A Call

Seamus Heaney · Leaving Cert Poetry

A Call is seventeen lines long and almost nothing happens in it: a woman answers the phone, goes out to fetch a man from the garden, and the man comes back and speaks. What Seamus Heaney does with that empty minute on the line is the reason the poem is on your course.

A Call Seamus Heaney: the whole poem happens in the wait

The poem comes from The Spirit Level (1996), and the set-up could not be plainer. The speaker rings a house, a woman answers, and the man he wants is outside because the weather is good. Heaney never tells you who that man is, and you should not guess. What fills the speaker’s head while he waits is the poem: a man kneeling among vegetables, then clocks ticking in an empty hall, then a thought about death that arrives before he can stop it.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Stanza 1 · Lines 1 to 14

Lines 1 to 3 are pure telephone: a woman’s voice, inside quotation marks, asking the speaker to wait while she fetches the man, who is outside in the good weather. There is no scene-setting and the register is flat and spoken. Her phrase in line 3 makes the gardening sound like nothing, and the poem then spends ten lines on that nothing.

Line 4 is short and pushed out to the right of the page, marking the moment the speaker stops listening and starts seeing: everything after it is imagined, not witnessed. Lines 5 to 8 put the man on his hands and knees at the leek rig, a raised ridge in a vegetable plot, and line 6 gives three verbs in a row for a man checking each plant by hand. Watch the two adjectives closing line 8: they describe growth that is weak and has no leaves, and would do as well for a failing body.

• “each little weed-root break”A tiny piece of garden violence, and the compound noun makes you feel the root snap. Use it for the way the poem carries mortality inside a detail that never mentions death.
• Line 10 adds that he is rueful too, then stops in a row of dots before saying why. Two feelings sit in one moment and Heaney will not sort them out for you.

Line 11 is the second short line, and it starts the way the poem’s biggest thought will start: the speaker finds himself listening. The phrasing is passive on purpose: he is not deciding to notice the clocks, he is being pulled towards them. Lines 12 to 14 give what comes down the abandoned line: hall clocks, a phone lying unattended, clock faces of mirror glass in which he could almost catch his own reflection.

• “The amplified grave ticking”Grave means solemn and it means a burial place, and Heaney never flags the double meaning. Explaining both senses precisely earns far more than naming auditory imagery.

Stanza 2 · Lines 15 to 16

Two lines, and they name what the first stanza has been assembling. Line 15 repeats the construction from line 11, the speaker again finding himself thinking rather than choosing to. Then line 16 lands the allusion. Everyman is the central figure of a medieval morality play in which Death arrives to summon him to account for his life, and the name stands for any ordinary person.

• “This is how Death would summon Everyman.”The poem’s thesis in one line, and the capital letter turns an abstraction into a figure arriving. Nothing before it is decoration: the clocks, the kneeling and the weeds pulled up have been building this.

Stanza 3 · Line 17

One line on its own, and it breaks the spell. The man picks up, says something, and the meditation collapses into ordinary talk. Nearly is the most important word in the poem: having just imagined this call as Death’s, the speaker comes within one word of telling the man he loves him, and then does not. The love is real, it stays unsaid, and that is the argument.

• “Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.”Plain monosyllables, no drama, and the poem lands on a word that cancels the declaration. Build a conclusion on it for almost any question here.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Mortality hidden inside the ordinary. Nothing in lines 1 to 14 is unusual: a phone, a garden, a hallway. Yet the vocabulary of decline in line 8, the root breaking in line 9 and the ticking in line 12 keep death present without naming it.
• The love that is nearly said. Heaney writes a family where the feeling is complete and never spoken, and he treats that as ordinary rather than tragic.
• Allusion as a way of naming the unnameable. The speaker cannot say what frightens him in his own words, so in line 16 he reaches for a play written centuries earlier. The borrowed figure gives him distance enough to think the thought.

Sound and image

• The pun in line 12. One word means solemn and burial at once, and the line never admits it.
• Two unfinished sentences. Lines 10 and 14 both trail away in dots, so the poem twice refuses to finish a thought before line 17 refuses again.
• Two short lines pushed right. Lines 4 and 11 sit apart on the page, each beginning a shift of attention.
• Speech rhythm. No rhyme, no fixed metre, sentences running over the line breaks: the poem sounds like a man talking, which stops the Everyman idea turning grand.

The voice you hear

A Call never raises its voice. It starts conversational and unremarkable, tightens through the garden description into unease, goes hushed and almost formal for two lines at the allusion, then drops back to plainness. That fall in register is deliberate: say so. The restraint is not coldness: it is a speaker who feels a great deal and has no vocabulary for it, so the feeling comes out sideways, in the care he takes over an imagined row of leeks.

Taking the poem into the exam

In A Call, argue that an ordinary minute is made to carry a full-sized thought about death, and that the method is indirection: the poem means most where it says least. Build from line 12 for the pun, line 16 for the allusion, line 17 for where it lands. Within Heaney’s own selection, pair it with The Harvest Bow on love for an older relative shown through an action rather than a statement, and with The Tollund Man on using an outside figure to shape a meditation on death.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• One word in line 12 has two meanings. Which word, and what are both?
• Why does Heaney use the same construction in line 11 and again in line 15?
• Is it more honest, or more of a failure, that he never actually says it in line 17?
• Which does more work on you, the weeding in lines 5 to 10 or the clocks in lines 12 to 14?

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