Seamus Heaney writing style by Seamus Heaney

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 […]

Loughanure

Heaney dedicates this elegiac sequence to the memory of Colin Middleton the eminent Irish artist who described himself as the only surrealist painter of his time in Ireland. Born in Belfast in 1910 he died at the end of 1983. He became a friend of the Heaneys even selling them a piece of his work (thirty guineas forty-odd years ago). i Heaney describes the correspondence he perceived between Middleton’s gaze (smoke … already in his eyes) – alluding cleverly to both to his abstract technique and his tobacco addiction – and the intensity with which the contortion of his artist’s eye (the way he’d narrow them to size you up) made Heaney feel like subject matter (a canvas all the while). […]

‘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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]