Ted Hughes+Seamus Heaney

Mapping the Misreadings: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and NationhoodAuthor(s): Raphaël IngelbienSource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 627-658Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208797Accessed: 29/11/2009 12:23

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RAPHAEL INGELBIEN

Mapping the Misreadings: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Nationhood

eamus Heaney's poem "Casting and Gathering" is dedi- cated to Ted Hughes and shows two fishermen on opposite sides of a river: "when one man casts, the other gathers / And then vice versa, without changing sides" (Seeing Things

13). The image could symbolize the bond between two imaginations that often fished in the same poetic waters, until Hughes's untimely death in 1998. However, both the extent and the nature of Heaney's relation to Hughes have been insufficiently explored.

As Heaney himself acknowledged, Hughes's rough-hewn nature

poetry was a major influence on Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark: "I'm a different kind of animal from Ted, but I will always be grateful for the release that reading his work gave me" ("Seamus Heaney" 74). The alliterative quality of Heaney's early poems also recalls Hughes, although it actually points to a shared infatuation with the music of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Heaney discov- ered before he read Hughes (Corcoran 18-19). Heaney's use of

weapons and machines as metaphors clearly echoes Hughes's own

penchant for such imagery (Corcoran 45; Parker 45).1 Hughes's pop- ularity in the 1960s had created the climate in which Heaney's first two collections were greeted by critical acclaim. But in Wintering Out

1. Many images in Heaney's "Trout"-"a fat gun-barrel," "his muzzle gets bull's eye," "darts like a tracer- / bullet back between stones" (Death 39)-can be traced back to the

metaphorical battlefields of Hughes's "To Paint a Water Lily," where a dragonfly "bullets

by // Or stands in space to take aim": "There are battle-shouts / And death-cries every- where here abouts" (Lupercal 29). However, Heaney sometimes predicts rather than follows Hughes: "The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon" (Door 18) points forward to Hughes's "Earth-numb" (Moortown 95-96) and to River.

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628 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E

and North, while retaining the intensity of his vision of nature, Heaney turned to myth, archaeology, and philology in his quest for

"images and symbols adequate to [the] predicament" of Northern Ireland (Preoccupations 56). This shift, which followed the beginning of the Troubles, seems to show that a Hughesian interest in nature was replaced by a need to explore the roots of the conflict in the Irish collective unconscious. Heaney once explained that when he "became very influenced by Hughes," "one part of [his] temperament took over: the private county Derry childhood part ... rather than the slightly aggravated young Catholic male part" ("Unhappy and at Home" 66). This may suggest that Hughes's influence became

secondary when Heaney turned to sectarian problems and explored their linguistic and mythical ramifications. However, I will argue that this was precisely the moment when Heaney's reading of

Hughes was most decisive. In the early 1970s, Hughes's poetry stopped spawning imitations and became an influence in the Bloom- ian sense of the word: Heaney identified a key problem in Hughes's poetics and solved it through a creative misreading. My contention is that the myths of Irishness that Heaney developed in Wintering Out and North are largely misreadings of Hughes's tentative myths of Englishness.2

Heaney's essay "Englands of the Mind" (1976; reprinted in Preoc-

cupations) remains a landmark in Hughes criticism. At the time, few of Hughes's readers had ever paid much attention to the place of

England in his poetry. Since then, however, the importance of nationhood in Hughes's thinking has been reflected not only in his laureate works but also in his Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and in the more recent essay "Myths, Metres, Rhythms" (Win- ter Pollen 310-72). These critical writings amount to a mythological account of the development of English nationhood as seen through

2. Although I am using Harold Bloom's terminology, my analysis will deviate from the aestheticizing Freudianism of The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading; instead, I will emphasize the ideological implications of Heaney's misreading. So far, the only critic who has discussed similarities between Heaney's and Hughes's myths is Neil Rhodes, who explores their common use of Elizabethan mythologies. My analysis complements some of his findings but casts them in a new light by analyzing Heaney's texts as strategic misreadings of Hughes's and by correlating both poets' use of myth with their philological methods, which Rhodes does not consider.

I N G E L B I E N * 629

its literature. Hughes's myth centers on the "dissociation of sensibility" that befell England during the Reformation (Winter Pollen 119). He criticizes the Protestant materialism and rationality of modern Britain through an exploration of the older England it sup- pressed, an England made up of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Celtic influences, brought together under the sign of a feminine religion that spans paganism and medieval Catholicism. Puritanism, by contrast, carries masculine connotations. This dissociation was compounded by the decline of the alliterative tradition, which Hughes also describes by contrasting a feminine nature with a masculine culture. Indeed, he allegorizes the history of English poetry as the failed union of a sensual bride (alliterative poetics) and a Puritanical groom, who stands for the traditions imported after the Norman

Conquest (Winter Pollen 369-72). The early poem "Witches" (Lupercal 48) runs the gamut of those

contrasts. The title signals the possibility of identifying the witches with the old goddess and her "witcheries" (Winter Pollen 111). The ancestral feminine principle is significantly evoked in strongly alliterative lines: "Once was every woman the witch / To ride a weed the ragwort road." It is also connected with the Norse and Celtic elements in the national psyche: the witches who are "Dancing in Ire- land nightly, gone / To Norway (the ploughboy bridled)" stand for the cultural continuum that characterized the pagan world of medieval England. The fourth stanza returns to modernity: "Did they dream it? / Oh, our science says they did." "Science" is the legacy of Puritan rationalism to modern Britain, and the last stanza confirms

Hughes's male/female dualism:

Bitches still sulk, rosebuds blow, And we are devilled. And though these weep Over our harms, who's to know Where their feet dance while their heads sleep?

This holds out the possibility that the older England may still be reached through inner journeys. Had Hughes's later writings been available when Lupercal was published, the poem could have been

interpreted as a versification of his national myth. As things stand, its sexual stereotypes show how much Hughes's later elaborations remained caught up in hackneyed perceptions of gender.

630 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E

This fascination with a primitive England is central to Heaney's essay on Hughes. "Witches" probably wasn't a good enough poem to engage his attention; instead, "Englands of the Mind" largely fo- cuses on "The Warriors of the North" and "Thistles."3 These more successful pieces are also dominated by Hughes's alliterative tech-

nique and his interest in English history, and more particularly in the

Vikings whose "slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep / sheen of the water-globe" (Wodwo 159). Sensitive though they are, however, Heaney's readings sometimes go surprisingly wrong. Heaney thus writes that Hughes's "consonants are the Norsemen, the Normans, the Roundheads in the world of his vocables, hacking and hedging and hammering down the abundance and luxury and

possible lasciviousness of the vowels" (Preoccupations 154). Heaney's description of consonants as "Normans" flies in the face of history; Hughes himself later made much of the fact that the Norman con-

quest marginalized the alliterative tradition (Winter Pollen 366-72). Given Heaney's in-depth knowledge of philology, the misreading is rather suspicious. His interpretation is purely political: it is the

roughness of Hughes's consonants, rather than their philological sig- nificance, that links them with Norman violence in Heaney's imagination. The "Roundhead" element seems rather out of place too: as

Heaney himself points out, Hughes's alliterations go back to Hop- kins, whom one would not readily call a Roundhead. In another

essay, Heaney himself described the landscape of Hopkins's poetry as "Marian, sacramental, mediaeval English Catholic" ("Place" 45).

Describing consonants as "Norsemen" makes perfect philological sense, but Heaney's conflation of Norsemen, Roundheads, and Nor- mans contradicts Hughes's own account of the struggle that was

waged over the soul of England. In Hughes's writings, alliterative poetry belongs to a cultural stratum where Celtic, Nordic, and Anglo- Saxon influences merged into a pagan-Catholic continuum where the life of the senses still held sway. Heaney, on the other hand, aligns both alliteration and the Scandinavian input with those whom Hughes held responsible for the dissociation of sensibility in England. Yet for

3. It may seem incongruous to use a poem about Scotland's national emblem in an essay entitled "Englands of the Mind," but Hughes's Englishness always drew vital sustenance from its connection with the Celtic fringes.

I N G E L B I E N * 631

all these apparent flaws, Heaney's reading actually hits upon a problem which Hughes himself more or less acknowledged. In "Myths, Metres, Rhythms," Hughes implicitly tried to do justice to Heaney:

To see the full irony of this Battle of the Metrical Forms and this intertan-

gled Battle of the Modes of Speech, in Britain, you have to be Welsh, Scots or Irish. You have to be one of those, that is, who failed, in successive de-

feats, to stop the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian and finally the Norman invaders stealing the country from beneath them.

But although he admits that the Anglo-Saxon influence dislodged Celtic forms in the same way that later traditions displaced it, Hughes clings to the synthesis which underlies his vision of a sup- pressed England: "For various reasons, the Celtic presence is usu-

ally to be found supporting the old English, and as time passes becomes less and less separable from it" (Winter Pollen 368, 369). This assessment glibly evades the implications of Heaney's Irish reading, in which time has failed to heal some wounds.

For Hughes, the conflict which Heaney insists on remembering must be attenuated; its protagonists must be united in the struggle to

preserve the older England. Hughes argued elsewhere that Nordic

myths are "much deeper in us, and truer to us, than the Greek-Roman

pantheons that came in with Christianity, and again with the Renais- sance.... It is as if we were to lose Macbeth and King Lear, and have to live on Timon and Coriolanus; or as if a vocabulary drawn wholly from the Greek-Roman branch were to take over absolutely from our

Anglo-Saxon-Norse-Celtic" (Winter Pollen 40-41). In the landscape poems of Remains of Elmet, the erasure of more recent cultural accre- tions uncovers traces that are both Celtic (in "The Ancient Briton Lay Under His Rock" 84) and Nordic, as "the children / Of rock and water and a draughty absence" "trailed away homeward aimlessly / Like the earliest / Homeless Norsemen" (38). The valley of Elmet itself is a

pass "between the Scandinavian pressures of the North Sea and the Celtic pressures of the Irish Sea" (Three Books 181). Hughes often tried to keep this Celtic-Germanic-Nordic continuum unified.4 His critical

4. According to Hughes, Coleridge's interest in Norse and Celtic myths (Winter Pollen

398, 429, 453) is part of what makes his work "a large-scale, brilliantly concise, diagnos- tic, luminous vision of England's spiritual/intellectual predicament" (439).

632 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E

writings show a profound grasp of mythology and philology, but he almost repeated the blunders of the early Romantics, who frequently mixed up Gothic, Scandinavian, and Celtic myths.5 Hughes's own romanticism tended to smooth away contradictions of which he remained uneasily aware. Moreover, some of his work has invited the

misreadings that expose the fissures in his myth of England. Hughes's primitive England may be feminine, but in "Thistles" the

task of perpetuating its legacy is clearly entrusted to male figures:

Then they grow grey, like men. Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear, Stiff with weapons....

(Wodwo 17)

The warriors in "The Warriors of the North" (159) are also as-

sertively male. Hughes tries to merge their virility with the feminine nature of the land they invaded: their frozen armory

Thawed at the red and black disgorging of abbeys, The bountiful, cleft casks, The fluttered bowels of the women of dead burghers, And the elaborate, patient gold of the Gaels.

The poem, however, ends on a more pessimistic note than "This- tles." Cyclical rebirth has been replaced by degeneration: the

Vikings' invasions have been

To no end But this timely expenditure of themselves, A cash-down, beforehand revenge, with extra, For the gruelling relapse and prolongueur of their blood Into the iron arteries of Calvin.

As the Latinisms of these lines take over from Germanic allitera-

tions, they linguistically reenact the process through which the

primitive violence of the Vikings was translated into the debased ab- straction of Puritanism. In Heaney's counterinterpretation, however, the Vikings are aligned with Puritanism from the beginning.

Heaney's analysis is in fact confirmed by other poems in Wodwo.

5. See Henry Beers's discussion of early romanticism (195-96).

I N G E L B I E N * 633

In "Gog," the "hooded horseman of iron" is a "Holy Warrior" who bears a striking resemblance to the Viking warriors. Hughes's knight, however, is battling against the feminine "wound-gash in the earth" from which he has emerged (151). His "enemy" is the "womb-wall of the dream that crouches there, greedier than a foe- tus, / Suckling at the root-blood of the origins, the salt-milk drug of the mothers" (152). The knight is drawn to the symbols of Protestant rationality, "to the ruled slab, the octaves of order, / The law and mercy of number." Another Northern Irish critic, Tom Paulin, identifies the knight as a "Cromwellian figure" (267) and analyzes Wodwo as a symptom of "that cult of the nordic which is so central to the imagination of British Protestantism" (265). Paulin knows that

Hughes is contrasting the Vikings' authentic violence with the debased violence of the Puritans, but he disregards his attempts at

blending the Celtic and the Nordic. Like Heaney, Paulin reads

Hughes's work in terms of dichotomies that differ from those pro- posed by Hughes himself. Paulin pits the "salt-bleached warriors

against the elaborate, patient gold of the Gaels," "the Germanic/puritan/masculine" against the "Celtic/Catholic/feminine," and

gives short shrift to Hughes's two-tiered conception of violence: "The Warriors of the North" "sets one form of violence against another, but it ratifies both" (266).

"Thistles" and "The Warriors of the North" show that Hughes's emerging myth of nationhood was doomed to founder on the excessive nature of his imagination of violence. Wodwo was not articu- lated around the theme of Englishness-this can perhaps only be said of a sustained mythological narrative like Gaudete.6 But Gaudete

actually underscores the shifting place of the Nordic element in

Hughes's thinking on England and shows him capitulating to

Heaney's reading. It contrasts the Puritanism of English villagers with the sensuality of the Reverend Lumb, who wants to reconcile

Christianity with paganism and seduces the village's women. In one

episode, his head "Rests on the shoulder / Of Pauline Hagen, the

Major's wife, / Whose body's thirty-five year old womb-fluttered abandon / Warms his calming hands" (25). This recalls how the

Vikings "Thawed at... The fluttered bowels of the women" in "The

6. Hughes's laureate poems are of course another exception.


Warriors of the North" (Wodwo 159). But Lumb is never associated with Nordic elements; instead, these are now conferred on Major Hagen, who is observing the scene:

Paradeground gravel in the folded gnarl of his jowls. A perfunctory campaign leatheriness. A frontal Viking weatherproof Drained of the vanities, pickled in mess-alcohol and smoked dark. Anaesthetised For ultimate cancellations

By the scathing alums of King's regulations, The petrifying nitrates of garrison caste.

(23-24; emphases added)

Hagen's Viking quality is part of a cluster of associations which typ- ify him as a Puritanical Victorian. Hughes's images belong to the mil-

itary rhetoric that he later used in his dismissal of Victorian English as "the officers' mess and parade-ground system of vocal controls which we inherit as Queen's English" (Winter Pollen 119). Hughes also commented that, when creating the character of Hagen, he tried to maintain a balance "between German/Scandinavian, and Ancient

Britain/Celtic, between Puritanical suppressive and Catholic woman worshipping" ("Ted Hughes" 215). And indeed, it is only when he reemerges in Ireland in the last section of Gaudete that Lumb starts singing hymns to a female deity. In Gaudete, Hughes himself

jeopardized the internal coherence of his ancestral England. If Hughes failed to forge a stable English myth, his problems were

solved in a work that completed his project through a powerful mis-

reading-the poetry of Irish nationhood that Seamus Heaney devel-

oped in the 1970s. Door into the Dark (1969) already contains the first

stirrings of Heaney's archaeological and mythological methods. In

"Shoreline," Heaney becomes aware of ghostly presences: "Listen. Is it the Danes, / A black hawk bent on the sail? / Or the chinking Nor- mans?" (52). Neil Corcoran writes, "Heaney's ear has perhaps been schooled to hear [the Danes] ... by Hughes's 'Thistles,' and also by ... 'The Warriors of the North"' (61). The Normans did not figure ex-

plicitly in Hughes's mythologies at this stage, although Heaney later mentioned them when discussing Hughes's consonants. Heaney may have found them in the poetry of Austin Clarke, who criticized

I N G E L B I E N * 635

the Norman influence on the Celtic Catholicism of medieval Ireland.7

Heaney's hesitation ("Is it... or.. .") may be a sign that the ancestral Ireland he is about to explore has its sources in both English and Irish

mythologies; it is defined in relation to both Clarke's Normans and

Hughes's Vikings-figures who will play a crucial role in North. Meanwhile, Wintering Out performed a philological misreading of

Hughes's "Thistles," through which Heaney invested the very sur- faces of his poetry with political meanings.

Hughes's thistles are "a grasped fistful / Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up / From the underground stain of a de-

cayed Viking"; they are also like "pale hair and the gutturals of dialects" (Wodwo 17). These gutturals, Heaney writes, are connected with the "Nordic [that is, consonantal] stratum of English speech," and yet he also suggests that they represent a "fundamental speech, uttering itself in gutturals from behind the sloped arms of consonants"

(Preoccupations 155; emphasis added). If Heaney contradicts himself in his analysis of Hughes, it may well be because, in his poem "Tradi- tions," he had chosen to identify his own "guttural muse" as the Gaelic poetry that was "bulled long ago / by the alliterative tradition"

(Wintering Out 31)-hence his clumsy attempt at keeping Hughes's gutturals separate from his consonants, which he once again describes through military metaphors. Heaney pursued a Hughesian quest for a fundamental speech, but with different results.

In his first two volumes, Heaney had displayed a virtuoso's abil-

ity to use alliteration for quasi-mimetic effects, as in his description of the frogs of the title poem of Death of a Naturalist: "their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: / The slap and plop were ob- scene threats" (16). But in Wintering Out, alliteration becomes the trace of Ireland's oppression at the hands of its invaders. Heaney will not discard it, but he will strive to subsume it under the original speech which is central to his vision of Ireland. This is the aim of the

philological method of Wintering Out. The speech to which Heaney has shifted allegiance is the theme of "Broagh" (Wintering Out 27), a

poem dominated by the "abundance and luxury and possible las-

7. See for instance Clarke's poem "Loss of Strength." As Susan Halper explains, Clarke bemoans "the Norman invasion which submerged the national uniqueness of the Celtic-

Romanesque" (86).


civiousness of the vowels" that Hughes's consonants allegedly re-

press (Preoccupations 154). "Broagh" is a celebration of its long vowels and diphthongs, of "the black O / / in Broagh." The "last / gh the

strangers found / difficult to manage" is then typographically fused with the "o" of "Broagh," symbolizing the alliance between a Gaelic

guttural and the vowels whose dark, feminine sensuousness contrasts with the alliterative mode, which Heaney now characterizes as British and masculine.8 He thus strategically appropriates the sexual and natural symbolism of Hughes's mythologies and devel-

ops a language that will prove easier to reconcile with the feminine- natural pole of Hughes's dichotomies than the harsh consonants of Wodwo. This enables him to define the origin which Hughes's self-

deconstructing quests could only gesture toward. Heaney's vision of Ireland will consequently possess the organic coherence which

Hughes's contradictions rendered impossible. Heaney's "guttural muse" is of course feminine: "her uvula grows

/ / vestigial" (Wintering Out 31). In "A New Song," the "Vanished music" that Heaney hears when meeting a "girl from Derrygarve" is a "smooth libation of the past / Poured by this chance vestal daugh- ter" (33). It is also a "dialect" (29) which, like Hughes's dialects in "Thistles," is part of a natural landscape; it issues from the "larynx / of the mossy places" (28). In "Gifts of Rain," the "tawny guttural water / spells itself" to become "an old chanter / / breathing its mists / through vowels and history" (25). Like "Broagh," the poem unites gutturals and vowels and gives rise to what Harold Bloom has identified as Heaney's "central trope" ("Voice" 137), that is, the "vowel of earth" of North (43).

This vowel, springing from the earth of Heaney's native land-

scape, is crucial to his vision of Ireland. A sister to the guttural muse, it was "hack[ed] and hedg[ed] and hammer[ed] down" (Preoccupa- tions 154) by the consonants that Hughes tried to identify with his fe-

8. In 1974, Heaney described Hopkins's creative processes as masculine: "There is a conscious push of the deliberating intelligence, a siring strain rather than a birth-push in his poetic act" (Preoccupations 85). R. J. C. Watt perceptively observes: "In all these ways, [Hopkins] is 'English' not 'Irish.' To that extent, Heaney's early affinity with him was an

affinity with the other, the alien" (219). However, Heaney's ideological revision of alliterative poetics does violence to his own reality: indeed, "the Ulster accent is generally a staccato consonantal one" (Preoccupations 45).

I N G E L B I E N * 637

male principle. "Traditions" contrasts its guttural speech with the "furled / consonants of [Protestant] lowlanders"; these are lumped together with the "Elizabethan English" and the "Shakespearean" language in which Hughes still read traces of his primitive England (31-32). In "The Wool Trade," vocalic words "Unwound from the

spools / Of... vowels" to evoke "a language of waterwheels, / A lost syntax of looms and spindles" (37). The vowels of the poem are cut short by the last lines: "And I must talk of tweed, / A stiff cloth with flecks like blood." The curt alliterations mingle with a suggestion of enforced economic change (the British tweed has replaced the native wool) and of political violence ("flecks like blood").9

Henry Hart writes that the "poetymologies" of Wintering Out owe much to Heaney's Irish predecessors: "With Joyce in his wake, Heaney's allegories of vowels and consonants seem traditionally Irish rather than eccentrically English" (55). Neil Corcoran links

Heaney's method to "the Gaelic tradition of dinnseanchas which

Heaney defines in 'The Sense of Place' as 'poems and tales which re- late the original meanings of place-names and constitute a form of

mythological etymology"' (87), while Blake Morrison argues that

Heaney's is an even "more ... political etymology" than that of the dinnseanchas, since "its accents [are] those of sectarianism.... it uncovers a history of linguistic and territorial dispossession" (41).

Another Irish source is Austin Clarke, to whom Heaney also refers in "The Sense of Place." Heaney discusses the view that "the note of Irish poetry is struck when the rhythms and assonances of Gaelic

poetry insinuate themselves into the texture of the English verse" and comments, "I am sympathetic to the effects gained but I find the whole enterprise a bit programmatic" (Preoccupations 36). Written in the year when the philological exercises of Wintering Out appeared, this critical note sounds paradoxical: some of Heaney's poems are as

programmatic as Clarke's. Perhaps Heaney's criticism reflects his sense of a greater complexity in his own enterprise; what makes it more complex is the fact that his method derives from Hughes as well as from Irish traditions. Indeed, if Heaney is reverting to a "vowel-music" similar to that which Clarke was reviving, he does

9. The etymological contrasts of "The Wool Trade" have been analyzed by Michael R. Molino.


not do so by introducing a "Gaelic internal assonance" (Halpern 140) that follows the regular patterns of Clarke's poems. In Clarke's

poetry, assonance "occurs when the tonic syllable at the end of the line is supported by an assonance in the middle of the next line," or when rhyme relies primarily on the vowels of the last syllable rather than on its consonants (Halpern 51, 71). In Wintering Out, by contrast, assonance infiltrates the whole texture of the poems much as

Hughes's alliteration does-without creating patterns of its own. In- stead, it is thematically foregrounded through the "black O" of

"Broagh," and it shares this thematic enshrining with the sup- pressed gutturals of "Traditions" (Clarke is largely silent about gutturals). Heaney's linguistic allegories thus echo the self-reflexivity of

Hughes's "Thistles," whose gutturals they appropriate. If Heaney reverts to a Celtic vowel music, it is largely in response to

Hughes. Not only are the etymological poems of Wintering Out based on a misreading of Wodwo, but the archetypal connotations with which Heaney invests his linguistic allegories are borrowed from

Hughes as well. Whereas most critics see these allegories as "Irish rather than eccentrically English," Heaney's method actually originates in his reading of an eccentric English contemporary. Heaney may well fathom the linguistic and historical strata of Irish history in order to restore Irish culture to itself (Preoccupations 60); but if he seems to uncover an original Irishness, his debt to Hughes reveals that this primeval, feminine Ireland of sensuous vowels and gutturals has

largely been wrested from the mythological fumblings of England's last neo-Romantic. The English presence in Wintering Out is not lim- ited to the cultural layers that were superimposed during centuries of British domination; indeed, the very framework within which

Heaney works out his myth of Irishness is the by-product of an En-

glish imagination. This fact has all too understandably escaped the notice of critics

who confer a sense of native authenticity on Heaney's search for

"images and symbols adequate to our predicament." Heaney has never advertised the extent of his debt to Hughes, but he has left

enough clues in his writings. His appropriations followed the relevant poems by Hughes with great regularity.10 "Englands of the

10. Wintering Out (1972) appeared five years after Wodwo (1967), but Heaney's response

I N G E L B I E N * 639

Mind" is littered with the traces of those misreadings. Hughes's own critical writings on England were still rather scant in the 1970s, but his seminal introduction to A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse

(reprinted in Winter Pollen) had appeared in 1971. Heaney briefly re- ferred to Hughes's afterword in 1974 (Preoccupations 91), but other texts show that he had also digested the introduction.

Hughes's denunciation of Puritanism in his introduction obvi-

ously struck a chord; it was actually echoed in Heaney's review of David Jones's The Sleeping Lord. Heaney praised Jones's "effort... to

graft a healing tissue over that wound in English consciousness in- flicted by the Reformation and the Industrial revolution" ("Now and in England" 547). While Jones's own views were ratified by T. S. Eliot's anti-Puritan organicism, Heaney's rhetoric more probably derives from Hughes's own adaptation of Eliot's "dissociation of

sensibility" (Winter Pollen 119). Unlike Eliot's pre-dissociation En-

gland, Hughes's primeval England is based on the cult of the "old

goddess-the real deity of Medieval England," whom he identifies with "the Celtic pre-Christian goddess, with her tail wound round those still very much alive pre-Christian and non-Christian worlds": "she is Nature" (Winter Pollen 109, 112). Heaney similarly observes that Jones's work feeds on "the insular Celtic and British traditions." He writes of "The Tutelar of the Place" that "the nurturing centre of the whole book" is the point "where the tutelar is both madonna and earth-mother" (547). This could be borne out by an analysis of Jones's text, but it also closely follows Hughes's comment that "the Isis behind the Virgin Mary and the Celtic goddess behind Medieval

England had originally been one" (Winter Pollen 109).11 Such statements were obviously of great interest to Heaney, who

has stressed the importance of Marian devotion in his Irish Catholic

background. Hughes's equation of medieval Catholicism with Celtic

religion invalidates Michael Parker's assertion that "after twenty- three years of intense exposure and devotion to Irish Catholicism, the

'primeval' feel of Hughes's world appealed to the Oisin in [Heaney]"

to that collection was already prefigured in Door into the Dark (1969). Hughes's "Thistles"

(1960) and "The Warriors of the North" (1962) had appeared in magazines several years before Wodwo.

11. Jones's text reads, "[s]he is but one mother of us all: one earth brings us all forth, one womb receives us all, yet to each she is other, named of some name other" (Sleeping Lord 59).


(44). Catholicism is, after all, present in Lupercal, where it mingles with Anglicanism and Celtic paganism in Hughes's anti-Puritan

equation. Thus Hughes's otter is a "king in hiding" (46) trying to es-

cape from Cromwell's troops like Charles II and from the industrial world created by Puritanism. "Nicholas Ferrer" contrasts Puritanism with a nature-worshipping Catholicism when Hughes mentions "the tree that crabbed / In Cromwell's belly as it bloomed in Rome" (27-28). Hughes's ancestral pike, finally, had "outlasted every visible stone / Of the monastery that planted them" (57).

Heaney's Catholicism has a cultural specificity which Hughes's at- traction to it lacks, but the poetic uses to which Heaney put the faith he was born into show a remarkable convergence with Hughes's thoughts. As Parker himself notes (123), Heaney's first bog poems made a strong impression on Hughes. This is not a coincidence: "The Tollund Man" articulates the link between Catholicism and primitive religions that Hughes theorizes. The victim of the fertility ritual

Heaney describes is a "Bridegroom to the goddess" of earth who "work[ed] / Him to a saint's kept body": the ease with which

Heaney's metaphors conjure up a central concept of his native reli-

gion shows that he would not really "risk blasphemy" by "Conse-

crat[ing] the cauldron bog / Our holy ground" (Wintering Out 47-48). Hughes's equation of Catholicism and Celtic primitivism also sur- faces in Heaney's comment that "Irish Catholicism is continuous with

something older than Christianity" ("Seamus Heaney" 60).12 But in the same way that "Traditions" turned Hughes's Nordic gutturals into Gaelic ones, Heaney's reference to Irish Catholicism implies that the real repository of Hughes's primitive values is not a long-sup- pressed England, but Ireland. By insisting on Ireland's centrality, Heaney simultaneously made Hughes's meditations relevant to his own historical predicament and turned them into a more coherent project. Paradoxically, this project blurred the traces of its derivative nature by encouraging readers to regard it as a nativist strategy.

12. In that interview, Heaney also states his preference for "a religion that has a feminine component and a notion of the mother in the transcendental world" (61). Although not a "pious Catholic," Heaney "never felt any need to rebel or to 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" (60). My suggestion is that Hughes is one of the

mythologists who helped Heaney to make poetic sense of his Catholicism.

I N G E L B I E N * 641

Heaney's misreading was helped by the fact that the female deity of Hughes's primitive world already had a Celtic dimension. This

qualifies Michael Parker's suggestion that the world of Lupercal "may have actually become 'celticised' in Heaney's imagination" (45), and his assertion that, although Heaney "learnt his craft from

[Hughes and other English poets], his technique and full poetic voice were achieved ... as a result of his relationship with the 'feminine,' Celtic influences" (21). Indeed, that relationship was mediated by none other than Hughes himself. As we have seen, Hughes's witches celebrated their pagan rituals in Ireland (Lupercal 48). In "Wilfred Owen's Photographs," Hughes pays a quasi-Aroldian tribute to the Irish influence on British culture when he describes how the flogging of sailors in the Royal Navy was abolished through the intervention of "Parnell's Irish in the House" (Lupercal 45). But the Arnoldian bent of that poem also points to Hughes's longing for a blend of Celtic and Old Saxon elements which is unblemished by the influence of British Puritanism.13 Hughes's Celticism must coexist with the Nordic and

Anglo-Saxon influences. More recently, Hughes had come close to

acknowledging that the Celtic element should be at the center of this

primitive England; he spoke of the "enveloping, nurturing Celtic ma- trix" without which "English poetry would be unrecognizably different and vastly deprived" (Winter Pollen 369). But his assertion that "the Celtic presence is usually to be found supporting the old En-

glish" betrays his unwillingness to relegate the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic elements to a secondary status. Too much was at stake:

Hughes identified his primeval England with the excessive violence that held his imagination in thrall and got translated in the rough Anglo-Saxon quality of his lines. As a result, his primitive violence was sometimes contaminated by the masculine, mechanical violence that he denounced. In a similar paradox, Hughes not infrequently described his instinctual creatures through mechanical metaphors. His famous thrushes were "More coiled steel than living" (Lupercal 52), his pike was "A life subdued to its instrument" (56).

Whereas Hughes's dream of a primeval England ended up decon-

structing itself, Heaney's mythology of Irishness was firmly an-

13. Matthew Arnold famously regarded Celticism as an antidote to Puritanism. See "On the Study of Celtic Literature."

642 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E

chored by his feminine and Gaelic "vowel of earth." Heaney divested

Hughes's primitivism of its hyperbolical violence, exchanging its in-

stability for the coherence of a seemingly homemade Irish organicism. His reading of Hughes gave him an insight shared by few oth- ers at the time, that is, that Hughes's apparently very male

imagination was imbued with a longing for an elusive female principle. What Hughes lacked was the ability to give it full poetic expression.14 It is that ability which is central to Heaney's myth.

While Hughes remained an anxious male quester, Heaney pro- duced fantasies of erotic satisfaction spoken by a female voice. The

early "Undine" is the song of water itself, a female presence that warms to the digging of a male worker (Door into the Dark 26). Win-

tering Out then stresses the identification of female sensuality with Irishness-a move prefigured by the sexual metaphor that ends "Bog- land" by describing the "wet centre" of Ireland (Door into the Dark 56). Heaney's symbolism is no different from that of Hughes's "Gog," with its "root-blood of the origins, / the salt-milk drug of the mothers" (Wodwo 152). But "Gog" is a chaos of half-symbolic hints thriving on the violence which renders them obscure, whereas "Bogland" pro- gresses neatly toward its glimpse of primeval origins. Heaney also

speaks freely of "our unfenced country" (55; emphasis added), while such possessives remain absent from Hughes's visions. Hughes's England therefore appears remote, and possibly unreal; Heaney's Ire- land, by contrast, is presented as a timeless organism.

Significantly, Wintering Out is virtually free from the Hughesian mechanical metaphors of earlier poems like "Trout."15 Instead, Heaney now goes past

loam, flints, musket-balls,

fragmented ware, torcs and fish-bones till I am sleeved in

alluvial mud....

(Wintering Out 26)

14. Neil Rhodes comments, "Hughes's mission to rescue the Goddess... is compromised by his need to give lavish accounts of the activities of the [male Puritan] figure" (155).

15. The poem "First Calf" is still rather Hughesian and actually seems to prefigure

I N G E L B I E N * 643

The only traces of industry are the tools of the local wool trade, which is contrasted with the British industrial revolution that sup- planted it and is safely naturalized into "spools / Of his vowels" and "A lost syntax of looms and spindles" (37). Wintering Out is re-

plete with suggestions of the watery softness of the Irish landscape; the word "soft" recurs throughout the volume (16, 25, 26, 37), cul-

minating in the phrase "the soft fontanel / Of Ireland" (75). Ireland is already the soft feminine body that will be raped by British invasions in the sexual allegories of North.

However, Ireland is not only a rape victim. Its erotic potential underlies a trope that Heaney's poetry deploys insistently: the trope of seduction. If the guttural muse was bulled by consonants, the

"tawny guttural water" is also " a mating call of sound" (25), and the

objects of its seduction are the very consonants which oppressed it:

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" 33)

Indeed, Heaney's philological contrasts are not only an exploration of Irish history: they are also part of his allegory of the contemporary sectarian conflict in Ulster. Heaney, like his colleagues of Field Day, has been trying to redefine a sense of Irish culture in which North- ern Protestants might recognize themselves. Field Day's program was already adumbrated in Wintering Out. "A New Song" is partly a philological investigation, but its title indicates that it is also a

utopian vision. It projects a culture in which the harsh consonants of Protestant culture are integrated in the resurgence of a primeval Ire- land, symbolized by the poem's "vowelling embrace."

In words like "Mossbawn" (which can be interpreted as either Gaelic or English according to its pronunciation), Heaney sees "a

metaphor of the split culture of Ulster" (Preoccupations 35). As he ex-

Hughes's Moortown: the "warm plaque" of a cow's "snout gathers / A growth round moist nostrils," while her afterbirth becomes "semaphores of hurt" that "Swaddle and

flap on a bush" (74). However, this poem belongs to the second part of Wintering Out, where Heaney's historical and philological preoccupations are less prominent.


plains, "I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the

literary awarenesses nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience" (37). But Wintering Out does not reflect a split; it thematizes a heal-

ing process in which the English part of Heaney's experience is folded back into his sense of Irishness. This is the theme of "Anaho- rish," the poem that pays homage to Heaney's "'place of clear water,' / the first hill in the world": its name is a "soft gradient / of consonant, vowel-meadow" (16); its etymology is Gaelic, but it is also a linguistic utopia in which the phonetic symbols of the British/Protestant presence have been inflected into sounds that harmonize smoothly with its native vowels. Heaney declared of

Wintering Out that "in some senses these poems are erotic mouth- music by and out of the anglo-saxon tongue" (qtd. in Corcoran 87). The reason is that consonants are infiltrated by the seeping vowels that are central to the collection. The "black O / in Broagh" is liter-

ally central to the eponymous four-stanza poem, since it straddles the enjambment between the second and third stanzas. It sends

echoing ripples into the neighboring alliterative lines that would stake it out: the long semi-open vowels and diphthongs in "ending in broad docken," "its low tattoo / among the windy boortrees / and rhubarb-blades" are its reverberations (27; emphases added).

By reabsorbing Hughes's consonants into a linguistic realm dominated by feminine vowels, Heaney rebuilt Hughes's fragile Celtic- Saxon alliance along firmer lines and turned it into an allegory for Irish unification. In the introduction to A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse, Hughes praised Shakespeare for turning an "erotic poetry into an all- inclusive body of political action" that reflected the conflicts of the Ref- ormation (Winter Pollen 116), but it was Heaney rather than Hughes who managed to translate the myths of the preface into contemporary political terms.16 In Heaney's hands, Hughes's confused nostalgia for a primeval nationhood became a coherent organicism that was made to look politically relevant by a neo-nationalist rhetoric.

16. Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts miss Heaney's indebtedness to Hughes by relating both poets' mythologies to Robert Graves, but this analysis confirms their suggestion that

"[w]hereas, for Heaney, the relevant meanings of the Celtic mythology of The White God- dess are immanent in contemporary history, for Hughes they have to be encountered

through a more radical imaginative journey" (96).

I N G E L B I E N * 645

The Irish integration that Heaney contemplates is not without its

ambiguities. If the trope of seduction dominates "Anahorish," the end of "A New Song" suggests that erotic tactics can alternate with a more muscular approach: "And Castledown we'll enlist / And

Upperlands, each planted bawn" (33). As Blake Morrison comments, this envisages "a more forceful and even violent kind of takeover" (42). Like Hughes's goddess, Heaney's primitive Ireland can either seduce or show her more violent, "Satanic" side (Winter Pollen 109). But her ambiguity no longer accounts for shifts in Shake-

speare's tragic vision of the Reformation: it underlies Heaney's mythological account of the Northern Irish conflict. In 1974, Heaney was developing a poetics that would allow him to

grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and

complexity. 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 indige- nous territorial numen, a tutelar of the whole island, call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever; and her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Or-

ange and Edward Carson.

(Preoccupations 57)

These remarks paved the way for North, which translated the Trou- bles into mythological terms by adding further twists to Heaney's misreading of Hughes.

Hughes's enthusiasm for Heaney's first bog poems had made him

encourage his Irish counterpart to pursue the theme. Some of the

poems in North were published separately as Bog Poems by Hughes's sister Olwyn (Corcoran 33), but North also bears Hughes's imprint in more significant ways. Hughes's blessing may have been prompted by the recognition that Heaney had solved the tensions which rid- dled Wodwo. Hughes's myth was centered on the figure of a primitive goddess, but it was Heaney who gave her successful expression. Only Heaney had the confidence to let the bog queen of the eponymous poem speak in the first person: "I lay waiting" (North 32). In "Come to the Bower," the female presence that Heaney ventrilo-

quizes in "Bog Queen" emerges "Out of the black maw / Of the peat"

646 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E

(31). "Gog" also features a similar "maw" (Wodwo 152), but Hughes's Puritan knight hastened away from that place of origins and unin-

tentionally dragged the whole poem with him. Heaney's male persona, by contrast, is a seasoned Prince Charming who "unpin[s]" the "dark-bowered queen" and reaches "past / The riverbed's washed / Dream of gold to the bullion / Of her Venus Bone" (31).

Heaney's scenes of seduction can be read as a response to

Hughes's "The Warriors of the North," in which the frosty Vikings first "thawed" at their contact with Gaelic culture, only to "relapse" into the "iron arteries" of Puritanism. The Nordic theme is of course the main key to North; Heaney explained that he found his inspiration in P. V. Glob's The Bog People and in the Viking exhibitions held in Dublin in the 1960s (Corcoran 33). Glob's haunting photographs and descriptions of corpses preserved in peat are reflected in

Heaney's imagery. But what made The Bog People and other related works so important for Heaney is that they enabled him to appropriate Hughes's myths for his own ends.17

At first sight, Heaney's inclusion of the Viking element in his ar-

chaeology of Ireland seems to complicate the opposition between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon that was central to Wintering Out. In

"Belderg," the dualistic etymologies of Heaney's previous collection are called into question:

So I talked of Mossbawn, A bogland name. "But moss?" He crossed my old home's music With older strains of Norse.

"But the Norse ring on your tree?" (14) is a question that will not go away. Edward Larrissy argues that North consequently symbolizes Heaney's "divided post-colonial consciousness" (155). This phrase echoes Heaney's hope that his Irish vowels and English consonants should be "vocables adequate to [his] whole experience" (Preoccupa- tions 37). But Wintering Out actually seduced and absorbed the En-

17. Although he does not analyze how Heaney's poetry deviates from its Hughesian model here, Neil Rhodes quite rightly points out that "the bog poems and related poems on Elizabethan themes emerge as much from Hughes's ideas about Shakespeare, Elizabethan

England and rescuing the goddess, as they do from P. V. Glob and his treasure trove" (160).

I N G E L B I E N * 647

glish element into a whole dominated by a Celtic, feminine, guttural- vocalic presence. Heaney's use of ancient Nordic religion in North is informed by a similar strategy.

According to Larrissy, Heaney's "savage, feminine, northern reli-

gion dissolves the boundaries between the opposites it comprises: Celt and Teuton, Catholic and Protestant, male and female" (155). This would be a brilliant analysis if it were applied to Hughes. Lar-

rissy's statement is prompted by Heaney's characterization of

Hughes's Norsemen as masculine, but whereas the critic thinks that this makes North ambiguous, I read it as a trace of the misreading through which Heaney extracted his own coherent mythology from

Hughes's ambiguities. Once again, Heaney achieves this through the trope of seduction, which North expresses successfully where "The Warriors of the North" ultimately failed.

Heaney once wrote of the Viking raids on Celtic Ireland and

Orkney, "Both populations sustained and seduced their invaders; have lived mostly on the land; possess an old culture that is vital to their identity but difficult for outsiders fully to sympathize with" ("Celtic Fringe" 254; emphases added). Like the gh in "Broagh," that the "strangers found / difficult to manage" (Wintering Out 27), the Celtic culture that absorbed its Nordic invaders challenges the un-

derstanding of modern non-Irish observers. Heaney's comment also

prefigures Hughes's assertion that the Celtic presence supports the old English in its fight against later invasions. But Heaney once

again insists on the centrality of the Celtic presence and finds it confirmed by Glob's analysis of northern religion:

The goddess is to be seen in all her majesty, splendidly fashioned, on Celtic bronze and silver vessels offered sacrificially in Danish bogs. Although these vessels were not manufactured in Denmark, and show us the Celtic

peoples' concept of their gods and goddesses, the rich world of pictorial imagery represented by the cauldrons cannot have failed to impress itself on the northern, Germanic, people also.

(171)

The gold of the Gaels also had its attractions for Hughes's Vikings, but whereas these eventually relapsed into Puritanism, Heaney's Norsemen remain faithful to the goddess. They sometimes look like

Hughesian caricatures of masculinity, with their "thick-witted cou-

648 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R ATU R E

plings and revenges, // the hatreds and behindbacks / of the alth-

ing, lies and women" (20). Those "old fathers" are "killers, haggers / and hagglers, gombeen-men" (23-24). However, as their longship "enters [Heaney's] longhand" (23), some transformations occur.

The "longship's swimming tongue" commands Heaney to "Lie down / in the word-hoard, burrow / the coil and gleam / of your furrowed brain" (19-20). The "word-hoard" is associated with the

Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, and yet Heaney's burrowing "retrieves an

extraordinary number of linguistic finds, many of them of Gaelic

origin" (Morrison 60). These linguistic finds are organized hierar-

chically, according to a progression charted in "Bone Dreams" (27-30). Heaney, like Hughes, begins by dismissing the more Lati- nate forms of English as he "push[es] back"

through dictions, Elizabethan canopies. Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants

cleaving the line.

The Anglo-Saxon and Nordic consonants are here separated from "Norman devices," whereas they would be conflated in Heaney's later analysis of Hughes's consonants. Heaney's consonants, unlike

Hughes's, are a station on the way to a more fundamental speech, which he uncovers "In the coffered / riches of grammar / and de- clensions":

a cauldron

of generation swung at the centre: love-den, blood-holt, dream-bower.

(28-29)

I N G E L B I E N * 649

As philology turns into mythology, Heaney's etymological brood-

ings blur into a contemplation of primitive origins. While the "cauldron" refers back to the "cauldron bog" of "The Tollund Man," the "centre" prefigures "Kinship": "facing a goddess," Heaney finally names the missing center of Hughes's mythologies and snatches the mantle of Irishness from the shoulders of a doubting Yeats: "This centre holds," "This is the vowel of earth / dreaming its root" (43). Few

contemporary poets have dared to contradict the opening of "The Second Coming" ("the center cannot hold") so boldly. Heaney fuses a vision of origins with the vowel of primeval Irishness and offers the

rough beast of his Celtic primitivism as the center that holds North to-

gether. Heaney's synthesis reverts to a full-blown organicist nationalism and also consecrates the naturalization of language that is a hallmark of his early poetry.18 The poet of North decodes the "porous / language of touch" (27) and the "hieroglyphic / peat" (40).

The source of this language is the Celtic vowel of earth, "dream-

ing its root" in the same way that quernstones are "dreaming / Of neolithic wheat" (13). Heaney's primitivism moves smoothly between nature and culture, between prehistory and Irish history. In-

deed, this is also the chthonic locus of origins in which the tensions of the present can be imaginatively absorbed:

Our mother ground is sour with the blood of her faithful,

they lie gargling in her sacred heart as the legions stare from the ramparts.

(45)

The Troubles are explained as the recurrence of an archetypal conflict whose "religious intensity" (Preoccupations 57) supposedly ex- ceeds the rationalism of contemporary commentators in the same

way that it baffled Roman observers.19

18. For a reading of Heaney's linguistic realism that examines its broader theoretical im-

plications, see Easthope. 19. Heaney declares: "there are satisfactory imaginative parallels between this religion


That religious intensity, however, is the preserve of Heaney's Catholicism. Like Hughes, Heaney contrasts the primitive violence of a pagan/Catholic culture with the debased, rational violence of Puritanism. Commenting on "Kinship," Edna Longley argues that

Heaney "excludes the inter-sectarian issue ... by concentrating on the Catholic psyche as bound to immolation, and within that immolation to savage tribal loyalties"; she adds that Heaney "defines the battlefield in astonishingly introverted Catholic and Nationalist terms" (45-46). Longley also discerns Catholic overtones in

Heaney's primitive rituals: according to her, the patient description of the Grauballe man's body "inclin[es] to rosary beads" (43). Lest these comments should seem primarily inspired by Longley's Protestant diffidence, it is worth pointing out that bogs endow the

corpses they engulf with qualities that Heaney connects with Catholicism. The Grauballe man thus becomes feminized in

Heaney's metaphors: "His hips are the ridge / and purse of a mus- sel" (35). Moreover, Heaney punningly underscores the Celtic origin of the ritual in which the Bog Queen was sacrificed by a Nordic tribe: her skull "hibernated / in the wet nest of [her] hair" (33; emphasis added). Heaney's explorations of Danish bogs do not contradict his Hibernian nativism: already at the end of "The Tollund Man," he felt

"Unhappy and at home" (Wintering Out 48). "Kinship" further re- minds us that "bog / mean[s] soft" (41) and points back to the softness that Wintering Out associated with Ireland.

In North, that boggy softness belongs to a feminine deity who seduces the very language of violence into a "soft gradient / of consonant" similar to those of "Anahorish" (Wintering Out 16):

Earth-pantry, bone vault, sun-bank, embalmer of votive goods and sabred fugitives.

Insatiable bride. Sword-swallower....

(North 41)

and time and our own time. They are observed with amazement and a kind of civilized tut-tut by Tacitus in the first century AD and by leader-writers in the Daily Telegraph in the 20th century" (qtd. in Morrison 63).

I N G E L B I E N * 651

By eroticizing the violence of fertility rituals, Heaney rids Nordic violence of the destabilizing ambiguity which it had in Hughes's work. If Hughes's Norsemen were fighting the "lasciviousness" of vowels (Preoccupations 154), the violence of Heaney's own goddess- worshiping Vikings is sensuously pagan: "they spread out your lungs / and made you warm wings / for your shoulders" (24). Heaney's Vikings are folded back into the primitive, Celtic world

they came to conquer, "like Gunnar / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence" (17).

The mythical structure of North is designed to articulate the paradox of a masculine violence that originates in a feminine religion. Hughes's poetry too often fails to convince that its fascination with violence is anything but a male obsession. Heaney, by contrast, man-

ages to imply that IRA violence is a resurgence of "feminine" cults- even when its victims are the real Catholic women of the controversial "Punishment," who end up "cauled in tar" for their sexual betrayals. The "intimate, tribal revenge" has claims on Heaney's imagination that can outweigh any "civilized outrage" at the violence it mytholo- gizes (38). Admittedly, Heaney sometimes shows unease with his success at adapting Hughes's religious primitivism: he is aware of being an "artful voyeur" (38), and the victims of violence can occasionally be found "outstaring axe / And beatification, outstaring / What had

begun to feel like reverence" (39). The end of "Kinship," however, shows that the ambiguity of Heaney's response to past and present atrocities is resolved through an ultimate recourse to mythology: observers of the conflict are challenged to report

how we slaughter for the common good

and shave the heads of the notorious, how the goddess swallows our love and terror.

(45)

In the second part of North, Heaney turns from his mythical method to a more straightforward treatment of the Troubles, but he still re-

jects the "voice of sanity" (58). He somehow doubts his own ability to "lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order" (59) and finally


proposes an "exposure" of his ambiguous stance as an Ulster poet newly settled in the Republic. The lines "I am neither internee nor informer; / An inner emigre, grown long-haired" seem to combine a suggestion of political impotence with a declaration of neutrality, but his self-description as a "wood-kerne / / Escaped from the mas- sacre" (73) actually shows this to be a strategic retreat. Indeed, notes Morrison, "'wood-kerne' has quite definite political overtones (wood-kernes were the shadowy Gaelic outlaws who put up resis- tance to the Protestant colonization of Ireland, and of whom later Re-

publican gangs of 'boys' are the natural successors)" (57). Moreover, as Heaney blends into his landscape by "Taking protective colouring / From bole and bark" (73), he reinforces the primitivism of North by identifying once more with his native environment.

North's mythologizing approach to the Northern Irish problem sparked off a heated critical debate. Seamus Deane, though critical of Yeats's myths (see his Heroic Styles), took a different view of Heaney's own when he wrote, "Although it is true that the Viking myths do not correspond to Irish experience without some forceful straining, the potency of the analogy between the two was at first thrilling" ("Seamus Heaney" 69). His essay on Heaney reproduces the poet's wavering between civilized outrage and tribal irrationalism, and his conclusion likewise surrenders to the latter as he speaks of "what

writing, to remain authentic, must always face-the confrontation with the ineffable, the unspeakable thing for which 'violence' is our

helplessly inadequate word" (76). When interviewing Heaney, Deane also suggested that "rational clarity" and "humanism" were "being used as an excuse to rid Ireland of the atavisms which gave it life even though the life itself may be in some ways brutal" ("Unhappy and at Home" 69). Asked in another interview whether his own "sacramental view of the earth" may not be "sentimentalizing a ... world . . . which in its own time must have been nasty, brutish," Heaney replied, "I think it was hard, maybe, but there was a kind of rhythm to it and a completeness to it" ("Seamus Heaney" 66-67).

On the other hand, Longley's skepticism echoed Ciaran Carson's attack on Heaney's pose as a "mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for 'the situation,' in the last resort, a mysti- fier" (qtd. in Hart 76-77). Their responses became paradigmatic of a distrust toward Heaney's method. Other critics were not slow to

I N G E L B I E N * 653

take these skeptics to task. For Eamonn Hughes, a poem like "Pun- ishment" is "an admission of the power of the communal over the individual for which [a] liberal conscience does not allow" (85). Henry Hart expresses disbelief at Longley's suspicion of "a pro- foundly Catholic slant to North": he reads the poems as confessions of "allegiances to both tribes," since Heaney "lovingly addresses victims of prehistoric fertility cults, elegizes murdered Catholics, but also finds himself paradoxically admiring the heroic traditions of the ... victors, even though they belong to English colonizer, Viking conqueror, or Norse raider" (78). But Hart misses Heaney's successful misreading of Hughes, which subsumes the Norse element under the Celtic primitivism that sustains and comforts his Catholic bias. As we will see in a moment, Heaney's treatment of the "En-

glish" element is quite different: its integration is not a historical fact but a utopian project that runs parallel to the enlistment of Protes- tant vowels imagined in "A New Song." Hart's claim that Heaney "embraces a complex dialectic" between tribal allegiances and rational response is deconstructed by his own description of Heaney's "apocalyptic desire for both rational and intuitive judgments" (82; emphasis added): Hart, like Deane and Heaney, only envisages a

synthesis that effectively tips the balance in favor of irrationalism. Michael Parker also neglects the role played by Hughes in the mak-

ing of North and consequently regards the collection as an attempt at transcending sectarian differences: "Heaney's attitude towards his Catholic inheritance is not by any means uncritical or unques- tioning" (151), for in North Heaney "felt compelled to examine other modes of feeling and perception-in addition to Catholic and Chris- tian ones-and to employ pre-Christian mythic material to enable him to confront and interpret the slaughter of innocence" (116). My analysis of Heaney's misreading of Hughes makes it possible to re- fute such claims, since the mythical structure that Heaney borrows from Hughes conflates Catholicism with pre-Christian religion and excludes Protestapitism. The major irony that has gone unnoticed in discussions of North is that Heaney's myth of Ireland emerged from the internal problems of the writer who would become England's poet laureate. The atavisms of Heaney's neonationalist poetics did not spring from any innate, mystically conceived Irishness. Those

poetics are a construct which he imported from England via his mis-

654 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E

reading of Hughes, and which he reexported through his treatment of England in North.

"Ocean's Love to Ireland" and "Act of Union" once again allegorize Ireland's history in sexual terms. But whereas other poems were dominated by the trope of seduction, the dominant trope here is that of

rape. Seduction was expressed through metaphors of springwater and seeping moistness that were associated with Ireland. In "Ocean's Love to Ireland," by contrast, it is England that is translated into more violent and threatening waters: "Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree / As Ireland is backed to England," "He is water, he is ocean."20 Se- duction has failed: the only "dark seepings" of the poem are those of the "mouthing corpses / Of six hundred papists" that the English invader leaves in his wake (47). This invader, unlike the Vikings, resists

integration into the ancestral culture: "Iambic drums / Of English beat the woods where her poets / Sink like Onan" (47). The rift in the En-

glish soul that Hughes associates with the Reformation and the iambic tradition corresponds to the invasion that Ireland could not sustain.21 The poem itself fails to articulate the erotic Anglo-Saxon music which was wedded to Heaney's gutturals and vowel of earth; its very lan-

guage reflects the loss of Celtic sensuality that it thematizes. In "Act of Union," the "imperially / Male" persona has left his

wife with "the pain, / The rending process in the colony." This becomes an allegory for the creation of Ulster, which now hosts "an ob- stinate fifth column / Whose stance is growing unilateral." Britain is "tall kingdom" over Ireland's feminine shoulder, and their sexual encounter is characterized by a warped, incomplete eroticism: if

England "caress[es] / The heaving province where our past has

grown," Ireland would "neither cajole nor ignore" (49). The damage is apparently irreparable, since

No treaty I foresee will salve completely your tracked And stretchmarked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

(50)

20. As Watt comments, "Despite his deep attachment to spring and well and stream, Seamus Heaney is afraid of water en masse" (225).

21. Hughes later wrote that Spenser "line[d] up his own syllables on the parade-ground and drill[ed] them to march in iambics" (Winter Pollen 356).

I N G E L B I E N * 655

However, Heaney does propose a solution: namely, to rediscover the

mythical England which Hughes idealizes. This is the neonationalist

utopia which the extended metaphor of "Bone Dreams" embodies. The bone of the title is brimming with "the rough, porous / lan-

guage of touch." Heaney's use of it is at first hostile; he would use "the sling of mind / to pitch it at England" (27). The lines seem to voice resentment and to emphasize the alien nature of the "strange fields" where the bone drops. However, Heaney later casts himself as an explorer of England's riches and, most importantly, as a se- ducer who would reawaken her buried sensuality. I have already analyzed his voyage through the linguistic layers of the English lan-

guage in that poem. After hitting upon the "love-den, blood-holt, / dream-bower" of primeval origins, Heaney orders himself to

re-enter the memory where the bone's lair

is a love-nest in the grass

This sets the scene for the seduction of England: the poet "hold[s] [his] lady's head" and turns himself into a primitive symbol of fer-

tility: "a chalk giant // carved upon her downs." This enables him to engage an archaic England in an erotic game that seals the tri-

umph of his Celtic seduction, as his hands "on the sunken / fosse of her spine / move towards the passes," so that he and England end

up "cradling each other" (29). Unlike the imperial male Britain of "Act of Union," Heaney's Celtic

male displays the more seductive approach of his romantic neona- tionalism. It is not a coincidence that the geographical references in the last section lead back to Hughes's England. "One morning in Devon / I found a dead mole": when told to "feel the shoulders," Heaney "touched small distant Pennines" (30). Heaney is here alluding to

places that have Hughesian associations: Hughes came from the Pen- nines and had moved to Devon in the 1960s. Hughes's longing for a

primitive, sensuous England has come full circle-in Heaney's work. The misreading is completed, but its result has been to make the or-

ganicism that both poets share look primarily Irish, and to give it the

ideological respectability that is often granted to Irish nationalism.


Heaney's work has been welcomed as a postcolonial manifesto to which the English should turn for inspiration. In an article that praises the linguistic subversiveness of Wintering Out, Stan Smith concludes, "If the English are truly the last people to be decolonised, then the politico-cultural logomachia... of such poets as Heaney... will show us the way" ("Darkening English" 55). It has been my aim to show that England already had a poet who developed the sense of nationhood that Smith calls for: its late poet laureate Ted Hughes. One can only wonder what response Hughes's work would have gotten had his own "politico-cultural logomachia" possessed the coherence with which Heaney endowed its primitivist organicism. As things stand, Hughes remains mysteriously neglected by Heaney's English sup- porters. And yet Heaney himself had shown the way quite explicitly when he greeted Hughes's appointment as poet laureate:

That [Britain] should turn to a poet with an essentially religious vision [and] . . . with a strong trust in the pre-industrial realities of the natural world, is remarkable. In fact, it is a vivid demonstration of the truth of the implied message of Hughes's poetry that the instinctual, intuitive side of man's, and in particular the Englishman's, nature has been starved and oc- cluded and is in need of refreshment.

("New Poet Laureate" 46)

The critics who regard Heaney as a guide to the decolonization of the English mind have largely failed to take the hint.22 But if they remain unwilling to refresh themselves in Hughes's primitive ener- gies, the time may have come for them to reassess the terms in which they praise Heaney.

University of Hull

22. Smith himself balks at the "feudal ethos of cruelty, superstition, and half-barbarous grandeur" of Hughes's primitive England ("Wolf Masks" 78).

I N G E L B I E N * 657

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