Chapter 4 - ‘Habit’s Afterlife’

Summary

Station Island is a key text in coming to an understanding of the changing nature of Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism. For this reason, it is the subject of Chapter Four, alongside Heaney’s translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Heavily informed by his reading of Dante, it comes at the mid-point of Heaney’s own life and is the most forthright engagement with the political and religious pieties of his childhood upbringing. I attend to a close reading of the twelve-sequence poem ‘Station Island’, the title poem of the collection, and read it in the context of its draft forms and what Heaney says elsewhere about the poem. I conclude by arguing that rather than resolving Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism, Station Island appears to reinforce it. However, as an act of spiritual catharsis, it clears the way for the more visionary and airy poems of subsequent collections. His translation of the Sweeney poem allows Heaney to ventriloquise, from a safe vantage point, his own poetic sense in the person of King Sweeney, who acts as a bridge between the two collections.