Today’s entry for
National Poetry Month comes from Seámus Heaney. Two years ago I gave you his
heartbreaking “Requiem
for the Croppies”, and mentioned his linguistic mastery, which included
lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For this round, I’ve chosen “The
Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
All you need to know
about Philoctetes is that he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors
for Helen, and thus honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was
stranded on the island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different
reasons, but all seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence
offended the Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they
wouldn’t win the war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on
Lemnos. As you might imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like
existence in the intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of
handing over the sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was
particularly pissed off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to
give up the artifacts and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would
become a great hero, a key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him
killing Paris, the little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in
the actual Trojan Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake
through it.)
So there are a lot of symbolic
moving parts to this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the
debasement of a warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a
permanent cure, which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.
Heaney wrote his version
in 1990 as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its
relevance to the situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like
Mandela—Heaney urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore”
with “cures and healing wells.” I believe these are thoughts we should keep
before us in these times.
“The Cure at Troy”
Human beings suffer,
They torture one
another,
They get hurt and get
hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars
together.
A hunger-striker’s
father
Stands in the graveyard
dumb.
The police widow in
veils
Faints at the funeral
home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the
grave.
But then, once in a
lifetime
The longed-for tidal
wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history
rhyme.
So hope for a great
sea-change
On the far side of
revenge.
Believe that further
shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing
wells.
Call miracle
self-healing:
The utter,
self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the
mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from
the sky
That means someone is
hearing
The outcry and the
birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
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