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 brendan corcoran

no man’s land he has to endure with almost geologic fortitude. If for those at Troy
thewar is the focus of their lives, all else nothing but forethought and afterthought,
then for the watchman the war years are a gap. Heaney, who famously says in
‘Terminus’, ‘Two buckets were easier carried than one.|I grew up in between’,^84
explains inThe Cure at Troythat this is precisely the place of poetry. The Chorus
at the outset of this play speaks of poetry’s role in telling about terrible events.
But, echoing ‘The Redress of Poetry’ and his criticisms of the activist who sees
poetry exclusively through its interventionist potential, Heaney, as Chorus member
disparaging heroes and victims alike, mocks any individual’s or society’s conscious
self-identification with its wounds:

Licking their wounds

And flashing them around like decorations.

I hate, I always hated it, and I am

Apartofitmyself.

And a part of you,

For my part is the chorus, and the chorus

Is more or less a borderline between

The you and the me and the it of it.

Between

The gods’ and human beings’ sense of things.

And that’s the borderline that poetry

Operates on too, always in between

What you would like to happen and what will—

Whether you like it or not.

Poetry

Allowedthegodtospeak.Itwasthevoice

Of reality and justice.^85

In identifying his idea of the ‘frontier of writing’,^86 Heaney describes a witnessing
poetry as a medium, the bridgeorthe gap, in between desire (‘destiny’) and actuality
(‘dread’).^87 Similarly, he conceives such a poetry as connecting the human and the
transcendent, and thus creating the channel through which the god speaks.^88 And
this is where Heaney’s boldness lies: in his inveterate willingness to allow room for
hope in the zone of his own ‘veteran knowledge’ that, truly, ‘no one really escapes
from the massacre’.^89 This gets most famously articulated in part of the Chorus’s
conclusion toThe Cure at Troy:

(^84) Heaney, ‘Terminus’, inOpened Ground, 295.
(^85) Heaney,The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes(London: Faber, 1991), 2.
(^86) Heaney, ‘Frontiers of Writing’, 190. (^87) Heaney, ‘Watchman’s War’, 415.
(^88) In ‘The Government of the Tongue’, Heaney writes: ‘The poet is credited with a power to open
unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inherit.
The oldest evidence for this attitude appears in the Greek notion that when a lyric poet gives voice, ‘‘it
is a god that speaks’’ ’ (p. 93). 89
Carson, ‘ ‘‘Escapedfrom the Massacre?’’ ’,The Honest Ulsterman, 50 (1975), 183.