And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other …
Those are the opening lines of the Irish Nobel poet Seamus Heaney‘s “Postscript.” It was the subject of an email sent to me by Dartmouth English Professor James Heffernan a few days ago:
Dear Cynthia,
Having tracked down your email address, I write to follow up on my tweeted response to the story of your brief correspondence with Seamus Heaney in your blog—evidently something you posted some time ago, though I just caught up with it.
I first encountered Seamus in (I think) the mid-90s, when he came to Dartmouth – a short hop from Harvard, where he was then teaching for regular stints each year. Besides reading his poetry, he gave a thoroughly captivating lecture on the first chapter of Ulysses, which I heard with particular interest since I was then leading a seminar on it.
A few years later, in (I think) the summer of 1998, I met him at a Wordsworth conference in the English Lake District. When I told him how much I had enjoyed his lecture on Ulysses, he threw back his head and called it a “ludicrous” performance, thus disclaiming his right to say anything about Joyce for lack of professional credentials—or something like that. But not long after, when I read his essay on Brian Merriman’s “Midnight Court” in The Redress of Poetry, I was so struck by the resemblance between Merriman’s poem and Molly’s monologue that I wrote an essay on the two that appeared in James Joyce Quarterly (Summer 2004). When I sent it to Seamus with thanks, he replied cordially.
Discussing “Ulysses” at Dartmouth
But all that is background to his postcard, which came in response to a letter of mine about my son Andrew and his daughter Kate. In late 2005, as I recall, Andrew sent me an email saying that just after he had read aloud Heaney’s “Postscript” to his daughter Kate, he was surprised to find that she had memorized nearly all of it and recited it back to him. When I wrote to Seamus about this and mentioned that Kate was (then) two-and-a-half years old, he replied by postcard: “Kate Heffernan blows the heart wide open. The poetic line is alive and well, in ear and ancestry.”
In every way, he was truly a marvelous man.
He was indeed. And the toddler was indeed precocious. The marvelous poem ends this way:
…You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Read the whole thing here. Or listen to the Irish poet (we’ve written about him here and here and here) read it himself below.
Tags: James Heffernan, Seamus Heaney