4 - ‘It was marvellous and actual’: Familiarity and Fantasy

Summary

Seamus Heaney once noted in an interview that, sometime after North was published, he wrote to the playwright Brian Friel, observing of his poetic practice that he ‘no longer wanted a door into the dark’. ‘I wanted a door into the light,’ he observed, ‘to be able to use the first person singular to mean me and my lifetime.' In the previous chapter we dwelt almost exclusively on the politically informed poetry which Heaney continued to write after North, but we should note that, from Field Work onwards, Heaney does begin to reintroduce into his work a kind of poetry that is less immediately political, a poetry more rooted in the world of personal concerns. Indeed, viewed in this light, we can see Field Work itself as falling very roughly into two halves. In the first stretch of the collection, Heaney continues to struggle with public themes, pursuing further the debates which he initiated in North, but, in the second, he turns to contemplate more intimate, more personal concerns.

In part this transition between the two halves of the volume (and, we might say, between the middle phase of Heaneys career and his later departures) is mediated through the sequence of poems that lies at the heart of Field Work - the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’. We have already seen the significance of Glanmore for Heaney in our examination of North's ‘Exposure’. In that poem, Glanmore serves as a site of conflict. On the one hand, Heaney's removal to the rural south of Ireland, far distant from the day-to-day experience of the Northern troubles, prompts him to re-evaluate the exact nature of his political commitments as a poet. But, on the other hand, it also provokes a certain sense of anxiety and guilt about his abandonment of his home territory in a time of political crisis. In the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’, by contrast, Heaney celebrates his family's stint of living in County Wicklow with a kind of ease and freedom that ‘Exposure’ signally lacks.

In part this celebration marks something of a return for Heaney to the concerns of his early poetry, in which he sought an easy engagement with the particulars of the immediate, natural world. We might note, indeed, that the sonnet sequence opens with several images which will be familiar to us from Heaney's earliest work.