‘Weird Brightness’ and the Riverbank

This chapter begins with a reading from a Virgilian perspective of the third section of the title poem from Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991): here, the poet gives an account of his own early memory of his father after an accident, coming back ‘undrowned’ from the river into which he had toppled on a cart. The chapter will examine in more detail a relevant passage from Heaney’s late translation of Aeneid VI (Virgil’s encounter with Charon). Next, section XI of the ‘Route 110’ sequence (in Human Chain (2010)) will be read in relation to the river motif, and there will be a discussion of Heaney’s term ‘translation’ in that poem, with consideration of its purchase of some fundamental aspects of his poetic theory and practice. The chapter will continue to a reading of an uncollected late piece, ‘The City’, in which Heaney reflects on (amongst other things) the differences between Virgilian and Homeric angles on poetry and suffering, and it will finish with an analysis of the first section (‘Sidhe’) of the Human Chain poem ‘Wraiths’, in order to focus on the poet’s reconciliation of both Virgilian and Irish elements of a metaphysical poetic.

Speaking Truth to Power

A recurrent feature in the last two decades of Seamus Heaney’s literary career was his immersion in classical, particularly Hellenic culture, which in itself sprang from a longstanding interest in literary translation and translating. Until recently relatively little critical attention was paid to Heaney’s role as a translator, due in part to the erroneous assumption that such activity was somehow peripheral to his literary project, rather than a significant element within it. Taking its cue from a contrary view first voiced by Alan Peacock, this essay offers a detailed analysis of The Burial at Thebes, the second of two of Sophocles’ plays adapted by Heaney, evaluating the quality of its poetry, tracing connections between it and Heaney’s other writings, identifying the contexts which helped shape its creation, and citing those crucial instances or clinamen where Heaney diverges from previous translators to forge ‘something new’.

A Door into the Dark

Nottingham Playhouse asked me to find a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone for production. After searching, Giles Croft the Artistic Director alerted me to Heaney’s wonderful The Burial at Thebes. Seamus allowed me a Dublin visit, to discuss the play. He guided me through the three different verse forms: the three-beat Gaelic bars for Antigone, the Anglo- Saxon alliterative form for the Chorus, and blank verse for Creon. Seamus saw a moral balance between Creon and Antigone: for him it was a double tragedy, as both are equally misguided in their beliefs. He also made me understand ‘The verse’s the thing’, so each word must be heard. My production in 2007 used verse, music, dance, and all actors played the Chorus. Seamus came to see it and for the revival he did rewrites. On tour, we witnessed how different audiences found the play relevant to their lives.

Heaney, Yeats, and the Language of Pastoral

Starting with Seamus Heaney’s essay on the beneficence of pastoral in extremis, I will argue that Heaney moves significantly between pastoral as healing in troubled times and its capacity for a more literary, simple language (as claimed by William Empson) so that the form works for literal rural description as well as for political description and argument. I want to argue that Heaney turned to classical pastoral in the volume Electric Light (2001) in the same way as Yeats turned to it in the volumes after 1916 in Ireland. In both cases there is a tension between what Heaney called ‘The Real Names’ and the generic names within the form, as in Yeats’s ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ about Robert Gregory and in the name ‘Augusta’ as applied to Lady Gregory and to Heaney’s benefactor Ann Saddlemyer.

Seamus Heaney

This chapter considers Heaney’s work linked with Greek tragedy, the Sophoclean versions The Cure At Troy and The Burial At Thebes and the sequence ‘Mycenae Lookout’ in the collection The Spirit Level (1996). It argues that Heaney used classical Greek drama not only to touch on the Irish troubles but also to present his personal views and values, sometimes employing images from his background as the son of a Catholic father, and often influenced by his upbringing as an Irish Catholic. He depicted war and the lust for violence, but always expressed hope, and a desire for the fires of war to be cleansed by the waters of a miraculous healing well.

Heaney and Hesiod

Heaney acknowledges an affinity with the farmer-poet, the source of a literary tradition which is inspired but rooted: rural and provincial rather than courtly, urban, or cosmopolitan. Distinguishing between ‘rural’ and ‘pastoral’, he draws connections between Hesiod and Kavanagh, Burns and Clare, poets who influenced and authenticated his own style. I explore the relation of poetic vocation to agricultural labour, discussing the encounter with the Muses in the Theogony and the Works and Days and its resonances in Heaney’s writing from the early ‘Personal Helicon’ to Human Chain. Heaney (like Hesiod) returns most often to the ‘expert’ art of the ploughman; I show how the shape and achievement of the ploughed field mirror those of the poem. I conclude with Heaney’s recognition of Hesiod in the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’.

‘The Forewarned Journey Back’

In his poem ‘The Conway Stewart’ the parental gift of a fountain pen, on the eve of Heaney’s departure to boarding school, performs a symbolic katabasis (descent), as the nib drinks deep of the fresh black liquid in a Lethean prelude to new birth. The pen’s mystical immersion signals the moment of severance from home and family but it also anticipates a return, a reconnection. In his earlier poem ‘Digging’ the pen was to be Heaney’s spade, the instrument that would connect him to the soil of his forbears. Now the pen is transfigured, it is his golden bough, his passage to the netherworld of the past, bearing with it the power to elegize, to revivify memory. This chapter will examine Seamus Heaney’s lifelong preoccupation—culminating in his final collection Human Chain (2010) and his posthumously published translation of Aeneid VI—with the numinous essence of Home and his continual association of the act of nostos (homecoming) with that of katabasis, with crossing and rebirth. It will also consider his notion of ‘poetry as a point of entry into the buried life of the feelings or as a point of exit for it’.

Ancient Greek Sailors with Twentieth-Century Metaphors (and Pan-Chronic Trousers)

This chapter particularly focuses on the duality of Heaney’s chorus, who are nominally the ancient sailors of the original, but use a diction and metaphoric landscape that places the play firmly in Heaney’s Ireland. We look not only at the literary and political implications of this, but specifically at the challenge it gives actors and directors working on the text. This chapter examines how the dual locus of The Cure at Troy works dramaturgically and visually, as an act of translation across time, space, and cultures, and the political questions the play raises by fusing chorus and God at the end of the play. As part of this exploration, the chapter charts Heaney’s journey to find a workable English verse line and metre for translating ancient drama, exploring his correspondence with Ted Hughes on the question. Furthermore, we look at the afterlife of The Cure at Troy, particularly revisions that Heaney has made when excerpts have been published in other contexts.

‘Mycenae Lookout’ and the Example of Aeschylus

Discussing ‘Anything Can Happen’, his response, via Horace, to 11 September 2001, Heaney said to Dennis O’Driscoll: ‘For better or worse, you can’t be liberated from consciousness’. His version of the thirty-fourth of the odes in Book 1 was, he said, ‘partly an elegy—but, to quote Wilfred Owen’s “Preface”, it was also meant “to warn”’ (O’Driscoll 2008: 424). Working from the heavy collocation of time and mood Heaney offered in these remarks, uniting elegiac retrospect and uneasy anticipation, this essay explores the coincidence of classical sources and contemporary concerns in Heaney’s earlier sequence ‘Mycenae Lookout’. It attends especially closely to Heaney’s re-imagining of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, and the burden of consciousness she both bears and represents.

Epilogue

This essay compares the forms, tone, and content of Heaney’s handling of Hellenic and Roman material and argues that the ambivalences and conflicts within and between these are at their most acute in displacing Heaney’s ‘middle voice’ from its moderating role in holding the balance between, on the one hand, anger and violence and, on the other hand, catharsis and resolution. The Antaeus/Heracles struggle is often read as a metaphor for the challenge presented to Heaney by the competing forces of his rural Irish roots and his elevated global status as a learned and feted poet. I argue here that the metaphor also signals profound conflicts in his handling of classical material. These can be read at a number of levels both within Heaney’s work and in and through the light it sheds on wider questions that are at the hub of aesthetic and political interaction. ‘Deep’ analysis of the differing trajectories of Heaney’s Greek and Roman voices reveals conflicted inscriptions of poetic, religious, and cultural memory and throws open windows into the poetics of repression and the study of trauma.