Janne Borgaes
Highly Recommended
The Louise Clancy Memorial Prize
“it was marvellous / and actual, I said out loud, ‘a haven’” (“Glanmore Sonnets: VII”, OG 169). Heaney’s relationship with landscapes has been much discussed, though somewhat less so his imagery of and literary interaction with the sea. His work is generally and accurately characterised as having an earthy quality, rooting itself in his “rural, agrarian home ground” (Hart 3). It searches for villatic and underground histories and meanings, often exploring ambiguous issues of territory and identity beneath the topsoil. To a poet as concerned with specific, identified, geographic space as Heaney, the sea presents a challenge. Lacking distinct landmarks or geographic features visible to those situated within that landscape, it seems primed to evade Heaney’s usual mode of giving a landscape names and centres, and thereby meanings. In the imagined seascape, there is no water pump to elevate to an omphalos or farmhouses that contain a family history. However, Heaney’s depictions of seascapes are no less vivid than his inland terrains. Like the land, they are saturated with historicity, mythical genii loci, journeys always looping to some point of departure, and onomatopoeic renderings of nature into assonant, consonant, and vowel sounds. From his first published collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Seeing Things (1991), Heaney’s poetry undergoes changes in focus, diction, soundscape, and composition, as is to be expected. The sea’s changeable surging physicality is at first predominantly represented by the hissing staccato consonants that dominate much of his earlier work. Later, contemplating a more halcyon sea, spacious vowels take their place, opening up the seascape towards Seeing Things.
After his move to the Republic of Ireland in 1972 (O’Driscoll 150), Heaney’s poetry undergoes a journey to reach a “clarity of expression” (210). This clarity slowly moves away from the “earthiness” of his earlier work, still very much present in North (1975), towards the openness and “airiness” (Vendler 136) of Seeing Things (1991). His representation of the sea develops in a similar direction. Instead of a mysterious place marked by “darker fathoms” (“Shore Woman”, OG 74) or questions of an unresolvable “full identity” (Naturalist 47), Heaney now locates there a “clarity of [the] poetic voice” (Howley 113). Heaney slowly distances his poetry from too-overt mythologies, and indeed from the bucolic focus ascribed to his earlier poetry. As his poetry develops from the 1970s to the 1990s, the sea becomes less fearsome and terrible. Instead of assuming the emotional and mythological resonance of particularly Wintering Out, it becomes a medium for poetic freedom.
Gradually, the poetry located on the shore, at first so occupied with the nature of the border itself, becomes concerned with the metaphysical issues of where it is and what lies beyond it. Additionally, it migrates away from the eroticised genius loci of his earlier work. Instead, he moves towards a more clearly defined and independent geography, such as Field Work’s (1979) “Glanmore Sonnet VII” with its sea distantly “toil[ing] like mortar” (OG 169), and the “perfected vision” (373) of the bay’s equanimous balanced waters in “Squarings” (ST). With this, Heaney finally fulfils his vision of founding the landscape “clean on [its] own shape” (“The Peninsula”, OG 21). What remains is a “delighted, sensuous merging of facts of nature and facts of culture” (Corcoran 102), a sensual intimacy with the natural world that affords both sides a calm neutrality.
The only sea poems of North that directly associate the sea with a human figure are “Oceans’ Love to Ireland” and, to a lesser degree, “Act of Union”. Both depict rapes or dubious sexual relations. “Ocean’s Love” recounts an Irish maid being raped by Walter Raleigh whose relentlessness is compared to the surrounding waters: “He is water, he is ocean” (North 46), as unstoppable and inescapable as the sea crashing onto shore. Notably, Raleigh remains the only depiction of an “explicitly male sea” (Howley 173) in Heaney’s work, echoing the sea’s invasive potential previously explored in “Shoreline”. David Farrier observes that “the dreams (or nightmares) of empire are never far away in North” (41f). The sea is trapped amid this colonial violence, occupying an uneasy position between border and conduit to it.
However, the sea becomes a transitive and freeing element when separated from these genii loci. Then, it can be an evocative presence that embodies potential for alternative mythologies to those that govern and catalyse the Northern Ireland conflict. In “Funeral Rites”, the speaker is looking for this possibility in a drive to the shore: “we will drive north again / past Strang and Carling fjords” (OG 98). The Northern Irish coast is here rendered Norse by changing the “ford” in Strangford and Carlingford “fjords”. This linguistic and literary reach across the water to the Norse sagas, specifically Njál’s Saga, continues as the poem goes on to reference Gunnar Hámundarson:
imagining those under the hill
disposed like Gunnar
who lay beautiful
inside his burial mound,
though dead by violence (98f.)
Gunnar, described as an honourable man, is killed as result of a blood feud between Icelandic families. In the saga itself, this “neighbourly murder” (97) is condemned as the product of a spiral into ritualistic killings stemming from a false sense of honour that superseded the legal word of the Althing. Their dynamics parallel the infighting and extrajudicial violence of the Troubles. As in the preceding collections, the “synaptic sea” (Howley 173) affords a freedom to explore the conflict in a safe and oblique manner, while also offering respite from it.
“North” then initiates a maritime movement away from Ireland and its politics. The speaker arrives at the shore, looking outwards to sea:
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering (OG 100)
The secular Atlantic invites Heaney and the reader to leave Ireland for the Norse settlements of Iceland and Greenland. This connective power also facilitates a one-sided communication across time as the Viking “longship’s swimming tongue / […] buoyant with hindsight” takes over the rest of the poem. Caleb Caldwell notes the prevalence of dead voices in “North”, remarking that “the poet is silent and the voices of the dead and the instruments of death speak to him” (112). Granting the dead their buoyant tongue, the speaker thereby gains permission to his own. The Vikings in their hindsight are experienced in the “hatred and behind-backs / of the althing” (OG 101) and “memory incubating the spilled blood” of blood feuds like Gunnar’s, dynamics similar to the Troubles. Their experience thus holds weight and is relevant to Heaney’s own. They then go on to give poetic instruction to the speaker, advising him to:
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. (OG 101)
This Arctic landscape in which Heaney can “compose in darkness”, away from the scrutinising gazes of sectarian dynamics, permits him to detach himself from political scrutiny while trusting his own experience and retaining his traditions. To “compose in darkness” possibly refers to writing practice of the filídh, Irish poets, who would lay in a dark room with a stone on their stomach to “keep away distracting thoughts, and [help] concentrate on the subject they had chosen” (Bergin 9). The sea-space gives passage to a parallel yet separate society, one that is both reminiscent of the violence that surrounds Heaney and poetically freeing, even if he cannot fully actualise this yet. But it marks the moment in which one of the central themes his seascapes explore in the coming years first emerges: A quest for the aquatic clarity of the icicle and the sea that widens the poetic gaze and grants it independence from political expectations and confines of the borderscape.
Heaney also seeks this marine opening in Field Work (1979). “Oysters” begins with a sensually intense moment as “shells clacked on the plates” and the speaker’s tongue becomes “a filling estuary” (145). Christopher Ricks notes that “open at once are the oyster, the mouth, the meal and the book” (95). This openness leaves a vulnerable, but also hopeful image that is nonetheless dismantled by the inability to ignore the violence hovering in the background and fully engage with the sea and what it represents. Howley finds in “Oysters” a “shift to finding a clarity of poetic voice in the sea, not ‘bogged’ down by the expectations and complexities of his home” (113). This is only partially true; there is no direct reference to either the Northern Ireland conflict or the usually so omnipresent Mossbawn. However, the peaceful and starlit opening is soon interrupted by exactly that violence, here evoked by the violated oysters that had to be killed to create this moment:
[…] My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades,
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. (OG 145)
What carries over from the man-nature unions of North is the speaker’s attempts to physically engage and merge with nature: “[his] tongue was a filling estuary” (OG 145), attempting to eat “the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me into verb, pure verb” (146). The tongue-heavy “L” sounds in “Bivalves: the split bulb” (145) mirror the oysters’ consumption, but the expected excitement into action does not occur. In fact, the speaker’s “anger that [his] trust could not repose / in the clear light” (146) shows that the clarity he searches for remains distant in his frustration. Instead, “poetry or freedom / lean[s] in from the sea”, just not quite into the reach of the poet, located somewhere in the ocean with the oysters. The same issue as in North arises; the integration of the sea into the human body is inherently problematic. The sea, represented by the oysters, can in some way be captured but will not give meaning as the land does, making the consumption an uneasy and dissatisfying one. The reason for this seems to be the desperate strain towards that clarity and the attempt to possess or force it.
In comparison, the interaction with the sea in “Glanmore Sonnets: VII” is more receptive and less insistent on direct contact.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Héléne
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes. (OG, 169)
From this simple, undemanding relationship emerges a “buoyant optimism” (McLoughlin 204) and an ease of movement. However, McLoughlin also claims that the storm, evocative of the now distant conflict in the North, engenders in the sonnet “a sense of guilt” (211) owing to Heaney’s apparent desertion. And indeed, the mention of Rockall, an islet in the Atlantic claimed by several nations, invokes dynamics of territorial conflict. To date, Rockall, or rather the rich fishing grounds and fossil resources surrounding it, is contested territory between the UK and Ireland. Nonetheless, the transit and distance granted by the sea in multiple ways alleviates the effect of the guilt and distress caused by the violence.
The sonnet begins with an out-of-order enumeration of meteorological sectors named in the Shipping Forecast, a British radio programme forecasting the weather on the waters around the British Isles:
Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into sibilant penumbra (OG 169)
The “collapse into sibilant penumbra” of the sea’s forces refers to the programme’s speaker, but also applies to Heaney’s own play with sounds that evoke a movement in nature. The Shipping Forecast’s almost poetic format reflects on Heaney’s childhood preoccupation with the radio as a “journey into the wideness of the world” (“Crediting Poetry”, OG 449). In fact, the eponymous cottage where he composed the “Glanmore Sonnets” was reminiscent of Heaney’s childhood home, a physical “connect[ion] back to the Mossbawn house” (O’Driscoll, 198). This childhood moment is also where Heaney’s propensity for etymologies and “guttural sibilants of European speech” (“Crediting Poetry”, OG 449) emerges. They navigate the sea in this poem in the form of the French ships like “L’Etoile”, while “keen” is Irish. The words are also taken from different eras, which adds diachronicity similar to the layers of historic invasions in “Shoreline”. However, here they are part of the movement away from the speaker’s position. The kennings “eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road”, are indicative of an Anglo-Saxon identity and timescape associated with England, especially “whale-road”, referencing the Old English poem Beowulf. They notably refer to the sea by its transitory properties, reciting “road” four times, while also engendering a growth of the road’s travellers, from eel to seal to boat to the largest, the whale. Alternatively, they trace the passage of water from Lough and river (eel) to shore (seal) to open sea (keel/boat) to ocean (whale).
Finally, the poem returns to the Shipping Forecast areas, once again arranged out of their intended order. Instead of ending in the Irish Sea, now the speaker (and with him the reader) travels on these locators north-westwards. The journey traces from the Scottish Minches out to the Faroes, drifting off to a wild poetic seascape invoked by the language, into the “liberation of feeling after stress” (Deane 74). Nicholas Allen characterises Heaney offshore as “a figure of the shallows and the morning mists, […] of riverbanks and the foreshore, two locations that persist throughout the body of his work” (131). And it is true that many of his sea poems are set in tidal zones and coastal areas, but “Glanmore Sonnets” finally leads that poetic voice out to the wider expanse of the ocean.
Station Island (1984) is dominated by its eponymous long poem which takes place at the island of the same name in Lough Derg, County Donegal. Station Island itself is host to St Patrick’s Purgatory, a popular site of pilgrimage. Field Work’s evocative aquatic vocabulary that eventually facilitates an outward movement also emerges in “Station Island”, though as less of a geographical journey. Barney Murphy’s drunkenly “rowing” (OG 251) hands and the speaker’s “blurred swimmings” (249) accompany a spiritual and psychological passage, even when not set on or by the water. The island, marked by a deep Catholicism and surrounded by “black water, white waves” (258), reflects Ireland itself. Lough Derg is thus both inland lake and, by association and metaphor, an ocean in miniature. According to Allen, the “liquidity of Heaney’s language suggests the alterity of the pilgrimage as a journey to unknown territory, both human and poetic” (133). This voyage is accompanied by ghostly visions of people from Irish history and Heaney’s own life. They, for instance James Joyce, are “made of water” (Allen 134) and the insight they give exemplifies the clarifying properties water takes on in the poem.
Ryan Womack asserts a similar idea of a clarifying, but also redemptive journey in “Station Island’s” pilgrimage to the island at the centre of Lough Derg in County Donegal (220). Indeed, the self-depreciating entrance into the water has something of a sinner looking for absolution.
I dreamed and drifted. All seemed to run to waste
As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood
Strange polypi floated like huge corrupt
Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,
My softly awash and blanching self-disgust. (262)
This passage evokes both an underwater dream-journey and the washing of sins performed through a baptism. In general, the water is repository for these personal ghosts of memory and the public ones of history, all present through apparition or intertextuality. As has been observed by numerous scholars, among them Corcoran, the speaker’s journey is analogous to Dante’s in La Divina Commedia. In the Commedia, the mountain of purgatory lies surrounded by water, in the poem mirrored by St Patrick’s Purgatory on the island. The combination of a pre-Christian immram with the “tradition of the dream-vision” (Corcoran 117) and Catholic redemptive pilgrimage is part of the same movement in Heaney’s poetry that had already started by Field Work. In Station Island, contact with water is Christianised. In general, the rather pagan folk elements of bog bodies and the Maighdeen Mara wane and give way to a play with ecclesiastical conceptions of holy nature, though not necessarily an embrace of them. The Catholic “vision” (OG 324) character of “The Disappearing Island” and the evocation of “John the Baptist / […] on the façade of a cathedral” (340) in “Seeing Things” both recall the redemptive pilgrimage to “Station Island”. The water assumes baptismal qualities that grant new insights and enables a new way forward. However, to Corcoran this amounts to “something very like a renunciation” (118). The rituals are also connected with fear and doubt, and the relationship between poet and religion remains unstable.
While not the actual sea, the waters of Lough Derg occupy a similar position in Heaney’s poetry. As Howley points out, “The island-within-an-island is a part of the island of Ireland but also separate from it” (62). The island in its centre is thus connected to the islands off the shore of Ireland that shape the coastal imagination, while the Lough becomes the sea that divides the island from the Irish mainland. The Lough’s “sea-ness” provides the basis for these visions by giving it a space that can be accessed and voyaged in the context of a ritual. As Corcoran observes:
These encounters find their structural shape in the nature of the pilgrimage itself, as the pilgrims leave the ordinary social world, cross the waters of Lough Derg, perform their penitential exercises, and return. (118)
The water at the same time separates the island, thus giving it its status as a ritual space, distinct from the land surrounding the Lough, and provides the passage that forms a vital part of the ritual. Paradoxically, this ritual voyage also results in a purification from the expectations and violence of organised religion.
Finally, Seeing Things (1991) continues the trend towards “unhampered freedom” (O’Driscoll 322), influenced by the death of Heaney’s father and a reacquaintance with Glanmore Cottage, clearing the sea’s waters to balanced tranquillity. “Squarings” takes its own approach to the sea’s poetic clarity that here is emulated by the water itself. “Deserted harbour stillness” (OG 373) and the “empt[y]” (391) offing “at a distance from the shore” again present the sea as a cleansing and open element that renders “Every stone clarified and dormant under water” (373). There is a sense that the space is being opened up, as the empty head of the bay “compelled / the eye that scanned it” (391), drawing the gaze further out to sea.
Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim. (373)
The dividing line here is not the shore, but rather the horizon between sea and sky. Its “equilibrium” is phonologically associative with “brim” and implies a fullness, a stability in the water that is reflected by the “elements of language […] in balance” (Vendler 148). Additionally, the prevalence of deep o-sounds slows the poem’s movement, a phonetic anchor from which the higher pitches of equilibrium and brim can sound to their sonar-like exploration of the water’s edge. On this balanced sea the speaker can coalesce the marvellous/fantastical and the actual, already tentatively established in “Glanmore Sonnets”. This is a much more concrete and profound epiphany compared to the uncertain meanings that are being searched for in “North” or even earlier poems. But despite this linguistic equilibrium, there is a decline in the intense haptic sensual assonances and staccato consonants when compared to Death of a Naturalist or the oysters of Field Work. In some parts it is still present, for instance in the “s” and “t” sounds of the “deserted harbour stillness. Every stone”, but the wide-vowelled gap left by the “harbour” between “deserted” and “stillness” mitigates the intensity of it. Vendler calls this a “contemplate[ion of] an aesthetic in which the medium would be far from the thing represented” (141). Instead of an audio-haptic approach to elements and surfaces, the focus is the visual experience, as indicated by the title Seeing Things. The “Squarings” poems form squares on the paper, it is “the eye” (391) that is vital to experiencing the scenery. This coastal landscape, normally one of shifting waters and boundaries, possesses a solidity in the “material nouns” (Vendler 148) that amounts to a material paralysis. Similarly, there is little movement in “xlvii”, rather an anticipatory quiet in the scenery’s emptiness that evokes a military conflict, the “lambent troop [retreating] on the borders of your vision” (OG 391). These borders are not terrestrial or littoral anymore, but hinge on the sensual perception of the scene.
The continuous outward movement initiated in “North” and “Glanmore Sonnet VII” has come to a stop at the edge of the paralysed shore of “Squarings”. Nonetheless, an orientation towards the open space beyond the confines of the coast remains, and this paralysis is a self-imposed one as opposed to the trappings of the selkie and Shore Woman. Depictions of the sea move away from the earthiness often ascribed to Heaney’s early poetry. Its murky “sud” (“Shore Woman”, OG 73) gives way to “seeable-down-into water” (“Seeing Things”, OG 339). Accordingly, across Heaney’s middle work, these maritime scenes are slowly but surely framed in a linguistic and poetic clarity that solves some of the poetic issues inflicted by the Troubles. They engender an absolution from sectarian impositions and fruitful personal reflections on memory and perception. The sea now becomes a medium to negotiate the imaginary, marvellous world and the world of clearly defined boundaries. Where in North there is a hopeful uncertainty towards the sea, the relationship eventually strives towards the respectful appreciation of “Glanmore: Sonnets VII” and perfect balances of “Squarings”. It remains an etymological poetry that reaches through history and explores the sounds that give words linguistic shape. While onomatopoeia and etymology have been firmly established in Heaney’s work at the latest since “Belderg”, he no longer searches an etiological significance in them. Instead, he presents the sea as both mutable and transforming alike, at once “deepening and clearing” (“Glanmore Sonnet VII”) his own poetic gaze.
Works Cited
Bergin, Osborn. Irish Bardic Poetry. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970.
Brearton, Fran. “Heaney and the Feminine.” The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 73-91.
Caldwell, Caleb. “Joy in Night: Witness and the Limits of Discourse in Seamus Heaney’s ‘North.’” Religion & Literature, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013, pp. 103-29.
Deane, Seamus. “Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold.” Seamus Heaney edited by Michael Allen, MacMillan Press, 1997, pp. 64-77.
Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Heaney, Seamus. North. Faber and Faber, 1975.
---. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. Faber and Faber, 1998.
---. Finders Keepers. Faber and Faber, 2002.
Howley, Ellen. Oceanic Connections: The Sea and Island Spaces in Irish and Caribbean Poetry. Dublin City University, 2020.
Lippsett, Lonny. “A lone voice crying in the watery wilderness.” Oceanus, vol. 44, no.1, 2005, p. 5.
McLoughlin, Deborah. “’An Ear to the Line’: Modes of Receptivity in Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 25, no. 2, 1989, pp. 201 – 215.
Milius, Susan. “Music without Borders.” Science News, vol. 157, no. 16, 2000, pp. 252 – 254.
O’Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones – Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Faber & Faber, 2009.
Oestreich, William K; Brianna Abrahms; Megan F. McKenna. “Acoustic signature reveals blue whales tune life-history transitions to oceanographic conditions.” Functional Ecology, vol. 36, 2022, pp. 882 – 895.
Ricks, Christopher. “The Mouth, the Meal and the Book: Review of Field Work.” Seamus Heaney, edited by Michael Allen, Macmillan Press, 1997, pp. 95-101.
Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Harper Collins, 1998.
Womack, Ryan L. “Converting to Things Foreknown: Heaney’s Marvelous Imagination in ‘Station Island’.” Estudios Irlandeses, no. 11, 2016, pp. 220-231.
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