poems by seamus heaney by Seamus Heaney

The Backward Look

A complex variant of Heaney’s ‘languagey’ poems, the piece explores linguistic impurities that have crept into the spoken word and adulterated the Irish language. The poet’s principle concern is linguistic dispossession. By use of a kind of Audenesque ‘verbal contraption’ he reflects on the wider erosion of the Irish domain. The landscape might have changed little but the language that describes it has suffered from crossbreeding. In his Backward Look, the poet measures the impact of repeated invasion and incursion. His message is carried by the emblematic Irish snipe. Heaney recognizes changes in the sounds and movement of the startled snipe, pretending all is well (sleight of wing) but under closer scrutiny showing signs of injury: A stagger in air […]

Traditions

For Tom Flanagan Heaney met Tom Flanagan and was inspired by his Ireland-centred thinking at Berkeley. He explains the dedication: ‘It was Tom’s poem because I lifted the conclusion of it from his book on the Irish novelists (The Irish Novelists 1800-1850). The epigraph to that book juxtaposes MacMorris’s question in Henry V ( ) with Bloom’s answer in Ulysses … (Bloom’s reply) seemed to cut through a lot of the Identity crisis stuff that surrounded us in the early seventies so I stole it for the end of the poem’ (DOD143). The title introduces national stereotypes and the piece will pull the rug from under their feet. I The speaker identifies closely (Our) with the guttural muse of throaty […]

A New Song

The poem spins a web comprising South Derry place names, issues of Irish history (dispossession, uprising), a vanished world, things that happen in real-life (universal: girl-meets-boy; particular: a flood event). Its phonological content adds to the complexity. To help unravel the piece’s message NC refers to the Heaney’s essay ‘1972’ in Preoccupations: ‘discussing his beginnings as a poet, he writes, ‘I think of the personal and Irish pieties (his roots) as vowels and the literary awarenesses nourished by English (his degree, his working language) as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience.’ ’ (NC42); Heaney’s title announces a new music bidding to retrieve a lost domain: a song to be heard, the […]

The Other Side

As sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland were boiling up into major 1970s conflict Heaney takes a peek back at relationships prevailing in the Heaney neighbourhood of the 1940s. ‘The Other Side’ presents a guarded but benign encounter between your family and your Protestant neighbour Johnny Junkin (DOD131). Heaney’s neighbours as he explained to DOD were ‘both beside us and on the other side’, Protestants and Catholics living alongside each other, and in harmony. Wading through vegetation on the edge of Heaney property (Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds) the young narrator is suddenly aware of a second looming presence at the ‘frontier’ separating them (a neighbour laid his shadow on the stream). Using a religious comparison the man writes off the […]

The Wool Trade

‘How different are the words “home”, “Christ”, “ale”, “master”, on his lips and mine’ Stephen Dedalus Heaney’s epigraph is taken from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the point when the young Irishman, in his dealings with the English Dean of Studies, suffers ‘unrest of spirit’ when it dawns on him that English (‘so familiar and so foreign’ to him) is a major legacy of English occupation. Three of his example words, of things that loom large in a young Irishman’s life (kinship, religion, social activity), lead to the fourth: his sense of Irish dispossession. Dedalus sounds the words out to himself conscious that the Dean, as an Englishman, will read their meaning differently. The […]

Linen Town

High Street, Belfast, 1786 A pen and ink study on tinted paper of Ye High Streete Belfast Anno Dom 1786 features the old Market House in front of which an insurrectionist would be hanged twelve years after; behind the vignette of bustling, fashionable Belfast life a clock is ticking: the political execution will change everything. Heaney uses a depiction announcing the political turbulence leading to the Act of Union of 1801 as a stark appeal to avoid yet another period of strife. His sense, however, that circumstances make recurring violence inevitable in Irish history will prove true: between the submission of the Wintering Out manuscript to Faber for consideration the events of Bloody Friday and Bloody Sunday will once again […]

A Northern Hoard

And some in dreams assured were/ of the Spirit that plagued us so Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner of 1798 provides the epigraph to the sequence. Coleridge’s long fable deals with the consequences of an aberrant act upon both the sinner and those around him; it weaves together matters of conscience, danger, serenity, the supernatural, mental health and salvation; it introduces spirits that come to haunt the mariner’s conscience; it picks out the sad fate of ordinary people caught in a vicious circle; it condemns the mariner to wander the earth re-telling his story in an attempt to leave people sadder and wiser. hoard: stock, store; for the poet his store of words. Heaney presents a five […]

Midnight

Midnight is to do with being robbed. Loss of language, prosperity and nationhood are dealt with in the collection; to them Heaney adds the contrived extinction of the wolf, once prevalent in Ireland. The spoliation visited on Ireland over the centuries has brought Heaney to a Midnight of gloom: things Irish lost or compromised by a string of occupying armies flooding Irish shores (Since the professional wars) with all the brutality of conquest (Corpse and carrion Paling in rain). The poet laments the disappearance of a predator that roamed free until the British got involved: The wolf has died out/ In Ireland hunted to extinction after the Cromwellian Plantations of the 1650s. Once upon a time packs/ Scoured parkland and […]

The Tollund Man

‘I did ‘The Tollund Man’ in Ballydavid in Kerry at Easter in 1970. Marie and I had gone there for holidays regularly …’ (DOD124); I Heaney makes the pledge he will fulfil in 1973 a year after Wintering Out is published: Some day I will go to Aarhus. His pilgrimage will aim to bring him face to face with Tollund Man his body recalled now (from photographs taken by PV Glob): his stained peat-brown head; the gentle swellings (mild pods) of his eye-lid; the leathery crown (His pointed skin cap). The body had been miraculously preserved by the Jutland peat bog (the flat country nearby/ Where they dug him out), leaving, too, remains of the thin food he consumed prior […]

Nerthus

Heaney concentrates his creative attention on a ‘Mother Earth’ figure of Norse legend (Nerthus) in whose name the Tollund bog-body of the previous poem was allegedly sacrificed. Her pagan beauty is set in tree form, within a sexually suggestive meld of landscape and female symbol of fertility: ash-fork staked in peat. The eye is drawn from mildly provocative long-distance shot (‘fork’) towards textures and shape suggestive of the female reproductive zone: Its long grains gathering to the gouged split. Jutland and Ulster landscapes have much in common; why not, then, a tree tolerant of all extremes of climate (A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather) preserved in an Ulster bog identical in all but the language to describe it: Where […]

Cairn-maker

For Barrie Cooke Poem dedicated to the British born artist and family friend living in Ireland since 1954 (Cooke painted a portrait of the poet). Heaney reveals to DOD (p148) that as he and his wife actively contemplated changes in the direction of their lives they visited Cooke who had fashioned a self-sufficient existence for himself in Kilkenny. The poet went on outings with Cooke, a 2-and 3-dimensional artist fascinated by natural materials and designs. The clues mount up: on a walk cairns would have provided Cooke with a creative distraction. He is the cairn-maker. Cairns are a feature of the Burren landscape since the earliest times and Heaney’s Cairn-maker latest in a line of builders. The poet observes the […]

Navvy

The humane portrait of a road-worker-superman, at once man of the earth dressed in fit for purpose (The moleskins stiff as bark) and man joined to the earth, driving a heavy pneumatic tool into the carriageway (the drill grafting his wrists/ to the shale). A modest labourer, perhaps, but no pushover: where works have created a chicane for drivers (the surface ( ) weavy) and caution is required, the navvy polices the situation. When camber tilts/ in the slow lane he is in charge: he stands / waving you down. Heaney is familiar with the boggy landscape through which the road passes (The morass the macadam snakes over) and the bog’s voracious appetite for anything that strays onto it: it […]

Veteran’s Dream

One of a string of individuals memorialized in Heaney’s poems provided by his 1940s neighbourhood. The warm-hearted child that Heaney was is reflected In Veteran’s Dream by his compassion for the physical and mental state of retired soldier Mr Dickson, my neighbour whose post-traumatic stress disorder born of Great War experiences in the trenches rendered his life not dream but nightmare. The time setting is established by the man’s experiences: (he) saw the last cavalry charge/ Of the war and got the first gas. He takes his injuries with him into his subconscious memory world, walking with a limp/ Into his helmet and khaki. Some near-death experiences are of distant concern: gas has yellowed his buttons; cavalry attack that leaves […]

Augury

The positive connotations of ‘Oracle’ (a youngster destined to be a poet growing up in a healthy environment) give way to a much darker Augury: the mask and body of a sick fish warn of impending threats to well-being. The ’inward broody style’ characteristic of Wintering Out underlines in allegorical form the threats facing both Ulster community and more widely by Mankind. Initial signs of normal health (The fish faced into the current) belie life-threatening changes: Its mouth agape as it searches for oxygen, Its whole head opened like a valve. The narrator bows to his companion’s prognosis: You said ‘It’s diseased’. Closer observation reveals the signs of sickness: an oval shaped pale crusted sore/ Turned like a coin dangling […]

Wedding Day

Heaney harks back to his Wedding Day in August 1965 when he married Marie Devlin; they have been married for nearly fifty years when the poet dies in 2013. Heaney’s day of celebration is filled with anxiety: I am afraid. Silence reigns (Sound has stopped in the day), replaced by a cascade of wedding ‘visuals’ (the images reel over/ And over). Heaney is puzzled as to why (when the Devlin family had not so much lost a daughter as gained a son) his abiding memory should be of all those tears, as to why his father-in-law’s emotions as betrayed by his countenance (The wild grief on his face /Outside the taxi?) fail to differentiate between a short honeymoon and total […]

Mother of the Groom

A compassionate poem in which Heaney moves from decoding the thoughts and feelings of characters he knows less well in Wedding Day to a person he has known all his life. Mother of the Groom focuses on the poet’s own mother listening to the wedding breakfast speeches. He imagines her feelings as she sits silently through the proceedings. Heaney imagines that at this life-changing moment his mother is remembering him, first as a babe in arms, bath-water reflected on his glistening back then, once he has learnt to walk, as a kind of Baby Bear figure his small boots In the ring of boots at her feet. The hands that once held the child on her knee lie now in […]

Summer Home

The poet revealed to DOD that ‘Those little poems in ‘Summer Home’ come more from pressure of personal experience than from any literary influence’ (p147). Significantly, in 1969, the Heaneys had spent time in the Bas-Pyrénées region of France fulfilling a condition of the Somerset Maugham Award of the previous year. The cocktail of summer heat in a foreign clime, questionable accommodation, sheer fatigue and the company of two children under three years of age pushes an otherwise reasonable man over the top. Heaney dramatizes a traumatic domestic event for which he feels guilty responsibility: act 1 provides the catalyst that lights his fuse; act 2 depicts deep remorse and an act of penitence; act 3 confirms an as yet […]

Serenades

Following the domestic tribulations of ‘Summer Home’ the Heaney family back home; harmony has been restored, the children are sleeping soundly and love is renewed. The poet celebrates the Serenades to be heard, before inviting his wife to shut out the world and retire for the night with him. Heaney engages in a spot of leg-pulling – the Irish nightingale is a figment of Irish folklore imagination. ‘Their’ Irish version is a sedge-warbler, a bird noted for the unromantic din it makes (A little bird with a big voice/ Kicking up a racket all night) decidedly unemblematic of Irish musical culture: Not what you’d expect/ From the musical nation. Wherever the Irish nightingale is supposed to perform it has never […]

Somnambulist

Helen Vendler, long-term friend of the poet and author of books, articles and reviews of his poetry, provides a key to this cryptic, elusive piece: In this dream of guilt and repentance Seamus Heaney is a Wordsworthian boy robbing a nest of eggs (cf. The Prelude (1850), Book First, ll. 326-28). Placed close in the collection to ‘Summer Home’ which describes a holiday crisis in Heaney’s relationship with his wife, Marie Heaney, for which he suffers acute guilt feelings, Somnambulist provides a ‘psychological’ dream sequel in which he and his estranged wife take part. A crime against life (the theft of a mother bird’s egg) is exposed via a tragedian’s dramatic body posture: the somnambulist stares at the physical agents of theft […]

A Winter’s Tale

Referring to the period before his sabbatical in 1971 (spent at Berkeley University in California) Heaney revealed to DOD (p124) that ‘Earlier on, in 1969 and 1970, I’d written the group of poems about women in distress – ‘Shore Woman’, ‘Maighdean Mara’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, ‘Limbo’. Heaney’s ‘more inward, broody’ mindset is present in A Winter’s Tale, an episode from the life of a lost soul linked via the title with Shakespeare’s Perdita (reference Latin ‘lost one’). Heaney knew the girl’s identity through the community grapevine. Offspring with mental health problems could be a feature of the ‘closed’ Ulster villages of and before Heaney’s time (see also ‘Stick Drawings’ of Spirit Level). The poet recalls a group that hunted down […]

Shore Woman

Heaney revealed to DOD(p124) that ‘the fishing scenario in ‘Shore Woman’ is in fact an amalgam of two Kerry occasions – one when we went out on Kenmare Bay with Sean O’Riada and actually caught a heap of mackerel; another, reported to us by a man in Dingle, who told how his wife panicked when their boat was surrounded by porpoises’. The poem, one of a series depicting women in distress, and its epigraph linking men with the land and women with the sea identify Shore Woman as the narrator. The piece paints all the themes, variations, dynamics and drama of a sea symphony in words. The first movement, calm, lyrical andante cantabile, introduces a storyteller sensitive to the sound […]

Maighdean Mara

For Sean Oh-Eocha The report of a drowning and its circumstances prompted Heaney to represent the happening as the action of a sea-spirit returning to her element rather than that of an unfortunate woman driven to despair and suicide by her narrow, hard-hearted judges. Heaney knew of the associated mythology identifying female selkies, said to make excellent wives but, because their true home was the sea, often to be seen gazing longingly at the ocean. If she found her skin she would immediately return to her true home in the sea. Sometimes, a selkie maiden was taken as a wife by a human man and might mother several children by him. In some stories it was one of her children […]

Limbo

Prompted by the story of a baby’s body dredged up by fishermen Heaney traces a path through the emotional, maternal, religious and spiritual ramifications of infanticide from within a confused mother’s experience. ‘The poem may be read as a parable for an Ireland in which ‘tribal taboos and laws can so easily outweigh ‘civilized’ humane values’ (MP114-5). Heaney suggests, without passing judgment on her himself that, rather than suffer the ostracism faced by unmarried mothers in the so-called ‘christian’ communities in which she lived, the mother has tried unsuccessfully to cleanse herself of sin by drowning her new-born.. A gruesome discovery, splashed as a news headline, Fishermen at Ballyshannon/ Netted an infant last night generates in the poet an image […]

Bye-Child

He was discovered in the henhouse/ Where she had confined him. He was incapable of saying anything. Articles in Ireland’s Mourne Observer of September and October 1956 outlined the extraordinary discovery of 7 year-old Kevin Murphy kept in isolation in an outhouse almost since birth and the subsequent conviction of his 45 year-old mother, Margaret Murphy, imprisoned for 9 months for the wilful neglect of Kevin, her fifth child. Kevin had been born illegitimate. ‘Although his short life-time has consisted of continuous physical and emotional deprivation, the child has been able to transcend his kennel prison and achieved a hard and bright lucidity of spirit … He has journeyed ‘beyond patience’ and beyond the limitations of human ‘love’, and identified […]

Good-night

A vignette from Seamus Heaney’s past set as a play; an elegiac dramatization in memoriam of his mother’s purposeful character. No words are spoken; no words are necessary. The scene is a humble farmyard, the observer’s attention is grabbed by the familiar sound of a door latch lifting and he watches the sharply delineated rectangle of warmth and security revealed by the swinging door: edged den of light/ Opens across the yard. The contrast of external darkness and stage lighting produces striking effects. A watcher in the dark, he follows the action from a distance. There are two actors on stage quickly identified as the parents who provided the love and security of Heaney’s family home at Mossbawn. Initially silhouetted […]