Casualty

I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II

It was a day of cold

Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,

The line lifted, hand

Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
http://arvidsonapenglish.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/casualty.html

Seamus Heaney: Casualty

In this Troubles elegy, the poet revisits a fisherman
and pub-goer he once knew.
By Joshua Weiner

Seamus Heaney is likely the best-selling English-language poet alive. Famous, at this
point, for being famous (he received the Nobel Prize in 1995), Heaney began earning
acclaim with his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Critical interest and popular
response came together in praise of Heaneys work, which captured a County Derry
childhood in what he called the sucking clabber of a rich, guttural, elemental, and
vivid music. With each successive volume, Heaney broadened the allusive reach of his
poetry; his nostalgia for a rural childhood fused with the sound of a deep tribal history
that also reached forward into the contemporary plight of Ireland, its political fate
shaken by the explosive Troubles of nationalist violence.
A Catholic republican from the north, Heaney had a talent for weaving personal
experience into the tale of the tribe, and his talent brought growing pressure on him to
become a public spokesman. After the political poems of his third book, North (1975),
Heaney grew wary of that role, finding it too confining. He had already left Belfast and
his teaching position at Queens University in 1972 to spend four years writing in
Glanmore, County Wicklow. From that experience grew the Glanmore Sonnets, the
heart of his fourth book, Field Work (1979). While the move south seemed to some a
deliberate withdrawal from a previous political commitment to fight the British
presence in Ireland, Field Work indicates rather a growing commitment to stay engaged,
but to do so by maintaining the long view, which asks questions more than it assumes
positions.
The title, Field Work, is a kind of pun; while it suggests most immediately
anthropological investigation and agricultural labor, the wordplay digs down to
submerged levels, evoking darker and more complex secondary figures of burial,
memorial, and the poetic genre of elegy. Casualty, one of the most powerful elegies in
the book, exemplifies Heaneys evolving identity as an Irish poet from the north who is
torn between public commitments and personal freedom, and who shares his language
and literary antecedents with the English and Irish alike. Because the political conflict
of Ireland is inscribed in Heaneys personal and poetic drama, it is fundamental to
understanding the shades of Heaneys great elegy.
The poem is set in the northern province of Ulster in 1972, the infamous year of Bloody
Sunday, when the British army killed 13 civil rights protesters in the Bogside area of
Londonderry. The elegy takes the form of a kind of triptych memorializing a regular
patron of the pubs, a fisherman known to Heaney who becomes a casualty of the
sectarian urban warfare in the north. Although Heaney named the man in an interview
he was Louis ONeillhe remains unnamed in the poem, a deliberate withholding that
underscores the way the violence pulls even those who have no designated role onto the
stage of history to play their accidental, anonymous part.
Casualty bears some formal resemblance to Yeatss Easter, 1916, which
memorializes the Easter Rising of 700 Volunteers, rebels who seized areas of Dublin
and held out against British forces for six days. (It is from just this legacy of the
Volunteers that the militant branch of the IRA, the Provisionals, would grow.) The
occasion of Heaneys poem makes a kind of subject-rhyme with Yeatss, as well as
echoing the trimeter and its scheme of crossed-rhyming (ababcdcd). But if Heaney
takes the abstract tune from Yeats to embody such figures of resistance in his own time,
the man whom Heaney memorializes in his poem is of a different stature than John
MacBride in Yeatss poem. Unlike MacBride, an executed leader of the Easter Rebellion

who resigned his part / In the casual comedy of life to assume his tragic role in the
uprising, Heaneys pub-loving fisherman refuses to abide by a curfew in order to
indulge in his nightly pint, and is killed without having assumed any significant part in
the struggle.
Heaneys echo of Yeatsthe way he adapts Yeatss use of casual to sound the darker
strains of casualtyfurther transforms the implications of Yeatss famous refrain in
Easter, 1916, that from such violence life in Ireland is changed utterly and a
terrible beauty is born. In Casualty, there are no beautiful transformations, only
hauntingly terrible ones. The rebels may have hearts with one purpose alone in
Yeatss poem, but the fisherman in Heaneys would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice
Neither does Heaney raise his own voice to reach the rhetorical elevation of Yeats. That
he takes so much from Yeats in plying his allusive craft while maintaining a more
modest level of address is one element of genius at play.
Yeats also has his Fisherman (also in trimeter), a wise and simple man for whom
Yeats hopes someday to have written one / Poem maybe as cold and passionate as the
dawn. One of the stunning particular observations of the fisherman, set like a jewel in
Yeatss highly rhetorical poem, is the downturn of his wrist / When the flies drop in the
stream. Heaney opens his elegy with similar though more deliberate portraiture: the
fishermans raised weathered thumb, his low voice, discretion, and quick eye / And
turned observant back.
Heaneys eye, as quick as his subjects, sees how even though the fisherman has his
back turned, he is animated by a sensory alertness to what he cannot see. There is a pun
buried in this descriptionthe fisherman has apparently turned his back on the political
struggle of the militant nationalists. Has Heaney also turned his proverbial back? The
implication gathers weight as Heaney defines those qualities he admires in the
fisherman: sure-footed but too sly / His deadpan sidling tact suggests, too, Heaneys
expert prosody, his often cunning indirect approach, and his final evasion of political
pronouncement that some readers have indeed found too sly.
Turning and turning. Yeatss favorite verb makes a figure of historical process in The
Second Coming, a poem often quoted by politicians and in newspapers, with its dark
prophecy about the center of civilization not holding as the beast of the apocalypse
famously slouches towards Bethlehem. Turning also refers to a natural process of
mutability, one that returns us to points of personal origin, to original sources of myth
and legend. Such turning is present in the very action of figurative language, which
turns one thing into another; in verse movement itself, which turns from the end of one
line to the beginning of the next; and in rhyme, which turns us back through a poem as
we listen for the acoustic correspondences.
Turning is also the dominant verb in Casualty. It captures the fisherman as he

turned / In that bombed offending place, / Remorse fused with terror / In his still
knowable face. And it signals Heaneys turning to the art of elegy, with its shifts
between public utterance of private feeling, to commemorate the fisherman, a fixture of
the pub scene, blown to bits / Out drinking in a curfew / Others obeyed. It is also
through the act of elegy that the role of observer shifts from the fisherman observing the
poet in the pub, to the poet watching the fisherman in a haunted imagination. And
through the shifting from simile into metaphor, the fisherman who drank like a fish
ultimately becomes a fish, swimming out of clich and towards the lure / Of warm
lit-up places.
The final turning in part three is even more remarkable for its suave displacements.
Though Heaney admits missing the fishermans funeral, he envisions the mourners
shoaling out of his lane / . . . / With the habitual / Slow consolation / Of a dawdling
engine, the sound of which seamlessly joins the funeral occasion to that morning / I
was taken in his boat, / The screw purling, turning / Indolent fathoms white. The
indolent fathoms of poetry are indeed slow to develop, but its on such waters that, in
the fishermans company, the poet tasted freedom.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond. . . .
The fishermans proper haunt was on the water, well out, beyond, as the poets
place is in the poem, where you find a rhythm working you, and where, through
elegy, the fisherman continues to haunt the poet.
To haul / Steadily off the bottom reinscribes Heaneys figure for learning ones craft
by learning to turn the windlass at the well of poetry. Usually, writes Heaney
elsewhere, you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up
taking air. You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly
tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. Youll have
broken the skin on the pool of yourself. Your praties will be fit for digging.
Much of the hardest digging Heaney does in Field Work is in these burial grounds of the
Troubles. In Casualty, he exhumes the fisherman who, in a final turning from the
human, becomes something other than human, a dawn-sniffing revenant, / Plodder
through midnight rain. It is no accident that, in the volumes sequence of poems,
Casualty is followed by The Badgersmurdered dead who glimmered away /
into another garden. Like Dante in Hell, Heaney desires to converse with the elusive
dead. Against the 13 victims of Bloody Sunday, who belong to history, Heaney depicts a
loner, an outsider to whom he feels the strongest affinity as a poet. The poems final
line, Question me again, is an invitation to the revenant to visit and to press the poet
to keep asking about his own proper haunt inside and outside the complicities and
conflicts of tribal belonging.