The Revolutionary Chora in Seamus Heaney’s Kite Poetry

Abstract

In Seamus Heaney's final collection Human Chain, and most explicitly in the last poem of this collection for Aibhin, Heaney reveals a corrective move into an inclusive space. His poetry attempts to rectify the socially constructed model of paternal behaviour received through his father and through his culture. He does this through a move to a more poetic space. It is necessary to clarify that this use of the term is problematic due to the unavoidable inference of the female sex, motherhood and birth. Calling his poetry is an insufficient expression of the feeling expressed by Heaney in his last kite poem. The limitations of the language available highlight the need for a new, more maternal, yet less gender specific language to describe paternal and relation ships like those present in Heaney's poetry. However, at this time, it is necessary to describe Heaney's poetry as since it is impossible to discuss Kristeva's concept of the and use the term paternal', as this suggests precisely the patriarchal regulation Kristeva is agitating against. Thus, when I speak of Heaney's move to the maternal, I am speaking outside of gender identity. I refer to Kristeva's concept of the chora as a genderless repository of drives and energies that are characteristically nourishing and maternal (Kristeva 1984: 94). for echoes Giovanni Pascoli's L'Aquilone, the poem shown to Heaney by Professor Morisco on a trip to the Italian University of Urbino. In a reflection on her meeting with Heaney called Two Poets and a Kite Morisco discloses her realisation of dear this topic to him and how it tied in with his own personal experiences (Morisco 2013: 35), as the poet had flown kites in his youth and written for Michael and Christopher'. In his foreword to the translation of L'Aquilone Heaney claims that Morisco: knew that Yeats's phrase lurked in the Italian text and knew moreover that I had written my own kite poem ('A for Michael and Christopher'). Sooner or later, therefore, I bound to go fishing in the sky (as the Chinese put it) one more time (Heaney 2012). This fishing in the sky led Heaney to rework L'Aquilone. This revision appeared in Human Chain as the last poem in the collection for Aibhin, and was written to salute the birth of Heaney's second granddaughter (Sonzogni 2014: 35). It is this final reworked and highly intertextual poem that becomes the pivotal focus of this essay, alongside theory from Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language. for demonstrates how Heaney's late style reveals a development in poetic language, a development which we could term revolutionary. A comparison of his kite poem for Aibhin against the poem for Michael and Christopher reveals a poetic style that in his later years, is uninhibited by those symbolic structures which castrate language, and thus, relationships. This is Heaney's ability to express love through poetic language; his ability to put feelings into words (Higgins 2014: 72). In his kite poems, the kite as a memory, a motif, and an action is a multifaceted symbol of Heaney's being transposed into words. Firstly, I wish to illuminate the interconnecting theoretical ideas in both Heaney and Kristeva's poetics. Heaney's The Redress of Poetry and Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language share an underlying assertion; that the revolutionary ability of poetry lies in its liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit (Heaney 1989: 2), in fact, through corrective poetry Heaney's work generates his own liberation. As Anne-Marie Smith observes Kristeva's revolution is an internal and individual revolution where the subversive work of the semiotic (Smith 1998: 18) infiltrates the symbolic elements of speech which are patriarchal and isolating, for Kristeva: All imaginative practice, such as art, poetry, love and psychoanalysis, represents the individual subject's encounter with the law of the father, of the symbolic and of society, with imposed form and structure as well as representing the imaginative attempts to battle with this frame of reference in the name of desire, subjectivity and the energy and drives they bring into play (Smith 1998: 18). …