Seamus Heaney writing style by Seamus Heaney

A Basket of Chestnuts

Heaney reflects on the ‘meaning’ of the portrait of himself exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland, focusing on a local-colour prop that does not actually appear in the finished panel. Involuntary memory (shadow boost) has brought chesnuts into his mind: the random act of handling a loaded basket has conjured up a hazy, ill-defined occurence (giddy strange assistance) swinging it revealed an interplay between gravity and weightlessness. He considers the dynamic variation of mass and momentum (lightness … diminish … actual weight), picks out the split second at the apex of the lift when hands feel no pull (unburdened), as if left behind (outstripped), surprised (dismayed), redundant (passed through). Then, just as unexpectedly, comes bounce-back (rebound), gravitational downthrust, and counter […]

The Pitchfork

Heaney revealed to DOD (336): I loved handling the fork and the rake, their lightness and rightness in the hand, their perfect suitedness to the jobs they had to do. It meant that the work of turning a swathe, for example, was its own reward; angling the shaft and the tines so that the hay turned over like a woven fabric – that was an intrinsically artistic challenge. Tasty work, as they say. Using the pitchfork was like playing an instrument. So much so that when you clipped and trimmed the head of a ruck, the strike of the fork on the hay made it a kind of tuning fork. The poem is a tribute both to the king of […]

Field of Vision

Heaney’s Aunt Mary whom he adored as a youngster is the central focus of Sunlight, a lyrical vignette from his early life in Mossbawn that introduces the North collection of 1975. Field of vision recalls the increasingly limited outlook the old aunt was reduced to in her last years. Heaney admired her fortitude and in this poem spends some time ‘seeing things’ through her eyes. Ultimately the stage Mary has reached contributes to young man’s feeling that it will soon be time to leave the family home. Prior to her hospitalization in the mid-70s Mary coped with a long period of immobility in the family home (sat for years In a wheelchair). Silence prevails in her living quarters. Mary’s gaze does […]

An August Night

Heaney’s titles often open more than a single line of suggestion; in this piece a possible play on the word ‘august’ linking a month that offers outdoor nocturnal nature-spotting opportunities with the hands of a venerable father. Heaney focuses on his father Patrick Heaney’s hands that he saw in a dream (again last night). The hands were those of the man: his warm heart, diminutive stature (small) and broad experience (knowledgeable). The interlacing of his fingers conjured up the contortions of a pair of fierce predators (two ferrets) at play; their aloofness (by themselves) is a further clue to his father’s nature. Hands in a dream but in the beloved august landscape (moonlit field) where such sightings were possible. Heaney is a […]

1.1.87

Heaney alluded to his father’s recurrent presence in Seeing Things in conversation with DOD: My father’s death in October 1986 was the final ‘unroofing’ of the world and I’m certain it affected me in ways that were hidden from me then and now. (p322). This brief poem, dated fewer than three months after Patrick Heaney’s death sees the poet facing a New Year still fresh with the pain of bereavement. Bleak midwinter offers no warmth to cheer Heaney’s way ahead (Dangerous pavements). His capacity to cope with the physical and emotional challenges (I face the ice this year) is bolstered by a symbol seen already in The Ash Plant, the iconic support that kept his father’s feet firmly on the […]

The Ash Plant

Seeing Things, the collection’s title poem, featured Heaney’s father Patrick in a make-believe dramatization that brought them ‘face to face’. Heaney revealed how his view of his father changed with age: With the passing of time, awe of the living father has given way to an affectionate acceptance of a fellow […]

Seeing Things

The title poem, a triptych, explores variations on the theme of ‘visibility’: a primary experience that taught of life’s impermanence; stone chiseled to produce liquid images; a telling face-to-face with a father, dead yet still alive. Annihilation, whereby ultimately everything is reduced to nothingness, lurks ineluctably in the background. I A poem about ‘utterness’: the visibility of primary experience raised to high-definition status. Once upon a time the infant Heaney was treated to a Sunday morning outing en famille to Inishbofin island. The scene provided a feast for his young senses: glare (Sunlight), sight and smell (turf smoke), sound (seagulls), perspective (boatslip), an invasive odour (diesel). The individual youngsters present were handled carefully (One by one […]

Man and Boy

Re-enter Patrick Heaney, the disguised Anchises of Golden Bough and the farmer with an eye for straight lines of Markings II. Heaney describes the impact of his bereavement: My father’s death in October 1986 was the final ‘unroofing’ of the world and I’m certain it affected me in ways that were hidden from me then and now. (DOD p322) This is helpful: Heaney is not composing a father-dedicated collection as such; Patrick Heaney will emerge from the shadows in poems that ‘came on at unexpected moments’ and threw up powerful associations (look for ‘roof’ and its cognates). I A poem triggered by memory of a father’s supposed fishing tip (Catch the old one first […]

Casting and Gathering

for Ted Hughes A river marks the uncrossed line between two fly fishermen who, when their turn comes to comment, represent very different attitudes – the poem takes on an elegaic tone. Heaney does not tell us who is who though we do know that he ‘accompanied’ fellow poet Ted Hughes and artist-friend Barrie Cooke on some of their joint expeditions. He delves far back in time (years and years ago) reflecting on their irreconcilable viewpoints: these sounds took sides. On one bank, behold a man whose fishing-fly speaks for him: green silk tapered cast went whispering through the air), a symbol of calm abundance (saying hush and lush), unconstrained (entireIy free), at home in every rural setting (the hayfield […]

Markings

The Markings triptych sets out Heaney’s new parameters: revisit and redefine first order experiences through the eyes of a fifty year old poet, tease out and ‘credit marvels’ he failed to spot first time round. Helen Vendler puts it another way: Heaney is concerned here with our immaterial extrapolations from the material … pretended boundaries, imagined grids and lines are the latitude and longitude lines ( ) by which mentality orders the world. They become more visible to the poet as ghostly returner than they were to him as first-time encounterer. I The ‘Markings’ poem … is set in one of our own fields at Mossbawn where a crowd of us would gather up in the summer evening and play […]

The Journey Back

Heaney introduces the first of a number of literary and artistic celebrities, poet Philip Larkin who had passed away in December 1985. He explained the poem’s provenance to DOD (below) and how, to his surprise, the poet’s shade (his dead persona), whom he met in imagination on the streets of London, quoted Dante. The poem ponders the ‘truths and mysteries’ of the soul’s post-mortem onward journey and pays a warm hearted, tongue-in-cheek tribute to a popular 20th century poet. Larkin quotes the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno II in which the serenity of evening (the umber air/ Soothing every creature on the earth now at rest after the daily toils) contrasts with the ordeal and duty of Larkin’s imminent journey: I […]

The Golden Bough

(Aeneid, Book VI, lines 98-148) Seamus Heaney tops and tails Seeing Things with his own versions of passages from classical masterpieces, the first snippet borrowed from the pre-Christian classical mythology of Virgil and ending with a Dante passage from the Christian era. In both cases the narrative is not Heaney’s as such, but he employs all his compositional skills to produce a polished translation. In conversation with DOD (p319) Heaney explained how the collection’s texts linked up: the relationship between individual poems in the different sections has some thing of the splish-splash, one-after-anotherness of stones skittering and frittering across water. Thus the collection’s themes, motifs, moods and key […]

Foreword

The current commentaries are dedicated to friend, former colleague and published poet Michael Woods who presented me with the volume back in July 2002 ‘in time that was extra, unforeseen and free’; I am only sorry, Michael that it took me more than 15 years to thank you in the way you deserve. Seeing Things published by Faber & Faber in 1991 is Seamus Heaney’s ninth collection. It supplements the accessibility, erudition and vitality of his earlier poems with a novel, geometrical pattern of sequences that break the Heaney mould. This, his previous and subsequent collections over more than half a century confirm Heaney’s place at the very top of the premier league of 20th century poets writing in English. […]

Foreword (Wintering Out)

Heaney – selective biography Heaney in 1972 The call of ‘pastures new’ Ulster before Berkeley – Heaney biding his time The Berkeley experience – Heaney on the move Post Berkeley – Heaney burning bridges Tipping point ‘Wintering Out’- publication and reactions ‘Wintering Out’ – the title Style … ‘inward broody’ The ‘languagey’ poems The religious divide of Heaney’s upbringing Sectarianism – the difficulties of remaining neutral place and rôle of the poet in times of social distress Finding ‘common ground’– the Glob effect Irish ‘underlay’ – identities and territory, history, tongue Historical links: pre-Christian > colonial > post-colonial> contemporary symbols , spirits , parables, the elements Wintering Out the poems: individual commentaries and notes Afterthoughts Finding the blend; the poet’s […]

Fodder

‘What the Californian distance did was to lead me back into the Irish memory bank’ (DOD142). The first poem of Wintering Out introduces a series of pieces in the collection that identify closely with beloved locations by featuring the sounds of and associations with Irish/ Ulster diction and pronunciation. Heaney refers to them as ‘languagey poems’ (DOD126). Recalled at a restless moment and from a huge distance, Mossbawn is a sacrosanct place of Heaney’s childhood, a blessed legacy ‘ forever part of his inner landscape’ (HV 21). The poet spotlights an age-old, traditional feed for livestock as it winters out: Fodder (required when, seasonally, grass has ceased to grow and provide renewable natural pasture); he identifies with the phonetic version […]

Bog Oak

‘What the Californian distance did was to lead me back into the Irish memory bank’ (DOD142). Ulster dialect and pronunciation are woven into the first piece (‘Fodder’) as a shared inheritance of Irish people whatever their religious denomination. The image of a recycled Bog Oak, preserved by the peat bogs that surrounded Heaney’s childhood home, is presented as further ‘common ground’; the poet adds Irish identity, climate and history to the mix. The peat bogs, ‘sacred places’ (MP94) for Heaney, stored and preserved what was deposited in them also acting, layer by layer, as a historical archive. Heaney acknowledges the aged Bog Oak as a usable wood retrieved from the peat and source of recycling income. Sight of it transports […]

Anahorish

The first of three place-name poems: ‘Anahorish’, ‘Broagh’ and ‘Toome’ are existing communities within a 2 or 3 mile radius of Mossbawn where the poet’s happy childhood unfolded. Heaney attended Anahorish Primary School and featured the townland in a number of pieces. Enigmatically Anahorish does not appear by name on current Ordnance Survey maps yet its identity is memorialized by Heaney and jealously guarded by its inhabitants. Heaney sings the music of a name that became part of his essence (Anahorish), celebrating a topographical inheritance founded in the distant past and shared by people of all persuasions. He offers an anglicized transliteration of the Gaelic etymology: My ‘place of clear water’. Anahorish is Heaney’s Garden of Eden, his pastoral paradise, […]

Servant Boy

Heaney’s poem, based on the experiences of a childhood neighbour Ned Thompson, makes a powerful statement about Irish dispossession at the hands of anglo-scottish invaders and their descendants. The deteriorating circumstances he witnessed upon his return from his sabbatical year at Berkeley served only to confirm the seemingly unchanging fate of the Catholic minority. Heaney portrays a male servant of indeterminate age, averse to his subservient status (boy) left with little choice but to turn the other cheek and bide his time in the hope of improved circumstances: wintering out/ the back-end of a bad year. The young male goes about his menial routine (swinging a hurricane-lamp through some outhouse): an unskilled hand like countless others over the centuries (a […]

The Last Mummer

Heaney revealed that his ‘last mummer is, like the servant boy (of the previous poem), an alter ego of sorts, He, too, is ‘resentful and impenitent’(DOD130). The narrative interlaces themes of dispossession, endangered tradition, ‘progress’, superstition, remnants of Scottish New Year ‘good luck’ custom and symbols of Catholic communion set against a landscape literally as old as the hills of Ireland. The poem moves from action to elegy. If Heaney’s servant boy symbol of Irish subjugation was disgruntled but placid by nature, his last mummer, portrayed as the last survivor of an age-old Irish mystery-play tradition, is driven beyond ‘patience’ and ‘counsel’. I The representative of Old Ireland has come prepared for direct action: a stone in his pocket,/ an […]

Land

Heaney’s 3-poem sequence approaches the title from different angles: a man steeped in country practices announces his intention to go; the effigy he intends to leave behind will transmit the messages of home to him; creatures natural to the Irish landscape-home are under threat from lurking, man-made dangers. A disastrous future for Ulster is on the cards. Land is all-encompassing: the ground beneath the poet’s feet; the extent of the family farm; his Ulster homeland; Irish territory. I The voice is that of a countryman by instinct (first person and barely anonymous) setting out his routines: measuring his personal domain in age-old units (I stepped it, perch by perch); separating and selecting natural growth that will serve many purposes (Unbraiding […]

Gifts of Rain

Widely regarded as one of the collection’s major pieces, the title introduces the element at the source of all life (Water is certainly a ‘shape-changer’ MP99), dominant feature of Irish climate, determinant of landscape and symbol of cleansing and renewal. Heaney wrote the poem in Berkeley: images, descriptions and associations stem from his Irish memory bank. Allegory is in-built: Heaney’s Ulster is under threat of political and social inundation and he is in ‘inward, broody’ mode. He returns to his home-ground especially the cherished Moyola river of his neighbourhood . I Prolonged rainfall associated with bounty (the Gifts of rain) becomes a recipe for flooding: whether full spate (Cloudburst) or continuous steady downpour now for days. Enter a living creature […]

Toome

Heaney’s second of three ingenious place-name poems contains a phonetic energy that identifies the poet’s specific Ulster background and alludes to the ‘Irish underlay’ of place, time and language that he explores in Wintering Out. As Heaney points out in the notes that follow the ‘languagey’ poems bridged the gap between his working language (English) and his Ulster Irish origins. The poet rehearses the pronunciation of a village that lies within an emotional stone’s throw of his childhood home at Mossbawn: Toome. He describes in words the oral gymnastics required to produce the genuine Ulster sound: My mouth holds round/ the soft blasting (the burst of compressed air from the throat released by consonant plosive [t]). Distance lends enchantment: Toome, […]

Broagh

Wintering Out features three ingenious place-name poems; this third piece provides the phonetic evidence that distinguishes those with a genuine Ulster background from outsiders; the poem alludes to ‘Irish underlay’, the common factors shared by Ulster folk for which Heaney searches in Wintering Out. The poem ‘acts as the linguistic paradigm for a reconciliation beyond sectarian division’(NC46-8). The poet confessed that the ‘languagey poems’ (DOD124) eased his professional conscience by bridging the gap between his working language (English) and his Ulster Irish origins. The village landscape that backed on to the river Moyola provides words planted into the Ulster vernacular by historical English and Scots occupation: trenches for vegetable growth (long rigs), wide-leaved docks (broad docken) and a tree-fringed track […]

Oracle

In a poem that foretells (Oracle) of a poet-in-the-making Heaney relives a childhood moment that demonstrates his strong spirit of independence, his sensitivity to the world around and his busy imagination. Once upon a real time, child Heaney’s eagerness to wriggle free of parental control, run ahead and play hide-and-seek in the hollow trunk/ of the willow tree provided a passport to a secret spirit world in which he could commune with Nature (its listening familiar). This moment of first communion was immediately disrupted by intrusive, repetitive calls: as usual, they/ cuckoo your name/ across the fields. He recognized the sounds of family closing in, navigating the barriers separating them from him: You can hear them/ draw the poles of […]

The Backward Look

A complex variant of Heaney’s ‘languagey’ poems, the piece explores linguistic impurities that have crept into the spoken word and adulterated the Irish language. The poet’s principle concern is linguistic dispossession. By use of a kind of Audenesque ‘verbal contraption’ he reflects on the wider erosion of the Irish domain. The landscape might have changed little but the language that describes it has suffered from crossbreeding. In his Backward Look, the poet measures the impact of repeated invasion and incursion. His message is carried by the emblematic Irish snipe. Heaney recognizes changes in the sounds and movement of the startled snipe, pretending all is well (sleight of wing) but under closer scrutiny showing signs of injury: A stagger in air […]