On Seamus Heaney 9780691211473

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•  ON SEAMUS HEANEY

WRITERS ON WRITERS

R. F. Foster On Seamus Heaney John Burnside On Henry Miller Michael Wood On Empson Colm Tóibín On Elizabeth Bishop Alexander McCall Smith What W. H. Auden Can Do for You Michael Dirda On Conan Doyle C. K. Williams On Whitman Phillip Lopate Notes on Sontag

R . F. FOS T ER  •  O N S E A M US H E AN E Y

PRINCE ­T ON UNIVERSIT Y PRESS P r i n c e ­t o n a n d O x f o r d

Copyright © 2020 R. F. Foster. Not to be quoted without permission Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­Publication Data Names: Foster, R. F. (Robert Fitzroy), 1949– author. Title: On Seamus Heaney / R. F. Foster. Description: Prince­ton : Prince­ton University Press, [2020] |   Series: Writers on writers | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009285 (print) | LCCN 2020009286   (ebook) | ISBN 9780691174372 (hardback ; acid-­f ree paper) |   ISBN 9780691211473 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Heaney, Seamus, 1939–2013—­Criticism and  interpretation. Classification: LCC PR6058.E2 Z6597 2020 (print) |   LCC PR6058.E2 (ebook) | DDC 821/.914—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020009285 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020009286 British Library Cataloging-­i n-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Ben Tate and Josh Drake Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis Production: Jacqueline Poirier Publicity: Katie Lewis and Jodi Price Copyeditor: Luane Hutchinson Jacket Credit: Seamus Heaney in his kitchen, 1977   © Ian Berry / Magnum Photos This book has been composed in MinionPro Printed on acid-­f ree paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

•  for Jan Dalley

• CONTENTS



Preface and Acknowledgements  ix

1. Certus  1 2. Kinship  30 3. The Same Root  60 4. In the ­Middle of His Journey  94 5. Alphabetical Order  120 6. The Moment of Mortality  148 7. The Bird on the Roof  176 8. Clearance  198

Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney 207

Index 215

• vii

• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This short book arises not only from a deep admiration for Seamus Heaney’s work, but also from a fascination with its unique ability to speak to a wide readership while retaining its own in­de­pen­dent mysteries. Sustained immersion in his writing for the past few years may not have supplied all the answers to the question of how he achieved this, but it has brought other pleasures in its wake. I am acutely aware that I am far from possessing Hea­ ney’s gift to ‘glean the unsaid off the palpable’, but working on this book has brought me somewhere closer to the core achievement of a g­ reat poet, and made me wish I had known him better in life. The book is written from the standpoint of a historian and biographer, to whom Heaney’s poetry has spoken in a direct and forceful way since his early books. I remember where I was sitting when I read North in 1975 and felt that au­t hen­tic sensation of the hairs standing up on my head. • ix

Nearly twenty years ­later, I read ‘At the Wellhead’ in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed but enduringly magical, it was still ­there when I moved out a­ fter another twenty-­odd years. And reading ‘­Album’ in his last collection, the attempts to embrace a lost ­father resonated so profoundly that my eyes filled with tears. I am just one of numerous readers for whom Heaney’s work has provided a series of touchstones throughout life, creating a permanent resource. It is difficult to write about someone who wrote so well about himself, not to mention leaving ­behind the trea­sure trove of interviews in Dennis O’Driscoll’s marvellous Stepping Stones—­a kind of transactional autobiography. Nonetheless, I have tried to read the work in the light of the poet’s life and the historical circumstances surrounding it. The result underlines Heaney’s lifelong commitment to artistic integrity. This was sustained in the face of pressures to write for the occasion, particularly the po­liti­cal occasion. He preferred to let a poem ‘find’ him—­and its audience. Th ­ ere is also a very strong sense of continuity and inheritance. ‘More than a c­ entury before Yeats imposed upon himself the task of hammering his thoughts into a unity’, Heaney wrote, ‘Words­worth was fulfilling it with deliberate intent. Indeed, it is not ­u ntil Yeats that we encounter another poet in x  •  Preface and Acknowledgements

whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, po­liti­cal awareness, artistic self-­knowledge and bardic representativeness are so fully and resolutely combined’. Heaney himself might be seen as the next link in this chain, and the connections with Yeats form one of the themes of this book, delicate though Heaney himself was about negotiating them. I am grateful to Ben Tate of Prince­ton University Press for suggesting I write it, to my agent Peter Straus for bringing it about, and above all to the Heaney ­family—­ Marie, Christopher, Mick, and Catherine—­for their friendly encouragement throughout. Much of the thinking and reading ­behind this book took place during my year as Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge; I am grateful to the Master, Rowan Williams, to the Fellows, and especially to Eamon Duffy, himself a penetrating and close reader of Heaney’s poetry. This is no more a work of exhaustive literary criticism than it is a comprehensive biography, but in arriving at ­these reflections, it w ­ ill be clear what I owe to the work of notable commentators on Heaney such as Neil Corcoran, Rui Carvalho Homem, Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Parker, Marilynn Richtarik, Richard Rankin Russell, and Helen Vendler, several of whom w ­ ere kind enough to discuss aspects of his work with me. I am also Preface and Acknowledgements  • xi

grateful to Mary Broderick, Eugene Kielt, Blake Morrison and Andrew O’Hagan for generously directing me ­towards material, and above all to Jan Dalley, Tom Dunne, Aisling Foster, Grey Gowrie, Joe Hassett, Hermione Lee, Christina Mahony, and—again—­Catherine Heaney for their close and im­mensely helpful reading of the manuscript. The extract from ‘­Little Gidding’ on pp. 102–3 is excerpted from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1971 by Esmé Valerie Eliot. Published by Faber & Faber and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Reprinted by permission. Poems by Seamus Heaney are quoted with permission of the Estate of Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to whom I am grateful: excerpts from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2001 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Human Chain by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 2010 by Seamus Hea­ ney; excerpts from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney; excerpts from Poems 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1980 by Seamus Heaney.

xii  •  Preface and Acknowledgements

Quotations from private letters appear by permission of the recipient and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The quotation from his journal on pp. 96–97 appears with permission of the Estate of Seamus Heaney and the National Library of Ireland. Though much e­ lse in this book is rooted in archival sources, the convention of the series in which it appears is not to have footnotes. So although a close rec­ord of references has been kept, they do not appear on the page; ­there is a guide to sources for quotations at the end. R. F. Foster January 2020

Preface and Acknowledgements  • xiii

•  ON SEAMUS HEANEY

1 Certus

When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. While he referred in l­ ater years to a ‘residual Incertus’ inside himself, his early prominence was based on a sure-­footed sense of his own direction, an energetic ambition, and his own formidable poetic strengths. It was also based on a re­spect for his readers which won their trust. ‘Poetry’s special status among the literary arts’, he suggested in a celebrated lecture, ‘derives from the audience’s readiness to . . . ​credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the real­ity we inhabit’. Like T. S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to ‘the auditory imagination’ and what it opened up: ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and

• 1

feeling, invigorating ­every word’. His readers felt they shared in this. The external signs of Heaney’s inner certainty of direction, coupled with his charisma, style, and accessibility, could arouse resentment among grievance-­burdened critics, or poets who met less success than they believed themselves to deserve. He overcame this, and other obstacles, with what has been called his ‘extemporaneous eloquence’ and by determinedly avoiding pretentiousness: he possessed what he called, referring to Robert Lowell, ‘the rooted normality of the major talent’. At the same time, he looked like nobody ­else, and he sounded like nobody e­ lse. A Heaney poem carried its maker’s name on the blade, and often it cut straight to the bone. Fame came to him young, but when necessary, Heaney practised evasiveness, like the outlaws on the run who regularly inhabit his work, or the mad King Sweeney of Irish legend, condemned to live the life of a mi­grant bird, whom he chose as an alter ego. This literally came with his territory. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1939, grew up among the nods, winks, and repressions of a deeply divided society, and saw ­those half-­concealed fissures break open into vio­lence. He knew ‘the North’ (as residents of the Irish Republic call the six north-­eastern counties), targeted it, eviscerated it, and left it to live 2  •  Chapter 1

in ‘the South’. It gave him the title of his most famous collection, and he showed how ‘it’ could be written about. But the restraint which he generally practised when addressing politics, coupled with the spectacular internationalising and cosmopolitanising of his reputation, raised sensitive questions. If ‘Sweeney’ rhymed significantly with ‘Heaney’, ‘famous’ rhymed too readily with ‘Seamus’. He was endlessly photographed and painted, but the portrait in oils by Edward McGuire commissioned by the Ulster Museum in 1973 is perhaps the most enduring image: ‘the poet vigilant’, in Heaney’s own description, expressing a ‘gathered-up, pent-up, head-on quality . . . ​ a keep of tension’. The power­ f ul, handsome head is placed against a densely interwoven thicket of leaves, suggesting the concealed bird-­ king or the watchful wood-­ kerne—­ but also, perhaps, the double-­f repeat pattern of a Faber book cover. It is a complex picture of a poet whose complexities stretch far beyond the charm of his early poems—­a charm which itself is never simply what it seems. Seamus Heaney’s background has been immortalised in t­ hose poems as well as a large archive of interviews: a small Derry farm­house, a cattle-­dealing f­ather, a much-­loved m ­ other and aunt presiding jointly over the domestic world; Certus  • 3

the routines of beasts, crops, and land; ­horses and carts, candles and oil lamps, an outdoor privy, mice scrabbling in the thatch above the ­children’s beds at night, a world already becoming archaic in his youth. (Smart alecks in Dublin used to refer to ­these poems, and their author, as ‘pre-­electric’.) ­There is a Proustian exactness in his evocation of the texture and detail of his early life, the unerring memory for the illustration on a tin of condiments or the name of an obscure piece of machinery, and he retained a novelist’s perception of circumstance and psy­chol­ogy. He could also mock this aspect of his reputation: on a visit to the ‘Tam O’Shanter Experience’ at Robert Burns’s birthplace, he was teased that ­there would one day be a ‘Seamus Heaney Experience’ and replied, ‘That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box’. Heaney was marked out early by his cleverness (in a ­family with its fair share of schoolteachers as well as farmers, and giving the traditional Irish priority to a good education). He progressed from the local primary schools, via success in the eleven-­plus examination, to life as a boarder in St Columb’s College, Derry. The wrench of leaving home and f­amily at twelve years old in 1951 remained a sharp memory; the poems and autobiographical reminiscences which rec­ord it suggest the special position which he held in his ­family. 4  •  Chapter 1

‘I began as a poet’, Heaney l­ater remarked, ‘when my roots ­were crossed with my reading’. At St Columb’s, his classmates included the ­future politician John Hume and the brilliant Seamus Deane, himself an apprentice poet but better known l­ ater as a power­ful and excoriating literary critic. From early on, they would try out their poetic efforts on each other. The College’s conventional but thorough education gave a good grounding in Latin, which served Heaney well in ­later life, but also exposure to the En­glish poetic tradition (discovery of Patrick Kavanagh’s work, which would mean so much to him, came l­ ater). The intensive interviews to which Heaney was subjected ­later in life, particularly ­t hose in Dennis O’Driscoll’s indispensable Stepping Stones, supply the framework for his emergence as a poet. ‘Just by answering’, Heaney himself remarked ruefully, ‘you contribute to the creation of a narrative’. H ­ ere as elsewhere, he was a­ dept at controlling his fame. His first poetic passion was Gerard Manley Hopkins, as is evinced in the lush and winsome wordplay of early poems submitted to local magazines during his time at Queen’s University Belfast (1957–61), which rightly remained uncollected. The lushness was eradicated fairly soon, in obedience to his mentor Philip Hobsbaum’s injunction to ‘roughen up’; winsomeness continued Certus  • 5

to break out now and then. From Queen’s, he proceeded to train as a schoolteacher, and rapidly attracted attention; the Inspector of Schools de­ cided to haul him out of the schools and appoint him Lecturer in En­glish at St Joseph’s College of Education ‘to teach the other teachers how to teach . . . ​he’s as good a teacher as he is a poet’. This remained true, at several levels, all his life. It is illustrated by notes he made around this time for an anthology of poetry to be used for teaching purposes. His approach stresses the need to explore a poem’s nature rather than simply evaluate it in terms of practical criticism, to address pro­cess rather than product, to intuit the direction of the poet’s mind, and to map the hinterland b ­ ehind a finished work; Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Kavanagh, MacNeice, Muir, Lowell, and Wilbur would feature. The anthology remained uncollected, but an academic life seemed on the cards. He had thoughts of writing a thesis on ‘the repressed hero in modern Irish writing’, but no-­one in Queen’s seemed interested in supervising it; he began an uncompleted thesis on Patrick Kavanagh, introduced to his work by the short-­story writer Michael McLaverty, a colleague, mentor, and friend during his school-­teaching days. And in 1966, Heaney joined the Faculty of En­glish at Queen’s University, a step up the academic ladder. 6  •  Chapter 1

The cultural atmosphere of Belfast in the early 1960s is hard to recapture. Given what happened from 1968–9, when communal vio­lence broke out, the British Army moved in, and three de­ cades of murderous conflict commenced, images of a calm before a storm are inescapable. But it did not always seem like that at the time. Patterns of sectarian discrimination ran deep and ­were carefully negotiated; the representatives of state power w ­ ere blatantly and often oppressively Protestant; the underside of vio­lence sometimes broke through (as captured chillingly in a 1964 short story by the poet John Montague, ‘The Cry’). Much recent analy­sis, however, has represented life in Northern Ireland (particularly middle-­class life) in the early 1960s in terms of the thawing of antagonisms and the hesitant beginnings of a more pluralist culture. Heaney’s own recollections are not inconsistent with this. But even if the advent of apocalypse ­after 1968 is seen as an avoidable lurch into vio­lence rather than the inevitable bursting of a boil, it fed on ancient antipathies as well as recent injustices. In some senses, the Queen’s University of the 1960s was at an a­ ngle to this universe. It certainly represented the Unionist governing class, and it was seen by some as a kind of colonial outpost. A large proportion of its teaching staff w ­ ere British, and many returned to ‘the mainland’ when Certus  • 7

teaching terms w ­ ere over. But this detachment, while accompanied by a fair amount of condescension sharply noted by the locals, helped insulate the Queen’s common-­room life from more atavistic attitudes, as Heaney himself recalled. At the same time, the under­lying realities of his native province ­were grist to his mill. A poem called ‘Lint W ­ ater’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 5 August  1965, though not reprinted in his first collection, Death of a Natural­ ist, a year l­ ater (nor anywhere e­ lse). The quin­tes­ sen­tial Ulster industry of linen-­making provided a meta­phor for the poisoning of r­ unning ­water; Northern Irish readers would be well aware that historically, linen making was notably sectarian in its work patterns. ‘Putrid currents floated trout to the loch, / Their bellies white as linen table­cloths’. The idea of a poisoned terrain (also used by John Montague for his landmark collection, Poi­ soned Lands, in 1961) was both irresistible and significant. So is the power­f ul authorial stamp carried by the poem, which signals the way that Heaney would choose to approach and unpick the tensions of his native province. His own ­family’s relations with neighbouring Protestant farmers w ­ ere amicable and equable; t­ here was a sense of difference rather than superiority or exploitation. (With Unionist grandees such as the 8  •  Chapter 1

Chichester-­Clark f­ amily in the neighbouring Big House, Moyola Park, the gap would be much wider and more definitive, both socially and po­ liti­cally.) Heaney’s ­father, according to his son, possessed the cattle-­dealer’s wide franchise of moving easily through dif­fer­ent circles of rural life, while his ­mother retained a stronger sense of historic grievance. The poems which Heaney was planting out in Irish newspapers and magazines in the early 1960s made him a name to watch; a cyclostyled sheet of a poetry reading around 1963–4, including several of his first published poems, rec­ords him as ‘Seamus Heine’, which may or may not be a joke. But he was one of an extraordinarily talented group of Belfast-­based writers who assembled to discuss their work ­under the aegis of the academic and poet Philip Hobsbaum, from 1963. They included the playwright Stewart Parker, the novelist and short-­story writer Bernard McLaverty, the critic Edna Longley, and the poets Michael Longley, Joan Newmann, and James Simmons. ­ Later commentators have queried the extent to which t­ hese writers formed a self-­ defining ‘Group’, and so have some of the writers themselves. But studies by Heather Clark and ­others suggest an undeniable esprit de corps, if not of joint endeavour, at the time. Th ­ ere was certainly a remarkable ‘coincidence of talent’, in Certus  • 9

Michael Longley’s phrase, and a practice—as Hea­ ney put it—of ‘­doing committee work’ on each other’s poems. This much-­mythologised ‘Group’ was undeniably impor­tant to Heaney’s poetic development, but so w ­ ere other poets then based or partly based in Northern Ireland such as John Hewitt, Derek Mahon, and John Montague, the paint­ers Terry Flanagan and Colin Middleton, and the musician David Hammond. Longley, Mahon, and Heaney would become the g­ reat triumvirate of Northern poets, with Montague their bridge to an older generation; members of a formidably accomplished younger generation would follow in their wake, such as Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson. Between their elders, an inevitable rivalry was maintained, but ­t here was also a certain difference of influence and ethos. Queen’s kept Heaney and his school friend Deane within the Northern habitus (though it was praise from the South African poet Laurence Lerner, then on the faculty, that helped spur Heaney t­owards the literary life). In a l­ater barbed reminiscence, Deane recalled that when he and Heaney discussed their own writing, they adhered to given roles: Deane excitingly experimental, Heaney imitative, modest, and careful. This memory reflected divergences on several levels over the intervening de­ cades. But more generously, Deane also recalled 10  •  Chapter 1

his realisation that Heaney’s precision was the mark of someone who was writing poems rather than (as in his own case) attempting ‘poetry’. Other kinds of difference can be charted too. Both of the Longleys and Derek Mahon w ­ ere products of Trinity College Dublin, a distinctively dif­fer­ ent culture; Heaney l­ater recalled their superior sophistication at this stage. In par­ tic­u­lar, Mahon’s authoritative irony carried the impress of that peculiar institution. The concentrated slow burn of Longley’s poems, engineered for the long distance, also differed from Heaney’s occasional dramatic effects. For Longley and especially Mahon, Louis MacNeice was a vitally impor­tant precursor; Edna Longley would become the most incisive authority on this other ‘Northern poet’, who left Ireland far ­behind him but whose Irishness haunts his autobiographical magnum opus ‘Autumn Journal’ and much ­else. MacNeice, son of a Church of Ireland bishop, was also enduringly conscious of his Protestant inheritance of difference: ‘banned forever from the candles of the Irish poor’. It is questionable how far this muffled his influence over Heaney, who was at this stage still semi-­immersed in a traditional Catholic background (making a pilgrimage to Lourdes when he was nineteen, abstaining from alcohol u ­ nder the influence of a devout Pioneer aunt ­u ntil the age of twenty). Certus  • 11

More immediately, the question of Longley’s and Mahon’s Protestant backgrounds cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, e­ ither to their own poetic consciousness or to their relation to Heaney’s. Heaney admitted that MacNeice did not—at this stage—­‘speak’ to him; he would l­ater stress that his immersion in Catholic theology and practice at St Columb’s, ‘living the liturgical year in a very intense way’, instilled an atmosphere which attuned him to Hopkins—­a Catholic priest—as his ‘main man’. ‘What you encounter in Hopkins’s journals—­t he claustrophobia and scrupulosity and ordering of the mind, the cold-­water shaves and the single iron beds, the soutanes and the self-­denial—­t hat was the world I was living in when I first read his poems’. A Catholicism of the imagination would remain. But the austere privations of St Columb’s ­were a world away from the atmosphere of literary Bohemian Belfast a de­cade l­ater: the poetry workshops, the blossoming of short-­lived journals, convivial parties around Queen’s, the acting world based on the Lyric Theatre where Hea­ ney first saw Yeats’s plays. (Heaney himself had a brief fling at acting in 1959–60, ­later rather lost from the rec­ord, but much praised in the local press: ‘Never has t­ here been a more true characterisation [of the nationalist hero Robert Emmet] than that which is now being given by Queen’s 12  •  Chapter 1

student Seamus Heaney. His movements and gestures are perfect while his diction leaves nothing to be desired’.) He also at this time met and became close friends with David Hammond, the charismatic folk musician, filmmaker, and educationalist, whom Heaney described as ‘a natu­ ral force masquerading as a ­human being’; Hammond, as Heaney saw it, was immune to Belfast’s constricting ideologies and ‘knew the codes of a divided society so well that he knew exactly how to break them, tactfully yet deliberately’. In other ways too, the mid-1960s set out ­future patterns of Heaney’s life. In 1965, he married the dazzling Marie Devlin; a­ fter pursuing her for some time, he realised (he told Deane) that she was ‘not so much a quarry, more a way of life’. This was prophetic. From a large and talented ­family which also produced writers and musicians, she was beautiful, clever, a teacher and editor, a close reader of poetry, and as strong-­ minded as himself. Their marriage formed the rock-­like foundation of his private life. Three ­children followed: Christopher, Michael, and Catherine. The Heaney ­house­hold was a centre of gregarious social life, especially when they moved into 16 Ashley Ave­nue, where meetings of the poetry group shifted ­after Hobsbaum’s departure from Belfast in 1966. The h ­ ouse was a hub of activity and conviviality. Hammond would recall Certus  • 13

it elegiacally long afterwards, when the Ashley Ave­nue h ­ ouse was scheduled for de­mo­li­tion, in spite of efforts to preserve it in view of its now-­ famous previous owner. Walking past the shuttered and vandalised h ­ ouse, Hammond recalled parties, ­music sessions, the constant to-­a nd-­fro of neighbours in the late 1960s, local friends such as the Longleys and the paint­ers Colin Middleton and Terry Flanagan, visiting Americans, the poet Ted Hughes and the playwright Trevor Griffiths from ­England, all contributing to an unforgettable atmosphere; the ­ house throbbed with energy, he recalled, and the door was always open. By a strange poetic transference, ­later still, Heaney would use that same image—­a ­house with the door standing open—­ for ‘The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark’, a plangent elegy in memory of Hammond, who died in 2008. Heaney’s explosive sense of humour, energetic joie de vivre, and legendary dispensation of hospitality created a focus of warmth and life, and a resonance that remained long a­ fter the f­ amily left Belfast; but he was si­mul­ta­neously putting in hard work at poetry, often late at night. In a student magazine of 1961, he had described himself as an ‘ex-­poet’, but he was now committed to his craft. Though the early spell of Hopkins wore off, it remained true that up to this time, as 14  •  Chapter 1

he put it himself, ‘the linguistic experiences that threw my switches w ­ ere En­glish’. Fittingly, his early poems, and his first collections, repeatedly if implicitly invoked Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’, though Kavanagh’s influence was increasingly clear as well. His breakthrough to a wider audience than Belfast came early on. In late 1964, the literary editor of the New Statesman, Karl Miller, published three Heaney poems, which attracted the attention of Faber and Faber, the premier British publishing ­house for poetry. A pamphlet of eleven poems was published in 1965 by the Queen’s University Festival; Dolmen Press in the Republic was offered a potential collection by Hea­ney, but given the generally shambolic organisation t­ here, its fate was uncertain. A letter from Liam Miller in the Heaney archives suggests that with Faber in prospect, Heaney reclaimed the poems and constructed a slightly dif­fer­ent se­lection. This was swiftly accepted by Charles Monteith, whom Heaney had met when he visited the publishers’ office on his honeymoon trip to London. Monteith was a fellow Northerner, from a conspicuously dif­fer­ent background but with a sharp eye for talent and a rapid comprehension of the heft and originality implicit in the poems that Heaney sent him. Death of a Nat­ uralist was published on 19 May  1966, costing Certus  • 15

eigh­teen shillings. It would prove as vital a point in Faber’s history as in Heaney’s. While the subject m ­ atter was pastoral, Ulster-­ style, the tone was resolutely anti-­pastoral, and the language arresting and even violent—­notably in the title poem but also in the evocations of such pastimes as blackberry-­picking and butter-­ making. Blackberries are bloody (and their pickers become stained like the wife-­murderer Bluebeard), jars full of cream are ‘pottery bombs’, frogs are potentially explosive grenades, images of armouries, sentries, and reconnaissance recur. Above all, in the opening poem ‘Digging’, which would become canonical, the poet’s pen nestles in his fist, ‘snug as a gun’. Heaney would l­ ater remark that this par­tic­u­lar simile was inspired by phonetic euphony rather than a deliberate imagery of vio­lence, but detonations and explosions recur throughout the volume. Elsewhere, he called ‘Digging’ ‘a big cross-­grained navvy of a poem’—­perhaps implicitly referring to the conversation that originally inspired it, when a road worker told the young Heaney on his way to school that h ­ andling a pen was lighter than a spade. ‘Navvy’ or not, the poem certainly had the stamina to become Heaney’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, pursuing him for de­cades. The poems that followed it in Death of a Nat­ uralist ­were ferociously accomplished, sharply 16  •  Chapter 1

honed, and tightly structured; along with images of vio­lence, themes of decay, rot, and rat infestation recur. The title poem is a nightmare vision which moves from a child collecting frogspawn to the invasion of a flax dam by ‘­g reat slime kings’, sexually voracious and intent on vengeance. None of the poems published in student magazines w ­ ere included; the earliest dates from 1962. One of ­t hese, ‘Turkeys Observed’, sees the dead birds on a poulterer’s slab as a squadron of fighter planes—­the kind of visual meta­phor ­later called ‘Martian’. (‘Turkeys made him a poet’ proclaimed the headline of an Ulster Tattler interview in May 1966.) But the direction of Heaney’s poetry was distinctly un-­Martian. The poems about ­family are gentler. ‘Follower’, first published in the Queen’s pamphlet, is a kind of companion piece to ‘Digging’, where the son recalls his ­father ploughing a field, ending with intimations of age and mortality. Th ­ ere are love poems, one of which—­‘Scaffolding’—­would become a staple for reading at weddings (not always a good sign). More strikingly, t­ here are reflections on Irish history at its more traumatic, the potato famine of the 1840s (‘At a Potato Digging’, ‘For the Commander of the Eliza’); while ‘Docker’ is a portrait of a Protestant proletarian in brutally reductionist terms. (As Heaney l­ ater ruefully recognised, it should have been called ‘Shipyard Certus  • 17

Worker’: in the sectarianised world of Belfast ­labour, dockers w ­ ere Catholic.) That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic— Oh yes, that kind of ­t hing could start again. The only Roman collar he tolerates Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Perhaps the most power­f ul poem in the book is ‘Mid-­Term Break’, a deceptively ­simple recollection of his younger ­brother’s death in a road accident outside the ­family home, when the fourteen-­year-­old Heaney was away at boarding school. The atmosphere of the mourning h ­ ouse, and the viewing of the dead child’s body, is evoked in brief tercets, ending with a ringing single line—an effect all the stronger for being restrained and unshowy. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left t­ emple, He lay in the four foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four foot box, a foot for ­every year. 18  •  Chapter 1

Perhaps this reflects the speedy way that the poem came to him; Heaney wrote it in February 1963, sitting in an armchair in his shared flat in Wellington Park, waiting for a flatmate to cook supper. It was first published in the Kilkenny Magazine ­later that year. Late in Heaney’s life, Michael Longley would refer to ­these early poems as ‘­little miracles’, and the last poem in Death of a Naturalist was dedicated to Longley: it is an envoi of astounding self-­confidence. PERSONAL HELICON

As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one u ­ nder a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquar­ium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch, A white face hovered over the bottom. Certus  • 19

­ thers had echoes, gave back your own call O With a clean new ­music in it. And one Was scaresome, for ­t here, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to fin­ger slime, To stare, big-­eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

The confidence was not misplaced. Death of a Naturalist was widely reviewed by major critics and won four prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award, which provided a grant to a young writer that had to be spent on foreign travel and would help bring the Heaneys to the French Pyrenees and Spain a ­couple of years ­later. Inevitably, in some less talented Northern writers, notably James Simmons, a pulse of envy began to beat. Simmons was six years older than Heaney and midway through an erratic ­career as a teacher, balladeer, and determined hellraiser. His undisciplined poetry shared some of ­t hese characteristics. Always keen to assume the role of literary entrepreneur, in 1968, Simmons started an influential magazine called The Honest Uls­ terman, with the intention of challenging the 20  •  Chapter 1

Northern Irish ‘establishment’ and what Simmons and some of his contributors saw as the ‘clique’ of Longley, Mahon, and Heaney. It also provided a showcase for his own work. Heaney contributed poems to it, but the journal also became an outlet for critiques and parodies of his own work. In 1969, the journal ran a competition for a poem ‘written in the Heaney manner’, allegedly to be judged by Heaney himself. Death of a Naturalist inaugurated what became a remarkable connection between Heaney and his readership. The book sold well for a first poetry collection, but more significantly, it created a following which would grow. Heaney’s public profile was coming into focus. Personal charisma had something to do with it, and an ability to read his own work to riveting effect (unfortunately, an ability not given to many poets). His voice could also be heard (from 1968) on a recording issued by Garech Browne’s Claddagh Rec­ords. (­Later, living in Wicklow, the Hea­ neys would encounter the glamorous and rather rackety world which Browne gathered around himself at Luggala, his legendary h ­ ouse in the mountains.) With Longley and Hammond, Hea­ ney organised a trailblazing poetry tour of Northern Ireland, called ‘Room to Rhyme’, in May 1968. His unforced skill as a lecturer made him much in demand. But all this was secondary Certus  • 21

to a poetic voice which, on one level, connected immediately with what many Irish ­people knew: a rural past slipping away, a violent and traumatic history, a social integument based on mutually observed avoidances. Reading him, they felt they ­were in good hands. On another level, that voice was heard and understood by readers far beyond Ireland, not only for its extra-­sensory powers of observation, its humanity, and its generosity of vision, but also for its ability to craft language with an unerring economy and to hit on the utterly unexpected, yet utterly appropriate, word. Early on, this was what drew him to the attention of major critics such as Christopher Ricks, John Carey, and Helen Vendler, while continuing to alienate ­those invested in a more restricted enterprise, such as Al Alvarez and Ian Hamilton. ‘What I was ­a fter’, he would ­later recall, ‘was a way of making the central tradition of En­g lish poetry, which we’d observed in college and university, absorb our own par­t ic­u ­lar eccentric experience’. From 1969—­the date of his next collection, Door into the Dark—­t he ‘eccentric experience’ of Northern Ireland would come into international focus, as what Heaney often termed the ‘noxious’ ele­ments of life ­t here ­were released into the ether. And this too would affect the contract between Heaney and his readership. 22  •  Chapter 1

Many of the poems in Heaney’s second collection ­were written before the violent assault on marchers for civil rights which sparked off the Northern crisis in 1968, but the volume is full of explosive ­little epiphanies which read presciently and prophetically (‘Dream’, ‘ The Forge’, ‘Thatcher’). Along with memorable evocations of country life, love, and m ­ usic, such as ‘The Given Note’, t­ here was a strong sense of Northern self-­consciousness, notably in ‘Lough Neagh Sequence’. (Eels, like frogs and rats, became a haunting presence in Heaney’s poetic world.) Above all, the collection ended with the prophetic ‘Bogland’, a step into the meta­phor for the memory of historical vio­lence which would become famous, and controversial, when he published North six years ­later. Looking back from the standpoint of the interviews published in Stepping Stones in 2008, he would describe it ‘like opening a gate’. We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening— Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. Certus  • 23

­ ey’ve taken the skeleton Th Of the G ­ reat Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate full of air. Butter sunk u ­ nder More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white. The ground itself is kind, black butter Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definition By millions of years. ­They’ll never dig coal ­here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of g­ reat firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, ­ very layer they strip E Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

Writing to Michael Longley a­ fter the publication of Door into the Dark, Heaney described it as an effort to tap into the self via ‘secret rather than public poems’: a search to find a mode of expression that ‘blends discipline and disarms disciplinarians’. But t­ here was more to it than that. 24  •  Chapter 1

Heaney’s notebooks for 1969 show a preoccupation with history, particularly the 1798 Rising, when a Republican enterprise briefly brought Northern Presbyterians and Catholic radicals together; it is the subject of a much-­worked-­upon but never broadcast radio play, among other ­t hings. The tentative politics of Door into the Dark took a more de­cided form in a celebrated poem about the 1798 Rising, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, with its power­ f ul closing image of the pocketfuls of barley seeds buried with the slaughtered rebels and sprouting from the ground a year l­ater. A ­ fter 1969, with the British Army on the streets of Belfast and the birth of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, this could look like an invocation of blood sacrifice in the style of Patrick Pearse, and Heaney was acutely conscious of this—so much so that he ­stopped reading it in public per­for­mances. From 1969, the question of the public stance of the poet became pressing—an issue that would separate Heaney from some of his contemporaries. A supporter of the civil rights movement (he had been on t­ hose early marches) and fiercely conscious of the injustices u ­ nder which the Catholic population lived, he was not actively involved in politics. But a good deal of unpublished work from ­these years suggests an angrier commitment than appeared Certus  • 25

in public—or in retrospect. ‘For the Catholic writer’, he remarked to Seamus Deane ten years ­later, ‘I think the Trou­bles ­were a critical moment, a turning point, possibly a vision of some kind of fulfilment. The blueprint in the Catholic writer’s head predicted that a history would fulfil itself in a United Ireland or something. Th ­ ese are very fundamental blueprints’. Heaney’s own blueprint was to emerge as less cut-­a nd-­d ried than this, and he was unprepared to see vio­lence as a necessary preliminary to any long-­desired po­liti­cal outcome. But a draft poem in his notebook for this time called ‘Ulster Politics’ uses Swiftian images of blocked bowels and necessary ruptures, while a series of interrogative verses about his own po­liti­cal commitment rehearses ­imagined slights and accusations against himself as a ‘smiling public man’ unprepared to align openly with his ‘tribe’. Significantly, this was also a juncture when his outlook was widening in all sorts of directions. With two Faber collections in print, he was writing for main-­line journals in Britain, such as The Listener and the New Statesman, rather than local outlets such as the Honest Ulsterman; though Heaney placed occasional pieces t­ here, his enterprise was consciously international. Simmons, among o ­ thers, would not view this ambition generously. More surprisingly, corre26  •  Chapter 1

spondence from Brian Friel with other writers in the 1970s, before his close friendship with Hea­ ney, suggests a certain asperity about Heaney’s ‘consciously cultivated’ approach to his work and easy manipulation of a new audience in E ­ ngland. But the horizons ­were widening beyond Britain. The year Heaney spent, with his young ­family, as a visiting lecturer in Berkeley, California, in 1970 was a vital broadening of opportunities, both personal and intellectual. It was not merely a question of—as he put it—­‘silence, exile and sunning’. Given his formalist literary aesthetic, he found the laid-­back students, the freewheeling academic culture, the radical politics worn on multicoloured sleeves, and the novelty of Californian life in the late hippie era unimaginably dif­fer­ent from Queen’s and Belfast. The excitement is tangible in letters he wrote to friends at home. He was experimenting with writing fiction (never published), revelling in the intellectual camaraderie of ­people from all kinds of backgrounds, shaking off ‘northern clay’. Nonetheless, Irish connections w ­ ere impor­tant: Thomas Parkinson, a distinguished Yeatsian, and Robert Tracy, who wrote incisively about Irish lit­er­a­ture from the eigh­teenth ­century on, ­were on the faculty, as was the critic and (­later) ­great historical novelist Thomas Flanagan, who became one of Heaney’s closest friends. Flanagan Certus  • 27

and Heaney would in subsequent years spend much time making summer expeditions to historic Irish sites; it was a stop-­off with Flanagan at Moran’s pub and restaurant at Kilcolgan, County Galway, en route to Yeats’s tower at Ballylee, that inspired Heaney’s celebrated poem ‘Oysters’. Through the Flanagans the Heaneys met the controversial critic and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien and his wife, the poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and many ­others. But ­there ­were also American poets in the vicinity, such as Gary Snyder and Robert Bly. Oddly, though Heaney was already familiar with Czesław Miłosz’s poetry in translation, and the Polish poet was in residence at Berkeley too, they did not meet at this juncture; his friendships with Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert would also come ­later. The literary culture of Berkeley (which also took in the short-­story writer Leonard Michaels, a friend of Heaney’s) acted as a kick-­start for the next phase of Heaney’s writing life, but in terms of approach rather than opening up new material; as he put it himself, ‘what the Californian distance did was to lead me back into the Irish memory bank . . . ​ origin and the inward path’. Even more significantly, Flanagan’s powerfully historicised approach to Irish lit­er­a­ture had given him ‘a more

28  •  Chapter 1

charged-up sense of Yeats and Joyce . . . ​I was starting to see my own situation as a “Northern poet” more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a w ­ hole’. This recognition infuses and penetrates the poems in his next two books.

Certus  • 29

2 Kinship

Heaney himself remarked that his first four books ­were in a sense one book, culminating in North (1975). It is just as convincing to see the decisive shift occurring between Door into the Dark and the book he published in 1972, ­after returning from California, Wintering Out. Divided into Part I and Part II, the rationale for this distinction appears to be between public and private. And the public ele­ment inevitably comes to grips with the descent into vio­lence experienced in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972: internment, riots, sectarian assassinations, bombs in shopping centres, the Bloody Sunday shootings of civilian protesters by paratroopers. The return from ‘silence, exile and sunning’ could not have presented a bloodier contrast, and ­t hose early 1960s intimations of a move forward ­towards an easier pluralism, and a relaxation of ancient attitudes, had been comprehensively ­derailed. ‘Subtleties and tolerances’, in Heaney’s own phrase, w ­ ere at a discount. 30  •

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poems in Winter­ ing Out bleakly confront buried history, twisted roots, and inheritances (‘A Northern Hoard’, ‘The Wool Trade’, ‘Linen Town’) as well as the dark side of community life. ‘Bye-­Child’ is a quietly horrifying delineation of a rejected child brought up in a hen­house. His notebooks at the time contain several drafts of more openly, even crudely, po­liti­cal poems, using images of explosions and communal vio­lence, though they w ­ ere dropped a­ fter early inclusion in potential contents lists. But ‘subtleties and tolerances’ remained at the heart of Heaney’s life and art, and he evoked them in a quin­tes­sen­tial poem. Though an early draft is called ‘Community Relations’, it was published u ­ nder the less obvious title, ‘The Other Side’—at once evoking the physical geography of neighbourly relations, and a phrase often used in Northern Irish parlance to denote a dif­fer­ent religion. The poem profiles a Protestant farming neighbour of the Heaney ­family at The Wood (the ­family farm near Bellagahy which Heaney’s f­ ather inherited and moved to in 1954). The language the neighbour uses about land and crops, and his visits to the farm­house in the eve­ ning, are laid out with deceptive simplicity—­ culminating in his making an eve­ning visit, and tactfully remaining outside u ­ ntil the f­ amily has finished saying the Rosary. The delicacy of the Kinship  • 31

poem avoids sentimentalism or wishful thinking; its conclusion epitomises exactly what Hea­ ney could do and what his imitators could not. But now I stand b ­ ehind him in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers. He puts a hand in a pocket or taps a l­ ittle tune with the blackthorn shyly, as if he w ­ ere party to lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping. Should I slip away, I won­der, or go up and touch his shoulder And talk about the weather or the price of grass-­seed?

Moreover, written and appearing when it did, the spirit of the poem spoke to ­t hose ‘subtleties and tolerances’, the dignified social observances, which Irish ­people, particularly in Northern rural communities, both recognised and—at that terrifying moment—­clung to. Not for the last time, part of Heaney’s importance to his readership lay in their hope for a better ­f uture. At the same time, in Wintering Out, Heaney was—in his own words—­‘laying claim to a hidden Ulster’. This was done in terms of linguistics, history, empathy with the dispossessed (‘Servant Boy’, ‘Land’), and a sharp and unapologetic as32  •  Chapter 2

sertion of Northern idioms (‘Broagh’, ‘Anahorish’, ‘Nerthus’)—­all characteristics epitomised in the poems which made up Part I of the book, while Part II was apparently more random and personal. More gaily, the conventional rhyming quatrains of ‘A New Song’ return yet again to the implications of naming places, with a strong suggestion that the natives are readying themselves for repossession of territory claimed by planters: But now our river tongues must rise From licking deep in native haunts To flood, with vowelling embrace, Demesnes staked out in consonants. And Castledawson w ­ e’ll enlist And Upperlands, each planted bawn— Like bleaching-­greens resumed by grass— A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

­ ere and elsewhere, Heaney was grasping at cerH tain meta­phors for the rooted tangle of partly suppressed tensions which made up the history of his native place, and he found a way in—­once more—by digging. In this case, it involved opening up bogland. ‘Bog Oak’, the second poem in the book, introduced the theme: a spar of ancient wood, exhumed from the bog to roof a thatched cottage, leads him back through time. But the destiny is Kinship  • 33

not ‘ “oak groves”, no / cutters of mistletoe / in the green clearings’. Instead of En­glish pastoral, he encounters Edmund Spenser, imagining ‘The Faerie Queen’ while surrounded by starving skeletal natives in the Munster ravaged by the brutal—­even genocidal—­Elizabethan conquest (which Spenser defended). This introduces the figure of the poet as observer of surrounding horrors—­a recurrent theme. So is the richly mixed inheritance of language. In ‘Traditions’ (significantly dedicated to Tom Flanagan, his mentor in Irish literary history at Berkeley), the focus on Elizabethan colonisation takes a linguistic turn. I

Our guttural muse was bulled long ago by the alliterative tradition, her uvula grows vestigial, forgotten like the coccyx or a Brigid’s Cross yellowing in some out­house while custom, that ‘most sovereign mistress’, beds us down into the British isles. 34  •  Chapter 2

II

We are to be proud of our Elizabethan En­glish: ‘varsity’, for example, is grass-­roots stuff with us; we ‘deem’ or we ‘allow’ when we suppose and some cherished archaisms are correct Shakespearean. Not to speak of the furled consonants of lowlanders shuttling obstinately between bawn and mossland. III

MacMorris, gallivanting round the Globe, whinged to courtier and groundling who had heard tell of us as ­going very bare of learning, as wild hares, as anatomies of death: ‘What ish my nation?’ And sensibly, though so much ­later, the wandering Bloom replied, ‘Ireland,’ said Bloom, ‘I was born ­here. Ireland.’ Kinship  • 35

Wintering Out is emphatically about language and displacement. Stephen Dedalus’s reflection on his exchange with the En­glish Prefect of Studies in Portrait of the Artist provides the epigraph to ‘The Wool Trade’: ‘How dif­fer­ent are the words “home”, “Christ”, “ale”, “master” on his lips and on mine’. In Heaney’s poem, woollens (soft, autochthonous) are native, replaced by tweed, ‘a stiff cloth with flecks like blood’, and by the Protestant-­dominated linen industry. The long first section of the book moves ­towards ‘A Northern Hoard’, a chilling sequence of short poems about the pervasive atmosphere of vio­lence, against which the ­simple transactions of life and love are helplessly negated. ­Here, again, is the note of impotent self-­reproach: Must I crawl back now, spirochete, abroad between shred-­hung wire and thorn, to confront my smeared doorstep and what lumpy dead? Why do I unceasingly arrive late to condone infected sutures and ill-­k nit bone?

In many of t­ hese poems, such as ‘Midnight’, the Irish landscape is a nightmare terrain, and the homely rural imagery of Heaney’s first work 36  •  Chapter 2

is put to brutal uses. Even in the gentler poems of Part II, currents of vio­lence and desperation pulse through poems dealing with lovers’ quarrels, abandoned c­ hildren, folk tales of mermaids and outcasts. A poem such as ‘The Other Side’ has to be read against this evocation of historical and psychological damage. Above all, the theme of vio­lence observed, encoded, and buried climaxes in an extraordinary and prophetic poem, ‘The Tollund Man’. Sparked by his reading in 1969 of P. V. Glob’s book about prehistoric Danish bog burials, and the evidence that the bodies preserved in peat had been ritually killed, Heaney found an encompassing image for land, vio­ lence, and the preservation of antagonistic identities through the ages. Writing for The Listener in 1974, he described Glob’s work as returning their past to the Danish ­people, and his own journey to Jutland the previous year as a ‘pilgrimage’. ‘I remember driving through flat misty country with a dyke and the North Sea on one hand, low fields on the other, and ­these ­silent hives of earth lying all about, and experiencing a sense of the oddness and ghastliness of the ­whole territory’. He wrote ‘The Tollund Man’ at a sitting, late at night, and changed it very ­little. It first appeared in the summer 1970 issue of Threshold, a Kinship  • 37

Belfast literary journal edited by Mary O’Malley. ‘When I wrote that poem I had a sense of crossing a line ­really, that my ­whole being was involved in the sense of—in the root sense—of religion, being bonded to something, being bound to do something. I felt it a vow’. The body dredged up from the bog has been sacrificed to the sexually voracious goddess, who ‘tightened her torc on him / And opened her fen, / ­Those dark juices working / Him to a saint’s kept body’; but the poet immediately connects the victim to more recent murders in his own country, sectarian rather than ritualistic: The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-­tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young b ­ rothers, trailed For miles along the lines.

­ ere, fi­nally, the poetic stance of observation and H the tribal impulse of identification come powerfully together; he w ­ ill visit Aarhus to look at the corpse’s ‘peat-­brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-­lids, / His pointed skin cap’—­and w ­ ill imbibe ‘something of his sad freedom’. 38  •  Chapter 2

Out ­t here in Jutland In the old man-­k illing parishes I ­w ill feel lost, Unhappy and at home.

The impact of this last signature stanza haunts the reader long a­ fter the book is closed. It was prophetic in more ways than one, delivering its impact with blunt force. (In e­ arlier drafts, the parishes had been ‘blood-­letting’ and ‘throat-­ cutting’ before hitting on the unequivocal and plainspoken ‘man-­killing’—­a characteristic Hea­ ney resolution.) The poem raised two questions which lay at the centre of the growing debate on Heaney’s work: first, how far does the image of ancient, repetitive, sacrificial vio­lence imply a defeatist and even acquiescent response to recurrent atrocity in our own day, and second, how far does the poet’s stance as observer and recorder entail or allow identification with victimhood? ­These questions would be raised when Heaney published North five years ­later. In the interim, the Heaneys had taken the decisive step of leaving Northern Ireland and moving south to the Republic—­a rented cottage near Ashford, County Wicklow, an hour’s drive from Dublin. The move more or less coincided with the publication of Wintering Out. It involved giving up his post as a lecturer at Queen’s University, and subsisting Kinship  • 39

on freelance earnings and (­after some time) his wife’s teaching c­ areer. It also raised questions about the perspective from which he would write about his native province, especially its ‘oddness and ghastliness’. Th ­ ere is a distinct defensiveness in his account of the decision to move, as given in a 1979 interview: I left in 1972 not ­really out of any rejection of Belfast but b ­ ecause . . . ​Well, I had written three books, had published two, and one was due to come out. I had the name for being a poet but was also discovering myself being interviewed as, more or less, a spokesman for the Catholic minority during this early stage of the trou­bles. I found the w ­ hole question of what was the status of art within my own life and what is an artist to do in a po­liti­cal situation very urgent m ­ atters. I found that my life, most of the time, was being spent in classrooms, with friends, at vari­ous social events, and I d ­ idn’t feel that my work was sufficiently at the centre of my life, so I de­ cided I would resign; and now I realise that my life was the age that is prob­ably crucial in every­body’s life—­around thirty-­t hree. I was ­going through a sort of rite of passage, I suppose. I wanted to resign. I wanted to leave Belfast b ­ ecause I wanted to step out of the 40  •  Chapter 2

rhythms I had established; I wanted to be alone with myself.

Nearer the time (February 1973), he wrote a long and self-­exculpatory letter insisting that he had not evaded taking up a po­liti­cal position in his work, citing ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, ‘At a Potato Digging’, ‘­England’, and several other poems. Simply being called ‘Seamus’, he caustically pointed out, made his position on Northern Ireland implicitly clear, as the name’s Gaelic provenance implied a nationalist background—­ ‘sure-­fire Pape’, he would ­later put it in a famous polemical poem. Nonetheless, he emphasised unapologetically that he was addressing an audience in Britain as much as in Ireland and—­ startlingly—­t hat politics w ­ ere indistinguishable from history, as far as he was concerned. When politics did come into a poem, it was not an act of summoning but the reflection of a cultural accumulation. He would have liked to write a major poem about Bloody Sunday, but the inspiration ­didn’t come, and he felt that the ballad he did write was inadequate. In the same letter, he made the point that inherited partisanship led to a continuous cycle of revenge. The defensiveness was also a response to the view of Dublin taken by certain circles in Belfast, especially t­ hose around The Honest Ulsterman: Kinship  • 41

Simmons affected to believe that literary life in the North was morally superior to the ‘gang warfare’ of Dublin, and even Mahon claimed in 1970 that Northern poets operated in a milieu of broader relevance than the ‘narcissistic provincialism’ of the South. (He would nonetheless end up living in County Cork.) To Northern literati, literary culture in the Republic might be dismissed as rhetorical, dishonest (Edna Longley’s description), and inbred; an anonymous columnist in The Honest Ulsterman went so far as to define it in terms of misogyny, sentimental male friendships, snobbery (‘the Dublin sickness’), alcoholism, and churchiness—in the writer’s opinion, ‘traits that may be associated with a homosexual community’. The overcompensation is palpable, but the resentment was real. To some Northern minds, Heaney, already suspect from his Californian sojourn and Faber connections, had decamped to somewhere that suggested a mixture of Grub Street and Sodom rather than a damp cottage on an obscure country road in County Wicklow. At the same time, Dublin was within easy reach, and life in Glanmore was not a hermit’s existence. He presented a fortnightly book programme on Irish radio for the next five years, and almost immediately was appointed to the Irish

42  •  Chapter 2

Arts Council. But the work which germinated at Glanmore established his fame at a new level. His next book would take as subject the province he had left ­behind: early drafts ­were called ‘Northerners’ and ‘The North’, which would have flagged up yet more clearly that this was a testament to the part of the island increasingly seen from ‘the South’ as a place apart. Instead, Heaney reduced it to the forceful single word which suggested a direction as well as a place. The frisson of reading North in 1975 was unforgettable: a chill, and a recognition. The inheritance of Northern horrors had been approached by other poets, notably John Montague and Thomas Kinsella, in their dif­fer­ent ways; but Heaney’s excavation of what he once referred to as ‘the tribal dirt’ was overwhelming. Readers thought, ‘So it can be written about, and this is how’. ‘The Tollund Man’ had shown the way into mythic and atavistic treatments of violent antagonisms, as had many poems in Wintering Out; North echoed this but with unrepentant decisiveness as well as a kind of shocking panache. The tone is distinctly Yeatsian: implicitly in phrases and allusions, explic­itly in using a Yeats epigraph for ‘The Singing School’. Above all, it is the Yeats of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, and perhaps also the Yeats who, in his philosophical

Kinship  • 43

meditation A Vision, reflected on the terrifying power of myth and on cycles of history. ‘It is as though myth and fact, united ­until the exhaustion of the Re­nais­sance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth—­the Mask—­which now but gropes its way out of the mind’s dark but w ­ ill shortly pursue and terrify’. Initially, Eliot was invoked too; an early draft of the collection was preceded by the lines from ‘­Little Gidding’ which begin ‘This is the use of memory, / for liberation’. This epigraph was abandoned, but ‘­Little Gidding’ would remain in Heaney’s mind, pervading the long poem ‘Station Island’ ten years ­later. The influence of ­t hese g­ reat precursors was less obvious than the elemental charge of the poems about Northern vio­lence, though they bear out Eliot’s idea that poetry was capable of ‘fusing ancient and civilised mentalities’. In 1974, electrified by reading Brian Friel’s play Volun­ teers, Heaney sent him some of the poems that would appear in North, pointing out that he and Friel w ­ ere mining the same seam of territory: ‘the communal generator is kicking into life’. Like North, Friel’s play deals with archaeology and vio­lence; interned po­liti­cal prisoners are paroled to work on a Viking site, for which collaboration

44  •  Chapter 2

they w ­ ill be punished and prob­ably killed by their fellow internees back in the cells. But Friel’s use of irony and a desperate humour are not echoed in North. In the notebook in which Hea­ ney drafted many of the poems, images of bones, exhumations, and vio­lence recur (including aggressive sexual relations). The impact was all the greater b ­ ecause the book opened with two poems ‘in dedication’ which struck a gentle note. ‘Sunlight’ is an enduringly beautiful evocation of his aunt Mary Heaney, who lived with his ­family: a hot after­noon in the farm­house kitchen, peacefulness, the baking of bread, and a recognition of love— like a tinsmith’s scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal-­bin.

The companion poem, ‘The Seed Cutters’, evokes the work of halving seed potatoes in the cold open air, likened to a scene from Breughel. But the poems which follow in Part I of North are not comforting. They move from archaeology to ritual to funerals: Now as news comes in of each neighbourly murder we pine for ceremony, customary rhythms:

Kinship  • 45

the temperate footsteps of a cortège, winding past each blinded home. I would restore the g­ reat chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre ­under the cupmarked stones.

This poem fi­nally envisions a serpentine pro­ cession winding through the Gap of the North down to the Boyne, returning ‘past Strang and Carling fjords, / the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated . . .’. The theme of Nordic raiders, the voices of ‘vio­lence and epiphany’, is sustained in a series of poems about archaeological remnants from Viking Dublin, bones, the secrets of the earth. Fi­nally, we confront in ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bog Queen’ the chilling but intensely sexualised image of a ­woman buried in ‘the black maw of the peat’, ­u ntil resurrected, like Lady Lazarus. The theme climaxes in a series of poems about the sacrificial dead—­such as ‘The Grauballe Man’, with his chin ‘a visor / raised above the vent / of his slashed throat’. As if he had been poured in tar, he lies

46  •  Chapter 2

on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan’s foot or a wet swamp root.

More controversially, ‘Punishment’ conjures up with unbearable exactness the image of a girl killed for sexual transgression: her shaved head like a stubble of black corn, her blindfold a soiled ban­dage, her noose a ring to store the memories of love.

And ­here—­fi­nally—­the poet introduces himself, to transcribe a daring arc forward to the pre­sent: My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know,

Kinship  • 47

The stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain’s exposed and darkened combs, your muscles’ webbing and all your numbered bones: I who have stood dumb when your betraying ­sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.

The reference to w ­ omen in Northern Ireland punished for g­oing out with British soldiers was unmistakeable, as was the sexual imagery which pervaded the following pieces, ‘Strange Fruit’ and ‘Kinship’. Other poems in the collection, ‘Ocean’s Love to Ireland’ and ‘Act of Union’, followed this theme more graphically, using the meta­phor of sexual intercourse as an image for British colonialism. As Heaney put it in a broadcast, Ireland was entered and possessed by ­England, planted with En­g lish seed, and then withdrawn from—­leaving her preg48  •  Chapter 2

nant with ‘an in­de­pen­dent life called Ulster’. Intriguingly, and rather obscurely, he added that ‘Act of Union’ might be a private love poem rather than a public poem. Inevitably, reactions to North also brought into focus the erotics of Heaney’s poetry and the pre­sen­ta­tion of submissive w ­ omen therein. The form of the poems was also assertive, and new. In 1973, while he was writing them, Heaney remarked that he thought it necessary, as an Irish writer using the En­glish lyric tradition, ‘to take the En­glish lyric and make it eat stuff that it has never eaten before . . . ​like all the messy and, it would seem, incomprehensible obsessions in the North, and make it still an En­glish lyric’. The result was what Neil Corcoran has called ‘a thin quatrain, now grown almost skeletal’, strongly punctuated, with many hyphenated portmanteau words, and uncompromising dialect. The tone of North, no less than the content, was assertively unique. ‘The poems in North ­were grimly executed’, Heaney said long afterwards, ‘and I ­really like them ­because ­they’re odd and hard and contrary’. Part II of the book moved into a dif­fer­ent register, with the long, discursive, ballad-­like ‘What­ ever You Say Say Nothing’, quickly celebrated as a laceratingly humorous commentary on the way sectarian signals operate in ‘the North’. Kinship  • 49

‘Religion’s never mentioned ­here,’ of course. ‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue. ‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse. Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung In the ­great dykes the Dutchman made To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus. Yet for all this art and sedentary trade I am incapable. The famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing Where to be saved you only must save face And what­ever you say, you say nothing. Smoke-­signals are loud-­mouthed compared with us: Manoeuvrings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses With hardly an exception to the rule That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-­fire Pape. O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, Of open minds as open as a trap, 50  •  Chapter 2

Where tongues lie coiled, as u ­ nder flames lie wicks, Where half of us, as in a wooden ­horse, ­Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks, Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

The informal quatrains of this idiomatic tour de force (in an early draft ‘yes, yes’ was replaced by ‘fuck it’) derived from verse letters periodically sent by Heaney to his friends. It was partnered by the equally personal and autobiographical ‘Singing School’, dedicated to his old friend and schoolmate Seamus Deane: homesickness, apprentice efforts at poetry, youthful courting ended by a police check—­and the discovery, yet again, of language and what it signified in a colonised country. This time, ­t here is an Orwellian twist: Ulster was British, but with no rights on The En­glish lyric: all around us, though We ­hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

In this last section, Heaney also introduced previously uncollected poems about Northern Ireland, written just before the outbreak of the Trou­bles, such as ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966’. But ‘Exposure’, the envoi poem which ends this extraordinary collection, is solidly and precisely fixed in the South—­opening (in an echo of Kinship  • 51

MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’) with ‘It is December in Wicklow’ and moving to a despairing self-examination. How did I end up like this? I often think of my friends’ Beautiful prismatic counselling And the anvil brains of some who hate me As I sit weighing and weighing My responsible tristia. But the poet sits amid his trees, refusing ‘the diamond absolutes’. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner émigré, grown long-­haired And thoughtful; a wood-­kerne Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling ­Every wind that blows; Who, blowing up t­ hese sparks For their meagre heat, have missed The once-­in-­a-­lifetime portent, The comet’s pulsing ­rose.

The first drafts of this poem ­were yet more obviously autobiographical; it was originally titled ‘Heaney’s Fancy’, a reference to a folk-­tune but 52  •  Chapter 2

obviously something more. Heaney carefully delineated what he was attempting in a piece for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin. ‘Perhaps the first function of a poem is to assuage the poet’s need for it to exist. For a while I found my needs satisfying themselves in images drawn from Anglo-­ Saxon kennings, Icelandic sagas, Viking excavations and Danish and Irish bogs, and the result is the bulk of the poems in the first section of North. The second section is the result of a need to be explicit about pressures and prejudices watermarked into the psyche of anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland’. The ‘bog bank’, he added, is a memory bank, and the etymology of words such as ‘bog’ and ‘moss’ helped diagnose ‘a past of invasion, colonization and language shift, a past which as Seamus Deane has pointed out “the Irish are conscious of as a pro­cess which is evidently unfulfilled” ’. But a­ fter this po­liti­cally provocative point, Heaney promptly added, ‘During the last few years ­t here has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland should “say” something about “the situation”, but in the end they w ­ ill only be worth listening to if they are saying something about and to themselves. The truest poetry may be the most feigning but t­ here are contexts, and Northern Ireland is one of them, where to feign a passion is as reprehensible as to feign its absence’. Kinship  • 53

In this statement, as in ‘Exposure’, it is as if, with true poetic prescience, he is anticipating the reactive explosion which the book would set off. Its impact was power­f ul, with wide-­ranging and admiring review coverage, followed by accumulating literary prizes. Robert Lowell made the celebrated assertion that this book confirmed Heaney as the best Irish poet since Yeats—an association enthusiastically repeated by Clive James. Helen Vendler l­ ater compared the importance of its impact to that of Eliot’s Prufrock. Taken with Heaney’s apparently effortless anointing by Faber, the Times Literary Supplement, and other arbiters of the metropolitan cultural market, a more mixed reaction in Irish literary circles might be expected. This was not unreasonable, given that Heaney’s admirers in Britain and the USA often seemed unconscious of other Irish poets labouring in the post-­Yeatsian Irish vineyard (Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon, to name but five). The adverse response came more slowly but with surprising vehemence—­a nd mostly in Ireland. Many shared the sombre admiration expressed by Conor Cruise O’Brien: ‘I have read many pessimistic analyses of “Northern Ireland”, but none that has the bleak conclusiveness of ­t hese poems’. But some reactions w ­ ere viscerally 54  •  Chapter 2

antagonistic. Several of t­ hese attacks have faded to deserved obscurity. One particularly self-­ regarding critique, published in the Irish Times, managed to accuse Heaney of both populist opportunism and writing principally to please ‘the academics’, while refusing to confront the actuality of the Northern crisis. An equally risible onslaught by James Simmons, once a companion in poetic apprenticeship, may have hurt more, but Simmons’s slack and chatty rhodomontade, ­u nder the faux-­bonhomous title ‘The Trou­ble with Seamus’, conveys ­little more than festering jealousy, while his ill-­concealed accusation that Heaney condoned paramilitary vio­lence and displayed a perspective ‘clogged with the fag-­end of Catholicism’ effectively torpedoed any claims the author might have had to impartial enquiry. It is more surprising that theoretically sophisticated critics, such as the academic David Lloyd, often ended up in a similarly reductionist stance—­t hough in Lloyd’s view, Heaney’s crime was to collude with an elite view of colonial vio­ lence characteristic of the late-­capitalist culture in which he was imbricated. This involved readings of the poems in North which ­were skewed and s­ haped to very par­tic­u­lar purposes indeed. ­There ­were subtler reactions too: Heaney’s brilliant protégé and close friend, the pyrotechnical poet Paul Muldoon, mischievously subverted Kinship  • 55

Heaney’s style and preoccupations in a celebrated poem called ‘The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants’, and g­ ently admonished him not to take himself as seriously as reviewers such as ‘the power-­ crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-­ powered Clive James’. Muldoon could get away with this. Edna Longley compared him to the young James Joyce, a wunderkind scorning the pieties of his elders, with Heaney (unfairly) cast in the role of an antique nationalist such as Daniel Corkery. The reservations expressed by two heavyweight figures in the Northern Irish literary world carry more substance. Ciaran Carson, a gifted poet and as fiercely intelligent as Simmons was lazily obtuse, took an oddly reductionist line on North, accusing Heaney of a defeatist and even aestheticising approach to the history of vio­lence. While giving some of the poems their considerable due, he dismissed ‘Punishment’: ‘it is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natu­ral; ­these t­hings have always happened; they happened then, they happened now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution. It is as if t­ here never w ­ ere and never w ­ ill be any po­liti­cal consequences of such acts’. The conclusion to his angry review in The Honest Ulsterman implied a certain amount of local grievance ­towards Heaney, perhaps for having ‘escaped 56  •  Chapter 2

from the massacre’. ‘Every­one was anxious that North should be a g­ reat book; when it turned out that it w ­ asn’t it was treated as one anyway, and made into an Ulster ’75 Exhibition of the good that can come out of Troubled Times’. Edna Longley’s critique was also minted in Belfast, but was longer in the making and subtler in its approach. Her long and thoughtful essay on North was first published in 1982, and covers far more ground than this one collection; it is an exhaustive analy­sis of Heaney’s poetic stance, specifically from the point in 1969 when, in his own words, ‘the prob­lems of poetry moved from simply being a ­matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for symbols and images adequate to our predicament’. In her view, he is ‘politicising the terrain’ of his first two books, a pro­cess initiated in Wintering Out and confirmed in North. Part of her reservations concerned Heaney’s use of Viking imagery, which she saw as unconvincing costume drama; but her disdain for Heaney’s importation of Norse raiders into the ‘not very Nordic north of Ireland’ deliberately misses the point. Heaney’s Viking theme takes in Dublin as well as the north-­east, and widens the ­whole aspect of historical inheritance, away from the antagonisms set up by the traditions of King Billy and King James—­and, for that ­matter, Protestant and Kinship  • 57

Catholic. It is another way of linking Ireland to Northern Eu­rope, through connections which predate the Reformation while still invoking vio­ lence, ritual, and expropriation. More profoundly, Longley took Heaney sharply to task for writing—as she conceived it—­ from a standpoint that accepts unquestionably just ­those ‘tribal’ identifications which should be queried, and in a sense justifying both the attitudes of antagonism and the actions that stem from them: ‘Kinship’ in her view is presented in ‘astonishingly Catholic and Nationalist terms’. This seems to miss the ironising distance imposed by Heaney’s poetic perspective, as well as his determination to abstract himself from too close a tribal identification. Her critique of what she calls his ‘landscape-­ sex-­Ireland poems’ is more to the point, and would be followed by ­others. ­Here, she sees the subtle congruences of poems in Wintering Out (especially ‘The Other Side’) reduced to a crude ­matter of equations. But her principal criticism lies elsewhere. Discussing Heaney’s 1977 interview with Seamus Deane, Longley remarked that it ‘epitomises the intensive pressure on Hea­ ney, including his own sense of duty, to be more Irish, to be more po­liti­cal, to “try and touch the ­people”, to do Yeats’s job again instead of his own . . . ​it heralds successive, obsessive articles 58  •  Chapter 2

on the relevance of his poetry to the Northern conflict’. But at the same time, her critique determinedly and often brilliantly excavates the po­ liti­cal implications of Heaney’s stance in North—­ while ­doing less than justice to Heaney’s equally exacting determination in that book to avoid just this kind of reductionism.

Kinship  • 59

3 The Same Root

When North was published in 1975, Heaney had only a year left living among the trees and fields of County Wicklow. In November  1976, the ­family moved to a ­house in Sandymount, Dublin, looking out over the strand walked by James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, and not far from the Martello tower at Sandycove where the novelist briefly lived, and immortalised in the opening scene of Ulysses. But the cottage at Glanmore remained a sacred space, and Heaney would eventually buy it from the friend who had let it to him (at a minimal rent) for the four years of vital creativity from 1972 to 1976, a period which he would ­later see as ‘the most intense phase’ of his writing life. The distance and concentration conferred by his upstairs study in the cottage also enabled a deliberate shift to a more direct and personal voice, evidenced in his next collection, Field Work, published in 1979:

60  •

It was like starting again in that I wanted to use the first person singular, to use ‘I’ in the poems and to make it closer to the ‘I’ of my own life, the grown-up ‘I’ that I use in my conversation and in my confidences with ­people. I wanted p ­ eople who know me to feel, when they lifted the book, that this voice and the noises in the poems ­were quite close to the noises that I would normally make in friendly, intimate situations. I remember that I wrote to somebody and said that ‘I ­don’t want any more doors into the dark: I want a door into the light’.

(That ‘somebody’ was, significantly, the playwright Brian Friel.) This is just one of several occasions when Hea­ney describes his sojourn in Wicklow as a ‘growing-up’ pro­cess; the adored prodigy of his Derry childhood and the magnetic young star of the Belfast literary scene ­were maturing into a figure of gravitas and authority, though the sociability and irreverence remained. His long connection with Harvard began at this time, and—­a rising from his developing prowess as a lecturer—he also began to publish the lucent but heavyweight essays on poets and poetry which would be gathered into vari­ous collections. But

The Same Root  • 61

while the personal perspective of many poems in Field Work struck a new, direct note, the preoccupations of North remained equally intense. Looking at Heaney’s just-­acquired h ­ ouse on Strand Road, his friend, the novelist John McGahern, obliquely referencing Leopold Bloom’s joke that an Irishman’s ­house is his coffin, had equably remarked, ‘Well, y­ ou’ve bought the coffin’. Reflecting the accelerated pro­g ress of Hea­ ney’s life, if one preoccupation of his work in the ­later 1970s is love, the other is death. The power­f ul series of elegies placed prominently in Field Work bears this out. ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ visualises the death of Heaney’s second cousin Colum McCartney, murdered by sectarian assassins on a lonely country road, ‘where you ­weren’t known, and far from what you knew: / The lowland clays and ­waters of Lough Beg, / Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew’. Returning to that familiar familial ground, where McCartney’s f­amily grazed their ­cattle, Heaney encounters his cousin as a revenant: I turn ­because the sweeping of your feet Has ­stopped ­behind me, to find you on your knees With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes, Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass 62  •  Chapter 3

And gather up cold handfuls of the dew To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud. I lift you u ­ nder the arms and lay you flat. With rushes that shoot green again, I plait Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.

The image, like the poem’s epigraph, comes from Dante’s Purgatorio, and Dante is a constant reference point in Field Work—­a presence that would become even more central in Heaney’s next volume. Yeats equally haunts Heaney’s work of this period, and another elegy, ‘Casualty’, echoes the formal economy of Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’—­all the more appositely, as the poem is written in memory of a fisherman, Louis O’Neill, murdered, prob­ably by Protestant paramilitaries, when out on an eve­ning’s drinking. I loved his ­whole manner, Sure-­footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman’s quick eye And turned, observant back.

Heaney knew him as a regular in a pub owned by Marie Heaney’s ­father, but O’Neill was drinking in an unfamiliar haunt that fateful night ­because most pubs had closed early as a tribute The Same Root  • 63

to the funerals of the demonstrators killed in Derry on Bloody Sunday. Thus, O’Neill’s fate raised the question of flouting the pressures brought to bear by the community, as well as the rancid hatred of sectarianism. He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming t­ owards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe’s complicity? ‘Now ­you’re supposed to be An educated man,’ I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me The right answer to that one.’

­ ere are several more elegies in Field Work: Th ‘A Postcard from North Antrim’ commemorates a murdered social worker, Sean Armstrong, who was prob­ably a closer friend of Heaney’s than McCartney or O’Neill, but whose poetic memorial is a less substantial achievement. Another poem, ‘­After a Killing’, was suggested by the murder of the British Ambassador to Ireland, Chris64  •  Chapter 3

topher Ewart-­Biggs, but concentrates on the image of ‘two young men with r­ ifles on the hill, / Profane and bracing as their instruments’, leaving the scene of the assassination. In fact, Ewart-­ Biggs and a female colleague w ­ ere blown up by a bomb placed u ­ nder a culvert outside the gate of his h ­ ouse while his three young c­ hildren played on the lawn nearby. Heaney would ­later be a strong supporter of the literary prize founded by Ewart-­Biggs’s w ­ idow for a work increasing understanding between Ireland and Britain, and he spoke with revulsion of the killing in a ­later interview. But the poem invokes a less squalid image than a bombed car and bereft ­children, recalling instead ‘the unquiet’ found­ers of the Irish Republic in the war of in­de­pen­dence. Another elegy, written in 1977, does not commemorate a victim of ‘The Trou­bles’ but rather a fellow-­poet. Heaney’s friendship with Robert Lowell was short but intense, cut off by Lowell’s sudden death in 1977. Lowell had hailed Heaney’s work early on, and they had met briefly in 1972. The friendship was soldered in the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 1975, in which Heaney took a leading part. Lowell’s aristocratic wife, Caroline Blackwood, was from Northern Ireland (if from a distinctly dif­fer­ent kind of Northern Ireland to Hea­ ney’s). They spent some time living near Dublin in 1976–7, and the two ­couples got on. Lowell The Same Root  • 65

presented the Duff Cooper Prize to Heaney for North, a tense occasion, since the famously bipolar American poet was afflicted by a manic high at the time. And Heaney was chosen to speak at Lowell’s memorial ser­v ice in London (to the annoyance of some Lowell aficionados). Lowell’s ­later collections such as History and The Dolphin made a strong impact on Heaney, and contributed to his approach to ‘personal’ themes in poems in Field Work. If Dante hovers ­behind the subject ­matter of many of the poems in that volume, the colloquial sometimes inquisitorial tone strikes echoes from Lowell—as does the subjectivity and unashamed intimacy of the poems which deal with f­amily life and love. The American poet’s readiness to take on translations, or versions, of poetry in other languages also prompted Heaney to write, for instance, the grisly ‘Ugolino’ which ends Field Work on a brutal note of mutual torture and hatred, derived yet again from Dante but implicitly echoing the internecine antipathies of his native province. Heaney’s friendship with Lowell amplified his increasing familiarity with the American literary scene. He returned to Berkeley as the visiting Beckman Professor in 1976, and job offers came from Prince­ton, Michigan, and Columbia, but his early ambition to teach in an American uni66  •  Chapter 3

versity had now dis­appeared. He had acquired an ease and assurance with wider horizons, along with a canny comprehension of poetic, no less than religio-­ethnic, tribes. ‘Lowell’, he l­ ater remarked, ‘was implicated in the Paleface versus Redskin version of American literary history. It was a simplification but it was a way of lining up. I was generally in the Redskin/Lowell camp, whereas the Longleys would have been more for the Paleface Wilbur. And they would have held up Derek Mahon’s translation of Villon, in his first book, as a superior job to Lowell’s—­which it prob­ably is. And they would have forwarded the claims of Larkin over Hughes. And so on. ­These w ­ ere the currents we w ­ ere creating and navigating among ourselves’. But he still drew on his established strengths. One of the most accomplished poems in Field Work was written just a­ fter the publication of North, and showcased the power and heft of Hea­ ney’s early work, carry­ing the stamp of his authorship as clearly as that first signature poem, ‘Digging’. ‘The Harvest Bow’ is also about his ­father, but more subtly and delicately enshrines in ‘a throwaway love-­knot of straw’ his memories of paternal closeness and unspoken affection. The loops of the straw emblem are a kind of magic lens through which a ­family history is envisioned, rather as a seashell may be listened to The Same Root  • 67

for the sound of the sea. At the end, it also expresses an artistic credo: The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser— Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

­Family love on another level is expressed in the series of ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ dedicated to Ann Saddlemyer, the owner of the eponymous cottage, but intensely realising the sense of married life t­ here, with its occasional tensions as well as its unforced intimacies. If romantic and inspirational, the l­ittle gate-­lodge was also cramped, often damp, and difficult to keep warm. The Hea­ neys now had three ­children, and both quiet and space had to be hard-­won. But the life of a full-­time writer, albeit with an increasingly busy freelance ­career as broadcaster, critic, and (from 1975) part-­time lecturer at a teacher training college in South Dublin, is evocatively conjured up in the ten sonnets which form the centre and hinge of Field Work (the cover illustration of the book confirmed this, showing an ancient map of Glanmore and environs). Originally published ­under the title ‘Hedge School’, they 68  •  Chapter 3

chart a pro­cess of learning and love. A ­ fter the winter ploughing of ‘opened ground’ in the first sonnet, the warp and weft of the rural year supply much less of the subject m ­ atter than the life within the cottage’s walls, and the concentration on remembered ‘spots of time’ brought on by solitude. In one of ­those Wordsworthian moments, an intense reverie is subverted, Lowell style, by a sharp rejoinder from the poet’s wife, unprepared to be consigned to a Dorothy role. And though the landscape seen through the win­dows is realised in three-­dimensional vividness, the Heaney thumbprint of elemental threat is ­t here too—­rats, blood, danger. Outside the kitchen win­dow a black rat Sways on the briar like infected fruit: ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not Imagining t­ hings. Go you out to it.’ Did we come to the wilderness for this?

Also pre­sent is a power­ful charge of erotic desire, though underscored by a note of fear and insecurity: as the poet lies ‘upstairs shaking’ in anticipation of making love, his mind is clouded by visions of war, carrion, ‘blood-­boltered’ ghosts on the road. Even in the final beautiful sonnet, a memory of the lovers’ first night together is brought on by a dream in which their bodies, The Same Root  • 69

‘darkly asperged and censed, w ­ ere laid out / Like breathing effigies on a raised ground’, Larkin is subtly referenced h ­ ere, as well as—­ more directly—­Thomas Wyatt. And in that dream I dreamt—­how like you this?— Our first night years ago in that ­hotel When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us t­ owards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our separateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming f­ aces.

Other love poems in Field Work demonstrate an ease and accomplishment often lacking in the genre. Heaney mischievously recalled, in a l­ater interview, observing a fellow-­poet unintentionally convulsing his audience at a reading by launching into a poem addressed to his wife, which began ‘I like you in your underwear . . .’. (Charitably, he left the poet unnamed.) Heaney’s own erotic poetry never erred into this kind of bald assertiveness—­even where a ‘black, plunge-­ line nightdress’ was concerned, as in ‘The Skunk’. Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail Paraded the skunk. Night a­ fter night I expected her like a visitor. 70  •  Chapter 3

The refrigerator whinnied into silence. My desk light softened beyond the verandah. Small oranges loomed in the orange tree. I began to be tense as a voyeur. ­ fter eleven years I was composing A Love-­letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’ Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel Had mutated into the night earth and air Of California. The beautiful, useless Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence. The aftermath of a mouthful of wine Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow. And ­t here she was, the intent and glamorous, Ordinary, mysterious skunk, Mythologized, demythologized, Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me. It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your ­t hings at bedtime, Your head-­down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-­line nightdress.

This is one of a series of powerfully realised erotic poems where physical bodily details (vaccination The Same Root  • 71

marks, a swimmer’s wet back emerging from a pool) are blended with images from the natu­ral world (a sand martin’s nest, laundry spread on gorse bushes, the ‘catspiss smell’ of flowering currant) to invoke a world of love. Heaney’s work in the l­ ater 1970s demonstrated a formidably authoritative range. His international profile was now decisively raised. He was a regular presence on the arts-­festival cir­cuit from Macedonia to Mexico; his visiting stint as a professor at Berkeley in 1976 was followed by a guest appointment at Harvard in 1979, which would be regularised in 1982 when he left his post at Carysfort College in Dublin, which had allowed him a fairly long leash. Faber published his Selected Poems in 1980. Si­mul­ta­neously, the workload imposed by his teaching duties, and the plethora of guest lectures which he was asked to give, is evidenced by the essays gathered in a volume called Preoccupations, also published in 1980. The epigraph is taken from one of Yeats’s early reflections about the theatre, and writing for a perceived audience: If we understand our own minds, and the ­t hings that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move o ­ thers, not ­because we have understood or thought about ­t hose ­others, but ­because all life has 72  •  Chapter 3

the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, ‘The end of art is peace’, and the following of art is ­little dif­fer­ent from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands’.

Yeats features prominently in the heavyweight essays which form the centrepiece of the volume, along with Heaney’s other touchstones, Words­ worth, Hopkins, and Kavanagh. They are followed by less substantial reviews, though ­here too the subjects are significant and influential: Mandelstam, Hewitt, MacDiarmaid, and, of course, Lowell. The question mark in the title of the essay ‘Yeats as an Example?’ (which began life as a lecture for the University of Surrey in 1978) is significant. Heaney closely interrogates the integration of life and work in a poet’s enterprise, and the extent to which—as Yeats famously declared—­the artist has to choose perfecting one at the expense of the other. Heaney’s reaction is strikingly personal: I admire the way that Yeats took on the world on his own terms, defined the areas where he would negotiate and where he would not; the way he never accepted the terms of another’s argument but propounded his own. I assume that this peremptoriness, this apparent arrogance, is exemplary in an artist, that it is The Same Root  • 73

proper and even necessary for him to insist on his own language, his own vision, his own terms of reference. This ­w ill often seem like irresponsibility or affectation, sometimes like callousness, but from the artist’s point of view it is an act of integrity, or an act of cunning to protect the integrity.

The essay is intensively and very specifically grounded in biography: first, the actions, statements, and involvements of Yeats’s early life, when he was making his way and becoming famous; then, his re-­making of himself and his work in m ­ iddle age; fi­nally, the grandeur and ac­ cep­tance of his late poems, notably the vision of death and transfiguration in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’. Heaney would return to t­ hese themes in a ­later lecture on Yeats, but what is striking in 1978 is his comprehension of Yeats as ‘the ideal example for a poet approaching m ­ iddle age—­the importance of continual revision, of pushing the borders of form and structure in order to expand the poet’s range, of accepting the real­ity of the poetic vocation’. While the perfection of the work is given its full due, Heaney also considers the life as it is lived, and the closeness with which the pro­cess is woven into Yeats’s developing art. Though this was a markedly unfashionable focus of criticism at the time, it has lasted far better 74  •  Chapter 3

than the fash­ion­able dictates of the 1970s and 1980s. It also bears a strong autobiographical thumbprint. The essays reflect the reading he had been immersed in, from Icelandic sagas to Yeats’s prose, during his retreats to Glanmore. The expansiveness and enthusiasm of Heaney’s critical writing is infectious; his essays give some inkling of the consummate lecturer he had become. A constant theme is Eliot’s idea of ‘the auditory imagination’—­the subconscious depth charge set off by the alchemy of rhythm, stress, and metre. But Heaney also linked this to a cultural, almost tribal sense of identification—­ pursuing this theme daringly in an essay called ‘­Englands of the Mind’, which began life as the 1976 Beckman Lecture at Berkeley. ­Here, he explored the characteristic styles of three con­temporary poets—­ Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill—­ each of whom he sees as transmitting a par­tic­u­lar kind of En­glishness. In claiming this, Heaney is also asserting his own right to ­handle En­g lish modes, the very subject of the En­glish language, with authority and verve—­and to ‘celebrate indomitable En­g lishry’, as he reworked the Yeatsian injunction in applying it to Hill. It is a tactful essay—­those who feel that Hughes can on occasion be self-­parodic, Larkin bloodless, and Hill pompous w ­ ill not find corroboration h ­ ere. The Same Root  • 75

But it also articulates a claim on critical territory which might seem unexpected back in Belfast, if not in Berkeley. And he is dealing with En­glish nationalism which, even if ‘composed and tempered’, is nationalism nonetheless. In conclusion, he suggested ‘that En­glish poets are being forced to explore not just the ­matter of ­England, but what is the ­matter with ­England. I have simply presumed to share in that exploration through the medium which ­England has, for better or worse, impressed on us all, the En­glish language itself’. Even in laid-­back California, the inheritance of E ­ ngland’s ‘impressing itself ” on Ireland in other ways must have come to the reader’s mind. In the early 1970s, Heaney had written some atmospheric journalistic pieces about the situation in Belfast; one of them was reprinted in Pre­ occupations, but the only other piece in the book which mentioned the Trou­bles of the province was an essay called ‘Feeling into Words’, originally a lecture to the Royal Society of Lit­er­a­ture in 1974. In an intensely autobiographical reflection on the creation of his own poetic technique, Heaney invokes Robert Frost’s idea that a poem begins as a ‘lump in the throat’, which turns itself into a thought, and then finds words. The concluding part of the lecture described the evolution of his ‘bog poems’ and the ways he had 76  •  Chapter 3

found ‘befitting emblems of adversity’ (Yeats again) for writing about vio­lence. He argued that, as for Yeats writing during the Irish Civil War, it was now once again incumbent upon Irish poets ‘to define and interpret the pre­sent by bringing it into significant relationship with the past’. No sooner is this said, though, than the next (and last) sentence of the essay draws back, warning that this ‘places daunting pressures and responsibilities on anyone who would risk the name of poet’. By the end of the de­c ade, with Northern ­Ireland spiralling further into bloody warfare, ­those pressures and responsibilities presented themselves more and more urgently. Given the power­ful commentary on the Northern Trou­bles provided by North, and the prominence of elegies for the victims of sectarian killings in Field Work, the absence of this theme from Preoccupations is striking. ­There ­were moments when (as he ­later said) a ‘timely utterance’ had to be made. He wrote, but did not include in l­ater collections, a ballad about the Bloody Sunday atrocity in 1972, reprinting it on the thirtieth anniversary of the tragedy. The 1981 Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger strikes in the Maze prison found their way into his poetry, and the publicity director of Sinn Féin, Danny Morrison, approached him for advice about publishing a book of Prison Poems The Same Root  • 77

by the most prominent hunger striker, Bobby Sands. Heaney’s advice was to publish the collection in Britain as well as Ireland, in order to prevent them being simply dismissed as propaganda: deliberately or not, this rather missed the point of Sinn Féin’s priorities, and the poems w ­ ere printed by their publicity office. Drafting his valedictory lecture for Carysfort College in 1982, he considered adding in some paragraphs about the need to reject a ‘monocular’ vision of ­either British or Irish identity, but—­ stepping carefully—he crossed out a passage reflecting on his ‘amphibious’ life between the ‘colonial and post-­colonial’ parts of the island of Ireland; he would raise t­ hese very issues more unequivocally in his Oxford lectures ten years ­later. The cover notes he drafted for a ­later collection of critical prose pieces, The Government of the Tongue (1988), are also significant: Seamus Heaney scrutinizes the work of several masterful twentieth-­century poets, American and Eu­ro­pean, whose devotion to the art of poetry was complicated by their recognition of poetry’s apparent indifference and ineffectuality in a world of suffering and injustice. Heaney is interested in the collusion/collision between the constraints society would impose on free78  •  Chapter 3

dom of utterance and the writer’s own embrace or rejection of self-­restraint . . . ​­t hese concerns arise partly from Heaney’s own experience as a poet living through the confusion of the times in Northern Ireland during the past few de­cades.

As this indicates, Heaney’s growing fame, and the weight of his reputation, meant he had to walk warily. He was now a prominent figure in Irish public life; in the Senate elections of 1977, at least three candidates asked for his sponsorship—­ Conor Cruise O’Brien and the academics Augustine Martin and Liam de Paor: ‘rent-­a-­poet at last’, Heaney remarked caustically. His endorsement went to Martin, who had asked first—­ somewhat to Heaney’s relief, as he had become alienated by Cruise O’Brien’s increasingly idiosyncratic views on the North. Though by 1981 he could privately rail against the demoralisation, materialism, and hypocrisies of Ireland ­under Fianna Fáil, led by the corrupt Charles James Haughey as Taoiseach, Heaney’s life was now solidly established in the South. In an interview in 1979, he remarked that his move to the Republic ‘looked like a betrayal of the Northern ­t hing’ to Unionists, and that ‘living in the South, I found myself lonelier, imaginatively’. ­These are odd statements: surely a feeling of The Same Root  • 79

‘betrayal’ would be felt by fellow-­Catholics rather than Unionists, and the force field exercised by his creative imagination at Glanmore hardly suggests ‘loneliness’. The fact that his interviewer was his old friend Seamus Deane may have something to do with this. And through Deane and another close friend, Brian Friel, in 1981, Heaney became involved in a unique cultural proj­ect, grounded in the North: the Field Day cooperative. Deane, Friel, the musician David Hammond, the actor Stephen Rea, and the poet Tom Paulin w ­ ere the other members of an enterprise formally dedicated to exploring a ‘fifth province’ of Irish culture, with the object of surmounting the traditional antagonisms of identity thrown into such ominous high relief in Northern Ireland. (The ‘fifth province’ concept was borrowed from the phi­los­o­pher Richard Kearney, who would ­later write for the Field Day cooperative.) Though the directors of Field Day came from dif­ fer­ent religious backgrounds, none could be described as Unionist, and sceptical commentators tended to see the theatrical and publishing enterprises undertaken by Field Day as a nationalist Trojan ­horse. The historian of Field Day has surmised that for Heaney, involvement was a way of affirming and retaining his Northern roots. In fact, despite their backgrounds, none of the directors apart 80  •  Chapter 3

from Hammond lived in the North (though Friel lived just across the border from Derry, in County Donegal). The achievements of the cooperative in the 1980s ­were striking—­a series of innovative touring theatrical productions followed Friel’s groundbreaking Translations, which had kick-­started the enterprise in 1980, together with a series of high-­profile publications. Deane had been involved in a series of stylish literary-­critical enterprises with a polemical slant, and was the driving force b ­ ehind commissioning Field Day’s series of provocative pamphlets. Ten years ­later, a massive multi-­volume anthology of Irish lit­er­ a­ture appeared ­u nder his general editorship. Deane provided generalship, and Friel intermittent inspiration, but the cooperative was managed in a fairly ad hoc way, enabled by the close personal friendships which at this stage linked all the directors. The loose structure and convivial nature of the organisation suited Heaney; he also shared Friel’s preoccupation with language, and the shifts whereby Irish cultural identity had come to be expressed in the En­glish tongue, but with an autochthonous current r­ unning beneath. Hea­ ney fully shared the initial enthusiasm generated by Field Day, assuring Friel that it would be like the legendary early days of the Abbey and Gate theatres; as soon as he read a draft of Friel’s The Same Root  • 81

Translations, he recognised its dramatic power and po­liti­cal heft, and wondered if it might have the revolutionising effect of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. In fact, many of Friel’s pronouncements on finding an au­t hen­tic Irish voice in En­ glish not only implicitly harked back to Yeats’s ­earlier enterprise, but echoed the themes explored in Heaney’s work. But while both men w ­ ere nationalists, neither Friel nor Heaney wanted to take as definitively Republican a stance as Rea, Paulin, or Deane. Deane’s account of Field Day’s origins in a 1985 interview with the Derry Journal was uncompromising: One of the basic assumptions of the group was that neither the North’s nor the South’s po­liti­cal establishment had long to survive and that in a comparatively brief historical period the w ­ hole island would be radically altered. Field Day felt that as writers it was part of their responsibility to help create in advance of t­ hese changes an idea of Irish culture and tradition which would be more generous than any of the essentially sectarian visions of Irish lit­er­a­ture which had previously existed.

Friel might have concurred in this expectation of an impending revolutionary change, but not Hea­ 82  •  Chapter 3

ney. They also shouldered heavier international reputations than their colleagues, and this imposed a wider set of identifications and involvements. The correspondence of the Field Day directors shows clearly that Heaney’s reputation was a vital ­factor in attracting financial sponsorship, especially from American sympathisers; but the archives also show Heaney’s growing impatience with the administrative shortcomings and lackadaisical organisation of the cooperative, in marked contrast to his own way of d ­ oing ­t hings. Tensions would also arise from the stellar trajectory of Friel’s playwriting c­ areer. In the annus mirabilis before Translations, Friel had written two other brilliant plays: Aristocrats and Faith Healer; more would follow, and it would be the production in 1990 of his most commercially successful play, Dancing at Lughnasa, which caused a lasting rift among the directorate when he took it to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin instead of the Northern cooperative. Differences among the directors ­were already crystallising. Heaney himself would instance his rural background, and relations with Protestant neighbours, as a reason for his more quietist approach—­the world of delicate observances which he had summoned up in ‘The Other Side’. ‘You c­an’t live a life of sectarian resentment and, at the same time, neighbourly co-­operation. The Same Root  • 83

I suppose it is pos­si­ble—­but we d ­ idn’t, anyway’. He said this in an Irish Times interview in 1984, though he had been more out­spoken a few years ­earlier when discussing with Deane the ‘slightly aggravated young Catholic male’ side of his Irish identity, along with the ‘slow, obstinate, papish burn’ of his poetry, emanating from his native ground. In 1983, the pamphlet series published by Field Day—­seen in some quarters as an enterprise dedicated to a reunification proj­ect which was implicitly po­liti­cal as well as cultural—­gave Heaney a high-­profile platform for a public statement about his own po­liti­cal identity. This took the form of an ‘open letter’ in verse to the editors of the Penguin Book of Con­ temporary British Poetry, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, objecting to his inclusion as a ‘British’ rather than ‘Irish’ poet. Written in a stanza form borrowed from Burns, the tone of the poem is politely playful, even larky at times, but makes serious points about language, history, and identity. Ulster is British is a tune Not quite deceased In Ulster, though on ‘the mainland’— Cf., above, ‘the other island’— Ulster is part of Paddyland, And Londonderry 84  •  Chapter 3

Is far away as New E ­ ngland Or County Kerry.

The final verse tried to head off the obvious riposte that this sensitivity might seem rather belated, given Heaney’s prominence as a Faber poet and his high profile in Britain. Need I go on? I hate to bite Hands that led me to the limelight In the Penguin book, I regret The awkwardness. But British, no, the name’s not right. Yours truly, Seamus.

Heaney’s correspondence with his Field Day colleagues shows a certain ner­vous­ness about the anticipated response, and also a determination to preserve a jocular, even superior, tone. Early drafts w ­ ere longer, uncomfortable, and sometimes awkward in places, employing a rather forced jocosity, and spelling out the po­liti­cal implications more crudely. He actually ran an early draft past Blake Morrison, one of the editors to whom the remonstrance was addressed (and author of one of the first books about Heaney’s poetry). ‘It is, of course, a kind of public gesture’, he told Morrison, ‘but it springs from a genuine sense of crisis about the w ­ hole t­ hing. I’ve a reluctance to raise the subject but a sense of abdication The Same Root  • 85

if I leave it alone. The exercise is fi­nally purgative for me and may prove a salutary irritant all round. At the same time I d ­ on’t want it to be a sectarian anti-­Brit tract . . .’ The finalised copy sent to Morrison was dedicated ‘For Blake, with gratitude, kindness, and a hangdog look’. When it appeared in pamphlet form, reactions to the final version ­were mixed. Damien Gorman in Fortnight called it ‘coy and self-­ conscious’, while Denis Donoghue, whose response to Heaney’s work was invariably ungenerous, damned it with faint praise. Though ‘charming’, it proved that Heaney was ‘too nice to be a satirist . . . ​his smile gets in the way when he tries to write rough stuff’ (not a restriction that applied to Donoghue himself). Another Irish reviewer took a predictably personal line: ‘If Seamus Heaney did not exist, certain p ­ eople would have found it necessary to invent him. Occasionally I suspect Heaney came to the same conclusion years ago’. The ‘open letter’ aired an issue that mattered. An early draft carried an epigraph from Miroslav Holub, ­later dropped. ‘The right name is the first step t­ oward the truth that makes t­ hings t­ hings, and us us’. Drafting a letter to the Irish Times in August 1983, objecting to the move to bring in a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, Heaney referred to An Open Letter and his em86  •  Chapter 3

barrassment at being called ‘British’. The projected amendment, he suggested, would make ­people embarrassed to be called Irish, given the coercive nature of government it implied. He added, but deleted, a reference to the ideals of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly, astutely realising that if left in, the emphasis would not fall on the need for cultural and intellectual in­de­pen­ dence but on Republicanism pure and s­ imple. To underscore the point made in An Open Letter, Heaney’s next book was initially published by Field Day, though also subsequently by Faber. Sweeney Astray was a translation of a medieval Irish epic, Buile Suibhne, dealing with an Irish king who is cursed by a cleric and wanders the island in the guise of a bird; forty-­odd years previously, Flann O’Brien used the tale to hilarious and mocking effect in his surreal classic, At Swim Two Birds. Translating Sweeney’s story was a long-­term proj­ect of Heaney’s, begun when he first moved to Glanmore, then left aside and revisited over a period of ten years. The results ­were not entirely satisfactory, as he knew; while some verse sequences w ­ ere eco­nom­ically beautiful, in a distinctly Gaelic mode, the book as a ­whole was marred by repetitions and longueurs. John Montague, reviewing the book for Fortnight, astutely read it as Heaney writing about Irish nature poetry from the outside: ‘he does not, it seems to The Same Root  • 87

me, possess the crucial gift or wound of a grafted tongue . . . ​as craftsman, his concern is more with the effect in En­glish than the form of the Irish’. Heaney’s own attitude ­towards the Irish language was respectful, and his ability to use it ­adept, but he was unapologetic about writing in En­glish. He dissented sharply from the message sounded by the Irish-­language poet Sean O Riordáin’s controversial manifesto, ‘Fill Arís’, first published in 1964, which exhorted Irish poets to turn their backs on the tongue of Spenser and Shakespeare and write in Irish only. While admiring the poem’s emotional impact, Heaney wrote in 1983 that ‘its sectarian application . . . ​ would refuse to recognise history and language other than its own espoused versions of them’, embodying a chilling desire to ‘obliterate history’. And privately he could refer to the ‘nostalgia and venom’ which characterised some aspects of the Irish-­language movement. But the figure of mad Sweeney, diving for cover in his woods, struck a chord with his translator, and would appear in a more effective guise in his next collection. The fact that Sweeney’s native kingdom was located in Ulster mattered, and Heaney made much of place-­names (another Irish tradition)—­ but rendered them in their modern Anglicised form to the disapproval of some purists. Heaney’s 88  •  Chapter 3

rationalisation (at least as delivered to an Irish-­ American journal called An Gael) was that he was trying to create ‘something that Ulstermen of both persuasions could have some identity with’ and that ‘in a hundred years’ time . . . ​ideally, [Sweeney] would be part of some united Ulster my­t hol­ogy’. This raised sceptical eyebrows among p ­ eople already alert to what they considered Heaney’s policy of having it, in terms of identity-­politics, both ways. Northern politics in the appalling late 1970s and early 1980s did not lend themselves to the kind of expansiveness invoked at the outset by Field Day’s directors; responses to the other pamphlets produced by the cooperative, and the public statements of some of the directors, meant that by the mid-1980s, a kind of kulturkampf had developed in which Field Day was accused of standing for irredentist nationalism and was closely interrogated for signs of backsliding from the original pluralist ideal by its critics, chief among them Heaney’s old friend Edna Longley. Deane’s assertion that Unionists ‘had no need for culture b ­ ecause t­ hey’ve had so much authority, and now that t­ hey’re losing authority they find that they have no culture’ sat oddly with the original wish to transcend differences in a platonic fifth province of the mind, but the enterprise of the cooperative remained ambitious. Driving The Same Root  • 89

back from the first night of Friel’s play The Com­ munication Cord in September 1982, Deane had floated to Heaney the idea of a large-­scale collection of Irish writing, like the nineteenth-­century Cabinet of Irish Lit­er­a­ture. When the enormous Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing appeared nine years ­later, the question of canon-­making and exclusivity of approach came quickly to the fore (not least ­because of the drastic under-­ representation of ­women, ­later rectified in two further volumes). But it rapidly became and remained indispensable. Heaney produced an Introduction to the section on Yeats; he also wrote a celebrated play for Field Day, a version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes called The Cure at Troy, performed by the com­ pany in 1990. The play was written ­a fter much urging from his fellow directors, and reflected a moment of high po­liti­cal tension as conversations between the moderate-­nationalist Social Demo­cratic and L ­ abour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Féin, the po­liti­cal wing of the IRA, tentatively developed. The pro­cess, while eventually bringing about a ceasefire, would in time sideline the SDLP, Heaney’s natu­ral constituency; while in a parallel development, the Official Unionist Party, ­a fter making the move ­towards power-­sharing with nationalists, would be displaced by the Paisleyite Demo­cratic Unionist Party. The complex90  •  Chapter 3

ities and antagonisms of Northern politics did not lend themselves to ­simple allegory, and Hea­ ney emphasised that his version of Sophocles’s play did not make parallels between Derry and Troy, nor pre­sent Greeks as Catholics and Trojans as Protestants, nor interpret Philoctetes as a Unionist adhering dourly to his veto. But the dilemma of the embittered hero, abandoned on his island with his suppurating wound and eventually coming to terms with ­t hose who have betrayed him, struck a chord in the po­liti­cal atmosphere of the early 1990s, as events in Northern Ireland moved uneasily forward—­a pro­cess requiring a ­g reat deal of strategic forgetting on both sides. The play concerns the morality of negotiation and, in Heaney’s version, places ­g reat weight upon the key character of Neoptolemus, who tries to keep his self-­respect while manoeuvring Philoctetes’s vital support back to Odysseus. The idea that ‘hope and history’ could rhyme, suggested in the most memorable of Heaney’s additions to Sophocles’s text, was swiftly incorporated into the politicians’ lexicon of cliché. The play, and its reception, marked the high point of Hea­ ney’s involvement with the Field Day proj­ect. By then, his soaring international profile and part-­ time residence in Amer­i­ca made for enormous claims on his time. But his distancing from Field The Same Root  • 91

Day also reflected his preference for the ­earlier, less polemical profile ­adopted by the com­pany. In the severance that followed Friel’s decision to give Dancing at Lughnasa (which Heaney recognised as a masterpiece) to the Abbey, his sympathies went with his friend and fellow-­writer. His correspondence indicates a growing weariness with the w ­ hole enterprise from the early 1990s, and by 1994, he could write privately that Field Day had gone dead for him. Heaney’s public prominence set up a tension with his bedrock belief that the poet’s vocation entailed an absolute need for privacy and in­de­ pen­dence—­what Yeats had called ‘the pure joy of ­things not indentured to any cause’. B ­ ehind much of his work lay the search to find a balance between this and the obligation to ‘be faithful to the collective historical experience’. This quotation comes from an essay Heaney wrote about Dante, a constant presence in his work at this time, not least for his simultaneous interrogation of dilemmas both personal and universal. The admonitory presence of familiar ghosts haunts Heaney’s poetry from Field Work on. ‘I like to remember’, he wrote in Preoccupations ‘that Dante was very much a man of a par­tic­u­lar place, that his g­ reat poem is full of intimate placings and place-­names, and that as he moves round the murky circles of hell, often heard rather than 92  •  Chapter 3

seen by his damned friends and enemies, he is recognised by his local speech or so recognises them’. In the long poem Heaney was working on at this time, he would proj­ect himself into a similar journey, and use the format of a pilgrimage to ask the kind of questions forced onto him by the demands of fame and the imperatives of art.

The Same Root  • 93

4 In the ­Middle of His Journey

In the last poem of ‘Tryptych’, ‘At the ­Water’s Edge’, Heaney visits the islands on Lough Beg with their vestigial early Christian remains. His reaction is a power­ful impulse to turn back to the sacred icons of his Catholic youth: Every­t hing in me Wanted to bow down, to offer up, To go barefoot, foetal and penitential, And pray at the ­water’s edge.

Instead, however, the impulse is overtaken by a memory of the beginnings of po­liti­cal activism. How we crept before we walked! I remembered The he­li­cop­ter shadowing our march at Newry, The scared, irrevocable steps.

This tension underlines the complicated nature of his responses. A he­li­cop­ter disturbs his 94  •

contemplations by the lake, and ­t here is a pagan, pre-­Christian ele­ment present among the relics too. The confused echoes of Catholic conditioning, and the questions raised by po­liti­cal protest and commitment, had long haunted him. He said as much in an essay for the liberal Catholic magazine, The Furrow, in 1978. ‘If you have ever blessed yourself in a city bus (or, more piercingly, not blessed yourself for fear of being noticed) . . . ​ if you have seen your protestant undergraduate friend’s eyes dilate as he scanned the Sacred Heart lamp and the view of the Lourdes Grotto on the wall of your parents’ home, you ­will know that even the intellectual figure-­skating of a [Jacques] Maritain, however exhilarating, is somehow inadequate to illuminate for you the relationship between your imaginative pro­cesses and your religious background’. That precise connection forms the bedrock of the ambitious poem which in 1984 gave its name to his longest—­ and possibly most substantial—­collection yet. ‘Station Island’ is the centrepiece of a volume whose opening section gathers poems memorialising love, childhood, and inheritance, framed by Heaney’s par­tic­u ­lar genius for establishing the quiddity of ­t hings, notably in a series of aperçus called ‘Shelf Life’. The third section of the volume returns to the theme of the deranged bird-­k ing Sweeney and his travels, but in a far In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 95

more liberated and accomplished fashion than the straightforward translation which he had been working on for so long. In between stands a monumental and audacious autobiographical pilgrimage, ‘Station Island’. As with Sweeney, it was long in the making; a diary entry for 4 September  1979 rec­ords his first shot at this ‘large undertaking’, during a moment of piercing clarity in his Sandymount study by the sea. This morning the sea was bright with sunlight, the tide was in to the strand, Catherine was off to school again for the first time since America—Marie off with her, the boys away to Conleth’s. I posted cards and sat in the clear glittering weather, looking over at Howth Head, the smoke drifting a suphurous dissolving brush [?] from the Pigeon House, the red and white chimneys of the power station hallucinatory. I felt the lift I used to sense at the seaside in Portstewart, or on the coast at Dingle or Donegal. I felt that the seven years since leaving Belfast had paid off, that perhaps steady inward effort would be pos­si­ble. I felt I could trust. I have been lucky but also I think I have worked to earn this. I pray to God or what­ever means the good to keep us all safe ­here and to sustain this effort. I am now in the study upstairs. 96  •  Chapter 4

The trains rattle through the sunlit suburban morning. The birds chatter in the garden bushes, the red leaves of the creeper on the gable flutter.

The first draft of the section of Station Island dealing with his murdered cousin Colum McCartney follows at once. He likened the pro­cess of the poem’s emergence to the action of a wheel on a watermill, turning round and round, ­going down empty into the river of memory, coming up full, and dispensing its cargo. A year l­ater, he would describe the poem-­ in-­ progress more gloomily as an abandoned building site, with puddles, mud, and unfinished structures all around. But a shape emerged, centred on the creation of the artistic self, from all that had gone before: attachment and detachment. In its autobiographical amplitude, its exploration of memory, and its interrogation of the creative pro­cess, it pre­sents the kind of artist’s odyssey expressed in Federico Fellini’s cinematic masterpiece 8½. To take a more obvious Italian master, this long poem, above all, underscores and develops Dante’s importance for Heaney, as it rec­ords a visit to an underworld, whose gateway is the religious site in County Donegal which gives the poem its title. The penitential pilgrimage around Lough Derg, experienced more than once in In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 97

Heaney’s own youth, frames an exercise of self-­ examination, which Richard Ellmann went so far as to call ‘an act of self-­accusation’. This seems too extreme, since the introspection embarked upon in ‘Station Island’ is neither self-­indulgent nor over-­dramatising. It is, more accurately, an enterprise of self-­a nalysis, in the light of the impulses to commitment (including po­liti­cal commitment) which are dictated by growing up enmeshed in a certain kind of society and background. ‘The pilgrim’s journey’, Heaney wrote, ‘its pattern of withdrawal and return, its encounters with p ­ eople and memories, its moods of self-­examination and re-­dedication, offers a way of dramatizing contradictory awarenesses. The world which formed the protagonist and the world he now inhabits exert conflicting pressures and t­ hese pressures manifest themselves in the voices and visitations he experiences at dif­fer­ent points in the sequence’. In an essay on Dante, Heaney himself underlined this yet more strongly. ‘The main tension is between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self. I had hoped (in “Station Island”) that I could dramatize t­ hese strains by meeting shades from my own dream life who had also been inhabitants of the ­actual Irish world. They could 98  •  Chapter 4

perhaps voice the claims of orthodoxy and the necessity to recognise [or] refuse t­ hose claims. They could probe the validity of one’s commitment’. The significant ­t hing is how much of the advice mediated to him is about refusing rather than recognising. This goes for religion as well as politics. The cave on Station Island, known as St Patrick’s Purgatory, was once popularly supposed to be an entrance to the other world. On the poet’s visionary journey, he encounters the ghosts of writers who have gone before him, notably the nineteenth-­century Irish novelist William Carleton who tells him: ‘We are earthworms of the earth, and all that has gone through us ­w ill be our trace.’ He turned on his heel when he was saying this and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

Carleton’s 1828 short story, ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrim’, which in fact exposes the ­whole pilgrimage affair as a squalid racket, had given Heaney one of his starting points. Another was Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem about Lough Derg, which—­while less contemptuous than Carleton— highlights the self-­interest of the pilgrims and In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 99

their intercessions on behalf of ­children ­doing exams, or hoped-­for inheritances from el­derly relatives. Both Kavanagh and Carleton appear as ghosts before the poet on the Lough Derg road. But ‘Station Island’ is not just a series of visionary encounters with Irish writers of the past. The first ghosts met by the poet are figures from his youth. The ‘hurry of bell-­notes’ that summons him to the pilgrimage is challenged by the appearance of an alarming figure from his childhood, significantly called Simon Sweeney—­a pagan woodcutter, partly based on one of the ‘travelling ­people’ (then called ‘tinkers’) who frightened Heaney as a child. Holding his bow saw ‘stiffly up like a lyre’, this ‘Sabbath-­breaker’ advises him to ‘stay clear of all pro­cessions’, an injunction which w ­ ill be repeated by a very dif­ fer­ent revenant at the end of the poem. The marvellous encounter with William Carleton follows, a rough, blustering presence who recalls the sectarian atrocities of his own times, and tells the poet that ‘though ­there’s something natu­ral in your smile / ­there’s something in it that strikes me as defensive’. (In early drafts, the accusations of po­liti­cal evasion are much more direct.) Carleton’s reputation and reception have always been affected by his conversion to Protestantism. For Heaney, ‘habit’s afterlife’ of a devout 100  •  Chapter 4

Catholic childhood recurs throughout the poem. It is sharply interrogated in section IV, a dialogue with a young priest—­‘ “­Father” pronounced with a fawning relish, / the sunlit tears of parents being blessed’. Terry Keenan, remembered by Heaney as a clerical student who was home for the summer and treated with faintly embarrassed re­spect, ­later died in a foreign mission, his health destroyed by tropical conditions and his faith implicitly shaken: but his ghost asks the poet why—­for all his scepticism—he is ­going through the exercise of pilgrimage. A diary note made by Heaney at the time recalled the moment when a priest asked Heaney himself to consider a religious vocation rather than ­going into ‘the world’. The question recurs, as Heaney conjures up mentors, avatars, and ‘fosterers’ such as his old teacher from Anahorish Primary School. Even Patrick Kavanagh appears, jeering at him for his acquired cosmopolitanism (‘Where ­else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’). Some of the ghostly encounters and interrogations are delivered in an elegantly manipulated Dantean terza rima, while the introspective sections reflecting—as in section VI—on erotic guilt and liberation follow dif­fer­ent forms. The Dantean echo is at its most power­ful when Heaney conjures up the ghosts of murdered men who met In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 101

terrible ends at the hands of sectarian assassins, and who now give their own versions of death and transfiguration. William Stathearn, a football companion of Heaney’s youth, becomes ‘the perfect clean unthinkable victim’, the circumstances of his death spelt out in an inexorable narrative. The poet unexpectedly asks for forgiveness—in terms which clearly show the impact of t­ hose polemical attacks on him provoked by the publication of North. ‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent— forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’ I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’ And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

That raises an unmistakeable echo of another poem featuring an advisory ghost, T. S. Eliot’s ‘­Little Gidding’, where the poet is warned against: ‘. . . ​t he rending pain of re-­enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of t­ hings ill done and done to o ­ thers’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. 102  •  Chapter 4

Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, ­unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in mea­sure, like a dancer.’ The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.

When Eliot drafted his own ghostly encounter, he was thinking, no less, of Yeats as his messenger from the dead, which adds a pleasing extra dimension to this implicit conversation between poets. Yeats had come to mean more and more to Heaney; ‘­every time you part the drapes and enter that inner chamber of his’, he wrote to a Yeatsian friend a few years ­later, ‘you realise ­you’ve only been surfacing an external, daylight world, while the real ­t hing has been ­going on in the poetry sanctum’. This kind of negotiation echoes what he himself tried to do in ‘Station Island’. Heaney’s careful response to Eliot is warier: Dennis O’Driscoll raised it in his probing interviews and was politely evaded. ‘Station Island’ similarly contains concealment as well as self-­revelation, and the dangers of assuming that a poet writing in the first person In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 103

is necessarily writing about himself have to be borne in mind. But the poem is nonetheless a key chapter of autobiography, in laying before his readers a cast of characters who haunt the poet and who thus far have had a part in his making. ­Later in the sequence, but drafted at the very beginning, that morning in his study at Sandymount, Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney accuses him more directly of ‘saccharining’ his death in ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’: preferring to spend time with poets at the Kilkenny Arts Week than mourn his cousin’s death, ‘you confused evasion and artistic tact’. This accusatory poem is followed by a power­ ful evocation of the death of an IRA hunger striker dreaming of his murderous past as ‘a hit-­ man on the brink, emptied and deadly. / When the police yielded my coffin, I was light / As my head when I took aim’. The image of fasting and ‘lightness’ is invoked in a dif­fer­ent and specifically Catholic way at the opening and closing sections of ‘Station Island’. In the hunger-­striker poem, it ushers in a brilliantly realised memory of the man’s funeral, followed by the poet’s nightmare vision of a foul flood of w ­ ater bearing a corrupt floating polyp, redeemed (possibly) by a lighted candle which rises from it ‘like a pistil’. The image was drafted and redrafted many times

104  •  Chapter 4

over in Heaney’s notebooks, and seems to originate in a dream. Waking in the pilgrimage hostel proj­ects him into another bout of self-­recrimination. ‘I hate how quick I was to know my place, I hate where I was born, hate every­t hing That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’ I mouthed at my half-­composed face In the shaving mirror, like somebody Drunk in the bathroom during a party, Lulled and repelled by his own reflection. As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn. As if the eddy could reform the pool. As if a stone swirled ­under a cascade, Eroded and eroding in its bed, Could grind itself down to a dif­fer­ent core. Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

Absolution of a kind follows this Yeatsian echo, when Heaney is instructed as a penance to translate a poem, or hymn, about the fountain of God’s grace, by St John of the Cross. This he obediently does, with characteristic panache. If the sequence ended ­t here, it would suggest a resolution into some kind of religious consolation, though a reluctant one. But the final section of

In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 105

‘Station Island’ swerves audaciously back to a meeting with the challenging ghost of James Joyce, whose ruthlessly decisive advice reverts to the sceptical injunctions of Simon Sweeney and William Carleton. (Carleton’s line about being ‘earthworms of the earth’ was, in an early draft, originally given to Joyce.) His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s, cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite. What you do you must do on your own. so get back in harness. The main ­t hing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-­lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-­headed, dangerous. Take off from h ­ ere. And d ­ on’t be so earnest, 106  •  Chapter 4

let ­others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. Let go, let fly, forget. ­You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

The poet steps out into the rain, shriven and liberated, while Joyce continues to harangue him: ‘That subject p ­ eople stuff is a cod’s game, / infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage’. The final instruction is to swim out into the sea, keeping at a tangent to the imposed circle, and fill the ele­ ment with signatures on his own frequency: ‘echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, / elver-­ gleams in the dark of the ­whole sea’. Heaney had published an e­ arlier version of the Joyce section in 1982, and it was long in the making. A draft had been sent in July 1980 to Brian Friel, who acted as a sounding board for successive drafts; an early version of the Carleton section was accompanied by a message that this might be the start of something much longer, and a query w ­ hether it should be continued. Its recipient was in no doubt, and when the sequence was completed in 1984, Heaney inscribed a bound typescript copy to Friel, ‘who kept a fire ­u nder the boiler all along’. Not every­one agrees that this is a tour de force; Denis Donoghue wrote a particularly harsh denunciation of Heaney’s ‘brashness’ in invoking Joyce, adding snidely, ‘It In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 107

is not clear what sacrifices Heaney has made for the sake of being an Irish poet’. Besides missing the point, this takes us back to the sort of antagonistic polemics which helped inspire ‘Station Island’ in the first place. And it is significant that Joyce recurs in another poem in the Station Island volume, ‘Granite Chip’. Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind. Saying An ­union in the cup I’ll throw I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant I keep but feel ­little in common with— a kind of stone age circumcising knife, a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith. Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive And exacting. Come to me, it says all you who ­labour and are burdened, I ­will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

Joyce has the last redeeming word in the title poem too, and his message to the poet is revealingly constructed around Stephen’s discussion with the Dean of Studies in Portrait of the Artist, which centres on the possession of the En­glish 108  •  Chapter 4

language. This encounter is so central to Heaney’s imagination that he enshrines it as ‘The Feast of the Holy Tundish’, the Old En­glish word for ‘funnel’, still used in Edwardian Ireland, which is discussed by Stephen and his En­glish interlocutor. Joyce’s ghost in ‘Station Island’ also endorses Hea­ ney’s individual path by invoking a ­whole range of quintessentially Heaney-­esque images and signatures (notably t­hose eels, changed from dolphins in an early draft). But the essentially Catholic framework of the poem is foundational—­a framework to which, Heaney himself remarked, Yeats had no point of entry. Lough Derg is a Catholic pilgrimage, already enshrined in Irish lit­er­a­ ture as such. Throughout its complex structure, Heaney’s poem continually confronts a kind of tribal solidarity and commitment. It may in fact be too late to ‘stay clear of all pro­cessions’. The first drafts begin with self-­accusation, focussing on his own inadequacy when faced with his archaeologist friend Tom Delaney’s fatal illness and his cousin Colum McCartney’s murder. But the final arrangement of the sequence prioritises the necessary credo of artistic in­de­pen­dence instead. The circumstances of composition of ‘Station Island’ also deserve decoding, as the poem was begun during the IRA hunger strikes and continued when Heaney had taken up his part-­time chair at Harvard, which opened up a new world. In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 109

This signalled another door through which Heaney stepped at an impor­tant time, as did his increasing fascination with and—to a certain extent—­identification with Eastern Eu­ro­pean poetry and poets. The interrogative poems which he would publish three years l­ater in The Haw Lantern with titles such as ‘From the Republic of Conscience’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, and ‘From the Canton of Expectation’ emblematise this. They followed hard on Station Island, which more than one critic has seen as a pivotal book in Heaney’s progression—­a consideration of where he has arrived in the m ­ iddle of his journey through life. Audacious and ambitious though it is, the sequence avoids pomposity; Heaney himself said he wanted ­people to read it as matter-­of-­factly as a train journey ‘but producing the sensation a train journey also produces, a sense that the ­whole t­ hing is a dream taking place ­behind glass’. This effect is mostly achieved. Even before the explorations of the title poem, the opening section of the book is full of interrogations and personal reflections. Love, death, and a sense of the other world are indicated from the start. The book opens with a beautifully realised love poem, recalling a frantic dash through the London subway system on the poet’s honeymoon: as she runs ahead of him, buttons start falling from his wife’s new coat, and tracking 110  •  Chapter 4

them recalls not only Hansel and Gretel, but Orpheus’s trip to regain Eurydice from Hades, eco­nom­ically signalled in the poem’s title, ‘The Under­ground’. Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons To end up in a draughty lamplit station ­After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.

An early draft included references to the sacrament of the mass, and Dante’s Beatrice—­wisely dropped in favour of subtlety and implication. Similarly, the beautiful ­little poem ‘Widgeon’, a Muldoonian tribute to Paul Muldoon, began life as several stanzas but was swiftly cut back to the bone, and is all the stronger for it. It had been badly shot. While he was plucking it he found, he says, the voice box— like a flute stop in the broken windpipe— In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 111

and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries.

The richness and ‘strangeness’ (a word which recurs) of the poems in the first section of the book evoke f­amily, neighbours, the ­things of rural life—in the manner now recognised as quintessentially Heaney. But they also cast lines further afield—­ Chekhov, drinking a farewell ­bottle of cognac on his way to practise medicine in a penal colony, a haunting narrative poem about an emigrant f­amily’s return, an invocation of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset cottage woven into a reflection of the poet’s own life and love. A poem in the final section of the book, ‘The Master’, is an admiring evocation of Miłosz, whom he had by now met. Sensual themes pulse through many of the poems, notably ‘Sheelagh na Gig’, inspired by an ancient erotic carving. ­There is a strong sense of a poet who is trying ­things out, at once steadying and relaunching his craft. But t­ here was also (as he himself l­ater confirmed) a sense of self-­accusation, and unease at his inability to take a more public stance on the savage po­liti­cal confrontations of the early 1980s and contribute ­towards their resolution (Chekhov g­ oing to the Sakhalin colony was exactly what Heaney himself was unable to do). 112  •  Chapter 4

The dialogue in a poem called ‘Away From It All’ bears this out—­where the actions of spearing a lobster from a tank, cooking it, and eating it provoke troubling questions—as the oysters at Kilcolgan had long before. I was stretched between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history. ‘Actively? What do you mean?’ The light at the rim of the sea is rendered down to a fine graduation, somewhere between balance and inanition. And I still cannot clear my head of lives in their ele­ment on the cobbled floor of that tank and the hampered one, out of ­water, fortified and bewildered.

However, the third section of the Station Is­ land volume is a cele­bration of evasion, flight, determined individuation. Written quickly, in a ­great burst of creativity during the late summer of 1983 in France and the USA, and pared down from the original drafts, the series of poems inspired by Sweeney delivered quick blows all round. The flitting bird-­k ing clearly reflects the In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 113

writer’s impatience with t­ hose who would pin him down: Stephen Dedalus’s vow to ‘fly by t­ hose nets’ echoes in the background. When Sweeney perches in a beech tree, watching fighter planes fly low over ‘my thick-­tapped, soft-­fledged, airy listening post’, it evokes the poet’s childhood observation of World War II pi­lots stationed near his home, not the more controversial incursion of a l­ater generation of soldiers. Some draft sections portraying Sweeney as a defeated nationalist (‘Sweeney Exhausted’) ­ were moderated, though ‘The Old Icons’ suggests a world of national pieties left ­behind. Sweeney’s function for Heaney is that of Aedh or Crazy Jane for Yeats: a persona who articulates an inner voice which clarifies poetic thought. Hea­ney himself described the Sweeney poems as ‘the freed voice of the legendary Sweeney, whose name and parts of whose experience rhyme with mine’, and he described the concerns of the w ­ hole book as ‘art and conscience, place and displacement, the transfigurations pos­si­ble in the erotic and remembered life’. Time and again in ­t hese swift, breathless poems, the bird-­man takes off, drifts, or soars away from it all; while a poem such as ‘The Scribes’ seems to repudiate the small-­minded world of literary and academic infighting. But ­here too we find the theme of a religious education where faith is replaced by po114  •  Chapter 4

etic vocation, in a poem called ‘In Illo Tempore’, with its strongly autobiographical conclusion. The big missal splayed and dangled silky ribbons of emerald and purple and watery white. Intransitively we would assist, confess, receive. The verbs assumed us. We adored. And we lifted our eyes to the nouns. Altar stone was dawn and monstrance noon, the word rubric itself a bloodshot sunset. Now I live by a famous strand where seabirds cry in the small hours like incredible souls and even the range wall of the promenade that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it.

The Sweeney section of Station Island ends with ‘On the Road’, where the migratory bird-­ poet finds eventual refuge in the decorated prehistoric caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne: yet another visit to the under­g round. But the sequence opens with a poem, ‘Sweeney Redivivus’, suggesting that the travel w ­ ill always also be a ­matter of return, and that growing fame is something that pre­sents its own kind of traps. In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 115

I stirred wet sand and gathered myself to climb the steep-­flanked mound, my head like a ball of wet twine dense with soakage, but beginning to unwind.

In unpublished early drafts of this poem, which are much more direct, the references to yellow taxis and other bursts of local colour make clear that Sweeney the exiled bird-­k ing is also Heaney the mi­grant poet in Amer­i­ca. At dif­fer­ ent times, he is fugitive, revenant, spoiled priest, observant artist, apprentice hermit. Heaney, like Yeats yet again, is trying out masks. Taken as a w ­ hole volume, Station Island is a  rec­ ord of autobiography as well as self-­ examination, and marks a decisive point in Hea­ ney’s ­career. It came at a time when innumerable articles w ­ ere being published about his work, and books devoted entirely to him had begun to appear (notably Blake Morrison’s in 1982). His readings and lectures ­were sold out, and his reputation in Amer­i­ca as well as Britain far outranked that of any con­temporary Irish poet. The ease and authority of his approach to poets and poetry was enviable and utterly distinctive, in part stemming from his friendships with so many literary g­ iants. It is beautifully caught in his reply to Dennis O’Driscoll’s question, ­later 116  •  Chapter 4

on, why ‘our age greatly prefers Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell’. Lowell is taking the punishment that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually; so no, I’m not surprised. Lowell was a white Anglo-­Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind. He was on the winning side from the start: Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic-­ ­although he was, of course, ever-­conscious about ­t hese advantages, and forever making his courtly bows, in public and private, to Elizabeth and her achievement. But then the fashion shifted, the culture favoured a less imperious style, the gender balance needed adjusting, the age of Merrill and Ashbery arrived, chamber m ­ usic and cabaret rather than orchestral crash ­were in favour, and the time was propitious for the perfect pitch of Bishop.

Punishment was on the way for him too. Hea­ ney’s prominence was powerfully established by the mid-1980s, reflected in a ramifying critical bibliography as well as endless interviews and demands on his time (many drafts of poems in the early 1980s are annotated ‘3:00 a.m.’ and In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 117

‘4:00 a.m.’). Scholars would shortly begin writing articles, and even books, analysing the critiques of Heaney rather than the work of the man himself. Not coincidentally, a backlash was on the way. Station Island was reviewed in places that normally gave ­little space to con­ temporary poetry, as well as in e­ very literary journal one could think of; generally, it was acclaimed as a power­f ul intervention, containing some of Heaney’s best work so far. But the tone, especially from some fellow poets, could be slightly admonishing. Paul Muldoon, both protégé and prodigy, but very much his own man, dispensed advice in his LRB review: keep a clear eye, forget about ‘general absolution’, and ‘resist more firmly the idea that [you] must be the best Irish poet since Yeats’. And reactions to North continued to appear, sometimes with remarkable vehemence. Reviewing his friend Ann Saddlemyer’s edition of J.  M. Synge’s letters, just when he was writing the Sweeney poems, Heaney carefully noted Yeats’s description of the playwright: ‘His place was outside the circle, gravely watching, gravely summing up, with a brilliant malice, the fools and the wise ones inside’. Heaney was too much involved in the world to take this stance, temperamentally or practically, but he was sharply aware of the constrictions of increasing 118  •  Chapter 4

fame. In 1986, he wrote to the Northern Ireland Arts Council passionately refusing to allow a section of a Heritage Centre at Strabane to be devoted to his life and work, objecting to the idea as an exaggerated and premature commodification, which he could not endorse. Sweeney’s example offered a route to be envied. In the end, the revenant bird-­k ing ner­vously circles down to a place which is both familiar and alien, knowing he w ­ ill be both hailed and misunderstood: Another smell was blowing off the river, b ­ itter as night airs in a scutch mill. The old trees w ­ ere nowhere, the hedges thin as penwork and the ­whole enclosure lost ­under hard paths and sharp-­ridged h ­ ouses. And ­t here I was, incredible to myself, among p ­ eople far too e­ ager to believe me and my story, even if it happened to be true.

In the ­Middle of His Journey  • 119

5 Alphabetical Order

If Station Island marked a milestone in Heaney’s work, the next book three years l­ ater set up vari­ ous signposts ­towards a new direction. The Haw Lantern opens with a kind of pedagogic autobiography. ‘Alphabets’, delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1984, deftly traces the poet’s education through reading; it is a poem about becoming ‘lettered’ in more ways than one. Deceptively ­simple half-­rhyming quatrains take the ­future poet through symbols and their sense. Y is pictured as ‘a forked stick’, two roof-­rafters linked by a cross tie make ‘the letter some call ah, some call ay’; the teacher’s approving tick inscribed in his copybook becomes ‘a ­little leaning hoe’. The symbols and meta­phors are first drawn from the rural world surrounding the growing boy. Then, with the switch to ‘a stricter school’, the calligraphy becomes more sophisticated, the linguistic range expands into Latin, the references are to En­glish pastoral as well as Gaelic nature poetry written by monks. 120  •

­ ere in her snooded garment and bare feet, H All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes, The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight And passed into the tenebrous thickets. He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field. Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab. Then self-­denial, fasting, the pure cold.

In the third and final section of the poem, grown to maturity, he has achieved control as a lecturer at the podium (‘He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves’). But the magic of symbolic lettering—­‘shape-­note language, absolute on air’—­still enthrals him. And the final stanza of the poem changes from third to first person, and swerves from an invocation of a space traveller extraterrestrially viewing the world as a letter ‘O’, back to the child’s eye view of Mossbawn. As from his small win­dow The astronaut sees all he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum— Or like my own wide pre-­reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Alphabetical Order  • 121

Skimming our gable and writing our name ­t here With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

Characteristically, Heaney brings his readers into his autobiography, allowing them to chart his own development t­ owards the poet they know (or think they know). This constituted an enduring part of the contract with his readership which was becoming central to his fame and reputation. But ‘Alphabets’ also outlines another agenda. This formidably accomplished opening poem announces much in the book that follows it. Questions of language, its construction, and its autonomy w ­ ere preoccupying academic literary criticism at the time, as Heaney well knew: he told one enquirer that it was ‘impossible not to have inhaled the new awareness of writing as  writing rather than “communication”, and ­impossible not to recognize the useful truths underlined by ­t hose who point out the connivance between the promotion of art and the prevailing structures of cap­i­tal­ist society and the economy’—­while firmly rejecting ‘the notion that the work of art is a sort of determined product’. Or, as he put it elsewhere, a poem is ‘a linguistic exploration, whose tracks melt as it maps its own pro­gress’. His own talent for put122  •  Chapter 5

ting symbolic language and allegorical concepts to haunting purposes was demonstrated in poems such as ‘Parable Island’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, ‘From the Land of the Unspoken’, and ‘From the Republic of Conscience’. The last was written in response to a request from Amnesty International, and ‘emerged’—as Hea­ ney noted when sending it—­w ith unexpected ease, bringing ‘the surprise and plea­sure of the genuine article’. The tone of ­these poems was new: low-­key, direct, almost confessional, as in the tight terza rima of ‘From the Frontier of Writing’. It was originally titled, much less po­liti­cally, ‘From the Place of Writing’, but ‘Frontier’ sets the mood. It opens with an evocation of a military checkpoint, awakening ‘that quiver in the self, / subjugated, yes, and obedient’. So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-­off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk. And suddenly y­ ou’re through, arraigned yet freed, Alphabetical Order  • 123

as if you’d passed from ­behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armour-­plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

‘From the Republic of Conscience’ is similarly stripped down: a fantastic vision of a visit to a strange country, where the procedures of immigration take the form of affirming tradition and custom (rather than ‘Customs’). The immigration officer shows the traveller a photo­graph of his own grand­father; the customs-­barrier requires a declaration of ‘our traditional cures and charms’. Explaining the magical Republic, the imagery of ‘Alphabets’ recurs: Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat. The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-­shape, the keel an open eye.

But the strange country could also be a return to an ancient homeland. The traveller comes back from the Republic of Conscience having achieved dual citizenship with this magical dominion, bearing the duty ‘to speak on their behalf in my own tongue’; the embassies of Conscience are everywhere but operate in­de­pen­dently, ‘and no 124  •  Chapter 5

ambassador would ever be relieved’. The slightly eerie, oddly contrived tone of t­hese poems is echoed in ‘Parable Island’, where po­liti­cal and historical consciousness derived from ‘missionary scribes’ and ‘old revisionists’ in what seems to be an inward-­looking Northern Ireland is sceptically and rather contemptuously explored in terms of allegory. The note struck in all this work echoes Hea­ ney’s deep reading in Eastern Eu­ro­pean writers, notably Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, as well as Mandelstam and perhaps Kafka; ­ there are echoes of the poems Miłosz was writing in Berkeley in the late 1970s, such as ‘Ars Poetica’ and ‘City Without a Name’. In some ways (not always successfully), Heaney was domesticating the Orwellian conditions within which Eastern Eu­ro­ pean poets wrote ­under totalitarian regimes, and applying them implicitly to a version of Northern Ireland. This new departure worked best when he applied the same tone to a more concretely Irish situation, as in ‘The Mud Vision’—­a poem partly inspired by a Richard Long artwork consisting of a ­great disc of handprints made in mud, and partly by a supposed miraculous vision which had recently occurred in rural Ireland. Heaney turns the notion of vision into a commentary on a country at the crossroads of modernity. ­Here too, as in ‘Station Island’, memories Alphabetical Order  • 125

of his youthful devoutness are interspersed, this time as a volunteer brancardier at Lourdes. But above all, like so many poems in The Haw Lan­ tern, it is an interrogation of marks, signs, and symbols. Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-­ wire crowns Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-­writers And punks with aerosol sprays still held their own With the best of them. Satellite link-­ups Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked The line between panic and formulae, screentested Our first native models and the last of the mummers, Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged And airy as a man on a springboard Who keeps limbering up b ­ ecause the man cannot dive. And then in the foggy midlands it appeared, 126  •  Chapter 5

Our mud vision, as if a ­rose win­dow of mud Had in­ven­ted itself out of the glittery damp, A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

Mud and silt invade the charged atmosphere, attracting pilgrims and the suffering in search of miraculous redress. It dis­appears, of course, and ‘experts’ appear instead, offering ‘post-­factum jabber’, as the inhabitants ‘crowd in tight for the big explanations’. Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours, Our one chance to know the incomparable And dive to a ­f uture. What might have been origin We dissipated in news. The clarified place Had retrieved neither us nor itself—­except You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us Who had our chance to be mud-­men, convinced and estranged, Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.

The regretful, Olympian tone of this mysterious poem suggests Eliot or Cavafy as much as Herbert or Miłosz; but the idea of a false visionary Alphabetical Order  • 127

in­de­pen­dence partly grasped and then lost to modern banality perhaps reflects aspects of the Irish experience since po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence. The intellectual heft and cosmopolitan allusiveness of ­these allegorical poems signalled a departure from what had come to be acclaimed as Heaney’s traditional strengths; but ­ t hose strengths w ­ ere also displayed in The Haw Lan­ tern, particularly in ‘Clearances’, a sequence of poems commemorating his ­mother, who died in 1984. H ­ ere, the homely rituals of domestic farm life are once more invoked—­splitting a block of coal to release ‘the linear black’, folding and hanging out sheets on a washing line, peeling potatoes. In ­these actions, his m ­ other appears as teacher and companion, passionately close to her gifted son: early drafts referred specifically to Paul Morel in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. ­These exchanges are counterpointed by scenes from her past life, and handed-­down memories. One of them, significantly, concerns Heaney’s great-­g randmother, who converted to Catholicism on her marriage, being attacked by a Protestant mob on her way to Mass: Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’. Anyhow, it is a genre piece Inherited on my ­mother’s side 128  •  Chapter 5

And mine to dispose with now she’s gone. Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone.

But it is the intimate understandings between ­mother and son, and the regretful evocation of the inevitable distancing brought by education and social mobility, that strike most sharply home. When all the o ­ thers w ­ ere away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, ­things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean w ­ ater. And again let fall. L ­ ittle pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the ­dying And some ­were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent t­ owards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the w ­ hole rest of our lives. Alphabetical Order  • 129

As his ­mother breathes her last, accompanied out of life by her husband’s affectionately murmuring ‘more to her / Almost than in their ­whole life together’, a ‘pure change’ happens, projecting a power­f ul memory into the poet’s mind. It concerns a chestnut tree planted from a conker at the time of Heaney’s birth, in the front hedge of Mossbawn, which had—to his child’s all-­ seeing eye—­grown up with him. When Heaney was fifteen, the f­ amily left the h ­ ouse to move to The Wood, and the new o ­ wners cut the chestnut down. The masterly last sonnet of the sequence unites the ‘clearance’ of his ­mother’s death with his own sense of mortality, brought on by the loss of his companion tree. I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet’s differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. 130  •  Chapter 5

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever ­Silent, beyond silence listened for.

This struck a prophetic note; the themes of death and translation to another world would press more and more insistently into Heaney’s work, reflected in the titles of subsequent collections such as ‘Seeing ­Th ings’ and ‘The Spirit Level’. He had already indicated this in describing his reaction to the destruction of his ‘coeval’ tree in an essay in The Government of the Tongue: ‘I began to think of the space where the tree had been or would have been. In my mind’s eye I saw it as a kind of luminous emptiness, a warp and waver of light and once again, in a way that I find hard to define, I began to identify with that space just as years before I had identified with the young tree . . . ​a ­matter of preparing to be uprooted, to be spirited away into some transparent, yet indigenous, afterlife’. ‘Indigenous afterlives’ would haunt his work from now on as the pace of his life accelerated. The poems in Seeing ­Things (1991) w ­ ere bookended by translations from Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno, both dealing with a trespass Alphabetical Order  • 131

into other worlds, while boat-­journeys and water-­​ crossings recur throughout the volume. Twenty-­ two years ­later, at the very end of his life, Hea­ ney would again translate Aeneid VI and do it rather differently. Tellingly, the 1991 book opens with Aeneas’s plea to the Sibyl of Cumae that he might visit Hades to see his f­ather once more, and Heaney’s own dead ­father continues to be a presence in the first poems that follow: pegging out lines of string to demarcate a flower bed in ‘Markings’, rescued from near drowning in ‘Seeing ­Things’, and directly compared to Aeneas carry­ing Anchises on his back from the flames of Troy in ‘Man and Boy’. As a culmination, a delicate haiku-­like poem suggests inheritance as well as mortality: Dangerous pavements. But I face the ice this year With my f­ ather’s stick.

Conscious that he was approaching fifty, Hea­ ney implicitly shares Yeats’s epiphany in ‘Vacillation’ when—at the same age—­his ­great pre­de­ ces­sor recognised for a moment that he ‘was blessed and could bless’. My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man,

132  •  Chapter 5

In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-­top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so g­ reat my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

Many of the poems in Seeing ­Things play to Heaney’s traditional strengths—­metaphorically defining objects in a way that sees them anew (‘The Biretta’, ‘The ­Settle Bed’, ‘The Schoolbag’). A sequence of sonnets called ‘Glanmore Revisited’ reflects the changes both in the beloved Wicklow cottage and in its denizens (now ­owners, not tenants). Throughout the book, rituals of fishing, farming, and harvesting are gifted with transcendence; the title of one poem, ‘Fields of Vision’, could stand for much of the book. Throughout the volume, as several commentators noted, ­t here is a turn away from the po­liti­ cal t­owards the visionary. The poem that concludes the first section of the book, ‘Fosterling’, yet again raises that Yeatsian question of the insights that come with age. It illustrates his belated belief in ‘marvels’ by invoking an Irish folk tale about a fantastic clock built by ingenious tinkers

Alphabetical Order  • 133

to fool the Devil when he arrived by appointment to gather souls. Me waiting ­until I was nearly fifty To credit marvels. Like the tree-­clock of tin cans The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

The second section of the book, called ‘Squarings’, sets out four groups of poems u ­ nder the names ‘Lightenings’, ‘Settings’, Crossings’, and fi­ nally ‘Squarings’. They explore the sensation of ‘dazzle’ and ‘lightening’ in a series of deft, visionary poems where the imperatives of the creative imagination are interrogated through a variety of pro­cesses, often using a precise geometry of space. The poems in the first series, ‘Lightenings’, are linked by images and insights, picked up from poem to poem and echoing fugue-­like through the sequence. Through the poem’s use of concrete images such as the construction of a ­house and the geometry of a child’s game of marbles, the ‘­music of what happens’ strikes a ringing frequency on the poet’s inner ear and is sharply transferred to the reader’s sensibility. One poem in par­tic­u­lar, inspired by a poem in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s Celtic Miscellany, would become canonical, and a favourite in Heaney’s own public readings: 134  •  Chapter 5

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise ­Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along b ­ ehind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And strug­gled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man c­ an’t bear our life h ­ ere and w ­ ill drown,’ The abbot said, ‘­unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

­ ere as so often in Seeing ­Things, the idea of H visiting another world is raised—­a nd the probability of returning (like Orpheus) profoundly altered. Th ­ ere are two kinds of ‘marvellous’, even perhaps two kinds of truth. Heaney would quote the poem at the end of his Oxford lecture on ‘Frontiers of Writing’, where he discussed poetry, identity, and politics, as well as what he described as ‘the line that divides the ­actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative Alphabetical Order  • 135

repre­sen­ta­tion of ­those conditions in lit­er­a­ture, and divides also the world of social speech from the world of poetic language’. ‘Squarings’ pre­sents a series of sharply realised memories, vivid as pictures in a medieval missal, and sometimes strangely obscure. ­Here again, the shade of Yeats is invoked, in a series of very Yeatsian questions to the self. Where does spirit live? Inside or outside ­Things remembered, made t­ hings, ­t hings unmade? What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul I­ magined in the dawn cold when it cried? Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks In a jackdaw’s nest up in the old stone tower Or a marble bust commanding the parterre? How habitable is perfected form? And how inhabited the windy light? What’s the use of a held note or held line That cannot be assailed for reassurance? (Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)

This kind of allusiveness persists in the penultimate section of the sequence, significantly called ‘Crossings’. ­Here, the connecting theme concerns journeying across bound­aries, accompanied by guardians and guides. 136  •  Chapter 5

‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’ My f­ ather told his s­ ister setting out For London, ‘and stay near him all night And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on The journey of the soul with its soul guide And the mysteries of dealing-­men with sticks!

In other poems too, the ­father’s shade returns, with other ghosts. And in this ostensibly unpo­ liti­cal collection, the last memory of a crossing conjures up the threatening aftermath of a civil rights march, where the companions regaining the poet’s parked car feel they may be entering Charon’s boat rather than finding sanctuary. The final sequence of the series conjures up the haunted landscapes of memory, and the sketchy traces left by the ghosts who have inhabited it. Even the clay-­floored out­house at Mossbawn is remembered with a certain chill: Out of that earth-­house I inherited A stack of singular, cold memory-­weights To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of ­t hings.

The last two poems use the image of that area of the offshore sea called the ‘offing’, seen as a ghostly realm where ‘­things foreknown’ are made Alphabetical Order  • 137

manifest. ­Here, one day, the light of revelation may break on the poet and possibly put him ‘in step with what escaped me’. This complex progression of poems raises more questions than it answers, but its otherworldly agenda is underscored by the envoi to the book. This is a translation from part of Dante’s Inferno, where Charon ships the damned souls across the Styx to perdition—­leaving the poet to stand aside, awaiting a lighter boat and a dif­fer­ent shore. Read from start to finish, Seeing ­Things may appear one of the most integrated and consistently thematic of Heaney’s books; reviewers hailed it as a triumph, even a masterpiece. Read in retrospect, the book seems to revolve around the notion of transcendence, mystery, and t­ hings unknown; revenants recur. It certainly lays out the agenda for much of what followed. In a l­ ater interview, Heaney accepted the presence in Seeing ­Things of a Yeatsian visionary impulse, but added: ‘my starlight came in over the half-­door of a h ­ ouse with a clay floor, not over the dome of a Byzantine palace; and, in a hollowed-­ out part of the floor, t­ here was a cat licking up the starlit milk’. He also stressed the rich resource of being ‘oversupplied’ with the imagery of divine mysteries in his devoutly Catholic youth. ‘I suppose—­like many Catholics, lapsed or not—­I am of the Stephen Dedalus frame of mind: if you 138  •  Chapter 5

desert this system, ­you’re deserting the best ­there is, and t­ here’s no point in exchanging one g­ reat coherence for some other ad hoc arrangement’. Receptivity to vision and mystery inform the ­whole ‘Squarings’ sequence, written in a burst of inspiration during 1988–9, which boosted his artistic morale and allowed him open up a range of sometimes intensely personal references. Even the form which the work took (twelve-­line poems, each divided into three-­line stanzas, grouped in twelve-­ poem sequences) came inspirationally, ‘solid as an iron bar’. A similarly geometric preoccupation appears in the recurrent image of marking out space—­reflecting, perhaps, the recalibration of the poet’s own life ­after his ­father’s death in 1986 and his own fiftieth birthday in 1989 (‘the new freedom of ­later life’). Yet again, life was being lived in fast-­forward mode. As seen by Helen Vendler, long one of his closest readers, this was a new departure: the Keatsian Heaney of the early books, the domestic Heaney of Field Work, and the Joycean Heaney of Station Island had given way to a chastened and profound investigation into the depths of death and life. The roof had lifted off his world, opening it to new intimations. ‘Squarings’ had another, unanticipated importance. The under­lying preoccupations of defining poetry, poets, and the making of poems Alphabetical Order  • 139

­ ere much in Heaney’s mind when (not for the w first time) he was asked to let his name go forward for election to the visiting post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford—­a post held by Matthew Arnold, Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, and other luminaries before him. It lasted five years (1989– 94), requiring three lectures a year. Accommodation was provided for the Heaneys in the beautiful surroundings of Magdalen College, where they could lie in bed in the morning listening to choristers practising below. At an earthier level, the sessions in the Eastgate ­Hotel ­a fter the lectures brought a distinctly Irish geniality to Oxford. The Heaneys’ close friend, the poet and critic Bernard O’Donoghue, took them on pilgrimages to fabled places around Oxford—­ Ewelme for its Chaucerian alms­houses, C.  S. Lewis’s and John Masefield’s h ­ ouses, Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington, ­Great Tew, the Rollright Stones—as well as sorties to hear Irish musicians in a pub on the Cowley Road. The Heaneys already had many friends in Oxford, and ­others attended from London; the level of interest from undergraduates was extraordinary, and the huge Examination Schools ­were packed for ­every lecture. The sense of occasion was palpable, with expectation building up before each per­for­mance; Heaney invariably entered on time, approaching the podium at a steady canter, gown billowing, 140  •  Chapter 5

half-­moon spectacles perched on his nose, giving half-­smiles to right and left, and a full grin when he reached the lectern and turned to face the enormous and anticipatory audience. The easy authority of the born lecturer, which he had ­gently mocked in ‘Alphabets’, was never more in evidence. What followed did not disappoint. He had early on hit upon the overarching theme of the lectures: what poetry does, in an imperfect world, to make sense of life and to ‘redress’ it. The poets through whom he chose to explore this theme ­were in some ways predictable. Less so ­were the combinations, comparisons, and uses to which their work was put. Above all, the idea of poetry’s function of fostering inclusiveness was invoked from the beginning and powerfully articulated in the final lecture. Throughout, Heaney demonstrated his analytical command over dif­ fer­ent modes of poetic expression—­from Ireland (Brian Merriman, Oscar Wilde), ­England (John Clare, Philip Larkin), Scotland (Hugh MacDiarmaid), Wales (Dylan Thomas), and Amer­i­ca (Elizabeth Bishop). Early on, he employed Yeats’s mischievous contrast between the ‘Irish preference for a swift current’ and the ‘meditative, rich deliberate’ En­glish mind, which ‘may remember the Thames Valley’, but both modes ­were given generous consideration. Alphabetical Order  • 141

The first lecture concentrated on George Herbert, exemplar of ‘the body heat of a healthy Anglican life’; a subsequent bravura piece on Christopher Marlowe managed to combine reflections on the brutality of Elizabethan colonisation with a pointed discussion of the erotics of ‘Hero and Leander’. Throughout the series ran a rich demonstration of MacDiarmaid’s definition of poetry as ‘­human existence come to life’ and what Hea­ ney himself called ‘the central, epoch-­making role that is always available in the world to poetry and the poet’. But t­ here ­were other riches too: the audience was treated to Heaney’s own translation of parts of Brian Merriman’s bawdy classic ‘The Midnight Court’, and to a brilliant rereading of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in terms of the long tradition of Irish nationalist prison narratives. Much in the lectures struck a personal note, as with his reflections on Hugh MacDiarmaid finding his way out of a received idiom that was not right for him, or Heaney’s reflections on vernacular poetry, a preoccupation he shared with his close Oxford friend Tom Paulin. Nor did his treatment evade what he called Mac­ Diarmaid’s occasional ‘vindictive nativism’, or the inadequacies of much of Thomas’s verse; a quizzical critical edge gave the lectures additional bite. 142  •  Chapter 5

Perhaps the peak per­for­mance was a bravura lecture delivered on 30 April 1990 which contrasted the views of death expressed in Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ and Yeats’s ‘Man and the Echo’—­t hus taking up the themes which predominate in See­ ing ­Things. Starting with a Miroslav Holub poem about dif­fer­ent ways of d ­ ying, the lecture moved to Yeats’s consummate ‘The Cold Heaven’, a vision which Heaney insisted was ‘neither frigid nor negative . . . ​[but] an image of superabundant life’. Along with Miłosz (whom he quotes at length), Heaney admires the devastating effect of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ but refuses to accede to the poem’s unforgivingly dark contemplation of life and its ending: marvellously counterpointing it by quoting Yeats’s ‘Man and the Echo’. In both poems, an ageing poet lies awake at night, thinking about the unknown that lies ahead, and in many ways, Yeats’s opening vision has its own kind of bleakness, while the poem closes with the violent image of a rabbit struck from above by a bird of prey. But it still delivers a power­f ul affirmative statement about ‘the spiritual intellect’s ­great work’: in Heaney’s words, ‘the consciousness of the poet is in full possession of both its creative impulse and its limiting knowledge’. Significantly, Heaney used the poets’ differing reflections on approaching death to argue in general terms for what poetry can ‘redress’ in life: Alphabetical Order  • 143

. . . ​when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add negative weight to the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all the odds. For all its heartbreaking truths and beauties, ‘Aubade’ reneges on what Yeats called the ‘spiritual intellect’s g­ reat work’.

By contrast, he added, ‘what “The Man and the Echo” implies is something that I have repeatedly tried to establish through several dif­fer­ent readings and remarks in the course of t­ hese lectures: namely, that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital ­factor in the achievement of that

144  •  Chapter 5

goal, is what Yeats called in “­Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind” ’. This lecture distilled and reinforced many of the themes now entering Heaney’s own poetry, and it was delivered with a passion which t­ hose listening to it would find hard to forget. Equally memorable, and just as ‘personal’, was Heaney’s climactic lecture on ‘Frontiers of Writing’ which confronted head-on the issues of being a poet from Northern Ireland in times of ‘trou­ble’ (as the Irish tactfully call episodes of vio­lence, antagonism, and murder). The lecture opened with Heaney’s recollection of staying at All Souls College for a feast in 1981, at a time when IRA prisoners ­were ­dying on hunger strike in the Maze prison, and proceeded to interrogate ‘that moment of conflicting recognitions, self-­division, inner quarrel’ which he defined as the ‘inner bind’ of being a constitutional nationalist in Northern Ireland. And in a lecture that ranged as widely as all its pre­ de­ ces­ sors, invoking Words­worth, George Seferis, Wallace Stevens, Robert Pinsky, and many ­others from the En­ glish and American canons, Heaney made clear that his perspective throughout the series had been a Northern Irish one. This related closely to his connecting thread: the idea that poetry could be ‘redressing’ in adjusting and

Alphabetical Order  • 145

correcting imbalances in the world: not only offering ‘a glimpsed alternative’ but reaffirming a new potential. Fi­nally, edging nearer politics than ever before, he discussed ‘bilocation’ in culture and national identity, particularly in Northern Ireland. He g­ ently admonished John Hewitt’s implicit view of Ulster as a tabula rasa before Protestant plantation in the seventeenth ­century, recurred to MacNeice’s ability to combine Irish and Anglo-­Irish va­ri­e­ties of identity, revisited and defended his own An Open Letter about not being called a British poet, and called in the end for a ‘two-­ minded’ approach to national identity, which accepts the British dimension of Northern Irishness and the centrality of the En­g lish language but as part of a larger Irish real­ity. In an arrestingly Yeatsian way, Heaney delineated this vision of Ireland as a symbolic diagram—­a ‘quincunx’ defining the Irish frontier by literary towers. This image incorporated the generic ‘round tower’ of Irish antiquity at the centre, Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee in the west, Spenser’s Kilcolman tower-­house in the south, and Joyce’s Martello in the east. Fi­nally, the northern fortress of Carrickfergus symbolised MacNeice’s achievement as ‘an Irish protestant writer with Anglocentric attitudes who managed to be faithful to his Ulster inheritance, his Irish affections and his En­glish 146  •  Chapter 5

predilections’. Within the individual self, Heaney concluded, ‘we can reconcile two ­ orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic’: each ‘redresses the other and the frontier between them is t­ here for the crossing’. This resolution was, in conclusion, simply but dramatically illustrated by the poem from ‘Lightenings’ where a magical ship appears to the monks of Clonmacnoise and is freed by them, allowing its trapped sailor to return from ‘the marvellous as he had known it’. Heaney’s audiences knew that they too had been given privileged access to the marvellous, and the huge international acclaim that would descend upon him a year ­later came as no surprise to ­t hose who trooped into that Oxford lecture hall to listen to him.

Alphabetical Order  • 147

6 The Moment of Mortality

Heaney heard that he had won the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in October 1995 when he phoned home from a h ­ otel room in the Peloponnese. Appositely, he was staying in the l­ittle harbour town of Pylos on the Bay of Navarino, by tradition home to King Nestor, in a land of sites and legends which he was already plumbing for poetic themes. The citation from the Nobel Committee invoked his poetry’s combination of ‘lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. What followed was a phenomenon he likened to ‘a mostly benign avalanche’. Th ­ ere was an enormous public reaction in Ireland, unremitting pursuit from the world’s press, and a torrent of invitations, solicitations, honours, and cele­brations, ranging from Harvard University to the Bellaghy GAA Club. His ­earlier life was now memorialised by exhibits in the Bellaghy Bawn Visitors’ Centre, forerunner of the ­later ‘HomePlace’ cultural centre dedicated to him. 148  •

He relinquished the Boylston Chair at Harvard for a non-­teaching role requiring a six-­week visit in alternate years, but his time was more heavi­ly compromised than ever, and his reputation had become irrevocably internationalised. Local reactions w ­ ere more pointed. Brian Friel sent Seamus Deane a postcard of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, annotating it as an image of Michael Longley’s reaction to the news. (This was unjust: Longley’s letter of congratulation to his old friend was a model of grace and generosity.) In general, the begrudging voices came from inconsequential journalists, not serious critics, whose consensus was that the new Irish laureate deserved his place with Yeats and Beckett. At the Nobel Prize cele­brations in December  1995, accompanied by old friends and colleagues such as Seamus Deane and Peter Fallon, Heaney delivered a memorable address, called ‘Crediting Poetry’. It opened with a kind of prose poem about his childhood: When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm I ­little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Acad­ emy and the Nobel Foundation. At that par­ tic­u ­lar time, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation; it was simply beyond The Moment of Mortality  • 149

conception. In the nineteen-­forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-­growing ­family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-­ life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the ­horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in every­thing that was ­going on, of course—­rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train along the railway line one field back from the house—­but we took it in as if we w ­ ere in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-­sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we ­were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking ­water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: ­every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that w ­ ater used to ­ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.

The focus then swings from silence to sound: the static crackles and staccato news announcements from the radio set, connected by a flimsy 150  •  Chapter 6

wire to an aerial in a tree outside. And one of the foreign stations on the dial is, of course, Stockholm. This is the childhood world exactly pictured in ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, a poem which would shortly appear in Heaney’s next collection. The lecture stresses, more ominously than the poem, that the news coming over the airwaves was about war, ‘the ­enemy’, and ‘allies’. But the main message is that the child was becoming attuned to words from elsewhere, beginning ‘a journey into the wideness of language’, and ultimately into an understanding that poetry ‘can make an order as true to the impact of external real­ity and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the r­ipples that rippled in and rippled out across the ­water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago’. This is one way of ‘crediting’ what poetry has brought to his consciousness, but the lecture proceeds to throw a much wider net—­taking in the atrocious politics of the last quarter-­century in Northern Ireland, and the challenges to the ‘non-­ combatant’ poet, faced with the alleged involvements of his contemporaries in po­liti­cal killings. While he quotes ‘Exposure’, and interrogates his own historical position and the nationalist tradition he comes from, ‘Crediting Poetry’ confronts the seamy horrors and actualities of sectarian The Moment of Mortality  • 151

murder more directly than, for instance, anything in his Oxford lectures given over the previous five years. Some years before, Heaney had made a directly po­liti­cal intervention in a speech receiving a literary prize, the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 1988. This followed hard upon a horrifying week in Northern Ireland: a Protestant paramilitary had opened fire at an IRA funeral, killing three p ­ eople, and at the subsequent funeral of one of the victims, two British soldiers who had mistakenly driven into the cortege ­were dragged from their car and murdered. Heaney’s speech at the Sunday Times event raised the issue of Anglo-­Irish relations, regretted that the spirit of the 1985 Anglo-­Irish Agreement was no longer being observed, and deplored the prejudice and complacency that characterised too much British reporting of the Irish crisis (he clearly meant the Sunday Times itself). This had not gone down well in Britain. By the time of his Nobel speech, although overtures ­towards peace talks ­were happening ­behind the scenes, the killing spree in his native province showed l­ittle sign of abatement. The early 1990s saw car bombs, random shootings of Catholic civilians by Protestant paramilitaries such as the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) and the Ulster Defence Association, and the appalling IRA 152  •  Chapter 6

practice of forcing a driver to detonate a primed bomb (and himself) at a military target by means of holding members of his ­family hostage. October 1993 was the bloodiest month since 1976. An IRA bomb in a fish and chip shop on the Shankill Road killed ten ­people, and in retaliation, the UFF entered a pub in Greysteel and slaughtered seven ­people t­ here. Despite the cautious moves ­towards a ceasefire which ­were just coming into view, the sectarian bloodbaths of the immediately preceding years formed the po­liti­cal background to Heaney’s speech in Stockholm. In ‘Crediting Poetry’, Heaney reached back further than the recent horrors to one par­tic­u­lar episode from 1976. A masked gang ambushed a minibus of workmen, lined them up, and asked any Catholics among them to step out. The single Catholic did so, despite a friendly pressure of restraint from a Protestant co-­worker, indicating that he would not betray him. But the single Catholic did step out—­a nd was the only man spared, as the murder gang was in fact Republican, not (as assumed from the question posed) Loyalist. The ­matters at issue in this terrible true story haunt Heaney. Though he clings to the solidarity and fellow feeling of the Protestant who tries to stop his Catholic friend identifying himself, the blood-­spattered infliction of tribally decreed The Moment of Mortality  • 153

vio­lence both obsesses him in the pre­sent and is refracted through the classical tragedies which had come to preoccupy his work. In a fascinating passage, he describes the years of attempting to contemplate histories of blood and tears, ‘like some monk bowed over his prie-­dieu . . . ​k nowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture’. Significantly, he told his Nobel audience, he found his way out by ‘straightening up’ and allowing for the marvellous as well as the murderous. This was elegantly illustrated by his own poem ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, conjuring up the saint’s immobility as a bird roosts and hatches out a brood in his hand. The thought was amplified by an ancient bas-­relief of Orpheus enrapturing birds with his song, seen in a museum in Sparta the day before he heard of the Nobel Prize—­ which would supply the cover illustration for the printed version of ‘Crediting Poetry’. The lecture is full of such subtle and satisfying circlings. The conclusion turns (as might have been expected e­arlier) to Heaney’s pre­de­ces­sor, Yeats, and his Nobel speech in 1923, which strikingly avoided the subject of the recent guerrilla and civil wars in Ireland, concentrating instead upon the Irish dramatic movement and the ­cultural importance of theatre in conjuring up a 154  •  Chapter 6

sense of in­de­pen­dent national culture. Heaney prefers to focus on Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a sequence which had already established a power­ful presence in much of his own work. Particularly, in an inspired echo of St Kevin nurturing the blackbird, Heaney chose to quote in full Yeats’s ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Win­dow’: The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and ­t here The m ­ other birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-­bees Come build in the empty h ­ ouse of the stare. We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a h ­ ouse burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in the empty h ­ ouse of the stare. A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty h ­ ouse of the stare. We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-­bees Come build in the empty h ­ ouse of the stare. The Moment of Mortality  • 155

But, as Heaney points out, Yeats takes in not only the nurturing ­mother love of the birds, but ‘the massacre on the side of the roadside’ and, implicitly, ‘the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures’. Thus, poetry is ‘credited’ with being adequate for recording the worst and the best at moments of extreme crisis: ‘touching the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic real­ity of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed’. Significantly, Heaney did not follow Friel’s suggestion of incorporating T. S. Eliot’s reflection (arising from a consideration of Polish history): ‘­whether a culture can survive systematic destruction from without depends less upon its forces of active revolt, than upon the stubbornness of the unconscious masses, the tenacity with which they cling to habits and customs, their instinctive re­sis­tance to change’. The message he wanted to send was not one of dogged re­sis­tance to conquest and oppression but a more hopeful indication at a dark time. In this remarkable lecture, Heaney allowed himself to demonstrate the authority he had now achieved, notably by facing up directly to Yeats— as ‘an example’ but without the question mark he had added many years before. The glancing but absolute exactness of his language follows a dif­ 156  •  Chapter 6

fer­ent idiom from Yeatsian flourishes, but strikes an equally resonant note. Th ­ ese strengths and preoccupations w ­ ere borne out in the poetry collection he published a year ­later, The Spirit Level. The title characteristically played on words—­ suggesting not only the pro­cess of mea­sur­ing, charting, and balancing, but also (in line with Seeing ­Things) a dimension of otherworldliness, even ethereality. This does not mean lightness of being, though the book opened and closed with cele­brations of transcendence. ‘The Rain Stick’ evokes a moment of magic, when the rattle of dry seeds in a hollow cactus enables the listener to enter ‘heaven / Through the ear of a raindrop’; ‘Postscript’, which rapidly became central to the Heaney canon, isolates a moment of joy on the windy coast of County Clare, when landscape, weather, and a kind of ecstasy come together. Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither h ­ ere nor ­t here, A hurry through which known and strange ­t hings pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. The Moment of Mortality  • 157

The poem came, he l­ ater said, in a moment of inspiration. ‘I had this quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was I went ­after it. . . ​­There are some poems that feel like guarantees of your work to yourself. They leave you with the sense of having been visited, and this was one of them’. The poem may also have been impor­tant to him through a certain Yeatsian assonance: not only b ­ ecause he (with Marie and the Friels) had just visited Lady Gregory’s summer ­house on the ‘Flaggy Shore’, nor ­because ‘the earthed lightning of a flock of swans’ are central to the poem’s imagery (Heaney would ­later admit that the poem implies a dialogue with Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’). By this point in his life, Heaney himself was more and more inevitably identified with his ­great pre­de­ces­sor. The Nobel Prize hammered this home, but so did his position as ‘national poet’. ­There are other reverberations too; much like Yeats, who at a similar point in his life announced his intention to dine ‘at journey’s end / with Landor and with Donne’, Heaney made a point of stressing the kind of poetic com­pany he liked to keep. Czesław Miłosz, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, and Hugh MacDiarmaid are figures who recur in his poems from the mid-1990s as well as in the litanies of friendship (and, increasingly, of mourning). 158  •  Chapter 6

Yeats’s turning t­ owards the classical world is echoed too. The central poem in The Spirit Level takes on the dark story of the House of Atreus, from an oblique ­angle. A diary note rec­ords that he began the poem at Hallowe’en 1994, determined to ‘break through the concrete’. He had at one point wondered about producing a full-on version of the Orestia, but felt it would be seen in the light of Tony Harrison’s recent adaptation and Peter Hall’s National Theatre production; his early efforts, he wrote privately, had turned out contrived and dutiful, without the necessary ‘madness’. The perspective he hit upon (much reworked in draft) was swiftly narrowed down to Agamemnon’s return from Troy to Mycenae, bringing the prophetess Cassandra as his forced concubine, and his subsequent murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. The vio­lence and bloodiness of the story is relayed through an observer: a sentry in the ramparts. The five sections of the poem take notably dif­fer­ent forms: rhyming pentameter couplets in the first section establishing the sentry’s viewpoint, switching to harsh, shocking, truncated verses for Cassandra’s fate. No such ­t hing as innocent bystanding. The Moment of Mortality  • 159

Her soiled vest, her l­ ittle breasts, her clipped, devastated, scabbed punk head, the char-­eyed famine gawk— she looked camp-­f ucked and ­simple.

The watchman remains the focus, able to ‘feel the beating of the huge time-­wound / We lived inside’, and vouchsafed (like Aeneas) a vision of the foundation of Rome—­another style-­switch to rhyming tercets. The final section of the poem invokes the healing powers of w ­ ater—­washing the blood off soldiers’ limbs, and gushing from wells in the ground. But this does l­ ittle to salve the savage view of inherited rage, guilt, and senseless vio­lence that has gone before, the watchman’s dreams ‘of blood like bright webs in a ford, / Of bodies raining down like tattered meat / On top of me asleep’. The poem was written a­ fter the IRA declared a ceasefire in 1994 (which would be broken in 1996). Another poem in The Spirit Level, called ‘Tollund’, specifically refers to that moment of 160  •  Chapter 6

hope, and bears the date ‘September 1994’. ‘Tollund’ ends with the poet visiting Jutland, and the landscape that inspired North, with its chilling meta­phors of murdered bodies buried in bog. But now, Things had moved on. It could have been Mulhollandstown or Scribe. The byroads had their names on them in black And white; it was user-­friendly outback Where we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe, More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning And make a go of it, alive and sinning, Ourselves again, free-­w illed again, not bad.

‘Mycenae Lookout’, however, is infinitely less hopeful, less user-­friendly, more visceral, and its concerns echo the bloodied and tortured victims of North far more closely. Cassandra carries echoes of that tarred girl in ‘Punishment’. Th ­ ings have not ‘moved on’ ­here. Thus, The Spirit Level signals a turn back to po­ liti­cal realities ­a fter the ethereal note struck by Seeing ­Things. The Moment of Mortality  • 161

Heaney being Heaney, the themes of locality and memory are evoked in the volume too, with his trademark jolts of exact observation. The magical transits of childhood are conjured up in ‘A Sofa in the Forties’: the row of ­children playing at being on a train, the ‘absolute speaker’ of the radio enabling an entry into the world of ‘history and ignorance’. The outside world is not as ominous as Heaney indicated in his Nobel speech; though the sofa might be, as the poem asks, ‘Ghost-­train? Death-­gondola?’ ­these images seem to come from the fairground rather than, as some critics have suggested, the rail-­tracks to Auschwitz. The autobiographical strain persists in The Spirit Level: domestic rituals such as jam-­making are invoked; ancestors, in-­laws, and neighbours paid tribute—­Heaney’s widowed father-­in-­law in ‘The Sharping Stone’, a blind musician in ‘At the Wellhead’. The poet’s parents are beautifully evoked in ‘The Swing’ and ‘The Errand’. But the dark terrors of vio­lence are never far away. The damson image in the poem of that name comes only ­after a gripping account of an accident suffered by a bricklayer working in the Heaneys’ ­house, the ‘glutinous colour’ of blood against the mortar arousing associations of roadside massacres. In ‘Keeping G ­ oing’, a poem dedicated to his farmer b ­ rother Hugh, an associated image of 162  •  Chapter 6

whitewashed walls shifts inexorably into ‘grey ­matter like gruel flecked with blood’ when a part-­ time reservist is shot against a wall in the local town. Though his b ­ rother ‘keeps g­ oing’ at the daily round, and the poem signals the necessity for endurance, it is also riddled with fateful signs and omens of bad luck; even his joker ­brother ‘cannot make the dead walk or right wrong’. Another kind of conjunction is flagged up in ‘Two Lorries’. It starts with a larky 1940s memory of a coalman delivering flirtatious badinage to Heaney’s ­mother along with his wares (‘Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?’). But with a consummate inevitability, the poem then shifts gear into a vision of a more sinister delivery by a ­f uture lorry, carry­ing a bomb to blow up the bus station in Magherafelt on 23 May 1993, killing eleven ­people—­that same bus station where Margaret Heaney used to meet her son on his visits home from school. The brilliance of the poem uses the idea of film to conjure a forward projection where coal-­delivery sacks become body bags, and the dust of an explosion fi­nally ­settles over every­t hing. So tally bags and sweet-­talk darkness, coalman. Listen to the rain spit in new ashes The Moment of Mortality  • 163

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt, Then reappear from your lorry as my ­mother’s Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-­white ashes.

In ‘Crediting Poetry’, Heaney had emphasised the crucial importance of a poem’s form in enabling and maximising its conscious and unconscious impact. The formal structure of ‘Two Lorries’ is a striking case in point: a sestina, where key words in six-­line stanzas repeatedly recur at the end of lines, climaxing in a final tercet. The poem is constructed around that image of ashes, transmuted from warming domestic ritual to chilling emblems of mortality, by a kind of poetic alchemy uniquely Heaney’s own. The several themes of The Spirit Level are melded in one complex autobiographical poem, ‘The Flight Path’, which might stand as a demonstration of all the preoccupations Heaney surveyed in his Nobel lecture. As first published in 1992, it included an autobiographical encounter with British security officials a­ fter a tipsy joke goes wrong: Not long a­ fter the Birmingham bombings A ­couple of us flew from Belfast, drunk As lords, miming into sick-­bags, d ­ oing 164  •  Chapter 6

Photo-­cartoons on the in-­flight magazines— Rent-­a-­Paddy Inc., in full production! In which state, IN BLOCK CAPITALS, one filled out (As instructed) an Embarkation card. Previous address. Address in Britain. Duration of Visit. Purpose of . . . ​We ­were Headed for a seminar (what e­ lse) On art and politics. At any rate, ­Under ‘Purpose of Visit’, this bard wrote TO EDUCATE (IF POSS.) SOME ENGLISH ­PEOPLE And thought no more about it. The plainclothes man Who checked us through Arrivals took his time. ‘What’s this, then, sir?’ ‘What’s what?’ ‘This h ­ ere, sir’. ‘That?’ ‘Oh, that’s what I’m across ­here for. You see The address? It’s the university.’ ‘All the same, it’s a bit sarcastic, sir.’ ‘It’s what we call in Ireland an En­glish joke.’ And all jokes s­ topped. Anti-­terrorism, Special powers and acts, arrests, detentions— At least our story held when they phoned out. We sobered up and a second form was brought. The Moment of Mortality  • 165

This section, which recalls an incident of 1974, was published in PN Review in 1992 but was dropped from the collected version in The Spirit Level, possibly reflecting the intervening change in the po­liti­cal weather. As published, ‘The Flight Path’ incorporates childhood memories, the sanctuary at Glanmore, Californian sojourns, a climb up to a pilgrim village in the Dordogne. But it is also about the implications of the poet’s calling at a time of extremism and vio­lence. The weight of the poem falls in the fourth section, when the euphoria of returning to Ireland from New York, relishing the seaside train journey north out of Dublin, is interrupted by an accusatory voice. Enter then— As if he ­were some film noir border guard— Enter this one I’d last met in a dream, More grim-­faced now than in the dream itself When he’d flagged me down at the side of a mountain road, Come up and leant his elbow on the roof And explained through the open win­dow of the car That all I’d have to do was drive a van Carefully in to the next custom post At Pettigo, switch it off, get out as if 166  •  Chapter 6

I ­were on my way with dockets to the office— But then instead I’d walk ten yards more down ­Towards the main street and get in with—­here Another schoolfriend’s name, a wink and smile, I’d know him all right, he’d be in a Ford And I’d be home in three hours’ time, as safe As ­houses . . . So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on. ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you ­going to write Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something, What­ever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’ And that was that. Or words to that effect.

An early draft sent to Brian Friel continued, ‘O, sadness of the merely adequate’, a phrase ­later dropped. The next stanza recalls ‘the gaol walls smeared with shite’, and directly compares the Maze prison of the dirty protests and hunger strikes to ‘Dante’s scurfy hell’, invoking and quoting Heaney’s own ­earlier version of the Ugolino passage. ­There is self-­reproach: the poet’s role is to ‘walk b ­ ehind the righ­teous Virgil, / As safe as ­houses and translating freely’. The wordplays The Moment of Mortality  • 167

are characteristically multiple ­here (safe ­houses, ­free translation). And the next section of the poem deftly raises an echo of ‘Exposure’ in North, placing the poet at an a­ ngle to the violent real­ity around him. When I answered that I came from ‘far away’, The policeman at the roadblock snapped, ‘Where’s that?’ He’d only half-­heard what I said and thought It was the name of some place up the country. And now it is—­both where I have been living And where I left—­a distance still to go Like starlight that is light years on the go From far away and takes light years arriving.

The sequence might well end on this wrenchingly sad note, but t­here is a final stanza—­ recalling the ‘sheer exaltation’ of climbing up to ‘the hermit’s eyrie above Rocamadour’ in France, and ending on the image of a dove rising in the morning air. If the intention is to invoke a cele­ bration of peace, it does not cancel out the sharp antagonisms which have gone before and are in168  •  Chapter 6

voked elsewhere in the volume. The tension between public responsibility and artistic freedom is framed over and over again, decisively and defiantly refusing a simplistic answer. ‘The Flight Path’, taken as a w ­ hole, also raises the questions preoccupying Heaney more and more, and insistently interrogated in lectures and essays at this time: what is poetry for, and how does it earn its place in the ‘real world’? During the ­later 1990s, at a time when public invitations and obligations w ­ ere raining down all round him, Heaney was imposing another kind of discipline on himself. The idea of translating the medieval En­g lish epic Beowulf had been suggested in the mid-1980s, but he only came to grips with it in the Nobel year; it would appear in 1999, a­ fter years of unremitting work, in close concert with several Anglo-­Saxon experts and publishers’ readers. ‘Each morning I was like a man sentenced to hard l­abour, rolling up his sleeves, spitting on his hands and taking hold of the shaft of a sledgehammer’. He spoke of it ­later as a hard slog, and a kind of ‘homework’ proj­ect; he had used similar imagery when referring to ‘The Cure at Troy’. For many ex-­students of En­g lish Lit­er­a­ture, Beowulf itself is inseparable from the idea of homework: a foundational text to be dutifully pored over, combining the unfamiliar worlds of The Moment of Mortality  • 169

Anglo-­Saxon language with Scandinavian legend, featuring b ­ attles, feasts, and strug­gles with legendary monsters. Heaney made of it something indisputably his own, without rendering it into a new form; something dutiful and archaic remained, even given the hard work converting the interlacing, alliterative nature of the original verses into a Heaney-­esque gait and rhythm. (‘I ­didn’t know or love Beowulf enough to remake it’, he ­later remarked.) What is striking in Hea­ ney’s version is the choice of language. It is overwhelmingly un-­Latinate (where a word such as ‘retaliate’ or ‘reconnoitre’ occasionally occurs, it jars with the rest), but even more notably, words from Ulster usage are introduced to atmospheric effect: such as ‘bawn’, ‘kesh’, and, above all, ‘thole’. The last word means to bear or put up with something, and in his Introduction to Beowulf, Heaney focuses on it as an entry-­point to making the saga his own: in the words of one excitable critic, ‘a final, triumphant reversal of his cultural dispossession’. By the 1990s, it is hard to think of anyone less culturally dispossessed than Heaney. But his appropriation of Beowulf is a distinct and deliberate effort to place himself in a position of authority over a hallowed if slightly fusty part of the En­g lish literary canon. This is not done—­mercifully—by asserting parallels be170  •  Chapter 6

tween Beowulf’s violent tussles in Denmark and the atrocities of twentieth-­century Northern Ireland. More to the point is his assertion of control over a central part of the En­glish syllabus; amplified by the resonant effect of his Oxford lectures, Heaney’s work and reputation ­were now positioned at the centre of the En­glish canon, while operating emphatically from a base in Ireland (North and South). Taken with his Nobel triumph, his position was unique and—­despite a half-­suppressed current of begrudging comment in Ireland—­u nassailable, particularly with a large popu­lar audience. Beowulf was widely reviewed, won the Whitbread Prize, and sold phenomenally well—­prob­ably, as Heaney himself remarked, to readers who often failed to finish it. The years of toiling over Beowulf ­were also the years of putting together the collection Electric Light, published in 2001. In both cases, ­there was a burden of expectation to be borne, and the new collection was markedly uneven compared to its pre­de­ces­sors, as several reviewers pointed out. It is also glossed over in Dennis O’Driscoll’s perceptive interviews, which concentrate upon two long poems in memory of Brodsky and Hughes. The Hughes poem is suitably brooding and portentous, incorporating a passage from Heaney’s Beowulf; the Brodsky memorial poem chooses the mea­sured metre of Auden’s famous elegy on The Moment of Mortality  • 171

Yeats, and reads uncomfortably like light verse. Heaney ­later admitted that the challenge of crafting it had ‘forced the note’. The book also includes short and perfect poems of microscopic observation, such as ‘Perch’ and some of the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’—­notably the first, ‘Into Arcadia’. It was opulence and amen on the mountain road. Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer Who’d worked in Melbourne once and now trained ­water Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed Known in Hellas, prob­ably, since Hesiod— That was the least of it. When we crossed the border From Argos into Arcadia, and farther Into Arcadia, a lorry load Of apples had burst open on the road So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered, Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station, Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation. 172  •  Chapter 6

Longer autobiographical poems deliver an au­ then­tic punch, especially ‘Known World’ built around recollections of a hard-­drinking poetry symposium in Eastern Eu­rope, or ‘The Real Names’, a recollection and invocation of Shakespeare’s magic as first experienced in school productions. But the classically derived dialogues, such as ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, and a translation of Virgil’s ‘Eclogue IX’, are uncharacteristically laboured in a way that often grates. One quizzical ­little poem is called ‘Fragment’, and t­ here is indeed something fragmentary about much of the work in the first part of Electric Light; Part II, mostly elegiac, is more achieved, and the title poem is a consummately evocative voyage back into childhood fears, viewed through the prism of his grand­mother’s ­house. Even well-­disposed reviewers noted a ‘meandering’ ele­ment, and a certain deficit of irony in Electric Light. Shortly a­ fter its publication, the Portuguese critic Rui Carvalho Homem perceptively pointed out to Heaney the self-­referential nature of the first poem in the book, ‘At Toomebridge’ (eels, checkpoints, a hanged rebel): in reply, Heaney affirmed that the book was ‘fashioned out of materials that gathered themselves up without much sense of forward purpose or planning’. He also placed the book as a kind of The Moment of Mortality  • 173

outcome from Seeing ­Things, as was The Spirit Level (a more convincing assertion), and agreed that his indeterminate, not-­quite-­sequence poems risked ‘losing the reader h ­ ere and t­ here’. In his notably frank responses to Carvalho Homem, Heaney admitted the additional pressures of publishing since his Nobel Prize, an inner voice saying, ‘­They’re ­going to be looking out for this book, you ­ought to button up, tighten your ­belt, and come out fighting’, and another part saying, ‘To hell with them! Just calm down, ­don’t worry! Just write your age, be your age!’ Equally revealing ­were his comments on The Cure at Troy, which he described as ‘­doing my Classics homework . . . ​I dutifully made En­glish verse for characters to speak but I d ­ idn’t take the play by the scruff of the neck and reinvent it. . . ​ What I learned through ­doing Sophocles was that, if I had to do it again, it would have to be done freely. Obedience is all very well, but it ends up being upholstery, as Pound called it’. Pressed by his interlocutor, Heaney talked expansively about his interest in Scots poetry, his ambition to tackle versions of the fifteenth-­ century Scottish poet Robert Henryson, and his adoption of classical themes and parallels as material, especially ­after the ceasefire began a tentative peace pro­cess in Northern Ireland from the mid-1990s, when ‘renewed possibilities . . . ​ 174  •  Chapter 6

equalled a kind of letting-in of light’. But the classics represented a personal priority too. ‘In one sense I’m just a scholarship boy who got a classical education refusing to let go, in another sense I’m someone experiencing American culture, which I’ve known for a long time, knowing that it is dif­fer­ent, knowing it is the ­f uture and fearful for that very reason that we in Eu­rope might let go every­t hing that we once had’. What comes clearly through in this 2001 interview is an impatience with the expectations now laid upon him, the ‘inner command and indeed outer expectation that the Trou­bles and their sorrows would be part of our subject . . . ​ [writing Seeing ­Things] I had this feeling that, genuine as the a­ ctual grief was, and constant as the distress was in our day-­to-­day life, the subject of the Trou­bles was worn out, and my own earnest elegies ­were even beginning to bore me’. Elsewhere, he put it more mordantly: ‘I think that the po­liti­cal moment, the po­liti­cal urgency is past for me. This is more the moment of mortality’.

The Moment of Mortality  • 175

7 The Bird on the Roof

The burden of expectation and duty which already pressed heavi­ly on Heaney’s daily existence accumulated hugely in the years a­ fter his Nobel Prize. The roster of commitments in 2001, detailed by Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones, gives some idea: Electric Light published. Delivers tribute at R.  S. Thomas’s memorial ser­v ice in Westminster Abbey. Delivers first Darcy O’Brien Memorial Lecture at University of Tulsa. Takes part in three-­day programme devoted to his work at Lincoln Center New York: a reading of Beowulf; a per­for­mance of ‘The Poet and the P ­ iper’ with Liam O’Flynn; and a pre­sen­ta­tion of Diary of One Who Vanished [a collaboration on Janáček’s song-­cycle with the director Deborah Warner and the tenor Ian Bostridge]. Golden Wreath awarded at International Poetry Festival, Struga, Macedonia. Visits South Africa; reads and lectures 176  •

at Rhodes University, Grahamstown; in Cape Town meets Kader Asmal—­ formerly of Trinity College, Dublin—­who is minister for education in the South African government. Attends centenary cele­ brations of Nobel Prize in Stockholm.

Always at ease in any com­pany, he was courted by celebrities from Bill Clinton to the Crown Princess of Japan. Heaney himself felt a mounting frustration, writing privately a­ fter the Nobel that he had been ‘pushed to the edge of my own life’. ‘All I do nowadays is “turn up”—­I’m a function of timetables, not an agent of my own being’. (That letter, typically, was written while on a transatlantic flight, and his l­ ater notebooks are punctuated by frequent scribbled itineraries and flight numbers.) He travelled for plea­sure too, and continued to make convivial pilgrimages to places connected with admired writers (Hardy, Burns, Yeats), or the sites of specific poems—­often with his friends the Scots writers Karl Miller and Andrew O’Hagan, who recorded them in a vivid and moving essay. At Yeats’s Tower in County Galway, a place Heaney often wrote about, O’Hagan photographed Heaney descending the poet’s winding stair—­and was told reprovingly, ‘No, Andy, that’s too much’. As always, Heaney’s The Bird on the Roof  • 177

relationship to his ­great pre­de­ces­sor was a ­matter of careful negotiation. The pressure of more dutiful commitments did not relent. The years ­after the Nobel saw him delivering lecture series in Cambridge, Prague, St Petersburg, Asturias, and elsewhere; attending events, cele­brations, and obsequies in Moscow, Madrid, and Krakow (Miłosz’s funeral); speaking at a conference in Delphi; opening exhibitions in Silkeborg and Grasmere; and lecturing and giving readings everywhere from St Petersburg to Hong Kong. The period from 2001 to 2006 closed not only with the publication of the power­f ul new collection District and Circle, but also—­perhaps less surprisingly—­with his suffering a stroke at the age of sixty-­six. Such pressures ­were augmented by a certain begrudgery inseparable from spectacular literary success, described by Heaney himself as ‘usually ­under the surface, as irrational and undeniable as sexual attraction . . . ​a kind of reverse flirtation’. Two kinds of response ­were available to him: the ‘implacable courtesy’ recommended by John McGahern, but also ‘an unspoken “Well, fuck you too, buddy” ’, though actually saying so out loud, he added, ‘would spoil every­thing’. ­These resources enabled him to survive ­g reat fame with exemplary elegance. So did a powerfully supportive and jealously guarded f­ amily life 178  •  Chapter 7

and the bolt-­hole of Glanmore Cottage. Driving south to Wicklow, between the sea and the mountains, opened up ‘a sudden joy . . . ​t he flow of the farmland, the sweep of the road, the lift of the sky; t­ here’s a double sensation of here-­and-­ nowness in the familiar place and far-­ a nd-­ awayness in something im­mense’. This combination of the immediacy of a loved landscape and the breathtaking sense of something immanent beyond was memorably caught in ‘Postscript’ and continued to haunt his poetry. The work collected in District and Circle was haunted in other ways too—by war, vio­lence, and a kind of pervasive foreboding. The ‘moment of mortality’ he had mentioned five years before had not passed. This seems especially true of the title poem of District and Circle, in which (as Heaney ­later put it) he ‘ghostified’ himself—­a pro­cess indicated even more clearly by the poem’s original title, ‘Sweeney Under­ground’. The flitting fugitive king had returned as Heaney’s alter ego, but the world he inhabited was no longer the treetops but the under­g round. As in the ­earlier love poem ‘The Under­ground’, the London ‘Tube’ transportation system did double duty, suggesting a visit to Hades: memories of a summer spent working in the metropolis as a student, a busker musician’s accusing stare, the dreamy descent down The Bird on the Roof  • 179

the escalators to the Under­ground, leaving above the world of lovers lying on the summer grass of London’s parks. ­There is an echo of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. But more immediately, this is Heaney’s version of Eliot’s ‘unreal city’, where he ‘had not known death had undone so many’; in Heaney’s prophetic phrase, ‘a crowd half straggle-­ravelled and half strung / Like a ­human chain’. And the dead are pre­sent. Strap-­ hanging in the rocking train, Sweeney/Heaney sees his ­father’s face in his own reflection in the carriage win­dow. And so by night and day to be transported Through galleried earth with them, the only relict Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward, Reflecting in a win­dow mirror-­backed By blasted weeping rock-­walls. Flicker-­lit.

And, of course, the under­ground train journey now carries a sense of danger and death, since the terrorist bombings of July  2005: the threat of an unstable world dissolving into destruction, which haunts several of the poems in the collection. In fact, the book takes its shape from this title poem. A far stronger and more coherent collec180  •  Chapter 7

tion than its pre­de­ces­sor, it turns again and again to ominous images such as fire from heaven and the transit across the Styx. Poems are addressed ‘To George Seferis in the Underworld’ and ‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven’; the chilling Horatian ode ‘Anything Can Happen’ reflected Heaney’s reaction to the world-­changing attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001; the power­f ul sonnet ‘Out of Shot’ has the poet leaning (like Hardy in ‘The Darkling Thrush’) on a farm gate in winter sunshine, recalling monastic fears of Viking sea-­raiders in the past and the image of carnage in the M ­ iddle East seen on tele­v i­sion the night before. November morning sunshine on my back This bell-­clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-­firm On the unseasonably warm Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock, Catching gleams of the distant Viking vik Of Wicklow Bay; thinking scriptorium, Norse raids, night-­dreads and that ‘fierce raiders’ poem About storm on the Irish Sea—so no attack In the small hours or next morning; thinking shock Out of the blue or blackout, the staggered walk The Bird on the Roof  • 181

Of a donkey on the TV news last night— Loosed from a cart that had loosed five mortar shells In the bazaar district, wandering out of shot Lost to its owner, lost for its sunlit hills.

The images fanned out before the reader return to familiar Heaney territory (farm life, donkey and cart, medieval Irish poetry), but radically reposition it in the threatened and ner­ vous world of international instability. The poems dealing with childhood memory, such as ‘Anahorish 1944’, invoke the presence of American troops in Northern Ireland during World War II; while another ominous sonnet, ‘The Nod’, recalls Saturday visits to the butcher’s shop, neatly tied parcels of beef ‘seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling’—­while outside on the street, off-­duty B-­Special policemen, ‘neighbours with guns’, nod at Heaney’s f­ ather . . . ​a lmost past him As if deliberately t­ hey’d aimed and missed him Or ­couldn’t seem to place him, not just then’.

Poems like this echo back to Heaney’s first collections—as does the opening poem, ‘The Turnip-­Snedder’, where a powerfully evoked 182  •  Chapter 7

piece of agricultural machinery metamorphoses into a guillotine. ‘This is the way that God sees life’, it said, ‘from seedling-­braird to snedder,’ as the ­handle turned and turnip-­heads ­were let fall and fed to the juiced-up inner blades, ‘This is the turnip-­cycle,’ as it dropped its raw sliced mess bucketful by glistening bucketful.

Reviewing the book, Andrew Motion remarked that Heaney ‘confirms existing loyalties, remaps old terrains, and fills his work with tributes to other poets who address subjects he has already explored (Auden, Cavafy, Hughes, Miłosz, Rilke, Seferis, Dorothy and William Words­ worth are among ­ t hose praised and prized)’, but added that the richness of language and freshness of response meant that ‘the book does not merely dig in, but digs deep’. A sequence of poems in memory of Miłosz invoke, first, transubstantiation in the ceremony of the mass, then Heaney’s own youthful memories of serving as a brancardier at Lourdes, and fi­nally the miracle of another kind of transformation, the alchemy of art. Even the love poems in the book The Bird on the Roof  • 183

are elegiac. Memories conjure up apparitions, and moments of revelation are recorded with that trademark exactness: a snowbound mowing-­ machine in an Iowa field, the ‘plain mysteriousness’ of a ritual haircut in a country cottage long ago. The dead are ever pre­sent, and ghosts walk; the spirit of Miłosz presides—­t hat Miłosz who described himself as ‘a chaplain of shadows . . . ​ wandering in the outskirts of heresy’. Nowhere is this clearer than in a carefully crafted sonnet sequence called ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’. Another of Heaney’s symbolic identity-­figures is summoned again as a revenant, leaving his museum-­case coffin to enter the world gingerly—an operation that reprises the original excavation of his body, in language wonderfully redolent of ‘weed-­leaf and turf-­ mould’. Dug up, mea­sured, scanned, displayed though he is, the Tollund Man still retains a magical sense of oneness with his boggy kingdom: ‘The soul exceeds its circumstances.’ Yes. History not to be granted the last word Or the first claim. . . ​In the end I gathered From the display-­case peat my staying powers, Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches, My old uncallused hands to be young sward, 184  •  Chapter 7

The spade-­cut skin to heal, and got restored By telling myself this. Late as it was, The early bird still sang, the meadow hay Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new. I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek, Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic Swarm at a roundabout five fields away And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

Observing the ‘newfound contrariness’ of the modern world, ‘in check-­out lines at cash-­points, in ­t hose queues / Of wired, far-­faced smilers, I stood off, / Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough’. Fi­nally, when a bunch of Tollund rushes brought with him has withered to dust, the Man absorbs this emblematic essence into himself, ‘mixed in with spit’. As a man would, cutting turf, I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit And spirited myself into the street.

This sequence revisits not only a key image from Heaney’s most famous sequence of poems, but also the atmosphere, diction, and imagery of his early work, right back to ‘Digging’. In its original conception, the Tollund Man set off through the London Under­g round, but ­these sections The Bird on the Roof  • 185

­ ere ­later adapted into the title poem ‘District w and Circle’—­because they ­were ‘more autobiographically weighted’, in Heaney’s own words, than the rest of the revenant’s experiences. All the same, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ is, he ­later said, ‘the voice of a poet repossessing himself and his subject’. This impulse was all the stronger for the pressures brought to bear on his life in the post-­Nobel period. Another kind of repossession pervades the last poem in the book, ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’. The bird who sits on the grass when the poet arrives at his refuge, and sings in the ivy as he leaves, is celebrated in language that evokes a medieval Irish scribe: ‘It’s you, blackbird, I love’. But the visiting bird also arouses the memory of ­little Christopher Heaney, killed in a car accident outside the door of Mossbawn, and subject of that early poem, ‘Mid-­Term Break’: a child who had once cavorted with joy to see his elder ­brother return from school, ‘my first homesick term over’. And ­after the accident, a neighbour remarked that a bird of ill omen had perched on the shed roof ‘for weeks’ beforehand, presaging ill fate: ‘I never liked yon bird’. (Heaney had used this memory in another poem about another ­brother, ‘Keeping ­Going’.) ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ loops and circles through his life and

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memories, leaving the poet with a foreboding ‘bird’s eye view of myself, / A shadow on raked gravel / In front of my ­house of life’. Though the poem ends by affirming the cheerful and supportive presence of the Wicklow welcomer, the sense of threat persists through the volume and stays in the mind at the end. District and Circle appeared exactly forty years ­a fter Death of a Naturalist, and Faber republished that first volume to coincide with the new book, implicitly drawing attention to the way that the latter mined some of the same territory. Some reviewers ­were surprised at the contained vio­lence and dark vision that pervaded the new poems, but the more perceptive among them pointed out that ­t hose ele­ments had been ­t here since the beginning. That feeling of foreboding—­t he bird on the roof—­was borne out a few months ­a fter the book’s publication, when Heaney suffered a stroke while staying in Donegal for a party at the Friels’. Recovery was fairly rapid, and the enforced cancellation of all scheduled commitments was a kind of blessing (if in ominous disguise). It also, possibly, opened the way to new poems of sustained depth and clarity. ‘In certain ­great poets’, Heaney remarked a c­ ouple of years ­a fter his stroke, ‘—­Yeats, Shakespeare, Stevens,

The Bird on the Roof  • 187

Miłosz—­you sense an ongoing opening of consciousness as they age, a deepening and clarifying and even a simplifying of receptivity to what might be awaiting on the farther shore. It’s like t­hose rare summer eve­nings when the sky clears rather than darkens. No poet can avoid hoping for that kind of old age’. The years a­ fter his stroke conferred that expansion of consciousness, accompanied by a certain frailty, and periods when he had to withdraw from all commitments. But the power and urgency of the poems he wrote in his last seven years w ­ ere undimmed. The love poem ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ arose directly from his stroke, and summons up the terrifying and terrified ambulance journey with his wife to intensive care, invoking Keats as well as Donne on the mysteries of bodily connection and soul space. Apart: the very word is like a bell That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled In illo tempore in Bellaghy Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn As college bellman, the haul of it t­ here still In the heel of my once capable Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift 188  •  Chapter 7

And lag in yours throughout that journey When it lay flop-­heavy as a bellpull And we careered at speed through Dungloe, Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected By a hooked-up drip-­feed to the cannula.

This complex and lovely poem stands as a sequel to ‘The Under­g round’, when the honeymooners raced through subterranean passages in their youth and strength—­but with the bride strewing a trail of buttons which suggested the ominous pre­ce­dent of Orpheus and Eurydice, no less than Hansel and Gretel. More broadly, in a poem written the year a­ fter his stroke and published by Gallery Press in a short volume called The Riverbank Field (2007), Heaney cast a long look back at his w ­ hole life. The title of the power­ ful sequence of tercets called ‘Route 110’ refers to his bus-­route home from Belfast as a schoolboy, but the journey it describes is—­yet again—­a Virgilian epic through the underworld. The poem begins with his youthful purchase of Aeneid VI in a wonderfully realised Smithfield market in Belfast: The pet shop Fetid with droppings in the rabbit cages, Melodious with canaries, green and gold, The Bird on the Roof  • 189

But ­silent now as birdless Lake Avernus. I hurried on, shortcutting to the buses, Parrying the crush with my bagged Virgil, Past booths and the jambs of booths with their displays Of canvas schoolbags, maps, prints, plaster plaques, Feather dusters, artificial flowers, Then racks of suits and overcoats that swayed When one was tugged from its overcrowded frame Like their ­owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge.

The theme of the musty clothes of the dead is spun through the sequence that follows: a vintage railway-­guard’s coat worn by the poet in his student days, memories of attending country wakes, emerging with ‘my clothes as smoke-­imbued / As if I’d fed a pyre’. The route is followed to the graves of ­t hose murdered in the Trou­bles (a nod back to ‘Station Island’ ­here), and a vision of Elysium: ‘The wrestlers, dancers, runners on the grass, / Not unlike a sports day in Bellaghy’. All comes together in the final stanzas: a visit to a newborn grand­child, bearing flowers that recall the stalks of oats which a neighbour once 190  •  Chapter 7

wrapped in silver foil, to adorn an altar—­a gesture ­towards the golden bough that ushered Aeneas into the underworld. The last line, ‘Talking baby talk’, quietly suggests senescence as well as the birth of a new life. This and other late poems, collected in his last volume ­Human Chain (2010), are eco­nom­ical but powerfully substantial. Even the form is pared down. Many are written in a tightly reduced pattern, three or even two words to the line (a form that suits the inspirations and translations from medieval Irish poetry, which are studded through the volume). The shape of many of the poems implies a tentative suggestion at the end, rather than a ringing affirmation. A lament for his beloved friend, the musician David Hammond, is painfully sorrowful and unsettling: ‘The door was open and the ­house was dark’. Eerily, this echoes a long-­ago reflection of Hammond’s, written a­ fter the Heaneys’ departure from Ashley Ave­nue in Belfast in 1972: ‘The ­house pulsed with energy and the door was always open’. In ­Human Chain, doors are inexorably closing all around. ‘The Butts’, ‘­A lbum’, and ‘Uncoupled’ retrace his parents’ lives and deaths, placed in a classicised frame (his ­mother carry­ing ashes, his ­father the ever-­present ash plant). The memory of the dead recurs in ‘Loughanure’, where the painter The Bird on the Roof  • 191

Colin Middleton is observed examining a landscape painting bought from him thirty years before. So this is what an afterlife can come to? A cloud-­boil of grey weather on the wall Like murky crystal, a remembered stare—

Over and over again, the sense of mortality intervenes. ‘In the Attic’ evokes a childhood memory of Trea­sure Island, and the poet’s grand­ father’s unravelling memory, to end with a strong sense of a journey to be undertaken. As I age and blank on names, As my uncertainty on stairs Is more and more the lightheadedness Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging, As the memorable bottoms out Into the irretrievable, It’s not that I ­can’t imagine still That slight untoward rupture and world-­tilt As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

The poems gathered in H ­ uman Chain ­were hailed as his best collection for some time and containing some of his best work. Neil Corcoran, who had detected a note of self-­conscious

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and slightly excessive poetic ‘dignity’ in Electric Light and District and Circle, welcomed the way that ­Human Chain avoided this danger, striking an elegiac note that was utterly unaffected, and achieving a consummate simplicity. Corcoran also noted the overwhelming presence of Virgil in the book, and the recurrent image of souls waiting on the banks of the River Lethe. But ­t here is a continuing dialogue with Christian imagery too, not incompatible with Hea­ ney’s own equably agnostic attitude t­owards conventional Catholic belief as a t­hing left ­behind him. The year that ­Human Chain was published, Heaney made his last ‘excursion’ with Karl Miller and Andrew O’Hagan, this time to Wales, where they visited the grave of the seventeenth-­century poet Henry Vaughan at Llansantffraed Church on the River Usk. Vaughan’s lines about the dead—­‘They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring ­here’—­had long hung in Heaney’s mind. O’Hagan listened to his friends’ conversation: ‘Miller: Well, ­here’s Vaughan. A believer. It’s hard to think of you, Seamus, without belief. I find it hard not to believe you believe.

The Bird on the Roof  • 193

Heaney: I s­ topped practising a long time ago, but some of it holds. If you have it as a child it gives you a structure of consciousness—­t he idea t­ here is something more. Miller: I prob­ably w ­ ouldn’t go that far, but I have to say: I always believed I would see my granny again. She was good to me. Heaney: For me, my ­father. I’d hope to see him again, all right. We stayed t­here for a while and Seamus spoke about Eliot and the Four Quartets. In all this gadding about, ­t here had been many versions of pastoral and an easy dalliance of time past and time pre­sent, but I sensed that, for Seamus at least, this w ­ asn’t an Eliotic r­ ose garden. It was just a place to rest your bones and take a breath. And that’s what happened, as the light came through the leaves.’

‘­A lbum’ is set in this mood, revisiting his parents’ marriage and his ­father’s death, and invoking the heartbreaking scene in Aeneid VI where Aeneas tries to embrace his f­ather in the shades, and repeatedly finds the insubstantial form sliding away from him: reprised by Hea­ ney in light of the shyness that inhibits expressed affection. The poignant closing stanzas circle

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back—­prophetically, as it would turn out—to the consolations of learning and of Latin. IV

­ ere I to have embraced him anywhere W It would have been on the riverbank That summer before college, him in his prime, Me at the time thinking how he must Keep coming with me ­because I’d soon be leaving. That should have been the first, but it ­didn’t happen. The second did, at New Ferry one night When he was very drunk and needed help To do up trouser buttons. And the third Was on the landing during his last week, Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm Taking the webby weight of his underarm. V

It took a grand­son to do it properly, To rush him in the armchair With a snatch raid on his neck, Proving him thus vulnerable to delight, Coming as g­ reat proofs often come

The Bird on the Roof  • 195

Of a sudden, one-­off, then the steady dawning Of what­ever erat demonstrandum. Just as a moment back a son’s three tries At an embrace in Elysium Swam up into my very arms, and in and out Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom Verus that has slipped from ‘very’.

Reading such poems now, ­there is a strong sense of facing up to last ­t hings, interrogated in the light of first recollections. Childhood memory had always been a feature of Heaney’s work, but it now appeared with a new urgency, counterpointed against themes of decline and decrepitude. The imagery of a journey across the Styx recurred in all sorts of ways, linked directly to the idea of translating Virgil in a poem written shortly a­ fter his stroke, ‘The Riverbank Field’. ‘Translation’ has a markedly double meaning ­here and throughout the collection: the voice in the poems is steadying and readying itself for a journey into another dimension. This may reflect the fact that many of them ­were written in the period just a­ fter his stroke, but the note persisted; it is ­there in one of the last poems he wrote, three years ­a fter ­Human Chain was published and

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shortly before his death, ‘In a Field’. It ends when the ghost of a soldier takes him . . . ​by a hand to lead me back Through the same old gate into the yard Where every­one has suddenly appeared, All standing waiting.

The Bird on the Roof  • 197

8 Clearance

A year before Heaney died, Colm Tóibín noted, with a novelist’s close perception, the way the poet appeared ­a fter a reading in Kilkenny. The command he had exercised on stage, Tóibín observed, gave way to a thoughtful, restrained, slightly watchful manner. ‘I sensed he was enjoying a sort of freedom which was apparent in his work a­ fter the volume Seeing ­Things . . . ​he felt easier about celebrating ­t hings, allowing the miraculous into his work and a sort of lightness into his cadences. . . ​He carried his fame lightly, easily. He preferred shadow to light; he preferred the half-­said, careful, ambiguous remark to the big statement; he liked the slow smile rather than the easy laugh. He enjoyed com­pany, but I always felt he had one eye on the door, and would be happy when the night was over and he could go home’. A portrait painted around the same time, now hanging in the Athenaeum Club in London, shows the same watchfulness, as well as a certain

198  •

physical exhaustion. ‘It’s more like me than I am’, Heaney remarked. That ironic sense of self-­observation—­Heaney as Sweeney—­had been with him from the start of his extraordinary ­career, and stood him in good stead. ­After his seventieth birthday in 2009, ­there was a sense of mea­sur­ing and pacing himself, while at the same time taking on new proj­ects—­a full-­length translation of Aeneid VI among them. In late August 2013, however, already in hospital ­after a minor fall, he was rushed for an emergency operation on a ruptured arterial blood vessel. He died on his way into the operating theatre on the morning of Friday 30 August. His last message to his wife was a Latin injunction: noli timere—­‘­don’t be afraid’. It was as if he w ­ ere underlining the conclusion of his memorable Oxford lecture on poetic approaches to death, where he had invoked Yeats’s resolute affirmation of ‘the spiritual intellect’s g­ reat work’ as he faced into the void. Noli timere became Heaney’s final manifesto to the nation and the world, appearing electronically on social media posts and physically on a gable-­end wall in Dublin, lovingly repainted and preserved to this day. This reflected the overwhelming impact of his death on a country and a culture united by a sense of grief and loss.

Clearance  • 199

The resolution, the achieved fullness of his life was what so many obituarists celebrated in 2013. It was also reflected in the extraordinary outburst of national grief in Ireland—­and, indeed, elsewhere, but especially in Ireland. At the All-­ Ireland Gaelic football semi-­final in Croke Park, a crowd of eighty thousand p ­ eople stood and applauded for two minutes in homage. His unforgettable funeral in Dublin, where Paul Muldoon delivered a heartbroken and heartbreaking eulogy, was a genuinely national occasion. It was as if all that he had given to his readers came back in a flood of gratitude and grief. Afterwards, the cortège drove north to Bellaghy and his last resting place—­the journey from South to North which he had made so many times in his lifetime. The sense of a ­great tree falling, leaving a sense of silence and emptiness b ­ ehind, was palpable. The begrudging note was absent, and stayed so. This was not ­because of a s­ imple disinclination to speak ill of the dead: it rather reflected the position of overpowering but benign authority which Heaney had come to occupy in Irish cultural life. A few years before he died, he remarked that a poet nowadays laboured ­under the disadvantage of having ‘no strong sense of critical response which has lived and loved that which it is responding to’. The responses, both popu­lar and critical, to his own work contradicted this. His 200  •  Chapter 8

sister-­in-­law, the writer Polly Devlin, remarked that he had preserved and made concrete feelings and sensations anchored in a world once familiar, but now gone—­‘what we stored up as we grew’, as he put it himself. ‘Who has seen how a coulter breaks ground b ­ ehind sweating h ­ orses?’ she asked. ‘Who knows what measling shins look like? Or has put a greath on a h ­ orse? Or what a scoop sunk past its gleam in a meal-­tin looks like. . . ​Seamus not only knew to his bones ­t hese country ways and vanished words that resounded with usage; he used them as echo chambers, made them necessary memories’. The odd contract he had forged with his readership was based not only on their affection for him as a poet but on a belief that he recorded something shared and essential, and that they knew that he could be trusted. This was unusual, not to say unique. The Irish, Dr Johnson remarked, are a very fair p ­ eople ­because they never speak well of one another. But regarding Seamus Heaney, a communal proprietorial sense persisted (reflected in a burst of rather competitive posthumous claims to his friendship). His friend Karl Miller once suspiciously enquired of him, ‘Seamus, are you r­ eally as nice as you seem?’ Heaney replied—­equally characteristically—­‘I have been cursed with a fairly decent set of impulses’. Clearance  • 201

­Those impulses guided him through a life of extraordinary success, enabled a radiantly happy ­family life, and made him universally beloved. He was, as he himself once wrote uneasily, ‘steeped in luck’—­a rare condition for a ­great artist. But a poet’s life—as Yeats famously said—is necessarily an experiment in living, and the river-­like course of Heaney’s work was sustained against competing events and pressures in his own life and, above all, against an era of exceptional vio­lence, brutality, and nihilism in his own country. In this as in other ways, the assonances between his position and Yeats’s are striking. Writing about J. M. Synge ‘and the Ireland of his time’ in 1910, a year ­after the playwright’s death, Yeats considered how an artist reflects and reacts to the po­liti­cal and social context of their times. The challenge of retaining integrity while responding to the currents and flux of con­ temporary history meant that the writer must also guard against ‘unmeaning pedantries and silences’, seeking and preserving the necessary ‘salt and savour’ in language, and finding an anchorage in ‘rich personal experience, patience of study, and delicacy of sense’. This is manifestly true of Heaney’s achievement. The phenomenal, uplifting, and somehow consoling outburst of national mourning ­a fter his death reflected not only the fact that he had— 202  •  Chapter 8

as he himself said of Yeats—­achieved authority within a culture, but also the fact that his work had entered the language and given cause for pride. ­Here too ­there is an echo of Yeats’s response to a question addressed to him in 1926, following the riots over Sean O’Casey’s controversial play about the 1916 Rising, The Plough and the Stars. The question concerned Irish sensitivity to ‘the faults of a country being exposed’. Yeats’s reply was that a country which had reached intellectual maturity became proud rather than vain—­t he difference being that vanity meant wanting other ­people to think well of you ­because you did not believe in yourself, whereas pride meant ‘indifference as to w ­ hether ­people w ­ ere shown in a good or bad light on the stage; as a nation came to intellectual maturity it realised that the only ­thing that did it any credit was its intellect’. Irish intellectual as well as social and economic life went through changes from the late 1950s which involved—­ sometimes traumatically—­ leaving ­behind self-­sustaining vanity and slowly achieving some kind of pride. This was sustained in spite of the thirty-­year nightmare of vio­lence in Northern Ireland. ­There are ways in which the rec­ord of Seamus Heaney’s work not only kept pace with, but kept faith with, the changes which Ireland evinced over the half-­ Clearance  • 203

century of his writing c­ areer. In a real sense, he had become the national poet, but he had achieved this authority through the kind of watchful in­de­pen­dence expressed by the personae in so many of his poems, as well as the lacerating insights which made his work so unmistakeable and, on occasion, scarifying. ­These same qualities enabled him to overcome a kind of criticism, much more evident in Hea­ ney’s early than in his ­later ­career, which arraigned him for not writing as ­others thought he should. Th ­ ese critiques are now forgotten, and most of his critics tended to auto-­destruct. More importantly, several of ­t hese early critiques w ­ ere grounded in a very prescriptive idea, not only of the poet’s role in general but of the poet’s duty to the Ireland of his time—­the kind of critique which unintentionally demonstrates exactly the difference Yeats pinpointed between national ‘vanity’ and national ‘pride’. By contrast, Hea­ ney’s work may be profitably and triumphantly read as reflecting the strategies and decisions which he employed to carve out vari­ous kinds of in­de­pen­dence, and to combine intellectual accessibility with a certain creative evasiveness, as well as a darkening vision which has perhaps not fully had its due. In the end, the affirmative message is what persists: what­ever life throws at you, what­ever horrors history holds, not to be afraid. 204  •  Chapter 8

The epitaph offered for Oedipus as he leaves the upper world struck a chord with Heaney: ‘wherever that man went, he went gratefully’. Gratitude operates both ways, and his readership w ­ ere grateful for the way he compressed and made vivid the instantly recognisable facets of life. But that mastery of the familiar coexisted with an uncanny ability to conjure up transcendence and transfiguration. ‘I believe the condition into which I was born and into which my generation in Ireland was born’, he once said, ‘involved the moment of transition from sacred to profane . . . ​the transition from a condition where your space, the space of the world, had a determined meaning and a sacred possibility, to a condition where space was a neuter geometrical disposition without any emotional or inherited meaning’. His gift, and what he did with it, contested this belief, making ‘emotional and inherited meaning’ come alive for his readers, and this would continue ­after him, like the ghost-­echo left ­behind in ‘Clearances’ when the tree which he had grown up with was felled. I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place Clearance  • 205

In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet’s differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what had luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever ­Silent, beyond silence listened for.

206  •  Chapter 8

• B RIEF REFERENCE NOTES TO

ON SEAMUS HEANEY

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x–xi More than a century before Yeats: Seamus Heaney, ‘Introduction’ to William Wordsworth: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney (London, 2001), pp. vii–viii CHAPTER 1. CERTUS 1

1

1

2 3 4

residual Incertus: Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: ­Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London, 2008) [hereafter SS], p. 98 Poetry’s special status: Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and other critical writings (London, 1988), p. 9 the auditory imagination: Seamus Heaney, Preoccupa­ tions: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London, 1980; 1984 ed.) [hereafter P], pp. 81, 150 rooted normality: SS, p. 451 the poet vigilant: SS, pp. 328–29 Seamus Heaney Experience: Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Foreword: The Excursions’, in Karl Miller, Tretower to Clyro: Essays (London, 2011), p. 9 • 207

5 5 6

9 11 12 12 13 14 15 21 22 24 26 26 28

I began as a poet: P, p. 37 Just by answering: SS, p. 126 to teach the other teachers: Heather Clark, The Ulster Re­ nais­sance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (Oxford, 2006), p. 41 coincidence of talent: Clark, Ulster Re­nais­sance, pp. 7–8 Seamus Deane on ‘poetry’: Clark, Ulster Re­nais­sance, pp. 38, 40 living the liturgical year: SS, p. 38 Never has ­there been . . .: cutting from Mid-­Ulster Jour­ nal, undated, courtesy of Eugene Kielt a natu­ral force: Seamus Heaney, obituary of David Hammond, The Guardian, 18 August 2008 ex-­poet: Gorgon [Queen’s University], Hilary 1961 the linguistic experiences: SS, p. 41 written in the Heaney manner: Clark, Ulster Re­nais­ sance, p. 85 What I was ­after: SS, p. 90 secret rather than public: Clark, Ulster Re­nais­sance, p. 195 For the Catholic writer: New York Times Book Review, 2 December 1979 Draft work that is referred to: Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493 what the Californian distance: SS, pp. 142–43

CHAPTER 2. KINSHIP I remember driving . . .: cutting from The Listener in ­Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/33 38 When I wrote that poem: James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares 5:3 (1979), p. 19 40 I left in 1972: Randall, ‘An Interview’, p. 20 42 Northern writers on literary culture in ‘the South’: Clark, Ulster Re­nais­sance, pp. 154–55 37

208  •  Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney

the tribal dirt: 1977 interview on Danish radio with Brian Donnelly, quoted in Daniel Tobin, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Lexington, KY, 1999), p. 104 48–49 References to Heaney radio broadcast on 6 July  1975: from Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/46 49 to take the En­glish lyric: quoted in Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London, 1998), p. 53 49 The poems in North: SS, p. 446 52 Poetry Book Society Bulletin: see drafts in Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/45 57 the prob­lems of poetry: Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1986), p. 144 58 epitomises the intensive pressure: Longley, Poetry in the Wars, p. 168 43

CHAPTER 3. THE SAME ROOT 61

62 67 73 76 78 79 82 83

It was like starting again: 1984 interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, quoted in Tobin, Passage to the Cen­ ter, pp. 142–43 Well, ­you’ve bought the coffin: SS, p. 228 Lowell was implicated: SS, pp. 217–18 I admire the way: P, p. 101 that En­glish poets: P, p. 169 Seamus Heaney scrutinizes: notes in Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/85, differing slightly from published version looked like a betrayal: New York Times Book Re­ view, 2 December 1979 one of the basic assumptions: Seamus Deane interview in Derry Journal, 8 February 1985 You c­an’t live: 1984 interview quoted in Marilynn  J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day

Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney  • 209



Theatre Com­pany and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 (Oxford, 1994), p. 95 84 slow, obstinate papish burn: ‘Unhappy and at Home’, interview with Seamus Deane in Crane Bag 1:1 (1977), reprinted in M. P. Hederman and R. Kearney (eds), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1977–1981) (Dublin, 1982), pp. 66–72 85 It is, of course, a kind of public gesture . . .: Private letter 86 Responses to ‘Open Letter’: from cuttings in Brian Friel MSS, NLI 37, 191/2 86 Draft letter to Irish Times: Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 483/259 87 He does not, it seems to me: Fortnight, December 1983 88 its sectarian application: quoted in Barry McCrea, Lan­ guages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-­Century Ireland and Eu­rope (London, 2015), p. 113 89 something that Ulstermen of both persuasions: quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, p. 150 89 had no need for culture: quoted in Richtarik, Acting ­Between the Lines, p. 259 90 Deane’s suggestion of an Anthology: mentioned in a letter from Heaney to Friel, 27 September 1982, Friel MSS, NLI 37, 247/4 92 to be faithful to the collective: Seamus Heaney, ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review 15:1 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–19 CHAPTER 4. IN THE ­M IDDLE OF HIS JOURNEY 95

If you have ever blessed yourself: from article in The Fur­ row quoted by Eamon Duffy, ‘Seamus Heaney and Catholicism’, in John Walker (ed.), The Pre­sent Word: Cul­ ture, Society and the Site of Lit­er­a­ture; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle (London, 2013)

210  •  Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney

96 98 98 101 103 108 110 114 117 119

This morning the sea: Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/57, p. 52 The pilgrim’s journey: Poetry Book Society Bulletin (August 1984) The main tension: Heaney, ‘Envies and Identifications’, p. 18 Diary note about religious vocation: Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/57 ­every time you part the drapes: private letter It is not clear: Denis Donoghue, We Irish: Essays on Irish Lit­er­a­ture and Society (Hassocks, 1986), pp. 11–12 but producing the sensation: SS, pp. 237–38 art and conscience: Poetry Book Society Bulletin (August 1984) Lowell is taking the punishment: SS, p. 280 Refusal to allow section of Heritage Centre to be de­ voted to him: see correspondence in Friel MSS, NLI 37, 247/3

CHAPTER 5. ALPHABETICAL ORDER 122 impossible not to have inhaled: quoted in Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse, 1992), p. 180 122 a linguistic exploration: P, p. 81 123 emerged: letter in Heaney MSS, NLI 49, 493/82 131 I began to think: quoted in Corcoran, The Poetry of Sea­ mus Heaney, p. 156 135 the line that divides: Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Po­ etry: Oxford Lectures (London, 1995) [hereafter R of P], p. xvi 138 my starlight came in: SS, p. 318 139 the new freedom: SS, p. 323 139 Helen Vendler’s observation: in her essay ‘Squarings’, in Eugene O’Brien (ed.), ‘The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances’:

Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney  • 211

The ­Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Notre Dame, IN, 2016), p. 84 142 the central, epoch-­making role: R of P, p. 38 144 when a poem rhymes: R of P, pp. 158–59 146 an Irish protestant writer: R of P, pp. 199–200 CHAPTER 6. THE MOMENT OF MORTALITY 149 When I first encountered: Seamus Heaney, Crediting ­Poetry: The Nobel Lecture 1995 (Oldcastle, 1995), p. 9 156 Eliot quotation: from his Preface to The Dark Side of the Moon and was suggested by Friel in a letter of 11 October 1995, Friel MSS, NLI 37, 247/1 158 I had this quick sidelong glimpse: SS, p. 366 158 Dialogue with ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’: mentioned by Heaney in Rui Carvalho Homem, ‘On Elegies, Eclogues, Translations, Transfusions: An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Eu­ro­pean En­glish Messenger x:2 (Autumn 2001), p. 29 164 Original, longer version of ‘The Flight Path’: published in PN Review in 1992, see Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Crediting Marvels or Taking Responsibility: Vocation and Declarations of Intent by Seamus Heaney ­a fter Seeing ­Things’, in O’Brien (ed.), ‘The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances’, pp. 209–10 169 Each morning I was like a man: SS, p. 440 170 I ­didn’t know or love Beowulf enough: SS, p. 440 170 a final, triumphant reversal: Terry Ea­gleton quoted in SS, p. 440 172 forced the note: review of Derek Walcott, cutting in Hea­ ney MSS, NLI 49, 493/79 173 Responses to Rui Carvalho Homem: in ‘On Elegies, Eclogues, Translations, Transfusions’, pp. 24–29; ‘moment of mortality’ is on p. 26

212  •  Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney

CHAPTER 7. THE BIRD ON THE ROOF 178 implacable courtesy: SS, p. 467 179 a sudden joy: SS, p. 475 183 confirms existing loyalties: Andrew Motion, review of District and Circle, in The Guardian, 1 April 2006 186 the voice of a poet: SS, pp. 410–11 187 In certain g­ reat poets: SS, p. 466 193 Miller: Well, h ­ ere’s Vaughan: Andrew O’Hagan, Foreword to Karl Miller, Tretower to Clyro, pp. 29–30 197 In a Field: first published in Carol Ann Duffy (ed.), 1914: Poetry Remembers (London, 2013) CHAPTER 8. CLEARANCE 198 I sensed he was enjoying a certain freedom: Colm Tóibín, ‘Monuments of the Dream Life’, in Irish Pages: A Jour­ nal of Con­temporary Writing 8:2 (Spring–­Summer 2015), pp. 102–3 199 It’s more like me: private recollection 201 what we stored up as we grew: Heaney, Crediting Poetry, p. 11 201 Who has seen how a coulter: Polly Devlin, ‘Thoughts on Seamus Heaney’, in Writing Home (London, 2019), p. 214 201 Seamus, are you ­really as nice: Karl Miller, Tretower to Clyro, p. 118 203 Yeats’s thoughts on ‘the faults of a country’: see my W. B. Yeats, A Life: Volume II, The Arch-­Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford, 2003), p. 309 205 I believe the condition: 1988 interview with Rand Brandes, quoted in Daniel Tobin, ‘ “Beyond Maps and Atlases”: transfiguration and immanence in the l­ater poems of Seamus Heaney’, in O’Brien, ‘The Soul Exceeds Its Cir­ cumstances’, p. 309

Brief Reference Notes to On Seamus Heaney  • 213

• I NDEX

Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 81, 83, 92 Aeschylus, Orestia, 159 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alvarez, Al, 22 American lit­er­a­ture, 28, 66,

sphere of, 7, 12–13, 27; Heaney leaves, 14, 40–41, 96, 191; literary scene in, 9, 41, 57, 61. See also Trou­bles, the Berkeley, California, 27–29, 34, 42, 66, 72, 75, 76, 125, 166

67, 78, 145. See also specific

Bishop, Elizabeth, 117, 141

American writers

Blackwood, Caroline, 65

Amnesty International, 123

Bloody Sunday, 30, 41, 64, 77

Anahorish Primary School,

Bly, Robert, 28

101 Anglo-­Irish Agreement (1985), 152

Boland, Eavan, 54 Bostridge, Ian, 176 Britain, 7–8, 65, 76, 78; and

Anglo-­Saxon kennings, 53

colonialism, 48–49; Heaney’s

Armstrong, Sean, 64

audience/reputation in, 26,

Arnold, Matthew, 140

41, 54, 85, 116, 152. See also

Ashbery, John, 117

London, ­England; Trou­bles,

Asmal, Kader, 177 Auden, W. H., 117, 183; elegy on Yeats, 171–72

the British Army, 7, 25 Brodsky, Joseph, 158, 171–72 Browne, Garech, 21

Beckett, Samuel, 149 Belfast, Northern Ireland, 18, 189–90; cultural atmo-

Buile Suibhne (medieval Irish epic), 87 Burns, Robert, 4, 84, 177 • 215

Carey, John, 22

20, 22, 54–59, 110, 117, 118,

Carleton, William, 100–101, 107;

149, 162, 170, 200–201, 204;

‘The Lough Derg Pilgrim’,

in the 1970s and 1980s,

99, 106

75; preoccupation of, with

Carson, Ciaran, 10, 56

questions of language

Carysfort College, Dublin,

and its construction, 122.

72, 78 Catholicism, 80, 91, 128–29; Heaney’s, 11–12, 55, 58, 84, 94, 95, 100–101, 126, 138–39, 193; and pilgrimages, 11,

See also Heaney, Seamus: as critic/essayist; and other specific critics Cruise O’Brien, Conor, 28, 54, 79

97–101, 109, 127; in ‘Station Island’, 104, 109. See also Trou­bles, the

Dante: and Beatrice, 111; Heaney on, 92–93, 98–99;

Cavafy, Constantine, 127, 183

importance of, in Heaney’s

Chekhov, Anton, 112

work, 63, 66, 97, 101–2, 111,

Chichester-­Clark ­family, 9

167; The Inferno, 131–32, 138;

Chris­t ian­ity: early remains/

The Purgatorio, 63

relics of, 94–95; imagery of,

de Paor, Liam, 79

193. See also Catholicism

Deane, Seamus, 13, 26, 51, 53,

civil rights movement, 23, 25, 137

84, 89, 149; as a classmate of Heaney’s, 5; and Field Day,

Clare, John, 141

80, 81, 82, 90; on Heaney’s

Clark, Heather, 9

writing, 10–11; interview of

classics/classical world, 154,

Heaney by, 58, 80

159, 173, 174–75; the River

Delaney, Tom, 109

Lethe, 193; the River Styx,

Demo­cratic Unionist Party, 90

138, 181, 196. See also specific

Denmark, 171; Danish bogs,

writers of classics Clinton, Bill, 177

37, 53 Derry, Northern Ireland,

Connolly, James, 87

4, 61, 81, 91; on Bloody

Corcoran, Neil, 49, 192–93

Sunday, 64; Heaney’s

Corkery, Daniel, 56 critics/criticism, literary: on Field Day, 89; on Heaney, 2,

216  • Index

childhood home in, 3, 150 Devlin, Marie. See Heaney, Marie (née Devlin)

Devlin, Polly, 201

34, 120; poetic/lyric tradi-

Donne, John, 158, 188

tion in, 5, 22, 49, 51, 141. See

Donoghue, Denis, 86, 107

also specific En­glish writers

Dordogne, France, 101, 115, 166

Eurydice, 111, 189

Dublin, Ireland, 4, 199;

Ewart-­Biggs, Christopher, 64–65

Heaney’s funeral in, 200; Heaneys’ Sandymount/ Strand Road home in, 60, 62,

Faber & Faber, 3, 15–16, 42, 54, 72, 85, 87, 187

96, 104; literary scene in,

Fallon, Peter, 149

41–42; Viking era in, 46, 57

Fellini, Federico, 8½, 97

Duff Cooper Prize, 66

Fianna Fáil, 79 Field Day cooperative, 80–92;

Eastern Eu­ro­pean poetry and poets/writers, 110, 125. See also specific writers Eliot, T. S., 117, 156; influence of, on Heaney, 1, 44, 75, 127,

Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 90 Flanagan, Terry, 10, 14 Flanagan, Thomas, 27–28, 34 Friel, Brian, 27, 61, 81, 149, 158,

180; Four Quartets, 194;

187; and Field Day, 80, 81,

‘­Little Gidding’, 44, 102–3;

83, 92; as a sounding board

The Love Song of J. Alfred

for Heaney, 107, 156, 167;

Prufrock, 54

subject ­matter of, 44–45, 81,

Ellmann, Richard, 98 Emmet, Robert, 12 ­England. See Britain; London, ­England En­g lish language, 108–9; Heaney’s use of, 15, 75–76, 88–89, 146–47; Irish cultural identity expressed in, 81–82

82–83 Friel, Brian, works of: Aristocrats, 83; The Communication Cord, 90; Dancing at Lughnasa, 83, 92; Faith Healer, 83; Translations, 81, 82, 83; Volunteers, 44–45 Frost, Robert, 76

En­g lish lit­er­a­ture: Beowulf ’s place in, 170; canon, in Heaney’s essays and

Glanmore. See Heaney, Seamus, homes of

lectures, 75–76, 141, 145;

Glob, P. V., 37

Heaney’s own place in the

Gorman, Damien, 86

canon of, 16, 134, 171; pastoral,

Graves, Robert, 140 Index  • 217

­Great Britain. See Britain

Heaney, Patrick (­father), 3, 9,

Gregory, Lady Augusta, 158

31, 139; in Heaney’s poetry,

Griffiths, Trevor, 14

17, 67, 132, 137, 162, 180, 182, 191, 194

Hall, Peter, 159

Heaney, Seamus: acting of,

Hamilton, Ian, 22

12–13; on the arts-­festival

Hammond, David, 10, 13–14,

cir­cuit, 65, 72, 176; bird-­k ing

21, 80, 81, 191

alter-­ego of, 2, 3, 88–89, 95–

Hansel and Gretel, 111, 189

96, 113–16, 119; and the ‘bog

Hardy, Thomas, 6; ‘The

bank’, and ‘bog poems’, 53,

Darkling Thrush’, 181;

76–77; as broadcaster, 42,

Dorset cottage of, in

68; California sojourn of,

Heaney poem, 112; Heaney

27–29, 42, 66, 72, 76, 166;

visits places connected

Catholicism of, 11–12, 55, 58,

with, 177

84, 94, 95, 100–101, 126, 138–39,

Harrison, Tony, 159

193; charm/wit/charisma

Harvard University, 61, 72,

of, 3, 14, 21, 61, 201; childhood

109, 120, 148, 149

of, in Derry, 3–6, 61, 100,

Haughey, Charles James, 79

114, 149–51, 100–101, 162, 166,

Heaney, Catherine

173, 182, 192, 196; children/

(­daughter), 13, 96

family life of, 13, 68, 202; as

Heaney, Christopher

critic/essayist, 61, 68, 72–76,

(­brother), 18, 186

78 (see also Heaney, Seamus:

Heaney, Christopher (son), 13, 96 Heaney, Hugh (­brother), 162– 63, 186 Heaney, Margaret (­mother), 3,

prose of); critics on, 2, 20, 22, 54–59, 110, 117, 118, 149, 162, 170, 200–201, 204; death of and mourning for, 199–203; and death of

9; in Heaney’s poetry, 128–

younger ­brother, 18, 186;

31, 162, 163–64, 191, 194

education of, 4–8; and ‘the

Heaney, Marie (wife; née

Group’, 9–10; Harvard

Devlin), 13, 40, 63, 69, 158,

appointment of, 61, 72, 109,

188, 199

149; hospitality/sociability

Heaney, Mary (aunt), 45

of, 14, 61; Irish identity of,

Heaney, Michael (son), 13, 96

58, 77, 78, 84, 86–89, 146–47,

218  • Index

203–5; lectures by, 1, 72, 73,

137, 150, 186; Glanmore,

74, 75, 76–77, 78, 116, 135,

County Wicklow, 39, 42–43,

140–47, 152, 153–57, 171, 199;

60, 61, 75, 80, 87, 133, 166,

literary prizes awarded to,

179; Sandymount/Strand

20, 54, 66, 148–52, 171, 176;

Road, Dublin, 60, 62, 96,

marriage of, 13, 68, 69; Nobel Prize awarded to,

104; The Wood, 31, 130 Heaney, Seamus, interviews

148–52, 154, 158, 169, 171,

with, 3, 17, 40, 65, 70, 79, 82,

174, 176, 177, 178, 186; and

84, 117, 138; with Seamus

Northern idioms, 33; parents

Deane, 58, 80; in Dennis

of, 3, 9, 67, 128–31; and

O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones,

poetic form, 49, 74, 84, 139, 159–60, 164, 191; poetic

5, 23, 103, 171, 175, 176–77 Heaney, Seamus, poetry of:

influences on, 5–6, 10, 14–15,

‘Act of Union’, 48, 49; ‘­A fter

29, 43–44, 63, 73–74, 77, 103,

a Killing’, 64–65; ‘­A lbum’,

110, 136, 138, 158–59, 180; and

x, 191, 194–96; ‘Alphabets’,

the poetic vocation, 74,

120–22, 124, 141; ‘Anahorish’,

78–79, 114–15, 139–40, 204;

33; ‘Anahorish 1944’, 182;

on politics, 2–3, 8–9, 25–26,

‘Anything Can Happen’,

40–41, 56–59, 84–87, 112, 146,

181; ‘At a Potato Digging’,

151–54; portraits of, 3, 198–99;

17, 41; ‘At the ­Water’s Edge’,

pseudonym of, 1; readings

94–95; ‘At the Wellhead’, x,

by, 21, 134; reputation/fame/

162; ‘At Toomebridge’, 173;

public profile of, 2, 3, 5, 21,

‘Away from It All’, 113; ‘Bann

61, 72, 79, 85, 91, 92, 116–19,

Valley Eclogue’, 173; ‘The

122, 147, 148–49, 169, 178,

Biretta’, 133; ‘The Blackbird

198, 200–205; stroke of, 178,

of Glanmore’, 186–87;

187–88, 189, 196; teaching

‘Bogland’, 23–24; ‘Bog Oak’,

of, 6, 21, 68, 72, 75; verse

33–34; ‘Bog Queen’, 46;

letters of, 51

‘Broagh’, 33; ‘The Butts’, 191;

Heaney, Seamus, homes of:

‘Bye-­Child’, 31; ‘Casualty’,

Ashley Ave­nue, Belfast,

63; ‘Chanson d’Aventure’,

13–14, 191; Mossbawn,

188–89 ; ‘Clearances’, 128;

County Derry (childhood

‘Come to the Bower’, 46;

home), 3–4, 121–22, 130–31,

‘Crossings’, 134, 136–38;

Index  • 219

Heaney, Seamus, poetry of (cont.)

‘Hedge School’, 68–69;

Death of a Naturalist, 15–20,

­Human Chain, 191–93, 196;

21, 187; ‘Digging’, 16, 67,

‘In a Field’, 196–97; ‘In Illo

185; ‘District and Circle’,

Tempore’, 115; ‘In the Attic’,

179, 180, 186; District and

192; ‘Into Arcadia’, 172;

Circle, 178, 179–87, 193;

‘Keeping ­Going’, 162–63,

‘Docker’, 17; Door into the

186; ‘Kinship’, 48; ‘Known

Dark, 22–25, 30; ‘The Door

World’, 173; ‘Land’, 32;

Was Open and the House

‘Lightenings’, 134–35,

Was Dark’, 14, 191; ‘Dream’,

147; ‘Linen Town’, 31;

23; ‘Electric Light’, 173;

‘Loughanure’, 191–92;

Electric Light, 171–74, 176,

‘Lough Neagh Sequence’,

181, 193; ‘­England’, 41; ‘The

23; ‘Markings’, 132; ‘The

Errand’, 162; ‘Exposure’,

Master’, 112; ‘Midnight’, 36;

51–53, 54, 151, 168; ‘Fields of

‘Mid-­Term Break’, 18, 186;

Vision’, 133; Field Work, 60,

‘The Mud Vision’, 125;

62–66, 67–72, 77, 92, 139;

‘Mycenae Lookout’, 161;

‘The Flight Path’, 164–69;

‘Nerthus’, 33; ‘A New Song’,

‘Follower’, 17; ‘The Forge’,

33; ‘The Nod’, 182; North,

23; ‘For the Commander of

ix, 23, 30, 39, 43–59, 60, 62,

the Eliza’, 17; ‘Fosterling’,

66, 67, 77, 102, 118, 161, 168;

133–34; ‘From the Canton

‘A Northern Hoard’, 31, 36;

of Expectation’, 110; ‘From

‘Ocean’s Love to Ireland’,

the Frontier of Writing’, 110,

48; ‘The Old Icons’, 114;

123–24; ‘From the Republic

‘On the Road’, 115; An Open

of Conscience’, 110, 123,

Letter, 84–87, 146; ‘Orange

124–25; ‘Funeral Rites’,

Drums, Tyrone, 1966’, 51;

45–46; ‘The Given Note’,

‘The Other Side’, 31, 37, 58,

23; ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, 173;

83; ‘Out of Shot’, 181–82;

‘Glanmore Revisited’, 133;

‘Oysters’, 28; ‘Parable Island’,

‘Glanmore Sonnets’, 68;

123, 125; ‘Perch’, 172; ‘Personal

‘Granite Chip’, 108; ‘The

Helicon’, 19–20; ‘A Postcard

Grauballe Man’, 46–47;

from North Antrim’, 64;

‘The Harvest Bow’, 67; The

‘Postscript’, 157–58, 179;

Haw Lantern, 110, 120–31;

‘Punishment’, 47–48, 56, 161;

220  • Index

‘The Rain Stick’, 157; ‘The

‘To George Seferis in the

Real Names’, 173; ‘Requiem

Underworld’, 181; ‘To Mick

for the Croppies’, 25, 41;

Joyce in Heaven’, 181; ‘Tol-

‘The Riverbank Field’,

lund’, 160–61; ‘The Tollund

196; The Riverbank Field,

Man’, 37–39, 43; ‘The Tollund

189–91; ‘Route 110’, 189–91;

Man in Springtime’, 184–86;

‘Scaffolding’, 17; ‘The

‘Traditions’, 34–35; ‘Tryp-

Schoolbag’, 133; ‘The Scribes’,

tych’, 94; ‘Turkeys Observed’,

114; ‘The Seed Cutters’, 45;

17; ‘The Turnip-­Snedder’,

‘Seeing ­Th ings’, 131, 132;

182–83; ‘Two Lorries’,

Seeing ­Things, 131–41, 143,

163–64; ‘Ugolino’, 66;

157, 161, 174, 175, 198; Selected

‘Ulster Politics’, 26;

Poems, 72; ‘Servant Boy’, 32;

‘Uncoupled’, 191; ‘The

‘Settings’, 134; ‘The ­Settle

Under­g round’, 111, 179, 189;

Bed’, 133; ‘The Sharping

‘What­ever You Say Say

Stone’, 162; ‘Sheelagh na

Nothing’, 49–51; ‘Widgeon’,

Gig’, 112; ‘Shelf Life’, 95;

111–12; Wintering Out,

‘The Singing School’, 43, 51;

30–39, 43, 57, 58; ‘The Wool

‘The Skunk’, 70–71; ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, 151, 162;

Trade’, 31, 36 Heaney, Seamus, prose and

‘Sonnets from Hellas’, 172;

drama of: ‘Crediting Poetry’

‘The Spirit Level’, 131; The

(Nobel Prize speech), 149–57,

Spirit Level, 157–69, 174;

162, 164; The Cure at Troy,

‘Squarings’, 134, 136, 139–40;

90–92, 169, 174; ‘­Englands

‘Station Island’, 44, 95–97,

of the Mind’, 75; essay in The

98, 103–9, 125–26, 190; Sta­

Furrow, 95; essays in The

tion Island, 95–116, 118–19,

Government of the Tongue,

120, 139; ‘St Kevin and the

78–79, 131; ‘Feeling into

Blackbird’, 154; ‘The Strand

Words’, 76–77; ‘Frontiers of

at Lough Beg’, 62–63, 104;

Writing’ (Oxford lecture),

‘Strange Fruit’, 48; ‘Sun-

135–36, 145–47; Oxford lec-

light’, 45; ‘Sweeney Ex-

tures, 78, 135, 140–47, 152, 153–

hausted’, 114; ‘Sweeney

57, 171, 199; Preoccupations,

Redivivus’, 115–16; ‘The

72–77, 92–93; radio play

Swing’, 162; ‘Thatcher’, 23;

on the 1798 Rising, 25

Index  • 221

Heaney, Seamus, themes/ subject ­m atter of: autobi-

night Court’, 142; Sweeney Astray, 87

ography, 4, 51, 52–53, 75, 76,

Henryson, Robert, 174

96–97, 104, 115–16, 120–22,

Herbert, George, 142

162, 164–69, 173, 186; classical

Herbert, Zbigniew, 28, 125, 127

world, 154, 159, 173, 174–75;

Hewitt, John, 10, 73, 146

countryside/rural past/

Hill, Geoffrey, 75–76

domestic world, 3–4, 16, 22,

Hobsbaum, Philip, 5, 9, 13

23, 128, 133, 162, 200–201;

Holub, Miroslav, 28, 86, 143

ageing, death, and the next

Homem, Rui Carvalho, 173–74

world, 62, 110, 131–34, 139, 179,

HomePlace, 148

184; ­family and childhood,

Honest Ulsterman, The,

17, 18, 66, 67–69, 95, 128–31, 132, 137, 139, 162–64, 173, 180, 182, 186, 191, 194, 196; language, 32, 34, 36; love and sex, 23, 45, 47–49, 62, 66, 69–72, 95, 101, 110–11,

20–21, 26, 41–42, 56 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 5, 12, 14, 73 Hughes, Ted, 14, 67, 75–76, 158, 171, 183 Hume, John, 5

112, 183–84, 188–89; history and myth, 25, 31, 32–35,

Icelandic sagas, 53, 75

43–44; inheritances, 31, 34,

‘Incertus’. See Heaney, Seamus:

95; memory, 97, 137, 162,

pseudonym of

196; politics, 31, 51, 53, 84–87,

IRA. See Irish Republican Army

112, 161; signs and symbols,

Ireland. See Irish Republic

126–27; transcendence,

Irish Arts Council, 42–43

vision, and mystery, 133,

Irish Civil War, 77

138–39, 157, 205; vio­lence

Irish language, 88–89

and trauma, 16, 17, 22, 23,

Irish lit­er­a­ture, 6, 27, 28–29, 77;

30, 36–39, 43, 44–48, 56, 69,

anthology of, 81; and the

77, 160, 162, 166, 168, 179, 187

Field Day cooperative,

Heaney, Seamus, translations

80–92; medieval, 191; mode

by: Aeneid VI, 132, 194–96,

of poetic expression in, 141;

199; Beowulf, 169–71, 176;

writers from the past, in

Dante’s Inferno, 131, 138;

‘Station Island’, 99–102. See

‘Eclogue IX’, 173; ‘The Mid-

also specific Irish writers

222  • Index

Irish potato famine, 17 Irish Republic, or Ireland, 2, 17–18, 125, 128; and Britain, 48, 65, 76; changes in, dur-

Janáček, Leos, The Diary of One Who Vanished, 176 Johnson, Samuel (Dr Johnson), 201

ing the second half of the

Joyce, James, 29, 56, 146; and

twentieth ­century, 203–4;

Stephen Dedalus, 36, 60,

culture of, and the Field

114, 138; in Heaney’s Station

Day cooperative, 80–92;

Island, 106–9, 139; A Portrait

and the En­g lish language,

of the Artist as a Young Man,

81–82; Heaney’s life in,

36, 108–9; Ulysses (and

42–43, 60, 79–80; and

Leopold Bloom), 60, 62

identity, 78, 87, 146; negative response to Heaney in,

Kafka, Franz, 125

54–56; and Northern Eu­

Kavanagh, Patrick, 5, 6, 15, 73;

rope, 58; place-­names in,

poem about Lough Derg,

88–89; reaction to Heaney’s

99–100, 101

death in, 200–203; reaction

Kearney, Richard, 80

to Heaney’s Nobel Prize in,

Keats, John, 139, 188

148; and the war of in­de­

Keenan, Terry, 101

pen­dence, 65, 128; in Yeats’s

Kilkenny Arts Festival, 65, 104,

Nobel speech, 154–55. See also Dublin, Ireland; Trou­bles, the Irish Republican Army (IRA): birth of, 25; bombings by,

198 King Sweeney. See Heaney, Seamus: bird-­k ing alter-­ego of Kinsella, Thomas, 43, 54

152–53; ceasefire declared by, 160; funeral, 152; hunger strikes of, in the Maze

Larkin, Philip, 67, 70, 75–76, 141; ‘Aubade’, 143, 144

prison, 77, 104, 109, 145, 167;

Latin, 5, 120, 195, 199

and Sinn Féin, 90

Lawrence, D. H., 6; Sons and

Irish Times, 55, 84, 86

Lovers, 128 Lerner, Laurence, 10

Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone, Celtic Miscellany, 134–35 James, Clive, 54, 56

Lewis, C. S., 140 Listener, The, 26, 37 Lloyd, David, 55

Index  • 223

London, ­England, 140; Hea­

Mahon, Derek, 54; as one of

ney’s honeymoon in, 15,

the ­g reat triumvirate of

110; in Heaney’s poetry, 110,

Northern Ireland poets,

179–80, 185–86, Lowell’s

10, 21; on Northern poets,

memorial ser­v ice in, 66;

42; as a product of Trinity

portrait of Heaney in, 198

College Dublin, 11; as a

Londonderry. See Derry Long, Richard, 125 Longley, Edna, 9, 14, 56, 67; on

Protestant, 12; translation of Villon by, 67 Mandelstam, Osip, 73, 125

Field Day, 89; on Heaney’s

Maritain, Jacques, 95

North, 57–59; on literary

Marlowe, Christopher, 142

culture in the Irish Republic,

Martin, Augustine, 79

42; on MacNeice, 11

Masefield, John, 140

Longley, Michael, 9, 11, 14, 21, 54, 67; as one of the ­great triumvirate of Northern Ireland

Maze prison, 77, 145, 167 McCartney, Colum, 62, 64, 97, 104, 109

poets, 10, 21; on Heaney, 19,

McGahern, John, 62, 178

149; Heaney’s correspon-

McGuire, Edward, 3

dence with, 24; as a product

McLaverty, Bernard, 9

of Trinity College Dublin,

McLaverty, Michael, 6

11; as a Protestant, 12

Merrill, James, 117

Lough Beg islands, 94–95 Lough Derg, 97–98, 99–100, 109

Merriman, Brian, 141; ‘The Midnight Court’, 142

Lourdes, 11, 95, 126, 183

Mhac an tSaoi, Máire, 28

Lowell, Robert, 2, 6, 56, 69, 73;

Michaels, Leonard, 28

The Dolphin, 66; friendship

Middleton, Colin, 10, 14, 192

of, with Heaney, 65–67;

Miller, Karl, 15, 177, 193–94,

Heaney on, 117; on Heaney, 54; History, 66 Lyric Theatre (Belfast), 12

201 Miller, Liam, 15 Miłosz, Czesław, 28, 178; ‘Ars Poetica’, 125; ‘City Without

MacDiarmaid, Hugh, 73, 141, 142, 158 MacNeice, Louis, 6, 11–12, 146–47; ‘Autumn Journal’, 52

224  • Index

a Name’, 125; influence of on Heaney, and Heaney’s admiration for, 112, 125, 127, 143, 158, 183–84, 187–88

Montague, John, 10, 43, 54,

Heaney, 2–3, 41–42, 145–47;

87–88; ‘The Cry’, 7; Poisoned

in Heaney’s poetry, 22,

Lands, 8

32–35, 51–59, 79, 125; life

Monteith, Charles, 15

in, before the Trou­bles, 7;

Morrell, Ottoline, 140

literary scene in, 10, 42, 53,

Morrison, Blake, 84, 85–86, 116

56–59; peace pro­cess in,

Morrison, Danny, 77–78

174–75; poetry tour of, 21;

Mossbawn. See Heaney,

po­liti­cal parties in, 90–91;

Seamus, homes of

during World War II, 182.

Motion, Andrew, 84, 183

See also Belfast, Northern

Moyola Park, 9

Ireland; Trou­bles, the

Muir, Edwin, 6 Muldoon, Paul, 10, 55–56, 111, 118, 200; ‘The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants’, 56 Munch, Edvard, ‘The Scream’, 149

O’Brien, Flann, At Swim Two Birds, 87 O’Casey, Sean, The Plough and the Stars, 203 O’Donoghue, Bernard, 140 O’Driscoll, Dennis: interviews

nationalism, Irish, 12, 56, 114; and Field Day, 80–92; and

of Heaney by, 103, 116–17, 171; Stepping Stones, x, 5, 176–77

prison narratives, 142; and

Official Unionist Party, 90

the SDLP, 90; tradition of,

O’Flynn, Liam, ‘The Poet and

and Heaney, 41, 58, 145, 151

the ­Piper’ (with Seamus

Newmann, Joan, 9

Heaney), 176

New Statesman, 15, 26

O’Hagan, Andrew, 177, 193–94

Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, 148–52,

O’Malley, Mary, 38

154, 158, 169, 171, 174, 176, 177,

O’Neill, Louis, 63–64

178, 186. See also Heaney,

O Riordáin, Seán, 88

Seamus, prose of: ‘Crediting

Orpheus, 111, 135, 154, 189

Poetry’ (Nobel Prize speech)

Oxford University, 142; fabled

Northern Ireland: Arts Coun-

places around, 140; Heaney

cil, 119; and the Field Day

as Professor of Poetry at,

cooperative, 80–92; Heaney

140; Heaney’s lecture series

moves away from, 2–3, 39,

at, 78, 135, 140–47, 152, 153–57,

40–41; inf luence of, on

171, 199 Index  • 225

Parker, Stewart, 9 Parkinson, Thomas, 27 Patmore, Coventry, 73 Paulin, Tom, 10, 80, 82, 142 Pearse, Patrick, 25 Penguin Book of Con­temporary British Poetry, 84–87

Scottish poetry, 141, 174. See also Burns, Robert SDLP. See Social Demo­cratic and ­L abour Party sectarianism in Northern Island, 7, 8, 18, 83–84. See also Trou­bles, the

Pinsky, Robert, 145

Seferis, George, 145, 181, 183

Poetry Book Society Bulletin,

Shakespeare, William, 88, 121,

53 Pound, Ezra, 174 Protestantism, 17, 36, 57, 91, 128–29, 153; Heaney’s rela-

173, 187–88 Simmons, James, 9, 26, 55, 56; and The Honest Ulsterman, 20–21, 41–42

tionship with, 8, 31–32, 83,

Sinn Féin, 77, 78, 90

95; and other writers, 11–12,

Snyder, Gary, 28

100, 117, 146–47. See also

Social Demo­cratic and

Trou­bles, the

­L abour Party (SDLP), 90 Somerset Maugham Award,

Queen’s University Belfast, 5–8, 10, 12, 27, 39; Queen’s University Festival, 15

20 Sophocles, 174; Philoctetes, 90–91 Spenser, Edmund, 88, 146;

Rea, Stephen, 80, 82 Republicanism, Irish, 25, 82, 89, 153. See also Irish Republic; Irish Republican Army Ricks, Christopher, 22

‘The Faerie Queen’, 34 Stathearn, William, 102 St Columb’s College, Derry, 4–5, 12 Stevens, Wallace, 145, 187–88

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 183

St Joseph’s College of

Saddlemyer, Ann, 68, 118

St Patrick’s Purgatory, 99

Sands, Bobby, Prison Poems,

Sweeney. See Heaney, Seamus:

Education, 6

77–78 Sandymount. See Heaney, Seamus, homes of

226  • Index

bird-­k ing alter-­ego of Sweeney, Simon, 106 Synge, J. M., 118, 202

terrorist attacks: July 2005

Unionism, 7, 79–80, 89, 90

bombings in London, 180;

United Kingdom. See Britain

September 11, 2001, attack

United States: Heaney in

on Amer­i­ca, 181. See also

“exile” in, 116; Heaney’s

Trou­bles, the

popularity in, 54, 83, 116;

Thomas, Dylan, 141, 142

Heaney’s residence and fa-

Thomas, R. S., 176

miliarity with the literary

Threshold, 37–38

scene in, 66–67, 91, 113. See

Times Literary Supplement, 8, 54

also Berkeley, California;

Tóibín, Colm, 198

Harvard University

Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 87 Tracy, Robert, 27

Vaughan, Henry, 193–94

Trea­sure Island (Robert Louis

Vendler, Helen, 22, 54, 139

Stevenson), 192

vernacular poetry, 142

Trinity College Dublin, 11, 177

Vikings, 46, 53, 57, 181

Trou­bles, the, 2, 30, 40, 76,

Villon, François, 67

77–78, 91, 100, 145, 151–54, 171,

Virgil, 167, 189, 190, 193, 196;

203; beginnings of, 7, 25;

Aeneid, 131–32; ‘Eclogue

in Heaney’s poetry, 23, 26,

IX’, 173

38, 49–51, 55, 59, 62–65, 104, 175; murders/assassinations

Wales, 193–94; poets from, 141

during, 38, 62–65, 97, 101–2,

Warner, Deborah, 176

109, 151–53, 190; poets’ need to

Whitbread Prize, 171

address, 53. See also Bloody

Wilbur, Richard, 6, 67

Sunday; Irish Republican

Wilde, Oscar, 141; ‘The Ballad

Army

of Reading Gaol’, 142 Wood, The. See Heaney, Sea-

Ulster, 8, 16, 49; in Heaney’s

mus, homes of

poetry, 32, 51, 84; language

Words­worth, Dorothy, 183

in, 170; Sweeney’s kingdom

Words­worth, William, 73,

located in, 88–89; view of, as a tabula rasa, 146 Ulster Defence Association, 152 Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), 152, 153

145, 183; “Wordsworthian” inf luences in Heaney’s ­poetry, 15, 69 World War II, 114, 182 Wyatt, Thomas, 70 Index  • 227

Yeats, William Butler, 6, 82, 92, 109, 116, 118, 141, 199, 204; and Aedh and Crazy

tower of, at Ballylee, 28, 146, 177–78 Yeats, William Butler, works

Jane, 114; and ageing, 132–33,

of: Cathleen ni Houlihan,

187–88; Auden’s elegy on,

82; ‘The Cold Heaven’, 143;

171–72; and T. S. Eliot, 103;

‘Cuchulain Comforted’, 74;

Heaney’s writings and

‘The Fisherman’, 63; ‘The

lectures on, 72–75, 90, 143–46,

Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 16;

154–57, 199; influence of, on

‘The Man and the Echo’,

Heaney, 29, 43–44, 63, 77,

143, 144–45; ‘Meditations in

103, 136, 138, 158–59, 180;

Time of Civil War’, 43, 155;

Heaney identified with, 54,

‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 180;

58–59, 118, 149, 158, 202–3;

‘The Stare’s Nest by My

Nobel Prize awarded to,

Win­dow’, 155–56; ‘­Under

149, 154–55; plays of, 12; on

Ben Bulben’, 145; ‘Vacillation’,

the poet’s life and vocation,

132; A Vision, 44; ‘The Wild

77, 92, 202; scholars of, 27;

Swans at Coole’, 158

228  • Index