poems by seamus heaney by Seamus Heaney

Remembered Columns

Things that survive displacement and re-creation, Heaney seems to be saying, may confidently be regarded as true. The poet’s writerly anxiety is to do with alphabet and by extension language – he imagines a film-like animation in which written characters fly away – his delivery and reassurance derive from a Catholic legend in which something similar is said to have happened with a felicitous outcome. The components of language with which hitherto Heaney has felt secure (solid letters of the world) were suddenly unsteady (grew airy). The sturdy architecture of written letters (marble serifs … clearly blocked uprights) that this seasoned wordsmith has underpinned (built upon rocks) and elevated (set upon the heights) suddenly took to the air (rose). A […]

Poet’s Chair

The 3-poem sequence is dedicated to Carolyn Mulholland, born in Lurgan, Co Armagh in 1944; she studied at the Belfast College of Art from 1962 to 1966, where she was awarded the Ulster Arts Club prize for Sculpture in 1965. Something borrowed from da Vinci’s notebooks enables Heaney to hail the momentousness of works of art – be they a piece of sculpture, a painting or a poem – that result from a spiritual journey undertaken by their creator. According to Leonardo the universal source of light perceives no shade (the sun has never seen a shadow). This prepares us initially for the world of light, dark, and changing perspective within Mulholland’s mind (Now watch the sculptor move) as she orbits the concept that forms the centre of her […]

The Swing

A sequence evoking a mid-Ulster time, a place and a child-centred activity. In the 1940s a large open barn in the Heaney farmyard at Mossbawn in Northern Ireland featured a swing that distracted Heaney and his siblings (the ‘herd life’ Heaney talks about in ‘Sofa in the Forties’ and his Nobel acceptance speech) and brought a mother’s presence to bear. The sequence moves back and forth between the extraordinary and the commonplace, the heavenly and the earthbound, idealized artistic representations and sheer down-to-earthness. * Learning to swing well is a metaphor for all manner of things not a means to successful independence. An early introductions to the laws of Physics: swinging was about maintaining impetus – the poet points out […]

The Poplar

Multum in parvo! This short piece goes to the heart of matters of alignment and balance. Heaney, a close observer of nature, is quick to perceive the previously unseen and consider whether it signals dramatic shifts in human affairs, themselves shaped by powerful forces. Heaney addressed the issue with Henri Cole in Harvard’s Paris Review: “The needle is always swinging between two extremes with me. One is the gravitas of subject matter, a kind of surly nose-to-the-groundness, almost a non-poetry, and the other is the lift and frolic of the words in themselves”. Heaney reflects on something he has not noticed before: a sudden rush of wind (shakes the big poplar) exposes as if by alchemy (quicksilvering) the lighter-shaded underside […]

Two Stick Drawings

Two vignettes borrowed from the lost domain of childhood portray youngsters in circumstances that to Heaney’s eye provided them with uninhibited pleasure. Walking-sticks form the main props to the action. 1 Heaney reflects on the actions and responses of a playmate (Claire O’Reilly) wilful enough to misappropriate her granny’s stick for her own purposes – its shape (crook-necked) ideal for blackberry-picking expeditions (snare the highest briars) and providing a solution to Claire’s refusal to be denied access to the best fruit (always grew the ripest blackberries). In comparison the fate of a ‘heroine’ of Greek mythology (Persephone) was much less fortuitous (in the halfpenny place compared to Claire), Claire’s nature ignored regulation (she’d trespass and climb gates) or danger (walk […]

A Call

The first of two rueful poems in which Heaney recalls incidents from the time when his parents were still alive. In A Call he is in telephone contact with them. Heaney had left the family home (after seven years of boarding-school experience) to go to university, after which he worked, married, travelled and brought up children in locations distant from his roots, initially in Belfast then after 1953 in the Irish Republic. Heaney’s mother has answered the phone and responded to his request to speak to his father (‘Hold on’ … ‘I’II just run out and get him). The elderly man still takes every opportunity (took the chance) to engage in the habits of a farming lifetime – fresh air […]

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

in memory of Donatus Nwoga Heaney pens an elegiac tribute to Nigerian scholar and critic Donatus Nwoga who was a fellow student at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the 1950s. He reworks an Igbo fable from the Nigerian folk lore of Donatus’s roots in which Humanity fails in its attempt to make earthly death anything other than an irreversible state. When men realized they were mortal (found out about death) they appealed to the highest Igbo authority via Man’s so-called best friend (sent the dog to Chukwu with a message). They urged the supreme deity to make death temporary and reversible (they wanted to be let back to the house of life). They were unhappy with the idea that their souls […]

M

The monogram represents iconic Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam much admired by Heaney for resisting the repressive Eastern European political machines that sought to silence him. The poet allegorizes his conviction that men of Mandelstam’s stature will ensure that truth will always come out. Heaney’s publisher of messages, a magician/contradiction in terms (deaf phonetician), has developed a method of bringing his patient’s interior monologue to light despite the vocal silence imposed by outside forces. He smuggles out what cannot be heard using touch (his hand over the dome of a speaker’s skull) – his skill at unraveling speech formats (diphthong … vowel by the bone vibrating to the sound) has made the unfeasible feasible and defeated censorship. Heaney’s speaker […]

An Architect

Evidence suggests that the unnamed Architect is Robin Walker who died in 1991. Heaney’s poem becomes an elegiac tribute to one of Ireland’s most eminent 20th century architects. He paints the portrait of a man in his professional and personal spaces. Observation of the architect’s demeanour and environment confirms an artistic kinship sensed by Heaney even acquaintance without implying close friendship. The architect’s success in life is predicated on his personal traits: healthy mind in healthy body (he fasted); special talent (gift); self-motivation (exacting more); a sense of self-preservation (minding) when for example indulging his taste for Japanese design (boulder and … raked zen gravel). A man equally full on (no slouch either) when consuming the ‘hard stuff’ (whenever it […]

The Sharping Stone

Five poems are triggered by the discovery of a gift in mint condition lying forgotten in a drawer. The fourth piece identifies Heaney’s late father-in-law Thomas ‘Tommy’ Devlin and clues suggest that he is the centrepiece. Heaney zooms slowly in on the whetstone: from the furniture in which it was discovered (an apothecary’s chest of drawers), a quality piece (sweet cedar) of modest provenance (purchased second hand) to its specific location in a drawer (one of its weighty deep-sliding recesses). Therein the object itself (sharping stone) and recall of its original intended recipient who for the moment will remain anonymous (our gift to him). In mint condition (still in its wrapping paper). Too late to deliver now (Tommy has passed […]

The Strand

A poem of love and loss – Heaney’s ageing father once left signature markings on a Dublin beach; inevitably washed away by the next incoming tide they will never be obliterated from the poet’s memory. As they took the air together once on Sandymount Strand the point of Patrick Heaney’s stick left a trail (the dotted line my father’s ashplant made). As long as Heaney lives nothing the all-powerful sea can do will succeed in effacing that visual memory: something else the tide won’t wash away. dotted line: literally the line of marks imprinted by the stick on soft sand; metaphorically the space left on a form or letter upon which a person leaves his signature; Strand: a Dublin beach […]

The Walk

Twin sonnets of love – the first for parental devotion and guidance – the second, a ‘longshot’ contemplating his marriage to Marie that has lasted more than three decades. The first ‘photo’ is ‘fixed’ (his parents are no longer of this world), the second a black and white negative from which positive prints are plentiful and on-going. Fifty years on Heaney’s childhood Mossbawn walks with his mother and father still shed a magical light (glamoured) on time and place (the road, the day) and them (him and her), wherever they might take him (everywhere). The elements mixed and merged – solid mineral and liquid (cobbles were riverbed), what they breathed associated with spiritual day (Sunday air) beneath the dome of […]

At the Wellhead

Two moving sonnets take Heaney back to his Castledawson roots and celebrate the blind musician Rosie Keenan who brought a new creative art into his life. The poet addresses the veteran singer (school-friend of his mother and his Aunt Mary). His emotions run deep. He recalls the tunes (your songs, when you sing them) delivered in her singular way (your two eyes closed as you always do); airs as familiar to him and his playmates as ‘the back of their hands’ (local road we’ve known every turn of in the past); lyrical melodies that betoken the mid-Ulster cul-de-sac where she dwelt (midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road) along the Broagh Road out of Castledawson. That is where they might find her, sightlessly attentive […]

At Banagher

An unexpected alter-ego of a kind – Heaney recognises an alternative embodiment of his own vocation. From his travels around Co. Derry he picks out an itinerant tradesman emblematic of old Ireland and detects similarities between himself and this wandering seamster. Just as the tailor has a way with clothes so the poet has a way with words – they both spend their time making up, unpicking, altering and putting back together. Without any warning (then all of a sudden) poetic charge can enter the poetic consciousness (appears to me) – on this occasion a remnant of old Ireland, a sharer of Heaney’s ancestry who mirrors in figurative form many of the poet’s traits (journeyman tailor who was my antecedent). […]

Tollund

Heaney penned this poem in September 1994 immediately following the IRA cease-fire of August 1994 that gave rise to cautious hope for Northern Ireland. Tollund Man first appeared in Wintering Out, Heaney’s third collection of 1972 and will feature again in District and Circle of 2006. Heaney explained how he and Marie ended up on Tollund Moss (DOD (p350): I was asked to write about the IRA announcement of ceasefire for the next weekend’s Sunday Tribune. That same weekend I was also bound for Denmark to do a reading in Copenhagen University, and inevitably I was remembering the visit I’d made to Jutland twenty-one years earlier to see the Tollund Man. What happened, at any rate, was an unexpected trip […]

Postscript

Memory, distance and emotion translate into a moment of simple joyous exaltation and deep love for being alive and Irish. The poem echoes all things Heaney and is for many their favourite music. The poet begs all who would listen and consent to share (some time make the time) to follow in his leisurely footsteps (drive out west) and be prepared for an unexpected moment of heart stopping beauty in the remoteness of the Burren (County Clare) where the land meets the sea in a series of rocky limestone plates (along the Flaggy Shore). Autumn (September or October) provides optimum elemental collaboration (the wind and the light … working off each other) – to the right untamed open sea (ocean […]

Afterthoughts

Contents Heaney an extraordinary man in ordinary clothing Heaney the cordon-bleu cook Heaney the agent of change Heaney the orchestral composer Heaney the word painter Heaney the meticulous craftsman (including phonetic information) Subjects and Circumstances of individual poems Formats and Rhymes of individual poems Stylistic devices Heaney an extraordinary man in ordinary clothes Poets are a breed apart! Unlike ordinary mortals such as you and I 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 […]

Navigating the ‘Station Island’ Collection

Contents Foreword followed by: Main Sources; the Structure of Station Island; biographical ‘events’ between 1976-1984; the collection and its moment; Heaney’s ‘book of changes’; ‘hampering stuff’; Catholic beginnings; loss of faith; breaking loose; the political dimension; ‘Troubles’ timeline; poetry and politics: retaining a neutral voice; reconciling the clash between politics and poetry; the redemptive power of Art; Irishness; the Poems individual commentaries with footnotes and reflections on style and structure Part 1: the stirrings of change; The Underground La Toilette Sloe Gin Away from it All Chekhov on Sakhalin Sandstone Keepsake Shelf Life A Migration Last Look Remembering Malibu Making Strange The Birthplace Changes An Ulster Twilight A Bat on the Road A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann A […]

Foreword

Station Island, published by Faber and Faber in 1984, is Seamus Heaney’s seventh collection. Heaney is in his mid-forties. The totality of his collections over more than half a century since Death of a Naturalist (1966) have confirmed his place at the very top of the premier league of poets writing in English. The textual commentaries that follow seek to tease out what Heaney’s poems are intimating in Station Island. Of course, the poet’s ‘message’ will have started life as an essentially personal one not intended primarily for his reader; there are moments when some serious unravelling is required. Thanks to the depth of Heaney’s knowledge, scholarship and the sincerity of his personal feelings, his poetry is rich in […]

The Underground

Heaney dramatises an incident from his honeymoon, dissolving a panicky rush into a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Underground and Underworld merge in a fusion of reality and nightmare. A London Underground tunnel is the unifying factor: first a memory played out (then),the intimate recollection of a mad rush to get to a Promenade concert at the Albert Hall; the second and third providing (now) imagined associations: first a character from German folklore lost in a dark forest then the scene of an Underworld trap into which a figure from classical mythology fell and lost his wife as a result. We follow two figures in a vaulted passageway leading to and from the Tube; the ‘she’ figure […]

La Toilette

The early-morning embrace of a loved one recalls unwelcome memories of Heaney’s Catholic training. The die is cast, however: Marie’s is Heaney’s new sacred body. Initial sensual contact focuses on the nightwear and body of a woman engaged at her ‘toilette’. The speaker’s voice reveals the excitement generated by the way she presents herself: bathrobe/ ungirdled, first coldness of the underbreast . At this moment of physical pleasure he cannot prevent the accessories of Catholic worship from interrupting the intimacy he is enjoying, touch is like a ciborium in the palm. He shakes his head at the Catholic message that they no longer believe in (Remember?); it was coldly dismissive of the physical closeness, allure and sexuality he is now […]

Sloe Gin

Heaney proposes a lyrical toast to a drink made from sloe berries that drip with taste and sensation and to the woman who produces sloe gin. The poem salutes the creation of an enjoyable tipple. The process is defined as a late autumn activity performed as the clear weather of juniper/ darkened into winter. The tipple-maker simply added alcoholic sustenance to the berries: fed gin to sloes. The speaker’s curiosity that led to him opening the sealed jar prematurely sent its bouquet (the tart stillness of a bush) rising through the pantry where it lay marinating. Sampling brought pleasure to taste and sight: the sharpness of its cutting edge and its cosmic twinkle that flamed/ like Betelgeuse. The chink of […]

Away from it All

The poem should be read in the context of the ‘Troubles’ in Ulster at a time of internment without trial, of the H-Blocks at Long Kesh and of hunger strikers. Heaney, a poet in the public eye, acknowledges that he has often been absent from Ulster as events unfolded; he has sympathy for ’causes’, but is unsure what stance he ought to adopt. The speaker and his anonymous friend are enjoying a convivial session in a seafood restaurant (let us suggest, to coincide with Heaney’s first meeting with Czeslaw Milosz, that the setting is somewhere on the Californian coast); others are almost certainly present. The poem explores the tensions writers share as regards their creativity, their historical moment, their take […]

Chekhov on Sakhalin

These instances from a political pilgrimage are dedicated to fellow Ulster man of Letters Derek Mahon (to whom Heaney’s Seeing Things collection is dedicated); amongst their numerous contacts Heaney and Mahon shared, in 1977, an Arts Council tour entitled In Their Element; The poem should be read in the context of the Troubles in Ulster at a time of internment without trial, of H-Blocks at Long Kesh and hunger strikers. Heaney, a poet in the public eye, deplores repressive policies and has sympathy for causes; here he explores the reactions of the Russian author and physician Anton Chekhov, a fellow author faced with similar political circumstances, one who demonstrated the courage of his convictions but who faltered at the final […]

Sandstone Keepsake

The poem should be read in the context of the Troubles in Ulster at a time of internment without trial, of H-Blocks at Long Kesh and hunger strikers. Heaney is holding a stone that he once picked up on the border separating Ulster from the Irish Republic. It comes to symbolise the speaker’s inner conflict in face of the whole swirl of events, feelings and insecurities to which both he and his native island are subjected, not least his sense of political restrictions imposed upon the north by the Brirish. He has kept the stone for a host of reasons: its reddish colouring (russet);its texture and fruit shape (solidified gourd);its geology of natural, local materials eroded by water: chalky …sedimentary. […]