one which ‘ends...in a momentary stay against confusion’.^14 Such
poetry helps people not only to enjoy life, but ‘to endure it’.^15
Heaney affirms the idea of poetry functioning as such a ‘stay’ through his recourse
to various figures for endurance, including, most famously, his bog-body poems.
St Kevin, however, is a tutelary image because not only is he resolutely ‘on the
side of life’,^16 as Czesław Miłosz says of poetry, he is ‘imagined’.^17 ‘St Kevin and
the Blackbird’ displays what Heaney calls, in relation to Dylan Thomas, a ‘veteran
knowledge’,^18 a worldliness evidencing a ‘craft [that] has not lost touch with a
suffered world’.^19 Heaney’s understanding of this story situated in the field of the
marvellous—but recounted in the Nobel Lecture as a response to the murderous-
ness of war—emphasizes the poetic and prosaic use of Wilfred Owen’s word ‘pity’
as the monk, ‘overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in
all creatures great and small’, begins his meditation on immobility, his extraordin-
ary holding action—literally—which suspends and sustains the bird through its
nesting cycle.^20 Such suspension of life is, for Heaney, the ‘order of poetry’:
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour, and not to seek reward’, he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.^21Heaney’s Kevin is not Goya’s unnamed supplicant and seer, but the two might just
as well be held in the same thought, balanced together like so many other binary
(^13) Simone Weil,The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle
Hill, 1956), 14. 14
15 Robert Frost, quoted in Heaney, ‘Government of the Tongue’, 93.
16 Heaney, ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’, inRedress of Poetry, 185.
Czesław Miłosz, quoted in Heaney, ‘Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and
Philip Larkin’, ibid. 158.
(^17) Heaney, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, inOpened Ground, 410.
(^18) Heaney, ‘Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas’, inRedress of Poetry, 135.
(^19) Ibid. 137. (^20) Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 458–9.
(^21) Heaney, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, 410.