Abstract
At the core of Heaney’s fifth collection, Field Work, is a sequence of sonnets and lyrics celebrating his wife, Marie, and their home, the cottage at Glanmore. The experience of living together there — as husband, father, poet — was the ‘makings of my adult self, he has said, an experience which left him renewed and fortified physically, spiritually, imaginatively.2 His aim had been to change the rhythms of his life and verse, to ‘displace’ himself in order to develop as a man and writer, and in this he succeeded as the longer, assured, melodious lines of the poems of Field Work testify. By the time the book was published, however, the Heaneys had been living for three years in a handsome Edwardian house in the Sandymount area of Dublin. He had taken up a permanent teaching post in October 1975 at Carysfort Teacher Training College, and in the following year was appointed Head of the English Department, a post he retained until 1981.3 They had decided to leave Glanmore partly because the initial attractiveness of its remoteness had worn off to some extent. The circumstances of domestic life were difficult as the house was a long way from the main road; it was sparsely furnished, and extremely cold in winter; it was too small for a growing family of five, and though they had made it a home, the property belonged to Anne Saddlemeyer.
She, in the midst of all, preserv’d me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name
My office upon earth, and nowhere else,
And lastly, Nature’s Self, by human love
Assisted, through the weary labyrinth
Conducted me again to open day,
Revived the feelings of my earlier life,
Gave me that strength and knowledge full of peace.
Wordsworth, The Prelude 1
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Notes
The subject of an excellent poem by Michael Longley, in The Echo Gate, London: Seeker and Warburg, 1979, p. 13. It is reprinted in Poems 1963–83, Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1985, p. 149.
The Ballad of William Bloat can be found in The Ulster Reciter, ed. Joe McPartland, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984, pp. 4–5.
Balachandra Rajan, W. B. Yeats, London: Hutchinson, 1965, p. 112.
Yeats’s mysterious angler, according to T. R. Henn, may have been partly based upon John Millington Synge, the playwright, since he was a ‘keen fisherman, and a great rambler in the Wicklow glens’ -the new Heaney country. See T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London: Methuen, 1965, p. 74.
Seamus Heaney, interviewed by Bel Mooney for Turning Points, BBC 1988.
Seamus Heaney, interviewed by Bel Mooney for Turning Points, BBC 1988.
Boris Pasternak, ‘Hamlet’, translated by Richard McKane, in Post-War Russian Poetry, edited by Daniel Weissbort, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974, p. 33.
Francis Ledwidge, ‘June’, The Faber Book of Irish Verse, ed. John Montague, Faber and Faber, 1978, p. 257. Perhaps coincidentally this poem includes within its second stanza two images found in ‘The Harvest Bow’. Both ‘loop’ and ‘snares’ are used as verbs, however.
Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty, Granada 1981, p. 143. Ledwidge was born in the village of Slane, Co. Meath, in the Boyne valley, some nine miles from Drogheda. He worked from the age of twelve as a labourer on an estate, where his talent for poetry came to the attention of the landowner, Lord Dunsany, whose protégé he became. It was Dunsany who subsequently selected the fifty poems for Ledwidge’s first publication, Songs of the Fields (1915).
Francis Ledwidge quoted in A. Norman Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature, Macmillan, 1982, p. 184.
“identified with the Bona Dea, an earth goddess of plenty .… Romans pelted each other with flowers during the licentious Ludi Floreales from April 23 to May 3 in honour of Flora, a Roman goddess of harvest and of fruitfulness whose cult was particularly associated with the heady flower of the hawthorn tree -mayblossom.” (Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. Reissued by Picador Books, 1985, p. 282)
Seamus Heaney, An Open Letter, reprinted in Ireland’s Field Day, Hutchinson, 1985.
A quotation from Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 68, which refers to the effect on Wordsworth of political crisis in France and political repression at home.
In an earlier version of SI, XII, entitled ‘Leaving the Island’ — it appeared in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1982, pp. 74–75 — Joyce contrasts his open break with the Church with Heaney’s timorous attitude.
Sydney Bolt, A Preface to James Joyce, Longman: London, 1981, p. 95.
Seamus Heaney ‘A Tale of Two Islands’, Irish Studies, I, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 9.
Tom O’Dea, ‘Pleasant Purgatory’, Irish Independent, 25 May 1990, p. 6. My main sources of information about Station Island have been Lough Derg Guide, by Joseph Duffy, revised edition 1978, and Deirdre Purcell’s On Lough Derg, Veritas: Dublin, 1988, which includes an introduction by Joseph Duffy.
See R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Hardmonsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 571.
A Sense of Wonder, produced and directed by Barnaby Thompson and George Case, Mark Forstater Productions, 1986.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review, Vol. 15, Part 1, 1985, p. 19.
William Carleton, Lough Derg Pilgrim, quoted by Heaney in ‘A Tale of Two Islands’, art. cit., p. 11. Patrick Kavanagh, in the seventh lecture of a series entitled Studies in the Technique of Poetry, delivered in 1956 at University College, Dublin, said, “For all Carleton’s stupid tirades he is like Stephen Daedalus saturated with that Catholicism in which he says he disbelieves” (see Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper, Goldsmith Press, 1979).
Patrick Kavanagh, Lough Derg, in November Haggard: The Uncollected Prose and Verse of Patrick Kavanagh, edited by Peter Kavanagh, The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, New York, 1971, pp. 119, 120.
“When Pan thought he had at last caught hold of Syrinx, he found that instead of the nymph’s body he held a handful of marsh reeds. As he stood sighing, the wind blew through the reeds and produced a thin plaintive sound. The god was enchanted by the new device and by the sweetness of the music’ You and I shall always talk together so!”, he cried; then he took reeds of unequal length, and fastened them together with wax.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes, Penguin 1955, pp. 47–48)
Seamus Heaney talking on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, 11 October 1984.
Interestingly, when Oliver St John Gogarty took up the tenancy of the Martello Tower, he envisaged it becoming “the Irish equivalent of the earth’s navel-stone at Delphi”, and pictured himself “as the Oracle” (see Frank Delaney, James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses, Hodder and Stoughton, 1981, p. 17). Perhaps for Heaney, as for many Irish writers, because of its associations with Joyce, the Tower has become a kind of shrine, a new omphalos from which to take his bearings.
Seamus Heaney talking on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, 11 October 1984.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Pilgrim’s Journey’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 123, Winter 1984, p. 3. Like Heaney, Kavanagh is appalled by the spiritually destructive elements in Catholic teaching, the way “The sharp knife of Jansen/ Cut all the green branches/ No sunlight comes in/ But the hot-iron sin” (November Haggard, op. cit., p. 133).
Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’ in First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin, Penguin, 1979, p. 184. “One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg/ After the matches, carried shoulder high.”
See Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre’, art. cit., p. 185, or James Liddy, ‘Ulster Poets and the Catholic Muse’, Eire-Ireland (1978), Vol. 13, part 4, p. 135.
See Patrick Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, Gill and Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1989, pp. 66–67, p. 70, p. 96.
Seamus Heaney, Among Schoolchildren, A John Malone Memorial Lecture, 1983, pp. 14–15. The kaleidoscope was a Christmas present, whose glamour was eclipsed when Heaney saw his Protestant friend’s present, a glorious red-white-and-blue battleship. Jealous, he tried floating his toy in the water-butt, but it soon sank. “Its insides had been robbed of their brilliant inner space, its marvellous and unpredictable visions were gone.”
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, Penguin, 1977, p. 105.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Leaving the Island’, in Jantes Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack and Alistair Stead, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1982, p. 75.
Derek Mahon, Poems 1962–78, Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 64–65.
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, twelfth edition, Phaidon Press, 1972, pp. 428–433. “In his youth Cézanne took part in the Impressionist exhibitions, but he was so disgusted by the reception accorded them that he withdrew to his native town of Aix, where he studied the problems of his art, undisturbed by the clamour of the critics.” Financially secure, just as Heaney was by the early 1980s, he devoted “his whole life to the solution of the artistic problems he set himself, and could apply the most exacting standards to his own work.”
A phrase used by the journalist, Martin Découd, to describe the politics of South America in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Penguin, 1969, p. 135.
Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders, San Diego/ New York: Harvest, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, p. 10. The cave paintings of Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of France, were discovered in September 1940. They date from before 13,000 B.c. One of the Lascaux paintings depicts a hunter with a ‘bird’s head’and ‘straight beak’ (ibid., p. 11). Herbert speculates that the primitive painter may well have been ‘longing for his forsaken animal family … He was ashamed of his face, a visible sign of his difference. He often wore masks, animal masks, as if trying to appease his own treason’ (ibid., p. 12). A revised version of Heaney’s Parnassus review of Herbert’s book appears in The Government of the Tongue.
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© 1993 Michael Parker
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Parker, M. (1993). Quickenings, 1975–84. In: Seamus Heaney. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390256_5
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