Requiem for the Croppies

Requiem for the Croppies, Heaney indicated, was written from the vantage point of a Northern Irish Catholic with a nationalist background. Once the poem took shape in his imagination he just went for it: I was conscious of a need to voice something that hadn’t got voiced (amongst contemporary Irish poets), to tune the medium in order to do that particular job.  If he foresaw the poem’s provocative political potential he relegated it below his writerly entitlement. Heaney plants a first flag in support of the Irish nationalist cause. His poem is set amidst the 1798 Rising, perhaps the first organised opposition to British rule in the south of Ireland at the time, emblematic also of a determination amongst Irish […]

Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965

Heaney was familiar with Salthill Promenade having unveiled a monument built there to celebrate this very poem. As was often the case he felt he had to write something to commemorate the event. He disguises it as a delightful holiday ‘snapshot’ celebrating Irishwomen swimming together and then, using a classical goddess and a Celtic legend, proceeds to his deeper intention – a love poem to his wife Marie. His beach-eye pans from breaking sea (swell foams) to its lady bathers, some inactive (float) others energetic (crawl), their swimming stroke’s explosiveness likened to a firework (catherine-wheel of arm and hand), the rise and fall of buoyancy (each head bobs) as predictably sudden (curtly) as an air-filled beach toy (football). Heaney hears […]

In Gallarus Oratory

Heaney pens the second ‘meditative interior’ of the collection (after ‘The Forge’). He visited the hilltop Gallarus site in south-west Ireland in August 1966 entering it through its ‘door into the dark’; this subsequent contemplation uses darkness as a positive metaphor reflecting on the miracle of faith felt by its monks as they emerged from their own interior darkness into the light. In the process also the poem adds new elements to  the content of the collection – elements of Irish geographical, architectural and spiritual history. A thousand years have failed to erase (still feel) the monkish presences once crammed into the oratory’s narrow space (community pack this place). Heaney has entered the chapel’s sombre millennium-old seat of monkish devotion […]

The Peninsula

Heaney pens the first of what MP describes as ‘meditative landscapes’. The poet is responding to the Irish landscape around him from behind the windscreen of his car, cut off in a sense from the object of his perception and locked into his own feelings. For NC (23) the poem tellingly recreates the exhilaration of meditative solitary driving. Heaney will reprise the figure on a score of occasions across his work (titles below). Heaney explained to DOD how he came to know the countryside around Belfast. Part of his job supervising trainee teachers at St Joseph’s College necessitated the use of a car. The Volkswagen Beetle he owned was also useful for himself, Marie and friends to go on outings: […]

Thatcher

Heaney pens a sister poem to The Diviner of Death of a Naturalist, delving into the Irish ‘underlay’ (things that make Ireland magically special and unique for him): both demonstrate the gifts of ordinary untutored Irishmen that, to onlookers, verge on the miraculous; at an allegorical level the poems allude to the skills that turn poetic charges into works of art. Located next to ‘The Forge’ the poem presents a second example of what Helen Vendler (p.19) refers to as ‘functional anonymity within longstanding rural practices’. The tradesman’s arrival is casual … meeting a spoken arrangement with no definite dates (bespoke for weeks) … without prior warning (turned up some morning unexpectedly) … without any fanfare (bicycle slung) … with […]

The Forge

The poem’s first line provides the collection’s title. Heaney himself is the first person narrator. The blacksmith he has in mind  is Barney Devlin who presided over the smithy on the Hillhead Road above Mossbawn farmstead. The poem will portray Barney anonymously both as an inadvertent contributor to young Heaney’s creative development and coincidentally as an iconic representative of a disappearing rural trade. Heaney pointed out in A Sofa in the Forties from Spirit Level, that in common with all children his development started from scratch. In his case his precocious intelligence and curiosity were ever eager to find out what lay on the other side of doors ‘into the dark’. The poet sums up that early stage (All I […]

The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon

The inquisitive observer of Death of a Naturalist described in detail the behaviour of trout and the swirling idiosyncrasies of flowing water in his local river Moyola.  Ringing a change Heaney pens a monologue in which a first person angler addresses the iconic fish he is seeking to net. Atlantic salmon was common in the Lower Bann and Moyola rivers of the poet’s mid-Ulster neighbourhood.  Coincidently Heaney has chosen a fish whose life-cycle covers huge distances as will be the case of the eel that populates A Lough Neagh Sequence.  The fisherman’s camera-eye dips beneath the river surface, picking out the salmon’s protruberant, plated mouth (ridged lip) facing the current (set upstream), engaged in its hectic, final journey (you flail […]

The Outlaw

Though the poem commands little attention from Heaney’s commentators it is a little gem – its grainy ‘period’ cine-camera sequence paints a humorous vignette of rural Irishness in the early 1950s, extending the Heaney family farm scenarios of Death of a Naturalist into the wider community one of myriad poems dealing with what it means to be Irish. The poem illustrates the sharp-wittedness of Irish farmers and provides a mating session that opens a boy’s eyes to a more complete understanding of ‘the birds and the bees’. It also introduces the ‘vantage point’ metaphor whereby Heaney learned about the world unfolding below him from elevated sites on fences or in trees. The ‘Agricultural Act Northern Ireland 1949’ stipulated that only […]

Door into the Dark – Foreword

Door into the Dark published by Faber and Faber in 1969 is Seamus Heaney’s second collection. Heaney was thirty. The totality of his collections over more than half a century confirmed Heaney’s place at the top of the premier league of poets writing in English. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He died suddenly in August 2013. The textual commentaries that follow seek to tease out what Heaney’s poems are intimating in Door into the Dark. Of course, the poet’s ‘message’ will have started life as an essentially personal one not intended primarily for his reader. There are moment, too, when some serious unravelling is required – thanks to the depth of Heaney’s knowledge, scholarship and […]

Gone

A poem is triggered by the ‘framed’ still-life of horse-tack on a farm wall. The poet reflects on the purposes it once served. The apparatus conjures up an equine absentee, perhaps the same horse as in Night Piece that described a child’s nightmare memory of the animal alive. Heaney’s elegiac piece reflects his compassionate nature only enhanced by distance in time and his sense of the irretrievable. Before Heaney’s gaze hangs the forensic corroboration of the horse’s existence: evidence of once living saliva (green froth that lathered) its liquid form still evoked (shining bit) alongside the remnants of what the animal once chomped (cobweb of grass-dust). Scanning and handling the items reveals the beast’s hard working life (sweaty twist of […]

Night Piece

Night Piece introduces the collection’s leitmotif that acts largely as a positive metaphor for discovering the treasure trove that lay within an inquisitive individual’s reach. Here however Heaney paints the picture of the youngster and the farm horse behind his bedroom wall coping sleeplessly with scary darkness. Poems that follow will pick up the theme: Dream sets out the dynamics of nightmare in an older Heaney whilst Vision and Bogland both suggest that his family’s finger-wagging warnings inadvertently exacerbated his subconscious fears. It interested DOD (p. 96) that the negative connotations of Heaney’s choice of collection title were immediately visible in the first poem. Heaney’s explained the sensitivity and unsureness he was born with that remained forever part of his […]

Door into the Dark – Contents

Foreword Night-Piece Gone Dream The Outlaw The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon   The Forge Thatcher   The Peninsula In Gallarus Oratory Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965   Requiem for the Croppies Rite of Spring Undine The Wife’s Tale Mother  Cana Revisited Elegy for a Still-born Child Victorian Guitar  Night Drive  At Ardboe Point Relic of Memory  A Lough Neagh Sequence- Forewords 1 Up the Shore  2 Beyond Sargasso  3 Bait                          4 Setting                     5 Lifting                      6 The Return             7 Vision                       The Given Note Whinlands  The Plantation   Shoreline Bann Clay Bogland   Afterthoughts      

Afterthoughts

Heaney the extraordinary man in ordinary clothes Heaney the cordon-bleu cook Heaney the agent of change Heaney the orchestrator Heaney the word painter Heaney the meticulous craftsman Stylistic devices an extraordinary man in ordinary clothes Poets are a breed apart!  Unlike ordinary mortals, such as you and me, their consciousness is constantly tuned into things that give off a poetic charge and their vocation compels them to pounce on such sudden, involuntary moments before they fade away. Poets are constantly on the qui-vive; they have a way of recording these unpredictable, involuntary instances – poets are never far away from composition mode which transforms  electrical impulse into verse poets are alchemists Heaney was one of the tribe – he acknowledged […]

Ugolino

(from Dante, Inferno, xxxii, xxxiii) Heaney closes Field Work with passages translated from Dante’s original text. The following commentary does not provide detailed textual survey but provides definitions as a means to understanding the narrative plus coloured-hearing that showcases Heaney’s craftsmanship even in translation.  Further comments and references relate to Heaney’s decision to complete Field Work in this grisly way. In a collection that spends a deal of its time bolstering Heaney’s decision in 1972 to relocate with his family to the Irish Republic and sever his contacts the North this ‘black painting’ of the medieval Ugolino episode, though he might downplay it, provokes Heaney’s sense of outrage at political developments effectively triggered from Whitehall. He explained the twin intent […]

In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

KILLED IN FRANCE IN JULY 1917 Heaney pays tribute to a poet whose life followed an enigmatic pattern and who though Irish through and through was killed in First World War action in Flanders fighting for the British. Heaney’s elegy falls into four parts: the ‘vigilant bronze’; the aspiring country boy; the white-faced Tommy; the poetic voice stifled. Part 1: in anticipation of Francis Ledwidge Heaney takes us back to his childhood and his first sight as a seven year old of the sculpture standing on Portstewart’s First World War Memorial. The effigy (bronze soldier) is adjusting his standard-issue uniform (hitches a bronze cape) textured (crumples stiffly) to mimic First World War conditions (in imagined wind) totally suited to the […]

The Harvest Bow

A harvest bow, said Heaney in conversation with Christopher Bigsby, is a little piece of wheat that is plaited and turned into a bow and my father simply made it without thinking every year. When I moved to Wicklow, when I was in my thirties, I thought I would like to have one of those and I got him to make me one. I wore it in my lapel and I thought that is a bit folksy for me to be wearing. I felt I had every right to it but at the same time it was just a wee bit heritagy and so I took it and pinned it up on the dresser and wrote this poem about it […]

Leavings

Heaney is touring the English Midlands. What he sees from his car window ignites a poetic charge expressing just how his mind and personality respond to things left behind (leavings), from field stubble to the scars inflicted by the Tudor Reformation. The poet’s eye meets burning fields after harvest time. His mid-Ulster farming background has taught him all about air funnels in heat (soft whoosh), farmers’ timings (sunset blaze) and the combustible materials involved (straw on blackened stubble). He can talk proportions (thatch-deep), clean start (freshening), fierceness (barbarous) and evening fire glow (crimson burn). Feigning period transport (I rode down England) he uses the coincidence of stubble burning (as they fired the crop) to clarify his title (the leavings of […]

Song

Eight lines produce an outstanding distillation of Irish landscape, Celtic mythology and the sounds and associations of language and music. The piece culminates in an expression of the pure joy of being alive and Irish, echoing the poetry of legendary Irish giant Finn McCool. The first tree Heaney espies (rowan) is female oriented, ideally shaped and coloured to house a Celtic wood nymph (like a lipsticked girl) growing alone at the junction of ancient and modern Ireland (between the by-road and the main road). Then trees with male associations (alder) braving the Irish climate (wet and dripping) distant and detached from humbler marshy flora (stand off among the rushes). Some Irish legends had it that the first woman came from […]

Field Work

The sequence navigates a route from imperfection to Heaney’s representation of perfection. The ultimate paragon will be his wife Marie. I Heaney was a vigilant close reader of what met his eye: willow leaves that bore differing tints above and beneath (sally tree went pale in every breeze), creatures ever on the qui-vive for danger (perfect eye of the nesting blackbird) the tiny idiosyncrasies of nature (one fern … always green). Close observation, too, of Marie (standing watching you ) on the occasion she picked up cleaning materials (pad from the gatehouse) on the other side of the railway track (crossing) and strained upwards (reach to lift) to remove an imperfection in nature (white wash off the whins). The circular […]

Polder

In yet another so-called ‘marriage poem’ the poet seeks to rebalance his relationship with a wife who has felt neglected. Analogizing the best of Dutch engineering in the light of his and Marie’s spits and spats on relationship issues Heaney portrays her as a stretch of reclaimed waterland (polder) ever susceptible to water, weather or, in poetic allegory, domestic moodiness (sudden outburst … squalls). His reclamation was the physical act of embracing her (hooped) mindful (remembered) of linguistic correspondences (what could be contained) between the wife in his tight supportive clench (caliper embrace) and words of Dutch provenance –physical closeness (bosom) and perfect fit (fathom) both its Old Norse meaning of ‘embrace’ and its measure and length (what the extended […]

A Dream of Jealousy

  Heaney made use of the dream trope across his poetry. As he well understands admitting us into his subconscious poses questions in search of answers. Dream narrative twists, turns and distorts but there is always an innate anxiety waiting to surface. The emotional pressures Heaney’s ‘absence’ from his relationship with Marie alluded to in An Afterwards remain centre-stage. In conversation with DOD (206) Heaney offered a strong pointer to the identity of the second woman as his poetic muse: Obviously, there were many times when I was under pressure to finish stuff for a deadline, and there were absences from home when I was doing broadcasts or readings, and there were the withdrawals and impatiences that are part and […]

Homecomings

Let us imagine that a poet who has returned from a lecture tour in the United States that he undertook on his own is facing the partner he left to cope with home and family alone. He presents himself as a housemartin returning from its long journey in early summer to reclaim its niche and its partner. He depicts her as the housemartin’s nest. I Heaney concentrates his eye-camera on the flight of the bird that becomes the focus of his own return to the nest. He barks out the first of his imperatives (fetch me the sandmartin). Here is a creature that flies alarmingly close to the watery surface (skimming) on a weaving flight path (veering) a mirror image […]

The Skunk

Heaney follows ‘The Otter’ with a second zoomorphic poem. Alone and cooped up in North Berkeley close to the University there were moments when Heaney felt five thousand miles from home. He uses the nightly presence of a creature not generally regarded as emblematic of love or desire to conjure up the beauty, intensity and sexual appeal of his wife Marie. Think creature think wife from the outset. A bobbing first impression (tail) triggered Heaney’s imagination – something proud and erect (up) with alternating black and white rings (striped), richly textured (damasked) like (a touch of irreverence perhaps from a man who has lost the faith) the Catholic clerical vestment at dire moment (chasuble at a funeral mass). The tail’s […]

The Otter

A man who adores his wife body and soul, cooped up on an American University campus five thousand miles from home is suddenly missing her acutely. Heaney relishes her beauty, intensity and sexual appeal as if she were there beside him before the poetic charge fades. He addresses his very personal message to her via an inventive zoomorphic picture using a creature not usually seen as a symbol of love or desire. Moments are memorable, catchable, describable, fleeting, retainable. Presence even in absentia has a permanence and intensity recreated and embedded in the eternal present of a poem. Pictures of Marie Heaney ‘skinny dipping’ (hence perhaps her ‘pelt’ of the final couplet) in a Tuscan pool trigger emotional and erotic […]

High Summer

The poem is set in the French Pays Basque region visited by the Heaney family in 1969 to fulfil the conditions of the Somerset Maugham Award. Heaney and Marie had their two young sons with them – Michael born in 1966 and Christopher born in 1968 who was cutting his teeth as they holidayed. The claustrophobia of gite accommodation in trying circumstances offered little respite to a man who was also a poet! Nothing was to be done to soothe Christopher (child cried inconsolably) when his crying most grated on parents in need of rest (at night). With his flowing locks the neighbours who mistook the ‘he’ for a ‘she’ (la petite) were treated to the endless wailing (him harrowing […]