Why are you arguing a case for them?
Forget them, and remember what you said
You’d do for me. You made a promise
To take me with you when you were going home
To Scyros. And that’s what you must do.
Otherwise, you’ll be tainted with their guilt
Just by association.
Neoptolemus
I can see that.
But even so, the signs are that the gods
Want you to go to Troy, and me with you.
Philoctetes
How can you bear to take their side like that?
Neoptolemus
It’s not their side.
It’s what our fates involve.
Philoctetes
This is real turncoat talk. Have you no shame?
Neoptolemus
What’s the shame in working for a good thing?
Philoctetes
But good for who? Me or my enemies?
Neoptolemus
Am I your friend or not?
Philoctetes
I thought you were.
Neoptolemus
Stop just licking your wounds. Start seeing things.
Philoctetes
There’s danger in all this somewhere. I can sense it.
Neoptolemus
The danger is you’ll break if you don’t bend,
So I give up. From now on, you can live
With every consequence of your decision.
Philoctetes
Whatever’s been laid out, I’m ready for it.
But there’s consequence to your own endeavours:
You gave your word – you pledged with your hand
And promised you’d take me home.
So do that now.
Restore your good name. Bury the name of Troy.
Neoptolemus
I gave my word.
So. Fair is fair.
We go.
Philoctetes
We go?
Neoptolemus
Gather yourself. Come on.
Philoctetes
I can’t believe it.
Neoptolemus
The Greeks.
No, wait.
The Greeks’ll be after us.
Philoctetes
Forget them. You’ll be safe.
Neoptolemus
But the country won’t be.
Philoctetes
I’ll be in your country.
Neoptolemus
And what good’s that?
Philoctetes
Hercules’s bow!
Neoptolemus
The bow. We have it still.
Philoctetes
Hercules’s bow is miraculous
And will save us every time.
Neoptolemus
Then so be it.
This time your farewell is farewell for good.
Philoctetes repeats some part of his original rite of departure. Perhaps he raises both arms, perhaps prostrates himself. A silence then, music perhaps also. Then an eerie, soundless (at first) flash and flame; mountain-rumble far off; an air of danger, settling into a kind of threatened, pre-thunder stillness. Darker stage, a kind of purpled twilight. Chorus in spotlight, positioned as at end of prologue.
Chorus
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
The full thunderclap and eruption-effects occur. Then a lingering, wavering aftermath of half-light. Brilliant spots find Philoctetes and Chorus.
Philoctetes (crying out)
Hercules:
I saw him in the fire.
Hercules
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.
Chorus (ritually clamant, as Hercules)
I have opened the closed road
Between the living and the dead
To make the right road clear to you.
I am the voice of Hercules now.
Here on earth my labours were
The stepping-stones to upper air:
Lives that suffer and come right
Are backlit by immortal light.
Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,
Go and be cured and capture Troy.
Asclepius will make you whole,
Relieve your body and your soul.
Go, with your bow. Conclude the sore
And cruel stalemate of our war.
Win by fair combat. But know to shun
Reprisal killings when that’s done.
Then take just spoils and sail at last
Out of the bad dream of your past.
Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.
Shoot arrows in my memory.
And, Neoptolemus, you must be
His twin in arms and archery.
Marauding lions on that shore,
Troy’s nemesis and last nightmare.
But when the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for the gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.
Philoctetes
Something told me this was going to happen.
Something told me the channels were going to open.
It’s as if a thing I knew and had forgotten
Came back completely clear.
All that you say
Is like a dream to me and I obey.
Neoptolemus
And so will I.
Chorus
Then go, immediately.
The winds are blowing and the tides are high.
Philoctetes (in a sort of daze, on all fours perhaps, or clasping an upright support: knocked out, flattened)
But I can’t believe I’m going. My head’s light at the thought of a different ground and a different sky. I’ll never get over Lemnos; this island’s going to be the keel under me and the ballast inside me. I’m like a fossil that’s being carried away, I’m nothing but cave stones and damp walls and an old mush of dead leaves. The sound of waves in draughty passages. A cliff that’s wet with spray on a winter’s morning. I feel like the sixth sense of the world. I feel I’m a part of what was always meant to happen, and is happening now at last. Come on, my friends.
Chorus
Now it’s high watermark
And floodtide in the heart
And time to go.
The sea-nymphs in the spray
Will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?
Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk
And the half-true rhyme is love.
About the author
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.
By the same author
poetry
DEATH OF A NATURALIST
DOOR INTO THE DARK
WINTERING OUT
NORTH
FIELD WORK
STATION ISLAND
SWEENEY ASTRAY
SWEENEY’S FLIGHT (with photographs by Rachel Giese)
THE HAW LANTERN
NEW SELECTED POEMS 1966–1987
SEEING THINGS
LAMENTS BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI (translated with Stanisław Barańczak)
THE SPIRIT LEVEL
OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996
BEOWULF
ELECTRIC LIGHT
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES
HUMAN CHAIN
NEW SELECTED POEMS 1988–2013
AENEID: BOOK VI
THE RATTLE BAG (edited with Ted Hughes)
THE SCHOOL BAG (edited with Ted Hughes)
prose
PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968–1978
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE
THE REDRESS OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES
FINDERS KEEPERS: SELECTED PROSE 1971–2001
STEPPING STONES (with Dennis O’Driscoll)
plays
THE BURIAL AT THEBES
Copyright
Paperback edition first published in 1990
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Cased edition first published simultaneously by Field Day Theatre Company, Derry
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 2018
The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The quotation from W. H. Auden on p. vii is from The English Auden edited by Edward Mendelson, reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34619–6