SOURCE: "Seamus Heaney's Poetry of Meditation: Door into the Dark," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 1-17.

Images of dark and light appear so frequently in poetic tradition that, when summoned for contemporary use, they run the risk of being immediately obsolescent. Each poet must dust off the old clichés and glaze them with new varnish. For Seamus Heaney, who is more attached to tradition than most, darkness and light dramatize his most pressing concerns. In his first book, Death of a Naturalist, as Dick Davis has pointed out, "Darkness is associated with an uncontrollable fecundity, a pullulation of alien, absorbing life." Darkness is persistently linked to Heaney's adolescent fears of sex and death, and light to their possible transcendence.

Many critics refuse to accept Heaney's second book, Door into the Dark, as an "advance on its predecessor," but surely it indicates a significant psychological advance. Rather than run from the dark, Heaney now faces up to it with grim determination, or actively seeks it out. He mines the metaphor of a "door into the dark" so extensively that many of his poems can be read allegorically. Still preoccupied with country matters—with farming, fishing, thatching, forging—he casts his rural personae in roles that dramatize the oppositions dueling in his imagination. Dark and light are now associated with speech and writing, forgetting and remembering, expiration and inspiration, blindness and insight, destruction and creation. The poems are intensely self-reflexive as they investigate their own perplexed making. Although Blake Morrison claims that "Door into the Dark is more promise than fulfillment, more hovering on the threshold than a decisive arrival," Heaney's narrators restlessly cross back and forth over thresholds [Seamus Heaney, 1982]. Like traditional Christian meditations, their crossings from confusion to revelation, from mute blindness to luminous communion with the divine, are overshadowed by the Cross itself.

For a poet who attended a Catholic school as a young man (St. Colomb's College), the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, as well as of his compatriots St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, must have presented obvious parallels to poetic practices. James Joyce, whose role as a mentor Heaney acknowledges at the end of "Station Island," may have suggested some of these. Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist finds Loyola's "composition of place" in the hellfire sermon so imaginatively effective that its central dictum "to imagine with the senses of the mind … the material character" of all things and events, when filtered through Aquinas, becomes his fundamental aesthetic principle. In The Poetry of Meditation, Louis Martz has demonstrated how Renaissance poets often derived narrative models from Loyola's pattern of composition of place, self-analysis, and colloquy, and dwelled on the psychological processes behind them: memory, reason, and will.

While Heaney's meditations focus on scenes of artistic rather than Christian passion, they employ traditional meditational techniques in doing so. Their "compositions" of rustic artificers, who sacrifice financial contentment and bodily vigor in their devotion to outmoded crafts, act as reflectors in which Heaney analyzes his own procedures. His soul-searching is often self-incriminating. Rather than carry on a colloquy with the godhead, normally he bears silent witness to craftsmen of his own ilk. Like Joyce, he finds in the divine author of creation a metaphor for the authorial imagination, praising and accusing it accordingly. Poetry, which for Heaney includes all makings, is a substitute religion, but one which he never wholeheartedly reveres since it too mystifies the word. While his meditating narrators withdraw from the world into a pregnant, darkened silence, he often accuses them of narcissism, of stubbornly denying life. If in the womb of the imagination secular as well as holy words are made flesh, as Dedalus attests, the desire to regress can be infantile and defeating.

Heaney's emblematic "door into the dark" has numerous religious and literary precedents. It may come from the Bible: "I am the door: by me if any man shall enter in, he shall be saved" (John, 10:9), where Christ is promising salvation for all. St. Teresa uses the metaphor in the initial stages of her meditational treatise, The Interior Castle, declaring: "the door by which to enter this castle is prayer and meditation." It is implicit in St. John of the Cross's meditation, The Dark Night, in which the soul passes through a door in a darkened "house of the senses" to venture into a night infused with divine illumination. St. John explains:

When this house of the senses was stilled (that is, mortified), its passions quenched, and its appetites calmed and put to sleep through this happy night of the purgation of the senses, the soul went out in order to begin its journey along the road of the spirit, which is that of proficients and which by another terminology is referred to as the illuminative way or the way of infused contemplation….

Poems form the kernels of St. John's meditations, and Heaney translates one of these ("Song of the Soul that Rejoices in Knowing God through Faith") in "Station Island," and compares its theme of the dark night to St. Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg. In his second book the "dark night" is a metaphor for the imagination which burns most intensely when darkened to the world.

Heaney's "door" is archetypal rather than specific. It may echo the "spiritual windows and doorways" in The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous medieval book on mysticism which holds that the doors of worldly perception must be closed so that the meditator can approach God's light. According to Benedict Kiely, Heaney's poetics are based on "the cloud of unknowing [and] … what Patrick Kavanagh … called the fog, 'the fecund fog of unconsciousness'" [in The Hollins Critic VII, No. 4]. Kavanagh said that we have to shut our eyes to see our way to heaven. "What is faith, indeed, but a trust in the fog; who is God but the King of the Dark?" In "A Raid into Dark Corners," Kiely traces Heaney's poetic mysticism to Catholic roots. From what Heaney calls the "negative dark that presides in the Irish Christian consciousness … the gloom, the constriction, the sense of guilt, the self-abasement," comes his poetic contention: "I think this notion of the dark centre, the blurred and irrational storehouse of insight and instincts, the hidden core of the self—this notion is the foundation of what viewpoint I might articulate for myself as a poet."

Joseph Conrad's "door of Darkness" and "door opening into a darkness" in Heart of Darkness, Robert Frost's poem, "The Door in the Dark," and the illuminating, purgatorial darknesses in Yeats's "Byzantium" and Eliot's Four Quartets, perhaps gave further support to Heaney's metaphor. But Heaney stakes out territory that is unmistakably his own even while occupying the eminent domain of others. His emphasis on ascetic withdrawal into the dark, for example, remains free of the mystic's grim desire for mortification. While St. John and St. Teresa relish God's "delicious wounds of love," and Loyola advises the retreatant to end his first week by chastizing "the body by inflicting actual pain on it … by wearing hairshirts or cods or iron chains, by scourging or beating," Heaney retreats from temporary distractions and confusions in a less melodramatic way: by walking, driving his car, or, like Kavanagh, by simply shutting his eyes.

Heaney embraces the mystic's sensory deprivation and renewed concentration, but for secular purposes. St. Teresa summed up the contemplative's "rite of passage" in the Fifth Mansion of The Interior Castle: "God deprives the soul of all its senses so that He may the better imprint in it true wisdom: it neither sees, hears, nor understands anything while it lasts." For the traditional Christian, the purgative way culminates in unity with God through grace and love. But when Heaney requisitions Catholic spiritual exercises, he does so to focus better on their hallowed assumptions, which now seem hollow, and attacks their methods even as he employs them. If he aims for transcendent clarity, it is to obtain a better view of the ground he is trying, often foolishly, to transcend. If he quests for unity with a mysterious creative source, usually he finds it in a peat bog, his own head, or his wife, rather than in God. Rather than climb a ladder to heaven, Heaney opens his front door and discovers avatars of the Creator in the blacksmiths and thatchers of an ordinary town.

Perhaps the best example of Heaney's meditative style can be found in "The Forge," a sonnet whose first line provides the title of his second book. Unlike Yeats, who celebrated golden smithies of an ancient Byzantine empire, or Joyce, whose smithy was an adolescent aesthete dreaming of forging art but never quite managing to, Heaney fastens on a brawny artisan who, "leather-aproned, hairs in his nose," hammers out horseshoes. Heaney approaches this "maker" or "artist-god" in a traditional meditative way, by entering a dark "cloud of unknowing." He declares, "All I know is a door into the dark." The door is knowable but the dark beyond blinds him to a creative process which is ultimately unknowable. Heaney intimates correspondences between his blacksmith and a god, but then retracts them. The blacksmith may be one of God's intermediaries, a priest transubstantiating the materials of common experience into holy artifacts, but at the end he is fundamentally a common laborer beating "real iron out."

Profane denotations undercut their sacred connotations. The blacksmith's anvil resembles a mysterious omphalos at the center of space and time. Heaney says, "The anvil must be somewhere in the centre." It is "Horned as a unicorn," a product of fairy tale and legend, as well as an eternal, "Immoveable … altar" where the blacksmith "expends himself in shape and music." Against this mythical background, however, he attends to secular makings rather than sacred ones, artifice rather than sacrifice, horseshoes rather than communion wafers. God's spirit in the last lines is no holy wind or breath inspiriting the soul of a communicant, but simply the air pumped from the bellows onto the forge's coals. If the blacksmith is an archetype (a type of Hephaestus) he is also a common man on the verge of obsolescence, sadly at odds with the modern-day world of traffic outside his door. Cars have made horses nearly redundant, yet he continues to recollect better days and bang out shoes with heroic, if not pigheaded, devotion:

He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

While Heaney admires his artificer, he refuses to gaze at him through the mystic's mystifying spectacles. By the end of the poem he has grounded the blacksmith firmly in the social and economic factors which determine and indeed threaten his existence.

Both Heaney and blacksmith follow the meditational paradigm of renunciation and reunion. While Heaney withdraws from the noisy bustle of traffic and the decaying yard of rust outside to glimpse the work inside, the black-smith leans out the jamb and then returns to his forge. For Heaney, the outside world is governed by a grim, incontrovertible law of entropy and corruption, the inside world by a passionate, irrational will to creation:

Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks….

Outside things fall apart; inside, "somewhere in the centre," they are held together and hammered into unity.

In "The Forge" Heaney illustrates the preliterature, instinctual, unconscious urges and binary oppositions he finds at the center of all creation. His essay, 'The Makings of a Music," reveals these oppositions in similar fashion, but now in terms of Wordsworth and Yeats. In Wordsworth's poetry, he writes, "What we are presented with is a version of composition as listening, as a wise passiveness, a surrender to energies that spring within the centre of the mind." Likewise, in "The Forge," Heaney listens passively to the "short-pitched ring" of the anvil "in the centre" of the shop. But he follows Yeats too, for whom "composition was no recollection in tranquility, not a delivery of the dark embryo, but a mastery, a handling, a struggle towards maximum articulation…. Thoughts do not ooze out and into one another, they are hammered into unity." "All reality," Yeats notes, "comes to us as the record of labour." Although Heaney's smith recollects the old equestrian days, at the end he repudiates nostalgic musing and hammers "real iron" in a fury of labor.

Blake Morrison contends in his book on Heaney that "What links the various traders, labourers and craftsmen who fill his first two books is that, unlike him, they are lacking in speech" and that Heaney, embarrassed by the linguistic sophistication provided by a university education,

found himself in the position of valuing silence above speech, of defending the shy and awkward against the confident and accomplished, of feeling language to be a kind of betrayal…. But the community Heaney came from, and with which he wanted his poetry to express solidarity, was one on which the pressure of silence weighed heavily.

In Catholic Northern Ireland, speaking your mind can be a dangerous business. For social and political reasons Heaney elevates his mother's dictum, "Whatever you say, say nothing," into a poetic principle. He celebrates silence to underscore solidarity with his Irish Catholic ancestors and peers. But silence is also part of the knowing "ignorance" and self-inflicted "blindness" of meditation. "You must become an ignorant man again," Stevens said in his long meditation, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "And see the sun again with an ignorant eye." In "The Forge," when the smithy ignores the fleeting present and focuses in silence on a radiant, sempiternal source (the forge of blazing coals), Heaney follows suit. Expiration—his figurative dying away from the environment—necessarily entails a repression of speech which, with luck, makes way for linguistic inspiration and the sublimation that is writing. Heaney and his compatriots may keep quiet to avoid sectarian recrimination; they also keep quiet to meditate and write.

Oppositions such as speech and writing, myth and fact, intellect and intuition, work and play, and hierarchies that have valued one over the other, receive a new ordering from Heaney. If a logocentric preference for the spoken has devalued the written in Western thought, as Derrida insists, Heaney tends to celebrate the concrete accomplishment of writing over the evanescence of speech. While traditional Christian meditations culminate in colloquies, "in which the soul speaks intimately with God and expresses its affections, resolutions, thanksgivings, and petitions," Heaney's conclude with speechless, writerly acts. His blacksmith, for example, merely "grunts"—he never speaks. In "deconstructing" the hierarchies foisted by Platonic and Christian tradition, Heaney is also going against an Irish grain. Hugh Kenner points out in A Colder Eye that:

Irish writers have always been naggingly aware that Irishmen do not as a rule buy books, have never bought them, have even inherited a tradition whereby to write when you might be talking is an unnatural act…. And sensing that written words can even be dangerous, the Republic employs pretty active censors, who in addition to keeping out Playboy, contraceptive advice, and tons of quick-turnover porn, have interfered with some poets and with nearly every major prose writer [A Colder Eye, 1983].

Heaney protests the view that writing is "unnatural" as well as Socrates' view that it is a superfluous supplement, a "semblance of truth" causing forgetfulness and deception. He affirms that, like sex, it derives from a natural urge to reproduce life out of life, and that its considered messages may contain more pungent truths than the less premeditated utterances of speech.

In "The Peninsula" Heaney specifically addresses the traditional opposition of speech and writing, and casts his investigation in the form of a meditation. The poem recounts a passage into a "dark night" which blinds the poet to an unremarkable present so that, like the blacksmith, he can recall the past in graphic detail. Writing here is not an unnecessary appendage to or a repression of speech; it is a natural complement of speech:

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

At the start, the landscape appears to be a text, but one erased of all "marks" of speech and writing. The emptying is a necessary purgation which, in time, will make space for a new "annunciation," a new influx of words. The "negative way" has its dangers (landfalls, darkness), as the mystics warned, but Heaney's journey ends with renewed inspiration. Reality is eclipsed, but then recalled by the mind as it finds what will suffice for its poem:

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog….

The birds and islands are emblems of the poet who is also doubled-back on himself, who meditates on the writerly imagination by means of the imagination. When the meditation concludes, perception is clarified. Things are seen in their quidditas, their unique thingness, radiantly and cleanly defined. Previously unfocused, the speechless poet is now prepared to uncode the landscape and translate what he reads into writing. Heaney admonishes:

Rather than write an imagist poem Heaney writes a poem about how one gets written.

In an intriguing essay on Andrew Marvell's use of the "self-inwoven simile or … short-circuited comparison," Christopher Ricks quotes from "The Peninsula" to show how Heaney draws on the earlier poet's legacy. "The reflective image," Ricks claims, "simultaneously acknowledges … opposing forces and yearns to reconcile them," and may refer to the "art of poetry … philosophical problems of perception and imagination" as well as to the raging factions in Marvell's England and Heaney's Northern Ireland [The Force of Poetry, 1984]. While Heaney's "selfinwoven" meditations become more overtly political in later books, in Door into the Dark they aim primarily at reconciling factions poised in the poetic imagination. The symbolic "birds stilted on their own legs" and "Islands riding themselves out into the fog," while providing images for the self-conscious poet also dramatize the paradox of creation, which is partly controlled and partly uncontrollable. Frost once claimed that a poem evolved through a happy series of accidents like a piece of ice on a hot stove riding on its own melting. Heaney's islands ride the same conscious and unconscious flow.

"The Peninsula," in its "self-inwoven" way, criticizes meditative tradition even as it follows its basic structures. Like Roland Barthes, who complained in his essay on Ignatius Loyola [Sade, Fournier, Loyola, translated by Richard Miller, 1976] that too often commentators on The Spiritual Exercises succumb to "the old modern myth according to which language is merely the docile and insignificant instrument for the serious things that occur in the spirit, the heart or the soul," Heaney deems language all-important and all-encompassing. In The Spiritual Exercises themselves, Barthes notes, "there is the awareness of human aphasia: the orator and the exercitant, at the beginning, flounder in the profound deficiency of speech, as though they had nothing to say and that a strenuous effort were necessary to assist them in finding a language." He concludes: "The invention of a language, this then is the object of the Exercises." This is the object of "The Peninsula" as well, where the silent driver quests for linguistic renewal.

But Heaney's new encoding is stubbornly rooted in the material world. Loyola has a more transcendent goal. He develops a language of prayers that, paradoxically, subvert human language as they prepare the meditator for an otherworldly sign. Loyola strives for "indifference," the opposite of language, which is a system of differences. God the Maker is God the Marker. He signifies the way as the meditator searches for election and vocation:

The exercitant's role is not to choose, i.e., to mark, but quite the contrary to offer for the divine mark a perfectly equal alternative. The exercitant must strive not to choose; the aim of his discourse is to bring the two terms of the alternative to a homogeneous state…. This paradigmatic equality is the famous Ignatian indifference which has so outraged the Jesuit's foes: to will nothing oneself, to be as disposable as a corpse.

Heaney's meditation moves in an opposite direction. He passes through linguisticindifference (the unmarked landscape and his own silence) to a situation where differences are marked, distinct shapes uncoded, and not by God but by himself.

Heaney's parable of reading and writing could have been suggested by Joyce's Ulysses where Stephen takes an epistemological stroll along Sandymount strand ("water and ground in their extremity"). Stephen reads in the "signatures of all things," wondering whether the world is an apparition of words in his head or composed of actual objects that might hurt if he knocked his head against them. Both Dedalus and Heaney conclude that the world has a degree of independent existence, but that the writer's duty is to manipulate codes of realism in order to deliver a facsimile of "things founded clean on their own shapes."

If Heaney is prescriptive (he asserts "you will uncode all landscapes") he is also diagnostic, analyzing how the mediative mind capitulates to "codes" that mystify as they pretend to mediate reality. Mystics of the via negativa, following the example of Dionysus the Areopagite, assert that only signs or signatures of God can be known and that God's book (the created universe) conceals as much as it reveals. Heaney diagnoses this linguistic mystification in the poem, "In Gallarus Oratory," a title combining notions of speech (oratory) and religious withdrawal (an oratory is a small chapel for special prayers). As in "The Forge" and "The Peninsula" Heaney renounces speech as he enters the sacred dark of the early Christian oratory (in Gallarus on the Dingle peninsula), but his composition of place and self-analysis, rather than bringing him closer to God, brings him closer to those monks in the past whose rapport with God he respects but cannot quite share.

His oratorical poems, so conscious of their rhetoric and fictive status, resemble the oratorical prayers of the monks in their passion but not their goals. While drawn to the old chapel, like Larkin in "Church-Going," he also intimates that the earlier communicants were both literally and figuratively "in the dark." All the images contribute to a sense of claustrophobic oppressiveness. The community's awareness of sin and fallenness is so strong it resembles a gravitational force pulling them down and burying them in a grave or "barrow." Heaney's meditative door opens on "A core of old dark walled up with stone / A yard thick." The monks, not unlike Robert Frost's "old-stone savage" who "moves in darkness … / Not of woods only and the shade of trees" ("Mending Wall"), enter a dark night that Heaney records with ambivalence:

What for Heaney is a hypothetical situation, however, for the earlier monks was a dire exigency. Their sense of fallenness was irrevocable: "No worshipper / Would leap up to his God off this floor." The "heart" and "core" of this place at first seem radically different from the creative altar "at the centre" of the blacksmith shop.

But as Heaney begins the sextet of his sonnet, he reveals the traditional turn of a meditation from dark trials to uplifting illuminations, from morbid concentration on evil to a vision of God's grace. The dead awaken, as if resurrected from their graves (but, ironically, like pagan Vikings who were once buried in barrows):

Founded there like heroes in a barrow
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer, and the grass a flame.

Although the monks obediently scour their souls, they seem pressured into doing so by the "king." They burrow inward, but have nowhere else to go. When they emerge after systematically deranging their senses, as Rimbaud would say, they uncode all landscapes, but in a sacramental as opposed to a realistic way. For a Catholic from Northern Ireland, "King" is hardly an innocent word. If for the monks it signifies an angry, jealous God, for Heaney it also implies the brutality of an imperialist master.

At the center of the Gallarus chapel is the oratorical scene in which spiritual words are delivered up to God, who in turn in-spirits the communicants with holy Words and with a mystic vision of censers and flames. But in this logocentric arena Heaney does not offer the traditional Catholic response. He does not pray or speak; he observes and writes. He may be recollecting the instructions of Loyola, "Every time I breathe in, I should pray mentally, saying one word of the 'Our Father' … so that only one word is uttered between each breath and the next," but he also mocks his heavy-breathers by making them seem uncontrollably narcissistic. The communicants, "Under the black weight of their own breathing," pray in a gothic atmosphere worthy of the stultifying enclosures of Edgar Allan Poe. Their sublime visions of censers and flames may be hallucinations bred out of repression. A nonbeliever, Heaney still expresses empathy for the Gallarus monks. "On a television talk," Benedict Kiely remarks, Heaney explained "how he felt that if all churches were like this one, 'congregations would feel the sense of God much more forcefully.'" That force, however, may be a psychopathological one.

As Heaney dismantles a religious heritage to which he still feels partly enthralled, his poems resemble a workshop littered with old icons and "trial pieces" constructed to replace them. His narratives, which are full of grammatical negatives, usually negate past myths to make way for more realistic alternatives. His meditations, like their classical paradigms, move toward love with increasing frequency, but celebrate its worldly rather than its apocalyptic vestments. In "Girls Bathing, Galway 1965," he begins negatively:

No milk-limbed Venus ever rose
Miraculous on this western shore.
A pirate queen in battle clothes
Is our sterner myth.

After the first negation, Heaney draws attention to the way his mind doubles back on itself, washing away the dusty images of the past after it casts them up for contemplation: "The breakers pour / Themselves into themselves, the years / Shuttle through space invisibly." In time the apocalyptic sea changes them too, mixing tales of Christian judgments with tales of Irish pirates:

The queen's clothes melt into the sea

And generations sighing in
The salt suds where the wave has crashed
Labour in fear of flesh and sin
For the time has been accomplished….

Heaney brilliantly invokes expectations of Christian apocalypse only to assert the living reality that such myths deny. Unlike St. John on Patmos, who envisioned a sea offering up the dead for judgment, Heaney imagines the sea offering up ordinary girls in bathing suits:

As through the shallows in swimsuits,
Bare-legged, smooth-shouldered and long-backed
They wade ashore with skips and shouts.
So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.

While Christian mystics clamor for spiritual marriages with the divine love, and classical mythmakers dream of beautiful women born out of sea foam like Venus, Heaney welcomes a flesh-and-blood beauty, to counter the etherealized women of old.

In tracing the arduous process in which the mind purges its images to create them anew, Heaney's meditations resemble what Mircea Eliade called "the eternal return." They seek to abolish temporal history in order to recover the timeless void out of which new order or "cosmos" burgeons. For cultures that regard action as ritualistic repetitions of archetypes, Eliade claims:

1. Every creation repeats the pre-eminent cosmogonie act, the Creation of the world.

2. Consequently, whatever is founded has its foundation at the center of the world (since, as we know, the Creation itself took place from the center.) [The Myth of the Eternal Return]

For Joyce, the artist repeated the cosmogonie act by writing, so that "the mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished." Heaney's imagination is similarly ritualistic, gravitating toward "centers" in order to repeat profane as well as sacred acts of creation which, he often painfully confesses, are wedded to destructions. In "The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon," a poem reminiscent of Robert Lowell's metaphysical fishing poems, the poet is the Fisher King, both victimized fish and Christ-like, "recreational" fisherman. Heaney, in imitatione Christi, follows the fish as it withdraws from the sea toward an interior space, a contemplative center. Here destruction is united with its opposite:

At the "centre" a created and captivating "lure" unites fisher and wounded fish.

If at-one-ment with God's crucified body (Christ's symbol was the fish) is the sacred analogue, Heaney repeats it in the common experience of fishing. As the lure unifies opposed forces, so does the poem, which is a love song to the fish as much as an elegy for its annihilation.

Heaney may have found support for his views on circularity and recurrence in Emerson, who in his essay "Circles" wrote:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

Heaney, likewise, finds circles everywhere. In "The Plantation," for example, he maps an eternal cycle of creation and destruction, which at first bewilders him. As he with-draws from the disturbing present—the "hum of the traffic"—his meditation as before strives to locate emblems for its own doubling back, its own circularity. The plantation provides a historical emblem too; the cycle of invasion and domination has recurred so many times in Ireland that Heaney regards it as archetypal. His act of communion invokes master and slave, victim and victimizer English landlord (Munster was divided into hierarchical plantations in the 1580s) and Irish tenant. Heaney dramatizes the combination of psychological and historical antinomies with a familiar but haunting fairy tale:

You had to come back
To learn how to lose yourself,
To be pilot and stray—witch,
Hansel and Gretel in one.

When he begins his investigations, "Any point in that wood / Was a centre." Now he is lost, traveling in circles, like the "toadstools and stumps / Always repeating" themselves. A meditative darkness ("the black char of a fire") marks his exclusion from society, but reveals those who have made similar journeys before: "Someone had always been there / Though always you were alone."As in "The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon," Heaney finally reveals his dual role as destroyer and creator, which unites him culpably to a process he would rather repudiate. He must play the reclusive witch, sacrificing childlike enthusiasms in order to redeem them in poems.

The last poem in Door into the Dark finds a new and startling image for the contemplative mind and its sacrifices in that most common of Irish landscapes: the bog. Rather than to a door in a blacksmith's shop or oratory, here Heaney is drawn to the bottomless "wet centre" of a tarn. His concentration is Emersonian; a "transparent eye-ball" focuses in ever-intensifying circles on a mysterious center:

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.

Concealing the sunlit world outside but penetrating the "dark night" inside, Heaney's eye glimpses its own reflection in the tarn, where images are received, broken down, preserved, and exhumed. The ground, like the mystic consciousness "wounded" by love, opens itself to all like

kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.

Its caritas seems ineffable and unknowable, archetypal rather than historical. He concludes:

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.

Common acts in the present again echo sacred ones of the past. His pioneers are turf-diggers who, like spiritual questors, ritually reenact the "eternal return" in their search for a mysterious, cosmogonic source.

The contrast between the expansive prairie and the vertical descent into the bog intimates a conflict in Heaney's mystic stance. If Heaney, like many Irishmen before him, is attracted by the "mystic" democracy of America (the country of prairies and pioneers), whose apotheosis is Walt Whitman's cosmic embrace of all created things, he is also irrevocably European as he plumbs tradition's hoard. He goes outward "to encounter the reality of experience," but also downward like an archaeologist to retrieve its reliquary forms. More like Joyce and Yeats than Whitman and Williams, he struggles to find in central institutions, such as the Catholic Church and its spiritual exercises, rituals and symbols for a faith he has lost but rediscovered in poesis. Whitman's apocalyptic rejection of European traditions is tempting, as is the American penchant for leveling hierarchies, decentering central institutions, and questing for democratic ideals in transcendent spaces, but Heaney's sensibility is as inextricably rooted in traditional poetic forms as in the political and religious institutions of Ireland. He wields the iconoclastic ax, but for the sake of revision rather than outright rejection. His emphasis on order and pattern is doggedly formalist, even though he overhauls old forms to make them consistent with contemporary experience.

While critics suspect Heaney's formalism to be part of a larger conservatism, and accuse him of stubbornly refusing to modernize himself, his unsettled attitudes with regard to both past and present seem particularly modern. [In New York Review of Books, March 1980] A. Alvarez, for example, chastises Heaney for repudiating Modernism's "literary declaration of Independence" (however antiquated it may be in the 1980s) and claims: "If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way." But Heaney's skepticism of "right true ways" and of the sensibility that tenders such illusions, makes him seem more modern than his detractors. His meditative style is troubled and exploratory. If it is not specifically informed by structuralist and post-structuralist debate, as Blake Morrison occasionally worries, it often predicts their major themes. Obsessed with such hierarchical oppositions as writing and speech, forgetting and remembering, blindness and insight, profane and sacred love, marginal and central institutions, Heaney typically reveals a dialectical relation where oppressively one-sided relations were the rule. His doors into the dark open onto a present inextricably wedded, for better or worse, to the past.

In "Literary History and Literary Modernity," an essay in Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man points out: "As soon as modernism becomes conscious of its own strategies … it discovers itself to be a generative power that not only engenders history, but is part of a generative scheme that extends far back into the past." Heaney's premeditated forgettings and renunciations in Door into the Dark aim to purge earlier anxieties and the images that provoked them. "Make it new," for Heaney as for Pound, also means "make it old." De Man writes: "When [writers] assert their own modernity, they are bound to discover their dependence on similar assertions made by their literary predecessors, their claim to being a new beginning turns out to be the repetition of a claim that has always already been made." Heaney's meditations, which scrutinize thenown procedures and compare them to all makings, find precedents in a tradition of Catholic meditation but give to the old forms a new complexity and an attractive, personal finish.