From cover to cover Seeing Things features a series of interfaces: journeys in and out of real world situations; between real and mythical; between secular and spiritual; between existence and annihilation; between objective and subjective; from the present into the future; between first order experience and seeing things through new eyes. Such crossings involve a range of access points: doors, windows, gates, casements, a circle of plaited straw.
Of tradition in Ireland St Brigid’s Day witnessed the piety and superstition of rural communities. This hybrid Christian/ Celtic feast of renewals (the new life could be entered) provides a poetic charge as Heaney reviews ‘old certainties’ (MP221, below).
The girdle is a crossing point (going through); from upbringing he recall the ‘official’ men’s protocol (proper way) that compares with the more sedate women’s version (drew it down … stepped out).
Heaney ponders the pay-off from this ritual act for those who participated – stepping through the girdle entered anew moment (the open they came into), stood for hopes renewed (Stood opener), optimistic horizons (hoops came off the world), offered sharpened sensual perception (feeI the February air still soft) – the girdle set alight (The limp rope fray and flare) allegedly meant the end of winter , its enriching straw released to the air (wind-borne gleanings) and flying as free as an unhindered goIdfinch over plough land.
- St Brigid was the secondary patron saint of Ireland after St Patrick, renowned for her piety; in medieval biographies Brigid bore numerous similarities with the legends of a pagan Celtic namesake; St. Brigid’s day is February 1, corresponding with “Imbolc,” the Celtic feast of renewals and purification associated with lambing com (adapted)
- Imbolc was known for its symbolic bonfires and pre-Christian Brigid associated with ritual fire that protected herds and harvests;
- At its simplest the ‘girdle’ is a belt of straw plaited into rope;
- proper: appropriate, fitting;
- hoop: circular band
- limp: loose, drooping;
- fray: become tattered;
- flare: suddenly blaze up;
- gleanings: scraps gathered together;
- unhindered: unobstructed, free-flying
- goldfinch: brightly coloured bird of the finch family with yellow feathers;
MP 221 Though the old hearth, and the old certainties, may now be cold, they retain an afterlife in his imagination. One cannot imagine Heaney not returning to them to rekindle memory, to admit ‘things beyond measure'(Squarings XLVI), to relish ‘the dazzle of the impossible’ (Station Island’, X). ‘I trust contrariness’, he says early on in the collection ‘Squarings’, like so much of his poetry since Death of a Naturalist, exemplifies his determination to keep faith with his ‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary’ origins (Crossings xxxiii), and his preparedness to flash beyond them like light from ‘a god’s shield’ (Crossings xxxv) or a ‘goldfinch over ploughland’ (this piece) .
- The 48 poems of the ‘Squarings’ sequences follow an identical format (12 lines in 4 triplets}; Heaney suggests the format just happened that way: ‘given, strange and unexpected’ … ‘I didn’t quite know where it came from but I knew immediately it was there to stay’) DOD 321;
- 4 triplets; variable line length between7 and 11 syllables; unrhymed;
- 3-sentence structure; balanced narrative flow using punctuation and enjambed lines;
- key word separating parallel realities/ old and new realities (in practice the same! ‘enter’;
- gender specific practices with the symbolic loop of rope;
- vocabulary of new mindset: ‘open’, ‘opener’, ‘hoops came off’, ‘unhindered’;
- Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
- the music of the poem: fourteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text:
- alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
- for example, the final four lines interweave labio dental fricatives [f] [v] and airless sounds [h] [l] [w], bi-labial plosives [b] [p], alveolar plosives [d] [t]] and nasals [m] [n];
- a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;