Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney

But what about the title? What does this expression of a not uncommon midlife longing have to do with the muse, with poetic inspiration. For Aristotle, the metaphor-making capacity defines the poet. For the poet of this poem, the metaphorical connection made between the girl's voice and the tench is the spark or germ of the creative activity of mind that results in the composition of the poem. The title calls attention to the poem's being about itself as well as about the middle-aged longing for youthful intensities. The speaker cannot be touched or healed by the soft-mouthed girl but he is touched - not palpably on the mouth, but figuratively in the throat where the sounds of the poem originate, sounds that are represented within the poem by the swarming voice of the girl. As in other poems (and prose statements), Heaney connects sexuality and creativity. His comment in the interview makes explicit what is implicit in the poem: his dry spell is over; he writes the poem I am talking about. And a good poem it is; there is no need for Heaney's dismissive closing remark.

Unfortunately, the title of the poem makes it difficult to stop at this point - the point, I would say, at which the poem gives maximum satisfaction. The poem's title is a literary self-allusion to Heaney's poem "Traditions" from Wintering Out. "Our guttural muse," it begins, "was bulled long ago/by the alliterative tradition,/her uvula grows//vestigial" (31). This contrast appears in several poems and essays of Heaney's: between "soft, vocalic Irish" and "hard, consonantal English" (O'Donoghue 47) and in its gendered form between subservient feminine Ireland and dominating masculine England. But this makes the meaning of Heaney's poem depend on knowing a private linguistic and cultural shorthand that draws the poem away from the metaphorical and into the less interesting orbit of the allegorical - the girl in the white dress as avatar of Ireland herself. In his allusive title, then, Heaney has been too allusive for the good of his poem. The reader who does not know that the poem's title is an allusion, nor is so informed by a commentator, is in a more fortunate position than the reader who does.

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The other poem I want to discuss in detail contains the most complexly successful literary allusion in Heaney's canon - a whole-to-whole intertextual relationship that illuminates both texts, not simply the alluding text. The poem is the tenth and last of the "Glanmore Sonnets" from Field Work:

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt - how like you this? -

Our first night years ago in that hotel

When you came with your deliberate kiss

To raise us towards the lovely and painful

Covenants of flesh; our separateness;