Chapter 1 - ‘Innerspaces of an Early Life’

Summary

Chapter One sets out to trace Heaney’s early Catholic formation at home, school and parish. It begins in his childhood home of Mossbawn, where a strong devotional piety was a product of what the historian Emmet Larkin called the ‘devotional revolution’ of the nineteenth century. Central to this piety was an emphasis on Marian devotion and the visual and tactile appeal of Catholic sacramental practice. The domestic piety of Mossbawn takes a more formal shape in the learning of the catechism at Anahorish Primary School and in more developed catechesis at St Columb’s College in Derry, where Heaney was a boarder. It was at St Columb’s that Heaney first came across the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who was to have the greatest influence on his early apprentice work. I trace the influence of Hopkins from Heaney’s early unpublished work to later poems such as ‘Seeing the Sick’ in Electric Light. Heaney’s later introduction to the work of Patrick Kavanagh provided him with the validation of his earliest writing instincts about the local landscape and the centrality of parish as a guarantor of the local.