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Forgot

PROGRAM NOTE
These two Seamus Heaney settings might seem odd companions: one is a retelling of a Nigerian creation myth, the other delves into the spiritual and cosmic consequences of an Irish monk's small act of compassion. They share a direct narrative contour, furthermore each tale is rooted in forgetfulness; the first with dark results for mankind, the second as the result of holding an agonizing posture past the point of agony. 

The vocal line for A Dog was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also is quite plain and matter-of-fact, accompanied sparely for the most part. The only percussion used is the udu, a Nigerian ceramic drum, and the piano is prepared to simulate the sound of a mbira—an African 'thumb-piano'. 

In St. Kevin and the Blackbird the vocal line is more elaborate and deliberately references Celtic modal scales and melodic cadences. The only percussion in this song is the bodhran (an Irish frame drum) and the piano is used as a plucked instrument. This song opens with a welter of spinning lines which gradually slow down and settle into featurelessness, just as Kevin's act itself moves through pain to meditation to transcendence. 

TEXTS
A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also
When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back to the same old roosts
And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu.)

But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At an other dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings,’ he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roosts not trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.


St Kevin and the Blackbird
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 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.
Seamus Heaney (b.1939)