Seamus Heaney’s five-part epic “Mycenae Lookout” was written in response to the IRA ceasefire of August 31, 1994, which brought an end to twenty-five years of armed conflict in Northern Ireland. Heaney began the poem two months later, more “to give a snarl rather than sing a hymn”. The sequence recounts episodes – voiced by the Watchman on the roof of the royal palace at Mycenae – from the Oresteia by Aeschylus. Agamemnon has left his wife Clytemnestra to lead the attack on Troy after the abduction of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. In her husband’s absence, Clytemnestra takes his cousin, Aegisthus, as a lover; then, when Agamemnon returns with Priam’s daughter Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill them both. Heaney has said that although there was “a certain amount of book learning involved”, he really entered the poem through the opening words of the Watchman in the Agamemnon who cannot speak because “the ox is on my tongue”. What this evoked for Heaney was “the splatter of cow’s feet on the floor of a byre in Mossbawn, the charge of bullocks up the ‘tripper’ of a cattle lorry … the weight and danger of those clattering beasts. Slaughterhouse panic”.
Heaney’s subject here is the fact that, in times of war, “there is no such thing / as innocent / bystanding” (“Cassandra”). This poem, first published in the TLS in 1994 and then as Part 3 of the final sequence (where it was retitled “His Dawn Vision”) in The Spirit Level (1996), finds echoes of the Trojan Wars in the conflict in Northern Ireland – “stalled in the pre-articulate”, waged by “Mouth athletes / Quoting the oracle and quoting dates / Petitioning, accusing, taking votes”. In the words of a TLS review, “the Irish parallels … jut out like bones in the grass”. But perhaps the most horrific vision of all is the Lookout’s description of a man who “jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran / Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down”. This “premonition of eternal civil and fratricidal conflict” turns a poem about the end of a war into “a fresh configuration in the endless rounds of massacre”.
Mycenae Lookout
“The ox is on my tongue”
– Aeschylus: Agamemnon
Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I’d come to with the night wind on my face,
Agog, alert again, but far, far less
Focussed on victory than I should have been –
Still isolated in my old disdain
Of claques who always needed to be seen
And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,
Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.
No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.
The little violets’ heads bowed on their stems,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them
I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand
When I would touch them, my whole being rained
Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,
Valleys of longing, tombs, a wind-swept brightness,
And far-off, in a hilly, ominous place,
Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.
SEAMUS HEANEY (1994)
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