Fallout from the thunder: poetry and politics in Seamus Heaney's District and Circle

Abstract

This article examines Heaney's preoccupation in District and Circle (2006) with international political events during this ‘new age of anxiety’, and how he initially approaches these circuitously through a return to originary, boyhood experiences. Such momentous acts as the attacks of 9/ll, the ‘War on Terror’ and the London bombings are filtered through, juxtaposed with and illuminated by episodes both from the ancient past and Heaney's family history. In attendance, as always, throughout the latest volume is the poet's diverse literary ancestry, a reminder of how his work exemplifies core claims made in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), where Eliot argues that ‘what makes the writer most acutely conscious of his own place in time’ is ‘the historical sense’, ‘a feeling for the whole of literature’ from Homer onwards. Thus, alongside its detailed address to politics and such crucial literary matters as structure, form and metaphor, the essay repeatedly returns to the intertextual ‘presences’ which haunt and animate Heaney's continuing creative project.

Keywords:

• Poetry
• contemporary politics
• history
• Northern Ireland
• America
• Britain
• Irish Republic
• intertextuality

Notes

 1. Heaney, Anything Can Happen, 18.

 2. See, for example, Sam Leith's comments in ‘Return of the Naturalist’, Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2006; Andrew Motion, ‘Digging Deep’, The Guardian, 1 April 2006; Ben Naparstek, ‘Notes from the Underground’, The Times, 25 March 2006; Clive Wilmer, ‘Down to Earth’, New Statesman, 17 April 2006.

 3. Heaney, ‘Reality and Justice’, 50–3; and Anything Can Happen. For a discussion of the poem see below, pp. 373–4.

 4. Kostick and Moore, Irish Writers Against War.

 5. Brian Friel was responsible for the Preface to Irish Writers Against War, in which he argued presciently that ‘there is something not-thought-through' about the planned invasion, ‘something wildly disproportionate about it, something inimical to reason and reasonableness’ (7).

 6. Jackie Nickerson, ‘He's Seen it All’, interview with Heaney, Sunday Telegraph, 9 September 2007, 8–10.

 7. In District and Circle , the Troubles are a significant presence in ‘One Christmas Day in the Morning’ (31–2) and ‘The Nod’ (33), both of which are discussed towards the end of this essay.

 8. It was later reprinted in Preoccupations , 217–20.

 9. For an account of her work as a UN Human Rights High Commissioner, see http://www.unhchr.ch/html/hchr/unhc.htm.

10. Beckett, Come and Go, 355.

11. Significantly the epigraph chosen by Heaney for ‘Reality and Justice’ (50–3), comes from a wartime letter of T.S. Eliot from 1942.

12. Cf. the glimpse of a minority childhood presented in ‘From the Canton of Expectation’, The Haw Lantern , 46–7, and ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, The Spirit Level , 9, in which ‘Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead’.

13. Heaney, Preoccupations, 35.

14. ‘All that glisters is not gold’ ( The Merchant of Venice , II. viii. 65).

15. Sonnets featured in earlier volumes include ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ (Door into the Dark), ‘Strange Fruit’, ‘Act of Union’ (North), ‘A Drink of Water’, ‘Glanmore Sonnets’, ‘A Dream of Jealousy’ (Field Work) and ‘The Stone Verdict’, ‘The Old Team’, ‘Clearances’ (The Haw Lantern). Interviewed by Harriet Cooke for the Irish Times, 6 December 1973, Heaney spoke of his determination to take the English lyric – which, of course, includes the sonnet – and make it ‘eat stuff that it has never eaten before’. Many of the sonnets cited above do precisely that.

16. Identifying ‘A Shiver’ based loosely on the Petrarchan sonnet, Meg Tyler, in ‘Lost, Loosed: Some Thoughts on Rhyme in Seamus Heaney's Sonnets’, notes that ‘in a traditional Petrarchan sonnet the octave and sestet often conduct actions that are analogous to the actions of contraction and release in the muscular system’.

17. ‘The Aerodrome’, 11.

18. Significantly, the mother and child depicted in ‘The Aerodrome’ are placed on ‘the perimeter’ (11).

19. I am grateful to Cliona Ni Riordain and Wesley Hutchinson of the University of Paris for drawing my attention to this source. Elsewhere in the song, written by Paddy McGuigan, British soldiers are depicted ‘Breaking little homes with scorn’, ‘Dragging fathers from their beds’, in short, behaving as savagely and despicably as ‘Cromwell's men’.

20. Films produced by American and British directors when Heaney was himself a youngster consistently idealised Allied soldiers. It was not until the 1960s – and the time of the Vietnam War – that these simplistic representations of the Second World War began to be questioned.

21. Interestingly, the narrator never identifies who is responsible for the interdiction, whether one parent or both. Who the ‘her’ of stanza 5 is similarly unspecified. These suppressions signal perhaps a continuing ambivalence towards and anxiety over parental authority.

22. In ‘The Harrow-Pin’, 23, fripperies are again excluded from the family home: ‘Let there once be any talk of decoration, / A shelf for knick-knacks, a picture-hook or rail / And the retort was instant’.

23. See, for example, Revelation 1: 4 (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition), ‘peace, from him who is, and who was, and is to come’, and 1: 8, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, says the Lord God who is, and who was, and who is to come.’

24. Hamlet , V. ii. 220–1; Gospel According to St Matthew 10: 29 (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition).

25. Psalm 130, v. 5–6 (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition). See also Psalm 102, v. 7: ‘I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top’. Like Revelation, Hamlet and Eliot's East Coker – see n. 75 below – Heaney's poem stresses the virtues of preparedness and endurance.

26. The USAF Martin B-26 Marauder was an extremely technologically advanced bomber, and, like the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, one of the most reliable planes to be deployed in the Second World War. The P-47s first arrived in the UK in January 1943, and took part in ‘546,000 combat sorties between March 1943 and August 1945, destroying 11,874 enemy aircraft … and about 6,000 armoured vehicles and tanks’ (http://www.aviation-history.com/republic/p47.html).

27. Emblematically perhaps, the boy and his mother find themselves on ‘the perimeter’.

28. Exodus 12: 297 (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition).

29. Seamus Deane's essay ‘Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold’, from Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, is particularly illuminating on the complex interweaving of religion, gender and politics in Heaney's texts and imagination:

   His attitude to maternity and love is one of pining and of apology – for not being of them. Maternity is of the earth, paternity belongs to those who build on it or cultivate it. There is a politics here, but it is embedded in an imagination given to ritual. That which in political or sectarian terms could be called nationalist or Catholic, belongs to maternity, the earth itself. (175)

30. ‘Reality and Justice’, 50.

31. ‘Reality and Justice’, 50

32. ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov's Cognac and a Knocker’, The Government of the Tongue , xxii.

33. In James Michie's translation of The Odes of Horace I, 34, 81, the narrator describes himself as ‘a professor in pure foolishness’.

34. James Michie's translation of The Odes of Horace I, 34, 81

35. ‘Reality and Justice’, 53.

36. ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ ( Dr Faustus in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. Steane, 330).

37. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed., 3204.

38. In the poem's ninth line Horace refers to ‘bruta tellus’, which Michie renders as ‘the brute earth’.

39. ‘One Poet in Search of a Title’, The Times (Books Supplement), 25 March 2006, 7, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1082510.ece.

40. Heaney is presumably referring to the title poem of his 1975 collection, though the adjective he uses there to describe the Viking raiders is ‘fabulous’ rather than ‘fierce’ (see North, 19).

41. Note how Heaney speaks of the ‘clear blue sky’ in ‘Anything Can Happen’, 13.

42. In ‘Lost, Loosed: Some Thoughts on Rhyme in Seamus Heaney's Sonnets’, an as yet unpublished conference paper from 2007, Meg Tyler writes that ‘here too, in the world of this tiny lyric, a kind of paradise has been lost, as the fallen continue to fall’.

43. Yeats, Yeats's Poems, 294.

44. Morrissey, The State of the Prisons, 106–7.

45. Heaney had himself written on Lorca for the Weekend Telegraph, 9 August 1989, and went on in a short Irish Times piece (9 December 1989) to name Ian Gibson's biography, Federico Garcia Lorca, as one of his books of the year. I am grateful to Rand Brandes for supplying this information.

46. Morrissey, The State of the Prisons, 106.

47. Images of mutilation recur in Lorca's Poet in New York. See Christopher Maurer's Introduction, xxi.

48. Lorca's Poet in New York. See Christopher Maurer's Introduction, xxi

49. Shakespeare, Richard II, V. v. 43; Hamlet , I. v. 188.

50. One of the bombers, Mohammad Siddique Khan, detonated his device on a Circle line underground train travelling from Edgware Road station towards Paddington, killing six people and injuring 163 others (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/what_happened/html/edgware_rd.stm).

51. Details provided by Seamus Heaney during a conversation with me, 30 January 2008. ‘District and Circle's’ first and fifth sonnets pre-date the bombings.

52. Heaney was conscious that people would read the poem with the London attacks in mind.

53. Featured on the cover of the first British hardback edition are green and yellow, the colours of the District and Circle line.

54. Heaney generally uses half-rhymes in the sequence. Taking the first and last sonnets as examples, one discovers a (half-) rhyming pattern respectively of aaabcbcdefefgg and abaabbbcdcdcbc.

55. The Haw Lantern , 6.

56. ‘Nod’ is repeated as the final rhyme in lines 13 and 14.

57. Heaney may have had in mind Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is on permanent display at the Prado in Madrid.

58. My colleague, Tom Day, detects an allusion here to the close of Canto XV of Dante's Inferno, in which one of the damned, Brunetto Latini, is compared to an athlete: ‘one of those who over the flat / And open course in the fields beside Verona / Run for the green cloth’ (Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation, 165).

59. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 209–10.

60. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed., 2002, vol. 2, 2522.

61. Gunn, ‘On the Move’, from The Sense of Movement, rpt in O'Brien, The Firebox, 118–19.

62. North, 15, 9, 20, 34; Station Island, 23.

63. The repeated short ‘ı’ in ‘Flicker’ and ‘lit’ causes the consonants to be voiced more quickly. In sound and rhythm the phrase seems not far removed from ‘clickety-click’.

64. ‘The Harrow Pin’, ‘Poet to Blacksmith’, ‘Midnight Anvil’, ‘Sugan’, ‘Senior Infants’, ‘The Nod’, ‘A Clip’, ‘Found Prose’, ‘The Lift’ and ‘Nonce Words’ (23–45) occupy the central section of the seventy-two page collection.

65. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 383.

66. In ‘One poet in search of a title’, The Times (Books Supplement), 25 March 2006, 7, Heaney reveals that ‘Midnight Anvil’ was once in the frame as the new collection's title.

67. Sprezzatura suggests an art that conceals the effort of its making. Originating in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528), it has been loosely defined in English as ‘nonchalance’, ‘studied carelessness’ and ‘contrived spontaneity’.

68. Yeats, ‘Adam's Curse’, in Yeats's Poems, 132.

69. Readers possessing even a minimal acquaintance with the latter's work will recall how in ‘Digging’ (Death of a Naturalist, 13), Heaney had constructed an analogous relationship between the pen, the spade and the gun.

70. Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, ‘A Chara Mo Chléibh’, in Ó Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire 1600–1900, 182–5.

71. McDonald, in ‘The Clutch of Earth’, particularly commends District and Circle's poems about childhood. He notes how in ‘The Sally Rod’ seeing Duffy, an old schoolmate now ‘walking with a stick’ prompts ‘the physical memory of another, chastising stick’, which then ‘unites the two men’.

72. ‘A Constable Calls’, North, 67.

73. Ronan Bennett in ‘An Irish Answer’, The Guardian: Weekend, 16 July 1994, 7, comments on the recurrence of abattoirs and meat imagery in writing about the Troubles. Amongst the instances he cites are in Kiely's Proxopera (1977), Mac Laverty's Cal (1982) and Madden's Hidden Symptoms (1986). Other examples of the butchery motif can be found in Michael Longley's ‘The Butchers’ in Gorse Fires (1991), Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992), and more recently Eoin McNamee's The Ultras (2004).

74. ‘Red’ and ‘white’ lead one to expect ‘blue’ as the third item in the sequence. It is not until the sestet that signs of the British presence in the North appear, with the arrival of the B-Specials.

75. Founded in October 1920 to counter the threat of the IRA, the B-Specials were disbanded in October 1969 following intense criticism in the Cameron and Hunt Reports of their role in fomenting violence.

76. The title of Edward Said's memoir.

77. A phrase from ‘England's Difficulty’, Stations, rpt in Open Ground: Poems 1966 –1996, 85. There the narrator recalls how Northern nationalist families would tune in to Lord Haw-Haw's propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War. As a member of the suspected minority, his existence resembled that of a secret agent, he suggests: ‘I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody’. In a speech in 1934, Lord Brookeborough, prime minister of Northern Ireland, said that there were very good reasons for discriminating against Catholics: ‘I recommend those people who are Loyalists not to employ Roman Catholics, ninety-nine per cent of whom are disloyal’ (qtd in Bell, The Irish Troubles, 25).

78. See Heaney's comments in Brian Bell's ‘The Poet who Came Back’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 November 1971, and in ‘Le Clivage traditionnel’, 187–8; quotations from both can be found in Parker, Seamus Heaney, 15–16. See also ‘A Constable Calls’, North, 60–1.

79. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 164.

80. The blackbird is also the symbol of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast, launched in February 2004. The bird was chosen, in the words of the Centre's first director, Ciaran Carson, as an ‘emblem of music and freedom, of flight and cunning’, and since it ‘sings and is heard from the margins’ (http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHeaneyCentreforPoetry/TheBlackbird/).

81. I am thinking of Wordsworth's famous reference to the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’; Yeats, in ‘The Wild Swans of Coole’, emphasises ‘a still sky’ and ‘still water’ (Yeats's Poems, 233–4); Eliot deploys the image of stillness repeatedly in Four Quartets. In ‘Burnt Norton’, V, he declares ‘Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness’; confronting darkness in ‘East Coker’, III, not least that brought about by ‘total war’, the narrative voice speaks twice of the need for patience: ‘I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you’, ‘I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / … / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing’; ‘Little Gidding’, V, concludes meditating on ‘the stillness / Between two waves of the sea’. See Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, 175, 180, 198.

82. The incident is recorded in one of Heaney's earliest published poems, ‘Mid Term Break’, published in the Kilkenny Magazine in March 1963. It is significant that when it came to naming their second child in February 1968, Seamus and Marie Heaney chose the name Christopher.

83. Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, 34–7, is clearly another text that haunts Heaney's poem.

84. In his interview with Sam Leith, in ‘Return of the Naturalist’, Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2006, Heaney gives a portrait of this unnamed neighbour: ‘There was an old woman – a weird sister figure, she lived down the fields … She read the world in terms of signs, omens. After Christopher's accident, she said to my mother, ‘Aye, I never liked the bird’. ‘What bird's that?’ ‘There was a bird on the byre for days before Christopher was killed.’

85. Sam Leith, in ‘Return of the Naturalist’, Daily Telegraph, 34, 36.

86. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, The Complete Poems and Plays, 175.

87. ‘One Poet in Search of a Title’, The Times (Books Supplement), 25 March 2006, 7.

88. Heaney, ‘Secular and Millennial Milosz’, 410, 416.