We met on 6th May 2015 to discuss some poems from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s final two collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). These poems, in their varying ways, deal with memory, loss and the relationship between past and present.
We began with ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ from District and Circle, a text that can be connected in subtle ways to the Northern Irish peace process, and to Irish history more broadly. Although a number of readers in the group were familiar with Heaney’s work, I felt it would be useful to set this poem in context. I first showed a series of images of bodies recovered from Danish bogs that had been buried in the Iron Age. These bodies became internationally famous when their pictures featured in P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (1969). Glob argued that these individuals, their skin, hair, clothing were perfectly preserved in the peat bogs of , may have been victims of ritual execution, or may alternatively have been killed as sacrifices to a Mother Goddess of the earth. The reading group found these startling images thought-provoking, and perhaps shocking, in their intimacy and strangeness. The bog bodies exerted a major influence on Heaney’s poetry in the mid-1970s, as he imaginatively connected them with images of contemporary victims of sectarian violence in the Troubles.
We looked at the poem ‘The Tollund Man’ alongside the image of this body, and considered two questions: how meaningful is it to use this ancient past to ‘explain’ the late twentieth-century present, and is it ethical to treat this murder victim as an aesthetic object? The Tollund Man in this poem is voiceless, but in ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’, he not only acquires speech and individuality, but reawakens through the long seasons to take the modern world – planes, scanners and cash-points – in his stride. He carries a bunch of Tollund rushes on his travels, and the poem ends with him mixing the pollen from the rushes in with his spit, and spiriting himself into the street. The group enjoyed the palpable and sensory nature of Heaney’s language, and the striking images that pass before the Tollund Man’s eyes as he lay in the soil. We felt that the poem was about coming to terms with a painful past, of not forgetting what went before but equally not being imprisoned by it.
In the second part of the session, we moved away from this ‘public’ focus in Heaney’s work to more ‘personal’ poems, ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ from District and Circle, and ‘The Door was Open’ from Human Chain. Both poems are elegies, but as our discussions revealed, they deal with the past, and with loss, in differing ways. ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ alludes to the death of Heaney’s four-year-old brother in a road accident, when Heaney was 12 and at boarding school, an event dealt with an earlier poem ‘Mid-Term Break’ (from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966). ‘The Door was Open’ is dedicated to David Hammond, a musician, film-maker and broadcaster born in Northern Ireland like Heaney. The blackbird is recalled as a harbinger of doom, but in the poem its jaunty presence was seen by the group as something enduring and positive, a reminder of how life will continue long after a human presence leaves the scene. The open door of the second poem initially makes the speaker feel an intruder, but gradually the dark interior becomes rather welcoming, a kind of invitation to explore the space beyond. The group felt that darkness and uncertainty was accepted and embraced in the text, and that this perhaps reflects a less burdened attitude towards the past in Heaney’s late poetry.
We had decided at the outset that, if they felt comfortable, members of the group would take turns reading a stanza. This was a really interesting exercise, as the range of accents brought the energy and the nuances of the poetry powerfully to life, and encouraged everyone to examine the language closely and appreciate its effects. At the end of the session, several members of the group said that they had enjoyed looking at modern poetry much more than they thought they would, and I hope our discussion will make it seem less daunting in the future!
Dr Scott Brewster