SOURCE: "Crossed Pieties," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1984, pp. 336-48.

[In the following review of Heaney's two volumes of collected poetry and prose, Shapiro relates the stylistic and thematic development of Heaney's poetry to his assertion of personal and national identity.]

There's an old Gaelic poem which goes, "Who ever heard/ Such a sight unsung/ As a severed head/ With a grafted tongue." This image—of a culture severed from the body of its own traditions and forced to speak another language—indicates the profound dilemma facing every Anglo-Irish poet fated to discover and express in English, the oppressor's tongue, his personal and national identity. One might even say that this identity resides, if anywhere, in the hyphen separating the Anglo from the Irish. Pulled in one direction by the English literary tradition, pulled in another by a social and political tradition which continues its centuries-old antagonism to all things English, the Irish poet finds himself inescapably involved in a bleak and unromantic triangle: if Irish culture is his wife, English is his mistress, and to satisfy one is necessarily to betray the other. And yet it is precisely in the Irish poet's response to this dilemma, in the thematic and stylistic strategies he devises to maintain his own identity in the oppressor's language, that one can find in Anglo-Irish poetry what seems distinctly Irish.

No contemporary Irish poet has struggled with this problem more self-consciously, or more successfully, than Seamus Heaney. In both Preoccupations, his recently collected essays and reviews, and in his first four books of poetry now published together under the title, Poems: 1965-1975, these tensions and crossed pieties inherent in Irish poetry are what preoccupy him most. In one essay he defines the role of poetry "as divination … as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself." He desires a poetry of place and origins, of connection to the Irish past, and of almost sacramental fidelity to the physical contours of the Irish present. In his first two books, Death Of A Naturalist and Door Into The Dark, Heaney attempts to satisfy this desire by writing almost exclusively of regional life and work, of hunting, blackberry picking, turfgathering, and of the various ways "living displaces false sentiments" in the rural world. The characters he's drawn to—thatchers, diviners, farmwives, and fishermen—embody continuity with the past, seem to bear or affirm the past in what they do. In one poem, he sees in laborers gathering potatoes ("Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble toward the black/ Mother") "centuries of fear and homage to the famine God." In another, he calls the door into a blacksmith's shop "a door into the dark"; and though the dark is actual, it also becomes a figure for an older way of life, as later in the poem the blacksmith, standing in the doorway, "recalls/ A clatter of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows/ Then, grunts and goes in," turning his back on the present.

Unlike the blacksmith, however, Heaney moves in two ways in these poems, turning, as he says in one essay, outward to the present, "to a clarification of life," as well as inward, "to a ramification of roots and associations." Yet in neither movement does he succeed in articulating an indigenous poetic idiom. And I think we can find the reasons for this failure in "Digging," the opening poem of Death Of A Naturalist, and the first poem in which Heaney claims to have gotten his feelings into words, "or, to put it more accurately, where I thought my feeling got into words." "Digging" defines the kind of poetry the beginning Irish poet wants to write. Sitting by a window, he hears his father digging turf outside in the same way his grandfather dug turf twenty years earlier, and the two figures, one real, the other recollected, merge into an image of continuity:

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.

Yet realizing he has "no spade to follow men like that," he says, "Between my finger and thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it." "Digging" bears all the earmarks of a Heaney poem, the qualities for which he's justly admired: an intense regard for metaphor, a dense speci ficity of detail, and a rich evocation of place. Descriptive language, here and throughout his work, is his most effective way of preserving his own identity and at the same time asserting his regional allegiance.

Yet one feels that Heaney protests too much in "Digging," as though the bold, untroubled confidence—"I'll dig with it"—belies an underlying fear that in writing poetry he'll be departing, rather man continuing, the family (and cultural) tradition. He evades this fear, I think, refraining from making it part of the subject, by the very qualities we admire. Description enables Heaney to sidestep the difficulties inherent in this enterprise. For despite his desire to restore "the culture to itself," the principal influences on his early work are American and English as much as Irish. Along with the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, poets such as Wordsworth, Hopkins, Frost, and Ted Hughes (some of whom he writes about at length in Preoccupations) stand behind his first two books. Kavanagh may influence what he chooses to articulate, that is, a close, unromantic attention to rural life, but it is the American and English poets who influence the manner of articulation. It is difficult, for instance, not to hear Wyatt's "My Galley Charged With Forgetfulness" in these lines from "Valediction," a poem from Death Of A Naturalist:

Or Frost's "For Once, Then, Something" in these lines from the personal "Helicon":

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss….

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

More than the darkness echoes in this poem. Considering that many poets learn to write by imitating the best poems in the language, and that the best poems in English are not all by Irishmen, it's no wonder that Heaney's early poems, impressive as they are, are mostly apprentice pieces.

In one essay, Heaney distinguishes between craft and technique. "Craft," he says, "is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making…. Technique," on the other hand, "involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of meter, rhythm and verbal texture, it involves also a definition of his stance toward life, a definition of his own reality." If we associate technique with Heaney's Irish loyalties, his passionate regionalism, and craft with his English literary training, we can say that what characterizes these early poems is a craft at odds with and insufficient for the full expression of a burgeoning technique. This tension between craft and technique accounts for the formal awkwardness of many of these poems, for Heaney's compulsion to swim too hard against the iambic current.

Two blank verse poems, "For The Commander Of The Eliza" and "Death Of A Naturalist," illustrate my point. Set in the mid-nineteenth century during the Irish potato famine, 'Tor The Commander Of The Eliza" is a dramatic monologue spoken by an English sea captain who comes upon a boatload of starving Irish peasants and refuses to give them aid. Because the speaker is English, Heaney can let him speak a clean blank verse line with little rhythmical variation. Even when the variations do occur, the iambic cadence still rings clear:

We'd known about the shortage but on board
They always kept us right with flour and beef
So understand my feelings, and the men's
Who had mandate to relieve distress
Since relief was then available in Westport—
Though clearly these poor brutes would never make it…

Next day, like six bad smells, those living skulls
Drifted through the dark of bunks and hatches
And once in port I exorcised my ship
Reporting all to the Inspector General…

In addition to the emphatic meter, the almost complete absence of grammatical pauses within the line increases the sense of regularity and restraint appropriate to the speaker's strained attempt to keep his guilt in check as he clumsily rationalizes his refusal to help the poor.

If 'For The Commander Of The Eliza" is hyper-metrical, "Death Of A Naturalist" isn't metrical enough. The verse is heavily varied because Heaney himself is speaking, not an English persona:

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles…

This is a poem about the loss of innocence and the realization of the presence of evil in the natural world and, by implication, in the self. One day the speaker finds that "the angry frogs" had "invaded" the flax dam:

In overall design and tone this incident recalls the boatstealing episode in "The Prelude." 'The great slime kings" are Heaney's version of Wordsworth's "huge peak, black and huge." Like Wordsworth, out of a troubled conscience Heaney attributes a sense of retribution to the natural scene. But the blank verse is anything but Wordsworthian. Heaney thickens the pentameter line with heavy syllables to the point of clotting ("Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods"), and dense, figurative language ("Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting"). He remains close enough to the iambic norm to keep it as constant expectation, but one he continually disappoints. He reminds us, in other words, that he's writing blank verse only to dramatize his independence from the tradition that blank verse implicates. The result is that his subject has to fight against the form; that is, the formal properties seldom issue from or respond to what he's trying to say. And this flaw applies, I think, to much of Heaney's accentual-syllabic verse, early and late. It's not that he's incapable of writing a passage of regular blank verse, as the passage from "For The Commander Of The Eliza" demonstrates. Rather, Heaney feels compelled by his Irish pieties to break or maim the formal elements, even if it means writing awkwardly, in order to assert his own identity.

In the essay "Belfast," Heaney discusses this divided consciousness; in his terms, poetry emerges from a quarrel with the self, a quarrel that's both national and sexual: "The feminine element for me involves the matter of Ireland, and the masculine strain is drawn from the involvement with English literature…. I was symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between 'the demesne' and 'the bogs.'" With this quotation in mind, it is possible to read two related poems, "Antaeus" and "Hercules and Antaeus" (from his fourth book, North), as acting out this quarrel in his work between the Irish and the English influences, which is to say, between his Irish technique and his English craft. In "Antaeus," written actually in 1966, the year Death Of A Naturalist was published, Antaeus describes himself as nursed by "earth's long contour/ her river-veins," "cradled in the dark that wombed me/ and nurtured me in every artery/ like a small hillock." Antaeus represents the native culture, the indigenous experience, whose power depends entirely on contact with the earth or region that nurtured him:

The tone here is as innocently confident as the tone of "Digging," but it's qualified, as the tone of "Digging" isn't, by what we know will happen to the giant. If Antaeus is the spirit of native culture, Hercules in "Hercules and Antaeus" is a figure for "the masculine strain" within the poet "drawn from involvement with English literature":

Antaeus, the mould-hugger,

is weaned at last:
a fall was a renewal
but now he is raised up—
the challenger's intelligence

is a spur of light,
a blue prong grasping him
out of his element
into a dream of loss

and origins—the cradling dark,
the river-veins, the secret gullies
of his strength,
the hatching grounds

of cave and souterrain,
he has bequeathed it all
to elegists. Balor will die
and byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.

Just as the English once subdued the Irish, the Herculean poet vanquishes his own experience in writing about it, destroying its terrestrial power "into a dream of loss … pap for the dispossessed."

"Antaeus" is not as full a treatment of this quarrel as "Hercules and Antaeus." For one thing, the hero does not figure in the poem, and so the giant's faith in his native strength is as yet untested. For another, the poem suffers, as most of Heaney's early work does, from being the product of a literary tradition at odds with his passion for locale and place. In terms of craft, "Antaeus" is already vanquished by his anticipated adversary, despite the boast that he can beat all challengers. The enforced variety of rhymes (some hardly rhymes at all) betray how hard the poet has to strain to find them. And the antithesis which closes the poem, "My elevation, my fall," makes Antaeus sound more like an Augustan poet than a regional spirit.

On the other hand, though the giant is defeated in "Hercules and Antaeus," in terms of form and phrasing the poem is itself a kind of triumph. Part of the reason is that Heaney by this time has moved to a short free verse line which allows him more freedom in drawing the syntax through the poem. In "Antaeus," the line breaks are dictated by the form and meter, not by the meaning. Here they dramatize the action and emotion of the poem. And in so doing they realize the two senses of the word 'verse,' which Heaney cites in his essay on Wordsworth's music: "'Verse' comes from the Latin versus which could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished one furrow and faced back into another." In "Hercules and Antaeus" the syntax turns expressively from line to line. This is especially true in the break between the third and fourth stanzas ("into a dream of loss/ and origins") which not only emphasizes Hercules' triumph as he lifts Antaeus off the ground, "out of his element," but also acts out the severing from origins that the lines describe.

In "Belfast" (quoted earlier), Heaney says that he thinks of "the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants." One can hear and see this distinction effectively yet unobstrusively at work in the two names, Hercules and Antaeus, as well as in the way Heaney associates the hard consonants with Hercules ("Snake-chocker, dung heaver"), and the softer vowels and assonances with Antaeus ("the secret gullies/ of his strength,/ the hatching grounds/ of cave and souterrain"). This is further reason for reading "Hercules and Antaeus" as an oblique comment on Heaney's practice as a poet, on the English and Irish tensions in his work, as much as a political allegory.

I have gone on at length about these two poems because they illustrate what happens when Heaney changes from traditional form to free verse, a change which first takes place in Door Into The Dark, his second book. It is by no means an exclusive change or a conversion, for Heaney continues to write in form; but his best poems, the ones that come closest to perfecting a personal and Irish idiom, are written in the short, dense free verse line. Free verse seems to liberate Heaney from the stylistic self-consciousness that burdens his formal work; it enables him to get free of the compulsion to smudge or crack the English lens, instead of seeing through it. And the reason is, obviously, that free verse does not bear as much traditional connotation and influence as the accentual syllablic line; it becomes, for him, a more pliable instrument, more responsive to his temperament and to his desire to articulate the lore of native life. It's not surprising then that his first fully achieved free verse poem, the last poem in Door Into The Dark, "Bogland," is about the bog as a distinctly Irish symbol of geographical memory, bearing and preserving within itself the Irish past:

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

In addition to the usual evocative detail, there's much to praise here: the way the rhythm quickens and slows in response to what's described, as light syllables give way to heavy ones ("Melting and opening underfoot" "The waterlogged trunks/ Of great firs, soft as pulp"); the way the line breaks here and there quietly dramatize the sense ("Our pioneers keep striking/ Inwards and downwards/ Every layer they strip/ Seems camped on before"); or the way the last line ends on such lightly stressed syllables that the line produces the very sensation of bottomlessness that it presents.

"Bogland" is, I would argue, the decisive poem in Heaney's collection, for the best poems in Wintering Out and North, his next two books, grow naturally, without awkwardness, out of its implied equation between landscape and mind. In Wintering Out especially, place and language seem almost interchangeable, as language is seen as shaped and nurtured by the soil and weather, inflected by the contours of the land itself. If the river Moyola in "Gifts of Rain" is a metaphorical statement about language ("an old chanter/ breathing its mists/ through vowels and history/ … hoarder of common ground"), the act of speaking in "Toome" becomes the penetration of a landscape ("My mouth/ holds round/ the soft blastings/ Toome, Toome,/ as under the dislodged slab of the tongue/ I push into souterrain"), just as in "Anahorish," Heaney's "place of clear water" turns into a "soft gradient/ of consonant, vowel-meadow." In almost imagist fashion, language and landscape interanimate each other, so much so that to explore one is inevitably to discover something about the other. It is as if despite a history of dispossession and political oppression, as in Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking Of Nations'" the land provides a source of enduring value, is itself the figurative and literal origin of culture (in all senses of the word), transcending yet authenticating the language of the tribe.

Not surprisingly, in "The Tollund Man," Heaney's most compelling exploration into the Irish past and its relation to the Irish present, what symbolizes the Celtic past, its legacy of violence, and its tradition of political martydom still painfully alive today, is the severed head of a man killed and dumped in a Jutland bog as a sacrificial offering to the Mother Goddess. And perhaps it's not too far-fetched to see "The Tollund Man" as also symbolizing the plight of the Irish poet. Heaney would pray to this severed head, as to a Saint, "To make germinate/ The scattered, ambushed/ Flesh of labourers,/ Stockinged corpses/ Laid out in the farmyards":

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongues.

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

"The Tollund Man" does for Irish culture what in one essay Heaney claims for Patrick Kavanagh's "Great Hunger": it satisfies "the hunger of the culture for its own image and expression." The image, however, is by no means a consoling one; though Heaney would feel at home standing before it, he would, in essence, feel at home in loss, in "the old man-killing parishes." Yet despite the unflinching acknowledgement of violence and dispossession, there is something genuinely consoling in the articulation itself, in the ability of the intelligence to face up to and define the barbarism that persists within the psyche and the culture, just as it was once preserved within the bog.

In North, Heaney continues his free verse investigation into the stratified layers of the Irish past, "Striking inwards and downwards." As in "The Tollund Man," the memories he unearths are never comforting, nor is his relationship or kinship with the past a simple one. If poetry involves the restoration of the culture to itself, what he restores are images of atrocity and sectarian violence predating the English invasion. "The Grauballe Man," for instance, now perfected in Heaney's memory (which like the bog transforms and preserves what it contains) "is hung in the scales/ with beauty and atrocity/ … with the actual weight/ of each hooded victim/ slashed and dumped." Though he still regards the bog with an almost sexual love, "the Goddess Mother" is also implicated in the violence she preserves, mingling the erotic and the violent, "the love seat" and "the grave," as though human sexuality and violence were merely the animation of principles at work within the physical world. In one line Heaney can declare, "I love the spring/ off the ground," and in next, "Each bank a gallows drop." In "Kinship," the bog is "insatiable bride./ Sword swallower,/ casket, midden." "Our mother ground," he tells us in another section of the poem, "is sour with the blood/ of her faithful,/ they lie gargling/ in her sacred heart." Here as in many of the poems in North, it is difficult to distinguish the tone of bitter disgust from that of reverence.

This ambivalence accounts for the undeniable power of the best poems in the book ("Punishment," "Hercules and Antaeus," and "Funeral Rites"—perhaps the best political poem since Yeats's "Easter 1916"). It also accounts for why North seems less successful as a whole than Wintering Out. Many of these poems are damaged by qualities we might be at first inclined to praise: a dazzling metaphoric ingenuity, a profoundly sensuous regard for language, and a fastidious attention to the physical world. I suggested earlier that this richness of descriptive language is one strategy by which Heaney can assert his personal identity and at the same time remain faithful to his national one. Description, in other words, functions as a kind of safeguard against the English elements of his literary heritage. In North, however, description takes on the aura of theatricality, a stage-Irish flaunting of his powers, not a legitimate use of them. It no longer serves to keep in check the English influence; it protects him, rather, from the legacy of violence he finds within his national past (and present). It is almost as if Heaney attempts to resolve his complicated attitude, his fascination and repulsion, stylistically through the dazzle of descriptive language; but the language only sanitizes the violence it appears to articulate so unflinchingly.

Consider, for instance, how the phrase "the mild pods of the eye-lids," from "The Tollund Man," does more than just describe or beautify the subject. Once we recall that the Tollund Man was sacrificed to the Mother Goddess in order to insure the renewal and fertility of spring, we realize that the simile sets up and justifies Heaney's later prayer to him "to make germinate" (within Heaney's imagination) "the scattered, ambushed/ Flesh of labourers." In contrast, these lines from "The Grauballe Man"—"As if he had been poured/ in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf/ and seems to weep/ the black river of himself—or these lines from "The Bog Queen"—"My body was braille for the creeping influences"—seem like a mere display, demonstrating what W. S. Di Piero has called "a too exclusive attention to the sheen and noise of language, such that flamboyance and inventiveness, however sincere and in service to however serious a theme, come to displace clarity and integrity of feeling." Even the language/ landscape trope begins to sound a little overdone ("I push back,/ through dictions,/ Elizabethan Canopies./ Norman devices,/ the erotic mayflowers/ of Provence." "This is the vowel of earth/ dreaming its root"). What once had the freshness and excitement of discovery in Wintering Out takes on in North the stale predictability of mannerism, whose function is to shield Heaney from, by prettifying, the realities it once enabled him to explore.

A harsh judgment. But having made it, I now want to add that only a poet of major talent can err so skillfully. Even when he is not at his best, Heaney remains an engaging and serious poet, capable of working the language with an intensity we would be quick to praise in a lesser poet's work. Part of this capability derives from sheer talent; but perhaps a more important part derives from native talent responding to the pressures of social and political circumstances, to the crossed pieties inherent inthe very language Heaney speaks and writes with. If these pressures sometimes cause Heaney to work the language too intensely until, in the words of the neo-Augustan critic, Archibald Alison, he deserts "the end of the art, for the display of the art itself," they also give his best work an intelligent urgency (and I stress both words here) that no other poet writing in English today can equal. In Poems: 1965-1975 and Preoccupations, as well as in his fifth collection of poetry, Field Work, Heaney struggles honestly and often brilliantly to satisfy "the hunger of the culture for its own image and expression." His best poems—"Bogland," "The Tollund Man," "Funeral Rites," "Punishment" and "Casualty" (from Field Work)—satisfy that hunger. And not just for the Irish, but for all of us who look to poetry for a clarification of life.