The Poet Who Dug in Bogs: A Tribute to Seamus Heaney

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Beowulf, Bog, Christianity, death, Heaney, Ireland, Malcolm Guite, Old English, Poetry, Prince Albert National Park, Seamus Heaney, St. John of the Cross, Tribute

Conflict makes for good writing – or so goes the theory – and so our assignment in the intro to writing course I took to get into university (because I was homeschooled and the process was less than clear at that time) was to write about something we were conflicted about. I, being a little new to the production (though not the thought processes) of papers submitted a paper called, “You, My Friend, Need Bogs.” I have, I hope, since learned to write better titles. But the feedback I got was not on the title, but on the content. I had to do a rewrite because there was not enough conflict. My problem was that I chose the topic expecting there to be a struggle – between everything I love about bogs, and the feeling that I ought not to because being fascinated by a place where dead things don’t decay and the plants kill things does not jar well with a precious moments conception of Christianity. But I could not help myself. I really did love bogs.

The bog I loved in particular was a bog in Northern Saskatchewan called, plainly enough, Boundary Bog, being as it is on the boundary of Prince Albert National Park. I have visited this bog almost yearly, when we go up to the park for our family holiday; I have even hiked around it (off the boardwalk) in the very rare dry season when the sphagnum was dry enough that we did not sink. What I liked (and still like) about the bog is its indifference to progress – and I mean this as the highest of compliments. Stupid people could go around doing their stupid politics and saying stupid things about God, and many people could react and make big deals about things etc., and the bog didn’t care. What was preserved there didn’t change; it had been there long before, and would be there long after our own little dramas that we either took seriously or became too cynical to take seriously, as the case might be. The bog was for me a somewhat morbid version of the justly famous passage from The Lord of the Rings in which Sam sees the eternal light of a star and it reminds him that there is a world beyond Mordor.

Why all this about bogs? Because in this post I want to honor a poet whose chief accomplishment was digging in bogs. I am admittedly a latecomer to Seamus Heaney’s poetry, having as I do a general aversion to modern poets. But when I found him, I realized that here was someone who could explain the tension: why the conflict I thought I was writing about in my essay – the alleged conflict between Christian hope and a love of bogs – was in fact not a conflict.

My purpose here is not to analyze in detail all of Heaney’s bog poetry; that has been done elsewhere. What I do want to suggest, though, is that where most modern poets spend their time focusing on the present moment – either praising or lamenting an inescapable societal “progress” – Heaney dug; the place his poetry starts is always the piece of ground he stands on. What he does is different from a merely sentimental or escapist desire to go back to “the good old days.” Rather, he forces us to look at the bodies in the ground we have built and sold on. He himself sometimes seems as much at a loss about what to do with these bodies as we are – whether these bodies be literal bog sacrifices, or the metaphorical body of Ireland he wrote so much about. But he insists we must look at them. Try as we might to cover them with the tarp of modern progress, the bog, like death, will get us in the end – and its bodies will ever be our companions.

This I knew, or at least there was a part of me that felt it intuitively in my love for bogs. What Heaney does, however, is articulate through poetry the Catholic theological vision that lies behind this love. There are two particular ways I see this working out in his poetry. The first is in his interest in Old English poetry, for, in many ways, the Old English poetic tradition is grubby and earthy and bog-like. Try as we might to overwrite its foundations with all manner of Norman, scholastic, and imperial inventions, it remains a space of quiet darkness touching earth. I do not say this to be entirely pejorative; indeed, I have a deep appreciation for the scholastics. But when I am looking for a poetry and a theology that is equal to the raggedness and darkness of life, it is not to Arthurian legend that I turn, nor even (magnificent though he is) to Dante – it is to Old English poetry. Old English poetry, we might say, is the boggy morass over which the rest of English literary tradition is built – and the exploration of this boggy morass is chalk full of theology. Heaney, I think, saw this, that Old English tradition was a way of facing the darkness head on without succumbing to nihilism, and it could do this just to the degree that it tempered Northern pessimism with Christian hope. I can put it no better than Heaney himself in the prophetic lines from his poem, “North”:

“Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

 

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

 

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

your hands have known.”

Here we find Heaney, grubbing about in the boggy darkness of Old English poetry, refracted as it necessarily is through the Christian culture that preserved it – boglike, if you will. Such digging – in the Christian bog of Old English poetry – seems to me to run through his ongoing interest in Old English poetry, including his justly praised translation of Beowulf.

Of course, one might ask how I know this is not simply a reversion to a kind of pre-Christian darkness; after all, though the evocation of Old English poetry with words like wordhoard is inescapable, there is nothing immediately here about monks or Christians. But though it is not here in the immediate text, it is, I think, implied when read against the backdrop of Heaney’s poetic corpus; this is nowhere more clear than in Poem 11 of Heaney’s Station Island. The idea that this part of the poem is a central text in the spiritual development of Heaney’s canon is hardly my own – I borrow it from Malcolm Guite, who has a wonderful chapter on Heaney in his book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry. What I want to particularly focus on though is the way this section gives us something that we might call a theology of the bog body, a justification for the exploration of everything opposite to easy light, triumphalistic faith, and simplistic hope. In this section of the poem is a translation of a poem by St. John of the Cross; throughout, the poem weaves together imagery of faith and darkness, with a set of concluding lines that particularly bring home this theme:

This eternal fountain hides and splashes

Within the living bread that is life to us

Although it is the night.

 

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

Because it is the night.

 

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

Although it is the night.

Here, then, Heaney works into his own poem St. John of the Cross’s understanding of theology in the dark, perhaps most famously know through his concept of the “dark night of the soul”. As Malcolm Guite notes,

“St. John titled this poem ‘Cantuar Del Alma que se huelga de consocer a Dios por Fe’, ‘The Song of the Soul Which Delights to Know God by Faith’; the significance is in the phrase about ‘knowing God by faith’. St. Paul contrasts faith and sight: ‘we walk by faith and not by sight’; to know God ‘by faith’ is to acknowledge the present darkness and yet to see beyond it, to see paradoxically what cannot be seen, for ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen’. To know God by faith is both to acknowledge his palpable absence from the world of the visible and yet at the same time to dare to see him ‘through a glass, darkly’. This paradox of finding that the visible may also be alive with ‘what’s invisible’ is at the heart of Heaney’s vocation as a poet.”

So, what does all this mean? It means that for Heaney, via St. John of the Cross, the poetic act of digging about in the dark murkiness of bogs is rendered a profoundly theological act, whether these bogs be literal or the more metaphorical kinds, Old English literature or Irish history. And it means for me that the conflict that so tied me in knots when I entered university – the problem of faith and bogs – is beautifully resolved in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. One of the last Old English poems Heaney translated was Deor, and there are few more fitting lines with which to end this tribute than the refrain of this poem: þæs ofereode, swa þisses mæg, or, in Heaney’s words, “That passed over, this can too.” Heaney wrote as one who knew the deep secret of this phrase: that the passing and death of worldly things does not underscore a despairing nihilism, as one might initially expect, but is rather a type of that other transient thing that Christian eschatology insists can and will eventually pass away: death itself.

Review of Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Part I: Imagination, Old English Poetry, and Malcolm Guite

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dream of the Rood, Evangelical, Faith, Hope, Imagination, Malcolm Guite, Old English literature, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Theology

In prior posts, I have raised the issue of what I termed “the scandal of the Evangelical imagination,” and have drawn attention to one of the figures who is helping to redress this, poet/priest/singer/songwriter/scholar etc Malcolm Guite. For Christmas, I received a copy of Guite’s book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, and had all kinds of good intentions of finishing the book and then reviewing it on this blog. My current problem is that I am only a third or so through the book, and already have probably enough inspiration to fill a number of blog posts, so I have decided to post my review of the book in a few parts. Here begins part I:

There is a point where one just can’t take it anymore. By “it” I mean the vague, fuzzy, warm sentimental idealism that one often encounters in my profession, the study of English literature – although to be fair it is more often the rhetors rather than the scholars who play it up. Poetry is inspirational!!!; isn’t creativity wonderful?; imagination is the key to [insert goal here]! And when one encounters this one too many times, one finally snaps.  Isn’t imagination wonderful? No, but I’ll say yes if it makes people like you  go away. Isn’t freedom to be creative great? No, because what you mean by freedom has I think very little to do with being creative. Doesn’t poetry just open your eyes to the wonder of the world?  Yes, yes it does, and also the tragedy, horror and misery of it too. Before one knows it, one feels deep kinship with Swift, seeks solace in Ecclesiastes, and knows what Flannery O’Conner meant when, upon being asked if universities don’t stifle aspiring writers, replied that they rather don’t stifle enough of them.

I include this as prefatory material because it will help give some measure of what exactly I mean when I say that Malcolm Guite’s book is helping to revive in me some understanding of wonder – of terms such as creativity, imagination – that were long ago shattered by encounters with vapours disguised as these things. The main title of the book covers three topics – faith, hope, and poetry – and while I’m good with faith, and good with poetry, hope, as some of you will know, is for me one of the hardest sayings of the gospel. Of course, the hardness of a thing should never keep us from enacting it in faith, but I will say that Guite’s remarkable book is opening my eyes a little to the thing I am trying to faithfully enact. It takes something special to be hopeful without allowing hope to become the kind of optimism that papers over things, and it also takes daring because being hope means imagining a vision beyond the alleged data – a vision that the reality police often do not like. In any case, Guite models both, and if I am a poor student, I am at least a willing student.

So, what is so special about this book? First off, I must say that not everyone picking it up should expect the same experience I have had. It will, for instance, be particularly annoying to those who do not believe in an ongoing conversation of great ideas from the beginning of writing till now. It will be annoying to those who believe that scholars shouldn’t make overarching claims about literary history, and should stick to their own little fields and let others stick to theirs – scholars such as I am in my worse moments. In fact, in approaching the poems he considers from both an academic and creative writing perspective, Guite takes the risk of being charged by one side of sacrificing scholarly nicety for creativity, and on the other side of dredging up old boring poetry that has nothing to say to the modern creative writer.

What such critics might find most annoying, though, is what I find most attractive. In the hands of Guite, old poetry is revivified such that it can speak into the milieux of contemporary poetry, theology, theory, and politics. However, this is not an only alleged dialogue where old works simply become puppetry to say what modern people want them to say – Guite lets the alterity of the poetry push back. The results of this are messy; the book is neither a neat scholarly work in the traditional sense, nor simply a modern “how-to” book for creative writers. Rather, what I sense most behind the book is ongoing dialogue – Guite wrestling with the poems he encounters in an arena where the strictest rules apply and the judge is Christ – no easy outs or deceptive maneuvers here. In certain ways it reminds me of what might have happened had Boethius encountered not Philosophy but the best of the muses rather than the harlots he dismisses at the beginning of the Consolatio.

I will be saying more, but for the current post I will focus on one particular section that impressed me: Guite’s treatment of Old English poetry. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I will admit that one of the most attractive features of this book even before I bought it was its inclusion of a chapter on “The Dream of the Rood.” Very often even Christians talking about faith and imagination are under the impression that nothing much happened before the Romantic period of literature, which has as much as anything else to do with the fact that such Christians who want to engage imagination are often Evangelicals, and Evangelicalism is birthed from the same historical moment as Romanticism – how can they remember what happened before they were born? In any case, as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, I am often frustrated by those who ignore these literatures when they look to define what creativity and imagination are, and part of the attraction of Guite’s book was the front and centre inclusion of “The Dream of the Rood” – an inclusion no doubt inspired in part by his friend, Seamus Heaney.

Beyond its inclusion, however, the real test for me was whether he in fact “got” the poem – not that I am of course the ultimate judge of this, but as an Old English scholar I am qualified to gauge this chapter in a way that I am probably not for any of the other chapters, with perhaps the exception of the one on John Donne, which I have not yet read. In any case, I was well aware that it would be very easy for a theologian to get his hands on a translation and use the poem as a superficial prop for a more broad theological claim. But this is not what Guite does. To his credit, he includes passages from the original Old English, and discusses minute nuances and shades of words. Of course, not every Old English scholar will agree with his interpretation (if they did, it would have to be a bland interpretation indeed), but I was personally intrigued by what he does with the poem, particularly with relation to the much vexed issue of Christianity and paganism in Old English literature. Though the best critics are careful to hedge their claims and carefully navigate the polyphony of the Old English texts, critics have in the past often found themselves divided into two camps: the exegetically oriented critics situating the literature with regard to the Christianity that informed the context in which the manuscripts were preserved; and oral-formulaic critics more interested in the poetry’s alleged sedimentary paganism preserved from the pre-Christian times when the poetry was passed down orally.

In any case, Guite reads the poem against the backdrop of C. S. Lewis’s idea that pagan myths, rather than mere falsehoods to be utterly destroyed, could gesture, powerfully yet also imperfectly, toward the truth of Christianity. Guite’s articulation of this set something off in my head, and I realized that this is the way I (likewise influenced by this idea in Lewis) tend implicitly to read Old English poetry – though an exegetically inclined critic, I knew, thanks to Lewis, that the inclusion of a pagan idea in a poem must not always be damnable syncretism or subversive revolt, but could in fact be the baptism of that idea, wherein that idea found its perfection in Christianity. Of course, in reality, this is neither Lewis’s nor Guite’s idea but a very longstanding one in Christian tradition. Guite’s relation of Lewis’s conversion, though, via the circuitous but probably also necessary avenue of Norse myth, is helpful in communicating the “The Dream of the Rood” to modern Christians, who can see that the “tree” of the cross is not only a simultaneous appeal to and displacement of Yggdrasil in Old Norse myth, but is also an appeal to and displacement of the enduring value conveyed in the myth and appreciated by (comparatively) modern people such as Lewis.

Of course, what Guite is saying here – that there is something in Old English alliterative verse that modern poets can learn from and use – is not an altogether new idea, given poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Earle Birney, as well as the poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien’s deeply Anglo-Saxon imagination. Moreover, there are, I imagine and hope, more than a few lovers or scholars of Old English verse who have tried their hand at it and found the results not entirely unpleasing and anachronistic. Where Guite’s genius lies, though, is in explicitly articulating beyond modern aesthetics why not only poets, but in fact theologians, Christians, and other moderns lamenting the modern/postmodern crisis in fact need to be revivified by engagement with poems like “The Dream of the Rood.”

He’s Got Wisdom in His Soul, He’s Got Whiskey in the Jar: Appreciating Malcolm Guite

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Arts, C.S. Lewis, Gawain, Green Knight, Green Man, Imagination, Literature, Malcolm Guite, Music, Poetry, Rich Mullins, spirituality

In my second last post, I talked about the problem of imagination in Evangelical circles; in this post I want to talk about someone who is doing something to redress it, a modern English poet, priest, and scholar by the name of Malcolm Guite. Guite was brought to my attention about a month ago at a concert by Canadian singer/songwriter Steve Bell. At some point after the concert, I looked him up, and was duly impressed with what I found. He dares to write sonnets in the 21st Century. He has written a book on theology and imagination (which I need to order), and includes a discussion of Old English poetry. His work that I have thus far become most familiar with is his CD, “The Green Man.”

This CD has a lot of good things going for it, both from a literary and theological point of view. The title track is – at least I would argue – an oblique reference to Gawain’s green night interpreted as a synthesis of Christ and the personified fertility of nature (a little like Chesterton’s Thursday). Like Gawain’s Green Knight, this “green man” cannot be beaten no matter how careless his human foes are; the chorus states “If you cut me down, I’ll spring back green again.”

Guite’s reference to the green knight is typical of the rest of the album. He inhabits Biblical and literary phrases but  puts his own slight enough twist on them to ensure they don’t become preachy or cliched. Though he lacks the cultural and politico-religious fabric from which poets such as Donne and Herbert wove their work, he nonetheless attempts to follow in their footsteps. “New TV” is a brilliant satire of modern society (no matter where you plug it in, you won’t get any love from your new TV), while “Our Lady of the Highway” takes Marian devotion to Highway 61 – and includes a good chunk of quotation from the Magnificat. “Open Door” is reminiscent of something Rich Mullins might have written, an infinite riff on the Biblical image of Christ as the door to heaven. “Angels Unawares” discovers grace in the midst of humble earthy romance, and “Texas Farewell” includes some treats for C. S. Lewis fans (I’ll let you discover those for yourself).

It is encouraging to me that people such as Malcolm Guite manage to exist somehow in the modern world; it is encouraging to see someone daring to imagine things outside of both secular narrowness and its cloned Evangelical narrowness so often found in Christian singer/songwriters.  It is encouraging to find someone who measures time by liturgical seasons and sings about nature, whiskey, and God like some kind of Johnny Cash turned celtic. And it is in the hope of encouraging others that I  share his website.