Diggings

William Doreski 79 Murphy Rd. Peterborough, NH 03458 Diggings Seamus Heaney's first four books--Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door Into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975)--established his reputation as a vital and original poet well before most American readers had heard of him (only North appeared in an American edition). These early but fully mature collections show him consolidating and perfecting his most obvious strengths--a wiry, consonantal, and insistently visual language and an irregular but energetic and sharply accentual rhythm. His subject matter during this decade, however, develops from an intense focus on the texture of Irish landscape and culture to a broader exploitation of the social and political implications of his materials. To foster this expanded grasp of the universe, some of the poems of Wintering Out and most of those in North wield syntactical and rhetorical complexities more challenging than those found in the more finely-grained poems of the first two books. A blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition of Death of a Naturalist speaks of "the soil-reek of Ireland," and certainly the dominant vocabulary is elemental, unforgettably so in lines like "the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water" and "in the sucking clabber I would splash / Delightedly and dam the flowing drain..." ("Death of a Naturalist"). In the dominant landscape of these poems water and earth merge in a bog, a drain, at the seashore. Yet in "Digging," the opening poem and an ars poetica, Heaney distances himself from the earthen life of his farmer-father by declaring himself equally inquisitive of the world of matter but committed to his own art: "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I'll dig with it." In all four of these books digging is the privileged metaphor of writing, culminating in North, in which human remains, literally dug from the peat bogs of Jutland embody the social complexities that have come to engross Heaney. By placing "Digging" at the beginning of his first book, Heaney warns us that his damp and earthy world contains social tensions and complexities. Therefore even in poems like "Cow and Calf," a trenchant naturalistic picture of a cow's oppressive pregnancy, we understand that the speaker, even as he "hit her again and again and / heard the blows plump like a depth-charge / far in her gut" distances himself from his subject and even his own actions by virtue of the hard irony of his similes and his intertextually-established refusal of the farmer's life. The title poem gives further evidence of this distancing and portrays the growing self-consciousness that causes it. In a withdrawal from nature echoing Wordsworth, the child of this poem who had been violating the world of frogs by collecting their egg-jelly and hatching tadpoles in jars finds himself reacting with palpable fear to the bass chorus of bullfrogs "Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting." Guilt and self-awareness combine to generate the visionary closure: "The great slime kings / Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it." Like the child Wordsworth who stole a boat and found a mountain poised to chastise him, Heaney not only recognizes his own thoughtless and cruel behavior but understands the way his actions intersect with the larger, darker passions of the world. Death of a Naturalist with its domestic and childhood dramas and its muscular agricultural landscapes, constitutes Heaney's most focused portrait of Irish rural life. His second book, Door into the Dark, continues the earth-water elementalism but opens up rhythmically by allowing more unaccented syllables into many lines (in poems like "The Outlaw," "Thatcher" and "The Peninsula"), and in "The Wife's Tale" expanding toward the modern rural eclogue as Robert Frost invented it, complete with a woman speaker like the one in Frost's "A Servant to Servants." But the dominant poem, one of Heaney's masterpieces, may be his most watery, and replies, if to any previous text, to Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" or the "Death by Water" section of The Waste Land. "A Lough Neagh Sequence" is a delicately framed elegiac study of our continual return to origins. Its vocabulary, though natural to Heaney, echoes Lowell's, notably in this passage in part 5: "Lifting": "...(and the smut thickens, wrist // Thick, a flail / Lashed into the barrel / With one swing) Each eel...." Rather than imitation or even homage, this poem demonstrates a convergence in sensibility between the Heaney of 1969 and the Lowell of 1946. Heaney's poem avoids the ambitious rhetoric of Lowell's poem; rather than being Miltonic it very faintly suggests the milder accents of George Herbert, whose modest submission of language to eternal necessities underlies much of Heaney's early work. The elegiac note becomes tragic in Wintering Out, in which poems like "Servant Boy" and "The Last Mummer" portray the finite, dwindling vitality of the Irish present, while "A Northern Hoard" assumes a broadly historical overview of the entropy of cultures. Further, poems like "Wedding Day" strike a more personal note in embracing a tragic vision. The most striking poem in the book, however, is "The Tollund Man," the first in Heaney's series of meditations on the remarkably preserved bodies found in bogs in Denmark and described by P. V. Glob in The Bog People (published in English in 1969). Heaney wrote without actually having seen the Tollund man, but notes that "Someday I will go to Aarus / To see his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin-cap." Working from Glob's vivid descriptions and the sharply-reproduced black and white photographs, Heaney gives the Tollund Man a dramatic three-dimensional social existence by linking the rural life that two thousand years ago fostered and then murdered him to contemporary Northern Ireland with its violent political strife. Glob concludes that the Tollund Man and many other bog people "were sacrificed and placed in the sacred bogs" to "consummate by their death the rites which ensured for the peasant community luck and fertility in the coming year." Heaney recognizes in the Tollund Man a totemic figure, an emblem of social scapegoating and cruelty, and considers risking the blasphemy of praying to him, renewing his ritual purpose by imploring him to "germinate" the dead of Ulster's recent troubles. Heaney concludes that the bog people society is all too familiar: "Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home." The full exploration of the world of the bog people occurs in North. Having established them as scapegoats of unrequited social or economic needs, Heaney examines the individual relics and fates of the Graubelle Man, an unnamed young woman ("Punishment"), a "Bog Queen," and other anonymous but vividly preserved victims. Their very preservation speaks to the poignant futility of their sacrifice, while the attitudes struck and preserved in death replicate in some ways their living qualities. The pity Heaney expresses in "Punishment" is tempered by his growing understanding of himself as a social creature: "My poor scapegoat, // I almost love you, / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence." The self-knowledge that grows out of these poems is that of a man confronting himself as a social being capable of silence in the face of atrocity. This is a harsh lesson for a citizen of Northern Ireland in 1975, and Heaney's series of bog poems indicts that unhappy land for its ritual condemnations and unappeasable judgments. Yet it also extends the notion of the human by consecrating the totemized human figure, reading it as one reads a cultural relic, but with pity, rue, and humility. Equally important, Heaney in writing the poems of North perfects his poetics by simplifying in some respects his vocabulary, eschewing the elegance of rhyme, and by rendering his voice more intimate extending his rhetorical range. Poems like "Whatever you say say nothing" embrace political complexities with a sense of drama and a candor rarely found in English political verse since Shelley. The subject matter now has become almost wholly social and the agrarian world of earth and water fades into the background. Even in the bog poems the focus is on the human figure, not the peat bogs, almost as though the newly discovered presence of these victims has depleted Heaney's former relish for such settings. These four books together constitute a body of poetry richer and more fulfilled than the lifetime work of most poets. Heaney after North develops a wider range of rhetorical stances and levels of diction and complicates his vision of poetry and its relationship to social necessities, especially in Station Island and Seeing Things, in which he works toward what he calls in the work of Miroslav Holub "The Fully Exposed Poem." Heaney explicates this evolved sense of the social role of poetry in The Government of the Tongue, and his critical sensitivity to the relationship between the poem's aesthetic and social desires produces a vital and exhilarating argument. However, his early work, socially alert if not activist, entirely satisfactory in itself, establishes Heaney as a poet firmly rooted in an elemental world, committed to a strongly accentual line, and visionary in his sense of the possibilities of art in a difficult era. His view of poetry, as he describes it in "Feeling into Words," values "poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds...; poetry as a dig...." (Preoccupations, 41). This metaphor of excavation, established by his initial emergence into print, remains a defining figure for his poetry. Heaney, as extraordinary an archaeologist as Professor Glob, in his first four collections uncovers more evidence than we had previously known our world contained. Works Cited: Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Door Into the Dark. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. Wintering Out. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber, 1980; New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980. The Goverment of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1988; New York: Farrar, Straus, 1989.