I HAVE been rereading Seamus Heaney’s 1972 collection Wintering Out. It amazes me to think that it has been 52 years in the world. Indeed, my own well-worn copy is the 1974 reprint, bought new; so I’ve had this book since my teenage years, and yet it somehow feels still fresh and new, because the poetry is still doing new work in me: uncovering layers, evoking visions, bringing me afresh into what T. S. Eliot called “the present moment of the past”.

I picked the book up again, as I had recently found myself haunted by the phrase from which the collection takes its title, and I wanted to see it again in context, though even out of context it’s a telling and apposite turn of words. That remembered phrase is:

He is wintering out
the backend of a bad year.

These two lines seem especially apposite for this year, as we ponder the calamitous state of international affairs, not to mention the crises that afflict so many of our great institutions: the NHS, the BBC, and my own beloved C of E. All seemed so stable and simply “given”, when I was growing up; now all three, in their different ways, are fighting for their lives, hunkering down, hanging on, wintering out the back end of a bad year.

The two lines I was remembering are the opening lines of a poem, “Servant Boy”, whom Heaney imagines

swinging a hurricane-lamp
Through some outhouse

a jobber among shadows.

And maybe Heaney’s imagined, unnoticed servant, taken for granted, is a good figure to remember; for it is only the unnoticed servants, the anonymous workers, jobbing among shadows, the people that make for a long continuity, who will sustain and redeem the institutions they serve.

For another great theme of Heaney’s collection is the continued presence of a seemingly disregarded past, waiting to be acknowledged and let in again. There is a perfect emblem of this in his poem “The Last Mummer”. In this poem, Heaney imagines a lone mummer standing behind a group who are all watching TV, ignoring him:

The luminous screen in the corner
Has them charmed in a ring

so he stands a long time behind them.
St George, Beelzebub and Jack Straw

can’t be conjured from the mist.

We’ve often had a mummers play around Christmas time in North Walsham (Poet’s Corner, 6 January 2023); but, this season, for various reasons, it’s not happening here, though I hope it will elsewhere. Heaney imagines the thwarted, ignored mummer, with all the archetypes that he embodies, beating his stick at a closed gate:

He catches the stick in his fist

And, shrouded, starts beating
The bars of the gate.

Maybe we’ll hear that urgent knocking, maybe we’ll turn from the luminous screen — or screens, as they are now — and make room, at last, for those archetypal and potentially renewing elements of our past, and of our own souls, exiled in an age of distraction.