The Development of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Fro Death of a Naturalist to North

The Development of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney From Death of a Naturalist to North by Byron Demitri Angelopulo A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English, University of Cape Town, 1 April 1987. Supervisor:University Dr. I.E. of GlennCape Town The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town Abstract Seamus Heaney's poetic development is examined through a series of close readings of selected poems from his first four volumes. The main focus of the di3sertation is on the stages through which he passes in his attempt to develop a poetic mode which is simultaneously responsive to the preoccu pations of the private self and to the wider political and cultural backdrop of Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark are examined in terms of the relation between poetic technique and historical situation. Correlatives of limitation characterise nearly all aspects of Heaney's poetic technique in the first volume. These are enumerated and examined. Enclosures at a conceptual rather than technical level are found to characterise Door into the Dark. The mode used threatens to become a form of self-enclosure, hermetically sealed off from the conditions of its production. At the root of the various forms of closure is Heaney's need to exclude certain material from consideration. History and the politics of contemporary Northern Ireland are the most notable phenomena excluded. The poet's inability to control certain intractable potentialities latent in his subject matter is examined in poems which deal with violence, history, the unknown and landscape. These poems, generally considered failures by critics, are shown to facilitate Heaney's poetic development. In an investigation of two sets of landscape poems in Door into the Dark, those which treat landscape as a surface phenomenon, and those which see it masking depths which Heaney has constituted as realms of significance, I examine the means whereby he begins to move toward "the matter of Ireland" through his contemplation of landscape as the memory-bank of Ireland's history. In Wintering Out Heaney develops an elaborate set of conceits in which he collapses the distinctions between various parts of his poetic terrain (landscape, language, the body, sexuality, violence, etc.). He blurs the distinctions between the self and an external environment which absorbs and preserves its history. The aim of these strategies is to enable him to generate a speech which is simultaneously both personal and socially symbolic. The complexity and ingenuity of the strategy is investigated and the reasons for its failure out lined. Heaney's estrangement, and his relations to his varied linguistic, literary and political traditions are also surveyed. The dialectical tension between the poet's contradictory needs to engage with politics and to remain detached from them is then examined. Among the topics in North which are considered are the bipartite structure of the volume, Heaney's use and eventual rejection of myth, the narrativization of part I, and the problems facing a poetry which takes violence as its subject. The poet's self-consciousness and his reflexive concern with his own poetry are found to be features which contribute to the success of the volume. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of how Heaney manages paradoxically to turn a failure--his failure to produce a politically efficacious speech--into a form of poetic success by making that failure his subject. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Death of a Naturalist 6 I Introduction 6 II From Farm to Landscape 9 III The Farm Poems 1 10 IV The Farm Poems 2 21 V Closure 26 VI Threats to Closure 32 i The Unknown 35 ii History 35 iii Violence 38 iv Landscape 39 VII "Personal Helicon" 46 Chapter 2. Door into the Dark 48 I Introduction 48 II Opening Poems. 49 III Enclosed Darknesses 51 IV Closure 58 i Imagery of Closure 64 V Landscape 70 i The Driving Poems 71 ii The Final Poems 77 Chapter 3. Wintering Out 95 I Introduction 95 II The Dedicatory Poem 99 III Estrangement 102 IV The "Field of Force" 109 \' V The P:ace-~ame Poems 124 \'I "Land'' and "Gifts of Rain" 133 VII Traditions 138 VIII Speaking Out: "A New Song" 147 IX Other Routes to the "Matter of Ireland" 15'.:; X 169 XI Part II 171 Chapter 4. North. 173 I Introduction 173 II The Dedicatory Poems 178 i "Sunlight" 180 ii "The Seed Cutters" 187 III The Antaeus Poems 195 IV Other AlJegorical Poems 203 V Part I as Sequence 207 VI Violence 209 VII From "Belderg" to "Bone Dreams" 213 VJJI The Bog Poems 235 IX "Kinship" 258 X Part II 268 XI The Sl1c1rter Poeins 270 X1I "W}-:;1tev..:0 r You Say Say ~othing" 271 XJII "Singing Sc11ool" 276 i "Exposure" 283 ConcJusi,:rn 291 Notes 294 Bi bl j O.S,l'dJ:ir1y 298 Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation for the guidance and assistance given me by my supervisor, Dr. Ian Glenn. I am grateful to Prof. J.M. Coetzee for permission to cite his unpublished article, "Writing the South African Land scape." I wish to thank my family and Cherry for their support and encouragement. The assistance of Mrs. L. Els with the typing is gratefully acknowledged. Financial assistance rendered by the Human Sciences Research Council towards the cost of this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed or conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not to be regarded as those of the Human Sciences Research Council. Introduction. This dissertation deals with the poetic development of Seamus Heaneyduring the decade which saw the publication of four volumes: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975). I do not pay detailed attention to the remainder of Heaney's poetic output: neither to the early Stations (1975), nor to the later Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984). Although the later volumes contain substantial and important poetry Heaney's early work warrants critical attention for a number of reasons. In the first place the four collections with which I deal form a unit. "I'm certain that up to North, that ·that's one book; in a way it grows together and goes together," says Heaney ("Meeting Seamus Heaney" 15-16). In 1980 he had his Selected Poems published. A year earlier he had said: I was to do a Selected Poems last year, and I hesitated and didn't do it for two reasons: one, that I think the publication of a Selected Poems isn't just a publishing convenience, and I still have this notion that it's a decla ration of a certain stage of artistic command; in a sense, you crown yourself when you're ready and I didn't think I was ready to crown myself ("Meeting Seamus Heaney" 15). Significantly, when he was ready he crowned himself and declared his artistic command with work from only the first four volumes. The first volumes form part of a single enterprise. They enact what Heaney calls his "finding a voice" (Preoccu- 3 [T]he shift from North to Field Work is a shift in trust: a learning to trust melody, to trust art as reality, to trust artfulness as an affirmation and not to go into the self-punishment so much. ("Artists on Art" 412) These statements tell us something about the differences between the early poetry and the later. The confidence and trust in his own poetic powers that characterise the poetry after North are not features of the first volumes. More noticeable, in fact, are his mistrust of the efficacy of his poetry in the peculiar conditions of its production, and his reservations and hesitations concerning his very ability to produce poems "that give me any right to speak: poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity ... " (Preoccupations 41). I will contend that Heaney's early poetry develops along a path that can be outlined in the following way. He begins by writing poems that derive their material from memory, child hood and the farm on which he grew up. The insularity in which this results is one manifestation of a general need to write a poetry that is contained--that excludes forces threatening to break in upon it. Primary amongst these are the forces of history and politics, which Heaney comes to see as permanent presences in the land. A shift occurs when he moves towards an acknowledgement of these presences by allowing them into his poetry. He does this by dismantling the closural elements of his early verse, by deconstituting the stable self at the centre of poems, and by radically exten- 4 ding his range of subject-matter, techniques and attitudes. Eventually, by an act of "surrender" he allows the self to become a vehicle for the expression of meanings held to be latent in the landscape: in his terminology, he surrenders his "imagination to something as embracing as myth or land scape." The primary tension in the poetry--which generates the development--is a tension between his implicit acknowledge ment that he has to take into account developments in the public realm (the Ulster situation making this a particularly pressing concern) and a desire to escape any such obligation.

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