Thomas O’Grady

On 29 August 2013, the day before Seamus Heaney died unexpectedly in Dublin, shocking into deep grieving not only the Irish world but also the global literary community and his vast legion of readers, I read a notice in the London Review of Books for a lecture he was scheduled to deliver at London’s Southbank Centre in November. The title of the lecture was advertised as ‘The Second Life of Art’. Perhaps he intended to engage with ideas advanced in an essay of that same title by Italian belletrist and fellow Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale, though I would not presume to guess at the substance of that engagement.

When, very early the next morning, the news of Heaney’s passing broke, I immediately thought of that title even as I thought of William Butler Yeats, his fellow Irish poet and also fellow Nobel Laureate, whose enduring stature Heaney’s high standing as both national and international man-of-letters has been frequently and favorably compared to. (Coincidentally, Yeats died in 1939, the year Heaney was born.) Specifically, I thought of British poet W. H. Auden’s well-known poetic response to Yeats’s death which, in part, echoes rhythmically the often-quoted next-to-last section of Yeats’s valedictory poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’, which was first published, in its entirety, in both The Irish Times and the Irish Independent on 3 February, five days after his death on 28 January. That section begins, ‘Irish poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well made … ’ In his elegiac poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, first published in The New Republic in March of 1939, Auden wrote:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

Decades later, in a poem titled ‘Audenesque’, Heaney would tap out the same echoing pulse in his own response to the death of poet and friend Joseph Brodsky:

Joseph, yes, you know the beat. Wystan Auden’s metric feet

Marched to it, unstressed and stressed, Laying William Yeats to rest.

But the lines I really summoned up from Auden’s poem were not from the section that picks up the beat where the penultimate section of Yeats’s poem leaves off. Rather, they were from earlier in his poem when the poet registers how news of the death of Yeats did not suddenly translate his poetry into the words of a dead man: to the contrary, Auden wrote, ‘By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems.’ And this is exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath of Heaney’s death: the poet’s verses, many of them already deeply etched into the cultural collective of the last four or five decades, lived on.

In fact, they took on just the sort of vitality Heaney had described in 1974 in his resonant essay ‘Feeling Into Words’, where he saw the art of poetry both as an archaeological excavation in search of shards of cultural continuity and as ‘a dig for finds that end up being plants’. As word of Heaney’s death spread and as the world began to grieve, the ‘worldwide web’ pulsated with lines and phrases and passages and entire poems quoted in obituaries, on websites, in blogs, and in emails. The famous closing lines of ‘Digging’, the famous opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist,¹ were repeated and repeated like a mantra: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.’ The final poem of The Spirit Level² was another favorite among Heaney’s online mourners. Titled ‘Postscript’, it opens with an imperative – ‘And some time make the time to drive out west’ – that leads ultimately to the suggestion that one may experience spiritual uplift simply through being pervious to the possibility of such uplift:

You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

For my part, while I resisted the reflex to contribute to the public outpouring of emotion online, I privately thumbed back and forth through Heaney’s various volumes, paying my respects to both the poet and the man by re-reading poems from across the spectrum of his almost half-century of putting feeling into words. Eventually – perhaps I should say inevitably – I landed on ‘The Harvest Bow’, from his 1979 volume Field Work.³ From where I sat, as an invested reader of Heaney for more than thirty-five years, that poem seemed suddenly to emblematise the enduringness of his entire body of work and thus stood suddenly as a prime example of how not only poetry but also the poet himself can have ‘a second life’. Indeed, this is the ultimate theme of Auden’s elegy as, imagining Yeats’s ‘last afternoon as himself’ – ‘An afternoon of nurses and rumors’ – Auden inscribes the finality of the poet’s passing:

The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers.

***

Yes, as the global response to his death testifies, Heaney became his admirers. But even that notion needs to be glossed by Auden’s further thoughts on Yeats expressed in ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, an essay he published in April of 1939 in Partisan Review as a sort of companion piece to his elegy for Yeats.⁴ Written in the form of an argument and a counter- argument between a public prosecutor, who has brought Yeats to a kind of judgment day trial, and a counsel for the defence, the essay is actually Auden’s own internal debate about the enduring merits of Yeats’s estimable body of poetry. The prosecutor summarises his case thus:

A great poet. To deserve such an epithet, a poet is commonly required to convince us of these things: firstly a gift of a very high order for memorable language, secondly a profound understanding of the age in which he lived, and thirdly a working knowledge of and sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of his time.

Did the deceased possess these? I am afraid, gentlemen, that the answer is, no.⁵

The rebuttal put forward in defense of Yeats is both less absolute and more nuanced. Rejecting the notion that the person and the poems be judged as one, the counsel proffers a generalisation that regardless of the position held by a poet-as-person on the world’s political, social, and economic problems, ‘Poetic talent, in fact, is the power to make personal excitement socially available.’ Speaking specifically of Yeats, he contends, ‘because the excitement out of which his poems arose was genuine, they will still [in two hundred years], unless I am very much mistaken, be capable of exciting others, different though their circumstances and beliefs may be from his’. The counsel concludes by arguing that ‘The social virtues of a real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear ever more clearly through successive volumes by the deceased.’

Before he gets there, the counsel, asserting that ‘art is a product of history, not a cause’, throws down a direct challenge to the prosecutorial presumption that a poem (or any work of art) be ‘an effective agent’ of measurable historical change:

The case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.⁶

Many readers acquainted with the tenets or the touchstones of modern poetry may hear in that summation an echo of one of the most memorable pronouncements in Auden’s elegy for Yeats: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying … ’ Interestingly, those lines were not part of the original version of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ published in The New Republic. In fact, Auden subjected the original poem to many revisions – additions, deletions, rearrangements of lines and of line breaks, changes in punctuation – that help to make the now-familiar version published in The London Mercury just one month later (simultaneous with his essay appearing in Partisan Review) as much an apologia for Yeats as an elegy.

In particular, a new ten-line second section of the poem seems to be informed by the perspective of the Counsel for the Defence, which forgives Yeats for his dismissive social biases and bigotry made manifest in his unembarrassed flirtation with Ireland’s fascist ‘Blueshirt’ movement in the early 1930s as well as in certain of his poems: ‘the virtues that the deceased praised in the peasantry and the aristocracy, and the vices he blamed in the commercial classes, were real virtues and vices. To create a united and just society where the former are fostered and the latter cured is the task of the politician, not the poet.’ ‘Sing the peasantry, and then / Hard-riding country gentlemen’, Yeats proclaimed in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, an affirmation by omission of his earlier deriding of the emerging bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and the like – diminishing them to ‘Paudeen’ and ‘Biddy’ – in his volume Responsibilities. As he wrote in ‘September 1913’:

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone?⁷

‘[M]ad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, Auden excuses the deceased in that new second section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.

Do I digress? Actually, for whatever it may be worth, Heaney appears to satisfy, as both person and poet, all the measures of ‘greatness’ put forward by both the prosecutor and the counsel for the defence in ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’. For example, in yielding some of Heaney’s most gracefully articulated lines – ‘As you plaited the harvest bow/ You implicated the mellowed silence in you’, ‘Until your fingers moved somnambulant’, ‘Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable’ – ’The Harvest Bow’ even answers one of the prosecutor’s very dubious tests of a poet’s greatness: ‘How many of his lines can you remember?’ But when I paused to re-read ‘The Harvest Bow’ in the immediate wake of Heaney’s death on 30 August 2013, I recognised and appreciated not just that particular aspect of the poem but really the deeply permeating richness – thematic, formal, stylistic – of its organic wholeness that Heaney himself recognised when he admitted in Stepping Stones, the volume of interviews with him conducted by fellow Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, that ‘the texture of “The Harvest Bow” is richer than many of the others in the book’.⁸ In short, the poem epitomised for me the capacity of Heaney’s full body of work to make, as Auden’s counsel puts it, ‘personal excitement socially available’.

***

In the case of ‘The Harvest Bow’, Heaney’s personal excitement begins with the literal subject matter of the poem, a rustic wheat weaving handcrafted by his father, Patrick Heaney, a recurring figure in his poems from start to finish. A cattle-dealer and small farmer, he makes his first appearance in ‘Digging’, where Heaney famously transforms the farm implements of his forefathers – the spade for digging potatoes, the sleán for cutting turf – into that compelling metaphor of the poet’s pen. (Yeats used a similar trope in his poem ‘Pardon, old fathers’, apologising that ‘I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.’) In ‘Follower’, another poem from Death of a Naturalist, Heaney recalls how as a young boy he aspired to emulate his father’s ease and expertise behind a horse-drawn plough:

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

Extending the trope of ‘Digging’, he concludes: ‘But today / It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.’ He even shows up several times in Heaney’s final standalone volume, Human Chain, in poems that recall his final days almost a quarter-century earlier.⁹

The poem about Patrick Heaney that best backlights ‘The Harvest Bow’ may be ‘The Stone Verdict’, from Heaney’s volume The Haw Lantern.¹⁰ Envisioning a judgment day scenario appropriate for a man known throughout his life for his ‘old disdain of sweet talk and excuses’, Heaney casts his recently-deceased father in mythic terms – as Hermes being acquitted of murdering Argus by the adjudicating gods each throwing a voting pebble (psêphos) at his feet: ‘It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out. / He will expect more than words in the ultimate court / He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.’ It is exactly his father’s speechlessness – his ‘mellowed silence’, and by specific extension what is left ‘unsaid’ between father and son – that the wheat weaving first becomes emblematic of in Heaney’s imagination, and in one long sentence of eighteen lines comprising stanzas two through four of the five-stanza poem, this simple and delicate keepsake, fashioned by his father’s rough and labor-toughened hands, becomes the instrument for the poet’s nostalgic reminiscence:

And if I spy into its golden loops

I see us walk between the railway slopes Into an evening of long grass and midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick For the big lift of these evenings …

‘The Harvest Bow’

In this respect, the poem reads readily not just as a dramatic lyric – Heaney fils apostrophising Heaney père – but also as an oblique love poem from son to father.

And rightly so, for as E. Estyn Evans, the father of Irish cultural geography, explains in Irish Heritage, harvest bows are common expressions of affection, especially in ‘north-eastern Ireland’, which would include Heaney’s native County Derry in Northern Ireland: ‘At harvest time two-ply twists of straw are worn in the button-hole: they are part of the ceremonial of harvest time.’¹¹ Including illustrations of two examples of harvest knots (as he calls them), ‘one with the ears left on, which is done in three plait, and the other more common two-straw pattern’ (which is what Heaney describes), Evans adds: ‘it is known that the first type was worn by girls, in their hair, and the second by boys … Mr Paterson [one of Evans’ “informants”] tells me that in Armagh they used to be exchanged between the sexes as a token of admiration or love.’¹² Inscribing in his poem the simple material essence of a harvest bow – ‘wheat that does not rust / But brightens as it tightens twist by twist / Into a knowable corona’ – Heaney ascribes to that ‘throwaway love-knot of straw’ the potential, the potency, to carry his own unspoken message of affection to his father. In effect, in addressing Patrick Heaney, the poem operates as an expressive counter not only to his father’s paucity of speech but also to the poet-speaker’s own filial reticence, not uncommon in rural Ireland, as a byproduct of his upbringing in ‘that original townland / Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.’

As the body of his work attests, Heaney was pervious to the potency of objects from very early in his career and remained so right to the end: a fragment of ossified wood from Lough Neagh on a schoolroom shelf, a piece of lumber exhumed from the bog and split into roof rafters, a Victorian parlor guitar, a priest’s biretta, a granite chip hammered from the wall of James Joyce’s Martello Tower in Sandycove, a railway spike found on poet Donald Hall’s farm in New Hampshire, a stone from Delphi, a seashell trinket associated with a long-deceased aunt, a tropical rain stick, a Boston fireman’s helmet, a knife-sharpening stone intended for his father, a schoolbag, a boyhood fountain pen. In ‘Place, Pastness, Poems: A Triptych’, an essay he published in the journal Salmagundi in the mid-1980s, Heaney suggests that objects like these – many of them seemingly random – can embody ‘the ghost-life that hovers over some of the furniture of our lives’ in such a way that the ‘objects can become temples of the spirit’. An object that is uniquely personal and intimate – his mother’s old ‘smoothing iron’, an inherited family settle bed, his late father’s ash plant walking stick – can even be ‘a point of entry into a common ground of memory and belonging’:

It transmits the climate of a lost world and keeps alive a domestic intimacy with a reality which might otherwise have vanished. The more we are surrounded by such things, the more feelingly we dwell in our own lives. The air which our imaginations inhale in their presence is not musty but bracing.¹³

Clearly, the harvest bow plaited by his father – ‘this frail device / That I have pinned up on our deal dresser’ – braces Heaney in just that way, ‘exciting’ him to preserve it first in the intimate space of the marital bedroom and then in a poem whose elegant simplicity belies, like a love-knot of straw itself, its intricate and refined artfulness.

***

One dimension of that artfulness involves the correlation between the poem’s subtle sonic texture and its formal structure of five six-line stanzas end-rhymed aabbcc. In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged how those foundational building blocks of ‘The Harvest Bow’ support its overarching richness: ‘the stanza form was what made the poem. I remember discovering a shape and then realising it could be built on, and relishing the whole gradual cumulative effect’. Even visually, the way the poem sits on the page, a reader might appreciate that effect in how those closely-knit and deftly enjambed rhymed couplets are mimetic of the harvest bow itself, the way it ‘brightens as it tightens twist by twist’. (More than a decade later Heaney would replicate this compacted rhyming to inscribe, with equal dexterity, ‘The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling’ in lines five through eight of his sonnet, ‘The Skylight’.) Relatedly, a reader might also note that of those fifteen rhymed couplets only two ‘sound the full chime’, as Heaney put it to O’Driscoll in the context of affirming his general preference for pararhymes and half rhymes (also known as ‘slant rhymes’) in his writing. ‘On the whole I’d go for something less than full rhyme’, he told O’Driscoll: ‘I improvise on the hoof, or maybe better say in the hope.’¹⁴ Thus, while ‘homesick’ rhymes fully with ‘stick’ and ‘townland’ rhymes fully with ‘hand’, through the rest of the poem ‘bow’ rhymes with ‘you’, ‘sticks’ with ‘cocks’, ‘wall’ with ‘lapel’, ‘corn’ with ‘warm’ and so on. The result is again mimetic: those improvised rhymes lend to the poem’s lines a pleasing variegation as naturally gradated as the burnished coloring of twisted straw.

A third aspect of the poem’s sonic texture – its conspicuously variable line lengths – is a bit more complex. In part, that aspect is illuminated by Heaney in ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, a lecture he delivered in 1978. Engaging with the ‘two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnés and les vers calculés’ identified by Paul Valéry, he remarks:

The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my impression that this haunting or donné occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness.¹⁵

Specifically, the distinctions he draws between Wordsworth and Yeats crystallise how his own lines in ‘The Harvest Bow’, loosely iambic but ranging downwards from twelve syllables to four syllables, reflect his own Wordsworthian receptiveness to a beckoning impulse:

It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné. If he surrenders to it, allows himself to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations, then we will have a music not unlike Wordsworth’s, hypnotic, swimming with the current of the form rather than against it. If, on the other hand, instead of surrendering to the drift of the original generating rhythm, the poet seeks to discipline it, to harness its energies in order to drive other parts of his mind into motion, then we will have a music not unlike Yeats’s, affirmative, seeking to master rather than mesmerise the ear, swimming strongly against the current of its form.¹⁶ Is it just a coincidence that Heaney uses the phrase ‘Beats out of time’ to describe his father’s ‘Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes’?

Perhaps that question is answered, and the poem’s ‘given line’ further illuminated, by glossing ‘The Harvest Bow’ with another poem, tellingly titled ‘The Given Note’, that Heaney published a decade earlier in his volume Door Into the Dark.¹⁷ Sparked by an anecdote about a fiddler who, on a visit to the westernmost point of the long-evacuated Blasket Islands off the south- west coast of Ireland, came away with a tune ‘Out of wind off mid-Atlantic’, that poem reads easily as a parable of artistic inspiration, of how the initial prompt or pulse for a melody – or for a poem – finds its channel for full expression in the receptive and capable artist: ‘It comes off the bow gravely, / Rephrases itself into the air.’ Incidentally, ‘The Given Note’ was the only poem read at Heaney’s funeral Mass, which took place in Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook on Dublin’s southside on 2 September 2013.

***

In his review of Heaney’s volume Field Work, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980, eminent literary critic Harold Bloom singles out ‘The Harvest Bow’ for favorable comparison with a variety of memorable poems written by notable poets at the age (as Heaney was at the time) of thirty- nine or forty – Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman. Most particularly, he places it alongside Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’, musing that it ‘may yet seem that strong against all of time’s revenges’. Continuing, Bloom suggests that ‘it begins to seem not far-fetched to wonder how remarkable a poet Heaney may yet become, if he can continue the steady growth of an art as deliberate, as restrained, and yet as authoritative and universal as the poems of Field Work’. The reception – critical, scholarly, readerly – of Heaney’s entire oeuvre (he was a prolific and brilliant essayist as well as poet) that continues in his ‘second life’ a decade beyond his death testifies to the ongoing upward trajectory of both his authority and his universality that ‘The Harvest Bow’ projected.

For while that poem is both a touching expression of bashful filial affection and a striking example of the desire Heaney described in Crediting Poetry, his Nobel Lecture delivered in Stockholm in 1995, ‘to repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds’, it is also much more than either of those attributes by virtue of where it takes the reader in its final stanza. Literally, the opening couplet of that stanza – ‘The end of art is peace / Could be the motto of this frail device’ – takes the reader to a passage from a Yeats reminiscence dated 1905 that Heaney quotes as the epigraph to Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, his first collection of essays and lectures and broadcasts and reviews, published the year after ‘The Harvest Bow’ appeared in Field Work: ‘Coventry Patmore has said, “The end of art is peace”, and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.’¹⁸

Did Heaney remember that Yeats would rework that phrase (apparently a paraphrase) from Patmore, a minor and now mostly forgotten Victorian poet, less than a decade later in one of his more polemical poems, included in Responsibilities, that Auden’s public prosecutor might have raised an eyebrow at? Titled ‘To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’, the poem addresses Sir Hugh Lane, the nephew of Yeats’s close friend and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory. Ultimately, alluding to the San Marco Library in Florence, ‘Whence turbulent Italy should draw / Delight in Art whose end is peace’, Yeats exhorts Lane to see himself relative to magnanimous patrons of the arts during the Italian Renaissance – the Duke of Ferrara, the Duke of Urbino, Cosimo de Medici. But before that he cannot resist the opportunity to register, not for the first time, his unrelenting disdain for the Dublin bourgeoisie in the early years of the twentieth century:

You gave, but will not give again

Until enough of Paudeen’s pence

By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain

To be ‘some sort of evidence’,

Before you’ll put your guineas down,

That things it were a pride to give

Are what the blind and ignorant town

Imagines best to make it thrive.

Would Heaney have had that citing of Patmore also in mind when he wrote ‘The Harvest Bow’? Probably not. Presumably, Heaney’s decision to exclude ‘To a Wealthy Man . . .’ from the generous selection of Yeats’s poems he made first for The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing¹⁹ and then for a slightly larger gathering he edited for Faber and Faber in 2000²⁰ (almost ninety poems in the latter instance) was based on grounds other than Yeats’s demeaning attitude toward the rising Dublin middle-class. Yet the contrast between how each poet adopts that phrase from Patmore is very telling, and its import may even hinge on an aphoristic recognition Yeats would arrive at in 1917 in his essay ‘Anima Hominis’: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ For Heaney, unlike Yeats, there is no quarrel with others: that borrowing from Patmore that he lifts from Yeats is an observation, not a proclamation. In Heaney’s hands it is also an invitation, though not just to his father, the putative addressee within the dramatic lyric, but to his readers, to appreciate how art – the art of poetry no less than the art of braiding wheat – can transcend a merely immediate utilitarian function. By the intricacy of its own weaving of word and sound and image and form, ‘The Harvest Bow’ is no less an emblem of Heaney’s desire in that regard than is his father’s dexterous handiwork that spurred the poem.

Coincidentally or not, Heaney’s description, in his introduction to the Faber and Faber volume, of the aspect of Yeats’s poetry that he most admires could, verbatim, synopsise the enduringness – the permanence – of ‘The Harvest Bow’: ‘Yeats’s essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form’.²¹ The relationship between the five- stanza formal structure of Heaney’s poem and its rhetorical structure – the movement from the literal to the symbolic in a mere three sentences spread over thirty lines – is masterfully executed. In one of a series of forty-eight twelve-liners gathered under the collective title ‘Squarings’ in his volume Seeing Things,²² Heaney asks: ‘Where does spirit live? Inside or outside / Things remembered, made things, things unmade?’ In a sense he had already answered those questions a dozen years earlier in the closing lines of ‘The Harvest Bow’ where, evoking a sort of genius loci ‘spirit of the corn’ (‘corn’ being the generic term for ‘grain’ in Ireland and the British Isles), he closes the poem by suggesting how that ‘thing’ made by his father – and now remembered, unmade, and remade verbally into a symbol – retains some touch of that ephemeral genius, having been ‘burnished by its passage, and still warm’.

Again, coincidentally or not, Heaney concludes the introduction to his selection from Yeats by quoting directly the first two lines of the closing tercet from that same twelve-liner: ‘What’s the use of a held note or held line / That cannot be assailed for reassurance?’ The final line of that poem reads: ‘(Set questions for the ghost of W. B.).’ The definition of the transitive verb ‘assail’ in the OED that seems to apply in this context is ‘put to the test’. That is the exercise that Auden has his public prosecutor and his counsel for the defence undertake with Yeats. Like so much of Heaney’s body of writing, ‘The Harvest Bow’ continues to pass that same test, extending the poet’s ‘second life’ ten years after his sudden and all-too-early death.

Thomas O’Grady is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he served as Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019.

He is the author of two books of poetry, What Really Matters (2000) and Delivering the News (2019), both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series.

(Notes)

1. Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966).
2. Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996).
3. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).
4. W. H. Auden, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, Partisan Review, 6:3 (1939).
5. Auden, ‘Public v. Mr Yeats’.
6. Auden, ‘Public v. Mr Yeats’.
7. W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1914).
8. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).
9. Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010).
10. Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).
11. E. Estyn Evans, Irish Heritage: The Landscape, the People, and Their Work (Dublin: Dundalgan Press, 1942).
12. Evans, Irish Heritage.
13. Seamus Heaney, ‘Place, Pastness, Poems: A Triptych’, Salmagundi, 188/189 (2015).
14. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones.
15. Seamus Heaney, Makings of a Music: Reflections on the Poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1980).
16. Heaney, Makings of a Music.
17. Seamus Heaney, Door Into the Dark (London: Faber & Faber, 1969).
18. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–78 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980).
19. Seamus Deane (general ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).
20. W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats, ed by Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2000).
21. Yeats, Yeats.
22. Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).