poetry appreciation by Seamus Heaney

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 […]