Heaney's Verses More than just Poetry in Emotion

When I first read about the Stendhal syndrome I was intrigued. The illness is named after the famous 19th-century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the experience during his 1817 visit to Florence in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio. Apparently, it is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when a person is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. 

I therefore reason that if there are curious reactions to beautiful art , then certainly there must be a term to describe the condition of one who is overwhelmed by the writings of great literary geniuses and Ireland has no shortage of such.

The recent demise of the poet Seamus Heaney on 30 August 2013 is a real loss to Ireland. The nearest I got to knowing the poet was through his poems and also by walking past his house in Sandymount, Dublin.

The similarities we share are an eye for detail and a love for the written word.

My first introduction to analysing poetry was during my Form Six days when I did the English literature paper four. Granted, poetry is not everyone’s cup of tea. Having said that, a good teacher and an innate passion for poetry appreciation transcends the bumps along the way and the combination of both finally led me to pursue a degree in English literature.

At 18, in a hot classroom with fans whirling, we learned to make sense of cultural imagery that was so far removed from our daily existence as light is to day. 

How similar could tropical heat and broiler chickens be to Yeats’ trees in their autumn beauty and nine and fifty swans upon the brimming water’? How similar could hibiscus shrubs be to Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils?

And yet, we all survived. Imagination is a strange thing. We can paint vivid images in our mind just the way we read about them and we can even feel the same emotions that the poet wants to portray if not more. Such is the power of the ‘squat pen that sits between the finger and the thumb’ that Seamus writes about.

It is all about familiarity.

When imagination meets reality and they both harmonise and agree, that is when the magnificence of the written word dawns.

In his poem ‘Digging’ Seamus wrote about two main activities – potato planting and turf cutting.  I have planted potatoes and understand how ‘the spade sinks into the gravelly ground’ and how ‘the rump stoops in rhythm through potato drills.’   

The last time we got some turf from the bog, it was exactly like how Seamus described his grand father ‘nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods, over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf.’

It became very familiar again when he talked about appreciation and acceptance.

How did the people in his town react to him being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1995? In his own words to a friend, initially, they ‘ignored’ it for the most part. Then after his passing, I waited for the national television stations to screen tribute after tribute to Ireland’s pride, only to find that the number of documentaries on Seamus screened by the BBC far exceeds that.

Then I thought about  our very own Tan Twan Eng who won the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction for his second novel The Garden of Evening Mists and  Tash Aw who won the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). How many Malaysians have actually heard of them or read their works?

I have recorded the televised tributes to Seamus and I will watch them again. I have audio recordings of his readings and I will listen to them again. I have his poems and I will read them again.

And then unlike Stendhall who wrote about being ‘absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations… I had palpitations of the heart… Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling’, another kind of reaction could be born.

This time it would be a positive reaction related to the written arts.


Source: http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/heaney-s-verses-more-than-just-poetry-in-emotion-1.374592?cache=03%252f7.198169%2F7.173253%2F7.480262%2F7.478218%2F7.478218%2F7.478218%2F7.490557%2F7.490557%2F7.490557%2F7.490557