The Conway Stewart

In the foyer of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, an arts and literary centre dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, located in Bellaghy close to where the poet was born and brought up, a prominent display case contains a Conway Stewart pen, possibly the same heirloom that his parents gave him as an 11 year old, though his widow, Marie Heaney, is ‘not quite sure’.

It was not uncommon for 1950s’ parents to offer children a gift to celebrate some important success, here passing the entrance examination to St Columb’s College in Derry and entering Secondary education as a boarder.

Four quatrains are devoted to a comprehensive, in-depth consideration of what would have been an expensive object. So authentic are the markings he describes that Heaney might well be looking at the very pen of 60 years earlier: the medium point for smooth script; its 14 carat gold nib and three gold bands that breathe out ‘luxury item’; the Conway Stewart image – pocket clasp so as not to lose it, engineered screw-top, branded colourings (mottled) and broad, rounded end (spatulate).

The pen-gun of ‘Digging’ makes a re-appearance – young Heaney’s Conway Stewart carried barrel and pump-action lever (akin those of a shotgun). It required to be manually loaded and they were shown how – first as if to please it (treated) by assuaging its thirst (first deep snorkel in a newly opened ink bottle). The process was not a clean one: ink might run smoothly (guttery) or emerge in thick clots (snottery); it needed patience (letting it rest then at an angle) as the vacuum of its inner rubber reservoir took ink in (ingest).

The mood music changes from business-like to emotional: the final six lines set out the poem’s deeper intent – the emblematic pen purchase and the technical process capture (together) then deflect (away) parents and son from a moment of severance (our parting), imminent (due that evening)

However, following St Columb’s pastoral routines for new boarders the Conway Stewart would be put to immediate use (next day’s first letter home) in best writing (longhand) delivering a filial exile’s love (‘Dear’ to them).

  • Seamus Heaney HomePlace was opened by the Heaney family on September 29th 2016;
  • Conway Stewart ranges are still in production and aimed at the luxury end of the market. They vary little in design and branding from the vintage heirloom Heaney is describing here;
  • medium: reference to nib choice from broad, medium and fine to italic;
  • 14-carat: reference to gold content; such nibs were tipped with harder metals but gave a luxury feel;
  • clip-on: with a short flexible clasp that would secure it in a blazer pocket;
  • screw-top: cap that is unscrewed rather than twisted off or pulled apart
  • barrel: central cylinder;
  • spatulate: with a broad, rounded end;
  • mottled: marked with spots or smears of different shades of colour;
  • pump-action: using pressure and vacuum to operate;
  • snorkel: use of a rubber tube connected to fluid;
  • gutter: flow steadily;
  • snot: slimy, thick suggestive of nasal mucus;
  • ingest: take a substance in;
  • longhand: handwriting, script;
  • 6 tercets of free verse; lines of varying length (from I to 10 syllables) and emphasis; the stressed monosyllable ‘Dear’; the whole piece in a single sentence;
  • 4 tercets refer in close detail to the purchase of an object and its maintenance; 6 lines reflect a much deeper emotional plane;
  • the pen is both metaphor ( personification ofingest) and essential schoolboy tool;
  • Heaney selects spatulateto describe the internal workings of the fountain-pen: its  external hinged lever operating a flat internal blade creates a vacuum in the rubber ink-bag so that it draws in the fluid when released;
  • alliteration: guttery, snottery: imaginatively used if not newly invented words, the former a clever concoction of like-sounding words e.g. ‘gutter’ and ‘guttural’ mimicking the throaty sucking sound made by the pen-filling process; the latter describing how ink might flood and collect at the end of the pen-nib, like a mucous ‘dewdrop’ on the tip of the nose;
  • further swimming image: snorkel;
  • Heaney’s treat (his present) is itself given a treat(something special), namely ink;
  • contradictory adverbs describe the delicate emotional position: together and away
  • loose rhyme: snorkel/ bottle; assonance: away next day;
  • The statement of poetic intent in the very first poem of Heaney’s first published anthology, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ of 1966 and its associated metaphors resurface in ‘The Conway Stewart:

Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests, snug as a gun… I’ll dig with it

The theme will find its echo in the collection’s later pieces dedicated to the earliest Irish scholar/ scribes, for example Colum Cille Cecinit where the scribe asserts ‘‘my hand is cramped from pen work’’.

  • … In ‘Digging’ the pen is what Heaney will dig with, and in “The Conway Stewart”, the pen still means poetry. In its shoring of the fragments against ruin, poetry prepares for severance and yet maintains attachments; it looks at life and gets ready for death Nick Laird in The Telegraph of 02 Sep 2010;
  • The shopkeeper demonstrates how to fill it, “Treating it to its first deep snorkel/ In a newly-opened ink-bottle” – and immediately we are in the liquid, mysterious, many-layered, freely metaphorical world of Heaney’s imagination. Such a transformation entails a cost: the pen’s first official task in Heaney’s hands is to write a letter home, so that in effect he signs the warrant for his own exile Sean O’Brien  in The Independent of Friday, 3 September 2010.
  • Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
  • the music of the poem: eleven assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
  • syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]

  • alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
  • a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;

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