Irish poet Seamus Heaney made a previous appearance on this page more than five years ago with his poem, “Doubletake” So here we will engage in our own doubletake of enjoying another of Heaney’s gems, this one from a series of eight 14-line sonnets that he dedicated to his mother under the heading, “Clearances.” The series appeared in his 1998 collection, “Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996.”
Since the sonnets are all printed consecutively, they have no separate title, and are known only by their number and first line. Thus the odd-looking headline atop this post and the poem below, with only the first letter and the proper noun of “Mass” capitalized.
With that bit of context out of the way, we can devote our attention now to the third poem in the sequence, 14 luminous lines that were named in a 2015 poll as Ireland’s “best-loved poem from the past century.” As an indication of just how revered Heaney, poetry in general and this poem in particular is in Ireland, the results of the poll were announced by none other than the country’s president at the time, Michael D. Higgins.
Not a university president or president of a poetry society, but the president of the country.
Imagine that…
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The poem in full:
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
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In a long writing life that ended only with his unexpected death at age 74 in 2013 following a fall outside a restaurant, Heaney scoured ancient myths and the numinous vestiges of his childhood Catholic faith to produce a poetry at once profoundly incarnate and pointing always to a religion beyond rational explanation.
Heaney “puts his trust in the ordinary miracles of human kin and kindness,” in the words of Irish theologian Anne Thurston. Nowhere is that sensibility more exemplified than in “When all the others were away at Mass.”
Is there a more pedestrian activity in all of life than peeling potatoes? This most humdrum activity, avoided whenever possible by sentient creatures the world over, is the setting for a boy to engage with his mother while the rest of the family is off observing the sacrament of Sunday mass.
During which he is, in a phrase drenched in import, “all hers.”
In truth, the reverse is more likely. With the normal competition for mother’s attention gone off to church, the boy’s mother is “all his.”
We don’t know how his mother views this perhaps rare one-on-one with her young son, but we do know she hasn’t taken him out for breakfast or a special pony ride at the county fair. She has instead enlisted him in this most ordinary household task, one of hundreds that must occur every day, mostly going unmentioned and under-appreciated, to keep a family’s life on course.
But the poet, looking back on it many years hence as his mother lays dying, sees nothing ordinary at all. He sees potato peels “Like solder weeping off the soldering iron.” The falling peels beget “Little pleasant splashes” that “would bring us to our senses,” given the propensity of such repetitive work to induce a kind of waking sleep, divorced from the elemental sight, sound and touch of the physical world.
Eyelids may begin drooping, but then: “Splash…” All accompanied by a visual memory, the peels “Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.”
It is a scene combining almost transcendent intimacy with the sacred mundane, made so by the sweet ambrosia of memory and a son’s devotion to the mother who sat with him to peel potatoes in the long ago, a heart-drenched moment preserved in time.
Indulging that moment as her life ebbs, he beholds the “the parish priest at her bedside” who was going “hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying.”
He says nothing more about the priest’s efforts, but he doesn’t have to. The “hammer and tongs” do all the work necessary to underscore where Heaney’s emphasis will instead be in appreciating the life and death of his mother, Margaret Kathleen McCann, and all the small, wordless and wondrous moments he shared with her that helped make him.
She who “bent her head” toward his, their very breaths conjoined, “never closer the whole rest of their lives.”
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All eight “Clearances” sonnets, 112 lines of poetry en toto, are available here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57042/clearances
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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Heart potato by Elisa, Italy https://www.flickr.com/photos/cuorhome/
Heaney portrait oil painting and photo by Arturo Espinosa, Barcelona, Spain https://www.flickr.com/photos/espinosa_rosique/
Needed this, thank you!
Glad to be of service, Deanna. :-)
Seamus Heaney’s “When All the Others Are Away at Mass” is touching. The unremarkable task of peeling potatoes with his mother never lost its clarity despite time’s natural tendency to fog our long-ago recollections. It was a wondrous moment because he didn’t have to share her with others. I remember a parallel incident in my life some 70-years ago. My mom had just finished inking her linoleum block for 150 Christmas cards. She asked me if I wanted to help. Without thought, I said, “Yeah.” She handed me four pounds of 3¢ stamps and said, “Lick.” To this day I can still feel the icky taste of the paste on my lips! It’s a bit like Marcel Proust’s remembrance of things past. Proust was luckier than I. The aroma of freshly baked cookies stirred his childhood memories. Mine, unfortunately, was void of mouth-watering tollhouse chippers; mine was merely a toll.
One word with six letters, Robert: s-p-o-n-g-e..
Nevertheless, this slice of life from some 70 years back makes for a great story today, just as so many unpleasantries & flat-out cluster-f–ks from years past grow ever more riotously funny in the telling later on. “Reframing,” I think they call that…
A perfect example of being present even while “washing the dishes.”
It’s the quiet moments that tell us where the heart lies.
Nicely put, Loren, thank you.