Ideations of Violence in the Poems of Seamus Heaney
By reading Seamus Heaney at different stages and from different angles, readers get the impression of ordered scrutiny, of a firmly positioned observer turning the gaze sometimes at the ancestral work, blown friends, violently killed people, and even natural fight and its triumph or defeat often at others. Seamus Heaney’s witnessing personas have slightly sophisticated instructions but a strong yearning to see occurrences in their natural state. As a result, such observational habits do not guarantee a visionary outlet. As a result, Heaney’s poems have a voyeuristic tone to them. Seamus Heaney is largely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important poet. He published nearly 20 books of poetry and criticism, as well as editing a number of well-known anthologies. Heaney has a worldwide audience and has received several literary prizes and distinctions, including the Nobel Prize.
At the turn of the century, the revival of Irish literature paralleled the country’s struggle for liberation from Britain. Yet, the literary movement itself flourished between Parnell’s death in 1891 and the Easter Rising in 1916. However, when the actual war began in 1916, literary voices were generally muted, with some expressing horrified by his separatist beliefs. After four years of horror and a horrific civil war, not only did writers such as W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey reject republican rhetoric, but so did once-ardent participants such as Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. Despite this overwhelming negative reaction, the entire period from 1916 to 1921 was later reduced in the popular mind to a single sentence from Yeats’ “Easter 1916”: “A terrible beauty is born.”
Seamus Heaney’s poems in Irish writing today are explorations of the melancholy that has given to Ireland’s recurring violence, rather than criticisms of nationalist rhetoric or celebrations of tragic fortitude. Seamus Heaney had established himself solidly as an important new voice in Irish poetry by the time the Northern Ireland conflict erupted in 1969, with his debut volume, Death of a Naturalist, released by Faber & Faber in 1966. 3 It was there that this farmer’s son first used his now-familiar “digging” metaphor. “The Death of a Naturalist” has allegorical interpretations, but both portray humanity as helpless observers. Although Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland’s sectarian environment, just one of the twenty-seven poems in his debut book dealt with social tensions in the region — and that was only a few years before hostilities broke out.
In Northern Ireland, Catholics initiated civil rights marches in 1968, urged by some of the more moderate Protestants. However, a fierce reaction rapidly ensued, as less liberal Protestants began to fear that any concessions to Catholics would result in their reluctant accession to the Irish Republic. Then, in 1969, Heaney was abruptly confronted with the job of turning his poetry powers away from his interactions with rural and local realities and toward confronting a radically escalated political scenario.
As a result of reading Glob’s book, Heaney penned the most commonly referenced poem, “The Tollund Man” (Wintering Out, 1972). This description has a melancholy beauty, even sweetness, to it that distracts the reader from the tragedy of what is viewed.The poem’s overall tone is one of passive observation on the inhumanity of human existence, with the fate of the four young brothers serving as an illustration of Ireland’s repeated and maybe inevitable brutality. The poem expresses desperation and failure, which appears to be suddenly undermined by the poem’s final two lines, in which the reader is presented with some justification for the poets’ voyeuristic barbarism; however, these lines reveal an even deeper desperation and inevitability by accepting human revenge’s insistence.
The Irish-Viking (Danish) note is common in North. While Heaney was living with the everyday horrors of Belfast in the 1970s and reading Glob’s book, Dublin was hurriedly unearthing old Viking foundations under pressure from urban planners aiming to remove potentially snowy regions.This circumstance provided additional support for Heaney’s bog topic by recalling the violent era of the Danish invasions in the 10 and eleventh centuries, foreshadowing bleak future Irish history.
Heaney has composed a number of more obviously personal and contemporary poems in part 2 of North, while still dealing with the Ulster predicament. Heaney had settled the dilemma of commitment in “Exposure,” the volume’s final poem, written following his move to Dublin. ‘What will happen to us, and it seems to get three responses,’ says Heaney in a poem at the introduction of the collection ‘Sibly.’ The first begins, ‘unless you discover the nerve and voice of forgiveness,’ and goes on without elaborating on the catastrophic implications.The second implication is that, unfortunately, people would place their faith in the riches promised by the North Sea oil finds rather than evaluate their preconceptions, believing that money can brighten the future for everyone. The third response is the one we’ve come to expect. Shortly after, three of Heaney’s best poems about the victims of Northern Ireland’s violence appear. However, such poems are only a small portion of a larger corpus that honors other heroes who died in more peaceful circumstances.
Seamus Heaney’s political ambitions, like those of all Irish with humanitarian sensibilities, are for a just and enduring peace in Northern Ireland, for reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics, and for constitutional acknowledgment of the province’s two unique cultures. However, the vision given in his poetry — what I would call an apolitical, pagan religious vision — and his personal self-awareness appear to me to be considerably more gloomy. For all of its lyricism, Heaney’s nature poetry is distinguished by its Frostian antiromanticism; it is a poem about disillusioned humanity caught in a horrible confrontation.
If, as Seamus Heaney quotes Borges, “poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the segments of symbols printed on pages,” we might recognize that the issues involved in the depiction of violence may differ from reader to reader or, more broadly, from one national readership to another — in this case, Irish, British, or American and other Anglophone readers.
Work Cited/References
All Poems of Seamus Heaney. 27 June 2006
Heaney.” Twentieth Century Literature 31.4(Winter 1985): 368–77
Heaney, Seamus. “Government of the Tongue.” Allen 185–205.
Boly, John. “Following Seamus Heaney’s “Follower”: Towards a Performative Criticism.”
Twentieth Century Literature: 269–81
