The Keats and Hopkins Dialectic in Seamus Heaney's Early Poetry: “The Forge”

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1In Stepping Stones, Heaney mentions that he read “a whole lot of Wordsworth and Keats” (404) in his final year of high school at St. Columb's in Derry, while later, at Queen's University in Belfast, he reveled in the “great delights of reading Keats, when I was an undergraduate […]” (35). 2See my discussion of this column in my Poetry and Peace, 308–10. 3In Stepping Stones, Heaney compares Ted Hughes to Hopkins's blacksmith Felix Randal, noting that “I think of a ‘bright and battering sandal’ that has more power than pitch, more effulgence than finish, and generally more mana” (339). He is quoting the last half line of Hopkins's poem, “his bright and battering sandal!” (“Felix Randal” 87). Heaney also compares his dying father to Felix Randal in “Seeing the Sick” from Electric Light when he opens that poem by musing, “Anointed and all, my father did remind me / Of Hopkins's Felix Randal” (79). The opening half-line is taken nearly verbatim from the start of Hopkins's sixth line, “Being anointed and all” (“Felix Randal” 86). Later in Heaney's poem, he notes that he had “None of your fettled and bright battering sandal” that Randal had in his prime (79), again drawing on the conclusion of Hopkins's poem. 4In Stepping Stones, Heaney happily notes that Barney Devlin, the model for the blacksmith of “The Forge,” is “in his late eighties now, but still capable of striking the epic out of the usual. For example, at midnight on the last day of 1999, he hit the anvil twelve times to ring in the millennium—and relayed the tune to his son in Edmonton by cellular phone. He's still going strong […]” (91). The poem “Midnight Anvil” treats this incident. 5See the similarly gripping, sonic language Heaney uses about first discovering Hopkins in “The Drag of the Golden Chain”: “Hopkins had a definite fetter-melting effect on my mid-Ulster tongue when I was an undergraduate.” Recalling his reading of the opening stanzas of Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Heaney muses that “Suddenly the world was tuned to a new and irrefutable note. The liturgical power, the ontological base-touching, the body-bracing sheerness of sound in Hopkins's apostrophe to God the Father, had the force of a primal incantation …” (14). 6Heaney's embrace of energetic, masculine figures in his early poetry obviates the slight embarrassment he feels in his apologia for the “book work” of poetry in “Digging” over against the real “spade work” of his father and grandfather. The scholastic Hopkins similarly embraced soldiers and other figures of action in his poetry. 7To put it more positively, Keats's urge toward truthfulness in his famous ode has generally affirmed for Heaney the truth of lyric poetry. In this regard, see the passage in Crediting Poetry where Heaney is clearly thinking of the emphasis on truth in Keats's ode: “[I]n lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices” (50–51). 8See my analysis of this aspect of the poem in Poetry and Peace, 189–90. 9Stanley Plumly has recently commented that the vision of the urn “is frightening. It is what the afterlife could be like: ‘no change of death in paradise,’ writes Stevens, a place where ripe fruit never falls” (346).