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Life and background
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm called Mossbawn in Co. Derry. His father was a farmer and cattle dealer. He did well in school and went on to receive a degree in English Language and Literature from Queen's University, Belfast, becoming interested in poets such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh and Robert Frost, whose work was rooted in their native backgrounds.
Declining an offer to do further study at Oxford, Heaney trained instead as a teacher and took up a teaching post in Belfast, while still pursuing his writing. Following the success of his early work, he was appointed lecturer in English at Queen's University, at a time when The Troubles in the North were gaining momentum.
A year lecturing at the University of California saw Heaney embracing a freer form of poetry. Shortly afterwards, finding the situation in Northern Ireland increasingly difficult, he resigned his position at Queen's and moved with his wife and their children, first to Wicklow and later to Sandymount in Dublin, where he still lives. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, reinforcing his reputation as one of Ireland's finest and best-loved poets.
Commentary
Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
His writing is very much rooted in his Irishness, celebrating native, traditional skills, exploring Ireland's past and identity and trying to find language and imagery with which to speak of Northern Ireland's troubled past and ambiguous present.
Many of his themes, however, are more universal and deal with the development of self, the nature of love and death, the creative process and the importance of the poetic imagination.
Throughout his work, Heaney often returns to aspects of his childhood, honouring the traditional skills and customs that surrounded him growing up. In The Forge, the craft of the blacksmith is portrayed as something mythical, sacred and "immovable". The work of the smith, carried on in the darkness of the forge, acts as a metaphor for the creative process itself, mysterious to outsiders and reliant upon moments of unexpected inspiration - "The unpredictable fantail of sparks".
Although Heaney has broken with these rural traditions by becoming a poet, he acknowledges a continuity between these crafts and his own. In The Harvest Bow, he sees his father's "throwaway love-knot of straw" as a work of art that illuminates and inspires. Despite the lack of communication that distances them, this shared creative impulse connects them.
He returns to the stability and contentment of his rural childhood at Mossbawn in Sunlight. The daily routines and simple domestic tasks of his aunt in her "floury apron" are imbued with a sense of warmth and security. But, as we learn in A Constable Calls, even the child soon internalises the fear and guilt of the community in which they live, in this case the community of Catholics living in a Unionist state.
If the child's observations are drawn to images of security in Sunlight, they become riveted to images of threat in A Constable Calls. The aunt's "floury apron" is replaced here with the policeman's intimidating uniform and the child's fear and inherited guilt are palpable as he imagines the legendary "black hole in the barracks", where his father might disappear for having made false returns.
Another folkloric dark hole appears in Bogland. To discourage the children from playing in the bog, the adults told them, "The wet centre is bottomless". For the adult Heaney, this image of the bog, with its infinite strata is suggestive of the Irish consciousness. The Irish identity, like the bog, is constituted by layers of mystery and memory and is shrouded in superstition and magic. The bog is the Irish version of the American Prairie but its frontiers draw one "inwards and downwards", in a "bottomless" excavation, each layer yielding secrets which tell us something new about ourselves.
This idea is reflected also in The Tollund Man, inspired by the preserved body of a prehistoric man, put to death as part of a sacrificial rite, which was discovered in a bog in Denmark. The discovery gives us insight into the customs and rituals of the past but, for Heaney, this body that the earth has yielded also becomes a symbol for the acts of violence that are part of the customs and rituals of present day Northern Ireland.
Heaney often draws on stories and legends of the past, allowing them to shed new light on things. In St. Kevin and the Blackbird and in Lightenings VIII, he blurs the lines between reality and illusion and challenges our ideas about life.
In St. Kevin and the Blackbird he takes the stereotypical image of the saint, engaged in an act of extreme piety, and humorously explores the nature of mysticism and the interdependence of all life. Through a light-hearted adaptation of a story from the 'Annals of Clonmacnoise', he challenges our ideas about what is mundane and what is "marvellous" in Lightenings VIII.
This impetus to see things in a new way is reiterated in Field of Vision, where the woman in the wheelchair represents a way of seeing the world which results in things losing their banality and becoming "more distinctly strange".
Frequently, Heaney takes those things which are most familiar in his life and examines them in a way which makes them more strange in this way. He explores his relationship with his wife, from its tension-filled and yet exciting beginnings in Twice Shy through its rough times in Valediction to its place as something at once familiar yet startlingly new in The Skunk. In this last poem, Heaney makes the unusual comparison between his wife, engaged in a "tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer", and a skunk. The image, surprisingly, takes on sensuous, appealing and erotic qualities as the senses are treated to an array of smells, sights and sounds, all celebrating the primitive nature of sex and demonstrating how the familiar can be exciting when, perhaps, we alter our "field of vision".
Detailed notes on three of Seamus Heaney's poems are available on the following webpages:
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