SOURCE: Deane, Seamus. “Powers of Earth and Visions of Air.” In Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit, edited by Catharine Malloy and Phyllis Carey, pp. 27-33. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Deane connects the political aspects of Heaney's poetry with definitions of Ireland as both cultural and geographic entities.]

Since his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Seamus Heaney has been much concerned with deaths of various kinds. His life as a writer has almost exactly coincided with the most recent period of crisis in Northern Ireland, and the degeneration of that rancid statelet over the past twenty years has provided enough violent killings to deepen a preoccupation that was already there in the early work. In Heaney's poetry, as in the political world that subsists with it, there is a need to possess or to repossess a territory that is always there in its specific actuality and yet evades all attempts to seize and hold it in one stabilizing grasp.

It has often been observed that Heaney's work—especially the first four volumes, including Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975)—has a remarkably large vocabulary for earth, especially earth in a state of deliquescence, earth mixed with water. Mud, slime, mould, silt, and slicks are words that note the ambiguity of the ground itself; they appear in those man-made workings that Heaney endlessly explores, in trenches, drains, pits, wells and furrows. These in turn belong to particular kinds of territory—fens, bogs, loanings, keshes—and all of these are finally embedded in political and religious division of the land: baronies, parishes, counties, and parklands. Even the local place-names are seduced into their alluvial origins. To name a place is to pronounce the kind of ground it occupies; to fail to pronounce the name properly is to fail to possess it truly, to be foreign. This devotion to the ground and its names, the constant ascent from original slime to the nominations of geography and history, provides Heaney's poetry with a highly complex sonar architecture in which vowels and consonants dispute between themselves for an equilibrium that will allow to each its separate function and yet acknowledge for both their interdependence. The vowel, especially the vowel O, is originary: but it cannot speak the emptiness it represents without the consonantal surround. Looms and honeycombs, seeds splitting into root systems, interconnected deltas of archaeological remains, develop their ramifications around these gaping open ground vowels, the eyes, sores, valves and wounds that are the characteristic marks of the creature who is the ultimate victim of and possessor of the ground—the buried corpse.

In Wintering Out and in North, more than in any previous volume, Heaney found a way to make the ground speak in a human voice. The act of ventriloquism by which he made the Viking dead speak for the contemporary victims of violence in Ireland was a brilliant stroke—it enabled to a higher degree than before the tone of reverence and piety that had been and has continued to be the most notable aspect of Heaney's mode of address to his subject. The violence of the actions that had produced these sacrificial victims was only partly muted. By deflecting it to these archaeological remains, he could brood on it without risking that pornographic observation of atrocity which is so frequently found in the reportage of political crises. More importantly, though, it brought him back to the inexhaustible trope of origin (since the violence is, in a sense, originary, prehistoric) and death as manifested in the earth itself. The territory now assumes yet another vocabulary—of souterrain, flint, and hoard—the words of archaeology that support and reproduce the words of farming and cultivation. A digging is now both a cultivation of the ground and an exploration of it. The ground is never firm; like the bog, with its moss and peat and its aqueous nervous system, it absorbs and preserves the dead it receives, making them like itself but allowing them to retain their own identity, an embrace of vowel and consonant. For Heaney, this is a linguistic as well as a historical and political drama, an actual place in time, geography intersecting history, in and through which he can gaze at the nub, node, or center his poetry craves.

For all the consolations Heaney's poetry is supposed to offer, it is, in truth, unconsoling. Its evocation of tradition, rural landscape, folk custom and deep historical time in tones that bespeak healing, annealment, reverence and peace is powerful indeed. Yet the quest for a center, for what he calls an “omphalos,” is darkly stimulated by his recognition that the idea of a center is fictive. The tree that he remembers from his childhood as part of the garden hedge has been cut down, and in the eighth and last poem of the sequence called “Clearances” (from The Haw Lantern, 1987), he writes of the empty source it has become:

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source …

Finally it has, marvelously, become

                                        a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

“Ramifying” is the key word here. As Heaney's poetry has changed, the thick trellises of earth and water have become more and more etherealized, as he dwells more and more somberly on that ultimate emptiness which death, like that of his mother and of the several victims of political violence, commemorated particularly in poems such as “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “Casualty” and “Triptych” (all in Field Work, 1979), make more acute. The tree that is cut down in the eighth poem of “Clearances” is anticipated in the immediately preceding sonnet, which ends with a similarly emptied space in which cries, not a tree, are felled. Ultimately, everything that has a physical actuality is translated into a voice. Silence is the voice of emptiness.

The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

Heaney's poetry is an attempt to voice that pure emptiness, to put the tongue in that O, the vowel that is the precondition of speech and that is altered by it. In North, he found a way to figure this issue in the opposition between Antaeus, the hugger of the ground, from which came his strength, and Hercules, who defeats Antaeus by lifting him off the ground into the air. The elemental territories are, of course, incorporated in this figure; earth and water vie with air and fire. It is Heaney's emblem for his won version of his development as a writer. He asks a severe question here. Is the emptiness actual or is it a virtual absence that produces a real poetry? Conversely, if it is a real absence, is the poetry that engages with it merely virtual? The terms in which he conducts this investigation are recognizably ones that recur in Irish poetry, particularly in this century. It is in Station Island (1984) that Heaney opens the debate into a series of encounters that take place at Lough Derg, a traditional site of pilgrimage in Ireland since early medieval times and a place of literary pilgrimage for a number of writers before him—William Carleton, Patrick Kavanagh, Denis Devlin, and Sean O'Faoláin.

All of these, in their different ways, represented Lough Derg as a place of ancestral faith, profoundly disturbing to the secular modern spirit with which they had become imbued. It is, in Heaney's terms, an Antaean place visited by a Herculean sensibility. Yeats is the great poet in whose work this debate had been most dramatically staged. His folk Ireland and his occult worlds were constantly coalescing to form an alternative to the modern world of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish enlightenment and its degenerate offspring, the modern secular world of the twentieth century. He too was intent on achieving an act of repossession out of a series of dispossessions. The territory of Ireland and the realm of magic were dissolved into one another in an attempt to assert an originary and blessed quality that had disappeared in a world without the aura of memory, without the charisma of the spiritual. This is all part of the traditional debate between the metropolitan and the regional community, with the latter now claiming that it possesses a form of knowledge not subordinate but superior to the rational knowledge produced by the metropolis. Regions, thus conceived, regard themselves and are regarded as the habitat of the instinctual, the irrational, or the nonrational. The attractions of this form of the debate were too much for Yeats. He sought to sacralize the territory of Ireland in order to ratify his notion of the Irish as an autonomous and antimodern community. This is the most powerful form of conservative nationalism, partly because it is based on a critique of the colonial power as a degenerate version of civilization. To that extent, it served Yeats well; the political situation in Europe in the first three decades of this century encouraged such views, although it did not often see such poetry elicited by them.

Since then, poetry in Ireland has, in its more remarkable manifestations, sought to reconstitute the Yeatsian version of culture. Yeats found all his versions of origin were complicit with violence. So too, from a quite different version, does Thomas Kinsella. Heaney rewrites the issue by attributing to his version of origin this pure emptiness. When the emptiness speaks, it speaks of violent death, but is distinct from it. The act of poetry is a Herculean effort to lift off from the old Antaeus-like hugging of the holy and violent ground into the realm of air and fire, the zone of vision, not merely the dry air of rational enlightenment. Heaney's later poetry is full of subtle slicings that confirm this distinction. He does not move from the regional to the metropolitan. The quizzical relationship between these two is of interest to him; but it is too limiting. He wants the powers of earth to give him sufficient liftoff to carry him into the regions of the air. In The Haw Lantern, there is a poem called “Mud Vision” about an “appearance”—of a sort frequent in Ireland, although usually in the form of the Virgin—that transforms a ruined gable wall into a great mud rose window. The enchantment stays for a while; then it disappears and the media begin their explanations. The community gives its trust to these and betrays itself.

Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,
Our one chance to know the incomparable
And dive to a future. What might have been origin
We dissipated in news. The clarified place
Had retrieved neither us nor itself—except
You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us
Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and                                                                                                              estranged,
Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.

That is only the most recent of a number of missed visionary opportunities. The poem “Exposure” (in North) is another notable example; in that instance, the poet misses the “comet's pulsing rose” because he had been listening to the rational or rationalizing explanations of his friends, attempting to account for the political crisis and for Heaney's ascribed or proscribed role within it. Listen to reason and you'll miss the vision, especially the vision that belongs to the air but is constituted of the material of the earth.

One has to be careful, therefore, with Heaney's invocations, in Station Island and elsewhere, of his mentors—whether Carleton or Joyce, Wordsworth or Dante or the name not mentioned, the emptiness at the heart of the list: Yeats. In effect, he is asking them for no specific guidance; he is really asking them to let him go, let him be free. The Irish mentors in these poems, Joyce especially, talk like Heaney. They are occasions for self-endorsement, to go ahead “and fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency.” Immediately after the Joycean encounter that closes the central sequence in Station Island, Heaney takes his own advice and becomes Sweeney, the legendary Irish king who was changed into a bird and is famous for his madness and his poetry. (It was Flann O'Brien who had most memorably commemorated Sweeney before Heaney's version, Sweeney Astray, 1983.) The cleric who had changed Sweeney into a bird played, unwittingly, the stern role of a Heaney mentor. He rebuked him into poetry by releasing him from the ground of history, from the imprisonment threatened by the competing allegiances of Irish experience:

he opened my path to a kingdom
of such scope and neuter allegiance
my emptiness reigns at its whim.

That is Heaney's way of making history, especially Irish political and literary history, consort with that pure emptiness, that blank and fictive center that is the heart of his desire. An allegiance that is neuter is a fidelity without an object of faith commensurate with its strength. As Sweeney Redivivus, Heaney looks for it in moments when the given, that which is there, is suddenly released from its congealment in the actual. A cave painting of a drinking deer is meditated on

until the long dumbfounded
spirit broke cover
to raise a dust
in the font of exhaustion.

Heaney's ultimate home is not Station Island, or the island of Ireland, but, as he titles it in The Haw Lantern, “The Disappearing Island.” In this poem the imagined situation is that of a band of wandering Irish monks, voyaging in the western seas and making camp on an island that disappears as they light their fire. (The old tales mention such islands that turned out to be whales, sea monsters.) The final stanza restores to us memories of Heaney's earlier explorations of that boundary between the actual and the visionary. “Water and ground in their extremity” (from “The Peninsula,” in Door into the Dark) is one version of it; another is registered in the recurrent images of eye, needle, notch, the infinitesimally small opening through which the actual flows, as through an isthmus, into the visionary. For that to happen, the fidelity must be there; but it must be given to a vision and in such a manner that it is the actual that becomes the product rather than the precondition of the vision.

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there was vision.

Perhaps it is this probing, exact and exacting measurement of the fictive distance between actualities and their representation that so attracts audiences and readers to Heaney's work. He gives the double impression that nothing gets lost in the translation of the world into poetry, and that it is only through the poetry that the world to which it refers comes fully into existence. He so narrows the discrepancy between world and word, so winningly lends a tongue to emptiness, that the effect is genial. His is an earth that speaks directly and in recognition to the body. It is without even the vestige of alienation. At the root of every word there is a tentacular handshake between the speaker and the thing spoken of. In “A Postcard from Iceland” (in The Haw Lantern), we learn that the word “lukewarm,” describing the temperature of the water from a spring, derives from the old Icelandic word luk, meaning “hand.” Heaney characteristically shares this knowledge with his reader by making it more intimate, by making hand into “palm” and by telling us we knew it already. Of course we did; but never this way.

And you would want to know (but you know
                                                                                                                        already)
How usual that waft and pressure felt
When the innerpalm of water found my palm.

Here the reader is acknowledged as a lover in a world that is “usual” and yet, as in love, extraordinarily perceived.

Heaney's New Selected Poems: 1966-1987 does not include this poem, but then there are very few indeed from the last three volumes that I would have had the heart to exclude. The work gets more and more Herculean, but the Antaean root does not snap. In The Place of Writing, the inaugural Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature delivered at Emory University, Heaney broods on the question of place and writing, with Yeats finally taking here a priority never assigned him in Heaney's own poetry. Heaney's reading of Yeats is also a reading of himself, particularly what he calls Yeats's “desire for foundedness” and the accompanying “fear of unfoundedness which might lurk beneath it.” Heaney is exploring his own recent preoccupation with an origin that is empty, because writing reveals its absence, and yet is actual because writing envisions its presence. Yeats's tower is transposed into the poems; for Heaney these themselves become buildings, stanzas return to their origin by becoming rooms, and the verbal architecture of the poem locates itself in a space that is also a place. The actuality of place queries the insubstantiality of space; but space is what place becomes in vision. This affirmation and denial are an operatic affair in Yeats. The music is Wagnerian, the libretto Nietzschean. Heaney loves the Götterdämmerung atmosphere, but his admiration is more pronounced than his affection. He prefers what his contemporaries, such as Kinsella, Montague, Mahon, and Muldoon, do when they refuse the limited destiny of place and go in search of “the problematic place of the writer.” In Ireland, where the place has been invested with such political energy, this is a difficult problem. In one sense, it is the struggle to become a writer rather than an Irish writer. You can't be one without the other; yet to be too self-consciously Irish might rob one of the freedom to be a writer, an author. These poets have to authorize their Irishness by giving primacy to author-ity; only then will the place of Ireland become real. Otherwise it is merely a stereotype, a place that is given, not found.