Bringing it All Back Home - with Seamus Heaney
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This document is a collection of poetry excerpts, quotes, and information about poetry related to Northern Ireland and Seamus Heaney. It discusses how poetry is turned to during times of grief, both personal and public. Several poems are referenced that relate to Northern Ireland and Heaney's childhood, including describing places, experiences with violence, and the role of poetry. Context is provided on Heaney's background and upbringing in Northern Ireland as well as the political violence during the Troubles.
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Bringing it All Back Home - with Seamus Heaney
- 1. Something to Write Home About Yvonne Watterson ycwatterson@gmail.com 9-27-15 Image:CCBY-NC2.0owaief89
- 2. We turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . When we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief. Carol Ann Duffy “
- 4. . . . Broagh, its low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage “ Heaney, S., 1972. Broagh. In Wintering out. London: Faber.
- 5. The Sandy Loaning A silky fragrant world there, and for the first few hundred yards, you were safe enough . . . But scuffles in old leaves made you nervous.” “
- 6. Perhaps if I’d stayed behind And lived it bomb by bomb I might have grown up And learnt what is meant by home. Derek Mahon “
- 7. leaving
- 8. Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake. “ Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008; London: Faber, 2009), p. 42.
- 11. Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 cogdog “the pen is easier handled than the spade . . . “
- 12. Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows. “ The Blacksmith, Barney Devlin
- 13. “ . . A mighty curve of sand and dunes running for a mile and more. It retains for me the aura of original wonder and, of course, there was the mystery of the courting couples in the dunes.” The Strand Beach, Portstewart, Northern Ireland
- 14. good with their hands
- 16. “Route 110 , Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.”
- 17. Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells . . .
- 19. What was there to fear?
- 20. From 1968 – 1999 during “The Troubles,” 3,289 people died. There were over 35,000 shootings, 150,000 bombings, and over 40,000 people wounded. Surveys say half of the population knows somebody killed or injured. Everybody knows somebody affected by “The Troubles.” CAIN Web Service (Conflict Archive on the Internet) University of Ulster, 2010 < http://cain.ulst.ac.uk>
- 22. Source: Belfast Telegarph: Young woman tarred and feathered for getting engaged to a British solider. My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know the stones of silence From “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney “
- 23. One morning early I met armoured cars, In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, All camouflaged with broken alder branches, And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets How long were they approaching down my roads As if they owned them? Heaney, S., 1979. The Toome Road. In Field work: poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. “
- 24. ”Whatever you say, say nothing”
- 25. Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us: Manoeuvrings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses With hardly an exception to the rule That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape. O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, Of open minds as open as a trap. “
- 27. Smoke furl and boiling ashes have been familiar in Northern Ireland for - well they had been – for thirty years, thirty-five years. Explosions. Fires. Seamus Heaney “
- 28. “We have coped too well. The heart is numb.” Damian Gorman
- 29. Devices of Detachment by Damian Gorman
- 30. I’ve come to point the finger I’m rounding on my own The decent cagey people I count myself among … We are like rows of idle hands We are like lost or mislaid plans We’re working under cover We’re making in our homes Devices of detachment As dangerous as bombs. “
- 31. From far away in America, I had distanced myself from it, until it was too close to the places that had formed me, to the landscape of childhood from which Edna O’Brien maintains we can never escape Many and terrible are the roads to home. “
- 32. “ Magherafelt, May 23, 1993.
- 33. “ More than a set of coordinates, more than “a legitimate target,” every bombed place in Northern Ireland is a part of someone’s personal history.
- 34. The ashes of the Magherafelt bombing appear in “Two Lorries,” a sestina written by Heaney three years later. It begins in the 1940s, a young Seamus Heaney observing while one lorry delivers coal to his mother. Then he takes us to the 1990s, a second lorry delivering a bomb to the center of Magherafelt.
- 35. Two Lorries by Seamus Heaney
- 36. This was Northern Ireland. Those who “stay on where it happens” understand a normality where the ashes of a 500lb bomb parked outside a bus station in Magherafelt can share the same lyrical space as the ashes of the coal fire built to keep a house warm.
- 37. Keeping going.
- 38. “Two Lorries” brings me back home to my father, a maker of things, a Magherafelt man with the “Midas touch” of the thatcher, the grasp of the diviner, and an ear for poetry. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground My father, digging. I look down . . . “
- 39. The magic of poetry – learned by heart . . . at Christmas and at Easter, elder friends of my father’s and mother’s would be in, and there would be sing-songs; and as I came into adolescence I would be asked to do a recitation. I knew several, such as “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” from Robert Service, and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Seamus Heaney “
- 40. There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. “
- 41. We knew love That kind of language would have been much suspect. We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven. Seamus Heaney “
- 42. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open Post Script “
- 44. References 15 Questions with Seamus Heaney | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson. Accessed August 26, 2015. Anon, 2013. Portstewart Strand was one of Seamus Heaney's Seven Wonders. Coleraine Times. Driscoll, D. & Heaney, S., 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heaney, S., 1972. Broagh. In Wintering Out. London: Faber. Heaney, S., 1998. Thatcher. In Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heaney, S., 1998. The Diviner. In Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- 45. Heaney, S., 1979. The Toome Road. In Field Work: poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Heaney, S., 1996. Two Lorries. In The Spirit Level. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Joyce, J., 1992. Ulysses Modern library., New York: Modern Library. Mahon, D.,. "Derek Mahon, The Art of Poetry No. 82." Paris Review. Accessed August 26, 2015. O’Brien, E., 2011. Plunder. In Saints and Sinners: Stories. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co. Parker, T., 1994. May the Lord in His mercy be kind to Belfast, New York: H. Holt.
Editor's Notes
- 1. I heard the poetry of Seamus Heaney for the first time in 1981 when I was late to a college class at Stranmillis College, Queen’s University Belfast. Ironically, even though I spent much of my childhood in Heaney country, his poetry was not standard fare in the high school curriculum at the time. A pity, because I think what Heaney had to say about the places that formed him would have helped me and others as we navigated a path through, out of, and back to Northern Ireland.
- Ever since hearing my professor read from “Death of a Naturalist,” I have turned to Seamus Heaney. In effect, I have turned home. From the collective grief for those lost and forever changed by Northern Ireland, to the more personal devastating grief following the loss of my husband, I have turned to poetry and the places that inspired it. We turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . When we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.
- 3. If you were to ask me to draw a map of the child-world that fed my daydreams, I would mark on it the places of Seamus Heaney’s poems, their pronunciation “difficult to manage” with handfuls of craftily placed consonants and vowels at once keeping strangers apart from and a part of the Moyola River and Magherafelt, Anahorish, Bellaghy, and Broagh, where my mother grew up.
- Broagh, it’s low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb blades ended almost suddenly, like that last GH the strangers found difficult to manage.
- One of seven children, my mother grew up on a farm not far from the Heaneys and recalls Paddy, the man Seamus immortalized in “Digging,” trading cattle at the local fair in his yellow boots and a heavy coat. She remembers him not as Nobel Laureate but a ‘young cub,’ only a few months younger than she, riding his bicycle into Castledawson, down a road like this, face to the wind, his sandy hair flying behind him. A lovely part of the country, but always a sense of something lurking beneath the surface. Of this part of the country, Heaney said, “If this was the country of community, it was also the realm of division.”
- 6.But there were other places - I am from Northern Ireland and I realized after I left that people would consider me a child of the troubles. . I left in 1987 at the height of The Troubles, turning my back – temporarily – on the places that made me.
- 7. My leaving began with a college education, and that began with my secondary education in what was called a “grammar school.” I was the first in my family to pass the 11+ - the qualifying – in order to attend the grammar. While I was learning Latin, my friends who had not passed, where learning more vocational skills – girls were taking classes in shorthand or typing. Unlike me, they were not bound for college. This was a whole new world for my family
- 8.Seamus Heaney would have signified to my mother a world beyond reach, having passed the eleven-plus “qualifying” exam and off to St. Columbs College, bound for university on a road unfamiliar to my mother and her family. As he explains in Stepping Stones to Dennis O’Driscoll,
- 9. When she was young, America would have been more accessible than Queen’s University Belfast to my mother -
- 10. Her parents emigrated there in the 1920s. Full of hope, they had settled in Connecticut, but a steady flow of letters from home, heavy with reminders of familial obligation, pulled them back to Broagh, with their American-born children - four little boys and a daughter. Resigned, they fell back into the known and expected ways of the townland, forced to abandon forever the unfulfilled promise of America. By 1938, the family was complete with the arrival of my mother.
- 11. They came back to no money. As a matter of economic necessity and from an early age, my mother and her brothers and sisters learned to be “good with their hands” and frugal too. Like their neighbors who move within and about Heaney’s poems, they were off the grid, resigned to hard work - the compulsory craft – thatching and churning, divining and digging. In the background, there would have been an awareness of the importance of education, but it was not enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “a pen was easier handled than a spade.” Uninspired and without more tangible encouragements, my mother attended the technical school in Magherafelt, an anathema on which she could barely wait to turn her back forever.
- People like Barney Devlin, 96 years old – we meet him in Heaney’s “The Forge.” A blacksmith – a sacred mystical figure. Not what I would have thought growing up, but I think so now.
- 12. Every morning she waited for the bus knowing that when it stopped for her, it will already be packed with students from Maghera, yet wishing for a day utterly different from the one that preceded it, for the bus-driver to surprise his desultory young passengers with a detour, on past Magherafelt to Cookstown or farther still to the sandy edges of County Antrim, to the place where, like Seamus Heaney, my mother first encountered the ocean - the Strand Beach, at Portstewart, “. . . a mighty curve of sand and dunes running for a mile and more. It retains for me the aura of original wonder and, of course, there was the mystery of the courting couples in the dunes.”
- 13.Then down to earth again, and perhaps too soon to her first job in Castledawson, at Crawford’s shop where she learned, among other things, how to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. As she had learned to bake and sew and make do by watching my grandmother, she observed Jim Crawford make parcels of groceries for his customers. Soon she was expertly packaging sweets and biscuits – Rich Tea or Arrowroot – that would deliver a taste of home to neighbors further afield, like Mrs. O’Connor’s daughter across the water in England. Always efficient, Jim Crawford had even devised a method of tying newspapers with string so news could travel easily to relatives in America or Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, and I cannot bring myself to open these Mid Ulster dispatches that remain in a drawer in my Phoenix kitchen - preserved ordinariness, a tribute to my mother’s heart and craft.
- Fast forward to the early 1960s. As a young mother, she frequently took me “up home” to those places I mentioned earlier, to stay with my grandparents. We took the Route 110 bus from Antrim which made an adventure out of it, me forcing my tiny self to quiet the fear that waited at the Hillhead bus stop from which we began our walk to my grandparents’ house. On the alert, my hand in my mother’s, I was afraid of what hid in the dark spaces in the canopy of beech and alder that hung over us.
- Scared, but buoyed by bluebells and foxgloves winking at me from the grassy edges of the road and rustic noises of men cutting turf or baling hay, I pressed on, knowing that soon I would be in my grandmother’s arms.
- Heartsome with a big indulgent smile for me, in a cardigan the color of buttercups and her flowery apron, she would let me help her fill an enamel bucket with water from the pump, and together we would carry milky tea to the men out in the fields. How she loved me. What was there to fear?
- What was there to fear?
- 21. The period known as The Troubles began when I was 5 years old. Never touched by them - just close enough to know someone who was. (Conflict Archive on the Internet)
- The news. From the grainy black and white images that flicker still in my memory – women on their knees banging bin-lids, young soldiers on street corners, smoke and ash where bombed out shops used to stand, panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes;
- There was the distressing conflation of perhaps a school report delivered on the same day as a radio report of a young Roman Catholic women tarred and feathered, publicly humiliated for having loved a British soldier; or,.
- 24. The questions of young soldiers at a security checkpoint on Route 110 outside Toomebridge, an in-between place on the border between County Antrim and County Derry. No longer bus passengers, my mother and I, but seated with my brother in my father’s car. The head of our house, obedient, dimming his lights and answering like a schoolboy before being released onto the road that was knew belonged to us. Heaney, S., 1979. The Toome Road. In Field work: poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
- 25. We kept the fear at bay in this place that shaped and divided us. Like a catechism, we learned the lexicon of The Troubles, each of us increasingly adept at the subtle and more overt ways of using language to determine one’s religion - one’s fate. In his interviews with the people who lived there in the early 1980s, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, from the start about a person’s background, so they can carry on in the conversation, maybe take it further into a friendship, a marriage, a lasting relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the way we pronounce an “H” all provide clues that help us establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?” We are well practiced in the dance-steps Heaney explains in “Whatever you Say, Say Nothing”
- Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us: Manoeuvrings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses With hardly an exception to the rule That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape. O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, Of open minds as open as a trap.
- We learned the lexicon of The Troubles, the words were handy to keep us detached – or numb.
- Sometimes, we were casual. It almost reached ‘an acceptable level,’ – the sirens and smoke, booby traps and barricades, incendiary devices and legitimate targets, all part of us, stitched into our remembrances of ordinary trips to the shops or to school or to the pub on a Friday night.
- How did we dope? Too well sometimes. County Down poet, Damian Gorman, articulates it better than anyone I know. We kept our distance because we always knew it would happen again. We were cautious, but not all the time, and we were dangerous in the distance we kept.
- We were detached.
- Then the inevitable jolts to the psyche when it happened again, and it always happened again.
- In May 1993, the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) renewed bombing campaign intensified with four car-bombings in as many days. On May 23, they packed 500lbs of explosives in a van and abandoned it outside the UlsterBus Depot on Broad Street in Magherafelt. They called in a warning and detonated the bomb only twenty minutes later, the explosion flattening the bus station and damaging three out of every four shops. Far away in the desert southwest of the United States, in the days before Skype and Social Media, I got word on the phone. No one was badly hurt, and business as usual signs were posted on boarded up windows, the community – Catholic and Protestant - unified in their shock and their commitment to keep going, but in my mother’s voice I heard a familiar refrain, sorrow for a place that from then on would only be accessed by memory
- Magherafelt was without its bus station, the place where once my mother took shelter, waiting for the bus home, the place where Seamus Heaney’s mother once waited for him to return from boarding school in Derry.
- The ashes of the Magherafelt bombing appear in “Two Lorries,” a sestina written by Heaney three years later. It begins in the 1940s, a young Seamus Heaney observing while one lorry delivers coal to his mother. Then he takes us to the 1990s, a second lorry delivering a bomb to the center of Magherafelt.
- The tragedy and the beauty of the Northern Ireland that shaped me lies within “Two Lorries” - the ashes of a devastating bomb can share the same lyrical space as the ashes of a coal-fire such as those my father built to keep our house warm. “
- “Two Lorries” brings me back home, to Heaney country, to Castledawson and to men like Paddy Heaney, to my father at work, digging potato drills,or “purdy drills,” as he called them, the sound of a spade slicing through the dirt – sure and steady - or the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel sharpening a dull knife, the long metallic strokes on each side ensuring a blade sharp enough to carve a Sunday roast or a Christmas turkey Once, I observed, awestruck, as he ‘witched’ water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands, bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting through a green hazel its secret stations.”
- Like my mother, he had no formal education. I rarely saw him read anything other than the daily newspapers, but somehow within the spare and uncompromising context of rural South Derry, he encountered poetry - the poetry of Robert Service and learned it by heart. I recall impromptu recitations of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils’ in response to the opening bulbs along the lane.
- Listening to Heaney recite poetry, I am immediately drawn back to my father’s random Service workshops and wonder what he would have made of his life if the opportunity for an education had been available to him. There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.
- As Shelley says, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.” My father understands that. What else do I know now about my father and the place where he lives to this day, the place where he will die? I know it is through these things – and in these places - he shows his love – finds the magic underneath the mundane. Making things and making magic. Reciting poetry.
- We are in-between. “. . . neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
- Thank you Northern Ireland and Thank you Seamus Heaney for teaching me to “Walk on Air against our better judgment.” Rest easy.