Last year the world lost one of its great poets. Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) of Ireland rather quietly commanded a place at the helm of contemporary poetry, although he received overwhelming acclaim and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. His verse launched a bridge between the modernism of the mid-twentieth century and the individual preoccupations of the present generation. His political consciousness conjures up memories of Yeats after 1916 as it does of a poet very close to the troubles of Northern Ireland in recent decades. At the same time his poetry reflects the universal humanist.
Fitting descriptions of him and his work come from The Poetry Foundation, which paid him tribute as “that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with ‘the common reader.’” (quoting Blake Morrison). Part of Heaney’s popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland,
its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule. The New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as “the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present.”
Heaney emphasized that he was Irish although he was born in Northern Ireland, and raised there in County Derry. He also lived in Dublin, identifying more with the Irish rebels than with the British. He celebrated the Easter Rising of 1916 although not known to be a political poet, much like Yeats and his idea of “a terrible beauty.” He published 12 major books of poetry in addition to three collected editions, four collections of prose, publishing faithfully with Faber and Faber throughout his career. He also published two plays, both adaptations of Sophocles, which reflected a keen interest of his in Greek mythology. Heaney also had an academic career as lecturer, professor, visiting professor and writer in residence at many universities, including the University of California, Harvard and Belfast. He was elected the Oxford Professor of Poetry 1989-1994, and was awarded several honorary doctorates. He continued to be highly decorated with a number of literary prizes including the TS Eliot Prize for District and Circle in 2006, the Whitbread and the David Cohen Prize.
The Nobel Prize citation in 1995 recognised Seamus Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” In his Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, Heaney said, “the American poet Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to/not true.’ As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself.” He applied that to the poetry he produced which he tied to his background growing up in Northern Ireland against the background of World War II, and later living there against the background of the blood and terror of the IRA between 1968 and 1974.
Heaney was the fourth Irish writer to win the Nobel, after Bernard Shaw, WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett. He compared his career to Yeats’, observing that while Yeats made hardly a reference to the political violence which ended in Dublin in 1923, only months before he won the prize, Heaney’s own speech was closely focused on the wider reaches of the violence in Northern Ireland and its effect on his poetry. Quite fittingly, to his mind, Yeats “came to Sweden to tell the world that the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of guerrilla armies.”
The Caribbean remembers Heaney as a close friend and colleague of Derek Walcott, the visits he made to St Lucia and the activities of poets there. They have both been world leaders. Although most critics will avoid rating writers and will argue against the soundness of it, Walcott is regarded as the finest poet in English today, and Heaney is always mentioned in the same league, appropriately winning the Nobel a few years after his friend. They made a famous trio with Russian poet Joseph Brodsky who was also a close friend and they all worked together on projects, including with Walcott in St Lucia.
* * * * * *
“About suffering they were never wrong / The old masters, how well they understood / Its human position” WH Auden remarked histrionically in the dramatic monologue Museé des Beaux Arts. He was talking about the painters, but it is just as easy to apply that to the poets, and specifically to one who was surely one of the masters.
The moment one begins to read the poem ‘Mid-Term Break,’ one becomes convinced it is the work of a master. And indeed, Auden’s remark about suffering applies. Heaney understands it thoroughly in this poem and focuses it in a very subtle way in which it underlines the poem – it is a constant undercurrent rather than in the obvious foreground. It is the work of a poet in his very early career, published in Heaney’s first major collection – Death of A Naturalist in 1966, yet it has the thoroughness and neatness of craft for which he is known. It is autobiographical, about the death of Heaney’s younger brother Christopher, killed in a car accident at four years old while the poet was away at boarding school.
The setting is clearly established in the skill of description and incident which capture a strong sense of place – the fairly old-world British society of the 1950s. Then note the way the story tells itself through the observation, descriptions and impressions of the persona/narrator. The story, the facts of the situation emerge incrementally, stanza by stanza; you discover that it is a death in the family but you still do not know who it is until the very last line. Bit by bit the narrator introduces the readers to different members of the family, so you know it is not any of them. Good poets do not waste a single line – that last line is loaded. Not only does it complete all the facts – it is the narrator’s brother, four years old, but it dramatizes all the grief, the sense of regret, the deep sense of senseless loss, felt in the persona’s mind.
The poetic strategies continue. In the first stanza you might believe the persona was ill. But the use of the word “knelling” to describe the bells triggers off a warning clue and you soon sees the significance of it by stanza two. Then you note that it is the neighbours who drive him home, not his own family – you soon find out why. The dramatization is total. The contrast between the persona’s feelings and response and the outward expressions of grief from everyone else. He remains quiet, speechless. You’re not even sure if he feels sorrow; he is embarrassed, overwhelmed by the behaviour of the others. His emotions are only suggested in that final line. The cause of death, too, is miserly revealed by reference to “the poppy bruise” and “the bumper knocked him clear.” The poet wastes nothing. Note the reference to a “poppy” which tells a lot, knowing the symbolism of a poppy.
The reference to Auden and the old masters’ thorough knowledge of suffering comes back here. “The baby cooed and laughed” oblivious of any grief, any suffering – life goes on merrily regardless.
The poem itself is a lesson in poetry. How it works. “About suffering they were never wrong,/The old masters; how well they understood/Its human position”. That is why ‘Mid-Term Break’ is the work of a master: Seamus Heaney – one of the best.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying –
He had always taken funerals in his stride –
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’
Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the
nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in a four foot box, as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
