‘A Meaning Made of Trees’: The Unwriting of a Symbol

Abstract

Rural, organic images have always populated Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and prominent among these has been the tree, with its natural, mythical, historical and linguistic connotations. In poems like ‘Nerthus’ and ‘Belderg’, Heaney probes ancient Norse expressions of tree worship and iconography, while Sweeney Astray is a regional forest saga. Heaney presents the tree as written sign in ‘Alphabets’, ‘The Scribes’ and ‘Squarings xxxi’; the tree/forest is represented as otherworldly in ‘The Plantation’, ‘The Wishing Tree’ and ‘Fosterling’ and as a place of refuge in ‘Exposure’ and the Sweeney poems. There are also trees which feature in Heaney’s personal history: the childhood tree (in ‘Oracle’, ‘In the Beech’ and ‘Glanmore Sonnets V’) and the chestnut tree (‘Clearances’), which the poet identifies with himself and his mother. This chapter will consider literary, mythical and cultural representations of trees in Heaney’s work, the association between poet and tree, and ways in which Heaney challenges the fixity of the literary tree in his canon. Starting with Sweeney Astray, this chapter will outline the process by which Heaney cultivates the poetic tree in his early work, only to ‘unwrite’ it in pieces like ‘Clearances’, ‘The Wishing Tree’ and ‘Squarings xxxi’.