Passage to the Center

Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Daniel Tobin

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813183879
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats.

Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's body of work up to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations.

According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of "the center, " a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

1

SENSES OF PLACE

Death of a Naturalist

This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

In “Place, Pastness, Poems,” Seamus Heaney quotes this passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” to support his view that in lieu of a cultural center the literary tradition is what links “the private experience of a poet to the usual life of the age.”¹ For Heaney, tradition allows the regional poet to affirm the centrality of local experience to his own being, but with the hope of making that experience accessible to readers from wholly different walks of life. Ideally, by raising private experience to the level of cultural expression, Heaney would have tradition transform personal memory into cultural memory. Transformation of this kind is crucial to Heaney’s early poetry for, like his mentor Patrick Kavanagh, by trusting the sense of place he would make the parochial and regional a matter of universal importance. To do so, however, requires that the poet liberate himself from the provincial pieties that would constrict his voice and limit his vision. In Heaney’s early poems, the use of memory and the centrality of local experience mark the beginning of a search for images relevant to the quest for self-definition that while adequate to such liberation also keep faith with his childhood roots.

Yet Heaney’s desire to remain faithful to the sense of place while at the same time seeking to liberate himself from all that is narrow and provincial places him in an imaginative bind. On the one hand his imagination inclines inevitably toward the place of origin as a source of renewal; on the other, he recognizes the absolute necessity for the imagination to break with that first world in order to transcend the given limits of home. This bind constitutes the root crisis of Heaney’s poetry, a crisis which remains constant throughout his career, despite stylistic developments and the seemingly unrelenting need to break new ground. Heaney’s work, from the start, is fruitfully at odds with itself, fostered alike by the lure of formative experiences and the imperative to break beyond those primal ties. His imaginative search, his passage, therefore not only grows out of the sense of place, but also out of what he calls “an almost biological need to situate ourselves in our instinctual lives as creatures of the race and of the planet, to learn the relationship between what is self and what is non-self.”² In Heaney’s case, learning this relationship demands that he confront the shaping forces of his home, for his sense of place and of the past defines his imaginative quest. This quest, from the world of his first poems to his most recent work, constitutes nothing less than the record of Heaney’s quarrel with himself, a quarrel that begins in the poet’s ambiguous and finally agonistic relationship to his home.

Memory and landscape stake out the thematic boundaries of Death of a Naturalist. Or perhaps I should say the landscape of memory stakes out these boundaries, for as Heaney suggested in an early interview, his “inspiration, for want of a better word, lay in the energies that spring from remembering.”³ These energies, however, also bring conflict into the poetry. Rich as it is in sensory detail, Heaney’s early poems do not portray an ideal, prelapsarian world. The natural pieties of childhood, the Wordsworthian interchange between mind and nature, betray a sense of displacement as well as a sense of place:

From the beginning I was very conscious of boundaries. There was a drain or stream, the Sluggan drain, an old division that ran very close to our house. It divided the townland of Anahorish and those two townlands belonged to two different parishes, Bellaghy and Newbridge, which are also in two different dioceses: the diocese of Derry ended at the Sluggan drain, and the diocese of Armagh began. I was always going backwards and forwards. . . . I seemed always to be a little displaced; being in between was a kind of condition, from the start.⁴

From the outset, Heaney’s sense of division, his liminal condition of “being in between”—of being suspended as though on a threshold between different conceptions of self and place—undermines any simple interchange between himself and the natural world. Boundaries that score into the landscape historical and sectarian antagonisms define Heaney’s original imaginative ground. What this suggests is that Heaney’s treatment of nature and childhood in the poems of Death of a Naturalist, rather than expressing a naive piety toward the place of origin, represents an effort to probe the psychic roots of his consciousness in response to a powerful feeling of disjunction.

To overcome this original sense of disjunction, Heaney is not content simply to record impressions, or to gloss the rift at the roots of identity. Instead, he seeks to explore his relation to the natural world, the world of his home, and so to plumb the hidden sources of that world through imagination. What Geoffrey Hartman observed of Wordsworth is true also of Heaney: nature per se is not the center of the poetry, but a complex relationship between poet and place.⁵ Nevertheless, if like Wordsworth Heaney’s purpose is “to put us religiously in touch with the natural life of the universe,” and therefore to mend our “broken connection with the roots of being,”⁶ we may ask how Heaney’s imagination can at once stand outside nature and accomplish this healing? The question is not only germane to Heaney but reflects a division endemic to consciousness. As such, the question is relevant not only to poets, but has been reformulated throughout generations and civilizations from the earliest myths. Myth itself, even while it seeks to express a primal connection between human being and the natural world, does so by bearing witness to our most primal fears. Cosmogonies, like myths that portend annihilation by the ineluctable powers personified in gods, both humanize the world and reveal its nonhuman foundations. They both articulate the longing for continuity and the inevitable knowledge of displacement. Heaney’s relationship to his place of origin can be said to be mythic in the deepest sense, for like myth his early poems imagine a “first world” predicated on the need to encounter those powers that are at once the source and limit of consciousness.

Appropriately, the poem “Digging” stands as the door to that first world. Rooted in the spade/pen metaphor that has become definitive for Heaney, the poem self-consciously probes the psychic and mythic roots of his consciousness. Written in 1964, almost two years after Heaney had begun to “dabble in verses,” “Digging” was a breakthrough for him, the first instance where he had done more than make “an arrangement of words,” but had “let a shaft down into real life” (P 41). Nevertheless, if he found his voice in “Digging,” he also began to explore the conflicts that pursue him throughout his career, conflicts that in addition to being personal, are also mythic and political. The poem opens with cinematic intensity. Self-enclosed, the two-line first stanza comprises an image as complete as the famous Escher print of the artist’s hand drawing itself into being: “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests.” Such artistic self-begetting, however, is more complex than that. Though early in his life Heaney had suppressed what he calls the “slightly aggravated young Catholic male part of his imagination,”⁷ the initial correlation of pen and gun hints at the political conflict that has troubled Northern Ireland for centuries. Yet Heaney drops the association and its political implications in the second stanza, where he links together spade and pen. The new linkage establishes the analogy between the father’s field work and the son’s imaginative work. At first glance Heaney would seem to be romanticizing the connection between himself and his father. The spade’s rasp is “clean,” rising above work that is nothing if not dirty. In turn, the colon after “ground” inscribes how immediately the son recognizes his father through the harsh music of his work. Only after he hears this music does he look down, drawn nearer to his father’s work.

At this moment, the reader expects a deepening sense of communion between the son upstairs with his pen and the father below with his spade, but that is not what happens. Heaney aspires to continuity, but it is discontinuity that initiates the quest for self-definition and the exploration of origins. This sense of discontinuity inheres in the proverb, “The pen is lighter than the spade,” a piece of neighborly advice that became the poem’s inspiration.⁸ By taking up the pen, he is set apart from the community, a realization that brings a feeling of banishment and guilt, but eventually a sense of power. Obviously Heaney cannot actually return to the first world of childhood, though his almost hyper-conscious awareness of his separation from that world initiates the drama of the poem. That breach is explored, if not healed, only when the poet acknowledges the sense of division out of which his imagination is born. This sense of division becomes evident in the second stanza, where time is telescoped into memory. In one moment the father bends low, in the next he stands up twenty years later. What separates father and son, their different worlds, is also what establishes their relationship. Notably, it is the father’s “stooping in rhythm” that creates the feeling of continuity between past and present. In tune with the rhythms of the yard, he is in those rhythms, as if the rhythms themselves constituted a wider, numinous reality.

Though removed from his first world, Heaney’s imaginative work seeks to tune itself to these same numinous rhythms. His effort is made explicit in the third stanza, where the image of his father’s coarse boot nestled on the spade’s lug counterpoints that of the pen resting in the poet’s hand in the poem’s opening lines. But the implied continuity between pen and spade is knowingly tenuous and fraught with conflict. In the short first stanza the son is alone, at his window, pen in hand, removed from the yard work’s rhythms. In memory he is part of a community: we pick the new potatoes and love their cool hardness in our hands. The memory is consoling, but that consolation testifies to the son’s sense of displacement. He is alone in the room above. The more Heaney imagines the scene in memory, the wider the gulf becomes between past and present, the wider the separation between the poet and his community. Both his sense of place and of displacement are uncovered as he digs into his past.

Furthermore, the boast that follows Heaney’s meditation—“By God, the old man could handle a spade / Just like his old man”—inevitably leads to the realization in the fifth stanza that, in fact, the poet has “no spade to follow men like them.” Though Heaney prides himself on his grandfather’s turf-cutting skills, the poem bears witness to his separation from his grandfather’s world, the world of the fathers. Nevertheless, the poet aspires to make the “living roots” awaken in his head, and would evoke the primal rhythms of the yard through his own imaginative skills. Yet, while the resolve in the phrase “I’ll dig with it” seems to equate the skills of spade and pen, the analogy assumes imaginative distance. The adult poet’s displacement from his childhood world emerges from his need to probe critically the sources of his imagination while remaining sensitive to his origins. Among other implications, by “digging” with his pen Heaney engages the deep-rooted conflicts of his community at a higher level of consciousness than that which advocates the use of violence to solve political differences. By dropping “snug as a gun” from the penultimate line, Heaney implicitly turns away from the somnambulant prejudices of sectarianism and begins his search for deeper answers, answers he hopes to uncover by exploring critically and imaginatively the dark, mythic potencies inherent in the sense of place.

If “Digging” gave Heaney the terms of his imaginative engagement with his home ground, it did so by establishing in his work a deeply felt connection between consciousness and discontinuity. Unlike Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander, Heaney does not fall “like Sleeping Beauty into the gentler continuum and quasi immortality of nature.”⁹ He has already wakened from the natural rhythms into an acute consciousness of self. Yet, precisely because his consciousness has been so thoroughly defined by the rhythms of that first world, Heaney is drawn to that world imaginatively. In contrast to those who perceive Heaney’s embrace of those rhythms as hopelessly naive, a close look at the poem reveals the extent of the work’s quiet complexity. When Heaney lets the shaft of his pen down into “real life,” it is the turbulent, contrary life of the self his pen begins to probe, with all its fears, ineluctable powers, and yearnings for communion welling up from a pervasive and insistent sense of place. This desire for communion, in particular when it reaches its highest pitch of imaginative intensity, assumes for Heaney all the gravity and promise of a marriage. Along with “digging,” then, the notion of betrothal, both as a way to express Heaney’s relationship to the land and as a way to symbolize the promise of his art, becomes a key metaphor in his early work.

In Hartman’s understanding of Wordsworth, the marriage of the imagination with nature reveals itself in moments he calls aqedot, or akedah (singular), from the Hebrew word to bind or tie.¹⁰ These are moments in which the intimate bond between human being and the natural world is discerned through the poet’s encounter with his surroundings. Heaney expresses a similar understanding when he states that much of the flora of his original place, rich in its history of half-pagan and half-Christian lore, provides a foundation for “a marvelous or magical view of the world” (P 133). More than magical, however, the original ground is imbued with a religious force, especially, Heaney observes, “if we think of the root meaning of the word in religare, to bind fast.” That root sense of religion, as a power that binds us to some wider, intuited unity of being, finds comparable expression for the poet in imagination, since in Heaney’s view “poetry of any power is always deeper than its declared meaning. The secret between words, the binding element, is often a psychic force that is elusive, archaic and only half apprehended by maker and audience” (P 186). Poetry as an essentially religious act that establishes a deep bond between words lies at the heart of Heaney’s understanding of his work. “Art has a binding force, a religious claim upon the poet,” Heaney remarks in his essay on Osip Mandelstam, “Faith, Hope and Poetry” (P 217). Naturally, then, it pervades his relationship to his home and, by extension, to those natural surroundings that recall locale in memory:

To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation . . . possess an immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated. [P 19]

Heaney, as he portrays himself here, at first appears to be quite close in spirit to Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander, immersed in a preconscious communion with the primal, watery, feminine ground. Yet, again, Heaney’s betrothal to place presupposes his separation from it. Both the image of betrothal and the religious sense of initiation emerge through the adult poet’s retrospection. Whether discerning or establishing a bond through the psychic force exerted by the imagination, the poet’s need to achieve that binding element presupposes his dispossession from his native place. Indeed, the idea of initiation itself begs the recognition of discontinuity, for without such recognition there would be no need for initiation. The poet, like the boy, would already be rolled round in the diurnal courses of the natural world. Likewise, the notion of betrothal presumes an initial separation of male and female, a separation that betrothal intends to heal. The specifically s...