D M David Mathews

Research Scholar

Department of English

Osmania University, Hyderabad

Abstract: 

Northern Ireland has been called one of the most violent regions of this world. The Troubles as they are termed now was a period of heightened tensions and violence beginning in the late 1960s that ‘ended’ with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Seamus Heaney writing from that region has called out the intractable violence that has been a veritable feature of the region. In doing so, the poet recurrently overturns some symbols and metaphors of romantic poetry, most significantly of the nightingales and swallows. In his first poem itself he referenced digging through which he promised his readers that he will dig through his family history, the history of the turbulent region, and of troubles that flared during the 1970s and 80s. The paper then goes on to raise issues on the role of the artist in such a clime, and how to counter violence that seems endemic. He also calls for a middle ground that offers a place for conciliation and peace.

Keywords: Northern Ireland; Seamus Heaney; overturning romantic symbols; role of the artist; countering violence

Introduction

In 1982, some his poems were included in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. To that Heaney wrote a not so flattering rejoinder to them in a poem titled “An Open Letter” (1983): “My anxious muse… has to refuse/ The adjective/ British, no, the name’s not right” (Heaney) [The poem remains an unpublished one in any of his collections]. This is both a rejection of the continuing British suzerainty over Northern Ireland and an assertion of his Irish roots. It is also that, if a poet writes in a certain language, his/her poetry instantly becomes part of its national tradition. Heaney seems to differ. Then again, this is further complicated by the poet choosing to write in English! In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, he commented on the force of his writing in English and not in Irish:

The writing current has to flow in your limbs and joints and the linguistic experiences that threw my switches were in English. What happened subsequently was a process of squaring this experiential fact with the cultural and political pieties I grew up with. There were always those old nationalist tests hovering over you: could you be an Irish writer if you wrote in English? Of course, you could, but you were still faced with that screening process (O’Driscoll 73).

In the significant sequence “Singing School”, the poet writes of this ambivalence, a predicament that did not possess easy answers, but posed several other contradictions: “Ulster was British, but with no rights on/ The English lyric: all around us, though/ We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear” (Heaney Opened Ground 125-126). The poet-persona questions if the region Ulster is indeed British, how come it has no place for the lyric? The people of Ulster seem to be secondary citizens, especially Catholics, rather than a people exercising their free will. The thing that has not been named yet, is the rapid enclosing of Northern Ireland by British paramilitaries, connoting Graham Greene’s work The Ministry of Fear. Perhaps, it could also mean what Michael Parker wrote in his work Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993):

…he came to recognize that the ‘gagging’ in the North within both communities, and the unwillingness to confront and speak out against injustices within his own, had been major factors in the explosion of violence (Parker 2).

Seamus Heaney also has a way of overturning some of the symbols of British romantic poetry. The first lines of his beautiful poem “Serenades” from his fourth collection Wintering Out (1972) are worth quoting: “The Irish nightingale/ Is a sedge-warbler,/ A little bird with a big voice/ Kicking up a racket all night (Heaney Opened Ground 72). Though Heaney says it’s just a serenade, these are serious lines. He’s asserting I’m Irish, I’m a nightingale but no I’m not the nightingale of John Keats who sings of summer, sunburnt mirth, and Bacchus. Not only he is incapable of singing hymns but one who not content with keeping himself awake, kicks up a racket and wakes up others. But, why does he want to kick up a racket? Doesn’t he like Keats nightingale sing drowsy songs and go numb? The poet seems to say a firm no. In the next stanzas of the poem he compares his song to “broken voice of a crow,” (75) the “wheeze of bats,” (75) and the hoarse notes of the corncrakes. Perhaps this is the poet’s way of answering the query as to his work being written in English: ‘yes, I will write in the language of my oppressor but I will overturn and transform its images and symbols.’

The very first of his poems’ “Digging” from his first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) is an illustration of this. In it he promised his readers to use his pen to dig and bring out his family’s history, of his homeland, and of the uneasy relationship between the British and the Irish. He begins with the land because he cannot be a potato planter like his ancestors. He speaks of bogs which reveal the connection of the Irish land to the European continent. In the sixth stanza he says that he carried milk to his father, we find no mention of tea and the leisurely ways of the island that has colonized it. He also makes reference to the violent history of the nation as he says in the very second line, “The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” And in the last line, which is a repetition of the first two-lined stanza, he almost says it as if he is answering a journalist’s question, “The squat pen rests,/ I’ll dig with it” (Heaney Opened Ground 14-15). There is something very important going on here. It is the use of this particular word ‘squat.’ It is of course a sitting position but also means something else in geographical/ territorial sense. It connotes unlawful occupation of land or territory. The squatting is done through unlawful treaties and phony laws, some thing that is registered in “Act of Union.”

In the beginning of the poem the squat pen rests, that is, the English have occupied and not leaving the Irish lands. It is achieved through the British paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies which regularly foment trouble. Now, of course, it can also mean that Heaney intends to use his pen as a gun, that is, to train his words towards the unlawful occupation. But then, to see this in the light of the last line of the poem in which Heaney says, “I’ll dig with it” (14-15). The gun in the first line is juxtaposed with the digging for potatoes and metaphorically to everything Irish. He’ll unearth not just his family’s past but also the often violent struggles as well. Helen Vendler, one of Heaney’s long-time critics offers this view:

This is to conceive of writing as, like war, politics by other means. It is significant that in this – the first poem in his first book – Heaney rejects the concept of writing as aggression and chooses the spade as his final analogue for his pen: the pen will serve as an instrument of exploration and excavation, yielding warmth (like his grandfather’s turf for fires) and nourishment (like his father’s potatoes) (Vendler 28).

Then again, the poet although abjuring the violence of the gun, in a way is transfixed by the power that comes out if it, both the bullet as well as the power to kill or not unkill, even if it is a horse as in the poem “Turpin Song”: “The horse pistol, we called it:/ Brass inlay smooth in the stock,/ Two hammers cocked like lugs” (Heaney Electric Light 18). In another poem he recalls the exhilaration of the “bullet’s song” (Heaney Seeing Things 75) as he fires it “once and only once” (75) in his life, as it jolts the poet into a “new quickened sense” (75).

“Requiem for the Croppies” an elegiac sonnet from his second collection Door into the Dark (1969) but written quite differently from the sonnets of the English mainland. The poem is an elegy for the Irish rebels who died while fighting the British in 1798. They were inspired by the French Revolution demanding an independent Ireland free of the English rule. The croppies refer to the men who cropped their hair close in the style of the French Republican army. This was a style that was against the wig style, considered aristocratic and supportive of the British rule. Heaney describes the people who marched without training and equipment against a regular army. It was more like hiking than an army marching to the battlefield, with their coats full of barley gains rather than with grenades, ammunition or other weapons. Their weapons were scythes, hardly a match to the heavy cannons of the enemy. The “conclave” which Heaney uses is significant. It is not a conclave where people met to discuss important things or even to elect the Pope, but where thousands were ambushed and slaughtered at Vinegar Hill. And then as a way to complete the cycle of the poem, the barley that the men took with them, got buried with them and in August on the land where thousands were buried “without shroud or coffin” (Heaney Opened Ground 34) there grew barley. Linking the Easter Rising of 1916 with the unsuccessful revolt in 1798, as well as the coming storm of the Troubles, Heaney himself commented:

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 (qtd. in Allen 34).

Then he castigates himself for not being part of the rebellion in the fourth poem “Summer 1969” in the series “Singing School.” While the Irish guerilla forces were facing heat from their British counterparts, all Heaney faced is the heat of Madrid. The artist has gone into exile but he cannot fully leave what is happening in his nation. Though he has for companionship James Joyce he can only see and marvel what Goya has painted in his “Shootings of the Third of May.” In this way this poem is an answer to Heaney’s question of the place of the artist in society and more importantly on how they should respond. The poem answers this by affirming the position of Goya. Considered as one of the first paintings of the modern era, the painting “Shootings at the Third of May” depicts a row of soldiers standing with their rifles aiming to shoot down Spanish citizens. The answer through the evocation of the painting of Goya is that… no matter what, it is the responsibility of the artist to portray and document ‘truthfully’ the events that are happening around them, even when they are violent. Lucy McDiarmid argues that this poem might suggest “the possibility that the realm of poetry might be used to oppose the State” (Bloom 43). Thus, Heaney questions himself and provides some answers to the most crucial questions of all… how should an artist respond to violence and civil strife?

“Casualty” offers a much closer view on the question of artists living and writing in a deadened world. The poem is written as an elegy to a family friend of Heaney who was killed in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday of 1972. This friend questions Heaney on what he is writing in his poems. But then the poet is too shy to talk about his own craft and would rather talk to him on anything but poetry. He calls his writing “tentative art” (Heaney Opened Gound 141) as there are no sides to be taken in the conflict: 

We would be on our own

And, always politic

And shy of condescension,

I would manage by some trick

To switch the talk to eels

Or lore of the horse and cart

Or the Provisionals (Heaney Opened Ground 141-142).

“Making Strange” from Station Island (1984) offers a further answer to this nagging question of the artists responsibility and how she/he should respond to things that happen around her/him. Two sides, one of “travelled intelligence” (202) and the other “unshorn and bewildered,” (202) fight for the poet’s voice, but then a third side crops up. This “cunning middle voice” (202) instructs the poet to “be adept and be dialect” (202). In “England’s Difficulty,” the poet imagines himself during war time as German bombs fall on Belfast, forcing him to move “like a double agent” (Heaney Opened Gound 87), as he tries to reach home. The poem ends with the poet-persona crossing checkpoints, uttering secret passwords to make a turn, and congratulating himself. But then, the poet seems to ask why would he have to do all this if he is in his own country?

I lodged with ‘the enemies of Ulster’, the scullions outside the walls. An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody (Heaney Opened Ground 87).

A similar experience is recorded in “The Flight Path” as the sentry questions where he is from, the poet replies that is comes from “far away” (Heaney The Spirit Level 30), the sentry is unaware of that place as he asks “Where’s that?” (30), to that the poet writes in half-mocking tone: “He’d only half-heard what I said and thought/ It was the name of someplace up the country” (30).

Speaking in dialect and a middle voice is the central theme of “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” from his collection North (1975). Why does Heaney would want to give a title like this. At a first reading it looks ironical… how can anyone say something and say nothing. It can mean that someone can speak a lot and still not say anything… that is, talking pointlessly. Does it mean that the poem is pointless? No, on the contrary the title invites us to be more serious about what Heaney is saying in the poem. To go a little deeper, doesn’t the title sound more like an injunction from someone who does not want the speaker to say anything at all… something like a polite way to stop speaking. And then, doesn’t it also mean that the speaker can speak but only on things that are non-controversial. Heaney here interrogates the role of media and almost urges them to provide a fuller and humane narrative rather than writing the usual descriptive phrases like “backlash,” “provisional wing,” and “long-standing hate” (Heaney Opened Ground 121). He questions the language used by the media to denote the conflict by putting these phrases and others in single-inverted quotations. In the third section of the poem, he writes…

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap,

….

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks (Heaney Opened Ground 121-122).

Heaney here writes of the mistrust that dominates the relationship between warring groups. The entire scene is one of a military siege where one has to furnish passwords just to stay alive. Even then they are not sure if they’d live as people’s minds have become traps and anybody could betray anybody. Even with all of this going on Heaney says he’ll sing of this:

Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

I am incapable. The famous

…

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

And Whatever you say, you say nothing (Heaney Opened Ground 121-122). 

He says he is incapable of joining the armed resistance but all he has are words and pen through which he’ll sing of the sacrifices that the Irish have made in their long battle for freedom.

            In “Route 110”, Heaney is anxious on how to express his anguish about the violence in Irish history. It is complicated, nonetheless, but how best to represent something that cannot be easily done. The poem reaches its crescendo in the section IX, as Heaney recounts those that the violence in Northern Ireland has taken away. Among them are his friends, people he knew from pubs, people who have been killed in reprisals, those that British paramilitary gunned down, and those that history forgets to lay them…

In war graves with full honours, nor in a separate plot

Fired over on anniversaries

By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled (Heaney Human Chain 52).

If history has forgotten people who have given their lives in the struggle for self-determination and freedom, the poet attempts to memorialize them in his poem as they “cannot rest in peace but remain restive, like the unburied dead of Virgil’s Limbo, until their loss is duly acknowledged” (O’Brien 41).

            A spirit, perhaps an embodiment of conscience is ever present in his poetry. In “District and Circle” a busker, a fellow artist, nudges him to review his work as a poet, as he travels down the London Underground:

               As the music larked and capered

I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin

Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered

For was our traffic not in recognition?

Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,

And he, still eyeing me, would also nod (Heaney District and Circle 21).

The poet wishes to act like a normal person, acknowledge his music and grant him a coin; but the artist in him plays with the coin in his coat pocket as the other artist concedes access. For a moment the poet-persona wishes to hide his identity, but the busker not only recognizes but also quietly questions him, in spirit. Eugene O’Brien argues that:

…it would be impossible not to read the title poem without thinking of the fallout from the American “war on terror” as visited upon London by the 7/7 bombers who killed fifty people and injured more than seven hundred in the Underground’s District and Circle line in 2005 (O’Brien 196).

While a fellow artist like the busker queries his personhood as a poet, another singer from “The Fragment” interrogates… “Since when,” he asked,/ Are the first line and the last line of any poem/ Where the poem begins and ends?” (Heaney Electric Light 47). In a tribute to Ted Hughes in the collection Seeing Things, he commented “I trust contrariness” (Heaney Seeing Things 15), suggesting that it is through a counter-measuring of differences and dialectics that art can be made as well as lives remade. Gates, gate-keeping, of things coming in and going out is also the central theme of “Field of Vision” as the woman in the wheel chair does not carry even “a spare ounce of emotional weight” (Heaney Seeing Things 24).

Conclusion

            It was inferred from the above discussion that Heaney had not shied away from responding according to his artistic sensibilities to the Troubles and to his nation’s struggle for independence. From his first published poem on, the poet has been acutely aware that he is writing in a language that is learnt. But then, it was also observed that the poet attempts to overturn some symbols and images from English romantic writers, like the sedge-warbler who cannot sing like a nightingale but ‘sings’ in its own way. The poet abjures violence but wishes for a free and independent Irish nation. It was observed that as an artist he is ambivalent about the positions he has to take, but then he favours the stance of Goya, who seems to represent in whatever way he can, the atrocities and deaths. Heaney over the years also favoured a position that he called ‘travelled intelligence’ as well of ‘fork-tongue’ and ‘governing ones tongue’. He favours a representation and writing that takes in all the complex and complicated histories of his nation as well as of the private sphere as well.

Works Cited

Allen, Michael, editor. Seamus Heaney. St Martin’s Press, 1997.

Andrews, Elmer. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper. Macmillan, 1998.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Seamus Heaney. Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Crowder, Ashley Bland and Jason David Hall, editor. Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1966. Faber and Faber, 1998.

—. Death of a Naturalist. Faber & Faber, 1970.

—. District and Circle. Faber & Faber, 2009.

—. Door into the Dark. Faber & Faber, 2013.

—. Electric Light. Faber & Faber, 2010.

—. Human Chain. Faber & Faber, 2010.

—. North: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

—. Seeing Things: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

—. Station Island. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986

—. The Spirit Level. Faber & Faber, 2009.

—. Wintering Out. Faber & Faber, 2011.

O’Brien, Eugene. The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney. University of Notre Dame Press, 2016.

O’Donoghue, Bernard, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

O’Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Faber and Faber, 2009.

Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. University of Iowa Press, 1993.

Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Fontana, 1999.