brendan corcoran
phantasmagoria. Knowledge, then, grounds into a core self where what cannot be
toldremains with the world it suffuses. At this point, Heaney addresses the limits of
testimony, as knowledge of ‘our war’ is ‘stalled’ sublingually—or, rather, at the ‘pre-
articulate’ source.^101 The poem suggests that rather than a failure of communication,
this butting up against an idea of sourceistestimony about an all-too-real if terrible
origin: ‘I felt the beating of the huge time-wound|We lived inside. My soul wept’.
At the ‘pre-articulate’, a nadir has been reached in which the weight of silence and
testimony are suspended with one another, but something begins to shift as well.
Some knowledge of death, a metonymy for war, lies within the self, ensconced
without words. But, most significantly, this‘pre-articulate’ origin also entertains
the hope that language will be accessed, that poetry of adequate witness will result.
The sequence’s penultimate poem, ‘The Nights’, presents life within the ‘time-
wound’ where ‘The war [has] put all men mad’.^102 For the watchman, war ends
with the derangement of the world inside and outside thepolis; peace becomes the
‘rope-net and...blood-bath’. Yet, for Heaney, the business of witnessing involves
more than an articulation of things as they are. ‘Mycenae Lookout’ ends with yet
another vision that maps the labyrinth and offers a different way of seeing within the
‘time-wound’ or ‘world-sorrow’. The final poem, ‘His Reverie of Water’, centres on
Heaney’s element; the prospect of thecureat Troy becomes a vision of the ‘future
we desire’,^103 he salubrious, healing well. Nevertheless, as the hero and killer enters
the humanizing bath, we are reminded ‘that the far cries of the butchered on the
plain||keep dying into...the housewalls’ behind which the cleansing takes place.^104
Within the poem, no walls dampen these cries; in his bath, the hero, who Homer
reminds us must also die, is suspended with his fate. Heaney follows the water,
however, towards a further source. The secret well below the Athenian Acropolis
becomes a site where invader and invaded, war and peace, past and future, come
together indistinguishably, the way ‘the treadmill of assault||turned waterwheel’.
In this image, the ‘time-wound’ is ‘cured’ like ‘the vent’ of the Grauballe Man’s
‘slashed throat’^105 —the murderous lies within the marvellous, and vice versa.
‘Mycenae Lookout’ ends with an image of omphalos; the ultimate source is a circuit
completed across this poet’s career linking the universal and the local. Traumatic
repetition is subsumed within a circuit of hope thatspecifically requires the language
of a witness—or a poem that is as willing to look for the Better as to subsume the
Worst. With this poem, Heaney’s ‘ladder’ is sunk not into the ‘foul rag and bone
(^101) Heaney relates the ‘pre-articulate’ to an idea of poetic source where life and death are nearly
comprehensible. In another context, he describes such a place: ‘It was just suddenly and solidly there
in front of you, like a parent or a pillar, and there it remains to this day, omphalos of the pre-literary
and even the pre-literate life, irreducible, undislodgeable and undeniably true’ (Heaney, ‘Burns’s Art
Speech’, in 102 Finders Keepers, 348).
104 Heaney, ‘The Nights’, in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, 421.^103 Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 457.
Heaney, ‘His Reverie of Water’, in ‘Mycenae Lookout’, 421.
(^105) Heaney, ‘Grauballe Man’, 115.