Seamus Heaney Poems by Seamus Heaney

The Butts

Crossings xxxiii from Seeing Things of 1991 is closely linked to The Butts. Both poems are set specifically at The Wood farm inherited from great-uncle Hughie into which the family moved from Mossbawn following the death of the poet’s brother Christopher in 1953. In the earlier poem the removal of his father’s personal effects from the deserted farmhouse (what had been emptied out) had completed an ‘unroofing’ process that closed the door on a chapter of Heaney’s life that had included parents (turning your back and leaving), Those feelings have lain and matured over nearly a decade. His father’s ‘plain, big, straight ordinary’ design for the house he built and lived in as a widower are reflected in the lack […]

Uncoupled

The collection moves from Heaney’s temporary separation from family and home as an adolescent exile in a boarding school to the pained recall of terminal severance. His Virgilian diptych focuses on his mother and father long since dead. There is an element of nightmare in both depictions. The two figures demonstrate their personalities via the challenges they dealt with and the circumstances in which they operated. As so often Heaney’s ingenious choice of title awakens multiple associations: his mother and father, so long a solid close-knit couple, exist now only in his memory and the eternal present of his poem; death has decoupled two links from one end of a human chain to which for the time being Heaney remains […]

An Old Refrain

Musicality is clear from the title, both reference to the jingle of a Tudor song and the musical power that words possess or conjure up in the poetic imagination. Heaney picks up the refrain from a joyous Elizabethan madrigal of Shakespearean provenance sung by the choir of Pages in As You Like It. The refrain placed as a break between verses becomes a predictable repetition echoing a landscape that repeats itself seasonally. His two poems mimic folk songs: the first celebrating the lush perennial vegetation growing in profusion along the byways of Heaney’s childhood; the second listing an array of images and sensations the poet associates with familiar Irish labels for other hedgerow dwellers. i The vetch plant familiar to Heaney […]

The Wood Road

The poem provides a series of visual dramas that occurred along the road outside Heaney’s second family home at the Wood which runs northwards from Bellaghy towards Portglenone via Mullhollandtown. Heaney uses Wood Road in his poems possibly because the actual name on the map (Ballymacombs Road) is too much of a mouthful! The Wood Road (as it is and was) has been maintained but not upgraded (resurfaced, never widened). This is how it will present when at the end of the poem all its dramas have been played out. Scene 1: a night scene from the 1950’s period prior to the so-called ‘Troubles’; a caricature B Special volunteer in training (Bill Pickering … with his gun ) on surveillance […]

Human Chain

Heaney’s title poem, dedicated to Terence Brown, salutes chains of support – human solidarity in the face of social disaster. He associates himself with the compassion, love and respect required of people who devote themselves selflessly to such missions The poem adapts the ‘shared burden’ theme of Miracle marking the backbreaking work undertaken by aid workers dedicated to the survival of victims of Third World famine and political repression. He imagines himself as an active even allegorical participant (he is a poet with a public voice and huge sensitivity to the Troubles in his own Northern Irish homeland). In the final couplet Heaney reflects on his own dwindling potential as a link in the human chain. Heaney is reviewing footage of basic […]

A Mite-Box

Encouraged by his mother’s example Heaney was a very active member of his local church and served for a period as altar-boy. He later referred to this as a ‘surfeit’ of Catholic training as slowly but inexorably his own faith lapsed. For all his loss of belief the stories and words, parables and liturgy he had learned by heart plus the sounds, smells and church paraphernalia with which he was familiar continued to resonate and emerged whenever poetic charge required. A Mite Box renews the charity theme downsizing it from large-scale international aid of Human Chain to the poet’s experiences as a youngster carrying a collecting-box round the parish in search of donations. As Heaney lies awaiting the return of […]

Slack

Heaney’s pictures from boyhood and adolescence the 1940s and 50s era are the richer for his minute and often sensuous concentration on detail. Here he ponders on the properties of a household fuel, the way his family adapted to shortage and austerity and the emotional leftovers of this temps retrouvé. Look too for one of the collection’s themes – weight felt, weight lifted. i Heaney’s post-WWII boyhood featured a coal product unknown to current consumers (slack). He sets out to describe its consistency – more than black powder (not coal dust), something with a little more bulk (weighty grounds of coal). It arrived at the farm conventionally enough (by lorryman … in open bags) and was tipped into the coal shed […]

A Herbal

after Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretaagne Eugène Guillevic (1907-1957; b. Carnac, Morbihan, Brittany, France) who used only his family name; well-known French regional poet of the second half of the 20th century. The sequence comprises 19 short pieces, the longest of 15 lines. The dedication’s after confirms that Heaney is offering his own version of a French poem altered to adapt it to Ireland’s flora, his own non-coastal surroundings and to meet his own poetic priorities. He is loyal to the original text but omits some sections and re-orders others. He adds a personal incident involving himself and Marie Heaney where the original text offers the possibility. The sequence produces plants in their natural environment with human voices, emotions and distinct […]

Derry Derry Down

The title is taken from the refrain of The Keeper, a traditional song, ostensibly about a gamekeeper searching for female deer but loaded with the insinuation of sexual encounter. Heaney combines young speaker, factual experience, fairy-story and ‘still life’ Art form to describe pleasurable moments from his life. His two settings elevate the less refined sensuality of the original song. In 2011 Helen Vendler spotted Heaney’s subtlety – ‘Two mildly erotic snatches of pleasure ‘, she commented, adding ‘sensuous delight in Heaney has often a tinge of the erotic’. i Heaney was foraging for fruit close to his Mossbawn home. It was July and he spotted the assonant ripeness (lush sunset blush) of a full bosomed fruit (big ripe gooseberry). His daring attempt […]

The Baler

‘Against the cyclical, seasonal processes there is apprehension that our partaking in them is limited’ says Nick Laird. The solid, repetitive sound of a vital piece of agricultural machinery delivering its annual farming bounty unearths deeper feelings in Heaney for whom a sense of mortality has crept in: about being and dying; about self; about a specific friend in memoriam. Lying in his convalescent bed Heaney has been aware of a constant (all day … ongoing) background thud (clunk) familiar to him (baler) as unexciting as the heartbeat (cardiac-dull) and unappreciated as vital (taken for granted). The after effect of stroke has held him in a semi-conscious state all day (evening before I came to); full consciousness restores fond memory (hearing […]

Death of a Painter

In his obituary for the painter, Nancy Wynne Jones, in the Guardian of Wednesday 29 November 2006 Seamus Heaney demonstrated his respect and affection for the deceased artist referring to her paintings as ‘earthy and moist, with rich warm, subtle ochres and reds … place and palette and spirit all equal’. What, Heaney reflects, might we learn about Nancy’s canvasses and how she perceives things via the launch pad of her studio window? Not an overarching dome of sky (tent of blue) rather the sweep of rich yellow (peek of gold) of the Irish landscape that inspired her (Wicklow cornfield) from her first floor room (gable window) most beneficial (favoured coign of vantage) to her intense powers of observation (long gazing). With whom might she […]

The Riverbank Field

after Aeneid vi, 704-I5, 748-5I Heaney dips into literature, tracking back to Classical author Virgil of around 30 BC. References to his Aenied vi much cherished by Heaney from his Sixth Form studies onwards will provide him with some opportunity to show-case his own translation skills. The poem is far from a literary exercise however setting the poet firmly in his mid-Ulster landscape around Castledawson. His local Riverbank Field alongside the Moyola is deemed every bit as perfect as Virgil’s paradise. Scholarly translation (what Loeb gives) depicts Virgil’s Elysium alone. Heaney will create a watery fusion of classical mythology and mid-Ulster fact (I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola). His Aeneas-like perambulation selects familiar place-names (Back Park … Grove Hill … Long […]

Route 110

A much admired sequence of 12 poems that ends with celebration of the arrival of first grand-child, Anna Rose, born to son, Christopher and his wife Jenny. Heaney collapses the distance between the mythical and the personal, setting out Aeneas-like on a staged journey of his own. In an interview with Eimear Flanagan for BBC Northern Ireland of September 23, 2010 Heaney commented that ‘oddly enough’ the poem began without any mourning intention, and was intended to mark a very happy family occasion. ‘Book VI, where Aeneas goes down to meet his father in the underworld, meets all the souls of the dead, the people he knew, people like his warrior friends … But then he is shown all the souls […]

Canopy

From the late 1970’s Seamus Heaney enjoyed a long relationship with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, initially as a guest lecturer. His regular presence enabled him to share the cultural calendar of America’s oldest established Ivy League university including a visual arts installation dating from May 1994. Its launch coincided with the spring-is-in-the-air suggestiveness of the most famous of the English madrigals, by Thomas Morley published in 1595 (Now is the Month of Maying). The installation lent a forest tree-top effect to Harvard Yard with added sights and sounds. In Heaney’s imagination it triggered something much more otherworldly. Spring was in the air (young green) and with it a hush of anticipation (whispering everywhere). An English visual artist had […]

Eelworks

In his interviews with Denis O’Driscoll that make up ‘Stepping Stones’ Heaney reveals his fascination, as he grew up, with Lough Neagh and his experiences of the eel trade (pp.93-4). The title of this 6-poem sequence refers to the familiar local name for the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative with which his future wife’s grandfather and father were connected. Heaney takes us into the fairy-tale period of courtship (win the hand of the princess). i Getting his feet under the table (being invited into a girl-friend’s family home for the first time) was seen as a significant stepping-stone. In fairy-tales the male aspirant, a standard figure, had to jump through hoops (tasks the youngest son had to perform) to prove he was worthy […]

Afterthoughts

Human Chain – what is in a title? How does Heaney turn poetic charge into poetry? Heaney provides a music pleasing to the ear Heaney is a meticulous craftsman Using assonance Using alliteration Creating a word-picture Heaney and ‘languages’. Human Chain – what is in a title? Heaney is a master of title, whether for a collection or an individual piece. His sometimes enigmatic, often ingenious headings invite the attentive reader to seek subtly submerged attachments. As regards Human Chain, it emerges that Heaney was carried down the stairs of the accommodation he was sharing with friends when his illness struck en route to the ambulance; he is a hefty six-footer and recognises the physical challenge that this represented. Within a short time he […]