Anju Bala Agrawal

Irish Folk Traditions In The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

 

Heaney was born and brought up in Ulster region. In his poetry he has concentrated upon graphic and imagistic descriptions of the Northern Irish countryside of his youth. Not only the physical aspect of the region but religious, literary, political, social aspects along with various and abundant sensuous phenomena also crowded into his verse. As a poet he surrendered to his native land and culture. He directed his poetic gaze as far into the depths of his cultural heritage as possible. As a whole Heaney's poetry seems informed by the principle of excavation. He dug his personal past, his language and perhaps most important, the cultural past of his country. Heaney comes from Derry, a province of Northern Ireland. Born and brought up in a family of peasants, Heaney was well versed in folk customs and ways. Now, "This general spirit of reverence towards the past helped Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer; he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its custom and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters." (Morrison 31)

Impressed by Evans' example of thatching, churning, ploughing, forging, cattle dealing and other activities, he wrote poems which describe these folk ways of life as he wanted to be faithful to his rural experience. His first book conjured the pastoral topography of his child hood on the farm. The first poem "Digging" is a fusion of personal folkway and literary memory. It presents physical strength and working capability of rural people. The poet affirms his kinship with the humble diggers of the ancestral turf. He presents his vision of his native farm, and we cannot doubt "the cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cut of an edge." Here we are reminded of Wordsworth's claim "fostered alike by beauty and fear," this poet lays claim to a similar parentage.
 
"Churning" and "Follower" also lay stress on use of physical power of folks. They also present the folk custom of churning. In 'churning' after an extended, exhausting 'bout' which leaves them bloodied, yellow curd' is transformed into 'heavy and rich, cogualated sunlight.' This act of churning is an age old custom as Heaney tells how his mother:

that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached.
Hands blistered. Cheeks and clothes were spattered
with flabby milk.
Where finally gold flecks
began to dance.
(D N, p.9)
"At a Potato Digging" reminds us of the Great Hunger of 1845-49.
After 1798 Rebellion and the 1800 Act of Union, Irish population was totally dependent on the potato crop. Heaney must have how each member  
Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.
(Field Work, p.40)

His fearful, fertile imagination brings forth familiar evil objects — the magpie, the toad, the rat — and leads him to interpret their natural activities as sinister maneuverings. Here the reference to magpie presents a folk belief. It is said of magpie that 'one brings sorrow two bring joy.' In "The Harvest Bow", Heaney describes the age old Irish folk custom of harvest.

Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
(Field Work, p.58)

Harvest knots, when twisted out of the ripe straw of the harvest, seem formerly to have been as true love tokens. Now-a day, they are worn merely as buttonholes for the harvest fair. Thus Heaney has given a new life and freshness to quite a few folk ways and beliefs of the people and thereby he has enriched his poetical works. In this revival of folk customs and enrichment of his poetic ventures, Heaney stands supreme as a poet of the people at a regional as well as at a universal level. Other Irish poets have also described Ulster but Heaney is different from them due to the archetypal dimension of his poetic involvement with Irish culture. This is more evident and more transcendent in poems about peat bogs of Ire and Jutland and the treasures and horrors that they have preserved. It starts with "Bogland" in Door into the Dark, continues with "The Tollund Man" in Wintering Out and culminates in a series of poems about figures preserved by the bog in North, his fourth volume.

Here it is appropriate to know the present condition of Ulster . In the summer of 1969, violence broke out in Northern Ireland. It filled the courtyards of Heaney's world with suffering and hatred. As the grim situation became grimmer in Heaney's Ulster , his poetry took a different shape. Due to conflict, there came a feeling of bitterness in Heaney. Heaney has depicted this bitterness in his third volume Wintering Out. An example is quoted here:

This morning from the dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a center of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade....
Is there a life before death?
That chalked up
On a wall downtown.
Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup
We hug our little destiny again.
(Wintering Out)

In North (1975), Heaney pulled all the threads together and in order to approach the appaling present, he found the distancing effect of history. Drawing images from different parts of Northern European experience, he describes the violence on his home ground.

Not only cultural, political or historical aspects but even the language of Ulster region has been used in Heaney's poetry. His search for broader cultural and historical roots is intensely portrayed in Wintering Out. Several of the poems such as "Bog Oak", "Anahorish", "Broaghe" and "A New Song" find traces of the Irish language surviving in Northern Irish place names that could open a door into that dark. Being an Irishman, Heaney always resents England 's centuries-long effort to take away his culture and especially his language. Inspite of imposition of English, some of the old words survive and they are resonant with the old ways. Heaney's "soundings" for "antediluvian lore" is presented in poems like "Gifts of Rain", "A Northern Hoard" and "The Tollund Man". They help him comprehend Northern Ireland 's present nightmare.

The situation in Ulster plays a large role in the poems of Station Island. Though Heaney apologizes in one for "my timid circumspect involvement" and in another explains, I have no mettle for the angry role," he cannot for long, as an Ulsterman, take his eyes off the victims on both sides. He acknowledges with bewilderment that in a no-win situation, the poet's duty is to register compassion, not partisanship. In Seeing things, the poem "The Settle Bed" shows political possibilities of Ulster as a settle bed is a very heavy thing, "a very Ulster , rural thing, a burdensomely heavy inheritance".

Thus Heaney's poetry is deeply embedded in the traditions of Irish writing. With its flashes of contemporary intelligence and language it constantly surprises the reader. The way Heaney effortlessly weds these has created a formidable and distinct poetic voice. Heaney is a man of the people who has never forgotten his roots. He is a man, who, on the one hand, negotiates with the paths of the King's own English, the siren call of the dominant American idiom. On the other hand, he is alleged to his own Irish language and customs, even as he has become a citizen of the wide world beyond Derry.

 

Works Cited

Evans, Estyn, Irish Folk Ways, London : Routledge, 1957.
Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
…………Door into the Dark. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
…………Wintering Out. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
…………North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
…………Field Work. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Kavangh, Patrick, The Green Fool, London : Penguin, 1975.
Morrison, Black, Contemporary Writers, London ; Metheun & Co. Ltd.,1921.
Parker,Michael, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet, Seamus Heaney with The Economist, Parker Parker Vol. 319, June 22, 1991.
Flanagan, T.P., Interview with Michael Parker, 27 November, 1985. Qtd. in  Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993.