The Books: North, by Seamus Heaney

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The next book on my poetry shelf is Seamus Heaney’s 4th volume of poetry, published in 1975 North.

In the bog poems, Heaney scrupulously inspects his own poetic art for an aestheticizing of death and murder, and the poems that result are cramped, anguished, and self-aware, among the most powerful poems about political violence written in the twentieth century. – The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry

In 1975, the year of the publication of North, Heaney and his family moved to Dublin. He still lives in Dublin, and is now a citizen of the Republic. This adds to the tension in his work, his in-between status, straddling two worlds simultaneously. North is a harrowing collection, and very difficult to take at times. It is relentless. Full of death. Political death, sure, but he goes back, way way back, to Viking times, and further, and the series of “bog poems” that make up the majority of this book (a sort of grisly Spoon River Anthology), are some of the best poems he has ever written. Things were bad in the 70s in the North of Ireland. We all know that. Heaney, with his particular genius, struggled to find forms that would help him talk about it. You can tell that there is a violent context behind North, and even the title gives the subtext away, but the poems are like dark dreams, one after the other after the other, showing how the landscape is seeped with death. All landscapes are. There are more dead people than there are alive people. Heaney clicks into that. These poems feel raw, but only a master of language can really get that effect across. The poems here are longer than in his other volumes. Many of them are multi-parted. He’s working on a theme, circling around it in multiple ways. The topic is too big for one man to take on, but he does his level best.

The bog poems (which he had been working on for a while, some of them show up in his earlier volumes) detail the different people found fully preserved in peat bogs, from the BC era and beyond. Heaney referred to the peat bog as a “memory bank”. The past may seem to be obliterated, but it is not. It is perfectly preserved. But how can a people access it? What can the bog people tell us? Not only about themselves but about us? Although “the North” is not overtly mentioned in the bog poems, because these people long pre-date even nationhood, that is all that they are about.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets writes:

[Heaney] moves from that landscape [the “authentically rural” landscape of his childhood] to a wider sense of Ireland, the shape that it is in a map, the roads that intersect it, the histories that divide it. The development of his early writing is vivid, culminating in the historical and then the autobiographical poems in North.

North is an important book, not just in terms of Heaney’s development, but in terms of literary history, Irish and otherwise.

One of the most famous poems in the book is called “Bog Queen” and that is the poems I will excerpt today.

Again, a couple of words from the Norton Anthology:

The dead undergo no spiritual transcendence, but remain tenaciously material, bodies bound to the earth. At the end of “Bog Queen”, he insists on bleak images of the woman’s deadness – bone, skull, stitches, even as he allows her rebirth into the light and into his dramatic monologue: “and I rose from the dark, / hacked bone, skull-ware, / frayed stitches, tufts, / small gleams on the bank.”

Speaking of his connection to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, there are echoes of “Lady Lazarus” in “Bog Queen”, especially in the last lines (the last lines of “Lady Lazarus” are “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”). It even looks like “Lady Lazarus”, the length of the lines, the small jagged-edged boxes the poem makes on the page.

Bog Queen

I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.

My body was braille
for the creeping influences:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled at my feet,

through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots

pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting

on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening.
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and Phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts’

soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs––

the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.
My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter’s spade

who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
between the stone jambs
at my head and my feet.

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut

and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.

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6 Responses to The Books: North, by Seamus Heaney

  1. Charles J. Sperling says:

    I’ve always thought Edgar Lee Masters’s *Spoon River Anthology* was pretty grisly on its own: now, it may be that “all, all are sleeping on the Hill,” but before they found their rest Thomas Rhodes made lives hell for many of them. Thornton Wilder may quote Lucinda Matlock’s “It takes life to love Life” in *Our Town,* I’m more apt to think of Doc Hill who became a beloved physician because he had no love at home, or of Elsa, the seduced maid servant who gave up her son to childless master and mistress who employed her and couldn’t say “that’s my son!” when the boy became a great politician and my first exposure to Alexander Pope, as one of Rhodes’s victims described how she lived by “act well your part, there all the honor lies.”

    Admittedly, things become grislier in *The New Spoon River,* where we meet Rita, Lucinda’s granddaughter, whose life wasn’t nearly as long or as happy, and where we have some harsh comments on America (Dick Sapper: “And some of you call this a Republic!/Well, some of you be damned,/And God-damned!”); the poet who gave Ann Rutledge a beautiful poem now sees soldiers dead “for iron/for sugar/and an empire of ciliated gold,” and seems to be setting up the poet’s later *Lincoln, the Man.*

    I don’t have a Hughes translation at hand (I finished those on Saturday and moved on to Neal Bascomb’s *Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin* — sort of a serendipity that Film Form will be showing Eisenstein’s film starting this Friday, no?) and you know Plath better than I ever will, so here’s the last poem of *The New Spoon River.*

    “Cleanthus Trilling”

    The urge of the seed: the germ.
    The urge of the germ: the stalk.
    The urge of leaves: the blossom.
    The urge of the blossom: to scatter pollen.
    The urge of the pollen: the imagined dream of life.
    The urge of life: longing for to-morrow.
    The urge of to-morrow: Pain.
    The urge of Pain: God.

    The last line tends to make me start singing John Lennon’s “God,” where he begins by stating that “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

  2. sheila says:

    Oh Charles, I am so glad you started commenting on my site. I hope you really know that. You add so much!!

    Okay, so first of all: me and Edgar Lee Masters go way back. His stuff is indeed grisly but the thing about Heaney that made me say that is Heaney’s are partially decomposing people. These are people with perfectly preserved heads and shriveled bodies, or the opposite. It would be like Edgar Lee Masters’ people talking about their lives on earth, and ALSO dealing with the fact that their hands are turning to dust. It would be like a zombie version of Spoon River Anthology.

    Here’s a post I wrote about Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River, which will explain it – but back when I was an undergraduate acting student, our great acting teacher made us pick a poem from Spoon River and do it as a dramatic monologue. I can still recite the one I picked. It still haunts me. I can still feel that primal reaction coming up in me when I read it now – 25 years later, or whatever awful number it is. I worked so hard on that piece, on trying to imagine my way into Minerva Jones’ horror – “I thirsted so for love! I hungered so for life!” Oh, how I, as an 18 year old actress, tried to connect with those words. If I ever teach an acting class, you can BET I will assign the kids to work on Edgar Lee Masters. Those are phenomenal poems.

    And it just makes me so happy to see you reference them so knowingly. Elsa makes goosebumps rise up on my arms. What a HORRIBLE story. I am not kidding: as I type this, goosebumps are racing all over me.

    Your comment makes me want to read the entire collection all over again.

    More in a bit. Just had to comment on the Edgar Lee Masters bit. And thank you for showing up here and commenting!

  3. sheila says:

    Oh, and the excerpt I chose in that link (I was still doing my daily book excerpt thing) is the Elsa poem. KILLER.

  4. sheila says:

    I have never seen Battleship Potemkin on the big screen. I’m tremendously excited.

  5. Charles J. Sperling says:

    No, thank you, Sheila, because you give me so much to think about — both to remember and to discover for myself, time permitting. (Chance Wayne may not be right to call it an enemy, but it can be decidedly unfriendly.)

    Nice distinction about the dead of Masters and the dead of Heaney: the former are ghosts and certainly not zombies. (The Hewlett-Woodmere Library had an illustrated edition of *Spoon River Anthology* which depicted Ollie McGee as decidedly spectral. She’d leave anyone haunted, not simply her husband.)

    Thank you for the link to your piece on Masters. Time isn’t permitting now, but I look forward to going through it when it does. Were there any students who chose “Flossie Cabanis”? (I would have chosen “Judge Selah Lively,” I think, because if the concluding question is almost inevitable, it does also make me think that it shouldn’t have to be that way.)

    I’m writing this on the morning of January 11th, which is the 83rd anniversary of the death of Thomas Hardy, a rare example of a great novelist who was also a great poet. He’s also the author of one of the few poems I can quote off the top of my head, and I offer it now:

    “Christmas: 1924”

    “Peace upon Earth!” was said. We sing it,
    And pay a million priests to bring it.
    After two thousand years of mass,
    We’ve got as far as poison gas.

    What to do in a world where peace makes dull reading and war makes rattling good history?

    Try your damnedest to be a meliorist, I suppose, and close your comment by saying both “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”

  6. Charles J. Sperling says:

    Pardon, chere Sheila, c’est encore moi.

    Time permitted and I clicked on your link. It was typical you, which meant that it was first-rate and provocative, and prompted these thoughts:

    1) Poets don’t come off very well in Masters’s world! Petit (what a symbolic name!), the Poet compares his “little iambics” to the thunder of Whitman and Homer and finds them wanting; Minerva’s verse probably never saw the inside of a book; Jonathan Swift Somers wrote “The Spooniad,” but it never was a success (Philip Jose Farmer as Kilgore Trout gives Somers a descendant in *Venus on the Half Shell*); and there is a Percy Bysshe Shelley who speaks thus:

    “My father who owned the wafon-shop
    And grew rich shoeing horses
    Sent me to the University of Montreal.
    I learned nothing and returned home,
    Roaming the fields with Bert Kessler,
    Hunting quail and snipe.
    At Thompson’s Lake the trigger of my gun
    Caught in the side of the boat
    And a great hole was shot through my heart.
    Over me a fond father erected this marble shaft,
    On which stands the figure of a woman
    Carved by an Italian artist.
    They say the ashes of my namesake
    Were scattered near the pyramid of Caius Cestius
    Somewhere near Rome.”

    A better man would not have to rely on hearsay!;

    2) The *Anthology* was indeed very successful upon its publication. *The New Spoon River* was less so, but still did very well. Other than that, Masters’s work isn’t easy to come by: Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library had *Mitch Miller* (but not Galileo Figaro — sorry, Queen joke) and Peninsula Public Library had *Lincoln, the Man* and *Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America,* but those are all I can think of;

    3) The introduction to *The New Spoon River* made an analogy with Hart Crane with “Marx the Sign Painter.” When I read *The Bridge* many years later, I didn’t see it; and

    4) Cherish the Ladies sing a Michael Smith song called “Spoon River” on their *Out and About* album. Beyond the “brave Union soldier boys sleep in the dirt,” I don’t think there’s much of a connection to Masters’s community. Wikipedia tells me I’m wrong. (It also alerted me to the fact that Steve Goodman didn’t write it. How odd that so many good songwriters are best known for their covers: Smith also wrote “The Dutchman,” one of Goodman’s best-known songs. Then there’s James Taylor and the late, lamented Kirsty MacColl.) It’s still a very pretty song;

    Here’s another Hardy poem. Since I’m sure you know “The Man He Killed,” I’m offering “The Dead Man Walking.”

    They hail me as one living,
    But they don’t know
    That I have died of late years,
    Untombed although?

    I am but a shape that stands here,
    A pulseless mould,
    A pale past picture, screening
    Ashes gone cold.

    Not at a minute’s warning,
    Not in a loud hour,
    For me ceased Time’s enchantments
    In hall and bower.

    There was no tragic transit,
    No catch of breath,
    When silent seasons inched
    On to this death…

    — A Troubadour-youth I rambled
    With Life for lyre,
    The beats of being raging
    In me like fire.

    But when I practised eyeing
    The goal of men,
    It iced me, and I perished
    A little then.

    When passed my frioend, my kinsfolk,
    Through the Last Door,
    And left me standing bleakly,
    I died yet more;

    And when my Love’s heart kindled
    In hate of me,
    Wherefore I knew not, died I
    One more degree

    And if when I died fully
    I cannot say,
    And changed into the corpse-thing
    I am to-day,

    Yet is it that, though whiling
    The time somehow
    In walking, talking, smiling,
    I live not now.

    Mourning becomes Electra; you adorn the treehouse!

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