In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes
  • Joseph Heininger (bio)

To say death is regrettable is only saying something about death, but to communicate that feeling is saying something about life.

bernard odonoghue

In a remarkable gift of literary and cultural enrichment, many Irish poets have written elegies and elegiac poems for Seamus Heaney. His death on August 30, 2013, in Dublin was mourned throughout the world, and in response, Irish poets have written memorable elegies. Rather than adhere closely to elegy’s traditional conventions, however, Irish poets have reshaped the genre’s forms and techniques so that greater breadth, depth, and thematic reach distinguish their elegies. Among these poets are Michael Longley, Kerry Hardie, Theo Dorgan, Eamon Grennan, Paddy Bushe, Mark Roper, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sean Lysaght, and Leontia Flynn. I have selected their elegies because they offer significant perspectives on the art of contemporary Irish elegists. Each poet memorializes Seamus Heaney by remaking elegiac conventions in innovative and varied ways. Outstanding elegies have also been written by Michael Coady, John F. Deane, Katie Donovan, Thomas McCarthy, Ignatius McGovern, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, among others. Before examining some of the Irish elegies, I shall discuss the critical contexts for my inquiry.

In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks points out the traditional subjects and forms for elegy: wanting to deny the fact of death; praise for the person’s attributes and virtues; pastoral or antipastoral imagery; personal lament and spoken loss; communal mourning and rituals of lamentation; and use of the pathetic fallacy.1 The contributors to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics also state: “Traditionally, the functions of the elegy were three, to lament, praise, and console. All are responses to the experience of loss: lament, by expressing grief and deprivation; praise, by idealizing the deceased and preserving her or [End Page 105] his memory among the living; and consolation, by finding solace in meditation on natural continuances or on moral, metaphysical, and religious values.”2 Historically, after John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” the English elegy may or may not address whether hope or consolation can be found amidst grief and shaken faith, or lost faith. This difficulty in finding any kind of consolation or hope is also true of the contemporary Irish elegy.

The traditional elegiac conventions are incorporated in many Irish elegies but with an emphasis on Irish features, genealogies, and idioms. Whether in Irish or English, Irish elegies demonstrate elegy’s importance in expressing what Eavan Boland and Mark Strand designate as a “cultural grief ” together with private grief: “In the traditional elegy, the grief the poet expresses is rarely a private one. More often, it is a cultural grief. . . . That the elegy speaks to this, that it locates the cultural customs of death in whichever society it occurs, adds greatly to its power.”3 In his influential study of Heaney’s elegies, Jahan Ramazani positions the work of several Irish poets: “While questioning, analyzing, and even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney—together with such Irish contemporaries as John Montague, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—energetically reclaims them for our time.”4 I endorse the idea that “the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on the one hand, and private feeling on the other.” I do not agree, however, with the contention that Heaney and his contemporaries attack and subvert elegy’s conventions and subgenres; this critical position overstates the case.

Peter Sacks concludes his study with a discussion of W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” He places Yeats within the English tradition, yet his study also prompts the question whether Yeats’s elegy belongs instead to an Irish tradition of cultural elegy and lamentation. Yeats invokes John Synge and George Pollexfen as Irish exemplars akin to Robert Gregory, and hews to English tradition by holding up the image of Robert Gregory to his Renaissance likeness, Sir Philip Sidney: “our Sidney and our perfect man.” Yeats’s poem accommodates personal lamentation and cultural elegy, and this joint impetus shows the excellence of the modern Irish elegy...

pdf

Share