THE eyes first. Kind, brown, narrowing as they smiled. Eyes that had squinted into wind and through smoke: that had seen a river rat “tracing its wet/Arcs on the stones”, wind “quicksilvering” a poplar in one sweep, a cut finger “swaying its red spoors through a basin”. Then the hands: big, red, with squared-off nails. Not a poet’s hands. These had paid out rope in long loops, taking the strain; had dressed a hay-ruck and combed it down; had felt the tug and strum of a fishing line in a river. When they switched to poem-work, his pen (the faithful Conway-Stewart, guttering and snorkelling its full draught of ink) became another tool in a long succession of them: the heavy spade, slicing and nicking the turf with its clean plate-edge; the “rightness and lightness” of pitchfork and rake; the sledgehammer’s gathered force, “so unanswerably landed/The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle”. “Do not waver/Into language,” he wrote. “Do not waver in it.”
He was bookish from boyhood, with a compendium of literature in his head; won a scholarship to Queen’s Belfast, did a lectureship at Berkeley, held professorships at Harvard and Oxford. There were four volumes of critical essays, translations from Greek, Italian, Irish and Anglo Saxon, Latin puns, etymological conversations, a lifelong struggle to resist the seduction of iambic pentameters. He rubbed shoulders with a constellation of great poets: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell. In 1995 he joined the select circle of winners of the Nobel prize. Yet he was always outside the academy. The farm boy from Mossbawn, County Derry saw poetry as general nourishment and necessity, saving proof that “whatever is given/ Can always be reimagined”, and was as happy gently floating his words in a village hall as in some elitist auditorium.
It had begun early, with his mother’s songs; with Hopkins, whose flashingly sprung poems gave him “verbal gooseflesh” at school; with Yeats, the towering and inescapable presence. He wrote first under the name “Incertus”, feeling his way among giants. The past became the shy youth’s touchstone, with its walled solidities of byre, kitchen, thorn tree, cot; of familial love “like a tinsmith’s scoop/sunk past its gleam/in the meal-bin.” He rhymed, he said, “To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”. Then he grew to learn that poetry flowed from self-forgetfulness. From 1972 he made it his day-job, understanding that he had succeeded when the crop of words “felt like its own yield”. Starting with “Death of a Naturalist” in 1966, moving through the bone-vaults of “North” (1975) and the glittering winds of “Seeing Things” (1991) to the mortal quietude of “Human Chain” (2010), there were 12 collections, and no failures.
He should have written more, some said, about the Troubles he lived through, as a Catholic teaching and poetising in Belfast in the 1960s. Indeed he did write about them: the “maimed music” of British helicopters, the “cold raw silence” after Bloody Sunday, the armoured cars in the lane covered with broken alder boughs. He made tender verses of rebel Croppy boys and of his cousin Colum, murdered at random for some sectarian reason, whose body he imagined washing on the grass by Lough Beg, “with blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes”. What he refused to do was propagandise. He would write for himself, not for a cause; would weigh up, rather than weigh in.
Out of the peat
His “fardel” of Catholicism was ever there, the clicking beads and the gold inner gleam of the ciborium, the “tremor and draw” of words he no longer believed but could not disavow. Inevitably, living in the North, he sensed “a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk taller”. Yet he strove to preserve a balance, insisted on his Protestant friendships. “Protestant poets, Catholic poets—and don’t those terms fairly put the wind up you?” His move south, to Glanmore in County Wicklow, in 1972 (“a wood-kerne/Escaped from the massacre,/Taking protective colouring/From bole and bark”) was driven not by funk but by the demands of family and poetry.
It was impossible in any case to avoid the deep history of Ireland, laid down in layers like the black peat he had dug down through on Toner’s Moss; to ignore the ancient kings, monks and wanderers who could be turned up again like bog people, with their patient, ebonised, twisted faces, into the spring light. He too had grown out of this bottomless “sump and seedbed”, “the vowel of earth/dreaming its root/in flowers and snow.” He involved himself wholeheartedly in Ireland’s literary rediscovery of itself in the 1980s, trusting in the power of poetry to drive out the rancid utterances of terrorist and sectarian with “the clear light…leaning in from sea.”
He was taken so comfortably for granted in the pantheon of poets that his going had the shock of a great tree falling. He had written of such a tree, the chestnut planted by his aunt when he was born and then, in later years, chopped down with “the hatchet’s differentiated/Accurate cut”:
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.
Yet his last texted words to his wife were Noli timere, don’t fear.