Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland 0813232716, 9780813232713

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. “Faith of Our Fathers Living Still”
2. Chosen Peoples
3. Sacred and Secular in the Sixties
4. Impious Auguries
5. A Last Look?
6. Miracle and Wonder
7. Combating Nothingness
8. Metaphysical Needs, Imaginative Ploys
9. Varieties of Religious Experience
10. Faith Replaced
11. Notes from Underground
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland

SEAMUS HEANEY and the End of Catholic Ireland

Kieran Quinlan

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2020 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Photo on page ii: The tombstones and church ruins of the 12th century Carran Church in County Clare, Ireland. Used with permission from iStock.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Quinlan, Kieran, 1945– author. Title: Seamus Heaney and the end of Catholic Ireland / Kieran Quinlan. Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020007050 | ISBN 9780813232713 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Heaney, Seamus, 1939–2013—Criticism and interpretation. | Religion in literature. | Catholic Church— Influence. | Catholic Church—Ireland—History—20th century. | Ireland—Religion—20th century. Classification: LCC PR6058.E2 Z856 2020 | DDC 821/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007050

For Úna

You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.              —James Joyce, Ulysses

C o n t en t s Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations  xi

Introduction

1

1. “Faith of Our Fathers Living Still”

11

2. Chosen Peoples

26

3. Sacred and Secular in the Sixties

51

4. Impious Auguries

77

5. A Last Look?

107

6. Miracle and Wonder

141

7. Combating Nothingness

171

8. Metaphysical Needs, Imaginative Ploys

194

9. Varieties of Religious Experience

212

10. Faith Replaced

239

11. Notes from Underground

262

Conclusion

283

Bibliography 293 Index 305

vii

A c k n o w led g m en t s In a wide variety of ways, and over a long number of years, the following, proximately and remotely, wittingly and unwittingly, have contributed to the completion of this volume: Mary Kaiser, Úna Quinlan, Róisín Gallagher, John Dunne, Cóilín Owens, Mark Jarman, Donald Davie, Eamon Duffy, Richard Easton, Alison Chapman, Adam Vines, Ron Schuchard, Geraldine Higgins, Kevin Young, William Riggan, Jim Rogers, Jeff Graveline, and the anonymous reviewers at the Catholic University of America Press. At the CUA Press also, Trevor Lipscombe has been encouraging from the outset, while Aldene Fredenburg, along with other editors, has patiently reconciled my numerous bibliographical inconsistencies. Brian Roach and Theresa Walker also assisted me. I am very grateful to all of them and wish to emphasize that I alone am responsible for the study’s opinions and point of view. Back in the early 1980s, I had a few casual conversations with Seamus Heaney before either he (likely) or I (certainly) knew the direction his work would eventually take; I have happy memories of his kindness. I especially recall his benign amusement that a famous critic had misidentified a family reference in one of his poems: I imagine Seamus would find much additional amusement here, though not, I trust, too much. Original sources in the National Library of Ireland’s Heaney Collections are printed with the library’s permission. Occasional wording and sentences from my own articles and reviews on Heaney and his academic commentators are reprinted by permission of World Literature Today and New Hibernia Review.



ix

A bbre v ia t i o ns I have used four main Heaney texts wherever possible: FK

Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001

OG

Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996

SP

Selected Poems 1988–2013

SS

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

Individual volumes of Heaney’s poetry and prose not contained in the above texts are footnoted as they occur.



xi

Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland

Introduction

R

oman C atholicism (any historical distinction between it and early Christianity not being of immediate concern for our purposes here), dominant in Ireland from the fifth century until relatively late in the twentieth, has been on the wane for the last four decades at least, a decline that has only accelerated during the last two. Not only has extraordinarily high church attendance, over 90 percent of the population (and that even in urban areas), fallen to a regular 18 percent weekly, and much lower in some places, but the number of priests and nuns has suffered such decimation that it is now necessary to recruit their replacements from Poland, India, and even Romania. More important, that inner commitment on the part of so many of the “faithful” to the doctrines and rites of the Catholic Church that for so long characterized the majority of the Irish population has dramatically eroded; even in rural parishes, pastors are aware that many of those who show up for christenings, weddings, and funerals are unfamiliar with the customary rites and need to have them explained for the ceremonies to proceed satisfactorily. In short, the Irish world of the ancient (or what was thought to have been such) and recent past has been turned upside down. Much of this change is due to a belated prosperity that has caused Ireland to become more like its fellow European countries and so experience similar degrees of secularization.1 Television and other media 1. These changes date back several decades; see Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher’s analysis in 1978: “Since the boom of the sixties [1960s] affluence has created a completely different context of values and life styles, different even from the fifties. Economics has quietly but inevitably replaced religion as the dominant value in Irish society”; Furrow, October 1978, 608.



1

2

Introduction

sources that have proliferated since the 1960s have inexorably weakened the censorship laws that for so long protected the majority of the population from the intrusion of modern mores and that kept modern ideas under relative control for even the minority attending the universities. In the early 1960s, too, the church itself began to change when few had expected it to do so, and then it didn’t change fast enough for the newly awakened. Some of this religious decline has undoubtedly been reinforced by revelations of sexual scandals among the diocesan clergy and those in religious orders, male and female. Less directly, some of it is the result of outrage at the atrocities committed in the name of religion-based nationality in Northern Ireland during the Troubles there in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Whatever the causes, however, there is a strong sense of a shift in Irish religious loyalties, less a wholesale embrace of atheism or indifference—though there is much of that too—than a feeling of spiritual loss and disappointment, if also one of relief and liberation. Seamus Heaney’s work, as Eugene O’Brien has accurately commented, “has been written in the shade of this process of secularization, and the discovery of church scandals.”2 There are, of course, complexities to this scenario. Gladys Ganiel, for example, refers to several studies that show a continuance of belief without belonging to the institutional church, of existing practices being liberalized rather than secular alternatives drawn on.3 Asian and other belief systems once considered exotic have attracted some disenchanted Catholic followers, while many among the growing number of self-declared unbelievers are still conscious of the novelty of their unbelief, experiencing what atheist journalist and political activist Eamonn McCann, a contemporary of Seamus Heaney at his diocesan boarding school, has described in his own case as a “shuddering fascination” with religion.4 In other 2. Eugene O’Brien, “‘An Art That Knows Its Mind’: Prayer, Poetry and Post-Catholic Identity in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Squarings,’” ed. Eamon Maher and Catherine Maignant, Études Irlandaises 39, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 2014): 130. 3. See Gladys Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25–53. 4. See Eamonn McCann, Dear God: The Price of Religion in Ireland (London: Bookmarks, 1999).



Introduction 3

words, faith issues are still in play. “I think we still are running on an unconscious that is informed by religious values,” Heaney himself explained in 2002, “but I think my youngsters’ youngsters won’t have that.”5 Those “youngsters” Heaney was referring to are now themselves reaching middle age, and even their own youngsters are beginning to take control of the reins of cultural, if not yet political, power in Ireland. From that perspective, the present study is about a lost world of Catholic belief and its erosion from the 1960s onward. It sees Seamus Heaney as an exemplar (a word frequently applied to him in a variety of ways, including his being called “the connoisseur par excellence of the Catholic communal self”) of those earlier changes. He no longer represents the present, of course, but he—or, rather his work—is in a rough and ready dialogue with it. Heaney was a man who experienced the satisfactions, exhilarations, and fears of traditional belief, its slow dissolutions, and its replacement by other, more diverse compensations.6 In a limited way, he was a changing Ireland talking to itself and even to a world beyond itself. His writings are as appreciative of the past as they are still representative of important aspects of the present and, even now, possibly predictive of the future. Unlike many other recent Irish commentaries on religious loss, they are without bitterness and even reproach, more an acknowledgment of the evolving human journey than a condemnation of earlier obscurantism. If James Joyce’s rejection of the faith was once a template for Heaney’s own choices—and it was never quite such—then Heaney’s later visions have more of a Yeatsian eclecticism about them. In any case, he is an excellent representative of what many other thoughtful members of his generation—the generation of those who, as Andrew J. Auge puts it, had to “struggle to transmute the debilitating aspects [of] 5. Quoted in Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 359. 6. See Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 209. It should be noted too that historian Thomas Bartlett, in remarking on the collapse of previously respected authority figures in Ireland in the early twenty-first century, observes, “The widespread celebrations surrounding Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday in 2009 suggested that such a person might be found among the ranks of Irish poets, novelists or playwrights rather than among the traditional professions”; Bartlett, Ireland: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 473.

4

Introduction

Catholicism into something more enlivening”—have experienced, and so the ports and steppingstones of his odyssey deserve visitation.7 Whether or not people should have questions about such insoluble matters, the fact is that they do, and so it’s of interest to see how one human being— and a variety of tangential others—coped with them at a particular time and in a particular place. In doing so, and while trying for the most part to be faithful to Heaney’s own development by referring mostly to those authors and texts we know have influenced him, I bring in observations on the subject of religion from other writers—mainly Irish, but not exclusively so—that might enhance or in some way illuminate our understanding of his case without corrupting its authenticity. In addition, since I myself was born and lived in Ireland through the late 1940s into the early 1970s, I presume to trust my own memory of the times on some occasions. With an exception here and there, however, I make only passing reference to the host of Continental philosophers, psychoanalysts, and theorists—Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Blanchot, Girard—whom other Heaney scholars have legitimately found useful in interpreting his work and his importance.8 So, the plan here is to provide some background on Catholicism, specifically in its Irish configuration, in the last century and earlier, and then to follow Heaney’s involvement with it more or less chronologically as both it and he undergo a series of changes. I include poems and prose as they are relevant to the life events. I give special attention to his 2008 quasi-memoir Stepping Stones, which consists of a collection of new “interviews” (really Heaney’s written responses to a set of agreed-on ques7. See Andrew J. Auge, A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 223. Auge, however, draws a firmer line between Heaney’s generation deeply formed in Catholicism and forced to grapple with it and the next generation—Dennis O’Driscoll, Seán Dunne, and others like them—who could borrow selectively according to their “spiritual needs” (222). I see an upbeat Heaney as rather straddling this boundary. Note also that Michael Cavanagh comments on Heaney’s desire in mid-career “to make his own life representative of the life of his generation”; Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 145. 8. In regard to Heaney’s prose, I’m specifically referring to Eugene O’Brien’s excellent Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016), where Heaney is examined as a poet-thinker comparable to Heidegger and others.



Introduction 5

tions) intended to serve that end.9 There religious matters occupy a surprisingly large space, much more than one would have expected from the poet’s earlier writings. Finally, while poets are not theologians or philosophers or historians (or even Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators”), much less social scientists, their informed sense of the world aims at presenting “what we have arranged that we shall not know otherwise” in the historical moment they share with everyone else: poets too help us negotiate our way through the culture as it evolves and changes.10 I have not, however, set out to write a strict biography of Seamus Heaney. Rather here I seek to position him in the context of the Ireland—or Irelands, since he is originally from the part of the country that remains within the United Kingdom—and the wider world of his time as a figure undergoing a significant transformation that has resonances in many lives in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond the millennium. I subscribe wholeheartedly to a line from W. B. Yeats that Heaney himself has often quoted: the poet’s career “is an experiment in living and those who come after him have a right to know it.”11 Moreover, Heaney was very cognizant of the trajectory described here: in regard to the arrangement of anthologized poems in The School Bag, published with British Poet Laureate and friend Ted Hughes in 1997, he explains that it begins with a piece by an Irish pagan poet of the sixth century lamenting “the arrival of Christianity in Ireland” brought by a “bishop” who will “chant impiety.” This is followed by “Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’ a work from the other end of the age of religion. . . . And immediately following Arnold, we printed Elizabeth Bishop’s . . . ‘At the Fishhouses,’ a poem in which one witnesses the rebirth of a religious impulse in a post-religious sensibility.”12 Thus, an “end”—in this case, of a Catholic Ireland—and, arguably, its replacing with something else here to be defined. For a long time to come, Ireland 9. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), vii–xiii (henceforth, SS). 10. John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), x. 11. Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 106 (henceforth FK). 12. Heaney, “Bags of Enlightenment,” Guardian, October 24, 2003, 4–6; Heaney, The School Bag, ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 4–8.

6

Introduction

will, of course, remain notably Catholic, but never again to such a degree that it could accurately be described in such a way—to do so will be as quaint as it is now to refer to “Protestant England.”13 In all this, I stress that while Seamus Heaney would not be considered a “religious” poet in the way that Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and even Robert Lowell at one phase in his career were, he has nevertheless always been concerned—and concerned more than most other writers— with the subject both in his poetry and in his prose. When he first met the Polish Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz in 1983, he recalls that they and poet and translator Robert Hass “spent a good deal of the evening going on about our experience as Catholics—the sense of the sacred, the sense of sin and so on,” all of which adds up to an unusually serious conversation rather than a mere recitation of amusing horror stories (SS 300). Most significantly, in a 2000 interview with Karl Miller, Heaney declares, “I’m coming to believe that there may have been something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.”14 Heaney never defends religion the way Eliot did—or even John Updike (whom he had read)—but he did see it as having a place in the totality of the human experience; it was always there for him. Nor has Heaney ever been at odds with Irish society in the way that the late Nuala O’Faolain or Frank McCourt, both internationally representative figures, were. But it is correspondingly significant that he was so celebrated within Ireland—in that sense the country itself is seen to have changed, to have become much less religiously orthodox. Enda McDonagh, an Irish theologian and friend of Heaney who was also a concelebrant at the poet’s funeral Mass in 2013, wrote afterward that while he wasn’t “arrogantly trying to gauge Heaney’s faith,” there was a need to study “the deeper and fuller relationship between the faith implicit in that imagination and what we call explicit creedal faith.”15 In attempting to answer that need, I 13. Even Auge’s A Chastened Communion does not predict a religious revival in Ireland but rather its opposite as the country continues to become increasingly secular (18). 14. Karl Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000), 32. 15. Enda McDonagh, “The Word Made Flesh,” Tablet, September 7, 2013, 13.



Introduction 7

ask what did Heaney, the man as much as the poet, believe in these matters? How “Catholic” was he? Because of this broad-ranging interest, while I offer an analysis of many of Heaney’s poems, my intention is always to do so at a level that makes them available to the thoughtful general reader rather than the literary scholar as such. Heaney himself distinguishes between the George Herbert “known to scholars and specialized readers” and “the general impression of him which a sympathetic literate audience carries around.”16 I aim to do the same. Nevertheless, in so doing, I try to keep in mind one of Heaney’s own cautions: when the future poet in his A Level class in Derry in 1956 was trying “to get a foothold on the slippery slope of the prescribed poems”—which included T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”—his teacher provided him with “a huge extraneous spike labeled ‘Loss of Faith in Modern World and Consequences for Modern Man.’ There at least was one way of subduing the querulous, outcast melodies of the poem to the familiar tolling of the bell of Faith.” Heaney adds, “The fraying quotations from the Lord’s Prayer and the general tone of litany (which was so much part of our daily round of prayers) all tended to co-opt the imaginative strangeness, formal distinctness, and fundamental difference of this poetry into the emulsifying element of our doctrinally sound young heads.” Heaney’s point here is the failure to “know the poem as a poem.” In the case of “Journey of the Magi,” with its three wise kings, three trees foreshadowing the Crucifixion, soldiers playing dice, the poem “seemed so generously provided with doctrinal spikes of its own that we could not help being pinned down by its images and its orthodoxy” (FK 34–35). I hope my readings here aren’t quite as reductive as those Heaney criticizes from his schooldays and that I have some awareness that his poems offer “an open invitation” into their meanings “rather than an assertion” of them.17 Lyrics, as Helen Vendler reminds us, “are not to be read as position papers.”18 Michael Cavanagh notes too that poetry like Heaney’s 16. Heaney, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 9. 17. Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 83. Heaney is referring to William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” 18. Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7.

8

Introduction

“does not wish, or does not always wish, to think and explain.”19 On the other hand, I don’t consider it entirely wrong to search for the “spike” of statement in the wayward music of his verse. In further defense of my approach, I would also point to Heaney’s own remark about Station Island that he “wanted readers to open the book and walk into a world they knew behind and beyond the book, but with a feeling of being clearer about their place in it than they would be in real life, a feeling of being stayed against confusion” (SS 237).20 Eugene O’Brien argues that “poetry is itself a form of thinking” and that “this conception of poetry is very much at the core of Heaney’s own work.”21 Briefly stated, when Karl Miller asked Heaney if he had “themes” in his poems, the reply was, “I know I have”; religion is one of those themes (indeed a preoccupation).22 Moreover, in his prose writings, often as beautiful as some of his poems and, as Michael Cavanagh notes, an important supplement to them, Heaney returns to the religious issue again and again.23 One might add too that while the well-made poem, the kind championed by the New Critics and embraced by Heaney also, deserves to be respected, many commentators have approached Heaney through the lens of politics, gender, and other social constructions; I do so through that of religion, and Roman Catholicism in particular. Several critics have already written about Heaney’s Catholicism, some confident that he rejected it entirely and specifically its promise of an afterlife, others equally confident that remnants remained and that he was unquestionably open to the “numinous” dimension of human existence. O’Brien has noted, rightly, that “Heaney’s Catholicism is a nuanced one, and one which has taken into account the problems which the Catholic church has been having in contemporary Ireland. To be a Catholic poet 19. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 108. 20. Vendler refers in passing to readers who “do not notice technique in any explicit way” even as they “are being persuaded into the poem”; Seamus Heaney, 3. It is such readers that I have mainly in mind. 21. O’Brien, Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker, 41. 22. Miller, Seamus Heaney, 49. In Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), John Dennison, using evidence from the poet’s manuscripts at Emory University, notes Heaney’s “sensitivity to [Helen] Vendler’s bracketing off of ‘thematic arguments’” in her 1998 book on him (215). 23. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 11–13.



Introduction 9

in the North of Ireland in 1969 is a very different proposition to being a Catholic poet in Dublin in 2010.”24 My account grapples with these different positions as it argues that a writer who so frequently referred to the unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam (the one holy catholic and apostolic church) designation so common in the church of his youth—and also to “orthodoxy”—and who had once been a meticulous counter of indulgences and a connoisseur of invisible diocesan boundaries, can hardly have been unaware of his departures from it; after all, as late as the 1980s, Heaney was reflecting on the arcane theological doctrine about the eternal consequences of “invincible ignorance.” Where Heaney went, then, is perhaps less of a mystery than it has been made out to be. If he told a respected journalist in Chicago in 2005 that he felt “woefully inarticulate” about “his own spirituality,” that was probably less because he wished to safeguard his privacy than that he truly had said all that he needed to on these matters.25 Here, therefore, I discuss the Heaney of public and published life rather than of private sentiment— though there is good reason to believe that there was little substantive difference between the two—and tease out the implications of his religious choices. The accumulation of the lyric register of a poem—what Vendler explains as “viewed from this angle, at this moment, in this year, with this focus, the subject appears to me in this light”—together with the statement of an essay or a lecture, and the supplement of the revelatory interview, provide a profile of a life.26 Gail McConnell makes the point that although Heaney certainly lost his religious belief, the ideology and liturgy of Catholicism continued to shape his concepts of poetry as a kind of secular theology and, in alliance with New Criticism, a verbal icon much more than has been recognized. She poses a convincing ar24. O’Brien, “‘Any Catholics among You . . . ?’: Seamus Heaney and the Real of Catholicism,” in Breaking the Mould: Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism and Ireland, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 164. 25. See Cathleen Falsani, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Falsani, however, has an entry on Heaney as, interestingly, he sent her a draft of his poem about his loss of faith but ongoing respect for it, then titled “A Found Poem”; God Factor, 165–67. 26. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 7.

10

Introduction

gument—or rather, substantially enhances previous recognitions of this fact.27 My emphasis, however, is on Heaney’s transition from belief to nonbelief, which was an important step for him, and one of which he was keenly aware in his later years; this needs to be acknowledged more than it has been and its full implications recognized. Seamus Heaney died peacefully, though unexpectedly, in a Dublin hospital at the end of August 2013. His by now famous last words were texted to his wife: Noli timere—“Don’t be afraid”—a familiar New Testament reference. At the time, it seemed that this was a message from the frontiers of death, and many people, whether believers or not, claimed that they found comfort in his words.28 Even now, when we know from Heaney’s son Michael that the circumstances in which they were sent made them less portentous than originally thought, their upbeat import still remains.29 His church-arranged funeral—lamented or explained away by some, resented by others, simply celebrated by most—received more media coverage than that of perhaps any other poet in history, making it possible to gauge his impact on his readers internationally, but more so on an Irish public that was often only marginally familiar with specific poems but, interestingly, still felt his loss and the need to comment on his passing. On the Sunday following Heaney’s death, at a major Gaelic football game at Croke Park in Dublin, “Faith of Our Fathers” wasn’t to be heard, and probably very few knew its words, but the 80,000 attendees delivered a standing ovation when a moment’s silence for the poet was called for. I think it was partly—and I would emphasize that last word—because the complex evolution of his religious beliefs was in empathetic tandem with theirs, because he was their representative too in bewilderment (a favorite Heaney word) and hope, even as his articulation of that hope marked a significant detour from what had been pursued (or seemed to have been pursued) for most of Ireland’s centuries-long religious pilgrimage. 27. Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 52–121. 28. Catholic theology had also developed a more positive interpretation of the “particular judgment” than that which reigned in Heaney’s youth: see John E. Thiel, Icons of Hope: The “Last Things” in Catholic Imagination (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). 29. Mick Heaney, “My Father’s Famous Last Words,” Irish Times, September 15, 2015.

Chapter 1

“ F ai t h o f O u r F a t hers L i v in g S t ill”

I

n m an y way s , it would not be untrue to say that Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century was as Catholic as the pope himself, maybe even more so. Although the entire country for the first two decades of the period was still under a largely Protestant British administration, its ethos was becoming more and more Catholic as the church of the majority of its inhabitants slowly but steadily increased its control over the educational and social life of the people. Even in the case of a “mixed marriage” between a Catholic and a Protestant—much frowned upon and minimally celebrated in the church service—the latter was obliged to agree that the children would be brought up as Catholics, a worldwide requirement, of course, but with special resonance in the contested Irish arena. Then, when the “Southern” part of the country gained independence in 1922, that dominance became even more overtly political, quickly leading to reforms of the legal system—among them the abolition of the right to divorce (famously opposed by then senator W. B. Yeats) and strict censorship of books and films—reaching its popular epitome in the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 (which drew over a million people, 25 percent of the population), and even more significantly in the declaration in the new Constitution of 1937 that the Roman Catholic Church was the primary religious affiliation of the Irish people.1 Practically all education and much

1. The original reads, “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the

11

12

“Faith of Our Fathers Living Still”

of the health care system were under Catholic ecclesiastical control. As recently as 1970, Catholics were forbidden to attend traditionally Protestant Trinity College Dublin without the permission of the archbishop of the diocese, a permission by no means to be presumed. What was relatively unusual about this development was that, unlike the situations in France, Italy, and Spain, where anticlericalism was a significant force, most Irish people not only acquiesced to the new regimen, but sincerely welcomed it as the proper goal of a nation that had once been designated as “the island of saints and scholars” and aspired to be such again.2 One can trace how Irish Catholicism would have been seen by most Irish people of the pre-1960s era by recalling its popular history as generally perceived even by the well-informed. The accepted narrative of Irish Catholicism went something like this: following an initial pagan period—exemplified in the tales of the wily Finn MacCumhaill and the heroic Cúchulainn, and with various Tuatha Dé Danann Celtic deities as backdrop—the Irish were converted to Catholicism (as noted earlier, Christianity and Catholicism were pretty much seen as one and the same) by St. Patrick in 432 a.d. when he stood before the high king on the hill of Tara and used the shamrock to explain the concept of the Trinity, that essential mystery of the faith (the conceptual intricacies of which few agonized about, however). In the centuries that immediately followed, there was a great flowering of Christianity, especially in its monastic form. These foundations at Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, and other sites—the ruins of many of them still relatively intact in the twentieth century— became centers of learning, drawing students from foreign parts as well as from Ireland itself. Meanwhile, Irish missionaries traveled to many areas of Europe to reconvert the Continent after the pagan barbarian incursions (engagingly recounted in Thomas Cahill’s popular How the Irish Saved Civilization, though rarely presented in such a compelling way).3 citizens.” The article was removed from the Irish Constitution by referendum in 1973 (multiple websites). 2. This judgment is confirmed over and over in, for example, Clair Wills’s That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007). 3. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor, 1996).



“Faith of Our Fathers Living Still” 13

The sixth-century St. Columcille (also known as St. Columba), who was banished from Ireland following a battle over the right to copy manuscripts and ended up on the island of Iona in Scotland, is in this sense the quintessential Irish saint, the lavishly adorned Book of Kells (likely from a couple of centuries later and also known as The Book of Columba) and the round tower its iconic artistic achievements. It was at this point too that Ireland became identified as the “island of saints and scholars.” The Viking invasions of the ninth to the eleventh centuries disrupted this monastic growth; less so the Catholic Norman arrivals of the twelfth century, though the earlier abbeys were soon replaced with an influx of Continental religious orders, most notably the Cistercians. Despite conflicts between English and Irish ecclesiastical administrations, however, Catholicism still reigned supreme until the period of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, culminating in much-married beheader Henry VIII’s separation from Rome and the decision to form an independent Christian church under monarchical governance. Since Ireland, unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, chose to remain loyal to Catholicism, its inhabitants came to be persecuted and dispossessed. Ownership of Irish lands passed into the hands of English Protestants, who had aided in the conquest of Ireland. And in this development, whereas in the Southern part of the country there tended to be Protestant landlords and Catholic tenants, in the Northern counties even the Catholic tenants were displaced by Protestant (mainly Presbyterian) artisans and farmers brought over from Scotland. Differences between Catholics and Protestants were exacerbated in all kinds of ways, not least by the cruel punishments inflicted by Oliver Cromwell on the resistant Irish in 1649 at the end of the English Civil War, and, crucially, following the defeat of the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690 (ironically changed later to July 12 to accommodate Britain’s belated adoption of Pope Gregory XIII’s corrected calendar in 1752). With the triumph of the Protestant cause, penal laws of varying severity were imposed on Catholics so that it became advantageous for the more prosperous among them to change their religious affiliations, which a number of them did even if they also provoked mockery in numerous songs and ballads of the time; the ma-

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jority did not change, however, and their refusal to do so was a source of pride for succeeding generations. The 1798 rebellion, led by Anglican-born freethinker Wolfe Tone, inspired by its American and French precedents, was generally seen as a time when Catholics and (Enlightened) Protestants united in their efforts to overthrow British monarchical rule, with even the sectarian Fr. Murphy of Boolavogue in County Wexford and Tone’s own suicide seamlessly incorporated into the ecumenical nationalist narrative.4 In spite of their defeat, however, Catholic Emancipation was eventually obtained under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell in 1829. After that, Catholicism grew stronger and stronger as its churches, monasteries, convents, schools, and hospitals proliferated, often with the assistance of British authorities who saw more to fear from militant French-inspired republicanism than from the traditional enemy of Roman Catholicism. This growth was made even more secure after the famines of the 1840s and the radical reduction in the Irish population through death and mass emigration to England and America. The leadership of Cardinal Cullen led to the “devotional revolution,” a phenomenon that resulted in Catholic practice becoming much more prevalent in the 1850s than it had been in the 1750s when the services of priests were more restricted, though the average twentieth-century Irish Catholic was probably unaware of this shift, assuming that current practice had always been the case.5 But again, the point to emphasize is that most Irish people were both inwardly as well as outwardly sympathetic with the religious restoration; the clergy too, although a rung or two above the average parishioner in terms of social class, were by and large seen as men of the people. Meanwhile, the Catholic revival in France, as witnessed by the Marian apparitions at Lourdes in 1858 and the prominence of other French saints such as Margaret Mary Alacoque (depicted in a popular picture in the home of James Joyce’s “Eveline”) and the Curé d’Ars only reinforced such 4. Seamus Heaney’s Wolfe Tone, however, in his poem of that title, is aware of being “out of [his] element among small farmers”; Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 294 (hereafter OG). 5. Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75,” American Historical Review 77, no. 3 (June 1972), 625–52.



“Faith of Our Fathers Living Still” 15

pieties, as was the case with the Virgin’s appearances at Knock, County Mayo, in 1879 (still a much visited shrine with its own airport), giving pious Catholics a sense that divine intervention was an ongoing phenomenon (as at Fatima in 1917) and unique to them as members of the one true church.6 In the European political theatre, the Irish identified with the beleaguered Pope Pius IX, the victim of Italian nationalism, as he defiantly declared papal infallibility shortly before losing the papal states—not many were aware or cared that the Archbishop of Tuam had opposed the dogma on pragmatic grounds—and even more so with Pius X in the early part of the twentieth century, with his stress on the importance of Holy Communion for the young and similar pieties, later a test case for Catholic practice. Typical of the time too, acknowledgment of the moral lapses of the Borgia popes during the Renaissance served only to strengthen the belief that the church would survive all disasters, as it was a divinely founded and guided institution. All things religious were burgeoning, and Joyce’s more jaundiced view of the matter was very much a minority opinion—and even he saw Protestantism as intellectually incoherent, thus sharing in the triumphalism of the very Catholic Church he so vehemently despised. One should add here too that Catholic Ireland tended to see Protestant England in a somewhat skewed way: not primarily as a bastion of the Reformation—in spite of the 1950s religious revival there—but, rather simplistically, as “pagan and promiscuous.”7 There was an awareness among the more educated at least that England was also the home of a remnant Catholic community from earlier times (the Howards, dukes of Norfolk, and other such eminent recusant families), a growing immigrant Irish Catholic population, and that it was the source of prominent converts, none more so than John Henry Newman, who, as an Oratorian priest in Birmingham, had been brought over from England to organize Ireland’s first Catholic university in the 1850s, and who was later elevated to cardinal.8 “Faith of our Fathers,” a hymn commemorating the resistance to religious persecution over the centuries and sung at major 6. James Joyce, “Eveline,” in Dubliners (New York: Vintage, 1993), 29. 7. On the revival in England, see Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5. 8. Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 473.

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Irish sporting events during most of the twentieth century with far more gusto than the Irish-language national anthem, was actually composed by Newman’s English convert follower Fr. Frederick W. Faber. Though he had also composed an Irish version (supposedly his preferred version) of this hugely popular hymn, the original referred to the hope that Faber’s own country would return to its traditional faith, asserting that “England shall then indeed be free.” Likely unaware of the differences, the Irish would probably not have objected had they known them, since Catholicism generally trumped nationalism in the ideological wars of the time.9 In brief, the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, far from being moribund, were ones of Catholic success and positive prospects for the future. The Protestant Reformation was broadly viewed as an unfortunate historical mishap (Heaney referred to it in a review of convert David Jones’s late poems as “that wound in English consciousness”) that would eventually be righted—after all, Faber’s hymn includes the lines “Faith of our fathers, we will strive / To win all nations unto Thee.” Even in the northeastern counties of Ireland, where Protestantism was the faith of more than half of the population and exercised sectarian control, the oppressed Catholic minority shared the same ultimate triumphalism: they would eventually win because they belonged to the one true faith of the unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. Few Catholics in either part of Ireland doubted this. Indeed, with its churches, monasteries, schools, hospitals, graveyards, priests, nuns, monks, friars, and religious brothers being so pervasive, it almost took more faith to believe that Catholicism wasn’t true than that it was. Writing about the secularism of the twentieth century, Charles Taylor asks (and tries to answer), “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us 9. Fr. Frederick W. Faber’s original hymn “Faith of Our Fathers” is available from multiple print and online sources. It has many adaptations, including a Mormon version. For comments on the Irish case, see Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 205. Colm Tóibín also recounts a discussion with Terry Eagleton on the subject in The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 255. See also Ira Seymour Dodd’s surprisingly informative “Faber and His Hymns: Mary Our Mother Reigns on High,” Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, no. 4 (June 1914): 427–31.



“Faith of Our Fathers Living Still” 17

find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”10 Of course, 1950s Ireland was not in the 1500s, but for a while its belief structures might have been mistaken for those that had prevailed then. The fact too that the modern canonization of saints required two miracles to be attributed to their intercession and verified by a panel of medical and scientific experts seemed like a confirmation of their heavenly arrival from a deity who was definitely there and to whom they had a direct line, even if he only deigned to respond in cases of exceptional performance.11 Furthermore, the major nationalist event of the twentieth century, the Easter Rising of 1916, was steeped in Catholic iconography. Whereas many of the revered Irish leaders of the past—Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Thomas Davis, Charles Stewart Parnell—had come from Protestant backgrounds, the 1916 Rising was led overwhelmingly by Catholics (even the Protestant “element” of Sir Roger Casement, Countess Markievicz, and, later, Maude Gonne eventually converted to that faith). Moreover, its Easter date was no accident, since it was intended to link the rebellion with Christ’s death and resurrection; its most famous member, Patrick Pearse, known for his ardent Catholic piety, constantly reinforced this association.12 Catholic priests conspicuously attended all the rebel leaders before their executions, a circumstance that helped further enshrine their memories in the mix of religious-political pieties that would surround them for the next half century. Following Irish independence in 1922, the number of Protestants in the South—never large—declined significantly over the decades so that, even while many of them remained prominent in the business and professional worlds and Catholics employed by them were aware of a glass 10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25. 11. In an interesting sidelight on this matter, statues of Blessed (later Saint) Martin de Porres, a black seventeenth-century Peruvian Dominican, were to be seen in many Irish churches in the 1950s and 1960s, not because of any burgeoning multiracial awareness but because he had a good track record for curing the sick who’d requested his intercession on their behalf. See Lawrence J. Taylor, Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 187–89. 12. See William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

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ceiling to their own aspirations, they seemed hardly there at all as Catholicism became ever more “natural,” the default religion of the Irish in a way it probably had never been in the past.13 For their part, Protestants were very much aware of a need to keep a low profile on social issues relating to politics, marriage, and schooling. The traditional tensions between the nationalist cause and the church—the condemnation of the Fenians in the nineteenth century for whom “hell wasn’t hot enough nor eternity long enough,” in the famous words of the Bishop of Kerry, or the excommunication of Éamon de Valera’s republicans during the civil war of the 1920s— were subsumed by emphasis on the genuine piety of Pearse and de Valera, now remembered as the author of the 1937 Constitution on which he had consulted with a future archbishop of Dublin.14 Catholics were frequently reminded, and themselves boasted, that their church had refused to join the ecumenical World Council of Churches when it was established in 1948 because it made no sense to do so: Jesus had founded but one church, and that had its divinely ordained center in Rome. By the 1940s and ’50s, then, Irish Catholics were generally so orthodox that they were hardly conscious of orthodoxy as a position. As the poet Thomas Kinsella, born just a decade before Seamus Heaney, once commented, Catholicism “was so pervasive that it hardly counted as an influence at all; it was a reality like oxygen.”15 Religious piety was everywhere in evidence in the huge attendance at Sunday Mass, the ubiquitous street processions and pilgrimages to holy places, the preoccupation with gaining indulgences that would shorten one’s time in Purgatory, the uncontested veneration of the papacy. As with Heaney later, it was not uncommon to find many ordinary people, who had made but a single trip outside Ireland, to have done so to visit the grotto at Lourdes, a pilgrimage they cherished for the rest of their lives. Louise Fuller gives a comprehensive description of the period: “On 13. See the essays in Olivia Cosgrove and Laurence Cox, eds., Ireland’s New Religious Movements (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). 14. Lawrence John McCaffery, The Irish Question: Two Centuries of Conflict (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 71. 15. Interview with John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 100.



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Saturday nights, there were long queues for confession throughout the length and breadth of the country. Sins had to be confessed in detail, as well as the number of times they had been committed. There was a very real fear of dying in a state of mortal sin and thus losing eternal salvation. Graphic images of hell-fire and damnation were etched into people’s consciousness, in particular by the Redemptorist preachers at parish missions every few years. This inculcation of fear began in school.”16 It was a culture in which, as Heaney noted graphically, “You’d hardly got out of the cot before you were envisaging the deathbed” (SS 471). The culture was repressive, certainly, in its emphasis on conformity and respectability and its obsession with sin and salvation, its ostracizing of many of its rebellious members to England and elsewhere, and its institutionalizing of others because of sexual mishaps or the anxieties of erotic repression. But these repressions insofar as they were publicly known were accepted, seeming to come from within the community more than from figures of religious or governmental authority as such. The spirit of the time is well summed up in de Valera’s famous 1943 radio speech on what he saw as the Irish ideal, a speech often reviled by intellectuals in subsequent decades for its narrow-mindedness, but one that even an enlightened Heaney would later nostalgically commend: The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.

16. Louise Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2002), 21.

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The then taoiseach (prime minister) went on to invoke St. Patrick as the originator of such an ideal, the resultant “island of saints and scholars,” and the poets and patriots who had sought to defend that vision during the long centuries of religious oppression. He urged the continuance of such purposes, “ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that that future must be sought.”17 De Valera’s description was one with which most Irish Catholics, his many enemies among them, identified at the time. It was broadcast when Hitler’s forces were imposing a very different ideal on many of the European nations and when there was still the possibility of a British invasion of the Irish Free State. His speech has been commended in recent times too by some utopian and “live simple” advocates disappointed with the materialistic turn of the last few decades. More ominously, perhaps, it might be noticed that the concluding reference to “the nation as a whole” implied the expectation of a United Ireland in which Roman Catholicism would be the majority religion and acknowledged as such, though, on the other hand, no coercion of Protestants was threatened—indeed, this circumstance too represented the innocence of the times when the truth of Catholicism seemed so obvious that all would eventually embrace it. There was a darker side, of course, especially in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s with Catholic admiration for Spain’s fascist General Franco (an admiration shared by convert Roy Campbell, the best-known translator of the poems of St. John of the Cross), and for the imprisoned collaborationist Marshal Pétain of Vichy France, a “mood” alluded to indirectly in Heaney’s comment on how the Irish-raised WWII treasonous broadcaster from Berlin, Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce), was perceived by Northern Catholics: “Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens. . . . ‘He’s an artist, this Haw Haw. He can fairly leave it into them’” (OG 83). Convert and papal knight Charles Bewley, the Irish envoy to Germany in the 1930s, was sympathetic with Hitler’s National Socialist party, as was novelist Francis Stuart, who came from a pro-Unionist family, converted to Catholicism, was a Republican rebel during the Civil War, married 17. See Diarmaid Ferriter, Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Éamon De Valera (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), 238, 286, 363–64.



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Maude Gonne’s daughter Iseult, broadcasted from Berlin during the war, and became an acute explorer of the spirituality of desolation afterward. But even that “darkness” espoused by “‘the enemies of [Protestant] Ulster’” was understood at least—if mistakenly—as being in the service of an ultimate religious light that would be shared by all.18 The early and mid-twentieth century was also another great missionary period in the history of Irish Catholicism, with outreach to the African and Asian countries in particular. Ironically, nearly all of these “nations” were colonies of the British Empire, the very condition that made the Irish missionary endeavor possible in the first place. One of the missionary publications, the Far East, was regularly distributed in Catholic schools, while a collection box for the “Black Babies” (a kneeling and nodding young black boy in a red soutane atop the box—a variant is commemorated in Heaney’s late poem “The Mite Box”)—was taken from classroom to classroom with at least the same frequency. Edel Quinn, a Legion of Mary lay missionary who died in Kenya at the relatively young age of forty-four, was a household name. African medical students, often the privileged tokens of this missionary outreach, were to be seen regularly in the center of Dublin. The celebration of this evangelizing history in 1961—supposedly fifteen hundred years after St. Patrick’s death—was a national event in Ireland, titled the “Patrician Year,” joyous more than dolorous, magnanimously rather than vengefully triumphant, the five visiting cardinals in their brilliant red robes (“all now familiar names to the people of Dublin,” as the Irish Times reported) the rock stars of the moment, the “marvelous” as the faithful knew it.19 Indeed, this missionary impulse appeared to represent the best of Ireland, drawing attention to its universal concerns rather than its local preoccupations. And even at home, the Catholic Church was often the most progressive corporate body around, certainly more socially active than the State itself, which

18. Note, however, the more critical response to Bewley’s views in the Irish Catholic in 1937 as recorded in Mary Kenny’s Goodbye to Catholic Ireland (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), 202–3. See also Anne McCartney, Francis Stuart (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 2000), and Kevin Kiely, Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast (Dublin: Liffey, 2007). 19. “The Patrician Congress,” Irish Times, June 22, 1961.

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depended unduly on its charitable outreach.20 By 1961 too, the church seemed to be in full recovery from a major conflict ten years earlier when a government minister tried to implement a more liberal health plan, one that had little support even among the proposer’s own party members.21 The abuses going on in convent laundries, orphanages, and presbyteries wouldn’t come to light for another forty years or more. Over the decades, too, Catholicism had also become intellectually respectable once again following the repressions of the anti-Modernist era of Pius X. The many prominent French writers who had converted to it—Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel, for example—or who either never lost or finally renewed their faith, were an inspiration, as more so the English (G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene) and American (Claire Booth Luce, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell) Catholic converts. A rosary-reciting T. S. Eliot, not a Roman Catholic as such even if his beads had been blessed by Pope Pius XII, was another inspiration, his later poems and essays widely read and commented on in Catholic circles.22 Even the Existentialist philosophical movement initially associated with atheist Jean-Paul Sartre, one seemingly antithetical to religion, was harnessed to deepen the mystery of faith and make its agonies and aridities appear all the more attractive precisely for being such. For those who cared, the theory of evolution, never remotely at the forefront of religious debate in Ireland, had been satisfactorily incorporated into the Catholic narrative by the progressive Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in his 1955 The Phenomenon of Man, a volume bearing the secular imprimatur of Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s greatest publicist, even if roundly dismissed by other members of the scientific community.23 The vague awareness that Gregor Mendel, a nineteenth-century 20. See Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (New York: Overlook, 2005), 583, 585. 21. Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, 236–37. 22. See, for example, Barry Spurr’s “Religion,” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 309. 23. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). For an overview of Teilhard’s wide-ranging importance in church circles, see Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 74–83.



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Augustinian priest, was the father of modern genetics, also helped ease any overt strain between the church and the sciences. Again and again, it was stressed that truth could not contradict itself, that there was nothing to fear from it, even as some of its more controversial pronouncements were denounced and their sources censored. Overall, then, in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s—the aftermath of WWII—both Roman and Irish Catholicism seemed to be doing well (in retrospect, emphasis would likely be placed on “seemed”). The postwar Western determination to oppose Soviet Communism only empowered the mission of the God-fearing against the godless, and in that matter Catholicism was in the forefront with the imprisoned and tortured Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty an international symbol of resistance. By the early 1960s, the church appeared to be doing even better. Then came Vatican II. Not surprisingly, given the importance of Catholicism in Ireland, when the newly elected Pope John XXIII summoned the Second Vatican Council in 1962 to inaugurate a plan for “updating” the church, the event was of interest to almost everyone. Very quickly, the Italian word aggiornamento became part of the vernacular in Dublin when pizza was still practically unknown. If many in the church’s administration were blindsided by the changes in the air, others were genuinely excited. The major liturgical innovations and an emphasis on ecumenism— the hope of a rapprochement between the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, that had for so long engaged in mutual denunciation— were probably what struck most people first as registering a difference from the past. In fact, it was the threat of this movement that provoked Northern Ireland’s Reverend Ian Paisley to fulminate against the whoredom of Rome and be dismissed as an embarrassing throwback in so doing: to many, it seemed that Christian unity was all the rage, Paisley’s isolationism the anomalous exception. An event indicative of the changing times and a literary cause célèbre for long afterward took place in 1966 when John McGahern was terminated from his primary school teaching position in Dublin by the institution’s religious administrator for the disruption caused by The Dark (1965), a novel that dealt explicitly with sexual abuse, both familial and

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clerical, in ways that were regarded as exceptional and totally unrepresentative at the time, but are now seen as harbingers of the grim revelations of the Ryan and other reports in the early twenty-first century.24 In the subsequent furor, the then minister for education justified McGahern’s dismissal with the declaration that “when the Church decides on a course of action, it generally has a good reason for that action,” only to see such censorship dismantled a year later.25 By the mid-1960s too, it was rumored that a scattering of young Jesuits had begun to take an interest in the past pupil they had long either ignored or reviled (mostly ignored), James Joyce. Sympathetic, even fawning, references to unbelieving playwright Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were turning up more and more in religious and theological journals as they groped with “the silence of God” problem. And from England, Slant magazine, a Catholic journal out of Cambridge University associated with future literary critic Terry Eagleton and his mentor, Dominican priest Herbert McCabe, while circulating mainly among young university-educated Catholics and seminarians on both sides of the Irish Sea, opened a lively dialogue between Catholicism and a progressive Marxism, thus reinforcing the sense of the church being at the forefront of change and giving its sometimes restless adherents good reason for staying within it. From a preoccupation with a divinely dispensed “sanctifying grace” being necessary for good deeds rather than mere human motivation, constant worry that the devil was all around to tempt the unwary innocent, and the need for indulgences, plenary and partial, to be meticulously calculated, the focus now was more on positive change and encouragement. A Catholic culture in which “communism, materialism and ‘impurity’ were regularly and hysterically denounced” from the pulpit was giving way to one of affirmation of the “good news” of the Gospel.26 The modern world was no longer wholly to be rejected; by engaging with it on its own grounds, Catholics might even win more souls to their beliefs. In all, Ca24. See the discussion in Eamon Maher’s The Church and Its Spire: John McGahern and the Catholic Question (Dublin: Columba, 2011), 62–65. 25. John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 250–52. See also Mary Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, 270. 26. Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (London: Penguin, 2000), 467.



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tholicism, while still notably repressive, was striving to show that it could be both true and modern, and at least in educated lay circles there was an engagement with matters theological that just a decade later would appear quaint and dated. Very few at the time anticipated what was just over the nation’s political, religious, and broader cultural horizon.

Chapter 2

C h o sen P e o ples

I

t was in t o t he separa t e Northern and Protestant-dominated part—“occupied” was the familiar term used by Catholics to describe the condition of “the Six Counties” of Ulster’s original nine—of a partitioned Ireland that Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939. The opposing names of his home county—the ancient “Derry” to Catholics, the seventeenthcentury “Londonderry” to Protestants—betrayed the depth of the local religious and cultural divisions. Far from being privileged after the formation of the new region in 1921, as would be the case in the South, the official representatives of the Catholic Church were scarcely welcome in the corridors of power at Stormont, nor were its leaders, the cardinal-archbishops of Armagh, Primates of All Ireland, treated with much deference or respect by the authorities in whose territory the ancient see of St. Patrick counterintuitively now found itself situated. For their parts, a succession of Catholic prelates remained intransigent, refusing to let Catholics participate in the new state school system partly because it included “Protestant” Bible reading, but more so because they were assured of the rightness of their own faith every bit as much as their opponents were of theirs. Indeed, what is surprising in retrospect is not the Unionist dismissal of them, but their complete dismissal of the Unionist government and a denunciation of a partition of the country “which God intended to be one and undivided.”1 In Northern Ireland itself, though Catholics made up just about a

1. See Daithí Ó Corráin, Rendering to God and Caesar: The Irish Churches and the Two States in Ireland, 1949–73 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 44; see also Edna Longley’s comment in Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, 651.



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third of the population, both sides of that divided society looked like mirror images of one another. With varying amounts of passion, both claimed the legacy of St. Patrick; even what many considered the quintessential Irish Catholic saint, Colmcille or Columba according to preference, was up for grabs.2 Like their Protestant Orange counterparts on July 12, Catholics had their Ancient Order of Hibernians marches on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17; instead of King Billy (the seventeenth-century William of Orange) on his charger, they displayed St. Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland; to the Orangemen’s singing of “The Sash My Father Wore,” Catholics rendered “I’ll Sing a Hymn to Mary” or “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick.” A massively unequal distribution of power, however, fatally unbalanced the equation. In a wider historical context, Seamus Heaney notes that the aisling (an Irish-language poetic genre in which a supernatural visitation promises future religious and national liberation and victory over one’s oppressors) “was based on the facts of invasion, expropriation and defeat of the Gaelic order, so it became part of the cultural nationalist mindset and continued to have a more than subliminal appeal for Northern nationalists—we could still romanticize ourselves as the ones in thrall to the foreigner, looking forward to a moment of deliverance into some true, ‘unoccupied’ condition.” Although a minority in the province, being Roman Catholic meant belonging to a worldwide community; its uplift arose from knowing that one was “chosen”—a word most often used to refer to Protestants almost exclusively because of their sense of divine election, but by no means foreign to Catholic sensibilities and self-perceptions— even if others around showed contempt for one’s faith as cultish and idolatrous. After all, Cardinal MacRory opined in 1931 that the Protestant Church was “not even a part of the Church of Christ.”3 In the late eighteenth century, in the aisling tradition, the English Benedictine monk Charles Walmesley Pastorini had predicted the end of Protestantism by 2. According to the Wikipedia entry, the saint is honored in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches. The “Colmcille” version of his name, however, seems to be confined to Catholic usage. 3. Alan Megahey, The Irish Protestant Churches in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 98.

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the early nineteenth century—a matter referred to by William Carleton in one of his tales in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830)—and though that obviously had not come to pass, the spirit of the prophesy survived long afterward, in Ireland, at least.4 Meanwhile, Protestants, remembering the Catholic atrocities from the 1640s and the lurid details presented in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), were determined never to surrender to Rome.5 The Reverend Ian Paisley, one of the starker representatives of this ethos (and with input from American Southern fundamentalism), has claimed, “God has a purpose for this province, and this plant of Protestantism sown here in the north-eastern part of this island. . . . The enemy has tried to root it out, but it still grows today.”6 As Terence Brown has pointed out, while the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland, with its “theories of Calvinist destiny, of Calvinist soul histories,” has produced a “mind different from that of the [Catholic] nationalists,” there is a strong sense too in which their respective beliefs in divine destinies are parallel and similar.7 In the final analysis, Northern Irish Protestants (mainly Anglicans and Presbyterians but also including Methodists and Baptists) and Catholics all believed that it was their religious faith that helped them endure attack, defeat, and, at times, starvation. In that sense, they were all loyalists, though ones with very different loyalties. Furthermore, as Tom Garvin notes, “Surveys indicate that secularization has occurred at about the same slow level in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern 4. Charles Walmesley, The General History of the Christian Church, from Her Birth to Her Final Triumphant State in Heaven, Chiefly Deduced from the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle (New York: Gale, 2010). See also James S. Donnelly Jr., “Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and Sectarianism in the Rockite Movement of 1821–4,” in Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, ed. Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 102–39. See a similar emphasis on Catholic triumphalism and lack of fear of Protestantism (as opposed to Protestants) in Elliott, Catholics of Ulster, 468. 5. See John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). 6. Quoted in Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster!: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 269–70. 7. Terence Brown, “Identities in Ireland: The Historical Perspective,” in Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster, ed. Jean Lundy and Aodán Mac Póilin (Belfast: Lagan, 1992), 44, 43.



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Ireland. This is so despite the very different social structures and political systems in the two Irish states.”8 In other words, Ireland North and South remained religious long after most of the other Western European democracies had loosened, if not quite abandoned, that commitment. And it was partly the element of comfort and the conviction of self-rightness, too—as opposed to self-righteousness—offered by religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, that served to distance the more fundamental problems of belief itself. In spite of this similarity of eternal destinies hoped for on both sides, however, living day to day in a Protestant state (as Northern Ireland for all practical purposes had become), Catholics, as Heaney later described them in his 1987 poem “From the Canton of Expectation,” dwelt “under high, banked clouds of resignation.” It was the prayers using “Vouchsafe or Deign” that bleakly consoled them and their tentative and modest aspirations that were “creditable” and “sufficient to the day.” Following a nationalist meeting and the singing of “our rebel anthem,” they “turned for home and the usual harassment / by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks” (OG 295). The “militiamen on overtime” is a sly religious reference to the Protestant B-Specials officially recruited to keep Catholic nationalists in line following the creation of the Northern state. The regular police force had also gradually become more and more Protestant in a way it hadn’t been under earlier British rule, while gerrymandered voting ensured that compromise candidates would never win power.9 For a young Heaney, it was a time when Catholics “were more than metaphorically put upon when you had the likes of [prime minister Lord] Brookeborough telling his supporters not to employ Catholics” (SS 170). “The likes of” is itself a telling phrase, implying both dismissal and a newly acquired freedom from the previously powerful. But that freedom only came slowly and, as it happened, very painfully, to Heaney and his co-religionists. In the 8. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 268. 9. Denis Donoghue gives an interesting account of his Catholic father’s experience when he decided to remain in the Ulster police force after the setting up of the separate Stormont government in 1921: see Donoghue, Warrenpoint (New York: Knopf, 1990).

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meantime, unlike their counterparts in the Republic, Northern Irish Catholics were more defensive and less confident in their social lives and correspondingly more wary of criticizing the recognized faults of their clergy lest they provide fodder for further Protestant denunciations of the institution.10 In this late 1930s world of contested political and religious traditions into which Heaney was “fatalistically” born, however, his “oppressed” family wasn’t by any means “poor” given the circumstances of the time, although with nine children a vigilant frugality was required; indeed, several local Protestants had much less. Staunchly Catholic, the Heaneys weren’t aggressively so, and the poet was always proud of the good relations his family had with their Protestant neighbors, some of them the very same “militiamen on overtime” when the occasion demanded. In at least one of his poems and frequently in interviews, he commented how his father thought it improper to use the divisive word “Catholic” when in the company of local Protestants. In fact, Heaney himself had a Protestant great-grandmother who converted to Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century to marry his great-grandfather and suffered ostracization (becoming a “Lundy” in local parlance) from her own community as a consequence (the subject of a poem in The Haw Lantern).11 But the family was indeed “staunch”: the rosary was recited every night, Mass attended faithfully on Sundays, and the whole of life interpreted in traditional Catholic terms. As Irish-born Cambridge University historian Eamon Duffy, just eight years younger than Heaney, remembers, at that time “Catholicism was certainty,” and the meticulous altar rituals of the highly respected clergy “marked the presence of the Immensities.”12 For believers, at the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass, God became present in a real way: the very fact that the walls didn’t shake on the 10. See Elliott, Catholics of Ulster, 474–76. 11. Heaney, “Clearances,” OG 283; see also Patricia Craig, Brian Moore: A Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 11, for Heaney’s recounting of the story. See also John Hobbs, “‘The Island Story’: Revising Irish History in Heaney’s The Haw Lantern,” Études irlandaises 2, no. 23 (1998): 71–80. 12. Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition (London: Continuum, 2004), 14–15.



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momentous occasion only furthered the sense of a direct, official, almost routine link to the deity, even if most worshippers didn’t actually feel it. Heaney has offered an affectionate description of the religious iconography of the home in which he grew up: religious calendars and pictures adorning the walls; what he refers to as a “tiny” red lamp beneath the picture of the Sacred Heart; Saint Brigid’s straw crosses (a fixture more of rural than urban Catholic homes) in the roof beams. An unexpected item, perhaps—though by no means uncommon—was the “picture of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932—the three patron saints of Ireland on it, Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille, and little ornamental medallions with motifs of round towers and Celtic crosses” (SS 11–12). Marianne Elliott has referred to the Eucharistic Congress itself as “the most stunning example of triumphal pageantry and [of] Catholic devotionalism as a leisure activity” (100,000 Catholics from Northern Ireland attended), a reminder to Catholics that their cause would eventually prevail, but hardly comforting to Protestants who saw themselves as continually under threat from a global religious rival.13 Years later, Heaney would recall how “a protestant undergraduate friend’s eyes dilate[d] as he scanned the Sacred Heart lamp and the view of the Lourdes Grotto on the wall,” showing his own keen awareness of how “other” the Catholic domestic culture must have appeared to Protestant “others.”14 Reminiscing more generally, Heaney has concluded that he was “oversupplied” with religion in his early days, though the use of the word doesn’t seem intended to express anger or regret. He “lived with, and to some extent lived by, divine mysteries” that included “the whole disposition of the cosmos from celestial to infernal” (SS 318). The very sounds in the words and phrases of its prayers—referring to the Virgin as “House of Gold,” “Tower of Ivory,” “Ark of the Covenant”—were early inspirations for his subsequent poetry, as were the secular words of the radio weather reports.15 The detail with which he describes his surroundings, though composed decades later, suggests an unusual degree of attachment to his 13. Elliott, Catholics of Ulster, 470. 14. Heaney, “The Poet as a Christian,” Furrow, October 1978, 606–9. 15. Eamon Duffy gives an extraordinarily detailed account of the religious practices of the time in Faith of our Fathers, 11–15.

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religious upbringing, part of it the result of his mother’s piety in particular.16 In one of Heaney’s “Clearances” poems in the 1980s written after her death, we find a confirmation of how deeply invested in Catholicism he was as a youth when, during Holy Week, in what he calls “our Sons and Lovers phase,” he and his mother were “Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next / To each other up there near the front,” following the “rubrics for the blessing of the font.” If the poem is as much about his closeness to his mother as it is about his early religious devotions, it is also about them both as attentive practitioners of their faith, the “font” positioned at the “front” of their lives. The poem goes on to foreground prayers, “chrism,” “Cruet tinkle,” and “Formal incensation,” ending with “the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride: / Day and night my tears have been my bread” (OG 288). There is a sense of deep conviction here, a total absence of irony, and nothing much of mere nostalgia even. The scene is completely un-Joycean and, in some ways, perhaps more mature than any similar experience the earlier writer described. It is, of course, fused with a later awareness—after all, it is unlikely that Heaney had read D. H. Lawrence’s novel at this time. Heaney’s spiritual awareness as a young boy was also deepened by tales of the family’s relationship to one of the local saints from early Christian times. As he told Robert Druce in an interview, “I think Catholicism meant everything to me in some ways; because it was my whole life. I was at a Catholic boarding school, and the community I lived in moved on the poles of the Church and the Gaelic football team.”17 One should note both the intensity and comprehensiveness of the italicized “everything,” in spite of the qualifying “in some ways.” It is significant too to observe how frequently Heaney stresses the impact of his religious upbringing, even if a rather assiduous scholar has found only eight occasions on which he uses the word “Catholic” as such in his poems.18 And again, Heaney’s personal, as opposed to his family’s, world was unusually religious, 16. See Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 4. 17. Robert Druce, “A Raindrop on a Thorn,” Dutch Quarterly Review 9, no. 1 (1979): 24–37. 18. See Eugene O’Brien, “‘Any Catholics among you . . . ?’” in Maher and O’Brien, Breaking the Mould, 171.



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even in its Irish context. In delivering milk to a neighbor’s house just a few hundred feet from his own, for example, Heaney writes that he was acutely aware of crossing the invisible boundary between two Catholic dioceses, a somewhat heightened degree of sensitivity one is inclined to think, since no markers indicated the division (SS 56). The minor differences in the school catechisms used by the two dioceses also registered with him.19 He sums up this phase of his life: “When I was young, from first awareness until at least my early teens, I dwelt entirely in the womb of religion. My consciousness was dominated by Catholic conceptions. . . . Salvation, damnation, heaven above, hell below, grace and guilt, all were for real.” But the scene wasn’t necessarily morbid, and, as Heaney immediately adds, “You had your puny south Derry being within the great echoing acoustic of a universe of light and dark, death and everlasting life, divine praises and prayers for the dead” (SS 405). Along with these Christian religious associations founded in the legacy of St. Patrick, there was also a strong pagan ambiance to his region of birth, a circumstance that would have marked an important difference from urban Catholicism even in Ireland: “Much of the flora of that place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word in religare, to bind fast. The single thorn-tree bound us to a notion of the potent world of fairies. . . . The green rushes bound us to the beneficent spirit of St. Brigid.” An elderly neighbor who used to weave crosses from these rushes is referred to as “a kind of local sibyl.”20 Such comments only reinforce the extraordinary sense of religion Heaney had from the beginning and that he continued to value in his adult life; “superstition” is rarely a bad word in Heaney’s vocabulary, although church authorities strongly disapproved of its use and practice. As Michael Cavanagh comments, “Heaney’s fidelity carries with it a kind of naiveté in seeing the landscape as numinous in an age when much science and secular ideology laugh at the numinous.”21 This early interest is also a pointer to Heaney’s fascination with myth at all stages of his life, sometimes in tension with or19. Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 236. 20. Heaney, Preoccupations, 133. 21. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 130.

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ganized religion, most often in fusion with it, and even persisting when conventional belief has fallen away. When Heaney won a scholarship to a Catholic boarding school in 1951, he ended up attending an institution not dissimilar to Joyce’s Clongowes Wood, though considerably more downscale. As he observes, “It was the usual monastic regime, Mass in the morning, masturbation at night, classroom in the daytime, the study-hall/scriptorium in the evening.” Heaney worried about sins of lust and impurity, what he calls “the usual Catholic adolescent griefs.” The tone here is obviously that of a much later perception, since masturbation in particular would not have been seen at the time as part of one’s natural development, much less a fit subject for public discourse, reflective or otherwise. He adds, “We were cowed because we weren’t clued in. Once you can joke about wanking, you have won a certain independence from the catechism and the confessional.” It was only afterward in college that Heaney found some liberation from such anxieties, ironically “from sharing digs with two Jesuit-schooled medical students from Clongowes” (SS 405). Still, Heaney was probably more worried about this “bother” than were many of his less-inhibited boarding school acquaintances. On the other hand, the intense confessional investigation of degrees of lust in accordance with the requirements of the Tridentine directives are known to have had acute mental repercussions for other Irish poets such as Austin Clarke and Paul Durcan and were the particular reason that caused Heaney’s friend, novelist Brian Moore, to abandon his faith altogether, not to mention the ordeal of the young Mahoney in McGahern’s The Dark.22 Heaney at least survived, possibly indicating not only a healthy ego, but that the positives of the religious experience outweighed its negative threats. In regard to sexuality overall, Heaney has claimed that “St. Columb’s was mercifully free of sexual molestation from either staff or students.” He takes a more benign view of a school that was harsh, in some ways brutal, and spartan than do many of his fellow students from those days, including Seamus Deane and even Bishop Edward Daly of “Bloody Sun22. See Clarke (20–21), and Durcan (169–71), in Auge, A Chastened Communion; see Craig’s Brian Moore for Moore (58–59). McGahern, The Dark (New York: Knopf, 1966), 39–43.



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day” fame. Most of the time, it appears, the fast-growing boarders were quite hungry, while the day-boys from Derry city (Deane among them) at least had recourse to home cooking, such as it was back then.23 Decades later Heaney would compose a prose poem, “Cloistered,” about his time at St. Columb’s, where “Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary”; the “duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster,” while Heaney and the other students rested their elbows “on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.” He claims that he “could make a book of hours” of those times; in such a book, Heaney appears to be “the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner,” a recurrent image that emphasizes the poet’s ongoing fascination with things monastic, however much he decried some parts of the ascetic regimen of St. Columb’s. Even then, his hand “cold as a scribe’s in winter,” Heaney is studying geometry and Livy rather than any religious text, while “the supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary” in the chilly room (OG 87). The “vapouring” is, of course, a consequence of the cold in the room back then; years later, at the time of writing the poem, however, it may also point to the perception of a suspected vacuousness in the priest’s muttering of his required daily prayers. But that would be later. At St. Columb’s, as had been the case in the first eleven years of his life, Heaney’s religiousness seems to have gone well beyond the usual. He has commented on several occasions on his long and anxious preoccupation from three to thirteen—an amazingly precise demarcation—with the details of the “particular judgement,” a next-life scene in which it was supposed that, immediately after death, God would meticulously scrutinize one’s every thought and deed and assign reward (unlikely, except for the most saintly) or punishment (hopefully purgatorial, possibly eternal), accordingly (SS 319–20; OG 332). If this preoccupation somehow dissipated during his first year of boarding school—his aforementioned precision about dates suggests that a seasoned confessor may have offered him some consolatory advice on the topic early on—his overall fidelity continued. Heaney was especially “alert 23. Maurice Fitzpatrick, The Boys of St. Columb’s (Dublin: Liffey, 2010).

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to the economy of indulgences; offering up little penitential operations for the release of the suffering souls in purgatory; adjudicating the moment when sexual fantasy passed from being a ‘temptation’ to being the deliberate ‘entertainment of impure thoughts’—not to mention the full surrender to the mortal sin of the job itself” (SS 38). No casualness here; strict accounting required. Heaney’s religiousness had intellectual heft too. His studies included Hart’s Christian Doctrine, culminating later in apologetics and “Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God,” the latter reference a reminder of how much emphasis was then put on Catholic belief having a solidly rational foundation and, by extension, that true scientific findings would never contradict revealed knowledge (SS 38). In addition, as Heaney wrote to Henry Hart (no relation to the aforementioned apologist) in 1987, “all of the great spiritual writers were constantly being applied, in digested, pre-packaged form, by preachers at retreats, and were generally in the Catholic air I breathed at boarding school.”24 These would have included most commonly such authors as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis de Sales, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, among many others. St. Columb’s, like every other Catholic school at the time, day or boarding, had an annual retreat. This was a matter of no small importance, since such periods not infrequently led to boys deciding to pursue the priesthood as a vocation, a “temptation”—in the good sense—that Heaney himself appears to have entertained at some point (SS 207). He puts the matter this way: “There was a sense of a common culture about the place, we were largely Catholic farmers’ sons being taught by farmers’ sons. The idea of a religious vocation was in the air all the time.” He goes on to explain that no “coercion” was exercised in this matter, but, again, when he adds that “you would have to be stupid or insensitive not to feel the invitation to ponder the priesthood as a destiny,” his own particular experience is being heavily relied on.25 Still, it was certainly not unusual at the time for pious (and often not so pious) boys to listen keenly for that 24. Hart, Seamus Heaney, 34. 25. Quoted in Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 239.



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mysterious call as they knelt in the hard pews of darkened churches gazing at the single sanctuary lamp that indicated the tabernacled presence of their Divine Lord. Although Heaney was acutely alert to this possibility, he chose to study French rather than Latin (he did receive training in the latter, however, training that would stand him in good stead in future decades when he returned to his Virgilian texts), thus consciously opting for a lay rather than a clerical vocation. Nevertheless, later Heaney was to interpret his vocation to be a poet as, in a sense, a Joycean summons to a priestly office in service of the human imagination, though not rebelliously so. It seems unlikely that he ever had the kind of interrogative encounter with the Jesuit recruiter depicted by Joyce in Portrait, but in 1981 he referred to a memory of a “Father O’Connor, sweating and wheezing at the gable, asking me to reconsider before I went into ‘the world.’”26 The impact of this vocation-preoccupied environment is evident too when he likens the art of writing poetry to being “an altar boy in the sacristy getting ready to go out on the main altar. There’s a gravitas comes over me” (SS 450). If his clerical teachers didn’t inspire Heaney to want to join them, the Victorian English Jesuit convert Gerard Manley Hopkins—not yet discovered in Joyce’s time at Clongowes in the 1890s—stimulated his artistic interest and direction. In discussing the early influence of Hopkins, Heaney first remarks that the fact that he was a priest was “incidental,” since “there were too many priests all round us for holy orders to be impressive as such,” but then adds, “More to the point was the general Catholic thing, the fact that the theology and doctrines that Hopkins embraced were the ones that embraced me and my generation.”27 He elaborates: “What you encounter in Hopkins’s journals—the claustrophobia and scrupulosity and religious ordering of the mind, the cold-water shaves and the single iron beds, the soutanes and the self-denial—that was the world I was 26. See Seamus Heaney, “Station Island: Jottings for a Poem,” Erato (Summer 1986): 3. Quoted in Daniel Tobin, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 184. 27. In her chapter on Heaney in Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, Gail McConnell makes much of the distinction between Hopkins embracing and Heaney being embraced by Catholicism (74).

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living in when I first read his poems.” So, he continues, “the height and depth of Hopkins’s understanding matched my own” (SS 38–40). The fact that Hopkins had spent the latter part of his life teaching at the university in Dublin and was buried there was also a source of pride for literary Catholics, even when it was acknowledged that he had not been happy in his posting away from England. But apart from Heaney’s often-mentioned acoustic joy in the innovative consonantal language of Hopkins’s poems or in the English poet’s celebration of the earth where “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” his encounter with a priest who at times was close to despair and hopelessness (“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee”) but underwent faithful recuperation (“I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be”) must have had a religiously sustaining effect on even a generally upbeat Heaney: here was no pious cant; here was a mind grappling with the dark side of life and in so doing showing that religion indeed had depth as well as height.28 Thomas Hardy, another early favorite and available on his aunt’s bookshelf, lived in an anxiety of unbelief that could, paradoxically, also provoke a deepened faith in many of his readers. Besides, the “crisis of faith” phenomenon, rather old hat by then, had been dealt with by Belfast’s Brian Moore in his 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a less cerebral version of Joyce’s progress in Portrait, but one in which Moore, not then widely known to be himself an unbeliever, rendered the problems of religious faith with such sympathy and depth that it was as likely to reinforce that faith’s anguished validity as to undermine its uncertain credibility.29 The Heaney that emerged from this minor boarding school upbringing to go away to college was a strong Catholic, keenly aware of his Protestant surroundings but hardly drawn to its peculiar theological teachings, and strengthened by his encounter with the sophistication of religious doubt and its able refutation. When he later describes his preparations for his A-Level exams class in 1956 and mentions his teacher’s offering 28. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, selected, ed. W. H. Gardner (London: Penguin, 1963), 62, 60. 29. Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (New York: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1955). See Craig, Brian Moore, 58–59, 126–27.



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of “a huge extraneous spike labeled ‘Loss of Faith in Modern World and Consequences for Modern Man’” to help interpret Eliot’s poetry for “our doctrinally sound young heads,” the implication is that Heaney himself was temporarily co-opted, that his own head at the time was “doctrinally sound” (FK 35). And when he also read T. S. Eliot’s essays in the popular, purple-covered Penguin edition of 1953 (its “particular tint” described by him as “appropriately reminiscent of a confessor’s stole” [FK 36]), he likely embraced the Anglo-Catholic convert’s censure of Tennyson’s In Memoriam as showing its author “desperately anxious to hold the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe. . . . [Tennyson’s] desire for immortality never is quite the desire for Eternal Life; his concern is for the loss of man rather than for the gain of God.”30 Heaney could hardly have foreseen that in some ways it was a prediction of his own course over the next several decades. At college—Belfast’s Queen’s University in 1957, then a modestly sized institution—Heaney’s life, and in this case his “religious” life, began to open up. But it did so initially more in terms of coping with challenges to his faith than departing from it: “I’d come out of the cocoon of a Catholic boarding school but my whole way of thinking and feeling was still structured by that discipline. . . . The ideal conclusion to such a schooling would have been entry into a seminary.” Queen’s represented the world outside that cocoon “and for us ‘the world’ carried negative associations that it wouldn’t have had for others . . . it belonged in a triad of danger that involved ‘the world, the flesh and the devil.’” So, the transition was less about the opportunity afforded by a university education—though that was present too—and more about walking onto “a testing ground for the soul” (SS 39). Heaney was an active participant in the Catholic Students’ Society, which “existed first and foremost in order to keep the students in touch with their religious practice.” Sodalities, retreats, as well as the usual Catholic worship services, conducted by the chaplain, made up a significant part of college life as well as—though not incidentally—providing a meeting place for prospective couples from similar religious and social backgrounds (SS 44). While the university itself may have been 30. Heaney, FK 36; T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (New York: Harvest, 1975), 244.

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more intellectually liberal and thus more dangerous to one’s faith than University College Dublin, where several key faculty positions were occupied by clerics, the Catholic chaplaincy at Queen’s, operating in an arena where a condescending social ethos from the British mainland prevailed, probably made the students more cohesive and self-aware than were those at UCD, where Catholicism was the default position and in little need of defense (FK 150).31 Heaney years later remarked that in Queen’s English Department he “had never been taught by an Irish or an Ulster voice.” Seamus Heaney, however, wasn’t just a passive, much less a reluctant, participant in such Catholic activities. The summer after he’d entered the university, he went to Lourdes as part of the Derry Diocesan Pilgrimage, where he assisted the sick and served Mass.32 Asked about how he perceived the encounter with the ill and the maimed, Heaney has explained, “At the time, the image of that grotto was omnipresent in Catholic houses and houses of worship: Bernadette kneeling with her beads in her hand and her shawl on her head, Mary with her blue sash and her pale hands stretching out. By then, we were even familiar with photographs of the shrine itself, the banks of candles and the rampart of crutches, reputedly cast away by people who had been cured. So, when I arrived, it was neither harrowing nor consoling, more a combination of expectancy and wariness” (SS 287–89). It is interesting to compare and contrast this rather innocent attitude with that of the American writer Flannery O’Connor, who, in her mid-thirties and certainly more decisively Catholic than Heaney, had arrived at Lourdes on a similar diocesan pilgrimage just a few months earlier in 1958. She found the place full of “religious junk shops” and prayed, not for her recovery from lupus, but rather for the success of her next novel. Writing to the poet Elizabeth Bishop about the “medieval hygiene” at the grotto, O’Connor noted that “The supernatural is a fact there but it displaces nothing natural; except maybe those 31. Marianne Elliott, who arrived at Queen’s exactly ten years later, notes that she took Scholastic Philosophy, which “instantly marked me out as Catholic, for the Department had been created in response to a successful campaign to create separate Catholic teaching programmes in controversial subjects” (Catholics of Ulster, xxxvii). 32. For a more jaundiced view of the Derry Diocesan Pilgrimage, see McCann, Dear God, 5.



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germs.”33 Heaney hadn’t yet made the boundary separation between natural and supernatural. Heaney has elaborated further: “I believed utterly in doing the good work, I believed that a cure was possible, although I had no trust in the inevitability of [a] cure or in the necessarily divine cause of it”—which hints at a belief in what might crudely be called the power of positive, maybe even magical, thinking. Being there, serving Mass and helping the sick “was both routine and eerie, and I was susceptible, of course, to the surge of crowd emotions, the big choral responses to the rosary, the hymns, and the druggy fragrance of flowers and candles in the grotto itself. You could think of it as either ‘utterly empty’ or ‘utterly a source’” (SS 287–89). But it certainly wasn’t “utterly empty” (a phrase from a later poem) at the time even if, again, the reference here to his having “no trust” in the “necessarily divine cause” of any of the cures indicates a surprising detachment from the experience. More likely, it may have been simply Heaney’s awareness of the frequent admonition by Catholic clergy not to expect miracles to happen. His basic inclination, however, seems to have been more in sympathy with, rather than antagonistic toward, the pieties of the time. In much the same way as the Lourdes foray, during his time at Queen’s Heaney also made three pilgrimages to Lough Derg, on the surface an extraordinary number, though he claims that two of them were “endof-term expeditions.”34 Part of his motivation was simple curiosity, a curiosity driven by “hearing about Lough Derg since I was a youngster, about people in earlier generations doing ‘the black fast.’ Apparently they would walk the whole way to Donegal, keeping going on black tea and dry bread . . . [so] I set off in a spirit that Chaucer would have recognized—for the company and the outing, just to see what was entailed.” The Chaucerian whiff came from the “flirtatious aspect” of the pilgrimage (begun by bus), sponsored by the university’s Catholic chaplaincy, being comprised of young men and women (all the products of single-sex schools) get33. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 286. 34. In terms of the number of Lough Derg pilgrimages in all, Michael Parker gives three, Daniel Tobin four. Both of them were in touch with Heaney about the matter.

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ting an early taste of relative independence. “But,” Heaney quickly adds, “there was a religious dimension too. The fasting and the all-night vigil had the attraction of the unknown” (SS 232). It isn’t clear that there was any immediate family tradition of making this pilgrimage to a place famously associated with St. Patrick for over a thousand years—which in a way emphasizes both Heaney’s personal religious interest and the practices of a newly burgeoning Catholic culture aided by the travel conveniences of modern life. When Dennis O’Driscoll asked Heaney if he had taken the pilgrimage seriously, the poet explained, “This was the late 1950s, when religion was still a pervasive element, so a cheery atmosphere didn’t mean an unserious engagement. Lough Derg was a ritual, it entailed the fulfillment of set exercises, the repetition of prayers, keeping a fast, going round the basilica and ‘the beds’ in your bare feet.” Then Heaney makes a nice distinction, almost an assertion of his Northern canniness: the pilgrim didn’t need to be “absorbed in sacred reverie” because, “technically speaking, there was a plenary indulgence [defined as “a complete remission of all temporal punishment due to sin”] to be gained by [just] completing the pilgrimage.” The offhand comment made in the early 2000s is very reminiscent of the spirit of the 1950s when Catholic priests themselves often had to seek advice from Canon Law experts on how the merits granted by the various indulgences were to be accurately calculated.35 Above all, Heaney enjoyed the challenge and the “definite catharsis” that followed. That feeling was likely a powerful one that would bind a person more to the mystery of faith and a sense of the numinous. As Heaney observed in an essay in the late 1970s, “We never felt ourselves alone in the universe for a second.”36 God, one’s guardian angel (who, in the words of the Catechism, “prays for us, protects us from harm, and helps us to do good”), and the afterlife were almost palpably present: what one needed to do was make sure that one’s papers were in order should the deity suddenly beckon. A Seamus Heaney who had had a brief experience of working in the British Passport Office in London in 1962 knew a thing or two about such matters. 35. See Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, 33. 36. Quoted in Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 237.



Chosen Peoples 43

In spite of his treks to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, however, and his awareness of other places associated with the Irish national saint, the latter was never immediately real for Heaney—a plaster or maybe a stone saint so to speak—and his guardian angel (“a tall winged strider at my elbow, like something out of a Renaissance painting” and “a real imagined presence”) trumped the deity. But he “did imagine a realm of light up there, a worldceiling that was a heaven-floor, a loft full of distance and translucence where He [Jesus] had absconded.” Heaney connects these images “synaesthetically, with the shine inside the ciborium, the reflection of the packed communion wafers on the gold plate lining. There was definite manna in the chill and sheen and ring of those holy vessels.” If there is a degree of specificity here that suggests a more than usual preoccupation with such matters, there is also, I think, an intimation that for him it will always be the “shook foil” of the earthly that points to the substantive heaven beyond (SS 233–34). And yet, Heaney also took an interest in the interior life to a surprising degree for someone who had no intention of becoming a priest: “I read, as an undergraduate, in a pious spirit, Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton,” a collection of spiritual meditations and aphorisms that at the time was like a breath of fresh air, relatively free of the usual saccharine language of such manuals, though with hindsight one can see how much conventional Catholicism was encrypted in it. Later, according to Henry Hart, Heaney’s “meditations bear the influence of Merton’s enlightened pacifism, social commitment, and affirmation of love.”37 Heaney also studied Evelyn Underhill’s classic Mysticism (1911), again giving him access to a religious and imaginative world beyond the routines of regular devotional life and well beyond the confines of Catholicism, though the author herself, an Anglo-Catholic, aspired to join the Roman Church and was only prevented by her husband’s vociferous opposition. In Underhill, he learned about the joys of the mystical life but also the dark night of the soul and the fact that the mystics, whatever their religious tradition, “come back to us from an encounter with life’s 37. Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 34–35.

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most august secret . . . filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance . . . urge them to pass on their revelation . . . the old demand of the dim-sighted and incredulous. . . . But they cannot . . . only fragments of the Symbolic Vision.”38 Pursuit of the mystical too was in line with the general culture of asceticism of the time (very much present in Eliot), the little penances one imposed on oneself during Lent and other occasions, the putting up with the inconveniences of headaches and toothaches rather than seeking immediate medicinal remedy for them. It was a culture of “offering things up,” and, after all, one’s saintly heroes had endured much more grueling deprivations. There was a strong pull in the opposite direction also, of course. It appears to have been at Queen’s that Heaney first read Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the time, he must have been quite familiar with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of Irish writers in conflict with a restrictive Catholic Church and opting for exile—thus even Protestant-born Seán O’Casey with his regular fulminations against the Catholic Church from his home in England—or lonely opposition (as with Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor) as a remedy from its oppressions. So established was the clerisy of Irish writers being at odds with Catholicism that it would almost have been seen as heretical had any of them professed to think otherwise. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish between Heaney’s own early views on this matter and those of Joyce. However definitive the latter’s semi-autobiographical portrayal of loss of faith may be, and however much Portrait was to serve as a stimulus and precedent for Heaney’s religious questioning in the future, it is clear that the two writers grew up in profoundly different generations. Heaney’s Catholicism was challenged—and in some ways reinforced—by, as was noted earlier, an often-hostile surrounding Protestantism, producing a different reaction from Joyce’s internal protest against the pervasive Catholicism of Dublin. The international Catholic Church’s position too had changed in significant ways over the intervening decades, made all the more attractive by the many literary converts it had won to 38. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Dover, 2002), 450.



Chosen Peoples 45

itself in the English-speaking world as well as in France, once the “eldest daughter of the Church” but deeply divided on the issue since the days of Voltaire in the eighteenth century. Heaney would later refer to Jacques Maritain’s work as “intellectual figure skating” and complain about its unhelpfulness for an aspiring poet, but his doing so makes it obvious that he himself had engaged with it at one point—nor could the glacial church of Joyce’s youth ever have been accused of “figure skating.”39 Reading Merton too would have extended his sympathies for the depth of the tradition and made him aware that even Joyce’s inheritance could lead one to the church—as it had Merton—as much as it might lead one away from it. Moreover, commenting on the “gradual secularization of literature during at least the last three hundred years” in his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” Eliot had exempted Joyce from the current phase “of those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism,” not in the least because Eliot thought him still a Catholic, but because Joyce’s works were saturated with faithful depictions of his abandoned religion.40 More significantly, perhaps, Heaney’s mature respect for his own parents’ simple piety—in marked contrast to Joyce’s rebellion against that of his mother and alliance with his father’s periodic mockery of the institution—meant that any rupture in his ecclesial affiliations would be delayed and would likely take a less openly oppositional form. As late as 2009, literary critic and Heaney friend Terry Eagleton, now an unbeliever, still felt a similar need to defend “my own [Catholic] forebears, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”41 There was a tradition too, emphasized again and again in church sermons and aided by St. Paul’s injunctions, that the so-called exalted and wise of this world were spiritually inferior to the humble and unlearned, even if ecclesiastics themselves frequently condescended to their less learned congregants; it was a tradition not without tangential effect on a Heaney ever skeptical of academic and artistic pretensions. 39. Heaney, “Poet as a Christian,” 603. 40. Eliot, Selected Prose, 100. 41. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 34.

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Heaney reinforces the point of his religious fidelity in his comment that he didn’t drink until he was in his early twenties, a claim confirmed by Seamus Deane who was surprised (“wonder of wonders”) when his old friend turned up at Cambridge University with his wife, Marie, in 1965 bearing a celebratory bottle of whiskey.42 As a member of a total abstinence society, Heaney explained to O’Driscoll, “You said a prayer every day promising to abstain from drink for life—for the greater glory of God, in order ‘to give good example, to practice self-denial and for the conversion of excessive drinkers’” (SS 48). Once again, the specificity here of the benefits and exact purposes is striking, almost like that of an insurance broker and a reminder of the pre–Vatican II ideology of Catholicism neatly summed up by novelist David Lodge writing about students at a Catholic chaplaincy at an English university in the early 1950s: religion “is their insurance—the Catholic Church offering the very best, the most comprehensive cover—and weekday mass is by way of being an extra premium, enhancing the value of the policy.”43 The particular temperance group to which Heaney belonged had been founded by the Jesuits in the early part of the century, but was in continuity with the work of the Capuchin priest Fr. Theobald Matthew in the previous one, and represented a long-standing effort to overcome this particular Irish vice in the names both of piety and respectability. A “good” boy back then would have survived as a nondrinker for about the same length of time as Heaney did. But tensions were slowly brewing between Heaney’s secular studies and the Catholic routines of his past and present. Heaney explains the situation concisely: The literate undergraduate at Queen’s University in my day found himself at one moment a member of the Chaplaincy Sodality, being urged to become a daily communicant; and at another moment, in another room on the campus, he was analyzing the way Joyce employs the idea and ritual of the Eucharist as a blasphemous analogue for the creative process. He found himself computing, classifying and confessing sins of impurity but at another level and at another time he was recogniz42. Seamus Deane, “The Famous Seamus,” New Yorker, March 20, 2000, 64. 43. David Lodge, Souls and Bodies (New York: Penguin, 1990), 16–17.



Chosen Peoples 47 ing the powerful wisdoms offered by D. H. Lawrence’s presentation of sexuality.44

In a more humorous account of his dilemmas given in a lecture at Queen’s in 1983, Heaney noted that “far from discussing the Victorian loss of faith, I was driving my mother to evening devotions in the ‘chapel’ or looking for my name in the list of ‘adorers’ at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Far from the melodies of courtly love, I was . . . trying to master a way of coaxing a [teacher] training college student into the back of our Austin Sixteen. And far, far from Lawrence’s phallic candour, finding myself subsequently confessing sins of immodest and immoderate embraces.”45 The Joyce-Lawrence comment of 1978 gets canceled out in the lecture of five years later, suggesting that even a groping Heaney—in every sense of the word—remained quite religious while at the university. Michael Parker observes a possible “inching away” from such religiously inscribed inhibitions in an early trial poem and in a short story that deals with an abortion (“‘risky’ territory”), but concludes that “Catholic morality is still in evidence.”46 After all, as a budding artist, Heaney was “already a slave to Hopkins,” writing his first poems “in Hopkins-speak” (SS 36, 37). Seamus Heaney graduated from Queen’s in 1961 with a first-class degree. He turned down the opportunity of attending Oxford for advanced studies in English literature because he felt the place was too much beyond his social ken (and kin), though his friend Seamus Deane went off to Cambridge. Wanting to contribute financially to his parents and siblings, Heaney began his studies at a local Catholic teacher-training college with such a vocation in mind and at a time when the word “called” was still used in regard to this important lay profession. While there, he wrote an essay titled “Modern, Functional, Beautiful” on the new college chapel for its Newman journal.47 Looking back, Heaney would identify himself as “a child of the fifties” who was “well and truly formed by 1963.” So when, according to Philip 44. Heaney, “Poet as a Christian,” 604. 45. Quoted in Parker, Seamus Heaney, 21–22. 46. Ibid., 25–26. 47. Heaney, “Modern, Functional, Beautiful,” Newman (Michelmas Term), 1961, 9–11.

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Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis,” “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixtythree / (Which was rather late for me)— / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP,” Heaney too was already (though just barely) on the older side of the divide.48 It may have been true that “all at once the quarrel sank: / Everyone felt the same,” but in regard to the more personal acceptance of this Catholic ethos in relation to sexual matters, Heaney confessed that he had come from “a time when everybody was provided with their own inner priest” (SS 46). Even his comment that during his short stint at the Passport Office a year earlier “I got the feel of London as the sixties were starting to swing,” has the resonance of a person from an older generation stumbling wide-eyed upon a new dispensation (SS 419). Still, he was aware more locally of the changing times as depicted in a John Montague poem “The Siege of Mullingar, 1963” about a Fleadh Cheoil (music festival) with its Yeatsian refrain that “Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone, / A myth of O’Connor and O’Faolain.”49 Besides, who among the informed back then hadn’t read J. P. Donleavy’s outrageous novel The Ginger Man about postwar bohemian Dublin in the age of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, first published in 1955, officially banned in Ireland until 1968, but readily available in the North long before that? In any case, although it might be noticed that Heaney’s pronouncements about the stages of his early development are sometimes contradictory, the minor discrepancies are not, I think, in any way significant. Read literally, his statement, for example, that “what happened to me in the first three decades of my life wasn’t quite a matter of personal decision, it was more or less typical and generational” takes Heaney to 1969, far beyond his college days and in fact to a time when he was himself a lecturer at Queen’s (SS 42). I therefore take it to mean that he more or less went with the cultural flow, his gradual disengagements from religious practices—likely beginning in the early sixties after his graduation—very similar to those happening all around him and still steeped in a keen awareness of departing from the pieties of the recent past. “Do you still 48. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 146. 49. Quoted in Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957– 1973 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 142.



Chosen Peoples 49

go to Mass?” would have been a routine question among younger Catholics in the pubs and dancehalls of the time, not at all implying an unusual piety or any kind of censure of those who did or didn’t go. But trouble—and specifically the “Troubles”—were on the way, even if few anticipated them at the time. Already, there was a sense of change in the air in the early 1960s, heralded not least by the arrival of the Beatles as Larkin noted (Paul McCartney himself remembers wishing that he lived in simpler times as “a Catholic lorry driver” with a “firm faith”); it was also the age of the irreverent and anarchic Monty Python’s Flying Circus.50 In a more narrowly religious sense—though extensively reported at the time—1962 was the year in which the Anglican bishop of Woolich, who had recently defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the famous trial over its alleged obscenity, got things all shaken up when he published Honest to God.51 There the progressive prelate offered a popular version of the findings of scholarly biblical criticism of the previous hundred years, gaining widespread attention with his calling of the physical ascension of Jesus into question and introducing new theological thinking that seemed to cross the traditional denominational boundaries. Bishop Robinson remained a clergyman, but his volley was an indication of upheavals to come in the world of belief in which Heaney had been so well formed. And even in the highly unlikely event that Heaney missed the Honest to God controversy—his future friend Dominican Fr. Herbert McCabe’s response had been included in the volume of critical essays that followed—the earlier-mentioned Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was in the wings. Although he had died in 1955, de Chardin’s history and ideas were about to come on stage intellectually as perhaps the first of the mid-century disrupters within the church, a wholly new occurrence at the time.52 Most of all, the new papacy of John XXIII and the Vatican 50. Quoted in Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 174–75. 51. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963). See also Callum C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 186, 190. 52. See David L. Edwards, ed., The “Honest to God” Debate: Some Reactions to the Book “Honest to God” (London: SCM, 1963), 165–80. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper, 1957). In her Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, Gail McConnell also thinks it likely that Heaney came across de Chardin’s writings through the chaplaincy and that their “scientific sacramentalism” had a specific influence on the “naturalist” poet (115).

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Council he initiated would eventually shake many of the foundations of Heaney’s and Ireland’s (North and South) religious practice. James Donnelly has rightly described the Irish Church on the eve of Vatican II as “authoritarian in its governance” and “Manichaean in its general approach to the modern world,” but it was the very idea that there could be change at all that was both exciting and upsetting.53 Louise Fuller sums up the transition by noting a small part of it, one that had especially engaged Heaney’s pragmatic religious interests: “The cult of indulgences was de-emphasised from 1967, and thus something that had been a quintessential feature of Catholic life in the 1950s and into the 1960s was scarcely heard of from the 1970s,” which must have been a rather disconcerting side effect for those who had racked up impressive remission numbers in earlier years. Fuller also mentions the disappearance of processions, “if only for reasons of the traffic congestion that they could precipitate,” a nice example of the confrontation of old piety with new prosperity. Irish Catholic culture was shedding its ancient and recent pasts as it became more “sophisticated.”54 When the beautiful, internationally acclaimed Irish soprano and harpist Mary O’Hara, an inspirer of the Clancy Brothers and the folk scene of the 1960s, became a widow at twenty-seven and entered an enclosed English Benedictine convent in 1962, her decision was lauded as exemplary; just four years later, on January 1, 1966, Irish non-enclosed nuns began sporting new habits designed for them by high-fashion couturier Sybil Connolly, marking the disappearance of one of the most iconic religious sights throughout the world. If old and new were still in interactive balance, this was also the beginning of what in retrospect looked like “the long slide / To happiness, endlessly,” where the latter no longer referred to the promised joys of the next life but the forbidden pleasures of this one.55 It was during this time of change, of anxiety, of possibility and excitement, that Seamus Heaney would begin his career as a poet. 53. Quoted in Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, 733. 54. Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, 226. 55. Larkin, “High Windows,” in Collected Poems, 129.

Chapter 3

S acred and S ec u lar in t he S i x t ies

T

he s tat e of t he Roman Catholic Church in the early 1960s when Heaney first seriously set himself the task of becoming a poet—by now he was a lecturer in English at St. Joseph’s College of Education in Belfast, his most recent alma mater—was tremendously hopeful. As noted briefly in chapter 1, the many converts to the church throughout the first half of the twentieth century had brought with them to the institution an air of contemporary rather than merely ancient intellectual respectability. Now the election of the first Catholic American president and the contemporaneous innovative theological work of American Jesuit John Courtney Murray on the relations between church and secular state had rendered Rome a less ominous presence in modern political life than it had been in even the very recent past. Most of all, the outward-looking papacy of John XXIII, the upcoming Vatican Council (the first in almost a hundred years), and the general emphasis on ecumenism and reconciliation between the Christian denominations promised a relaxation and even a possible end to chronic hostilities. No Catholic at the time was unaware of this new mood, least of all a writer with strong ties to the faith. In Ireland itself, meanwhile, on the highly significant date of July 12 (Orange Day) in 1963, the cordial and unprecedented meeting of Irish taoiseach Seán Lemass and Northern Ireland’s prime minister, Lord Terence O’Neill (an Anglican and an Etonian, but one whose name suggested tangled links with the Catholic clan that once ruled the province), gave



51

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promise of better relations and perhaps an eventual reconciliation between the two Irelands and was an event of sufficient international interest to place Lemass on the cover of Time magazine.1 A commentator looking back from 1984 titled his book about Ireland in the 1960s The Best of Decades.2 It is worth examining each of these changes in some detail, as nearly all of them have become so tarnished in the intervening years as to have left their once-positive interpretations well-nigh forgotten. First of all, the conversions of prominent people to the Roman church—as opposed to those thousands who converted annually for purposes of marriage to a Catholic—were enormously encouraging; indeed, often the self-reported circumstances of their crossing over seemed to confirm a quasi-divine intervention on their behalf.3 Seamus Heaney was well aware of the phenomenon and was both an admirer and friend of one of the most prominent of them, Robert Lowell, and a reader of several others. The wave of conversions in the 1940s and ’50s—American novelist and convert Walker Percy saw it as representing “a tremendous spiritual awakening or hunger . . . in the postwar generation”—took its remote stimulus from similar happenings in England and France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 From England there was the precedent of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement (praised by Heaney for its “immense intellect and emotional stamina”), of his disciple Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Henry Edward Manning (like Newman, later to become a cardinal), of William George Ward (writer and publisher Maisie Ward’s grandfather, who famously declared, “I should like a new Papal Bull every morning with my Times at breakfast”), and more recently of G. K. Chesterton, Eric Gill, Waugh, Ronald Knox, David Jones, the priest philosopher-historian Frederick C. Copleston, and Graham Greene.5 Ulster’s Eton- and Cambridge-educated Sir Shane 1. Time, July 12, 1963. 2. See Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, 537. 3. See, for example, the cases of Thomas Merton and Richard Gilman in Kieran Quinlan, Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 42. 4. Quoted in Quinlan, Walker Percy, 36. 5. Seamus Heaney, National Library of Ireland Manuscripts Collection, MS 49/493/142/ notebook (no page numbers).



Sacred and Secular in the Sixties 53

Leslie (a cousin of Winston Churchill), owner of the Lough Derg property in County Donegal, had made that Newman-inspired journey in 1907, as had Dublin’s notorious Oscar Wilde on his deathbed some seven years earlier.6 From France there was the influence of the Catholic revival (which involved conversions from other faiths to Catholicism, but more often a rediscovery of the church by the disaffected, anticlerical, and agnostic nominal Catholics) expressed in the works of J. K. Huysmans, Charles Péguy, Leon Bloy, Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, and, above all, the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. The new American postwar wave to which Percy was referring—Dorothy Day of Catholic Worker fame had converted in the 1930s and was an inspiration to many of those who followed—included Lowell, Henry Ford II, Clare Booth Luce, Jean Stafford, Thomas Merton, Avery Dulles (son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and later a Jesuit and a cardinal), Frances Parkinson Keyes, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon. The Canadian New Critic and media guru Marshall McLuhan, a familiar name in the 1960s and ’70s, had converted in 1937. Merton was probably the most widely known because of his 1948 autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, a compelling account of his rather bohemian life in New York (after being sent down in disgrace from Cambridge University for a sexual misdemeanor), his conversion, and subsequent entry into a silent Trappist monastery in Kentucky; it became a bestseller in the UK also in an edition edited by Waugh and commended by Greene with the Hopkins phrase Elected Silence as its new title, the one with which Heaney would have been familiar.7 In postwar England, meanwhile, Douglas Hyde, a prominent journalist in the British Communist party, had joined the long procession 6. See Peggy O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 81–82. In his internationally acclaimed one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar in the 1960s, the well-known Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóir, widely known to be gay, would always close with an account of Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism. 7. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1948); British edition edited by Evelyn Waugh as Elected Silence: The Autobiography of Thomas Merton (London: Hollis and Carter, 1949).

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to the baptismal font and published his story, I Believed, to enthusiastic applause.8 In the 1950s, Muriel Spark (of Jewish and Presbyterian background), the eccentric poet Edith Sitwell, and the actor Alec Guinness were drawn in. In France, even Gertrude Stein’s erstwhile companion Alice B. Toklas joined the ranks of the converted, while Simone Weil, though Jewish and unconverted and dead by 1943, remained of great interest to many writers, including Heaney, for her sympathetic Catholic leanings and her widely known religious tutelage by a French Dominican priest.9 Many of these conversion stories were popularized in Fr. John A. O’Brien’s The Road to Damascus, the first of a series of volumes in which he collected accounts by such notables as Luce, Keyes, Waugh, Alexis Carrel (Nobel laureate in physiology and author of Man, the Unknown in 1935), and several others.10 But they became known more often through teachers, clergy (packaged like the earlier spiritual nosegays from the saints), and Irish, British, and American newspapers and magazines that kept track of such happenings because they were of interest to their readers. It was known too that Monsignor Fulton Sheen (later bishop), a philosophy professor at the Catholic University of America, who was emerging as one of the first major radio and television evangelists, was bringing Catholic thought into popular dialogue with modern thinkers such as Freud and the European existentialists, even if the church’s stance in relation to them was still corrective and triumphalist. To the more recherché inquirer, there was the case of the late tormented and oracular Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, not at all a professing Catholic but baptized as such, who had been surrounded— as he wistfully acknowledged—by a cadre of ardent lay Catholic followers 8. Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (London: Heinemann, 1949). 9. Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 197. See John F. Desmond’s chapter on Weil in his Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009), 19–32. 10. John A. O’Brien, The Road to Damascus: The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Fifteen Converts to Catholicism (New York: Doubleday, 1949); Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Harper, 1939).



Sacred and Secular in the Sixties 55

and several priests, part of the Dominican community at the university, many of whom subsequently decamped to Oxford bearing his intellectual remains. The onetime restless protégé of arch atheist Bertrand Russell had passed from the cavern of logical positivism to the cathedral of speculative metaphysics with his theory of “language games,” where the need for the empirical verification of all statements was no longer the requirement of the day. Overall, there was a new sense of intellectual engagement, a realization that Catholics could and should have thoughtful and informed views on contemporary issues. Catholic-born Flannery O’Connor found much-needed inspiration in these writer converts, who were a welcome alternative to the excessive devotionalism of her neighborhood church in Savannah, Georgia. It was an encouraging time indeed even in hidebound and insular Ireland where, circumstantially, there were very few local converts: there too, similar to O’Connor in America, educated and thoughtful cradle Catholics who had never deviated from orthodoxy were affected, being renewed in their rather dull routines by the fresh wave of international enthusiasm. The fact that these intellectual trends were taking place outside of pious Ireland probably gave them a certain cachet there that they would not have had were they to have originated locally. This conversion phenomenon too, at least in its “celebrity” mode, seemed confined almost exclusively to Catholicism with its arcane rites and ancient churches and intricate doctrines, rarely if ever to Methodism or Presbyterianism. Anglicanism, particularly at the “high church” end, was seen as a kind of half-way house to Catholicism (J. R. R. Tolkien was irritated and saddened that his friend and Oxford colleague C. S. Lewis, born in Belfast, never completed the journey), one at which T. S. Eliot had arrived in 1927 and for which W. H. Auden had set out in 1940 (“After Marx and the Thirties, it was New York and Chester and God,” as Heaney teased decades later).11 In the new age of anxiety, many of the converts, of course, were actually fleeing the confusions of modernity for the certainties of Catholicism, but they were also bringing the frisson of their abandoned 11. Heaney, “Ten Glosses,” in Electric Light (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 55. See Joseph Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (Charlotte, N.C.: Saint Benedict Press, 2013), 58.

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worlds with them as well as drawing fresh attention to the wonders of what had become all too familiar for regular churchgoers. There were, then, many worthy “new” Catholics that an engaged writer could identify with—Merton among them—and, in poetry, it was the age of Robert Lowell. “All through the sixties I was reading Lowell,” Heaney has noted (SS 217). Influenced by his mentor Allen Tate, Lowell had converted with absolutely frightening ardor in the early 1940s to what he had once described, with Boston Brahmin hauteur, as “the religion of Irish servant girls,” and published two volumes under its influence. Although he had reverted to Episcopalianism by the time Heaney first read him, he was still commonly thought of as a “Catholic poet,” even if later Heaney would refer to Lowell’s “Protestant searching for a role in the world.”12 The sometimes difficult combination of Cotton Mather Calvinism and Dantesque Catholicism in Lowell’s poems—what Phillip Hobsbaum, founder of the “Belfast Group” at Queen’s in 1963 to which Heaney belonged, described as “a Catholic gloss” on an “essentially New England puritanism”—may have been more congenial to a Heaney familiar with both traditions in their Ulster embodiment than would have been the case with a writer in Dublin.13 Lowell too, as Heaney commented in 1986, had made a “swerve” into the Roman Catholic Church that was a “betrayal” of his ancestors’ faith and a declaration of his religious independence.14 In all, the conversion phenomenon, especially as it became fairly routine in the artistic world, provided at least a marginal reason for intellectually energetic young Catholics to stay within the fold.15 12. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: Norton, 1994), 91. In A Reader’s Guide to Robert Lowell (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), a volume dedicated to “Seamus and Marie Heaney, his [Lowell’s] friends in Ireland,” Philip Hobsbaum, founder of the “Belfast Group” at Queen’s, quotes Jean Stafford on how Lowell pestered the priest who had converted him with “abstruse exegeses of the sacraments as they might be applied to the modus vivendi of the New England transcendentalists” (15). See also Michael Cavanagh’s chapter on Heaney and Lowell in his Professing Poetry, as well as Heaney, “Interview with Seamus Heaney,” by Helen O’Shea, Quadrant 25 (1981): 13 (quoted in Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 123). 13. Hobsbaum, Reader’s Guide to Robert Lowell, 15. 14. Heaney, “Lowell’s Command,” in The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 132. 15. In the 1960s too, the British broadcaster and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge’s prolonged dangling (which included several visits to Trappist monasteries) before becoming a Roman



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Next, President John F. Kennedy’s reputation at the time—especially in Catholic Ireland—was of a true believer who would quietly affirm his faith while remaining independent of ecclesiastical manipulation. It was often reported that he would faithfully read his missal whenever public duty made it impossible for him to attend Sunday Mass, and his famous phrase of “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,” whatever its actual origin, was attributed to his Catholic sense of service, which received concrete expression in his founding of the Peace Corps in 1961. Over the last several decades, the endless revelations of Kennedy’s insatiable philandering have tarnished that naïve image—apparently shared by most Irish Americans at the time—even as his popularity and political reputation have grown during that same period. But as one of the most prominent faces of Catholicism in the early 1960s, Kennedy was appealing in all the glamor of Camelot. The war in Vietnam had not yet escalated, and such as it was, to many in Ireland it simply looked like a defense of the Catholic regime of President Diem against Godless Communism, a defense rightly assisted by the new American president and approved of by New York’s Cardinal Spellman, friend of popes and grandson of an Irish immigrant. Kennedy even seemed to be especially responsive to the literary world. Without question, Kennedy made it easier to be Catholic and modern. Fr. Murray’s work, meanwhile, legitimized a shift in the Catholic view of the modern state, representing a willingness to accept diversity and democratic pluralism as opposed to the never-changing tenets of a traditional hegemonic faith. The Vatican Council that came in the wake of all this looked as though it too would make changes that would allow Catholics to accommodate their faith to the positive needs of a modern society, not least in the realm of marital sexual relations; after all, the inventor of “the pill,” Dr. John Rock, was himself a faithful Catholic. Among the educated laity, European theologians such as Hans Küng, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeekx, many of them published by a Sheed and Ward imprint that Catholic was a regular topic in religious newspapers and a matter of much amusement to his erstwhile associates. Muggeridge was a champion of Mother Teresa, a critic of Monty Python, and an opponent of the sexual revolution, including use of “the pill.”

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had been introducing Catholic thinkers since the 1920s, were close to being household names (and it was a meaningful accomplishment to be able to pronounce “Schillebeekx” with panache). The details of liturgical innovations were enthusiastically discussed in major newspapers, while the liberalism of the Vatican-upsetting 1966 Dutch Catechism, a controversial presentation of the basic tenets of Catholicism originally sanctioned by the Dutch hierarchy and aimed at making “the message of Jesus Christ sound as new as it is,” was a subject of eager conversation far beyond ecclesiastical confines.16 Reports of cardinals and bishops disagreeing among themselves on church matters regularly appeared in the newspapers, showing fissures in the once seamless veil of doctrinal authority. Soon all this fermentation would morph into the more perilous brew of Rahner’s “anonymous Christian” (sincere, conscience-based belief—or even unbelief—is sufficient for salvation), interest in the Nazi-martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity,” and the Hassidic Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” depiction of the relationship between person and person and person and God. A sense of a new religious freedom was in the air, and it mattered immensely in Ireland precisely because the country had for so long been under the church’s dominance. It would be quite a while before Irish political scientist Tom Garvin would refer to Vatican II as attempting “to liberalise the unliberalisable.”17 So, with a more positive view of the church in the ascendant, for a time it looked as though Catholic-Protestant relations in Northern Ireland, with the help of a little goodwill on both sides, were bound to improve. Ironically, however, the very success of the meeting between Lemass and O’Neill would aggravate fears on the part of Ulster Protestants of a United Ireland dominated by Rome and at least indirectly lead to the horrific conflict of the late 1960s and subsequent decades. Meanwhile, the new experiments in the liturgy—altars reversed so that priests could face the people rather than the tabernacle, English substituted for 16. See, for example, John Broderick’s “Letter from Rome,” in his Stimulus of Sin: Selected Writings of John Broderick, ed. Madeline Kingston (Dublin: Lilliput, 2007), 186–201; A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). 17. Garvin, Preventing the Future, 182.



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Latin, a Sunday attendance obligation redesigned to include Saturday, fish on Friday no longer required—far from increasing fervor, often led to dismay, disenchantment, laxity, and eventually, especially in the case of younger people, nonattendance. The most distinctive expressions of Catholicism—which were not always its most Christian elements—had disappeared almost overnight. I n t hese e xci t ing but also confusing circumstances, Seamus Heaney was initially, if cautiously, hopeful that the divide in Northern Ireland would heal and thus bring an end to what he would later refer to as the “demeaning” social and political conditions of Catholic life there. It is this sense of impending social change (together with a measure of self-restraint about the insults to Catholics) that may explain why in his first volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966)—partly the fruit of Heaney’s participation in Hobsbaum’s “Belfast Group” where the aspiring poets who met regularly to critique one another’s efforts came from both communities—the sectarian divide was a matter dealt with explicitly in only one of these poems. While Heaney was initially very aware of other Group members being Protestants with a schooling different from, and perhaps more conventionally “finished,” than his own, the idea at the time was of educated people of goodwill coming together. Of course, Heaney’s first and most famous metaphor for his activities would be that of digging, an exercise that inevitably uncovers ugly shards and rotted potatoes, as well as unexpected treasures and beauties, the latter too often mired with long or recently buried horrors. In any case, “Docker” (an early trial poem that Heaney later referred to as his “urban foray”), turned out to be a foreshadowing of things to come in its carefully constructed description of a stereotypical Protestant shipyard worker (though dockers as such tended to be Catholic). Sitting in the corner of a pub “staring at his drink,” the man’s “Cowling plated forehead” and his “sledgehead jaw” bode trouble:18

18. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 79.

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Sacred and Secular in the Sixties That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic— Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again, The only Roman collar he tolerates Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter. Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets; God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

The poem itself is carefully structured with its own rivets, its images “bang[ed] home” with precision and rigidity, the “Roman collar” reference a nice final tap. It has been described as an “angry” poem, one that captures the intolerance toward Catholics, the kind of self-righteous stubbornness that the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement will have to face when “that kind of thing” starts up again in the late 1960s. Heaney later acknowledged that while he “wasn’t consciously writing from a Catholic perspective . . . undoubtedly the work was affected by the bonding.” Interestingly too, since Heaney has described the poem as being “about a bigoted, dangerous man I used to see in the corner of a local pub,” it also brings to mind the Citizen of Joyce’s Ulysses, an equally blinkered nationalist of another persuasion who would have his counterparts too in the Troubles to come.19 Elsewhere Heaney declares that July 12 was never a mere “folk festival” to him (SS 67). But in the mid-sixties, it was very close to becoming such, at least as reported on RTÉ, the television network in the Republic. Even BBC Northern Ireland was trying to balance its exclusively “loyalist” programming to appeal to a more inclusive audience, though without explicitly identifying nationalist themes.20 For a while, the early protests—an apt word—of the Reverend Ian Paisley, at home in Northern Ireland and abroad in Rome itself, that the Protestant cause was in danger were frequently presented as matters of amusement and derision unlikely to halt the tide of history. In retrospect, Catholics in the North— 19. Quoted in James Campbell, “The Mythmaker,” Guardian, May 26, 2006. 20. See Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 71–80.



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about whose on-the-ground situation Catholics in the South knew remarkably little unless they had relatives there—may not have been quite as persuaded that all would be well in a future peaceable kingdom of ecumenical fraternization. Speaking more generally and acknowledging that he does not see himself as representing all Ulster Catholics, Heaney clarifies his stance: “It would be untrue to say that I was without a Catholic self-awareness. You didn’t grow up in Lord Brookeborough’s Ulster without developing a them-and-us mindset.” He denies any prejudice in his home, but asserts that “we knew and were given to know that Ulster wasn’t meant for us, that the British connection was meant to displace us.” Heaney lists “the discrimination in housing and in professions such as medicine, the paramilitary nature of the RUC and B-Special Constabulary.” Since poetry requires “truth to your feelings,” his own early poems “are true to my spots—maculate conceptions, if you like” (SS 66). In that sense, Heaney would never lose a certain tribal sympathy with traditional Irish Catholicism’s ethos. It was a kind of “parish piety,” and, after all, he had gotten his first passport to go to Lourdes “of all places” (SS 81, 86). For much of his life, he would see Catholicism from the inside rather than the outside, and even in his later going outside of it there would be little element of overt rebellion. But if Heaney’s early Catholicism was thus reinforced by the very fact of its local condemnation and marginalization, apart from “Docker”—which was more cultural than strictly religious—the topic was only tangentially the focus of Heaney’s first volume. St. Colmcille appears in passing, and St. Francis has a poem all to himself (of which more later), but the only other “Catholic” contemporary poem, “Poor Women in a City Church,” seems like a dutiful exercise in form as the “Old dough-faced women with black shawls” pray with “whispered calls” that (Hopkinslike) “Take wing up to the Holy Name” and cause the “blue flame” of the candles to “Mince and caper.” The claim that “Golden shrines, altar lace, / Marble columns and cool shadows / Still them” serves to place the pious women within a world where it is the tangible objects that engage their attention rather than the unknown reality they purport to signify.21 Still, 21. Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 29.

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they exist in what Heaney too regards as a sacred space, one to which he had accompanied his mother on numerous occasions, not “the cave of gloom” glimpsed by an earlier Louis MacNeice in his 1931 “Belfast” when walking by “so buoyantly and glib.”22 According to Heaney, “Mid-Term Break,” composed in 1963 close to the anniversary of his baby brother Christopher’s accidental death ten years earlier while the author was away at boarding school, was one of the first poems that “confirmed” him in his vocation. It is also the first significant text to touch on an intimate aspect of the religious world, the confrontation with one of life’s absolutes that has universal implications. But here the most striking note is one of numbed reaction (probably more than detachment), with a minimal religious reference on an occasion that often summons an intense one: “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.” The focus then turns to the uncharacteristic crying of his father, the “angry” sighing of his mother, the condolences of family friends. It is a “corpse” that arrives in the ambulance from the hospital, “Snowdrops / And candles” that “soothed the bedside” (OG 11). Religious imagery is totally absent apart from the school bells of the second line that “knell” the hours of the passing day and foreshadow the passing of the little boy. We now know from Heaney himself that on the occasion he was inclined to cry but that his father urged him, as the eldest in the family, to show strength before his siblings. So, perhaps, what emotion there is—and the title suggests that there is much of it—is constrained within the mesh of metre (poet Christian Wiman once described this formalism as a kind of “diving shell” into experience). Meanwhile, no more is present than what he immediately sees. And if a serious “break” now separates past from future, that rupture isn’t examined as such; at most it is stored up in the memory hoard for later metaphysical reflection. It should also be noted that Heaney has altered his brother’s age for effect—the four years were really only a little more than three, but they fit with the four-foot coffin; and the poem has been written long after the event it describes. 22. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems 1925–1948 (London: Faber and Faber, 1949).



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However, if Catholicism isn’t substantially present, one might see Heaney’s take on nature in Death of a Naturalist as an indication of his wider religious beliefs. Thus, in the title poem, Heaney contrasts the sentimental—if also quasi scientific—view of nature inculcated by his schoolteacher with her talk of “mammy” and “daddy” frogs against his actual encounter with a bullfrog that farts and looks like a “mud grenade” (OG 5). This image marks the beginning of a delicious disillusionment that continues with his experiences in “The Barn” where rats, ever on the prowl for whatever carrion they can find, lie in wait for the terrified boy; in “Blackberry-Picking,” the once fresh fruit quickly develops “a ratgrey fungus” as it decays, and it seems to the narrator that the cycle of life “wasn’t fair” (OG 7).23 Much of this narrative is really about the boy’s development—and is never quite as grim as Frost’s Arnoldian “nature is cruel” declaration— but it does invoke the same message of a natural world that is in many ways hostile to us.24 And this, of course, raises questions as to the nature of the deity that supposedly governs it, though Heaney at this time doesn’t raise such issues, his evocations of rural life being more celebratory and revelatory than cautionary. Sometimes disillusioned, he is never disenchanted. Likely it is not in the theological DNA of Catholicism to regard nature as fundamentally cruel, the possibility not so much being rejected but rather barely conceived of. For believers, no matter what happens, nature will always in some way, and of necessity, remain sacramental: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” as Hopkins claimed in “God’s Grandeur.” Gail McConnell comments that Heaney’s “earlier poetry is shaped by [Ted] Hughes’s Darwinian view of nature—one without a beneficent deity,” but I’m more inclined to agree with Bernard O’Donoghue’s judgment that the “sadness” in Heaney’s early pastoral poems is still “warm hearted” as opposed to what will follow 23. Richard Rankin Russell, though usually inclined to emphasize the religious in Heaney’s poems, has reservations about Gail McConnell’s extensive and imaginative interpretations on this occasion: see Russell, Seamus Heaney: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 44. 24. Quoted in Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 8.

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at the other end of his life.25 To adapt the final line of the celebratory “Saint Francis and the Birds,” here Heaney’s “argument” is “true, his tone light.”26 At this point too, as much as he lives in the world of Catholicism, Heaney also inhabits that of rural magic as in “The Diviner,” where “The rod jerked with precise convulsions, / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations,” the “stations” reference itself subtly undermining familiar Catholic usage of the term (OG 12). As he would say in his 1980 interview with John Haffenden, “Irish Catholicism is continuous with something older than Christianity.” 27 Or, as Heaney was to note later in a different context about John Millington Synge, “He had found a power-point [in its pre-Microsoft meaning], he was grafted to a tree that had roots touching the rock bottom, he had put on the armour of authentic pre-Christian vision which was a salvation from the fallen world of Unionism and Nationalism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglo and Irish . . . those bedeviling abstractions and circumstances.”28 Faith systems blend, their individual orthodoxies less important than their common purposes, though at this time in the 1960s Heaney probably still accepted the orthodox Catholic view that the Roman Church is the divinely intended fulfillment of earlier preparations and searchings, a view that from almost the very beginning had led Catholic thinkers to harness the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle to their own intellectual ends. More likely, Heaney was noticing the continuity rather than agonizing about its intellectual implications. Ted Hughes’s work, with which Heaney became familiar in 1962, had given him confidence in the possibility of further exploring and creatively exploiting a shared pagan past. Specifically, Michael Parker refers to Hughes’s writing as revealing 25. McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, 83; Bernard O’Donoghue, “Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108. See also Hart, “Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes: A Complex Friendship,” Sewanee Review 120, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 76–89. 26. Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, 40. 27. Haffenden, Viewpoints, 60. 28. Heaney, “A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival,” in Irish Studies 1, ed P. J. Drudy (1980): 9.



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“an imagination tunneling back before Christianity, conjuring a Lear-like universe in which endless repetitions of human guilt and brutality are set against the ‘innocence’ and permanence of elemental power,” a direction that was yet to be explored.29 No doubt too Heaney was aware of the use of mythology by Carl Jung and Robert Graves that, John Dennison observes with some caution, “offered exhaustive, whole-system elaborations of all human thought through time. As such, both sponsor Heaney’s baptism into a secularized state, accommodating his childhood Catholicism within a schema of pan-historical mythopoesis which itself promises intellectual respectability (for a decade or two, at least), as well as initiation into mystery of a kind.”30 But there was also a more direct influence on Heaney’s beliefs closer to hand. In 1965, a year before Death of a Naturalist appeared, Brian Moore, author of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (previously mentioned), published The Emperor of Ice-Cream, a novel about growing up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland that was significantly informed by his own experiences and that Heaney once referred to as the ur-text for young Catholics in Ulster in his day.31 Almost two decades later, Heaney would dedicate “Remembering Malibu” to Moore, observing that “much of his fiction is about disengagement from middle-class Catholic Belfast” and that “The Emperor of Ice-Cream is your essential Ulster Bildungsroman” (SS 250). At Moore’s memorial service in London in 1999, Heaney eulogized a writer whose work “performed primal cultural tasks by giving one’s consciousness a set of co-ordinates whereby it could locate itself in reality.” Moore’s early novels: provided invaluable sketch-maps for me and my generation, scholarship boys and girls who had one knee bent at the altar rail and the other raised to climb the steps to the graduation platform. We were starting out at a moment when two great powers were finishing off, when the might of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and 29. Parker, Seamus Heaney, 44. 30. Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 58–59, 85. 31. Moore’s novel is also mentioned by Marianne Elliott (Catholics of Ulster, 468), as a catalyst for questioning church authorities.

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Sacred and Secular in the Sixties that of the British Empire were beginning to ebb. It was a time of dismay and crisis, even if we did not recognise it, and it is all there in those early novels of Brian’s: Judith Hearne’s loss of faith . . . Gavin’s discovery of alienation in the Belfast Blitz, the Abbot’s embrace of a redemptive unfaith on an island off Kerry.

Heaney concluded, “If desolation [emphasis added] has to be the price of such transformations, those books seemed to say, so be it: let us proceed, competently, towards it and through it.”32 An examination of those “sketch maps” from that time of an unrecognized “dismay and crisis” is in order, so here I want to take a look at the first two of them—Judith’s loss, Gavin’s discovery—as well as comment on the potential “desolation” in following such guides; the third, the abbot’s “redemptive unfaith” will be dealt with in a later chapter. Brian—or “Breean” in the Irish Gaelic pronunciation of his name that he went by—was famous long before Seamus. Moore was commercially successful—and by the 1980s, movies with major stars such as Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, and Martin Sheen were being made from several of his novels—and critically acclaimed, even if his remarkable facility (often compared to Graham Greene’s, a model and an early supporter) made him a bit of an outlier in the world of academic commentary. He also had impeccable Catholic (an aunt a nun), nationalist (his professor uncle Eoin McNeill had founded the Irish Volunteers and unsuccessfully countermanded Patrick Pearse’s 1916 Rebellion), and even Joycean credentials (another uncle served as a model for a character in Ulysses), though Heaney, like most early readers, probably wasn’t aware of these details in the mid-1960s. Heaney was still at his seminary-like Catholic boarding school when Judith Hearne, originally inspired by Moore’s own loss of faith, appeared in 1955 (the title was changed to The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in 1956). It offers a more accessible presentation of the religious issues that Joyce, in a decidedly more pontifical manner, posed in Portrait. In fact, we know that Moore was consciously trying to rewrite Joyce’s classic but had to find an innovative way to do so. In Moore’s ac32. Heaney, “Brian Moore,” Harp: Journal of Irish Literature 5 (2000): 122–24.



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count, set in his native Belfast, the once-respectable but now aging, alcoholic, impoverished, and unloved protagonist undergoes a loss of faith powerfully and symbolically dramatized when Judith tries to access the tabernacle, the holy of holies where the hosts consecrated at Mass are enshrined. In her desperation to find her God there, she is chased away by the guardian priest. Judith’s plight is much more poignant than Stephen Dedalus’s intellectual rebellion because her alternative resources are so much more limited than his were. In a very narrow but important way, the nonintellectual Judith is even more like the educated Heaney than was the haughty Stephen. It would be going too far to pose Heaney as the “peasant” Davin in Portrait (though Heaney has commented sympathetically on Davin’s rural background), but by his own admission he retained his early pieties well into his twenties, and there was never a question of an articulated Joycean non serviam. So, the fictional Judith Hearne is stage one on a tentative “sketch-map.” She is such too because, as Patrick Hicks notes, she wants to remain a Catholic but cannot, as did Heaney for a relatively long time, whereas Stephen wants to free himself completely from the institution.33 Reading, and afterward teaching (as he had done also with Judith Hearne), The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965) marked an advancement in Heaney’s learning. Although the World War II–era protagonist, Gavin Burke, is a mere seventeen-year-old, his situation likely helped the twentysix-year-old poet, now married, reframe his own dilemmas at that early age even if he hadn’t been as rebellious. What Emperor offers over Judith Hearne is a humorous and articulate debunking of intimate Catholic pieties by an educated young man who also has serious purposes. Gavin is from a comfortable, middle-class family, is expected to go to Queen’s like his two siblings and, less definitely, marry a respectable girl of similar background. The Burkes are contemptuous of Protestant Ulster and laudatory of a Germany that may be about to teach the Brits a well-deserved lesson, a sentiment replicated in Heaney’s family listening on the radio to Irish-raised Lord Haw-Haw as he broadcast his anti-British speech33. Patrick Hicks, “The Fourth Master: Reading Brian Moore Reading James Joyce,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 38, no. 2–3 (April–July 2007): 101–14.

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es from Berlin in the early 1940s. But Gavin himself is alienated from his family, his school, and his religion. In defiance, he joins the medical branch of the air warden service being set up to cope with expected casualties should Hitler’s Luftwaffe decide to bomb Belfast, a center of the vital shipbuilding industry. In the novel’s opening scene, Gavin is in imaginary conversation with the statue of the Infant of Prague in his bedroom. Described as “a desperate little preacher” and placed there by Gavin’s mother, the Infant objects to the young man’s service uniform and job, and most of all his sinful lust. Moore’s joking about the iconic statue once so familiar in Catholic homes—a statue that at one point refers to Gavin’s “stunted growth”—probably offered Heaney a retrospective release from past pieties and lingering sexual guilts. Gavin, of course, is much more openly defiant than Heaney was at that age—he sees himself as having abandoned Catholicism (though his mindset is still pervaded by it)—but his sexual behavior in particular is still fairly inhibited, his Catholic nursingstudent girlfriend’s even more so as she tries to defend her virginity from premarital compromise.34 This particular conflict between desire and conscience—the subsequent need for confession worrying the male, confession and the possibility of pregnancy worrying the female, birth control out of the question for both parties—was still commonplace, as we’ve seen, in Heaney’s college days, and as the Catholic characters in David Lodge’s early novels conclusively demonstrate.35 Hence the effect that Moore’s novel had on Heaney. It is worth repeating here that it was these same guilts—and the subsequent series of “bad” confessions that often resulted from them (due to culpable lies in the rather embarrassing calculation of degrees of lustful consent required in the confessional)— 34. Heaney critic and poet Blake Morrison has also written a similar real-life account of his Irish Catholic physician mother’s early efforts to stave off his unbelieving, randy English physician father’s premarital sexual advances at about the same time as the action in Moore’s novel: see Morrison, Stories My Mother Never Told Me (New York: Granta, 2002), 180. 35. See especially Lodge’s Souls and Bodies, which, in its original British edition, was titled appropriately How Far Can You Go? (London: Penguin, 1981). It is indicative of the changing times that the expression “How far can you go?,” totally familiar to Catholics in the 1950s and ’60s as being about sexual activity short of mortal sin, was largely unfamiliar a decade later.



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that spawned Moore’s early abandonment of Catholicism. Belief drifted away, then vanished, and never even faintly returned in spite of Moore’s ongoing preoccupation with the dilemmas of conscience posed by faith and his extraordinary familiarity with the arcana of Catholic theology. 36 Moore explained that for him religion was a mere metaphor that he used because it was what he knew best—a slightly suspect explanation, perhaps, until one recalls that some recent psychologists have shown an equal fascination with the thought patterns of conscientiously functioning pastors who themselves are no longer believers.37 While most of Moore’s Emperor narrative is taken up with the comedy of the situation, when Belfast is unexpectedly bombed toward the end, resulting in hundreds of deaths in both Protestant and Catholic areas of the city (and, incidentally, causing Gavin’s father to quickly change his tune about the Germans), the story takes a more serious turn as Gavin copes with the grim reality of piled up corpses: Gavin had seen his first corpse when he was eleven years old. Corpses were elderly relatives, dressed sometimes in brown shrouds, more often in their Sunday best. They lay in the downstairs bedroom on white linen sheets, their hands crossed over their breasts, fingers entwined in rosary beads or crucifixes. . . . But now, in the stink of human excrement, in the acrid smell of disinfectant, these dead were heaped, body on body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes . . . a carter, still wearing his coal sacks, on top of a pile of arms and legs, his own arm outstretched, finger pointing, as though he warned of some unseen horror.38

Gazing at the dead, “his attention caught by the bare, callused feet of an old woman, sticking out from the bottom of a pile of bodies,” Gavin remembers a few lines from Wallace Stevens’s cautionary poem that gives the novel its title: 36. Craig, Brian Moore, 58–59. 37. See, for example, Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola, “Preachers Who Are Not Believers,” Evolutionary Psychology 8, no. 1 (March 2010): 122–50. 38. Moore, The Emperor of Ice-Cream (New York: Viking, 1965), 231.

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Sacred and Secular in the Sixties If her feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Helen Vendler has convincingly shown how the plot of Stevens’s poem works and paraphrases the meaning of these striking but evasive lines: ice cream is being made in the kitchen, while the corpse in the bedroom is inadequately covered so that “art is exposed as too scanty in its powers to cover up death; the embroidered sheet . . . if it is pulled up to cover the dead woman’s face, reveals her ‘horny feet,’ which show ‘how cold she is, and dumb.’ In choosing to ‘let the lamp affix its beam,’ as in a morgue . . . Stevens makes his momentous choice for reality over appearance.”39 Those readers who first encountered Stevens’s poem in Moore’s excerpt from it may not have arrived at such a nuanced reading of a tricky text, but they would likely have noticed the contrast between the solidity of the corpse and the incongruous solubility of the ice cream. So, when the nuns in the Catholic hospital in Belfast kneel beside the victims of the bombing to pray to a nonexistent deity, Gavin and his friend Freddy remain standing in agnostic defiance as “Godless guardsmen of the rational view,” defending gruesome immediacy against vacuous hope—though at one point a touchingly nervous and uncertain Gavin silently prays for the safety of his parents.40 Overall, it is the depictions of day-to-day life in Moore’s explorations that make his work appeal to those who have undergone similar experiences—that is, those like Seamus Heaney, whose reading of The Emperor of Ice-Cream came at a critical moment in his early life; thus Heaney’s reference to the bildungsroman aspect alluded to earlier. I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of Moore’s novel, but I think it fair to judge that reading such material probably helped Heaney to see Catholic orthodoxies in a new and more critical light. After all, as late as 1963—just two 39. Vendler, “Wallace Stevens,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 382–83. 40. Moore, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, 224.



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years before the publication of Moore’s novel—Heaney was still “in the grip of those cultural and political pieties which [Patrick] Kavanagh, all unknown to me, had spent the last fifteen years or so repudiating,” where “cultural” can be taken broadly to include “religious” also.41 But Heaney had at least begun to work his way out of such inheritances. Already, in “Personal Helicon,” he was rhyming “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing” (OG 14). In a 1975 poem, “Fosterage,” which is about the time in 1962 when he was teaching at a Catholic high school whose principal was the short story writer Michael McLaverty, Heaney mentions how the former would refer to “Poor Hopkins!” The poem continues, “I have the [Hopkins] Journals / He gave me, underlined, his buckled self / Obeisant to their pain” (OG 134). The implication is that McLaverty had felt some of Hopkins’s despair and that this registered too with Heaney—an intimation of his growing problems with religion (if still very much within the longitude and latitude of orthodoxy), problems that would go on temporary pause with the upcoming Troubles, but then reemerge all the more strongly because of them. Thirty years later, Heaney would describe this phase of his life (most of the 1960s) as a time when “I eventually did my best to change from catechized youth into secular adult. The study of literature, the discovery of wine, women and song, the arrival of poetry, then marriage and family, plus a general, generational assent to the proposition that God is dead: all that screened out the first visionary world” (SS 471–72). We may also assume that somewhere along the line Heaney had given “a general, generational assent” to the reigning academic narrative of the development of human thought from the obscurantism of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, and then to the post-Darwinian consensus, even if his assent was punctuated with reservations from his Catholic apologetic formation. In any event, there is a certain Wordsworthian regret here: Heaney is writing, after all, when he has re-found that “visionary world” in precisely the way that the author of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” did; he also applies the phrase “generational assent” to Nietzsche’s proclamation as if it were something that 41. Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, 10.

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was happening in the wider culture and that he had never had it out with himself in a fully personal way. In other words, religion is undergoing a hiatus rather than a rejection in his life. In a 1980 interview with John Haffenden, asked if “the Faith” has been “a solid ground with you all your life,” Heaney replied, “I’m not what you’d call a pious Catholic, I don’t go to Mass much, and the doctrines of the Faith aren’t my constant reading . . . but . . . I was going to Confession into my twenties, and the whole of my life was permeated with it.” So this gives us a rough timeline for his slide from regular practice: somewhere around the days of the Vatican Council that ended in 1965. A further comment clarifies what happened afterward: “I’ve never felt any need to rebel or do a casting-off of God or anything like that, because I think in this day anthropologists and mythologists have taught us a lot, to live with our myths.” The “faith,” then, has become a “myth” of sorts. Pressed to explain whether such interests “militate against what we call a creed,” Heaney responds evasively “I don’t probe too far. . . .”42 At this point, Heaney’s case seems to have been like that of John McGahern, who observes that by the late 1950s—he too would have been in his twenties— he had “drifted” from the faith: “So imperceptibly did it happen that it was not clear even to me whether I had left the Church or the Church had left me.”43 The condition was not uncommon, if also not widespread. The year 1966, the year of McGahern’s termination from his teaching position in Dublin, was also the year in which another terminating event took place in the English Catholic Church that would have repercussions in Ireland. In the first of the big profile cases of clergy leaving the ministry, the English theologian Fr. Charles Davis, frustrated with the church’s failure to implement many of the changes recommended by Vatican II, departed the “corrupt” organization, published a book on his reasons for doing so, and married, all in quick succession. Herbert McCabe, the respected Aquinas scholar and Wittgenstein devotee earlier associated with Slant and now at the Dominican house in Oxford where he edited New Blackfriars, sympathetically criticized Davis for leaving but 42. Haffenden, Viewpoints, 60. 43. McGahern, Memoir, 222.



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admitted that, of course, the church was “corrupt” (the word that stuck in the throat of officialdom), but that that was no reason for leaving it. McCabe, who had attended Davis’s wedding, was swiftly removed from his own ministry by the English hierarchy (and by his order) and, early in 1967, exiled to Ireland. It was during this “affair” that McCabe rediscovered his family’s Irish roots and acquired his repertoire of rebel songs that, on his return, he would sing in Oxford pubs to the embarrassment of his English, and often his Irish, companions; it was also when he got to meet several Irish journalists and writers, including Seamus Heaney, who would end up in his motley circle, which included many other distinguished artists, scholars, and clerics.44 A sometimes hectoring McCabe nurtured a whole generation of young Catholic-educated thinkers, arguing for staying within the fold rather than stepping outside it. Heaney wrote decades later about McCabe’s “ongoing mission to the people around him, a laity he gathered to himself, a group at once learned and leftish, as bohemian as they were academic.” Some of his ministry was conducted in his annual summer visits to Ireland, where he scootered from pub to pub across the country vigorously spouting, as Heaney put it, “politics, limericks, theology, codology.” But Heaney, as we shall see, was acquainted with McCabe’s more serious side also, as had been Anthony Kenny, priest, eminent philosopher, and translator for the new Jerusalem Bible, who had sought McCabe’s counsel when departing quietly a few years earlier from both church and faith. Through McCabe (and several other clerical friends acquired over the years), we may suppose that Heaney had a broad awareness of the new thinking in the church, thinking 44. Jay P. Corrin devotes a chapter of Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II to “Charles Davis and the McCabe Affair” (302–16), along with numerous other references, claiming that the Dominican “significantly influenced” Anglican Rowan Williams (later the archbishop of Canterbury), Anthony Kenny, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, James Alison (convert, Catholic priest, subsequently LGBT advocate), and Seamus Heaney, among others (224). At the height of the Northern Irish Troubles, McCabe renounced his British citizenship in favor of an Irish passport. For what it’s worth, as a former monk and a “mature student” at Oxford in the 1970s, I recall being advised by a fellow Irishman to stay clear of this “phony” one; I did so, apprehensively watching McCabe in the King’s Arms from time to time as he held court volubly with his variegated clientele. I obviously underestimated the company he kept.

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that made the threats of hell and damnation and the necessity of sound belief and meticulous practice appear less important than they had been in the past, and thus unintentionally provided a relatively safe withdrawal strategy for the doubting and disaffected.45 “Desolation” would not go away—after all, religion or no religion, we all have to face suffering, disappointment, and death, and in fact doing so without assurance of a loving Savior at the other end could render these trials even more daunting— but the eternal consequences should it turn out that one was wrong about doctrinal matters no longer looked as dreadful as they had in Joyce’s day. By 1968, leaving the Roman Catholic Church was about to receive an added, if unintended, incentive from the Vatican itself. At the same time that the political situation in Northern Ireland was worsening, Catholics throughout the country—and indeed throughout the world—were growing more and more disenchanted with the church. Humanae Vitae, the encyclical by Pope Paul VI released in July of that year, upheld the ban on the use of artificial contraceptives just when it appeared likely that the “pill” (which was already being provided in Irish maternity hospitals) would be allowed as it took into account the natural rhythms of female menstruation.46 It was also widely known that there were serious differences of opinion among the pope’s ecclesiastical advisors. The disappointment therefore was massive and relevant to the lives of all Catholics, whether educated or not. While many members of the clergy tried to temper this harsh pronouncement with understanding and tolerance, it marked the beginning of the slow erosion in church attendance and voluntary sexual abstention as the spirit of Carnaby Street and the “swinging sixties” took over. A good example of the dilemma at the time is offered by David Lodge. At a party in the home of Bernard McCabe in Boston (then a professor at Tufts University to whom Heaney would dedicate The Haw Lantern some twenty years later, and a brother of Herbert McCabe), Lodge meets a young Catholic professor who “said that she knew several Catholic couples who had decided to make their own conscientious de45. See Heaney’s obituary for McCabe, in “Herbert McCabe, O.P. II,” Religious Life Review, July/August, 2001, 250–52. 46. See Daly, Sixties Ireland, 147–49.



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cision on the matter while continuing to go to mass and communion.” This unexpected solution disconcerts Lodge, who has long thought of the church as a “Club” with “a rule book which covered all the possible contingencies of life, and if you kept them, or received absolution for breaking them, you were assured of eternal life and God’s help in the trials of this one. It seemed obvious that you couldn’t ignore the rules which you found inconvenient without forfeiting membership, and for this reason many Catholics had ‘lapsed’ over the issue of birth control.” The nub of the problem was that “of all the mortal sins, contraception was one of the most deliberate and habitual by its very nature, and incompatible with ‘a firm purpose of amendment’ in the sacrament of Penance; therefore couples who took the conscientious personal decision route would have to either make confessions that were invalid and possibly sacrilegious according to the rule book, or stop going to confession altogether—which was what vast numbers of Catholics did in due course.”47 Assuming Heaney had informally left the church a few years earlier, Humanae Vitae gave him all the more reason for not being tempted to return. As Wilfrid Sheed, the son of publishers, writers, and preachers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, poignantly commented on his own and similar cases, “Pious young parents, whose faith had once seemed as solid as the Maginot Line, began to find it alarmingly porous in the post–Vatican II melee.”48 In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, what had begun as a period of religious liberation elsewhere was not such there. In “Ulster” (an appellation common among Protestants, but often offensive to Catholics since technically it refers to the province’s nine counties, only six of which are in Northern Ireland proper), the terms “Protestant” (or a loaded “Christian”) and “Catholic” had cultural resonances often more powerful than 47. Lodge, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir; 1935–1975 (New York: Vintage, 2016), 372–73. 48. Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 246. Sheed writes movingly about how devastated and disorientated his parents were when both his and his sister’s faith and marriages dissolved, marking the end of an era—or maybe of two since Sheed and Ward had soldiered on from the days of Chesterton to those of Küng and, through their convert son-in-law Neil Middleton, even sponsored the Marxist-leaning Slant in the early 1960s.

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those of religion itself. Even as ecumenism seemed about to thrive, political circumstances were forcing everyone to identify culturally with that kind of stereotype. In other words, and on the Catholic side especially, many Northern Irish people of that denomination were more “Catholic” than ever—there was no way of escape, as the joke about a Jewish resident there being pressed to say whether he was a “Catholic Jew” or a “Protestant Jew” indicated—while participating less and less in the rituals traditionally associated with such a designation. Religious fears—and comforts—were waning as religious identifications were waxing. As the rest of the Western world, including the Republic of Ireland, was becoming more secular, Northern Ireland was becoming more sectarian. In 1969, when Philip Larkin revisited Ireland—where he had spent several years in the late 1940s and early ’50s as a librarian at Queen’s in Belfast—it seemed to him that the North was more Loyalist than he remembered it; the South, where he noticed that one could now purchase Ulysses and The News of the World, seemed less “remote.”49 It was. 49. Richard Bradford, The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs (London: Frances Lincoln, 2017), 224.

Chapter 4

I m pi o u s A u g u ries

B

y t he t i m e that Seamus Heaney’s second book of poems, Door into the Dark, appeared in 1969, his home province was several months into major sectarian conflict. Inspired by the peaceful Civil Rights marches in the American South led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Catholics in Northern Ireland, partly supported by liberal Protestant sympathizers, had hoped to improve their lot in housing, jobs, and voting matters without invoking the traditional nationalist call for a United Ireland. Heaney had participated in some of these marches, which, however, caused such a reaction from Protestant loyalists—similar to those that the American Southern marches had provoked from angry whites—that the British army had to be sent in first to protect the Catholics, which in turn led to a nationalist community backlash in the form of a revived IRA (the Provos), resulting in more troops being sent in to quell the latter, and a fairly rapid escalation of the violence. Killings, bombings, maimings, and torture, both targeted and random, were perpetrated by almost all parties, many of them with a ferocity and horror peculiar to intimate civil conflict. If most Catholics and Protestants remained on the fringes of these events, they were also keenly aware of their existence, frequently knowing some of the victims and, with the increasing number of military roadblocks and personal searches, hyperalert to the dangers of the deteriorating situation. A disappointed Heaney was also cognizant of his own cultural loyalties, while genuinely deploring the mayhem and later resisting the entreaties of the men of violence—men whom he often



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knew at least slightly, thus making it harder to ignore their requests—to compose anthems for their cause (SS 257–58). He tried to walk a fine line, one perhaps best represented by a later comment: “If you were tuned to Gregorian chant rather than the surge of Old Testament prose and poetry, if you began within the magisterium of Roman Catholicism rather than in the arena of individual conscience, you’re probably less likely to aspire to the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (SS 195–96). Standing apart from his tribe, entering the “arena of individual conscience,” wasn’t familiar or comfortable, and there is a strong hint too that even his project of secularizing himself earlier, while serious, wasn’t fully a thought-out choice but rather a case of drifting with the times. It is important to recall, however, that in the years immediately prior to 1968, a sense of hope prevailed, partly because of naïve enthusiasm for ecumenism, partly because the palpable growth of secularism on the British mainland (Larkin’s apt “Bonds and gestures pushed to one side / like an outdated combine harvester, / And everyone young going down the long slide // To happiness, endlessly”) seemed to herald a universal freedom from outdated religious restrictions in all the denominations, even if Catholicism never regarded itself as a mere “denomination.”1 Most of the poems in Door into the Dark, its title notwithstanding, are from this upbeat period: they are explorations of inner rather than outer darkness, an extension of the project announced in “Personal Helicon” (a poem dedicated to Protestant fellow poet Michael Longley) in Death of a Naturalist. “In Gallarus Oratory” has a newly unfettered Heaney engage with that personal darkness of belief and tradition as he reprises the ancient monastic experience of entering into this now famous beehive-shaped stone chapel in County Kerry, a structure built sometime between the sixth and twelfth centuries. Of the actual experience in 1967 (a year before the Troubles broke out), he later commented, “I felt the weight of Christianity in all its rebuking aspects, its calls to self-denial and self-abnegation” inside the constricting space. Emerging, he had “a lift of the heart, a surge towards happiness.” Unexpectedly, Heaney adds 1. See Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain; Philip Larkin, “High Windows,” in Collected Poems, 129.



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that this same feeling “must have been experienced over and over again by those monks as they crossed that same threshold centuries ago,” almost as though the going in and coming out were designed to heighten rather than depress their faith.2 But it is precisely because he has become more secular that Heaney no longer automatically commends “self-denial and self-abnegation,” as surely the monks would have done. And although the monks come out to a smiling God and a sacramental nature, inside the sacred space each one of them, and now Heaney, feels himself a “reduced creature”—for them, a reminder of their creaturely status in this earthly place of exile, for him an unwelcome and possibly unjust deprivation of its joys: “And how he smiled at them as out they came, / The sea a censer, and the grass a flame.”3 Eamon Duffy comments that “the too-easy rhyme which resolves the tension . . . suggests that the energy of the poem runs in another direction, and represents even more ambivalent feelings towards Christianity than are explicitly acknowledged in [Heaney’s] prose commentary.”4 If this is so, then Heaney’s religious position is fast increasing in complexity. The outer darkness of political exclusion based on religious difference is explored in “Requiem for the Croppies,” a poem written to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising but dealing with the 1798 rebellion, a long past event that, though horrific in its consequences for the rebels, has always been a positive in Irish historical lore, since it involved Catholics and Protestants coming together for a common purpose. It was a purpose that Heaney in 1966 could still hope would be a harbinger of reconciliation in contemporary Northern Ireland. In 1798, the scantily armed and fed rebels are shot down in waves, and barley grows out of their graves the following August, a symbol of the future survival of their cause (OG 23). But even though Protestants participated in the rebellion and the whole movement was nominally led by the icon of icons among Irish nationalists, the Protestant-born Wolfe Tone, the poem also reaffirms Heaney’s cultural, and thus Catholic, roots: “Terraced thousands 2. Heaney, Preoccupations, 189. 3. Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 22. 4. Eamon Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” in The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature, ed. John Walker (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), 169.

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died, shaking scythes at cannon.” Heaney later explained that “when I read this aloud in the ’70s . . . it went down as an anthem in certain nationalist domains, but sounded very uneasy in the Unionist zones.” So the context of the writing of the original poem was commemorative—at a time when British prime minister Harold Wilson had quietly returned 1916 Irish (and partly Ulster) rebel Sir Roger Casement’s ashes to the Dublin government, and when Irish president Éamon de Valera invited the British officer who had arrested him in 1916 to participate in the celebrations (which the colonel did)—while its subsequent repetition had some degree of provocation: “I think the young nationalist in me was trying to give voice to things that the culture in Northern Ireland did not admit. There was no official space for anything of that kind.” But this was also an atypical foray. As an “upwardly mobile Catholic,” by then teaching at Queen’s University, part of the “access” generation, Heaney felt he “did not have to enter into politics as a subject matter to have a sense of myself as having political meaning. The very fact that you were called ‘Seamus’ on the back of a Faber book, where before it had been Louis MacNeice, was all part of the thing.”5 When the Northern crisis, rooted in religious differences that had immediate social consequences, escalated from peaceful marches to outright conflict in 1968, it was impossible not to identify with one’s tribe. In this sense, a young person in his late twenties—Heaney’s age at the time— in the Republic could afford to explore his issues with the “weight” of Catholicism and such matters with relative privacy, and certainly no danger of physical attack; in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, that wasn’t the case: an abstract “justice” or “fairness” couldn’t be pursued, since what it really meant was “justice for Catholics.” Thus, while Heaney’s religious thinking evolved, it was seriously constrained by the conditions of the time and the place; literally, it too was encountering roadblocks. In fact, denominational politics continued to tunnel under the poetry as the political situation grew worse. In Heaney’s 1972 collection, Winter5. On Casement’s repatriation, see Ferriter’s Transformation of Ireland, 565; Casement was also a convert to Catholicism prior to his execution in 1916, a fact often mentioned in Catholic classrooms; Heaney, Guardian, May 26, 2006.



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ing Out, it appears subterraneously in a number of poems that examine the ancestries of Ulster’s linguistic inheritances, digging down through English, Scottish, and Irish place names to their pre-Christian roots and asserting some form of impending restoration: But now our river tongues must rise From licking deep in native haunts To flood, with vowelling embrace, Demesnes staked out in consonants.        (“A New Song,” OG 58) Words such as “rise,” “native,” “flood,” and even “embrace” could have threatening associations for those not in the nationalist camp. Meanwhile, the Irish “vowels” and the English “consonants”—which many commentators have remarked is a too-easy linguistic distinction—is also paralleled by Heaney’s frequently seeing Catholicism as feminine, Protestantism as masculine, another controversial strategy, though one also importantly indicative of Heaney’s cultural and religious perceptions. Wintering Out takes its title from a line in “Servant Boy,” a more overt expression of Heaney’s political position. The protagonist is a Catholic from a previous era in service (and, possibly, pretended servility) to a Protestant farming family: “He is wintering out . . . / swinging a hurricane lamp.” Certain lines in the poem might even receive an answering echo from African American protest songs of the pre-Emancipation period: Old work-whore, slaveblood, who stepped fair hills under each bidder’s eye . . . how you draw me into your trail. The Catholic boy is at least minimally aware of having been dispossessed of his ancestors’ ancient lands—he is “resentful / and impenitent”—which have been usurped by the forerunners of the current Protestant landowners (“the little / barons”), and this awareness resonates with the speaker

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(OG 48). However lax his religious practice may have become, here, politically and culturally, Heaney is Catholic through and through. The same theme of dispossession also receives expression, though in a much more sympathetic and even hopeful way, in “The Other Side,” Heaney’s first really significant engagement with religion in its broadest sense. The narrator—presumably Heaney—comes upon a Protestant neighbor standing outside his house not wanting to interrupt the nightly saying of the rosary inside. Heaney recalls his acoustic delight as a child listening to the man’s “fabulous, biblical dismissal, / that tongue of chosen people,” and how the Heaney family kindly mock their neighbor in private, repeating his phrases about them not living by “the book” while they themselves, of course, are confident in their own religious election. For now, Heaney and the neighbor will avoid religious issues by talking about the weather. But even if the tone here is more of neighbors being neighborly, sensitive to their religious differences but accepting of them in some fashion or other, it also invokes the brutal past that has brought about the divided present where the neighbor’s “lea sloped / to meet our fallow,” leading the former to remark of the Heaney property that “‘it’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground’” (OG 59–60). Nevertheless, Heaney’s main impulse here is to transcend such differences as in his later expressed wish for the historic meeting between the Ulster Catholic chieftain Hugh O’Neill (Earl of Tyrone) and Queen Elizabeth I’s Earl of Essex in 1599 on the eve of the battle that was to cause all these divisions: “We want each of them to be released from the entrapment of history. We want the sky to open above them and grant them release from their earthbound fates. And even if we know that such a release is impossible, we still desire conditions where the longed-for and the actual might be allowed to coincide” (SS 60). Of course, there is a significant element of digging down in “The Other Side” as Heaney digs at the neighbor’s late arrival in their shared landscape. As he had declared in the final poem (“Bogland”) of his previous volume, here in Ireland “Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before” (OG 41). The rolling out of the stripped layers satisfies the need to assert that a Gaelic culture was there earlier—thus empowering Catho-



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lics in the present—but in doing so it destabilizes the newer foundations, while also implying that they have less validity and security and maybe need to be displaced. This digging into the bog metaphor received renewed relevance (and controversy) as the Troubles wore on and after Heaney read Danish archeologist P. V. Glob’s The Bog People, which had appeared in English translation from Faber and Faber in 1969. Heaney explained: It was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. The author argues convincingly that a number of these . . . were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess . . . who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring. . . . The unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles.6

The ancient victim—who reminded the poet of some of his own male forebears—that came to be named “The Tollund Man” in one of those photographs provided Heaney with the title for his poem on the subject. Here too he would be able to link past religious sacrifices from the pagan period with those from the present where the desire to hold on to the land—by Protestants as well as Catholics—was driven by devotion to varieties of the Christian myth (probably more on the Catholic side in this case, though invoked too by Paisley in terms of devotion to a divinely promised land): showing the continuity between Irish paganism and Irish Christianity was no longer an academic exercise but a valid—confirmatory as well as troubling—reality. “The Tollund Man” too points back to a pagan period, sans Catholics or Protestants, when man’s inhumanity to man, sanctioned then as now by the religion of the times, was also in ev6. P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).

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idence (OG 62). Indeed, the connection is explicitly made by his likening the corpse of the pagan era bog body to a Christian era “saint’s.” In general, it seems likely that the murders in Northern Ireland at this time made Heaney reflect more deeply on the animal brutality of human existence—a brutality to which he had been exposed earlier mainly in historical narratives and Jacobean drama—so that he could no longer have entertained a benign view of the matter if, of course, he ever had such. He was, after all, confronted with this brutality in the present more than most writers ever are, since it touched on his family and friends; it was also unnervingly random. But rather than engage in “liberal lamentation that citizens should feel compelled to murder one another . . . over the matter of nomenclatures such as British or Irish,” he immediately set out to discover “symbols adequate to our predicament,” “a field of force in which . . . it would be possible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity” (FK 26). The phrase “religious intensity” suggests that religion itself has added an extra dimension to such ferocity, almost confirming Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg’s caustic comment in 1999 that “for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”7 Heaney explains further: “And when I say religious, I am not thinking simply of the sectarian division. To some extent, the enmity can be viewed as a struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess. There is an indigenous territorial numen . . . call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ní Houlihan . . . whatever; and her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult” (FK 26). As with “Bogland” and “A New Song,” the weight of rightness lies with those who have been usurped, and the loaded “temporarily” suggests impending change, resurgence, even reversal. Both the photographs in Glob’s book and those appearing daily in the newspapers—of knee cappings, butchered limbs, the aftermaths of ex7. Steven Weinberg, “A Designer Universe?,” https://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm. However, in this instance, Richard Rankin Russell draws on the “scapegoat” theory of Catholic thinker René Girard to argue that ultimately Christianity resolves all political and personal hatreds through Christ’s sacrificial self-scapegoating. See Russell’s Seamus Heaney: An Introduction, 70–71.



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plosions, and even of bodies dumped in bogs—would have caused anyone to have doubts about our shared humanity. But there’s also a tag at the end about Heaney too needing to go on pilgrimage and be serious so as to avoid “invoking dangers for myself” and an earlier comment on how his views differ from the economic and pragmatic interests of regular politics—another gesture in the direction of the reality of the religious and even the superstitious, whether benign or not (FK 26–7). In the poem, he declares: Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap . . . The Tollund Man is presented as having been a “Bridegroom to the goddess,” a goddess who “tightened her torc on him” and whose “dark juices” have led to his preservation over the centuries until his corpse is now like “a saint’s kept body.” If there is a sad beauty, even sweetness, in this description of the Tollund Man that distances the reader from the horror of what is being observed, a sense of shock emerges in the second part of the poem when Heaney refers to a much more recent atrocity from the 1920s, a time of open repression of Catholics in the newly created statelet of Northern Ireland: “Tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers / Of four young brothers, trailed / For miles along the lines.” Recollection of the incident tempts the poet to “risk blasphemy,” a curious inhibition about blaming the deity as the ultimate perpetrator of the gruesome killing. In the third part, however, he returns to a more plangent tone as he empathizes with the plight of the Tollund Man on his way to execution: Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me driving. Out there in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home. (OG 63)

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The general mood of the poem is one of meditative reflection on the dark side of man’s existence, the fate of the four young brothers being but an example from an Irish trove. It is noteworthy too that he adds to a pagan account of ritualistic suffering one from his Catholic archive, further developing his growing interest in the continuity between religious beliefs and practices that were once seen, officially at least, as wholly separate. “The Tollund Man” did not immediately provoke criticism for its linking of past mythology and current actuality, but it gave an indication of what was to become a major theme and approach three years later in North. Meanwhile, in “Limbo,” a poem about a young woman who, to hide her shame, drowns her illegitimate baby, Heaney depicts the harshness of a culture that would cause a person to take such a horrendous action. Although the poet is obviously sympathetic with the woman, at first she is represented as almost callous, her baby “A small one thrown back / To the waters.” By line six, however, she is “Ducking him tenderly,” and soon “She waded in under / The sign of her cross. / He was hauled in with the fish. / Now limbo will be // A cold glitter of souls / Through some far briny zone. / Even Christ’s palms, unhealed, / Smart and cannot fish there” (OG 72). There is sympathy also with a Christ who cannot rectify or give comfort in such a situation—or who is made out by the authorities to be unable to intervene, since the limbo here described is an invention of theologians to account for the fate of unbaptized babies and others who suffered from “invincible ignorance” of the truth of Catholicism. It was a powerfully real place in Catholic iconography up until very recent times, but is hardly a destination to which one would want to go and so a further source of stress for the woman. It is also a further example of how the church had come to be a kind of earthly civil service for the divine, regulating all aspects of the “economy of salvation” as derived from an original “deposit of faith.” Wintering Out ends with “Westering,” a poem from Heaney’s period at Berkeley, to which he had been invited as a visiting lecturer in 1970–71. Already in California with his family, he is recalling recent happy times in Donegal after the “free fall” of summer. Then the poem shifts back to Good Friday in March, when they had started out on their journey to the Irish west: “Cars [were] stilled outside still churches” as they “drove by,



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/ A dwindling interruption, / As clappers smacked / On a bare altar // And congregations bent / To the studded crucifix.” Heaney is conjuring up the rituals taking place in the churches—Jesus dead, the tabernacle temporarily empty, the altar stripped—while not himself, for whatever reason, participating in them; indeed, according to Michael Parker, he is enjoying a “truant pleasure” in not being there.8 Even if, as Parker also notes, “one cannot imagine that the theological associations of the word ‘fall’ were absent from Heaney’s mind,” it would seem too that he is glad—indeed relieved—to be temporarily free from both the Troubles of Northern Ireland and the troubles of a religious belief now challenged by the sectarian atrocities perpetrated in its name: “What nails dropped out that hour?” he asks, invoking ambiguously the nails in Christ’s hands or, perhaps, Christ’s nails in his. Now, in California, “Six thousand miles away, / I imagine untroubled dust, / A loosening gravity, / Christ weighing by his hands” (OG 76). Neil Corcoran invokes the famous Salvador Dali painting to explain this puzzling image, asking if it reinforces the depiction of a powerless Christ from the “Limbo” poem or points to a Christ who is no longer nailed down in suffering and atonement?9 Either way, there is definitely a sense of weightlessness, or of a weight being lifted from Heaney, as in the “In Gallarus Oratory” poem. Parker has strongly objected to those critics who have seen the earlier moment as a “stepping stone” in Heaney’s definitive pulling away from his Catholic roots, or at least in placing the rupture at this early juncture in Heaney’s career. According to him, Heaney’s “fondness for the pieties of his Mossbawn childhood survived both the impact of his secular ‘British’ education and the psychological-spiritual trauma of the Troubles, and has not been diminished. The highly charged language in which the church’s teachings were couched permeate the poet’s idiolect. His religious metaphors and allusions are not to be dismissed simply as the products of nostalgia, the detritus of a belief long since abandoned; rather they incarnate a potency of feeling remembered and renewed.”10 8. Parker, Seamus Heaney, 114. 9. Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 31. 10. Parker, Making of the Poet, 115.

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I see more loosening here, however, not a break certainly—even later a dramatic uncoupling never occurs because Heaney does not think in such absolute terms—but just as certainly not a renewal. Perhaps the stance here is of an insider in the process of becoming an outsider, or at least getting a chance to look at his world from an intimate distance. Californian Catholicism, too, could have had an attractive “lightness of being” aspect, one seldom encountered in its Irish incarnations; the prominence of the clerical Berrigan brothers in the Vietnam protests would also have lent a certain ongoing vibrancy to the American church. Biographically, Heaney recalled in 2006, “We loved . . . the Bay Area . . . everything about the place was counter-cultural and anti-establishment. Hare Krishna and hard rockers singing from the one hymn sheet. . . . This was the time . . . of the loose garment and the long hair; of pot in the air and sex on the waterbed . . . the other side of the draft card and the water cannon.” Berkeley changed him: “I was taller and freer in myself at the end of the year than at the beginning. . . . I couldn’t entirely expel the Irish Catholic in me but he became a bit less uptight” (SS 136–68). Whatever the case, the Northern Ireland to which Heaney returned in late 1971 after his exposure to a freer and more tolerant, if also radicalized, California (where too, still as an admiring client, he had visited Brian Moore in Malibu) had grown even grimmer than before: anyone, but overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists, suspected of connections with terrorism could be rounded up and imprisoned without trial, a move that only emphasized the discriminatory nature of the administrations in both Belfast and London. When, on January 30, 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on Civil Rights protestors in Derry, killing thirteen of them and thus creating what afterward became known as “Bloody Sunday,” the Protestant-Catholic, British-Irish divide was further solidified. At the time, even a normally pacific Heaney, his “heart besieged by anger,” his “mind a gap of danger,” wrote a bitter song about the political situation from a self-confessed nationalist point of view for the popular folk group “The Dubliners.”11 11. Quoted in Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 249; see other similar poems there too, 248–51.



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In August of that same year, Heaney and his family left these “massacres” for a new life in County Wicklow in the Republic. There were several reasons for the move: anonymous threats made against the Heaneys; a desire to break free of the confinements and “demeaning” conditions of Northern Ireland and to enjoy one’s Irish identity in a society where Catholics were the overwhelming majority; the new tax laws in the South that favored writers and artists so that Heaney might be able to earn a living entirely from his creative writing and occasional journalism (an undertaking abandoned three years later for practical reasons); and a generous rental arrangement. But there was also a recognition that “in the late ’60s and early ’70s the world was changing for the Catholic imagination,” an apparent reference to the new, contending but also liberating forces that had been unleashed in the church in the wake of the Vatican Council.12 In some sense at least, the comment suggests that his imagination was still an identifiably Catholic one. It was not a move, however, without emotional stress and a sense of abandoning the dire situation in his native province, a consideration that didn’t fail to register with both friends and enemies, the latter publicly welcoming the departure of “the well-known papist propagandist” back to “his spiritual home in the popish republic.”13 In practice, while Heaney might find it easier to go about his daily business in the Catholic-dominated Republic, it was still in many ways a less secular society than that of the sectarian North in the sense that the latter’s multiple connections to the British mainland had resulted in a more liberal social ethos in the important areas of censorship and sexual behavior, as well as in matters intellectual. In the Republic, on the other hand, Éamon de Valera was still the president, conservative John Charles McQuaid of Dublin still the most powerful Irish archbishop, and Northerners, whether Catholic or Protestant, were perceived as having an edge to them different from Southerners, occasionally provoking hostility or at least a less than warm welcome. While Heaney’s arrival had been heralded in the press, later he would write a poem about his reception among some of the lite12. Ibid., 254. 13. Ibid., 253.

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rati (“The Scribes,” OG 257) and allude to his “‘runner-in’ status” in their jealously guarded enclosure (SS 262). Heaney’s winning of the Nobel Prize over twenty years on, the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger decade (roughly 1995–2005), and the decline of ecclesiastical authority have all tended to mute memories of the raw challenges and uncertainties of that era. Artistically, nevertheless, the period of relative withdrawal proved tremendously fruitful. In 1975, the year in which Heaney returned to teaching (at a Catholic-run teacher training college), saw the appearance of Stations, a small volume of prose poems begun in California, in which the poet “attempts to touch what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time,’ moments at the very edge of consciousness which had lain for years in the unconscious.” Arriving back to the Troubles, he was temporarily distracted from pursuing these buried recollections until he got to Wicklow, where “the sectarian dimension of that pre-reflective experience presented itself as something asking to be uttered also.”14 The twenty-one pieces (only nine of them included in Opened Ground) take him from his earliest childhood during WWII to his university days. Shy and cautious about putting his hand into hidden places, a very young Heaney stands “sentry” to hear the sand martins in their nest, “listening for the silence under the ground”; in July, he hears the Orange Drummers leading “a chosen people through their dream”; listening illegally to the enemy, German propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, on the radio, he is faintly aware that his own nationalist tribe is seen as “‘the enemies of Ulster.’” The remembered comment that “‘When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst’” reflects attitudes similar to those of the Catholic family in Brian Moore’s novel, ones that were indeed commonplace at the time, even though many thousands of Irish Catholics from South and North served in British uniforms on the Allied side. “Trial Runs” revisits—or previsits—“The Other Side” as it recounts a Protestant neighbor returning from the war with a big rosary brought back from Italy as a gift for Heaney’s father. The exploratory dialogue between them—“two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs across a territory”—is revealed in the elder Heaney’s “‘Did they 14. Heaney, Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman, 1975), 3.



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make a Papish of you over there?” (OG 81–83, 85). The emphasis here, of course, is on the culture of Catholicism (and Protestantism) rather than in any sense of its truth or otherwise; Heaney is trying to convey the complex, untidy, contradictory interactions that he has experienced along the way. But some of the matters referred to are ones that might have been discreetly ignored—those, for example, that reinforce the suspicion that Northern Catholics were hoping for a German victory—while the acknowledgment of friendly relations with Protestant neighbors might well not have suited the agendas of some nationalists in the 1970s. And, in fact, Heaney’s other volume of the same year, North, is more in keeping with the actualities of the Northern crisis as it then was. But two of the prose poems of Stations that were left out of Opened Ground are also relevant here. The first, “Patrick and Oisin” (the standard Gaelic fada accent is omitted from Oisín’s name) again has a very young Heaney studying his catechism with its “polysyllabic runs” about “morose delectation and concupiscence” and “calumny and detraction,” while the latter sins are being committed by the adults near him in their “backbiting undergrowth.” When a Father Hughes “clappered” the students the next day with “hands up who said their morning prayers this morning,” Heaney’s “hand was a tendril reaching with the others.” Then, “The night wore on. The phrases that had sapped my concentration atrophied, incised tablets mossed and camouflaged by parasites and creeping greenery.” So even at that initial phase of Heaney’s formation, pagan Oisín has won out over pious St. Patrick, while the condemned “morose delectation and concupiscence” have begun to work their magic at least in their auditory mode. In the second poem, “The Sabbath-Breakers,” Heaney refers to an incident of his boyhood when local Protestants, upset that Catholics would play sports on the Sabbath, destroyed their preparations to do so, only to have the Catholics play anyway “In spite of dungeon, fire and sword,” a rather dramatic invocation from Faber’s “Faith of our Fathers,” with bold lettering chosen to emphasize his point.15 Heaney’s preoccupation with such matters and his felt need to proclaim them meant that abandoning Catholicism as an ideology did not 15. Ibid., 10, 15.

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require leaving it as a culture or ceasing to identify with it whenever it was under siege from Protestant militancy. Stations is deeply concerned with the oppression of Catholics in the North: “When I think about my territory and my hinterland and my past I am thinking in terms of Ireland as a whole and the history of the famine and the rebellion. Within Northern Ireland having that set of myths for yourself and your nation is what it means to be a Catholic.” His poetry “is not sectarian,” but “the smells of sectarianism” are embedded in it.16 At the same time, he is also well aware of a shift in his loyalties as we see in a 1974 review of David Jones’s last volume of poetry, where Heaney identifies the latter “as a [Catholic] convert, as a philologist, as a priest of the word, as a maker and breaker of metre and vocabulary” who is “the direct heir of Hopkins,” and who, in contrast with “your mid-American” who “is often an aesthetic opportunist, exploiting a Red Indian myth for its charming effect . . . retrieves, a tradition [i.e., Catholicism] with great labour, affirms it by its authentic images and exposes its outline as a form of truth.”17 Heaney would not regard himself, obviously, as “an aesthetic opportunist” in his use of Catholic tradition, but for him the latter does stand somewhere between “myth” and “a form of truth,” with emphasis on form. That there was a distinction at this time between Heaney’s cultural attachment to Catholicism and his actual belief in its doctrines is shown by “Freedman,” one of the poems in North (1975) where Heaney professes his liberation through poetry from both British and Roman Catholic subjugation—almost in the manner of Joyce—to a new condition. There are three significant points to be made about “Freedman”: the first is that in the original prose-poem version published in an anthology in 1974 as “Romanist,” the speaker never emerges from his “subjugated” position: he was “a humble client at the lattice of confessionals” and “estimated and enumerated with my own, indelibly one with the earth-starred denizens of catacomb and campagna”;18 the second is that the retitled lyric 16. Quoted in Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 198. 17. See Heaney, “Now and in England.” Spectator, May 4, 1974, 547. 18. Russell (Seamus Heaney’s Regions) notes that Heaney’s wording here is close to St. Paul’s in his letter to the Galatians (5:1–15) and suggests the poet’s understanding of Catholic subjugation as similar to that of African Americans (196).



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version—“Freedman”—with a stanza that both reflects his successful escape and suggests that he had to think through that escape, was first published in May 1975 in Fr. Herbert McCabe’s New Blackfriars, a sympathetic venue certainly, but also one aligned with that from which he had escaped;19 thirdly, in the version that appeared a month later in North, the poem has an epigraph about how slaves in ancient Roman might be molded, educated, and finally freed to become “useful” in society. Overall, then, a rustic Heaney too has been educated in Roman Catholic (and “British”) institutions—“Subjugated yearly under arches, / Manumitted by parchments and degree”—trained in the ways of “fast and abstinence,” and reminded of his last end: “‘Memento homo quia pulvis es.’ / I would kneel to be impressed by ashes // I was under the thumb too like all my caste.” But now he is declaring his new imaginative freedom, which has come about because “poetry arrived in that city,” leading him to “abjure all cant and self-pity”; in short, it was poetry that “wiped my brow and sped me.” Some of the mean-spirited, will, of course, “say I bite the hand that fed me.”20 For whatever reason, however, Heaney afterward did not include “Freedman” in Opened Ground; perhaps the poem that marks his own religious independence was too declarative, too Joycean; more likely, however, it needed more aesthetic mastery. Heaney is well aware too that a lyric poem is less declarative than a prose-poem, the latter less so than a prose essay. He knows how to be selective. North represents a major station, or stepping stone, in Heaney’s religious as well as artistic trajectory, even if Robert Lowell’s hailing him as the best Irish poet since Yeats is taken with Heaney-like caution. Heaney himself has said that “some kind of surge of confidence came with the ending of Wintering Out and the beginning of North. . . . Although those poems were written here and there, there is a bed of imagery upon which most of the poems grow.”21 In part 1 of this collection, he extends the bog imagery that he had derived from Glob’s book, sometimes using Danish 19. See Rand Brandes and Michael J. Durkan, Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959–2003 (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 312. 20. Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 56. 21. Frank Kinahan, “Artists on Art: An Interview with Seamus Heaney,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 1982): 410.

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examples, sometimes those taken from similar excavations by Irish archeologists. In a volume that looks back to Heaney’s Northern Irish days more than it looks forward to those in his new home, “Funeral Rites” marks the transition from the old dispensation to the new—or rather the contemporary—in terms of the perception of religious rituals. It shows the contrast between the funerals of dead relatives in an earlier, more peaceful era and the gruesome “neighbourly” murders of the present. Earlier, the corpses in “tainted rooms” had their “dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads” and “wrists / obediently sloped”; they wore “dulse-brown” shrouds (frequently provided by local Catholic charities) (OG 95). The words “shackled” and “obediently” imply criticism of the church’s power over the deceased both in life and in death, though the deaths had occurred without violence. In the troubled, murderous present, however, we “pine for ceremony”: Heaney imagines a pagan journey from the North to the “great chambers of Boyne”—doubly significant as both the ancient burial site of pagan Ireland and as the scene of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism, and thus the remote source of the ongoing murders. The ultimate invocation of the Scandinavian mythical hero Gunnar (the mention of fjords sets the scene), who too had been rendered “dead by violence” but seems to have gone “unavenged,” presumably expresses a hope on Heaney’s part that something similar would happen in present-day Northern Ireland (in fact, Heaney changed the original text to this effect).22 It is notable that the precedent for peace here lies in the pagan rather than in the Christian past, again in a way eliding traditional distinctions between them. In “Punishment” too that elision between pagan and Christian periods is again implied, though in service of persistent human cruelty rather than of peaceful impulses. The tone is self-accusatory—Rand Brandes has found that the original title was “Shame”—and the description of the mummified corpse less honeyed than in “The Tollund Man.”23 The grim centerpiece of the poem is the bog-preserved body of a young adulteress (since revised by the archaeologists to that of a young boy) who was killed 22. See Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 147. 23. Brandes, quoted in Russell, Seamus Heaney, 24.



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thousands of years ago for her “crime.”24 Heaney “can see her drowned / body in the bog” and “her shaved head / like a stubble of black corn.” The poet then reflects honestly on what his own attitude would probably have been on the occasion of her public execution. While he “almost” loves her, had he been there he “would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence.” As testimony, he recounts his passivity in present-day Belfast where he has seen Catholic girls tarred and feathered—a particularly gruesome ordeal that, while not resulting in death, has the intended aim of also being a scene of communal ritual humiliation—by the IRA for associating with “enemy” British soldiers: I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings. The poem expresses helplessness and failure. He accuses himself of being one who would “connive / in civilized outrage” at what had happened (presumably at the safe distance of a subsequent letter to the paper about the barbarity of the IRA’s actions), but abruptly undercuts this with the admission that he would also “understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (OG 112). In acknowledging the continuity of human vengefulness through the ages, these lines imply an even deeper helplessness and inescapability not directly attributable to any doctrine or denomination, though at the time the poem provoked severe criticism for seeming to sympathize with the IRA perpetrators. The genesis of the poem that immediately follows, “Strange Fruit,” nicely illustrates how Heaney has transitioned from Christian to pagan metaphors. In a 1974 interview, he’d explained that “Catholicism as a set of doctrines and beliefs is not what being a Roman Catholic means in Northern Ireland. It’s almost a racist term, a label for a set of cultural suppositions.”25 Earlier, in an essay titled “Christmas 1971” in the Listener, he commented on a wall mural that read “‘Keep Ulster Protestant’ 24. Ibid., 75. 25. Ibid., 164.

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and ‘Keep Blacks and Fenians out of Ulster.’”26 Thus, the comparison of Northern Irish Catholics with African Americans, an established trope, was one that allowed Heaney to borrow the “strange fruit” term—used to refer to black men lynched by white Southerners—for yet another bog poem: “Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. / Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune stones for teeth.” He finally describes her as “Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible / Beheaded girl, outstaring axe / And beatification, outstaring / What had begun to feel like reverence” (OG 114). Examining Heaney’s many drafts of the poem in great detail, Richard Rankin Russell has noted that an earlier title was “Reliquary” (a container for a saint’s remains) and that “Strange Fruit” was “heavily Catholic and devotional” with references to “a monstrance / for her exposition” and the implied “stories of saints whose bodies stayed un-decomposed and fragrant in death because of their sanctity in life.” Another early title for “Strange Fruit” was “My Reverence,” which related the severed head to that of Saint Oliver Plunkett—enshrined since 1921 in a Catholic church in Drogheda—the Irish Archbishop of Armagh, who had been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in London in 1681 for his faith and belatedly elevated to sainthood in the year Heaney wrote the poem: “He kept the faith for us, / this Oliver. / We name our sons for him / and call him blessed.” In revising the poem, however, Heaney “largely jettisoned that Catholic devotional language and emphasized instead the pagan Celtic cult of the human head.” Russell is puzzled by this, speculating that Heaney “may have feared running the risk of over-reverencing the girl’s head by conflating it with Christ’s body and blood and thus committing blasphemy.”27 A more likely reason was that by this time he had conflated paganism and Christianity—partly as a result of reading Anne Ross’s book on the Celtic tradition of the severed head—and thus established a new narrative for his evolving beliefs.28 Just as Glob’s book had provided Heaney with what he considered an 26. Ibid., 166. 27. Ibid., 173, 178. 28. Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).



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apt metaphor for the happenings in Northern Ireland, the concurrent excavations in Dublin into its Viking past—hastily undertaken when the city wished to use the site for its new administrative offices, a plan that incited much protest at the time—provided further reinforcement for Heaney’s bog imagery by revisiting the violent era of the Danish invasions in the tenth and eleventh centuries, grim portents of future Irish history.29 In the title poem: suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin . . . . . . were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. Although Seamus Deane found some “forceful straining” in the Viking-Irish analogy, he conceded its “potency” as “at first thrilling.”30 The less than encouraging conclusion to the poem is that “exhaustions nominated peace, / memory incubating the spilled blood” (OG 98). In other words, peace will come only from weariness, and even then, the memory of the “spilled blood” will be incubated for future resurrection when the cycle of violence and terror begins anew. To some extent, this was what would happen in the 1990s with the Good Friday Peace Agreement, when both sides in Northern Ireland had come to realize that neither one could triumph over the other and yet, in some quarters at least, did not substantially surrender their prior convictions, a circumstance still potent and unstable in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Part 2 of North consists of a series of more obviously personal and contemporary poems, still dealing with the Troubles, however. Heaney is sometimes dissatisfied with how little a poet can do for his “wronged 29. See, for example, Thomas Farel Heffernan, Wood Quay: The Clash over Dublin’s Viking Past (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 30. Seamus Deane, “The Timorous and the Bold,” quoted in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 110.

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people” in this kind of crisis. In “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” he abandons any reference to mythological precedent in his description of the current situation in his native province as “men die at hand” so that “The liberal papist note sounds hollow / When amplified and mixed in with the bangs / That shake all hearts and windows day and night.” The conflict is seen in traditional sectarian terms as Heaney declares that “(Last night you didn’t need a stethoscope / To hear the eructation of Orange drums / Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.).” He himself inclines to prayer more than to clichéd journalistic analysis to solve the problems of the society, although this is less a serious affirmation of a religious stance than a generalized expression of desire and hope. There is strong criticism of the whole Northern Irish scene—Catholic and Protestant— where everyone is much too attached to the past as “we hug our little destiny again.”31 It is the very sectarian nature of the conflict that will ultimately disillusion Heaney in regard to the traditional religious commitments of his country, though the fact that he was to exclude section 2 of this poem from his subsequent selected collections suggests that the sentiment expressed may itself have been more sectarian than he would have wished.32 This emerging freedom from overly sectarian and denominational identification is made clear in “Summer 1969.” Heaney and his family are in Madrid, he reading Richard Ellmann’s celebrated biography of Joyce, a writer often considered at the time as having been apolitical and noted especially for his horror of violence (and also, of course, a prime renouncer of Catholicism, as Ellmann insists in chapter and verse). Now Spain’s Catholic Guardia Civil, the enforcement unit of the Franco regime, remind Heaney of the equally intimidating Protestant police force in Northern Ireland, indicating that he would wish to extend his analysis of the Irish situation to cover other countries. He is burdened by his responsibilities toward those at home in Belfast: “‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ / Another conjured Lorca from his hill.” The poet’s 31. Heaney, North, 52–55. 32. Russell notes that Heaney gave a talk to an ecumenical church group in Belfast at Christmas 1971; Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 197.



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response is to retreat to “the cool of the Prado,” where he contemplates “Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’”: “the thrown-up arms / and spasm of the rebel, the helmeted / And knapsacked military.” Then, as if to give the theme a more universal application, “In the next room, / His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall— / . . . Saturn / Jeweled in the blood of his own children, / Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips / Over the world.” This is a troubling vision that raises fundamental questions about the supposedly benign—from a Christian perspective, at least—nature of the universe and the course of its unguided history (OG 132). In “Exposure,” the volume’s final poem, written after Heaney’s subsequent move to Dublin, he sees himself as “An inner émigré, grown longhaired / And thoughtful,” someone who has “Escaped from the massacre” but one who, in doing so, may also have missed the “pulsing rose” of the “once-in-a-lifetime” historical moment (OG 139). It is not too much to say that he also seems to be an “inner émigré” from many elements of his religious past. But “thoughtful” about the Ulster scene Heaney did become, partly because, following the publication of North, he was accused by some fellow Irish writers of now being “an anthropologist of ritual killing” whose emphasis on the cyclical nature of Irish violence appeared to offer an indirect justification for its continuance. From the very beginning, of course, Heaney had a mythologizing imagination, one reinforced by his reading of Hughes, if not quite as feral, that led him to see patterns and recurrences as shaping forces in people’s lives and that also tended, in the view of some, to privilege the tribal over the sociological. It was a strain made manifest in the bog poems especially, one of which (“Kinship”) literary critic and friend Edna Longley accused of presenting the atrocities “in astonishingly introverted Catholic and Nationalist terms,” while Blake Morrison described it as a display of “the tribal prejudices of an Irish Catholic.”33 A review of the commentary at the time shows clearly that those of nationalist sympathy were more likely to defend Heaney’s practices. Denis Donoghue wrote that “it is clear that thousands of read33. Edna Longley, quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 96; Blake Morrison, quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 92.

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ers have found their feelings defined in that volume more than in any other,” while on the especially controversial “Punishment,” Deane concluded that “imaginatively, [Heaney] is with the revenge, morally with the outrage.”34 Still, it was a Catholic Ciaran Carson who famously described Heaney as here becoming “the laureate of violence—a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing . . . and charming noble barbarity.” Heaney was also accused of forgoing a rational understanding of the violence in the Northern Irish community, based as it was on social and economic inequities, in favor of a more artistically satisfying metaphor.35 Heaney didn’t fully accept these interpretations, of course—and was resentful of some of them—but in Field Work (1979), the tragedies of the Northern Irish conflict are recorded more immediately and with less emphasis on archetypal patterns, although historical and literary precedents are still invoked, and Greek mythology and pagan and Christian deities hover overhead. The style changes, too, to a more expansive mode. Perhaps “meditative” would be a better word than “thoughtful” as Heaney struggles with the “anger” that prevents him from fully enjoying the “starlight” pleasures of eating and “toasting friendship” because of the intrusion of violent realities (“Oysters,” OG 139). In “Sibyl,” an early poem in the volume, Heaney asks, “What will become of us?,” and appears to receive three replies. The first begins, “Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,” and trails off without specifying the dire consequences. The second implies that, unfortunately, people will put their trust in the prosperity promised by the North Sea oil discoveries then in the news and fail to examine their prejudices— something that was to happen in more extreme form during the Celtic Tiger years of the 1990s and early 2000s—hoping that money will lull the future for everyone. The third reply is the one we have come to expect from Heaney: “The ground we kept our ear to for so long / Is flayed or 34. Denis Donoghue, quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 89; Seamus Deane, quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 111. 35. Quoted in O’Donoghue, Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, 4. Heaney’s other harshest critic in this matter is David Lloyd, who approaches his work from a Marxist perspective: see his “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity,” in Seamus Heaney, ed. Michael Allen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 155–84.



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calloused, and its entrails / Tented by an impious augury. / Our island is full of comfortless noises” (OG 141). In another poem from this “Triptych,” “At the Water’s Edge,” Heaney is still in the North (in border areas close to the Republic) visiting islands with Christian and pagan monuments. On Devenish, “Carved monastic heads / Were crumbling like bread on water,” representing the disintegration of a Christian inheritance. On pagan Boa, the “god-eyed, sexmouthed stone” is “Socketed between graves,” answering “my silence with silence,” a suggestion of divine absence or uncommunicativeness. The word “Anathema” is used here too, presumably a reference to the fact that sex was celebrated by the pagan Irish only to be condemned and repressed by Catholic Ireland. In the ruins of a house on Horse Island, he hears the army helicopter overhead, bringing to mind how they hovered over Civil Rights marches earlier, and how he and other protesters “crept before we walked!” as they took their “scared, irrevocable steps.” But it seems likely too that there is a double allusion here, the hovering helicopter also standing in for an all-seeing and fearsome deity that automatically inspires obeisance in a Catholic-reared Heaney: “Everything in me / Wanted to bow down, to offer up, / To go barefoot, foetal and penitential” (OG 142). It is reminiscent too of “In Gallarus Oratory,” the earlier poem that he excluded from his anthology, in which the ancient Irish monks are described as existing “Under the black weight of their own breathing,” that old “weight of Christianity in all its rebuking aspects, its call to self-denial and self-abnegation, its humbling of the proud flesh and insolent spirit.”36 The gods, old or new, are hardly comforting, much less supportive. Three of Heaney’s best poems on the victims of Northern Ireland’s violence follow: Sean Armstrong, whose “candid forehead stopped / a pointblank teatime bullet” (“A Postcard from North Antrim”);37 Colum McCartney, Heaney’s cousin, who was killed “Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew” (“The Strand at Lough Beg,” OG 145–46); the unnamed friend (Louis O’Neill) who was “blown to bits / Out drink36. See Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 13. 37. Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 19–20.

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ing in a curfew” (“Casualty,” OG 147–50). But such poems are just part of a collection that commemorates other men who have died in more peaceful circumstances: Sean O Riada, the most noteworthy of recent Irish composers; Robert Lowell, with whom Heaney was in close touch during the American poet’s last years in Dublin. Later in the volume, an elegy for Francis Ledwidge, the World War I Irish Catholic poet killed in that earlier conflict where Irish men, Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist, fought, though separated by regiments and ideologies, offers a summary of what has gone before. Since all of these poems deal with death, and death in the present moment in most cases, they raise issues as to Heaney’s conception of such matters at this time. They are important too because Heaney is now beginning to engage with Dante as his new guide, replacing his earlier use of Glob and the Scandinavian mythologies as he prepares to visit the underworld of the great Italian’s imagining— one, however, much informed by Virgil’s precedent (and presence). On the face of it, this would seem like a turning to, rather than away from, traditional orthodox Catholicism; part of a more neutral explanation would be that Dante’s images are more historically and culturally relevant than those of prehistoric and Norse times. “The Strand at Lough Beg,” the poem on his murdered cousin, is prefaced by a quotation from Canto 1 of Dante’s Purgatorio in the Dorothy L. Sayers translation in which references to “tall rushes” and “oozy sand” faithfully describe the actual place in which the murder was committed. Interestingly, Heaney refers to the road where his cousin was held up as “a high, bare pilgrim’s track” and his cousin as a Sweeney fleeing a “demon pack,” a reference both to a future interest of his and back to the island visit of “At the Water’s Edge.” The poet recalls his association with his cousin and then journeys on over the same ground to an encounter with the young man’s shade, a trope that will become more and more common as Heaney progresses over the next several decades. Just as Virgil wipes Dante clean prior to their ascent of the Mount of Purgatory, Heaney wipes the “blood and roadside muck” from his cousin’s “hair and eyes,” then “gather[s] up cold handfuls of the dew / To wash you, cousin.” Laying his corpse down, “I plait / Green scapulars to wear over your shroud” (OG



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146). The imagery is traditionally Catholic, but the “scapulars” are earth’s “rushes that shoot green again” rather than the felted cloth of pious familiarity. Nature, rather than the supernatural, forms the canopy of his cousin’s passing.38 “A Postcard from North Antrim” with its dedication “In Memory of Sean Armstrong,” a friend from Queen’s days, commemorates another tragic passing that resulted from the Troubles: “You were the clown / Social worker of the town / Until your candid forehead stopped / A pointblank teatime bullet.” In his exuberant persona, Armstrong was “independent, rattling, non-transcendent / Ulster” and his invocation now is depicted wholly in earthly remembrances of him as a drinker of whiskey (“Old Bushmills”) and “strong tea,” an eater of “Potato bread” and a smoker of “Woodbine,” the cheap cigarettes often referred to in those days as “coffin nails.”39 No prospect of immortality or an afterlife is mentioned. Likewise with Louis O’Neill of “Casualty,” breaker of the IRA curfew of Bloody Sunday by going out as usual in search of a drink and dying in a bomb explosion; his “proper haunt” is in his boat fishing “Somewhere, well out, beyond . . .” (OG 147–50). Likewise with the composer Sean O Riada and his “sceptic eye,” and even with onetime Catholic convert and fellow fisherman Robert Lowell, the “Elegy” for whom ends with “‘I’ll pray for you’”—the common phrase significantly in quotation marks, “an affectionate and mocking assertion of the fact of their mutual lapsed religion,” according to Helen Vendler.40 The poems—one a translation—with which Field Work concludes do indeed introduce us to an afterlife, but it is one of hellish suffering and more an imaginative commentary on the present—as was the case too with Dante—than a projection into a really existent supernatural dwelling place of the soul. Thus, “In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge”—where there is another of Heaney’s earliest usages of “Catholic,” a clear religious 38. A close-up shot of McCartney’s gravesite in Charlie McCarthy’s 2009 documentary Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous shows the words “A Martyr for His Faith” on his tombstone, unintentionally highlighting Heaney’s different interpretation; https://binged.it/308In4M. 39. Heaney, Field Work, 19–20. 40. Ibid., 29–30, 31–32; Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 62.

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self-identification—examines the fate of a fellow Irish poet who was killed in the uniform of a British soldier at Ypres in 1917. But, the poem notes, Ledwidge’s true home was among “the dolorous / And lovely” in his native town of Slane, County Meath: “the May altar of wild flowers, / Easter water sprinkled in outhouses, / Mass-rocks and hill-top raths.” Here again pagan mythology and Catholicism are intertwined, the fact that Mass was celebrated in such places during Penal times reinforcing the connection. Ledwidge, though in “a Tommy’s uniform,” still has “a haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave” but is also like a ghost from a “Boyne passage grave.” He is away at war in a season when his own country “wears her confirmation dress.” Shortly before this Ledwidge had written a lament for his friend Thomas MacDonagh, one of the leaders executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising that had aimed at achieving independence for Ireland. “I am sorry / That party politics should divide our tents,” Ledwidge had apologized to MacDonagh. Heaney declares, “In you, our dead enigma, all the strains / Criss-cross in useless equilibrium.” Ledwidge now lies buried with the “true-blue” Unionists, the opponents of Irish independence, who fought in the same uniform: “all of you consort now underground.” If the “equilibrium” of one who embodied all the strains of Irish history—an English name, an Irish Catholic background, a hope for reconciliation with England, a sympathy for the republican cause—is “useless,” then we are thrown back into the bleak landscape of North, where exhaustion, not reason or goodwill, brings about peace, “memory incubating the spilled blood” of the present conflict until a further sacrifice becomes due (OG 176–77). But, again, this is a comment on the depth of the antagonisms above ground, not a description of the psychic temperature of the world beneath it. Field Work’s last poem, “Ugolino,” a translation of a gruesome episode from Cantos 32 and 33 of the Inferno, takes us literally into hell. Here, though Heaney follows Dante’s text with reasonable fidelity, he manages to employ several key words and phrases from his earlier poems, so that this translation should be seen as a reaffirmation of his earlier attitudes rather than as a departure from them:



Impious Auguries 105 I walked the ice And saw two soldered in a frozen hole On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s, Gnawing at him where the neck and head Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain, Like a berserk Tydeus gnashed and fed Upon the severed head of Menalippus. (OG 178–80)

Count Ugolino, who had betrayed his native city, was in turn betrayed by Archbishop Roger, who imprisoned him and his young family and starved them to death. Now Ugolino and Roger are “soldered” in a frozen hole, where Ugolino gnaws continually on the archbishop’s neck and head, just as the bronze statue commemorating the Irish soldiers who had died in World War I soldered together Protestants and Catholics; the “sweet fruit of the brain” recalls Heaney’s poems on the excavated bodies from the Danish bogs; and “berserk” Tydeus echoes Heaney’s description of Goya’s “Duel with Cudgels” that had appeared in the poem quoted earlier from North. In the general context of Heaney’s thematic concerns, it is ominous that he should not only have chosen this particular episode from the Italian poet (after his previous trial of the Purgatorio), but should have placed it at the end of the collection. “In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge” implied that surface differences between men were relatively unimportant because they would all eventually have to consort together underground. But “Ugolino” at the very least suggests that this consorting may be but a prolongation of the hatreds and enmities of those above ground. Heaney momentarily appropriates Dante’s Inferno to his own developing idea of a never-ending Northern Irish hell; or, as in the famous slogan “chalked up” on Belfast’s Ballymurphy walls at the time (and quoted by Heaney in North [OG 125]), he too asks, “Is there a life before death?” The hell remains distinctly above ground. Richard Rankin Russell has observed that in spite of Heaney’s delight in Dante, “he was not drawn to the descriptions of the torments of the dead being punished in hell.”41 Heaney’s references, then, should be seen again as a grim commentary on the present, the expression of a worried 41. Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 250.

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despair, rather than an analysis of a real afterlife. As he himself has commented, the “purple passage” from Dante “happened to have an oblique applicability (in its ferocity of emotion and in its narrative about a divided city) to the Northern Irish situation.”42 Distressed and disillusioned by the savageries perpetrated in Christianity’s name by Irish nationalists as much as by Protestant Unionists and his own apparent inability to respond adequately to them, Heaney felt that he needed to sort out the purposes of his poetic art and look for answers to his broader preoccupations; he needed to go into retreat mode, and a part of that would involve a more extensive reconsideration of his religious beliefs. It was to be far more extensive than he had originally envisaged.43 42. Quoted in Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 56. 43. Heaney himself explained “Station Island” to Daniel Tobin as following the trajectory described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where the protagonist undergoes “separation—initiation—return.” See Tobin, Passage to the Center, 176.

Chapter 5

A L as t L o o k ?

B

y lat e 1975, three years after his move to the Republic and a trial stint as a freelance journalist and broadcaster, Seamus Heaney had returned to academic life, finding employment at Carysfort College, a two-year Catholic institution focused on preparing primary-level schoolteachers. Although he claimed that he “didn’t have to affect piety” or change his teaching style from what it had been at Queen’s or at Berkeley, “the ethos of the place was certainly Catholic.” Still, while “the wimple and the veil were much in evidence in the corridors . . . the place was in transition” (SS 229). He even mentions a comparable situation at Queen’s: there he was “well used to withholding ‘ratification’ from some of the forms and presuppositions of the [British-oriented] institution.” Now “God Save the Queen” was being replaced with “Faith of our Fathers,” but, in his view, “there are protocols and courtesies to be observed.” The parallel is striking—though comments on the simultaneous decline of both the British Empire and the Roman Church will proliferate in the decades to come—as is the idea of “withholding ratification,” indicating a marked departure from orthodoxy and a keen awareness of the fact. Heaney continues, “Your private life was still your own. Indeed, to my certain knowledge, I was a hell of a lot more emancipated from Catholic practice at the time than many a star in the UCD firmament,” an apparent poke at some “name” faculty there and another indication of Heaney’s further lapse from “Catholic practice” in the mid ’70s, though still with a significant awareness of lapsing rather than being merely negligent (SS 230).



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In spite of “the occasional statue in a niche and holy pictures on the walls” and “elder nuns [who] tended to infantilize the students,” Heaney “witnessed the regimentation disappearing and a far more independently minded student body establishing itself” (SS 230). It was a time also when secular clergy and members of religious orders had begun to step down from their former pedestals to mingle with the “faithful,” some of them even basking in their popular musical entertainment abilities, many feeling the constraints of clerical celibacy more than ever in an increasingly permissive society, and with urban, educated younger people becoming much more relaxed in fulfilling their church obligations. Official Catholicism was under challenge from many sources, including a government that wished to show its independence from the church’s influence—partly to make the Republic more inviting to Protestant Ulster (some politicians thought that the canonization of Oliver Plunkett in 1975 was ill-advised in this regard)—and by a vigorous women’s movement orchestrated back then by both religious and laity. But Catholicism was still a force to be reckoned with as its new churches and new media-savvy institutions proliferated. The election of a new pope in 1978, the energetic and conservative survivor of the Polish Communist regime, John Paul II, would also usher in a period of renewed authoritarianism and an end to earlier dialogues with Marxists (as Thomas Merton and the contributors to Slant and New Blackfriars had attempted) or the kind of political protest represented by the Jesuit Dan Berrigan and his Josephite brother at the time of the Vietnam war and by Franciscan liberation theologian Leonardo Boff afterward. Religious orthodoxy, with all its remembered oppressions, was attempting a comeback, although it would take several years before its various parts (mainly the appointment of like-minded bishops) were in their strategic places, and by then it would be too late to turn the tide of disaffection. The complexity of Heaney’s views on religion at this juncture is evident in a 1978 essay, “The Poet as a Christian,” which appeared in the Furrow, an Irish Catholic periodical with a largely ecclesiastical readership of pastors of progressive bent. Here a perceptibly uncomfortable Heaney (one assumes that his contribution was solicited) is relatively



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clear about his position in regard to traditional religious belief in that he admits that he can no longer profess such; the “axial moment” (a term, borrowed from the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, that was popular at the time to describe major turning points in history) for him has long since passed but, of course, the actual writing about it in this venue brings it to a new level of consciousness. Still, in regard to his Catholicism, Heaney proceeds rather circuitously: “I have no real interest here in exploring or explaining the erosion of my religious practice or my problems with some central mysteries.”1 So we have “erosions” and “problems” with “central” rather than peripheral matters and little desire to explain them, yet all cased in a blunt declaration of their rebellious existence. Neil Corcoran suggests that as department head of English in a teacher-training college, “the Irish Catholic forms and presuppositions of the institution seemed to be demanding from him a degree of ratification which he felt increasingly unable to give.”2 While we have seen from Heaney’s 2007 description of his time at Carysfort that it wasn’t quite as “demanding” as Corcoran intimates, his judgment neatly registers where Heaney was thought to stand religion-wise at that time, and perhaps the jolt he got not so much in working in a Catholic institution—which he had done several times before—but in doing so in the still Catholicdominated Irish Republic.3 He was also a breadwinner who needed to keep his job, a consideration never completely absent from a canny and responsible Ulsterman (or, to be fair, from any lay teacher at a religious institution, no matter where they came from). Heaney’s appearance in this clerical journal as a self-proclaimed nonpracticing and rather marginal member of the church, of course, signifies a new openness on the part of at least some members of the ecclesiastical powers that be, although Heaney’s friend playwright Brian Friel had declared himself an agnostic in another Catholic publication, the Word, back in 1970.4 For the 1. Heaney, “The Poet as a Christian,” Furrow, October 1978, 604. 2. Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 258. 3. Heaney has mentioned the surprise he got in moving to the Republic and finding that the Times Literary Supplement, for example, was not as readily available as it had been in Belfast. 4. Desmond Rushe, “Kathleen Mavourneen, Here Comes Brian Friel,” in Brian Friel in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 80. The interview

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church, even the heretics were interesting, if only because they were still interested. The essay that immediately follows Heaney’s, by Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher, sees rising prosperity as the main threat to Catholic practice. While the statistics the priest gives for Mass attendance are strikingly and comfortingly high, however, he worries about “a serious absence of internalized faith behind the impressive church practice.”5 The events of the next two decades were to confirm that finding to an unimagined degree, even a seemingly successful papal visit in 1979 “one last blast” rather than the intended new beginning.6 As feminist writer Nell McCafferty said afterward about her attendance at the pope’s Mass in Phoenix Park, which drew over a third of the country’s population, “I saw absolutely no contradiction in opposing his daft policies on birth control and cheering the great day for the Irish. It was a cheerful fingers up to Cromwell.”7 By his late thirties, then, Seamus Heaney, no longer a regular churchgoer, had long since drifted into that extremely broad, but unsatisfactory category of onetime believers conventionally referred to as “lapsed Catholics,” though Brendan Behan in an interview once had delightfully—and accurately—amended the phrase to “collapsed Catholic.” Lapsed or collapsed, the implication always was that the entanglements of life (usually sexual or marital) had brought about a loss of direction, a fall from grace, but also that there was a wistful hope—even in the mind of the protagonist—of an eventual, possibly deathbed, reconciliation. Friel, in the Catholic publication alluded to in a previous paragraph, described himself as being a “very confused man” in religious matters: “I suppose I’m a sort of lapsed practicing Catholic . . . and I don’t see any contradiction in this either.”8 Yet such a profile doesn’t at all fit Heaney’s life at this point. Far from being a wounded or “confused” believer, in his Furrow essay originally appeared in the Word: An International Catholic Pictorial Magazine, February 1970, 12–15. Friel referred to himself as a “practicing lapsed Catholic,” inventing a wholly new category of unbelief (81). 5. Michael Paul Gallagher, “What Hope for Irish Faith?,” Furrow, October 1978, 613. 6. Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, 732. See also David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland’s New Elite (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005). 7. Quoted in Ferriter, Ambiguous Republic, 654–55. 8. Quoted in ibid., 646.



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Heaney described the “poetic vocation” as “a pursuit of psychic health” and as “a religious commitment to the ever-evolving disciplines of the art which the poet has to credit as his form of sanctity.”9 Furthermore, the old “lapsed” category itself needs to be rethought, as it belongs to a time when the church appeared to be a beacon of supernatural certainty in a sea of disruptive modernity. Vatican II had unintentionally changed all that so that while one might still return to religious practice after a period of neglect, the “home” of traditional Irish Catholicism (and more so of worldwide Catholicism) had altered itself so much even in its own terms as not to be there any longer for familiar and comforting retrieval. In practice, Heaney never desired to return; he never felt homeless, but he continued to speak when required to do so in terms of casual nonobservance and muted nonbelief rather than outright rejection. Part of his discretion on the matter undoubtedly arose from a native courtesy, an unwillingness to be blunt or unkind to the many believers of all stripes and degrees who considered him “one of themselves”; part of it, perhaps, can be attributed to the fact that his parents, unliterary though they may have been and so unlikely to peruse his essays or interviews, were still alive, and he did not wish to upset them. Yet he had all the time been establishing his new nest in the tree of poetry as he was leaving the “bare ruined choirs” of the old one, creating a place for himself that was more native and natural. As he put matters at the end of his 1978 talk, “I think I am a Christian because the Sermon on the Mount satisfies so much in me that pines consciously and unconsciously for appeasement. But I have no doubt that I am also a pagan, and that every poet is: the poet will have to be standing with Oisín against Patrick, he will have to roost in the tree of his instincts with Mad Sweeney while St. Moling stands ideologically in the cloister.” From this perspective, then, the contest is between “instincts”—which can be a frustratingly broad concept—and “ideology,” which, in turn, can be too narrow, dogmatic, and closed to the complexities of daily living. Thus, Heaney continues, “The poet in this way is deeply conservative, hoarding the wisdoms and consolations that the old religions discovered and rendered into the ever-stable currency of myth 9. Heaney, “Poet as a Christian,” 606.

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and literature.”10 It is “myth and literature” that are “ever-stable” in the human imaginary while specific faiths—including Catholicism—are but passing contributions to the store of “wisdoms and consolations” needed for our mortal journey. The implication would seem to be that there is no point in declaring any religion “wrong,” much less “right” or “true,” though Heaney’s particular problems with Catholicism suggest that the latter does not so easily fit into the universal mythological narrative. This was the period too when Heaney explained in an interview that he was “not what you’d call a pious Catholic,” that he didn’t go to Mass very often, and that “the doctrines of the Faith aren’t my constant reading,” qualifying all this, however, with the addendum that “it was part of the texture of growing up,” that it “permeated” his life, that he “never felt any need to rebel or to do a casting-off of God” because “anthropologists and mythologists have taught us . . . to live with our myths.”11 Still, in deliberately not attending church or engaging with its rituals and doctrines, he is in some way rebelling against and casting off the tradition in which he was raised; and, again, he seems to be aware that Catholicism itself, unlike some other religions, does not accept that it is simply a way rather than the way, nor does it want in its bosom those who think such. At the same time, his apparent substituting of poetry for religion is not, I think, “missional” as John Dennison has claimed; Heaney is as much aware of a sad loss as of a joyous gain; his aim is to console rather than to convert.12 S ea m u s H eane y ’ s progressive “flight” from conventional Catholicism is epitomized in Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1983). “The poem,” Eamon Duffy observes, “allowed Heaney to ventriloquize long and deeply held concepts” in that it “provided a powerful symbol for the strains between unregenerate pagan man and the stern and constraining demands of Christianity.”13 Although a translation of a medieval saga, the poem embodies parts of Heaney’s own consciousness as well: in other words, and within limits, it is as much about Heaney as it is about Swee10. Ibid. 11. Quoted in Andrew Murphy, Seamus Heaney (Horndon: Northcote, 2010), 65. 12. Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 183. 13. Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 173.



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ney. Here he “gets under way” as an independent seeker, so to speak. In the original poem, Sweeney, one of Ulster’s ancient mythical kings from the seventh century (his tale probably dates from the tenth century, with thirteenth-century reorganizations, and surviving manuscripts from the 1600s), having cursed a cleric (St. Ronan) and even tried to kill him, is punished with madness and transformation into a bird that wanders all over Ireland in flight from a variety of pursuers. However, in Heaney’s version, Sweeney is both pious (he is upset with women who eat on the Lord’s fast day) and profane (“It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight”) (OG 185). Much celebratory description of nature is interspersed throughout the narrative in the dinnseanachas tradition (or like a modern talk-show host soliciting applause by mentioning a guest’s hometown or state). Sweeney flees and flees, depending for sustenance and protection on the kindness of strangers: “I am a sheep / without a fold.”14 At the time of his inevitable slaying, however, Sweeney still seems to prefer the sounds of nature over the rituals of the church, though at the end, “[St.] Moling and his community came along to where Sweeney lay and Sweeney repented and made his confession to Moling. He received Christ’s body and thanked God for having received it and after that was anointed by the clerics” (OG 194–95). Sweeney’s deathbed (or dungbed) conversion, however, is—as many commentators have noted—unconvincing, and perhaps tellingly so in light of Heaney’s own religious situation. The Sweeney translations represent Heaney’s sympathy with the outlaw from the church: “Insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation.” But it is also possible to see Sweeney’s rebellion as occurring within a religious context, rather like Hopkins’s anguish mentioned earlier.15 This pagan-Christian tension, traditional in Irish literature for the last fifteen 14. Heaney, Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 42. 15. Ibid., ii.

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hundred years, has always provided an outlet for artistic frustration with the strictures of religious orthodoxy, Austin Clarke, an early supporter of Heaney, being one of its main exponents.16 It will take another push for Heaney to actually abandon the beliefs of the past. By the time Sweeney Astray appeared in 1983, Seamus Heaney had already begun his own annual spring migrations to a new teaching post in Harvard University’s English Department. Like his earlier passage from the North to the South of Ireland, it too required reflection on the consequences for his art and for his family life. He finally chose to go there partly because it offered him more time to devote to his poetry back home, partly because on this occasion it freed him from the constrictions of his southern Irish intellectual confines, and partly because it was, well, Harvard, whether In Christi Gloriam or not.17 Helen Vendler, the scholar of Yeats and Stevens fame and, very relevant here, the most assured announcer of Heaney’s religious apostasy, had encouraged and organized his coming. But it was in America too that he encountered “The Master”— Heaney’s term—who would considerably influence his future trajectory and ambiguously undulate its extended religious flight. Heaney had been aware of the Polish-Lithuanian poet Czesław Miłosz, fellow exile and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, since his time at Berkeley and especially in the 1970s when there was much interest in the politics of Eastern Europe and the writing coming from there. Miłosz was also the author of the classic and controversial antiStalinist The Captive Mind (1951), had witnessed the horrors of the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, and was one of the inspirations for Poland’s Solidarity movement led by Lech Wałęsa.18 Having also grown up in a city deeply divided by large populations of Catholics and, in this case, Jews (separate schools, same university, separate or16. See Auge, Chastened Communion, 27–32. 17. However, in a personal conversation during a reading at Vanderbilt University in 1983, Heaney informed me that he sometimes felt alienated and even intimidated by the peculiarly insular, outdated, and aggressive Irishness he encountered in Boston’s pubs. 18. Early on, Wałęsa had been arrested for distributing Miłosz’s The Captive Mind: see Magdalena Kay, “Dialogues across the Continent: The Influence of Czesław Miłosz on Seamus Heaney,” Comparative Literature 63, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 161–81.



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ganizations within it), Miłosz would serve as a model for Heaney’s ongoing artistic and personal engagement with the complex loyalties of the Northern Irish situation. More importantly, Miłosz was a skeptical Catholic still very much involved with the faith and had been a friend of the late Thomas Merton. As noted earlier, when Heaney first met him in 1983 in the company of the American poet and translator Robert Hass, their shared Catholic backgrounds were the main topic of conversation (SS 300). Miłosz would never draw Heaney back to Catholicism—indeed, in some ways the relationship confirmed his distance from it (“Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.”)—but Miłosz would ensure its continuing to hover over him. According to “The Master” (1984), after meetings with the formidable Pole, then in his early seventies, in his “unroofed tower,” Heaney felt “flimsy” as he climbed down “the unrailed stairs on the wall, / hearing the purpose and venture / in a wingflap above me” (OG 256).19 Heaney too had lived in serious times, but never on Miłosz’s scale, and with much less of the philosophical engagement and gruff manner that the latter brought to the issue; the Irish poet would need to rediscover his own gravitas and steadiness. The late 1970s and early ’80s, then, represent a period of reassessment for Heaney, with “Station Island” (another name for Lough Derg) and its multiple religious associations and implications being a kind of culmination of this undertaking.20 The original “jottings” for the poem date, in fact, from 1966, have the revelatory title of “Lenten Stuff,” and open with a line about this being the “only place” where he can “find” himself.21 Imaginatively, Heaney is returning to where he had gone on pilgrimage on at least three occasions in the 1950s and from whose penitential exercises he had gained several plenary and partial indulgences that would accrue to his spiritual balance in the next life, a circumstance 19. See Parker, “Past Master: Czesław Miłosz and His Impact on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry,” Textual Practice 5, no. 1 (2013): 825–50. 20. The “stations” at Lough Derg are really a set of penitential and prayerful exercises— some of them conducted barefooted at stone “beds” (as in a flower bed) associated with various Irish saints—not to be confused with the more familiar “Stations of the Cross” in Catholic churches. 21. See Heaney, “Station Island: Jottings for a Poem,” 3. Quoted in Tobin, Passage to the Center, 176–77.

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that mattered to him at the time. Now, in the 1980s, he is not actually going there again—such a journey would probably have been unbearable for him at this stage, intellectually, aesthetically, and likely even religiously—and, as he told Dennis O’Driscoll in 2007, he is performing an examination of conscience, not making a confession of guilt (SS 234). His unresolved experience of an ongoing crisis of faith, the gradual erosion of Catholic authority in the years following Vatican II (which even the papacy of John Paul II failed to stem), and the challenges of the Troubles in his province (especially the 1980s hunger strikes of the IRA prisoners at Long Kesh that were emblematic fusions of religious and nationalist traditions and ideologies based on physical and mental sacrifice) needed to be confronted. Heaney sought “to release an inner pressure.” However, the sequence “was also set up so that different voices could speak and different weights get lifted” (SS 233–34). Later he commented on “Station Island” in more expansive terms as a poem designed “to have it out with myself, to clear the head, if not the decks”—this in spite of his much later claim that, in regard to religious matters at least, he never had it out with himself (SS 236). The Station Island collection (1984) is dedicated to Brian Friel as a mark of gratitude for his encouragement, though the fact that Friel had once been a very unhappy seminarian at Maynooth in the 1940s and struggled with his own problems of faith and doubt also made him an appropriate dedicatee.22 Part I, untitled, consists of an eclectic variety of poems, twenty-five in all, that set the main feature in a broader context, perhaps lightening its excess weight but still rehearsing themes of entering the underground, following Dante, retreating to an island like Chekhov did to confront the suffering of the world in a penal colony, and confronting Heaney’s own sins of omission and commission in his political and artistic endeavors. He explores his disillusionment with a once seemingly benevolent natural world and at the same time the oppressions that traditional Catholicism imposes on the human imagination. In short, a focused preparation for Part II, the poem that gives the book 22. See Brian Friel, In Conversation with Brian Friel, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).



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its title. Part III, “Sweeney Redivivus,” takes flight by positively reimagining the old world of restriction and repression, occasionally precisiondropping an odorous turd where deserved along the way, and eventually descending down to the earthly truths of human origins and existence. On the way in, then, “Stone from Delphi” combines Catholic images with those of ancient Greece to which the poet must make obeisance: To be carried back to the shrine some dawn when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south and I make a morning offering again: that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood, govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth. (OG 207) An older, wiser, and sadder pilgrim this time around, the pagan gods are now part of Heaney’s world, as is the God of his Catholic upbringing (the phrase “morning offering” has a very specific Catholic reference to prayers said immediately after rising): the many gods will be upset by a lack of honesty or the presence of hubris; one or more or all may “speak” through him in the truthfulness of his imagination, since that, after all, is what they represent.23 “Remembering Malibu,” dedicated to the unbelieving Brian Moore, who has abandoned the “cold ascetic” and “monkfished” Atlantic and Skellig’s “beehive hut[s]” of Ireland’s western coast, serves as a reminder of the possibility of Heaney taking a similar option and is a kind of forerunner of the James Joyce who will appear on the other side at the end of the pilgrimage. On the way out, in Part III, “The Master,” his poem for the believing Miłosz will steady him with its ballast of hard-won wisdom, even should it differ to some degree from that of his mentor: in his new persona, he will exercise the gravitas of the Polish poet.24 Heaney, however, is also in a long line of literary pilgrims to Lough Derg, famous after all for over a thousand years and likely known to Dan23. As late as 2012, recalling his visit to the Peloponnese in 1995, Heaney invoked a sense there of “omen and benediction,” another nice bringing together of the two traditions; see “Seamus Heaney’s Favorite Places,” in “Intelligent Life,” Economist, December 2012, 24. 24. Heaney, Station Island (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 30–31.

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te, though only two of those pilgrims appear recognizably in his own account. In addition, he is in the tradition of another poet not mentioned but with whose work he was quite familiar—Heaney had even disputed the poet’s version of ideal “Irishness” earlier—and whose similar pilgrimage to another iconic Irish shrine Declan Kiberd rightly sees as anticipating “Station Island” “by decades.”25 That is to say, Seán Ó Ríordáin’s “Cnoc Mellerí,” an Irish language poem of the late 1940s, is also a story of a troubled conscience rather than of a satirical or skeptical imagination. Although it looks at the religious question from the inside rather than the outside, it is free of most of the pieties of the period; and Ó Ríordáin’s artistic life, if not this poem, has an explicitly Joycean resolution. “Cnoc Mellerí,” then, is worth looking at. Ó Ríordáin’s pilgrimage destination is the Trappist (Cistercian) monastery of Mount Melleray in County Waterford that also received famous attention from William Makepeace Thackeray, who despised its ascetic practices in the 1840s, and from Joyce in “The Dead” as the scene of Freddy Malins’s periodic “drying out,” a place where the monks are commended for their hospitality and incorrectly described as sleeping in their coffins as they make atonement for the sins of the outside world.26 And of course, too, Miłosz’s friend and one of Heaney’s earliest spiritual mentors, Thomas Merton, was a member of the same Trappist Order. Ó Ríordáin’s poem, meanwhile, is considered to be one of the high points of his creative achievement, bringing a modern sensibility to a premodern language in a way that upset a few purist Gaelgóirí at the time. In its own genre, it is every bit as iconic as Heaney’s Lough Derg narrative. Ó Ríordáin’s real presence in the monastery’s guesthouse implies an initial pursuit of penance and likely a desire to resolve ongoing spiritual difficulties in the dreary way that characterized that peculiar period of recent Irish history—which right away establishes a difference with Heaney’s “last look” virtual visit. The twenty-two-stanza poem opens with 25. See Frank Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 49, 19. 26. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990), 52–53; Joyce, Dubliners, 182. For the story of a more recent poet pilgrim, see Seán Dunne, The Road to Silence: An Irish Spiritual Odyssey (Dublin: New Island, 1994).



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this penitential theme as the narrator speaks of “laethanta an pheaca bhoig mar bhreoiteacht ar mo chuimhne”—being sick with the memory of “days of soft sin” and “lust”—and hears the monks like “sidhe gaoithe”—“a fairy wind”—on their way to Mass as promising joyful relief.27 But soon the speaker’s tone alters: the monk reading to the guests at meals has become enemy-like—perhaps because the poet is now even more acutely aware of their purity and his, and everyone else’s, sinfulness. Seeing a young monk shuffle by like an old man, Ó Ríordáin asserts that to induce a young person to adopt this celibate way of life is an insult to the mercy of God. The poor lad has been cut off from the wildness of the imagination and will never experience “tréanmheisce mná,” a phrase that Patrick Crotty translates as being “woman-drunk” and one that belongs squarely in the unreflectively masculinist discourses of that time period, too (though reflected also in a Patrick Kavanagh quote in Heaney’s poem).28 But then a further twist is made: the poet criticizes this criticism itself as representing his worldly ego; he should not be so concerned with the individual. His own life has been one of waste and sin, whereas the monks’ lives express “Meadaracht, glaine, doimhinbhrí is comhfhuaim”— measure, clarity, profundity, and harmony. Formal Confession to one of the monk-priests produces release but also leads the penitent to overconfidence, to imagining that he is full of the Holy Spirit, and that his words come from Heaven. As a predictable consequence, he reacts that the church has become a spancel on his mind, the priest a eunuch, the Faith nothing more than lip service—and he rejects both only to find himself buzzed by the bee-like monks (a familiar trope for this apiarist monastery) so that his mind becomes burdened by questions once again. 27. The Irish version of the poem is available in Seán Ó Ríordáin, Eireaball Spideoige (Dublin: Sairseal agus Dill, 1952), 64; see the original Irish and an English translation in Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Dublin: Blackstaff, 1996), 118–23. 28. Ó Ríordáin, in Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry, 121. For a sympathetic account of the monastery as it was in 2014, see John Waters, “Inside Mount Melleray,” Sunday Independent, September 28, 2014; Waters, an Irish journalist, was invited to give a retreat to the nineteen monks then living there—it had 150 or so when Ó Ríordáin visited—and his narrative bears informed witness to a neglected aspect of recent religious decline. The monastery now has fewer than seven residents. Waters had criticized Heaney vehemently in 2009 for declaring his unbelief on Irish radio; see chapter 11.

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The future is described as being hidden in God’s fist, and the poem itself becomes the proverbial drowning man’s grip on the receding world of belief.29 Ó Ríordáin ends, as Seán Ó Tuama has observed, in greater doubt than ever.30 “[T]á m’anamsa i gcarcair”—my soul is imprisoned—Ó Ríordáin says in another poem in the same 1950s collection. Later, Ó Ríordáin too would identify himself with Joyce—at one point he even asserts his own religious and artistic independence by declaring, “Is mise é” (“I am he”).31 Overall, Ó Tuama has noted, Ó Ríordáin “managed to mould and expand the [Irish Gaelic] language in order to communicate abstract thoughts and, sometimes, deep personal torment resulting from the widely felt instability of the post-war, ‘post-Christian’ world.”32 In any case, Ó Ríordáin experienced an anxiety that was replete with contradictions and uncertainties that remained even after a Joycean quasi redemption, one where the consequences of getting the answer wrong could have eternal consequences, and thus a Pascalian wager of betting on belief in God seemed called for. But while Ó Ríordáin’s and Heaney’s trajectories have much in common, in contrast with the Irish language poet, Heaney’s persona in his pilgrimage is not asking, “How can I resolve my difficulties with the faith I’m still trying to believe in?,” but rather, “How can I clarify for myself why I have drifted away from this faith?,” “How can I escape its inherited oppressions of resignation and abnegation?,” and, “What remains behind, and in what direction should I go?” His “journey” too is undertaken in a much less constricted period, though it has some of the same oscillation in its moods as Ó Ríordáin’s turas. And yet it is precisely because the culture is less constricted that the pilgrimage is needed at all, since the once certain has now become the constantly doubted. 29. Ó Ríordáin, in Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry, 123. 30. Ó Tuama’s judgment is paraphrased in Modern Irish Poetry by Sewell, who adds, “The poet speaker remains characteristically torn between spiritual independence and traditional, communal belief” (20–21). 31. See an English translation of Ó Ríordáin’s poem on Joyce in Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry, 204. 32. Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry, 48.



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In September 1979, as a buoyant Heaney was about to begin “what I hope will be a large undertaking,” he prayed “to God or whatever means the good,” invoking a less than orthodox, though apparently benign, cosmic influence.33 Dante may well have been his immediate inspiration for the poem’s conception (the encounters with shades of the dead) and style (the terza rima Heaney uses extensively together with his blending of colloquial and formal linguistic usages), but ultimately “Station Island” is about Heaney himself, not a homage to past masters. If the shades he meets there are more like himself than like themselves, that, in the circumstances of his personal quest, is a strength rather than a weakness; besides, Heaney nearly always uses the past for present purposes. “S tat ion I sland ” the poem opens with the sound of “bell-notes” on a “quiet” Sunday morning. The speaker (henceforth referred to here for convenience as “Heaney,” even though it is partly a constructed persona that might not equate totally with its subject) notices a man—the first of the Dantean ghosts (figures from his real or reading past) that will appear to him—with a lyre-like bow-saw and immediately accuses him: “I know you, Simon Sweeney, / for an old Sabbath-breaker who has been dead for years,” a reference both to a neighbor familiar to Heaney as a child and who tended to work on Sundays—forbidden by the traditional practice of the Catholic Church (whose priests in rural areas sometimes drove around on the Sabbath checking compliance)—as well as to “mad Sweeney” of the earlier poem. Simon Sweeney is Heaney’s “mystery man,” the first to set off religious questioning in the poet himself because he has crossed the boundaries of religious convention. When Sweeney responds that “your First Communion face / would watch me cutting timber,” he is shown as a kind of haunting bogeyman in the author’s imagination, one who mocked the boy’s early religious innocence. When a spectral “crowd of shawled women” appear, whispering “to the silence / ‘Pray for us, pray for us’” and conjuring through the air so that “the field was full / of half-remembered faces,” their submissive gyrations seem to imply the absence of a deity and the consequent foolishness of their prayers. 33. Heaney, “Station Island: Jottings for a Poem,” 2.

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Nevertheless, while Sweeney shouts after him to “stay clear of all processions!,” Heaney, on this journey that he must complete, falls in behind them as “a fasted pilgrim” on “a drugged path” (OG 224). At the beginning of section II, however, Heaney chooses the skeptical nineteenth-century William Carleton as his imaginary guide. Carleton was a writer from his own Northern tradition, a former pilgrim to Lough Derg well over a hundred years earlier, and someone who had been constrained in part to change from Catholicism to Anglicanism in order to achieve professional success in his own time. Heaney explained in Stepping Stones: William Carleton was the one who auditioned for that part. Joyce would never have walked those nineteenth-century Catholic roads or put up with the murmurs and the mea culpas of the island. Carleton, on the other hand, had all the qualifications: he was a cradle Catholic, a Northern Catholic, a man who had lived with and witnessed the uglier side of sectarianism, but still a man who converted to the Established [Anglican] Church and broke with “our tribe’s complicity.” He had a wide-angle understanding of the whole Irish picture and a close-up intimacy with the vicious Northern side of it. (SS 236)

Carleton, then, provides Heaney the example of a like-minded Irish countryman who, similar to Sweeney earlier, had stepped outside the bounds, even if Heaney would never want to do so in quite the same way, or to the same alternative faith institution, one that by the late 1970s was far more depleted than the Catholic Church. Also, and importantly, Heaney is claiming that he himself is unlike Joyce, who wasn’t a man inclined to the rigors—and self-abasement—of pilgrimage; in other words, Heaney’s “take” on Catholicism will never be fully Joycean. But to embrace the religious turncoat Carleton is, in a way, more radical than claiming Joyce who, after all, dismissed Protestantism as cavalierly as any Roman Catholic cleric: the nerve of Heaney’s search is different. Carleton had famously written about the Lough Derg pilgrimage from a somewhat jaundiced position as a convert to a more enlightened Anglicanism. One notes, for example, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), Carleton’s satiric depictions of rapacious Catholic clergymen as



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they visit their parishioners in their homes or extort ecclesiastical fees from indigent laborers, or the various tricksters that he met on his pilgrimage in 1817.34 In his autobiographical “The Lough Derg Pilgrim,” from 1833, the skeptical, but rather innocent, narrator encounters a world of characters far more wily than himself. A nineteen-year-old Catholic aspirant to the priesthood when he made the pilgrimage but a confirmed Protestant when he published his account some sixteen years later, Carleton now looks upon the place as guilty of “the monstrous birth of a dreary and degraded superstition . . . destined to keep the human understanding in the same dark unproductive state as the moorland waste that lay outstretched around.” The pilgrims are self-deceiving and ignorant; at night they emit “groans and shrieks” or are convulsed in “sudden paroxysms,” and are often flatulent. Prayers are said in English by petitioners “totally ignorant of that language” with so many malapropisms that even the priests laugh outright at the poor perpetrators.35 When Heaney encounters the ghost of Carleton, he tells his predecessor, “I’m on my road there now to do the station”—which provokes the exclamation “‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’” Carleton narrates the circumstances of his own apostasy as an impoverished, aspiring writer in nineteenth-century Dublin, presented here as the only strategy in times that were hard. Heaney’s response is that his isn’t “the angry role” and that the few surviving, ineffective Ribbonmen (older rebels less driven by hatred) in his Derry “on Patrick’s Day still played their ‘Hymn to Mary’” (OG 226). Carleton listens sympathetically to the poet’s litany of what he has done, only to tell Heaney that “you have to try to make sense of what comes”—his description of Heaney’s love of nature suggesting perhaps the limits of finding refuge there—ending with, “‘We are earthworms of the earth, and all that / has gone through us is what will be our trace’” (OG 227). If that is the case, then Heaney’s own experience of Catholicism is what he will have to grapple with rather than earlier versions, however relevant certain elements of them may be. 34. See William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970), 810, 813. 35. Ibid., 797, 806, 807.

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Section III, the beginning of the pilgrimage proper, finds Heaney “back [emphasis added] among bead clicks” (OG 228–29). His kneeling down may be no more than “Habit’s afterlife,” an unwillingness to rock the religious boat as he continues with the exploration he has already begun, stoically determined to “make sense of what comes,” maybe even not yet quite sure of the outcome. He is made reminiscent by “the murmurs / from inside confessionals” and “side altars / where candles died insinuating slight // intimate smells of wax at body heat.” These once-familiar sensory stimulants lead him to experience a “vision,” though really a memory from his childhood past: a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells and cockles glued in patterns over it, pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath into a shimmering ark, my house of gold that housed the snowdrop weather of her death long ago. The “trinket” had been kept in a kitchen press for occasional rediscovery. Now, in what seems to be a touchstone of his earlier faith, her name comes to him as though it were “a white bird trapped inside me / beating scared wings when Health of the Sick / fluttered its pray for us in the litany.” The story of the death of this young girl—Heaney’s aunt who died over a decade before he was born—is one that anchors him in his older pieties, a caution against abandoning them. But then he wonders if there’s anything there beyond a great emptiness and mere dead bones: A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards. I thought of walking round and round a space utterly empty, utterly a source, like the idea of sound or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair of our dog that had disappeared weeks before. (OG 229)



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His recalling of the ritual habits of Catholic life reads as though he himself hasn’t practiced them for some time. The remembrance of the toy grotto trinket associated with the deceased aunt has stayed with him from childhood days and now reminds him of the power and ominousness of an absence, reflected in the present by a memory of discovering the family dog’s carcass (similar, though marked by no religious rites). But there’s still a tension: if the memory on this occasion is of “a space utterly empty,” there is no consoling presence there where one might have most expected to find it; if it is “utterly a source”—of what remains indeterminate, though Heaney has spoken of it elsewhere as “potential”—perhaps it has some value.36 We reach one of the several declarative nubs of the poem in section IV. A deceased clerical friend, whom Heaney had known as a seminarian when he himself was a child, appears in a “blurred swimming” that comes to the poet when his back is to St. Bridgid’s cross and he is about to say the prescribed, “I renounce [the World, the Flesh, and the Devil].”37 It is another take on the scene with the young aunt’s rather tacky relic, an extension of it from a more educated and reflective stance, as well as a “symbol of what might have happened” had Heaney himself responded to the “call” to the priesthood in his impressionable youth: “Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces, / ‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish, / the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.”38 This iconic ordination scene, one that would have enjoyed enormous prestige well into the late 1960s, and one whose falling off has been a register of the pervasive religious decline in Ireland in the subsequent decades, is here critiqued (“Fawning”) and momentarily celebrated (“relish”):

36. Rand Brandes, “Seamus Heaney: An Interview,” Salmagundi 80 (Fall 1988), 6: “emptiness and potential stream in opposite directions.” 37. See Heaney, “Station Island: Jottings for a Poem,” 3, and Tobin, Passage to the Center, 184, for more information on the priest who is part of the inspiration for this encounter. There seems to be some confusion among critics, however, as to whether he was in Brazil or the Philippines. 38. Heaney, “Station Island: Jottings for a Poem,” 3.

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The seminarian has now been ordained and is a “secular” priest subject to a bishop, rather than a “regular” priest who would be a member of a religious order subject to its particular rules and regulations. Thus, the usage is historically accurate and unsurprising. But, of course, “secular” too has its usual connotations of the nonreligious—and Heaney registers his own earlier piety with “unexpected,” as though he had expected something more ethereal following ordination—so that it also foreshadows what is about to become of this particular priest, whose name “had lain undisturbed for years” and is now retrieved “like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch / ripped at last from under jungling briars, / wet and perished.” The latter is a word with multiple resonances, meteorological as well as eschatological, in an Irish context where people routinely refer to themselves as being “perished with the cold.” Sent to foreign parts as a missionary, living among “Bare-breasted / women and rat-ribbed men,” the young priest “lasted // only a couple of years.” A man from a time long forgotten, it is a shock to find that he hasn’t quite remained “undisturbed” in his “place”: His breath came short and shorter. “In long houses I raised the chalice above headdresses. In hoc signo . . . On that abandoned mission compound, my vocation is a steam off the drenched creepers.” Just as the duty-priest in the Stations prose poem earlier was described as “vapouring into his breviary” as he recited his required prayers in the cold scriptorium, suggesting that Heaney perceived the insubstantial nature of his activity, the cleric’s sense of vocation here too has “vaporized” in the “drenched creepers” of the mission jungle.



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Disturbed by the encounter, the Heaney persona “had broken off from my renunciation . . . / so as to clear the way / for other pilgrims queuing to get started.” When he resumes the conversation, he tells the dead priest that he himself is “‘older now than you when you went away,’” that he couldn’t imagine him as a foreign missionary, but remembers him instead on his bicycle, “a clerical student home for the summer, / doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours. / Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.” Doing “the decent thing” and even “praising the home-made bread” might have been roundly commended elsewhere in Heaney, but here they suggest the tediousness and triviality of such summer visitations to relatives and other local farmers’ houses and the awkward and often embarrassing gratitude of those visited: “Something in them would be ratified / when they saw you at the door in your black suit, / arriving like some sort of holy mascot.” The seminarian and later priest had been the peoples’ “mascot,” a comfort in a world in which they weren’t respected: “‘you raised she siege / the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes / hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’” But just as the toy grotto trinket of the sick young aunt in the earlier section was not something that the Protestant world of Ulster would respect, now even the life of the validating priest too is being placed in question, most of all by himself as he attacks Heaney for holding on to customs in which his onetime friend had lost faith: “And you,” he faltered, “what are you doing here but the same thing? What possessed you? I at least was young and unaware that what I thought was chosen was convention. But all this you were clear of you walked into over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn. If “the god” has withdrawn for the priest, then he must be doing so even more for the lay poet; indeed, the very fact that the priest has lost his faith counterintuitively sanctions Heaney’s own departure. Meanwhile, the only justification the dead priest can find for Heaney’s “going through these motions” is that he may be “‘taking the last look.’” The depiction

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of the priest saying this as “his whole fevered body yellowed and shook” emphasizes the degree of disturbance and even upset on his part with Heaney’s long outdated pieties and with the “choice” that he himself had made as a young man (OG 229–30). The encounter leads Heaney to pity their mutual cultural background and to realize that neither of them belongs to a religiously “chosen” tribe. Heaney has been over-preoccupied with this nonsense (the awkward phrasing—“all this you were clear of you walked into”—is justified because it nicely encapsulates Heaney’s awkward entanglement with his religious past), and can only be forgiven if he is “here taking the last look.” The late missionary’s final state appears to have been an especially lonesome and abandoned one. Neil Corcoran sees the episode as a meditation on “the ratifying role of the priesthood in Irish society,” but I think it has a much more troubling implication: in decades past, it was generally the layperson that left the church and whose return was prayed for by the faithful clergy; now, not only are the clergy too departing, but even members of it whom one has known personally.39 Now each individual soul is feeling not just “lost” and “Unhappy,” as in “The Tollund Man” more than ten years earlier, or not just as Mad Sweeney was when he fled over a still familiar terrain, but as one who is on a path that is far lonelier than what went before. Patrick Kavanagh’s brief appearance at the end of section V—Heaney’s virtual enabler for many of his earliest poems who had given him confidence that his rural Catholic experience could be the subject of poetry, but also a more acerbic observer of the Lough Derg pilgrimage (“Sure I might have known / once I had made the pad, you’d be after me / sooner or later”)—bluntly desacralizes the sacred purpose itself: “In my own day / the odd one came here on the hunt for women.” The fact that Kavanagh’s “parting shot” is true—a sad consequence of the repressive culture of the time—makes it all the more deflationary, a reminder too, perhaps, of Heaney’s own flirtatious spirit during his visits in the late 1950s (OG 233). The brevity of Kavanagh’s appearance too may imply that he has not played a major part in Heaney’s religious decision making, though that claim, as we shall see later, would need much parsing. 39. Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 117.



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In light of the previously mentioned discoveries and awarenesses, in section VI Heaney recalls old sexual forays that opened up a new world to him—the “honeyskinned / Shoulderblades and the wheatlands of her back”—but ones also that tended then to lead inevitably to the confessional. He feels “mocked” when he recalls “my own long virgin / Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts, / Haunting the granaries of words like breasts,” only to advance to a sense of liberation from the guilts and repressions of his overly religious upbringing, a significant transition marked by italicized lines: As little flowers that were all bowed and shut By the night chills rise on their stems and open As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight, So I revived in my own wilting powers And my heart flushed, like somebody set free. (OG 233–34) Not only is guilt relieved, but there also seems to be a hint of a rebirth of normal sexual potency. Although, several pages on, Heaney is again on his knees, this time “at the hard mouth of St. Brigid’s bed,” apparently engaged in the religious rituals of repentance, what he repents now is different: true sins of omission and commission. He recalls a dead archeologist friend and later his second cousin Colm McCartney, who accuses him of saccharining his death in the earlier poem—indeed, in both cases he had evaded confronting the full brutality of death. He left his friend to face it alone in his sickbed and draw nurturance from “familiar stone,” that which had engaged him throughout his professional career. “I half-knew we would never meet again . . . / Did our long gaze and last handshake contain / nothing to appease that recognition?” The blunt reply—“Nothing at all. But familiar stone / had me half-numbed to face the thing alone”—implies that Heaney has never had the words to cope with death and in that sense is subject, too, to not admitting the force of Philip Larkin’s criticism in “Aubade”: “This is a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels.”40 And the “never meet again” phrase suggests at least a disbelief in an afterlife, 40. Philip Larkin, “Aubade,” in Collected Poems, 190.

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while his friend’s fear of facing death alone may be an echo of Heaney’s (OG 237–39). In section IX, the unnamed Francis Hughes, a neighbor active with the IRA (“a hit-man on the brink”) in the grimly ongoing Troubles, who starved himself to death during the hunger strikes of political prisoners at Long Kesh in the early 1980s (just three years before the poem was published) also comes to haunt Heaney. Hughes’s witness, wrongheaded though it may have been, is a reminder of the Irish famine of the previous century, by its very nature a guilt-inducing act. But, even in this sensitive area where Heaney had little sympathy with the deceased’s notorious exploits, he needs courage to openly condemn the IRA neighbor’s actions: in reality, “There he was, laid out with a drift of Mass cards / At his shrouded feet”; in thought, Heaney comments, “Unquiet soul, they should have buried you / In the bog where you threw your first grenade” (OG 239–40). Andrew J. Auge has given a far more negative but textually grounded reading of these lines than the one I offer—“the depletion of Hughes’s starving body also reflects the moral vacuity of a gunman responsible for an estimated twenty-five to thirty deaths,” and the recommended burial in a bog would be “devoid of the religious and military tributes that accompanied the actual event”—but Heaney’s lines also, I think, are not ones that would immediately strike the young man’s family (whom Heaney knew well) and comrades as directly offensive: in other words, Heaney is condemnatory but sadly and cautiously so, remembering a life gone wrong, one that, as Helen Vendler notes, could well have been his own “had he been brought up differently.”41 Nevertheless, as in the case of his cousin Colm McCartney, Heaney has at last confronted the issue and now experiences profound guilt and “self-disgust” at his earlier political noninvolvement. Finally, “My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.” In the elation of his revival, he confesses, “I hate how quick I was to know my place. / I hate where I was born, hate everything / That made me biddable and unforthcoming.” The false or misguided guilt of the past has been trans41. Auge, Chastened Communion, 129; Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 93. See also Heaney’s comments on his friendship with the family in O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 222.



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formed into the legitimate guilt of the present even if, as he admits, he can’t “grind” himself down “to a different core” (OG 240–41). There is also, though more obscurely, redemption: in the pilgrimage hostel, he has a remembrance of an old mug at home transformed by being used in a little play, just as in the Sweeney Astray legend St. Ronan’s psalter was returned to him by an otter, leading the saint to praise God “for that dazzle of impossibility.” “Impossibility,” then, must be “credited” rather than dismissed outright, but it is a feature of the imagination, a feature that Heaney embraces enthusiastically rather than sadly as a replacement for his lost faith: “that dazzle of impossibility / I credited again [my emphasis] in the sun-filled door, / so absolutely light it could put out fire” (OG 241–42). In the sequence as it has been developing, it seems odd that an encounter with a Carmelite priest should appear now in section XI when the religious issue has been dealt with in III and IV and Heaney has apparently opted for “crediting” the imagination—religion’s substitute—in section X. However, the friar (Heaney is incorrect in referring to him as a “monk,” a member of an enclosed order, although this may have been necessary for schematic purposes) serves at least three useful functions: he shows how the religious past might be included in the present of the secular imagination; he assigns to Heaney the task of translating St. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who is also a literary icon (perhaps like John Donne in the English canon) and who is associated with the darkness and aridity of faith; and, finally, the Carmelite “made me feel that there was nothing to confess,” always a consolation to hear even for the unbelieving as they transition to a new, more secular life (OG 243). The Carmelite (loosely based on a visiting retreat giver at St. Columb’s) “spoke again about the need and chance / to salvage everything, to reenvisage / the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift / mistakenly abased.” So, an aspect, or aspects, of the religion that had been “abased”—and “mistakenly” so (“mistakenly” here, I think, doesn’t mean that Heaney’s choice was mistaken but that he shouldn’t just jettison the whole of his past as he may at first be inclined to do)—is now re-seen as a “gift,” but one to

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be “re-envisage[d]” as a work of the imagination, not a reality in the old sense. An initial spiritual quest that had begun in the rituals and beliefs of Catholicism “came to nothing,” but can “always be replenished” by the satisfactions of the imagination that are tangentially connected with religion, since in many ways the pursuit is the same (OG 243). Thus, the inspirational (“his forehead shining”) Carmelite advises Heaney to “‘Read poems as prayers,’” and to translate St. John of the Cross for him. The saint would have been familiar to Heaney from his college reading of Evelyn Underhill and Thomas Merton, and it is very likely that he also knew the poems from Roy Campbell’s highly acclaimed translation in a slender Penguin volume of the 1950s. Campbell, South African by birth but of Ulster Protestant family background, had converted to Catholicism in the 1930s, going from mocking priests—“Had they nine lives, O muddled and perplexed, / They’d waste each one in thinking of the next”—to becoming a close friend of the Carmelites in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War and a staunch supporter of General Franco’s regime; he was also a friend of T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, and a much commended author in pre–Vatican II Roman Catholic literary circles.42 While an unbelieving Heaney does not end up with a St. John of the Cross that is significantly different from that of a believing Roy Campbell, taking on a new translation of the Spanish poet marked a reentry into a field of spiritual force that had multiple 1950s and ’60s remnant Catholic associations. Heaney would co-opt the tradition rather than merely reject it, thus substantiating Gail McConnell’s point that although Heaney certainly lost his religious belief, the ideology and liturgy of Catholicism continued to shape his concepts of poetry as a kind of secular theology and, in alliance with New Criticism, a verbal icon much more than has been recognized.43 It would seem that the specific text by the Spanish Carmelite has been chosen by Heaney because it brings together religion and imagination as emanating from the same unfathomable source. So, “That eter42. See Mary Campbell’s preface to St. John of the Cross, Poems, trans. Roy Campbell (London: Penguin, 1960), 10–11; note also Martin D’Arcy, SJ’s introduction to the same work. 43. McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, 10.



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nal fountain, hidden away” is known to him in some ways but “not its source because it does not have one”; “I know no sounding-line can find its bottom, / nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom.” Meanwhile, the fountain’s current is “so in flood it overspills / to water hell and heaven and all peoples,” while the Eucharistic “bread of life” becomes the feeder of the poetic imagination (OG 242–44). The “Although it is the night” refrain, variants of which conclude all eleven stanzas, emphasizes the obscurity of the source, our inability to define it. Later Heaney explained—rather ambiguously if not actually contradicting himself—that “in ‘Station Island,’ I arranged for John of the Cross to help my unbelief by translating his ‘Song of the Soul that Knows God by Faith’” (SS 234). If this statement is taken at its surface meaning, it would surely indicate that a struggling Heaney hoped that engagement with St. John of the Cross’s text might bring him back to orthodox belief; since he uses the exact same phrase later in regard to Joyce, however, the idea seems to be that it is his unbelief in Catholic orthodoxy as such that will be strengthened by John of the Cross as poet rather than saint—John of the Cross’s transition to poetry makes it easier for Heaney too to do so, since he now sees that both of them are celebrants of a luminous world. Thus, in 2006, asked if the Carmelite was “a mouthpiece for mystical vision,” Heaney replied that: He was based on a Carmelite who gave a retreat during my last year in St. Columb’s. He didn’t actually suggest I translate John of the Cross as penance, but he had indeed just come back from Spain and seemed to shine with inner light. And he did say to me, “Read poems as prayers.” He probably would have explained what he meant by quoting Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and by saying that God’s grandeur shines out in the “shook foil” of poetry. I could and can see the sense of that, and the point of reading poems in that spirit. It’s in line with something Miłosz once wrote: “He felt gratitude so he couldn’t not believe in God.” (SS 249)

At the very least, these rather jumbled remarks indicate a tension between the disbelief occasioned by meeting the dead clerical friend in

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section IV and the quasi-religious affirmation of the recollected Carmelite. Heaney has also declared that the “potency” of those expressions of religious belief, confession, and sacrament “retain an undying tremor and draw; I cannot disavow them.” But then, in a very typical move on his part, he adds, “Nor can I make the act of faith,” a clear indication that at some point he has attempted to do so and is fully aware of his not being able to (SS 234). In a 1984 talk at Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, Heaney spoke about the Cumberland poet and certain writers from Northern Ireland being “displaced from a confidence in a single position by [their] disposition to be affected by all positions,” a comment that could well apply also to his stance on Catholicism and religious belief.44 Overall, then, it would seem that Heaney has made a switch from the priests of orthodoxy to those of the imagination—again, John of the Cross as Spanish poet rather than as Spanish saint—a judgment supported by the fact that he chooses to conclude “Station Island” with his encounter with the high priest of the “eternal imagination” himself, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. In that final section XII, a spiritually exhausted Heaney has completed his pilgrimage and left the island so “convalescent” that he needs assistance from Joyce to disembark at the landing. He has fulfilled the pilgrimage’s requirements, but has done so in his own peculiar way. Joyce’s admonition is that he must not follow “any common rite” but rather “What you do you must do on your own.” Crossed out lines in an earlier draft of the poem add a religious note to this directive: “When I [Joyce] refused to take the sacrament / I made my life an instrument of grace // So all of you had more abundant / life.”45 In those elided lines, Joyce appears to have become a secular version of Jesus, a neat confirmation of my argument here, though obviously later considered by Heaney as an overstatement that needed qualification. Joyce too condemns “this peasant pilgrimage” and points out that “You lose more of yourself than you redeem / doing the decent thing,” a condemnation of Heaney’s own accommodating tendency and a reference back to his seminarian friend’s habits 44. Quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 78. 45. National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Collection, MS 49, 493/63, folder 2, page 51.



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as a young man of going through the expected motions. Now Heaney is to “Keep at a tangent”—which turns out to be rather a good description of his progress afterward (OG 245). He should not fear upsetting others, even in a matter as intimate as that of religious belief. Heaney later explained, “Joyce is there . . . to help my unbelief,” which seems to mean in this case (as opposed to the similar comment on St. John of the Cross earlier), paradoxically but also literally, that Heaney needs the support of Joyce’s example (that is, Joyce, the former Papist, rather than Yeats, who never shared this faith) to become an unbeliever (SS 249). Joyce’s work had been “an essential aid to self-awareness.” Although Joyce may have appeared to be hostile to the kind of Irish rural culture favored by Heaney, “there’s a limit to the enmity” he felt for it. At this stage, Joyce has been assimilated back into the mainstream of Irish culture, and it is relatively easy to accept that “he had left, as Lowell says, a loophole for the soul which others had found and followed through” (SS 250). Heaney comments that the advice at the end to swim out on his own is, “in the fiction of the poem . . . given to somebody who has been ‘in the swim’ of Lough Derg, as it were, rather than out on his own. He’s being told to flee the nets” as Joyce had eventually done (SS 250). Moreover, as Heaney noted in an essay on Dante, “The choice of Lough Derg as a locus for the poem did, in fact, represent a solidarity with orthodox ways and obedient attitudes, and that very solidarity and obedience were what had to be challenged. And who better to offer the challenge than the shade of Joyce himself?” [italics added].46 Thus, Heaney is very conscious of “orthodoxy” as a position with which he himself once identified and from which he has now been liberated. “The presentation of religion in Station Island,” Eamon Duffy rightly concludes, “is far from uniformly negative, the pilgrimage not straightforwardly ‘infantile,’ but there is no mistaking the fact that the volume as a whole represents and was meant to represent a decisive turning away from any overt or at any rate continuing catholic identity.”47 Neil Corcoran, a little uncertain about the poem’s merits 46. Heaney, “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Irish University Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 5–19. 47. Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 176.

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within a strong Heaney canon, has nevertheless called it a “necessary” poem.48 Heaney himself saw it as exploring “the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country”: in that sense, Heaney was rewriting the script.49 His twelve-step pilgrimage completed, Heaney can now reinhabit his Sweeney persona in a new way. In the “Sweeney Redivivus” poems that conclude the Station Island collection, the tree of self-pleasuring activities from the 1940s is now a place of unsinful delight. In a limited way, the suggestion may be that Heaney himself has become a new Joyce who lives among a people that once were “two-faced and accommodating” and now “still / they are holding on, every bit / as pious and exacting and demeaned,” so that he must liberate them through his work and example (OG 250). No longer “mired in attachment,” he seems in the poems that follow to be soaring above his critics: he is a Sweeney-like “outlaw” with his own legitimate place—he has tried to deal with the Northern Irish crisis, been accused of being “a feeder off battlefields” but in contrast to “the people of art / diverting their rhythmical chants // to fend off the onslaught of winds,” he would “welcome [them] and climb / at the top of my bent” (OG 251). In “The Cleric,” where Heaney again pits pagan Ireland against the advent of Christianity (“his Latin and blather of love”) that “ousted me to the marches,” he is recalling his Catholic education, which seemed to invalidate his natural instincts. But then, with a passing question about whether it was he himself who deserted that past, Heaney is willing to commend the priest who taught him Latin because “he opened my path to a kingdom / of such scope and neuter allegiance / my emptiness reigns at its whim” (OG 254).50 In other words, the world of the imagination revealed to him by his priest-teacher has made it possible for Heaney to fill its emptiness with his own resources. In a way, as in “The Her48. Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 125. 49. Heaney, quoted in Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 116. 50. Heaney’s posthumously published translation of part of Virgil’s Aeneid: Book VI is dedicated to this priest, Fr. Michael McGlinchey, who “created an inner literalist who still hunts for the main verb of a sentence and still, to the best of his ability, disentangles the subordinate clauses” (ix). See Heaney, Aeneid: Book VI (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).



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mit,” by definition a man alone, Heaney has become like the operator of “a ploughshare” that “had not spared / one stump of affection” and has been “interred to sustain the whole field / of force” as he deeply and quietly pursues “the work of refreshment” (OG 255). Even in “The Icons,” where the opening question is, “Why, when it was all over, did I hold on to them?,” the answer is in terms of performing a priestly service for his people. The poem is about a painting of a priest during the days of the Penal Laws who is about to be arrested because betrayed by informants, an iconic scene that still has a secular resonance in a changed world (OG 260). Although Heaney himself would have rejected the statement as such, he is here the new (if unofficial) priest of a new religion or of whatever of value carries over from the old one. Thus, “In Illo Tempore” has a title like the beginning of a gospel story, and Heaney seems to be writing about the residue that religion has left: with “The big missal splayed / and dangled silky ribbons / of emerald and purple and watery white”: Intransitively we would assist, confess, receive. The verbs assumed us. We adored. And we lifted our eyes to the nouns. Altar-stone was dawn and monstrance noon, the word “rubric” itself a bloodshot sunset. The words are the magic and the rituals are intransitive, having no object. But there is continuity as well as change in the Joycean aftermath where Heaney now lives by Sandymount strand: Now I live by a famous strand where seabirds cry in the small hours like incredible souls and even the range wall of the promenade that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it. (OG 261)

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Heaney’s belief has shifted from the imagined to the real, and yet even that requires imagination for its fullest comprehension (OG 261). Or, as Duffy presents the matter more bleakly, “The loss of religious faith has itself become a metaphor for an all-embracing loss of meaning and certainty, the plight of modernity: ‘the god has departed.’”51 In “On the Road,” Heaney is like the young man called by Jesus to renounce all and follow him, once a summons to ascetic fidelity, now a call to the lonely vocation of the independent thinker. Heaney as Sweeney is again invoked but with a positive twist—he sees himself as a bird “scaling heaven / by superstition, / drunk and happy / on a chapel gable,” and then descending down to the Lascaux-like cave of human artistic beginnings, lines that encapsulate his whole trajectory and indicate his difference from an enlightened William Carleton who shunned “superstition” (OG 262–64). Here we have, as Heaney would say in a happy phrase about Eliot’s later poems, “a graph of the effort of transcendence,” though one different from that offered in Four Quartets.52 Helen Vendler has beautifully articulated the arc of these Sweeney poems in the third part of Station Island as they move autobiographically through childhood, professional achievement, disappointment, anger with himself, revisioning of his past, emphasizing that Heaney now is “yearning for an idea of salvation as powerful to his conscience as the Christian one once was.” In a secular world without pilgrimages, the place of “balm” is elusive, the new pilgrim “bewildered.” As a consequence, “the poet lifts himself by imagination into a bird-form, flies (like the ousted Sweeney) to a cleft in a churchyard wall and then, in optative mood, wishes to migrate into a place that would antedate Christian belief. ‘I would migrate,’ he says, into a cave with walls covered by the paintings and carvings of prehistoric masters. In ‘the deepest chamber’ of that cave, the poet would find, and meditate on, the ‘incised outline’ of a deer bending to drink, whose predicament resembles his own.” Meditating on what Jesus’s call to “follow me” might mean for his secularized self, he asks, “Where can an alternative path to salvation be found?” and 51. Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 176. 52. Heaney, “Envies and Identifications,” 5–19.



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comes to see that the ancient cave is “a legitimate place of devotion.” Heaney, Vendler explains, “migrates downward through history to the place where human beings first made art. There is as yet no water in the ‘font of exhaustion’ . . . but the spirit has rebegun its efforts to live in the light of a possible salvation.” Convincingly, she points out that since “the deer is iconic within Christian representation. . . . By carrying the Christian symbol back to its pre-Christian presence in the prehistoric cave, Heaney affirms for himself the truth that a natural symbol has always preceded an institutional one.”53 Here Vender points to much that, I confess, I hadn’t seen, and while she might be accused of carrying Heaney across the finish line, of completing a touchdown that hadn’t quite been made by the poet himself, her commentary is wholly convincing as a statement of what is challengingly implied in the poet’s own lines.54 Heaney as pilgrim, then, in both the poem “Station Island” and the collection of the same title, is neither a jaundiced Carleton, a disaffected Joyce, nor the religiously committed Eliot of “Little Gidding,” the part of Four Quartets in which the American poet accepts the need to pray at this holy place associated with King Charles I and not to question, “verify, / Instruct yourself. . . . / Or carry report” but rather to “kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”55 Indeed, if the latter is conceived of as a conversion poem—which it surely is—then Heaney is attempting the very opposite. Or rather, Heaney claims neutrally that, as quoted earlier, he “wanted readers to open the book and walk into a world they knew behind and beyond the book, but with a feeling of being clearer about their place in it than they would be in real life, a feeling of being stayed against confusion” (SS 237). The invocation of Frost’s justification of poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion” suggests some comfort, but also implies that Heaney’s original Catholic world, now better understood, has been undermined: in other words, the poem will help transition the reader to 53. Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 351, 352, 353, 355. 54. In Charlie McCarthy’s Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous documentary, Heaney commends Vendler for her ability to explain elements of his own works that he himself hadn’t noticed; https://binged.it/308In4M. 55. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971).

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a new and different kind of belief grounded in the earliest aspirations of our remote ancestors. Furthering the contrast between Heaney’s situation and Eliot’s, it should be noted that Heaney has said of sections 2 and 4 of “Ash Wednesday” that “it is a moment of crisis, of turning towards and of turning away, when the converting Eliot begins to envy the coherence and certitude, the theological, philosophical and linguistic harmonies available to his great predecessor [Dante].” Heaney, on the other hand, identifies with the rough-and-ready view of the world as presented in Shakespeare— which Eliot opposed—as the “Elizabethan capacity for provisional and glamorous accommodations between faiths and doubts.” For the Eliot of The Waste Land, “the imagination is . . . bewildered on the flood of its own inventiveness”; for the Eliot of Four Quartets, Dante “stands for the thoroughly hierarchical world of scholastic thought, an imagined standard against which the relativity and agnosticism of the present can be judged. . . . There is a stern and didactic profile to this Dante, and as Eliot embraces a religious faith he turns towards that profile and would re-create it in his own work” (FK 191). Heaney, in contrast, has turned away from the certainties of the orthodox religious world to make his own accommodations with the faiths and doubts of the imagination in its natural form.56 If, as Heaney has noted of the later Eliot, “he was composing his soul rather than rendering images of its decomposition,” then Heaney himself could be said to be recomposing his own soul (FK 186). He will not even begin to pursue the mystic union with the divinity that Eliot sought and failed to achieve. Nevertheless, as Corcoran points out in Heaney’s case, “any future sense of freedom” from Catholicism will also “be defined by it.”57 There’s an implication too, from Heaney’s own account, that at this stage his virtual “Last Look” might have at least a virtual question mark attached to it. 56. Neil Corcoran puts the matter this way: “The irony of ‘Station Island,’ however, is that this pilgrimage leads to no confirmation in the religion and values of the Catholic community, but to something very like a renunciation of them”; Corcoran, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 118. 57. Ibid., 132.

Chapter 6

Miracle and W o nder

S

ea mu s H eane y did not return from his self-examination in a virtual Lough Derg as a prophetic Zarathustra announcing the end of the afterlife, Catholicism as no more than a cultural formation, divine revelation as a total delusion, much less that “God is dead”—that was old news by then, the whole tone of “the god has withdrawn, as they say” implying a jadedness about the matter—even if in the years and decades that followed he would variously be called a Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, an ex-Catholic, a post-Christian, an agnostic, and an atheist. He himself was partly responsible for the confusion. In some ways, he might even be said to have come ashore with a new passion for the transcendental, especially now that he had been liberated from the narrow church orthodoxy in which he had hitherto been confined. He would settle his outstanding accounts with the past in order to make way for the future. His most celebrated series of poems would be called “Clearances,” “Squarings,” and “Lightenings,” as though he were clearing away, squaring away, and thus lightening his existential load. In future, too, the “supernatural” would have to be consciously made up by humans who now no longer believed that its wisdoms were handed down by a deity. Of course, not everyone would agree on what had been removed and what remained behind, what was made up and what was handed down. Writing about the poets of Northern Ireland in 1984, Heaney quoted from Derek Mahon lines that have the ring of Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “Are we truly alone / With our physics and myths, / The stars no more

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// Than glittering dust, / With no one there / To hear our choral odes?” Heaney comments appositely that “the speaker laments his exile in such a way that we would not have him rehabilitated,” a sentiment that can be legitimately applied to its author also (FK 133–34). It should be noticed that this is not so much a rejection of the value of what Mahon regrets losing as it is an affirmation of that sense of loss itself and the need for its ongoing articulation: to say simply “it’s gone, so let’s move on” is not enough. Heaney acknowledges exile and is not entirely satisfied with Wallace Stevens’s sentiment in “Sunday Morning” in similar circumstances: “And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know? / The sky will be much friendlier then than now . . . / Not this dividing and indifferent blue.”1 With Heaney, there is always the sense of divine loss here, the feeling of a god at the very least “withdrawn,” though not quite the “empty Sky, no pity, stone wasteland, life ended by death” that Miłosz objected to, nor the “total emptiness” and “sure extinction” that preoccupied Larkin.2 John Dennison sees at this point a critical “dissolution” between past and present: “Heaney remarks in 1987 that Wordsworth’s metaphysical poetics of connection are underwritten by persisting notions of Providence and Creation, a connection between historical and natural reality and human endeavor that was subsequently broken by Darwinism and the Great War.”3 Yet it is at this time too that Heaney begins looking upward, taking flight as in the last poems of Station Island, and indeed as Stephen Dedalus does after his rejection of the Jesuit recruiter’s invitation to consider joining the Society and his alternative epiphany on 1. Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 66. Peggy O’Brien notes that while Heaney often quotes from Stevens’s “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” he omits Stevens’s comment that “the soul no longer exists and we drop in our flight and at last settle on solid ground.” O’Brien asks, “Can we imagine Heaney ever uttering Stevens’s flat, apostate words? I cannot”; O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg, 205. 2. Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, Striving towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 60–62; Philip Larkin, “Aubade,” in Collected Poems, 190. 3. Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 29; see also the source in David Montenegro, “Seamus Heaney” [1987], in Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics, ed. David Montenegro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 181.



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Dollymount Strand: “Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophesy. . . . What did it mean? . . . Was it . . . a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?”4 Heaney’s own name is not in any way “strange,” of course, but it does rhyme nicely with the soaring “Sweeney” of the legend, and words such as “impalpable” and “imperishable” are hardly foreign to the trajectory of his new flight path. If one heaven has closed down, another has opened up. This is the terminology Heaney used in the mid-1980s when his parents died within two years of one another. He also spoke about this matter on numerous occasions in the decades that followed. In an interview with Mike Murphy in 2000, for example, Heaney explained that there was “a sense that a weight had been lifted off and that some light had entered in. Words like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ were beginning to be plied, and I relate that to the fact that my father and mother had recently died. It was not so much that the roof had been blown off, but that it had been lifted off and that both a hettiness [sic] and a brightness were there.”5 It is somewhat strange that “soul” and “spirit” should be entering into Heaney’s vocabulary just when he has rejected all notions of divinity and eternity, yet this has come about because he is now free of their old, narrowly Catholic associations.6 Their appearance or renewal (some critics claim they never really went away) is partly the result too of Irish culture moving quite rapidly from a world of perhaps excessive belief to one of its too easy dismissal, one in which “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The transition needs exploration. Certainly, by the late 1980s and thereafter, there’s a sense on Heaney’s part of a new sympathy for Catholicism’s comforts and purposes, though without believing in their reality—indeed, even believing less and 4. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Vintage, 1993), 142. 5. Mike Murphy, in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy, ed. Mike Murphy and Clíodhna Ní Anluain (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), 90. 6. John Dennison explains the shift as “a concerted recovery of Christian religious and transcendent language out of an experience of secularization, a recovery prompted by his parents’ deaths,” although he emphasizes that Heaney’s original Catholic beliefs were in no way being reasserted—on the contrary; Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 136.

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less and proclaiming such more and more confidently. Of course, it could be argued that Heaney had never really strayed that far away: it is interesting, for example, to find a passing reference to his son’s First Communion back in the early 1970s, a tradition that, whatever his beliefs, he hadn’t been willing to forgo or oppose (as Joyce and others had), and that reinforces his general reluctance to be too defiant on these matters, to be, in other words, always tending toward doing “the decent thing” (OG 325). He has, in a manner of speaking, moved out but not moved away, and it could be claimed that his moving away itself will never quite cover as much religious ground as did many other Irish writers before, during, and after this period. Czesław Miłosz’s influence may have been even more important in this regard, offering Heaney a model of an engaged faith that had weathered the storms of several revolutions, wars, and cultural transitions. Heaney’s questing, if not his questioning, on religious matters was reinforced and possibly redirected by the Polish poet, though they would each end up at recognizably different destinations. Yet it was at this time too that, aside from his personal religious revisioning, Heaney was disillusioned as much with “political” Northern Irish Catholicism as he had been from the beginning with “political” Ulster Protestantism: “At that stage, the IRA’s self-image as liberators didn’t work much magic with me” (SS 260). As he says of “The Haw Lantern” poem—in the 1987 volume of the same title claimed by Vendler to be his most “intellectual” collection, his “first book of the virtual,” and dedicated to Herbert McCabe’s brother Bernard and his wife, Jane— where Diogenes is imagined “with his lantern, seeking one just man”: “I also liked the poem because it was requiring strict self-examination from everybody, be they poets, pundits, priests, party political jabberwocks, whatever. It discovered a bedrock disappointment” (OG 275; SS 283).7 Heaney explained, “Deep down, the question about obligation in relation to the Troubles persisted. The old Miłoszian challenge was unavoidable: ‘What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?’” 7. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 122, 113. Lines accompanying The Haw Lantern dedication “For Bernard and Jane McCabe” run, “The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves. / Us, listening to a river in the trees,” yet another iteration of Heaney’s Catholic religious to transcendental secular journey.



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(SS 290). Again, since Miłosz had witnessed the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and acted as a Polish Communist representative in France and the United States afterward, he would serve as a tested beacon for a challenged conscience. In “From the Republic of Conscience,” the poem that immediately follows “The Haw Lantern,” Heaney is now his own person ruled by that inner voice rather than the dogmatic dictates of a church or faith. In this Republic of individual moral principles, “You carried your own burden.” But he finds that his grandfather (presumably the one who had married a Protestant) has been there before him—so he too had to live by conscience and was not very different after all. There is also an open acceptance of some of the old pagan religious ways: “The woman in customs asked me to declare / the words of our traditional cures and charms / to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye,” ways that now can be exercised as matters of responsible ethical choice (examples, perhaps, of “scaling heaven / by superstition” of “On the Road”). So, liberated, “my allowance was myself,” and “no ambassador would ever be relieved” (OG 276). In the vocabulary of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” Heaney was at last “unsponsored, free.”8 With the former age of conventional Catholicism now passed and another era in the making, Heaney has moved to a place of (re)vision, and though that perspective is never truly supernatural, it is still inspired by such traditions—in other words, seeing more than is immediately there is recognized as a legitimate exercise of the human imagination. While perhaps downplaying or ignoring Heaney’s interest in his pagan mythological inheritance, Vendler presents his agenda in the following way: “The invisible, in Heaney’s upbringing, was the prerogative of either nationalist politics or the Catholic religion. Heaney takes on, in The Haw Lantern, the job of exploring the use, to a secular mind, of metaphysical, ethical and spiritual categories of reference.”9 It may be significant too that this (around 1985) was a time of reported Marian apparitions and “Moving Statues” in several parts of Ireland, 8. Stevens, Collected Poems, 66. 9. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 117.

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often interpreted as a kind of rural pious Catholic backlash against the modern age—the sightings taking place just a few years after the Marian visions at Medjugorje in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina—both of which were frowned upon by the official church. Secular though he certainly was, a newly freed Heaney shifting to “seeing things” would likely not have been entirely hostile to such events, distorted versions of his own sightings.10 Nor has he ever been averse to, though not acquisitive of, Catholicism’s embarrassing swag, tchotchkes, the religious “junk” that invited Flannery O’Connor’s complaint at Lourdes back in 1958. In any case, “The Mud Vision,” examined later, favors miracle and wonder. So, there may be no afterlife, but we need to affirm the unseen. This agenda is put to the test in the “Clearances” sequence that commemorates Heaney’s mother’s death where the nonexistent afterlife is yet imaginatively created to correspond to emotional need and truth. There she enters a very domestic heaven where she meets her own father: It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. “What’s this? What’s this?” And they sit down in the shining room together. (OG 284) The image of her actual death that Heaney presents in what is perhaps the most moving poem of his whole career seems to favor the natural—albeit religiously tinged—over the supernatural. “When all the others were away at Mass,” he and she were at home engaged in the ritual of peeling the potatoes for the Sunday meal. Although this circumstance is sometimes compared to Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” where the unbelieving subject of the poem no longer attends church, this is an unlikely implication here because of the time period reference and the presumption that, in a rural area, there was “First Mass” (which mother and son would have attended) and “Second Mass” for husbands and the other children. In the 1984 present of the poem, however, a contrast is offered between this activity 10. See Cosgrove and Cox, Ireland’s New Religious Movements.



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and the religious ceremonies around her deathbed to the obvious criticism of the latter: So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the whole rest of our lives. (OG 285) Their domestic rituals are what is important—even holy—rather than the invocations of the praying priest, yet it is the background presence of the priest that at least reminds us of the holiness of all activities so that without him such a sensibility might be lost altogether. Near the final moment of her dying, the natural, domestic image of the next world is reinforced—or maybe it is one invented by his father that Heaney himself has chosen to use, an interesting perspective on the older Heaney’s religious views: “‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night / And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad / When I walk in the door. . . .’” He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open. High cries were felled and a pure change happened. (OG 289) Although this appears to be some kind of transformational moment, what happens is psychological rather than theological, even if such a description may be too mundane and reductive to encompass the event. Her being now exists only in the memories of those who knew her. That new emptiness is emphasized in the last section of “Clearances” in which Heaney, slightly adapting a couple of lines from “Station Island,” extends his description of his reaction:

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He describes a tree that had been planted when he was born but that has since been chopped up and is “long gone,” “Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, / A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for” (OG 290). There is a sense here of a real presence (“Utterly empty, utterly a source,” “a bright nowhere,” and echoes too of Four Quartets: “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence”) of that which is no longer present—but the presence, of course, is in the “hurt” of imagination rather than in a supernatural sense—though Heaney deliberately manages to keeps things hovering between the two domains.11 “The Wishing Tree” extends the arboreal comparison when it is described as ascending to heaven, shedding all its earthly cares as it rises: I thought of her as the wishing tree that died And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven, Trailing a shower of all that had been driven Need by need by need into its hale Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail Came streaming from it like a comet-tail New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud, Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood. (OG 292) While this extraordinary depiction seems almost to present his mother as going to the next world in an Elijah-like scene (or, more aptly, like the Virgin Mary being assumed into heaven as Catholic doctrine teaches), there’s more longing here than anything else. This is his “thought,” and the scene is quickly “dissolved,” even the “vision” part not at all having the force or assertiveness of its Blakean counterpart on the occasion of 11. Eliot, Four Quartets, 19. Also see Auge, Chastened Communion, 194–98.



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the death of that poet’s brother. “I had a vision” has the force of “I imagined.” The afterlife contemplated here is an “indigenous” one, more reminiscent of earth than of heaven, more in him than experienced by her.12 In fact, at this time Heaney appears to have more consciously adopted what might be called substitutes for Catholicism, or Catholicism itself in a radically less orthodox way—a kind of salvaging of what was worthwhile in it as some of the early Gnostics did and as the Carmelite advised. Put differently, he now became more willing to affirm all religious traditions as examples of humanity’s groping for meaning without any one of them being “the” way (the old unam sanctam catholicam ecclesiam idea), much less the result of an outside, supernatural incursion. In a way, they are all what Stevens referred to as “local mythologies.”13 Thus he found William K. Guthrie’s The Greeks and Their Gods “of great and permanent interest” (SS 293). Heaney explains further: With the Greeks, you’re hand to hand with the world: much of the Roman stuff was texted to them, whereas the Greeks turfed it all out on their own. There’s a clannish energy about the classical and preclassical Greeks that feels familiar. I’ve a notion that the Irish word fleadh [feast] would cover what happened on many of their calendar days better than the word “festival.” Epidaurus wasn’t exactly Glyndebourne: there was a touch of Knock Shrine about it, maybe even Puck Fair. And the frisson of the cave at Eleusis, for instance, must have been something like the frisson of the “cave” that pilgrims used to enter on a Lough Derg pilgrimage. I sense a far greater closeness between the lived life and the official pumps in Greece than in Rome. It’s the vitality of that ritual and romance at ground level that attracts me as much as the big earth-moving machinery of the literature and the myths. (SS 294)

12. Heaney, quoted in Kennedy-Andrews, Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 170. 13. Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1965), 17.

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Heaney nicely illustrates the relation between the ancient world of belief and his local scene when giving some background to his poem “Grotus and Coventina,” inspired by a visit to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland where he saw Coventina’s shrine “in the soggy, rushy corner of a field that could have been the corner of a field at home, one of those mucky old sanctuaries down overgrown lanes, far from the road and the house” (SS 294). Increasingly in the 1980s, Heaney philosophized about this religious transition as he noticed the Irish world about him changing radically: “We have lost the overall, ordering Christian myth of ‘down there, up there, us in between.’ It’s been lost as a living myth. But its place in Western culture has been taken by general awareness of classical myths. In my case, it’s mostly that—a general awareness” (SS 295). Perhaps that’s the key phrase: “a general awareness” of the “other,” the supernatural, so that when he also expresses gratitude to the priest who taught him his Virgil in the original Latin, there is no contradiction here, since that figure too was a passing witness to the imagined beyond that makes our earthly lives more expansive and thus tolerable. Heaney’s longstanding interest in Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return and The Sacred and the Profane—significant influences in theological circles in the 1960s and ’70s and ones that he shared with Ted Hughes—shows another element of his eclectic borrowings.14 Heaney, as Dennis O’Driscoll notes, “linked [Eliade], and his writings on sacred and profane space” with the idea in “Clearances” of “walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source.” He lamented what he called the “desacralizing of space,” a phenomenon that his “generation experienced in all kinds of ways: faith decaying and the turas [pilgrimage]—the turn around the holy well or the Stations of the Cross—losing its supernatural dimension; ‘fairy rings’ being archaeologized into ‘hilltop forts’; grates being removed from living rooms and kitchens, hearths 14. According to John Dennison, Heaney did not read Eliade until 1983—and then only The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (see Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 108n17). However, it is very unlikely that Heaney wouldn’t have heard of him much earlier.



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blocked up, central heating installed, with the consequent loss of focus.” He had always had “a deeply ingrained notion of ‘sanctuary’ in the space behind the altar rails” and was “always conscious too of the boundary between the graveyard and the road.” Thus, “Eliade’s book gave all those disparate awarenesses a credible frame of reference; he helped you to see the accidentals of your autobiography and environment as symptomatic of spiritual changes in your world” (SS 309). Heaney is intimating that Eliade’s book was as important for him at this stage as Glob’s had been earlier: it provided both sanction and shape for his imaginative speculations.15 That lament over a religious or supernaturalist loss—rather than a celebration of being liberated from such—is present too in “The Mud Vision,” a poem that was originally published in a limited-edition volume dedicated to Vendler (OG 297). The opening stanza presents the confusion of the times: “Statues with exposed hearts and barbed wire crowns / Still stood in alcoves” in an age of “punks with aerosol sprays”; “Satellite link-ups” that “Wafted over us the blessings of popes” with “idols on tour” had their helicopters, as did the sick on stretchers; “We sleepwalked / The line between panic and formulae” and, in our confusion, were like “a man on a springboard / Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive” (OG 297). In the second stanza, the vision itself is described: it is like a spinning “rose window of mud” that is “sullied yet lucent” that has appeared in “the foggy midlands.” There are what seem to be passing references to the apparitions at Fatima—“the sun standing still and the sun / That changed colour”—but what we really have is only “original clay, transfigured.” The effects are ambiguous—they can’t be “clean[ed] off”—but, still, “some / Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads” (a reference to Ash Wednesday), though the line immediately 15. Here Heaney seems to be referring to Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), though, as explained in the previous note, it is unlikely that he wasn’t aware of Eliade’s more famous The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958). Glob, Eliade, and Carl Jung should probably be seen as enabling rather than directive influences in that they helped Heaney conceptualize what he had already intuited. Dennison, however, sees Eliade as causing Heaney to accept “a narrative of inevitable secularization” (110).

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following—“To be prepared for the whatever”—suggests skepticism even if it’s better not to take any chances. The more pious, meanwhile, keep vigils “around puddled gaps,” while “a rota of invalids came and went / On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower,” the “lease” here hinting at some huckster making a profit from the event. The onlookers in stanza three are “A generation who had seen a sign!,” as though signs haven’t been seen for some time. But lower-level private perceptions or sightings of “Mould in the verbena” or “Furrow breath on the pillow” that evoked both “fear” and “a secret pride” are drawn upon, experiences that were unique to the individuals having them and that were both frightening and exhilarating because of their very uniqueness. There’s a deep ambivalence then about accepting the marvelous as represented in the “vision” that is the subject of the poem—drivers stop to watch “the rainbow / Curved flood-brown” but “We wished it away”—and yet something is lost by dismissing it entirely. So, rather than criticizing this likely illusion, the poem suggests that the “vision” belonged to those who had it and should not be downgraded by the ordinariness of the reality—and that in spite of a certain coming down to earth afterward. We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that. One day it was gone and the east gable Where its trembling corolla had balanced Was starkly a ruin again . . . Then the “experts” arrived to pour cold water on the incident. They “Began their post factum jabber and all of us / Crowded in tight for the big explanations.” Something was lost in the process: “we forgot that the vision was ours, / Our one chance to know the incomparable.” The entire happening “We dissipated in news.” Overall then, “The Mud Vision” offers itself as a testimony to the existence of the marvelous and in some way ratifies the “visions” of all of Ireland’s religious past. As Dennis O’Driscoll has observed, “A whole underlife or otherlife of religious devotion, known from childhood, seems to inspire” the poem. Heaney’s own comment is that the “actual memory behind it was of thronged roads and gardens around a housing estate in



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County Tyrone in the late 1950s, when the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared to a woman in Ardboe” (SS 286). To the more skeptical mind, there is something pathetic and even sad about the whole incident and the culture that spawned it, but Heaney doesn’t appear to share this sentiment. He adds: There are a couple of lines in another Haw Lantern poem that refer to “the melt of the real thing / smarting into its absence.” They’re about the sensation of holding a ball of hailstones in your tightly closed fist. But they also point to one of the main concerns of the book: call it loss of faith—or rather loss of faiths, of all kinds. Religious faith, as in “The Mud Vision.” . . . Faith in patriotism in “Wolfe Tone” and “The Disappearing Island.” Loss of faith, to a certain extent, in language itself, or at least doubts about the “real presence” behind it, as in “The Riddle.” I didn’t see this as clearly at the time, but now I can see also that there’s a countervailing impulse at work, a refusal to discredit “the real thing,” however much it may be melting.

Heaney, then, wants to credit “the real thing,” and what that may be is far more extensive than what is revealed in ordinary day-to-day perceptions. Yet there’s a certain puzzle here as though Heaney were recrediting Catholicism, and as though there hasn’t been closure or resolution with the “Sweeney Redivivus” poems. He alludes to French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and how “in the milieu of the Harvard English Department, it was impossible not to be aware of the challenge he was offering. The words in the word-hoard were in danger of being dematerialized and everything in me was protesting silently.”16 In this circumstance, Heaney identifies with the onlookers in “The Mud Vision”: “What was at stake for the population in that poem was also at stake for the poet who wrote it” (SS 287–89). In other words, Heaney wants to retain some kind of metaphysical “presence” rather than deconstruct such, even as he is aware also that he may be “snagging on nothing” (“The Spoonbait” OG 281). There’s a kind of recapitulation of Heaney’s “position” in the late 16. It is rather ironic that Derrida—in his later work at least—has since become a muchcited and affirmative name in Heaney criticism.

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1980s in “The Disappearing Island” that is about medieval monks who have mistaken a whale for an island with “sandless shores” so that they “gathered driftwood, made a hearth / And hung our cauldron in its firmament.” Then “The island broke beneath us like a wave.” Yet that sudden catastrophe is resolved: “The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm / Only when we embraced it in extremis. / All I believe that happened there was vision” (OG 299). These last lines are enigmatic: Patrick Crotty speculates that the monastic narrator may have fallen “victim to his imagination” or, conversely, that “his faith (‘All I believe’) was vindicated on the whale’s back, where the powers to which he has dedicated his life reciprocated marvelously.”17 Could the message then be: only believe and all will be well? But in what should one believe? There’s no answer, just the obscure assertion that “vision” is needed. “The Riddle,” the final poem in The Haw Lantern, tries to “sift” and screen those questions through a wire “mesh.” But it too is left with questions: “Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through?” Or “does the choice itself create the value?” How do we “sift the sense of things from what’s imagined”? The last two lines are ominous for anyone of Catholic background, yet the simple asking of them is like a sudden moment of clarification: “Was it culpable ignorance, or was it rather / A via negativa through drops and let-downs?” (OG 300). In the Catholic tradition, “culpable ignorance” refers specifically to those who have heard the Christian message but have refused to accept it (whether through intellectual pride or downright perversity), or—as in the case of someone like Heaney—have rejected its absolute truth, the penalty for which is eternal damnation, exclusion from paradise. The “via negativa” refers to the spiritual darkness and aridity that the believer will certainly encounter as they journey through life in prayer and hope, a darkness that will tempt them to give up and so also perish like those who have chosen “culpable ignorance.” And, of course, the ultimate part of the riddle is that all of these traditional religious threats may be mere illusions based on a set 17. Patrick Crotty, “All I Believe That Happened There Was Revision: Selected Poems 1965– 1975 and New Selected Poems 1966–1987,” in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001), 193.



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of humanly devised self-defense doctrines that are themselves illusions. It seems that there is no way to win. And, probably, one shouldn’t minimize the occasional anxiety that Heaney himself must have felt in regard to the choices he was making. Vendler offers an insightful, if nonconclusive, observation on the dilemma: “By being true to his drops and letdowns [Heaney] may ultimately be of more use to his fellow-men than he would by rallying them too sanguinely to singly-conceived causes.”18 The clear sense, I think, is that Heaney is experiencing darkness and isn’t sure whether it’s the darkness that is there because there is no light in an undirected, unsponsored universe, or the darkness of the “via negativa” most often experienced by the mystics, including especially St. John of the Cross, and, more recently, it would appear, Mother Teresa; the Catholic inheritance of the narrator (Heaney?) causes him to be worried about getting the answer right, while his secular liberation makes him anxious about wasting time on such an obvious nonissue. Alluding to Heaney’s frequent invoking of Osip Mandelstam’s comment that art is directed at “the reader in posterity,” Vendler has commented that “the social, historical, and religious perceptions of The Haw Lantern, if they should become general in Ireland, would indeed create a new psychic reality there. Such a prospect seems so unlikely now [in the early 1990s] that it is only by believing in ‘the reader in posterity’ that a writer can continue to address Irish issues at all”—a quasi-prophetic insight that was to be fulfilled within the next decade, but perhaps to a greater and more troubling extent than even Heaney himself would ever have wished or anticipated.19 Indeed, in these years of the late 1980s and early ’90s, there is a definite impression of Heaney shifting from being an émigré from his religious past to acting now in its defense, not at all in the specificity of its doctrines, several of which he no longer accepts, but in its orientation toward a beyond of at least virtual possibility. He may not have believed in an afterlife, or in a supernatural revelation such as the Judeo-Christian tradition necessarily espoused, but he was not an advocate for his own agnosticism such as was the case with others who had made a similar 18. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 122. 19. Vendler, in Curtis, Art of Seamus Heaney, 175.

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journey. The disruption in modern times arises because, as he was to put it over twenty years later in much the same frame of mind he had when discussing Eliade previously, people have been suddenly: sprung from the world of the awestruck gaze, where there was belief in miracle, in the sun standing still and the sun changing colour—just as it was said to have done at Fatima—they have entered the world of media-speak and postmodernity. They’ve been displaced from a culture not unlike that of de Valera’s Ireland—frugal, nativist and inward looking, but still tuned to a supernatural dimension; and they find themselves in a universe that is global, desacralized, consumerist and devoid of any real sense of place or pastness. They have moved from a world where the young were once sent to serve as stretcher-bearers at the shrine in Lourdes to a world where the young have shares invested for them at birth by their Celtic Tigerish parents. (SS 287–89)

He adds, interestingly, that “in all this, that fictional population is like myself,” indicating the disruption in his own life in spite of his attachments to traditional ways and also, of course, confirming his own—admittedly limited—representativeness. The v er y t i t le of Heaney’s 1991 collection, Seeing Things, connotes his ongoing preoccupation, though always far from religious orthodoxy, with the liminal and the visionary in all its forms. Indeed, Bernard O’Donoghue has referred to “this book’s religion and the principal operative sense of ‘seeing things’” as a form of “secular mysticism.”20 In an interview in the Economist in the same year, Heaney explained that “the religious language [of his Catholic youth] was entirely radiant and mysterious—but it was unquestioned. Then you come to the detached, self-secularized period, and you say: eternal life? It’s all language, you know. There’s no afterlife. . . . And then, suddenly, you say: well, wait! Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. And that’s what there is. . . . The sacred value is actually eternal life. So that language is perfectly 20. Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 126.



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proper. It can be used again.”21 There’s a sleight of hand at the end here— or slippage of meaning—that wouldn’t satisfy everyone. And even on Heaney’s part, there may occasionally be a measure of skepticism implied as in the commonplace rebuke, “You must be seeing things!” Indeed, the latter meaning would probably be the most common, so that Heaney may be playing off of this but in favor of looking deeper into the ordinary. In his own words, “metaphysical need” is leading him to “imaginary ploys” to satisfy it (FK 344). In the opening poem, “The Golden Bough”—in addition to its Virgilian reference, a clear allusion to Sir James Frazer’s volumes of the 1890s that both affirmed the universality of core religious narratives and, in doing so, undermined Christianity’s claim to uniqueness—we experience this embrace of a once dismissed (from a Catholic perspective) pagan religion, but also an establishing of a new religious narrative. 22 As with the original Sweeney poem, we have a translation, this time of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. We begin with Aeneas praying at an altar and receiving advice about going down to the “underworld dark” but with the hope of returning from it—hence the need of the golden bough that will only yield to his pulling “if fate has called you” (OG 311). “I pray for one look,” Aeneas says, “one face-to-face meeting with my dear father. / Teach me the way and open the holy doors wide.”23 All this is by way of introduction to the rest of the collection, one that in its quest for an elusive transcendence has provoked a variety of contending interpretations. In the Greco-Roman underworld, the first shade Heaney encounters is that of Philip Larkin, who had died just a few years earlier and who was, in his way, to haunt Heaney’s later years. Heaney comes upon him quoting Dante—most of the poem technically consists of that quotation, though it is divided between italics and regular type and sounds mostly like Larkin. For the poet from Hull, the next life “felt more like the forewarned journey back / Into the heartland of the ordinary. / Still my old 21. Quoted in Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 153. 22. For a brief account of Frazer’s ongoing worries about his treatment of Christianity, see Robert Fraser’s introductory essay to his abridged edition: Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ix–xliii. 23. Heaney, Seeing Things (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 3.

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self.”24 There’s no transformation at all (and no punishment for “culpable ignorance”). In a highly critical commentary on the poem, Douglas Dunn notes that “instead of an elegy for Larkin, the poem’s prestige . . . comes from the phrase ‘the heartland of the ordinary,’” signaling the consistently natural rather than supernatural focus of the collection.25 The three-part title poem, “Seeing Things,” might be approached as Heaney’s “Sunday Morning,” since it begins with a description of nervously getting into a boat on moving waters on a Sunday morning. The actual experience terminates in an “as if” moment of speculative contemplation: “It was as if I looked from another boat / Sailing through air, far up, and could see / How riskily we fared into the morning, / And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.” More is seen than meets the eye, yet that more is in imagination only. In part II, the “Hard and thin and sinuous” lines of a cathedral carving of Jesus standing “up to his unwet knees” as John the Baptist pours water over him shifts from “utter visibility” to being “alive with what’s invisible.” A colon follows that last word, yet this explanatory marker leads us not to the metaphysical but rather to a sensation of the natural realities depicted in the stone: “The air we stood up to our eyes in wavered.” In the final section, Heaney’s all-competent father has an accident while spraying potatoes that lands him in the river, causing him to return “scatter-eyed / And daunted, strange without his hat, / His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent” (OG 316). Again, the transformation is within the bounds of the ordinary, setting a pattern that will be repeated in subsequent poems and collections. Whatever “invisible” there is is only imagined, and likely only in Wordsworthian recollection at that. Vendler states the case more dramatically: “The airiness of Seeing Things occurs because Heaney is contemplating the physical through the scrim of extinction.”26 “Field of Vision” is a kind of test case of what is going on in all of the poems in the volume. It is about a woman (Heaney’s beloved aunt?) in a wheelchair (perhaps in a nursing home) gazing at the rural life before her 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Douglas Dunn, “Quotidian Miracles: Seeing Things,” in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001). 210. 26. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 138.



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“Straight out past the TV in the corner”; her persona is “steadfast” and “never lamented once” and “never / Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.” So she seems to be of sound mind and not looking for consolatory visions. But what does she see? “Deeper into the countryside than you expected.” Or rather, the speaker sees this because of an “education” that has made him aware of the familiar as “more distinctly strange,” as the linguist Viktor Shklovsky has theorized (OG 319). This, it is implied, is our field of vision. Even in an essay by Henry Hart aptly titled “What Does Heaney See in Seeing Things?” in which the author explores the religious allusions in the poem, he concludes that all the woman—or the narrator—actually sees is “a common field behind a common hedge made ‘strange’ by the power of her contemplative gaze.”27 However, while Hart appears to fault Heaney for seeming to say more than he does—or maybe even for thinking he is saying more—I would suggest that this is all that he aspires to. In other words, he isn’t throwing in a phrase from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (“face to face”) for its religious resonance to upgrade the experience, but rather pulling the apostle down into the world of nature as experienced in rural County Derry.28 Refining rather than restoring an “extra” dimension in human experience, Heaney summons up other examples. In “The Pitchfork,” he tries to turn the ordinary into the marvelous, to see such in the immediacy of objects—here the pitchfork thrower “has learned at last to follow that simple lead / Past its own aim, out to another side / Where perfection—or nearness to it—is imagined” (OG 320). Douglas Dunn justly notes that “without the guidance of [Heaney’s] later statement . . . the idea of a platonic pitchfork as a soaring poetic spear is a touch ridiculous,” and yet Dunn’s own use of “platonic” here may be seeing more than Heaney intended.29 Thus again, in “The Settle Bed,” the poet is attempting to etherealize the physical not into the metaphysical other, but simply into the other of memory and imagination. The poem exudes the strength of Heaney’s nostalgia for such a couch where so much playful activity hap27. Henry Hart, “What Is Heaney Seeing in Seeing Things?,” Colby Quarterly 30, no. 1 (March 1994): 33–42. 28. Ibid., 37; Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” Collected Poems, 66. 29. Douglas Dunn, “Quotidian Miracles: Seeing Things,” 214.

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pened in his childhood: “whatever is given // Can always be reimagined, however four-square, / Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time / It happens to be.” We are the “far-seeing” lookouts who gaze beyond the obvious—but only by “reimagining” the latter (OG 321). “The Biretta,” a poem that Heaney dropped from Seeing Things in the selected version, though John Bayley at Oxford had praised it highly, is especially significant for the present study in that it shows both a distancing from an oppressive Catholicism and at the same time the persistence of the “invisible,” even in the church’s most mundane artifacts.30 Heaney has commented that the poem was originally inspired by a nineteenth-century painting titled The Sick Call depicting a priest wearing a soft hat, a kind of “objective correlative” of him “as somebody halfway between a man of sorrows and a man of service.” In contrast, Heaney notes, “The hard-edged tricorn biretta stood for . . . the hard line, the pulpit bark, the articulated and decided authority of unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.” So the priest of the painting is to be revered for his humanity, while the priest of the biretta is to be feared for his dictatorial stance. Heaney elaborates: “As a child, I tended to be frightened of priests with birettas on their heads. At the same time there was something trim and shipshape, almost airborne, about the feel of the thing. When you took it into your hand from the priest’[s] hand, there was a momentary temptation to launch it into the sanctuary like a paper dart or a little black-winged stealth bomber.” By 1991, he has decided to “let that impulse stand for poetry’s impulse to outstrip the given, and turned it instead into the boat of imagination that Dante launches in the opening lines of the Purgatorio.” So, Heaney has moved from appreciation for the kindness in the tradition (the soft hat) to censure of the haughtiness implied by the biretta, only to recognize too that even that should be venerated because it “outstrip[s] the given” (SS 327).31 “Outstrip[ping] the given”—one of the many phrases Heaney will use from now on in his transcendentalist explorations—is the theme also of “The Skylight,” though here one might want to change the word to “un30. Quoted in Dennis O’Driscoll, “‘The Biretta’: Heaney’s Boater,” Harvard Review 17 (Fall 1999): 74. 31. Heaney, Seeing Things, 28–29.



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strapping.” Giving some background to this “Glanmore Revisited” sonnet about his attic study, Heaney recounts that he “used to very much like claustrophobic conditions.” Then he arrived home from his semester at Harvard to find that his wife, Marie, had added a skylight. “It was a tremendous change for me; again something to do with getting near fifty: I lifted up my eyes to the heavens” (SS 326–27). In his poem on the subject, Heaney interprets this domestic event—“extravagant / Sky entered and held surprise wide open”—to give it a religious resonance: For days I felt like an inhabitant Of that house where the man sick of the palsy Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, Was healed, took up his bed and walked away. (OG 325) The religious imagery wouldn’t be there at all were this not a very important aspect of Heaney’s ongoing interests, and yet the sick man who was cured by Jesus does not ascend to any heavenly paradise but, presumably, returns to his own earthly home. The sonnet “Fosterling,” however, is Heaney’s most overt poem about the major transition taking place in his life at this time. As a boy, he loved a Dutch painting that had “heavy greenness,” canals, the “immanent hydraulics” of a silted land and thus satisfied “My lowlands of the mind.” But now he is astonished to discover that he has had to wait until he was “nearly fifty” to escape from “Heaviness of being” and a poetry “Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens” to a psychic space where he is able to “credit marvels,” for “air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten” (OG 331). This is rightly considered a breaking-out or coming-out poem, an admission that Heaney is willing to see, even wants to see, more in things than his earlier self would have allowed or than some of his skeptical friends and readers would ratify. But again, the very first “marvel” he mentions is “the tree-clock of tin cans / The tinkers made,” nothing supernatural. If his heart is lightening, it is in terms of seeing even more in the mundane than before—literally an extraordinary achievement for such a celebrated celebrant of the ordinary. Examples follow in his Lightenings series. In an essay on the creative process deeply indebted to Jacques Maritain’s analysis of such (itself in-

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debted to the French philosopher’s colleague at Princeton, Allen Tate, and the New Critics), Heaney—cautioning that “one does not need to be a Thomist to agree”—explains the genesis of the first (and rather puzzling) poem in the sequence: I . . . know from the drafts that the action and theme derived from a sixth sense of a subject, from what Maritain would have called the “poetic sense.” . . . I had no plans for the poem, no designs on the reader, nothing to go on except a supply of images from the inner frond-forest. From the start, and out of the blue, there was a picture of a beggar at the threshold of a roofless cottage, a puddle of rain-water in the hearth, and a high cold sky with moving clouds. There was also an understanding that this was an image of the soul being called to judgement on the brink of eternity, what I had once learned to call “the particular judgement”—as opposed to that final, general judgement in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The particular judgement was a far lonelier affair, and the prospect of it both expanded and bewildered the consciousness of the child who was taught to expect it. And it is that sense of expansion and bewilderment and solitude that found its way into the poem.32

So, in the poem, the “particular judgment” is described as taking place in a setting like “winter light / In a doorway” with “A beggar shivering in silhouette.” The area seems troublingly exposed even as—or maybe especially as—“brilliancies” and “Bright” are set against “shivering,” “bare,” and “cold.” Then the “commanded journey”—the judgment?—leads to a different awareness: “And it is not particular at all, / Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round. / Unroofed scope. Knowledgefreshening wind” (OG 332). The consolatory “lightening” seems to be— though this certainly isn’t clear in a poem that has come to bear enormous weight in the interpretation of Heaney’s religious position—that of finding “Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown” in such a dreaded experience, and indeed of realizing that “there is no next-time-round,” a realization that offers “Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.” 32. Heaney, “Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven,” Dublin Review 8 (Autumn 2002): 115–26.



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Vendler, however, sees this realization in a bleaker way: “The central image [is] of chilly reflection, which is no longer the family hearth with the warmth of first-order fire, but rather the inhuman but beautiful cloudlife reflected in the second-order puddle of reflection. One cannot deny the beauty of the free drift of the unsouled clouds, but the puddle refuses to be transparent to the spiritual. A flood of resigned negations follows . . . but is checked by ‘scope’ and ‘wind.’”33 Magdalena Kay too sees it as a “chilly picture,” a scene that “Philip Larkin would recognize,” though not as dark as that of the poet from Hull.34 As remarked earlier, the “no next-time-round” phrase has most often been interpreted as a rejection of an afterlife—which is probably correct—but it also signifies that there is no “particular” judgment because there will be no “general,” Last Day judgment as Catholics traditionally believed. The “unroofed” image here too, common in Heaney’s work at this period, follows the deaths of his parents, but for him appears to have fairly positive connotations though not always interpreted as such: Duffy comments that his parents’ deaths “represented for him a final ‘unroofing’ of reality, the decisive transition from the religiously enclosed and ‘pre-historic’ world in which he had grown up, into a world without religious bearings.”35 There seems to be general agreement, however, that “the poetry is increasingly explicit about his rejection of belief in an overtly supernatural order, and especially of an afterlife.”36 In spite of that, Catholic images and allusions continue to pervade Heaney’s texts as, to radically adapt one of his most famous lines, they too represent “the marvellous as he had known it” (OG 338). In a subsequent poem (xii) in the series, Heaney pursues an investigation of one meaning of “lightening,” the context deeply resonant with familiar religious imagery: 33. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 141. See also her later “Squarings” essay, in “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016): 72–73. 34. Magdalena Kay, “Death and Everyman: Imagining a ‘Not Unwelcoming Emptiness,’” in O’Brien, “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances,” 52. 35. Heaney, SS 322; Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 177. 36. Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 177.

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Miracle and Wonder A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares With pure exhilaration before death— The good thief in us harking to the promise! So paint him on Christ’s right hand, on a promontory Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems Untranslatable into the bliss Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead, By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain: This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise. (OG 341)

If the “pure exhilaration” and “bliss” are positives here, “body racked,” “untranslatable,” and “empty space” are not encouraging. Does the phrasing of “he seems / Untranslatable into the bliss” indicate a measure of ambiguity as between “hardly likely” and “yes, this is the real surprise”? Heaney explains: “[The] title of first section, ‘Lightenings,’ arrived by accident, when I found a dictionary entry that gives it to mean a flaring of the spirit at the moment before death. And there were also the attendant meanings of being unburdened and being illuminated, all of which fitted what was going on as the first poems got written.” Again, he mentions his father’s death in 1986 as “the final ‘unroofing’ of the world,” an event that “affected me in ways that were hidden from me then and now,” and “the approach of the fiftieth birthday” as “another factor in the whole subliminal mix” (SS 321–22). All of this, yet again, seems positive, yet Vendler speculates that “the crucified thief stands for the intolerable knowledge of the physical pain of dying” in a volume where everything is “a hieroglyph of death.”37 But whether Heaney saw death as so terrible will be an ongoing question—after all, he would criticize Philip Larkin for such a view—and there is a more obvious sense in which seeing his parents die (and dead) relieved him of such expected but perhaps surprisingly unfounded fears—their deaths may not have been easy for them, but neither were they awful. In another, more abstract poem in the Settings series, one that is in 37. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 149. In her 2016 “Squarings” essay, she adds, the good thief’s “brain is still aching for that afterlife; faith and hope hover as possibility” (80).



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the tradition of “Sailing to Byzantium” (and that has elements from Sweeney Astray), Heaney ponders, “Where does spirit live? Inside or outside / Things remembered, made things, things unmade?,” and, following Wallace Stevens, “How habitable is perfected form? / And how inhabited the windy light?” (OG 346). Over and over in these poems, Heaney seems to be attempting to cross from the natural to the supernatural, as we see in the appropriately titled Crossings: Everything flows. Even a solid man, A pillar to himself and to his trade, All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat, Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads, Guardian of travellers and psychopomp. (OG 348) The poem goes on to deal with “The journey of the soul with its soul guide / And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!” But perhaps no more is being said than Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion that we have indeed lived in “marvellous [rural] places” inhabited as much by mythological gods as were those in ancient Greece. The imaginary light of poetry can transform the ordinary; the old tropes of a supernatural world once believed in can be legitimately applied to the things of this earth. In “St. Brigid’s Day,” once again there is an effort to reach the “supernatural” through the natural, a combining of folk and religious traditions, and an ending that returns to nature (or at least to images taken from that world). On St. Brigid’s Day in this unusual and certainly local and rural tradition, men and women, separately, step through a straw girdle to enter “the new life”: “The open they came into by these moves / Stood opener, hoops came off the world,” though immediately afterward all they feel is “the February air” and “imagine” “an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland” (OG 350). The use of the natural imagery here seems to take us back to Stevens and his claim that this is the only world we know. It also reluctantly implies that we can’t go beyond this world in spite of all our attempts at such flight. A partial explanation of Heaney’s apparent contradictions here—

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denying the existence of another life but endlessly seeking it—lies, perhaps, in his claim that “It steadies me to tell these things.” He goes on to mention “my father’s shade appearing to me / On a path towards sunset” (OG 351). If this seems strange, it is also a fairly frequent occurrence (and implied in Patrick Kavanagh’s poem on his deceased mother) in most people’s lives as they grow older and vividly recall their past friends and relatives occupying their once familiar places. Thus, Heaney “encounters” these ghosts, but without any faith in their actual existence. Thus, the bleakness faced after his father’s death—as in “The raindrops on the pane [were] more scourged, the grass / Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed, // Or so it seemed”—needs to be temporarily assuaged (OG 352). More and more death is all around him: getting into a car after a march on a dark street is compared to stepping onto Charon’s boat that ferries the dead to the otherworld (OG 354). But it is only a thought, if still a compelling one. In a more general way, Heaney appears to be trying always to push the natural as far as it can go into the supernatural—but it can only go so far, and maybe this is why Larkin’s “Aubade” will come to so obsess him (in Michael Cavanagh’s phrase, Larkin will require “fighting off”): that poem is against everything Heaney is for, though it also exercises its siren attractions. Meanwhile, a poem set at the Giant’s Causeway—an unusual geological formation in Northern Ireland characterized by stones cut by prehistoric volcanic eruptions into pillars of uneven height—presents Heaney at his most “scientific” and seems to offer some kind of resolution, or at least a clarification of the limited thing that Heaney is trying to do: the material world is all there is, but it is from it that we get our “spiritual” power to see more. The “you” of the poem (Heaney?) realizes that— . . . you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone, The rocks and wonder of the world were only Lava crystalized, salts of the earth The wishing chair gave a savor to, its kelp And ozone freshening your outlook Beyond the range you thought you’d settled for. (OG 357)



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It is nature itself that wants, and gives, more than the natural—at least insofar as it is materially responsible for our consciousness. In its linguistic mode, it causes us to imagine things beyond the strictly material; in its more developed linguistic mode, its words are, as Heaney has quoted Stevens, “of things that do not exist without the words.”38 So everywhere now there is “Sweet transience” (OG 359): “The places I go back to have not failed / But will not last”; apparitions are many (OG 360), though more as memories and imaginings than anything else, even if it is noted again that it was at about this time (1985) that several accounts of “moving statues” of the Virgin Mary were being reported from around the country.39 In Heaney’s imaginative world, farming neighbors of the past are “Apparitions now, yet active still // And territorial, still sure of their ground.” Yet they do not know “how far / The country of the shades has been pushed back.” They seem to appear merely as images “in a freak of sunshine” as the modern secular world presses against them. It is in poem xliv of Squarings that we find an early and very revealing truncated use of Henry Vaughan’s 1655 “They Are All Gone Into the World of Light” and the phrase “the nothing there” as Heaney recalls the dead and as though he is advancing to another major stepping stone: All gone into the world of light? Perhaps As we read the line sheer forms do crowd The starry vestibule. Otherwise They do not. What lucency survives Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift, Ungratified if always well prepared

38. Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 32. 39. In 1985, at the time of the government debate about changing the divorce laws, there were several reports from different parts of Ireland of statues of the Virgin Mary being seen to move. Credulity rather than faith seems to have inspired the numerous pious pilgrims who came to visit such places. A bishop reminded the faithful that “direct supernatural interventions” were rare and that “common sense” should be used on these occasions; a priest lamented inadequate pastoral care “when people have to turn to moving statues in order to satisfy their spiritual needs”; see Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, 243–44.

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Miracle and Wonder For the nothing there—which is only what had been there. Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping, That moment of admission of All gone, When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage. (OG 362)

Here is an accurate metaphor for the loss of belief—it isn’t, as at first seemed to be the case, the finding of “the nothing there” that was “only what had been there.” It is more like thinking that you’ve caught something—although being prepared for disappointment—and the dawning of the full realization that all has truly gone, those who have departed that you didn’t ever fully realize were going to go, and the sense of nothingness thereafter. One has lost touch with what one vaguely thought was there, yet that thinking, that sense of a tug on the line, needs to be acknowledged. Or—in the supernatural sense at least—what one thought was there never was there, and yet there is more to be said about the experience than admitting that one was deceived earlier. There’s a strong echo of Stevens’s nonbelief and total identification with nature of “The Snow Man” here: “the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”; any assertion of a beyond has no more force than Tennyson’s in In Memoriam when the poet feels the presence of his dead friend as he reads his old letters (thus Heaney’s “As we read the line sheer forms do crowd / The starry vestibule. Otherwise / They do not.”).40 And yet, there is also a going beyond Stevens and Tennyson here—or maybe an arrival at a place between the disappointed unbelief of the former and the wavering belief of the latter, if not quiet at Vaughan’s plea to God: “Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill / My perspective still as they pass, / Or else remove me hence unto that hill, / Where I shall need no glass.”41 40. Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in Collected Poems, 9; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam: “So word by word, and line by line, / The dead man touch’d me from the past, / And all at once it seem’d at last / The living soul was flash’d on mine”; section XCV, lines 33–36, ed. Erik Gray (New York: Norton, 2004), 69. 41. Henry Vaughan, “Beyond the Veil” (1655).



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On this, Magdalena Kay comments, “The poet maintains a pose of conjecture until he allows anguish to have its say: in the moment where he turns Henry Vaughan’s initial affirmation—“They are all gone into the world of light”—into a question, his hardest work begins.” Vaughan needs the consolation of a next life in order to make this one meaningful. Pointing out their differences, Kay states starkly, Vaughan’s “poem describes a downward arc from the brightness of remembrance and certainty to doubt. Heaney attempts stoicism.” She concludes, “Heaney knows the feeling of being ‘ungratified’ by a reality harder and darker than what we feel we have been promised. Thus he amends his initial metaphor: rather than the disappointment of an empty fishing line, the sense of disbelief is rather like finding the line snapping, breaking, and drifting away, leaving us shocked and bereft.” Vendler is just as bleak, but ends with noting a series of positive compensations in the real world after this break with Heaney’s past (his dead parents): “Joys, too, inhabit rooms in the theater of memory and are as undeniable in their plenitude as mourning is in its emptiness. Among the joys are landscape, music, companionship, and sexual energy.”42 Pursuing yet another ploy, in poem xiv of the sequence, Heaney appears to be imagining a variety of afterlives for the dead based on what most preoccupied them during their actual lives. But why do this at all except to comment on their earthly preoccupations, a series of different interests according to the lives they have led? “For certain ones,” Heaney’s poem declares tentatively, “what was written may come true”—presumably a token reference to the “elect” of biblical, and especially Protestant, Christian history. But: For our ones, no. They will re-enter Dryness that was heaven on earth to them, Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay. For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed-beds And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling. For our ones, snuff 42. Vendler, “Squarings,” 80–81, and Kay, “Death and Everyman,’” 53–54—both in Eugene O’Brien, ed.,“‘The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances.’”

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Miracle and Wonder And hob-soot and the heat off ashes. And a judge who comes between them and the sun In a pillar of radiant house-dust. (OG 363)

In general, this belongs with a number of poems in which Heaney imagines an afterlife wistfully full of the things of this one that country people (“our ones”) have most wanted or believed in: dry weather, snuff, the heat off ashes, a judgment that will incline to mitigate any punishments due them. These may be fantasies, but they are ones that give shape and coherence to peoples’ lives and are thus not to be casually dismissed. The same ongoing concern, the task of retrieval and saving that which is left—finding “salve” amidst the wreckage of a lost “salvation”—continues in the next poem: on hearing a fiddle being played, Heaney wonders: Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands. (OG 364) The fact that this poem deals with the question of God’s existence suggests that this is a theme in these pages overall—giving plausibility to my earlier musings on the fish-rod poem. But God is here less affirmed than accepted as a name for “things beyond measure”—hardly a satisfying explanation for theologians, but happily consistent with Heaney’s other observations.43 “The anguish of the knowledge of death in Seeing Things is usually expressed in muted ways,” Vendler claims.44 In Heaney’s prose of the period, it would be announced more explicitly and more loudly. 43. James Booth, however, reads these lines as more affirmative of religious belief: “The final statement just holds back from asserting the existence of God. It remains a ‘supposition,’ albeit a supposition that ‘stands,’”; Booth, “The Turf Cutter and the Nine-to-Five Man: Heaney, Larkin, and ‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” Twentieth-Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 384. 44. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 149.

Chapter 7

C o m ba t in g N o t hin g ness

I

n t he lat e 1980s, Seamus Heaney was preoccupied with questions about the supernatural, death, and the afterlife in his prose almost as much as in his poems. Indeed, most of the time prose and poetry intersect seamlessly. As early as 1978—several years before his parents died— he had commended Yeats for “the humility of his artistic mastery before the mystery of life and death”: Yeats’s approach to death in “Cuchulain Comforted,” a poem written within two weeks of his own demise in 1939, is “one in which his cunning as a deliberate maker and his wisdom as an intuitive thinker find a rich and strange conclusiveness” (FK 117). Employing the terza rima meter of Dante for the first and last time, Yeats “was preparing his own death by imagining Cuchulain’s descent among the shades,” so that “we witness here a strange ritual of surrender, a rite of passage from life into death, but a rite whose meaning is subsumed into song, into the otherness of art” (FK 119–20). In 1985, in this ongoing conversation and almost as a kind of preparation for the Yeats-Larkin lecture on last things that is the main focus of this chapter, Heaney quotes from Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar: “You must not confuse being dead with not being” (FK 426). Heaney goes on, “What is most impressive about Mr Palomar is a sense of the safety net being withdrawn at the end, of beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination being carried off not so much to dazzle an audience as to outface what the poet Philip Larkin calls ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’” (FK 428). There is an echo of John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud”

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in the use of “outface” (“Death, thou shalt die”) as also in a more general way a sense of Heaney testing the natural-supernatural waters for himself to see if he has faith enough to attempt walking on them. He too will carry out “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination” to “outface” a despairing Larkin. Heaney’s comments on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert in 1987 (“Atlas of Civilization”) are also relevant. For Herbert, the façade of the cathedral at Orvieto differs “from the interior—as though the gate of life full of birds and colours led into a cold, austere eternity,” while visiting Lascaux gives Herbert a surer conviction “that I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but almost of the whole of infinity” (FK 168), an echo of Heaney’s “On the Road” in Station Island. Yet Herbert sees the afterlife—if there is such—in Heaneyesque, earthly terms: in his Mr. Cogito poem, Herbert speculates about the protagonist that “perhaps he will manage / to convince the angels / he is incapable / of heavenly / service // and they will permit him to return / by an overgrown path / at the shore of a white sea / to the cave of the beginning.” This reference too to a continuity from Lascaux, to the Greeks and Romans, and on to Catholicism seems to tie in with Heaney’s own comment in an interview with Melvyn Bragg that he wanted to show in his bog poems that there had been people in Ulster six thousand years ago—that it was too limiting to see everything simply in terms of the Orange vs. Green of the last few hundred years; in other words, Heaney sees himself as the inheritor of past faiths and a portal to future ones, though as a former Catholic, he must have been ironically aware of the theological objections to such a proposition (FK 172). “Herbert’s mind [too] is fixed constantly on last things,” declares Heaney; his own is also (FK 179–80). Turning to Yeats again in 1988 (“W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee”), Heaney notes that “the last stanza of ‘All Souls’ Night,’ for example, represents all the positive force that Yeats’s tower-schooled mind could command: his prayer for concentration is itself focused and shining with an inward, self-illuminating ardour”: “Nothing can stay my glance / Until that glance run in the world’s despite / To where the damned have howled away their hearts, / And where the blessed dance.” At least “in mind’s wandering,” Yeats brazenly defies the world to join the dead on this tra-



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ditional communing night. Heaney, meanwhile, responds in a series of artfully chosen phrases: Here conviction arises out of the very words in which it is sought, and stamina has been conjured by the strong expression of the poet’s need for it. But, as Richard Ellmann has insisted, the credibility of this art is ultimately guaranteed by Yeats’s readiness to doubt its efficaciousness. The very power of his desire for foundedness should alert us to the fear of unfoundedness which lurks beneath it. It is Yeats’s greatest triumph that he could acknowledge this possibility and yet maintain a resolute faith in the worth of artistic creation. (FK 259)

These are sentiments that seem especially applicable to Heaney’s own religious stance with its jostling elements of desire and fear, confidence and uncertainty. He concludes with an unexpected and enigmatic Beckett comment: “Behind the large firm gestures of Yeats’s last poems, where the humanist effort is racked upon a wheel that is a paradigm of hollowness, we can already make out the shuffling, unappeasable decrepitude of Beckett’s heroes going on refusing to go on” (FK 260). I take this to mean that Yeats’s marvelous attempt cannot stretch enough to bear its load, that Beckettian despair will follow, but yet that even this despair too will go on living (unlike Larkin’s darker version) in the face of adversity. This interpretation is reinforced by another somewhat enigmatic statement in a subsequent and related lecture on Thomas Kinsella’s translations of ancient Irish monastic texts: “The radiance of a God-filled and divinely ordained nature is implicit in each little pleasure-spurt from the hermit’s pen. In Kinsella’s gloss, on the other hand, a post-Darwinian nature instructs the self in the necessity of constant self-digestion” (FK 264). The point seems to be that this “post-Darwinian” awareness is not one that Heaney can totally ignore either, however much he might wish to do so. Continuing with the same theme—and as though partly in conversation with himself—in a 1989 lecture Heaney commented on Edwin Muir’s account of death, an account that may partly apply to a teenage Heaney when his baby brother was killed decades earlier: encountering “an intuited, endangering pressure of reality, a true weighing of things as they are dreaded against things as they are desired,” Muir “nevertheless main-

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tained his innate, positive disposition” (FK 269–70). Heaney, however, is more cautious: the description of the Muir family at prayer as echoed in his poems seems to want to “impose the order of art a little too amiably upon the disorders of experience” (FK 271). Heaney reinforces this point with his further and very relevant observation that “Muir’s faith in the immortality of the soul and his hard-won if high-toned perspective on personal and historical suffering come through in these poems as a shade too readily available,” suggesting that this has been a problem for him in his own life (and harks back to Ellmann’s observation earlier that Yeats’s value lies in his undermining of his own assertions) (FK 272). Likewise, to some extent at least, with Heaney’s comments on Christ and redemption in Muir’s “The Combat,” which “can be read politically as a parable about the war against Nazism,” but which too “can be read—also too trimly—within a Christian framework of redemption through suffering” (FK 276). So Muir’s bleak vision is the reality of things, one that ought not be inflected so much with a consoling Christianity. Heaney sums things up in another deft remark about Muir’s “temperamental impulse to foreclose with a hopeful QED . . . to correct Kafka with a dose of Browning” (FK 278). He also commends “Muir’s early period of Nietzschean ‘hardness,’” which was eventually replaced by “a sensibility that is deeply affected by Christianity and almost too susceptible to the appeal of passive suffering” (FK 279). Indeed, Heaney appears to be warring against those very tendencies in himself. He foregrounds this tension again when he remarks in regard to Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” that “its psychological realism insists that too much should not be expected from people, or from life in general, while its artistic virtuosity insists that too much is the least we should expect” (FK 298). It is out of these ongoing concerns that Heaney’s “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin,” a lecture given in 1990 in Heaney’s capacity as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University—a position once held by Matthew Arnold and in which his immediate predecessor was Peter Levi, poet, classicist, and former Jesuit—arises.1 1. Michael Cavanagh gives the date of composition as 1990, of delivery as 1993 (Professing Poetry, 185), though the date given in Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 163, is 1990; Denis Donoghue



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Here, in prose, and post “Station Island” and the poems of The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things that we’ve been looking at, he further explores issues of meaning, death, and the afterlife, the whole “religious basket,” so to speak. Thus “Joy or Night,” while ostensibly about the views of Yeats and Larkin, is even more a profound reflection of Heaney’s own position on these matters. Thus far, it does not appear as if Heaney ever suffered the kind of night-sweats of religious anxiety (his schoolboy sexual worries don’t count, as they were within the parameters of a received faith) that a struggling believer like John Updike, for example, has confessed to, or sat quietly in the darkness of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on weekday afternoons contemplating the eternal verities as Wallace Stevens is reputed to have done, but he had obviously long been preoccupied and conflicted about these subjects, as his imaginary pilgrimage to Lough Derg has shown.2 Heaney’s religious inheritance was quite different from those of Stevens and Updike, of course, its personal anguish muted by traditional communal loyalties, and by broader mythical and, as he himself would claim, “pagan” satisfactions.3 And yet, since Heaney was so anxious to confront Larkin, it may be taken that the latter’s concerns, like those of a believing Updike, found some—perhaps much—resonance with him, even if Heaney almost never deals with religion the way that Larkin (or indeed Updike) does. In a way, Larkin and Yeats are the leftover ghosts that he didn’t visit or include in “Station Island,” but with goes with 1990 (Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001]), 119. In the published version, an endnote references John Updike’s Odd Jobs, Essays, and Criticism (London: Penguin, 1992) on Karl Barth. Obviously, the version familiar to readers is post 1992 and likely has additional revisions of the original lecture. 2. Updike, “The Future of Faith,” New Yorker, November 29, 1999, 84–91; Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1977): 294, 297. However, in a review of Magdalena Kay’s Knowing One’s Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig (2012), Charles S. Kraszewski records that “Robert Hass once told an anecdote about walking into St. Mary Magdalen Church in Kensington, California, and seeing Czesław Miłosz in prayer at one side altar, and Seamus Heaney, across the nave, at another. ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘at that point I figured that this was a parish worth looking into’”; Kraszewski, Review in Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 1 (2014): 190. 3. Eamon Duffy, however, still a Catholic, also confesses to “icy sweat” and a “nauseating physical fear of death” during an early crisis of faith—see his Faith of Our Fathers, 5.

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which he now has the strength and authority to engage. It is too a Heaney lecture (and published essay) into which Czesław Miłosz makes a decisive—literally—entry for the first time. This frisson with Larkin can be argued for, since Heaney’s earlier treatments of the poet had generally been much more sympathetic. A 1982 essay for Larkin’s sixtieth birthday, for example, was titled “The Main of Light”; by the early 1990s, the English poet is associated with “Night.” In 1982, Larkin’s “Aubade” was already five years old, so there was no future shock that would have provoked the later reassessment. Indeed, Heaney praised “the melody of intelligence” in Larkin, “this encounter between a compassionate, unfoolable mind and its own predicaments—which we are forced to recognize as our predicaments too—that gives his poetry its first appeal.” Thus Larkin’s skepticism had been an attraction—or at least a reality—from the beginning. But, back then Heaney felt that in spite of Larkin’s pessimism, “there survives in him a repining for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance.” Heaney even speaks of moments in Larkin’s poetry “which deserve to be called visionary” (FK 158–59). He feels the presence of a “minute light” there, that Larkin’s attitude is similar to Joyce’s at the end of “The Dead.” Acknowledging Larkin’s unbelief, he still places an emphasis on light, spirituality, the English poet’s work as a “natural monstrance” (FK 163). And indeed Larkin’s “The Explosion,” a poem about a mineshaft disaster, offered a foretaste of much of Heaney’s own subsequent poetry in Seeing Things:4 The dead go on before us, they Are sitting in God’s house in comfort, We shall see them face to face— Plain as lettering in the chapels It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion Larger than in life. . . . 4. See Raphaël Ingelbien, “Seamus Heaney and the Importance of Larkin,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 3/4 (Summer 2000): 471–84; Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, x.



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Heaney concludes that overall “in Larkin’s poems there was enough reach and longing to show that he did not completely settle for that well-known bargain offer, ‘a poetry of lowered sights and patently diminished expectations’” (FK 165–66). At the time of the 1982 essay, Heaney worried that his approach might “irritate” Larkin, especially since it ended with a reference to Dante, but received a gracious letter of appreciation from the poet, who was glad to be recognized as such.5 And, as was noted about Seeing Things, which was almost contemporaneous with the first draft of Heaney’s Oxford lecture, Larkin there enjoys a rather benign poetic afterlife—typically one very much like what he had experienced in his day-to-day librarian routines in Hull, though being consigned to reading Dante might have been judged by him as excruciatingly purgatorial, not to say hellish.6 The argument of Heaney’s 1990 lecture, however, is both more critical and more intricate. A sympathetic Richard Rankin Russell has called it an “unfair tirade” against its subject, while Denis Donoghue sees it as “prejudicial”; James Booth, Larkin’s most recent biographer, has objected to the image of Larkin therein as “one of [Heaney’s] own creation.”7 Again, although it might seem that Heaney is talking less about the afterlife as such than about how we should face death—after all, the focus of his lecture is his objection to Larkin’s view in “Aubade” that “Death is no different whined at than withstood” (Heaney’s italics), against which Heaney is recommending a vigorous, but traditional, stoicism, if not the “rage” of a Dylan Thomas in the face of the inevitable—that isn’t quite so (FK 344). He also attacks Larkin’s “facts” about “the mind’s disappearance after death.” So, like the protagonist of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”—an5. National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Collection, MS 149, 493/145, page 3. Heaney is commenting on Larkin’s reply. 6. Robert Potts, “The View from Olympia,” Guardian, April 7, 2000, comments that this is “the worst case” of Heaney enlisting ghosts: “‘Larkin’s shade surprised me. He quoted Dante’— to which one responds, yes, that certainly would be a surprise.” But maybe Heaney thought that Dante would be useful reading in whatever part of the next world Larkin inhabited. 7. Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 374; Donoghue, Adam’s Curse, 119; James Booth, “The Turf Cutter and the Nine-to-Five Man: Heaney, Larkin, and ‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work’”; Twentieth-Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 386.

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other name invoked in this lecture—Heaney seems to at least feel the need “for some imperishable bliss,” possibly illusory, or as he himself put it in 1983 in a comment on Seán Ó Ríordáin, a desire for “that universal, paradisiacal place where our conflicts will be resolved.”8 And whereas the Dylan Thomas of “Do Not Go Gentle” was looking back to lives unfulfilled, Heaney seems to be looking forward to an encounter of some form or other. Heaney rarely discussed a poem in detail without first presenting the text itself, and this lecture with its very extensive quotations from Yeats and Larkin is no exception; with this precedent, I want to examine his lecture in similar detail. Another motive for such close examination is that Heaney’s lecture poses problems for a too-easy assumption that he had entirely dismissed the possibility of an afterlife as early as The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things—or if he had, then “Joy or Night” at the very least complicates the issue and suggests an ongoing hesitation on his part.9 In other words, could the poet who was certain in the 1980s that there was “no next-time-round” have given this lecture where he seems to be arguing against not only Larkin’s nihilism about this world, but also about the next one—on the nonexistence of which, presumably, they agreed? In “Joy or Night,” Heaney attacks more than Larkin’s fears about his own death, fears expressed even more intensely by John Betjeman, who was a Christian believer, and also by Seán Ó Ríordáin, another of the terminally tormented.10 In “Joy or Night,” Yeats and Miłosz, advocates of the numinous, now dominate the scene, the skeptical Joyce of “Station Island” being totally absent from the conversation. Heaney opens with lines from the Czech poet Miroslav Holub about two different approaches to death by two men, one quietly content yet in an earthy way, the other bitter, “as if he stuck his pale face out / on a 8. Heaney, “Forked Tongues, Céilís and Incubators,” Fortnight, September 1983, 116. Quoted in Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry, 43. 9. Michael Cavanagh registers this uncertainty too, attributing it partly to “a ghost of his former belief”; Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 200. 10. See Kevin J. Gardner, ed., Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An Anthology of His Religious Verse (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006); Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry, 43–46, for Seán Ó Ríordáin.



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skewer from behind the graveyard wall.” Holub concludes with “I know they died the same death / but I don’t think they died / in the same way” (FK 343). Heaney finds a “great cogency” in Holub’s statement, one to which Larkin’s “Aubade” “constitutes a direct contradiction . . . in that it treats as mystification any imaginative or rhetorical ploy which might mask the facts of the body’s dissolution and the mind’s disappearance after death. Religion, courage, philosophy, drink, the routines of work and leisure—all these are regarded by Larkin as placebos.” Notice that it is not just a useless belief in the false promises of religion that Larkin is rejecting, but all the other human strategies as well. As Larkin grew older, according to Heaney, “his vision got arrested into a fixed stare at the inexorability of his own physical extinction. Human wisdom therefore seemed to him a matter of operating within the mortal limits, and of quelling any false hope of transcending or outfacing the inevitable.” Heaney thus sets out to “consider the implications for poetry of Larkin’s attitude” and to place it alongside that of the Yeats whom Larkin had earlier rejected. Putting the matter in this way, however—we are only to be concerned with “the implications for poetry”—serves to narrow an argument that has much wider implications. Indeed, Heaney says as much when he recalls that the Yeats poem he is about to consider was, according to its author, the result of a “mood” when “looking at the sky in wintertime” and counters that “it is as much about metaphysical need as it is about the meteorological conditions” (FK 344). Heaney first contrasts Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven”—on the face of things hardly a reassuring title—with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s more orthodoxly Catholic view. Yeats, imaginatively encountering the interstellar void, declares: . . . I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken By the injustice of the skies for punishment? Heaney’s comment on these lines is that they offer “an extraordinarily vivid rendering of a spasm of consciousness, a moment of exposure to

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the total dimensions of what Wallace Stevens once called our ‘spiritual height and depth.’” He elaborates on the “sudden apprehension that there is no hiding place, that the individual human life cannot be sheltered from the galactic cold. The spirit’s vulnerability, the mind’s awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they represent—all of this is simultaneously present.” Hopkins too has had this experience—“the swoon of a heart . . . trod / Hard down with a horror of height,” and “has gone through his ordeal on the mind’s mountains, on those ‘cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.’” “But,” notes Heaney, “the difference is that in Hopkins the terror has its given co-ordinates; the Deity, doubted though He may be, does provide a certain theological longitude and latitude for what is unknown and unknowable.” As Heaney argues the case, “Hopkins’s intensity is the intensity of dialogue, of blame and beseeching: a ‘thou’ is being addressed, a comforter is being called upon,” whereas with Yeats “this personal God has disappeared, and yet Yeats’s poem still conveys a strong impression of direct encounter. The spirit still suffers from a sense of answerability, of responsibility, to a something out there, an intuited element,” a wonderful verbal claim—maybe sleight of hand—that at this point may, of course, be total nonsense (FK 345). The point seems to be that, by being more supernaturally generic, Yeats is more contemporarily acceptable than a specifically orthodox Hopkins. For Heaney, “The ‘I’ of the poet as a first-person singular, a selfknowing consciousness, is brilliantly and concretely at one with the eye of the poet as a retina overwhelmed by the visual evidence of infinity and solitude” (FK 345–46). Yet there is a kind of trick here in the use of the phrase “visual evidence”—a trick similar to that which Heaney will accuse Larkin of shortly—in that this “infinity and solitude” are in no way representative of anything supernatural. “And this,” continues Heaney, “is only one of several instances where the poem’s stylistic excellence and its spiritual proffer converge,” though the wary reader may be inclined to think that this is only because Heaney himself has made the twain converge.11 The faculty of “reason” that Yeats at one point in the poem rejects 11. James Booth’s judgment is harsher (but also quite revealing of one aspect of Heaney’s



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is described by Heaney as a “potentially debilitating force.” Stating the matter “in yet another and perhaps provocatively simple way, ‘The Cold Heaven,’” declares Heaney, “is a poem which suggests that there is an overall purpose to life; and it does so by the intrinsically poetic action of its rhymes, its rhythms and its exultant intonation. These create an energy and an order which promote the idea that there exists a much greater, circumambient energy and order within which we have our being.” But Yeats, then, is merely “promoting” an idea, not winning an argument with it as Heaney seems to infer. We may also wonder what on earth Heaney means by the phrase “circumambient energy . . . within which we have our being” unless he is in some way referring to a kind of nondetectable electromagnetic field of quasi spiritual force in the universe (FK 346)? Heaney goes on to rehearse Yeats’s long history of interest in fairies, Celtic mythology, Buddhism, and the occult and everything to do with a possible afterlife, concluding with the reminder that “Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side.” This paraphrase of Yeats’s famous allusion to Blake offers a wonderful clarity of purpose in describing the individual seeker; and rather than see Yeats as foolishly committed to a vague mysticism—the kind of Madame Sosostris figure ridiculed by Eliot in The Waste Land—Heaney commends the full force of the poet’s lifelong religious search. Heaney even concedes that Yeats’s “studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic, and yet his intellect remained undeluded. Rational objections were often rationally allowed by him, if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed.” But, one might legitimately ask, is this overwhelming by the imagination and by the force of rhetoric really possible without an abandonment of rationality itself, and does one want to go there? “Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.” Alluding approach here): “In his own poems [Heaney] often confuses ‘spiritual proffer’ with poetry, or, rather, he prefers spiritual ‘proffer’ to poetry”; “Turf Cutter,” 390.

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to Yeats’s A Vision, Heaney declares that the poet was “as complicated as the rest of us when it came to the nature of his beliefs in a supernatural machinery” (FK 346–47). So for Heaney, as for a Yeats who is “as complicated as the rest of us” in this matter—thus allowing, it would seem, for contradictions and illogicalities—it is the spiritual that dominates over the material. Heaney continues, rather tellingly, to juxtapose—or even oppose—the introduction to A Vision in which Yeats seems to concede that his supernatural insights are no more than “stylistic arrangements of experience comparable . . . to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi” with a detailed account of a conversation Lady Dorothy Wellesley once had with Yeats on the afterlife: WBY: “After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.” . . . I [LDW]: “How long does this state last?” WBY: “Perhaps some twenty years.” “And after that,” I asked, “what happens next?” He replied, “Again a period which is Purgatory. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.” And then again I asked: “And after that?” . . . [Yeats] spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, “Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church” . . . his only retort was his splendid laugh.

It is curious, even touching, that Heaney should employ this conversation at all, a conversation that earlier would probably have been dismissed less for its unscientific, not to say inane, speculations between two speakers of dubious credibility, than for its clumsy—from a Roman Catholic point of view—theological unorthodoxy. Heaney’s very quoting of it, then, suggests, to my mind at least, a real and quite ordinary wonder about such matters, almost—though not quite—a reassertion of the kind of traditional faith that Heaney had avoided, or felt less compelling, in Hopkins. Heaney even offers a tentative interpretation of Yeats’s evasive laugh: “It was the social expression of that frame of mind which allowed the venturesomeness of a supernatural faith to co-exist with a rigorously sceptical attitude” (FK 347–48). The “venturesomeness of a supernatural faith” phrase suggests the possibility that Heaney has pretty much con-



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cluded that an afterlife of any kind is unlikely, but still rather wishes that there were one—and even holds some faint hope for such. Thus, he will venture to bet on such a possibility as opposed to its opposite. To the frequent accusation that Heaney misinterprets “The Cold Heaven,” it can be replied that what is important in this case is not the validity or otherwise of his explication but what he chooses to read into Yeats’s poem.12 The argument is about Heaney’s beliefs more than it is about Yeats’s art. Larkin, on the other hand, had long since turned from a joyful Yeats to a “dolorous” Thomas Hardy. In the latter’s “Neutral Tones,” it was “the disenchantment of Hardy’s ‘God-curst sun, and a tree / And a pond edged with greyish leaves’ [that] carried far more weight and cut more emotional ice with Larkin than any illumination” that a Yeatsian heaven could provide. Heaney then remarks—in contrast to an earlier, more hopeful view of his—that “it is surely a God-curst sun that creates the glassy brilliance at the end of [Larkin’s] poem ‘High Windows.’ Certainly it is the opposite of whatever illuminates the scene where Yeats’s protagonist ‘cried and trembled and rocked to and fro.’” Heaney now insists (taking aim at two of Larkin’s most celebrated poems) that Yeats’s cold heaven “is neither frigid nor negative. It is, on the contrary, an image of superabundant life, whereas Larkin’s sun-struck distances give access to an infinity as void and neuter as those ‘blinding windscreens’ which flash randomly and pointlessly in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’” (FK 349). What Larkin sees in the skies, Heaney continues, “is a great absence. . . . Out there, no encounter is possible. Out there is not our business”—the latter a claim that seems to dismissively misinterpret Larkin, though by doing so it registers yet again, as with his employment of Yeats, Heaney’s purposes. If Larkin is being criticized for implying that “out there is not our business,” then Heaney is asserting that “out there 12. In his MS notes, Heaney speculates about various meanings of the poem, claiming afterward that “there is a logical case for reading the poem” the way he does, proving at least that his choices weren’t just arbitrary—but also that he was deliberately looking to justify his already adopted approach; National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Collection, MS 49, 493/184, folder 1, page 1. He notes also that “Yeats was passionately devoted to getting behind the veil of appearances,” a theme that also attracted Heaney in Miłosz. He notes too Larkin’s “suspicion of what he called religion” and his “reluctance to be consoled” (20).

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is our business.” In this case, according to Heaney, all Larkin provides us with “to protect us against these metaphysically Arctic conditions is the frail heat-shield generated by human kindness,” the same offering as that from Matthew Arnold over a hundred years earlier in “Dover Beach.” Heaney proceeds: “Larkin is to be taken seriously when he writes, in his late poem ‘The Mower,’ ‘we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ But this minimal shield is insufficient to ward off the enormous No which reality pronounces constantly into the face of human life. Naturally, we would like him to answer back with the enormous Yes which love and art might generate, but [Larkin] is unable to do it because he insists on taking full account of the negative evidence and this finally demoralizes the affirmative impulse” (FK 349). While Heaney recognizes that “Larkin’s poetry at its best is . . . sensitive to the . . . imagination’s stalemate between the death-mask of nihilism and the fixed smile of a pre-booked place in paradise,” he acknowledges that in the end Larkin certainly opted for the nihilistic. It is interesting that Heaney places the choices in such terms, especially his implied disavowal of a bland heaven that any thoughtful believer could hardly wish for. Meanwhile, Heaney favors instead the belief of Czesław Miłosz, who protested Larkin’s stance in “Aubade” while praising its poetic technique. For Miłosz, “no intelligent contemporary is spared the pressure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning,” and yet equally poetry “must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries long hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy” (FK 350). In Miłosz’s view, we must remain resistant, as Larkin has not, to a science that would reduce man to “a bundle of perceptions, or even less” (FK 354). This last admonition may be admirable, but maintaining a “hostility” to reason and science should surely give one pause. As with Yeats’s poem, Heaney makes present the art work he is about to discuss, praising it highly even as he objects to it trenchantly. Noting the chilling effect “Aubade” had when it first appeared two days before Christmas in 1977, Heaney intones its wonderful, if despairing, opening:



Combating Nothingness 185 I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.

As it wends its way, “Aubade” expresses horror at “the total emptiness for ever, / The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.” The consolations of religion are dismissed as “vast moth-eaten musical brocade.” Even the rationalist’s argument that we need not worry since we will not be there to feel the emptiness is presented—illogically (how will we be “lost” in “Total emptiness” “always” if we’ve already suffered “sure extinction”?), though with psychological realism—as precisely the object of our fear. We are told that stoicism in the face of death is of no advantage, since “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Grim morning finally arrives—“The sky is white as clay, with no sun”—and the world carries on without us. Heaney’s first response is to say that “it would be hard to think of a poem more opposed than this one to the life-enhancing symbolism of the Christ child in the Christmas crib” (FK 352). Nevertheless, he praises Larkin’s poem effusively, noting the poet’s opposition to Christianity’s consoling beliefs in the face of “unresting death,” and how Larkin “unleashes [‘unresting’] at line 5 and then for the next forty-five lines it beats the bounds of our mortality, forcing its borders to shrink further and further away from any contact with consoling beliefs” (FK 352). He is hugely impressed—as he should be—by the technical qualities of the poem but concludes that for him it is “the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality and denies the Deity’s immemorial attribute of infinite personal concern”—the latter a phrase that implies the possible existence of a deity. Heaney advances purposefully with “no matter how much or how little readers may at the outset be in sympathy with these views, they still arrive at the poem’s conclusion . . . like unwary surfers hung over a

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great emptiness, transported further into the void than they might have expected to go” (FK 353). This is a striking image suggestive of what happened to Heaney himself when he first read the poem precisely because it reached into his own fears; it is also possibly an image of what Heaney is doing to his readers in his essay. In other words, just as Larkin takes away too much without our quite noticing it until the end, so too Heaney restores more than can be thoughtfully accepted. If Larkin’s poem “arrives at a place where, in Yeats’s words, ‘cold winds blow across our hands, upon our faces, the thermometer falls,”’ the latter’s response to such a void would have been different: Yeats “considered these things to be symptoms not of absence but of the ecstatic presence of the supernatural.” Yeats’s “ice” was “the antithesis of the stuff to be found under the mortuary slabs.” Heaney argues that what we have here is “an analogue also of Yeats’s rejection of the body heat of the pathetic and the subjective in art, for his embrace of the dramatic and the heroic.” Amplifying this point, he asserts that for Yeats, “there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death” (FK 353). Thus, in contrast to Larkin, for Yeats “death withstood is indeed very different from death whined at” and “it is up to poets and actresses to continue to withstand” it. But the more important point here surely is that they—the heroes and poets—behave as they do precisely because of either a Christian or a more generically religious expectation of being resurrected in some form or other. Without that, they would hardly be so brave. So, when Heaney even goes so far as to suggest that “we must imagine Yeats as the reader in eternity who resists Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade,’” we can wonder if their situations are quite the same (FK 354). Once again, Heaney invokes Miłosz against a scientific understanding that would reduce man to “a bundle of perceptions, or even less.” Rather, Miłosz asserts, “Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time, and it has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms,” a provocative statement that would, of course, require further exploration



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before accepting its validity, but that does give an “out” for the less orthodox, like Heaney. In the end, then, pursuing Miłosz’s line of thought, Heaney sees Larkin’s poem as affirming life through its artistry (something that Larkin himself acknowledged), while its argument at the same time “add[s] weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline” (FK 354–55). Heaney then claims that in “The Man and the Echo,” Yeats “tries to make sense of historical existence within a bloodstained natural world and an indifferent universe”—and that he remains “undaunted” in doing so (FK 357). Where “Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ ended in entrapment, ‘The Man and the Echo’ has preserved a freedom, and manages to pronounce a final Yes.” Heaney relates this Yes to “what Karl Barth said of the enormous Yes at the centre of Mozart’s music, that it has weight and significance because it overpowers and contains a No.” Heaney’s choice of Barth, the theologian famous for his opposition to the rationalism of Harnack and other liberal Protestant biblical scholars, is indicative of his fundamental—though not, of course, fundamentalist—mindset. Barth too opposed a Christian paradise based on Greek philosophy, though he did believe in a biblical afterlife. Concluding his argument, Heaney claims that “Yeats’s poetry . . . gives credence to the idea that courage is some good; it shows how the willful and unabashed activity of poetry itself is a manifestation of ‘joy’ and a redressal, in so far as it fortifies the spirit against assaults from outside and temptations from within—temptations such as the one contained in Larkin’s attractively defeatist proposition” (FK 360). The use of “temptation” and “attractively” here surely suggests that Heaney felt himself vulnerable to the enticements of Larkin’s argument and had to work to resist it. Heaney’s conclusions, then, would appear to be that not only should death and what follows be faced and even embraced with fervor and wonder, but that there is—possibly—something beyond death. It is a possibility not to be dismissed without, as he says elsewhere, “selling life short,” and one that is to be assented to in the face of the contrary indications from scientific fact and speculation, and even the zeitgeist of the times. It may even be—admittedly this is a stretch—that Heaney’s reference to

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Larkin’s poem as “the definitive post-Christian English poem” rather than as “the definitive post-Christian poem in English” implies the continuing resistance of an Arnoldian Irish-Celtic consciousness to the depredations of a rationalistic, life-denying contemporary English secular mindset. Given his purposes in the lecture, it is neither surprising nor wrong that Heaney should have misread Yeats and Larkin, co-opting the two poets to his own agenda and remapping their journeys. But if he exalted one, he diminished the other, and so something more needs to be said about Larkin’s take on religion and death to see how the real difference between him and Heaney stands after such a broader review. After all, David Wheatley has described Heaney’s reading of Larkin in his famous lecture as “reductive and blinkered,” omitting some of the larger issues that Larkin poses.13 Peter Levi, properly laicized and still a practicing Catholic after he had left the Jesuits, had been more generous to Larkin in his comments as Professor of Poetry a few years earlier.14 I conclude, however, that apart from the unlikelihood of a previously concealed animosity toward Larkin (Heaney knew that Larkin had criticized him dismissively, but also that Larkin had done much the same with countless others), Heaney was principally driven by two circumstances: Miłosz’s even more critical view of “Aubade” as a symptom of the malign effects of secular modernity and, more especially, the extent to which Larkin’s very grounded anxieties appealed to Heaney’s own grounded, if less anxious, concerns. I want to look at these matters in turn, as they also help clarify what the real differences were between Heaney and Larkin in regard to religious issues.15

13. David Wheatley, “Professing Poetry: Heaney as Critic,” in O’Donoghue, Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, 132. 14. See Brigid Allen, Peter Levi, Oxford Romantic (Oxford: Signal, 2014), 348–49. Levi quoted from St. John of the Cross in a commemorative lecture on Larkin. 15. Michael Cavanagh goes in a different direction, arguing that “what Heaney essentially dislikes in ‘Aubade’ [is] not its soul-denying atheism alone but its relentless monorail discursiveness, its callous straightforwardness, its sheer plain-sense explicability”; Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 204.



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F irs t of all, Heaney’s drafts for his lecture show more sympathy with Larkin than does the lecture itself. There, although in terms influenced by Miłosz’s 1983 characterization of Larkin as “effeminate” in the face of death, Heaney refers to him as “wimpish,” Yeats as “bullish” (in itself an interesting reallocation of his earlier tropes for the Irish-English, Catholic-Protestant division); he adds, “As always, however, the wimpishness includes a measure of decency and warmth, for however skeptical the eye that Larkin casts on life, it is never cold.” Even when Heaney goes on to note that in this galactic frontier of the spirit Larkin offers “a sort of provisional, frail domestic heating system,” there is a sense of a shared sympathy in the use of an image that summons up their common inheritance of icy bedrooms and regular climatic discomfort.16 Secondly, Heaney’s notes mention the objections of the “Logical Positivists,” the anti-metaphysical, empiricist movement long identified in the UK and Ireland with A. J. Ayer’s popular Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), to an afterlife. Their position had its remote origins in the philosophical thinking of Bertrand Russell and the Vienna Circle and was one that a then actively Catholic David Lodge had provocatively associated with Larkin and similar postwar English poets.17 More importantly, since Logical Positivism denied the value of all religious statements, it was regularly berated by Catholic thinkers (hence the attraction of Wittgenstein, who equally opposed the group) well into the 1950s as epitomizing all that was wrong with modern thought. It also represented the kind of “scientific” mindset that Miłosz considered to be at the root of the twentieth-century intellectual malaise that denied even the possibility of religious belief. So, in the end, there is nothing arbitrary about Heaney confronting both of these issues in his lecture or about him making the arguments his own in the process. In addition, the early 1990s were not good years for Philip Larkin’s legacy. Andrew Motion’s biography and the Selected Letters temporarily di16. National Library of Ireland, MS 49, 493/184, folder 2, page 21. See also the interview with Miłosz in Cynthia Haven, ed., Conversations with Czesław Miłosz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 64. 17. See James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 207.

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minished the poet’s public reputation.18 There all too often Larkin came across as endlessly self-absorbed, an exploiter of his lovers with an almost creepy voyeuristic habit while working as chief librarian at the University of Hull, a jazz aficionado who was deeply racist, and a “Little Englander” of saddening provinciality. Some of this was known already, but the accumulation of detail certainly did not enhance his image.19 More recently, there has been a serious effort, partly successful, to correct these views or to put them in a more sympathetic context.20 But even in Motion’s account— some of which Heaney may have known about before it was published— the life is more nuanced than in Heaney’s lecture. We see, for example, that during his years as a young librarian at Queen’s in Belfast, Larkin had said that it is useless to dwell day by day on the inevitability of death, even while he did dwell on it then and afterward.21 Like the unbelieving American poet John Crowe Ransom, also preoccupied with death at least in his poetry, Larkin enjoyed many of the church rituals surrounding the event; he had prayers said for his mother after her funeral; by choice, even he himself had a church funeral service and burial. There is no doubt, of course, that he was not a believer (he described himself proudly as “an Anglican agnostic”), and he was especially irritated with those who read his iconic “Church Going” as essentially a religious poem.22 Nevertheless, Larkin’s involvement with Maeve Brennan, a Roman Catholic librarian who for religious as well as personal reasons did not accede too readily to a sexual relationship, seems to show him as not being quite as hostile to religion as one might otherwise have thought. Indeed, in John Haffenden’s collection of interviews conducted in 1979–80 with ten contemporary 18. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993); Philip Larkin and Anthony Thwaite, eds., Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). 19. See, for example, Czesław Miłosz’s even more hostile references to Larkin in light of these revelations in the Paris Review (1994), accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.theparis review.org/interviews/1721/the-art-of-poetry-no-70-czeslaw-milo. 20. See especially Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 21. Motion, Philip Larkin, 122. Ruth Bowman, with whom Larkin had a romantic relationship while in Belfast, remembered that “he was infuriated by my sense of the numinous” (121). 22. Booth, Philip Larkin, 195. Booth also comments that “cultural Anglicanism exerted a powerful hold over him.”



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Irish and English poets, including Heaney and Larkin, the latter declared that “no one could help hoping Christianity was true, or at least the happy ending—rising from the dead and our sins forgiven. One longs for these miracles, and so in a sense one longs for religion.”23 In about 1981, Larkin formed a friendship with literary journalist and believer A. N. Wilson, a friendship that Richard Bradford describes as being “fueled by a broader and for [Larkin] painstakingly open-minded reconsideration of something that since his childhood he had taken for granted, the non-existence of God.”24 Wilson sent Larkin to an Anglican priest for advice. The result was his attendance at Evensong (there were seven others present) and his purchase of the “elaborately footnoted Oxford University Press Bible.” According to Bradford, Larkin “consulted key passages every day, usually while shaving.” Larkin remarked to Motion, “To think that anyone ever believed any of that. Really, it’s absolute balls. Beautiful of course. But balls.’”25 Although this comment hardly qualifies as a studied reconsideration, it suggests a degree of openness to the spiritual, as Bradford noted. Like Heaney also, Larkin too could experience “buffetings” while driving that “catch the heart off guard and blow it open,” as once when he turned on the radio and listened to Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”: “I couldn’t see for tears . . . it’s amazing how effective it was when one was totally unprepared for it.”26 While Larkin was certainly preoccupied with the fear of death, according to Bradford, he eventually came to think that “Aubade” (completed shortly after his mother died in 1977) was turning into “a combination of a creative suicide note and a fixation for patrons of the macabre.” In 1978, after reading the manuscript of a novel by a woman who had lost her son, he commended the author but cautioned that “your narrative isn’t a story, it’s a frieze of misery; your characters are numb with unhap23. Haffenden, Viewpoints, 124. 24. Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (London: Peter Owen, 2005), 259. 25. Motion, Philip Larkin, 486. 26. Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 53. See also Mary Karr’s “Post-Larkin Triste,” in The Devil’s Tour: Poems by Mary Karr (New York: New Directions, 1993), 8–9.

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piness, there is no relief, no contrast.” Yet even Bradford thinks that Larkin’s criticism here “is a near-perfect account of the mindset and execution of ‘Aubade’ and ‘Love Again’: a ‘frieze of misery,’ without ‘story, ‘self’ or ‘contrast,’ reflecting a presence so ‘numb with unhappiness’ that he has no more to say on the matter.”27 Bradford also comments on Larkin’s 1983 review of The Oxford Book of Death, where the poet complained that the mainstream idea that “death is the end of everything, and thinking about it gives us a pain in the bowels—is poorly represented.” The editor “doesn’t want to make our flesh creep.”28 Larkin explains, “The intrusion of death into our lives is so ruthless, so irreversible, so rarely unaccompanied by pain, terror and remorse, that to ‘anthologise’ it, however calmly, quizzically and compassionately, seems at best irrelevant, at worst an error of taste.”29 And yet, after he had visited his dying friend Lesley Dunn in 1981, Larkin commented on “her composure and courage, and even the gaiety with which she made it, incredibly, a happy occasion.”30 The attraction of Larkin, of course, is precisely that he does touch on the plain reality of things over and over. In regard to death, it sometimes seems as if it is Heaney who is going “hammer and tongs” with the rituals that accompany our medicated, incoherent, and often messy demise. Larkin should be commended for that degree of honesty, at least. What “Aubade” has that “The Cold Heaven” doesn’t have to the same extent is a chilling immediacy. Few among us are likely to have pretty, affirmative exits; many of us will probably no longer know who we are—or, more accurately, were. This is not the whole truth of the matter, of course, but it deserves noting, and Larkin has noted it with spades. When Larkin died in 1985, he appears to have done so with depressed resignation and relative fear more than anything else. James Booth describes an event that took place while the poet was in the hospital during his last months and that unintentionally brings together a number of elements from his life. Larkin’s former lover, Maeve Brennan, 27. Bradford, First Boredom, 258. 28. Larkin, Further Requirements Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Reviews, 1952–1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 247. 29. Ibid., 347. 30. Motion, Philip Larkin, 486.



Combating Nothingness 193 still determined to win Philip for the Church . . . persuaded Anthony Storey, the Catholic chaplain of the University, with whom Philip had a friendly relationship, to visit him. Only too aware of the poet’s atheism, Storey was reluctant, but he agreed in order to satisfy Maeve. He later recalled that Philip was dozing, so he lent over him and whispered: “Hello, Philip, this is Anthony Storey.” Opening his eyes, Philip saw the dog collar and, understanding Maeve’s strategy, exclaimed: “Oh, fuck!”31

Larkin was a “cultural Anglican,” Heaney by this time a “cultural Catholic,” but the Irish poet would have been a lot less disconcerted no matter what color cloth or shape of neckwear the minister leaning over him was sporting. Heaney was definitely unfair to Larkin in his 1990 lecture and in the revised essay version subsequently published in 1995. But it was an unfairness motivated by his passionate engagement with the topic. He was certainly on Yeats’s side, though it is doubtful that he agreed with many of his particular views either. Still, even after a more extended and sympathetic review of Larkin’s position, it is clear that Larkin and Heaney differed quite strongly on these issues. Putting one’s finger on the precise difference is still somewhat difficult, since neither of them held orthodox beliefs about an afterlife, and indeed Raphaël Ingelbien has claimed that Heaney’s later poetry shows a “creative interest in Larkin’s ‘absences,’” while Booth would assign true “venturesomeness” to an unbelieving Larkin rather than to a hesitating Heaney.32 There’s a clear point of contention, however, in how they each conceived of the “numinous”: long ago, Larkin had been irritated by his Belfast girlfriend Ruth Bowman’s belief in it, but Heaney too was open emotionally and intellectually to the “numinous.” What exactly the latter is requires exploration because it constitutes the core of what remained after Heaney’s loss of his inherited Catholic faith. 31. Booth, Philip Larkin, 442. 32. Ingelbien, “Seamus Heaney,” 482; Booth, “Turf Cutter,” 386, 390.

Chapter 8

Me t aph y sical N eeds , I m a g ina t i v e P l o y s

B

y t he early 1990s, after years of ever more vicious atrocities on all sides, peace talks were underway in Northern Ireland, leading finally, after many frustrating detours, to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. There was much heated argument about who had won, but, whatever the arrangement’s flaws, this was a major achievement for all sides after thirty years of civil conflict; serious political differences continued, but murders and bombings by and large came to an end. Catholics certainly had gained much in the way of civil rights and recognition of the legitimacy of their Irish, as opposed to British, identity. Their lives were, to use a favorite Heaney word, substantially less “demeaning” than they had been before. Things Roman Catholic in Ireland as a whole were on a downward spiral, however. In May 1992, the socially progressive bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, resigned abruptly from his diocese and then fled the country (on ecclesiastical advice) because of the revelation that he had fathered a son by an American divorcée in the 1970s and had subsequently both distanced himself from mother and son and used diocesan funds to support them.1 In 1995, in the face of strong ecclesiastical

1. Another public fall from grace at about the same time was that of the by then deceased Father Michael Cleary, a popular media figure and advocate for both priestly celibacy and a focus on the poor, who was alleged to have fathered two children with his long-term housekeeper. Meanwhile, more serious accusations have since been made against Casey, including some

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opposition, a fairly modest divorce bill was passed by means of a referendum, thus reversing seventy years of its prohibition and vindicating Senator Yeats’s famous 1925 denunciation of the new Ireland’s parochialism and excessive deference to the church. If the bishop’s case played out as a kind of national farce—extended a few years later in British Channel 4’s Father Ted comedy series, which was eventually aired even on Ireland’s RTÉ network—and if the reintroduction of divorce could be seen as a measured but significant step in Ireland’s becoming a truly secular state—at about the same time, a major tragedy was also being recognized in the clergy abuse scandals that were then beginning to surface. Even Catholics who had stood with the institution during earlier upheavals were finding themselves alienated from an Irish religious hierarchy that for so long had told them in great detail how they were to conduct their sexual lives. Less than twenty years later, the Irish government would close its embassy to the Vatican, an unprecedented decision, because of dissatisfaction with the latter’s handling of abuse issues.2 The overall result was that the church lost much of its former moral and social authority. Although by general European and even American norms, Ireland remained a relatively conservative country, especially in relation to marriage and abortion (the latter, however, to be passed overwhelmingly in a restricted form by yet another referendum in 2018), for the most part a man or woman in the Republic could believe or disbelieve as they wished without having to fear loss of position or government intrusion on personal freedoms. By and large, nothing material was to be gained by believing, nothing material to be lost by not doing so.3 Meanwhile, the birth of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-nineties, spawned by a combination of improved education and foreign investment attracted by lower tax rates, further eroded the pieties of the past, while a rampant drug culby his niece (see Patsy McGarry, “Bishop Eamonn Casey Accused of Sexually Abusing Three Women as Children,” Irish Times, March 25, 2019). 2. In January, 2014, the current Irish president, Michael D. Higgins, was being criticized by the head army chaplain, a Catholic cleric, for failing to include a specific mention of Christianity in his Christmas address to the nation: see Irish Times, January 3, 2014. In 2014 also, the Irish embassy to the Vatican was reopened. 3. However, access to a still largely Catholic-run primary and secondary educational system that privileges declared Catholics over others is a matter of ongoing contention.

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ture took hold as never before. Even the extraordinary enthusiasm for a reinvented Celtic-Catholic spirituality, embodied in former priest John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara (loosely translated as “Soul Friend”) in the late 1990s, was, in retrospect, more a sign of conventional religion’s waning than of its renewal.4 It was the best of times and the worst of times, and Seamus Heaney’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the middle of the decade without doubt contributed to the heady mix. Overall—and post the Yeats-Larkin lecture—there’s a degree of resolution in Heaney’s religious musings at this period, an ongoing search but one grounded in a new appreciation for his believing past. Indeed, one could make the argument that as Ireland was becoming less religious, Heaney was becoming more so, not in any conventional or creedal way but in the sense of his being keenly aware of what was being jettisoned. In “Crediting Marvels: Heaney after 50,” John Wilson Foster regards this shift with a judicious eye: “The marvellous, even miraculous, has steadily asserted itself . . . the language of Catholicism is deployed by a residually Christian, even secular sensibility trying nonetheless to imagine through literature a world that somehow exists beyond this one: a vague, disestablished but intense religious feeling.” Foster refers to Heaney’s many borrowings from Catholicism and other mythologies as a “religious bricolage” in the various parts of which “Heaney at some serious level believes.”5 In spite of Foster’s cautionary “a world that somehow exists” (emphasis added) phrase, one might also say that Heaney “knows” what he believes, though he articulates it differently at different times. Thus, in 2007, asked if he would see “some connection” between Squarings (in Seeing Things) and “your ‘fardel’ [a word borrowed from Yeats in a similar context] of Catholic beliefs?,” Heaney replied, “Undoubtedly.” When his interlocutor pointed out that there might be a contradiction between this reply and the claim in the very first poem that there isn’t an afterlife (the “no next-time-round” phrase), Heaney explained, “But it’s also firmly 4. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). O’Donohue’s volumes paralleled those of another former seminarian, Thomas Moore, in the United States; see Moore, Care of the Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 5. John Wilson Foster, “Crediting Marvels: Heaney after 50,” in O’Donoghue, Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, 214.



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grounded in a sensation of ‘scope,’ of a human relation to the ‘shifting brilliancies’ and the roaming ‘cloud-life.’ It’s still susceptible to the numinous” (SS 311). The use of the word “numinous” here is an allusion to Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917, but enjoying a revived popularity in the 1960s and ’70s in Catholic theological circles, and in vogue more generally in the last couple of decades as orthodox religious practice continues to decline.6 Otto explained this feeling of a mysterious presence as “non-rational, non-sensory,” as “irreducible to any other,” and as an experience that “while it admits of being discussed, cannot be strictly defined.”7 C. S. Lewis, Belfast-born and Anglican, but generally commended by Catholic authorities even in the pre-ecumenical 1950s, used the term extensively and creatively in The Problem of Pain (1956), where he explicitly invoked Otto: “Either it [the sense of the numinous] is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.”8 Otto and Lewis (who calls on a wide swath of writers—from Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, and the biblical authors to Wordsworth and Kenneth Grahame—to illustrate the phenomenon) were very conscious of challenging a purely materialist account of this feeling that would attribute it to a perfectly natural fear of the unknown consistent with Darwinian evolution, in favor of understanding the “numinous” as foundational to Christianity (O’Donohue uses it in this way, too, in Anam Cara). We need not suppose that Heaney would go this far—indeed, we know that he would not—but we can suppose that he too at least loosely regarded the “numinous” as an “irreducible” mode of experience, even if it had no supernatural content or origin. Heaney comments, too, on the notion of 6. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); Auge, Chastened Communion, 72, 76, 109, 141, 198, 215. 7. Otto, Idea of the Holy, 7. 8. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956), 5.

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“Particular Judgement,” also used in the Squarings poem, as one that “may be an archaic technical term, even for Catholics, but there’s a strict phonetic clip to it and I’d rely on that to suggest a moment of final spiritual reckoning,” thus possibly implying some kind of existence after death and a deity to make such judgments—or not (SS 311); his use of “rely” is certainly curious. There is also, of course, a measure of evasiveness here and, from a skeptical perspective at least, massive wishful thinking, too, though again Heaney seems relatively satisfied with his position. He may well be wrong, but he is not, I think, confused. Moreover, Heaney appears to have maintained these positions even while being well aware that there were alternatives. Thus, he would refer to the bleakness of the views of Wallace Stevens, a poet known to him since at least his reading of Brian Moore in the 1950s and one to whom he had been more extensively exposed during his period of teaching at Harvard with Stevens scholar Helen Vendler. In so referring, Heaney implied that he himself would not go the whole way with Stevens in the latter’s rejection of the religious: Deep down [Stevens is] as bleak as the Larkin of “Aubade” except that he’s determined to replace the “moth-eaten brocade” of religion with the heavy embroidery of his own songs of earth. . . . What went on in the [Hartford Insurance Company’s] boardroom didn’t enter the poetry as content, but the hard stare of the executive, the cutting through fudge to get to a bottom line—that kind of unremitting need to reach an unblinkered view of the real state of affairs—is where the poetry starts from. . . . God is gone, he says, the world runs down the ringing grooves of change, the imagination is necessary if the human is to stay on track and not be run over . . . the opulence and flim-flam of Stevens cover up a stark vision of unaccommodated man and his need to accommodate himself as best he can to this “old wilderness of the sun.” The poetry, in other words, is a very deliberately constructed defence, the equivalent of a camouflaged stockade or an ozone layer. It allows for stand-off and resistance. (SS 385)

Not wholly converted to Stevens’s view—though most of its elements seem to coincide very closely with his own—Heaney yet remains “in thrall” to



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the “plain mystery” of the later poems, “the way thinginess and concept are plied together” (SS 433). There’s an acknowledged subtlety here, seen in the use of “mystery” (though qualified by “plain,” which suggests that it obviously can’t be explained) and appreciation for how “thinginess and concept are plied together.” Yet Heaney is different if only in being less bleak.9 So, in response, Heaney now formulates his own agenda, or at least one version of it: “It’s not impossible to write a poetry . . . which recognizes the whole weight and burden of the suffering of the world and at the same time doesn’t either fly into bits or go into enigma.” He commends Yeats, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop late in their lives for doing such and implies that he can do—maybe has done—the same in creating work that “can be there for the contemplation, available to the understanding, without betraying you into simplicity, deception or fake consolation” (SS 452). Heaney sees the distinguished Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (mentioned in chapter 7), a friend of Czesław Miłosz and possibly a distant relative of the seventeenth-century English priest poet George Herbert, who negotiated his way through the tangles of Nazi, Communist, and even Catholic totalitarianisms and who borrowed widely from multiple belief systems to establish his own individual position independent of all dogma, as a living exemplar of this stance where “enigma,” “simplicity,” “deception,” and “fake consolation” won’t do. Another such positive and sympathetic version of things is given when Heaney is explaining his changing of the title of Sophocles’s Philoctetes to The Cure at Troy (1990) (in which he also uses the phrase “stepping stones”): “In Ireland, North and South, the idea of a miraculous cure is deeply lodged in the religious subculture, whether it involves faith healing or the Lourdes pilgrimage” (SS 422). In the play, Philoctetes wants to be with his father in the next world: “Away to the house of death. / To my father, sitting waiting / Under the clay roof” (SS 303). There’s a promise from the Chorus that justice can be done eventually and that one needs to 9. Vendler attributes the difference to a matter of Heaney being by nature more optimistic than Stevens. See Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 158. I’ve avoided the controversy over Wallace Stevens’s possible conversion to Roman Catholicism at the end of his life since it does not seem to have figured in Heaney’s perception of him.

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“Believe that a farther shore / Is reachable from here” (SS 306). “Here on earth my labors were / The stepping stones to upper air. / Lives that suffer and come right / Are backlit by immortal light.” Meanwhile, we must “Show gods respect” (SS 307). All of this, of course, is a translation of a fixed text with all that that implies; nevertheless, as with Sweeney Astray earlier, the choice of this text equally implies some personal sympathy with its claims. And if we see Heaney as now “believing” in a succession of mythologies—for him, Greek, Roman, Celtic, folk, Christian, Catholic—then it too implies some kind of reaching out to the metaphysical dimensions of life, a reaching out only confirmed by the title of his next volume, The Spirit Level (1996), where he also further develops his established interest in classical mythology and steadies himself in doing so. In a manuscript note for the Yeats-Larkin lecture, Heaney had described Yeats as “always . . . inclined to look through nature towards the supernatural,” an appropriate phrase to represent his own quest at this stage (or on this particular stepping stone).10 Yet it is in his comments on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, a major modern American poet, friend of Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor and Heaney’s predecessor at Harvard, that Heaney’s own awareness of some of the problems about his position in regard to what exactly constitutes the numinous is best expressed. On her poem “Sandpiper,” for example, he remarks that “we might in fact go so far as to say that the poem is about the way in which obsessive attention to detail can come through into visionary understanding”—very much an account of his own practice—“the way in which an intense focus can amplify rather than narrow our sense of scope” (FK 369). And of Bishop’s “two late longish poems, ‘The Moose’ and ‘Crusoe in England,’” he notes that “each of them is a memory poem, each gives access to a marvelous thing, but neither of them treats the marvelous as other than an achievement of the imagination,” the latter another personally revealing phrase that could be said to keep the marvelous within the orbit of the natural, as indeed it does in his own poem “Wheels within Wheels” where the upturned bicycle’s spinning wheel sweeps him along “Into an orbit coterminous with longing” 10. National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Collection, MS 49, 493/184 folder 2, page 26.



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(OG 329). In Bishop’s poems, “When the moose comes out of the woods, when Crusoe remembers the aura which his jackknife once possessed for him, the world does shimmer in a transformed light; and yet both of these poems, in Auden’s words, find the mortal world enough” (FK 370)— again an attitude that eventually could well be Heaney’s own (otherwise why use that last phrase?). Here too Heaney comments incisively on Bishop’s iconic “At the Fishhouses,” where the seal she sees was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment.11 Heaney comments that the seal “is a sign that initiates a wonder as he dives back into the deep region where the poem will follow, wooed with perfect timing into the mysterious. Looking at the world of the surface, after all, is not only against the better judgement of a seal; it is finally also against the better judgement of the poet.” But the unconvinced reader might want to argue here that the seal is concerned about the material beneath the surface, while the poet is concerned with the immaterial beyond it, and that Heaney himself is thus wooing the reader somewhat deceptively as he tended to do earlier in the Yeats-Larkin essay, though again without any unworthy intention. The concluding lines of Bishop’s poem (like the water that is “drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”), he says, “have a dream truth as well as a daylight truth about them; they are as hallu11. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 72–74.

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cinatory as they are accurate.” Note that the commendations of “dream truth” and the “hallucinatory” precede those of “daylight truth” and the “accurate.” The former seem to be Heaney’s priority—at least until he immediately goes on to commend Bishop also for “enduring the cold of . . . her own mortality” (FK 205–6). He thus remains comfortably ambivalent, happy to keep the “supernatural” in rather than throw it out, deftly ending with the mortal just when we thought he had inadvertently affirmed something more. It is precisely the latter caution, however, that leads me to assert that he “knows” where he stands. Thus, elsewhere he has commented, “This in-between condition is not to be regarded as a disabling confusion but . . . it is rather a necessary state, a consequence of our situation between earthy origin and angelic potential.”12 Although this last statement may seem again like little more than a repetition of the original claim, Heaney is specifically asserting that this is our necessary state. Decades earlier, Miłosz too had said, “I am satisfied with sketching contradictions; a stroll through the garden where ‘pro’ and ‘contra’ grow side by side suffices me.”13 Heaney’s subsequent poetry can be seen as a continuing effort—though for the most part not an agonized one—to keep exploring the issues he’d already raised in Seeing Things about the spiritual aspect of the human journey. The fact that there’s no neat resolution this time either is hardly surprising. Instead, what he establishes are the parameters beyond which it isn’t possible for humans like us to go. So, in The Spirit Level, Heaney presents us as entering heaven through a raindrop—in many ways the essence of his position, with the meaning of “heaven” obviously just as open to interpretation as was the “numinous.” The different sounds of a rain stick offer beautiful evocations of the otherworld, and we should not worry if they’re produced merely by “grit or dry seeds through a cactus” (OG 371). In “Keeping Going,” Heaney reiterates a major and very Yeatsian theme of his later years: the challenge to simply carry on. But he does so in the context of continuing to raise questions about life’s meaning. 12. Heaney, Commencement Speech, University of Pennsylvania, May 22, 2000; accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/current/node/1003. 13. Czesław Miłosz, Legends of Modernity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), xvi.



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In the final section of the poem, his brother, working the old farm, has “good stamina” but “cannot make the dead walk” and amid “the smell of dung” and cows must wonder, “Is this all? As it was / In the beginning, is now and shall be?” (OG 375–77). The answer, says Heaney in a later interview, is “yes.” The decision to use a liturgical phrase and then omit the familiar “ever” in the final part (“ever shall be”) signals the conscious elision of the likelihood of an eternal life, as Heaney confirms in his remark: “Fundamentally” it is “what William Wordsworth said long ago: that it is on this earth ‘we find our happiness, or not at all.’ Which is one reason for keeping going” (SS 475). In “‘Poet’s Chair,’” inspired by a sculptural piece by Northern Irish Carolyn Mulholland that has “two bronze and leafy saplings” for its back support and is placed in an “inner-city courtyard” where “Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers, / All have a go at sitting in it some time” and are made “happy,” taken “out of nature,” and “come back in leaf and bloom / and angel step,” the last line is nevertheless about “being here for good in every sense” (OG 399). So much for St. Augustine’s “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee,” a phrase oft repeated in an earlier phase of Irish Catholic instruction.14 In the end, Heaney lies down with the natural rather than supernatural Cumberland poet. In “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” he has the eighth-century iconic hermit associated with Glendalough supporting a bird that has landed on his outstretched palm and thus “finding himself linked / Into the network of eternal life” (OG 384). So engaged, the saint has forgotten self, the bird, everything. But, of course, if this is the saint’s only heaven, it is certainly less than what was once promised by Irish Catholic culture. Indeed, Gail McConnell has pointed out that the poem is not as nostalgically devotional as many think because of Heaney’s emphasis on the saint’s suffering (“Are his fingers sleeping. . . .”): “These are hauntingly evocative lines, throwing into relief Heaney’s vision of the existential horror that a determined Catholic piety might not yet succeed in shaking off. Instead, Catholic devotion might be a means of staving off the potential silence and nothingness of the material world through the distraction of a heavenly vision.” 14. St. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

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Since Heaney poses that “the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,” McConnell argues that he is engaging in a self-reflection that questions the whole religious enterprise and even the existence of God.15 Again, the recurrence of old pious concerns appears in “The Gravel Walks,” where this “plain” material, “the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady.” But then Heaney makes a dismissive reference to his own absorption in “The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.” So he gives himself the admonition to transcend this past life of religious guilt, to “walk on air against your better judgement” (OG 395–96). In “The Swing,” there is the religious imagery of heaven—much as in Frost’s “After Apple Picking”—and the Nativity. The swing is seen as “A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise” and yet “Even so, we favoured the earthbound” (OG 400). So, however hard he tries, however much he is tempted, Heaney cannot or will not leave this world to which he is irrevocably bound. And yet the sensation of escaping remains: In spite of all, we sailed Beyond ourselves and over and above The rafters aching in our shoulderblades, The give and take of branches in our arms. (OG 401) “A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also,” a poem in memory of a deceased Nigerian friend, seems to offer a resigned protest against death (though one pair of critics have called it a “hulking mythic pessimism”).16 In the fable of the poem (taken from an Igbo legend), when human beings find out about death, “They don’t want to end up lost forever / Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke / Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.” Rather, they want death to “be like a night spent in the wood: / At first light they’d be back in the house of life.” A dilatory dog fails to deliver the message to the reigning deity, however—“‘Human beings want death to last forever,’” the latter is told instead by a toad—and no change can be made to the human situation (OG 405). If what Heaney elsewhere calls 15. McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, 103. 16. John Goodby and Ivan Phillips, “Not Bad: The Spirit Level,” in Curtis, Art of Seamus Heaney, 258.



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“the fretful part of me” is here expressing a fear of death and of a future nonexistence, the alternative would be a return to earth, not a heavenly mansion in the sky; the human situation is just the same in County Wicklow in Ireland as among the Igbo in Nigeria. Electric Light (2001) follows not only The Spirit Level but also Heaney’s Opened Ground anthology of selected poems in 1998, thus possibly representing a new beginning, a looking at what comes after, which, clearly, is earthly even if electricity once had a uniquely celestial source. This is the dark night of the world lit up from the inside, less luminescent for being such. In a review of the volume, John Taylor makes the pertinent comment that Heaney’s never that personal: “Wit, erudition, and technical mastery distract him from the too-intimate; or rather, give him license to avoid it” so that he leaves us in the “entryway” without taking us inside.17 It is a remark that indirectly provokes the thought that perhaps Philip Larkin is more the one who is “walking naked” and thus making himself more available to us. What one might unkindly call Larkin’s “whine”—it is never quite that—lays him bare; Heaney’s stoicism (together with his optimistic disposition), of necessity, masks—though never quite that—his vulnerabilities. In this period of his own somewhat eclectic religious searching and reappraisal, when he is aware of growing thin on inspiration—“late now in the day / I need their likes, freshets and rivulets / Starting from nowhere, capillaries of joy”—and journeying abroad more than ever (he mentioned once that his home in Dublin was beginning to seem like a travel agency), Heaney sees elements of the Irish world he had known as a youth replicated in many other parts of the European continent.18 Thus, Heaney continues with his emphasis on the Greek and Roman past, in particular seeing these (especially the Greek past) as just as rural as his own. In the Balkan and Eastern European locales of ethnic and religious conflict, as in a visit to Orthodox Serbia in “Known World,” Heaney realized that his own Northern Ireland of the hyper-religious 1950s was in many ways “universal.” They’ve just passed a magician on the road and: 17. John Taylor, Review of Electric Light, Poetry 179, no. 5 (February 2002): 297. 18. Heaney, Electric Light, 70.

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Metaphysical Needs, Imaginative Ploys Then on the mountain top, outside a church, Icons being carried, candles lit, flowers And sweet basil in abundance, some kind of mass Being celebrated behind the iconostasis, A censer swung and carried through the crowd. I had been there, I knew this, but was still Haunted by it as by an unread dream.19

Soon afterward, however, a plane takes him back—“All systems go”—to the modern world of Lufthansas and airports and the awareness that now he himself has become yet another tourist of the past. In “Castalian Spring,” Heaney describes himself as having been angry because he was barred from visiting an ancient site; he sneaks in anyway defiantly—there is much reference to “Zeus,” “vowed,” “Apollo”—as he goes up the steps that lead “into the sandstone grottoes” where “I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.”20 Now all religions seem one, religion as such— the generic and undefined numinous—replacing the specific religions of old. There is too a kind of solace in directly encountering the variety and universality of religion, thus loosening his attachment to any one form of it while at the same time validating his ongoing preoccupation with, his haunting by, this perennial philosophy. There’s also a lightening up, as in a reference to having his palms “tautly strung” during a football exercise “as Francis of Assisi’s / In Giotto’s mural,” a possible deconstructing of any remnant piety there may have been in his earlier poem on St. Kevin with his outstretched arms that hold a bird endlessly.21 In a poem on Auden, a flippant seriousness pervades the description of the English poet’s imaginative trajectory—“After Marx and the Thirties, it was New York and Chester and God”—almost as though Heaney is in a way even laughing at himself.22 “The Fragment” may or may not be humorously cautionary in the religious realm. It is about delivering a “message” in his works (or possibly in Miłosz’s): here 19. Ibid., 22. 20. Ibid., 42. 21. Ibid., 53. 22. Ibid., 55.



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the poet’s various pronouncements—“‘Light came from the east,’ he sang / ‘Bright guarantee of God’”—are disconnected and enigmatic so that his presumed followers object that he is “leaving them / Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines / Neither here nor there—.”23 But again, the sense of the “unknowing” Heaney is that he essentially “knows” both what he wants to reveal and what need, perhaps should not, be said. Heaney’s poem on the death of Ted Hughes in 1998, however, has a more serious note. Hughes, the poet who had once warned Sylvia Plath against reading the Christian mystics, is now referred to as “a listening post / Open to the light, to the limen world / Of soul on its lonely path,” lines that presumably well represent Heaney’s own spiritual commitment, his basic understanding of the nature of things, of himself as listener. Heaney has been “pounded” by the “roller griefs” of his deceased friend, but fortified by them too so that now, recalling the art and solidity of Hughes’s work, “I felt like one come out of an upper room / To fret no more and walk abroad confirmed.” He has had a semi-Pentecostal experience from this “dumbfounding of woe.” Narrating a tale of great mortal distress from Beowulf, he concludes stoically that “Soul has its scruples. Things not to be said. / Things for keeping, that can keep the small-hours gaze / Open and steady,” an attitude quite different from Larkin’s “stare” in “Aubade”’ when he wakes “at four to soundless dark.”24 Again, in “Seeing the Sick,” Heaney revisits the last days of his father in which the latter grew “wee” and “spectral,” his cattle-dealing persona and talents (“The assessor’s eye”) gradually disappearing: But then that went as well. And all precaution. His smile a summer half-door opening out And opening in. A reprieving light. For which the tendered morphine had our thanks. The last line is interesting—though, of course, understandable—in that it suggests pharmaceutical assistance in facing the inevitable (even if given specifically for bodily pain). Eamon Duffy notes that “the title is itself a 23. Ibid., 57. 24. Ibid., 61, 60–62.

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phrase from Hopkins’ poem [“Felix Randall”], and the poem opens and closes with other borrowed phrases—Patrick Heaney, like Felix Randall, is ‘anointed and all,’ but ‘the sweet reprieve and ransom’ ‘tendered’ to him in his extremity is not, as in Hopkins, the Viaticum, Christ’s Body, but ‘the tendered morphine.’ It is a startlingly secular substitution, which the borrowed phrases from Hopkins, a seminal model for Heaney of the Catholic as poet, writing here in his most overtly clerical mode, render all the more shocking.”25 In the final—and title—poem, Heaney as a child is left one night with his maternal grandmother in whose village house he first encounters electric light, something he didn’t have at the time in his rural home: Knitting needles ticking, wind in the flue. She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped, Electric light shone over us, I feared The dirt-tracked flint and fissure of her nail, So plectrum-hard, glit-glittery, it must still keep Among beads and vertebrae in the Derry ground.26 Explaining the poem in the Guardian (June 16, 2001), Heaney mentions his desire to commemorate “the brightness of my grandmother’s house,” which was “associated in my mind with a beautiful line from the Mass for the Dead—‘Et lux perpetua luceat eis,’ ‘And let perpetual light shine upon them.’” Yet in the poem itself, this vision is brought down to earth, and it is only her “glit-glittery” nail, “beads,” and “vertebrae” that are the perpetual lights of her legacy. Indeed, the presence of the beads that in an older time signified a desired ascent to heaven in the present are no more—and no less—than the thing-hoard of her time and place. In referring back to his mother in the early 2000s, too, Heaney gives a less visionary account of her religious experience than on previous occasions: “My mother also had a strong devotional element in her makeup, and I have the impression that her father was both strict and ardent in the 25. Ibid., 79; Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 181; Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 47–48. 26. Heaney, Electric Light, 80.



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practice of his own and his family’s religion. Prayer, at any rate, was an important part of her habit and her equipment.” Elaborating on this last point, Heaney goes on to reflect on “the siege she must have experienced in body and spirit for the first two decades of her marriage—a child arriving almost every year to begin with, they being cooped in a small house, the family crowding in and growing up around her.” Religion was needed to strengthen and console her. “As she recited the rosary, you could almost hear a defiance in the strength of her voice announcing the mysteries and leading the Hail Marys, as if she knelt to give challenge to the conditions . . . it now seems to me to have been the redress of praying” (SS 310). But, very significantly, he adds that later “I believe she settled into a far easier life of faith, skeptical but not disaffected, still ‘practicing’ but not, I think, believing in the afterlife as she might have to begin with” (SS 311). This, of course, is speculation on Heaney’s part, but it is more than a mere effort to include his mother in his own skepticism and, indeed, serves to elevate her as a thoughtful, independent human being arriving at sober, realistic conclusions without the assistance of an advanced education. However, in the 1990s, too, with the inherited world of traditional Irish Catholicism fast losing ground and no longer a force to be fought against at substantial personal and professional risk, and with a newly prosperous Ireland devoting itself more and more to the things of this world, there is a growing sense, as mentioned earlier, of Heaney fighting in some measure for the old ways lest all be carried away with the withdrawing religious tide. The character of this rediscovery of the virtues of older religious ways needs some analysis, however. In an essay on “The Influence of Frost and Eliot on Heaney’s Later Phase,” Daniel W. Ross expresses surprise that the poet “appears not to have thought about the close resemblance between his own turn back to religion and Eliot’s.” Ross then refers to that Karl Miller 2000 interview in which Heaney claimed that “‘there may have been something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.’ Heaney continued by saying that the invaluable thing about his Catholic upbringing ‘is

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the sense of the universe you’re given, a light-filled, Dantesque, shimmering order of being. You conceive of yourself as a sort of dewdrop, in the big web of things, and I think this is the very stuff of lyric poetry.’”27 Again, in a 2002 interview with John Brown, Heaney explained, “What I’ve found myself doing more and more, especially in interviews like this, is emphasizing the purely religious, transcendental importance of Catholicism” and commending “the beauty and salvific effect of growing up with the idea of God in his eternal present around and about and above you everywhere, growing up with ideas of continuous creation, of guardian angels, of sanctifying grace, a universe shimmering with light.”28 This is hardly the same thing as saying that Heaney returned to religion, and surely the reason for not mentioning Eliot is that Heaney was well aware that he had not followed the American poet’s path. Richard Rankin Russell, who acknowledges Heaney’s abandonment of Catholicism, captures some of the complexity and confusion (to others, not to the poet himself), when, quoting Heaney’s comment that “all achieved poetry . . . opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit,” adds that it rebels “even . . . at the limits of the poet’s own lack of belief in a Christian afterlife.”29 However, there’s some clarification of the religious issue in, for example, Heaney’s remarks at the memorial service for the Welsh Anglican clergyman poet R. S. Thomas at Westminster Abbey in March 2001. On this occasion, the Irish poet spoke of the deceased, an early inspiration for him, as “a pastor, someone who went down upon his knees, someone constantly knocking at the door of truth and finding no entry. A visionary, but, as the poem also says, ‘a visionary only / in his perception of an horizon / beyond the horizon.’” Heaney went on to claim that Thomas “was parched for religious truth and it’s because his thirst remained unslaked that the work speaks so convincingly to his posterity in the twenty-first century. Not for him the trembling fulfillments of prayer as they were 27. Daniel W. Ross, “The ‘Upward Waft’: The Influence of Frost and Eliot on Heaney’s Later Phase,” in Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator, ed. Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 98. 28. Quoted in Dillon Johnston, “Irish Influence and Confluence in Heaney’s Poetry,” in O’Donoghue, Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, 161. 29. Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 389.



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evoked by George Herbert. No church bells beyond the stars heard, no kind of celestial strumming or ringing.”30 A few years afterward, Heaney added that what he “loved” in the works of Thomas “were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish—full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating” (SS 113). There is a sense here of Heaney himself still listening for a celestial sound, suspicious of those in former ages who have claimed to have heard such, and appreciative of Thomas’s confessing his disappointments while also choosing to remain on his knees in hope. Heaney’s statements could not have been made without him being fully conscious that his own hopes had begun in his Catholic consciousness and that they would never lose that inflection. However much he had settled into his stoicism by then, he still felt the pain of a profound loss. And, as much as any ordained clergyman, he was ever alive to the nuances of orthodoxy, of where he stood in regard to it, and why it couldn’t satisfy him. 30. Heaney, “R. S. Thomas Memorial, Delivered at Westminster Abbey, March 28th, 2001,” Poetry Ireland Review 69 (2001): 11, 12.

Chapter 9

Varie t ies o f R eli g i o u s E x perience

A

legitimate question at this point is whether Seamus Heaney had arrived at a fairly definitive position—a better word might be “satisfying,” since he wasn’t aiming at a sophisticated philosophical or theological articulation of his views—on the religious issue by the late 1990s at least, if not considerably earlier, and spent the next two decades living with it and exploring it in a variety of ways, or whether he continued to wrestle with the matter (outside of his poetry as much as in it) as something yet unresolved. Was his case an instance of the popular U2 anthem of the time, rooted in the African American gospel tradition, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”? The fact that there is a debate at all suggests some ambiguity, in contrast with the ideas of Philip Larkin, for example, whose position—in spite of his late toying with religion—left almost no room for speculation. It can be agreed that Heaney continued to be interested in the subject: his statements quoted at the end of the previous chapter affirm that. It can probably be agreed too that he was concerned that a post-religious view of the human condition shouldn’t offer a narrower understanding of the subject, but would be catholic enough— in the etymological meaning of the word—to embrace the totality of the human achievement, including religion, as a complex, often admirable creation of the imagination rather than a disastrous aberration to be jettisoned in an enlightened future. There’s the important consideration too that the tone and flavor of religious questioning changed so radically in

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Ireland and elsewhere from the 1970s onward, as such matters were seen less and less in a specifically Catholic, and especially ecclesiastical, context and more and more in a generic, perhaps amorphous, one. And then there’s that pesky 1999 interview with Karl Miller quoted twice earlier, where Heaney declares that he’s “coming to believe” that his early religious background was more formative than any Irish-British political or identity matters.1 At this late stage in the game, the “coming to believe” phrase at first sounds rather startling—what else had he been doing for the previous two decades?—but it makes some sense when one thinks of the Troubles, even though they were troubles based deeply in religious differences, as an extended distraction from the “normal” development of his artistic inclinations, however successfully he had risen to the aberrant occasion and had come to think that he would be remembered most for his “bog poems.” Now in 2000, in any case, there’s a promise of a more focused engagement with his religious past, one that will necessarily have a Catholic inflection, whether of embrace or rejection or nuanced reevaluation. In other words, and to answer the question originally posed above: yes, there’s more to come, mainly in two books of poetry—separated by Heaney’s stroke in 2006—and in two major translations, together with a variety of lesser works, and, of course, Stepping Stones, the series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll conducted largely before the poet’s stroke and that have been drawn on extensively in these pages. Nevertheless, before examining some of the latter, there’s already an abundance of material on which to make a comprehensive, if incomplete, evaluation of his religious views in this and the next chapter. What I propose to do here, then, is first to review and assess a handful of books in which Heaney’s religious views are extensively or significantly examined; about half were published before 2000, half after. Following that, I will go on to argue that the poet’s evolving religious position can be further clarified, though without being exhaustively articulated, propose a Heaney-prompted logistic for doing so, and execute the plan.

1. Karl Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller, 32.

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I n delinea t in g Heaney’s overall religious stance, Helen Vendler stresses the element of rejection: Heaney’s “I’ll pray for you” in his 1979 elegy for Robert Lowell is “as Heaney has explained—an affectionate and mocking assertion of the fact of their mutual lapsed religion”; “The Stone Verdict” witnesses to “the poet’s disbelief in personal immortality”; in “Station Island,” “Like Simon Sweeney . . . the poet [too] is a ‘Sabbath-breaker,’ but he turns away from Catholic observance out of intellectual conviction rather than outlawry” (a significant distinction that points to Heaney’s engagement with matters philosophical and theological, even if not in a professionally academic way). For Vendler, Heaney accepts the “total annihilation of death”—after all, he himself declares that “there is no next-time-round”—though his stoicism, his embrace of the “nothing” is more hopeful and upbeat than was the case with Wallace Stevens. As Vendler claims over and over, the hereafter for Heaney is virtual, not actual. In other words, Heaney’s vision is a modern instance of a purely “natural supernaturalism.”2 It is very likely too—and without wishing to suggest an unacceptable departure from strict textual analysis—that, as a colleague and friend of Heaney at Harvard over almost three decades and described by Paul Muldoon in the official eulogy for the poet at the Requiem Mass on September 2, 2013, as Heaney’s “honorary sister,” Vendler gives a reading that bears some of the authority that such immediate access to his personal thoughts on the subject would, presumably, afford.3 Vendler’s commentaries are post Heaney’s 1990 Yeats-Larkin lecture, so she obviously doesn’t regard the latter as contradicting her judgment. Indeed, in 1991, in an interview with Blake Morrison, Heaney remarked that he believed “in the atheist position,” a strong, clear statement even if supported by a curious use of the verb “believe” and subsequently modified by other statements.4 Still, there’s a sense here of Vendler being too well satisfied 2. Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 62, 96. 3. Paul Muldoon, Eulogy at Seamus Heaney’s funeral, September 2, 2013; available at https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2013/09/05/seamus-heaney/. 4. Quoted in Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 200. This comment made in an interview with Blake Morrison (“Seamus Famous: Time to Be Dazzled,” Independent on Sunday, May 19, 1991:



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with Heaney’s religious unbelief—a “get over it” factor—when, in fact, Heaney’s overall tone is one of salvaging whatever is valuable from the wreckage, if wreckage there has been at all. Vendler’s own acknowledged atheism, her precocious questioning of the faith as a very young girl in a strict Irish-American Catholic home, her lauding of her teachers at Boston University for leading her from her “literally medieval upbringing into the expansive precincts of secular thought” so that she has “never regretted the world I left,” perhaps biases her interpretation of Heaney in this instance.5 The substance of what she says may be right, but the tone, dare one say so, is surprisingly off. But even Michael Parker, who in his 1993 semi-biographical study Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet is critical of those who suggest that Heaney fairly early on abandoned any commitment to orthodox Catholicism, concludes nevertheless that for the poet “perhaps the only afterlife is the one created by the Imagination.” He too quotes the “there is no next-time-round” line, claiming that “All gone into the world of light?” means “All gone” (Squarings xliv), since “any consolation ‘perhaps’ and ‘may’ in Squarings xliv and xlv might have possessed comes up against the definite images of transience with which those poems end, the dead leaf whirling, ashes and house-dust.”6 In his obituary for Heaney in 2013, journalist and scholar Fintan O’Toole, now Heaney’s official biographer, summed up the matter succinctly by referring to the deceased poet as “the atheist in search of the miraculous.”7 But again, even here we can probably allow that Heaney’s overall register is more one of affirmation of what is than dismay over the loss of what was (or seemed to be). Heaney is only momentarily the celebrant of a release from an old mythology. Not surprisingly, then, and in contrast to Vendler and Parker, the stress in Daniel Tobin’s 1999 study is more on the positive replacement 26–27) is probably the reason Heaney has ended up on lists of international atheists, along with Graham Greene, Terry Eagleton, Roddy Doyle, and, of course, Philip Larkin. Cavanagh thinks it is misleading and confusing. 5. See Vendler, Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, 8–9. 6. Parker, Seamus Heaney, 221. 7. Fintan O’Toole, “Seamus Heaney, 1939–2013,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 2013; accessed January 29, 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/10/ seamus-heaney-1939-2013/.

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that Heaney has found for his lost Catholicism. Tobin claims that for Heaney poetry is “a religious act in itself,” a sacralizing of the world it inhabits. Pursuing the poet’s many references to bottomlessness and nothingness, Tobin draws upon St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton, Joseph Campbell, and particularly Keiji Nishitani, in Religion and Nothingness, to elucidate the concept of the “empty center,” Heaney’s going beyond all restrictive attachments. In this case, Heaney “breaks the narcissistic image that limits identity to the self as mere ego,” and even—as with Eliot—“by going out of the normal cognitive bounds . . . participates in the pattern of self-emptying revealed in the Incarnation,” an assertion that is in danger of looping the poet back to his abandoned Catholicism.8 Tobin’s still-religious Heaney is deeply faithful to the often elusive and understated original; the problem is, as Tobin himself concedes, that not all of the intellectual armory his study offers seems quite fitted to what we know of the poet’s recorded interests.9 Approaching the matter from a more conventionally Catholic position, John F. Desmond too has objected to Vendler’s view of Heaney’s progress. For him, Heaney “has evolved into an autonomous religious seeker, a poet who conducts ‘raids on the inarticulate’ into the realm of the translucently real (hence the predominance of the image of light in Seeing Things, and The Spirit Level).”10 Drawing on Heaney’s acknowledged influence by Czesław Miłosz and interest in the writings of French mystic Simone Weil (some of which Miłosz translated into Polish), Desmond argues that Heaney’s later poems “are explorations of religious mystery, and as such irreducible to categorical labels such as skeptical, stoical, or post-Christian.”11 Without agreeing with Desmond—though I find a good deal of truth in his approach—I imagine that Heaney himself might ob8. Tobin, Passage to the Center, 298. 9. Tobin’s recent “Beyond Maps and Atlases: Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney,” in “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 300–28, continues in this vein of highly sophisticated exegesis, noting along the way that “the disruptive effect of Nietzsche’s declaration ‘God is dead’ and Heaney’s tacit ‘generational assent’ to that condition stands at odds with Heaney’s stated poetics and his practice of the art” (317). 10. Desmond, Gravity and Grace, 60. 11. Ibid., 61.



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ject to the overuse of the “post-Christian” label in its usual sense, as it seems to place him among the disillusioned—à la Samuel Beckett—when he is basically a retriever of whatever can be retrieved. And while, as we know from Heaney’s invocation of Miłosz’s anti-science position in the Yeats-Larkin lecture, the Irish poet wasn’t too happy with a totally reductive account of the human animal, neither was he, in spite of his sympathies with Miłosz, engaged in the more general opposition to “scientism” ascribed to him by Desmond. Wisely then, perhaps, Michael Cavanagh warns in 2009 that “it is perilous to generalize about religion in Heaney, for several reasons,” and goes on to enumerate them: that Heaney isn’t explicit about the subject very often, that he tended to be brief when he did address it, that Heaney’s statements are “multidimensional and sometimes seemingly contradictory,” and that they shifted in emphasis from decade to decade. Nevertheless, Cavanagh concludes, rightly in my view, that while “to a mind like Heaney’s that rejects fixity, there’s a world of difference between an ‘atheist position’ and an actual statement of atheism,” yet “it does seem clear that Heaney is not an orthodox believer.”12 Even Andrew J. Auge, who shows how Heaney used the elements of his boyhood faith to finally escape its bondage, and who occupies a more nuanced middle ground in which Heaney becomes another generic defender of the numinous, admits that the “ontological status of what is revealed” in many of Heaney’s most visionary poems “always remains in doubt” and can even be “profoundly vexing.”13 Of Heaney’s final volume in 2010, Human Chain, Auge notes that it “provides no transcendent music, no celestial harmonies, to console us in the face of death. However, neither does it leave us stranded in the eternal silence of the void that so terrified Pascal.”14 John Dennison, a more recent entrant into the fray, takes a view similar to Vendler’s—indeed, stressing her nefarious influence on the Irish poet in this regard—but from the opposite side: a lay Anglican chaplain as 12. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 209, 199. 13. Auge, Chastened Communion, 139. 14. Auge, “Surviving Death in Heaney’s Human Chain,” in O’Brien, “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances,” 46–47.

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well as a sophisticated literary critic, he traces a consistent pattern from Heaney’s university days to the end of his life in which the poet substituted literature for religion in the direct tradition of Matthew Arnold.15 Dennison even goes so far as to claim that Heaney was a quasi-evangelist for this new faith: “Heaney’s secularized, post-Christian search for answers—no less for the prose than for the poetry—to ‘the question of how to place a structure upon which to rejoice, how to place a geometry on the middle of the absence, how to create a trustworthy form’ is, as Heaney concedes to Michael Schmidt, ‘a sort of religious question.’”16 The only difference in this area that Dennison sees between Heaney and Larkin is that “Heaney would rather have some poetic approximation of ‘Religion / That vast . . . brocade’ than its absence,” whereas “Larkin’s blasphemy is in fact to capitulate more completely and readily than Heaney to the spiritual consequences and immanence of the post-Christian presumption that religion—particularly the grounding metanarrative of the incarnation—is a construct.”17 In the end, according to Dennison, Heaney becomes a post-Christian humanist fundamentalist whose pronouncements are in the tradition of “a cultural transcendentalism predicated on the refusal of Christian orthodoxy.”18 Wi t h s uch di v ersi t y of opinion, more can and needs to be said on the matter of Heaney’s religious beliefs. One way of negotiating the “perilous” waters and fishing this sea of doubt is to place him in the context of a number of other authors about whom he has written (I make one exception to that list) in regard to “religious” matters. Just as in “Station Island,” where Heaney “auditioned” a wide range of “ghosts” in order to illuminate and understand his passage from religious belief and guilt to secular guilt and artistic satisfaction, so too I’ve selected those writers (including two from “Station Island,” one that got only nine lines there, 15. Dennison quotes a 1999 interview in which Heaney stated, “My poetry is somehow my religious substitute, as Matthew Arnold says”; Dennison, Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry, 214n91. 16. Ibid., 141. 17. Ibid., 169. 18. Ibid., 212.



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the other forty-nine) that serve my purpose of clarifying the points I wish to make in this area. This means, first of all, that I will exclude two Irish writers alluded to several times earlier to whom Heaney was very close and who arrived independently at religious positions not dissimilar to his: Brian Friel, who attended the same school as Heaney a decade before him, spent a couple of years as a seminarian, served like Heaney as a schoolteacher before becoming a short story writer and playwright exploring many of the same themes; likewise John McGahern, also a onetime aspirant to the priesthood, who suffered serious abuse from family and clergy in a repressive Catholic era but still valued its traditions as he hauntingly examined them in his novels. Likely it was a sense of propriety that prevented Heaney from commenting substantively on either of their beliefs, or they on his. But it is also the case that they never explored the subject in quite the way—the very personal and artistic way—he has done. Eugene O’Brien quotes Heaney’s remarks from a 2001 interview that “Catholicism gives you a set of precision instruments” and that “while a novelist might seem overwhelmed by the ‘authoritarian’ or ‘repressive’ nature of the worldview, for a lyric poet it offered a lot of possibilities.”19 The fact that Heaney is not identical in his religious views with any of those writers I’ve chosen later—or rather that he has chosen, since he wrote about their positions in his essays and indirectly included them in his poems—should, perhaps, serve to show where he stands, since it is definitely not where they are, or were, positioned. The purpose of this exercise is not to give Heaney a rating on either a religious or nonreligious scoreboard—a kind of U.S. National Rifle Association’s calibration of a political candidate’s voting record—but rather to situate him among a diversity of relevant voices that will set off his similarities and uniqueness in informative ways. In this chapter, then, I want to focus on relevant writers—the dramatis personae without the drama part—who either rejected Catholicism or who came from other faith traditions: in sequence, these are James Joyce, Brian Moore, W. B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, and—the exception—David Lodge, included here because of his status as a bellwether of mid- and late twentieth-century Catholic belief in the 19. O’Brien, “‘An Art That Knows Its Mind,’” 132.

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UK. I’ll treat professing Catholic or Anglo-Catholic figures, especially Czesław Miłosz, in chapter 10.20 No I rish C at holic w ri t er , perhaps no Catholic-born writer anywhere, can fail to confront James Joyce’s religious apostasy because no other Irish writer has stated it so explicitly. In the persona of Stephen Dedalus, and also in his own person, Joyce soon and late renounced Catholicism with a Yeatsian “passionate intensity”: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church”; “I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.” Even his less rebellious wife, Nora (who eventually returned to the church), responded to the Swiss priest who offered to give her husband a Christian burial: “I couldn’t do that to him.”21 Heaney is no exception to the list of those preoccupied with Joyce’s religious choice. And yet the intellectual genesis of that challenge is not at all clear in either the pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or its prequel, Stephen Hero. One might almost say that with Joyce, as with Heaney, “There was never a scene / when I had it out with myself.” That is not true, of course, but we only know such, we can only construct such, from the external Joyce documents and the researches of others. It is therefore important to take a brief look at these in our ongoing effort to delineate Heaney’s religious position. What then was Joyce’s actual trajectory? How did he lose his Catholic faith? It is a commonplace that many educated people in the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries abandoned their religious belief, already destabilized by the Deism of the Enlightenment thinkers, after exposure to the new findings in the sciences—especially those of geology, biology, and anthropology—but perhaps more so due to related approaches, also deemed scientific, that were reexam20. There, however, I leave out Hopkins because, as quoted in chapter 7, Heaney acknowledged his distance from him in his remark that in Hopkins “the Deity, doubted though He may be, does provide a certain theological longitude and latitude for what is unknown and unknowable” (FK 345). 21. Joyce, Portrait, 208; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 742.



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ining the origin and formation of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The discovery that even the New Testament was written a couple of centuries after the events it describes had taken place, that there are serious contradictions in the Gospel accounts, and that the surviving manuscripts are copies of copies of copies with all the possibilities for error that such transmission involves, undermined the faith of many, though certainly not all, students of the scriptures. As Matthew Arnold so famously noted, the “supposed fact” that had previously supported belief was “failing” under more rigorous scrutiny.22 Cóilín Owens gives a detailed account of Joyce’s dissenting evolution in this matter: in 1900, Stanislaus and James read Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863), comparing and contrasting its interpretation with those of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and with the Bible itself.23 Geert Lernout sees Joyce as being familiar with philosophical ideas running from Spinoza through Shelley’s early essay on “The Necessity of Atheism,” Goethe, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, to the Socialist and Communist rejection of religion. He also adds in the various non-Christian and heterodox spiritualist reactions to what was seen as the materialism of the late nineteenth century.24 Darwin’s findings played an important role here, too, not just for what the theory of evolution and scientific developments could contribute to the discussions about the origin of humans and of civilization, but mostly because issues about that descent became the rallying point for all kinds of liberal and secular thinkers. Then there were the great heroes and heretics of the dissenting tradition: Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and a host of less well-remembered but once popular texts, including that of the French Leo Taxil on the mythical origins of Christianity. No doubt too Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of the great religions, The Golden Bough (1890), which was immensely influential at the time, played its part in calling into question the purported supernat22. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” (1880), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ articles/69374/the-study-of-poetry. 23. Cóilín Owens, James Joyce’s Painful Case (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 24. Geert Lernout, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010).

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ural credentials of any and all faiths that claimed a historical revelation. In his famous 1904 letter to Nora, Joyce declared that he hated the Catholic Church “most fervently,” that he “found it impossible . . . to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature,” and that he was now making “open war upon it by what I write and say and do.”25 This statement is the closest Joyce ever got to explaining his ideological and political commitment in writing. In 1905, Joyce refused to have his son Giorgio baptized. Owens also quotes from a 1918 conversational remark of Joyce’s: “In my works there is a good deal of talk about religion. . . . I profess no religion at all. Of the two religions, Protestantism and Catholicism, I prefer the latter. Both are false.” Far from feeling anxiety about the matter in later years, the mature Joyce seems to have been like “humane [Leopold] Bloom, whose lips were never twisted in prayer,” and who “shrugs past the apostate’s guilt.”26 Stanislaus Joyce claimed that his brother “felt that poets in the measure of their gifts and personalities were the repositories of the genuine spiritual life of their race, and that priests were usurpers”; he also dismissed the claim that Joyce was ever pining for the ancient church he had early on rejected.27 It is hard to think of Seamus Heaney, who had encountered much of this background material in Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography, which he had taken with him to Spain in the early 1970s, adopting any of these positions, personally or artistically. Nor is Joyce’s keen interest in the specific doctrines of Catholicism and in some of its famous controversies replicated in Heaney—in spite of the Sweeney confrontation, or his youthful concern about the “particular judgment.” In most ways, Heaney’s religious convictions seem to have been deeper, his skepticism never as radical as Joyce’s. Coming after Joyce, Heaney’s grasp of things religious has a greater maturity, the church he confronts being both institutionally weaker and intellectually more open. Perhaps Heaney “gets” religion in a way that Joyce did not. Can one imagine the concept of “sec25. James Joyce, Letters (New York: Viking, 1966), 2:48. 26. Owens, James Joyce’s Painful Case, 3. 27. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking, 1958), 120.



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ular prayer-poems” having much appeal for Joyce?28 The fact that Heaney’s parents, unlike the fathers at least of Yeats and Joyce, had rather modest educations meant that he wasn’t exposed to the same kinds of discussion of religious and political matters that would have been the case with them. But, from the other side, Joyce did provide the space to be different, to be less accepting of the status quo, and in this sense his influence on Heaney shouldn’t be downplayed. It is no accident that he is the final ghost in “Station Island,” the terminus of one world beyond which one enters another mode of imaginative life. Heaney too seems to believe that poets are the new priests of the numinous, though it is doubtful that he would call the present clergy “usurpers,” or even privately think of them in that way. One should also add an important footnote about a matter sometimes overlooked: the fact that Joyce in the person of Stephen Dedalus is concerned with religious issues from a very early age and in places, and churches, and schools that a young Irish student with literary interests would know of by name at least gave his work an immediacy that was of tremendous importance: it was like having a member of one’s family fall away when very few did such, and when those who did were cast among the ostracized, to be remembered ever after with censure and warning. Belfast’s Brian Moore was even closer to home. We’ve seen earlier his acknowledged influence on Heaney through The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) and The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965) and how Moore relied on Joyce as a model for his art, his exile, and his post-Catholic life. Heaney’s personal friendship with Moore began in 1970 during his time at Berkeley when he visited the novelist at his home in California and commemorated the event in “Remembering Malibu” several years later; their subsequent work bears interesting intertextual parallels also. Thus, in his 1999 eulogy for Moore, Heaney referred to the unbelieving abbot in Catholics (1972), who chooses the “embrace of a redemptive unfaith” out of love for his small and isolated monastic community.29 “Remembering Malibu,” dedicated to Moore, has much of the imagery of that novel. The 28. Eugene O’Brien, “‘An Art That Knows Its Mind,’” 138. 29. Heaney, “Brian Moore,” Harp, 2000, 122–24, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20533424.

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title of Moore’s narrative may seem inappropriate, as practically all the characters are monks of the Albanesian Order living in a monastery off the coast of Kerry, but they do represent the pervasive ascetic ethos of the church among many pastors and members of the faithful even as late as the post–Vatican II era (and in Heaney’s “In Gallarus Oratory” from the mid-1960s). The overt conflict of Catholics is between a recalcitrant, elderly abbot who insists on saying Mass in Latin—to the wide support of the locals and the many pilgrims who come for the occasion—and the young American priest sent as a Vatican emissary to get him to change his ways. But underlying this confrontation between the past and modernity is the conflict within the abbot himself: his very attachment to the old ways has been brought about because his faith has never been sound, a fact that he discovered on an early visit to Lourdes when he doubted the “miraculous” cures there. So, while the new theology wants him to see the Mass as symbolic rather than real, his own private belief has always been in that mode: he was “a man wearing the habit of a religious, sitting in a building, staring at a table called an altar on which there is a box called a tabernacle and inside . . . the ciborium [containing] . . . wafers of unleavened bread. . . . That is all that is there.” The abbot has suppressed his unbelief because of his concern for the ordinary needs of his community, many of them basically fishermen. He has become “a very secular man,” and when he prays . . . he enters “null” and will “never come back.”30 Heaney’s tribute poem makes no overt reference to the themes of the novel (in his eulogy, however, Heaney claims that they “co-exist” there), yet its setting and diction are obviously related: Moore’s Pacific Ocean was “wilder and colder” when Heaney visited him there than he had expected, “Yet no way was its cold ascetic / as our monk-fished, snowed-into Atlantic; / no beehive hut for you / on the abstract sands of Malibu.” Heaney acknowledges that he himself “was there in the flesh // and underwent the bluster of the day” but that the place (Malibu) “would not come home” to him. Although Heaney may never have climbed up to the monastic cells on the Great Skellig off the coast of Kerry, its steps “are welted solid to my 30. Brian Moore, Catholics (Chicago: Loyola Classics, 2006), 99.



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instep.” Unlike Moore, he cannot as easily abandon “the suck of puddled, wintry ground” of his homeland and, by implication, of his own fading beliefs. Again, the onetime seminarian in “Station Island,” who had become a disillusioned missionary priest in the rain forest, at the very least parallels Moore’s seventeenth-century intellectually tormented Jesuit missionary to the Huron in Black Robe (1985), who finally comes to see his own religion as just another form of sorcery. But the comparison goes further. From almost the very beginning, Moore’s realistic novels had been replete with dreams, ghosts, talking statues, and even religious apparitions. In the 1980s and ’90s, when Heaney had begun “to credit marvels” and was lecturing on Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven,” Moore’s Cold Heaven (1983) was exploring some of the same material. In the novel, a young Irish woman whose husband has recently been killed in an accident, leaving her in a disturbed mental state, begins to have a variety of hallucinatory experiences. Some of the commentary that Moore’s novel has elicited could very well be applied to Heaney’s similarly ambiguous explorations: “Moore writes Cold Heaven . . . in a vivid, detailed and concise manner, but try to find a single line that definitively tells the reader what really has happened in the novel, and you’ll draw a blank. It’s as if he wrote the novel and then went back to the beginning editing out all the certainty in favour of ambiguity. All the more impressive because the language is concrete and vivid throughout, as if he were actually seeing the events in front of him.” The same critic concludes that “at the end of the novel you’ve no idea whether Moore was a Catholic; whether he believed in Marian visions; whether he thought of faith as a gift or a con-job.”31 Place this alongside Heaney’s Squarings xlvii, where the sense seems to be (with a courtesy bow to Arnold’s “Dover Beach”) that of a onetime presence that is now absent: Heaney claims of “The visible sea at a distance from the shore” that “The emptier it stood, the more compelled / The eye that scanned it.” Then you turn away, and around again, to find the scene “Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated” (OG 365). Andrew J. Auge 31. Quote from Tim Winton, accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.threemonkeysonline .com/tag/brian-moore/.

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has commented recently about this scene that “far from inducing vacuity, the vacancy . . . is cast, in Daniel Tobin’s felicitous phrase, as a ‘generative emptiness.’ It evokes the numinous while allowing it to remain intangible.”32 I’m far less sure of this assertion, but I would grant that Heaney’s usage too parallels Moore’s artful metaphors of transcendence. Indeed, both writers have attracted positive attention from believing and unbelieving readers.33 Brian Moore was, then, a significant influence on Seamus Heaney from the 1950s onward, ratifying the poet’s complex religious uncertainties as both legitimate and representative. Indeed, both writers speculated that their once-pious mothers died in a state of religious doubt.34 In the 1980s and ’90s too, both writers took an interest in, and saw similarities between, Ireland—Moore wrote a novel about the Northern Irish Troubles—and the countries (and writers) of an Eastern Europe emerging from Soviet control. Moore’s many other novels also treat his clerical protagonists from lowly priests to bishops and cardinals with great sympathy and a total absence of caricature as they negotiate their ways through the intricacies of the modern world. But Moore was more confident and satisfied in his unbelief—his biographer claims that Catholicism “was a closed book to Brian even in his church-ridden youth”—than was Heaney, whose “innate positive disposition” made him feel the need for an ongoing engagement with a possible presence of which one need not be afraid.35 As in the case of Heaney’s qualified sympathy for Joyce’s apostasy, he by no means embraced the totality of Moore’s rejection of religion, either. W. B. Yeats, the dominant poetic presence in the Irish—and indeed the entire Anglophone—literary landscape in the twentieth century, at first presented a far less accessible model for Heaney, and his many essays on the master range from admiration and resentment, shared by 32. Auge, Chastened Communion, 141. 33. In a new preface to Catholics in, surprisingly, Loyola Classics, Robert Ellsberg, a convert and onetime editor of Dorothy Day’s the Catholic Worker, acknowledges that both believers and unbelievers must leap into the “void.” 34. For Moore, see Craig, Brian Moore, 152. 35. Ibid., 264.



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several Irish commentators in the 1960s and ’70s in regard to Yeats’s aristocratic politics and colonialist presuppositions, to near uncritical celebration. Overall, Heaney has certainly been more sympathetic to Yeats than have many of his contemporaries, especially those coming from Catholic backgrounds, whatever their current personal beliefs; and, as he pushed on in his own career, Heaney became more appreciative of the efforts Yeats had to make not only to initiate but to keep going in his. Far more than any earlier Irish writer, Heaney has been acutely alert to the intricacies of Yeats’s religious stance, previously considered rather “batty” and “daft.” There was a distance, of course, a social haughtiness in Anglo-Irish Yeats toward Catholics and a presumption of authority in all things Irish, from defining the significance of Cuchulainn to, as a senator, planning the design of the new state’s coinage in the 1920s. Nevertheless, in Heaney’s 1995 Nobel Laureate Lecture “Crediting Poetry,” it is fellow-laureate Yeats who receives most of the wide-ranging encomiums.36 In religious matters, Yeats rejected both his clergyman grandfather’s Christianity and his father’s fierce positivism (and Darwin in a materialistic sense) to create his own “fardel” of beliefs from all faith traditions, myths, folklores, and contemporary superstitions. In one of his many clarifications of his position on the poet, Heaney remarks that “Yeats’s quest is conducted in burnished armour . . . he’s like William Blake as he appears in ‘An Acre of Grass,’ the Blake ‘Who beat upon the wall / Till Truth obeyed his call.’” Yeats’s poetry can be otherworldly, “but the poetry itself still bears the brunt of the physical . . . you can feel the full blast of Blake’s spirit-force, but you can also feel his fist meeting the solid wall.” But then Heaney adds that “I’m much closer to the fundamentally Catholic mysticism in [Patrick] Kavanagh. My starlight came in over the halfdoor of a house with a clay floor, not over the dome of a Byzantine palace” (SS 318–20). If Yeats was brought up without religion so that he had to create his own, Heaney says that he himself was “oversupplied” with it. While the “Protestant” in Yeats might have considered such a narrow and author36. Heaney, “Crediting Poetry,” in Opened Ground, 426–28.

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itarian denominational upbringing as a form of intellectual slavery, Heaney declares that “like many Catholics, lapsed or not—I am of the Stephen Dedalus frame of mind: if you desert this system, you’re deserting the best there is, and there’s no point in exchanging one great coherence for some other ad hoc arrangement.” Then, just at the point when it seems that Heaney has decided either to follow Joyce over the cliff or to revert to traditional Catholic belief, he adds, “It must also be said that Yeats’s construction, bare-handed, of a cosmology and a psychology, if not a theophany, was first of all another proof of intellectual power and secondly, as is universally acknowledged, a great scaffolding” (SS 318–20). And of Yeats’s last days, Heaney observes: The very deliberately chosen and executed terza rima of “Cuchulain Comforted,” for example, is like a passport he issued for himself just before he had to cross the dark water. It says that this particular body is ready to board the barge as a shade . . . in certain great poets—Yeats, Shakespeare, Stevens, Miłosz—you sense an ongoing opening of consciousness as they age, a deepening and clarifying and even a simplifying of receptivity to what might be awaiting on the farther shore. It’s like those rare summer evenings when the sky clears rather than darkens. (SS 465–67)

Yet following this mention of a “farther shore” and a clearing sky, Heaney immediately alludes to the “marvellous rally” of Wordsworth’s late poem “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,” the most important line of which declares that “our haughty life is crowned with darkness,” a sentiment scarcely redeemed by a subsequent reference to the “breathless sleep” of the grave, and so seeming to close down the Yeatsian project. Heaney had already commented elsewhere that the reader of Wordsworth “rejoices in the occasional full-throated cry of hurt, so immediate—as in ‘Extempore Effusion’—that one wishes it would overflow the imposition of his customary resignation.”37 Thus Wordsworth’s “cus37. Wordsworth’s poem is included in The Essential Wordsworth: Selected by Seamus Heaney (New York: Ecco, 1988), 175–76; Heaney, “Introduction,” 12.



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tomary resignation” needs to be overcome with Yeats’s exuberant courage in the face of the inevitable. Heaney’s lecture-essay on “Joy or Night” is a paean to the “immortal diamond” (Hopkins) of Yeats’s late musings. Heaney would likely commend too Roy Foster’s intricate account of Yeats’s last month in January 1939: “The great wheel of his imagination was turning at the last to the inspirations of his youth. Faith and instinct outweighed rational philosophic argument.”38 For better or worse, Heaney’s sympathies also generally lie in the realm of “faith and instinct” in their battle against “rational philosophic argument.” What may be said in the end, then, is that the pendulum of Heaney’s life swung much more in the direction of Yeats’s eschatological views as he aged; he may have agreed with Stephen Dedalus’s point about the “great coherence” of Catholicism being better than any ad hoc system, but his own final stance seems to have come to rest with something more resembling the latter. Indeed, in a foreword to his own selection of Yeats’s poems in 2000, Heaney is remarkably sympathetic to the poet’s religious musings, much as he had been in the Larkin essay of almost a decade earlier. For Heaney here, Yeats’s “imagined Ireland represented not only a regenerative breakaway from the imperium of Britain but also from the magisterium of orthodox Christianity.” He even sees Yeats as pursuing his own Joycean quest for “‘the Spiritual liberation of [his] country’” with a poetry “that would sound every bit as given, self-born and unquestionable as the myths and symbols of traditional systems of belief.” Whereas even Joyce operated “within a set of cultural and intellectual forms that were generally shared and assented to”—making him not unlike Hopkins were the latter to have been more rebellious, though Heaney doesn’t say so here—Yeats was “always starting from scratch.”39 What this comparison of the two premier Irish writers does in the end, however, is to show why Heaney will of necessity dwell more within the Catholic cosmos that Joyce inherited and rebelled against, and at 38. Roy F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2, The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 640. 39. In W. B Yeats, Poems, xv, xvi, xvii.

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the same time why Heaney is all the more admiring of Yeats’s powers of invention. Yeats’s aim was “to launch upon the world a vision of reality that possessed no surer basis than the ground of his own imagining.” But it is interesting too that Heaney is cautious in his descriptions of Yeats’s “religious” agenda. Thus, the “reality of a world of spirit, the immortality of the soul and its fated reincarnations” are not said to be things that Yeats actually believed in, but rather “ideas” to which his “mind was hospitable.” Yeats, Heaney goes on to assert, wasn’t “a gullible consumer of superstitions” but had a mind that “was at least equal to that of the most secular and topically focused minds of his generation.” Yeats’s is an “unconsoled modernity” that is “inexhaustibly relevant” as he and we try to account for “the human impulse to transcendence” amid the pressing temporality of our lives.40 And surely, in being transcendentally affirmative, Yeats’s project is closer to Heaney’s than to Joyce’s; in other words, if one is not prepared for the complete abandonment of religion as Joyce was, all that is left are Yeatsian-style variants of Catholicism and similar speculative enterprises. While Nicholas Boyle notes that “the presence-in-absence of his Catholic past provides Heaney with the access into universality for which Yeats had to seek artificial and sometimes lurid substitutes,” it is Heaney’s embrace of the Mage that needs to be kept in mind.41 A more contemporary influence, Ted Hughes, the British Poet Laureate following Larkin’s refusal of the office (and for whom Larkin had little regard), was also Seamus Heaney’s very close friend over several decades.42 Hughes was a lyrical recorder of the grim and the gruesome in nature, one who experienced major tragedies in his marital lives and the huge publicity that surrounded them, but also a writer steeped in the mythologies of the past and the superstitions of the present. Michael Parker has described the earliest influence of Hughes’s work on Heaney in 1962: it “contained many of the ‘masculine’ features Heaney had admired in Hopkins; a preoccupation with energy and identity . . . vigorous and vivid 40. Ibid., xviii, xviii–xix, xix, xxiv. 41. Nicholas Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 309. 42. Heaney, “A Great Man and a Great Poet,” Observer, May 16, 1999, Review Section 4.



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diction . . . powerful rhythms. . . . Although their visions of the controlling Force or forces in the universe differ profoundly, Hopkins and Hughes share an intense reverence for creation, making words and worlds blaze with a religious awe.”43 Heaney and Hughes also shared a mutual interest in the fairy and the folk: when Seamus and Marie visited the poet in 1970 at a turbulent time in his emotional life, “they gave Ted and Brenda a rubric to protect Court Green.”44 One can only speculate what such a magical rubric might have been. There were serious differences between them, of course, in religious matters. Henry Hart has noted, for example, that Hughes “for the most part, repudiated the machinery of orthodox Christianity. When [Sylvia] Plath was reading St. Augustine and other Christian thinkers at Cambridge in the 1950s, Hughes wrote her a letter . . . condemn[ing] the ‘Christian philosopher trash.’ . . . Christian theologians were ‘vicious and at bottom selfish, at bottom stupid and timid. The whole pack are contemptible. And when you realize that there has not been a monastery, nor a church foundation of any sort, not a single post of any ecclesiastical dignity, that has not from the start been the perch of avarice, greed, cruelty, and tyranny, you marvel why they are still given so much attention.’”45 Still, at the other end of life, in a 1999 review, Heaney sympathetically drew attention to Hughes’s shift “in the plane of understanding from the tragic to the transcendental,” and indeed possibly toward the afterlife, as if this were a good thing that Heaney wished to share with his friend: I have always tended to read “Littleblood” [a poem about one of Hughes’s imaginary creations] as an instance of just that kind of transition. It is as if, at the last moment, grace has entered into the Crowcursed universe and a voice that had hitherto been as obsessive and self-flagellating as the Ancient Mariner’s suddenly finds that it can pray. More than a quarter of a century before the publication of Birthday Letters, before the appearance of the poem “Freedom of Speech,” in which the shift to the transcendental has clearly occurred, Littleblood 43. Parker, Seamus Heaney, 44. 44. Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (New York: Norton, 2001), 176. 45. From Hart, “Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes,” 76–89.

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is granted this little moment of epiphany, sitting on the poet’s finger, singing in his ear, singing the song of both omen and amen.

Even if Heaney is wrong about the actuality of Hughes’s perceptions—unlikely given their long friendship—this is a further clarification of his own thoughts on the subject. However, on this occasion too, a Yeats-like Heaney immediately and characteristically brings in hope and despair, never settling for either one exclusively: in Hughes’s “Freedom of Speech,” there’s “a birthday party in eternity. The shade of Sylvia Plath is being feted, Ariel perches on her knuckle and there is happy laughter in the land of the dead.” But “the note of omen, however, acknowledges that the understanding behind all future poems is going to be darkened, and what gives ‘Littleblood’ its mysterious, votive power is the co-existence of this tragic understanding with other, more transcendent desires and realizations” (FK 443). This delicate balancing is also present when Heaney is recalling his own role as eulogist at Hughes’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey in 1999: “What was marvellous and reliable about the event was the way Ted’s language worked in the same register as the language of the liturgy, the extent to which the scope of his imagining had accommodated the idea of the divine”—a suitably deft weaving of belief and unbelief (SS 474). Hughes also figures in Heaney’s religious narrative as a collaborator, one that has inspired what is perhaps Heaney’s best summing up of the whole history of belief (in a Western context, at least). In 1997, Heaney and Hughes published their second eclectic anthology of favored poems, The School Bag (where, in an “Afterword” on memorizing poems, Hughes quite surprisingly quotes Aquinas and blames the Puritans for trying to “eradicate imagery” and the “methods dimly associated with paganism and Catholicism”).46 Some of Heaney’s subsequent comments on the arrangement of poems in the volume have relevance for his religious views, especially as they pertain to the transience of Christianity itself. The volume “sets out to instruct by juxtaposition”—“‘Dover Beach’ with its expression of disappointment at the decline of Christian belief 46. See Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds., The School Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 568–69.



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follows James Kearney’s translation of the early Irish poem called ‘Adze Head,’ which is essentially an expression of disappointment at the arrival of Christianity” (FK 412). “Disappointment” seems to have marked each transition and will likely do so again in the future. Heaney expanded on this observation in an essay in the Guardian in 2003 significantly called “Bags of Enlightenment” in which he explains his collaboration with Hughes six years earlier in producing the collection. There, “immediately following Arnold, we printed Elizabeth Bishop’s great invocation to the sea and its waters, her poem called ‘At the Fishhouses,’ a poem in which one witnesses the rebirth of a religious impulse in a post-religious sensibility.” If poetry, then, is seen as a “rebirth of a religious impulse in a post-religious sensibility,” it has an importance that satisfies both past commitments and current complexities.47 It is, or can be, a secular religion. Heaney goes on to spell out the matter when, in line with Hughes’s preoccupation with World War I, he discusses Isaac Rosenberg’s war poem “Break of Day in the Trenches.” The poem, “in which the new and terrible human conditioning of the first world war comes home to us,” ends with the image of a poppy in a soldier’s ear, an image that, “just by being what it is, a flicker of original sweetness and shared sorrow in the face of the atrocious,” is “a help.” He concludes that “while the grand primary principle of pleasure is one that will always justify and underwrite the teaching of poetry, poetry should also be taught in all its seriousness . . . because it encompasses the desolations of reality”—a phrase used also about Brian Moore—“and remains an indispensable part of the equipment we need in the human survival kit.”48 So too in Heaney’s poem on the death of Hughes, his friend is depicted as “a listening post / Open to the light, to the limen world / Of soul on its lonely path”: poetry has replaced religion as a comfort and link to whatever undefined reality may lie beyond and thus is vital to human welfare and wayfare.49 And, finally, as Richard Rankin Russell has discovered, in an unpublished essay about 47. Heaney, “Bags of Enlightenment.” 48. Ibid. 49. Heaney, Electric Light, 61.

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Hughes’s appointment as Poet Laureate, Heaney had written “movingly and positively of how Hughes had quickly ‘re-established, without sanctimoniousness, a sacerdotal function for the poet in the realm.’”50 Finally, there’s David Lodge, the British novelist and literary theorist best known for his humorous and insightful tales of academe, who has been one of several threads running through this narrative. He may seem an odd choice here since, unlike Joyce, Yeats, Moore, and Hughes, Heaney hasn’t written about him, nor vice versa. Yet Lodge is also, and extensively, a very sympathetic chronicler and interpreter of Roman Catholic life in the UK in the twentieth century, as we’ve seen in his comments on his experience of the Humanae Vitae crisis and his associating of Philip Larkin with the antireligious, Logical Positivist movement. He also frequently has Irish, or second-generation Irish, characters in his works—a Heaney skeptic has even suggested that the Irish protagonist in Lodge’s Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) bears a functional resemblance to the poet.51 The only child of what used to be called a “mixed marriage” in which his Catholic mother was “dutiful but not particularly devout,” Lodge himself married into a second-generation Irish Catholic family in England of more expressive devotion and received his early encouragement from an Irish teacher at his Birmingham school. He has noted too that “the ethos of English Catholicism at the parochial level in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not very different from Irish Catholicism at the beginning of the century.”52 A Joyce devotee, Lodge rarely turns up in commentary on Heaney because his focus isn’t on poetry, but, along with Terry Eagleton, Anthony Kenny, Herbert McCabe, Eamon Duffy, and others, he is part of what might loosely—perhaps very loosely—be called the English-Irish Catholic intelligentsia (even though not all of them are believers) of the late twentieth century in Britain. Four years older than Heaney, Lodge was also a visiting professor at Berkeley in 1969, the year before Heaney’s stint there, a friend of the McCabes in Boston even earlier than Heaney, and later followed Heaney in giving Emory University’s 50. See Russell, Seamus Heaney. 51. Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (New York: Routledge 1999), 193. 52. Lodge, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, 93.



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Richard Ellmann Lectures in 2001. In a way different from Brian Moore— and probably even closer to everyday experience—Lodge has traced the evolution of the English Catholic consciousness over the last six decades, beginning with The Picturegoers in 1960, a tale that he himself has compared with the American Catholic novelist Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer published a year later.53 Having written a doctoral dissertation on the development of the Catholic novel from the days of Newman’s Oxford Movement onward, Lodge is steeped in the arcana of post-Tridentine Catholic practice and its eventual unraveling. He is also more than well informed about Catholic life and theological thought since Vatican II. Eamon Duffy has described Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?—published in 1980 but about a group of English Catholic students associated with a university chaplaincy in the 1950s, around the period of Heaney’s attendance at Queen’s—as offering “a crash course in some of the more exotic features of Catholicism as then understood . . . transubstantiation, holidays [sic] of obligation . . . the difference between mortal and venial sin, the Rosary, plenary indulgences, purgatory, and the almost permanently tormented state of a pubescent young Catholic male’s conscience.”54 The students are followed through a series of transformations as the sexual edicts of the church conflict with their evolving mores. In Paradise Island (1991), Lodge offers an extraordinarily moving account of a former priest’s (with a meddlesome Irish father) painful reengagement with the world of physical and emotional desire, while Therapy (1995) presents a secularized version of the popular Camino de Santiago pilgrimage (Heaney’s turas) that still has religious resonances in the lives of the protagonists. Thinks (2001) reflects Lodge’s involvement with the current debates about consciousness in the work of Daniel Dennett and others, something that has long occupied him in his academic study of the novel as an ever-changing genre. Meanwhile, Lodge’s personal life has followed much of the trajectory of his narratives as belief becomes vaguer and vaguer, though never absent, and indeed often informing his characters’ 53. See Lodge’s Introduction to the 1993 reprint of his novel The Picturegoers (London: Penguin, 1993), x. 54. Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, 139–40.

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best traits. In short, for over half a century, Lodge’s novels were eagerly awaited as news bulletins from the frontiers of belief until belief itself dissipated. Rereading The Picturegoers in 1992, Lodge was surprised by how religious it had been—partly the influence of Greene, Waugh, Mauriac, and Bernanos—so that it seemed “like the work of another person.”55 Of this progression, the author has recently commented: Basically if you read my novels in chronological order, it’s obvious I was once quite an orthodox, believing, practicing Catholic, that’s the education I had, and the fact that I married a Catholic also reinforced that. Intellectually, theologically I have completely changed since I was a young man. I no longer believe literally the doctrines. I am like many educated Catholics in this respect. Some, like myself, go on sort of belonging to the Catholic community. I go to Mass though I don’t go every week as I used to with a sense of obligation.

The paragraph is riven with unresolved contradictions that show even more how like Heaney he is, reinforcing the comparison. Then Lodge’s autobiographical account—which has striking resemblances to Heaney’s if one replaces “poems” with “novels”—takes a more analytical turn: “Basically I don’t think Christianity or any of the other great world religions has any firm epistemological foundations. They are attempts to explain or address some fundamental problems: why are we here, what is it about?” Like Heaney, Lodge regards Catholic Christianity as a “great tradition” to which he remains attached. But for him now, “religion is a record of human thinking . . . about fundamental questions about life and the mysterious question of what happens after death,” rather than the result of any divine revelation as such. Criticizing those who dismiss religion too glibly, Lodge—with rather uncharacteristic condescension— argues for it as a consolation for people whose lives otherwise offer few joys and satisfactions. For himself, “hope has replaced faith. You hope that there is something beyond death, which will rectify the obvious evils and injustices of this world,” which is a thought not unlike what Heaney 55. Lodge, Picturegoers, viii–ix.



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has expressed on occasion. But then, like Heaney, Lodge qualifies his statement: “But it’s only hope. There is no real foundation at all.” He goes on to trace his own religious history: “When I was young I was taught that the Catholic Christian religion was the only really true one. Now Catholics are taught to respect the validity of other faiths,” which seems to suggest that the church’s own quasi-permission not to believe has been a comfort to him. While Lodge is somewhat saddened to see religion “waning” thus, “the whole cosmology of traditional religion now seems to me childish and mythological so that I can’t believe it, can’t seriously believe it.” Still, Lodge isn’t convinced that everything happened by chance, or that there is no mystery to our existence; but, while “that sort of question may encourage the idea of God . . . the assumption that whatever is behind the visible universe is anything like us, is obviously mythological. Neither science not religion can solve the mystery.”56 Deeply influenced by his studies of language, consciousness, and personhood, Lodge ends up declaring that he is “an agnostic Catholic” rather than a “Catholic agnostic” like Graham Greene. Agnosticism comes first for him. But then, regretting that “disagreements . . . about sexuality, about homosexuality, whether women can be priests, whether priests can marry . . . are tearing the Christian Churches apart,” he shows what Heaney would call his “spots” (and a rather odd concern with matters that must surely be trivial to a nonbeliever) even when he concludes that all of this confirms that “religion is a cultural production.”57 In all, Lodge is much more informed than is Heaney about the scientific challenges to Catholicism or to any form of revealed religion, has no interest in the kind of folk magic and holy wells that have appealed to both Heaney and Hughes, but is still engaged—even more than Heaney was—with the rituals of a lost faith. It might be added, too, that Lodge’s very faintly hoped-for afterlife in which the injustices of this world will be rectified is like Heaney’s (though even less expected on his part) in that neither of them is focused 56. Rong Ou, “An Interview with David Lodge at Cambridge,” Journal of Cambridge Studies 5, no. 2–3 (2010): 134–35. 57. Ibid., 136.

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on the deity as such: put plainly, they fall under T. S. Eliot’s censure of Tennyson’s In Memoriam as showing its author wanting “to hold the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe,” having a “desire for immortality” rather than “the desire for Eternal Life,” and a “concern . . . for the loss of man rather than for the gain of God.”58 Irish Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, too, teaching comparative religion as a priest at DePaul University in Chicago in the early 1970s, noted of his students that “if there were no God, there would be no eternal life. It always came down to that. The purpose of divinity was our immortality.”59 Attempting an overview of the situation, one might conclude the following: Joyce and Moore support Heaney in leaving the church; Hughes’s immersion in a British pagan past confirms the validity of Heaney’s interest in an Irish one; Yeats provides a template for a post-Catholic eclecticism in which all these borrowings can be recast. But one also needs to add that Joyce and Moore denied more than Heaney ever has, while whatever Yeats and Hughes affirmed fell short of Heaney’s affirmations. In this smorgasbord, then, Heaney seems closest to Lodge, though perhaps less satisfied with his own conclusions, and dramatically less influenced by scientific considerations, even if not totally unaware of their importance. To better situate Heaney religiously, it remains to compare his unique view with the inherited orthodoxies of the Catholic tradition as understood both in Ireland and in a wider, global context. All this should lead to a better understanding of his post “Station Island” filling of “‘the element / with signatures of [his] own frequency, / echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements, / elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea’” (OG 245–46). 58. Heaney, FK 36; Eliot, Selected Prose, 181; T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (New York: Harvest, 1975), 244. 59. John Dominic Crossan, A Long Way from Tipperary: What a Former Monk Discovered in His Search for the Truth (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2000), 106.

Chapter 10

F ai t h R eplaced

I

t is difficult not to think that the Seamus Heaney of Stepping Stones in the early 2000s is more Catholic-leaning, or at least Catholic-aware, than he was in his earlier incarnations from the 1960s onward, even up to the 1990s. His traditional faith has apparently come back to preoccupy him more than ever. This is hardly surprising, given the totality of his original immersion in a system that satisfied so many of his aspirations even as it severely frustrated many more. Nor could the ongoing presence of the church and its ministers be wholly ignored: after all, the local parish priest, even if barely known, has a reality different from a priest of ancient Isis—should such even exist—or a stranded Celtic druid operating out of an eighteenth-century basement on Dublin’s southside. One doesn’t have Dominican scholar Fr. Herbert McCabe and Benedictine literary critic Dom Mark Patrick Hederman as personal friends without occasionally doubting that they could be wholly wrong or deluded in their religious commitments. Heaney had also long been a welcomed visitor and sometimes a resident at that unique brotherhood and sisterhood of Roman Catholic colleges and universities that stretch across America from sea to shining sea, reminders of his past and in lively, if curated, conversation with his present. It was, in fact, to such an audience at Fordham University’s 1982 Commencement that, in what Richard Rankin Russell calls his “rollicking verses,” Heaney, teasing the teasable, commended the older “men of knowledge” of whom he deemed himself the inheritor:

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Faith Replaced Magi, druids, seers and augurs, Brehons, temple priests, witch doctors And a thousand other characters Long since defunct.1

Yet Heaney is never orthodoxly Catholic, and most of its strict creedal members would probably not see him as belonging to the church at all. When asked by Dennis O’Driscoll in the early 2000s if he agreed that “God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry?” Heaney assented: Poetry is a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence. You can lose your belief in the afterlife, in the particular judgement at the moment of death, in the eternal separation of the good from the evil ones in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, but it’s harder to lose the sense of an ordained structure, beyond all this fuddle. Poetry represents the need for an ultimate court of appeal. The infinite spaces may be silent, but the human response is to say that this is not good enough, that there has to be more to it than neuter absence.

Heaney’s “has to be” claim is, of course, disputable—but his iteration of it is not: rightly or wrongly, this is how he saw things.2 Referring back to “The Stone Verdict” from The Haw Lantern (1987), Heaney explains that he had “imagined this uncommunicativeness as a sort of divine corrective to human protestation.” But if this is the case in the rather convoluted logic of Heaney’s argument—that is, if “there has to be more than neuter absence,” and the “uncommunicativeness” of a silent God is “a sort of divine corrective to human protestation” so that, as Heaney concludes, “poetry is a pay-off for all the duplicities of language and disappointments of reality” and “can also be said to be ‘a form of redemption’”—then poetry is our God, our comfort, and in the words of Czesław Miłosz, whom 1. Heaney, “Verses for a Fordham Commencement,” Fordham (Summer 1982): 8–9. See also Russell, Seamus Heaney, 235–36. 2. Back in 1977, the American Catholic convert Walker Percy expressed a similar idea: “I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age . . . without demanding a gift [from God] commensurate with the offense”; Percy, “Questions They Never Asked Me,” Esquire, December 1977, 193.



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Heaney quotes here, “a dividend from what you know and what you are” (SS 470–71). Frankly, I’m not clear about what all of this might mean: is it an obfuscation on Heaney’s part in response to the perceived silence of “a God withdrawn”?; an extraordinary exaltation of the art of verse?; an admission that poetry is all we can know and that we should be content with our lot? The discontented skeptic—as opposed to the contented one—is likely to want more in the way of answers. In fact, responding to O’Driscoll’s further questions, Heaney appears to give more. Following his evocation of his childhood when he “dwelt entirely in the womb of religion,” the interviewer pops the old canard, “‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic’?” Heaney’s response is “I suppose so,” but there is a proper hesitancy in the “suppose” even as he goes on to affirm this identity in a complex way and, indeed, to provide a rather neat synopsis of his entire religious career. Heaney has “always” been a Catholic, because Catholicism provided a totally structured reading of the mortal condition which I’ve never quite deconstructed. I might have talked differently, certainly more diffidently, if you’d asked me about these matters thirty years ago, since I eventually did my best to change from catechized youth into secular adult. The study of literature, the discovery of wine, women and song, the arrival of poetry, then marriage and family, plus a general, generational assent to the proposition that God is dead: all that screened out the first visionary world. But, in maturity, the myths of the classical world and Dante’s Commedia (where my Irish Catholic subculture received high cultural ratification) and the myths of other cultures matched and mixed and provided a cosmology that corresponded well enough to the original: you learned that, from the human beginnings, poetic imagination had proffered a world of light and a world of dark, a shadow region—not so much an afterlife as an afterimage of life. (SS 471–72)

If this is the essence of things for Heaney, the “Catholicism” portrayed in it—a religion formed of an almost Yeatsian matching and mixing of various myths to provide a relatively coherent cosmology that is “not so much

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an afterlife as an afterimage of life”—hardly conforms, as Heaney explicitly realizes, to the unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam of his Derry youth and young manhood. To see how far Heaney has “moved away”—in a 1988 interview he had spoken of the “command to solidarity” with one’s community, and a “second command . . . to liberate the consciousness from the collective pieties”—rather than “strayed” from the fold, we summon up the next set of auditioned speakers or interlocutors: T. S. Eliot, Patrick Kavanagh, above all Czesław Miłosz, the Dominican Herbert McCabe, and the historian Eamon Duffy. Each registers a significant difference, each a significant similarity.3 They can’t entice Heaney back, but neither can he wander too far away. T. S. Eliot has been mentioned again and again throughout this narrative. Indeed, Michael Cavanagh has identified him as Heaney’s poetic father, with Yeats more as Heaney’s older brother. Eliot’s 1927 conversion to Anglicanism in its high church, Anglo-Catholic mode is one of the most famous religious turn-arounds of the Modernist era, almost as famous in the literary world as Joyce’s deconversion from Catholicism. The onetime—if uneasy—protégé of philosopher Bertrand Russell (again, probably the most famous Anglophone atheist in the early part of the twentieth century), the poet still considered the most innovative in the last one hundred years, the explorer of spiritual desolation, mystic exaltation, and creator of his own compound ghosts, has exercised an enormous influence on the religious as well as artistic lives of numerous writers, though perhaps the religious influence has been more in his native America than in his adopted England. Eliot came into Heaney’s young adult life almost as early as Hopkins. Like most Catholics at the time, the first Eliot Heaney encountered was more the poet of “Ash Wednesday,” “Journey of the Magi,” and Four Quartets than the creator of a neurotic “Prufrock” or of the infertile residents of The Waste Land. In other words, it was the Eliot of faith rather than of fate; it was Eliot co-opted “into the emulsifying element of our doctrinally sound young heads” (FK 34–35). There was certainly an Irish Catholic solace to be found in the 3. Rand Brandes, “Seamus Heaney,” 8.



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Anglo-Catholic American poet (whose nationality, to many Irish and likely British readers at the time, too, was buried so deep within his English persona that he appeared, as Stephen Spender noted, more English than the English themselves). As we’ve seen in chapter 5, Heaney also commented favorably on parts of “Ash Wednesday” when “the converting Eliot begins to envy the coherence and certitude, the theological, philosophical and linguistic harmonies available” to Dante. Heaney’s North, meanwhile, employs Eliot’s “mythic method” in placing the current religious conflict over the pagan bog of the past, while Eliot the pilgrim of Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding” especially) is central to, if unnamed in, “Station Island.” Cavanagh contends that “the opening passage in ‘Burnt Norton’ inscribed itself in Heaney’s imagination, establishing a ‘story’ of vision that he hereafter adopted as befitting his own world.”4 Heaney also visited Little Gidding in “England and nowhere,” and commented subsequently that Eliot’s later poems offered “a graph of the effort of transcendence.”5 Cavanagh also sees Heaney as being more like Eliot than like Yeats in his spiritual quest: “His own, quieter visions belong to Eliot’s world, and they arrive in a more deflated secular context, the ‘dry place.’” And, very importantly too, Heaney commented positively on Eliot’s understanding that “poetry housed older and deeper levels of energy than those supplied by explicit meaning and immediate rhythmic stimulus.”6 But Heaney objects that by Four Quartets, Eliot’s Dante and indeed Eliot himself have acquired a too “stern and didactic profile” (FK 191). So Heaney turns away from the certainties of the orthodox religious world in favor of the truths of the human imagination and has no interest in uniting his soul with God in the way Eliot hoped to do. The “graph of the effort of transcendence” can be followed, he thinks, without the mesh and support of its underlying doctrines. Nor did Eliot’s very close identification with the official Church of England—the “born-again” Anglican, “vestry4. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 96. 5. Heaney, “Envies and Identifications,” 5–19. 6. Heaney, Government of the Tongue, 148.

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man,” and Lambeth attender part of him—at all appeal to Heaney.7 So, Eliot’s beliefs, though ever present, in their dogmatic or creedal aspects have no more attraction than their equivalent Roman Catholic versions, but Eliot as eternal seeker is still interesting, and certainly more so than Eliot arrived.8 Momentarily contrasting himself with Yeats, Heaney—as seen in chapter 9—acknowledged that he was “much closer to the fundamentally Catholic mysticism” of Patrick Kavanagh, an unusually strong religious endorsement of the older poet (SS 318–20). Indeed, in his 1980 essay “From Monaghan to the Grand Canal,” Heaney had also juxtaposed the early rural Kavanagh of the 1930s with the urban poet of the other end of his life in markedly religious terms. There Kavanagh advances from being “a postulant, full of uninitiated piety,” one who “stands up . . . as the celebrant of his own mysteries,” where “Monaghan is his pastoral care in the sacerdotal as much as in the literary sense,” to his leaving for Dublin in 1939 (the year of Yeats’s death and Heaney’s birth), and there “taking orders” and “consecrat[ing] new ground for himself on the banks of the Grand Canal.”9 Heaney even adds that Kavanagh’s “destiny was to become a mendicant rather than a parish priest,” presumably a reference to Kavanagh’s straitened financial circumstances throughout his life as a cantankerous and unreliable journalist, drinker, and his own worst enemy. Heaney also praises him for forging “a consciousness for the great majority of his countrymen, crossing the pieties of a rural Catholic sensibility with the non serviam of his original personality.”10 There’s even a reference later to Kavanagh’s “Franciscan acceptance.”11 Kavanagh’s early poems had validated Heaney’s own “comparatively bookless” rural life, giving him “permission to dwell [there] without cultural anxiety” (FK 151). Then, in the second half of Kavanagh’s life, and especially after his lung cancer operation in 1955, he moved to a “wise 7. Cavanagh, Professing Poetry, 87, 101. 8. Ibid. Cavanagh gives a wonderful, intricate account of what he calls Heaney’s “Eliot complex” on p. 89. 9. Heaney, Preoccupations, 120–21. 10. Ibid., 116. 11. Ibid., 128.



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and unassertive afterlife,” a certain “weightlessness” that equally inspired Heaney—or rather, one that Heaney fully noticed when he himself arrived there by his own route in the 1980s (FK 155, 154). In artistic terms, Kavanagh, as Heaney nicely describes the transition, went from Millet to Chagall, from the former’s stooping down to the earth to the latter’s floating free of it, and from painting to drawing (FK 156). Heaney adds that Kavanagh now has “that sense of sufficiency in the discovery of a direction rather than any sense of anxiety about the need for a destination” (FK 156). This openness to a lighter Kavanagh appears in Heaney’s 1985 “A Placeless Heaven,” a phrase taken from Kavanagh’s “Auditors In”: “From the sour soil of a town where all roots canker / I turn away to where the Self reposes / The placeless Heaven that’s under all our noses” (FK 154). Heaney too had recently been “uprooted . . . spirited away into some transparent yet indigenous afterlife. . . . It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a heavenly place” (FK 147). Likewise with Kavanagh’s perception of rural places: “They have been evacuated of their status as background, as documentary geography, and exist instead as transfigured images, sites where the mind projects its own force . . . the country he visits is inside himself.” Heaney clarifies further: “At the edge of consciousness in a late poem . . . we encounter the white light of meditation; at the edge of consciousness in the early poems, the familiar world stretches reliably away” (FK 148). This transition is illustrated when Heaney comments on the older poet’s “In Memory of My Mother”: “The poem says two things at once: mother is historically gone, mother is a visionary presence forever”: On your way to the station, or happily . . . Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday— You meet me and you say: “Don’t forget to see about the cattle—” Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

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For Heaney also, the poem “does have something of that ‘weightlessness’ that Kavanagh came to seek as an alternative to the weightiness of the poetic substance in, say, The Great Hunger,” his epic of Catholic repression and denial. Heaney’s analysis demonstrates an obvious parallel between himself and Kavanagh as they both discover lightness at the back end of life, and as both (here at least) see the afterlife as spectral rather than actual—the last line of the poem has Kavanagh’s mother “smiling up at us” rather than down from above (she is still with him in an earthly if ghostly way rather than merely in the “wet clay / Of a Monaghan graveyard”) (FK 153–54). Kavanagh, however, in spite of periods of rage and depression with the church and its restrictions—Peggy O’Brien notes that “‘The Great Hunger’ . . . never relents in its balancing of faith and skepticism” and that “its opening entertains the atheistic position,” while his biographer, Antoinette Quinn, records that in an unpublished novel, Kavanagh remarked, “‘You couldn’t work for a so-called Catholic newspaper without being an atheist”—seems to have remained conventionally faithful to his religious inheritance and never expressed quite the same intellectual distance from it as Heaney has done (SS 154).12 But it isn’t just that Kavanagh stayed in, while Heaney stepped out. O’Brien remarks of Heaney that “in aligning himself with this autodidact’s roughhewn religion, inhospitable to all orthodox naming, even mysticism, Heaney is revising both the hegemonies of English literature and the Catholic church. He is calling attention to an independent lineage of metaphysical inquiry among poets and how an unlikely revolution in cultural givens can be achieved by meditation.”13 I take this to mean that Kavanagh’s ragings and rangings within the confines of Catholicism and in poems of high artistic art as well as of “willful doggerel” liberated a more buttoned-up Heaney to plot his own psychic and cultural rebellions (FK 157). Without question, Seamus Heaney’s most important religious influ12. Peggy O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg, 135–36; Patrick Kavanagh, A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput, 2003), 13. It was on the recommendation of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid that Kavanagh got a reporting job with the Standard, a Catholic newspaper, and he remained on good terms with the prelate to the end. 13. O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg, 264.



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ence in his later years was Czesław Miłosz, a writer whose work first came to his attention through Ted Hughes and the Penguin Modern European Poets series in the 1960s and again around 1980 in response, as he admits, to “the chicness of Polish writing” in the decade leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.14 Still, in spite of having been at Berkeley at the same time in 1970—Heaney as a lowly visiting poet, Miłosz as a relatively unknown or forgotten professor in a tiny Slavic languages department— their first meeting seems to have been in 1983 in the company of Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, when Miłosz, Hass, and Heaney recounted their experiences of Catholicism to one another (SS xxv, 300). By then, Miłosz, who first came to international attention with The Captive Mind and aroused new interest in the 1970s with the surprisingly successful English translations of his earlier and more recent work, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Miłosz’s Catholic background, as with that of other Polish writers suffering under a repressive Communist regime, was central to Heaney’s interest, a point he has made again and again. In 1988, for example, Heaney had mentioned a “neediness” in himself that wasn’t satisfied by the writers in the English canon: in “the poetry of the Poles, I find sub-cultural recognitions in myself which are never called up or extended in English poetry . . . an experience of fullness and completion which is new and refreshing to me.”15 In the early 2000s, he referred to “that clued-in, undaunted poetry of post-war Poland” as “certainly a tonic to somebody who had grown up in Northern Ireland, where the quiet surface covered up profound faults and disturbances. It suited the mood and attitudes of the minority population I belonged to.” Here Heaney is more vehement than usual in regard to the “demeaning conditions” for Catholics in his native Northern Ireland that had often barred them from “relish and fulfillment.” In their resistance to an oppressive and alien regime, the Polish poets offered “nurture” and “injunction” to stand “at the crossroads where truth and beauty intersect” (SS 297). Almost everything in Miłosz’s experience resonated with Heaney, not least his engagement with political life in Nazi-occupied Poland, where 14. Brandes, “Seamus Heaney,” 10. 15. Ibid.

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he saw the Jewish ghetto being destroyed; his subsequent career as a diplomat with the Polish Communist regime; his time in France “during the ideological civil wars of the 1950s,” where he was more sympathetic with Albert Camus than with Jean-Paul Sartre; afterward in California “during the era of the Beats and the flower children and anti-Vietnam protests,” and, in spirit and quite effectively from a distance, “in the era of Solidarity in Poland.” While Heaney acknowledges that Miłosz “had not borne arms in the Warsaw uprising and had served for a while with the new Communist regime,” he recognized that in “a kind of twentieth-century pilgrim’s progress,” Miłosz had written “his way out of that state of affairs” (SS 302). Heaney especially admired the way Miłosz “followed conscience into solitude” and mentions the poet’s 1960s correspondence (not published until 1997) with Thomas Merton as “one of the most revealing books in this regard,” almost as though the latter has confirmed Miłosz’s authenticity as a spiritual seeker (SS 302). In that epistolary exchange, a formidable Miłosz (freshly arrived in the United States to take up his professorship at Berkeley) confesses to Merton that he has always “been crypto-religious” but in “conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism, which is perhaps similar to Irish Catholicism,” and asserts his inability to “proclaim” himself a Catholic.16 More importantly, Miłosz acknowledges his problems with believing in an afterlife, even while he accepts other Catholic doctrines, and his worries about the religious issues that “torture” the young: “How one believes, what are the contents of faith,” since the “image accepted by the majority is clear: empty Sky, no pity, stone wasteland, life ended by death.”17 Merton’s replies may have comforted Heaney. In 1961, for example, the Trappist monk feels “spiritually excommunicated,” claiming that he is a Jew and a Muslim and a Buddhist as much as he is a Catholic; he hates “all that this comfortable and social Catholicism stands for,” including—in an image that must have particularly appealed to Heaney—“this regimenting of birettas. I throw my biretta in the river. (But I don’t have 16. Merton and Miłosz, Striving towards Being, 11, 48, 118, 134. 17. Ibid., 60–62.



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one.).”18 It is of interest, however, that a Benedictine reviewer of this correspondence, who also knew Miłosz toward the end of his life, finds Merton evasive in answering some of the Polish poet’s most fundamental questions about the cruelty of death and about how one initially arrives at faith—here it is Miłosz who is the true listener, not Merton, a fact that Miłosz himself later confirmed.19 Presuming that Heaney noticed this, too, or that Miłosz mentioned it to him, may have given Heaney a distance on Merton’s wisdom that contributed to his own final judgment on these issues. Miłosz, however, despite his ongoing religious skepticism and his toying with gnosticism, not to mention a fairly tangled romantic life, was very Catholic: “To put it very simply and bluntly, I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My answer to this is: Yes. So I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer without any of those evasions and artful tricks employed by theologians: Yes or No? I answer: If I am mistaken in my faith, I offer it as a challenge to the Spirit of the Earth”—itself evasive or at least obscure, but still a committed reply.20 Learning that Polish intellectual culture is just as divided as are others between the “visionary obstinacy” of “the ‘Dies Irae’ from Verdi’s Requiem” and the “arrested development” of “something utterly bleak and minimal by Beckett,” Heaney doesn’t “blame Miłosz for sticking with the Christian humanist wager.” Miłosz is celebratory even after Auschwitz, just as Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” is celebratory precisely “when the gleam had fled” (SS 304). Nevertheless, Miłosz’s informed distrust of science, while something that Heaney shared and understood in him, was not a subject that greatly interested the Irish poet. That distrust is a persistent topic in the MiłoszMerton correspondence, a place in which one might not expect to find the matter referred to at all. There Miłosz condemns the Jesuit paleontologist 18. Ibid., 120, 137. 19. See Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, “The Correspondence of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz: Monasticism and Society in Dialogue,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 11, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 17–48. 20. Quoted in Driscoll, “The Witness of Czesław Miłosz,” First Things, November 2004, 28–33.

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Teilhard de Chardin as “crazily optimistic.” Miłosz, a onetime enthusiast for Darwin, is especially critical of biology because the “‘Historical Necessity’ of totalitarians is a projection of the XIXth c. scientific outlook in biology . . . into the World of Man, which belongs to Nature and does not belong at the same time—that projection is a source of great evil.”21 Miłosz’s anti-science stance appears to come out of his opposition to “philosophical thinking on the ‘iron’ laws of Nature invented by us and then applied to society as per Marxist ideology”; overall, “we are all perhaps too much influenced by that most demoniac science, biology.”22 No doubt Miłosz had in mind the horrific crimes perpetrated in biology’s name by Hitler’s Nazis and Lenin’s and Stalin’s Communists. The attitude is tangentially present in Heaney’s essay on Larkin’s “Aubade.” Yet here again it needs to be said that for all Heaney’s endorsement of Miłosz’s cosmic scream, he is also attuned to the background register of Larkin’s groan, incapable of a Miłosz-like visceral anger with the sad trembler in Hull. The science issue is never remotely as central for him as it was for Miłosz. Late in their relationship, Heaney describes a visit to Miłosz—one of two—in Poland when the poet was close to his end and “seemed to be viewing . . . everything . . . from another shore,” being ministered to by his daughter-in-law like “the aged Oedipus.”23 Then Heaney adds, “‘The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth’: so Miłosz had written, and for his many friends he himself was one of those wise men. His sayings were quoted, even when they were wisecracks rather than wisdom.” Robert Pinsky wrote to Heaney about his own visit to Miłosz about a month before the old poet died: “How are you?” Pinsky had asked. “‘Conscious,’ was the reply. ‘My head is full of absurd bric-a-brac.’ It was the first time [Heaney] had ever detected a daunted note in any of his utterances.”24 Miłosz, Heaney claims, “developed a fierce conviction about the holy force of his art, how poetry was called upon to combat death and noth21. Merton and Miłosz, Striving Towards Being, 150. 22. Ibid., 84. 23. Heaney, “Foreword,” in Selected Poems of Czesław Miłosz 1931–2004 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), xiii. 24. Ibid., xiv.



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ingness, to be ‘A tireless messenger who runs and runs / Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, / And calls out, protests, screams’ (‘Meaning’).” Now, with Miłosz dead, “the world has lost a credible witness to this immemorial belief in the saving power of poetry.”25 But Miłosz seemed to have believed in much more than poetry, and yet he too was “daunted.” In spite of his wisdom (and friendship with fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II), maybe he was not wholly unlike the Philip Larkin whom he accused of having an “effeminate” fear of death rather than facing it in “masculine” fashion.26 And, even then, was Heaney right to reduce Miłosz’s faith to “the saving power of poetry” alone? Heaney begins his explanation of the circumstances in which he wrote a tribute for the deceased Miłosz in the New Republic in 2004: “For a good while I’d been aware that Czesław was lining up in the queue for Charon’s barge, and I knew from the poems he was writing that his point of view was that of a man who’d already made the crossing . . . he, like Oedipus, had found a resting place [in Poland] after years of hardship and wandering and was due to become a hero . . . a genius of his place, one who would . . . be honoured as a kind of guardian spirit” (SS 305). Reflecting on the different phases of Miłosz’s political and intellectual journey, Heaney senses “that the author is witnessing a much older drama, the struggle between God and the Devil for the soul of Everyman.” Miłosz stands for “individual responsibility in an age of relativism.” Very importantly, Heaney adds that “his poetry concedes the instability of the subject and constantly reveals human consciousness as a site of contending discourses, yet he will not allow these recognitions to negate the immemorial command to hold one’s own, spiritually and morally” (FK 447). The comment seems to imply that, in Heaney’s view, there is a close relationship between “individual responsibility” and “religion”—or at least some kind of spiritual dimension to life, and that Heaney too has had to deal with “contending discourses” in his own mind and stick with his own conclusions. Significantly, in commending Miłosz for exploring his “doubt about 25. Ibid. 26. Motion, Philip Larkin, 521.

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the worth of the poetic vocation,” Heaney talks about the Christian influence here, too. Heaney provides an extraordinary, if indirect, affirmation of a Christian, and specifically Catholic, cosmology: The tradition of Christian humanism—the tradition [Miłosz] was born into and that formed the whole basis of his sensibility—was under assault from the moment he came to consciousness. His imagination is supplied and made ample by a fundamentally religious vision, the one based on the idea of Incarnation. What this entails is an assent to the stark, astonishing proposition that through the incarnation of the Son of God in the figure of Christ, the eternal has intersected with time, and through that intersection human beings, though creatures of time, have access to a reality out of time. This is the vision, after all, that gave us much that is glorious in Western architecture and art—Chartres Cathedral and The Divine Comedy, The Book of Kells and Paradise Lost, Gregorian chant and the Sistine Chapel—and it still inspires this poet to occasionally symphonic utterance.

“Stark” and “astonishing” imply that Heaney is fully aware of the specific claims of Catholicism. More troublingly, once again—as in the Yeats-Larkin lecture—Heaney invokes Miłosz on “‘the centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science and science-inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on other,’” suggesting perhaps that this is an issue that has been on his own mind. For Miłosz, the poet is “somebody on a secret errand with ancient and vital truths in his keeping” (FK 448). Miłosz has “vital truths” because he has witnessed much of the suffering in the world in the twentieth century. The comment that follows seems to be as much about Heaney himself as about Miłosz: “Within this man the boy who had made his first Communion in the age of innocence still survived; and in spite of the evidence of ‘human unsuccess’ which assailed the adult, the raptures and entrancements of that boy could never be denied” (FK 450). Hence Miłosz’s famous poem on death—which Heaney quoted earlier—that offers a striking expression and clarification of a desire that many people may have regardless of whether or not they believe in an



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afterlife, a desire to “see the lining of the world” and “The true meaning.” Should it turn out that there is no such lining, and “on this earth there is nothing except this earth,” then: —Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.27 We protest and we scream for something beyond what we have because we want to know why things are as they are or have been; according to Miłosz—and perhaps a little less so to Heaney, though he too is beating on the walls—we should not be satisfied simply to deny our protesting as misdirected, the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of the human condition. In the end, then, it is the imperfect Catholic Miłosz who has meant the most to Heaney in religious matters, the one he had to make the least hesitant effort to embrace, even as—as we shall see—he could never embrace him fully. After all, Heaney wasn’t waiting for Czesław Miłosz or anyone else to instruct him on the intricacies of his childhood faith. A significant difference between them is to be seen in some of the poems in District and Circle (2006), a collection that takes its title from two tube lines in London’s underground transport system, and that begins with the ominous “The Turnip-Snedder”—the source also for the cover illustration—in which a “cast-iron” farm machine for chopping turnips that “dropped its raw-sliced mess, / bucketful by glistening bucketful” is compared to “the way God sees life,” shattering, as Gail McConnell recognizes, “the idea of a benevolent, omniscient” creator.28 Midway in the volume, in the tripartite sequence “Out of This World” with the dedication “in memory of Czesław Miłosz,” Heaney’s focus is not only on religion but on his own argument with it, honoring Miłosz by declaring his differ27. Miłosz, “Meaning,” in New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: Ecco), 569. 28. Heaney, District and Circle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 3–4; McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, 116–17.

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ence from him (and, at the same time and from another perspective, his own Irish, former-believer representativeness): 1. “Like everybody else . . .” Like everybody else, I bowed my head during the consecration of the bread and wine, lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice, believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred. I went to the altar rails and received the mystery on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes, and felt time starting up again. There was never a scene when I had it out with myself or with another. The loss occurred off stage. And yet I cannot disavow words like “thanksgiving” or “host” or “communion bread.” They have an undying tremor and draw, like well water far down. (SP 163) What we have here is a rehearsal of Heaney’s entire religious journey—the initial piety, the “off stage” (unlike Joyce) loss, the recognition of the ongoing symbolic power. Maybe there’s a hint too of “Little Gidding” in the indirect reference to Eliot’s “timeless moment”: Eliot’s occurred (or he longed for it to occur) in adulthood, Heaney’s—the adult unbeliever—in childhood. But the tone throughout is solemn and respectful. And if he cannot “disavow,” neither can he “vow” anymore; a loss is acknowledged. While some critics have argued that the speaker could be either Heaney or Miłosz, it is hard to see how it could be the latter, especially with the line that “There was never a scene / when I had it out with myself,” hardly applicable to someone who was always having it out with himself, engaging in the “so I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead?” questionnaire rehearsed earlier, something that Heaney never does with himself. “Brancardier,” part two of the poem, recollects Heaney’s pilgrimage to Lourdes—a place that Miłosz had visited too with much more reli-



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gious relish—as a schoolboy where he helped care for the sick. His group stopped in Paris on the way (“Prayers for the Blessed M. M. Alacoque, / That she be canonized”), but they also had a more secular experience in the city of light, some details of which he now can’t remember: “All gone.” At Lourdes, Heaney helped carry the sick on their stretchers, saw a pilgrim group of Belgian miners, and heard “the unam sanctam catholicam acoustic / Of that underground basilica.” That experience is “maybe / Not gone but not what was meant to be, / The concrete reinforcement of the Mystic- / al Body, the Eleusis of its age.” The “maybe / Not gone” alludes to the remnant left (as opposed to the “All gone” memories of the secular parts of the journey), which is not the church-intended belief in the Mystical Body of Christ but rather an ongoing faith in the “Mystic” aspect of all things, a faith, however, originally inspired by Lourdes, a shrine that is in continuity with ancient Eleusis. The beliefs of one era morph into those of the next without posing too insistent a need to keep registering the transitions.29 In the third section, “Saw Music,” English-born Irish painter Barrie Cooke from his “actual palette” of “sludge and smudge” paints “‘godbeams,’ / Vents of brightness that make the light of heaven / Look like stretched sheets of fluted silk or rayon / In an old-style draper’s window.” Miłosz apparently deprecated painting as “a paltry thing.” Now, however, the Polish poet “lies this god-beamed day / Coffined in Krakow, as out of this world now / As the untranscendent music of the saw / He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw // And would not have renounced, however paltry.”30 Thus, it would seem, Miłosz in death is not “out of this world” in any transcendent way. He never gets to see the “lining of the world” that remains a mystery. In short, Heaney honors “The Master” by declaring his freedom from him. The scootering Herbert McCabe, the friend and maverick Dominican priest whom Heaney had known since the 1960s and with whom he was in intermittent contact, especially during the 1990s when he was professor of poetry at Oxford, presents a somewhat different case. Heaney 29. Heaney, District and Circle, 46–47. 30. Ibid., 48–49.

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attended McCabe’s funeral at Wolvercote, on the edge of Oxford, in 2001. Later, he composed what he called “a post-burial reflection,” likely written out of affection and a desire to do “the decent thing” in response to a request from McCabe’s Dominican confreres. It is all the more revealing for its very ordinariness—in no way is it a moment of remarkable insight on Heaney’s part, but it does confirm where he stood on the religious issue. Here he focuses on the sprinkling of holy water on McCabe’s simple coffin: “The rite was being carried out with that mixture of reverence and casualness which is the guarantee of a real tradition, so I presumed this was a special Dominican practice, to be performed exclusively by Herbert’s own family and the community; before long, however, everybody round the grave was getting into line and by the time we left the cemetery we had all cast a threefold blessing over him.” Then, referring to the homily, Heaney notes that it dealt with “Herbert’s orthodoxy and obedience” amidst a life of turmoil, reprimand, but overall celebration. The homily also included a mention of McCabe’s interest in Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, as well as his view that “when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about.”31 Heaney readily partook of the ceremonies and the celebration, but it was the word “orthodoxy” that he especially noticed, just as he had the invisible line between one diocese and another some fifty years earlier. McCabe had stood inside that line, Heaney—knowingly—beyond it. However much of McCabe’s belief Heaney shared—and it was probably substantial, since over the years and away from the pubs, he had observed and respected “the Blackfriars Herbert, striding the corridors, heading towards you in his Dominican habit . . . in thrall to Aquinas. Ready to do work in the kitchen or the confessional. Swinging into chapel with the rest of the community, singing the office”—its source lay not in any supernatural intervention but in the innate sanctity of the human experience.32 McCabe’s 1985 The Teaching of the Catholic Church: A New Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbering just seventy-six pages (264 31. Heaney, “Herbert McCabe, O.P. II,”, 251; Columba Ryan, OP, “Homily at Herbert McCabe’s Funeral,” New Blackfriars 82, no. 965/966 (July–August 2001): 308–12. 32. Heaney, “Herbert McCabe, O.P. II,” 251.



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entries) with its “Nihil obstat” and imprimatur attesting its reliability, had been commended in the official homily, and Heaney repeated the reference to its “simple beauty and strength” in his reflection. Had the poet ever looked at the tiny volume—which he, a self-declared connoisseur of catechisms, likely had—or even flipped to its final question, “To what are we destined beyond death?,” and its answer, “All the faithful are destined beyond death to the resurrection, when the kingdom of God will be finally established and we shall live our own real bodily lives, transfigured by the spirit and, in Christ, share the Father’s eternal life of understanding and joy. This is called heaven,” he would have understood that it was nothing like his own expectation. Had he turned to McCabe’s no. 161, which asks, “What is the minimum of belief?,” and answers “that God exists and cares for us,” but then noticed that no. 162 allows that with regard to atheists “only God himself can know our hearts with any certainty,” Seamus Heaney would almost certainly have been amused, comforted, but still skeptical. He was no longer a young, rebellious Stephen Dedalus—if he’d ever been such—but he too knew what “a believer in the narrow sense of the word” was, and that it had been a very long time since he himself had been one.33 Finally, Eamon Duffy, whom we met in several previous chapters, the Irish-born Cambridge historian of Christianity best known for his revisionist account of the Reformation in The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and on the fringes of the McCabe circle, confirms Heaney’s separation from things Catholic even as he admired them. Though almost a decade younger than Heaney, their early Irish educations have striking similarities. In an essay in Faith of Our Fathers, Duffy wonders why the “narrow” Catholicism of his 1950s childhood, “warts and all,” means more to him now than all his celebrated studies of religious movements and controversies in the interim. While Duffy admits that a journey into his subconscious and his family’s history would be needed to answer the question, the centerpiece of his reply is that he has a “growing appreciation of just how much of the essence of Catholicism my provincial Irish childhood transmitted to me”: 33. Heaney, “Herbert McCabe, O.P. II,” in Herbert McCabe, The Teaching of the Catholic Church (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1985), 78, 52.

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For all its apparent narrowness, it bore stronger witness than many modern forms of Catholicism to realities which have come to seem to me infinitely precious. Its ritual absolutes and rules look legalistic, rubric-mad today: but they spoke with a sure confidence of the sacramentality of life, the rootedness of the sacred not in pious feelings of “spirituality,” not in our heads or even exclusively our hearts, but in the gritty and messy realities of life, birth and death, water and stone and fire, bread and wine. The matter-of-fact ex opere operato [the doctrine that it is of no technical importance to the lay Catholic whether the priest administering religious rites is himself in a state of grace or of sin] confidence of our ritual world assured us that God was real, with a reality that did not depend on what we thought or how we felt about it. And its ritual contacts with the remote past, its shrines and graveyards and wells, helped us locate our little lives within longer and wider continuities.

As a consequence, the lives of ordinary people were “more dignified” then than now “because of the sense of their companionship with the holy dead.” Duffy ends, “We receive and proclaim the Catholic faith which comes to us from the apostles, we do not invent it: the Brothers, and my grandmother, knew that too.”34 Duffy’s very moving account appears—I say this with keen awareness that he is one of the most respected calibrators of the nuances of change in Reformation-era English Catholicism—to minimize the extent to which the doctrines and practices of the church have shifted over time, how much the culture of the 1950s made things seem more permanent than they really were; above all, it can be called into question by the many older people—like Heaney’s mother—who eventually recognized the artificiality of their earlier piety. That difference from traditional Catholicism (and from Duffy’s view) becomes clearer as Heaney elaborates on his own experience of aging and its religious consequences: “Getting older has . . . been a matter of dwelling with and imagining in terms of . . . archetypal patterns. . . . One of the things I’ve done with most relish is a 34. Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, 17–18, 19.



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version of the Messenger’s speech in Oedipus at Colonus, where he tells of the end of the old king, how he simply disappeared, assumed into earth rather than into heaven” (SS 472). In other words, Heaney believes our “assumption” will be in a reverse direction to that to which we had once aspired. And even when, in the 2000 Miller interview, Heaney mentions the importance of his early religious upbringing, it is in terms of his “mental formation” rather than a clarified religious appreciation and rededication, as was the case with Duffy.35 Happily—or conveniently at least—we know definitively that Heaney differs from Duffy because the latter’s 2013 essay on “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism” says so clearly. There Duffy presents Heaney as a onetime believer caught up in the rural Catholicism of his childhood that he later abandoned, though he retained a nostalgic sympathy with it and had little interest in the developments of the post–Vatican II era. Duffy marks the stages of Heaney’s disenchantment from his not being able to “‘credit’ the universal faith in which he was raised,” to Christianity being “increasingly experienced as weight,” to “a decisive turning away from any overt or at any rate continuing catholic identity,” to the subject matter engaged with being “entirely secular,” even if that secularized matter ends in an epiphany that a Christian “might want to call the work of grace.”36 Moreover, Duffy’s own account of what he would think essential to even an evolving Catholicism clearly rules Heaney out: this includes confidence that “We can believe, and hope, and love, because God has drawn near to us . . . above all in the history of Israel and in the person of Christ,” and belief “in the reality of revelation” and “that the Church is entrusted with it.”37 Summing up again rather broadly: my sense of things is that Heaney was never seriously tempted to return to orthodox Roman Catholicism, however much he was aware of the loss of its promises. In different ways, however, Eliot and Kavanagh validated and extended his interest in the numinous and the transcendental rather than in the doctrinal aspects 35. Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller, 32. 36. Duffy, “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism,” 166, 168, 176, 182. 37. Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, 18–19.

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of that tradition. McCabe and Duffy, both friends, would have reminded him of his separation and difference, though with more camaraderie than censure or intrusiveness. Miłosz is the wild card: admired, respected, in almost total sync with Heaney in his views on the importance of poetry, and very compelling in his seesawing between belief and unbelief and his intimate knowledge of all things Catholic, he also seems to have been someone whom Heaney watched from a distance, and from whom he kept his distance. Here again, one needs to add that all five affirmed more than Heaney ever has. In this smorgasbord, then, Heaney seems closest to Miłosz, though perhaps more comfortable with his own conclusions, and dramatically less concerned with the scientific considerations that bother the Pole. What c onclu sions can we come to, then, from having taken, perhaps penitentially dragged, Heaney by the stations of these two groups of writers, the alienated and the believers? Heaney and Miłosz are not one in their inherited Catholicism—that is to say, Heaney does not assent “to the stark, astonishing proposition that through the incarnation of the Son of God in the figure of Christ, the eternal has intersected with time, and through that intersection human beings, though creatures of time, have access to a reality out of time.” One might then be tempted to say that Heaney is Catholically eclectic, whereas Yeats is Occultly or Transcendentally such. But that would be misleading, identifying him as a “cafeteria Catholic” who chooses and rejects according to taste while still presuming to belong to the church. Defining his situation is complex, though the complexity is not of a profoundly theological nature. Heaney was by choice outside the boundaries of belief as orthodoxly defined, and as he would have recognized them from his childhood background; he was inside those boundaries in that he accepted the impulse toward transcendence that Catholicism represents. But, contrary to what the Abrahamic faiths all claim, the transcendent remains unknown and, for Heaney, has not revealed itself, so that the doctrines presented by these bodies have no sanction, no authority beyond their truth to the human condition. Heaney was not quite a deist without a belief in a revelation, but rather



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an agnostic, but hopeful, transcendentalist. By the same token, Heaney would probably not be too concerned with the current finding that most Americans of all denominations are only vaguely aware of their group’s specific doctrines, that—as Harold Bloom argued over twenty years ago—a vague gnosis prevails.38 Or maybe one should narrow that statement to say that Heaney would not be too concerned as long as the eternal verities are retained. In his translation of Beowulf, for example, Heaney is less troubled than other scholars by the Christian scribal intrusions, as these can be seen as being in surprising continuity with those traditions from earlier centuries. Accepting the Christian perspective within the poem as historically received, Heaney claims that “the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now been comprehended as part of another pattern.”39 So what he himself has done in his life is to go on to another stage, incorporating the Christian-Catholic past into yet “another pattern.” When poet Christian Wiman, then editor of Poetry, spoke with Heaney at a dinner in Chicago a few months before he died in August 2013, the frail sage told him “he felt caught between the old forms of faith that he had grown up with in Northern Ireland and some new dispensation that had not yet emerged.”40 38. See Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 39. Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Norton 2000), xvi. 40. Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 88–89, 94.

Chapter 11

N o t es fr o m Under g r o u nd

B

y t he early 2000s, Dublin had changed dramatically since Seamus Heaney and his young family arrived there in 1972. At the end of that decade, just a year prior to Ireland’s first papal visit, a new (Matt) Talbot Memorial Bridge was built over the Liffey honoring a saintly dock laborer from the early 1900s who had recovered from alcoholism and dedicated the rest of his life to prayer and extreme mortification. His tale was known to generations of Dublin Catholics and was often commended by a celibate clergy as an (improbable) ideal for laboring, married men. By 2003, when “the Pope’s children” had all grown up, the city’s newest bridge farther up the Liffey was dedicated to James Joyce, a name once so reviled that it was rarely mentioned even in the schools he had attended. Now there were annual celebrations in the center of the city commemorating the new holy day of June 16 (Bloomsday), with monuments and museums to Joyce seemingly everywhere as though the city had been rebuilt in his honor. The new world had gay pride parades, whole areas populated by Poles, Chinese, and Nigerians (much less likely to be the privileged medical students from the missionary days of the 1950s and ’60s), among other immigrants, and a vibrant women’s movement of recent success with even more revolutionary ambitions ahead. Meanwhile, the city’s main Roman Catholic seminary had closed in 2001 for lack of vocations to the priesthood, while convent numbers were in steep decline. Now it wouldn’t be hard at all to cross the city without encountering a single priest or nun, though several of them must have been going about

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their business anonymously, those few identifiable, the defiant ones, like ghosts from the past. The rest of Ireland, too, had changed, if more slowly. Even in the country towns and villages, the clergy in their off hours wore the same shirts and baggy brown pants as everyone else their age. Former seminaries belonging to once-revered religious orders that occupied eighteenth-century manses were reverting back to their original secular uses as they were being purchased by the new elites. In short, the religious estate had contracted, and the golfers were moving in on the lawns. And in the midst of all this, the swelling tide of clerical abuse revelations and governmental inquiries was threatening to swamp the entire religious enterprise.1 The soiled linens of the Magdalene laundries were finally being washed in public. It was during this new decade of ever increasing change that an equally fast-paced, probably overextended Seamus Heaney suffered a mild stroke in 2006. He recovered, kept writing (even about “the sunlit cold // Of a Sunday morning ambulance,” his “gaze ecstatic and bisected / By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula”), and lived to see his seventieth birthday celebrated, like Bloomsday, on the national stage, a truly monumental occasion in the history of the Republic.2 It was on that day in 2009—or in a recording studio shortly before it—that Heaney both gave a stark account of his religious thinking and provoked some pushback as a consequence. Marian Finucane, a well-respected RTÉ interviewer with her own radio show, began by stating that after researching Heaney’s various writings, she still wasn’t clear about where he stood “in terms of religiosity and death and faith.” It was an interesting and perhaps a defensible comment and query in such an interview format, but one too that suggests some obscurity in the poet’s longtime “message.” Heaney’s response—unprepared, unlike his answers for the O’Driscoll interviews— 1. Irish Times Religious Affairs correspondent Patsy McGarry provides an excellent overview of how the sequence of abuse scandals were dealt with by church and government. See his “‘The Times They Are a Changin’: Tracing the Transformation of Irish Catholicism through the Eyes of a Journalist,” in Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 23–37. 2. Heaney, “Chanson d’Aventure,” in Human Chain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 13–15.

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is informative. Rehearsing his rural Catholic childhood where religion comprised “rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, judgement at the hour of death, and the fear and trembling of that,” he ended with “now, over the years that has disappeared. Obviously.” Pressed to elaborate, Heaney said that he believed in death as “extinction,” adding, “That’s what happens.” After further questioning, the poet explained that “the Christian message is about faith in this life.” He followed with asserting that, apart from “those entrusted with the Magisterium, the teaching of the Church, I think that clergymen, sisters, nuns, the official Church is much less dogma-bound than it was. And I think that the faithful, so to speak . . . are . . . less orthodox, certainly than they were.” Asked again about whether our happiness was here below rather than in heaven, Heaney repeated that the older view had “disappeared,” followed by a rhetorical “who on earth now, with a few orthodox exceptions I would say, believes that their reward is in eternity? I mean who among the Irish middle classes sits up at night and thinks that? Maybe I overestimate that, but it’s . . . a hazy area for those brought up with belief.”3 Irish Times journalist John Waters, a onetime agnostic but now enthusiastically back in the fold, fairly or otherwise, was deeply “bothered” by Heaney’s declarations, attributing them to the casual and unexamined secularism of the age. He objected that “it did not appear to occur either to Heaney himself or to his interviewer that he might well have been striking despair and distress into the hearts of some of his listeners.”4 The academic response to Waters’s response has, understandably, been that had he been reading his Heaney over the years, he wouldn’t have dismissed the latter’s skepticism as a mere afflatus of the secular zeitgeist.5 But it could also be argued that an older radio audience, many of whom, though proud of Heaney’s success, were probably unable to cite the title of even a single poem of 3. John Waters, Beyond Consolation: How We Became Too “Clever” for God and Our Own Good (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 116, 121, 123–24. 4. Ibid., 130. 5. See Auge, “Surviving Death in Heaney’s Human Chain,” 29. Peter Mulholland, in Love’s Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), reports a 1984 study “showing that nearly a quarter of the Catholics surveyed did not believe in life after death” (3).



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his, would be dismayed to find their next-life expectations so cavalierly dismissed by a national icon. Whatever the case, after the Finucane interview it would be hard to deny the fact of Heaney’s unbelief, though it is interesting that he should imply that so many of those engaged in the church’s official ministries had also come part of the way with him. He must have been talking with them. I n t he narr ow er world of literary critique, meanwhile, Heaney’s last two poetry volumes made fewer waves. Calvin Bedient thought of District and Circle (2006), discussed in the previous chapter, as being “largely about what can be fondly remembered,” and that while the writing “has real distinction, the book itself lacks importance. To put it another way: the world has changed, but Heaney’s art has not.”6 In World Literature Today, William Pratt too judged that “the poems carry surprisingly little weight and contain no heart-stopping lines.”7 But, with an eye out for the specific Catholic references, John Breslin in America spotted that while “Saw Music” (the third part of “Out of This World,” the poem dedicated to Miłosz) begins with words that echo the baptismal liturgy, “‘Q. Do you renounce the world? / A. I do renounce it,’” Heaney “uses only a portion of this ritual dialogue, the renouncing part, but omits the far more crucial lines about clinging to Christ and his church.” Nevertheless, Breslin ended with an overall commendation.8 Clive Wilmer in the New Statesman made a similar observation from the other side: “The Christian afterlife is aerial and celestial. The pagan realm of the dead, by contrast, belongs to the earth. District and Circle is a book about death very much in that pagan sense.”9 Heaney’s final collection, Human Chain (2010), continues his dialogue with Miłosz both directly and indirectly and gets added significance in the “replacing faith” venture from the fact that it comes post Miłosz’s 6. Calvin Bedient, Review of District and Circle, Chicago Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 161, 162. 7. William Pratt, Review of District and Circle, World Literature Today (January–February 2007): 73–74. 8. John Breslin, “Everyday Renewals,” America, November 9, 2006, 30. 9. Clive Wilmer, Review of District and Circle, New Statesman, April 12, 2006, 48–49.

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death (and overmastering influence), post Heaney’s stroke, and, indeed, post his birthday revelations, which, paradoxically, may have ended up lifting a weight from his shoulders. As Louisa Thomas notes succinctly, “This is poetry written from within that bright nowhere, as it were—death isn’t only an inevitability on the horizon; it surrounds him. The line has been crossed; this is poetry from the other side.”10 Thomas’s comment is an exaggeration, of course—in 2011, Heaney was being solicited to run for the Irish presidency—but it does point to the gravitas of his situation as he himself, shaken by his illness, engages existentially with last things. To begin with, Human Chain reminds its readers not only of our links together and dependence on one another—the theme of the title poem— but also of our other “chain,” the unbreakable attachment we have to this earth. Thus, in a loose (“my own words”) translation of lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, souls in the underworld long to shed their memories of that afterlife abode and “dwell in flesh and blood / Under the dome of the sky” (SP 197–98).11 At the same time, however, we seem eternally condemned to want to transcend earth’s confines. “A Mite Box” thus recalls a time when “each donation” made to the school collection for the foreign missions was “Accounted for by a pinprick in a card,” so providing “A way for all to see a way to heaven.”12 A tension remains therefore between an acceptance that this is all (and should be all), and a desire to see the light that will explain everything and make us happy forever. The pinprick—and it is no more than that—that even Richard Dawkins would allow for uncertainty about a divinity remains, replacing the blaze of light that once shone in through the church’s clerestory with a faint ray of a very unlikely, but not impossible, beatific future. Or maybe the “feel” of the cardboard mite box “in your cupped palm” as the boy assigned went from classroom to classroom is just a memory of what had once been and now no longer is? In section ix of “Hermit Songs,” a series in which he retraces the stages of his artistic development, Heaney both invokes Miłosz and Yeats and 10. Louisa Thomas, “Seamus Heaney’s Near-Death Experience,” Newsweek, September 30, 2010, accessed January 30, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/seamus-heaneys-near-deathexperience-71917. 11. Heaney, Human Chain, 47–48. 12. Ibid., 18.



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distances himself from each of them in turn: “A great one has put faith in ‘meaning’ / That runs through space like a word / Screaming and protesting, another in // ‘Poet’s imaginings / And memories of love.’” Heaney’s faith is more mundane in that he simply aspires to go on writing: “steady-handedness maintained / In books against its vanishing.”13 He establishes a difference from his fellow Nobel laureates concerning last things without spelling it out. The title of Heaney’s poem in memory of his lifelong friend David Hammond, “The door was open and the house was dark,” is reminiscent of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, where the Victorian poet moved from arriving at the dark house of his dead friend for “A hand that can be clasp’d no more,” then passed through a crisis of geology-provoked rumination and despair, only to be reassured while rereading Hallam’s letters that his friend still lived in a heavenly realm, finally returning joyfully to the same house where “in my thoughts with scarce a sigh / I take the pressure of thine hand.”14 For Heaney, in the virtual presence of his absent friend, “there was no danger, / Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming / Emptiness”—which seems like a good description of a nonexistent afterlife (SP 214).15 Where Tennyson imaginatively and self-convincingly encounters his dead friend, Heaney only wistfully recalls his. It needs to be acknowledged, I think, that, on the surface at least, there’s a problem about this whole afterlife theme in Heaney, one going back several decades. The afterlife doesn’t exist—it is, as Heaney said of Kavanagh, “inside himself”—yet the poet proposes to keep telling us not only about its absence, but about its dimensions and even its furniture (FK 148). Magdalena Kay foregrounds some of the dilemma: “Modern elegists do not tend to believe in ‘successful’ mourning. . . . When the notions of appropriate judgment and a benevolent heaven are put into doubt, the question of how to adequately mourn the dead, to liberate oneself from morbid melancholy or excessive grief, becomes unanswerable.”16 She also does a remarkable job in tracing the arc of Heaney’s 13. Ibid., 77. The Yeats poem referred to is “The Tower.” 14. Tennyson, In Memoriam, sections VII and CXIX. Multiple editions. 15. Heaney, Human Chain, 81. 16. Magdalena Kay, “Death and Everyman: Imagining a ‘Not Unwelcoming Emptiness,’” 64.

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poetry from Seeing Things to Human Chain as it relates to death and the afterlife. Kay emphasizes, rightly, that “Heaney knows the feeling of being ‘ungratified’ by a reality harder and darker than what we feel we have been promised,” and that “throughout his life . . . Heaney is attracted to the traditional notion of a final account, a last look at the shape of one’s life.” But his realization that “there is no next-time-round” (from “Squarings,” in OG 332) sets up the need for an acceptable alternative. Kay argues therefore that, for Heaney, a “parallel—not necessarily compensatory—vision must be established.” In pursuing this course, and along the way, she shows how Heaney mourns differently for different deaths, those of his family being more questioning of the religious promises than the elegies for dead friends, and that collective disaster—as in the London Underground bombings of 2005—elicits a different poetic response from individual tragedy. Kay’s vision quest eventually leads to her finding a kind of solution in “A Herbal,” described as “a new accomplishment” where death is “utterly physical.”17 I emphasize the latter statement. This is an important poem, and a very significant claim is being made about it, so I want to spend this and the next paragraph on its argument (even if it doesn’t have anything so crude). I should also mention that, following my own initial reading of “A Herbal” (a title that, as a longtime resident of the United States, I now find difficult to say) I’m selecting Kay’s interpretation from among at least two others that appear to go in almost entirely different directions (ones with which I’m also sympathetic, however), since hers pursues the afterlife theme more consistently.18 I approach “A Herbal” in the following way: the subtitle to the poem notes that it is “After Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretagne,’” a reference to twentieth-century French Breton poet Eugène Guillevic, who began life as a faithful Catholic, but later rejected the church as he became immersed in a variety of socialist causes throughout a very long lifetime. So here we have another of Heaney’s creative translations or adaptations in 17. Ibid., 54, 55–56, 56–57, 63, 66. 18. The two others here are Richard Rankin Russell’s in Seamus Heaney, 209–11, and Michael Parker’s in his essay “Renewed, Transfigured, in Another Pattern: Metaphor and Displacement in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain,” in Eugene O’Brien, “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances,” 152–55.



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the tradition of Sweeney Astray, Beowulf, Aeneid Book VI, and similar undertakings, all more than less faithful, all less than more unfaithful. All set out to make a point, however, all to record an experience that interests Heaney and that reflects the peculiarities of his own interests. The scene in “A Herbal” is of a graveyard with flourishing plants “Sinking their roots / In all the dynasties / Of the dead.” The question posed early on: is “graveyard grass” any “Different from ordinary / Field grass?” Unlike the deceased, the wind-blown grass in the graveyard never “rests in peace,” while “The bracken / closes and curls back / On its secrets, // The best kept / Upon earth.” Meanwhile, the dead constantly arriving in their hearses “are borne / Towards the future,” which presumably means, from a totally physical perspective, that they will turn into the fertilizer that is part of the ecosystem of the cemetery. A childhood memory of being in a graveyard follows. What one knows about the universe, bad and good, comes from having faced its terrors here: “The tail of a rat / We killed,” nettles described as “Malignant things, letting on / To be asleep,” but also “dock leaves / To cure the vicious stings.” The poem ends with a wistful, and very tricky, question: Where can it be found again, An elsewhere world, beyond Maps and atlases, Where all is woven into And of itself, like a nest Of crosshatched grass blades? Remembering my own childhood play either alone or with others in a village graveyard hundreds of years old in Ireland, I think I have a grip on the first three lines: I detect a note of nostalgia for a lost world, though I’m not sure whether it is religious or not. However, I’m stymied by the final three. With regard to them, I thought I had aerial liftoff, but have been returned to “crosshatched grass blades.” I swing for the stands. The graveyard is the “nest” where the dead “rest,” all the time being transformed into whatever grows there, “borne / Towards the future” of herbal

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life. It’s an “elsewhere world,” but “its secrets” are “The best kept / Upon earth.” In other words, we know nothing about the life underneath except in the fertility of its constant reproduction, which too will come to an end eventually. It is a magical place, an “elsewhere world” out of the busy mainstream, but the only afterlife is in becoming part of its soil, nourishing its plants, and, maybe, giving bitter-sweet thoughts to the few relatives and friends who visit (in addition to the happy children who satisfy their curiosity there). I’m embarrassingly aware it’s a rather simple reading, unsatisfactory even to me. Magdalena Kay digs deeper: “When we bring ashes to ashes, earth to earth, we may not rest in peace but participate in a Heraclitean flux.” So, Heaney “adds the search for ‘an elsewhere world’ to the poem’s end, to signify not homecoming but a journey onward, outward.” She goes on to ask, however, whether such a poem “invalidate[s] the elegiac project altogether by evading the reality of death and grief?” I’m with her here and am relieved to see the earth-to-earth theme being kept in mind. Her answer, however, is unexpected—as she herself seems to acknowledge: “The vision of ‘A Herbal’ is surprisingly bright.” Thus, Kay continues, Henry Vaughan’s “previously questioned line—‘All gone into the world of light?’ [from “Squarings xliv,” in OG 362]—can now be affirmed. . . . The pull of Catholicism, seen as the ‘tremor and draw’ of hidden water in ‘Out of This World,’ is curiously bypassed” in this parallel or alternative “postCatholic resolution.” I’m feeling a little out of my depth, but continue on: “We are enclosed by air instead of water, a material landscape rather than an emblematic one; the primum mobile here is earth itself. . . . Perhaps this is how Death summons Everyman—by cutting him loose from the history, politics, familial ties, and stories constituting the substance of the self. The turn from symbolic emblems to physical things that survive death or even take sustenance from it—as plants flourish among graves— is accomplished by this summons. As we leave behind the subjective self, we also leave behind pathos.” Her rather organic conclusion is that “there is new beauty in this view of death as entrance into the unknown, a new verbal space we cannot know, not an underworld but, more radiantly, ‘an elsewhere world, beyond // Maps and atlases.’” The conclusion, however,



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remains somewhat unclear to me, “a new verbal space” being hardly more comforting than having the contents of one’s brain uploaded to a digital server and wondering if the “I” will survive in the “crosshatched” data.19 Better to be part of the physical landscape. As I’ve come to like the poem more and to find rest and even consolation in it, I’m also keenly aware, however, that its supposed resolution is less a case of the reader being “persuaded” into its meaning than being “helped” in by the fascinating and inventive scholarly commentary it has invited.20 “Route 110,” an “autobiographical sequence” that “plotted incidents from [Heaney’s] own life against certain well-known episodes in [Aeneid] Book VI,” is another important poem in which Heaney seeks a “solution” to the death problem. Here the young Heaney persona purchases a secondhand copy of the Latin poet and makes his way to the bus for home “Parrying the crush with my bagged Virgil.” The “racks of suits and overcoats” in the open market along the way are “Like their owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge.” We’re quickly, and fairly convincingly, in the underworld. Memories of his own life wearing various suits follow, ending with a trip to Etruscan Italy in one of them “to a small brick chapel / To find myself there the one most at home” (presumably as a result of his study of Virgil). Later, the golden bough needed to enter the underworld comes from a Catholic “votive jampot” in a friend’s house that “lit me home” in the dark. In this “age of ghosts,” too, the interrogating and intimidating RUC night patrols of Northern Ireland are recalled as Heaney makes his way to a wake for a young man drowned swimming in the Bristol Channel (a reference to Aeneas’s drowned helmsman Palinurus). Afterward, “The corpse house then [becomes] a house of hospitalities / Right through the small hours.” There’s “The antiphonal recital of known events / And others rare, clandestine, undertoned.” There’s a recollection of a girlfriend mistreated by him “after our holdings on / And holdings back, the necking / And nay-saying age of impurity.” The dead of his past reappear—ones killed in the Troubles, their body parts scattered and 19. Kay, “Death and Everyman,” 67, 67–69. 20. Russell, Seamus Heaney, goes in a completely different direction on this one. See 209–11.

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bagged—“what in the end was there left to bury”? The next group mentioned (in x) are “Virgil’s happy shades” engaged in the fun and tussles of a sports day. Section xi is a bit trickier, but points to several things imperfectly seen at twilight—“an otter’s head” (maybe not, but there’s “No doubting, all the same / The gleam”), “shades and shadows stirring on the brink.” All this leads to “the age of births,” “mother and child” arriving back “from the nursing home.” Heaney’s welcoming “fresh plucked flowers,” his “bunch of stalks,” have now become the golden bough that allows him to return to normal life and the new beginning that his grandchild promises: it is this child that represents—and is the only representation of—those dead family ancestors from whom she has sprung. What was a Virgilian transmigration of souls has become a Mendelian transmission of genes, so to speak. A problem is that we have to know our Virgil to understand the significance of the differences between old text and new treatment (and even poet Mark Jarman, familiar with both and laudatory of Heaney’s final extended translation, found it “a bit of a puzzle to identify the correspondences”).21 The five-part “Loughanure,” written “In memory of Colin Middleton” (an artist friend), is another strange case. The first section describes a painting of the west of Ireland that Heaney had purchased from Middleton decades earlier and that the painter looks at every time he visits the poet. Section ii abruptly plunges us into the metaphysical: “So this is what an afterlife can come to?,” and a description of the painted scene follows. The references somehow mean that we in the afterlife are looking back as Middleton did on his visits. “This for an answer to [Dante] Alighieri / And Plato’s Er?”—and the reader might agree with the sense of letdown. In their afterlife myths, Dante and Plato “watched immortal souls / Choose lives to come according as they were // Fulfilled or repelled by existences they’d known / Or suffered first time round.” So here, it would seem, there’s a second time ’round available, in which Odysseus might come back as “a private man,” Orpheus “as a swan.”22 This leads in part 21. Mark Jarman, “You Are Not Finished: Seamus Heaney’s Translation of the Aeneid Book VI,” Hudson Review (Autumn 2016): 510. 22. Heaney, Human Chain, 59–62.



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iii to Heaney wondering “Will the Kingdom / Come?” for him too. He has had “The idea of it there / Behind its scrim since font and fontanel,” and the possibility “Breaks like light or water.” In a complicated few lines, he makes a Bosch-like reference to Middleton looking at the world from between his legs “For the mystery of the hard and fast / To be unveiled.” The poem winds down with scenes of possibility from Heaney’s youthful visits to the Gaeltacht in the 1950s, his shyness there, what could have been, ending with his later revisiting “the skyline the one constant thing / As I drive unhomesick, unbelieving,” as he remembers the other little pleasures of his first visit, all this presumably his “afterlife” of the experience. Commenting on “And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom / Come?,” Richard Rankin Russell speculates that “although [Heaney] quickly deflates the eruption of eternal life in a Christian context with a story of Middleton bending over and looking between his legs ‘Like an arse-kisser’s in some vision of the damned,’ the possibility of everlasting life gleams on in the poem, suffusing his recounting of a Gaelic story with a paradise inside a ‘fairy hill’” that Heaney didn’t understand because of his poor Irish at the time.23 Russell continues, “If he had, ‘Language and longing might have made a leap / Up through that cloudswabbed air, [where] the horizon lightened / And the far ‘Lake of the Yew Tree’ gleamed.’”24 Then, at the end, comes Russell’s pure—and unconvincing—speculation: “Simply entertaining the possibility of that restored childhood world he returns to in the last two stanzas might suggest his continued openness to the restoration of the world as a whole through a providential act, perhaps at Christ’s Second Coming, although he explicitly does not invoke this eschatology.”25 No, he doesn’t! Both Kay and Russell here are dogged by a “might suggest” qualification in their analyses of these two respective poems. Maybe Heaney himself expected us to do more work than we want to—or maybe he himself hasn’t given as much detail (deliberately drawing rather than painting: “The blanknesses that the line travels through in a drawing are not ev23. Ibid., 61. 24. Ibid. 25. Russell, Seamus Heaney, 216–17.

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idence of any incapacity on the artist’s part to fill them in”) as the reader would wish (FK 156). However, we can make conclusions: “A Herbal” ends with us becoming no more than parts of the ecosystem—a worthy enough goal and all the more satisfying in this climate-conscious era; “Route 110” ends with the only form of new life that any of us can have: our direct or indirect or communal transmission of our genes to the coming generation—or, more accurately, the new generation consists of our successful transmission of those genes. I n spi t e of w ha t Kay says earlier (and she would probably agree), there isn’t a final word—that is, a final poetic word—of closure, or at least, of total, satisfactory closure, from Heaney, though he has advanced to seeing our physical death as terminal at this end, our only life afterward being in our biological transfers in the various forms they will take. It couldn’t have been otherwise. In regard to death, there is, after all, a very strong sense of him hitting a wall—Heaney, no more than the rest of us, knew what lay beyond: as he noted in the Yeats-Larkin essay, that is “unknown and unknowable” (FK 345). Even the once admired Thomas Merton had no simplistic acceptance of things unseen: “Instead of facing the inscrutable fact that the dead are no longer there, and that we don’t know what happens to them, we affirm that they are there, somewhere, and we know. . . . But we don’t know, and our act of faith should be less facile; it should be rooted in our unknowing.”26 Somewhat similarly, in 1986, in The Government of the Tongue, Heaney had commented on the relationship between religion and freedom: “In ideal republics, in Soviet republics, in the Vatican and Bible belt, it is a common expectation that the writer will sign over his or her individual, venturesome and potentially disruptive activity into the keeping of an official doctrine, a traditional system, a party line, whatever” (FK 198). Heaney would not do that. But neither would he likely agree with Paul Muldoon’s view that “organized religion is the same as organized crime,” nor with his fellow-graduate from St. Columb’s, politician and journalist Eamonn McCann, that Catholicism is 26. Merton, Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 6, 1966–1967 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 260.



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simply “untrue,” “there was no substance to it.”27 The substance, Heaney might say, remains in the genuine quest for a beyond and can take many different forms as it adapts to different places and times; whether that “beyond” is there or not is beside the point, as the possibility itself expresses a needed dimension to our otherwise all-too-insular existence. This conclusion is, of course, a long, long way from Roman Catholic “orthodoxy.” Indeed, coining the kind of phrase that would likely have appealed to a Heaney who once noted that there was more of Derry than Derrida in his work, one might argue that there is more of numen than Newman in his final religious position. If he did not explicitly identify what doctrines precisely had led him to leave the church—though that of transubstantiation seems to have been one of them—it was probably because most of the groundwork for such a rupture had been laid by others— including Joyce—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and alternative narratives of belief and unbelief solidly established. An earlier generation had already “turfed out” the material much as Heaney claimed the Greeks had done for the Romans. He seems too to have experienced in the deaths of his own parents the sense that there was, indeed, no afterlife. While he lived with an acute awareness of the loss of his childhood and adolescent beliefs, “leaving” the church as such was no longer the disruptive gesture that it once had been, since even the caretakers were turning a blind, or at least not unkind, eye on those departing in peace. Heaney could freely pursue his own alternative “echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements” (OG 245–46); he could rejoice in poetry as a form of salvation while we are alive, giving us access to a realm of consciousness not otherwise available to us, though still a part of our human inheritance; he could finally face death with equanimity, “leave behind the subjective self,” “leave behind pathos,” and, to adapt ever so slightly what W. H. Auden confirmed of W. B. Yeats, “become his admirers.”28

27. Paul Muldoon, “Why It’s Poetic Justice to Denounce Catholic Abuse,” accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/why-its-poetic-justice-to-denouncecatholic-abuse-28528953.html; Fitzpatrick, Boys of St. Columb’s, 165. See also McCann’s Dear God. 28. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

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By his ow n acc ou n t , at the turn of the millennium, Seamus Heaney no longer feared death “in the way I’d have feared it sixty years ago, fearful of dying in the state of mortal sin and suffering the consequences for all eternity.” Now “it’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.” Heaney still embraced the rituals of the church as they relate to the dead: “I think it’s the right moment for ceremony. The funeral pyre is one thing, the crematorium something else. At that stage you want a stand taken against nothingness and a word spoken . . . rather like the one in Miłosz’s poem ‘Meaning,’ a word that ‘runs . . . Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.’” But then Heaney added a coda that seemed to separate him from his Polish friend: “At Miłosz’s own funeral, of course, it was a sung mass rather than a galactic screech, and that suited him since he was a practicing Catholic, if a very sceptical one” (SS 472). And when Heaney talked, comfortably and playfully, of where he himself might be buried, while denominational faith played a part, it was mostly in the sense of his being grounded with members of his family and the icons of his tribe (SS 474). The circumstances of Seamus Heaney’s actual death at the end of August 2013 appear to have been relatively fortunate (insofar as death can be deemed fortunate in any circumstance): while frail and ill, he died unexpectedly in the midst of creative activities and future plans. His last message—texted on his way to a serious surgery from which, however, he was expected to recover—was Noli Timere (“Do not be afraid”), a message in keeping with his stated philosophy. He had used the phrase before, of course—“Tell the truth. Do not be afraid” in the revised version of “The Master.”29 As his son Michael added in a talk to hospice participants two years later, “It seemed to us that he had encapsulated the swirl of emotion, uncertainty and fear he was facing at the end, and articulated it in a restrained yet inspiring way.”30 A year later again, in 2016, his widow, Marie, explained in an interview that her husband had expressed his 29. Compare the version in Station Island (1984) with that in Opened Ground (1998). 30. Mick Heaney, “My Father’s Famous Last Words.”



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desire for a Requiem Mass (as had John McGahern with his local parish priest seven years earlier). She added, “For him it gave to people a sense of transcendence, a sense of something beyond us even though you may not believe in it.”31 So, the poet had the full Catholic services of a local church in Dublin (though not a sung mass), attended by the great and the good and the many in between. Even for someone like me, an amateur aficionado of Catholic rituals watching the service on a laptop almost four thousand miles away, while it was interesting to observe who approached the altar rail for communion and who did not, it was striking that everyone there seemed to want to be there, an extremely rare phenomenon. The occasion also had the formality and casualness that Heaney said was a mark of true authenticity. Seamus Heaney “entered the door of death forever” and was afterward buried in a churchyard in County Derry where his people came from.32 There he lies under ash and sycamore trees, close to his baby brother, Christopher, his mother, his father, his two aunts, and his sister Anne, but separate from them. A Ballaghy woman explained to the Irish Times that the parish priest “‘felt he should have a place of his own.’”33 Even if this account of the decision-making process is unlikely to be accurate, the remark offers a certain pleasing confirmation of Heaney’s sense of ecclesiastical boundaries. When, sometime later at their home in Dublin, Marie came upon the reading glasses he had not been able to find, wherever Seamus was, like Henry Vaughan over three centuries earlier, he no longer needed them. H eane y ’ s R om an C at holic f u neral was a surprise to some, however. Helen Vendler, who attended the ceremony, later reaffirmed Heaney’s unbelief: “Brought up a Catholic, he was no longer a believer as an adult, but he also remarked that one cannot forget the culture in which 31. Kathy Sheridan, “Marie Heaney: ‘I Had a Very Public Grief,’” Irish Times, September 10, 2016. In this interview, Marie Heaney also refers to “Dover Beach” as “one of the greatest poems in the English language.” 32. Heaney, Electric Light, 62. 33. Quoted in Patsy McGarry, “Seamus Heaney Recalled as He Rests in a Country Churchyard,” Irish Times, September 1, 2015.

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one was raised. He attended no church, but by his own wish was buried at a Catholic Mass.” She added, almost apologetically, that “there is no other way to bury someone from the Catholic tradition in Ireland,” which isn’t wholly correct.34 A scattered few devout believers thought the Catholic funeral inappropriate for one who no longer professed the faith and that it was an example of the church caving in to an important cultural figure. Enda McDonagh, the theologian and Heaney friend who was a concelebrant at the Mass, seemed a little uncomfortable a week later in his obituary article in the English Tablet, quoting another priest friend of Heaney that the deceased was “above all . . . a poet of the Catholic imagination,” and himself desiring to show “how Heaney’s work may help to deepen our understanding and our lives as Christians.” Choosing to comment on “Out of This World,” the poem Heaney had dedicated to the memory of Miłosz, McDonagh interpreted it less as an autobiographical account of Heaney’s loss of belief—he wasn’t “arrogantly trying to gauge Heaney’s faith”—but more about his inability to “disavow words like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’ / or ‘Communion bread.’” For McDonagh, “Heaney is a great nurturer of the Catholic imagination” and thus very relevant “in the current depressed state of the Church in Ireland, and the patchy level of faith and practice.”35 But perhaps the greatest surprise—at least for those who keep watch over a rapidly changing Ireland—was that so few people, laity or clergy, were surprised at all at Heaney’s receiving such religious rites. Unlike James Joyce, there was no need for Seamus Heaney to make a statement about belief or unbelief in his passing, or for the church to do so either. Brian Moore in 1999 certainly hadn’t wanted such ceremonies for himself, though his Irish relatives insisted on a Requiem Mass in Belfast where the officiating priest was clearly confused about the deceased’s 34. Vendler, “My Memories of Seamus Heaney,” New Republic, October 3, 2013, accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114706/seamus-heaney-1939-2013eulogy-helen-vendler. 35. McDonagh, “The Word Made Flesh,” Tablet, September 7, 2013. Louise Fuller, in her “Revisiting the Faith of Our Fathers . . . and Reimaging Its Relevance in the Context of TwentyFirst Century Ireland,” in Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), also latches onto these same lines for comfort (47).



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religious views.36 Miłosz’s much more elaborate funeral was threatened by angry Poles who judged that his short stint in the diplomatic service of the Communist government disqualified him from such honors. As with Philip Larkin’s self-arranged Anglican services, Heaney’s funeral indicated an attachment to the culture from which he had come, though the Irish poet’s link was probably more rooted than was Larkin’s, and deeper than that of many of those “faithful” still above ground. Writing in the Heythrop Journal in 2018 on the theological problems of providing church services for the funerals of self-declared agnostics— those of Heaney, Nuala O’Faolain, John McGahern, and Maeve Binchy are specifically mentioned—Fiona Lynch explains that “the Church stands firm in her [own] agnosticism about the status of the individual soul before God.” After rehearsing a fairly standard Catholic view of European intellectual history, secular and sacred, along the way, and enfolding Wittgenstein and Stevens into her argument, Lynch finally settles on a quotation from Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (in itself a nicely ironic choice) to justify the practice: “Those who deny Thee could not deny, if Thou didst not exist; and their denial is never complete, for if it were so, they would not exist.” Lynch concludes, “‘Their denial is never complete’ [is] perhaps . . . the best last word on agnostic Catholic funerals.” The elusive logic of Eliot’s statement would likely have elicited Heaney’s sympathy, though whether Lynch is practicing Roman Catholic co-option or simple Christian charity remains for the picky reader to decide.37 S ea m u s H eane y ’ s full translation of the Aeneid Book VI, in which Aeneas goes down into the underworld of Avernus (the “place / Without birds”) in search of his father, appeared in 2016, three years after the poet’s death (or passing). Charles McNamara began his review in Commonweal by suggesting that “one can read Heaney’s translation not just as a fresh version of Virgil’s tale but also as a firsthand account of one who has passed to this ‘nowhere,’ a travelogue that Heaney has sent from 36. Craig, Brian Moore, 264. 37. Fiona Lynch, “Either/Or? On Funerals Catholic and Agnostic,” Heythrop Journal 59, no. 1 (January 2018): 77–83.

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beyond the grave.”38 Running with that suggestion, we find the following landscape there: the wicked are punished in an array of excruciating ways (fulfilling Heaney’s desire for an ultimate justice); others are painfully cleansed for a time and then “given the freedom / Of broad Elysium”; the good are rewarded: Here was a band of those who suffered wounds Fighting for their country; those who lived the pure life Of the priest; those who were dedicated poets And made songs fit for Apollo; others still Whose discoveries improved our arts or ease, and those Remembered for a life spent serving others. Others again, meanwhile, are awaiting processing as at a border crossing; some will return to earth (by their own desire). Heartbreakingly, Aeneas and his father Anchises cannot embrace: “Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped / Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.”39 It was those returning to earth that interested Heaney: “The focus this time . . . was not the meeting of the son with the father, but the vision of future Roman generations with which Book VI ends, specifically the moment on the bank of the river Lethe where we are shown the souls of those about to be reborn and return to live on earth.”40 While Aeneas begs his father to explain to him “this mad desire / To get back to the light,” to “re-enter the sluggish drag of the body,” and receives a long and detailed reply, it is to “Route 110” that we readers must return to find Heaney’s own twenty-first-century interpretation there: the “second life” of the “spirits” is in the birth of the next generations, not in the return of the dead. We live on through our individual and collective offspring, and maybe too through the propagation of the ideas we have sown in our lifetimes. So, in this text to which he had been introduced almost sixty years earlier by his teacher priest, Father Michael McGlinchey (the trans38. Charles McNamara, “Report from the Afterlife,” Commonweal, January 6, 2017, 32–34. 39. Heaney, Aeneid: Book VI (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), viii. 40. Ibid.



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lation “the result of a lifelong desire to honor [his] memory”) we come to Seamus Heaney’s own resting place. Whatever Virgil may have thought, no one will come or migrate back from the dead even if there is an afterlife; it is only the dead before they died, and those living now, that we know anything about. The paradise believed in and promised by Jesus, by Paul, by Dante, by Milton, and by the priests and nuns and brothers of the 1940s and ’50s is as unknown and, in Heaney’s view, as unlikely, as ever. Does Seamus Heaney leave us then with less than we had before he abandoned hope of any afterlife? The simple answer might be “No,” because in his view we never had it to begin with. Besides, it is highly unlikely, in spite of John Waters’s complaint, that anyone ceased believing in an afterlife merely because Heaney had done so. The new awareness, however, if we accept it, is more complex, and our sense of loss will inevitably reshape our understanding depending, among other things, on how much we were exposed to the promise of eternal life in the first place. Furthermore, if, as Heaney admits, these were the beliefs that inspired the cathedral builders, poets, painters, musicians, and monastic scribes of earlier ages, what happens in their absence? What is unusual about Heaney is that he explores this space beyond—the numinous, a nonexistent afterlife—in poems, and essays, and memorial elegies so much, as though trying to push the boundaries back (as the culture at large with its present-centered focus ignores this space as existing at all), and that he does so without, apparently, the recurrent questioning of a Miłosz or the anxiety of a Christian Wiman, though he does set himself up as a listening post for whatever may be out there. The sense of loss pervades his writings—otherwise why specify the promises of old so often and in such detail?—yet the loss has been absorbed into his own reassuring equanimity. And if Wiman is right in detecting “some rift between the revelations of [Heaney’s] art and the reality of his life,” then that all the more brings him down to our shared, uncertain humanity, as a being who had final thoughts that were never finished thoughts.41 Whimsically, were there to be an afterlife, one imagines Joyce being taken aback that God wasn’t a Jesuit, Larkin wearily disappointed at his continued existence, Heaney 41. Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light, 88–89, 94.

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. . . well, surprised by joy perhaps. Whimsy does capture a partial truth. The immediate reality, of course, is that Heaney didn’t think there was an afterlife, or that there had ever been a divine revelation of its existence. He was more than aware that he once believed that; part of him may even have wanted to believe it again. But he didn’t. Meanwhile, the art of poetry, the space of poetry, what Eugene O’Brien refers to as its “cryptic and sporadic insights” that offer “glimpses of the transcendent,” is our compensation, and yet that compensation will seem meagre to many and is unlikely to be available to most. All we can do to comfort ourselves about the loss of our loved ones and, finally, of ourselves, is to read about his and meditate cosmically about ours.42 42. Eugene O’Brien, “‘An Art That Knows Its Mind,’” 132.

C o ncl u si o n

T

he ar g u m en t of this study is that Seamus Heaney has been a representative generational figure in Ireland at a time when old religious beliefs, and specifically Catholic ones, have been in steep decline there. Part of what he offers in these circumstances, it seems to me, is a series of “momentary stay[s] against confusion,” the opportunity, as he described it in his Nobel Prize speech “Crediting Poetry” in 1995, to “repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds” (OG 430). The difference between him and those who would openly rebel against Catholicism is that he sees the latter as but one attempt to produce such a “stay,” as rich and respectable in its way as all the others—likely even more so. We have certainly arrived in a new place, he would say, yet we should not forget where we came from. We must be celebratory more than we are regretful, or, as W. B. Yeats put it in 1917, “we sing amid our uncertainty.”1 These are views that have their own advantages and problems, as Heaney himself well knew, and so here I want to situate them in a series of contexts—Irish, Catholic, secular—before offering a final assessment of their reach and value. In a local Irish context, it is important to recall that even the obsessively religious Republic of most of the twentieth century has had a curious pantheon of “Catholic” skeptics and unbelievers, from James Joyce through Seán O’Casey (baptized a Protestant, but so vociferous in his attacks on the Catholic Church as to seem like a former, disaffected member), to Seán O’Faolain, Austin Clarke, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Thom1. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), 492.



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as Kinsella, Edna O’Brien, and, more recently, John Banville, Nuala O’Faolain, Roddy Doyle, and Colm Tóbín (and even an outlier like the Jesuit-educated scientist J. D. Bernal). Indeed, so established was the clerisy of Irish writers at odds with the Catholic Church that it would have been seen as heretical had any of them professed to think otherwise. The most famous clerical victim of Pope Pius X’s anti-Modernist edict of 1907 was the convert Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell.2 Longtime international journalist and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, though married to Irish-language poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, the niece of a Roman Catholic cardinal, made no bones about publicly declaring that he did not believe in God (and mentions that several of his Irish Civil Service contemporaries in the 1940s and ’50s were unbelievers also).3 Heaney thus follows in and belongs to a long line of dissenters, even if the measure of his dissent is less, and less necessary, than theirs. The Ireland of the last thirty years or more is, of course, a radically different place with a younger generation, many of whom would either not sympathize with or barely understand Heaney’s religious and maybe even social preoccupations. But it is still one in which the issues of the past form part of the dialogue of the present in the manner of many traditional societies transitioning belatedly to the modern world. Anti-Heaney, anti-American, anti-consumerist, pro-Catholic journalist Desmond Fennell has bemoaned the lack of serious intellectual debate in contemporary Ireland, but that stance—shared by many intellectuals who would not otherwise agree with Fennell—seems to me to be contemptuous of the discourses of ordinary life that are serious in spite of all their messy disarray.4 Former talk show host Gay Byrne’s The Meaning of Life series on RTÉ, for example, very much reflects the dayto-day thoughtful sensibility of the place, with Byrne himself remaining undeclared (for purposes of the show) but those he interviews—celebri2. See Alexander Roper Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: University Press, 1978). 3. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “The Roots of My Preoccupations,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1994, 73–81. 4. Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney Is No. 1 (Dublin: ELO, 1991).



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ty writers, actors, politicians, clergy—frequently sparring with him. No doubt some observers have decried the inanities of what they regard as Byrne’s phony camaraderie and his controlling formula—the progress of the “discussion” from faithful youth, through adult doubt and loss, to current reevaluation, and the final series of questions on meeting relatives (in the next life), meeting God (if there turns out to be one), the punishment of the wicked (Hitler and Stalin in particular)—but the whole setup is very like what people of Heaney’s generation would think about almost instinctively in this area. And while it might not be a suitable vehicle for the presentation of any poet’s (or philosopher’s or theologian’s) nuanced views, I can readily see how Heaney’s broad trajectory could be fitted into its programmatic shell.5 The fact is that religious issues enjoy a curious afterlife in Ireland where, for good or for bad, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are feted as frequently as they are in the fundamentalist American South, while in London or New York they have much less (at)traction. In his Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame in 2000, a believing Denis Donoghue, resurrecting and quoting the argument that a wavering John Crowe Ransom made for religion and a “thunderous” God (a God not just in our own image) in the late 1920s, expressed a desire to see “the primacy of theology and doctrine established, and the commonplaces of psychology displaced.” Like Eamon Duffy, he affectionately invoked the Christian Brothers School where he “learned more of Catholicism from a prescribed book called Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine than from any other source.” Donoghue assumes a “fall,” a redemptive revelation, the authority of papal encyclicals (though not uncontested), and commends a classic modern theologian, Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar, as exemplar. A champion of Heaney over the decades, Donoghue worries that the poet’s “crediting” poetry is just a step or two from Richard Rorty’s desired “‘religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture,’” and concedes that an effort at a Catholic revival “may be too late.”6 From the 5. Gay Byrne, The Meaning of Life, http://www.rte.ie/tv/meaningoflife/. 6. Donoghue, Adam’s Curse, 27–28, 122. Donoghue concedes that Ransom later abandoned these ideas for a secularist view: see Kieran Quinlan, John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith (Baton

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other end of the spectrum, Benedictine-educated Richard Kearney, another Heaney friend, has introduced the concept of what he calls “anatheism,” which is an openness to the numinous as presented in the human but without any dogmatic implications; he also refers to it as “finding god after God.” Heavily based in the modern Continental philosophy of thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida and the anti-secularism of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (a onetime McCabe associate), it registers as a peculiarly Irish solution to the Irish dilemma posed by the fall of Roman Catholicism. Yet even though this approach overlaps in some ways with Heaney’s views, the poet seems more grounded and never speaks in this kind of idiom; indeed, in that sense Heaney is more Larkin than Levinas, to mention another of Kearney’s pantheon.7 Meanwhile, the ghost of Philip Larkin, Heaney’s “philosophical” nemesis, who wrote “Church Going” in 1954, has returned to haunt the Irish.8 Back then, Larkin prophesied the decline of religion in England (though, and as he himself explained in 1964, the poem was inspired by his seeing a ruined church in rural Northern Ireland during his early tenure at Queen’s University library); now the prophesy applies as much to the Republic.9 Even the Yeats-commissioned “Irish sixpence” with its symbolic wolfhound that Larkin’s pilgrim leaves in the empty church’s collection box, a coin withdrawn in 1972 prior to decimalization and Ireland’s subsequent entry into the European Union and thus its opening up to the modern world, only adds ironic detail to the poem’s relevance. Now the Irish churches, so vibrant in the 1950s, are beginning to fall out of use, some already libraries and aroma centers, though not yet the restaurants and hotels common in other European countries. The elderly Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Donoghue’s views are similar in important ways to those of John Dennison in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry. 7. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to god after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 8. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, 58. 9. See Larkin: “One Sunday afternoon in Ireland when I had cycled out into the country I came across a ruined church, the first I had seen. . . . I had seen plenty of bombed churches, but never one that had simply fallen into disuse, and for a few minutes I felt the decline of Christianity in our century as tangibly as gooseflesh”; Larkin, Further Requirements: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 83.



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congregations in many of Dublin’s inner city churches on Sundays are as likely to be Polish as Irish; once-revered monasteries and convents entomb their aging residents as never before, those still belonging to them frequently suffering from levels of depression that are of concern to their superiors in Rome; already “a few cathedrals [are] chronically on show.”10 Larkin’s triumvirate of marriage, birth, and death “and thoughts of these” still bring in the crowds, though they too have begun their “separation” from the traditional ecclesiastical rites of passage. Practically, with the rapid decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood in Ireland, soon there will simply be no one left to baptize the newborn and to bury the dead, or at least not in the traditional way. Larkin too foreshadowed, as ghosts so often do, Heaney’s own pilgrimage from “parchment, plate, and pyx,” through puzzlement about “what this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,” to “surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground, / Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, / If only that so many dead lie round.”11 In 1965, Heaney and his wife Marie—less than twenty-four hours married and honeymooning in London—religiously visited the publishing holy of holies, Faber and Faber in Russell Square, whose acceptance of the poet’s Death of a Naturalist months earlier “was like getting a letter from God the father.” Here in this temple, founded, as it happened, by Fr. Frederick Faber’s great-nephew (who magically replicated his own essence in the firm’s title, since there was only one Faber), a shrine largely built and faithfully curated by Eliot, whom should they encounter coming out the door but Philip Larkin. In retrospect, it could be seen as an entirely fortuitous case of “in my beginning is my end.”12 In the world at large, however, and in spite of the many scandals that continue to accumulate in regard to it, Roman Catholicism thrives, its raw numbers greater than ever. But its theologians are no longer as prominent as they once were, while many of the great Catholic converts and their offspring are known to have reverted to their ancestors’ convictions, or to 10. See, for example, Paul Harran, ed., New Life for Churches in Ireland: Good Practice in Conversion and Reuse (Portadown, N.I.: Ulster Historic Churches Trust, 2012). 11. Larkin, Collected Poems, 58. 12. Charlie McCarthy, Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous, https://binged.it/308In4M.

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have lapsed in the practice of their adopted ones, so that what was once a powerful and inspirational movement has proved, according to historian Patrick Allitt, “a momentous and protracted failure.”13 The Roman Catholic and other churches have, of course, adapted to some of these changing circumstances. Whereas the traditional religionist response had been to insist that an immediate belief choice needed to be made, that there was an everlasting punishment for getting the answer wrong, and that those who disagreed were egotistical, malicious, or obtuse, now the more sophisticated leaders and members of the mainstream churches, partly as a result of their own goodwill and a shift in doctrinal emphasis, partly from their shared perplexity in perplexing times, have begun to show more understanding of those who cannot embrace their particular faith. A still-excommunicated Anthony Kenny (now Sir Anthony) is on excellent terms with Catholic pastors and institutions across the globe even though he hasn’t changed his arguments for the unlikelihood of the existence of a deity, the impossibility of mystical experience such as the great saints claimed to have had, and, most importantly, the fundamental philosophical problem of the concept of faith itself.14 In this context, Heaney’s religious outsiderness is barely noticeable. Nevertheless, Heaney himself fully recognized a serious problem with his own position. As traditional belief continues to erode and those like Heaney remain sympathetic with some of its rites and structures without believing in them, that stance is ultimately unsustainable. Carol Zaleski (a past commentator on the history of St. Patrick’s Purgatory) points out that “talk of the transcendent dimension is effective only as long as it continues to have a purchase on a concrete and living myth of the other world, a ‘true myth,’ to use J. R. R. Tolkien’s expression. . . . We have been living off the capital of a concretely supernaturalist worldview. Once that capital is spent, however, our abstractions will seem like thin fare.”15 Not everyone, of course, would agree with Zaleski’s analysis—the count13. Patrick Allitt, The Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 16. 14. See Anthony Kenny, What I Believe (London: Continuum, 2006). 15. Carol Zaleski, “In Defense of Immortality,” First Things, August 1, 2000, 42. See also Umberto Eco and Cardinal Martini, Belief or Nonbelief? A Dialogue (New York: Arcade, 1997).



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er claim is that morality is thriving in a post-religious world in which its priorities and contents are simply different from heretofore—but her view is still a respectable player on the scene. In his later years, while Heaney confessed to not missing the old “authoritarian church” and its “puritanism,” he still regretted the loss of “its sense of service and readiness to go on missions and so on,” somewhat of a departure from his “Station Island” views. He further claimed that “the dwindling of the faith and, secondly, the clerical scandals have bewildered things. I think we still are running on an unconscious that is informed by religious values, but I think my youngsters’ youngsters won’t have that.”16 Heaney offered no solution, however, and certainly not one that would involve a restoration of earlier church practices, even were that possible. Finally, in the modern secular world of unrevealed knowledge—the world we all inhabit when we’re not just focused on our specific professional or personal interests—Heaney’s position raises some awkward questions and possibly serious doubts. Most of all in this area, his repeated commendation of Miłosz’s strictures on science and the general development of human knowledge is problematic. Miłosz’s concise and poignant description of “a huge change in the contents of the human imagination,” about Heaven and Hell disappearing, “the belief in life after death” weakening, “the [malign] impact of the theory of evolution,” and so forth is like a catalogue of all that has happened since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.17 While religionists such as Miłosz are right to draw attention to the misuse of scientific findings in the past and present and the consequences of abandoning a supernaturalist belief system, it is simply not possible to accept his magisterial condemnation of the science of biology in an age dominated by its achievements or his disdain for a new paradigm of human development that appears to be a more accurate and truthful account than that earlier offered by religion. It is easy, however—very easy—to understand his disturbance. Miłosz invokes Cardinal Newman among his pantheon of builders of the “huge edifice of creeds and dogmas 16. Quoted in Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, 359. 17. Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 329–30.

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[that] has been erected” over past centuries. Well over a hundred years ago, Newman too in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua agonized when he looked “into this living busy world” and saw “no reflection of its Creator.” While Newman accepted the traditional arguments for the existence of God, he added sadly that “they do not take away the winter of my desolation” and that “were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist.”18 Now very many thoughtful people are Newmans too, but with a plethora of additional knowledge from psychology and the neurosciences that has made them question the validity of his inner consolations. It is noticeable also that many of those who rightly berate the intellectual paucity of a Yeats-reciting Richard Dawkins’s comments on theology elsewhere admit their own lack of religious belief and the fact that they agree with the substance of what he says.19 In addition, it is hard not to take into account, as I have here, the thoughtful views of a David Lodge who has passed from sincere Catholic belief to sympathetic agnosticism to—more recently, after studying Dennett—finding it “ever more difficult . . . to subscribe to any transcendental religious faith,” even while wanting to make sure that the scientific study of consciousness doesn’t fail to include the full range of the human imagination.20 It is no small thing to find supernatural expectations withdrawn, a divine presence recede. It would be very hard for anyone of Heaney’s generation steeped in childhood, adolescent, and even adult Catholicism, having experienced its joys and promises as well as its restrictions and impediments, not to be disturbed by the shift. Like him, what many want is a chance for once to see what Miłosz described as “the lining of the 18. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 117. 19. In a debate at Oxford in February 2012 between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, moderated by (Sir) Anthony Kenny, Dawkins allowed for a miniscule possibility that he was wrong about the existence of God, provoking much commentary that he had retreated from being an atheist to a mere agnostic; the agnostic Kenny, meanwhile has asserted that he agrees 90 percent with Dawkins; see reports in Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, and YouTube video. Michael Ruse, “Science and Religion Today,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (2011): 167–77. 20. Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 297.



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world.” But it isn’t likely that such a wish will ever be fulfilled, and, presumably, in the nature of things, most of us will be anxious at the end no matter what we anticipate. In the world we live in, there are legitimate questions about what (as much as who) we are as persons, sets of probabilities about what will happen to ourselves, to our species, our planet, our solar system, the cosmos, several of them unpleasant and even frightening to think about; no matter what happens, issues of meaning and purpose will continue to concern us; but we must simply live in “the cloud of our unknowing” and push through it as best we can as the divide between faith and reason seems to ever widen. Seamus Heaney did not aspire to solving such issues beyond the explorations of his chosen art, but he did decide that the old religious option, loved and feared, of his ancestors, remote and proximate, was not for him. He too lived in this “cloud of unknowing” in that he did not subscribe to any revelation and had no notion of what the endgame might be. On the other hand, he offered an imaginative caution against a too-easy acceptance of a claustrophobically reductive view of our existence. Perhaps as much as Elizabeth Bishop, he too was a witness to “the rebirth of a religious impulse in a post-religious sensibility.”21 In any case, Heaney still speaks humanly and humanely to our anxieties at a time when a wholly new paradigm is of only relative interest, when the shape of the old one becomes “less recognizable each week,” and when what may lie beyond seems stranger than ever. His poems enrich the journey, ease the pain, and still—often—say that which could not be said otherwise. He is quoted as frequently by unbelievers—witness, for example, Peter Watson’s The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (2014)—as by believers—witness Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013).22 Out there in the great galactic spaces, down here in the smaller ones, he is still a guide and a comfort. Some may think this is not enough; Heaney’s writings suggest there can’t be anything more. 21. Seamus Heaney, “Bags of Enlightenment,” Guardian, October 24, 2003, 4–6; The School Bag, ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 4–8. 22. Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

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I nde x Aeschylus, 197 Africa, 21, 132 African American, 81, 92n18, 96, 212 Afterlife, 8, 42, 103, 106, 124, 129, 141, 146, 149, 155, 156, 163, 164n37, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 187, 189, 193, 196, 209, 210, 215, 231, 237, 240, 241, 242, 245, 246, 248, 253, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 275, 280n38, 281–82, 285 Agnosticism/agnostic, 53, 70, 109, 140, 141, 155, 190, 237, 261, 264, 279, 290 Alacoque, Margaret Mary, St., 14, 255 Allitt, Patrick, 288 America/American, 14, 22, 40, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 81, 88, 92, 102, 114, 115, 139, 190, 194, 195, 200, 210, 215, 224, 235, 239, 242, 243, 261, 284; American South, 28, 77, 285 America, 265 Andrews, Elmer, 97n30 Apollo, 206, 280 Aquinas, Thomas, St., 36, 72, 232, 256 Aristotle, 64 Armstrong, Sean, 101 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 63, 174, 184, 188, 218, 221, 225, 233; “Dover Beach,” 5, 184, 225, 232, 277n31 Atheism/atheist, 2, 22, 55, 141, 188n15, 193, 214, 215, 217, 221, 242, 246, 257, 286, 290, 291 Auden, W. H., 55, 201, 206, 275 Auge, Andrew J., 3, 4n7, 6n13, 34n22,



114n16, 130, 148n11, 197n6, 217, 225, 264n5 Augustine, St., 36, 203, 231 Ayer, A. J., 189 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 285 Banville, John, 284 Barth, Karl, 174n1, 187 Bartlett, Thomas, 3n6, 15 n8 Bayley, John, 160 Beatles, The, 48, 49 Beckett, Samuel, 24, 173, 217, 249 Bedient, Calvin, 265 Belfast, 38, 39, 51, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 88, 90, 95, 98, 98n32, 105, 109n3, 190, 193, 197, 223, 278 Berkeley (University of California), 86, 88, 107, 114, 223, 234, 247, 248 Bernal, J. D., 284 Bernanos, Georges, 53, 236 Berrigan, Dan, 88, 108 Betjeman, John, 178 Bewley, Charles, 20, 21n18 Binchy, Maeve, 279 Bishop, Elizabeth, 5, 40, 199, 200–202, 233, 291; “At the Fishhouses,” 5, 201–202, 233 Blanchot, Maurice, 4 Bloody Sunday, 88, 103 Bloom, Harold, 261 Bloy, Leon, 53 Boff, Leonardo, 108

305

306

Index

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 58 Boolavogue, 14 Booth, James, 170n43, 177, 180n11, 189n17, 190n20 and n22, 192, 193 Borgia popes, 15 Bosch, Hieronymus, 273 Boyle, Nicholas, 230 Boyne, Battle of, 13, 94, 104 Bradford, Richard, 76n49, 191–92 Bragg, Melvyn, 172 Brancusi, Constantin, 182 Brandes, Rand, 93n19, 94, 125n36, 242n3, 247n14 Brazeau, Peter, 175n2 Breslin, John, 265 BBC Northern Ireland, 60 Broderick, John, 68n16 Brookeborough, Lord, 29, 61 Brown, Callum, 15n7, 49n50, 78n1 Brown, Terence, 28 Browning, Robert, 174 Bruce, Steve, 28n6 Bruno, Giordano, 221 Buber, Martin, 58 Byrne, Gay, 284–85 Cahill, Thomas, 12 Caine, Michael, 66 Calvino, Italo, 171–72 Cambridge University, 24, 30, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 231, 257 Campbell, Joseph, 106 Campbell, Roy, 20, 132 Carleton, William, 28, 122–23, 138, 139 Carrel, Alexis, 54 Carson, Ciaran, 100 Carysfort College of Education, 107, 109 Casement, Roger, 80 Casey, Eamon, 194 Catholicism, Irish, 1–2, 11–14, 17–23; changing, 23–25, 89, 118–120, 262–63; and England, 15–16; missionary empire, 21, 262, 266, 289; in Northern Ireland, 26–30; scandals, 2, 194–95, 263, 287, 289. See also entries for Heaney, Seamus

Catholic Emancipation, 14 Cavanagh, Michael, 4n7, 8, 33, 56n12, 101n36, 166, 174n1, 176n4, 178n9, 188n15, 214n4, 217, 242, 243, 244n7 Celtic Tiger, 90, 100, 195, 156 Chagall, Marc, 245 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 41 Chesterton, G. K., 22, 52, 75n48 Cistercians, 13, 118 Civil Rights Movement, 60, 77, 88, 101, 194 Clancy Brothers, 50 Clarke, Austin, 34, 114, 283 Claudel, Paul, 53 Clonmacnoise, 12 Commonweal, 279 Communism/Communist, 23, 24, 53, 57, 108, 145, 199, 221, 247, 248, 250, 279 Confession/confessional, 19, 34, 68, 72, 75, 92, 113, 116, 119, 124, 129, 134, 205n14, 256 Congar, Yves, 57 Connelly, Sybil, 50 Converts, 15, 22, 44, 51, 54n10, 55, 287 Cooke, Barrie, 255 Copleston, Frederick C., 52 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 221 Corcoran, Neil, 3n6, 33n19, 87, 109, 128, 135–6, 140 Corrin, Jay P., 22n23, 73 n44 Craig, Patricia, 30n11, 34n22, 38n29, 69n36, 226n34, 279n36 Croke Park, 10 Cromwell, Oliver, 13 Crossan, John Dominic, 238 Crotty, Patrick, 119–20, 154 Cuchulainn, 12, 171, 227, 228 Cullen, Paul, 14 Curé d’Ars (St. John Vianney), 14 Daly, Edward, 34 Daly, Mary, 48n49, 74n46 Dante Alighieri, 56, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 116, 121, 135, 140, 157, 160, 171, 177, 210, 241, 243, 272, 281 D’Arcy, Martin, 132n42



Index 307

Darwin, Charles, 22, 63, 71, 142, 173, 197, 221, 227, 250 Dawkins, Richard, 266, 285, 290 Deane, Seamus, 34–35, 46, 47, 97, 100 Dennett, Daniel, 69n37, 235, 285, 290 Dennison, John, 8n22, 65, 112, 142, 143n6, 150n14, 151n15, 157n21, 217–18, 286n6 Derrida, Jacques, 4, Desmond, John F., 54n9, 216–17 De Valera, Éamon, 18, 19, 20, 80, 89, 156 Devotional Revolution, 14 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 57 Diogenes, 144 Dodd, Ira Seymour, 16n9 Donleavy, J. P., 48 Donne, John, 131, 171 Donnelly, James S., Jr., 28n4, 50 Donoghue, Denis, 29n9, 99, 100n34, 174n1, 177, 285 Doyle, Roddy, 284 Driscoll, Jeremy, 249n19 Druce, Robert, 32 Dublin, 9, 10, 12, 18, 21, 23, 31, 38, 40, 44, 48, 53, 56, 72, 80, 89, 97, 99, 102, 123, 205, 239, 244, 262, 277, 287 Dubliners, The, 88 Duffy, Eamon, 30, 31n15, 79, 112, 135, 138, 163, 175n3, 207–8, 234, 235, 242, 257–59, 260, 285 Dulles, Avery, 53 Dunn, Douglas, 158, 159 Dunne, Seán, 4n7, 118n26 Eagleton, Terry, 16n9, 24, 45, 215n4, 234 Easter Rising, 17, 79, 104 Easthope, Antony, 234n51 Eckhart, Meister, 216 Eco, Umberto, 288n15 Ecumenism, 14, 18, 23, 51, 61, 76, 78, 98n32, 197 Eleusis, 149, 255 Eliade, Mircea, 150–51, 156, 216 Eliot, T. S., 6, 7, 22, 39, 44, 45, 55, 132, 138, 139, 140, 148n11, 181, 209, 210, 216, 238, 242–44, 254, 259, 279, 287; “Ash

Wednesday,” 140, 242, 243; Four Quartets, 138, 139, 140, 148, 242, 243 Elliott, Marianne, 24n26, 28n4, 30n10, 31, 40n31, 65n31 Ellmann, Richard, 98, 173, 174, 220n21, 222, 235 Emmet, Robert, 17 Eucharistic Congress, 31 Faber, Frederick W., 16, 91, 287 Faber and Faber, 287 Falsani, Cathleen, 9n25 Fatima, 15, 151, 156 Fennell, Desmond, 284 Ferriter, Diarmaid, 20n17, 22n20, 26n1, 50n53, 52n2, 80n5, 110n6 and n7 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 221 Finucane, Marian, 263, 265 Fordham University, 239–40 Foster, John Wilson, 196 Foster, Roy F., 229 Franco, Francisco, 20, 98, 102 Frazer, Sir James, 157, 221 Freud, Sigmund, 54 Friel, Brian, 109, 110, 116, 219 Frost, Robert, 63, 139, 199, 204, 209, 210n27 Fuller, Louise, 18–19, 42n35, 50, 167n39, 278n35 Furrow, The, 1n1, 108, 110 Gaeltacht, 273 Galileo, Galilei, 221 Gallagher, Michael Paul, 1n1, 110 Ganiel, Gladys, 2 Garvin, Tom, 28–29, 58 Gilson, Étienne, 53 Girard, René, 4 Glendalough, 12 Glob, P. V., 83, 84, 93, 96, 102, 151 Gnosis/gnostic, 149, 249, 261 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 221 Goya, Francisco Jose dé, 99, 105 Grahame, Kenneth, 197 Graves, Robert, 65

308

Index

Greene, Graham, 22, 52, 53, 66, 215n4, 236, 237 Gregory XIII, 13 Group, The, 56, 59 Guillevic, Eugène, 268 Guinness, Alec, 54 Guthrie, William K., 149 Haffenden, John, 18n15, 64, 72, 190 Hammond, David, 267 Hardy, Thomas, 38, 183 Harnack, Aldolf von, 187 Hart, Henry, 36, 43, 64n25, 159, 231 Harvard University, 114, 153, 161, 198, 200, 214 Hass, Robert, 6, 115, 175n2, 247 Heaney, Marie, 46, 56n12, 161, 231, 276, 277, 287 Heaney, Mick, 10n29, 276 Heaney, Seamus, afterlives, 263–76; and Brian Moore, 223–26; as Catholic, 8–10, 241– 42; and cultural Catholicism, 91–92; and Czesław Miłosz, 253–59; and David Lodge, 234–38; death of, 10, 276–77; on the defensive, 171–88; doubts and departures, 46–47, 49–50, 63–72, 78–79, 86–88, 96, 101, 104–106; 107–111; and Eamon Duffy, 257–59; early influence of religion, 30–34; encounters with the numinous, 197–205; and Herbert McCabe, 255–57; and Irish writers, 283–86; and James Joyce, 220–23; and Patrick Kavanagh, 244–46; and Philip Larkin, 174–93; poetry as religion, 92–93, 141–150, 240–41; as religious writer, 6; as representative figure, 3–4, 5, 156, 226, 254, 278, 283; rethinkings, 115–40; at school and university, 34–49; searchings and substitutions, 207–11; second thoughts, 151–57; and secular thought, 289–91; and Ted Hughes, 230–34; as thinker, 8; transcendental transformations, 158–70; and T. S. Eliot, 242–44; and W. B. Yeats, 193–95 Poetry (and Drama): Aeneid Book VI, 136n50, 157, 266, 269, 271, 279–80;

“Barn, The,” 63; Beowulf: a new verse translation, 207, 261, 269; “Biretta, The,” 160; “Blackberry-Picking,” 63; “Bogland,” 82, 84; “Brancardier,” 254; “Castalian Spring,” 206; “Casualty,” 102, 103; “Chanson d’Aventure,” 263; “Clearances,” 29, 30n11, 32, 141, 146, 147–48, 150; “Cleric, The,” 136; “Cloistered,” 35; “Crossings,” 165, 166; Cure at Troy, The, 199; Death of a Naturalist, 59, 63, 65, 78, 287; “Death of a Naturalist,” 63; “Disappearing Island, The,” 153–54; District and Circle, 253, 265; “Diviner, The,” 63; “Docker,” 59, 61; “Dog Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also,” 204; Door into the Dark, 77, 78; Electric Light, 205; “Electric Light,” 208; “Elegy,” 103; “England’s Difficulty,” 83; “Exposure,” 99; “Field of Vision,” 158–59; Field Work, 100, 103, 104; “Fosterage,” 71; “Fosterling,” 161; “Found Poem, A,” 9n25; “Fragment,” 206; “Freedman,” 92–93; “From the Canton of Expectation,” 29; “From the Republic of Conscience,” 145; “Funeral Rites,” 94; “Golden Bough, The,” 157– 58; “Gravel Walks, The,” 204; “Grotus and Conventina,” 150; Haw Lantern, The, 30, 74, 145, 153, 154, 155, 175, 178, 240; “Haw Lantern, The,” 144, 145; “Herbal, A,” 268–71; “Hermit Songs,” 266; Human Chain, 217, 265, 266, 268; “Icons, The,” 137; “In Gallarus Oratory,” 78–79, 87, 101, 224; “In Illo Tempore,” 137; “In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge,” 103–04; “In Memoriam Sean O Riada,” 103; “Keeping Going,” 202; “Kinship,” 99; “Known World,” 205; “Lightenings,” 161, 162–63, 163–64; “Limbo,” 86; “Loughanure,” 272–74; “Master, The,” 114–15, 117, 255, 276; “Mite Box, The,” 21, 266; “Mud Vision, The,” 151–53; “New Song, A,” 81; North, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, 99, 104, 105, 243; “On the Road,” 138,



Index 309 145, 172; “On His Work in the English Tongue,” 207, 233; Opened Ground, 90, 91, 93, 205; “Other Side, The,” 82, 90; “Out of This World,” 253, 255, 265, 270, 278; “Oysters,” 100; “Patrick and Oisin,” 91; “Personal Helicon,” 71, 78; “Pitchfork, The,” 159; “Poet’s Chair,” 203; “Poor Women in a City Church,” 61; “Postcard from North Antrim, A,” 101, 103; “Punishment,” 94, 100; “Requiem for the Croppies,” 79–80; “Riddle, The,” 153, 154–55; “Route 110,” 271–72, 280; “Sabbath-Breakers, The,” 91;“Saint Francis and the Birds,” 61; “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” 203; School Bag, The, 5, 232; “Scribes, The,” 90; “Seeing the Sick,” 207–08; Seeing Things, 156, 158, 159, 160, 170, 175, 176, 177, 178, 196, 202, 216, 268; “Seeing Things,” 158; “Servant Boy,” 81; “Settings,” 164–65; “Settle Bed, The,” 159–60; “Sibyl,” 100; “Skylight, The,” 160–61; Spirit Level, The, 200, 202, 205, 216; “Spoonbait, The,” 153; “Squarings,” 2n2, 141, 163n33, 164n37, 167–70, 196, 198, 215, 225, 268, 270; Station Island, 8, 116, 135, 136, 138, 142, 172, 276n29; “Station Island,” 115, 116, 118, 121–35, 139, 147, 175, 178, 214, 218, 223, 225, 238, 243, 289; Stations, 90, 91, 92, 126; “Stone from Delphi,” 117; “Stone Verdict, The,” 214; “Strand at Lough Beg, The,” 101, 102–03; “Strange Fruit,” 95, 96; “Summer 1969,” 98–99; Sweeney Astray, 112–14, 131, 165, 200, 269; “Sweeney Redivivus,” 136, 138–39; “Swing, The,” 204; “Ten Glosses,” 55; “Tollund Man, The,” 83–85, 86, 94, 128; “Trial Runs,” 90; “Triptych,” 101; “Turnip-Snedder, The,” 253; “Ugolino,” 104–05; “Verses for a Fordham Commencement,” 240; “Westering,” 86–88; “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” 98, 105; “Wheels within Wheels,” 200;

Wintering Out, 81, 86, 93; “Wolfe Tone,” 153 Prose: “Bags of Enlightenment,” 5n12, 233, 291n21; “Brian Moore,” 66n32, 223n29; “Christmas 1971,” 95–96; “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture,” 227, 283; “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” 135n46, 138n52, 243n5; Essential Wordsworth, The, “Introduction,” 228; Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001, 5, 7, 39, 40, 84–85, 140, 142, 157, 171, 172, 173–74, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 200, 201, 202, 220, 232, 233, 238, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 251, 252, 267, 274; “Forked Tongues, Céilís and Incubators,” 178n8; Government of the Tongue, The, 274; “Herbert McCabe, O.P. II,” 73–74, 256–57; “Learning from Eliot,” 7, 39; “Lowell’s Command,” 56n14; “Modern, Functional, Beautiful,” 47; “Now and in England,” 92n17; “Placeless Heaven, The: Another Look at Kavanagh,” 245; “Poet as a Christian, The,” 31n14, 42, 45n39, 47n44, 108–111; Preoccupations, 7n17, 33n20, 79n2, 244n9; Redress of Poetry, The, 7n16; “R. S. Thomas Memorial, Delivered at Westminster Abbey, March 28th, 2001,” 211; “Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven,” 162; “‘Station Island’: Jottings for a Poem,” 37n26, 115, 121n33, 125n37; Stepping Stones, 5, 6, 8, 19, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 56, 60, 61, 65, 71, 78, 82, 88, 90, 107, 108, 115, 116, 122, 133, 134, 135, 139, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156, 160, 161, 163, 164, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 209, 211, 227, 228, 232, 241, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 276; “Tale of Two Islands, A,” 64n28; “W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee,” 172, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 4 Henry VIII, 13

310

Index

Herbert, George, 7, 199, 211 Herbert, Zbigniew, 12, 172, 199 Heythrop Journal, 279 Hicks, Patrick, 67 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 68, 250, 285 Hobsbaum, Philip, 56 Holub, Miroslav, 178–79 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 6, 37–38, 47, 52, 53, 61, 63, 71, 92, 113, 133, 179, 180, 182, 208, 220n20, 229, 230–31, 242 Hughes, Francis, 130 Hughes, Ted, 5, 63, 64, 99, 150, 207, 219, 230–34, 237, 238, 247, 291n21 Humanae Vitae, 74, 75, 234 Huysmans, J. K. 53 Hyde, Douglas, 53–54 Ignatius of Loyola, St., 36 Infant of Prague, The, 68 Ingelbien, Raphaël, 176n4, 193 IRA (Irish Republican Army), 77, 95, 103, 116, 130, 144 Irish Times, 21, 264, 277 James II, 13 Jarman, Mark, 272 Jaspers, Karl, 109 John of the Cross, St., 20, 131–33, 134, 135, 155, 188n14, 216 John Paul II, 108, 116, 251 John XXIII, 23 Jones, David, 16, 52, 92 Joyce, James, 3, 14, 15, 24, 32, 34, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 47, 60, 66, 67, 74, 92, 93, 98, 117, 118, 120, 122, 133, 134–36, 137, 139, 143n4, 144, 176, 178, 219, 220–23, 226, 228, 229, 230, 234, 238, 242, 254, 262, 275, 278, 281, 283; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 37, 38, 44, 66, 67, 143n4, 220; in “Station Island,” 134–36 Joyce, Stanislaus, 221, 222 Joyce, William (Lord Haw-Haw), 20, 67, 90 Jung, Carl, 65, 151n15

Kafka, Franz, 174 Karr, Mary, 191n26 Kavanagh, Patrick, 48, 71, 119, 128, 165–66, 227, 242, 244–46 Kay, Magdalena, 114n18, 163, 169, 175n2, 267–68, 270, 273, 274 Kearney, James, 233 Kearney, Richard, 286 Kempis, Thomas à, 36 Kennedy, John F., 57 Kenny, Anthony, 73, 234, 288, 290n19 Kenny, Mary, 21n18, 22n21, 24n25 Keyes, Frances Parkinson, 53 Kiberd, Declan, 118 Kiely, Kevin, 21n18 Kinahan, Frank, 93n21 King, Martin Luther Jr., 77 Kinsella, Thomas, 18, 173, 284 Knock Shrine, 15, 149 Kraszewski, Charles, 175n2 Küng, Hans, 57, 75n48 Lacan, Jacques, 4 Larkin, Emmet, 14n5 Larkin, Philip, 48, 49, 50n55, 76, 78, 129, 142, 157, 158, 163, 164, 166, 171, 172, 173, 174–93, 196, 198, 200, 201, 205, 207, 212, 214, 217, 218, 229, 230, 234, 250, 251, 252, 274, 279, 281, 286, 287; “Aubade,” 129, 142, 166, 176–79, 184–88, 191–92, 198, 207, 250; “Church Going,” 190, 286–87 Lawrence, D. H., 32, 47 Ledwidge, Francis, 102, 103–04, 105 Lemass, Seán, 51 Lernout, Geert, 221 Leslie, Shane, 53 Levi, Peter, 174, 188, Lewis, C. S., 55, 132, 197 Liberation Theology, 108 Little Gidding, 243 Lloyd, David, 100n35 Lodge, David, 46, 68, 74–75, 189, 219, 234–38, 290 London, 42, 48, 65, 88, 96, 253, 268, 285, 287



Index 311

Longley, Edna, 26n1, 99 Longley, Michael, 78 Lorca, Federico García, 98 Lough Derg, 41, 42, 53, 115, 117, 118, 122, 123, 128, 135, 141, 149, 175 Lourdes, 14, 18, 31, 40, 41, 61 146, 156, 199, 224, 254, 255 Lowell, Robert, 6, 22, 52, 53, 56, 93, 102, 103, 135, 200, 214 Luce, Claire Booth, 22 Lynch, Fiona, 279 MacNeice, Louis, 62, 80 MacRory, Joseph, 27 Maher, Eamon, 24n24 Mahon, Derek, 141–42 Mandelstam, Osip, 155 Manning, Henry Edward, 52 Matthew, Theobald, 46 Marcel, Gabriel, 22, 53 Maritain, Jacques, 22, 45, 53, 161–62 Markievicz, Countess, 17 Marlowe, Christopher, 174 Marx/Marxism/Marxist, 24, 55, 75n48, 100n35, 108, 206, 221, 250 Mather, Cotton, 56 Mauriac, François, 53, 236 Maynooth College, 116 McCabe, Bernard, 74, 144, 234 McCabe, Herbert, 24, 49, 72, 73, 74, 93, 144, 234, 239, 242, 255–57, 260, 286 McCafferty, Nell, 110 McCann, Eamonn, 2, 40n32, 274 McCartney, Colum, 101, 103n38, 129, 130 McCartney, Paul, 49 McConnell, Gail, 9, 37n27, 49n52, 63, 132, 203, 204, 253 McCourt, Frank, 6 McDonagh, Enda, 6, 278 McGahern, John, 23–24, 34, 72, 219, 277, 279 McGarry, Patsy, 194n1, 263n1, 277n33 McGlinchey, Michael, 136n50, 280 McLaverty, Michael, 71 McLuhan, Marshall, 53

McNamara, Charles, 279–80 McNeill, Eoin, 65 McQuaid, John Charles, 89, 246n12 McWilliams, David, 110n6 Megahey, Alan, 27n3 Melleray, Mount, 118–19 Mendel, Gregor, 22 Merton, Thomas, 22, 43, 45, 52n3, 53, 56, 108, 115, 118, 132, 142n2, 216, 248–50, 274; Merton- Miłosz correspondence, 248–50 Mhac an tSaoi, Máire, 284 Middleton, Colin, 272–73 Middleton, Neil, 75n8 Miller, Karl, 6, 8, 209, 213, 259 Millet, Jean-François, 245 Miłosz, Czesław, 6, 114–15, 117, 118, 133, 142, 144, 145, 175n2, 176, 178, 183n12, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190n19, 199, 202, 206, 216, 217, 220, 228, 240, 242, 247, 253–59, 260, 265, 266, 276, 278, 279, 281, 289, 290; “Meaning,” 251, 253, 267 Mindszenty, József, 23 Miracles, v, 17, 41, 146, 156, 158n25, 159n29, 191 Montague, John, 48 Moore, Brian, 30n11, 34, 38, 65–71, 88, 90, 117, 198, 219, 223–26, 233, 234, 235, 238, 278–79; Catholics, 66, 223–24; The Emperor of Ice-Cream, 67–71; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 38, 65–67 Morrison, Blake, 68n34, 99, 214 Motion, Andrew, 189–90, 191, 192n30, 251n26 Mounier, Emmanuel, 53 Moving Statues, 145, 167 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 187 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 56n15 Muir, Edwin, 173–74 Muldoon, Paul, 214, 274 Mulholland, Carolyn, 203 Mulholland, Peter, 264n5 Murphy, Andrew, 112n11 Murphy, Mike, 143 Murray, John Courtney, 51, 57

312

Index

Myth/mythology, 33, 48, 60n19, 65, 72, 83, 86, 92, 94, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 111, 112, 113, 141, 145, 149, 150, 151, 165, 175, 181, 196, 200, 204, 215, 221, 227, 229, 230, 237, 241, 243, 272, 288; Catholicism as mythology, 72, 104, 111–12, 149, 150, 196, 200, 241, 288 New Blackfriars, 72, 93, 108, 256n31 New Criticism, 8, 9, 53, 132, 162 Newman, John Henry, 15, 16, 47, 52, 53, 235, 275, 289–90 New York, 55, 57, 175, 206, 285 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 174, 216n9, 221 Numen/numinous, 8, 33, 42, 84, 178, 190n21, 193, 197, 200, 202, 206, 217, 223, 226, 259, 275, 281, 286 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín, 283 Ó Corráin, Daithí, 26n1 O Riada, Sean, 102, 103 Ó Ríordáin, Seán, 118–120, 178 Ó Tuama, Seán, 120 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 284 O’Brien, Edna, 284 O’Brien, Eugene, 2, 4n8, 8, 9n24, 32n8, 163n33, 216n9, 219, 223n28, 263n1, 282 O’Brien, John A., 54 O’Brien, Peggy, 53n6, 142n1, 246 O’Casey, Seán, 44, 283 O’Connell, Daniel, 14 O’Connor, Flannery, 40, 555, 146, 200 O’Connor, Frank, 44, 48 O’Donoghue, Bernard, 63, 64n25, 100n35, 156 O’Driscoll, Dennis, 4n7, 5n9, 42, 46, 116, 130n41, 150, 152, 213, 240, 241, 263. See also Heaney, Seamus, Stepping Stones O’Faolain, Nuala, 6, 279, 284 O’Faoláin, Seán, 44, 48, 283 O’Hara, Mary, 50 O’Neill, Hugh, 82 O’Neill, Louis, 101, 103 O’Neill, Terence, 51

O’Shea, Helen, 56n12 O’Toole, Fintan, 215 Odysseus, 272 Orange Order, 27, 51, 90, 98, 172 Otto, Rudolf, 197 Ou, Rong, 237n56 Ovid, 197 Owens, Cóilín, 221, 222 Oxford University, 47, 52, 55, 72, 73, 160, 174, 177, 235, 255, 256, 290n19 Pagan/paganism, 5, 12, 15, 33, 64, 83, 84, 86, 91, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 104, 111, 112, 113, 117, 136, 145, 157, 175, 232, 238, 243, 265 Paisley, Ian, 23, 28, 60, 83 Papist, 89, 98, 135 Parker, Michael, 32n16, 41n34, 47, 64, 87, 115n19, 215, 230, 268n18 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 17 Patrician Year, 21 Paul VI, 74 Pearce, Joseph, 55n11 Pearse, Patrick, 17, 18, 66, 98 Péguy, Charles, 53 Penal Laws, 13 Percy, Walker, 52, 53, 235, 240n2 Pétain, Marshal, 20 Pinsky, Robert, 247, 250 Pius IX, 15 Pius X, 15, 22, 284 Pius XII, 22 Plath, Sylvia, 207, 231–32, Plato, 64, 272 Potts, Robert, 177n6 Pratt, William, 265 Protestants/Protestantism, in Northern Ireland, 13, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28–31, 59–60, 75–77, 81–83, 89–92, 94, 95–96, 105–6; in Southern Ireland, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16–17, 18; Protestants and Catholics compared, 28–29 Queen’s University, Belfast, 39–41, 44, 46, 47, 48, 56, 67, 76–80, 103, 107, 190, 235, 286



Index 313

Quinlan, Kieran, 52n3, 285n6 Quinn, Edel, 21 Rahner, Karl, 57, 58 Ransom, John Crowe, 5n10, 190, 285 Reformation, Protestant, 13, 15, 16, 257, 258 Renan, Ernest, 221 Ricoeur, Paul, 286 Robinson, John A. T., 49 Rock, John, 57 Rorty, Richard, 286 Ross, Daniel W., 209 RTE, 60, 195, 263, 284 Ruse, Michael, 290n19 Russell, Bertrand, 55, 189, 242 Russell, Richard Rankin, 3n5, 16n9, 60n20, 63n23, 84n7, 92n16 and n18, 94n22, 96, 98n32, 105, 177, 210, 233, 239, 240n1, 268n18, 271n20, 272, 289n16 Ryan, Columba, 256n31 Ryan Report, 24 St. Brigid, 31, 33, 129, 165 St. Colmcille/Columba, 13, 27, 31, 61 St. Columb’s College, Derry, 34–36, 131, 133, 274 St. Francis de Sales, 36 St. Francis Xavier, 36 St. Joseph’s College of Education, Belfast, 51 St. Martin de Porres, 17n11 St. Patrick, 12, 20, 21, 26, 27, 31, 33, 42, 43, 91, 111, 123, 175, 288 St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 36 Sayers, Dorothy L., 102 Schillebeekx, Edward, 57–58 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 221 Sectarian/sectarianism, 14, 16, 28n4, 59, 76, 77, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92, 98, 122 Secularism/secularization, 1, 2, 6n13, 9, 16, 22, 28, 31, 33, 45, 46, 51, 65, 71, 76, 78, 79, 87, 89, 108, 126, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 143n6, 144n7, 145, 146, 151n15, 155, 156, 167, 188, 195, 196, 208, 215, 218, 221, 224, 230, 233, 235, 241, 243, 255, 259, 263, 264, 279, 283, 285, 286, 289

Sewell, Frank, 118n25, 120n30 Shakespeare, William, 140, 186, 228 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5 Sheridan, Kathy, 277n31 Slant, 24, 72, 75n48, 108 Stalin, Joseph, 114, 250, 285 Sheed, Frank, 57, 75 Sheed, Wilfrid, 75 Sheen, Fulton, 54 Sheen, Martin, 66 Shklovsky, Viktor, 159 Sitwell, Edith, 54 Smith, Maggie, 66 Sophocles, 199 Spark, Muriel, 54 Spinoza, Baruch, 221 Stafford, Jean, 53 Stevens, Wallace, 69–70, 114, 142, 145, 146, 149, 159n28, 165, 167, 168, 175, 177, 180, 198–199, 214, 228, 279; “Sunday Morning,” 142, 145, 146, 158, 177 Stuart, Francis, 20 Superstition/superstitious, 33, 85, 123, 138, 145, 227, 230 Synge, John Millington, 64 Talbot, Matt, 262 Tate, Allen, 53, 56, 162 Taxil, Leo, 221 Taylor, Charles, 16, 73n44, 286 Taylor, John, 205 Taylor, Lawrence J., 17n11 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 22, 49, 250 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 39, 141, 168, 238, 267 Thiel, John E., 10n28 Thomas, Dylan, 177, 178 Thomas, R. S., 210–11 Time, 52 Tobin, Daniel, 37n26, 41n34, 106n43, 115n21, 125n37, 215–16, 216n9, 226 Tóibín, Colm, 16n9, 284 Tolkien, J. R. R., 55 Toklas, Alice B., 54 Tone, Wolfe, 14, 17, 79, 153

314

Index

Trappist, 53, 56n15, 118, 148 TCD (Trinity College Dublin), 12 Troubles, The, 2, 49, 60, 71, 73n44, 78, 83, 87, 90, 97, 103, 116, 130, 144, 213, 226, 271 Tyrrell, George, 284 Underhill, Evelyn, 43, 132 UCD (University College Dublin), 40, 107 Updike, John, 6, 175 U2, 212 Vatican, 58, 74, 195, 224, 274; Second Vatican Council, 23, 46, 50, 51, 57, 58, 72, 75, 89, 111, 116, 132, 224, 235, 259 Vaughan, Henry, 167, 168–69, 270, 277 Vendler, Helen, 7, 8n30 and n22, 9, 59n18, 70, 103, 114, 130, 138–39, 144, 145, 151, 155, 158, 163, 164, 169, 170, 198, 199n9, 214–15, 216, 217, 277, 278n34 Verdi, Giuseppe, 249 Vikings, 13, 97 Virgil, 37, 102, 136n50, 150, 157, 197, 266, 271–72, 279, 281 Voltaire, 45 Wałęsa, Lech, 114 Walmesley, Charles (Pastorini), 27–28 Ward, Maisie, 52, 57, 75

Ward, William George, 52 Waters, John, 119n28, 264, 281 Watson, Peter, 291 Waugh, Evelyn, 22, 52, 53, 54, 236 Weil, Simone, 54, 216 Weinberg, Stephen, 84n7 Wellesley, Lady Dorothy, 182 Wheatley, David, 188 Wilde, Oscar, 53 William of Orange, 27 Wills, Clair, 12n2 Wilmer, Clive, 265 Wilson, A. N., 191 Wilson, Harold, 80 Wiman, Christian, 62, 261, 281, 291 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 54–55, 72, 189, 256, 279 Wordsworth, William, 71, 90, 134, 142, 158, 191, 197, 203, 228, 249; “In Memoriam,” 39, 141, 168, 238, 267 Yeats, W. B., 3, 5, 11, 48, 93, 114, 135, 171, 172–75, 178–84, 186–89, 193–95, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202, 214, 217, 219; “The Cold Heaven” 179–83, 192, 225 Zaleski, Carol, 288 Zeus, 206

Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland was designed in Filosofia and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Maple Eggshell Cream and bound by Maple Press of York, Pennsylvania.