"Customary rhythms": Seamus Heaney and the rite of poetry

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2001 by Bolton, Jonathan

Taken as a whole, the station poems in Wintering Out constitute a formal and procedural breakthrough in Heaney's career as he discovered that perhaps the most effective means of sounding the depths of racial consciousness, of imagining and revisiting crucial historical moments, and of addressing national political crises lay in the liturgical action of his poetic situations.

II

In "The Poet as Christian," Heaney recalls that, during his formative years, the experience attending wakes and funerals, with their "inner system of courtesy and honour and obligement," had a "definite effect" on him.6 The ritualistic observances of Catholic burial-the stationary observation at the wake, the rhythmic steps of the funeral procession, and the downward motion of interment (what poetry critic Jonathan Hufstader has referred to as "coming to consciousness by jumping in graves")7 - appear to be intimately connected with Heaney's development of the station poem. One of his earliest station poems is "Elegy for a Still-Born Child," and he uses a three part division in all of his major elegies: "Funeral Rites," "Triptych," and "Casualty." As the critic Bernard O'Donoghue has noted, Heaney's formal decisions are "never only formal, but at once formal and also emotional" (ix), and his station poems reflect emotional as well as liturgical stages of mourning. In "Funeral Rites,"for instance, the first station revisits the wakes of dead relatives, recalling in sensuous detail their "glistening" eyelids and "dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads," and how he "knelt courteously" and "kiss [ed] their igloo brows" (SP 65). In station two, Heaney returns to the violence and murder of the present, and pronounces a deep need to revive public ritual, those "customary rhythms." His ideal is to "restore // the great chambers of the Boyne" (SP 66), at New Grange, site of Neolithic burial mounds, for a mass burial that would draw thousands and lay violence to rest for once and all. The second station concludes with a vision of a long, sinuous funeral procession, like a serpent with its tail in Ulster and its head in the South, about to pass through a megalithic doorway-a funeral procession that would unify Ireland by invoking an ancient pagan ritual. Station three returns to the present, but it is a present enlightened and informed by a consciousness of the past and of the unifying potential of ritual. The poem ends, appropriately enough, at the tomb of Gunnar, the epic hero of Njal's Saga, whose death at the hands of enemies remains unavenged. Although in the saga Njal's son swears vengeance, for Heaney it arbitration / of the feud [is] placated" (SP67) by the death of Gunnar, and the ritualistic sacrifice of the hero terminates the cycle of violence,just as Heaney's ritual form is designed to heal and placate. "Triptych," from Field Work, is Heaney's somewhat belated but nevertheless powerful response to the Bloody Sunday massacre, generated retrospectively following a later, isolated killing. The first station, titled "After a Killing," shrinks from an expansive vision of Ireland, "that neuter original loneliness / From Brandon to Dunseverick" (SP 108), to a particular vision of a stone house by a pier where the ancient rural economy of fishing and planting survives. In station two, "Sybil," Heaney asks the oracle: "What will become of us?" The Sibyl predicts a change for the worse "unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice" (SP 109). The oracle goes on to reproach the habitual reticence of the people, who discuss the weather and fail to confront political reality, and who are seduced by the promise of economic gain away from nationalistic imperatives. "My people," says the Sibyl, "think money / And talk weather. Oil rigs lull their future / On single acquisitive stems" (SP 109). Station three shifts to the monastic sites at Devenish, Boa, and Horse Island, the silence of which is disturbed by an Army helicopter patrolling. The poem concludes with Heaney being overwhelmed by a ritualistic impulse, a compulsion to act, physically and verbally, in order to disturb the silence: