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.  
To set the darkness echoing.
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.
 Analysis of Personal Helicon
• In Greek mythology, Mount • Heaney explores the
Helicon was sacred to Apollo conflict between the
and the Muses.
freedom of youth and
• Heaney alludes to Narcissus, society’s expectations of
a Greek figure obsessed with adults. He uses his poetry
his reflection. This parallels
Heaney’s captivation with his
as compensation for lost
lost childhood. childhood experiences.
• Heaney’s optimistic language • Personal Helicon is a
can be juxtaposed with the means for Heaney to
connotations associated with communicate his internal
his dark topic. His emotions and illuminate
passionate way of describing the negative aspects of life.
the dank and dark is ironic.
  
Twice Shy
Her scarf a la Bardot,
Our Juvenilia
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening Had taught us both to wait,
For air and friendly talk. Not to publish feeling
We crossed the quiet river, And regret it all too late -
Took the embankment walk. Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm: So, chary and excited,
Dusk hung like a backcloth As a thrush liked on a hawk,
That shook where a swan swam, We thrilled to the March twilight
Tremulous as a hawk With nervous childish talk:
Hanging deadly, calm.
Still waters running deep
A vacuum of need Along the embankment walk.
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.
 Analysis of Twice Shy
• This poem approaches the • Heaney uses diction that
essence of love in a shy would normally express the
and tentative way. innocence of love to convey
• Heaney uses imagery to a darker message.
express the picturesque • Underscoring the poem, is
image of love. the idea that love is
• The entire second stanza is ephemeral.
characterized by • He draws a parallel
personification of the between new romances and
lovers’ surroundings. childlike relationships.
• Discusses the purity of the
unspoken in terms of love.
 Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs
You implicated the mellowed silence in you in hedges,
In wheat that does not rust An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Into a knowable corona, Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
A throwaway love-knot of straw. For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
sticks Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game Nothing: that original townland
cocks Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your
Harked to their gift and worked with fine hand.
intent The end of art is peace
Until your fingers moved somnambulant: Could be the motto of this frail device
I tell and finger it like braille, That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, Like a drawn snare
And if I spy into its golden loops Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
I see us walk between the railway slopes Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
 Analysis of Harvest Bow
• In this poem, Heaney • Heaney uses a description of the
develops the idea that the wheat as a metaphor to describe
relationship between a child the unbreakable bond between
and their parents is the most their relationship.
crucial development of • This poem once again
childhood. elaborates on the theme of a lost
childhood. The memories of
• Heaney elaborates on the times with his father are
idea that artistic tendencies sweeter than his current
exist between families which position in a cruel world.
is a stronger bond then • Rather than viewing this loss as
words that can be formed on a negative thing, Heaney makes
paper. it clear that the bond between
• His dad’s many talents father and son can not be
reveal the similarity between dissipated by mere time or
Heaney’s talent and passion knowledge of the real world.
as a writer.
 Digging
Between my finger and my thumb My grandfather could cut more turf in a
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun. day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Under my window a clean rasping sound Once I carried him milk in a bottle
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: Corked sloppily with paper. He
My father, digging. I look down straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Till his straining rump among the Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
flowerbeds Over his shoulder, digging down and
Bends low, comes up twenty years away down
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills For the good turf. Digging.
Where he was digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft squelch and slap
Against the inside knee was levered firmly. Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright Through living roots awaken in my
edge deep head.
To scatter new potatoes that we picked But I've no spade to follow men like
Loving their cool hardness in our hands. them.

By God, the old man could handle a spade, Between my finger and my thumb
Just like his old man. The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
 Analysis of Digging
• The poem explores the • Heaney appeals to his
respect Heaney holds for audience through the use
his heritage. of onomatopoeia to make
• Heaney explore the his descriptions more
parallelism between his vivid.
father and grandfather’s • Heaney uses repetition in
strength as working men the first and last stanza to
and his place as a writer. show his realization that
• The poem serves as an his writing can serve as a
extended metaphor for way to discover the roots
revealing the roots of of his past.
Heaney’s past through the
power of his writing.
 Bibliography
• ELEVEN POEMS, 1965 • FIELD WORK, 1979
– A pamphlet that coincided with the – A poem exploiting a political
Belfast Festival. situation in Northern Ireland from
• DEATH OF A NATURALIST, 1966 Heaney’s Catholic standpoint.
– A poem discussing childhood • CLEARANCES, 1986
experiences through revelations in – A series of sonnets that presents
nature. stark images of the spaces death
• WINTERING OUT, 1972 leaves between us, through the use
– A collection of poems that explores of euphemisms.
the “radical connection between the • THE CURE AT TROY, 1991
land and the language it nurtures.“ – A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
• BOG POEMS, 1975 • THE BURIAL AT THEBES, 2004
– A series of poems that studies the – A version of Sophocles’ Antigone
political and social situation in his •
native Northern Ireland. THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY
by ELEMER ANDREWS
• GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE:
SELECTED PROSE, 1978-1987 – Collection of critical responses to
– An anthology discussing societal Seamus Heaney’s poetry,
presenting the debates surrounding
divisions among religion and politics the poets work and popular appeal.
and his struggle between creative
freedom and social obligations

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