I spent many months writing my January cover story about my relationship with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. During that time, I was asked the question familiar to all writers: “What are you working on now?”
I would scarcely have the words out of my mouth before the inquisitor assumed the defensive position: “I hate poetry.” The message was as clear as if my subject had been eugenics: Don’t say another word on the loathsome subject or you and I are going to have trouble.
I know that a lot of people hate poetry, or think that they hate it. But they don’t necessarily hate poets. And even people who had the shortest encounters with Seamus—at a pub, or after a reading—felt deeply moved by the experience. He loved people, he loved having a good time, he easily tolerated all kinds of individual weirdnesses, and no matter how brief the connection was, he listened and responded to each person in a considered way. It seemed that if I could provide a view of the man, it would lead some readers to the poetry, which has sustained and comforted me for most of my life.
He was in his 30s when he became close friends with my father. Already he was at ease with the offices of fame, while also completely certain of what really mattered more—who he was and where he came from. He knew what was right, and what was expected of him, and also that wherever this gift had come from, it came with obligations. There are a lot of great poets who were nasty people—Seamus defied that fact every single day.
I had a sense that I could write a good personal essay on him, because what could be easier? It was Seamus I’d be talking about. But I also had the hope that if I did it right, some people would walk across the delicate bridge from the man to the poetry. Since the story was published, I’ve heard from readers who told me they’d returned to some of his melting, transcendent poems, and others who have discovered them for the first time.
The poems he wrote to his shimmering wife, Marie, are a tribute to a marriage like no other—but they also gave language to feelings and experiences that many people recognized. In a poem called “Scaffolding,” he describes—briefly and vividly—the way that masons use that equipment at the beginning of their work, but have no need for it once they’re finished. The second half of the poem is addressed directly to Marie:
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
In my favorite of his poems—which isn’t saying anything about my own judgement; many, many people say it’s their favorite—he writes about the aunt who lived with his family, helping to raise the nine children. She had a particular love for Seamus, the firstborn.
It’s set during a “sunlit absence” when the two of them are alone in the farmhouse kitchen and everyone else is outside, presumably tending the endless labors that come with that way of life. We sense that Seamus is very young—he later said that he imagined himself looking through the slats of his wooden crib—and he’s watching her as she makes scones and then, companionably, silently, sits on a chair waiting for them to rise.
In the final stanza, Seamus uses a word that rarely appears in his poetry, and it’s all the more powerful because the impression is that this is his first memory of matching that word—love—to the experience it describes:
And here is love
Like a tinsmith’s scoop
Sunk past its gleam
In the meal-bin
Caitlin Flanagan
Staff writer
