For our Stanzas web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a brief excerpt of a poem. This week, James Davis May—whose poems “Our Patron Saint of Happy Hour” and "The Patron Saint of Cancellations" appears in our Fall 2024 issue—considers “Oysters” by Seamus Heaney.
If I were to draw up a list of my twenty favorite stanzas, at least five of these would come from Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters.” The stanzas in this poem are less like little rooms and more like microclimates, or, to use a more apt comparison, a progression of waves, each one cresting in a different but no less powerful way. Heaney has called the poem “an escape into a kind of freedom,” but that escape is not a clean break. He wrote “Oysters” in the 1970s, at a time when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their height.
The opening stanza comes about as close as any other piece of writing I can think of to capturing the sensuousness of eating oysters. That sensuousness is as much in the music of the words as it is in the literal description: “Our shells clacked on the plates. / My tongue was a filling estuary, / My palate hung with starlight.” The bluntness of the first line—shells, clacked, plates—hits up against the smoothness of “filling estuary” in a mimicry of the somewhat contradictory experience of eating an oyster: sipping the briny, almost-not-solid innards from their cement-like shell. But an even larger contradiction is at play. As much as the poem is about “Laying down a perfect memory / In the cool of thatch and crockery,” it’s also about violence.
In Two Cities, Adam Zagajewski argues that “two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony.” Ecstasy, Zagajewski argues, “is tied to an unconditional acceptance of the world, even what is cruel and absurd. Irony, in contrast, is the artistic representation of thought, criticism, doubt.” Heaney puts Zagajewski’s theory into action. The two elements roll over each other in “Oysters,” ecstasy surging in the first and third stanzas, while irony swells in the second and fourth—the fifth and final stanza almost reaches an equilibrium.
The top spot on my list of favorite stanzas would go to the second stanza of this poem for how it introduces and then amplifies the ironic element, key to differentiating “an escape into a kind of freedom” from pure escapism. Here’s the second stanza:
Alive and violated
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
The first three lines are a fireworks display of fricatives and plosives—all those v and b sounds. This turbulence resolves in the fourth line with the smoother, somewhat Whitmanian “philandering sigh of ocean,” only to return in the heavy stresses of “ripped and shucked and scattered.” Violence here is described violently. Of course, I don’t like the stanza because of the violence; rather, I admire the fierceness of Heaney’s self-reflection, his willingness to be uncomfortable. In the book-length interview Stepping Stones, Heaney has this to say about several poems, including “Oysters”: “The writing of certain poems took me to the bottom of something inside myself, something inchoate but troubled.” He adds that “those poems arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring. There’s something unoppressed about them.” My hunch is that only by embracing Zagajewski’s “contradictory elements” was Heaney able to access that freedom. Ecstasy saves the poem from anhedonia, while irony propels it away from frivolity and toward something more lasting.