seamus heaney sense of place essay

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Second Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture Focuses on Sense of Place

Posted on: 07 September 2015

The second annual Seamus Heaney lecture was delivered by Chris Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, on Friday September 4th in the the University of Notre Dame.

Hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, at the University of Notre Dame, the lecture was entitled Heaney, Place and Property and focused on the complex relationship Heaney’s poetry had with places of writing, places of memory, places of being.

Taking as its starting point the recognition that the poem chosen as Ireland’s favourite in RTÉ;’s “Poem for Ireland” earlier this year, “Clearances III”, is rooted in a sense of home, the 2015 Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture looked at the idea that the current homelessness crisis in Ireland need not be understood purely in economic terms.

Instead, he argued that resituating Heaney’s poetry of the 1980s and 1990s in longer-term understanding of property in Irish culture opens up new ways of thinking about some of Heaney’s most popular and enduring poems as responses to a more profound transformation in Irish culture over recent decades.

“It has long been recognised – since at least Heaney’s own early lecture, “The Sense of Place” – that Seamus Heaney’s poetry has carried out a series of complex negotiations with place: places of writing, places of memory, places of being. It may be simply stated that Heaney’s poetry and thought are grounded in place – but not in any simple way. “The places I go back to have not failed”, he writes in “Squarings xli” from Seeing Things (1991); “But will not last…”.  

“In the end, what emerges is a new way of thinking about homelessness in contemporary Ireland, not purely in economic or social terms, but as a condition to which poetry provides a response,” explained Professor Morash.

Professor Morash was appointed as the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity in 2014. The Professorship was named in honour of one of Ireland's greatest poets and Nobel Laureate who had a long standing relationship with Trinity. 

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Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing

As the title indicates, this book examines the attitude to place and home that is enunciated in the work of Seamus Heaney, as well as looking at the place or role of his writing within notions of the political. Given the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the contextual background of much of Heaney’s writing, this book examines the relationships between Heaney’s texts and this context. I will argue that, far from accepting the cultural and religious ‘givens’ of his heritage, Heaney’s writing sets out a more inclusive notion of identity, which is ethical, in the sense used by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. He is constantly probing the nature of selfhood and of self-identity as well as the relationship between that selfhood and different forms of otherness, and his work sets up a dialectical interaction between these positions that is ultimately transformative. His work as viewed as driven by the desire to create a space where notions of Irishness are pluralized and opened to different influences, and which is predicated on the ‘an erotics of the future’) where ‘whatever is given / can always be reimagined’. This is the first thematic study of Heaney’s work in terms of its creation of a politics of identity, as well as being the first to discuss his critique of notions of home and place, both terms that are important in Irish literature and politics. It is the most contemporary study to date, dealing with all aspects of his writing – poetry, prose and translations – up to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict. It also examines Heaney’s engagement with the issue of Ireland as a postcolonial society. The book examines Heaney as a cultural thinker, whose work combines the aesthetic and the political, using one mode to critique the other. It is the first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, suggesting parallels between the writing of Heaney and Derrida. It offers a reading of his most famous book, North, which takes issue with David Lloyd’s now canonical reading of Heaney, by seeing the book as opening a dialogue with other traditions.

Related Papers

Eugene O'Brien

This book traces the aesthetic epistemology of Seamus Heaney, by placing it within the context of the writings of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. Examining all of his writing to date – poetry, prose and translations – this study examines Heaney’s probing of issues of selfhood and alterity as well as the parallels between Heaney’s and Derrida’s critiques of essentialist aspects of identity. Both writers create plural and complex structures within which binary oppositions can interact and inform each other, in the name of what Heaney describes as the need to accommodate ‘two opposing notions of truthfulness simultaneously’. The book also examines the ethical aspects of Heaney’s writing in terms of his creation of structures whereby selfhood and alterity can be transformed into the ‘through-other’, through the creation of complex cognitive structures like his ‘field of force’ and ‘quincunx’. These are traced through both explanatory prose, and emblematic poetry, and the notion of absence as a creative source is paralleled with Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. The intersection between aesthetics and politics in Heaney’s work is probed, with parallels between Heaney and Derrida in terms of concepts of identity, responsibility, liminality and the fluidity of borders being discussed. Finally, the Nobel lectures of Yeats and Heaney are examined in order to trace the complex relationship between these two writers in terms of the ethical similarities of their views on the role of the aesthetic with respect to the politic, as well as in terms of their attitudes to the complexities of identity.

Seamus Heaney’s development, as I will argue in this study, parallels that of the Irish psyche over the past fifty years. Heaney has progressed in terms of his thinking from a relatively simplistic and conventional perspective into a far more cosmopolitan and complex view of his own identity. His developing writing, encompassing, as it does, influences from different cultures, languages and texts, enacts a movement from “prying into roots” and “fingering slime” to an embrace of different aspects of European and world culture which has strong parallels with the development of Ireland itself. I will be examining how Heaney progressed from a personal vision of digging into his familial past to a more Jungian view of digging into the historical consciousness of his psyche. However, I will also be suggesting that to see North in particular, and Heaney’s writing in general, as in any way a simplistic account of a nationalistic outlook is to misread them completely. I will argue that these books adopt a far more complex attitude to issues of nationalism, Catholicism and Irishness. From being a backward, inward-looking country, obsessed with the past and with a sense of inferiority, Ireland has begun, in the words of Robert Emmet, to take her place among the nations of the earth. By this, I do not just mean in economic terms, as evidenced by the much lauded Celtic Tiger phenomenon. I also mean in cultural, social and intellectual terms, as we become more confident of our place in Europe, and of our position as a bridge between Europe and America. Because the thrust of my argument suggests a parallel between the development of Heaney’s own thought and the developing sense of self-consciousness and sophistication of contemporary Ireland, my approach will be broadly chronological, grouping different works into different stages of development. While such a procedure is necessarily arbitrary, nevertheless I feel that there is an internal coherence in the groups of texts which I have chosen.

There has been a lot of material written about contemporary Ireland and its cultural state, the Celtic Tiger is a much discussed animal. However, the insights of contemporary literary and cultural theory, most notably those of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, are notable by their absence, and it is this theoretical perspective – written without undue use of jargon – which will allow for a different and new perspective on issue of contemporary Ireland. Critical theory is a notable absence in contemporary Irish cultural criticism. With the exceptions of feminism and postcolonial theory, there has been an absence of analysis from the points of view of postmodern, deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory. These paradigms, used in tandem with textual examples, allow for a fresh, future-oriented, Ireland reading of aspects of Ireland as a cultural text. While there has been much opinion on the nature of Ireland and the Celtic Tiger, there has been little sustained cultural analysis and this book will bring together the cultural and the literary in order to suggest an overview of Ireland now in a secularized, globalized and affluent context. This book rereads aspects of Irish studies through the medium of literary and cultural theory. It looks at the imbrication of texts and their contexts and analyses how the writer both reflects and transforms aspects of his or her cultural milieu as well as looking at the cultural contexts themselves. The essays examine literary texts by W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Sean Ó’Faoláin, media texts like Father Ted, American Beauty and a series of Guinness Advertisements, as well as cultural and political texts like globalisation, religion, the Provisional IRA, media treatment of murders in Ireland. It also looks at aspects of the postcolonial and feminist paradigms and makes use of a theoretical matrix based on the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

This article examines the influence of Virgil upon the poetry of Seamus Heaney through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. The paper argues that the present and future are influenced by spectres of the past through what Derrida would term hauntology. Heaney's later poetry inherits deeply from what has come before it in terms of classical mythology. Similarities are drawn between contemporary Northern Ireland and that of the classical past in the poetry and it is the circular, repetitive nature of history that enables the poet to locate a plateau, outside his primary world, to view the events of his present world.

The Sewanee Review

Jonathan Allison

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Seamus Heaney : a collection of critical essays

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Jill Wharton April 2021

Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney invoked medieval literary allusion, adaptation, and translation to punctuate his iterations of Irish history. [1]  And not, as one might expect, to catalyze a nostalgic sense of lost authenticity, but extensively and strategically, to transformative structural ends. To elucidate a ‘transformation’ is to speak of the coeval nature of latency, of potentiality, alongside those qualities that outlast an ending. As Heaney’s translation of  Sweeney Astray  opens: “the why and wherefore of [one’s] fits and trips, and  also  what happened afterwards.” To  transform  is supremely a matter of artifice: to incarnate a subject’s alterity requires exposing narrative architecture, a willingness to display ‘character’ as an instance of technê, through which modes of art fluctuate or combine. The result for Heaney is often an episodic, associative, rhetorical structure designed to privilege perception over physicality, thus dilating the historical present. 

Part lunatic, part prophet, mad Sweeney-the-bird-man is both physically and spiritually translated from historical figure to mythic archetype and in his metamorphosis he becomes the suffering vatic poet. “The world goes on but I return / to haunt myself. I freeze and burn. / I am the bare figure of pain” (61). As a medieval source-text,  Sweeney suggests to Heaney a tradition that enables ecological thought, what the poet describes as “poetry piercingly exposed to the beauties and severities of the natural world…extend[ing] our sense of location to include ‘anywheres.’”  [2]

Heaney’s translations and poems foreground correlations between Irish linguistic germination and a located sense of trans-historic dwelling. His identity-constituting pilgrimage narratives subtend contemporary Irish politics, permeating sectarian exigencies with vignettes of pre-12 th -century Northern Europe. As Declan Kiberd has noted, after  Sweeney Astray , Heaney’s poems became “less bound by hard-and-fast titles… now they tended to take off into the sky or across the waters on a voyage into the unknown. That unknown was a dimension in which man could at last become an almost non-human witness of himself.” [3]  This observation is central to the title poem in 1991’s  Seeing Things which conflates the image of nervous passengers on pilgrimage to Lough Derg, by way of Inishbofin ( Inis Bó Finne  or ‘Island of the White Cows’), with an extraterrestrial sky-ship borrowed from  The Book of Clonmacnoise .

Lough Derg, Station Island (including the 1984 volume by that title), and St. Patrick’s Purgatory feature across Heaney’s oeuvre as experiential sites for both reimagining the significance of sacred symbols, and for reflecting on the Irish past from the vantage point of imagined utopias. In “Seeing Things”, Heaney’s speaker recalls: 

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning. Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel. One by one we were being handed down Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied Scaresomely every time. […] All the time As we went sailing evenly across  The deep, still, seeable-down-into water, It was as if I looked from another boat Sailing through air, far up, and could see How riskily we fared into the morning, And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

This double-vision, it is important to note, does not leave the speaker with a dichotomous sense of Christian submission to an external providence, but rather with a benedictory vision of ethical humility. In the poem, there is no spiritual father to appeal to in the ferry to Inishbofin to calm the poet’s incipient panic. The mundane world, refracted through nature’s powers of semblance, henceforth seems strange: nature catalyzes the visionary.

Heaney’s figurations of landscape are often remarkably consonant with the dinnseanchas tradition. Modern Irish translates the word dinnseanchas as ‘topography’—in old Irish, it connotes ‘stories, or lore of the old places,’ and the genre dates to the early Middle Ages, at least to the 11 th  century (the earliest date known for such poems as were compiled in the  Book of Leinster .) Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who has reimagined the genre in both her poetry and criticism, writes: “In dinnseanchas, the land of Ireland is translated into story: each place has history that is being continuously told… The landscape itself contains memory, and can point to the existence of a world beyond this one. [It] allows us glimpses into other moments in historical time.” [4]

Heaney’s eighth poem in “Squarings”, which Helen Vendler has called (for her this is a criticism), “the ‘theory poem’ in the volume”, demonstrates the textual strategies of both place-name poetry—by invoking the 6 th  century monastery at Clonmacnoise—and the diffusive passage between world-orders central to  an saol eile  (‘the other world’). [5]  That is, it exemplifies the ontological orientation I’m arguing these traditions furnish to Heaney: the dialectical ballast of medieval literary and topographical tradition that opens the landscape of Ireland to more expansive “pre-national” ways of conceiving of dwelling, alongside the reflective, visionary ‘through-line’ lyric can provide for non-human concerns in the radically destabilized ‘natural’ world: 

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

[1]  Heaney, aside from his distinguished translation of  Buile Suibhne  (as ‘ Sweeney Astray: A Version form the Irish ’, 1983), translated  Beowulf  (1999); published his lectures “The God in the Tree: Early Irish Nature Poetry” (given in 1978 for Raidió Teilifís Éireann); redacted “The Wanderer” in his prose-poem of that title in the 1975 volume  Stations ; translated “Deor” (“Tear”) from the  Exeter Book ; and authored the “Foreword” for  The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (2011). 

Omitted from this brief essay is Heaney’s 1996 poem “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” a work that illustrates the confluence of Heaney’s thinking on the relationality of the natural world and human habitation in Irish source texts. Specifically, he cribs the chronicle of St. Kevin retailed in Gerald of Wales’  The History and Topography of Ireland .

[2]  Seamus Heaney, “The God in the Tree: Early Irish Nature Poetry” pp. 54-55.

[3]  Declan Kiberd,  Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation  (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 597.

[4]  Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,  Selected Essays  ed. Oona Frawley (Dublin: New Island, 2005), p. 159-160.

[5]  In Irish: ‘the Otherworld” is a repository of that-which-is-inherently-fantastic. In modern Irish,  saol  signifies, alternately, ‘life’, ‘time’, and ‘world’, and is distinct from the pedestrian noun for world “domhan” which can’t be combined with any term for “other” in idiomatic use. 

Helen Vendler,  Seamus Heaney  (Harvard, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 136. 

Summary in Portuguese Ao longo da sua carreira, Seamus Heaney recorreu a alusões, adaptações e traduções da literatura medieval como forma de pontuar as suas releituras da história da Irlanda. E não o fez, como se poderia esperar, para despertar um sentimento nostálgico de autenticidade perdida, mas, antes, de uma maneira ampla e estratégica, com objectivos estruturalmente transformadores. Esclarecer o que é uma “transformação” é falar da natureza coeva da latência, da potencialidade, que acompanha as qualidades que prevalecem após um final. Conforme a abertura da tradução de Heaney de  Sweeney Astray : “o porquê e o para quê das [nossas] convulsões e escorregadelas, e  também  o que acontece depois.”  Transformar é, supremamente, uma questão de artifício: encarnar a alteridade de um sujeito requer que se exponha uma arquitectura narrativa, uma disponibilidade para apresentar a ‘personagem’ como um exemplo de  technê , por meio do qual os modos da arte oscilam ou se misturam. O resultado, para Heaney, é muitas vezes uma estrutura retórica episódica, associativa, concebida para privilegiar a percepção ao invés da fisicalidade e, assim, dilatar o presente histórico.

Amândio Reis

Presses universitaires de Caen

Studies on seamus heaney.

Seamus Heaney: the makings of the poet

Texte intégral.

1 Preoccupations, Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, New-York, 1980, 61.

2 Ibid., 43.

1 Seamus Heaney names his essay on Wordsworth’s distinctive poetic rhythms The Makings of Music and explains this choice by saying "I chose the word making for the title because it gestures towards the testings and hesitations of the workshop, the approaches towards utterance, the discovery of lines and then the intuitive extension of the vital element in those lines over a whole passage" 1 . Through Heaney’s definition the word "makings" here evolves into an extensive development of meaning, and emphasizes the tentative, exploratory quality, the vital almost organic energy at the root of the individual poetic voice. He uses the verb "gestures": "it gestures towards the testings and hesitations" and he speaks of the "approaches towards utterance", "the discovery and the intuitive extension", as if he were describing a process of gradual and initially difficult birth and eventual growth. Another essay title in the same collection, Feeling into Words, finds its explanation too when he declares that "Finding a voice means that you can get your feelings into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them" 2 . In both these examples we distinguish a common characteristic; a kind of primitive approach to the mystery of a poet’s intimate melody and rhythm, the "vital element" in the first example we gave is paralleled in the second by the word "feeling", that is, a living impulse, an imperative form of guidance springing from within. This pristine seizure of mystery, this realistic interpretation of its working, is one of the most salient features in Heaney’s writing, and that he should speak of the craft of verse in such terms is in keeping with his work itself. "Your words have the feel of you about them", the poet’s presence is a most palpable sensual one.

3 Ibid., 35.

2 Our aim is to explore the origins of this particularly sensorial voice, those "testings and hesitations", those "approaches towards utterance", and then "the feeling into words", that is the final outcome of such a tentative process. There are, we may suppose, several possible fields of exploration, among them: childhood experience, place, history, literary, political background, culture, language, these all indissolubly linked, together form a total ethos. As Heaney declares "One half of one’s sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever we want to call it" 3 .

3 Heaney’s essays are some of the most illuminating and primitive appreciations of what the poetic quest may be, both considered in the light of his own particular evolution and in relation to other writers’ works, and his poems uphold the fact that most poetry is a meditation on itself, a form of perpetual self-commentary with regard to its own secret processes, even when the poem is obviously a declaration on some precise subject other than poetry.

4 Ibid., 41.

5 Ibid., 41-42.

6 Ibid., 42.

4 Heaney’s opening poem to his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, is called Digging and is a most blatant statement on his stance as a poet, making a parallel between the family peasant ascendancy whose tool of work is the spade, and his new self-chosen trade, that of poetry, with his pen. This parallel allows two universes to coexist within the poem’s unfolding revelations; the secret, abstract workings of the poet’s mind are seen in terms of the physical activity where sharp cutting work contrasts with the soft liquid movements of earth. It is one of Heaney’s earliest poems, written when he first began to "dabble in verse" as he says 4 . He affirms the essential role of this poem as expressive of a kind of incentive energy: "I now believe that the Digging poem had for me the force of an initiation... having experienced the excitement and release of it once, I was doomed to look for it again and again" 5 . The word "initiation" here is most relevant to the theme of our discussion for does it not imply that incipient moment, the birth of a poet, with which we are concerned? The poem’s analogy for the writing process indeed, that of working the earth, will repeat itself "again and again" throughout the following poems, and when Heaney here declares himself "doomed" to this repetitive process, he is in fact expressing the almost physical force with which the muse, the poetic impulse or call it what you will - pushes him onwards, digging and digging further. Naturally, the creative force of such an impulse springs from a central source, and the Freudian echoes Heaney suggests are frequent in his verse "digging becomes a sexual metaphor, an emblem of initiation, like putting your hand into the bush or robbing the nest, one of the various natural analogies for uncovering and touching the hidden thing" 6 .

7 Ibid., 43.

8 Ibid., 43.

5 The poet treats this poem with humorous realism by calling it "a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem," 7 and when we read later subtler and finer textured poems we are inclined to agree. However, as an opening poem to his collection, and to our talk, its heavy explicitness serves to declare the essential "earthiness" of his art. As he tells us "it is interesting as an example of what we call finding a voice" 8 .

9 The Poet’s Calling, Robin Skelton, Heinemann, London, 1975, 18-19.

6 It has been said of course that poets are born, not made. It is rather the hen or the egg question: does the poet have a particular form of experience because his inner nature provokes such experience, or does a strange experience at a sensitive age trigger off the poetic impulse? I am more inclined to feel that the first solution is the true one, and that the initial step in the poet’s quest is the result of a specific poetic sensibility for which all experience has the taste of wonder. Wordsworth’s emphasis on childhood solitude enhances the legendary necessity of a certain kind of environment for this sensibility to be able to evolve, he says "the child is father of the man". There is an original inner force or drive guiding and feeding the poetic vision from an early age. Robin Skelton in an interesting study of the relationship between the secret workings of the imaginative faculties and the surrounding environment, quotes several poets’ personal experience and concludes that solitary children seem to be subject to poetic trance and likely to experience between about twelve and fifteen years of age a vision, "foretaste of Paradise", says Robert Graves, "the Divine Sophia" says John Montague 9 .

10 Ibid., 20.

11 Ibid., 21.

12 Preoccupations, 19.

7 It is strange indeed, that of these various poets quoted by Skelton, the one whose childhood anecdote holds the closest parallel to Heaney’s is John Montague. Speaking of "dialogues" of adolescents with trees, rocks, etc., Skelton goes on to cite Montague’s intense communion with the Earth Mother: "in very early puberty I used to go there, (a wood and river) and I used to take off all my clothes slowly and I used to get into the trees and going from tree to tree with my body very excited, then drop from the trees into the soft mud below and then go and wash in the river" 10 . Robin Skelton refers to this as "an almost ritual embrace of the earth" 11 . We have only to turn to the opening pages of Heaney’s collection of essays, to read: ’To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even glimpsed from a car or a train, possess an immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the river thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated" 12 .

8 These two contemporary Irish poets, both from Northern Ireland, lived their childhood communion with nature in very similar fashion. Then-particular origins may be the same geographically, but this "initiation" itself is universal, and such an earthly paradise experience may be lived by children anywhere. The common feature is water, and it may be the greatest link of all, flowing as it does through the "vases communicants", the "uische" or "ochor" running through the veins of the gods:

13 Jan Le Witt, "Water" Temenos, I , 1981, ................. waters the oldest and deepest mirror on the face of the earth 13 .

14 Edwin Honig, The Dark Conceit, Oxford University Press, 1966, 173-174.

9 In these childhood "moments privilégiés" the vision consists of mortality /immortality in the paradoxical flux and constancy of earth, a kind of synthesis between Dionysiac and Apollonian, in which the poet finds a terse form of balance poised as he is between life and death. As a making of the poet it seems to be the first necessary baptism in these two personal accounts, and in the case of Heaney we can discover a very neat evolutive pattern springing from this initial vision, for is it not a close confrontation between poet and nature, from whence he must emerge to become the mature artist persona? This process follows a classical pattern as evoked by Edwin Honig in his study of allegory entitled The Dark Conceit : "The initiation symbolizes a dying, a rebirth, a sleep and a new awakening, analogous with the cyclic forces at work in nature. In regaining selfhood, one gains or is integrated with the universe" 14 .

10 This orphic myth is seen in Heaney’s title poem to his fust collection, Death of a Naturalist; this poem expresses a certain kind of death to this childhood encounter with nature, and the next collection will then take a step beyond this, denoting a kind of rebirth in Door into the Dark.

15 "Undine", Door into the Dark, Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, New-York, 1980, 56.

11 No longer is it merely a question of this closed communion of his or Montague’s account, this secretive "huis clos", now mother earth ultimately leads him beyond her forces, back to himself, and coming full circle she sets him off on a long poetic quest. Here the water and earth take a further mythopoeic dimension, already enhanced by the pantheistic impact of those earthly youthful days, water now stirs him, channels him into greater distances. In Undine, a poem in Door into the Dark, this river-goddess creature, inspired by a definition of Paracelsus, herself recites the poem’s lines. That she should be the recitant is most meaningful, for it reveals how the evolution has indeed come full circle 15 . Jung’s conjunctio meeting between the animus and anima leads to full awareness of the total self:

But once he knew my welcome, I alone, Could give him subtle increase and reflection.

12 The important osmosis between child and nature, has now become an essential spiritual process, blending violence as in the poem’s opening lines:

He slashed the briars... I ran quick for him,

13 with the reflective mirror-like exchange of the poem’s development.

16 Honig, op. cit., 174.

14 This is a most striking example of how the poet’s early formative vision may evolve and become a process we can interpret in the light of myth, an archetypal moment in the history of a soul and ultimately of man himself. "The ever-new sense of the body of the world discoverable in a single individual body, in a single human experience" 16 .

17 Preoccupations, 53.

18 Ibid., 53

15 Paracelsus, says Heaney, inspired Undine when he read how she is a water-spirit who can obtain a human soul by bearing a child to a human husband 17 . Is this not indeed, the fusion of spirit and flesh, of anima and animus, the Jungian unity and self-realisation, expressed in terms redolent of the poet’s childhood awareness. In his essay he refers to Undine as "an orphaned memory", that of "watching a man clearing out an old spongy growth from a drain between two fields". Whilst immediately relevant to the quest for unity within the self, the poem expresses the wonder of finding that unity through the other, the anima, as Heaney himself declares: "This image was gathered into a more conscious reading of the myth as being about the liberating, humanizing effect of sexual encounter" 18 .

19 "Personal Helicon", Death of a Naturalist, Selected Poems, 40.

16 The mirror-like theme underlying Undine is also in the poem which is chosen to close his first collection, and it forms a kind of link with Door into the Dark which follows 19 . The dark of Personal Helicon is that of the well, and the fascinated gaze of childhood: "As a child, they could not keep me from wells" says the first line. The transition from the squelchy, watery experience such as he shares with Montague is refused here in a most declarative, final verse:

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

20 Skelton, op. cit., 22.

21 "The Forge", Door into the Dark, Selected Poems, 49.

17 Thus in Personal Helicon the lines trace an evolution from the simple childhood gaze upon the well, and demonstrate how the opaque reality of youth has given way to the creation of a mirror-opus within which the darkness echoes. This reciprocal gaze between water and child’s face is recounted by Kathleen Raine; in her girlhood gaze it was "deep red flower petals", which led her to declare "flowers were, for me, a first experience and knowledge of things in themselves perfect, of the faces, one might say, with which the world looks at us, and we at the world’s face" 20 . This experience of flowers was, she says, "a constant absolute, and complete thing in itself". For Heaney’s boyhood knowledge of nature too, we feel the complete reality of the thing itself, and then, as in Personal Helicon, we see how this first meeting opens on to an inner landscape, and how the child’s innocent exploration takes on a completely unexpected depth. The Forge whose first line is the title of his second collection makes an ironically limiting statement: "All I know is a door into the dark" 21 . Ironical it is, for the child who sees only the dark open gap of the forge doorway can then imagine beyond it, the creative activity of he who is inside:

The animal must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end square, Set there immoveable; an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music.

18 This, like the well in the earlier Personal Helicon, is also a form of darkness, echoing with vibrant activity, the creative shaping of form and sound. As in much of Heaney’s writing an obvious reference reveals the poem’s orientation. Helikon, favorite seat of the muses, and sometimes referred to as a fountain, designates the meaning of this young child’s favorite watery haunt, and how it leads him to apprehend the world beyond, the platonic reality beyond the appearance. To both this poem and The Forge, we owe concise evocations of the poet’s, and indeed of the artist’s act. In Personal Helicon, "he rhymes to set the darkness echoing", a kind of magic bringing to life, setting the darkness, as when a child makes his voice echo in the well’s depth. Does this not recall some lost mythological universe too, where the oracle Helikon responds to the gods, setting the dark forests and mountains alive with their magic existence beyond the mere appearances of landscape? In the same way, in The Forge the blacksmith "expends himself in shape and music". Here the poetic process is realised through a very precise verbal image ex-pendere to weigh out, i.e. the poet gives his own weight (value) in shape and music, weighing out his inner resources into a palpable reality for the world to hear and see. We remember the legendary role of the blacksmith, an artisan of great social importance as in The Tain for example.

22 "Kindship", North, Selected Poems, 195.

23 Honig, op. cit., 169.

19 These developments of childhood haunts, their transformation into a further poetic reality, is an essentially formative experience, and central to our theme of the poet’s makings. We have not yet touched on the most striking examples of this however. In Kinship, the poet visits yet another of his childhood landscapes, and indeed treads this bogland with all the verbal dexterity and ingenuity of his maturer verse 22 . This collection, North, is a significant landmark in his work, for it states a yet more profound exchange between language and place, a complete symbiosis with all the magic of the poet’s craft stirring his surroundings into life. In Kinship it is not simply youthful memories, but an ancestral memory, a whole ascendency, a deep "kinship" which is the work of centuries: "I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat". Later in this poem, Heaney asserts how that gradual growing towards poetry, where we’ve seen the child as father of the man, has now reached a kind of equilibrium, he is related to his earth, in a natural allegiance: "This is the vowel of earth dreaming its roots in flowers and snow, mutation of weathers and seasons, a windfall composing the floor it rots into. I grew out of all this like a weeping willow inclined to the appetites of gravity". This is a most explicit statement of the downward gaze, the "underworld" drawing the poet with magnetic force, Heaney’s mythological universe par excellence. In relation to this perfect equilibrium arising out of boyhood memory we may refer to Honig when speaking of pastoralism: "The pastoralists say that there is a paradise buried in each man’s heart, a personal myth or an image in memory, which will lead him to rediscover his true relationship with nature and with other men" 23 .

24 Preoccupations, 18.

20 The poise and equihbrium, the perfect situating of self as Honig evokes it, a vital link with hidden, secret working, is to be felt in this line just quoted: "I grew out of all this like a weeping willow inclined to the appetites of gravity". In his essay in Preoccupations we find that willow tree, as another childhood haunt: "I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse’s collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life, looking out on the familiar yard as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness. Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you. In that tight cleft, you sensed the embrace of light and branches, you were a little Atlas shouldering it all, a little Cerunnos pivoting a world of antlers" 24 .

• 25 Daithi O Hogain, The Visionary Voice. A Survey of Popular Attitudes to Poetry in Irish Tradition", (...)

26 "Oracle", Wintering Out, Selected Poems, 106.

27 Robin Skelton, The Poetic Pattern, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1956, 78.

28 See Graham Hough, Image and Experience, Gerald Duckworth, London, 1960, 128-129.

21 This passage ends in the opposite direction to that "appetite of gravity" of the weeping willow leaning downwards in Kinship, for here the poet is a little Atlas linking earth - and sky, of Cerunnos whose antlers reach upwards towards the light. The description achieves a most striking synthesis between the earth - fed life of the tree, gnarled, with a pithy inside, and the lithe and whispering crown of willow reacting to the sky. The centre where all these elements come together is in the boy’s own perception, poised as he is in the throat of the tree, in the mouth, "at the heart of a different life" caught in that tight cleft. The boy is already the poet here, hidden within the "throat"; ancient Irish poets referred "the gift of poetry to specific parts of the body"... and in particular "the mouth" and "the tongue", thus stressing the oral tradition, says Daithi O Hogain in an article significantly entitled The Visionary Voice 25 . Heaney’s bodily kinship with the throat - like tree would seem to incarnate this magic and oracular/oral function. In Oracle the boyhood pleasure of hiding from the calls of the family opens the poem: "Hide in the hollow trunk of the willow tree, its listening familiar, until, as usual, they cuckoo your name across the fields. You can hear them draw the poles of stiles as they approach calling you out" 26 . The poem then concludes by stating the double function of the poet as subjective listener and active voice, the "vases communicants" where oral/auricular unify within the concept of the title, Oracle: "Small mouth and ear in a woody cleft, lobe and larynx of the mossy places". The essential paradox of such a memory, a backward glance in time, is that it recreates in language, a moment of timelessness, as in Eliot’s "Still point of the turning world". Rilke, as referred to by Robin Skelton in another study of his, The Poetic Pattern, found "the ideal condition of the poet in something akin to childhood, when what lies behind is not the past and no future lies before, when in what he calls some interspace between the world and a plaything we entertain ourselves with the everlasting" 27 . In Heaney’s prose reminiscence and poem, the plaything is the willow, where the "interspace" is indeed weighty with the "everlasting" being as it is the throat, the lobe, the larynx and a link with the earth goddess herself. Indeed, this title Oracle as it is interpreted here, makes a kind of image cluster, a series of connecting ideas which link myth, mystery, within the voice and ear of the listening boy or poet. Mythos -- the word in the sense of the most ancient original account of the world is strangely related to mystery by the common root of muien -- "to close up" which evolved into mystery, mystic, secret. Thus the Greek mu — originally an inarticulate sound made by a beast - became both mystery and myth. Here the primitive organs of lobe and larynx are the receptacle of mystery, and incarnate the myth of the oracle. Also, we think of the theory according to which there was originally one single primitive meaning in which abstract and concrete were undifferentiated. Spiritus was not simply breath evolving by metaphor into the principle of life -- both meanings existed at the origin. It is as if Heaney is aiming at reendowing language with this original pristine unity, as indeed does most poetic language try to restore "this primitive wholeness" 28 .

29 Preoccupations, 131.

30 Ibid., 186.

22 So far we have only mentioned the makings of the poet in relation to the child, but this has necessarily brought us to talk of "place", and by so doing, we are in fact going beyond the strictly personal, biographical concept of the child, to the wider concept of an ascendancy, an ethos of a particular countryside. In the case of Irish poetry, as Seamus himself tells us by the title of his essay, The Sense of Place is essential to Irish writers. As he says on opening his essay: "In Irish poetry there is a whole genre of writing called dinnseanchas, poems and tales which relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology" 29 . Just before this, he has said something of most vital interest to our subject: "I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension"... In the domain of the "illiterate" and "unconscious" here, we have seen how the child has "known and cherished" his place of birth, and when this is allied as in Oracle to a mythological truth, it becomes also a "learned literate and conscious" reality. In an essay entitled The God in the Tree, the mythological ascendancy becomes more specific in that we may not only relate it to a universal Greek and classical universe, but also to the ancestral myths of Ireland. Heaney refers to Mad Sweeney in his essay, the mad Ulster king who will feature in his latest collection, Station Island; "a foliate head, another wood lover and tree-hugger, a picker of herbs and drinker of wells" 30 . Thus a natural boyhood feeling for trees reveals itself as also an integral part of the literary and mythological heritage, and there is as it were an osmosis between these two aspects. Heaney speaks of earlier, literate and illiterate, conscious and unconscious, or as we could say, in the vein of our theme, the child and the man have once again come together within the poem’s unfolding.

23 It is each time this process which interests us, the poet is formed, shaped from the source of the child’s experience, and what is an immediate awareness of immanence, whether in a tree or a bog, becomes an awareness of further mythological and transcendental realities, and their translation into mythopoeic form.

31 "The Barn", Death of a Naturalist, Selected Poems, 7.

32 Death of a Naturalist, 10.

33 "Blackberry Picking", 10.

34 "Mid-Term Break", 18.

35 "Summer 1969", North, Selected Poems, 224.

24 Perhaps we have put the cart before the horse but only now do I wish to speak of the presence in Heaney’s early poetry of that apprehension of palpable, tangible reality which emerges with spontaneity and immediacy in some of his poems. That is, the mythopoeic transmutation has not really occured — the thing is very much itself, it is an initial step, in what will later become a much more elaborate and mature process. To make clearer what I mean, we have only to glance at the poem entitled The Bam from his first collection. The child sees within the poorly lighted barn the sharp outline of impressively cutting objects: "A scythe’s edge, a clean spade, a pitchfork’s prongs; Slowly bright objects formed when you went in" 31 . The final lines express what I wish to say by this distinctive form of perception: "I was chaff to be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits. I lay face-down to shun the fear above. The two lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats". Now the inherent presence of evil has come in, the child’s imagination has enhanced the place, and imbued it with a further form of life, so it has become mythopoeic too, but here we remain within the domain of a make-believe world although evil is also a reality, as much as that oracular power given to the child in the willow tree, but the process is not the same. In Death of a Naturalist this experience of evil is seen also as a step beyond the mere reality of things. Expressed in childlike music, especially centred on the vowel "o" sound Seamus really recounts his tadpoles expeditions "The waver thick slobber of frogspawn that grew like clotted water". He would fill "jampotfulls" and "watch until the fattening dots burst". At the end of the poem, the toads become "great slime kings" ... "gathered there for vengeance" 32 . The fresh innocence of the boy’s fishing has become infested; this is the Paradise lost of Blackberry Picking where the immediate joyful reality of blackberry picking is also conveyed by this strangely childish echo of the " o " - "a glossy purple cl o t" "hard as a kn o t" - "jamp o ts", "b oo ts",... "p o tat o drills"... "b o tt o m" ... "on t o p" "big dark bl o bs", etc. A very obvious degradation of the initial joy sets in "The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour". And the poem ends on a musically nostalgic echo of the earlier " o " sound: "That all the lovely canfuls smelt of r o t. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would n o t" 33 . These two " o "s of rot and not are hard sounds, and claim to be ironically linked with the kn o t of the early lines, the cl o t, and the jamp o ts. Another poem of obvious childhood relevance is Mid-Term Break, on the death of his little brother, and here the experience is an account, anecdotal with less immanent sense of its inherent content of evil, for the event is evil. Instead, the child’s world is communicated in a series of concise, almost prosaic images of the surrounding suffering, and the pathos of it is conveyed only at the end but in the "o" sound. "Snowdrops, poppy, foot, cot - a four foot box" 34 . (This is almost an aside, as the development of my theme does not permit me to follow this interesting tangent further, this strangeness of the "o" as perhaps an expression of the child’s immediate presence within the poem?)In any case, to sum up here, this form of exploration in memory leads into a kind of dead end, the cul-de-sac of lost paradise; it is only in poems such as Personal Helicon, where his well gazing sets the darkness echoing, or his discovery of that door in The Forge, that the child engenders the creative imagination as an opening into a fertile transcendental world. Evil is indeed that rank sourness in Death of a Naturalist remembered suddenly in the heat of Madrid "Stinks of the fishmarket rose like the reek off a flax-dam", or the "patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish bellies in flax-poisoned waters" 35 . Here political evil has the sudden remembered stench of childhood evil.

36 Preoccupations, 148-149.

37 "The Tollund Man", Wintering Out, Selected Poems, 126.

38 Preoccupations, 36-37.

25 This leads us to our last point, and one which you can only be expecting. The cultural, political heritage as the makings of the poet. In The Sense of Place he writes: "We are no longer innocent, we are no longer just parishioners of the local. We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable. "Chicken Marengo! it’s a far cry from the Moy", Paul Muldoon says in a line depth - charged with architectural history. Yet these primary laws of our nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories" 36 . This, taken from A Sense of Place, is not explicitly political, it does however imply politics. Seamus did not have to go far to "search for his political history" anyway; as in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, we can see history active at his frontdoor in this satirical portrait of the North. There is another North too however, that ancestral history which he seeks in archeological places, in Scandinavia. As he says in The Tollund Man, "Out there in Jutland in the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, unhappy and at home" 37 . As a schoolchild brought up within a British governed province nourished on Gaelic literature he is part of that "divided mind" which is the legacy of every Irish writer indeed, but more so for the North. Here, it is language rather than politics that enter into account; his poetry is fathered so to speak by a forked tongue. He says: "Certainly the secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise, lies in the summoning of the energies of words. But my quest for definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape I was born into. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants" 38 . Interesting, this point about vowels and consonants!

26 Our final poem will be Freedman, a most succinct statement of his "makings", an explicit one as it concerns school and religious background, and ends on one of the most relevant summaries of how a writer feels in any political context when he turns away from that context to write elsewhere and of other things:

27 Indeed, slavery comes nearest to its justification in the early Roman Empire: for a man from a backward race might be brought within the pale of civilization, educated and trained in a craft or a profession, and turned into a useful member of society.

39 "Freedman", North, Selected Poems, 216. R.H. Barrow: The Romans Subjugated yearly under arches, Manumitted by parchments and degrees, My murex was the purple dye of lents On calendars all fast and abstinence. Memento homo quia pulvis es. I would kneel to be impressed by ashes, A silk friction, a light stipple of dust - I was under that thumb too like all my caste. One of the earth-starred denizens, indelibly, I sought the mark in vain on the groomed optimi: Their estimating, census-taking eyes Fastened on my mouldy brow like lampreys. Then poetry arrived in that city - I would abjure all cant and self-pity- And poetry wiped my brow and sped me. Now they will say I bite the hand that fed me 39 .

28 Suffering, certainly, has nourished the mature work of Heaney, who calls himself an "inner émigré", and when we read of his "schooling" as he exposes it here in Freedman, we remember Keats in a letter of 1819: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and Troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"

13 Jan Le Witt, "Water" Temenos, I , 1981,

25 Daithi O Hogain, The Visionary Voice. A Survey of Popular Attitudes to Poetry in Irish Tradition", Irish University Review, Spring 1979, 49-50.

39 "Freedman", North, Selected Poems, 216.

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Place, Pastness, Poems: A Triptych

Seamus heaney.

The sense of the past constitutes what William Wordsworth might have called a “primary law of our nature,” a fundamental human gift, as potentially civilizing as our gift for love. It is a common, non-literary faculty, embodied very simply in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “The Garden Seat”:

Its former green is blue and thin, And its once firm legs sink in and in; Soon it will break down unaware, Soon it will break down unaware.

At night when reddest flowers are black Those who once sat thereon come back; Quite a row of them sitting there, Quite a row of them sitting there.

With them the seat does not break down, Nor winter freeze them, nor floods drown, For they are as light as upper air, They are as light as upper air!

The poem is about the ghost-life that hovers over some of the furniture of our lives, about the way objects can become temples of the spirit. This garden seat is not just an objet , a decorous antique; it has become a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging. It transmits the climate of a lost world and keeps alive a domestic intimacy with a reality which might otherwise have vanished. The more we are surrounded by such things, the more feelingly we dwell in our own lives. The air which our imaginations inhale in their presence is not musty but bracing.

It could even be maintained that objects thus seasoned by human contact possess a kind of moral force. They insist upon human solidarity and suggest obligations to the generations who have been silenced, drawing us into some covenant with them. In this passage by Pablo Neruda, for example, although the poet is not explicitly concerned with the object as capsule of time past, he is nevertheless testifying to the power of the inanimate, its aura of persuasiveness:

It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth … The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

Neruda’s declaration that “the reality of the world … should not be underprized” implies that we can and often do underprize it. We grow away from our primary relish of the phenomena. The rooms where we come to consciousness, the cupboards we open as toddlers, the shelves we climb up to, the boxes and albums we explore in reserved places in the house, the spots we discover for ourselves in those first solitudes out of doors, the haunts of those explorations at the verge of our security—in such places and at such moments “the reality of the world” first wakens in us. It is also at such moments that we have our first inkling of pastness and find our physical surroundings invested with a wider and deeper dimension than we can, just then, account for.

What I am talking about is at the time an unconscious process. It is neither sentimental nor literary, since it happens during the pre-reflective stage of our existence. It has to do with an almost biological need to situate ourselves in our instinctual lives as creatures of the race and of the planet, to learn the relationship between what is self and what is non-self. It has to do with feeling towards, sniffing out, settling in and shaping up.

In my own case, the top of the dresser in the kitchen of the house where I lived for the first twelve years of my life was like a time machine. This was where much of the bric-a-brac of the farmyard would end up, broken whetstones, old nails, putty, screwdrivers, lamp-wicks. Its mystery had to do with its inaccessibility, yet when I did manage to hoist myself up there, the dusty newspaper round the putty, the worn down grains of the whetstone, the bent nails, the singed wicks, all that dust and rust and stillness suggested that these objects were living some kind of afterlife. Something previous was vestigially alive in them. They were not just inert rubbish but dormant energies, meanings that could not be quite deciphered. Naturally, I did not think this to myself at the time. It was all sensation, tingling with an amplification of inner space, subtly and indelibly linked with the word “old.”

“Old” was not an idea. It was an atmosphere, a smell almost, a quality of feeling. It brought you out of yourself and close to yourself all at once. “Old” drifted in the mind and senses when you came upon mossed-over bits of delph or fragments of a clay pipe plugged up with mould. You took such things for granted yet they swam with a strangeness. And the strangeness deepened when you actually dug such things out of the ground for yourself. My first archaeological tremor occurred when I was making holes for goalposts in one of our fields which had always been kept as grazing and was therefore always pure surface, pure present. When I dug down about a foot into the tight-packed ground, I came upon a hoard of soft red brick and white crumbly mortar, an unexpected cache that even to a six year old meant foundations, meant house, a living but obliterated past. I pestered my father to tell me who might have lived there and found that he did not remember any house on the site. Then I heard him questioning a neighbour about whose place it might have been, who was supposed to have owned that land in the old days, and the hole for the goal-post began to open down and back to a visionary field, a phantom whitewashed cottage with its yard and puddles and hens. The world had been amplified; looking and seeing began to take on aspects of imagining and remembering.

Another example: I knew more from overhearing and piecing together than from being told directly that a number of my father’s family had died in their teens and twenties from “the decline,” as tuberculosis had been called in rural Ulster in those days. Names of uncles and aunts who might have been floated through the conversation. Johnny and Jamie and Maggie and Agnes. Agnes, I knew, had died young and her invalid pallor which I had never seen was intuitively present to me, again because of her association with an object. This was a little trinket which was kept wrapped in tissue paper and laid away with other specially conserved knick-knacks in the bottom of a sideboard in my parents’ bedroom. I knew there was something slightly taboo about rummaging in those shelves but I was drawn again and again to unwrap the thing because I knew that it had belonged to Agnes. It had obviously been bought at the seaside as a present for her. A little grotto about four or five inches tall, like a toy sentry box, all covered with tiny shells, a whitish gleaming secret deposited in the family sideboard like grave-goods in the tomb of a princess. To this day, I cannot imagine the ravages of disease in pre-inoculation rural Ireland except in relation to the slight white fact of that trinket.

In such ways we read ourselves into a personal past but it is not a past which is chronologically determined by calendar dates or any clear time-scale. Rather it is a dream time, a beforehand, a long ago. We learn it without deliberate instruction and the result of our learning is a sense of belonging to a domestic and at the same time planetary world of pure human being.

But there is another past which is not just inhaled unconsciously but which is to some extent imposed and to some extent chosen. This gives us our cultural markings, contributes to our status as creatures conditioned by language and history. It is posited upon images which have a definite meaning and implication, unlike images of the bricks and grotto sort whose meanings are accidental and familial.

Take the fairytales we were told at home and at school: these also conjure up a potent sense of the long ago and can endow the world with a sort of legendary history. There is, for example, a story which I can now recall only in the vaguest way about a hen that panics when a nut drops down upon her out of a tree and causes her to think that the end of the world is coming. That tale gave a marvelous status to the corner of our yard where the fowl used to mould themselves in the roots of an old hawthorn. I kept looking there to make sure that the sky was still in position, that no crack was appearing in the dome and that the hens were going about their business free from the hens’ version of the nuclear terror. Another story about the man—or maybe it was a widow—who grazed a cow on the grass growing up on the thatched roof of a cabin invested certain old houses and wallsteads in the district with an aura of the fantastic; and the story of the traveler shut beneath the hill with the fairy queen populated certain local slopes with rare possibilities as well.

This fairytale glamour was real enough but it was dispersed and impalpable. It had nothing to do with the sense of history which began to be derived from books and pictures at around the same time, but which could also be derived from objects in the everyday surroundings. There was in our house an old, cock-hammer, double-barrelled pistol, like a duelling piece, fixed on a bracket above a door in the kitchen. It was a completely exotic item in our world of dressers, churns, buckets, statues and Sacred Heart lamps. It did not belong and it was never explained. Yet when I began to get comics and to read adventure stories, this pistol linked the kitchen with highwaymen, stage-coaches, women in crinoline skirts, men in ruffs and duels at dawn in the woodlands of great estates. Not that this involved any great reverence for the thing itself. When my brothers and I grew up a bit, we got our hands on it and broke it into pieces, inevitably, accidentally and, in truth, not very regretfully.

More significantly influential than exotic items like the pistol, however, are those images and objects which signify common loyalties and are recognized as emblems of a symbolic past which also claims to be the historical past. These guarantee our own way of feeling about ourselves as a group and as such have a potent influence upon our everyday attitudes. I am thinking, for example, of a picture dear to the Irish Catholic heart in years gone by. This was an oleograph of the outlawed priest in red vestments, raising the host above a massrock in a secluded corner of the hills. The hills are covered in snow, the congregation huddles around in shawls and frieze coats under a frosty sky, a band of redcoats is coming into view over a distant crest and in between, a man is running wild over ditches to alert the congregation. Nothing I have learned or could ever learn about penal laws against Catholics in eighteenth century Ireland could altogether displace the emotional drama of that picture. The century will remain in some corner of the mind technicolour, panicky, humble and heroic. Just as Wolfe Tone, our enlightenment revolutionary and founding father of Irish Republicanism, will never quite escape from his reincarnation as the figure in tight-fitting white trousers and braided green coat whose large profiled nose stared out over the audience in our local hall. There he was, a given figure with a strange name, a man called wolf.

He was to come up again, this time as an illustration in an old Wolfe Tone Annual that I came across some time in the late forties; now he was dressed in an open shirt and dark breeches, his arms folded, staring into a shaft of light that struck into his prison cell from a high barred window. Again, this image of a noble nature stoically enduring had a deeply formative effect on my notion of the United Irishmen, the 1798 rebellion and the whole tradition of Irish separatism. I do not mean that I closed my mind to other notions but it offered a dream against which all further learning took place. Tone’s eloquent profile, for example, was not entirely eroded when I read Sir Joshuah Barrington’s description of him: “His person was unfavourable—his countenance thin and sallow; and he had in his speech a hard guttural pronunciation of the letter R.”

In Ireland we have been properly taught to be wary of these idealized images of the political past because of the righteousness and simplifications implicit in them and the dangerous messianic arrogance which can flow from them. Less ideologically conditioning, more humanly accurate are those objects and documents which survive from the historical moment. No image of Hugh O’Neill, the last Gaelic Earl of Tyrone—to take another powerful figure from the pantheon—no portrait of him with his strong Ulster face and Elizabethan clothes can get as close to our feelings and be as acutely suggestive of the conditions of his life in the hill fort at Tullyhogue as this list of his abandoned possessions, compiled after his defeat at the Battle of Kinsale. I can almost feel the wind press the quill in the English secretary’s hand as his cold Tudor gaze falls upon the debris of a world:

2 long tables, 2 long forms, an old bedstead, an old trunk, a long stool … 5 pewter dishes, a basket, a comb and a comb case, 2 dozen trenchers and a basket … one pair of taffeta curtains, an other pair of green satin curtains, a brass kettle, 2 baskets with certain broken earthen dishes and some waste spices, a vessel with two gallons of vinegar, 2 glass bottles, 2 stone jugs whereof one broken, a little iron pot and a great spit.

We have entered the realm of the museum where pastness is conjured as we run the tips of our sympathy and understanding over the braille of the exhibits. When we gaze at an ancient cooking pot or the shoe of a Viking child or a gaming board from the rubble of a Norman keep, we are exercising a primary part of our nature. It is the part which cherishes human contact and trust, which responds with gratitude to a lighted window in the countryside at night, is consoled when it finds on a mountainside a path worn out by previous feet, and is well pleased to discover old initials carved on the range-wall of a bridge or in the bark of a tree.

The contemplation of such things emphasises the truth of that stunningly simple definition of our human neighbor offered by the old school catechism. “My neighbor,” the catechism declared, “is all mankind.” So I think of my mesolithic Ulster neighbor, and of his flint flakes, flint spears and arrowheads which were found in abundance at New Ferry on the River Bann during the drainage of the river in the early part of the century. Seeing these on display in the Ulster Museum in Belfast once gave me a vision of those first hunters among the reeds and bushes at the lower end of our parish and I thought of them not as having disappeared but as being at one with the farmers and clay workers and fishermen and duck-shooters who were the geniuses of the place when I first got to know it. And that time scale, that double sense of great closeness and great distance, subtly called into question the factual and sectarian divisions which are and have long been pervasive in that part of the country. I do not say that a sense of the mesolithic ancestor could solve the religio-political conflicts of the Bann Valley but I do say that it could significantly widen the terms of the answer which each side could give to the question, “Who do you think you are?”

Similarly with that magnificent hoard of gold objects found in my native County Derry and now held in the National Museum in Dublin as “The Broighter Hoard”: to gaze at those arm-bands and gorgets and lunulae, so silent and solid and patiently beyond one, is to be displaced from one’s ordinary sense of what it means to be a County Derry person. For the moment, the gazer is carried out of himself, is transported into a redemptive mood of openness and readiness. He has, in fact, crossed the line that divides instinctive apprehension from artistic experience.

It is tempting to slip from this personal experience and inflate it by analogy, recalling Keats’s rapt vigils in the British Museum and the way his entrancement with the Elgin Marbles supplied some of the dream-charge for his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Yet in that poem Keats’s gaze emanated not from any desire to savour the local and domestic world but from a thoroughly self-aware literary imagination. His response was not dictated by his sense of belonging to a particular place, nor was it especially afflicted by the burden of a particular history. His was a gaze that pined to found itself upon a trust in the reality of art in time. Historical Greece may have provided images for his daydream but transfigured Greece, under the aspect of the urn, wakened his imaginative and intellectual appetites—although not in the same way as Neruda’s imagination was awakened in the presence of human artefacts. Neruda’s words come from a piece called “Towards an Impure Poetry” and they are anti-idealist and anti-aesthetic, strongly reminiscent of Moneta’s indignation (in “The Fall of Hyperion”) against “dreamers,” and her urgent preference for “those to whom the miseries of the world/ Are misery, and will not let them rest.” Neruda, we might say, is tormented by the injustice of history and his past is accusatory, whereas Keats’s past is closer to the long-ago of fairy-tale and functions in his mind as a source of possibility, a launch-pad for transcendence.

For all poets, Neruda included, pastness is to a greater or lesser degree enabling. The word poetry itself is an orb on the horizon of time, simultaneously rising and setting, imbued with the sunset blaze of master-works from the tradition yet dawning on every poet like hope or challenge. It is very hard to conceive of an imagination which creates without the benefit of inherited forms, modes of expression historically evolved yet universally available, and that benefit itself is an unconscious perspective backward.

Language, too, is a time-charged medium. No matter how much the poetic mind may wish to rid itself of temporal attachment and observe only its own pristine operations, its very employment of words draws it into the “backward and abysm” of common human experience. Indeed, even though one of the results of the Symbolist experience was to educate us in a language that abandons its referential tasks and revels in the echo-chamber of its own inner memory, this liberation placed upon reader and writer alike an obligation to be responsive, at some level, to literary history, to the cultural and phonetic heartbeat of words themselves. The idea that each vocable, each phonetic signal, contains a transmission from some ur-speech and at the same time is wafted to us across centuries of speaking and writing, that the auditory imagination unites the most ancient and most civilized mentalities, this has been one of the most influential refinements of poetic theory during the last century and it is deeply underwritten by an implied identification of the literary imagination with a sense of the past.

Take Wallace Stevens’s “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” a poem which originated when Stevens received a postcard from a friend in Ireland. It carried a photograph of the cliffs, a prospect of sheer dark promontories dropping hundreds of feet to the Atlantic Ocean, distant from Stevens by three thousand miles, but nevertheless reaching and compelling him to this:

Who is my father in this world, in this house, At the spirit’s base?

My father’s father, his father’s father, his— Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech, At the head of the past.

They go back to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist, Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above The wet green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe, It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth And sea and air.

The argument of the poem could be reduced to something like this: the black mass of these cliffs looms before us rather as the father’s presence first looms above the infant; such things also affect us as the memory of a father and the idea of forefathers affect our adult imagining. Their plumb implacable bulk suggests foundation and origin and a security in the world. Yet they appear strangely insubstantial when shawled in mist and this hallucinatory aspect also suggests that our natural father may only be an accidental incarnation of an archetypal form, of a dream father previous to all our biographies and potentially present when the world was earth and sea and air. Hence our sense of being at home upon the planet may depend as much upon our mental and imaginative powers—seen in action here as they search out a sense of God the Father—as upon any physical evolution or biological adaptability.

Whether this would be every reader’s paraphrase of the poem does not really matter. What does matter is the sorry deprivation that occurs when any conjectural meaning is divorced from the poem’s body of sound. The stateliness, the pomp of its progress, the solemn march established in three-time at the beginning—“in this world, in this house, /At the spirit’s base,” “My father’s father, his father’s father, his—,” “before thought, before speech,/At the head of the past”—all this contributes to a deep horn music, the rounded-out, lengthened-back note of the cor au fond du bois ; and it is this musical amplitude that persuades the ear of the reality of an inner space where the dimension of time has been precipitated out of the dimension of space, where density streams towards origin. Yet for all its shadowy effectiveness, the poem is not a mere “somnambulation.” It is rather a definite matter of sensation, arising from the cliffiness not of the cliffs themselves but of the word-cliffs in the poem, the vowel-caverns of “house,” “father,” “shadows,” “Moher.”

“The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” then, is a poem which discovers “at the head of the past” a haven for the imagination itself, yet we would never want to claim that “a sense of the past,” in any of its pathetic or emotionally conditioning manifestations, is an attribute of Stevens’s subjects or a part of his intonation. Rather, by its independence of all such affective machinery, the poem emphasizes the idea that the primary laws of our nature are organically linked, that “pastness” and “language” and “imagination” are grafted together at some radical level and that, to quote the conclusion of Eliot’s great encyclical upon the subject, the poet “is not likely to know what is to be done … unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent.”)

The actual poetic task is to find a way of melding the intuitive and affection-steeped word-world of personal memory with the form-hungry and projecting imagination, to find an idiom at once affective and objectified, as individual as handwriting and as given as the conventions of writing itself. This happens most naturally when the poet inherits a coherent place and a language imbued with the climate and love and history of that place.In this way we can see that Thomas Hardy was lucky and John Crowe Ransom, say, was needy. Hardy had a natural sense of his past, Ransom had a perfected literary imagination. Hardy could be busy, Ransom had to be adept; Hardy could speak, Ransom had to write; Hardy could follow his nose, Ransom had to mind his step.

Think of Hardy’s “Channel Firing.” A touch of the grotesque. A hint of the blasphemous—God tells men that the “rest eternal” which they need may well be an unresurrected sleep in the earth. A parson called Thirdly. A church mouse. A God who calls men “mad as hatters” and goes on to rhyme “hatters” with “matters.” Who exclaims with an iamb—surely it is not a spondee—“Ha, ha.” By this account it should be a rickety performance, yet Hardy gets away with it, in fact, triumphs with it:

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds.

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.

That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening… .

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men And rest eternal sorely need).’

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,’ Said one, ‘than when he sent us under In our indifferent century!’

And many a skeleton shook his head. ‘Instead of preaching forty year,’ My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, ‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’

Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

—April 1914

When the first line talks of “your great guns,” who is the “you”? Hard to say until the second line when “our coffins” give the answer. The speakers are the dead addressing “you”—us—the living. And it is speakers, not a speaker; a communal rather than an individual voice enunciates the poem. Already a continuum of past and present has been created and immediately after that a site, indeed sacred site with its “chancel window-squares,” is also established.

We are at the tribe’s centre of feeling and belonging, where the spirits of the ancestors are pressing actively in upon the consciousness of the living. The withdrawing worms, like the astonished mouse, may be an image of the shock that all life must sustain in an age of naval gunnery, but the mounds into which they withdraw remind us not just of graves and churchyards and the Christian culture of England. The associations of the word “mounds” itself reach back to the hill-forts and earth-works of Celtic Britain and infuse the atmosphere of the poem with a feeling of ancient belonging.

The settled world of glebe and hound-pack is menaced, yet in the perspective of folk memory the gunnery is recognized both as a new danger and as a part of the old pattern of war and destruction. The length and reliability of this perspective is enforced when God speaks in an idiom completely at one with the dialect usage (“forty year”) of the head-shaking skeletons. God’s speech is not particularly solemn or oracular; it is more a voice from a local pulpit, colored by the liturgical and biblical drone of official religion— “the judgment hour,” “the trumpet,” “rest eternal”— and by the echo of a medieval popular pageant— “for Christés sake,” “to scour/Hell’s floor”—these latter terms putting us in touch with an age when Christ was crucified and hell was harrowed by the tradesmen of the parish. The mixture of eternal verity and domestic expression lodges us firmly in a world of continuity, yet the continuity is neither offered as a rebuke to a more fragmented world nor patronized as Philip Larkin’s “ruin-bibber, randy for antique” might patronize it. It is simply the natural climate of Hardy’s imagination.

The “Channel” of the title, for example, while it may not be endowed with the big patriotic legends of “Camelot and starlit Stonehenge,” is nevertheless more than a name on a map. It is deeply ingrained with England’s island history, with crossings by Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror, the defeat of the Armada, the threat of Napoleon’s invasion. It is a word that somewhat mutely sweeps the string of Englishness, yet an English person would not dwell on it for a second. It enters the common consciousness much as the garden seat entered Hardy’s personal awareness, as a fume of affection and ordinariness. It contains the folk world of neighbors and parsons and assumes it into a bigger unity of historical achievement and cultural unity.

A crucial fact about the poem is the date of its composition which Hardy deliberately appends, “April 1914.” By now this constitutes part of our own sense of the past, a marker of the critical point when for the last time war might be contemplated as part of the natural cycle of human life and could still be contained within a half-admiring cliché as “red war.” That patient God’s eye view of all things, war included, as a cyclic pattern, a pattern seemingly demonstrated by history to be inevitable like seasonal labor or young love—Hardy could still envisage it like that in 1915 in his poem “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”—that view was no longer tenable after the First World War. In “Channel Firing,” however, while the word “gunnery” does rumble with danger and modernity, it still manages to harmonize with the hymn tune swell of the quatrains. The music of continuity could still absorb the vocabulary of danger and one of the pleasures of the poem (which we both relish and suspect) is this deeply founded security. We recognize that the land of England with its legendary placenames, its yeoman tillage and its “pipes and beer” has here found its equivalent “in the farming of a verse.”

So Edward Thomas could lift a handful of earth and declare that that was what he was fighting for. Yet the fight itself changed all that. Hardy’s England became a matter of elegy. Auden and Larkin, two of his natural heirs, are much more at a remove from their emotions when they come to feel about a past which they know to be, among other things, a construction of the literary imagination. They may well recognize a connectedness within the past and feel themselves connected to it, but the posture of their writing selves is different from Hardy’s. They have crossed a divide that opened when hostilities opened in 1914 and which had its repercussions in the big push of modernism in the subsequent years, a divide blasted into consciousness by a work like Pound’s Mauberley where the quatrain operated not, as in “Channel Firing,” like an aural shock-absorber but more like a chiselled niche packed with explosive.

Pound’s past was neither parochial nor patriotic, but literary. His myriad dead went under the earth not for any Thomas-like love of the earth, but “For two gross of broken statues, /For a few thousand battered books.” He could perceive and lament the patriotism which produced “fortitude as never before,” but his relationship to it was critical: a stance interposed itself in the tooling of the stanzas, so that the poem is driven forward by a ferocity of present-tense intelligence rather than by any drumroll of loss. The resulting idiom is stretched between rage and elegance, a style won out of despair at “styles,” a palimpsest of literary modes and allusions which derives from his necessary passionate love of literature and a simultaneous scepticism about that very love.

Hardy’s poetic ear was to the ground, Pound’s was tuned to the airwaves. Hardy naturally heard a kind of indigenous background murmur which his voice took up, Pound was assailed by transmissions from foreign stations and messages from the old dispersed centers of civilization. Hardy holds, as it were, the string of a single persisting tradition while Pound gathers the fallen beads of many traditions. Pound’s imagining had its first impulse in the excitement of encountering classical and medieval poetry at university; it is historical, eclectic, prescriptive, a project of retrieval and design. Hardy’s imagining is not as intellectually fired nor as academically ratified; it has a smallholder’s grip upon its territory rather than a developer’s ambition; and it is not exactly historical since it never goes beyond its own ken but subdues everything within its unifying mythic scope.

For Hardy, place, pastness and poems were all aspects of a single mind-stuff. Even his seeming bookishness was the result of a naturalness, a readiness to bring the common word of the district out of the mouth and ear, straight on to the page. The same is true, in a more anxious and scholastically self-justifying way, of Hopkins, whose linguistic experiments were part of a patriotic urge to keep all of English hard at work. There may be more of the lexicographer in Hopkins but there is still earth under the nails of his hand turning the dictionary pages. His poetry does not spacewalk in the ether of literary associations but is grounded in the insular landscape which, in the month of May, blooms and greens in a way that is still Marian, sacramental, medieval English Catholic.

The early Auden style, too, for all the ellipses and disjunctions and angularities which, at the time, seemed so fast and up to date, can be recognized half a century later as a mode of English belonging. Its skaldic abruptness is the natural marking of a voice from the Danelaw, a runic disposition as ancestral to the English language as it is to his own nordic surname. Fells, kestrels, dooms, dingles, snows, crossroads—they are not simply “effects” but passports to a locale, a sensibility and an inheritance. Unlike Hardy, however, Auden could neither settle for the inheritance nor settle into it. For him, “channel” could not be a word that secured the mind within a moat of national triumph: it was a strip of water under “the new European air/On the edge of a sky that makes England of minor importance.” (“Dover”) The southern cliffs of the country were similarly diminished to “the small field’s ending pause.” (“On This Island”) On a summer night, “in this English house,” he could feel:

Soon, soon, through dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent And, taller than a tree, Hold sudden death before our eyes Whose river dreams long hid the size And vigours of the sea.

(“A Summer Night”)

Auden certainly owns a past yet he also owns up to a present where past attitudes are both inadequate and inefficacious. Impatience with a nostalgic and politically wobbly England is countered by a natural reflex of love for it as it comes under threat. He performs brilliantly in verse partly in order to distract himself from the sombreness of his recognitions. Auden’s contemporaneity was most evident in his sensitivity to current dangers but his ironical affection for the surviving and apparently imperturbable surfaces and rituals of English life guaranteed that the poetry was as emotionally ballasted as it was brilliantly admonitory. It was domestic and it was a tour de force , the work of a lonely mind made lonelier by a critical attitude to what it prized, a victim of the new conditions as inevitably as Hardy was a beneficiary of the old ones.

So, to come back to John Crowe Ransom: when I contrasted him with Hardy, I was thinking of a poem like “Captain Carpenter,” of the way it is a performance, a set piece, a system of diction and rhyme and enjambement that is never for a moment unaware of itself as a set of variations upon well known lyric tunes. Like Auden, Ransom was at a detached angle to what he cherished. He was in two, maybe three places at once: in the parochial south, within the imposed Union, and inside the literary “mind of Europe.” He was in place and displaced and consequently his poetic challenges and their resolutions were tactical, venturesome and provisional. His plight was symptomatic of the double focus which the poet from a regional culture is now likely to experience, caught between a need to affirm the centrality of the local experience to his own being and a recognition that this experience is likely to be peripheral to the usual life of his age. In this situation, the literary tradition is what links the periphery to the centre—wherever that imaginary point may be—and to other peripheries. It is a kind of pseudo-past which can absorb the prescribed local present and which allows each writer—by way of parody, allusion, inflection, parallelism—equal access to its resources. No wonder that it—the literary past, the tradition—became a category of our thinking at precisely that moment when, politically and culturally, the centre could not hold, when one place could no longer be proved more than another place, when St. Louis and Dublin and Wyncote, Pennsylvania could each affirm its rights to it all and Paterson, New Jersey could, with equal and opposite confidence, proclaim an independence of it.

A quarter of a century after he had thought it all out in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot with equal authority but new and mind-sweetening simplicity, summed it all up:

This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. Thus love of a country Begins as attachment to our own field of action And comes to find that action of little importance Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

(“Little Gidding”)

Seamus Heaney: Ireland ’s Laureate

A lecture series given by Bruce Stewart (University of Ulster, emeritus) at UFRN, Brazil, 20 March – 4 April 2014. Lecture I: “A Sense of Place”

The first lecture will cover: 1. The works and life of Seamus Heaney 2. The Irish cultural and historical background 3. The poet’s early life and influence 4. Some examples of his early work 5. His use of Irish landscape and tradition in the early poetry ... 6. A close reading of some early poems

Northern Ireland ...

“The British Isles” .. Republic of Ireland Works of Seamus Heaney

Faber & Faber of London issued all of the poet’s collections in a uniform box-set after his death in 2013.

(Selected poems and prose were not included.) 1966 1969 1972 1975

1979 1983 1984 1987 1990 1991 1996 1999

2001 2005 2006 2010 A Poet’s Life A Poet’s Life [cont.]

SH enters Queen’s University, Belfast , Sept. 1957.

The Belfast Poets – John Hewitt , Michael Longley , Derek Mahon , Seamus Heaney A Poet’s Life [cont.]

Ambassador, scholar Irishman, countryman, son, husband ...

Poet, teacher ...

lecturer, critic, reader ..

.. “national poet” A Poet’s Life [cont.]

Ted Hughes Address, Heaney with his wife Sandymount, Dublin Westminster Abbey, 2011 Marie (née Devlin)

State dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, Dublin, Winner of The Nobel Award May 2011 (with President Mary McAleese) for Literature, 1995 A Poet’s Life [cont.]

“Heaney at 70” (RTE 2009) Acclaimed translation of Beowulf

Roulston Chair (Harvard)

Donates his manuscripts to National Library of Ireland

Oxford Poetry Chair, 1989 Ulysses Medal, UCD, 2011

Funeral in Dublin and burial in Bellaghy, Co. Derry, 2 Sept 2013 Cohen Lifetime Achieve- ment Award, 2013 Modern Ireland: A Brief History of “The Troubles”

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” of 1969-1998 provided the immediate background of much of Heaney’s early poetry and, in an oblique way, its inspiration and the chief determinant of its themes; but he was not a political poet in any overt way. Instead, he drew on the energy of the troubles to construct a mythic explanation of violence which – inevitably – worried and appalled some while it thrilled and satisfied many others. After his “Bogland” series of poems, however, he turned to more pacific themes and contributed significantly to the peace process through his articulation of the juncture between “hope and history” and the increasing inter- nationalism of his work.

1913 – Ulster Convenant and formation of Ulster Volunteers (North) 1914 – Home Rule Bill and formation of Irish Volunteers (South) 1916 – Nationalist Rising in Dublin 1921 – Independent Irish State (South) Independent British State (North) 1939-45 – Irish Neutrality in World War II 1947 – Butler Act brings free secondary education to Northern Ireland 1963 – Lord Robbins’ Free University Education Bill 1969 – Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland 1972 – “Bloody Sunday” in Derry City (Paratroopers kill 13 peaceful marchers) 1975, 1994 1998 – Northern Ireland Peace Agreement “Everyone held his breath, and trembled ..”: The Ulster Troubles 1969-1998

Northern Ireland Civil Rights March, 1969 “Free Derry” History says: Don’t hope 0n 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. —Heaney, The Cure of Troy (1990) Orange Order annual marches

Heaney’s Philotectes (Cure of Troy, 1996) “Bloody Sunday”: British Army shoots Belfast “Peace” Agreement, 1998 13 marchers, Derry Jan. 1972 Co. (London)Derry, N. Ireland

Heaney was born into the family of Catholic farmers in Ballaghy, , in rural County Londonderry. The Northern Ireland state had been established in 1919-21 with a decisive Protestant/Unionist majority over Catholics as an alternative to joining the rest of the country in a Home Rule (i.e., “devolved”) government or a Republic. Although protected by law and the British democratic process, Catholics were treated as enemies of the state by the authorities. Until the Civil Rights Movement of 1969, only Republican extremists voiced their objections to this state of affairs publicly, while the increasingly accessible educational opportunities after 1944 were skillfully exploited by many upwardly-mobile Catholics to advance themselves.

“Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived In important places.* [...] Ulster was British, but with no rights on The English lyric: all around us, though We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.”

- “The Ministry of Fear”, in North (1979)

*The reference here is to “Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh, Heaney’s great precursor among Irish poets from a rural background. Patrick Kavanagh 1904-67

Inishkeen Post Office

Peasant poet?

.. About town

Potato Digging

McDaid’s Pub “Commemorate me ...” The importance of Kavanagh’s example as a rural Irish poet who claimed the dignity of a European classic by comparing his material with Homer’s was immense. Heaney wrote of Kavanagh: ‘Much of his authority and oddity derive from the fact that he wrested his idiom bare- handed out of a literary nowhere. At its most expressive, his voice has the air of bursting a long battened-down silence.’ (p.116.) Here is his most influential poem:

“Epic”, by Patrick Kavanagh I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided, who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork armed claims. I heard the Duffys shouting “Damn your soul!” And old MacCabe stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue-cast steel - “Here is the march along these stones” That was the year of the Munich bother. Which was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind He said, I made the Iliad from such a local row. Gods make their own importance.

Collected Poems (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1964, 1968), p.136. “A Sense of Place”

Traditional Irish small farm preserved in the Ulster Folk Museum

Ulster’s changeless landscape Heaney wearing his father’s hat and coat for a photo-shoot

The bogs of Ireland. The bogs form 27% Ballaghy Bawn – now of total area and are used for fuel. the Heaney Museum School days in (London)Derry – the last fortified city to be built in Europe “A Sense of Place” (Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1977)

‘The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only thirties years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of place as it was experience in the older dispensation.’

‘It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation’ (p.132.)

We are dwellers we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories. And when we look for the history of our sensibilities I am convinced [...] that it is to the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity.’

Seamus Heaney, “A Sense of Place” [1977], in Preoccupations: Selected Prose (London: Faber & Faber 1980), pp.131-49. Ancient Ireland

Dolmen (portal grave)

Newgrange Passage Tomb (4000 bc)

Passage tomb (inside) Ardagh Chalice (13th c.)

Tara Broach, 700 ad.

st Book of Kells (9th c.) Broighter Boat (1 century b.c.) Glenisheen Gorget Literary Ireland The tradition in English

Jonathan Swift W. B. Yeats

William Congreve J. M. Synge

Oliver Goldsmith Lady Gregory

Edmund Burke Sean O’Casey

Maria Edgeworth James Joyce

William Carleton Samuel Beckett

R. B. Sheridan Seamus Heaney

Lady Morgan John Banville

Sheridan Le Fanu Colm Toibin

Bram Stoker Sebastian Barry

George Bernard Shaw Anne Enright ... W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) Founder of the Irish Literary Revival

Philosophical Songs: XII - Meru Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality: Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome! Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest, The Stolen Child Caverned in night under the drifted snow, Away with us he's going, Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast The solemn-eyed: Beat down upon their naked bodies, know He'll hear no more the lowing That day brings round the night, that before dawn Of the calves on the warm hillside His glory and his monuments are gone. Or the kettle on the hob (1934) Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, Yeats created a national literature based on For the world's more full of weeping than you Irish folklore, but also an arcane, intellectual can understand. modernism which has little to do with nation. (1886) For Patrick Kavanagh, Yeats’s Irish Literary Revival was “a thorough-bred English lie.” Early poems – laying the foundations

Note: A recording of Heaney reading this poem is available on internet at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland- 23900998 and many other websites.

Peasant poet? After the phenomenal successing of his first collection, Heaney obliged photographers by appearing in his home fields wearing clothes very like those of his father – or Patrick Kavanagh. In reality, he was a university-educated teacher of English Literature who, in other circum- stances, might have “escaped” from his rural background without looking back ... Great Irish Elk The inspiration of “Bogland”

Heaney has said that he wrote “Bogland” returning from the studio of his friend T. P. Flanagan whose haunting images of Irish bogland suggested to him “the afterlife of experience”:

“They advance and retire along the brink of the “Irish Bogland (I)” by T. P. Flanagan actual, sometimes close enough to be tinged with the bolder presences of colour, sometimes haunting the canvas like luminous mists.” (quoted in Brian O’Doherty, ed., The Irish Imagination 1959-1971, 1971, p.58.)

Flanagan (1929-2011) was born in Co. Fermanagh, near Heaney’s place of birth in N. Ireland and – though a good figurist - concentrated on landscape painting throughout his career. “Irish Bogland (II)” “Carrickrea Quarry” by T. P. Flanagan by T. P. Flanagan “Feeling into Words”: Heaney explains “Boglands”

‘I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly because it is a landscape that has a strange assuaging effect on me, one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We used to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an elk had been taken out of a bog nearby and a few of our neighbours had got their photographs in the paper, peering out of its antlers.

So I began to get an idea of the bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realise that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was “found in a bog” .

Moreover, since memory was the faculty that supplied me with the first quickening of my own poetry, I had a tentative unrealised need to make a congruence between memory and bogland and, for the want of a better word, our national consciousness. And it all released itself after “We have no prairies […]” - but we have bogs. (pp.54-55.)

“Feeling into Words”, in Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-78 (London: Faber & Faber 1980), pp.41-60; pp.54-55). The Bogland Poems This remarkable series of poems, all dealing with Irish bog considered as the geographical locus of national memory and hence a symbolic explanation of the long history of violence and victimhood in Ireland, preoccupied Heaney mainly in two collections, Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). The poem “Bogland” – heralding that theme – was the last in the preceding collection, Door into the Dark (1969). Bog Bodies

Heaney was much affected by P. V. Glob’s study of The Bog People (1969)

P. V. Glob, Mosefolket (1965) , Great Irish Elk trans. Into English by Robert Bruce-Mitford (Faber 1969).

Oldcroghan Man: one of Grabaulle Man (Denmark) the few known Irish examples. Heaney’s critics

Edna Longley: “if the bog becomes a symbol of national consciousness, it is not in the manner of an insular, self-righteous nationalism. Heaney is mindful of the fact that the lost homeland is less a territorial locality than an ontological locus whose universal dimensions forever elude the boundaries of a particular nation. [...] The bogholes or receding memory lead back to a fathomless ocean flow which transcends our contemporary grasp.’ (p.106.) In commenting on the phrase ‘images and symbols adequate to our predicament [… &c.]”.

Longley, ‘Heaney and Homecoming’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Dublin: Wolfhound 1988), pp.101-22:

Blake Morrison, ‘It would be going too far to suggest that ‘Punishment’ in particular and the Bog poems generally offer a defence of Republicanism; but they are a form of ‘explanation’. Indeed the whole procedure of North is such as to give sectarian killing in Ulster a historical respectability which it is not usually given in day-to-day journalism.’

(British Poetry Since 1970, [n.d.; poss. in Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, 1982], pp.109-10.) In 1972 – the year when North appeared – Heaney moved to cottage in Glanmore, near Ashford, Co Wicklow, which he bought from Prof. Ann Saddlemyer, have previously occupied it on loan. About this time was portrayed by Edward Maguire.

Glanmore would be for Heaney a place of quiet retreat and healing throughout the rest of his life and ultimately the setting of one of his most moving late poems, "The Blackbird of Glanmore”. It was here that he discovered the upper atmosphere of the imagination and took flight in it – foresaking the gravity of Irish history and its sorrows for a newly metaphysical vision.

Seamus Heaney by Edward McGuire “The Skylight” - “Glanmore Revisited (vii).

You were the one for skylights. I opposed Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there, it was all hutch and hatch. The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant Sky entered and held surprise wide open. For days I felt like an inhabitant Of that house where the man sick of the palsy Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

—”Glanmore Revisited”, in Seeing Things (1991); rep. In Opened Ground (1998), p.350. A poem for reading practice This poem from North (1975) is greatly admired for its expression of familial love – in this case, the love of a recently-lost aunt who was a constant presence in Heaney’s childhood. It is set in the kitchen of the farmyard home where he grew up and which he revisits in imagination after her death, with his memories of her in his mind. Now read Part I: Sunlight.

“Ulster Farmyard” by Task: Form work-groups and discuss the “Sunlight” – i.e., the first part of this poem - in relation to Frank McKelvey three topics: a) The general meaning; b) the vocabulary; and c) the best way to read the last stanza. Special question: why are there “two clocks” in the penultimate stanza? Poems for reading with this course

You may like to read through the selection of Seamus Heaney’s poems which I have placed on the Ricorso website. These are arranged chronologically and include all the poems expressly mentioned in this course, along with several others which illustrate the same themes and treatment. RICORSO The Ricorso website is a large resource of information on Irish writers. It can be found at www.ricorso.net. If you click the “I accept” button on the Terms page, you can reach to all the resources of that website.

Alternatively, you can simply type in www.ricorso.net/rx/index.htm, and then choose “Seamus Heaney” under “H” in the region of the website called “Authors A-Z”. This will give you access to all the material about Heaney which I have collected for teaching, writing, and research. (Please don’t get too involved with this – it’s easy to get lost!)

Finally, you can go straight to the selection of Heaney’s poems used for this class by clicking www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/Heaney_S/Poems1.htm.

I really hope you enjoy your visit to Ricorso – and the “Seamus Heaney” experience!

―Bruce Stewart

Seamus Heaney: Poem summaries and tips for the Leaving Cert English Poetry Exam

Listen to our H1 audio notes on the poet Seamus Heaney

My name is Laura Daly, I’m an English teacher from Dublin and I’m going to be taking you through an exam-focused podcast on Seamus Heaney.

There are 13 Heaney poems on the course, which is a lot, so be sure to skip to the ones that your teacher has covered in class. Remember you need to discuss four in-depth and refer briefly to two more for an H1. The Youtube video below is broken into chapters so you can just focus on the poems you are studying. 

What is covered in this podcast?

I cover a range of different topics in this podcast, such as: 

Background to Heaney's life

Poetic Influences

Key images and language

Stylistic features

A breakdown of 13 of Heaney's poems

How to use this podcast to learn

I recommend having each poem to hand while you listen to the podcast. You can find all of these poems by looking them up on Google. I have also included the transcript of this podcast so you can take down the notes you find useful.

Have a listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Or if you prefer, you can watch listen to it on Youtube it instead!

If you have ideas for the Studyclix Explains channel, topics you'd like us to cover, or guests you'd like us to get on, please let us know. You can follow Studyclix on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat and share your ideas with us there.

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Otherwise, drop us a line at  [email protected]

Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

1. Introduction

Hi there, welcome to this Studyclix podcast on Seamus Heaney. My name is Laura Daly, I’m an English teacher from Dublin and I’m going to be taking you through an exam focused podcast on Seamus Heaney. Heaney is a literary icon, a source of cultural pride and Nobel prize winner. But do not be intimidated, in terms of being a Leaving Cert poet he is extremely accessible to students and a great choice to focus in on for the exam.  There are 13 Heaney poems on the course, which is a lot, so be sure to skip to the ones that your teacher has covered in class. Remember you need to discuss four in depth and refer briefly to two more for a H1.

Just like in a Leaving Cert essay I’m going to follow a structure to give this podcast coherence. First of all, I’m going to tell you a little bit about Heaney’s background and his poetic influences, giving you a brief cultural context for his poetry and outline some key stylistic features. Then we will move towards the main section of the podcast analysing each of the poems on the course with a with a view to condensing them into the bitesize elements to make them easy for you to remember.

These elements will include looking at:

Imagery and Sound techniques

Stylistic Features

Finally, I’ll give you some top tips in terms of exam prep.

Background and Poetic Influences

So in terms of Heaney’s background, we know so much about him, it’s a case of selecting a few key elements for your essay that will lend to understanding his influences and his social and cultural context. The social and cultural context in simple terms, means what was happening in society when the poet was growing up or writing, that would’ve impacted their views and therefore, their art. So who and what, influenced Heaney? 

Well Heaney was born in County Derry in 1939 and reared on the farm Mossbawn until 1953, after the untimely death of his younger brother caused the family to move. Many of you will be familiar with the poem ‘Mid Term Break’ from Junior Cycle which deals with his brother’s death. The farm Mossbawn and the North feature heavily in Heaney’s work, both the personal and political aspects are explored in his poetry.  

Writing during the Troubles means that violence and Irish identity are key issues that emerge in his writing. He moved from the North, from Mossbawn to Belfast and then to the Republic of Ireland living for a time in Wicklow and then Dublin. He also spent time working in America. The landscape of Ireland and beyond holds a fascination for Heaney, becoming a metaphor for creativity and identity in his poems ‘Postscript’ and ‘Bogland’, respectively.

As well as abstract or ideological themes like identity, poets are human beings, so of course their personal relationships impact their writing and we see this also in Heaney’s poetry. Three of the poems on the course deal with Heaney’s wife, Marie and the different stages of their romance; ‘The Underground’, ‘The Skunk’ and ‘Tate’s Avenue’. We also see Heaney’s relationship with his father feature in many of the poems such as; ‘A Call’, ‘The Harvest Bow’ and ‘The Pitchfork’.

Another thing to note about Heaney’s influences is that the writing process itself, the production of art, often a preoccupation of poets, is something explored in his poetry; we see this in ‘The Forge’ and ‘The Pitchfork’.

During his lifetime, Heaney was widely recognised and had a very successful career. He began as an English teacher, before becoming a lecturer and full time poet. Among his many roles and accolades he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in Harvard, one of the university’s most prestigious offices; he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford University; he served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland; he was heavily involved with the Field Day theatre company; he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture, and he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. However, if we are purely focusing on the exam get your pens ready now, I’m going to give you a few key bullet points from his biography to take note of for your essay:

His childhood in Derry deeply influenced him.

Growing up in the North and the Troubles, influenced his perception of violence and Irish identity.

The natural world features in his poetry.

His relationships with his wife and father are important sources of creativity.

He writes about the creative process.

While you have your pens there I’m just going to highlight a couple of key stylistic features that reoccur throughout Heaney’s work that you may want to take note of too, before we begin to take a closer look at the poems.

• Heaney favours a four line stanza and you’ll see this form repeated in his poems.
• He uses classical allusion/mythology in his poems.
• In terms of language, Heaney often favours compound adjectives, lending a unique richness to his imagery.
• Many of his poems feel like you entering half way through a conversation, there is a lovely intimacy to them as a result.

Let’s move now to an overview of each of the poems.

Overview of the poems

1. the forge.

Let’s begin with some technical language in relation to the structure of the poem and get it out of the way. ‘The Forge’ is a Petrarchan sonnet, a 14 line poem with a set rhyming scheme yet it is loosely in iambic pentameter which is associated with Shakespearean sonnets. Iambic pentameter is a line with 10 syllables, 5 stressed and 5 unstressed, which lends the poem a rhythmic beat. What makes it a Petrarchan sonnet is that it is divided into an octave, the first 8 lines, and a sestet, the final 6 lines. Between the octave and the sestet there is a volta, which means a turn or a change in focus of the poem. You will not need to explain all this in the exam but if you are aiming for a H1 it’s crucial that you can confidently use the words; sonnet, octave, sestet, volta and iambic pentameter, throughout your analysis of this poem.

On the surface the poem is about a forge and the blacksmith who works within it, but as with most poems there are layers of meaning to be unravelled by the listener. In this case the deeper meanings in poem concern creativity, craftsmanship and how certain arts are dying in the face of encroaching modernity. The craftsmanship of the blacksmith, which Heaney so admires, is an extended metaphor for the craftsmanship of the poet himself, his ability to walk through the ‘door into the dark’. The alliterative opening image captures how poetry is a journey into the recesses of a poet’s mind and imagination.

The whole poem is littered with sound; ‘ring’, ‘hiss’, ‘clatter’, ‘grunts’, ‘slam’, onomatopoeia bringing to life the work of the smith and noisy forge. A H1 tip is that any technique that is reoccurs throughout a poem, such as the onomatopoeia in this poem, must be mentioned in your analysis of the poem.

So let’s first look at the octave which focuses on the workings within the forge and then move to the sestet, where, after the volta, the poem switches focus to the blacksmith himself. The ‘door into the dark’ immediately lends a sense of mystery to the poem; this mystery is continued with the alchemical work of the blacksmith:

The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a shoe toughens in water.

The unpredictability of the creative process and its transformative nature are captured in this vivid image. The magical and spiritual essence of creativity is illustrated when Heaney compares the anvil to ‘an alter’; his tone is one of reverence and awe.

When the poem switches focus to the smith in the sestet, it celebrates the mastery of the man who ‘expends himself in shape and music’, his job is physical but not without a beauty of its own. The tone changes sharply here, to one of nostalgia for times gone by as he ‘recalls a clatter/of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows’. The blacksmith and his work appear anachronistic in this modern world. An anachronism is something that belongs to another era or is perceived as old-fashioned. These skilled trades are becoming defunct with increasing improvements in technology and automation. The poem comes from a collection published in 1969 but this anxiety still exists today, if not even more so. The skilled trade of the smith as I’ve mentioned before is comparable to the work of the poet, and the poem contains Heaney’s anxiety that his work may too be undervalued. But this anxiety is discarded in the final lines of the poem as the poet asserts that the smith:

…grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick, To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

This idea of beating ‘real iron’ is a very masculine image; Heaney surmises that the work has intrinsic value and will continue on.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes : the creative process, lost arts.
• Key images : The octave; the door into the dark, the fantail of sparks, the anvil as the alter. The sestet: shape and music, the traffic where hooves were, real iron.
• Stylistic features : sounds permeate the poem, onomatopoeia
• Tone : mystery, awe, nostalgia.

‘Bogland’ is a poem about the natural world but on a deeper level it is a commentary about Irish identity. We see this subtle shift in perspective from the individual ‘I’ to the collective pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ used throughout the poem. There is a comparison at play in the imagery here between America and Ireland; the vastness of the former is contrasted with the depth of the latter. The American landscape may be big but our bogs hold the secrets of millennia. This is perfectly captured in the imagery of the opening stanza;

‘We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening - Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon’

The use of the dash here cleverly slicing the line, mirroring the language. 

These lines continue with the vivid image of how the eye is ‘wooed into the cyclops’ eye of a tarn’, meaning the sun disappears into a mountain lake. The words ‘cyclops’ and ‘tarn’ lend a mythical aspect to the poem and this is continued in the unearthing of artefacts from the bog. Artefacts from previous era’s ‘the skeleton/Of the Great Irish Elk’ and the ‘butter sunk under/More than a hundred years’.

The bog itself is compared to the butter preserved within it, ‘The ground itself is kind, black butter’. Its porous nature means that it lacks definition, both physically and ideologically; ‘Missing its last definition/By millions of years’. It is yielding, with an hint that one could be ensnared in it, ‘Melting and opening underfoot’.

A key image in the poem is that of the pioneers, the Irish pioneers, digging down, as opposed to the American pioneers who journeyed West. 

‘Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards’

But as always there are layers of metaphorical meaning below the surface, just like the ‘layers’ of the bog. The pioneers may be the Irish artist digging deep in search of inspiration or some definition of identity;

‘Every layer they strip Seems camped on before’

The sense here is of the deep historical and cultural significance of our island, encapsulated in the bog.

The poem closes with the ambiguous image; ‘The wet centre is bottomless.’ This can be interpretated that the Irish landscape and cultural heritage are a bottomless well of both inspiration and pride for the Irish people. 

Like all of Heaney’s poems the language is infused with a musicality, we see sibilance, assonance and alliteration throughout. The tone is very self-assured and authoritative to an extent, Heaney assumes the voice of the Irish people. This is very much a universal poem as opposed to a personal one.

So to recap:

• Themes : the natural landscape, Irish identity, poetry as a way of searching for a collective identity.
• Key images : the bog, the elk, the butter, the pioneers digging down, the ‘layers’ of the bog, the bottomless centre.
• Stylistic features : contrast, mystery and mythology. The collective pronoun ‘we’.
• Tone : self-assured.

3. The Tollund Man

‘The Tollund Man’ should be read in conjunction with ‘Bogland’. ‘Bogland’, as we’ve just seen, deals with Irish bogs, but ‘The Tollund Man’ refers to a bog body found in the Jutland region of Denmark in the 1950’s. The bog man died around the 5 th Century BC in what is presumed was some sort of ritual human sacrifice. If you have not done so, you should google the images of the Tollund Man now; the way the bog preserved the man is absolutely fascinating and it will bring the imagery of the poem vividly to life. The themes of the poem are violence, death and rebirth.

First let’s look at a brief overview of the form and content of the poem; it has eleven stanzas divided into three distinct sections. In the first section Heaney imagines a trip Aarhus to see where the bog body ‘reposes’. In the second section the poet links the bog and its powers to preserve a body, to the victims of the War of Independence and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And in the third section he imagines the bog man on his way to his ceremonial death and describes how the poet would feel oddly at home in that foreign place. Why Heaney would feel a familiarity with the place is the crux of the poem and we will get to it a bit later.

The poem opens with the wistful ‘Some day I will go to Aarhus’, immediately there a sense of something desired but is not yet a reality, and this is important in relation to the Northern Irish context in section two. The opening stanzas are extremely vivid as Heaney gives us a detailed description of the bog body, an image full of alliteration;

‘his peat brown head, the mild pods of his eye lids, his pointed skin cap.’

The man was thought to be a sacrifice to the goddess Nerthus, goddess of fertility and the language of sex and fertility can be seen throughout, ‘naked’ he is her ‘Bridegroom’ and the she ‘opened her fen,/ those dark juices working/Him to a saint’s kept body’. The bog has a transformative effect on the man’s corpse.

Heaney wonders could he ‘risk blasphemy’ by asking the Tollund man ‘to make germinate’ to regrow, the bodies of those lost to violence in Ireland. The imagery here becomes violent and the tone becomes menacing; victims of Ireland’s bloody history are remember in graphic terms. His first image of violence is in reference to the War of Independence;

‘The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards’

The language used, ‘scattered…flesh’ evokes total revulsion in the reader. This brutalisation of the bodies of victims into parts, is continued in the imagery of the next stanza. Heaney references the sectarian murder of four brothers, whose bodies were mutilated by dragging them along railway tracks; ‘Tell-tale skin and teeth/Flecking the sleepers’. We feel disgust, mirrored in the harsh alliterative ‘t’ in this stanza. The bodies in fragments are sharply contrasted with the perfectly preserved body of the Tollund Man we see earlier in the poem. The land in Denmark preserving its men, the land of Ireland destroying them.   

Section three returns us to Heaney’s imagination as he visualises himself journeying through the land where the Tollund man made his final journey on the ‘tumbril’. Heaney describes how he will feel alien the strange place names and foreign language ‘not knowing their tongue’ contributing to his feeling ‘lost’. However, the final statement is the crux of the poem I referred to earlier;

‘I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.’

Heaney equates being lost and unhappy in the ‘man-killing parishes’ with being in Ireland; this is an a particularly cutting compound adjective in this final stanza. The poem is a scathing commentary on our violent past.

• Themes : violence, sectarian violence, death, rebirth.
• Key images : the Tollund man, the goddess, the bog, the body parts of the victims of violence
• Stylistic features : the personification of the bog as the goddess Nerthus.
• Tone : wistful, revulsion, unhappy, critical.

4. Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication 1 Sunlight

Mossbawn was the farm where Heaney spent his early years and the woman in the poem is his aunt Mary. Sunlight is a beautifully simple poem; it has the painterly quality of a Vermeer, look up the painting ‘The Milkmaid’ and you will see what I mean. The poem captures a moment of simple domesticity, full of comfort and love. His aunt is baking scones, the kitchen is quiet; this act of baking is an act of love.  The poem is divided into seven four line stanzas but a key stylistic feature is the enjambment that gives the poem a laconic flow, mirroring the slow pace of the scene depicted. This effect is also created by the assonance, the long ‘oo’ sounds we see throughout.

The opening image, as with all poems, is important, he begins ‘There was a sunlit absence.’, part of the farmyard is in shadow and yet ‘water honeyed’ in the heat and the sibilant simile, ‘the sun stood/like a griddle cooling/against the wall’, playfully contradicts his earlier assertion. This poem is about light and shadow, illuminating the love in the scene but the words are never spoken aloud between Heaney and his aunt. 

Stanzas 3, 4 and 5 concern the act of baking ‘her hands scuffled/over the bakeboard’. Then the focus slowly turns towards his aunt ‘broad lapped’ with ‘whitening nails’ and ‘measling shins’, the realism of the imagery here is refreshing in our world of edited perfection.

One of the most significant lines in the poem is the simple statement ‘here is space/again’. Time is suspended and the moment is reflective and meditative.  The ‘tick of two clocks’ lends no urgency, only a rhythm to the scene. The final stanza contains the crux of the poem ‘And here is love’, Heaney finishes with a clever simile:

And here is love Like a tinsmith’s scoop Sunk past its gleam In the meal bin.

So much of the affection between the aunt and nephew is unsaid, ‘sunk’ like the scoop, but there nonetheless.

• Themes : domesticity in all its simple beauty, love.
• Key images : the sunlight and heat, the images of the aunt baking and sitting, the tick of two clocks, here is space, love like sunk scoop.
• Stylistic features : painterly quality of the imagery, light and shadow.
• Tone : meditative, appreciative, loving.

5. A Constable Calls

It is interesting to analyse ‘A Constable Calls’ alongside ‘Mossbawn: 1 Sunlight’ because both deal with encounters in the family home. Yet, while one is familiar and full of love, the other is chilling and full of threat. Remember, that linking your poems like this throughout your Leaving Cert essay is important in creating a cohesion. As discussed earlier Heaney was a Catholic growing up in Northern Ireland at a time when Catholics were marginalised and largely underrepresented in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).  The Constable has called to do a tax return on Heaney’s father’s crops from the farm, and seen through the eyes of the child, it is an ominous visit.  

An interesting technique used in the poem, to dehumanise the Constable, is synecdoche. Synecdoche is when a part is used to represent the whole, in this case ‘the boot of the law’. The constable is representative of the law and justice, but he represents the violence and oppression of it, as seen in the word ‘boot’. The constable is continuously fragmented, young Heaney sees only the accoutrements of his position; ‘the cap’, the ‘polished holster’, ‘revolver butt’, ‘the heavy ledger’ and the ‘Domesday Book’, he cannot see beyond these symbols of power and violence, to see the man as whole person.

The voice in the poem, the power of language also belongs to the Constable, save for a terse ‘No’ from Heaney’s father, the Constable is the interrogator and person in control.

‘Any other root crops? Mangolds?  Marrowstems?  Anything like that?’

In fact the young boy is so intimidated by the visit he questions the veracity of his father’s statement; ‘was there not a line of turnips where the seed ran out/in the potato field?’ His uncertainty and naivety means he ‘assumes small guilts and sat/imagining the black hole in the barracks’. The ‘black hole’ here is important for the sheer terror it represents, an annihilation at the hands of the law and the tone created by the forceful alliteration in these lines is oppressive.

Because we share young Heaney’s fearful perspective of the visit, the effect on the reader is one feeling disconcerted. The anticipation of the ticking bomb cleverly alluded to in the onomatopoeic final line ‘And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked’ creates an unbearable tension, especially because as readers we know the tragedy of the Troubles lies ahead for Northern Ireland. The final line is in this way devastatingly premonitory.

• Themes : power and power structures, violence, oppression.
• Key images : all the images associated with the constable, his bike, the Domesday book. 
• Stylistic features : synecdoche, the onomatopoeia, the direct speech of the Constable.
• Tone : threatening, fearful, ominous.

A call is another memory of Heaney’s father and the themes are love and mortality. It describes a phone call he makes to his parents and while his mother goes to call his father in from the garden to talk to him, Heaney pictures his father in his mind’s eye.  Suddenly, he is struck by the mortality of his aging parent and deep sense of love for him.  

The poem opens with the voice of Heaney’s mother, the use of direct speech gives the poem a sense of immediacy and a casualness to begin with. She goes out to get Heaney’s father who is ‘weeding’. Her reference to the fact that ‘The weather here’s (my emphasis) so good’ creates a sense of physical distance between the son and his parents, a distance that the phone call is trying to diminish.

Heaney pictures his father gardening, a man of action, emphasised by the use of the verbs ‘Touching, inspecting, separating…pulling’. He is gently extracting the ‘frail and leafless’ stalks, a subtle metaphor for the aging process and death. He is satisfied in his work but and an undercurrent of sadness is alluded to;

‘Pleased to feel each little weed-root break, But rueful also…’

We are left wondering what has caused his melancholy. 

Heaney’s visual is interrupted by the aural image of the clocks ticking in the silence of his parent’s far away hall.

‘Then found myself listening to The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks’

‘Grave’ here means serious, but it is also an allusion to death, and a few lines later Heaney describes the ‘sunstruck pendulums…’, pendulums were often stopped when someone in a house died. This gives rise to a philosophical thought; the poet repurposes the Medieval morality plays which feature the characters ‘Everyman’ and the personification of Death, and imagines that nowadays Death would merely make a phone call to their victim to summon them to the afterlife. 

‘…if it were nowadays This is how Death would summon Everyman.’

It is a morbid thought and one that overwhelms Heaney because when he is interrupted by the voice of his father he proclaims, ‘I nearly said I loved him’. 

It is the word ‘nearly’ that makes this concluding line so poignant, Heaney feels deep love for his father but is unable to express it out loud.

The form of this poem differs from many of the others, there are irregular stanzas and the use of ellipses, give it a slow, meandering feel that is then sharply interrupted by his musings on mortality and his undeclared filial love. It is an ordinary moment suffused with the extraordinary acknowledgement of our most human conditions, our ability to love and our mortality.

So to recap;

• Themes : a son’s love, mortality.
• Key images : the father gardening, the clocks in the hall, the morality play and the characters of Everyman and Death.
• Stylistic features : direct speech of Heaney’s mother.
• Tone : loving, poignant, undercurrent of melancholy.

7. The Harvest Bow

A harvest bow was a bow made of straw worn on a the lapel of a jacket in celebration of the end of harvest, they were also given as small love tokens. In the poem, Heaney is speaking to his father, remembering a Harvest Bow that he made when Heaney was a child and the poem moves between past and present. Adult Heaney has that same bow on his dresser now and it creates a makes him nostalgic. The poem is in praise of his father’s craftsmanship and character.

In the first stanza Heaney addresses his father directly and recalls him plaiting the harvest bow, seemingly infusing the wheat with the his own ‘mellowed silence’. The image of the father here is a calm person, a person who does not talk unnecessarily perhaps, someone who takes pride in their work. The bow is outwardly described as ‘a throwaway love-knot’, yet Heaney has kept it, and in the final stanza we see how he cherishes it’s symbolism.

The second stanza focuses on the father’s work worn hands, hands that have ‘aged’, hands involved in manual labour and yet hands that could do delicate creative work too as seen in the image:

‘Hands…harked to their gift and worked with fine intent Until your fingers moved somnambulant’

It is done with such skill it is almost as if he is doing it in his sleep, Heaney the master crafter of words is admiring his father’s ‘gift’, his craftsmanship and skill.

The end of the second stanza moves back to the present with Heaney holding the bow in his hands ‘Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable’. I love this image it’s so evocative.  ‘Palpable’ means something you can touch and feel but it also means a feeling that is so strong that you can touch it. The ‘unsaid’ could mean a few things here, so there’s a lovely ambiguity at play; ultimately I read it that Heaney feels his father’s love when he holds the bow.

When he looks through the bow in the third stanza ‘spy into its golden loops’, he is again brought back to his childhood. This time he is on an evening walk with his father in the fields of Mossbawn, the farm he grew up on but was subsequently sold as referenced by the ‘auction notice on the outhouse wall’. Heaney describes how he was ‘already homesick/for the big lift of these evenings’, perhaps meaning he was anticipating the families imminent departure from Mossbawn, but also acknowledging the transience of that special time with the his father, ‘the big lift’ being how he was emotionally buoyed by such intimate evenings. 

In the final stanza Heaney quotes a poem saying ‘the motto of this frail device’, the bow, could be ‘The end of art is peace’ and again this line defies a single interpretation.  It could mean when an artist finishes his work, he finally gets peace. Or more probably that the end goal of any artistic endeavour is political, it’s aim is for peace. These peaceful pastoral images of father and son stand in sharp contrast with the violence associated with the North in Irish consciousness, is Heaney offering an alternative image, a peaceful image, as a representation of his homeland? Or is it a utopian, idealistic image that he craves returns to the North? 

The final simile of the bow, ‘like a drawn snare’ who the spirit of the corn has managed to escape from the trap. Is this a reference to Heaney’s move out of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has he managed to slip out of danger?

Ultimately, the poem is an intimate portrait of a father and his admiring son. In terms of form, it has a steady aabbcc rhyming pattern throughout and it gives it a lovely steady rhythm, a pattern, just like the pattern his father followed in making the bow. The enjambment contributes to the flow of the poem, mirroring the meandering walk of father and son through ‘the long grass and midges’.

• Themes : father son relationship, craftsmanship and skill, the political purpose of art.
• Key images : the bow, his father’s hands, ‘the big lift’, the motto, simile of the snare.
• Stylistic features : rhyming scheme, the enjambment.
• Tone : nostalgic, admiration, intimate, didactic.

8. The Pitchfork

‘The Pitchfork’ should be read in conjunction with ‘The Harvest Bow’, as it also celebrates Heaney’s father. In this poem the poet uses confluence to merge the imagery of the pitchfork with his father, he highlights his admiration for both the man and the tool he uses in this beautiful lyric poem. Some interpretations see the ‘he’ in the poem as young Heaney, but for this reading the ‘he’ is assumed to be Heaney’s father, as the poem comes from collection that mourned his father’s passing. The poem is also a meditation on the art of writing poetry.

In the opening lines, we once again see the stylistic technique, so often favoured by Heaney, where we feel as if we have entered mid-conversation;

‘Of all the implements, the pitchfork was the one That come near to an imagined perfection:’

This ‘imagined perfection’ is because of the transformation the father undergoes in young Heaney’s eyes when he handles the pitchfork. He becomes a ‘warrior’, or ‘athlete’ and a worker all in one. He uses a simile to say that it ‘felt like a javelin, accurate and light’.  It becomes a weapon in his father’s skilled hands and classical images of the hero are evoked here. The ‘accurate and light’ show the father’s skill and strength respectively.  The tone is admiration and awe.

The language in the third stanza is unusual in that nearly the entire stanza is a list of descriptors of the pitchfork and by extension, his father. It is described as being ‘sweat-cured’, here is the compound adjective which makes Heaney’s imagery so individual, the implication is that hard work has almost curated and refined the tool, just as a writer curates and refines a poem. The ‘springiness’ is suggestive of his father’s youth and vitality. ‘Balanced’ is a testament to the calm and quiet nature we observed in the Harvest Bow. There is definitely a masculinity associated with the pitchfork through the language chosen, the instrument itself is described in quite phallic terms at times.

The poem becomes even more symbolic of the writing process in the final two stanzas. He describes his father imagining the flight of the pitchfork ‘He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past’ but this flight can be seen as a metaphor for flights of imagination. The father has learned to let go of controlling the outcome of the throw. Let’s look closer at the final stanza

…has learned at last to follow that simple lead Past it’s own aim, out to an other side Where perfection – or nearness to it – is imagined Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

Metaphorically speaking Heaney has learned that ‘perfection’ in writing, or the closest thing to it, comes not from what you believe is the aim of the piece, but the vulnerability that occurs during the process ‘the opening hand’. How it lands in the consciousness of the reader is out of his control, like his father before him he can only trust the process and ‘follow that simple lead’, his imagination. There is something almost metaphysical hinted at here in the skill of the two men. The soft sibilance of the pitchfork ‘sailing past/Evenly, imperturbably through space,/Its prongs starlight and absolutely soundless –‘ has connotations of the transcendental quality of poetry, its ability to traverse space and time is evoked here.

• Themes : his admiration of his father’s skill and masculine prowess, the art of writing as imaginative flights of fancy and vulnerability.
• Key images : the pitchfork and the plethora of adjectives used to describe it, the warrior and athlete, the pitchfork flying through space, the opening hand.
• Stylistic features : compound adjectives, feeling as we have entered a conversation that’s already begun, repetition of ‘perfection’.
• Tone : awe, admiration, pride, trust (in relation to the creative process)

9. The Underground

Outwardly ‘The Underground’ is poem about the Heaney’s honeymoon in London, when he and his wife, Marie, took a tube to a concert in the Albert Hall. When reading the poem it’s important to contextualise it, the Heaney’s were Catholics who married in the 1960’s, a time when sex outside of marriage was illicit, so often peoples’ first sexual experiences happened on Honeymoon. In fact, ‘The Underground’ is an incredibly sexual poem, full of the heady chemistry of a newly married couple. It is poem about love and sex, tension and gratification.  

The opening stanza sets the scene vividly, the couple are running through the ‘vaulted tunnel’ of the tube and there is an urgency to it with the continued use of the present participle, the ‘ing’ form, throughout; ‘running, ‘speeding’, ‘gaining’.  The imagery has all the hallmarks of an old fashioned courtship. The idea of the ‘chase’ is evoked and ‘playing hard to get’, as his wife is ‘speeding’ ahead, out of reach. Classical allusion, of which Heaney is so fond, also features in this opening stanza and contributes to the sexual connotations. He uses a simile to compare himself to Pan who ardently pursued the virginal spirit Syrinx, who turns herself into a reed to avoid his advances.

‘And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned into a reed’

The second stanza goes on to compare his wife to a ‘new white flower japed with crimson’, here Heaney uses white to represent his wife’s virginity and the ‘crimson’ to represent the loss of it. Her buttons come off her coat as she runs ahead, almost as if she is undressing before him, or he wishes it so:

‘As the coat flapped wild and button and button Sprang off and fell in a trail’

The repetition of ‘button’ and the energetic verb ‘sprung’ adds tension here.

The pace of the third stanza slows as assonance abounds, ‘Honeymooning, moonlighting’, ‘moonlighting’ can doing something illicit. The main metaphor in the third stanza is the child’s story of Hansel and Gretel, he compares himself to Hansel picking up the breadcrumbs as they retrace their steps after the concert. Yet the use of the fairy-tale imagery belies the sexuality of the lines:

‘…and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlight stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons’.

There is a shift in tone again in the final stanza and yet another classical allusion. The metaphor used here by Heaney is that of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice was stolen by Hades and brought to the Underworld, Orpheus was allowed to take her back on one condition, as she followed behind him out of the underworld, he was not allowed to look back. He looked back and lost her forever.  Again while it’s important you know this story to understand the image, you do not have to explain it in the exam.

Heaney’s sexual appetite appears not to have been quenched and he compares the empty phallic tracks to himself:

‘ …the wet track Bared and tensed as I am’

The final line is ambiguous, while it is a poem about love and intimacy it is also about early love, there is erotic tension but perhaps all is not perfect in the young lovers’ relationship. Heaney is acutely aware of his wife’s step behind him ‘your step following’ but he fears he will lose her if he looks back, just like Orpheus lost Eurydice. The metaphor here contains certain anxieties about trust and a wife following a husband’s path. Is there a more guarded tone this final stanza than the intimacy we saw earlier in the poem? Is the idea that Heaney is ‘leading’ his wife from the Underworld, that he is her escape route, somewhat self-important?

• Themes : love, sex, eroticism of early marriage, tension in relationships.
• Key images : Pan and Syrinx, white flower with crimson, Hansel and Gretel, the buttons, the wet track, Orpheus and Eurydice.
• Stylistic features : classical allusion, sexual language.
• Tone : excited, intimate, tense.

10. The Skunk

It is a good idea to follow analysis of ‘The Underground’ with ‘The Skunk’, both deal with the subject of Heaney’s marriage to his wife, Marie. However, as we’ve just seen, ‘The Underground’ is about the beginning of their marriage, while ‘The Skunk’ was written much later in their relationship and is a much more playful poem. 

Heaney spent time in California working away from his wife and as the cliché goes, ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. He wrote her love letters and everyday things such as the ‘eucalyptus’ and ‘wine’ reminded him of her absence. During this time, Heaney would see a skunk at night ‘like a visitor’. Once home with his wife, he is suddenly reminded of the skunk and draws a comparison between the two, not the most flattering of comparisons perhaps! But while his desire and love for his wife are no doubt in earnest, the metaphor is meant playfully.

The poem opens with another unusual comparison, the skunk’s tail is compared to the black and white garment worn by a priest at a ‘funeral mass’, the tail is so striking that it ‘paraded the skunk’, there is a sense of the skunk flaunting herself here. The poem has from the outset a sense of voyeurism or scopophilia, the poet himself proclaiming in the third stanza ‘I began to be tense as a voyeur’ as he watches first the skunk and in the final stanza, his wife.

The poem is an extremely sensuous poem, appealing to all five senses, and immersing us in the poet’s experience. We see vivid visual imagery in the skunk herself. Aural imagery lends an immediacy to the scene; ‘The refrigerator whinnied into silence’,  the skunk ‘snuffing the boards’. Olfactory imagery, which appeals to our sense of smell, occurs when Heaney imagines ‘inhaling’ the scent of his wife ‘off a cold pillow’. The sense of taste is evoked in gustatory imagery with the ‘tang of the eucalyptus’ and the ‘mouthful of wine’ Even tactile imagery appears in the composition of the love letters to his absent wife. The poem truly is a riot for the senses.

An important element in the poem that you must mention, apart from its sensuous nature is the idea of a marriage transforming over time. We see this when Heaney talks about the word ‘‘wife’….had mutated’, their relationship has shifted, we see this later in the succinct ‘Mythologized, demythologized’, although he is referring to the skunk here the skunk is a metaphor for his wife. Perhaps at the beginning of romantic relationships there is a certain mystery but as time progressed the myth of romance becomes the reality of marriage ‘demythologized’. 

This is not to say that the chemistry between husband and wife has diminished we see in the final lines a sexual suggestiveness.

Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

The poem is about love and absence, but also a celebration of his wife who ignites all his senses.

• Themes : love, desire, the unfolding of relationships over time.
• Key images : the skunk, the final two lines of the wife searching for the nightdress.
• Stylistic features : metaphor, abundance of sensuous imagery.
• Tone : playful, longing, loving.

11. Tate’s Avenue

‘Tate’s Avenue’ is the third poem on the course that deals with Heaney’s relationship with Marie. In this poem he uses three different rugs to illustrate three different periods in their romance.

In the first stanza, Heaney is recalling a specific rug, rooting a time in his relationship in a memory associated with a physical object.  He dismisses the ‘first rug’; ‘Not the brown and fawn car rug’. This was a rug used perhaps a little while into their courtship, when they were in a ‘comfort zone’, but before their marriage, before sex. We see this in the image of the rug,  ‘It’s vestal folds unfolded’. Vestal here is a classical allusion to the Vestal virgins, the relationship is comfortable but there’s a neutrality, even the colours of the rug are neutral; ‘brown’, ‘fawn’, ‘sepia-coloured’. The rug is ‘spread on the sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths’, this image is full of beautiful soft sibilance and alliteration, adding to the comfortable tone of this stanza.

He also dismiss the second rug, which is contrasted to the first, this one is ‘scraggy’ and bears the marks of reckless abandon; it is covered in ‘crusts and eggshells/and olive stones and cheese and salami rinds’. The use of polysyndeton, the repetition of ‘and’, adding to the idea of excess and indulgence. This rug was in Spain, beside the ‘torrents’ where they got ‘drunk’ before a bullfight. It is depicted as a time of heady excitement, and passion.

It is the third rug, the one they sat on earliest in their relationship that he wishes to recall. A rug they sat on in a Belfast back yard and this is where the title of the poem comes from, Tate’s Avenue is a street in Belfast. The description of this rug is of a ‘locked-park Sunday Belfast’ rug, alluding to the puritanical nature of Belfast at that time when the parks would’ve been locked to observe the Sabbath. The character of this rug is not remembered in as much detail, instead it the interplay between the two characters resting on it. There is a silence a as one reads ‘a page is turned’, itself a metaphor for a new chapter of their lives beginning. Heaney’s senses are heightened as he is acutely aware of Marie’s movements ‘a finger twirls warm hair’, and the feeling of the ground underneath the rug

‘I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth, Keen sensed more than ever through discomfort’. 

Here Heaney is describing both his stubborn nature, and his ability to sit with discomfort. The outwardly ordinary moment was significant for them in that they came to an understanding of each other’s personalities;

‘When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.’

The tone here is sort of mutual admiration felt between the couple.

Something to note in the poem is Heaney’s use of compound adjectives ‘land-breaths’, ‘locked-park’ and ‘keen-sensed’, as mentioned in the introduction to the podcast, these unique adjectives lend a liveliness but also an individuality to Heaney’s imagery.

• Themes : love, stages in a relationship.
• Key images : metaphor of the three rugs, the brown one on the beach, the scraggy one in Spain, the Belfast rug at the beginning of their relationship.
• Stylistic features : compound adjectives
• Tone : reminiscent, nostalgic, content, admiration.

12. Postscript

Postscript is where the term ‘P.S’ from written letters comes from, it means ‘written after’. So the whole poem is like an afterthought, and it reads almost like a stream of consciousness. This is accentuated by the enjambment, there are only two full stops, and by the fact the poem begins with the conjunction ‘And’, as if part of the sentence has already been said.  

It is a beautiful nature poem, praising the rugged natural beauty of the County Clare coastline and the impact that the natural world can have on a human heart at unexpected moments. To go beyond the superficial, the poem is also about aging as well as transience, trying to capture a moment and the uselessness of the endeavour.

The opening line reads like one friend offering friendly advice to another, the tone is warm and inviting;

‘And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore’

This repetition of ‘time’ is subtle yet significant; it hints at the relentlessness of the passage of time, and the poet is warning us to take leisure time, to observe what is around us. The poet advises the listener to go in September or October, and months of the year representing the seasons, are important. These are months of change, a transition towards winter, the weather is wild and the comfort of summer is gone.  Heaney wrote the poem in his later years his ‘September or October’ and this again alludes to the theme of the passage of time which is captured later in the line ‘You are neither here nor there / A hurry through with known and strange things pass’. The ambiguity in this line is wonderful as the reader tries to find their own definition of what the ‘known’ and ‘strange’ things might be.

The key imagery of the poem is the natural world, the elements of the landscape that impacted the poet on his journey; the sea, the ‘stones’ of the Burren, the lake and the swans alighting on it. Let’s look first at the alliterative image ‘when the wind/And the light are working off each other’, there is a lovely playfulness in this image, it is one of harmony among the natural elements. The wildness of the ocean is mirrored when a flock of swans disturb the surface of the ‘slate-grey lake’. The metaphor used here is a particularly vivid one, the flock of swans are compared to a bolt of lightning striking the earth as they reach the lake

The surface of the slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of flock of swans

The swans themselves are described with soft alliteration and vivid repetition of their colour

‘The feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white’.

The poet changes from observer documenting what he sees, to thinker analysing the impact of it:

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly.

This line is interesting because although he doesn’t try to capture it at that exact moment, the very act of writing the poem is an attempt to do so in retrospect. Is Heaney making a commentary on how arts attempt to capture the beauty of the natural world in fact pales in comparison to the experience of the real thing? A top tip for the exam is that it is ok to ask one or two rhetorical questions such as this as part of your analysis, it acknowledges that when it comes to poetry, we don’t have all the answers.

The final lines of the poem focus on the impact the experience had on Heaney;

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I love the vulnerability of these lines, the poet has been moved by this scene of natural beauty and it shows how our sense of wonder and awe need not deteriorate with age.

• Themes : the beauty and impact of nature, transience and aging, trying to capture a moment and the uselessness of the endeavour, our sense of awe.
• Key images : time, the journey motif; September/October, the sea, the ‘stones’ of the Burren, the lake and the swans alighting on it, the heart.
• Stylistic features : soft alliteration,
• Tone : conversational, intimate, awe.

13. Lightenings, viii: ‘The Annals Say’

‘ Lightenings, viii: ‘The Annals Say’ is probably the poem that coheres the least with the other poems on the course. My advice would be that if you covered it in class use it as one of the poems you refer to briefly, as opposed to analysing it in depth in your essay. 

The poem is about a story that survives in the records from Clonmacnoise Monastery.  It is a fantastical story about the how a ‘ship appeared’ to the monks while they ‘were all at prayers inside the oratory’. The ship’s anchor gets stuck on the ‘alter rails’ in the second stanza. In the third stanza ‘a crewman shinned and grappled down the rope/ And struggled to release it’. Upon seeing this the abbot exclaims;

‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown…unless we help him’.

They free the ship and  the man climbs back into the ship. The poem finishes with the cryptic line:

…the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it’.

The poem is an exploration of the mystical or supernatural, and in this final line Heaney changes the perspective, saying that the sailor also saw the monks as supernatural beings. 

One of the themes of the poem is about offering help, even to those you don’t understand, a metaphor for the relations between the two communities in Northern Ireland. The poem is also about heaviness and lightness, the massive ship is floating and yet in the second stanza we see the harsh, alliterative image halting its course ‘the anchor dragged along behind so deep/it hooked itself into the alter rails’. Finally, the ship is ‘freed’ again. We see an undercurrent here of imagery about being captured or caught and freedom.

So to recap,

• Themes : the mystical or supernatural, understanding and helping those we may not understand.
• Key images : the ship, the monks, the anchor, the crewman.
• Stylistic features : the voice of the Abbott. Metaphor for the differing communities in the North.
• Tone : wonder.

Now we’ve recapped all 13 poems here’s a couple of final top tips in preparation for the poetry section, which is 12.5% of the overall exam.

Remember the PCLM marking scheme at all times.

• P is for purpose – am I answering the question asked?
• C is for coherence – am I linking my responses coherently.
• L is the marks awarded for language , ‘lively phrasing’, vocabulary, syntax etc.
• M is for mechanics , spelling and grammar.

Purpose, coherence and Language are all 30% of the essay's marks and the remaining 10% is for mechanics. 

In terms of revision firstly, you must practice planning sample exam questions, look at past exam papers, mock papers and your textbook for the type of questions that come up about Heaney. Often the questions can centre on the idea that in Heaney’s work he manages to convey the universal in the ordinary. If we look at the 2021 question it is a version of this idea; it states on Heaney ‘ transforms the familiar and mundane through his powerful use of language, thereby enabling us to learn a range of profound lessons from his poetry’. This is essentially asking you to outline all the ordinary things Heaney writes about but then examine the greater themes he extracts from these familiar things. Go through your poems and do a very quick one line per poem plan. This will prepare you to adjust your studied notes to suit the question on the day of the Leaving Cert. One of the biggest mistakes students make is just writing down all the notes they can remember without properly referencing the question asked. Here are some examples of how to plan the 2021 answer very quickly so it’s focused on the question:

‘The Forge’ – the familiar is the blacksmith and forge, the ‘lesson’ is about valuing artistic creativity. 

‘A Constable Calls’ – the familiar is the Constable doing his job, the lesson is about oppression and division in the North from a child’s perspective.

‘A Call’ – the familiar is making a phone call to his father, the lesson or theme is the realisation of our parent’s mortality, our love for them.

‘Postscript’ – the familiar, a beautiful landscape, the lesson or theme is the transience of life, and artistic inspiration.

‘Tate’s Avenue’ – the familiar, sitting on a rug with his wife, the theme – the different the stages of romantic love.

Secondly, when you have practiced gearing your notes towards sample questions write a sample essay and go over the essay with a highlighter. Any time you see a word of poetic terminology or a quote from the poet, highlight it. By poetic terminology I mean; theme, image, simile, metaphor, personification, all the sound techniques; alliteration, assonance, sibilance, onomatopoeia, or words like hyperbole, contrast etc. If your essay is covered in highlighter you are on track for a H1!

So to conclude, I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast, Heaney is certainly a poetic tour de force, his language is beautiful and his themes are universally appealing. He is a fantastic poet to focus in on for the exam, so the very best of luck!

An English teacher with over 15 years of experience, Laura teaches at St Benildus College, Co. Dublin. She is also a graduate of UCD, Trinity and taught at the European School of The Hague in the Netherlands.