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

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

Until the early 1970s, when Heaney was writing North, he had in fact never much read Yeats. (10) Given a chance of taking Yeats or Frost as an examination subject at Queen's University in the late 1950s, Heaney picked Frost. (11) Indeed, over the course of Heaney's work, there has been a long sequence of master-poets emulated in the successive books: Hughes, Hopkins, Frost, Roethke, Lawrence, Lowell, Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, along with greats like Dante and the poet of Beowulf. (As a consumer of poetic models, Heaney has a large appetite and dines with relish.) In this long series of influences, Yeats would not obviously figure as the most important; however, reviewers of Death of a Naturalist in 1966, Door into the Dark in 1969, and Wintering Out in 1972 often called Heaney "the best Irish poet since Yeats," a standard of praise used earlier of Clarke, Kavanagh, Kinsella, and Montague, in a sort of stairway the generations climbed toward unattainable past greatness. (12) When Heaney finally got around to reading Yeats, he was evidently struck by the full sectarian force of the difference between their experiences of life. Giving a lecture at the University of Surrey in 1978 (three years after the publication of North), Heaney borrowed a title from Auden, "Yeats as an Example," but added a question mark: could someone so different--so peremptory, cold, equestrian, patriarchal (he doesn't say Protestant)--be of any use to him? (13)

In my dissertation I had argued that in fact Yeats could be used by Heaney, and had been. The title poem of North does not allude to phrases by Yeats, but it does follow his example in the theatrical way it stages the self in a moment of vision (OG, 98-99):

   I returned to a long strand,
   the hammered curve of a bay,
   and found only the secular
   powers of the Atlantic thundering.

   I faced the unmagical
   invitations of Iceland,
   the pathetic colonies
   of Greenland, and suddenly

   those fabulous raiders,
   those lying in Orkney and Dublin
   measured against
   their long swords rusting,

   those in the solid
   belly of stone ships,
   those hacked and glinting
   in the gravel of thawed streams

   were ocean-deafened voices
   warning me, lifted again
   in violence and epiphany ...

The poem is written in the first person; it is meditative, world-historical, self-dramatizing, and declarative in ways characteristic of Yeats, but up until that point not characteristic of Heaney, who had been accustomed to representing himself as a child or not representing himself at all. (14) Dramatic monologues, fugal narratives featuring an eel, compact portraits of thatchers, blacksmiths, water-diviners, and potato-diggers, and associative litanies of landscape and language all left the poet largely off stage. In "North," Heaney is the mage under the spotlight in a symbolist theatre of Yeats's design. Even the word "suddenly" comes straight from Yeats's personal code for the moment of vision, his Ali Baba's open sesame! It occurs thirty-six times in his poetry. (15) Like Yeats in time of civil war, in "North" Heaney looks for auguries of the coming times and, appropriating his home ground, speaks as one of a particular people. It is just a different people, and the voice speaking is very much Heaney's own invention: endlessly metaphorical, a mouth in love with words, the rarer the better (bleb, althing), mournful even when angry, full of wishes unfulfilled, prayerful but weak of faith. His visionary experience also stands between the mystical and the metaphorical, rather than straightforwardly purporting to be supernatural as in the case of Yeats. Heaney, for instance, says that the bodies of Vikings still lying in Dublin and Orkney now speak to him, as if he is comprehending the significance of figures in a museum or book, and the prow of a Viking boat--"the longship's swimming tongue"--gives him a view of past and present. We don't imagine that the boat spoke out loud; we understand that this is a figure of speech for how the poet came to understand or represent the significance of a past culture from its archaelogical remains.