Discusssome of the ways in which Seamus Heaney makes use of the past in his poetry

Rebecca Lee English Coursework

Discuss some of the ways in which Seamus Heaney makes use of the past in his poetry

Seamus Heaney was born on 13th April 1939 on a farm called Mossbawn in Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic, which later, proved to be a popular topic in his poetry. Heaney’s childhood was full of deaths from relatives and friends which give him a certain amount of understanding about death and corpses, a poem that shows this is ‘The Tollund Man’. In his poetry, Seamus Heaney usually starts in the past tense, imagining that he is still in his childhood, and then suddenly, towards the end of the poem, turns to the present tense, and reflects how his childhood memories have affected him as an adult.

‘Digging’ is a perfect example of Heaney returning to his origins. Heaney evokes the rural landscape where he was raised and shows the care and skill of how his Father and ancestors farmed the land ‘My father, digging’. In the poem there are many monosyllabic words such as ‘bog’, ‘sods’ and ‘curt cuts’, which is also alliteration and assonance. The colloquial term, ‘By God, the old man could handle a spade’ shows Seamus Heaney’s pride of his Grandfather. “Irishmen are justifiably well known for digging, but Heaney shows the skill and dignity in their labour”. By giving examples of his Father digging for food ‘potato drills’ and his Grandfather digging for fuel ‘cut more turf’ indicates how it is traditional in his family to dig as a profession, and how Heaney broke that tradition. ‘The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it’, shows metaphorically that Heaney will ‘dig’ for words in his poetry, rather than for turf or potatoes. Onomatopoeia is used often throughout the poem ‘rasping’, ‘sloppily’ and ‘squelch and slap’, this engages the reader’s attention by imagining that they are with the poet, hearing those sounds. By repeating the words ‘digging’ and ‘roots’ it “shows how the poet, in his writing, is getting back to his own roots (his identity, and where his family comes from)”.

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However, in ‘Mid-term Break’ we see a very different picture of Heaney’s Father then in ‘Digging’, where his Father is a very tough and masculine character, never stopping for a break ‘stooping in rhythm through potato drills’. Whereas in ‘Mid-term Break’ Heaney remembers ‘In the porch I met my father crying-He had always taken funerals in his stride’. This is because of the death of Heaney’s brother, but because his father does not normally express his emotions it shocks him. It shows Heaney’s Fathers vulnerability, and the tragedy reveals to the young Heaney how brutal and violent the world can be. At this time Heaney was forced to grow up, ‘old men standing up to shake my hand…whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest’ and was responsible for Heaney losing his innocence as a child. ‘No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear’ is blunt and implies that his brother was killed by a car. The last two lines of the poem are an iambic rhyming couplet. ‘A four foot box, a foot for every year’ is full of vowels, alliteration and assonance which help to bring closure to the poem. Heaney’s brothers life is summed up in one line. In this last line, Heaney uses basic words that are mostly monosyllabic to give the effect by using short words, the true extent of how short his brother’s life was.

‘Death of a Naturalist’ is also another of Heaney’s poems that is about a bad memory from childhood and realising that things are not always as you expect them to be. The title is “amusingly ironic” because by a naturalist, you would expect it to be someone with a scientific knowledge of living things and ecology, whereas yes, Heaney did start to observe nature ‘wait and watch until the flattening dots burst into nimble swimming tad poles’, but when he realises what frogs are like in their natural environment he feels disgusted ‘I sickened, turned, and ran’ which you cannot imagine any real naturalist doing. The way the teacher described how frogs reproduced is very patronizing, ‘The daddy frog was called a bullfrog/And how he croaked…the mammy frog had hundreds of little eggs…this was frogspawn’. The teacher personifies the frogs by making it easier for the children to relate to them. However, this nice and simple version puts false images in the young Heaney’s head, so when in the second stanza he sees the frogs in their natural habitat, he is unprepared. You can tell from his choice of wording that he is disgusted, ‘rank’, ‘gross-bellied’, ‘cocked on sods’, ‘blunt heads farting’ and ‘slime kings’ by using a lot of monosyllabic words which sound harsh and he uses many sensory images that make us imagine we are there with him. Neil Corcoran says that “The sheer noise Heaney manages to make out of English vowels is remarkable-a dissonant cacophony”. Philip Holsbawn says “Heaney speaks…the snap, crackle and pop of diction”. Heaney believes that the frogs wanted revenge for putting the ‘jellied specks’ on his ‘window-sills at home’ by saying ‘I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it’. The poem is a story about the life cycle of frogs and the end of innocence.

In Seamus Heaney’s later poems, he addresses religion and politics and the troubles that were occurring in Northern Ireland at the time. ‘Clearances 1’ describes how his Great Grandmother changes religion and was a traitor to the loyalists, ‘He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’ ’. Lundy is when a Protestant converts to the Jacobite side in 1689. It shows that his Father is Catholic and his Mother is Protestant. ‘The Exogamous Bride’ describes how Heaney’s Mother and Grandmother have married out of their tribe (religion) and ‘Running the gauntlet’ shows that they were punished for changing religion, by people throwing stones at them while going down the road. It is like an obstacle course. ‘The Exonerated stone’ that is ‘inherited on my mother’s side’ that Heaney talks of, is the inheritance of being a traitor. But it shows that now it is ‘exonerated’ the blame has washed away, showing that religion is not such a big thing anymore.

Another poem that also covers religion is ‘The Other Side’, which is a version of the phrase used by Catholics and Protestants to refer to each other ‘the other sort’. The poem divides the Catholics (Heaney) and the Protestants (the neighbour). ‘Towards his promised furrows’ can be compared to the promised land in the bible, which makes the neighbour’s land sound better then Heaney’s ‘scraggy acres’. The poem has many biblical connections like ‘Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon and David and Goliath’ and ‘patriarchal dictum’ exhibits that it is male dominated. ‘Too big for our small lanes’ suggests that the characters in the Bible are too big for Catholics (Heaney) and suggest that Protestants think they are superior to them. However, in the third part of the poem it shows the growing of friendship between Heaney and his neighbour. ‘I might as well call’ and ‘taps a little tune with the blackthorn shyly’ reveals the neighbour’s awkwardness and is embarrassed about their differences (religions). Throughout the poem, all of the stanzas are three lines long except the last stanza in the poem which is only one line long, ‘or the price of grass seed?’. The question mark at the end of the poem shows his uncertainty about his new friendship, but shows that he knows his neighbour enough to know that they can both relate to grass seed. Also, grass seed could imply a new start, their friendship growing and a fertile relationship.

Seamus Heaney also uses bog bodies to explore Irish conflicts, as he looks to the past to understand the future. ‘Punishment’ is a poem that describes the Windeby bog girl of Glob’s account punished for adultery. The way she was found in the bog ‘shaved head like a stubble of black corn’ is a simile and is referring to the land. ‘She was a barked sappling’ is a metaphor and ‘oak-bone, brain-firkin’ makes her body look like an old tree after coming out of the bog, and shows that she has organic qualities. ‘Would have cast, I know, the stones of silence’ is a biblical reference, “Let him who has no sin cast the first stone” –Jesus. ‘Your muscles’ webbing and all your numbered bones’ is a very graphic image. ‘Numbered bones’ can also be linked with the Bible “They have numbered all my bones” –Jesus. And in the Roman Catholic religion they are used in worship. The windeby girl’s punishment was tar and feathers ‘tar-black face’ for ‘going with’ British soldiers. The last stanza ‘connived in civilised outrage, yet understand the exact and tribal, ultimate revenge’ reveals that on the outside, Heaney would show shock and horror, but on the inside he would understand why they had to do it.

On the whole, Seamus Heaney uses the past and his childhood in many of his poems to be able to see them in a different light and be able to understand different memories with maturity. Heaney uses a variety of different ways to include past in his poems, like the bog people, the conflicts in Northern Ireland and in his childhood, to attempt to understand present day sectarian conflict and to explore human cruelty.

Word Count: 1,583

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