Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

Seamus Heaney’s “Middle Voice”

Seamus Heaney’s “Middle Voice” The convenient fit between poetry and politics suggested by the coupling of Seamus Heaney’s 1995 Nobel Prize with the peace process in Northern Ireland is not so neat as the journalism I have read on the subject would have us believe. Not only is Heaney not a product of the Northern Ireland conflict, his is a sensibility that seeks to assuage (one of his favorite words) and to heal. It would not be true to say, as Auden wrote of Yeats, that “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry .” Unlike the early Auden, whose genius was sharpened by the revolutionary currents of the 1930s, Heaney would prefer, it seems to me, not to have lived in what his younger contemporary Eavan Boland has called “a time of violence.” On the other hand, if Heaney is seen as a symbol of rapprochement and healing, then the political symbolism of his Nobel Prize is brilliantly apt. Seamus Heaney has never evidenced the kind of cultural parochialism represented, for example, by the tragic destruction of Dublin’s Georgian architecture since the 1950s in the name of anticolonialism. He seems to have gleaned from his own reading and from his education at Queens University in Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 170 Belfast a sense that the English literary tradition was his to do with what he chose. When he once, rightly, bristled at being placed in an anthology of British poetry, he averred that if he were going to be placed among the English poets, that would be another matter—defining his work in terms of the language rather than of a political entity. In “The Ministry of Fear” from the sequence “Singing School,” this is how he puts it in the 1975 collection, North, assessing what it was like to apprentice as a writer in Northern Ireland: Ulster was British, but with no rights on the English lyric: all around us, though We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear. In the short poem “Holly” from Station Island (1984), while the experience rendered in the poem comes straight out of an Irish childhood, Heaney doesn’t hesitate for a moment to marshal the full resources of English, both linguistic and cultural. It is one of many poems in which this poet struggles to reconcile the journey that has brought him from a farm in County Derry to his position as one of the most honored literary figures in the English-speaking world. The remembered scene couldn’t be homelier: a childhood Christmastime expedition in search of greenery to decorate the house, when “the ditches were swimming , we were wet / to the knees, our hands were all jags // and water ran up our sleeves.” Fast-forward to adulthood: Now here I am, in a room that is decked with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff, and I almost forget what it’s like to be wet to the skin or longing for snow. I reach for a book like a doubter and want it to flare round my hand 171 Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 171 a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall cutting as holly and ice. The poem is a lament for the intensity of childhood enthusiasms , even for childhood discomforts. The book he reaches for would be a substitute for those intensities. I find it striking that as a metaphor for the “cutting” sharpness he seeks, Heaney comes up with an image from Anglo-Saxon celebrations of war, the “shield-wall” familiar to readers of poems like “The Battle of Maldon.” This is a literary heritage few Irish poets have claimed as their own. The thrust of the Irish nativist movement since Independence has been to recover a cultural heritage suppressed under English rule. Few modern poets have taken the course of actually writing in Irish as, for instance, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Michael Hartnett, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt, and Liam Ó Muithile (as well as Micheal O’Siadhail in his early books) have done; but few, I think, would range so freely in the cultural territory of “the oppressor.” Even the Anglo-Irish Yeats and others in the Celtic Revival movement looked for cultural references to the battles of Cuchulain or some other figure out of Irish myth. Heaney’s counterthrust finds a rough parallel in the poetry of Derek...