Making a Dantean Poetic: Seamus Heaney's "Ugolino"

Beginning with Field Work (1979), and continuing with Electric Light (2001), Seamus Heaney's poetry, translations, and criticism have engaged with the poetic example of Dante. Although he has produced translations from the Irish and Anglo-Saxon, and has explored affinities with poets including Lowell, Frost, Walcott, Larkin, Milosz, Swir, and Herbert, Heaney has consistently returned to Dante during the past twenty-five years of his career. The examples are many: he has translated Cantos I–III of the Inferno and published them in Daniel Halpern's Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets (1993). The pilgrimage sequences and encounters with "familiar ghosts" in Station Island (1985) are closely modeled on the design of Dante's Inferno. Most important, he has created and continues to explore a Dantean poetic in his own work. After writing the poems of Field Work and Station Island, Heaney has shown his inclination toward Dante's example by working in such forms as the three-line tercets and the occasional terza rima, forms which amplify his earlier reliance on quatrains and sonnets. At Heaney's poetry readings, audiences can hear Dante's formal example in the adaptations of terza rima in his verse as well as in his commentaries, many of which point to Dante's pervasive and philosophically liberating influence in his work.¹

In two poems from Field Work, "The Strand at Lough Beg" and "Ugolino," the auditory qualities, or the "acoustic" of Heaney's language, signal his immersion in the poetics and habits of mind cultivated by Dante. The first of the poems in Field Work to announce Dante's influence on Heaney's new poetic direction is "The Strand at Lough Beg," a powerful elegy for his murdered cousin, Colm McCartney. The poem's epigraph and its final images of loss, mourning, and poetic reparation are borrowed from the first canto of the Purgatorio, in Dorothy Sayers's translation. This poem also signals Heaney's engagement with the visionary and ethical Dante and his fascination with the influence of the poet on other poets. Other Field Work poems, especially the elegies and poems that feature addresses to other poets, or such tutelary poems as "An Afterwards," "Elegy," "Leavings," and "Casualty," are marked by Dantean forms, images, and expressions of feeling.²

As Seamus Deane and others have shown, the theme of monstrous violence and its personal and cultural costs reaches back to the originary roots of Heaney's imagination. His "touchstone" poems, such as "Punishment" from North (1975), represent the difficulty of coming to terms with violence and how deeply violence is embedded in the poet's heritage. Although it does not employ three-line stanzas or Dante's speakers, "Punishment" sounds a Dantesque note of self-scrutiny as it explores the depths of the poet's misgivings at this ancient ritual killing.³ At the same time, the figure of the poet, here identifiable with the speaker, explores his perverse pride in his status as "artful voyeur," his moral complicity and tribal implication. Meditating on the duality of a tribal slaying in "the man-killing parishes" of Jutland, Heaney's poem retraces the punishment of the Iron Age girl and allusively speaks to the situation of her contemporary Northern Irish sisters. In a Dantesque manner that points to the ambiguous moral situation of the speaker, Heaney suggestively parallels the speaker's careful observation of the ancient victim and his awareness of how he "would connive / in civilized outrage" in his witness to the modern scapegoating of her "betraying sisters" in 1970s Northern Ireland.

Heaney's extended encounter with the Divine Comedy in the Glanmore Cottage years (1972–1976) nourishes his poetry and poetic in fresh ways.⁴ The important intellectual and moral turn in Heaney's handling of violent Irish materials develops from Dante's representation of his pilgrims' encounters with sinners in the Inferno. Dante proves exemplary on both counts, as Heaney observes in a 1980 review of C. H. Sisson's translation of the Divine Comedy:

The 'big shape' of The Divine Comedy is 'the archetypal one of faring forth into the ordeal, going...