Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense
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(Guest post by Harriet Scott Chessman)
I am a minimalist at heart, and now more than ever I’m searching for inspiration – comfort – significance – in the smallest number of words possible. So, last March, almost a year ago, I felt enormously glad to discover “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney. A gorgeous, lyrical sixteen-line poem (two more lines than a sonnet), it isn’t a haiku, yet it has the feeling of a haiku blossoming into something more. I have held this poem close all year, like a touchstone; this winter, as we approach March again, it’s helping me come back to writing.
First, the title: “Postscript”! I love this idea of a “P.S.” dashed off, something remembered after the correspondent has written and signed the letter. “Postscript” suggests that this poem is part of a larger, ongoing conversation with someone who can be trusted to receive an additional thought with openness and interest. (And how wonderful that the reader is instantly in this position of recipient too!)
The first word of the poem is “And” – marker of this continuity of relationship and communication:
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter…
Ahhhh! “And some time make the time” – isn’t this what all of us wish to do, in our days and in our art? Time hurries on, and you have to grab it, create it, if you have hope of slowing it down, so that you can observe the world you inhabit, and create something in response. This poem, in fact, IS an instance of “making the time.” Beautiful, the subtly grand forward motion of iambic pentameter in the first line, followed by the wonderful variations following, suggestive of wind and waves, as we go further “west / Into County Clare.” This is a poem that brings us into a richly specific place and moment, the shining here and now, where we have the chance to be surprised and moved at this edge of land and shore, ocean on one side and lake on the other. The sharp glory of this image, the ocean “wild / With foam and glitter,” balances itself with the different glory of the “slate-grey lake,” “lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.” Earthed lightning! Amid feathers “roughed and ruffling, white on white,” the “headstrong-looking heads” immerse themselves in all kinds of busyness: “Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.”
By this point in the poem, I am filled, almost to satiety, with beauty. I am present, in this wild and surprising place, in the present tense. And if the poem were to end here, I’d be grateful for all I’ve been given, even as I yearn for more – more images, more sounds, more colors, more swans, more wildness.
This is where the poem starts to go deeper, though. Following the eleven-line first sentence is this shorter, more abrupt second sentence – a second movement in this three-movement poem:
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly.
I love this pulling back, this floating, discouraged pause, as the poet – and the “you” -- seem to wave off all the lovely lines before, the effort to “capture” this glittering moment on the Flaggy Shore. It is here that the voice – already so intimate, so genuine – shows something more: a pungent humility, in the face of this world’s abundance. “Useless [powerful trochee!] to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly,” as the world remains stubbornly itself, outside of the poem.
And now the poem arrives at the heart, in the third movement:
…You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
The action here comes now not from inside, but from outside. Such a great turn, from the “you” who has had the illusion of being able to act on the world, to observe and “capture” it in words, to this “you” who is simply “[a] hurry through which known and strange things pass.” Now it’s these “things” that act, and the “you” who becomes something transitory, almost ghost-like.
But wait! the poem seems to say. There is hope for you yet! If you permit yourself to BE this “hurry,” you may have the chance to notice how the world not only passes through you, but acts upon you, with its “big soft buffetings,” which “come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” If you’re lucky, the poem promises, this could happen to you. Your heart too will be caught off guard, as the “buffetings” “blow it open.” Magnificent, to bring the poem to this wondrous landing – not a landing, so much as a launch, a soaring inauguration.
In my fiction, I have often tried to capture the world through a lyric voice, filled with images and senses of the world, and I have also sought to suggest the impossibility of this capturing. Especially in my novella The Beauty of Ordinary Things, this lyric impulse, even in its bafflement, becomes a saving grace. In this short (minimalist!) book, about despair and healing, two characters come to know each other at a fictional Benedictine abbey in New Hampshire, in 1974: Benny Finn, a grief-stricken Vietnam vet, and Sister Clare, a nun wrestling with her own doubts and yearnings.
This novella took me seven years to write, because, although I loved these characters, I am not sure I understood them very deeply for a long time, and I couldn’t figure out what would happen to them. Benny’s voice came to me first, and I knew it was a confessional one; it’s just that Benny didn’t really want to talk to me! I had to tune my ear way down, and find a place of humility in relationship to this creature who was me and yet not me, on the boundary between his world and mine. Slowly, he opened up, as I let myself become “A hurry through which” he passed.
It takes Benny most of the story to move from past tense to present – something I didn’t realize until the book was almost done. He can’t, in a sense, reach the present until he has had a chance to tell what has happened to him in the past: the loss of a baby, and then of two friends; the love for a young woman engaged to his brother. At the fragile start of Benny’s journey out of despair, he meets the young nun Sister Clare one morning as he works with her in an Abbey garden, and they start a conversation that will continue, in person and in letters, possibly for the rest of their lives.
I wrote my first letter to Sister Clare after that March visit.
Dear Sister Clare,
I started thinking a lot, after my conversation with you at the sheepfold, about reasons to stay in the world. I made a list in my head, and I have to say, it was a good thing to do.
I ’m still making this list, in fact, like in some letter I’m writing to God, as if God is there at all. Or who knows, maybe this is a letter God’s writing to people all the time and people don’t even recognize it, what do you think? Here are some items:
meadows with cows
sheep and sheepfolds
dogs: Harry, Lily, and the rest
forsythia in my neighbor’s garden
the strong coffee my mother makes
my father’s books
It doesn’t have to be something big or dramatic. It just has to be what it is. And you could say it isn’t that such things are especially amazing to look at. They can be totally ordinary. It isn’t beauty, only. It’s something more.
This is what I can’t handle, though: I can’t let myself off the hook for the awful stuff – like Sully, and my cowardly feelings when I saw him go down. I wish I could cut my mind open, and take out that part, and other parts too.
Sincerely,
Benny
My credo, reflected in this novella and (sometimes) in my daily life, is this: that if you open yourself to the world, then the world in all its frustrating, trenchant, terrible, ordinary, extraordinary ugliness and beauty, its startling spectacle and immersion, will buffet you. My character Benny Finn has to let the world in; he has to let himself become that “hurry” through which things pass; he has to be buffeted, his heart blown open; the alternative, as he might put it, is to jump out of the world entirely.
As a writer, I too have to find a way to be present, to let the story (the swans, the wind) come to me, to let it crash around inside me. The starting point is sometimes a fleeting thought, a postscript, a wish to add something I’ve noticed. Often the midpoint is despair. If I’m lucky, I can get out of my own way, and let the story do its strange work as it moves through me.
Seamus Heaney, in an interview with The Irish Times (which first gave “Postscript” a home) describes the inspiration for this poem: “It came from remembering a windy Saturday afternoon when Marie [Devlin, his spouse] and I drove with Brian and Anne Friel along the south coast of Galway Bay,” and came upon “this glorious exultation of air and sea and swans.” Heaney adds,
There are some poems that feel like guarantees of your work to yourself. They leave you with a sensation of having been visited, and this was one of them.
So here’s to just such visitations for all of us! Here’s to the present tense, when it graces us; to humility; to finding the voice; to calmness and form at the heart of a chaotic and terrifying world.
Harriet scott chessman photo by brigitte carnochan
Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of five novels: The Beauty of Ordinary Things, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. She created the libretto for MY LAI, a mono-opera commissioned by Kronos, with music composed by Jonathan Berger. She is writing the libretto for Sycorax, an opera inspired by The Tempest and commissioned by Konzert Theater Bern, with music composed by Georg Friedrich Haas.