Searching for Seamus Heaney

Poring over all this in Heaney’s giant shadow, I felt anxious to admire, then annoyed by my anxiety. A writer’s canonization is a slow slaughter of the real, the wax of the replica hardening until all that shows is mask or mascot. Yeats, the obvious Irish antecedent to Heaney’s global fame, supplied one of Heaney’s favorite descriptions of this predicament: in others’ eyes, the poet sees reflected the “smiling public man” who has nothing to do with the scribbler at his desk. Maybe, I thought, hearing Heaney’s actual voice would reveal the man behind the mask. On YouTube, scrolling and clicking resurrected him on my screen: there he was in 2010, still reciting “Digging,” his South Derry accent scooping and flensing.

The poem’s speaker, a Heaney type, sits pen in hand and observes through a window his father digging outside, like his father did before him. “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” Heaney says. To close the personal and generational divide, Heaney replays that first couplet, this time transforming the pen into a tool: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Utility rather than threat. A peaceful resolution emerges, as both poetry and potatoes, after all, require “stooping in rhythm.”

As I listened to Heaney, some of my old resistance to the lines’ forceful march came back, but it occurred to me that “Digging” offered a model for tackling his daunting trove. Poetry, Heaney said in a lecture in 1974, is no surface matter. It arises “as revelation of the self to the self”; it uncovers “the buried shard.” To follow him, I, too, would have to dig. Attention to Heaney and his lifelong habit of unearthing, shaped by an Ireland layered with histories and enmities, hasn’t led me to a “true” version of the poet (what would that even mean?), but it has revealed a poet at once less assured and more curious—above all, more interesting—than the one I had shunned.

heaney was born in 1939 on a farm in Northern Ireland, where work and life proceeded according to season, task, sun, and kerosene—an almost premodern relation to time. Many of Heaney’s poems limn the landscapes and rituals of his childhood in County Derry, but he fends off uncritical nostalgia by making apparent the labor and endurance it required: one feels the weight of things lifted, pulled, hewn, tilled. But these poems are not just antipastorals; they dirty up some idea of “simpler place, simpler time” while reveling in the muck. “Churning Day” delights in “the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps”—onomatopoeic lines that convey his pleasure in “the music of what happens” in ordinary life, whether that’s birdsong or the soft slip of potato peelings into a bowl.

“All children want to crouch in their secret nests,” Heaney wrote in an autobiographical essay. His hiding spots were “the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a boxwood hedge,” “the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre,” and “a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots.” When he was very young, he got lost in a patch of peas for long enough that his parents launched a search, his name soaring over the “green web, a caul of veined light.” The child hidden under vines or in a tree recurs throughout Heaney’s poetry. In his essay, as in his poems, the story ends with the boy on the brink of being found, an interrupted, ambiguous metamorphosis: Is this rescue or removal?

These are the stakes when the poet digs beyond the safe and easy. Bringing to light “the buried shard” means embracing some amount of alienation from the social world. Writing great poems, as Heaney put it in his Nobel lecture, requires being “true to the impact of external reality” while remaining “sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being.” For Heaney, this delicate (and dialectic) work begins in that child-sense of being caught on the edge of something ancient and inexplicable, “the vowel of earth / dreaming its root.” His lines often seem to be trying to get beyond, or get past, or get through. Whether he takes up a thatched roof, a settle bed, or an alder, he digs hard in that “earth,” straining for the truth of the thing.

Perhaps, above all, this means reaching into the past. The temporal frame in Heaney’s poetry is vast and cyclical: potato digging happens in the wake of “centuries / Of fear and homage to the famine god.” Closer at hand, Heaney’s poetic life tracks, with uncanny synchronicity, the development of modern Ireland, and his books respond to the ugly convulsions that birthed it. He writes, always, as an Irish poet and—whether willingly or not—as a political one.

Heaney, who came from a Catholic family, grew to adulthood in a period of relative political quiescence. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) waged a border campaign but had little success, and by the time it finished, the political movement was near defunct. Heaney earned a university degree, got married, became a father, and began writing and teaching while his home territory lay in “frozen violence,” to borrow a phrase from the historian and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. He studied a very English English literature curriculum at Queen’s University Belfast, but he read widely, including Irish poets like Patrick Kavanagh and John Montague, whose examples authorized inscribing rural Catholic life in verse. His experience in the Group, a workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum, with members who went on to become the core of a Northern poetic renaissance, seemed to affirm for Heaney that he was, in fact, a poet, without imposing any single aesthetic or ideology. As Heaney once told two other members of the Group, “I’d like to write like you boys, but I have to do my own thing.”

That thing took initial shape in Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), two collections that sketch the world before the thaw. These poems reflect a climate of diffuse discrimination: under the Unionist majority, Catholics struggled to secure jobs and housing and were widely disenfranchised. They also faced prejudice and brutality from a largely Protestant police force that could, using the Special Powers Act of 1922, imprison people without charge. “Even though there was no sectarian talk or prejudice at home,” Heaney said decades later, “there was still an indignation at the political status quo.” His early work peers into the frozen North’s shadows: cast-off children, hypocritical pieties, sectarian unease, intimacy with death. In “Dream,” from 1969, Heaney’s pen again becomes an excavating tool, exposing a sinister subtext in the farm’s mundane repetitions:

Still, the “dark” Heaney explores in these volumes is, most of all, the country dark of deep water and lightless nights, not the dark reaches of human-on-human violence. The pen holstered in “Digging” is held lightly, almost flippantly.

The upheaval that ensued brought terror to the surface. Heaney described the period, which became known as the Troubles, as “a quarter century of life-waste and spirit-waste.” In the late 1960s, a nonviolent civil rights campaign was met with official, violent suppression, which ignited further protests, empowered loyalist paramilitary groups, and renewed the IRA. In the wake of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when the British Army shot at unarmed protesters in Derry and killed thirteen people, spasmodic violence became the norm.

As the Troubles worsened, Heaney seemed to seek literal distance from the oppressive atmosphere of conflict in the North; his poetry, meanwhile, had to contend with “surviving” or “cohabitating” with it, as he later told an interviewer. For him, this meant getting inside or underneath reportorial summaries or partisan talking points. In 1970, Heaney left Ireland for a teaching stint at the University of California, Berkeley. There he received a reeducation in Irish literature from an American colleague with Irish heritage. This, and distance, seemed to provide fresh perspective; Heaney left with a “charged-up sense” of his “situation as a ‘Northern poet’ more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a whole.” He returned first to Belfast, but in 1972 moved to the republic, taking up residence at Glanmore Cottage, in County Wicklow. The relocation was not, he always took care to specify, flight from the North, but it did answer an inner need: he later characterized himself as “a wood-kerne // Escaped from the massacre.” In Wintering Out, published that same year, Heaney dwells on Northern sounds, like the place-name Broagh, with “that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage,” as if trying to reach below the known contours of the landscape through the words used to talk about it. Similar etymological poems recur in later books, plumbing names and pronunciations for revelations about culture and history until the words nearly become places themselves. Although Heaney was culturally rather than devoutly Catholic, these explorations suggest, to me, the possibility of a linguistic Eden, a truth that lingers somewhere deep in the past.

In 1975, Heaney published a book titled, simply and chillingly, North—his most concentrated effort to make “work adequate to the terrors and wrongs” of the region. Some of the poems in the collection, such as the famous “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” confront the events of Northern Ireland head-on, but others are more oblique, tunneling into a prehistory of violence, peopled by “neighbourly, scoretaking / killers, haggers / and hagglers, gombeen-men.” (Those short, chopped, consonant-heavy lines are pure Heaney.) The entire first section of the book ruminates on Iron Age “bog bodies,” corpses naturally preserved by the peat and exhumed approximately two thousand years later, in Denmark. In Heaney’s hands, this process of excavation becomes a means of reckoning with current events—and, at times, with the poet’s role in them. In “Punishment,” a young female bog body becomes an analogy for women tarred and feathered by the IRA for disloyalty. The speaker, another Heaney type, enters as an “artful voyeur” who, by the poem’s end, stands complicit with the executioners: he “understand[s] the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.”

North, which became Heaney’s best-known collection, was rapturously received by many, but this sort of poetry elicited fierce criticism from Northern writers such as Edna Longley, who eviscerated Heaney’s identification with the “‘slightly aggravated young Catholic male,’” and accused him of “fence-sitting”—an artistic as well as political failure. The poet Ciaran Carson saw danger in Heaney’s project of digging into the past to see the present: “It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution.” In 1970s Northern Ireland, unearthing the ancestral Viking North seemed to suggest that intercommunal violence was inescapable, even fated. If “each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped” was one more link in an old chain, historically and culturally encoded, then peace was not dream but delusion.

Reading North now, alongside the praise it garnered and lumps it took, I am inclined to a more sympathetic reading. These poems may express aggravation, but they also testify to exhaustion, as the revolutionary hopes of the late 1960s were sucked into a morass of despair. The volumes that followed North continue to probe this unsteady terrain, and the poet’s especially uneasy footing. There are many poems that do not take up public or social concerns: poems about oysters, butter, lupines, old suits, a stroke; the sinuous, sensitive Glanmore sonnets; love poems and poems infused by eros; elegies for father, mother, dead friends. But as Heaney writes in North’s closing poem, he was always “weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia.”

From within Heaney’s later work, you can hear the same accusations he heard from without. In “An Afterwards,” from Field Work (1979), a poet trapped in a Dantean hellscape is accosted by his wife, who seems to speak for Ireland as a whole: “You aspired to a kind, / Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.” In “The Flight Path,” which appears in The Spirit Level (1996), Heaney dramatizes a real encounter with an IRA activist on a train. The other man comes out swinging: “‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’” The poet answers: “‘If I do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’”

Heaney seemingly rejected propagandizing on behalf of a cause. More nationalist than republican, he was, above all, a humanist, sympathetic to individual suffering and “the eternal reciprocity of tears,” to use a line by Wilfred Owen that Heaney often cited. After an early poem, “Requiem for the Croppies,” was taken up as an IRA anthem, he stopped reading it aloud in public. Still, defiance did not come naturally. He had been “a prefect from St. Columb’s,” as he writes in a verse-epistle, and he expressed respect for institutions and authorities. In his letters, he comes across as a man plagued by a wish to satisfy everyone. In 1983, Heaney published a poem, “An Open Letter,” objecting to his own inclusion in an anthology of British poets—a public stance that, his papers show, entailed much hand-wringing. Once it appeared, and quickly spread, he wrote to the editor to restore good relations. In “Weighing In,” also from The Spirit Level, he returns to the language of measuring to reprimand himself for his “principle of bearing, bearing up / And bearing out” rather than doing what the title says: “every now and then, just weighing in.”

But this internal tension, less fence-sitting than genuine precarity, like standing on a tightrope with no net beneath, is precisely where I locate Heaney’s real achievement as a political poet, or as a poet at all. It’s clear, throughout the work, that he isn’t fully, or consistently, sure what poetry can do in the face of violence. But by writing for himself—by both recording and resisting all the warring allegiances and sympathies he felt—he remained responsive to the unsteadiness of his context, and his political poems are more interesting, and more illuminating, because they refuse a static position.

more than forty years before the Troubles began, Yeats declared that the task of art is “to hold in a single thought reality and justice”—a challenge that sounded anew in Irish poets’ ears from the 1960s on. Heaney, I think, lives up to it while also interrogating and destabilizing the unity of the “single thought.” His earliest poems were published under the pseudonym Incertus, which means “uncertain” in Latin and was chosen, he said, due to “a lack of writerly self-confidence.” It’s hard to imagine such a lack persisting as his fame grew, but other uncertainties flocked, and these animate his finest work.

In North, flickers of doubt about the power of language emerge. “The Ministry of Fear,” which pores over his childhood and adolescence in light of sectarian violence, retells two incidents in which a young Heaney is asked his name and gives, in different ways, the wrong one; when words come into contact with a difficult world, they go awry. In subsequent books, Heaney continues a practice of turning to other stories and other sources, as if digging through the archives for ground that will hold. But the myths and allusions he draws into his work often deepen that hovering “uncertainty” about poetic power. In Station Island (1984), Heaney uses Dante’s Purgatorio as a kind of scaffolding for the collection; he had read the poet for the first time in the 1970s, and wrote that he responded deeply to “the way in which Dante could place himself in an historical world yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history.” In the title poem, a poet encounters shades who, like Dante’s interlocutors, give their stories along with questions, reproofs, and counsel. When I first read “Station Island,” I marveled at how far from the assurance of “Digging” it seemed; it makes a drama of doubt. And yet it also displays a greater confidence by bringing so many voices, from the familial to the august, to grapple with vast communal problems. Among these voices, a relative murdered during the Troubles appears to castigate the poet for having “confused evasion and artistic tact” and “saccharined my death with morning dew”—a sugarcoating. The poem delves into the core of literary insecurity: the fear that language makes reality more tolerable but fails to accomplish anything more than beautifying what should, to be true, remain ugly.

James Joyce (sounding a lot more like Seamus Heaney than James Joyce) issues the last admonishment in “Station Island”:

I’ve returned to these specific lines many times to try to understand how, exactly, they should be understood. They have the ring of proper conclusion, yet the poem’s nested dialectics wind between one voice and another, question and answer, public speech and private inquiry, safe silence and risked expression. The lines echo Heaney’s oft-repeated skepticism of poems that reify common feelings, or that can be converted into propaganda. “To swim out on your own” does not mean leaving history or politics behind but, rather, engaging with the contest within, where real poems emerge. Here, I am reminded of the child enchanted by watery places, now an adult treading the watery reaches of knowledge, attuned to the shift and flow of conclusions that others may see as stone-hard and unvarying.

“Markings,” a poem from Seeing Things (1991), demonstrates how language itself can disturb the boundary between water and earth, vision and reality:

“Sea of corn” sweeps us into the metaphor smoothly enough, but then the details of fieldwork intrude, ensuring that the metaphorness remains present. By keeping both imagined and actual in sight, the poem lifts clear of cliché. We end on a picture simultaneously ordinary and arresting: two men who you can believe, for an instant, are wielding oars, though you know they stand on solid earth. For Heaney, that instability, captured in the image that wavers even as it holds, is where poetic discovery begins.

in 1995, as bill clinton sought a truce in Northern Ireland, he quoted from Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Heaney’s poem stages a redemptive turn: “But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” Three years later, the Good Friday Agreement enacted a fragile end to the violence. These lines make Heaney a tidy oracle, but read in the context of Sophocles’ play, they suggest a more complicated meaning.

When The Cure at Troy begins, Philoctetes is living on a deserted island, having been abandoned by his Greek shipmates a decade earlier because of a foul-smelling wound. Those same traitors are now sent to retrieve him, told by a seer that only Philoctetes and his famous bow will help them triumph at Troy. Much of the play focuses on Philoctetes’ psychic wound, not his physical one: he refuses to contribute anything to the cause of those who betrayed him. In a 1985 letter, Heaney wrote that the play was “about the artist and his relation to society. His right to his wound, his solitude, his resentment. Yet society’s right (?) to his gift, his bow, his commitment to the group.” It’s a fraught “relation” with no easy solution, and no small consequence. As Heaney had known since “Digging,” the pen, like the bow, can be a gun or a spade; it can be at once destructive and generative. But as I read across Heaney’s career, the assured young speaker of that first poem, careless of his weapon’s reverberations, fell away. He was more like a wounded hero, reckoning with his complex “rights”—and arriving at a question mark.

Considering Heaney’s poems alongside all the “SHit”—the onslaught of requests, awards, interviews, readings, and more—makes the woundedness of the self in society practically, tangibly apparent. His letters reveal the successful, mature Heaney besieged not just by heavy national responsibilities but by quotidian personal ones. Later in his life, in particular, a pitiable quality enters: he dreams of time off, of saying no, and bemoans the lack of time to think. His longest break from public activity is forced by a stroke. “You know what a procrastinating fucker I can be,” he writes to another writer, but he mostly seems overwhelmed and slightly desperate, hampered from making art—or getting rest—by his own poetic success.

Describing the poet Czesław Miłosz, whom he admired and eventually befriended, Heaney once said, “You think of the mark made on him by event rather than any need on his part to make an event of himself.” This is equally apt as self-description. Despite the many forces that sought “to make an event” of Heaney, he tried to maintain the difficult equilibrium that Miłosz articulated and Heaney quoted in a poem of his own: the state of being “stretched between contemplation / of a motionless point / and the command to participate / actively in history.” What drew both men to lyric in the first place was a descriptive, celebratory, visionary impulse rather than a desire to document, speechify, or address. In a letter from 1973, Heaney wrote that he “began to write with a desire to make poems adequate to my personal experience” and “unconsciously assumed that the poet was apolitical and priestlike.” History assigned him another role, but the innate tendency couldn’t be undone: poetry is defined by a single voice singing its peculiar note. Heaney’s great achievement is to have been a poet who could speak to a huge swath of people while holding fast to the dictates of his conscience, language, uncertainties, soundings. From “Digging” onward, he put his own feel into his own words.

Heaney once praised Miłosz for capturing “the stability of truth,” but I am more intrigued by the instabilities: not just the doubts and changes in perspective but also the troublesome relationship between the “smiling public man” and the child still hiding deep inside, seeking to return to the “lobe and larynx / of the mossy places.” The real Heaney, if the term can be ventured, seemed immured by his own poetry, able to reach its source only with difficulty. The penultimate poem in the new anthology, “The Latecomers,” appeared in Poetry Ireland Review in 2014, months after Heaney’s death, and captures both the toll and purpose of this hard work. It draws an analogy between the poet and Jesus, which might seem like more of the swagger I’d initially disliked in Heaney if the tone weren’t so tired and beleaguered. While in the thick of performing miracles at crowded gatherings, Jesus is “hedged on every side, // Harried and responsive to their need.” He is also plagued by “the pain of loss / In the eyes of those his reach had failed to bless.” Here is another story, told slant, about the artist in relation to society. “Exhaustion and the imperatives of love / Vied in him.” The poem, collected here for the first time, reminds us that there is a cost to the highest achievements of art, one the artist himself pays. What the truest poet digs up is what we might dare to call his soul.