Seamus Heaney
Michael and Rebecca
Biography
• Born April 13, 1939
• Lived on family farm in County Derry
•Attended St. Joseph’s College
• Married Marie Devlin and had three children, Michael,
Christopher, and Kathryn Ann
• Published Eleven Poems in 1965 with the Belfast Festival
• Became renown after publishing Death of A Naturalist
•Honored with the Poetry Book Society Choice of the year award
for Door into the Dark
• Joined Field Day, a theatre company founded by Brian Friel
and Stephen Real
•Adapted a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
•In 1984, he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and
Oratory, one of Harvard’s most prestigious offices
•Won Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1995
Heaney’s Work as a Whole
• His parent’s diverse background included the traditional
Gaelic farm life and the up and coming Industrial
Revolution, which led to an inner quarrel.
• This inner quarrel became a conflict between his childhood
innocence versus his place as an adult in society.
• His passion towards his native country of Ireland serves as a
reference point for many of his poems.
• Heaney explores what it is to be a human being during times
of joy and times of struggle.
• Heaney uses literary allusion throughout his poems, often
alluding to Greek gods and figures
• Many of Heaney’s poems serve as his way to discover his place
as a writer in a world where physical action is the
traditionally accepted symbol of strength.
for Michael Longley
Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
I rhyme to see myself,
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savored the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
To set the darkness echoing.
Analysis of Personal Helicon
• In Greek mythology,
Mount Helicon was sacred
to Apollo and the Muses.
• Heaney alludes to
Narcissus, a Greek figure
obsessed with his reflection.
This parallels Heaney’s
captivation with his lost
childhood.
• Heaney’s optimistic
language can be juxtaposed
with the connotations
associated with his dark
topic. His passionate way
of describing the dank and
dark is ironic.
• Heaney explores the
conflict between the
freedom of youth and
society’s expectations of
adults. He uses his poetry
as compensation for lost
childhood experiences.
• Personal Helicon is a
means for Heaney to
communicate his internal
emotions and illuminate
the negative aspects of life.
Twice Shy
Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.
Our Juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.
So, chary and excited,
As a thrush liked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.
Analysis of Twice Shy
• This poem approaches the
essence of love in a shy
and tentative way.
• Heaney uses imagery to
express the picturesque
image of love.
• The entire second stanza is
characterized by
personification of the
lovers’ surroundings.
• Heaney uses diction that
would normally express the
innocence of love to convey
a darker message.
• Underscoring the poem, is
the idea that love is
ephemeral.
• He draws a parallel between
new romances and
childlike relationships.
• Discusses the purity of the
unspoken in terms of love.
Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane
sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game
cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine
intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs
in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall-You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your
hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser-Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
Analysis of Harvest Bow
• In this poem, Heaney develops
the idea that the relationship
between a child and their
parents is the most crucial
development of childhood.
• Heaney elaborates on the idea
that artistic tendencies exist
between families which is a
stronger bond then words that
can be formed on paper.
• His dad’s many talents
reveal the similarity between
Heaney’s talent and passion
as a writer.
• Heaney uses a description of
the wheat as a metaphor to
describe the unbreakable bond
between their relationship.
• This poem once again
elaborates on the theme of a
lost childhood. The memories
of times with his father are
sweeter than his current
position in a cruel world.
• Rather than viewing this loss
as a negative thing, Heaney
makes it clear that the bond
between father and son can
not be dissipated by mere
time or knowledge of the real
world.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Till his straining rump among the
flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a
day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He
straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving
sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and
down
For the good turf. Digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge
deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch
and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my
head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Analysis of Digging
• The poem explores the
respect Heaney holds for
his heritage.
• Heaney explore the
parallelism between his
father and grandfather’s
strength as working men
and his place as a writer.
• The poem serves as an
extended metaphor for
revealing the roots of
Heaney’s past through the
power of his writing.
• Heaney appeals to his
audience through the use of
onomatopoeia to make his
descriptions more vivid.
• Heaney uses repetition in
the first and last stanza to
show his realization that
his writing can serve as a
way to discover the roots of
his past.
Bibliography
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ELEVEN POEMS, 1965
– A pamphlet that coincided with the
Belfast Festival.
DEATH OF A NATURALIST, 1966
– A poem discussing childhood
experiences through revelations in
nature.
WINTERING OUT, 1972
– A collection of poems that explores
the “radical connection between the
land and the language it nurtures.“
BOG POEMS, 1975
– A series of poems that studies the
political and social situation in his
native Northern Ireland.
GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE:
SELECTED PROSE, 1978-1987
– An anthology discussing societal
divisions among religion and
politics and his struggle between
creative freedom and social
obligations
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FIELD WORK, 1979
– A poem exploiting a political
situation in Northern Ireland from
Heaney’s Catholic standpoint.
CLEARANCES, 1986
– A series of sonnets that presents
stark images of the spaces death
leaves between us, through the use of
euphemisms.
THE CURE AT TROY, 1991
– A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
THE BURIAL AT THEBES, 2004
– A version of Sophocles’ Antigone
THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY
by ELEMER ANDREWS
– Collection of critical responses to
Seamus Heaney’s poetry,
presenting the debates surrounding
the poets work and popular appeal.
Complete List of Works
Works Cited
• Audio Interviews - Seamus Heaney
• Books and Writers
• Harvard University Press/Seamus Heaney
• Interview with Seamus Heaney
• Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
• Seamus Heaney-Cover Page
• Themes in Seamus Heaney's Poetry
• The Seamus Heaney Page
• The Seamus Heaney Portal
ENJOY YOUR COOKIES!!!!
“The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power
to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's
credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our
consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of
wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are
hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and
distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest
of our veritable human being.”
-Heaney