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A couple of years ago a scientist-friend wanted to interest me in
the subterranean workings of the earth as a subject for poems. ‘After
all’, he said, ‘it’s what poets do, isn’t it –
visit the underworld?’ Dante, Virgil, Orpheus… I could hardly
deny the precedents. Even so, I didn’t find inspiration in magma,
abyssal trenches, and the movement of tectonic plates – although
the physical dynamics of the planet are a cause for wonder.
I was reminded of this when standing at Ground Zero. I happened to be
there not by intention but because I’d lost my way. As well as those
milling about the raw excavation were office workers on their lunch hour,
shoppers, children eating Big Macs and ice cream. The life of the great
city was going on (as of course it must) heedless of its ghosts, in Frank
O’Hara’s words ‘a step away from them’.
Yet the silence of the dead is not observed in our dream life. The mind
does not accept that those we love no longer make a noise. Since a poem’s
pursuit of eloquence implies the belief it can embody words, literally,
in air, it probably follows that its orphic task – or its gift –
is to offer a living voice to the dead. In some important sense, to visit
the underworld requires surrender to the idea of the equal, the greater
authority of the dead. I doubt (though the prospect tantalizes) a mule
ride into the Grand Canyon, and down through the geological strata, would
bring one to this place where the dead hold sway.
The pre-scientific ages had just such specific doorways to the underworld.
Virgil’s hero entered the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae; Dante made
his way to Lake Averno, which, like Lough Derg in Donegal, was known to
former times as an entrance to Hell. Poets from Eliot to Milosz and Heaney
have used the Underground as a modern equivalent. However, what lies beneath
is virtual space. This is the place of swirling mists and speaking shadows.
A large part of the poet’s work must be to give it a precise and
memorable topography.
To what end? We know Orpheus braved Hades only to succumb to doubt at
the last step. But this moment of apparent failure is perhaps where poetry
takes over from magic, when primitive wish-fulfilment gives way to tragic
knowledge. Milosz, in his late great version of the myth, has Orpheus
look back wilfully, without hope for the resurrection of the body, knowing
that ‘on the path behind him was no one’. Thus he surrenders
the beloved to death – and finds himself immediately back on an
earth that everywhere speaks her name.
His quest was not to bring Eurydice to life, it seems, but to recover
the truth of her spirit and recall it to the living world. And it is the
return that may be the ultimate test of a poet, since s/he has in practice
haggled with Death. As the Sibyl tells Virgil’s hero at the threshold
of Tartarus, the way down is easy: the door stands open night and day,
but to retrace one’s steps to the upper air? Hoc opus, hic labor
est – in Heaney’s translation: ‘This is the real
task and the real undertaking.’
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