Seamus HeaneySeamus Heaney

Michael and Rebecca

BiographyBiography• Born April 13, 1939• Lived on family farm in County Derry•Attended St. Joseph’s College• Married Marie Devlin and had three children, Michael, Christopher, and Kathryn Ann• Published Eleven Poems in 1965 with the Belfast Festival• Became renown after publishing Death of A Naturalist •Honored with the Poetry Book Society Choice of the year award for Door into the Dark• Joined Field Day, a theatre company founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Real•Adapted a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes •In 1984, he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of Harvard’s most prestigious offices•Won Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1995

Heaney’s Work as a Heaney’s Work as a WholeWhole

• His parent’s diverse background included the traditional Gaelic farm life and the up and coming Industrial Revolution, which led to an inner quarrel.

• This inner quarrel became a conflict between his childhood innocence versus his place as an adult in society.

• His passion towards his native country of Ireland serves as a reference point for many of his poems.

• Heaney explores what it is to be a human being during times of joy and times of struggle.

• Heaney uses literary allusion throughout his poems, often alluding to Greek gods and figures

• Many of Heaney’s poems serve as his way to discover his place as a writer in a world where physical action is the traditionally accepted symbol of strength.

Personal HeliconPersonal Helicon for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.  

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savored the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it.  

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft

mulch A white face hovered over the bottom.  

Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.  

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I rhyme to see myself,

To set the darkness echoing.

Analysis of Analysis of Personal Personal HeliconHelicon

• Heaney explores the conflict between the freedom of youth and society’s expectations of adults. He uses his poetry as compensation for lost childhood experiences.

• Personal Helicon is a means for Heaney to communicate his internal emotions and illuminate the negative aspects of life.

• In Greek mythology, Mount Helicon was sacred to Apollo and the Muses.

• Heaney alludes to Narcissus, a Greek figure obsessed with his reflection. This parallels Heaney’s captivation with his lost childhood.

• Heaney’s optimistic language can be juxtaposed with the connotations associated with his dark topic. His passionate way of describing the dank and dark is ironic.

Twice ShyTwice Shy 

Her scarf a la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one eveningFor air and friendly talk.We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk.

Traffic holding its breath, Sky a tense diaphragm: Dusk hung like a backclothThat shook where a swan swam, Tremulous as a hawkHanging deadly, calm.

A vacuum of needCollapsed each hunting heartBut tremulously we heldAs hawk and prey apart,

Preserved classic decorum, Deployed our talk with art.

Our JuveniliaHad taught us both to wait, Not to publish feelingAnd regret it all too late -Mushroom loves alreadyHad puffed and burst in hate.

So, chary and excited,As a thrush liked on a hawk,We thrilled to the March twilightWith nervous childish talk:Still waters running deepAlong the embankment walk.

Analysis of Analysis of Twice ShyTwice Shy

• This poem approaches the essence of love in a shy and tentative way.

• Heaney uses imagery to express the picturesque image of love.

• The entire second stanza is characterized by personification of the lovers’ surroundings.

• Heaney uses diction that would normally express the innocence of love to convey a darker message.

• Underscoring the poem, is the idea that love is ephemeral.

• He draws a parallel between new romances and childlike relationships.

• Discusses the purity of the unspoken in terms of love.

Harvest BowHarvest BowAs you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed

silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by

twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot of straw. Hands that aged round ashplants

and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on a lifetime

of game cocks Harked to their gift and worked

with fine intent Until your fingers moved

somnambulant: I tell and finger it like braille, Gleaning the unsaid off the

palpable, And if I spy into its golden loops I see us walk between the railway

slopes Into an evening of long grass and

midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

An auction notice on an outhouse wall--

You with a harvest bow in your lapel, Me with the fishing rod, already

homesick For the big lift of these evenings, as

your stick Whacking the tips off weeds and

bushes Beats out of time, and beats, but

flushes Nothing: that original townland Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by

your hand. The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal

dresser-- Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its passage, and

still warm.

Analysis of Analysis of Harvest Harvest BowBow

• In this poem, Heaney develops the idea that the relationship between a child and their parents is the most crucial development of childhood.

• Heaney elaborates on the idea that artistic tendencies exist between families which is a stronger bond then words that can be formed on paper.

• His dad’s many talents reveal the similarity between Heaney’s talent and passion as a writer.

• Heaney uses a description of the wheat as a metaphor to describe the unbreakable bond between their relationship.

• This poem once again elaborates on the theme of a lost childhood. The memories of times with his father are sweeter than his current position in a cruel world.

• Rather than viewing this loss as a negative thing, Heaney makes it clear that the bond between father and son can not be dissipated by mere time or knowledge of the real world.

DiggingDiggingBetween my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.Under my window a clean rasping soundWhen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging. I look downTill his straining rump among the flowerbedsBends low, comes up twenty years awayStooping in rhythm through potato drillsWhere he was digging.The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaftAgainst the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we pickedLoving their cool hardness in our hands.By God, the old man could handle a spade,Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner's bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, digging down and downFor the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I've no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

Analysis of Analysis of DiggingDigging• The poem explores the

respect Heaney holds for his heritage.

• Heaney explore the parallelism between his father and grandfather’s strength as working men and his place as a writer.

• The poem serves as an extended metaphor for revealing the roots of Heaney’s past through the power of his writing.

• Heaney appeals to his audience through the use of onomatopoeia to make his descriptions more vivid.

• Heaney uses repetition in the first and last stanza to show his realization that his writing can serve as a way to discover the roots of his past.

Bibliography• ELEVEN POEMS, 1965

– A pamphlet that coincided with the Belfast Festival.

• DEATH OF A NATURALIST, 1966 – A poem discussing childhood

experiences through revelations in nature.

• WINTERING OUT, 1972 – A collection of poems that

explores the “radical connection between the land and the language it nurtures.“

• BOG POEMS, 1975– A series of poems that studies

the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland.

• GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE: SELECTED PROSE, 1978-1987 – An anthology discussing societal

divisions among religion and politics and his struggle between creative freedom and social obligations

• FIELD WORK, 1979 – A poem exploiting a political

situation in Northern Ireland from Heaney’s Catholic standpoint.

• CLEARANCES, 1986 – A series of sonnets that

presents stark images of the spaces death leaves between us, through the use of euphemisms.

• THE CURE AT TROY, 1991 – A version of Sophocles’

Philoctetes• THE BURIAL AT THEBES, 2004

– A version of Sophocles’ Antigone

• THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY by ELEMER ANDREWS– Collection of critical responses

to Seamus Heaney’s poetry, presenting the debates surrounding the poets work and popular appeal.

Complete List of Works

Works Cited

• Audio Interviews - Seamus Heaney• Books and Writers

• Harvard University Press/Seamus Heaney• Interview with Seamus Heaney

• Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

• Seamus Heaney-Cover Page• Themes in Seamus Heaney's Poetry

• The Seamus Heaney Page• The Seamus Heaney Portal

“The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and

always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness

of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us

that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable

human being.”-Heaney

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