WORDS: Lola Boorman
Yeats was hailed as the multifaceted poet; his poetic potential was fractured, reinvented, remoulded. Myth, nationalism, nature, age and death were among his diverse array of themes and preoccupations. Poet, Robert Lowell, said of the late Seamus Heaney that he was ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats.’ Heaney, who died on the 30 August 2013, aged 74 and was buried yesterday in Bellaghy, County Derry, indeed shared Yeats’ astounding variety. Heaney’s life was irrevocably bound to his poetry, which in turn comprises not only a sense of national literature but which makes up part of the Irish emotional landscape. Throughout the 50 years of Heaney’s career his poetry has, both abroad and at home, penetrated the hearts of many and ‘set the darkness echoing.’
Heaney, The Child
The Poem // ‘Digging’, ‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘Personal Helicon’, ‘Peeling Potatoes’
The Collection // Death of a Naturalist (1966)
The Quote // “I sat all morning in the college sick bay/ Counting bells knelling classes to a close.” (Mid-Term Break)
Born in Toomebridge, County Derry, Heaney’s childhood has always been a central focus of his poetry with many of his later collections returning and reevaluating the experiences of his past, family tradition and the lost way of life encapsulated in his childhood in Northern Ireland. More than anything else, Heaney was a poet of landscape. His early poems feature a connection with the land which he often lamented as lost. In ‘Digging’, which has been hailed as Heaney’s poetic manifesto, his poetry is aligned with his familial tradition of turf cutting, creating a fusion of intellectual and physical, of tangible and metaphorical, of land and language: “Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.” Heaney’s words on nature is not that of the observer, it is inside the land. His language becomes the mud, weeds and turf; the reader moves into the natural world he creates. ‘Personal Helicon’ exemplifies this ability most clearly, the lines of which any Junior Cert student will reel off as an example of their first encounter with onomatopoeia.
It is these poems, perhaps, which resound most clearly in Irish consciousness for it was this poetry which shaped our collective childhood. We read ‘Mid-Term break’ when we were 14 years old, and we continued to read Heaney throughout our education. ‘Heaney, The Child’ in Death of a Naturalist is particularly dear, because it forms our childhood and the subsequent loss of it, an irrevocable part of our upbringing.
Heaney, The Activist
The Poem // ‘Act of Union’, ‘Funeral Rights’, ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, ‘Singing School’, the ‘Bog Poems’
The Collection // North (1975)
The Quote // “Be advised,/ my passport’s green/ no glass of ours was ever raised/ to toast the Queen” (Open Letter 1983, objecting to his inclusion in the Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry)
As a Catholic and a Nationalist, Heaney’s relationship with The Troubles was often criticized. His refusal both to come out in support of the Republican movement and to condemn their violence made his position as a Northern poet living in the South controversial. Heaney often expressed his reluctance to become a ‘spokesman’ for the cause and yet his awareness of these events is omnipresent is his poetry. In his Nobel Lecture Heaney states that as a Northern poet at the time of The Troubles he felt a certain expectation: “A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.” The tensions in the North are always addressed in his poems in the latent potential of his language. Heaney could be described as the subtle activist, and this subtle approach gained him criticism for his collection, North. He was accused of mythologizing The Troubles in his search for a larger historical framework. Blake Morrison, has attested that Heaney’s political poetry is often a struggle against his political role, a search for the apolitical and a need to impose order on an inherently chaotic system.
Heaney’s political potential lies in his duality. In his Nobel Lecture, Heaney goes on to recall his younger self, switching between the BBC and Radio Éireann on the wireless “listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster.” It is internal conflict in Heaney’s own identity which makes him emblematic of the struggle. It is telling that Heaney’s Lecture is comprised almost entirely of his experiences of The Troubles. He was far from indifferent, rather he was profoundly and permanently engaged.
Heaney, the Love Poet
The Poem // ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, ‘The Skunk’, ‘An Afterwards’, ‘Summer Home’
The Collection // Field Work (1979)
The Quote // “The aftermath of a mouthful of wine/ Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow. /And there she was, the intent and glamorous,/Ordinary, mysterious skunk,/ Mythologized, demythologized” (The Skunk)
Heaney was survived by his wife of many years, Maire Devlin. Their marriage was the subject of his poetry on numerous occasions. Soft, tender, erotic, tumultuous: Heaney’s love poems demonstrated the full range of marriage, love and partnership. ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, from the collection The Human Chain (2010) describes Heaney’s stroke in 2006 as a ‘renewal’ of love for Maire as she sat next to him in the ambulance.
The collection Field Work (1979) contains the Glanmore Sonnets which are borne out of Heaney’s time in County Wicklow. The sonnets represent a tribute to unbridled nature and Heaney’s utter submergence in it.
Heaney, the Academic
The Poem // ‘Route 110’, Beowulf (Translation)
The Collections // District and Circle (2006), The Cure of Troy (1990), The Burial at Thebes (Translation of Antigone) (2004) Preoccupations (1980)
The Quote // ‘Let whoever can/win glory before death. /When a warrior is gone,/that will be his best and only bulwark.’ (Translation of Beowulf)
Heaney’s poetry is better known for its down-to-earth quality, however, Heaney’s verse is often very much informed and shaped by his classical education. Heaney studied English Language and Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, graduating in 1961 with a first-class degree. He proceeded to gain a lectureship at Queen’s in 1966. He spent a year lecturing at UCLA Berkeley in 1970 and from 1985 to 1997 he held the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. From 1989 to 1994 he was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. During his academic career, he published Preoccupations (1980), a collection of critical essays on poetry. Indeed, Heaney is almost equally well known for his translation of Latin and Anglo-Saxon texts, most notably his acclaimed modern translation of Beowulf (1999). His play The Cure of Troy (1990) was an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and was first staged by the Field Day Theatre Company, of which Heaney was one of the directors. His classical education permeated his poetry. His collection District and Circle (2006), which won the T.S Eliot prize for poetry, evokes the poet’s journey on the London underground in the wake of the July 7th bombings; the collection echoes Dante’s vision of hell. Similarly, his poem Route 110 combines antiquity with everyday life, as he evokes and weaves Virgil’s description of the descent into the underworld in Book IV of the Aeneid.
Heaney, The Man
The Poem // ‘Miracle’
The Collection // The Human Chain (2010)
The Quote // “Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/ But the ones who have known him all along /And carry him in—“
Yeats’ poems about old age represent not only his own physical decay but a tumultuous period of change: the birth of modernism and modernity, the beginning and end of war. Yeats’ later poetry can ring with bitterness and regret. There is none of this in Heaney’s last collection, The Human Chain, in which he describes his recuperation following a stroke in 2006. The highly acclaimed collection is gentle in its negotiation of loss, pain and memory. The poetry within it is overshadowed by Virgil’s Aeneid; it demonstrates an acute awareness of mortality and physical limitation. Moreover, it is in constant dialogue with his earlier poems, as though he is looking back to his origin as he approaches his end.
Heaney’s poetry has been described by many in their tributes to him following his death, as a means to confront and confound mortality, a bulwark against the difficulties of life and death. In his early poem, ‘The Forge’, Heaney wrote: “All I know is a door into the dark”. Heaney’s poetry was, and is, for many an illumination of this darkness.
