The poet Keats wrote that “the only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s own mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought, not a select body”. That this may be an admirable aim for a poet, and especially so for one writing against a background of ethnic violence, is not in doubt. It is, however, extremely difficult to remain neutral when one identifies oneself with an ethnic party involved in conflict.
It is my intention, then, in this essay, to document how Seamus Heaney’s reaction to violence in his homeland has affected his writings, with particular reference to the volume of poetry entitled “North”. This volume first appeared in 1975, a year after the collapse of the so-called Sunningdale Agreement, a power-sharing executive which came into being at the start of 1974 and had brought for many and certainly for Catholic nationalists a certain hope. However, shortly after its introduction, the IRA declared that “the war goes on” and a 15 day strike by loyalist workers brought the Faulkner-led government to disbandment.
Thus, 1974 and 1975 saw some of the darkest days of the northern “troubles”. Heaney then is forced to react to the maelstrom in which he finds himself, much like Yeats after the 1916 rising, and like Yeats, he finds himself unsure of his position. Unlike Yeats, however, he is not a well-established, mature poet and upon being presented with an era which will shape the future of Ireland, he is often found wanting. Edna Longley describes the latter half of “North” as “”a cobbled up second section of topical’ material” and yet upon its publication it caused a massive storm of controversy, not least amongst other Northern Irish poets.
James Simmons accuses Heaney of having “timid moral postures” and I believe that if we study some of the poems we can see that he is correct to do so. Pervasive throughout “North” is the idea of placing contemporary situations against ancient happenings. In “Punishment” we are presented with a woman’s drowned body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and boughs. Heaney goes on to call this ancient, punished bog-body a “Little adultress” which implies the poet’s comprehension both of the need for punishment and of those who did the punishing.
The body is then compared to those of local Catholic girls, tarred and feathered for fraternising with British soldiers: I who have stood dumb When your betraying sisters, Cauled in tar, Wept by the railings, Who would connive In civilised outrage Yet understand the exact And tribal, intimate revenge. Reading these last two stanzas of the poem, it is not difficult to understand why it caused outrage upon its publication. To even the most liberal of readers it surely must seem that the poet is in league with those who tar and feather women merely for having friends from the wrong side’.
One can accept that a casual onlooker may not risk life and limb to intervene to aid a stranger; what one finds much more difficult to accept is that Heaney, on seeing young women tarred and weeping, understands the ” tribal, intimate revenge”. This is poetry as catharsis. Although adultery and dating British soldiers are obviously two different things, they are both activities which occur outside the tribe. The sense of tribalism is present throughout and is presented as an inescapable and timeless pattern.
Throughout the poem Heaney has apologetically distanced himself from violence, always “the artful voyeur”. This poem tells us much in relation to Heaney’s stance on the violence in Northern Ireland. He certainly identifies with it, as we see in the poet’s inclusion of himself in the first line where “I can feel” and indeed how could he not for he was surrounded by it. His attitude, as already stated, seems to be that it is merely part of an inevitable cycle and that any attempt to alter it would be as successful as Canute’s attempt to stem the tide.
There is however no attempt made to distance himself from the reality of the present, which is in itself an admirable and brave trait and he is indeed letting the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought, as Keats suggested. That we may not like what he discovers – his understanding of the “tribal revenge” – is not the poet’s problem. The poet’s problem, one suspects, is that he may not like it much either. It is difficult, however, for one to come away from this poem without a bad taste in the mouth. As Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it “It is the word exact’ that hurts most” .
It is important to note the importance of the bog itself in both this poem and the next that we shall examine. To the poet, “the bog requires intensive interpretation and yet it is commonplace. It is ordinary but also macabre; it is a mortuary and a love-nest”. Of course, much of Ireland is covered in bog, so it is also something that many Irish can easily relate to in a physical as well as a metaphorical dimension. We know of its ugly terrors, but there is occasionally something almost sexual about bogland as presented in Heaney’s poetry. Looking at section III of the poem “Kinship” we are told how Heaney plunges his sword into
A tawny rut Opening at my feet Like a shed skin, The shaft wettish As I sank it upright That this is suggestive of sexual intercourse is inescapable, and serves to connect the Poet, as a man representing his time, directly with the feminised bog representing past times, terrors and fears. This connection with the past is emphasised by the poet’s twinning’ of his spade with “that obelisk:”. This part of the poem ends with one of the most powerful images in “North”, and is difficult to read without feeling a shudder of fearful excitement: I stand at the edge of centuries facing a goddess.
This completes the characterisation of the bog, from black turf to a deity, or perhaps more accurately an oracle who predicts the future through the exhumation of the past. Certainly, the spirit of ceremonial reverence is present. The opening lines of part IV: This centre holds And spreads are surely a reference to Yeats’s “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” from the poem “The Second Coming” which is itself very much concerned with violence within a repetitive historical cycle. At first glance, Heaney may seem to be disagreeing with Yeats when he talks of the centre holding, but they are talking about two very different centres.
Whereas Yeats was referring to a centre of social and spiritual stability, Heaney, standing on a wild bogland, is talking of the past as a centre. Not only is the past holding, it is spreading its influence in the shape of the new terror in Ireland. Heaney is also asserting the place that the bog has within himself as his muse, the centre from which his creativeness flows. He goes so far as to maternalise it I grew out of all this Like a weeping willow Inclined to The appetites of gravity. The bog is what he grew out of, and remains as the source of his strength.
It is his inheritance; and it is in the shadow of death. He seeks to identify with the corpse (as is of course implied in the title, “Kinship”) and imagines that I was his privileged Attendant, a bearer Of bread and drink, The squire of his circuits. There is something of the father figure in Heaney’s portrayal of the corpse; the poet admires his sturdy physicality and healthy robustness. Is it not right that if Heaney regards the bog as in some ways maternal then this male corpse, literally inside the bog, should become paternal?
Part VI of the poem takes us from this warm familiarity to an altogether different kind of kinship which Heaney cannot escape from, try as he might. And you, Tacitus, Observe how I make my grove On an old crannog Piled by the fearful dead: For all the romance inherent in and associated with the corpse, it was a barbarian; a killer. The last two stanzas make for somewhat uncomfortable reading Read the inhuman faces Of casualty and victim; Report us fairly, How we slaughter for the common good and shave the heads of the notorious, how the goddess swallows our love and terror.
It is difficult to know exactly how to interpret these lines. The shaven heads are obviously a reference to yet another punishment meted out to Catholic girls who consorted with the British army or RUC, and those unfortunate individuals would certainly have achieved notoriety in their neighbourhoods. What, though, is Heaney’s response to this? Again, it is impossible to provide a clear answer for there is a deliberate ambiguity in the lines. When the poet asks Report us fairly, How we slaughter For the common good one must believe that there is a cruel sense of irony at work.
It is frustrating, as has been noted many times by many critics (most outspokenly by James Simmons), that at no time during “North” does Heaney directly address his personal response to the contemporary violence in the North. Moving on to another so-called Bog Poem’, “The Grauballe Man” we see history treated with a broader slant. The sense of being trapped in a repetitive historical cycle is even more prevalent here than in “Punishment”. The Grauballe man himself was found in Apirl 1952 near to the village of Grauballe in Denmark, and is an extraordinarily well preserved example of a bog body’ with hair and nails still intact.
The body has been dated to around 50BC, which would make the man a rough contemporary of Julius Caeser. That Heaney uses this body serves to enforce the idea that the past is very much with us, in fact one might say he labours the point somewhat. When Heaney asks “Who will say body’/ to his opaque repose” James Simmons rather facetiously answers “Everybody, I would think”. He goes on to say “Yes, he has been slashed and dumped’, as happened then and happens now” . However, Simmons’s articles on Heaney have a faint whiff of jealousy about them, and the poet’s point is well made.
Heaney challenges us to declare history as being in the past, and we cannot in all consciousness do so, for as Heaney writes are not people even now being “slashed and dumped” as “hooded victims”? One may take moral issue with the penultimate stanza: Hung in the scales With beauty and atrocity; The juxtaposition here of beauty upon atrocity again raises questions as to Heaney’s position on contemporary acts of terrorism (if indeed they are to be so called). One can feel the shadow of Yeats over Heaney here, the latter failing to produce something of the standard or insight of “A terrible beauty is born” and one can sympathise with his plight.
This is the crux of the issue for Heaney – how to relate this new, militant provisional IRA with those martyrs of 1916 and 1921. Are they merely (and the word is used guardedly) terrorists or are they fighting for a cause which is noble and just? In many ways this question also caused Heaney to undergo a paradigm-shift in authorial tone. His earlier well-known poems such as “Digging” seem like infantile juvenilia when compared with those from “North”. If we look at the poem entitled “Funeral Rites” we can see he himself accepts the inner change that external events have forced upon him.
The very title suggests rites of passage, in this case from a young(ish) man with unshaped ideas into a Poet desperately trying to come to terms with the fast-changing world around him. He accepts that he is not yet fully formed as a man – the poem opens at a traditional Irish funeral with the poet as a pallbearer, which should be a terribly adult experience, and yet he admits only that he “shouldered a kind of manhood”. It is the word kind’ that is significant here; it is an admission that Heaney does not yet regard himself as fully formed.
It is not only himself that Heaney questions in the poem. In the first part the traditional Irish funeral is described – dreary and morose, taking place in “tainted rooms”. Tainted with what, one may ask. Death itself? Or perhaps with the drab and dreary lives that these people with “their dough white hands” and “Their puffed knuckles” have had meted out to them, “shackled in rosary beads” to a repressive church which seems to impose inadequate strictures upon death. “little gleaming crosses” seem an inadequate icon to be buried with, and “kissing their igloo brows/had to suffice”.
Now, when death is so prevalent, Heaney demands something more to be made of it. “as news comes in/of each neighbourly murder” the poet Would restore The great chambers of the Boyne, Prepare a sepulchre Under the cupmarked stones. There are several ideas to be gleaned from this passage, other than the magnification of death rituals. The Boyne was the site of a battle in 1690, when the Catholic forces of James II were defeated by Protestant William III and the mentioning of same is thus a clear reference to the domestic terror being inflicted upon the north in 1975.
Whilst contemplating the past, we are not allowed to forget about the present. The Boyne Valley is also home to the Newgrange Megalithic passage tomb, and Heaney may be suggesting that perhaps we should go back to 3200BC and start all over again, or perhaps when he writes that “we pine for ceremony,/customary rituals” he is suggesting that we are not in fact longing for The temperate footsteps Of a cortege, winding past Each blinded home. Walking demurely and pulling blinds down over windows is simply not enough.
We long for something of our true heritage, not that imposed upon one by a relatively new church and religion. When Heaney introduces Purring family cars Nose into line, The whole country tunes To the muffled drumming Of ten thousand engines. one immediately thinks not only of the futility of such things, but also of the marching season and ultimately its often violent futility and the deaths which accompany it. Those ten thousand engines, one suspects, are not just engines but also potential corpses and potential killers.
Another aspect of the traditional Irish country funeral are the “somnambulant women,” who traditionally stayed in the house to prepare tea and sandwiches’ whilst the men went to the graveside to bury the dead. Again, there is something in this that rings of futility, and indeed the line “imagining our slow triumph/towards the mounds” which conjures up ideas of the funeral as a force of power is in itself ultimately futile. As the second part of the poem draws to a close we are reminded once again of how the past and the present not only collide but seem to co-exist.
The funeral procession “drags its tail/out of the Gap of the North”, a place which has an incredibly important part in Irish folklore. In the Tain, it is the site where Cu Chulainn defended Ulster from the armies of Queen Maeve, lashing himself to a tree when he became too weak to stand and fighting until the birth pangs of Macha passed from the Red Branch Knights, the army of Conor, the king of Ulster, and they rode to a great victory.
As such, it is the site of brutal killing and willing self-sacrifice; a self-sacrifice which may be equated by some to IRA volunteers who died in their armed actions whilst defending’ Catholics in Ulster. The third part of the poem concerns itself with Gunnar, a mythological Icelandic hero. After killing twice in the same family, Gunnar is given a choice: he must either leave Iceland for two years or he will die. On the verge of leaving, Gunnar finds the beauty of Iceland overwhelming and stays, therefore ensuring his early death.
He here is compared to the ancients who lay underneath Newgrange and similar tombs and by association with modern Ireland. The implications are clear. Gunnar died for his patriotism, as so many would do in Ireland throughout the troubles. However, in an episode somewhat similar to the Arthur legends, there is a postscript to Gunnar’s tale. When his son and some others stand outside the mound: Suddenly it seemed to them that the mound was open; Gunnar had turned round to face the moon. There seemed to be four lights burning inside the mound, illuminating the whole chamber.
They could see that Gunnar was happy; his face was exultant. He chanted a verse so loudly that this could have been heard clearly from much further away. The return of the procession “past Strang and Carling fjords” is a content one, the memory “allayed for once”. In the face of Gunnar looking at the moon we find peaceful co-existence. Heaney declines to remind readers that Gunnar’s singing provoked his son and followers to avenge his death by more killing, and one wonders whether or not he wishes his readers to know that.
If not, then why choose Gunnar as a model, for there are many other mythical heroes he could have used, but if so, why not mention it in the poem? It is a question of some importance, for the answer to it completely determines whether the poem ends on a note of optimism or fatalism. Perhaps, then, the idea is to leave it ambiguous, to leave Gunnar happy, as he was before men killed for his memory and when he turns “with a joyful face/to look at the moon” it is representative of beauty and all the other ideals that the moon represents.
It would be strange indeed to write on the anthology “North” without mentioning the title poem. In its own way, it is an excellent choice to take the titular position. It introduces us to the theme of the past reflecting and in a way co-existing alongside the present and transports us to the pre-Christian times of the bog poems and “Punishment”. In “North” itself, we are presented with the distant (geographically and historically) yet to us as an island race strangely familiar, Viking ethos of The hatreds and behindbacks Of the althing, lies and women,
Exhaustions nominated peace, Memory incubating the spilled blood,. We are reminded of the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering. Which echo the idea of some greater power, cult or creed than the Christianity that we found in “Funeral Rites”, and harkens back to a simpler time when violence was an accepted way of life and one did not have to moralise or critique; one did not have to worry about one’s reaction to the tarring and feathering of young girls. So far we have seen that Seamus Heaney has been truthful in his opinions up to a point.
He confronts wanton violence, death and destruction by evoking ritualism. There has been no sense of individual pain or of individual outrage. Certainly, the use of ritualism allows Heaney to place the “troubles” in a wider context, but one never gets an unambiguous sense of the poet’s feelings, and that is surely a failing. In fact, one could suggest that Heaney himself knows this, as the only poem that really tackles the present without undue recourse to the past is “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”.
In the first stanza of the poem he writes “bad news is no longer news” and perhaps one could argue that the poet thinks it is no longer poetry either. Again, as earlier, Heaney desires to minimise the violence of the situation. One could argue that he is merely representing the general public Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree. ‘ Where’s it going to end? ‘ It’s getting worse. ‘ but one must wonder whether that is really the job for a poet. Perhaps Heaney wonders this himself: “Yet for all this art and sedentary trade/I am incapable”.
It is easy to condemn Heaney as being far too passive in the face of violence, and all too easy to forget that the majority of the Northern Irish population was implicit in that passivity, and indeed that is what “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” is all about. Some have read it as a poem of condemnation, about people’s lack of action against terror, but it seems to me to be more in the way of an apology – that whatever the populace of Northern Ireland has failed to condemn or take action with then the poet too has failed to condemn or take action with:
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place And times: yes, yes. Of the wee six’ I sing Where to be saved you only must save face And whatever you say, you say nothing. It is, I believe, an admission that the poet has skirted the issue’. Should he be condemned for this, as Simmons would have him be? It is debatable whether it is the job for a poet to show leadership in such times or merely to produce art. That Heaney has produced art throughout “North” is undeniable.
It is also undeniable that he offended many and some would suggest that was his intention from the outset – to hold a mirror to our faces and show us the errors of our ways. Heaney has often been referred to by critics and the press as the greatest living poet since Yeats. This is an assertion which is probably largely based on his being the only Irish poet since Yeats to win the Nobel Prize (excluding Beckett, who was of course mostly a dramatist), and is one I would take issue with as it rather glibly ignores MacNeice and Kavanagh, two poets of equal and arguably greater talent than Heaney.
MacNeice lived through the Second World War, and his poems from and about that time are quite forthright in their statements of belief. Of course, it is not comparing like with like to set WWII against the Northern “troubles” but one cannot help but wish that Heaney had set out his own views on the subject in a somewhat more forthright manner.
