Neff 2

“Dreaming Umber”: The Search for Artistic Freedom

in Seamus Heaney’s Field Work

Ireland is a nation in possession of a rich and complex history; unfortunately, it is a nation that has been both nurtured by the ancient traditions of its people and ravaged by the political strife that has resulted from the conflict of many of these same customs. Hostilities between the North and South, Unionist and Nationalist, and Protestant and Catholic communities have been a part of Irish life for centuries. Consequently, the search for a unified national identity has both frustrated and inspired the Irish populace. Of these people, artists and writers in particular have often attempted to explore and define a concept of “Irishness.” Dramatists and poets like J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and especially W.B. Yeats generated a body of work that is widely regarded as the foundation of the modern Irish literary canon. In their works, these writers experimented with many of the prominent symbols of the culture to create a literary consciousness that was fueled largely by the country’s fractured political status. Yeats, Synge, and Gregory’s focus upon subjects like the contrast between the lives of Irish peasantry and nobility and the conflict between the native Irish and the encroaching English invested the writers’ works with urgency and honesty that are still felt today. They wrote of a nation struggling for independence and, in the process, undergoing the pains and progress of revolution.

The modern Irish poet faces a dilemma even more pronounced than that confronted by artists like Yeats in the early 20th century. Modern Irish poets like Seamus Heaney must fashion a cohesive national identity in a land divided upon itself. In his essay “Down to the center: Seamus Heaney and his place,” Lionel Basney underscores this difference between the foundations and the present state of modern Irish poetry, noting that “…Yeats stood between England and Ireland, while Heaney stands between two impulses in Ireland itself, violence and humaneness, attachment and detachment” (5). Yeats’ Ireland consisted of a “Self” and “Other” defined largely by the divisions between two separate nations: Ireland and England. Heaney, however, must contend with the aftermath of Yeats’ “terrible beauty”: an Irish national spirit that began with politically-charged independence but fell into violent civil war. How is a poet who, like Yeats, has involuntarily been identified as a voice of Ireland, able to draw upon the inspiration of the land and its history when it is these same elements that gave rise to political turmoil in the first place? Lesser poets would falter in this momentous task but Heaney, through a deliberate shift in poetic content, escapes this intellectual barrier. Through a careful withdrawal from the nation’s impersonal, politically-charged consciousness into the realm of the individual, and finally into his own mind, Heaney is able to retain the integrity of his poetry’s “Irishness” while remaining free from the political confines of Ireland itself.

It is in North, published in 1975, that the metamorphosis of Heaney’s national voice begins. In much of the collection, Heaney confronts the darkest aspects of the politically-charged violence, but he does so with a noticeable distance. In “bog poems” like “The Tollund Man” and “Punishment,” Heaney draws upon connections between his Ireland and ancient Ireland to portray the violence as tribal tradition, but he is reluctant to criticize the brutality of either. In The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Elmer Andrews explains the premise behind “Punishment”: “In ‘Punishment’ the girl hanged and dumped in the bog for adultery is linked…with modern-day transgressors of the tribal code –Catholic girls who were tarred and feathered for fraternizing with British soldiers” (90). Heaney summons the mysterious and mythic violence of Ireland’s pagan past to inform a similar modern act. As the poem begins, the speaker identifies with the ancient victim, saying that he “can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck…” (1-3).

Both speaker and subject are victims, and one might expect the poem to develop into an aggressive rebuking of the people who would commit such a despicable act; instead, the speaker retreats from the sympathetic perspective established at the beginning of the poem and offers an honest, ashamed admittance: “I almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence” (29-31). As the poem closes, the speaker withdraws even further from the perspective of the victim, expressing instead an understanding of the reasons behind this punishment: “I who have stood dumb… / who would connive in civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (37-44). Although the speaker may “connive in civilized outrage” over the girl’s punishment, he admits to an understanding of the reasons behind it. He does not condone the violence, but neither does he criticize it. Instead he investigates it purely as an act of tribe against tribe and finds the present act in accordance with past tradition. The girl’s punishment is impersonal and intended to serve as a warning to the rest of the community.

The ritualistic origin behind the death of the ancient bog girl is utilized to explain the ritual significance of the modern punishment: the personal suffering for the greater good of the communal. Maurice Harmon comments on the ritual aspect present in “Punishment” and the rest of the collection:

The metaphor of ceremony permeates North, a collection deeply concerned with the violence of Northern Ireland. The poems do not confront that violence. They do not speak of individual pain or individual outrage. Instead Heaney adopts a communal response. Whatever personal feelings he has about death and suffering are deflected into large, ceremonial gestures. (qtd. in Murphy 56)

This impersonal stance is reflective of the nature of the violence itself: perpetrated not for its effect on the victim but in order to exert political influence over the community. Heaney attempts to understand the violence at its most basic level but intentionally retreats from a judgment of it. It is this unwillingness to prescribe a moral judgment that has provoked some of the harshest criticisms of the work. Ciaran Carson, one of Heaney’s renowned contemporaries, said of the poems of North:

It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened…and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution. It is as if there never were and never will be any political consequences of such acts. (qtd. in Foley 8)

Critics like Carson object to Heaney’s amoral and impersonal treatment of Catholic violence and look for a resolute and critical voice, but it is evident that this is exactly what Heaney was trying to avoid in North. In approaching the violence from a communal perspective, grounded in myth and ancient tribal traditions, Heaney sought to present Ireland’s violence as apolitical: a disease of human nature rather than religious or ideological underpinnings. The poems of North, however brilliant from an artistic perspective, were flawed because they purposely ignored the innate political character that subjects such as tribal violence and mythic history have in the context of Irish identity. In order to remain true to his origins as a poet of Ireland, Heaney would need to find a way to confront politics without letting them overshadow his artistic integrity.

In Field Work, Heaney leaves the community-centered perspectives of North—much as he did, literally, in moving southward to County Wicklow in August of 1972—to examine the personal side of Ireland’s tribal violence. It is clear from the beginning of the collection, in “Oysters”, that the poetry of Field Work is aware of its struggle to diverge from the political foreground of North: “Alive and violated / They lay on their beds of ice: / Bivalves: the split bulb / And philandering sigh of ocean. / Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered” (6-10). The speaker describes the oysters with the language of suffering; they are “violated”, “split”, “ripped”, “shucked”, and “scattered”. “Oysters”, unlike “Punishment”, immediately presents a tone of regret for the victims of senseless violence. As the poem ends, however, the speaker’s anger is redirected into frustration at his inability to escape social consciousness; he is “…angry that [his] trust could not repose / In the clear light, like poetry or freedom / Leaning in from sea…” (21-23). He feels burdened by the political implications of language. What began as an attempt to describe the simple act of eating has inescapably become invested with political sentiment. The speaker’s desire to “…repose / In the clear light, like poetry or freedom…” is ironic because it is the unrelenting political implications of poetry that have caused his frustration. He senses his unintentional entrance into the political realm and yearns for an escape: “…I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb” (23-25). He embraces the act of eating in the hopes that this natural operation will bring him freedom like that which he believes should be granted by poetry or “pure verb”, but this is ultimately a false hope. As George Cusack explains in “A Cold Eye Cast Inward: Seamus Heaney’s Field Work”, “The speaker may try to turn away from [the language’s] political implication, but once the sentiment has been expressed, it cannot simply be erased. Thus, despite the speaker’s confidence, poem and poet close in ambivalence” (2). As the opening poem of Field Work, “Oysters” is Heaney’s recognition that his words, no matter how apolitical in intention, will be invested with the political spirit of the land that inspires them. In the rest of the collection, Heaney resolves to confront this dilemma rather than retreat from it.

“The Strand at Lough Beg” addresses the personal consequences of Ireland’s sectarian conflict. As an elegy for Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney who “was the victim of a random sectarian killing in the late summer of 1975” (qtd. in Cusack 3), the poem is an intimate portrayal of the violence that wracks the country, and a far different approach than the impersonal nature of the North poems that came before it. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the elegized’s journey into Lough Beg, a land that is innately Irish, but ultimately foreign and dangerous: “…in your driving mirror, tailing headlights / That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down / Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew: / The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,” (12-16). Even in his own country, the elegized is made to feel like an outsider. This trend is continued in the speaker’s reference to the “…old language of conspirators” spoken by “…you and yours and yours and mine…” Their knowledge of the Irish language marks them as Nationalists and Catholics and, ironically, their use of the Irish tongue also makes them foreigners in this area of Ireland. The poem becomes heavily invested with political weight, and when the speaker finds his cousin “With blood and roadside muck in [his] hair and eyes,” (37) one anticipates an outcry or an emotional response to the murder. Instead, the speaker attempts to avoid the pain and ramifications of his cousin’s death by reuniting him with the earth: “…I dab you clean with moss… / With rushes that shoot green again, I plait / Green scapulars to wear over your shroud” (40-44). With his cousin victimized by irrational violence, the speaker intends to consecrate a portion of the land so that it will finally be free from the civil war that has plagued it for decades; however, the event has already been invested with political significance. The speaker’s attempt to escape political implications fails because the act has become one of Catholic defiance in the face of Protestant violence. As George Cusack explains:

By creating an uncontestable territory with his cousin’s body, he is not escaping sectarian conflict altogether; he is declaring a victory for his tribe by claiming a part of the landscape into which the Protestant invaders cannot encroach. In this sense, the repetition of “green” in the last two lines is a symbol of Republicanism as well as of new life. (5)

The method the speaker uses to depoliticize his cousin’s murder instead identifies his body with the earliest origins of the violence that caused his death: the dispute over land. The elegized is Catholic and a speaker of the Irish language and in death he wears green, the color of his heritage and the flag of his tribe. Heaney has retreated from the withdrawn, mythic portrayal of the Irish conflict as presented in North, but his attention to the personal, human side of the violence leaves him with little room to avoid political ramifications. The elegized has too intimate a connection with the national strife and the poet’s own emotions to exist as a politically neutral entity, and instead he becomes a symbol of Catholic resistance.

“Casualty”, another elegy for a victim of violence, also serves to define Heaney’s ambivalence toward the separation of personal and political. The poem elegizes a Catholic fisherman killed in an IRA bombing. It deliberately investigates the private aspect of a public act of violence and gives a face to a formerly faceless victim. Unlike the victim in “The Strand at Lough Beg”, the elegized in “Casualty” is a mere acquaintance with no personal ties to the poet. In this manner, “Casualty” bears more resemblance to “Punishment”; both victims are relatively unknown to the speaker and both meet their fate at the hands of a public, tribal violence in which the speaker does not intervene. Unlike “Punishment”, however, the speaker finds himself identifying with the deceased, and in so doing he transforms the impersonal into the personal and the personal into the political, ultimately entrenching himself back within the tribal conflict he consistently attempts to avoid.