Seamus Heaney: Teaching Material (ENG507C2)

Some Quotations in Poetry and Prose

Any quotations here are chiefly illustrations of remarks made in our lecture. for further citations see ...
Life, Works, Commentary, Quotations, &c., - at Heaney pages in RICORSO — online.

Poetry

“Bogland” ‘We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening - / Everywhere the eye concedes to / Encrouching horizon, //Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye / Of a tarn. Our unfenced country / Is bog that keeps crusting / Between the sights of the sun. // They’ve taken the skeleton / Of the Great Irish Elk / Out of the peat, set it up / An astounding crate full of air. // Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years / Was recovered salty and white. / The ground itself is kind, black butter //Melting and opening underfoot, / Missing its last definition / By millions of years. / They’ll never dig coal here, // Only the waterlogged trunks / Of great firs, soft as pulp. / Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards, //Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before. / The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless.’ [from Door into the Dark (1969); on WWW Heaney Internet Page.] Note, ‘the fish full of fish like a bog full of turf’ (a line Raftery’s Killeadan, Heaney’s trans. of poem by Antoine Raftery, in Éire-Ireland, Fall/Winter 1996, pp.9-10, p.10.) [See page-version - as attached].


“Markings” ‘And the actual kicked ball came to them like a dream heaviness, and their own hard / Breathing in the dark and skids on grass / Sounded like effort in another world … / Some limit had been passed, / There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness / In time that was extra,unforseen and free.’ [8]; [III:] ‘All these things entered you / As if they were both the door and what came through it. / They marked the spot, marked time and held it open. […]’ (Seeing Things, pp.8-9.)


“Mint” ‘It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles / Growing wild at the gables of the house / Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles: / Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice. / But to be fair, it also spelt promise / And new ness in the back yard of our life / As if something callow yet tenacious / Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife. // The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday / Mornings when the mint was cut and loved: / My last things will be the first things slipping from me. / Yet let all things go free that have survived. // Let the smell of mint of heady and defenceless / Like inmates liberated from that yard. / Like the disregarded ones we turned against / Because we’d failed them in our disregard.’ (The Spirit Level, 1996, p.6.) Cf., ‘the anvil brains of some who hate me […] (Ibid., in North, 1975).

“Bogland” ‘We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening - / Everywhere the eye concedes to / Encrouching horizon, //Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye / Of a tarn. Our unfenced country / Is bog that keeps crusting / Between the sights of the sun. // They’ve taken the skeleton / Of the Great Irish Elk / Out of the peat, set it up / An astounding crate full of air. // Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years / Was recovered salty and white. / The ground itself is kind, black butter //Melting and opening underfoot, / Missing its last definition / By millions of years. / They’ll never dig coal here, // Only the waterlogged trunks / Of great firs, soft as pulp. / Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards, //Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before. / The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless.’ [from Door into the Dark (1969); on WWW Heaney Internet Page.] Note, ‘the fish full of fish like a bog full of turf’ (a line Raftery’s Killeadan, Heaney’s trans. of poem by Antoine Raftery, in Éire-Ireland, Fall/Winter 1996, pp.9-10, p.10.)


“Tollund Man” ‘Some day I will go to Aarhus / To see his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin cap. // In the flat country near by / Where they dug him out, / His last gruel of winter seeds / Caked in his stomach, // Naked except for / The cap, noose and girdle, / I will stand a long time. / Bridegroom to the goddess, // She tightened her torc on him / And opened her fen, / Those dark juices working / Him to a saint’s kept body, // Trove of the turfcutters’ / Honeycombed workings. / Now his stained face / Reposes at Aarhus. // [II:] I could risk blasphemy, / Consecrate the cauldron bog / Our holy ground and pray / Him to make germinate // The scattered, ambushed / Flesh of labourers, / Stockinged corpses / Laid out in the farmyards, //Tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers / Of four young brothers, trailed / For miles along the lines. // [III:] / Something of his sad freedom / As he rode the tumbril / Should come to me, driving, / Saying the names //Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, / Watching the pointing hands / Of country people, / Not knowing their tongue. //Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home.’
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Prose (criticism)

‘The Sense of Place’ [1977], Preoccupations (London: Faber 1980), pp.131-49: ‘We have to retrieve the underlay of Gaelic legend in order to read the full meaning of the name and to flesh out the topographical record with its human accretions. The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague’s words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read. [...] The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only thirties years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of place as it was experience in the older dispensation.’ (p.132).

‘The Frontiers of Writing’ (1994), ‘There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. If, for example, there was something exacerbating, there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture. One doesn’t have to inoculate oneself. That culture is one of the places where we live. It’s in the language. And it’s where the mind of many in the republic lives also. So I would suggest that the majority in Northern Ireland should make a corresponding effort at two-mindedness. Obviously, it will be extremely difficult for them to surmount their revulsion against the violence perpetrated in the name of Ireland, but everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, but not necessarily constitutionally, by the northern point of the quincunx.’ (Bullán, vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp.1-15, p.14)

‘Crediting Poetry’ (1994): ‘[...] I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from the BBC to Radio Éireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world. (Crediting Poetry, [Stockholm Nobel Prize Address], rep. in Listener, 23rd Jan. 1996.)
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ENG507C2 - University of Ulster - 2003