Two months before Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 1995, Seamus and Marie Heaney drove through the winding roads of the Peloponnese with their friends, Dimitri and Cynthia Hadzi.
The trip joined many parts of Heaney’s life: an interest in the classical world, good company, fields, rivers, and a playful sense of arrival, as when he recited a few lines from The Cure at Troy at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus. A little north are the remains of Agamemnon’s palace, from where you can see the blue inlet from which ships sailed for Troy. Heaney thought of that place when he imagined what peace might look like in Ireland.
Worn down by war, and burdened with the premonition of lasting trauma, The Mycenae Lookout kept watch, as the poet had, for signs of better days to come. The late century invited hope for the future, the dying years of the Northern Troubles yielding to ceasefire and peace talks, the intractable giving way to the imaginative. The richness of the landscape fitted this moment, Kalamata drowsy in the autumn heat, Pylos a haven after days in the car on swerving mountain roads.
The Peloponnesian coast is the outer rim of a bowl of olive trees, which grow to the outskirts of the port of Kalamata, ringed now by new roads that soon peter out in the Mani, the Greek Connemara. Heaney had been immersed imaginatively in this landscape for years. He read widely in classical literature and was attentive by nature and experience to the rhythms of the countryside they drove through, ordered as it was by agricultural rhythms long familiar to him.
Pylos was familiar to Heaney too. In ancient times it was home to Nestor, the king and elder. Nestor’s advice to the young Telemachos gave the prince fortitude to continue in the Odyssey, a theme that Heaney took up when overwhelmed by the news that he had won the Nobel, which he discovered two days after his family when he phoned home to Dublin.
Dimitri Hadzi remembered shrieks from the balcony, champagne and a quiet, reflective dinner, which came to life when the restaurant owner discovered the identity of his guests. Heaney caught the moment differently later in Sonnets from Hellas, the sequence he wrote to commemorate this transformative time in his life. For Heaney still carried within himself the depth of deathly decades, which didn’t end with the bounty of Sweden. He was conscious of this as he imagined the line between self and poetry as a music that unstrung violence. It was an imperfect equation, and a continuing journey, which overshadowed his return to Greece two years later:
… it was there in Olympia, down among green willows, The lustral wash and run of river shallows, That we heard of Sean Brown’s murder in the grounds Of Bellaghy GAA Club. And imagined Hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt In the car park where his athlete’s blood ran cold.
Among all the deaths, I remember this one with particular melancholy. My family had moved from Belfast to Magherafelt in Co Derry with my father’s job some years before and the intimacy between terror and the townlands was disturbingly close in those late years of the Troubles. On the way from Magherafelt, Bellaghy is a dip in the road from Castledawson to Portglenone, shelving off on one side to the shores of Lough Neagh, shouldered on the other by the rising ground of the Sperrins. The GAA club is off to the right of the crossroads, down a country road that narrows towards the inflow of the River Bann.
Heaney later described the landscape around here as veiled, and the image is well chosen. Bleak in winter and early spring it is luminous in the May and June time, the ditches threaded with hazel and berry. It is possible here to see the centuries-old stitches of plantation and removal, Bellaghy the tip of a triangle whose other points are Maghera and Moneymore. There are imprints of that colonial phase everywhere in the landscape. Magherafelt, the one major town in the triangle, has a school founded on an endowment from the London guild of salters. The Moyola, which flows down from the Sperrins past Tobermore and Castledawson, and which became for Heaney a river of the mind, meanders through a tapestry of settlement and dispossession.
These were the people and places that gathered in Heaney’s mind as he raced from Greece to Ireland to Sweden in a flurry of press and congratulations. He soon longed for the peace he had known before the Nobel announcement. Heaney had lived a hectic life of readings, writing, social and academic engagements for decades, but the prize brought scrutiny of an entirely different order.
He associated the world before with his last moments in the grounds of Epidaurus, the ancient theatre that he recognised also as a place of healing, in anticipation of new beginning. Time spent there was preparation for an epiphany, a rebirth that had its echoes in his own memories of the family doctor’s visits to the farmhouse to deliver his siblings. As Heaney pictured it in Out of the Bag, Dr. Kerlin was of another world than ancient Greece, his eyes “beyond-the-north-wind blue”. But he was a bridge, like Asclepius, between this world and another, the poet an observer of the process of arrival. Earlier he had compared Dr. Kerlin’s bag to an “ark”. Becalmed, Heaney thought again of his place in time.
It was midday, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight In the precincts of the god, The very site of the temple of Asclepius. I wanted nothing more than to lie down Under hogweed, under seeded grass And to be visited in the very eye of the day By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying The haven of light she was, the undarkening door.
The association of light with a clearance runs deep in Heaney’s poetry. It represents extension in the poems, dark stillness and pause. The panorama between is life, which registers as rain or cloudy weather, those in-between states in which the everyday happens. Heaney was most attentive to those moments when that weather broke, that conditioned surprise that he understood to be the substance of poetry. Hygeia is a figure of myth, and a figure of speech, the word “haven” summoning Heaney’s other poems of journey and refuge, the poetry a reading of the cultural barometer since the Glanmore Sonnets,
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.
Place is an overlapping texture of sensations the poet is alive to, on the radio, in a book, by touch and sight. At the beginning of his writing life Heaney imagined this progress as a door into the dark. Now, in Epidaurus, he saw in the goddess the light of change, even as the association with Hygeia as a figure of cleanliness offers another entry to the underworld of Heaney’s poetry, going back to The Strand at Lough Beg and the ritual washing of the murdered Colum McCartney in fallen rain.
Lough Beg lies in the low country north of Lough Neagh, from where you can see the new road bridge that bypasses Toome in the distance, a blue arch among the greens and browns. I have tried for years to walk out to its shores from the road beyond Bellaghy, but have never made it yet thanks to the cattle in the field that gives access via Church Island. Now there is a guided path out to the next promontory, threaded through sedge and ditches.
The last woods before the path ends are sanctuary to the red squirrel and a hide to watch migrating swans and geese in the shallows of the Bann as it wanders into Lough Neagh. It is a place of slow time still, as Heaney found it. In the later Heaney, such landscape is the accumulation of experience in the pervious place of memory, a bog meadow of the imagination expressed in words weathered by use. In this world, the home place was a little island, connected to the outside world by the wireless, and part of a chain of human associations that extended to neighbours and school, and from there to Derry, Belfast, Dublin, Wicklow and beyond.
As a child Heaney’s far horizon was marked by Slemish, the flat-topped holy mountain. It is visible for miles from the north-eastern shores of Lough Neagh, elevated on the escarpment that drops on the other side to the Glens of Antrim, the sea and Ailsa Craig across the water. Heaney’s sense of his early place as pre-historical was generated partly from its physical setting, Bellaghy in a hollow of fields and sky, its connection to the outside world its roads, its streams and rivers.
As he read, travelled and lived he returned to these landscapes as a painter might, picturing them in different light from different angles, the drenched melancholy of the Troubles giving way in the late Heaney to a sunny evening by the Moyola, the riverbank and water meadows an old territory made new.
This is an extract from Late Heaney by Nicholas Allen, published by Oxford University Press and which will be reviewed by Bernard O’Donoghue in The Irish Times tomorrow