Virgil and Heaney: “Route 110”

Abstract

Virgil and Heaney: “Route 110” MICHAEL C. J. PUTNAM —for Matthew Santirocco The epic tradition, including the rich self-referentiality of Wordsworth’s great contribution to it, The Prelude, remains a prominent part of the heritage of “Route 110,” Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary autobiographical poem central to Human Chain.1 But it is Virgil’s Aeneid that serves as its prime model, one against which the Irish poet is continually matching himself. It is to the modern epigone’s strong relationship to the earlier genius that I devote the following pages.2 The profile of Heaney’s poem echoes the normal division of epic into variations of twelve parts, with each segment also twelve lines in length.3 Every section is self-contained but there is a careful meshing between the divisions so as to form a closely linked whole. Nevertheless we are dealing with an extraordinary difference in scale as we exchange the grand sweep of Milton, say, and Wordsworth for Heaney’s focused intensity, as we move from epic’s wide range through histories impersonal and personal to an individual’s private curriculum projected through the subjective immediacy of lyric’s first-person warmth. Meter urges us toward an interpretation of meaning by suggesting the complementary relationship of one genre with another. Equally relevant in this case, as we pursue interpretation , is what T. S. Eliot defines as the “mythic method.” He coined the phrase in a brilliant critique of James Joyce’s newlycompleted novel, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” first published in 1923.4 Joyce’s use of Homer’s Odyssey, in Eliot’s words, illustrates a way of “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance arion 19.3 winter 2012 to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” In other words, by having imaginative recourse to his literary inheritance, a poet can also bring structure and meaning to his own work of the present. Such a project enables an author , by careful reference to a parallel, earlier text, to offer his readers, through the very patterning and meaning of words from the past that put forward a standard against which the present moment of creativity can be measured, a time for contemplative pleasure that puts them, in Frost’s words, “beyond confusion.” In the case of both Joyce and Heaney, texts from the Greco-Roman world serve to bring order as both models and stimuli. For Joyce, it is Homer’s grand narrative that offers a means of shaping his groundbreaking novel as he idiosyncratically draws past into present, and we will examine Joyce’s particular role in the genesis of “Route 110” at the conclusion of this essay. For Heaney, it is Virgil’s Aeneid that plays a role similar to that of the Odyssey for Joyce. At the very start of “Route 110,” he immediately puts forward the great Roman author and his final masterpiece, one of the ancient world’s most extraordinary accomplishments in any branch of poetry , as a major influence on his own imagination.5 The purchase of a used copy of the epic’s sixth book is the salient event of the poem’s initial segment, and the Roman master is mentioned directly in part ii and at the opening of part x. As we read “Route 110,” we are witnessing simultaneously an act of creation that is also one of recreation. Heaney is Virgil redivivus, the poet of our time following the example of a superlative ancient predecessor to mold his own idiosyncratic artifact. In the case of the Irish poet, to read Virgil is to become Virgil. Specifically, as we would expect from the opening segment where to buy implies to absorb intellectually and for a crafter of words to emulate, it is Aeneid 6 which serves both as general model and, in its particulars, as a crucial background for the understanding of the modern saga of which the poem tells. virgil and heaney: route 110 80 But Heaney is not just one great poet following in the tradition of another whom he admires. He is also a...