Blog - Page 3 of 21 - Connecting with Seamus Heaney

An Afterwards

Seamus and Marie Heaney were strong individuals with differing personalities (‘our separateness’ of Glanmore Sonnet X), so the occasional contretemps is natural to a healthy relationship between two people faced with different priorities – his to make sure the bills were paid, hers to make sure their children enjoyed their fair share of father’s time. Marie Heaney has reached an emotional flash-point! Her husband’s constant withdrawal up the ‘narrow winding stair’ to his workroom to meet a deadline or inhabit the world where poets were his ‘next of kin’ is an abdication of responsibility. Heaney selects a scene from Dante’s Inferno to play out a dramatic exchange between man and wife. Once when Marie reached the end of her tether […]

September Song

Heaney acknowledges that like Dante then, he now is en el medio del camino, at the half-way stage of his ‘threescore years and ten’ (in the middle of the way). He and his family are faced with re-relocation from Glanmore to Dublin and nature is in tune with torn emotions: wateriness (wet of late September) low-pressure turbulence (ash tree flails). Even the household pet senses disruption (our dog is tearing earth). At the back end of the Wicklow year water mounts (rising ditches) and nature regresses (fern subsides). Downpours sit on both natural and man-made surfaces (rain-logged berries and stones are rained upon); fallen mast (acorns) reflects in the morning light (shine from grassy verges). Change is nigh (it’s nearly […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 10

x With all the twists and turns of Heaney’s subconscious dream the Glanmore Sonnets reach a positive conclusion. The poet’s imagination fired e when he was asleep (I dreamt we slept). His anxiety as regards a major relocation of his own doing has placed him and Marie alongside each other in an Irish Republic peatbog (a moss in Donegal) facing a night under the sky (turf banks under blankets), open to the elements (our faces exposed all night), in unfavourable conditions (wetting drizzle) and deathly pale (pallid) amidst the pathetic fallacy of empathetic nature (dripping sapling birches). There are comforting precedents: a couple with Shakespearean credentials (Lorenzo and Jessica) made it together, far from the warmth of Venice (in a […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 9

IX The peace and stability of domestic life in Glanmore is disrupted by a dark force (black rat), in clear view (sways on the briar) and threatening well-being (like infected fruit). Marie Heaney builds to a paroxysm of revulsion – the creature’s audacity (It looked me through) and wilfulness (stared me out) as clear as day (I’m not imagining things)! She dispatches her liegeman husband on a rodent extermination mission (Go you out to it). How much did the drama, Heaney wonders, cast a cloud over the whole decision to move to the Republic (the wilderness for this?) when all else is positive: healthy natural greenery (burnished bay tree at the gate) Irish as Irish(classical) its pagan association replaced […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 8

VIII Heaney’s routine is suddenly unsettled (thunderlight): signs of everyday Glanmore productivity (split logs) are marred by a warm summer downfall (big raindrops at body heat) that, as it changes colour (spattering dark) onthe wood-cleaving tool (hatchet iron), introduces a darkening mood (lush with omen). The early-day portent of a lurching scavenger (magpie with jerky steps) looking instinctively for personal advantage (horse asleep beside the wood) is consistent with the damper (dew) of Ireland’s battles and bloody victims (armour and carrion). Questions betray increasing anxiety as to where threats lie (what … meet?) – a gory animal corpse run over by a vehicle (blood-boltered, on the road?) or an evil Shakespearean ‘familiar’ (toad) haunting the cottage garden (deep into […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 7

VII The counselling voice Heaney Incertus sought in the title poem of ‘North’ is replaced by Heaney’s own voice pronouncing his eureka moment, a single word that corroborates the benefits and protections Wicklow offers fishermen in a storm and the Heaney family re-located in Glanmore Cottage. A clipped BBC radio voice intones sea areas (most of them) adjacent to Ireland (Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea). Heaney envisions the turbulence they share – the colour, swell and thunder of the ocean (green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux). Poetic charge has been triggered (conjured) by the BBC radio Shipping Forecast announcer (strong gale-warning voice), his intonation falling (collapse) into the hissing consonant sounds of the forecast’s final listing –‘Faeroes, Southeast Iceland […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 6

VI Perhaps Heaney is recalling his ‘wood kerne’ (one of those Catholic rebels who, during the earlier course of Irish history, took to the woods when defeated, to prepare for further resistance) in ‘Exposure’, the final poem of ‘North’. Sitting in his workroom the poet conjures up a mid-Ulster folk hero said to have ridden his motorbike daringly through extreme winter conditions in 1947, a ‘wild goose’ figure (a second group of rebels who supported the defeated Catholic cause). With this in mind the whole sonnet may be read as an allegory of minority Catholic repression in Northern Ireland challenged. Heaney introduces an anonymous man (He) the mirror image of himself who has lived tongue-tied in an Irish sectarian […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 5

v Heaney examines the distinctive textures of the two languages and traditions that shaped his upbringing (MP 169) From his new-found Glanmore location Heaney explores in his mind the properties of a familiar tree first known by its mid Ulster name (boortree). He can still feel its vertically furrowed trunk (soft corrugations), recall its eagerness to grow (green young shoots) and its youngest branches (rods) shining molten silver with dark flecking (freckled solder). Once upon a time the Heaney siblings used it as a hideaway (our bower as children), now in retrospect a tad less appreciated (greenish, dank and snapping memory). Background and education taught him a different name (elderberry I have learned to call it). Heaney had a […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 4

IV Heaney vaults neatly over the recent past in Belfast to land in his rural surroundings at Mossbawn farm skirted by the Castledawson railway line. Precociously curious, the child-poet-to-be was interested in the messages of sound … if one knew how, the railway track (lie with an ear to the line), he was told (they said), would broadcast in advance (a sound escaping ahead) the metallic song (iron tune) of an express steam locomotive (flange and piston) speeding headlong by (pitched along the ground). Nothing so romantic happened in his case (I never heard that) – just the echoes of freight traffic (struck couplings and shuntings) from Castledawson marshalling-yard (two miles away) carried through space (lifted over the woods). […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 3

III Evening with the Heaneys … the poet watches from the window as night begins to fall: two different species of bird (cuckoo and … corncrake) (and in the back of his mind perhaps himself and his wife) are regaling in a surfeit (so much), nay, a superabundance (too much) of togetherness (consorted). He is in poetry-mode as regards both the language of light effects (all crepuscular) and the ‘tum-tee-tum’ of composition (iambic). New life in his eyeshot (baby rabbit), learning its way (took his bearings); images of shy creatures (I knew the deer) … instinctive (connoisseurs), danger-alert (inquisitive of air … careful), ever poised to make an escape (under larch and May-green spruce). There is no going back […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 2

II The relocated wordsmith checks that his word-hoard is operational: involuntary charges (sensings) arising from a store-house in the depths of his mind (mountings from the hiding places) in distinct meaningful shapes (words) that he can almost hold in his hand (entering almost the sense of touch), words with a creature instinct of their own (ferreting themselves) and a yearning to be released into the light (out of their dark hutch). Heaney’s is not to reason why he possesses this gift, as he recalls from an insightful comment (‘these things are not secrets but mysteries’) offered by a creative spirit engaged in a parallel process (Oisin Kelly), an Irish sculptor he met once (years ago In Belfast) – Kelly, […]

Glanmore Sonnets – 1

I Totally at home with the farming calendar from his Mossbawn days but now a freelance poet Heaney sets out to test his muse against his new Glanmore surroundings. His mood could not be more determined: now is the moment to sow new poem seeds (vowels ploughed into other), to make optimum use of the gap established between his family in Glanmore and the rawness of life in Northern Ireland (opened ground). The weather omens are excellent: conditions for early germination are ideal (mildest February for twenty years) the family’s new Eden appeals to the senses with its lyrical visual opportunities (mist bands over furrows) plus the total absence of city noise – deep no sound broken (vulnerable) only […]

Glanmore Sonnets – an Introduction

Glanmore was the fortuitous outcome (hence the dedication to Ann Saddlemyer who first rented then sold the cottage to the Heaneys) of a couple’s shared agreement to change direction and move on and away from suburban Belfast steeped in pain and turbulence. Heaney was not of a mind to remain in Belfast out of provincial loyalty; his resentment of the way minority Catholics were treated added to the attraction of a move to the Irish Republic. The move however was fraught with complications at a domestic level, not least his children’s educational needs and family income – he had resigned his University post and the family was now dependent on his freelance work to pay incoming bills. Most importantly perhaps […]

Elegy

Heaney pens his farewell to American poet Robert Lowell. He had become familiar with Robert Lowell’s poetry as early as the Group led by Philip Hobsbaum in the poet’s undergraduate period at QUB around 1963, via meetings in which Heaney was able to share his rookie poems with like-minded fledgling poets. Heaney acknowledged that Lowell’s poetry (‘all through the sixties I was reading him, constantly’) was to his liking as he was searching for his own poetic voice. Heaney first met Lowell in 1972 at a party thrown for the American poet and his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick in London: he sums up their first conversation (DOD217) ‘he was well clued into the Northern Ireland situation. It was a genuine […]

In MemoriamSeán Ó’Riada

Heaney pays tribute to Seán Ó’Riada’s contribution to Irish musical culture. Ó’Riada died suddenly at the age of forty in 1971. Heaney had admired the different thrusts of O’Riada’s talent from the classical podium to the craich of Irish traditional songs on the stage or in the pub. In contrast he hints that he and his fellow creative spirit were poles apart in personality. DOD 225 his posturing irked me … interrogating rather than conversing … I admired him even if I didn’t get too close … his change of life, from Dublin bohemia to Gaeltacht dachas (home), was an example that was there to be followed. As with all the poems preceding the Glanmore Sonnets it is worth considering […]

The Guttural Muse

At first sight Heaney’s title seems light-heartedly appropriate to himself – with his rootsy, gravelly Gaelic articulation of mid-Ulster village names like Broagh the poet would be recognized by many Irish people as their ‘guttural muse’! Heaney has an emotional narrative to grapple with and falls back on his poetry to offset feelings of loneliness, exclusion and middle age. He placed the poem in the same set as ‘The Singer’s House’ and ‘The Harvest Bow’ acknowledging in retrospect ‘a renewed sense of the value of poetry itself as a consolidating element, the writing of which took me to the bottom of something inside myself, something inchoate but troubled … the Troubles, you might say, had muddied the waters but I […]

The Singer’s House

Heaney reflected on the double preoccupation that produced poems such as ‘The Singer’s House’ in Field Work: living up to my neck in complication, resident in Dublin but feeling called upon by what was happening in the North plus a renewed sense of the value of poetry itself as a consolidating element (DOD 195). On the occasion of David Hammond’s memorial service in August 2008 The Irish Times reported that the proceedings included Heaney’s poem ‘The Singer’s House’ about Hammond’s holiday home in Gweebarra near Glenties, written in 1979 to encourage him to keep singing and to remind him of the importance of his art at a time when the Troubles were sucking out the joy of song … The […]

The Badgers

Heaney spoke to James Randall: There is a poem called “The Badgers” which I’m very fond of—a kind of bridging of the inner and outer life. It’s literally badgers, but they began in my mind to stand for the night-self, the night part in everybody, the scuttling secret parts of life. Just as in a sense the Provisionals are the nightlife of the Catholic community (Issue 18 of Ploughshares, Emerson College). As regards the poems of ‘Field Work’ preceding the Glanmore Sonnets it is worth considering how each individual lyric, elegy and meditative piece contributes to Heaney’s barely veiled relief at having severed his ties with Belfast. In this introspective piece Heaney addresses himself (you). A swirl of associations is […]

Casualty

Background: Heaney talked about O’Neill with DOD (214) Louis O’Neill was a regular customer in my father-in-law’s public house in Ardboe: a small farmer and eel fisherman. The kind of level-headed, low-key, humorous countryman I always feel at home with. Sometimes I’d be on the outside of the counter with him and his friends, as a customer, and sometimes, as the public saw, I’d be on the inside, doing barman. My friendship with Louis was special because of that unforgettable summer morning when I went out on Lough Neagh with him and another companion to lift the eel lines. So when he was killed in that explosion, I knew I would have to write something, but wasn’t sure how it […]

A Postcard from North Antrim

IN MEMORY OF SEAN ARMSTRONG Heaney revealed the background to his relationship with Armstrong (DOD 221-3): Sean was at Queen’s when I was there and edited the rag magazine… in October 1962 he was giving a party and had asked me. I’d actually met Marie a couple of nights before, on the Tuesday of that week, and had arranged for her to drop back the book she borrowed on the Thursday. So when she arrived to deliver it, I suggested we go down to Sean’s jamboree; she agreed, and the thing took off from there. Sean then disappeared from the scene and turned up again in the early seventies. He had spent time in communes of one sort or another […]

The Strand at Lough Beg

By any measure The Strand at Lough Beg makes a substantial contribution to the collection with its very personal subject-matter, its contrast between intensity and calm, its alternation between violence and peaceableness, between brutality and final restorative gestures. As with all the poems of ‘Field Work’ is worth considering how each individual lyric, elegy and meditative piece contributes to Heaney’s barely veiled relief at severing his ties with Northern Ireland and his eagerness to ratify the family move to the Irish Republic. DOD221 SH When I read the passage at the start of Dante’s Purgatorio 1 (from line 100) describing that little lake and rushy shore where Virgil and Dante find themselves once they emerge from the murk of hell, […]

A Drink of Water

When he received the David Cohen Prize in March 2009 Heaney had been asked to recite two poems that represented his Lifetime’s Achievement! As his second choice he plumped for A Drink of Water recalling a moment from his childhood when an old woman who drew water every morning revealed herself later as a muse of sorts to him. Heaney remarked that it was ‘about receiving a gift and being enjoined to remember the giver’ … something, the old charmer added, that underlined the value he placed on the Cohen Prize and the evening’s reception. As with all the poems of ‘Field Work’ is worth considering how each individual lyric, elegy and meditative piece contributes in a positive or negative […]

The Toome Road

If part of the intention of Field Work is rooted in Heaney’s subliminal desire to validate the decision to move lock, stock and barrel from Belfast to the Irish Republic in 1972 and thereby to draw a line under his relationship with the ‘dirty old glove’ that Northern Ireland had become, then The Toome Road provides an illustration of the frustrations suffered by an essentially fair-minded young man who spent his teenage years on The Wood Farm in Castledawson Heaney responded to DOD’s questions on the matter (p.212): whilst he might have understood the need to deal with IRA outrages, the British Army were no better – ultimately at a personal level he felt it ‘ an affront to the […]

Triptych

I After a Killing Heaney explained what prompted the first stanza to DOD (211): the assassination of Christopher Ewart-Biggs wasn’t so much personal grief as shock … that knocked me and everybody else sideways … The news that morning on the radio mentioned two men with rifles running up the hill from the site of the explosion … it stayed with me as a kind of dream image: it was as if the ghosts of those Old IRA men of the West Cork Flying Column – ‘the unquiet founders’, the ones who’d fought and ambushed the Black and Tans – it’s as if they were coming back to haunt the state they’d fought to establish … but in my old-fashioned […]

Oysters

The first poem of Field Work immediately distances Heaney from the rueful words of time lost and missed opportunity in Exposure the final poem of North. Heaney’s direction has changed: he has discovered the first person plural and a snatch of pleasure in the company of friends. He is not yet sure whether the line he has drawn under Northern Ireland and Belfast will hold good but the omens are favourable beyond the Province’s borders. In the poems preceding the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ it is worth considering how each individual lyric, elegy and meditative piece contributes to Heaney’s barely veiled relief at having severed his ties with Northern Ireland. The title offers a vital clue to the activity in which Heaney […]