[In the following essay, Tillinghast assesses the political and artistic implications of the poems in Station Island and North.]

Some years ago when Seamus Heaney was rumored once again to have missed a close vote for the Nobel Prize in literature, Charlie Haughey, Ireland's taoiseach (prime minister), was quoted as having remarked: “We wuz robbed!” As Haughey's humorous use of sports-talk and the first-person plural pronoun suggests, Heaney's Nobel on some level belongs to Ireland as a whole. And now, with the cease-fire in Northern Ireland, his having been brought up Catholic in the Protestant-dominated province “positions” Heaney as the kind of writer to whom the Nobel committee likes to give its literature prizes.

But this positioning, this convenient fit between poetry and politics, is perhaps not so neat as much of the journalism I have been reading on the subject would have us believe. Not only is Heaney not a product of the Northern Ireland conflict, his is a sensibility that seeks to assuage (one of his favorite words) and to heal. It would not be true to say, as Auden wrote of Yeats, that “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” or that the conflict in his native province, as has been suggested, has significantly stimulated him as a writer. Unlike the early Auden, whose genius was sharpened by the revolutionary currents of the Thirties, Heaney would prefer, it seems to me, not to have lived in what his younger contemporary Eavan Boland has called “a time of violence.” On the other hand, if Heaney is seen as a symbol of rapprochement and healing, then the political symbolism of his Nobel Prize is brilliantly apt.

Under the Catholic, nationalist, pro-Gaelic Eamon De Valera, the Republic of Ireland, once liberated from British rule, pointedly distanced itself from the British side of its complex cultural history. The result has been a cultural narrowness, where the Church has banned books, kept divorce illegal, banned abortion. The tragic destruction of Dublin's Georgian architecture since the 1950s was aided by a sense that all signs of British domination were well got rid of.

Seamus Heaney has never evidenced that kind of cultural parochialism. He seems to have gleaned from his own reading and from his education at Queens University in Belfast a sense that the English literature tradition was his to do with what he chose. When he once, rightly, bristled at being placed in an anthology of British poetry, he averred that if he were going to be placed among the English poets, that would be another matter—defining his work in terms of the language rather than of a political entity. This is how he puts it in the 1975 collection, North, assessing what it was like to apprentice as a writer in Northern Ireland,

Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn't named it, the ministry of fear.

In the short poem “Holly,” from Station Island (1984), while the experience rendered in the poem comes straight out of an Irish childhood, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to marshall the full resources of English, both linguistic and cultural. It is one of many poems in which this poet struggles to reconcile the journey that has brought him from a farm in County Derry to his position as one of the most honored literary figures in the English-speaking world.

The remembered scene couldn't be homelier: a childhood Christmastime expedition in search of greenery to decorate the house, when “the ditches were swimming, we were wet / to the knees, our hands were all jags // and water ran up our sleeves.” Fast-forward to adulthood:

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,
and I almost forget what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.
I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,
a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall
cutting as holly and ice.

The poem is a lament for the intensity of childhood enthusiasms, even for childhood discomforts. The book he reaches for would be a substitute for those intensities. I find it striking that as a metaphor for the “cutting” sharpness he seeks, Heaney comes up with an image from Anglo-Saxon celebrations of war, the “shield-wall” familiar to readers of poems like “The Battle of Maldon.”

This is a literary heritage I fancy it would occur to few Irish poets to claim as their own. The thrust of the Irish nativist movement since Independence has been to recover a cultural heritage suppressed under English rule. Not many modern poets have taken the course of actually writing in Irish, but few, I think, would range so freely in the cultural territory of “the oppressor.” Even the Anglo-Irish Yeats looked for cultural references to the battles of Cuchulain or some other figure out of Irish myth. Heaney's counter-thrust finds a rough parallel in the poetry of Derek Walcott, who emerged in the Caribbean from another outpost of the former British Empire. The approach here has been to make free with one's linguistic heritage and not be programmatic about its origins. As opposed to many ideological approaches that come to mind, Heaney's way with the material may be seen as commonsensical and workmanlike.

“Making Strange,” from the same 1984 collection, again shows Heaney engaged in cultural mediation. Here the conflict transpires at first not within the poet, but in a triangular configuration involving two other people he brings together on his native turf:

I stood between them,
the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I'd brought him.

The language here is pure Heaney, with its well-rubbed, determinedly unabstract adjective, “tawny,” and its tight, masterly simile, “like the twang of a bowstring.” What other poet could set the scene so sure-handedly and with so little fuss?

It's easy to imagine the farmer scratching his head and rocking back and forth in his mud-spattered wellingtons, contemplating this sleek exotic his friend the poet has presented him with. Having set up the dramatic face-to-face between these two, Heaney leaves them for a moment and goes within. Or rather “a cunning middle voice / came out of the field across the road …” The voice's message goes right to the heart of the divided experience dramatized in “Holly” because it says “Be adept and be dialect … love the cut of this travelled one,” and calling forth the Old Testament's most memorable symbol of alienation, the voice says, “call me also the cornfield of Boaz.” Keats alludes to the story of Ruth and Boaz in “Ode to a Nightingale.” The immortal Bird's voice is “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

Elsewhere Heaney writes that in school he took on the Latin pen-name “Incertus,” to underscore his innate shyness. And here the middle voice is a voice of encouragement and departures, urging him on to

“Go beyond what's reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.”

Just as in Keats's poem, there is a bird here also—not the grand Romantic nightingale, though, but a common Irish bird of field and stone wall: “A chaffinch flicked from an ash,” bringing him out of his reverie,

                                                                      and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.

These lines make a distinction that is precise, unshowy, and cunning. He is the master of actions that bring two worlds together, enhancing them both, truly one who is “adept at dialect.” The poem stubbornly asserts the departures Heaney has earned for himself; but paradoxically it is the homely things of farm and field that he has been able to “make strange.”

As for the political ramifications of Heaney's middle voice, it is worth quoting from a short piece he wrote for the BBC periodical, The Listener, in 1971:

For some people in this [Northern Irish] community, the exercise of goodwill towards the dominant caste has been hampered by the psychological hoops they have been made to jump and by the actual circumstances of their lives within the state, British and all as it may have been. A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled.

Even granted that this was written for a British audience, what restraint, what dignified irony there is in this passage! While faulting the British majority for bullying the Irish minority, he evenhandedly acknowledges the “twists” in the psychology of the dominated caste. And note the use of “caste” itself, pointing out an inflexible social structure in a province where advancement for the Catholic Irish is all but impossible. Readers hoping for a passionate defender of the Republican cause were not going to find it in Heaney, whose sympathy was with the victims on both sides. And as he notes in “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” also from North, language itself, including his own, is one of the victims:

Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
“Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.”
“Where's it going to end?” “It's getting worse.”

Contemplating the ironic use of “sing” in this passage, one might consider its distance from Keats's nightingale and Yeats's golden bird in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Among the several reconciliations that concern Heaney is that between male and female, even within a single personality. In his 1978 essay “Yeats as an Example?” he sees such a blending taking place in Yeats toward the end of his life. On the one hand,

Yeats lies under Ben Bulben, in Drumcliff Churchyard, under that dominant promontory which I like to think of as the father projected into the landscape, and there is perhaps something too male and assertive about the poem that bears the mountain's name and stands at the end of the Collected Poems.

Heaney proposes as a more fitting conclusion the poem “Cuchulain Comforted,” written shortly before the death of Ireland's earlier Nobel Prize-winning poet. “It is a poem deeply at one with the weak and the strong of the earth”—and here one thinks of Heaney's own response to the Troubles—“full of a motherly kindness toward life, but also unflinching in its belief in the propriety and beauty of life transcended into art, song, words.”

In “The Harvest Bow,” a poem written about the same time he would have been writing the essay on Yeats, Heaney enunciates an artistic credo based on the Irish folk-craft of weaving crosses and lapel decorations out of wheat straw left over from the harvest. The first lines—“As you plaited the harvest bow / You implicated the mellowed silence in you”—introduce a “you” whose identity is never specified: his father or grandfather perhaps? In “Cuchulain Comforted” Yeats has his hero, “a man / Violent and famous” who “strode among the dead,” humble himself and sew a shroud for himself in the underworld. Heaney says nothing explicitly to indicate that the “you” is male, except that he has “lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks” and that he carries a stick, “Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes.” He makes with his practiced fingers “A throwaway love-knot of straw.”

Quietness, mellowness, love have been—in Heaney's lovely use of a latinate word for its etymological suggestions—“implicated,” or folded into, the harvest bow to the extent that it becomes a talisman: “I tell and finger it like braille, / Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.” The words are rich with connotations: that he can “tell” the object, likens it to a rosary; that he is “gleaning” something off it, shows that where its maker has reaped, he comes along behind like Ruth and picks up what remains, which is what it means to glean. Twentieth-century poetry is rich with objects used as sources of meaning: William Carlos Williams's red wheelbarrow, Elizabeth Bishop's toy horse and ballerina from “Cirque d'Hiver,” Robert Lowell's father's battered chair from “91 Revere Street,” the laundry in Richard Wilbur's “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” But I can think of no poem that uses an object more evocatively than “The Harvest Bow” does. Heaney can almost literally see into it:

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel …

This poet, “Incertus” no longer, even has the confidence to come right out—in defiance of conventional twentieth-century poetic practice—and draw an explicit meaning from the harvest bow, quoting from Coventry Patmore:

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

If the Nobel Prize committee registered the message of this “frail device” when it linked Seamus Heaney with the frail but hopeful cease-fire in Northern Ireland, then its decision was a wise one indeed.