‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ Human beings suffer.
Theytorture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.^90Of course, ‘hope’ does not and never will literally rhyme with ‘history’; Heaney
expects the miracle of such real rhyming to occur most rarely, if at all. Indeed, the
play,asheseesit,ishardlyaboutwar.^91 Yet, just as the Trojan conflict forms the
back-story forPhiloctetes, another take on war shadows Heaney’s version. Behind
TheCureatTroylies the astounding avoidance of full-scale war in South Africa
as the apartheid regime was falling and Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
Heaney even describes ‘the wondrous change and wondrous intervention of Nelson
Mandela’ as ‘themiraculum’, pointing out that Sophocles’ play seemed ‘to mesh
beautifully with Mandela’s return. The act of betrayal, and then the generosity of his
coming back and helping with the city—helping the polis to get together again.’^92
For the watchman of ‘Mycenae Lookout’, however, no miracle is as yet in sight,
though like poetry or the poet, he stands as a plinth, the still centre of a scale of
justice, static and powerless to influence the outcome of the weigh-in. His mind
and gaze distorted from such static gazing, the watchman describes how
If a god of justice had reached down from heaven
For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on
He would have found me tensed and ready-made.
I balanced between destiny and dread
And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn
Igniting and erupting, bearing down
Like lava on a fleeing population.(^90) Heaney,Cure at Troy, repr. as ‘Voices from Lemnos’, inOpened Ground, 330.
(^91) Rather, as he says, it is ‘really about someone who has been wounded and betrayed, and whether
he can reintegrate with the betrayers or not. Human sympathy says yes, maybe political vengefulness
says no, but the marooned man in Sophocles’ play helps the Greeks who betrayed him to win Troy’
(Heaney, quoted in Shaun Johnson, ‘Hope Is Something That Is There To Be Worked For’,The
Independent 92 (London), 31 Oct. 2002, Features, 4).
About Mandela himself, whom he met in Dublin, Heaney says, ‘Of all the heroes, he’s the great
one. There’s a great transmission of grace there—and, of course, great stamina to go with it’ (Heaney,
quoted ibid.).