Authors: Seamus Heaney
Opened Ground (12 page)
When Sweeney heard the shouts of the soldiers and the big noise of the army, he rose out of the tree towards the dark clouds and ranged far over mountains and territories.
A long time he went faring all through Ireland,
poking his way into hard rocky clefts,
shouldering through ivy bushes,
unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles,
wading estuaries,
breasting summits,
trekking through glens,
until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.
That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to assemble once their year in madness was complete.
Glen Bolcain is like this:
it has four gaps to the wind,
pleasant woods, clean-banked wells,
cold springs and clear sandy streams
where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime
philander over the surface.
It is nature’s pantry
with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels,
its berries, its wild garlic,
its black sloes and its brown acorns.
The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its watercresses and for the beds on its banks.
Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the thorny bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying:
– It is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!
Then he spoke this poem:
A year until last night
I have lived among dark trees,
between the flood and ebb-tide,
going cold and naked
with no pillow for my head,
no human company
and, so help me, God,
no spear and no sword!
No sweet talk with women.
Instead, I pine
for cresses, for the clean
pickings of brooklime.
No surge of royal blood,
camped here in solitude;
no glory flames the wood,
no friends, no music.
Tell the truth: a hard lot.
And no shirking this fate;
no sleep, no respite,
no hope for a long time.
No house humming full,
no men, loud with good will,
nobody to call me king,
no drink or banqueting.
A great gulf yawns now
between me and my retinue,
between craziness and reason.
Scavenging through the glen
on my mad king’s visit:
no pomp or poet’s circuit
but wild scuttles in the wood.
Heavenly saints! O Holy God!
No skilled musicians’ cunning,
no soft discoursing women,
no open-handed giving;
my doom to be a long dying.
Our sorrows were multiplied
that Tuesday when Congal fell.
Our dead made a great harvest,
our remnant, a last swathe.
This has been my plight.
Suddenly cast out,
grieving and astray,
a year until last night.
Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloon-burren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church were singing nones, women were beating flax and one was giving birth to a child.
– It is unseemly, said Sweeney, for the women to violate the Lord’s fast day. That woman beating the flax reminds me of our beating at Moira.
Then he heard the vesper bell ringing and said:
– It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight.
Then he uttered the poem:
I perched for rest and imagined
cuckoos calling across water,
the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter
than church bells that whinge and grind.
Friday is the wrong day, woman,
for you to give birth to a son,
the day when Mad Sweeney fasts
for love of God, in penitence.
Do not just discount me. Listen.
At Moira my tribe was beaten,
beetled, heckled, hammered down,
like flax being scutched by these women.
From the cliff of Lough Diolar
up to Derry Colmcille
I saw the great swans, heard their calls
sweetly rebuking wars and battles.
From lonely cliff-tops, the stag
bells and makes the whole glen shake
and re-echo. I am ravished.
Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.
O Christ, the loving and the sinless,
hear my prayer, attend, O Christ,
and let nothing separate us.
Blend me forever in your sweetness.
It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.
– This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.
He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehearsed some of his own hardships and sorrows, saying:
The bushy leafy oak tree
is highest in the wood,
the forking shoots of hazel
hide sweet hazel-nuts.
The alder is my darling,
all thornless in the gap,
some milk of human kindness
coursing in its sap.
The blackthorn is a jaggy creel
stippled with dark sloes;
green watercress in thatch on wells
where the drinking blackbird goes.
Sweetest of the leafy stalks,
the vetches strew the pathway;
the oyster-grass is my delight,
and the wild strawberry.
Low-set clumps of apple trees
drum down fruit when shaken;
scarlet berries clot like blood
on mountain rowan.
Briars curl in sideways,
arch a stickle back,
draw blood and curl up innocent
to sneak the next attack.
The yew tree in each churchyard
wraps night in its dark hood.
Ivy is a shadowy
genius of the wood.
Holly rears its windbreak,
a door in winter’s face;
life-blood on a spear-shaft
darkens the grain of ash.
Birch tree, smooth and blessed,
delicious to the breeze,
high twigs plait and crown it
the queen of trees.
The aspen pales
and whispers, hesitates:
a thousand frightened scuts
race in its leaves.
But what disturbs me most
in the leafy wood
is the to and fro and to and fro
of an oak rod.
*
A starry frost will come
dropping on the pools
and I’ll be astray
on unsheltered heights:
herons calling
in cold Glenelly,
flocks of birds quickly
coming and going.
I prefer the elusive
rhapsody of blackbirds
to the garrulous blather
of men and women.
I prefer the squeal of badgers
in their sett
to the tally-ho
of the morning hunt.
I prefer the re-
echoing belling of a stag
among the peaks
to that arrogant horn.
Those unharnessed runners
from glen to glen!
Nobody tames
that royal blood,
each one aloof
on its rightful summit,
antlered, watchful.
Imagine them,
the stag of high Slieve Felim,
the stag of the steep Fews,
the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,
the fierce stag of Killarney.
The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag,
the stag of Moylinny,
the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,
the stag of the two-peaked Burren.
*
I am Sweeney, the whinger,
the scuttler in the valley.
But call me, instead,
Peak-pate, Stag-head.
Then Sweeney said:
– From now on, I won’t tarry in Dal-Arie because Lynchseachan would have my life to avenge the hag’s.
So he proceeded to Roscommon in Connacht, where he alighted on the bank of the well and treated himself to watercress and water. But when a woman came out of the erenach’s house, he panicked and fled, and she gathered the watercress from the stream. Sweeney watched her from his tree and greatly lamented the theft of his patch of cress, saying
– It is a shame that you are taking my watercress. If only you knew my plight, how I am unpitied by tribesman or kinsman, how I am no longer a guest in any house on the ridge of the world. Watercress is my wealth, water is my wine, and hard bare trees and soft tree bowers are my friends. Even if you left that cress, you would not be left wanting; but if you take it, you are taking the bite from my mouth.
And he made this poem:
Woman, picking the watercress
and scooping up my drink of water,
were you to leave them as my due
you would still be none the poorer.
Woman, have consideration,
we two go two different ways:
I perch out among the tree-tops,
you lodge in a friendly house.