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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
3
I now want to discuss in some detail two short poems, each containing an allusion to an antecedent poem. In both cases, the allusion is a veiled referent and explicable at the intratextual level (like the "act of stealth" marker in "The Ministry of Fear"). But once the allusion is recognized, intertextual considerations perforce become a factor in the reader's experience of the poem. The first poem is "The Guttural Muse" from Field Work:
Late summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.
Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk - the slimy tench
Once called the "doctor fish" because its slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.
A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life. (28)
In an interview, Heaney recalled this poem's "gestation":
One evening, I went fishing with a friend of mine... tench fishing. They're a toothless fish and they send up bubbles - they love the slime and the mud, and you fish for them in the dark. There's this kind of slimy goodness about them; they told me they were called a doctor fish because there was a superstition that the slime upon them healed wounded fish - pike and so on - that touched them as they went past. Then later on I was in a hotel up around County Monaghan one night, feeling strange and poetically barren, and there was a dance on, a lot of country kids listening to pop music, and about half past one they came out over the car park, and these absolute dialect voices came bubbling up to me. It was like a vision of the kind of life I had in the fifties, going to dances and so on, and I felt the redemptive quality of the dialect, of the guttural, the illiterate self.
I held those two things in my head for two years, and then suddenly I wrote it down. But maybe I let them lie too long, because those original elements didn't generate anything more out of themselves in the end. (Haffenden 57-58)
This passage contains an important piece of information: "That evening" does not mean the evening of the day the speaker went fishing for tench, as one would tend to assume - that is, the speaker observed tench feeding at dusk and later that same night watched a crowd leaving a discotheque. This reading makes the relationship between the two observations metonymic or syntagmatic, based on contiguity, and it makes the poem into a narrative, a condensed short story.
Knowing the author's comments in the interview makes possible a better reading of the poem - better because it makes the poem a more interesting performance and accounts for its title. It can now be read as a text in which two temporally and spatially distanced events are connected by a metaphoric link - a paradigmatic relationship of similarity rather than contiguity. The girl with the puddling voice in the muddied night air feeding off male attention resembles the slimy tench feeding and sending up oily bubbles. There is the further suggestion of the healing touch, the restorative potential, of both the girl and the doctor fish. As the pike wants to touch the soft-mouthed (toothless) tench, so the older male speaker wants to feel the touch of the girl's soft-mouthed life.
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