Abstract
This chapter establishes that local speech in traditional forms of poetry provided a way for Seamus Heaney to convey the restorative aspects of rural life while maintaining his commitment to poetic form. It then illustrates how such speech in poems written at the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles resulted in allegories of political unification that braid different aspects of Northern Irish identity. Heaney would later turn to local speech to confront the Troubles more directly in poems that depict the machinations of such speech in a deteriorating society where people are forced to patrol their words in order to reveal or conceal allegiances. Finally, when murdered victims of political violence speak in his poems, their colloquial monologues confront the risk of aestheticizing the social atrocities they consider.
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Notes
- 1.
The partition of Ireland occurred after the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1922 when twenty-six counties of the island gained independence from Britain as the Irish Free State (eventually becoming what we know today as the Republic of Ireland), and the six remaining counties in the north of the island remained under British rule (creating a separate political entity, “Northern Ireland”). The partition caused a year-long civil war in Ireland between those who supported the Treaty that led to the creation of Northern Ireland and those who did not. The majority of citizens in the six counties were Protestants (with variances; for instance, in Derry the majority was Catholic) who identified as British and wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. However, almost as many people in Northern Ireland were Catholics who identified as Irish. Northern Ireland thus became a deeply divided and dangerously contentious place. One of the effects of such division was institutionalized discrimination in employment and housing against Irish Catholics. What we know today as “the Troubles” began in the late 1960s when student-led demonstrations demanding civil rights for Northern Irish Catholics were met with violence by loyalists and the police force and, eventually, the British army that was originally called in to protect the Catholic community. Heaney succinctly relates the sectarian crisis that began a few years after the publication of his first book (Death of a Naturalist in 1966) to the 1922 partition: “partition created crisis. It kept the Protestant majority out of Ireland’s Ireland every bit as effectively as it kept the Catholic minority within Britain’s” (Redress 198). The Troubles have lasted for over thirty years, with the worst violence occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1998, the “Good Friday Agreement … put in place wide-ranging strategies of accommodation between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between Ireland and Britain. In 1999 a devolved assembly was formed in Stormont, only to be revoked in 2000 when agreement could not be reached on the decommissioning of weapons. In 2007 a new devolved assembly was established involving power-sharing between Sinn Fein and Dr. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party” (“Northern Ireland”).
- 2.
The Listener was a weekly magazine established by the British Broadcasting Corporation that covered literature and politics. It ran from 1929 to 1991.
- 3.
Longley lays out some of the reasons why he and his contemporaries were especially tentative about writing poems in response to the Troubles:
We believed that poetry, the opposite of propaganda, should encourage people to think and feel for themselves: it should appeal to their “generous instinct,” as [Louis] MacNeice said in the violent 1930s. We hated what we came to call “Troubles trash.” We believed that, even when generated by the best of intentions, bad poetry about the sufferings of fellow citizens would be an impertinence; as part of an agenda it would be a blasphemy. We disliked the notion that civic unrest might be good for poetry, and poetry a solace for the broken-hearted. We were none of us in the front line (“Songs”).
- 4.
The Peace Process began with the Good Friday Agreement, ratified in May 1998. It ended the war in the mid-1990s via power-sharing between the two communities. It did not, as Peter Geoghegan explains, end the “structural sectarianism of that society” (xi).
- 5.
Longley has often contrasted the poet’s impulse to write about the Troubles to the sometimes opportunistic and reductive intentions of journalism: “From the beginning my poet-friends and I resisted the temptation to hitch a ride on yesterday’s headlines, to write the poem of the latest atrocity” (“Songs”). For an analysis of the poet-journalist divide in the context of Northern Irish poetry about the Troubles, see Suhr-Sytsma’s chapter, “Publishing the Troubles” (162–95). Suhr-Sytsma notes, “University-educated poets in the postwar years imagined journalism as the opposite of literature” (163).
- 6.
The Yeats quote is “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (285). It is from his essay “Anima Hominis” published in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918).
- 7.
These are the poems: “Oysters,” “The Singer’s House,” the ninth “Glanmore Sonnet,” “An Afterwards,” “Song.” The letter—in the Heaney archive at Emory University’s Rose Library—is addressed only to “Ramon.”
- 8.
Helen Vendler’s 1995 monograph on Heaney has sections titled “Archaeologies” and “Anthropologies.” Heaney’s fifty-year body of work has been thoroughly studied by scholars ever since Blake Morrison in 1982 issued the first Heaney monograph. Other works of Heaney criticism that examine Heaney’s language in relation to culture and history include two classic studies, Bernard O’Donoghue’s Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994) and Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1989). In 2009, Bernard O’Donoghue summarized the extensiveness of the scholarly output: “By now the number of specializing books on Heaney is too large to itemize because it is likely to be out of date as soon as it is published. For example there are at least sixteen books whose title is simply Seamus Heaney” (Cambridge 2). According to O’Donoghue, such critical attention on a single contemporary poet is unparalleled: “no other current poet [has been] nearly as much written about as Heaney.” Since 2009, there have been book-length studies on Heaney’s prosody (Hall), on his prose about other poets (Cavanagh), on his readings of and relations to Eastern European poets (Kay), on his poetic conceptions of local, political, and spiritual “regions” (Russell), on his persistent consideration of the socially “adequate” poem in his own critical writings on poetics (Dennison), on the European-inflected “aesthetic thinking” of his prose (O’Brien), on the function of memory in his later work (Piavanini), on the ways Heaney’s work in education, journalism, and broadcasting informed his poetry, as well as the ways his poetry was made available in newspapers, on recorded programs, and in annotated drafts at major archival libraries (Lavan), and on his relation to American poetry (Laverty).
- 9.
Quotations from Heaney’s poems are from his individual volumes. I indicate the volume and inclusive page numbers the first time a poem is quoted and then proceed without page citations for short poems and with page citations for longer poems.
- 10.
A televised BBC Northern Ireland special on Heaney shows a montage of Heaney reading “Digging” in the way I describe.
- 11.
The place-name poems from Wintering Out include “Anahorish,” “Gifts of Rain,” “Toome,” and “Broagh.” Lavan reveals that “Anahorish,” “Toome,” and “Broagh” were initially presented as a sequence: “Heaney gathered three poems, ‘Anahorish,’ ‘Toome,’ and ‘Broagh,’ all subsequently published independently in Wintering Out, under the title ‘Watermarks’ for inclusion in the journal Stand in July 1972, and manuscript drafts suggest that he may also have considered the title ‘Folk Musics’ for this sequence of place-name poems” (42).
- 12.
Heaney spells the form “dinnseanchas” (see his essay “The Sense of Place” in Preoccupations 131–49). The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, whose definition I cite, spells it “dinnshenchas.” Robert Welch, editor of that Companion, uses the spelling “dindshenchas” in his recent study of Irish literary history, The Cold of May Day Monday (2014).
- 13.
Deibidhe is an Irish-language poetic “form which rhymes monosyllables with the unstressed syllable of a two-syllabled word” (O’Donoghue, Language 18). Rob Jackaman explains that it is an especially difficult form to bring into English because its seven-syllable structures “are generally unfamiliar in English prosody” (162). Heaney uses the form, for example, in the sixth section of Sweeney Astray, his version of the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne (McCarthy 20).
- 14.
The last three stanzas of “Broagh” constitute one rhythmic sentence that makes use of assonance, consonance, and alliteration, countering the blunt sound of the last two lines. Richard Russell points out the prevalence of assonantal o sounds, both long and short, throughout the poem: we hear “broad,” “ford,” “mould,” “O,” “Broagh,” “boortrees,” and “tattoo,” as well as “docken,” “canopied,” “down,” “shower” and “found” (Poetry and Peace 205). Such instances of assonance occur amid the alliteration and consonance of “docken” and “down,” “canopied” and “pad,” and “black,” “Broagh,” “boortrees” and “rhubarb-blades.” Russell hears the poem rendering the uncommon gh sound in the wind that “ended almost suddenly”: “the ‘low tattoo’ of the uttered ‘Broagh’ that sings in the ‘boortrees’ in stanza 3 abruptly stops in stanza 4” (205). For him, that sonorous, sudden stopping of wind gives way to the last line’s “fricative ‘difficult’ and the harsh ‘a’ sounds of ‘manage’” (205).” Russell thus concludes that the poem reproduces the difficulty that strangers experience when trying to say the word “Broagh”: “The effect on the reader is jarring, and he is forced to literally reshape the sounds issuing from his mouth, echoing the difficulty of the ‘strangers’ (presumably English) in uttering ‘Broagh’” (205).
- 15.
Not all of the bog poems come from Glob’s images. For instance, “Bog Queen” is not based on a photo, nor was this “Queen” a Scandinavian or Germanic victim of tribal violence: “There’s no photo of the ‘bog queen,’ only a quotation about a body being found on Lord Moira’s estate in the late eighteenth century” (Stepping Stones 158). The speaker is, however, a victim of violent natural processes—“the seeps of winter/digested me”—and daily life in rural Ireland: “I was barbered/and stripped/by a turfcutter’s spade.” In her essay “Bog Queens,” Patricia Coughlan argues that Heaney is unable to construct autonomous, empowered feminine figures; they are always subordinated to his male ego, or rather, to his spade/pen: “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” (186).
- 16.
Vendler has pointed out that “Bog Queen” is indebted both to English and Irish traditions: the poem is a blazon, but it is also a “renovation of the aisling poem (a poem envisaging the nation as a maiden appearing to the poet)” (Heaney 46–47).
- 17.
All drafts of “Fosterage” are from the Seamus Heaney Collection at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University. There are ten pages of drafts in one folder. I cite this first instance of quoted material then proceed without in-text citations. For a comprehensive description and analysis of the drafts, see Allison.
- 18.
“Whatever You Say Say Nothing” was first published in a different version under the headline, “Seamus Heaney gives his views on the Irish thing” in the October 14, 1971 edition of The Listener. In Chapter Four of his book, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (2017), Suhr-Sytsma reads this poem that begins by referring to journalistic references to the Troubles in relation to the poem’s appearance in the pages of a journalistic periodical distributed to a public much larger than that usually afforded for poetry. This earlier version identified the location of the graffiti in the last section as appearing “on a wall down town,” a line later changed to “in Ballymurphy” for the poem’s final version published in North. Lavan notes that the former phrasing is “self-consciously American English, part of the linguistic legacy of his year away at Berkeley. ‘Ballymurphy’ signals with precision the return to Belfast” (40). Indeed, Heaney was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1970–71 academic year. Lavan provides an overview of the unpublished drafts of the poem, examining how Heaney’s diction in early versions of the poem reflects a “Californian colloquialism” (59).
- 19.
These lines in which Heaney employs the very colloquialisms he critiques and in which he ponders rhyming “pangs” and “bangs” are from the poem’s second section. Though “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” is one of his most famous poems, Heaney apparently felt compelled to hold his tongue while making editorial decisions for Opened Ground, his large selected poems. The second section is not included in that book, nor is it included in his earlier Selected Poems.
- 20.
“Station Island” is a twelve-poem sequence modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy that depicts a pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg. Corcoran explains that 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” (159). Along the way, the narrator encounters a number of ghosts of “the type Dante meets in the Purgatorio,” including an Irish traveler, the Irish novelist William Carleton, Patrick Cavanagh, a young priest, a Northern Irish hunger striker, and James Joyce. The sequence comprises the second part of the book Station Island.
- 21.
The poem tells the story of William Strathearn, whom Heaney knew as a young man. Strathearn was “a Catholic murdered in his general store in Ahoghill, County Antrim, on April 19, 1977 by two loyalist paramilitary members, supported by two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the latter two later being convicted of the killing” (Russell, Introduction 117).
- 22.
Terza rima is “an Italian stanzaic form, used most notably by Dante Alighieri in Commedia (The Divine Comedy), consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes (ABA BCB DED EFE, and so on). A concluding couplet rhymes with the penultimate line of the last tercet” (“Terza Rima,” Poetry Foundation). The form formally establishes “interconnectedness” with its interlocking rhymes that “provide a reassuring structure of woven continuity” (“Terza Rima,” Princeton 1423).
- 23.
Russell explains that terza rima “replaced Heaney’s formerly favored quatrain as the poet’s dominant form from the mid-1980s onward, even though he wrote occasionally in tercets after the early 1960s” (Regions 241). Russell provides an overview of Heaney’s different uses of the form throughout his career (248–56).
- 24.
Heaney’s reference to trying to “say what happened” recalls Robert Lowell’s famous phrase in his poem “Epilogue,” where Lowell ponders whether his poems should be entirely imagined, foregoing autobiographical detail, especially when “All’s misalliance.” He comes out on the side of reality when he asks, rhetorically, “Yet why not say what happened?” (836).
- 25.
Cavanagh, Fumagalli, Heininger, O’Brien, Ross, and Russell have examined extensively the influence of Dante on Heaney. Cavanagh hails section “VII” as “one of Heaney’s greatest poetic accomplishments” (164). He identifies characteristics that set it apart from Dante. Fumagalli provides a close examination of the relation between Dante and Heaney (and Derek Walcott) but only refers to section “VII” briefly in a summary of the “Station Island” sequence. Russell examines the poem’s technical modulation of the terza rima form (Regions 263–65).
In his essay “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Heaney discusses Dante’s importance to modern poetry in general and the very nature of literary influence: “when poets turn to the great masters, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures” (5). Heaney proceeds here to critique T. S. Eliot’s rendering of Dante in the second section of “Little Gidding” because Eliot divests Dante’s language of its “parochial element”: “when he makes Dante’s confident and classically ratified language bear an almost allegorical force, he does less than justice to the untamed and thoroughly parochial elements which it possesses. To listen to Eliot, one would almost be led to forget that Dante’s great literary contribution was to write in the vernacular and thereby to give the usual language its head” (12).
- 26.
Neil Corcoran and Bernard O’Donoghue have opposing views of the language of section “VII”: Corcoran calls it “heavy handed” and “stilted,” in part because of Heaney’s use of contractions like “you have” and “it is” rather than “you’ve” and “it’s” (124), while O’Donoghue says “the language of the exchange is not rhetorically recast in the poem, but occurs unprocessed” (Language 93). Russell says the poem combines formal and informal cadences: there are, he points out, elided colloquial constructions apropos of dialogue but also contractions that indicate a kind of anxious unnaturalness due to the intense and malevolent circumstances (Regions 264).
- 27.
Cavanagh identifies connections between details in Heaney’s narrative and Dante’s: “Strathearn is deliberately modeled on Inferno III’s Manfredi, the excommunicated Ghibelline hero killed fighting the papacy three years before Dante was born. Dante describes Manfredi as ‘fair haired and beautiful and of noble appearance, but one of his eyebrows had been severed by a blow’” (164).
- 28.
Russell distinguishes Heaney’s use of the form’s rhyme scheme from both Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s in the second section of “Little Gidding,” observing that “Heaney maintains, by use of some pararhyme, a chiming of the first and third lines in each tercet throughout, although he does not use the rhyme of his initial second line to begin the rhyme of his second stanza as normal terza rima would do. … Therefore, Heaney establishes a new alternating rhyme scheme in each successive tercet in this particular section that departs from the hurtling rhyme scheme of true Dantean terza rima but certainly is far from Eliot’s general lack of any rhyme in that famous section of ‘Little Gidding’” (Regions 265).
- 29.
Heaney’s professional obligations as a poet caused him to miss his cousin’s wake. He was attending Kilkenny Arts Week at Jerpoint Abbey to introduce Robert Lowell when the murder happened. Because he did not know his cousin well (McCartney was a son of Heaney’s father’s cousin, so he would have been a rather distant relative), and because he would have been represented by family who were in Bellaghy, Heaney didn’t feel compelled to abandon his duties in order to attend the funeral. Still, he felt considerable compunction about that decision: “the circumstances of his death were so brutal you couldn’t not feel that your presence was called for, in protest as much as in sympathy” (Stepping Stones 220).
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Fogarty, W. (2022). Troubled Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political Poetics of Speech. In: The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7_2
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