The Books: Door Into the Dark, by Seamus Heaney

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The next book on my poetry shelf is Seamus Heaney’s second volume of poetry, published in 1969 Door into the Dark: Poems (Faber Paperbacks).

Because of Seamus Heaney’s Catholic upbringing in the Protestant north of Ireland, because of his schoolboy experience of Greek and Latin, because of the tight-knit mores of rural farm-life, Heaney has had a surfeit of assumptions. His career has been a puzzle of knowing how to be done with these without having to repudiate or denigrate them. – Tom Sleigh

In this collection, Heaney is still rooted firmly in the rural tradition of Ireland, the landscape of his childhood. Yet somehow, his work never seems quaint or nostalgic. It is personal. It comes from a personal place. Heaney has never been a throwback. Despite all of the peat bogs and thatched cottages, he is a strictly modern poet. And yet his rhythms are often old: he loves sonnets, for example. But the old forms, and the traditional landscape, are all used to personal effect with Heaney, which is what gives him that strange singular tension and uniqueness. He knows how to end a poem. He is unafraid of being lyric, or emotional. The poems appear to be releasing something in him. The language has energy, it transforms him AS it goes along. This is one of the reasons why his work can be so moving. Because you can feel him “digging”, you can feel him working stuff out through language. On the flip side, he never seems like he’s “grasping”, or struggling for effect. He clearly works very hard to get the effect of spontaneous release.

He got married the year before Death of a Naturalist, and many of the poems in Door in the Dark deal with marriage, being married. The politics here are a given. Heaney’s background and upbringing made sure of that. He was born into the middle of an intense political situation, inescapable, and while his later work is more overtly political, it’s still here. Any time you talk about history in Ireland, you’re talking about politics, even if it just seems like you’re talking about Irish myths and legends. Because the culture had been stomped out by the British, because the language had been suppressed, there is a lot of energy in those things. None of them are dead. They pulse with meaning, different for every poet. They are things to be reclaimed. It is an act of war to reclaim them. It puts a flag in the ground, it declares, “This, here, is OURS.”

Well-trod ground, perhaps, for Irish writers, but Heaney is better than most. I think what I respond to most in his work is how personal it feels, as I mentioned before.

In later collections, Heaney wrote a series of “bog poems”, about the Iron Age people/tools that were taken out of the Irish bogs, perfectly preserved. Those bog poems are yet to come, but Door in the Dark ends with a poem called “Bogland”, which is a precursor to those later famous poems. Heaney already seems to know where he wants to go. So that’s the poem I will excerpt today.

Door in the Dark is a beautiful collection. Personal and urgent, haunted and specific, you feel that Heaney couldn’t stop writing if he tried.

Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening–
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.