Seamus Heaney is clearly conversant with Jung's psychology and its relevance to art, specifically literature: in a conversation with Borges [in The Crane Bag, Volume 7, 1983], he referred to the "Jungian archetypes" as "valid explanations of what we experience in the subconscious worlds of dreams and fiction," and more recently in The Government of the Tongue, he used Jungian terminology quite naturally when he emphasised that poetry and the imaginative arts "verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life." He has spoken of "The secret between the words, the binding element … a psychic force that is elusive, archaic and only half apprehended by maker and audience"; [in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963] Jung refers to "The energy underlying conscious psychic life" and the "archetypes, which are pre-existent to consciousness and condition it." Seamus Heaney uses the Jungian concept of mythical archetypes to explore himself, his family and his race; to understand the origins of his own creative energies and the distortion of creativity in the destructiveness of his society.

Through his understanding and use of Jungian perspective Heaney defends himself against the charge that lyric poetry is a luxury that Ireland cannot afford; this does not merely illuminate his poems but constitutes a thesis of the value of poetry itself. In this sense his poems are virtually (though tangentially) concerned with the very issues that superficially they seem to evade.

[In Archetype: A Natural History of the Self 1982] Anthony Stevens has argued that, "Jung knew that people needed myths if they were to remain vitally in touch with the archetypal core of their nature. Myths provide an entire cosmology compatible with a culture's capacity for understanding…" In his poetry Heaney can be seen to reflect the Jungian concept of myth as the human attempt to appreciate and apprehend life, not as a mere existence but as the intercommunication of the whole complexity of body, intellect and psyche. A number of poems in Seeing Things reflect the Jungian parallels of conscious and unconscious, and the extension of the ego to fuller realisation of the Self archetype in "the individuation process … to integrate the unconscious into consciousness."

In "Casting and Gathering," Heaney presents the conscious and unconscious "voices" through two views of fishing, recognising that he has long been concerned with opposition and tensions, as "Years and years ago, these sounds took sides," yet "I am still standing there, awake and dreamy." The "dreamy" state is an appropriate one in which to listen to the voice of the unconscious, or to be aware of the tension between that and the conscious, as he is also "awake." [In his Collected Works, edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, Vol. 9, 1953-78] Jung explained, "Once the unconscious content has been given form and the meaning of the formulation understood … The position of the ego must be maintained as being of equal value to the counterposition of the unconscious and vice versa…" Later in the same essay he refers to a dialogue which an "other voice" and the poem can be read as a dramatisation of this kind of psychic dialogue:

One sound is saying, "You're not worth tuppence,
But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe."
The other says, "Go with it! Give and swerve.
You are everything you feel beside the river."

In this formulation of the two styles of fishing the alert attention of the ego "voice," "Watch it!" is balanced in counterposition of the affective mode of the unconscious, "everything you feel."

In equilibrium between them Heaney sums up, "I trust contrariness." If the Jungian reading of the poem is con tinued, the trusting of contrariness could reflect Anthony Stevens' comment on the transcendent function, "when permitted to do so, the psyche transcends reason and the rules of logic, no less than the opposites, for it sees no problem in the simultaneous perception of incompatibilities." If Heaney speaks for his race, which is divided against itself, his poetry must embrace the conflicts but more, the incompatibilities are essential.

In Seeing Things, Heaney mythologies his father; his examination of self is powerfully extended through the father archetype, enabling him to confront the archetypal experience of death. Jung's researches revealed that "it not infrequently happens that the archetype appears in the form of a spirit in dreams or fantasy-products, or even comports itself like a ghost…it mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions…" Heaney's father is embodied in the landscape he dominated; as adult the son is constantly reminded, he finds he "cannot mention keshes or the ford / Without my father's shade appearing to me / On a path towards sunset," the young child

was inside the house
And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed
And daunted, strange without his hat,
His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent…

Heaney's recollection of this incident reflects Jung's comments directly: "I must have been three or four. I wasn't there, but it was as if I saw it all, him falling off, the cart going into the river. I remember him coming back and walking towards me in a dream, and the strangest thing was seeing him without his hat…" [The Independent on Sunday, May 19, 1991].

Heaney achieves a skilful balance between the material and the spiritual in his reminiscences, establishing his father in terms of the motif of the ashplant, his badge of authority, as the "Wise Old Man" archetype recorded in Jung's psychiatric studies. This frequently repeated image of the ashplant creates a microcosm of the responsibility and respect accorded the cattle dealer:

"Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat"
My father told his sister setting out
For London, "and stay near him all night

And you'll be safe…."

Heaney movingly describes his father's urgent clinging on to this symbol of authority on his death-bed, as if once he has it in his grasp he is himself again, with his powers restored, as his son would have wished equally desperately:

As his head goes light with light, his wasting hand
Gropes desperately and finds the phantom limb
Of an ash plant in his grasp, which steadies him.
Now he has found his touch he can stand his ground…

The concept of continuity and tradition linked with the archetypal significance of the character is encompassed in the marvellous economy of haiku form as Heaney describes how he, now head of the family as the eldest son, takes on the authority and self-confidence of his dead father, represented yet again in the ash-plant:

Dangerous pavements.
But I face the ice this year
With my father's stick.

The title of the poem, "1.1.87," in its stark numerals, suggests the bleak isolation of the world bereft of the father, yet also the directness of determination to start a new year and a new phase of life with confidence gained from the father within the son.

It is only at his father's death that he can fully acknowledge his filial debt, in the archetypal experience of death of the self as a child. As Jung explained, "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated…" This seems to be exactly the experience explored in the concise lyricism of the final poem of the "Squarings" sequence:

Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.

The movement, progression in self-development and realisation, after his father's death, is a release celebrated in many moments in the "Squarings" sequence of poems, in relation to the creative energy of the poet's gift. As Heaney suggested in The Government of the Tongue, "…poetry, having to do with feelings and emotions, must not submit to the intellect's eagerness to foreclose … art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it…" In Seeing Things there are a number of poems which present the concept of a journey or progression outwards, into the freedom of a wider range of reference than was accessible to the poet in earlier collections. It is the trusting of this level of experience and response which gives the work its depth in relation to archetypal expression, in Jung's terms, 'The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists of the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work."

There are uncertainties and hesitancies however, acknowledged in the poems themselves. There is the exciting challenge of "Unroofed scope" in "Lightenings (i)" but in the next poem the denial of the freedom glimpsed calls for repressive action in appropriately constrained staccato phrases, "Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in." In the next there is a tentative response to the unknown but it is restricted and fearful, "You squinted out from a skylight of the world." The progression is charted through this sequence, as a bolder reaction is encouraged, when as in so many earlier works, Heaney effectively blends description of the countryside setting with the practice of the poetic art:

Improvise. Make free
Like old hay in its afterlife
High on a windblown hedge.

In Heaney's own words, the freedom of the form is described with a sense of excitement and exuberance, "There's a phrase I use, 'make impulse one with wilfulness': the wilfulness is in the 12 lines, the impulse in the freedom and shimmer and on-the-wingness. Until recently I had no titles or numbers for these poems, as if they were afloat all at once but moving separately, like mosaics."

The idea of the poems having their own power, "unconscious activation of an archetypal image," with order imposed by the poet "shaping this image into the finished work" but initially driven by impulse rather than will, reflects Heaney's protean concept of the "government of the tongue," both governed by the poet and governing the poet. Referring to his chosen title for the T.S. Eliot memorial lectures, he explained, "When I thought of 'the government of the tongue' as a general title … what I had in mind was this aspect of poetry as its own vindicating force … form is achieved not by dint of the moral and ethical exercise of mind but by the self-validating operations of what we call inspiration…" This is very close to the description of creative energy in the poet as Jung depicted it: "…he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being, yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never have entrusted to his tongue."

Heaney's own remarks on Kavanagh can equally well be related to himself when he suggests, "This then is truly creative writing. It does arise from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but the overflow is not a reactive response to some stimulus in the world out there. Instead it is a spurt of abundance from a source within and it spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self." Again, Jung's words complement these, "…We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche."

The welcome release of this freedom and self-vindication of poetic power in maturity is presented in "Fosterling":

Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

The contrast with the earth-bound quality of earlier poetry in terms of lightness, in opposition to both heaviness and darkness, is developed further in relation to the burden of responsibility to the Northern Irish political situation. As Douglas Dunn has noted [in The Irish Times, June 1,1991], "Poets ask a great deal of themselves these days when they decide to set out in search of an uncompromised route into the detached and disinterested realm of poetry itself and its special truths. More ordinary beginnings need to be explored first, as well as the loyalties attached to them, those local and national pieties which are more insistent than what can be yielded by an imagination in its freedom."

This is Heaney's particular skill, to use the "ordinary beginnings" and in this volume, to have the courage to reach out beyond the ordinary and "credit marvels" yet still retain the connection with "local and national pieties." This is effectively demonstrated in "The Settle Bed," where the physical heaviness of the wooden cot-bed, "standing four-square as an ark," is potently infused through the tactile description with the "local and national pieties" filtered into the poet's consciousness during childhood occupation of the bed, tapping into the "collective unconscious" of the race:

…I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:
…Anthems of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten,

Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads…

the burden of this "inheritance" is emphasized aptly in terms of the solidity and impenetrable qualities of the wood, "unshiftably planked … un-get-roundable weight." These awkward, bulky sounds from a poet so honed in the mellifluous sensuousness of language enforce the sense of "insistence" noted by Dunn, yet later in the poem the resistance claimed by "the imagination in its freedom" is celebrated through the freedom of spaces created by skilful enjambment, a positive response to the "burden" according with Jung's remark, "…it is not surprising that when an archetypal situation occurs we feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though transported, or caught up by an overwhelming power. At such moments we are no longer individuals but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us…."

Such a voice could in itself become part of the burden; could drown the individual voice; or could be taken up as Heaney does, and turned from constraint to freedom, "It's a poem about turning heavy things into light things, It's saying: you can handle experience."

…to conquer that
weight,
Imagine a shower of settle-beds tumbled from heaven
Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people,
Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is
given

Can always be reimagined…

Heaney does not escape by ignoring the situation; however, he suggests ways to "handle experience," finds objective correlatives for his own circumstances, as in his poem "Sounds of Rain" he identifies with Pasternak in his sense of responsibility:

"I had the feeling of an immense debt,"
He said (it is recorded). So many years
Just writing lyric poetry and translating.
I felt there was some duty … Time was passing.

The psychologically saturating voices of his conscience and the collective unconscious or "national pieties" are powerfully evoked in insistent sibilants:

The eaves of water-fringe and steady lash
Of summer downpour: You are steeped in luck.
I heard them say, Steeped, steeped, steeped in luck.

The tension between the constraints of responsibility and poetic freedom are further examined in Heaney's essays, "…lyric poetry, however responsible, always has an element of the untrammelled about it. There is a certain jubilation and truancy at the heart of an inspiration. There is a sensation of liberation and abundance which is the antithesis of every hampered and deprived condition. And it is for this reason that, psychologically, the lyric poet feels the need for justification in a world that is notably hampered and deprived." He has suggested, "…it is tempting to view the whole syndrome in the light of Jung's thesis that an insoluble conflict is overcome by outgrowing it, developing in the process a 'new level of consciousness.'"

Although Heaney used the analogy originally in a lecture in 1984, referring to poets of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and onwards, he has reprinted it in his Government of the Tongue collection, and the continuation of the reference to Jungian psychotherapy is still relevant to his work in Seeing Things: "This development involves detachment from one's emotions:

One certainly does feel the affect and is tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identified with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say "I know that I suffer…."

"The affect" means a disturbance, a warp in the emotional glass which is in danger of narrowing the mind's range of response to the terms of the disturbance itself. In our case, this affect rose from the particular exacerbations attendant on natives and residents of Northern Ireland at that time."

Heaney's explanation of the affect as "a warp in the emotional glass" is directly taken up in another poem examining the privilege of art in "hampered and deprived" conditions, through memories of sightseeing on his London honeymoon:

…like refections staggered through warped glass,
They reappear as in a black and white
Old grainy newsreel, where their pleasure-boat
Goes back spotlit across sunken bridges
And they alone are borne downstream unscathed…

The sense of responsibility hampers the reminiscence of youthful freedom, given chilling physicality later in the disturbing image of "a silk train being brushed across a leper"; such riches in a time of diseased distortion of creativity mean those so privileged have to shoulder the consequent burden, and risk "narrowing the mind's response to the terms of disturbance itself:

So let them keep a tally of themselves
And be accountable when called upon
For although by every golden mean their lot
Is fair and due, pleas will be allowed
Against every right and title vested in them
(And in a court where mere innocuousness
Has never gained approval or acquittal.)

Heaney continues his analogy with Jung's terminology, "By the 1960s, in Jung's scenario, 'a higher consciousness' was manifesting itself in the form of poetry itself, an ideal towards which the poets turned in order to survive the stunting conditions." This "higher consciousness" is reached through the mythological dramatisation of the circumstances, as in the last of the "Crossings" poem, depicting the "stunted conditions":

As danger gathered and the march dispersed…

We were like herded shades who had to cross

And did cross, in a panic, to the car
Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in
Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.

The past tense of this scene is counteracted with the final hopeful encounter at the end of the volume, in which the present tense emphasises Heaney's freedom from the "herded shades," rising to a "higher consciousness" through the acknowledgement that he does not have to accept the world of the dark but can reach out, beyond, into the light. He is encouraged to reject the threat of the Shadow archetype represented by those turned to "shades":

No good spirits ever pass this way
And therefore, if Charon objects to you,
You should understand well what his words imply.

Thus one reason to welcome recent ceasefires is the need of the joy that the political struggles destroy. Heaney keeps alive the belief in and hope for that joy: the life of the spirit as a possibility through poetic imagination, when any kind of war threatens total despair. Through the Jungian interpretation of the mythical archetypes employed in the poems of Seeing Things, the reader can identify with Heaney's comment, partly quoted in the opening paragraph of this paper and now in fuller context, confirmation that "Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited."