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

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

There is also the matter of the possibly oedipal character of the poem--its troubled gaze at the patriarchs, while the speaker holds in his hand what is a smaller tool. The poems of Heaney's young manhood were rife with rude or disturbing sexuality. In a poem about one of his favorite subjects, the pump at the farm, he explains how it can become frigid or frozen, by what means it can then be primed, etc., then "Her entrance was wet and she came" ("Rite of Spring"), as if it were a man with a cold woman--she's no problem if you've got the know-how. (26) The title poem of Death of a Naturalist makes frogspawn appear so much like male sperm that the ending--"I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it" (OG, 5)--suggests the terrors of puberty and masturbation. The crude sexualization of the pictures of life in these early books is rarely discussed fully. Yet liberation from a sexually repressive culture was surely an attraction of these early poems; there is a Lawrentian release in their capacity to feel a companionate pulse with the things of nature. Is there also an imagining of the sexual threat of the father--as in Theodore Roethke's The Lost Son and Other Poems? (27) In "Digging" the sexual element is not explicit, but the poem is still alive with disturbance: there is an oedipal verso of the statements of filial admiration. Those "curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots" that "waken in [the poet's] head" as he writes suggest some severance of past from present, father from son, even as they claim an imaginative identity or mental repossession.

Who was the strong, good, potato-digging father in "Digging"? Heaney's father, Patrick, born in 1910, was a cattle-dealer with a forty-acre farm in Derry, situated alongside a railway, the now-famous Mossbawn, sacred omphalos of his first-born son's poetry. (28) Patrick Heaney served on the local council and, in a dignified, edgy way, tried to get on with his Protestant neighbors. The locale seems to have been somewhat sheltered from the wider sectarianism of the six counties. (29) After Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, his mother, Margaret McCann Heaney, had eight more children. From 1945 until 1951, when Seamus Heaney was twelve, he attended the primary school at Anahorish. Heaney has time and again evoked his childhood at Mossbawn: the barn where terrifying rats might come at you, the well that was his "Personal Helicon," his aunt in a floury apron, her hands scuffling over the bakeboard as sunlight poured on the floor; the sofa on which the many children pretended to be a chugging railway carriage; the telegraph wires near the railway along which the children imagine messages sizzling toward their destinations, carried in raindrops. (30)

This family idyll came to a sudden stop when Heaney was twelve: he then won one of the new Education Act scholarships and left Mossbawn for a Catholic boarding school in Derry, St. Columb's, a school mainly devoted to training priests. Heaney was terribly homesick. In fury he threw the biscuits sent from home over the school walls, as he recalls in "The Ministry of Fear." Yet there he was stuck term after term, classes six days a week, with the chance to go into Derry one Saturday in three. At Christmastime or for summer holidays, the St. Columb's boarder might go back home, go fishing with his father, try to learn the crafts of the farm, or attend Irish classes in Donegal, (31) but otherwise he had nothing before him but to please his schoolmasters, and that he did.