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Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013
Aug. 30th, 2013 12:27 pmThis is "Punishment," my favorite poem by Seamus Heaney.
So there I am, in my English Lit class (it must have been Longmire's class, because Carson taught early English Lit, Haegert was Modernism and Lit Crit, Clough was totally American Lit, and I only took World Lit with Richardson. I remember this poem in Dr. Longmire's voice, anyway; he was short, and limped because he had polio as a kid; he had all this white hair and was the best advisor my intimidated self could have gotten as a freshman in college, first-person-in-my-family to go to college and utterly clueless beyond knowing without question that I could write, read, and analyze a text. One day I may blog the story of how I prompted him to declare to the class that one should "never use irony with freshmen," but that day is not today) ...
Okay. So I'm eighteen, maybe nineteen. Ridiculous girl--pretension and insecurity and feeling, dear lord, but also intelligence; my brain was starting to grow and I could feel it--but heading toward the future me, this person blogging on her laptop with silent headphones on, having forgotten to turn on her music (ridiculous in a different way, I suppose). I sat in my lit class, Norton Anthology open in front of me.
If you imagine the inside of my brain as a large open field with a lot of half-built stone walls here and there in mounds and lumps?
Dr. Longmire read "Punishment" out loud.
There was no explosion, no epiphany, no moment of This is what poetry is, I see! I'd had that moment already, with e.e. cummings. This ... this was a rumbling, a quaking; this was those half-formed walls crumbling, shaken, but not being destroyed. I felt this poem in the frame of me.
This poem was history, this was girlhood, this was anger and guilt and real and a part of my heart I didn't know I had.
It was like Robert Frost, a little; this feeling of Oh, that, that's in my blood, I belong to that somehow. (Though I never loved Frost the way I loved this poem.) It was locked in with the end (though not the rest) of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill": Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea. It was utterly itself, in the end, related but not exact.
There are things--poems, paintings, photographs, novels, comic books, songs, artists, whole works and phrases and bits of things--that I think, if I could somehow collect them and hand them to someone, they would know me. They're not what I love, always (though I love this poem); they're things that I recognize, that my bones reach for.
I who have stood dumb/when your betraying sisters/cauled in tar/wept by the railings
So there I am, in my English Lit class (it must have been Longmire's class, because Carson taught early English Lit, Haegert was Modernism and Lit Crit, Clough was totally American Lit, and I only took World Lit with Richardson. I remember this poem in Dr. Longmire's voice, anyway; he was short, and limped because he had polio as a kid; he had all this white hair and was the best advisor my intimidated self could have gotten as a freshman in college, first-person-in-my-family to go to college and utterly clueless beyond knowing without question that I could write, read, and analyze a text. One day I may blog the story of how I prompted him to declare to the class that one should "never use irony with freshmen," but that day is not today) ...
Okay. So I'm eighteen, maybe nineteen. Ridiculous girl--pretension and insecurity and feeling, dear lord, but also intelligence; my brain was starting to grow and I could feel it--but heading toward the future me, this person blogging on her laptop with silent headphones on, having forgotten to turn on her music (ridiculous in a different way, I suppose). I sat in my lit class, Norton Anthology open in front of me.
If you imagine the inside of my brain as a large open field with a lot of half-built stone walls here and there in mounds and lumps?
Dr. Longmire read "Punishment" out loud.
There was no explosion, no epiphany, no moment of This is what poetry is, I see! I'd had that moment already, with e.e. cummings. This ... this was a rumbling, a quaking; this was those half-formed walls crumbling, shaken, but not being destroyed. I felt this poem in the frame of me.
This poem was history, this was girlhood, this was anger and guilt and real and a part of my heart I didn't know I had.
It was like Robert Frost, a little; this feeling of Oh, that, that's in my blood, I belong to that somehow. (Though I never loved Frost the way I loved this poem.) It was locked in with the end (though not the rest) of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill": Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea. It was utterly itself, in the end, related but not exact.
There are things--poems, paintings, photographs, novels, comic books, songs, artists, whole works and phrases and bits of things--that I think, if I could somehow collect them and hand them to someone, they would know me. They're not what I love, always (though I love this poem); they're things that I recognize, that my bones reach for.
I who have stood dumb/when your betraying sisters/cauled in tar/wept by the railings
