The Books: Wintering Out, by Seamus Heaney

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The next book on my poetry shelf is Seamus Heaney’s third volume of poetry, published in 1972 Wintering Out.

In Wintering Out he brings politics into his verse directly. Politics had been latent, he claims, before, and perhaps he is right. He began writing when he began teaching: an urge to compete with R.S. Thomas and [Ted] Hughes, classroom poets. Like Thomas he becomes political when his environment is politicized, when the pull of history becomes too hard to resist. Would he have achieved his public eminence without the Troubles? To what extent do external factors here, as in Plath and Hughes (and latterly Gunn), determine his reputation? The question, posed by those who resent his success, is fatuous. The Troubles are not external to one whose community is riven by them, nor do they become external when he leaves. We have to connect where he came from with where he has gone, what he was with what he now is, the uses made of him and his resistance to or complicity in those uses. – Michael Schmidt

Here is where things start to get very interesting. Not that they were not interesting before, Heaney’s poems were good from the start, but I am taking as my cue Michael Schmidt’s comment above. Wintering Out was published in 1972, a terrible year for Northern Ireland. The year of Bloody Sunday, for sure, but that was just the culmination of a spiral of terrible events. Seamus Heaney had begun his teaching career in the mid-60s. He started out at a school in west Belfast and in 1966 he started lecturing on Modern English at Queen’s University in Belfast (his alma mater). This is his time of publishing his first two collections, his involvement in the Belfast Writer’s Group, his marriage to Marie Devlin and the birth of two sons. In 1970-71, he became a guest lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley. Most of the poems for Wintering Out were written during this time. It’s a big collection, with two parts. The poems should be read in sequence (at least at first), because you can actually feel the growing tension of the times, as filtered through by this poet, first far from home, and then back in Belfast by 1971. Just in time for everything to explode. Originally, as he was compiling the poems (all written between 1969 and 1971) the collection was called Winter Seeds, a safe rural title, that tells us nothing, and is something that we might expect from an Irish poet in a certain tradition. The phrase “winter seeds” is from a poem in the collection “The Tollund Man” (read it below), and when you see the context in which it is used in that poem, it definitely opens some deeper doors (sustenance, hibernation, preservation), but as a title I think it’s rather weak. Heaney’s return to Belfast in the fall of 1971 changed everything for him, and by the time he submitted the next round of the manuscript to his publisher, Faber and Faber, he had changed the title to Wintering Out, a much more frightening and evocative title – and where there had originally been 72 poems, there were now 80 poems. It was as though the second Heaney landed into the middle of the shitstorm that was now Belfast, he realized that he could not release Winter Seeds as it was, there needed to be more, he needed to write about what was happening. Otherwise the book would be immediately consigned to irrelevance. This is why the book should be read in sequence. It has an immediacy to its poem-order. You can feel the outside world encroaching on the poet’s life. It cannot be stopped or shut out. The situation in Northern Ireland was deteriorating. And while Heaney’s NEXT collection, published in 1975, is called North (the politics become explicit, overt, from top to bottom, in that one), it is in Wintering Out that he started directly addressing what was happening in his country. Yet, because he’s Seamus Heaney, he does it through metaphor and imagery which make you ask what is history? Is history a nightmare from which we all are trying to awake, as Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses? Or is there something there to be reclaimed?

The great poets can often help us figure out how to think. Not WHAT to think, but “how”. Heaney, in Wintering Out, is coming to terms in a 2-year period with the cataclysm of violence that is ripping his community and country apart. He does not remove himself from the fray, and go on and on about the beauties of rural life, and the good green sod, while the bombs explode in the street outside, although his poems remain rooted in rural imagery and words (I always need to look stuff up when I read Heaney’s farm poems). He does not step back. He does not put his hands over his ears and shout, “lalalalalala”. Nor does he pontificate, lecture, browbeat. He is a genius, after all. He looks for “ways in”, and his way in is often through rural imagery, and also through language. There are a couple of awesome language poems here, and language is ALWAYS political in Ireland.

“Tollund Man” is perhaps the most famous poem in this third collection. Heaney has been reading it for decades. When I saw him at NYU, someone asked that he read it, and he obliged. He knows it by heart, naturally, but still, it’s something else to see a poet just begin speaking out his own poem, without looking at any notes.

The Tollund Man was an Iron Age corpse pulled out of a peat bog in Scandinavia in 1950.

The Tollund Man

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.