STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY
Jan Liljegren
Department of English
Catherine Dahlström
5 June 1992

60 POINT ESSAY

INTIMACY AND DISTANCE - SETTLING THE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES:

SEAMUS HEANEY'S Death of a Naturalist

CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION                                                    




HEANEY`S POETIC VISION       




DIGGING         




FOLLOWER         




MID-TERM BREAK                 




PERSONAL HELICON                 




SUMMING-UP                  




NOTES                    




WORKS CITED                   








                          
INTRODUCTION




Being a renowned Northern Ireland poet, Seamus Heaney has on several occasions
been asked to respond to the crisis in Northern Ireland. Early on he wrote
a few poems about the troubles but in the mid seventies he chose to stay
outside the political arena and has remained there, defending the right of
poets to be apolitical. Consequently, the main body of Heaney's poetry is
not so much about political issues as it is about his own background.


In his first collection of poems from 1966 Heaney deals with his  childhood
in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Many of the poems are written from an
observer's point of view. It is the poet Seamus looking back on the experiences
of the boy Seamus.  


Death of a Naturalist is in many ways an apprentice volume and its
main concern is the loss of childhood innocence. In this essay however, I
intend to concentrate on the theme of intimacy and distance between the child
and its relatives and near community, and on Heaney's need to settle the
childhood experiences with his own poetic idiom before taking on the world
of his maturity. By intimacy I mean on the one hand Heaney's closeness to
his family and on the other hand the intimate memories of his childhood.
By distance I do not imply a literal distance but rather a perspective. I
will refrain from making a cursory survey of the collection as a whole, and
after a look at Heaney's poetic vision I will instead analyse more deeply
a number of poems: "Digging", "Follower", "Mid-Term
Break" and "Personal Helicon".




                     
HEANEY`S POETIC VISION




One of the poets to whom Heaney feels most indebted is Wordsworth. In
the second part of Preoccupations Heaney quotes a passage from "The
Prelude":







  The hiding places of my power

  Seem open; I approach, and then they close;

  I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,

  May scarcely see at all, and I would give,

  While yet we may, as far as words can give,

  A substance and a life to what I feel:

  I would enshrine the spirit of the past

  For future restoration.




                              (Book XI ll.336-343)                   
             




What appeals to Heaney here is the notion of poetry as a kind of divination,
"poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the
culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity
of archaeological finds." (1) In a way Heaney is an archaeologist. To
him poems sometimes come "like bodies come out of a bog, almost complete,
seeming to have been laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of
mystery." (2) "Mid-Term Break" is an example of such a poem.
It came to Heaney quite spontaneously and he wrote it very quickly.


With his poetry Heaney wants to maintain the contact with the rural society
he has left. He compares the poet's task to that of traditional craftsmen
such as ploughers and water-diviners. And through his craft, poetry,
Heaney continues the tradition of his ancestors, and many poems in Death
of a Naturalist contain analogies for the art of poetry. In "Digging",
for instance, Heaney`s father uses an actual spade whereas Heaney's spade
is the pen. In Preoccupations Heaney writes that poetry is a sort
of dig, "a dig for finds that end up being plants." (3)


Heaney has much more in common with Wordsworth than with his fellow- countryman
Yeats concerning not only poetic credo but also method of composition. Yeats
did not adhere to the Wordsworthian idea of composition as "recollection
in tranquility". To him composition meant labour, "struggle towards
maximum articulation." (4) In contrast Heaney says that he listens for
poems, and that they sometimes surface almost complete. (5) The poet is more
of a passive receiver than an active creator.


One of the reasons for Heaney's preoccupation with his own childhood is then
that he wants to trace the sources of his creative power. The voice in the
poems is often that of a child's. Andrews observes consequently that recreating
and re-entering the world of the child enables Heaney to recognise the hidden movements of the deepest self. (6) To the adult the
world often seems insecure and precarious whereas the child wonders at the
world, and, certainly, at times finds it frightening and menacing, but never
feels resignation or despair. Heaney wants to capture the pure and unspoiled
conception of the world that the child alone possesses.


As to the role of poetry Heaney considers it to be that of a philosphy or
a religion. It helps us to deal and cope with the problems of everyday life.
 To Heaney it is absolutely necessary to use poetry to reach a solution to
his problems. To write poetry is not so much a choice as it is a need. In
both containing reality and in that it can resolve conflicts of mind, poetry
manages to create in us a state of equanimity rarely achieved in any other
kind of experience. (7) Through the poet's imagination the seemingly hazy
and featureless reality can assume a more lucid and significant form.





                            
DIGGING               




Written in 1964 "Digging" is the earliest of the poems in Death
of a Naturalist. Heaney considers it to be the first poem in which he
managed to transform his feelings into words and find his own voice. (8)
It deals with Heaney's relationship with his father. The poem begins with
a very powerful image in which the poet compares his pen with a gun. Sitting
by his window and letting his pen rest he hears his father digging below.
The window seems to be that of the child's as well as that of the poet's.
Hearing his father digging brings back memories of his father digging potatoes
twenty years before. Even further back there was his grandfather cutting
"more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner's bog." (ll.17-18)


 For generations the Heaneys had been farmers but now the young Heaney as
a sharp contrast is sitting indoors and writing, instead of being outside
digging like his ancestors had been. In describing his father as a 
skillful, almost hero-like craftsman he betrays a feeling of guilt for taking
up the pen instead of continuing the family tradition. Heaney recalls that
he as a schoolboy often got the admonition to keep on studying "because
`learning`s easy carried` and `the pen`s lighter than the spade`."(9)


This proverbial wisdom provides an explanation for the harsh image at
the beginning of the poem. The pen is not so light. It is squat and Heaney
goes on to say that it is "snug as a gun." (l.12) as if to convince
us of its power.


In the fourth stanza Heaney praises his father's farming skills and his intimacy with the land. In precise

details he describes his father digging potatoes, how he sinks and levers the spade.



   
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

   Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

   He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

   To scatter new potatoes that we picked, 

   Loving their cool hardness in our hands.




                                         (ll.10-14)        




I find it interesting to observe how the father's relaxed movements and
smooth rhythm are reflected and parallelled in Heaney's poetic technique.
The digging-procedure is related in a language of great lucidity and brevity.
Words are few and exact. Only the most necessary adjectives are used to convey
the image. The assonance of "routed", "out" and "tops"
and the alliterating "buried" and "bright" together with
the onomatopoetic "edge deep" are examples of a language of astounding
sensuousness. Heaney wants to absorb and recreate the precise handling and
controlled rhythm of the father and grandfather.




Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

  Over his shoulder, going down and down

  For the good turf. Digging.




                                  (ll.22-24) 




In these lines we can actually follow the way of the sods. The short 
vowels in "nicking and slicing" 
reproduce the sound of the spade cutting into the ground. In the long vowels in "neatly, heaving" we can
hear the sods soughing over the grandfather's shoulder through the air, and then how
they land with the hard beats of "going down and down" (my italics).
The scene focused on the grandfather closes with the curtness of the single word  "Digging." 



Overwhelmed by the amount of impressions the poet awakens from his reverie
in stanza eight. Like the cut-off potato-roots Heaney feels cut-off from
his tradition. He looked upon his father and grandfather as victorious heroes.
But he cannot repeat their heroic deeds. He is not like them. He has no skill.
In a sharp contrast he establishes that he has "no spade to follow men
like them." (l.28) In choosing the pen instead of the spade Heaney feels
as if he has betrayed his tribe. It is, as Mc Guinn observes, by choosing
poetry and not farming, Heaney distances himself from his family. (10) Education
was not considered particularly worthwhile in the farming community. Heaney's
father would mock him for being ambitious in school. (11) And English poetry
was in the community regarded as nothing more than some strange manifestation
of the threatening mainland. (12) At the age of twelve Heaney received a
scholarship and boarded for six years at St Columb's College in Derry. These
boarding-school years meant a separation from his family that was difficult
not only for personal reasons but because it meant that he was cut off from
the source of his poetic inspiration. To move from a rural home where the
most important books were the ration books to an urban school where he was
force-fed with "the classic canon of English poetry" was naturally
a dramatic event, since Heaney`s family belonged to a taciturn community
where instances of communication and reading were scarce. (13)




  Once I carried him milk in a bottle

  Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

  To drink it, then fell to right away

  Nicking and slicing neatly




                                   (ll.19-22)




 When Seamus brings his grandfather some milk there is no communication
between the little boy and the strong and able man. There is no contact.
The distance, the lack of intimacy, is obvious.


 In contrast to line 28 above the last stanza may perhaps offer some kind
of resolution. Waking up from the daydream Heaney accepts that he is not
like his ancestors but he will nevertheless continue the tradition in
his way. Instead of the spade he will use the pen and he will "dig
with it." (l.31) The spade and the pen perform similar tasks; through the
intimacy with the land they both dig up new produce, potatoes with the spade
and poems with the pen, but in the rural community the traditional farming
skills were handed down from generation to generation whereas Heaney passes
on the traditions through his poetry.




From the first stanza's strong, alienating and seemingly irreconcilable imagery
via the praise of the ancestors' skills the poem in the end reaches a sort
of reconciliation. Perhaps the gun-simile was absolutely necessary in order
to break out of an impossible situation. Heaney needed space to breathe and
to see himself he needed to stand back from the people closest to him in
order to be able to put the important relationships with them in some kind
of perspective. (14)


In "Digging" Heaney achieves this needed distance through the tone
and how he "directs" the poem. The strictly arranged stanzas are
fairly short and airy, never allowing any space to lose control. The account
of the father is quite unemotional and the poet himself, or rather the young
Seamus, is kept outside. He has detached himself from the father in order
to give a true and not pathetic or nostalgic account of the father. It is
not so much because of an intimacy with his father that Heaney needs to distance
himself but rather that the memories of his childhood are very intimate,
almost obtrusive and that they threaten to stifle his creativity.  


It is then, as Morrison observes, not an untroubled and uncomplicated closeness
to his homeground that Heaney enjoys in "Digging". He feels torn
between his roots and his reading. (15) It is not possible to say that the
poem offers a complete solution to the conflict. In fact, the pervading atmosphere
of the poem is that of unease. It is restless, tentative and uncertain: feelings
are mixed. On the one hand there is the worship of the hero-like father and
grandfather which sometimes seems too overdone: "By God, the old man
could handle a spade." (l.15) It sounds a bit as if he is trying too
hard. The line seems to express more respect than admiration or appreciation.
Closeness makes it hard to see clearly. On the other hand there is the frustration
at not being able to follow his father. In employing the gun-simile Heaney
wants to show that the pen is not so light, but that it is powerful and heavy to handle. Being a poet is no easy task.



The absence of the gun in the last stanza seems to suggest that the poet
after all has reached some sort of temporary solution to the problem of establishing
a healthy relationship to his childhood. However, more poems would be needed
to settle it properly.




                          
FOLLOWER




"Follower" has much in common with the first poem of the collection.
Like "Digging" it describes the father as a god-like hero cultivating
the earth with great expertise. However, the similarities are less striking
and less interesting than the differences. There is a completely different
feel about "Follower". It is more relaxed, flexible and tranquil
than "Digging". But if the poet is more collected than in "Digging"
there is still a feeling of regret and frustration at the situation. That
feeling is however more muted. The tension is gone and the atmosphere is
that of resigned acceptance. Heaney knows that he will never be able to follow
his father, that he cannot repeat his deeds.


The poem consists of six stanzas, the three first describing the father at
work with the plough. The portrait of the father conveyed here depicts a
man at one with nature. He is a strong man, all flesh, immensely powerful.




  
My father worked with a horse-plough, 

  His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

  Between the shafts and the furrow.

  The horses strained at his clicking tongue.




        (ll.1-4)




This Atlas-like man is in full control. He performs his craft professionally and systematically. He knows 

exactly what he is doing. In the last three stanzas follows the total opposite: his son. He does  practically 

everything wrong. Sometimes the father even has to carry him on his back.






 I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,

  Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

  Sometimes he rode me on his back,

  Dipping and rising to his plod.




               (ll.13-16)




The son`s ambition was to be just like his father but all he "ever
did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm." (ll.19-20) He
was nothing but a problem, a burden to his father. However, in the last lines
of the poem the scene changes completely.




                    But today

  It is my father who keeps stumbling

  behind me, and will not go away.




           (ll.22-23)




Just as Heaney as a child had been a burden to his father, the memory
of the father has now become a burden to Heaney. Of course, the end could
be interpreted more literally, that the father has grown old and weak and
that he is a burden to his son because he will not die. However, I do not
find this interpretation worth pursuing because, dead or alive, the burden
of the memory is still there. It would not go away just because the father
died.


"Follower" would not have been possible without "Digging".
In "Digging" Heaney ventilated his strong and mixed feelings about
his  father. He could no longer suppress them and writing the poem he managed
to get some of the feelings out of his system. The relief of "Digging"
gave Heaney new strength and enabled him to continue dealing with the humiliating
experiences related in "Follower". Heaney has begun to achieve
the distance, the needed perspective to his childhood experiences. He brings
himself into the poem and omits no mortifying details. He is the 


complete antithesis of his father. The three last stanzas begin "I 

stumbled" (l.13), "I wanted" (l.17) and "I was a nuisance".
(l.21) It is by accepting and admitting his shortcomings that Heaney confronts
his father again. The scene, or the battle as Mc Guinn calls it, is fought
again, but now on the son's condition with the tools, or weapons, that he knows better
than his father how to handle - words. (16)


 "Follower" is an important part of Heaney`s process of coming
to terms with his childhood and in it he has come close to a solution: through
the distance violently achieved in "Digging" Heaney has obtained
the perspective essential to establish a proper and healthy relationship
to his childhood. Aggravation and resentment are gone and have been replaced
by growing composure.

              




                     
 MID-TERM BREAK




"Mid-Term Break" commemorates the death of one of Heaney's younger
brothers, Christopher, who died in a car accident in 1953 when Heaney was
fourteen. This incident together with the fact that the family moved from
the Mossbawn farm  to another farm  meant an abrupt end to Heaney's childhood.
The new farm, The Wood, could never replace the old and it is to the Mossbawn
surroundings that Heaney returns in his poems in Death of a Naturalist.



"Mid-Term Break" is a very straightforward and rather prosaic poem,
giving a plain account of literal details. (17) Heaney describes only what
he sees, not commenting, never letting any feelings reach the surface. His
emotions are totally left out.


The knelling bells in the beginning are ominous. We do not know what 

has happened and we do not know whether the young man Seamus knows as he
sits and waits in the sick bay. At home he is met by a father very different
from the one we know from "Digging" and "Follower". This
one cannot hold back his emotions. He is crying although "He had always
taken funerals in his stride". (l.5) His mother cannot withhold her
helpless, angry grief either: "my mother held my hand / In hers and
coughed out angry tearless sighs." (ll.12-13) When Seamus the next morning
goes up to his brother`s room he sees him "For the first time in six
weeks." (l.18) The low-key lament is calm, controlled and undramatic:








      Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

   He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

   No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.




   A four foot box, a foot for every year.




       (ll.19-22) 




There is, as Buttel observes, a matter-of-factness and directness about
this poem. (18) The ending, however, is quite different and would probably
have been better off without the last line, which is perhaps a bit too maudlin,
almost soppy. But if we consider the process of development the poet is going
through we can perhaps understand why he chose to end the poem in an apparently
sentimental way. The account of the event has been a very cold, controlled
and detached one. Heaney has consequently taken a stance from where he achieves
the needed perspective. The hero-father from "Digging" and "Follower"
has now become a human being. The poem is about a painful experience that
does not focus on Heaney's deficiencies. In fact, the only thing said about
Seamus is that he "was the eldest, / Away at school" (ll.11-12)
Around him are the baby cooing, "old men standing up to shake"
his hand and whispers informing strangers. (l.9)  Heaney is in between the
very young and the old. He is outside. The fact that Heaney chose to write
a poem about such a difficult subject as the death of a brother, shows that
he has grown stronger, that he feels less troubled by the intimacy of his
childhood memories. Bearing this in mind, it seems quite possible that Heaney
chose deliberately to include the last line. The fact that "Mid-Term
Break" is included in New Selected poems 1966-1987 shows that
 Heaney was not dissatisfied with it. The newly-won strength makes Heaney 
feel relaxed and selfconfident enough that he even can afford to be a little bit pathetic.
He is strong enough to accept his feelings.  




       
 PERSONAL HELICON




"Personal Helicon" is the last poem in Death of a Naturalist.
It has the character of an epilogue, summarizing the results that Heaney
has reached through the collection. The poet`s voice is for the first time
that of a mature man reminiscing about his childhood in an untroubled and
unapprehensive way. He has come closer to a solution to the problem of establishing
a proper relationship to his childhood. In the poem the poet is sufficiently
detached and he has achieved the necessary perspective. 


As Mathias observes, Heaney seeks in "Personal Helicon" to link
his childhood experiences with the adult experience of writing poetry. Heaney
uses the image of an outgrown Narcissus. (19)




 As a child, they could not keep me from wells

 And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

 I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

 Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.




           (ll.1-4) 




Helicon was in Greek mythology a mountain inhabited by the Nine Muses
and on the mountain there was a source called Hippocrene from which the muses
got their inspiration. The dark depths of the wells in "Personal Helicon"
are analogous to the sources of Heaney's poetic inspiration, the childhood
experiences. Unlike Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection,
Heaney does not look down the well to admire himself but to discover and
see himself, to reveal through poetry the self to the self.




  Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

  To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

  Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

  To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

          

                  
(ll.17-20)



  

The bucket Heaney used to let down the well has been replaced by the pen.
It has become his new instrument to bring up dark and hidden material from
his childhood. The child received an image of himself just by looking down
the well, but today the poet can only see himself when he rhymes. Poetry
is also an acceptable way to continue prying into his childhood. To stare
"into some spring / Is beneath all adult dignity." (ll.18-19) The
sadness of having lost the childhood is however somewhat compensated by the joy
of recreating it in poetry.


The three different wells described in the three middle stanzas seem to say
something about Heaney's process of coming to terms with his childhood. In
the first well in the brickyard the bucket crashed as it plummeted down the
well which was "So deep you saw no reflection in it." (l.8) The
harshness of the language in this stanza echoes the atmosphere in "Digging".
It is tense, hard and the poet is not able to see himself. In the following
stanza the situation is different. This well is not so deep and




When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch, 

 A white face hovered over the bottom.

      

      
(ll.11-12)




That is exactly what Heaney does in his poetry. He digs and drags out his
roots into the light in order to see himself more clearly. And when he manages
to get away from the stifling closeness he can get a perspective that enables
him to reach a greater clarity concerning his childhood. In the fourth stanza
there are wells that have echoes, that can give "back your own call
/ With a clean new music in it." (ll.13-14) One is more frightening:
the young Seamus can see a rat slapping across his reflection. The days of
childhood innocence have passed.


The end of "Personal Helicon" is interesting and a bit obscure.
Heaney knows that it is only through his poetry that he can get to know himself
and that Death of a Naturalist has been a necessary collection in
which he has tried to come to terms with his childhood. In the collection
Heaney has found his voice but it is not clear where he is going or what
he will find. Poetry is his proper element but Death of a Naturalist
has really just meant scratching the surface and a deeper plunge into the
childhood is necessary. The last line of "Personal Helicon", "to
set the darkness echoing" points forward to his next collection, Door into
the Dark. 








                       
  SUMMING-UP



Death of a Naturalist was a collection that had to be. Heaney wrote it
because he felt compelled to. He had to free himself of the childhood memories
that possessed him. They had become a burden. His childhood had been a source
of inspiration but the suffocating closeness of the memories also threatened
to stifle his creativity. Through distancing himself and being a passive
observer Heaney managed to achieve a perspective which enabled him to establish
a healthy relationship to his childhood. Death of a Naturalist was
a rather painful process which Heaney had to go through to come to terms
with his childhood. As a 27-year-old's first major collection Death of
a Naturalist is a remarkable achievement, and it is clear that Heaney
"could do this poetry thing too".(20) 

























                           
NOTES




1. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-1978. (London:
Faber and Faber. 1980.) 41.

2. 34.

3. 41.

4. 75.

5. 34.

6. Elmer Andrews,  The poetry of Seamus Heaney. All the realms of whisper.
(London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1988.) 20.

7. 15.

8. Heaney 41, 43.

9. 42.

10. Nicholas Mc Guinn,  Seamus Heaney. (Exeter: A. Wheaton & Co.
Ltd. 1986.) 18.

11. Heaney 21

12. 26

13. 21, 26.

14. 19.

15. Blake Morrison,  Seamus Heaney. (London: Methuen. 1986.) 27.

16. Mc Guinn 20.

17. Robert Buttel,. Seamus Heaney. (London: Associated University
Presses. 1975.) 21.

18. 22.

19. Roland Mathias, "Death of a Naturalist." The art of Seamus
Heaney.  Tony Curtis, editor. (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. 1982.) 23.

`20. Heaney 42.   












                        
WORKS CITED




Andrews, Elmer. The poetry of Seamus Heaney. All the realms of whisper.London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1988.


Buttel, Robert. Seamus Heaney. London: Associated University Presses.  1975.


Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber. 1966.


- - -   Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber.      1980.


Mathias, Roland. "Death of a Naturalist." The art of Seamus
Heaney.  Tony Curtis, ed. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. 1982. 11-25.


Mc Guinn, Nicholas. Seamus Heaney. Exeter: A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd.
1986.


Morrison, Blake. Seamus Heaney. London: Methuen. 1986. 


Wordsworth, William. "The Prelude" (1805) in The Oxford Authors
William Wordsworth Stephen Gill, ed. Bungay, Suffolk: Oxford University Press. 1984.