brendan corcoran
At this moment of history’s charge, the watcher becomes a seer caught between what
heknows must, and what he hopes will, come to pass. The witness here occupies a
terrible position, helpless before not the ‘tidal wave of justice’ but the lava flow of
injustice bearing down horrifically and inexorably on innocents. ‘The Watchman’s
War’ describes seeing and knowing as kinds of trauma parallel to the experience
of combat. It presents a remarkably grim situation in which, despite his decency,
the watchman’s hope—what Heaney in relation to the IRA’s 1994 ceasefire calls a
‘stoical clarity...different from optimism’^93 —finds expression only in the severity
of his dread. A witness to catastrophe over the horizon as well as here in thepolis,
the palace, the self, the watchman is left like the shaken tree from ‘The Poplar’,
asking: ‘What loaded balances have come to grief?’^94
‘The Watchman’s War’ portrays a very earthbound witness-as-poet bearing like
St Kevin the costs of his oddly privileged knowledge and solitary, in-between
perspective. ‘Cassandra’ is, of course, the true visionary, but on the scale opposite
the watchman, she presents the real voice of abjection. InAgamemnon, as a witness
not to what happens but to what will happen, she speaks truth to the Chorus: ‘I
tell you, you shall look on Agamemnon dead.’ The Chorus begs for silence, and
in disgust, as opposed to despair, she says, ‘Useless; there is no god of healing in
this story.’^95 Whether such a god or principle exists haunts Heaney, who, when in
Greece in autumn 1995, made a special point of visiting the temple of Asclepius.
In conversation with Vincent Browne in 2001, Heaney speaks of care:
You look at the world and you look at Kosovo, at Africa, at South America, at Russia and you
realise that care for the other is a kind of global fundamental obligation almost of our kind,
you know. That used to be doctrinally taught in schools as part of the kind of penitential
faith that I grew up in. There was a system, a theological, doctrinal system applied to the
widest reach of your understanding. It applied to the most intimate crevices of yourself in
the examination of conscience.^96
His interlocutor regrettably says, ‘I don’t see that reflected in your poetry, that sense
of caring for the other, for the broader world?’ Heaney replies: ‘It’s not. The broader
world as a content and as a geography is not in my poetry, no...[and here he
mentions Kosovo in ‘The Known World’]. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the
way poetry works. It’s more a pitch and a tuning, poetry. I think there’s something
(^93) Heaney, ‘Cessation 1994’, inFinders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001(London: Faber, 2002),
47.
(^94) Heaney, ‘The Poplar’, inThe Spirit Level(London: Faber, 1996), 50.
(^95) Aeschylus,Agamemnon,inAeschylus i, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), ll. 1246 and 1248.
(^96) Heaney, quoted in Vincent Browne, ‘Still Finding Himself in his Poetry’,Irish Times,31Mar.
2001.