01 March 21 Ars Poetica #05: Horace & Seamus Heaney

Ars Poetica - #5: To Each His Own! & Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.    

Ezra Pound

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

Carl Sandburg

Our friend, Horace, has far more to say regarding the elegant art of writing. Today, we present the fifth excerpt from his Ars Poetica, Horace’s advice to a friend on the concerns of good writing. As you know, this advice has made its way through many centuries and into thousands of serious writers’ hands. Let’s take a moment to take stock of why all the fuss. It’s about the outcome of the writing. Horace tells us how to write and gives a few examples of what to write about; however, as will become obvious, his advice is shy on describing the desired outcome of following his counsel. Once the “good” writing is complete, what questions should the work answer? Perhaps, these questions could guide writers considering the results they wished for when the writing finally reaches the readers’ hands. 

The following questions and their answers would make a decent Ars Poetica: Part 2. The timeless questions below can be directed toward any type of writing from poetry to essays, to journalistic pieces. The responses make excellent explorations into the most important consideration of writers: readers.

1. Would you be eager to suggest the piece to friends and acquaintances? This puts some skin (your reputation as a person of taste) in the game.
2. Does the writing amuse, inform, and/or in other ways satisfy a serious reader – that is, a reader who values regular reading; the subject definitely doesn’t have to be serious
3. Will the work still be worth reading or re-reading a year or twenty years from now?

Don’t miss Seamus Heaney’s poem wherein he speaks of being unappreciated as a poet – or at least different from his forebears. And while there, why not apply the three questions just above, and see if his poem passes muster?

Fifth Excerpt from Horace’s Ars Poetica

It is not enough that poems be beautiful; let them be tender and affecting and bear away the soul of the auditor whithersoever they please. As the human countenance smiles on those that smile, so does it sympathize with those that weep. If you would have me weep you must first express the passion of grief yourself; then, Telephus or Peleus, your misfortunes hurt me: if you pronounce the parts assigned you ill, I shall either fall asleep or laugh.

Pathetic accents suit a melancholy countenance; words full of menace, an angry one; wanton expressions, a sportive look; and serious matter, an austere one. For nature forms us first within to every modification of circumstances; she delights or impels us to anger or depresses us to the earth and afflicts us with heavy sorrow then expresses those emotions of the mind by the tongue, its interpreter. If the words be discordant to the station of the speaker, the Roman knights and plebians will raise an immoderate laugh. It will make a wide difference, whether it be Davus that speaks, or a hero; a man well-stricken in years, or a hot young fellow in his bloom; and a matron of distinction, or an officious nurse; a roaming merchant, or the cultivator of a verdant little farm; a Colchian, or an Assyrian; one educated at Thebes, or one at Argos.

You, that write, either follow tradition, or invent such fables as are congruous to themselves. If as poet you have to represent the renowned Achilles; let him be indefatigable, wrathful, inexorable, courageous, let him deny that laws were made for him, let him arrogate everything to force of arms. Let Medea[1] be fierce and intractable, Ino[2] an object of pity, Ixion[3] perfidious, Io wandering, Orestes[4] in distress.

If you offer to the stage anything unattempted, and venture to form a new character; let it be preserved to the last such as it set out at the beginning, and be consistent with itself. It is difficult to write with propriety on subjects to which all writers have a common claim; and you with more prudence will reduce the Iliad into acts, than if you first introduce arguments unknown and never treated of before. A public story will become your own property, if you do not dwell upon the whole circle of events, which is paltry and open to everyone; nor must you be so faithful a translator, as to take the pains of rendering [the original] word for word; nor by imitating throw yourself into straits, whence either shame or the rules of your work may forbid you to retreat.

Commentary: 

Horace has many opinions in this excerpt. He nearly commands the writer to “move the reader” or forget about writing. He also calls out the various kinds of poetry, making the point that a writer’s chosen style and language must be suited to those types (e.g., epic, drama, lyric). Just as style and type must be in harmony, so too, Horace says, when a character opens his mouth the language and its sounds must “be suitable to the character.”

How many of us writers stop to consider the best form for our creations to take? How many of us take the time to flesh-out our chosen characters – their idiosyncrasies, their manner of speaking, their strengths, their clothes, and perhaps most important these days, their inner lives? I have two writer friends who do this, and their writing is magnificent. One has a native talent, and the other works really hard to get to know her characters.

Digging

by Seamus Heaney 

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Background

Digging is about a poet-son’s relationship with his father and the sense that the working-class son, by choosing the vocation of the poet, is adopting a path very different from his father’s, and his father’s before him. Heaney resolves to use his pen as his digging implement, and to perform a different kind of excavation from that practiced by his forefathers.

The poem’s structure is significant not least in the fact that it almost goes full-circle: Heaney begins with the pen in his hand, "snug as a gun" – a suggestive simile, especially given the complementarity of ‘snug’ and the word it spells when reversed, "guns". A gun is a weapon associated with "manly" ideas of war (however misguidedly); a spade is associated with honest manual labor, such as that performed by the poet’s father and grandfather. But the pen is, by comparison, no weapon – yes, as the proverb has it, the pen is mightier than the sword (or the gun or the spade).

The final three words in this four-word declaration of semi-independence proclaim themselves in blunt and direct monosyllables, each one using the flat "i" sound to suggest a no-nonsense approach to the art of writing poetry that will enable Heaney to remain true to his origins. The pen goes from being "snug" (albeit dangerously so, like a gun) to being a tool or implement comparable in hearty usefulness and labor to the spades used by his father and forefathers.

Exploration 1: Refer to the three questions located just before the Horace excerpt about the results of a piece of writing. Do you consider these worthwhile questions to ask? Would you add to the list or delete any item?

Exploration 2: Horace says that a poem can be beautiful, but should not “bear the soul away". Do you agree?

Exploration 3: Horace cautions, “It is difficult to write with propriety on subjects to which all writers have a common claim …” Do you agree?

NOTES:

1. Medea, in Greek mythology, an enchantress who helped Jason, leader of the Argonauts, to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father, King Aeëtes of Colchis. She was of divine descent and had the gift of prophecy. She married Jason and used her magic powers and advice to help him.
2. In Greek mythology Ino was a mortal queen of Boeotia, who after her death and transfiguration was worshiped as a goddess under her epithet Leucothea, the "white goddess." Alcman called her "Queen of the Sea", which, if not hyperbole, would make her a doublet of Amphitrite. 
3. In Greek mythology, Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly.
4. In Greek mythology, Orestes was the prince who avenged the murder of his father, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, by killing his own mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes' sisters Iphigenia and Electra play important roles in his story.