Our Poetry Editor, Ira Maine brings us more from the late Seamus Heaney with
‘A Daylight Art’. His comments follow the poem.
On the day he was to take the poison
Socrates told his friends he had been writing
putting Aesop’s fables into verse
And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom
and advocated the examined life.
The reason was that he had had a dream.
Caesar now, or Herod or Constantine
or any number of Shakespearean kings
bursting at the end like dams
where original panoramas lie submerged
which have to rise again before the death scenes-
you can believe in their believing dreams.
But hardly Socrates. Until, that is,
he tells his friends the dream had kept recurring
all his life, repeating one instruction:
Practise the art, which art until that moment
he always took to mean philosophy.
Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift
for practising the right one from the start-
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod’s eye or the nib’s eye.
COMMENTARY by Ira Maine
Four hundred years before Christ, a newly elected Greek government, a bit wobbly, a bit unsure of itself, made it known that anybody who chose to opposed its power, or even to speak up against it, would be dealth with in no uncertain manner. This ‘send in the death squads’ attitude is typical of a government or indeed a nation in long term decline when even free speech is seen as a direct challenge to its authority. The Greeks had just had their heads kicked in by the upstart Spartans and confidence was low.
Socrates(470-399) the philosopher ignored this governmental demand for silence and instead spoke up in defence of the enemy. Socrates, whose philosophical interest included the nature of truth, saw that the truth of this matter was that the Spartans at least were operating in a positive way, as opposed to his own Athenian society which had become negative, cowardly and fatly corrupt. People in power never, ever, enjoy hearing this stuff. He was summoned to account for himself and was quickly found guilty of supporting the Spartans in their attempts to overthrow the state. He was sentenced to death. Amazingly, the apocryphal story goes, on the appointed day, when he was expected to swallow a liberal dose of poison and expire, he was found to be quietly turning some of Aesop’s Fables into poetry.
Whether this is true, or not, doesn’t matter. What he told his friends he was doing on the day of his hemlocked death should matter to all of us. He told them he was practising his art. He confessed to them that a life-long dream had insisted he do so. Not simply the art of poetry, but the art of both devoting his life, and now sacrificing that life in the cause of his philosophical beliefs. To do otherwise, to recant, would negate everything he believed in.
Heaney takes the view that Socrates had sadly, chosen an ‘art’, the practise of which was about to bring about his own death.This is not supposed to happen to philosophers. To Caesar perhaps, or Constantine, or Shakespeare’s kings, any one of whom’s vaulting ambition would cause them to risk all in an attempt to impose their dream or ‘panorama’ on the world. But not Socrates. If he had, from the start, chosen poetry as his ‘art’, or indeed, as Heaney says, somethimg as simple as ‘…fishing…’ his night life might have been less beset by dreams. The suggestion here is that the dream recurs because Socrates, in choosing philosophy, has made the wrong choice. If he had made the correct choice, the dreams would have certainly ceased and he might have lived a different life. But then, if he had chosen ‘correctly’ he would not have become Socrates, but somebody else.
Socrates chose philosophy (as Heaney chose poetry) because, in the end, he had no choice.
Heaney’s last lines suggests that …’happy the man…whose nights are dreamless…’ whose subconscious ideas rise and pass by unheeded, and in so doing, leave the individual in peace.
This is true for the vast majority of the population. It was certainly not true for Socrates, or indeed Heaney.