The Pen and the Spade: The Poems of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was a self-consciously self-made poet. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, he gives one of the best accounts available of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer. There were early stirrings of poetry in listening to his mother recite the Latin grammar of her schooldays; the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms’ of the BBC shipping forecast and ‘the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry’ of a Catholic household. He learned to articulate the feelings these induced through reading English poetry at school, and in particular ‘the heavily accented consonantal noise’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose ‘staccato’ music Heaney heard an encouraging echo of his own ‘energetic, angular’ Ulster accent.

This sage essay was given as a lecture in 1974 to the Royal Society of Literature, less than a decade after Heaney composed the debut that would establish his reputation, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Although early student poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’, there was no long struggle towards maturity and recognition: Heaney arrived fully conscious of what he was about, with a product whose quality was evident straight out of the box. As Chris­topher Ricks shrewdly observed in a contemporary review, ‘you continually catch yourself wanting to apply to the poems themselves their own best formulations.’ Ricks gives the example, from the poem ‘Digging’, of ‘the cool hardness in our hands’ of unearthed potatoes. This, he reflects, ‘is just what we love in the words themselves’. 

Death of a Naturalist ends with the poet remembering how, as a child, he liked peering into wells, but now ‘I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’. It was this skilful incorporation of a kind of director’s commentary into his twelve collections that helped to invest readers in the Heaney journey, from 1940s farm childhood to Nobel Prize in 1995. His last book, Human Chain, sold almost sixty thousand copies in the UK and Ireland between publication in 2010 and his death in 2013 – an enormous number for a living poet – and many more after that.

The pleasure of The Poems of Seamus Heaney – which, at almost 1,300 pages, sits in the hand with a cool hardness of its own – is to have in one place those dozen books along with all the uncollected poems, as well as over five hundred pages of notes. We can now follow ‘Incertus’ in his first imitations of Hopkins, where the tuning-fork fineness of Heaney’s feeling for the world around him is immediately apparent (‘Hushed/And lulled/Lay the field … /Pushed/And pulled/Came the rasp of steel’). Like many young poets, he briefly drinks too much Dylan Thomas homebrew (‘Hill-happy and wine-wonderful’), but the agricultural realism that would become his signature manner is already tempering things (he borrows Ted Hughes’s ‘sharp hot stink’ of fox for the ‘sharp porter stink’ of a farmer on
the Guinness).

Death of a Naturalist was the only book that Heaney would significantly prune when revising later in life, and it’s striking how, in the uncollected poems that follow it, his diction and imagery have already settled into familiar grooves. So, we get the ‘guttural chat’ of rooks and the ‘guttural oars’ of a boat before, in Wintering Out (1972), we get ‘the tawny guttural water’. This is not a story of poetic missteps so much as perfectionism: how best to apply the right word to the right thing. Heaney spoke of poetic technique as a proprietary matter, ‘the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought’. But the risk of inimitability is self-parody, as he also knew, though didn’t always avoid it (in one of the twenty-five unpublished poems at the end of the book, he wryly admits: ‘I keep going on about/That hardware store’).

Heaney mitigated his repetitions, however, by pushing each collection into doing something new. North (1975) was the book in which he most boldly addressed the history of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Less well known is Stations, a pamphlet of prose poems published in Belfast the same year, and reprinted in full here for the first time in half a century. Here, Heaney conjures childhood memories of sectarianism with more rawness than before, even if the sentence cadences still fall into something like verse. (‘The air grew dark, cloud-barred, a butcher’s apron’ is an iambic pentameter that combines Keatsian pastoral with Irish republican slang for the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.) Then there was the long Dantean title poem of Station Island (1984), at the end of which the ghost of James Joyce tells the pilgrim poet ‘don’t be so earnest’, advice he took to heart in later books, such as The Spirit Level (1996) – that hardware store, again – which prized a metaphysical lightness of vision and voice.

For me, Heaney’s unfailing polish as a lyric poet means he rarely strikes the note of inspired weirdness that distinguishes the canonical poets his canonisers often invoke, such as Wordsworth and Eliot. By the same token, though, he never wrote as boringly as those eminences did in later life. It’s a rare collected poems of this size – around 700 pages of poems – that you can crack open expecting something good almost anywhere.

Unfortunately, the extensive editorial matter, which in its scale recalls Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s massively annotated The Poems of T S Eliot (2015), has not been subjected to the same consistent quality control. Evidently a labour of love shared between three Heaney experts – Rosie Lavan, a poetry scholar; Bernard O’Donoghue, an Irish poet and academic; and Matthew Hollis, former Faber poetry editor – it is hit and miss in its illuminations and accuracy. The summaries of the publication and reception of each Faber collection are welcome and enriching critical biography, intimate with detail. But while it’s fascinating to learn that ‘The Early Purges’, about a farmworker drowning kittens, drew complaints when set for O level in 1976, this story seems not to have been fact-checked: the poem wasn’t condemned by a Tory MP in the House of Commons, or in an ‘anonymous letter’ to the Daily Tele­graph, but in a news report in that paper.

The poem-by-poem commentary, meanwhile, when it goes beyond helpful glossary, can be a curious mix of the obvious and the off-beam. ‘Digging’, for example, famously compares the poet’s pen to both a spade and a gun (‘martial imagery’, the editors note). But it seems odd to explain that the poem’s ‘unexpressed subtext’ (as opposed to its expressed subtext?) is the proverb ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and not mention that in his 1974 lecture Heaney says he was thinking of country people cheerfully telling him on the way home from school, ‘the pen’s lighter than the spade’. Similarly, to claim that the ‘sense’ of the last line, ‘I’ll dig with it’, ‘requires a stress on “it” that occurs in some Northern Irish accents’ seems at first a very Heaneyesque point about regional nuance. But a few minutes on YouTube will yield recordings where the poet himself stresses both ‘I’ll’ and ‘dig’ over ‘it’. The poetic voice cannot, in the end, be so precisely watermarked.