Seamus Heaney - From Personal Experience To Poetry (Seamus Heaney in general)

Member Name: repairmanjack

Product:	Seamus Heaney in general
Date:	14/10/02 (3399 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Verbiose and lyrical, Intensity of emotion, Its not all "Death of a Naturalist", you know!

Disadvantages: None, this is genius that fell from Heaven

Before sampling his work in detail, I found myself dismissing Seamus Heaney as “one of the Irish poets“. I expected him to be political, whilst I admit to being largely ignorant of the man and his life. Think of Ireland and you think of lush green country fields or blood-red city streets - what ripe fair for an angry man to work his pen upon. Who would write of the country when they could write of the history and violence of the country? I was very wrong.

The first thing that has occurred to me, especially with some of his earlier work, is that Heaney often seems to be apologising to me, the reader, as if he believes there is something intrinsically impure about his profession. Ridiculous, given the man’s ability with the written word - yet upon reading such poems as “Digging”, “Follower”, even “Thatcher”, I believe I have a glimpse into what it is that makes Heaney devalue some of his work.

The man himself has risen from a background of family poverty. His family, you imagine going back for many generations, were manual labourers, tillers of the land - a connection that the poet seems to proudly make with the original ancestors of Ireland. Heaney is unlike the others from his family. He is fiercely intelligent, the academic pearl lying in the honest dirt of the ground. I wonder at the Catholicism in his guilt at being unlike his parents - as if he feels within himself an act of betrayal by not living and working upon the earth that has reared the earlier generations of his family.

The poem “Follower”, by my reading, is both a testament to family, honest earthy labour; and an apology to his father that he is not, nor can ever be, truly like him. The pride and love is tangible within the verses. Despite the poem being written in adulthood, the poem is initially told from the stance of a child. Heaney bestows upon his father an almost Atlas like proportion. A man who holds the
world in his hands. “His shoulders globed like a full sail” paints a dedicated picture of both strength and the potential to harness nature itself to achieve his goals. His father is described as “an expert”. There is admiration here. The man’s expertise is demonstrated in the way the sod softly rolls for him, without breaks, without imperfections. Heaney is showing us that there is more to ploughing than merely following the plough. You lead the plough, the horses, you bend the earth to your will. Here is achievement. Yet this is what I can never achieve.

His father has an eye for this, it is an inherent skill - not taught, for perfection like this can be shown but not taught, rather it is something that is innately known. You are born to the task. From the womb the earth is calling you. The man and the earth are made indivisible within the line “Mapping the furrow exactly”. The furrow of earth and the furrow of concentration upon his father’s brow. There is room for little else.

Heaney the child classes himself as incidental here. His father is at work, focussed, the child can merely follow on, clumsy and, on occasion, hitch a ride upon his father’s broad back. From this early age he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps - physically, in every way. You imagine this boy stretching to fill his father’s footprint with his small booted own, dreaming of the day when it is he clicking his tongue at the horses and sailing across the land at the plough-head. Heaney wanted to be this, but you can imagine he knew, even at that early age that he lacked the eye or tread. His eye would pick out the details in other ways; other worlds. All he does is follow - as if he is secondary in his fathers attentions. The earth must come first. The poet berates himself for his clumsiness, the nuisance he was, yet the ending of the poem is a vivid turnaround from this. Their roles and worlds have chang
ed. Heaney has, quite literally, found his field, the earth he was born to plough - as a poet. His achievements and perfections are every bit as important and nourishing as his father’s labours before him. Yet Heaney cannot escape what it was he believes he should have been, and the last two lines of the poem are a poignant reminder to himself of this. Age has wearied and weakened his father, turned him back into the slight, clumsy child you imagine he must have been in the days when he followed Heaney’s grandfather - yet there is the acknowledgement, too, that he will not go away. I believe this refers to the persistence of guilt Heaney feels that he is not, in the way he most believes he should be, his father’s son.

A different image of Heaney’s father appears in the poem “Mid-Term Break”. I have selected this poem as I feel it continues with the theme of family, yet is also the poet’s principle introduction to death and sorrow - which will tragically come to serve him so well as he matures and lives and writes of Ireland’s troubled times.

I found the poem unusual in that it portrays so little emotion from the man himself. Given the stark subject matter and the intensity of the effect upon a family it is almost chilling in the way it formalises the scene. The effect is possibly all the more heart-rending for it. This is way beyond simple documentary here. The last four lines of the poem contain the ability to knock the reader off their feet. You realise there is so much emotion in the reading of the poem, if not in the lines. Heaney asks the reader to import the sorrow from themselves.

The poem begins with the young Heaney waiting. Simple alarms, before used merely to transport school-children from one classroom to another, are now portentous and “knelling”. Already there is death here, in this simple scene. Like the young child, at this point we cannot quite understand it. The
great shock for the poet must come from the second verse: his father meets him, and the once mighty man is crying. To see such a pragmatic figure, a man who rules the land in tears must surely have been almost too much for the child to bear. You imagine this was as big a shock as news of the death - for what is death when you are merely a child? The sole emotion he ascribes to himself here is the embarrassment he feels at the sympathy and attention from men, old and grown, who would otherwise have paid him little mind.

Heaney describes the moment the next morning when he ventures up to the little room (the “tainted room” of his later work “Funeral Rites”) and sees his younger brother in repose. Snowdrops and candles, although no mention of religious paraphernalia here, which I find strange, and assume to be intentionally omitted, mellow and sooth the terrible image of the dead child.

The young boy’s fatal mark is described as a poppy bruise - the word and image of the poppy long synonymous with death and remembrance. It is only upon reaching the line “He lay in the four foot box as in his cot” that the full blow is delivered to the reader. I wondered upon re-reading the poem whether the casual nature with which I initially accepted this death, and the aftershocks that ran through me upon laying down the book, would have pleased Heaney. As if I had learned some lesson from him.

The final poem I‘d like to talk about is “from Whatever you Say Say Nothing.” This is the Heaney I was expecting to find - to a degree. This is the poet writing about his family in the broadest possible sense. The family of Ireland. Heaney is angry here. The cause of it would purport to be the offhanded manner of an English journalist; yet I believe Heaney is always angry. Angry at the troubles, the death, the politicians, the two sides and the fact of the factions themselves. This is the Ireland that I know
, says Heaney, yet this is not the Ireland that I know.

There is almost a hint of sarcasm in with his cynicism. He tries to point out the detail and the horror of the situation, beyond the newspaper headlines and reportage. The poem is about distrust, from the perspective of both the British and the Irish. Heaney knows that one so vocal can never seem partial - even to his countrymen. The poem also reflects this attitude, and his frustration at it. It is about finding voice, but the need to do so quietly. Change the world in little ways. If I do it, if you do it, maybe we’ll all do it.

Something in the poem that shone through for me was the idea that words do not capture the realities that Seamus Heaney grew up with. Heaney has to be careful, that much is obvious. In a country where all are a target, it is foolish to be anything other than a quiet man. Heaney is, in my belief, a quiet man. He overlays his own grief and grievances with those of the country, mixing up his perspectives and allusions to protect himself, as well as force the reader to analyse and fully understand what he is trying to say. I feel he believes he does not always succeed in this teaching. “For all this art and sedentary tirade I am incapable.” As in “Digging” I feel a sense of shamefulness and apology from the poet. These are his honest works - yet are they honest enough? And is it really work? I think he believes not. His father; his father’s father. Here are the working men.

Even religion is brushed aside; tidied away with a couple of lines as if that too is neither source or solution to the problem. “But I incline as much to rosary beads ... As to the jottings and analyses ... Of politicians and newspaper men” .The problem is within the nature of the men who war. Religion is an excuse to vent their rage - a scapegoat for their violent and ignorant urges. Religion is not the reason they war.

The oppression
of the place is well detailed. This is Heaney the diarist. At its simplest sense he merely wants Ireland to actually look at what it is doing to itself, instead of wringing its hands and weeping the aftermath. His “civilised outrage” comes to the fore again and again. Ireland is his punished maiden: “My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain’s exposed and darkened combs” (from “Punishment”). A line from an old nursery rhyme has come to my mind several times when reading both this poem and “Westering”: “He bangs his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.“ I believe this is Heaney’s albatross. He says so much, yet fears he can never say enough - and no matter what he says, things will never change.

It is a pessimistic idea - yet one I believe that rings true with the last line of this poem: Ireland and its “little destiny”. A stark reference to the perpetual, unending troubles - a sorrow Heaney could have imposed upon the suffering of people around the globe, or one man with one broken heart. But today, at this moment he is content with his discontentment: this is Ireland’s future. A consolation, booby prize, and not the destiny the country deserves or needs. The ‘voice of sanity’ is indeed getting hoarse.

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