Catriona Clutterbuck

The author Colm Toibín salutes the fact that in his final collection, Human Chain, Seamus Heaney ‘wrote about growing older and weaker with a shivering honesty and grace’.¹ Honesty inheres in this volume’s unflinching recognition of mortality in terms of injury, illness, depletion of powers and death; grace, in its remarkable formal achievement, but also in its exploration of an alternative order of being to the betrayals and loss that seem given in human history. This is a book of lyrics of such ‘luminous clarity’² (Clarke) that they do indeed seem to breathe ‘air from another life and time and place’ beyond such destiny.³

In Human Chain that locus of difference is associated with three main realms of (re)imagined experience, which, though they remain distinct, are also here represented as mutually constitutive: the poet’s intimately experienced personal past (especially his childhood), the unknown future beyond his lifetime, and the promise of eternal life as a spiritual ideal with which Heaney continues to reckon. The volume’s heightened focus on such multi- layered other-dimensionality points to Heaney’s sense of the transcendent as an efflorescence of his religious inheritance. In 2010 he remarked that ‘no matter what kind of secularisation occurs’, the effect of Catholic formation is that ‘there is a huge coordinate established for consciousness from the beginning, that sense of the outer shimmering rim of everything always being there in your imagination’.⁴ For Heaney, poetry at once inheres in and maps this corona of alterity as a plane of consciousness, alertness to which affects one’s sense of agency, responsibility, and creativity in the here and now.

Perceiving in a new way human beings’ intricate, multidimensional interdependence, late Heaney continues to broadcast ‘poetry’s call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line’.⁵ In Human Chain he advocates in a more comprehensive manner than ever before, our human need to ‘Go with the flow’⁶ of both our given and our possible alternative existence, in order to enable optimal engagement with life on this earth. In effect, therefore, these late poems operate like the ‘pinholed Camera / Obscura’ to which Heaney compares the pricked card recording his neighbours’ donations to the ‘alms-collecting mite-box’ of his childhood. For believers and doubters alike, these poems ‘unblind[s] the sun eclipsed’, offering ‘A way for all to see a way to heaven’⁷ – no matter in what terms each of us might imagine that realm of utter fulfilment.

In what follows, I argue that, for Heaney, the only reliable basis upon which the real and the ideal enter authentic relationship is for us to actively and unconditionally recognise our common human condition of vulnerability and desire. In other words, in Human Chain, Heaney proposes that the more we become conscious of our shared exposure to fate and come to terms with this frailty while honouring our longing that the associated suffering be made good, the more truly we come alive both to ourselves and to the larger world we inhabit – compassion fostering realisation of ourselves as ‘Needy and ever needier for translation’⁸ into alternative ways of being and seeing in this life. The present essay explores the ramifications of this position with regard to three main themes in Human Chain: connectivity as bound up with mortality, inspiration spurring renewal, and synergy between immanence and transcendence.

Connectivity and mortality

In his 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Heaney described his career in terms of an open-ended, self-generative process of linkage: ‘a journey into the wideness of the world [which] in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or one’s life – turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination’.⁹ Readers of Human Chain have long recognised this volume’s fulfilment of the meaning of its title in its ubiquitous representation of networks of relationship – between people, places, periods in the poet’s own life history and in the history of his home place, human and natural life, and between artworks and personal destiny. These chains are not linear but cross under and over each other at multiple nodal points. Critic Andrew Auge has well identified the intersection between this collection’s defining concern with connectivity and its equally prevalent preoccupation with mortality, describing a key ethos of Human Chain as follows: ‘it is not heroic self-sufficiency but human connections – the bonds of care and love linking the living and the dead – that allow death to be faced, withstood and survived’.¹⁰ Most striking in this regard is the volume’s tracing of chains of relationship generated through familial generational shift, by virtue of the life processes of birth, aging, and death. For example, we find here the ‘ineluctable’ presence of the unborn poet at his parents’ uncomfortable wedding feast in ‘Album’, the intimate physical contact of a grown child with his dying father in ‘The Butts’, and the proximity of the poet’s own death suggested at the joyful nativity of his granddaughters Anna Rose and Aibhín in ‘Route 110’ and ‘A Kite for Aibhín’. These family links are at once unbreakable and bound to be broken – a paradox poignantly intimated in the loss-suffused poem ‘Uncoupled’, asking as it does of each of his long- dead parents in turn, ‘Who is this […]?’ The twelve-part sequence ‘Route 110’ offers an extended meditation on human connectivity in the light of mortality, moving to its climax in the penultimate poem’s river-bank scene where the adolescent Heaney and his taciturn father ‘commingled / Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink’, signalling their conjoined death- bound fate, followed by the final poem where Heaney suggests himself to be already a pre-emptive shade, ‘the last [or, latest] to leave’, yet holding on so as to celebrate ‘the age of births’ of his grandchildren – and himself – into existences of unknown possibility.

In his late sixties and at the turn of his seventies, writing the poems that would be gathered in his final collection, Heaney’s understanding of particularised interconnectivity coincides with newly heightened alertness to mysterious, other-dimensional forms of existence:

Where can it be found again, An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases, Where all is woven into

And of itself, like a nest

Of crosshatched grass blades?

‘A Herbal’

For Heaney, apprehension of this richly self-inwoven ‘elsewhere world’ involves direct encounter with existential otherness through confronting mortality: the type of encounter that remains outside the reach of normative empirical systems of measurement but not beyond the reach of art or religion.

Heaney once described the Romantic poet John Keats as exemplary because he ‘simplifies his vision of the poetic destiny to a parable about the education of an intelligence into a soul: a school is needed [for this] and that school is the world of pain’.¹¹ A key context of such schooling for Heaney has been the violent socio-political conflict scarring the North of Ireland – the ongoing claims of which history are registered in Human Chain in the post- peace process poem ‘The Wood Road’, describing the surreal co-location of political conflict with everyday personal and communal history: ‘The Wood Road as is and was, / Resurfaced, never widened’. The long-range consequences of the Troubles are also highlighted in ‘Route 110’, about the anonymity of the ordinary victims of murderous political violence whose claims on our attention persist ‘Behind the grief cordons’ of official history – unpaid debts of honour starkly highlighted by the heroized public obsequies and memorials traditionally afforded to those who perpetrate such crimes. A more muted context for this volume’s focus on the discomforting experience of otherness is the collective uncertainty and fear that marked the boom-and- burst trajectory of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland between 2006 and 2010, during which period of national economic climax and collapse most of the poems of Human Chain were written. Such public circumstances of instability feed into the volume’s prevailing theme of personal precarity. For example, the collection explores estrangement in relation to the experiences of leaving home as an adholescent in ‘Album’ and ‘The Conway Stewart’, and of cross- border movement to the Gaeltacht in ‘Parking Lot’. Human Chain notably attends to the defamiliarisations experienced by men who, having been raised in a patriarchal culture valorising masculine stability and toughness, discover their own vulnerability to sorrow, loneliness, and frailty (but also delight), as we see especially in ‘Album’ iii, iv and v.

Above all, darker reality insists itself at this late stage of Heaney’s career through his own experience of bodily infirmity, especially following his 2006 stroke. Although his practical resilience in the aftermath remains entirely admirable – ‘I learned balance, learned to walk, got refurbished, and got tablets and instructions’¹² – nonetheless, this event clearly prompted the poet to embrace the ‘midge-drifts’ of existential uncertainty in new awareness that his own participation in history was approaching the boundary of dissolution.¹³ In this penultimate section of ‘Route 110’, the double effect of conjunction and disjunction between the meanings of the proximate phrases ‘No doubting’ and ‘Or doubting’ testifies to the manner in which in Human Chain more generally the asserted realm of the known also becomes strange and unreliable. For example, many of these poems invest in tactile recall of the body sensations involved in handling now-obsolete objects – inkwells, meal sacks, home-made kites etc. Such anchor points of Heaney’s early life offer not compensatory security but a different kind of assistance: in their increasing unfamiliarity, these objects form the coordinates of an alterity now being summoned by the poet for purposes of facing his own mortality and the life-reckoning and stock-taking which this necessarily involves.

With his situation occasioning a sharp sense of the ‘unroofed’ human condition,¹⁴ in Human Chain, he views his present circumstances through the lens of the loss of his parents, whose deaths took place in the mid- 1980s within two years of each other. Recalling that period of grief as one where he had become acutely conscious of ‘the creature, [the] soul-body, down here with nothing between it and the infinite’,¹⁵in late Heaney – now himself ‘Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma’¹⁶ – a related but more all-prevailing sense of exposure similarly renders the self strange to itself. Accompanying such knowledge of nearing the brink, Human Chain’s several poems on leaving this earth as an ageing or vulnerable human being communicate ‘That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt’ of alienation in one’s worldview.¹⁷ For example, in each of the poems ‘Uncoupled’, ‘The Butts’, ‘Chanson d’Adventure’, ‘The Wood Road, ‘Slack’, the ‘Route 110’ sequence and ‘A Herbal’, the human body is presented in terms of distance, absence, sundering or abjection. This collection of poems certainly faces the void – ‘The door was open and the house was dark’ as he says in his elegy for David Hammond of that title – but as we shall now explore, it also affirms the likelihood or hope of ‘a turnover warp in the black / Quick water’¹⁸ of our final oblivion: this, by virtue of the shock of inspiration involved in being jolted from our usual way of seeing and being seen, once we confront mortality.

Inspiration and renewal

Late Heaney opens himself more and more to the kind of transcendence or overcoming of limits that can be ongoingly activated within our given lives here and now. This involves an opening to alterity that Human Chain’s opening poem, ‘“Had I Not Been Awake”’ shows is also central to creative inspiration. Unsurprisingly, the poem has been read as a processing of Heaney’s recent experience of serious illness,¹⁹ because in it, revelatory inspiration arriving in the traditional biblical form of wind is also an alarming ‘courier blast’. This warning barrage declares the importance of being awake so as to be able to cope with the danger and promise of what is coming – the totally unknown. Reminiscent at once of Shelley’s west wind and early Yeats’s wind among the reeds (in both of which poets’ work, the spirit of the new is likewise threatening as well as regenerative), in late Heaney, inspiration ‘constitutes a moment of epiphany, shock, [and] creative verification’:²⁰

Had I not been awake I would have missed it, A wind that rose and whirled until the roof Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter, Alive and ticking like an electric fence: […]

A courier blast that there and then Lapsed ordinary. But not ever After. And not now.

‘Had I Not Been Awake’

Inspiration’s ‘courier blast’ transforms the poet’s waking state into one of hyper-conscious receptivity, electric with responsiveness, during which he is brought into full presence-to-himself. The poem’s unexpected simile of the ticking electric fence communicates the fact that the life of this poet touched with such inspiration remains charged to deliver a shock to anyone who subsequently comes into contact with it through his work: ‘it came and went so unexpectedly / And almost it seemed dangerously’. This disturbing potential inheres not only in the wind’s ‘pentecostal’ character,²¹ but in the fact that this courier blast also signals forward to death – ours as well as the poet’s – as the event of being permeated with a related kind of new and extraordinary lifeforce: one completely other to what is humanly knowable, but which will involve total evacuation from our present corporeal existence. For late Heaney, the very fact that such inspiration is offered only momentarily – it ‘there and then / Lapsed ordinary’, seeming to have been nothing at all – vividly realises such contingency: we attain our most vibrant and present sense of being in the here-and-now, at the moment when we realise that both we and the creative opening so suddenly afforded us might not (and one day will not) be ‘here’ at all. Such realisation cannot be sustained long at the same pitch of intensity and retreats to lie in wait before it will spring to our throats (in terms both of our voice and its silencing) at some unforeseeable moment in the future. Thus, immediacy of presence is underpinned by absence as at once the condition and essence of inspiration’s unexpected power.

These qualities are vividly communicated through this poem’s formal achievement. As Michael Parker notes, the wind’s ‘gyre-like’ momentum is advanced through the poem’s tercet verse form, recurrent use of enjambment, and in the opening stanza, the deployment of monosyllables, iambs and alliteration.²² The sudden, transformative change heralded by the wind is also embodied in the fact that, following one long sentence distributed across nearly eleven lines, two short sharp sentences make up the poem’s final line and a half (‘But not ever / After. And not now’). These seven words offer a breathtaking combination of enjambment, alliteration, assonance and consonance that mimetically communicates the power of inspiration to disturb. Unsettling the possibility that this wind will remain ‘Lapsed ordinary’, form transmits awareness that soon – in fact, each and every time these poems are genuinely encountered anew – life-force charges through Heaney’s Human Chain, however much these texts may seem to ‘die down’ into textual familiarity and canonicity. Intimating its creator’s awareness of already speaking from a position outside his own mortal history, this annunciatory poem affirms that we, its present readers, are included in the volume’s extended time-out-of-time, calling us to be participants in a story that is happening right now in the telling. As such, we, like him, must open ourselves to the discomposure of transformation and authentic (self-)renewal. For Heaney, as this poem has dynamically made clear, mortality, inspiration, and revival are intimately linked. In a 1996 speech delivered at a University of North Carolina graduation ceremony, he described the ‘gift of getting started all over again’ as ‘never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment, but getting renewed and revived by some further transformation’.²³ It is to this philosophy of regeneration in Human Chain that we now turn, with a particular focus on the ethics of interdependence.

Heaney has celebrated in the work of Thomas Kinsella ‘the motif of renewal at the point of exhaustion’,²⁴ and the same is true of his own poetry, especially this last collection. In a book where the theme of transience prevails, Heaney demonstrates that the human chain is remade in the breaking. Such a ‘turnover warp’ in human destiny is highlighted through his representation of overlap between the life stages of entry into death and coming-of-age. In ‘The Conway Stewart’ – a poem which unrolls in one long sentence from beginning to end suggesting the unstoppable momentum of growth – a kind of ‘death’ to his previous child-self was required when Heaney left his home and family to go to boarding school. New links are added through the opening of the chain, this forward action most obviously proven through the birth of grandchildren. Heaney’s ‘parelleling of the prenatal and the postmortem’²⁵ is clearest in ‘Route 110’ xii, where his first grandchild’s ‘long wait [to be born] on the shaded bank has ended’ even as Heaney readies himself to step onto death’s ferryboat to the other side. If that final poem in the sequence ‘Route 110’ announces a future Heaney knows he will not see, the volume as a whole suggests that the underworld for which he is bound, is also, by some strange alchemy, an over-world – the home of the ‘white wing beating high against the breeze’ figuring the soul in ‘A Kite for Aibhín’. This is a realm he trusts he will share with his grandchildren, as each attains unbounded new potential following entry into their respective, radically changed, states of being. For Heaney, poetry itself is assurance of such faith: ‘When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit’.²⁶

Facing loss directly, late Heaney asserts renewal through interpersonal relationships which command us to fulfill the instinct and responsibility to succour and care for each other. Hence, the chain motif attains particular resonance in the light of this volume’s concern with the many kinds of aesthetic, social and political dividing lines which, by virtue of our shared humanity, call to be overcome. Thus, in the title poem, ‘Human Chain’, as the speaker watches a TV report of famine relief workers and makes an association with the requirements of co-operative effort during the annual harvest periods of his childhood, he affirms a more general relationship between the local and the universal family vis-à-vis the ideal of service, especially in contexts of strain or violence. In this poem, his body’s stored memories of heavy lifting – the strenuous effort, labour, and sheer work involved in farming in the past – is symbolic of the same effort needed in all times and places for authentic participation in the human chain. In poems including but not limited to ‘Miracle’, ‘The Butts’, and ‘Chanson d’Adventure’, Heaney likewise celebrates – in reviewer Sian Hughes’s precise description – ‘Humans as levers, hoists, props, each other’s limits and each other’s best support’, the poet suggesting the fundamental meaning of the human chain to be about ‘sharing a heavy load, completing a painful task, moving the weight of each other down the line’.²⁷ Crucially, the title poem suggests that only by acknowledging these claims upon our human interdependence in the light of our shared condition of mortality can the freedom of self-realisation be made possible:

Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback, A letting go which will not come again.

Or it will, once. And for all.

‘Human Chain’

Here, recognition of and response to suffering enables that possibility of release for each ‘And for all’, which is ‘backbreak’s truest payback’. Aligning mortal and moral destiny, the chiasmus (word inversion) in the latter phrase dramatises the value of accepting, sharing and releasing each other’s burden, including that of the self. These lines more broadly suggest the paradox that, insofar as we recognise and suffer our unconditional membership of the human chain, our corrupt and death-bound condition may be what secures us sudden access into the free space of unearned and un-earnable grace, ‘once. And for all’. In other words, late Heaney induces confidence in the fact that human limitation can correlate rather than conflict with human boundlessness. As he similarly indicates in ‘The Riverbank Field’, although we may have no choice but to enter underworlds of darkness in our lives, we also have the right to seek release ‘So that memories of this underworld are shed / And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood / Under the dome of the sky.’

In ‘Miracle’, Heaney directly explores the co-operative nature of such release. This poem deals with the gospel story of the paralyzed man lowered by his friends through the roof of the house where Jesus was staying in order to be cured (Mk 2:3–11). However, it attends, not to the miracle’s direct beneficiary, but rather to those others ‘who have known him all along’ as disabled, yet who – whether or not they themselves formally believe in the possibility of healing – practically perform such faith by overcoming significant physical obstacles in order to bring him into Christ’s presence. Literally enacting the volume’s larger injunction that we become each other’s human chain, their bodies subsequently register the work involved: ‘Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked / In their backs’ – physical effects suggestive of paralysis drawing them closer to their friend, even though for them (as soon too, for him) this incapacity is temporary. In testimony to the fact that the miracle of healing could not have come about without this act of faith made by their co-operative physical effort, the poem avers that even as these friends ‘stand and wait’ for that pain to pass, they will retain the memory of ‘Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity’ on this day. Just as their paralysed friend is about to be made new, their own role in the process may open to themselves the same experience of dizzyingly transformative self-estrangement and renewal. In other words, by virtue of following through on the imperative of their empathy, these friends have been made co-beneficiaries of the miracle, registering a related kind of healing in their spirits.

In Heaney words from ‘A Herbal’, the purpose of all his work is to ‘Show[] them / They have to keep going, // That the whole thing’s worth / The effort.’ His late poetry teaches us that in the midst of our human experience of loss and (self) betrayal, we need to trust those ‘freshets and rivulets / Starting from nowhere, capillaries of joy // Frittered and flittering’.²⁸ Anticipating its readers’ resistance to the difficult challenges involved in absorbing the strange interdependence of irrecoverable loss and such creative renewal, Human Chain offers ‘A vision of the school [of life and of its pain] the school / Won’t understand’.²⁹ Nonetheless, we are invited into the same space of understanding Heaney occupies when remembering himself as a schoolboy experiencing a sudden expansion of understanding: the poet has a vision of his own life as at once bounded, like the beaker of water he dips into a stream with which to make ink while a singing class he has been excused from goes on without him, and unbounded – part of the greater flowing stream.

Immanence and transcendence

We have seen how, in Seamus Heaney’s final collection, two sets of values that are usually understood as mutually exclusive are dynamically integrated – on the one hand, the values of resilience and endurance and holding on, commanding that we and our sense of the spiritual remain grounded in the material experiential world, and on the other, the values of abandonment and release and letting go, impelling us to allow ourselves and our sense of the divine to launch into numinous unknown. Because exploration of this opposition has been a constant in his work at least since the mid-eighties, it is easy to underestimate just how radical a commingling of its extremes is brought about in late Heaney – those values commune to the point where ‘all is woven into // And of itself, like a nest / Of crosshatched grass blades’.³⁰

Heaney spent a lifetime exploring tension between constraint and freedom in human experience. Intimately linked to this vocation, his work has always intuited both/and inclusivity in the relationship between immanence and transcendence, the claims of the here and of the beyond – but has not always trusted it, even in his justly-celebrated 1990s output. In his earlier poetry, Heaney tended to withdraw behind the lines of dialectical (albeit increasingly permeable) opposition between earth and air, as synonyms for states of limitation and non-limitation. No matter how frequently and resolutely those boundary lines were challenged, for the most part, they remained at best provisionally traversable: more impulse than pulse, Heaney’s boundary- breakings were constrained by his confining of the relationship between the quotidian and the numinous to the terms of juxtaposition, ‘codependency’³¹ and counterbalance.

Such self-constraint with regard to his founding oppositions has ethical and aesthetic as well as existential implications. This is clearly indicated in Heaney’s 1989 essay on Edwin Muir, where he proposes that ‘Th[e] apprehension of broken harmonies, of the entry of contradiction into life, is what we expect from the highest art, and we expect it […] as an intuited, endangering pressure of reality, a true weighing of things as they are dreaded against things as they are desired’.³² However, in Heaney’s final years, he expects and achieves more. Although up to this point he may have been satisfied with his own formulation in The Redress of Poetry that ‘consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them’,³³ to the extent that the main parties to this arbitration – immanence and transcendence – are still assumed by definition to stand not only distinct but also apart from each other, Heaney’s vision of ‘a disembodied, spiritual dimension’ (as Magdalena Kay astutely observes) ‘is less a part of life than of death [and] until Human Chain it will be held quite separate from what he elsewhere calls soft-mouthed life’.³⁴ The result is stalemate between immanence and transcendence, and therefore also between dread and desire as our available options for responding to the ‘things’ we face – no matter how often the envoy of poetry is sent out to negotiate between these oppositions.

Human Chain outsteps this impasse, because late Heaney no longer conceives of the Fall in terms of lost and broken harmony: he allows the Fall but dismisses the idea of harmony as what is needed to redress it – indeed, the very concept of redress becomes redundant. Rather than the answer being congruity or symbiosis between the real and the ideal, he conceives of something more: a ‘both/and’ mode of being, in which the ideal is always already integral to our fallen human condition. In terms of his poetics, this mode is characterised by synergy between what Daniel Tobin aptly names ‘the centripetal and centrifugal poles of Heaney’s imagination’ or ‘a knot where all is inwoven into one’.³⁵ Tobin suggests that ‘Heaney’s parabolic double sensation, his double capacity, his double vision, wants and has it both ways simultaneously’.³⁶ However, for the poet of Human Chain, the very concept of double vision may no longer suffice, because in this condition, one only appears to have it both ways. Medically speaking, double vision or diplopia is an eye problem where a person sees two separate images of the same object, one of which is a fainter ‘ghost’ image, due to non-alignment of the eyes, which should instead work together to create depth perception.³⁷ The metaphor of double vision aptly describes Heaney’s earlier weighing of air against earth and vice versa, in that one of these poles in effect always dominates over the other. By contrast, late Heaney’s understanding of the relationship between immanence and transcendence has moved beyond that (re)balancing high-wire act that so strongly characterised his work between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties. From the turn of the millennium onwards, and most especially in Human Chain, the needed action is, instead, the (re)generation of the one through and within the other: that which is within and that which is beyond our grasp, foci of our desire and dread, no longer understood to operate in opposition, but rather commingling in intimate, boundless interdependence. Daniel Tobin recognises just this when he celebrates late Heaney’s definitive poetic concern as being ‘The world as it is, alive with transfiguration’³⁸ – to which description can be added, transfiguration alive with the given, ‘In the everything flows and steady go of the world’.³⁹

In his ‘Loughanure’ sequence in Human Chain, Heaney dramatises the movement towards this synergy within his larger body of work, in a set of poems which together attend to the question of human power to reconfigure our lot in the combined light of our mortality and our hope of redemption. The sequence directly addresses this final volume’s overarching question of whether a conception of heaven can (or should) alter or offset our death- bound corporeal condition and its associated sorrows – ‘Each small ash increment flicked off / As white as flecks on the horizon line’ of the life to come.⁴⁰ In these poems, Heaney does not propose counterbalance but rather convergence between our necessary submission to fate and the possibility of our being rescued from our fallen condition by a larger beneficent force. Crucially, Heaney also makes explicit each person’s calling in the here and now to come to terms with the life they have lived and may still live, through fully acknowledging their own free will as well as their given situation in history in relationship with other people. In ‘Loughanure’ II, the poet looks at a landscape painting by Colin Middleton, which he and his wife own, into which he reads a message about the limits of our human vision of the afterlife: from where we presently stand, the next world can be no more than ‘A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall / Like murky crystal.’ Highlighting the fact that we can only envision life after death through the storm-glass of our present delimited condition, this poem probes ways in which we humans nonetheless tend to read our present lives into the afterlife, usually conceiving that ‘now’ and ‘then’ in oppositional terms. Thus we silently assume that our ‘immortal souls [may] / Choose lives to come according as they were // Fulfilled or repelled by existences they’d known / Or suffered first time round’ – irrespective of whether such choice of reincarnation would result in a benevolent or malignant outcome for ourselves or our fellow-man.

By contrast, in the third poem of the sequence, Heaney offers as exemplary a curious ritual of altered perspective, which is also one of creative initiation, as performed by the painter Colin Middleton preparatory to taking up his brush to make the first stroke on a canvas. Heaney describes how Middleton would turn away from his given subject, bend over, and stare at his chosen ‘motif’ backwards from between his own two spread legs. Such a practice generates in Heaney a feeling of ‘giddiness’ and release⁴¹ because, in so deliberately defamiliarising his normal perspective, the artist shows us how to ‘look […] / For the mystery of the hard and fast / To be unveiled’ by actively (here, literally) recognising and using their own bodily situation. Heaney implies that by so combining self-estrangement and self-recognition, any equivalent ritual – not least those offered in the achieved form of his own late poems – points towards a larger truth about man’s relationship to his fate in the context of the idea of divine redemption.

In the opening lines of ‘Loughanure’ III, Heaney borrows from the Lord’s Prayer, where it says, ‘Thy Kingdom come’, opening up the space between the subjunctive and the imperative moods of this key biblical phrase by parsing it as two conjoined questions: ‘And did I seek the kingdom? Will the kingdom / Come?’ This hinged question signals the fact that for Heaney, responsibility to bring about the kingdom of the ideal world properly shifts back and forth, shared between the human individual and the sacred (‘did I seek the kingdom? Will the kingdom come?’ [my emphasis]) – rather than that agency being assumed to belong exclusively to either needy mankind or an omnipotent deity. Heaney is well aware through his Catholic education that the Our Father’s immediately-following phrase – ‘Thy will be done / On earth as it is in heaven’ – invokes the unity of heaven and earth as God’s ultimate plan. Accordingly, his poetry puts its faith in ‘A world restored completely’ through unconditional love of the real, rather than in the false promise of any ‘grant-aided, renovated scene’ of existential homecoming sponsored by reactionary, exclusivist versions of religion (or politics) – in response to which Heaney remains ‘unhomesick, unbelieving’.⁴² For him, agency properly belongs to both heaven and earth, God and man, indivisible: an ‘idea’ of co-responsibility between God and humankind – securing the same principle between man and fellowman – which baptisimally ‘Breaks like light or water’ in this sequence and volume.⁴³ Hence, for late Heaney, our desired ‘leap / Up through the cloud-swabbed air’⁴⁴ of our mortal condition is a leap ‘Not all that far, as it turns out’⁴⁵ – no further than the most quotidian instances of our daily experience, past or present. As Eugene O’Brien says, this final poem of the sequence intimates that ‘ultimately the transcendent and immanent will fuse completely and that the latter will shine through the former’.⁴⁶ It is in this new light that Heaney’s late poetry as a whole takes a radical step towards the kingdom, by positing the need to fundamentally challenge institutional religion’s traditional binary opposition between mortality and the fully-redeemed life. The present essay has explored ways in which Heaney’s final book addresses this major task and its broader ramifications.

Conclusion

The final poem in Human Chain offers in a single one-page text a condensed dramatic synthesis and allegory of the major development of vision that took place at the end of Heaney’s career, as proposed in this essay. ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ famously addresses the power of human desire and imagination to move us beyond a sense of being trapped and burdened in this world – whether or not our situation appears to change. In this larger volume, likewise, Heaney’s writing hand is the ‘spindle / Unspooling’ the kite of human hope which this poem so vividly conjures and releases. He teaches us that such hope does not fly in the face of our limitations as bodies bound to this earth and tied to our human condition of uncertainty, weakness, debilitation, loss, and sheer ‘need[iness] for translation’; rather, hope is affirmed as integral to, and a factor of, those same constraints. Fostering at once our powers of clear-sighted realism, empathy, imagination and faith, in Human Chain, this kite rises as

[…]                                   a thin-stemmed flower Climbing and carrying, carrying further, higher,

The longing in the breast and planted feet And gazing face and heart of the kite flier Until string breaks and – separate, elate –

The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

‘A Kite for Aibhín’

Though it may become ‘lost’ in the blue of unconfirmable possibility, such hope is never lost to the inner eye of human beings’ sense of the imminent extraordinary within our immanent, fallen lives. It is entirely appropriate, then, that in the last two words of this poem, Heaney’s rising kite becomes something falling – an apple freely given by the tree which lets it go, ‘a ripe fruit ready to be harvested by another’s hand’.⁴⁷ As we have seen, throughout his final collection, Newton’s laws of gravity are affirmed in their overthrow, as Heaney discerns the power of the crosshatched connectivity of the human chain.

Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where she teaches poetry and Irish literature, with a particular focus on women writers. Her research specialism is contemporary Irish poetry, with broader interests in gender, creativity, faith concepts, and the poetics of mourning. Her debut poetry collection, The Magpie and the Child, was published with Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) in 2021.

(Notes)

1. Colm Toibín, ‘Monuments of the Dream Life’, Irish Pages, 8:2, p. 103.
2. Heather Clarke, review of Human Chain, Harvard Review Online, 16 May 2013, <www. harvardreview.org/book-review/human-chain/>
3. Seamus Heaney, ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 85.
4. Eleanor Watchel, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Brick: A Literary Journal, 95 (2015),<https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-seamus-heaney/>
5. Seamus Heaney, FindersKeepers:SelectedProse1971–2001(London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. x.
6. Heaney, HumanChain, p. 37.
7. Heaney, HumanChain, p. 19.
8. Heaney, ‘Route 110’, HumanChain,xi.
9. Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 449.
10. Andrew Auge, ‘Surviving Death in Human Chain’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p. 30.
11. Heaney, FindersKeepers, p. 70.
12. Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
13. Heaney, ‘Route 110’, HumanChain, xi.
14. Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
15. Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
16. Heaney, ‘In the Attic’, HumanChain, iii.
17. Heaney, ‘In the Attic’, HumanChain, iv.
18. Heaney, ‘Route 110’, HumanChain, xi.
19. Irene de Angelis, ‘A Voice Fit for Winter: Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on Ageing in HumanChain’, in Imagining Ageing, ed by Carmen Concilio, vol. 18 (Transcript Verlag, 2018), p. 86.
20. Michael Parker, ‘“His Nibs”: Self-Reflexivity and the Significance of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, Irish University Review, 42:2 (2012), p. 332.
21. Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 332.
22. Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 332.
23. Quoted in Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 340.
24. Heaney, FindersKeepers, p. 243.
25. Auge, ‘Surviving Death’, p. 39.
26. Heaney, FindersKeepers, p. 327.
27. Sian Hughes, ‘This mortal coil’, The Spectator, 18 September 2010, p. 42, <www.spectator.co.uk/ article/this-mortal-coil/>
28. Seamus Heaney, ‘Late in the Day’, ElectricLight(London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 70.
29. Heaney, ‘Hermit Songs’, HumanChain, VII.
30. Heaney, ‘A Herbal’, HumanChain.
31. Daniel Tobin, ‘“Beyond Maps and Atlases”: Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances, p. 313.
32. Heaney, FindersKeepers, pp. 246–7.
33. Heaney, TheRedressofPoetry(London: Faber & Faber, 1995), viii.
34. Magdalena Kay, ‘Death and Everyman: Imagining a “Not Unwelcoming Emptiness”’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances, p. 53.
35. Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, pp. 317, 318.
36. Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, p. 322.
37. Tim Newman with Megan Soliman, ‘What to know about double vision’, Medical News Today, 1 February 2024, <www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/170634>
38. Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, p. 316.
39. Heaney, ‘Perch’, ElectricLight, p. 4.
40. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, I.
41. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, III.
42. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, V.
43. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, III.
44. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, IV.
45. Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, HumanChain, V.
46. Eugene O’Brien, ‘“The Door Stands Open”’: Liminal Spaces in the Later Heaney’, in TheSoulExceeds its Circumstances, pp. 368–369.
47. Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 221.