brendan corcoran
are both dominated by dread and the metamorphic potential of what Heaney calls a
‘life-warpand world-wrong’;^75 the power, musicality, and scope of both sequences,
as parts of larger lyric visions aimed at sustaining the human image, affirm Eliot’s
conclusionthat‘ThesefragmentsIhaveshoredagainstmyruins’.^76 HeaneyandEliot
confront catastrophe not by representing it, but by letting it into their poems, where
ruin is momentarily stayed by the resources of poetry and the vision of the poet.
‘I was a lookout posted and forgotten,’ opens a ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ poem from
1984.^77 And over a decade later, reprising the part first laid down in ‘Oracle’ from
Wintering Out(1972), but now fully realized, Heaney says, ‘Me the lookout|The
queen’s command had posted and forgotten.’^78 Mycenae’s lookout is connected by
more than shared language to Heaney’s version of theBuile Suibhneand his own
riffs on the life of the fabulous Sweeney. Heaney identifies closely with Sweeney
and the lookout as both suffer the metamorphic force of war. Sweeney is literally
changed into a peripatetic bird-man by a curse that follows the shock of combat,
andtheMycenaewatchmancomestoseehisownlifeaspetrifiedintoa‘silent
and sunned...esker on a plain’, a glacial deposit akin to the ‘ridge’ that Heaney’s
defeated Antaeus becomes, ‘a sleeping giant,|pap for the dispossessed’.^79 Heaney’s
‘Mycenae Lookout’ is a long time coming, as it embodies over thirty years of intense
consideration of poetry’s capacity to bear witness to war.
Some people wept, and not for sorrow—joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound in a gong
That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong
It brought to pass, still augured and endured.Seeing, knowing, and testifying to what transpires is the essential concern of
‘Mycenae Lookout’, and its first poem, ‘The Watchman’s War’, crucially establishes
from the outset the tension of being, albeit from afar, a witness to history’s
‘abattoir’. The watchman sees the terrible conjunction between ‘sorrow’ and ‘joy’
that is war. His humble and trustworthy voice, first conveyed in the martial stability
and confidence of the heroic couplet, is immediately undercut by the excruciating
paradox, the apt and corrupt rhyming of ‘joy’ and ‘Troy’. Though Clytemnestra
and Aegisthus are thrilled to see Agamemnon embark on his bloody mission, the
watchman, akin to Goya’s supplicant and seer,feelsin the present ‘what must come
to pass’, but lacking the means or the strength to truly testify, insteadbearswitness
the way sound stuck in a struck gong stays and stays within the vibrating bronze.
The watchman, like the poem or poet, is an instrument, akin to the water bucket in
(^75) Heaney, ‘The Watchman’s War’, in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, inOpened Ground, 414.
(^76) T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land,inTheCompletePoemsandPlays(London: Faber, 1969), 75.
(^77) Heaney, ‘In the Beech’, in ‘Sweeney Redivivus’, inOpened Ground, 271.
(^78) Heaney, ‘Watchman’s War’, 414. (^79) Heaney, ‘Hercules and Antaeus’, ibid. 130.