One of my favourite poems by Seamus Heaney is this one from his 1991 collection Seeing Things. This poem is the eighth in the first section (Lightenings) of Part 2 (Squarings).
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I love the dual nature of the marvellous here – that of what we and the monks don’t know (the world of the ship) and that of what the crewmen don’t know (our world). And, of course, by suggesting how it was seen from the crewmen’s perspective, the poem allows us to see our own familiar world anew, making it unfamiliar – even for a moment – and marvellous to behold. I am reminded of something Alasdair MacIntyre says about the educated mind and perplexity:
Our students need, we need, to learn to be constantly suprised, astonished, and perplexed. And it is a great defect in too many of our students and in ourselves that they and we do not find enough of the world astonishing or puzzling … (page 2, 2001).
One reason we don’t feel astonished or perplexed, MacIntyre thinks, is because we are accustomed to seeing things as ‘puzzles internal to and to be solved by means of the enquiries of the specialized disciplines’. Instead, we need ‘to know how to bring the various findings and methods of different specialized disciplines to bear on that perplexity’ (page 2). This, of course, is another argument for a wider and richer university education, one that offers more intensive training in one or more academic discipline.
References
Alasdair MacIntyre (2001). ‘Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices’, in Robert E. Sullivan (ed.) Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–21.
Seamus Heaney (1991). Seeing Things. London: Faber.
(Picture of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009.)
