Night Drive
The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France;
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.
Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montrueil, Abbéville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.
A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.
I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.
Seamus Heaney, from Door Into the Dark (Faber)
I have been thinking a lot about Seamus Heaney’s ‘Night Drive’ lately. Originally published in Door Into the Dark (1969), it is not especially famous or noteworthy, but I love it.
It reminds me of the holidays, and poetry should always be the holidays.
It explores in a resolutely low-key register those fertile and liminal spaces between wakefulness and sleep, light and dark, arrival and departure. As in so many of Heaney’s poems, there is a back-note of cautionary guilt and self-reproach running across the lines; the separation which causes the poem to be written is celebrated as it appears to be mourned.
A masterclass in how to write about nothing much at all, the poem is bookended in its first and final lines by the word ‘ordinariness’. Some years after he wrote it, Heaney used the word ‘gunslinger’ to describe the approach of his poem ‘Digging’. Below the tactful surface of ‘Night Drive’ it is possible to detect something of that same bravado, albeit a quieter one: in the suggestive and repetitive ‘l’ sounds of ‘smells’, ‘relentlessly’, ‘Montreuil’, ‘Abbéville’ and ‘fulfilment’ which deliberately and not-quite-discretely set up a chime with Italy laying its loin to France.
The poem is much more than an exercise in delayed gratification, however. It asks the question so central to Heaney’s work as a whole: how far is an artist ever fully present in their inhabited circumstances and therefore necessarily prey to the guile required to craft poetry from experience? Heaney would never resort to something so vulgar as an answer, but there is a hint in the poem’s penultimate word ‘renewed’ of the speaker’s belief in life as redemptive, even if it is qualified as ordinary and under the cover of darkness.
If you liked this, why not try Tomas Tranströmer’s ‘Alone’ or Raymond Carver’s ‘Prosser’
Anthony Wilson 
Loved this, Ant. Next week: what are your travel arrangements ? We had hoped — arrive at Tonbridge for c. 3:30ish — natter, cup of tea– workshop for 4.30 until around 5.45ish. Natter, set up reading etc– leave gear at our house — reading from 7.00 to 8.00 ish — eat out , return to us, natter etc Friday — a few lessons for reading/ q and a — depart c 11.15 ? If train travel — dead easy via London Bridge — then will pick u up from station etc Let us know Emily Dickinson x
Peter Carpenter
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Lovely. Will arrive on train between 3 and 3.30.
Will let you know. Timings all perfect with me.
Hugely excited to be coming.
Mentioned you and Ann S in today’s blog post about
James Tate. X A
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Thanks for this. Completely forgot it (though I must have read it at least once) till I happened on this. Wonderful, and an excellent close reading, a renewal.
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Dear Mark
Many thanks for your kind comment and thanks for visiting my site. That is high praise indeed.
As ever with best wishes
Anthony
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Thanks so much for commenting on my post. I like your analysis very much and also the Lowell quote. A touchstone. Thank you and best wishes, Anthony
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Reblogged this on currankentucky and commented:
Thank you Anthony Wilson for this blog post (posted September 2012). Today, being the day Seamus Heaney moved to the stars I had a conversation with a friend on Facebook. He shared his hatred of poetry and I tried reminding him poetry is music lyrics without the music. He also pointed out the bad teaching he encountered in school, sadly, I too suffered this same blight, but no one should let bad teaching come in the way of discovery. Thankfully, we have people like Anthony Wilson to share the goodness of poetry and the greatness of poets such as Seamus Heaney.
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Thanks so much for your kind words. I am pleased you passed this on. As ever with grateful thanks, Anthony
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So simple-seeming…and dripping with sentiment. I love it like a morning coffee.
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Thank you for saying so
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Always loved this poem which reminds of my own nocturnal travels through France. It doesn’t have to be famous, it just has to be good and if possible evoke something in the imagination of the reader.
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