Casualty is an elegy written by Irish poet and writer Seamus Heaney. It is broken up into three distinct sections. The poem has no definite metric or rhyme structure;

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Casualty: Poem Commentary    

Casualty
Poem Commentary

Casualty is an elegy written by Irish poet and writer Seamus Heaney. It is broken up into three distinct sections. The poem has no definite metric or rhyme structure; instead, assonance and rhyme are used only sometimes within the poem in order to accentuate certain lines and phrases. Set in Ireland, during the time of ‘The Troubles’, each section, all of similar length, depicts a different scene, narrating the story of a fisherman—presumably Heaney’s friend—who was killed as a result of the violence arising from the ethno-political conflict between the nationalists (who were predominantly Roman Catholic) and the unionists (mainly Protestants), shortly after Bloody Sunday (otherwise known as the ‘Bogside Massacre’), which took place in Derry, Northern Ireland.

The title of the poem—Casualty—puts the focus upon the unnamed victim, making him the subject within the poem. The deliberate sense of anonymity evoked by the unnamed casualty in the title is reflective of the way such senseless violence affects even the nameless, the unidentified, even the innocent; the people, for example, like the casualty himself, killed as a result of violence but who were not directly involved in the violence itself.

The first section of the poem is written in an intimate tone, full of observations of the speaker’s fisherman friend, his manners, and his actions, as he drinks in a typical Irish pub. Beginning the poem with a pronoun on the opening line of the first stanza, ‘He would drink by himself / And raise a weathered thumb / Towards the high shelf, / Calling another rum / And blackcurrant’, Heaney immediately introduces the subject of the poem—the lone fisherman, whose thumb is weathered from his work—and sets the scene, as he orders a typical drink (another ‘rum / And blackcurrant’) in the convivial atmosphere and familiar environment of the Irish pub, the words ‘thumb’ and ‘rum’ emphasised through their perfect rhyme. The man’s gentle character is denoted by Heaney’s description of his actions (‘Without / Having to raise his voice’, ‘Order a quick stout / By a lifting of the eyes / And a discreet dumb-show / Of pulling off the top’) and the author’s incorporation of carefully chosen adjectives and alliteration; although the words ‘discreet dumb-show’ themselves suggest the man’s mild mannerisms, the plosive sound of the consonants perhaps indicates a certain roughness in the fisherman’s life—in this case, possibly connected to the harshness of the weather involved with his tough living, or, more likely, relating to the Troubles.

Heaney describes, then, how after the pub closed (most likely in the early hours of the morning), the fisherman would go, ‘in waders and peaked cap’—referring to the clothes of a fisherman—‘into the showery dark’. The ‘showery dark’, a description of the harsh Irish weather, is juxtaposed to the light and warmth of the pub and, most possibly, is also a metaphoric representation of, noticeably harsher than even the Irish weather, the largely sectarian protests and violence occurring in Ireland. ‘A dole-kept breadwinner, the man is described; the ‘dole’, of course, referring to social welfare, and, through this referral, the implication of his difficult life as a fisherman who, even with such little pay that he must be put on the ‘dole’, must sustain his family. The fisherman is described, despite this, as ‘a natural for work’, possibly a description of his physical appearance and strength—a strong build—or, most probably, a description of his character; although he does not earn much and must partly rely on social welfare in order to feed his family, he is good at his job and, with dedication and commitment, continues his daily work.

Heaney, with a sense of immediacy and spontaneity, expresses his admiration for the man: ‘I loved his whole manner, / Sure-footed but too sly’, ‘sure-footed’ describing the fisherman’s understanding of himself and his place in life, but ‘too sly’ possibly alluding to his stubbornness and reluctance to adhere to the Irish Catholic society’s unwritten rules. The poet then describes his love for the fisherman’s discreet intuition—‘His deadpan sidling tact, / His fisherman’s quick eye / And turned observant back’; the assonance within the words ‘sly’ and eye’, ‘tact’ and ‘back’, lending them particular emphasis, and the oxymoron found within the phrase ‘turned observant back’ (as one cannot possibly ‘observe’ something with his back turned) used in order to portray the man’s intelligence and ability to sense things—even those, seemingly, he cannot literally see. The oxymoron—‘turned observant back’—is also a reference to the fisherman’s opinion on Irish politics; though he is able to experience and observe the happenings in the country, he has, figuratively, ‘turned his back’ on the problems, stubbornly and slyly refusing to take part in the political conflict between the nationalists and unionists.

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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 ...

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