English
Poetry of the XIX and XX Centuries. Factultad de Filología. Universitat de Valencia.
Professor:
Dr. Vicente Forés
Student:
Marcos A. Palao Contreras
I shall deal in this paper with some of the poems by Seamus Heaney; the
Irish poet awarded with the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature (wikipedia.org) and
who is considered, for some people, the greatest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats
(Pellegrino, Joe). Moreover, I shall try to show that for Heaney, first of all,
everything is in darkness, everything is hidden, and that the only way to know
things, to shed light on the world and to get inspiration to do so is through
poetry and by going back to his roots as a way of understanding, and specially
to the conflict with the English that takes place in his home land, Northern
Ireland (wikipedia.org).
We can see that for Heaney everything seems to be in darkness, that
there is no light to see what is really happening, when at the poem entitled
“The Forge” he says that “All I know is a door into the dark” an interest on
which he already felt when he was just a child as the author writes in
“Personal Helicon” that “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.”, and which more than interest seems
fascination.
As a result of this darkness Heaney feels that he has to know to be able
to understand and to shed light over this darkness and that the best way to
acquire knowledge is through poetry and to get inspiration to do so he has to
go back to his roots, as I said, which can be seen in “Digging”, a poem that
talks about his father and grandfather who work as potato growers and diggers
–Irish main source of food-, by writing in the beginning that “Between my
finger and my thumb/The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.”, and to end it writing
that “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it.”,
that is he shall use his pen to dig, to find out truth. But there is also again
“Personal Helicon”, a poem where Heaney uses the image of Mount Helicon –famous
in Greek mythology because two springs sacred to the Muses were located there-
(wikipedia.org) to state that darkness is what matters to him and that it is
his own and “personal” source of inspiration and the reason why he does poetry:
“I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”; and just a bit before
those lines of this poem Heaney tells us that the way to do so is only “[…], to
pry into roots, to finger slime,/To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some
spring…”.
This prying into (his Irish) roots idea can be checked also in the
numerous usage of the word bog, which are wetlands widely found throughout
Ireland (wikipedia.org) such is the case of the title of the poem “Bogland”
itself or not so directly addressing them but mentioning them, like in the case
of another poem entitled “The Tollund Man” where he talks about the man that was
found in the Danish bogs buried more that 2000 years ago (wikipedia.org) just
to name some of them. But it can also be seen in the poem “At a potato digging”
where Heaney writes on the process many Irish had to do to be able to eat and
which is very important to this people (wikipedia.org).
But of course, if Heaney is “prying into his roots” he can not forget
the most important issue of them all, the Irish conflict with the English
invaders; and I think that he pretends to arise awareness of the situation but
not directly taking a clear stand for or against it, as I shall try to show
later.
Where he shows his concern about this issue is for example in “The
Tollund Man” inspired by The Bog People, the book that Danish
anthropologist P.V. Glob published 1967 (Todd Dayton, 2002).
Heaney's ode to the Tollund Man, with his "peat-brown head,"
became a consideration of the culture and religion of Northern Europe, ancient
and modern and he also compares the Irish situation with that of the Danish vs.
Jutes had thousands of years before fighting for a piece of land, Jutland.
(wikipedia.org) and which is where the Angles came from. The Tollund man is one
of the recovered bodies featured by Glob in his book. He was a victim
sacrificed to Nerthus, in the hope of securing a good crop from the land, and
it is in this sense that the speaker describes him, “Bridegroom to the
goddess”, Heaney does not venerate the Tollund Man as king or martyr, but as
victim (Nunculba, 2002).
There is also “Casualty”, where Heaney explores the question of the
aftermath of the Bloody Sunday killings (January 1972), where the central
figure presented in the poem is Louis O'Neill, a Catholic fisherman who was a
neighbour and acquaintance of Heaney and who was 'blown to bits' in an IRA pub
bombing, carried out in reprisal for Bloody Sunday (Nunculba, 2002). Or
eventually, in another poem entitled “Act of Union” in which Heaney talks of
the act that in 1800 abolished the parliament in Dublin, and as a result of
which Irish MPs migrated to Westminster (Ray Foster, 2005), and where Heaney
makes use of a linguistic technique because whilst the Gaelic language is seen
as a feminine tongue consisting mostly of vowels, the guttural consonants of
English are used effectively in the poem, coinciding with the masculine
personification of England. Alliteration and onomatopoeia exaggerate this harsh
masculinity whilst also contributing to the rhythm of the poetry, which
reflects the ‘battering ram, the boom burst from within’ of violence (Twixfix
2003).
Heaney also wants to arise consciousness over these troubles and about
this situation as for example in the poem “Broagh” where he is using already in
the title an English transliteration of the Irish word “bruach” and which
linguistic changes were common practice in English language politics towards
the Irish (Eugene O’Brien, 1996), because as Heaney writes, the “gh the
strangers found/difficult to manage.” There is also the poem “The Forge” again,
where the author says what the situation in Northern Ireland is when he writes
that “Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;/Inside, the hammered anvil's
short pitched ring,/The unpredictable fantail of sparks” hoops rusting stand
for the Irish people getting rust with the hammer over them, and which
“sparks”, which stand for fights, can happen anytime as a result of it. Only at
“Open Letter” Heaney clearly takes position saying the he is Irish because “Be
advised/My passport's green./No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast The
Queen.”.
The rest of the positioning in Heaney’s writings is very ambiguous, like
he for some reason, does not want to take sides.
This ambiguity can be seen in the poem “Punishment”, which is about a
young woman who has been shorn, stripped, killed and thrown into the bog as
punishment for adultery (Nunculba,
2002). It is early in the poem where the speaker expresses a sense
of identification and empathy with the victim, but quickly becomes a voyeur,
exercising his male power to take pleasure in the woman's exposed body by
writing “I can feel the tug/of the halter at the nape/of her neck, the wind/on
her naked front./It blows her nipples/to amber beads,/it shakes the frail
rigging/of her ribs.” This ambiguity, this conflict between empathising on one
hand and watching passively, is compounded later when the speaker directs his
words to the dead woman: 'My poor scapegoat/I almost love you/but would have
cast, I know/the stones of silence.” (Nunculba,
2002). And also on one hand, he 'connives/in civilised outrage', yet
he finds himself again complicit in the act of retribution, as he admits that
he is able to understand the rationale for the punitive act. This ambiguity can
also be seen again in “Casualty” when after talking of the man who died at the
IRA bombing he questions “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.”
On the other hand, he does not want to take sides because this seems to
happen elsewhere, the “stones of silence” I mentioned before are an allusion to
the story of a woman's adultery in the Bible (John8: 1-12) and through this
allusion conflates pagan and Christian mythologies, which again serves to show
such stories happen elsewhere (Nunculba,
2002).
For me, Heaney is helpless regarding the Irish conflict and that it is
only by writing that he can get to know where truth lies. What he does?: “I
rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”.
SOURCES:
-
Seamus
Heaney – Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. 26 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27
April 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney>
-
Pellegrino,
Joe. Seamus Heaney. April 2006. Arlindo Correia’s Home Page. 27 April 2006. <http://www.arlindo-correia.com/120101.html>
-
Helicón
- Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. 3 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27 April 2006.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicon>
-
Ireland
- Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. 26 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27 April 2006
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Flora_and_Fauna>
-
Tollund
Man - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. 12 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27 April
2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollund_Man>
-
Potato
- Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. 27 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27 April
2006.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Ireland>
-
Todd
Dayton. Illuminations – Tales form the bog. April 2002. Berkeley’s online
magazine of research in the arts and humanities, University of California,
Berkeley. 27 April 2006 <http://illuminations.berkeley.edu/archives/2002/article.php?volume=1&story=1>
-
Jutland
- Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. 27 April 2006. Wikipedia.org. 27 April 2006.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutland_Peninsula>
-
Nunculba.
Modernist Poetry Message Board. 26 November 2002. Sparknotes LLC. 27 April
2006. <http://mb.sparknotes.com/mb.epl?b=121&m=471368&p=5&t=124765>
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Ray
Foster. Guardian Unlimited Books, Review, Indomitable Irishry. 26 February
2005. Guardian Newspapers Limited. 27 April 2006. <http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1424572,00.html>
-
Twixfix 2003. Open ground poems 1966-1996 –
Seamus Heaney – Review – an introduction to the poetry of Heaney. 15 May 2003.
Ciao.co.uk. Ciao Gmbh. 27 April 2006.
<http://www.ciao.co.uk/Open_Ground_Poems_1966_1996_Seamus_Heaney__Review_5336983>
-
Eugene
O’Brien. At the frontier of language: Literature, Theory, Politics. 1996.
University of Limmerick, Ireland. 27 April 2006. <http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol1/paper3.html>