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In Finders Keepers Seamus Heaney gives a poignant account of the anxiety
he experienced when he first encountered the poetry of TS Eliot. This
was at a time, in the 1950s, when Eliot was the light and the way: a name
synonymous with modern poetry itself. A volume of the collected poems
was posted to Heaney at school ‘like a food parcel’, yet instead
of supplying a longed-for pleasure, the words produced in him something
resembling a panic attack. They were on a wave-length as inaudible to
him as if they had been the squeaks of a bat. Physical symptoms –
a growing lump in the throat, a tightening of the diaphragm - were not
relieved by subsequent readings. Instead, and for years, ‘Eliot
scared me off, made me feel humiliated and small, made me want to call
on the Mother of Readers to come quick, to make sense of it, to give me
the secure pacifier of a paraphrasable meaning.’
Was he exaggerating? I don’t think so. At the same time as inviting
us to identify with the plight of the schoolboy, Heaney also says that
the acute anxiety he describes is not a schoolboy reaction, or not merely.
We are all learning from Eliot, and others, that a poem can never take
us entirely beyond its language to a brightly lit and focused place –
as if ‘obscurity’ were murky water that intelligent reading
could render transparent and clear. ‘A poem must resist the intelligence
almost successfully’ (Stevens) is the downright sort of assertion
it’s easy enough to accept. But what is so attractive in Heaney
is the frankness with which he admits to the anxiety of not understanding.
When Stevens writes ‘A man and a woman/ Are one’ we can understand
without difficulty, but ‘A man and a woman and a blackbird/ Are
one’ and we are flummoxed. We set off on a path in the anxious hope
that we will arrive sooner or later at a single main sense for the poem
that will include the blackbird. But, perhaps, losing our bearings is
a fundamental part of the process. The playground game of Heaney’s
title ‘Finders Keepers’ has loss as its counterpart.
A statement Heaney makes in a later chapter revises my image of the path:
‘Poetry is more a threshold than a path – one constantly approached
and constantly departed from at which reader and writer undergo in their
different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.’
Perhaps it was the spatial imagery of the threshold as well as the theme
of anxiety and loss that made me want to look again at the story about
his grandson I’d read years ago in Freud’s ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’.
The little boy, in an attempt to cope with his mother’s alarming
ability to vanish from his sight for hours at a time, plays a repeated
game. Holding one end of a string attached to a cotton reel he hurls it
over the edge of his cot and then spools it in, accompanying its arrival
and departure with the words ‘Here’ and ‘Gone’.
This stark game enacts his mother’s presence and absence –
or so psychoanalysts say.
Part of the appeal of Freud’s story about his grandson, seen as
the figure of the poet, is the idea that the desire for presence and the
effect of absence are implicated in each other and even animate each other
permanently. The game of Here and Gone is one that the poet plays in the
little theatre of each sentence. With the Mother of Readers holding the
poet’s hand, words play their familiar roles with a reassuring and
consoling logic. Here is the static noun, the active verb, the spaces
and perspectives of the prepositions. And above all, here is the rigid
duality and separateness of subjects and objects. In fact, the necessary
grammar of the sentence itself slots the world into arrangements on which
our day-to-day sanity depends. This, as Yeats might say, is the language
of the breakfast table.
But suddenly, within the reassuring flow of sentences, disturbances are
created. Words are arranged into lines, lines into rows. They are turned
over, turned towards each other to make musical patterns – to mention
only a few of the huge disruptions poetic form introduces into language.
Metaphor takes away literal meaning and Mother has fallen through a trapdoor
out of sight. We are left in the scary yet vivid zone Yeats described
as ‘phantasmagoria’ where our awareness of the subjectivity
of objects and the objectivity of subjective emotion becomes uniquely
possible. It is here that we begin to discern the reshaped and recreated
meanings of poetry.
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