Hailing Elizabeth Bishop: Seamus Heaney from Long Island, Summer, 1979.

After the Heaneys had spent a hectic spring semester at Harvard in 1979,?they didn't return immediately to Ireland. Instead, they drove to the home of Tom and Jean Flanagan, their old friends from Berkeley. ?Tom Flanagan was now teaching at SUNY Stony Brook, ?and they lived at 33 Gnarled Hollow Rd. East Setauket.?Since the Flanagans were spending the summer in Ireland they invited the Heaneys to ?relax and housesit at their home, a large house off the Long Island Sound and close to the campus but set well back from the road.??Heaney wrote Flanagan on June 29th, 1979: ?“My second morning in this fragrant clime and the pace is settling to a quieter one that I've known for months. ?I feel the system calming and am grateful: the house and trees are all kindly influences…. At any rate I'm at your desk in the study which will remain inclined to be pilot house and engine room, as long as I have anything to do with it. And presently I shall assay for the first time the electric typewriter…. I am looking forward to July in this place-- it couldn't be better from the point of view of silent space and friendly spirits.”

Contrary to what some critics have written, Heaney wrote a good number of poems in America and some lesser number about America. A few notable poems that Heaney wrote on Long Island were “Near Anahorish” which would become “Making Strange” in Station Island, also a notable one ?that never quite realized full fruition called “A Hank of Wool” intended as a gift for Elizabeth Bishop.??Heaney had gotten to know her as a new friend in the semester just completed at Harvard. Bishop had invited the Heaneys up to Maine for a visit, but they had already committed to house sitting. Heaney says about the poem it “began with me as a child holding out a hank of wool on my arms so that my aunt Mary could wind it into a ball-- and ended with me standing with arms still stretched out empty facing Maine in gesture of homage to Elizabeth.” Heaney says about the poem “it was OK as a personal salute, maybe but I just don't think it got proper purchase.” The reasons are complicated.

?The poem was only printed after Elizabeth Bishop’s unexpected death in The Times Literary Supplement on March 7th, 1980 as an “IM” poem, an in memoriam poem for Elizabeth Bishop.

i, "Hank," I hear you say,

all tact and masquerade.

"Sounds like the name for a cowboy."

But didn't you hold the wool--

shop wool, ticketed bought wool--

until your shoulders ached?

I used to sit like a hermit

with my two arms held out

to stretch the hank between them.

So what began as a long distance hail to Bishop in Maine ended as a somewhat uneasy elegy. ??In “A Hank of Wool,” Heaney first imagines Bishop's art as one of knitting. But at some point he realized, ?as he noted in his Harvard lecture on Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil, January 1st, 1502” Bishop’s ?practice was closer to that of a painter who begins with a broad cartoon of a scene, then begins to build up ?forms, ?at first rather generic, ?and then increasingly precise as Bishop the poet keeps refining her first impressions ?through repeated self corrections (alluded to through the use of the ?word “rather”). ??

Heaney’s poem acknowledges that Bishop herself, somewhat rebelliously, had in fact abandoned knitting. Esthetically Heaney’s poem is built on negations, a visit that never happens, a woman who once knitted but has stopped, a tribute to a living friendship while the poem uneasily becomes an an elegy. ?Heaney in the “IM” version attempted to memorialize Elizabeth Bishop as would be expected. But they never quite became full colleagues at Harvard, their friendship a promise unfulfilled. He finally must have realized that there were too many unresolved issues in the poem both formally, it after all comes up short as elegy, and as an accurate description of Bishop's practice.??He wisely never collected the poem he spent so much energy on that summer of 1979 on Long Island.

(Adapted from Seamus Heaney's American Odyssey (Routledge, 2023)