In her poem ‘Santarém’, one of the last she wrote, Elizabeth Bishop begins: ‘Of course I may be remembering it all wrong/ after, after – how many years?’

We can trace the origins of Bishop’s poem ‘The Moose’ not from her memory, not from what she might have got wrong, but from an account of the original experience set down in a letter soon afterwards. In 1946 she wrote to her friend Marianne Moore describing an incident on the long journey between Great Village in Nova Scotia and Boston: ‘Just as it was getting light, the driver had to stop suddenly for a big cow moose who was wandering down the road. She walked away very slowly into the woods, looking at us over her shoulder. The driver said that one foggy night he had to stop while a huge bull moose came right up and smelled the engine.’

In l956 Bishop wrote to her Aunt Grace to say that she was writing a long poem ‘about Nova Scotia. It's dedicated to you. When it's published, I'll send you a copy.’ But Bishop took her time with poems. Sixteen years later – twenty-six years after the actual experience - the poem was finally finished. She wrote to Aunt Grace ‘It is called “The Moose”. (You are not the moose.)’

Elizabeth Bishop read it at the joint Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa ceremony and was later delighted when she heard one student's verdict: ‘as poems go - it wasn't bad’.

‘I consider that a great compliment,’ she wrote to a friend.

‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’, at eight hundred pages, differs from the similar volume of Bishop’s letters, which is shorter by a hundred pages, in a good many ways. Bishop, although she wrote about travelling, tended not to travel very much. (She made big moves – Nova Scotia to New York to Key West to Brazil to Boston – but stayed put in each place for a good long stretch, often more than a decade.) The most productive period of her life and the happiest - 1951 to 1967 – was lived mainly in Brazil from where she wrote many long letters. She had no children and few close friends. The people she wrote to – most of them living in North America – included the poet Robert Lowell, who she considered her best friend, and her Aunt Grace in Nova Scotia.

In Brazil, she depended on letters received, and some of the ones she wrote are brilliant in their descriptions and also revealing and personal and filled with insights into her poetry and how her days were spent.

Seamus Heaney doesn’t write letters much about the actual sources of poems, or how a poem gets made, or how memory works against imagination. For him, this seems to be private, a ritual that depends maybe on mystery. Stir it up, throw light on it, tell everyone about it, and it might dart away.

Heaney writes well in a few letters about the time when nothing much happened, when nothing stirred, when he seemed to be having no thoughts that were of any interest, no memories that led anywhere, no poems.

And he worried sometimes that he wasn’t lazy enough.

On November 25 2012, he wrote to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize the previous year, and his wife Monica: ‘I spend too much time saying no to invitations, not enough being indolent, being in what Wordsworth called “a wise passiveness.”’

Indolence might be important for a poet. John Keats wrote an ‘Ode on Indolence’. Indolence is a word that turns up a great deal in Keats’ letters. It ran in his family, it seemed, since he writes that ‘the Keatses were ever indolent…and that it was born in them.’ He was a great believer in ‘a doze upon a sofa’ and ‘a nap upon clover.’

Keats tries to excuse ‘my own indolence’ or even apologizes for indolence in his own poetry: ‘I am sorry I am so indolent as to write such stuff as this.’ The word, as Keats uses it here, seems less narrow that its current usage. It seems often to mean ‘not rigorous’ intellectually. In a letter in February 1819, Keats writes about reviews: ‘for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent men’s minds – few think for themselves’.

In many of his letters, Seamus Heaney apologizes for how long it has taken him to reply. ‘You should have heard from me earlier,’ he writes to Patrick Crotty on 11 May 2011. ‘You have been on my conscience for a while,’ he writes to Andrew Motion on 10 November 2009. ‘I have to apologize, therefore, for not having written earlier,’ he writes to Peter Sirr on 1 January 2009.

Keats did this too. ‘I shall henceforth shake off my indolent fits, and among other reformation be more diligent in writing to you,’ Keats wrote to his sister on 17 June 1819.

Sometimes, Heaney is not indolent. ‘And I’ve been writing like a whore,’ he writes to David Hammond from Berkeley in October 1970. At other time, the letter itself is a sign of energy. In January 1974, he wrote to John Montague: ‘I am just, I hope, lifting out of a despondent, sluggish, lazy, uncoordinated, un-energetic couple of months. I’m not writing and I’m not sure what I’m doing here or what I’m going to do. I seem to have lost touch with whatever sense of purpose and confidence I had last year – and to be spending my time doing itty-bitty broadcasts and articles. But the last couple of days have seen a resurgence – witness even this letter.’

In February the following year, from the same address – Glanmore Cottage near Ashford in Wicklow – Heaney writes to Michael Longley: ‘I am in a seemingly unbreakable lethargy, but not a fulfilling one, for I keep saying to myself what I should be doing. Income tax should be cleared up…Money-making projects should be initiated. Poems are wished for. I have this notion that only a wilful act of making – sonneteering, shouldering the burden of set forms – will stir the pool.’

And then July a year later, also from the Wicklow address, to Brian Friel: ‘With the kids on holiday here and Marie out at the course in Dublin I get into blind furies because of the impossibility of silence and study here: the summer is my only time just now, and utterly shot to bits. They’re up round me here at this minute.’

The following year – in December 1977 – Heaney writes to Seamus Deane from the house he has bought in Strand Road in Dublin: ‘I see myself doing far too much hack work, dissipating energy, rushing, neglecting the silence or neglecting to fence it off and graze in it deliberately. But I hope to create order soon…The idea would be to live on one’s salary and go on such jaunts as rewards to one’s self for work completed. But at my back I always hear the Bank of Ireland hurrying near.’

A month later, from the same address, he writes to Michael Longley: ‘I am stiff and dull as to verse. Cannot even muster the energy to type out things I have revised. Say a prayer for me. Too laden with fucking things I should never have taken on.’

Four months later, Heaney writes to Seamus Deane from Karl Miller’s house in London: ‘it seems that these times in the silence of another person’s home and in the oasis of time pulled out of Dublin’s hurry are the only times when I sit down and take stock.’

In June 1980, he writes to Paul Muldoon: ‘I hope that I might get some work done, but feel far from sources. A bit ossified.’ Two months later, he writes to Donald Davie: ‘I’ve been wobbling and wasting the summer, feeling unfocused and dry.’ A year later, he writes to Derek Mahon: ‘I can’t get a grip on myself and my hopes. Just sitting dopey and fiddling, with a heap of letters to answer and a reluctance to commit myself to them before I open some vein that promises poetic life. But maybe we’ll get going after this.’

On 26 May 1985, from Harvard, Heaney writes to Barrie Cooke about overdue letters: ‘I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me, inertia grows and, fuck it, I’m going to get rid of them before I board the plane on Thursday.’

In January 1987, in a letter to Paul Muldoon, a new tone about work not done comes accompanied by the magic word ‘indolence’: ‘I’ve not done a stroke of work this year. Bits and pieces of lectures and reviews but no settled focus or indeed drive. Partly it was the unsettling effect of the Eliot lectures as they loomed over September and October, then it was the aftermath of my father’s going. And then just the constant hurly-burly of the house and home, here. Besides which, I have an immense gift for indolence, snoring like the bog-eel in the dirty loanin’.’

In July that same year, he writes to David Hammond from Bernard McCabe’s flat in London: ‘At last I am well slept and decisive – I did nothing all day yesterday but sit about the McCabe’s flat, doze, go out and drink soft pints of bitter, fart, daydream, eat an Indian meal, fart again and sleep for eight hours again last night.’ Later that month, he writes to Michael Longley about the prospect of ‘quiet spell in a nice big house in Cambridge [ie Harvard], farting and scratching and sweating and moaning. Teaching too, of course.’

A year later, he writes to Michael Longley from Cheltenham ‘where I have an hour on my own, mid-morning, in a booklined room. The peace and mellowness of the place make me wish I could have a fortnight’s silence, or a year’s.’

In November 1994 he writes to Seamus Deane: ‘I’m beached on the soft sands – or mud, is it – of this sabbatical leave and feel only waste and inertia within me.’ Three years later, he writes to Helen Vendler: ‘The fact that I had three weeks free was a bad thing maybe, I simply wasted time.’

Often, Heaney writes letters while on airplanes, including one to Adolphe Haberer in May 2003: ‘But the big bonus is time for reverie on the plane.’ And, from another plane, to Henri Cole in June 2004: ‘But these outings have their advantages – dream time of sorts in lounges and on planes, reading time, drift and slack time.’

When, then, did Seamus Heaney write the actual poems? In the between-time, the magic time, the snatched time, the time he didn’t want to describe in letters? Or did he spend days and days at his poems, diligent, dutiful, concentrating, but didn’t want to write letters about that either? Did nothing make poetry happen? Some things are none of anyone’s business.

And yet in ‘Stepping Stones’, the book of interviews Heaney did with Dennis O’Driscoll, he gives an account of writing a poem: ‘I have an especially happy memory of writing “Bog Queen” because it was the first time in my life, believe it or not, that I’d spent a whole uninterrupted workday on a poem. Before we moved to Wicklow, you know, my time wasn’t particularly my own: there was always the Queen’s job, or the school, or the training college, or grading papers, or having to go to see my parents at the weekend, or whatever. But in Glanmore that day I learned to shift the emphasis, found myself free to regard poem work as the day job.’

Which is it, then? ‘A whole uninterrupted workday’ or, as in a letter to John Montague from the same period, ‘I’m not writing and I’m not sure what I’m doing here or what I’m going to do.’

It is, of course, both. One is a memory, the other a moment in a letter. The memory could be fully accurate. The letter could be a way of making its recipient feel good, since these poets were often jealous of each other.

Heaney’s Collected Poems, when it appears, will be a large volume. His Collected Essays will probably need two large volumes. His Collected Translations, published last year, is a revelation, not least for its sheer quantity and scale. Heaney was, evidence shows, a worker, what Henry James called ‘a constant producer.’

His comments on his own inertia in these letters is merely one strand in his correspondence. It is of interest because it may blur a picture of Heaney as a man comfortable in the world, a man who went easily to his desk each day, a man to whom poems came naturally. And this, in turn, maybe help us to read some poems most clearly.

It might help to give one example of how a line from a letter might help us read a poem. In that letter written to Michael Longley from Wicklow in February 1975, Heaney wrote, as quoted above: ‘I have this notion that only a wilful act of making – sonneteering, shouldering the burden of set forms – will stir the pool.’

There are four (or more) ways of reading this. One, it is no more than a passing thought, something that might interest Longley whose early work used ‘set forms’. Two, it is a reference to Robert Lowell, a friend of Heaney’s by this time, who, the previous year, had published three different books of sonnets. Three, it is the first intimation we have about Heaney himself writing a sonnet sequence. Four, the letter itself, just writing down the words, might have been a kind of spark, something that lingered in Heaney’s mind as the beginning of something, the first brush with an idea, casually put down here, in a self-deprecating way, ‘sonneteering.’

Add to this a letter to Christopher Ricks in November 1979 when Heaney mentions that his book ‘Field Work’ was published on October 15, and ‘I had a terrific reading in Trinity in Dublin.’

I was at that reading in the Edmund Burke Hall, sitting at the back. I had a proof copy of ‘Field Work’ sent by the publishers and, as there were some minor differences between the reading and what was on the page, I enjoyed following the reading line by line.

There were two lines that struck me then: ‘Vowels turned into other, opened ground,/ Each verse returning like the plough turned round.’ They didn’t sound like two lines in a Heaney poem whose tones were usually more tentative.

I didn’t know about the echoes from Virgil’s plough poems. Nor did I know what Heaney would explain in his book ‘Preoccupations’: ‘”Verse” comes from the Latin versus, which could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished one furrow and faced back into another.’

The two lines came as a couplet at the end of a sonnet, one of a sequence by Heaney called ‘The Glanmore Sonnets’. It seemed natural to me then that a poet might write sonnets or go ‘sonneteering.’ But it is more complicated than that.

In his book ‘The Sonnet’ Stephen Regan writes: ‘In his candidly revealing conversation with Karl Miller, recorded in May 1999, Heaney confirms that there was a self-consciously subversive design in his use of the sonnet form for a poem [‘Requiem for the Croppies’] celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of 1916 and its roots in the Rebellion of 1798.’ Heaney told Miller: ‘My poem about the croppies was particularly pleasing to me because it was a sonnet. It was an example, if you like, of an official English poetry-form, but one that incorporated what had been sub-cultural meaning during my growing up – ballads about [17]98, and so on.’

There are no sonnets in Heaney’s first book ‘Death of a Naturalist’, unless ‘Cow in Calf’ is one because it has fourteen lines. In ‘Door into the Dark’, his second volume, there are two sonnets – the Croppies poems and ‘The Forge’, which begins: ‘All I know is a door into the dark.’ (As in Patrick Kavanagh’s two great sonnets – ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ and ‘Epic’ – it matters that the setting is deep rural Ireland, a place more raw and ramshackle than sylvan.) There are no sonnets in Heaney’s third volume ‘Wintering Out.’ In ‘North’, his next volume, ‘The Seed-Cutters’ is a sonnet, as is ‘Strange Fruit’, his poem about the preserved body of the murdered girl. And ‘Act of Union’, possibly the most unconvincing poem Heaney wrote, is a double sonnet ending with a couplet: ‘And stretchmarked body, the big pain/ That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.’

By February 1975, when Heaney writes to Longley about ‘sonneteering’, these poems are already written. He is in that state any writer is in when a book is done, or almost done, but not published yet. Heaney’s next book will be ‘Field Work’, published in 1979. ‘The Glanmore Sonnets’, the poems he writes now, have a sound and rhythm different from the earlier sonnets. They are more confident in their tone, in how rhymes work and how lines end; but this is not a ringing confidence, it is matched by a hushed cadence, a sense of hauntedness. (‘My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.’) He is less interested in narrative or description or setting a scene and more in offering a vision that is uneasy, unsettled, exploratory. He lets each of the ten sonnets echo against each other, circle, rather than follow in a straight line. He has taken what he himself called ‘an official English poetry-form’ and has sought not to subvert it but use what he needed from it, such as the occasional pure iambic pentameter line (‘And vanished into where they seemed to start’). And then he finds a more coiled and whispering music, sometimes fragmented, hesitant and then solid and well-formed. These ten poems first excited me in 1979, and, when I read them now, I wonder what night, what day, what moment, did this sequence start, and what gave Heaney the impetus, between ‘North’ and ‘Field Work’, to change his response to the sonnet.

Colm Tóibín (October 2023)