The second stanza is a beautiful portrayal of two men from two completely different worlds—the poet Heaney and his friend, the fisherman—and the nuance of emotion and meaning in their talks as they tentatively reach out to each other through quiet conversation at the pub. It begins with a syntactically rearranged sentence: ‘Incomprehensible / To him, my other life.’ The placement of the word ‘incomprehensible’ at the beginning of the stanza and in its own line stresses its importance within the sentence, the fisherman’s inability to understand Heaney’s ‘other life’, of course, alluding to the life of a Nobel Literature Prize-winner poet, and the fisherman’s awkwardness, perhaps even uneasiness, towards the topic of poetry, is shown through his actions: ‘Sometimes, on the high stool, / Too busy with his knife / At a tobacco plug / And not meeting my eye, / In the pause after a slug / He mentioned poetry.’ Through the alternating breaks, end-stopping and enjambment of the lines, and the word ‘pause’, the phrase is lent a slow and broken rhythm, symbolic of the man’s hesitation. Shy and uncomfortable with the talk of poetry, the mentioning of poetry in itself a reflection upon his character: gentle and selfless, curious about his friend’s ‘other life’, though he finds it utterly unfathomable, the fisherman occupies himself with his tobacco and alcohol. ‘We would always be on our own / And, always politic, / And shy of condescension, / I would manage by some trick / To switch the talk to eels / Or lore of the horse and cart / Or the Provisionals.’ Heaney describes his own awkwardness, here; being always ‘politic’—tactful and wise—and afraid of arrogance through the discussion about something his friend did not understand, he managed, by some ‘trick’—some change of the subject—to ‘switch the talk’ to things the fisherman did understand; ‘eels’, the life of the fisherman at sea; or to the ‘lore of the horse and cart’, presumably referring to manual labour; or, the word itself placed at the end of the stanza and left to linger in the reader’s mind, the ‘Provisionals’—a reference the Provisional Irish Republican Army (whose campaign against the partition of Ireland involved violence in itself), and, more extensively, the highly political Troubles themselves. Observant indeed, then, was the fisherman, and intelligent, despite his simplistic life, to be able to hold conversation about these Irish politics—to be interested, yet so opposed to, the senseless violent acts, that he, against his tribe’s unwritten rules, had turned his back on them.
The third stanza sees a change of tone, from the intimacy and the author’s fond admiration for the fisherman in the previous stanzas to one of cynicism and seething, but somewhat withheld, contempt for the political and sectarian violence in Ireland, which resulted ultimately in the death of his beloved friend and many other innocents. ‘But my tentative art / His turned back watches too’; the poet, perhaps, makes a reference to his own ‘tentative’ and incomprehensible poem, this time the fisherman’s ‘turned back’, a repeated idea from the previous stanza, observing the ‘art’—Heaney’s elegy to him—from the grave. Turning his back, however, on the political struggle, defiantly preferring to drink instead of obeying the curfew, proved, for the fisherman, to be fatal: ‘He was blown to bits / Out drinking in a curfew / Others obeyed’. The alliteration of the plosive consonants (‘blown to bits’) intensifies the image of the fisherman’s explosive and loud death, evoking fear within the reader as they imagine the horrific and dramatic consequence of the fisherman’s “disobedience”, ‘three nights / After they shot dead / The thirteen men in Derry’ (this, of course, being allusion to the Bloody Sunday of 1972, or the ‘Bogside Massacre’, which took place in Derry, Ireland, and during which thirteen civil rights protesters were ‘shot dead’—a succinctly powerful and dramatic description—by the British Army, during a protest march). ‘PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, / BOGSIDE NIL’: the Bogside Massacre, and, more expansively, the Irish political conflict, is cleverly compared, through metaphor, to an immense sporting match; the ‘Paras’ (probably a colloquial term derived from the word ‘Paratroopers’, as in the ‘British Army Parachute Regiment’) scoring thirteen goals against the ‘Bogside’ team, metaphoric for the killing of the thirteen people, who, without a proper goal-keeper or anything by which to protect themselves, have ultimately lost the game. The ‘game’ is perhaps symbolic of the way that there must always be a winner and loser in football, no matter for how long the players play; there are no compromises or logical decisions made as to who wins or loses, and the players are always, tiresomely, endlessly, passing the ball to each member of the team in an attempt to score a goal against the other team—until, of course, they do.
The assonance of the ‘e’ vowel sound and run-on lines found within the concluding lines of the first section of the poem—‘That ‘Wednesday / Everyone held / His breath and trembled.’—create an eerie and hollow effect representative of death; once full of life, the fisherman is now nothing but emptiness. The pronoun ‘his’ (‘Everyone held / His breath and trembled’), as opposed to the general ‘their’, is symbolic of how the whole town—not just Heaney himself—holds the same breath and grieves, together, in the same way, for the victims killed as the result of the senseless and unnecessary violence.
The beginning of the second section of the poem, which commences on the fourth stanza, is about the day of the funeral held for the victims killed during Bloody Sunday, taking a tone of great melancholy to illustrate the impact of the brutal event upon the now bereaved town. The stanza begins by immediately painting a bleak and dreary scene in the reader’s mind: ‘It was a day of cold / Raw silence’. The assonance of the hollow vowel sounds (‘cold’, ‘raw’), the adjective ‘raw’ being almost onomatopoeic, evoke the feelings of emptiness, stillness and painful emotion, in direct juxtaposition to the powerful and intense images of the violence in the previous section. The ‘wind-blown / Surplice and soutane’ is a reference to the garments worn by the church priest, the alliteration of the voiceless consonant ‘s’ (‘surplice’ and ‘soutane’) accentuating the rustling sounds of the wind and the town’s quiet grieving. ‘Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin / Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water.’ ‘Coffin after coffin’, the repetition of the word ‘coffin’, is an indication of the great number of deceased and the extended metaphorical images of flowers and water are repeated within the phrase (‘rained-on’, ‘flower-laden’, ‘float from the door’, ‘blossoms on slow water’), comparing the odd movement of the many coffins through the doors of the cathedral to the gentle floating of blossoms on slow water. Creating a tranquil, even beautiful, image, and dramatically slowing down the rhythm of the poem, the eerie metaphor is juxtaposition to the cold, raw silence mentioned at the beginning of the stanza and is representative of the slowness of the community’s lamentation: like blossoms on slow water, their grief-filled thoughts can only slowly drift away.
The community is united in their grief: ‘The common funeral / Unrolled its swaddling band, / Lapping, tightening / Till we were braced and bound / Like brothers in a ring’. The adjective ‘common’, and the likening of the Catholic community in Derry to a ‘swaddling band’—a small blanket which is wrapped very tightly around a bab, possibly reflective of the way the community wraps itself around the sleeping dead, sleep being a common metaphor for death within literature, in the same way a swaddling band is wrapped around a sleeping baby—is representative of the way Bloody Sunday has brought them closer together. ‘Lapping, tightening’, a repetition of adverbs describing the increasingly intense tightening of the community, leading to the climax: ‘Till we were braced and bound / Like brothers in a ring.’ The alliterative plosive consonants of the adjectives (‘braced’, ‘bound’, ‘brothers’) create a hard sound; the tightening is complete, and, like ‘brothers in a ring’ (the ‘ring’, being a circle, possibly symbolic of the equality and sameness of their losses), the bereaved have created a hard and unbreakable community through their shared sorrow.
Heaney’s thoughts, however, run immediately back to the fisherman, who ‘would not be held / At home by his own crowd’: in juxtaposition to the strong sense of community of the grieving Catholics within the previous stanza, the fisherman was defiant towards the political struggle between the unionists and nationalists, turning his back even on his own community of Irish Catholics by rebelliously refusing to adhere to his set curfew, ‘whatever threats were phoned / Whatever black flags waved’—‘black flags’, emphasised through the use of assonance and, of course, being symbolic of violence and death (as opposed to white flags, a symbol of peace and surrender). The poet ‘see[s] him as he turned / In that bombed offending place’; figuratively ‘seeing’ him, he imagines the fisherman turning his back on the ‘bombed offending place’, the inversion of syntax deliberately laying emphasis on the plosive and very onomatopoeic word ‘bombed’ in order to evoke emotion and auditory imagery within the reader as he imagines the dramatic explosion that was the final consequence of the fisherman’s ‘offending’, or illegal, presence. The author’s overactive imagination leads him to imagine his friend’s brutal death: ‘Remorse fused with terror / In his still knowable face, / His cornered outfaced stare / Blinding in the flash’. Even in his last moments, Heaney imagines, the fisherman would be bold, defiant (‘cornered outfaced stare’), stubborn against politics, despite his remorse, terror and having nowhere to run.
The third stanza of the second section, the sixth stanza of the poem as a whole, likens the fisherman’s mannerisms, actions and character to a fish in the sea, through the extended metaphor of the ocean and the language of a fisherman. Beginning the stanza with a simile, the fisherman is compared to a fish: ‘He had gone miles away / For he drank like a fish’; the fisherman, like the fish, who is constantly surrounded by water and ocean, constantly spent his nights at the pub. ‘Nightly, naturally / Swimming towards the lure / Of warm lit-up places / The blurred mesh and murmur / Drifting among glasses in the gregarious smoke’; the fisherman has now become the metaphorical fish, ‘nightly, naturally’, a clever use of alliteration and repetition of the adverbial ending ‘-ly’ to describe his naturally ‘swimming’ towards the lure and temptation of the convivial and friendly atmosphere of the bar (the ‘warm lit-up place’), despite the inevitable risk involved in breaking his curfew, in the same way a fish in the ocean swims towards the lure of bait and a fishing net (the alluded ‘mesh and murmur’, alliteration and onomatopoeia used to replicate the humming sounds of both the pub conversation and the ocean’s gentle waves), despite the risk of being caught by fishermen.
Heaney then poses an unanswerable question: ‘How culpable was he / That last night when he broke our tribe’s complicity?’ The ‘tribe’s complicity’, referring, of course, to the curfew set by the Irish Catholics, the phrase questions the fisherman’s responsibility for his own death: should he have been defiant against his own ‘tribe’, the community brought closer than ever by deaths of their own kind? The perfect rhyme found within the words ‘he’ and ‘complicity’ put emphasis on them, adding to the unanswerableness of the question of whose responsibility his death truly was. The stanza ends on an intimate, yet mysterious, tone, the poet imagining personally what his friend would have said to him if he had asked his question: “Now, you’re supposed to be / An educated man,”—‘educated’, of course, on the contrary to himself, and referring to the education that won Heaney the Literature Prize—‘I hear him say, ‘Puzzle me / The right answer to that one.’ However, of course, the question being an unanswerable one, Heaney cannot, and the haunting mystery lingers in the mind of the reader.
The third part of the poem describes the morning of the funeral, surreally merged and intertwined with Heaney’s past experience on the fisherman’s boat. The stanza begins with the poet’s confession that he did not actually attend the fisherman’s funeral; however, through his vivid imagination, he visualises the doleful funeral attendees, ‘those quiet walkers / And sideway talkers’, quiet, obedient, afraid to speak out about the fisherman’s death, ‘shoaling out of his lane / To the respectable purring of the hearse...’, ‘shoaling’, another word in the fisherman’s vocabulary, comparing the movement of the crowd to the shallowing of waters, ‘out of his lane’, to the ‘purring’, an onomatopoeic word mimicking the gentle sound of a car, of the ‘hearse’, a funeral vehicle. ‘They move in equal pace / With the habitual / Slow consolation / Of a dawdling engine.’ The adjectives ‘habitual’, ‘slow’ and ‘dawdling’, used to describe the people’s ‘pace’, lend the phrase a slow, measured rhythm, suggestive of a funeral march. The word ‘engine’, at this point, leads Heaney to remember the engine on the fisherman’s boat.
With nothing but an end-stop to separate it from the funeral setting, the poet delves immediately into his new setting—his memories aboard the fishing boat: ‘The line lifted, hand / Over fist’, an observation of the fisherman’s hands as he is about to throw the fishing line into the sea; ‘Cold sunshine / On the water’, an oxymoron describing the chilly early morning weather; ‘the land / Banked under fog’, a portrayal of the misty, cold Irish surroundings and possibly a metaphor representative of the Troubles in Ireland, shrouded in cold, suffocating, mystery. ‘That morning / I was taken in his boat, / The screw purling, turning / Indolent fathoms white, / I tasted freedom with him’: Through observations so vastly magnificent and different from his usual day-to-day life, through the ‘purling’ and ‘turning’ (the words made rhythmic through the assonance and their repetition of endings) of the boat’s navigating screw, which made his ‘indolent fathoms’—the lazy comprehensions an allusion to his poetry—‘white’, pale in comparison to the adventure and simplistic bliss of the fishing boat, the poet ‘tasted freedom’ with the fisherman.
As the poet watched the fisherman at work in the early morning, he had observed his natural, rhythmic movements, now seeming to talk to the ghost of the fisherman himself: ‘To get out early, haul / Steadily off the bottom, / Dispraise the catch, and smile / As you find a rhythm / Working you, slow mile by mile’; ‘steadily’, and in ‘rhythm’, ‘slow mile by mile’, the words create a steady, measured pace as the elegy describes the fisherman working with his everyday routines and regularities, happy in his natural setting (the words ‘smile’ and ‘mile’ emphasized through perfect rhyme) and his familiarly effortless talent. This is the fisherman’s ‘proper haunt’, Heaney tells his ghost; not at the pub, his defiant rebellion against the curfew, but on the vast ocean, ‘somewhere, well out, beyond…’: far, far away from the political conflicts and the tribal complicities on the land.
The last stanza is Heaney’s invitation to the fisherman’s ghost to ‘question [him] again’. Now gone, the fisherman, an outsider from society, and a loner in his ‘proper haunt’, has become a ‘dawn-sniffing revenant’. Heaney longs to talk to him again, inviting him to ‘plodder through midnight rain’ and ‘question [him] again’, alluding to their midnight conversations in the pub, and asking him to ask him unanswerable questions (a reference to the ‘How culpable was he / That last night when he broke our tribe’s complicity?’ of the second part of the poem) once again; that is, a reminder to remember forever the fisherman’s death, endlessly questioning the political conflicts within his country and their brutal effects upon the entire community.
In conclusion, Casualty, by Seamus Heaney, is a highly emotive elegy, broken up into three distinct sections and having no definite metric or rhyme structure. It is set in Ireland, during the time of ‘The Troubles’, and each section, all of similar length, depicts a different scene, narrating the story of an anonymous fisherman who was killed as a result of the violence arising from the Irish ethno-political conflict, shortly after Bloody Sunday (otherwise known as the ‘Bogside Massacre’), which took place in Derry, Northern Ireland. As well as being a memorial poem, it depicts the terror relating to the sectarian violence which led to his friend’s death, and is the poet’s cynical criticism of the ‘tribal’ warfare between the nationalists and unionists in Ireland.