From Hills and Bogs: Seamus Heaney and R S Thomas
This week we move away from the urban and the directly radical, direct action turmoil of the capitals of Europe and USA, to the poetry of two writers whose work ‘fashions’ self out of land, identity from myth and landscape, and a discourse that challenges identities imposed from without. As we will see, both writers offer important contrasts to the work of Geoffrey Hill and Ted Hughes in their recuperations of England and Englishness.
Heaney and Thomas, not exactly contemporaries, so briefly let’s place them in context.
R S Thomas: 1913-2000 – these dates locate him firmly in the 20th century, and are significant in that Thomas’s work expresses his struggle to accommodate modernity (though not modernism and its legacies which are evident in his use of form) – and I say accommodate, since the tension evident in his poetry concerns both the losses and gains that attend industrial and technological advances. I will return to this. It is also significant that Thomas was:
- Welsh (though not a native Welsh speaker – he learnt the language in adulthood, and wrote in English) – but his poetry depicts the loss of a nation, though it is often as unkind to the Welsh as it is to those responsible for the Anglicisation of Wales;
- a priest: the roles of poet and priest are indissolubly tied for Thomas and in certain cultural perceptions or traditions – and we will explore this in the poetry, but the concept goes back at least to Arnold;
- lived and worked in rural Wales; his poetry is noted both for the exaltation of the landscape, and its unflinching – as they say – depictions of the harshness of rural life.
Thomas published roughly 20 collections of poetry, inter alia
Seamus Heaney: 1939 – still living; Northern Ireland, again his date of birth places him squarely in the 20th century, and like Thomas, he was born on the cusp of one the major conflicts of that century. Again like Thomas, his background is rural, and this connection to land is one that Heaney explores and uses in his poetry. Unlike Thomas, Heaney studied his native language (and Latin) in late childhood, and later Anglo-Saxon, as a student, factors to be considered in his treatment of language in its materiality (Heaney is also known for his works of translation – eg. Beowulf in 2001). That he translates actual works of mythology is, we might say, the concretisation of his re-interpretations of mythologies in his own poetry.
Both Thomas and Heaney understand the role/s of poet and poetry to have important social, political and spiritual significance and impact. Religion figures largely in the work of both men, albeit very differently: for Thomas, the spiritual absence/presence which he experiences/seeks respectively is articulated in his poetry as an anguish of sorts, which is a personal crisis, but not unconnected to what he perceives as a wider loss for Wales and humanity in general; for Heaney, the tension is located more in the sectarian divisions and tensions that dog and haunt Ireland – personal and national, but exterior rather than interior.
This lecture will outline the poetics of both poets, and introduce and explore their respective involvements and expressions of an identity at risk, and a land and/or language or culture claiming a stake in modernity – yet, in Thomas’s case, at odds with modernity.
Turning first to Heaney, whose work must first be located in terms of his connection to the Field Day programme/group. Although this began in 1980, so a little way beyond our chronological remit for this week, (but then the poetry roams these decades rather) the principles driving its foundation are essential to Heaney’s project. The Field Day group sought to bring together playwrights, poets and writers across the sectarian divide, and create a ‘fifth province’ – a space in which sectarian tensions could be explored but transcended – the idea being in part that Irishness across the geographical and sectarian boundaries shares more than divides, that there is a unified Irishness, and therefore Ireland – it also of course, promotes art and culture in terms of these activities having a political impact, and an optimism! That the project centred itself in Derry (its colonial name was Londonderry) is highly significant: Derry is close to the border with the Republic, and the name ‘Londonderry’ announces the struggle for ownership – the city is inscribed by dichotomy and hierarchy – it is not Derrylondon for example.
Brian Friel’s play Translations was the first play to come out of the movement in the ‘80s, and it was not long after this that Heaney began publicly to support the project, and joined the Board of Directors.
Heaney links us more directly to the events and turmoil of 1968, his work negotiating as it does ‘the Troubles’, and being, as Kibberd puts it, an ‘attempt […] to translate the violence of the past into the culture of the future.’ (DK, 591); the attempt is thwarted as often as not, by the now highlighted presence of violence and cruelty in the everyday, as if the eruption of sectarian violence threw into relief the more ordinary so to speak, even pragmatic violence of rural life – which no pastoral convention can easily contain: a poem from Death of a Naturalist (1966), ‘The Early Purges’ (as DK and others note) draws a line between sentiment and pragmatism, town and country – the danger is that such pragmatism too quickly can translate into justification for the riddance of other ‘pests’:
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, “Bloody pups.” It makes sense:
“Prevention of cruelty” talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
Heaney is more frequently found dealing less directly with matters of nationhood however:
- in the materiality of language itself, through gendered metaphor of sound and meaning;
- the manner in which ownership of place and culture is inscribed on the landscape;
- through the use of myth;
- and through metaphors of archaeology;
Kibberd again: ‘Heaney developed an aesthetic in which the hard, masculine consonants of Protestant English culture ‘bulled’ the softer, feminine words of Gaelic tradition. (DK 592) This aesthetic is on the one hand radical and poetically sleek in its ear for sound, but on the other hand, problematic. It resurrects too easily the figure of Ireland as the beautiful maiden, the spéirbhean (casting the country in the virginal role of Muse, and condemning Irish womanhood to a similarly passive and prescriptive role), and echoes Cullingford: ‘In nineteenth-century British hands, this fusion of Ireland with the feminine had dubious consequences. [Matthew Arnold claimed] that the ‘sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them […]’. (EBC 226-7)You may recall that we looked at these ideas and concerns in Level 1, in Contemporary Literature. The feminisation of Ireland by the English rehearses colonial subjugation, in which the colonised, following the ideological positions of the day concerning gender, are ‘reduced’ to the status of women and children – feminised and infantilised, inducing a crisis of masculinity in the colonised male subject. While Heaney suggestively reclaims that femininisation in arguably positive terms, it remains problematic; Cullingford notes too, that Heaney ‘describes the Troubles as a gendered struggle between Cathleen ni Houlihan and a “male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange, and Edward Carson [barrister for prosecution against Oscar Wilde, and Irish] “ (EBC 229) – and she argues that Heaney’s essentialism is evident too in his ‘bog’ poems.
In Kibberd’s words, the ‘bog in Heaney’s mythos preserves not just bodies but consciousness’ – which marks the land again as history and time inscribe it. There is a very real and physical concretisation of collective memory, in which authenticity is understood as that which can be uncovered, in which origin is a given, awaiting return and discovery. We will explore the bog as trope in the seminars, but look here at some further problems with this trope: Kibberd notes one effect (which could be both advantageous and difficult), in that ‘the bog-myth has the effect of distancing contemporary violence’ (not to mention the uneasy closeness to stereotypes of ‘bog-Irish’ and all that that entails).But Cullingford notes again, how gender troubles this particular mythos in her reading of ‘Bog Queen’ – this poem on is p. 66 of your h/out – the poem responds to, and appropriates the account of the body found in the bogs of estates of Lord Moira in County Down (1781), and is one of several of such poems by Heaney. While the trope of the bog, and the archaeological quest for origin (and ownership, belonging) is powerful, Cullingford argues that the poem also ‘literalizes the familiar topos of the land as a woman’s body by producing a corpse.’ She contrasts the report of the finding and description of the body and its clothing (the peat preserves organic matter) – the report by P Glob, is as objective as it can be, and would aspire to be – with what she terms Heaney’s ‘erotic nationalist resonance’ – ‘phoenician stitchwork/retted on my breasts’//soft moraines./I knew winter cold/like the nuzzle of fjords/at my thighs’. (EBC 229). Cullingford does not cite all that I have cited, but the eroticism is clear; even more evident is the manner in which body and earth merge in a strange gestation (in which death is confounded yet present – the body corrupts despite the preserving properties of the peat), and with rhetorical manoeuvres which recall the rhetoric of sexual conquest in the colonial discourses of empire – breasts are moraines, fjords and thighs join sexually; there is however, in the bog-queen’s emergence an agency and return of sorts: she speaks her own history, and this is perhaps the radical gesture: Ireland speaks ‘her’ self; there is too, an ambivalence in Heaney’s final stanzas:
The plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut
and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
Here we have the monstrous birth of the feminine, viscous and organic, and terrifying – and more reminiscent in appearance of the ‘hag’ figure than the sky-woman or spéirbhean, but here a figure of hope, not treachery.
I want to look at Thomas too, but before doing so, note that Heaney’s bogs and mythology, so apparently Irish, are, it is argued by Raphaël Ingelbein, indebted to Heaney’s deliberate ‘misreadings’ of the work of Ted Hughes, whose own appropriations of mythologies and ancient landscapes recuperate an England prior to the Industrial Revolution for the post-Industrial world. Ingelbein notes similar gendered imagery and metaphor at work in Hughes’s poetry, as Hughes locates the problem in ‘Protestant materialism and rationality of modern Britain’ (masculine) which suppressed ‘an England made up of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Celtic influences, brought together under the sign of a feminine religion that spans paganism and medieval Catholicism.’ (RI 629) I won’t go into this here, but Ingelbein sees in Heaney’s journeyings through bog and myth, a process of recovery not dissimilar to that of Hughes, though to quite different ends.
R SThomas:
In 1990, in an interview with Planet magazine, Christopher Morgan cites Thomas on the matter of language:
I complained once [to Saunders Lewis] about the problem of writing in one language and wanting to speak another, and his reply was that out of such tensions art was born. (CM 3)
As Morgan goes on to note, such tensions are wider reaching in terms of how language/s are deeply cultural, and profoundly connected to matters of identity, ‘identity’ – Morgan stresses the word. As already mentioned, Thomas grew up outside of his own language, which suggests an alienation that Thomas never overcame, and which is echoed in his chosen professions of poet and priest: the poet is always in some sense apart, the tribe’s bard/voice (a notion proposed by Ted Hughes on his appointment as Poet Laureate), crafting language, and always in the position of mediator, crafting observation and experience into art. In Thomas’s case, the more he writes about his country (men/women, landscape) the greater the distance between him and those whom he writes/speaks, into being – always in English – he did learn to speak Welsh, and with some fluency, but did not write poetry in Welsh. Morgan points to his reference to this decision as necessary (perhaps because, if the voice of Wales speaks only in Welsh, it speaks only to itself), but ‘as the scar on my personality, intensifying the embedded and visceral sense of language’s physicality, where identity is concerned. The scar signals a wound not quite healed, visible, and as Morgan continues, functions as a boundary, a threshold, a place of tension, and a place in which Thomas remained. Thomas worked too, as an Anglican priest in North and Mid-Wales, where Welsh is spoken and the religion largely non-conformist: as an Anglican priest, and incomer, he must negotiate a ‘plurality of tensions’.
The position of priest sets its incumbent at several removes from the rest of the community, and is a liminal space, another threshold. It is also both in keeping and at odds with that of the poet – in keeping: the priest is a figure of particular authority, of necessity removed from, and above his parishioners, invested too, with the sort of vision the poet has, into (spirit, soul, truth etc) and ‘beyond’ or ‘through’ to the real – this takes a slightly Emersonian view of the poet as the one who ‘hears’ the divine music/voice through the clutter and noise of the everyday:
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own. The men [sic] of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of nations (RWE 262)
Again, slightly Arnoldian in its understanding of poetry’s task and function, as poetry for Thomas, as it is for Arnold, is an elevated form of communication: in the Planet interview, Morgan cites Thomas as saying that poetry is ‘the communication of thought and emotion at the highest and most articulate level. It is the supreme human statement’. (CM 9) See Arnold, in ‘The Study of Poetry – in which he claims for poetry, that it will do the job of science, religion and philosophy.
At odds seemingly, if we understand poetry now to be divorced from its ‘Romanticist’ intent or project – that is the revelation of truth via the imagination, and to be a solely creative, located in the individual practice, and the poet to be that individual apart entirely from the everyday – even then, there are elements of the divine here, in that very separation from the everyday; but chiefly the poet might seem distant from the priest in the matter of orthodoxy.
However, Thomas is quite clear that for him the two professions are utterly inseparable, and he recognises that orthodoxy is a concern which the poet must transcend. But so too perhaps, must the priest.
A poet must be able to claim… freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry…[but] in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is a metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor […] The core of both are imagination as far as I am concerned… My work as poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth. (Davis, ‘Poet-Priest’ 92-3)
The mystic fails to mediate God adequately in so far as he is not a poet. The poet… shows his spiritual concern and his spiritual nature through the medium of language, the supreme symbol. The presentation of religious experience in the most inspired language is poetry. (ibid. 93)
The mystic/priest is practically poet-manqué in this account, where the poet apprehends and confronts, and mediates the presence/absence of God, and in that in confrontation, brings the presence forth. Another threshold crossed, or at least repeatedly negotiated. It is Davis who notes, that the absence of presence as it is confronted represents the ‘dark night of the soul’ which presages nevertheless, ‘the final union with the divine’. Or self, in more secular terms. The key point however, is that it is in language that Thomas places his hopes, and it is language that, paradoxically, is the ‘supreme symbol’. (And poetry is the evidence of how supreme that symbol and system can be, in the poet’s hands.)
To return to the matter of Thomas’s Welsh identity: the spiritual and revelatory are experienced via landscape, nature, and it is here that poet-priest-mystic are one: ‘The Bright Field’ is such a poem (RST, Thwaite 87)[read]:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Morgan offers a reading of this poem, and its theological allusions – noting particularly that it is in the stillness, in the moment of turning and ceasing that hone hears the voice, comes into the Presence; but the poem echoes too, the Wordsworthian moment of immersion in nature, which Jerome McGann observes of ‘Tintern Abbey – the poem that begs us he says:
‘not to fill the eye of the mind with external and soulless images, but with “forms of beauty” through which we can “see into the life of things”, to penetrate the surface of a landscape to reach its indestructible heart and meaning’; it is in the stillness that we will ‘hear’, but that stillness can, or will only occur in nature. And Thomas’s ‘nature’ is utterly Welsh. This is why there is such anguish regarding the theft of that land and language, and again, as in the case of Ireland, we see how nationhood > land> religion> identity are inextricably tied and bound.
In the seminars, we will consider, through comparative readings of Thomas and Heaney’s work, how the two poets manage loss and rediscovery of self as Irish/Welsh, through misreadings/appropriations and negotiations of nation, history and religion.
Bibliography:
Books:
William V Davis, ed., Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R S Thomas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1993)
William V Davis, R S Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ in Nature and Selected Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 259-284 (p. 262)
Dominic Kibberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996)
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
Christopher Morgan, R S Thomas: Identity, environment and deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
Journals: [all on JSTOR]
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel and McGuiness’, PMLA 111 (2), 1996, 222-239
William V Davis, ‘R S Thomas: Poet-Priest of the Apocalyptic Mode’, South Central Review, 4 (4), 1987, 92-106
Raphaël Ingelbein, ‘Mapping the Misreadings: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Nationhood’, Contemporary Literature, 40 (4), 1999, 627-658
David Lloyd, ‘Through the Looking Glass: R S Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow as Poetic Autobiography’, Twentieth Century Literature, 42 (4), 1996, 438-452
Brian McHale, ‘Archaeologies of Knowledge: Hill’s Middens, Heaney’s Bogs, Schwerner’s Tablets’, New Literary History, 30 (1), 1999, 239-262
A V C Schmidt, ‘”Darkness Echoing”: Reflections of the Return of Mythopoeia in Some Recent Poems of Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney’, The Review of English Studies, 36 (142) 1985, 199-225