Benign but not bland, temperate but not soft, the late poet is irreplaceable as a public figure
Just as the canal in the Caillebotte poem is “towing silence with it”, this poem concludes on the word “silently”. The end of a great eloquence, the silencing of a voice of incomparable richness, the approach of “that final vowel” is – at least in hindsight – being intimated.
There is no rational reason to think of these poems as eerie portents. Heaney was well that summer, seemingly recovered from the stroke that had laid him low in 2006 and left him, as they might say in his native Ulster, shook. On the one hand he presented himself as a living link with the deep past, remarking that “it surely says something about the Ireland I grew up in that I feel closer to the first exhibit, from 7,000 years ago, than I do to a couple at the end of the book.” He was still, at some level, the farm boy who relished the simple, practical implements that had changed little between the Mesolithic era and the 1940s.
He suggested that contemplating these objects that had survived from our history might “open up a new way of thinking about ourselves and the country we live in”. Again, it is only in sad retrospect that the sharply political message of that speech would seem like a last testament to what he stood for in Ireland as a moral and cultural counterweight to the narrow-minded hubris and vulgarity that had brought the country so low. But, if there had to be a final political statement, this was indeed an apt summary of his public ethic of care, connection and depth.
It is perhaps one of the most Irish things about him, this almost companionable familiarity with the dead. In Funeral Rites he evoked the Irish matter-of-factness of seeing people laid out in their own homes, “their dough-white hands/ shackled in rosary beads”, and of “stepping in to lift the coffins/ of dead relations”.
The dramatic climax of the poem comes when Aeneas meets his dead father and tries to embrace him: “Three times he reached arms round that neck./ Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped/ Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.” It was perhaps a kind of reply to another Latin phrase he would have known very well, from the Catholic Church’s old Office for the Dead and from the medieval poets he loved: Timor mortis conturbat me – fear of death distresses me. Fear of death did not distress him.
It has that austere, deceptively calm memory of going upstairs to see the corpse laid out: “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,/ He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.” The restraint of the lines and the intimate exactitude of the imagery make it possible for us, too, the readers, to approach the dead body with sorrow but without horror.
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