This
poem’s music has been bumping along at the back of my brain, coming in and out
of focus along with the words. I’m
obsessed with the poem and have to write about it. (A completely different experience from the
often exasperating one of having a song on the brain.)
Like
many readers and students of poetry, Irish and British at least, I’ve known
‘Personal Helicon’ for years, especially its much-quoted ending. Recently I picked up Death of a Naturalist again, started on the last page and was
transfixed as if I’d never read it before.
Last poem of Heaney’s first book (and nicely balanced with ‘Digging’,
the opening poem). It’s here, with a
recording of him reading it.
The
odd title (personal what? first-time readers must ask) sets us up for something
elevated and classical. Mount Helicon
was a haunt of the Muses and its springs were said to inspire poetry – hard for
northern Europeans used to rain and damp earth to grasp the magic of fresh
water in the arid mountainscape of central Greece. But from the first line we’re down in wells:
deep in the unknown earth whose crust we live on unthinkingly, amid dankness,
rats, echoes, weed and mud; deep in the unknown self, in origins and childhood
fascinations. And down in wells we stay
(or rather half looking down, half down there) though in the last verse Narcissus brings us back to Helicon, where Echo fell in love with him and he with his own
reflection.
The
rhythms of the poem are based on iambic pentameters but move far from
them. Stressed syllables tend to be
strongly stressed, almost Hopkins-like; two often occur next to each other, as
in the first two lines of the second verse:
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted
board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a
bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
The
consonants in the second line mimic the crash.
The third line unwinds the bucket from the windlass in rapid dactyls. There’s humour in all this but it’s
scary too – there’s danger in the rotted top, the crash, the reflectionless
depths that get their own short sentence for emphasis. Later in the poem the lines smooth out to
become more conventionally iambic – until disturbed by “a rat slapped…”
There’s
such relish in the language – as always with Heaney – unLatinate, onomatopoeic,
often monosyllabic, enriched with words like windlasses, scaresome, mulch. My shorter OED hasn’t taken scaresome on
board. Then, as if for fun, Heaney gives
us a Latinate line with an unusual word, “Fructified like any aquarium”.
Heaney’s
laying claim to his own language here, his own territory, as well as his right
to be up that Greek mountain. It’s a
political poem, subtly so.
Apart
from the aquarium line there’s little metaphor in the poem whose effects come
from graphic, pungent detail: rat, roots and slime, smells and sounds. Despite these the brilliance of language and
rhythm, the relish and the humour give a sense of refreshment. The word “reflection” appears twice to
bring in both light and thought.
And
of course the whole poem’s a metaphor, leading up to the denoument of the fifth
verse:
Now, to pry into roots, to finger
slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into
some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I
rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness
echoing.
The
perfection of that last sentence sets up echoes of its own in the reader. The final line is a lone hexameter –
declarative. It acts out the echoing in -self,
set, -ness, ech-, following lots of short and long i's in the rest of the verse.
Has
anyone expressed the Why of writing poetry, the introspection and excitement, as
well as this? Not just in that sentence
and the lovely, serious piss-take preceding it (poets, self-obsession/-indulgence,
vanity) but also the run-up, the set-up, the whole poem?
