Heaney's 'The Forge'

Hi all, it's Alex.

I had some thoughts about the problems of creation, preservation and authentic representation in Heaney’s ‘The Forge’. In choosing to write a sonnet on the simple figure of the blacksmith, Heaney commemorates this modest artisan with Wordsworthian dignity. But whereas Heaney, the poet, leaves his written work for posterity, the blacksmith is voiceless, uttering only a ‘grunt’ throughout the poem. Nonetheless the poem revels in its own oral effects (this comes across well in Heaney’s reading, especially the last three lines http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfatu3_seamus-heaney-the-forge_creation), and is a celebration of a figure who can articulate himself wordlessly ‘in shape and music’. In light of this, the objects created at the forge become important symbols of the non-verbal expression the blacksmith leaves behind. The ‘old axles and iron hoops rusting’ outside the forge containing the anvil/‘altar’ are reminiscent of neglected tombstones outside a church, which will not survive in comprehensible completeness for posterity.

Blake Morrison records that ‘taciturnity’ is a key characteristic in Heaney’s early figures, and that poetry was regarded as a luxurious superfluity to Irish working-class life (Contemporary Writers: Seamus Heaney, Routledge, London & New York, 1982, 21). Heaney’s commemoration of the physical, wordless process of creation in the forge thus marks his paradoxical relationship with his Irish rural heritage; by commemorating the unsung folk heroes with formal poetry, he is diverging from the very culture which he wishes to preserve.