‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ figure truth and Mandelstam to embody beauty in their respective responses to
horroroffers a false ‘resolution...akin to a state of chronic poetic schizophrenia’.^72
Such an unresolved resolution, ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’,^73 is not
a pathology, but a key to Heaney’s poetics. His truly antinomial (as opposed to
antithetical) poetics of suspension, in which life is necessarily suspendedwithdeath,
depends on a poetic witnessing of a catastrophic world throughbothtruth and
beauty.^74 This is his aim. Heaney’s own work across a career offers an additive
poetry of inclusion enduring the knowledge that a salubrious prospect requires a
response to the Worst the world might offer.
The Spirit Level, published during Heaney’s Nobel year, contains some of his
strongest poems in response to the violence of war, including ‘The Flight Path’,
‘Keeping Going’, and ‘Two Lorries’, each of which addresses the Troubles directly.
However, the sequence that dominates the volume, ‘Mycenae Lookout’, while
referring discreetly to the crisis at home, casts its gaze back in time and beyond
Ireland’s borders to the first ‘total war’ represented by an extremely adequate poetry.
Though Heaney has addressed Homer’sIliadbefore, most notably inThe Cure at
Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes(1991), any iteration of theIliadby an Irish
poet will readily be seen as a response to the Troubles. Yet Homer is valuable as
a resource because the world-rupturing intensity of the Trojan War speaks to the
denaturing effect of all wars—including the Troubles. Troy isnotBelfast or Derry,
and the Trojan War as the subject of the first great poem in the West allows modern
poets to stretch momentarily their fidelity to the parochial so as to confront a figure
of universal human crisis.
Freely based on Aeschylus’sAgamemnon, ‘Mycenae Lookout’ presents Heaney’s
vision of war through an indirect witness to the war at Troy. It is precisely his
indirect yet intimate knowledge of this war’s various costs that allows the gaze
of lookout and poem to transcend an exclusively local relevance. Furthermore,
‘Mycenae Lookout’ is Heaney’sThe Waste Land. Among many similarities, both of
these five-part poems are set against the backdrop of global cataclysm that infiltrates
their civil societies functioning apart from the dying. Eliot’s and Heaney’s poems
what Heaney calls ‘the indispensable poem...arrives from and addresses itself to a place in the psyche
that Ted Hughes called ‘‘the place of ultimate suffering and decision’’ ’. Explicitlynotprivileging one
aggrieved nation, he says that ‘we have all been driven to thethreshold of that place [by] acts of coldly
premeditated terror, carefully premeditated acts of war’. Such witnessing poetry addresses at once the
‘assimilable facts of day-to-day life’ and ‘terrible foreboding’ (p. 14). This project, with its local and
global dimensions, tries to demonstrate the scope of poetry to sustain suffering with the prospect that
something human, as insignificant as a poem even, remains.
(^72) Brearton,Great War in Irish Poetry, 245, 249–50.
(^73) Heaney uses Wordsworth’s phrase asthe epigraph to ‘Singing School’,Opened Ground, 134.
(^74) In 1972, shaken by the violence in Belfast, Heaney says: ‘On the one hand, poetry is secret and
natural, on the other hand it must make its way in a world that is public and brutal’ (Heaney, ‘Belfast’,
inPreoccupations, 34).