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Even the ‘And’ that opens the poem (a nod-is it possible?-to The Cantos) seems to confess, here I go again. And so
he might, except that the poem quickly sprouts a second section that effectively thwarts such expectations:
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘to labour and not to seek reward’, he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
This doesn’t quite escape from cloying abstraction-hello ‘shut-eyed blank of underearth’ and ‘love’s deep river’-
but at least contextualises them clearly (if uneasily) in the imagination. Heaney’s questions put us at a “distance”
precisely as they enumerate specific sufferings, snapping us out of the first section’s too-easy lull of narcotic
identification. There are few “mainstream” poets who would rend the veil quite as thoroughly as Heaney does here
- this is just a poem, folks!-and one must wonder at his motivation. Is this a dismissive denouncement of the
frivolous imaginings of poetry in the face of the saint’s total sacrifice, or a fear on Heaney’s part that faith in the
natural threatens to “blank” his own consciousness of self, identity, location and therefore purpose? Does he admire
St Kevin, or is he frightened by him?
One of the more valid points McKendrick makes against Side is pertinent here: Heaney has adapted and changed
over the years, albeit slightly, and saddling him with an unwavering Hobsbaum-inspired poetics is like arguing that
Prynne never really moved on from early models like Donald Davie or Charles Olson. In The Spirit Level, as in the
preceding volumes Seeing Things and The Haw Lantern, ‘the great physician of the earth’ - as Paul Muldoon
waggishly calls him-‘is waxing metaphysical, has taken to “walking on air”’, i.e. has self-consciously moved away
from his previously grounded concerns to something more abstract and fable-like. [2]
Form itself reflects the change. The tercets of this poem-like those of the earlier sequence Squarings-seem more
indebted to the airy Wallace Stevens than the labourious Robert Frost Heaney favoured earlier in his career. Such
self-consciousness in compensating for past bias is not an example of “dissembling”, but a more fundamental
attempt at a self-righting equivocation. Ira Lightman is right in seeing this aesthetic of ‘saying nothing’-’Is it any
wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?’-as coming out of Heaney’s political context and history,
from a climate in which not taking a side represented taking a side. This can be seen in the very texture (and title) of
a volume like The Spirit Level, which balances a Yeatsian public poem like ‘Tollund’ (in which a vaguely-defined “us”
is liberated to become ‘[o]urselves again, free-willed again, not bad’ in the light of the Good Friday Agreement) with
the comfortless ‘A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also’, with its encompassing vision of death as ‘Great chiefs
and great loves / In obliterated light’. If today’s poetic “mainstream” can usefully be referred to as-appropriating
Silliman’s appropriation of Poe-a ‘School of Quietude’, Heaney’s quietude, while undeniable, is no oasis of stolid
calm, but riven with tension.
Attempted balance generates not calm in ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’ but explosion. However we interpret this
individual poem, or place it in Heaney’s oeuvre, the violence of the gesture is unmistakable: the whole poem erupts
into surprising self-laceration and doubt after a “typical” Heaney opening, balancing impulse with consequence like a
willed act of contrition. Although the critic Heaney-the public Heaney-can be relied on for periodic accounts of the
vital humanistic work of poetry-indeed, his Nobel speech evokes St Kevin again in a slightly less ambiguous light as
‘true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and
the same time a signpost and a reminder’-I cannot help feeling that his real power as a writer lies not in uplift, but
in torn and doubtful poems such as this one and the non-stance stance he takes in them.
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