First posted 21` December 2014

The Given Note
By Seamus Heaney

On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

Comments:
That extraordinary inventor, Nicola Tesla tells the tale of how he was out for a walk one day, when suddenly, his mind elsewhere, he understood precisely how the modern electric motor would work.  We, nowadays, attribute the motor’s invention to Tesla.  Tesla himself believed, indeed insisted, that the entire idea literally popped into his head ‘out of the ether’ and that he was merely a conduit.  This was not false modesty.  It was Tesla’s honest belief that all information, all knowledge is here, all around us and that ‘genius’, whatever it may be, is an almost accidental tapping into that knowledge.

Jaqueline Du Pre, the cellist, had the sublime capacity to subtly alter and add to a piece of music, as if Mozart or Bach were whispering in her ear.

Listen to Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan at their best, and, their voices, interweaving with the other instruments, become an inspired part of the music itself.  This is a rare gift

Heaney’s poem deals with this condition.  Monks, a thousand or more years ago, sought inspiration living as hermits on the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland.  Their ‘dry-stone huts’ are still there.

Heaney requires his violinist, in order to hear his own music, to imitate the action of the hermit, and take up residence in the Blaskets, if not literally, then in his mind.

The poet is saying too that the ‘unpractised’, the journeymen violinist, is ‘fiddling easy’, and constitutes a refusal to take on the responsibilities of his craft. Only by dedication, by taking to the Blaskets, can something miraculous be achieved

‘…For he had gone alone into the island…’  ‘..He took it out of the wind in mid-Atlantic…’

Very few of us have the courage for ‘the road less travelled’

The ‘..others who followed..’ heard ‘..nothing like melody…’.  Like the ‘Druids’ who flock to Stonehenge every year, then go back to work on Monday ….

Thank God that so much courage exists in the world.  Without it, music, art and literature would cease to exist.

Ira Maine, Poetry Editor