Pilgrim Ways

at another sound: a crowd of shawled women were wading the young corn, their skirts brushing softly.

Their motion saddened morning. it whispered to the silence, “Pray for us, pray for us,” it conjured through the air until the field was full of half remembered faces, a loosed congregation that straggled past and on.

As I drew behind them I was a fasted pilgrim, light-headed, leaving home to face into my station.

As he makes his ethereal pilgrimage, Heaney recounts a series of dream meetings at each of the pilgrim stations, one is with “a bleeding, pale faced boy, plastered in mud,” Heaney‟s cousin, Colum McCartney, who was shot through the head by Loyalist paramilitary terrorists while driving home one Sunday in County Armagh. Yet, this does not drive Heaney into the expression of blood curdling imagery or call to arms but into an encounter - at the end of the poem - with the Irish writer, James Joyce, who warns against the solution of tribalistic tit for tat vengeance: “ You are raking at dead fires, a waste of time for somebody your age. That subject people stuff is a cod‟s game, infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage. You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing”. Joyce also encourages the poet to take an isolated secularised road away from the orthodox Catholic pilgrim path: You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous Take off from here. And don‟t be so earnest, Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. Let go, let fly, forget.

Forgetting is not in the Irish character nor, I daresay, are most people inclined to simply forget. Our ghosts have a habit of appearing out of the shadows when they are least expected.

Heaney chooses to recall figures from his personal past whose memories had grown dim. For instance, in Section IV of the poem Heaney encounters a priest called Terry Keenan, who was a seminarian when Heaney first knew him, and who died on the foreign missions shortly after ordination. Then come ghosts of teachers, mentors, friends who have died, and a hunger-striker who died at Long Kesh in 1981. Through the medium of his poetry and his ghosts Heaney takes us through the introspective process of soul-searching and examination of conscience. Everything is here, from the youthful pangs of guilt over fatal sexual attractions to the agonising over whether unwillingness to bear arms was conscionable in the face of the death of friends and family; and the deep urge which we all have to be forgiven: “Forgive the way I have lived indifferent - forgive my timid circumspect involvement,” I surprised myself by saying. “Forgive my eye”, he said, “all that‟s above my head.” And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.”