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  • Seamus Heaney and Ted HughesA Complex Friendship
  • Henry Hart (bio)

When Seamus Heaney spoke at Ted Hughes’s funeral in Devon on November 3, 1998, he said that no death had been as devastating to poetry as Hughes’s death, and that no death outside his family had hurt him as much. At a memorial service in Westminster Abbey half a year later, he remarked that Hughes’s coffin at the Devon funeral had reminded him of a boat floating down a river from the Battle of the Somme that Wilfred Owen had once described. Although Heaney didn’t cite the title of Owen’s poem or quote from it, he had in mind the sonnet “Hospital Barge at Cérisy,” in which the World War i poet compared the barge to the boat that brought King Arthur to the fabled island of Avalon so he could heal wounds he’d sustained in a much earlier battle: “How unto Avalon, in agony, / Kings passed, in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.”

For Heaney, Hughes was not only a wounded king; he was also a Merlin-like dreamer, healer, magician, and prophet who mythologized himself in poems and, for better or worse, was mythologized by others. According to Heaney, Hughes had “a soothsayer’s awareness that facing a destiny was bound to involve a certain ordeal.” As a result he “recognized that myths and fairy tales were the poetic code.” The fundamental message encoded in Hughes’s poetic myths and fairy tales was that there was a “struggle at the heart of things—a struggle in the soil as well as in the soul.” This ongoing struggle pitted life and creativity against “the black fusillade of everything that was deadly and undoing.” It was a Darwinian struggle between animals, a global struggle between social factions, and a personal struggle between compulsions in Hughes’s psyche. For Heaney, Hughes’s ultimate goal was ecological “wholeness and harmony,” but it never came without a fight.

At Hughes’s funeral in Devon, Heaney called Hughes a “beloved” figure, and at Westminister Abbey on May 13, 1999, he extolled Hughes as “a great man and a great poet.” Over the [End Page 76] years in interviews, essays, poems, and letters, he paid tribute to Hughes as a mythic hero guiding his own poetic journey the way Virgil had guided Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy. Of his various literary cohorts Hughes was the one who fortified him the most. “Right up until the end I still experienced a sense of privilege in his company,” Heaney told Dennis O’Driscoll. “There was something foundational about my relationship with him. I felt secured by his work and his way of being in the world, and that gave the friendship a dimension that was in some sense supra-personal.”

But in another interview Heaney declares: “I’m a different kind of animal from Ted.” It is significant that Heaney distinguished himself from his friend with a reference to animals. Hughes once declared that animals constituted his “symbolic language,” and that he deployed them as totems and shamanistic masks to identify himself and others. Hughes’s hawks, fish, crows, and jaguars are well known because he described their predatory ferocity in gut-wrenching detail. Heaney’s animals—his bullfrogs in “Death of a Naturalist,” his bull in “The Outlaw,” his sedge-warbler and corncrake in “Serenades”—are menacing at times, but they rarely possess the murderous vivacity that Hughes bestowed on his animals. In general Heaney’s animals are tamer, more comical, and more erotic than Hughes’s animals. Heaney’s skunk in “The Skunk” reminds him, hilariously, of his naked wife on a “tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer” for her “black plunge-line nightdress”; his otter in “The Otter” also reminds him of his wife—this time on a vacation in Tuscany where she cavorts in a pool before “swimming” in bed with him. In “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” he celebrates the patient saint who kneels for weeks with his hand extended out the window so a mother bird can build a nest and raise her fledglings in it. Rather than curious child...

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