[In the following excerpt, Zoutenbier traces the thematic and stylistic development of Heaney's verse.]

Seamus Heaney was born in Country Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, the oldest of nine children; and spent the first fourteen years of his life at Mossbawn, near Lough Neagh in County Derry, where his father was a fanner and cattle dealer. From the primary school at Anahorish, he moved on to St Columb's, a Catholic boarding school in Derry, and then to Queen's University, Belfast, where he read English and where, after working in a Belfast secondary school and in a teacher training college, he returned to teach. In 1972, he gave up teaching for full-time writing, moving with his family to the Irish Republic, to a cottage that was a gate lodge of Glanmore Castle on the former Synge estate in Wicklow. He has since moved back into Dublin, living with his wife and three children in Sandymount, and teaching at Carysfort College, a Catholic teacher training college, where he is head of the English department. He is a member of the Irish Arts Council, and runs a fortnightly book programme on Irish radio. So far Heaney has published four volumes of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975); a collection of short autobiographical fragments Stations (1975); and a number of critical articles and uncollected poems in different magazines.

Heaney's rural background and the "matter of Ireland" provided him with a subject; his reading of English liter ature helped to shape his language; or as Heaney has said himself: "I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading". A book by the Danish archeologist, P.V. Glob, The Bog People, which Heaney first read in 1969, became important to him, when what he found there merged with his own images of bogland, and helped him towards finding symbols and a myth for his own writing. The reading of the Glob book set off a further interest in archeology, which is apparent in North: some of the poems in that volume being inspired by recent excavations in Ireland. And this interest in archeology coincides with Heaney's notion of a poem as an archeological find, dug up from the depths of the memory or imagination.

The fact that Heaney's poetry is so much tied up with a particular locale may seem a limitation, but his feeling for his own territory is a source of emotion for the poet, which infuses his language, and makes it come alive. In a lecture called "The Sense of Place" Heaney has talked about the "vital and enhancing bond that exists between our consciousness and our country", and about a "grounding of the self and an "earthing of the emotions". In Heaney's later poetry his response to the Irish situation has become increasingly imaginative and visionary as a "country of the mind" has replaced the geographical country, though the former is still rooted in the latter.

One could say that the poetry of Seamus Heaney starts from a sense of displacement, personal and cultural—Heaney moved away from his home area, physically as well as in the mind, and has moved away again from Northern Ireland—which leads to a search for identity and roots through language; or as Heaney has put it himself, to the making of a "myth of identity through language". This search starts with the rediscovery and recreation of Heaney's personal past in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, volumes which include among other things reminiscences of a country childhood. Towards the end of Door into the Dark and in Wintering Out Heaney widens his scope to Irish history, and goes deeper into the origins of his country's culture. The first part of North continues this quest, while the second part deals with dayto-day personal and political events.

There is a continuous development of theme and style throughout the four volumes that Heaney has published so far. He has extended his subject matter from personal memories and private experience to history and mythology and the origins of a culture. The landscape, which features throughout the poetry, has become associated with history and with language, changing from the actual physical landscape of Heaney's home area, to a conceptual, cultural landscape embodying the past, or to a visionary landscape which reveals a kind of sacral history.

Heaney has become more certain of his subject as he has got a closer grip on it with his language: one could characterize his poetry as a continuous attempt to get in touch with a subject or a vision, something that is already there in the imagination, but needs to be brought out into the light. Unlike Joyce who uses experience as a starting-point from which his language and his imagination take off, Heaney moves inward to his subject. He goes back to the structures which underlie experience, to a life "deeper and older than himself"; and again unlike Joyce he submits himself to his country's history and culture, finding himself through a sense of community rather than in isolation and exile.

Death of a Naturalist

In "Digging", the opening poem of Heaney's first volume, several items of theme and style that turn out to be characteristic of Heaney's poetry are already evident: the precise observation of physical phenomena (as in the beginning of Joyce's Portrait all the five senses play a part); memory which goes back from father to grandfather; a sense of unease and alienation ("But I've no spade to follow men like them"); the search for roots; and the continuation of a tradition (digging with the pen instead of with a spade). The father digging, "nicking and slicing neatly", is the first example of a series of portraits of local craftsmen as a metaphor for the poet: as in "The Diviner", "The Thatcher", and the smith in "The Forge", and others. The "nicking and slicing neatly" corresponds to the craft of the poet shaping his language, while the "going down" and "digging" are another task for the poet, like the plumbing of hidden sources of the diviner. "Making" and "discovering", the "craft" and the "gift" are words which Heaney himself has used several times for these two activities. There are other poems about the writing of poetry in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark. In "Personal Helicon" Heaney states that the writing of poetry is a search for the self:

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.

In "The Peninsula" (Door into the Dark) poetry is the re-shaping of past experience in order to create the self, and to get in touch with the outside world.

The poems in Death of a Naturalist can be loosely divided into groups according to theme. The largest group are the poems about childhood, which read like a kind of Bildungsroman in verse. They move from a child's fear in "Death of a Naturalist", and "The Barn" to the conquering of that fear in "An Advancement of Learning", and the shrugging of shoulders at the sight of drowning puppies; "Follower" and "Ancestral Photograph" are about the son succeeding the father. "At a Potato Digging" and "For the Commander of 'Eliza'" treat a subject from Irish history, the great famine. "Docker" and "Poor Women in a City Church" present images of the two cultures in Ireland: the violence of the Belfast docker whose idea of God is "a foreman with certain definite views / Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure"; and the submissive women kneeling in a church: "Golden shrines, altar lace, / Marble columns and cool shadows / Still them." The volume ends with a group of love poems, and a group of poems about art and artists such as Synge and Saint Francis who like Heaney derive their subject from nature.

Death of a Naturalist contains a variety of styles. On the one hand there is a poem like "Turkeys Observed", a description of slaughtered turkeys in a poultry shop, which is among the earliest poems that Heaney wrote, a very neat and accurate exercise, very limited in tone and subject-matter. Contrasting with that there is the group of poems about childhood, where the tone is very personal and open. Most of those poems are written in free verse. They are the most successful in the volume, where the language gets closest to the experience, even though Heaney lays it on rather thick at times, for example in the excessive description in the title-poem "Death of a Naturalist". The influence of Hopkins, whom Heaney read as a student, is noticeable in some of the early poems, in heavily alliterated lines like "the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge". In "At a Potato Digging" the language imposes a vision on an observed scene, which does not fit. The potato-diggers are seen as enacting a kind of pagan ritual, but the religious sentiment expressed does not belong to them, nor does it belong to Heaney. In a poem like "Waterfall", where a waterfall is compared to "villains dropped screaming to justice", and the poet poses as the self-conscious observer: "My eye rides over and downwards, falls with / Hurtling tons that slabber and spill", the language becomes too fanciful in its metaphors and diverts attention from the object described. Heaney is at his best in this volume when he describes his own personal experience, and he has not much grip yet on a subject that lies outside himself, like history or inanimate nature.

Door into the Dark

The poems in Door into the Dark are linked not so much by a theme as by a common mood or metaphor. Darkness in one form or another occurs in most of the poems and embodies different though not unconnected things. In the title-poem it dramatizes the poet's uncertainty: "All I know is a door into the dark". In this volume Heaney is groping about in the dark, trying to get a grasp on his subject. In a poem like "The Forge" he is not very successful. The smith, like Kelly's bull in "The Outlaw", retires into the dark, as if he ultimately escaped the poet. In the first three poems of the volume, "Night-Piece", "Gone" and "Dream", the subjects seem to come up out of the dark of the imagination, but they remain half-hidden there. In "The Peninsula" and in "In Gallurus Oratory" the dark is the place where one needs to retire in order to achieve a vision. This vision is not something that lies outside the common order of things, but an illumination or heightening of the ordinary: "things founded clear on their own shapes", "the sea a censer, and the grass a flame", like the renewal of the "smells of ordinariness" in "Night Drive". In the latter poem the movement is the same as in the other two: travelling, immersion in the dark, and coming back with a vision. There are sexual undertones, but they escape analysis. These poems are as much about how to live, as how to write or to make art. For both it is necessary to establish an intimate contact with the outside world. In "In Gallarus Oratory" this amounts to the erotic vision of the mystic; but the poem is about that kind of vision or writing, it is not itself an embodiment of it, as are some later poems of Heaney's. "The Plantation" is another poem about the problem of living and/or writing. Losing oneself without being lost, "following whim deliberately" ("The Return",) to be in control while at the same time surrendering oneself, are necessary conditions. "A line goes out of sight and out of mind / Down to the soft bottom of silt and sand / Past the indifferent skill of the hunting hand" ("Settings"), is another metaphor for the writing of poetry. In "A Lough Neagh Sequence", a poem about the life-cycle of eels, the dark has a more explicitly sexual meaning in the life of the eels, as well as cosmic significance. It is a poem full of circular movements, dramatizing this cycle and the "horrid cable" in which both human and animal are caught without distinction. The sequence ends in fear (a more adult version of the fear in Death of a Naturalist) of the dark cosmic processes for which there is no resolution.

The latter part of Door into the Dark contains a few poems which point forward to further developments. "Relic of Memory" is the first poem about relics in the bog and the attraction they have for the poet. "Shoreline" is about the ritual timeless moment which brings the poet into contact with sacral history, which is revealed in the landscape:

Listen. Is it the Danes,
A black hawk bent on the sail?
Or the chinking Normans?
Or currachs hopping high

On to the sand?

"Bogland", at the end of the volume, is the first poem where the bog becomes a mythical landscape and a symbol for Ireland:

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.

Wintering Out

In Door into the Dark Heaney had already extended his scope beyond the strictly personal; in Wintering Out he goes further in this direction, though he approaches his subject-matter in a rather cautious and hesitant manner at first. The five poems with which the volume opens are about the Irish colonial past, but this is only indicated through allusions. The mood in the poems is desolate, there is a sense of starvation and of the shrinking of life, but one does not know why. They are not located specifically in time or place. "These long nights", "those mound-dwellers", "the back end of a bad year", "some outhouse", could be any time and any place. The poet's vision is blurred by fog and rain ("mizzling rain / blurs the far end / of the cart track", "Those mound-dwellers / go waist-deep in mist") and he is hesitant to approach or accept it. He is merely pondering a possibility: "I might tarry / with the moustached / dead", "Perhaps I just make out / Edmund Spenser". The poem "Bog Oak" presents a rather sharp contrast between the English and native experience:

Edmund Spenser,
dreaming sunlight,
encroached upon by

geniuses who creep
"out of every corner
of the woodes and glennes"
towards watercress and carrion.

Edmund Spenser's pastoral vision is not for Ireland, but these poems are not entirely desolate. "The Last Mummer" ends with hope and the possibility of a new beginning. "Anahorish" (meaning "place of clear water") is a version of Gaelic pastoral or the poet's personal Helicon, which first fertilized his imagination. It is the first poem where landscape becomes language: "soft gradient / of consonant, vowel meadow".

"Land," "Gifts of Rain" and "Oracle" present the poet in a relationship of close intimacy with the land. In "Gifts of Rain" he states what this intimacy means to him as a poet:

I cock my ear
at an absence—
in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need
for antediluvian lore.
Soft voices of the dead
are whispering by the shore

that I would question
(and for my children's sake)
about crops rotted, river mud
glazing the baked clay floor.

The function of poetry is no longer private: the shaping of one's own identity. But the poet assigns himself a public role:

a mating call of sound
rises to pleasure me, Dives,
hoarder of common ground.

The next series of poems are about language and landscape and the two cultural and language traditions in Ireland. "Toome," like "Broagh" and "Anahorish" is a place-name poem (the writing of poems explaining the names of places is an old genre in Irish literature). Here the sound of the Gaelic words "anahorish", "broagh" and "Toome" (all names connected with Heaney's home area), draw the poet back into the past of the land and the language. These poems, like "A New Song," are an attempt to incorporate and combine both the Gaelic and the English tradition. Heaney himself, in an interview with Seamus Deane, has said about these poems: "I had a great sense of release as they were being written, a joy and devilmay-careness, and that convinced me that one could be faithful to the nature of the English language—for in some senses these poems are erotic mouth-music by and out of the anglo-saxon tongue—and, at the same time, be faithful to one's own non-English origin, for me that is County Derry." "A New Song" is a rallying poem, written out of impatience with the state of cultural affairs, the separateness of the two cultures:

But now our river tongues must rise
From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,
Demesnes staked out in consonants.
And Castledawson we'll enlist
And Upperlands, each planted bawn—
Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass—
A vocable, as rath and ballaun.

Words like "demesne", "Castledawson", "Upperlands", "bawn", "bleaching-greens" call up the English colonization of Ireland. In "The Trade of an Irish Poet" Heaney has said: "I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awarenesses nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience."

"Linen Town," the poem that precedes the sequence "A Northern Hoard," is about the irreversibility of history. "A Northern Hoard," like the introductory poem of Wintering Out about an internment camp, treats the present violent situation in Northern Ireland, in language that refers to the actual situation (words like "gunshot", "siren" and "clucking gas" and "sniper") but also puts it in a mythological perspective. "Roots," the first poem of the sequence is about the "nightmare of history" intruding into people's private lives, and the failure of ordinary human feelings like love, in that situation. In "No Man's Land" there is a sense of guilt at the inadequacy of one's reaction. "Stump" is about the failure of poetry: "What do I say if they wheel out their dead? / I'm cauterized, a black stump of home". In "No Sanctuary" and "Tinder" there is a sense of complicity within a community. In "Tinder" "cold beads of history and home", relics of the past, fail to light up the imagination: "What could strike a blaze / From our dead igneous days?" The present violent situation cuts one off from a sense of continuity with the past: "new history, flint and iron / Cast-off, scraps, nail, canine." The poems are full of images of pagan rituals and animal savagery and have an almost surrealist quality:

Leaf membranes lid the window.
In the streetlamp's glow
our body's moonstruck
To drifted barrow, sunk glacial rock.

And all shifts dreamily as you keen
Far off, turning from the din
Of gunshot, siren and clucking gas
Out there beyond each curtained terrace

Where the fault is opening. The touch of love,
Your warmth heaving to the first move,
Grows helpless in our old Gomorrah.
We petrify or uproot now.

"The Tollund Man" is the first of a series of poems about bog people which Heaney wroteafter reading The Bog People. The poems of "A Northern Hoard" can be said to be public poems in so far as they deal with communal experience. In "The Tollund Man" Heaney goes on a private imaginary pilgrimage to Denmark: "Some day I will go to Aarhus"; but he hesitates to commit himself fully to this pagan religion: "I could risk blasphemy / Consecrate the cauldron bog / Our holy ground". The poem ends in speculation:

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

Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Now knowing their tongue.

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

The first section of Wintering Out ends with a few poems which recall again scenes from Heaney's home area, but there is a felt distance now:

What can fend us now
Can soothe the hurt eye
Of the sun,

Unpoison great lakes,
Turn back
The rat on the road.

If one takes the introductory poem of Wintering Out as the context for the whole volume, then the poems of the second part seem a retreat into a private world of marriage and home, or to stand for the continuity of ordinary human life in the context of violence. Of the marriage poems the best is "Summer Home," about guilt and complicity in a private relationship. The form of the poem is much freer than that of the rest of the poems in the volume: and the breaking off of the lines in the middle of a sentence after a stressed syllable, creates the tension the poem is about.

Apart from the marriage poems there is a group of poems about Irish folk-tales written in a dramatic narrative style reminiscent of Robert Frost—who influenced Heaney to some degree—especially the poem "Shorewoman." In "First Calf Heaney projects his own changed sensibility and the pain of existence into a recalled scene, whereas the poem "May" presents a picture of original innocence and peace. In the final poem in the volume "Westering" Heaney takes his distance from Ireland:

Six thousand miles away,
I imagine untroubled dust,
A loosening gravity,
Christ weighing by his hands.

North

Whereas the introductory poem of Wintering Out puts the volume into a context of violence, the two introductory poems of North put it in a framework of peacefulness and permanence. "Sunlight" is a very clear and tranquil vision of a domestic scene; and in "The Seedcutters" a pastoral scene which lies fixed in history outside time, is embodied in a very balanced poem. The poem expresses a desire for permanence:

O calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.

The volume North itself is divided into two contrasting sections. Heaney told Seamus Deane "the two halves of the book constitute two different types of utterance, each of which arose out of a necessity to shape and give palpable linguistic form to two kinds of urgency—one symbolic, one explicit." Yeats and Kavanagh represent these two poles in poetry, they "point up the contradictions we have been talking about: the search for myths and sagas, the need for a structure and a sustaining landscape and at the same time the need to be liberated and distanced from it, the need to be open, unpredictably susceptible, lyrically opportunistic."

The first section of North begins and ends with two not very successful allegorical poems "Antaeus" and "Hercules and Antaeus." Antaeus is an image of the instinctive poet who derives his strength from the earth and whose "elevation" or education is his "fall". The application of the allegory in the context of the volume is not very clear.

"Belderg" is a poem about an excavation done in Mayo. The "quernstones out of a bog" connect the imagination with the past:

To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries

Fell open like a glib:
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.

A landscape fossilized,
Its stone-wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.

The discussion about the word "Mossbawn" (the name of Heaney's birth-place), which is seen to contain Irish, Norse and English roots and therefore represents the mixed cultural heritage of Ireland, is resolved by the poet, who passes "through the eye of the quern", in a test of the imagination, and sees "A worldtree of balanced stones, / Querns piled like vertebrae, / The marrow crushed to grounds"—an image of a mixed culture.

"Funeral Rites" is again (like "A Northern Hoard") a poem which combines the actual with the mythological. In the first part the poet sees himself as a member of a culture in which the dead are buried with elaborate ritual. There is a detailed description of the dead, as in the poems about bog corpses, in a volume where Heaney is preoccupied with fossils, bones, skeletons, corpses. In the second and third parts the poet imagines the reinstitution of ritual, which involves the whole country in a gigantic funeral procession, to cope with the present situation in Ireland, in which murder is a frequent occurrence.

In "North," as in the poem "Shoreline" in Door into the Dark, there is a shift from the secular to the sacral, and the poet is almost overwhelmed by a vision of Viking raids in Ireland, of which the present situation is a continuation ("memory incubating the spilled blood"). But he is told to retain his power of vision and to go on writing:

It said, "Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and the gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known."

The poem "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces" is one long flowing line of associations, starting at the sight of a piece of incised bone exhibited in the National Museum in Dublin, and involving history and art and death, in language that implies a gay acceptance:

"Did you ever hear tell,"
said Jimmy Farrell,
"of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?

White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,"

In "Bone Dreams," as in the poem "Toome" in Wintering Out, the poet goes back to origins which lie beyond language:

Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move towards the passes.

In "Funeral Rites" Heaney imagined a community and a ritual for the community; in the series of poems about bog corpses he turns to communion with the landscape, and what is concealed there, in private meditation, in order to come to terms with the violence in Ireland. The tone of these poems is much more assured than in "The Tollund Man" in Wintering Out. Heaney has now found a focus for his imagination, a myth which encompasses past and present. The intimate communing with these preserved bodies leads to an almost complete identification:

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

But in the same poem ("Punishment") Heaney admits to an ambiguity of feeling:

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who could connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Though these poems contain references to the present situation in Ireland, they can also be read as poems about the universal fate of 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.

The bog is not only a symbol for Ireland as a female goddess to whom sacrifices are made, but also the "all-tombing womb" of the earth-mother where the bog corpses lie buried like embryos awaiting rebirth. These poems may express an unwillingness on Heaney's part to come to terms with the situation in Northern Ireland in more direct terms, but they may equally stem from a private need to come to terms with universals. The poem "Kinship" is a kind of finale which gathers up the images of the bog that have occurred in Heaney's poetry. It contains references to earlier poems, and there is a kind of ritual summing up:

Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
sun-bank, embalmer
of votive goods
and sabred fugitives.

Insatiable bride.
Sword-swallower,
casket, midden,
floe of history.

Ground that will strip
its dark side,
nesting ground,
outback of my mind.

Walking down the bog the poet walks back in time and stands "at the edge of centuries / facing a goddess"—the earth-goddess of Irish history and of time. In the poem "Bogland" in Door into the Dark the "wet centre" of the bog was "bottomless". Here the centre has gathered meaning, and "holds and spreads"; it has revealed the congruence between present and past, and given an image of the country's cultural identity. The poet accepts being tied to this ground, which means an acceptance of the culture of which he is a member, and of history and fate:

I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity.

In the second part of North Heaney turns from Norse mythology to the actual North of Ireland and a more public kind of poetry:

I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of "views
On the Irish thing".

The style has changed from the heightened to the satiric and the debunking with stanzas rhyming a-b-a-b:

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."
"They're murderers." "Internment, understandably…"

The "voice of sanity" is getting hoarse.

"Whatever you say, say nothing" is like "The Other Side" in Wintering Out, about rituals of co-existence between the two communities, which imply submitting to a code:

"Religion's never mentioned here," of course.
"You know them by their eyes," and hold your tongue.
"One side's as bad as the other," never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

It is also a poem about different kinds of language: the language of codes of the community, the clichés of journalism ("escalate", "backlash", "crack-down") and the language of poetry, all inadequate to cope with the situation:

(It's tempting here to rhyme on "labour pangs"
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight
But that would be to ignore other symptoms.

Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides "little platoons" are mustering—
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke—while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
An order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

"Freedman" is about the poet's emancipation from submission to religion and society, and yet another kind of language ("Memento homo quia pulvis es") to the freedom that poetry has given him. It precedes the sequence "Singing School" where Heaney returns to autobiographical material, but in a very different way than in Death of a Naturalist. The landscape is now peopled by policemen and Orangemen instead of local characters. The quotation from Wordsworth "Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear" gets another poignant meaning in a Northern Irish context, where one's name assigns one to one side of the community and where a representative of the law, or the threatening sound of Orange drums, inspire one with fear. "Summer 1969" (a summer in which trouble broke out in Belfast) is again about the need for myth or art to come to terms with present happenings. At a remove from the actual situations, watching television during a holiday in Spain, and hearing the news from home, the poet retreats to the Prado to look at "Shootings of the Third of May," a painting by Goya, which is a more real representation of violence than the impersonal "real thing" on television. According to this poem the only possible commitment is through art, though it also suggests the other possibility:

"Go back," one said, "try to touch the people."
Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

In the next poem "Exposure," the last in the volume, neither possibility offers solace. The poet is removed from his people—unlike in the first poem of the second part, "The Unacknowledged Legislator's Dream," where the poet sees himself in a dream at the centre of his community and poetry has also lost its meaning:

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.

This seems like an ending but more likely points to a different direction in Heaney's development. He has talked about this in an interview with Monie Begley [in Ramble in Ireland, 1977]:

The book ends up in Wicklow in December '73. It's in some ways the book all books were leading to. You end up with nothing but your vocation, with words and your own free choice. Isolated but not dispossessed of what produced you. Having left a context, stepped away, you can't really go back. It ends up with just the responsibility of the artist, whatever that is, and that responsibility has no solutions.

I would say that I am a product of that isolation we were talking about before. And for me now it's just the usual middle-age coasting toward extinction, but trying to define the self. I'm not interested in my poetry canvassing public events deliberately any more. I would like to write poems of myself at this age. Poems, so far, have been fueled by a world that is gone or a world that is too much with us—public events. Just through accident and all the things we've been talking about, I've ended up with myself, and I have to start there, you know.