Anger and nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the ghost of the father

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2001 by Adrian Frazier

Six months later, just before the issue had to go to press, an envelope finally arrived, with a brief but characteristic note: Mea culpa! Seamus. One of the enclosed two poems especially caught my attention. "The Harvest Bow," later published in Field Work, seemed to strike a new note of outright loveliness. And in the last stanza appeared a quotation from Yeats, himself quoting Coventry Patmore: "The end of art is peace." (2) The poetic line in "The Harvest Bow" was longer, more aureate in its fashioning, more iambic than in his previous two collections. From Wintering Out through North, Heaney had normally used an unrhymed quatrain with short lines of irregular metre. One function of such a form was evidently to draw attention to the phonetic and etymological character of the words, and away from their accentual, syntactic, and rhetorical features. Indeed, in Wintering Out, the poems themselves employ a vocabulary of linguistics: plosive, liquids, vocables, vowels, consonants. It is an avant-garde equivalent of a takeover of a landscape he claims the skill to read and the right to reclaim. The linguistic terminology is part of a myth about Irish Gaelic being the very speech of nature in his home locale in South Derry, and English being the language of the settler. Vestiges of the original Gaelic culture show up in place-names like Anahorish and Broagh, from which poems spring in Wintering Out. It is a surprising development of Daniel Corkery's nationalist thesis in The Hidden Ireland (1925) that aristocratic Gaelic literary culture continued right through the penal times, unintelligible and invisible to settlers ignorant of all but English. Heaney had lectured about Corkery's book in November 1965 at the Belfast Festival. He did not dwell on Corkery's still more openly chauvinistic thesis in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931): that to be Irish is to be Catholic and Irish-speaking and agricultural. Yet the Gaelicism of Wintering Out in 1972 seems like such a nationalism in another form: proud, possessive of the four green fields ("hoarder of common ground"), bitterly resenting the "lost fields" and the hard times with the "strangers" in the house. (3) Yet Heaney perhaps gives hints of an awareness that such a jealous possessiveness is wrong; for instance, in his imaginative possession of the parish, he compares himself to Dives (Latin: "rich man"), and Dives is an archetypal sinner, one who denied help to poor, sick Lazarus, and so is condemned in the next world, repenting when it's too late ("Gifts of Rain"; Luke 16: 19-31).

Northern Protestant reviewers had worried over the obscure intentions of poems in Wintering Out. Were Protestants after centuries in the Six Counties supposed to be "strangers" unable to pronounce the dialect "gh" in "Broagh"? That would be less difficult for Protestant locals than for Catholics from West Cork. And wouldn't the river Moyola "spell itself" to Protestant inhabitants and make its music for them with an accuracy and rich fantasy equal to that of any other dwellers on its banks, proportionate to their imaginative powers? The implications of the poems were not plainly evident, but insofar as they were discernible, they were both ideological and threatening. The obscure final two stanzas of "A New Song" in Wintering Out excited particular comment: