Last autumn when Seamus Heaney read at Cornell University, he ended by reciting (from his enviable translation) the closing passage of Beowulf. He did so in tribute to the Irish American namesake of the reading series, Eamon McEneaney, killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Mr. McEneaney was quietly one of the world’s unacknowledged legislators, a poet Mr. Heaney’s homage acknowledged as a hero, like Beowulf, but in the “soft-gradient, vowel-meadow” of Mr. Heaney’s accent, Mr. McEneaney was consecrated as a friend and brother. When the news of Mr. Heaney’s death reached me, those lines returned to me; his voice, frail yet unflagging, had gone beyond utterance, becoming the pyre burning into the marrow of his audience, with a fire that Shakespeare said was “light, and will aspire.” Here are the beginning four and the last five lines of the passage:
The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf, stacked and decked it until it stood four-square, hung with helmets, heavy war-shields and shining armour, just as he had ordered.
…
So the Geat people, his hearth companions, sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low. They said that of all the kings upon the earth he vas the man most gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
In the silence after his voice, some in tears, some just staring opened-mouth at the lectern where he silently stood, we were all the Geats, conducted from sorrow to compassion and then, all at once, praise, for the hall broke into a grand applause, all of us standing, clapping until it seemed endless. Fame won, yes, and hearts.
Later in the evening at dinner, the crowd smaller and very cheerful, he was no longer a distant myth to me. There he was, spirited, funny, the amber whisky in one hand, addressing all the faces without condescension. I saw him through a memory, the half-lit, dungeon-like campus library in Jamaica of twelve years ago when Jevvor Duncan showed me his copy of Death of a Naturalist. From the first poem I was altered irrevocably; I had imagined the voice and made a covenant to one day hear it. The poet whom I encountered then with Jevvor, whom had “set the darkness echoing” in me “to see myself,” echoed equally with the man whom I had now grown confident enough to sit down beside. Our talk began small: “How is it here?” “Very well, very well.” “You seem well.” “I am. How are you?” The ice broken we moved on to literature. It was then that something happened that will remain for me a kind of fostering. Mr. Heaney was telling me, in a voice conspiratorially low for the effect of the joke, that one of his contemporaries’ work proves the opposite of the art of sinking into poetry. At first I didn’t catch on until he asked, “Whom is it by again, The Art of Sinking in Poetry?” I answered, “Pope. Peri Bathous.” He lit up with laughter, grasped and shook my hand and said, “Good man. Yes, Alexander Pope.” The delight that came over him and that I had a part in that delight by being simply accurate—which he would agree with Robert Lowell is “grace”—touched me considerably. Maybe we begin by appeasing a shadow and we go on appeasing it a little too much; we hope it modifies our ordinariness; that moment did for me. For his concentrated effort of over five decades of making his world word, give thanks, give thanks to his voice stirring primitive grace that shall endure time and – in Spenser’s phrase – “shall live, and later life renew.”
—Ishion Hutchinson, Ithaca, NY.
“Remembering Seamus Heaney” is a series from Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art that provides a space for writers to offer short reflections on the life and work of Seamus Heaney, who passed away in Dublin, Ireland, on 30 August 2013.
Clearing out the iCloud, I’ve posted to YouTube the remainder of my pandemic-era online lectures from my penultimate year adjuncting in a large public university’s English department. This was Introduction to Literature in Spring 2020. The first two-thirds of the class, on fiction and drama, were held in person; then the rest, mostly on poetry, were online. These were almost my first video lectures, so they should be amusingly rough.
Above is the first video. Here is the playlist of four videos. The first three are a very basic introduction to poetry with major examples; I cover Pound, Eliot, Plath, Heaney, Walcott, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Yeats, and Keats. The third lecture, in which I explain why Yeats uses symbolism wrongly and Keats uses it rightly, might be the most fun—I like a strong opinion—but the middle one, where I trace faith, doubt, and skepticism in literary form across three poets, may also entertain.
The final video in the playlist is a q&a. I invited students to submit whatever questions they still had after the course was through. I answer such queries as: is literature superior to other media? is older literature better than contemporary literature? are Shakespeare’s borrowed plots a stain on his achievement? should we read “problematic” (racist, etc.) books? what makes a classic? what’s my favorite Jane Austen novel? and more. Please enjoy!
