Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

Man and Boy

Re-enter Patrick Heaney, the disguised Anchises of Golden Bough and the farmer with an eye for straight lines of Markings II. Heaney describes the impact of his bereavement: My father’s death in October 1986 was the final ‘unroofing’ of the world and I’m certain it affected me in ways that were hidden from me then and now. (DOD p322) This is helpful: Heaney is not composing a father-dedicated collection as such; Patrick Heaney will emerge from the shadows in poems that ‘came on at unexpected moments’ and threw up powerful associations (look for ‘roof’ and its cognates). I A poem triggered by memory of a father’s supposed fishing tip (Catch the old one first […]

Casting and Gathering

for Ted Hughes A river marks the uncrossed line between two fly fishermen who, when their turn comes to comment, represent very different attitudes – the poem takes on an elegaic tone. Heaney does not tell us who is who though we do know that he ‘accompanied’ fellow poet Ted Hughes and artist-friend Barrie Cooke on some of their joint expeditions. He delves far back in time (years and years ago) reflecting on their irreconcilable viewpoints: these sounds took sides. On one bank, behold a man whose fishing-fly speaks for him: green silk tapered cast went whispering through the air), a symbol of calm abundance (saying hush and lush), unconstrained (entireIy free), at home in every rural setting (the hayfield […]

Markings

The Markings triptych sets out Heaney’s new parameters: revisit and redefine first order experiences through the eyes of a fifty year old poet, tease out and ‘credit marvels’ he failed to spot first time round. Helen Vendler puts it another way: Heaney is concerned here with our immaterial extrapolations from the material … pretended boundaries, imagined grids and lines are the latitude and longitude lines ( ) by which mentality orders the world. They become more visible to the poet as ghostly returner than they were to him as first-time encounterer. I The ‘Markings’ poem … is set in one of our own fields at Mossbawn where a crowd of us would gather up in the summer evening and play […]

The Journey Back

Heaney introduces the first of a number of literary and artistic celebrities, poet Philip Larkin who had passed away in December 1985. He explained the poem’s provenance to DOD (below) and how, to his surprise, the poet’s shade (his dead persona), whom he met in imagination on the streets of London, quoted Dante. The poem ponders the ‘truths and mysteries’ of the soul’s post-mortem onward journey and pays a warm hearted, tongue-in-cheek tribute to a popular 20th century poet. Larkin quotes the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno II in which the serenity of evening (the umber air/ Soothing every creature on the earth now at rest after the daily toils) contrasts with the ordeal and duty of Larkin’s imminent journey: I […]

The Golden Bough

(Aeneid, Book VI, lines 98-148) Seamus Heaney tops and tails Seeing Things with his own versions of passages from classical masterpieces, the first snippet borrowed from the pre-Christian classical mythology of Virgil and ending with a Dante passage from the Christian era. In both cases the narrative is not Heaney’s as such, but he employs all his compositional skills to produce a polished translation. In conversation with DOD (p319) Heaney explained how the collection’s texts linked up: the relationship between individual poems in the different sections has some thing of the splish-splash, one-after-anotherness of stones skittering and frittering across water. Thus the collection’s themes, motifs, moods and key […]

Foreword

The current commentaries are dedicated to friend, former colleague and published poet Michael Woods who presented me with the volume back in July 2002 ‘in time that was extra, unforeseen and free’; I am only sorry, Michael that it took me more than 15 years to thank you in the way you deserve. Seeing Things published by Faber & Faber in 1991 is Seamus Heaney’s ninth collection. It supplements the accessibility, erudition and vitality of his earlier poems with a novel, geometrical pattern of sequences that break the Heaney mould. This, his previous and subsequent collections over more than half a century confirm Heaney’s place at the very top of the premier league of 20th century poets writing in English. […]