The Books: Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The next book on my poetry shelf is Seamus Heaney’s first volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist.

Many of the paradoxes of Heaney’s work can be understood only in the context of his historical situation as an Irish Catholic who grew up in the predominantly Protestant North of Ireland under British rule. Heaney is a political poet, affirming his affinities with the Catholic civil rights movement, which has struggled against British and Protestant domination. Yet he refuses slogans, journalistic reportage, and political pieties, instead scrutinizing the roots of communal identity and exploring his ambivalences. He is a devotedly Irish poet, who translates poetry from Gaelic; renews Irish traditions such as the aisling, or vision poem; draws on the examples of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Patrick Kavanagh; and strongly rejects descriptions of himself as “British”. Yet he recognizes his many debts to and affinities with British poets, from Beowulf (his prize-winning translation was published in 1999) to John Keats, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, and Ted Hughes, and his poetry ironically uses Anglo-Saxon alliterative effects and other techniques to suggest the sounds of Irish in English. – Foreword to the Seamus Heaney entry in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair

My father gave me this collection. It is Heaney’s first, published in 1966. A haunting and personal book, it starts off with the famous poem “Digging” – Heaney’s mission statement, his declaration of independence from the rural life of work he grew up in. His poems have been called “archaeological” in nature, because there is so much dirt in them, I suppose, but also because his role as poet, is to dig deep into the nature of things: associations, history, inferences, meaning. He was a Catholic living in the North. His family were farmers and cattle-dealers. He was born in the same year that Yeats died. A rather amazing coincidence, but Heaney has ambivalent feelings about Yeats, one of the aristocracy of Ireland, and also digs into those ambivalences in his poems. Yeats is the “model” for Irish poets, and Heaney, without being a dick about it, rejects that model. However, Heaney is never one for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. His essays on Yeats are amazing, because it shows him really wrestling with Yeats. Yeats is so huge, so omnipresent, that young Irish poets must deal with him if they want to find their own voices. Also, there is an assumption from people who don’t know any better that all Irish are the same. That a man from Dublin is the same as a man from Mayo. That a man from Derry has a lot in common with a man from Cork. While there may be some similarities, the context is entirely different, as it would be here in America, or in England, or Brazil, or in any country on earth. Nationality does bind people together, sometimes culturally, but Heaney consciously separated himself from the example of Yeats, because he could not write like that, didn’t want to write like that: Yeats’s life had nothing to do with his. Yeats had to be dealt with, yes, but to assume that a Catholic farmer’s son from County Derry could have anything in common with a Protestant Anglo-Irish (yet Republican) aristocrat from Dublin whose family had vast land-holdings throughout Ireland is absurd. There are many ways to be Irish. Heaney might as well have been from another planet as Yeats, although they shared the same country.

The Norton Anthology entry on Heaney reads:

Reacting against “something too male and assertive” in poems such as “Under Ben Bulven”, Heaney criticizes Yeats for moving, by career’s end “within his mode of vision as within some invisible ring of influence and defence, some bullet-proof glass of the spirit.” At the same time, he recognizes in some of Yeats’s late poems an introspection, a “humility”, a “tenderness towards life and its uncompletedness” (“Yeats as an Example?”). The differences between Yeats and Heaney are partly explained by the discrepant affinities of a would-be aristocratic Anglo-Irish Protestant and a working-class Northern Irish Catholic. Nature for Heaney does not mean lakes, woods, and swans, visible from the houses of the aristocracy. Instead, a farmer’s son, Heaney describes, in “Station Island” II, the “dark-shaped grass where cows or horses dunged, / the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open” (the latter a line that Hopkins would have welcomed). Heaney’s nature is agricultural; it includes such farm equipment as a harrow pin, a sledge-head, a trowel. This contemporary poetry marks its difference from Yeats’s by subdued rhythms, less clamant philosophy, less prophetic utterance, but Heaney’s abiding respect for Yeats is evident in his rewriting of his precursor’s work, as in the recasting of “The Fisherman” by “Casualty.” Irish poetry since Yeats has been at pains to purge itself of the grand manner, and Heaney austerely excludes it.

Death of a Naturalist is not as political as some of Heaney’s later volumes. Published before the North exploded in violence, it is a personal work, full of ghosts and memories. His ambivalences here have to do with his own family, with finding his own way as a man. His father walks behind him in one haunting poem, and Heaney wishes he could forget that his father was back there. It is a young man’s collection, personal and confessional (you can tell he has read Ted Hughes), but without the “mess” of the American confessional poets. But they are deeply personal nonetheless.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

For all his travels, Heaney remains a poet with a locality and landscape, though he is displaced from it as he was once displaced in it. His early displacement was due to the fact that he did not have a rural vocation – an estrangement like Tony Harrison from his class and community – but Heaney is neither bitter nor enraged: hi expresses through his evocations a warm solidarity with what he left behind, a nostalgia for the past that becomes a nostalgia for the present, which he can watch but cannot in conscience fully engage. This failure of engagement is one of the most powerful themes of his poetry and a testament to its political and social integrity.

Here is a beautiful poem from Heaney’s first volume. Digging, again. Not just the literal potatoes, but into the vast sea of associations of what “potato” means to the Irish, the horrible history of the potato famine, stalking the landscape. But Heaney keeps the whole thing grounded in memorable imagery, specific and sense-driven. I love that phrase: “flint-white, purple.”

At a Potato Digging

I

A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
Heads bow, trucks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf
Turns work to ritual. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

II

Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
Like inflated pebbles. Native
to the blank hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.
Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.

III

Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in ‘forty-five,’
wolfed the blighted root and died.
The new potato, sound as stone,
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.
Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.
A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.
Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus in filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.

IV

Under a white flotilla of gulls
The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.
White bread and tea in bright canfuls
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop
Down in the ditch and take their fill,
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.