Opinion His passport was green
Heaney was simultaneously the most local and most international of poets.
Heaney was simultaneously the most local and most international of poets.
Seamus Heaneys wish to be buried in Bellaghy,the small village close to his childhood home,in a grave beside his younger brother,is testament to the Nobel-prize winning poets extraordinary sense of rootedness. He had become perhaps the best-known contemporary poet in the English language,and was honoured with awards and titles around the world,but to read his poetry is to become familiar with small,knowable communities,albeit on the cusp of change.
The tension is there in the first poem of his first collection,Digging,still his most famous poem,in which the poet sits with pen in hand,writing,while his father can be heard outside digging with a spade. By God,the old man could handle a spade,writes Heaney,Just like his old man… But Ive no spade to follow men like them. Instead,with the pen resting in his hand,he resolves to dig with it. In that manifesto poem,Heaney signals one of his most enduring preoccupations,the ambivalence of the modern break from age-old tradition.
Heaney was alive to the sounds of the new. He recalled in his Nobel acceptance speech his childhood delight in listening to the many languages and voices of the radio. The newness which he was compelled to describe,however,as his work came to maturity in the 1970s,was the collapse of civil society in his native Northern Ireland into terror and war. In the collection,North (1975),he sought out the images and metaphors from nature and history that might make sense of,or provide some analogy for,the sudden eruption of sectarian violence around him. The demands upon him,and his insistently creative response,are reflected in the poem,Whatever You Say Say Nothing,in which the obsession with long-standing hate leads the poet to protest that I live here,I live here too,I sing.
And sing he did. But Heaneys poetry never shied away from the violence,and from the intimate and intricate relationship between conflict and community. The complexity of that relationship is articulated in the poem,Two Lorries,published shortly after the IRA ceasefire in 1995,in which Heaney recalls a coal lorry that used to deliver to his mothers house 40 years before,which is paired with the image of another lorry,packed with explosives to blow the bus station to dust and ashes. The coalmans flirtatious invitation to Heaneys mother to go to a film in Magherafelt is cheeky,yet innocent too,an innocence which is banished by bombs. Yet the poem connects and conflates the two lorries into one,and Heaney imagines his mother at the bus station,as she had often been,but with her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes. The dark implication of the poem is that the seeds of violence lay in those seemingly innocent days of the distantly recollected past,and that communities of all kinds are complicit in engendering conflict.
There was controversy in Heaneys response to the conflict too. Perhaps inevitably,as Heaney sought to understand the violence,he was accused of condoning it. He was compelled also to assert an Irish identity when he objected to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry,and declared in the poem,An Open Letter: My passports green./ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen. Yet,in a gesture typical of his personal,artistic,and political generosity,when the queen made a historic visit to Ireland in 2010,Heaney was seated next to her at dinner. If he was a national poet,Heaneys great achievement was also to be simultaneously the most local and the most international of national poets.
There was a local joke about his growing international stature,that he was Famous Seamus,which smacks of the national gift for deprecation and begrudgery. But like one of his Irish influences,Patrick Kavanagh,who felt local insults more keenly,Heaney ploughed his own furrow,and made his localities a universe. In an essay called The Regional Forecast,Heaney expressed this determination as a poetic manifesto,that while the literary scene in which the provinces revolve around the centre is demonstrably a Copernican one,the task of talent is to reverse things to a Ptolemaic condition. The writer must envisage the region as the original point. For the many aspiring writers who are likely to visit his grave under the sycamore trees in Bellaghy over the coming decades and centuries,there could hardly be better counsel.
The writer is with the School of English,Drama and Film,University College Dublin express@expressindia.com
John Brannigan
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