April 13:
On this day in 1939 Seamus Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children on a
County Derry farm. Heaney's first collection of poems earned four major awards
and provoked Christopher Ricks to declare that those "who remain unstirred
by Seamus Heaney's poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give
up the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry." There have been some
three dozen books since, and the awards list now includes a Nobel. In
"Crediting Poetry," his Nobel Lecture, Heaney recalls when the childhood
farm kitchen was a cosmos:
In the nineteen forties,
when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we
crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and
lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually
proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely
existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one
bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen
beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course—rain in
the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one
field back from the house—but we took it in as if we were in the doze of
hibernation.
In "A Sofa in the Forties"
(The Spirit Level, 1996), Heaney
recalls "All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling / Behind each other,
eldest down to youngest, / Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train."
With help from the radio, the nine kids left the three rooms for "history
and ignorance": "Yippee-I-ay, / Sang 'The Riders of the Range.' HERE
IS THE NEWS, / Said the absolute speaker...." At the closing lines, the living-room
child-train chugs on confidently through unimaginable hairpin turns and
potential disasters:
…we sensed
A tunnel coming up where
we'd pour through
Like unlit carriages
through fields at night,
Our only job to sit, eyes
straight ahead,
And be transported and
make engine noise.
Heaney says in his Nobel
speech that the radio brought first news of places like Stockholm. He also
recalls the worldly advice of his Ballymurphy schoolmaster: "Work hard and
when you leave school, don't end up measuring your spits on some street
corner."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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