Heaney remembered

ENDA McDONAGH

The word made fresh

Seamus Heaney, who died last week, has been called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. He was, above all, says one of his priest friends, a poet of the Catholic imagination
n the beginning was the word, the poetic word. That was how Seamus Heaney came into the lives of most of us, as readers, admirers and, for the (many) fortunate ones, friends. His transfixing and frequently transforming word moved us over the years into friendships graced by his person and presence. He opened us up to the worlds he himself inhabited and was inhabited by. A great poet, as Heaney surely was, is populated by many worlds, from childhood through to maturity. In his Nobel laureate speech in 1995, recognising the role of memory, he spoke of poetry as making an order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. My own originating worlds were those of rural County Mayo, its broad landscape not unlike Heaneys beloved Bellaghy but without the tensions of its religious and political divisions. Sometime in the late 1960s, I was introduced to his work and to Heaney himself by a mutual friend, the Dominican priest and theologian Herbert McCabe. The three of us had several sessions over the years. But Seamus was a very private person, whose privacy deserves our respect, even in death. Or perhaps it is simply the habit of the confessor that makes me hesitate to blather on about our friendship. By the time we met, I had moved away from my rural roots, into the academic world in Europe and the United States as a professor of theology. But I had been coming to realise how important the imagination and the arts, especially poetry, were to the intellectual exploration of religion. I was determined from the beginning not to use poetry in the service of theology but to seek to be inhabited by it, to allow it to extend my imaginative range as I came to explore the Scriptures and other theological texts and practices. As the theme is too often neglected, I want to reflect here on how Heaneys work may help to deepen our understanding and our lives as Christians, as a small tribute to his poetic genius. Given his cherished rural background, it is no surprise that Heaney began his career as a nature poet. His first volume, Death of a Naturalist, and his constant return to nature provide wonderful expressions of his gifts of observation and of transformation, or, in the more searching word, of creation. There is a venture into the unknown in these poems that reminds me of the venture of Yahweh described in Genesis, with which Heaney was certainly familiar. And Creation is the key to poetry, as it is to nature. 12
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As I read the nature poetry of Heaney and of others, such his contemporary and friend, Michael Longley, I realise that they have been inhabited by the landscape or seascape by big soft buffetings which catch the heart off guard and blow it open, as Heaney puts it in the last line of Postscript, from his 1996 collection, The Spirit Level. That final image exposes another quality of Heaney and of his poetry: his vulnerability. This was essential to his being inhabited by the world about him, natural and human, and so to his creativity. His vulnerability to others emerges most forcefully in his writing about his family. He wrote about a younger brother killed, aged four, in an accident in the moving Mid-Term Break, with its concluding line describing the coffin: A four foot box, a foot for every year. Other family poems Irish poet and essayist Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Literature Prize, shown at Harvard University. Photo: Reuters also expose this vulnerability, which feeds his creativity in wonderful love poems that address his wife, Marie, and his children. And, of course, the Troubles were a constant test of his vulnerability and of his ability to provide a loving and creative response in poetry. Such poems had their own further and specific enrichment for me, as a Catholic, a priest and a theologian. Without attributing to Heaney any specific religious awareness or intent, they pushed me into a deeper engagement with the doctrines of divine Creation and reconciliation. They revealed to me something of the vulnerability of God. Heaneys references to Christian stories, teaching and practices are balanced by his frequent use of ancient Greek and Roman myths, plays and poetry. His affinity with Dante is an important, but relatively unexplored, aspect of his work. But, for me, poems based on ancient Irish tales, such as St Kevin and the Blackbird or the vision of the monks

at Clonmacnoise from Seeing Things, have at least a hint of the grace of a gospel parable, reminding me of Jos Pagolas description of Jesus as the poet of the parables in Jesus: an historical approximation. More significant may be the poem Heaney dedicated to the memory of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, Out of This World, from his 2006 collection, District and Circle. Like everybody else, writes Heaney, I bowed my head/ during the consecration of the bread and wine,/ believing (whatever it means) that a change occurred. He goes on, There was never a scene/ When I had it out with myself or with another./ The loss occurred off-stage. It would be improper to read this poem as simply a slice of biography, however far Heaney may have drawn on his own experience or of those about him. And, although Heaney speaks of a loss, he concludes this elegiac poem with words suggestive of affirmation, And yet I cannot/ disavow words like thanksgiving or host/ or Communion bread. They have an undying/tremor and draw, like well water far down. Out of This World is, in my view, more correctly read as parable of the Catholic imagination. Heaney, immersed in his childhood pieties and his Catholic education, is a great nurturer of the Catholic, and, more widely, of the Christian imagination. Without arrogantly trying to gauge Heaneys faith, the fruits of his Catholic imagination are there to read. In the current depressed state of the Church in Ireland, and the patchy level of faith and practice among Catholics and other Christians in Western Europe, the rich fruits of the Catholic imaginations of poets like Seamus Heaney, of painters like Hughie ODonoghue and of sculptors like Imogen Stuart, among many others, continue to have a serious and salvific influence on individuals, society and the Church. The deeper and fuller relationship between the faith implicit in that imagination and what we call explicit creedal faith awaits collaborative investigation by theologians and artists, and the Dante-Heaney relationship, too, will repay endless study. Meantime, not only Marie, but all of us who loved him, may take heart and love, faith and hope from Seamus final text message to her just before he died, Noli timere. Be not afraid. It was undoubtedly in that spirit that he went to meet his Lord. Enda McDonagh was professor of moral theology at the University at Maynooth 1958-95. He was one of the concelebrants at the funeral of Seamus Heaney in Dublin.

7 September 2013