The Fourth Seamus Heaney Lectures: Mirror up to Nature

---

The description achieves a most striking synthesis between the earth - fed life of the tree, gnarled, with a pithy inside, and the lithe and whispering crown of willow reacting to the sky. The boy is already the poet here, hidden within the "throat"; ancient Irish poets referred "the gift of poetry to specific parts of the body" In Oracle the boyhood pleasure of hiding from the calls of the family opens the poem: You can hear them draw the poles of stiles as they approach calling you out" Rilke, as referred to by Robin Skelton in another study of his, The Poetic Pattern, found "the ideal condition of the poet in something akin to childhood, when what lies behind is not the past and no future lies before, when in what he calls some interspace between the world and a plaything we entertain ourselves with the everlasting" Indeed, this title Oracle as it is interpreted here, makes a kind of image cluster, a series of connecting ideas which link myth, mystery, within the voice and ear of the listening boy or poet.

Mythos -- the word in the sense of the most ancient original account of the world is strangely related to mystery by the common root of muien -- "to close up" which evolved into mystery, mystic, secret. Thus the Greek mu — originally an inarticulate sound made by a beast - became both mystery and myth. Here the primitive organs of lobe and larynx are the receptacle of mystery, and incarnate the myth of the oracle.

Also, we think of the theory according to which there was originally one single primitive meaning in which abstract and concrete were undifferentiated. Spiritus was not simply breath evolving by metaphor into the principle of life -- both meanings existed at the origin. It is as if Heaney is aiming at reendowing language with this original pristine unity, as indeed does most poetic language try to restore "this primitive wholeness" In the case of Irish poetry, as Seamus himself tells us by the title of his essay, The Sense of Place is essential to Irish writers.

As he says on opening his essay: Just before this, he has said something of most vital interest to our subject: One is lived illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension" In the domain of the "illiterate" and "unconscious" here, we have seen how the child has "known and cherished" his place of birth, and when this is allied as in Oracle to a mythological truth, it becomes also a "learned literate and conscious" reality.

In an essay entitled The God in the Tree, the mythological ascendancy becomes more specific in that we may not only relate it to a universal Greek and classical universe, but also to the ancestral myths of Ireland. Heaney refers to Mad Sweeney in his essay, the mad Ulster king who will feature in his latest collection, Station Island; "a foliate head, another wood lover and tree-hugger, a picker of herbs and drinker of wells" Thus a natural boyhood feeling for trees reveals itself as also an integral part of the literary and mythological heritage, and there is as it were an osmosis between these two aspects.

That is, the mythopoeic transmutation has not really occured — the thing is very much itself, it is an initial step, in what will later become a much more elaborate and mature process. To make clearer what I mean, we have only to glance at the poem entitled The Bam from his first collection.

The ways of the possible a textual analysis of "gifts of rain" by Seamus Heaney

The child sees within the poorly lighted barn the sharp outline of impressively cutting objects: The final lines express what I wish to say by this distinctive form of perception: I lay face-down to shun the fear above. The two lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats". In Death of a Naturalist this experience of evil is seen also as a step beyond the mere reality of things. Expressed in childlike music, especially centred on the vowel "o" sound Seamus really recounts his tadpoles expeditions "The waver thick slobber of frogspawn that grew like clotted water".

He would fill "jampotfulls" and "watch until the fattening dots burst". At the end of the poem, the toads become "great slime kings" A very obvious degradation of the initial joy sets in "The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour". And the poem ends on a musically nostalgic echo of the earlier " o " sound: These two " o "s of rot and not are hard sounds, and claim to be ironically linked with the kn o t of the early lines, the cl o t, and the jamp o ts. Another poem of obvious childhood relevance is Mid-Term Break, on the death of his little brother, and here the experience is an account, anecdotal with less immanent sense of its inherent content of evil, for the event is evil.

In any case, to sum up here, this form of exploration in memory leads into a kind of dead end, the cul-de-sac of lost paradise; it is only in poems such as Personal Helicon, where his well gazing sets the darkness echoing, or his discovery of that door in The Forge, that the child engenders the creative imagination as an opening into a fertile transcendental world.

Evil is indeed that rank sourness in Death of a Naturalist remembered suddenly in the heat of Madrid "Stinks of the fishmarket rose like the reek off a flax-dam", or the "patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish bellies in flax-poisoned waters" Here political evil has the sudden remembered stench of childhood evil.

Studies on Seamus Heaney

The cultural, political heritage as the makings of the poet. In The Sense of Place he writes: We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable. Yet these primary laws of our nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories" This, taken from A Sense of Place, is not explicitly political, it does however imply politics. Seamus did not have to go far to "search for his political history" anyway; as in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, we can see history active at his frontdoor in this satirical portrait of the North.

There is another North too however, that ancestral history which he seeks in archeological places, in Scandinavia. As he says in The Tollund Man, "Out there in Jutland in the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, unhappy and at home" As a schoolchild brought up within a British governed province nourished on Gaelic literature he is part of that "divided mind" which is the legacy of every Irish writer indeed, but more so for the North.

Here, it is language rather than politics that enter into account; his poetry is fathered so to speak by a forked tongue. But my quest for definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape I was born into. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants" Interesting, this point about vowels and consonants!

The Romans Subjugated yearly under arches, Manumitted by parchments and degrees, My murex was the purple dye of lents On calendars all fast and abstinence. Memento homo quia pulvis es.

Seamus Heaney: the makings of the poet

I would kneel to be impressed by ashes, A silk friction, a light stipple of dust - I was under that thumb too like all my caste. One of the earth-starred denizens, indelibly, I sought the mark in vain on the groomed optimi: Let us, therefore, in our first formal approach to Gifts of Rain, forget about any miraculous atlantis of meaning, desirable as it may be, and concentrate on the waters and stepping stones of the text. Let us go forth and accept the risks and hazards of the journey, fording our reading not, like the man at the end of section I, our lives by sounding.

The 4 sections, moreover, are unequal in length. The first technical difficulty encountered is in counting the lines of section I: The counting of lines in the rest of the poem is easy:. At that level already we note a progression towards integration and regularity. Note that two-line stanzas are not traditional, and that 14 lines altogether cannot but evoke the length of a sonnet. Kinship, which could be read as a structural and thematic development of Gifts of Rain, is made of 6 sections of 6 quatrains each.

A three-line stanza is unsual, unless combined with a strict rhyme-scheme terza rima , or part of the sestet in a sonnet.

Studies on Seamus Heaney - Seamus Heaney: the makings of the poet - Presses universitaires de Caen

Let us review the most important ones, bearing in mind that the semantic cohesion, important as it is, has no place here. Their being scarce and irregular may sometimes confer a great force of emphasis to them:.

Texte intégral

Note, too, the positional importance of "ground" as last word of the final section. Some, as we shall see further on, have a major structural function; the first effect produced by them all, however, is to enhance the concatenation of the signifier, give form, substance and texture to the "verbal contraption" of the poem. A few examples will be enough to illustrate what is meant by concatenation and texture: What first claims our attention is the way in which the initial line shows forth a double mirror-effect, or phonological chiasmus.

This is the line:. They give the line its self-contained, cohesive structure a self-contained cohesiveness which, at another level, the syntactic enjambment denies , a sort of normal autonomy which bears upon the signifier [daun] as a double arch bears upon a central pillar. The architectural simile, already used, might serve again to indicate that a first occurrence of "ground" II, 12 constitutes a first intermediary pillar announcing the final closure of the all-encompassing arch.

Its effect is that of closure. It operates within three textual units, that of the line, that of the section, that of the whole poem.

Navigation menu

It can be summed up as follows:. The first is that the beginning of the poem is marked by a great phonological cohesiveness, which is maintained but becomes looser framing of line 1, of section I, of the text as a whole. The second is that, with end-rhymes, parallels and repetitions, each of the following three sections is related to the first one within a general pattern that confers on the poem some degree of formal unity or cohesiveness.

Such a conclusion may sound rather vague and limited in scope: For me the part played by section I is to give a figure to the impossible to the real upon which the three following sections are articulated as explorations of the ways of the possible. That form, here, is that of a short poem that resists integration and comprehension. At a first level this is shown in the breaking up of lines 2, 8 and 9.

At a second level, the phonological framing studied above, with the closure at the end " sound ing. Sound ings " ; the insistant, emphatic attempt at neatly enclosing the whole structure fails emphatically. S 1 and S 3, though different, are both descriptive of the rain; S 2 and S 4 have the same pronoun he as subject.

This parallel structure leaves out S 5, the elliptic, nominal, one-word final sentence: The first problem is that of the identity of the referent behind the subject he; to say that the referent is found later, at the beginning of section II, is no acceptable solution since we are dealing here with the formal and semantic cohesiveness of section I.

Not only is there no referent for he, but the rest of S 2 raises the problem of the identity of that referent further. Are we to understand, with "Still mammal", that he is soon to lose that quality and turn oviparous or something? Is "straw-footed" an original metaphor? The introduction of the notion of life, though, cannot but bring into the semantic effect of the metaphor that of death, and with the stepping-stones now flooded and invisible the fording of life by sounding means a blind, precarious progress over the waters of death.

Surely, as with the bogholes at the end of "Bogland" , "The wet centre is bottomless" 4 ; if the stones of the ford can be sounded, the rest is unsoundable, unfathomable, and, since it is limitless, impossible to comprehend. The dictionary is no great help: With life and death at stake, the elliptic final sentence is so vague and obscure that it can be said not only to defeat comprehension but to mark the end of the possibility of meaning and of representation.

It is the word upon which rests most of that paradoxical figure of the impossible presented by section I.

It is, in the last analysis, an addition which means the loss of everything. Here is the beginning of the description:. The metaphors are not merely ornamental and the choice of "uncastled" is not indifferent: The man is now part of an integrated harmonious natural landscape. The mirror of flooded fields is no longer broken, so that both ground and reflected sky "are running naturally among his arms". Closure and harmony are also formally signified by the first occurrence of "ground" in the chiasmatic structure analysed above, on the one hand; on the other by the sudden iambic regularity of the rhythm with which the description ends:.

Part 1 Time past They , their knowledge of Nature "their world-schooled ead " presence plenitude the iterative would line 2. Part 2 I, my Lack of knowledge "I cock my ear at an absence absence need, lack the modal would of vain desire line Continuity between the end of section II and the beginning of section III, if there is any, is less important that the articulation of the autobiographical narrative to the initial figure of the impossible.

Loss there is again, but loss accounted for, loss made bearable, loss experienced against a background of remembered happiness.

With Wordsworth, the poet could almost declare: Childhood was the time when fears could be eased because everything in Nature was meaningful and the elders knew how to decipher the messages of the rain and of the Moyola:. The structure of stanza 4, now taken as a unit of signification, gives form to the sense of severance that goes with the abrupt change in syntax and meaning:. Absence, ever so briefly, is given its unbearable vacant figure of speechlessness in the simple dash that follows it "absence --" , with something of the dissolution of all reference and all representation we noted about "Soundings", before it is related to the formulation of desire, and made to make sense:.

Absence is related to presence, death to life, kinship "the shared calling of blood" and filiation "my children". Though the dead are dead and cannot be summoned or questioned, their soft voices can still be heard "whispering by the shore". If "antediluvian lore" has been lost, there is no poignancy in that loss: Even if emotionally charged, like all allusions to his early childhood at Mossbawn 5 , what the question is actually about is felt to be apparently insignificant.

With the waters now gone, leaving behind them a mirror more lasting than the "pane of flood", meaning seems to have withdrawn as the signifier was becoming more insistent and proclaimed the solidity and self-containedness of the poetic structure: In section III, the narrative structure posits an original unity and presence in the past, succeeded in the present by loss and absence; closure is made possible because loss is euphemized, the poignancy of absence toned down, and it is formally achieved at the end when the narrative structure is taken up by the poetic structure.

The tawny gutteral wafer spells itself; Moyola is its own score and consort What is implied by the idea that the water spells its own name is no less than the bridging of the gap of language 7 between word and referent. Unity and self-containedness are further signified by the second "reflexive image": In the context of section IV, this is perhaps the dominant semantic effect of the metaphor of the Moyola as. History being, for Stephen Dedalus as well as for many Irish people, a nightmare from which they are trying to awake, this could be a dissolution Sexual union is first hinted at in line 3 because of the double meaning of "consort".

It finds its full development and expansion in the climactic final sentence of the poem:.

Neither is there any mention of the flood.

• Data Structures Using C
• Rituelle und kultische Elemente in der Aristophanischen Komödie (German Edition)
• Sex Crimes Chronicles - 28
• The Good Life: The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World
• La princesa en el paraíso (Deseo) (Spanish Edition)
• Home Reference eBook - The Encyclopedia of Homes