“St Kevin and the Blackbird” by Seamus Heaney
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
Heaney, Seamus. 1996.
“St Kevin and the Blackbird.” in The Spirit Level. London: Faber and Faber
This poem stumped me when I first read it. In so few lines, Seamus Heaney presents a compelling interpretation of our connection to God, the natural world, and earthly burdens. But the poem seems irreconcilably simple. It describes one man, Saint Kevin of Glendalough, losing his sense of self when a blackbird nests in his outstretched palm. The diction is relaxed, the approach is relatable, and the telling is clear. At the heart of this feigned simplicity is the poem’s remarkable structure, whose subtleties give the reader lyrical access to St Kevin’s spiritual transformation.
Four equal parts make up the poem: two halves subdivided into two sections. The first half recounts the tale of a blackbird nesting in St Kevin’s palm. The second half breaks the fourth wall, entertaining – and dismissing – reasonable concerns about the story’s feasibility.
The beginning of the first half presents St Kevin in hermetic prayer, fervent in his attempts to connect with God. The corresponding structure is enjambed and crowded, and its overflowing lines convey St Kevin’s ill-at-ease disposition as he prays in a cell too cramped for both arms.
Despite the well-guided intentions of Kevin’s prayers, divine revelation rarely comes through an expected medium. God sees St Kevin’s discomfort and presents Himself as a delicate animal, a mother searching for home. From having arms “stiff / As a crossbeam” to holding his hand “like a branch, ” the bird’s nesting literally recasts St Kevin as a cradle for fledgling life. It shakes him from his isolation and throws him into the great and natural déroulement of our world.
This is the fundamental tension of St Kevin’s story: a bird nesting is as commonplace as it is the most remarkable, awe-inspiring, speechlessness-inducing, miraculous miracle imaginable. It embodies the interdependence of being and the marvelously complex yet crystalline layers that God’s world harbours ad infinitum. It is God’s omnipresence in a natural world we often take for granted, if not exploit. It is the miracle of life.
Heaney promptly ruptures this revelation with inquiry’s creeping doubt. The second half of this poem breaks the fourth wall when the narrator concedes that “the whole thing’s imagined anyhow. ” This surprising split, coupling text and interpretation, reveals Heaney’s overarching form: this piece is a homily in poetic form.
The admitted fiction deepens the impact of the story’s message. While the miracles of holy people often overshadow their basic mortality, the narrator questions St Kevin’s 11humanity directly. The audience is asked to question what exactly they just read (How unbelievable was that?!), while common sense dictum suggests that a bird nesting in your palm for weeks is as miraculous as it should be physically agonizing. These questions emphasize St Kevin’s reinvention by opposing it. St Kevin’s tenderness is not miraculous despite his humanity, but because of it.
The truths thrust upon St Kevin are, fortunately for us, thrust upon Laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature Seamus Heaney as well. Heaney wields the poem’s structure to capture and convey St Kevin’s transfiguration. The first half, focused on St Kevin, begins with his discomfort, and finishes with his new clear-eyed generosity. The second half, focused on the reader, begins with contrarian logic, and finishes by divulging the spiritual truths that render it moot. Each half mirrors the other. From confusion to transcendence, their subdivisions align in message and depart in subject. Reader and Saint undergo the same transformation.
The audience-directed questions are both reasonable and fallacious, a duality symptomatic of the ambivalence of the blackbird’s arrival. Faith is the ultimate differentiator and the nexus of St Kevin’s revelation. He could not have known, without faith, whether the blackbird was a gift or a condemnation. Faith allowed St Kevin to overcome the pains of his newfound arborification and instilled in him a sense of obligation, that he “must hold his hand” instead of shooing the bird away. Faith was the precondition of and catalyst for his change.
Faith, as the mirrored structure dictates, is just as vital to the reader’s fulfillment. The existential truths we seek saturate our daily lives, Heaney suggests, and the only difference between us and St Kevin is the faith to recognize them when they land in the palm of our hand.