Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney

I envy you your sight of them this morning,

Docked and massive with their sloped-back funnels.

The outlook is high and airy where you stand

By our attic window. Far Toledo blues.

And from a shelf behind you

The alpine thistle we brought from Covadonga

Inclines its jaggy crest.

Last autumn, we were smouldering and parched

As those spikes that keep the vigil overhead

Like Grendel's steely talon nailed

To the mead-hall roof. And then we broke through

Or we came through. It was its own reward.

We are voluptuaries of the morning after.

As gulls cry out from the deep channels

And you stand on and on, twiddling your hair,

Think of me as your MacWhirr of the boudoir,

Head on, one track, ignorant of manoeuvre. (41)

The absent speaker of the poem imagines his wife looking out at the harbor containing the big ferries that nightly cross the Irish Sea. On a shelf behind her lies a thistle, a souvenir of a Spanish holiday, that is used to figure a recent bad patch in their relationship - a period during which they were as smouldering and parched as the thistle's spikes. Eventually, the speaker says, they came through their period of friction. Having done so was rewarding and brought its own satisfactions.

In the poem's final stanza, the speaker invites his wife to think of him as "your MacWhirr of the boudoir." The allusion is to the ship captain in Conrad's novella Typhoon, who brought his ship safely through an appalling storm by staying on course and steering straight through the middle of it. This reference is both metonymic and metaphoric - the husband-speaker figures himself both as one of the contiguous ferries and as a character in a book. At one delightful stroke, two previously unconnected components of the poem are linked - the sea vessels seen from the window and the now reconciled couple.

The reader who knows Conrad's novella well has the additional pleasure of noting the playful self-deprecation of Heaney's comparing himself to the utterly unimaginative and inarticulate MacWhirr (also a native of Ulster), who at one point "expostulated against the use of images in speech" (72). If only Heaney had heeded this expostulation when composing the third stanza of his poem. The stanza alludes to the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, whose title character comes in quest of glory to Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, which has been subject to the murderous, nocturnal visitations of Grendel. Beowulf defeats the monster in combat and nails his shoulder and arm to the hall roof as a sign of his victory. This part-to-part allusion (the thistle's spikes resembling Grendal's talons) is out of phase with everything else in the poem. As a figure for the couple's autumn troubles, the thistle suggests edginess; Grendel's disjecta membra suggest great physical or psychological violence. That "we" brought back the thistle from Covadonga intimates the source of the couple's discord is internal to their relationship, while the monster from the fens invading Heorot suggests exactly the opposite. And, of course, the heroic Beowulf is the antithesis of the unassuming MacWhirr.