District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

Nonce Words

Heaney coins expressions to toast a particular moment on an undated drive west during the pre-Christmas period. At its simplest, the piece urges celebration of being alive, of ’the time being’, the ‘to-be-going-on-with’. In a collection that hints at metaphysical issues, bringing us face to face with ‘Mick Joyce in Heaven’, with the otherworldliness of ‘George Seferis in the Underworld’ and Dantesque references to the underworld tunnels of the London Tube, Nonce Words seats us next to an ageing poet at the wheel of his car overriding mortality concerns to savour the privilege of just being there. Heaney is growing older and he knows it … a senior moment has brought about memory lapse: a missed turning, an alternative route. […]

Stern

Dedicated to the memory of Ted Hughes, the piece is concerned with two poets: their differing backgrounds, personalities and cultures, the respect felt, the reverence generated, the tributes due. Heaney acknowledges the ‘electrifying’ effect Hughes ’ work had on him, knows well his humble background, his modest fortune, his unfortunate private life and his dourness of personality. Heaney teases with his title: beyond the obvious reference to a boat’s rear end, ‘stern’ might also describe Hughes’ earthy dourness. Finally deliberately or otherwise the title contains the sonic echo of Eliot’s ‘middle’ name Stearns; Heaney has posed a question to Hughes about the time he met T.S. Eliot. Heaney quotes Hughes’ actual response (DOD p.406): like standing on a quay watching […]

Out of This World

A sequence in memory of Czeslaw Milosz using an adjectival title that offers a variety of suggestion: no longer alive; not of this world, somewhere else; extraordinary. Each poem in the sequence talks of issues and experiences that in one sense or another are beyond the material world. The dedication confirms Heaney’s admiration of Milosz, an Eastern European poet (1911-2004), Polish speaking, of Lithuanian origin, who lived through successive periods of political turbulence from the Russian Revolution onwards and via Communism, Nazism, The Cold War and Iron Curtain to Polish Independence from the Russian Federation. He was Nobel Prize-Winner for Literature in 1980, twenty years after moving to the USA where he was at once diplomat, scholar, translator and professor […]

In Iowa

The first of three poems alluding to the threats posed by climate-change – the piece recalls a moment from Heaney’s visit to Mennonite country in Iowa. His powers of observation, memory and recall resurrect a scene and a moment in compelling detail. His store of local and biblical references adds a decidedly Mennonite dimension and contributes to his growing conviction that the world is under threat. Stranded in a snowstorm beyond any sign of human presence in Iowa once, among the Mennonites and freed from the ordeal of driving (conveyed all afternoon) Heaney could concentrate on what was rubbing off on him: the sheer volume of snow (slathering – an ingenious sonic porte-manteau, perhaps conveying both the liquidity of ‘slaver’ […]

Hōfn

The omens and warnings of Anything Can Happen and In Iowa ensure that the mere mention of natural phenomena in decline awakens fear of global threat. The first-person speaker recounts a personal experience flying above the massive glacier behind the town of Hōfn in south-east Iceland. Heaney toured Iceland in 2004 with piper Liam O’Flynn on a joint poetry/ music venture; en route to their next destination Heaney overflew ‘ this stony grey scar of ice …we learned that the ice is actually melting. As a ‘child of earth’ I’ve rarely felt more exposed’ (DOD p.411) Heaney writes his headline: an ice mass of huge magnitude is thawing: The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt. The Icelanders foresee a bleak […]

On the Spot

The coldness of death prompts huge questions. The speaker has unearthed evidence of the failure of birds to reproduce. The sonnet moves from a tiny though significant example of biological death, decay and decline to global even universal laws of physics that hold matter in its planetary stand-off. Here is an example of Heaney’s subtle use of title: merely ‘being present where it happened’ is injected with the urgency suggested by ‘immediate, here and now’ and feelings of discomfort when one is or should be ‘put on the spot’. On an early-morning walk Heaney has unearthed a cold clutch of last year’s bird- eggs, a nestful, all but hidden and preserved intact by last year’s leaf-mould. To a country […]

The Tollund Man in Springtime

Heaney reintroduces his iron-age hero, whose sacrificially murdered body had been miraculously preserved in a Jutland peat-bog since the 4th century BC, recovered in 1950 and exhibited in Silkeborg, Denmark. Interestingly Heaney has used a similar device in Sweeney Redevivus (Station Island Part 3) where he joins forces with Sweeney, a legendary, exiled Irish king endowed with the gift of flight, takes a bird’s-eye-view of the landscape below and reacts to what he finds. This sequence might equally be entitled ‘Tollund Man Redevivus’. Heaney first introduced Tollund Man in ‘Wintering Out’ of 1972. In a newspaper article of April, 2006, he talked about his re-appearance: ‘He came again to remind me that lyric poetry was OK … I love the […]

Moyulla

Heaney referred to ‘Moyulla’ as ‘a praise poem but it’s keenly aware of ‘green’ issues; and to a degree, its drift is also political’. ‘Moyulla is about a polluted river, but there’s a river nymph on the scene too aswim in the words and the water. There’s erotic glee as well as ecological gloom’… ‘I wanted to darken the vowel from “oya” to “ulla “ to suggest a darkening of the ecological climate’. The river had become polluted from the ‘release of poisoned water from the flax dams years ago’ along with ‘agricultural waste’ (DOD 406) The 4-poem sequence contrasts ecological decline with primordial purity, provides evidence of pollution and offers a host of female symbols … its final images […]

Planting the alder

The sonnet celebrates a tree that flourished in the riverbank landscape of Heaney’s upbringing. Alders abounded along the banks of the Moyola. The poet tacks on an appeal for everyone to plant a tree to help the environment. Heaney takes on the challenge of describing colours and textures in a lyrical version of what might be found in a botanical handbook of trees, citing compelling reasons for planting the alder and raising a glass to each of the qualities in turn. For the alder’s high-class heraldic bark of dulled argent alternating with white striations (pigeon collared). For its leaves as they inter-react with rain drops: acting as a sound-board (splitter-splatter), disposing of the downfall (guttering ), not taking the relationship […]

Tate’s Avenue

Shared rugs are emblematic of a long partnership that after forty years has lost none of its physical chemistry! Discussing the erotic in District and Circle with DOD (p 406) Heaney indicated (with tongue in cheek, no doubt) that it was present in this piece ‘in an abstinent kind of way’- there was something in the air but nothing came of it. The poem take us to Tate’s Avenue, an address in Belfast via two stanzas devoted to rugs from other occasions and not the particular one he wishes to concentrate on. The first was a brown and fawn car rug, spread out by the sea but very much earth-bound (breathing land-breaths) and dating from the chaste period (vestal folds) […]

A Hagging Match

In a love poem sequel to Tate’s Avenue Heaney demonstrates how to say ‘I’m stuck on you’ in twenty words. Let us imagine that the Heaneys are in Glanmore on an autumn afternoon – one of them is thinking ahead to winter and the comfort of an open fire; the other is at his work-desk, composing the poem that is taking shape in his head as he follows the sounds of physical labour. There are two protagonists (ostensibly anonymous but we know darned well who they are!), an I and a you – a ‘match’ is possible in all its senses. What the poet hears but cannot see conjures up associations in the poetic mind: the familiar sounds of axe […]

Fiddleheads

A different angle on the ‘erotic’, not the ‘wood nymph’ presence in Moyulla or the more overt sexuality of Tate’s Avenue, rather a memory of sensual pleasure-on-a-plate. This short prose-poem is designed to bring a smile to the lips of a Japanese friend. In a surprise choice, Heaney selects fiddlehead ferns, a culinary delicacy not to be found just anywhere, as a foodstuff that gave him a thrill. He offers them in response to a Japanese friend’s expressed literary taste for the erotic and his suggestion that there was not enough of it in poetry. In a neat tongue-in-cheek, Heaney serves up an erotic dish Toraiwa would not have had in mind – fiddlehead ferns, sexy in the way they […]

To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff

Following the taste of ‘Fiddleheads’ that Heaney defined as ‘erotic’ in a piece to a Japanese friend he provides a further moment of uncontrolled pleasure – something exquisite that came from something markedly unlovely. Heaney had received a gift from a local acquaintance: crab-apple jelly from a tree he can locate at Duff’s Corner and, for all he knows, still grows there. The produce was little short of miraculous (I never once saw crab apples on the tree). Heaney provides the crab-apple tree with an unflattering ‘reference’ – perverse of nature (contrary), showing little sign of fertility (unflowery), standing out like an implement used to scare off flies (sky whisk) or a rough brush (bristle), a haphazard criss-cross profile […]

Rilke: The Apple Orchard

Heaney’s version of a second Rilke poem leaves readers with a double challenge: addressing the complex thinking process of the original poet and considering Heaney’s success as interpreter and translator. For latter comparison an alternative version is appended. Heaney sees a correspondence with his own inner feelings as if conscious of a certain ‘something’ inside himself that he needs to ‘excavate’. Ultimately he digests Rilke’s message! Rilke invites us to observe (watch) changes of light brought on by nightfall in an apple orchard (deepening of green in the evening sward). This has a purpose – he is seeking to give meaning to his feeling (it will be expressed in a long single sentence) that, just as darkness deepens at dusk, […]

Quitting Time

The sonnet-portrait of a humble but fulfilled pig-farmer on the point of packing up after a fulfilling day’s work. A poem as uncomplicated as the figure it portrays. The farmer takes a last look before he closes down for the night (kills the light) nodding his approval at the cleanliness of hosed-down chamfered concrete, angled at the edges so that the water does not lie. His eye moves methodically via the cleaned up yard and the tools of his particular trade (pails and farrowing crate) to the iconic cast-iron pump, solid as a a classical relict (immobile as a herm), proud as an ancient boundary post (upstanding elsewhere, in another time). Last looks at the wet shine of the […]

Home Fires

A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth This ‘Tale of Two Dorothys’ portrays William Wordsworth’s sister at different stages in her life. A scuttle such as Heaney describes in the piece still sits next to the hearth at the Wordsworths’ Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the English Lake District. The first Dorothy young, energetically poking and raking the grate (jig-jigging her iron shovel) with tetchy, noisy determination (barracking a pile of lumpy coals). The man with the appropriate name (Thomas Ashburner) lived in a cottage opposite Dove Cottage and did odd jobs for her including coal delivery. Dorothy is indifferent to what is going on around her, wracked with pain (her toothache ablaze), a condition aggravated by the stoking process (every […]

The Birch Grove

A retired couple in their domestic setting. Both the couple and the tress they have planted are at their happiest growing close together. Heaney revealed to DOD (p.412) that the poem is ‘a portrait of Bernard McCabe (English academic and writer) and his wife Jane (to both of whom the Haw Lantern collection is dedicated) in a little grove they planted at the bottom of their garden in Ludlow (Shropshire, UK)’. The Heaneys and McCabes were close friends spending time abroad in each other’s company. Heaney picks out the differences between the two personalities with great subtlety. Heaney tells us the ‘where’ – close to the babble of the river Teme in a walled off enclave akin to historical buildings […]

Cavafy: ‘The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades’

Heaney presents a version of C.P. Cavafy’s poem Tα δ’ άλλα εν Άδου τοις κάτω μυθήσομαι Set in Ancient classical times the poem reports a conversation between an important figure governing a Greek province whose honesty confesses he has things to hide and a sophist ‘philosopher’ unlikely to offer concrete alternative. Only one of the protagonists accepts without question that the afterlife will be spent below in Hades. The title reproduces the last words spoken by Ajax in Sophocles’ drama before he impaled himself on his sword. A powerful, well-read man (proconsul) approves a line just read from an ancient scroll to be true and beautiful. Sophocles at his most philosophical. He believes the disgraced Ajax will have the opportunity […]

In a Loaning

The collection’s penultimate poem returns to the ‘kesh’ and ‘loaning’ of Heaney’s Ulster landscape. A short poem of both celebration and relief published in the New York Times of December 31st, 2005. Writing poetry is complex; ‘vers donnés’, lines with poetic charge, are not automatic. If, as has been suggested Heaney was re-discovering his voice after a lean period of writer’s block it is interesting to recall that when his first collection of 1965 was under discussion with Faber he was urged to compose poems about what he knew. Heaney reverts to his cherished birth- place environment. Paradoxically, autumn, traditionally described as the ‘back-end’ of the annual cycle, represents rebirth (recovered speech), a sense of poetic composition coming naturally (having […]

The Blackbird of Glanmore

The collection’s final poem, ’The Blackbird of Glanmore, offers an intensely moving epilogue: an ageing poet revisits the beloved site where much of his work was composed; he interacts with a kindred spirit – a creature and its endearing characteristics; he sees the shadow of a younger brother killed in a road accident outside the family home in 1953 and reflects on rites of passage: arrivals … departures … superstition … premonition … making the best of what is left. Heaney has driven to Glanmore and is met by his beloved blackbird filling the stillness of the empty property with life. He recognises the nature of this ever-active but nervous creature preconditioned to scare off at the first wrong move. […]

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 Summary versions of the contents 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 […]