Heaney the cordon-bleu cook

Heaney the agent of change

Heaney the orchestrator

Heaney the word painter

Heaney the meticulous craftsman

Stylistic devices

an extraordinary man in ordinary clothes

Poets are a breed apart!  Unlike ordinary mortals, such as you and me, their consciousness is constantly tuned into things that give off a poetic charge and their vocation compels them to pounce on such sudden, involuntary moments before they fade away. Poets are constantly on the qui-vive;

• they have a way of recording these unpredictable, involuntary instances – poets are never far away from composition mode which transforms  electrical impulse into verse
• poets are alchemists
• Heaney was one of the tribe – he acknowledged that there were times poems ‘came on’ in torrents
• he said of the ‘Squarings’ sequences in ‘Seeing Things’ …’I felt free as a kid skimming stones’, the poems had something of ‘the splish-splash one-after-anotherness of stones skittering and frittering across water’
• then, in almost the same breath, he confessed to periods of drought when he wondered where his next title might come from;
• poems are unexpected
• the catalyst might be something from a book or a photo … a gallery exhibit or a foreign place … a newspaper report or a dictionary… something televised or remembered from church… even a serious metaphysical conversation between poet and his inner self;
• poets are ordinary humans capable of producing extraordinary pieces of art.
• no question of Heaney living in some ivory tower … inside the skin of this extraordinary poet lived a modest, practical man coping with the things everyday life threw at him –  a wife and children to support,  bills to pay,  publishing contracts to meet, the need to supplement his poetry royalties or go without  – poetry readings,  radio programmes, chances to meet his contemporaries;
• he was so successful and approachable that as he grew older the burden became exhausting; Heaney the generous spirit was a person who found it difficult to say ‘no’; Heaney was forever at a ‘beck-and-call’ of his own making.
• once his global reputation was established, his life developed an almost unstoppable momentum – increased foreign travel, a constant flood of invitations, prestigious awards in the shape of a Nobel prize for Literature in 1995 and distinguished academic positions he held at Harvard and Oxford Universities
• Heaney rose head and shoulders above the others in the tribe and, like cream in milk, rose to the top of his profession?
• comparison with top performers in three other creative roles might offer a few insights into what it took for him to weave his particular magic

Heaney is a cordon bleu ‘cook’

• in common with the best chefs he strives to find the right blend;
• he and they recognise the finest products – they are endowed with a talent that adds the individual flavours of spices, herbs and myriad ingredients in just the right amounts at just the right moment;
• they produce unique, signature dishes capable of delighting and inspiring those who savour the result;.
• their ‘knowledge’ is gleaned from experience, experimentation and hard graft … their ‘talent’ is a gift granted only to very few.
• Heaney is both wordsmith and ‘master-chef’ – inspiration is just a start – spontaneous ideas can only gain from being worked upon.

Heaney is an agent of change 

• he wants to transform poetic charge into mouth-watering dishes – each will involve a deliberate process of composition and revision that will determine the ultimate structure, vocabulary, verse-form and imagery of each poem.
• Heaney’s copious ‘word hoard’ grants him access to a rich list of poetic devices available to all who write – he takes from it just what he needs –  to add an underlay… or ring a change … or carry an image through … or provide an echo;
• he wants no more than to turn ordinary language into a culinary feast for the senses and his blend of ingredients, roughly translated as ‘style’, is the ‘mix’ he favours in each poem to carry his message forward

Heaney is an orchestrator

• in seeking to write poetry that is pleasing to the ear or reflects his mood and preoccupations – jubilant, sad or harsh, calm or furious, light or sweet or slowly dying away Heaney has much in common with an orchestral composer;
• he starts at a slight disadvantage because scored music brings with it a code of expression marks that indicate the way in which a piece is to be performed in terms of volume, cadence, emphasis and so on
• without expression marks the music risks being monotonous and boring.
• No such notation for Heaney – he leaves it to his words, phrasing and punctuation to suggest timbre, modulation so that the skilled reader can turn each poem into a linguistic ‘event;

Heaney paints using words

• Heaney was excited by artists and by Art Galleries around the world – ‘anything can happen in a gallery: that’s the joy of it’, he once enthused;
• across his poetry he refers to countless named examples appropriate to his poetic moment, from Renaissance Giorgione to 20th century Dutch abstract Piet Mondrian; from Breughel’s Flemish landscapes to Goya’s nightmare canvasses in Madrid’s Prado;
• as a friend with Irish surrealist painter, Colin Middleton, he was able to observe the techniques, overlays and textures  of a creative act exercised within another medium; this  awakened the notion  that he could ‘outstrip the given’ and reflect visual scenes in word;
• his magic paintbrush works – Heaney’s word-canvasses generate individual textures and compositional balance – he sets emotional sensations, shapes and colours within the picture’s frame, even mimicking cinematic techniques of zoom and pan to add movement and focus

Heaney is a meticulous craftsman

• Heaney’s intention was simply to use the musicality of language to generate beautifully turned passages;
• he wove strands of assonant vowel sounds into the text, sometimes as many as 14 separate ones within the same poem, either grouping them within specific areas to create internal echoes or reprising them at intervals;
• these are reflected in the coloured-hearing section of each poem using standard phonetic icons – ‘same colour’ means ‘same sound’ so that regional differences in vowel pronunciation will still be accommodated; Heaney rarely leaves a vowel sound in isolation;
• he had another trick up his sleeve- he used the alliterative effects of consonants to modify his assonant melodies with pulses or beats or soothings or hissings or frictions;
• consonants (with their phonetic symbols) can be classed according to where in the mouth they occur:
• Front-of-mouth sounds voiceless bi-labial plosive [p] voiced bi-labial plosive [b]; voiceless labio-dental fricative [f] voiced labio-dental fricative [v]; bi-labial nasal [m]; bilabial continuant [w]
• Behind-the-teeth sounds voiceless alveolar plosive [t] voiced alveolar plosive [d]; voiceless alveolar fricative as in church match [tʃ];  voiced alveolar fricative as in judge age [dʒ];  voiceless dental fricative  [θ]  as in thin path; voiced dental fricative as  in this other [ð]; voiceless alveolar fricative [s] voiced alveolar fricative [z]; continuant [h] alveolar nasal [n] alveolar approximant [l]; alveolar trill [r]; dental ‘y’ [j] as in  yet
• Rear-of-mouth sounds voiceless velar plosive [k] voiced velar plosive [g]; voiceless post-alveolar fricative [ʃ] as in  ship sure, voiced post- alveolar fricative [ʒ]   as in pleasure; palatal nasal [ŋ]  as in ring/ anger.
• Heaney’s thought processes and instinctive use of rhythm work hand in glove, whether in phrases of bare simplicity or more complex ideas and emotions

Stylistic devices

Translating ideas, notions, themes, that ‘something’ from the inner recess of the mind, into words involves first selection: words and phrases, the ‘mot juste’ and so on, then the weaving of these lexical items into the fabric of the piece. This weaving process is a means to multiple ends: flow, sound, rhythm, echo, emphasis and so on; part of the ‘tradecraft’ is drafting and redrafting text to achieve maximum impact in the finished product.

Published poetry, though not perhaps written for the reader, is there for the enjoyment and can be an intellectual challenge as well as a pleasure. Part of that enjoyment can legitimately include analysis of the style of the piece. What follows is a list of devices open to writers as part of their technique.

Whilst there might be no intrinsic value in spotting a particular device and knowing it by name, nevertheless it is good training. It helps the reader to be inquisitive and begs the question as to why the writer chose that particular device and to what end. We cannot always tease out the poet’s real intention but it is well worth trying!

‘a figure of speech is a way of talking or writing by which you say what you don’t mean and yet mean what you say. For example, ‘He blows his own trumpet’. You don’t mean he has a trumpet but you do mean that he blows it.  HUNT, Fresh Howlers (1930)

antithesis: an arrangement of contrasted words in corresponding places in contiguous phrases, to express a contrast of ideas;

chiasmus: the arrangement in parallel clauses of related terms in a reversed order, so AB BA as opposed to parallel order AB AB;

cliché: A phrase whose wording has become fixed, or almost fixed, as usage has given it a fixed meaning. Cliches commonly use a recognised literary device which eventually uses its power;

comparison: A statement that there is a likeness between things which can in fact be likened;

dual meaning: This when a word or phrase is used so as to be understood in two different meanings, both of which fit the sentence (e.g. a literal  and a symbolic meaning), and in order that the two meanings may be related with each other;

enjambment: The continuation of a sentence, in verse, into the following line. Traditionally an enjambement is permissible if the break is at the normal break in the syntax or at a normal break between breath groups. This happens more routinely outside those conditions in free verse;

enumeration: The arrangement of terms in succession, e.g. nouns in apposition, adverbs or adverbial phrases; economy of words is achieved. As a literary device enumerations can be used to add implications and rhythm to the subject matter, by grouping or gradation or even intentional incoherency;

euphemism: replacement of a distasteful by a more pleasant term, to refer to the same thing;

free indirect speech: the expression of what is spoken or thought without introductory words such as He said, ‘…’ or He said that.. In narrative FIS may be signalised by use of vocabulary appropriate to the character rather than the words of the author. Continuous FIS becomes ‘interior monologue;

hyperbole: the intentional use of an exaggerated term in place of the one more properly applicable, adding implications to the subject matter;

inversion: The reversal of the normal order of the members of a sentence, perhaps to avoid ambiguity or to bring certain words into stressed or key position or to modify the rhythm;

irony: The use of words containing a sufficient and apparently serious meaning in themselves, but conveying also, intentionally, to a more initiated person a further, generally opposed meaning; frequently the first meaning is laudatory or untenable;

litotes: intentional understatement inviting the reader to rectify. Frequently a negative expression;

metaphor: an expression which refers to a thing or action by means of a term for a quite different thing or action, related to it, not by any likeness in fact but by an imagined analogy which the context allows;

A simile uses words like ‘like’ or ‘as…as’. Metaphors and similes have 2 terms: the thing meant and the thing ‘imported’ as a means of expressing, by analogy, what is meant. Personification is a form of metaphor.

This substitution of words has wide uses: ornament, implication, overtone. Its use may be regarded as a special means of revealing hidden truth.

Apart from enriching the thought by a device of form and enhancing the reader’s contact with the author, metaphors and similes may be significant or characteristic because of their reiterated suggestion of a writer’s preoccupations or his processes of thought.

metonymy: the use of a word in place of another with which it is associated in meaning;

objective-subjective: ‘objective’ – expressing reality as it is or attempting to do so; the reality of events or things is regarded as ‘external’. The reality may mental or emotional experience, examined rather than evoked. ‘Subjective’- expressing a version of reality in which it is modified by emotion or preconceived belief; or expressing conscious or subconscious experiences of states of mind;

oxymoron: the juxtaposition of contradictory or incongruous terms, understood as a paradox;

paradox: a statement or implication expressed so as to appear inconsistent with accepted belief, or absurd, or exaggerated, but intended to be realised by the reader as an acceptable or important truth, in some respect; often placed as a conclusion; in a paradox there is often a word which  cries out for redefinition;

pathetic fallacy: ascribing human traits or feelings to inanimate nature, corresponding with those being experienced by a character or ‘voice’;

periphrasis: the expression of a meaning by more words than are strictly necessary or expected, so that additional implications are brought in;

porte-manteau word: a deliberate mixture of 2 words into one retaining both meanings: ‘’a bestpectable gentleman’, respectable guy wearing glasses!

preciosity: aiming at or affecting refinement or distinction in expression; avoiding vulgar phrases; visibly introducing greater care in expression; using this precision, formal arrangement of words, difficult combinations of ideas, allusions and puns in the hope of revealing truths not to be expressed in plain and simple terms; exaggerating this so that, for example an ‘armchair’ might become a ‘commodity for conversation’!

repetition: expressing a meaning or an attitude by implication, through the deliberate use of a word or phrase a second time;

symbol: a term for an object representing, conventionally or traditionally, an abstraction;

synecdoche: the use of a word denoting a ‘part’ in place of the word for the whole, so ‘100 sails’ meaning ‘100 ships’;

synesthesia: the representation of a sensation or image belonging to one of the five senses by words proper to another (‘loud tie’; Disney’s ‘Fantasia’);

zeugma:  providing syntactical economy of words by using one word with dual possibility so that two meanings are taken separately – ‘he took his hat and his leave’.

The post Door into the Dark – Afterthoughts appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

Commenting on the relationship between his first two collections to DOD (p.98) Heaney acknowledged some new ventures:  I don’t see all that much ‘development’ in Door into the Dark; it’s more a matter of trying out and spreading out … spreading  out from Toner’s Bog in Bellaghy parish to ‘Bogland’ in general.

He added that placing the poem at end of Door into the Dark pointed forward to his further use of the bog as a metaphor. The piece itself it had been given, had come freely, had arrived out of old layers of lore and language and felt completely trustworthy as a poem (DOD90) … From the moment I wrote it, I felt promise in ‘Bogland’. Without having any clear notion of where it would lead or even whether I would go back to the subject, I realized that new co-ordinates had been established. Door jambs with an open sky behind them rather than the dark … self-forgetfulness, then coming to something different. The kind of thing you wish could happen all the time. It seemed the right poem to close with since it didn’t seem to stop after the last line.

MP 61 Heaney’s second volume, Door into the Dark, concludes with ‘Bogland’, a poem which embodies what had gone before and anticipates the future direction of his poetry, looking forward to the place-name and bog poems of Wintering Out and North. Like so much of his first book, it asserts the author’s sense of affinity and continuity with his cultural forbears. It takes pleasure in the particularity of the Irish landscape, which seems full of resilience and fecundity, and transmutes Ireland’s richest resource in economic terms into a symbol for the imagination’s potential.

MP88 the bog ceases to be merely a physical or geographical phenomenon; it has come to embody a huge span of time, since, as Kavanagh wrote, ‘A turf bog is a history of the world from the time of Noah’,(‘The Green Fool’)  … It is both grave and reliquary, hoarding the treasures of its past, then, like an arbitrary, but beneficent goddess – or poet? – yielding up its mysteries and miracles, like the elk and the butter … The poem’s climax celebrates the primacy of water, and the endless potential, the bottomless well of the imagination. Writing at a time when prejudice was hardening in each community and ‘neighbourly murders’ were at hand, he proffered the assuaging, purifying gift of water and of Art, a spiritualised landscape and language, the common inheritance of all the Irish people. Having found in the bog a door into ‘the dark rich places of the human psyche’ … Heaney crossed the threshold in Wintering Out and North with conspicuous success. On the other side, along with those ‘dark rich places’, lay brutality and violence beyond words.

NC 19 Heaney said of ‘Bogland that it was  ‘the first poem of mine that I felt had the status of symbol in some way; it wasn’t trapped in its own anecdote, or its own closing-off: it seemed to have some kind of wind blowing through it that could carry on‘;

MP (from p.87) reports the special circumstances that brought together two creative spirits, Heaney and Terry Flanagan, in Irish bogland:

In the autumn of 1968, the painter T. P. Flanagan and his wife, Sheelagh, invited the Heaneys to spend some time with them at McFadden’s Hotel in Gortahork, Co. Donegal. While their wives looked after the children, poet and painter ‘escaped’ for trips to look at the Donegal landscape. These were casual ‘jaunts’, but Flanagan would stop the car at times to sketch. Between them there was ‘an unvoiced decision not to discuss the landscape’, the recognition that each must ‘preserve his isolation’ as he examined the bogland scenery. Flanagan informed me that he was unwilling to show Heaney even the outline of a sketch, since any definition might endanger the success of the ‘individual imagination’s wrestle with its subject’ … Listening to Flanagan describing his own attitudes to the bogland, one can easily recognise the affinity of spirit linking Heaney and his fellow Ulster artist. The painter described his attraction to ‘the fundamentals of Irish landscape’, and his love of the moistness, the softness of the bog, its fecundity, its femininity, its connectedness with a pre-Christian, primeval past … he delighted in the ‘visual surprise’ of the bogland … His awe at the bogland did not spring so much from its size or colour, but from his ‘sense of its ancient life’ … Heaney dedicated his poem ‘Bogland’ to this painter friend, whose familiar, he writes, must be ‘Oisin or Wandering Aengus.’ In a letter … Heaney contrasted the two men’s responses to the ‘benign and solitary landscape’ … I think I did the ‘Bogland’ poem independently, but the whole feeling of shared pleasure in the landscape, the bleakness and the bareness was a shared one. Terry, however, was very much a visual, painterly reactor: I don’t think he had much politico­historico interest in it as an image.

Seamus Heaney said of his bog pictures: ‘what invites the eye back again and again is the fetch of water and air, their mutual flirtation, their eternal triangle with a moody light.’

Bogland

Possibly responding to Theodore Roetke’s ‘In Praise of Prairie’, Heaney focuses on the shared Irish landscape (we) which possesses none of the vast wide-open spaces of the New World (no prairies) or renderings of big sky at sundown (slice a big sun at evening).

Heaney acknowledges (eye concedes) that his Irish field of vision is less expansive in scope (encroaching horizon) and drawn enticingly (wooed) towards a watery nexus (cyclops’ eye of a tarn). An island (our) without marked boundaries (unfenced country) is bonded by peat-land (bog) that dries and forms an ever stiffer outer layer (keeps crusting) as one day merges into the next (between … sights of the sun).

Bogland’s miraculous properties preserved an ancient creature (skeleton of the Great Irish Elk), its bones recovered and reconstructed (set it up), its soft tissue eaten away over 13 millennia (astounding crate full of air). Equally impressive: recovered dairy produce (butter) stored (sunk under) and long forgotten (more than a hundred years) was still recognizable for its taste (salty) and colour (white).

The poet describes bogland’s nature as obliging (ground itself is kind), sustaining (black butter melting), receptive (opening underfoot), at an early stage (missing … by millions of years) of its geological consummation (last definition) and final deposits (never dig coal here).

Bogland gives back what fell into its clutches: soaked remnants (waterlogged trunks) of fallen grandeur (great firs) no longer able to support themselves (soft as pulp).

The collection’s concluding lines salute the succeeding generations of peat diggers known to Heaney since childhood (his own grandfather included) celebrated in ‘Digging’ the first poem of Death of a Naturalist – those who blazed the trail (our pioneers), who engaged with vigour (striking) in the on-going digging process (inwards and downwards) excavators of Irish history enclosed in every descending stratum (every layer they strip) and evidence of previous human presence (camped on before).

The collection’s coda sounds a warning bell: fenland was riddled with deep cavities (bogholes) formed by percolating water (Atlantic seepage). These life-threatening traps his parents warned him to avoid at all costs when he was small (wet centre is bottomless) return us full circle to Night Piece and its scaresome ‘door into the dark’.

• Flanagan, T. P. [Terry] (1929-2011): Painter, principally of landscapes; born Enniskillen; dedicatee of the current poem; Head of the Art Department at St Mary’s College of Education, Belfast (1965-83), where he first met Seamus Heaney;
• prairie: large open area of grassland, especially in North America and Canada
• slice: divide, cut with a knife;
• concede: give way to, yield;
• encroach: invade, muscle in;
• woo: entice;
• cyclops: reference to the savage one-eyed monster from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’;
• tarn: small mountain lake;
• crust: form a hard outer layer;
• between the sight of the sun: on a day-by-day basis;
• Great Irish Elk: The Irish elk is known from abundant skeletal remains which have been found in bogs in Ireland Most remains of the Irish elk are known from the Late Pleistocene. A large proportion of the known remains of M. giganteus are from Ireland, which mostly date to the Allerød oscillation near the end of the Late Pleistocene around 13,000 years ago. Over 100 individuals have been found in Ballybetagh Bog near Dublin; it bears little resemblance with modern elk;
• set up: reconstruct the skeleton into its original shape;
• crate: rigid framework;
• definition: use here covers both the original Latin notion of boundary and the act of stating what something means;
• coal: combustible black rock formed from peat subjected to the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years;
• pulp: soft wet mass of matter;
• pioneers: trailblazers
• camped on: bears the evidential remains of a previous age:
• seepage: slow percolation of liquid
• bottomless: reference to a hole whose bottom cannot be seen or found; an abyss, hell; by extension something which is unfathomable;

• 6 quatrains (Q) in 10 sentences (S) ; variable line length of 5-9 syllables;
• rhyme scheme abab cdcd;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the piece is strongly enjambed;

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: thirteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the first two stanzas are dominated by alveolar plosives [t] [d ], nasals [n] [m] and sibilants [s] [z] alongside front of mouth sounds: breathy [w], alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], labio-dental fricatives [f][v]; these are supported by velar plosives [k] [g];

The post Bogland appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

The Bann Valley interested Heaney as he grew. He discusses the archaeological dimension with DOD (135).  Oh yes… there was always a lot of talk at school (Anahorish Primary) … about the flints and scrapers found in the mud of the banks. There were even flints in a cupboard in the master’s classroom.

Bann Clay delves deeper into the telluric underlay, focussing on a mineral specific to the Bann valley, a natural product once harvested in pits near Toome that operated during Heaney’s Castledawson days but closed down once they became unprofitable.

Toome’s Bann clay pits were worked by relaxed local men who went to work on two wheels (labourers pedalling at ease) unmistakeable (white with it), their working clothes (dungarees and boots) discoloured by what they dug out (its powdery stain).

Labourers spent long hours (all day) in the workplace (open pits) digging out heavy Bann clay and depositing it (loaded) on a spread-field (bank), slicing in a specific way (slabs … squared off) revealing its dense consistency (clots) and colour tinge (like … blue cream).

The questioner in Heaney thirsted to learn more about the clay’s long hidden presence (sunk for centuries under the grass), its changing properties once exposed (baked white in the sun), how it dried and solidified (relieved its hoarded waters), how it developed its own odour (began to ripen).

He traces Bann clay’s watery presence in the deep mid-Ulster geology (underruns the valley), an offshoot (first slow residue) of the Bann’s percolating spread (river finding its way).

Far older in date than the mesh of fenland that now covers it (the webbed marsh is new) and long predating stone artefacts of ten millennia BC unearthed on the site (clutch of Mesolithic flints).

Heaney recalls a personal experience from his farming days (once) when, engaged in heavy-duty maintenance (cleaning a drain), he came across (shovelled up) traces of Bann clay with its pasty complexion (livery), its insolubility (slicks) and incompatibility (water gradually ran clear) with the ditch’s flow (old floor). Dredged from beneath the ditch-back growth (humus and roots) the clay revealed its even, heavy properties (smooth weight).

Heaney’s residual feelings are of unfinished intellectual business (I labour towards it still) perhaps even a wistful recognition that whilst he is perishable Bann clay will always be there (It holds and gluts).

• Bann clay; diatomite deposits emanating from the wider Bann valley of Mid Ulster and hidden beneath the peat; a light coloured porous substance of use to various industries; dug manually from pits in Heaney’s youth;
• labourer: manual worker;
• pedal: ride a bicycle using pedals;
• dungarees: hard wearing work garment made up of trousers and a bib held up by shoulder straps;
• pit: large hole from which clay was dug;
• bank: edge, fringe where the clay was deposited;
• slab: block;
• square-off: cut to form four equal sides and right angles;
• clot: mass of coagulated liquid
• sunk: submerged
• relieve: surrender, give up
• hoard: rich reserves
• underrun: flow beneath
• residue: the amount that remains
• webbed: toughened by its closely woven composition
• clutch: small group (of eggs, people or here geological fragments);
• Mesolithic: middle stone age about 9000 years BC; Greek lithos means ‘stone
• flint: OE type of rock noted for hardness and for giving off sparks when struck; one of the first materials used by early people to fashion tools;
• drain: channel, culvert, water run-off;
• shovel: (sometimes wide-bladed) spade
• livery: bearing the pale colour of sickness;
• slick: glossy patch floating on or in water with which it is not compatible;
• humus: loam
• glut: fill to excess;

• 6 quatrains (Q) in 10 sentences (S) ; variable line length of 5-9 syllables;
• rhyme scheme abab cdcd;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the piece is strongly enjambed;
• the poem broadly follows a sequence in time and geological layers: 1 earth 2rivers 3 percolation 4 deposits adding chemical processes;
• Q1 two enjambed sentences; mid line full stop; ‘lane’ brings us close to where the poet was living; dominant colouring; personification of work-wear ‘wore’;
• Q2 enjambed sentence; mid line punctuation; density of the substance achieved via comparison – clay/ clotted cream;
• Q3 telluric underlay: subtext of age introduced to be extended in various way; loss of liquid component ‘relieved’- personification? watery treasure house ‘hoarded’ adds a porous property; water vocabulary will recur down the narrative ‘underrun’ etc;
• Q4 geological development in focus to do with rock strata and water’s persistence; vegetation above is matted for strength ‘webbed’; old and/ versus new;
• Q5 midline full stop; labelled reference to ancient period of geological development; autobiographical element added when the properties of Bann clay became obvious to the observant eye;
• Q6 notion layering/ strata ‘old floor’; personal stance as regards scratching the surface of a topic of wide personal/ academic interest and modest Heaney non-specialist effort ‘labour’ returns us to the labourers of the first line who just did what they did without hesitation; final clay presence suggest survival ‘holds and gluts’;

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: twelve assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the first two stanzas are dominated by alveolar plosives [t] [d ], nasals [n] [m] and sibilants [s] [z] alongside front of mouth sounds: breathy [w], alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], labio-dental fricatives [f][v]; these are supported by velar plosives [k] [g];

The post Bann Clay appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

From the 1960s’ days when the poet was assessing teaching practices around Northern Ireland he became accustomed to using his car to access remote schools he was required to visit as part of his job. The habit stuck and, as time went by, countless outings undertaken alone or with wife and friends took him along the beautiful and varied Irish coastline by road. Unsurprising perhaps that in numerous poems across his published work a windscreen separates the passing Heaney from the object of his attention.

From behind the wheel of his car north of Belfast (County Down), as if merely following the road (turning a corner, taking a hill) he catches sight of the sea, now angling in, now coming to rest (sidling and settling) strikingly close to the land (back of a hedge).

At another spot (or else) a dull coloured stretch of strand (grey foreshore) with pools (puddles) left behind – lifeless and washed out (dead-eyed as fish) – where random (haphazard) tidal remnants (craters) bounded (march) arable and dairy farmland (corn … grazing).

From Ulster’s north coastal plateau (all round Antrim) down the Atlantic coast of the Irish Republic (two hundred miles at Moher) igneous rock (basalt) forms a line of defence (stands to).  Perhaps Heaney was misled about the shale and sandstone of Moher cliffs but no matter.

The immense power of water-flow is awe-inspiring both out at sea and in outlets leading to the sea (ocean and channel), as it seethes (froth) against man-made, black painted barriers protecting placid river flow (black locks) or subjects the beaches (strands) to wind-whistling salvos (hissing submissions) on both sides of the island of Ireland (off Wicklow and Mayo).

At whatever moment one chooses (any minute), wherever and without exception (foot of all fields, all cliffs and shingles) incoming seawater will be poking around (rummaging in) conjuring up sound reminders (listen) of eighth century Viking raiders (Danes) their longboats spreading fear (black hawk bent on the sail) or two centuries later chain-mailed northern French invaders (chinking Normans) – or in places marshy stretches fighting back – (currachs) seeking to reclaim (hopping high) the sea’s domain.

Human coastal settlements both large and small to all four corners of Ireland (Strangford, Arklow, Carrickfergus,

Belmullet and Ventry) are set in stone (stay), disregarded guardians of the shoreline (forgotten like sentries).

• sidle: move obliquely;
• settle: come to rest;
• foreshore: area between water and cultivated land or shore between high and low water mark; point to point the Irish coast is estimated to be about 2,000 miles in length;
• puddle: poll of liquid on the ground;
• dead-eyed: with no sparkle of life:
• haphazard: random;
• crater: bowl shaped cavity;
• march: act as a boundary, bound, mark out, delimit
• basalt: hard volcanic rock very common in Antrim (for example the Giant’s Causeway coast) but also along stretches of the wild Atlantic coast of the Irish Republic;
• stand to: wait prepared for attack (by the tide)
• Moher: sea cliffs located on the Burren cost of County Clare; the name means ‘ruined fort’ in Gaelic; formed largely of sandstone and shale;
• froth: mass of bubbles in a liquid;
• channel: length of water linking two larger areas of water;
• black locks: Dublin’s Grand Canal has three black-painted sea locks where it enters the tidal River Liffey;
• strand: beach, sea shore
• submission: capitulation;
• Wicklow, Mayo: counties of the Republic of Ireland;
• rummage: sift through, poke around
• shingle: describing a beach formed by small rounded pebbles en masse;
• Antrim, Wicklow, Mayo: counties of the island of Ireland;
• Danes: Viking: 8-11 century Norwegian seafarers who first raided and then built coastal settlements in Ireland, which would go on to become some of the country’s major cities – Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford;
• black hawk: bird of prey that would instil fear when used as a Viking long-boat emblem or insignia;
• Normans: from the 12^th century groups of Normans originally from northern France invaded and settled in Gaelic Ireland
• chinking: body armour by Norman times included chain mail;
• curragh: stretch of marshy waste ground;
• hop: spring, dance;
• Strangford: Co Mayo village at the head of Strangford Lough north of Belfast;
• Arklow: seaside town town in County Wicklow founded by the Vikings in 9^th century;
• Carrickfergus: large town in Co. Antrin, Northern Ireland
• Belmullet: coastal Gaeltacht (where Irish is spoken) town in Co. Mayo
• Ventry: Gaeltacht village in Co. Kerry;
• stay: stand one’s ground;
• sentry; sentinel, military guard;

• MP 84 The final group of poems from Door into the Dark which merit consideration are ‘meditative landscape poems’, (‘The Peninsula’, ‘Whinlands’, ‘The Plantation’, ‘Shoreline’ and’ Bogland’) encompassing ‘notions about history and nationality .. primeval, and sometimes pre-Celtic landscapes … all illustrating Heaney’s increasing concern with Irish geography, history and archaeology, and how ‘home’ now means something greater than the Mossbawn microcosm… natural forms and shapes from both childhood and adult experience, ones … which articulate the identity of the whole of Ireland, and not merely his own ...  (MP94) His growth and survival as a poet will depend on his ability to ‘uncode all landscapes’, to remain fluid and responsive like the spirit of ‘Undine’, to accept new personas, other personalities …  After the sensual richness of Death of a Naturalist, Heaney developed a taste for the austere sublime, influenced in part perhaps by his painter friends, such as T. P. Flanagan to whom Bogland is dedicated;
• NC 18 In ‘Shoreline’, Heaney receives the first of those visitations from the Vikings which are to constitute part of the mythology of North: ‘Listen. Is it the Danes, / A black hawk bent on the sail?’ Even if the Vikings are present not in the vegetation of Ireland, but in the tide ‘rummaging’ at its coastline;
• NC 23 picks out Heaney’s taste for ‘meditative solitary driving’: A second recurrent feature of Door into the Dark identified by NC is In the characterization of the poet-as-driver in Door into the Dark, the potential solipsism of the reflexive (the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist) is given an accompanying poetic persona, as the perceiver is cut off from the object of perception by a car windscreen. Even ‘Shoreline’, for all its recovery of a history of invasion from the Irish coastline, and for all that it eventually swells to embrace the whoIe island of Ireland opens with a car ‘Turning a corner, taking a hill/In County Down’.

• 7 quatrains (Q) in 13 sentences (S) including questions; variable line length of 4-7 syllables;
• composed in the present tense; the addition of participle ‘ing’ gives the poem a continuous happening-nowness;
• The sentence frequency reflects the poetic mind flicking between images and intellectual charges;
• unrhymed perhaps with the exception of the final couplet;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the longer sentences are more heavily enjambed interspersed  with short sentences ; overall the poem is heavily enjambed;
• Heaney has things to transmit to/ invite his reader to share his reader hence perhaps his use of imperatives;
• Q1 the ever proximity yet surprise appearance of the sea depicts the configuration of the Co Mayo landscape; personification perhaps in use of ‘sidle’ and ‘settle’; final two words introduce move from sea to shore, from distant to closer; from landscape to interface;
• Q2 muted colourings; antithetical comparison puddles/dead fish; human activity/farms identified by their output;
• Q3 geography and geology; suggestion of all-Ireland coastline and hard rock deposits (only partly accurate); place names; final line introduces the sea’s will to conquer the land (worth reading the Aran poem of ‘Death of a Naturalist’);
• Q4 onslaught of sea seeking ‘submission’ visual ‘froth’ and audible ‘hiss’;
• Q5 imperative seeks Heaney’s/ reader’s reflection on the generalised tidal circumstances ; personification ‘rummage’ is a human activity;
• Q6 imperative seeks attention to imagined sounds as a way into examples of Ireland under occupation and the conditioning effect on the people; use of interrogatives; image of the land fighting back;
• Q7 named geographical settlements; final image introduces a Heaney fondness for those with physical oversight of a place or a dilemma (see for example ‘Mycenae Lookout’) set in position and forgotten;

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: fifteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the final two stanzas are dominated by nasals [n] [m], alveolar plosives [t] [d ], sibilants [s] [z] and velar plosives [k] [g] alongside front of mouth sounds: alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], aspirate [h], labio-dental [f] [v];

The post Shoreline appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

The piece falls into the category of ‘meditative landscapes’ (MP84) featuring a discrete section of woodland, ostensibly a site of orderly trees planted for commercial gain used by ‘incertus’ Heaney as a mystical door into the as-yet-undiscovered, an interface between the literal and the allegorical, the lived life and make-believe, disorientation and self-revelation. Let us refer to Heaney’s voice as ‘Traveller’.  

Traveller’s specific location (that wood) possesses otherworldly properties. As if watchable via some form of thermal tracking, Traveller’s first steps from wherever he chooses(any point … a centre) and his itinerary (your bearings) are followed by watching trees (ghosting) which furnish fascinating emblems (improvising charmed rings) to embellish his every respite (wherever you stopped).

Traveller discovered that he could not guarantee solid navigation (straight line … a circle you travelled) against the plantation’s film-like loop (repeating) of woodland effects – fairy-tale conceits (toadstools) or evidence of forestry (stumps) – leading to his confusion (did you re-pass them?).

As the only human presence, Traveller takes in nature’s bounteous ground-cover (bleyberries quilting the floor) interspersed with less respectful signs of human intrusion (black char of a fire) replicated over time (once … again), akin to a limbo of absent presences (someone had always been there) that intensified his feeling of being on his own (always you were alone).

Some visitants came with a purpose (lovers, birdwatchers), others to sleep out (campers), or vagrants (gipsies and tramps) variously identified by their abandoned tools (some trace of their trades) or their detritus (excrement).

Screened from casual wayfarers (hedging the road) the site welcomed anyone (all comers) prepared to share its specific sensory properties – for the ears (hush), for the treading feet (mush) ; its calm continuum (whispering treadmill), perhaps wrongly (so they thought), seemed to deny it stand-alone status (limits defined … from outside).

Feelings of anxiety were tempered (thankful) by sounds of the world outside (hum of the traffic) amongst those brave enough (ventured) to go beyond the Dantesque first circle (picnickers’ belt) or whose imagination evoked (began to recall) scary make-believe (tales of fog on the mountains).

Once experienced by Traveller the plantation became addictive (you had to come back) as a haven  (learn how to lose yourself) sufficient for all facets of his ‘me’ – the navigator in him (pilot), the Incertus yet to establish his own poetic voice (stray), fairy tale proxies – the evil individual who hurt others (witch) – the survivor resembling those who made it to the end of the journey (Hansel and Gretel) in short all that made up the sum of his parts (in one).

• plantation: area in which trees have been planted, largely for commercial purposes; the label also carries a reference to Irish historical colouring not pursued here: colonization or settlement of emigrants, especially of English and then Scottish families were imposed upon Ireland in the 16th–17th centuries by the government in London thus displacing and dispossessing the indigenous Irish;
• birch: slender hardy tree common to Ireland which has thin peeling bark and bears catkins;
• ghost: watch over, witness like a spectre;
• bearings: directions being followed:
• improvise: create spontaneously;
• ring: circular marking;
• toadstool: dome topped fungus with coloured cap similar to mushroom; often poisonous;
• stump: projection left in the ground after a tree has been felled;
• bleyberry: alternative name for a bilberry – small dark blue edible berry;
• quilt: warm, padded bed covering;
• char: partially burnt remains;
• trace: vestige, visible evidence;
• trade: craft, occupation, activity;
• excrement: waste matter, droppings’ humen mess;
• hedge: girdle, enclose;
• hush: silence, calm;
• mush: soft wet mass;
• treadmill: large wheel turned by people or animals reading on steps; long continuous moving belt; connotations of a challenging situation from which it is hard to escape;
• hum: low pitched continuous sound perhaps from distance;
• venture in: take the risk of going somewhere;
• belt: specific strip or area;
• tales: recounted stories, often fictitious;
• fog on the mountains: mysterious remote conditions well known in children’s literature;
• pilot: navigator, guide;
• stray: homeless individual, waif;
• Hansel and Gretel: reference to Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel; Hansel laid a trail of white pebbles so that he and Gretel could find their way home after being abandoned in the forest by a wicked step-mother;

• For all the poem’s title the poet’s preoccupation is not with the political rumblings of the Tudor plantations imposed on Ireland by military occupation.
• Across his work Heaney is happy to use references to fairy tale, for example the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in ‘The Underground’ of Station Island’. Some time later in ‘Canopy’ from Human Chain Heaney will write of a Voice and Light installation in Harvard Yard, Cambridge Massachusetts which inspired references to Dante’s ‘Inferno’, Canto XIII, in which trees sprang to life
• MP94 offers a different reading: Heaney’s growth and survival as a poet will depend on his ability to ‘uncode all landscapes’, to remain fluid and … to accept new personas, other personalities. These ideas are expressed succinctly in the final quatrain of ‘The Plantation’;
• MP93 Michael Parker echoes the walk that starts but is never ending: as with the poetic necessity of peregrination in ‘The Peninsula’, Heaney seems to be echoing Eliot in asserting You will not arrive/ But pass through’;             
• NC 21 outlines a specific stylistic device used in In Door into the Dark: so-called ‘self-inwoven simile’ or the ‘short-circuited comparison’ sometimes referred to as known as ‘reflexive imagery’ connects with the structural circularity or reflexivity … those epigrammatically reflexive lines in the reticent and difficult poem ‘ The Plantation’, ‘Though you walked a straight line / It might be a circle you travelled’, ‘And having found them once / You were sure to find them again’;
• NC22 speaks of the unresolved tension between the literal and the metaphorical and a situation both desolation as well as a comfort, both envy and self-assertion: ‘Someone had always been there / Though always you were alone’.
• There seems to me to be a link with Heaney’s psyche in Spirit Level’s Postscript in which the thrill of a landscape that created a beautiful lyrical moment forhim raised the more fundamental questions as regards the riddles of earthly existence and the self (you are neither here nor there … a hurry through which known and strange things pass);
• Heaney was the Incertus of his early poetic nom de plume; his self-confessed moments of insecurity required that the nightmare of a babe in the wood or a Hansel and Gretel parable should have a happy outcome. One thinks of the poet’s insecurity in ‘The Underground’ of Station Island with its references to the Orpheus and Eurydice story and the threat of losing his beloved wife (DF);

• 9 quatrains (Q) in 9 sentences (S) including a question; with a single exception line length of 5-7 syllables;
• hints of rhyme in Q1 but no pattern;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the longer sentences are more heavily enjambed interspersed  with short sentences ; S7 is fully enjambed;
• Q1 introduces the notion of ‘thermal imaging’ what cannot be seen/ is taking refuge; personification of trees as part of the make-believe underlay culminating in an actual Brothers Grimm reference in the poem’s final line;enter ‘you’ ‘your’ raise questions – the poet , those engaged in a similar journey as opposed to ‘they’ in Q7 suggesting all the others;

• Q2 confirms the idea of uncertain location ‘any … wherever’ whether physical or a state of mind; opposites ‘straight’, ‘circle’; more magic underlay ‘toadstools’; the theme of a hidden journey ‘travelled’;
• Q3 personal confusion couched in opposites ‘repeat’, ‘repass’; the longest line painting lyrical beauty of woodland left to itself is juxtaposed with human negligence;
• Q4 introduces the notion of a repeated venture; the use of ‘sure’ is not full of confidence; ‘though’ links the two sides of a paradox strengthened by repeated ‘always’; repeated ‘them refers to both nature and man;
• Q5 enumerates human sets with reference to human litter and absence of modern conveniences;
• Q6 introduces the contrast of impenetrability ‘hedging’ yet open access ’all comers’; ’so’= ‘thus; alliteration of key plantation properties ‘hush…mush’ extended to include the constant natural growth ‘whispering treadmill’ (example of synaesthesia?);
• Q7 completes S7 adding a caveat ‘ so they thought; repetition of ‘they’ appears to resolve the enigma of personal pronouns – ‘you, your’ insiders ‘they‘ outsiders; the latter never leave their objective world with its signs of life ‘hum…traffic’;
• Q8 completes sentence 8 (totally enjambed); contrast ‘ventured … picknickers’ belt’ and hints of ghostly tales that prevent the wary from being adventurous;
• Q9 unites the swirl of notions the poem carries: Heaney and his like-minded cannot keep away from a haven of refuge; the poet seeks a self that draws together his personal attributes and contradictions – responsible husband and parent ‘pilot’ – incertus who has not yet discovered his true voice ‘stray’ – guilt at his moments of unpleasantness ‘witch’ – finally those who made it to the end of the journey ‘Hansel and Gretel’… in children’s  fiction at least!

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: sixteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the first stanza is dominated by alveolar plosives [t] [d ], nasals [n] [m] and sibilants [s] [z] alongside front of mouth sounds: breathy [w], alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], labio-dental fricative[v]; these are supported by velar plosives [k] [g];

The post The Plantation appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

For Heaney the ever present bush (all year round) boasts its best light both out of season (blossom or two) and at its splendid best (in full bloom now).

To illustrate the whin’s sheer profusion the natural colour match he finds (small yolk stain) would exhaust its every source (all the birds’ eggs … all the nests) to meet peak demand (spring) decking out (spiked and hung) the superabundant frieze of blossom (everywhere … bushes) reaching its pinnacle (ripen).

The wider landscape (hills) celebrates the colours of the Irish flag (oxidizes gold), enjoys the nascent fervour of new growth (smoulder of green shoots) above the unproductive (dross) barrenness (dead thorns underfoot) now seared with yellow (blossoms scald).

Botany and allegory join forces: the spark of lightning strike or arson (a match under whins) guarantees instantaneous combustion (go up of a sudden) as Ireland’s troubled history past and present so clearly shows.

Not always immediately visible (no flame in the sun) the blaze creates a ferocious shockwave (fierce heat tremor). Whether natural or sectarian, the flare up (incineration like that) will only alleviate the immediate symptoms for a while (takes the thorn) whilst the main entities survive to pursue their beliefs (tough sticks don’t burn) … with the durability of ossified remains (like bone) burnt and all but petrified (charred horn).

So, Heaney suggests, think ‘whinlands’, think a land where the whin is prolific, think ‘Ireland’. He sets out the allegorical correspondences: richly overlaid (gilt); able to inflict injury (jaggy); resilient (springy); delicate around the edges (frilled); held back by circumstances (stunted); from arid yet splendid roots (dry richness); tenacious (persists); largely rural (hills) with man-made features (stone ditches) … and, when push came to shove, brought by its razor-edged societal mix (flintbed) to the point of violence (battlefield)!

• whin (word of Scandinavian origin): wild bush with sharp thorns and small, yellow flowers; its name is used commonly in Scotland and Ireland in place of ‘gorse’ or ‘furze’; whin grows on otherwise barren land, in sandy soil with good sun exposure; it has glossy green leaves, spines, and grows as a low shrub where not much else grows; in the spring it has bright yellow flowers. The whin lends itself readily to allegory – it is likely to survive and sprout after a fire; in fact it is exceedingly flammable and may well have adapted specifically to survive sporadic fires, particularly those from lightning strikes;
• – lands adds the notion of unbounded, expansive tracts of Irish landscape;
• full bloom: with its flowers fully open
• yolk: yellow internal part of a bird’s egg or poultry eggs
• stain: coloured patch, blotch;
• spiked: formed into a cover of sharp points
• ripen: reach maturity;
• oxidize: go through a chemical reaction by combining with oxygen;
• smoulder: burn with smoke but no flame
• shoot: fresh new growth, tendril;
• dross: worthless matter, chaff;
• thorn: stiff sharp-pointed projection
• scald: injure with hot liquid or steam;
• match: specially tipped wood that ignites when rubbed against a rough surface
• of a sudden: in a flash;
• tremor: involuntary quivering, trembling movement;
• incineration: burning to ashes;
• stick: thicker stem;
• bone: hard whitish tissue as of a skeleton;
• charred: burnt and blackened;
• horn: hard outgrowth resembling bone;
• gilt: covered with a thin gold leaf or gold-coloured veneer
• jaggy: with sharp projections;
• springy: elastic, stretchy
• frilled: fluted, pleated;
• stunted: prevented from growing properly;
• flintbed: geological stratum of hard greyish-black stone from which stone-age tools were fashioned; there were deposits in both Co Derry and Co Antrim in Northern Ireland;
• battlefield: site of ancient hostilities hiding the possibility of archaeological findings;

• MP(84) After the sensual richness of Death of a Naturalist, Heaney developed a taste for the austere sublime, influenced in part perhaps by his painter friends, such as T. P. Flanagan, and perhaps partly in response to the Hughes of Wodwo. Like Hughes’s ‘Thistles’, the humble gorse blossom in ‘Whinlands’, is ablaze with identity, spikily determined to hold its ground. Through nature’s alchemy, the hills are covered with oxidised gold. The ‘small yolk stain’ of each bush, which is multiplied many times over, emphasises the fertility, resilience and lyric beauty of this particular feature of the Irish countryside;
• The primeval, and sometimes pre-Celtic landscapes of ‘The Peninsula’, ‘Whinlands’, ‘The Plantation’, ‘Shoreline’ and’ Bogland’ all illustrate Heaney’s increasing concern with Irish geography, history and archaeology, and how ‘home’ now means something greater than the Mossbawn microcosm (id) … this ‘old dark’ of history and prehistory begins to be read out of the Irish landscape, in a way that points forward to some of the central poems in the two subsequent volumes, Wintering Out and North.
• the whin surfaces occasionally in poems set in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, Mossbawn and Glanmore: as a passing reference in Death of a Naturalist’s ‘Dawn Shoot’; as an emblem of beauty as POET salutes incoming summer in Electric Light’s ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, as a memory of pinpoints of the whin’s yellow colouring woven into his Aunt Sarah’s tweed clothing in District and Circle’s ‘Home Help’; as part of Ireland’s rich flora A Herbal 3,a sequence that features plants in their natural environment with human voices, emotions and distinct personalities;

• 6 triplets (T) in 9 sentences (S); very variable line length of 5-11 syllables;
• occasional hints of rhyme in Ts 4/5/6 but no sustained pattern;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the longer sentences are heavily enjambed interspersed  with short sentences ;

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: thirteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]
• the use Heaney seeks to make of assonant effects can be judged and measured in the ‘coloured hearing’ that follows;

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the final six lines are dominated by alveolar plosives [t] [d ], nasals [n] [m] and sibilants [s] [z] alongside a cocktail of front of mouth sounds: aspirate [h], breathy [w], alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], labio-dental fricatives [f] [v]; a smattering of velar plosives [k] [g] completes the alliterative deal;

The post Whinlands appeared first on Connecting with Seamus Heaney.

It was the only one of Heaney’s poems to be read at his funeral service held at the family’s Parish Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, South Dublin, chosen perhaps because it represented in memoriam all that was dear both to the poet and his wife – their deep-seated Irishness … their love for the Irish-speaking populations of Ireland’s Gaeltacht … the magical Celtic underlay … things that render Irish music special and unique … Heaney’s own ability to pluck beautiful lyrics from ‘nowhere’. In that sense musician and poet are kindred spirits faced with identical challenges and creative impulses – think ‘fiddler’, think ‘poet’.

The poem’s title introduces the musical motif (note) but equally importantly the notion of creative charge (given) bestowed involuntarily on a chosen few. Heaney alluded to his own experience of this in his  District and Circle poem ‘In the Loaning’ where he suggested that writing poetry was complex and that ‘vers  donnés’ (‘given lines’) were not automatic; when they occurred he made sure to find a place for them in his verse.

The Given Note is set on perhaps the Irish Republic’s remotest island (most westerly Blasket) in an abandoned habitation (dry-stone hut) where an anonymous musician (he) picked out a musical strain (air) gifted to him as if from nowhere (out of the night).

The coded messages (strange noises) were discerned differently by those who tried it later (others who followed), who picked up odd notes here and there (bits of a tune) carried (coming in) on the island’s climatic forces (loud weather). To the Blasket fiddler the others who tried fell short of the mark (nothing like melody).  

He put it down (blamed) to lack of technique (fingers) and musical sensibility (ear), lack of application (unpractised) and unadventurous performance (fiddling easy).

The lone fiddler had sought seclusion on Inish Tearaght (alone into the island), imprinted the musical legacy of the wind blowing over the island on his memory (brought back the whole thing) and given it full vent back home (house throbbed like his full violin).

Heaney knows how it feels: creative spirits respond to their ‘given notes’ so whether or not the fiddler’s lament was inspired by the fairies (spirit music) is decidedly immaterial to him (I don’t care).

What struck him was the fiddler’s gift to create something from nothing (off mid-Atlantic … from nowhere). What captivated him was the end result – the solemn piece his Blasket fiddler performed (comes off the bow gravely) and the sound effects that made it just right (rephrases itself into the air).

• Blasket: group of islands off the Dingle peninsula in Co Kerry; The Irish Government evacuated the last of its Gaelic-speaking residents in 1953. The evacuation resulted from a young man’s death from meningitis which occurred during one of the many storms that cut the islands off from communication with the mainland
• most westerly: reference to Inish Tearaght translated as ‘westerly island;
• dry-stone: constructed without mortar;
• air/ tune: melody, song, theme, strain,
• loud weather: conditions that produce booming, thunderous sounds;
• unpractised: with no musical training;
• fiddle: the Irish fiddle is one of the most important instruments in the traditional repertoire of Irish music, identical to the violin, perhaps but played differently in widely-varying regional styles;
• throb: pulse as with a heartbeat;
• spirit: ghost, phantom, spectre, apparition, wraith, shadow, presence; all relating to deceased folk;
• maintain: insist;
• bow: curved rod with horsehair drawn across violin strings to produce sounds;
• grave: solemn, earnest, sober;
• phrase: term used for short sequences of notes within a melody;

• In Death of a Naturalist ‘The Diviner’ delves into another aspect of Irish ‘underlay’ (things that make Ireland magically special and unique for Heaney) depicting a talent that, to onlookers, verges on the miraculous.
• Heaney’s fascination with creative sources finds expression in ‘At the Wellhead’ from the ‘Spirit Level’ collection: the singing of his mother’s friend, blind neighbour Rosie Keenan, came to him and his pals as children stopping them in their tracks; the songs they heard came as if from a wellhead of notes ‘strange and new’ (DOD336); the poem invited her in memoriam to ‘sing yourself to where the singing comes from’;
• as regards the poetic effects: the tune wrote itself, it is said … repetition of movement in various modes. Lovely curls, differently lovely, Also love the shadows, empty or full. Brian O’Donovan
• ‘The Given Note’ … I understood Heaney’s beautiful poem to be a meditation on the unfathomable origins of ALL music, all art, all inspiration. In a way they are ‘given’ to us from somewhere mysterious, and although in the modern world we might laugh at the quaint concept of ‘fairies’, when you think about the intangible origins of art, perhaps the idea isn’t so wide of the mark … at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Seamus Heaney looked to landscape, and to a lesser but comparable extent traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’ … traditional music and song would appear to have provided Heaney with what he interpreted as an appropriate metaphor for artistic inspiration, his portrayal often avoided the political and social complexities associated with this music. David Bruce
• a possible Shakespearean influence suggests itself in Caliban’s monologue to Trinculo and Stephano (The Tempest III,ii): Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices;
• of lateral interest as regards the song’s unmentioned title a pouca, or in Irish púca, usually refers to a magical being–a “water sprite,” or “mischievous fairy”–a word adapted by Shakespeare for his character Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream Tony McMahon
• to complete the musical link a version of Port na bPúcaí a lament performed on the fiddle in 1968 by Seán Cheaist Ó Catháin (who was born and brought up on Great Blasket) can be found on https://soundcloud.com/patrick-cavanagh-2/port-na-bp-ca-played-by-se-n

• 6 triplets (T) in 9 sentences (S); very variable line length of 5-11 syllables;
• occasional hints of rhyme in Ts 4/5/6 but no sustained pattern;
• the balance of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause; overall the longer sentences are heavily enjambed interspersed  with short sentences ;
• rich use of musical terms: ‘note’, ‘air’, ‘tune’, ‘melody’, ‘phrase’; instrumentation – ‘fiddling’, ‘ violin’, ‘bow’; insubstantial musical sources ‘strange noises’, ‘loud weather’ (is this an example of synaesthesia?), ‘spirit music’, ‘out of wind’;
• contrast: ‘ bits of … whole thing’;
• neat use of prepositions: ‘out of’ suggests mysterious transfer; ‘in on’ implies something compelling; ‘into the island’ points at commitment; ‘comes off’ suggests the continuity of the lament; ‘into the air ‘implies the mixing of two invisible forces;
• ‘night’ echoes the collection’s title but with the twist that the music emerges from the dark behind which it was hidden;
• personification inside a simile: both house and instrument have a heart-beat;
• narrated in the past except where Heaney intervenes;
• local colour: location; describing basic Island existence ‘dry-stone hut’;
• the fiddler’s judgment of his less competent fellows resembles in its directness Heaney’s critical assessments in other contexts; the fiddler’s contribution to the narrative is couched at his intellectual level – ‘got’; Heaney’s on a higher poetic plane;
• do Heaney’s rhythms mimic the sounds and emotions of the music do you think?

• Heaney is a meticulous craftsman using combinations of vowel and consonant to form a poem that is something to be listened to.
• the music of the poem: fifteen assonant strands are woven into the text; Heaney places them grouped within specific areas to create internal rhymes , or reprises them at intervals or threads them through the text;
• syllables without highlight are largely the unstressed sound as in common, little [ə]
• the use Heaney seeks to make of assonant effects can be judged and measured in the ‘coloured hearing’ that follows;

• alliterative effects allow pulses or beats, soothings or hissings or frictions of consonant sound to modify the assonant melodies; this is sonic engineering of the first order;
• a full breakdown of consonant sounds and where in the mouth they are formed is to be found in the Afterthoughts section;
• the final six lines are dominated by alveolar plosives [t] [d ], nasals [n] [m] and sibilants [s] [z] alongside a cocktail of front of mouth sounds: aspirate [h], breathy [w], alveolar [l], bilabial plosives [p] [b], labio-dental fricatives [f] [v]; a smattering of velar plosives [k] [g] completes the alliterative deal;

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Dire warnings instilled by grown-ups (unless …  they said) served to make sensitive child-Heaney all the more

susceptible to vivid dreams.  Mind you, as an avid young reader Heaney might in fact have frightened himself – Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter describes the disastrous consequences visited on a boy who did not groom himself properly!

Head lice common amongst schoolchildren in a 1940s’ Anahorish classroom required manual removal from the scalp (fine combed). The story he was fed about being un-groomed was presented as an actual event: nits massing (gang up), forming a leash (mealy rope) to manhandle him (drag … to the water) powerless (small) and unwashed (dirty) … and even drown him (doomed).

Exaggerating the disastrous consequences of  misconduct made young Heaney wary (cautious) of getting too close to the Moyola (riverbank fields) because he imagined a hawser (thick as a birch trunk) lying in wait to rear up on him (cable flexed in the grass) disturbed air pressure betray his presence (wind passed).

The apprehension remained with him – years later he dreamt an incident (stood at night) in which the waterlogged Moyola meadow was alive with eels in transit (moved through the grass) like that old dire warning coming true (hatched fears).

Rooting him to the spot (in one place) the surreal images of flood-plain (flowed past), sticky eel highway (jellied road) and creatures out of their element (eels crossing land) required a re-appraisal (re-wound his world’s live girdle), permitted thoughts of the unthinkable … even, who knows, dread of times in spasm and the darkness of sectarian divisions exploding into the Troubles?

For the moment however glowing eel-ness (phosphorescent) and slippery muscularity (sinewed slime) formed an endless procession (continued at his feet) corroborating the horror he had been warned of (time confirmed the horrid cable).

Heaney acknowledges that poetry provides a way to express to greater self-understanding  in a much wider comment to Peter Mackay on the ‘relationship between present and past’ : ‘the complications and contradictions of history, politics, culture, fidelity, hostility, inner division, challenge and change get themselves gathered into words and become available to writer and reader as a mode of self-knowledge’.

• vision: something seen in the imagination or the supernatural; something experienced in a dream; mental image of what the future might have in store;
• fine comb: fine-toothed hair-comb used to control louse infestations;
• lice: nits, tiny insects that live in hair; highly transmissible;
• gang up: attack as a group;
• meal: ground, powdery substance;
• doomed: ill-fated;
• riverbank field: the Moyola next to Mossbawn farm had damp meadows that acted as flood plains;
• flex: bend, tense to make muscle definition stand out;
• hatch: emerge from the egg;
• jelly: slimy, gelatinous substance;
• girdle: band worn round the waist; likely allusion to St Brigid’s girdle:  a belt or sash of straw plaited as a mark of respect (for Ireland’ second patron Saint) in pious, rural communities;  folk might step in and out  of the emblematic girdle to cleanse themselves of sin;
• phosphorescence: radiated light;
• sinew: tough fibrous tissue uniting muscle to bones, ligaments and tendons;
• horrid: (original Latin suggested hairy, savage); from 16^th century ‘causing horror’ and synonymous with horrible;

• Peter Mackay has it that Vision’s cable of eels becomes ‘the physical manifestation of a warning Heaney had been given as a child that a cable of lice would drag him into the water if his hair was not ‘fine-combed’. The poem ends with the horrid realization of this fear. (‘The Strange Loneliness: Heaney’s Wordsworth’ 219);
• (MP84) Fittingly, ‘The Vision’ completes the sequence with two nightmarish scenes from childhood. In the first, he recollects a threat and his own susceptibility to superstition; in the second, it is as if fears have been made flesh, as he witnesses during adolescence the eels’ massed exodus from land to water. In ironic contrast to the ‘bright girdle’ of faith which once encircled the world of which Matthew Arnold spoke. Heaney presents a ‘live girdle’, a ‘horrid cable’ surrounding us. All too soon the poet’s ugly vision would be realised. From the malign depths within human nature, fresh violence would hatch, a spawning which would quickly overrun the whole province. Instead of metaphorical frogs or eel, camouflaged men would soon occupy the ditches and hedges, and street corners, having ‘gathered there for vengeance”
• In Human Chain’s Eelworks Heaney will describe a fellow-pupil at Anahorish Primary school Alfie Kirkwood who in his own way accustomed him to uncomfortable realities: the classmate remains an indelible memory on account of the eel skinhe wore as a kind of glove and the ‘pong’ he gave off. The class was forbidden to draw attention to it.

• 5 quatrains in 7 sentences (S); line-length based around 7 syllables; narrated in the past;
• discernible but inconsistent rhymes – initially a loose play of alliterative or assonant effects abba,  eventually settling into a firmer form of that pattern;
• the piece is richly enjambed overall; its combination of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and  rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause;
• third person pronouns fail to hide autobiographical features;
• S1 reported speech; unforeseen psychological consequences of finger-wagging; vocabulary of nasty consequences includes triple adjectives all inculcating a sense of unworthiness; S2 it was effective on young Heaney leaving him prone to nightmare even in his own domain;
• S3 nightmare exaggeration ‘cable’ and medium sized tree; strong muscularity ‘flexed‘; feeling of emotional unbalance intensified the effect of wind on the inner ear;
• S4 totally enjambed; passage of time yet involuntary recall; door into the dark ‘night; whether fact or dream waterlogged meadows adopt a life their own; comparison eels/ ‘hatched fears; vocabulary of flows and channels; eels out of their element yet still in it; allusion to the St Brigid circular girdle through which people stepped in the superstitious/ religious hope of different/ better times; concentrated eel-ness on show; ever-present in the poet’s psyche the ‘mealy rope’ comes full circle ‘horrid cable’; allegorical threat of sectarian violence;

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It turns out eels live out almost their entire lives in a juvenile form, only developing sex organs as they make their final journey back to the Sargasso. Heaney converts the ‘he’ of Beyond Sargasso into the female pronoun.

After ten or fifteen years (older now) the eel’s Northern Irish location (ponds, drains, dead canals) is suddenly in her slipstream (turns her head back). Driven by an irresistible impulse (whim deliberately) she has set out on her journey back to Sargasso roots (at sea in grass) with not the slightest intention (damned if she’ll turn) to refashion (new trenches)  the habitat she has just vacated – Heaney lists the sites she passes on her journey seawards from Lough Neagh and the Lower Bann (lough … river).

Her physique has altered (stomach shrunk) and (Heaney lends her emotions) she feels totally excited (exhilarates) to be on her way. The ocean’s heartbeat (throbbing) will spur her on in her marathon challenge (speed through days and weeks).

The whole eel mind set is beyond Heaney’s ken (who knows) – perhaps beyond her own (if she knows) as regards her exact location (depth … direction).

Charts provide progress indicators understood by humans – the sea area Malin, Tory island off Donegal. She-eel leaves no sonar clue (silent) no give-away trail (wakeless), no global tracker with which to follow the progress of this tiny, tiny creature (wisp), self-energizing (wick), this mere minuscule reflection (own taper and light) in the disordered deep (weltering dark).

Her journey’s end in every sense: she-eel spawns and dies (lost once she lays) in the Sargasso trench (ten thousand feet down) back home (in her origins). Yet her legacy and with it the eel cycle live on: clouds of floating eggs (slicks) as yet unfertilized that will never know their parent (orphaned spawn).

• return: after 10 or 15 years in its distant home, here Lough Neagh, the eel returns to the Sargasso Sea where it was born; once there she spawns and dies;
• pond: body of still water;
• drain: channel carrying off surplus water;
• head back: neat use of a phrase doubling the sense of ‘go back in the direction you came from’;
• whim: urge, sudden desire;
• grass: forests of seaweed;
• damned if: strong indication of lack of intention to behave otherwise;
• shrink: become smaller;
• exhilarate: ex adds a connotation of ‘thoroughly’ to ’feel glad’;
• throb: beat, pulsate steadily;
• Malin: sea area immediately west and north of the Irish landmass; the Lower Bann flows directly into it;
• Tory: rugged island 10 miles west of west of the Co Donegal coast within the Malin sea area;
• wake: trail of disrupted water;
• wisp: small, insubstantial object;
• wick: porous strip that draws fuel up to a naked light (capillary action);
• taper: slender candle;
• weltering: turbulent;
• lay: deposit eggs, spawn;
• slick: layer, thick cloud (coined to describe discharged floating oil that does not mix with water);
• orphaned: the eel’s offspring is parentless;

• (MP84) After the massacre, in the penultimate section, ‘The Return’, Heaney celebrates the resilience of the female eel, who ensures the survival of the species despite her ordeal in ‘the weltering dark’. She ‘exhilarates’ in her ‘mid-water’ element, and, again like the maturing poet, delights in the deep, the familiar unknown.

• 2 lengthy verses (12 + 11) (V) in 7 sentences (S); lines based around 6 syllables;
• unrhymed – loose play of alliterative or assonant effects in end of line words or phrases;
• the combination of punctuation and enjambment dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause (note colons and dash);
• V1 in 3 richly enjambed sentences; S1 the last stage in a life-cycle; she eel personified , aware of what she is leaving behind but taken over ‘whim deliberately’; capable of firm decision; S2 new-found delight; different athletic shape as if trained for an ordeal; ocean personified – ‘throbbing’ of its/ their joint heartbeat;
• V2: interrogative questions the urge that defeats choice; if the eel was large in previous settings she is infinitesimally small alongside a Sea area, a land mass or ocean depth; imagination creates an eel with ‘wing-light’ pulses that give her position away to the eye in the sky; S6 S7 set out the inevitable fate (compare the salmon) once the life-cycle/ life-circle is complete; ‘slick’ perfectly describes the sleek, glossy, treacly substance that will not mix with sea-water (compare the negative image of oil pollution); life cycle begins again without maternal  guidance ‘orphaned spawn’;
• NC21 Having noted ‘self-inwoven similes’ (also referred to as ‘reflexive imagery’) in In Gallarus Oratory, Peninsula, Girls Bathing and At Arboe Point NC links the example in The Return  (‘wick that is its own taper and light’ with ‘the structural circularity or reflexivity’ of the sequence as a whole;

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The thin, discoloured fishing line (filament of smut) is recovered in a rhythmical routine (drawn hand over fist), its yield exposed hook by hook … no catch (hook’s missed) … ‘eel on’ (taken). Dark, clinging fragments accumulate (smut thickens, wrist- thick). The line becomes a whiplash (flail)  with which to dislodge the eel catch (lashed into the barrel) in a single swipe (one swing).

The treatment eels receive is described ironically (welcome) – each incoming creature becomes a piece of merchandise (hook left in gill or gum) and summarily stunned (slapped … numb).

The observer’s spirits are raised as each eel’s lone fate is overtaken by a corporate interlocking (knits itself, four-ply) of instinctive kinship (furling, slippy haul), a tight skein (knot) of dull grey bodies (back and pewter belly), inseparable (continuously one) adopting each violent arrival (catch they fling in) as one of its own (sucked home) and creating an oily togetherness (lubrication).

Can the same togetherness, the poet asks himself, be said of fishermen with wage-earning mind-sets?

The yields of the trawl (catch on the morning water) have focussed his attention on the criss-cross design of competing boats (wakes …enwound) and the deeper questions thrown up: about distinctions within the eel-fishing industry (which boat was which?) – about the industry’s existence (when did this begin?) – about the timing (this morning, last year?) – about business opportunism (when the lough first spawned?).

Lough Neagh fishermen don’t waste time with this level of intellectual curiosity – for those who earn their crust from a part-time, short-lived cyclical bonanza only the signing-on date matters (‘Once the season’s in’).

• stalk: pursue stealthily, furtively;
• Antrim: borders the west and north-west shoreline of Lough Neagh;
• Power: driving force, horse-power;
• filament: thin cable;
• smut: sooty discolouration;
• hand over fist: rapid repetitive manual operation;
• flail: violent swing;
• lash: violent blow;
• barrel: cylindrical container of wooden staves and metal rings with a bulging midriff;
• gill: fish’s respiratory organ:
• gum: firm teeth-bearing area of upper and lower jaws;
• numb: without physical sensation;
• knit: produce something made of interlocking loops of wool;
• four-ply: made of four strands, said of thick wool;
• furl: become rolled up, interwoven;
• haul: number of fish caught, yield;
• pewter: grey alloy of tin and copper;
• suck: draw in by creating a vacuum;
• lubricate: add a substance to minimise friction and allow smooth movement;
• wakes: trail of disturbed water; enwind: coil around, encircle;
• season: between June and mid-August for all fish in Lough Neagh including eel;

• Heaney learns lessons from his observations: Death of a Naturalist featured the drowning of kittens on the Mossbawn farm; Heaney-child’s instinctive revulsion at the callousness if the event was gradually replaced by a fatalistic recognition that other priorities come to prevail – not least in the case of Lough Neagh fishermen generating income to put food on the family table or pay for drinks in the public bar.
• (MP84) Part Five, ‘Lifting’, illustrates Heaney’s capacity to match Hopkins or Hughes in capturing the haecceitas (the ‘thisness’ property that uniquely identifies an object) of a creature and an event. He is able to realise in words, sounds and rhythms, the summary fate and frantic flailing of each eel, as it ‘knits itself, four-ply’ into an oily tangle of strands. The ironic parallel between victims and killers is maintained as the poet pictures the departing boats’ wakes winding into each other, indistinguishable, without a separate identity.

• 8 triplets(T) in 7 sentences (S) including colons; very variable line length between 3-10 syllables;
• discernible sometimes weak rhyme pattern aaa bbb ccc etc save for the final triplet that rhymes on 1&3 ;
• the combination of punctuation and enjambment (the short units lend themselves to enjambment) dictates flow and rhythm within the oral delivery potential,  governing pace or pause (note colons and dash);
• unusual formatting includes divided compound adjective and unexpected syntactic splits this draws the verse towards prose-poem form;
• S1/ S2 enjambed; hunting imagery sustained ‘stalks’; geographical location; silence reigns ‘power cut’; discolouration suggestive of darker moments to come ‘smut’; rhythmical retrieval reveals the yield;
• T3/T4 balance of enjambments and colons; the ‘wrist-thick’ fishing line perhaps a precursor of the nightmarish ‘cable’ of ‘Vision’; violence downgraded to irony ‘welcome’; contrasts– stunned eel/conscious eel, singular/shared fate …
• (T5/ T6) largely enjambed  instinctive kinship amongst ill-fated creatures –possibility of Northern Irish minority Catholic allegory at its strongest – Heaney struck by the amazing  eel phenomenon – knitting imagery of shape and size ‘four-ply; Its symmetrical neatness ‘furling’, oilyness (‘slippy’, ‘lubrication’ and sticking-togetherness; motif of circularity reflecting the movement of fishing vessels, the fishing season etc;
• T7 T8 series of questions of an intellectual investigative nature meet with only a single answer from the more modest fisher intellect ‘that’s where I earn my money’;

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