On a summer’s evening in 2010, Seamus Heaney read his poems to a large and admiring crowd at St. Oswald’s Church in the center of Grasmere Village in the eastern part of the Lake District. The church stood not far from the cottage where, a little more than two hundred years before, William Wordsworth lived and wrote with the company and encouragement of his sister Dorothy. Their graves lie in the churchyard there. The reading was arranged in conjunction with the annual Wordsworth Summer Conference, and afterward, at a dinner in Heaney’s honor, I shyly asked the poet if he would sign my copy of his latest collection, District and Circle. His generous inscription reads:
for Erica—
in the windermere
(mistake) district—
fondest wishes—
Seamus Heaney
Grasmere July 2010
Heaney, the ever-humane wordsmith, was presumably trying to personalize his note by associating the physical “lake district” within which we found ourselves with the title of his book. But his chance mistake—“windermere” for “lake”—put an end to the pun, highlighting instead the fallibility to which all people, even famous poets, are subject. Heaney modestly acknowledges his small “(mistake)” and then takes a second stab at place. “Grasmere July 2010” reads as a declaration of regained footing.
But 24 pages into District and Circle, there is further trouble. In his short poem “Wordsworth’s Skates,” which commemorates The Prelude’s ice-skating episode and was initially published in the New Yorker, Heaney again bungles the locale:
Star in the window.
Slate scrape.
Bird or branch?
Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
Not the bootless runners lying
toppled In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its
curve And left it scored.
Heaney spins an extraordinary image of the young Wordsworth in his final three lines from ordinary elements: star, slate, skates. Neil Corcoran has described this compositional tactic elsewhere in Heaney’s work as a process of “revelation” whereby “the close act of attention, which is always firstly the manifestation of descriptive capacity, is extended beyond itself into an excess or superabundance in which the initial object or image becomes vision.” The visionary capacity in the final stanza is made possible by the mundane observations that precede it. But a geographical error in line 8 puts the poet himself on thin ice.
As readers of The Prelude may remember, it was almost certainly Esthwaite Water, near Hawkshead, where he went to school, on which Wordsworth skated as a child, not the much larger Windermere, which is farther afield and rarely freezes. Wordsworth mentions Esthwaite multiple times in The Prelude in connection with his childhood; it was on the shores of this lake when he was “not nine years old” that the young poet discovered a “heap of garments” belonging to a drowned man. And less than a hundred lines after his skating passage in book 1, Wordsworth recalls playing games indoors when “From Esthwaite’s neighboring Lake the splitting ice” sounded “distant yellings” that he memorably compares to the “noise of wolves / . . . on the Bothnic Main.” Esthwaite—a small and relatively shallow lake—was frequently covered with ice, often for several weeks during winter. As was the case with Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” the fact-checkers at the New Yorker either did not pick up on the error or did not care.
One wants to agree with them and say immediately of Heaney’s mistake, if I may presume to call it that, “of course it does not matter.” But doesn’t it matter a little? After all, Heaney was a poet who cared deeply about places and their names. Poems like “Anahorish,” “Broagh,” and “Toome” demonstrate his attentiveness to the specific locations connected with his own childhood and the words and sounds that describe them. He also knew how important such details were to Wordsworth, who wrote, among many other poems about place, “Poems on the Naming of Places,” and was a “local” poet in more ways than one.
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