Seamus Heaney Poetry by Seamus Heaney

Digging

‘Digging’ was composed ‘at home’ at The Wood in 1964. Pen in hand the poet is sitting behind a window when the sight of his father provides the poetic charge. He focuses initially on the hand holding his squat pen, the symbolic tool of the trade to which he aspires. Compared with the elegance of the spades used by father and grandfather, his pen is unglamorously short and stubby. Heaney lends the pen a small-arms image, warm and reassuring in his grasp, snug as a gun … designed to fire bullets. The world below Heaney’s window is ‘on screen’. His attention has been attracted by the sound of digging: a clean rasping sound … into gravelly ground. The man bent […]

The Barn

A second bad-dream poem plays on the stuff of nightmare: half-light and darkness; day and night, benign and threatening. Harmless objects picked out in the first section assume very different natures once a child’s imagination is given free rein. A youngster describes a place very familiar to him: his memory recalls farm objects stored in a barn. His eye observes initially at floor level. Here he sees threshed corn with the consistency, colour (and indeed value to the farmer) of grit of ivory lying scattered on the ground or packed solid as cement in two-lugged sacks (the stitching-up of the sacks provided two ear-like corners, to be gripped by those lugging them about); here he smells musty dark and […]

Death of an Naturalist

Heaney recalls how, as a youngster with a vivid imagination, he was open to disturbing dreams, describing how his childish enthusiasm for nature around his Irish townland turned into a nightmarish tale fed by his guilty perception of having committed a crime and his dread of punishment. He recounts the annual All year flax process (that leads eventually to the production of linen), picking out the natural phenomena surrounding it: gases given off (bubbles gargled delicately); abundance of insect life (bluebottles/ wove a strong gauze of sound …/ dragon-flies, spotted butterflies). The language is rich in alliterative and assonant effects ( flax-dam festered … heavy-headed) with a vocabulary of fermentation (festered … rotting … sweltered … smell). To a boy […]

Blackberry Picking

Recalling himself as a boy enjoying a family activity that appealed to his nature and all his senses Heaney show-cases his talent for transposing close observation into words. From late summer blackberries would grow in profusion around the family home at Mossbawn. Every year optimum growing conditions of moisture and warmth (heavy rain and sun) would guarantee a crop of blackberries. Reference to summer’s blood ensures the idea of a ‘living’ fruit. Each bramble would carry blackberries at different stage of maturity and edibility: red, green, hard as a knot. The front-runner (just one, a glossy purple clot) savoured for its flesh…sweet/ Like thickened wine was sufficient to whet the desire to savour (lust or picking). As increasing numbers […]

Churning Day

Heaney describes the production of farm-made butter witnessed as a youngster. The poem reveals close observations of the technical stages that accompany a ‘magical’ transformation. The process is akin to alchemy: the family produces gold from base metal, butter from milk! They are magicians The rising cream of the milk gradually formed a thick crust with the texture and colour of building materials: coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast. The milk-containers are four crocks/ … large pottery bombs, an analogy that forecasts the explosive transformation that will ultimately take place, echoed, perhaps, in the later reference to the suffocating sulphur mine. On its journey to the butter-churn the milk underwent a radical change, from its creation inside the cow’s hot brewery of […]

The Early Purges

The title is borrowed from totalitarian politics where ‘purges’ removed elements deemed ‘undesirable’ by those in power. Heaney applies it to the cruel realities of farm-yard life as he experienced them as a six-year-old. A youngster’s innate feelings are challenged. The boy has a conscience and sympathies but (as Heaney, perhaps, later in the Troubles) is never an active contributor to violence; Dan Taggart, in life a modest farmhand who did as he was told, is portrayed as the ruthless agent of totalitarian policy, despatching ‘pests, in this case drowning kittens. Insulting his victims beforehand as ‘scraggy wee shits’ somehow helps Taggart to justify his acts. The young watcher’s compassion is aroused by the sounds of their clawing attempts to […]

An Advancement of Learning

The poem was written in early 1963 and first published in The Irish Times. It portrays an instinctively timid person poised to make a stand against the nature he was born with. The defeated child of ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (and the over-imaginitive youngster of ‘The Barn’ will grow in courage and see himnself a little more clearly. The poem’s title is borrowed from English philosopher Francis Bacon’s book The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605). Heaney prefers the indefinite article to specify an incident instrumental in his own personal development. The speaker sets out along the river. His aside confirms the habitual choice of route (As always, deferring/ The bridge). As he stands Hunched over the railing, his initial […]

Mid-Term Break

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney The title’s play on the word break (‘time off school ’) refers more poignantly to a tragedy to which Heaney was exposed at the age of fourteen and led to a moment of severance that would affect his whole life. From peculiar changes in his daily routine, via stages of dawning reality, to the heart-rending visual impact of a corpse laid in its casket, Heaney comes to understand the irreversibility of his younger brother Christopher’s death (as result of a car accident in February 1953). Driven home from school he responds impassively to the reactions of family and neighbours before coming face to face with his deceased brother and finding a form of words that […]

Ancestral Photograph

A brown-tinted study of the family’s past is to be removed from the wall where it has been hanging. The study is a revealing snap-shot of the person it depicts conjuring up three generations of the Heaney human chain. The poet transposes the photo into words: that of a proud Irish countryman (with jaws that puff) of seemingly indestructible build (round and solid as a turnip), his lifeless, matt (dead) eyes (fixed by the camera’s shutter) like those of a statue, the facial features suggestive of a dour, overbearing nature: upper lip/ Bullies the heavy mouth down to a droop. His accessories (a bowler-hat and well-to-do watch-chain of silver … like a hoop) lend him a theatrical stage Irishman […]

Dawnshoot

A burlesque drama is played out in the guise of paramilitary exercise. Two macho Laurel and Hardy ‘heroes’ are motivated by official bounty payments that could be claimed for killing listed vermin. Their pursuit of financial reward is long in build-up and over in a flash; relative failure is written off as hardly worth the effort anyway! The poet chuckles at the laddish mentality exhibited by the narrator and his companion, Donnelly. The inhospitable dawn sky is as grey and damp as building materials: Clouds ran their wet mortar, plastered the daybreak. The bounty-hunters are en route to the ‘killing fields’, along a railway-track, disturbing stones that clicked tartly underfoot and compromised the surprise factor (mostly silent). Too early for […]

Follower

Heaney expresses his respect and love for his father, explores his own place in the family line and, in observing the toll that time takes on Man, sets out a paradox that is evident to him twenty years on. The poet paints the rural portrait of a strong, silent father from twenty years before: an impressive sight then, a tall-ship (shoulders like a full sail strung); a man at work in the fields, in full control of plough and horses (between the shafts and the furrow). In short, to his admiring son, he is a hero (expert) adept at positioning the plough’s wing and bright steel-pointed sock so as to produce the perfect sod rolled over without breaking, controlling his […]

For the Commander of the Eliza

In a dark setting unrelieved by any chink of light Heaney pursues the issue of Irish suffering at the hands of the British (the 1845-8 famine conditions were introduced in Potato Digging iii). He describes an incident that upholds the poem’s epigraph and accounts for the burning sense of injustice still felt within the Irish psyche over 150 years later. The epigraph (drawn from The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845 – 49 by Cecil Woodham-Smith) sets out the visual manifestation of suffering on Irish ground and the absence of compassion further up the chain of command; the most dismissive are the loftiest who hold the whip hand in London. CWS cites Routh Russell, a contemporary provider of reports on the Irish […]

At a Potato Digging

Heaney builds his sympathy for the Irish condition into this bleak sequence via particular reference to the great misfortunes suffered by his fellow countrymen during the Irish potato famines between 1845–8. All four poems explore Irish dependency on its staple potato crop. Heaney is asking why anyone should be surprised at long-term Irish grievance resulting from the non-response to rural hardship of those who over history have imposed insensitive government from Whitehall in London. I In many cultures Mother Earth (presented here as a divinity worshipped in Ireland on the altar of the sod) presides as a pre-Christian symbol over planting and harvesting. The legendary importance to the Irish of the potato crop explains the reverence Heaney lends it. This […]

Personal Helicon

Personal Helicon dedicated to Michael Longley, co-member of Hobsbaum’s Belfast poetry Group in the 1960s. In the collection’s final poem Heaney delves into the Irish ‘underlay’ (things that make Ulster magically special and unique for him) revealing his affection for a common feature of the damp South Derry landscape. He identifies the wells of his childhood as sources of poetic inspiration (his Personal Helicon). Still a part-time poet he reflects on the transition from childhood to the here-and-now and whilst acknowledging a debt to wells reveals that he has outgrown his childish pursuits. The youngster was fascinated by wells and old pumps that no parental cautions could ( ) keep me from, particularly on account of the winching gear (buckets […]

The Play Way

As a young teacher Heaney was required to plan and assess lessons and teaching methods; his poem reports on a lesson he devised to encourage creative writing. Some things have not changed: classic sunlight entering in shafts through the window-panes (glass) seeks confirmation (probes each desk) of the sights smells and textures (milk-tops, drinking straws and old dry crusts) of a standard British classroom. In contrast, responding to a progressive Educational initiative of the period, the trainee goes for innovation: using a classical recording (music strides to challenge it) he eschews the ‘chalk-and-talk’ of his own school-days (mixing memory and desire with chalk-dust) and seeks the creative and emotional responses of the pupils themselves. His lesson-plan introduces Beethoven. Initial impertinence […]

The Diviner

Heaney delves into the Irish ‘underlay’ (things that make Ireland magically special and unique for him) depicting a talent that, to onlookers, verges on the miraculous. At a different level the poem alludes to the transmission of the poetic message and the magical talent of the poet; its title is ideally chosen to introduce the ‘extraordinary’. The dowser (called in to locate underground water) goes about his task in a calm and professional way. His equipment amounts to a forked hazel twig, living wood from a green hedge which he grips tight by the arms of the V. He walks in circles so to capture a signal from below ground (the pluck of water) as distinct as the note made […]

The Folk Singers

The poet delves into the Irish ‘underlay’ (the ‘something’ that makes Ireland magically special and unique for him) here elegizing a rural music genre eclipsed by modernism. Note that after 1957 Heaney lived independently in Belfast accommodation initially as an undergraduate student; this piece has a city provenance. The poet regrets the technological changes overtaking the ‘live’ folk-music beloved of his nation. He weaves the ‘new’ vocabulary of commercialised sound-production (‘turn-tables’ and ‘grooves’) into a lament. A wistful country boy in the city listens to music on a turn-table. He sums up his discomfort: vinyl records that enable him to play and replay the same track of well-known lyrics as he pleases (Re-turning time-turned words) have replaced ‘the real thing’ […]

In Small Townlands

Heaney’s artist-friend, Colin Middleton (who saw himself as the only Irish ‘surrealist’ of his time and to whom the poem is dedicated) is composing a landscape painting in his own very personal style. Heaney’s poem creates its own word-canvas of the painting in progress reporting the transformations Middleton imposes en route. Often preoccupied with his own issues of poetic composition and personal imprint on his poems, Heaney observes the techniques and overlays of a creative act exercised within another medium. The initial big-brush outlines and washes executed with hogshair wedge reflect things much as Heaney sees them: Middleton works on the different segments to distinguish between the granite and the clay, using washes of muted colour (blue … grey), until […]

Afterthoughts

Settings, subject matter and formats Digging Ulster home setting; composed ‘at home’ at The Wood in August, 1964. The poet is seated behind a window pen in hand, in the act of composition. Initial focus on the hand holding his squat pen, the symbolic tool of his poetic trade, contrasts it with the elegance of the spades used by father and grandfather; Heaney has abandoned the family farming tradition by going to University and choosing a different direction in life. 9 stanzas of varying length from 2 to 5 lines (31 lines in total); lines grouped largely around 10 syllables; stanzas end in half lines breaking the rhythm or adding emphasis; the rhyme scheme is equally diverse: starting formally aabbb […]

Foreword

Foreword Overview Fifty Years on Heaney in the four years since District and Circle Main Sources Thumbnails The textual commentaries that follow seek to tease out what Seamus Heaney’s poems are intimating in Human Chain. Of course the poet’s ‘message’ started life as an essentially personal one not intended primarily for his reader Accordingly there are moments when some serious unravelling is required. In the case of a poet as accomplished, complex and focused as Heaney the rewards for persevering are at once enriching, fortifying and hugely pleasurable. There are issues, too, beyond ‘the text, the whole text and nothing but the text’: there is the question of ‘style’, that is, the combination of language and poetic devices deliberately selected by the […]

‘Had I not been awake I would have missed it’.

Heaney recalls a moment pivotal to his recovery from stroke (in 2006 in a Co Donegal guesthouse) describing the moment when Nature’s external show of energy kick-started his own internal engine. The poem builds in Heaney’s certainty (Had I not been awake) that he would not have been conscious of his next poetic spark (I would have missed it). There is a further dimension – within the consciousness of an agnostic poet over 70 years of age, lies the knowledge that departing this world will bring everything to a close. Sleep inducing treatment has rendered moments of consciousness more fleeting and increasingly important; ‘reawakening’ generates a new-found impetus that replaces a mind-set of physical and mental frailty, even fear. Heaney’s […]

The Conway Stewart

In the foyer of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, an arts and literary centre dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, located in Bellaghy close to where the poet was born and brought up, a prominent display case contains a Conway Stewart pen, possibly the same heirloom that his parents gave him as an 11 year old, though his widow, Marie Heaney, is ‘not quite sure’. It was not uncommon for 1950s’ parents to offer children a gift to celebrate some important success, here passing the entrance examination to St Columb’s College in Derry and entering Secondary education as a boarder. Four quatrains are devoted to a comprehensive, in-depth consideration of what would have been an expensive object. So […]

Album

Poems such as Album trace the development of emotional relationships as the individuals involved change and age, imbuing each moment with a significance that resonates throughout the collection. Fascination with the captured moment may be a theme found in earlier work renewed in Human Chain, but Heaney’s current perspective as a septuagenarian under some threat allows his poems to dip in and out of a lifetime, from his boyhood through…. Christine Fears in The Literateur of 13th September 2010 ‘Album is a sequence of vignettes painted in remembrance and with regret. Initial focus on Heaney’s parents and himself, their first born, comes eventually to rest on father ‘Paddy’ Heaney. Heaney’s rueful recollection of his own and his father’s reluctance to be too showy in affection not […]

Miracle

Heaney adapts a New Testament miracle to pay tribute to those who came to his aid in crisis. The Nobel prizewinner and his wife, Marie, had been in a Donegal guesthouse in 2006 celebrating with close friends the 75th birthday of Anne Friel, the wife of playwright Brian Friel. Heaney fell ill during the night, could not find his balance and discovered that his leg was twisted. Such were the symptoms of stroke. Fortunately, surrounded by strapping fellow guests his ‘support chain’ of Human Chain, he was carried downstairs to a waiting ambulance and transferred to Letterkenny hospital. ‘I cried and I wanted my daddy, funnily enough,’ he admitted. Heaney is commemorating not the beneficiary of a biblical miracle (the […]

Chanson d’Aventure

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is the book The epigraph, drawn from Donne’s Ecstacie, judges the inter-relationship of body and soul and the spiritual union between individuals: the body is the all-too vulnerable vessel within which the soul is said to repose; the soul is the area in which emotions are born. The soul seeks outward expression through the body, inhibited at this point in time by Heaney’s stroke-induced paralysis. When the metaphysical dimension is stripped away Heaney and his wife Marie are the main actors in an extraordinary love poem. The chanson d’aventure originated in Old French lyric as a framing device in which the troubador- poet wanders into a wild, […]