‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ answerable in the poetry, I think there is a sense of being answerable to and for
what’sgoing on.’
With ‘her soiled vest,|her little breasts,|her clipped, devast-||ated, scabbed|
punk head,|the char-eyed||famine gawk’,^97 Cassandra embodies the bog-body
from ‘Punishment’: a naked girl with ‘shaved head|like a stubble of black corn’.^98
Only now, the bog-body speaks her rage. Is this a revision in the vein of the poems
about Heaney’s murdered cousin? Or is this a case of a poem, a character, a voice
refusing its status as historical? If ‘Punishment’ looked outwards to Jutland to speak
directly to the inner dark of Ulster, ‘Cassandra’ looks directly into Agamemnon’s
palace and her death to speak of a far wider world—that also assaults Heaney’s
bold self-identification in ‘Punishment’: ‘I am the artful voyeur.’ ‘No such thing|as
innocent|bystanding’, begins Cassandra. But she continues, turning the same
words in on herself as scapegoat: ‘No such thing|as innocent.’ An anxiety about
what happened to such a thing as innocence in the twentieth century underlies her
criticism and her own self-identification, just as Philip Larkin’s Great War poem
‘MCMXIV’ haunts the palace at Mycenae: ‘Never such innocence again.’^99
Just as Heaney’s Cassandra echoes Larkin on the First World War, his watchman,
in the third section of ‘Mycenae Lookout’, revisits Auden, whose Troy is haunted
by the Second World War, cataclysm connecting to cataclysm across the millennia.
Cassandra and Agamemnon murdered, ‘His Dawn Vision’ bears allusions to
Auden’s seminal poem about war, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, and returns to the
watchman’s view at the edge of disaster:
No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.^100Here, time is out of joint; we know the killings have taken place, and yet the poem
ends not with definitive ‘tombs’ but with Achilles still ‘amorously’ pursuing Hector
before distraught spectators on Troy’s ramparts. This is a vision of catastrophe
always already about to befall the human community. Whether ‘sad presentiments’
or what has always been beneath the veneer of civilization, the watchman envisions
‘Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace’. Beginning with this apocalyptic
vision of total war as the obliteration of the city, whether Troy or Hiroshima, the
poem, like the sequence, accommodates the distant past and our indeterminate
future. Heaney shows the human witness suffering as nothing out there in ‘the
grievous distance’ connects, and language fails to adequately comprehend the
(^97) Heaney, ‘Cassandra’, in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, 415–16.
(^98) Heaney, ‘Punishment’, inOpened Ground, 117.
(^99) Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, inCollected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1990), 128.
(^100) Heaney, ‘His Dawn Vision’, in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, 418.