Modernism (Literary Movements for Students): Modern literary practices.

Also, the
principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth
century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary
conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste,
traditions, and economic values. Many writers are associated with the concepts of
Modernism, including Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams,
Eugene O’Neill, and James Joyce.

Postmodernism (movement origin: c. 1950) (Literary Movements for Students):

Postmodernism is the name given to the period of literary criticism that developed toward
the end of the twentieth century. Just as the name implies, it is the period that comes after
the modern period. But these are not easily separated into discrete units. Postmodernism
came about as a reaction to the established modernist era, which itself was a reaction to
the established tenets of the nineteenth century and before. What sets Postmodernism
apart from its predecessor is the reaction of its practitioners to the rational, scientific, and
historical aspects of the modern age. For postmodernists this took the guise of being self-
conscious, experimental, and ironic. The postmodernist is concerned with imprecision and
unreliability of language and with epistemology, the study of what knowledge is. An exact
date for the establishment of Postmodernism is elusive, but it may be said to have begun
in the post-World War II era, roughly the 1950s. It took full flight in the 1960s in the face of
global social and political unrest. In 1968 it reached an early zenith with the intense
student protests in the United States and France, the war for independence in Algeria, and
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The beginning of space exploration with the launch
of Sputnik in 1957, culminating in the 1969 landing of men on the moon, marks a
significant shift in the area of science and technology.

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-
known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his
summers in the west of Ireland in the family’s summer house at Connaught. He married
Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 and had two children. His plays usually treat Irish legends;
they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism.
After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and
esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with
masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays.
Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist
movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the
Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written
after the award of the Nobel Prize. He is one of the outstanding and most influential
twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and
life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of
beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.
William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939.

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)

Life: Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, where his family
engaged in farming and selling cattle. Heaney was raised as a Catholic in Protestant
Northern Ireland. His education included studies at Queen's University in Belfast, where
he also served as a lecturer at the end of the 1960s. He made his debut as a poet then,
but continued to divide his time between his own writing and academia. He worked at
Carysfort College in Dublin, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at
Oxford University. Seamus Heaney was married and had three children.
Work: Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century.
Seamus Heaney's poetry is often down-to-earth. For him, poetry was like the earth -
something that must be plowed and turned. Often he paints the gray and damp landscape
from the British Isles; peat moss has a special place in his poetry. The poems often are
connected with daily experiences, but they also derive motifs from history, all the way back
to prehistoric times. Seamus Heaney's profound interest in the Celtic and the pre-Christian
as well as in Catholic literary tradition has found expression in a number of essays and
translations. . His work showed his concern both for the traditions of Irish culture and about
the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The intensity of the Irish experience is portrayed in much
of the work of Heaney. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and
edited several widely used anthologies.

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

Born in London to a Scottish mother and an English father, poet and scholar Kathleen
Jessie Raine was educated at the University of Cambridge’s Girton College. A visionary
poet whose work probed the intersection of science and mysticism, Raine bridged
elements of Jungian psychology and neo-Platonism in her work.
She was the author of twelve books of poetry, four of autobiography, and much scholarly
work, particularly on Blake and Yeats.
Her poetry is infused with the urge to approach the sacred through art. The sacred is
understood in a wide and inclusive sense, one in which there is room for Plato, Jesus,
Buddha and Shiva, all alongside a visionary understanding of smaller things, such as the
ephemeral 'Daisies of Florence' that open into an image of "her who walks through spring
after spring in primavera robed". Yet these are woven into a human world that includes
painter-friends, children and Raine's own mother, and natural details.
she wrote in the romantic, visionary tradition of John Clare, Blake and Yeats, which valued
above all things nature and the power of the imagination.
She had high-minded tastes, among them for such disciplines as neo-Platonism and
Jungian psychology, and lamented what she described as the materialistic sensibility of
the modern public. "For most people today," she said in 1992, "to say one has seen
sublime or beautiful things is seen as some sort of hypocritical self-aggrandisement, even
though it is only in moments when we transcend ourselves that we can know anything of
value."
This remark was characteristic of the theme to which she returned again and again in her
poetry.
For Kathleen Raine, mankind is born out of immortality into a world of pain; for a few years
in childhood we retain the key to a "lost Eden", but soon the world closes in, exiling us
from Paradise, as we become forgetful of that pre-natal bliss.
Her father, George, a miner's son, went to Durham University, and became an English
teacher and Methodist lay preacher. Her mother encouraged Raine’s poetry from
childhood. Although Kathleen had a Christian upbringing and became a Roman Catholic in
the 1940s - a decision she later admitted was a mistake - her spirit was more at home in
the eastern traditions and the world view of Plato, Plotinus and the 18th-century English
Platonist Thomas Taylor.

Easter, 1916
BY WILLI AM BUTLER YE ATS

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the
Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats
celebrates the memory of the general individuals who blindly sacrifices their lives in the
Easter Rebellion despite the fact that they would certainly be defeated by the English
government. Yeats, as a tribute to the martyrs, immortalizes them in his poetry for their
ability to transform themselves and the history of Ireland. Yeats was an Irish nationalist,
but he chose not to become actively involved in the political movements of his time. The
purpose of the poem is for Yeats to come to terms with the Easter Rising and the deaths of
many Irish revolutionaries, as well as his desire to understand whether the Easter Rising
was a good idea or not. In ‘Easter 1916’, Yeats refers to a number of key figures in the
struggle for Irish independence, although without naming them, so the poem requires a bit
of analysis and context.

“Easter 1916” is written to commemorate the Irish rebellion against England.

FIRST STANZA:
In the first stanza, Yeats describes the uneventful scene of Dublin before the tragedy
happens. The poet initially presents the people he meets on the streets in the evening,
with whom he makes small-talk or with whom shares a funny story at the club. We can see
streets where there are dark grey eighteenth century houses and people coming home
towards evening after their work who nod or say‘polite meaningless words. Such a
beautiful and simple description is in striking contrast to the fear of the coming
tragedy. He suddenly changes his tune almost at the end of the stanza. ‘ ... they and I ...
lived where motley is
worn’ but unexpectedly the tragedy happened, and‘ All changed, changed utterly’, and‘ A
terrible beauty is
born.’

SECOND STANZA:
In the second stanza, Yeats describes the executed men not sentimentally but realistically.
He conveys their humanity and imperfections.
The second stanza then describes the revolting Irish people who ended up losing their
lives. The lady described in the stanza was Countess Constance Markievicz. She was a
politician and socialist who participated in the uprising, later being forced into surrender
and sentenced to prison. Yeats characterizes Constance Markievicz as a figure of
"ignorant good-will”. Through this portrayal of Markievicz, Yeats suggests that she might
not be conscious of the fatal consequences that the rebellion might have.
Yeats continues to describe Patrick Pearse, "a man who had kept a school" and Thomas
MacDunagh, "his helper and friend". Pearse and MacDunagh were actively involved in
Ireland's fight for independence. Yeats focuses on their daily life, rather than their political
involvement, thus suggesting the humanity of Ireland's heroes and indicating that common
citizens have the ability to effect a change in society.

THIRD STANZA:
In stanza three, Yeats portrays John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary and the estranged
husband of Maud Gonne, as a "vainglorous lout"(32). Although Yeats personally despised
MacBride because "He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my
heart", Yeats maintains that "He, too, has been changed in his turn". Yeats implies that
the figures of the Easter Rebellion should be respected for their participation in an event
that will evoke change in Ireland. Yeats describes these heroes as imperfect figures.
In the final lines of stanza three, Yeats indicates that these individuals have "Transformed
utterly". Yeats emphasizes that by rebelling against the established ruling class, the
martyrs of the Easter Rebellion overcome their former weaknesses and become
heroes. Rather than subject to English rule, Ireland progresses down a path of
independence, responsibility, change, and hardship, and this is implied in the line "A
terrible beauty is born".

FOURTH STANZA:
The use of "stone" in lines 43 and 56 is symbolic to the poem. A stone represents an
inanimate object that stays the same. To go along with the theme of change, Yeats
includes the idea that clouds change minute by minute. The state of immutability is the
important aspect of this word. Everything that has happened previously in the poem
cannot be changed. The stone will forever be a stone, as will the deaths of those
mentioned earlier. The stone, whose purpose is "to trouble the living stream," hinders the
flowing of the water.
The entire stanza has the motif of nature. None of the previous stanzas mention
nature. Instead, Yeats discussed people and their actions. He shifts the focus from the
individual to nature. Nature proves to be important because the constant motion of the
stream and the clouds symbolizes that change is inevitable.

FIFTH STANZA:
Amidst all of this change, the stone, (as first presented in stanza four), is a symbol of
consistency as it does not move from its position on the bottom of the stream. In line 57-
58, Yeats expresses the heart in a transformation, becoming consistent like the
stone. "Too long a sacrifice"(57) in regards to war, has caused the heart to become a
stone, bringing detrimental effects upon the hearts of all men. When this occurs, the
responsibility the world must take is to love each corrupted soul, calling each by name "as
a mother names her child when sleep has come"(63). However, sleep is a metaphor for
death and these men die in result of their inability to change among the changing events
around them.

SIXTH STANZA:
Everyone with that heroic dream died in result of the defeat, driven by the "excess of
love" for their cause, country, and dream. Yeats "writes out in a verse," as he does in
many of his poems to convey enlightenment and understanding to affect the future
readers. He leaves this poem as a legacy and memorial to those people (MacDonagh,
MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse) who shared dream, giving Ireland everything they
could. Yeats continues to say that wherever the spirit of Ireland lies, represented by
people wearing the color "green," those people will be forever changed. The terrible
beauty has been born. That is, the revolutionary dream was put into action, and it turned
into a nightmare. The fact that many were killed in the end is a tragic notion to digest. It is
obvious that Yeats felt Ireland was in a state of chaos and he was sending the message
that things needed to change. He was also expressing pain about the passing of many
well-known revolutionaries.
Yeats‘ Easter, 1916 describes the poet’s sentiments concerning Easter Rising staged in
Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. The people who took part in
Dublin in Easter 1916 were commonplace people whom he interacted with on a daily
basis. He had quite often witnessed their sparkling faces, and traded greetings with them
and shared humorous moments with them

Overall significance:
During the war, Irish separatist saw an opportunity to rebel against Britain and gain
independence. The uprising, termed the Easter Rising, occurred in 1916. Yeats, at this
point in his life, was a well-known writer and playwright who supported the nationalist. The
poem centers around the author’s conflicting emotions about the uprising. It identifies the
events of everyday life against the sacrifice of everyday people for a broader national goal.
The murder of James MacBride during the Easter Rising by the British was very troubling to
him. This was the man who married Maude Gonne the woman Yeats had proposed
marriage to in 1899. The events of the uprising clearly left a mark on Yeats as his later
poetry and work would reflect. In fact, it is the interaction of public event and private
experience that distinguishes a poem like “Easter 1916.
Yeats mixes the political with the personal. He intertwines public events with his own
personal grieve. In this style, the poems reference not only his pain but also the pain of
others around him.
Yeats considered himself Irish and was involved in Irish politics. His experienced shaped
his view of the greater United Kingdom and its policies towards its subjugated areas. In
Yeats’ poem “Easter, 1916” we repeatedly find the theme of identity.
This memorable poem succeeds because it reaches the reader in an intimate way. The
poem is a poem about the side-effects of said war on the United Kingdom’s political system.
The poem does celebrate a particular event of a public character  but its tone is that of
private meditation. The poem focuses on the intimate and the personal. The events of the
political crises fade to the background to allow the individual to share his own moral and
personal growth.
The focus broadens after the first stanza to encompass the people in the speaker’s life. He
touches upon the lives of women but mostly focuses on men and their sacrifices and the
daily struggle that makes up life. He touches upon the intimate and the personal such as
the arguments of marriage and the lust of days gone by, “what voice more sweet than
hers / When, young and beautiful”. He laments for the sacrifices and the loss of people
he had dismissed in the first stanza. It is an interesting capitulation to the political will of the
multitude. The fundamental political changes represented by the Easter rebellion contain
the potential for a moral petrification. The poem wonders if that path to independence is
worth the sacrifice.
The third stanza is the only one that does not end with the line “a terrible beauty is born”. In
this way and in others, it is different from the other stanzas in the poem. It focuses on the
changing nature of the situation. It veers into the moment of the confrontation. The speaker
is forced into the action. The ‘living stream’ that is troubled by the stone clearly is life itself.
In a constant state of progression, the stream contains a force and purpose that drive
without comprehension past everything it passes over, or which passes through it. 
The final stanza again focuses on the personal. It is as if the speaker understands through
the force of the preceding events the sacrifice of the people around him. He begs the
question, “was it needless death after all? The speaker lost people he had for better or
worse known and associated with intimately. The struggles and the sacrifices added up.
Thus Yeats’ work is a poem of experience, a dramatic lyric in which actual persons and
places from the poet’s own life and from the public life of the Ireland that he knew become
constituent parts of his drama. Therefore, “a terrible beauty is born”. The sacrifices are
terrible and the deaths tragic, but from the events of the 1916 uprising something is
accomplished. The march towards Irish independence had not come to a conclusion but, as
Yeats suggests with the last poignant line, the sacrifices will be remembered.
The uprising was a public and private event for Yeats. “Easter, 1916” reflects this duality.
“At the heart of “Easter 1916” are the mixed feelings of respect and annoyance, grief and
horror. The public and personal impress upon each other and Yeats demonstrates how he
cannot extricate himself from the events that are affecting his loved ones, friends, and
acquaintances. The author seems to be weighing the costs of the sacrifices and ultimately
glorifying those sacrifices. Was the rising a heroic sacrifice in the name of Irish
independence, or treasonous and needless bloodshed in a time of world war, or something
more complex?

Historical background:
The Easter Rising: the rebellion in Dublin against British rule, which took place at Easter in
1916. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, armed nationalists occupied sites around Dublin
and proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic independent from England.
Outgunned by incoming Crown forces, the rebels surrendered within a week. People were
killed in the four days of fighting, including 64 of the rebels. Several leaders of
the rebellion were later executed.

P ATR I C K PE AR S E
Pearse was headmaster at St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, in Dublin. The finest writer and orator
of the Rising (although Thomas MacDonagh was the better poet), he read out the 1916
Proclamation

TH O M AS M AC D O NAG H
MacDonagh attended Rockwell College and followed his parents into teaching. He and
Pearse became friends. He was a poet like Pearse. A signatory of the Proclamation, he
was executed on May 3rd 1916.

M AJ O R JO HN M AC B RI D E
“A drunken vainglorious lout,” is the poet William Butler Yeats’s famous description of
Major John MacBride. Yeats may have been motivated by jealousy as MacBride had been
married to Maud Gonne, the great love of the poet’s life. MacBride was a nationalist hero
before the Easter Rising for his part in commanding the Irish Brigade which fought with the
Boers in South Africa. He was executed.

J AM E S CO NNO LLY
A Scottish-born socialist and trade union activist. He was one of the seven signatories to
the Proclamation. He was sentenced to death.

Turner’s Sea, Kathleen Raine

Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)
1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner
One of Turner’s most celebrated works, Slave Ship is a striking example of the artist’s
fascination with violence, both human and elemental. The painting was based The painting
was based on a poem that described a slave ship caught in a typhoon and on true story of
the slave ship Zong whose captain, in 1781, had thrown overboard sick and dying slaves
so that he could collect insurance money available only for slaves “lost at sea.” Turner
captures the horror of the event and terrifying grandeur of nature through hot, churning
color and light that merge sea and sky.

This poem is an aesthetic manifestation of the painting “Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing
Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)” by Joseph M. W. Tuner.
The critic John Ruskin, the first owner of Slave Ship expressed his opinion of the painting:
“if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.
Its daring conception, ideal in the highest sense of the word, based on the purest truth,
and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life; its color is absolutely perfect, is
a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and
full of motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to
the most sublime of subjects and impressions, the power, majesty and deathfulness of the
open, deep, illimitable seas.”
Ruskin overlooks the “guilty” content of the painting preferring to turn to matters of
aesthetic form or the lines of Turner’s composition, which Ruskin sees as an expression of
higher truth. The slaves are forgotten in favor of the sublime technique and style of the
painting.
Unlike Ruskin, the contemporary poet Kathleen Raine, is horrified by Turner’s seas:
We call them beautiful
Turner’s appalling seas, shipwreck and deluge
Where man’s contraptions, mast and hull,
Lurch, capsize, shatter to driftwood in the whelming surge and swell
The sublime is not that beautiful as it inspires terror; this terror is unrepresentable, and is
integral to the discourse of slavery.
? If different viewers see this painting as something that is simultaneously sublime and
terrible then what we have is a painting that provides us with an ambivalent response to
the subject matter. Turner’s overlooked slaves drowning in his terrible seas are an
expression of his culture at the time the picture was painted. From this, it does not
automatically follow that Turner supported slavery or that he can be blamed for the slaves’
occlusion.
The painting was exhibited in the year of the rebellion in Ireland, which was inspired by the
revolution in France. If Turner’s sympathies were with radical republicanism, then it would
not necessarily follow that he was a supporter of the inequalities of slavery.6 Turner’s
politics were never explicit. Turner’s close friends noted he was tolerant, and liberal.
In view of all this, Smiles is right to assume that “Turner’s liberal sympathies are very much
apparent in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying,” which he refers to as “a
painting that confronts the horrors of the slave trade”.
The poem might be an attack on aesthetics or a questioning of an aestheticism that
distances itself from political realities, an aestheticism that renders the painting gratifying,
giving preeminence to pleasure over pain.
Kathleen Raine seems to bring the work into relation with its truth, the historical moment.

The Oval Portrait, by Kathleen Raine

Jessie Wilkie: her mother

Poem directed to her mother
Feminist aspect: women’s history
Kathleen Raine: lyrical eye
KR: Scotish parents. Raised as Christian. Neo-platonism (all religions are equal). Many
women were neo-platonic because neo-platonism is not biased. There’s no gender
differences.
Contraries
Concept of body
Ekphrasis
Isotopy
Object/life

Ekphrasis: the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.

Isotopy: In a story, we detect an isotopy when there is a repetition of a basic meaning

trait (seme); such repetition, establishing some level of familiarity within the story, allows
for a uniform reading/interpretation of it.

The Oval Portrait seems humanised by the loss of her Scottish mother, and is
correspondingly beautiful in places.

Jessie went to study as a trainee teacher at Amstrong College at Newcastle. It was here at
the College that Jessie met her future husband, George Raine, a fellow student. Her
mother encouraged Raine’s poetry from childhood. Her mother noted down Kathleen’s
poems before she could even write. Katlheen Raine owes her her happiness during her
childhood. Jessie Wilkie was a poet, a free woman that encourage her to fulfil her dreams,
her hidden gifts, to develop her imaginative ability.

Although Kathleen had a Christian upbringing and became a Roman Catholic in the 1940s
- a decision she later admitted was a mistake - her spirit was more at home in the eastern
traditions and the world view of Plato, Plotinus and the 18th-century English Platonist
Thomas Taylor.

Raine was a visionary poet whose work probed the intersection of science and mysticism,
Raine bridged elements of Jungian psychology and neo-Platonism in her work.
For Kathleen Raine, mankind is born out of immortality into a world of pain; for a few years
in childhood we retain the key to a "lost Eden", but soon the world closes in, exiling us
from Paradise, as we become forgetful of that pre-natal bliss.

Neo-Platonism: A philosophical and religious system developed by the followers of

Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. Neoplatonism combined ideas from Plato, Aristotle,
Pythagoras, and the Stoics with oriental mysticism. Predominant in pagan Europe until the
early 6th century, and it re-emerged during the Renaissance.. It envisages the human soul
rising above the imperfect material world through virtue and contemplation towards
knowledge of the transcendent One. It postulates a single source from which all forms of
existence emanate and with which the soul seeks mystical union.

Carl Jung: Carl Jung was an early supporter of Freud because of their shared interest in
the unconscious.
Jungian therapy, sometimes known as Jungian analysis, is an in-depth, analytical form of
talk therapy designed to bring together the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind to
help a person feel balanced and whole. Jungian therapy calls for clients to delve into the
deeper and often darker elements of their mind and look at the “real” self rather than the
self they present to the outside world.

1st stanza: the photograph depicts a young, beautiful, strong, free, rebellious woman.
2nd stanza: the woman is unaffected by real-life. Life has not crushed her. She is
lighthearted and strong.
3rd stanza: the scene shifts. Now we are looking at a photograph showing an elderly
womam. Despite her old, advanced age, she looks at the world with the same young eyes.
She is still warm-hearted, elevated, noble-minded. At her age (she’s ninety years of
age/old) it’s only natural that she sees her loved ones die, but she says goodbye with
lightness and wisdom, without ties.
4th stanza: My interpretation is that the old woman is in a coffin. She is ready to depart
her life and and go to a sacred world, to Paradise. She died with pride, free, pleased with
her life.

Summer 1969, by Seamus Heaney

VERANO DE 1969
Mientras la policía cubría la muchedumbre
disparando a los Falls, yo sufría tan solo
el sol avasallador de Madrid. Todas las tardes, metido en el horno
de aquel piso, mientras recorría sudando
la vida de Joyce, como el hedor de los puestos de pescado
subía como el tufo de una presa de lino.
Rojos de vino, de noche en el balcón,
había una sensación de niños en oscuros rincones,
de viejas con negros chales junto a ventanas abiertas,
el aire, un cañón fluyendo en español.
Volvíamos a casa, charlando, por descampados bajo las estrellas,
donde el charol de la Guardia Civil
brillaba como vientres de peces en aguas envenenadas por el lino.
«Atrás», dijo uno, «manténganse unidos».
Otro conjuró a Lorca desde su colina.
Nos tragábamos casos de muerte y crónicas de toros
en la televisión, celebridades
llegadas de donde lo real aún sucedía.
Me retiré al frescor del Prado.
«Los fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo» de Goya
cubría una pared – con los brazos en alto
y el espasmo del rebelde, los militares con
casco y mochila, la eficiente
ráfaga de los fusiles. En la siguiente sala,
sus pesadillas, injertadas en el muro del palacio
ciclones oscuros, alzándose, rompiendo; Saturno
enjoyado en la sangre de sus propios hijos,
caos gigantesco haciendo girar sus caderas brutales
sobre el mundo. También, ese encinar
donde dos locos se apalean a muerte
por cuestiones de honor, metidos en el fango, y hundiéndose.
Él pintaba con sus puños y codos, haciendo florecer
la corteza teñida de sangre de su corazón mientras la historia cargaba.

"In the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland"

In the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland was ravaged by violent civil conflict between Irish
Catholic Nationalists and the British Protestant majority. In order to establish order, the
English government introduced British troops to the area, concentrating them in the Falls
Road section of Belfast where riotous behavior had intensified. Unfortunately, the British
soldiers heightened hostility among Irish nationalists who have resented the imposition of
British authority for over three hundred years. Amidst the chaos, the troops, whose
loyalties lay with the Protestants supportive of England's control of Ireland, shot and killed
many Irish protesters. Meanwhile, Seamus Heaney was vacationing in Spain. In his poem,
"Summer 1969", the atrocities in Northern Ireland are referenced, but the setting in which it
commences is under the blistering sun of Madrid, far-removed from the struggles of his
fellow countrymen in his home of Belfast.

The first stanza of "Summer 1969" is primarily an account of Heaney's experience in

Spain. But he commences the poem with a reference to the events unfolding in Northern
Ireland and suggests that his disengagement leads to feelings of guilt. The first three lines,
"While the Constabulary covered the mob/ Firing into the Falls I was suffering/ Only
the bullying sun of Madrid," express that his guilt is so terrible as the violent British
troops he would have faced had he been home. While he is "suffering" the inconvenience
of stifling heat, his friends and family in Belfast are actually suffering through political
turmoil.
Although the insertion of sensory details like the "casserole heat," the "stinks form the
fish market" and "The air a canyon rivering in Spanish" indicate Heaney's focus on his
immersion into Spanish culture, his inclusion of distinctly Irish elements demonstrate he is
not entirely removed from his home. For instance, the enjambment of the line "I seated my
way through" serves to create suspense (a sensation that might result in sweating) which
results in the emphasis of the following line "The life of Joyce". James Joyce, arguably
the most famous Irish writer, represents Irish literary culture. The fact that, as Joyce was,
Heaney is out of Ireland suggests he may be following the design of his great predecessor.
James Joyce lived in self-imposed exile, finding an artistic freedom in Europe that he could
never find in Dublin.

The connection he creates between the smells from the fish-market and the "reek off a
flax-dam" more straightforwardly links his surroundings in Madrid with those of Ireland.
Flax-dams are an emblematic Irish production. Both the references to Joyce and to flax-
dams suggest that Heaney is likening his experience in Madrid to elements of his Irish
home. Yet, he is emphasizing how insignificant his instances of distress are in comparison
to the constant anguish felt by individuals all over Ireland at this time.

The second stanza serves as a transition. Heaney presents options for possible plans of
action or inaction regarding the conflict in Northern Ireland. One of his companions says
he might "try to touch the people", proposing that he go home and get involved in the
conflict. "Another conjured Lorca from his hill" - a reference to the famous Spanish
poet-playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, who defied conservative authority during the
Spanish Civil War and was killed for his liberal sympathies. This reference to Lorca might
imply that Heaney should be prepared to die for his country and seek martyrdom as Lorca
did. "We sat through death counts and bullfight reports/ On television," seems to
suggest passivity. Yet, when Heaney mentions that "celebrities/ Arrived from where the
real thing still happened," one cannot ignore the irony of a statement that places
"celebrities" and "the real thing" in the same sentence. The word celebrity connotes
embellishment and the inflation of reality. Heaney might be suggesting that his physical
presence will be no more helpful to the cause than the fleeting images of celebrities on
television are.

When Heaney seeks refuge at the "cool of the Prado" the very language of his action
("retreated") seems to connote escapism and defeat. However, his immediate reference
to Goya's The Third of May 1808, demonstrates otherwise. The painting is a powerful
anti-war statement. In the work, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance
to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War. The heart-
wrenching reality of the composition clearly parallels the previously invoked image,
"Constabulary covered the mob/ Firing into the Falls" from the first lines of the poem.
Heaney's description of the armed soldiers in the paining as, "the helmeted/ And
knapsacked military, the efficient/ Rake of the fusillade" convey the cold, machine-like
quality of the armed men with no defining characteristics other than the props they carry
(helmets, knapsacks, and guns).
As Heaney moves away from the harsh reality of The Third of May 1808, he descends into
a deeper, more disturbing state of mind. He describes the next painting as "His [Goya's]
nightmares". It is called Saturn Devours his Son. Saturn Devouring his Son, one of
Goya's most horrific and unforgettable images, illustrates the myth of the Roman god
Saturn, who, haunted by a prophecy that he would be overthrown by one of his sons, ate
each of them moments after they were born. The image is Goya's attempt to demonstrate
the atrocity of humans killing one another. Heaney's reference to this painting is an
application of the same thinking to the current situation in Ireland, since members of the
same country are killing each other, just as Saturn kills his own child. Heaney's words do
not solely convey physical violence but extend deeper to illustrate the psychological
degradation of a society long plagued by bloodshed, which culminates in "Gigantic Chaos
turning his brute hips/ Over the world". The use of the verbs "hosting" and "breaking"
present a contradiction in the actions of the "Dark Cyclones" indicating the volatile,
unpredictable state conveyed by the painting. Circling back to the first stanza of the poem,
the inclusion of the descriptive noun "gules," which means the color dark red, foreshadows
the imagery of "Saturn/ Jewelled in the blood of his own children".

Heaney's final allusion to Goya's work builds upon the metaphor begun in the previous
painting. Duel with Cudgels depicts two men beating each other with large sticks. Heaney
compares this picture to "that holmgang" which is a traditional duel to the death practiced
by Norsemen in the 13th century in order to settle legal disputes. Again, Heaney is
referencing the violence in Northern Ireland where two parties are essentially slaughtering
one another "for honour's sake, greaved in a bog and sinking". "Where patent leather
of the Guardia Civil/ Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters". The Guardia
Civil can be seen as a reference to both the Garda (the Irish police force) and the imposing
British troops. The "flax-poisoned waters" can only be in a small, enclosed aquatic space,
like a bog. Through simile, the representational shiny leather of the Guardia Civil is
compared to dead fish, which references the "two berserks [who] club each other to
death". Heaney (most likely) implies that these insane antagonists represent the two
opposing sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland: the Irish and the British.

Heaney returns to a bull-fighting metaphor (referenced twice in the phrases "bullying sun"
and "bullfight reports") that culminates in the poem's final two lines with a description of
Goya:
He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged
Here, violence, an integral part of history, is equated with the metaphorical bull and history
at large. Goya is the metaphorical torero welcoming the bull as it charges towards him with
a wave of "The stained cape of his heart." Through the creation of this poem Seamus
Heaney is imitating Goya's approach to addressing the issues of national crisis and the
advancement of history. The poem is not merely concerned with accounting for the
specific atrocities in Northern Ireland, with conveying the concept that an artist can
confront reality through historical channels. The presentation of this model, that
emphasizes the effectiveness of looking back in time, is the most effective way Heaney
believes he can contribute to ending the incessant carnage in Northern Ireland.

The Seed Cutters, by Seamus Heaney

Los Cortadores de Tubérculos

Parecen encontrarse a cientos de años. Brueghel,
Los reconocerás si consigo plasmarlos fielmente.
Se arrodillan bajo el seto formando un semicírculo
Tras una barrera contra el viento que barre el viento.
Son los cortadores de tubérculos. Los pliegues y jaretas de los retoños recubren las
patatas de siembra bajo la paja. Como les sobra tiempo,
Se toman su tiempo. Cada cuchillo afilado procede
con pereza a dividir en dos cada raíz, que cae
sobre la palma de la mano: un destello lechoso,
y, en el centro, una oscura filigrana.
¡Ah, las costumbres anuales! Bajo la retama
que amarillea sobre ellos, compón del friso
Con todos nosotros allí, con nuestro anonimato.

Mossbawn is the name of the townland where he grew up.

In the poems ‘The Seed Cutters’, the passage of time – history – is denied. Two times are
conflated.
Contemporary farm-workers look as if they have stepped out of a picture by Breughel; our
present and the past are visually indistinguishable. And the seed cutters are outside time
(Heaney’s apostrophe ‘O calendar customs!’ stresses that the agricultural year is cyclic,
rather than linear). But the poem prefigures the violence which characterizes both past and
present. The silent farm-workers have ‘time to kill’, and their knives are sharp.
The artist's ability to create images that transcend the limitations of time.
Acutely aware of the ongoing process of “yellowing,” time’s inevitable effect, the speaker
turns to art as a way of fixing and recording the obscure, season-bound motions of farm-
workers.
"The Seed Cutters" opens with an image of Irish potato farmers and a centuries-old
custom:
They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
You’ll know them if I can get them true.
The allusion to Breughel, who worked on paintings of peasant life, is an address to a
mentor, a kindred spirit. When Heaney calls upon an artistic ancestor to witness his
description of Irish peasants carrying out their "calendar customs," we might think of seed
cutters as links in a long line of country people. By making reference to Breughel, Heaney
might think of poetry as some kind of image or visionary thing. If the poet can, like
Breughel, "get them true" in his image, the poet can make the particular universal. While
Heaney might emphasize the beauty of country life in his allusions to Breughel, he is at the
same time demonstrating the ugly realism.
"The Seed Cutters" is a Shakespearean sonnet, modeled on a form developed in
Elizabethan England, during a time in which many of the contemporary problems took root.
Heaney's choice of the Shakespearean sonnet demonstrates the complexity and ambiguity
of his response to the problems in Northern Ireland. The relationship between Heaney,
Breughel, and Shakespeare lies in the realm of art. Shakespeare gave Heaney the poetic
form just as Breughel taught him the power of the visual image. These two legacies from
the Renaissance counteract the terrible political inheritance from Elizabethan England:
during Elizabeth’s reign society was characterised by extremes of rich and poor. An
increasing population and rising poverty became a big problem.
Imitating Breughel, Heaney describes the Irish seed cutters with beautiful visual images:
The seed cutters kneel under the hedge in a half-circle behind a windbreak:
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.
The dark watermark in the white potato suggests/symbolizes the darker side of the history
of the Irish peasant:
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
The slow motion action of the seed cutters might have several meanings. While this image
describes the pace at which the seed cutters work, it also suggests that they are "taking
their time" in another sense, playing out their short scene in the long historical drama of
European peasant life:
With time to kill
They are taking their time.
The poem illustrate the ritual of reaping a harvest, the daily drudgery of hard work which in
the long history of Ireland has produced a good number of skeletons
Thematic implications suggest a social commentary on a long history of unrewarded hard
work.
In “The Seed Cutters,” one of two dedicatory poems in North (1975), Heaney begins by
addressing the Dutch artist Brueghel. Although the speaker first claims that the workers in
20 the piece “seem hundreds of years away,” he has little trouble navigating that distance,
zooming in the scene with details born of his own firsthand knowledge of farm activity.
The fact that the workers “have time to kill” might imply that the work is a timeless activity
which unites the individual instance of it to other workers in other times and places.
"The Seed Cutters” resumes Heaney’s focus on historical continuities embodied by place.
Heaney resorts to the sonnet form to describe an age-old rural farm task in Ireland as well
as in a large part of northern Europe. His depiction of a group of Irish farmers growing
potatoes in Ulster stands for the poet’s recognition of the work done on the family farm,
and his intention of bringing it back, perpetuating it and not letting it fade away throughout
history.
Potato-growing involves close ties to the land. It does not only constitute the historic
sustenance of the Irish people, but an emblem of Ireland, to the point of becoming
metonymical with Ireland itself. The scene depicted in the poem has a huge potential for
historical evocation: “They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel, You'll know them if I
can get them true.” The allusion to Brueghel is not random, since both artists can be said
to possess a similar “palette” for domestic scene portrayal.
Accuracy of detail should be attributed to both Heaney’s familiarity with traditional cropping
techniques, which he must have observed as a child, and his remarkable ability to
describe, similar to that of the Flemish painter:
Buried under the straw. With time to kill
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
Seamus Heaney seems concerned about preserving the link with the past and combating
oblivion. At the same time, the failure of the windbreak in line 4 might convey the failure of
the poet’s project of fighting oblivion.

Pieter Brueghel (1525-69): usually known as Pieter Brueghel the Elder to distinguish him
from his elder son, was the first in a family of Flemish painters. You’ll often find his name
spelled as Bruegel or Breugel or Breughel. He was born in Breda in the Duchy of Brabant,
which is now part of The Netherlands but back then part of the Flanders. He produced
landscapes, religious allegories, and satires of peasant life.

Ulster: A former province of Ireland, in the north of the island.

Elizabethan England: the period belonging to or connected with England in

the second half of the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth the First was Queen.