Digging Memory of the Dead in Field Work, The Haw Lantern & Seeing Things

Abstract

Seamus Heaney is one of the representative writers who wrote many poems in memory of the dead people and memory is Heaney’s principle muse. Through rereading the selected poems for the dead, I could find out that Seamus Heaney used the different genres as memory art for the dead: some pastoral elegies of Field Work, a series of sonnets of The Haw Lantern and some free verses of Seeing Things containing the method of pastiche and incantation. Pastoral elegy is a funeral song or a lament for the dead with some convention: Although, Seamus Heaney following this convention, “The Strand at Lough Beg” and “Casualty” show some digression. And sonnet means “little songs” of fourteen lines that follow a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure with the theme of love. However, Heaney’s sonnets also show some transformation in line and rhyme. And the word pastiche means either a “hodge-podge” or imitation of several original works. Heaney’s some memory poems of Seeing Things apply some method of incantation which transforms keepsakes into the spiritual ones with the method of pastiche. What I came to the end from this study is that when Heaney commemorated victims of Ulster Trouble, he used somewhat artificial genre of pastoral elegy. However, for the memory of his dead mother, he used the sonnet genre of lyric mode which can contain praise and love of the dead. To our interest, he used free verse with pastiche and incantation to express love for his dead father and the late Philip Larkin. In short, he can be evaluated as a craftsman, memory digger and occulter.