Seamus Heaney

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 30:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is a poet. A Catholic Ulsterman, he's been called the best Irish poet since Yeats. Others go further, describing his writing as the finest in the English language today. He's won a clutch of literary prizes and this summer followed the distinguished footsteps of Arnold, Auden and Graves into the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He said this is his chance to stir the cultural pot, an indication that this particular poet, liked by his readers and acclaimed by the critics, sees no difficulty in harnessing popularity. He is Seamus Heaney.

Presenter1:04

Seamus, how much did it matter to you being elected to that high office?

Seamus Heaney1:08

Well, it began to matter more to me after the, so to speak, result was declared.

Seamus Heaney1:14

Beforehand I kept it at a distance within myself. I mean I I took it all very playfully.

Seamus Heaney1:20

And in fact, many of the remarks I made inside about three minutes of hearing the the result were

Seamus Heaney1:25

Faintly sceptical, but I have to say that it's impossible not to respond.

Seamus Heaney1:31

to the the great arch that stretches back.

Seamus Heaney1:34

And not to respond to the sensible case in Oxford itself.

Seamus Heaney1:38

It is a fact that a great institution with a great history.

Seamus Heaney1:42

The university first of all and then the the um professorship does give you a sense of being responsible to something more than yourself, right?

Presenter1:49

So what are you now called upon to do? I mean, how do you profess poetry?

Seamus Heaney1:54

Well, the statutory requirement is to give three lectures each year, one in each term. And I was looking at the uh original founding statutes and they are

Seamus Heaney2:04

to speak of the old poets uh in order to polish the endowments of the young, I think, and to help in human and uh sacred learning.

Presenter2:14

You also have a wonderful title at Harvard, don't you? You're the Boylstone Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, which is quite an ugly label, really, for a man who loves words.

Seamus Heaney2:23

It's it's a magnificent label. Uh I think it's a chair that's kept for people who aren't quite scholars. I mean, in fact I know that. In Harvard the standards of traditional literary scholarship are very high. I myself am a BA from Queen's University, Belfast, and uh haven't uh trained in research and never did my Ph D and so on. So it's kept for mavericks uh whom they I think

Seamus Heaney2:45

White and disgrace the university.

Presenter2:48

And Maverick, who is now the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Tell me how you envisage the desert island that we're sending you to.

Seamus Heaney2:55

I'm afraid my desert island isn't so sunny. Uh my wife and myself have this difficulty always in the summertime. She she likes the sun, and uh if the sun comes out I retreat into the stone house.

Seamus Heaney3:05

So I I suppose Ice something Icelandic and uh it's fairly bleak with stunted bushes, but wonderful little alpine flowers in the springtime uh and uh the the occasional goat, I suppose.

Presenter3:19

And what sort of figure do you cut on it?

Seamus Heaney3:22

Well, I I think I'm I'm gathering sticks and uh sitting in a corner uh rather like people I used to know in in the countryside. I mean I I remember one house I used to go into which was sort of Neolithic house really. It had an earthen floor and one chimney. It was very primeval. So I think that if I got the hut built and the fire started in the hearth that I would be completely at home at once.

Presenter3:47

So so you're not a a dramatic hero who's longing to escape, you're more of a romantic who's resigned to life.

Seamus Heaney3:53

Yes, I think I'm I'm in the the tradition of the hermit poets of the early Celtic nature tradition.

Presenter3:58

Right, let's hear the first piece of music that you'd like to play to yourself.

Seamus Heaney4:01

While this This Isn't Very Hermity is from a Beethoven uh quartet, um I associate this music with a house.

Seamus Heaney4:10

completely the opposite of the one I've just uh mentioned.

Seamus Heaney4:13

a friend of mine who whose house abounds in grace and music and uh the spaciousness

Seamus Heaney4:19

of mornings listening to m music in in that place would come back to me.

Presenter5:05

Part of Beethoven's Quartet No. thirteen, opus a hundred and thirty, in B flat major, played by the Albenberg Quartet.

Presenter5:13

Were you a a born poet, Seamus, is there such a thing?

Seamus Heaney5:16

Well, uh most children probably have the solitude and

Seamus Heaney5:22

Distance and fear of the world, which we associate with the truly imaginative being.

Seamus Heaney5:29

The onset of capacity and the onset of capability and the onset of

Seamus Heaney5:36

Adequacy

Seamus Heaney5:37

Banishes the the poet. So I think that there are many born poets and that's

Seamus Heaney5:43

spacious, uh little fearful part of yourself. That's where the poetical being resides.

Seamus Heaney5:49

Probably I in that sense I was born, but I would say many people are born.

Presenter5:53

But reading about your roots, your your background now, it sounds very poetic. I don't know whether the reality was sound.

Seamus Heaney5:59

Well the the reality was indeed. I mean uh when I describe it in words it immediately becomes, if you like, a mythic status. It is true that there was uh a house with uh trees around it and a thatch and there there were horses in the fields and uh people came to the well for water and so on. So when you're describing that you're describing

Seamus Heaney6:20

a medieval uh community.

Presenter6:22

Your father w was a farmer.

Seamus Heaney6:24

He was a farmer, but he had a certain freedom. Uh I mean, he he had the farming thing, but actually he wasn't enslaved to it. That is the killing thing about small farming, is to be uh enslaved day and night, or day after day. And he had a certain uh

Seamus Heaney6:40

Panash with his stick and going out, and he was able to have people at home working on the farm.

Presenter6:46

And and inside the house there were two very important women in your life.

Seamus Heaney6:50

Well, indeed I have become to realize that I had really two mummies.

Seamus Heaney6:53

I had my own mother, of course, who bore me.

Seamus Heaney6:59

But uh

Seamus Heaney7:00

My father's sister, Mary, was in situ in the house when my mother came to live there, when she buried my father.

Seamus Heaney7:08

And I suppose it says a lot about uh my aunt, the father's sister, that she and my mother worked out. They lived together in

Seamus Heaney7:16

My aunt every day, for example, baked bread. She also milked because she uh was there to assist. And and my mother was much more involved necessarily with the whole business of youngsters. I mean, our our family came very quickly, one after the other. How many?

Presenter7:35

How many?

Seamus Heaney7:35

There were nine of us and I think uh you know probably six of us born inside eight years or

Presenter7:41

Were were you the elder?

Seamus Heaney7:41

Uh

Seamus Heaney7:42

I was the eldest, yeah.

Presenter7:43

Yes. And it was a very happy, obviously very secure house.

Seamus Heaney7:46

It was secure, yeah. There was no menace other than the menaces that are in the imagination, you know, the dark and the trees and uh the scuttling of wild things on the ceiling at night and so on.

Presenter7:58

But religion was the mainstay, was it?

Seamus Heaney8:00

Yes, I mean everything was deeply, deeply uh uh full of religion. The social life of of the district

Seamus Heaney8:08

I mean, first of all, it was divided Catholic, Protestant, and the Catholic calendar was related to the church feasts. And it was a kind of segregation, you know. The segregation worked at a social level, but the piety and the actual faith worked at a very intimate uh

Seamus Heaney8:23

uh level of belief

Seamus Heaney8:26

Everything was permeated with it, truly.

Presenter8:28

Shall we pause there for record number two? What's that?

Seamus Heaney8:31

Well this is uh a namesake of my own, his name is Johaney, Shoss of O'Haney in Irish, he's singing in Irish.

Seamus Heaney8:38

He's singing a a famous uh song.

Seamus Heaney8:41

called An Bonan Bui.

Seamus Heaney8:43

which means the yellow bittern.

Seamus Heaney8:45

And uh he sings in what is called in Irish the Shan Nos, which is the old way, the old traditional singing.

Seamus Heaney8:52

O in yawn we Moro Shinch Tadohro chui won the doom.

Seamus Heaney9:12

Todne of scorn Adeher nois Sevellas ne la colom.

Presenter9:29

Joe Heaney singing An Bunan Bui, a song about the Yellow Bitton.

Presenter9:34

So were you Seamus in in the midst of this big happy family? Were you a a robust child, or were you a dreamy chap?

Seamus Heaney9:42

I don't know, I've always thought of myself as uh sort of fearful and uh

Seamus Heaney9:46

Conformist. I mean, I I know I've uh

Seamus Heaney9:49

changed a bit and that is one of the uh central gifts and mysteries in my own life, I think, because I

Seamus Heaney9:56

Up until about the age of seventeen or eighteen I was uh

Seamus Heaney10:00

Very, very uh

Seamus Heaney10:02

Shy and I was extremely homesick, for example, when I went to St Columb's College at the age of twelve. I cried easily as a youngster.

Seamus Heaney10:10

I had my bottle till I was four.

Presenter10:13

The conversion.

Seamus Heaney10:14

Got a lot of memory dependence all around.

Presenter10:17

And so what were you like out on the streets? I mean, were you aware, as a a lad out on your bicycle, about the divisions, where you got at, where you bullied?

Seamus Heaney10:26

Well, I was very aware of the divisions, but I wasn't got at or bullied.

Seamus Heaney10:29

My own household was completely without

Seamus Heaney10:33

any sectarian energy. In other words, the attitudes uh that w I heard in the House were never

Seamus Heaney10:39

Based upon sectarian difference. Nevertheless, what we would call now the sense of difference was deeply there.

Seamus Heaney10:47

It was extremely subtle. I mean, it was just a a gram of psychological

Seamus Heaney10:52

difference in the in the weighting of the way people behaved with each other.

Seamus Heaney10:56

When shall we say um

Seamus Heaney10:58

A Protestant neighbour came to the door to collect milk.

Seamus Heaney11:03

Just be a s faint delicacy of decorum more decorum observed.

Seamus Heaney11:09

And yet and yet that that dr melodramatizes it even.

Presenter11:13

But the balancing act that you performed and you've written about it since, haven't you? Written about um two buckets were easier to carry tha carry than one. You I grew up in between, you said.

Speaker 211:23

In yourself.

Presenter11:24

I mean, obviously I think most people must believe that that is the ultimate solution that people should be able to balance. Do you think it's achievable?

Seamus Heaney11:31

Well, in my experience

Seamus Heaney11:33

It is possible. Certainly at the uh

Seamus Heaney11:37

micro level of of a small community.

Seamus Heaney11:41

I do believe it is achievable. And

Seamus Heaney11:44

I have always been I mean constantly

Seamus Heaney11:47

Surprised, uh, I mean, I don't want to sound naive, of course, I know there's I know the bitterness inside out, I know it very well.

Seamus Heaney11:55

But

Seamus Heaney11:56

Disappointed, I suppose, that uh there's not more uh trust around. I think that's the real problem in the North of Ireland, that the conditions

Seamus Heaney12:07

of uh distrust and uh the experience of betrayal and the experience of disappointment on each side makes everybody so wary of making any generous gesture.

Seamus Heaney12:20

that the innate generosity of spirit which is in

Seamus Heaney12:24

Many, many people.

Seamus Heaney12:25

is hampered and their public rhetoric becomes more careful than their

Seamus Heaney12:32

private yearnings. And I think that's a sorrow, you know.

Presenter12:35

Let's have record number three.

Seamus Heaney12:37

Well record number three is from

Seamus Heaney12:39

It's from the streets of Belfast and it's a merry, non-sectarian song, uh sung by my friend David Hammond, who who is a a man capable of much merry commotion himself.

Seamus Heaney12:51

My aunt Jane, she took me in, she give me tea out of her wheat ten, Half a bap, and a wee snow top, Three black lumps at a her wee shop, Half a bap, and a wee snow top, Three black lumps at a hurrowy shop.

Seamus Heaney13:09

My aunt Jing she's awful smart, She bakes spear rings and an apple tart And when Halloween comes round For nouns that tart I'm always bound And when Halloween comes round

Speaker 213:22

And artifacts.

Presenter13:22

David Hammond singing My Aunt Jane, a Belfast street song.

Presenter13:26

You were saying earlier that you became quite homesick when you were sent away to school. Did did you feel similarly when you went away to university?

Seamus Heaney13:34

No, I didn't because I was at home in Belfast uh and happy.

Seamus Heaney13:40

To some extent. I mean, a little bit inadequate, but nevertheless.

Seamus Heaney13:45

Feeling confident enough. The boy had got his A-levels and he had got a state exhibition. Indeed, yes, he was a brilliant scholar.

Presenter13:51

Indeed, yes, it was a brilliant scholar. You won a first, so you you felt you'd found a bit of yourself, but you still weren't writing, were you?

Seamus Heaney13:59

No.

Presenter13:59

So what person or what point or what experience was it that unblocked the poetic dam, as it were?

Seamus Heaney14:04

Big down.

Seamus Heaney14:06

Well, it was after I left Queen's University and I was teaching in Belfast and I began to read contemporary

Seamus Heaney14:13

Irish and British poetry. And I read Patrick Kavanaugh's poetry, who's an Irish poet.

Seamus Heaney14:19

From County Monachan, who writes very much about the rural outback, the same kind of life that I came from myself.

Seamus Heaney14:24

and at the same time

Seamus Heaney14:26

I encountered the poetry of Ted Hughes, which was immensely exciting to me, and it opened a channel into not just into memory, but into language. I always liked, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry. I liked words that had a terrific

Seamus Heaney14:43

rough energy to them.

Seamus Heaney14:44

And in Ted Hughes's poetry, this was poetry being written in the

Seamus Heaney14:48

But from nineteen sixties

Seamus Heaney14:50

I said, My goodness, you know, you're permitted to relish this.

Seamus Heaney14:53

And uh you're permitted to write about pigs lying on barrows.

Seamus Heaney14:59

I always remember opening the book called L'Opercal in the Belfast Public Library and said View of a Pig and said the pig lay in a burrow dead. I thought nobody knew about that except myself.

Seamus Heaney15:09

So there was that uh sudden access of, as the Californians would say, permission.

Seamus Heaney15:16

And uh

Presenter15:17

And so the th the the ability to write set in and and it's been there ever since. I mean, do you have a

Seamus Heaney15:21

Yeah.

Presenter15:22

Do you fear it will disappear?

Seamus Heaney15:23

Well, I think all poets fear it all the time, that is

Seamus Heaney15:27

The life of poetry.

Seamus Heaney15:29

as at its most vital is a life of fear, I think.

Seamus Heaney15:33

And uh

Seamus Heaney15:34

panic that that that will leave.

Seamus Heaney15:37

So that's there's great desperate joy each time it uh comes up and you feel vindicated.

Presenter15:43

It's have record number four.

Seamus Heaney15:46

One of my great joys recently was was uh to be made a fellow of Maudlin College.

Seamus Heaney15:51

A supernumerary, non-stipendary fellow. Nevertheless, a fellow and makes it.

Presenter15:55

Is that what they called it?

Presenter15:57

Makes you sound like a magistrate, man.

Seamus Heaney16:00

Well

Seamus Heaney16:01

Uh and one of the joys of of being at Modelin is to go to listen to the choir in the chapel. So I thought it'd be lovely to hear the Modelin uh choir singing Thomas Tallis, uh one of his anthems.

Presenter17:16

An anthem by Thomas Tallis, O Lord, give Thy Holy Spirit, sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, directed by John Harper. You started writing, Seamus, in the early sixties. What were those first poems about?

Seamus Heaney17:28

Well, they really were about a life that I had lived as a youngster.

Seamus Heaney17:33

We lived in the same house, the same place.

Seamus Heaney17:35

For the for the first fourteen years of my life. And then in the course of my

Seamus Heaney17:41

College life, we moved to another place. And when I began to write in the twenties, it was as if

Seamus Heaney17:47

I took the lid off uh

Seamus Heaney17:49

of something like an old uh

Seamus Heaney17:52

tobacco tin that used to those vacuum sealed tobacco tins used to give a little sigh when you opened them and the fragrance came out. And somehow I went straight back into childhood really.

Seamus Heaney18:02

And um

Seamus Heaney18:04

The poems are very directly

Seamus Heaney18:06

Memory based.

Presenter18:08

Can you recite one to us?

Seamus Heaney18:10

I'll do one which

Seamus Heaney18:11

It isn't an early poem, but I have been writing recently going back to that first place, the first physical place and the first emotional place. This is a poem I wrote uh after my mother died. It's just a memory of um pulling the sheets or folding sheets with her.

Seamus Heaney18:27

is from a sequence of sonnets called Clearances.

Seamus Heaney18:33

The cool that came off sheets just off the line.

Seamus Heaney18:36

made me think the damp must still be in them.

Seamus Heaney18:39

but when I took my corners of the linen and pulled against her,

Seamus Heaney18:43

first straight down the hem, and then diagonally.

Seamus Heaney18:46

then flapped and shook the fabric like a sail in a cross wind.

Seamus Heaney18:51

They made a dried out, undulating thwack.

Seamus Heaney18:54

So

Seamus Heaney18:55

We'd stretch and pull, and end up hand to hand for a split second, as if nothing had happened.

Seamus Heaney19:02

for nothing had that had not always happened beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

Seamus Heaney19:10

coming close again by holding back.

Seamus Heaney19:13

In moves where I was X and she was O

Seamus Heaney19:16

Inscribed in sheets, she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

Presenter19:23

What did your parents and family think in those early days when you started

Presenter19:27

writing about all those smells and

Presenter19:30

habits and traditions of yours.

Seamus Heaney19:33

My mother and father uh were given the book.

Seamus Heaney19:37

They would read it, but they wouldn't venture any comment.

Seamus Heaney19:40

The w the way it was conducted was through

Seamus Heaney19:43

uh other things happening, like for example, if you get reviewed or your pictures in the paper saying they see so-and-so likes the book and so on. They weren't literally people, they were shy in face of this.

Presenter19:54

You might have embarrassed them.

Seamus Heaney19:55

And cools.

Seamus Heaney19:57

It was embarrassing.

Presenter19:58

You you wrote, too, didn't you, about the the death of your small brother?

Seamus Heaney20:01

And in an odd way that wasn't embarrassing.

Seamus Heaney20:04

because it was such a a solemn and shared memory in itself.

Seamus Heaney20:08

and uh they recognized it poetry.

Seamus Heaney20:12

Is for that.

Presenter20:14

Your poems were first published, I think, in um in newspapers in Ireland, weren't they? But then you were championed in the end by London, not Dublin.

Seamus Heaney20:22

I wouldn't want to say that I wasn't championed in Ireland, because very important to me was the Irish Times, the Belfast Telegraph and the Kilkelly Magazine. But it is true that uh Carl Miller published three poems in The New Statesman uh when he he was literally editor there and that was the beginning of a kind of annus mirabilis really from nineteen sixty five sixty six.

Presenter20:42

It was a a a complete turning point really that period, wasn't it? Because not only did you have your first book published, but you I think you were made a a lecturer at your old university. Um and you got married and you had your first baby.

Seamus Heaney20:54

That's right. That's quite true.

Presenter20:55

Well you were twenty seven years old. I wonder which of the um experiences was the most fulfilling in you?

Seamus Heaney20:57

I wonder which of the

Seamus Heaney21:01

They really were intertwined. They really were part of a whoosh of energy. To fall in love, to fall into a book of poems and all that all at once was

Seamus Heaney21:11

Bless it.

Presenter21:13

Another record.

Seamus Heaney21:15

I've like s a speech record, you know, and this voice

Seamus Heaney21:18

I love it's the voice of Jackie McGarren, an actor who died in the early seventies.

Seamus Heaney21:24

Samuel Beckett loved Jackie's voice also and um

Seamus Heaney21:27

This is from a record.

Seamus Heaney21:29

Uh

Seamus Heaney21:30

Takima and he speaks a piece of

Seamus Heaney21:33

Malone Dies, uh, Beckett's novel.

Seamus Heaney21:37

I shall soon be quite dead at last.

Speaker 321:40

Yeah.

Seamus Heaney21:40

Uh

Speaker 321:40

Spite of all

Speaker 321:42

Perhaps next month.

Speaker 321:45

Then it will be the month of April.

Seamus Heaney21:46

Yeah.

Seamus Heaney21:47

Arov.

Speaker 321:47

Yeah.

Seamus Heaney21:47

May

Seamus Heaney21:49

for the year is still young.

Seamus Heaney21:51

A thousand little signs tell me so.

Seamus Heaney21:55

Perhaps I am wrong.

Seamus Heaney21:57

Perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist's day.

Seamus Heaney22:00

and even the fourteenth of July.

Speaker 322:02

Yeah.

Seamus Heaney22:03

Uh

Speaker 322:03

Festival of

Seamus Heaney22:04

Uh

Speaker 322:04

Freedom.

Speaker 322:06

Indeed, I would not put it past me to pant on to the transfiguration, not to speak of the assumption.

Speaker 322:13

But I do not think so.

Speaker 322:15

I do not think I am wrong in saying that these rejoicings will take place in my absence this year.

Speaker 322:24

I have that feeling.

Speaker 322:27

I've had it now for some days, and I credit it.

Presenter22:31

Jackie McGarron, speaking part of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies.

Presenter22:35

You've refused, I think, and been criticised for it, Seamus, um, to champion or be the spokesman of the Republican cause in any way, haven't you?

Seamus Heaney22:44

I haven't uh been a spokesman for, I think, any cause, and any time I have spoken, I have spoken usually impatiently.

Seamus Heaney22:53

And uh out of genuine personal unease and a desire to clear my own slate.

Seamus Heaney23:01

in order not to deceive

Seamus Heaney23:03

Either the British or the Irish.

Seamus Heaney23:06

And uh

Seamus Heaney23:07

I don't think I have a a program.

Seamus Heaney23:10

I have a a set of dispositions and affections.

Seamus Heaney23:15

And I I desire, as far as possible, to conduct myself uh honestly.

Presenter23:20

But you believe ultimately in the um

Presenter23:24

to use the non-political word, the wholeness of your country.

Seamus Heaney23:28

Yes, well I feel entirely uh free north and south, but I also think it hasn't been worth the uh the whole business, the the killing and

Seamus Heaney23:37

violence and so on, as leading to no wholeness.

Seamus Heaney23:41

In the sixties, I would say my generation of Catholic Northern people.

Seamus Heaney23:48

felt that

Seamus Heaney23:49

We were moving just by just by becoming vocal, by becoming part of the action, by making the unspoken spoken, by making the unprinted printed.

Seamus Heaney24:01

that a contribution was being made that things were moving.

Seamus Heaney24:04

At first I have to say that I think that in the sixt late sixties, early seventies when even when the violence was occurring

Seamus Heaney24:10

It was possible to think aesthetically almost about it, deplorable as that is, and you would say, Well, it is it's terrible, but it means something. It's leading towards something.

Seamus Heaney24:20

In the last uh fifteen years.

Seamus Heaney24:25

That has been impossible.

Seamus Heaney24:27

I don't think it has been leading towards anything.

Seamus Heaney24:30

It is a transformative necessity that we're faced with.

Seamus Heaney24:33

And it is only through acts of

Seamus Heaney24:36

Individual

Seamus Heaney24:39

Not forgiveness, but transformation. I think forgiveness is very difficult for people.

Seamus Heaney24:43

But if they can change, if the energy can be turned into something forward-looking.

Seamus Heaney24:48

I believe that can happen. I mean, it's these are very vague terms, but

Seamus Heaney24:52

Uh I I trust the uh the possibilities.

Presenter24:56

You of course in in in nineteen seventy two you left Belfast, didn't you? And you took your family off to a a cottage in County Wicklow in the south. And again you were criticised for that. They said you were turning your back on the north, didn't they?

Seamus Heaney25:08

Well, I guess I'm I'm not sure. I mean

Seamus Heaney25:11

The fact of that move from Belfast to Wicklow was it was indeed accidental. We didn't begin the enterprise by saying now we will leave Ulster.

Seamus Heaney25:22

There was a a happy uh chance when a woman wrote to us from Canada.

Seamus Heaney25:27

And she said, I have this cottage in Wicklow. I heard on the grapevine you were looking for one. So we went there at Easter 72.

Seamus Heaney25:34

And it was a sylvan, romantic, uh dormer windows, stone, uh, secluded. Yes, yes. So

Presenter25:43

Wonderful. And and it and you've said since that it brought you closer to your family?

Seamus Heaney25:48

Well, indeed, that's true. And I I I think of that time as um

Seamus Heaney25:53

As a time of listening to radio and uh behind closed doors, so to speak, stealing a march.

Seamus Heaney26:00

out on the edge and feeling sort of

Seamus Heaney26:03

almost invulnerable because we were so frugal and close to the ground.

Presenter26:08

Record number six, I think, we we need.

Seamus Heaney26:12

Well this is uh one of John Field's nocturnes and

Seamus Heaney26:15

I associate this particular music with the cottage in Wakelow very much and with the wistfulness but security of that time.

Presenter27:26

John Fields knocked on number one in E-flat major, played by Veronica McSweeney.

Presenter27:32

Seamus Heenia, a poet obviously wants his poetry to be understood, and and yours is very understandable, I think. Is that the most important thing to you as a poet?

Seamus Heaney27:43

I think the most important thing to me now, truly, is that the thing be right in itself.

Seamus Heaney27:50

It is a matter of form. How do we know something's finished? It's that mysterious tilt.

Seamus Heaney27:56

uh of a thing towards being its complete self. It's to give it its whole itness. Now that's pretentious, it's sounding sometimes, it sounds abstract, but that is really most important.

Presenter28:07

So you don't mind when people try to read a lot into your poetry?

Seamus Heaney28:12

I don't mind people reading things out of the poems.

Seamus Heaney28:16

But there is a difference between uh the reading things into them. If if somebody comes with uh prepared notions and

Seamus Heaney28:24

Rips evidence for it out of the things. That's one thing. But I think it is, it is entirely possible to.

Seamus Heaney28:30

Dwell upon

Seamus Heaney28:32

poem to dwell upon uh a rhythm or a word or a run of words

Seamus Heaney28:38

And to extend and draw out meanings that the poet wasn't.

Seamus Heaney28:44

entirely conscious of. The analogy I sometimes use is of action replay in uh television football.

Seamus Heaney28:50

If you see a goal being scored first in action, it's very speedy ch

Seamus Heaney28:55

Straight it goes. It's a whole sudden instinctive combination of chance and intention. Then you stop the thing, you go back, you say, play it back, look at that, look at this move. The guys didn't know quite what they were doing when they were doing it, but the the commentator and the experts watching the action replay can show you what's happening.

Presenter29:13

You were talking about the poem as a form.

Presenter29:17

What advantages do you think it has? What power do you think it has? That is greater than the play or the novel?

Seamus Heaney29:23

And the word poet, I think.

Seamus Heaney29:26

Within the English language.

Seamus Heaney29:28

uh isn't quite secularized yet.

Seamus Heaney29:31

The word novelist is.

Seamus Heaney29:33

Uh the word playwright is. But the w I think the word poet still retains an archaic uh force.

Seamus Heaney29:40

At whatever distance, it's still related to the chant and to the s to the song. And it's related to.

Seamus Heaney29:46

That space in your throat and your ear, where

Seamus Heaney29:50

The most uh

Seamus Heaney29:52

common and fond uh pieties live, you know.

Seamus Heaney29:56

I think, for example, of of a sound. I use this sometimes when I'm teaching about poetry.

Seamus Heaney30:02

That uh that there is a a line which runs across Britain and Ireland, and uh north of it people say Uch.

Seamus Heaney30:11

And south of it they say, Oh dear. And and I think you say that that somehow poetry taps the ochness of your nature or the oh dearness, that there is a reservoir somewhere

Seamus Heaney30:25

Where a certain melody, a certain rhythm, a certain syllable, a certain touch.

Seamus Heaney30:31

wakens and opens a space into your whole affective, your whole emotional nature. And the most uh satisfying experiences of poetry are where that

Seamus Heaney30:41

inner touch is felt uh

Seamus Heaney30:44

You know, it's felt instinctive. You don't say, There I have been touched inwardly, thank goodness for that, but.

Seamus Heaney30:49

But something happens it's a there's an excitement and a pacification at once.

Presenter30:53

Record number seven.

Seamus Heaney30:55

Well, this is uh from Schubert's uh quintet the trout. I I associate this.

Seamus Heaney31:01

Very much with my rooms in Adams House and Harvard University during the months of

Seamus Heaney31:08

February and March. I'm in Harvard on my own. Uh my family are in Dublin and uh this this record for some reason I've played.

Seamus Heaney31:16

very often in those circumstances.

Presenter32:13

Schubert's Trout Quintet played by the Albenberg Quartet and the pianist was Elizabeth Leonskaya.

Presenter32:20

Seamus, I haven't asked you, and and perhaps I should who your favourite poet is.

Seamus Heaney32:24

I would have said, you know, a year ago, WB Yates,

Seamus Heaney32:29

Because uh

Seamus Heaney32:31

I think Yeats's poetry.

Seamus Heaney32:33

Can take the brunt of many things.

Seamus Heaney32:38

public atrocity. Yeats's uh moves through uh a very

Seamus Heaney32:44

tragic time in Ireland and writes poems which stand up to

Seamus Heaney32:49

The occasion

Seamus Heaney32:50

They aren't just occasional poems about it, they are poems where the the man's inner energy uh takes the measure of the outer circumstances and

Seamus Heaney33:00

wins a kind of uh freedom against it. He's not oppressed. But then I began to react just very recently against HP just precisely because of his

Seamus Heaney33:11

almost absolute control.

Seamus Heaney33:13

And uh

Seamus Heaney33:15

The other poet that I loved in that way too was Dante. I mean this is in translation and it sounds I mean I've said Dante's like the ultimate deterrent when you come to these discussions. He's the atom bomb that you bring out to deter all further discussion. But it is true that Dante and Yates were of enormous importance to me over the last ten years or so.

Seamus Heaney33:38

Now I m uh find myself uh more susceptible to

Seamus Heaney33:42

Delicate uh lyric poetry. I was in Rome uh for the first time this April.

Seamus Heaney33:49

And we had a very jocund evening and we went out to view the forum in moonlight. And I said to my friend,

Seamus Heaney33:55

Looking at this marble, you know, all this marble temple, columns, the hard, perfect classical forms, I said, well, we must stop this. I said, we must get back to Japanese poems about uh spring shoots, delicate things, little haikus about the cherry blossom. So I'm yearning for some unwritten poetry of sweetness and delicacy.

Presenter34:19

Let's have your eighth record.

Seamus Heaney34:22

The eighth record would be a scene qua non. I would have to have something, I think, by John McCormick, who.

Seamus Heaney34:28

As a child lying in bed at night listening to the radio, one of the

Seamus Heaney34:32

radio programmes was always listened to was from Athlone as they called it, was from Radio Airne, Irish Radio, and it always seemed to have John McCormick singing.

Seamus Heaney34:41

And this is a song that uh

Seamus Heaney34:43

My wife sings also.

Seamus Heaney34:45

A sentimental ballad. Nevertheless, there would be place for that on the island, I hope.

Speaker 234:51

Thou wouldst still be at one as this moment thou art.

Speaker 235:00

Let it die long.

Speaker 235:07

And around dear ruin, each wish of my heart Woulder twining

Seamus Heaney35:18

I need self-veradently stay.

Presenter35:24

John McCormick singing Believe Me if all those endearing young charms.

Presenter35:29

You have to choose one of those records, Seamus, which you would require to have with you more than any of the others.

Seamus Heaney35:35

Well, I think because I always feel that uh I have to improve myself.

Seamus Heaney35:41

And uh because I have not made enough space in my life for sitting attending to the

Seamus Heaney35:48

The large inner spaces of the spirit in music, I think I would have to take the Beethoven quartet.

Presenter35:55

I think people might well be able to guess what what book you would like to take with you. Would you like to explain which and why?

Seamus Heaney36:01

Well, I would love to take Joyce's Ulysses because apart from the exquisite joys of the language itself, the the way in which the English language is opened like an accordion or a pack of cards in the hands of a magician, the other great thing about Ulysses is it's it's an absolute documentary.

Seamus Heaney36:23

Soundtrack of the volubility rascality

Seamus Heaney36:28

and uh humour and vindictiveness of of Dublin.

Presenter36:32

And your luxury.

Seamus Heaney36:33

Well, I'm thinking of bringing a pair of Doc Martin's boots.

Seamus Heaney36:37

My son Michael bought me a pair and uh my children enjoy seeing me parading in them.

Seamus Heaney36:42

I think it'd be very good for walking over

Seamus Heaney36:45

Rocks in this faintly northerly island, and also for kicking rocks and trees in moments of exasperation.

Presenter36:52

Seamus Heaney, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 337:03

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio form.