Actaeon Revisited: Seamus Heaney and Sinéad Morrissey Respond to Titian

Abstract

Actaeon Revisited:Seamus Heaney and Sinéad Morrissey Respond to Titian Christelle Serée-Chaussinand To mark the London 2012 Olympics and the recent gathering of three outstanding pieces by Titian, the National Gallery collaborated with the Royal Ballet to exhibit a wide range of contemporary British artistic activity. The gallery commissioned three ballets, with scenery, sets, and costumes by Britain’s foremost artists. All were inspired by Titian’s paintings “Diana and Callisto,” “Diana and Actaeon,” and “The Death of Actaeon,” and by Ovid’s epic work Metamorphoses that the Venetian master was illustrating. The three ballets (Machina, Trespass and Diana and Actaeon) were performed in July 2012 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Their designs were displayed at the National Gallery. Artists involved in the project included choreographers Alastair Marriott and Christopher Wheeldon or Kim Brandstrup and Wayne McGregor, and sculptors and painters Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross, and Mark Wallinger. In addition, fourteen leading contemporary poets were invited to respond to the same paintings and texts. Among them were distinguished writers like Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, and Seamus Heaney, as well as younger poets like Sinéad Morrissey and Frances Leviston.1 Heaney and Morrissey were the only two Irish-born poets in the group. The sort of conversation that was thus inevitably created between them through their poems—respectively titled “Actaeon” and “Diana and Actaeon”—is a thought-provoking one. Although they belong to different generations, Heaney and Morrissey’s Irish origins share much in common: the North, Belfast, and Queen’s University. Each of their poetic oeuvres manifests international influences as well. Heaney’s poetry often shows the influence of Dante and Eastern European writers, whereas Morrissey is attracted to the cultures of the Far East. Their highly personal, often autobiographical works are frequently written in the same vein—in a meditative and self-reflective mode, using deeply sensuous [End Page 119] language and seeking the transcendent into the everyday, the extraordinary into the ordinary and vice versa. Justifying their commissioning for “Metamorphosis 2012,” both poets had also written ekphrastic poetry before, though Morrissey to a greater extent than Heaney. The two most notable occurrences in Heaney’s poetry are “Summer 1969” and “A Basket of Chestnuts.” In one, he engages in meditation upon Goya’s paintings at the Prado.2 In the other, he speculates upon his own portrait by Edward Maguire.3 Numerous poems by Morrissey are inspired by artworks: for instance “Eileen, Her First Communion” in Between Here and There (2002) responds to John Lavery’s portrait of his daughter.4 Her poem “Fur,” originally composed in 2011 and inserted in her most recent collection Parallax (2013), is an ekphrastic rereading of Holbein’s The Ambassadors.5 Indeed ekphrasis is a cornerstone of Morrissey’s Parallax, a volume in which the poems are preoccupied with the visible and the invisible, perception and deception, and with “the artificiality of art in framing and containing its subject.”6 In that collection, “Photographing Lowry’s House” astutely depicts pictures within pictures, such as Laurence Stephen Lowry’s collected images within Denis Thorpe’s photographs. Likewise, in “Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg,” Morrissey ponders over skewed perspectives, poses and changing textures, remarking that “the eye is banked / as much by what unravels / as by flint.”7 In each of those ekphrastic poems, the inspirational art pieces are not merely described but created anew in poetic language—a process that both poets consider fundamental to their practice. This point was made by Heaney in his keynote address to the 2009 European Federation of Associations and Centers of Irish Studies in Vienna. When asked to list the main influences on his work, the poet cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the same address, he asserted that one of the most notable virtues of creative imagination is its ability to retrieve “the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects. Poetry is thus less a matter of ‘de-familiarisation’ than one [End Page 120] of ‘re-familiarisation’.”8 Such “re-familiarisation” is precisely what Heaney does with the poem “Actaeon,” inspired by Titian’s The Death of Actaeon: he restores a sense of...