It is a mistake … to think of Heaney as merely a descriptive poet, endowed with unusual powers of observation. From the first his involvement with landscape and locale, with the physical world, has been both more personal and more remarkable in its implications than any mere act of observation and record could be. (p. 173)

For Heaney, the natural world must be accepted for what it is—heavy, palpable in its irrefutable bulk, in its almost intractable forms. He paints it in thick oils, rarely allowing (except in the delightful 'Lovers on Aran') for light, fire, air, for what the poet has himself called 'the sideral beauty' of things. (p. 174)

Heaney's sense of landscape combines erotic and religious impulses. He responds with a deep sense of the numinous in the natural world, and reads a scene as if it were governed by feminine, sexual principles. (pp. 174-75)

In Heaney's imagination, which is synthetic and osmotic (in the sense that ideas and intuitions seep across thin membranes to blend with each other), this sense of landscape and the natural world extends in its implications into his treatment of another major obsession—Irish history and mythology. The implications of his vision of landscape are that nature, for all its processes, is a static form shaped by feminine forces, worked on by energetic, crafty makers, diggers, ploughmen. Irish history too reveals itself in his poetry as a landscape, feminine, protective, preservative, in which man's artifacts and deeds are received in an embracing comprehension. Love for this deity induces dark fantasy and nightmare, drives to deeds of desperation. A more strictly historical intelligence than Heaney's moves to distinguish nature and history. Heaney, dominated by a sense of nature's powers, reads history, language and myth as bound up with nature, with territory and with landscape. (p. 175)

Heaney's sense of the self and of the poetic imagination is markedly similar to his apprehension of nature and history. He himself has remarked, indeed, that in Ireland 'our sense of the past, our sense of the land and perhaps even our sense of identity are inextricably interwoven'. So the imagination has its dark bog-like depths, its sediments and strata from which images and metaphors emerge unbidden into the light of consciousness…. Such a sense of self as bound up with, and almost indistinguishable from, the dense complex of Irish natural and historical experience, obviously allows Heaney to explore Ulster's contemporary social and political crisis through attending to his own memories and obsessions. Ireland and her goddess of territory shaped unchangeable patterns in the prehistories of landscape and of the self. History and experience lay strata upon strata, and the poet takes his soundings. So poems such as 'The Other Side' and 'A Northern Hoard' consider the poet's personal life, his recollections and nightmares, as moments when Irish reality becomes explicit in himself. (pp. 180-81)

The formal development of Heaney's poetry relates to [his] passive sense of life. His first poems, rich in texture and heavy with the weight of language and rhythm, established a vision of reality as a palpable intractable absolute from which the poet, the conscious self, must accept what gifts may come. His recent poetry is more spare, the line less loaded with poetic and linguistic ore; these poems are moments of revelation when the past, the land and the imagination permit insight into their packed depths. Where Heaney's early poems attempted to comprehend the whole of their experiences in crowded, apparently unselective, sensuously inclusive poetic organisms, his recent poems seem the minimal revelations of a reality that exists at the beck and call of no man—not even of the poet.

An impression of poetic and imaginative humility is one of these poems' initially attractive features. Yet it is this very humility, which one suspects in fact may be a quietist acquiescence, a passivity before the goddess, that this reader finds unsatisfying in Heaney's work, confining its emotional and dramatic possibilities. Heaney has in a singularly beautiful phrase defined a poem as 'a completely successful love act between the craft and the gift'. He clearly thinks that a poem comes up out of the dark, almost unbidden, organically oozing up through capillary channels pressured by incomprehensible forces. He contrasts this to what he considers a 'more Yeatsian view of poetry':

When he talked about poetry, Yeats never talked about the 'ooze' or 'nurture'. He always talked about the 'labour' and the 'making' and 'the fascination of what's difficult'.

                                        (pp. 181-82)

But for Yeats 'labour' was as much the arduous task, between poems, of remaking over and over again his poetic, imaginative self, as it was concern with rhyme and rhythms. For Yeats the self was not an intractable absolute, but a field of possibilities among which the poet is forced to choose, the drama of the choice itself being charged with poetic opportunity.

There is evidence in Heaney's work that such knowledge of the poetic self has not yet been achieved. The poems often give the impression that Heaney has not decided fully what his feelings about the matter of his poetry could be. Choice of either a consistent or a dramatically inconsistent stance within a poem is avoided in an indirection which, however admirable it may be with regard to journalistic exploitation of Ulster's present troubles, renders much of his recent work gnomic and, in some instances, emotionally ambiguous to the point where feeling itself drains from the poems. At moments Heaney himself seems aware that his poetry avoids choices, since he occasionally dramatises himself in positions of hesitating indecision. 'The Forge', for example, ends with the poet still at the door of the forge. (pp. 182-83)

His recent poetry has therefore seemed at times a remarkably skilled, compelling poetic organisation of his indecision, lacking emotional range and drama.

The emotions that I detect running underground through Heaney's work, emotions that have surfaced only once or twice as the subjects of poems, are feelings of revulsion and attraction to violence, pain and death. These are often implicit in the poet's images where empathetic identifications with victims' shame or with oppressors' sadistic sensations are persistent features. (p. 183)

In one poem, 'Summer Home', Heaney allows such feelings as sadistic cruelty and masochistic ambivalence about pain to serve as the explicit matter of his work. The poem is one of his finest so far. Here the poet knows what his feelings are, recognises they are bitter and dark, yet risks making a poem of them…. Such a poem emerges not from the impersonal unconscious but from the pain and complexity of experience which the poet has accepted as his proper territory. This poem is no corpse from the bog, no gift from a dark goddess passively accepted by a craft-conscious artist. (p. 185)

Terence Brown, "Four New Voices: Poets of the Present," in his Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (© Terence Brown, 1975), Rowman and Littlefield, 1975, pp. 171-213.∗