Work in progress: The work began in and much can be attributed to Dr. Joe Pellegrino’s 19th and 20th Century British Literature Fall ’22 class at Georgia Southern University.
1939 SH born on April 19, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast in County Derry.
1951 SH wins a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry.
1957 Attends Queen’s University, Belfast.
1961 Takes a teacher’s certificate at St. Joseph’s College in Belfast.
1963 Becomes a lecturer at St. Joseph’s College.
1965 Becomes a lecturer at Queen’s University. Marries Marie Devlin.
1966 Death of a Naturalist. Son, Michael, is born.
1968 Son, Christopher, is born.
1969 Door Into The Dark.
1970 Visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley.
1972 Wintering Out. Moves to the Republic of Ireland.
1973 Daughter, Catherine Ann, is born.
1975 Begins teaching at Carysfort College in Dublin.
1976 Moves his family to Dublin.
1979 North. Gains international fame.
1980 Selected Poems 1965-1975. Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968-1978. The Field Day Group is established by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stepehen Rea. Their intent is to create a space, a “fifth province,” where art looks beyond the factionalism that was prevalent in Irish politics at the time (Orange/Green, British/Irish, Unionist/Nationalist, Protestant/Catholic, etc.). Their work begins in Derry, in Northeren Ireland, but addresses both Eire and NI. Before their first performance, SH becomes a member of the Board of Directors.
1981 Becomes visiting professor at Harvard.
1984 Station Island. Named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. Mother dies.
1987 The Haw Lantern.
1988 The Government of the Tongue.
1989 The Place of Writing. Becomes Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
1990 New Selected Poems 1966-1987.
1991 Seeing Things.
1995 Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.
1996 The Spirit Level.
Awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he is the commencement speaker
2000 Beowulf: A New Translation. Spends 10 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List.
2003 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry opens at Queens University, Belfast. SH places a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University.
2006 District and Circle is named one of the 10 best books of the decade.
August: While in County Donegal celebrating the 75th birthday of Anne Friel (wife of Brian Friel, above), SH suffers a stroke.
2010 The Human Chain. Many of the poems collected here are about his experiences after his stroke, which left him “babyish” and “on the brink.”
2013 30 August: SH dies in Blackrock Clinic, Dublin. After a fall outside a restaurant in Dublin, he entered the hospital for a medical procedure, but died at 7:30 the following morning before it took place.
His funeral is held in Donnybrook, Dublin, on the morning of 2 September 2013, and he is buried in the evening at his home village of Bellaghy, in the same graveyard as his parents, young brother, and other family members. His son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father texted his final words, “Noli timere” (Latin: “Be not afraid”), to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.
The day after his death, a crowd of 81,553 spectators applauds Heaney for three minutes at an All-Ireland Gaelic football semi-final match on 1 September. His funeral is broadcast live the following day on RTÉ television and radio and is streamed internationally at RTÉ’s website.
2016 SH’s translation of Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid is published. It follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that “there’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years — the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.”
I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.
from the commencement speech
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
twenty years – make the past into the present
Movement down movement from “bad” to “good”
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
The poem is about Heaney’s brother, who was killed by a car in 1953 when he was only 4 years old, and Heaney only 14.
The Early Purges
I was six when I first saw kittens drown. Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’, Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout Of the pump and the water pumped in. ‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said. Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead. Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung Until I forgot them. But the fear came back When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks. Still, living displaces false sentiments And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense: ‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town Where they consider death unnatural But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
explains the problems between protestants and catholics
Requiem for the Croppies
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley . . .
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp . . .
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching . . . on the hike . . .
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until . . . on Vinegar Hill . . . the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.
sonnet
let’s talk about the people who knew about tactics and were so overwhelmed
priest is most respected and the tramp is the least
First rebellion where Catholics and protestants worked together because they realized it wasn’t about religion but about class
Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkening combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilised outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Involved, guilty because he allows it. Guilty becasue he is only the “artful voyeur”
suffering servant whose bones are numbered – biblical
Irish girls who date a British person – head shaved, tarred and feather.
nobody gets to claim moral superiority
The Tollund Man
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
torc – necklace
fen – swamp
sounds like sex but he is actually talking about the tanic acid that is preserving the body
Kells don’t have saints – but Catholics do, like the saints that have their bodies preserved – purity does this – the incorruptibles
This historical event – members of the protestant paramilitary thought these boys were members of the IRA. They were tortured for information and then they hogtied them and drug them behind ATVs until their bodies disintegrated, and stuck to the sides of the railroad cars
tumbril – open cart often used for ammo
We should not consider ourselves morally superior as we too have sacrificed life for the good of our tribe – just like the Tollund man
Clearances
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.
The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,
Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.
1
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
Keeps coming at me, the first stone
Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.
The pony jerks and the riot’s on.
She’s crouched low in the trap
Running the gauntlet that first Sunday
Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.
He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’
Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.
Anyhow, it is a genre piece
Inherited on my mother’s side
And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace,
The exonerating, exonerated stone.
2
Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big—
An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone
Were present and correct. In case it run,
The butter must be kept out of the sun.
And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.
Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.
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.
3
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
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.
4
Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek. She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary. With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.
5
The cool that came off sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
6
In the first flush of the Easter holidays The ceremonies during Holy Week Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase. The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next To each other up there near the front Of the packed church, we would follow the text And rubrics for the blessing of the font. As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. . . Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on. The water mixed with chrism and with oil. Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride: Day and night my tears have been my bread.
7
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
‘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 . . . Isn’t that right?’
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
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.
8
I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.
Sonnets on the death of his mother
cobble – cobblestone
Exogamous – marrying outside of a community
history of love trumping institutional religion
Grandmothers house
turn takes us to the mother’s death
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