Belonging as Mastery: Selfhood and Otherness in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Like other of Seamus Heaney's early poems, "The Tollund Man" registers a fear that the land may swallow or pervert one's selfhood, concluding with the line "I will feel lost, unhappy, and at home."¹ Heaney feels himself lost while affirming cultural at-homeness; he is unhappy when he recognizes the lineaments of his home place, yet those lineaments are clearest when viewed from a distance and not at close range. In response to this dislocation, he asserts, or seeks to assert, control over space by creating three tropes of mastery. One is the archaeological dig, a delving into the land and the psyche; a second is ritual; and a third is Heaney's use of myth, which he employs to metaphorize the quality of Northernness. "Belonging," in this schema, is ultimately affirmed through a master trope of land as language: the bottomless bog is converted into a text. The poet, in turn, becomes both reader and writer, decoder and mystifier.

In this schema, the psychic divisions that complicate the poet's relation to his home place can be glossed over, but the speaker always finds his position lacking. The land can never be perfectly owned. Heaney's work struggles to realize that belonging through continuity—of land, of language, of imagery, of ritual—may not be a sustainable ideal. Subsuming the local into a mythic masterplan will not allow the expression of a local identity; Heaney struggles to speak with a voice whose personality is not overborne by history even if this history is constructed by the poetic speaker himself. Each trope represents a distinct effort to establish belonging, yet, finally, Heaney's master narratives break down and leave the speaker in a liminal position, between an unsatisfying solipsism and subsumption of the individual into history.

"Death of a Naturalist" is one of several early poems that established the tropic parallel of an encounter with the land as an encounter with one's own psyche. "Digging"—which opens Heaney's first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966)—has been extensively discussed. Its kernel is an analogy between pen and spade, poetic and manual labor; the poet's pen fits "snug as a gun" (OG 3) in his hand. Yet, that colloquial phrase accrues full weight when one reads "Death of a Naturalist," with its baroque imagery of dissolution: "All year the flax-dam festered in the heart / Of the townland; … best of all was the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water" (OG 5). The metonymic and rhythmic association of "frogspawn" with "flax-dam" connects procreation to decomposition, eggs to rot. The townland, as a body with a "heart," is also infected.

The speaker's repulsion heightens as he appears to grow younger; the poem's opening assertion bespeaks a long-range perspective ("All year") and a certain literariness ("festered in the heart") that do not correspond to the voice of the young schoolchild who starts speaking in the middle of the poem: "Miss Walls would tell us how / the daddy frog was called a bullfrog." The poem's second, shorter stanza shows a narrator who is, perhaps, younger still, not fascinated by frogspawn but revolted by the scene:

. . . The air was thick with a bass chorus.Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cockedOn sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some satPoised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kingsWere gathered there for vengeance and I knewThat if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

(OG 5)

The language bullies the speaker: slant rhymes like "slap" and "plop" seem to erupt instead of being summoned, the "o" vowel insistently intrudes itself, and the rhythm is stuck in the materiality of mud—the lines cannot disentangle themselves from a mess of stressed syllables.²

The poem's language is forcing home the knowledge of sexuality and bodily decomposition. The poem is divided into two parts: what is known by the senses, and...