SEAMUS HEANEY’S HISTORICAL IMAGINATION
On Saturday, 4th of November on the occasion of the annual gathering of the American Conference for Irish Studies (mid-Atlantic Region), I was asked to respond to Professor Michael Valdez Moses’ paper entitled ‘Where the Bodies are Buried: Seamus Heaney’s Political Geography’, which prompted me to reflect on the sense of place and historical space in Irish poetry.
Seamus Heaney's home place was the contested space of County Derry, with its tensions and conflicts, its overlapping, competing identities of Orange and Green, its linguistic fluxes of Irish, English and Ulster Scots.
Heaney was not the first Irish poet to have managed the conflicted pull of place and space. All the great Irish poets have been obliged to manage such tensions and have been moulded by them.
Yeats was torn between the politics of the Ireland in which he was born and the aesthetics of the language in which he wrote. He had to cope with the conflicting calls of the Irish national literature he sought to create and the Anglo-Irish tradition to which he belonged.
His successor, Austin Clarke (1896-1974), was inspired by the luminosities of early Christian Ireland and tortured by what he saw as the pieties and austerities of 20th century Irish Catholicism. He found himself out of sympathy with, and deeply critical of, the Ireland in which he lived.
For Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), the standoff was between the ‘stony grey soil’ of his home county of Monaghan (‘the laugh from my love you thieved’) and the pull of the life of a poet in Dublin. (In one poem, he recalls with evident pleasure, the poet John Betjeman, then a British diplomat in wartime Dublin, calling for him in a car). Kavanagh sought to universalise the local and vice versa.
.. I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Heaney's near contemporary, John Montague, lived between the cosmopolitanism of Berkeley and France on the one hand and the intimate brutalities of the Rough Field that was his home place and which inspired his finest collection.
It cannot be a coincidence that of the six leading Irish poets of Heaney's generation, Eavan Boland, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, and Heaney himself, four hailed from a divided, troubled Northern Ireland. That is not to suggest that any of them was a poet of the Northern Ireland Troubles, but it was hardly possible for that generation not to be affected by the social and political environment within which they lived and wrote.
Heaney was born in 1939 and growing up in County Derry could hardly have escaped the burden of history or the impact of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which began when he was just 30 years of age and close to the beginning of his personal literary journey. While this political and historical backdrop was never Heaney’s main theme, there is a certain sprinkling of Irish history and of the politics of Ulster that runs through his work.
In his second collection, the poem 'Requiem for the Croppies', he pays an eloquent tribute to the bravery of the nationalist combatants in the Rising of 1798 and the 'fatal conclave' at Vinegar Hill in County Wexford where 'terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.'
In 'Bogland' there is a subtler evocation of the troubled layers of Irish history in 'our unfenced country' where 'the eye concedes to encroaching horizon' and 'every layer they strip seems camped on before'. I have heard Seamus Heaney speak powerfully about the tensions embedded in the different linguistic influences on the place names of his home area.
In 'England's Difficulty', Heaney recalls his Catholic childhood in wartime Ulster where he 'moved like a double agent among the big concepts' and 'crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.'
The poem ‘Act of Union’ describes Ulster as the 'heaving province where our past has grown' and a 'tracked and pockmarked body, the big pain/That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.'
And then there is his evocation of the tensions of the place in which he grew up: 'the famous Northern reticence, tight gag of place and times' and 'of open minds, open as a trap.' The people of Ulster were in Heaney's view:
Besieged within a siege, whispering morse.
For me, Heaney's journey through Northern Ireland's troubled landscape and Ireland's chequered history culminates in a strange place - on the Somme. I refer to his poem 'In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge', which recalls the enigmatic life and death of the Meath-born poet who was killed on the Western Front on 31 July 1917.
Ledwidge was a pastoral poet who was blown to pieces in a place that war had made ugly and infernal. He was a fervent Irish nationalist who died in British uniform and whose best-known poem is a lament for the 1916 leader, Thomas MacDonagh.
Heaney struggles to understand Ledwidge's motivations for he belonged 'among the dolorous and lovely' and not 'ghosting the trenches' like 'silence cored from a Boyne passage grave.' Heaney sees Ledwidge as someone in whom 'all the strains criss-cross in useless equilibrium'. He views Ledwidge as out of place in a British uniform - 'you were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones/Though all of you consort now underground.'
It is in that last line that some of Heaney's own strains seem to me to criss-cross. I see it as a halting acceptance of the apparent enigma of Ledwidge's death. Heaney published his Ledwidge poem in his 1979 collection, Field Work. This makes him an early adapter to the enigma of Irish history during that troubled era a century ago. In Ireland, we are now more comfortable with the fact that so many Irishmen did what Ledwidge did in 1914, and that this in no way compromised their passionate Irishness.
In Heaney's work, therefore, the enigma of poetry (for it is full of hints and suggestions rather the straightforward statements: it is curved, not linear) and the enigmas of Ireland's jagged history come together.
Before I finish, I would like to recall some of Heaney’s most evocative lines:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
When I was involved in the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation (1994-95), I viewed those lines as a kind of signature tune for what was going on at that time, the sense that this was a rare opportunity to disperse the shadow of despair and usher in a better future. Over the years, so many public figures, in Ireland and beyond, have used Heaney’s words to encapsulate their own hopes for the future. Long may they continue to resonate!
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in Washington