‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ the scullery of Heaney’s childhood home, registering ‘in utter silence’ the ‘passing’
ofevery earth-shaking event.^80
Heaney describes the originary sensitivity and perspicacity of his ‘ahistorical,
pre-sexual’ self as ‘in suspension between the archaic and the modern’, connecting
times passively if acutely, the way ‘the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a
reformation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin’.^81
Child and adult, then and now, here and elsewhere, interior and exterior, are all
suspended and sustained together in this image that defines Heaney’s poetics. In a
1999 interview, he says: ‘For years I thought of that image of the surface of water
shaking while a train passes....I thought of it as an image for lyric poetry—perhaps
all art—registering the effect of history. The train passes with a thunder like war. It
is not necessary that the poem documents this war, but it registers the vibrations of
a state of mind.’^82 The watchman, however, suffers because these vibrations have
no release except in horrifying dreams of carnage. ‘Posted and forgotten’, left to his
nightmares and knowledge of ‘world-sorrow’, the watchman is ultimately stifled by
the tension between the scope of the disaster impending (perhaps always) and the
desire for some end to it all:
And then the ox would lurch against the gong
And deaden it and I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,
All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,
A victory beacon in an abattoir.This is the moment when Ireland, always already a part of Heaney’s poetic and
personal concerns, enters in the image not of a bog but of the fetid muck of an
overflowing cattle truck. This is the image of silent witness to the deaths wrought
by history;notsaying anything about the global or the local devastations—as he
suggested in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’—also bears a potentially explosive
cost for the witness or his community. Curiously, this poem fromNorthalso bears
an image from Troy used to describe Ulster’s Catholic community: ‘Where half of
us, as in a wooden horse,|Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks|Besieged
within the siege, whispering morse.’^83 By ‘Mycenae Lookout’, Heaney’s gaze, while
encompassing the past’s atavisms, quite literally has ‘concentrate[d] attention out
beyond|The city and the border, on that line|Where the blaze would leap the hills
when Troy had fallen’.
For the watchman poised and expectant, assigned to await word of what will
happen, the war is a bizarre interregnum, literally ‘an in-between-times’, a temporal
(^80) Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, ibid. 447. (^81) Ibid. 447 and 466.
(^82) Heaney, interviewed by Luigi Amara, David Huerta, and Julio Trujillo, ‘Conversacion con ́
Seamus Heaney: La conciencia poetica’, 83 Letras Libres, 1/4 (Apr. 1999), 38; my translation.
Heaney, ‘fromWhatever You Say Say Nothing’, inOpened Ground, 132–3.