"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"
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"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"

The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Eugene O'Brien, Eugene O'Brien

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"The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances"

The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Eugene O'Brien, Eugene O'Brien

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About This Book

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner's later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney's early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney's earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections.

The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney's debts to classical and modern literature—in the original languages and in translations—and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many general readers of Heaney's poetry.

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PART ONE
HEANEY AND DEATH
lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.
—Seamus Heaney, “The Lift”
CHAPTER ONE
SURVIVING DEATH IN HEANEY’S HUMAN CHAIN
Andrew J. Auge
On Easter Saturday, April 11, 2009, as part of RTÉ’s celebration of Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday, the radio presenter Marian Finucane interviewed Heaney. Over the course of the program, she questioned him about what thoughts of death had arisen in the aftermath of his stroke in 2006. After initially demurring, Heaney preceded to indicate that he no longer accepted the traditional Catholic beliefs in the particular judgment and an eternal heavenly reward and that he believed that death meant “extinction” (Waters 2010, 116). Those offhand comments sparked outrage from the Irish cultural commentator John Waters. After acknowledging the potential nuances of this position, Waters ultimately insisted that Heaney’s response was intentionally provocative, that he had leveraged “the weight of his poetic ‘office’ to make a reinforcing point on behalf of the prevailing culture … denying something that for many people is of momentous importance: the idea of eternal life” (2010, 118). Waters then mocked Heaney for the superficiality and incoherence of his thinking on this topic and on the general role of religion in contemporary Irish society. Whatever guarded praise of Heaney’s poetry Waters offered in this essay was offset by its title, which consigned the Nobel Prize winner’s oeuvre to “the poetics of nothingness” (2010, 115).
Such fulminations might have been avoided had Waters taken the trouble to read the full expanse of Heaney’s poetry or, in lieu of that, his prose reflection on the poet’s responsibilities with regard to the subject of death, “Joy and Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin,” collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995). There he would have found that his accusation that Heaney is a purveyor of “the poetics of nothingness” not only misrepresents Heaney’s thoughts on mortality but also anachronistically ignores the realities of modern secularity, where, as Heaney paraphrases the Catholic poet Czesław Miłosz, “No intelligent contemporary is spared the pressure exerted … by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning.” Facing death, the modern poetic imagination is, Heaney asserts, always caught in a “stalemate between the death-mask of nihilism and the fixed smile of a pre-booked place in paradise” (RP, 153). For Heaney, merely dwelling within the tensions of this dialectic is not sufficient: the poet’s task is to negotiate a settlement that at least tentatively enacts an “outfacing [of] the inevitable” rather than a hopeless acquiescence to it (RP, 147). He delineates these alternatives by pitting the facile negation of Larkin’s “Aubade” against the hard-wrung affirmations of Yeats’s “A Cold Heaven” and “Man and the Echo.” It is the later poem, written when Yeats was on the cusp of death, which for Heaney manifests the transformative power of poetry, its ability to hew a shard of meaning from a stony silence. However, despite the sense of creaturely sympathy evoked at the end of Yeats’s poem by the cry of a stricken rabbit, the confrontation with death staged in “Man and the Echo” is, as the title suggests, solitary. In that regard if not others, it typifies Yeats’s quest in his late poems to cultivate a hard-edged masculine aloofness that outfaces death’s nullity (Ramazani 1990, 145–50). Here, as elsewhere, the contrast between Heaney and his precursor is illuminating. In Heaney’s last published book of poems, Human Chain (2010), it is not heroic self-sufficiency but human connections—the bonds of care and love linking the living and the dead—that allow death to be faced, withstood, and survived.
To understand this difference better, we might consider Yeats’s resolute grappling with mortality in light of the most significant modern philosophical analysis of the role of death in human existence. In book 2 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger establishes death as foundational for human existence—as Dasein’s most integral and intimate possibility. When mortality is no longer regarded as a distant terminus but is accepted to be ever-present as the fatal condition that occasions all of the self’s projects, it becomes a bounding line that gathers human being into an individualized totality. In Heidegger-speak, this being-toward-death means embracing mortality as the “ownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassed” (Heidegger 1996, 232). That is to say, the human being who authentically confronts death recognizes that it “does not just ‘belong’ in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Da-sein [being], but it lays claim on it as something individual” (1996, 243). Jahan Ramazani discerns in what he calls Yeats’s “self-elegies” something akin to this Heideggerian posture: an unflinching approach to death that triggers a process of self-recapitulation and thereby consolidates the self into a distinctive “aesthetic whole” (1990, 163–64). It is precisely this narrow emphasis on being-toward-death as an individuating project that has disturbed some of Heidegger’s more recent philosophical interlocutors, most notably Simon Critchley and Jacques Derrida. Their correctives to Heidegger deserve further attention, since, as I hope to show, they point toward something distinctive in Seamus Heaney’s approach to death in Human Chain.
In characterizing death as “nonrelational,” Heidegger asserts that we never truly participate in the death of others but are merely off-stage spectators of their ordeal. Certainly, the deaths that we witness, especially of those closest to us, remain fundamentally enigmatic, closed off to any efforts to comprehend them. However, Heidegger pushes this too far when he claims that “we do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense… [but] are at best always just ‘there’ too” (1996, 222), or so Simon Critchley suggests when he insists, pace Heidegger, “that death is first and foremost experienced in a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in being-with the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are dead” (2008, 144). Derrida in Aporias makes the same point more succinctly when he insists that being-toward-death ultimately means acknowledging “the death of the other in ‘me’” (1993, 76). For Derrida, this experience of bearing traces of dead others and bequeathing traces of our passing selves to others constitutes the act of survival. Like the related Derridean motif of the specter, survival undermines the familiar binary oppositions of self and other, presence and absence, life and death, being and not-being. Perhaps for that reason, Derrida in one of his last public statements identified survival as “an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence” (2007a, 50). In that final interview he insisted that life is nothing more, nothing less than survival, literally the act of “living on”— that is, living upon the remnants of other lives as well as living through the remnants of ourselves incorporated by others (2007a, 26). Survival is then manifested, not just through mortality, but in mundane acts of departure or passing on. For instance, the act of writing whereby one’s own words are ceded to others signifies for Derrida “at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me” (2007a, 32). Yet mortality remains for Derrida the boundary by which survival is ultimately defined. The traces of the dead survive only if those who remain are willing “to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared” (2005, 148). This unappeasable responsibility exceeds the traditional Freudian notion of mourning, whereby the death of the loved one is eventually resolved through the “idealizing introjection” of the lost other into the self. The melancholy that prohibits this and that Freud identifies as pathological is regarded by Derrida as “necessary,” for it acknowledges that these lingering traces of the dead can never be fully assimilated or subsumed but will continue to haunt the survivors who carry them (2005, 160–62).
The extent to which these contrasting philosophical approaches to death parallel the differences between Seamus Heaney’s and W. B. Yeats’s culminating responses to morality is strikingly evident in Heaney’s revision of one of Yeats’s privileged figures for death: the image of the empty coat upon a hanger. That image anchors Yeats’s late poem “The Apparitions,” where each stanza concludes with the refrain: “Fifteen apparitions have I seen; / The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger” (1965, 352; italics in original). This skeletal simulacrum encountered in solitude elicits from the aging poet an intensification of mood, a meditative self-concentration: “When a man grows old his joy / Grows more deep day after day, / His empty heart is full at length.” An earlier variant of this figure in “Sailing to Byzantium”—“An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul claps its hands and sings” (Yeats 1965, 193)—epitomizes the solitary soul’s power to override mortality through artistic creation. Heaney humanizes this image by restoring it to its actual mundane context. In “The Butts,” the empty coat is his father’s suit jacket hanging in the wardrobe. Whereas in the past it was raided for the loose tobacco left in its pockets, in more recent times it yielded “nothing but chaff cocoons” (HC, 13). Those husks of detritus serve as a metonym for the frailty of the father’s body, in his last days carefully tended by his children, who must reach beneath
Each meagre armpit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
(HC, 13)
This move from a generic empty coat on a hanger to the unclothed body of one’s father marks the distance between Yeats and Heaney on this crucial issue. It is the difference between a poet who confronts death in the solitary recesses of his own consciousness and one who addresses it through an intimate encounter with the dying other. While the unnerving task of washing a moribund parent lacks the grandeur of Yeats’s staged confrontations with his own imagined cadaver, Heaney invests this act with a matter-of-fact dignity. He casts the process of “being-with the dying in a caring way” and “grieving after they are dead,” to quote Critchley again, as strenuous labor. It is precisely this hard work that makes death, and its survival, tangible.
The title poem of Human Chain sharpens this insight by rendering death as a physical jettisoning of the body that paradoxically binds us to others, by forging from the discarded mortal coil a link that connects even the most distant members of the human race. This point is made deftly through a sequence of three loosely concatenated scenes: the all-too-familiar televised image of sacks of flour being passed by aid workers to a starving Third World crowd; the poet’s recollection of lugging bags of grain during the harvests of his rural youth; the shuffling off of the body in death. Heaney reverts here and frequently throughout this volume to the twelve-line structure that he first employed in the Squarings sequence of Seeing Things, capitalizing once more upon this form’s fluidity and its drift toward a culminating flash of insight. Beyond a shared sense of a sudden unburdening, the scenes each spotlight the human body’s vulnerability. And the hyphenated phrases—“hand-to-hand,” and “eye-to-eye” (HC, 18)—describing the close coordination involved in conveying the bags of grain stress how those corporeal limits necessarily connect us to one another. While the passage of the bags of grain yields something substantive, that is not the case with the passing on of the human body itself. The poem’s conclusion evokes that difference through the abrupt sundering of syntax.
Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
(HC, 18)
The stanzaic enjambment implies that only an abyssal emptiness awaits human beings as they pass beyond life into death. But the subsequent chiasmic rime riche, the kind of aural flourish so characteristic of Heaney, casts the “unburdening” of the body in death in more ambivalent terms: as both welcome release from and meager recompense for the pain endured in life. It is the final caesura, though, that justifies this poem’s position as the volume’s signature work, for it augments death’s finality by gesturing toward the binding power of its universality.
Several other poems from Human Chain echo the figuration of death established in the title poem, employing the well-worn trope of death as release into an unfathomable domain. Heaney has always wielded such elegiac motifs with an ambidextrous flexibility that balances “the claims of both consolation and skepticism, transcendence and realism” (Ramazani 1994, 358). However, here, even more than he had previously done, Heaney imbues them with a provocative open-endedness. Consider, for instance, the volume’s last poem, “A Kite for Aibhín,” an adaptation of “L’aquilone,” by the fin de siècle Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. Heaney’s version concludes by paralleling the departure of the human spirit in death with the ascent of a kite that eventually breaks free from its string:
the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Until string breaks and—separate, elate—
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
(HC, 85)
What is most striking about Heaney’s adaptation is how it radically rearranges the original to fashion this conclusion. In the more precise translation of Pascoli’s poem that Heaney produced for an Italian colleague, a variant of the above passage appears near the middle of the poem, where the “you” addressed is subsequently identified with a schoolmate of the Italian poet who died young, with his childlike notions of death intact: “You over whom I shed my tears and prayed, / You were lucky to have seen the fallen / Only in the windfall of a kite” (Morisco 2013, 42). The conclusion of Heaney’s adaptation garners even more significance when it is juxtaposed with his midcareer poem “A Kite for Michael and Christopher” (SI, 44), where the anticipated collapse of the kite in the woods signals death’s eventual felling of the body. In “A Kite for Aibhín,” Heaney employs the equivocal word windfall to present death not as exclusively destructive, as he had done in the earlier poem, but also as a bit of good fortune, a blessing. That attitude is no longer tarnished by naïveté, as in Pascoli’s original, but is invested through its culminating position with the mature poet’s authority.
In two of the formal elegies that appear in Human Chain, Heaney elaborates on the postmortem realm into which the dead are delivered, deepening its penumbra of mystery. “The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark” is dedicated to David Hammond, the Belfast musician and media impresario who was one of Heaney’s oldest friends. As the poem’s speaker ventures into the now abandoned house of his dead friend, its silence nearly overwhelms him until he ac...

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