North is a major accomplishment, a book-length sequence of lyrics which exploits the metaphor of possession more fully than any other Irish poet has done. The poems are richly autobiographical, yet [Seamus Heaney] consistently weaves the particulars of his life into a mythic frame; he has evolved a unique species of political poetry which refers at once to the current Irish "troubles" and to the human situation generally. One would have to invoke Pablo Neruda's Heights of Macchu Picchu for a parallel. Consequently, I think Heaney is among the finest poets writing today in English, and I shall examine his work to date to support my large claim for him. His poetry has evolved with remarkable integrity from the beginning. He has drawn ever widening concentric rings around the first few themes he circled; his language has grown steadily more dense, more resonant, more singularly his own with each successive volume. And now, at the height of his powers, one awaits each new book with the same expectancy afforded Yeats and Eliot in their middle years.

Heaney comes from the north, from Derry, and his first book conjured the pastoral topography of his childhood on the farm. One should remember, of course, that even Theocritus and Virgil did not write for country folk, to put it mildly; rather, they evinced the atmosphere of rural life for the benefit of cultivated city dwellers who would appreciate the subtle texture of meaning embedded in their eclogues. This is the pastoral tradition, and Heaney's Death of a Naturalist … fits into it. He was in fact a farm boy, and he writes from immediate experience; but his craft was learned in the city, at Queens University, Belfast, where he enjoyed the tutelage of Philip Hobsbaum, the poet-critic, among others. Hobsbaum's bias toward lean, physical language wedded to intellectual toughness shows up in Heaney's early work, as in the first lines of "Digging."… Heaney furls us into his vision with lines admitting no abstraction; his experience thrusts itself upon us directly, and we cannot doubt "the cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge."… Like Wordsworth, who says in The Prelude that he was "fostered alike by beauty and by fear," this poet lays claim to a similar parentage. (pp. 100-01)

Death of a Naturalist is an apprentice volume, one in which a young poet tests the limits of his abilities, tries out various verse forms and metrical patterns. But if there are echoes in these poems, they are well assimilated. A major poet often steps into his own clearing from the start, and Heaney does this here. The controlled irony of "The Early Purges," with its adumbration of things to come in later volumes, shows this young writer possessed of a maturity beyond his years…. None of the sentimental flurries characteristic of Yeats as a novice can be found in Heaney; he writes with a stern grip on reality. (pp. 102-03)

The boyhood evoked in these poems is tinged with violence … but not blotted out by it. (p. 103)

Family deaths, the persistence of old ghosts, hunting expeditions, potato diggings, and the normal preoccupations of a life in County Derry provide material for Death of a Naturalist; yet the loveliest poems in the book are those addressed to Marie Heaney, the poet's wife. "Valediction" sets the standard…. Not an ounce of fat detracts from the poem's swift statement and hard, clear edges. It is a minor classic. (pp. 103-04)

"Personal Helicon" concludes the book, and it is as good as anything Heaney has written since. It pulls into a single locus the varied themes of Death of a Naturalist, and it may be thought of as a poetic credo, a guide to this poet's personal iconography. Heaney's version of Helicon, the stream which ran from Parnassus and the source of inspiration to ancient poets, is the well on his farm…. The well of memory, with its slippery sides and musky odors, goes down "so deep you saw no reflection in it." Like a poem, it "gave back your own call / With a clean new music in it." This world of dangling roots and slime, of soft mulch and scary ferns, recalls the greenhouse poems of Theodore Roethke, with whom Heaney has much in common at this stage in his development. Here is concrete poetry with a vengeance, what Roethke called "that anguish of concreteness." (p. 105)

With Door into the Dark…. Heaney opens a new vein of subject matter and works his way slowly, at times painfully, toward the mature style fully realized in North. There is the expected carry-over from Death of a Naturalist; anything that good deserves carrying-over! The folksy, pastoral side begins to dwindle, although poems like "The Outlaw" …, "The Thatcher," and "The Wife's Tale" are a fine addition to earlier poems like "Churning Day" and "The Diviner." Heaney's geniality, compassion, and impish wit run through these poems like a watermark. There is great precedence in British poetry for this kind of poem, of course, and this poet adds a few fresh lyrics to this tradition (which reaches back well beyond Wordsworth, who comes to mind as a master of this genre). Heaney is matched among his British/Irish contemporaries writing this kind of romantic-pastoral verse only by R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. What interests me especially about Door into the Dark is Heaney's discovery of natural symbols in rural life—which gives his work a new resonance; also, I am intrigued by the sudden compression of style, the tough intellectual sinew flexed in phrase after phrase, and the laser-beam focus of his vision: the image is seared indelibly on the reader's mind.

Heaney pushes his style toward a spareness, an absence of rhetoric and normal syntactical connective tissue, which culminates in the granite style of Wintering Out…. The style [of Door into the Dark] recalls Hopkins, one of Heaney's dominant ancestors, with its heavy alliteration, "sprung" rhythm, and the tightly packed imagery. A tendency toward symbolism is also in evidence…. (pp. 105-06)

"Description is revelation"—a phrase from North—illumines the technique behind many of the poems in Door into the Dark, where each act of description becomes a repossession of experience. Often Heaney's tone, as in "Girls Bathing, Galway 1965," is whimsical, using bathos as a common trope; but one finds a seriousness underlying even this light poem. (p. 107)

The remaining poems of Door into the Dark are closely autobiographical and anecdotal…. "Elegy for a Stillborn Child" stands out among these more personal poems for its startling analogies…. (p. 108)

The most important poem in the book, I believe, comes last "Bogland" concludes Door into the Dark and lends additional meaning to the title, for the Irish bogs (which preserve generations of Irish civilization intact) may be thought of as openings into the dark of history. The theme of this poem is the literal repossession of the ground, a theme which becomes central in Heaney's next two books…. The suggestive possibilities of bogland seem unbounded, and Heaney knows this; but he refuses to go much beyond a literal representation until the last line: "The wet centre is bottomless." As a symbol of the unconscious past which must be unfolded, layer by layer, the bog image will prove indispensable. For this reason, "Bogland" is a watershed poem in the Heaney corpus. After it, one rereads all the poems coming before it with a new lens, realizing that this poet's vision of historical sequence reaches beyond the pastoral-folk tradition. The theme of digging, registered twice in Death of a Naturalist (potato digging, then), moves into a rich light now, acquiring new potency from the symbolic force of the bogland metaphor.

In Wintering Out … Heaney was quick to pick up the end note of Door into the Dark to mine the ore still locked inside this vein. Ireland's archaelogical sites yield poems like "Bog Oak," "Anahorish," and "Toome," and Heaney's research into Danish excavations results in "The Tollund Man" and "Nerthus." These poems exploit the metaphoric plunge backward through time tenaciously. As one delves in bogland, history peels away like the layers of an onion; one falls through shelves of civilizations often represented by odds and ends…. (pp. 109-10)

The poems in part 1 of this collection all reconstruct historical instances or offer a meditation on some fact of the lost past. "Servant Boy," for example, draws a simple portrait of a lower-class child…. The poet clearly identifies with this "jobber among shadows." Placed where it is, in the sequence of bog poems, "Servant Boy" stands out as a reminder of Heaney's breadth of vision, his empathetic range. The poem recollects the old feud between invading noblemen and the indigenous servant classes; it helps to explain the present Irish conflict by pointing to centuries of accrued resentment. There is nothing overtly political about "Servant Boy," of course. Heaney stays rather far away from engagement of this sort until North; but one senses the gathering storm. (p. 110)

Part 2 of Wintering Out moves away from the wide historical rummage of part 1 into the private arena of one man's life; I prefer the poems in this section on the whole, no doubt because they are less dense, less tortuously argued. (p. 112)

[North] represents this poet's latest repossession of history, of his tongue, of himself. There is a new directness here, indicated by the title; but Heaney loses none of the suggestive power of controlled ambiguity seen in earlier volumes. His "north" is not just Northern Ireland. The tone of the book rings like a struck anvil; it is stark, cold, brisk as the northerly themes and diction which suffuse these poems. The poet-as-scop (Old English minstrel) entertains us with our foibles, with the past (we identify with his past) reenacting itself on the native ground. The setting is specifically Irish, of course, but the subject matter obtains for all of us, in any country of the present. His theme, that love is what redeems the past and makes living possible in today's violent world, is set out in the two dedicatory poems, "Sunlight" and "The Seed Cutters," both of which evoke the idyll of remembrance.

Once again, Heaney uses a two-part division, working in the same overall pattern used so effectively in Wintering Out. In the first part, beginning and ending with poems referring to Antaeus, the mythical giant whose strength derived from contact with the ground, Heaney investigates the burden of Irish history once more: the history of possession and repossession of the island by various tribes. The magnificent "Belderg" begins with another of the poet's bog poems…. I find these bog poems much more easily comprehensible, but not less dense or complex, than similar poems in Wintering Out. (pp. 116-17)

The majestic title poem "North" itself focuses on Viking invasions…. Here, the "ocean-deafened voices" of the past speak to him, explaining how "Thor's hammer swung / to geography and trade, / thick-witted couplings and revenges." The violence foisted upon man by man is rooted in economic necessity and irrational desires. The "longship's swimming tongue" says, "Lie down / in the word-hoard … compose in darkness." This Heaney does, consummately. (p. 117)

"Ocean's Love to Ireland" shifts to the Elizabethan colonial possession of Heaney's island, and its theme is summed up in the last line—my principal theme in this essay—"The ground possessed and repossessed." Heaney envisions the English-Irish relation in explicit sexual terms, making literal the metaphor of "possession." "Act of Union," which follows shortly, pursues the analogy further, making the poet's beloved into "the heaving province where our past has grown."… A deeply plunging terror underlies this poem, one of Heaney's memorable achievements. The political implications suggest that no treaty will salve the wound inflicted by England on this "ruined maid" of Ireland. To quote William Empson, "It is the pain, it is the pain endures."

Pain, in all its sinister permutations, obsesses Heaney in part 2 of North…. [These poems] must be read qua poems, not political tracts. They register one sensitive man's response to an impossible historical situation, a country "where bad news is no longer news."… The pastoral element has disappeared; the pastoral whimsicality of some of the earlier work fades as the poet offers a stinging new version of reality, almost without comment save in the implicit irony of such lines as "Whatever you say, say nothing."

The last sequence of seven poems is called "Singing School," a title summoning the ghost of Yeats; it's theme may be called the growth of the poet, "fostered alike by beauty and by fear." (pp. 119-20)

"Fosterage," the penultimate poem of this final sequence, pictures Heaney "with words / Imposing on my tongue like obols" (silver coins). Its grand first line, "Description is revelation," a quotation, could easily serve as an epigraph to Heaney's oeuvre. In his poems description gives way, continually, to evaluation, to revelation. The poet becomes seer, "a transparent eyeball" in Emerson's great phrase. He becomes everything and nothing, fixing his eye on the object, transforming it. "Fosterage" ends with a tribute to Hopkins, who sought the inscape of each object, who "discerned / The lineaments of patience everywhere." Hopkins, of course, continues as the dominant ancestor for Heaney, the source, the starting point of his own angle of vision. But "Fosterage" remains a preface to poetry, not the thing itself, a prelude to "Exposure," the last poem of "Singing School" and North as a whole.

"Exposure" is, again, a meditation of the poet's responsibility in a desperate historical moment. It is a poem about withdrawal, deeply autobiographical; for Heaney has himself in a sense withdrawn into Eire, the south. He lives, now, with his wife, Marie, and children in a stone house in Dublin, looking out to Joyce's fabled Martello tower from Ulysses. He is in his own tower of imagining there. "Exposure," being the last poem in a sequence tracing the growth of a poet, should be triumphal. That it lacks this note, for the most part, points not to the poet's failure but to a particular kind of success. Heaney's tower is not Yeats's. His escape is not into the artifice of eternity but into the recesses of his own solitude…. "How did I end up like this?" he wonders, thinking of "the anvil brains of some who hate me / As I sit weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia." A wonderful self-irony permeates "responsible" here as Heaney acknowledges the need for detachment and engagement at the same time. Yeats could manage this combination, of course; indeed, the cutting edge of his best poems can be described as the point where these seemingly incompatible realms touch. And Heaney's greatness in "Exposure" derives from a similar balance of conflicting needs…. Without independence and withdrawal, a poet's work becomes infected with the langauge of propaganda; but this independence depends, paradoxically, on an intimacy with his environment that has made Heaney Ireland's successor to Yeats.

"Ulster was British," Heaney writes in "Singing School," "but with no rights on / The English lyric." He claims for himself, now, the rights denied to his countrymen at an earlier date. He has turned aggressor, repossessing the ancient role of scop, and his poems have become, progressively, a private reclamation—a protest—and a personal reclamation of a heritage buried under layers of earth and language. Heaney digs with his pen, exhuming a past which informs and enriches the present and which has designs upon the future. His delving in the philological soil has yielded a poetry of the first order already; indeed, Seamus Heaney is a major poet writing today at the height of his powers. (pp. 121-23)

Jay Parini, "Seamus Heaney: The Ground Possessed" (copyright, 1980, by Jay Parini), in The Southern Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, January, 1980, pp. 100-23.