poetry appreciation by Seamus Heaney

District and Circle

A sequence of 5 sonnets bears the title Heaney chose for the collection as a volume, after long consideration of alternatives. The poems are based on his memories of early-days’ vacation work in London, tempered by subsequent terrorist attacks on London transport. Heaney weaves mythological images of the underworld into the corridors and levels of the London ‘tube’. Michael Schneider suggests that ‘unless you know he’s referring to the Edgeware Road station, where the District and Circle lines converge, site of 2005 terrorist bombs, you miss much of the resonance of a poem in which death is a ghostly presence’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 08, 2006 Heaney recalled to DOD that he ‘removed 2 sonnets from the ‘Tollund Man’ sequence […]

Wordsworth’s Skates

Heaney responds to an exhibit once worn by a celebrated Romantic poet in a piece about celebrity, professional respect and legacy. It offers insights into the poetic process. On a visit to Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage near Grasmere the British Lake District, Heaney latches onto a literal and metaphorical star in the window. His initial idea takes on poetic a poetic charge that will lift Wordsworth beyond the reach of gravity As he studies the exhibit he allows the external sounds he hears (Slate scrape. Bird or branch?) to act as a stepping-stone to an ice-bound Lake District around 1800 and the sounds of sharp blades cutting into the smooth, frozen Lakeland surface (the whet and scud of steel on […]

The Harrow-Pin

In this first of three ‘workshop’ poems Heaney paints the character portrait of local blacksmith, Barney Devlin of ‘Midnight Anvil’, recalling his uncompromising finger-wagging insistence on high moral standards amongst the rural children who frequented his workshop … and we believed him. Barney is issuing the ‘old’ warning that Santa Claus only visits good children – the naughty ones will get only an inedible vegetable (old kale stick) – his short-lived spoken reprimand (admonition) compares with the enduring solidity of the harrow-pin he is producing, a symbol of ‘real’ chastisement if ever there was one: correction’s veriest unit.. The pin’s qualities are listed: blacksmith-produced, a head-banged spike with the sharpness of a tooth (forged fang); a pin resembling a […]

Poet to Blacksmith

In search of perfection – Heaney offers his version of an 18th century Irish list of ‘instructions’ given by an agricultural labourer to his ‘spade-maker’ in the confidence that the latter can engineer the bespoke tool he requires to become a champion at what he does: a side-arm to take on the earth. The spade must meet the following criteria: fit-for-purpose (suitable for digging and grubbing), comfortable in his grip (right for the hand); when taking a break (pleasant to lean on); aesthetically pleasing (tastily finished); of flawless appearance (no trace of the hammer); with the necessary elastic qualities of purchase and spring that save it from snapping; perfectly engineered where wood meets metal: The shaft to be socketed in […]

Midnight Anvil

Heaney is reminded of the last seconds of December 31st, 1999 when local blacksmith, Barney Devlin, already in his eighties, struck twelve hammer-blows on his anvil for the millennium. In an article Heaney described this moment as a ‘strike’ similar to the 9/11 ‘strike’ in that both ‘strikes, the latter a hostile act, the former celebratory, acted as ‘tuning-forks’ for poems’. What starts as a remembered happening becomes an elegiac tribute to blacksmiths over history. Heaney reveals he was not actually present in the smithy on that New Year’s Eve yet can celebrate the resonance of the moment (I can still hear it). Modern technology permitted Devlin’s nephew 8000 miles away in Canada to share the happening (the cellular phone […]

Súgán

Heaney describes an age-old process, its material and its product. A parallel is suggested: the composition of a poem is as complex and demanding of energy, skill and commitment as the practice being described. In Ireland súgán is a kind of straw rope with a variety of uses from farmyard twine to furniture seating. Heaney’s poem follows the traditional twining method. The poet himself, working on the family farm is fully engaged in the process. The jumble of soft raw material is set in a series of sibilants (the fluster of that soft supply) and the gentle dexterity required to unravel it velar plosives (coax () it from the ruck) and feed it into the twining machine. Heaney uses […]

Senior Infants

A short sequence in poetry and prose recalling characters from Primary schooldays (before the age of reason) … a poet and his contemporaries, once infants now of senior age, and the different life-styles they were exposed to. The Sally Rod Heaney bumps into a Primary school class-mate in the street, larger than life, grown senior, jovial, affectionate. A particular memory floods back, exaggerated by time – of physical punishment suffered once upon a winter’s day (a reworked standard fairy-tale opening ‘Once upon a time…’ from the lost domain of childhood). A primary school teacher Miss Walls, out of control (lost her head) administering frenzied physical punishment (cut the legs off us) in retribution for no more than a laddish ‘crime’ […]

The Nod

A disturbing sonnet set in Heaney’s adolescence pursues the themes of suspicion and hidden threat, reflects on the implications of being ‘recognised’ when a community is unstable and requires an armed police reserve presence … and asks who exactly one’s ‘neighbour’ is. A slight inclination of the head, ostensibly one of unspoken recognition, is not always what it seems. The poem recalls uncomfortable sectarian moments akin to the final piece of Senior Infants. Routine meat shopping for Sunday lunch (we would stand in line) with his father in a Saturday evening queue of folk with similar aims in mind. Young Heaney was struck by the vivid colours: red for the meat, white string and standard brown-paper ripped from a roll […]

The Clip

In a touching sonnet that reveals much about the poet’s own sensitive, observant and imaginative nature Heaney outlines a feature of rural Irish community life, describing his first barber shop situated in the tiny home of a villager (Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney house) where Harry practises his trade and lives his private life (with its settle bed). The villagers refer to the hair-cut by its colloquial title – ‘a clip’. Heaney’s memories of the experience are rich in sense data: what he could not see he could feel and hear (cold smooth creeping steel and snicky scissors); what he could see (the strong-armed chair) held him firmly in its grip. The protective cloth placed around his neck spurred his fertile […]

Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road

Once upon a time, the ghost of an iconic WW1 poet made an appearance on a road familiar to the poet conjuring up the ghosts of other WW2 survivors. Heaney describes the place, the event and the supporting cast in some detail. Heaney provides a dramatic continuo sound effect of approaching footsteps … an incoming ‘presence’ as yet unseen: a step on the grass-crowned road, footsteps with purpose echoing the whip of daisy-heads on the toes of boots. However the stage is not yet prepared for his entrance … a man and woman in their lovers’ hide-away are engaged in passionate but amateur sexual foreplay (fully clothed, strong-arming each other); they hear, sense they are intruders and are minded to […]

Found Prose

3 prose-poems celebrate places, people and routine events of school-aged boyhood. Freedom from the particular demands poetry imposes of its creator leaves us with a sense of Heaney-unplugged speaking from the heart. The Lagans Road Heaney walks the iconic road already featured in the Edward Thomas poem towards to a rite of passage – his first day at Primary School – destined to open up a host of new experiences and sense data and set him on the road ultimately to successful independence. Heaney is an excellent landscape-painter in words, providing detail that both he and the attentive reader can envision: the physical road, the characteristically poorly maintained, infrequently used country road; the bog-side situation and its flora … in […]

The Lift

A touching, much admired poem, filled with the poet’s warm humanity for individuals and groups in memoriam; the piece follows Heaney’s sister Ann’s coffin on its final journey to the graveyard. Ann passed away in 2002. Paradoxically spring is showing signs of life (first green braird) at the very moment a cherished sister is being laid to rest. Her funeral procession is well attended by the local community (filled the road). Heaney makes a link between the close-knit folk of mid-Ulster and images of the ritual burial processions of rural Brittany (Breton pardon) with the well-ordered formality (remote familiar women and men in caps walking four abreast) he associates with Celtic/ Catholic tradition. The drumming reverberations of post-Troubles Northern Ireland […]

Nonce Words

Heaney coins expressions to toast a particular moment on an undated drive west during the pre-Christmas period. At its simplest, the piece urges celebration of being alive, of ’the time being’, the ‘to-be-going-on-with’. In a collection that hints at metaphysical issues, bringing us face to face with ‘Mick Joyce in Heaven’, with the otherworldliness of ‘George Seferis in the Underworld’ and Dantesque references to the underworld tunnels of the London Tube, Nonce Words seats us next to an ageing poet at the wheel of his car overriding mortality concerns to savour the privilege of just being there. Heaney is growing older and he knows it … a senior moment has brought about memory lapse: a missed turning, an alternative route. […]

Stern

Dedicated to the memory of Ted Hughes, the piece is concerned with two poets: their differing backgrounds, personalities and cultures, the respect felt, the reverence generated, the tributes due. Heaney acknowledges the ‘electrifying’ effect Hughes ’ work had on him, knows well his humble background, his modest fortune, his unfortunate private life and his dourness of personality. Heaney teases with his title: beyond the obvious reference to a boat’s rear end, ‘stern’ might also describe Hughes’ earthy dourness. Finally deliberately or otherwise the title contains the sonic echo of Eliot’s ‘middle’ name Stearns; Heaney has posed a question to Hughes about the time he met T.S. Eliot. Heaney quotes Hughes’ actual response (DOD p.406): like standing on a quay watching […]

Out of This World

A sequence in memory of Czeslaw Milosz using an adjectival title that offers a variety of suggestion: no longer alive; not of this world, somewhere else; extraordinary. Each poem in the sequence talks of issues and experiences that in one sense or another are beyond the material world. The dedication confirms Heaney’s admiration of Milosz, an Eastern European poet (1911-2004), Polish speaking, of Lithuanian origin, who lived through successive periods of political turbulence from the Russian Revolution onwards and via Communism, Nazism, The Cold War and Iron Curtain to Polish Independence from the Russian Federation. He was Nobel Prize-Winner for Literature in 1980, twenty years after moving to the USA where he was at once diplomat, scholar, translator and professor […]

In Iowa

The first of three poems alluding to the threats posed by climate-change – the piece recalls a moment from Heaney’s visit to Mennonite country in Iowa. His powers of observation, memory and recall resurrect a scene and a moment in compelling detail. His store of local and biblical references adds a decidedly Mennonite dimension and contributes to his growing conviction that the world is under threat. Stranded in a snowstorm beyond any sign of human presence in Iowa once, among the Mennonites and freed from the ordeal of driving (conveyed all afternoon) Heaney could concentrate on what was rubbing off on him: the sheer volume of snow (slathering – an ingenious sonic porte-manteau, perhaps conveying both the liquidity of ‘slaver’ […]

Hōfn

The omens and warnings of Anything Can Happen and In Iowa ensure that the mere mention of natural phenomena in decline awakens fear of global threat. The first-person speaker recounts a personal experience flying above the massive glacier behind the town of Hōfn in south-east Iceland. Heaney toured Iceland in 2004 with piper Liam O’Flynn on a joint poetry/ music venture; en route to their next destination Heaney overflew ‘ this stony grey scar of ice …we learned that the ice is actually melting. As a ‘child of earth’ I’ve rarely felt more exposed’ (DOD p.411) Heaney writes his headline: an ice mass of huge magnitude is thawing: The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt. The Icelanders foresee a […]

On the Spot

The coldness of death prompts huge questions. The speaker has unearthed evidence of the failure of birds to reproduce. The sonnet moves from a tiny though significant example of biological death, decay and decline to global even universal laws of physics that hold matter in its planetary stand-off. Here is an example of Heaney’s subtle use of title: merely ‘being present where it happened’ is injected with the urgency suggested by ‘immediate, here and now’ and feelings of discomfort when one is or should be ‘put on the spot’. On an early-morning walk Heaney has unearthed a cold clutch of last year’s bird- eggs, a nestful, all but hidden and preserved intact by last year’s leaf-mould. To a country […]

The Tollund Man in Springtime

Heaney reintroduces his iron-age hero, whose sacrificially murdered body had been miraculously preserved in a Jutland peat-bog since the 4th century BC, recovered in 1950 and exhibited in Silkeborg, Denmark. Interestingly Heaney has used a similar device in Sweeney Redevivus (Station Island Part 3) where he joins forces with Sweeney, a legendary, exiled Irish king endowed with the gift of flight, takes a bird’s-eye-view of the landscape below and reacts to what he finds. This sequence might equally be entitled ‘Tollund Man Redevivus’. Heaney first introduced Tollund Man in ‘Wintering Out’ of 1972. In a newspaper article of April, 2006, he talked about his re-appearance: ‘He came again to remind me that lyric poetry was OK … I love the […]

Moyulla

Heaney referred to ‘Moyulla’ as ‘a praise poem but it’s keenly aware of ‘green’ issues; and to a degree, its drift is also political’. ‘Moyulla is about a polluted river, but there’s a river nymph on the scene too aswim in the words and the water. There’s erotic glee as well as ecological gloom’… ‘I wanted to darken the vowel from “oya” to “ulla “ to suggest a darkening of the ecological climate’. The river had become polluted from the ‘release of poisoned water from the flax dams years ago’ along with ‘agricultural waste’ (DOD 406) The 4-poem sequence contrasts ecological decline with primordial purity, provides evidence of pollution and offers a host of female symbols … its final images […]

Planting the alder

The sonnet celebrates a tree that flourished in the riverbank landscape of Heaney’s upbringing. Alders abounded along the banks of the Moyola. The poet tacks on an appeal for everyone to plant a tree to help the environment. Heaney takes on the challenge of describing colours and textures in a lyrical version of what might be found in a botanical handbook of trees, citing compelling reasons for planting the alder and raising a glass to each of the qualities in turn. For the alder’s high-class heraldic bark of dulled argent alternating with white striations (pigeon collared). For its leaves as they inter-react with rain drops: acting as a sound-board (splitter-splatter), disposing of the downfall (guttering ), not taking the relationship […]

Tate’s Avenue

Shared rugs are emblematic of a long partnership that after forty years has lost none of its physical chemistry! Discussing the erotic in District and Circle with DOD (p 406) Heaney indicated (with tongue in cheek, no doubt) that it was present in this piece ‘in an abstinent kind of way’- there was something in the air but nothing came of it. The poem take us to Tate’s Avenue, an address in Belfast via two stanzas devoted to rugs from other occasions and not the particular one he wishes to concentrate on. The first was a brown and fawn car rug, spread out by the sea but very much earth-bound (breathing land-breaths) and dating from the chaste period (vestal folds) […]

A Hagging Match

In a love poem sequel to Tate’s Avenue Heaney demonstrates how to say ‘I’m stuck on you’ in twenty words. Let us imagine that the Heaneys are in Glanmore on an autumn afternoon – one of them is thinking ahead to winter and the comfort of an open fire; the other is at his work-desk, composing the poem that is taking shape in his head as he follows the sounds of physical labour. There are two protagonists (ostensibly anonymous but we know darned well who they are!), an I and a you – a ‘match’ is possible in all its senses. What the poet hears but cannot see conjures up associations in the poetic mind: the familiar sounds of axe […]

Fiddleheads

A different angle on the ‘erotic’, not the ‘wood nymph’ presence in Moyulla or the more overt sexuality of Tate’s Avenue, rather a memory of sensual pleasure-on-a-plate. This short prose-poem is designed to bring a smile to the lips of a Japanese friend. In a surprise choice, Heaney selects fiddlehead ferns, a culinary delicacy not to be found just anywhere, as a foodstuff that gave him a thrill. He offers them in response to a Japanese friend’s expressed literary taste for the erotic and his suggestion that there was not enough of it in poetry. In a neat tongue-in-cheek, Heaney serves up an erotic dish Toraiwa would not have had in mind – fiddlehead ferns, sexy in the way they […]

To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff

Following the taste of ‘Fiddleheads’ that Heaney defined as ‘erotic’ in a piece to a Japanese friend he provides a further moment of uncontrolled pleasure – something exquisite that came from something markedly unlovely. Heaney had received a gift from a local acquaintance: crab-apple jelly from a tree he can locate at Duff’s Corner and, for all he knows, still grows there. The produce was little short of miraculous (I never once saw crab apples on the tree). Heaney provides the crab-apple tree with an unflattering ‘reference’ – perverse of nature (contrary), showing little sign of fertility (unflowery), standing out like an implement used to scare off flies (sky whisk) or a rough brush (bristle), a haphazard criss-cross profile […]