Transcript Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013:
‘me in the place and the place in me’
Contemporary Literature in English
Natália Pikli
ELTE
Irish poet/British poet? – international
acclaim - Nobel Prize in Literature (1995)
”I had my existence. I was there.
Me in the place and the place in
me.”
(from A Herbal, publ. in Human
Chain, 2010, 12th volume of
poems)
places Born in Northern Ireland
(Mossbawn, 1st of 9 children,
belonging to the Catholic
minority), education:
Anahorish Primary School, St
Columb Catholic School in
Derry, Belfast Queen’s
University
celebrated poet in UK, living in
Dublin (1972), Harvard and
Oxford Prof. of Poetry (1989-
Places/belonging/identity
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•
when included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry in 1982
by Andrew Motion – ‘be advised:/ My passport’s green’ (An Open Letter)
Aosdána, the national Irish Arts Council, established in 1981, Heaney was
among those elected into its first group, he was later elected a Saoi, one of
its five elders and its highest honour, in 1997
Turning down the offer to be the Poet Laureate: his "cultural starting point"
was "off centre"
Poet’s task – to speak for all, not taking sides, ’to stand on all sides’ and
accept
• Search for some stable centre – for/in the land/people
• 1970s volumes Wintering Out, North – search for common ground – from
personal to national past/present/future (In 1969, British troops were
deployed in Belfast, marking the beginning of The Troubles.)
Heaney:
‘the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving a
satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate
to our predicament.’
aesthetics and ethics
• Language = memory = history – „word-hoard”
(Beowulf)
• history, objects and peoples speak through the
poet
• CRITICAL ESSAYS: The Government of the
Tongue (1988), The Redress of Poetry (1995),
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001
(2002)
• Nobel Comittee: "works of lyrical beauty and
ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and
the living past"
Poetic works
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Poetry
1966: Death of a Naturalist, Faber & Faber
1969: Door into the Dark, Faber & Faber
1972: Wintering Out, Faber & Faber
1975: Stations, Ulsterman
1975: North, Faber & Faber
1979: Field Work, Faber & Faber
1984: Station Island, Faber & Faber
1987: The Haw Lantern, Faber & Faber
1991: Seeing Things, Faber & Faber
1996: The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber
2001: Electric Light, Faber & Faber
2006: District and Circle, Faber & Faber
2010: Human Chain, Faber & Faber
Poetry: collected editions
1980: Selected Poems 1965-1975, Faber & Faber
1990: New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber & Faber
1998: Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, Faber & Faber
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
Digging, cont.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Digging
• Uncovering the past/ of family traditions/ of the nation – digging: a
central metaphor for Heaney, ars poetica (cf. Ted Hughes’s The
Thought-Fox, Carol Ann Duffy’s Little Red Riding Hood –
gramdmother’s bones)
• exterior and interior (cf. The Thought-Fox)
• proposing a moral / a method
• grandfather, father, son – craftsmen and poet – is poetry a craft?
(proverbial ‘the pen is lighter than the spade’ vs ‘the quill/pen is
mightier than the sword’)
• spade v pen: common and differentiating features (lines of
digging/writing, one letter/push after the other, rhythm needed,
necessary for new birth/crops, difficulty-gruelling, physicality vs
intellectuality, etc.)
• alienation by education AND origins
• bog, peat, soil, potato – Irishness – fuel and food
Blackberry-Picking
•
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in
it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that
hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jampots
Where briars scratched and wet grass
bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were
full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs
burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were
peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as
Bluebeard's.
•
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the
bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would
turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they
would not.
Blackberry-Picking
• rural childhood - sensual description
(metaphors, similes, assonance, onomatopoeic
words)
• child’s vivid imagination and eagerness (rhythm
of 3s: ‘milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots’) vs adult
‘lust’/’stain’ and Bluebeard
• innocence vs experience, alternating viewpoints
(child v adult)
• disillusionment at the end (rat, stinking, sour)
• blackberry-blood, lust/greed and sensuous
recalling of the taste of the fruit
Death of a Naturalist: child’s naive curiosity
(home, classroom, fairy tale) – fear of the
monster /sexuality
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. […]
Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls […]
Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. […]
Then one hot day when fields were rank […]
a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. […]
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it
Death of a Naturalist
• humour in the title – the boy, a would-be naturalist, at-home with
nature realises his detachment, the strangeness in the familiar (lilttle
tadpoles – frightening, repelling bullfrogs), together with his nascent
sexuality: sexuality, grown-up body seems revulsive, the frogs now
control the boy, the young adolescents’s embarrasment at his body
• words loaded with sexual overtones
• four-/five stress line only approximating iambic diction; slowing down
with extrasyllables, ceasures to create distance
• Universal experience of maturation – though the
community/particulars are specific
(R.King: Nine contemporary poets. A critical introduction, London,
Methuen, 1979 )
• structure: similarly to Blackberry-Picking ,extended descriptive first
stanza + shorter, more compact 2nd stanza of
disillusionment/disgust
Bogland, The Tollund Man,
Punishment
• Heaney: ” So I began to get an
idea of the bog as the memory
of the landscape, or a
landscape that remembered
everything that happened in it
and to it.”
• Also a symbol of Ireland’s
troubles and violence, past
and present
• Peat bog – both family and
national symbol, preserving
objects, sacrificial victims, the
past intact
• layer upon layer: digging,
which is the ‘authentic’?
Bogland
– vs England (undefined, mythical, rural, insight, fertile depths)
[…]
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Bog people
• P.V. Blog: The Bog People, 1969
• Iron Age victims of ritual murder, sacrificed
to mother earth – preserved in peatbogs,
skin tanned but intact
• ancient and modern violence – sacrifice or
murder – Ireland/bogland/mother earth
devouring her children
• to understand ”the exact/ and tribal,
intimate revenge” (Punishment)
Tollund Man
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
The Tollund Man, cont.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,
[…]
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
North
I faced the unmagical
Invitations of Iceland,
The pathetic colonies
Of Greenland, and suddenly
Those fabulous raiders,
[…]
ocean-deafened voices
Warning me, lifted again
In violence and epiphany
[…]
It said, 'Lie down
In the word-hoard’
• Ireland-IcelandGreenland: a common
past – present geography
• Poet’s revelation –
cherishing and upholding
the past through
language (cf. Beowulf)
• myth, fable and reality of
violence/menace
(”compose in darkness”)
Beowulf
• 1999 – bestseller vs 10thcentury highbrow, hardly
accessible Anglo-Saxon
epic
• past and present
concerns: violence,
brutality, funeral rites,
tribal warfare
• the common ‘word-hoard’
(thole-suffer) –
philological archeology
The Republic of Conscience
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1980s: more universal/more direct politically - paradox
(cf. Sándor Kányádi: There is a land/Vannak vidékek)
imaginary/virtual border-crossing - ‘dual citizen’
a feeling of ‘home’ – ‘homespun, grandfather, traditional cures and charms’
”Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.”
”He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.”
- responsibility – language/life-time commitment
The Disappearing Island
Medieval legend: Saint Brendan and monks
arriving at an island that turns out to be the
back of a sleeping whale → Irish
nationalism/patriotism
”The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there
was vision.”
The Aerodrome
• Childhood memory – Toome military airport in
WW2
• The young girl in charge of the boy – infatuation
with American bomber pilots
• Last stanza – a more general view:
• ”If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”
Blake Morrison on Heaney
• the poet "has written poems directly about the Troubles
as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who
have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical
framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and
he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman,
someone looked to for comment and guidance... Yet he
has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role,
defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical,
and questioning the extent to which poetry, however
'committed,' can influence the course of history."
• Heaney’s place?
Epilogue
• In 2003, the Seamus Heaney Centre for
Poetry was opened at Queen's University
Belfast. It houses the Heaney Media
Archive, a record of Heaney's entire
oeuvre, along with a full catalogue of his
radio and television presentations
• latest Hungarian translation: Hűlt hely.
Válogatott versek, Kalligram, 2010