Seamus Heaney's Anxiety of Trust in "Field Work"

Abstract

Most poetic careers advance like waves disturbed by central event, each new pulse collapsing only after tensions impelling it have been exhausted. Heaney's career is no exception. His image of family's drinking water shaken by train in Sonnets IV (the small ripples . . . vanished into where they seemed start) brilliantly captures this contrapuntal progress. Following Blake's assertion that Contraries is no progression, Heaney has made sure that his surges are always matched by equally powerful counter-surges. His early pastoralism in Death of Naturalist, for example, relied on an opposing 'anti-pastoralism' for credibility and contemporaneity. Without recognition of rural hardship, his enchantment with agrarian ways would have seemed foolishly nostalgic. Similarly, his meditational via negativas in Door into Dark, while aimed at recollecting sacred lights (the altar-like anvil wreathed with sparks in forge, grass flaming outside Gallarus Oratory), gained intensity from 'dark night' they struggled illuminate. In Wintering Out scholarly disquisitions on place names in Northern drew mythic and political force from Protestant and Catholic conflicts raging beneath their linguistic surfaces. And in North apocalyptic desire raise dead for judgment and invoke history as guide saner future achieved pathos from 'counter-revelation' of Irish history as dark, tragic mire of bloody feuds and mindless sacrifices. In this series of oscillating movements, Field Work marked new departure and is crucial understanding of books that come after. Seismic is still central event resonating through poems, but here Heaney writes from south rather than north. The move from Belfast Wicklow in 1972 (and Dublin four years later), whose political ramifications were declaimed by press, initiated stylistic shift as well. The narrow, constricted poems like Punishment, in which Heaney excoriated his failure become more actively engaged in political events of Northern Ireland, modulate here into more relaxed, melodic verse. In his interview with Frank Kinahan, when asked whether substance determined style, Heaney remarked: the line and life are intimately related, and that narrow line, tight line |in North~ came out of time when I was very tight myself. When he began lengthening his lines in Field Work, the constriction went, tension went. Addressing severed heads and strangled victims of Iron Age fertility rites and their modern-day equivalents in Northern Ireland, Heaney took on grim Anglo-Saxon abruptness and ornamental complexity. He believed that musical grace of English iambic line was of affront, that it needed be wrecked. In Wicklow, in pastoral landscape of Glanmore surrounded by Catholic majority rather than Protestant hegemony, he felt that he had reached kind of appeasement.(1) As he wrote Brian Friel, he now wanted open a door into light rather than a door into dark.(2) In one of most perceptive reviews of Field Work, Christopher Ricks pointed out that the word which matters most is 'trust'. . . . Heaney's poems matter because their uncomplacent wisdom of trust is felt upon pulses, his and ours, and they effect this because they themselves constitute living relationship of trust between him and us. In an Ireland torn by reasonable and unreasonable distrust and mistrust resilient strength of these poems is in equanimity even of their surprise at some blessed moment of everyday trust.(3) At first glance, it would seem that Heaney's new trust arose from his new sense of 'trusting' audience, of assumed covenant between himself and his new community of predominantly Catholic and Republican citizens in South. But while his new trust was more artistic than political (it depended more on private impulses than public compulsions), and while he wanted to bring elements of . …