Seamus Heaney: Naming his nation

About four hundred years ago, on the stage of the Globe Theatre in London, a minor military character in a major English drama of war and peace asked a question which continues to reverberate through the life and literature of this island. When in Henry V, Shakespeare's stage Irishman, Captain Macmorris asked his Welsh compatriot in-arms, Captain Fluellen, "What ish my nation?" he was acknowledging, in his own too easily imitable manner, that a problem existed, that his national identity was in question. Although he proferred his own rumbustious and provocative answer - 'Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal.' - it was neither conclusive nor convincing.
Eighty years ago, next June, the same question was asked of a Jewish advertising agent in Barney Kiernan's Dublin public house. When. in Joyee's Ulysses the pint swilling citizen asked Leopold Bloom to account for his national identity with a taunting jeer - "What is your nation if I may ask?" - the answer was at least conclusive: "Ireland. I was born here. Ireland," But it was hardly convincing. Bloom's earlier definition of a nation as "the same people living in the same place" was openly derided, It remained for others to attempt to answer the question in more oblique and more muted tones.

Seamus Heaney has frequently pondered both Macmorris's question and Bloom's attempt to answer it. It has become, to quote the title of the collection of essays in which he explores the question, one of his central Preoccupations. It is also, as the title of a poem on the topic suggests, a matter of "Traditions", the plural acknowledging the impossibility of a singular answer. "Much of his work is preoccupied with the conflicting traditions which confront anyone born in the Northern counties of this island or, to put it another way, his traditional preoccupations have centred on the question of his national identity.

That the question continues to haunt Heaney, continues to echo through his poetry, is evident from his recent pamphlet-poem, An Open Letter (Field Day, IR£2.45). The letter, in thirty-three ringing stanzas, is addressed to Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion who, last year, included a substantial selection of his poems in their Penguin anthology, Contemporary British Poetry.

It might, at first, 'appear that Heaney has little to complain about. He is given pride of place in the anthology, he has more poems printed than any of the other contributors, he is called in the introduction "the most important new poet of the last fifteen years" and he is the subject of a sympathetic booklength critical study written by one of the editors. That the anthology was initially to be called "Opened Ground", after a phrase in one of his poems, and was later given a more commercial title is not, however, the source of his discontent. What rankles, what Heaney feels he has to publicly refute, is the adjective "British" applied to his poetry. He open letter is his way of endorsing Bloom's answer to the question Captain Macmorris proposed so long ago.

But while Heaney's answer, like that of Bloom, is conclusive, it is also,like Bloom's, open to certain objections. As Blake Morrison suggests in his critical study, (Seamus Heaney, Methuen, IR£2.50) "Heaney's cultural identity is a complex one. He grew up in the North of Ireland, which technically, at least, makes him British; and it was in London, not in Dublin, that he was first published and taken up." Heaney is aware of these objections; aware of the doubts which arise when somebody who publishes 'in LRB and TLS/ The Listener/ - in other words, whose audience is/via Faber/a British one" objects to being labelled "British". He is aware also of his "Prince of Denmark hesitation" in the past when the adjective was applied. Why break a silence which has served him so well? His answer is more sonorous, more measured and more convincing than that of Bloom:

You'll understand I draw the line
At being robbed of what is mine,
My patria, my deep design
To be at home
In my own place and dwell within
Its proper name -

And what, you may ask, is Seamus Heaney's patria? "My passport's green,' he says at one point. But that is merely to confirm allegiances, not to answer the abiding question. "Its proper name," and the pun is chosen with an exactitude that characterises Heaney's dealing with diction, is given in a stanza of apt detail and eloquent elegy where the images evoke its manifold identity:

Traumatic Ireland! Checkpoints, cairns
Slated roofs, stone ditches, ferns,
Dublin squares where sunset burns
The Georgian brick –
The whole imagined country nourns
Its lost erotic
Aisling life

To call the country "imagined" is to view it as a country of the mind, a place that is not merely geographical but also imbued with a cultural heritage. To call that heritage “lost" is to lament not only its passing but also the confused sense of national identity which replaces it.

Heaney's long poem recalls Yeats' exploration of his own questionable national identity in “The Fisherman", a poem in which an "imagined country" is contrasted with the despicable reality Yeats saw burgeoning around him. Where Yeats bemoaned the beating down of the wise and great art beaten down, Heaney employs an elaborate metaphor of rape, induced birth, miscegenation and adultery to explore the ugly reality of the strained relations between Britain and Ireland. Ulster, married to Ireland, is raped by Britain and forced to bear twins. ("One island-green. One royal blue.")

The result is that the South has been made a cuckold and remains impotent in Leinster House. Britain sequestered in Westminster, all passion spent, continues to pay maintenance. It is an ingenious conceit. yet one indulged not for its ingenuity but for the bitter anti-erotic emphasis of its conclusion: exhaustion underlines the scene'"

Among the victims of this sordid tale is language itself. its currency devalued by glib or apocalyptic solutions. its slogans rendered meaningless by apathy and exhaustion. Yet Heaney is too clever and too ambitious a poet to be content with mere lamentations. Suffering. like Ulster. Uthe pangs of ravishment" (a phrase he borrows from that most British of writers, Donald Davie, and applies to his own parria) he seeks a redemptive language. seeks, as Yeats sought in his grey Connemara fisherman. a sustaining image (or aislil/g) of Ireland which would enable him to confront the complex strands of his national identity.

Both Yeats and Heaney find in the rhetoric of poetry, in words consciously and carefully chosen. the means to elaborate those images of (reland that sustain their work and maintain their national and cultural identities. For Yeats that rhetoric was both heightened and rigorous as he sought to create poems that would be "as cold and as passionate as the dawn". For Heaney that rhetoric is rich with the resonance of proper names, particularly place names. All Open Letter, hedged by protective ironies, a self-deprecating awkwardness and the prosody of light verse, ends with an "unembarrassed protestation ":

Like Brian Friel in Translations, the play that launched the Field Day enterprise, Heaney has been "telling truth" by revealing the historical and etymological layers that lie concealed in the names of the townlands and villages, the hills and rivers, of his traumatic natioIl. He has managed, in his continuing search for an honest answer to Mac. morris's question. to create a poetry of naming, one in which the sound and sense of the proper names become the subject of his continually developing art.

The method Seamus Heanney continues to employ in his search for a cultural and a national identity was signalled as early as the first poem of his first collection, Death of a Naruralist (1966). "Digging", which is still his best known and most frequently anthologised poem, compares the prowess of his father with the local reputation of his grandfather as a spade-handler. Unable and unwilling to carry on that tradition he comments ruefully, "But I've no spade to follow men like that." Yet the poem ends on a note of detennination, establishing continuity in the art of poetry,

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Heaney has played down the significance of both the poem ("a big coarse grained navvy of a poem") and its central metaphor. ("There has been a good deal of writing about the metaphor of digging and going back, but luckily that was unselfconscious.") Nevertheless, it offers an appropriate introduction to the abiding concerns of his art, concerns which have often been misunderstood, What Heaney is turning over with the spade of his poetry is not the rural pieties of his upbringing; it is not the farmyard lore nor the often cruel customs of the countryside; it is not even the traditional crafts - thatcher, blacksmith. fisherman, diviner - to which so many celebrated poems are dedicated. What is being unearthed is nothing less than language itself.

Rereading the poems contained in that first book and in the subsequent collection, Door into the Dark (1969) with the hindsight offered by Heaney's subsequent development, we can now see the extent to which the poems contained in those two volumes arc self-regarding and self-sustaining. In the slap and plop of words, the splash and gurgle of sounds, Heaney was digging deep into his own verbal resources in his search for what he called his "personal helicon": "I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing." That darkness, the subject of his second collection, was a subterranean store-house of words. In setting them one against the other he was creating his own distinctive and personal echoes. Yet there were difficulties, British influences loomed large, particularly that of Ted Hughes, and the metrical norms and stanzaic patterns of traditional English verse proved unsuitable to Heaney's Irish experience. If he had the words, he had yet to find a form adequate to contain them.

That form he found in Wintering Out (1912). It was in this third collection that his now characteristic art of proper naming first became a pronounced feature of his style. It owes something to the example of Patrick Kavanagh who studded his poems with the place-names of his native Monaghan and about which Heaney wrote: "Kavanagh's place-names are there to stake out a personal landscape, they declare one man's experience, they are denuded of tribal or etymological implications," Yet despite his admiration for the Monaghan poet, Heaney ploughs a different furrow. His place-names are communal; they declare shared, often divided allcgiances, and. most important, they are restored to their tribal and etymological roots.  The result is poems like "Anahorish",

My “place of clear water”,
The first hill in the world
Where springs washed into
The shiny grass
And darkened cobbles
In the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
Of consonant, vowel meadow,
After—image of lamps
Swung through the yards
On winter evenings.
With pails and burrows
Those mound-dwellers
Go waist-deep in mist
To break the light ice
At wells and dunghills.

The poem is not only about a place but also about a placename; the sense and sound of the word relate Heaney's experience to the "mound-dwellers" whose land and livelihood he celebrates. The gradients and meadows are in the language as well as in the landscape. By excavating the etymological implications of the word, Heaney is restoring the place-name to its pristine significance in the tribal history of his homeland. The art of naming a nation becomes, ultimately, the art of poetry.

Hidden in these place-names is the antediluvian lore, the sectarian conflicts and the colonial impositions of his divided heritage. The poetic exploration of their exhumed meanings was Heaney's response to those cataclysmic events which took place in Northern Ireland in the late sixties. The change in his style from the formal and sometimes formulaic pieties of his earlier poems to the rigorous and resonant archeology of these place-name poems can be traced back to that infamous summer of 1969 when the sectarian divisions, so long contained by custom and ceremany, burst onto the streets with murderous ferocity. "From that moment", Heaney wrote, "the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament."

That search began in the very recesses of the words themselves. The hidden Ireland was to be found in placenames: "the lines of sectarian antagonism and affiliation followed the boundaries of the land. In the names of its fields and townlands, in their mixture of Scots and Irish and English etymologies, this side of the country was redolent of the histories of its owners," Saying the names, delighting in the rustle of sound and resilience of sense, was a fresh and fruitful response to what Heaney called "our predicament", Yet Wintering Out remains an inconclusive collection, the place-name poems scattered like museum pieces in a loosely arranged exhibition of local lore. Missing from the images and symbols employed was some unifying and coherent mythology which wou1d give his local habitation a national and not simply a regional identity.

That mythic inclusiveness he found in North (1975) his most ambitious attempt at naming his nation. Written "as news comes in/of each neighbourly murder", Heaney sought in the placename of his province, in the history of Ireland's various invasions and occupations and in the often neglected language of his tribe a means of establishing analogies between the continuing violence in Northern Ireland and what he considers to be its antecedents in English and Nordic history. Aware of the buried strata of that common civilisation which links contemporary Ireland 
with prehistoric Jutland and colonial Britain, North was a carefully structured attempt to excavate what layers of Viking legend and Anglo-lrish history Heaney could use fully apply to his own predicament.

Central to this search for a mythic order was a brilliant series of poems based on those photographs of preserved Stone Age corpses, recently unearthed in a Danish bog and which Heaney discovered in P.V. Glob's The Bog People. "I saw in those pictures," he said, "the archetypal symbols of territorial religion and in some ways I think Irish Republicanism is a territorial religion." Confronted by that religion, the poems displayed a certain awe-struck reverence, but they also acknowledged the responsibility, personal and poetic, involved in such reverence. "Punishment", for example, modulates from an identification with the Stone Age corpse of an executed adultress to a consequent examination of the poet's attitude to her contemporary prototypes - the tarred and shaved victims of IRA punishment squads:

I who have stood dumb
When your betraying sisters,
Cauled in tar,
Wept by the railings,
Who would connive
In civilised outrage
Yet understand the exact
And tribal, intimate revenge.

The language chosen reveals a complicated pattern of interwoven allegiances: to the customs of the tribe ("betraying") to the suffering of its victims ("wept") to the prepared rhetoric of its politicians ("civilized outrage") to the traditional claims of his poetic craft ("understood the exact") and to his own unhappy ambivalence ("connive"). It is a delicate moment, a recognition of his own complicity in the circumstances he describes. Naming a nation involves naming his own role in the process. This he does most poignantlv in the last lines of the book:

I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.

For all their eloquent ambiguity, their sense of lost opportunities and failed ambitions, these lines are tentatively affirmative, proclaiming an irresolute independence. They may signal an end to the grand design which made North such an imposing and portentous collection. Yet they also confirm that enduring contact with the landscape of Ireland which nourishes and sustains all of Seamus Heaney's poetry.

Heaney "escaped from the massacre", when he left Northern Ireland to settle in Wicklow. The collection which followed, Field Work (1979), remains his most assured, most accomplished and most humane volume to date. It circles back to the source of his success and revitalises that initial metaphor of digging:

Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs
 
In the 'Glanmore Sonnets' from which these lines are taken, Heaney celebrates the contiguity of place and poem. As always, he aspires to give language the tactile solidity of the land, "words entering almost the sense of place". Continuing to be "an etymologist of roots and graftings", he finds in the art of poetry a means of opening out to fresh yet fundamental sources of inspiration. The feelings are personal rather than political but, unlike the poems in his fIrst two collections, they are confident and creative in their tonalities. By Field Work, Heaney had tuned his voice to a pitch "very closejTo the music of what happens."

That voice remains one in thrall to the resonance of names. People and places predominate. There are elegies for the "murdered dead", friends and companions whose liolent ends are tempered by the memories they leave. There are elegies for those artists whose life and works offer exemplary and cautionary inspiration: Rohert Lowell, Francis Ledwidge, Sean 0 Riada. And there are love poems, "broaching the word 'wife' like a stored cask." In these poems Heaney names, as he has never managed to do before, "the lovely and painfuljCovenants of flesh."

Yet it is the placenames that continue to reverberate throughout the collection. In chanting the names in the shipping forecast - Dogger, Rockhall, Malin, Irish Sea, Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes; in delighting in the memories names evoke; in lovingly holding their tang on the tongue; these poems continue to name a nation. The end of art is peace, one poem tentatively suggests, and in the verbal music of these place-names, Heaney has made his peace with his own tragic, troubled homeland.

That process of appeasement through placenames is also at work in Heaney's most recent book, Sweeney Astray. (Field Day, IR£4.50). Subtitled "A version from the Irish", it is a translation of the medieval poem Bulle Suibhne (The Madness of Sweeney) which describes the fate of Sweeney, King of Dal-Arie in Ulster, who, cursed by a cleric for his blasphemous ferocity, was turned into a bird and driven mad, condemned to wander the length and breadth of Ireland until the curse was fulmled by his death. What gives it shape is less the narrative account of Sweeney's misadventures (related in the prose passages) than his poetic response to those places in which he finds himself (revealed in the lyric genres: laments, dialogues, litanies, rhapsodies, curses.) What unites the poem is the topography of his wandering.

In translating the place-names into their modern equivalents, in returning them to their present inhabitants, Heaney is building bridges between modern and medieval Ireland and, more particularly, between the planters in south Antrim and north Down, where much of the poem takes place, and their Celtic inheritance. The poem is, and the introduction underlines the point, a sign of peace in a time: of trouble.

In the art of naming there are opportunities for a shared sense of identity and displacement. It is not only place names that are evoked. The famous poem in which Sweeney praises aloud all the trees of Ireland is a litany, like that of the shipping forecast, which Heaney delights in translating.  There are litanies of individual stags, of innumerable birds of woodland animals, of nourishing food. (Sweeney's diet consists mainly of watercress and water.) Naming a nation is naming its natural habitat and the book is rich with th, abundance of the soil and all who feed on it. Driven by religion and politics from the world of men and women Sweeney finds in the consolations of the earth a bitter sweet satisfaction:

From lonely cliff-tops, the stag
Bells and makes the whole glen shake
And re-echo. I am ravished.
Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.

That unearthly sweetness IS the result 0f a conflict between a sense of home and a sense of displacement which Sweeney resolves in religious terms. (The story ends wjth a death-bed repentance and a Christian burial). But it is the conflict, not the resolution, which Heaney savours and makes his own.

That the book is more modern than medieval, more Heaney's than Sweeney's, is obvious from its style. It doesn't need a line like 'wintering out among the wolf packs" to remind us that the language is being forged into an individual and personal shape. And it is in its language that the translation is most successful. There are times when the tone is iII judged ("A haunted father's memory of his small boy calling Daddy.") and when the idiom is inappropriately colloquial. ("I was for the high-jump once more.") But, in general, the style has all the natural richness, the particularity of naming, that one has come to associate with Heaney's poetry at its best. In appropriating the Irish, he is not colonising the language but making it amenable to English modes and thereby celebrating the coexistence of respective cultures. It is an appeasing, not a domineering, process.

Heaney was attracted to the medieval king by more than the accident of their rhyming surnames and the coincidence of their shared locale. Sweeney, like his translator, is an inner emigre, someone lost, unhappy and at home in his beautiful but war-scarred country. While the translation remains close to the original, it is obyjous that Heaney wants it to playa part, at once exemplary and inspirational, in the development of his own poetic identity. One sentence from the introduction makes this clear: "Insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political and domestic obligation.' Out of that quarrel, those constraints, Heaney continues to make poetry. His answer to the question Macmorris asked so long ago is revealed not in any statement, not in any public pronouncement, but in the lines of his poems which, like the contours on a map, chart that nation he has named so often and so eloquently.