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Seamus Heaney (Photo by Nancy Crampton) |
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.”
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