In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From Winter Seeds to Wintering Out:The Evolution of Heaney’s Third Collection
  • Michael Parker

Winter Seeds is the title that Seamus Heaney originally gave to his third collection, which comprises poems written between 1969 and late September, 1971, and which was published as Wintering Out (1972) In September, 1971, Heaney had returned to Belfast from a year's sabbatical leave at the University of California, Berkeley. On October 14, 1971, he dispatched a typescript to Faber with the title Wintering Out.1 As he endeavored to get to grips with the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground in Northern Ireland, over the following six months he modified the collection he had submitted in October. A letter dated April 14, 1972, from Faber and Faber states, "I am pleased to return to you the Mss now incorporating the additional poems. We shall work this at 80 pages instead of 72."2 On May 15, 1972, Heaney sent on to Faber two copies of his proofs as well as the typescript of Wintering Out.3

Heaney borrowed the typescript's original title—Winter Seeds—from his poem "The Tollund Man." A decade later, in the course of introducing a reading of "The Tollund Man," Heaney states that he intended the poem to voice a hope that the "destructive old passions" manifest in Northern Ireland in 1970 "might in some way be . . . transmuted into some kind of benign future."4 His choice of title suggests a belief that a time of renewal—whether national, political, or cultural—might be at hand.5 For Heaney at this time, as for his contemporaries Ted Hughes, John Montague, and the American poets whose [End Page 130] work he had absorbed in Berkeley (Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Robert Duncan), the idea of myth held major attractions. Myth ratified both poet and poems by seeming to embody "timeless" values; it gave access to "universal" narratives, which could then be employed to interrogate—or, more commonly, to castigate—the present. Most importantly, as Clair Wills has suggested, myth opened a door into "the primitive" regions of the human psyche, thereby enabling poets and their readers to re-establish contact with some deeper originary human "essence."6

Yet, myth is only one of the routes that Heaney was exploring at this point, as both Winter Seeds and the final version of Wintering Out testify. The poet is clearly casting around, like his fellow Northern Irish poets, in search of appropriate strategies for addressing the political crisis. Like John Hewitt, Roy McFadden, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and John Montague, Heaney turned both to family biography and to other cultures and other histories in a search for analogues to confront what he and the other poets believed were the historical, cultural, and linguistic origins of the province's divisions and sectarian hostilities. A few poets, most notably Padraic Fiacc, attempted to address directly in their work such events in the street as the Falls curfew and the bombing of the Springfield Barracks.7 Between August, 1969, and December, 1971, Heaney only intermittently opted for the more immediate road taken by Fiacc.

Only one part of a four-part sequence called "Offerings"—which appeared in The Honest Ulsterman in November, 1969—made its way into Winter Seeds and Wintering Out. "Offerings" contains a dedication to the dead nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, one of the earliest casualties in the violence of the "Troubles" in August, 1969. In the fourth poem in the sequence, "September Song," Heaney alludes to Rooney's "half-filled jotter . . . hidden in the store-room" and how a "thick line" through the school register "blanks his name."8 Heaney replicates its subject's erasure, a decision that flaws the elegy more than clumsy rhetoric and rhythm. By stressing the way "normal" life in Belfast proceeds despite the killing ("Tele early! Curse the pope and fire away!"), he diverts emotion from the victim, giving no insight into who Patrick Rooney was. The poet's touch seems far surer in the sequence's second poem, "High Street, 1786" (placed fifth in Winter Seeds). As Heaney himself later observed, his poetic energies9 seemed to be [End Page 131] more galvanized...

pdf

Share