Seamus Heaney’s Regions

Afterword

Afterword Visiting the Dead and Welcoming Newborns Human Chain and Heaney’s Three Regions At the core of it [the Aeneid] is respect for the human effort to build, to sustain a generous polity—against heavy odds. Mordantly and sadly it suggests what the effort may cost, how the effort may fail. But as a poem it is carried onward victoriously by its own music. —Robert Fitzgerald, Postscript to The Aeneid If well over half the poems in Seeing Things were tercets— fifty-four of the eighty-one poems in that volume were fully in tercets and several more used the tercet form at least once—Heaney uses the form almost exclusively in the last major collection published before his death, Human Chain. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine poems in this volume employ only tercets, and several more use them at least once. There are still several twelve-liners, but more poems, such as “Album,” “Chanson d’Aventure,” “Eelworks,” “Slack,” “Route 110,” “The Riverbank Field,” “Loughanure,”“Hermit Songs,”“Lick the Pencil,” and “In the Attic,” employ the tercet across a series of ruminative sections. While Paul Fussell could still argue in 1979 that “we may inquire how well any three-line 393 stanza, regardless of the talent of its practitioner, can ever succeed in English ,” Heaney’s repeated recourse to the form over the course of the last thirty years and his adroit handling of it now suggest otherwise.1 Of all the reviewers of Human Chain, Sean O’Brien has been the most insightful about Heaney’s tercet.He notes that“Heaney makes frequent use of the tercet stanza, which posterity may indicate he has done much to render a contemporary forma franca. In his hands it has remarkable flexibility—see the dozen 12-line sections of ‘Route 110.’ The stanza moves as though between the epigrammatic hinge of a couplet and the more expansive quatrain,generating drama and extension (as though into the future of the imaginative act) through enjambed line- and stanza-endings. The triple line, with its echo of terza rima, reels in and out, re-gathering to achieve the tension of resolution—a movement clearly suited to the alert, considering melodies that Heaney so often plays.”2 Heaney’s musical stanzas in the volume thus achieve their power and resolution through his most extensive use of the tercet form yet in his poetry—a form that refuses the finality of the couplet and the promise of extension inherent in the quatrain. The Heaneyesque tercet brings together in this volume his life’s exploration of the triple strains of regionalism in his work: the rural rhythms and later, the war-torn region of Northern Ireland; its imagined future state; and the spirit region that hovers tantalizingly close to the poet. In this way, his adaption of the terza rima into this form accords with his unambiguous declaration to Seamus Deane in 1977: “You have to make your own work your home.”3 Heaney once mused, “I just happen to belong to the last generation that learned Latin, that read Virgil, that knew about the descent into the underworld,” and book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid rivals Dante’s Commedia in its influence on him and certainly predates his close reading of the great Italian master (SS, 295). He pointed out his great love for book 6 of the Aeneid:“I like that book of the Aeneid so much I’m inclined to translate it as a separate unit” (440). The great translator of The Aeneid in our time, Robert Fitzgerald, made comments that illuminate why Heaney might have been so drawn to book 6 of the epic:“In this half of The Aeneid, and it really begins with Anchises’ review of Roman souls in Book VI—the poet was on home ground, his action at last ranging along the river and in the countrysides that he cared for, north, east, and south, among places 394 SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONS named and folklore handed down by the fabulists and annalists of Rome. But during his century this land of Italy . . . had been torn by civil wars between big armies.”4 Having survived the Troubles and having largely successfully upheld his artistic integrity despite the demands upon his poetic regionalism from multiple quarters, Heaney similarly revels in being back on“home ground”in District and Circle and Human Chain. He has internalized this book from Virgil’s epic, even observing, “There’s one Virgilian...