Imagine a group of people taking turns making clever remarks, echoing and developing each others’ cues. To play the game well is to extend the discussion for another round in a pleasurable way.

For instance, they might be middle-aged Jewish men trading Jewish jokes, like the one

About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together …

Or they might be “Basho and his friends,” drinking saki one 17th-century night and improvising long chains of the linked haikus called rengas:

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid
Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit.

Or all the stories might flow from a single speaker who has a desperate need, like Scheherazade, not to stop entertaining. And that person might not be an Arabian princess but rather a small boy in a sad apartment, whose mother

… tells the child she’s going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,
The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father
Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning.

In “Impossible to Tell,” Robert Pinsky weaves these and other stories about story-telling together to create one jazz-like poem. He improvises on the title, which recurs three times in markedly different contexts. Parts of the poem are jokes that made me actually laugh. Parts are like haikus in their fresh descriptions of everyday reality: “In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter.” (Note the 7-syllable phrase.) And parts are very sad, like the death of Pinsky’s friend Elliot Gilbert, as seen by his family.

As for the child who tells jokes to keep his mother from suicide,

… maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga
The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight.

(en route to Tarrytown, NY) The son of a Catholic farmer in Ulster, with an education and an extraordinary gift for language, Seamus Heaney knew oppression and he knew art. Oppression came in many forms and layers–the Unionists and British representing only two of the oppressors–and it demanded active, bodily resistance: joining his people in labor, suffering, or even violence. The art meant moving away from all that in several respects: away from physical objects into words, away from the laboring poor into the middle class or even the global elite, away from Ulster to places like Spain and Oxford, and away from his Irish roots into English literature.

Heaney’s “Singing School” explores this profound tension by means of six short autobiographical scenes from his own education. At the risk of distorting the poem, I’d suggest that each scene presents different oppressors and teachers.

First, the epigraphs are quotations from two of Heaney’s teachers, great poets who wrote in the oppressors’ English language. Wordsworth was an Englishman but a liberal revolutionary. He invented a style of elegaic memoir (in natural-sounding formal verse) that made Heaney’s work possible. Yeats was originally a Protestant Irishman, one of the oppressors, and the quoted passage recalls his childhood hatred of Heaney’s people. But Yeats became a nationalist bard, and he provides the poem’s title:

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Stanza 1: The oppressors are the teachers at St Columb’s College (Catholic priests) and the police. Heaney’s teachers are the modern Irish poets Seamus Deane and Patrick Kavanagh, and surely, James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist infuses the stanza.

Stanza 2: The oppressor is the constable, hence the British government. The teacher is Heaney’s silent father, teaching not to sing but to work with one’s hands and keep truths hidden.

Stanza 3: The oppressor is the Orangeman marching through Belfast (but showing weakness as he struggles with his drum). The teacher is the crowd, teaching the rhythms of hatred.

Stanza 4: The oppressor is the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British government. But Heaney’s problem is that he is no longer directly oppressed. His career has liberated him to live in Madrid, much as Joyce lived in Paris and Trieste. (“Rivering” is another Joycean echo). Heaney’s teachers, as he struggles with guilt and exile, are Joyce, Lorca, and Goya.

Stanza 5: The main teacher is Heaney’s mentor, the short-story-writer Michael McLaverty, who invokes Katherine Mansfield and “poor Hopkins”–referring to the English poet exiled unhappily to Ireland. In this stanza, oppression recedes as McLaverty encourages Heaney to improve the world by describing it. He has permission to be a poet.

Stanza 6: I think nature is the main teacher here–and also Ovid, whose “Tristia” were songs of exile. Yeats is again an inspiration. The stone hurled by Republican revolutionaries that recurs through “Easter 1916” may be the stone in Heaney’s poem:

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a clingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

The oppressor is still political–Heaney has escaped from a “massacre”–but political oppression has become more abstract and general now that Heaney lives in Wicklow (in the Irish Republic). Not only a Catholic from Ulster but almost any thoughtful person could feel “I am neither internee nor informer.”

Many people are contributing memories of “Famous Seamus.” I will not claim any great insight, and certainly no important interactions with the poet, although he, his wife, and I did wait on a freezing pitch-black Oxford winter morning for the bus to Heathrow, ca. 1990. This is the wife to whom he texted his very last words: “Noli timere” from the Gospel of Matthew:

And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.

But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. (Mathew 14:26-7)

I don’t think Heaney was identifying himself with Jesus. He was just recalling the Latin for “be not afraid” from his childhood of school and church. But he was an insightful reader of the New Testament, pointing out, for example, that it was Jesus’ bare act of writing that saved the “Woman Taken in Adultery.”

And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst (John 8:8-9)

Heaney said that poetry, like Jesus’ mysterious and quiet writing, “holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Poetry puts us in the “Republic of Conscience.”

People seem to like my discussion questions prompted by Heaney’s magnificent poem of that name. That post has had 1,300 unique visitors, including a burst of readers just lately. I first heard “The Republic of Conscience” in the soft Irish lilt of Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who read it at a conference. It belongs to Amnesty International because Heaney gave AI the copyright. Looking back over my blog, I also find that I’ve reviewed Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, quoted his commentary on terrorism from his Nobel Lecture, quoted him on the liberating power of poetry, and ruminated on what it would really mean to live in a republic of conscience. That is a fair amount to have written about one poet on a civics blog, so I am satisfied I have done my bit to memorialize this great man.