Cutting A Better Man Out Of The Hedge: a discussion of the relation of land, landscapes and nature to Seamus Heaney's sense of Irishness as laid out in his poetry.

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Cutting A Better Man Out Of The Hedge: a discussion of the relation of land, landscapes and nature to Seamus Heaney’s sense of Irishness as laid out in his poetry.

Seamus Heaney has long been recognised as one to truly epitomise the sense of Ireland in his poetry, from the vantage point of the individual as well as from a more universal perspective. However, criticism up until now has mainly focused on the relationship between Irish identity and language. While the link between land and identity is not discredited as such, it is not given the critical attention of the relationship between language and identity, and it is thus not investigated nearly as much as it deserves. The identity:language:land: identity cycle is at best ignored by the critics – a dreadful prospect when one considers how inherently and inextricably Heaney considers language and land to be linked too.

Consequently this paper will explore this relationship using a variety of Heaney’s work, from his earliest collection to his later poems, including his most recent collection, District and Circle, released in 2006. I will also briefly examine links between Heaney’s poetry and some of that of his principal predecessor, W. B. Yeats, in order to reveal further where the link between land and identity originates and in order to contrast the poets’ different approaches.

Although it is acknowledged that at times Heaney likes to appropriate and sometimes entirely quote Yeats (160), Yeats appears more concerned with martyrdom and the elevation of individuals in order to express Irishness (particularly in ‘Easter 1916’), Heaney prefers to project his concern in the direction of the ‘ordinary people’ – unsurprising given the significance of ‘ordinary people’, in the context of farming and landowning, to the nation’s economy. This is apparent from the start of his poetic career – in ‘Digging’, and in many other poems that come after it, he focuses his attention on the first ‘ordinary people’ he would have come across in the form of his family. More significantly, he frequently links this sign of his genetic identity to his family’s history as labourers on the land. The impression given is not just that the family worked on the land; they are the land.

There is also a hint in ‘Digging’ of a further subtext of universal history, alongside that of personal history, in the lines ‘Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds/Bends low, comes up twenty years away’, and the somewhat regret-laden line ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’. There is more to Heaney’s Irishness than ancestry in the land; there is a trace of a greater archaeology here that becomes further evident in later poems.

In Death of a Naturalist, though, the emphasis is on the personal history. One memorable example lies in ‘Follower’, in the final image of Heaney’s father and Heaney’s ancestry stumbling behind him and refusing to go away, tripping on the freshly-ploughed sods as he did as a child. This nostalgic feel, however, is very different to that felt in the Celtic Twilight poetry of Yeats. While Heaney’s poetry creates effects that linger, Yeats creates poetry that haunts. One particularly evocative example of this type, where we also have the link between the land and Irishness, is present in ‘The Two Trees’, where the voice speaking could be easily interpreted as the voice of Ireland as a female figure. This adds to a long line of figures representing Ireland as a woman (including Kathleen ni Houlihan, to name one of the most significant), and the tone of the poem is successfully captured in a musical arrangement by a folk music artist, Loreena McKennitt (refer to music CD attached). The effect recreated in the music is very different to what one would imagine a musical arrangement of any of Heaney’s poems would sound like. Heaney himself also points out a lack of immediacy in Yeats, going to writers like Kavanagh for a more intimate reaction (1129). While Heaney and Yeats both take an elegiac stance in their poetry, Yeats stays at a distance, whereas Heaney prefers to get his hands dirty.

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The cosiness of Heaney’s history, however, also has a more sinister subtext, which has been pinpointed by several critics in the past, including J Stallworthy and Helen Vendler. The former highlights the many references to armoury in ‘The Barn’ (‘an armoury/Of farmyard implements’), ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (‘Some [frogs] sat/Poised like mud grenades’) and ‘Churning Day’ (‘large pottery bombs’) (162) , whereas Vendler chooses to focus on the assonant ‘snug as a gun’ description of the pen in ‘Digging’:

“The Irish Catholic child grew up between the offers of two instruments: the spade and the gun. ‘Choose’, said ...

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