Ourselves again (again?)

After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog that contains no commentary. That poem was Tollund, by Seamus Heaney. I felt I took a risk in not saying anything about it – I thought readers would be able to join the dots between political events across the pond and Heaney’s description of ‘low ground, […] swart water, […] thick grass/ Hallucinatory and familiar’ which culminate in the self-reflexivity of his final lines, where his group (of friends? family?) stand:

 More scouts than strangers, ghosts who'd walked abroad
 Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
 And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
 Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

Everything in that stanza fulfils what Heaney sets out in my favourite of his essays, ‘The Government of the Tongue‘:

In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

I find it poignant to read it again today, not least because of the person who now occupies the White House, but also because Heaney prefaces his remarks with one of his grittier sentences: ‘Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.’ Again, the links to current events are there to see in plain sight.

The good news is that he does not stop there:

Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

When you think of hope, what do you think of? I was asked this at about 11.00 on New Year’s Eve, and, introvert that I am, I went blank and have only thought of the answer now: the power of the imagination to strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life – even though no poem has ever stopped a tank.

I think of words that affirm my capacity to be ‘unfazed by light’. I think of making ‘a new bginning’. I think of places, like that late-December gathering, where we might become, however briefly, ‘ourselves again, free-willed, not bad.’

Happy (late) new year.

I realise that for many it will be too soon to listen to this, but it is worth a listen:

And I know that this will now feel a long time ago – but again, if you want an analysis of what happened in the US election which really goes in under the fingernails (a Heaney phrase), this podcast is indispensable.

And finally, if you are lacking hope and feel it is in short supply, this recent sermon, given by The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde at Washington National Cathedral in the presence of the newly-inaugurated president of the US, may lift your spirits:

With thanks to Luke Bretherton, Paul Trueman and all of the New Year Crew.