Abstract
The word ‘neighbour’ consistently exudes a sense of menace in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. ‘Funeral Rites’ in North (1975) contains a reference to ‘each neighbourly murder’; in the same volume, in ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, Vikings are described as ‘neighbourly, scoretaking / killers’.1 Later, when Heaney has a vision of the nineteenth-century novelist William Carleton in Station Island (1984), the ghost raves of ‘yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour / among them, hammering home the shape of things’.2 Heaney relocates Carleton’s experience of being intimidated by neighbours to his own home-parish of Bellaghy in County Derry and brings it into the twentieth century by telling the ghost of the novelist that he, too, has seen ‘neighbours on the roads at night with guns’.3 More recently, in District and Circle (2006), ‘The Nod’ features ‘Neighbours with guns, parading up and down’, while the young Heaney’s first taste of tobacco in ‘A Chow’ results in the metaphor ‘the roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to / At the burning-out of a neighbour’.4 In Heaney’s last volume, Human Chain (2010), an armed neighbour is glimpsed in the moonlight, patrolling the highway outside the Heaneys’ farm in ‘The Wood Road’.5 Even in poems in which neighbours from across the religious divide come to his family’s threshold in friendship, Heaney never depicts them crossing over into the house itself.6
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Notes
Seamus Heaney, ‘Funeral Rites’, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 16; ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, North, p. 23.
Heaney, ‘Station Island’, Station Island (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 65.
Heaney, ‘The Nod’, District and Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 33; ‘A Chow’, District and Circle, p. 30.
Heaney, ‘The Wood Road’, Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 22.
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Scott Brewster, ‘The Space That Cleaves: The House and Hospitality in Medbh McGuckian’s Work’, in Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words, ed. by Richard Kirkland and Shane Alcobia-Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), pp. 105–16 (p. 112).
The idea that religious identity begins in the home and the significance of the threshold in Northern Irish poetry have been discussed by Maryvonne Boisseau and Carle Bonafous-Murat in ‘Les Seuils du Protestantisme Dans la Poésie de Derek Mahon’, Le Cahier Charles V, 33 (March 2003) pp. 33–60.
John Hewitt, ‘The Hill-Farm’, The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. by Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), p. 124. I am grateful to Edna Longley and Peter McDonald for bringing this poem to my attention.
Victor Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 93–111.
Heaney to James Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, 5.3 (1979), 7–22 (p. 16). Heaney also stated in interview that in Wintering Out he ‘politicize[s] the terrain and imagery of the first two books’ (quoted in Andrews, All the Realms of Whisper, p. 60).
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
Additional information on the nature of the public sphere comes from James Gordon Finlayson, Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and
Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, eds, After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Lucy Collins has written illuminatingly on this subject in ‘Performance and Dissent: Irish Poets in the Public Sphere’, in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 209–28.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, in The Poems, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 340.
F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 113 ff.
Heaney, ‘The Government of the Tongue’, in The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 91–108 (p. 108).
Heaney gave an intriguing indication in an interview with Seamus Deane that his poems of childhood acted as substitutes and perhaps as concealments for a more radical political stance. He reported that, by the time he came to publish Death of a Naturalist (1966), ‘one part of [his] temperament took over, the private County Derry childhood part of [himself] rather than the slightly aggravated young Catholic male part’ (Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney, ‘Unhappy and at Home’, The Crane Bag, 1.1 (Spring 1977), 61–7 (p. 61). Heaney’s ‘inwardness’ is the focus of a chapter of John Redmond’s Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Bridgend: Seren, 2013), p. 111–29.
Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 13.
Thomas Hajkowski, ‘This is Northern Ireland: Regional Broadcasting and Identity in “Ulster”’, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 203–32.
Further insights into the ‘imperial’ project of radio at this time can be found in Adrienne Munich, ‘In the Radio Way: Elizabeth II, the Female Voice-Over, and the Radio’s Imperial Effects’, in Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, ed. by Susan Merrill Squier (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 217–36.
More broadly, radio broadcasts were intended by the BBC’s administrators to ‘forge a link between the dispersed and disparate listeners and the symbolic heartland of national life’ according to David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 66. As the title of René Wolf’s The Undivided Sky: The Holocaust on East and West German Radio in the 1960s indicates, radio broadcasts are no respecters of state borders and create overlapping, elective communities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
A Heaney, ‘The Regional Forecast’, in The Literature of Region and Nation, ed. by R. P. Draper (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 10–23 (p. 10).
Stephen James, ‘The Sway of Language’, Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 127–45 (p. 145).
See Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 50;
also Charles Bennett, ‘The Use of Memory: On Heaney’s Stations’, in Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry: Proceedings of the Leiden IASAIL Conference: Volume 5, ed. by Tjebbe A. Westendorp and Jane Mallinson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 95–106 (p. 102).
The ironies generated by the world’s gaze turning on Northern Ireland’s poets were affectionately, if acerbically, recorded by Edna Longley’s clerihew ‘THE ULSTER POET / Is never off the set / Explaining his scruples / About exploiting the Troubles’ (‘Ten Cliquey Clerihews’, published in the Honest Ulsterman (1974), quoted by Heather Clark, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 148).
Thomas Nagel, Concealment and Exposure: and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 8.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), p. 157.
Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 91.
Anthony Easthope, ‘How Good is Seamus Heaney?’, English, 46.194 (1997), 21–36 (p. 29).
Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation, p. 17; Greg Garrard, ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling’, in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 1998), pp. 167–80 (p. 178).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994);
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt, 1987).
Seamus Heaney to John Brown, ‘Seamus Heaney’, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Publishing, 2002), pp. 75–86 (p. 85). The poem under discussion is poem ii of ‘Squarings’, Seeing Things, p. 53.
Bachelard, p. xix. A useful analysis of Bachelard’s work can be found in Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), pp. 154–60.
Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems, ed. by Harry Thomas (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 122.
Emily Dickinson, ‘The Chariot’, Poems, ed. by T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), p. 140.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 152.
Douglas Dunn, ‘Quotidian Miracles: Seeing Things’ in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. by Tony Curtis, 4th edn (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), p. 220.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Part Two (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 288.
Jeremy Hooker, The Poetry of Place: Essays and Reviews 1971–1980 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982), p. 181.
This is discussed in William Robins and Robert Epstein, ‘Introduction: the Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature’, Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), ed. by William Robins and Robert Epstein, pp. 3–29 (pp. 3 ff.).
Seamus Heaney to Randy Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’, Salmagundi, 80 (Fall 1988), 4–21 (p. 6).
Louis MacNeice, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. by Peter McDonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 261.
Seamus Heaney in John Haffenden, ‘Seamus Heaney’ in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 57–75 (p. 66).
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Hanna, A. (2015). Seamus Heaney: Neighbours and Strangers. In: Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493705_2
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