From Shancoduff to Mossbawn: Lines of Convergence and Divergence in Kavanagh and Heaney

Abstract

From Shancoduff to Mossbawn: Lines of Convergence and Divergence in Kavanagh and Heaney1 Una Agnew SSL Landscape and everyday life The poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) and Seamus Heaney (1939– 2013) is inspired, in large part, by the landscapes and everyday life of their respective rural communities. The drumlin farm-land of South Monaghan and its farming chores are as central to the poetry of Kavanagh as the routine daily life of Mossbawn, Broagh and Anahorish are in the work of Heaney. Whether we realise it or not, this attention to very ordinary events such as spraying potatoes, milking cows or picking blackberries is significantly new in Irish poetry written in English. Raising these commonplace daily realities to the status of lyric poetry is a radical break with an Irish literary tradition that for years had been strongly preoccupied with nationalism: with Ireland as a ‘Dark Rosaleen’ or as the tragic beauty of Kathleen Ní Houlihan. In a BBC Radio 4 interview in 1974, Heaney uses the Greek word omphalos to root himself firmly in his home at Mossbawn. He explains: ‘would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of someone pumping water outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s . . . There the pump stands a slender, iron idol, snouted and helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle’. A procession of neighbours come with rattling buckets to draw water daily and leave ‘weighed down by silent water’.2 Thirty-five years later this pump in his family’s backyard will still be iconic and will assume that place forever in one of Heaney’s finest poems, ‘Mossbawn: Sunlight’, one of two written in dedication to his aunt Mary Heaney: ‘There was a sunlit absence / The helmeted pump in the yard / Heated its iron, Water honeyed / In the slung bucket / And the sun stood / Like a griddle cooling / Against the wall / Of each long afternoon’.3 Studies • volume 107 • number 425 9 In a parallel way, the family setting outside Kavanagh’s home in Mucker on Christmas morning is foundational for an exploration of Kavanagh’s ‘childhood country’, the centre of his world. On Christmas morning the domestic world of his six-year-old self is captured in detail, as if rolled out on film: ‘My father played the melodeon / Outside at our gate; / There were stars in the morning east / And they danced to his music . . . Outside in the cow house my mother / made the music of milking; / The light of her stablelamp was a star / And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle’.4 Memory Early domestic settings such as these are essential sources of inspiration for both poets and are deeply embedded in their poetic DNA. ‘On the stem / Of memoryimaginationblossoms’areKavanagh’swell-chosenwords.5 Heaney’s poetry openly declares undying devotion to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses.6 In his series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, he recalls how childhood memories from his Mossbawn and Anahorish days are organically stored in his body’s memorybank ,7 awaiting the trigger, that moment of inspiration that transforms a forgotten image into material for a poem. For Heaney, Toner’s Bog, stories of bottomless bog-holes, the train shunting into Castledawson, blackberry picking, churning and his Aunt Mary’s floury apron all bear dividends in terms of poetic inspiration. Kavanagh’s ‘animal remembering mind’ is also packed with teeming archives of early memories that translate into poems. One such instance occurs when he finds himself an exile in London, dreaming back over the past and remembering the plight of a neighbour’s donkey he once borrowed and kept in an outhouse overnight: ‘We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass / To go to Dundalk with butter. / Brought him home the evening before the market / An exile that night in Mucker’. Almost as incantation, we hear Kavanagh naming the familiar items of harness and, with characteristic humorosity, address in sonnet form his own sense of exile and ‘out-of...