District and Circle
In one of his gloomier moments, the Welsh priest and poet R S Thomas wrote of his homeland:
There is only the past/Brittle with relics.
That weight presses down on us all. We are born into stories that have been told for countless generations, plots that long predate our arrival on stage. This is where we get our identity, our security. Yet we also long to be unbound from the past, free to tell our own stories, to work out our own plots.
We want to be new creations without forsaking the old.
Seamus Heaney, whose twelfth collection of poems, District and Circle, is published this week, has long recognised this tension. The past has shaped his work profoundly, both through the reassuring, earthy routines of the County Derry farm on which he grew up and through the myths and histories - not to mention the ancient bodies in the bogs - that inform his verse.
Yet he has never been captive to the past. He has always displayed that distinctive poet's ability of 'seeing things' - the title of an earlier collection - anew.
District and Circle continues in this vein. The poem 'Anything Can Happen', a loose translation of an ode by the Roman poet Horace, captures the anxiety of our age in which can even 'the tallest towers/Be overturned'. The title poem begins with the speaker going down into the London Underground, descending into both the underworld of mythology and the newly threatening darkness of the Tube.
As we approach Palm Sunday, this ability to respect the past without becoming slaves to it, to retell stories in new, life-enhancing ways, to see things afresh, comes into focus.
We see a man on a donkey, retelling an ancient story in a new way. He has done this many times in recent years, albeit in less dramatic ways, delighting some and infuriating others with his sometimes painful, sometimes comforting new twists. Now the bigger plot moves to its own agonising climax, though not in the way his audience expects.
We, too, travel through Holy Week, inheritors of a great drama, one that is at once 'finished', as Jesus gasped before his death (John 19.30), and yet incomplete, as he told his disciples days later (Matthew 28.19).
Our task is not to finish it but to tell it, and act it, afresh every day.
Nick Spencer
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