Seeing Things: Poems

by Seamus Heaney

Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Seamus Heaney's late father.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, Nobel Prize, Literature, Fiction, Classics

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.

Reviews

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney (born April 13, 1939) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, four years after the publication of this book, Seeing Things. The Nobel committee described his works as “those of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He was a poetry professor at both Harvard and Oxford and was named one of “Britain’s Top 300 Intellectuals” by The Observer.

Seeing Things is his ninth collection of poems and it draws inspiration from the visions of afterlife of Virgil and Dante Alighieri. Reading his poems makes you feel that you are standing on a crossroad with pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle around you and you have to take careful steps toward a certain direction. Careful because all around you are visions of inferno, purgatorio or paradiso and one wrong step could lead you to a place you don’t want to be. Wiki says that the poems are written by Heaney as his way of coming to terms with his father’s death in 1986. Hence, most of the poems are haunting, hallucinatory with a tinge of forgiveness and acceptance. Tinge, because the way Heaney expressed himself is not as straightforward as the other earlier not-so-many poems I’ve read. You have to twist your brain and think deeper to grasp what you think are his messages. He uses lots of metaphors and symbolisms so I would say that his poems, at least those included in this book, are not for everyone.

But what I liked about his poems is that they create vivid though illusory images while you are reading them. Take for example, this second stanza of Markings:

Youngsters shouting their heads off the field
As the light died and they kept on playing
Because by then they were playing in their heads
And the actual kicked ball came to them
Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard
Breathing in the dark and skids on grass
Sounded like effort in another world…
It was quick and constant, a game that never need
Be played out. Some limit had been passed,
There was fleetness, furtherance , untiredness
In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

Magical, right? First I pictured the boys playing a ball game in a field. Then the image shifted to that of cerebral setting: that the playing was only in their brains. Then it becomes celestial as if everything is an illusion and part of images in the universe.

I have no doubt that Heaney is an intellectual.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another lovely collection of poems from Heaney. I really enjoyed this one.

An August Night

His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.
When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,
Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

My next book: Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey: The Hunt For Harley

[Samir Rawas Sarayji · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection but no where as much as some of his others. They were mostly pastoral poems, which were heavy-handed with their jargon. I found myself looking in the dictionary one-time too many to really grasp the nuances or embrace any poetic effect. Maybe second-time round...

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I doubt there’s anyone who would pair poets Seamus Heaney and John Ashbery together. One seems earthy, fairly straightforward, full of traditional poetic fireworks, the other a clown in French fashion. But after reading this collection I’ve come to the conclusion they are two of a kind. For lack of having any compelling metaphysics they resort to coy strategies, in the case of Ashbery, or a kind of embarrassing New Age philosophy, in the case of Heaney. They are two symptoms of the confused, decentered nature of contemporary poetry.

Ashbery’s niche is having nothing to say but saying it in an interesting way. Heaney has plenty to say, and that’s a problem. The quotable bits are consolations, and lack the punch of genuine, intellectual insight. They get tacked onto his lovely music (such as “I remember little treble Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks”), but spoken not from any perceivable center of gravity. Ashbery has no center of gravity by choice (at some level you have to respect a man who has made a career of “I have no idea about existence either”); with Heaney he gives the impression he has one, though I don’t see it, and for that reason he is a very frustrating poet to read.

The results are often awkward. One poem actually ends, “Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.” Elsewhere, didacticism works hand-in-hand with dead language; for instance, the way he uses “soul-free” here: “Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.” That is too philosophy-specific for what was initially felt as perception-specific. So the clouds are reflected in a puddle, where, as a boy, he might have looked up above/below with sacred wonder? The haiku poets capture this kind of sublimity beautifully without resorting to a rhetoric-rich phrase like “soul-free”, one that for me, at least, ruins the mood.

The following bit was amazing… until he coughs up the ball at the end.

Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

“The stone’s alive with what’s invisible” is a fantastic image for what he’s doing here: it is not philosophy anymore but pure description of the life we cannot witness in a rock. It too is on the move. But then, “like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.” Ugh, no, stop it, spare us the cheap Egyptian philosophy please! What does it add that isn’t already beautifully said? There is a lot of that in Heaney where he senses something deep but lacks the language for it, and yet he’ll insist on describing it in half measures anyway (for what purpose, for filling up the space with unknowingness?). One poem actually has this: “Ultimate fathomableness, ultimate stony up-againstness” – awful.

If that’s the best a poet can do “with what’s invisible”, it makes me wonder. To be generous, if he really doesn’t know what he’s seeing, can’t hate on the man for that: it makes him human. But not a very great poet. If in fact he does know what he’s seeing but uses this gunk instead of sacred language (after all, he is saying this deep feeling he feels is beyond our comprehension), there’s something terribly cynical about his poetry. By all accounts, Heaney was a lovely man. I doubt he was being cynical about human potential which poetry represents best. If he genuinely saw the world whole like Shakespeare did it wouldn’t have been possible for him to write with such flabby inexactness. That “stony up-againstness” is truly horrific. As much as Wallace Stevens annoys me, at least he let those vagues be. Ted Hughes I’m finding is almost never vague like that. If he felt the sublime, he’d be sure and find a language for it, just like Emily Dickinson did (a poet Hughes admired). Heaney however, like Ashbery, gives the sense he would rather do anything but try.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe he should have seen less things

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know those inexplicably beautiful moments in life that catch you offguard --when it feels like the universe is telling you some kind of secret through an image or motion so simple you never stopped to look at it? Seamus Heaney knows those moments too. He knows lots of them, and you will feel like you are his kindred spirit as you read his poems and see the things he sees. I'm getting a little choked up here . . . excuse me. .

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney makes simple remembrances into poetry that takes you from the Earth to the stars. These poems work like science fiction to let your mind transcend an Earth-bound viewpoint, yet the images keep you anchored to the Earth. Some of the poems also bring the ancient past into the present and invoke a sense of timelessness. This is a thrilling book.

[Katelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney had a gift for poetry, especially when concerning his relationship with his father, but the excerpt from The Crossing is what really made this a five-star review. Absolutely incredible.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.6
One may know of Seamus Heaney(as I initially did) via his translation of Beowulf. Which, in my opinion, was an Extremely enjoyable read and was a welcoming translation of the old work. However, he came to fame way before that, and won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1995: 4 years before that…

(I partially gave this a lower score simply because I’m not too knowledgeable about certain geographic features and other things that are mentioned in some of the poems, so some of the imagery didn’t really “click” with me.)

The poems here are often pretty personal, with his father almost ever-present throughout the poems.

There is an almost Wealth of literary devices in this book that truly show how talented Heaney was as a poet. I could somewhat “scent” a device at times, even though I wouldn’t even know how to describe it, and would have to look it up to see if I was correct, and it impressed me because of the magnitude of device usage in the poems. Kennings, alliteration, consonance, rhyme, etc.

I haven’t read many other poems by him, although I have heard his earlier poems are seen as superior to this work, however. Perhaps more reading of his poetry is needed…

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is as much a feast for the ears as a series of poems to be read. Heaney's work demands to be read aloud, so every word has its chance to linger on the air for a while.

[bri · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl
Summer come early. Slashed carmines
And washed milky blues…”

“His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.
When I saw them again last night, they were two
ferrets,
Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.”

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Seeing Things, Heaney describes his experiences growing up on a farm. However, he does not try to recreate those moments as he originally experienced them; rather, he writes from the perspective of an adult remembering those experiences. Thus, in addition to telling both of his past childhood and present maturity, Heaney employs these poems to explore the theme of memory (in which regard it may be that with the title "Seeing Things" Heaney means to allude to his mind playing tricks on him; my sense of the collection is that the mature Heaney revisited his childhood home after many years away from it, and the contrast between how he remembered it and how he was seeing it as an adult led to the production of these poems).

A significant presence in the poems is that of the poet's deceased father, who appears most often as a doomed figure (the translated passage from The Aeneid with which Heaney opens the collection is a kind of overture, foreshadowing the themes of death, darkness and fathers and children that emerge in the poems that follow--and in this context, I think that the title of the collection can also be read as referring to apparitions, i.e. ghosts, whether that of the poet's father, or of the childhood home (and the simple rural life that represents here), or of the poet's memories of the past).

[Insomuch as the passage discusses the plucking of the golden bough and will remind some readers of Frazer's study, it introduces the themes of magic and myth, both of which are also present in some of the poems.]

As is the case with other of Heaney's work I have read, the poems are not too demanding in terms of the work they require of the reader. There are metaphysical moments, as well as metapoetic moments, but usually Heaney's meaning is there to be discovered on the surface (and what a surface it is, with the kind of original and vital imagery and language that one expects from this great Irish poet).

[Addenda on "metaphysical moments": at least one, in which a passing ship becomes entangled with a church altar, seems to be all in fun].

Some of the poems employ rhyme, but most do not. A few are in free verse, and many are in three-line stanzas that suggest the terza rima of Dante, to whose work Heaney alludes several times (and as Virgil was Dante's guide through much of The Divine Comedy, that ties all of these references back to the passage from The Aeneid with which the book begins).

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like some of his other collections more, but this had enjoyable bits as well:

From Squarings, 2. Settings,
xxii

Where does the spirit live? Inside or outside
Things remembered, made things, things unmade?
What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul

Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?
Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks
In a jackdaw's nest up in the old stone tower

Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?
How habitable is perfected form?
And how inhabited the windy light?

What's the use of a held note or held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?
(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)


And Squarings, 3. Crossings xxxvi reminded me so of his poem, The door was open and the house was dark...

Squarings, 3. Crossings
xxxvi

And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.
Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.
As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

Scene from Dante, made more memorable
By one of his head-clearing similes-
Fireflies, say, since the policemen's torches

Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust
Their unpredictable, attractive light.
We were like herded shades who had to cross

And did cross, in a panic, to the car
Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in
Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.

I've got two more that may stick with me. Or two more to come back to, anyway. One, I'll leave with my review of Everything Under, because that's where it placed me. The other, I'll leave here:

Squarings, 4. Squarings
xlviii

Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.
Seventh heaven may be
The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.

[Vishvapani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Heaney at his finest. It's very much a collection, not just a collection of poems, united by the theme of what you could call 'transcendence'. In a couple of the poems Heaney contrasts the transcendence he desires with that of Yeats, the great evaded predecessor, and freeing the body from the soul.

Heaney's version is embodied: rooted in sensation, memory, childhood and his father - who as elsewhere in Heaney's work is represents a kind of authenticity. The Squarings poems are the strongest in the book, along with a few others. Some are large poems compressed into the twelve line form, and some are very strong indeed.

In these poems Heaney shifts modes with great subtlety, as here, where earth becomes light:

Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic
The moorings barely stirred in, very slight
Clucking of the swell against boat boards
.
Perfected vision: cockle minarets
Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle-glass,
Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never been a huge fan of Heaney. Although I've always loved his translations, his poems leave me confused and wanting more of a foothold in sentence structure less abstract. I know this is not a common sentiment in grad school, but I like reading poems that are less work and more reward. I do love the snippet of an Inferno translation he gives at the end.

[Miguel Alves]

For anyone still hung up on Seamus Heaney as spokesman of the furrowed ground and rugged earth, Seeing Things, at this late stage of his career, signaled the definitive lunge toward airy realms of radiant glow. Roofless and lost after the passing of his father, Heaney went back to basics, in a way, seeking a foothold in everyday teachings of experience and sensation (the exaltation of sports, the craft of metalwork, the minutia of housekeeping, the subtle pulses of reel-and-rod fishing), but letting his poems grow from their down-to-earth roots into sunlit upper planes, and raising, from everyday ashlar blocks, great geometries of castles in the clouds. Struck by the transience of things and uncertain of an afterlife to follow, Heaney seems at times to be locked in battle with the encroaching pale gloom. He even bookends the collection with Dante’s and Virgil’s twin tellings of trips down into the underworld's mire and murk. But in the kinship between the material and immaterial (how the tangibility of carved rock can channel something of the sacred unseen) he is able to achieve the clear perception he longs for.

It’s a song-like collection, alliterating and assonating wondrously, better heard than read. Also, countering what you’d expect from its temple-like nature, it can be very cheeky at times, with tongue-in-cheek references to classical cannon ("like Gaul, the biretta was divided into three parts") and a madcap craft of nouns and adjectives. I mean, you have got to love "seeable-down-into water" in the title poem. See also the amazing "fathomableness, ultimate stony up-againstness".

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.

Seamus Heaney is one of my favourite poets and I have, unintentionally, begun to work my way through all his poetry. I actually remember reading one of his poems, 'Digging', at school either just before or during English Lit O-Level and being impressed with it even then.

He doesn't over-water his poems. They're usually normal language, occasionally salted with a more complicated word or poetic thought. But nothing that ever seems to have been chosen for the sake of showing off. Although what is poetry if it isn't linguistic showing off.

He's also the master of the line that is a list or a rule of three, especially when describing something (and I'm aware I am ripping these out of context):

Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time
from The Settle Bed

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish grain
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.
from The Pitchfork

Nothing rose to the occasion after that
Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit,
Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate
At the still centre of the lariat.
Perpetuum mobile. Sheer pirouette.
Tumblers. Jongleurs. Ring-a-rosies. Stet!

So, I really enjoyed reading this. Onwards to more Seamus Heaney.

[Jacopo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le poesie di Seeing Things sono sogni e visioni che rimbalzano sui limiti delle cose, ma l’impatto è attutito ed elastico, è soffice. L’altro mondo è raccontato da confini che sono allo stesso tempo materiali e immaginari.
Ecco un pezzo della poesia Markings (traduzione mia):

Segnavamo il campo: quattro giacche per quattro pali,
Tutto lì. Gli angoli e i fuori
Erano come longitudine e latitudine
Sotto il terreno gibboso e incardato, da
Essere accettate o discusse
Al momento giusto. E allora si facevano le squadre
E attraversavamo la linea che i nostri nomi chiamati tracciavano tra
noi
.
Ragazzini che si sgolavano in un campo
Mentre la luce moriva continuavano a giocare
Perché allora stavano giocando nelle loro teste
E la palla calciata davvero gli arrivava
Con il peso di un sogno, e il loro fiato
Corto nel buio e le scivolate sull'erba
Suonavano come sforzi da un altro mondo...
Era rapido e costante, un gioco che non aveva bisogno
Di esser mostrato. Qualche limite era stato oltrepassato,
Erano agili, scattanti, infaticabili
In un tempo che era extra, imprevisto, e libero.

[…]

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly the most accessible collection yet from Heaney; it is my favourite so far (out of eight, reading in order of publication).

The book opens with a few pages of translation from the Aeneid, and closes with some pages translated from Dante's Inferno; in each case, a demonstration of what Heaney can achieve and perhaps an enticement to do more in that way. Many of the other poems are visibly disciplined to fit a formal structure in one way or another, with generally delightful results, though the exercise provokes the occasional barbarous expression [to be brutally honest, that probably reflects my limitations and not his, as I have since found by reading Helen Vendler's book on Heaney]. This suggests a writer still working on his technique, not resting on laurels that had certainly accumulated by this time, but the impression of greater simplicity and clarity is of course a mark of great skill.

After his previous book focused on his mother, this one opens with a number of poems that seem to refer to his father, albeit the reference can be lightly concealed; that slightly coy evasion may be part of the point in this relationship, where direct statements of affection may be unwanted.

"Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,
Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen,
Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.
The springiness, the clip and dart of it."

These are by all means attributes of a pitchfork, and I do love a list, but surely the poem is really about its owner, "he" who "loves its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash." The son is observing with admiration and love his father’s fondness for the pitchfork; but let’s not be too overt about it.

In the title poem, Seeing Things, Heaney refers to his father going to spray the potatoes, and this invites an obvious association with Patrick Kavanagh's subversive poem on that same subject. Kavanagh refused to romanticise this mundane farming chore; there is anger bottled up in his frank realism, though it takes a few readings to discern. Heaney’s account is far more cheerful; the toxic spraying materials are incorporated in his poem too but the occasion is one for farce and good humour.

Whether they describe his childhood or his own family as an adult, Heaney’s poems in this volume are good natured and content, with only the slightest hint from time to time towards the darker world of Irish politics. Yet there may be an implicit politics all the same in his appeal to the basic decency of this life, its intrinsic worth.

[jude lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I totally enjoyed this departure from previous Heaney I have read! The first half of the collection explored some really interesting conversations of reality versus abstraction that I don’t normally associate with Heaney’s work so that was really interesting. Got to have a riveting conversation on the different reading of the title poem “Seeing Things” and it is still swaying back and forth with me. And then the second section of “Squarings” with the 12 line tercets was a really fun exploration of form and how to put pieces into conversation. The two about Thomas Hardy (vi and vii I think) especially caught my eye but I enjoyed the various ways Heaney worked with this “out of the blueness”.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights: Markings, Seeing Things, An August Night, Glanmore Revisited, Fosterling, Squarings.

[Francisca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again . . . Beautiful

[Tabish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney verses rhyme and remain free at the same time!

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Seamus Heaney’s poetry is earthy, grounded in people, place, memory, and tradition/family. He closes this volume with a translation of a Dante scene. His translations are wonderful. Looking forward to his Beowulf.

[Ian Wall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, especially the enigmatic 'Squarings'.

[Strider Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading this book of poetry for the third time. Heaney's poetry rewards patience. The metaphors and symbolism connect the past and present and elsewhere in language that is both earthy and from a higher plaine of thought used to reveal the secrets in everyday situations. Heaney doesn't play to the highest common denominator for popularity, or play it safe by selling his soul to powerful causes. He is his own man, letting you in in his own language, simple but complex and always with that earthy or other worldly lyrical beauty in so many lines and phrases. Like W B Yeats, Heaney's poetry turns my thinking inside out and back again and somehow leaves me feeling more complete.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

really really beautiful.

[Michael Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful

[Lex Poot · Rating 3 out of 5]

playing hopscotch through his memories

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of poetry I know