seamus heany and phillip larkin

Hinamalik · #1 Thursday, April 19, 2007

Plz help me on these two poets....send me themes of seamus heaney keeping in view poems (personal helicon,a constable calls,tolland man,casting and gathering,toome road) and themes in larkin's peoems (ambulance,church going,mr bleaney,1941) ... i mw aiting for reply..plz its urgent.......

Second Coming · #2 Thursday, April 19, 2007

Some of the material I think is relevant.

Personal Helicon

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

-- Seamus Heaney

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Notes]

"Personal Helicon" first appeared in "Eleven Poems", published in 1965.
The poem is dedicated to Michael Longley, a contemporary of Heaney's at
Philip Hobsbaum's poetry workshop in Belfast.
Mt. Helicon in Greece is said to be the home of the Muses, nine sister
goddesses in Greek mythology presiding over song and poetry and the arts and
sciences.

[Commentary]

Seamus Heaney has always been fascinated with the earth, with the quality of
earthiness. His poems are invariably dense and muddy, clumps of murky
adjectives and plodding nouns pulling the reader into a world full of 'the
smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss'. Even his titles reflect this
preoccupation, from "Bogland" (the very first poem in his very first
collection), to his justly celebrated (if somewhat unsettling) masterpiece,
"Death of a Naturalist".

Unfortunately, this predilection is not a very fashionable one - indeed, I
can't help but shudder at some of the imagery in "Naturalist" - which is
perhaps why Heaney chose to expand on it in today's poem. As the title makes
clear, this is a poem about poetic inspiration: Heaney's Muse is a gritty,
plodding, deliberate creature, more Caliban than Ariel. A perfectly
legitimate choice (if it can be called a choice at all), and one which sets
his poetry apart, and gives it distinction.

Second Coming · #3 Thursday, April 19, 2007

Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast in County Derry. He attended the local school at Anahorish until 1957, when he enrolled at Queen's College, Belfast and took a first in English there in 1961. The next school year he took a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. In 1963 he took a position as a lecturer in English at the same school.

While at St. Joseph's he began to write, publishing work in the university magazines under the pseudonym Incertus. During that time, along with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others, he joined a poetry workshop under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965, in connection with the Belfast Festival, he published Eleven Poems. In August of 1965 he married Marie Devlin. The following year he became a lecturer in modern English literature at Queen's College, Belfast, his first son Michael was born, and Faber and Faber published Death of a Naturalist. This volume earned him the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award in 1967, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, also in 1968. Christopher, his second son, was born in 1968.

His second volume, Door into the Dark, was published in 1969 and became the Poetry Book Society Choice for the year. In 1970-71 he was a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1971, and in 1972 he resigned his lecturship at Queens College, moved his family to Glanmore, in County Wicklow, and published Wintering Out. In 1973 his daughter, Catherine Ann, was born. During this year he also received the Denis Devlin Award and the Writer in Residence Award from the American Irish Foundation. In 1975 North was published, winning the E.M. Forster Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. During these years at Glanmore, Heaney also gave many readings in the United States and England and edited two poetry anthologies.

In 1975 Heaney began teaching at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1976 the family moved to Sandymount, in Dublin, and Heaney became Department Head at Carysfort. In 1979 he published Field Work, and in 1980, Selected Poems and Preoccupations: Selected Prose. In 1981 he gave up his post at Carysfort to become a visiting professor at Harvard. In 1982 he won the Bennett Award, and Queen's University in Belfast conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He cofounded Field Day Publishing with Brian Friel and others in 1983. Station Island, his first collection in five years, was published in 1984. During that year he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and Open University awarded him an honorary degree. Also in 1984 his mother, Margaret Kathleen, died. The Haw Lantern, published in 1987, contains a brilliant sonnet sequence memorializing her. Heaney's father, Patrick, died after this, and Heaney's latest collection, Seeing Things, published in 1991, contains many poems for his father.

Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaneyboppers" attend his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be seen throughout his work, but most especially in his first two volumes, where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and even Dante have played important roles in his development.

The first poem in this archive, "Personal Helicon," introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor.

"Bogland," the final poem in his second volume, presents once again his fascination with things buried. He acknowledges an attachment to the soil that is the source and subject of his poetry. The catalog of objects, buried in bogs for years, sometimes centuries, and dug up in remarkable condition, encompasses the vegetable world ("waterlogged trunks / of great firs"), the animal world ("the skeleton / of the Great Irish Elk"), and the human world ("Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years"). Perhaps with hindsight we see a progression toward the bog's most important preservation, a human being.

Hard on the publication of P.V. Glob's The Bog People, detailing the discovery of a series of bodies over 2000 years old in the bogs of Denmark, Heaney's metaphor, begun in "Bogland," reaches its ultimate fruition. In Glob's book, Heaney found the consummation of his descent into the earth. His series of "Bog Poems" (including "The Tollund Man") address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney's fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. Perhaps the most striking of these poems is "Punishment," where he sees in the corpse of a ritually sacrificed woman an echo of the Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. He acknowledges his guilt for implicit participation in such terrible deeds, because he "would have cast, I know / the stones of silence." He recognizes his own conflicting feelings, this man

who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or taken to task for remaining aloof from it. Nevertheless, some of his most convincing elegies deal with friends and family he has lost to the Troubles. "Casualty," a poem about a Catholic friend murdered by a bomb set by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in a Protestant pub, gives us another look at the tribal warfare in Northern Ireland. His questioning of his friend's responsibility for his own death realizes the ambiguous nature, the muddling of right and wrong, that grips Northern Ireland today. And yet, what is important is not placing blame, but the recognition of what remains to those who live, memories and sadness.

It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. That conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. "Song" demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and "Personal Helicon," this short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and the details of language make this poem a small success.

"Harvest Bow," a touching look at his father's creative impulse, also addresses Heaney's own art. The poem rests on the recognition that there are more important creations than the ordering of words. Rather than being merely a recollection of childhood, this poem takes on universal weight in the intertwining of the artistic forces in father and son. Heaney presents the mature relationship of a child with his or her parents, the unspoken joy of a shared experience. His recognition of his father's different talents leads to a consideration of his own work, like his father's a "frail device." Be it a harvest bow or a formal elegy, "The end of art is peace." Further explorations of Heaney's thoughts on his own poetry can be found in his two collections of essays, the previously mentioned Preoccupations and The Government of the Tongue. He is an insightful critic of both the Romantic tradition and the poetry of the twentieth century.

Perhaps his most moving works are the series of sonnets called "Clearances," written as a memorial to his mother. The two poems we have here, the third and fifth of the sequence, show him taking firm hold of the sonnet form and bending it to his own interpretation of the elegaic tradition. These poems possess a soft power that bathes all in the golden haze of memory while presenting stark images of the spaces that death leaves between us. In "When all the others were away at Mass" Heaney moves from the distant past of the first two quatrains, through a telling break in lines, the into a place nearer the present in the final quatrain. But this present reality is too much to bear, and he retreats again to the past in the final couplet. In this way memory serves as a shield to protect him from his mother's death. "The cool that came off sheets just off the line" takes place entirely in the past, as he recalls the intricate dance he and his mother performed in folding bed linens. His comment on their relationship, "Coming close while again holding back," speaks to a lifetime of memories, and the space that her absence leaves in his life.

His final poems here, from "Lightenings," take up again thoughts of death, the afterlife, and other planes of existence. The structure of these poems, with their three-line stanzas, recalls Dante's Divine Comedy, where the poet as pilgrim is guided through the afterlife. Heaney has remarked that, since the death of his parents, he feels as if "the roof has blown off" his life. We are all inevitably relased from both the weight and the shield of our ancestors. This lightening, when we are finally exposed to the elements, to the cosmos, is both freeing and frightening. The first poem acknowledges the transience of life, framing death in the religious terms of the particular and universal judgements that come at the end of an individual life and the end of the world. Recognition of the fact that "there is no next-time-round" carries with it a mixture of fear and freedom.

Heaney discusses that mixture again in the Hardy lyrics, and explores the questions that the nearness of death brings. Hardy pretends to be dead in "vi," and, being dead, "He experimented with infinity." He claims that the recognition of death is a necessary act for a poet, for it alone opens the poet up to what the universe has to say. In "vii" Heaney admits to the frailty of memory, a fragility that makes what is remembered all the more dear. Hardy's communion with the frightened sheep holds the anticipated sorrow that would later fill his poetry at bay for a moment. Again, the nearness of death, or, for Hardy, the pretending to be dead, is an essential component, if not the ultimate font, of poetry. The final poem here ends on a life-affirming note, for Heaney recognizes the beauty of earthly existence, placing that beauty in a religious context that not only enhances it, but holds out hope for more wonders to come after death.

Heaney's work is filled with images of death and dying, and yet it is also firmly rooted in the life of this world. His tender elegies about friends and family members who have died serve many purposes: they mourn great losses, celebrate those who have gone before us, and recall the solace that remains to us, our memories. When asked recently about his abiding interest in memorializing the people of his life, he replied, "The elegaic Heaney? There's nothing else."

Second Coming · #4 Thursday, April 19, 2007

The Constable Calls
By Seamus Heaney
A Constable Calls is the second in a sequence of six poems entitled 'Singing School' which concludes Heaney's fourth collection 'North' (1975). The poem is a vivid description of an incident from the poet's childhood - a policeman making an official visit to his father's farm at Mossbawn to record tillage returns. There is something grotesquely bizarre about an armed representative of the law travelling by bicycle around the Ulster countryside to record agricultural statistics. Although the incident is described through the impressionable eyes of a child, we are also aware of the wiser presence of the adult Heaney. On a broader level the poem accurately records the sense of resentment and alienation felt by the Catholic Nationalist minority community in an artificially created State governed by the descendants of Protestant planters. The constable is an agent of this repressive sectarian regime. The Royal Ulster Constabulary has always had a predominantly Protestant membership and has traditionally been unequivocally pro-Unionist.

In the opening movement of the poem the constable's bicycle is described in language that is detailed, unemotional.

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
Skirting the front mudguard,
Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the 'spud'
Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,
The pedal treads hanging relieved
Of the boot of the law.

However, its different component parts are subliminally associated with the repressive power of an alien law. The 'handlegrips' suggest handcuffs and the 'dynamo gleaming and cocked back' becomes a gun primed for firing. The second verse climaxes with the pedals 'relieved Of the boot of the law', hinting at the brutal physical force used by the R.U.C. against Catholics at different periods in the troubled history of the Northern Ireland State, but particularly during the Civil Rights marches of 1969. By contrast the image of the 'spud' emphasises how incongruous the armed representative of British law is in this rural community. 'relieved' anticipates the young Heaney's feeling when the constable thankfully departs. An unpleasant, tense atmosphere is created by the use of sinister 's', hard 'c','g','b' and harsh 'r' consonants, combined with ugly broad vowel sounds.

In the second movement the constable himself is described seen through the eyes of the 'staring' child. The man is described purely in terms of his uniform - the 'cap, the polished holster With its buttoned flap, the braid cord Looped into the revolver butt' - and the visual symbol of the purpose of his visit - the ominous-sounding 'heavy ledger'. The description

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
In his slightly sweating hair

cleverly emphasises that the uniform is the man, making him the visible embodiment of the hated Protestant government, endowed with no more humanity than his bicycle. The absence of any physical description emphasises that for the Catholic community the constable has no existence as an individual human being - he is a non-person, no more than an unwelcome, intrusive representative of an alien, repressive regime. To emphasise this, there is a total absence of hospitality - the visitor's hat is not hung up; although he is 'slightly sweating' he is not offered a drink and there is no exchange of pleasantries. The visit is strictly professional and impersonal.

In the third movement the constable goes about his business of recording Heaney Senior's tillage returns. Significantly, this is done in British imperial measures - 'acres, roods, and perches' - subtly suggesting the presence of occupying British planters on Irish soil. There is a bitter irony in the representative of an oppressive alien power cataloguing returns from the land belonging to the native Irish. The constable's curt questions

Any other root crops?
Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?

introduce a palpable atmosphere of tension and the exchange assumes the nature of an interrogation. The father's surly, monosyllabic reply

'No'

effectively captures the resentment felt by a member of the Catholic Nationalist community at being called to account by this arrogant representative of British imperialism. The phrase 'Arithmetic and fear' links the adult and child worlds. While the men are concerned with totals, the boy is frightened by the constable's revolver.

In the fourth movement Heaney brilliantly captures the mind of a child (himself) through his fearful questioning of self which maintains the tension

But was there not a line
Of turnips where the seed ran out
In the potato field

The 'black hole in the barracks' convincingly, yet humorously, expresses the child's frightened sense of the enormity of his father's guilt, and his own, in withholding information about the illegal row of turnips. On a more serious political level the 'black hole' anticipates (with hindsight?) the detention centres which would be set up by the R.U.C. and the British army during the Troubles. The phrase 'Small guilts' betrays the presence of the adult Heaney.

In the fifth movement the young boy's feeling of relief at the imminent departure of the constable is qualified by the sight of his 'baton-case' (another frightening symbol of his official power), of his ledger, the 'domesday book' where the Heaneys' 'crime' has been officially recorded. The reference to the 'domesday book' is richly allusive, but again it makes the reader aware of the controlling presence of the adult Heaney.

The Domesday Book was commissioned in 1086 by the first Norman king of England, William the Conqueror. The new king suppressed Saxon uprisings and introduced Norman customs and institutions into England. The Book contained an extensive survey of the lands of England in order to establish an informed basis for taxation. The unpopular survey was given its name because, like the Biblical Day of Judgement, there could be no appeal against it. There is also an implied allusion to another William, the Protestant William of Orange, also an intruder, who defeated the Catholic King James and imposed his rule on Northern Ireland. There is an ironic hint too at Catholic guilt in the allusion to the Domesday Book. The line

Fitted his cap back with two hands

echoes the 'fat black handlegrips' of the opening verse, emphasising the constable's lack of humanity by linking him to his bicycle. The action also conceals the one hint of his humanity, his 'slightly sweating hair'. The fact that he

looked at me as he said goodbye

is open to several interpretations. It could suggest the child's fear that the constable is aware of the 'crime' that has been committed and of his (silent) complicity in it. It could represent an attempt by the constable to intimidate the boy. On a positive note it could indicate an (unsuccessful) attempt by the constable to elicit a positive reaction through establishing eye-contact. The word 'shadow' implies that the constable is not a real person, but also that he has cast a (temporary) shadow over life at Mossbawn, so idyllically described in the poem Sunlight. The verb 'bobbed' echoes 'bobby', ironically a friendly British colloquialism for a policeman. 'His boot pushed off' is both literal and metaphorical - the feeling of repression departs with the intruder. The final line

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked

has been dismissed as an implausible, melodramatic ending. However, it is deliberately ambiguous. On one level it suggests the boy's fear of delayed punishment for his 'crime'. Heaney may also be saying (with the benefit of hindsight) that the political situation in Northern Ireland when he was a boy was like a time-bomb ready to explode, metaphorically blowing up in the faces of the repressive Protestant government and literally blowing many members of the R.U.C. sky-high. There is a strong contrast between this ominous 'ticked, ticked, ticked' and the rhythmic 'tick of two clocks' in the same setting of Mossbawn in Sunlight.

A Constable Calls is a memory poem, narrated in the past tense. However, the detailed descriptions bring the past vividly to life and are evidence of how indelibly this incident from his childhood has been imprinted on the poet's mind, like the bevel marks of his cap on the constable's hair.

Second Coming · #5 Thursday, April 19, 2007

The following resource contains copyrighted material, so I am not pasting the material on this forum because there might be some legal restrictions to it.I am just giving the link here.

http://www.longroad.ac.uk/accreditat...aneythemes.PDF

Another Link:

following is a paper on Heaney. seems to be a good one, though very lengthy.

http://facta.junis.ni.ac.yu/facta/la...lal2001-05.pdf

Second Coming · #6 Thursday, April 19, 2007

More on Heaney

Seamus Heaney, the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, is among the most widely respected Irish poets of the time. Born on 13 April in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, his rural Catholic upbringing in Protestant Ulster has provided an important focus for his literary works. His pastoral style of poetry uses specific images of the rural simplicity of rural Ireland to suggest greater, universal situations and ideas (Burris 4). Though he spent a several years in the 1960's as an active sympathizer with the Catholic situation, writing political pamphlets and essays, as a poet, his work is less an ideological statement than an effort to create a "general historical awareness" (Burris 21). His themes contain some ingredients of resistance and small acts of defiance, but do not make an active political statement. He is able to insinuate through his descriptions of the land, the use of mythology and history, and the all-pervading religious atmosphere the images of prejudice, violence, and intolerance.

Though pastoral literature is often used to describe the idyllic rural home life, using smooth and picturesque vocabulary, pastorals often utilize ruder language to imply at greater matters (Burris 4). Heaney makes use of both poetic phrases and conversational language simultaneously, as well as devices such as onomatopoeia and different styles of rhythm, to clarify and focus on his peculiar subjects. Some of his early works have an air of wandering and less focus than that of his later works. He received direction, however, with the beginning of the violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 between Catholics and Protestants. "[T]he problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to [Heaney's] predicament" (Malloy 92). Three poems particularly illustrate his search for poetic direction and characteristic perspectives. "Digging," written in 1966, "The Tollund Man," written in 1972, and "Funeral Rites," written in 1975, are each in some way similar in their style and impact, illustrating Heaney's familiar poetic images and common literary themes.

The first poem, "Digging," compares the poet's pen to the farmer's spade, depicting Heaney's early struggle to define himself as a poet, and break the family tradition of physical labor as an occupation. Heaney attempts to connect to the past and continue the tradition, but there is a note of independence and resolution, which may signal the end of the old ways. It serves as a defining moment in Heaney's personal life. It also serves as a hallmark for the poetry that follows. He begins to develop his version of pastoral poetry, and lays the foundation for the political dimensions that ensue.

Heaney was at first wary, and perhaps embarrassed, of his vocation as a writer. Northern Irish Catholics, generally reticent by nature, were ordinarily not especially supportive of literature and poetry. He encountered a degree of occupational tension early on. Heaney said there was "some part of me entirely unimpressed by the activity... it's the generations, I suppose, of rural ancestors-not illiterate, but not literary" (Burris 31). For a time, he had difficulty justifying, even to himself, the validity of his work. When he wrote "Digging," however, it was the first time his feel got into the words, and he found his voice as a poet (Curtis 17).

The poem depicts fond memories from his childhood in the country, emphasizing pride in his culture and personal indecision. His "squat pen" is compared to a clean spade, with a "bright edge," exhibiting his unease and discomfort (Heaney 3). As he muses on the differences he examines the validity of his trade. This soul-searching is amplified by Heaney's use of stanza and line length. The poem begins with a two line stanza, but as the poem progresses, the subject wanders and the stanzas grow in length. His varying use of different syllabic patterns, such as tetrameters, hexameters, and decasyllubic couplets, helps create an impression of searching or wandering (Burris 34). As the author reaches his conclusion, however, both the length of the lines and of the stanzas is shortened, leading to a terse, confident answer as the poet comes to terms with himself.

"Digging" is generally recognized as a poorer example of Heaney's work. Heaney himself describes it as "a big coarse grained navvy of a poem" (Parker 62). The style is much rougher, and its theme is much more direct than his newer pieces. His later style is evident in the use of specific details which create the general impact. Also, the impact created is not as deep or as significant as that in his current poems. The violence of the late 1960's in Northern Ireland largely shapes, to at least some degree, his later works. When he wrote "Digging," Heaney hadn't encountered the violence, or hadn't connected to it. The crudeness of the poem, however, creates an origin and a comparison for the rest of his writing.

In "Digging," the turf cutters offer a perspective from which past and present may be observed. The author relates the poet to a digger or farmer, unearthing valuable objects, bringing treasure to light. In "Tollund Man," he makes a similar comparison, with the poet acting as an archeologist. When Heaney viewed the preserved body of a prehistoric man found buried in the peat, he found a common thread linking himself and his situation with that of the Tollund man. The man had been sacrificed in a ritual by his community to the goddess Nerthus in the hope that this offering would continue the seasons and bring a fertile harvest (Malloy 106). Heaney saw him as a scapegoat for society's crimes and ignorance, in a way a surrogate Christ. His peculiar resurrection is interpreted to mean the possible indication of the redemption of Ireland from the violence she is encountering.

The religious nature of the tension between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland is associated with the ritualistic sacrifice of the Tollund man. He links religion in general with the ordering of violence, or sacrifice, in order to bring peace. When the violence erupted in 1969, the killing was uncontrolled, and had lost the ritual. Heaney finds the connection in "Tollund Man" (Malloy 74). The Tollund man is also a product of ritualistic violence out of control. He compares the "old man-killing parishes of Jutland" (Heaney 40) to the counties of Northern Ireland. When the poet speaks of his "saint's kept body" he sees him as a martyr and prays to him to intercede on behalf of the victims of the senseless violence in Ireland, mentioning the "stockinged corpses/laid out in the farmyards" and the "four young brothers, trailed/for miles along the lines." He hopes that through his intercession the atrocities of modern Ireland will not be totally for nothing and that somehow the contention may be resolved.

The historical analogy, myth, and emotion is characteristic of Heaney' poetry, but the many references to land and the emphasis on religion are especially so. The man is found buried in the peat, seemingly married to the earth. The goddess he was sacrificed to, Nerthus, a goddess of the harvest and the seasons comparable to Aphrodite or Demeter in Greek mythology is equated to Mother Ireland and the earth (Malloy 106). The description of the Tollund with his "mild pods of his eye-lids" and "his stained face" suggests an image of Christ the Savior (Heaney 39). His "saint's kept body," dug from "the cauldron bog/Our holy ground " brings to mind the incorruptible bodies of some of the saints of the Catholic Church. These stark images obliquely create a political and religious impact that is strongly representative of Heaney's works.

The last of the poems, "Funeral Rites," is a similarly detailed poem with precise images that have indirect political conclusions or ideas. He begins by describing in detail the images of a corpses and a funeral parlor, "admiring it all" (Heaney 65). The violence makes the author seek solace in the beneficial functions of ceremonies or rituals, as in "Tollund Man" (Curtis 84). From the "Tollund Man" to "Funeral Rites," the poet has gained confidence. In the first poem, there was an air of servitude, with the poet as the servant asking for assistance from his savior. Now, there is more distance, almost seeming to direct the affairs. However, in both poems the poet is attempting to assuage the violence by generating order from death and violence through the use of rituals.

Violence and its byproducts are apparent throughout the poem. Heaney depicts the childhood deaths of family and friends, victims of political violence, and ancient Viking murders, relating them to the condition in Northern Ireland in the 1970's. The "neighborly murders" have become numbingly commonplace, with citizens and "neighbors" deeply and passionately divided (Heaney 66). He sees each "blinded home," blinded by prejudice, by their complicity, to the horrific events that surround them.

As he describes the huge funeral procession, he prays for the end of the senseless deaths. The massive procession leads to the River Boyne, the river of knowledge, to the mounds where Aengus, the Irish god of love is buried (Parker 131). What began as a grieving process becomes a hopeful consummation. Heaney does not specify between the mourners, constituted by both Catholics and Protestants, themselves victims of the violence. They have the same troubles, share the same pain, and journey together to reach an understanding. The mythological figure invoked, Gunnar, is a Viking hero whose unavenged death in a blood feud brought an end to the long-standing and bloody fight. This legendary person, similar to the "Tollund Man," fulfills a Christ- like role, whose own personal sacrifice is held up as an example and message to the people. The last image in the poem is a hopeful picture of resurrection, as Gunnar chants "verses about honor" with "four lights burn[ing]," and the doors of the chamber open, and he turns with a joyful face/to look at the moon" (Heaney 68).

Heaney's pastoral use of the land, religion, and myth creates his unique poetic impact. Though his use of history and myths has been criticized for appearing to give the conflict in Northern Ireland a "fatalistic historical determinism," it is more of an attempt to connect to the past, and put it into a larger mythological perspective(Malloy 91). He seeks to reestablish the timeless rituals in order to put an end to the violence. As poet Tony Curtis says of Heaney's work, "for peace to return to Northern Ireland, people have to reestablish the rhythm of the natural world" (Curtis 11)