seamus heaney study guide by Seamus Heaney

Come to the Bower

In this first of six titles referred to as the ‘bog poems’ in North the voice is that of the individual, whoever he is, who has come upon the mummified corpse of a woman hidden beneath the surface of the bog in which it has been preserved. An initial ‘forensic’ unwrapping of the mummy is overtaken by the finder’s ultimate focus on what it might confirm to him about Iron Age civilisation. Citations that follow the commentary suggest some uneasiness. The searcher’s hands come, touched (the sense of exploring fingers is paramount in the piece) by the bog-side flowers (sweetbriar and tangled vetch) before dipping beneath the surface (foraging) ignoring the possibility of valuables bagged and left as royal burial […]

Bog Queen

Heaney allegorizes an event recorded on the Moira estate (in Co Lisburn) in the Autumn of 1780 or Spring of 1781 at a time of Anglo-Scottish ‘occupation’. He voices the poem to the first bog body dug up in Ireland. The Bog Queen’s body lies dead yet sleeping (waiting) at the interface between the peat bog (turf face) in which it is preserved and the boundary of Anglo-Scottish landownership (demesne wall), between Irish peat deposits (heathery levels) below and the non-Irish ‘Keep Out’ signs (glass-toothed stone) above. Her body bears the marks and messages of Nature’s unseeing trespassers (braille for the creeping influences), the extreme effects of temperature – groped then cooled by the orbiting sun – consumed (through my […]

The Grauballe Man

The bog-body was found by peat-cutters in April 1952 near Grauballe in Denmark. Providing stunning close description of an iconic ‘bog body’ on show in the Moesgaard museum near Arrhus the poem reveals Heaney’s emotional responses to a piece of anthropological history. Struck by the barbaric treatment revealed by the mummified remains Heaney turns up the volume on links between the fate of Grauballe Man and contemporary internicene violence in Northern Ireland. The body might have emerged from a mould (as if …poured in tar). It is displayed recumbent in a bog-land setting (lies on a pillow of turf) with an expression of inner sadness (weep the black river of himself). The poetic eye moves up and down the body […]

Punishment

Conflicting loyalties, pity and guilt, private and collective, supply ‘Punishment’ with its emotional charge… Heaney is looking for a tenable position (MP p. 137). Heaney measures the sense of injustice generated by an iron-age community’s brutal intolerance of rules perceived to have been violated. It leads him to articulate a troubling irony: iron-age justice that puts an adulteress to death is not so far removed from elements in contemporary Northern Irish society that mete out punishment when sectarian rules are seen to be breached. Prompted perhaps by graphic images of a bog body Heaney creates a scenario in which his first person speaker (let us call him ‘Observer’) attends the iron-age execution of a young woman accused of adultery. Observer […]

Strange Fruit

In his creative imagination Heaney stands alongside anthropologists engaged with the bodiless head of a young woman similar to one retrieved (exhumed) from the Roum Fen in north Denmark in 1942. He showcases the head with a sweep of the hand (Here is) and lists the physical properties that label it a strange fruit: large and hard skinned (gourd); oval in shape; epidermis wrinkled as a dried plum (prune-skinned), teeth retaining the stained appearance of the same fruit (prune- stones). He watches as the hair is carefully disentangled (unswaddled … wet fern) and reset as for display (exhibition of its coil) and her features (leathery beauty) exposed to life-restoring air in preparation for display case or museum. The waxy surface […]

Kinship

Heaney’s exploration of his Irish heritage in all its twists and turns is mightily important to him. The six-poem sequence explores selected lines of connection, correspondence and closeness and the pieces sit in a landscape of which Heaney feels himself very much a part. In the first 5 poems kinship describes affinity, fellow feelings, at-oneness from the landscape’s beginnings via Celtic myths and rituals to Heaney’s lost domain of mid-Ulster childhood. The sequence’s grim finale acknowledges that, as Heaney composes, the cycles of murder and revenge evident in Northern Ireland in the name of religion and politics are simply the latest version of an earlier inhumanity driven by distant tribal and ritual instincts. I The first piece is triggered by […]

Ocean’s Love to Ireland

Heaney summarised the sequence of 3 short poems and the two that follow in a response to DOD (p 169): an allegory involving the Elizabethan armies entering Gaelic Ulster (Smerwick below is in fact in Munster) and the ground being possessed by the planters – the whole ‘Aisling’ scenario – England being the male conqueror, Ireland the ruined maid and wee ‘no surrender’ Ulster being the product of the union … The ‘speaker in the poem’, whoever he is, is deeply aware of his implication in being ‘imperially’ male. The poems plot a crucial moment in political history pointing to the desolation that will be the outcome for Ireland; The title requires a preposition. Heaney’s unexpected choice of to suggests an […]

Aisling

An Irish poetic genre – a classical myth – a ‘he’ and a ‘her’ appropriate to allegory – merited punishment. The Ralegh figure (see ‘Ocean’s Love to Ireland’) whose historical acts would result ultimately in the social and secular violence of the Troubles gets what he deserves in Heaney’s succinct Irish dream poem. Unlike Ocean’s rape of the maid of Ireland Actaeon’s attempt to possess Artemis (he courted her) is based on arch flattery (decadent sweet art) but judged equally unworthy. Peeping-Tom is given away by Nature (wind’s vowel blowing through the hazels) whispering the forbidden question that seals his fate (‘Are you Diana . . . ?’) Classical Actaeon or figure of allegory, Heaney warns all abusers of Ireland, […]

Act Of Union

Allegorizing on the pun of ‘union’ as an act of sexual as well as political ‘congress’, Heaney reflects on a historical enactment imposed upon Ireland by the British government in 1801 and the gap between what was anticipated in Westminster at the time and the turbulent reality it has delivered. Heaney offered insights to DOD (p 169-70): The ‘speaker in the poem’, whoever he is, is deeply aware of his implication in being ‘imperially male’. He lies like the island of Britain beside an expectant mother island who has her back turned to him. He’s experienced a certain guilt at having caused the pregnancy. Far from creating a bond, the child born of union forced upon the maid of Ireland […]

The Betrothal of Cavehill

A formal engagement ceremony is about to be celebrated; a young couple wish to get on with the important things in life despite the backdrop of divided Ulster. Heaney and fiancée Marie Devlin, both from mid-Ulster rural backgrounds spent their undergraduate lives in Belfast. In the troubled Belfast of the 1960s sectarian stand-offs seeking ‘ownership’ of locations were common (gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill). The hill’s napoleonic nose shape (profiled) looks down unerringly (maintains it stare) over the religious and political make-up of wards to its south: hard (basalt) and all things Unionist – self-satisfied (proud) dominated by non-Catholics like himself (protestant), part of the United Kingdom (northern), run by men (male). Heaney takes a good natured poke at […]

Hercules and Antaeus

As predicted in the very first poem of the collection Hercules has invaded Antaeus’ space. They meet in single combat: superman versus child of earth, brain versus brawn. Legend has already ordained that Antaeus (Ireland’s ‘champion’ figure in Heaney’s eyes) will be no match for Hercules as the poet pointed out in his Birthday Speech. Hercules the golden boy with the god-sponsored future (sky-born and royal) enters Antaeus-space fresh from Labours fulfilled – snake-choker (the nine-headed hydra); dung heaver (the Augean stables) and preoccupied (his mind big) with his next mission (to steal the golden apples of the Hesperides from the north-African Atlas range) – he is destined to succeed on all counts (his future hung with trophies). Hercules has […]

Part II

In a 1973 conversation, Heaney said that the ideas behind Hercules and Antaeus led to Part II which was ‘an attempt at some kind of declarative voice’; In a 1975 article Heaney referred to ‘a need to be explicit about the pressures and prejudices watermarked into the psyche of anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland’; The language becomes more conversational, less poetically charged (MP p 144) The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream Whatever You Say Say Nothing Freedman Singing School 1 The Ministry of Fear 2 A Constable Calls 3 Orange Drums 4 Summer 1969 5 Fosterage 6 Exposure

The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream

I In his essay, ‘A Defense of Poetry’ (1821) English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley christened poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. He felt that their unique blend of observation, judgment and refined expression identified them as the ideal proposers of laws promoting societal evolution, development and improvement. That identifies Heaney as one of the breed and Heaney can picture an alternative! Mindful perhaps of WH Auden’s contrary view that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ he voices his prose-poem to a spokesman (let us call him ‘Poet’) who tests the water and ends up in a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare (dream). In dialogue with DOD (p 181) Heaney had the following to say about his prose-poem: It’s a free-floating invention, that […]

Whatever You Say Say Nothing

Heaney once said that returning to Northern Ireland from his US part-year teaching commitments was like pulling on ‘an old dirty glove’. In 1974 after nearly two decades of sectarian and political turbulence things reached a very low ebb. By the end of the year 1281 murders directly associated with the Troubles period had been registered. Little wonder that the generally mild mannered Heaney, empathetic, certainly, as regards the minority Catholic cause but opposed to violence for whatever reason, was depressed and angered by what was unfolding and the way people responded. A poster put up during the ‘Troubles’ featuring a masked, uniformed paramilitary carrying a sten-gun bore the legend: ‘Loose-talk costs lives In taxis On the phone In clubs […]

Freedman

Heaney has chanced upon a passage decribing the system within Ancient Rome that regarded outsiders/ vanquished races as second class and subservient but who, with exposure to what was civilizedly Roman and the right attitude, might be permitted freedom status. Heaney unites title, epigraph and narrative to introduce the transformation that liberated him from previous control: the undergraduate period that allowed him to cast aside both Protestant Unionist domination that usurped his sense of Irishness and the Catholic markings of tribe, caste and conditioning that dominated his upbringing. First the Orange Unionist sway to which the mild mid-Ulster Hibernian tradition exposed the Catholic minority (subjugated yearly under arches); then his personal search for academic corroboration (manumitted by parchments and degrees); […]

Singing School

A sequence of 6 poems grouped under a title borrowed from WB Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium: ‘Nor is there singing school but studying/ Monuments of its own magnificence’. The 2 epigraphs compare contrasting roots: the first is from Wordsworth, reflecting on his gentle apolitical, ‘English’, Church-of England childhood; the second from WB Yeats reflecting much more aggressively his ‘politicised’ Irish Protestant childhood; The sequence of 6 poems explores some of the conditioning cultural circumstances of SH’s own biography (NC79); 1 The Ministry of Fear 2 A Constable Calls 3 Orange Drums 4 Summer 1969 5 Fosterage 6 Exposure

1 The Ministry of Fear

dedicated to Seamus Deane. Heaney identifies two systems that brought their repressive regimes to bear on him as an individual with a mind of his own. Such was the trepidation that their rules of conduct generated that in the poem he reprises the notion of incarceration in The Unknown Legislator’s Dream. Though the piece is bedded in Heaney’s real-life experiences in Ireland the title alludes to the bureaucracies of oppressive states in post WWII Eastern Europe. Sandwiched between them is a short account of Heaney’s red-blooded male frustrations! The initial interjection (well) announces that Heaney is poised to speak – of events from his personal biography – his important places borrowed from Patrick Kavanagh’s Epic of 1938. His first ‘monument’ […]

2 A Constable Calls

The poem is a tour de force – a simple and hugely atmospheric vignette depicting an incident in the life of a minority Catholic farming family in a Protestant-ruled province called Northern Ireland. What we know about the principal actors renders it unmistakably autobiographical – fly-on-the-wall boy Heaney senses his father might be attempting to deceive authority but gives him the benefit of the doubt. Heaney provides the ingredients of a compelling psychological drama: an atmosphere of threat; an attentive youngster; an interrogation; a father’s lie; a moral dilemma that tests the innocence of the listening boy; the threat receding. The ‘poet-film-director’ employs all the zooms, pans and slow-motions of cinematic technique. The boy’s eye is the camera, his ear […]

3 Orange Drums

Heaney paints a caricature in words of a figure prominent in a Protestant Unionist parade. The poet’s distaste for the tone and tenor of the event and for what its emblematic drummer stands for is immediately obvious. The lambeg drummer at the resembles an overpowering fusion, his size and mass doubled by the bulk and weight of his drum and evident in the lexis of obesity (balloons…belly … weighs … buckles). The sound he produces is part of the whole (lodging thunder), a bullying unsavoury emanation (grossly) from his groin area. He cuts a paradoxical figure – what boosts his psychology (raised up) is more than his physical frame can cope with (buckles under). As if each arm has a […]

4 Summer 1969

Heaney was in Spain at the very moment riots were exploding on the streets of Belfast. His personal discomfort (I was suffering only the bullying sun of Madrid) paled into insignificance when compared with RUC (constabulary) using firearms against Catholic communities (deemed mob) around the Falls Road. His personal daily schedule included some serious reading (life of Joyce) as he cooked slowly (casserole heat), unable to escape foul odours (stinks from the fishmarket) that reminded him of his Castledawson origins (reek off a flaxdam). Evening brought tastes of Spain (gules of wine), youngsters heard but not seen (sense of children), elderly widows (old women in black shawls) enjoying the freshness of evening (near open windows), the sounds of Castilian rising […]

5 Fosterage

For Michael McLaverty In Ancient Ireland young aspirants were fostered to other members of the clan for their education. Heaney recounts his earliest encounter with the Headmaster, coincidentally one of Ireland’s finest short-story writers, who took him on as a trainee teacher. Michael McLaverty fitted the ‘fosterage’ bill perfectly via the experience he offered a modest ‘rookie’ searching for both poetic voice and career. A quotation from Wallace Stevens extolling the use of description in creative writing (Heaney will follow his tip in this very piece), a timing (Heaney was 23 and recently graduated with a First Class degree in English from Queen’s University Belfast – newly cubbed in language), a meeting place in the smart administrative centre of the […]

6 Exposure

Exposure is deliberately placed as the collection’s coda for reasons of emphasis, impact and confessional self-revelation. Heaney takes stock of changes to his personal circumstances, his role and function as poet and public voice, the immediate world around him and current events. The poem is all about whether he has stepped up to the mark or fallen short. In conversation with Henri Cole in Harvard University’s Paris review no 75. Heaney explained the emotional build-up expressed in his closing poem: … leaving the north didn’t break my heart. The solitude was salubrious. Anxiety, after all, can coexist with determination. The anxiety in a poem like “Exposure” is about whether the work that comes out of this move is going to […]

Afterthoughts

Countdown to extremes of violence prior to the troubled period 1969 – 75. The following time-line seeks to set out some key dates before concentrating on the period during which North was taking shape. Whilst far from comprehensive it gives an idea of the tensions and fear that might exist on a day-to-day basis punctuated by the incidents listed below. 1801:Act of Union – Ireland and Britain formally united; 1905:Creation of Sinn Fein – a political party with the aim of freeing Ireland from British rule; 1913: Creation of Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – formed of Protestants who opposed Irish Home Rule; 1916:Easter Uprising Irish Catholics proclaim an Irish Republic in Dublin, brutally suppressed by the British army. The Easter […]

Foreword

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection since Death of a Naturalist (1966), was published in April 2006 by Faber and Faber. There are 44 titles including 5 sequences – 68 poems in all. Many pieces had already appeared in some form or other in a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The volume includes some ‘Found Prose’ and a number of translations. Heaney’s work since 1966 has lost none of its diversity, erudition and vitality. In composing poetry Heaney set out to fulfil his writerly needs. The ‘messages’ that emerged were essentially personal ones, not expressed with his readers in mind – accordingly, there are moments when some serious unravelling is required. In the case […]

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 […]