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

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

After he'd been there two years, he was called home in February for the funeral of his four-year-old brother, Christopher, killed by a car. Heaney's poem about this death, "Mid-Term Break," was his first publication (Kilkenny Magazine, Spring 1963) and it has (regrettably) gone into many school anthologies since, but it is weirdly unfeeling (OG, II). It is certainly a "well-made" poem, the stanza taken from Montague's aestheticizing "Water-Carrier," indeed as well made as a coffin, "A four-foot box, a foot for every year." The poem apparently proposes that its formal detachment should stand in for feelings unexpressed. One is meant, it seems, to recognize the inadequacy of all expressions of grief--the "old men" who shake the poet's hand and say they are "sorry for [his] trouble," "Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow." Yet this recognition of the shortcomings of all condolence covers the poem also: it is wholly inadequate, and seems exploitative of a feeling it does not comprehend but knows is significant. The speaker is like a man still in shock: he sees clearly the things around him, and sleepwalking, notes them in a daze, but cannot see the meaning of anything. We assume something important is passing within the poet, but what it is, besides a poem, is impossible to say.

Following that death, Patrick Heaney moved house, leaving Mossbawn behind. Patrick Heaney, his wife, his sister, and his children all moved to the town of Bellaghy, where a new house was built. In Seeing Things (1991), Heaney describes that house (OG, 352):

   ... The house that he had planned
   `Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know,'
   A paradigm of rigour and correction,

   Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,
   Stood firmer than ever for its own idea
   Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

This is a description of a house not loved by the son, however characteristic it is said to be of the strict and tightly controlled father. One wonders if the house had a hearth. In an interview, Heaney talked sadly of the massive transition in the ways people lived in the Irish countryside, from the sacred to the profane he calls it, when people left their thatched cottages for block-built, slate-roofed bungalows, many of them without a chimney, so "hearthless," which, Heaney points out, given the Latin etymology, means unfocused. (32) It is a changeover from the charm of backwardness to unpicturesque, unmagical modernization; and it was more or less total across the thirty-two counties, so that now a cottage with the thatch still on it is a rare sight. His father's Bellaghy house is not elsewhere described in the poetry, and few mentions of the town appear either, but that is where his family lived from the time Heaney was about fifteen. The cattle-fairs in the North were going the way of traditional customs throughout the island, and his father's ashplant for herding stock stood behind the door of the new bungalow; by the time "Digging" was written, Patrick Heaney's cattle-trading days belonged to the past.