Seamus Heaney by Michael Allen

New Casebooks
SEAMUS HEANEY
New Casebooks
PUBLISHED FORTHCOMING
Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus
Hamlet Feminism and Shakespeare
King Lear Julius Caesar
Macbeth The Merchant of Venice
A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing and
Shakespeare's History Plays: The Taming of the Shrew
Richard II to Henry V Othello
Twelfth Night Shakespeare's Problem Plays
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Feminist Theatre and Theory
Waiting for Godot and The Duchess of Malfi and
Endgame The White Devil
Christopher Marlowe
Joseph Conrad
David Copperfield and Hard Bleak House
Times Wilkie Collins
Emma Jane Eyre
E. M. Forster Jude the Obscure
Frankenstein Mansfield Park and Persuasion
Great Expectations Toni Morrison
Middlemarch Ulysses
Mrs Dalloway and
To the Lighthouse John Donne
Sense and Sensibility and Philip Larkin
Pride and Prejudice Paradise Lost
Sons and Lovers Metaphysical Poetry
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tristram Shandy
Villette
Wuthering Heights
William Blake
Chaucer
Coleridge, Keats and Shelley
Seamus Heaney
Victorian Women Poets
Wordsworth
Postcolonial Literatures
New Casebooks
SEAMUS HEANEY
EDITED BY MICHAEL ALLEN
St. Martin's Press

New York
ISBN 978-1-349-10684-4 ISBN 978-1-349-10682-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0
SEAMUS HEANEY
Introduction, selection and editorial matter copyright © 1997 by Michael
Allen
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-48684-9
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information, address:
St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1997
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and

made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
ISBN 978-0-312-16502-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-312-16503-1 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seamus Heaney I edited by Michael Allen.
p. em.- (New casebooks)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-16502-4 ISBN 978-0-312-16503-1 (pbk.)
I. Heaney, Seamus-Criticism and interpetation. 2. Northern
Ireland-In literature. I. Allen, Michael. II. Series.
PR6058.E2Z874 1997
821'.914-dc20 96-27424
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgments Vll
General Editors' Preface X
Introduction: MICHAEL ALLEN 1

1. Growing Up: Review of Death of a Naturalist 21
CHRISTOPHER RICKS
20 A Slow North-east Wind: Review of North 25

CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
3o 'Inner Emigre' or 'Artful Voyeur'? Seamus

Heaney's North 30
EDNA LONGLEY
4o Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold 64

SEAMUS DEANE
50 Representation in Modern Irish Poetry 78

EAMONN HUGHES
6o The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review

of Field Work 95
CHRISTOPHER RICKS
70 Review of Field Work 102

TERRY EAGLETON
80 Writing a Bare Wire: Station Island 107

NEIL CORCORAN
9 0 The Government of the Tongue 129

SEAMUS HEANEY
v
VI CONTENTS
10. The Sign of the Cross: Review of The Government

of the Tongue 147
THOMAS DOCHERTY
11. 'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and

the Poetics of Identity 155
DAVID LLOYD
12. 'Bog Queens': The Representation of Women in the

Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney 185
PATRICIA COUGHLAN
13. Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape,

Seamus Heaney 206
THOMAS DOCHERTY
14. The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney 223

STAN SMITH
15. Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus Heaney 252

RICHARD KIRKLAND
Further Reading 266

Notes on Contributors 271
Index 274
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to a considerable number of people for their help in

the preparation of this New Casebook: in particular, Maureen
Alden, Jim Arnott, Rand Brandes, Michael Durkan, Seamus
Heaney, Ivan Herbison, Eamonn Hughes, Richard Kirkland,
Christopher Ricks and Michael Smallman. Special thanks are due to
Kate Arnott for expertly typing from a fairly illegible script. The
Queen's University of Belfast Publications Fund gave welcome
financial assistance.
I have, with the authors' agreement, shortened two essays repub-
lished here, those by Terry Eagleton and Patricia Coughlan, in
order to exclude material not directly relevant to Heaney's poetry.
The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permis-
sion to use copyright material:
Neil Corcoran for material from Seamus Heaney (1986), by per-
mission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Patricia Coughlan for material
from "'Bog Queens": The Representation of Women in the Poetry
of John Montague and Seamus Heaney' in Gender in Irish Writing,
ed. T. O'Brien Johnson and D. Cairns (1991), by permission of
Open University Press; Seamus Deane for 'Seamus Heaney: The
Timorous and the Bold' in Celtic Revivals (1985), by permission of
Faber and Faber Ltd; Thomas Docherty for 'The Sign of the Cross:
Review of The Government of the Tongue', Irish Review, 5,
Autumn (1988), 112-16, by permission of the author; and 'Ana-; or
Postmodernism, Landscape, Seamus Heaney' in Postmodernism: A
Reader, ed. T. Docherty (1992), by permission of Harvester
Wheatsheaf and Columbia University Press; Terry Eagleton forma-
terial from 'Recent Poetry: Review of Field Work', Stand Magazine,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
21:3 (1980) 77-8, by permission of the author; Seamus Heaney for

'The Government of the Tongue' in The Government of the Tongue
(1988). Copyright © 1989 by Seamus Heaney, by permission of
Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc.; Eamonn
Hughes for material from 'Representation in Modern Irish Poetry'
in Aspects of Irish Studies, ed. M. Hill and S. Barber (1990),
Institute of Irish Studies, by permission of the author; Richard
Kirkland for 'Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus Heaney', in Writing
and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1968, Studies in Twentieth
Century Literature Series (1994) Longman, by permission of
Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd; David Lloyd for "'Pap for the
Dispossessed"; Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity' in
Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(1993), by permission of The Lilliput Press; Edna Longley for mate-
rial from "'Inner Emigre" or "Artful Voyeur"? Seamus Heaney's
North in Poetry in the Wars (1986), by permission of Bloodaxe
Books; Conor Cruise O'Brien for 'A Slow North-east Wind: Review
of North', The Listener, 25 September 1975, by permission of the
author; Christopher Ricks for 'Growing Up: Review of Death of a
Naturalist', New Statesman, 27 May 1966, by permission of New
Statesman; and 'The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review of
Field Work', London Review of Books, 1:2, 8 November 1979, by
permission of London Review of Books; Stan Smith for 'The
Distance Between: Seamus Heaney' in The Chosen Ground: Essays
on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil
Corcoran (1992), Seren Books, by permission of the author.
For copyright material included in the above essays:

Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc. for extracts
from Seamus Heaney's poetry; selections from Field Work.
Copyright © 1976, 1979 by Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern.
Copyright © 1987, by Seamus Heaney, Poems 1965-1975.
Copyright© 1980 by Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things. Copyright©
1991 by Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems 1966-1987. Copyright©
1990 by Seamus Heaney, Station Island. Copyright © 1975 by
Seamus Heaney; and Elizabeth Bishop, 'At the Fishhouses' from The
Complete Poems 1927-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice
Helen Methfessel; Penguin Books Ltd for Zbigniew Herbert, 'A
Knocker' in Selected Poems, trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Pater Dale
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
Scott (1968) Penguin Books. Copyright© Czeslaw Milosz and Peter

Dale Scott 1968.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any
have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
General Editors' Preface
The purpose of this series of New Casebooks is to reveal some of the

ways in which contemporary criticism has changed our understand-
ing of commonly studied texts and writers and, indeed, of the nature
of criticism itself. Central to the series is a concern with modern criti-
cal theory and its effect on current approaches to the study of litera-
ture. Each New Casebook editor has been asked to select a sequence
of essays which will introduce the reader to the new critical ap-
proaches to the text or texts being discussed in the volume and also
illuminate the rich interchange between critical theory and critical
practice that characterises so much current writing about literature.
In this focus on modern critical thinking and practice New
Casebooks aim not only to inform but also to stimulate, with
volumes seeking to reflect both the controversy and the excitement of
current criticism. Because much of this criticism is difficult and often
employs an unfamiliar critical language, editors have been asked to
give the reader as much help as they feel is appropriate, but without
simplifying the essays or the issues they raise. Again, editors have
been asked to supply a list of further reading which will enable
readers to follow up issues raised by the essays in the volume.
The project of New Casebooks, then, is to bring together in an il-
luminating way those critics who best illustrate the ways in which
contemporary criticism has established new methods of analysing
texts and who have reinvigorated the important debate about how
we 'read' literature. The hope is, of course, that New Casebooks
will not only open up this debate to a wider audience, but will also
encourage students to extend their own ideas, and think afresh
about their responses to the texts they are studying.
John Peck and Martin Coyle

University of Wales, Cardiff
X
Introduction
MICHAEL ALLEN
Four narratives intertwine to provide a context for the materials col-

lected here. The first tells of the amazingly rapid growth of a living
writer's reputation over the last thirty years and is enlivened with
Heaney's critical commentary on his own work and on poetry in
general as he makes his bid to influence the climate of taste in which
his poems will be read. The second involves the emergence within
that same time-span of a challenging range of critical methodologies
to compete with the Anglo-American 'New Criticism' which had
governed the young Heaney's notions of poetic technique and
schooled him as a critic in the early 1960s. In the third narrative,
Britain and Ireland engage with their postcolonial legacy as the in-
tercommunal conflicts endemic to the latter island break out,
flourish and subside across the disputed territory where Heaney and
other 'Northern' 1 poets have their roots. The fourth and core narra-
tive, constantly modifying and modified by the other three, displays
the development of Heaney's verse, from the rich sensuousness of
Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969) and the
early poems of Wintering Out (1972), through the myth-making
that book shares with North (1975), towards a sinuous but plainer
style in Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984), often becom-
ing parabolic in The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991).
(Visible in such poems as 'Fosterling' in the latter volume is an au-
thorial capacity to reconstruct his own early literary identity which
emerges fully in The Spirit Level, 1996.)
Later in this volume David Lloyd and Richard Kirkland (essays
11 and 15) give stimulating accounts of the way this body of work
1
2 INTRODUCTION
has been argued into a high place in the canon of Anglophone

poetry; Lloyd also notes the large-scale cooption of Heaney to
school and university syllabuses. Canon-making is a characteristic
feature of what I called above Anglo-American 'New Criticism'
(one way 2 of denoting the family resemblance or paradigmatic
quality common to the work of such critics as T.S. Eliot, Cleanth
Brooks and F.R. Leavis). Leavis, alongside Eliot, was probably the
most influential representative of this approach in the United
Kingdom during Heaney's apprenticeship. By 1966, when Death of
a Naturalist was published, the approach had lost much of its
urgent sense of poetry's spiritual mission (inherited from Matthew
Arnold), but is still unmistakably identifiable in the review of that
volume included as the first essay in this collection. There
Christopher Ricks positions the young Heaney in the canon using a
recognisable kind of inter-subjective persuasiveness. This poetry is
better ('Is it not?' 3 as Leavis would say) than Peter Redgrove's 4
because its language actively reconstitutes the physical world rather
than being enmeshed in that world's particularities. It does this by
way of rhythm, rhyme, stanzaic form and linguistic complexity
which 'enact' the meaning rather than directly stating it. Ricks's
New Critical manoeuvres (comparison and analysis: the critic's es-
sential tools according to Eliot5 ) are used to nudge Heaney into a
'tradition' stretching back at least to the English eighteenth century
but defined without the fierce exclusiveness of Leavis's canon-
making: the word 'stations' in the poem 'The Diviner', for instance,
is commended because it has 'a simple and honourable place in tra-
ditional praises of nature (the stars in their stations) ... '. 6
In the contrasting essay (2) which follows, Conor Cruise O'Brien,
an intellectual man of affairs rather than a literary academic, writes
with a broad sweep, little methodological finesse and no interest in
privileging the text as a discrete verbal structure. His critical mode,
like that of the American critic Edmund Wilson, has its antecedents
in the French school of Taine and Sainte-Beuve. For him Heaney's
North is straightforwardly a presentation of the Ulster 'situation' in
the 1970s from a Northern Catholic's point of view. In Part I of the
book Heaney actually interposes a complicated mythic machinery
between the topical material and the reader, while angling his lan-
guage (as in the last lines of 'Punishment') towards a New Critical
respondent on the lookout for the embodiments of conflict and
tension. But O'Brien simply registers with trepidation 'the chasm'
between Heaney's 'insider' view of 'the exact/ and tribal, intimate
INTRODUCTION 3
revenge' ('Punishment', II. 43-4) and his own hopes (as a cos-
mopolitan and liberal Irishman) for a satisfactory resolution of the
Northern situation? In taking the poems of North as a vindication
of his own pessimistic view of historical events with little attention
to their formal qualities or canonical worth, O'Brien's stance is ac-
tually quite similar (because of its Continental antecedents) to one
which was by the 1970s significantly influencing English and
American academic literary thinking:
criticism is not at all a table of results or a body of judgements: it is

essentially an activity, i.e. a series of intellectual acts profoundly
committed to the historical and subjective existence (they are the
same thing) of the man[ sic] who performs them. 8
What is interesting about the third essay in this collection, Edna

Longley's "'Inner Emigre" or "Artful Voyeur"', is that it at once
fulfils and denies this well-known formulation by Roland Barthes.
The author is shaping her own intellectual contribution to the
debate initiated by O'Brien, but she is also assembling a 'body of
judgements' about Heaney's poetry up to and including North in a
characteristically New Critical way.
To take the latter point first: Longley places Heaney in a 'tradi-
tion' (in which he is preceded by Robert Frost and Patrick
Kavanagh) which 'travels a rich boundary between conscious and
unconscious' and 'fuses physical and metaphysical exploration'.
The success of the poetry in this tradition (and here she is like
Leavis 9 ) is manifested in 'the movement of the poem' and its 'varied
physicality'. The best poems in Heaney's first three books she sees
as matching up to these criteria. But most of the poems of North
(Part I), unlike the 'epiphanic' 'Tollund Man' from Wintering Out,
seem to her to have a factitiously ritualistic quality (of which the
author shows himself aware in the last stanza of 'Strange Fruit');
while the more topical poems of North (Part II) tend to either ac-
commodate and collaborate with the cliches they aim to expose or
to become melodramatic and over-literary. Only the first and last
poems of the book fully display the exploratory and rhythmical
qualities through which Heaney's authentic note is manifested.
Longley's essay shares a New Critical agenda with the Ricks
review from which we began but it has an extra dimension. She
aims to persuade a responsive reader that the imaginative failings
she sees in North result from its gestures of Catholic and
4 INTRODUCTION
Nationalist commitment: 'has tribal preordination or ordination

any petrifying effect on poetic life?' For Longley, partisanship in
poetry falls too far short of its long-term solving and resolving
power over social circumstances. This is because she retains -
perhaps in Ireland it still has some relevance- Arnold's belief that
good poetry provides a spiritual resource for a crisis-ridden society
whose institutionalised religion is counter-productive. Her literary
agenda and her cultural agenda clearly combine when she finds 'ex-
ploratory' qualities in the tentative rhythmic movement of 'The
Other Side', a poem from Wintering Out which intimates the imagi-
native possibility of reconciliation between the two cultures and the
two communities of Northern Ireland (and implicitly between a
'British' and an Irish allegiance). 10 Her reading here of the earlier
Heaney points to the possibility of a less pessimistic political
conclusion than O'Brien's.
Longley and the next essayist in this collection, Seamus Deane
(essay 4), have both promulgated their cultural agendas beyond acad-
emic criticism, she through the Northern Irish Cultural Traditions
Group, he through the Field Day Theatre Company. 11 (Both groups
have, according to their adherents, contributed to the present [spring,
1996] prospect of peaceable negotiation between the two commun-
ities and the two governments.) Within the literary sphere the
agendas of the two critics are very different, and Deane had already
laid down a gauntlet for Longley to pick up 12 in urging on Heaney
(and other Northern poets) what he calls 'politicisation' of their
poetry as an antidote to New Critical attitudes (English in origin, and
in his view too ready to see the 'well-made poem' as an end in itself
and poetry as independent of the society which engenders it).
In the essay reprinted in this New Casebook Deane sees Heaney's
poetry from Wintering Out on as displaying such 'politicisation' .13
The implicit Nationalism of this is fleshed out early in Celtic
Revivals, the book of which the essay is an integral part, when he
revives (like Raymond Williams) an alternative definition of 'tradi-
tion' to the New Critical one: tradition for him is treachery against
one's own dispossessed inheritance and insurgent allegiance. 14
Longley saw Heaney's authentic (exploratory and reconciliatory)
voice as released within the 'tradition' of Frost and Kavanagh (both
postcolonial writers who adopt and revitalise the English lyric).
Deane sees Heaney rather as fighting to dislodge such alien
influences in the course of the self-assertive struggle against father-
figures postulated for 'strong' writers by Harold Bloom. 15
INTRODUCTION 5
Deane does concede some New Critical points to Longley: the

'Viking myths' of North 'do not correspond to Irish experience
without some fairly forceful straining', in 'Strange Fruit' Heaney
'begins to doubt his own reverence, his apparent sanctification of
the unspeakable'. 16 But he applauds in both North and Field Work
what he sees as the alliance between Heaney's poetic practice and
'the experience of [an] oppressed culture ... the Catholic Irish
one'Y In the latter book he particularly admires the way this point
of view releases a visionary intensity within which a familiar world
is set against the dimension of atrocity. Theodore Adorno 18 proba-
bly influenced his sense that the momentary resolution achieved by
a Heaney poem is like the psychological equilibrium between id and
ego: new disturbances caused by the unresolved antagonisms of
postcolonial Ireland upset this balance and keep the developmental
procession in motion. So if the poet leaves the North of Ireland to
commit himself to a writer's career, it is the 'boldness' of his writing
that Deane is able to set (within the dialectical framework of the
whole essay) against the 'timorousness of being there' as an insur-
gent, 'gun, not pen in hand'. 19 If the latter possibility has been left
behind, it is because the developing sequence of new art-works
must inevitably engage with, if not vindicate (in terms drawn from
Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred); 'the ineffable, the unspeak-
able thing for which "violence" is our helplessly inadequate
word'. 20
It must be apparent that if Longley is privileging as critic some
kind of transcendent power and force for poetry, Deane gives an
almost equally transcendent value to Irish resistance to English tra-
dition, influence and oppression. But there is obviously very little
common ground between these two interpretations of Heaney
(which are rooted in the confrontational potential of the Northern
Irish situation). Another Irish critic, Eamonn Hughes (essay 5), tries
to break the particular deadlock which centres on the significance
and achievement of North by bringing into play some of the ideas
of Saussure, Bakhtin (as mediated by Julia Kristeva) and Volosinov.
He is drawing on a congruent cluster (which we might call
Formalist/structuralist/poststructuralist) of the Continental influences
which have recently widened the conceptual vocabulary of Anglo-
American criticism: all of them are approaches which treat litera-
ture not only as made up of language (as do the critics we have
already discussed) but also as though it is itself a language. Hughes
adapts an influential distinction of Saussure's in seeing Part II of
6 INTRODUCTION
North as 'parole', the personal voice of the poet, selecting and con-
stituting itself out of the immense possibility of articulation pre-
sented by 'langue', the social order of language.
A logical consequence of the strict belief that each parole is a
working part of an impersonal system, langue, is the refusal to
accept that 'a free subject' (the author) can 'penetrate the substance
of things and give it meaning', can 'activate the rules of a language
from within and thus give rise to the designs which are properly its
own' (Foucault). 21 This is a model derived from Saussure's view (as
a linguist) of the way signifiers function in a linguistic community. 22
Hughes is no purist in the way he appropriates it, but he finds its
metaphorical transfer of agency from the poet on the one hand or
'society' on the other to literary language itself very useful. What is
more, Kristeva's version of Bakhtin can be seen as poised 'between
traditional "high" structuralism with its yearning for "scientific"
objectivity' and 'a remarkable early form of "poststructuralism" or
the desire to show how the pristine structuralist categories always
break down under the pressure of the other side of language'. 23
Hence Hughes suggests that the linguistic procedures of North open
up a 'carnivalesque' or 'dialogic' space where texts meet, contradict
and relativise each other. Heaney is to be seen in North as im-
mersed in the intertextual 'babble' of various idioms: of his own lo-
cality; of Wordsworth, or Yeats, or his own student contemporary
and friend, Seamus Deane; of Irish voices, English voices, even the
translated Spanish voice of Lorca. Within this 'dialogic' arena the
possibility of rejecting English voices (what Deane calls 'politicisa-
tion') is tested experimentally to the point of desolation represented
by the book's final poem, 'Exposure'. How is this desolation to be
interpreted? According to Hughes it demonstrably results from the
failure to comprehend and activate the variety of possible selves
available in earlier poems. Volosinov's thinking suggests that lan-
guage (including Heaney's poetic language) is a site of social strug-
gle and will opt to be as active as possible. So we can see rehearsed
in the later pages of North, says Hughes, the discovery that to
accept English language and culture 'may be to lose a measure of
independence'; but it provides opportunities to be active and to be a
representative voice. Hence, according to Hughes, Heaney's reas-
severation of English voices in his next book, Field Work.
Hughes, of course, had the advantage of retrospection in seeing
Heaney's developing 'parole' as almost involuntarily moving into
the space within the literary 'langue' which was waiting for it. His
INTRODUCTION 7
sense in 1990 of Heaney's capacity to become a representative voice

throws an interesting light back on two reviews of Field Work
(1979) which appear as the sixth and seventh essays in this book.
Christopher Ricks (in essay 6) had changed his critical idiom in the
thirteen years since he reviewed Death of a Naturalist. He is less
concerned to appeal intersubjectively to what Leavis, quoting Eliot,
called 'the common pursuit of true judgement'. 24 Indeed, he engages
in considerable critical 'play' which is very much his own in re-
sponse to a Heaney text like 'Oysters'; and he may also be respond-
ing to the increasingly influential precedent provided for
Anglo-American criticism by Roland Barthes:
the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the
reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game,
looking for a practice which re-produces it. 25
Nevertheless, Ricks's playful pitting of his own urbane sense of

English Augustan values against poetry with rather different quali-
ties does find common ground where Heaney can be seen as dis-
playing the self-undercutting 'irony' or 'ambiguity' dear to New
Critics. And when Ricks detects the inter-textual presence of
Wordsworth or exclaims 'pure Keats, this!' or illustrates Heaney's
'trust in other poets' by way of the poet's Shakespearian allusive-
ness26 he is continuing the English New Critical mode of canon-
making in a way which anticipates John Carey's euphoric account
of Seeing Things in his Sunday Times review of that bookP One
can see why someone like David Lloyd who shares something of
Seamus Deane's political perspective might slyly attribute literary
colonialism to Ricks's phrase 'the most trusted poet of our islands'
by italicising the 'our'. 28
Terry Eagleton (essay 7) is also suspicious of such canon-building
and quotes a notorious example from Clive James. 29 He finds it
difficult not to concede that Heaney is 'major', 'technically accom-
plished', 'probably one of the finest English language poets of the
century'. But he insists that Heaney lacks 'much to say' or 'the
impulse to totalise', that he makes no attempt to deal with 'global
imperialist crisis'. 30 (There may be first murmurings here of there-
ductive view of Heaney's poetry that David Lloyd will be seen ad-
vancing later in this collection.) Eagleton's account of Field Work
is, however, very positive and hinges on the same nexus of
Formalist and structuralist ideas which sparked Hughes's essay. The
8 INTRODUCTION
first of these schools of criticism, as Eagleton was shortly to explain

in his influential Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983 ), stood
'on its head' the New Critical notion of 'form as the expression of
content' and the second clinched this inversion with its emphasis
on 'the constructedness of human meaning' .31 Hence Eagleton's
pleasure that Heaney sees his own art as 'labour, craft and produc-
tion', thereby conceding to language 'its own specific mode of mate-
riality'. Eagleton sees Heaney's verse as having moved away from a
'densely textured' phase in which form was the expression of
content (the imagery corresponding to physical reality in the way
demonstrated by Ricks's review of Death of a Naturalist). The
danger of the next phase had been that its 'rich technical virtuosity'
would deprive Heaney of access to his unique repertoire of realistic
materials. What poems like 'Glanmore Sonnets' III and 'Triptych'
III now demonstrate by their subtly crafted 'modulations' between
'literary' and 'plainer notations' is how the best writing in Field
Work grants to language 'its own material workings without detri-
ment to its status as a realistic medium'. 32
Like Hughes, Eagleton is partly talking about the language of lit-
erature and partly about literature as if it were a language (with
that 'materiality' which Saussure was so fond of assigning to lan-
guage).33 But Eagleton is no more ready than Hughes was to dis-
pense with the concept of reference (to a boyhood on a farm in
County Derry, say) and see literature as an independent system on
the strict Structuralist model. The reduction of Heaney to 'Heaney',
to an 'author function' or 'labelling' line of print at top or bottom
or front of the text 34 is something that neither Hughes, nor
Eagleton (nor, in fact, any of the more radically 'theoretical' con-
tributors to this volume) find themselves tempted to do. One reason
for this must surely be Heaney's historical and textual proximity as
an active contributor to the debates about his verse. As reviewer,
occasional critic, public reader of his poetry, lecturer, Professor (at
Harvard and Oxford), celebrated Irishman, as well as in his prose
collections, Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and
The Redress of Poetry, he constantly supplies ancillary materials to
illuminate and justify his books of poems.
The essay by Neil Corcoran which comes eighth in this New
Casebook illustrates how powerful the poet's collaborative presence
can be, especially when it is reinforcing in the critic the kind of New
Critical attitudes and techniques to which Heaney's own mind is
attuned. This account of Station Island is the final chapter of
INTRODUCTION 9
Corcoran's Faber Student Guide to Heaney: the Student Guides

were, according to their editor, 35 to be a bastion against the way
'theory' was diverting attention from the 'text' (which so many
sixth-formers and university students were assumed to be studying
in a broadly New Critical way). The chapter was written shortly
after Station Island appeared and not only relies crucially on a par-
ticular critical essay by the poet but acknowledges his practical as-
sistance in clarifying a number of private references which give
meaning to the book's title poem. 36 The collaborative role for the
critic does not end there, however. Corcoran uses as his epigraph
Heaney's aspiration (in a letter to Fintan O'Toole) to dispense with
'a Keatsian woolly line, textured stuff': 'I would like to be able to
write a bare wire'Y The title, 'Writing a Bare Wire' in the context
of the epigraph implies that by the time of Station Island Heaney
has achieved this developmental aim. Furthermore, Heaney's own
formulation is transparently close to Yeats's 'There's more enter-
prise/ In walking naked' ('A Coat'); its use implies a sympathetic
view of Heaney's 'measuring of himsel£' 38 against Yeats in Station
Island and reinforces Corcoran's canonisation of Heaney alongside
Yeats and Eliot as 'the most significant poet now writing in
English'. 39 He is, of course, quick to point out how different
Heaney is from both Yeats and Eliot40 and shows New Critical 'ju-
diciousness' in approving the earlier and later lyrics of the book
while demurring about its central sequence (too narrative and dra-
matic, he says, to display Heaney's truest poetic gifts 41 ). But his
readiness to minimise his critical distance from the living poet and
to accept the collaborative role offered is clear when he hands over
to Heaney the last words of his essay (and his book): 'the tune is
not called for the poet, he calls the tune'. 42
Heaney's essay, 'The Government of the Tongue', and Thomas
Docherty's review of the book to which it gives its title (essays 9
and 10) show how Heaney's own critical presence sharpens the
debate about his poetry. 'The Government of the Tongue' begins
with a characteristic etymological device of the kind which Stan
Smith writes well on below (essay 14).43 Heaney breaks down his
title into a binary opposition: the tongue (poetry) has authority/ the
tongue (poetry) should subserve authority. This is, however, more
what Smith calls 'a tic of rhetorical routine' than a real destabilising
strategy of the kind we shall shortly see Docherty engaging in. The
symbolist resonance of Eliot's The Waste Land may illustrate the
first sort of tongue-government, the discursive tone of Four
1 0 INTRODUCTION
Quartets the second, but Heaney's deeper purpose is to show us

Dante, Zbigniew Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop combining the two
modes (as, we are meant to conclude, does his own poetry). The
synthetic conclusion that emerges from his thesis and antithesis is
not unlike Edna Longley's: 'poetry is more a threshold than a
path'. 44 Indeed, Heaney retains as critic a similar idea of the recon-
ciling power of imagination to hers. He makes of the figures of Eliot
writing in wartime London or Jesus writing in the dust emblems of
an authority for poetry outside and beyond the political arena: a
solving and resolving power, holding (he quotes Yeats) 'in a single
thought reality and justice' .45
Docherty's review of The Government of the Tongue (essay 10
here) shows a readiness for self-assertive critical 'play' like that in the
Ricks review of Field Work. For Docherty, though, this 'play' reflects
the poststructuralist belief that signifiers, rather than being tied into a
relationship with an appropriate signified within the sign as Saussure
imagined, are slippery and unstable: that their meaning proliferates
or is endlessly deferred. He allows his own meaning to do this
throughout an essay which deliberately evades paraphrase; but his
aim is to show thereby that the same tendencies are unconsciously
present in Heaney's language. His argument as a whole provides a
good example of the poststructuralist critical gambit of 'deconstruc-
tion'46 and one which illuminates the Heaney essay collected here.
Elsewhere in The Government of the Tongue 47 (the book) Heaney
chooses to give the word 'conscience' his own etymologically derived
meaning: 'knowing the same thing together'. Docherty is aware how
easily a meaning imposed upon a word can slide out of control
towards something which is the opposite of the user's intention. He
sees this happening when Heaney finds a conscientiousness in
Robert Lowell which impels that American poet into knowing dif-
ferently from others. Lowell became a conscientious objector ac-
cording to Heaney when 'doctrine, ancestry and politics fused
themselves in one commanding stroke'. To show that two can play
etymological games Docherty mischievously italicises 'fused' and
sees Heaney approving here of 'confusion' (fusing together) which is
therefore almost a synonym of 'conscience' in Heaney's imposed
sense. He shows Heaney approving of 'confusion' too (in its regular
sense) when he takes pleasure in Auden's 'opacity' and his 'obscurity
- even if it is wilful'. But in Heaney's frequent endorsement of
Frost's famous view that poetry is 'a stay against confusion' there is,
as Docherty says, a clear assumption that confusion is a bad thing. 48
INTRODUCTION 11
The contradictions in Heaney's language and discourse are taken

by Docherty to undermine his essentialist and self-justifying conclu-
sions. We are to see him driven back to his original dichotomy,
with Auden and Frost now coming to exemplify (as The Waste
Land and Four Quartets did) his two modes of 'tongue-
government' which Docherty would call respectively 'alterity' and
'identity'. But the very instability of Heaney's own language seems
to explode the claims of 'identity'. And since he has shown himself
as acknowledging and displaying 'alterity', difference, incomprehen-
sibility, 'the Other' as well as 'identity' (or 'knowing ... together'),
he can be faulted, says Docherty, for subordinating the first of these
options to the second, for 'imperialist thinking' and 'the desire not
to hear the Other'. 49 A key example of such 'imperialist thinking' is
the way Heaney sees the recent ideological predicament of Eastern
European poets not as it is in itself ('difference') but as a mirror-
image of the situation of a Northern Irish poet like him. 5° But it is
interesting that the possibility of development for the living poet
allows for Docherty a collaborative and communicative role in the
literary process. While he insists that the association of poetry on
Heaney's part with a reconciling and unifying understanding ('iden-
tity') is self-centring if not self centred, he can nevertheless prophesy
that 'Heaney, as Ulysses' may yet crucify himself upon the mast in
order to hear the sirens of 'alterity, the incomprehensible other-
ness'.51 In the later essay by Docherty (13) in this volume he exam-
ines a poem from North where he thinks Heaney is already doing
this.
The 'imperialist thinking' of which Docherty accuses Heaney is
seen by David Lloyd (essay 11) as governing the whole Roma.ntic
and imperial tradition in which Heaney's writing stands and as
already apparent in 'the initial formulations ... of Young Ireland's
ideologists in the 1840s'. 52 The concept of a distinctive Irish litera-
ture in English aiming to uncover 'a common ground beneath politi-
cal conflicts, whether between peasant and landlord, Catholic and
Protestant or class and class' has always been counter-productive ac-
cording to Lloyd. At every point a bourgeois hegemony has been
deflecting the attention of the dispossessed from the fact of their
own dispossession whether they are potential Irish insurgents or
gulled and anaesthetised student-readers of Heaney within the
Anglo-American education system. What Lloyd is arguing is that
Heaney's poems are really functioning to reinforce the dominant
hegemony of bourgeois consumer capitalism and to evade the
12 INTRODUCTION
insurgent implications of their postcolonial context. This is why they

foreclose the issues that they claim to be opening up, so that what
the poem is 'about' very quickly becomes a metaphor justifying the
way its materials are used. Lloyd's illustrative analyses of the poems
soon make it clear that what he is complaining about is very much
what, early in this collection, we found Christopher Ricks and Edna
Longley applauding. His version of cultural history and his way of
reading dictate an ideological and methodological opposition to the
premisses of what throughout this introduction I have been calling
New Criticism: premisses which clearly correlate, to a considerable
extent, with the avowed aesthetic of Heaney himself.
Heaney's writing may or may not be placed in an irredeemably
vulnerable position by what Docherty calls 'the political dialectic,
familiar to poststructuralist thought, of Identity and Difference', 53
as Lloyd interprets it. But there is no doubt that the 'Other' which
threatens his totalising concept of 'the Sovereign diction' 54 most di-
rectly is difference seen in gender terms. 'Can poetry's claim to uni-
versality of utterance and to utopian insight,' asks Patricia Coughlan
in essay 12, 'be upheld in the face of a reader's awareness of its gen-
dered and therefore (perhaps unconsciously) partial perspective?' 55
The linguistic analogy we have become familiar with shapes her
answer to this question. In terms of 'parole', there is a definite 'vo-
cabulary of roles allotted' to female figures in Heaney's verse; and he
gives his own characteristic 'inflections' to the conventions governing
such roles, thus conjugating a particular 'Heaney' version of a para-
digm ('langue') endemic to Western literature and culture. According
to Coughlan, Heaney either 'constructs an unequivocally dominant
masculine figure, who explores, describes, brings to pleasure and
compassionates a passive feminine one', or he proposes a woman
who 'dooms, destroys, puzzles and encompasses the man, but also
assists him to his self-discovery'. This vocabulary of female roles is
unsatisfactorily limited in Coughlan's view in that the woman is in-
variably seen as 'Other' and not as an autonomous and equal 'subject
or self'; whether Heaney is engaged in autobiographical or mythic
construction (the bread-baking aunt of 'Mossbawn: Sunlight' or the
Bog Queen of the eponymous poem), his practice, according to
Coughlan, 'precludes the possibility of understanding history as the
product of human actions', insists on seeing it 'as a fated, cyclical
natural process'. And so deep is Heaney's involvement in these inade-
quate gender-constructions that his deterministic outlook colours his
treatment of political and rural situations and processes in general. 56
INTRODUCTION 13
Coughlan's indictment here overlaps with Lloyd's but her values

are liberal and humanitarian in their concern for individual choice,
whereas he seems to look outside the liberal consensus for solu-
tions. She is also more inwardly responsive to the textures and
rhythms of Heaney's verse, showing in text and footnotes a certain
amount of fellow-feeling for the New Critical apen;us of Edna
Longley. Her quiet suggestion that Heaney is among those 'not
always exactly choosing to take up the challenge to the notion of
the unitary self offered by the "high" Modernists' 57 can be con-
trasted with Lloyd's unqualified attribution of the adjective 'minor'
to the poet. 58 But Coughlan should still be coupled with Lloyd in
the active ideological role she expects poetry and criticism to play,
endeavouring as critic herself not just to describe reality but to
change it: 'the social and cultural construction of gender is a contin-
uously occurring process', she says, 'in which it is certainly not yet
time to stop intervening'. 59
Aesthetic value, subordinate to cultural value for Coughlan and
Lloyd, returns to the fore for the next two contributors to this New
Casebook; though their approach to Heaney is similarly distrustful
of structures which override their historical context and propose a
transcendent centre for themselves. Having detected these tendencies
in Heaney's theory (in essay 10 here) Thomas Docherty proceeds in
essay 13 to argue that some of his poetry breaks free of them
through its 'postmodern' qualities. He meets the question of whether
'postmodernism' is a way of describing certain innovative art-forms
or a historical condition that manifests itself in and through those
art-forms by insisting that a postmodern poem (Heaney's 'The
Grauballe Man') is an event. The ontological uncertainty, the desta-
bilisation of all discursive origins and centres, influentially reflected
upon by Jacques Derrida 60 has contributed in his view to a condition
in which life is dominated by time rather than space; in which his-
torical certainty has disappeared so that historical fact is abstracted
into historical image, temporal event into electronic image, individ-
ual experience into pluralistic montage. 'The Grauballe Man', seen
as an event, is both an engagement with and an embodiment of such
a condition. The free and decentred 'play' of critical language which
provides the chicken to the egg of Derrida's ontological view allows
Docherty to follow Lyotard in interpreting the 'post' of postmodern
as 'a process in "ana-", a process of analysis, of anamnesis, of
analogy, of anamorphosis'. 61 By rooting his critical exposition of the
poem in the active plurality and ambiguity of a Greek prefix ('up, in
14 INTRODUCTION
place or time, back, again, anew' - OED) Docherty gives himself

great interpretive latitude. And to demonstrate that the poem func-
tions as postmodern event rather than as a piece of misplaced or
limited Modernism makes it possible to 'raise the stakes' 62 of the
poem (though it is far from clear at first whether it is Heaney or
Docherty who has given the poem the new status in question).
However, as Docherty pursues these issues intertextually into the
wider processes of North, tracing the influence on Heaney of Hamlet
and Lowell's For the Union Dead, he can be seen as defending the
poet against detractions voiced earlier in this collection by Eagleton
and Lloyd; it is interesting, too, that his explication63 of the way
gender issues are explored in 'Grauballe Man' reflects back on to
some of Coughlan's complaints.
It is possibly a measure of Heaney's presence in the critical debate
about his poetry that a scholar as far from New Critical practice as
Docherty should put a detailed analysis of a single poem at the
centre of his critique. Stan Smith (essay 14) is equally concerned to
justify the later Heaney; but he deploys his analyses of individual
poems to illustrate what he sees as a steady transformative power in
Heaney's language. He formulates more precisely an awareness
earlier voiced by Eagleton that Heaney's mature practice under-
mines the traditional critical assumption that poetic language must
be 'inflected either towards its signifieds or towards its signifiers'. 64
Smith argues that Heaney's late achievement of a 'classical austerity
and bareness of diction' does not preclude a wide range of linguisti-
cally mimetic effects; he sees these as engineered by Heaney's
syntax, which he explores along general lines established by Donald
Davie's influential Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952).
Heaney himself had seen the relationship of 'Place and
Displacement' 65 as crucial to Northern Irish poetry: Smith follows
the tendency in contemporary criticism which this introduction has
been tracing by relocating this relationship between place and dis-
placement in the achieved textuality of Heaney's written language.
In particular he locates it in his prepositional manoeuvres.
His argument goes through several stages. He suggests that the
parabolic mode of much of the later poetry (exemplified in 'Parable
Island') promulgates the awareness that 'there are no authenticating
origins: only a plethora of story-tellings which push the origin
further back into an original emptiness scrawled over with too much
meaning'. 66 (Not only Derrida's disbelief in 'origins' is invoked but
also his idea of 'supplementarity' - his notion that articulation is
always both replacing and adding to what is there.) Reading Heaney
INTRODUCTION 15
is thus engaging with something which is not historical or geograph-

ical but textual: 'It is in this area of dense secondary signification,
where script dissembles an original emptiness, that Ireland
"begins" .' 67 What, then, of Heaney's explanation (in Place and
Displacement) that the Northern Irish experience involved 'being in
two places at once, needing to accommodate two opposed condi-
tions of truthfulness simultaneously'? 68 Smith presents this as pri-
marily a linguistic dilemma, its exploration one to be furthered
through prepositional activity of the kind implied by the section-
headings of his essay: 'A Place to Come From'; 'Sounding Out
Through'; 'Thinking In and Back Into'; 'Drawing a Line Through';
'Standing In and Standing For'; 'The Distance Between'.
At this point the arguments of Derrida's On Grammatology 69
(which has similar section-headings) become important. Derrida
had set out to undermine Saussure's belief in the primacy of oral
over written language. Under the heading 'The outside iX the inside'
he pressed his refutation of Saussure's position (using evidence like
the common routine whereby one falls back on written equivalents
when there is disagreement about what is being said). But this does
not eliminate the older view that the oral is prior to the written, it
merely supplants (or supplements) it, leaving the other articulable.
The X in Derrida's section-heading represents 'erasure' which
nevertheless does not remove the 'trace' of the opposite position:
the new-found supremacy of 'writing' over 'living speech', of 'text'
over 'experience', is only partial. From here Smith, perhaps more ef-
fectively than Eagleton earlier, can move to restore Heaney's
mimetic potency. Heaney's achieved literary repertoire both encap-
sulates and resembles a linguistic repertoire. Both carry, in the way
Derrida emblematises, the 'trace' of their experiential source: a
moment like that when the young Heaney and his mother are lin-
guistically 'allied and at bay' ('Clearances' 4) 'speaks from the
central reticences of Heaney's verse ... the voices' echo or trace
erased and yet co-opted in the lines of writing'. 70
There is considerable difference between Smith's mode of critical
advocacy and Neil Corcoran's but both display a commitment to
the living poet. Richard Kirkland, in the final essay (15) of this
Casebook, can be allied, perhaps, with the British school of
Cultural Materialists 71 in wishing to rid not only poetry but all
'canonised' texts of any hint of privileged status vis-a-vis other
texts. His concern is with ascertainable knowledge about cultural
production 72 and he sees the 'writing' of this knowledge as exclud-
ing any special commitment (of the kind visible in most of the
16 INTRODUCTION
essays in this collection) to the wntmg of Heaney. He quotes

Barthes: 'to go from reading to criticism is to change desires; it is no
longer to desire the work itself but to desire one's own language'. 73
This balance of the utilitarian and the aesthetic excludes even the
kind of political moralism displayed by David Lloyd (though Lloyd
has clearly had considerable influence on Kirkland). Like so many
earlier contributors Kirkland sees Heaney's self-presentation as
dramatising the tension 'between a full individuation and the desire
for assimilation' .74 But this motif is seen as a product at once of the
British/Irish politico-cultural situation as it emerges in Northern
Ireland and of the literary critical establishment which monitors
Anglophone poetic reputations. 'From the Frontier of Writing', he
suggests, can be read as recognising this and so sidestepping the
New Critical need for 'a reconciliation of issues - a perfection of
form' (what Kirkland calls 'the Modernist reading'f 5 which usually
dominates Heaney's practice and his reception alike.
Kirkland's own larger emphasis (in the book from which this
essay is takenf6 is on the need for new initiatives to help in the re-
construction of Northern Irish society (which he sees as arrested in
a pause or interval between two eras). With the possibility in mind
that the poetic revival within the province may constitute such an
initiative he constructs a paradigm 77 delineating the characteristic
features of the 'Ulster Poet'. But he finds Heaney's literary project
to be circumscribed and curtailed within this paradigm. There is a
debilitating contradiction, in Kirkland's view, between the rooted
and community-oriented elements in the paradigm which make the
poet a representative of his society and the New Critical tenets
which dictate the nature of the poetry he must write to receive insti-
tutional validation for his art. (An interesting contrast can be drawn
between Kirkland's treatment of this subject and Eamonn Hughes's
earlier). Kirkland analyses what he takes to be a representative 'late'
work, 'Making Strange' (claiming that it asks stern 'questions of
Heaney's relationship with his poetic'), to show that the crucial
issues are 'evaded through its insistence on being judged [by New
Critical criteria] as a well-made poem'. His conclusion seems to be
that the mature Heaney raises questions about the contradictory
forces involved in the production of Ulster poetry which if pursued
might foster cultural regeneration; but is unable to escape the re-
ductive parameters of the aesthetic which has brought him success.
It seems appropriate to give Kirkland the last word here, not only
because his is the most recent essay in the Casebook, but also
INTRODUCTION 17
because his brisk no-nonsense stance lends its own sense of an

ending to what is obviously an on-going debate.
NOTES
1. See 'Further Reading', p. 268 below (Contexts: List A).
2. Other ways of labelling this approach would be: 'Practical Criticism'
which is what Heaney himself calls it (Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968-1978 [London, 1980], pp. 13-14); 'Anglo-American Formalism'
(which then has to be distinguished from Russian Formalism: I have
simply called the latter Formalism); 'the Modernist Reading' (adopted
by Richard Kirkland, p. 261 below from Anthony Easthope and Jane
Tomkins). All such labels have their problems, including my own,
which parrots the title of a book by John Crowe Ransom (Norfolk,
CT, 1941) and is often used of a coherent group of American critics
including Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt.
3. '"This- doesn't it?- bears such a relation to that; this kind of thing-
don't you find it so? - wears better than that", etc.' F.R. Lea vis,
'Criticism and Philosophy', The Common Pursuit (London, 1965),
p. 215.
4. Whose fourth book, The Force (London, 1966), appeared in the same
year as Heaney's first.
5. T.S. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism', Selected Essays (London,
1958), pp. 32-3.
6. Seep. 22 below.
7. See p. 26 below. ('Punishment' is a locus classicus of Heaney criticism.
[See below, pp. 25-6, 44-6, 70, 174-6, 195].)
8. Roland Barthes, 'What is Criticism?' Critical Essays (1964, English
trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL, 1972), p. 257.
9. P. 35 below. Compare 'Imagery and Movement', A Selection from
Scrutiny (Cambridge, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 231-47.
10. See p. 35 below.
11. For the origins of the first, see Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland
(ed. Maurna Crozier; Belfast, 1989); for those of the second, see
Ireland's Field Day (afterword by Denis Donoghue; London, 1985).
14. See Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals (London, 1985), pp. 18-27 and
Raymond Williams, Keywords (London, 1976), pp. 268-9.
18 INTRODUCTION
15. In Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973).

17. Seep. 66 below.
18. See Negative Dialectics (1966; English trans. E.B. Ashton, London,
1973); Aesthetic Theory (1970; English trans. C. Lenhardt, London,
1984). Deane acknowledges the influence of the first of these books,
Celtic Revivals, p. 191.
19. Seep. 73 below.
20. See p. 76 below and Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972,
English trans. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore, MD, 1977).
21. Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' in Josue V. Harari (ed.),
Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca,
NY, 1979), p. 158.
22. See Course in General Linguistics (1913, English trans. Roy Harris,
London, 1983 ), p. 68: 'the individual has no power to alter a sign in
any respect once it has become established in a linguistic community.'
23. Tori! Moi, '"Introduction" to "Word, Dialogue and Novel"', The
Kristeva Reader (ed. Moi, Oxford, 1986), p. 34.
24. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London, 1965), p.v. (quoting
T.S. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism', Selected Essays, p. 25).
25. Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', Image-Music-Text (English
trans. Stephen Heath, London 1977), p. 162. The New Critical version
of 'play' which Ricks displays here can be seen also in critics like
Frank Kermode and Richard Poirier (who theorises it in The
Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages
of Contemporary Life [London, 1971]).
26. See pp. 98, 100, 101 below.
27. Seep. 254 below.
28. Seep. 97 below.
31. Literary Theory, pp. 3, 107.
33. See, for instance, Course in General Linguistics, Part Two, ch. IV, 3:
'Linguistic value: material aspect' (pp. 116-18).
34. See Foucault, 'What is an Author?' in Josue V. Harari (ed.), Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, pp. 141-60.
INTRODUCTION 19
35. John Lucas, whose prefatory note to volumes in the series begins: 'In
an age when critical theory promises or threatens to cross over into lit-
erature and become its own object of study, there is a powerful case
for re-asserting the primacy of the literary text.'
36. See the quotation on p. 112 below from 'Envies and Identifications:
Dante and the Modern Poet' (Irish University Review, 15: 1 [Spring
1985], 5-19), and the thanks expressed to Heaney in Corcoran's
'Preface' (Seamus Heaney [London, 1986], p. 9).
37. P. 107 below.
39. Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p. 9.
43. Pp. 223-4 below.
44. P. 144 below. See Longley's words on p. 32 below: 'his poetry suffers
when he forsakes the hovering suggestiveness of thresholds'. Longley,
however, does seem to imply that some poetry (Yeats?) goes beyond
thresholds.
46. 'to deconstruct a text is to show how it undermines the philosophy it
asserts or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying
in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground
of argument, the key concept or premise.' Jonathan Culler, On
Deconstruction (London, 1983), p. 86.
47. (London, 1988). Docherty gives references to this edition throughout.
48. It is in the nature of Docherty's strategy that I can only approximate to
his meaning in this account of pp. 14 7-9 below. For the full statement
of Frost's view, see 'The Figure a Poem Makes', Complete Poems of
Robert Frost (New York, 1967), p. vi.
50. See pp. 149-51 below.
54. The Government of the Tongue (London, 1988), p. 137.
20 INTRODUCTION

60. Most famously in 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences', Writing and Difference, ed. and trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago, 1978), pp. 278-93.
64. See pp. 240-1 below. The assumption seems to have been first voiced
in this form by Barthes. See Writing Degree Zero (London, 1967),
pp. 47-58.
65. See Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland
(Grasmere, 1984).
69. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD, 1977).
71. Catherine Belsey, 'Towards cultural history- in theory and practice';
Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, 'Culture and textuality: debat-
ing cultural materialism', Textual Practice, 3 (1989), 159-72; 4
(1990), 91-100.
76. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of
Danger (London, 1996).
1
Growing Up: Review of

Death of a Naturalist
CHRISTOPHER RICKS
Literary gentlemen who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney's

poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give up
the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry. The power and pre-
cision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death
of a Naturalist is outstanding. You continually catch yourself
wanting to apply to the poems themselves their own best formula-
tions. He remembers his father digging:
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
And 'their cool hardness in our hands' is just what we love in the
words themselves- an unsentimental clarity which impinges with a
sense of the physical and yet never becomes obsessed (in Peter
Redgrove's way) with physical impingement. 'Digging' is even able
to risk mentioning rhythm ('Stooping in rhythm through potato
drills'), and then to manifest the very firmness of rhythm which it
speaks of:
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
The extra syllable in 'firmly' braces itself - it sees the line through
by skill and will. And the way that the skill of digging combines
21
22 CHRISTOPHER RICKS
strength with delicacy is caught in the felicitous play of 'coarse'

against the unforeseen but altogether apposite 'nestled'.
Again, 'Follower' is able to evoke the taut accuracy of the
ploughman by itself evincing just such an accuracy: the poem tells
how the memory of his expert father now stumbles behind him just
as he himself once stumbled as a boy behind the plough. The wheel
has come full circle, and the poet needs to manifest an expertness
which is a counterpart of that skilled authority which he so
poignantly remembers from childhood. Needs to, not merely in
order to write the poem, but because self-respect and mutual
respect insist that working with words is no less dignified, no more
prissy, than working with earth.
'The Diviner' presents the intuitive skill of the water-diviner in a
way which manages - without narcissism or sidelong glances - to
imply that just such a skill is needed here and now by the poet too.
One striking moment in the poem takes the kind of risk which the
diviner has to, and then pulls it off: the twitch shows
Spring water suddenly broadcasting

Through a green aerial its secret stations.
Too clever, too outre? No, because 'stations' has a simple and hon-
ourable place in traditional praises of nature (the stars in their sta-
tions), and because 'broadcasting' did originally mean scattering
seed: the modern sense is the metaphorical one, borrowed from
country life, and so when Mr Heaney rotates the metaphor, he
repays the debt or the compliment to country life. The wheel again
comes full circle.
'Churning Day' is not only a finely evocative and unaffected de-
scription of how butter is churned from milk, but the poem itself
follows the arc of those processes. It gradually becomes 'heavy and
rich, coagulated sunlight', and then finally, itself a memory, remem-
bers how the household remembered the recent churning:
And in the house we moved with gravid ease,

our brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns,
the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk,
the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.
What is surprising is the dignity with which Mr Heaney invests

such simplicities, such wet lumps. His subject is those things which
REVIEW OF DEATH OFA NATURALIST 23
are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his

own work.
The central subject is growing up. Wordsworth grew up 'fos-
tered alike by beauty and by fear', and Mr Heaney writes with
vivid strength about both. The beauty he finds in unexpected
places - the farm machines glinting in the dark barn, the soft
mulch at the bottom of the well. The fear he never exaggerates
into that sensationalism, that sedentary violence, which currently
passes for manly sensibility. Some of the poems present an adult-
hood achieved once and for all - say, a moment that conquered
the fear of rats. Others show us an adulthood won in retrospect,
not then. Frogspawn was quaint, but the multitude of frogs is
suddenly terrifying. 'Death of a Naturalist'? Long live the natu-
ralist, since Mr Heaney's powers enable him to transcend the
limits of anecdote without kicking the anecdote away from
beneath him.
The piercing nostalgia of 'Blackberry-Picking' does not cease to
be literally itself in becoming furthermore a type of all that transi-
toriness for which we have all wanted to weep. The hoarded black-
berries rot:
Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
'It wasn't fair' calls across the years in the accents of childhood -
only to be answered by the concluding and conclusive rhyme of
'rot' and 'not', so uncompromising after the half-rhymes of the pre-
vious lines.
The deploying of rhymes and half-rhymes, the subtle taking up of
hints, the sardonic pitying puns - there can be no doubt about Mr
Heaney's technical fertility, and it gains its reward in a directness, a
freedom from all obscurity, which is yet resonant and uncon-
descending. The two poems on Ireland's great hunger are masterly.
Only in some of the love-poems is there a note of mimicry (Robert
Graves?).
From The New Statesman, 27 May 1966, p. 778.

NOTES
[This is the first of two essays in this collection by Christopher Ricks. It is
included because it offers a characteristic analysis in the style of English
New Criticism, albeit in the shape of a review, emphasising the form of the
poetry and its relationship to other canonical poems. The reader is ex-
pected to be sufficiently familiar with the work of two English poets, Peter
Redgrove (b. 1932) and Robert Graves (b. 1895), to be able to compare
Heaney with the first and see the second as a possible influence on his love
poetry. Ed.]
2
A Slow North-east Wind:

Review of North
CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
The pigskin's scourged until his knuckles bleed.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.
('Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966')
I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of listening to the

thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony and dissolution,
the tragedy of a people in a place: the Catholics of Northern
Ireland. Yes, the Catholics: there is no equivalent Protestant voice.
Poetry is as unfair as history, though in a different way. Seamus
Heaney takes his distances- archaeology, Berkeley, love-hate of the
English language, Spain, County Wicklow (not the least distant)-
but his Derry is always with him, the ash, somehow, now standing
out even more on the forehead.
A prehistoric body, dug out of a bog 'bruised like a forceps
baby', leads to and merges with the image of a girl chained to a
railing, shaved and tarred, with the poet as silent witness:
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence ...
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
25
26 CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
who would connive

in civilised outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
('Punishment')
'Betraying' ... 'exact' ... 'revenge'. The poet here appears as part of
his people's assumption that, since the girl has been punished by
the IRA, she must indeed be guilty: a double assumption -that she
did, in fact, inform on the IRA and that informing on the IRA is a
crime. The IRA - nowhere directly referred to - are Furies with an
'understood' role and place in the tribe. It is the word 'exact' that
hurts most: Seamus Heaney has so greatly earned the right to use
this word that to see him use it as he does here opens up a sort of
chasm. But then, of course, that is what he is about. The word
'exact' fits the situation as it is felt to be: and it is because it fits and
because other situations, among the rival population, turn on simi-
larly oiled pivots, that hope succumbs. I have read many pessimistic
analyses of 'Northern Ireland', but none that has the bleak conclu-
siveness of these poems.
In a poem with the finely ironic title, 'Act of Union', Heaney has
'the man' addressing a woman pregnant by him, with the metaphor
of England addressing Ireland:
Conquest is a lie. I grow older

Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
REVIEW OF NORTH 27
The terms of the metaphor are surprising. After all, it is not just the
'obstinate fifth column' engendered by England - the Ulster
Protestants - who wield parasitical and ignorant little fists; and
most Ulster Protestants would be genuinely bewildered at the
thought that it was they, rather than their enemies, who were
beating at borders, or threatening England.
It is true that the act of impregnation can be thought of as pro-
ducing the total situation in Northern Ireland, a fifth column rela-
tive to both England and Ireland: the poem is rich enough.
(Elsewhere, Seamus Heaney writes of the Catholics as 'in a wooden
horse', 'besieged within the siege'.) In a sense, the poet here is delib-
erately envisaging the matter mainly as 'the man' feels the woman
(Ireland, the Catholics of Ireland, within the metaphor) feels it to
be; and in relation to these feelings he is never likely to be wrong. In
any case, there is a kind of balance at which Seamus Heaney is not
aiming. He mocks at one of the protective Ulster cliches in
'Whatever You Say Say Nothing': "'One side's as bad as the other"
never worse'. His upbringing and experience have given him some
cogent reasons to feel that one side is worse than the other, and his
poems have to reflect this.
Many people in Northern Ireland are in the habit of arguing that
they 'have nothing against Catholics as such' (or 'Protestants as
such', as the case may be). The trouble is that neither lot, in prac-
tice, can remain just 'such', they have to be the much more and
much less that it means to be Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants:
such-plus and seen as such-plus, inherently hostile and frightening.
In these poems of Seamus Heaney's, Protestants are seen as such-
plus: a matter of muzzles, masks and eyes. About his own such-
pluses he is neither sentimental nor apologetic. This, on their mood
in (I think) the winter of 1971-2:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome

'sa happy man this night'. His flock suspect
In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make
As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow
28 CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
When amplified and mixed in with the bangs

That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
('Whatever You Say Say Nothing')
Seamus Heaney is being compared with Yeats, and this is un-

avoidable, since his unmistakable emergence as the most im-
portant Irish poet since Yeats. Yet to call them both 'Irish poets'
would be more misleading than illuminating, unless the Protean
nature of 'Irishness' is remembered. It would be wrong to say that
'Southern Protestant' and 'Northern Catholic' have nothing in
common, but to state what they do have in common, which they
do not have in common with the British, would be an enterprise
reqmnng delicate discriminations within the concept of
'Irishness'. One such common characteristic is an uneasy but
fruitful relation to the English language in surprising ways, yet
without individualist eccentricity.
Seamus Heaney's writing is modest, often conversational, ap-
parently easy, low-pitched, companionably ironic, ominous, alert,
accurate and surprising. An Irish reader is not automatically re-
minded of Yeats by this cluster of characteristics, yet an English
reader may perhaps see resemblances that are there but over-
looked by the Irish - resemblances coming, perhaps, from certain
common rhythms and hesitations of Irish speech and non-speech.
One may, of course, be reminded, by the subject-matter, of
Yeats's 1916 poems and of 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' and
'Meditations in Time of Civil War'. Again, I am more struck with
the differences than the resemblances. Yeats was free to try, and
did splendidly try, or try on, different relations to the tragedy:
Heaney's relation to a deeper tragedy is fixed and pre-ordained;
the poet is on intimate terms with doom, and speaks its language
wryly and succinctly:
I am neither internee nor informer;

An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful: a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre ...
As I read and re-read North, I was reminded, not so much of any

other Irish poet, as of one of Rudyard Kipling's most chilling fairy-
stories, 'Cold Iron'. It is a story in which bright and tender hopes
are snuffed out by ineluctable destiny, the hand of Thor. And the
REVIEW OF NORTH 29
way in which Thor makes his presence felt is always 'a slow north-
east wind'.
From The Listener, 25 September 1975, pp. 204-5.
NOTES
[Conor Cruise O'Brien, a prolific writer on political topics, suggests in
another essay that what he has to say about contemporary Ireland should
be 'considered less as a theoretical analysis than as a report from ... an in-
formant: a person otherwise ignorant, but familiar with a particular local
situation' ('An Unhealthy Intersection', The Irish Times, 22 August 1975,
p. 10). Interestingly, Heaney in his view is this and more: poetry, he says
elsewhere, may 'attempt to reveal, through metaphorical insight, what is
actually happening and even, in a broad sense, what is about to happen'
('Passion and Cunning', In Excited Reverie [ed. A. Norman Jeffares and
K.G.W. Cross, London, 1965], p. 278). In this sense, he reads Heaney's
poetry directly into the troubles of Ireland. Quotations not identified by
O'Brien in this review are from 'Grauballe Man' ('bruised like a forceps
baby'), 'Whatever You Say Say Nothing' ('in a wooden horse', 'besieged
within the siege') and 'Exposure' ('I am neither internee nor informer .. .').
Ed.]
3
'Inner Emigre' or 'Artful

Voyeur'? Seamus Heaney's
North
EDNA LONGLEY
Seamus Heaney himself sees North (1975) as a culmination: 'I'm

certain that up to North, that that was one book; in a way it grows
together and goes together.' 1 While broadly agreeing that the col-
lection indeed crowns Heaney's previous poetry - in terms of merit
as well as development - British and Irish commentators have di-
verged in their emphases. Anthony Thwaite, for instance, praises
both style and content:
These new poems have all the sensuousness of Mr Heaney's earlier

work, but refined and cut back to the bone. They are solid, beauti-
fully wrought, expansively resonant. They recognise tragedy and
violence without despairingly allowing them to flog human utterance
into fragments. 2
But he does not probe the content more particularly or more politi-
cally, falling back on the blurb ('Seamus Heaney has found a myth
which allows him to articulate a vision of Ireland' etc.). Five years
later Blake Morrison was to note: 'with the exception of Conor
Cruise O'Brien in the Listener, hardly anyone seemed interested in
what it was that Heaney had to "say" about Northern Ireland'. 3
There is nothing new in divergent perceptions on either side of the
Irish Sea. (Or, conversely, in Irish writers simultaneously trans-
mitting different messages to different audiences.) Still, O'Brien's
30
'INNER EMIGRE' OR 'ARTFUL VOYEUR'? NORTH 31
informed response established a native line of comment on North,

including contributions by its author, that raises the most funda-
mental questions about the relationship between literature and poli-
tics. He begins: 'I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of
listening to the thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony
and dissolution, the tragedy of a people in a place: the Catholics of
Northern Ireland.' 4 Being so locally tuned in, O'Brien can dismiss
simplistic comparisons between Heaney and Yeats: 'Yeats was free
to try, and did splendidly try, or try on, different relations to the
tragedy: Heaney's relation to a deeper tragedy is fixed and
pre-ordained. ' 5
Is Heaney then, like 'The Tollund Man', 'Bridegroom to the
goddess'? His reaction to the Man's photograph deserves the much-
abused term 'epiphany', with its full Joycean connotations: a revela-
tion of personal and artistic destiny expressed in religious language.
Glossing the poem, he figures as pilgrim-acolyte: 'My sense of occa-
sion and almost awe as I vowed to go to pray to the Tollund Man
and assist at his enshrined head'; 6 or as initiate into an order:
when I wrote that poem I had a sense of crossing a line really, that
my whole being was involved in the sense of - the root sense - of re-
ligion, being bonded to something, being bound to do something. I
felt it a vow. 7
The three parts of the poem itself might be tabulated as evocation

('his peat-brown head,/ The mild pods of his eye-lids'), invocation
('I could ... pray/ Him to make germinate/ The scattered, am-
bushed/ Flesh of labourers'), and vocation ('Something of his sad
freedom ... Should come to me'). If nothing else, 'The Tollund
Man' certainly germinated North. In so far as Heaney's own role in
the poems parallels that of the bridegroom-victims, does he really
attain 'sad freedom', or in fact sacrifice some imaginative liberty to
that 'dark-bowered queen', Cathleen Nf Houlihan? Has tribal pre-
ordination, or ordination, any petrifying effect on poetic life?
Part of the answer must lie in the distinctive strengths of
Heaney's earlier poetry: in whether certain approaches to 'historical
agony' go against the grain of these strengths. From the outset his
poems have travelled a rich boundary between conscious and un-
conscious, or instinctual, experience; between the farm and 'The
great slime kings' of wild Nature. His imaginative adventures take
place upon the brink that 'Personal Helicon' leans over:
32 EDNA LONGLEY
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
Symbolically summarising Death of a Naturalist, the wells with

their varying depths and contents represent different entries into
different parts of the hidden self. The poem evokes both Robert
Frost's 'For Once, Then, Something', and Heaney's comment on
another Frost poem, 'The Most of It':
a poem housing power of some kind. It's not discourse, analysis,

judgment, display, it moves by instinct, moves itself, moves the
reader; a sense of connection and perhaps not much deliberation. 8
'Personal Helicon' partly exemplifies, partly describes such strategic

semi-consciousness. Key-verbs - savour, hover, pry, finger - fuse
physical and metaphysical exploration. John Wilson Foster criticises
the continuation of these methods in Door into the Dark: 'the dark
remains unchallenged by the end of the book. Heaney has a marked
reluctance to strike inwards, to cross the threshold, to explore the
emotional and psychological sources of his fear' .9 But many of the
best poems in the language depend on signs, hints, mysteries. Indeed
'The Most of It' refuses to go further than 'and that was all'. Heaney
'rhymes ... to set the darkness echoing', rather than switch on lights.
It will be part of my further argument that his poetry suffers when
he forsakes the hovering suggestiveness of thresholds, the actual
process of discovery, a slowly opening door, and comes to or from
political conclusions. In Door into the Dark 'The Plantation', like
Thomas's 'Lights Out', implies the poet's mystery-tour:
You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,
To be pilot and stray- witch,
Hansel and Gretel in one.
When Heaney evolved this productive strategy his Helicon was

still largely personal. Interviewed (1977) by Seamus Deane about
the relationship of the Ulster poets 'to the Northern crisis', he first
volunteers the wise minimum: 'The root of the troubles may have
something in common with the root of the poetry'; then adduces
some revealing autobiography:
the very first poems I wrote, 'Docker' and one about Carrickfergus
Castle for instance, reveal this common root. The latter had William
of Orange, English tourists and myself in it. A very inept sort of

poem but my first attempts to speak, to make verse, faced the
Northern sectarian problem. Then this went underground and I
became very influenced by Hughes and one part of my temperament
took over: the private county Derry childhood part of myself rather
than the slightly aggravated young Catholic male part. 10
The 'slightly aggravated young Catholic male' did, however, occa-

sionally surface before Wintering Out and his complete emergence
from hibernation in North. As well as 'Docker' ('That fist would drop
a hammer on a Catholic'), Death of a Naturalist contains two poems,
'At a Potato Digging' and 'For the Commander of the "Eliza"',
written in reaction to Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger.
The Commander, obliged by orders to withhold food from starving
men in a rowing-boat, is haunted by an image that anticipates the
boneyard of North: 'Next day, like six bad smells, those living skulls/
Drifted through the dark of bunks and hatches.' Heaney's private
imagery of rot and smells spills over into the public domain, perhaps
also sniffing something rotten in the state of Northern Ireland. In 'At
a Potato Digging' a rather awkward metamorphosis changes pota-
toes as 'live skulls, blind-eyed' into the real thing:
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on

wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,
wolfed the blighted root and died.
This transition is the hinge on which the poem turns from present
to past (a better-oiled process in North). 'At a Potato Digging'
starts out like an echo of Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger:
'Clay is the word and clay is the flesh/ Where the potato-gatherers
like mechanised scarecrows move/ Along the side-fall of the hill'
(Kavanagh); 'A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,/ Spins up a dark
shower of roots and mould./ Labourers swarm in behind ... '
(Heaney). But Kavanagh's title symbolises the starvation of the
spirit in twentieth-century rural Ireland; his perspective on servi-
tude to the land is local in place and time, whatever historic depri-
vations lurk in the background. As Heaney says, 'The "matter of
Ireland", mythic, historical or literary forms no significant part of
[Kavanagh's] material.' 11 And again, 'At the bottom of Kavanagh's
imagination there is no pagan queen, no mystique of the national,
the mythic or the tribal.' 12 (Does this make Kavanagh paradoxically
34 EDNA LONGLEY
more forward-looking than Heaney - a function of the

North-South timelag?) Heaney's potato-diggers undoubtedly guide
him towards 'the matter of Ireland', and towards his first embry-
onic fusion of Catholic experience in the North with the longer na-
tional history: 'A people hungering from birth'; 'and where potato
diggers are/ you still smell the running sore' (rottenness in the state
again). In another portent of the procedures of North, Heaney re-
solves the poem by drawing on a mixture of Christian and pagan
ritual. The diggers who make 'a seasonal altar of the sod', finally
propitiate 'the famine god' by spilling 'Libations of cold tea'.
'Requiem for the Croppies', the historical poem in Door into the
Dark, joins the centuries more seamlessly and achieves a more
organic, indeed germinal, resolution: 'And in August the barley
grew up out of the grave'.
[It] was written in 1966 when most poets in Ireland were straining to
celebrate the anniversary of the 1916 Rising. That rising was the
harvest of seeds sown in 1798, when revolutionary republican ideals
and national feeling coalesced in the doctrines of Irish republicanism
and in the rebellion of 1798 - itself unsuccessful and savagely put
down. The poem was born of and ended with an image of resurrec-
tion based on the fact that some time after the rebels were buried in
common graves, these graves began to sprout with young barley,
growing up with barley corn which the 'croppies' had carried in their
pockets to eat while on the march. The oblique implication was that
the seeds of violent resistance sowed in the Year of Liberty had
flowered in what Yeats called 'the right rose tree' of 1916. I did not
realise at the time that the original heraldic murderous encounter
between Protestant yeoman and Catholic rebel was to be initiated
again in the summer of 1969, in Belfast, two months after the book
was published. 13
Heaney speaks in the poem as one of the 'fatal conclave', a more ef-
fective tactic than his use of the Commander's voice as a semi-ironic
filter. However, in 'Bogland', a threshold-poem like 'The Tollund
Man' ('I wrote it quickly ... revised it on the hoof' 14 ), he abandons
both straight history and the dramatic monologue. He opens his
proper door into 'the matter of Ireland', by imagining history as an
experience rather than a chain of events, by dramatising his own
imaginative experience of history, by discovering within his home-
ground a myth that fits the inconclusiveness both of memory and of
Irish history, and by fusing the psychic self-searching of poet and
nation:
Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards ...
The qualities and contents of bog, as before of wells and plantation,

represent an unconscious - this time collective. But it is the move-
ment of the poem, in Heaney's Frostian sense, that counts. Metre,
sound, and rhythms enact a descent through layers. The poem alter-
nates ampler development with sharp insertions. Thus the abrupt
'They'll never dig coal here' interrupts assonances which imitate the
wet softness of bog 'Melting and opening underfoot'. 'Bogland'
might be called not so much 'a prospect of the mind' (to use
Heaney's favourite Wordsworthian phrase for poetic landscape) as
a prospecting of the mind.
1969 thus coincided with Heaney's readiness to pioneer the fron-
tiers of Irish consciousness: 'From that moment the problems of
poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfac-
tory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate
to our predicament.' Again, 'those language and place-names ...
poems [in Wintering Out] politicise the terrain and the imagery of
the first two books.' 15 The poem that most literally, and perhaps
most richly, 'politicises the terrain' is 'The Other Side', in which
Heaney intertwines land, religion, and language to characterise, and
tentatively close, the distance between Catholic and Protestant
neighbours in Ulster:
I lay where his lea sloped

to meet our fallow,
nested on moss and rushes,
my ear swallowing
his fabulous, biblical dismissal,
that tongue of chosen people.
This new kind of exploratory relation to Mossbawn complements the

Belfast terrain of 'A Northern Hoard', a sequence that puts the ques-
tion to which the surrounding poems respond: 'What do I say if they
wheel out their dead?' 'Tinder', whose prehistoric imagery connects
with that of 'The Tollund Man', might be described as Heaney's
'Easter, 1916'. But his before-and-after contrast displays little even of
Yeats's qualified excitement. The underprivileged 'tribe' who have lit
the tinder of revolution, wonder what to do with their 'new history',
while the poet simultaneously wonders about his role:
36 EDNA LONGLEY
Now we squat on cold cinder,

Red-eyed, after the flames' soft thunder
And our thoughts settle like ash.
We face the tundra's whistling brush ...
Both the rhetorical questions of 'A Northern Hoard', and the an-
swering probes into rural local history, develop the prospecting of
'Bogland'. Heaney's 'Inwards and downwards' strike also turns up
anonymous ancestors, deprived even of 'scraggy acres': servant boy
('Old work-whore, slave-/ blood'), mummer (though this model of
the vanishing tribal artist has English origins), 'mound-dwellers',
Spenser's 'geniuses who creep/ "out of every corner/ of the woodes
and glennes'". Occasionally such figures convey a thinner, more ro-
mantic, more literal version of history: not so much active prospect-
ing as nostalgic retrieval: 'how/ you draw me into/ your trail'. 'The
Tollund Man' himself and two poems with no explicit historical
ties, 'Limbo' and 'Bye-Child', embody more powerfully the same
structure of feeling. 'Bye-Child', which might symbolise 'A people
hungering from birth', expresses Heaney's most intense empathy
with deprivation:
Little henhouse boy,

Sharp-faced as new moons
Remembered, your photo still
Glimpsed like a rodent
On the floor of my mind.
The 'language and place-names poems' too sometimes resort to

ready-made history. 'Traditions', for instance, exchanges the multi-
layered socio-linguistics of 'The Other Side' for a narrower focus:
'Our guttural muse/ was bulled long ago/ by the alliterative tradi-
tion.' However these poems excitingly pioneer, in the context of
Ulster English, the kind of resonance that Edward Thomas's paral-
lel researches found more traditionally latent. And they give Heaney
a valid 'political' role within his profession of poet. An aesthetic
brand of revolutionary action, perhaps more linguistic reclamation
than decolonisation, takes on the English language itself, with
mixed declarations of love and war:
But now our river tongues must rise

From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,

Demesnes staked out in consonants.
('A New Song')
As a group the poems insinuate that the ghost of Gaelic, local idiom,
the sound of the land itself, all united in Heaney's own utterance, are
compelling the tradition of Shakespeare and Spenser to go native.
He puts this, and other things, more bluntly in Part II of North:
Ulster was British, but with no rights on

The English lyric
- or so they thought. Perhaps Heaney's poetry was always a form

of revolution, like negro jazz:
Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
In Berkeley (1970-1) he became aware 'that poetry was a force,

almost a mode of power, certainly a mode of resistance' . 16 To
Seamus Deane he says: 'I think that my own poetry is a kind of
slow, obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was
brought up on.' 17 'Obstinate' is a favourite and favourable word of
Heaney's, signifying the immovable object or objection that reverses
'No Surrender'. (John Hewitt's oft-repeated 'stubborn' may repre-
sent the Protestant cultural equivalent.) Up to and including
Wintering Out his poetry may have been poetry-as-protest or
protest-as-poetry in an extraordinarily profound sense: unjust
Ulster 'hurt' him into poetry. However, in North this subtext
whereby Heaney makes up for the lost time of those lost 'geniuses',
the mute inglorious Spensers, coarsens as it becomes text. 'The
Ministry of Fear' and 'Freedman' turn the tables with too much
relish for the effect to be wholly ironic:
Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

Were walking, by God, all over the fine
Lawns of elocution ...
Then poetry arrived in that city -
I would abjure all cant and self-pity-
And poetry wiped my brow and sped me.
Now they will say I bite the hand that fed me.
38 EDNA LONGLEY
Such speaking-out by the 'slightly aggravated young Catholic male',

or poet, accords with Heaney's view elsewhere in Part II, that
artificial balance distorts: "'One side's as bad as the other," never
worse' ('Whatever You Say Say Nothing'). Much of the aggravation
continues as a portrait of the artist, especially in the sequence
'Singing School' which begins with 'The Ministry of Fear'. The
third poem, 'Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966', was written before the
Troubles- a pointer to how throughout North Heaney's creative
maturity catches up on his youthful pieties and impieties.
Combining aural and visual menace, the drums define Unionist
hegemony in terms of 'giant tumours', of a claustrophobic violence
that afflicts its inflictor:
The pigskin's scourged until his knuckles bleed.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.
'A Constable Calls' (the second poem) lacks the same ultimate
impact, the caller's bike becoming, even from the child's eye view,
an implausibly melodramatic time-bomb: 'His boot pushed off/ And
the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.' However, both poems explore
their own subjects; we infer the effect on Heaney's developing sensi-
bility. 'The Ministry of Fear' and 'Summer 1969' (4) seem written
largely for the sake of the sequence, and to fill in a poetic curricu-
lum vitae (down to the provision of dates). Again, the nods to Yeats
and Wordsworth in Heaney's titles and epigraphs (one of which is
'Fair seedtime had my soul') look self-conscious as well as satirical.
'The Ministry of Fear' veers from the sharply specific:
In the first week

I was so homesick I couldn't even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951 ...
to the archly literary: 'It was an act/ Of stealth.' Heaney's theme

may contrast the boy and the 'sophisticated' author ('Here's two
on's are sophisticated'), but his language need not divide them. Also
sophisticated, 'Summer 1969' forces home-thoughts from Spain:
'stinks from the fishmarket/ Rose like the reek off a flaxdam'; cites
Lorca and Goya as exemplars in the context of trying 'to touch the
people'; and finally applies too much local colour to the latter's
portrait:
He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.
This is elementary stuff from the proven matador of Wintering Out.

The two remaining poems, 'Fosterage' (5) and 'Exposure' (6),
withdraw towards the centre of Heaney's own art. The former
quotes the anti-heroic advice of Ulster short-story writer Michael
McLaverty ('Don't have the veins bulging in your biro'), although
the manner and content of the last line partially disregard it: 'and
sent me out, with words/ Imposing on my tongue like obols'.
'Exposure' (to which I shall return) sets up a much more genuine
inner conflict than 'Summer 1969', and falls a long way short of
confidently identifying the artist with the man of action:
I walk through damp leaves,

Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
This truly is the doubtful mood and mode of Yeats's 'Meditations

in Time of Civil War':
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair

Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share.
But if 'Exposure' casts second thoughts back over North as a

whole, most of Part II underwrites Part I - in the sense of para-
phrase as well as of explaining its motivation. A few critics indeed
have found Heaney's personal and documentary explicitness more
to their taste than the mythic approach of Part I. Colin Falck con-
siders it 'a relief ... that he can still call on some of his old direct-
ness in dealing with the Ulster conflicts' . 18 But is the directness of
'Whatever You Say Say Nothing' either equal or equivalent to the
sensuous immediacy of Heaney's first three books?
The times are out of joint

But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
40 EDNA LONGLEY
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas

And protest to gelignite and sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarisation' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse' ...
Heaney too seems to practise a kind of shorthand: 'gas/ And protest

to gelignite and sten' cannot be offloaded on to 'newspaper-men',
while 'the provisional wing' is a hasty reference that carries its own
'backlash'. His subsequent anatomy of Ulster evasiveness ('Smoke-
signals are loud-mouthed compared with us .. ./ 0 land of password,
handgrip, wink and nod,! Of open minds as open as a trap'), labours
the point in comparison with Derek Mahon's bleak earlier indictment:
[We] yield instead to the humorous formulae,

The spurious mystery in the knowing nod.
Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade,
Rehearsing our astute salvations under
The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God.
('In Belfast')
The mood of Heaney's poem comes over as irritation, impatience,

rather than grand indignation (perhaps partly a result of his difficult
gear change from poetic smoke-signaller to loud-speaker). The con-
cluding vision of a petty society leaves a sour taste, because it
admits empathy but excludes sympathy: 'Coherent miseries, a bite
and sup,/ We hug our little destiny again.' His blanket dismissal of
cliche is more palatable, indeed a cliche itself. Yet it may have
something to do with the fact that Heaney's own poetry - unlike,
say, MacNeice's Autumn Journal- has among its many rich re-
sources no means of accommodating, transforming, criticising such
idiom. The inadequacy of media jargon, or of everyday common-
place, invalidates neither the political process nor 'civilised outrage'.
However, 'Whatever You Say Say Nothing'- which Heaney did not
include in his Selected Poems - essentially voices the same senti-
ment as Edward Thomas's 'This is No Case of Petty Right or

Wrong'. Just as Thomas during the First World War insisted on ex-
pressing England in his own way ('I hate not Germans, nor grow
hot/ With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers'), so Heaney is
justifying the language, aesthetic and perspective of the greater part
of his book.
The lecture 'Feeling into Words', from which I have already
quoted, coincided with the completion of North. By 'a search for
images and symbols adequate to our predicament', Heaney
[does] not mean liberal lamentation that citizens should feel com-
pelled to murder one another or deploy their different military arms
over the matter of nomenclatures such as British or Irish. I do not
mean public celebrations or execrations of resistance or atrocity -
although there is nothing necessarily unpoetic about such celebra-
tion, if one thinks of Yeats's 'Easter, 1916'. I mean that I felt it
imperative to discover a field of force in which, without abandoning
fidelity to the processes and experience of poetry ... it would be pos-
sible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the
same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its de-
plorable authenticity and complexity. And when I say religious, I am
not thinking simply of the sectarian division. To some extent the
enmity can be viewed as a struggle between the cults and devotees of
a god and goddess. There is an indigenous territorial numen, a
tutelar of the whole island, call her Mother Ireland, Cathleen Ni
Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever; and
her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new
male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange
and Edward Carson, and whose god-head is incarnate in a rex or
caesar resident in a palace in London. What we have is the tail-end of
a struggle in a province between territorial piety and imperial power.
Now I realise that this idiom is remote from the agnostic world of
economic interest whose iron hand operates in the velvet glove of
'talks between elected representatives', and remote from the political
manoeuvres of power-sharing; but it is not remote from the psychol-
ogy of the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing, and not
remote from the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in
the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant. The question, as ever,
is 'How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?' And my answer is,
by offering 'befitting emblems of adversity'. 19
My contention will be that 'this idiom' can represent as unreal an

extreme as the other: that Part I of North (unlike Wintering Out)
42 EDNA LONGLEY
often falls between the stools of poetry and politics instead of build-
ing a mythic bridge.
After the passage quoted above, Heaney tells how he found
'befitting emblems' in P.V. Glob's The Bog People, and swore his
vow to the Tollund Man. What is the precise 'emblematic' rele-
vance of these mummified figures to the 'man-killing parishes' of
Northern Ireland? The prototype developed by 'The Tollund Man'
is a scapegoat, privileged victim and ultimately Christ-surrogate,
whose death and bizarre resurrection might redeem, or symbolise
redemption for,
The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards ...
Here Heaney alludes particularly to Catholic victims of sectarian

murder in the 1920s. His comment to James Randall interprets the
amount of family as well as religious feeling in the poem: 'The
Tollund Man seemed to me like an ancestor almost, one of my old
uncles, one of those moustached archaic faces you used to meet all
over the Irish countryside.' 20 Thus related to 'the moustached/ dead,
the creel-fillers' elsewhere in Wintering Out, the Man becomes the
logical conclusion, the terminal case, the reductio of ancestral dis-
possession and oppression. In 'Feeling into Words', having sum-
marised Glob's account of 'ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess'
for the sake of fertility, Heaney asserts: 'Taken in relation to the
tradition of Irish political martyrdom for that cause whose icon is
Cathleen ni Houlihan, this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it
is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs ...
blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and
present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles.' 21
Heaney does not distinguish between involuntary and voluntary
'martyrdom', and the nature of his 'archetype' is such as to
subsume the latter within the former.
If 'The Tollund Man' and its glosses lay down a 'pattern' for
North, as it seems reasonable to suppose, how do the later Bog
poems compare with the original model? 'The Grauballe Man' ob-
viously invites such a comparison; even the inference that the poems
typify successive books (after the manner of 'Sailing to Byzantium'
and 'Byzantium', or 'Toads' and 'Toads Revisited'). Whereas 'The
Tollund Man' varies its angle of approach and moves with the
dynamic of a pilgrimage, 'The Grauballe Man' has more the air of a
set-piece, arrival, its subject celebrated because he's there, rather
than summoned into being by the poet's need:
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
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.
A difference in quality issues from the difference in stance; emotion

anticipated in excitement gives way to tranquil contemplation; the
intensity of conversion to ritual observance; crucifixion to resurrec-
tion. Almost too dutifully the poem venerates wrists, heel, instep,
hips, spine, chin, throat, hair - inclining to rosary beads indeed.
The chain of inventive similes reinforces the point that the Man has
been translated into the element of the bog, and is thus at one with
faintly healing nature, but the Tollund Man somehow remains the
human face of the Bog People. The less elaborate physical detail in
the first poem counts for more, especially 'The mild pods of his eye-
lids'. 'Mild' combines physical suggestiveness with a subliminal ref-
erence to Jesus ('Gentle Jesus, meek and mild'), while its last three
letters set up a soothing assonance within the line, which ratifies
the union. The two humanising images in 'The Grauballe Man':
'And his rusted hair,/ a mat unlikely/ as a foetus's', 'bruised like a
forceps baby', compete with each other and retain a chiefly visual
quality. (Again, the simple 'stained face' of 'The Tollund Man' says
more.) The climax of the poem, following on the latter simile,
appears unduly self-referring, pointed towards the 'perfection' with
which the rosary has been told:
but now he lies

perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity ...
44 EDNA LONGLEY
Beauty on the whole has outweighed atrocity by the time we reach

'the actual weight/ of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped'. In
fact the poem almost proclaims the victory of metaphor over
'actuality':
Who will say 'corpse'

to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?
Possibly someone should. The ultimate difference between the two

poems is that between Christ on the Cross and a holy picture: the
urgent presence of 'The Tollund Man' worked 'to a saint's kept
body'. Heaney may have mistaken his initial epiphany for a literal
signpost, when it was really a destination, a complete emotional
curve that summed up profound feelings and wishes about the situ-
ation in Northern Ireland. The ambiguous resolution - 'lost,/
Unhappy and at home' - may be as far as he can genuinely go, and
it resembles other reactions in his poetry to tragic circumstances.
'Elegy for a Still-born Child' (Door into the Dark), for instance,
ends: 'I drive by remote control on this bare road ... White waves
riding home on a wintry lough.'
Heaney's contracted or 'perfected' perception of the Bog People
in North renders their emblematic function, as well as his poetry,
less complex. If what was hypothetical in 'The Tollund Man'- the
consecration of 'the cauldron bog' - has hardened into accepted
doctrine, do these later images imply that suffering on behalf of
Cathleen may not be in vain, that beauty can be reborn out of
terror: 'The cured wound'? The females of the species also attain a
'leathery beauty'. For the girl in 'Punishment', the wind 'blows her
nipples/ to amber beads', and the tone of love-making compensates
for any deficiencies:
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
As women cannot be 'bridegrooms', Heaney must find them a dif-

ferent place in the 'archetypal pattern'. The final moral twist of
'Punishment' has attracted a good deal of comment:

cauled in tar,
who would connive
This is all right if Heaney is merely being 'outrageously' honest

about his own reactions, if the paradox 'connive ... civilised' is de-
signed to corner people who think they have risen above the primi-
tive, if the poem exposes a representative Irish conflict between
'humane reason' and subconscious allegiances. But can the poet run
with the hare ('I can feel the tug/ of the halter') and hunt with the
hounds? Ciaran Carson observes:
Being killed for adultery is one thing; being tarred and feathered is
another ... [Heaney] seems to be offering his 'understanding' of the
situation almost as a consolation ... It is as if he is saying, suffering
like this is natural; these things have always happened; they hap-
pened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for un-
derstanding and absolution. It is as if there never were and never will
be any political consequences of such acts; they have been removed
to the realm of sex, death and inevitability. 22
Perhaps the problem is one of artistic, not political, fence-sitting.

The conclusion states, rather than dramatises, what should be pro-
found self-division, one of Heaney's most intense hoverings over a
brink. In any case it remains unresolved, unless the poem does in a
sense make a political point by endorsing the 'idiom', of something
deeper than politics. (Although today's anthropology may only be
yesterday's politics.) Blake Morrison argues:
It would be going too far to suggest that 'Punishment' in particular

and the Bog poems generally offer a defence of Republicanism; but
they are a form of 'explanation'. Indeed the whole procedure of
North is such as to give sectarian killing in Ulster a historical re-
spectability which it is not usually given in day-to-day journalism. 23
In fact Heaney grants no licence to the latter. He excludes the inter-

sectarian issue, warfare between tribes, by concentrating on the
Catholic psyche as bound to immolation, and within that immola-
46 EDNA LONGLEY
tion to savage tribal loyalties. This is what he means by 'slaughter/

for the common good' ('Kinship'), and by 'granting the religious in-
tensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity' -
and, of course, no apologia for the 'male cult' of imperial power.
'Kinship' defines the battlefield in astonishingly introverted Catholic
and Nationalist terms:
Our mother ground

is sour with the blood
of her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.
If North doesn't cater for 'liberal lamentation', neither does it offer

a universal, Wilfred Owen-style image of human suffering. It is a
book of martyrs rather than of tragic protagonists. Only 'Strange
Fruit' questions its own attitude, challenges inevitability:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
The frank adjectives capsize what has previously been rather a dec-
orative dawdle of a sonnet ('Pash of tallow, perishable treasure';
'Diodorus Siculus confessed/ His gradual ease among the likes of
this'). They also capsize a good deal else in North. Heaney told
John Haffenden: '['Strange Fruit'] had ended at first with a kind of
reverence, and the voice that came in when I revised was a rebuke
to the literary quality of that reverent emotion.' 24
'Bog Queen' has the advantage of dealing directly with the
goddess herself, so that questionable behaviour on the part of her
acolytes may be ignored. The female figures in the poems,
perhaps understandably, bear a family resemblance to one
another: 'The pot of the skull,/ The damp tuck of each curl'; 'My
skull hibernated/ in the wet nest of my hair'; 'They unswaddled
the wet fern of her hair'; 'my brain darkening'; 'your brain's
exposed/ and darkened combs'. However 'Bog Queen', although
over-amplified like 'The Grauballe Man', renews that well-worn
genre the aisling by presenting Ireland as her landscape, weather,
geography, and history, and by pushing her 'old hag' incarnation

to an extreme:
My diadem grew carious,

gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.
Since this is the one Bog poem with true Irish antecedents, 25 it can
begin with an apt analogue of dormant nationhood ('I lay waiting/
between turf-face and demesne wall'), and end with an equally
plausible 'rising':
and I rose from the dark,

hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
These lines, and the poem's clearly shaped symbol, speak for
themselves. But Heaney sometimes asks too much of his myth, as
if all statement has been shunted off to Part II, as if 'archetypes'
remain above or below argument. ('Punishment' suggests the con-
trary.) A number of his comments on poetry nudge it towards the
visual arts - a surprising development from such a rhythmic
prodigy: 'the verbal icon'; 'a search for images and symbols'; 'The
poetry I love is some kind of image or visionary thing'; 'a painter
can lift anything and make an image of it'. 26 The notion of
'befitting emblems' also requires examination. Their original
context is section II of 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', where
Yeats defines the purpose of his art in terms of 'founding' his
Tower:
that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.
Yeats's 'emblems' are the many facets of the Tower and of his
poetry as a whole. Heaney seems to regard a symbol or myth as
sufficiently emblematic in itself: 'beauty' pleading with 'rage' within
the icon of 'The Grauballe Man' - Man and poem synonymous -
rather than through any kind of dialectic. Nor does the myth, as the
resemblances between the poems suggest, undergo much evolution.
48 EDNA LONGLEY
Before the publication of North, John Wilson Foster said of the

language poems in Wintering Out: 'Heaney's conceit (landscape =
body= sex = language) and the way it sabotages emotion leads him
into ... difficulties' Y In North the addition of = Ireland, of the
aisling element, makes it still harder to determine which level is
primary, or whether they are all just being ingeniously translated
into each other. Presumably 'Come to the Bower' signifies the poet's
imaginative intercourse with his country, but does the conceit do
more than consummate itself?
I reach past
The river bed's washed
Dream of gold to the bullion
Of her Venus bone.
When England participates in the landscape-sex-Ireland poems,

Heaney's edifice and his artifice wobble. In 'Bone Dreams' the
poet's lady uneasily assumes foreign contours:
I have begun to pace

the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, dreaming
of Maiden Castle.
'Ocean's Love to Ireland' overworks phallic symbolism: Ralegh

'drives inland'; 'his superb crest ... runs its bent/ In the rivers of Lee
and Blackwater'; 'The Spanish prince has spilled his gold/ I And
failed her'. Love poetry in political language risks even more than
the reverse:
And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
This poem, 'Act of Union', pursuing the parallel between sexual

and political union, and between imperialism and maleness, casts
the speaker in a role which fits uneasily. And the allegory could
apply to begetting Loyalism as much as 'obstinate' Republicanism.
In any case, the poem hardly persuades as a man's emotion towards
his wife or child: 'parasitical/ And ignorant little fists'.
Given Heaney's previous successful explorations of landscape,

water, femaleness, what has gone wrong this time? His prose com-
ments support the view that an obsession with stacking up parallels
has replaced flexible 'soundings'. And in the case both of sex-and-
landscape and of Bogland regions, Ireland is the straw that breaks the
poems' backs. The Jutland connection does achieve certain archetypal
dimensions but, as 'Punishment' indicates, the moral and political
ground beyond the self-contained emblem is boggy indeed.With refer-
ence to the process in 'Kinship', whereby the poet finds 'a turf-spade'
and quickly ends up 'facing a goddess', Ciaran Carson points out:
The two methods are not compatible. One gains its poetry by em-
bodiment of a specific, personal situation; the other has degenerated
into a messy historical and religious surmise - a kind of Golden
Bough activity, in which the real differences between our society and
that of Jutland in some vague past are glossed over for the sake of
the parallels of ritual. 28
Whereas 'Bogland' enacted the stages of the poet's thrust into the
past, he now obtains ready access: 'Kinned by hieroglyphic peat ...
to the strangled victim' ('Kinship');
To lift the lid of the peat

And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
('Belderg')
That exclamation (at quernstones) represents a kind of elementary

archaeological awe, borne out by the poem's Irish, Planter, and
Norse 'growth rings' which express simply 'A congruence of lives'.
In Wintering Out Heaney worked from present to past, interpreting
(the historic congruence and incongruity of 'The Other Side'); in
North he works from past to present- equating. The book appears
fascinated more by bones, fossils, relics, archaisms - 'antler combs,
bone pins,/ coins, weights, scale-pans'- than by those things which
they are emblems of. 'Bone Dreams', as perhaps its title candidly
admits, loses all contact with the thing itself: 'I wind it in/ I the sling
of mind/ to pitch it at England'. An ecumenical gesture, despite the
metaphor, but 'England' soon becomes an amalgam of history, geo-
graphy, literary and linguistic tradition ('Elizabethan canopies./
Norman devices'; 'ban-hus ... where the soul/ fluttered a while'; 'I
am ... a chalk giant'; 'Hadrian's Wall'; etc.). Apart from section VI,
50 EDNA LONGLEY
a beautifully exact poem about a mole- and moles do focus differ-

ences between the Irish and English terrains - the poem turns the
tables on Romantic versions of Ireland in English literature.
But the real costume-drama imports into North are the Vikings.
The title-poem begins with the poet searching for a kindred revela-
tion to that of 'The Tollund Man':
I returned to a long strand,

the hammered shod of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
those fabulous raiders ...
The somewhat abstract adjectival sequence- 'secular', 'unmagical',

'fabulous' - gives the show away. Why not write a 'secular' or
nature poem about the sea? (Like 'Shoreline' in Door into the Dark,
where the Danes are a notional and mysterious 'black hawk bent on
the sail'.) Why dismiss Iceland as 'unmagical', unless because
Heaney is not Auden? 'Suddenly' (at the end of a stanza) introduces
'fabulous raiders' to a fable-hungry poet too much on cue. They
also open communication with remarkable speed, and the word
'epiphany', deeply implicit in 'The Tollund Man', is actually used:
ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight -
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behindbacks
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
This is Heaney's own 'hindsight', a 'relevant' historical summary

which hardly requires such elaborate sponsorship. (May he be for-
given the zeugma 'lies and women'!). And does the idea of the
North really provide an umbrella for the not very Nordic north of
Ireland, fertility rites and capital punishment in prehistoric
Denmark, and the conquests of the Vikings in Ireland - coming to
or from the north? Although all these different places, time-zones
and moral worlds clearly strike genuine imaginative chords in
Heaney, why attempt to unify them into a mythic confederation?
Perhaps again in order to stress the obvious: 'these things have
always happened', as Carson says, and as Morrison finally puts it:
'His allusions to former cultures amount to a sort of historical
determinism. ' 29 Yet determinism, the plundering of the past for
parallels, circular thinking (all incidentally features of Republican
and Loyalist ideology) once more insist on 'territorial piety', on a re-
ligious-anthropological, even slightly glamorous way of apprehend-
ing the conflict, beside which 'talks between elected representatives'
indeed look dull. In the last three quatrains of 'North' the longship
adds an aesthetic to the subject-matter it has already supplied:
It said, 'Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nub bed treasure
your hands have known.'
This self-dedication hints at a purpose - 'long foray' - beyond

'befitting emblems', and to which Heaney's sensuous intimacy with
his world ('nubbed treasure') might contribute a value as well as an
'explanation'. Like D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes before him, he
edges towards turning his instinctive sureties into a philosophy.
Ritual is undoubtedly a value and a method, as well as a subject,
in North. It sets and sets off the emblems. While of course aware
that some rituals have more in their favour than others, Heaney
employs the term a little oddly at times: 'the long rites of Irish polit-
ical and religious struggles'. A struggle is not a rite, just as murder
like that at Vinegar Hill is not 'heraldic' when it happens. The
52 EDNA LONGLEY
decorative tinge that Heaney imparts to violence and to history

derives from a ritualising habit, which itself derives from his reli-
gious sensibility. The continual catalogues in North - whether
details of the Bog People, inventories of objects like 'antler-pins', or
historical summaries as in the message of the longship - level dis-
parate experience into a litany, a rosary, a faintly archaic incanta-
tion: 'neighbourly, scoretaking/ killers, haggers/ and hagglers,
gombeen-men,/ hoarders of grudges and gain'. In those lines from
'Viking Dublin' alliteration swamps meaning. 'Funeral Rites' de-
clares Heaney's love for the positive function of ritual:
Now as news comes in

of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms ...
(An echo of Yeats there.) Carson praises the poem's initial evoca-
tion of remembered funerals:
their eyelids glistening,

their dough-white hands
shackled in rosary-beads
but then comments: 'all too soon, we are back in the world of
megalithic doorways and charming, noble barbarity'. 30 The worthy
root-emotion of 'Funeral Rites' is that of 'The Tollund Man' -
Heaney's passionate desire to 'assuage' 31 - but he goes to such ritu-
alistic lengths as to obliterate his starting-point:
I would restore
the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulchre
under the cupmarked stones ...
Somnambulant women,
left behind, move
through emptied kitchens
imagining our slow triumph
towards the mounds.
An affirmation of 'custom' and 'ceremony' - especially as a kind of

mass trance - cannot in itself earn 'the cud of memory/ allayed for
once'. Heaney's 'rites', ancient, modern or imagined, are pro-

foundly 'Catholic' in character:
My sensibility was formed by the dolorous murmurings of the rosary,

and the generally Marian quality of devotion. The reality that was
addressed was maternal, and the posture was one of supplication ...
Irish Catholicism, until about ten years ago, had this Virgin Mary
worship, almost worship. In practice, the shrines, the rosary beads, all
the devotions were centred towards a feminine presence, which I
think was terrific for the sensibility. I think that the 'Hail Mary' is
more of a poem than the 'Our Father'. 'Our Father' is between chaps,
but there's something faintly amorous about the 'Hail Mary'. 32
The sense in North that something is to be gained by going through

the ritual, telling the beads, adopting a posture of supplication or
worship, curiously aligns Heaney with the early rather than the
later Yeats (the Catholic ethos of the Rhymers' Club). 'A Prayer for
my Daughter', on the other hand, is not only a prayer but a contest
in which 'custom' and 'ceremony' engage with their opposites.
The whole design of North, including its layout, proclaims a
more punctilious patterning than that of Heaney's first three books:
'I had a notion of North, the opening of North: those poems came
piecemeal now and again, and then I began to see a shape. They
were written and rewritten a lot. ' 33 In contrast with the fecund
variety of Wintering Out there is system, homogenisation. Certain
poems seem dictated by the scheme (rather than vice versa), com-
missioned to fill in the myth or complete the ritual. Conspicuous
among these are three first-person quatrain sequences, all in six
parts: 'Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces', 'Bone Dreams' and 'Kinship'.
Neatly spanning the Vikings, England and Bogland, the sequences
present the poet in a somewhat self-conscious physical and imagina-
tive relation to each mythic territory: 'a worm of thought/ I I follow
into the mud'; 'I push back/ through dictions'; 'I step through
origins'. Such announcements seem again a substitute for action,
for genuine prospecting. 'Land' and 'Gifts of Rain' in Wintering
Out began this kind of open quest, which owes a debt to the Ted
Hughes of Wodwo. But the further back Heaney pushes, in default
of a specific impulse, the more specialised or specialist he in fact
becomes; so that the sequences exaggerate the book's anthropologi-
cal, archaeological and philological tendency. The evolution since
Wintering Out of the theme of language typifies other contractions.
The place-name poems, if occasionally too calculated, stir mutual
54 EDNA LONGLEY
vibrations between landscape and language. But in 'Viking Dublin'

Heaney's phonetic fantasy drives a huge wedge between word and
thing: a longship's 'clinker-built hull' is 'spined and plosive/ as
Dublin'. 'Kinship', already off to a sign-posting start ('Kinned by
hieroglyphic/ peat') that has travelled far from 'We have no prairies'
('Bogland'), eventually goes into a swoon of synonyms:
Quagmire, swampland, morass:

the slime kingdoms,
domains of the cold-blooded,
of mud pads and dirtied eggs.
But bog
meaning soft,
the fall of windless rain ...
'Bone Dreams', perhaps because of the poet's outsider position,

relies more heavily on linguistic keys to unlock England:
'Elizabethan canopies,/ Norman devices,/ I the erotic mayflowers/
of Provence/ and the ivied latins/ of churchmen', 'the scop's/ twang,
the iron/ flash of consonants/ cleaving the line'. This comes uncom-
fortably close to the way Heaney talks about English in his lecture
'Englands of the Mind' (1976). In Geoffrey Hill's poetry: 'The
native undergrowth, both vegetative and verbal, the barbaric scroll-
work of fern and ivy, is set against the tympanum and chancel-arch,
against the weighty elegance of imperial Latin'; 34 '[Hughes's] conso-
nants ... take the measure of his vowels like calipers, or stud the
line like rivets.' 35 That the gap has narrowed between Heaney's cre-
ative and critical idioms, while widening between word and thing,
underlines the extent to which the artist's own specialism also
figures in these poems. Every poet worth his salt imprints his poetry
with a subtext about poetry itself- as Heaney does, profoundly and
skilfully, in 'The Forge' or 'Bogland'. A minority, because of the
particular nature of their art, go public like Yeats as the poet-artist,
taking on all comers. The protagonist's high profile in the North se-
quences, however, reveals him almost incestuously involved with
the contents of his own imagination:
My words lick around

cobbled quays, go hunting
lightly as pampooties
over the skull-capped ground.
('Viking Dublin')
I grew out of all this

like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity.
('Kinship')
(Contrast: 'As a child, they could not keep me from wells' in

'Personal Helicon'.) Heaney's appetite for abstraction has certainly
grown: 'ceremony', 'history', 'violence and epiphany', 'memory',
'dictions', 'the cooped secrets/ of process and ritual'. Several com-
mentators on North have headlined 'Hercules and Antaeus' as sym-
bolising the different approaches of Parts II and I. Mark Patrick
Hederman follows up such an attribution with this analysis:
Hercules and Antaeus represent two different kinds of poet: the first
composes his own poetry; the second is composed by his own poetry.
The first is the self-assertive poet, the political poet, who has a
definite vision of things, who chooses his style and his words, who
decides what kind of poet he is going to be. The second kind of poet
is he whom Martin Heidegger calls the 'more daring' ... because he
works from the heart and ... articulates a song 'whose sound does
not cling to something that is eventually attained, but which has
already shattered itself even in the sounding ... ' 36
The poem certainly dramatises a conflict in Heaney (amply

evidenced by Preoccupations) between an instinctive, 'feminine'
artesian procedure ('the cradling dark,/ the river-veins, the secret
gullies/ of his strength'), and an ordering, 'male' architectonic 'intel-
ligence' ('a spur of light,/ a blue prong graiping him/ out of his
element'). However, Hercules may be quite as responsible for the
prescribed rituals of Part I as for the outbursts of Part II: telling
yourself to 'Lie down/ in the word-hoard' makes it less likely that
you have done so. Stylistic examination suggests that Heaney has
upset his strategic brinkmanship, his former complex creative
balance, by applying architectonic methods to artesian matters, by
processing his rich organic resources into hard-edged blocks, by
forgetting 'They'll never dig coal here'.
Heaney should have been the last poet to turn 'the word-hoard'
into a dragon-hoard: 'the coffered/ riches of grammar/ and declen-
sions'. The burnishing by repetition of certain words is an allowable
consequence of recurrent subjects; other instances serve the grand
design, as in the shot-gun marriages of berg and bog: 'the black
glacier/ of each funeral'; 'gemstones dropped/ in the peat floe/ like
56 EDNA LONGLEY
the bearings of history./ I My sash was a black glacier/ wrinkling';

'floe of history'. But repeated rhythms and constructions do more
than words to reinforce the ritual or cement the architecture. Metre,
the skinny quatrain, is the most obvious formal unifier: 'those thin
small quatrain poems, they're kind of drills or augers for turning in
and they are narrow and long and deep' Y The narrowness of the
line, in conjunction with that of the stanza, makes immense
demands on both local variation and overall rhythm, if pre-
fabricated cadences are to be prevented. As Heaney himself said
later, 'The shortness of a line constricts, in a sense, the breadth of
your movement'. 38 In fact, the quatrain often falls into two iambic
pentameters, each harshly severed at the caesura:
Come back past

philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair ...
It can dwindle to mere layout unjustified by stress or sense:
... is a love-nest
in the grass.
The method really amounts to a ribbon-developed sentence where

the enjambement of line and stanza quickly becomes itself a con-
vention, and the basic unit must be a phrase that will fit into some-
thing more like a passive receptacle than an active drill. This form
blurs climaxes and by-passes terminuses, while also letting the se-
quences divide too tidily into equal sections. Nevertheless Heaney
stiffens the backbone of the poems by drawing on the 'alliterative
tradition'. His comments on its importance to Ted Hughes inter-
pret his own motives: 'Hughes relies on the northern deposits, the
pagan Anglo-Saxon and Norse elements, and he draws energy also
from a related constellation of primitive myths and world-views.
The life of his language is a persistence of the stark outline and vi-
tality of Anglo-Saxon that became the Middle English alliterative
tradition ... ' 39 The 'iron/ flash of consonants' undoubtedly strikes
sparks, as in the dedicatory 'Sunlight' ('the scone rising/ to the tick
of two clocks'), but can also be overdone ('baggers/ and hagglers')
and pepper a poem with hard little pellets, for which the Anglo-
Saxon compound word is the model: 'Earth-pantry, bone-
vault,/sun-bank', 'oak-bone, brain-firkin' (an empty interchange of
images). Consonantal monosyllables are conspicuous- taking their

cue from 'bone' and 'skull' - especially those with an archaic cast:
shod, scop, bleb, coomb, crock, glib (as a noun), nubbed. Heaney's
fondness for the hard -ed ending as participle/ adjective (often with
a co-opted noun) has developed into infatuation: 'the tomb/
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,/ Flared with dry turf-coomb';
'Their puffed knuckles/ had unwrinkled, the nails/ were darkened,
the wrists/ obediently sloped'. Sometimes the participles seem to
involve a shortcut as well as shorthand: 'the cud of memory/
allayed'. The ending of 'The Grauballe Man', 'each hooded victim,/
slashed and dumped', is less poignantly precise than 'the scattered,
ambushed/ Flesh of labourers' and 'Stockinged corpses' of 'The
Tollund Man'. Constant asyndeton helps to compress the pellets,
but the conjunction 'and' sets up its own syntactical orthodoxy:
'geography and trade,/ thick-witted couplings and revenges'; 'ances-
try and trade'; 'pinioned by ghosts/ and affections,/ I murders and
pieties'. The prominence of paired abstractions in the Viking poems
underlines their anxiety to connect. Thus the form and sound of the
quatrain exert pressure on syntax and meaning to the point where
'customary rhythms' may indeed take over.
And yet North is framed by three poems that avoid or transcend
such mannerisms. 'Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication' occupies
a truly timeless zone within which 'calendar customs' of domesticity
and agriculture inoculate against the more barbaric 'rites' to come.
Two emotionally and rhythmically expansive endings emphasise
how much Part I cuts down, and cuts out, in pursuit of 'the matter
of Ireland':
And here is love

like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
('Sunlight')
0 calendar customs! Under the broom

Yell owing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.
('The Seed Cutters')
The first stanza of 'Sunlight' does contain 'helmeted', 'heated' and

'honeyed', but their varied physicality shows up 'slashed and
dumped'; just as the last four lines show up the periphrastic sensu-
58 EDNA LONGLEY
ousness of 'Kinship': 'The mothers of autumn/ sour and sink,/ fer-

ments of husk and leaf/ I deepen their ochres'. Consummating a se-
quence of diversely rendered 'customary rhythms', the subtle
chiastic assonance 'gleam' - 'meal' dramatises the complete sub-
jugation both of 'love' and the poem- and the poem because of its
love - to what they work in. These poems are Heaney's real,
unceremonious assertions of 'custom' and humanity, his most im-
portant refusal to let 'human utterance' be flogged 'into fragments'.
Carson observes that in the opening of 'The Seed Cutters':
They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You'll know them if I can get them true ...
'the apostrophe works perfectly; we realise how Brueghel's realism,

his faithfulness to minutiae, are akin to Heaney's, and what could
°
have been portentousness takes on a kind of humility'. 4 Compare
the strained self-introduction to Tacitus in 'Kinship': 'And you,
Tacitus,/ observe how I make my grove/ on an old crannog/ piled by
the fearful dead' - this he doesn't know and doesn't get true. Field
Work makes a significant return to Mossbawn, to 'that original
townland', for visionary renewals.
From composure to 'Exposure', from sunlit suspended moment
or Grecian Urn 'frieze' to 'It is December in Wicklow'. With day,
season, Nature, the weather, the heavens all in a state of exhausted
flux - 'Alders dripping, birches/ Inheriting the last light', Heaney
wonders about the lasting usefulness of his own enterprise, about
perfection of the life or of the work. The poem asks why he sits
weighing and weighing

My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
Anguished dialectic, recalling that of 'A Northern Hoard', banishes

both the polished icon of Part I, and the top-of-the-head arguments
in the rest of 'Singing School'. The contrast between images of drip-
ping, falling, darkening, 'let-downs and erosions', and 'The
diamond absolutes', dramatises a profound self-searching, a 'sad
freedom', which goes beyond the aesthetic politics of 'Hercules and
Antaeus' into the moral and emotional priorities of the artist.
Fundamentally, the poem asks whether departure from Ulster, for
which the writing of North may be an over-compensation ('blowing
up these sparks'), has precluded some personal or poetic revelation
(akin to that of 'The Tollund Man', perhaps):
Who, blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.
In 'Exposure' the poet earns the label he gives himself - 'inner

emigre', inwardly examining his emigration - which conflicts with
another, bestowed not quite self-critically enough in 'Punishment':
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs ...
Is this objective correlative, or substitute, for an interior journey?

Heaney's move South between Wintering Out and North must
indeed have shifted the co-ordinates of his imagination: distanced
some things, brought others closer. In an essay of 1975 Seamus
Deane found Heaney (and Derek Mahon) apolitical in comparison
with John Montague, whose The Rough Field (1972) had 'politi-
cised the terrain' of his native Tyrone: 'it is in Montague, with his
historical concentration, that this fidelity [to the local] assumes the
shape of a political commitment' .41 Interviewing Heaney after
North, Deane encourages him to 'commit' himself: 'Do you think
that if some political stance is not adopted by you and the Northern
poets at large, this refusal might lead to a dangerous strengthening
of earlier notions of the autonomy of poetry and corroborate the
recent English notion of the happy limitations of a "well-made
poem"?' Heaney replies:
I think that the recent English language tradition does tend towards
the 'well-made poem', that is towards the insulated and balanced
statement. However, major poetry will always burst that corseted
and decorous truthfulness. In so doing, it may be an unfair poetry; it
will almost certainly be one-sided. 42
('One side's as bad as the other, never worse.') This interchange

logically, but oddly, ties in the espousal of a Nationalist attitude
with divorce from 'English' modes. The combination marks a step
across the border, away from 'vowelling embrace'. Similarly,
whereas Wintering Out was written from the perspective of
Belfast/South Derry, Heaney's hinterland interpreting the 'plague'-
ridden city, North was written from the perspective of
Wicklow/Dublin, and a broader Nationalism:
60 EDNA LONGLEY
I always thought of the political problem- maybe because I am not

really a political thinker- as being an internal Northern Ireland divi-
sion. I thought along sectarian lines. Now I think that the genuine
political confrontation is between Ireland and Britain. 43
The vision of 'The Other Side' is absent from North: 'the legions
stare/ from the ramparts'. The 'Mossbawn' poems (though not the
learned debate about the place-name's origin in 'Belderg') prove the
local textures that Heaney's panoptic view omits. 'The Seed
Cutters' also shows how the English dimension of his technique
lives on in a concreteness and empiricism reminiscent of nothing so
much as Edward Thomas's 'Haymaking' (written during the First
World War): 'All of us gone out of the reach of change- I Immortal
in a picture of an old grange'. Preoccupations salutes the varied
influences that have fertilised Heaney's imagination, and which
render irrelevant the false distinction between 'well-made' and
'major' poetry, rather than good and bad. (No real poem is 'well-
made' in any limited sense; no major poem ill-made.) Heaney here
seems to join ranks with Montague and Thomas Kinsella, who in
different ways, and often too self-consciously, have stressed the
European and transatlantic alliances which should be reflected in
the outlook and technique of Irish poetry.
The Deane interview epitomises the intensive pressure on
Heaney, including his own sense of duty: to be more Irish, to be
more political, to 'try to touch the people', to do Yeats's job again
instead of his own. Printed in the first issue of the journal Crane
Bag, it heralds successive, obsessive articles on the relevance of his
poetry to the Northern conflict. Again, Deane sets the tone with an
attack on Conor Cruise O'Brien:
But surely this very clarity of O'Brien's position is just what is most
objectionable. It serves to give a rational clarity to the Northern posi-
tion which is untrue to the reality. In other words, is not his human-
ism here being used as an excuse to rid Ireland of the atavisms which
gave it life even though the life itself may be in some ways brutal? 44
Heaney demurs ('O'Brien's ... real force and his proper ground is
here in the South' 45 ); nor is he responsible for the conscription of
his poetry to bolster pre-set Nationalist conceptual frameworks, to
endorse 'an Irish set of Archetypes, which form part of that collec-
tivity unearthed by Jung, from which we cannot escape'. 46 But one
of O'Brien's 'clarities' is his distrust of the 'area where literature
and politics overlap'Y If they simply take in one another's mytho-

logical laundry, how can the former be an independent long-term
agent of change? North does not give the impression of the urgent
'matter of Ireland' bursting through the confines of 'the well-made
poem'. Heaney's most 'artful' book, it stylises and distances what
was immediate and painful in Wintering Out. It hardens a highly
original form of procedure ('pilot and stray') into a less original
form of content ('imperial power' versus 'territorial piety'). By
plucking out the heart of his mystery and serving it up as a quasi-
political mystique, Heaney temporarily succumbs to the goddess, to
the destiny feared in Derek Mahon's 'The Last of the Fire Kings' 48
where the people desire their poet-king
Not to release them

From the ancient curse
But to die their creature and be thankful.
From Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle, 1986),

pp. 140-69, 253-4 (An earlier version appeared in Tony Curtis
(ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney [Bridgend, 1982].)
NOTES
Edna Longley's piece combines the New Critical concern with the poetry's
canonical worth and formal qualities which we saw in Ricks's review (essay
1) and the political preoccupations visible in O'Brien's essay (no. 2). It
makes wide reference to English poets (Edward Thomas, Lawrence, Auden,
Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill) as well as those from south (Yeats,
Kavanagh) and north (Hewitt, Montague, Mahon) of the Irish border. It
assumes knowledge of Burntollet where Loyalist groups attacked Civil
Rights marchers in 1969 and Vinegar Hill where the Wexford rising was
brutally crushed in 1798 (pp. 34, 51).
Certain terms of traditional 'rhetoric' are used: 'zeugma' (p. 51) is a figure
in which two words are yoked together although only one of them is strictly
appropriate to the intended meaning; 'asyndeton' (p. 57) is the omission of
normally expected conjunctions; 'chiastic' (p. 58) usually indicates a figure
in which the order of words in one clause is reversed in the next but is here
used about a similar reversal of letters in juxtaposed words. Ed.]
1. John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London, 1981),

p. 64.
2. Anthony Thwaite, TLS, 3829, 1 August 1975, p. 866.
62 EDNA LONGLEY
3. Blake Morrison, 'Speech and Reticence: Seamus Heaney's North',

British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey. ed. Peter Jones and
Michael Schmidt (Cheadle Hulme, 1980), p. 103.
4. Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener, 25 September 1975, pp. 404-5.
5. Ibid.
6. Seamus Heaney, 'Feeling into Words', Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968-1978 (London, 1980), p. 59.
7. James Randall, 'An Interview with Seamus Heaney', Ploughshares,
5:3 (1979), 18.
8. Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 71.
9. John Wilson Foster, 'The Poetry of Seamus Heaney', Critical
Quarterly, 16 (1974), 40.
10. Seamus Deane, '"Unhappy and at Home", Interview with Seamus
Heaney', The Crane Bag, 1:1 (Spring 1977), 61.
11. Seamus Heaney, '"From Monaghan to the Grand Canal", the Poetry
of Patrick Kavanagh', Preoccupations, p. 115.
12. Heaney, 'The Sense of Place', ibid., p. 142.
13. Heaney, 'Feeling into Words', ibid., p. 56.
14. Ibid., p. 55.
15. Randall, Ploughshares, 17.
16. Ibid., p. 20.
17. Seamus Heaney, The Crane Bag, 1:1 (Spring 1977), 62.
18. Colin Falck, The New Review, 2:17 (August 1975), 61.
19. Heaney, Preoccupations, pp. 56-7.
21. Heaney, Preoccupations, pp. 57-8.
22. Ciaran Carson, 'Escaped from the Massacre?' review of North, The
Honest Ulsterman, no. 50 (Winter 1975), 184-5.
23. Morrison, British Poetry since 1970, pp. 109-10.
24. Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 61.
25. P.V. Glob, The Bog People (London, 1971), pp. 77-8. The body,
probably of a Danish Viking, was found in 1781 on Lord Moira's
estate in Co. Down.
26. Haffenden, Viewpoints, pp. 61, 66.
27. John Wilson Foster, Critical Quarterly, 16 (1974), 45.
28. Carson, The Honest Ulsterman, no. 50, 184.

29. Morrison, British Poetry since 1970, p. 110.
30. Carson, The Honest Ulsterman, no. 50, 185.
31. Haffenden asks: 'The word "assuaging" seems a favourite with you;
can you say why?' Heaney replies: 'It's possible to exacerbate ... I
believe that what poetry does to me is comforting ... I think that art
does appease, assuage' (p. 68).
32. Haffenden, Viewpoints, pp. 60-1.
33. Ibid., p. 64.
34. Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 160.
35. Ibid., p. 154.
36. Mark Patrick Hederman, 'Seamus Heaney, The Reluctant Poet', The
Crane Bag, 3:2 (1979), 66.
38. Ibid.
40. Carson, The Honest Ulsterman, no. 50, 185-6.
41. Seamus Deane, 'Irish Poetry and Irish Nationalism', in Two Decades
of Irish Writing, ed. Douglas Dunn (Cheadle Hulme,1975), p. 16.
42. Deane, The Crane Bag, 1:1 (Spring 1977), 62-3.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 63-4.
45. Ibid.
46. Hederman, '"The Crane Bag" and The North of Ireland', The Crane
Bag, 4:2 (1980), 98-9. Quotation from a letter of his to Conor Cruise
O'Brien, which continues: 'Your desire to demythicise us is, perhaps,
an impossibility, and one which can only serve to drive the "reality"
even more deeply and dangerously underground.'
47. 'An Unhealthy Intersection', Irish Times, 21 August 1975; quoted by
Richard Kearney in 'Beyond Art and Politics', The Crane Bag, 1,
no. 1 (Spring 1977), 9. [The quotation is actually from the continua-
tion of O'Brien's essay in Irish Times, 22 August 1975, p. 10. Ed.]
48. Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (London, 1975), p. 10.
4
Seamus Heaney: The

Timorous and the Bold
SEAMUS DEANE
As he tells us in his essay 'Feeling into Words', Seamus Heaney

signed one of his first poems 'Incertus', 'uncertain, a shy soul fret-
ting and all that' .1 Feeling his way into words so that he could find
words for his feelings was the central preoccupation of his appren-
ticeship to poetry. In a review of Theodore Roethke's Collected
Poems he declares that 'An awareness of his own poetic process,
and a trust in the possibility of his poetry, that is what a poet
should attempt to preserve' .2 The assurance of this statement is
partly undercut by the last phrase. It strikes that note of uncer-
tainty, of timorousness which recurs time and again both in his
poetry and in his prose. His fascination with the fundamentals of
music in poetry, his pursuit of the central energies in another
writer's work, his inspection of the experiences, early and late,
which guarantee, validate, confirm his perceptions, his admiration
of the sheer mastery of men like Hopkins or Yeats, all reveal a
desire for the absolute, radical certainty. But this boldness has
caution as its brother. For all its possibilities and strengths, poetry
is a tender plant. Heaney dominates a territory - his home ground,
the language of Hopkins, an idea of poetry - in a protective, tute-
lary spirit. Images of preservation are almost as frequent as those of
nourishment. The occlusions of life in the Northern state certainly
contributed to this. It was not only a matter of saying nothing,
whatever you say. For him, there is no gap between enfolding and
unfolding. It is a deep instinct, the reverence of an acolyte before a
64
THE TIMOROUS AND THE BOLD 65
mystery of which he knows he is also the celebrant. Hence the alle-

giance to the mastery of other writers is indeed that of an appren-
tice. But he is indentured, finally, to the idea of poetry itself and is
awed to see it become tactile as poems in his own hands. His bold-
ness emerges as he achieves mastery, but his timorousness remains
because it has been achieved over mystery.
This duality is visible in his first two books. Writing in a medley
of influence - Frost, Hopkins, Hughes, Wordsworth, Kavanagh,
Montague - he emerges from the struggle with them with a kind of
guilt for having overcome them. This sense of guilt merges with the
general unease he has displayed in the face of the Northern crisis
and its demands upon him, demands exacerbated by the success of
his poetry and the publicity given to him as a result. Although polit-
ical echoes are audible in Death of a Naturalist and in Door into
the Dark, there is no consciousness of politics as such, and certainly
no political consciousness until Wintering Out and North. It would
be easy, then, to describe his development as a broadening out from
the secrecies of personal growth in his own sacred places to a recog-
nition of the relations between this emergent self and the environing
society with its own sacred, historically ratified, places. This would
not be seriously inaccurate, but it is unsatisfactory because it misses
one vital element - the source of guilt in Heaney's poetry and the
nature of his search for it.
His guilt is that of the victim, not of the victimiser. In this he is
characteristic of his Northern Irish Catholic community. His atti-
tude to paternity and authority is apologetic - for having under-
mined them. His attitude to maternity and love is one of pining and
also of apology - for not being of them. Maternity is of the earth,
paternity belongs to those who build on it or cultivate it. There is a
politics here, but it is embedded in an imagination given to ritual.
That which in political or sectarian terms could be called nationalist
or Catholic, belongs to maternity, the earth itself; that which is
unionist or Protestant, belongs to paternity, the earth cultivated.
What Heaney seeks is another kind of earth or soil susceptible to
another kind of cultivation, the ooze or midden which will be cre-
ative and sexual (thereby belonging to 'art') and not barren and
erotic (thereby belonging to 'society' or 'politics'). Caught in these
tensions, his Ireland becomes a tragic terrain, torn between two
forces which his art, in a healing spirit, will reconcile. Thus his
central trope is marriage, male power and female tenderness con-
joined in ceremony, a ritual appeasement of their opposition. One
66 SEAMUS DEANE
source of appeasement is already in his hands from an early age -

the link between his own, definitively Irish experience and the expe-
rience of English poetry. There was a reconciliation to be further
extended by Kavanagh and Montague in their domestication of the
local Irish scene in the English poetic environment. But what was
possible, at one level, in poetry, was not possible at another, in pol-
itics. Part of the meaning of Heaney's career has been in the pursuit
of the movement from one level to another, always postulating the
Wordsworthian idea of poetry as a healing, a faith in qualities of re-
lationship which endure beyond the inclinations towards separa-
tion. Yet such has been the impact of the Troubles in the North,
that Heaney's central trope of marriage has been broken, and in
Field Work (1979) a new territory has been opened in pursuit of a
reconciliation so far denied, although so nearly achieved.
In the early volumes, poems commemorated activities and trades
which were dying out - thatchers, blacksmiths, water-diviners,
threshers, turf-cutters, ploughmen with horses, churners, hewers of
wood and drawers of water. These, along with the victims of histor-
ical disasters, the crappies of 1798, the famine victims of 1845-7,
are, in one light, archaic figures; in another, they are ancestral pres-
ences, kin to parents and grandparents, part of the deep hinterland
out of which modern Ireland, like the poet, emerged. These figures
have skills which are mysterious, even occult. Banished, they yet
remain, leaving their spoor everywhere to be followed, like 'Servant
Boy' who leaves his trail in time as well as on the ground:
Your trail
broken from haggard to stable,
a straggle of fodder
stiffened on snow,
comes first-footing
the back doors of the little
barons: resentful
and impenitent,
carrying the warm eggs.
In commemorating them, Heaney is forming an alliance between his

own poetry and the experience of the oppressed culture which they
represent (the Catholic Irish one) and also between his poetry and
the communal memory of which their skills, as well as their misfor-
tune, are part. Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark are not
simply threnodies for a lost innocence. They are attempted recover-

ies of an old, lost wisdom. The thatcher leaves people 'gaping at his
Midas touch'; the blacksmith goes in from the sight of motorised
traffic 'To beat real iron out'; the diviner 'gripped expectant wrists.
The hazel stirred'. And the Heaneys had a reputation for digging:
By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.
For the inheritor, the poet, his matching activity is the writing of
verse, a performance which has to be of that virtuoso quality that
will make people stare and marvel at this fascinating, almost
archaic, skill, still oddly surviving into the modern world. The
sturdy neatness of Heaney's verse forms in the first two volumes
and the homely vocabulary emphasise this traditional element, en-
abling us to treat them as solid, rural objects, authentically heavy,
not as some fake version of pastoral. But the alliance I spoke of has
yet deeper implications.
In Part 2 of 'A Lough Neagh Sequence' (from Door into the
Dark) we are given what, for want of a better word, may be called
a description of an eel:
a muscled icicle
that melts itself longer
and fatter, he buries
his arrival beyond
light and tidal water,
investing silt and sand
with a sleek root
That sibilant sensuousness, however spectacular, is not devoted en-

tirely to description. It gives to the movement of the eel an almost
ritual quality, converting the action into a mysterious rite, empha-
sising the sacral by dwelling so sensuously on the secular. This mys-
terious and natural life-force becomes the root of the soil into
which it merges before it is disturbed again by something like 'the
drainmaker's spade'. Heaney's fascination with the soil, for which
he has so many words, all of them indicating a deliquescence of the
solid ground into a state of yielding and acquiescence - mould,
slime, clabber, muck, mush and so on- ends always in his arousal
of it to a sexual life. Quickened by penetration, it responds. A spade
opens a canal in which the soil's juices flow. A turf-cutter strips it
68 SEAMUS DEANE
bare. It converts to water as a consonant passes into a vowel. Even

there, there is a sexual differentiation, the vowel being female, the
consonant male; and in the sexual differentiation there is a political
distinction, the Irish vowel raped by the English consonant. Thus a
species of linguistic politics emerges, with pronunciation, the very
movement of the mouth on a word being a kiss of intimacy or an
enforcement. Variations on these possibilities are played in
Wintering Out in poems like 'Anahorish', 'Gifts of Rain', 'Broagh',
'Traditions', 'A New Song', 'Maighdean Mara', and in 'Ocean's
Love to Ireland' and 'Act of Union' in North. It might be said that
the last two poems from the later volume go too far in their exten-
sion of the subtle sexual and political tensions of the others, turning
into a rather crude allegory what had been a finely struck implica-
tion. However, the close, intense working of the language in all
these poems derives from his activation of the words in terms of
sexual and political intimacies and hatreds. In addition, many
poems display an equal fascination for decomposition, the rotting
process which is part of the natural cycle but which signals our
human alienation from it. Fungoid growth, frog-spawn, the lep-
rosies of decay in fruit and crop, are symptoms of 'the faithless
ground' ('At a Potato Digging') and this extends to encompass
soured feelings, love gone rancid, as in 'Summer Home' (from
Wintering Out):
Was it wind off the dumps

or something in heat
dogging us, the summer gone sour,
a fouled nest incubating somewhere?
Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

of the possessed air.
To realise suddenly,
whip off the mat
that was larval, moving-
and scald, scald, scald.
The language of Heaney's poetry, although blurred in syntax on

occasion, has extraordinary definition, a braille-like tangibility, and
yet also has a numinous quality, a power that indicates the
existence of a deeper zone of the inarticulated below that highly ar-
ticulated surface:

in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.
('The Grauballe Man', North)
When myth enters the poetry, in Wintering Out (1972), the

process of politicisation begins. The violence in Northern Ireland
reached its first climax in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and of
assassinations, of the proroguing of Stormont and the collapse of a
constitutional arrangement which had survived for fifty years.
Heaney, drawing on the work of the Danish archaeologist P.V.
Glob, began to explore the repercussions of the violence on himself,
and on others, by transmuting all into a marriage myth of ground
and victim, old sacrifice and fresh murder. Although it is true that
the Viking myths do not correspond to Irish experience without
some fairly forceful straining, the potency of the analogy between
the two was at first thrilling. The soil, preserving and yielding up its
brides and bridegrooms, was almost literally converted into an altar
before which the poet stood in reverence or in sad voyeurism as the
violence took on an almost liturgical rhythm. The earlier alliance
with the oppressed and archaic survivors with their traditional skills
now became an alliance with the executed, the unfortunates who
had died because of their distinction in beauty or in sin. The act of
digging is now more ominous in its import than it had been in
1966. For these bodies are not resurrected to atone, in some bland
fashion, for those recently buried. They are brought up again so
that the poet might face death and violence, the sense of ritual
peace and order investing them being all the choicer for the back-
ground of murderous hate and arbitrary killing against which it was
being invoked. In 'The Digging Skeleton (after Baudelaire)' we read:
Some traitor breath

Revives our clay, sends us abroad
And by the sweat of our stripped brows
We earn our deaths; our one repose
When the bleeding instep finds its spade.
Even in this frame of myth, which has its consoling aspects, the
violence becomes unbearable. The poet begins to doubt his own
reverence, his apparent sanctification of the unspeakable:
70 SEAMUS DEANE
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
('Strange Fruit', North)
The sheer atrocity of the old ritual deaths or of the modern political
killings is so wounding to contemplate that Heaney begins to show
uneasiness in providing it with a mythological surround. To speak
of the 'man-killing parishes' as though they were and always would
be part of the home territory is to concede to violence a radical pri-
ority and an ultimate triumph. It is too much. Yet how is the vio-
lence, so deeply understood and felt, to be condemned as an
aberration? Can an aberration be so intimately welcomed?

cauled in tar,
who would connive
('Punishment', North)
Heaney is asking himself the hard question here - to which is his

loyalty given: the outrage or the revenge? The answer would seem to
be that, imaginatively, he is with the revenge, morally, with the
outrage. It is a grievous tension for him since his instinctive under-
standing of the roots of violence is incompatible with any profound
repudiation of it (especially difficult when 'the men of violence' had
become a propaganda phrase) and equally incompatible with the
shallow, politically expedient denunciations of it from quarters not
reluctant to use it themselves. The atavisms of Heaney's own commu-
nity are at this stage in conflict with any rational or enlightened hu-
manism which would attempt to deny their force. Heaney's dilemma
is registered in the perception that the roots of poetry and of violence
grow in the same soil; humanism, of the sort mentioned here, has no
roots at all. The poems 'Antaeus' and 'Hercules and Antaeus' which
open and close respectively the first part of North, exemplify the
dilemma. Antaeus hugs the ground for strength. Hercules can defeat
him only by raising him clear of his mothering soil.
the challenger's intelligence

is a spur of light,
a blue prong graiping him
out of his element
into a dream of loss
and origins ...
This is surely the nub of the matter- 'a dream of loss/and origins'.
Origin is known only through loss. Identity and experience are in-
evitably founded upon it. Yet Heaney's loss of his Antaeus-
strength and his Herculean postscript to it (in Part II of North) is
only a brief experiment or phase, leading to the poem 'Exposure'
which closes the volume. In 'Exposure', the sense of loss, of
having missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

The comet's pulsing rose ...
is created by the falseness of the identities which have been enforced

by politics. This is a moment in Heaney's work in which he defines
for himself a moral stance, 'weighing/My responsible tristia', only
to lose it in defining his imaginative stance, 'An inner emigre, grown
long-haired/And thoughtful', and then estimating the loss which
such definitions bring. To define a position is to recognise an iden-
tity; to be defined by it is to recognise loss. To relate the two is to
recognise the inescapable nature of guilt and its intimacy with the
act of writing which is both an act of definition and also the com-
memoration of a loss. The alertness to writing as definition - the
Hercules element - and the grief involved in the loss that comes
from being 'weaned' from one's origins into writing- the Antaeus
element - dominate Heaney's next book, Field Work. But it is
worth repeating that, by the close of North, writing has itself
become a form of guilt and a form of expiation from it.
In Field Work, all trace of at consoling or explanatory myth has
gone. The victims of violence are no longer distanced; their mytho-
logical beauty has gone, the contemplative distance has vanished.
Now they are friends, relations, acquaintances. The violence itself is
pervasive, a disease spread, a sound detonating under water, and it
stimulates responses of an extraordinary, highly-charged nervous-
ness in which an image flashes brightly, a split-second of tender-
ness, no longer the slowly pursued figure of the earlier books:
72 SEAMUS DEANE
In that neuter original loneliness

From Brandon to Dunseverick
I think of small-eyed survivor flowers,
The pined-for, unmolested orchid.
('Triptych I, After a Killing')
In this volume, that gravid and somnolent sensuousness of the

earlier work has disappeared almost completely. Absent too is the
simple logic of argument and syntax which has previously distin-
guished the four-line, four-foot verses he had favoured. Atrocity is
closer to him now as an experience and he risks putting his poetry
against it in a trial of strength. In 'Sibyl', Part II of 'Triptych', the
prophetic voice speaks of what is happening in this violent land:
'I think our very form is bound to change.

Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.
Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,
Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree
Can green and open buds like infants' fists
And the fouled magma incubate
Bright nymphs ... '
Forgiveness has to find its nerve and voice at a time when the conta-
mination has penetrated to the most secret and sacred sources. The
ground itself is 'flayed or calloused'. It is perhaps in recognition of
this that Heaney's voice changes or that the tense of his poems
changes from past to future. What had been the material of nostalgia
becomes the material of prophecy. The monologue of the self
becomes a dialogue with others. The poems become filled with
voices, questions, answers, guesses. In part, the poet has gained the
confidence to project himself out of his own established identity, but
it is also true, I believe, that the signals he hears from the calloused
ground are more sibylline, more terrifying and more public than
those he had earlier received. The recent dead make visitations, like
the murdered cousin in 'The Strand at Lough Beg' or as in 'The
Badgers', where the central question, in a very strange poem, is:
How perilous is it to choose

not to love the life we're shown?
At least a partial answer IS given m the poem m memory of

Robert Lowell, 'Elegy':
The way we are living,

timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
Choosing one's life is a matter of choosing the bold course, that of

not being overwhelmed, not driven under by the weight of grief,
the glare of atrocious events. Among the bold are the recently dead
artists Robert Lowell and Sean O'Riada; 3 but the victims of the
recent violence, Colum McCartney, Sean Armstrong, the unnamed
victim of 'Casualty', are among the timorous, not the choosers but
the chosen. Among the artists, Francis Ledwidge 4 is one of these, a
poet Heaney can sympathise with to the extent that he can embrace
and surpass what held Ledwidge captive:
In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium ...
Perhaps the poet was playing aspects of his own choice off
against one another. Leaving Belfast and the security of a job in
the University there, he became a freelance writer living in the
County Wicklow countryside, at Glanmore. In so far as he was
leaving the scene of violence, he was 'timorous'; in so far as he
risked so much for his poetry, for the chance of becoming 'pure
verb' ('Oysters'), he was 'bold'. The boldness of writing con-
fronted now the timorousness of being there, gun, not pen, in
hand. The flute-like voice of Ledwidge had been overcome by the
drum of war, the Orange drum. But this, we may safely infer, will
not happen to Heaney:
I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans
But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.
You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones
Though all of you consort now underground.
In 'Song' we have a delicately woven variation on this theme.

Instead of the timorous and the brave, we have the mud-flowers
and the immortelles, dialect and perfect pitch, main road and by-
road, and between them all, with a nod to Fionn McCool,
And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.
74 SEAMUS DEANE
This is the moment he came to Glanmore to find. It is the moment

of the Field Work sequence itself, four poems on the vowel '0', en-
visaged as a vaccination mark, a sunflower, finally a birthmark
stained the umber colour of the flower, 'stained to perfection' - a
lovely trope for the ripening of the love relationship here. It is the
remembered moment of 'September Song' in which
We toe the line

between the tree in leaf and the bare tree.
Most of all, though, it is the moment of the Glanmore sonnets,

ten poems, each of which records a liberation of feeling after stress
or, more exactly, of feeling which has absorbed stress and is the
more feeling. The sequence is in a way his apology for poetry. In
poetry, experience is intensified because repeated. The distance of
words from actuality is compensated for by the revival of the actual
in the words. This paradoxical relationship between loss and revival
has been visible in all Heaney's poetry from the outset, but in these
sonnets it receives a more acute rendering than ever before. The
purgation of the ominous and its replacement by a brilliance is a re-
current gesture here. Thunderlight, a black rat, a gale-warning,
resolve themselves into lightning, a human face, a haven. As in
'Exposure', but even more openly, the risk of an enforced identity is
examined. But the enforcement here is that desired by the poet
himself, the making of himself into a poet, at whatever cost, even
the cost of consequences this might have both for himself and his
family. The fear of that is portrayed in the Dantesque punishments
of 'An Afterwards'. But in the sonnets there is nothing apologetic,
in the sense of contrite, in the apology for poetry. This is a true
apologia. It transmits the emotion of wisdom. What had always
been known is now maieutically drawn out by these potent images
until it conjoins with what has always been felt. The chemistry of
the timorous and the bold, the familiar and the wild, is observable
in Sonnet VI, in which the story of the man who raced his bike
across the frozen Moyola River in 1947 produces that wonderful
final image of the final lines in which the polarities of the enclosed
and the opened, the domesticated and the weirdly strange, are
crossed, one over the other:
In a cold where things might crystallise or founder,

His story quickened us, a wild white goose
Heard after dark above the drifted house.
In such lines the sense of omen and the sense of beauty become one.
In Field Work violence is not tamed, crisis is not domesticated, yet
they are both subject to an energy greater, more radical even, than
themselves. By reiterating, at a higher pitch, that which he knows,
his familiar world, Heaney braves that which he dreads, the world
of violent familiars. They - his Viking dead, his dead cousin and
friends, their killers - and he live in the same house, hear the same
white goose pass overhead as their imaginations are stimulated by a
story, a legend, a sense of mystery.
It is not altogether surprising, then, to find Heaney accompanying
Dante and Vergil into the Inferno where Ugolino feeds monstrously
on the skull of Archbishop Roger. The thought of having to repeat
the tale of the atrocity makes Ugolino's heart sick. But it is precisely
that repetition which measures the scale of the atrocity for us,
showing how the unspeakable can be spoken. Dante's lines:
Tu vuo' ch'io rinove11i

disperato dolor che 'l cor mi preme
gia pur pensando, pria ch'io ne fave11i
(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, 11. 4-6) 5
have behind them Aeneas's grief at having to retell the tragic history
of the fall of Troy:
Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem,

Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum
eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi
et quorum pars magna fui ...
(Aeneid, II, 11. 3-6) 6
The weight of a translation is important here because it demon-

strates the solid ground-hugging aspect of Heaney's language and
concerns, and reminds us once again, as in Kinsella/ of the import-
ance of the Gaelic tradition and its peculiar weight of reference in
many poems. 'The Strand at Lough Beg' is enriched in the same
way by the reference to the Middle Irish work Buile Suibhne, a
story of a poet caught in the midst of atrocity and madness in these
specific areas:
Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim's track

Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-bears and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
76 SEAMUS DEANE
Atrocity and poetry, in the Irish or in the Italian setting, are being
manoeuvred here by Heaney, as he saw Lowell manoeuvre them,
into a relationship which could be sustained without breaking the
poet down into timorousness, the state in which the two things
limply coil. Since Field Work, Heaney has begun to consider his lit-
erary heritage more carefully, to interrogate it in relation to his
Northern and violent experience, to elicit from it a style of survival
as poet. In this endeavour he will in effect be attempting to reinvent
rather than merely renovate his heritage. In his work and in that of
Kinsella, Montague and Mahon, we are witnessing a revision of our
heritage which is changing our conception of what writing can be
because it is facing up to what writing, to remain authentic, must
always face - the confrontation with the ineffable, the unspeakable
thing for which 'violence' is our helplessly inadequate word.
From Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals (London, 1985), pp. 174-86.
NOTES
[This is the first essay in the volume to break with both the traditional
politico-literary and the New Critical approaches (represented respectively
by essays 2 and 1 and combined in essay 3). Instead, we find a commitment
to the ideological dimension of the poetic act influenced by both left-wing
(Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams) and conservative (Harold Bloom,
Rene Girard) theorists. Ed.]
1. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London,

1980), p. 45.
2. Ibid., p. 190.
3. Sean O'Riada (b. 1931) was an Irish composer and traditional
musician. [Ed.]
4. The poet, Francis Ledwidge (b. 1891), an Irish volunteer in the British
Army, was killed in France on 31 July 1917. [Ed.]
5. Translated by Heaney in 'Ugolino' as '"Even before I speakffhe
thought of having to relive all that/Desperate time makes my heart
sick'" [Ed.]
6. Deane's purpose in underpinning the Italian with some lines of Virgil
may be to 'politicise' the sense of 'atrocity' in Dante (and Heaney): '0
queen, you order me to reopen the unspeakable wound so that the
Greeks may bring down the Trojan wealth and their sorrowing
kingdom, pitiful events which I myself saw and in which I took a con-
siderable part'. [Ed.]
7. On Thomas Kinsella's use of the Gaelic tradition, see Deane's Celtic
Revivals (London, 1985), pp. 142-5. [Ed.]
5
Representation in Modern
Irish Poetry
EAMONN HUGHES
The introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British

Poetry claims 'to extend the imaginative franchise' .1 The anthology
functions as a Representation of the Poet's Act, suggesting that
somewhere, a poetic equivalent of Westminster, there are those who
hold the power to extend the franchise. Seamus Heaney's response
to the anthology, An Open Letter, is at root a declaration of inde-
pendence, an expressed desire not to be represented at a poetic
Westminster. But there are problems with this declaration of inde-
pendence. Seamus Deane has spoken of how Heaney caresses the
intimacies of the Anglo-Irish connection and we live in a world of
interdependencies in which such intimacies cannot simply be re-
jected, constituting as they do our reality. Rejecting them does not
return us to a pristine origin; it leaves us instead in a void. The
usual questions which arise from such considerations are about
how the Irish are (mis)represented. Instead, I want to consider how
certain Irish writers represent other cultures, particularly England's.
The second section of Seamus Heaney's North, particularly
'Singing School', is a pivotal moment in his career. Although often
dismissed, 2 it is Heaney's first sustained interrogation of his inti-
macy with English culture. His response is to strip his writing of the
influences of that culture. His later writing shows this to have been
a wrong turning, rejects the attempted nativism of 'Singing School',
and returns to English culture with a new and dialectical purpose:
nor is Heaney alone in this.
78
REPRESENTATION IN MODERN IRISH POETRY 79
Paul Muldoon's volumes end with long poems influenced by the

Irish language traditions of voyage and vision poetry but referring
only to these neutralises him by locating him in a safe, known tra-
dition. It implies a nativist endorsement of the methods of a
modern writer. Other, equally weighty influences in Muldoon's
writing, for example, the narrative songs of Bob Dylan or the de-
tective quests of Raymond Chandler, must be acknowledged. This
is not just to say that there is a need to relocate Irish poetry in a
broader context, although this is no small matter. It is rather to
stress that the continuous influence of local contexts is dialect-
ically balanced by influences from the wider world. Consequently,
Irish poetry is best viewed as an intertextuality which can only be
understood through a consideration of both nativist and external
influences. '7 Middagh Street', the bravura poem which closes
Meeting the British 3 (hereafter in the text as MtB), is a deliber-
ately intertextual debate on whether poetry can make things
happen. The figure of Auden begins the sequence by quoting from
Masefield's 'Cargoes', itself previously represented in the volume
as a parentally recommended distraction from growing sexual and
political knowledge ('Profumo', MtB, p. 8). The sequence ends
with Louis (MacNeice) and others proclaiming that' ... poetry can
make things happen- /not only can, but must ... ' (MtB, p. 59).
Nevertheless, there are those who hold to the idea that poetry is
separate from the political:
'MacNeice? That's a Fenian name.'

As if to say, 'None of your sort, none of you
will as much as go for a rubber hammer
never mind chalk a rivet, never mind caulk a seam
on the quinquereme of Ninevah.'
(MtB, p. 60)
These lines pit a monocultural and aestheticist position against the

actualities of Northern Ireland in a rewrite of 'Ulster was British,
but with no rights on/ The English lyric ... ' 4 and make clear the
fatuity of trying to hold on to the autonomous text - whether it be
'Ulster' or 'Cargoes' - in an internationalist, multinationalist and
post-imperial world.
Tom Paulin's poetry is also often read in relation to a nativist
tradition. In this case it is the unionist tradition which provides a
safe point of reference, on the assumption that Paulin's attitude to it
80 EAMONN HUGHES
is a disgust for its shabbinesss and vulgarity as apparently typified

by a poem such as 'Off the Back of a Lorry':
A zippo lighter
and a quilted jacket.
two rednecks troughing
in a gleamy diner,
the flinty chipmarks on a white enamel pail.
Paisley putting pen to paper
in Crumlin jail ... 5
However, the poem, like the tradition it describes, relies on American

popular culture - its 'tune' is that of 'These Foolish Things' - which
alters its apparent disgust to exasperated affection. Without a sense
of such external presences we are unable to appreciate the full impact
of the poetry. This is especially so in Paulin's most recent collection,
Fivemiletown, 6 which deploys a pentecostal range of tongues as it
sets out Paulin's 'defiant version of dinnseanchas' .7
There are a number of reasons for considering North (hereafter
in the text as N) especially Part II, in this light. It was among the
first and most keenly anticipated poetical responses to the Northern
political situation. 8 It is the first step in the politics of contemporary
poetry in the North and is indicative of the struggle the Northern
poet has to undergo in order to create a representative voice.
North, famously, is divided into two parts. In Part II, Heaney
turns from the synoptic vision of Part I, which is historical and ana-
logical in method, to a more personal and intertextual approach,
particularly in 'Singing School'. Certain theoretical considerations,
which bear on my opening comments, will elucidate Heaney's
method throughout North.
Stan Smith has used Julia Kristeva's concepts of 'foreign dis-
courses' and 'intertextuality' to assess Yeats's attitude to inheri-
tance.9 The issue of inheritance has a number of determinants, not
the least of which is the problematic relationship of the Irish writer
to English language and culture. Traditionally this gives rise to the
lot of the Irish writer; alienated from language, the writer must
work with language in such a way as to redefine the self in lan-
guage by forcing language to come to terms with experience for
which it is not fitted. The concept of 'intertextuality' is thus of
central importance to modern Irish writing as the writer's 'fretting'
issues in a dialogic procedure within language and his discourse
becomes 'carnivalesque'. This, Kristeva defines as 'a social and po-
litical protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, identity between

challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law' .10
The problematic nature of Irish identity required both a challenge
to cultural and political preoccupations, and an attempt to compre-
hend, in both senses of that word, the variety of cultural experience
which is available because of the split and joined nature of Irish-
English. Irish writing is therefore a literature in which lived experi-
ence and linguistic performance are not necessarily matched.
However, while much of this applies to contemporary writing, the
historical situation for Heaney is different from that of Yeats.
Volosinov has distinguished the 'native language ... one's "kith and
kin"; we feel about it as we feel about our habitual attire' from the
foreign language:
Only in learning a foreign language does a fully prepared conscious-

ness - fully prepared thanks to one's native language - confront a
fully prepared language which it need only accept. People do not
'accept' their native language- it is in their native language that they
first reach consciousness. 11
His point is that active response, rather than passive understanding,

is available through the native language. To acknowledge English
language and culture as foreign is to be passive, to be represented.
To reject English language and culture as foreign may achieve inde-
pendence but does not alter those representations. To accept
English language and culture as now native may be to lose a
measure of independence, but it is to gain the right to be active, to
represent. This is the central concern of Part II of North in which
Heaney represents the constituents of the self and its voice.
The first three poems of Part II represent the North as a babble of
voices. Throughout this welter, the poet's concern is with the poss-
ibilities of freedom and of reshaping language. 'Singing School' con-
tinues this representation of other voices with the purpose of
representing the self.
The epigraphs to 'Singing School', from the autobiographical
works of Wordsworth and Yeats (N, p. 62), signal Heaney's ex-
amination of the 'tradition of myself' .12 The self which he presents
is obviously from a Catholic background. To say this, however, is
not enough. If it were, we should have to agree with O'Brien
about the 'bleak conclusiveness' 13 of the volume, because we
would be surrendering to the implication that the self, and its
voice in these poems, is fixed, consistent, and unitary. Heaney's
82 EAMONN HUGHES
method in 'Singing School' does not allow that conclusion. The

'foreign discourses' within this sequence are external and deter-
mining in one way, but they are equally internal and determined
presences; that is to say they exist apart from Heaney, but they are
also a part of Heaney's own voice. His experience of language is
both personal and social; language exists as both 'langue', the
social order of language, and 'parole', the personal voice. 14
Intertextuality is, therefore, a fact of language as a whole, al-
though it can be subject to conscious manipulation as in 'Singing
School'. Heaney's voice does not exist apart from the allusions of
'Singing School'. We can recognise the voices of Wordsworth,
Yeats, Kavanagh, Deane, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hopkins, Lorca,
Goya- if a painter may be allowed a voice- Michael McLaverty,
Mansfield, Chekhov, Joyce, Montague, Mandelstam, and Ovid in
this sequence - all voices which are themselves intertextual and
informed by history - but if we removed them we would not be
left with the 'pure drop' of Heaney.
Each epigraph to 'Singing School' contains an apparent opposi-
tion: 'beauty and fear' for Wordsworth, and 'Orange' and 'Fenian'
for Yeats. In the autobiographical works from which the opposi-
tions come, the impulse is for both elements to be comprehended.
Wordsworth and Yeats are not simply opposed for Heaney - they
are not just English and Irish- because Wordsworth was a part of
Yeats's cultural 'langue' and both are a part of Heaney's cultural
'langue'. The sequence is concerned with comprehension rather
than opposition even if comprehension ultimately fails.
'The Ministry of Fear' (N, pp. 63-5) is about Heaney's growth as
a poet. Addressed to Seamus Deane, it begins with a reference to
Kavanagh, 15 and goes on to school life, education and the learning
of a variety of voices, but returns to the 'South Derry rhyme' (N,
p. 64 ), which locates his voice. The poem matches Heaney's lived
experience against an array of 'foreign discourses'. The language in
which he registers experience is the language of a poetic tradition
which he is constructing. Gazing into 'new worlds' from his school,
he echoes Shakespeare: 16 throwing biscuits away becomes a
Wordsworthian 'act of stealth': 17 his first attempts at writing poetry
develop, in Kavanagh's terms, into a life (N, p. 63 ). His experiences
in school - 'inferiority complexes .. .' - and corporal punishment,
are both Shakespearean 18 and Joycean 19 (N, p. 64). Certain events
seemingly cannot be voiced in this way - the growth of sexuality
and the encounter with the RUC (N, p. 64 j2° - which is consonant
with the inability of the English poetic traditions perceived by

Heaney to comprehend particular types of experience. He has
spoken of the 'insulated and balanced statement ... that corsetted
and decorous truthfulness' towards which 'recent English language'
poetry has tended. 21 Although certain issues cannot, apparently, be
forced into this tradition, Heaney relies on it to represent the facts
of his own life. The name he gives the framework in which he
grows, 'the ministry of fear', evokes both Coleridge's 'secret min-
istry' and Wordsworth's 'ministry/more palpable' 22 in such a way as
to suggest the importance of this poetic tradition in Heaney's self-
representation.
Heaney, as schoolboy, is 'shying as usual' (N, p. 64) - still in-
dulging the reticence of his community. This is not a response to the
overwhelming force of English culture. That culture represents a
means of expressing himself while still remaining true to the tradi-
tions of his community. The poem is an effort to comprehend both
the silence of the community and this poetic tradition. 'Ulster was
British, but with no rights on/The English lyric ... ' (N, p. 65) is
therefore a statement of the situation which Heaney is trying to
redress in his very articulation of it.
The poem's 'foreign discourses' can be divided into English and
Irish with the Irish voices being apparently more intimate. The
latter are just as removed from Heaney as the English ones. Deane,
for example, is bewildering. His 'hieroglyphics' are not easily com-
prehended and his 'svelte dictions' seem almost an embarrassment
(N, p. 65). Deane's strangeness is balanced by Kavanagh's reminder
of the importance of the local, which Heaney both endorses and
alters. Heaney's balancing of these two is a mark of his confidence.
English poetry, Irish poetry, Catholic schooling, sexuality, and the
fear of living in a hostile state are the elements which constitute
Heaney's identity in this poem. His confidence rests not in a cer-
tainty about how they fit together but in his juxtaposition of them
as his identity.
I threw them over the fence one night

In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road
Were amber in the fog. It was an act
of stealth.
Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here's two on's are sophisticated.
(N,p. 63)
84 EAMONN HUGHES
The movement from an exact time, place and climate, to Belfast

and then Berkeley- the outermost point of travel - provokes an al-
lusion to Lear which implies both a regret at this sophistication -
meaning disguise- and the sense that the wish to cast off one's 'ha-
bitual attire' is a sign of madness. 23 This is all the true voice of the
poet, because it is the voice he has composed from the available
components. When Blake Morrison reads 'The Ministry of Fear' as
a sign of Heaney's aspiration to participate in the English poetic
tradition, 24 he imposes his own provincial attitude and does not
admit the complexity of Heaney's relationship, which encompasses
both Kavanagh's distinction between the 'craven provincial' and the
'genuine parochial', and the duality of the self, to that tradition.
One half of one's sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from be-
longing to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one
wants to call it. But consciousness and quarrels with the self are the
result of what Lawrence called 'the voices of my education'. 25
Heaney's attitude is not one of being Irish and wanting to be

British; nor is it one of being tainted by Britishness and wanting to
be pristinely Irish. Rather, he feels himself pulled in two ways. His
identity and his voice are not unitary because their determinants are
not unitary. This struggle for definition is specifically located in a
preoccupied language.
The language issue is a common feature of any history of colonial
dispossession and the reassertion of national rights:
For any speaker of it, a given language is at once either more or less
his own or more or less someone else's, and either more or less cos-
mopolitan or more or less parochial - a borrowing or a heritage, a
passport or a citadei.2 6
What makes Heaney's case and that of Irish writers in general, so

problematical is that there is only one language which can practi-
cally fulfil all the contradictory roles of a language-struggle,
English. Although English is not itself unitary, the writer cannot
take what he wants from it and leave the rest. The poet's search for
a voice in which to express his own identity, his own 'parole', is
made the more complex by the fact that all the available 'langues'
are relativised within the one system. Nor is the voice wholly deter-
mined. It is also determining. The 'literary heritage' of 'The
Ministry of Fear' does not exist as an absolute; it is a heritage
which Heaney himself constructs and it is biddable to his voice.

Heaney is aware of this two-way process. His analysis of poetry as
both taking and making, 'a dig for finds that end up being plants>,2 7
is a description of how we construct traditions from available
materials. Poetry is both a determined activity and an act of con-
struction. 'The Ministry of Fear' establishes the complex of factors
from which Heaney's voice arises and which that voice alters. It is
the poet's attention to voice, in a world of reticence, which sets him
apart from his community and which bestows responsibilities upon
him. 'The Ministry of Fear' is located outside common experience
because it is attentive to specifically literary concerns, but it has re-
minders of the world of direct experience. The next two poems turn
to experienced rather than linguistic elements of the ministry of
fear.
'A Constable Calls' and 'Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966' are both
poems of alienation. Throughout the former there is an air of
menace and a sense of guilt which is disproportionate to the knowl-
edge of the actual wrong that has been committed. The visit is obvi-
ously routine and so too is the fear which nonetheless attaches to it.
If 'A Constable Calls' is regarded as a measured response to the
RUC, rooted in experience, then 'Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966' is
most often regarded as being far from measured.
Morrison has called 'Orange Drums ... ' (N, p. 68) 'hostile carica-
ture', and has noted that Heaney did not include it in his Selected
Poems, although Morrison's judgement and Heaney's decision are
not necessarily related. Morrison has also pointed out the contrast
between 'exact' in 'Punishment' (N, pp. 37-8) and 'grossly' in
'Orange Drums ... '. 28 The contrast is not simply, as he implies, sec-
tarian. 'Exact' is part of an honest effort to account for the way in
which a sense of belonging includes collusion in certain communal
emotions; it does not imply approval of those emotions but it is an
admission of the power of the communal over the individual for
which Morrison's liberal conscience does not allow. 'Grossly', pri-
marily a description of a drum, becomes, because of what the drum
symbolises, part of the poet's confrontation of disquieting features
within his experience. Both 'grossly' and 'exact' are alike in
denoting disquiet.
'Orange Drums ... ' is a carefully specific instance of the ministry
of fear: Orange drums in 1966 had a sharper edge than they had
had in previous years. In 1966 they were a response to the 50th an-
niversary celebrations in Southern Ireland of Easter 1916, as well as
86 EAMONN HUGHES
being an expression of Orange triumphalism. As F.S.L. Lyons has

said:
The 1916 anniversary convinced staunch Ulster Unionists, if they

needed any convincing, that the leopard had not changed his spots
and that inside every nationalist there was a ravening republican
waiting to get out. 29
1966 might with some justice be seen as the pivotal year in the de-
velopment of the present political situation in Northern Ireland. On
the one hand Terence O'Neill's 'liberal unionism' seemed to offer
hopeful signs, but Ian Paisley had already achieved some promi-
nence. The possibilities of a North-South 'rapprochement' seemed
strong, but Catholics were being shot and their businesses burned.
The poem is concerned with this balance, no matter how tentatively
and unsuccessfully. The fear and hostility in the poem are obvious,
but there are three balancing factors which have to be ignored if the
poem is to read as a simple expression of bigotry. Firstly, the poem
is about a part of Heaney's own experience; it is, like everything
else in this sequence, a lesson learnt in his 'singing school'. The
voice describing these events is made, in part, by them and cannot
deny them. Placing the poem in Heaney's work as a whole confirms
that what it describes cannot be merely denied. It is one of his
'craftsman' poems in which there is an explicit or implicit compari-
son between a craft and poetry making. It would therefore be
doubly out of character for Heaney to reject completely the
drummer. Finally, the line, 'He is raised up by what he buckles
under' (N, p. 68), carries the sense of how any craftsman, including
Heaney, working within rules and conventions, is better for such
discipline. There is a surprising allusion within the line. The only
other appearance of a form of the word 'buckle' occurs in
'Fosterage' where G.M. Hopkins is 'his buckled self' (N, p. 71), a
reference to 'The Windhover' and its central pun on the word
'buckle':
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, 0 my chevalier! 30
Here again rule and convention are seen as both a constriction and
a spur to better craftsmanship. The line quoted from 'Orange
Drums ... 'paraphrases these lines from 'The Windhover' and while
the allusion is tentative, it remains central to an understanding of

the tensions and difficulties of this poem, as well as to the project of
the sequence as a whole.
The sequence has so far moved from the confident intertextuality
of 'the Ministry of Fear' to the naked, unallusive voice of 'A
Constable Calls' and the awkward, hesitant allusion of 'Orange
Drums ... ' in such a way that it seems as if the voice which Heaney
is constructing is unable to represent all aspects of the self. The
'voices of his education' have little to offer when he wishes to bring
certain parts of his lived experience into his writing; the same gap
appeared in 'The Ministry of Fear' when Heaney dealt with inti-
mate or Northern Irish experiences. This monologism, as opposed
to the intertextual dialogue, suggests that the project of 'The
Ministry of Fear' might fail. Alternatively, the second and third
poems of the sequence can be seen as precisely those aspects of the
lived experience which must be accommodated by 'the voices of ed-
ucation', if those voices are to retain their value, and if Heaney's
own voice is not to be irremediably split. In this light, the
confidence of 'The Ministry of Fear' becomes an overly easy cul-
tural ecumenism which fails to take account of the project's
inherent difficulties and tensions.
'Summer 1969' addresses itself to this issue. In a kind of exile,
sweating through the 'life of Joyce' (N, p. 69), Heaney is guiltily
preoccupied with events in Belfast. The question at the heart of the
poem is 'How should the poet respond?' In what way should he try
to 'touch the people', and how should he try to represent these
events? Lorca is suggested as a possible model but it is Goya who
dominates this poem. If the 'life of Joyce' and superficial indiffer-
ence of the first stanza suggest and then discount exile as a possible
response, the second stanza acts as pivot and the references to Goya
indicate two possible responses.
Those responses are mediated by an echo of Yeats' 'Municipal
Gallery Revisited'. 31 In each case, the poet looks at paintings as a
way of representing his circumstances. Heaney, in partial exile,
cannot share Yeats' tranquillity. The first painting to which he
refers, Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May' (N, p. 69), offers en-
gagement as a response. In both the painting and Heaney's descrip-
tion of it, sympathy is with the rebel rather than the military firing
squad. This is an attitude Heaney had taken previously, 32 but its
dangers become apparent as he turns his attention to Goya's 'Black
Paintings': 'Saturn devouring his son' - 'Saturn/Jewelled in the
88 EAMONN HUGHES
blood of his own children'; 'Quarrel by cudgelling' - ' ... that holm-
gang/ Where two berserks club each other to death! For honour's
sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking' (N, p. 70). This is the most
pessimistic note of the entire sequence. In between these two paint-
ings is 'Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips/ Over the world ... '
(N, p. 70) which can only be 'The Colossus (Panic)', although it is
not a 'Black painting' nor is it in the same room as them. 33 The
order in which Heaney consciously places these paintings offers a
gruesome commentary by analogy on Ireland. The old sow eating
her farrow is evident in 'Saturn devouring his son'; a mass evacua-
tion flees before the figure of chaos and we are left with 'two
berserks' locked in a holmgang, the almost obsolete word connot-
ing the 'anachronistic passions' 34 at large in the North. The poem
enables us to construct this analogy between Goya's paintings and
Northern Ireland, but it is only by placing the poem back in the se-
quence that we can evaluate it. The preceding poems in the se-
quence are almost entirely enmeshed in local actualities. 'Summer
1969' suffers the opposite fate. Here the cosmopolitan dominates
and Ireland is represented only by analogy. The poem's importance
in the sequence lies in Goya as a model of artistic response:
He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.
(N,p. 70)
The histrionic quality does not match Heaney's reticence and

thoughtfulness in other poems in the sequence, but while this open-
ness and vulnerability amounts to engagement it also leads to the
madness and despair of the 'Black Paintings'. The analogies that we
are enabled to construct are subject to O'Brien's strictures about
determinism: the imposition of paradigms which are not responsive
to local contingencies is not worthwhile, leading only to the cliched
response of 'Whatever you say say nothing'.
This critique of 'Summer 1969' is substantiated by the opening
words of the following poem, 'Fosterage':
'Description is revelation!' Royal

Avenue, Belfast, 1962.
A Saturday afternoon ...
(N,p. 71)
The opening words, spoken by the poem's dedicatee, Michael

McLaverty, are immediately responded to by the poem's exact
location in time and space, and more importantly by the fact that
the poet is once again on home ground. McLaverty, in Heaney's
description of him, possesses 'fidelity to the intimate' while being
sensible of 'the great tradition that he works in' 35 and the virtues
of patience and a sense of the value of words. He is an exemplary
presence: the writer as a congruence of the forces at work in
Northern Ireland. What is notable about the poem is that it not
only moves the poet back to his own place but also back in time,
against the flow of the sequence so far. 1962 is a time of origins:
'me newly cub bed in language' (N, p. 71 ), and the preceding
poems are therefore partially revoked. The 'ministry of fear' is
not denied, but the focus has shifted to the idea of a second
ministry, and a new beginning. Other voices are present in
the poem: McLaverty's voice, obviously, but it in turn is a
conflation of Hopkins, Mansfield, and Chekhov. 36 Affection for
McLaverty and his role as foster-father draws Heaney back into
Irish history.
There are undercurrents in the poem, however, which belie this,
perhaps sentimental, reading. The 'words ... like obols' (N, p. 71)
may be highly valued but the simile suggests a death of the self. Nor
is McLaverty's teaching straightforward. The advice, 'Go your own
way./ Do your own work', is ironical, especially when followed by
references to models more suited to the short-story writer than to
the poet. In this way the poem distances the voices within it and
suggests that the poet's own voice, while acknowledging its compo-
nents, must speak for itself. The heart of the poem is the restraint
proposed by McLaverty which is opposed to the violence of Goya.
This restraint can be just as vulnerable and open as Goya's over-
statement.
'Exposure' (N, pp. 72-3) is the consequence of the previous five
poems of the sequence. It presents us with the poet at the moment
of writing. As with 'Fosterage' it is located in a specific time and
place: 'It is December in Wicklow' (N, p. 72). The title bespeaks the
poet's sense of vulnerability away from the protection of fosterage
and the question the poem poses is 'who is responsible for this ex-
posure?'; is it the poet himself or is it a failure of the cultural tradi-
tions evident in the rest of the sequence. Those traditions are here
present only as hints and traces: Yeats may be present in the
diction; Joyce, Montague and Kinsella in the fire imageryY Neil
Corcoran identifies Osip Mandelstam as the primary presence in the
poem with a secondary reference to Ovid in exile. 38 The English
poetic tradition is replaced by others just as the country replaces
90 EAMONN HUGHES
the city, the South ironically replaces the eponymous North, and
the historical replaces the contemporary:
I am neither internee nor informer:

An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful: a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre.
(N,p. 73)
The poet, refusing the opposed contemporary terms 'internee' and

'informer', has adopted the strategy of the 'wood-kerne', whose en-
gagements are followed by strategic withdrawals. The choice of
term is important, because this reference back to the Elizabethan
period is to an originary moment in the relation of Ireland and
England. As Heaney withdraws to the South and engages in dia-
logue with Irish, Russian and Roman voices, 39 he represents himself
in a term derived from Old Irish. The exposure of the poem is, in
part, a stripping away of English voices. The poem offers no under-
standing; its tone is one of regret and puzzlement. By refusing both
contemporary terms within which the self might be comprehended,
there is a sense of lost opportunity and of a lost self. The suggestion
of the death of the self in 'Fosterage' is continued by this poem's
winter imagery and its movement from the contemporary to the his-
torical, a time before the self. This leads us to a contradiction in the
poem's title: what is being exposed if not the self?
The answer is best provided by the autobiographical impulse un-
derlying the sequence. If the other poems are taken to be 'spots of
time' - those epiphanic moments which bring the self into definition
- then the 'missed comet' is the failure to comprehend the variety of
selves in the other poems. The exposure is then not of the self but
of the failure of self-comprehension, indicated by the absence of
English voices. This is not to say that there has been a complete
failure to carry out the sequence's project. Its context is not only the
poems which precede it in North but also those which follow it in
Field Work. 40 The autobiographical impulse has not yet been
worked out. Comprehension has not yet been achieved because the
representation of the self eventually lacks one of its prime con-
stituents. The project of 'Singing School' is thus continued in Field
Work and beyond until it can achieve, not that Irish shibboleth of
independence but rather a sense of dialectical equality in Station
Island, with a glance back to the missed comet of 'Exposure':
... 'Who cares,'

he jeered, 'any more? The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
a waste of time for somebody your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod's gameY
After this, Heaney, previously a digger and delver 'par excellence',

becomes a traveller, and in The Haw Lantern42 he makes English
both a citadel and a passport to cross frontiers, especially the fron-
tier of writing, and in so doing acquires the right to represent as
well as being represented.
From Aspects of Irish Studies, ed. M. Hill and S. Barber (Belfast,

1990), pp. 55-64, 146-7.
NOTES
[Eamonn Hughes's essay is the first one in this collection to draw attention
to the literary commonalty which 'Northern poets' like Paul Muldoon and
Tom Paulin share with Heaney (See Further Reading, p. 268). His theoreti-
cal perspective is more coherent and less idiosyncratic than Deane's (essay
4), responding to an influential line of thinking which passed from the
Russian Formalists into structuralism and poststructuralism.
Volosinov, Bakhtin, Saussure and Kristeva enable him to examine
Heaney's development in North in terms of a sustained analogy with lin-
guistic phenomena, thus mediating between more ideologically partisan
readings like those of Longley (essay 3) and Deane. Heaney's 'An Open
Letter' (p. 78) was first published as a Field Day Pamphlet (Derry, 1983)
and can be found in Ireland's Field Day (London, 1985). Michael
McLaverty (b. 1907) was a Belfast short-story writer and novelist (p. 88).
Ed.]
1. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, 'Introduction', The Penguin

Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1982),
p. 20.
2. The two most recent studies of Heaney - Neil Corcoran, Seamus
Heaney (London, 1986), and Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus
Heaney (London, 1988)- follow the usual pattern of concentrating
discussion of Part II on 'Exposure'.
3. Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (London, 1987).
4. Seamus Heaney, North (London, 1975), p. 65.
92 EAMONN HUGHES
5. Tom Paulin, Liberty Tree (London, 1983), p. 33.

6. Tom Paulin, Fivemiletown (London, 1987).
7. George Watson, 'An uncomfortable, spikey poet', Irish Literary
Supplement, 7:2 (Fall1988), 33.
8. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London, 1982), ch. 4. See also:
Simon Curtis, 'Seamus Heaney's North', Critical Quarterly, 18:1
(Spring 1976), 80-3, 83; Edna Longley, 'Fire and Air', The Honest
Ulsterman, 50 (Winter 1975), 179-83, 182; Douglas Dunn, 'Manana
is now', Encounter, 45 (Nov. 1975), 76-81, 76, 77; Conor Cruise
O'Brien, 'A Slow North-east Wind', The Listener (25 Sept. 1975),
pp. 404-5.
9. Stan Smith, 'Writing a Will, Yeats's Ancestral Voices in "'The
Tower" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War"', Irish University
Review, 13:1 (Spring 1983), 14-37.
10. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', in Desire in Language
(Oxford, 1980), p. 65.
11. V. N. Volisinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans.
Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 73-81:
the direct quotations are on pp. 75, 81 and 73 respectively.
12. W.B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York,
1964), p. 312.
13. O'Brien, 'A Slow North-east Wind', p. 404.
14. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin, intro. Jonathan Culler (London, 1974), p. 9. See also Culler's
'Introduction', pp. xvii-xviii and Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney,
p. 15, n. 2 for Heaney's own sense of this issue.
15. Patrick Kavanagh, 'Epic', Collected Poems (London, 1972), p. 136.
Allusions will be identified in the notes where appropriate.
16. William Shakespeare, The Tempest V.i.182.
17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell
(Harmondsworth, 1972), 1805 version, Book 1, ll.388-9. Heaney's
epigraph is identifiably from the 1805 text, Book 1, ll.305-9, so I
shall refer only to it.
18. William Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i.148.
19. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London,
1968), pp. 51-2- the 'pandy bat' incident.
20. The incidents with the RUC, and with the priest at school, recall
Joyce's two masters, Church and State, and there is an echo of
Yeats's 'The years like great black oxen tread the world' ('The
Countess Cathleen', 1892 text, in The Variorum Edition of the

Plays, ed. Russell K. Alspach [London, 1966], p. 158) in the descrip-
tion of the police 'like black cattle'. Although only hints, it is
significant that the writers whom Heaney calls on here are both
Irish. Sexual and political knowledge are precisely those areas of
self-comprehension to be repressed by reading Masefield's 'Cargoes'
in Meeting the British.
21. Seamus Deane, 'Unhappy and at Home, an Interview with Seamus
Heaney', The Crane Bag, 1 (Spring 1977), 61-7, 63. See also Blake
Morrison, Seamus Heaney, p. 44, n. 42.
22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Frost at Midnight', II. 72, in Poetical
Works, ed. E.H. Coleridge (London, 1969), p. 242; William
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, 11.370-1. There is a slight
Orwellian allusion here.
23. Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.105. Michael Longley uses the same
quotation as epigraph to 'Options' which pre-dates 'Singing School'
and is similarly about the variety of voices available to a poet; Poems
1953-83 (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 106-7.
24. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney, pp. 66-7.
25. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Pruse (London, 1967), pp. 282-3, and
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978
(London, 1980), pp. 29, 35; Lawrence, of course, being a 'voice of
education'.
26. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays
(London, 1975), p. 242.
27. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 41.
28. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney, p. 66.
29. F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1973), p. 761.
30. G.M. Hopkins, Poems and Prose, selected and introduced by W.H.
Gardner (Harmondsworth, 1953), p. 30.
31. W.B. Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, ed. R.J. Finneran (London,
1983), pp. 319-21. This poem's presence is felt throughout North.
32. Seamus Heaney, 'Old Derry's Walls', The Listener, 24 October 1968,
pp. 521-3.
33. See Antonio J. Oneiva, A New Complete Guide to the Prado Gallery,
trans. P.M. O'Neill, new edn rev. Miriam Finkelman (Madrid,
1966), p. 182. See also Hugh Thomas, Goya: The Third of May,
1808 (London, 1972); F.D. Klingender, Goya in a Democratic
Tradition, intro. Herbert Read (London, 1948); G.A. Williams, Goya
and the Impossible Revolution (London, 1976), for accounts of the
94 EAMONN HUGHES
historical and political background to Goya's work which enables

Heaney's analogy.
34. Seamus Heaney, 'Delirium of the Brave', The Listener, 27 November
1969, pp. 757-9.
35. Seamus Heaney, 'Introduction' in Michael McLaverty, The Collected
Short Stories (Dublin, 1978), p. 7.
36. Ibid., p. 7 where 'that note of exile' is to be found in Chekhov.
37. See A Portrait, pp. 189-90, John Montague, The Rough Field, 3rd
edn (Dublin, 1979), p. 19 and Thomas Kinsella, 'Death Bed', New
Poems 1973 (Dublin, 1973).
38. Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, pp. 124-6; and see Seamus Heaney,
The Government of the Tongue (London, 1989), p. 72.
39. An echo of Yeats's 'Politics', with its rejection of Roman, Russian,
and Spanish politics; Yeats, The Poems, p. 348.
40. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London, 1979).
41. Seamus Heaney, Station Island (London, 1984).
42. Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London, 1987).
6
The Mouth, the Meal and

the Book: Review of Field
Work
CHRISTOPHER RICKS
Those of us who have never swallowed an oyster have presumably

never lived life to the full. The Augustan poet was not merely
mocking the heroic when he said that the man must have had a
palate coated o'er with brass who first risked the living morsel
down his throat. Seamus Heaney offers 'Oysters ('Alive and vio-
lated') as his opening. Opened at once are the oyster, the mouth,
the meal and the book. It is at the start a delicious poem, not least
in its play of the obdurate against the liquid:
Our shells clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight.
'Clacked', for once, does not rebuke the 'tongue' of other people;
'plates' finds itself soothed out into 'palate', rather like 'oysters' into
'estuary'.
But indignation flickers, and though it is appeased it is not
expunged.
Bivalves: the split bulb

And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
95
We are not to sigh Shucks. For even the happiest recollection is

liable to be blandly tinged with snobbery, as if memory were a fine
cellar:
And there we were toasting friendship,

Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
So in the end, having next riddled the oysters (they are something of
a riddle themselves) as 'The frond-lipped, brine-stung/Glut of privi-
lege', the poem is stung too:
And was angry that my trust could not repose

In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
The anger is real, but is headstrong. Instead of the nouns of privi-

lege (property and possessions), there is to be the imaginative activ-
ity that is alive only as verb. At least since Ezra Pound, this has
been a lure for poets, a thrill and a delusion. For as Heaney's last
line acknowledges, 'verb' is indissolubly a noun. And the word
which matters most is 'trust'.
When we come to close this book which opened with 'Oysters',
we have finally contemplated the hideous devouring of a living
morsel through all eternity. For the book ends with 'Ugolino',
Dante's insatiable avenger, gnawing undyingly and unkillingly
upon the head of the man who had starved to death his children
and him:
That sinner eased his mouth up off his meal

To answer me, and wiped it with the hair
Left growing on his victim's ravaged skull,
Then said ...
The 'eased' is cause of wonder; and of horror, like the serviceable-

ness and decorum of that napkin of hair. 'Ugolino' too is in part
about trust:
how my good faith

Was easy prey to his malignancy ...
REVIEW OF FIELD WORK 97
The word 'prey' feels how intimate may be the bonds between
trusting and tasting. Both the first and this last poem in the book
speak of 'my tongue'.
Field Work is alive with trust (how else would field work be pos-
sible?), and it could have been created only by an experienced poet
secure in the grounded trust that he is trusted. Heaney is the most
trusted poet of our islands. (Larkin is now trusted not to produce
bad poems, but not necessarily to produce poems.) Field Work is an
even better book than North, Heaney's last collection, in that it is
more profoundly exemplary. One poem is admittedly sceptical of
the word 'exemplary' when applied to poets, as is clear from the
question which the poet, lodged in the ninth circle of Hell, puts to
his wife when ('Aided and abetted by Virgil's wife') she visits his
damnation. About the poets now alive, he asks:
whose is the life

Most dedicated and exemplary?
But Heaney's art is urgently exemplary while being aware that

urgency may easily be in collusion with violence and threats. A
landscape's peace of nature, a person's peace of mind, a land's
peace: 'The end of art is peace' could be, we are told, the motto of
the woven harvest bow.
North, by bending itself to deep excavations within the past of
Ireland and of elsewhere, achieved a racked dignity in the face of
horrors. The poems were truly enlightened. But Field Work shows,
more variously and with high composure, that there is something
more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugenie de
Guerin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his,
that she 'was certainly not enlightened'. Yet when James went on,
'But she was better than this- she was light itself,' the respectful di-
rectness of this does itself have something of light's unarguable
presence. Its presence is not sentimentalised in Heaney's poems. 'I
think the candour of the light dismayed us.'
Ungullible trust will always be of value, but especially so in Ireland

torn by reasonable and unreasonable distrust and mistrust. The re-
silient strength of these poems is in the equanimity even of their
surprise at some blessed moment of everyday trust. So the book's
second poem, 'After a Killing', likewise gives us food for thought,
but this time the food is not outre like oysters. What hope is there,
after a killing? Only this - and if we insist on prefacing it with
'only', we have already sold the pass:
And today a girl walks in home to us

Carrying a basket full of new potatoes,
Three tight green cabbages, and carrots
With the tops and mould still fresh on them.
Such an ending, in its tender hope, looks cynicism's desperation

levelly in the eye. The gait with which the line itself 'walks in home
to us' is simply sturdy. There are no exclamations, even of grati-
tude, just a sense of gratitude. What could be less novel than those
new potatoes? Some may think that this is bathos, but the presence
within these poems of William Wordsworth (Dorothy and he at one
point make a fleeting appearance, grave comic spectres not lightly
to be called up for comparison) is a reminder that after the
Augustans had derided it there really was discovered to be such a
thing as the art of sinking in poetry.
Art practises what it preaches, and it turns into substantial worth
what might be unworthy in both of those verbs. Heaney's poems
matter because their uncomplacent wisdom of trust is felt upon the
pulses, his and ours, and they effect this because they themselves
constitute a living relationship of trust between him and us. He
trusts you not to snigger at surprising simplicities:
trusting the gift,

risking gift's undertow.
says Heaney of a man with a musical gift, and it is brought home

that there may be as much wisdom in trusting your own gifts as in
trusting those who bear gifts.
What saves the poems from cadging is their supple legitimate
pre-emption, their conscious, resourceful and bracing acknowl-
edgement of what is at stake. Braced to, not against, as in the de-
scription of the sunflower as 'braced to its pebble-dashed wall',
where even 'dashed' is secure and stable and not destructively
hasty. A great deal of mistrust is misconstruction, and like the
acrobat half-feigning a faltering Heaney's poems often tremble
with the possibilities of misconstruing and misconstruction which
they openly provide but which only a predator would pounce
upon.
It is there, for instance, in the play of 'mould' against 'fresh':
and carrots
With the tops and mould still fresh on them.
After all, one near-fetched sense of the word 'mould' would bring it
into contention with 'fresh'. Heaney's sense of the word here (the
brown earth, not the green mildew) is manifestly unmistakable, but
the force of the line is partly a matter of the other sense's being
tacitly summoned in order to be gently found preposterous.
Nothing can more bring home the innocent freshness of carrots
with the earth still on them than the calm rejection- utterly unut-
terable - of the dingier sense of 'mould'.
Heaney practises this beneficent sleight throughout the poems. It
is there earlier in this same poem in the line, 'As if the unquiet
founders walked again', where the faltering sense of 'founders' is
felt under the feet of the line, a line which walks so differently from
'And today a girl walks in home to us'. The founder of modern
Ireland may perhaps founder. Or here:
And as forgotten water in a well might shake

At an explosion under morning
Or a crack run up a gable,
She began to speak.
It is unthinkable that Heaney just didn't notice the subterranean

ripple of 'well might'. It is not an unfortunate oversight: it
is a fortunate overseeing, and its point is to 'shake' our sense of
these relationships without shaking our trust. If you were to notice
nothing, you well might be impervious to the unseen ripples.
The ripple has, even in this sardonic poem ('Sibyl'), an affinity to
comedy. Indeed, 'well might' is a comic counterpart of Kingsley
Amis's satirical shaking of the word 'just'. Amis invoked Shirley:
Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
And in doing so expressed his settled distrust:
Which does the just about as much

Good as a smart kick in the crotch.
Just about as much.

1 00 CHRISTOPHER RICKS
Heaney's comedy, like all the best comedy, is a matter of trust. So

'The Skunk' is an exquisitely comic love-poem, and you have to
love your wife most trustingly, and trust in the reciprocity, before
you would trust yourself to a comparison of her to a skunk. No
offence meant; no offensive launched. Then the poem is at once fol-
lowed by 'Homecomings', where the loved woman is a clay nest
and the man is a martin. Affectionate, delicate, calmingly dark, and
as confidently trusting in its own arc as is the bird in its flights
nimbly and repeatedly home, the poem goes out of its way (except
that this is how the martin skims and veers) to speak in ways which
would lend themselves to misconstruction if it weren't that love is a
nesting trust. 'Far in, feather-brains tucked in silence.' For in this
sweet evocation of the bird within the nest of the woman's head,
nothing could be more remote than any accusation that anyone is
feather-brained. How could we appreciate such trustful remoteness
except by calling up the sheer ludicrousness of its possibility?
Mould my shoulders inward to you.

Occlude me.
Be damp clay pouting.
Let me listen under your eaves.
The tucked-in pressure is there in the way in which 'mould' wants

to expand into 'shoulders'; and the mouth of the clay nest may be
'pouting', but in the confidence that no other pouting is going on
(pure Keats, this). Nothing could be more unmisgivingly an act of
loving inclusion than the stern word 'occlude' here, just as nothing
could be less furtive, more openly trusting, than the final
eavesdropping.
No need of manna when the actual is marvellous, our
conversation
a white picnic tablecloth spread out

Like a book of manners in the wilderness.
Likewise, the word 'implicated' is consciously innocent in Heaney:

implicated, not in wrongdoing, but as the plaiting of the harvest
bow. Heaney's resourcefulness is astonishing, not least in that as-
tonishment is not then something which the poems incite. This
pacific art has learnt from the poet to whom Heaney offers here an
elegy, Robert Lowell, but the effect is altogether different from
Lowell's Atlantic astonishments. But then Heaney's trust in other
poets is itself part of his art, as in the rueful comfort to be divined

within the conclusive line: 'Our island is full of comfortless noises'.
Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises ... And that's true too.
From The London Review of Books, 8 November 1979, pp. 4-5.
NOTE
[An Augustan point of reference is established in Ricks's first paragraph
(the quotation is from Gay's 'Trivia', Book III, 11.195-8) and this is rein-
forced by the invocation (p. 98) of Peri Bathous (largely if not entirely by
Pope: see Edna Leake Steeves [ed.], The Art of Sinking in Poetry [New
York, 1968]). This is the second review by Ricks to figure in this volume
(see essay 1) and his (not quite serious?) assimilation of Heaney into an
English tradition rooted in the eighteenth century shows again a New
Critical canonical preoccupation. But the approach is now less analytical
and more widely discursive, the tone more playful, in tune with a changing
critical climate (as I suggest in my Introduction). Ricks's sharing of a liter-
ary camaraderie with the poet is very different, certainly, from the 'author-
itative' stance with which Leavis took 'the line of wit' as a touchstone to
judge other poetry in Revaluation (London, 1936). Ed.]
7
Review of Field Work

TERRY EAGLETON
'Soon people are going to start comparing him to Yeats', wrote

Clive James of Seamus Heaney, a cunningly self-fulfilling prophecy.
Actually Heaney has about as much in common with Yeats as he
has with Longfellow, but he is, you see, Irish, and what more
obvious to compare one Irishman to than another? Isn't there some-
thing unwittingly racist about this way of thinking? Why should a
Southern Protestant pseudo-Ascendency crypto-fascist who died in
1939 be presumed to be comparable to a contemporary Northern
Catholic of peasant stock, just because of the abstract fact of their
shared Irishness?
There are two particular reasons, among thousands of others,
why the comparison of Heaney with Yeats is inept. Yeats's
conception of poetry was a fairly commonplace Romantic
inspirationalism, entailing an irrationalism not unconnected with
his politics. Heaney, by contrast, conceives of art as labour, craft
and production, precariously analogous to manual labour, a
traffic with Nature mediated by verbal rather than material
instruments:
Vowels ploughed into each other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
102
And I am quickened with a redolence

Of the fundamental dark unblown rose ...
('Glanmore Sonnets')
Perhaps the untypical formality of this, its metrical decorum and

faint sense of intellectual conceit, is meant to alert us to the specula-
tive, rather strained quality of the writing/work metaphor, which in
Heaney's work involves a displacement in a double sense - the cre-
ative displacement of all metaphor, but also, notably in the proba-
tionary poems of Death of a Naturalist, a secondary substitution of
intellectual for manual labour. But Frank Ormsby is probably right,
if a little romantically uncritical, when he writes of Heaney in his
Introduction to Poets from the North of Ireland that 'he is con-
stantly aware of his poetry as a craft akin to the traditional crafts of
turf-cutter, ploughman, thatcher, water-diviner, salmon-fisher,
mummer and blacksmith'. 1 Yeats has images of crafting and ham-
mering too, of course, but they are finally subordinated to an aes-
thetic of visionary spontaneity; it is in Blake, intriguingly, that
vision and production consort most fruitfully together.
'Verbal rather than material instruments': the semioticians lie in
wait to protest, rightly, that nothing could be more material than
language itself. The recovery of the materiality of language - the
growing refusal of Cartesian, metaphysical models which would
relegate language to a pale reflection of another pale reflection
(thought), and privilege the apparently immaterial 'voice' over the
more obstrusively material 'script' - is a precious theoretical devel-
opment which Heaney's poetry in some way parallels. This doesn't
just mean that he is gnarled and densely-textured; indeed that, often
enough, has been a sort of empiricist substitute for a genuine lin-
guistic materialism, a mistaking of words for 'things' which bases
itself on a nai:ve reflectionism. Heaney recognises that if language is
indeed in some sense material, it has its own specific mode of mate-
riality, complexly related to work, Nature and human relationships.
So that if Nature can be 'textualised', its wry recalcitrance to the
'literary' can also be deftly hinted at, precisely by bringing the two a
little too neatly together:
This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
It was all crepuscular and iambic.
Out on the field a baby rabbit
Took his bearing, and I knew the deer
104 TERRY EAGLETON
(I've seen them too from the window of the house,

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)
Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.
I had said earlier, 'I won't relapse
From this strange loneliness I've brought us to.
Dorothy and William-' She interrupts:
'You're not going to compare us two ... ?'
Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze
Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.
('Glanmore Sonnets')
The modulations of this, all the way from the faintly mincing over-
tones of 'It was all crepuscular and iambic' and the calculated liter-
ariness of the last two overbred lines, to the simple unadorned
perception of the rabbit, might help to assuage certain fears about
Heaney which Jon Silkin has expressed in a review. 2 Silkin argued
roughly that the later Heaney was in danger of sacrificing the
realist force of his early work to a gathering 'deftness', a rich tech-
nical virtuosity which couldn't easily be combined with his raw
materials; and indeed there did seem a risk at one point, as
Heaney's forms grew leaner and leaner, that he would have a
problem in unifying an almost unrivalled technical resourcefulness
with the social and material taproots of his art. The relation
between different sorts of materiality is in this sense a problem of
form, not just a 'theme'. What is perhaps most impressive about
Field Work, however, is that this problem seems more out in the
open, and in the best of the volume triumphantly resolved: lan-
guage can be granted its own material workings without detriment
to its status as a realist medium:
On Devenish I heard a snipe

And the keeper's recital of elegies
Under the tower. Carved monastic heads
Were crumbling like bread on water.
On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone
Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned,
Answered my silence with silence.
A stoup for rain water. Anathema.
From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island
I watched the sky beyond the open chimney
And listened to the thick rotations
Of an army helicopter patrolling.
('Triptych')
The characteristics devices of the first two stanzas - the nearly ex-
cessive terseness, the austere elegance of image, the curious blend of
reticence and density - open out undisruptively onto the plainer
notations of the third verse.
Another way in which Heaney differs from Yeats is that, if he is
indubitably a 'major' poet, he isn't obviously so - not major in the
same way, not major in an epoch of major poetry. Nobody could
doubt from Yeats's tone that he believes poetry to be an intrinsi-
cally superior genre to, say, fiction, whereas it would be difficult
for Seamus Heaney to believe this. Whatever Yeats's harebrained
and repellent fantasies, he wrote out of an historical crisis where the
impulse to 'totalise' was urgent. Heaney, whatever evidence of
global imperialist crisis he may find on his doorstep, handles that
evidence in the style of an 'end-of-ideologies' writer. Most of the
poems in Field Work are superb, but the plain truth is that Heaney
doesn't really have much to 'say' which is inherently more complex
or compulsive than a whole range of more 'minor' writers. A lot of
what Yeats had to 'say' was nonsense, but he did after all have a lot
to say. This is not, of course, just a quantitative matter: it is much
more a question of historical situation, which is to say, among
other things, that it isn't a matter of entirely blaming Heaney. But
nor is it a matter of letting him off the hook by dint of some histor-
ical determinism. Heaney has been much praised, and properly so;
he probably is one of the finest English-language poets of the
century. But it is perhaps not surprising that he has been praised by
a criticism which invests deeply in 'experience' and little in 'ideas'.
On the latter score, Heaney does not show up particularly well in a
comparison with much less technically accomplished writers, even if
there is little to fault him on the former.
From Stand, 21, No. 3 (1980), 77-8.
NOTE
[Terry Eagleton's theoretical concerns are Marxist but this does not emerge
strongly here (the review was written for Stand, a non-academic literary
magazine). He does draw attention to the political implications of Heaney's
poetic stance in a way that anticipates David Lloyd's essay (no. 11) below.
But Eagleton's basic approach here is comparable with that of Eamonn
Hughes (essay 5) in its dual awareness of the language of literature and the
way that literature can be seen as functioning like a language. In Criticism
106 TERRY EAGLETON
and Ideology (1976; London, 1978, p. 79) Eagleton had made use of
Barthes's distinction in Writing Degree Zero between the text which 'may
so "foreground" its signifiers as to radically deform, distantiate and defa-
miliarise its signified'; and that which strictly curbs 'such excess in apparent
humble conformity to the logic of its "content"'. 'This key Formalist/
structuralist idea animates his debate with Stand's editor, Jon Silkin.
Eagleton's aim is to suggest that Heaney's development is not determined
by the rigour of this 'either/or' formulation: that he is increasingly able to
do both these things. Ed.]
1. Frank Ormsby, Poets from the North of Ireland (Belfast, 1979), p. 8.

The latter part of Eagleton's review, which discusses this book, has
been omitted here. [Ed.]
2. Jon Silkin, 'Bedding the Locale', New Blackfriars (March 1973),
pp. 130-3.
8
Writing a Bare Wire:

Station Island
NEIL CORCORAN
There are some lines in poetry which are like wool in texture and
some that are like bare wires. I was devoted to a Keatsian woolly line,
textured stuff, but now I would like to be able to write a bare wire.
(Seamus Heaney to Fintan O'Toole, 1984)
Station Island, by far Seamus Heaney's longest book, is in three

separate parts: an opening section of individual lyrics which take
their occasions from the occurrences and the memories of the ordi-
nary life; the central section, the title sequence itself which nar-
rates, or dramatises, a number of encounters, in dream or in
vision, with the dead; and a concluding sequence, 'Sweeney
Redivivus', which is, as Heaney puts it in one of his notes to the
volume, 'voiced for Sweeney', the seventh-century king trans-
formed into a bird, whose story Heaney has translated from the
medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne as Sweeney Astray.
Despite its separate parts, the book also has a formal unity,
however, signalled by the presence, in all three parts, of the
Sweeney figure. He is there in the poem which ends Part One, 'The
King of the Ditchbacks' (which is, partly, about the act of transla-
tion itself); then in the opening section of 'Station Island', in his
manifestation as the unregenerate Simon Sweeney, one of a family
of tinkers remembered from Heaney's childhood (the introduction
to Sweeney Astray explicitly links this Sweeney with the legendary
character); and finally, of course, in the 'Sweeney Redivivus' se-
quence itself. What 'The King of the Ditchbacks' calls Sweeney's
107
108 NEIL CORCORAN
'dark morse' is therefore tapped throughout the volume; and what

the code spells out is an extraordinarily rigorous scrutiny by
Seamus Heaney of his own commitments and attachments to his
people, and of his responsibilities as a poet. This self-scrutiny pro-
ceeds through ail three parts of Station Island in different models.
In Part One, it is pursued, sometimes implicitly, in separate lyrics
originating in autobiographical experience; in 'Station Island', this
contemporary self undergoes a penitential exercise in self-examina-
tion on a mythologised purgatorial pilgrimage; and in 'Sweeney
Redivivus', the newly steadied self is released from its Purgatorio
into the freedom of a kind of anti-self or parallel-self, as Heaney's
voice is twinned with that of the character whose name rhymes
with his own, 'Sweeney'.
The different voices of the volume - the lyric; the narrative and
dramatic; the disguised or ventriloquial - are perhaps designed
partly to offset the dangers of self-importance in this very self-
involved book. They are, nevertheless, all chosen modalities of the
voice of Seamus Heaney himself; and, in this sense, the shortest
poem in Station Island, and one of its most perfect, 'Widgeon', may
be read as an allegory of the book's procedure:
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 -
and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.
This tiny anecdote about the shot wild duck is a story already told
('he says') - like the already much written-over pilgrimage to
Station Island, like the Buile Suibhne - which Heaney now tells
again, in his own words. The bird is 'badly shot', as some of the
shades in 'Station Island' have been badly (wickedly, cruelly) shot,
in Northern sectarian murders. 'He' in 'Widgeon' blows his own
cries on the dead bird's voice box, just as Heaney briefly and
poignantly returns a voice to the dead in the 'Station Island' se-
quence, a voice which remains, nevertheless, entirely his own voice
too; and as, in 'Sweeney Redivivus', his own voice sounds through
the 'voice box' of Sweeney, the bird-man.
WRITING A BARE WIRE 1 09
In this dartingly implicit allegory of the way the individual

poetic voice speaks through the real and the legendary dead -
through biographical experience and through literary tradition - it
is the word 'unexpectedly', given a line to itself, which carries the
greatest charge of implication: the poet who would properly -
without sentimentality, without self-importance - articulate his
own small widgeon cries through encounters with the dead must
seem uncalculatingly preoccupied with his subject or with the form
of his own poem, having something of the intent self-forgetfulness
of one who would, testingly and probingly, attempt to blow upon
a dead bird's voice box. The preoccupation may then release, 'un-
expectedly', and almost distractedly, a genuine self-illumination or
self-definition, just as 'Widgeon' releases allegorical implications
most 'unexpectedly' too.
It is precisely this unexpectedness which makes the best work of
Station Island so bracing. The scheme of the volume is an ambi-
tious one, and, in my opinion, the book is not equally successful in
all its parts. Nevertheless, Station Island gives notice that Heaney's
poetry, in its dissatisfied revision of earlier attitudes and presump-
tions, and in its exploratory inventiveness as it feels out new direc-
tions for itself, is now in the process of successfully negotiating
what is, for any poet, the most difficult phase of a career- the tran-
sition from the modes and manners which have created the reputa-
tion, to the genuinely new and unexpected thing. It is a poetry, in
Station Island, bristling with the risks and the dangers of such self-
transformation but, at its high points, triumphantly self-vindicating
too.
I want to spend most of the space available to me in this chapter

discussing the two long sequences in Station Island, since they
present particular difficulties which may be aided by sustained con-
sideration. However, the individual lyrics of Part One also represent
something new in Heaney's poetic voice: they have a harsher, more
astringent quality than the richly sensuous music of Field Work.
This is impelled by the preoccupations which they share with the
book's sequences, as Heaney's rueful self-scrutiny is pursued in
poems in which the objects and occasions of the ordinary world
(rather than, as in 'Station Island', the visitations of ghosts) insist
their moral claims on the poet.
In 'An Aisling in the Burren' there are, literally, sermons in stones
- 'That day the clatter of stones I as we climbed was a sermon I on
11 0 NEIL CORCORAN
conscience and healing'; and in poem after poem Heaney listens to

similar, if less explicit, sermons, as the natural world offers in-
stances of the exemplary. Sloe gin, in the marvellous poem it gets to
itself, is 'bitter I and dependable'; a lobster is 'the hampered one,
out of water, I fortified and bewildered'; a granite chip from Joyce's
Martello tower is 'a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith'; old
pewter says that 'Glimmerings are what the soul's composed of';
the Pacific in Malibu is an instruction in how one is indissolubly
wedded to the ascetic Atlantic; visiting Hardy's birthplace is an edu-
cation in displacement; flying a kite is to know 'the strumming,
rooted, long-tailed pull of grief'; listening in to 'the limbo of lost
words' on a loaning is to hear how
At the click of a cell lock somewhere now

the interrogator steels his introibo,
the light-motes blaze, a blood-red cigarette
startles the shades, screeching and beseeching.
These instructive moralities make Part One of Station Island

severe and self-admonitory, and the astringent lyric voice, if it is
willing to be counselled, is also chastened, restrained and wearied.
As a result, a number of these poems sustain a sad note of dimin-
ishment and loss, a sense of transience and of the perilous fragmen-
tariness of memory. 'What guarantees things keeping I if a railway
can be lifted I like a long briar out of ditch growth?', Heaney asks
in 'Iron Spike'; and the pathos attaching to what has disappeared is
one of the essential marks of these poems: they are, I think,
Heaney's first real exercises in nostalgia. If the newly tart lyric
manner is a departure of the kind recommended in 'Making
Strange' by the voice of poetry itself - 'Go beyond what's
reliable/in all that keeps pleading and pleading' - the departure is
nevertheless fully conscious of how much must be left behind: 'The
Loaning' confesses that 'When you are tired or terrified/your voice
slips back into its old first place/and makes the sound your shades
make there ... '
Despite the new departures of these lyrics, however, what never-
theless keeps pleading at some level in a number of them is the po-
litical reality of the North. In 'Sandstone Keepsake', another stone
acts as the spur to a meditation in which Heaney paints a wry self-
portrait of the artist as political outsider which is characteristic in
its shrug of uneasy self-depreciation. The poem remembers how the
WRITING A BARE WIRE 111
stone was 'lifted' from the beach at Inishowen. At the northern tip
of Co. Donegal, lnishowen is at the opposite side of Lough Foyle
from the Magilligan internment camp. Heaney is therefore
prompted into mythologising the stone in the terms of a Dantean
analogy, imagining it as 'A stone from Phlegethon,/bloodied on the
bed of hell's hot river'; but he rejects the grandiose comparison in
deflating embarrassment ('but not really'), before concluding the
poem in the self-deflating contemplation of how he might appear to
the Magilligan guards:
Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers
from my free state of image and allusion,
swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders
and not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators.
The incapacity for the political role is subtly rebuked in those lines
by the pun which makes over the 'Irish Free State' into a phrase for
the disengagement of poetry, and by the allusion itself which refuses
the obligation Hamlet finds so overwhelming, to 'set right' the times
that are 'out of joint'. 'Sandstone Keepsake' inherits, it may be, the
guilt and anxiety of 'Exposure', but seems more ironically assured
of the poet's peripheral status: the most the poem may aspire to is
the 'veneration' of the political victim. This self-presentation, with
its let-downs and erosions, casts its shadow far into Station Island.
'STATION ISLAND'
Station Island, or St Patrick's Purgatory, is a small rocky isle in the
middle of Lough Derg in Co. Donegal which, since early medieval
times, has been a place of pilgrimage for Irish Catholics. The three-
day pilgrimage (which Seamus Heaney himself made three times in
his youth) involves a self-punitive routine of prayer, fasting and
barefoot walking around stone circles or 'beds', thought to be the
remains of ancient monastic cells. From the very earliest times,
Lough Derg has inspired popular legend and literature, in particular
medieval accounts of miracles and visions, and historical narratives
about the suppression of the pilgrimage in the eighteenth century,
112 NEIL CORCORAN
under the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. As a result, 'Station Island' is

the name for a nexus of Irish Catholic religious, historical and
cultural affiliations.
Since the nineteenth century, it has also been the subject of more
specifically literary treatments: William Carleton's mocking but fas-
cinated prose account, 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim' (1828); Patrick
Kavanagh's lengthy Lough Derg: A Poem (written in 1942, but
only published posthumously in 1978); Denis Devlin's characterist-
ically portentous and frenzied poem, Lough Derg (1946); and Sean
O'Faolain's well-known short story, 'The Lovers of the Lake'
(1958), a story about the uneasy coexistence of sexuality and the
Irish Catholic conscience. In a published talk touching on 'Station
Island', 'Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet',
Heaney says that it was partly the anxiety occasioned by these nu-
merous earlier literary versions of the pilgrimage which turned him
to Dante's meetings with ghosts in the Purgatorio as a model for his
own poem: Dante showed him how to 'make an advantage of what
could otherwise be regarded as a disadvantage'. Inheriting from
Field Work's interest in Dante, Heaney therefore makes his imagi-
nary pilgrimage to the island a series of meetings with ghosts of the
type Dante meets in the Purgatorio - friendly, sad, self-defining,
exemplary, admonitory, rebuking.
A central passage from 'Envies and Identifications' illuminates the
relationship between Heaney and Dante in the sequence:
What I first loved in the Commedia was the local intensity, the ve-
hemence and fondness attaching to individual shades, the way per-
sonalities and values were emotionally soldered together, the
strong strain of what has been called personal realism in the cele-
bration of bonds of friendship and bonds of enmity. The way in
which Dante could place himself in an historical world yet submit
that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history, the way
he could accommodate the political and the transcendent, this too
encouraged my attempt at a sequence of poems which would
explore the typical strains which the consciousness labours under
in this country. The main tension is between two often contradic-
tory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experi-
ence and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self. I
hoped that I could dramatise these strains by meeting shades from
my own dream-life who had also been inhabitants of the actual
Irish world. They could perhaps voice the claims of orthodoxy and
the necessity to recognise those claims. They could probe the valid-
ity of one's commitment.
The shades Heaney meets in the poem, then, have all been 'inhabi-
tants of the actual Irish world', whether personally known friends
and acquaintances, or writers known from their work; and their
conversations turn, in some way, on the living of a proper life or on
the production of a proper work. The revenants are advisers, from
beyond the grave, on the poet's responsibilities in the realms of
morality and of art.
In I, a prelude to the pilgrimage itself, the encounter, on a
Sunday, is with the unregenerate 'sabbath-breaker', Simon Sweeney,
a figure of fascination as well as fear, with his advice to 'Stay clear
of all processions'. The advice is set against the orthodox pieties of
a crowd of women on their way to mass, in a scene which contains
(in 'the field was full/of half-remembered faces') a sudden echo of
the opening of the medieval poem of vision and pilgrimage, Piers
Plowman, and its 'field full of folk' - a reminder that poetry in
English, as well as in Italian, has its tradition of the dream-vision,
and that 'Station Island' self-consciously inherits from it. In II, the
ghost is William Carleton, encountered appropriately on the road
to Lough Derg, and not on the island itself, since, after visiting
Station Island in his youth, he subsequently renounced Catholicism
and wrote 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim' as a denunciation of its bar-
barities and superstitions (hence the reference to 'the old fork-
tongued turncoat'). The 'ghost' of III is the inanimate 'seaside
trinket' which, for Heaney as a child, had been redolent of the
death of the girl who owned it (she was, in fact, Agnes, the sister of
Heaney's father, who died of TB in the 1920s).
In Section IV Heaney meets a priest who had died on the foreign
missions shortly after his ordination. (This was a man called Terry
Keenan, still a clerical student when Heaney knew him.) The
section meditates on the ratifying role of the priesthood in Irish
society, and its effect on the priest himself, 'doomed to the decent
thing'. V includes three separate encounters with teachers or
mentors of Heaney's, including his first teacher at Anahorish
School, Barney Murphy, and- interestingly in this context- Patrick
Kavanagh. VI recalls, with affectionate tenderness, a very early
sexual experience and, after 'long virgin/Fasts and thirsts' under the
dominion of Catholic doctrine on sexual morality, a later satisfying
and fulfilling one. The ghost of VII is a man Heaney had played
football with in his youth, the victim of a sectarian murder in
Northern Ireland. (Heaney is remembering William Strathearn,
killed by two off-duty policemen in a particularly notorious
114 NEIL CORCORAN
incident in Co. Antrim.) The victim's description of the circum-

stances of his death impels Heaney into a confession of what he
regards as his own evasive, uncommitted politics. VIII confronts
Heaney with two further ghosts whose challenges provoke self-
rebuke - Tom Delaney, an archaeologist friend who died tragically
young at thirty-two, towards whom Heaney feels 'I had somehow
broken/covenants, and failed an obligation', and Colum
McCartney, the subject of 'The Strand at Lough Beg' in Field Work,
who utters the most unrelenting accusation in the sequence, "'for
the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew/the lovely blinds of the
Purgatorialand saccharined my death with morning dew"'.
Section IX gives a voice to one of the ten IRA hunger-strikers
who died in Long Kesh between March and September 1981.
(Heaney is actually thinking of the second of them to die, Francis
Hughes, who came from his own district, Bellaghy, and whose
family he knows.) The certitude which could lead to that kind of
political suicide is juxtaposed with a dream of release and revival in
which the extraordinary symbol of a 'strange polyp' ('My softly
awash and blanching self-disgust') appears, to be supported and il-
luminated by a candle, and is followed by a further symbol of poss-
ibility, an 'old brass trumpet' remembered from childhood. X has
another inanimate ghost, a drinking mug removed from Heaney's
childhood home by actors for use in a play, and returned as
Ronan's Psalter is miraculously returned from the lake by an otter
at the opening of Sweeney Astray - a further symbol for the unex-
pected translations the known, ordinary and domestic may
undergo.
In XI the ghost is a monk to whom Heaney once made his con-
fession and who, suggesting that Heaney should 'Read poems as
prayers', asked him to translate something by StJohn of the Cross,
the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, as a penance. Heaney re-
sponds now, belatedly, with his version of 'Cantar del alma que se
huelga de conoscer a Dios por fe', the 'Song of the soul that is glad
to know God by faith', a hymn to the 'fountain' of the Trinity to be
discovered within the sacrament of the Eucharist, that sign of the
believing Church in harmonious community. Finally, in the con-
cluding section of the poem, Heaney, back on the mainland, meets
the ghost of James Joyce, who recommends a course antithetical to
that of orthodox Catholic pilgrimage, a striking-out on one's own
in an isolation which, Joyce claims, is the only way the poet's
proper work can be done.
These individual encounters find their basic structural shape in

the nature of the pilgrimage itself - leaving the ordinary social
world, crossing the waters of Lough Derg, and then returning to
that world with some kind of refreshment and new clarity. The
irony of 'Station Island', however, is that this pilgrimage leads to no
confirmation in the religion and values of the tribe, but to some-
thing very like a renunciation of them. It is possible to read the se-
quence as a kind of reverse palinode, directed at some of the innate
assumptions and attitudes of Heaney's own earlier work - a palin-
ode which actually rejects the orthodox communal doctrine and
morality, rather than giving final assent to them. When Heaney
does 'repent' in IX, it is the old tribal complicities which are imag-
ined as immature and self-restricting: "'I repent I My unweaned life
that kept me competent/To sleepwalk with connivance and mis-
trust."' Heaney is tentative about his repentance, ironically aware
of all the ways in which one must remain permanently 'unweaned'
from such powerful formative influences and experiences, and the
poem has, throughout, the poignancy of anxiety and misgiving.
Nevertheless, 'Station Island' uses the metaphor of its Irish Catholic
pilgrimage to define some of the constrictions which that religion
and culture have imposed on one individual consciousness, and to
suggest how, under alternative mentors, and through art, a newly
enabling freedom might be gained.
It is possible to read out of the earlier parts of the poem a subtext
of accusations against Catholicism: in I, where Heaney is set,
behind the pious women, on a 'drugged path', that it acts as a mere
opiate, numbing the obedient conscience with its claims of author-
ity; in II, where the radical Ribbonmen of Carleton's day have
become, by the time of Heaney's childhood, a drunken band who
'played hymns to Mary', that it keeps you patient and enduring, in-
capable of the anger of action; in III, where the child's death, held
in pious memory, is juxtaposed with the brute animal reality of a
dog's death, that, in attempting to account for death, it in fact
refuses to face its reality, and sentimentalises it; and in IV, with its
'doomed' priest, that Irish clericalism thwarts the lives of those who
represent it, and bolsters the platitudinous pieties of those it
'serves'. In the latter sections of the poem, Catholicism is heavily
implicated in Heaney's adolescence of sexual dissatisfaction and
guilt, and in his unease and regret about his lack of any firmer polit-
ical commitment - the 'timid circumspect involvement' for which he
begs forgiveness of Strathearn, and that confusion of 'evasion and
116 NEIL CORCORAN
artistic tact' of which McCartney accuses him. All of these charges

generate the outburst of rejection in section IX- "'I hate how quick
I was to know my place. I I hate where I was born, hate everything I
That made me biddable and unforthcoming"' - where knowing his
place is both establishing an identity with a particular territory
(celebrated as a virtue often enough in the earlier work) and also
meekly accepting a servitude to the mores of a community (where
to 'know your place' is to stay put).
Even though it quickly undercuts itself with rueful qualifications,
the venom of that climactic attack makes it unsurprising that,
despite appearances, no true pilgrimage is actually undertaken in
the poem. In IV, Heaney is 'ready to say the dream words I
renounce ... ', the renunciation of worldliness which is the essential
prelude to repentance, when he is interrupted by the priest wonder-
ing if Heaney is on Station Island only to take the 'last look', and
suggesting that, for him, the pilgrimage is without its essential point
- 'the god has, as they say, withdrawn'. No orthodox praying is
done on the pilgrimage: when he kneels in III, it is only 'Habit's af-
terlife'; and the poem-prayer in XI could be thought to undermine
its song of faith with its constant refrain, 'although it is the night'.
In John of the Cross this is the 'dark night of the soul', in which the
mystic feels himself temporarily abandoned by God; but, to a more
secular consciousness, it could equally well be the sheer inability to
believe.
Heaney is also sometimes in physical positions which dissociate
him from the other pilgrims: in V, he is 'faced wrong way/into more
pilgrims absorbed in this exercise', and in VI, the others 'Trailed up
the steps as I went down them/Towards the bottle-green, still/Shade
of an oak'. That same section goes so far as to appropriate, from
the beginning of the Divine Comedy, the moment when Dante is
impelled on his journey by learning from Virgil of Beatrice's inter-
cession, in order to describe Heaney's own sexual awakening after
the enforced virginity of his Irish Catholic adolescence. The truant
which Heaney is playing from the pilgrimage there turns the tradi-
tion of the vision-poem on its head, making sexual not divine love
the object of the exercise; but it reminds us too that Dante's great
poem of Christian quest discovers its images of heavenly bliss in a
transfigured human woman.
At the centre of Heaney's pilgrimage, however, there is not pres-
ence but absence, figured frequently as a 'space'. It is 'a space
utterly empty,/utterly a source, like the idea of sound' in III; 'A still-
ness far away, a space' in VI; 'the granite airy space/1 was staring
into' in VIII; and, in XII, after the pilgrimage. 'It was as if I had
stepped free into a space/alone with nothing that I had not
known/already'. This final linking of the blank space with freedom
comes after Heaney has been counselled by Joyce; and the whole of
'Station Island' discovers its enabling and releasing alternative in its
exemplary artist figures. Joyce is, implicitly, the repository of a new
kind of personal and cultural health when Heaney takes his hand
'like a convalescent' and feels an 'alien comfort' in his company. In
this sense, the pilgrimage to the island in the poem is a large paren-
thesis, the brackets of which are closed by William Carleton at one
end, and by James Joyce at the other- artists offering, on the main-
land, their alternatives to the orthodoxies of the island, alternatives
which ironically echo the very first advice Heaney is given in the
poem, the unregenerate Simon Sweeney's 'Stay clear of all
processions'.
Carleton's essential significance for the poem is clarified by
Heaney's essay, 'A tale of two islands', where 'The Lough Derg
Pilgrim', with its portrait of a culturally and materially deprived
Ireland, is opposed to Synge's much better known account, in his
plays and prose, of the Aran Islands- in Heaney's opinion, a glam-
orising of the reality in the interests of the Irish Literary Revival.
The 'two islands', 'Station' and 'Aran', represent two different
Irelands, realities put to virtually opposed literary and ideological
uses. Carleton, in fact, is regarded very much as a nineteenth-
century equivalent of Patrick Kavanagh - a teller of the true tale,
from the inside, but also from a position of estrangement, of Irish
rural life ('not ennobling but disabling'). In his appearance in
'Station Island', he counsels Heaney in a righteous anger (of which
Heaney knows himself- it seems, shamefully- incapable) and also
in the redemptive necessity, for the Irish writer, of a memory and
sensibility schooled by politics as well as by the natural world:
'"We are earthworms of the earth, and all that/has gone through us
is what will be our trace"'. The word associated with Carleton in
'Station Island' is 'hard'. Defining his 'turncoat' politics, Heaney
has him say, "'If times were hard, I could be hard too'"; and when
he departs in the final line, he 'headed up the road at the same hard
pace'.
His hardness is matched by Joyce's 'straightness'. In XII, 'he
walked straight as a rush/upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight
ahead'; and when he departs, 'the downpour loosed its screens
118 NEIL CORCORAN
round his straight walk'. This is the straightness of his decisiveness

and authority, as he counsels the more pliable Heaney in a course
opposed to tribal and local fidelities. This account of Joyce spells
out more clearly some of the implications of Leopold Bloom's ap-
pearance at the end of 'Traditions' in Wintering Out. What Heaney
jokingly calls the 'Feast of the Holy Tundish' is a very secular feast,
constructed from Stephen's diary entry for 13 April, at the end of A
Portrait of the Artist. The entry is 'a revelation // set among my
stars' because 13 April is Heaney's birthday. In the passage referred
to, Stephen is remembering an earlier conversation with an English
Jesuit about the word 'tundish'. The priest has never heard the word
before, but it is a common usage for 'funnel' in Stephen's Dublin:
That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up

and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean
of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his
own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the
other!
The damnation of the Englishman is a register of Joyce's supreme

confidence in his own language, and this is a releasing and enabling
moment, a 'password', for Heaney, who inherits in his own art the
necessity of conveying uniquely Irish experience in the English lan-
guage as it is spoken in Ireland. Hence Heaney's addressing Joyce as
'old father', as Stephen addresses the mythical Daedalus at the end
of the Portrait (and as Heaney had already addressed the Vikings in
North).
The confidence is combined, in Joyce, with that arrogant pride
and disdain which enabled him, as Heaney has put it in Among
Schoolchildren, to 'deconstruct the prescriptive myths of Irishness'.
Hence Joyce's concluding advice to Heaney, in this poetic undertak-
ing which may be said similarly to deconstruct such myths, to 'keep
at a tangent', to
'swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'
Given the interest and complexity of its conception, and the per-
sonal urgency of its themes, it is unfortunate that, in my opinion,
'Station Island' is far from entirely successful. There are some excel-
lent things in it. Section III, for instance, with its extraordinarily
inward and intimate evocation of the way the young Heaney is
almost erotically possessed by the child's death, is as good as any-
thing he has written. And the poem's most Dantean moments -
McCartney's rebuke, and the fading of some of the shades - have
the kind of heartbreaking poignancy which shows the lessons learnt
from the 'Ugolino' translation in Field Work.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the narrative and dramatic
structure of the sequence is peculiarly inhibiting to Heaney's truest
poetic gifts and touch. The encounters come to seem predictable
and over-schematic. The dialogue is sometimes very heavy handed:
'Open up and see what you have got' and 'Not that it is any conso-
lation, I but they were caught' are jaw-breakingly unlikely from
people in any kind of passion. The symbols seem over-insistent,
particularly when one remembers the great grace and delicacy with
which the literal slips into the symbolic in some of the earlier work.
There are moments of distinct bathos: when, in IX, after seeing the
vision of the trumpet, Heaney tells us he 'pitched backwards in a
headlong fall', and we are suddenly closer to slapstick than to sym-
bolic reverie; and, more subtly perhaps, when the Joycean voice of
XII seems so much more accommodating, concerned and hortatory
than anything Joyce ever wrote himself - for the good reason,
perhaps, that its marine imagery is much more Heaney-like than
Joycean, much closer to 'Casualty' and 'Oysters' than to the
Portrait. Finally, there are some uncertainties in the handling of
verse form, particularly in Heaney's rather ragged variations on the
Dantean terza rima. The form is notoriously difficult in English, but
Heaney's variations on it are bound to summon much too closely
for comfort Eliot's tremendous imitative approximation of it in the
second section of 'Little Gidding', and Yeats's use of it in a poem
Heaney admires in Preoccupations, 'Cuchulain Comforted'.
All of this is perhaps to say, in another way, that Seamus
Heaney's true distinction as a poet is a lyric distinction, and that the
successful larger forms he has so far found are forms which accom-
modate, even while they provoke and extend, his lyricism. While I
cannot think that 'Station Island' with its narrative and dramatic
exigencies, is such a form, it is clearly a necessary poem for Heaney
to have written, one that defines a painful realignment between
himself and his own culture, and brings him to that point of newly
steadied illumination where it might be said of his work, as it is
120 NEIL CORCORAN
said of its symbol, the polyp supported by a candle, that 'the whole
bright-masted thing retrieved/A course and the currents it had gone
with/Were what it rode and showed.'
'SWEENEY REDIVIVUS'
Seamus Heaney's engagement with the figure of Sweeney from the
medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne lasted over ten years - from his
earliest attempts at a translation in 1972 until its eventual publica-
tion, as Sweeney Astray, in 1983 in Ireland and in 1984 in England.
Sweeney, in the poem, is a possibly real seventh-century Ulster king
who offends the cleric St Ronan, and is punished by being cursed
after the Battle of Moira in 637. Driven mad and transformed into
a bird, he flies, exiled from family and tribe, over Ireland and as far
as Scotland. The poem's narrative is frequently interrupted by
Sweeney's poignant lyric expressions of his own misery, and by his
equally sharp and tender celebrations of the Irish landscape, partic-
ularly its trees. Sweeney is therefore, as well as being a mad, exiled
king, a lyric poet; and in Robert Graves's account of Buile Suibhne
in The White Goddess he describes it as 'the most ruthless and
bitter description in all European literature of an obsessed poet's
predicament'.
Heaney recognises in the poem a crucial point in the changeover
from a pagan to a Christian culture in Ireland, and he is also inter-
ested in it for political and topographical reasons; but in the intro-
duction to his version, he spells out too some of the implications of
a recognition similar to Graves's:
... insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty,

assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as
an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the
constraints of religious, political and domestic obligation.
A further aspect, in fact, of that 'quarrel' already evident in 'Station

Island'; and it is difficult to read far into Heaney's version of Buile
Suibhne without sensing some of the ways in which Sweeney's voice
is harmonised with, or subdued to, Heaney's own. Sweeney uses a
vocabulary familiar from Heaney's own poems - 'visitant', 'casual-
ties', 'recitation', 'trust', 'philander', 'teems of rain', 'A sup of
water. Watercress', as well as employing the thin quatrain as his
most frequent lyric form. At one point, indeed, the original is
'translated' in lines which are wryly self-referential: at the conclu-

sion of section 67, Sweeney says:
I have deserved all this:

night-vigils, terror,
flittings across water,
women's cried-out eyes.
This is another version of a sentence which concludes 'The wan-

derer', one of the prose-poems in Stations, which mythologises
Heaney's departure from his first school - 'That day I was a rich
young man, who could tell you now of flittings, night-vigils, let-
downs, women's cried-out eyes.'
That 'rich young man' reappears in the final poem of the
'Sweeney Redivivus' sequence, 'On the Road'. In the gospel narra-
tive of Matthew XIX, the man asks Christ what he must do to be
saved, and the answer is the uncompromisingly absolute one which
Heaney repeats in his poem, 'Sell all you have and give to the poor
and follow me.' The demand, whether it is made in the realm of re-
ligion or of art, and whether a response to it is a real possibility or a
chimera, is one that haunts the sequence, and in a sense encloses it,
since 'The King of the Ditchbacks' in Part One ends in lines which
bind Heaney, Sweeney and the rich young man together. That poem
has brilliantly evoked the mesmerised and obsessive process of
poetic translation ('He was depending on me as I hung out on the
limb of a translated phrase .... Small dreamself in the branches')
before its final section effects this further 'translation' which carries
Heaney over, in an imagined magical rite, into Sweeney:
And I saw myself

rising to move in that dissimulation,
top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting
the fall of birds: a rich young man
leaving everything he had
for a migrant solitude.
Heaney translates himself into Sweeney, then, in the context of a

biblical allusion which summons to the metamorphosis notions
of urgent demand, of striking out on one's own, of exile, of at-
tempting to go beyond what is recognised and known. They make
it clear why Heaney told Seamus Deane in 1977 that he thought
he had discovered in Sweeney 'a presence, a fable which could
122 NEIL CORCORAN
lead to the discovery of feelings in myself which I could not

otherwise find words for, and which would cast a dream or poss-
ibility or myth across the swirl of private feelings: an objective
correlative'.
It is clear that this 'migrant solitude' is akin to the 'tangent' rec-
ommended by Joyce at the end of 'Station Island', and the actual
form of the poems of 'Sweeney Redivivus' seems to bear some rela-
tion to Heaney's description of Joyce's voice, 'definite/as a steel
nib's downstroke' (in Ulysses, Stephen refers to 'the cold steelpen'
of his art). There is a definiteness, a hard edge, a sense of the thing
suddenly and speedily, but finally, articulated in Heaney's free
forms in these poems. They have something of the quick cut and
sharpness of a trial piece, compared to what seems to me the
worked over and occasionally congealed finish of 'Station Island'.
In this, their forms clearly also inherit from Heaney's view of med-
ieval Irish lyric, as he expresses it in 'The God in the Tree' in
Preoccupations. In that essay, he compliments Flann O'Brien (who
had made his own use of Sweeney in his novel, At Swim- Two-
Birds) for his characterisation of the 'steel-pen exactness' of Irish
lyric; and he also describes such lyric himself in terms appropriate
to his own sequence - its 'little jabs of delight in the elemental', its
combination of 'suddenness and richness', and its revelation of the
writer as 'hermit' as much as 'scribe' ('Sweeney Redivivus' includes
poems called 'The Hermit' and 'The Scribes').
I think it is worth adducing this larger context for 'Sweeney
Redivivus', a context in which a hard and sharp kind of Irish litera-
ture puts its pressure on Heaney, since the Sweeney of Buile
Suibhne is really only one chord of Heaney's voice in the sequence;
and, despite the description, in a note, of the poems as 'glosses' on
the original story, there are in fact remarkably few obvious points
of correspondence. 'Sweeney' in 'Sweeney Redivivus' is the name
for a personality, a different self, a congruence of impulses, a mask
antithetical to much that the name 'Seamus Heaney' has meant in
his previous books. In 'Envies and Identifications', Heaney defines
the Yeatsian mask in terms which seem relevant to 'Sweeney':
Energy is discharged, reality is revealed and enforced when the artist

strains to attain the mask of his opposite; in the act of summoning
and achieving that image, he does his proper work and leaves us with
the art itself, which is a kind of trace element of the inner struggle of
opposites, a graph of the effort of transcendence.
Yeats himself is, I presume, 'The Master' in the poem of that title
in the sequence, which could be written almost as an allegory of
what the critic Harold Bloom has called the 'anxiety of influence':
the 'master' as the precursor, the poet against whom Heaney's own
art must struggle in order properly to define and articulate itself.
Heaney imagines Yeats as a 'rook' in the 'tower' of, presumably, his
art and of his Protestant Ascendancy culture (just as Yeats did live
in a tower, and entitled one of his major books The Tower); and
the gradual coming to terms with him is the discovery that 'his
book of withholding/ ... was nothing/arcane, just the old rules/we all
had inscribed on our slates', the discovery that Yeats's notoriously
private mythology conceals an apprehensible human and political
meaning and relevance. Heaney's measuring of himself against this
magisterial authority, which has sounded the Sweeney note of en-
terprising, wily self-assertion, is also, however, combined with an
envious humility -
How flimsy I felt climbing down

the unrailed stairs on the wall,
hearing the purpose and venture
in a wingflap above me.
- and the poem is the trace not so much of a struggle, as of a bold

but wary inspection, a revelation of how to be unafraid which is the
measure of one's own authority.
That this poem is an allegory is typical of the sequence, in which
allegory and parable, the puzzling and the hermetic, are the con-
stant modes. In fact, one of Heaney's major derivations from the
original source is - as the master-as-rook suggests - a series of or-
nithological correspondences. 'The First Flight', for instance, views
Heaney's move from Belfast to Glanmore as a bird's migration;
'Drifting Off', a version of a medieval 'Boast' poem, ascribes differ-
ent human (or poetic) qualities to birds; 'A Waking Dream' imag-
ines poetic composition as the attempt to catch a bird by throwing
salt on its tail (as the popular recommendation has it), but in fact
being transported into flight oneself; and 'On the Road' actually
locates the moment when Heaney, previously behind the wheel of a
car, is lofted into flight ('I was up and away'). Apart from this
system of analogy, what the original story offers 'Sweeney
Redivivus' is little more than a medieval-anchorite colouring in
some poems, and a tolerant hospitality to others which could just as
124 NEIL CORCORAN
easily have appeared without its support-system - 'In the Beech',

for instance, which imagines the young Heaney in a tree, and the
brilliant 'Holly'. Indeed, three poems which appear towards the end
of the sequence- 'An Artist' (on Cezanne), 'The Old Icons' (on re-
publican politics) and 'In Illo Tempore' (on the loss of religious
faith) seem written more straightforwardly in Heaney's own voice,
though by now clearly schooled into a 'Sweeney' scepticism and
distrust.
Although the mask, then, is not worn consistently in the se-
quence, 'The Master' suggests its usefulness to Heaney. There it
allows him the opportunity to articulate in a parable what would
otherwise be virtually impossible without pretension or overween-
ing vanity, the measuring of himself against Yeats. Elsewhere, it
allows him a similar pride in his own achievement, and a tangential,
dubious, sideways-on inspection of some matters already handled
more straightforwardly in his earlier work. This is why 'The First
Gloss' steps from its 'justified line/into the margin' only after recall-
ing, in the metaphor, 'the shaft of the pen', the first poem in
Heaney's first collection, 'Digging'. And it is why, in the poem,
'Sweeney Redivivus', and in 'Unwinding', Heaney pursues the
metaphor of his head as 'a ball of wet twine/dense with soakage,
but beginning/to unwind'. The 'twine' - the string made by joining
together, 'twinning', two separate strands- is both Heaney and
Sweeney. Its 'unwinding' is Heaney's studied attempt to dry out the
'soakage' of his heritage and, perhaps, of his more acceptable,
pliable social self.
The sequence as a whole may be thought to define different
stages in this process of unwinding as, in a newly suspicious per-
spective, Heaney reviews his life and reputation. 'In the Beech' and
'The First Kingdom' suggest how selective his earliest accounts of
his first world were. 'In the Beech' sets the young Heaney in a
'boundary tree' between the old rural ways and modern military in-
dustrialism (he is thinking, I presume, of the British airforce bases
in Northern Ireland during the Second World War): the latter, of
course, made no appearance in Death of a Naturalist. 'The First
Kingdom' takes a more jaundiced view of the inhabitants of that
world than one would have believed possible from the author of
Heaney's first book: 'And seed, breed and generation still/they are
holding on, every bit/as pious and exacting and demeaned' - where
'exacting' perhaps looks back rebukingly to the 'exact' revenge of
'Punishment'.
Similarly, 'The First Flight', 'Drifting Off' and 'The Scribes'

imply a more unapologetic confidence in his own work than is ap-
parent in anything Heaney has previously written. 'The First
Flight' celebrates, with a Joycean disdain, his outwitting of
adverse criticism ('they began to pronounce me/a feeder off
battlefields' leaps out of the parable into contemporary literary
battlefields for anyone who remembers some Northern accounts
of North); 'Drifting Off' ends with Heaney not as the Joycean
'hawklike man', but as the hawk himself, 'unwieldy/and brim-
ming,/my spurs at the ready'; and 'The Scribes' is an almost con-
temptuous jousting with, again, his critics (or his peers?), which
culminates when Heaney/Sweeney throws this poem itself in their
faces: 'Let them remember this not inconsiderable/contribution to
their jealous art.' That 'not inconsiderable' is finely judged,
keeping its temper along with its hauteur, utterly certain that it is
'considerable'; and the poem has something of that insolence
Heaney once admired in Nadezhda Mandelstam's treatment of the
Soviets, 'the unthinking authority of somebody brushing a fly
from her food'. This is the reverse of accommodating, it is danger-
ous, and one would not like to get on the wrong side of it; but its
tone allies Heaney with an Irish tradition to which he has not pre-
viously given great allegiance, one that includes eighteenth-century
Gaelic poetry and Austin Clarke, for instance, as well as Joyce.
Heaney has chosen - temporarily, perhaps - to call this tradition
'Sweeney'; but, under whatever name, it is a salutary guard
against certain kinds of sweetness and lushness which have whis-
pered at the edge of earshot in some of his styles.
These asperities of tone are softened by a certain regretfulness in
those poems in the sequence which once again review Heaney's atti-
tude to religion and to politics. 'The Cleric', on Catholicism, seems
to acknowledge, ruefully, at its close that, having once placed faith
in all of that, any future sense of freedom from it will be defined by
it - the familiar enough double-bind of the devout lapsed Catholic,
but phrased here, in the tones of the still-pagan Sweeney reflecting
on St Ronan, in a way which gives genuinely new life to the old
song:
Give him his due, in the end

he opened my path to a kingdom
of such scope and neuter allegiance
my emptiness reigns at its whim.
126 NEIL CORCORAN
'In Illo Tempore'- its title taken from the words which introduced
the reading of the gospel in the old Latin mass - is perhaps
Heaney's most straightforward and personal rehearsal of the theme
(released, it may be, by the Sweeney mask, but not much indebted
to it). Imagining Catholicism as a language one has lost the ability
to speak, consigning it to 'il/o tempore', 'that time', the poem is
sadly resigned rather than gratefully released; and in this it is at
one, perhaps, with the reverence still felt, at some level, for the out-
grown republican images in 'The Old Icons'- 'Why, when it was all
over, did I hold on to them?' In these poems, which are among the
best in 'Sweeney Redivivus', resolve and regret merge to create a
peculiarly chastened tone, which is also peculiarly honest.
The poem which closes 'Sweeney Redivivus', and the whole of
Station Island, 'On the Road', may be read as a kind of summary of
Heaney's career to date, and the statement of an intention for the
future, as it inherits and brings to fulfilment the volume's imagery of
journeying, pilgrimage, quest and migration. The poem opens with
that figure common in the earlier work, Heaney-as-driver, but now
with the driver behind the steering wheel's 'empty round'. This is an
emptiness, a space suddenly filled with the rich young man's ques-
tion about salvation. Christ's invitation, accompanied by the sudden
'visitation' of the last bird in Station Island, provokes a response in
which Heaney is translated out of that early figure and its present
emptiness, into Heaney-as-Sweeney. The flight which follows, with
its swooping and dipping rhythms, seems similarly to translate
Christ's injunction out of the realm of religion - Heaney/Sweeney
migrating from 'chapel gable' and 'churchyard wall' - into the realm
of art, as it ends inside a 'high cave mouth' beside the prehistoric
cave drawing of a 'drinking deer'. This is presumably related to that
'deer of poetry .. ./in pools of lucent sound' which appears in 'A
Migration' in Part One; but in 'On the Road', its nostril is 'flared//
at a dried-up source'. It is a source, nevertheless, which provides
Heaney with at least the possibility of some arid renewal:
For my book of changes

I would meditate
that stone-faced vigil
until the long dumbfounded
spirit broke cover
to raise a dust
in the font of exhaustion.
The 'font' in a church usually contains holy water, used to make the
sign of the cross; but this dry 'font of exhaustion' is perhaps Seamus
Heaney's equivalent of Yeats's 'foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'
at the end of 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', that point of desola-
tion from which, alone, the new inspiration may rise. In that poem,
Yeats reviews the stages of his career in some detail, and in 'On the
Road', Heaney may be thought to review his own, more glancingly,
in little verbal echoes of his earlier work. The road 'reeling in' re-
members the roads that 'unreeled, unreeled' in that other poem of
flight, 'Westering', at the end of Wintering Out; 'soft-nubbed' and
'incised outline' recall the archaeological diction of North, as the
poem's chain of optatives ('I would roost ... ', 'I would migrate .. .',
'I would meditate .. .') make again one of the characteristic gram-
matical figures of North; the 'undulant, tenor/black-letter latin'
recalls the 'sweet tenor latin' of 'Leavings', and the phrase 'broke
cover' recalls the badger that 'broke cover in me' in 'The Badgers',
both in Field Work. This unobtrusive self-allusiveness makes it
plain how much in Heaney's earlier 'source' is now 'dried-up', and
how much directed energy and effort must go into the construction
of any new 'book of changes'.
This is the final stage of self-knowledge and self-declaration to
which the Sweeney mask has brought Heaney; and I find the se-
quence of exceptional originality and authority. Sweeney has been a
more subtle, responsive and intimate means of self-dramatisation
than the sometimes creaking machinery and over-earnestness of
'Station Island'. The mask has provided the opportunity for a new
kind of autobiographical poetry- not 'confessionally' flat and pre-
sumptuous, not as edgily invisible as the Eliotic personae, not
risking the sometimes histrionic grandiloquence of Yeats. Sweeney
is, above all, the name for a restless dissatisfaction with the work
already done, a fear of repetition, an anxiety about too casual an
assimilation and acclaim, a deep suspicion of one's own reputation
and excellence. He is, therefore, also an instruction to the critic,
ending his account of a poet still in mid-career, against too
definitive a conclusion. As Sweeney's creator and alter ego re-
minded John Haffenden, 'the tune isn't called for the poet, he calls
the tune'.
From Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (Faber Student Guides,

London, 1986),pp. 153-80.
128 NEIL CORCORAN
NOTES
[Taken from one of the two most useful and influential 'introductory'
studies of Heaney (Blake Morrison's [London, 1982; new edition 1993] is
the other one), it is in the nature of this essay largely to explain itself as it
goes along. It is essentially another piece of New Criticism seeking to
present Heaney as a major poet and to emphasise his authority as a
significant living writer. Other writers (Dante, Carleton, Joyce, Denis
Devlin, Sean O'Faolain, Austin Clarke) and works (Buile Suibhne, Piers
Plowman, Graves's White Goddess) tend to be here for their intertextual
significance for Heaney rather than as touchstones in evaluating his poetry.
Only Eliot and Yeats are used in this latter way. Stations (p. 121) was a
pamphlet published in Belfast in 1975. 'Envies and Identifications: Dante
and the Modern Poet' (pp. 112-13) appeared in the Irish University
Review (15:1, Spring 1985, 5-19); 'A tale of two islands: reflections on the
Irish Literary Revival' (p. 117) in P.J. Drudy (ed.), Irish Studies, 1
(Cambridge, 1980), 1-20. For the interviews with Heaney by Deane
(pp. 121-2) and Haffenden (p. 128) see Further Reading, p. 267 below.
Ed.]
9
The Government of the

Tongue
SEAMUS HEANEY
Reading T.S. Eliot and reading about T.S. Eliot were equally forma-
tive experiences for my generation. One of the books about him
which greatly appealed to me when I first read it in the 1960s was
The New Poetic 1 by the New Zealand poet and critic, C.K. Stead.
The title referred to that movement, critical and creative, which was
instituted in the late nineteenth century against discursive poetry,
and which Stead judged to have culminated in England with the
publication of The Waste Land in 1922. One of his purposes was to
show how in The Waste Land Eliot made a complete break with
those popular poets of the day whom Eliot's contemporary, the
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would have called 'the purveyors
of ready-made meaning' 2 - bluff expositors in verse of arguments or
narratives which could have been as well conducted in prose. Stead
also provided instruction and delight by sussing out titles and
reviews of books which 'the new poetry' was up against: such as
Anna Bunston's Songs of God and Man, perceived by the literary
pages to have 'freshness and spirituality'; Augusta Hancock's
Dainty Verses for Little Folk which were 'written in the right
spirit'; and Edwin Drew's The Chief Incidents in the Titanic Wreck,
which 'may appeal to those who lost relatives in this appalling cata-
strophe'. These popular volumes (of February 1913) were possessed
of a strong horsepower of common-sense meaning. The verse was a
metrical piston designed to hammer sentiment or argument into the
public ear. This was poetry that made sense, and compared to its
129
130 SEAMUS HEANEY
candour and decent comprehensibility, The Waste Land showed up

as a bewildering aberration. In fact, Eliot's poem was hardly avail-
able enough to the average reader even to be perceived as an
aberration.
Stead also pointed out that the poem was therefore defended or
promoted in terms of the public's expectations. Its first defenders
argued that if poetry was discourse that made sense, then The
Waste Land was indeed discourse, except that bits of it were
missing. Wrong, Stead averred. This poem 'cannot be seen accu-
rately if it is read as a discourse from which certain "links in the
chain" have been omitted'. 'No critic concerned primarily with
"meaning" could touch the true "being" of the early poetry.'
The Waste Land in Stead's reading is the vindication of a poetry
of image, texture and suggestiveness; of inspiration; of poetry which
writes itself. It represents a defeat of the will, an emergence of the
ungainsayable and symbolically radiant out of the subconscious
deeps. Rational structure has been overtaken or gone through like a
sound barrier. The poem does not disdain intellect, yet poetry,
having to do with feelings and emotions, must not submit to the in-
tellect's eagerness to foreclose. It must wait for a music to occur, an
image to discover itself. Stead thus rehabilitated Eliot as a Romantic
poet, every bit as faithful to the process of dream and as susceptible
to gifts of the unconscious as Coleridge was before he received the
person from Porlock. 3 And so the figure of Old Possum, 4 netted for
years in skeins of finely drawn commentary upon his sources, his
ideas, his criticism of the modern world and so on, this figure was
helped to rise again like Gulliver in Lilliput, no longer a hazy
contour of philosophy and literary allusion, but a living principle, a
far more natural force than had been recognised until then.
When I thought of 'the government of the tongue' as a general
title for these lectures, what I had in mind was this aspect of poetry
as its own vindicating force. In this dispensation, the tongue (repre-
senting both a poet's personal gift of utterance and the common re-
sources of language itself) has been granted the right to govern. The
poetic art is credited with an authority of its own. As readers, we
submit to the jurisdiction of achieved form, even though that form
is achieved not by dint of the moral and ethical exercise of mind but
by the self-validating operations of what we call inspiration - espe-
cially if we think of inspiration in the terms supplied by the Polish
poet Anna Swir, who writes of it as a 'psychosomatic phenomenon'
and goes on to declare:
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE 131
This seems to me the only biologically natural way for a poem to be

born and gives the poem something like a biological right to exist. A
poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a
medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subcon-
scious. For one moment he possesses wealth usually inaccessible to
him, and he loses it when that moment is over. 5
Poetry's special status among the literary arts derives from the audi-
ence's readiness to concede to it a similar efficacy and resource. The
poet is credited with a power to open unexpected and unedited
communications between our nature and the nature of the reality
we inhabit.
The oldest evidence for this attitude appears in the Greek notion
that when a lyric poet gives voice, 'it is a god that speaks'. And the
attitude persists into the twentieth century: one thinks of Rilke's re-
statement of it in his Sonnets to Orpheus and, in English, we may
cite the familiar instance of Robert Frost's essay, 'The Figure a
Poem Makes'. For Frost, any interference by the knowing intellect
in the purely disinterested cognitions of the form-seeking imagina-
tion constitutes poetic sabotage, an affront to the legislative and ex-
ecutive powers of expression itself. 'Read it a hundred times,' he
says of the true poem. 'It can never lose its sense of a meaning that
once unfolded by surprise as it went.' 'It begins in delight, it in-
clines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid
down, it runs a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of
life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are
founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.' 6
In this figure of the poem's making, then, we see also a paradigm
of free action issuing in satisfactorily achieved ends; we see a path
projected to the dimension in which, Yeats says, 'Labour is blos-
soming or dancing where/The Body is not bruised to pleasure
soul'? And just as the poem, in the process of its own genesis,
exemplifies a congruence between impulse and right action, so in its
repose the poem gives us a premonition of harmonies desired and
not inexpensively achieved. In this way, the order of art becomes an
achievement intimating a possible order beyond itself, although its
relation to that further order remains promissory rather than oblig-
atory. Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly
system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the
given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it.
My favourite instance of this revision of the Platonic schema is
Osip Mandelstam's astonishing fantasia on poetic creation, entitled
132 SEAMUS HEANEY
- since Dante was the pretext for the thing - 'A Conversation about
Dante'. A traditional approach to Dante, naturally enough, might
involve some attention to the logical, theological and numerological
significances which devolve from the number 3, there being three
Persons in the Holy Trinity, three lines in each stanza of The Divine
Comedy, three books in the whole poem, thirty-three cantos in each
book, and a rhyme scheme called terza rima. All this can press upon
the mind until Dante is gradually conceived of as some kind of
immense scholastic computer, programmed by Aquinas, and print-
ing out the triadic goods in response to whatever philosophical,
metrical and arithmetical data it has been fed. Dante, in other
words, is often studied as the great example of a poet whose tongue
is governed by an orthodoxy or system, whose free expressiveness is
under the strict control of a universe of rules, from the rules of
metre to the commandments of the church. Now, enter
Mandelstam. Nothing, he implies, could be further from the truth.
The three-edged stanza is formed from within, like a crystal, not
cut on the outside like a stone. The poem is not governed by exter-
nal conventions and impositions but follows the laws of its own
need. Its composition had all the spontaneity of a chain reaction, of
an event in nature:
We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at

this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant
stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and greater
numbers as they were required ... Their cooperation expands and
grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming
the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.
This is extraordinarily alive and persuasive, one felicity in a work of

disconcertingly abundant genius, the greatest paean I know to the
power which poetic imagination wields. Indeed the tongue, which I
have been employing here as a synecdoche for that same power, is
analogous in this context to the conductor's baton as it is reimag-
ined by Mandelstam. His hommage to the baton is too long to
quote in full, but this extract should suffice to show how deeply
structured in all our thinking is this idea of imagination as a
shaping spirit which it is wrong to disobey:
Which comes first, listening or conducting? If conducting is no more

than the nudging along of music which rolls forth of its own accord,
then of what use is it when the orchestra is good in itself, when it
performs impeccably in itself? ... This baton is far from being an ex-
ternal, administrative accessory or a distinctive symphonic police
which could be done away with within an ideal state. It is no less
than a dancing chemical formula which integrates reactions percepti-
ble to the ear. I beg of you not to regard it merely as a supplementary
mute instrument, invented for greater visibility and to provide addi-
tiona! pleasure. In a certain sense this invulnerable baton contains
within itself all the elements in the orchestra. 8
As ever, Mandelstam writes jubilantly and persuasively. Far from

being perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy, Dante becomes
for him the epitome of chemical suddenness, free biological play, a
hive of bees, a hurry of pigeon flights, a flying machine whose func-
tion is to keep releasing other self-reproducing flying machines,
even, in one manic extended simile, the figure of a Chinese fugitive
escaping by leaping from junk to junk across a river crammed with
junks, all moving in opposite directions. Dante is thus recanonised
as the sponsor of impulse and instinct - not an allegory-framer up
to his old didactic tricks in the middle of the journey, but a lyric
woodcutter singing in the dark wood of the larynx. Mandelstam
brings Dante back from the pantheon to the palate, subverts the
age-old impression that his work was written on official paper, and
locates his authority not in his cultural representativeness, his reli-
gious vision or his sternly unremitting morality but rather in his
status as an exemplar of the purely creative, intimate, experimental
act of poetry itself.
All the same, as I warm to this theme, a voice from another part
of me speaks in rebuke. 'Govern your tongue,' it says, compelling
me to remember that my title can also imply a denial of the
tongue's autonomy and permission. In this reading, 'the govern-
ment of the tongue' is full of monastic and ascetic strictness. One
remembers Hopkins's 'Habit of Perfection', with its command to
the eyes to be 'shelled', the ears to attend to silence and the tongue
to know its place:
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:

It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
It is even more instructive to remember that Hopkins abandoned

poetry when he entered the Jesuits, 'as not having to do with my
134 SEAMUS HEANEY
vocation'. This manifests a world where the prevalent values and

necessities leave poetry in a relatively underprivileged situation, re-
quiring it to take a position that is secondary to religious truth or
state security or public order. It discloses a condition of public and
private repressions where the undirected hedonistic play of imagina-
tion is regarded at best as luxury or licentiousness, at worst as
heresy or treason. In ideal republics, Soviet republics, in the Vatican
and Bible-belt, it is a common expectation that the writer will sign
over his or her individual, venturesome and potentially disruptive
activity into the keeping of an official doctrine, a traditional system,
a party line, whatever. In such contexts, no further elaboration or
exploration of the language or forms currently in place is permissi-
ble. An order has been handed down and the shape of things has
been established.
We have grown familiar with the tragic destiny which these cir-
cumstances impose upon poets and with the way in which 'un-
governed' poetry and poets, in extreme totalitarian conditions, can
become a form of alternative government, or government in exile. I
was struck, for example, to learn that lines by the poet Czeslaw
Milosz are incorporated into the memorial to the Solidarity workers
outside the gates of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. But I was
stunned by the image which Andrei Sinyavsky provides of the sub-
versive and necessary function of writing as truth-telling, when he
tells how, at the height of the Stalin terror, Alexander Kutzenov
used to seal his manuscripts in glass preserving jars and bury them
in his garden at night-time. 9 It is all there, the suggestion of art's cu-
rative powers, its stored good~ess and its ultimate appeal to 'the
reader in posterity'. The scene has the perturbing oneiric reality of
an actual dream and could stand for the kind of ominous premoni-
tion which a dictator might experience, waking in the small hours
and remembering the reality of the poetry he would constrain.
For the moment, however, I am concerned with states of affairs
less repressive and less malign. I am thinking not so much of au-
thoritarian censorship as of an implacable consensus in which the
acceptable themes are given variously resourceful treatments, and in
which the felicity or correctness of a work's execution constitutes
the conspicuous focus of attention for both audience and artist. It is
not right to assume that such conditions always produce inferior
art. As a poet, for example, George Herbert surrendered himself to
a framework of belief and an instituted religion; but in his case, it
happened that his personality was structured in such a way that he
could dwell in amity with doctrine, writing a poetry which was in-
tellectually pure, emotionally robust and entirely authentic. An un-
constrained, undebilitated mind measured itself against impositions
and expectations which were both fundamental and contingent to
it. Its discipline, however, proved equal to its challenges, so that a
pun on the work choler, meaning both outburst of anger and
emblem of submission, could hold the psychic and artistic balance;
and a rhyme of 'child' with 'wild' could put the distress of his per-
sonal predicament in a divinely ordained perspective. 10
Moreover, what holds for George Herbert also holds for the T.S.
Eliot who wrote Four Quartets. As C.K. Stead also pointed out,
this was a poet very different from the one who wrote The Waste
Land, one who turned from an earlier trust in process and image to
embrace the claims of argument and idea. To this grave and senior
figure, the example of Dante was also important, although his
import was significantly different for Eliot than for Mandelstam.
Both men, interestingly enough, were turning to the great Florentine
at a moment of mid-life crisis, Eliot's first essay appearing in 1929
and Mandelstam's being written, though not published, in the early
1930s. (One thinks again of preserving jars in the dark garden.)
Mandelstam was interested primarily in vindication by language,
Eliot in salvation by conversion. Eliot's essay ends with an evoca-
tion of the world of the Vita Nuova, of the necessary attempt to
enter it, an attempt 'as difficult and hard as rebirth', and bows out
with the declaration that 'there is almost a definite moment of ac-
ceptance when the New Life begins'. Here, ten years before the
Quartets began in earnest, Eliot's writing looks forward to the con-
cerns of those poems. What obsessed Mandelstam and shook him
into heady critical song - namely, the sensuous foragings and trans-
ports of the body of poetic language - hardly seems to interest Eliot
at all. He is much more preoccupied with the philosophical and reli-
gious significances which can be drawn from a work of art, its truth
quotient rather than its technique/beauty quotient, its aura of cul-
tural and spiritual force. There is a stern and didactic profile to the
Dante whom Eliot conjures up and, as he embraces a religious faith,
it is to this profile he would submit in order that it be re-created in
his own work.
The Eliot of The Waste Land, on the other hand, reproduced in
his poem a sense of bewilderment and somnambulism, a flow of
inventive expressionist scenes reminiscent of those which Virgil
and Dante encounter in The Divine Comedy. In the Inferno,
13 6 SEAMUS HEANEY
pilgrim and guide proceed among shades in thrall to the fates of

which they have become the archetypes, in much the same way as
Eliot's poem proceeds upon the eerie flood of its own inventive-
ness. But in the Quartets, Eliot has been born again out of the
romance of symbolism into the stricter exactions of philosophia
and religious tradition. The inspired, spontaneous, essentially
lyric tongue has been replaced as governor by an organ that func-
tions more like a sorrowful grand seigneur, meditatively, author-
itatively, yet just a little wistfully aware of its lost vitality and
msouctance.
That vitality and insouciance of lyric poetry, its relish of its own
inventiveness, its pleasuring strain, always comes under threat when
poetry remembers that its self-gratification must be perceived as a
kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its own imperfections,
pains and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its quarantine?
Should it not put the governors on its joy and moralise its song?
Should it, as Austin Clarke said in another context, take the clapper
from the bell of rhyme? Should it go as far in self-denial as
Zbigniew Herbert's poem 'A Knocker' seems to want it to go? This
translation, in the Penguin Modern European Poets senes, was
originally published in 1968:
There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities
it's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheads
my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick
I strike the board
it answers me
yes- yes
no-no
for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE 13 7
I thump on the board

and it prompts me
with the moralist's dry poem
yes- yes
no-no
Herbert's poem ostensibly demands that poetry abandon its he-

donism and fluency, that it become a nun of language and barber its
luxuriant locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical goads.
Ostensibly too, it would depose the tongue because of its cavalier
indulgence and send in as governor of the estate of poetry a
Malvolio with a stick. It would castigate the entrancements of
poetry, substituting in their stead a roundhead's plain-spoken
counsel. Yet oddly, without the fluent evocation of bells and
gardens and trees and all those things which it explicitly deplores,
the poem could not make the bleak knocker signify as potently as it
does. The poem makes us feel that we should prefer moral utter-
ance to palliative imagery, but it does exactly that, makes us feel,
and by means of feeling carries truth alive into the heart - exactly
as the Romantics said it should. We end up persuaded we are
against lyric poetry's culpable absorption in its own process by an
entirely successful instance of that very process in action: here is a
lyric about a knocker which claims that lyric is inadmissible.
All poets who get beyond the first excitement of being blessed
by the achievement of poetic form confront, sooner or later, the
question which Herbert confronts in 'A Knocker' and, if they are
lucky, they end up, like Herbert, outstripping it rather than an-
swering it directly. Some, like Wilfred Owen, outface it by living a
life so extremely mortgaged to the suffering of others that the
tenancy of the palace of art is paid for a hundredfold. Others, like
Yeats, promulgate and practise such faith in art's absolutely ab-
solved necessity that they overbear whatever assaults the historical
and contingent might mount upon their certitude. Richard
EHmann's statement of the Yeatsian case is finally applicable to
every serious poetic life:
He wishes to show how brute force may be transmogrified, how we

can sacrifice ourselves ... to our 'imagined' selves which offer far
higher standards than anything offered by social convention. If we
must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and
this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all
men do in their degree.U
13 8 SEAMUS HEANEY
Every poet does indeed proceed upon some such conviction,

even those who are most scrupulous in their avoidance of the
grand manner, who respect the democracy of language, and
display by the pitch of their voice or the commonness of their sub-
jects a readiness to put themselves on the side of those who are
sceptical of poetry's right to any special status. The fact is that
poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may
concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and
historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and
promise of the artistic event.
It is for this reason that I want to discuss 'At the Fishhouses' 12 by
Elizabeth Bishop. Here we see this most reticent and mannerly of
poets being compelled by the undeniable impetus of her art to break
with her usual inclination to conciliate the social audience. This
conciliatory impulse was not based on subservience but on a respect
for other people's shyness in the face of poetry's presumption: she
usually limited herself to a note that would not have disturbed the
discreet undersong of conversation between strangers breakfasting
at a seaside hotel. Without addressing a question as immense and
unavoidable as whether silence rather than poetry is not the proper
response in a world after Auschwitz, she implicitly condones the
doubts about art's prerogatives which such a question raises.
Elizabeth Bishop, in other words, was temperamentally inclined
to believe in the government of the tongue - in the self-denying
sense. She was personally reticent, opposed to and incapable of self-
aggrandisement, the very embodiment of good manners. Manners,
of course, imply obligations to others and obligations on the part of
others to ourselves. They insist on propriety, in the good large orig-
inal sense of the word, meaning that which is intrinsic and charac-
teristic and belongs naturally to the person or the thing. They also
imply a certain strictness and allow the verbs 'ought' and 'should'
to come into play. In short, as an attribute of the poetic enterprise,
manners place limits on the whole scope and pitch of the enterprise
itself. They would govern the tongue.
But Elizabeth Bishop not only practised good manners in her
poetry. She also submitted herself to the discipline of observation.
Observation was her habit, as much in the monastic, Hopkinsian
sense as in its commoner meaning of a customarily repeated action.
Indeed, observation is itself a manifestation of obedience, an activ-
ity which is averse to overwhelming phenomena by the exercise of
subjectivity, content to remain an assisting presence rather than an
overbearing pressure. So it is no wonder that the title of Bishop's

last book 13 was that of an old school textbook, Geography III. It is
as if she were insisting on an affinity between her poetry and text-
book prose, which establishes reliable, unassertive relations with
the world by steady attention to detail, by equable classification and
level-toned enumeration. The epigraph of the book suggests that
the poet wishes to identify with these well-tried, primary methods
of connecting words and things:
What is geography?
A description of the earth's surface.
What is the earth?
The planet or body on which we live.
What is the shape of the earth?
Round, like a ball.
Of what is the earth's surface composed?
Land and water.
A poetry faithful to such catechetical procedures would indeed

seem to deny itself access to vision or epiphany; and 'At the
Fishhouses' does begin with fastidious notations which log the
progress of the physical world, degree by degree, into the world of
the poet's own lucid but unemphatic awareness:
Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
140 SEAMUS HEANEY
growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water's edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.'
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion

spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to
dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually
taking the leap. For about two-thirds of the poem the restraining,
self-abnegating, completely attentive manners of the writing keep
us alive to the surfaces of a world: the note is colloquial if tending
towards the finical, the scenery is chaste, beloved and ancestral.
Grandfather was here. Yet this old world is still being made new
again by the sequins of herring scales, the sprinkle of grass and the
small iridescent flies. Typically, detail by detail, by the layering of
one observation upon another, by readings taken at different levels
and from different angles, a world is brought into being. There is a
feeling of ordered scrutiny, of a securely positioned observer
turning a gaze now to the sea, now to the fish barrels, now to the
old man. And the voice that tells us about it all is self-possessed but
not self-centred, full of discreet and intelligent instruction, of the
desire to witness exactly. The voice is neither breathless nor de-
tached; it is thoroughly plenished, like the sea 'swelling slowly as if
considering spilling over', and then, thrillingly, half-way through, it
does spill over:

element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
142 SEAMUS HEANEY
Just a minute ago I said that the habit of observation did not
promise any irruption of the visionary. Yet here it is, a rhythmic
heave which suggests that something other is about to happen -
although not immediately. The colloquial note creeps back and the
temptation to inspired utterance is rebuked by the seal who arrives
partly like a messenger from another world, partly like a dead-pan
comedian of water. Even so, he is a sign which initiates a wonder as
he dives back into the deep region where the poem will follow,
wooed with perfect timing into the mysterious. Looking at the
world of the surface, after all, is not only against the better judge-
ment of a seal; it is finally also against the better judgement of the
poet.
It is not that the poet breaks faith with the observed world, the
world of human attachment, grandfathers, Lucky Strikes and
Christmas trees. But it is a different, estranging and fearful element
which ultimately fascinates her: the world of meditated meaning,
of a knowledge-need which sets human beings apart from seals and
herrings, and sets the poet in her solitude apart from her grand-
father and the old man, this poet enduring the cold sea-light of her
own wyrd 14 and her own mortality. Her scientific impulse is sud-
denly jumped back to its root in pre-Socratic awe, and water stares
her in the face as the original solution:
If you should dip your hand in,

your wrist would ache immediately
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
This writing still bears a recognisable resemblance to the simple

propositions of the geography textbook. There is no sentence
which does not possess a similar clarity and unchallengeability.
Yet since these concluding lines are poetry, not geography, they
have a dream truth as well as a daylight truth about them, they
are as hallucinatory as they are accurate. They also possess that
sine qua non of all lyric utterance, a completely persuasive inner

cadence which is deeply intimate with the laden water of full tide.
The lines are inhabited by certain profoundly true tones, which as
Robert Frost put it, 'were before words were, living in the cave of
the mouth', 15 and they do what poetry most essentially does: they
fortify our inclination to credit promptings of our intuitive being.
They help us to say in the first recesses of ourselves, in the shyest,
pre-social part of our nature, 'Yes, I know something like that
too. Yes, that's right; thank you for putting words on it and
making it more or less official.' And thus the government of the
tongue gains our votes, and Anna Swir's proclamation (which at
first may have sounded a bit overstated) comes true in the sensa-
tion of reading even a poet as shy of bardic presumption as
Elizabeth Bishop:
A poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a

medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective
subconscious.
In the three lectures which follow, I shall explore the ways in which
W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath each contrived to
become 'an antenna'. And in concluding this one, I want now to
offer two further 'texts' for meditation. The first is from T.S. Eliot.
Forty-four years ago, in October 1942, in wartime London, when
he was at work on 'Little Gidding', Eliot wrote in a letter to
E. Martin Browne:
In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down
at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling
with words and rhythms is justified activity - especially as there is
never any certainty that the whole thing won't have to be scrapped.
And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug
than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless. 16
Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in

general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they
are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike
and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individu-
ated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil - no lyric has ever
stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the
writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are
left speechless and renewed.
144 SEAMUS HEANEY
I am thinking of Jesus's writing as it is recorded in Chapter 8 of

John's Gospel, my second and concluding text:
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in
adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in
the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned:
but what sayest thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as
though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience,
went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman,
he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no
man condemned thee?
She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I
condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the

usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is
arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It
does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, 'Now
a solution will take place', it does not propose to be instrumental or
effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and
whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a
space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus
where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.
This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest
moments it would attempt, in Yeats's phrase, to hold in a single
thought reality and justiceY Yet even then its function is not essen-
tially supplicatory or transitive. Poetry is more a threshold than a
path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at
which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experi-
ence of being at the same time summoned and released.
From Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London,

1988), pp. 91-108.
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE 14 5
NOTES
[Heaney explains (Preocccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 [London,
1980], pp. 13-14) that his early essays were written in the days of
'Practical Criticism' (another way of describing what I am calling New
Criticism) and although later essays like this one are more discursive and
allusive than those in Preoccupations they are still predominantly New
Critical. Heaney must be aware that poststructuralists like Barthes and
Foucault claim that authors don't matter; certainly he insists on seeing the
value and the different modes of operation of poetry as inseparable from
the strenuously committed life of the poet. Hence his attention to Eastern
European poetry where this connection seems obvious.
The range of Heaney's literary reference (constantly relevant to his own
poetry as his expositors are well aware) can only be represented adequately
here by a sequence of editorial end-notes. Ed.]
1. C.K. Stead, The New Poetic (London, 1964).

2. '[T]ranslators of ready-made meaning': Heaney met this phrase (he
misremembered a word) in Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against
Hope (Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 225). She locates it in Mandelstam's
'Conversation about Dante' but was probably referring to a different
draft of that essay to the authorised version (See Jane Gary Harris's
editorial note in Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and
Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, MI,
1979), p. 677.
3. See Coleridge's introductory note to 'Kubla Khan', The Poems of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1954), pp. 295-7.
4. An allusion to Eliot's book of verse for children, Old Possum's Book
of Practical Cats (London, 1939).
5. Quoted by Czeslaw Milosz in his 'Introduction' to Happy as a Dog's
Tail: Poems by Anna Swir, trans. Czeslaw Milosz with Leonard
Nathan (New York, 1985), p. xiv.
6. Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1967), p. vi.
7. Yeats, 'Among Schoolchildren', 11.57-8.
8. Jane Gary Harris (ed.), Mandelstam: the Complete Critical Prose and
Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor,
MI, 1979), pp. 409, 426.
9. See Terz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky), 'The Literary Process in
Russia', Kontinent 1 : the Alternative Voice of Russia and Eastern
Europe (London, 1976), pp. 73-4.
10. See the title and 11.35-6 of Herbert's poem 'The Collar'.
146 SEAMUS HEANEY
11. See Richard EHmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edn, 1964; London,
1975), p. xxiv.
12. Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London, 1970), pp. 72-4.
13. Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III (London, 1977).
14. Word used in the Old English elegiac tradition for 'fate' or 'ordained
course of events'. See B.J. Timmer, 'Wyrd in Anglo-Saxon Prose and
Poetry', Neophilologus, 26 (1940-1), 24-33,213-28.
15. Frost to Walter Prichard Eaton, 18 September 1915. Selected Letters,
ed. Lawrance Thompson (London, 1965), p. 191.
16. E. Martin Browne, The Making of Eliot's Plays (Cambridge, 1969),
p. 158.
17. Yeats, A Vision (London, 1974), p. 25.
10
The Sign of the Cross:

Review of The Government
of the Tongue
THOMAS DOCHERTY
Seamus Heaney's new collection of critical pieces falls into two sec-
tions. The first brings together reviews, articles and lectures con-
cerned with some poets who are more or less close to Heaney's own
work: Kavanagh, Larkin, Walcott, all writers who problematise the
notion of the poet's (literal) 'place', the poet's 'Here' -ness, as Larkin
might have thought it. This is followed by considerations of a body
of work which raises questions of the poet's place in language -
poetry in translation - firstly from the Irish and then from the lan-
guages of the Eastern bloc. Finally, the second section of the book
comprises Heaney's ruminations on 'the government of the tongue'
in Auden, Lowell and Plath, the substance of his T.S. Eliot
memorial lectures.
Near the end of the collection of essays, reviews and lectures,
Heaney calls to mind Lowell's refusal to read at President Johnson's
White House Festival of Arts in the 1960s. Lowell remarked then
that 'every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public cele-
bration without making subtle public commitments'. 1 Since he
quotes this with approval, Heaney must have been troubled by a
similar thought when invited to give the T.S. Eliot memorial lec-
tures in 1986. Certainly, the essays gathered together here address
the pressing issue of conscience. Indeed Heaney focuses on 'the role
of the poet as consCience, one who wakens us to a possible
147
148 THOMAS DOCHERTY
etymology of that word as meaning our capacity to know the same

thing together' (p. 130). This 'conscience' is later itself 'known to-
gether' with another term, 'confusion', which recurs in Frost's well-
known phrase, much cited here, in which he suggested that poetry
offers a 'momentary stay against confusion'. Heaney writes of
Lowell's act of conscientious objection defining it as one in which
'doctrine, ancestry and politics fused themselves in one command-
ing stroke and Lowell succeeded in uniting the aesthetic instinct
with the obligation to witness morally and significantly in the realm
of public action' (p. 133; italics added). At this point, 'conscience'
and 'confusion' are themselves conscientiously confused.
These two words, and their binding confusion with each other,
alert us to the interweaving of two guiding threads in Heaney's crit-
icism. On the one hand, there is a major concern with ethics, with
the question of the relation of I to Thou, to borrow the terms from
Buber favoured by Heaney; 2 on the other, there is a concern which
often crosses with the first, warps its possibility of articulation, and
this is the political dialectic, familiar to poststructuralist thought, of
Identity and Difference. The figure made in this weft, and the real
centre of Heaney's attentions here, is that of the critical poet herself
or himself, the poet trapped in crisis, between the demands of what
Heaney describes as two musics, one of celebration and one of suf-
fering; or, in another troping of the same opposition, between the
aesthetic demands of poetry and the historical demands of ethics
and politics.
It is, perhaps, in the 'conscientious confusion' of these essays,
their desire to discover some fundamental 'identity', a 'capacity to
know the same thing together', between, say, the poets of Ireland
and those of the Eastern bloc countries, that one finds the most pro-
ductive crux in Heaney's critical thinking. There is a labyrinthine,
or poetic, logic to the essays as a whole; but this logic reveals a par-
ticular limitation in Heaney's politicisation of the aesthetic or poeti-
cal 'conscience'. Theoretically, Heaney proceeds as if criticism were
itself productive of such conscience, as if it aided in the understand-
ing of poetry, in allowing the reader to know the same thing to-
gether with the writer. And yet there lingers in Heaney an element
of distrust of that notion, as his lecture on Auden here makes clear.
He discusses Auden's well-charted obscurities, and remarks that the
poet's obscurity 'excludes' him but does not bother him: 'I am now
content that Auden should practise such resistance to the reader's
expectations; I take pleasure in its opacity and am ready to accept
REVIEW OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE 149
its obscurity - even if it is wilful - as a symptom of this poet's

insistence upon the distance between art and life' (p. 121). Here, it
is the very denial of 'conscience', the refusal of the postulation of
'identity', which makes Auden's poem fully operational. The prob-
lematic limitation in the politicisation of aesthetics in this collection
of essays lies here, in the function of criticism itself as some sup-
posed aid to understanding, or more precisely 'conscience'.
In terms of the political dialectic between identity and difference
which is axiomatic to Heaney's understanding of conscience here,
there is a fairly consistent orientation or earthy magnetism drawing
Heaney towards the prioritisation of the pole of 'identity'. What
this means, in short, is a rejection of 'difference', a rejection in
which one can discover a 'blind spot' in Heaney's relation of poli-
tics to aesthetics. Clearly and overtly concerned with emancipation,
Heaney in this collection of essays betrays in his own language a
readiness to reduce alterity to identity, to commit precisely the same
kind of 'imperialism of understanding' from which, Heaney
reminds us, so many writers from the Eastern bloc have suffered.
These writers can only be heard, are only available for poetry, in so
far as they 'govern their tongue' and speak decorously, or in a mode
which is 'understandable' or which can be accommodated by the
ideologies under which they suffer. And yet there is also a realisa-
tion in Heaney here that this stance is not enough, and a deep
awareness that a poetry which defies understanding is the most
vital, the most politically emancipating. In other words, and contra
Frost, Heaney validates here, perhaps despite himself, a poetry of
confusion. This phrase, 'a poetry of confusion', is, however, am-
biguous. On the one hand, it refers to a poetry in which one wit-
nesses the reduction of difference or alterity to identity and
sameness, a poetry which works through anamnesis to recall to the
reader that which she or he has always already known, phenomeno-
logically 'fusing' reader and writer in an instant of consciousness or
'conscience'. But on the other hand, it also refers to a poetry which
operates in direct contrast with this, a poetry whose function is to
stir anarchic confusion by being precisely incomprehensible, a
poetry whose tongue is 'ungoverned' and indecorous or at odds
with the dominant ideology through which a social formation
understands or knows itself.
It is for this reason, clearly, that poetry in translation will play
such an important role in Heaney's current critical thinking; for
such poetry, almost by definition, will problematise understanding
150 THOMAS DOCHERTY
as such. The problem is set out right from the start, when Heaney
indicates that:
In the course of this book, Mandelstam and other poets from Eastern
bloc countries are often invoked. I keep returning to them because
there is something in their situation that makes them attractive to a
reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish. There is an
unsettled aspect to the different worlds they inhabit, and one of the
challenges they face is to survive amphibiously, in the realm of 'the
times' and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect, a chal-
lenge immediately recognisable to anyone who has lived with the
awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland's history over the last
couple of decades.
(p. xx)
The magnetic attraction of such writers draws Heaney here primar-

ily because of their alterity, the 'different worlds they inhabit; and
yet such 'different worlds' turn out to be 'immediately recognis-
able', always already known: 'Gdansk' is 'Derry' in a different
accent; 'Voronezh' is a particular inflection of 'Belfast', and so on.
Such 'confusion' or translation here allows for the production of a
musical harmony, a kind of Owenesque pararhyme between, say,
Heaney and Brodsky, Larkin and Esenin; or, in specific relation to
the essays printed here, between Kavanagh and Lowell, writer of
the Mills of the Kavanaughs, and so on. And yet a political har-
monisation of 'different worlds' is not simply achieved through the
aesthetic or poetic device of pararhyme, as Heaney is well aware;
more importantly, nor is it entirely desirable. But Heaney - here at
least - does not acknowledge the possibility that this kind of har-
monic convergence of different worlds might be undesirable. In the
claim to understand translation, poems which are uprooted from
their cultural and political or historical provenance, there is at work
what might be termed an 'imperialism of thought', in which the
critic reduces the potential anarchic confusion produced by obscure
'foreign' writing through a reduction of that alterity to identity,
through the production of 'conscience' in Heaney's terms. But it is
precisely such an imperialism of thought which has made for the
problems of writers such as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva,
Holub and many others in the first place. It might be more consci-
entious to accept the radical incomprehensibility of such writings,
to refuse to reduce their problems to the status of the merest aspects
of our own; to refuse what is essentially a bland political
identification made in the interests of the production of an aesthetic

harmony.
But there is another aspect of this which is of importance in these
essays. Heaney is making a radical shift in the orientation of his
own writing, and these essays offer in some ways an apologia pro
poemate meo':
Might we not nowadays affirm ... that the shortest way to Whitby,
the monastery where Caedmon sang the first Anglo-Saxon verses, is
via Warsaw and Prague?
(pp. 40-1)
Magnetic North is turning here to an 'easter rising', and Heaney is

conceding a secondary axis, one which was of extreme importance
to his Modernist precursors, Yeats and, of course, Eliot in whose
memory these lectures are written. But this is tantamount to making
articulate a suggestion which haunts these texts. Heaney, concerned
with criticism, finds himself here at a moment of crisis, a moment of
literal self-crossing. He is caught between the desire for identity and
conscience on the one hand and the awareness of the necessity of
difference and the political demand for a song of discord on the
other, a poetry which will stir confusion. He is also, clearly, on a
metaphorical geopolitical crux between two axes. It is as if he finds
a solution to his crisis by a covert theology. These essays mark the
horizontal axis which complements the vertical axis of the earlier
poetry (and the prose in Preoccupations too, of course), making a
textual figure, a weaving of a sign of a cross. Heaney here seems to
find some act of blessing, a theological act, as a figure for the re-
demption of the conflict between aesthetics and politics. When he
explicitly invokes Jesus, it is as a writer, writing in the sand when
confronted with a crowd eager to stone in hard judgement a
woman caught in adultery or betrayal. And Jesus's position, as de-
scribed by Heaney here, seems to be analogous to the position of
crisis in which the poet/critic is located:
The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the usual
life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is arbi-
trary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It does
not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, 'Now a so-
lution will take place', it does not propose to be instrumental or ef-
fective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and
whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a
152 THOMAS DOCHERTY
space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus

where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.
This is what gives poetry its governing power.
(p. 108)
Poetry thus operates rather like a rest in a musical phrase, accord-

ing to this, as a powerful but passive silence. There arises a some-
what mystical view of poetry here, one which pays enormous
political dividends in principle, but which Heaney does not fully
draw in these essays, concerned as they are with the possibility of
understanding and comprehending difference by reducing it to an
aspect of identity. Heaney opens the entire collection with a brief
narrative, in which the singer David Hammond and himself were
about to record some songs and poems for a friend in Michigan.
On their way to make the recording, a contrary music, a music of
discord, broke in: explosions and the sirens of ambulances and fire
engines announced that a political history was going on even as
Heaney and Hammond proposed to celebrate 'conscience' in the
recording studio. This opening raises Heaney's fundamental
problem of the relation of aesthetics to politics, a problem which, I
suggest, he solves through the ghostly presence of a theology. But it
also raises the whole question of understanding or hearing which
seems crucial here.
In what is the most consequential critical piece here, on Plath,
Heaney recounts another narrative allegory of the progress of the
poet, this time from Wordsworth's great poem of deflection and de-
ferral, The Prelude. The passage of 'The Boy of Winander' offers a
tripartite staging for poetry. In the first stage, the poet learns, like
the boy, how to whistle in the most basic of modes. Secondly, the
poet then finds a mode of whistling 'in tune', in a kind of harmony
with the owls or birds which surround him in nature. But there is a
third stage in which the poet cannot sing at all, a stage in which the
poet's task seems to be to hear the 'melodies and hieroglyphics of
the world; the workings of the active universe ... are echoed far
inside him' (p. 163 ). Here, the poem comes as a kind of gift, and it
is the poet's task not to sing but to bear witness, to allow a poetry
to articulate itself through the more or less unconscious body. It is
here that the poet can begin to hear the alterity, the incomprehensi-
ble otherness which Heaney strives after in the political dialectic.
The 'sirens' must be heard, but Heaney, as Ulysses, must also
crucify himself on the mast as he hears them; there is the suggestion
all the way through this collection that Heaney regards that suffer-
ing in the east as the primary condition of great poetry. It is this
that he wishes to identify himself with; but this necessitates the
flight from home, in every sense of the word, the flight from
comfort and from the known; it requires a desire to sail into the
unknown, to make the real move eastwards. In this, the reader of
poetry would, perhaps for the first time, acknowledge its difficulty,
would release poetry into its full incomprehensibility and obscurity.
And she or he would thus find a mode of emancipation from the
self and from the claim upon identity, a claim which fundamentally
reposes in imperialist thinking, and in the desire not to hear the
Other, not to hear the discordant music of Eliot's Keatsian nightin-
gale whose song is a kind of 'poison in the ears', a song of discord,
not a harmony: 'Jug jug'. In this way, poetry becomes not the
repository of the possibility of anamnesis; rather, it opens the poss-
ibility of a future in which, to put this in Rilke's words here cited
(in translation) by Heaney: 'You must change your life' (p. 14).
From Irish Review, No 5 (Autumn 1988), 112-16
NOTES
[Thomas Docherty's review is the clearest example in this New Casebook
of 'deconstruction', a mode of analysis favoured by Jacques Derrida and
other poststructuralists. It is not at first easy to follow and you might find it
helpful to reread the detailed account of its linguistic ploys and reversals
provided in the Introduction to this volume. Docherty detects an underly-
ing binary opposition between 'identity' and 'alterity' in Heaney's dis-
course. By displaying how such terms achieve their meaning through their
difference from each other, each carrying the 'trace' of the other, Docherty
sets out to overturn Heaney's preferred hierarchy (in which 'identity' is
privileged over 'alterity'). Docherty suggests that it is 'the ghostly presence
of a theology' (the authority with which Jesus writes in the dust in
Heaney's last long quotation) (p. 144 above) which prevents the poet from
abandoning 'imperialist thinking' in aesthetic and ideological matters alike.
This piece is like Eagleton's review of Field Work (essay 7) in drawing at-
tention to the political implications of Heaney's aesthetic stance in the
pages of a general literary magazine. Ed.]
1. Lowell's refusal to read at the White House in 1965 is documented by

Steven Gould Axelrod (Robert Lowell: Life and Art [Princeton, NJ,
1978], pp. 180-1. [Ed.]
154 THOMAS DOCHERTY
2. Heaney 'favours' the terminology of Martin Buber (I and Thou [1923;

trans R.G. Smith, Edinburgh, 1937]) in his essay on Auden on p. 126 of
The Government of the Tongue. He associates the obscurity of Auden's
earlier poetry with Buber's 'I-Thou' relationship: the later poetry, says
Heaney, is stronger on the relationship of the subject with things, of 'I'
with 'It'. [Ed.]
11
'Pap for the Dispossessed': 1

Seamus Heaney and the
Poetics of Identity
DAVID LLOYD
I
I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the
peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not them-
selves natives of England but who spoke the English language ... A
desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagina-
tion's supply lines to the past ... to perceive in these a continuity of
communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threat-
ened - all this is signified by their language.
(Seamus Heaney, 'Englands of the Mind', Preoccupations, p. 150)
The centrality of the question of identity to Irish writing and crit-

ical discussion of it since the nineteenth century is not due simply
to the contingent influence of political preoccupations. Rather, it
indicates the crucial function performed by literature in the artic-
ulation of those preoccupations, inasmuch as literary culture is
conceived as offering not merely a path towards the resolution,
but the resolution itself of the problems of subjective and political
identity. At present, the Irish poet whose work has most evidently
gained such authority is Seamus Heaney, the dust-jackets of
whose volumes of poetry since Field Work carry such banal as-
sertions as 'Everyone knows by now that Heaney is a major
poet ... ' 2 Heaney's quasi-institutional acceptance on both sides of the
155
156 DAVID LLOYD
Atlantic as a major poet and bearer of the tradition coincides

with a tendency to regard his work as articulating important intu-
itions of Irish identity, and as uttering and reclaiming that iden-
tity beyond the divisive label, 'Anglo-Irishness'. Therefore, it is
not untimely to interrogate these assumptions in the context of an
historical elaboration of the principal concepts which founded
and still dominate literary and political formulations of Irish
identity.
An isomorphism can be traced not only between Heaney's formu-
lations of his poetic and the poetic theories current at the inception
of Irish nationalism, but furthermore, between his poetic and the
aesthetic politics whose 'atavisms' and 'archetypes' it pretends to
sound. This is not to suggest, with some, the uncanny 'Orphic' po-
tential of this poet to 'lead us through that psychic hinterland which
we will have to chart before we can emerge from the northern
crisis', or even to substantiate the interpretative validity of his 'un-
wavering pursuit of a myth through which we might understand
Northern Ireland today'. 3 Rather, it is to address a crucial
insufficiency in the poetic itself, one which permits Heaney to pose
delusory moral conflicts whose real form can better be understood
as a contradiction between the ethical and the aesthetic elements of
bourgeois ideology. Heaney's inability to address such contradic-
tions stringently stems from the chosen basis of his poetic in the
concept of identity. Since this concept subtends the ethical and aes-
thetic assumptions that his poetry registers as being in conflict, and
yet thoroughly informs his work, he is unable ever to address the
relation between politics and writing more than superficially, in
terms of thematic concerns, or superstitiously, in terms of a vision
of the poet as a diviner of the hypothetical pre-political conscious-
ness of his race.
It is within the matrix of British Romanticism that the question
of Irish identity is posed, with the result that the critique of imperi-
alism is caught up within reflected forms of imperialist ideology.
This is already apparent in the initial formulations on literature and
identity of Young Ireland's ideologists in the 1840s, which in fact
present the predicament they would pretend to be resolving. The
nationalist critic D.F. MacCarthy provides a representative in-
stance. Insisting that any knowledge of a people's genius is incom-
plete 'unless it be based upon the revelations they themselves have
made, or the confessions they have uttered', MacCarthy argues that
full knowledge of the ballad poetry of Ireland would furnish not
HEANEY AND THE POETICS OF IDENTITY 157
only an aid to an archaeology of the Irish genius, but the very foun-
dation on which an Irish literature might construct a distinctive
identity:
that we can be thoroughly Irish in our feelings without ceasing to be

English in our speech; that we can be faithful to the land of our birth,
without being ungrateful to that literature which has been 'the
nursing mother of our minds'; that we can develop the intellectual
resources of our country, and establish for ourselves a distinct and
separate existence in the world of letters without depriving ourselves
of the advantages of the widely-diffused and genius-consecrated
language of England, are facts that I conceive cannot be too widely
disseminated. 4
Beneath the affirmation of MacCarthy's text persists the disturb-

ance in which it originates, an apprehension of the real state of
Ireland, its identifications split between the 'real' and the 'nursing'
mother.
This passage, and its implicit resolution, is representative of Irish
nationalist thinking in the nineteenth century: rather than oppose
their apprehension of a real incoherence against the imperial call to
union and identity, the Irish nationalists chose to seek an alternative
principle of unity on which to base their opposition. Hence it is for
the writer to seek beyond the evidence of disintegration for counter-
evidence of the continuity of an Irish spirit in his writings. What
allows him privileged access to that spirit - and here the argument
is resolutely circular - is his total integration with it, 'saturated with
Irish feeling ... sympathising in every beat of an Irish peasant's
pulse', as an anonymous contributor in the Young Ireland journal
of the 1840s, the Nation, phrases it. 5
The writer, like the analogous figure of the martyr, attains 'satu-
ration' with meaning, and hence representativeness, for nationalism
by partaking of that which he represents, the spirit of the nation.
Both represent the ideal resolution of the problem faced by the
ideologists of the bourgeois nation state which comes into existence
by deposing 'arbitrary' power: how, that is, 'to reconcile individual
liberty with association'. 6 The resolution is primarily ethical, since
it locates the nature and form of human liberty in identification
with the spirit or Geist of the people. The identity of the individual,
his integrity, is expressed by the degree to which that individual
identifies himself with and integrates his differences in a national
consciousness. This identification becomes in Ireland, as across the
158 DAVID LLOYD
whole spectrum of European nationalisms, a precondition to poli-

tics rather than a political option? But while the martyr provides
the high points or, as the 1916 nationalist leader Patrick Pearse was
later to express it, the 'burning symbols', through which the call to
identity achieves its moments of intensity, it is the function of the
writer to mediate the continuity of the national spirit. The distinct-
ively Irish literature intended by nationalist theorists was to have
uncovered a common ground beneath political conflicts, whether
between peasant and landlord, Catholic and Protestant, or class and
class, which could then be seen as mere surface phenomena of Irish
society. In such a way, Irish literature was to become a 'central in-
stitution or idea', forming a 'social bond' to replace the historically
evolved constitution that was thought to override and integrate
social differences in England. Twenty years before Arnold's famous
formulations, Irish culture is envisaged as performing the work of
integration, uniting simultaneously class with class and the prim-
itive with the evolved. 8
Writing is accordingly endowed with the function of grounding, a
term which serves to conduct the uneasy shifts between organic
metaphors of the spirit and growth of the nation and architectural
metaphors of the construction of an institution. The slogan of the
Nation succinctly expresses the ramifications of the nationalist
project: 'To foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil.' The
act of fostering, by which a people 'separated from their forefathers'
are to be given back an alternative yet equally arbitrary and fictive
paternity, is renaturalised through the metaphor of grounding:
through its rootedness in the primary soil of Ireland, the mind of
Ireland will regain its distinctive savour. The 'root' meaning of
culture is implicit here, and certainly, in so far as a literary culture is
envisaged as the prime agent and ground of unification, it is literary
taste which is subjected to the most rigorous 'reterritorialisation'. In
an essay entitled 'Our National Language' Thomas Davis diagnosed
the consequences of imposing a foreign language on a native popula-
tion as a primary deterritorialisation, a decoding of the primitive re-
lation of the Irish to their territory, 'tearing their identity from all
places' .9 That deterritorialisation is seen by Davis as occurring in
three main forms: in the relation of identity to territory, in the rela-
tion of place-name to territory, in the relation of the people to their
history, envisaged as the continuity of a patrimony. Language medi-
ates each of these relations. The reterritorialisation of language as
the literary language of culture is accordingly threefold. The
identification of the writer with that spirit of the nation which his re-
searches reveal supplies his relation to the 'entail of feeling' which
links him to his patrimony; that identification similarly ensures the
revitalisation of the relation of his language to native place or
ground, despite the fact that that language will, as MacCarthy was
only too aware, be English; and thirdly, the revitalised relation of
writer to place sutures that writer's formerly ruptured identity, en-
suring, as if to complete the topology, his relation to the paternal
spirit or genius of the nation. Since nationalism offers a theory of the
integration of the individual subject with the destiny of the race, it is
not surprising that the dynamic sketched above resembles that of the
'family romance' by which, supposedly, the victory of the race over
the individual is achieved. 10 As in the family, so in the nation, as na-
tionalist ideologists have so often stressed. Within the triangle of his
family romance, the writer mediates between his motherland and a
symbolic fatherland. He elevates his imaginary relation with the land
of his birth to an identification with a spiritual nation which is that
of his forefathers in the double sense of their possession and his
inheritance. His identity is thus assured in assuring the quasi-
procreative relationship between land and culture.
The recourse to the 'racial archetype', in the ever more
commodified and familiar images of Irish nationalism, and the ma-
nipulation of the relation of Irishness to Irish ground, linked as
these are through Kathleen Nf Houlihan, the motherland, together
produce the forms in which the aestheticisation of Irish politics is
masked. Aesthetics, understood here to be ultimately the concept
of man as producer and as producer of himself through his prod-
ucts, posits an original identity which precedes difference and
conflict and which is to be reproduced in the ultimate unity that
aesthetic works both prefigure and prepare. The naturalisation of
identity effected by an aesthetic ideology serves to foreclose histor-
ical process and to veil the constitution of subjects and issues in
continuing conflict, while deflecting both politics and ethics into a
hypothetical domain of free play. 11 This is, par excellence, the
domain of culture, envisaged by Arnold as the end of historical
process and as the timeless zone within time where one may cultiv-
ate one's 'best self' beyond or outside historical conflict. Aesthetic
politics in turn represents images of origin and unity to convey an
ethical demand for the political coherence which will override
whatever differences impede a unification in continuity with
original identity.
160 DAVID LLOYD
It would be generally true to say that the history of Ireland in the

last seventy years - to regress no further - exemplifies both the
efficacy and the disabling contradictions of the politics of identity.
The peculiar and largely anomalous position of Ireland as an ex-
colonial state in a Western European context has led to political
and social developments which are untypical of, but by no means
entirely alien to, the general political frame of recent European
history. Nationalism, and the concomitant concern with racial and
cultural identity, are, as has been suggested, political phenomena,
oriented towards the production of a sense of popular unity and
conceived within a generally oppositional framework. Under
normal circumstances, the efficacy of the appeal to racial identity as
a unifying principle would wither away once political victory has
been achieved and consolidated in the nation state. Other modes of
political organisation tend to displace nationalism in the politically
stabilised nation state, although it is clear enough that at moments
of crisis appeal to some form of nationalist ideology is a constant
resource of both governments and their oppositions. 12
The anomalous character of recent Irish history derives from the
fact that, unlike most other Western European states, the moment of
nationalist victory did not constitute a moment of apparent national
unification, but rather institutionalised certain racial and sectarian
divisions. The Treaty of 1922, which, after prolonged guerilla
warfare, established the Irish Free State, did so only at the expense
of also establishing the Northern Irish state, a self-governing enclave
with a deliberately and artificially constructed majority of Protestant
citizens. But although the Treaty appears thus to have instituted
simply another divisive factor in Irish politics, within the two states
themselves its effect was to perpetuate forms of nationalist ideology
as dominant and hypothetically unifying forces.
In the Republic, it has not been hardline nationalists alone who
have appealed to partition as the major block to the attainment of a
full Irish identity. The doctrine of the territorial and political in-
tegrity of Ireland was enshrined in the Irish constitution and has
been conceived, if only formally, as a primary political objective of
any Irish government. Moreover, and more importantly, the perpet-
uation of partition has allowed the persistence of what is effectively
a two-party system, dominated by parties whose origins lie in the
initial rejection of the Treaty's provisions by one group of national-
ists. Since the parties - Fine Gael and Fianna Fail - serve urban and
rural bourgeois interests respectively, the instant articulation of Irish
politics in relation to the questions of the border and of Irish identity

has historically been detrimental to the development of the smaller
Labour party. The politics of identity, precisely by locating division
and difference at the border of the Irish state, has tended to obscure
another internal political reality: class difference. 13 The contradic-
tion is, of course, that although in the short term such policies have
served bourgeois interests, and even drawn working-class support
for what would seem objectively unlikely policies, it has in the
longer term helped to retard the development of capitalism in
Ireland by dividing bourgeois interests. Ireland remains accordingly
in a classical postcolonial situation in which economic underdevel-
opment continually undermines attempts to forge political cohesion.
In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the figment of Protestant
identity, with all its racial overtones, immediately masked certain
internal differences of sect and geographical origin as well as of
economic interest. More importantly, 'Protestantism' acted for
bourgeois politicians as a means to divide Protestant and Catholic
workers along sectarian lines. In a manner reminiscent of the ideo-
logical function of the English constitution as a barrier against
Jacobinism in the late eighteenth century, the border played a
crucial role in externalising the threat of difference, placing it
outside the Protestant community and the ideally Protestant state,
and permitting the definition of the Catholic population as alien. 14
Through the crises of recent years, those internal differences have
returned with manifest political effects in the splitting of the
Unionist Party and in the increasing militance of working-class loy-
alists. The effects of sectarian and political differences between
Protestants and Catholics, unionists and republicans within
Northern Ireland needs little emphasis.
What may need emphasis, however, is the role which a politics of
identity has played in producing the form of the current civil war in
Ireland. The combined effect of political thinking on each side of
the border has been to perpetuate not only nationalist ideologies,
but their articulation along sectarian and, effectively, racial
grounds. The real basis of the present struggle in the economic and
social conditions of a postcolonial state, and the peculiar twist
given to class differences by such conditions, has consequently been
systematically obscured. This obscurantism has further permitted,
both within and without Ireland, a subtle knotting in popular
liberal and conservative interpretations of Irish history: vociferous
mystification as to the apparently insistent repetitiveness of Irish
162 DAVID LLOYD
history joins with a persuasive insinuation that the reasons for repe-
tition lie in the nature of Irish identity. It is the argument of this
essay that such mystifications are inherent in the cultural and aes-
thetic thinking which dominates both the Irish and the English tra-
ditions, and that the apparent freedom of the aesthetic realm from
politics is in itself a crucially political conception. The political
function of aesthetics and culture is not only to suggest the possibil-
ity of transcending conflict, but to do so by excluding (or integrat-
ing) difference, whether historically produced or metaphysically
conceived, in so far as it represents a threat to an image of unity
whose role is finally hegemonic. 15 The poetics of identity is inti-
mately involved in both the efficacy and the contradictions of aes-
thetic politics and political aesthetics.
II
And when we look for the history of our sensibilities I am convinced,
as Professor J.C. Beckett was convinced about the history of Ireland
generally, that it is to what he called the stable element, the land
itself, that we must look for continuity.
(Heaney, 'The Sense of Place')
Since his earliest volumes, Seamus Heaney's writings have rehearsed

all the figures of the family romance of identity, doubled, more
often than not, by an explicit affirmation of a sexual structure in
the worker's or the writer's relation to a land or place already given
as feminine. A certain sexual knowingness accounts in part for the
winsome quality of such poems as 'Digging', 'Rite of Spring', or
'Undine' in the early volumes. 16 The winsomeness and the knowing-
ness are compounded by the neatness with which the slight frissons
produced by the raised spectres of patricide, rape or seduction are
stilled by denouements which stress the felicities of analogy or cure
the implied violence of labour and sexuality with a warm and hu-
manising morality. That such knowledge should be so easily borne
and contained makes it merely thematic, and renders suspect the
strenuousness of that 'agon' which Harold Bloom seems to identify
in Heaney's work as the effort to evade 'his central trope, the vowel
of the earth' .17 Bloom here correctly identifies a crucial theme in
Heaney's work, and one which indeed organises his preoccupation
with the establishment of poetic identity. The relevant question,
however, is whether that 'agon' ever proceeds beyond thematic con-
cerns, and, further, whether it could do so without rupturing the

whole edifice within which the identity of the poet, his voice, is
installed.
To be sure, Heaney makes much play, both in his poems and in
his prose writings, with the deterritorialisation inflicted both on a
national consciousness by the effects of colonialisation, and on the
individual subject by acculturation. But in Heaney's writing such
perceptions initiate no firm holding to and exploration of the
quality of dispossession; rather, his work relocates an individual
and racial identity through the reterritorialisation of language and
culture. Heaney's rhetoric of compensation - 'You had to come
back/To learn how to lose yourself,/To be pilot and stray' (Door
into the Dark, p. 50)- uncritically replays the Romantic schema of
a return to origins which restores continuity through fuller self-pos-
session, and accordingly rehearses the compensations conducted by
Irish Romantic nationalism. But his poetic offers constantly a pre-
mature compensation, enacted through linguistic and metaphorical
usages which promise a healing of division simply by returning the
subject to place, in an innocent yet possessive relation to his objects.
'Digging', an instance still cited sometimes with the authority of an
ars poetica, finds its satisfactions in a merely aesthetic resolution,
which, indeed, sets the pattern for most of the subsequent work:

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump along the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
That which is posed as problematic, the irreducible difference

between physical and cultural labour, and consequently the relation
of the writer to his subjective history, is neatly resolved merely by
reducing physical labour to a metaphor for cultural labour, while
displacing the more intractable question of subjective history
beyond the frame of the poem as the project of that labour. At the
same time, the intimation of violence, of a will to power, carried in
the opening lines already with more fashionable swagger than
164 DAVID LLOYD
engagement - 'snug as a gun' - is suppressed at the end by sup-

pressing the metaphorical vehicle:
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
With that suppression the writer can forget or annul the knowledge
of writing's power both for dispossession and subjection - 'I look
down' - and represent it instead as the metaphorical continuation
of a work which has already been taken as a metaphor for writing.
What assures that continuity, both across generations and across
the twenty-year span of the writer's own history, is the symbolic
position of the father in possession of and working the land.
Standing initially as a figure for the writer's exclusion from identity
with land and past, the father, by way of his own father, slides
across into the position of a figure for continuity:
By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
'Digging' holds out the prospect of a return to origins and the

consolatory myth of a knowledge which is innocent and without
disruptive effect. The gesture is almost entirely formal, much as the
ideology of nineteenth-century nationalists - whose concerns
Heaney largely shares - was formal or aesthetic, composing the
identity of the subject in the knowing of objects the very knowing
of which is an act of self-production. This description holds for the
writer's relation to the communal past as well as to his subjective
past: in the final analysis, the two are given as identical. Knowledge
can never truly be the knowledge of difference: instead, returned to
that from which the subject was separated by knowledge, the

subject poses his objects (perceived or produced) as synecdoches of
continuity:
poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as

restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity,
with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the
buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the import-
ance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up
being plants. 18
Poetry as divination, poetry as dig: in both these formulations

Heaney resorts to metaphors which seek to bypass on several fronts
the problematic relation of writing to identity. Firstly, the
objectification of the subject that writing enacts is redeemed either
through the fiction of immediate self-presence, or in the form of the
significant moment as synecdoche for the whole temporal sequence,
in which is composed the identity of the subject as a seamless con-
tinuum. Secondly, the predicament of a literary culture as a spe-
cialised mode of labour is that it is set over against non-cultural
labour, yet Heaney's writing continually rests in the untested as-
sumption that a return is possible through writing back to the 'illit-
erate' culture from which it stems and with which, most
importantly, it remains at all times continuous. The actual, persist-
ing relation between the literate and the non-literate, at times
antagonistic, at times symbiotic, disappears along with such atten-
dant problems as class or ethnic stratification in a temporal
metaphor of unbroken development. No irreparable break appears
in the subject's relation to his history by accession to culture, nor is
culture itself anything but a refined expression of an ideal commu-
nity of which the writer is a part. Thirdly, given that the 'touch-
stone' in this context is Wordsworth, the specific relation of an
'Irish identity' to the English literary- and political -establishment
provides not only the language, but the very terms within which the
question of identity is posed and resolved, the terms for which it is
the question to be posed and resolved. For it is not simply the verse
form, the melody, or whatnot, that the poet takes over; 19 it is the
aesthetic, and the ethical and political formulations it subsumes,
that the Romantic and imperial tradition supplies.
To this cultural tradition, it is true, Heaney seeks to give an Irish
'bend', grafting it on to roots which are identified as rural, Catholic,
and, more remotely, Gaelic. That grafting is enabled by the return
166 DAVID LLOYD
to place, a reterritorialisation in a literal sense initially, which sym-

bolically restores the interrupted continuity of identity and ground.
An implicit theory of language operates here, for which the name is
naturally integrated with place, the sign identified with the signified,
the subject with the object. The putative sameness of place supplies
an image of the continuity underlying the ruptures so apparent in
the history of language usage in Ireland. If identity slips between be-
longing in and owning the land, between object and subject,
between nature and culture, in unrelenting displacement, the land
as 'preoccupation' furnishes the purely formal ground, the matrix
of continuity, in which identity ultimately reposes. The signs of dif-
ference that compose the language are underwritten by a language
of containment and synthesis, that is, 'the living speech of the land-
scape', which is in turn identified with the poem itself, the single,
adequate vocable: a word 'with reference to form rather than
meaning'. 20 In all its functions, language performs the rituals of syn-
thesis and identity, from the mysterious identification of the gut-
tural and the vowel with Irishness, the consonantal with
Englishness, to the symbolic function of metaphor which produces
those recurrent stylistic traits of Heaney's metaphors of identity
born by the genitive, the copula or the compound: 'the hammered
shod of a bay'; 'the tight vise of a stack'; 'the challenger's intelli-
gence/is a spur of light,/a blue prong'; 'My body was braille';
'Earth-pantry, bone-vault,lsun-bank'.
Place, identity and language mesh in Heaney, as in the tradition
of cultural nationalism, since language is seen primarily as naming,
and because naming performs a cultural reterritorialisation by re-
placing the contingent continuities of an historical community with
an ideal register of continuity in which the name (of place or of
object) operates symbolically as the commonplace communicating
between actual and ideal continua. The name always serves like-
ness, never difference. Hence poems on the names of places must of
their nature be rendered as gifts, involving no labour on the part of
the poet, who would, by enacting division, disrupt the immediacy
of the relation of culture to pre-culture:
I had a great sense of release as they were being written, a joy and a
devil-may-careness, and that convinced me that one could be faithful
to the nature of the English language - for in some sense these poems
are erotic mouth-music by and out of the anglo-saxon [sic] tongue-
and, at the same time, be faithful to one's own non-English origin,
for me that is County Derry.
The formulation renovates the concerns, even the rhetoric, of early

nationalist critics.
Thus the name 'Anahorish' resides as a metonym for the ancient
Gaelic culture that is to be tapped, leading 'past the literary mists
of a Celtic twilight into that civilisation whose demise was effected
by soldiers and administrators like Spenser and Davies'
(Preoccupations, p. 36). 'Anahorish', 'place of clear water', is at once
a place-name and the name of a place-name poem in Wintering
Out. The name as title already assures both continuity between
subject and predicate and the continuity of the poet's identity, since
titular possession of this original place which is itself a source guar-
antees the continuity of the writing subject with his displaced
former identity:
Anahorish
My 'place of clear water',
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass ...
The writer's subjective ongm doubles the Edenic and absolute

origin, the untroubled clarity of his medium allowing immediacy of
access to the place and moment of original creation, which its own
act of creation would seem to repeat and symbolise, knowledge
cleansed and redeemed to graceful polish. The poem itself becomes
the adequate vocable in which the rift between the Gaelic word and
its English equivalent is sealed in smooth, unbroken ground, speech
of the landscape:
Anahorish, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow.
The rhetoric of identity is compacted not only in these metaphors,

representative again of Heaney's metaphors of identity, but in the
two sentences that compose the first and most substantial part of
the poem, where no main verbs fracture the illusion of identity and
presence. The name itself asserts the continuity of presence as an
'after-image of lamps', while in the last sentence, those lamps
appear to illuminate genii of the place- 'those mound dwellers'- a
qualification which expels history, leaving only the timelessness of
repeated, fundamental acts. Their movement unites the visible with
the invisible, while the exceptional moment of fracturing is regained
168 DAVID LLOYD
as a metaphor for access to the source and the prospect of renewed

growth:
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
What is dissembled in such writing is that the apparent innocence,

the ahistoricity, of the subject's relation to place is in fact preceded
by an act of appropriation or repossession. 'Anahorish' provides an
image of the transcendental unity of the subject, and correspond-
ingly of history, exactly in so far as it is represented- far from in-
nocently - as a property of the subject. The lush and somewhat
indulgent sentiment of the poems of place in Wintering Out
('Anahorish', 'Toome', 'Broagh', and 'A New Song') can be as-
cribed to that foreclosed surety of the subject's relation to place,
mediated as it is by a language which seeks to naturalise its appro-
priative function.
'Erotic mouth-music': it is indeed the seduction of these poems to
open what would in the terms of its aesthetic be a regressive path
through orality beyond the institution of difference in history and in
writing. Hence perception of difference, through the poet's sense of
his own difference, which is in fact fundamental to their logic of
identity, has finally to be suppressed. Difference is of course regis-
tered throughout Heaney's work, at all those points of division and
dispossession previously observed. Those divisions are, further-
more, embraced within sexual difference, which comes to provide
for political, national and cultural difference a matrix of the most
elementary, dualistic kind: 'I suppose the feminine element for me
involves the matter of Ireland, and the masculine strain is drawn
from the involvement with English literature' (Preoccupations,
p. 34). This difference, however, is posed as the context for a reso-
lution beyond conflict, in the poem as in relation to the land, which
is at once pre-existent and integrating:
I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies
come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down
a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery. They certainly
involve craft and determination, but chance and instinct have a role
in the thing too. I think the process is a kind of somnambulist en-
counter between masculine will and intelligence and feminine clusters

of image and emotion ....
It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geograph-
ical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the
mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited
culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from
both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its
richest possible manifestation.
(Preoccupations, pp. 34, 132)
For all their rigid, dualistic schematisation, which is only the more
rigid for its pretension to be instinctual and unsystematic, and for
all the inanity of the content of that dualism - oral, feminine, un-
conscious image and emotion versus cultured, masculine, conscious
will and intelligence - such formulations acutely register the form of
integration which is projected. Non-differentiation lies in the matter
which precedes all difference and is regained in the product which is
the end of difference, the aesthetic object, the poem. Culture repeats
primary cultivation, its savour is oral, racy of the soil. Masculine
and feminine marry likewise in the moment the poem is forged out
of their difference, reproducing a unity of word and flesh always
assumed to pre-exist that difference. In the insistent formalisation
of this rigidly gendered representation of difference, Heaney elides
the complex and often contradictory heterogeneity of Irish social
formations and their histories, recapitulating his similar dualisation
of the oral and literate elsewhereY
Only when special and explanatory status is pleaded for this con-
solatory myth do contradiction and difference return, to use a
Heaneyish notion, with a vengeance, as in the series of bog poems
which commences with 'The Tollund Man' in Wintering Out, and
is extended through North. The origin of these poems in P.V.
Glob's The Bog People is doubtless familiar, but it is as well to re-
produce Heaney's own account:
It [Glob's book] was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men

and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with
their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times.
The author, P.V. Glob, argues convincingly that a number of these,
and in particular the Tollund Man, whose head is now preserved
near Aarhus in the museum at Silkeburg, were ritual sacrifices to the
Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bride-
grooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the bog, to
ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring. Taken
170 DAVID LLOYD
in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for that cause

whose icon is Kathleen Nl Houlihan, this is more than an archaic
barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable
photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs
of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and
religious struggles.
(Preoccupations, pp. 57-8)
Heaney here posits a psychic continuity between the sacrificial prac-

tices of an Iron Age people and the 'psychology of the Irishmen and
Ulstermen who do the killing' (Preoccupations, p. 57). This is effec-
tively to reduce history to myth, furnishing an aesthetic resolution
to conflicts constituted in quite specific historical junctures by ren-
dering disparate events as symbolic moments expressive of an un-
derlying continuity of identity. Not surprisingly, it is the aesthetic
politics of nationalism which finds its most intense symbolism in
martyrdom.
As with the question of identity, so the question as to whether ar-
chetypes and archetypal patterns exist is less significant than the
formal role their invocation plays. Something of that role emerges
in 'The Tollund Man' (Wintering Out), apparently the first of the
bog poems to have been written:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her tore on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body ...
The distance of the historical observer rapidly contracts in this first

section into an imaginary immediate relation to the corpse, and ulti-
mately to the putative goddess as, in a singularly deft piece of campo-
sition, the appositions 'Naked except for!fhe cap, noose and girdle,'
and 'Bridegroom to the goddess' slip between the poet and the victim.
The immediacy of that relation, brought thus to the very brink of
identification, facilitates the elimination of human agency, which is
distilled to thematically equivalent operations of sacrifice (by which
the corpse is worked 'to a saint's kept body') and poetic rememora-
tion which reverses, by analogy with exhumation, the direction of
sacrifice without invalidating it. The subordination of human agency
to aesthetic form is reinforced in the second section as the two atroci-
ties there described are contained within the faintly redeeming notion
of their possible germination, their flesh scattered like seed:
I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
The matter of the form in which they will germinate, as Cadmus's

warriors, perhaps, or as 'The Right Rose Tree', is carefully
hedged. 22 In so purely aesthetic a performance, which evades the
logic even of its own mythologies, the 'risk' of 'blasphemy' is easily
carried. In the third section, the poet is confirmed as the stable
centre of this tableau of identifications:
Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saving the names
Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
172 DAVID LLOYD
I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.
What is the 'sad freedom' that the poet as tourist or pilgrim in

Jutland will take over from the Tollund man other than that
derived from the aesthetic rehearsal of rites whose continuity
with the present is preassured by the unquestioned metaphoric
frame of the writing, a writing whose dangers have been defused
into pathos by their subordination to that same metaphoric func-
tion? Thus the repetition of place-names ('Tollund, Grabaulle,
Nebelgard'), abstracted from context and serving a cultural
purpose as synecdoches of continuity, overrides the actual alien-
ation of one 'Not knowing their tongue', only to issue in the
'at home-ness' always available to those whose culture is a
question of reterritorialisation. The bodies of Jutland are, one
recalls, 'disposed under the peat' for the poet-archaeologist's
appropriation.
Metaphorical foreclosure of issues, by which the proposed matter
of the poem acts simultaneously as the metaphor justifying the
mode of its treatment, has been a constant feature of Heaney's
writing since such early poems as 'Digging', perfectly sustaining its
drive towards cultural reterritorialisation and the suturing of iden-
tity, because the concepts of culture and individuation thus appear
as the formal repetition of the primary ground to which they are
thereby returned. The racial and psychological archetype, like the
reified human nature of bourgeois ideology from which it stems,
subserves this circularity. The archetype allows the process of indi-
viduation and the specific forms taken on by any given culture to be
envisaged as retaining a continuity with an homogeneous, undiffer-
entiated ground, such as indeed the symbol is supposed to retain
with that which it represents and, crucially, of which it partakes.
The regressive nature of this model is significant less in the evident
psychoanalytical sense, which doubles Heaney's own temporal
schema, than in the neatness with which the location of that arche-
typal or indifferent ground can be pushed back as far as required-
from oral culture and territory to the abstract form of the land, for
example. This regression, nevertheless, does not affect the essential
structure by which the immediacy of a primary relation to origins
and ground can be replaced by a cultural medium, though in subli-
mated form and with the gain of pathos, as in Heaney's myth of
Antaeus:
a blue prong graiping him

out of his element
into a dream of loss
and origins - the cradling dark,
the river-veins, the secret gullies
of his strength,
the hatching grounds
of cave and souterrain,
he has bequeathed it all
to elegists.
(North)
That which is foregone is the most efficient myth of integration,

supplying the lost object by which the work of mourning is trans-
formed into the work of identification, specially, here, identification
with an inheritance.
Contradiction returns where the myth that has most effectively
furthered the goal of integration by obviating the state's need for
overt coercion clashes with those 'civilised values' that it under-
writes. For both unionists and nationalists in Ireland, in ways which
agree in form but differ in specific content, concepts of racial iden-
tity asserted since the nineteenth century have performed such an
integrative function in the service of domination, at the cost of insti-
tutionalising certain differences. That the interests promoted by
these myths should have come into conflict at various periods, of
which the current 'troubles' are only the latest instance, does not
affect the correspondence that subsists between those ideologies.
Even insurgent or anti-colonial violence, generally speaking directed
against the state apparatus, can become in the strict sense 'terrorist'
where it seeks by symbolic rather than tactical acts to forge integra-
tion or identity within the discursive boundaries already established
and maintained by dominant hegemony. A socialist or feminist cri-
tique of such tendencies has to be located not in a generalised criti-
cism of 'men of violence', but in the analysis of the totalising effect
of an identity thinking that discretely links terrorism to the state in
whose name it is condemned. For what is at stake is not so much
the practice of violence - which has long been institutionalised in
the bourgeois state - as its aestheticisation in the name of a freedom
expressed in terms of national or racial integration. This aesthetic
frame deflects attention from the interests of domination which the
national state expresses both as idea and as entity.
174 DAVIDLLOYD
The aestheticisation of violence is underwritten in Heaney's re-

course to racial archetypes as a means 'to grant the religious inten-
sity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity'
(Preoccupations, pp. 56-7). In locating the source of violence
beyond even sectarian division, Heaney renders it symbolic of a
fundamental identity of the Irish race, as 'authentic'. Interrogation
of the nature and function of acts of violence in the specific
context of the current 'troubles' is thus foreclosed, and history
foreshortened into the eternal resurgence of the same Celtic
genius. The conflict of this thinking with 'the perspectives of a
humane reason' (Preoccupations, p. 56) is, within the poetry that
results, only an apparent contradiction, in so far as the function of
reason is given over to the establishment of myths. The unpleas-
antness of such poetry lies in the manner in which the contradic-
tions between the ethical and aesthetic elements in the writing are
easily resolved by the subjugation of the former to the latter in
order to produce the 'well-made poem'. Contempt for 'connivance
in civilised outrage' is unexamined in the frequently cited
'Punishment' (North) where the 'artful voyeurism' of the poem is
supposedly criticised as the safe stance of the remote and lustful
'civilised' observer, yet is smuggled back in as the unspoken and
unacknowledged condition for the understanding of the 'exact-
ness' of 'tribal, intimate revenge':
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.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin ...
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,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
cauled in tar,
who would connive
The epithet 'tribal' cannot, in this context, be immanently ques-

tioned, since it at once is sustained by and reinforces the metaphor
of tribal rites which organises the whole poem, and which is at once
its pretext and its subject-matter. Neither the justness of the
identification of the metaphor - the execution of an adulteress by
Glob's Iron Age people - with the actual violence which it suppos-
edly illuminates - the tarring and feathering of two Catholic 'be-
traying sisters' - nor the immediacy of the observer's access to
knowledge of his object ('I can feel ... I can see') is ever subjected to
a scrutiny which would imperil the quasi-syllogistic structure of the
poem. Voyeurism is criticised merely as a pose, never for its func-
tion in purveying the intimate knowledge of violence by which it is
judged. As so often in Heaney's work, the sexual drive of knowing
is challenged, acknowledged, and let pass without further interroga-
tion, the stance condemned but the material it purveys nevertheless
exploited. Thus a pose of ethical self-query allows the condemna-
tion of enlightened response - reduced in any case to paralytic
'civilised outrage', as if this were the only available alternative -
while the supposedly irrational is endowed as if by default with the
features of enlightenment - exactitude, intimacy of knowledge - in
order to compact an understanding already presupposed in the se-
lection and elaboration of the metaphor. The terms of the dilemma
are entirely false, but the poem rehearses with striking fidelity the
propensity of bourgeois thought to use 'reason' to represent
176 DAVID LLOYD
irrationality as the emotional substratum of identifications which,

given as at once natural and logical, are in fact themselves thor-
oughly 'irrational'. 23
III
So much in Ireland still needs to be done ... the definition of the
culture, and the redefinition of it. If you could open students into
trust in their own personality, into some kind of freedom and cultiva-
tion, you could do a hell of a lot. 24
In its play with atavisms, with the irrational substrata of its

identifications, aesthetic ideology effectively excludes both violence
and difference from the ideal image of its own internal structure.
The irrational- all which eludes the governing principle of identity-
is reduced to the originating matter which is repeatedly to be culti-
vated into unity. While it supplies the ground for culture, it is de-
barred from either real agency or representation, and figures
thenceforth when 'active' as a 'disruption' of the supposedly natural
ordering of cultivation. Thus its return merely bolsters up the ratio-
nale of an essentially exclusive culture, supplying at once the pretext
and the matter upon which that culture's work is performed. The
discourse of culture itself originates in the moment that the division
of intellectual and physical labour has become such that 'culture' as
a specialisation is privileged yet entirely marginalised in relation to
productive forces, and seeks to disguise, or convert, both privilege
and marginalisation in a sublimation which places it beyond division
and into a position whence it can appear to perform the work of
unification. Hence the importance not only of the image of the man
of culture as a non-productive worker, but also the idea of a method
which brings to an epistemology already analogous to industrial
processes the privilege of unity retained even in transition, that of
the 'science of origins' which reconciles where it first dissolves and
finds differences. 25 The discourse of culture consistently seeks, by
representing itself as withdrawn from implication in social divisions,
as indifferent, to forge a domain in which divisions are overcome or
made whole. The realisation of human freedom is deferred into this
transcendent domain, with the consequence that an ethical invoca-
tion is superadded to the exhortations of culture.
It is a cultural resolution of this order that Heaney proposes in
Field Work, a generally acclaimed volume. 26 The sonnets composed
in the 'hedge-school of Glanmore' pose as an apt centre-piece to the

book, thematising at once the notion of withdrawal and the agricul-
tural root of the culture which is its goal: 'Vowels ploughed into
other, opened ground,/Each verse returning like the plough turned
round' (Glanmore Sonnets, II). Though this withdrawal is envisaged
as a return and a grounding, it is still a ground whose otherness is
carefully contained as a metaphor for the locus and source of poetic
activity, and as such is resolutely cultivable. Secure in its protected,
pastoral domain, the writing is full of unrealised resolve, governed
primarily by a conditional mood which mimes the celebration of
conditions for writing, yet is in actuality reduced to the almost con-
tentless formal reiteration of the paradigms which sustain its com-
placencies. The small reminders that might threaten the benediction
of that 'haven', the word with which Heaney obliquely encapsu-
lates his relief at being harboured in a poetic which allows him the
shelter of the English tradition and voice (Glanmore Sonnets, VII),
are either framed carefully on the outside - 'Outside the kitchen
window a black rat/Sways on the briar like infected fruit'
(Glanmore Sonnets, IX)- or smothered in a rhetoric so portentous
that it merely accentuates the bathos of its referents:
This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood
I thought of dew on armour and carrion.
What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?
How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?
What welters through this dark hush on the crops?
(Glanmore Sonnets, VIII)
It is difficult to credit the solemnly voiced pursuit of an 'apology for

poetry' (Glanmore Sonnets, IX) in these sonnets with any real intel-
lectual strenuousness, reduced as they are to such highly strung aes-
theticism. Whatever slight resonances they evoke are gained from
political and ethical concerns which the knowledge of matters
beyond their refined scope must supply.
The sonnets' implicit thesis that the preciousness of art- and the
pathos of human being - may lie in the vulnerability of its fragile
pieties to the 'ungovernable and dangerous' ('Elegy') is elsewhere
delivered over to the test of more exacting conditions. The elegy
'Casualty' - which, of the three in the volume, most nearly con-
fronts the supposed saving power of art with 'danger' -labours un-
easily with the realisation of the remoteness of this art from the
178 DAVID LLOYD
pathos of the everyday which it celebrates elsewhere, and, as if in

abreaction, asserts the more strongly the difference of art as the
image of freedom posed against conformity to putative 'tribal'
values. The assertion nevertheless regrounds itself through finding
its paradigm in labour, in a labour, however, which is crucially pre-
determined as gratuitous, 'natural' and free, that of 'A dole-kept
breadwinner/But a natural for work'. This image of the fisherman's
labour as essentially free underwrites the concluding lines, which
render fishing as a paradigm for art in its transcendence:
I tasted freedom with him.

To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond ...
At once natural and transcendent, freedom finds its image in gratu-

itous creative work, in a 'taste' which is shared beyond the divi-
sions established by the 'incomprehensibility' of the poet's 'other
life'. That such 'condescension' is always one-sided is debarred
from consideration, as is the wider context of unfreedom which sus-
tains that aesthetic once the idea of constraint has been reduced to
the myth of the tribe.
The cautious limits which Heaney's poetry sets round any poten-
tial for disruptive, immanent questioning may be the reason for the
extraordinary inflation of his current reputation. If Heaney is held
to be 'the most trusted poet of our [sic] islands', 27 by the same
token he is the most institutionalised of recent poets. At the func-
tional level of school and college teaching and examination, much
of the prominence given to Heaney's writing may be attributed to
its aptness for the still dominant discipline of practical criticism.
Almost without exception, the poems respond compliantly to analy-
sis based on assumptions about the nature of the well-made lyric
poem: that it will crystallise specific emotions out of an experience;
that the metaphorical structure in which the emotion is to be com-
municated will be internally coherent; that the sum of its ambigui-
ties will be an integer, expressing eventually a unity of tone and
feeling even where mediated by irony; that the unity will finally be
the expression of a certain identity, a poetic 'voice' (Preoccupations,
pp. 43-4 ). On the side of the writer, writing is envisaged as at once

constitutive and expressive of an identity liberated from the inco-
herent unity of its ground. That act of self-production gives the
writer his representativeness as human despite the specialisation of
his labour. For the reader, the act of reading appears also as a liber-
ating act. To read, to criticise, is to exercise the right of private
judgement and thereby to develop one's best self. The illusion of a
free-market economy, where taste pretends to be an expression of
the consumer's uncoerced judgement, thrives in the pedagogical
method that furnishes the core of those literary institutions which in
fact arbitrate cultural values.
In this period where the illusion of a free-market economy is dis-
integrating in crisis, it is appropriate that, within the increasingly
marginalised domain of high culture, a pedagogy locating the au-
tonomy of the individual subject in the private arbitration of value
should become increasingly retrenched and all the more earnestly
defended. It is perhaps only a small irony that the product of this
pedagogy turns out to be such an unprecedented homogeneity of
'taste' that a reviewer can state, 'Everyone knows by now that
Heaney is a major poet', and be confirmed not only by the accord
of his peers, but by the remarkably high sales of the volumes con-
cerned.28 But that small irony - scarcely to be attributed to the
benevolent dissemination of the sweetness and light of culture - is
nonetheless symptomatic of a contradiction implicit in cultural dis-
course, and in some sense even recognised there, as if the terms of
the discourse already resolved it. The contradiction, formally con-
gruent with that produced by bourgeois ideology's attempts to 're-
concile individual liberty with association', lies in the fact that the
cultivation of the individual's best self is to be conducted under the
arbitration of an authority whose end is the constitution of a more
integrated whole beyond divisions. 29 If that authority has tended to
shift from the individual critic-teacher to institutions in which the
existence of single tone-setting figures is much less apparent, this
tendency belongs with a general shift from the concentration of
power in the entrepreneur to its disposition through larger struc-
tures. 30 So much is implicit in common parlance when one speaks
of one or other 'critical industry'.
The democratisation of education that has stemmed in large part
from nineteenth-century cultural discourse has followed the track of
industrialisation, and with similar effects in view. Where the net
effect of increased technological efficiency has been to override the
180 DAVID LLOYD
perception of difference with the homogenising image of general

prosperity, the end of literary education has been to override class
and individual difference with the image of a common culture, both
as something inherited and as something currently produced. The
concept of a common culture can be seen to double that of the
common land (whence, indeed, the concept of 'culture' has always
derived its specific etymological and metaphorical resonances), and
this conveniently underwrites the nominal decentralisation of liter-
ary production. Pre-programmed as this development is, the result-
ing notion of the revitalisation of the centres of culture through the
influence of less deracinated, less cultivated regional sensibilities,
continues to subserve the linked fictions of indigenous and subject-
ive identity. Just as rhetoric about enterprise and the free market
exploits the image of individualism while masking the actual diffu-
sion of power through larger heterogeneous structures, so the cele-
bration of regionalism dulls perception of the institutional and
homogenising culture which has sustained its apparent efflorescence
at the very moment when the concept of locality, enclosed and self-
nurturing, has become effectively archaic, and, indeed, functions as
such. The pathos which the defenders of high culture and regional
identity win from a stance offering to protect the vulnerable and
vanishing against imponderable forces of technology and progress is
gained in spite of the contradiction that the higher integration,
which culture was to maintain beyond the class society, coincides
perfectly with that being produced by technological development.
The thematising and defusing of these elements within Heaney's
poetry provides the basis of the trust with which it is currently ac-
cepted, at every point confirming - as only such poetry can - the
aesthetic and cultural expectations whence it stemmed and to which
it promises an apparently authentic renovation. The seeming coher-
ence between this scenario of the elevation of a minor Irish poet to
a touchstone of contemporary taste and a discourse whose most
canonical proponent argued for the Celtic literature as a means to
the integration of Ireland with Anglo-Saxon industrial civilisation is
appropriate and pre-programmed. 31 It is, for all that, profoundly
symptomatic of the continuing meshing of Irish cultural nationalism
with the imperial ideology which frames it.
From David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-
Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993), pp. 13-40. (First published in
Boundary, 2:13, 2-3 [1985).)
NOTES
[David Lloyd is like Thomas Docherty (essay 10) in privileging 'difference',
'the dialectical contrary to the concept of identity' (n. 15 below). In the
main line of poststructuralist thought he sees the latter concept as governed
by the Western intellectual tendency to postulate a humane centre for all
discursive activity. 'Difference' for Lloyd is 'that which cannot be assimi-
lated to the unity of identitarian thinking' (n. 15 below). Lloyd's own
thought is systematically Marxist, following Adorno (nn. 15 and 23) and
Gramsci (n. 11). He insists that social and political existence implies 'divi-
sions' impervious to the ideology of identity: first between the non-
productive and the productive worker (p. 176 above) and then between the
developing postcolonial polity and neo-imperialism (pp. 161 and 180
above). According to Lloyd, the concern with identity manifested by
Heaney's poetry (and the tradition in which it stands) ignores and conceals
these divisions. His introduction to Anomalous States in which the essay
was republished (Dublin [1993], pp. 1-12) makes explicit the relationship
of his approach to that of other 'postcolonial theorists' like Franz Fanon,
Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak. (On all three see Selden and
Widdowson, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory [Heme!
Hempstead, 1993], pp. 188-97, 200-2.) Ed.]
1. Seamus Heaney, 'Hercules and Antaeus', North (London, 1975),

p. 53.
2. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London, 1979). The citation is from
John Carey, 'Poetry for the World We Live In', review of Seamus
Heaney, Field Work, and Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home (Oxford, 1979), in the Sunday Times, 18 November 1979,
p. 40.
3. Mark Patrick Hederman, "'The Crane Bag" and the North of Ireland',
The Crane Bag (Dublin), 4:2 (1980-1), 102, and Blake Morrison,
Seamus Heaney (London, 1982), p. 69.
4. Denis Florence MacCarthy (ed.), The Book of Irish Ballads, new edn
(Dublin, n.d.), pp. 15, 25-6.
5. 'Recent English Poets, No. 1 -Alfred Tennyson and E.B. Browning',
Nation, 15 February 1845, 314.
6. Anonymous, 15 February 1845, 'Union Against the Union', Nation,
11 March 1848, 168. See also E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The
Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London, 1973), pp. 9-10. Marx's
'Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State' in Early Writings, trans.
Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York, 1975),
pp. 57-197, comprises an extensive critique of the state in terms of the
split between the civil state of individualism and the political state of
'association'.
182 DAVID LLOYD
7. Elie Kedourie's Nationalism (London, 1961) supplies the wider

European context of nationalism, and emphasises the ethical nature of
its demands.
8. See the anonymous article, 'The Individuality of a Native Literature',
Nation, 21 August 1847, 731.
9. In this particular context, I use the term 'reterritorialisation' in a more
literal sense than do Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from whose
Anti-Oedipus (New York, 1977) and Kafka: pour une litterature
mineure (Paris, 1975) it is derived. This, and related terms, are well
analysed in Vincent Descombes, Le Meme et !'Autre: quarante-cinq
ans de philosophie fran~aise, 1933-1978 (Paris, 1979), pp. 205-6.
Davis's essay was published in the Nation, 1 April1843, 394.
10. Sigmund Freud, 'Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction between the Sexes', The Complete Psychological Works
(London, 1958-68), XIX, p. 257.
11. I understand ideology, briefly, in relation to Gramsci's concept of
hegemony, as consisting of the general shared structure of disseminat-
ing institutions and a set of discourses of analogous structure which
operate not through coercion but through the 'naturalisation' of
certain forms of thought. See, for example, Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), pp. 240-6. I have used
the verb 'to double' throughout this essay to describe - by analogy
with the word's musical sense - the way in which the structure of one
discourse may appear congruent with that of another, giving rise to the
'knotting together' (see Gramsci, p. 240) of disparate hegemonic dis-
courses into an apparently self-reinforcing, limiting structure of
thought.
12. This is the general argument of John Breuily's persuasive study,
Nationalism and the State (New York, 1982), see especially chs 2 and 3.
13. See George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London, 1982), p. 239,
where he remarks that 'one of the most important unifying themes of
southern politics after the 1920s was Hibernia Irredenta'.
14. See Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, pp. 364-5.
15. 'Difference' is employed throughout less in the Derridean sense than as
the dialectical contrary to the concept of identity, i.e. that which
cannot be assimilated to the unity of identitarian thinking. Theodor
Adorno argues this to be an inescapable contradiction within such
thinking; see Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York,
1973), pp. 5-6.
16. Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London, 1966), pp. 13-14,
and Door into the Dark (London, 1969), pp. 25-6.
17. Harold Bloom, 'The Voice of Kinship', TLS, 8 (February 1980),

pp. 137-8.
18. Seamus Heaney, 'Feeling into Words', Preoccupations (London,
1980), p. 41.
19. Frank Kinahan, 'Artists on Art: An Interview with Seamus Heaney',
Critical Inquiry, 8:3 (Spring 1982), 406; see also Seamus Heaney's
lines in 'The Ministry of Fear', North (London, 1975), p. 65: 'Ulster
was British, but with no rights onffhe English lyric.'
20. See Preoccupations, pp. 36-7. I allude to the COED definition of
'vocable'.
21. For further discussion of gender issues in Heaney's writings that have
appeared since this essay was first published, see Elizabeth Butler
Cullingford, "'Thinking of Her ... as ... Ireland": Yeats, Pearse and
Heaney', Textual Practice, 4:1 (Spring 1990), 1-21, and Patricia
Coughlan, "'Bog Queens": The Representation of Women in the
Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney' in Toni O'Brien
Johnson and David Cairns (eds), Gender in Irish Writing (Milton
Keynes, 1991), pp. 88-111.
22. See Richard Kearney's comments on the intertwining of both aspects
of this mythology in 'The IRA's Strategy of Failure', The Crane Bag,
4:2 (1980-1), 62.
23. See Theodor Adorno's remarks on this subject, specifically in relation
to the mobilising of 'additional regressive memories of its archaic root'
in the bourgeois nation state, in Negative Dialectics, p. 339.
24. See the interview with Seamus Heaney in John Haffenden, Viewpoints
(London, 1981), pp. 59-60.
25. See Coleridge, 'Essays on Method', The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke
(Princeton, NJ, 1969), p. 476; Matthew Arnold, 'On the Study of
Celtic Literature' in R.H. Super (ed.), Lectures and Essays in Criticism,
vol. III of The Complete Prose Works (Ann Arbor, MI, 1962), p. 330.
Adorno comments on the duplication of the mechanical reproductive
process in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. See Negative Dialectics,
p. 387.
26. Reviews acclaiming Field Work range from Harold Bloom's in the TLS
to one by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times ('Change of Idiom', IT, 20
October 1979, p. 11). Reviewers are almost unanimous in regarding
the volume as a steady advance on the previous body of work.
27. Christopher Ricks, 'The Mouth, the Meal, and the Book', review of
Field Work in The London Review of Books, 8 November 1979, p. 4.
28. Neither Faber and Faber, nor Farrar, Straus and Giroux have been
willing to divulge detailed figures concerning sales of Heaney's works.
184 DAVID LLOYD
I am, however, obliged to Craig Raine of Faber and Faber for the fol-
lowing 'approximate figures', whose 'general lesson is sound and
obvious enough': 'We would probably have printed 2000-3000 copies
of his first book, whereas now we would print somewhere in the
region of 20,000 copies' (letter, 12 October 1983).
29. See Matthew Arnold, 'The Function of Criticism in the Present Time',
Lectures and Essays, pp. 265-6: 'Force till right is ready; and till right
is ready force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate
ruler' (original emphasis).
30. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2nd edn
(Harmondsworth, 1974), especially ch. 5, 'Capital and Power'. The
analysis, if not the conclusion, of this study is valuable, and challeng-
ing to any materialist view of the current economy.
31. Arnold, 'On the Study of Celtic Literature', pp. 296-7.
12
'Bog Queens': The

Representation of Women
in the poetry of John
Montague and Seamus
Heaney
PATRICIA COUGHLAN
I
This essay investigates the construction of feminine figures, and the
vocabulary of roles allotted to them by two prominent contempo-
rary Irish poets, John Montague and Seamus Heaney. Feminine
figures and more or less abstract ideas of femininity play a major
role in the work of both: how should this centrality of the feminine
be interpreted? Is it, as it most usually announces itself, to be taken
as a celebration? Or does it flatter to deceive, as has been remarked
about Matthew Arnold's perhaps analogous celebration of the
alleged Celtic virtues of passion, sensuousness, non-rational insight
(see Cairns and Richards, 'Woman' 1)? I have chosen to discuss the
work of male poets, believing strongly that both 'gynocritics' - the
'naming', recovery and revaluing of women's writing - and the per-
sistent demystifying of representations of women in men's work
must continue in tandem. The social and cultural construction of
gender is a continuously occurring process, in which it is certainly
not yet time to stop intervening. I shall argue that even able and
185
186 PATRICIA COUGHLAN
serious contemporary work is deeply and dismayingly reliant upon

old, familiar and familiarly oppressive allocations of gender pos-
itions. Our celebration of this work must therefore be inflected by
this question as to its effect: can poetry's implicit claim to universal-
ity of utterance and to utopian insight be upheld in the face of a
reader's awareness of its gendered and therefore (perhaps un-
consciously) partial perspective?
The representation of femininity which occurs most insistently in
this material takes the form of dualistically opposed aspects:
beloved or spouse figures versus mother figures, which are in turn
benign and fertile or awe-inspiring and terrible. Very much as in
the actual social construction of femininity, the various feminine
functions are sometimes made to coalesce bewilderingly, sometimes
set in opposition to one another. In Heaney, for example, the
nature-goddess is simultaneously spouse, death-bringer and nur-
turer. This invocation of a magna mater figure is celebrated by
some readers as an empowerment of women, but it is only dubi-
ously so if the agency described is a death-bringing one; such
representations of feminine power ultimately arise from a masculine
psychological difficulty in acknowledging woman's subjectivity
as a force in itself, and not merely as a relation to man's (see
Dinnerstein). 2
My discussion will attend particularly to the invocation of such
allegedly immemorial archetypes of femininity and the various
strategies by which that invocation is sustained. Especially import-
ant among these strategies are the attempt to reinvest with imagina-
tive energy figures such as the sovereignty goddess from early Irish
literature and myth as well as magna mater figures from other
European contexts, and the projected conjunction in such figures of
a neo-Jungian 'feminine principle' with the physical territory of
Ireland. This combined representation is also merged with the
imagery of woman-as-land-and-national-spirit from the tradition of
Irish nationalist political rhetoric. In this poetry, such mythic repre-
sentations are often projected, with varying degrees of explicitness,
upon a repertoire of female figures presented by a lyric speaker as
autobiographically given.
One must question in general the elision of history which is in-
volved in this smooth passage from memory to myth - an elision
which precludes the possibility of understanding history as the
product of human actions and not merely as a fated, cyclical
natural process. It is also necessary in particular to interrogate the
THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN 187
notions of essential femininity and immemorially assigned female

functions as the vehicles of this myth-memory passage, and to
notice that it requires an implicit assumption of the inescapability
of a gendered allocation of subject-positions, by means of which ra-
tionality, speech and naming are the prerogatives of the autobio-
graphically validated male poet, and the various female figures
dwell in oracular silence, always objects, whether of terror, venera-
tion, desire, admiration or vituperation, never the coherent subjects
of their own actions. This reification of traditional modes of per-
ceiving feminine identity is also supported by tactics such as recall-
ing the Irish aisling form, which invests a potentially amorous
encounter with allegorical political content. 3
A particular contradiction is discernible in Montague and Heaney
between the project of speaking for a politically oppressed and
therefore hitherto unspoken group, Northern Catholics - a project
important both intrinsically and to the reception of these poets -
and their failure, in general, to perceive their own reliance upon
and tacit approval of the absence of women as speaking subjects
and of female disempowerment. Their female figures function as
crucially important forms of validation-by-opposition of the indi-
vidual poet's identity, in a (sometimes almost comically blatant)
neo-Oedipal struggle. In Heaney, this wresting of a speaking ego
from the magna mater which is also the land is interestingly compli-
cated by specifically political Irish/English stereotyping: the (neces-
sarily, if self-expressing) male poet (phallically) digging and
ploughing like his ancestors becomes the culturally female voice of
the subjugated Irish, about to inundate the 'masculine' hardness of
the planters' boundaries with 'feminine' vowel-floods (see 'A New
Song', Wintering Out [London, 1972], p. 33; and 'Undine', Door
into the Dark [London, 1969], p. 26).
Irish ideology tends to an idealisation of rural life. This is often
centred on female icons of ideal domesticity, especially mother-
figures, who are associated with unmediated naturalness. The femi-
nist critique of this ruralist ideology must investigate the
designation of spheres and human subjects as natural or cultural
and their respective valuation. It is also necessary to bear in mind
the way ideology has effectively denied women the freedom to
develop a fully self-conscious ego and therefore to participate in
civil society by allocating them a fixed position within the domestic
sphere, and by the celebration of domestic virtues as constitutive
of femininity. Feminist psychoanalytic demonstrations of the
construction of human subjectivity as male and Oedipal also afford

a perspective on which I have drawn. 4
In the poetry I discuss, as in the culture which produces it,
women are typically associated with that which is material, and
defined in opposition to mind. They are nevertheless seen as posses-
sors of a form of knowledge hidden from the masculine speaker;
but this they mutely embody and cannot themselves expound. In
Montague's and Heaney's lyrics each masculine speaker characteris-
tically celebrates the domestic as immemorial and relishes it as sen-
sually and emotionally satisfying, but defines himself in the
performance of his most characteristic activity, poetry, in contradis-
tinction from it. Woman, the primary inhabitor and constituent of
the domestic realm, is admiringly observed, centre stage but silent.
She is thus constructed by a scopic gaze, her imputed mental inac-
tion and blankness being required to foreground the speaker's
naming and placing of her. 5 What ostensibly offers itself as a cele-
bration may rather be read, then, as a form of limiting definition, in
which certain traditional qualities of the feminine are required to
persist for a fit wife, mother or Muse to come into being. The con-
stant naming of autobiographical 'originals' for these figures effect-
ively masks this nearly ubiquitous blotting out of the individual
qualities of actual women by the dominant - and stereotyped -
ideal.
The reader may feel a general resistance as such to the mythicising
mentality this examplifies: that is, to the dehistoricising effect of dis-
cerning, in some notional way as a truth beneath the actualities, an
immemorial status quo which is represented as implicitly superior to
modernity; and further, to the accompanying aestheticisation by the
observer of the actual deprivation, suffering and hard work of
others in the name of celebration. This objection applies whether it
is farming life, Irish political violence or gender roles which are in
question, and indeed in Montague and Heaney all three of these are,
in fact, intimately bound together. Such mythicising moves are dis-
cerned as false ones by Montague himself in a moment of the
'Epilogue' of The Rough Field in the lines 'Only a sentimentalist
would wish/To see such degradation again .. .',and Heaney's work
is perhaps more open to this charge than Montague's own. Yet
Montague falls back upon just such sentiment later in the poem,
when agricultural labour is once again interpreted as part 'of a
world where action had been wrung/through painstaking years to
ritual' in apparent nostalgia for the imputed absoluteness of such
humble lives. The poem's ending stresses the poet's 'failure to

return' for all his 'circling' round his rural origin (The Rough Field
[Dublin, 1972], pp. 82-3). The point is the necessary exclusion of
the speaker as poet from this rural scene - even if it had not been
'going'. The very practice of cosmopolitan literary expression marks
off the poet-figure from his material throughout Montague's - and
indeed Heaney's - work, however much rural pietas it shows. This
self-exclusion from the whole rural world as it might be understood
on its own terms is particularly focused in the female figures this
poetry constructs, who cannot even be manipulated, as the men can,
into role-models for the apprentice to poetry-making, divided, as
they are, by gender and its assigned functions from the son-figures
who construct them. Heaney's digging and ploughing ancestors can
be, however transiently and superficially, nominated as ur-makers,
but baking, praying, home-making women - icons of domesticity
whether vibrant (mothers) or ruined (spinsters living by wells) are
set apart from and by the poet who is concerned with conscious
self-definition: an activity which must be pursued in explicit opposi-
tion to the encompassing space of a home. 6
Heaney's attempt, in 'The Seed Cutters', to sink the sense of self
into the immemorial betrays its own static quality, its relinquishing
of the possibility of any significant action or change in its freezing
into a final pose:
0 calendar customs! Under the broom

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.
(North, p. 10)
The formal qualities of this poetry require particular analytic

strategies from the critic. It is very largely autobiographical and
takes its claim to authenticity from that familiar covenant between
reader and poet which tacitly agrees the immediacy and authority
of such experience.? This fiction of autobiography is perhaps a
necessary and enabling one for lyric poets not always exactly
choosing to take up the challenge to the notion of a unitary self
offered by the 'high' Modernists. But where the fictionality of the
poetic speaker is routinely concealed, a responsible criticism must
seek to recover the moment of his construction (it almost always
is 'his'). If this work were to be read primarily as unmediated
transcription of the experience of historical individuals, it would
become impertinent to question the constitution of the emotion-

ally pivotal female figures - beloveds, wives, mothers, grand-
mothers- in it. My comments about these female figures, then, as
about the central male ones, concern fictive beings whose status is
virtual, not actual.
II
Turning to the representation of gender roles in Heaney's work in
particular, we find that he tends towards two opposing and possibly
complementary representations of gender interaction. One con-
structs an unequivocally dominant masculine figure, who explores,
describes, brings to pleasure and compassionates a passive feminine
one. The other proposes a woman who dooms, destroys, puzzles
and encompasses the man, but also assists him to his self-discovery:
the mother stereotype, but merged intriguingly with the spouse.
Members of the first group, representing masculine domination, are
'Undine' and 'Rite of Spring', in which the man's victory is achieved
in agricultural terms; 'Punishment' and 'Bog Queen', which
combine an erotic disrobing narrative (as in Renaissance and other
love poetry) and a tone of compassionate tenderness, with a very
equivocal result; and the political group including 'Ocean's Love to
Ireland', 'Act of Union' and 'The Betrothal of Cavehill', which
usually rehearse narratives of rape and sexual violation. The second
group contains 'The Tollund Man', 'The Grauballe Man' and the
intense and intriguing 'Kinship', which merges mother and spouse
as well as active and passive and, I shall argue, functions primarily
as a masculine-identity myth, despite its political ending and the
political criticism it has chiefly attracted.
In Heaney's first two collections, the most prominent form of at-
tention to gender roles is what may be termed vocational: an alloca-
tion of special domains to the masculine and feminine, of a
triumphantly traditional kind. Masculine actors find the greater
space: in Death of Naturalist, the very first poem 'Digging' fore-
shadows later, explicitly sexual, bog poems, with its all too rele-
vant succession of phallic surrogates - pen, 'snug as a gun', spade -
and its sensuously rich material which waits passively to be 'dug'
('He ... buried the bright edge deep', in the 'squelch and slap I Of
soggy peat' [p. 12]). The active prowess of the speaker's male ances-
tors is stressed, and he is concerned to present his own displace-
ment to intellectual performance as not interrupting his place in

that succession. 8 Parallel to this insistence of inheritance, however,
these early poems also rehearse the construction of an individuated
masculine self: in the title poem 'Death of a Naturalist', the croak-
ing bullfrogs - 'croaked on sods' - may be perceived as an invasion
of maleness into the child's pre-pubertal feminised world, governed
by 'Miss Walls' the teacher, whereas two poems later in 'An
Advancement of Learning' the boy successfully faces down the
slimy, 'nimbling' rat in a test of courage which confirms his own
masculinity (pp. 15, 18). 9
With increasing definiteness in the successive collections, the
memory of an essentially unchanging rural world is rehearsed, with
its traditional crafts and trades; and as a central part of that dispen-
sation, male and female subject-positions are also construed as im-
memorially fixed. Once natural threats such as those represented by
the rat, or by the eel-nits in 'Vision' (Door into the Dark, p. 45)
have been overcome, the speakers of the poems identify admiringly
with active natural creatures such as the bull 'Outlaw' (p. 16), and
the trout which is rendered in strikingly phallic terms - 'Gun-
barrel', 'torpedo', 'ramrodding' ('Trout', Death of a Naturalist
p. 39). The trout's ballistic activity is contrasted with the neigh-
bouring 'Cow in Calf', where bulk, slowness and recurrence of the
same are stressed: 'Her cud and her milk, her heats and her
calves/keeping coming and going' (p. 38).
There are human versions of such continuities: 'The Wife's Tale'
with its rare female speaker is typical in celebrating, without
obvious intentional irony, the separate spheres of farm and home
labour: 'I'd come and he had shown me/So I belonged no further to
the work.' 10 But Heaney's imagination is already dwelling more in-
tensely on metaphors of nature as feminine than on the human
version. Other strongly conventionalised female figures do also
appear, especially mother figures signifying domesticity, intermit-
tently from the earliest poems. But the centre of imaginative inten-
sity is undoubtedly his curious and compelling construct of the
land-cum-spouse-cum-deathbringer, with its active and passive
aspects.
The hags and goddesses, classical and Celtic, 11 of Montague's
poems are replaced in Heaney's by this figure. Its more politicised
version, as it appears tentatively in Wintering Out and assertively in
North, represents a merging of the north European fertility goddess,
whom Heaney found described in P.V. Glob's study of Iron Age
bog burials, with the rather vaguely realised notion of the land of
Ireland as seeker of sacrifices, from nationalist political tradition. 12
In his bog poems Heaney sexualises the religious conceptions of
Celtic and north European prehistory. 13 Gender in Celtic and other
early mythologies was a metaphysical concept, one of several
dyadic means of cosmic organisation (male:female lining up with
black:white, left:right, north:south, and so forth); a proper service
to male and female divinities of earth and air was connected with
successful cultivation. 14 This is, of course, markedly different from
the predominantly sexual interpretation of gender in our culture,
which sees it as inextricably bound up with individual personal
identity and affective fulfilment, an understanding deriving from
Christian theology, the European tradition of courtly love, and the
insights of psychoanalysis, among other sources. Heaney's archais-
ing projection of specifically sexual feeling on to agricultural prac-
tices ('Rite of Spring', 'Undine') (Door into the Dark, pp. 25, 26)
and human sacrifices to a fertility goddess (the bog poems) seems to
be a bid to reach past urban and intellectual social forms and their
accompanying thought-world, which are implicitly judged as
wanting, to a notional state of physical naturalness and 'anonymi-
ties' whether folk or prehistoric. An obvious casualty of this
attempt, were it to succeed, would be the impulse to individual self-
determination and reflexivity. This is an impulse noticeably present
in the self-construction of poets, but it is its assumed absence as a
defining figure in the lives of Irish rural people and Iron Age Danes
which seems to be being celebrated. Thus a disjunction appears
between the speaking subjects of these writings and their unspoken
objects. In particular the female figures in this conjured world are
the epitome of a general silence, at the opposite pole from the de-
scribing, celebrating, expressing poet. Whether active or passive,
these figures are spoken for, and this division is a highly
problematic one.
The two successive poems, 'Rite of Spring' and 'Undine' are
perhaps the first examples of an attempt to project sexual feelings
into a landscape (Door into the Dark, pp. 25, 26). They are there-
fore ancestors of the more famous bog poems, but differ from them
in using the second model I have outlined at the outset, one of male
activity and female passivity. They project onto a water-pump and
a stream respectively the figure of a sexually willing woman, who
waits to be coaxed into satisfaction by farming skill: 'It cooled, we
lifted her latch,/Her entrance was wet, and she came' (p. 25). This
masculine narcissism is even more apparent in 'Undine', which ven-

triloquises the water-nymph's voice:
... And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed ...
Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned ...
He explored me so completely, each limb
Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.
(p. 26)
It is difficult to read these pieces as other than classic fantasies of

male sexual irresistibility: the moist pump-entrance, the flowing irri-
gation drain ('he dug a spade deep into my flank/And took me to
him') seem almost like a parody of the narrative of erotic wish-
fulfilment, in which the frigid female gladly warms to an expert and
forceful man. 15 In one sense, the guise of a representation of rural
life scarcely survives this sexual excitement, though in another it is
being mobilised to legitimise the work, as eternal fact. One might
read this conjunction of rural and sexual utopianism, foregrounding
pleasure and promising a notional return to an earlier less repressed
state; but the obliviousness of most sexual revolutionaries of the
period to their own masculinist understanding of pleasure also
marks Heaney's version, and hinders such an interpretation. 16 The
pump and the stream are (preposterously, when one puts it like
that) each imagined as 'fulfilled in spite of herself', which is to say
disempowered; hence the real resemblance to pornographic fantasy.
They cannot choose but be played upon, like the 'Victorian Guitar'
which like its gentlewoman owner needs to be 'fingered' into plea-
sure (Door into the Dark, p. 33).
There is a further recurring feature of Heaney's work which con-
nects with this nexus of ideas. This is the conceit of language as
erotically enabling, joined in the following passage from 'Bone
Dreams' with the female-body-as-landscape in a political conceit.
The Irish poet 'colonises' with his charm - or force of language -
the 'escarpments' of a female England. He projects himself as the
phallic 'chalk giant':
Carved on her downs.

Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move towards the passes.
(North, p. 29)
The lover-speaker 'estimate(s) for pleasure/her knuckles' paving',

and begins 'to pace' her shoulder: all usual amorous activities in
which, however, the explorer's, 'estimator's', evaluator's position is
the man's. Other instances of the association of speech with eros
and energy or force in Heaney help to elucidate the topic. In
'Midnight' the eradication of wolves in Ireland is made the sign
both of the seventeenth-century conquest and of emasculation. The
poem ends:
Nothing is panting, lolling,

Vapouring. The tongue's
Leashed in my throat
(Wintering Out, p. 46)
making a symptomatic equation of phallus, speech, predation and

national strength almost too obvious to mention. 'Come To the
Bower', which echoes the title of a favourite Irish parlour patriotic
song, combines the traditional topos of disrobing with the richly
sensuous apprehension of the landscape which is one of Heaney's
most characteristic features:
My hands come ...

To where the dark-bowered queen,
Whom I unpin,
Is waiting ...
This land-spouse is herself rendered as a bog body, wearing the

necklet or tore which stood for the goddess:
A mark of a gorget in the flesh

Of her throat. And spring water
Starts to rise around her.
(North, p. 31)
The welling water indicates her fertility. The unpinning and

marking encode her female disempowerment (precisely as porno-
graphic texts do, since social life and the aesthetic utterances it pro-
duces form a symbolic continuum) and thus fix her role as an erotic
object. At the end of the poem, she is further named, as wealth: 'I
reach ... to the bullion/Of her Venus bone'. Here the reality of the
ritual murders Heaney found recorded in Glob is metaphorised and
explicitly eroticised, in a striking and disturbing mental transfor-
mation.
'Punishment', the poem describing Glob's 'Windeby girl' - the

drowned body of a young woman with a halter round her neck -
has attracted much commentary, chiefly about the analogy it makes
with tarring and feathering in Northern Ireland. The speaker of it
does to a certain degree interrogate his own position, discerning it
as that of 'the artful voyeur', but the words' overt application here
is to his sense of his political ambiguity: he would 'connive/in
civilised outrage', but understand the 'tribal, intimate revenge'
being exacted (North, p. 38).
The publicly expressible 'civilised outrage' belongs to a language
which the persona of all these poems feels is denied him and his
ethnic group; he constructs Northern Irish Catholics, as, like Celts
to the ancient Romans, a race mysterious, barbarous, inarticulate,
lacking in civilityY But, one might argue, the result of this ex-
pressed sense of marginalisation by the speaker is to make the girl
seem doubly displaced: the object of equivocal compassion by a
subject himself forced to be covert, himself the object in turn of
others' dominant and therefore oppressive civility. Thus the fasci-
nated details of the description which composes the girl as passive
and observed object have the effect, whatever the intention, of out-
weighing the initial assertion of a shared subjectivity ('I can feel the
tug/of the halter at the nape/of her neck ... '). The compassion is
equivocal not just because of the half-sympathy with the punishers,
but because of the speaker's excitement (can we not identify it as
specifically sexual?) at the scopic spectacle of the girl's utter disem-
powerment ('It blows her nipples/to amber beads ... '). Hence the
usual sense of the work 'voyeur' must suggest itself strongly.
Turning to the active feminine, Heaney's engagement with a
female destructive principle is particularly intense, as an examination
of his Ireland-spouse poems 'The Tollund Man' (Wintering Out,
p. 47) and 'Kinship' (North, p. 40) shows. 18 In the 'Tollund Man',
the sacrificed corpse is described as 'bridegroom to the goddess', who
is credited with a murky amalgam of lethal and sexual acts:
She tightened her tore on him

And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body ...
(Wintering Out, p. 4 7)
This, like 'Punishment', aestheticises the horror of a murdered

corpse and presents it as a natural phenomenon ('The mild pods of
his eye-lids,/His pointed skin cap'). But here it is also made an effect
of erotic absorption and incorporation by a female energy con-
ceived as both inert and devouring. 19 If one turns the motif this way
round, for the moment understanding it primarily as a way of
thinking about woman rather than about Irish political murder, it
reveals an intense alienation from the female. Eros-Thanatos pair-
ings generally do seem to rely on a perception of woman as channel
for masculine fear and desire, and this is no exception. 20 When one
readmits into one's mind the poem's parallel between Stone Age
sacrifices to the fertility goddess and Irish political murders in the
1970s, one's increased awareness of the erotic-aesthetic frisson in
the first section makes the analogy seem all the more shaky and
difficult to assent to. Can this sexual thrill really have anything
other than mischief to bring to our thought about the actual perpe-
tration of torture and murder? 21
'Kinship' at the dead centre of the collection North, also represents
a centre of Heaney's project. Developing a hint at the end of the
earlier 'Bogland' ('The wet centre is bottomless', Door into the Dark,
p. 56) it presents Ireland's bogland as above all an encompasser -
ruminant, storer, embalmer, 'insatiable bride', swallower, mideen,
floe. At the end of the passage is a disrobing moment: the ground
'will strip/its dark side' as if undressing. As the poem's hero pulls out,
then replaces, a turf-spade in the bog, 'the soft lips of the
growth/muttered and split', leaving the spade-shaft 'wettish/as I sank
it upright .. .' (North, p. 42). Following this moment of phallic dis-
covery (evidently granted with some reluctance by the bog) and rein-
sertion, recalling Heaney's many earlier digging and ploughing
passages, there is an explicit merging of birth and death - 'a bag of
waters/and a melting grave' - in this personified ground, a 'centre'
which, unlike Yeats's, 'holds' (North, p. 43 ). The poet identifies
himself as having grown out of this bog 'like a weeping willow/in-
clined to/the appetites of gravity'. In a turn to the overtly political at
the end of this poem, he addresses Tacitus, Roman describer of Celtic
Europe, wryly acknowledging the practice of 'slaughter for the
common good' (which presumably represents both the ritual human
sacrifices described in the Germania and Northern Ireland's deaths):
Our mother ground

is sour with the blood
of her faithful,
Report us fairly,
How the goddess swallows

our love and terror.
(North, p. 45)
First, taking this passage politically, one might argue that the
evident irony in the expression 'slaughter for the common good'
does not solve the more general problem of a projection of the
mythic and ritual onto history and the resulting blockage of ratio-
nal understanding and possible action. The poet compulsively pred-
icates his claim to intuitive identification with his landscape on
personifying it as feminine and equating it with death ('The goddess
swallows/our love and terror'). As others have suggested, this
further entangles the gloomy facts of Irish political history with the
heady rhetoric of nationalist ideology instead of interrogating
them. 22 My second point concerns the poem's real priorities. It pri-
vatises and sexualises the political. Its early sections show much
greater intensity than the later (which has probably contributed un-
noticed to critics' questioning of the ending): the charged personal
ode to the bog as mother and partner - giver and receiver of the
spade-phallus - is no more than tenuously related to political refer-
ences at the end, which risk seeming merely dutiful. I think the real
focus is on the speaker's private myth of identity formation, on
wresting a self from 'feminine' unbounded indeterminacy of the
bog. This poem attempts a synthesis of the stereotypes of feminin-
ity: the bog-goddess is imagined as both mother and spouse, and as
destroyer and provider, but it is still persistently (and in both
senses) the ground on which the speaker's self and his very identity
is predicated. The feminine is thus once again an Other but not
really envisaged as an alternative subject or self: a relation of com-
plementarity, certainly, but not of equality, and one which en-
shrines difference in the oppressive sense of that word.
Following the privatised and sexualised bog-Ireland poems, there
is also a series of poems in North which mount a specifically politi-
cal gender-historical narrative of English conquest and colonisation
in Ireland. This series includes 'Ocean's Love to Ireland' and 'Act of
Union'. Both these poems employ the conceit representing political
conquest by acts of sexual possession, and 'Act of Union' makes
the male/English violator its speaker; and/or: it is a love poem to a
pregnant spouse. There is a crucial ambiguity about the sexual act
in both poems: rape (indicated by a reference to Elizabethan mas-

sacres) or seduction by a male force whose energy is attractively ir-
resistible? The language of 'Act of Union' strongly recalls that of
the exploring lover in 'Bone Dreams':
... I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie ...
(North, p. 49)
Her mutuality is said by the male speaker (England) to have sup-

planted violation of an unwilling woman (Ireland). How ironically
is that speech to be read? Does not the tone strongly recall the
gender triumphalism of 'Rite of Spring', which, after all, enthusias-
tically celebrated the farmer's sexualised thawing of the pump? The
speaker in 'Act of Union' regrets the pain of his partner's imminent
childbirth ('the rending process in the colony/The battering ram')
but also reads it as the promise of a forth-coming Oedipal struggle:
'His parasitical and ignorant little fist already . . . cocked/At me
across the water'. One can credit Heaney with a vivid rendering of
the complications, the tangled intimacy, of Anglo-Irish political re-
lations. But one might also feel that to rehearse the narrative of
these relations in these terms is to re-mystify rather than to attempt
an understanding of the phenomena. What is especially question-
able is the apparently unconscious equivocation in Heaney's de-
ployment of gender. The application of force in the agricultural
handling of nature, imagined as male sexual domination, is felt as
deeply right. But the occurrence of the same structure in political re-
lations is (presumably, in the work of a poet of Catholic nationalist
origins) to be taken as reprehensible and grievous. Further, in the
structure of North the death-bringing goddess's claiming helpless
victims (female force) in the bog poems is matched with the rape-
narratives in the pendent colonisation series (male force). The sym-
metry of this deepens the sense of inevitability generated by the
whole project of the mythicisation of history. The social, economic
and constitutional conditions of modern Ireland are elided in this
reductive narrative which merges the chthonic personifications of
the Iron Age with a presentation of gender roles as immemorial.
The brief lyric 'The Betrothal of Cavehill' closes the series with a
quizzical moment:
Gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill

And the profiled basalt maintains its stare
South: proud, protestant and northern, and male.
Adam untouched, before the shock of gender.
They still shoot here for luck over a bridegroom.
The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love's hideouts, her pods and broom,
They fired above my car the ritual gun.
(North, p. 51)
In the second stanza, the familiar moment when the land is taken
as spouse(' ... to bed me down/Among my love's hideouts, her pods
and broom') allows us to identify the 'bridegroom' equivocally in
three possible ways: either as an autobiographical splinter of the
poet, or as an IRA man on the run and living rough in the country-
side, or as the rock itself 'marrying' the prone land it surveys so
dominantly. So the familiar reprise of nationalist attachment to the
land as a betrothal to death is complicated by the ethnically double
male presence in the poem: the 'Adam untouched' figure of
Cavehill, which is made to represent the culturally masculine in-
transigence of northern Protestantism, disdaining converse with the
land-as-Eve; and the presumably Catholic 'bridegroom', who 'beds
down' in the land. Even the culturally feminine Catholic/nationalist
figure is biologically male: may we read this as a discreet Utopian
moment in which all (males) may merge their differences in a
general bedding down in the (female) land? As to politics, this may
be an improvement; but as to gender, it is the status quo as in all
the other poems: politics is seen in terms of sexuality, but not the
reverse. The mildly humorous characterisation of the rock as phallic
stops short of demythicising Genesis, however wry it is about
northern Protestant no-surrendering: the gender there was before
gender was already male.
It may seem that I am ignoring one of the prominent develop-
ments of Heaney's later work, namely his 'marriage poems', partic-
ularly in Field Work, and indeed the sprinkling of earlier personal
love poems. I believe, however, that these poems are mostly also
recuperable to this broadly dualistic active-passive pattern I have
outlined. 23 Poem VI in the sequence 'Station Island', for example
('Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom'), is motivated by an
autobiographical 'plot', but centres on the constitutively masculine
gestures of watching and actively desiring an uncommunicative and
mysterious female figure, who is associated with bags of grain, like

the sheela-na-gig in Station Island:
Her hands holding herself

are like hands in an old barn
holding a bag open
(p. 49)
and what one might term a genial voyeurism is typical of the love
poems in general: 'The Skunk' is a classic example (Field Work,
p. 48). 24 'Polder' (Field Work, p. 51), one of the 'marriage poems',
is a kind of psychologised reprise of 'Kinship', shorn of political ex-
trapolation. It retains the land-woman metaphoric equation: in the
combined metaphor of possession and origination re-employed
from 'Kinship', the woman is the territory where the man, 'old
willow', has his 'creel of roots', and 'I have reclaimed my polder ,fall
its salty grass and mud-slick banks'. One might read the sequence
Field Work itself, and its stress on the erotic excitement of retracing
physical marks and stains on the spouse's limbs, as working to
fetishise woman's body in much the same way as Montague's The
Great Cloak does. 25
So must we not conclude that the poetry of Montague and
Heaney as a whole is insistently and damagingly gendered? Its mas-
culine personae, whether in the narrative of personal identity, or
that of nationality, must, it seems, possess or be possessed by a
counter-force personified as feminine: an encounter of the genders
as of aliens - dog eat dog, possess or be swallowed up - is forever
occurring, even within and beneath politics. On this evidence, it
remains very difficult for men, when they imagine self-formation as
a struggle, to escape conceiving that struggle, however metaphori-
cally or virtually, as against the feminine. The integral self counted
as so precious to the capacity for expression of these poets is won
against a necessarily subordinated ground of merely potential, never
actual feminine selves. In Lacanian terms, they seem to be stuck in
the self/not-self dualism of the mirror stage, failing to arrive at an
acknowledgement of the existence of an autonomous subjectivity in
others: a structure common to sexism and racism. 26 Just as 'every
document of civilisation is a document of barbarism>,2 7 in
Benjamin's phrase, so one is tempted to conclude that every feat of
self-discovery by these masculine poets entails the defeat of a femi-
nine ego. Or as Irigaray puts it:
the/a woman fulfils a twofold function- as the mute outside that sus-
tains all systematicity; as a maternal and still silent ground that nour-
ishes all foundations - ... 28
From Gender in Irish Writing, ed. T. O'Brien Johnson and

D. Cairns (Milton Keynes, 1991), pp. 88-92, 99-111.
NOTES
Patricia Coughlan identifies her own practice in terms of the second of two
modes prescribed for feminist criticism by Elaine Showalter. The first, 'gyn-
ocritics' was to be concerned with the woman as writer. The second, 'the
feminist critique', was to demonstrate how 'the hypothesis of a female
reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the
significance of its sexual codes' ('Towards a Feminist Poetics', Women
Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London, 1979,
pp. 25-6). The essay's wide range of reference to anthropology, psychology
and the history of mythology and to critics like Walter Benjamin, Homi K.
Bhabha and Luce lrigaray carefully subserves this purpose. I have, with the
author's permission, excised from the original text of her essay a section
devoted exclusively to John Montague's work. Montague remains,
however, a comparative foil to Heaney in the development of her argument
and the reader may wish to refer to his New Selected Poems (Newcastle,
1990) which contains all the poems discussed. Ed.]
1. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, 'Tropes and Traps: Aspects of

Woman and Nationality in Twentieth-Century Irish Drama', Gender
in Irish Writing, ed. Toni O'Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Milton
Keynes, 1991), pp. 128-37.
2. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual
Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York, 1976).
3. Paul Muldoon's 'Aisling' which parodically refuses its due of rever-
ence to this icon, substituting 'Anorexia' for Aurora and Flora, merely
replaces a falsely idealised feminine figure with a self-destructive one
arousing masculine distaste- inadequate as demystification (see Quoof
[London, 1983], p. 39). See also Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars
(Newcastle, 1986), p. 207, for an approving view.
4. For the debate in feminist anthropology on the applicability of the
nature-culture opposition to gender see: Sherry Ortner, 'Is Female to
Male as Nature is to Culture?' in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds),
Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford, CA, 1974), pp. 67-88;
Penelope Brown and Lydia Jordanova, 'Oppressive Dichotomies: the
Nature-Culture Debate', Cambridge Women's Studies Group (eds),
Women in Society (London, 1981), pp. 22~1; Carol MacCormack

and Marilyn Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge,
1980): and Shirley Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (London, 1975).
On the limitation of women to domesticity, see Patricia J. Mills,
Women, Nature and Psyche (New Haven, CT, and London, 1987);
and on Freudian Oedipal dogmatism, Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the
Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985). More
specifically, I have been helped by John Goodby, whom I wish to
thank for kindly showing me his research. Trevor Joyce's discussion
with me on theoretical issues and his suggestions about drafts of this
paper have been invaluable.
5. The phrase in Heaney's poem 'Punishment' (North [London, 1975],
p. 38) describing the poet as 'artful voyeur' is only an explicit crys-
tallising of a very general subject-position in his work, as I shall try to
show. Laura Mulvey's classic discussion of the male gaze and the
scopic is helpful here ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen,
16 [1987], 6-18).
6. For baking, see 'Mossbawn 1. Sunlight' (North, p. 8); the ploughing
and digging fathers are enlisted in 'Digging' and 'Follower' (Death of a
Naturalist [London, 1966], pp. 13, 34). [For spinsters living by wells,
see Montague's 'The Music Box', in The Dead Kingdom (Dublin,
1984) and Heaney's 'A Drink of Water' in Field Work (London,
1979). Similar myth-based 'hag' figures occur in several poems by
Montague like 'The Sean Bhean Bhocht', Poisoned Lands (Dublin,
1977) and 'The Wild Dog Rose' (The Rough Field, Dublin, 1972). In
their dual aspect of horror and grace these realistically presented
figures reflect the 'sovereignty goddess' met by the legendary hero as
described in Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage (London, 1961),
pp. 73-4. Ed.]
7. Even the sequences of Montague and Heaney tend to be predicated as
narrative on the personal experience of the poet.
8. See also 'Follower' (Death of a Naturalist, p. 24).
9. See Nicholas Roe's argument that this poem reveals what he calls
Heaney's 'mythic wish' in an early form. Roe says that the female
teacher who explains the natural history of frogs 'appears as external
author of guilt - perhaps a sexual awakening' - and represents 'a sort
of primary school Eve who bears responsibility for the ... child's lost
innocence'. 'Wordsworth at the Flax Dam: an Early Poem by Seamus
Heaney', Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox (eds), Critical Approaches
to Anglo-Irish Literature (Gerrard's Cross, 1989), p. 169.
10. Though, of course, a feminist reader might not be able to avoid giving
ironic reading to such a poem: 'I gathered cups .. ./And went. But they
still kept their ease/Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees'
(Door into the Dark [London, 1969], p. 27). I am grateful to Mary

Breen for discussion of the issue of the masculinist representation of
domesticity.
11. See note 6 above.
12. P.V. Glob, The Bog People, trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford (London,
1971). See Heaney, Preoccupations (London, 1980), pp. 57-8, for his
own account of his inspiration by Glob. The modern political half of
the construct finds perhaps its most popular and familiar expression in
the writings of Patrick Pearse.
13. The most sustained account of Heaney's whole bog complex is
Jacqueline Genet's 'Heaney et l'homme des tourbieres', ]. Genet (ed.),
Studies on Seamus Heaney (Caen, 1987) pp. 123-47, which crisply
notices the poems' sexual emphasis and meanings, but forgoes interro-
gation of them.
14. See Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage; Pamela Berger, The
Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from
Goddess to Saint (Boston, 1985). See also Proinsiais Mac Cana, Celtic
Mythology (London, 1970), pp. 49-50, 85-94: 'the mythological role
of love ... is of its nature functional or ritual rather than personal'
(p. 85).
15. Neil Corcoran severely understates the case when he says 'the poem
has, like "The Wife's Tale", its element of male presumption' (Seamus
Heaney [London, 1986], p. 58).
16. See Patricia ]. Mills, Women, Nature and Psyche, on the in-
adequacies of Marcuse's sexual libertarianism in Eros and
Civilization, which greatly influenced thought in the 1960s. In the
Irish context, Heaney is also revising the rural vision of Patrick
Kavanagh, one of his primary enabling figures, to include sex, but
sex neither as ideal romance nor as frustration, its two guises in
Kavanagh. The crucial moment in earlier Kavanagh, of critique of
the emotional and other deprivation attending Irish rural life, is,
however, elided in Heaney.
17. See 'Freedman' (North, p. 60); 'The Toome Road' (Field Work, p. 15),
with its British tank crews as 'charioteers', and also 'Kinship', dis-
cussed below.
18. It may be worth remarking that his sense of this identification seems
quite different from that in early Irish mythology, in which several
female war- and death-divinities appear; the hero or king must couple
with them so as to ensure his victory or continued rule, but they - the
Morrighan, the Badhbh, and Macha - are actively characterised as
speaking figures. The territorial goddesses such as Anu dominated an
area but were not especially thought of as murderous. Heaney's
version seems a modern and hybrid construct. See Mac Carra, Celtic
Mythology, pp. 66, 86.
19. See Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, pp. 96ff., for an informed and intelli-
gent commentary from a general point of view on these poems.
Longley, Poetry in the Wars, pp. 140-69 gives a trenchant discussion
which makes some good demystificatory points, but insists on a for-
malist and depoliticising understanding of poetry which is itself open
to question ('Poetry and politics, like church and state, should be sepa-
rated' [p. 185]). Elmer Andrews (The Poetry of Seamus Heaney
[London, 1988]) is sensitive and painstaking, but his formalist
approach tends to perpetuate the reification of gender-roles.
20. See Mills, Women, Nature and Psyche, pp. 157ff. on Freud, Marcuse
and the notion of the 'primal horde': 'Because woman was
Eros/Thanatos/Nirvana in "immediate" union she represented the
threat of "mere nature" - "the regressive impulse for peace which
stood in the way of progress - of Life itself"' (p. 157, quoting
Marcuse's Eros and Civilization [1972]). One might add that Heaney's
repeated meditations on the bog bodies are, of course, not at all con-
cerned to open the enquiry anthropologically towards a rational in-
vestigation either of Stone Age religious and agricultural behaviour, or
of Irish politics, but to make 'offerings or images that were emblems'
(Heaney interview, 1977, quoted in Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p. 96).
21. As Edna Longley has well said: 'Heaney does not distinguish between
involuntary and voluntary "martyrdom", and the nature of his "arche-
type" is such as to subsume the latter within the former' (Poetry in the
Wars, 151).
22. On the irony in the last section of 'Kinship', see Corcoran, Seamus
Heaney, p. 119, against other commentators who accuse Heaney of a
crude nationalism (Longley, Poetry in the Wars, pp. 185-210 and
Morrison, Seamus Heaney, pp. 68, 81).
23. With the exception of the early 'Lovers on Aran', in which for once the
stress is on a quality of mutuality and indistinguishableness in the
lovers' relation: 'Did sea define the land or land the sea? .. .' (Death of
a Naturalist, p. 4 7), and occasional other poems such as no. X of the
Glanmore Sonnets ('I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal .. .') (Field
Work, p. 42).
24. The engagingly self-mocking 'Sweeney's Returns' even discerns that
voyeuristic structure as a comedy, but scarcely to the extent of dis-
mantling it (Station Island, p. 114 ).
25. Uohn Montague, The Great Cloak (Dublin, 1978). See, for instance,
poems like 'Snowfield' (p. 11) and 'Don Juan's Farewell' (p. 19). Ed.]
It is fair to say, however, that Heaney's The Haw Lantern (London,
1988) marks a general turn away both from mythicising in the earlier
manner, and from sexual stereotyping in love poetry; but it is not yet
clear whether this does signal a new politics in the most general sense.
26. As Homi K. Bhabha says, 'Colonial power produces the colonised as a
fixed reality which is at once an "other" yet entirely knowable and
visible' ('The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the
Discourse of Colonialism', 0. Francis Barker et al. [eds], Literature,
Politics and Theory [London, 1986], p. 156). On the mirror stage and
entry into the symbolic order as a passage beyond dualism, see J.P.
Mueller and W.J. Richardson, Lacan and Language; a Guide to Ecrits
(New York, 1982), p. 136. I thank Nick Daly for discussion of this
point.
27. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1992), p. 248. [Ed].
28. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 365.
13
Ana-; or Postmodernism,
Landscape, Seamus
Heaney
THOMAS DOCHERTY
'Back-up-again'; or, in Greek, 'ana-, ana-, ana-'. 'The Grauballe

Man', ostensibly about a man who is 'back up again', is an exercise
in what I shall call 'anagrammatology': it is a writing elaborated in
various modes of this 'ana-': anamnesis, anagogy, anamorphosis
and analysis. In the present essay, I will show the poem as a writing
which occurs as an event in these four modes. This status of the
writing, as an event and not a work, nor even a 'text' in the conven-
tional sense, is important. 'Eventuality' opens writing to a postmod-
ernism, as an anachronic or untimely meditation, countering the
'punctuality' of the Modern, which is concerned to map two points
in time as if they were two stable points in space. Eventuality re-
leases the interior historicity of those 'spots of time'. To think this
writing as event enables an analysis which will be, literally, a setting
free of its elements into a movement of emancipation. A philosophy
of postmodernism will raise the stakes of the poem, disabling the
conventional reading of it as a neo-Modernist exercise in myth-
making and replacing the usual banal reading of its politics with
something literally more compelling. Three elements construct the
argument: the issue of historicity; an exploration of the poem's cin-
ematism; and a consideration of the poem as an engagement with
the issue of justice, judgement and criticism: a 'cutting' which
attempts to trancher Ia question.
206
POSTMODERNISM, LANDSCAPE, SEAMUS HEANEY 207
'THE BEARINGS OF HISTORY'

Once imagined, he cannot be seen
(Seamus Deane, 'A Killing')
On the face of it, Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' seems an unlikely

contender for the title of 'postmodernist poem'. In terms of obvious
theme and style, it seems that most critics would think of it in terms
of a 'late Modernist' text, Heaney as a late Modernist poet, the
ephebe influenced by Yeats and by a Romantic tradition which was
crucially concerned with landscape and a particular kind of eco-
relation to the land. 1
This 'economy', or law of space, however, is no longer available
in the same way to Heaney as it was to the Romantics or even to
the Modernists who were all so famously concerned with the issue
of 'exile'. Contemporary space is what Virilio thinks as an 'espace
critique', a space in which geometry is giving way to chronometry:
our socio-political being is organised not primarily by spatial or
geo-political mappings, but rather by temporal, chrono-political de-
terminations.2 Heaney lives in this different eco-consciousness of
the aesthetic of space proposed by (for example) Beuys and Long,
sculptors whose work is uncannily 'temporal' in that it is marked
by its internal historicity and temporal mutability. A typical piece
by Richard Long, say his 'A Line Made by Walking, England' is, in
a certain sense, no longer 'there', except in the photographic record
or image. Heaney's 'sense of place' is also - inevitably - now a
sense of time. He writes:
We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and

search for our histories. And when we look for the history of our
sensibilities I am convinced ... that it is to ... the stable element, the
land itself, that we must look for continuity. 3
This land is also a repository of history and continuity across time.

It is the case that for Heaney, space has become critical in precisely
another way close to this. Ireland itself is, of course, a 'critical
space', a space built upon a 'critical difference' called 'the border'
between North and South; it is built on that stasis or civil war
which problematises any sense of its identity, specifically any sense
of its historical identity. It is for this reason, of course, that the
Field Day company, with whom Heaney works extremely closely, is
crucially concerned to forge a history, to remember, as a therapeu-
208 THOMAS DOCHERTY
tic - and political - act which aims to 'suture' the wound to Ireland
which is the border.
'The Grauballe Man' is, in a sense, a poem on poetry itself; its
writing is precisely this kind of therapeutic anamnesis:
I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies
come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down
a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery. 4
But it is a poetry which lies uncertainly between image (the photo-

graph which prompted the poem) and memory (where 'now he
lies/perfected'), between history and its representation. If anything,
then, this is a poem which is about poetry as mediation or about a
specific act of reading. Heaney is confronting the bog as 'the
memory of a landscape', the palimpsest record of history which is
now conceived as 'a manuscript which we have lost the skill to
read'. 5 Most importantly, 'The Grauballe Man' is what we should
think as a kind of 'interstitial' event, a writing half-way between
image and text, figure and discourse.
For the neo-Romantic and Modernist traditions with which
Heaney is conventionally aligned, 'imagination' forges a link
between the Subject of consciousness and History as its Object.
This enables the formulation of a transcendental Subject in
Romanticism or - less gloriously - a Self capable of persistence in
Modernism. This trans-historical or mythic Subject is, however, no
longer easily available to Heaney, for the postmodern has prob-
lematised the relation between the Subject and History, or between
the 'real' and its 'representation'. If, in the 'society of the spectacle'
or the 'hyperreal simulacrum', everything is now of the status of
the image, then the 'real' has simply disappeared. The reality which
is supposed to ground our representations, be it the presence of
History as exterior fact or the presence-to-self of the supposed tran-
scendental Subject, has itself become an image. 6
This, in fact, is Heaney's problem, both a political and an aes-
thetic problem. The 'ground' for his poetry, history itself in the Irish
context, has disappeared, gone underground. As a result, a series of
reversals takes place in 'The Grauballe Man': what seemed a tomb
is a womb; what seemed a man gives a kind of birth while also
being the baby itself; to dig is to discover not the past at all
(history) but rather 'the presence of the past' (anamnesis). When
Heaney wrote the poem, he was deeply aware of the presence of the
past, not just in terms of his search for 'images and symbols ade-
quate to our predicament'/ but, rather, in terms of the very his-
toricity of the present, his present as a moment in flux, his spatial
present as a moment bifurcated, divided, a moment when space has
gone critical, differential, historical rather than antiquarian. As
Deane suggests, the mythologisation of history is more of a wound
than a salve. 8
The poem's crucial turn lies in a stanza which is itself an inter-
stitial stanza:
Who will say 'corpse'

to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?
This stanza asks: is history dead, a thing of the past; or is it alive,

vivid, a presence of the past? It is the very posing of the question
which opens the text to a postmodernism, to what I shall call its
postmodern cinematism.
THE CINEMATISM OF THE POSTMODERN

'Postmodern' is frequently misunderstood: many follow a particular
inflection of Fredric Jameson who, while theoretically aware of the
complexity of the postmodern, takes it in his practice to mean a
rag-bag of the art produced since 1945. But postmodernism, if it is
to be taken seriously, is not to be understood as a simple period-
ising term like this. Rather, the postmodern calls into question this
very manner of thinking history. Lyotard, for instance, asks:
What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not

occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of
image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that
has been received, if only yesterday ... must be suspected. What
space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What objects do
Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does
Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a
painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition
which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp:
the place of presentation in the work. In an amazing acceleration,
the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern
only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not
210 THOMAS DOCHERTY
modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state 1s
constant. 9
Postmodernism is, as it were, the moment in the modern work

when a critical difference becomes apparent; it is, for instance, the
critical distance between Cezanne and Picasso when the latter
paints in such a way as to call even the experimentalism of Cezanne
into question; Picasso - postmodernist to Cezanne - becomes
modern when a critical space is introduced by the works of
Duchamp, and so on.
'Postmodern' does not describe a work, but, rather, an event; it is
not a point in history, but an event in its historicity. The effect of
this is to question a prevalent understanding of history itself. One
view of history suggests that the past can be 'sliced into', and that
certain nodal 'points' can be identified and epistemologically under-
stood: thus, say, the 'history' of '1848'. Call this the 'Modernist'
view, one shared by Jameson whose periodisations necessitate the
location of some crucial 'points' in history. Another view suggests
that this 'point' is merely an epistemological hypothesis: '1848' is
not a point in time, but is itself internally historical, in the sense
that within 1848 there is only a series of differing 'becomings' or
events whose flux and mutability cannot be arrested. There is, as it
were, an overlap between, say, January and February 1848, and it
is this overlap or interstice which is history, not the points 'January'
and 'February' between which the overlap eventuates. Call this the
postmodern view: in this, epistemology becomes difficult; but the
historicity of history is maintained. The Modernist view is, prop-
erly, the very contradiction of history.
This can be more easily explained in terms of a kind of cinema-
tism which is extremely appropriate to Heaney's poem, which itself
hovers undecidably between discourse and figure, between the pho-
tographic still and the properly cinematic moving image. Heaney's
task in the text is not to discover an archaeological remnant of the
past in its antiquarianism, but rather to write in the interstices of
history itself, to be historical and to be aware of the flow and move-
ment of history, history as 'becoming' even as he writes - or
because he writes - the poem. It is an attempt to make movies out
of the still image, which is, of course one of the reasons why most
of the descriptions of the body describe it in fluid movement or flux.
Cinematism is precisely aligned with the postmodern. Bergson
characterised 'old philosophy' as the belief that the flow of Being
could be reduced to a series of 'coupes immobiles' or 'stills'.

Deleuze follows Bergson in the rejection of the still and its replace-
ment with the 'coupe mobile', a 'cut' which releases the temporality
or cinematic heterogeneity ('l'espace critique') held within the ap-
parently still or homogeneous photographic image itself. For
Bergson, according to Deleuze,
le mouvement ne se confond pas avec l'espace parcouru, l'espace par-

couru est passe, le mouvement est present, c'est l'acte de parcourir ...
les espaces parcourus appartiennent tous a un seul et meme espace
homogene, tandis que les mouvements sont heterogenes, irreductibles
entre eux. 10
(movement is not mixed with space traversed, space traversed is past,
movement is present, it is the act of traversing ... spaces traversed all
pertain to a single, same and homogeneous space, whereas move-
ments are heterogeneous, not reducible to each other.)
The reading of Heaney as a Modernist has to view this text as one

in which there is an established homogeneity- a late symbolist 'cor-
respondance' a la Baudelaire - between Jutland and Ireland which,
as Deane has pointed out, can only be maintained by some 'forceful
straining'.H Such a reading, further, has to ignore the literal move-
ment of the text, which delineates not the past but the presence of
the past as a living present and the mutability of that present, its
fluidity or flux.
'The Grauballe Man' is an example of a kind of montage, which
Eisenstein had described as a kind of dialectical process. Montage
'arises from the collision of independent shots', 12 as, for example,
the collisions between Jutland and Ireland, the Iron Age and the
IRA, the description of the man prior to the 'corpse/body' stanza
and the child hinting at a Christian iconography, raising the issue of
justice which dominates the latter half of the poem, and so on.
Montage such as this gives what Deleuze calls
l'image indirecte du temps, de la duree. Non pas un temps homogene

ou une duree spatialisee, comme celle que Bergson denonce, mais une
duree et un temps effectifs qui decoulent de !'articulation des images-
mouvement.13
(the indirect image of time, of duration. Not a homogeneous time or
spatialised duration, like that which Bergson denounces, but a real
duration and time proceeding from the articulation of the image-
movement.)
212 THOMAS DOCHERTY
It is a common misconception, deriving from much literary criti-

cism, to suggest that Bergson had argued for the prioritisation of
some kind of subjective time, a time which was to be measured
within the Subject. Deleuze points out the fallaciousness of this. Far
from time being within the Subject, the Subject is, that is,
'becomes', only through the agency of Time itself. 14 Virilio raises
this to a sociological status:
Au temps qui passe de la chronologie et de l'histoire, succede ainsi un

temps qui s'expose instantanement. Sur l'ecran du terminal, la duree
devient 'support-surface' d'inscription, litteralement ou plutot au-
tomatiquement: le temps fait surfaceY
(A time which manifests itself instantaneously thus takes the place of
the time which passes of chronology and history. On the screen of
the terminal, duration becomes 'support-surface' of inscription, liter-
ally, or, rather, automatically: time becomes surface.)
Time surfaces, a little like the body in the bog which is also, for
Heaney, the poem itself in which time - or in my preferred term
here, historicity - exposes itself.
This 'temps qui s'expose' is prefigured, as Virilio points out, in
the techniques of photography and cinema. 16 Those techniques, of
course, were precisely the techniques which Benjamin feared, on the
grounds that they would make history less accessible, would dere-
alise it in some wayY However, this derealisation is nothing more
nor less than the denial of the availability of the coupe immobile,
the denial of the still; and it bears repeating that the still itself is the
very opposite of historicity as such; the still, or the coupe immobile
which enables a stable knowledge of the past, the pastness of the
past, is a kind of epistemological myth, however necessary.
Heaney's text, however, is not about the pastness of the past but its
presence. This is in accord with the living in a critical space of
Ireland which Virilio would see as a paradigmatic postmodern con-
dition. As a result of the movement away from perspectivism and
its pieties towards cinematism, the inhabiting of time has sup-
planted the inhabiting of space itself. It is this issue which Heaney's
poem is addressing: the anamnesis of history.
In anamnesis, according to Plato in Meno, we have something
which Modernism articulated much later as a Proustian souvenir
involontaire. In this, there is not so much a moment of knowledge
of the past, but rather an actual recreation of the past, now present
fully: it is, as it were, the actualisation of the virtual. 18 It is this
process of 'actualisation' which is central to Heaney's poem. The

body in the photograph starts off as a fluid being:

in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself
As the poem continues the description, we have what is in fact a

process very like Robbe-Grillet's well-known description of a paint-
ing, 'La defaite de Reichenfels' in Dans le labyrinthe which, as it
elaborates itself, becomes less static painting and more mobile sce-
nario. A soldier, described fully as an image, begins to talk with a
little boy, himself fully delineated within the frame of the painting;
but as the description progresses the frame is transgressed and the
boy and soldier leave 'La defaite de Reichenfels' (the title of the
canvas: figure) and engage with each other in a fully narrative situ-
ation, 'dans le labyrinthe' (the title of the novel: discourse)Y This
tendency towards the mobility and the mutability of narrative, the
actualisation of the virtual, of that which seemed to be merely a rep-
resentation - in short, the presentation of the unpresentable - occurs
also in Heaney. The poet describes the corpse/body to the point
where it is unclear whether it is alive or dead, on which side the grave
it is; then recalls the photograph; and moves towards the perfection
of the man in the memory of the poet, at which point the presence of
the past becomes all the more telling in the issue of justice which the
poem is addressing. It is 'the actual weight/of each hooded victim'
which the poet feels. 'Actual' means 'current; present'; and the issue
of justice is itself realised as now and present for the writing/reading
of the poem. Through anamnesis, the virtual or hypothetical issue of
justice which is proposed by the atrocity of the Northern Irish situa-
tion is made actual, current, an event. Its currency or fluency is also,
of course, realised in the fluidity of bog man, who is seen not as a still
but as a moving image: as a coupe mobile.
CURT CUTS
the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head
(Heaney, 'Digging')
214 THOMAS DOCHERTY
In this cinematic poem, then, there is an arrangement around a

crucial 'cut' or rupture. Within the text itself, that cut is the slashed
throat of the bog man; and a slashed throat is also a throat which
cannot speak. Heaney writes a poem about the difficulty of writing
poetry within the problematic of injustice which determines the
situation of the poet and his poem; both live in a terrain marked by
a savage cut or crucial space which lodges them in history rather
than in place. If people have no clearly demarcated terrain within
which to identify themselves, they must turn to time and live in it.
But the time is 'out of joint', in the sense that the history of Ireland
is itself 'cut' or slashed, interrupted by a long colonial sojourn.
These are Heaney's 'living roots' which quicken or come to life in
his head. As Virilio indicates, 'le temps n'est un temps vecu ... que
parce qu'il est interrompu' (time is a lived time only as and when it
is interrupted). 20 The poem enacts this living time through its cut
and montage organisation.
But this slashed throat raises another issue: that of justice and
revenge. The text is clearly related to Heaney's 'Trial Pieces', poems
exploring Viking culture in relation to his own:
I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull-handler, parabalist,
smeller of rot
in the state, infused
with its poisons,
pinioned by ghosts
and affections,
murders and pieties,
coming to consciousness
by jumping in graves,
dithering, blathering. 21
The Jacobean revenge motif in Heaney is closely related to the

idea of 'finding a voice', with 'Feeling into Words', those 'words,
words, words' which Hamlet reads/says when confronted with the
not so wily spy, Polonius, who finds a 'pregnancy' in Hamlet's
talk. 22
Heaney's first prose collection, Preoccupations, opens with the
word 'Omphalos' repeated three times ('words, words, words'),
with which he 'would begin'. This is important to the Oedipal
impetus in Heaney. In this poetry, the land frequently occupies the
position of the maternal womb, a womanly space to be 'quickened

by penetration' as Deane puts it. 23 Heaney 'speaks daggers' to this
Gertrude earth, this 'Bog Queen'. Oedipalisation is, of course, a
setting of time 'out of joint', for it enables the mythic attempt of the
son to be at once both son and father of himself. In Heaney, this
temporal decalage is made more evidently a 'presence of the past' in
the ghostly apparition of Hamlet in 'The Grauballe Man' and his
other 'Danish' poems.
This bog man is strangely androgynous. Firstly, we find that a
'ball' is like an 'egg'; there is a dark linguistic hint here that the tes-
ticle is like an ovary; and this linguistic slippage or ambivalence,
this metaphor itself, merging ball and egg, produces that theme of
pregnancy which dominates the latter half of the poem. Further,
even his body takes on a female cast:
His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel ...
There is a kind of anamorphosis going on here, as the male char-

acter mutates into something female. A mussel typically is a con-
tainer of sorts; and here it is as if the man's hips contain a
'currency', a pearly fluency. This fluency or fluidity in the cast of
the body makes it an example of what Irigaray thinks as a me-
canique des fluides, 24 a 'mechanics' which enables the poem to
become mobile, a mutable coupe mobile. It is also a mechanics
which enables the poem to articulate a 'becoming womanly'; and
again, the drive towards becoming rather than being is a drive
towards the historicity of eventuality rather than to the fixity of a
punctuality. This engagement with gender places the text in the
mode of anamorphosis.
The man is 'pregnant' in these lines: but what he is pregnant with
is, of course, the presence of a future. The poem, then, is written in
this peculiar future anterior tense which, according to Lyotard, de-
scribes the typically postmodern event. Further it again recalls
Deleuze who cites Augustine's notion:
il y a un present du futur, un present du present, un present du passe,

tous impliques dans l'evenement, enroules dans l'evenement, done si-
multanes, inexplicables. De !'affect au temps: on decouvre un temps
interieur a l'evenement 25
00 0
(there is a present of the future, a present of the present, a present of

the past, all implicated in the event, rolled together in the event, and
216 THOMAS DOCHERTY
thus simultaneous with each other and inexplicable. From affect to

time: one discovers a time which is interior to the event ... )
This slipperiness of the 'actual', the constant and fluid actualisation

of a virtual which organises the poem, is manifest in all the slipperi-
ness which threatens to be arrested but which the text constantly
strives to release or to loosen. If the man is in a sense giving birth to
himself from the female bog in which there lies a 'Bog Queen', then
it follows that the poetry is in a sense also giving birth to itself,
originating itself or authorising itself in this peculiar act. The poet is
Hamlet giving birth to himself, the poet as ephebe delineating a
birth to himself through a violent act of self-wounding. For the
poem is itself paradigmatic of poetry for Heaney; it is a poem about
his own writing, which comes from the bog or from anamnesis, but
it is also thus a poem which delineates how the poetry must derive
from an act of self-wounding anamorphosis.
In my epigraph to this section, Heaney has described himself as
the man suffering from the cut or bruise to the living root which is
not in the Grauballe Man's head but in his own. The poem is his
epithalamium, in a sense, the wedding text which tries to wedge to-
gether the wounding, a suturing which is involved in the act of love.
It is the 'Wedding Day' on which:
I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. ... 26
It also brings to mind his dream of freedom:
I had to read from Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream'
speech. 'I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the full meaning of its creed' - and on that day all men would be
able to realise fully the implications of the old spiritual, 'Free at last,
free at last, Great God Almighty, we are free at last.' But, as against
the natural hopeful rhythms of that vision, I remembered a dream
that I'd had last year in California. I was shaving at the mirror of the
bathroom when I glimpsed in the mirror a wounded man falling
towards me with his bloodied hands lifted to tear at me or to
imploreY
The Grauballe Man is, as it were, the image in Heaney's mirror:

it is his Imaginary, his dream of freedom. As an Imaginary, it fits
in with the idea of anamnesis in the poem. For what we have is a

situation in which the world, that alien space, turns out,
according to the logic of the poem, not to be an unknown alien
realm at all, but rather simply what the poet always knew but
had simply forgotten: it is as if the world is, as it were, a latent
unconscious for the poet, his Imaginary; and the writing of
the poem is the therapeutic act of recovering what had been re-
pressed and facing it. In these terms, the atrocities of violence in
Ireland are a return of the repressed pagan rites of sacrifice.
Paganism, of course, is itself aligned by Lyotard with a certain
postmodernism. 28
But there is another image which fits this in the text as well. That
image is an image of Robert Lowell, who ghosts this poem. Lowell
ghosts the poem in the stanza which describes the head of the
Grauballe Man:
The head lifts,

the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat ...
What we have here is a situation again reminiscent of Hamlet, espe-

cially that Hamlet who tests the veracity of Horatio when the latter
is testifying to seeing Hamlet's dead father, returned from the grave
rather like a proto-Grauballe Man. In that sense, Hamlet asks
whether the ghost was armed:
Hamlet: Armed, say you?

All: Armed, my lord.
Hamlet: From top to toe?
All: My lord, from head to foot.
Hamlet: Then saw you not his face.
Horatio: 0, yes, my lord. He wore his beaver up. 29
This can be easily translated back into Heaney's text. Here, the idea
of the chin as a visor which is raised above the throat suggests a
literal 'disfiguration' in the sense that the face disappears in a par-
ticular way. It implies a closeness of the eye and the mouth, or, as
Lowell would have thought this, a closeness of 'Eye and Tooth'. In
Lowell's poem of that name, we have an examination of a particu-
lar kind of justice, the justice of a biblical mode (eye for eye, tooth
for tooth, etc.) which is placed at the service of a political ideology,
218 THOMAS DOCHERTY
that which is identified in Lowell's poem by the imperialist

American eagle:
No ease from the eye

of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one ascetic talon
clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth. 30
In a certain sense, then, Heaney's 'bog poems' become his version

of a text 'For the Union Dead': a volume which is, of course, a vali-
dation of America's 'North'. Heaney's 'Act of Union' sees the rela-
tion of imperialism in precisely the same Oedipal terms which 'The
Grauballe Man' explores.
In the interstices of the poem, then, there comes a pressure
which breaks it from within. It is, in a sense, an allegory
of Ireland's situation. But whereas the Modernist reading would
see this in terms of a spatial allegory: in which the text would be
regarded as falling into two halves, marked by the interstitial
line of Lowell and/or Oedipus, and would thus think of this
breakage or interruption in spatial terms, what my own reading
shows is that this Irish situation, this 'curt cut', is itself a tempo-
ral cut, hence allegory as anagogy, one which involves history
and which sees the poem as itself a historical event. Heaney here
is not map-making, but history-making: one of the 'history
boys' _31 When Lowell appears as the ghostly father figure in the
way I have described, we have 'the presence of the past', not its
pastness.
Lyotard suggests that the 'post' of postmodern be understood in
terms of 'ana-': it is a 'proces en ana-':
Tu comprends qu'ainsi compris, le 'post-' de 'postmoderne' ne

signifie pas un mouvement de come back, de flash back, de feed back,
c'est-a-dire de repetition, mais un proces en 'ana-', un proces
d'analyse, d'anamnese, d'anagogie, et d'anamorphose, qui elabore un
'oubli initial'. 32
(You understand that understood in this way, the 'post-' of 'post-
modern' does not signify movements of the type come back, flash
back, feed back, that's to say of repetition, but rather a process in
'ana-', a process of analysis, of anamnesis, of anagogy, of anamor-

phosis, a process which elaborates an 'initial forgetting'.)
Heaney's poem is precisely such a process. It is analysis: literally a

setting free and into mobility of elements which had seemed to be
irreversibly conjoined. It is anamnesis, in its articulation of and ac-
tualisation of the presence of the past, even of disparate pasts. It is
anagogical in its allegorical enactment of the historical split which
is the espace critique of Ireland. It is anamorphic, a distorted
drawing or representation with its abnormal transformations of
Heaney into Oedipus, Oedipus into Lowell, Ireland into America,
North into For the Union Dead, Jutland into Ireland, and so on: all
those montage effects of this cinematic poem. It is in short the elab-
oration of an 'initial forgetting', a forgetting of the violence of
origin itself.
From Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. T. Docherty (1991)
NOTES
[In his review of Heaney's The Government of the Tongue (essay 10 above)
Thomas Docherty envisaged the poet beginning to hear 'the alterity, the in-
comprehensible otherness' as a preferable alternative to his 'imperialist
thinking'. In this later essay Docherty finds this projected shift of awareness
already accomplished in 'The Grauballe Man' which he diagnoses as a
'postmodernist poem'. One of his main aims is to provide an adequate
definition of postmodernism and my own Introduction tries to summarise
his conclusions. But another aim is to 'raise the stakes' of the poem (and
possibly of other related poems) so that Heaney is seen as engaging experi-
mentally with a wider range of contemporary issues than has yet been
acknowledged in recent criticism of his work.
Docherty assumes knowledge of Plato's dialogue, Meno, of the writing
of Robbe-Grillet, Lowell and Fredric Jameson, of the sculpture of Richard
Long as well as the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso, but the main chal-
lenge to the reader is linguistic. Docherty's first sentence (p. 206 above),
for instance, offers three meanings for the Greek prefix upon which his
argument is hinged, but the OED definition (up, in place or time, back,
again, anew) usefully complements what the 'play' of Docherty's critical
text provides. The following short glossary is similarly intended to bring
dictionary definitions fruitfully to bear on Docherty's sometimes cryptic
vocabulary:
220 THOMASDOCHERTY
Anagogy. Mystical or spiritual understanding or interpretation.

Anagrammatology. Docherty has combined 'Anagram' (transposition of
the letters of a word or, more loosely, the elements of an utterance, so
that a new word or utterance is formed) with 'Grammatology' (the
scientific study of writing systems).
Analysis. Resolving something complex into its simple elements (etymo-
logically, loosing back and up).
Anamnesis. Recalling of things past.
Anamorphosis. Distorted projection of something which when seen from
one particular point appears regular.
Cutting. The action of the verb 'cut' in various senses; an intersection;
also a section; also used in film-making.
Decalage (Fr.). Shifting the zero of an instrument. (Decalage horaire:
time shift).
Event. An incident or occurrence; also the outcome of a course of action.
Palimpsest. Parchment on which you can write and then erase what you
have written.
Simulacrum. A mere image, a specious imitation or likeness.
Trancher (Fr.). To slice (bread); to cut; to settle (question) once and for all.
Ed.]
1. See, for example, Seamus Deane, 'The Timorous and the Bold', in his
Celtic Revivals (London, 1985); Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus
Heaney (London, 1988); Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London,
1986). In their 'Introduction' to The Penguin Book of Contemporary
British Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1982), Blake Morrison and Andrew
Motion made a polemical claim for Heaney as '[t]he most important
new poet of the last fifteen years', one in the forefront of a new 'depart-
ure' in poetry 'which may be said to exhibit something of the spirit of
postmodernism'. The hesitancies in this final phrase reveal the fact that
their notion of postmodernism was extremely underinformed and un-
dertheorised. Antony Easthope trounces their suggestion in his piece,
'Why Most Contemporary Poetry Is So Bad', PN Review, 48 (1985),
pp. 36-8, where he also argues that 'The Grauballe Man' is, in fact,
'resolutely pre-modernist'. Both views miss some essential points of
what is at stake in the postmodern, as I'll argue here.
2. Paul Virilio, L'espace critique (Paris, 1984). At the simplest level, this
corresponds to an organisation of life in terms of 'quality time' or 'labour
time' rather than its organisation in terms of the 'metropolis' and the
'suburbs'. Cf. the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially with regard to the
idea that social, political and psychological life are all organised around
'lines of flight', making territorialisations and deterritorialisations.
3. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (London, 1980), pp. 148-9. For a
more detailed explication of this aesthetic in Long, see Thomas
Docherty, After Theory (London, 1990), pp. 22-4.

5. Heaney, Preoccupations, pp. 54, 132; the latter phrase is attributed to
John Montague.
6. See Guy Debord, La Societe du spectacle (Geneva, 1967); Jean
Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mort (Paris, 1976);
Baudrillard, Amerique (Paris, 1986). This tendency in poetry is
perhaps most marked in the work of John Ashbery. But it has been
there in a great deal of modernist writing, where there was a marked
interest in the 'interstitial'. Modernist writers did not chart the 'death
of the Self': they were interested in the self-in-time, and in the intersti-
tial moments between those significant moments of assured selfhood
or supposed self-presence. Hence Proust was interested not in the
heartbeat itself but in the 'intermittences du coeur'; Woolf was inter-
ested not in actions but in what goes on 'between the acts'; Bergson
was interested in the time 'between' marked instants; Eisenstein in the
dialectical relation between the images which constituted montage in
cinema; Saussure in the relations 'between' signs rather than in signs
themselves; Einstein in 'relative' rather than absolute measure; and so
on. It is this 'interstitial' area which determines Heaney's writing here.
7. Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 56. 'The Presence of the Past' was the title
of the 1980 Venice Biennale which initiated the 'postmodern debate' in
architecture.
8. Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 179.
9. Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester,
1984), p. 79; cf. Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism; or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-92; and
Jameson, 'The Politics of Theory', in his The Ideologies of Theory, II
(London, 1988), pp. 103-13.
10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: L'image-movement (Paris, 1983), p. 9.
12. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form, as quoted in Gerald Mast and
Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn (New
York, 1979), p. 104.
13. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 47.
14. See Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris, 1968), p. 116, especially
the passage on Kant and what Deleuze thinks as the 'je fele', which
marks the becoming of the Subject, its existence in historicity or in the
form of time.
15. Virilio, Espace critique, p. 15
16. Ibid., p. 77.
222 THOMAS DOCHERTY
17. See 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction',

Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1992),
pp. 210-44. [Ed.]
18. See, for example, Georges Poulet, Proustian Space (Baltimore, MD,
1977).
19. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dans le labyrinthe (Paris, 1959), pp. 24-31
et seq.
20. Virilio, Espace critique, p. 103; cf. Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy
(Minneapolis, 1984), pp. vii-viii.
21. Heaney, 'Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces', in North (London, 1975),
pp. 21-4.
22. See Heaney, 'Feeling Into Words', in Preoccupations; the references
here are to Shakespeare's Hamlet, II.ii.
24. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY, 1985).
25. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'image-temps (Paris, 1985), p. 132.
26. Heaney, 'Wedding Day', in Wintering Out (London, 1972), p. 57.
28. See Lyotard, Rudiments paiens (Paris, 1977) and Instructions paiennes
(Paris, 1977), Tombeau de l'intellectuel (Paris, 1984), Le postmoderne
explique aux enfants (Paris, 1986).
29. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.ii.
30. Robert Lowell, 'Eye and Tooth', in For the Union Dead (London,
1965), pp. 18-19.
31. Seamus Deane, 'Send War in Our Time, 0 Lord', in History Lessons
(Dublin, 1983), p. 12.
32. Lyotard, Le postmoderne explique aux enfants, p. 126.
14
The Distance Between:

Seamus Heaney
STAN SMITH
A PLACE TO COME FROM

Perhaps Seamus Heaney's commonest critical mannerism is the
teasing out of innuendoes and ambiguities in some ordinary locu-
tion, as for example in his comments in The Government of the
Tongue 1 on Robert Lowell, whose poetic 'resources proved them-
selves capable of taking new strains, in both the musical and stress-
ful sense of that word'. Heaney's device doesn't always take the
strain, sometimes seeming more a tic of rhetorical routine than a
necessary complication: 'that strain again, it had a dying fall'. As
with his recurrent arguing from etymology, too much of the argu-
ment's strain can be taken up in a verbal play which substitutes for
logic and demonstration. Most notorious perhaps is the schoolboy
double entendre of that lecture given at the Royal Society of
Literature in 1974, 'Feeling into Words', which effectively exposed
Leavisite pieties by touching up their lower parts as a discourse of
sexual displacement. But it is apparent even in such apparently in-
nocuous items as his 1977lecture at the Ulster Museum, 'The Sense
of Place', a phrase which he glosses as 'our sense, or - better still -
our sensing of place'.
Nevertheless, the linguistic strategy is deeply symptomatic. It
effects a kind of destabilisation on the ground of language itself,
unsettling what he calls the 'sovereign diction' 2 with alternative,
subversive voices. This is apparent in the slant light cast on the
1977 lecture by a later one g1ven at the Wordsworth Summer
223
224 STAN SMITH
Conference at Dove Cottage. 'Place and Displacement: Recent

Poetry of Northern Ireland' makes it clear, in terms of a Saussurean
binary, that place is impossible to define without displacement.
Displacement, one might say, is the necessary ground upon which
to find or found one's place.
'I hate how quick I was to know my place.

I hate where I was born, hate everything
That made me biddable and unforthcoming',
the poet mouths at his 'half-composed face/In the shaving mirror'

(Joyce's 'cracked looking-glass of the servant') in a moment of con-
fessional self-loathing in 'Station Island'. But really knowing your
place means refusing to settle for being put in your place, whether it
is your own people or an occupying presence (Joyce's Haines)
which is doing the placing - means learning, in the ghostly ventrilo-
quism of 'Station Island', 'that what I thought was chosen was con-
vention'. The subtitle of this lecture significantly speaks of poetry of
Northern Ireland, not from it, and a whole world of difference can
hang on such a preposition. In The Haw Lantern, four parables
give a precise twist to this topographic insistence: 'From the
Frontier of Writing', 'From the Republic of Conscience', 'From
the Land of the Unspoken', 'From the Canton of Expectation'. The
preposition in one sense simply indicates the place of origin of the
missive (as in 'A Postcard from Iceland'). But that 'from' carries
more weight than this. In the first poem he writes from the frontier;
but as the last three stanzas indicate he also experiences a sense of
release at having come away from, escaped across it:
And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,

as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall ...
past armour-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
The prepositions do much here in effecting the sense of relief in

passage, 'passed from behind ... past... out between ... receding ...
into'. That 'through', a preposition turned adverb and then collo-
quially a verb complement, takes on a heavy freight of meaning. If
it 'concentrates an identity in a heave of renewal' it also 'disperses it
in a blast of evacuation', a process which in The Government of the
Tongue 3 Heaney finds 'morbid' in Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' - where,
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN 225
though he does not remark on it, the word acquires a similar

duplicity:
So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through ....
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Working it through, getting through, may mean saying you're

through with it for ever. This poem Heaney disapproves of (though
he nevertheless calls it a 'brilliant ... tour de force'), is highly appo-
site to the frontier of writing. Heaney too is not only through the
roadblock. He is also through with that country: with its exposed
positions, with having to justify himself, with perpetual interroga-
tion. In the light of Plath's usage, 'through' picks up the resonance
of that 'spent' applied to the self earlier - spent, that is, like a used
cartridge, or a life 'spent' by an over-itchy trigger finger:
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.
The prepositions themselves relentlessly train down out of upon the

'subjugated, yes, and obedient' self held in its place down the sights
of 'cradled' guns.
That the preposition is a key resource in Heaney's poetic
armoury is confirmed by his remarks, in 'The Sense of Place', on a
line of Kavanagh's:
And the same vigour comes out in another little word that is like a
capillary root leading down into the whole sensibility of Kavanagh's
place. In the first line, 'the bicycles go by in twos and threes'. They
do not 'pass by' or 'go past', as they would in a more standard
English voice or place, and in that little touch Kavanagh touches
what I am circling. He is letting the very life blood of the place in
that one minute incision. 4
'Pass by' may be a sly dig at Yeats's horseman. Heaney, at the fron-
tier, we note, is suddenly through, as if by magic without any ap-
parent act of transit, only in a simile passing from behind, passing
out between. The 'From' of the poem's title takes up but also takes
on the title of W.H. Auden's play On the Frontier. In 'Sounding
226 STAN SMITH
Auden', the second lecture of The Government of the Tongue,

Heaney remarks on the oddity of the preposition 'between' at
another frontier of decision in Auden's verse:
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,

On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees ... 5
Similarly, in analysing the effect of 'chafing' 6 he tunes in, finely, on

its inbetweenness: 'disturbed by a lurking middle voice' between
active and passive, it 'occupies' (a loaded word before the Popean
noun phrase) 'a middle state between being transitive and intransi-
tive, and altogether functions like a pass made swiftly, a sleight of
semantic hand which unnerves and suspends the reader above a
valley of uncertainty'. When he writes of 'this deferral of a sense of
syntactical direction' Heaney is indicating some of the preoccupa-
tions of his own poems in Station Island and The Haw Lantern,
which also, like early Auden, turn upon 'the necessity of a break, of
an escape from habit, an escape from the given ... only to expose
their ultimate illusory promise'. 7
If Auden's poems 'sound back' to earlier ones, Heaney's own
poem here resounds with this earlier source in Auden, coming out
'from behind a waterfall/on the black current of a tarmac road'.
Auden's advice to the stranger, 'frustrate and vexed', is to 'Go
home', or find himself equally emptied and subjugated by a land
which 'cut off, will not communicate'. Heaney's poem inhabits
an occupied 'middle state' and 'middle voice' full of spoken and
unspoken communications (the 'intent' of the rifles, the atmo-
sphere of 'pure interrogation'), of knowledges of the self with-
held from it, and of the silent messages of fear, obedience and
power that grow from the barrel of a gun. In 'The Mud Vision'
this is identified as that state of Irish paralysis in which, once,
'We sleepwalked/The line between panic and formulae', unable
to 'dive to a future'. 'Terminus', recalling his variously divided
childhood, takes a more balanced position - between rural and
urban, agrarian and industrial, active and passive, transitive and
intransitive, weighing pros and cons. If 'Baronies, parishes met
where I was born', so that he grew up 'Suffering the limit of each
claim', these 'limits' are not only passively borne (suffered) as
limitations on the self but also tolerated, in a learnt and active
sufferance, as limited claims, which can be put in their place
because they are limited. Coming to understand such limits can

then offer insight:
Two buckets were easier carried than one.

I grew up in between.
'Second thoughts' thus become the first fruits of thinking itself, and
the poem's second thoughts, moving out from between, end at a
watery margin which is also a crossing point, a place of negotiation
between opposing forces which figures the stance of one whose end
is peace, 'in midstream/Still parleying, in earshot of his peers'.
Whereas the early Auden stands repeatedly transfixed 'Upon this
line between adventure', caught 'Between attention and attention',
ordered to 'Turn back' before he reaches any frontier by a man
with a gun, because 'There is no change of place', 8 Heaney's prepo-
sitional space is a different one, not transfixed but moving 'with
guarded unconcerned acceleration' from 'out between'. In 'Station
Island' the ghost of William Carleton speaks of his own hardness in
a hard time as maybe containing a lesson for the poet, "'whoever
you are, wherever you come out of"'. Freedom may be found in
displacing oneself. But, as Heaney observes in 'The Sense of Place',
citing Carson McCullers, 'to know who you are, you have to have a
place to come from'.
SOUNDING OUT THROUGH

For such 'an earnest of the power of place' this essay returns to the
world of Heaney's own childhood:
The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a

system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only thirty years ago,
and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world
vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of
place as it was experienced in the older dispensation. 9
The Celtic Twilight, for all its naiveties, was 'the beginning of a dis-
covery of confidence in our own ground, in our place, in our
speech, English and Irish', a discourse 'that would bind the people
of the Irish place to the body of their world'. This bodiliness of a
world 'instinct with signs', I shall suggest, is important. Heaney's
model here is Patrick Kavanagh's assertion that 'Parochialism is
228 STAN SMITH
universal; it deals with fundamentals ... now that I analyse myself I

realise that throughout everything I write, there is this constantly
recurring motif of the need to go back'. Kavanagh's 'sense of his
place involves detachment', for it is only when one is fully in and of
a place that one can feel fully Kavanagh's need to be 'detached,
remote ... take part but ... not belong'. As with Wordsworth, these
native places are 'influential in the strict sense of the word
"influential" -things flowed in from them'. As Heaney elaborates
the argument, the prepositions once again pre-position the preoccu-
pied subject, in this 'middle state' where things flow in from and
flow out to.
Etymology is summoned to explain this relation at the beginning
of the Plath lecture, speaking of a Yeats
less concerned in his criticism to speak about the actual tones and
strains of poetic language than to evoke the impersonal, impersonat-
ing, mask-like utterance which he takes all poetry to be. We are re-
minded how persona derives from personare, meaning 'to sound out
through', how the animation of the verb lives in the mask's noun-like
impassiveness. For Yeats, the poet is somebody who is spoken
through. 10
'Sounding back' in the discussion of Auden has its corollary in this

'sounding out through'. 'Through', as we have seen, is 'another
little word' fraught with ambivalence. 'Poetry makes nothing
happen', Auden said famously, in what is clearly a direct response
to Yeats's fretful questions about poetic responsibilities in 'The
Man and the Echo'. But it is nevertheless, in a less frequently cited
line, 'A way of happening, a mouth'. This is what Heaney argues in
the opening, title lecture of The Government of the Tongue,
quoting the Polish poet Anna Swir on the poet as 'an antenna cap-
turing the voices of the world, a medium expressing his own sub-
conscious and the collective subconscious':
Poetry's special status among the literary arts derives from the audi-
ence's readiness to concede to it a similar efficacy and resource. The
poet is credited with a power to open unexpected and unedited com-
munications between our nature and the reality we inhabit. 11
Heaney's habit of ringing all the possible changes on an equivocal

word or phrase comes from a refusal to be pinned down prema-
turely in a fixed place, a wish to keep open those channels of com-
munication which allow all the ambivalences of his Northern Irish
provenance to sound through. As 'From the Republic of

Conscience' indicates, dual citizenship as an Irishman and an Ulster
Catholic has its poetic equivalents. To come back from is to carry
no baggage of duty-free allowance; but, as the comic circumlocu-
tion makes clear, it does carry the duty to be oneself, and to speak
conscientiously, and without relief, as an ambassador of this
freedom:
I came back from that frugal republic

with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself
and the old man at immigration
therefore desired me when I got home

to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
In the Republic of Conscience, 'You carried your own burden and

.. ./your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared'. But if this is a
place where the salt has not lost its savour, it is also a place where
everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt. For speaking in
your own tongue means avoiding the folly of 'the fork-tongued
natives' of 'Parable Island', who 'keep repeating/prophecies they
pretend not to believe', and who, in some perpetually deferred
future, are going to start mining for truth beneath the mountain
where, it is said, 'all the names converge', and the conflicting narra-
tives are reconciled.
In 'Station Island', the ghost of Carleton laments being made by
Ribbonmen and Orange bigots 'into the old fork-tongued turn-
coat/who mucked the byre of their politics'. In 'Whatever You Say
Say Nothing' (North) it is difficult not to be 'fork-tongued on the
border bit' in a world 'Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie
wicks' and "'You know them by their eyes", and hold your tongue'.
It is in the context of these locutions and locations that we must un-
derstand the title of The Government of the Tongue. It is a charac-
teristically tricksy phrase, and its tricks lie in that multiple-choice
preposition: government of the tongue, by the tongue, for the
tongue? The book itself offers the first two possibilities:
what I had in mind was this aspect of poetry as its own vindicating
force. In this dispensation, the tongue (representing both a poet's
23 0 STAN SMITH
personal gift of utterance and the common resources of language

itself) has been granted the rights to govern. The poetic art is credited
with an authority of its own. As readers, we submit to the jurisdic-
tion of achieved form, even though that form is achieved not by dint
of the moral and ethical exercise of mind but by the self-validating
operations of what we call inspiration. 12
However, such a jurisdiction may be that of a poetic Diplock

Court, and a poet who has inscribed in a poem's title the home-
spun political wisdom of the Irishism 'Whatever You Say Say
Nothing' (almost a performative injunction, self-exemplifying,
nullifying itself in a paradox in which nothing is said, twice),
knows that utterance is never quite so undemanding. I am not
myself sure whether Heaney picked up this phrase from an exist-
ing political slogan, or whether the Provisional IRA got it from
Heaney. In either case, the poetry accrues legitimacy to the politi-
cal slogan, putting the poem in the same compromised place as
those writings Yeats fretted over in 'The Man and the Echo',
opening up a whole new area in the relations between poetry and
politics. The poem refers to 'The famous/Northern reticence, the
tight gag of place'. If, in The Government of the Tongue, Heaney
claims that 'I have, on the whole, been inclined to give the tongue
its freedom', 13 the poem defines the constraints of a freedom
which 'Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit'. The border
may be the bit that is between the teeth, but the poem leaves us
with the biter bit, and biting his own tongue. The Government of
the Tongue likewise speaks with a forked tongue, immediately
qualifying its grandiose reiteration of Romantic cliches with a
word to the wise:
All the same, as I warm to this theme, a voice from another part of
me speaks in rebuke. 'Govern your tongue,' it says, compelling me to
remember that my title can also imply a denial of the tongue's auto-
nomy and permission. In this reading, 'the government of the tongue'
is full of monastic and ascetic strictness. One remembers Hopkins's
'Habit of Perfection', with its command to the eyes to be 'shelled',
the ears to attend to silence and the tongue to know its place. 14
Its place here is firmly in the cheek. It's noticeable that Heaney
nominates an equally Romantic, inspirational source for this coun-
tervailing instruction: 'a voice from another part of me ... com-
pelling me'. Yet it is an impersonal 'one' who remembers, not from
the poet's original place, but from a position where the voice
assumes, not the vatic authority of the bard, but that of a well-
placed member of the literary ascendancy, languidly calling up
fellow members of the club. Just which place is it that Heaney is
knowing about, here?
A moment in The Haw Lantern sneakily qualifies this authority,
reminding us from what part of himself that voice may in fact have
spoken, as well as what he may know better, in the fourth of his
sonnet elegies for his mother:
With more challenge than pride she'd tell me, 'You

Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better.
The maternal reproach arises from her own 'Fear of affectation',

her mispronunciation of words 'beyond her' expressing- possibly-
fear of betraying 'The hampered and inadequate by tool
Well-adjusted a vocabulary'. The already readjusted poet, conde-
scendingly relapsing into 'the wrong/Grammar which kept us allied
and at bay', only obliquely questions how this community's
demotic is somehow ruled 'wrong' in the discourse of polite society.
Although the poet is instructed to govern his tongue, it seems that it
is the mother's tongue - the mother tongue - which is put in its
place, and that place is in the wrong. However, the poem's tongue
is subtle and diverse here, as I will argue later.
There is another moment in The Haw Lantern where the poet
governs his tongue, self-consciously submitting, not to the voice of
inspiration, but to a formal tradition of occasional verse which has
'English' written all over it. 'A Peacock's Feather' is a poem written
for the christening of an 'English niece' (as the text designates her),
and it squirms with polite embarrassment at so bridling its tongue
as to utter something alien but in keeping with the pastoral 'mel-
lowness' of a Gloucestershire landscape. Even here the poem still
knows where it comes from:
I come from scraggy farm and moss,

Old patchworks that the pitch and toss
Of history have left dishevelled.
But here, for your sake, I have levelled
My cart-track voice to garden tones,
Cobble'd the bog with Cotswold stones.
232 STAN SMITH
But it's not so sure of where it's going. Compelled by occasion,

status, loyalty, to write a light celebratory poem, one thinks of
Yeats, that earlier voice which spoke with Ascendancy accents in a
good cause:
While I, a guest in your green court,

At a west window sat and wrote
Self-consciously in gathering dark.
I might as well be in Coole Park.
Slyly coiled in the 'in-law maze' of the tongue, in the poem's absolv-
ing 'touch of love', the voices wait to speak out through the mask:
'Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?' One thinks too, that is, of
Joyce, deflating Yeats's flattery of Lady Gregory: 'The most beauti-
ful book that has come out of our country in my time. One thinks
of Homer.' 15
The tone is very different from Yeats's, a 'billet-doux', a
nursery rhyme, quiet, casual, governed, wishing no harm, its
blushful whimsy calling up the de la Mare of Peacock Pie. But
there is an altogether more strident resonance to the bird, recall-
ing that peacock which screamed among a rich man's flowering
lawns in Yeats's 'Ancestral Houses', betokening the end of a civil-
isation, adding a deeper darkness to the gathering dark. 'The
future's not our own'. But neither is the past. This levelled land-
scape reqmres a prayer for its future precisely because of that
past:
May tilth and loam

Darkened with Celts' and Saxons' blood
Breastfeed your love of house and wood.
That 'blood/Breastfeed' is a dark enjambement, in which the

mother's milk runs with blood. 16 The slate of the opening may not,
after all, be wiped clean, for all our pious hopes. The poem sounds
out through the persona it assumes against the place to which it is
quite sincerely addressed - a place identified in an essay in
Preoccupations as 'In the Country of Convention: English Pastoral
Verse'. Pastoral is a conventionally innocent realm, certainly; but
England is a country governed by the false naiveties, the feigned in-
genuousness, of pastoral.
THINKING IN AND BACK INTO

Kavanagh's landscapes, Heaney says, are 'hallowed by associations
that come from growing up and thinking oneself in and back into
the place' Y Heaney's own most Kavanaghish poem is probably
'The Old Team' in The Haw Lantern, but even here the real places
'Have, in your absence, grown historical', part of a history which is
a repertoire of antagonistic stories. The title of Field Work had
pointed the way to these later developments, poised equivocally
between the local- the real fields and hedges of this sequence, from
which the particular poetic talent emerged - and the larger field of
meanings within which that life now finds itself, which, as indicated
in a poem such as 'A Postcard from North Antrim', is always else-
where. 'A Postcard from Iceland' in The Haw Lantern reads like an
ironic postscript to Auden's and MacNeice's Letters from Iceland.
Auden may have had his Ulster travelling companion in mind when
he wrote, in the opening poem to that volume, 'North means to all:
reject!'. Certainly Heaney seemed to be recalling this when, in the
title poem of his own North, he 'faced the unmagical/invitations of
Iceland', foremost of which is the invitation to encompass by going
beyond, rejecting his native culture as Auden did in casting from
Iceland a cold anthropologist's eye on Englishness. Heaney's island
parables (including 'Station Island' and 'Parable Island' itself), all
test and transcend the limits of Irish insularity, the better to return
to and interpret it - to rediscover, thinking in and back into the
place, 'How usual that waft and pressure felt/When the inner palm
of water found my palm.'
It is from outside the field that the pattern of forces can best be
understood, rather than simply suffered. That identity is best found
in displacement, in both the literal and the psychoanalytic sense, is
the point of the important lecture on Place and Displacement
Heaney delivered at Dove Cottage in 1984, seeing in the uprooted-
ness of the returning native Wordsworth, a displaced person,
persona non grata in his own country, a model for all subsequent
poetic displacements:
The good place where Wordsworth's nurture happened and to which

his habitual feelings are most naturally attuned has become ... the
wrong place. He is displaced from his own affections by a vision of
the good that is located elsewhere. His political, utopian aspirations
deracinate him from the beloved actuality of his surroundings so that
234 STAN SMITH
his instinctive being and his appetitive intelligence are knocked out of
alignment. He feels like a traitor among those he knows and loves. 18
Recent Northern Irish poetry, he says, reveals the same double dis-
placement. The way to cope with 'the strain of being in two places
at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of
truthfulness simultaneously' 19 is not despair, however, but Jung's
strategy of finding a 'displaced perspective' in which the suffering
individual can outgrow particularist allegiance while managing to
'keep faith with ... origins', 'stretched between politics and transcen-
dence ... displaced from a confidence in a single position by his dis-
position to be affected by all positions, negatively rather than
positively capable'. 20
The echo of Keats's 'negative capability' as an answer to
Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' indicates the way out Heaney
was to find from the Northern Irish deadlock from Field Work
onwards. It is in the 'lyric stance', in language as itself a site of dis-
placement, 'the whispering gallery of absence', 'the voice from
beyond', 21 that the writer can seek the hopeful imaginary resolu-
tion of real conflicts. Heaney's poetry has pursued language as po-
litical metaphor and metonymy through to its source, to a
recognition of language as both place of necessary exile and site of
a perpetual return home. Station Island is the product of such a
recognition, a volume full of departures and returns. Displacement
is here seen not as exile but as freedom, whether in the wide-blue-
yonder of America or the poetically licensed otherworlds of Dante's
Divine Comedy. The loving fidelity of the emigre who, like
Wordsworth, is necessarily now just 'visiting' that which he's left
behind provides the motive force for the volume, and a poem such
as the ironically entitled 'Away from it All' catches some of the
complexities of such a position. In The Haw Lantern Heaney goes a
step further, beyond the margins altogether, to deconstruct those
blarney-laden tales of nativity, decentring and redefining a self-
regarding Irishness. In the words of the title poem, it is not enough
to bask in 'a small light for small people'. The modest wish to
'keep/the wick of self-respect from dying out,/not having to blind
them with illumination' is too limited, too easy an ambition. Now
'it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes/with his lantern, seeking
one just man' to be the true measure of this field, scrutinising with a
gaze which makes 'you flinch .. ./its blood-prick that you wish would
test and clear you'. The terror of being tested, assessed, and the
anxious yearning for clearance, run through most of the poems in

the volume. The gaze that 'scans you, then moves on' here brings to
bear both a moral and a poetic measure. 'Parable Island' tells us
that there are no authenticating origins, only a plethora of story-
tellings which push the origin further back into an original empti-
ness, scrawled over with too much meaning. It is in this area of
dense secondary signification, where script dissembles an original
emptiness, that Ireland 'begins'.
DRAWING A LINE THROUGH

'Whatever You Say Say Nothing' speaks of the ends of art:
To lure the tribal shoals

To epigram and order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.
The word 'order' crosses its customary frontiers here, negotiating

familiar transactions between political and literary structures, as
that pun on 'line' as boundary demarcation, poetic line and, poss-
ibly, ideological narrative indicates. The further, suppressed
meaning of 'line' (taking up 'gaff and bait') adds a rather more
dubious resonance, for the fisher of men may lure the tribal shoals
into those Joycean nets which ensnare the soul, though purification,
in the echo of Mallarme mediated by Eliot, is clearly the poet's aim.
In 'The Sense of Place', Heaney writes en passant of Synge 'whom
Yeats sent west to express the life of Aran, in the language of the
tribe', thereby creating 'a new country of the mind' 22 and, although
he sees this here as positive, in 'A Tale of Two Islands: reflections
on the Irish Literary Revival' he speaks rather more warily of
Synge's enterprise, invoking in support not only Kavanagh but,
most potently, Stephen Dedalus's intense and satiric rejection, at
the end of Portrait, of the old man of the west whose mountain
cabin is 'hung with the nets of nationality, religion, family, the ar-
resting abstractions'. But, Heaney adds, though Stephen fears, he
will not destroy him:
The old man is as much a victim as the writer. His illiterate fidelities
are the object of Stephen's scepticism, the substance of what Stephen
rejects; and yet they are a part of Stephen himself. Stephen is angry
23 6 STAN SMITH
that all his culture can offer him for veneration is this peasant oracle,
yet understanding the ruination that he and the old man share, he is
not prepared to struggle to the death. 23
There is a poetic course to be charted here between the demands of

'native' orality and 'universal' writing. But if the siren voices of an
illiterate oracle are not to run the project aground on populist mud-
banks it must take on board those instructions to 'purify the dialect
of the tribe' from 'Little Gidding' which resonate in Heaney's own
ghostly Dantean sequence, 'Station Island'. And indeed, Eliot,
Dante and Jung rub shoulders in the last displacing moments of the
essay. However, the fullest account of Dante as role-model in this
later poetry is given in Heaney's 1985 article, 'Envies and
Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet':
The way in which Dante could place himself in an historical world

yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history,
the way he could accommodate the political and the transcendent,
this too encouraged my attempt at a sequence of poems which would
explore the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in
this country. 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. 24
Heaney's use of the phrase 'the language of the tribe' in 'The

Sense of Place' is suggestive, for it reproduces the mis-citation of
Eliot Donald Davie deploys throughout Purity of Diction in English
Verse 25 a book not unrelated in theme and argument to Heaney's
recurrent concerns. (Davie speaks of "'Mr Eliot's phrase, to purify
the language of the tribe"' 26 and uses this formula for the title of his
crucial chapter.) Davie's book, written while he was a lecturer in
Dublin, also deploys Synge as an example of a suspect linguistic
populism which exploits the 'bathetic' and 'brutal'; while in an im-
portant chapter he sets up Dante as an antithetical model of how
poetry should relate to 'the vulgar tongue'. Davie's introduction
raises questions of diction as political and moral touchstones in
terms which are strikingly consonant with Heaney's:
[T]he poet who uses a diction must be very sure of the audience
which he addresses. He dare not be merely spokesman of their senti-
ments and habits, for he must purify the one and correct the other.
Yet he dare not be quite at odds with his age, but must share with his
readers certain assumptions ... At this point, discussion of diction
becomes discussion of the poet's place in the national community,

or, under modern conditions (where true community exists only in
pockets), his place in the state. This aspect of the matter will become
clearer when we ask how the poet, in his choice of language, should
be governed, if at all, by principles of taste. And this is inseparable
from the question of what Goldsmith and others understood by
chastity and propriety in language. 27
Dante's treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia is a key item in Davie's ar-

gument,28 and the terms in which Dante negotiates the relation
between the vernacular ('The Vulgar Tongue') and 'Grammar'
(Latin) are cast in a language suggestively similar to that Heaney
deploys in The Haw Lantern. This is specifically a question of the
relations between 'the language of the tribe' and its many dialects,
and the distinction, in many ways corresponding to the Saussurean
one between langue and parole, explains why both Davie and
Heaney misquote Eliot's formula.
Davie observes: 'Dante remarks that no one of the dialects can be
considered the most illustrious, since the best poets have always de-
parted from their own dialect for the purposes of their poetry.'
What Dante calls the 'Illustrious Vulgar Tongue' is 'the perfection
of a common language', 'intelligible to all ... but peculiar to none'.
And, in words which recall the figure of the lantern-bearing
Diogenes in the title poem of The Haw Lantern, 'our Illustrious
Language wanders about like a wayfarer and is welcomed in
humble shelters' and 'shines forth illuminating and illuminated'. It
recognises no local princely court or court of justice, because it is
itself 'courtly' and 'curial', carrying within itself 'the justly balanced
rule of things which have to be done', itself the final court of lin-
guistic appeal, 'though, as a body, it is scattered'. 29 This is, in fact,
language as that 'frugal republic' with 'embassies ... everywhere' of
which the poet is required to be 'a representative/and to speak on
their behalf in my own tongue', in 'From the Republic of
Conscience'.
Dante's discourse on the 'Illustrious Language', and Davie's com-
mentary on it, call up many of the preoccupations of Station Island
and The Haw Lantern. In particular, they go some way to explain-
ing that complex, multiply punning play on 'clear' and 'clearance'
in the latter volume, linking the 'blood-prick' of the haw lantern
'that you wish would test and clear you', 'the squawk of clearance'
of 'From the Frontier' to the running motif of the elegiac sequence
23 8 STAN SMITH
'Clearances', where his mother's death effects a clarification of

meanings and clears a space which is momentarily common:
And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
The inconspicuous metaphor 'felled' then leads on to the final clear-

ance of the sequence, and the poet's sense of his own mortality in
the image of the chestnut tree, coeval with him, now long gone
from the hedge where it was planted, no more than 'a space/Utterly
empty, utterly a source', having 'lost its place', 'become a bright
nowhere,/A soul ramifying and forever/Silent, beyond silence lis-
tened for'. The motif here is not finally personal life and death, but
the sources and ends of poetry, calling up both that line quoted in
The Government of the Tongue as evidence of Larkin's unlikely
affinity with Dante, 'Such attics cleared of me, such absences', 30 and
Auden's elegy for Yeats, who 'became his admirers', 'scattered
among a hundred cities/And wholly given over to unfamiliar
affections'.
Heaney's prose gloss of this anecdote in 'The Placeless Heaven:
Another Look at Kavanagh' makes it clear that it is a parable about
the relation between the poet's actual and his verbal universe. As a
child, he says, he identified with the tree; now he identifies with the
'luminous emptiness' its absence creates:
Except that this time it was not so much a matter of attaching oneself
to a living symbol of being rooted in the native ground; it was more a
matter of preparing to be unrooted, to be spirited away into some
transparent, yet indigenous afterlife. The new place was all idea, if
you like; it was generated out of my experience of the old place but it
was not a topographical location. It was and remains an imagined
realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven
rather than a heavenly place. 31
Dante offers an authority for effecting such a clearance of the lin-

guistic ground, asking, of the 'Illustrious Vulgar Tongue' in a
metaphor Heaney seems to pick up, 'Does it not daily root out the
thorny bushes from the Italian wood? Does it not daily insert cut-
tings or plant young trees? What else have its foresters to do but to
bring in and take away as has been said?' with the result that writing
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN 23 9
is 'brought to such a degree of excellence, clearness, completeness,

and polish'. Heaney, however, in a poem such as 'The Mud Vision',
knows how easy it is to forfeit such clarification (a poem 'ends in a
clarification of life', says The Government of the Tongue, echoing
Frost), to let the truly vulgar overwhelm the possible 'new place',
'transparent, yet indigenous', of the illustrious language:
Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,

Our one chance to know the incomparable
And dive to a future. What might have been origin
We dissipated in news. The clarified place
Had retrieved neither us nor itself.
For this project of clarifying and clearance Davie's polemic offers

ample precedents. His exposition of Owen Barfield's analogy
between 'metaphor: language: meaning:: legal fiction: law: civil life'
runs parallel with Heaney's own recurrent analogy between poetic
form and political jurisdiction:
For just as law is consistent, inflexible and determinate, yet must, to

keep pace with social changes, have recourse to fictions; so language
is fixed and determinate, to satisfy needs of logic, yet must, to keep
pace with changes in thought and life, evolve new meanings by way
of metaphor. 32
But of singular application to this volume is Davie's account of how

diction can be purified when 'the dead metaphors of poetry are
brought to life by the tang of common usage; and vice versa'. This
revivification of dead metaphors has itself a social and political im-
plication: 'For if the poet who coins new metaphors enlarges the
language the poet who enlivens dead metaphors can be said to
purify the language.' Heaney exposes the artifice of language
throughout The Haw Lantern by showing both these processes at
work. He foregrounds language, not by thickening it into the opa-
cities of his earlier work, reinforcing that 'sensation of opaque
fidelity' which is the history of 'a dispersed people' in 'From the
Land of the Unspoken', but by insisting instead on a classical aus-
terity and bareness of diction. The more transparent it is, 'a bare
wire' after all that 'textured stuff' 33 the more, paradoxically, it
manifests its status as language, a medium.
Heaney in fact does a remarkable thing in this volume. He inverts
the traditional critical argument that language is inflected either
240 STAN SMITH
towards its signifieds or to its signifiers, either self-effacingly pre-

sents its meanings or self-importantly calls attention to itself as a
medium. In the empiricist ideology, language should ideally efface
itself, act as a clear window through which its meanings are imme-
diately and unmediatedly visible. In the radical, Modernist assault
on this, language is distrusted as a suborner of meanings, and has to
be fractured, dislocated, foregrounded in order to expose its ideo-
logical predisposings. Baring the device alerts us to the fact that lan-
guage is not innocent but complicit, distorting or transforming that
which it communicates. Heaney in these later poems demonstrates
the opposite. The clearer, the more transparent the language, the
more we become aware of its artifice. For in this apparent bareness
it becomes clear that no language is free of metaphor, every word
may double its meaning, and all discourse can turn back on itself in
coy or brazen self-consciousness. If the clogged, sedimented streams
of his earlier poetry here run clear, free of mud visions, they are
still (in the words of 'The Summer of Lost Rachel') 'thick-webbed
currents', and, in an image from 'Grotus and Coven tina' which
recalls analogies in Mandelstam and Pasternak, this clear flowing
can bring
Jubilation at the tap's full force, the sheer

Given fact of water, how you felt you'd never
Waste one drop but know its worth better always.
Moving towards an eighteenth-century clarity of utterance, Heaney

in such parables as 'From the Land of the Unspoken' and 'From the
Canton of Expectation' is able to write of his condition in cool,
generalising narratives which imply a view of relation and order in
the universe, and in Davie's words, 'turn their back upon sense-
experience and appeal beyond it, logically, to known truths
deduced from it'. 34 Personified concepts like 'Conscience', Davie
says, 'specify only to the extent that they place a thing in its appro-
priate class, or assign it its appropriate function', 35 in a system of
classification like that of Linnaeus. This verse, as Heaney says of
Elizabeth Bishop, 'establishes reliable, unassertive relations with the
world by steady attention to detail, by equable classification and
level-toned enumeration' .36 Of personification Davie observes, 'an
abstraction is personified to some extent as soon as it can govern an
active verb'. Heaney turns this to good effect when in 'Alphabets',
he depicts language taking precedence over the subjects who utter
and are uttered by it: 'Declensions sang on air like a hosanna',

rising up like columns of cherubim and seraphim in the young boy.
'The Song of the Bullets' is even more explicitly classical in its
personifications ('As justice stands aghast and stares') though it
marries these with a Hardyesque bitter whimsy. Such techniques
combine with periphrasis and circumlocution to make us see things
in a new way, draw new lines through experience, in parables about
the dangers of confusing story-telling with reality such as 'Parable
Island' and 'From the Canton of Expectation', or fables about
fable-making like 'A Daylight Art'.
STANDING IN AND STANDING FOR

The Haw Lantern shows a remarkable retreat from the linguistic
density of metaphor which characterised Heaney's earlier volumes.
Metaphor overrides all the differences between tenor and vehicle,
concentrating them into some fused and compacted unity of
meaning. Instead, these poems demonstrate language's incessantly
metaphoric power by foregrounding it in the cooler, more explicit
procedures of simile, where likeness is established between two
items which nevertheless remain discrete, unfused. These poems
abound in the quasi-prepositional connective 'like', from the very
first analogical moment in 'Alphabets', where the child is initiated
into the human world of comparisons, shadows and reflections that
become substances, similes that overwhelm their referents, as the
father's hands make on the wall a shadow 'like a rabbit's head'.
Throughout the poem, the child grows up by learning to recognise
and make analogies for himself, acquiring that simile-making
process which maps a world of general categories, constructing
more and more elaborate systems out of comparisons between the
discrete phenomena of the world, learning to seek out 'the figure of
the universe/And "not just single things'". 'The Spoonbait' reveals
the secret of this analogical habit at the heart of language. Inflected
into archaism by its preposition, the process takes on an odd and
artificial character. We cannot slide unselfconsciously from tenor to
vehicle as if this were the most natural thing in the world:
So a new similitude is given us

And we say: The soul may be compared
Unto a spoon bait that a child discovers ...
242 STAN SMITH
As the analogy is developed, metaphor crowds out the original

similitude until the narrative generates its own new simile ('Like the
single drop that Dives implored'). But the poem then disrupts this
naturalising of simile into metaphor by offering two equally unex-
pected alternative endings, foregrounding the fact that we are
dealing here with analogies, not literal acts. One is a fanciful
metaphor achieved simply by omitting the 'like'; the other stresses
its 'alternative' status, and insists once again on the gratuitousness
of the simile, 'spooling out of nowhere' and 'snagging on nothing'.
By calling our attention to the process of analogy-making, these
poems emphasise that meaning is a linguistic act, subject to choice
and capriciousness, and not a natural event. 'Parable Island' is the
clearest exploration of such a process. Stressing in the idea of
parable the gratuitous and deliberate drawing of analogies between
one narrative and another, it offers a metanarrative in the parable-
making act itself. Even Heaney's own recurrent argument from ety-
mology is here satirised, in deriving 'Island' from 'eye' and 'land', in
this parable of visions and revisions. The dilemma of 'Parable
Island' is that the competing narratives that dominate this terrain,
so close and so far from 'Ire-land', do not know they are
metaphoric, and so condemn themselves to beating their heads
against stone. As so often, Heaney's precedent here is Joyce. Not,
this time, the much-quoted encounter between Dedalus and the old
English Dean but that earlier episode in which the infant Stephen
na"ively tries to resolve the political and religious squabbles of the
Christmas dinner by dissolving them into problems of metaphor
and metonymy: 'Tower of Ivory', 'House of Gold'. Purifying the
dialect of the tribe is then not just an act of linguistic reclamation. It
also clarifies moral and political confusions generated by the opaci-
ties of language itself, melting down and reforging in the smithy of
the soul those clanking narratives 'From the Canton of Expectation'
calls 'songs they had learned by rote in the old language'.
The poems in The Haw Lantern illustrate the ways in which the
dead political and religious metaphors of everyday language can
come alive in unexpected clarifications of meaning. There is 'The
Wishing Tree', for example, 'lifted, root and branch, to heaven'. In
the sequence 'Clearances', 'Cold comforts set between us' sees the
ordinary past participle of place turn into a verb which sets (seals
and solidifies) a covenant of comfort between mother and son. The
dead metaphor of 'bring us to our senses' in the same poem is
renewed by being taken literally, just as the priest going 'hammer
and tongs at the prayers for the dying' comes alive in the echo back
to the coal hammer of the opening, the household implements of
the previous poem and the soldering iron, bucket and 'fluent
dipping knives' of this. In another poem in the sequence the simple
chore of folding sheets 'hand to hand' and 'touch and go' opens up
these dead metaphors by figuring them forth in real space as
enacted moments in a complicated relation:
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

For a split second ...
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back.
An implied pun in 'Parable Island' says it all, speaking of archaeolo-

gists who variously interpret stone circles as 'pure symbol' or 'as-
sembly spots or hut foundations':
One school thinks a post-hole in an ancient floor

stands first of all for a pupil in an iris.
The other thinks a post-hole is a post-hole.
The exasperation of that last bald statement restores the dead

metaphor of 'stands for' back to an original literalness, in which a
post-hole stands for the post which stood in it. A change of preposi-
tion converts literal into metaphoric and back again. By insisting on
such clarifications of experience in language the poet can, in the
words of 'The Sense of Place', define 'where he stands and he can
also watch himself taking his stand.'
It is perhaps in the Latinate pun that Heaney most clearly fulfils
Davie's prescription for purity of diction. 'The clarified place' of
'The Mud Vision' refers to both a physical and an intellectual
process. The soul 'ramifying' in 'Clearances' extends the analogy
with the chestnut tree. 'Clearances' is particularly rich in the device.
Religious and everyday meanings of 'incensation' are brought out
by juxtaposition with 'the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride'. A
scarcely noticed series of these in the fourth sonnet plays on a range
of etymologies to suggest the complex negotiations of mother and
son. The mutual jostlings of 'affectation' and 'affect' (to put to,
aspire to something beyond, put on), 'adequate' (made level with,
equal to) and 'adjusted' {put next to) open up the central ambiguity
of the clause 'whenever it came to/Pronouncing words "beyond
her"'. The relation of the here and now ('came to') to a 'beyond' is
244 STAN SMITH
in fact the subtext of the whole sequence, even at the level of its
prepositions. 'Adjusted' (actually from adjuxtare) according to the
OED was early confused with the idea of an equalising 'justice' (ad
justus) which put things in their proper place, thus establishing a
kind of punning relation with 'adequate'; and the poet enacts this
adequation by juxtaposing them in his own 'genuinely well-/
adjusted adequate betrayal'. 'Pronouncing words "beyond her'"
thus overlays the simple speech act with the pronouncement of an
edict of expulsion by and from the tongue's seat of government.
This in turn opens up the politic adjustments of 'manage': in 'affect-
ing' incompetence (all she could manage) she adroitly manoeuvres
the son to fall fittingly back into his place ('decently relapse').
The Latinate pun is most brilliantly affected, however, in the con-
clusion of the poem:
I'd naw and aye

And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.
'Allied' (from alligare) can mean bound together either by kinship

or treaty, and so keeps open the nature of the truce negotiated
between them. 'At bay', however, is a dead metaphor which
ramifies into remarkable life when its etymology is considered.
According to the OED (p. 712):
Two different words seem to be here inextricably confused.

Originally the phrase to hold at bay seems ad. OF tenir a bay
(Godefroy) It. tenere a bada, where bay, bada, means the state of
suspense, expectation, or unfulfilled desire, indicated by the open
mouth (late L. badare to open the mouth); but to stand at bay, be
brought to bay, correspond to mod. Fr. etre aux abois, meaning to
be at close quarters with the barking dogs, and bay is here apheti-
cally formed from ABA Y, a. OF abai barking.
'Allied and at bay' is itself a state of suspension between decency

and lapse, wrong grammar and right place. The poem's open-
mouthed closure, a fork-tongued moment of unfulfilled desire in the
government of the tongue, speaks from the central reticences of
Heaney's verse. What 'Grammar' (Greek gramma, a written mark)
and 'at bay' (open-mouthed) set up at either end of this line is the
same antithesis uttered in the Latinate pun of the prefatory poem of
the sequence, which speaks of a 'co-opted and obliterated echo'
struck off the real world, which may 'teach me now to listen/To
strike it rich behind the linear black' of a written text. 'Obliterated',

literally, means erased from writing: in a Derridean sense, the
voice's echo or trace erased and yet co-opted in the lines of writing.
It is by making such clearings in the undergrowth of language that
the bewildered self can find a place to stand, a place to make a
stand.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN

The relation between mother and son, 'allied and at bay', is also a
relation between two moments of language - between writing and
speech, and between langue, 'Grammar', and parole, voice. It is a
relation of kinship and treaty, not hostility. It reproduces, there-
fore, a more condign version of that stand-off Stephen Dedalus
effects in relation to the 'illiterate fidelities' of a 'peasant oracle'.
An alternative relation in Portrait is figured in a passage to which
Heaney has adverted more than once, Stephen's encounter with the
old English Dean. 'Stephen, in that famous passage', Heaney says in
the lecture 'Among Schoolchildren', 'feels inadequate when he hears
the English Jesuit speaking English.' The differences between them,
differences according to Heaney of 'cultural and geographic
placing', are the oral register, 'on his lips and mine', of a differance
within a shared 'language, so familiar and so foreign' ('allied and at
bay'). Heaney first drew on this passage for the epigraph to 'The
Wool Trade' (Wintering Out), where the words are finally left to
'hang/Fading, in the gallery of the tongue'. In the lecture, however,
he moves on, calling our attention to Stephen's less frequently re-
marked comeback, in which, brooding on his linguistic displace-
ment, he looks up the world 'tundish' in the dictionary only to 'find
it English and good old blunt English too'. Heaney's comment is
significant:
What had seemed disabling and provincial is suddenly found to be

corroborating and fundamental and potentially universal. To belong
to Ireland, to speak its dialect, is not necessarily to be cut off from
the world's banquet because that banquet is eaten at the table of
one's own life, savoured by the tongue one speaks. Stephen now
trusts what he calls 'our own language' and in that trust he will go to
encounter what he calls 'the reality of experience'. But it will be his
own specific Dublin experience, with all its religious and historical
freight, so different from the English experience to which he had
heretofore stood in a subservient relationship. 37
246 STAN SMITH
In his encounter with the ghost of Joyce at the end of 'Station

Island', the poet returns to this episode, referring to it jokily as 'The
Feast of the Holy Tundish', canonising it among his stars as
Stephen had turned it into a governing myth in his diary.
I take these three writing events to be crucial for Heaney.
Stephen recuperates the event by writing it up, and he turns to the
higher authority of the dictionary to find the true lineage of the
word restored in the authentic history on the printed page, rather
than in the unreliable local narratives of the oral order. He thus
delivers the rationale for Heaney's own compulsive resort to ety-
mology, not as a search for lost origins, but so as to restore lan-
guage to a living, changing history, to underwrite (I use the
metaphor deliberately) the written synchronic langue and the di-
achronic spoken parole with the print that establishes authentic
historic relation between them. Joyce refuses to be displaced by
linguistic nationalism, English or Irish, because, as Heaney notes
in a Latinate pun, he 'is against all such alibis'. In refusing to
claim he was somewhere else, 'he is also intent on deconstructing
the prescriptive myth of Irishness which was burgeoning in his
youth and which survives in various sympathetic and unsympa-
thetic forms to this day.'
Rewriting this episode in 'Station Island', Heaney attempts a
similar deconstruction, putting words into the mouth itself into
a highly material simile of writing:
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.
Joyce's peroration likewise homes in on writing as a physical act,

something effected by that hand which grasps the ash plant, which
grips that of the younger writer, and which Joyce once joked no-
one would ever want to kiss who knew what other things it had
done besides writing Ulysses:
... The main thing 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.
A final ironic transformation turns the broadcast voice into a

metaphor of that writing which most intimately defines the unique,
autonomous self:
swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency.
Heaney here gives a subtle, original twist to the cliche of the poet
finding his own voice. It is no accident, then, that the poem which
follows this and opens the next sequence, 'The First Gloss', should
instruct the poet to hold his pen like a spade ('Take hold of the
shaft of the pen'), in an intensely physical act of writing which
recalls the resolution in the first poem of his first collection:

The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
'Subscription', in 'The First Gloss', means paying one's dues, ac-

cepting a lineage and an authority, even as the first step is
'taken/from a justified line/into the margin'. 'Alphabets', the
opening poem of The Haw Lantern, spells out this subscription in
the most literal of terms, exploring the child's conscription to his
culture through the succession of writings he acquires. Writing here
is a manual labour, acquired with difficulty: 'there is a right/Way to
hold the pen and a wrong way'. We are reminded that words them-
selves, no matter how seamlessly interwoven in utterance, are really
made up of more primary units, represented by written signs
(gramma) which arbitrarily and artificially stand in for consonants
and vowels. The poem plays games with its own origin, starting
with the alphabetic Greek of the Harvard 'Phi Beta Kappa' poem,
to reconstruct a whole series of other signs the child has lived
through, from his father's shadow-drawing, through modes of
writing pictographically only a step away from this - the letter Y
seen as a forked stick, 2 as a swan's neck and back, A as 'Two
rafters and a cross-tie on the slate', 0 a schoolroom globe, the
teacher's tick 'a little leaning hoe' - through the joined-up writing
of 'new calligraphy that felt like home', the Ogham whose letters
were trees, 'The lines of script like briars', the bare Merovingian
style, the Latin capitals of the sky-writing IN HOC SIGNO which
converted Constantine, until it returns abstract signs to material
248 STAN SMITH
reality in the balers dropping bales 'like printouts where stooked

sheaves/Made lambdas', the potato pit with a 'delta face', and
omega as the shape of a horseshoe over the door.
Such analogies between arbitrary signs and the referents they
invoke are not just accidental but, as this aetiology of writing sug-
gests, grow out of an incorrigible tendency to see correspondences
in the world itself, to draw similitudes, deploying that little word
'like' which runs through the poem to construct 'the figure of the
universe/And "not just single things"'. The astronaut is the first
human whose 0 is not a figure of the world but the great globe
itself, seen unprecedentedly not as an emblem but as
all he has sprung from,

The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent 0
Like a magnified and buoyant ovum.
Going back to the origins, this poem proposes, means rediscovering

in one's own prehistory (before writing) the origin of the species as
a sign-making, tool-making animal; means recovering a state where
writing is seen to be as material as that 'buoyant ovum', and as
manual a labour as plastering a wall:
Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.
This estrangement is simultaneously a homecoming - not a return

to origins but to a new 'sensing of place' in a landscape 'instinct
with signs'. In his interview with Rand Brandes published in
Salmagundi Heaney explained the origin of the poem as a
commiSSIOn:
I had a real problem: Write a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa at
Harvard that had to be spoken aloud, and be concerned with learn-
ing. And that poem is precisely about the distance that intervenes
between the person standing up in Sanders' Theatre, being the
donnish orator, and the child, pre-reflective and in its pre-writing
odd state. 38
That 'pre-writing odd state' is not in any sense innocent, prior to

discourse, the poem makes clear, since the child is already captured
in the nets of language, and the whole poem explores the succession
of discourses, as of alphabets, through which he learns to construct,

not just a writing, but a self. And it is in some Popean 'middle state'
that both poem and speaker find themselves, in that intercalated
'distance ... between' of which Heaney speaks in the interview:
there is a bemused, abstracted distance intervening between the

sweetening energy of the original place and the consciousness that's
getting back to it, looking for sweetness.
Contemplating a prehistoric 'dried-up source' in the last poem of

Station Island, Heaney speaks of keeping a stone-faced vigil 'For
my book of changes',
until the long dumbfounded

spirit broke cover
to raise a dust
in the font of exhaustion.
Neil Corcoran39 sees this as a holy water font, and so it is. But it is
also the font of print itself, which is where all new texts find their
origins. Here, in the punning metaphoric overlaying of particular
life and printed page, Heaney figures forth that relation between
place and displacement which is the very ground of his writing.
From The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of

Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend, 1992), pp. 35-61.
NOTES
[Stan Smith is particularly concerned to justify the Heaney of The Haw
Lantern (a book in which some reviewers found a diminution of imagina-
tive power). He examines Heaney's later poetic language, its combination
of bareness of diction with syntactic vigour, and particularly its preposi-
tional manoevres. His approach combines an interest in the grammar and
syntax of poetry prompted by the English critic Donald Davie with a post-
structuralist awareness of the shifts and contradictions of textual
structures.
Smith's essay shows not only the influence of key theoretical works like
Derrida's On Grammatology (see my Introduction, p. 15 above) but a
more pervasive resort to the general assumptions which have followed in
the wake of Saussure. The 'binary' way 'place' and 'displacement' define
each other (p. 224) offers Smith a way of acknowledging Saussure's major
premiss that meaning is determined by the difference of one arbitrary
250 STAN SMITH
signifier from another. Smith accepts Saussure's assumption that language

can be seen either synchronically (as a simultaneous system) or diachroni-
cally (in its historical development) (p. 246); he also uses Derrida's coinage
dif{erance (p. 245) which involves not only the 'difference' through which
language functions but also the constant 'deferral' of conclusive meaning
within the play of signification (Writing and Difference [London, 1978]).
Smith's approach shows a recognition (in Peter Widdowson's words)
that 'theory' may be tactical and strategic rather than seemingly philosoph-
ically absolute ... and that it is to be put to use' (A Reader's Guide to
Contemporary Literary Theory [Hemel Hempstead, 1993], p. 7). As with
Christopher Ricks (See my introduction, p. 7 above), Smith shows a sense
of 'play' governed by a creative relationship between poet and critic. He re-
sponds for instance, to Heaney's praise (on p. 120 of the Government of
the Tongue) of his own specialist work on Auden by providing some
specific illustrations for Heaney's general account of that poet (p. 226
above). Other literary references are to Kavanagh's 'Iniskeen Road, July
Evening' (p. 225) and to his 'The Parish and the Universe' (Collected Pruse
[London, 1973], p. 283); to Mallarme's 'Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe' (p. 235)
and to Larkin's 'Absences' (p. 238). 'Diplock Courts' (p. 230): the juryless
courts instituted in Northern Ireland in 1973 to deal with terrorist offences.
Ed.]
1. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London, 1988),

p.132.
2. Ibid., p. 137.
3. Ibid., p. 168.
4. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (London, 1980), p. 138.
5. 'Sounding Auden', The Government of the Tongue, p. 118.
6. Ibid., p. 123.
7. Ibid., p. 110.
8. Ibid.
9. Preoccupations, pp. 131-49.
10. The Government of the Tongue, p. 149.
11. Ibid., p. 93.
12. Ibid., p. 92.
13. Ibid., p. 166.
14. Ibid., p. 96.
15. James Joyce, Ulysses (1937 text), pp. 204-5.
16. W.B. Yeats, 'Ancestral Houses', in The Tower, 1928.
17. Preoccupations, p. 145.

18. Seamus Heaney, Place and Displacement (Grasmere, 1984), p. 3.
19. Ibid., p. 4.
20. Ibid., p. 8.
21. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London, 1979), pp. 7, 9, 10.
22. Preoccupations, p. 135.
23. Seamus Heaney, 'A Tale of Two Islands', Irish Studies 1, ed. P.J.
Drudy (Cambridge, 1980), 1-20.
24. Seamus Heaney, 'Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern
Poet', Irish University Review (Spring 1985), 15-19.
25. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London, 1952).
26. Ibid., p. 31.
27. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
28. Ibid., pp. 82-90.
29. Ibid., pp. 86-9.
31. Ibid., pp. 3-4.
32. Ibid., pp. 29ff.
33. Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London, 1986), p. 153.
34. Purity of Diction in English Verse, p. 48.
35. Ibid., p. 52.
37. Seamus Heaney, 'Among Schoolchildren' (Belfast, 1983). pp. 10-11.
38. Salmagundi, no. 80 (1988), 20.
39. Seamus Heaney, p. 179.
15
Paradigms of Possibility:
Seamus Heaney
RICHARD KIRKLAND
The tightness and the nilness round that space

when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration -
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by 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 off-on mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk .... 1
Seamus Heaney's journey through two frontier check points

presents a readily identifiable parable of the literary self-
conscious; a parable which poetry from Northern Ireland has had
recourse to many times. In 'From the Frontier of Writing', the
journey from doubt, through confrontation, to a visionary state
of artistic confidence is one which offers a paradigm of poetic de-
252
PARADIGMS OF POSSIBILITY 253
velopment which Heaney has located in the work of Patrick

Kavanagh 2 and which also, microcosmically, images Heaney's
own poetic career from North, through Station Island, and into
the future tense with Seeing Things. 3 The final state of achieve-
ment is one dependent on the 'squawk of clearance' granted by
literary criticism, an examination which leaves him 'a little
emptier' ('as always') but to which he is equal. While such a
reading may seem to portray Heaney's poetic manoeuvres as
slightly pat, I would rather emphasise the liberation through cyni-
cism that 'From the Frontier of Writing' proffers; an interpreta-
tion which allows the poem a prefigurative quality beyond the
ineffable world of the transcendent or prophetic. Central to this
is the intersection of the British military presence in Heaney's
known landscape and the preponderance of literary critical term-
inology ('Frontier of Writing', 'nilness round that space', 'pure
interrogation') which describes their operations within the para-
meters of the poetic artefact. I have previously demonstrated how
British empirical paradigms of criticism were imported into
Ireland and how these paradigms not only have had a prolonged
existence in Ireland beyond British criticism but, in some in-
stances, have been used to protect partition itself. 'From the
Frontier of Writing' carries a similar awareness and, as such, is
analogous to the dissection of British literary critical colonialism
Heaney undertakes in his Field Day pamphlet 'An Open Letter'. 4
It is not that the forces of coercion and cultural interpretation are
seen as equally oppressive or equally undesirable but rather that
both require Heaney to submit to their strictures in order to gain
poetic subjecthood. Significantly, the result of this process is to
render the subject as typical in all aspects. To acknowledge the
poem's ultimate status of being 'arraigned yet freed' is to allow
the poet the status of the visionary or the prophet but only once
that status has been valorised by the process of examination
which renders the individual as exemplary. David Lloyd, in an
astute essay on Heaney, has codified this trope as one in which
'the identity of the individual, his integrity, is expressed by the
degree to which that individual identifies himself with and inte-
grates his difference in a national consciousness'. 5 This goes some
way towards depicting the central dilemma to which Heaney's
poetry has continually addressed itself. While the binary opposi-
tional nature of Northern Irish society makes such an integration
unavoidable - as do, in a sense, the binary comparative methods
254 RICHARD KIRKLAND
of literary criticism (gestured by the 'on-off mike' of the sergeant)

-Heaney's fundamentally bourgeois poetic has chosen to repre-
sent that integration as a constant crisis of interest between the
urge to a full individuation and the desire for assimilation. As ex-
isting within the genre of the journey poem then, 'From the
Frontier of Writing' is swept along 'the black current of a tarmac
road' to a destination which is always in view and which is not to
be evaded. It culminates with Heaney's knowledge of his assured
canonical status, a status posthumously conferred on both
Kavanagh and Yeats before him, and, in another sense, can be
said to mark the transition from writing to poetry.
It is interesting to test this progression against the critical recep-
tion accorded to Heaney since the publication of his latest collect-
ion of poetry, Seeing Things, a title which, if ironically, suggests
the kind of visionary state which looks beyond the critical judge-
ment in itself and on towards posterity. For John Carey writing in
the Sunday Times, 6 the experience was transcendent: 'Reading
these and several other poems, you feel what the first readers of,
say, Keats's odes or Milton's 1654 (sic) collection must have felt-
the peculiar excitement of watching a new masterwork emerge and
take its permanent place in our literature.' As an English critic (and
one perhaps sensitive to Heaney's previous statements of dissent
from British traditions), Carey can only adumbrate his praise in
terms of the sensation of reading not criticism. This allows a form
of appropriation to take place but only within the liberal frame-
work of 'our literature'; an absolute inversion of Roland Barthes'
famous statement that, 'to go from reading to criticism is to change
desires; it is no longer to desire the work itself but to desire one's
own language'. 7 Secure in his language, Carey desires Seeing
Things as a readerly pleasure; it is presented as literally beyond
criticism. Certainly, as Declan Kiberd pointed out in his own
review of the collection, 'Greater love no English critic hath than
to write such lines of an Irish poet' 8 yet this only begins to tell part
of the astonishing story of Heaney's rise. As now undoubtedly the
most famous Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney is the physical embodi-
ment of George Moore's belief that art 'must be parochial in the
beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end'. 9 To witness the un-
folding of each stage of his deep design is to become aware of the
slightly anomalous position he now holds in relation to other con-
temporary Irish poets. While the rapid rise to pre-eminence of Irish
poetry in general and Northern Irish poetry in particular over the
last twenty-five years has been echoed by a concomitant interest in

Irish literary and cultural criticism (of which Field Day is the clear-
est example), Heaney's work now places him fundamentally
beyond the parameters of such interpretation. 10 Instead, his work
often occupies a landscape of absolutes, a location in which lan-
guage becomes only an unwarranted intrusion in the on-going
drive to present unity and reconciliation within the transcendent
expenence:
I am trying to name and describe magic, the magic of a poetry deft,

accurate and pure, but I might as well try to spear satellites with a
pitchfork. There is a Sufi term, baraka, which connotes, among other
things, blessedness, as in the unmediated blessedness of being. This is
a book steeped in baraka, a pure poetry of what almost escapes us in
this extraordinary world.U
Having invoked an absolute as a definitive term, Dorgan is left with

no other option but to invoke another. The book itself becomes an
icon, a receptacle for all that is left perfect in a fallen world, and a
text which forms its own community - beyond social fracture - of
pure believers. With this awareness Seeing Things becomes the
Koran of modern poetry, while Heaney, appropriately, figures as
the prophet raised up from the people. Sharing their difficulties yet
simultaneously removed from them he is rendered exotic, displaced,
within the quotidian actualities of everyday life:
The problem with a conversation with Seamus Heaney is its range is

so wide, its levels so various and its diversions so many that, uninten-
tionally- he is the most courteous of men- questions become redun-
dant. They assume an emaciated, tentative tone, as one becomes
aware of the resonances of his talk, the mastery of his language and
the searching restlessness of his mind.
Not that he is ungenerous with his time, his ideas, and, above all,
discussion of his craft. Sustained by coffee, digestive biscuits and the
offer of malt whisky, I was gripped by the diversity of his phrases,
the intricacy of his word relationships and the luminosity of his
thought. He used no word that wouldn't be at home on his Derry
farm or in a Belfast or Dublin pub. But the words and phrases were
formed by a rare golden vision.
I had asked him to talk about the difference between a play-
wright and a poet, and I was reminded of another poet as he an-
swered. A poet is a human being speaking to others - albeit one
endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tender-
ness, with greater knowledge of human nature and a more
comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among

humankind.
Wordsworth's words are not, I imagine, those that would be
chosen by Heaney for himself. But they echoed in my mind as he
spoke. 12
It is in the reconciliation of the division between 'digestive biscuits

and the offer of malt whisky' and the 'rare golden vision' that, for
John Keyes, Heaney's success becomes explicit. His example forges
a unity between the present and the canonical ghosts of the past
which transcend not only historical fracture, but the division
between the quotidian, fallible individual and the great work of art.
A recent study of Heaney by Michael Parker 13 extended this percep-
tion into a full poetic biography and was revealingly sub-titled The
Making of the Poet. Through the course of the book the narrative
portrays Heaney as simultaneously typical of the south Derry com-
munity from which he comes while emphasising the paradigmatic
nature of his lifework in the production of a universal poetry. With
this, as with the Keyes article, the overall emphasis falls on the role
of the poet as mediator of experience: a central aspect of Romantic
ideology as Keyes's quotation from the 'Preface to Lyrical
Ballads', 14 wittingly or not, demonstrates.l 5 Perhaps in this in-
stance, Heaney is only the most successful embodiment of an idea
of the poet in Northern Ireland present since the 1960s. Centrally
placed within this ideal is a notional ideology of poetics predicated
on the belief in an achievable perfection of the matured voice; a ten-
dency first located in Heaney by Clive James in 1972:
With Seamus Heaney, an already achieved, uniquely precocious ma-

turity is being deepened into a tragic voice. He has already left the
point at which his contemporaries are now arriving. Soon people are
going to start comparing him with Yeats. 16
James's early awareness of the analogous nature of Heaney's

poetic persona (although, it should be noted, this is an awareness
carefully expressed) is one which has become increasingly popular
and further allows the tentative codification of a number of as-
sumptions about the Northern Irish poet which can be organised
for the sake of this chapter as a general paradigm. I am here follow-
ing Antony Easthope's definition of the term in Literary Into
Cultural Studies,U as one amenable to my own methods in that it
'signals the dependence of understanding on discourse while includ-
ing the idea of knowledge, and so, crucially, an epistemology in-

volving a subject/object relation'. Moreover, while a paradigm does
not expect nor desire to find any particular subject existing in
perfect relation to the objective paradigm itself, it can, in Easthope's
terms, bring 'object and subject into a relation of knowledge'. The
particular paradigm of Northern Irish poetics I am attempting to
outline necessarily involves a consideration of the subject as both
the poem as text and the poet as creator and embodiment of those
texts. This need not be contradictory or overtly problematic if the
poet is approached textually within the framework of the object.
There are then six features which constitute this paradigm as I have
identified it. These are:
1. a reading of the poet as rooted to a physical location and

community;
2. a sense of the poet as exemplifying the values of that
community;
3. an insistence that the poet can mediate the truths already inher-
ent in the community to the community;
4. a field of interpretation in which the poem does not so much
represent truth as embody it in its actuality;
5. the assumption that within the poet is the possibility of teleolog-
ical perfection;
6. a literary critical practice which recognises both the primacy of
the poem and the limits of its own discursive empirical practices
in relation to it.
It should be recognised that these features are not necessarily re-

stricted to Northern Irish poetry. As Easthope points out (after
Kuhn), 'paradigms are inter-paradigmatic, internalising for them-
selves features shared by other paradigms'. However in this is the
possibility of making explicit naturalised or traditional forms as
well as a method of identifying the inevitable declensions from the
paradigm as they are present in each particular example. Naturally,
as such codification can tend towards the stereotypical there are
other ways of presenting this subject/object distinction. In 1974,
Fortnight, aware of the growing interest in Northern Irish poetry as
a recognisably distinct entity, carried a feature on 'The Ulster Poets'
by Harry Chambers. 18 To illustrate this article on the front cover of
the magazine was a cartoon by Martyn Turner 19 - perhaps the most
incisive of Irish political caricaturists - which presented the stereo-
typical Ulster poet (with 'Ulster' probably taking a wry look back at
Kavanagh) and his environment. Perhaps the intention was to play
this stereotyped image against the specific differences Chambers en-
countered in his consideration of particular poets: an aim frustrated
by Chambers' own reluctance to dispense with that homogeneous
model. However, Turner's cartoon provides a visual representation
of most of the features of the paradigm I have previously outlined.
In the foreground is the figure of the poet sporting clipped goatee
beard, checked shirt and ill-fitting jacket. His right hand clutches a
loose leafed manuscript, his left is upraised in a gesture of enuncia-
tion. In the background is a divided landscape sundered (or linked)
by the figure of the poet. To the left is an image of a rural agrarian
location, to the right, the barbed wire, burning houses and broken
glass of a riot-torn Belfast, Derry, Portadown, or wherever. The
foregrounded figure of the poet mediates our reading of the back-
ground. Northern Ireland is not encountered through the poetry in
his hand but through the values embodied in the stance he adopts.
Moreover it is only the poet figure who can link the two disparate
landscapes in continuity. The urban/rural divide signals one form
of fracture while gesturing both to a temporal discontinuity
(past/present) and a conflict, understood empirically, between
reality and image. It is only possible to quantify these juxtaposi-
tions by recourse to the central figure who can embody, reconcile,
and represent the oppositions within his own example. A critical
practice which destabilises this centre cannot, therefore, hope to
access the privileged continuities it offers.
This paradigm was most fully tested by the publication, one year
later, of Heaney's North, a collection which relied heavily on the
mediating figure of the poet to reconcile the mythological elements
of the work to the political actuality which became its insistent
function. While there is a danger of overstressing Heaney's reliance
on this model within a reductive argument ill-equipped to analyse
its complications, it is fair comment to note that Heaney's painful
agonisings through North about the role of the poet within society
are best understood as a series of abdications and reaffirmations
from and to the paradigm as I have previously outlined it.
Moreover, in interview, Heaney could comment:
The Tollund Man seemed to me like an ancestor almost, one of my

old uncles, one of those moustached archaic faces you used to meet
all over the Irish countryside. I felt very close to this. And the
sacrificial element, the territorial religious element, the whole mytho-

logical field surrounding these images was very potent. So I tried, not
explicitly, to make a connection between the sacrificial, ritual, reli-
gious element in the violence of contemporary Ireland and this terri-
ble sacrificial religious thing in The Bog People. This wasn't thought
out. It began with a genuinely magnetic, almost entranced relation-
ship with those heads .... And when I wrote that poem ('The Tollund
Man') I had a sense of crossing a line really, that my whole being was
involved in the sense of - the root sense - of religion, being bonded
to something, being bound to do something. I felt it a vow; I felt my
whole being caught in this .... I'm very angry with a couple of snotty
remarks by people who don't know what they are talking about and
speak as if the bog images were picked up for convenience instead of
being a deeply felt part of my own life. 20
The necessary emphasis on intuition stresses a framework of inter-

pretation absolutely beholden to the figure of the poet as a mediat-
ing presence. With this the possibility of theorising the relationship
between present day violence and ritual sacrifice, even if it were
possible, is significant only in that it would challenge the position of
Heaney as the central function of the myth; it has to be accepted on
his terms or cannot be understood at all. Read in this way, the
'snotty remarks by people who don't know what they are talking
about' can be seen as the frustrated aspiration of certain aspects of
literary criticism to overthrow the primacy of poetry as a privileged
discourse within Irish culture. Heaney's connections to the original
myth, both familial ('like an ancestor almost') and ineffable,
prevent any sympathetic consideration of the effectiveness of his
parallels which do not first acknowledge an implicit trust in
Heaney's instinctive judgement. Edna Longley, not usually the sort
of critic inclined to trust the opinion of the poet over the content of
the poem, recognises this in her own consideration of North and
begins her analysis with the admission that, 'His reaction to the
Man's photograph deserves the much abused term "epiphany",
with its full Joycean connotations: a revelation of personal and
artistic destiny expressed in religious language' .21 As further on in
the essay Longley can comment that 'Heaney may have mistaken
his initial epiphany for a literal signpost, when it was really a desti-
nation', this becomes a mode of criticism aware of the fact that to
challenge the initial validity of Heaney's vision would be to render
the complete volume as synthetic and open to theoretical procedure.
Its primary structural principle being one which revolves around
the mysteries of Heaney himself. Similarly, Conor Cruise O'Brien,

in an influential review of North, 22 commented:
I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of listening to the

thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony and dissolution,
the tragedy of people in a place: the Catholics of Northern Ireland.
Yes, the Catholics: there is no equivalent Protestant voice. Poetry is
as unfair as history, though in a different way. Seamus Heaney takes
his distances - archaeology, Berkeley, love-hate of the English lan-
guage, Spain, County Wicklow (not the least distant) - but his Derry
is always with him, the ash somehow, now standing out even more
on the forehead.
Again it is in the realm of the mysterious, 'the uncanny', that

Heaney's work transubstantiates into 'the thing itself'. Beyond rep-
resentation, the poetry becomes an embodiment of the real angst of
the community and its place, while Heaney is absolutely assimilated
into its people. As always, the more Heaney's achievement becomes
remarkable, the more typical he is rendered. Inevitably the result of
such procedures deeply underplays the complex relationship of the
contemporary political situation in Northern Ireland to the on-
going violence. As Lloyd has noted, by basing his poetic in the
concept of identity Heaney is 'unable ever to address the relation
between politics and writing more than superficially, in terms of
thematic concerns, or superstitiously in terms of a vision of the poet
as a diviner of the hypothetical pre-political consciousness of his
race'. 23 Ciaran Carson, in a perceptive review of North, 24 was one
of the first critics to identify this tendency. Observing that Edward
McGuire's recent portrait of Heaney allowed the poet the 'status of
myth, of institution' while 'forestall[ing] criticism', he comments:
One can hardly resist the suspicion that North itself, as a work of
art, has succumbed to this notion; Heaney seems to have moved -
unwillingly perhaps - from being a writer with the gift of percision
(sic), to become the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthro-
pologist of ritual killing, an apologist for 'the situation', in the last
resort, a mystifier. It make (sic) North a curiously uneven book ....
No-one really escapes from the massacre, of course - the only way
you can really do that is by falsifying issues, by applying wrong
notions of history instead of seeing what's before your eyes.
Ultimately Carson's most vivid comment on the difficulties of this

aesthetic was not found in prose but in the relentless probing of
identity which constituted his collection The Irish For No, 25 yet his
preliminary accusations were well aimed. Unwilling or unable to rec-

oncile liberal individuation to social assimilation, much of Heaney's
poetry can only find resolution of the contradiction within the no-
tional closure offered by the well-made poem. A technique informed
by practical criticism, Heaney's predominantly lyrical style allows a
notional poetic voice to achieve a reconciliation of issues - a perfect-
ion of form - which addresses the contradictions inherent in his
commitment to the paradigm. Such an interpretation, ironically if
one considers 'From the Frontier of Writing', takes its methodology
and example from within the institution and conforms to what
Easthope (after Jane Tompkins) refers to as 'the Modernist
reading'. 26 Within this, the text is intransitive, is presumed to be
significant in the interaction of all possible meanings, yet simultane-
ously is restrictive of those meanings in the overall unity of the text.
This often contradictory process is reliant on the transformative
power of the ineffable statement; an absence which Barthes
identified in Writing Degree Zero as one located within the poetic
word itself which: 'shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to
radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections'. 27
Able to reconcile all difference, the modernist reading's central
emphasis on the poetic word not only encourages the play of
meaning within the artefact but requires such play as a crucial
factor in its overall efficacy. This has been necessarily important to
the assimilation of Northern Irish poetry into an English interpreta-
tive framework. The specificities of difference, expressed as the
strange or the dissenting ambiguity, can be welcomed in so far as
they contribute to the overall richness of the poem's textual fabric-
a progression which places the textual manifestation of the para-
digm of Northern Irish poetics as I have previously outlined it
within an institutional context. Heaney has written of his induction
into this process with mixed feelings. 28 At one level he maintains his
insistence on the connection between 'the core of a poet's speaking
voice and the core of his poetic voice', on another he recognises the
benefits which can accrue through the modernist reading:
I couldn't say, of course, that I had found a voice but I had found a
game. I knew the thing was only word-play, and I hadn't even the
guts to put my name to it. I called myself Incertus, uncertain, a shy
soul fretting and all that. I was in love with words themselves, but
had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of
how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping stone
in your life. Those verses were what we might call 'trial-pieces', little
stiff inept designs in imitation of the master's fluent interlacing pat-

terns, heavy-handed clues to the whole craft.
It is difficult to assess the significance of this apprenticeship to

Heaney's later work if only because his sense of the process as 'a
game' - an artificial impediment to his primary and natural love of
words -conflicts with his later awareness of the transformative pos-
sibilities of the lyric form to the lifework. As with the critical
thought militia of 'From the Frontier of Writing', Heaney's poetic
undergoes an examination which leaves him 'arraigned yet freed'.
He is granted a certain liberty yet remains absolutely implicated in
the machinations of the literary critical institution. Indeed this
conflict is reinforced by the Foreword to Preoccupations 29 which
deems it necessary to highlight those prose pieces which bear the
hallmark of 'the slightly constricted utterance of somebody who un-
derwent his academic rite of passage when practical criticism held
great sway in the academy'. Heaney's 'slightly constricted utterance'
has been well documented and criticised30 but its root cause has
rarely been located as part of a specific critical practice. However, if
this argument is accepted it can be seen that it is solely within the
modernist reading that Heaney's expression of dissent has its being;
an awareness which gives credence to Lloyd's contentious accusa-
tion that 'almost without exception, the poems respond compliantly
to analysis based on assumptions about the nature of the well-made
lyric poem'. 31 Desmond Fennell, coming from an entirely different
tradition of criticism to Lloyd's, has similarly noted the welcome af-
forded to Heaney's work by academics (who he places in oppos-
ition to 'Ordinary Readers'), 32 while Heaney, in an interview with
Randall, has commented that many of his poems are 'usually pulled
tight at the end with little drawstrings in the last line or two'. 33
Perhaps this tendency is most clearly expressed by reference to the
lyric poem 'Making Strange'. Part of the 1984 collection Station
Island - a volume often considered as undertaking the sternest form
of self-analysis within Heaney's canon - it subtends its nominal
consideration of identity as expressed in relation to geography
under a desire to achieve a satisfactory form of coherent closure
within its own formal limits:
I stood between them,

the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
and another, unshorn and bewildered

in the tubs of his wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I'd brought him.
Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, 'Be adept and be dialect,
tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this travelled one
and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
Go beyond what's reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.'
Michael Parker has helpfully noted that this poem has its genesis
in a guided tour of South Derry undertaken by Heaney for the
benefit of the Jamaican poet Louis Simpson. 34 Encountering a
childhood acquaintance, Heaney is cast as a mediator between the
two men, who concomitantly embody aspects of his own lyric
persona. It is in this mediation that a reconciliation of the
parochial with the universal is made possible. Heaney as the artic-
ulate expression of his community is asked 'for help' by its voice-
less, 'bewildered' aspects. Embodying the location through the
relationship of dialect to territory, Heaney's strategy is, at first,
'cunning'; a mode of evading the awkward confrontation. This is
eased by the shift the poem takes towards formal closure through
its emphasis on the poetic voice; a transformation which Parker
notes approvingly: 'As a result of the stranger's presence, and
because of the increased sophistication of his technique, he is able
to re-cover his country, rediscover its familiar features and figures
by means of metaphor and allusion that "make strange".' While
this reading of the process delimits the full range of poetic co-
herencies available it should be noted that it allows Heaney a
closure which would be unobtainable in any other form. Rather
than suggesting a rediscovery of the location, the pressure implicit
to the concept of 'making strange' formalises Heaney's initial
impressions of the country, rendering the absolute fracture

between the community and the individual gestured by 'I stood
between them' as little more than an ironic aftertouch by a poet
securely in command of his craft. In this sense, while Heaney ac-
knowledges the difference engendered by his induction into 'the
game' he remains satisfied with the ultimate forms of closure it
offers. 'Making Strange' can be seen as asking sterner questions of
Heaney's relationship with his poetic than the longer title poem
'Station Island', yet those questions are not so much left unan-
swered as evaded through its insistence on being judged as a well-
made poem. In other words, the aspects of Heaney's work which
conform to the paradigm can only remain unproblematic if ap-
proached via the intransitive self-contained modernist reading.
From Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland

since 1968: Moments of Danger (London, 1996), pp. 149-60.
NOTES
[Richard Kirkland is interested in poetry as a cultural 'product' and in
whether Heaney's poetry contributes to the kind of cultural initiative re-
quired to push Northern Irish society forward and through its present social
and political arrest. He sees Heaney's readiness to function within the para-
meters of New Criticism as a serious drawback in this connection. Like
Jonathan Dollimore ('Culture and textuality', Textual Practice, 4 [1990],
91-100), whose 'cultural materialism' he to some extent shares, Kirkland is
keen to divest literary studies of a 'lingering attachment to Englit.' and is
deeply suspicious of critical modes with a compliant relationship to what he
calls 'ineffable statement' (p. 261 above). He shares with David Lloyd (essay
11) a belief that the 'identitarian' thinking which lies behind New Criticism
is allied to that which underpins the bourgeois status quo; and that the
critic's 'theoretical procedure' (p. 259 above) should undermine both. He
refers on p. 253 above to Chapter 4 of his book Literature and Culture in
Northern Ireland since 1965 entitled 'Unconscious Partitionism: Northern
Criticism in the Nineteen-eighties'. Ed.]
1. Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London, 1987), p. 6.

2. Seamus Heaney, 'The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh',
The Government of the Tongue (London, 1988), pp. 3-14.
3. Respectively published London (1975) (1984) (1991).
4. Ireland's Field Day (afterword by Denis Donoghue; London, 1985),
pp. 23-30.
5. David Lloyd, "'Pap for the Dispossessed": Seamus Heaney and the
Poetics of Identity', Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-
Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993), p. 15.
6. John Carey, 2 June 1991, cited in Declan Kiberd's 'Heaney's Magic',
the Sunday Tribune (9 June 1991), p. 21.
7. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman
(London, 1987), p. 143.
8. Kiberd, 'Heaney's Magic', 21.
9. George Moore, Hail and Farewell (1911), ed. Richard Allen Cave
(Gerrards Cross, 1985), p. 56.
10. It is an awareness of 'Heaney's quasi-institutional acceptance on both
ideas of the Atlantic as a major poet' which led to Lloyd's 'Pap for the
Dispossessed'. [See essay 11. Ed.]
11. Theo Dorgan, 'Heaney's Vision Throws Light on the Ordinary',
Sunday Tribune Books Supplement (9 June 1991), p. 3.
12. John Keyes, 'A Dramatic Conversation', Fortnight, 288 (October
1990), 25. For a similar early example of this tendency see: John
Haffenden, 'Meeting Seamus Heaney', London Magazine (June 1979),
5-28.
13. Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Dublin,
1993).
14. William Wordsworth, 'The Oxford Authors', ed. Stephen Gill
(Oxford, 1987), p. 603.
15. For a fuller, if contentious, reading of this phenomenon see Lloyd,
'Pap For the Dispossessed', pp. 14-18.
16. Clive James, Review of Wintering Out, Observer (26 November
1972), p. 25.
17. Antony Easthope, Literary Into Cultural Studies (London, 1991),
pp. 9-10.
18. Fortnight, 81 (5 April, 1974), 12-13.
19. This cartoon was republished in Troubled Times: Fortnight Magazine
and the Troubles in Northern Ireland 1970-91, ed. Robert Bell eta!.,
(Belfast, 1991), p. 106. A later cartoon of Heaney by Peter Brookes
used to illustrate Lachlan MacKinnon's review of Seeing Things ('A
Responsibility to Self', Times Literary Supplement, 4601, 7 June 1991,
p. 28) presented Heaney's head as the contours of Ireland itself.
Although it is unlikely that Brookes knew of Turner's earlier cartoon,
questions of mediation and embodiment, this time to an all-Ireland
state, are similarly represented.
20. James Randall, 'An Interview with Seamus Heaney', Ploughshares, 5:3
(1979), 18-19.
21. Edna Longley, '"Inner Emigre" or "Artful Voyeur"? Seamus Heaney's
North', Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle, 1986), p. 140.
22. Conor Cruise O'Brien, 'A Slow North-east Wind', The Listener
(25 September 1975), pp. 23-4.
23. Lloyd, 'Pap for the Dispossessed', p. 14.
24. Cianin Carson, 'Escaped From the Massacre?', The Honest Ulsterman,
50 (Winter, 1975), 183-6.
25. Cianin Carson, The Irish For No (Oldcastle, 1987).
26. Easthope, Literary Into Cultural Studies, pp. 16-17.
27. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith, ed. Susan Sontag (New York, 1968), p. 47.
28. Seamus Heaney, 'Feeling Into Words', Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968-78 (London, 1980), p. 45.
29. Ibid., p. 13.
30. Most infamously in Desmond Fennell's pamphlet, 'Whatever You Say,
Say Nothing': Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1 (Dublin, 1991). Fennell's
work forms possibly the most sustained attack on Heaney's poetry,
particularly from within Ireland itself.
31. Lloyd, 'Pap for the Dispossessed', p. 35.
32. Fennell, 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing', p. 21.
33. Randall, 'An Interview With Seamus Heaney', p. 18.
34. Parker, The Making of the Poet, p. 189.
Further Reading
I have grouped these suggestions for further reading into sections and,
except in the final section, I have listed them chronologically. This is so
that the reader can relate dates of publication, where appropriate, to the
time-span covered in the Introduction.
INTERVIEWS
According to Rand Brandes, 'dozens of interviews' with Heaney have been
published ('Secondary Sources: a Gloss on the Critical Reception of Seamus
Heaney, 1965-1993' Colby Quarterly [Spring, 1994), pp. 63-77). The
most influential are:
Randall, James, 'An Interview with Seamus Heaney' Ploughshares, 5:3
(1979), 7-22.
Haffenden, John (ed.), interview with Seamus Heaney, Viewpoints: Poets in
Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981),
pp. 57-75.
Kinahan, Frank, interview with Seamus Heaney, Critical Inquiry (Spring
1982), 405-14.
Deane, Seamus, 'Unhappy and at Home', interview with Seamus Heaney,
The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, ed. Mark Patrick Hederman and
Richard Kearney (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982), pp. 66-72.
AUTHORED BOOKS AND COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS ON

HEANEY
There were over twenty such titles when Brandes wrote his article. The
number will probably have doubled before this New Casebook appears.
The following seem to me the most helpful:
Curtis, Tony (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1994
[first published 1982]).
Morrison, Blake, Seamus Heaney (London and New York: Routledge,
1993 [first published 1982]).
Corcoran, Neil, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986).
Bloom, Harold (ed.), Seamus Heaney (New Haven, CT: Chelsea House,
1986).
267
268 FURTHER READING
Burris, Sydney, The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral
Tradition (Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1990).
Andrews, Elmer (ed.), Seamus Heaney: a Collection of Critical Essays
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992).
Hart, Henry, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992).
Parker, Michael, Seamus Heaney: the Making of the Poet (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1993 ).
O'Donoghue, Bernard, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
Foster, J. Wilson, The Achievement of Seamus Heaney (Dublin: Lilliput,
1995).
Durkan, Michael J. and Rand Brandes, Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide
(New York: G.K. Hall, 1995).
Garratt, Robert F. (ed.), Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney (NY: G.K. Hall;
London: Prentice-Hall, 1995).
CONTEXTS
List A assembles some books which help the reader to place Heaney among
the Northern poets and in the Northern Irish context. List B is of books
which assume a broader Irish, archipelagic or world context.
A
Brown, Terence, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (London: Gill and
Macmillan, 1977).
Stewart, A.T.Q., The Narrow Ground: the Roots of Conflict in Ulster
(London: Faber, 1977).
Ormsby, Frank (ed.), Poets from the North of Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff
Press, 1979; revd, enlarged edn, 1990).
Whyte, John, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Hughes, Eamonn (ed.), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland,
1960-1990 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991).
Ormsby, Frank (ed.), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland
Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992).
Corcoran, Neil (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary
Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992).
Wills, Clair, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
B
Dunn, Douglas, Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey (Cheadle:
Carcanet, 1975).
Morrison, Blake and Motion, Andrew, The Penguin Book of
Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Paulin, Tom, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Bloodaxe, 1984 ).
FURTHER READING 269
Deane, Seamus, Celtic Revivals (London: Faber, 1985).

Johnston, Dillon, Irish Poetry After Joyce (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1985).
Sekine, Masaru, Irish Writers and Society at Large (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smyth; Totowa, VJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985) (see George Watson, 'The
Narrow Ground: Northern Poets and the Northern Ireland Crisis',
pp. 207-24).
Garrett, Robert F., Modern Irish Poets: Tradition and Continuity from
Yeats to Heaney (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989 [first published 1986]).
Longley, Edna, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986).
Muldoon, Paul (ed.), Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London:
Faber, 1986).
Lyons, F.S.L., Ireland since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1987).
Brown, Terence, Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (Gigginstown:
Lilliput Press, 1988).
Cairns, David and Richards, Shaun, Writing Ireland: Colonialism,
Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Foster, R.F., Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988).
Brown, Terence and Grene, Nicholas (eds), Tradition and Influence in
Anglo-Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Fallon, Peter and Mahon, Derek (eds), The Penguin Book of
Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Penguin, 1990).
Eagleton, Terry, Jameson, Fredric and Said, Edward W., Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature (introduction by Seamus Deane;
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
Longley, Edna, From Cathleen to Anorexia: the Breakdown of Irelands
(Dublin: Attic Press, LIP Pamphlet, 1990).
Foster, John Wilson, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and
Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991).
Johnson, Toni O'Brien and Cairns, David, Gender in Irish Writing (Milton
Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991).
Andrews, Elmer (ed.), Contemporary Irish Poetry: a Collection of Critical
Essays (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992).
Lloyd David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial
Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993).
Longley, Edna, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994).
Kibert, Declan, Inventing Ireland (London: Cape, 1995).
Kenneally, Michael (ed.), Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature
(Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994) (see, in particular, Peter
Macdonald, 'Seamus Heaney as a Critic', pp. 174-89).
INTRODUCTORY APPROACHES TO LITERARY THEORY

As with the last section I have included anthologies here as well as discur-
sive texts. Seldon and Widdowson's Reader's Guide provides excellent
booklists for further theoretical study.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: an Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
1983).
2 70 FURTHER READING
Seldon, Raman and Widdowson, Peter, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary

Literary Theory (Heme! Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) [first
published with the late Raman Seldon as sole author, 1985].
Adams, Hazard and Searle, Leroy (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965
(Tallahassu: Florida State University Press, 1986).
Lodge, David (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: a Reader (Harlow:
Longman, 1988).
Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the
Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 1975).
Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism (London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1983 ).
Notes on Contributors
Neil Corcoran is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Swansea.
In addition to his book on Heaney, his publications include The Song of
Deeds: A Study of 'The Anathemata' of David Jones (Cardiff, 1982),
English Poetry since 1940 (London, 1993) and, as contributing editor,
The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern
Ireland (Bridgend, 1992).
Patricia Coughlan teaches at University College, Cork. She is contributing
editor of Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork,
1989) and has also written on seventeenth-century English discourse
about Ireland. She has published several essays and articles on later
Anglo-Irish literature, including the work of Mangan, Maturin, Le Fanu,
Kate O'Brien and Samuel Beckett. She is contributing co-editor with Alex
Davis of Irish Poets of the 1930s: a Revisionary Approach (Cork, 1994)
and is currently studying the representation of gender in contemporary
Irish poetry by women.
Seamus Deane is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at Notre Dame
University, Indiana. In addition to Celtic Revivals (London, 1985), his
publications include The French Revolution and Enlightenment in
England, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), A Short
History of Irish Literature (London, 1986) and a number of volumes of
poetry including Gradual Wars (Shannon, 1972), Rumours (Dublin,
1977), History Lessons (Dublin, 1983) and Selected Poems (Dublin,
1988). He was General Editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing (Derry, 1991) and the author of two of the most influential Field
Day Pamphlets, Civilians and Barbarians (Derry, 1983) and Heroic
Styles: the Tradition of an Idea (Derry, 1984).
Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. His
publications include Reading (Absent) Character (Oxford, 1983), John
Donne, Undone (London, 1986), On Modern Authority (Brighton,
1987), After Theory: Postmodernism/ Postmarxism (London, 1990) and,
as editor, Postmodernism: a Reader (Hemel Hempstead and New York,
1992). His latest publication is Alterities: Criticism, History,
Representation (Oxford, 1996).
271
272 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the

University of Oxford. Among his publications are Myths of Power: a
Marxist Study of the Brontes (London, 1975), Marxism and Literary
Criticism (London, 1976), The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford, 1982), Literary
Theory: an Introduction (Oxford, 1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(Oxford, 1990), Ideology (London, 1991) and Heathcliffe and the Great
Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London, 1995). He is author of two
plays, Saint Oscar (1989) and The White, the Gold and the Gangrene
(1993).
Seamus Heaney's most recent volume of poems is The Spirit Level (1996).
He is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard and was, until recently,
Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His Preoccupations (London, 1980), The
Government of the Tongue (London, 1988) and The Redress of Poetry
(London, 1995) are important critical adjuncts to the poetry. In October
1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Eamonn Hughes is a lecturer in the School of English at Queen's
University, Belfast. He has edited Culture and Politics in Northern
Ireland, 1960-1990 (Milton Keynes, 1991) and is currently completing a
book on Irish Writing, 1800-1990. He is the author of a number of arti-
cles on Irish writing and is doing research on Irish Literary
Autobiography.
Richard Kirkland lectures in English at Keele University. He is the author
of Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of
Danger (London 1996) and essays on Irish poetry in various literary
journals and is currently joint-editing a volume of essays: The Mechanics
of Authority: Ireland and Cultural Theory.
David Lloyd teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his
publications are Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence
Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley and
London, 1987) and Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-
Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993).
Edna Longley is Professor of English at Queen's University, Belfast. Among
her publications are Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle, 1986), Louis
MacNeice (London, 1988), From Cathleen to Anorexia: the Breakdown
of Irelands (Dublin, 1990), The Living Stream: Literature and
Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle, 1994) and editions of Edward
Thomas's poetry (Poems and Last Poems, London and Glasgow, 1973)
and prose (A Language not to be Betrayed, Manchester, 1981). She is an
editor of the Irish Review and has written on poetry in many journals
and collections of criticism.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, until recently Consultant Editor of the Observer
and now a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic, entered the Department
of External Affairs of Ireland in 1944 and was Head of the UN Section
and Member of the Irish Delegation to the UN from 1956 to 1960; he
then served as Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Katanga in
1961, when he resigned from the UN and Irish service. He has since been
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 273
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana (1962-5); Albert Schweitzer

Professor of Humanities, New York University (1965-9); Member of the
Dublin parliament (1966-77); Minister for Posts and Telegraphs
(1973-7); Member of the Irish Senate (1977-9): Pro-Chancellor of
Dublin University since 1973; Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College,
Oxford (1973-5); Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford (1978-81);
and Editor-in-Chief of the Observer (1978-81). Among his many publi-
cations are Parnell and his Party, 1880-90 (Oxford, 1957), To Katanga
and Back, a UN Case History (London, 1962), Camus (London, 1970),
States of Ireland (London, 1972), Passion and Cunning, Essays on
Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution (London, 1990) and The Great
Melody: a Thematic Biography and Commenting Anthology of Edmund
Burke (London, 1992).
Christopher Ricks is Professor of English at Boston University. His many
publications include Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), Keats and
Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974), The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984),
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (London and Boston, 1988) and Essays in
Appreciation (Oxford, 1996) as well as editions of Tennyson (Harlow,
1969; London, 1987) and Housman (London, 1988).
Stan Smith is Professor and Head of English at Dundee University and co-
director of the Auden Concordance Project there. His publications
include Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth Century Poetry (Dublin,
1982), W.H. Auden (Oxford, 1985), Edward Thomas (London, 1986),
W.B. Yeats: a Critical Introduction (Basingstoke, 1990) and The Origins
of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (Hemel
Hempstead, 1994). He is General Editor of the Longman Critical Reader
Series and of Longman Studies in Twentieth Century Literature.
Index
Adorno, T., 5, 76, 181; Negative Carson, Ciaran, 45, 49, 52, 58,
Dialectics, 18, 182, 183 260-1; The Irish For No, 260
Akhmatova, Anna, 150 Cezanne, Paul, 210
Amis, Kingsley, 99 Chambers, Harry, 257-8
Andrews, Elmer, 91, 204 Chandler, Raymond, 79
Arnold, Matthew, 2, 4, 158-9, Chekhov, A., 82, 89
184, 185 Clarke, Austin, 125
Ashbery, John, 221 Coleridge, S.T., 82, 83, 130
Auden, W.H., 10-11, 147, 148-9, Corcoran, Neil, 8-9, 15, 91, 204,
225-7,233,238 249
Coughlan, Patricia, 12-13, 14,
Bakhtin, M., 5-6, 91 201
Barfield, Owen, 239 Culler, Jonathan, 19, 92
Barthes, Roland, 3, 7, 16, 145, Cultural Materialism, 15, 264
254; Writing Degree Zero, 20,
261 Dante, 10, 75, 112, 116, 132-6,
Benjamin, Walter, 200, 212 234,236-9
Bergson, Henri, 210-12 Davie, Donald: Purity of Diction
Bhabha, Homi K., 181, 205 in English Verse, 14,236-41,
Bishop, Elizabeth, 10, 138-43, 243
240 Davies, Sir John, 167
Blake, William, 103 Davis, Thomas, 158-9
Bloom, Harold, 4, 123, 162 Deane, Seamus, 4-5, 6, 7, 32, 37,
Brandes, Rand, 248 59-60,78,82-3,121-2,209,
Brodsky, Joseph, 150 211, 215; Celtic Revivals, 4; 'A
Brooks, Cleanth, 2, 17 Killing', 207
Browne, E. Martin, 143 deconstruction, 10-11, 19, 153
Buber, Martin, 148, 154 Deleuze, Gilles, 182, 211-12,
Buile Suibhne, 75, 107, 108, 120 215-16
Devlin, Denis, 112
Caedmon, 151 Derrida, Jacques, 13-14, 153; On
Carey, John, 7, 181, 254 Grammatology, 15, 249
Carleton, William, 117; 'The Docherty, Thomas, 9-11, 12,
Lough Derg Pilgrim', 112, 113, 13-14,181,219-20
117 Dollimore, Jonathan, 264
274
INDEX 275
Dorgan, Theo, 255 Graves, Robert, 23, 24; The White

Duchamp, Marcel, 210 Goddess, 120
Dylan, Bob, 79 Guattari, Felix, 182
Eagleton, Terry, 7-8, 14, 105-6, Haffenden, John, 46, 63, 127
153; Criticism and Ideology, Hammond, David, 152
105-6; Literary Theory: An Heaney, Seamus, growth of repu-
Introduction, 8 tation, 1-2, 155-6, 178-80,
Easthope, Anthony, 220, 261; 253-6; and 'intertextuality',
Literary Into Cultural Studies, 80-4, 217-18; and language,
256-7 5-7,8,36-7,56-7,68-9,80-5,
Einstein, Albert, 221 102-5, 166-9,223-8,236-49;
Eisenstein, Sergei M., 211 and Nationalism, 3-5, 59-61,
Eliot, T.S., 2, 7, 9-10, 127, 143; 197-8; and New Criticism, 1, 4,
'Dante', 135; Four Quartets, 9, 12, 16,145, 178,261-4;
9-10, 11, 135-6; 'Little 'politicisation' of his poetry, 4,
Gidding', 119, 236; The Waste 59-60, 69-70; 'Act of Union',
Land,9, 11,129-30 26-7,68,190, 197-8,218;
EHmann, Richard, 13 7 'After a Killing', 97-8; Among
Esenin, Sergei, 150 Schoolchildren, 118; 'An
Advancement of Learning', 191;
Falck, Colin, 39 'An Afterwards', 74, 97;
Fanon, Franz, 181 'Anahorish', 68, 167-8;
feminist criticism, 12-13, 201; see 'Antaeus', 70; 'An Aisling in the
gender Burren', 109-10; 'Alphabets',
Fennell, Desmond, 262, 266 240-1, 247-9; 'An Artist', 124;
Field Day Theatre Company, 4, 'At a Potato Digging', 33, 68;
207-8,255 'The Badgers', 72, 127; 'The
Formalism, 5, 7-8, 17, 91, 106; Betrothal of Cavehill', 190,
see Russian Formalism 198-9; 'Belderg', 49;
Foster, John Wilson, 32, 48 'Blackberry-Picking', 23;
Foucault, M., 6, 145 'Bogland', 34, 54, 196; 'Bog
Freud, Sigmund: 'family romance', Queen', 12, 46-7, 190; Bone
159, 182 Dreams, 48, 49-50, 53-4,
Frost, Robert, 3, 10-11, 143; 'The 193-4; 'Broagh', 68, 168; 'Bye-
Figure a Poem Makes', 131, Child', 36; 'Casualty', 119,
148; 'For Once, Then, 177-8; 'Churning Day', 22;
Something', 32; 'The Most of 'Clearances', 15, 231, 238,
It', 32 242-5; 'The Cleric', 125; 'Come
to the Bower', 48, 194; 'A
Gay, John, 101 Constable Calls', 38, 85; 'Cow
Geertz, Clifford, 93 in Calf', 191; 'A Daylight Art',
gender, 12-13, 14, 169, 185-205 241; 'Death of a Naturalist', 23,
Girard, Rene: Violence and the 191; Death of a Naturalist, 1, 2,
Sacred, 5 7,8,21-3,32-4,65,66-8, 103,
Glob, P.V.: The Bog People, 42, 190-1; 'Digging', 21, 67, 124,
69, 169-70, 191-2 162-5, 190-1,213-14; 'The
Goya,F.de,82,87-8 Digging Skeleton (after
Gramsci, Antonio, 181, 182 Baudelaire)', 69; 'The Diviner',
276 INDEX
2, 22; 'Docker', 32, 33; Door Spike', 110; 'The King of the
into the Dark, 1, 32, 34-5, 65, Ditchbacks', 107-8, 121;
66-8, 163; 'Drifting Off', 123, 'Land', 53, 'Kinship', 46, 49,
125; 'Elegy', 72-3, 177; 'Elegy 53-5,57-8,190, 195-7;
for a Still-Born Child', 44; 'Leavings', 127; 'Limbo', 36;
'Englands of the Mind', 54, 155; 'The Loaning', 110; 'A Lough
'Envies and Identifications; Neagh Sequence', 67;
Dante and the Modern Poet', 'Maighdean Mara', 68; 'Making
112-13, 122-4,236; Strange', 16, 110, 262-4;
'Exposure', 6, 29, 39, 58-9, 71, 'Midnight', 194; 'A Migration',
89-91; 'Feeling into Words', 126; The Ministry of Fear', 37,
41-2, 64,214, 223; Field Work, 38, 82-5; 'Mossbawn: Two
5,6, 7-8,66,71-6,90,95-101, Poems in Dedication', 57; 'The
102-5, 109, 114, 127, 155, Mud Vision', 226, 239, 243; 'A
176-8, 199-200, 233; 'The First New Song', 36-7, 68, 168, 187;
Flight', 123; 'The First Gloss', 'North', 50-1; North, 2-4, 5-6,
124, 125, 247; 'The First 11,25-9,30-1,37-61,65,
Kingdom', 124; 'Follower', 22; 69-71,78,80-90,97,118,127,
'The Forge', 54; 'For the 169,173, 197-99,258-61;'A
Commander of the "Eliza"', 33; Northern Hoard', 35-6;
'Fosterage', 39, 88-90; 'Ocean's Love to Ireland', 48,
'Fosterling', 1; 'Freedman', 68, 190, 197-8; 'The Old Icons',
37-8; 'From the Canton of 124, 126; 'The Old Team', 233;
Expectation', 224,240, 241; 'On the Road', 121, 123, 126-7,
'From the Frontier of Writing', 249; 'An Open Letter', 78, 253;
16, 224-6, 252-3, 262; 'From 'Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966',
the Land of the Unspoken', 224, 25, 38, 85-7; 'The Other Side',
239, 240; 'From the Republic of 4, 35; 'Outlaw', 191; 'Oysters',
Conscience', 224, 228, 237; 7, 95-6, 119; 'Parable Island',
'Funeral Rites', 52, 'Gifts of 14,229,235,241-3;'A
Rain', 53, 68; 'Glanmore Peacock's Feather', 231-2;
Sonnets', 8, 74-5, 102-3, 'Personal Helicon', 31, 55; Place
103-4, 176-7; 'The God in the and Displacement: Recent
Tree', 122; 'The Government of Poetry of Northern Ireland,
the Tongue, 9, 129-44, 228-30; 14-15,224,233-4;'The
The Government of the Tongue, Placeless Heaven: Another Look
8,147-53,223,224,226,228, at Kavanagh', 238; 'The
229-31, 239; 'The Grauballe Plantation', 32; 'Polder', 200; 'A
Man', 13, 29, 42-5, 47, 57, Postcard from Iceland', 224,
190, 206-19; 'Grotus and 233; 'A Postcard from North
Coven tina', 240; 'The Harvest Antrim', 233; Preoccupations, 8,
Bow', 97; 'The Haw Lantern', 17,55, 145,151,167,168-70,
234-5; The Haw Lantern, 1, 91, 174, 178-9,214,232,262;
204-5,224-7,231-5,239-45; 'Punishment', 2-3,25-6,44-6,
'Hercules and Antaeus', 55, 70, 70, 124, 174-6, 195; The
172-3; 'The Hermit', 122; Redress of Poetry, 8; 'Requiem
'Holly', 124; 'Homecomings', for the Crappies', 34; 'Rite of
100; 'In Illo Tempore', 124, Spring', 162, 190, 192-3;
126; 'In the Beech', 124; 'Iron 'Sandstone Keepsake', 110-11;
INDEX 277
'The Scribes', 122, 125; 'The Herbert, Zbigniew, 10, 136-7

Seed Cutters', 57-8, 60, 189; Hewitt, John, 37
Seeing Things, 1, 254-5; 'The Hill, Geoffrey, 54
Sense of Place', 162, 223, 225; Holub, Miroslav, 150
'September Song', 74; 'Servant Hopkins, G.M., 64, 65, 82, 89,
Boy', 66; 'Sheelagh na Gig', 200; 133-4; 'The Windhover', 86
'Shoreline', 50; 'Sibyl', 99; Hughes, Eamonn, 5-7, 8, 16, 91,
'Singing School', 38-9, 78, 105
81-90; 'The Skunk', 100, 200; Hughes, Ted, 51, 53, 54, 56, 65
'Song', 73; 'The Song of the
Bullets', 241; The Spirit Level, Irigaray, Luce, 200-1, 215
1; 'The Spoonbait', 241; 'Station Irish Republic, 160-1
Island', 107, 108, 111-20, 122, James, Clive, 7, 102, 256
127,199,224,227,229,246-7, James, Henry, 97
264; Station Island, 1, 8-9, 90, Jameson, Fredric, 209-10
107-27,226-7,234,262; Joyce, James, 82, 89, 117-19, 232;
Stations, 121; 'The Strand at A Portrait of the Artist, 118,
Lough Beg', 72, 75, 114; 235-6, 242, 245-6; Ulysses, 122
'Strange Fruit', 3, 5, 46, 69-70; Jung,C.,60,234,236
'Summer, 1969', 38-9, 87-8;
'Summer Home', 68; 'Sunlight', Kavanagh, Patrick, 3, 33-4, 65,
12, 58; Sweeney Astray, 107, 66,82,84, 117,147,203,225,
114, 120; 'Sweeney Redivivus', 227-8, 233, 254; The Great
107, 108, 120-7; 'A Tale of Hunger, 33; Lough Derg: A
Two Islands: Reflections on the Poem, 112
Irish Literary Revival', 117; Keats, John, 7, 100, 234, 254
'Terminus', 226-7; 'Tinder', Keyes, John, 255-6
35-6; 'Traditions', 36, 68, 118; Kermode, Frank, 18
'The Tollund Man', 3, 31,42-4, Kibert, Declan, 254
57, 169-72, 190, 195-6; Kinsella, Thomas, 75, 76, 89
'Toome', 168; 'Trial Pieces', 53, Kipling, Rudyard, 28-9
214-15; 'Triptych', 8, 72, Kirkland, Richard, 1-2, 15-17,
104-5; 'Trout', 191; 'Ugolino', 264
75,96-7, 119; 'Undine', 162, Kristeva, Julia, 5-6, 80-1
187, 190, 192-3; 'Unwinding', Kuhn, T. S., 257
124; 'Victorian Guitar', 193; Kutzenov, Alexander, 134
'Viking Dublin', 52, 53-4;
'Vision', 191; 'A Waking Lacan, Jacques, 200
Dream', 123; 'Wedding Day', Larkin, Philip, 147, 238; 'Toads'
216; 'Westering', 127; 'Whatever and 'Toads Revisited', 42
you Say Say Nothing', 27, 29, Lawrence, D.H., 51
39-41, 229-30; 'Widgeon', Leavis, F.R., 2, 7, 101
108-9; 'The Wife's Tale', 191, Ledwidge, Francis, 73
202-3; Wintering Out, 1, 3, 4, Lloyd, David, 1-2, 7, 11-12, 13,
33, 53-4, 61, 65, 68-9, 127, 14, 16,105, 181)253,260,262
167, 169; 'The Wishing Tree', Long, Richard, 207
242; 'The Wool Trade', 245 Longley, Edna, 3-4, 10, 12, 13,
Hederman, Mark Patrick, 55 201,204,259
Herbert, George, 134-5 Lorca, F.G., 6, 82, 87
278 INDEX
Lowell, Robert, 10, 73, 100-1, see 'the Modernist Reading',

147-8, 150,217-19,223;'Eye 'Practical Criticism'
and Tooth', 217-18; For the Northern Ireland, 1, 2-5, 16-17,
Union Dead, 14,218-19 25-9,32-4,150,156,160-1,
Lucas, John, 19 256,264
Lyons, F.S.L., 86 Northern Ireland Cultural
Lyotard, J.-F., 13,209-10,217-19 Traditions Group, 4
MacCarthy, D.F., 156-7, 159 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 2-3, 29,

MacNeice, Louis, 79, 233; 30-1,60-1,81,88,260;
Autumn Journal, 40 'Passion and Cunning', 29
Mahon, Derek, 59, 76; 'In Belfast', O'Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-
40; 'The Last of the Fire Kings', Birds, 122
61 O'Faolain, Sean: 'The Lovers of
Mallarme, S., 235 the Lake', 112
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 125, O'Neil, Terence, 86
145 O'Riada, Sean, 73
Mandelstam, Osip, 82, 89, 129, Ormsby, Frank, 103
150, 240; 'A Conversation O'Toole, Fintan, 9, 107
about Dante', 131-5 Ovid, 82, 89
Mansfield, Kathleen, 82, 89 Owen, Wilfred, 137, 150
Marx, Karl, 181
Marxist Criticism, 11-12, 105, Paisley, Ian, 86
181 Parker, Michael, 256, 263
McCullers, Carson, 227 Pasternak, Boris, 240
McGuire, Edward, 260 Paulin, Tom, 79-80
McLaverty, Mchael, 39, 82, 88-9 Pearse, Patrick, 158
Milosz, Czeslaw, 134 Penguin Book of Contemporary
Milton, John, 254 British Poetry, 78, 220
'the Modernist reading', 17, Picasso, Pablo, 210
261-4; see New Criticism Piers Plowman, 113
Montague, John, 59, 65, 66, 76, Plath, Sylvia, 147, 152,224-5
82,89,185-9, 191,200-1; The Plato: Meno, 212
Great Cloak, 200; New Selected Poirier, Richard: The Performing
Poems, 201; The Rough Field, Self, 18
188-9 Pope, Alexander, 101
Moore, George, 254 postcolonialism, 1, 11-12, 160-2
Morrison, Blake, 30, 45, 84-5, postmodernism, 13-14,206-19
128 poststructuralism, 5, 6, 10, 12,
Muldoon, Paul, 79; 'Aisling', 201 153
Mulvey, Laura: the 'scopic gaze', Pound, Ezra, 96
202 'Practical Criticism', 17, 145,
178-80, 262, 264; see New
The Nation, 157-9 Criticism
nationalism, 160 Proust, Marcel, 221
Nationalism (Irish), 4-5, 157-61,
182 Randall, James, 42, 262
New Criticism, 1, 2, 3, 4-5, 7, 8, Ransom, John Crowe: The New
9, 12, 16,1~24, 128,145,264; Criticism, 17
INDEX 279
Redgrove, Peter, 2, 21, 24 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 150

Ricks, Christopher, 2, 7, 12, 24, Turner, Martyn, 257-8
101
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 131, 153 Virgil: Aeneid, 7 5
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 213 Virilio, Paul, 207, 212, 214
Roe, Nicholas, 202 Volosinov, V., 5-6, 81
Roethke, Theodore, 64
Russian Formalism, 17; see Walcott, Derek, 147
Formalism Widdowson, Peter, 250
Williams, Raymond, 4, 76
Sainte-Beuve, C., 2 Wilson, Edmund, 2
StJohn of the Cross, 114, 116 Wimsatt, W.K., 17
Saussure, F. de, 5-6, 8, 10, 15, Woolf, Virginia, 221
221,224,249-50 Woodham-Smith, Cecil: The Great
Shakespeare, William, 37, 82; Hunger, 33
Hamlet, 14, 214-17; King Lear, Wordsworth, William, 6, 7, 23,
84 65,81,82,98, 165,228,233-4;
Silkin, Jon, 104 Lyrical Ballads Preface, 256;
Simpson, Louis, 263 The Prelude, 152
Sinyavsky, Andrei, 134
Smith, Stan, 9, 14-15, 80, 249-50 Yeats, W.B. 6, 9, 10, 28, 31, 34, 52,
Spenser, Edmund, 36, 167 53,54,80,81,82,89,102,105,
Spivak, Gayatri C., 181 123-4,127,137,144,207,232,
Stead, C.K.: The New Poetic, 254; 'Among Schoolchildren',
129-30, 135 131; 'Byzantium', 42; 'The
structuralism, 5, 6, 91, 106 Circus Animals' Desertion', 127;
Swir, Anna, 130-1, 143, 228 'A Coat', 9; 'Cuchulain
Synge, J.M., 117, 235 Comforted', 119; 'Easter, 1916',
35; 'The Man and the Echo',
Taine, H., 2 228; 'Meditations in Time of
Tate, Allen, 17 Civil War', 28, 39, 47;
Thomas, Edward, 36; 'Light Out', 'Municipal Gallery Revisited',
32; 'This is No Case of Petty 87; 'Nineteen Hundred and
Right or Wrong', 41 Nineteen', 28; 'Politics', 94;
Thwaite, Anthony, 30 'Sailing to Byzantium', 42; The
Timmer, B.J., 146 Tower, 123
Tompkins, Jane, 261 Young Ireland, 15 6-9

Seamus Heaney by Michael Allen

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Seamus Heaney by Michael Allen

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Seamus Heaney by Michael Allen

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What books and authors are mentioned?

What books and authors are mentioned?

What publication information is provided?

What publication information is provided?

New Casebooks

EDITED BY MICHAEL ALLEN

St. Martin's Press

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-48684-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division,

First published in the United States of America in 1997

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and

ISBN 978-0-312-16502-4 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

General Editors' Preface X

Introduction: MICHAEL ALLEN 1

20 A Slow North-east Wind: Review of North 25

3o 'Inner Emigre' or 'Artful Voyeur'? Seamus

4o Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold 64

50 Representation in Modern Irish Poetry 78

6o The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review

70 Review of Field Work 102

80 Writing a Bare Wire: Station Island 107

9 0 The Government of the Tongue 129

10. The Sign of the Cross: Review of The Government

11. 'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and

12. 'Bog Queens': The Representation of Women in the

13. Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape,

14. The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney 223

15. Paradigms of Possibility: Seamus Heaney 252

Further Reading 266

I am grateful to a considerable number of people for their help in

21:3 (1980) 77-8, by permission of the author; Seamus Heaney for

For copyright material included in the above essays:

Scott (1968) Penguin Books. Copyright© Czeslaw Milosz and Peter

The purpose of this series of New Casebooks is to reveal some of the

John Peck and Martin Coyle

Four narratives intertwine to provide a context for the materials col-

has been argued into a high place in the canon of Anglophone

criticism is not at all a table of results or a body of judgements: it is

What is interesting about the third essay in this collection, Edna

Nationalist commitment: 'has tribal preordination or ordination

Deane does concede some New Critical points to Longley: the

sense in 1990 of Heaney's capacity to become a representative voice

Nevertheless, Ricks's playful pitting of his own urbane sense of

first of these schools of criticism, as Eagleton was shortly to explain

Corcoran's Faber Student Guide to Heaney: the Student Guides

Quartets the second, but Heaney's deeper purpose is to show us

The contradictions in Heaney's language and discourse are taken

insurgent implications of their postcolonial context. This is why they

Coughlan's indictment here overlaps with Lloyd's but her values

place or time, back, again, anew' - OED) Docherty gives himself

is thus engaging with something which is not historical or geograph-

essays in this collection) to the wntmg of Heaney. He quotes

because his brisk no-nonsense stance lends its own sense of an

15. In Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973).

55. Seep. 186 below.

Growing Up: Review of

Literary gentlemen who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney's

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep