Outside’s Insides: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

I first read Seamus Heaney as a teenager, in the way a lot of teenagers probably do: in an educational anthology which tried to make poetry accessible and interesting for teenagers. It presented, and not without good reason, what is probably best known as the populist Heaney: the poet-as-farmer, delighting in the squelch and splash of the natural world, and occasionally extrapolating what he learns there onto the burden of being human. It was, for me, a bad introduction. I was fifteen, and much more engaged by the bright lights and the big city, as Jay McInerney put it. I was interested, or thought I was interested, more in the artificial electricity that runs from pylons to tenements than the coagulation of energy in the outside world, in amplified voices and electronic music than the divine harmony of the seasons, and in gutter-rats chasing up subway tunnels than the untameable ferocity of jaguars.

Coming back to Heaney with a dubious but at least tangible handle on English-language poetry at the age of twenty-one, I realized two things: firstly, that his body of work encompassed far more than what the anthology had presented. Well, duh, you could fairly say, but I was fifteen. His first two collections, Death of a Naturalist from 1966 and Door into the Dark from 1969, are indeed rural-centric, but they cut much deeper than a lawnmower.

Secondly, the poems are crafted with an extremely keen ear, which manages to bring the sound of the outside onto the printed page. Take the much-quoted and anthologized “Blackberry Picking”. When Heaney reads the poem out, his accent renders the words onto that ethereal line between cacophony and pure natural harmony. The effect is not altogether lost in my own Received Pronunciation accent, or indeed in other varieties of English.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
we trekked and picked until the cans were full,
until the tinkling bottom had been covered
with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

The nature of blackberries as living, decaying things, and indeed the conflation of life and decay, is carefully, almost precariously positioned next to human activity and concerns: “You ate that first one”, “Our hands were peppered”, “I hoped”. It’s probably fair to say that Heaney regarded some of Death of a Naturalist as apprentice work, as much of it is omitted in his compilations New Selected Poems: 1966-1987 and Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96.

In a contemporary review of Wintering Out, Christopher Ricks wrote that Heaney would “have to reconcile himself to the fact that Door into the Dark will consolidate him as the poet of muddy-booted blackberry-picking”. His next collection, 1973’s Wintering Out, and to a greater extent 1975’s North, take on a more explicit social and political dimension, dealing not only with the current Troubles of Northern Ireland, but also with the history of British oppression of the Irish people. These concerns are held together in the poems alongside established concerns like the natural world and human existence, informing and explaining each other.

In North, Heaney uses the form of the poems and the structure of the book to examine some of the most pressing political questions of the day. The volume largely consists of lyrics in quite a free mode of verse, until we get, foisted in the middle, “Act of Union”, composed of two sonnets, rhymed, allowing for some phonetic license, in the English way: ababcdcdefefgg:

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

It’s extremely uncomfortable reading-- not just the sex, or the violence Heaney works into it, but the central conceit: sex as a metaphor for English colonization of Ireland. This is the first instance of Heaney using the phrase “opened ground”, which would later form the title of his most substantial collection; in a bookstore shelf it can easily be read to project the populist Heaney, but dig a little deeper and the phrase is much more uneasy, much more socially resonant.

There has been critical disagreement over just how regular the sonnets are; to me, Heaney seems to mix strong, near-perfect rhymes with ones that feel deliberately forced (“pain”/ “within”) as part of the central conceit: this abrasive, monolithic and distinctly English sonnet which disrupts the natural rhythm of the volume. Heaney's formal approach can be contrasted with his contemporary Paul Muldoon: whilst Muldoon takes the sonnet and throws innovations at it from every angle, pushing hard at the concepts of rhyme, meter, volta, etc., Heaney takes what has proven a very flexible form and questions its normativity.

I’m not best placed to judge the outcome of Heaney’s political poems; they were very well received outside of Ireland, but Irish critics have sometimes viewed them as profiting from misery. Another opinion, from the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, has pointed out that “the inflexibility of the man and woman metaphor” in “Act of Union” has “‘something to do with the poet’s sense of his audience. The heavy equations belong to a world of shared assumptions, not one in which poetry can make a single perception unique.”

Probably my favorite Heaney poem is the opening one from The Haw Lantern, titled, tellingly plurally, “Alphabets”. Its omniscient speaker details the process of a boy learning to communicate: in the first part with signs and gestures that slowly become letters, in the second, as a scholar struggling to learn Latin, and finally, in the third, as a confident man of letters who can use the power of language to travel to the moon and back.

There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,
Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.
This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back
Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

[...]

When he walked abroad. As from his small window
The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from,
The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O
Like a magnified and buoyant ovum -

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

It’s written in the quatrains that have served Heaney so well, and have helped to establish in his poetry a genealogy from Romanticism, which can help to account for his enduring popularity with readers enamoured by the variousness and fractiousness of modernism and its successors. In many ways, though, this poem stands thrillingly in opposition to the Romantic trope of lost innocence and youth: as the subject ages, his power with words increases until it begins to resemble sorcery, or at least rocket science. As Helen Vendler puts it, “Against Wordsworth's myth of a childhood radiance lost, the poem sets a counter-myth of an imaginative power that becomes fuller and freer with the child's expanding linguistic and literary power.” The off-rhymes, occasionally heightening to full ones, show off a confident literary swagger, the speaker and subject have become one, and possess an artist’s linguistic palette not through some innate miracle, but through a hard, human, and realistic process.

***

It's kind of strange, having covered all of this ground, to read from what would turn out to be Heaney's final collection, Human Chain. It includes lyrics of taut, metaphysical simplicity, such as this one, titled by its first line:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.

The poem inaugurates the collection's association of wind with the transience of life (and therefore, of course, death), but it’s also a beautiful evocation of the moments we all feel, most of them probably quite transient to speak objectively, where we’re blessed with a moment of clarity that’s almost beyond articulation. With the knots in our soul undone, the universe becomes pre-Copernican.