Observations on Heaney

Hi all, it's (the other) Alex.

I sensed an air of self-deprecation and self-dissatisfaction about Heaney's collection. Michael commented on Heaney’s dissatisfaction with Irish politics, and I would agree; however, what runs deeper in the poem (I refer to ‘Punishment’) is an anger directed back upon himself:

My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
But would have cast, I know,
The stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

…

I who have stood dumb
When your betraying sisters,
Cauled in tar,
Wept by the railings,

[I] Who would connive
In civilised outrage
Yet understand the exact
And tribal, intimate revenge.


The word “Yet” makes the ending problematic; it suggests that Heaney is affecting “civilised outrage” but in fact “understand[s]” and accepts the women's punishment. However, while Heaney understands its “tribal, intimate” nature, he does not necessarily condone the punishment; rather, his point is that he now understands it on the level of a ritual. In invoking this ritual (which harks back to the first century), Heaney lends the atrocities a further layer of barbarism; adultery and cavorting with enemy soldiers are equated by Heaney, which by extension equates the uncivilised system of justice of the first century to that of modern Ireland. The poem is therefore an indictment of these punitive practices.

More importantly, though, the poem is a self-censure. Heaney, as “artful voyeur”, feels he is hiding behind something, willing only to “cast … the stones of silence” - that is to say, like so many others, he disagrees with the measures taken against the “betraying sisters” but is unwilling to endanger himself in actively aiding their plight. This armchair moralising - incidentally, note a sense pervasive in Heaney’s work that the poet is set apart from the world, distanced; unable to affect it; able only to observe it as "voyeur" - is what Heaney rails against: good intentions, says he, are worth nothing without actions to accompany them.

His preoccupation with “the point of poetry” (I again refer to Michael) is the sort of self-reflexive concept with which artists are in perpetual grips; it will inevitably force any artist to question the importance of his own creations and, indeed, the act of creation itself. I think, then, that while (qua artist) he is inherently concerned with the point of poetry, Heaney’s major anxiety is his own poetic inadequacy. We see this in ‘Station Island’, when the ghost of Joyce emerges to lend artistic advice; and also in ‘The Forge’, where the labour of the blacksmith is majestically depicted as a foil to poetic practice, “a door into the dark”.