Remember Everything: Things Past in Station Island

Abstract

‘Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps’, we are informed by ‘The First Kingdom’, five poems into the first third of Station Island (1984).³ The primary reference here is to the attitudes and habits of the country people among whom Seamus Heaney grew up in Derry,⁴ and this vision of the past is characteristic of the newly cold eye evident in the ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ section of the book. The backward rote might even be a more general problem. R. F. Foster records a flight of fancy entertained by A. E. in 1914, in which a book of Irish history, steadily improving through the centuries, turns out to have been bound backwards.⁵ At least that book was encouraging while it lasted. In a glummer view, what the past has to show is mourning and misery, defeat and betrayal, wrongs to be remembered, Stephen Dedalus’s ‘tale like any other too often heard’.⁶ A good deal of Heaney’s work entertains such a relation to the past, imagining it as dead weight, buried guilt or vice versa. In this essay, however, I want to explore some of the other figurations of the past in Station Island.

Nor can one readily say what decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist. (W. G. Sebald¹)

I travelled to a mystical time-zone (Morrissey²)