Seamus Heaney, great Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, died last month aged 74. He was a wonderful, life-enhancing writer. Towards the end of his life he was asked whether anything he had written might serve as a suitable epitaph for himself. He was reluctant to choose but when pressed quoted from his translation of the play Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. In it the Messenger, telling how the old King dies and vanishes into the earth, says: “Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.” That, Heaney said, would do for his own epitaph. Yes, it is a good enough epitaph for any man. His last words, texted to his wife from his hospital bed minutes before he died, were in his beloved Latin: “Noli timere” – “do not be afraid.”
In his marvellous collection of essays, The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney wrote that W H Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.” Heaney believed that one function of poetry is to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world; he called this “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” This is what he called “redress,” whereby “the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions,” offering “a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effort upon the individual spirit… tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium… This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”
I believe that is finely put. But the overwhelming majority of people ask the question – in our “real” world what is poetry’s relevance? In such tumultuous, oppressive times as these what is the point of poetry? For myself I am convinced about a good poem’s value as “a glimpsed alternative” to so much in the world that is a denial of enlightened humanity. But at the end of the day what I get most out of good poetry is pleasure, pure enjoyment in what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” a feeling of intense contentment and lasting satisfaction that I have discovered a perfect expression in words of some fact about the world or feeling or thought which once I have experienced it there seems no other way it could have been written or said, an inevitable achievement of the human imagination to be savoured and remembered.
Here is a poem by one of the Seamus Heaney’s dearest friends, the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who died in 2002. It was written when Milosz was a young man, trapped in Warsaw in 1944, when not only his world but all civilization seemed to be collapsing into blood and fury.
A Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering
net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows
are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as
it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields
under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the
edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in
the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes
nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the
air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning
and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs
and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening
now.
As long as the sun and the moon
are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a
rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening
now.
Only a white-haired old man,
who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s
much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his
tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the
world,
There will be no other end of the
world.
Milosz wrote that beautiful poem in the midst of death and destruction. Whatever our circumstances, there is always beauty – and there is always good work to do, mending the nets, binding the tomatoes. Let us learn to go gratefully in the world and be not afraid.
