seamus eaney

SELECTED POEMS

Seamus Heaney (1939--)

“Words themselves are doors” 

Seamus Heaney

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LIFE AND WORKS OF HEANEY "I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing" Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast in County Derry. He attended the local school at Anahorish until 1957, when he enrolled at Queen's College, Belfast and took a first in English there in 1961. The next school year he took a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. In 1963 he took a position as a lecturer in i n English at the same school. While at St. Joseph's he began to write, publishing work in the university magazines under the pseudonym Incertus. During that time, along with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others, he joined a poetry workshop under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965, in connection with the Belfast Festival, he published Eleven Poems. In August of 1965 he married Marie Devlin. The following year he became a lecturer in modern English literature at Queen's College, Belfast, his first son Michael was born, and Faber and Faber published Death of a Naturalist. This volume earned him the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award in 1967, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, also in 1968. Christopher, his second son, was born in 1968. His second volume, Door into the Dark, was published in 1969 and became the Poetry Book Society Choice for the year. In 1970-71 he was a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1971, and in 1972 he resigned his lecturship at Queens College, moved his family to Glanmore, in County Wicklow, and published Wintering Out. In 1973 his daughter, Catherine Ann, was born. During this year he also received the Denis Devlin Award and the Writer in Residence Award from the American Irish Foundation. In 1975 North was published, winning the E.M. Forster Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. During these years at Glanmore, Heaney also gave many readings in the United States and England and edited two poetry anthologies. In 1975 Heaney began teaching at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1976 the family moved to Sandymount, in Dublin, and Heaney became Department Head at Carysfort. In 1979 he published Field Work, and in 1980, Selected Poems and Preoccupations: Selected Prose. In 1981 he gave up his post at Carysfort to become a visiting professor at Harvard. In 1982 he won the Bennett Award, and Queen's University in Belfast conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He confounded Field Day Publishing with Brian Friel and others in 1983. Station Island, his first collection in five years, was published in 1984. During that year he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and Open University awarded him an honorary degree. Also in 1984 his mother, Margaret Kathleen, died. The Haw Lantern, published in 1987, contains a brilliant sonnet sequence memorializing her. Heaney's father, Patrick, died after this, and Heaney's latest collection, Seeing Things, published in 1991, contains many poems for his father. Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaneyboppers" attend his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be seen throughout his work, but most especially in his first two volumes, where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and even Dante have played important roles in his development. 2

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The first poem in this archive, “Personal Helicon” introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor. Bogland the final poem in his second volume, presents once again his fascination with things buried. He acknowledges an attachment to the soil that is the source and subject of his poetry. The catalogue of objects, buried in bogs for years, sometimes centuries, and dug up in remarkable condition, encompasses the vegetable world ("waterlogged trunks / of great firs"), the animal world ("the skeleton / of the Great Irish Elk"), and the human world ("Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years"). Perhaps with hindsight we see a progression toward the bog's most important preservation, a human being. Hard on the publication of P.V. Glob's The Bog People, detailing the discovery of a series of bodies over 2000 years old in the bogs of Denmark, Heaney's metaphor, begun in ”Bogland” reaches its ultimate fruition. In Glob's book, Heaney found the consummation of his descent into the earth. His series of "Bog Poems" (including “The Tollund Man” address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney's fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. Perhaps the most striking of these poems is "Punishment," where he sees in the corpse of a ritually sacrificed woman an echo of the Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. He acknowledges his guilt for implicit participation in such terrible deeds, because he "would have cast, I know / the stones of silence." He recognizes his own conflicting feelings, this man who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or taken to task for remaining aloof from it. Nevertheless, some of his most convincing elegies deal with friends and family he has lost to the Troubles. “Causality” a poem about a Catholic friend murdered by a bomb set by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in a Protestant pub, gives us another look at the tribal warfare in Northern Ireland. His questioning of his friend's responsibility for his own death realizes the ambiguous nature, the muddling of right and wrong, that grips Northern Ireland today. And yet, what is important is not placing blame, but the recognition of what remains to those who live, memories and sadness. It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. That conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. “Song” demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and “Personal Helicon” this short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and the details of language make this poem a small success. “Harvest Bow” a touching look at his father's creative impulse, also addresses Heaney's own art. The poem rests on the recognition that there are more important 3

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creations than the ordering of words. Rather than being merely a recollection of childhood, this poem takes on universal weight in the intertwining of the artistic forces in father and son. Heaney presents the mature relationship of a child with his or her parents, the unspoken joy of a shared experience. His recognition of his father's different talents leads to a consideration of his own work, like his father's a "frail device." Be it a harvest bow or a formal elegy, "The end of art is peace." Further explorations of Heaney's thoughts on his own poetry can be found in his two collections of essays, the previously mentioned Preoccupations and The Government of the Tongue. He is an insightful critic of both the Romantic tradition and the poetry of the twentieth century. Perhaps his most moving works are the series of sonnets called "Clearances," written as a memorial to his mother. The two poems we have here, the third and fifth of the sequence, show him taking firm hold of the sonnet form and bending it to his own interpretation of the elegiac tradition. These poems possess a soft power that bathes all in the golden haze of memory while presenting stark images of the spaces that death leaves between us. In "When all the others were away at Mass" Heaney moves from the distant past of the first two quatrains, through a telling break in lines, the into a place nearer the present in the final quatrain. But this present reality is too much to bear, and he retreats again to the past in the final couplet. In this way memory serves as a shield to protect him from his mother's death. "The cool that came off sheets just off the line" takes place entirely in the past, as he recalls the intricate dance he and his mother performed in folding bed linens. His comment on their relationship, "Coming close while again holding back," speaks to a lifetime of memories, and the space that her absence leaves in his life. His final poems here, from ”Lightening” take up again thoughts of death, the afterlife, and other planes of existence. The structure of these poems, with their three-line stanzas, recalls Dante's Divine Comedy, where the poet as pilgrim is guided through the afterlife. Heaney has remarked that, since the death of his parents, he feels as if "the roof has blown off" his life. We are all inevitably released from both the weight and the shield of our ancestors. This lightening, when we are finally exposed to the elements, to the cosmos, is both freeing and frightening. The first poem acknowledges the transience of life, framing death in the religious terms of the particular and universal judgements that come at the end of an individual life and the end of the world. Recognition of the fact that "there is no next-time-round" carries with it a mixture of fear and freedom. Heaney discusses that mixture again in the Hardy lyrics, and explores the questions that the nearness of death brings. Hardy pretends to be dead in "vi," and, being dead, "He experimented with infinity." He claims that the recognition of death is a necessary act for a poet, for it alone opens the poet up to what the universe has to say. In "VII" Heaney admits to the frailty of memory, a fragility that makes what is remembered all the more dear. Hardy's communion with the frightened sheep holds the anticipated sorrow that would later fill his poetry at bay for a moment. Again, the nearness of death, or, for Hardy, the pretending to be dead, is an essential component, if not the ultimate font, of poetry. The final poem here ends on a life-affirming note, for Heaney recognizes the beauty of earthly existence, placing that beauty in a religious context that not only enhances it, but holds out hope for more wonders to come after death. Heaney's work is filled with images of death and dying, and yet it is also firmly rooted in the life of this world. His tender elegies about friends and family members who have died serve many purposes: they mourn great losses, celebrate those who have gone before us, and recall the solace that remains to us, our memories. When asked recently about his abiding interest in memorializing the people of his life, he replied, "The elegiac Heaney? There's nothing else." SEAMUS HEANEY'S REMARKS ON GETTING NOBLE PRIZE 4

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Today's date, May 12, will always be a memorable one for you, and for me too. From here on, the mark of the tar is upon all of us, academically and indelibly: so let us rejoice in that, because now we fare forth as Tar Heels of the mind, and the world w here we are to make our tarry mark in lies all before us. But then, when it comes to faring forth, today's date, May 12, has always been an auspicious one. Especially in my native province of Ulster, for long ago it was designated a kind of second May Day, the official start of the summer season; and so May the 12 became the day when the great hiring fairs took place at towns all over the countryside, when working men and working women would assemble there to be hired out for another term to new masters and mistresses. The hiring fair was a cross between a commencement day and a slave market; it was a carnival shadowed by the tyranny of economic necessity, but it did produce a real sense of occasion. It was a hosting of the local clans and it brought the singer and the musician and the whole community on to the streets, with all their wares and in all their finery; so I thought that I could celebrate this great hosting of the clans here at Chapel Hill and celebrate the old links that have been established between Ulster people who emigrated to North Carolina in the 18th century and who played such an important part in the founding of this university -people like the Rev. David Ker, the university's first presiding professor, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin -- I thought I could celebrate that old connection and celebrate, of course, my own new one here today by quoting from a ballad I used to hear when I was growing up in County Derry. It tells the story of a young woman setting out with high hopes of romantic adventure on May the 12, to the May Fair at Magherafelt, which is the one sizable town in our part of the country. But it begins like this:

“I am a bouncing fair young girl, my age is scarce sixteen, and when I'm dressed all in my best   I look like any queen; bright, young, at play, who wants a way to go and sell her wares, on the twelfth of May I made my way to Magherafelt May Fair.  My mother's caution unto me was not stay late in town,  for if you do, my father and I  both on you we will frown. Be wise and shun bad company and of young men do beware -how smart you be, don't make too free in Magherafelt May Fair.”  Well, I would like to quote the whole thing, but at this stage it's enough that the bouncing fair young girl has started on her journey; like the heroine of a thousand other ballads, she has roamed out on a May morning to encounter whatever fortune puts in her way. And over the years, because of her confidence and buoyancy, she has become for me the guardian angel of all such moments of faring forth; for it matters very little on occasions like this whether you are the tomboy daughter of God-fearing rura l parents in 19th-century Ulster or the atheist heir of tobacco barons in our own date -- what matters at these occasions is not the economic givens of your background but the state of readiness of your own spirit. In fact, the ability to start out upon y our own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms, not to mention the further and more fulfilling gift of getting again all over again -- never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment, but getting renewed and revived by some further transformation. 5

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Getting started, keeping going, getting started again -- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. So this rhythm is what I would like to talk about briefly this morning, because it is something I would want each one of you to experience in the years ahead, and experience not only in your professional life, whatever that may be, but in your emotional and spiritual lives as well -- because unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting whatever profile the world provides for you. You'll be in danger of moulding yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being. The world, for example, expects a commencement speaker to arrive with a set of directives, a complete do-it-yourself success kit, which he or she then issues to the graduating class; the commencement speaker's appointed role is to provide a clear-cut map of the future and a key to navigating it as elegantly and profitably as possible. To be a mixture of Polonius and Tiresias, of bore and of bard. But while that is what the world prescribes, the inner laws of this particular speaker's being make him extremely anxious about laying down laws or mapping the future for anybody. In fact, this speaker believes that all those laws and directions have to be personal discoveries rather than prescribed routes; they must be part and parcel of each individual's sense of the world. They are to be improvised rather than copied, they are to be invented rather than imitated, they are to be risked and earned rather than bought into. Indeed, I have to say that for me, this very commencement address has been a matter of risk and improvisation from the moment I said I would do it, because I kept asking myself how I could reconcile my longstanding aversion to the know-all with a desire to say something worthwhile to you. I therefore did what I increasingly do in moments of crisis nowadays: I asked my daughter what I should do. "Just be yourself, Dad," she said. "Talk about yourself. Tell them a few stories." And this advice was a great relief to me because I thought, "Yes, that's true. Some of the greatest wisdom speakers in the world went about their work that way. So Seamus what was good enough for Aesop and for Jesus should be good enough for you. Relax. For a start, for a start, tell them something about getting started." Like for example, the Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak's definition of talent. Talent and the art of writing is "boldness in face of the blank sheet." The sheer exhilaration of those words is already enough to convince you of their truth, the truth that getting started is more than half the battle. One of the great Sufi teachers expressed the same wisdom in a slightly different way. "A great idea," he said, "will come to you three times. If you go with it the first time, it will do nearly all the work for you. Even if you don't move until the second time, it will still do half the work for you. But if you leave it until the third time, you will have to do all the work yourself." My own story in this regard, however, is more a story about a false start, although it is indeed a story about the importance of getting started from that first base of your being, the place of ultimate suffering and ultimate decisions in each of you, the last ditch and the first launching pad. When I was in primary school, I was once asked to do a composition entitled "a day at the seaside" -- a common, indeed a predictable subject in a country school in Northern Ireland years ago. So, I wrote about the sunlit sand, of the yachts in the bay, of the perfect sand castles and of diving in the pool, even though the weather was usually rainy and it was a coal boat rather than a yacht in the bay and I was a farmer's son who couldn't have passed through the University of Carolina because I couldn't in fact swim at all, never mind diving into a pool. But my chief lyrical effort was reserved for the description of the bucket and the spade I said I had used at the beach. The sky-blue enamelled inside of the bucket, as bright as a graduating class at the 6

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University of North Carolina, and the technicolor outside, all its little canary yellows and greenfinch greens and canary yellows. And then I also praised the little spade for being so trimly shafted, so youngster friendly, so small and scaled down. And so I got my grade for making up a fantasy and delivering the conventional goods, pictures I had seen on postcards of other people's days at the seaside. But years later what came back to me was the thing I did not describe, the truth I had suppressed about a day which had actually been a day of bittersweet disappointment. An account of what had actually happened would have been far more convincing as a piece of writing than the conventional account I had rendered up , far truer to life altogether. I have to say this even it is on Mother's Day, but when my mother was out for the day -- indeed especially when she was out for the day -- she was a frugal woman, far too self-denying and far too much in thrall to the idea of keeping going to indulge her self or her children in the luxury of catchpennies that she would see like buckets and spades. After all, we were only out for the day; next morning we'd be back on the land, up in the morning for our porridge, out to the field to bring the cows to the by re and after that to deliver the milk to our neighbours. But still, in her mother's heart, she desperately wanted to do something for us, so off she went to a hardware store and bought not the conventional seaside gear that we desired but a consignment of down-to-earth farm equipment which she could utilize when she went home: instead of bucket and spade, she brought us a plain tin milk can and a couple of wooden spoons, durable items indeed, useful enough in their own way, but wooden spoons for Gods sake s, totally destructive of all glamour and all magic. I hope it will be obvious why I tell you this: I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another. Calling a spade a spade may be a bit reductive but calling a wooden spoon a wooden spoon is the beginning of wisdom. And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle. Luckily, in a commencement address you only have to get started and keep going. Luckily for you and for me there is no necessity to start again. But for you today, class of 1996, starting again is what it is actually all about. By graduating from this great and famous university, you have reached a stepping stone in your life, a place where you can pause for a moment and enjoy the luxury of looking back on the distance covered; but the thing about stepping stones is that you always need to find another one up there ahead of you. Even if it is panicky in midstream, there is no going back. The next move is always the test. Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. Back in Magherafelt May Fair, for example, our young woman didn't dazzle the crowd as thoroughly as she had hoped she would. The song ends like this:

“So I bade them all good evening  and there I hoisted sail,  Let the best betide my countryside, my fortune never fail. Then night coming on, all hopes being gone,  I think I will try elsewhere, at a dance or a wake my chance I'll take and leave Magherafelt May Fair.”  Class of 1996, Tar Heels of the mind, when I said at the beginning that the world was all before you, I was echoing what the English poet John Milton said at the end of his great poem, "Paradise Lost." And I am not the first one to have echoed that line. Almost a 7

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century-and-a-half after Milton wrote about Adam and Eve being driven out of Eden, into history, having to keep going by the sweat of their brow, Milton's words were echoed by another English poet, William Wordsworth, at the start of his epoch-making autobiographical poem, "The Prelude." By making the entry into adult experience an adventure rather than a penalty, Wordsworth was announcing the theme I have addressed this morning; he was implying that history, and our individual lives within history, constantly involve the same effort at starting again and again. Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. But there is a pride and joy also, a pride and joy that is surging through this crowd today, through the emotions of your parents and your mothers particularly on Mothers Day, your families and your assembled friends. And through you yourselves especially. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you. HEANEY AND BOGLAND Hard on the publication of P.V. Glob's The Bog People, detailing the discovery of a series of bodies over 2000 years old in the bogs of Denmark, Heaney's metaphor, begun in “Bogland” reaches its ultimate fruition. In Glob's book, Heaney found the consummation of his descent into the earth. His series of "Bog Poems" (including “The Tollund Man”) address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney's fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. Perhaps the most striking of these poems is "Punishment," where he sees in the corpse of a ritually sacrificed woman an echo of the Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. He acknowledges his guilt for implicit participation in such terrible deeds, because he "would have cast, I know / the stones of silence." He recognizes his own conflicting feelings.

Nobel laureate Heaney is a pastoralist with a strong and critical sense of history. His rich and earthy poems are about the life of the land of Northern Ireland as well as the evolution of the heavily mythologized Irish identity. Heaney's sonorous lyricism stems from his love of the cycles of country life, the mystery of the sea, the satisfying rhythm of hard, physical work. But Heaney loves poetry and poetics as well as nature and expresses this passion in his forceful if demanding literary essays. This is his third book of criticism, and it contains 10 lectures Heaney delivered as professor of poetry at Oxford. In the title essay, Heaney explains how poetry balances the "scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium." After considering all the burdens contemporary poets carry, from the long tradition of the form itself to pressing political perspectives, Heaney still insists that "poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally selfdelighting inventiveness." This viewpoint underlies his shrewd essays on George Herbert, Christopher Marlowe, the Irish poet Brian Merriman, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. That conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. “Song” demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and “Personal Helicon” this short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and the details of language make this poem a small success. 8

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Heaney uses the book, 'The Bog People', written by P.V. Glob, in many of his poems. Heaney wrote that the book 'was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times.' He saw in the book a way to focus a number of his traditional interests, and it offered him a frame of reference, and set of symbols which he could deploy in engaging with the present conflict and its antecedent history. Glob's book offers an image of a pre-Christian, northern European tribal society, in which ritual violence is a necessary part of the structure of life. Most of the bodies recovered from the Jutland bogs had been victims of ritual killings, many of them having served as human sacrifices to the earth goddess, Nerthus. Heaney detected a kinship between the pagan civilisations and Ireland's own Celtic traditions and he used these Iron Age narratives to explore contemporary atrocities.

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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS Q: Q: Q:

SEAMUS HEANEY IS POET OF EXILE. MAKE A CONVINCING CASE. DISCUSS SEAMUS HEANEY AS A POET OF MODERN IRELAND. GIVE A DETAILED DEPICTION OF HEANEY’S POETIC QUALITIES.

Ans: To survive like a poet in a culture glutted with politics is a touch and go business. Investing poetry with the heavy albatross of public gist, only circumvention is its flight, however, it is appetizing, it is to bring one’s poetic aptitude into effect for the sake of a programme or and ideology, but the aftermath has little to do with poetry. Heaney’s poetry exhibits the latter day chronicles of Ireland. Heaney’s poems range from more subjective poems about his upbringing and the significance of the simpleton life on the land to those that explore the social injustice and murderous history of his country. Poet is very actuated by the society and the subject matter. The sectarian violence is in the saddle of his work and sometimes addresses specific revenge killing. Heaney’s poetry is also said to be the “Poetry of exile”. In fact, Heaney has stood in the way of the bloodiest era; his pre-teens come into contact with barbarianism and suppression prevalent in his country at that time and it stimulates him to write about freedom. Thus, there was no way out for the poet except exile and it was the only means of restoring the autonomy of his poetic voice. As he says:

“I will content elsewhere.”  The pre-eminent critic Edna Longky opines; “In other words, Heaney sees the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland as amongst other things, a symptom of collision between the opposing claims of  rationalistic order and religious atavism.”  For an instance, his poem “A Constable Calls” is based on his personal experience. The poem is about a child’s feedback to constable’s visit. The constable takes the routine official visit in a connection with usual collection of data regarding the area under cultivation and its agricultural produce. On this, the little lad is thrown into a panic. And the child reacts to it with trepidation. The autochthons of this region have experienced this long fright as they were born and sent illustrated. The constable’s ovesence, his get up and his bike are sinister presence that makes the child’s blood run cold and feels fidgety. “The ministry of fear” thus comes to light as a collective coercive force is put into the mouth of the child. The sound image of ‘tick-tick’ very plainly refers to the jeopardy of time-bomb that can go off at any moment to bring quietus and demolition. It also turns to a state of topsy-turvy, uncertainty and difference. In “The Toome Road” Heaney wishes to kick up a fuss about and elevates his personal voice against the antagonistic activities and unauthorized military movements of invaders across the country. He also wants to impart awareness to his fellow countrymen regarding under the counter capture of his territory by the intruders for their nefarious designs of subjugating the native of Northern Ireland, but he finds himself isolated among a cowering and a cringing crowd of passive and vulnerable people. He says: “The whole country was sleeping  whom should I run to tell.”  10

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Heaney’s poem “The Tollund Man” sets down events that took place in prehistoric  Jutland, in Denmark and in modern day Ireland. These phenomenen have similitude of purpose. The people of this place have offered their lives for the sake of their mother land just like in the way, as the bog people in Early Iron age were oblated to please their gods and goddesses to safeguard their motherland from some calamity or famine or drought or for bounteous grain, whereas, Irish people lost their lives during the civil war. Heaney blended these events to highlight the atrocities and ferocity mankind suffered at the hands of power groups. Some critics say that the poem “The Tollund Man” is a desirable instance of poetry of fuss, whereas, some others say that the poet takes the both sorts of violence i.e. ritual and political in a pessimistic way. Through mingling both kinds of events, Heaney has scrutinized perpetual human bloodshed in a detached and unconcerned manner. He opts for tristesse and agony without a word of protest. In fact, Heaney has utilized all his poetic abilities and finesse to portray the biter reality of the world. Heaney’s poem “Casting and Gathering” is also allegorical to a higher degree. It touches the intuitive in the poet sometimes. This poem presents an overview of interchange of social, political, theological and economic concepts that put a new spirit in the people to raise their voice against injustice. This poem shows his point of view very clearly as he says:

“I loved hushed air, I trusted contrariness years and years ago past and I do not  move for I see that when one man casts, the other gathers. And then vice versa, without changing sides.”  Heaney is not a quintessential or archetypal poet. His poem “Personal Helicon” claims to corroborate him as a narcissist. He concerns his own self as the source of inspiration. Helicon is another name of Mount Olympus. This mount was a source of inspiration for the poets of Greek era. That is why, the poets used to visit that Helicon. But Heaney is of the opinion that he has his own (personal) Helicon. In other words, for fillip, he does not rely on any external source. He dives into the unfathomable sea of the thought to extract the genuine power of faculty of reason. Through his poetry, he wants to make a description of the untold and unrevealed realities. He wants to set the darkness echoing through his poetry. He says to himself: “To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”  Heaney’s opus is well fed with images of death nevertheless; it is truly rooted in the cosmic life. His solicitous elegies about his pals and family members, who have pushed up the daisies, serve multi-purposely. They are wearing widow’s weeds over great losses and recall the solace that remains to their recollections. He wants to egg on the people for freedom. “The whole country was sleeping. Whom should I run to tell.”  According to George Boyce, “The necessity to choose words carefully in the context of Irish politics has been succinctly put by the Ulster poet, Seamus Heaney”  And is said; “Whatever you say, say nothing.”  So, Heaney’s protest is not that of a political agent or propagandist. He simply longs his people to dwell with all their heart and soul in the land of their ancestors. He hankers for such a life instinctively. In other words, he is a marvellous “Pacifist”. In a nutshell, Heaney’s poetry is packed with primordial or antediluvian sentiments and conveys a message to millions of downtrodden, who were ill-treated at the cruel hands of foreign unbridled forces. 11

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Q: Q: Q:

DISCUSS SEAMUS HEANEY AS NON-POLITICAL POET. SEAMUS HEANEY’S POETRY ALIENATES HIM TO HIS SURROUNDINGS. HOW CAN YOU MAKE A CONVINCING DEBATE? HEANEY IS STAGGERED BETWEEN TWO FORCES THE PURE POET AND A POLITICALLY AWARE PERSON. DO YOU AGREE?

Ans: It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a political and provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or taken to task for remaining aloof from it. As one can connote his awareness and caring attitude from ‘the boot of the law’, ‘the heavy ledger’, ‘the polished holster’, and ‘imagining the black hole in the barracks from “A Constable Calls” and ‘armoured cars’, ‘warbling along on powerful wheels’, ‘my roads’; and ‘I had the right of way’ from “The Toome Road”. That finale, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. “Casting and Gathering” demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and “Personal Helicon”. This short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and detail of the poems make it a small success. Heaney imbues with Joseph Brodsky that the only thing poetry and politics have in common “are the letters P and O”. He is of the view that poet should be well aware of his surroundings, especially when there is bloodshed, and that he must perform his role as much as he can. But he does not want to be identified with hacklers. In his essay “The Redress of Poetry”, he is at crusade against hacklers who have made poetry a source of propaganda.

"There is no getting around that there is a political component to the decisionmaking," said Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux,   Heaney's New York publisher. "But this has been a long time coming, and it  couldn't go to a more popular, beloved person." The poem in this archive, “Personal Helicon” introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor. Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaneyboppers" attend his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be seen throughout his work, but most especially in his “A Constable calls”, and “The Toome Road”, where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and even Dante have played important in this context. Q: 12

GIVE A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF “THE TOLLUND MAN”.

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Q:

“THE TOLLUND MAN” PRESENTS THE TRAGIC SITUATION OF IRELAND IN MYTHICAL MANNER. DO YOU AGREE?

Ans: Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man” is one of the ‘Bog’ poems. It is his dazzling endeavour at conflating his sense of Juteland rituals with his own perception of mythic and modern Irish history. Hard on the publication of P.V. Glob's The Bog People, detailing the discovery of a series of bodies over 2000 years old in the bogs of Denmark, Heaney's metaphor, begun in “Bogland” reaches its ultimate fruition. In Glob's book, Heaney found the consummation of his descent into the earth. His series of "Bog Poems" (including “The Tollund Man”) address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney's fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. Perhaps the most striking of these poems is "Punishment," where he sees in the corpse of a ritually sacrificed woman an echo of the Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. He acknowledges his guilt for implicit participation in such terrible deeds, because he "would have cast, I know the stones of silence." He recognizes his own conflicting feelings. The excavators of history of Denmark found ‘preserved bodies’ of young men and women in the bogs of Juteland naked and, strangled or with their throats cut disposed under the peat since early Iron Age. Heaney observes a similarity between the bog men and those Irishmen who have been killed during the civil war. He develops a myth out of the happenings and proclaims that the soil has always desired for sacrifices from its dwellers as the bog men were sacrificed to the goddess of land (Nerthus), similarly the Irish men are being slaughtered for their land. It is in this spirit that Heaney aspires to visit the Bogland to personally observe what happened in the early Iron Age. For that reason, he gives vent to his desire to go to Aarhus- a place where the heads of the bog man, called, Tollund man, is kept in a museum. Heaney took a perusal of Glob’s book “The Bog People”. “The Tollund Man” is one of the recovered bodies featured by Globe in his book. He was a sufferer sacrificed to Nerthus, in hope of securing superior crop from the land; in this sense the amplifier calls him ‘ Bridegroom to the goddess’. The raconteur fancies the killing of the Tollund Man and his subsequent burial in the bog as a kind of violent lovemaking between surrendering person and the goddess, in which Nerthus ‘opened her fen’, preserves the victim’s body by immersing it in her sexual ‘dark juices’. When the Tollund Man is hollowed out, many centuries later, the turf cutters discover, “His last gruel of winter seeds caked in his stomach”. As a sacrificial-goat to the goddess of germination, the Tollund Man carries the potential of germination (‘gruel of winter seeds’). The goddess tightened the noose around his neck and the bridegroom was sucked by the fen or the bog. The sacrificed men thus became the fertilizers of the land. ‘The Dark Juices’ symbolize the transference of the sacrificed man to the earth. To Heaney, in such custom, he becomes a martyr whose death is the life of others and whose blood works as the fertilizers for the land. The poet then compares these martyred bodies to the beehives, the cells of which are full of honey and that face still exists in the museum of Aarhus. In the second section of the poem the connection between Jutland and Ireland is made explicit. Both places have had their innocent victims. Ireland also has killings that have a certain ritualistic dimension to them. In the last stanza the speaker recalls an incident in which bodies of four young Catholics, murdered by Protestant militants, were dragged along a railway line in an act of mutilation:

“'Tell-tale skin and teeth  Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed  13

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 For miles along the lines.”  The speaker imagines that, if he addresses a prayer to the Tollund Man ('risking blasphemy' as a Christian by aligning himself with pagan rituals), then perhaps the potential for germination and regeneration inherent in the Tollund Man's sacrifice, and in his very body ('winter seeds') might be released, not in the victim's native Jutland, but in contemporary Ireland. It might 'make germinate/The scattered, ambushed/Flesh' of the sacrificial victims. In the final section of the poem, the speaker imagines a visit to the Museum in Aarhus where the Tollund Man has been in display. Though the names of the region he passes through ('Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard') will be alien to him, and the local language unintelligible, he fancies that, as an Irishman burdened with the weight of his country's history, he will feel a kinship with a landscape that has witnessed similar conflict and killings. The poem shows that the sacrificial death of the Tollund man is associated with ritual and this seems to be reflected in the dead body's restful pose, which is a contrast to the terrible maiming and unrest of the victims in contemporary Irish society. The Tollund man's body has been preserved and is aligned with a saint (saint's kept body'). The body is constantly associated with the Earth ('peat-brown head', 'mild pods') and fertility ('His last gruel of winter seeds'). The earth is represented as female and sexual: 'And opened her fen,/Those dark juices working') and it is this that has preserved and elevated him to a saint. He is seen as a bridegroom to the bride-goddess Earth, a sacrifice that will bring some good, some alleviation of pain (though of course he has been violently killed), unlike the four young brothers who are killed shamefully, resulted in only more turmoil and bloodshed. The last lines reveal the state of mind of the speaker. The terrible paradox of both feeling lost and unhappy while 'at home', show the correspondences between Neolithic   Jutland and modern Ireland as well as acknowledging the terror and loss that is an everyday occurrence in his world, though there is still resignation but rather a desire for peace that underlies the final lines and the whole poem. The symbolic utilization of these bog men is applied to the strugglers of Ireland. Heaney makes a comparison between these buried men and the dead bodies of Irish labourers found in the fields. These labourers were in their dungarees; they have their stockings on. Heaney wants to express that these people were not fighters or so called rebels; they were ordinary people killed mercilessly in the civil war in Ireland. So many innocent people who had nothing to do with that civil war were butchered. The poet also tells the tales of men who were dragged from miles along the railway track. They had been thoroughly skinned and their rotten dead bodies were bare to teeth because of that Draculaian dragging. Heaney recalls, perhaps alluding to the cruel scenes of condemned people carried in tumbrels to the guillotine during the French Revolution presented by Dickens in ‘A Tale of two Cities’. Heaney calls these people with their proper names, Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard like Yeats, who also gave the names of Irishmen in “Easter 1916”. This comparative style mentions the close associations of the poets for people who are killed in civil war. Those were his fellow-countrymen. Though the bog men were belonged to a dissimilar land and spoke a different language, yet there is an archetypical kinship between them. Heaney feels that in Juteland, he will feel at home because the bogs at Juteland are not poles apart than bogs in Ireland. He will be gloomy that the thrashing of so many lives but the idea that the tragedy is universal is a source of consolation to him. This is what he identifies as ‘the redress of poetry’. He will feel unhappy and at home simultaneously. 14

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Heaney avers to be a pure poet who considers that poetry should have no function beyond poetry. He believes in poetry for the sake of poetry. He reviles the hackler who wants to employ the poetry for political ends. Heaney asserts that politics is not the function of poetry, but, ironically enough, he cannot detach himself from the world surrounding him. On seeing men falling in dilapidated condition around him, he feels culpable that he is only writing poetry. He wants to find a role for himself in that strife. This poem, as we can observe, is a political poem, but Heaney fastens together the tragedy of Ireland with the tragedy of pre-historic Juteland. He creates a myth of misery. In resultant, he turns a political tragedy into an aesthetic one. This is how he combines politics with poetry. Perhaps it consoles him but does it really console hundreds and thousands who are being butchered in Ireland. Andrew Lynch's remarks about the poem: 'Heaney does not venerate the Tollund Man as king or martyr, but as victim. His vowed journey to Aarhus in Jutland recalls the Catholic custom, of pilgrimage to a saint's shrine, sometimes featuring the miraculously preserved body of the saint. Heaney's 'saint' has had a brief period of glory, but has been violently killed 'for the land'. To the poet, he stands for the Irish people killed for their allegiance to Ireland, a suggestion which is symbolically rendered as the embrace of the earth-goddess. The gold 'torc' (collar), worn by Celtic royalty, is likened to the arms of the goddess encircling the bridegroom's neck, but the metaphor reminds us that this embrace is a strangulation, the noose of the victim-bridegroom.' Q: GIVE A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF “THE TOOME ROAD”. Ans: State terrorism combined with unending threat of war and violence has turned the life of Irish people into a night mare. While speaking about freedom of his people, Heaney does not like to be labelled a heckler or a professional political provocateur, though at the same time he cannot help sympathizing with his people plight at the hands of foreign aggressors. Heaney’s protest is not that of a political agent or propagandist. He simply wants his people to live happily their lives in the land of their forefathers. “The Toome Road” reflects poet’s childhood impressions of military exercises of American soldiers in connection with Normandy invasion of 1944. In the poem the poet reacts to the invasion of his native country by foreign soldiers. He can see the foreign soldiers march there on roads; the vehicles are with heavy body and tyres. They are moving about in the land of his forefathers without any hindrance.

“Armoured cars in convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,  All camouflaged with broken alder branches,  Headphone soldiers standing up in turrets”  This and later developments regarding sectarian and political schism during poet’s adult day experience serve as background to this protest piece of poetry, “How long were they approaching down my roads  As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping”  The poet feels that all Irish people appear to have become insensitive to this threatening movement of all out foreign domination. He does not know whom he should ask to realize the approaching danger of evil designs of the aggressor; “Whom should I run to tell  Among all of those with their back doors on the latch  For the bringer of bad news”  The people lost hope of setting their freedom restored to them. They shut their doors if they find somebody approach them to tell them of their own good and welfare. 15

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They avoid him as they think that the visitor will, with his message, add to their suffering and misery. They hope for nothing better. Heaney is quite cognizant of the seriousness of the problem. He wants to share his concern with his people. He is certain that the presence of foreign soldiers on the Irish soil is a clear indication that rights of the Irish people are in jeopardy. He proclaims pathetically, “I had rights”, that now it is a thing of the past,

“I had right-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping, Tractors hitched to buck rakes in open sheds Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the green and reds, of outhouse roofs”  But now, he believes, they are all “in other’s keeping” occupied by the invaders. Their movement goes unchecked, unnoticed and they move about in such a way as if they are the owners of all that. His voice, he thinks, is alone voice a cry in wilderness. The poet’s use of clear visual images is a rich source of vivid description. The poem begins with movement of armed soldiers head-phoned in camouflaged armoured vehicles. The picture of this convoy approaching down the poet’s roads is very clear. He also talks about concrete things like ‘fields’, ‘cattle’, ‘tractors’, ‘shed’, ‘soils’, ‘chill gates’, ‘wet slates’, ‘the greens and reds of outhouse roofs’. “Warbling” is a sound image whereas “wet slates” is a touch image. The colour images of “the greens and reds of outhouse roofs” add to the clarity of vision and meaning. The last four lines appear as a ray of hope in the pitch dark gloom of the whole description of disappointment and distress. The poet invites the ‘Sowers of seeds’ and the erectors of headstones of his oppressed native area to listen his message of hope. He tells them that somewhere high above the tanks and weapons carried by the soldiers exists a living force like that of ‘Omphalos’ the invisible and unshakable stone holding the whole universe in place at its centre. The poem is packed with patriotic sentiments and sends a message across million of down-trodden, oppressed at the cruel hands of foreign unbridled forces. The symbolic use of ‘Omphalos’ is to show the unshakable will of Irish people as a central indomitable force in freedom struggle, and ‘charioteers’ as invaders of the modern day war help the reader understand the message of the poet. Q:

Q:

WHAT IS CONCEPT OF POETIC INSPIRATION IN HEANEY’S POETRY? GIVE A DETAILED DEPICTION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HIS “PERSONAL HELICON”. GIVE A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF “PERSONAL HELICON”.

Ans: The important he archive, “Personal Helicon” introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, “Digging,” acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor. In 'Personal Helicon', Heaney proclaims that he writes poetry in order 'to set the darkness echoing'. Heaney's poems often explore language as a means of examining 16

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reality and the individual's relationship to the world, and he once said that 'Words themselves are doors' that open up new ways of understanding. In the final lines of 'Personal Helicon' the 'darkness' is the unknown, the things that remain hidden, concepts that have not been brought into the light and articulated in words. Whether it is personal fears or social injustices, poetry is a medium to bring these 'unspoken' attitudes to the world, to make it 'echo' and resound with force. In the poem, the 'Helicon' is a reference to the mountain in Greek mythology where the nine muses lived. The streams that run down the mountain have the power to give those who drink from it the inspiration to write poetry. It is in this context that the poem explores the nature of writing or at least a definition of poetry. Seamus Heaney in “Personal Helicon” claims that his own soul is the source of his inspiration basic to his creative work. In other words, the Muses are not the source of his inspiration leading to his poetic creation. He believes that nothing lies outside his own soul that can inspire his urge ‘to rhyme’. The poem records Heaney’s own childhood rambles across his farmland and its neighbourhood when as a pleasure pursuit he peeped into the dark deep wells refers to the unknown hidden deep into the recess of the poet’s own soul itself an abode and reservoir of mystery. The secret is out when the depth (well) of soul is searched and the unknown and the hidden is brought to light at the tip of inspiration. A poet, of course, in his own well of his soul, feels the need of inspiration to have a go at truth finding. Heaney defines poetry here in his own way. He asserts that poetry is vehicle of poet’s personal thought and feelings. It is an inspired act of expressing what lies deep in the consciousness of the poet’s soul. We find the poet’s untrained childhood sensibility exposed to a country landscape dotted with brickyards, wells and cold pumps. We follow the child’s curious look searching for his reflection in the calm water of these dark and deep wells. The smells of rank ‘weed, fungus and rotten moss” in the wet surrounding here fascinate him. The poet mentions a well in particular that is located in a brickyard. It is protected with a wooden plank used as its cover on top. As a child he loved to hear the noise that came from the well when the empty bucket, lowered into it, hit water below with a splashing noise. The dark depth of the well, its pitch black water, and its noise presented a weird and mysterious look to the child’s untamed sensibility. The well, he mentions, was too deep and dark to look at one’s reflection in its water. It was not a deep hole under a dry stone ditch. It had a close resemblance with a fish pond, as the poet seeks a likeness between the plenty of fish swimming in an aquarium and the lot of rotten plants floating in the water of the well. As the water in bucket was cleared of all its dart of weed, the child could see his face mirrored in it. The reflection of child’s white face was visible in it. The poet here symbolically asserts his theory of subjective approach to poetry. His looking at his own reflection also refers to this subjective and intuitive nature of his poetry. Like legendary Narcissus he is interested in expressing his own fears and doubts that lie deep in his soul. He does not look around to be inspired for creating his verse. The fountainhead of his poetic thought is his soul, and what lies hidden there is the subject matter of his verse, and the same is revealed through his poetic words. Heaney’s personal experiences of injustice, fear, apprehensions, losses, unfulfilled desires, and deprivations urge him to speak and write. They are the source of his inspiration. He looks at his own face when he writes. When Heaney claims to adopt this course in his poetry, he denies the role that environment plays in evolving a work of art, since his theory of poetry hinges mainly on his remaining detached from what is going on around him. What Heaney, in this way, claims to practise is difficult to do particularly when modern psychology insists that 17

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personality is an indivisible combination of hereditary traits and environment. A sensitive person, a poet in particular, cannot keep aloof when his immediate surrounding is exposed to grave crisis involving injustice and violence, death and destruction. Inevitably, he is supposed to be stirred by necessity of circumstance and react accordingly. Simple words, metaphorical use of wells, buckets, windlasses and dark drop, and sight, smell, sound and taste images have a lot to do with the transparency of meanings in the poem. Heaney, by force of his descriptive art, paints a pretty landscape of brickyards, wells, open sky and wild water weed. His childhood rambles across the place and his Narcissus pursuit have skilfully been used to support his subjective approach to poetic thought and creation. Q:

Q:

WHAT ARE MAJOR CONFLICTING FORCES THAT ENCOMPASS HUMAN LIFE? HOW HEANEY PRESENTS THIS CONFLICT IN “CASTING & GATHERING”. GIVE A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE POEM “CASTING & GATHERING” BY SEAMUS HEANEY.

Ans: The limerick “Casting and Gathering” presents an over view of interplay of social, political, religious and economical views that inspired people everywhere to raise their voice against inequality. The working class was greatly inspired by these views. The poem seeks a compromise on the ideological conflict that has long been contaminating society with numerous tribulations. Philosophers like Rousseau and Hegel have expressed fairly like chalk and cheese opinions regarding the extent of freedom and authority that individual and society should have. Man has over centuries been trying to strike a balance between the two extremes held in these views but the titled scale of opinion in favour of both has widened the distance and originated a conflict between the Leftist and the Rightist, between the progressive and conservative, communist and capitalist and the oppressor and the oppressed. The poem consigns symbolically to man’s innate love for pleasure and his instinctive desire to escape fear. These desires have made him long for prosperity and avoid pain. Heaney looks back at this dilemma and feels the need of resolving the conflict behind it. The ‘river’ in the poem is a river of life. The ‘banks’, where workers on both sides are engaged in toilsome activities, are vital to the very portion of human race. The sight images of river banks are “Green silk tepard net moving fast in the air”, “hayfields”, “marsh birds”, “farming machines”, “moving arms and rods”, “workers absorbed in sowing seed” and “cutting crops in the holy stillness of countryside” Mentioned images convey a vivid representation of farm work to the reader’s mind. The poet describes two different stages of process in farming. That are sowing seeds and reaping a crop. That is the culmination of producing grain to sustain life. Same as the views do no look alike but in spirit they lead to envisage a better and improved future life for human race. The sound images used by Heaney are no less gratifying to the mind and soul of the reader. The sounds of words like “hush and lush”, “swishing noise” stand for fear and hope. The feelings of fear and hope are a reaction to movements calling for a change. The swishing noise of the net plays the role of messenger with a good or bad whispering of news. The jarring noise of cries of the “marsh birds”, and the loud noise of “farming machines” pierce the calm of the peaceful farmland atmosphere on banks. The voices of “a speeded-up corncrake”, “a sharp rat-chatting” suggest that individual has no important role to play in society.

18

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The title of the poem “Casting and gathering” refers a thought to the mind of reader on both views. Casting a net or scattering seeds is one view and gathering the fish or collecting grains by reaping or harvesting is another view. Both are quite different but both are essential to lead our life. It provides a healthy environment of co-existence. The people need to rise above social, racial, political, religious and economic differences and work together to achieve higher goals of human welfare, without a compromise on contraries; it is very hard to live a life of peace and prosperity. The poet is optimistic about the outcome of efforts if made in that direction. He believes that both views in their own right aim at improving life by putting in their share of knowledge and skill. The poem gives the message of hope and tolerance. According to the poet,

“A culture of tolerance is the ultimate need to promote peace and harmony among the people. One needs not subscribe to opposite views but one can respect and accommodate them”. Q:

POETRY CAN EXPLORE THE PERSONAL DIMENSIONS OF THE SELF AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE FAMILIAR THINGS AROUND, OR ELSE INVESTIGATE THE LARGER ISSUES THAT PERSIST IN THE OUTSIDE   WORLD. DISCUSS THE WORK OF HEANEY BY ANALYSING TWO OR MORE POEMS IN RELATION TO THIS STATEMENT.

Ans: For this analysis of coursework on Seamus Heaney, we will be choosing two poems “Mid-Term Break” and “Personal Helicon”, and we'll be writing a commentary on each of them. Firstly we will be writing an introduction about Seamus Heaney, which will include his poems and on his educational background and then on what types of poems he writes. We will then write about each of the poems 'Mid-Term Break', and 'Personal Helicon', which are similar, as they're both about his child hood. Finally, we will attempt to show why his poems are so effective. Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet who was born in April 1939 and still lives today. Seamus Heaney was a very bright boy who as a country boy attended local primary schools and colleges to gain scholarships at Colleges. At college Heaney was taught Latin and Irish and moved on to Queens University in Belfast. In the course of his career Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotions of artistic and educational causes both in Ireland and abroad. In recent years Seamus Heaney has been the recipient of several honorary degrees, he's a member of the Aosdana (Irish academy of artist and writers), and a foreign member of the American Academy of arts and letters. 'Mid-Term Break' is an incredibly sad poem. “Mid Term Break” is basically about a little boy, who was actually Seamus Heaney's brother, who was sadly killed by a speeding car. Seamus Heaney describes in the poem of what he did that day when his younger brother was killed. The stanza begins with the "morning" in line one, but it is two o'clock in line three, showing that hours have passed in waiting. The second stanza begins with the image of Heaney's father "crying". Heaney's father appears to be a strong man of few words, so having him crying causes a powerful emotion in the reader. Heaney skilfully takes the reader with him as he enters the house (showing he was scared) through the porch as we meet his father; "Big Jim Evans"; the baby in its pram; the old men gathered in the room; and finally Heaney's mother coughing out "angry tearless sighs", which show that she was hiding her true emotions. The little brother of Seamus Heaney was hit on his head, as it says the ambulance arrived at 10 o'clock, with the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. We learn in the sixth stanza that Heaney hadn't seen his brother for six weeks having been "away at school", which suggests he went to a boarding school. The words "paler now", hang at 19

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the end of the stanza on line 18, causing a sad pause before the sentence continues and describes how little changed in appearance from when the boy was alive and dead, the big difference is his paler colour and his "poppy bruise". The final line stands out of the rest of the poem. Almost every word is special so that the reader must take in the line's message and the shock and deep grief that the family must have felt. There is shock for the reader reading it for the first time also, when they discover who has died and that he was only four years old. The little four-year-old child who suffered a hard hit to the head from a speeding car was well written in the poem. The mood is set almost immediately in the second line: Counting bells knelling classes to a close. We noticed how Heaney uses an alteration to the funereal sound of the bells and the feeling of time dragging. 'Personal Helicon' is basically about childhood and discovery. This poem is well written, which cleverly makes us think so that we may see ourselves better as a species. Looking at the first and last stanzas, I can see opposing points of view. The first line begins 'As a child' and in the last line Heaney says that these activities are now 'beneath all adult dignity'. He also begins by describing the very real echoes found in wells, but the last line "I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing", which is about echoes of a more metaphorical kind. The poem itself seems to be about the journey from childhood to adulthood that he has taken. This means he has moved away from the poetry he wrote when he was younger to a more mature kind when he became older. I find some lines in the poem wild and disgusting, words such as "fructified", fungus", "dank" which were said earlier in the poem, and later Heaney speaks of "a clean new music", reflecting his life as he has become more mature. Looking at the two poems 'Mid-Term Break' and 'Personal Helicon' I have learnt that Seamus Heaney's poems can be very meaningful and in depth. You could have so many ideas of what the poem is suggesting which makes you think what's happening and what the poem is all about. Looking at the poem 'Mid-Term Break' we feel it is very well written. The poem builds up lots of tension towards the final stanza, which makes you wonder what's going to happen, which makes it highly exciting. The highlight of this poem would probably have to be the way it was written as it builds up tension, and also makes people feel sympathies for the little four-year-old boy who was killed as he looked like he was sleeping in the coffin as he slept in his cot. In 'Personal Helicon', Seamus Heaney writes about childhood and discovery, which is very hard to understand. He creates a mirror with his rhymes. In a way, archaeology is like "hands-on" poetry. Its purpose is to "pry into roots" of humanity, "to set the darkness echoing" so that we may see ourselves better as a species. Q: DISCUSS THE TECHNICALITIES OF HEANEY’S POETIC STYLE. Ans: Robert Lowell has reckoned Heaney as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. Heaney is the best promising example of a highly intelligent, honest and decent Irishman struggling like Hercules with the contradiction of his inheritance. The political pressures on him were certainly great but it gave him a subject. The love of language and the love of place are one for Heaney, and the ideal of  justice entails a certain democracy of language, as well as common subject matter. He is well aware that his is ‘tentative art’, and he understands those who are somewhat sceptical about poetry’s special status.

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His poems abound in such voices, mostly drawn from Heaney’s own experience, and they never shy away from speaking their minds, even if what they have to say about the poet’s tactics is not always flattering. It is commonplace to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his Island and his memory. That conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. “Personal Helicon”, “Casting and Gathering” and “Song” are good examples of Heaney’s own imaginative power. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth’s, and his attention to the world around him and the details of language make his poems a great success. Selection of Expressive words is Heaney’s hallmark. He is of the view that, “words are themselves doors”, His words open the minds of poet to the threshold of the reader. The language is inflected either towards its signified or to its signifiers, presents its meanings and calls attention to itself as a medium. It acts as a clear window through which its meanings are immediately and un-immediately visible, Heaney in his poems demonstrates the opposite, the clearer, the most transparent, the language. For in this apparent bareness it becomes clear that no language is free of images and symbols, every word may double its meaning. “A Constable Calls” is full of images that help trace the meaning. The things are so minutely described through clear images. The images of “bike” and “boot” have been used for inspiring awe. The “revolver” and “Bolton” images stand for state terror, too. The “black hole in barrack’s” is an image used to inspire the fear of punishment. The sound image of “ticked, ticked, ticked” very clearly refers to the danger of time bomb that can explode any moment to bring death and destruction. It also refers to state of chaos, uncertainty and insecurity. Symbolism is special area of Heaney. He manipulates it to get his desired aim. In the “Toome Road” the symbolic use of “Omphalous” shows the unshakeable will of Irish people as a central indomitable force in freedom struggle, the “charioteers” as invaders of the modern day war help the reader to understand the message of the poet. Heaney’s series of bog poems address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney’s metaphor, begins in “Bogland” reaches its ultimate fruition. His fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. “Casting and Gathering” is comparison of two approaches of human mind to deal with its immediate crises, and works for its vested interest. One is to kill man for religious syndrome the other to appease political force. The decision to avoid the limitations of dogma frees Heaney and enables him to attain “visions of air”. His poetic visions never lose sight of the physical, the immediate, and the local. His is poetry of nouns. Exile serves as a way to bypass the political which constantly inserts itself between man and society. Heaney never disdains the so-called “common man” to accuse him of arrogance would be completely misguided. Heaney is the voice we love to hear, for his talent ultimately serves the common good.

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Qaisar Iqbal Janjua, Contact: (92) 300 94 678 [email protected], [email protected]