Fighting Off Larkin: Seamus Heaney and "Aubade"

Seamus Heaney (Photo by Nancy Crampton)

I’ve just finished reading Michael Cavanagh’s absorbing Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2009). For me, the most interesting part is its consideration of Heaney’s great essay “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B, Yeats and Philip Larkin,” included in Heaney’s 1995 collection The Redress of Poetry. Cavanagh calls it, among other things, “Heaney’s denigration of Larkin.” This seems harsh. Yes, Heaney’s essay attacks Larkin’s “Aubade” for accepting “the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death” and denying “the ecstatic presence of the supernatural.” But it also praises “Aubade” for its “high poetic achievement,” and, in a most original analytic move, tries to use that achievement to argue that “Aubade,” for all its bleakness, is really “on the side of life.” Heaney says,

Still, when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s “Aubade” does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all odds. For all its heart-breaking truths and beauties, “Aubade” reneges on what Yeats called the “spiritual intellect’s great work.”

Cavanagh sees “Joy or Night” as a departure from Heaney’s “insistence on the reality principle.” But, to me, Heaney isn’t a realist; he’s a transcendentalist. He believes in the supernatural. Larkin doesn’t. For him, “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” included in Larkin’s 1983 collection, Required Writing). I’m with Larkin. Nevertheless, I admire the hell out of Heaney’s “Joy or Night.” It’s one of the most spirited arguments I know of on whether “death is no different whined at than withstood.”