SEAMUS HEANEY'S 'OPENED GROUND'

Our chosen collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney begins with one of his most famous, "Digging." That poem immediately creates a continuity and sense of cohesion with the title of this volume, OPENED GROUND. The initial poem sees the speaker--presumably Heaney, typically characterized as a very personal, if not confessional, poet--meditating on the hard manual labor done by his father and grandfather:

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. (3)

Heaney himself also sees himself as a digger, but of a cultural digger, rather than a physical one. The poem concludes:

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. (4)

Heaney's "Digging" is probably his most anthologized poem, and for good reason: it many ways it encapsulates his approach and philosophy toward poetry, or art in general. There is a sense in his verse that Heaney approaches his poetry as a process of excavation; language as a means of uncovering--rather than creating--identity, both personal and cultural/national. Personal and group identities can be found in the subconscious--individual for the former, collective for the latter--and it is through literature and language that we unearth, understand, and often recover those identities.

Heaney's interest in "digging" up identity can hardly be discussed without reference to the Irish identity and "the Troubles." But, first, a slight detour: I would like to point out the personal nature of Heaney's work, and his interest in individual identity, before touching on his national concerns. Clearly, Heaney's work can be deeply and intensely personal: the best example is perhaps "Mid-Term Break," describing his return home for the funeral of a four-year brother. Returning to "Digging," one of its characteristics that has always struck me is the personal attachment Heaney seems to feel towards his father and grandfather's trade. There is a sense that it goes beyond admiration: Heaney sees this type of work--unearthing--as part of his own lineage and identity. The amount of descriptive attention and detail given to their manual work, compared to his form of digging, also suggests a sense of guilt over his methodology. Yes, he is "digging" metaphorically--but he'd rather be doing so literally.

These veneration for the working class and "common man" seems to run throughout much of Heaney's poetry. I've read "The Forge" multiple times and--try as I might--I don't see much more to the poem than an ode to a blacksmith. Of coures, to quote a famous episode of SEINFELD, "not that there's anything wrong with that." My point is rather simply: Heaney holds a great deal of respect for physical laborers, and that admiration manifests itself in his poetry. However, it is more than just respect or veneration. The world of the peat shoveller or blacksmith is the world with which Heaney personally identifies. Heaney brings poetry into the hands of the workers: rather than a form used by intellectuals and the elite for grand meditations, it is a craft--a trade, a tool--used to work, build, uncover, and refine.

Of course, such a position regarding poetry and personal identity must have implications toward   the collective, and Heaney is no stranger to issues of national identity. Many of Heaney's most interesting poems to deal with the national and cultural identity of the Irish come in the form of his "bog poems." Preserved bodies and other archeological finds have often been found buried deep within the bogs, making it an apt metaphor for uncovering and mythologizing a collective Irish identity and experience.

Another of Heaney's famous poems, "Punishment," uses the bog to unify Irish experiences over time in an attempt to reconcile conflicts within the nationalist Irish identity. In the first nine stanzas of the poem, Heaney describes the partially preserved body of a woman dragged from the bog. Heaney presumes that the woman--who had been weighed down and blindfolded--was abused and executed as punishment for adultery. Yet, as he feels great sympathy for the woman he deems a "scapegoat," he realizes his own hypocrisy when considering contemporary Irish women who have affairs with British soldiers:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge. (113)

Here we have the internal conflict that still affects so many modern Irish (and other peoples as well): how does one preserve decency and avoid cruelty, while at the same time protect cultural traditions and identity? Heaney has no interest in punishing Irish women, but is deeply attuned to the impulse that does so when they violate codes that are designed to protect the clan. Heaney doesn't necessarily solve the problem, but he does bring it to the fore, and exposes the conflict--and the need to reconcile it--as a defining feature of the collective Irish identity and experience. Again, this excavation is Heaney's way of fulfilling his role as a workman--by unearthing and digging out the ore of identity, both personal and national, he is making it available and ready to be refined.

--Jack Ayres

Comments

[alschmidt]

Jack "hits the nail on the head" with this business about 1) not only uncovering identity but also REcovering it, 2) and not only in terms of personal identity but also in terms of national/cultural identity.

Heaney's portrayal (and admiration, etc.) of manual labor trades, particularly in regards to his own family, does seem to be, as Jack mentions, infused with a sort of guilt (over performing a cultural type of digging rather than a manual type). I think this deserves further discussion (though I'm not certain what else to say about it "now") specifically in relation to what Jack identifies as Heaney putting "poetry into the hands of the workers" (v. into those of elite intellectuals-- hmmm-- what do you suppose the implications of this are for "us"?). Heaney's ability to "ground" poetry without seeming condescending or voyeuristic is noteworthy (I don't know much about his biography, but I was under the impression that he farmed himself? If so, is this the reason he's able to pull off this merging of (what modernists probably would identify as) "low" and "high" culture?)

I also agree that Heaney's "bog" poems exemplify his concern with family and cultural/national history, and I get the sense that he is not only "uncovering" but also REcovering it-- a not uncommon impulse for a variety of historically oppressed groups (I'm thinking of feminist (black and white) scholarship over the past forty or so years). And, of course, it is noteworthy that Heaney chooses to do so through poetry (rather than through explicilty historical scholarship, or perhaps nonfiction prose, more generally?). I was particularly taken with "Punishment," as well, for this reason (among others): Heaney seems to convey (and I suppose this is debatable, but because I want to marry Seamus Heaney, this is what I'm choosing to believe) the need to REcover this woman's "story"-- again, both on a national/cultural level but also on a personal level. And, as Jack points out, her story, as Heaney imagines it, exposes the tension between these two "levels" and the need to reconcile it-- again, not an uncommon need. (This poem also reminds me of (a type of) African American nationalism and the (sometimes) conflicts and tensions over interracial relationships within that milieu.)

At any rate, it seems that Jack and I are finally "on the same page," and perhaps the next time I read Hughes (Ted, not Langston), I'll be able to transfer to his work my lust for Heaney.

[Margaret Poist]

Piggybacking on Jack's discussion of the theme of digging throughout OPEN GROUND, I think it's crafty how, in the poem "Digging," Heaney presents the generations as layers of earth and atmosphere. He, as the youngest of the three generations in the poem, inhabits a second story room above the ground and looks down at the next oldest of his generation, his father. His father is digging below him, and below him is Heaney's grandfather, who is implicitly in the ground because Heaney speaks of him fully in the past tense. In the way that the poem is set up on the page, there is a nice visual of the layers: it progresses in reverse time, and thus Heaney is at the top of the page in his upper story, his father in the middle on the ground, and his grandfather at the bottom of the page under the earth. Heaney even calls the deepest turf the "good turf," the turf for which his grandfather sliced in "heavy sods/ Over his shoulder, going down and down/ for the good turf. Digging." This creates a sense that the oldest turf, the turf his grandfather knew (and may I suggest the turf of older Irish customs and heritage,) buried down under new generations, is/was the richest of turfs.

This sense of the riches that can be found beneath the surface of the world shows up again in "A Lough Neagh Sequence": in this poem, Heaney nearly depicts a sort of living ghost world beneath the lake. He begins the poem by saying that "The Lough will claim a victim every year" and that "There is a town sunk beneath its water." But it's almost as if the fisherman who fish on the lough want to drown and thus inhabit that town, because they "sail miles out, and never learn to swim." Furthermore, when they are asked why they do not learn to swim, their nonchalance about drowning almost implies a reverence for the depths of the lake as they argue that "We'll be the quicker going down." Is this a morbid sense that they might be better off dead? Maybe, but I think it is also an acknowledgement of the fecundity of the depths below both the ground and the surface of the water.

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