Published by the Jesuits in Ireland since 1912, Studies examines Irish social, political, cultural and economic issues in the light of Christian values. It also explores issues in literature, history, philosophy and religion, with an emphasis on the Irish dimension.
Autumn 2024
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
Eugene O’Brien The Heaney–Steele Letters
Catriona Clutterbuck Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain
Patrick Crotty A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney’s Letters
Thomas O’Grady Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
Liam Kelly OFM The Priest as Sacred Figure
Mary O’Donnell Four Poems
Tom O’Reilly Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life
Patrick Riordan SJ Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism
Liam Aungier Poem
Declan O’Keeffe Dublin City Walls and Defences
Spring 2023
Ireland in 2030: Thinking Ahead
Back Issues
Summer 2023
Newman’ s University
Autumn 2023
Ireland: Art, Literature and National Identity
Editors of Studies 1912-2021:
Timothy Corcoran, 1912-1914
Patrick Connolly, 1914-1950
Roland Burke-Savage, 1950-1968
Peter Troddyn, 1968-1974
Patrick O’Connell, 1974-1984
Brian Lennon, 1984-1989
Noel Barber, 1989-2001
Fergus O’Donoghue, 2001-2011
Bruce Bradley, 2011-2021
Winter 2023-24
Justice in the Here and Now
Spring 2024
The Arts and Society
A Question of Values
Summer 2024
Power and Punishment
Challenging Prison Policy
Editor
Dermot Roantree
Irish Jesuit Provincialate, Milltown Park, Milltown Road, Dublin D06 W9Y7
Tel: 01-676 7491
Fax: 01-676 7493
General Enquiries: studies@messenger.ie Editor: editor@studies.ie Web: www.studiesirishreview.ie
Editorial Board
Stephen Collins; Kevin Hargaden; Peadar Kirby; John Looby SJ (Chair); Suzanne Mulligan; Gerry O’Hanlon SJ; Dermot Roantree (Editor); Cecilia West; Tony White.
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IE ISSN 0039-3495
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Cover image: Seamus Heaney at University College Dublin, 11 February 2009. By Sean O’Connor (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Seamus Heaney: Reaching for the Sacred
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ Gerald O’Collins SJ
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’:
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in
and Manfred Cain
Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy in Twentieth-Century
Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life Tom O’Reilly 403
Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism
Poem: ‘Heirloom’
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
Patrick Riordan SJ 411
Liam Aungier 422
Declan O’Keeffe 423
Book Reviews
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis
Peter Sirr, The Swerve
J. Anthony Gaughan, Some Occasional Writings, 2003–2024
Kevin Hargaden 434
Mary O’Donnell 437
Stephen Collins 440
Editorial
In his 2008 essay to accompany a fifteen-CD box set of Seamus Heaney reading his own poetry, Irish poet Peter Sirr remarked that Heaney’s imagination is ‘to an extraordinary extent nourished by ritual’ and is ‘always reaching for a sacral framework’.1 Heaney picked out these phrases as especially resonant when he wrote to Sirr to commend him on the essay.2 They struck him ‘as a remembrance’, he said – a truth only tacitly known, perhaps, that is brought suddenly to the fore.3 The context of Sirr’s remark was Heaney striving in ‘The Tollund Man’ to come to an imaginative and moral apprehension of ritualised slaughter in the ‘man-killing parishes’ of Denmark’s remote past and Northern Ireland of his own time. If the configurations of sacredness that Heaney inherited through his Catholic upbringing were no longer readily available to him, could he not still see the world, especially human life, as imbued with the sacred?
In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, at least among the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion, the sacred was held to be a category that belonged to religious discourse alone. In essence, this is what ‘disenchantment’ meant – a secular, demystifying re-reading of the world. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century new thematisations of the sacred began to emerge, even among writers with no religious commitment, though many of them acknowledged a debt to monotheistic religious culture. The most conspicuous starting point of this development might be Émile Durkheim’s response to the outrageous abuse of Alfred Dreyfus in his 1898 essay ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’. Even for a secular intellectual, there may be something about being human that sets a person apart, much as it has always done in the great religions. ‘The human person’, Durkheim writes, ‘whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word’.4 He continues: It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty
Editorial: Autumn 2024
space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts … Whoever makes an attempt on a man’s life, on a man’s liberty, on a man’s honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.
Strains of this same sense of sacredness are apparent in the work of many twentieth-century thinkers, people as diverse as William James, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek. Perhaps the most fruitful opening out of the concept during that time, however, was in the field of hermeneutics. For Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular, there is a sacral element in artistic creation, as it discloses the transcendental, raises ordinary reality ‘into its truth’,5 and transforms the observer. ‘A work of art always has something sacred about it’, he says; ‘Ultimately every work of art has something about it that protests against profanation’.6 And this holds for poetry most of all. Gadamer insists on ‘the essential priority of poetry with respect to the other arts’.7 All human understanding is linguistically mediated – even the visual and plastic arts are dependent on language. Poetry, however, is a special kind of language; due to its ‘forgetfulness’ of the formal elements that govern language, it is able to reach beyond the strict instrumentality of everyday speech and access deeper, existential truths, truths about being human and being in the world. It is, Gadamer says, ‘the highest fulfillment of that revealing which is the achievement of speech’.8
Poetry as revelation. It is more than incidental that poetry has been an essential mode of transmitting the message in scripture-based religions. More than incidental too that, in a notable instance of the ‘interdisciplinary turn’ in contemporary academic culture, theology has come to pay ever closer attention to poetry, seeing it as offering insights not conveyed by grand ontological or epistemic systems. Poetry is not theology, of course, nor is it prayer; but there are clear affinities between the disposition of the poet – and indeed the reader of poetry – and the attitude of prayerfulness to be found in many religious traditions. In particular, both share a sense of attentiveness – attentiveness especially to the depth, the mystery and the strangeness behind the ostensible meaning of things in the world. And this attentiveness is not a matter of strenuous effort but rather of quiet receptivity. It’s about knowing how to look at the world in a certain way – about letting the world speak, letting it disclose itself. Simone Weil, for whom attention was the very substance of both love of God and love of neighbour, insisted that attention
Editorial: Autumn 2024
entailed ‘suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object’.9 She added:
Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains.
Inscribed on the backrest of a bench on the Seamus Heaney Walk in the Devil’s Glen, Co. Wicklow is a couplet written by the poet himself which resonates well with Weil’s sense of prayerful attention: ‘Walker, pause now and sit. Be quiet here. / Inhale the breath of life in a breath of air.’
This issue of Studies opens with eight previously unpublished letters from Seamus Heaney to a close friend, Peter Steele SJ, priest, fellow-poet, and fellow-academic. They are remarkable for their warmth, intimacy, and good humour. They are also striking on account of the sense they give of Heaney’s attentiveness to the rhythms, the rituals, and the structures of sacredness that governed the life of his friend. Steele’s poems based on Catholic liturgy, his homilies, his meditations on the Stations of the Cross – all of these were enough to make Heaney grieve ‘for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world’. What he responded to most in Steele, however, was his character, ‘his steady, learned, merry, moral self’. It was this ‘braiding of faith and intellect’ that made Heaney see him as ‘like a spiritual director to me’.
The letters published here, as well as another set of still unpublished letters between the two men, were discovered by Steele’s Jesuit confrere and friend Gerald O’Collins SJ in repositories in Melbourne, Australia, where Steele lived most of his life. The discovery was too late to be brought to the attention of Christopher Reid for possible inclusion in the 2023 volume The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I am deeply grateful to Fr O’Collins for editing the letters and making them available to us. Also to the estate of Seamus Heaney for granting us permission to publish them, and especially to Catherine Heaney, through whose good offices the permission was obtained. In ‘“Ave, pater, atque vale”: The Heaney–Steele Letters’, Eugene O’Brien takes a close look at the eight letters. He notes that they corroborate what we already know about Heaney: his warmth and his wit as well as his dedication
Editorial: Autumn 2024
to language and his conviction of the significance of art and poetry – the taproot, O’Brien says, of his friendship and connection with Steele. What is apparent here too, though, is Heaney’s sense of the ‘confluence of religion and poetry, both of which are devoted to very specific incarnations of language that may touch or signify aspects of the transcendent not available to ordinary language’.
Catriona Clutterbuck, in her essay on Heaney’s final volume of poetry, Human Chain, explores his reckoning with what he terms ‘poetry’s call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line’ – to traverse the distance between the intimately felt world of human experience and the unknown future that may hold a promise of transcendence. In ‘“Crosshatched” Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, Clutterbuck notes Heaney’s final image of a kite, symbolic of human hope, that rises higher until the string breaks and it takes off. ‘Though it may become “lost” in the blue of unconfirmable possibility,’ she remarks, ‘such hope is never lost to the inner eye of human beings’ sense of the imminent extraordinary within our immanent, fallen lives.’
In ‘A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer’, a review article on The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Patrick Crotty notes the empathy, courtesy, and indeed humour that characterises Heaney’s voluminous correspondence, the scale of which, he says, is ‘old-world – indeed almost Victorian’. He further considers Heaney’s negotiation of fame and privacy, his relations with other poets, and his discretion in talking about religion and current affairs.
Concluding the set of essays on Heaney is Thomas O’Grady’s ‘Seamus Heaney’s Second Life’. He ruminates on the poet’s ‘afterlife’ in this world –the life after passing away, in which, citing W. H. Auden on Yeats, he ‘became his admirers’. Paying specific attention to ‘The Harvest Bow’, from Field Work, O’Grady judges that Heaney passes the tests of greatness that Auden set for Yeats. ‘The Harvest Bow’, he says ‘epitomised for me the capacity of Heaney’s full body of work to make, as Auden’s counsel puts it, “personal excitement socially available”’.
This issue of Studies includes a small number of contributions unrelated to the core theme of Heaney and the sacred. The first of these, however, also
Editorial: Autumn 2024
concerns the sacred and serves the good purpose of problematising sacredness itself. In ‘The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Liam Kelly OFM brings the insights of René Girard regarding violence as the ‘heart and secret soul’ of the sacred to bear on the Irish experience of priestly violence. The fallacy that he identifies at the base of this phenomenon is the conflation of the sacred and the holy. Irish priests in the recent past were effectively managers of society’s sacred economy, but those days are gone now, leaving them free ‘to bear witness to the holy, now that their service to the sacred is ended’.
Terry O’Reilly, a renowned scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly of its literature and spirituality, died last year after suffering for a number of years from motor neurone disease. In ‘Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life’, his son Tom describes his academic contributions, mostly during his decades as professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. Most noteworthy was Terry’s rigorous study of early Jesuit history and of the patristic and medieval influences on the spiritual culture of St Ignatius of Loyola.
In ‘Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism’, Patrick O’Riordan SJ addresses the rise (or indeed the return) of Catholic integralism, the belief that the state ought to recognise the spiritual authority of the Church and aim to promote the common good as defined by its moral teachings; also that civil laws should be in harmony with Catholic doctrine. This stance, O’Riordan argues, entails a radical misunderstanding of what the Church means by the common good, especially as that doctrine was elaborated at the Second Vatican Council and in the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI.
Another contribution to this issue is Declan O’Keeffe’s account, in ‘Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317’, of the development of the city of Dublin in late medieval times, with the merging of two settlements and the subsequent erection of defensive structures. Also featured here are the work of two Irish poets, Mary O’Donnell (who also reviews Peter Sirr’s The Swerve in this issue) and Liam Aungier.
Just before this issue of Studies went to press we received the sad news that Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ died, after a brief stay in hospital, on 22 August. I would like to extend my condolences to his friends, his family, and his fellow-
Editorial: Autumn 2024
Jesuits in Australia. I remain deeply grateful to him for pursuing the matter of having Studies publish Seamus Heaney’s letters to Peter Steele SJ. Also for his warmth and graciousness in all our correspondence. May he rest in peace.
(Notes)
1 Peter Sirr, ‘“In step with what escaped me”: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney’, The Poetry Ireland Review, 98 (July 2009), p. 17.
2 Heaney–Sirr, 1 January 2009, The Letters of Seamus Heaney, ed by Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2023), pp. 722–723.
3 In his essay ‘Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin’, Heaney identifies this as an effect proper to the work of poetry itself: ‘The best [poetry] can do is give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering’. In Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 328.
4 Émile Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, translation in Stephen Lukes, ‘Durkheim’s “Individualism and the intellectuals”’, Political Studies, XVII:1 (1969), pp. 21–22.
5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), p. 102.
6 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 133.
7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 117.
8 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 112.
9 Simone Weil, Waiting on God (London: Fontana Books, 1973), p. 72.
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
Part I: Heaney and His Herbert
Gerald O’Collins SJ
Recalling the acclaimed seventeenth-century priest-poet George Herbert, Seamus Heaney, the beloved Irish Nobel Laureate, summed up the achievement of Peter Steele, a priest- and poet-friend, when he wrote to Steele, ‘George Herbet would be proud of you’.1 A fellow Jesuit, Steele was a lifelong friend of mine. When he passed away, I wrote his obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald2 and reprinted it in Portraits: Popes, Family, and Friends. 3 The obituary ended with a brief reference to his friendship with Heaney. At the time I had no idea of its rich significance for those two warm, witty, and learned poets.
Born in Perth (Western Australia) in 1939, Steele joined the Jesuits in 1957, spent his life at Newman College, and taught generations of students in the University of Melbourne’s department of English literature. In 1993 he was named to a personal chair. He held visiting chairs at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), the University of Alberta, and Loyola University, Chicago. He also delivered the Martin D’Arcy Lectures at the University of Oxford, which he later published as The Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show. 4
Steele published major works on the Irish satirist and Anglican cleric, Jonathan Swift: first An Air of Truth Apparent: A Study of Gulliver’s Travels and then a longer book Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester. 5 He also wrote studies of contemporary poets, both Australians and others, Expatriates: Reflections on Modern Poetry and Peter Porter, as well as a short study of Samuel Johnson and Dante Alighieri, Flights of the Mind: Johnson and Dante 6 And, of course, he also published many volumes of poetry, including two books of poems prompted by works of art, Plenty: Art into Poetry and
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, as well as White Knight with Bee Box: New and Selected Poems, which was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for poetry in that year.7 In 2010 he received the Christopher Brennan Award, given by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) for ‘lifetime achievement in poetry’.
For some golden years the English department at the University of Melbourne included several notable poets. Apart from Peter Steele, there were Vincent Buckley (1925–88), Evan Jones (1931–2022), and Christopher Wallace-Crabbe (b. 1934). All four were on first-name terms with Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), but Steele enjoyed a particularly close friendship with him. ‘Young Steele’, as Heaney sometimes called him, was born in the same year as Heaney himself but a few months later.
The two poets first met in Chicago, no later than the early 1980s. Over the years that followed, Steele regularly sent Heaney copies of his essays, homilies, and poems, and there were repeated reunions in Dublin, where Heaney lived. Heaney refers to their first encounter in a letter to Professor Margaret Manion after Steele’s death:
I first met him in Loyola University in Chicago and took to him immediately. In fact, from that moment he was like a spiritual director to me – not that he catechised, he simply was his steady, learned, merry, moral self, and his homilies (which would arrive with the poems) were nonpareil: a braiding of faith and intellect. I often said to Marie, only half in joke, that if she needed someone to speak at my obsequies, she was to get Peter Steele.8
In a letter of 19 September 2007, Heaney told Peter of the impact of the homilies. This letter reserved its warmest words for the meditations on the Stations of the Cross that Peter had been commissioned to write for the 2008 World Youth Day held in Sydney:
As ever too I was the better for the homilies and the lovely act of thanksgiving in your fiftieth anniversary address [for Peter’s fifty years in the Society of Jesus]. Plus, as they say, the World Youth Stations of the Cross. This latter manages, as you know better than anyone, to do something difficult and do it without seeming effortful – to match scripture not just with meditation and prayer, but with a style, a level of utterance, a pitch and proffer that will be neither a let down nor a strain up. As I read it I grieved with and for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
back there in the first aisle of the world. George Herbert would be proud of you …9
We don’t know whether Steele shared with Heaney the identity of the ecclesiastic who had commissioned the writing of the meditations, which were to be accompanied by movingly choreographed Stations of the Cross. The stations led the youth of the world from the heart of Sydney to the death of Jesus at sunset on the shore of its uniquely beautiful harbor. When he also read the texts that Peter had prepared, George Pell (still then Archbishop of Sydney) phoned to express concern that Peter may have ‘let down’ the divine identity of Jesus Christ.
Heaney was also lavishly positive when commenting on Steele’s poetry. When Steele sent him a collection of eleven poems called ‘A Mass for Anglesea’, in which each poem takes part of the Catholic liturgy as its subject, Heaney praised them as ‘among the richest you have done: abundant linguistically and spiritually, grounded and visionary, “private and planetary”’.10 ‘They open in so many directions,’ he added, ‘into the personally possessed image, out to the shimmering rim of the known and the strange’. Responding to another set of poems a few years later, Heaney wrote that he found ‘such a beautiful sense of a convergence of that twain, poetry and theology, of the mind’s gambolling for Christ’s sake, of language-relish from beginning to end … ’.11
Steele was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2006 – Heaney called it ‘your own enemy within’. He faced operations, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions with gentle courage, realism, and never a touch of self-pity. On 27 June 2012 he died peacefully at Caritas Christi Hospice in Kew, Melbourne, aged seventy-two. The last letter he received, two days before his death, came from Heaney. Sent by fax, it ended: ‘with heavy heart but with love and rich memories it’s a case of Ave, pater, atque vale. Seamus.’
Heaney himself died one year later, on 30 August 2013, in the Blackrock Clinic, Dublin, aged seventy-four.
Heaney’s letters to Steele breathe the trust and esteem in which he held his Australian priest-poet friend. Shared joy, wit, reflections on their poetic craft, and jokes pervade the eight letters that I have retrieved from the archive of Newman College and present below.
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
Part II: The Letters
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain (eds)
Two archives in Melbourne contain many letters exchanged between Heaney and Steele: the Australian Jesuit archives and the study centre of Newman College, University of Melbourne, where Steele lived, wrote and taught for most of his life. The Jesuit archives hold over thirty letters from Heaney to Steele and around twenty-five from Steele to Heaney. The eight letters published here, however, are from the Newman College archives. They are the only letters from their correspondence in that repository. By the time they came to light it was too late to make them available for publication in Christopher Reid’s magisterial volume of selected correspondence by Heaney, The Letters of Seamus Heaney, 12 as it was at the proofing stage. These letters have not been published before. ***
28 October 1985
191 Strand Road Dublin 4
Dear Peter,
Glad to hear from you and forgive me for not replying earlier to the previous letter. Indeed, I am mired in bad when I think of Australia … I owe Vincent [Buckley] a big letter for the big and true and thoroughly written Irish book.13 Maybe now that I have got pen to paper I’ll keep it there and begin to loosen the jam. (My metaphor, as Dr Chasuble would say, is drawn from logs, not preserves.)14
I think the villanelle is dandy – light and singing and debonair in the face of something sullen. I like it and ‘the Demon’ the best of the four, and wonder in the latter case if in the penultimate line a - - - (dactyl?) verb might not be better than ‘make the case for’? ‘The Heart’s Xanthippe’ is terrific, both as warp, sound and wit.15 And it’s not that I don’t like the geniality and banter of ‘Cue’ [?] and ‘The Less Rare’ [?] – just that the other ones make a more purposeful incision.
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
Forgive me for not writing when the news of your father’s death came with the words you spoke, so convincing and recognisable to me: ‘his piety was simple and strong, without any kind of flourish or showiness … He was a principled man and principles move towards prayer.’ I love that and know it in many people here. Our belated sympathy. Marie’s mother died a couple of weeks ago; and, in May also, I had a nine-year-old niece killed in a road accident. And yesterday I got news of my seventy-year-old aunt (a nun with the Dominicans in Glasgow), [who] has just had to have a masechtomy [sic]. It is the decade of the deaths, all right, the forties.
So your meditation on the moon came and comes at the right time. I hope you’ll print that in the poetry-essay book: it is quite extraordinarily rich and it amplifies the phenomenological pleasures of a Bachelard and his poetics of space into an act of faith.16 The sense of the form of intellect-opening in the breeze of affection is very exhilarating. I am honoured to float in across the horizon of its homing and to share the firmament of its reveries with so much else that I love – your linking of Hopkins with the lordless Anglo-Saxon poet is so exact, shooting the needle – the heart’s needle – and stitching the tent in English culture in a single perception. The unstinted and the deliberately pursued and the naturally subjective yet weathered quality of the piece is quite extraordinary, as I say, and lifts the heart.
I’ll have a few poems in the TLS next month – there’s an Irish issue on the cards – which will give you some sense of what I’ve been at. I also enclose a couple of sonnets which are part of a short sequence in memory of my mother.17 Don’t think of saying anything or writing about them. I just want to raise a little semaphore in greeting to your great pennants of generous work. Give my regrets and promises to Vincent and my best wishes to Chris & Evan & Dinny [O’Hearn, a local literary figure in Melbourne].
And watch as the sky darkens with hats thrown high in honour of your selving, going yourself –
Sláinte!
Seamus *
6 April 1997
Dear Peter, My excuses are 1) I’m on an aeroplane and this is the only pen to hand 2) you
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
wrote on St Patrick’s Day.
Marie and I are aimed down to Atlanta; we came to Boston on Thursday, went to Wilmington, Delaware on Friday and spent yesterday in corporate company since (hangdog, spaniel-lugged, he admits). I was named for the well-named Common Wealth Awards, given out by PNC Bank here. Five phallic trophies plus five fairly decent cheques to five ‘achievers’ – including [the American playwright] Edward Albee, edgy and excellent, coming out on the balls of his feet punching daintily; a Dr DeBakey, he who pioneered the open-heart work; Jane Goodall, she of the chimps; and James Clark, he of the Webs and Nets – and private planes and undainty ways [presumably the computer scientist James H. Clark]. Anyhow, all the well-upholstered rhetoric about global messages and saluting excellence gave me a chance to tell them what the chaplain at the Blackrock Clinic said as he walked through the cardiac ward (heard by Barrie Cooke as he awaited his bypass): ‘Blessed are the pace-makers.’18 It’s in the same class as Phelim Donlon’s remark, which I am sure has been reported to you, about the awful portrait of the dramatist in the Abbey Theatre: ‘Aw Jaysus,’ says Donlon as he passes the thing, ‘the unbearable likeness of Behan’.19
Anyhow, the PNC crowd paid for Marie and me to come across the ocean, and months ago we arranged to proceed down to Emory University where we have about as many friends as we have in Melbourne. I did the Richard Ellman Memorial lectures there a few years ago, but before that I had known a big Texan called Ron Schuchard (who recently edited T. S. Eliot’s Clark lectures on varieties of Metaphysical Poetry) and his pig-roasting, hoochwhooping hospitality made the link an impressive one. Meanwhile, Emory has been buying the manuscript of every last pen-person who ever published a line and there has been much circling and wondering about what Heaney should do about his ‘archive’. So our trip is partly a response to that interest but mostly a visit to friends. I don’t quite know what to do about the ‘archive’ thing. If I were to sell to Emory, I’d get a fortune which (they say) would equal the bounty of Sweden, and Mrs Heaney is of the opinion that this option would be good for the future of the Heaneylings, not to mention her own wardrobe. And the cattle dealer’s son in me can see the sense of all this. But in order to act upon this wisdom I have to work through my accursed piety, which murmurs that the impoverished National Library in Dublin should be given the bloody stuff; we all know that it’s only wastepaper, apart from the Steele works which are layered into it here and there …
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
Speaking of which, when I read those new poems I thought of a definition of the activity in general which seemed to apply to these Steele works in particular: ‘Sauter pour mieux reculer’.20 I was both lifted and laid by the melodies and mass of ‘Spadework’ and ‘Driving Home’ and ‘Second Coming’, they felt so gifty and – harking back to one of your sermons –committed, or better say the rewards of commitment. Not that I didn’t rejoice in the spangle and figure-skating and flourish of ‘The Envy [?] of the World’ – which passes what [Derek] Mahon once called the ‘good crack’ test with flying parrot colours; as the parrot-speak and shot-silk of popinjay and Papageno.21 You seem to be pedalling on a wonderful taut chain, with real purchase on the hub. Enviable and recognisable.
I, meanwhile, feel a bit convalescent as a verse-worker. I could do with a bit of the Herbertian relish and sun-feeling. Am operating on the translation alibi at the moment, crowbarring dully and brutally into Beowulf: real convict-labour with very little reward. I agreed to do a line-by-line verse translation for Norton (a commission, with eye – on my side – on pension/ text-book royalty, agreed in March 1995, after putting it off several times during the previous fourteen years). So I am stuck with it, and will bludgeon on, but unless there’s a boat crossing water, with the foamy-throat of the woody floater preening on the wave-weft, there’s damned little reward in it. So I have taken to doing the occasional short poem from the Irish as a kind of refresher, and am thinking that I should make a small anthology of those in a few years time. I even have a corny ‘working title’ to keep me going, nothing that would be usable, but something that gives me what Philip Sidney called ‘a fore-conceit of the work’. How about ‘Metres Meet’?
As ever, mon cher prêtre, I was brought to myself by your homilies. Brought to the lessness of said selfness. Less said the better for the truth here. Gratias ago.
Also, a bit of agens called for on the Miłosz front. I loved the way the frame of reference kept passing outwards, the way you Saturn-ringed the poems, gave a Czesławian amplitude and encompassing to the poems themselves. You were able to say wonderful things about the effect of each poem – for example, the way he is hostage to the vision he refuses in the Jeffers poem – and yet follow in the direction in which the poem points – the Dantesque conflation and proclamation at the end is marvellous.
We have entered turbulence and are coming towards Atlanta; if I don’t speak to you by the phone method soon, I look forward to seeing you in
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
Dublin in June. I sympathise with the sad witness & waiting you are in thrall [to,] attending to your mother’s state. My sister Ann (50) has just had a mastechtomy [sic], but it is in the glands. Treatments and attendings in store. Love to you from
[The signoff is missing.]
P.S. I loved the comedy romp of that harp-wielding donkey.
2 July 2003
Peter – Sorry for the hold up. This ole dog was on the not-so-hard road in Russia when you faxed, got back a week ago and within three days was off again to a teachers’ conference in the land of the Britons. Please excuse me for not getting back immediately to say a Molly-[Bloom]ish yes to the publisher re-quote. I do have a rule which operates against this activity – until I am prepared to break it. Perhaps the trimmed quotation would be faxed to Dublin, just to have it looked over and returned, if necessary.
January should see us in Dublin, so we look forward to seeing you – and maybe we can assemble also for a plateful and pow-wow when you’re at Fordham. I hope to be at Harvard in October 2004.
Your note gave me the usual pangs – Tony Hecht’s paean should have been greeted by me immediately. Now it’s behind time and irreparably so, but when the hurry stops … And dear C. W. C. [Chris Wallace-Crabbe] and all his troubles. Mortalia tangunt, all right. Love from her in Dublin, too –
Seamus
4 June 2006
Dear Peter, Halfway across the Atlantic, westering un-home – to Princeton for pomps, to Pierpont Morgan Library, for podium work – with Mrs Heaney accompanying
The beauteous Whispering Gallery arrived at Strand Road earlier in the
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
week – when I was at Hay-on-Wye, tent city during its literary festival – but all I was able to do was gaze and skim.22 When I get back; in a week’s time, there should be a little more time, although this year I’ve written myself into lit fest after lit fest: before you arrive I’ll have done Dublin Writers and Rotterdam …
Delighted with your salute to D&C23 – especially in light of the lift I got from ‘Raggedly Love’ – enough to live by in those couple of pages. And a wonderful account of what you have lived by, or nearby, in the Quartering essay. So much in there to be noted and quoted: So much reckoning and rumination (I loved the Jesuit’s caution about coming to pathy [sic] to Hopkins). If writing like that is what you do to mitigate the restlessness, then let there be no settling and slumping, but an ongoing merry-go-round of the mind.
Call us when you get to London – by which time I hope my fax will be back in working order. It wore out while I was in the States last month and I was so worn out and hid away when I got back; it has remained out of order. But next week should see executive powers restored … Marie sends a lot of the un-ragged commodity, and so do I –Seamus
19 September 2007
Dear Peter,
If the opposite of talking, as your sage Lebowitz observes, is waiting, you’ll be thinking that in Heaney’s case it is also the opposite of writing. The plan was to be in touch before you went for the CT scan last month, but there, or rather here we are. Hell is full of good intentions, don’t put off until tomorrow, Où sont les nieges – which we don’t know, barring the successful implementation of Flann O’Brien’s patent for a machine designed to preserve last year’s snow. But now the Lady Ardboe and myself are gladdened by your news that drear chemo has been postponed, that Georgetown beckons or back-ons (Dennis O’Driscoll is a bad influence on me, forever at that kind of thing) and that we’ll be seeing you in Dublin. (Speaking of back-on, I think I may have told you that D. Walcott says there are only two African tribes left in the Caribbean: the Moeteesas, who go around hotel lounges aiming
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
teapots and asking, ‘Mo’ tea, sah?’ and that Backonbacs who stand at the end of entryways crying to the lorry-driver in his cabin, ‘Back on back, back on back … ’ Well, Walcott’s allowed, I suppose. But it’s still technically a scandal to repeat it?)24
The Anglesea poems are among the richest you have done: abundant linguistically and spiritually, grounded and visionary, ‘private and planetary’, the raw meat and the heavenly radiance, earthed altar and ekphrastic celebrant. I rejoice, you have constructed that upon which to rejoice. This is absolutely the right materia for a limited edition, it deserves as much braille as the word can be embossed with … The place and its place in your present, past and future shines through, gives power from below, sanctions the sanctus, instresses the offerings. You yourself must know these ones forced themselves through the green, or better say golden fuse. They open in so many directions, into the personally possessed image, out to the shimmering rim of the known and the strange. I’ve covered the pages with marks and ‘little leaning hoes’, and got more from each time I went through them – which is the sign of the real thing. Also, as a sequence, there’s great virtue in the different angles of approach in different sections – the kyrie and gloria, for example, with their honest to goodness, differentiating, democratic purchase, after the temperate sacerdotal prologue; and then the marvellous rapturous mystery of ‘Word’. I could go on, except I’d have to try to find how to be a ‘master of starcraft’ myself. So let’s just say I joy, and have done and not done.
As ever too I was better for the homilies and the lovely act of thanksgiving in your fiftieth anniversary address.25 Plus, as they say, the World Youth Stations of the Cross. This latter manages, as you know better than anyone, to do something extraordinarily difficult and do it without seeming effortful – to match scripture not just with meditation and prayer, but with a style, a level of utterance, a pitch and proffer that will be neither a let down nor a strain up. As I read it I grieved with and for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world. George Herbert would be proud of you, and not just for quoting the whole of his poem … You can plainly say ‘My God, My King’ and still get away with it. (I greatly enjoyed those asides on atheism in one of the homilies – made me think again of Betjeman’s at-homeness in the Church of England because of its accommodation of/with ‘the real Absence’).
It would be good to be able to boast that I’m a better person for having read the homilies over the years, but I can at least truly report that I’ve been
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
bettered by them as I read, and indeed bested. And this time my special reward was your quote from Augustine, where he avers that to say ‘I love you’ means ‘I wish you to be’. It will help me to speak to my old friend [David] Hammond [1926–2008] next week: for months he has been ailing from deficiencies in the blood and in his wily gifted way deflecting his friends’ attention from the seriousness of the situation, but yesterday he rang to say it is now frankly proclaimed acute leukemia and his doctor told him he’s not likely to see Christmas.
Before Belfast, however, I’m off to the Barbican, where the Nottingham Playhouse Repertory people are putting on their new production of The Burial at Thebes; and I’ll be bringing the enclosed manuscript to the people at Faber. I send it because it requires no response, being a romp that I engaged upon for sheer pleasure. When I do the introduction, hopefully in a Faber series called ‘Poet to Poet’ where a contemporary stave-monger selects and introduces staves by late lamented makers (I have done Yeats and Wordsworth – I shall solemnly invoke the example of Pope and Dryden in order to justify my ‘modernising’ of the Scottish Chaucerean, Robert Henryson. It’s the schoolmaster in him I respond to, also the fact that I feel closer to his fifteenth-century world than the one I’ve ended up in in Dublin. Anyhow, ‘Seamus and Marie to their trusty and well-beloved Peter, greetings’, agus grá –
Seamus
[PS]
Peter – I’ve also done a ‘translation’ of Henryson’s ‘Testament of Cresseid’ and hope eventually that it and all this stuff will appear as a parallel text. But probably that won’t be until 2009, since the interview book with Dennis O’D should be out at the end of next year, and one offering per annum is more than enough. (Dennis, incidentally, has asked me to keep the text of that book to myself until publication, so for all my murmuring about sending it to you for assaying, I feel honour bound to obey the lad).
I still harbour a hope that the mad marvellous Scots comedian Billy Connolly might do a reading of one or two of the fables – or bits of three or four of them – some time. He’s manic and obscene and bloody magnificent as a stand-up, and yet he did a great, straight job as Queen Victoria’s gamekeeper in that movie Mrs Brown – with Judi Dench the perfect Vicky. Worth a look, if you ever get the chance.
Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
Anyhow, no need to read more than a few pages. My own favourites are the mice near the beginning and the wee mouse at the end. And ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’.
Better crack than Beowulf, all the same.
S.
4 June 2011
Glanmore Cottage, Ashford, Co. Wicklow
Dear Peter,
A recent review by the zesty Mary Beard – TLS or NYRB – took me back to Latin and Livy and Hannibal and Hannibal’s match, the cunctator Fabius Maximus. It’s a self-aggrandising comparison but there has been far, far too much cunctating in my writing to you – yet I pray that your own enemy within will also have the sense to pull back well beyond the predicted date. (I see this makes you into a Hannibal, but then, alas, we do have an elephant in the room).
By now you have probably rounded the zodiac as your own Star Man, and since Elemental Man is already so intellectually and imaginatively plenary, Sidereal Man will probably rise with ease and repossess that space where the Father brooded over the face of the waters. The four poems and attendant contemplations in the piece you sent (and the quotations – not to mention the Child of Prague gag) the whole thing rinsed and rang more than the ear. There’s such a beautiful sense of a convergence of that twain, poetry and theology, of the mind’s gambolling for Christ’s sake, of language-relish from beginning to end – and what an end, with those two Piero [della Francesca] images.
And when it comes to relish, the juice and joy of ‘Auguri’ is hard to beat, so much more than an abecedarian exercise, a fully realised chant which allows me to quote Miłosz at you, ‘it seems you were born for this, / To glorify things just because they are’26 – although typically enough for old Czesław, the pronouncement came originally in the first person singular. Everything and nothing to report here. I’ve been on medication which has definitely slowed me down, except for my hands, where it has induced a shake and I have to remind myself not to order soup. After my ‘dip’ last
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
year, the consultant – a very good fellow who put up early on with my almost mockery of his biochemical account of the brain – prescribed a cocktail – as they say – of stuff and it has upped and steadied the spirits but produced a new found inclination to stay abed in the morning and retire for another while in the afternoon. Inertia, more or less, and a sluggishness in reading and writing. But then Marie keeps saying, ‘You’re seventy-two, so what do you expect?’
[The following page or pages are missing. Or did Heaney simply end abruptly?]
25 June 2012
To: Peter Steele SJ, c/o Caritas Christi, Kew [Victoria, Australia]
I would be deeply grateful if you could convey the following message to Father Steele who is now in your care.
Dear Peter
Chris Wallace-Crabbe telephoned a few minutes ago to tell us you had a triumphant book launch [of Braiding the Voices] and that you had moved to Caritas Christi [hospice for the dying]. You should have heard from us long ago but we were ever late responders.
Your stamina, physical and spiritual, has been indomitable and has long since braided itself into many lives and bound them to you in grateful friendship. All our meetings have been significant, from the moment we first met in Chicago and on through our reunions in Dublin. And Marie’s love is as steadfast as my own.
It would be a happiness if we could see you in Australia, but this is not to be. So with heavy heart but with love and rich memories it’s a case of Ave, pater, atque vale.
Seamus
13 October 2012
[To Professor Margaret Manion, IBVM, Melbourne]
Dear Margaret,
This is a shamefully late reply to your kind letter of more than a month
O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain
ago, and your dispatch a little later of Braiding the Voices, generous acts in memory of Peter. The disgraceful delay stems in no small part from a feeling of having failed to keep in touch with Peter in the latter days; I ought to have written more and initiated phone calls, which is why I’ve tended to wince away from things that remind me of that time. In the circumstances, therefore, I appreciate your gentle news of his last journey and the friends who with you were with him to the end.
I first met him in Loyola University in Chicago, and took to him immediately. In fact, from that moment he was like a spiritual director to me – not that he catechised, he simply was his steady, learned, merry, moral self, and his homilies (which would arrive with the poems) were nonpareil: a braiding of faith and intellect. I often said to Marie, only half in joke, that if she needed someone to speak at my obsequies, she was to get Peter Steele. It was always a joy and a fortification of sorts to have Peter in the house. As you know, he made a habit of calling in Dublin when he was on his way to Georgetown, and having him in your company was like putting your back to some great tree when the sap was rising. And all of that comes through in the essays – pure conviction about the seriousness of the art, extraordinary range of reference, wonderful level-toned expositions and illuminations.
His loss is hurtful to us all. But to you who were so close the absence will be that much more dismaying. A poem by Miłosz may be a little secular in its imagery, and in its last couple of lines not applicable to Peter, but there’s an amplitude that’s right:
‘The Fall’
The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation
That had valiant armies, captains and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas, But now it will not relieve any besieged city, It will not enter into any alliance,
Because its cities are empty, its population dispersed, Its land once bringing harvest now overgrown with thistles, Its mission forgotten, its language lost,
The dialect of a village high upon inaccessible mountains.
Ah well, God rest him.
With gratitude and kind regards –
Seamus
Emeritus Professor Gerald O’Collins SJ, AC, taught theology at the
Gerald
Poet to Priest-Poet: Eight Letters from Seamus Heaney to Peter Steele SJ
Gregorian University in Rome from 1973 to 2006. He published over eighty books. He was living in Parkville, Victoria, Australia, at the time of his death, on 22 August 2024, just as this issue of Studies was going to press. Manfred Cain is engaged with studies in English literature at the University of Melbourne and is a prize-winning poet.
(Notes)
1 Melbourne, Newman College Archives (NCA), Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
2 Gerald O’Collins, ‘Obituary’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 2012.
4 Peter Steele, The Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989)
5 Peter Steele, An Air of Truth Apparent: A Study of Gulliver’s Travels (1968); Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
6 Peter Steele, Expatriates: Reflections on Modern Poetry (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985); Peter Porter (Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand, 1992); Flights of the Mind: Johnson and Dante (1997).
7 Peter Steele, Plenty: Art into Poetry (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2003); The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2006); White Knight with Bee Box: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne: John Leonard Press, 2008).
8 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 13 October 2012.
9 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
10 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
11 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
12 Christopher Reid (ed), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2023).
13 Heaney refers to V. Buckley, Memory Ireland: Insights into the Contemporary Irish Condition (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
14 Dr Frederick Chasuble is a character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
15 Xanthippe was the bad-tempered wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates.
16 The reference is to Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), The Poetics of Space (orig., 1958).
17 One of these sonnets (‘When all the others were away at Mass’) recalls the death of his mother in 1984; it has become one the most-loved works in modern English literature.
18 The Irish abstract impressionist painter, Cooke (1931–2014) went fishing for years with Heaney and the poet laureate, Ted Hughes. The fellowship of this trio brought out the best art in each other.
19 Phelim Donlon was an Irish arts manager.
20 ‘Go back in order to make a better leap.’
21 ‘Popinjay’ is the original word in English for ‘parrot’. ‘Papageno’ refers, presumably, to the Papageno Papagena duet in Mozart’s Magic Flute. A fellow Irish author, Mahon wrote for Heaney’s seventieth birthday the controversial poem ‘A Country Kitchen’.
22 Steele, The Whispering Gallery.
23 ‘D’ presumably is Dinny Ahern and ‘C’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe; see letter of 28 October 1985 above.
24 Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950) is an American author; Flann O’Brien (1911–66) was a delightfully comic writer. Since she came from that town in County Tyrone, Heaney names his wife ‘Lady Ardboe’. Heaney and Steele admired the poetry of the Irish writer Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012). The Saint Lucian poet and playwright Sir Derek Alton Walcott (1930–2017) received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992.
25 Heaney refers to Steele celebrating fifty years as a Jesuit.
26 ‘Blacksmith shop’ in Provinces (1991), published in Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 503. In this translation, the lines Heaney refers to run as follows: ‘I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.’
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’: The Heaney–Steele Letters
Eugene O’Brien
To say that Seamus Heaney wrote letters is to understate the case. The vast majority of academics who interacted with him have letters or emails from him. The recent book The Letters of Seamus Heaney sets out a selection of these letters from 1964 to 2013.1 The editor, Christopher Reid, makes it very clear that this is only a selection, and that there is a significantly greater number of letters in existence, and it is worth remembering that this book comprises 799 pages. Peter Raina, in his Seamus Heaney: A Portrait in Letters, makes the point that letters were a core part of Heaney’s relations with his wide circle of friends, ‘amongst them prominent contemporary poets’, and that one of his favourite pursuits was ‘writing letters and comparing notes with them’.2 We often see a side of Heaney as letter-writer that is not clear from the public persona that we find in talks, recordings, and interviews, including of course Stepping Stones, Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length interview from 2008.3 The letters included in this issue of Studies, the Heaney–Steele correspondence, constitute just one tranche from that undiscovered archive of Heaney’s letterwriting.
Having studied his work for a long time and having met him a number of times, one of the most interesting things this writer can say about these letters is that they give us a familiar Heaney but also something more. There are aspects of these letters that shed great light on Heaney’s thinking and on his outlook on life, and that makes them very worthy of interest. What characterises them is their warmth and their familiarity. There is a genuine affection and lack of guardedness on Heaney’s part, and, in this unguarded tone and in the in-jokes and sly asides, we see an epistolary version of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘wink and elbow language of delight’,4 as Heaney jokes about different aspects of life in a very familiar manner with a good friend. In July 2003 he writes to Steele, ‘maybe we can assemble also for a plateful and pow-wow when you’re at Fordham. I hope to be at Harvard in October 2004’:5 the genuine affection here is palpable.
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
An intimate and relaxed friendship
Heaney calls Steele ‘mon cher prêtre’6 and has a number of punning and joking remarks across the letters, indicating both affection and regard. For instance, speaking about Emory University, he refers to his host, a ‘big Texan called Ron Schuchard’, a professor and editor of some of T. S. Eliot’s work, and his ‘pig-roasting, hooch-whooping hospitality’.7 He goes on to confide in Steele that Emory has been buying the manuscript of ‘every last pen-person who ever published a line’, and that there have been questions about his own archive. In the following lines, he makes clear the pulls of desire and duty that were a factor in all of his writings, and indeed in all of his life: If I were to sell to Emory, I’d get a fortune which (they say) would equal the bounty of Sweden, and Mrs Heaney is of the opinion that this option would be good for the future of the Heaneylings, not to mention her own wardrobe. And the cattle dealer’s son in me can see the sense of all this. But in order to act upon this wisdom I have to work through my accursed piety, which murmurs that the impoverished National Library in Dublin should be given the bloody stuff; we all know that it’s only wastepaper, apart from the Steele works which are layered into it here and there … 8
These are sentiments that really can only be uttered between friends. There is no grandiloquent sense of leaving his work to the nation, just that nagging sense of duty that he should do so, and the sense that the impoverished National Library in Dublin might be a more fitting place for his archive. The droll references to ‘Mrs Heaney’ and the ‘Heaneylings’ also speak of a comfortable relationship, as Steele had met Marie Heaney often, and indeed had stayed in their house a number of times. The joking reference to their own correspondence as the ‘Steele works’ is self-deprecatingly droll but possibly speaks a truth through humour, as Heaney seems very relaxed in these letters and in other letters that he wrote to Steele.
He found in Steele’s friendship and in their epistolary connection a solace and a comfort that he was comfortable speaking about. They first met in Loyola University in Chicago, and Heaney ‘took to him immediately’, praising his ‘steady, learned, merry, moral self’. They swapped poems with each other, and Steele sent on some of his homilies, which Heaney saw as ‘nonpareil: a braiding of faith and intellect’. Indeed, he told Marie, ‘only half in joke’, that if she needed someone to speak at his funeral, she could ask Peter Steele.9 In a letter to Margaret Manion, after Steele’s death, Heaney
Eugene O’Brien
speaks of the value of his friendship with Steele, saying that when Steele was in his house on Sandymount Strand, having him in your company was like putting your back to some great tree when the sap was rising. And all of that comes through in the essays – pure conviction about the seriousness of the art, extraordinary range of reference, wonderful level-toned expositions and illuminations.10
The value of poetry
It is this shared sense of the ‘pure conviction’ of the significance of art and poetry in the world that is the taproot of their friendship and connection. From the outset, they were both poets and essay-writers, as Steele’s homilies can be adequated very closely with Heaney’s own essays, talks and lectures, which have generally been seen as adjuncts to the poetry but are increasingly being studied in their own right.11 These letters are a necessarily one-sided conversation, but looking at one book of Steele’s books, The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, 12 we can get some insight into the core sympathies of each man in terms of their shared attitudes to the value, worth and significance of poetry in the world. Steele sent a copy of the book to Heaney, who is in fact mentioned in the acknowledgements, and Heaney acknowledged receipt: ‘the beauteous Whispering Gallery arrived at Strand Road earlier in the week’.13 This book has Steele looking at pictures in a gallery and writing poems in response to them. The book’s title alludes to the ‘whispering galleries’ to be found, for example, in St Paul’s Cathedral in London and in the dome of the Congress building in Washington, DC. In such places, ‘even a murmur at one strategic spot can be carried as reverberation to a distant point’.14
I chose this book as a point of comparison because of the title – the intimacy of these letters between two like-minded poets is a little like whispering, as it is intimate, close, and very much a two-way conversation that needs no outsiders; a conversation among people who understood the minutiae of language and writing and who offered opinion at a deep level. Heaney commented on four poems Steele had sent: ‘I think the villanelle is dandy – light and singing and debonair in the face of something sullen’; and he goes on to praise a poem called ‘The Demon’, but he wonders if ‘in the penultimate line a - - - (dactyl?) verb might not be better than “make the case for?”’.15 Here we see a real under-the-bonnet aspect of poets reading the work of other poets. The tone and tenor are different to the letters adduced
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
by Reina in his book, as here Heaney is commenting far more formally with other poets, and the discourse is amicable but professional. In this letter, however, there is a real sense of wanting to improve the poem and of trusting that the suggestion will be taken in this manner.
The conflation of pictures and poetry with which The Whispering Gallery is concerned has a long aesthetic history. Gerard Vaughan, in his foreword to the book, refers to this, tracing it back to Horace’s Ars Poetica and the phrase ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), which has occupied many minds in the annals of literature and art ‘from antiquity to the Renaissance and later, including many nineteenth-century writers and critics, from Ruskin in England to the French Symbolists’.16 It is this sense of the significance of poetry as a cultural and human event that binds Heaney and Steele – and that bond moves from the preference for a dactyl to the value of intertextual allusion: ‘your linking of Hopkins with the lordless Anglo-Saxon poet is so exact, shooting the needle – the heart’s needle – and stitching the tent in English culture in a single perception’.17 The sweep of commentary here is interesting, as Steele is effortlessly placed in the broad span of English poetry. However, as well as the broad sweep, Steele and Heaney are both fascinated by the pointillistic detail which poetry can encompass. So Steele, in The Whispering Gallery, tells how many of the paintings he looks at are ‘miniatures, but they can still engross at least as thoroughly as some renderings of the Grand Canyon’. But even these poems ‘precipitated by the tiny’ can be ‘mesmeric in their power to engross’.18 It is a point echoed by Heaney in Stepping Stones, where he speaks of preferring the culture of Greece to Rome, because it is closer to the ‘lived life’, and it is the ‘vitality of that ritual and romance at ground level that attracts me as much as the big earth-moving machinery of the literature and the myths’.19 For both poets, the micro is as important as the macro in terms of poetic effects.
Playfulness and wit
In tandem with these serious literary discussions is a light and bantering humour, full of literary allusions and generally strewn with quotations. So Heaney tells Steele of some of his corporate duties in Atlanta, Boston and Delaware, duties at which he was ‘hangdog, spaniel-lugged’, and how he was given an award, one of five ‘phallic trophies’, noting that one of the other winners was ‘James Clark, he of the Webs and Nets – and private planes and undainty ways’ .20 Steele would have picked up immediately on the Joycean
Eugene O’Brien
resonance here in ‘undainty ways’, an association triggered by the use of the word ‘nets’. This is a key term in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen declares that ‘when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’21 Later in the book, Stephen as an artist writes a poem in which the phrase ‘ardent ways’ occurs eight times.22 Heaney goes on to recall ‘the chaplain at the Blackrock Clinic [saying] as he walked through the cardiac ward (heard by Barrie Cooke as he awaited his bypass): “Blessed are the pace-makers”’.23 In a similarly jocose literary vein, Heaney recalls the comment by Phelim Donlon on a poor portrait of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan in the Abbey Theatre: ‘“Aw Jaysus,” says Donlon as he passes the thing, “the unbearable likeness of Behan”’.24 There is a delicious playfulness at work in this letter to Steele, as literary allusions and humour dance together and pile on top of each other. It is almost like a stream of consciousness, as Heaney unloads his good oneliners onto his friend, who he knows is an appreciative audience and someone who shares so much in terms of poetry and poetic thinking. Verbal echoes resound through their work. Take this phrase of Steele’s, for example: ‘works of art can enlist us, but they can also unleash us, and the resulting poetry may bear the marks of both processes’.25 It has a strong resonance with Heaney’s own ideas (indeed the phrase would not be out of place in a Heaney essay). One thinks of Heaney’s own notion of poetry as ‘more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released’.26 Similarly, both writers see the spatial dimension of poetry as central, with Steele noting that ‘the very word “stanza” means “room”’27 while Heaney says that the ‘place of writing is essentially the stanza form itself’. 28 It is a point made in these letters. Clearly, both men had read the work of Gaston Bachelard,29 and Heaney is very admiring of how Steele, in a homily on the moon, ‘amplifies the phenomenological pleasures of a Bachelard and his poetics of space into an act of faith’.30 The easy segue from comments about ‘the unbearable lightness of Behan’ to the phenomenology of Bachelard is a performative demonstration of the easy relationship between these two poets. They are sure enough of their sympathetic connection to juxtapose the serious and the comic without any need for signposting.
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
Finding the right word
In April 1997, Heaney writes about some new poems sent by Steele, and again there is praise and a comment on the actual techniques used in the poems: ‘when I read those new poems I thought of a definition of the activity in general which seemed to apply to these Steele works in particular: “Sauter pour mieux reculer” [going back in order to make things better]’. It is the accuracy and the persistence in getting the words right in revision after revision that Heaney applauds, as he is only too aware of how difficult this can be (a point he will make about the work of translating Beowulf). He also connects the poetry with the homilies, noting that the poems feel ‘gifty’ but at the same time ‘harking back to one of your sermons – committed, or better say the rewards of commitment’.31 The power of poetry to delight and teach, to inform and to improve, are clear here; the fact that he is quoting Steele’s sermon in order to praise Steele’s poem is another example of Heaney’s deep connection with both the man and the work.
‘Gifty’ is not how Heaney feels about his work on Beowulf32 in the same letter. He seems to find it very much ‘convict-labour with very little reward’. He sets out the work and its points of origin clearly to Steele:
I agreed to do a line-by-line verse translation for Norton (a commission, with eye – on my side – on pension/text-book royalty, agreed in March 1995, after putting it off several times during the previous fourteen years). So I am stuck with it, and will bludgeon on, but unless there’s a boat crossing water, with the foamy-throat of the woody floater preening on the wave-weft, there’s damned little reward in it. So I have taken to doing the occasional short poem from the Irish as a kind of refresher, and am thinking that I should make a small anthology of those in a few years’ time. I even have a corny ‘working title’ to keep me going, nothing that would be usable, but something that gives me what Philip Sidney called ‘a fore-conceit of the work’. How about ‘Metres Meet’.33
To most of us, translation is something we read, but to a poet, translating both the sense and the sway of the original language is a task in which, as for Steele, there is a lot of going back in order to go forward. Heaney, who had been doing this for a long time, was clearly finding the process difficult. The fact that financial considerations were also a factor is interesting, as such issues do not often figure in more publicly-oriented correspondence. What is fascinating to a reader is that, in his efforts to bring something of
Eugene O’Brien
the Irish use of the English language into Beowulf, Heaney, in his version, translates the opening exclamation Hwaet, which has generally been given as ‘Lo’ or ‘Hark’ or ‘attend’ or ‘listen’, as the very Irish particle ‘So’, in a single-word sentence;34 and both the second and the third sentences from this letter also begin with that same word, ‘So’. Is it possible that these two uses are proleptic of the use of the term in Beowulf? This ‘so’ is a case of ‘Metres Meeting’. Hence the letter may be deeply imbricated in Heaney’s pondering about finding the right words for the translation, so as to put his own spin on the original text. The sense of duty and difficulty he experiences in translating this classic of English literature is clear, and that he feels so comfortable in sharing this with Steele is another demonstration of their mutual regard.
Bringing opposites together
This regard is expressed forcefully in the letter in 2007. In July of that year, Steele sent Heaney some of the poems from his collection ‘A Mass for Anglesea’,35 which is set in Anglesea, a small seaside town about 102 kilometres west of Melbourne, where the Jesuits have long had a beach house, and follows the structures of the Catholic Mass. Its headings are: ‘Prologue’; ‘Kyrie Eleison’; ‘Gloria 1’; ‘Gloria 2’; ‘Word’; ‘Credo’; ‘Offerings’; ‘Sanctus’; ‘Fires’; ‘Meal’; and ‘Homecoming’. Heaney’s immediate response is positive and engages with the material at quite a deep level: The Anglesea poems are among the richest you have done: abundant linguistically and spiritually, grounded and visionary, ‘private and planetary’, the raw meat and the heavenly radiance, earthed altar and ekphrastic celebrant. I rejoice, you have constructed that upon which to rejoice. This is absolutely the right materia for a limited edition, it deserves as much braille as the word can be embossed with …. The place and its place in your present, past and future shines through, gives power from below, sanctions the sanctus, instresses the offerings. You yourself must know these ones forced themselves through the green, or better say golden fuse.36
In a series of four binaries that echoes the earlier comparison of Heaney’s and Steele’s views on the power of poetry, Heaney sees the Anglesea poems as bringing opposites together. They express both groundedness in Anglesea and its diurnal rhythms, but they also voice a sense of vision that can come from this groundedness. The confluence of religion and poetry, both of which are devoted to very specific incarnations of language that may touch or signify
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
aspects of the transcendent not available to ordinary language, is clear in the other two binaries: ‘the raw meat and the heavenly radiance, earthed altar and ekphrastic celebrant’. The image of meat, a synecdoche of our transient flesh and mortality, can give rise to heavenly radiance; and the altar, grounded in a specific place and a specific time, can host the ekphrastic celebrant. What Heaney so admires is the way that one part of the binary slides into the other and transforms it; he calls Steele’s style ‘an ongoing merry-go-round of the mind’.37 In these comparisons, religion and poetry cohere, as they do in Steele’s presence and dual vocation, and Heaney, who has long held a sacral and sacramental view of aspects of language, is very much an ideal audience for this type of writing. It speaks to him at a visceral and experiential level: ‘as I read it I grieved with and for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world’.38
In Preoccupations, for example, Heaney recalls the influence of the ‘exotic’ names on the wireless dial of the radio in his childhood home, the names of places that he hears on the BBC weather forecast, the ‘gorgeous and inane phraseology’ of the Roman Catholic catechism that he would have learned at school, and the metaphorical descriptions of Mary in the Catholic ritual, all of which he remembers as part of the ‘enforced poetry in our household’.39 In this sense, he fully understands the philosophy and theology that underline Steele’s worldview and in many ways shares it. His need for a transient perspective to be grounded comes up twice more in this quotes section, and the repetition underlines its importance for him, as do the literary allusions contained therein. The use of instress recalls the work of Gerald Manley Hopkins, another Jesuit poet, whose philosophy is important to the early Heaney, as it is to Steele for whom Hopkins served as a poet-priest progenitor. For Hopkins, instress meant the ability to capture the essence of a thing, and Heaney has written that in Hopkins’ poetry ‘world becomes word: the volume and density of the actual has been transformed into a high linguistic voltage. To read these poems is to go through the hoops of the palpable’.40 And again, the depth behind the words ‘instresses the offerings’ and the shared knowledge of Hopkins’ poetry and theory of instress and inscape allows for this shorthand, and for it to be fully understood. Similarly, the oblique reference to Dylan Thomas’s poem in the final line of the quotation above, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’,41 where the ‘green fuse’ is transformed into a golden one, is typical of the very literary intertextuality that flows strongly through these letters.
Eugene O’Brien
In one line of praise, Heaney says that these poems ‘come from out to the shimmering rim of the known and the strange’.42 Here the binary is expressed in words that one might see as metonymic of Heaney’s own prose style when talking about poetry: ‘shimmering’ and ‘strange’ as derivations of, and complications on, the ‘known’ – indeed, Heaney has used the word ‘shimmer’ across five collections of poetry and in two of his prose books. He speaks of going back over the poems repeatedly, saying he ‘got more from each time I went through them – which is the sign of the real thing’. The fusing of the poetic and the religious comes in the different sections of the Mass written in poetry, ‘and then the marvellous rapturous mystery of “Word”’.43 The lack of a definite article here speaks volumes as the poetic word and the religious word fuse in these poems for Heaney. Speaking about this transformative power of poetry is something that inheres in all of the letters and that both men see as crucially important.
Intimations of mortality
One of the poets who appears throughout is Czesław Miłosz, about whom Steele had written. Heaney is impressed by the way the ‘frame of reference kept passing outwards, the way you Saturn-ringed the poems, gave a Czesławian amplitude and encompassing to the poems themselves’. Heaney is a strong admirer of these poems, and he admires the way Steele was able to make connections between them and the work of Dante – another Heaney favourite: ‘the Dantesque conflation and proclamation at the end is marvellous’.44 In 2011, he praises Steele’s ability to fuse the diurnal and the divine in his poem ‘Auguri’, which he calls ‘a fully realized chant’, remarking that it allows him to quote Miłosz: ‘it seems you were born for this, / To glorify things just because they are’.45
In the opening letter of the sequence, in 1985, Heaney writes about the friends and family members of them both who have died. He talks of his sister who had had a mastectomy, with ‘treatments and attendings in store’, and he ruefully remarks that ‘It is the decade of the deaths, all right, the forties.’46 As the sequence progresses, intimations of mortality start to become more prevalent. So, in 2003, he speaks of ‘dear C.W.C. [Chris Wallace-Crabbe] and all his troubles. Mortalia tangunt, all right’,47 with the Latin phrase (‘they touch mortals’) deriving from Book I, line 462 of the Aeneid, by Virgil: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent (‘there are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart’).48 In 2007, he speaks jokingly of how
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
‘Lady Ardboe (Marie) and myself are gladdened by your news that drear chemo has been postponed, that Georgetown beckons’.49 It is interesting that the use of Latin and the jocose elevation of the status of his wife are ways of lightening the discussion of Steele’s cancer and its treatment. It shows the great delicacy that Heaney has in discussing matters of illness and mortality. He uses Latin as a hedge again in 2011, as he describes reading a review of Hannibal’s campaign by the ‘zesty’ Mary Baird, in ‘TLS or NYRB’, who speaks about Fabius Maximus, the Roman general, nicknamed ‘the cunctator [delayer]’,50 by way of leading into his own ‘cunctating’ in responding to Steele’s letters:
It’s a self-aggrandising comparison but there has been far, far too much cunctating in my writing to you – yet I pray that your own enemy within will also have the sense to pull back well beyond the predicted date. (I see this makes you into a Hannibal, but then, alas, we do have an elephant in the room).51
It is the delicacy of introducing Steele’s own cancer, the ‘enemy within’, that is interesting here: Heaney is reluctant to dwell on the issue and is keen to see the cancer as something extraneous to Steele himself. In the same letter, in comradely fashion, he lists his own health issues as, after his ‘dip last year’, he has been placed on a ‘cocktail – as they say – of stuff’ which has ‘definitely slowed me down’, and has produced a new found inclination to stay abed in the morning and retire for another while in the afternoon. Inertia, more or less, and a sluggishness in reading and writing. But then Marie keeps saying, ‘You’re seventy-two, so what do you expect’?52
This is Heaney trying to make the point that both men are subject to illness and that Steele is not alone, but it is written with great tact and care.
In the final letter of the collection, and its saddest, Heaney speaks of a phone call from Chris Wallace-Crabbe, telling him that Steele has had a triumphant book launch of Braiding the Voices, but that he ‘had moved to Caritas Christi [hospice for the dying]. You should have heard from us long ago but we were ever late responders.’ The final remarks in the letter are quite beautiful, as they are a farewell to an old dear friend, written with understated feeling but a very real sense of emotion and loss, as well as gratitude for their friendship and for being a part of each other’s lives: Your stamina, physical and spiritual, has been indomitable and has long since braided itself into many lives and bound them to you in
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grateful friendship. All our meetings have been significant, from the moment we first met in Chicago and on through our reunions in Dublin. And Marie’s love is as steadfast as my own.53
The core words here are ‘significant’ and ‘steadfast’, as they speak to a strong, rooted bond between the two men, in which Marie Heaney is also included. We have already noted the importance of the work of Miłosz to both men, so it is fitting that in the letter about Steele’s death to Margaret Mannion, Heaney should see the value of a poem by Miłosz, ‘The Fall’, as a type of epistolary epitaph to their correspondence, noting that ‘there’s an amplitude that’s right’: ‘The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation … ’ 54
Eugene O’Brien is Professor of English Literature and Theory at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He has written many books, including four monographs on Seamus Heaney, and he is editor of both Oxford Bibliographies Online: Literary and Cultural Theory and Routledge Studies in Irish Literature.
(Notes)
1 Christopher Reid (ed.), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2023).
2 Peter Raina, Seamus Heaney: A Portrait in Letters (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2024), p. 3.
3 Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).
4 Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems, ed by Peter Kavanagh (Newbridge, Kildare Ireland: The Goldsmith Press, 1972), p. 18.
5 Melbourne, Newman College Archives (NCA), Heaney–Steele letter, 2 July 2003.
6 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
7 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
8 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
9 NCA, Heaney–Manion letter, 13 October 2012.
10 NCA, Heaney–Manion letter, 13 October 2012.
11 See Michael Cavanagh, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009); Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016); and Ian Hickey and Eugene O’Brien (eds), The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose (London: Routledge, 2024).
12 Peter Steele, The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2006).
13 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2006.
14 Steele, The Whispering Gallery, p. 11.
15 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 28 October 1985.
16 Steele, The Whispering Gallery, p. 7.
17 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 28 October 1985.
18 Steele, The Whispering Gallery, p. 12.
19 Heaney and O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 294.
20 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
21 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed by Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 137.
22 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 147, 149, 150, 151.
‘Ave, pater, atque vale’ : The Heaney–Steele Letters
23 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
24 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
25 Steele, The Whispering Gallery, p. 12.
26 Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 108.
27 Steele, The Whispering Gallery, p. 14.
28 Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 29.
29 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
35 Peter Steele, ‘A Mass for Anglesea’, in White Knight with Beebox; New and Selected Poems (Ellwood Victoria: John Leonard Press, 2008), pp. 43–63. I am very grateful to Gerald O’Collins SJ, and Andre Bullen SJ, for the details of this book, which is sadly out of print.
40 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Convert’, Alpha, 8 June 1989, p. 15.
41 The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition, ed and annot. by John Goodby (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014), pp. 87–88.
42 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
43 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
44 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 6 April 1997.
45 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
46 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 28 October 1985.
47 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 2 July 2003.
48 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, ed and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough (London: William Heinemann, 1916), pp. 172, 273.
49 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 Sept 2007.
50 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
51 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
52 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
53 NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 24 June 2012.
54 NCA, Heaney–Manion letter, 12 October 2012
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain
Catriona Clutterbuck
The author Colm Toibín salutes the fact that in his final collection, Human Chain, Seamus Heaney ‘wrote about growing older and weaker with a shivering honesty and grace’.1 Honesty inheres in this volume’s unflinching recognition of mortality in terms of injury, illness, depletion of powers and death; grace, in its remarkable formal achievement, but also in its exploration of an alternative order of being to the betrayals and loss that seem given in human history. This is a book of lyrics of such ‘luminous clarity’2 (Clarke) that they do indeed seem to breathe ‘air from another life and time and place’ beyond such destiny.3
In Human Chain that locus of difference is associated with three main realms of (re)imagined experience, which, though they remain distinct, are also here represented as mutually constitutive: the poet’s intimately experienced personal past (especially his childhood), the unknown future beyond his lifetime, and the promise of eternal life as a spiritual ideal with which Heaney continues to reckon. The volume’s heightened focus on such multilayered other-dimensionality points to Heaney’s sense of the transcendent as an efflorescence of his religious inheritance. In 2010 he remarked that ‘no matter what kind of secularisation occurs’, the effect of Catholic formation is that ‘there is a huge coordinate established for consciousness from the beginning, that sense of the outer shimmering rim of everything always being there in your imagination’.4 For Heaney, poetry at once inheres in and maps this corona of alterity as a plane of consciousness, alertness to which affects one’s sense of agency, responsibility, and creativity in the here and now.
Perceiving in a new way human beings’ intricate, multidimensional interdependence, late Heaney continues to broadcast ‘poetry’s call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line’.5 In Human Chain he advocates in a more comprehensive manner than ever before, our human need to ‘Go with the flow’6 of both our given and our possible
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
alternative existence, in order to enable optimal engagement with life on this earth. In effect, therefore, these late poems operate like the ‘pinholed Camera / Obscura’ to which Heaney compares the pricked card recording his neighbours’ donations to the ‘alms-collecting mite-box’ of his childhood. For believers and doubters alike, these poems ‘unblind[s] the sun eclipsed’, offering ‘A way for all to see a way to heaven’7 – no matter in what terms each of us might imagine that realm of utter fulfilment.
In what follows, I argue that, for Heaney, the only reliable basis upon which the real and the ideal enter authentic relationship is for us to actively and unconditionally recognise our common human condition of vulnerability and desire. In other words, in Human Chain, Heaney proposes that the more we become conscious of our shared exposure to fate and come to terms with this frailty while honouring our longing that the associated suffering be made good, the more truly we come alive both to ourselves and to the larger world we inhabit – compassion fostering realisation of ourselves as ‘Needy and ever needier for translation’8 into alternative ways of being and seeing in this life. The present essay explores the ramifications of this position with regard to three main themes in Human Chain: connectivity as bound up with mortality, inspiration spurring renewal, and synergy between immanence and transcendence.
Connectivity and mortality
In his 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Heaney described his career in terms of an open-ended, self-generative process of linkage: ‘a journey into the wideness of the world [which] in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or one’s life – turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination’.9 Readers of Human Chain have long recognised this volume’s fulfilment of the meaning of its title in its ubiquitous representation of networks of relationship – between people, places, periods in the poet’s own life history and in the history of his home place, human and natural life, and between artworks and personal destiny. These chains are not linear but cross under and over each other at multiple nodal points. Critic Andrew Auge has well identified the intersection between this collection’s defining concern with connectivity and its equally prevalent preoccupation with mortality, describing a key ethos of Human Chain as follows: ‘it is not heroic self-sufficiency but human connections – the bonds of care and love
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linking the living and the dead – that allow death to be faced, withstood and survived’.10 Most striking in this regard is the volume’s tracing of chains of relationship generated through familial generational shift, by virtue of the life processes of birth, aging, and death. For example, we find here the ‘ineluctable’ presence of the unborn poet at his parents’ uncomfortable wedding feast in ‘Album’, the intimate physical contact of a grown child with his dying father in ‘The Butts’, and the proximity of the poet’s own death suggested at the joyful nativity of his granddaughters Anna Rose and Aibhín in ‘Route 110’ and ‘A Kite for Aibhín’. These family links are at once unbreakable and bound to be broken – a paradox poignantly intimated in the loss-suffused poem ‘Uncoupled’, asking as it does of each of his longdead parents in turn, ‘Who is this […]?’ The twelve-part sequence ‘Route 110’ offers an extended meditation on human connectivity in the light of mortality, moving to its climax in the penultimate poem’s river-bank scene where the adolescent Heaney and his taciturn father ‘commingled / Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink’, signalling their conjoined deathbound fate, followed by the final poem where Heaney suggests himself to be already a pre-emptive shade, ‘the last [or, latest] to leave’, yet holding on so as to celebrate ‘the age of births’ of his grandchildren – and himself – into existences of unknown possibility.
In his late sixties and at the turn of his seventies, writing the poems that would be gathered in his final collection, Heaney’s understanding of particularised interconnectivity coincides with newly heightened alertness to mysterious, other-dimensional forms of existence: Where can it be found again, An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases, Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest Of crosshatched grass blades?
‘A Herbal’
For Heaney, apprehension of this richly self-inwoven ‘elsewhere world’ involves direct encounter with existential otherness through confronting mortality: the type of encounter that remains outside the reach of normative empirical systems of measurement but not beyond the reach of art or religion.
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
Heaney once described the Romantic poet John Keats as exemplary because he ‘simplifies his vision of the poetic destiny to a parable about the education of an intelligence into a soul: a school is needed [for this] and that school is the world of pain’.11 A key context of such schooling for Heaney has been the violent socio-political conflict scarring the North of Ireland – the ongoing claims of which history are registered in Human Chain in the postpeace process poem ‘The Wood Road’, describing the surreal co-location of political conflict with everyday personal and communal history: ‘The Wood Road as is and was, / Resurfaced, never widened’. The long-range consequences of the Troubles are also highlighted in ‘Route 110’, about the anonymity of the ordinary victims of murderous political violence whose claims on our attention persist ‘Behind the grief cordons’ of official history –unpaid debts of honour starkly highlighted by the heroized public obsequies and memorials traditionally afforded to those who perpetrate such crimes. A more muted context for this volume’s focus on the discomforting experience of otherness is the collective uncertainty and fear that marked the boom-andburst trajectory of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland between 2006 and 2010, during which period of national economic climax and collapse most of the poems of Human Chain were written. Such public circumstances of instability feed into the volume’s prevailing theme of personal precarity. For example, the collection explores estrangement in relation to the experiences of leaving home as an adholescent in ‘Album’ and ‘The Conway Stewart’, and of crossborder movement to the Gaeltacht in ‘Parking Lot’. Human Chain notably attends to the defamiliarisations experienced by men who, having been raised in a patriarchal culture valorising masculine stability and toughness, discover their own vulnerability to sorrow, loneliness, and frailty (but also delight), as we see especially in ‘Album’ iii, iv and v.
Above all, darker reality insists itself at this late stage of Heaney’s career through his own experience of bodily infirmity, especially following his 2006 stroke. Although his practical resilience in the aftermath remains entirely admirable – ‘I learned balance, learned to walk, got refurbished, and got tablets and instructions’12 – nonetheless, this event clearly prompted the poet to embrace the ‘midge-drifts’ of existential uncertainty in new awareness that his own participation in history was approaching the boundary of dissolution.13 In this penultimate section of ‘Route 110’, the double effect of conjunction and disjunction between the meanings of the proximate phrases ‘No doubting’ and ‘Or doubting’ testifies to the manner in which in Human
Catriona Clutterbuck
Chain more generally the asserted realm of the known also becomes strange and unreliable. For example, many of these poems invest in tactile recall of the body sensations involved in handling now-obsolete objects – inkwells, meal sacks, home-made kites etc. Such anchor points of Heaney’s early life offer not compensatory security but a different kind of assistance: in their increasing unfamiliarity, these objects form the coordinates of an alterity now being summoned by the poet for purposes of facing his own mortality and the life-reckoning and stock-taking which this necessarily involves.
With his situation occasioning a sharp sense of the ‘unroofed’ human condition,14 in Human Chain, he views his present circumstances through the lens of the loss of his parents, whose deaths took place in the mid1980s within two years of each other. Recalling that period of grief as one where he had become acutely conscious of ‘the creature, [the] soul-body, down here with nothing between it and the infinite’,15in late Heaney – now himself ‘Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma’16 – a related but more all-prevailing sense of exposure similarly renders the self strange to itself. Accompanying such knowledge of nearing the brink, Human Chain’s several poems on leaving this earth as an ageing or vulnerable human being communicate ‘That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt’ of alienation in one’s worldview.17 For example, in each of the poems ‘Uncoupled’, ‘The Butts’, ‘Chanson d’Adventure’, ‘The Wood Road, ‘Slack’, the ‘Route 110’ sequence and ‘A Herbal’, the human body is presented in terms of distance, absence, sundering or abjection. This collection of poems certainly faces the void – ‘The door was open and the house was dark’ as he says in his elegy for David Hammond of that title – but as we shall now explore, it also affirms the likelihood or hope of ‘a turnover warp in the black / Quick water’18 of our final oblivion: this, by virtue of the shock of inspiration involved in being jolted from our usual way of seeing and being seen, once we confront mortality.
Inspiration and renewal
Late Heaney opens himself more and more to the kind of transcendence or overcoming of limits that can be ongoingly activated within our given lives here and now. This involves an opening to alterity that Human Chain’s opening poem, ‘“Had I Not Been Awake”’ shows is also central to creative inspiration. Unsurprisingly, the poem has been read as a processing of Heaney’s recent experience of serious illness,19 because in it, revelatory inspiration arriving in
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
the traditional biblical form of wind is also an alarming ‘courier blast’. This warning barrage declares the importance of being awake so as to be able to cope with the danger and promise of what is coming – the totally unknown. Reminiscent at once of Shelley’s west wind and early Yeats’s wind among the reeds (in both of which poets’ work, the spirit of the new is likewise threatening as well as regenerative), in late Heaney, inspiration ‘constitutes a moment of epiphany, shock, [and] creative verification’:20
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter, Alive and ticking like an electric fence: […]
A courier blast that there and then Lapsed ordinary. But not ever After. And not now.
‘Had I Not Been Awake’ Inspiration’s ‘courier blast’ transforms the poet’s waking state into one of hyper-conscious receptivity, electric with responsiveness, during which he is brought into full presence-to-himself. The poem’s unexpected simile of the ticking electric fence communicates the fact that the life of this poet touched with such inspiration remains charged to deliver a shock to anyone who subsequently comes into contact with it through his work: ‘it came and went so unexpectedly / And almost it seemed dangerously’. This disturbing potential inheres not only in the wind’s ‘pentecostal’ character,21 but in the fact that this courier blast also signals forward to death – ours as well as the poet’s – as the event of being permeated with a related kind of new and extraordinary lifeforce: one completely other to what is humanly knowable, but which will involve total evacuation from our present corporeal existence. For late Heaney, the very fact that such inspiration is offered only momentarily – it ‘there and then / Lapsed ordinary’, seeming to have been nothing at all – vividly realises such contingency: we attain our most vibrant and present sense of being in the here-and-now, at the moment when we realise that both we and the creative opening so suddenly afforded us might not (and one day will not) be ‘here’ at all. Such realisation cannot be sustained long at the same
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pitch of intensity and retreats to lie in wait before it will spring to our throats (in terms both of our voice and its silencing) at some unforeseeable moment in the future. Thus, immediacy of presence is underpinned by absence as at once the condition and essence of inspiration’s unexpected power.
These qualities are vividly communicated through this poem’s formal achievement. As Michael Parker notes, the wind’s ‘gyre-like’ momentum is advanced through the poem’s tercet verse form, recurrent use of enjambment, and in the opening stanza, the deployment of monosyllables, iambs and alliteration.22 The sudden, transformative change heralded by the wind is also embodied in the fact that, following one long sentence distributed across nearly eleven lines, two short sharp sentences make up the poem’s final line and a half (‘But not ever / After. And not now’). These seven words offer a breathtaking combination of enjambment, alliteration, assonance and consonance that mimetically communicates the power of inspiration to disturb. Unsettling the possibility that this wind will remain ‘Lapsed ordinary’, form transmits awareness that soon – in fact, each and every time these poems are genuinely encountered anew – life-force charges through Heaney’s Human Chain, however much these texts may seem to ‘die down’ into textual familiarity and canonicity. Intimating its creator’s awareness of already speaking from a position outside his own mortal history, this annunciatory poem affirms that we, its present readers, are included in the volume’s extended time-out-of-time, calling us to be participants in a story that is happening right now in the telling. As such, we, like him, must open ourselves to the discomposure of transformation and authentic (self-)renewal.
For Heaney, as this poem has dynamically made clear, mortality, inspiration, and revival are intimately linked. In a 1996 speech delivered at a University of North Carolina graduation ceremony, he described the ‘gift of getting started all over again’ as ‘never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment, but getting renewed and revived by some further transformation’.23 It is to this philosophy of regeneration in Human Chain that we now turn, with a particular focus on the ethics of interdependence.
Heaney has celebrated in the work of Thomas Kinsella ‘the motif of renewal at the point of exhaustion’,24 and the same is true of his own poetry, especially this last collection. In a book where the theme of transience prevails, Heaney demonstrates that the human chain is remade in the breaking. Such a ‘turnover warp’ in human destiny is highlighted through his representation
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
of overlap between the life stages of entry into death and coming-of-age. In ‘The Conway Stewart’ – a poem which unrolls in one long sentence from beginning to end suggesting the unstoppable momentum of growth – a kind of ‘death’ to his previous child-self was required when Heaney left his home and family to go to boarding school. New links are added through the opening of the chain, this forward action most obviously proven through the birth of grandchildren. Heaney’s ‘parelleling of the prenatal and the postmortem’25 is clearest in ‘Route 110’ xii, where his first grandchild’s ‘long wait [to be born] on the shaded bank has ended’ even as Heaney readies himself to step onto death’s ferryboat to the other side. If that final poem in the sequence ‘Route 110’ announces a future Heaney knows he will not see, the volume as a whole suggests that the underworld for which he is bound, is also, by some strange alchemy, an over-world – the home of the ‘white wing beating high against the breeze’ figuring the soul in ‘A Kite for Aibhín’. This is a realm he trusts he will share with his grandchildren, as each attains unbounded new potential following entry into their respective, radically changed, states of being. For Heaney, poetry itself is assurance of such faith: ‘When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit’.26
Facing loss directly, late Heaney asserts renewal through interpersonal relationships which command us to fulfill the instinct and responsibility to succour and care for each other. Hence, the chain motif attains particular resonance in the light of this volume’s concern with the many kinds of aesthetic, social and political dividing lines which, by virtue of our shared humanity, call to be overcome. Thus, in the title poem, ‘Human Chain’, as the speaker watches a TV report of famine relief workers and makes an association with the requirements of co-operative effort during the annual harvest periods of his childhood, he affirms a more general relationship between the local and the universal family vis-à-vis the ideal of service, especially in contexts of strain or violence. In this poem, his body’s stored memories of heavy lifting – the strenuous effort, labour, and sheer work involved in farming in the past – is symbolic of the same effort needed in all times and places for authentic participation in the human chain. In poems including but not limited to ‘Miracle’, ‘The Butts’, and ‘Chanson d’Adventure’, Heaney likewise celebrates – in reviewer Sian Hughes’s precise description – ‘Humans as levers, hoists, props, each other’s limits and each other’s best support’, the poet suggesting the fundamental meaning
Catriona Clutterbuck
of the human chain to be about ‘sharing a heavy load, completing a painful task, moving the weight of each other down the line’.27 Crucially, the title poem suggests that only by acknowledging these claims upon our human interdependence in the light of our shared condition of mortality can the freedom of self-realisation be made possible: Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback, A letting go which will not come again. Or it will, once. And for all.
‘Human Chain’
Here, recognition of and response to suffering enables that possibility of release for each ‘And for all’, which is ‘backbreak’s truest payback’. Aligning mortal and moral destiny, the chiasmus (word inversion) in the latter phrase dramatises the value of accepting, sharing and releasing each other’s burden, including that of the self. These lines more broadly suggest the paradox that, insofar as we recognise and suffer our unconditional membership of the human chain, our corrupt and death-bound condition may be what secures us sudden access into the free space of unearned and un-earnable grace, ‘once. And for all’. In other words, late Heaney induces confidence in the fact that human limitation can correlate rather than conflict with human boundlessness. As he similarly indicates in ‘The Riverbank Field’, although we may have no choice but to enter underworlds of darkness in our lives, we also have the right to seek release ‘So that memories of this underworld are shed / And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood / Under the dome of the sky.’
In ‘Miracle’, Heaney directly explores the co-operative nature of such release. This poem deals with the gospel story of the paralyzed man lowered by his friends through the roof of the house where Jesus was staying in order to be cured (Mk 2:3–11). However, it attends, not to the miracle’s direct beneficiary, but rather to those others ‘who have known him all along’ as disabled, yet who – whether or not they themselves formally believe in the possibility of healing – practically perform such faith by overcoming significant physical obstacles in order to bring him into Christ’s presence. Literally enacting the volume’s larger injunction that we become each other’s human chain, their bodies subsequently register the work involved: ‘Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked / In their backs’ – physical effects suggestive of paralysis drawing them closer to their friend, even though for them (as soon too, for
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
him) this incapacity is temporary. In testimony to the fact that the miracle of healing could not have come about without this act of faith made by their co-operative physical effort, the poem avers that even as these friends ‘stand and wait’ for that pain to pass, they will retain the memory of ‘Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity’ on this day. Just as their paralysed friend is about to be made new, their own role in the process may open to themselves the same experience of dizzyingly transformative self-estrangement and renewal. In other words, by virtue of following through on the imperative of their empathy, these friends have been made co-beneficiaries of the miracle, registering a related kind of healing in their spirits.
In Heaney words from ‘A Herbal’, the purpose of all his work is to ‘Show[] them / They have to keep going, // That the whole thing’s worth / The effort.’ His late poetry teaches us that in the midst of our human experience of loss and (self) betrayal, we need to trust those ‘freshets and rivulets / Starting from nowhere, capillaries of joy // Frittered and flittering’.28 Anticipating its readers’ resistance to the difficult challenges involved in absorbing the strange interdependence of irrecoverable loss and such creative renewal, Human Chain offers ‘A vision of the school [of life and of its pain] the school / Won’t understand’.29 Nonetheless, we are invited into the same space of understanding Heaney occupies when remembering himself as a schoolboy experiencing a sudden expansion of understanding: the poet has a vision of his own life as at once bounded, like the beaker of water he dips into a stream with which to make ink while a singing class he has been excused from goes on without him, and unbounded – part of the greater flowing stream.
Immanence and transcendence
We have seen how, in Seamus Heaney’s final collection, two sets of values that are usually understood as mutually exclusive are dynamically integrated – on the one hand, the values of resilience and endurance and holding on, commanding that we and our sense of the spiritual remain grounded in the material experiential world, and on the other, the values of abandonment and release and letting go, impelling us to allow ourselves and our sense of the divine to launch into numinous unknown. Because exploration of this opposition has been a constant in his work at least since the mid-eighties, it is easy to underestimate just how radical a commingling of its extremes is brought about in late Heaney – those values commune to the point where ‘all is woven into // And of itself, like a nest / Of crosshatched grass blades’.30
Catriona Clutterbuck
Heaney spent a lifetime exploring tension between constraint and freedom in human experience. Intimately linked to this vocation, his work has always intuited both/and inclusivity in the relationship between immanence and transcendence, the claims of the here and of the beyond – but has not always trusted it, even in his justly-celebrated 1990s output. In his earlier poetry, Heaney tended to withdraw behind the lines of dialectical (albeit increasingly permeable) opposition between earth and air, as synonyms for states of limitation and non-limitation. No matter how frequently and resolutely those boundary lines were challenged, for the most part, they remained at best provisionally traversable: more impulse than pulse, Heaney’s boundarybreakings were constrained by his confining of the relationship between the quotidian and the numinous to the terms of juxtaposition, ‘codependency’31 and counterbalance.
Such self-constraint with regard to his founding oppositions has ethical and aesthetic as well as existential implications. This is clearly indicated in Heaney’s 1989 essay on Edwin Muir, where he proposes that ‘Th[e] apprehension of broken harmonies, of the entry of contradiction into life, is what we expect from the highest art, and we expect it […] as an intuited, endangering pressure of reality, a true weighing of things as they are dreaded against things as they are desired’.32 However, in Heaney’s final years, he expects and achieves more. Although up to this point he may have been satisfied with his own formulation in The Redress of Poetry that ‘consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them’,33 to the extent that the main parties to this arbitration – immanence and transcendence – are still assumed by definition to stand not only distinct but also apart from each other, Heaney’s vision of ‘a disembodied, spiritual dimension’ (as Magdalena Kay astutely observes) ‘is less a part of life than of death [and] until Human Chain it will be held quite separate from what he elsewhere calls soft-mouthed life’.34 The result is stalemate between immanence and transcendence, and therefore also between dread and desire as our available options for responding to the ‘things’ we face – no matter how often the envoy of poetry is sent out to negotiate between these oppositions.
Human Chain outsteps this impasse, because late Heaney no longer conceives of the Fall in terms of lost and broken harmony: he allows the Fall but dismisses the idea of harmony as what is needed to redress it – indeed, the very concept of redress becomes redundant. Rather than the answer
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
being congruity or symbiosis between the real and the ideal, he conceives of something more: a ‘both/and’ mode of being, in which the ideal is always already integral to our fallen human condition. In terms of his poetics, this mode is characterised by synergy between what Daniel Tobin aptly names ‘the centripetal and centrifugal poles of Heaney’s imagination’ or ‘a knot where all is inwoven into one’.35 Tobin suggests that ‘Heaney’s parabolic double sensation, his double capacity, his double vision, wants and has it both ways simultaneously’.36 However, for the poet of Human Chain, the very concept of double vision may no longer suffice, because in this condition, one only appears to have it both ways. Medically speaking, double vision or diplopia is an eye problem where a person sees two separate images of the same object, one of which is a fainter ‘ghost’ image, due to non-alignment of the eyes, which should instead work together to create depth perception.37 The metaphor of double vision aptly describes Heaney’s earlier weighing of air against earth and vice versa, in that one of these poles in effect always dominates over the other. By contrast, late Heaney’s understanding of the relationship between immanence and transcendence has moved beyond that (re)balancing high-wire act that so strongly characterised his work between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties. From the turn of the millennium onwards, and most especially in Human Chain, the needed action is, instead, the (re)generation of the one through and within the other: that which is within and that which is beyond our grasp, foci of our desire and dread, no longer understood to operate in opposition, but rather commingling in intimate, boundless interdependence. Daniel Tobin recognises just this when he celebrates late Heaney’s definitive poetic concern as being ‘The world as it is, alive with transfiguration’38 – to which description can be added, transfiguration alive with the given, ‘In the everything flows and steady go of the world’.39
In his ‘Loughanure’ sequence in Human Chain, Heaney dramatises the movement towards this synergy within his larger body of work, in a set of poems which together attend to the question of human power to reconfigure our lot in the combined light of our mortality and our hope of redemption. The sequence directly addresses this final volume’s overarching question of whether a conception of heaven can (or should) alter or offset our deathbound corporeal condition and its associated sorrows – ‘Each small ash increment flicked off / As white as flecks on the horizon line’ of the life to come.40 In these poems, Heaney does not propose counterbalance but rather
Catriona Clutterbuck
convergence between our necessary submission to fate and the possibility of our being rescued from our fallen condition by a larger beneficent force. Crucially, Heaney also makes explicit each person’s calling in the here and now to come to terms with the life they have lived and may still live, through fully acknowledging their own free will as well as their given situation in history in relationship with other people. In ‘Loughanure’ II, the poet looks at a landscape painting by Colin Middleton, which he and his wife own, into which he reads a message about the limits of our human vision of the afterlife: from where we presently stand, the next world can be no more than ‘A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall / Like murky crystal.’ Highlighting the fact that we can only envision life after death through the storm-glass of our present delimited condition, this poem probes ways in which we humans nonetheless tend to read our present lives into the afterlife, usually conceiving that ‘now’ and ‘then’ in oppositional terms. Thus we silently assume that our ‘immortal souls [may] / Choose lives to come according as they were // Fulfilled or repelled by existences they’d known / Or suffered first time round’ – irrespective of whether such choice of reincarnation would result in a benevolent or malignant outcome for ourselves or our fellow-man.
By contrast, in the third poem of the sequence, Heaney offers as exemplary a curious ritual of altered perspective, which is also one of creative initiation, as performed by the painter Colin Middleton preparatory to taking up his brush to make the first stroke on a canvas. Heaney describes how Middleton would turn away from his given subject, bend over, and stare at his chosen ‘motif’ backwards from between his own two spread legs. Such a practice generates in Heaney a feeling of ‘giddiness’ and release41 because, in so deliberately defamiliarising his normal perspective, the artist shows us how to ‘look […] / For the mystery of the hard and fast / To be unveiled’ by actively (here, literally) recognising and using their own bodily situation. Heaney implies that by so combining self-estrangement and self-recognition, any equivalent ritual – not least those offered in the achieved form of his own late poems – points towards a larger truth about man’s relationship to his fate in the context of the idea of divine redemption.
In the opening lines of ‘Loughanure’ III, Heaney borrows from the Lord’s Prayer, where it says, ‘Thy Kingdom come’, opening up the space between the subjunctive and the imperative moods of this key biblical phrase by parsing it as two conjoined questions: ‘And did I seek the kingdom? Will the kingdom / Come?’ This hinged question signals the fact that for Heaney,
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
responsibility to bring about the kingdom of the ideal world properly shifts back and forth, shared between the human individual and the sacred (‘did I seek the kingdom? Will the kingdom come?’ [my emphasis]) – rather than that agency being assumed to belong exclusively to either needy mankind or an omnipotent deity. Heaney is well aware through his Catholic education that the Our Father’s immediately-following phrase – ‘Thy will be done / On earth as it is in heaven’ – invokes the unity of heaven and earth as God’s ultimate plan. Accordingly, his poetry puts its faith in ‘A world restored completely’ through unconditional love of the real, rather than in the false promise of any ‘grant-aided, renovated scene’ of existential homecoming sponsored by reactionary, exclusivist versions of religion (or politics) – in response to which Heaney remains ‘unhomesick, unbelieving’.42 For him, agency properly belongs to both heaven and earth, God and man, indivisible: an ‘idea’ of co-responsibility between God and humankind – securing the same principle between man and fellowman – which baptisimally ‘Breaks like light or water’ in this sequence and volume.43 Hence, for late Heaney, our desired ‘leap / Up through the cloud-swabbed air’44 of our mortal condition is a leap ‘Not all that far, as it turns out’45 – no further than the most quotidian instances of our daily experience, past or present. As Eugene O’Brien says, this final poem of the sequence intimates that ‘ultimately the transcendent and immanent will fuse completely and that the latter will shine through the former’.46 It is in this new light that Heaney’s late poetry as a whole takes a radical step towards the kingdom, by positing the need to fundamentally challenge institutional religion’s traditional binary opposition between mortality and the fully-redeemed life. The present essay has explored ways in which Heaney’s final book addresses this major task and its broader ramifications.
Conclusion
The final poem in Human Chain offers in a single one-page text a condensed dramatic synthesis and allegory of the major development of vision that took place at the end of Heaney’s career, as proposed in this essay. ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ famously addresses the power of human desire and imagination to move us beyond a sense of being trapped and burdened in this world –whether or not our situation appears to change. In this larger volume, likewise, Heaney’s writing hand is the ‘spindle / Unspooling’ the kite of human hope which this poem so vividly conjures and releases. He teaches us that such
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hope does not fly in the face of our limitations as bodies bound to this earth and tied to our human condition of uncertainty, weakness, debilitation, loss, and sheer ‘need[iness] for translation’; rather, hope is affirmed as integral to, and a factor of, those same constraints. Fostering at once our powers of clear-sighted realism, empathy, imagination and faith, in Human Chain, this kite rises as […]
a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying further, higher,
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and – separate, elate –
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
‘A Kite for Aibhín’
Though it may become ‘lost’ in the blue of unconfirmable possibility, such hope is never lost to the inner eye of human beings’ sense of the imminent extraordinary within our immanent, fallen lives. It is entirely appropriate, then, that in the last two words of this poem, Heaney’s rising kite becomes something falling – an apple freely given by the tree which lets it go, ‘a ripe fruit ready to be harvested by another’s hand’.47 As we have seen, throughout his final collection, Newton’s laws of gravity are affirmed in their overthrow, as Heaney discerns the power of the crosshatched connectivity of the human chain.
Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where she teaches poetry and Irish literature, with a particular focus on women writers. Her research specialism is contemporary Irish poetry, with broader interests in gender, creativity, faith concepts, and the poetics of mourning. Her debut poetry collection, The Magpie and the Child, was published with Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) in 2021.
(Notes)
1 Colm Toibín, ‘Monuments of the Dream Life’, Irish Pages, 8:2, p. 103.
2 Heather Clarke, review of Human Chain, Harvard Review Online, 16 May 2013, <www. harvardreview.org/book-review/human-chain/>
3 Seamus Heaney, ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 85.
4 Eleanor Watchel, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Brick: A Literary Journal, 95 (2015),
‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal
9 Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 449.
10 Andrew Auge, ‘Surviving Death in Human Chain’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p. 30.
11 Heaney, Finders Keepers, p. 70.
12 Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
13 Heaney, ‘Route 110’, Human Chain, xi.
14 Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
15 Watchel, ‘Interview with Heaney’.
16 Heaney, ‘In the Attic’, Human Chain, iii.
17 Heaney, ‘In the Attic’, Human Chain, iv.
18 Heaney, ‘Route 110’, Human Chain, xi.
19 Irene de Angelis, ‘A Voice Fit for Winter: Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on Ageing in Human Chain’, in Imagining Ageing, ed by Carmen Concilio, vol. 18 (Transcript Verlag, 2018), p. 86.
20 Michael Parker, ‘“His Nibs”: Self-Reflexivity and the Significance of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, Irish University Review, 42:2 (2012), p. 332.
21 Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 332.
22 Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 332.
23 Quoted in Parker, ‘Self-Reflexivity’, p. 340.
24 Heaney, Finders Keepers, p. 243.
25 Auge, ‘Surviving Death’, p. 39.
26 Heaney, Finders Keepers, p. 327.
27 Sian Hughes, ‘This mortal coil’, The Spectator, 18 September 2010, p. 42, <www.spectator.co.uk/ article/this-mortal-coil/>
28 Seamus Heaney, ‘Late in the Day’, Electric Light (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 70.
29 Heaney, ‘Hermit Songs’, Human Chain, VII.
30 Heaney, ‘A Herbal’, Human Chain.
31 Daniel Tobin, ‘“Beyond Maps and Atlases”: Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances, p. 313.
32 Heaney, Finders Keepers, pp. 246–7.
33 Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), viii.
34 Magdalena Kay, ‘Death and Everyman: Imagining a “Not Unwelcoming Emptiness”’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances, p. 53.
35 Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, pp. 317, 318.
36 Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, p. 322.
37 Tim Newman with Megan Soliman, ‘What to know about double vision’, Medical News Today, 1 February 2024, <www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/170634>
38 Tobin, ‘Beyond Maps and Atlases’, p. 316.
39 Heaney, ‘Perch’, Electric Light, p. 4.
40 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, I.
41 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, III.
42 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, V.
43 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, III.
44 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, IV.
45 Heaney, ‘Loughanure’, Human Chain, V.
46 Eugene O’Brien, ‘“The Door Stands Open”’: Liminal Spaces in the Later Heaney’, in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances, pp. 368–369.
47 Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 221.
A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
Patrick Crotty
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2023), 820 pages.
The steady rise in Seamus Heaney’s cultural prominence that gathered pace on the publication of North in 1975 and reached one of its summits twenty years later when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature has shown no sign of dropping away since his death. Heaney was so intimately familiar a figure – and not only in his native Ireland – that his demise on 30 August 2013 seemed untimely, albeit, at seventy-four, he had lived longer than W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and even W. B. Yeats. The customary dip in reputation after death did not take place in his case. Posterity saw the emergence of unfamiliar and to some degree unguessed at writing – the version of Aeneid VI in 2016, and then in 2022 the hefty Translations of Seamus Heaney. (The earlier of those years witnessed also the opening of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, which admitted 40,000 visitors in its first twelve months of operation.) Alongside established works such as Sweeney Astray and Beowulf, Translations presented scores of high quality lyric renderings of material from various ancient, medieval and contemporary languages. The existence of most of these pieces was a surprise even to commentators who considered themselves familiar with the shape and substance of the poet’s output. That all but one of the newly gathered translations had already been published – sometimes more than once – hinted at the scale of Heaney’s sub-canonical activity across a range of newspapers, periodicals and commemorative volumes, and whetted readerly appetites for the fugitive original verses currently being recovered by Bernard O’Donoghue for the promised Collected Poems. And now comes Letters, an 800-page annotated selection representing no more than a fraction of Heaney’s enormous surviving correspondence.
Discipline and courtesy
If there is something old-world – indeed almost Victorian – about the scale of
A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
Heaney’s epistolary output, the immediate circumstances of its composition were distinctively modern. Many of the letters were written in airport lounges and hotel foyers, on airliners or otherwise in transit. A distinction between their formally declared and actual places of composition is repeatedly drawn, either in the texts themselves or the editorial commentary. Heaney’s habit of appropriating headed notepaper from august institutions and expensive hotels and owning up to the misleading implications of the letterhead as he writes from some later point of his itinerary provides a sort of running gag through the Letters. Humour apart, though, the on-the-move nature of much of the correspondence attests to the industry and good manners that marked the career from the beginning. The poet was both extraordinarily hard-working and implacably courteous. People who attended his public readings were frequently astonished at his insistence on staying behind to autograph the books of every last member of the unfailingly long signing queue that formed as the audience broke up. (He used to joke that in futurity unsigned copies would become valuable collector’s items.) Discipline and courtesy were intertwined values for Heaney: many of the letters begin with apologies for their own lateness but their very existence testifies alike to his work ethic and his manners. He typically praises the productions (artistic, critical or editorial) of his correspondents in sufficient detail to demonstrate that he has devoted attention to them. His applause is never cursory, though it is sometimes perhaps a little dutiful; only rarely does it verge on what in Ireland we call plámás (flattery).
When plain speaking was called for, Heaney could come briskly to the point, as for instance when he told the aspirant rural poet James Crowden that his verses put themselves ‘in the service of true record rather than of lyric flight / transformation’. He was more forthright again on 12 July 1988 when he responded in alarm to the disclosure that the English critic Michael Parker’s unannounced investigations among his siblings and neighbours in County Derry were to be drawn upon for a biographically inflected study, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet:1
The people you interviewed – with a few exceptions – are not literary acquaintances but presences in the life of my first affections. The places you photographed and hope to map are actually now images that inhere as much in what I wrote as in what I remember. For this reason, the shock of intrusion, which I felt when I heard of your initial visit to my family, has been
Patrick Crotty
dramatically renewed with the news of the Macmillan project. For example, the Moyola sandbed. That place I marked so that you could see it. If any photograph appeared, or map that gave access, I would be devastated. It is one of the most intimate and precious of the places I know on earth, one of the few places where I am not haunted or hounded by the ‘mask’ of S. H. It would be a robbery and I would have the cruel knowledge that I had led the robber to the hidden treasure and even explicated its value.
He made clear that his objections were in part artistic, as Parker’s project ‘interferes with the way I possess my own generative ground and memories; and is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write’. (In the event, critic and poet agreed a modus operandi for the study, and letters later in the volume attest to the genial character of their subsequent relations.)
Negotiating privacy and fame
Heaney’s consternation in 1988 may be understandable but it highlights quandaries with regard to the conflicting demands of privacy and fame that are difficult to resolve. Indeed the very volume that so eloquently attests to the poet’s ‘shock, rage and self-rebuke’ (his own words near the end of the quoted letter) at intrusions into his personal space may itself strike readers as unduly defensive with regard to that space now that its occupant has passed into history. Few will quibble with the request of Heaney’s widow and children that the confidentiality of communications between members of the immediate household should remain, in the editor’s word, ‘inviolable’. But what of the wider family? We know from various references in the work that as a teenager and young man the poet wrote letters home. ‘Yet when I appealed to Heaney’s surviving siblings they were unable to show me any’, observes Reid, in a phrase one is tempted to call pointedly diplomatic. The poet’s career was from the beginning characterised by a dialectic between openness, on the one hand, and what might be termed reputation management, on the other. Few writers have put themselves so generously at the disposal of their readers, as those many hours of book-signing attest. Yet there has been a measure of occlusion also. Stepping Stones presented a series of frequently fascinating reflections on the connections between the life and the art, but such revelations as the volume contained were made very much at the poet’s discretion, in the course of curated, deeply deliberated responses to questions by Dennis O’Driscoll that had in their turn been submitted in written form.2
A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
For all of Heaney’s Wordsworthian qualities, we are very far from the spontaneous overflow of feelings, powerful or otherwise, in Stepping Stones. The book, ultimately an orchestrated collection of interviews, was intended not merely to obviate the necessity for formal autobiography but also (as Heaney admitted to Michael Longley on 10 July 2011) to forestall biography. There may of course be an entirely innocent explanation for the absence of the poet’s epistolary juvenilia from Letters, and the matter may have more to do with the pragmatic, unsentimental values of the community from which he sprang than with issues of reputation management. The early correspondence, that is to say, may simply have been thrown out in the interests of good housekeeping by folk who had no inkling that the charming firstborn of Patrick and Margaret Heaney was on his way to global fame. What is significant where the volume under review is concerned, at any rate, is the fact of, rather than the reason for, the lack of youthful correspondence. By the time he wrote the first of the letters preserved here – to Seamus Deane on 9 December 1964 – he was already well on the way to becoming ‘Seamus Heaney’. He was twenty-five years old, and the approach from Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber that would lead to the publication of Death of a Naturalist in May 1966 was a mere five weeks away. By contrast, we first encounter the epistolary selves of Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes at seventeen, of Philip Larkin at eighteen and of Robert Lowell and Hugh MacDiarmid at nineteen in the published correspondence of five celebrated senior practitioners with whom Heaney was to have first-hand interaction in the initial decade or so of his fame. The Irish poet’s case is highly unusual in that the epistolary record not only postdates the literary one but does so decisively: poems and articles by him had been appearing in Belfast periodicals from at least as early as 1959.
A talent for friendship
The recipient of that December 1964 letter had been close to Heaney since their secondary schooldays at St Columb’s in Derry. The friendship with Deane was atypical, insofar as it appears eventually to have broken down. A narrative of the two writers’ gradual estrangement can be pieced together from letters to shared acquaintances rather than from direct exchanges: the furore about the gender politics of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 of which Deane was general editor, and the subsequent difficulties of the Field Day Theatre Company, of which both men were directors, appear to
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have combined to push apart colleagues who were still on terms of warmest amity in August 1988 (see the hasty procrastinatory note reproduced on p. 298). The overall impact of the volume, though, is to exhibit a rare – even a lavish – talent for friendship. The empathy which forms so striking feature of Heaney’s verse, early and late, is sometimes associated with the values of romantic poetry (Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’, Keats’s ‘negative capability’); it appears ultimately, however, to have been a matter of psychological disposition, an openness to others that is evident on page after page here and that was instinctively picked up on by the adulatory audiences at his public readings.
That the poet was on terms of more or less intimate friendship with a large number of people cannot be doubted. There was nonetheless an inner circle that persisted for decades, albeit new members were admitted from time to time. The core group included the singer and documentary maker David (‘Davey’) Hammond, the dramatist Brian Friel, the painter Barrie Cooke, the poet Ted Hughes, the academic and novelist Thomas Flanagan, and the critic Helen Vendler. Celebrity was no pre-requisite for entry, and ‘private individuals’ such as Des Kavanagh, a Galway-based pal from his St Columb’s days, and Jane and Bernard (brother of the more famous Herbert) McCabe were among those of the first importance to Heaney. One of the remarkable things about these friendships was the way they could ignore ideational differences to thrive on a sometimes small intersection set of shared interests. Vendler was essentially a belated, if undoubtedly brilliant representative of ‘New Criticism’, a post-War American trend in literary studies that ignored questions of power and cultural value to focus on the allegedly stable internal dynamics of literary texts. Heaney’s poems were certainly of sufficient verbal intricacy and symbolic heft to facilitate New Critical readings, as Vendler’s 1998 monograph on them demonstrates, but the political and historical concerns that are front and centre of their subject matter, and that were of manifest import to their creator in his life beyond the page, meant nothing to her. Similarly with Hughes. The impact of the English poet’s example can be detected in the way Death of a Naturalist4 and Door into the Dark5 evoke the physical world, and – even more crucially – in the use of rural detail to give sudden, visionary-seeming access to the past in Wintering Out6 and North 7 The brooding, atavistic and irrationalist side of Hughes’s achievement, however, like his insistence on the shamanistic nature of the poetic calling, could scarcely have been further from Heaney’s
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Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
rationalist cast of mind and his conception of the poet as a civic agent with moral responsibilities. An affecting tribute in a letter of 19 May 1999 to Hughes’s widow Carol, understandably, makes no reference to these disparities:
On the dedication page [of Beowulf] I want to put ‘in memory of Ted Hughes’, not only because he fostered me as a poet, but because he was like the minstrel who sings in Heorot Hall, ‘telling with mastery of man’s beginnings, / how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain, girdled with waters’. And so on. It belongs to him.
Relations with other poets
Heaney has been lauded for so long that it is salutary to be reminded of how he had to struggle in his early days. The correspondence reveals that he was harried by financial worries until late in the 1970s, and even that he initially felt less than wholly welcome in the Republic, his move from Belfast to Wicklow in 1972 being met with as much scepticism on the southern as on the northern side of the border. (We find him expressing relief to Longley in June 1975 that North ‘has conquered the Dublin resistance’.) The burgeoning critical and public enthusiasm for his work brought its own problems in the shape of the resentment of some of his fellow-poets. The already southernbased John Montague, who was ten years older than Heaney and had grown up in his neighbouring county of Tyrone, behaved in an openly truculent manner in response to what he saw as the usurpation of his position as representative voice of the northern Catholic experience. To be fair to Montague, he began to come round once he encountered the poems that in due course made their way into Field Work, 8 and thereafter he increasingly acknowledged the depth and originality of the younger man’s gift. Heaney and his most immediate northern contemporary, Longley, maintained cordial, mutually admiring relations until the end, a few bumps along the road notwithstanding. With the slightly younger Derek Mahon it was otherwise. Mahon’s poetry was cerebral, allusive and (a tad too self-consciously?) sophisticated, but it lacked the verbal resource and extraordinary capacity for renewal that marked Heaney’s. When the older poet wrote on 27 October 1997 to congratulate him on The Yellow Book, then as now seen something of a ‘comeback’ volume after a fallow decade, Mahon inscribed ‘Pompous ass’ under the ‘Seamus’ signature. While Heaney’s letter is far from pompous, the quotation-laden,
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polyglot character of its eulogy, for all its mimesis of the procedures of The Yellow Book itself, may have struck the recipient as insincere.
Poets of subsequent generations, perceiving no threat, simply admired Heaney. Their delight in his achievement was reciprocated by a precursor who – unsurprisingly – was drawn in particular towards younger writers whose work displayed a flair for stylistic ingenuity. The verses of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Durcan in (very) different ways remind us that poetry, even if it must be and do other things also, essentially consists of arranging lineated words in unprecedented combinations.
Comments from February 1976 in praise of Muldoon’s Mules, for all their brevity, are masterstrokes of insight and expressive force. Their concentrated metaphorical mode shows one of Heaney’s critical idioms, the beguilingly anti-professional language of his compliment to McGuckian in January 1991 quite another. Her poetry, he told the Belfast poet, is so inventive, so fluid, so different, so resistant to the clompclomp of linear narrative, the one-two-three addy-uppy and drawa-line kind of writing, that it is, of course, very hard to write about.
When on 16 December 2005 he received by way of Christmas greeting Durcan’s ‘A View of the Bridge’, a playful fictional vignette of Heaney with John McGahern in the west of Ireland, he reciprocated with a bravura Durcanesque flourish of his own, a thirty-three line hommage that comes close to replicating the Dubliner’s distinctive serio-comic tonalities.
Other letters cast either entirely in verse or featuring passages of epistolary poetry are included also. Revealingly, all five of these performative pieces use Standard Habbie (commonly but misleadingly known as the Burns stanza). Only one of them, the 1983 ‘Open Letter’ protesting an anthological presentation of Heaney’s poems under the banner of ‘British Poetry’, has been previously published, and it is by some distance the weakest, as awkward (as the editor notes) in its manner as its versification. By contrast ‘The Stirling Stanzas’ appended to a July 1990 letter to his friends Alasdair and Elise Macrae bring an assured swagger to their comic celebration of the English Studies department at the University of Stirling, where Alasdair worked and where Heaney had been conferred with an honorary degree the previous month. ‘Epistle to Rab Wilson’ comprises a witty April 2011 apology declining an invitation, itself issued not only in Standard Habbie but in Scots, to inaugurate a series of poetry readings at the Burns Museum in Alloway. In between come two verse letters of startling quality, an untitled
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one to Sorley MacLean dated 3 September 1991, and ‘Epistle to Robert Crawford’, a 31-stanza tour-de-force from March 1996 addressed to the St Andrews academic, poet, and biographer. The verses to Crawford turn back upon themselves to scrutinise the limitations as well as the power of Standard Habbie, and to communicate the sender’s unease at being attracted to a literary form that can be identified as easily with the authoritarian as with the libertarian tendencies of Scottish (and Ulster) Presbyterianism. The poem to MacLean, too, is self-aware in its straddling of cultural and linguistic faultlines, deploying as it does a Scots (Teutonic, Lowland) stanza to salute the Gaelic (Celtic, Highland) art of one of the twentieth century’s great poets, an art mediated to its Irish admirer primarily through the medium of his salute, English:
I heard you, Sorley, and expanded,
My ear and being were commanded. It was as if the Prince had landed
And won the day.
I did and did not understand it: Poetry!
Poetry by its pitch and tone, Its crises suffered in the bone, Its tragic magma and ozone
Survived translation,
The spirit’s cover had been blown
By inspiration.
The extent of Heaney’s fascination with Scottish poets and poetry is difficult to exaggerate. He published three essays on MacDiarmid, one each on Burns, Edwin Muir and Norman MacCaig, a volume of translations from the Older Scots of Robert Henryson, along with sundry articles and a lecture on MacLean and a superb English rendering of the latter’s spectral ballad ‘Hallaig’; he wrote one poem about MacDiarmid (‘An Invocation’), two kick-started by lines from his work (‘Keeping Going’, ‘The TurnipSnedder’), and a joint elegy for MacCaig, MacLean, George Mackay Brown and Iain Crichton Smith (‘Would They Had Stay’d’). In the Letters he thanks Hughes for supplying in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being9 a theoretical framework that allows him to understand the decline in imaginative force from the early (mainly Scots) lyrical poems to the later
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(mainly English) discursive verse of MacDiarmid, a matter about which Heaney cared deeply and Hughes cared scarcely at all. Quite why the south Derry poet was so engaged by Scottish poetry has never been satisfactorily explained. The opening stanzas of the verse letter to MacLean offer an answer unbidden when they reveal that Heaney’s earliest exposure to poetry came by way of the folk imitations of Burns (‘the first / Art-speech I heard’) that remained popular in northern counties from the late eighteenth century through to his own formative years.
Religion and public life
The volume clarifies various other issues also, even if it contains few startling revelations. Heaney was reticent about his opinions, knowing that any public airing of them could serve only to distract attention from his art and divide his audience between those who agreed and disagreed with his espousal of this or that point of view. He was aware, however, that the confidentiality afforded by private correspondence was limited by time, and that in the case of writers in whom posterity retained an interest discretion could amount to no more than a holding operation. ‘Christ, now that Larkin’s letters are out and Longley’s are in the archives,’ he observed to Mahon on 9 October 1992, ‘I’m beginning to panic about putting down a line!’ While anyone who paid close attention to the poems could work out that Heaney’s religious position was a sort of dolorous agnosticism, the Letters indicate that his rejection of the Catholicism of his early years was lastingly painful in character; they also convey his desire to restrict discussion of the matter to his own immediate circle. In 2006 he took steps to prevent disclosure by an American journal of his refusal of Communion at his mother’s obsequies in 1984, commenting that he was ‘shy of making the funeral story more public than it is’. He refers again and again to what one letter (to the poet Tom Sleigh) calls ‘the voices of my early and earnest and admirable Catholic education’. Touchingly, in July 1996 he tells Hughes that when he attended evening Mass in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela and witnessed there the ordination of two priests and the consecration of three deacons, ‘the whole underlife of my childhood and teens rallied and wept for itself’.
Letters makes few direct comments on current affairs, and such positions as are endorsed – support for the Good Friday Agreement, opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq – are predictable. A rare outburst of vehemence was occasioned by the landslide defeat of Liam Cosgrave’s Fine-Gael–Labour
A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
coalition in the June 1977 general election. That an administration could boast of commitment to constitutional politics while overseeing extra-judicial Garda operations and hounding the president from office for his having had the temerity to discharge one of his few constitutional functions clearly proved too much for Heaney, who responded to newspaper photographs of defeated cabinet ministers by telling Friel, ‘I got a sense of hope for the first time when I saw them all to-day on the Irish Times, nest featherers and chest beaters, chancers and bouncers’.
He reserved particular contempt for Conor Cruise O’Brien, who lost his Dáil seat along with his ministry in the governmental rout; the poet had initially welcomed the former diplomat’s entry into national politics but on the evidence of his ministerial performance in government had now come to see him as an ‘egotistical … west British’ poseur.
What Heaney will be remembered for is what he most cared about, poetry, and it is scarcely surprising that the aspect of public life that most exercises him in his correspondence is the place of poetry, and to some degree of literature more widely, in society. His career coincided with the rise of critical theory, whose advocates promised to intellectualise literary study by replacing the fuddy-duddy belle lettrism of traditional English departments with approaches of near scientific rigour, reflecting the new understanding of the relationship between word and world offered by Saussurean linguistics. Things did not go quite according to plan, and the bright snow crystals of theory quickly turned to the slush of cultural studies. The poet, in his capacity as someone actually engaged in the production of literature, was disconcerted to see swathes of criticism by younger academics take the form of reductive moralising, with one or other famous author featuring in his or her (usually his) capacity as serial offender against some solemnly venerated abstraction. The matter was one of intimate concern because of his friendship with Hughes, victim in his eyes of hate crimes on the part of militants, who considered themselves qualified to sit in judgement on the English poet’s relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Some of Heaney’s comments are offhand and relatively good-humoured, as when he mentions ‘the theory dreck … young Turks and Turkettes will be broadcasting’ at the Yeats Summer School. Others, though, are deadly serious, like his 1994 expression of dismay at ‘how utterly the academy has abandoned its responsibilities to the culture’.
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The poet’s art
The correspondence offers many insights into Heaney’s own art. The excitement of the decade up to 1975, when the poetry was racing ahead not only of its own public record but even of the poet himself, is vividly conveyed. We can track his growing sense of creative capacity as the mimetic impulse displayed in the earliest poems becomes freighted with symbolic possibilities that he always somehow manages to locate means of realising in language. The greatest work nevertheless still lay well in the future during those heady years: there is something approaching critical consensus that it is to be found among the simultaneously grave and agile ruminations of Seeing Things10 and The Spirit Level 11 Such light as the book casts on the poetry is for the most part retrospective, as for instance in the 1982 comments on ‘Broagh’ to the Polish poet Piotr Sommer, or the unusually detailed 1993 explication of ‘King of the Ditchbacks’ to Audrey C. Davies (a correspondent identified only as the addressee of a letter discovered in an Orkney bookshop). An exception is provided by an account from 26 September 2000 of the composition of the then almost immediately contemporary ‘Glanmore Eclogue’. The poet tells the American translator David Ferry of the associative, one-thing-leadsto-another, circumstance-registering way the poem accrued, a description that presumably has pertinence for the creation of many other late pieces also. Readers may be surprised to find that Heaney appears to have valued the ‘literary’ (even fanciful) ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ as much as its magisterially imagined companion piece, ‘District and Circle’ (titlepoem of his penultimate collection). They may similarly be intrigued by the seriousness he brought to bear upon his translations of Greek tragedy, The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes. Along with letters discussing various Field Day productions of work by other authors, the correspondence relating to his versions of Philoctetes and Antigone attests to his keen interest in the staging and pacing of plays, an interest running well beyond the rendering of dialogue and chorus into his own distinctive English.
Diversity of styles
Something must be said, before concluding, about the variety of mode and mood that enlivens The Letters. The book encompasses transcriptions not only of the handwritten or typed contents of envelopes, but also of faxes, email attachments, and – a favourite medium – post cards. If the setting of the poetry is largely Irish, that of the correspondence is global. Grim,
A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer
haunted reactions to South African poverty coexist with celebrations of ‘the dense reality of gathered pastness in the gardens and shrines and tea-houses’ of Japan. Foreign haunts are sometimes presented in pseudo-Hibernian ‘translation’, as when the poet tells O’Driscoll of the guest quarters on Derek Walcott’s property in Saint Lucia: ‘He has some class of a hen-house or turfshed on the premises where we can be on our own.’ Such comic flourishes recur, though sometimes the humour is of a more or less private kind: only those fortunate enough to have experienced at first hand the sonorous conversational style of Sorley MacLean and the gleefully jokey one of Iain Crichton Smith, for example, will appreciate the accuracy and wit of Heaney’s phrase (in the already cited letter to the Macraes) ‘the ululations of Raasay and the jocund whinnyings of Taynuilt’. The poet was a gifted mimic, albeit he chose to exercise that talent out of earshot of his public. The mischievous side of his character, though somewhat underplayed in Reid’s selection, breaks cover here and there, as when Heaney writes a letter in the guise of Robert Henryson, worried at the prospect of being translated by an Irish upstart, or sends a card to Hammond in the fictional persona of a massage parlour employee called Sadie. The overall tone of the volume is far from jocular, however. The letters typically adapt their style to the circumstances of their recipients: we find a delicately judged message of condolence to Crichton Smith’s widow Donalda, a reverential tribute to Gary Snyder, and a friendly, uncondescending sharing of school memories with the pupils of St Mary’s primary school, Bellaghy. A self-reflective alertness to language is evident throughout, and when occassion demands – as it often does in his letters to Hughes – Heaney can combine intellectual force with astonishingly resourceful eloquence. The capacity for on-the-hoof figurative invention that so lit up his conversation, though, is perhaps not as richly exercised as might have been expected.
One of the paradoxes of being Seamus Heaney was that a talent for friendship evolved, as his fame increased, into a talent for obligation. Many of the poet’s public appearances were made as favours to friends, and not a few required the preparation of lectures rather than just the reading of poems. How he managed to sustain his creative output through all the resulting labour and travel is little short of a mystery. The letters are punctuated by increasingly frequent complaints of being ‘frazzled’, reduced to a ‘mascot’ or a ‘waft of aftermath’. We hear of ‘the subtle wastage-by-exposure of one’s meaning and specific literary gravity – or rather literary specific gravity’. In
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the summer of 1997 Heaney appears to have come close to depression. A more lasting – and concerning – dip in spirits took place in 2010, though he was by and large restored to himself early the following year. The exacting sense of obligation alike to friends and public that is reflected in his unfailing courtesy as a correspondent took its toll upon his person, certainly, yet it served his conviction that poetic authenticity could never be achieved without travelling what Wordsworth called ‘life’s common way’. If Heaney’s heart, as the romantic poet said of Milton’s, ‘The lowliest duties on [it]self did lay’, his discharge of those duties has left us, in the volume under discussion, with an abundant and absorbingly interesting testament to a life well lived.
Patrick Crotty is Professor Emeritus of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is an authority on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and has written widely on modern Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American poetry. He has been a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement since 1992.
(Notes)
1 Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).
2 Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).
3 Seamus Deane (general ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).
4 Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966).
5 Seamus Heaney, Door Into the Dark (London: Faber & Faber, 1969).
6 Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).
7 Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975).
8 Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).
9 Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
10 Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).
On 29 August 2013, the day before Seamus Heaney died unexpectedly in Dublin, shocking into deep grieving not only the Irish world but also the global literary community and his vast legion of readers, I read a notice in the London Review of Books for a lecture he was scheduled to deliver at London’s Southbank Centre in November. The title of the lecture was advertised as ‘The Second Life of Art’. Perhaps he intended to engage with ideas advanced in an essay of that same title by Italian belletrist and fellow Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale, though I would not presume to guess at the substance of that engagement.
When, very early the next morning, the news of Heaney’s passing broke, I immediately thought of that title even as I thought of William Butler Yeats, his fellow Irish poet and also fellow Nobel Laureate, whose enduring stature Heaney’s high standing as both national and international man-of-letters has been frequently and favorably compared to. (Coincidentally, Yeats died in 1939, the year Heaney was born.) Specifically, I thought of British poet W. H. Auden’s well-known poetic response to Yeats’s death which, in part, echoes rhythmically the often-quoted next-to-last section of Yeats’s valedictory poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’, which was first published, in its entirety, in both The Irish Times and the Irish Independent on 3 February, five days after his death on 28 January. That section begins, ‘Irish poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well made … ’ In his elegiac poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, first published in The New Republic in March of 1939, Auden wrote: Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
Decades later, in a poem titled ‘Audenesque’, Heaney would tap out the same echoing pulse in his own response to the death of poet and friend Joseph Brodsky:
Joseph, yes, you know the beat. Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed, Laying William Yeats to rest.
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But the lines I really summoned up from Auden’s poem were not from the section that picks up the beat where the penultimate section of Yeats’s poem leaves off. Rather, they were from earlier in his poem when the poet registers how news of the death of Yeats did not suddenly translate his poetry into the words of a dead man: to the contrary, Auden wrote, ‘By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems.’ And this is exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath of Heaney’s death: the poet’s verses, many of them already deeply etched into the cultural collective of the last four or five decades, lived on.
In fact, they took on just the sort of vitality Heaney had described in 1974 in his resonant essay ‘Feeling Into Words’, where he saw the art of poetry both as an archaeological excavation in search of shards of cultural continuity and as ‘a dig for finds that end up being plants’. As word of Heaney’s death spread and as the world began to grieve, the ‘worldwide web’ pulsated with lines and phrases and passages and entire poems quoted in obituaries, on websites, in blogs, and in emails. The famous closing lines of ‘Digging’, the famous opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist, 1 were repeated and repeated like a mantra: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.’ The final poem of The Spirit Level2 was another favorite among Heaney’s online mourners. Titled ‘Postscript’, it opens with an imperative – ‘And some time make the time to drive out west’ – that leads ultimately to the suggestion that one may experience spiritual uplift simply through being pervious to the possibility of such uplift:
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
For my part, while I resisted the reflex to contribute to the public outpouring of emotion online, I privately thumbed back and forth through Heaney’s various volumes, paying my respects to both the poet and the man by re-reading poems from across the spectrum of his almost half-century of putting feeling into words. Eventually – perhaps I should say inevitably – I landed on ‘The Harvest Bow’, from his 1979 volume Field Work. 3 From where I sat, as an invested reader of Heaney for more than thirty-five years, that poem seemed suddenly to emblematise the enduringness of his entire body of work and thus stood suddenly as a prime example of how not only poetry but also the poet himself can have ‘a second life’. Indeed, this is the
Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
ultimate theme of Auden’s elegy as, imagining Yeats’s ‘last afternoon as himself’ – ‘An afternoon of nurses and rumors’ – Auden inscribes the finality of the poet’s passing:
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers.
Yes, as the global response to his death testifies, Heaney became his admirers. But even that notion needs to be glossed by Auden’s further thoughts on Yeats expressed in ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, an essay he published in April of 1939 in Partisan Review as a sort of companion piece to his elegy for Yeats.4 Written in the form of an argument and a counterargument between a public prosecutor, who has brought Yeats to a kind of judgment day trial, and a counsel for the defence, the essay is actually Auden’s own internal debate about the enduring merits of Yeats’s estimable body of poetry. The prosecutor summarises his case thus:
A great poet. To deserve such an epithet, a poet is commonly required to convince us of these things: firstly a gift of a very high order for memorable language, secondly a profound understanding of the age in which he lived, and thirdly a working knowledge of and sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of his time.
Did the deceased possess these? I am afraid, gentlemen, that the answer is, no.5
The rebuttal put forward in defense of Yeats is both less absolute and more nuanced. Rejecting the notion that the person and the poems be judged as one, the counsel proffers a generalisation that regardless of the position held by a poet-as-person on the world’s political, social, and economic problems, ‘Poetic talent, in fact, is the power to make personal excitement socially available.’ Speaking specifically of Yeats, he contends, ‘because the excitement out of which his poems arose was genuine, they will still [in two hundred years], unless I am very much mistaken, be capable of exciting others, different though their circumstances and beliefs may be from his’. The counsel concludes by arguing that ‘The social virtues of a real democracy are
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brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear ever more clearly through successive volumes by the deceased.’
Before he gets there, the counsel, asserting that ‘art is a product of history, not a cause’, throws down a direct challenge to the prosecutorial presumption that a poem (or any work of art) be ‘an effective agent’ of measurable historical change:
The case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.6
Many readers acquainted with the tenets or the touchstones of modern poetry may hear in that summation an echo of one of the most memorable pronouncements in Auden’s elegy for Yeats: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying … ’ Interestingly, those lines were not part of the original version of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ published in The New Republic. In fact, Auden subjected the original poem to many revisions – additions, deletions, rearrangements of lines and of line breaks, changes in punctuation – that help to make the now-familiar version published in The London Mercury just one month later (simultaneous with his essay appearing in Partisan Review) as much an apologia for Yeats as an elegy.
In particular, a new ten-line second section of the poem seems to be informed by the perspective of the Counsel for the Defence, which forgives Yeats for his dismissive social biases and bigotry made manifest in his unembarrassed flirtation with Ireland’s fascist ‘Blueshirt’ movement in the early 1930s as well as in certain of his poems: ‘the virtues that the deceased praised in the peasantry and the aristocracy, and the vices he blamed in the commercial classes, were real virtues and vices. To create a united and just society where the former are fostered and the latter cured is the task of the politician, not the poet.’ ‘Sing the peasantry, and then / Hard-riding country gentlemen’, Yeats proclaimed in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, an affirmation by omission of his earlier deriding of the emerging bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and the like – diminishing them to ‘Paudeen’ and ‘Biddy’ – in his volume Responsibilities. As he wrote in ‘September 1913’: What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till
Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone?7
‘[M]ad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, Auden excuses the deceased in that new second section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.
Do I digress? Actually, for whatever it may be worth, Heaney appears to satisfy, as both person and poet, all the measures of ‘greatness’ put forward by both the prosecutor and the counsel for the defence in ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’. For example, in yielding some of Heaney’s most gracefully articulated lines – ‘As you plaited the harvest bow / You implicated the mellowed silence in you’, ‘Until your fingers moved somnambulant’, ‘Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable’ – ’The Harvest Bow’ even answers one of the prosecutor’s very dubious tests of a poet’s greatness: ‘How many of his lines can you remember?’ But when I paused to re-read ‘The Harvest Bow’ in the immediate wake of Heaney’s death on 30 August 2013, I recognised and appreciated not just that particular aspect of the poem but really the deeply permeating richness – thematic, formal, stylistic – of its organic wholeness that Heaney himself recognised when he admitted in Stepping Stones, the volume of interviews with him conducted by fellow Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, that ‘the texture of “The Harvest Bow” is richer than many of the others in the book’.8 In short, the poem epitomised for me the capacity of Heaney’s full body of work to make, as Auden’s counsel puts it, ‘personal excitement socially available’.
In the case of ‘The Harvest Bow’, Heaney’s personal excitement begins with the literal subject matter of the poem, a rustic wheat weaving handcrafted by his father, Patrick Heaney, a recurring figure in his poems from start to finish. A cattle-dealer and small farmer, he makes his first appearance in ‘Digging’, where Heaney famously transforms the farm implements of his forefathers – the spade for digging potatoes, the sleán for cutting turf – into that compelling metaphor of the poet’s pen. (Yeats used a similar trope in his poem ‘Pardon, old fathers’, apologising that ‘I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.’) In ‘Follower’, another poem from Death of a Naturalist, Heaney recalls how as a young boy he aspired to emulate his father’s ease and expertise behind a horse-drawn plough:
Thomas O’Grady
I wanted to grow up and plough, To close one eye, stiffen my arm. All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
Extending the trope of ‘Digging’, he concludes: ‘But today / It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.’ He even shows up several times in Heaney’s final standalone volume, Human Chain, in poems that recall his final days almost a quarter-century earlier.9
The poem about Patrick Heaney that best backlights ‘The Harvest Bow’ may be ‘The Stone Verdict’, from Heaney’s volume The Haw Lantern 10 Envisioning a judgment day scenario appropriate for a man known throughout his life for his ‘old disdain of sweet talk and excuses’, Heaney casts his recently-deceased father in mythic terms – as Hermes being acquitted of murdering Argus by the adjudicating gods each throwing a voting pebble (psêphos) at his feet: ‘It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out. / He will expect more than words in the ultimate court / He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.’ It is exactly his father’s speechlessness – his ‘mellowed silence’, and by specific extension what is left ‘unsaid’ between father and son – that the wheat weaving first becomes emblematic of in Heaney’s imagination, and in one long sentence of eighteen lines comprising stanzas two through four of the five-stanza poem, this simple and delicate keepsake, fashioned by his father’s rough and labor-toughened hands, becomes the instrument for the poet’s nostalgic reminiscence:
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, An auction notice on an outhouse wall –You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings …
‘The Harvest Bow’
In this respect, the poem reads readily not just as a dramatic lyric – Heaney fils apostrophising Heaney père – but also as an oblique love poem from son to father.
And rightly so, for as E. Estyn Evans, the father of Irish cultural geography, explains in Irish Heritage, harvest bows are common expressions of affection, especially in ‘north-eastern Ireland’, which would include Heaney’s native County Derry in Northern Ireland: ‘At harvest time two-ply twists of straw are worn in the button-hole: they are part of the ceremonial of harvest time.’11 Including illustrations of two examples of harvest knots (as he calls them), ‘one with the ears left on, which is done in three plait, and the other more common two-straw pattern’ (which is what Heaney describes), Evans adds: ‘it is known that the first type was worn by girls, in their hair, and the second by boys … Mr Paterson [one of Evans’ “informants”] tells me that in Armagh they used to be exchanged between the sexes as a token of admiration or love.’12 Inscribing in his poem the simple material essence of a harvest bow – ‘wheat that does not rust / But brightens as it tightens twist by twist / Into a knowable corona’ – Heaney ascribes to that ‘throwaway love-knot of straw’ the potential, the potency, to carry his own unspoken message of affection to his father. In effect, in addressing Patrick Heaney, the poem operates as an expressive counter not only to his father’s paucity of speech but also to the poet-speaker’s own filial reticence, not uncommon in rural Ireland, as a byproduct of his upbringing in ‘that original townland / Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.’
As the body of his work attests, Heaney was pervious to the potency of objects from very early in his career and remained so right to the end: a fragment of ossified wood from Lough Neagh on a schoolroom shelf, a piece of lumber exhumed from the bog and split into roof rafters, a Victorian parlor guitar, a priest’s biretta, a granite chip hammered from the wall of James Joyce’s Martello Tower in Sandycove, a railway spike found on poet Donald Hall’s farm in New Hampshire, a stone from Delphi, a seashell trinket associated with a long-deceased aunt, a tropical rain stick, a Boston fireman’s helmet, a knife-sharpening stone intended for his father, a schoolbag, a boyhood fountain pen. In ‘Place, Pastness, Poems: A Triptych’, an essay he published in the journal Salmagundi in the mid-1980s, Heaney suggests that objects like these – many of them seemingly random – can embody ‘the ghost-life that hovers over some of the furniture of our lives’ in such a way that the ‘objects can become temples of the spirit’. An object that is uniquely personal and intimate – his mother’s old ‘smoothing iron’, an inherited family settle bed, his late father’s ash plant walking stick – can even be ‘a point of entry into a common ground of memory and belonging’:
Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
Thomas O’Grady
It transmits the climate of a lost world and keeps alive a domestic intimacy with a reality which might otherwise have vanished. The more we are surrounded by such things, the more feelingly we dwell in our own lives. The air which our imaginations inhale in their presence is not musty but bracing.13
Clearly, the harvest bow plaited by his father – ‘this frail device / That I have pinned up on our deal dresser’ – braces Heaney in just that way, ‘exciting’ him to preserve it first in the intimate space of the marital bedroom and then in a poem whose elegant simplicity belies, like a love-knot of straw itself, its intricate and refined artfulness.
One dimension of that artfulness involves the correlation between the poem’s subtle sonic texture and its formal structure of five six-line stanzas end-rhymed aabbcc. In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged how those foundational building blocks of ‘The Harvest Bow’ support its overarching richness: ‘the stanza form was what made the poem. I remember discovering a shape and then realising it could be built on, and relishing the whole gradual cumulative effect’. Even visually, the way the poem sits on the page, a reader might appreciate that effect in how those closely-knit and deftly enjambed rhymed couplets are mimetic of the harvest bow itself, the way it ‘brightens as it tightens twist by twist’. (More than a decade later Heaney would replicate this compacted rhyming to inscribe, with equal dexterity, ‘The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling’ in lines five through eight of his sonnet, ‘The Skylight’.) Relatedly, a reader might also note that of those fifteen rhymed couplets only two ‘sound the full chime’, as Heaney put it to O’Driscoll in the context of affirming his general preference for pararhymes and half rhymes (also known as ‘slant rhymes’) in his writing. ‘On the whole I’d go for something less than full rhyme’, he told O’Driscoll: ‘I improvise on the hoof, or maybe better say in the hope.’14 Thus, while ‘homesick’ rhymes fully with ‘stick’ and ‘townland’ rhymes fully with ‘hand’, through the rest of the poem ‘bow’ rhymes with ‘you’, ‘sticks’ with ‘cocks’, ‘wall’ with ‘lapel’, ‘corn’ with ‘warm’ and so on. The result is again mimetic: those improvised rhymes lend to the poem’s lines a pleasing variegation as naturally gradated as the burnished coloring of twisted straw. A third aspect of the poem’s sonic texture – its conspicuously variable
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line lengths – is a bit more complex. In part, that aspect is illuminated by Heaney in ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, a lecture he delivered in 1978. Engaging with the ‘two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnés and les vers calculés’ identified by Paul Valéry, he remarks: The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my impression that this haunting or donné occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness.15
Specifically, the distinctions he draws between Wordsworth and Yeats crystallise how his own lines in ‘The Harvest Bow’, loosely iambic but ranging downwards from twelve syllables to four syllables, reflect his own Wordsworthian receptiveness to a beckoning impulse:
It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné. If he surrenders to it, allows himself to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations, then we will have a music not unlike Wordsworth’s, hypnotic, swimming with the current of the form rather than against it. If, on the other hand, instead of surrendering to the drift of the original generating rhythm, the poet seeks to discipline it, to harness its energies in order to drive other parts of his mind into motion, then we will have a music not unlike Yeats’s, affirmative, seeking to master rather than mesmerise the ear, swimming strongly against the current of its form.16
Is it just a coincidence that Heaney uses the phrase ‘Beats out of time’ to describe his father’s ‘Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes’?
Perhaps that question is answered, and the poem’s ‘given line’ further illuminated, by glossing ‘The Harvest Bow’ with another poem, tellingly titled ‘The Given Note’, that Heaney published a decade earlier in his volume Door Into the Dark. 17 Sparked by an anecdote about a fiddler who, on a visit to the westernmost point of the long-evacuated Blasket Islands off the southwest coast of Ireland, came away with a tune ‘Out of wind off mid-Atlantic’, that poem reads easily as a parable of artistic inspiration, of how the initial prompt or pulse for a melody – or for a poem – finds its channel for full expression in the receptive and capable artist: ‘It comes off the bow gravely, / Rephrases itself into the air.’ Incidentally, ‘The Given Note’ was the only
Seamus Heaney’s Second
Thomas O’Grady
poem read at Heaney’s funeral Mass, which took place in Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook on Dublin’s southside on 2 September 2013.
In his review of Heaney’s volume Field Work, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980, eminent literary critic Harold Bloom singles out ‘The Harvest Bow’ for favorable comparison with a variety of memorable poems written by notable poets at the age (as Heaney was at the time) of thirtynine or forty – Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman. Most particularly, he places it alongside Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’, musing that it ‘may yet seem that strong against all of time’s revenges’. Continuing, Bloom suggests that ‘it begins to seem not far-fetched to wonder how remarkable a poet Heaney may yet become, if he can continue the steady growth of an art as deliberate, as restrained, and yet as authoritative and universal as the poems of Field Work’. The reception – critical, scholarly, readerly – of Heaney’s entire oeuvre (he was a prolific and brilliant essayist as well as poet) that continues in his ‘second life’ a decade beyond his death testifies to the ongoing upward trajectory of both his authority and his universality that ‘The Harvest Bow’ projected.
For while that poem is both a touching expression of bashful filial affection and a striking example of the desire Heaney described in Crediting Poetry, his Nobel Lecture delivered in Stockholm in 1995, ‘to repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds’, it is also much more than either of those attributes by virtue of where it takes the reader in its final stanza. Literally, the opening couplet of that stanza – ‘The end of art is peace / Could be the motto of this frail device’ – takes the reader to a passage from a Yeats reminiscence dated 1905 that Heaney quotes as the epigraph to Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, his first collection of essays and lectures and broadcasts and reviews, published the year after ‘The Harvest Bow’ appeared in Field Work: ‘Coventry Patmore has said, “The end of art is peace”, and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.’18
Did Heaney remember that Yeats would rework that phrase (apparently a paraphrase) from Patmore, a minor and now mostly forgotten Victorian poet, less than a decade later in one of his more polemical poems, included in Responsibilities, that Auden’s public prosecutor might have raised an
Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
eyebrow at? Titled ‘To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’, the poem addresses Sir Hugh Lane, the nephew of Yeats’s close friend and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory. Ultimately, alluding to the San Marco Library in Florence, ‘Whence turbulent Italy should draw / Delight in Art whose end is peace’, Yeats exhorts Lane to see himself relative to magnanimous patrons of the arts during the Italian Renaissance – the Duke of Ferrara, the Duke of Urbino, Cosimo de Medici. But before that he cannot resist the opportunity to register, not for the first time, his unrelenting disdain for the Dublin bourgeoisie in the early years of the twentieth century: You gave, but will not give again
Until enough of Paudeen’s pence
By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain
To be ‘some sort of evidence’,
Before you’ll put your guineas down,
That things it were a pride to give
Are what the blind and ignorant town Imagines best to make it thrive.
Would Heaney have had that citing of Patmore also in mind when he wrote ‘The Harvest Bow’? Probably not.
Presumably, Heaney’s decision to exclude ‘To a Wealthy Man . . .’ from the generous selection of Yeats’s poems he made first for The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing19 and then for a slightly larger gathering he edited for Faber and Faber in 200020 (almost ninety poems in the latter instance) was based on grounds other than Yeats’s demeaning attitude toward the rising Dublin middle-class. Yet the contrast between how each poet adopts that phrase from Patmore is very telling, and its import may even hinge on an aphoristic recognition Yeats would arrive at in 1917 in his essay ‘Anima Hominis’: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ For Heaney, unlike Yeats, there is no quarrel with others: that borrowing from Patmore that he lifts from Yeats is an observation, not a proclamation. In Heaney’s hands it is also an invitation, though not just to his father, the putative addressee within the dramatic lyric, but to his readers, to appreciate how art – the art of poetry no less than the art of braiding wheat – can transcend a merely immediate utilitarian function. By the intricacy of its own weaving of word and sound and image and form, ‘The Harvest Bow’ is no less an emblem of Heaney’s desire in that regard
Thomas O’Grady
than is his father’s dexterous handiwork that spurred the poem.
Coincidentally or not, Heaney’s description, in his introduction to the Faber and Faber volume, of the aspect of Yeats’s poetry that he most admires could, verbatim, synopsise the enduringness – the permanence – of ‘The Harvest Bow’: ‘Yeats’s essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form’.21 The relationship between the fivestanza formal structure of Heaney’s poem and its rhetorical structure – the movement from the literal to the symbolic in a mere three sentences spread over thirty lines – is masterfully executed. In one of a series of forty-eight twelve-liners gathered under the collective title ‘Squarings’ in his volume Seeing Things, 22 Heaney asks: ‘Where does spirit live? Inside or outside / Things remembered, made things, things unmade?’ In a sense he had already answered those questions a dozen years earlier in the closing lines of ‘The Harvest Bow’ where, evoking a sort of genius loci ‘spirit of the corn’ (‘corn’ being the generic term for ‘grain’ in Ireland and the British Isles), he closes the poem by suggesting how that ‘thing’ made by his father – and now remembered, unmade, and remade verbally into a symbol – retains some touch of that ephemeral genius, having been ‘burnished by its passage, and still warm’.
Again, coincidentally or not, Heaney concludes the introduction to his selection from Yeats by quoting directly the first two lines of the closing tercet from that same twelve-liner: ‘What’s the use of a held note or held line / That cannot be assailed for reassurance?’ The final line of that poem reads: ‘(Set questions for the ghost of W. B.).’ The definition of the transitive verb ‘assail’ in the OED that seems to apply in this context is ‘put to the test’. That is the exercise that Auden has his public prosecutor and his counsel for the defence undertake with Yeats. Like so much of Heaney’s body of writing, ‘The Harvest Bow’ continues to pass that same test, extending the poet’s ‘second life’ ten years after his sudden and all-too-early death.
Thomas O’Grady is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he served as Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019. He is the author of two books of poetry, What Really Matters (2000) and Delivering the News (2019), both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series.
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Studies • volume 113 • number 451
Seamus Heaney’s Second Life
(Notes)
1 Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966).
19 Seamus Deane (general ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).
20 W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats, ed by Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2000).
21 Yeats, Yeats
22 Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy in
Twentieth-Century Ireland
Liam Kelly OFM
A world of love and violence: Ireland sacred and profane
In John McGahern’s evocative Memoir, the author describes his tender childhood relationship with his adored and ailing mother. Both McGahern and his mother live in the shadow of his domineering and secretive father. The sensitive boy is aware of his mother’s visits to the hospital, which are the occasion of harsh and unpleasant treatments. The rural community McGahern describes is impoverished, and social relations are frequently boorish and uncouth. The Memoir describes a society overshadowed by the menace of casual violence, a violence which is alien to the tenderness of McGahern’s childhood bond with his mother. The beliefs and practices of their Catholic faith provide an alternative social reality, a social imaginary which functions to protect their relationship and validate it. On occasions when the boy and his mother went to town for the day, they would visit the little church before returning home. In the almost perfect silence of the church, they both lit penny candles, and the boy was directed by his mother to pray for various family intentions, but he ‘always made the same wish: that she would never go away again and [would] be with me forever’.1
McGahern’s affectionate and at times idyllic description of a young boy’s love for his dying mother, set against a background of cultural stagnation in rural Ireland of the 1950s, reaches its apogee in a ‘dream’ the dying mother shares with her young son: she dreamed she would see her boy ordained and their bond would then be elevated beyond the commonplace: I would become a priest. After the Ordination Mass I would place my freshly anointed hands in blessing on my mother’s head. We’d live in the priest’s house and she’d attend each morning Mass and take communion from my hands. When she died, I’d include her in all the Masses that I’d say until we were united in the joy of heaven, when time would cease as we were gathered into the mind of God.2
In this ‘dream’ the boy’s vocation to the priesthood was to be – for
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
both mother and son – the opportunity for a new life. McGahern’s Memoir captures the potential of faith and religious practice to create affective and spiritual havens in mid-twentieth century Ireland. Against the vagaries of an impoverished and traumatised state, an insular and uncouth rural society, there existed religious spaces where tenderness and creativity could breathe; spaces which resisted the casual violence, begrudgery, and buffoonery that roamed free in the land.
McGahern’s Memoir is also remarkable for his almost laconic descriptions of the clergy of that time as practitioners of physical violence. The ‘dream’ which offered McGahern and his mother the hope of a new life contrasts with the disturbing reality of clerical violence, exemplified in the visit of the canon to the local national school. The canon was typically seen carrying a small brown suitcase in which – it was supposed – he kept the holy oils for anointing the sick. On this particular visit to the school, the canon had come to punish a boy who had broken into the church poor box and had used the money from the box to buy sweets. Having secured a confession of guilt, the canon offered the unfortunate boy a choice: to go at once to the guards and submit himself to official justice or to take his punishment there and then from the canon. The boy elected to face the priest’s judgement. The canon opened his case and removed a length of electric flex. Before the assembled school the boy was scourged while his classmates looked on in ‘stricken fascination’.3 The scene’s uncanny and perverse drama is well described. The boy, hoping for a milder judgement from the cleric, receives a savage punishment. The brown case, generally supposed to carry the holy oils, instead conceals a rudimentary instrument of torture. Moving from the religious ideal to the particular, McGahern transforms the idea of the priest from a figure of union into a figure of extreme violence: holding the boy with one arm and wielding the length of flex with the other, the beating moving in a slow circle as the boy sought to drop to the floor and to move away from the wire cutting into his bare legs.4
The reaction of the school children, described as ‘stricken fascination’, is apt. In the minds of these young children, religion must have represented a great paradox: it is both security from violence and the ultimate legitimisation of violence. The guilty boy entrusted himself to the canon, hoping for a milder justice, and he was subjected instead to arbitrary and extreme violence. The mysterious contents of the canon’s brown case could have been the elements
Liam Kelly OFM
of sacramental healing; they revealed instead another side of religion. McGahern’s account of the incident evokes a recognisably Irish example of what René Girard famously described as violence and the sacred.5
A keen observer of mid-twentieth century rural life, and of the singular role of clergy in this social order, McGahern’s Memoir explores the contradictions at the heart of Irish religious culture in the early decades of the state. McGahern’s Memoir holds in tension two contradictory expressions of religion: religion provides McGahern with the means to vindicate his relationship with his mother and to acknowledge it as something wholesome and authentic; in the ‘dream’ their bond is effectively raised to the level of a sacrament. Yet religion is inseparable from the arbitrary and unforgiving violence of the canon. McGahern’s religion exists between the fault lines of holiness and the sacred. On the one hand religion gives shape to holiness and connects ordinary goodness – the goodness of the bond between mother and son – with transcendence. On the other hand, the sacred fixes the boundaries wherein violence is practiced and legitimised, so that it may be contained. In Ireland these two opposing and contradictory dynamics ran parallel to each other for most of the twentieth century and both were identified primarily with the role of clergy and religious. It is the relationship between these two expressions of religion that McGahern has pointed to, holiness and the sacred, that I will explore in this article.
McGahern’s views on the clergy are perceptive. He observes that in his youth:
it took considerable wealth to put a boy through Maynooth, and they looked and acted as if they came from a line of swaggering, confident men who dominated field and market and whose only culture was cunning, money and brute force. Though they could be violently generous and sentimental at times, in their hearts they despised their own people.6
How could such radically unstable men – men who could be both ‘violently generous and sentimental at times’ and yet despise their own people – represent and (in some sense) embody for others the value of the holy? How could they mediate the holy and, at the same time, perform and legitimise violence? McGahern’s assessment of the clergy is even-handed: ‘Though they were granted power, they were also figures of sacrifice, and, often cynically, they were seen to be men who had been sacrificed’.7 They were, in other words, belonging to the world of the sacred.8
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
Defining the sacred: models of desire
As my opening paragraphs suggest, my purpose here is to explore the priest as a sacred figure, within the recent historical context, sketched out by references above from McGahern’s Memoir. McGahern’s Memoir doesn’t immediately suggest the idea of the sacred; on first reading it will suggest, rather, something like Sigmund Freud’s famous Oedipal theory of desire. The boy and his mother achieve a remarkable, almost exclusive attachment. McGahern’s father, the local police sergeant – the boy’s natural rival for his mother’s affection – is an absent figure from the home. McGahern describes his father as distant, authoritarian, and secretive. The father cannot compete with his son in sensitivity or in expressing affection. Unequal in other respects, those qualities – which the boy shares with his mother – makes the boy a potential rival to his father. McGahern’s mother is certainly the centre of his childhood desires, and he freely admits in his Memoir that he was loath to share his mother’s affections with his own siblings. A longing for his mother and an ambivalence towards his father; so far, so Freudian. The motivation of the boy’s ‘dream’ to become a priest might easily suggest a natural strategy for winning his mother from his father, for that would be the end result of this ‘dream’. By becoming a priest within the deeply religious society of that time the boy could effectively displace his father in the affections of his mother. This religious displacement, sketched out in the ‘dream’, was not merely possible in mid-twentieth century Ireland, it was socially legitimate. According to Freud’s Oedipal theory, a boy will naturally take his father as a model; the boy desires to grow up and be like him. This natural fascination with the father is the root of the boy’s determination, expressed over time, to replace the father in every respect. According to Freud the boy notices that, with regard to his mother, his father blocks the way and so, imitation of paternal desire leads to Oedipal conflict. Grounding his interpretation of the Oedipus myth in the human sexual appetite, Freud reduces the mother to an object of sexual desire and the father to the status of primordial rival, fixing them in these determined roles, with respect to the son. This Oedipal triangle is radically reimagined some decades after Freud by René Girard. Girard affirms the triangular model of desire; there is always a model, a subject, and a desired object. However, the three points of triangular desire are not bound to Freud’s Oedipal structure of father/mother/son.9 As Mark R. Anspach notes: Freud’s Oedipus is forever bound to a primordial object, the mother, and a primordial rival, the father; later relationships perpetually
Liam Kelly OFM
re-enact, for better or worse, this original triangle. Girard unbinds Oedipus, cutting him loose from any particular object and endowing him with a primordial desire that, being abstract or metaphysical, is utterly open-ended, capable of remoulding itself in protean fashion to fit the mediator of the moment.10
Freud errs in grounding desire in the sex instinct: the so-called incestwish of the little boy, Girard contends, is pure fabrication and no more than an adult projection upon infancy. Girard, like Freud, was interested in myth and was convinced that myth both reveals and conceals important truths about human nature. Girard ‘unbinds’ Oedipal desire such that our desires are not determined or fixed by family position, nor are they grounded in a child’s libidinal drive. For Girard it is mimesis, the capacity to imitate, which always gives birth to desire. Very naturally, a boy may choose his father as a model of desire, but it is the choosing of a model that is significant, for Girard, not the model’s status as father/mother. That is why triangular desire can and is replicated continuously throughout a person’s life; new models continue to emerge, suggesting new objects of desire and it is mimesis, not familial structure or the sex instinct, that creates these new triangles.
Girard asserts that Freud saw ‘the mimetic path stretching out before him and deliberately turned aside’.11 Freud acknowledges the taking of a model (the father) and indicates that the boy’s desire leads inevitably to rivalry: ‘he would like to grow like and be like him, and take his place everywhere’.12 This is the essence of mimetic desire: to become like the model and to desire what the model desires. Freud – from Girard’s perspective – wilfully obscures this fundamental dynamic of desire by binding it, from the beginning, to sexual development and libidinal drives. In a sense it does not matter from whom desire is ‘borrowed’. What matters is that desire is always borrowed, always imitated; it is never simply innate or spontaneous.13 Girard grounds desire in an intuition (in the subject) that he/she lacks being; this sense of lack will naturally direct our attention towards the Other. The Other becomes the model, arousing desire by imitation:
Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, the object much surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being. It is not through words, therefore, but by the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object.14
Girard notes that ‘two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict’.15 As we tend to do in writing memoirs, McGahern returns to the home for some essential explanation; to trace the source of his life’s path. Girard would insist that the explanation is not buried in a mysterious and predetermined Oedipal conflict. Rather, it is in taking models and then pursuing their desires that we achieve the shape of our personality. As our models change throughout our lives, and new objects of desire capture our attention, new avenues mysteriously open up for us. If a boy chooses his father as a model, the dynamics are obvious. But in adulthood the taking of models is by no means straightforward or rational. In the ever-changing course of desire it is not always clear who is the model and who is the disciple; who is the original and who is the copy. Imitation begins with admiration, attraction, and gratification. Mimetic desire, at this stage, is good and productive. However, mimesis, working unseen, can by innumerable and undetectable imitated signs transform the model into a rival. Neither the subject nor the model anticipate this transformation, nor do either feel any responsibility for it. To borrow the words of Iris Murdoch, both subject and model are ‘removed from a state of guiltless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition’, such is the sway of mimesis in our lives.16 As both the subject and the model/rival reach out for the same desired object, mimesis will affect the sudden passage from admiration/gratification to pure antagonism. Both the subject and the model/rival will, henceforth appear to one another as an obstacle.
Violence and the sacred
Over the course of little more than a decade Girard’s mimetic theory developed from literary criticism into a scientific study of cultural anthropology. This move is achieved in Girard’s seminal work on culture, Violence and the Sacred. In this work, a remarkable survey of ethnological data and classical myth, Girard proclaims that ‘violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred’.17 Girard links the social function of religion, specifically, sacrifice,
Liam Kelly OFM
with the human predicament of mimetic violence; a violence that has no instinctual breaks, a violence immune to natural dominance hierarchies, as they occur in other animal species. Religion and myth in archaic societies are endlessly diverse; however, the sacrificial structure is unified and this, Girard asserts, points to the most vital need in every archaic social group: the need to survive our violence.
Girard’s theory of desire shifts our focus from Freud’s concentration on libidinal drives to the phenomenon of human rage. If menstrual blood, for example, has traditionally been regarded as impure and the subject of taboo, the taboo was not primarily based on sexuality but on blood. Girard notes that wherever violence threatens, ritual purity is present: When men are enjoying peace and security, blood is a rare sight. When violence is unloosed, however, blood appears everywhere –on the ground, underfoot, foaming in great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to the contagious nature of violence.18
According to Girard, it is the dread of mimetic, collective violence, of blood-letting, which produces the traditional social tensions associated with menstrual blood and the various laws and prohibitions attached to it. Central to Girard’s hypothesis is that violence is not impure because it is sometimes connected to sexuality, the opposite is true: ‘Sexuality is impure because it has to do with violence’.19 The most extreme forms of violence are never linked directly to sexuality because such extreme acts of violence are properly collective in nature. They involve the whole community in a release of terrifying rage. Sexuality can never achieve such collective force, and it is thus a secondary concern of humanity. For most of human history our chief anxiety has always been human violence. Raymund Schwager, agreeing with Girard, notes that the evidence from myth and ritual tells against Freud’s theory of repression:
Neither in literature nor in tribal religions is sexuality repressed; its fascinating power is there for all to see. Many myths are imbued with sexual representations. In many tribes orgiastic acts were part of religious rites; and it was not unusual for the transgression of the incest taboo, whose observance was usually subject to the strictest vigilance, to be actually prescribed within the framework of sacrificial celebrations.20
Archaic or ‘primitive’ societies lacked all forms of buffering institutions and were, for the greater part of human history, radically vulnerable to
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
mimetic violence. Mimesis could produce collective irruptions of ‘blind rage’ during which the group is vulnerable to complete collapse, even annihilation. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard offers us a troubling picture of our precultural ancestors: hyper-mimetic creatures, modelling and borrowing desires for scarce resources, repeatedly collapsing into cycles of mimetically driven violence. Lacking any form of cultural or institutional barrier which might serve to slow or to stem the tide of mimetic conflict, our remote ancestors lived within a nightmarish world of conflict. From this dystopian scene, Girard asserts, is born the institution of sacrifice, the sacred.
The scapegoat theory
Modern political theory, since Thomas Hobbes, has frequently posited an agonistic origin to societies. Along these lines the origins of our present social order can be explained by a ‘social contract’. In his political treatise Leviathan (1651), Hobbes accepts a theological presupposition in favour of the fundamental equality of all humans. Viewed as a social and political reality this fundamental equality is problematic. The natural equality of humans engenders an equality of hope, which inevitably leads to envy, rivalries, and conflicts. In order to avoid the dystopian ‘war of all against all’, Hobbes insists that humans elected to surrender some of their powers to a monarch, specifically the power of unlimited use of force. This very reasonable transfer of power guarantees the rule of one over the many, and at the same time protects all the subjects from ‘continuall feare, and the danger of violent death’, since by nature human life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.21 It is precisely the claim that reason (in the form of a social contract) delivers humans from violence that Girard resists. At the highest pitch of collective violence, escape comes not from reason but from violence itself, i.e., the appearance of a member of the group whose absolute expulsion will unite the whole group and will exhaust its collective rage: the scapegoat. Following Girard, Schwager argues that those who imagine violence can be so easily managed and trust that reason is the ideal organiser of human society are ‘already the victims of an abysmal irrationality’.22
What Girard proposes is that our hominid ancestors escaped from the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ by means of a war of all against one. This scapegoating mechanism (mechanism since it is an unconscious process and not the product of reason) delivers the archaic group in the throes of a mimetic crisis from certain destruction and by its constant repetition it becomes what
Liam Kelly OFM
we refer to as the institution of sacrifice. Girard asserts: The miracle of sacrifice is the formidable ‘economy’ of violence that it realises. It directs against a single victim the violence that, a moment before, menaced the entire community. This liberation appears all the more miraculous for intervening in extremis, at the very moment when all seems lost.23
According to Girard it is easier to choose a victim than a monarch; in other words, monarchy and all other social institutions emerge from sacrifice. Sacrifice is the original type of violence by which humanity learned to control the effects of its rage. The sacrificial violence by which the community is delivered from its accumulated antagonism is effective precisely because the community believe in the guilt of the victim. The fact that, in the ultimate paroxysm of collective rage, an arbitrary victim is identified and lynched is never recalled by the group. On the contrary, the victim is the subject of a double transference from the group. The victim will be held responsible both for the conflict that brought the group to the brink and for the miraculous deliverance by which the group’s peace is restored. Henceforth the victim will be remembered only as divine, or quasi divine. He or she will be transformed into a sacred figure. To serve this vital social function is the original purpose of religion. Religion ‘humanises violence, it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed’.24 To this end, society requires victims and sacrificers; and the sacrificers may also be ‘figures of sacrifice … men who had been sacrificed’.25
The twilight of the sacred Mimetic Theory offers an explanation for the origins of sacrifice and religion. When Violence and the Sacred first appeared it was heralded as the first ‘authentically atheistic theory of religion and the sacred’.26 Girard’s next major work, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, proved that mimetic theory was no simple deconstruction of religion, still less an authentically atheistic theory of the sacred.27 Nevertheless, Girard does provide a natural explanation for religion and its social utility. Schwager addresses this claim, drawing attention to the peculiar etymology of ‘sacred’. Both in Greek (krateros) and in Latin (sacer), the sacred signifies an object or a reality that is simultaneously cursed and blessed. According to Schwager,
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
ethnologists have never given an adequate account of why the sacred signifies that which is both repulsive and attractive, ugly and radiant. Rudolf Otto’s work, The Idea of the Holy (1917), explores the dual aspects of the sacred: numinous awe (tremendum) and alluring fascination (fascinosum) and asserts that this experience amounts to an a priori religious category.28 For Schwager, Girard is the first to arrive at a meaningful explanation for ‘the seemingly incomprehensible bond and fusion of the benevolent and the malevolent’.29 Schwager argues that this paradox at the heart of the sacred can be understood in the one, unifying element: the victim. The victim embodies both the total sum of the groups rivalries, conflicts, and fears, and the collective relief at an almost immediate restoration of peace, once the victim is lynched. When the crisis is over the community is aware that the victim, the original referent, is the cause of their greatest fears and the bringer of their salvation. In the context of scapegoating, the victim is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In light of Girard’s theory, McGahern’s description of the children’s ‘stricken fascination’, as they watch the canon dispense punishment, is apposite. At that moment the canon can be considered a sacred figure, using violence to create or restore social order. He is also, to quote McGahern again, ‘a figure of sacrifice’ and a man ‘who had been sacrificed’. Viewed from the perspective of mimetic theory the canon represents – for the community – a fearful and fascinating figure. He is both part of the community and permanently at a remove from the community; in a sense he has been sacrificed in order to maintain the boundaries by which the community manages violence.30 Accounts of clerical violence have in recent years become commonplace. These tend to be treated either in terms of particularly violent or sadistic individuals, the proverbial ‘bad apples’, or as evidence of an inherent violence in Catholicism or in religion in general. Mimetic theory allows a different perspective to emerge, one which treats violence thematically, as a human problem. In mimetic theory religion, understood as the sacred, is a fundamental element in the story of violence. But any move to scapegoat ‘religion’ or particular religious groups as inherently violent is itself a religious strategy; since it is yet another attempt to absolve one group (‘my group’) of violence by scapegoating or excluding another group. Considered from the perspective of mimetic theory, the present diminishment in the number of priests in Ireland and elsewhere may be explained, in part, by the rapid disappearance of their role as sacred figures. The virtual disappearance of figures like the canon may be accounted for, superficially,
Liam Kelly OFM
in terms of the steady emancipation of Irish society over several decades of economic growth. But what has happened in the Church and in society that has removed the priest as a sacred figure first from the centre, then to the margins, and finally, to history?
In a Furrow article exploring contemporary faith and the Church as institution, Fr Michael Conway cites the French Jesuit Joseph Moingt’s remark, ‘A society that no longer produces priests is a society that no longer desires to replicate itself on the model of its religious past’.31 Conway references Moingt in relation to his argument that the institutional atrophy that has characterised the Church in Ireland in recent decades is due to its attachment to a patriarchal worldview. However, Moingt’s remark might also suggest that society’s sacred economy is no longer managed by explicitly religious figures such as clergy. If this is so we might legitimately ask how does society now manage its violence? Who are now societies’ sacred figures? And what role is left to the priest who no longer functions to maintain societies’ sacred boundaries?
No longer functioning as a sacred figure in Irish society, the priest is still associated with the idea of the holy, and it is now possible to distinguish these two opposing concepts that have in recent history been confused and seen as almost identical. Indeed, we are experiencing for the first time a priesthood that is no longer required to involve itself in the sacred. Since society’s first and chief concern is with self-preservation and protection from violence, not the pursuit of holiness, the rapid disappearance of the de-sacralised priest from Irish society is not to be wondered at. Whatever regrets and disappointments we experience as Church, in relation to the changed status of the priest and religious today, we must surely celebrate this unexpected passage from identification with the sacred.
Returning to the holy
What role is left to the priest or religious, if they are no longer identified with the sacred? What is the identity of the priest or religious when they can no longer manifest that particular fascination produced by the sacred? Exiled from the sacred, they can now return to the holy. Allowing for the dominant role of the sacred in the recent history of the Church, there is also within religion a particular articulation of the holy, as McGahern’s Memoir indicates. God is holy and God bears a holy Name (Ex 3:1–6; Jos 24:19–20; Is 6:1–3; Ez 36:16–36). The theophany of Exodus 3:1–17, in which Moses encounters
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
the Living God in the burning bush, is an encounter altogether different from the ersatz transcendence of sacred power. The power of the sacred is a power to deliver us from violence by means of violence which, according to Girard, Christ refers to as Satan casting out Satan. It is the power to produce a radically unstable and divided social order or ‘kingdom’ (Mt 12:26). If the sacred has, indeed, the power of fascination, it is of a completely different kind to the power of the Holy One. Fundamentally, there is no violence in the holy. The sign of the burning bush, which is not consumed, is itself an eloquent witness to the particular form of God’s presence in creation; the presence of the holy neither consumes what is created, nor overwhelms it by any force, let alone expels it, or destroys it.
Schwager’s analysis of tremendum et fascinosum grounds this experience of dread and attraction in the sacred, remaining silent about the human experience of the holy. There is an experience – tremendum et fascinosum – that describes not the human experience of an ersatz transcendence, that which is merely sacred, but the human response to the mystery of the divine in creation. Human contact with that which is absolutely beyond all that is created, finite, and contingent, evokes the tremendum et fascinosum, a response beyond the categories of the purely rational. Indeed, the sacred is gradually revealed as a counterfeit of this true holiness, though superficially they can resemble one another. The mystery of the incarnation is, in the history of religion, a perfect example of tremendum et fascinosum, whereby the presence of God in creation evokes feelings of fear/dread and attraction, and is both terrible and alluring, yet completely void of violence. The element of terror, I suggest, is the implicit command to abandon violence as a means of creating social order. The ‘fear’ we feel in the presence of the holy is not a fear of violence; it is the fear of living without violence. It is, indeed, a holy fear.
A charming evocation of this peculiar phenomenon is captured in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. In chapter VII of Graham’s book, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, Mole and Rat go upstream to look for Portly, the baby otter. Arriving on the island and making their way into the interior, Mole begins to experience a sense of awe: ‘It was no panic terror – indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy – but it was an awe that smote him and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near.’32 Rat and Mole discovered ‘the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter’ Portly, nestled between the hooves of
Liam Kelly OFM
Pan, the pipes having only just fallen from Pan’s parted lips:
‘Rat!’ He found breath to whisper, shaking. Are you afraid?’
‘Afraid! Of Him. O, never, never! And yet – and yet – O, Mole, I am afraid! Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.33
The experience of the holy, as distinct from the sacred, requires our attention. The diminishment of the numbers of clergy and religious may tell us as much about how wider society is managing its relationship to violence as anything else. Theological debates about the nature of the priesthood and the prophetic value of religious life in the Church notwithstanding, the priest and religious today is finally loosed from any obligation to the sacred and the apparent irrelevancy of these vocations in society is, in some measure, due to this emancipation. It remains to be seen how the Church will call forth priests and religious to bear witness to the holy, now that their service to the sacred is ended.
Conclusion
The kind of violence which once produced ‘stricken fascination’ is now rightly revealed as violence, pure and simple, having lost all its sacred power. McGahern’s Memoir reveals this sacred violence as something terrifying and fascinating, and he describes something about violence that René Girard has intuited and explored systematically. From the perspective of mimetic theory, violence is fundamentally a human problem and must be treated thematically. Religion understood as the sacred is a foundational element in the story of violence. Religion as an institution has functioned to protect society from violence by sanctioning a ‘legitimate’ violence. The instinct to scapegoat ‘religion’ or particular religious groups as inherently violent can be viewed as a characteristically religious approach to violence. It represents a human anxiety about violence and the human temptation to manage or control violence by identifying it with some alien individual or group. If religion/religious groups are now potentially the objects of sacrifice, where, or to whom, has the power to sacrifice migrated?
If, as mimetic theory asserts, violence is a human problem and – like mimetic desire itself – it migrates rather than disappears or dissolves, we are left with an essential question. Where now are our sacred boundaries, and which individuals and groups stand guard over these boundaries today? To what extent, for example, as has violence migrated to the online forum? Can
The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy
the phenomena of online cancellations and so-called ‘twitterstorms’ produce something like that ‘stricken fascination’ that McGahern remembered from his childhood? The sacred violence associated with clerics and religious has, thankfully, been exposed as violence pure and simple. It has no mystique. However, if Girard is correct, violence, like the poor, is with us always (Mt 26: 11). Our violence continues to dominate us even – and especially – as we imagine we have gained mastery over it.
Dr Liam Kelly OFM lectures in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.
(Notes)
1 John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber & Faber, 2005) p. 75.
2 McGahern, Memoir, pp. 62–63.
3 McGahern, Memoir, p. 81.
4 McGahern, Memoir, p. 81.
5 René Girard (1923–2015), French-American literary critic and cultural theorist. Girard’s ideas about the nature of desire, violence, and religion are known as mimetic theory.
6 John McGahern, ‘The Church and its Spire’, in Love of the World: Essays by John McGahern, ed by Stanley Van Der Ziel (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 139.
7 McGahern, ‘The Church and its Spire’, pp. 142–143.
8 The term ‘sacred’ is a technical term in Girard’s mimetic theory. It refers to those forces whose dominance over humanity increases, or seems to increase, in proportion to our efforts to control them. In primitive societies natural phenomena such as tempests, forest fires, floods, plagues etc., could be classified as ‘sacred’. Outranking these, Girard insists, is human violence, which is understood (like the other phenomena cited above) to be something exterior to human nature. Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 34. In mimetic theory the ‘sacred’ refers to the structure, dynamics, and ends of human violence. It is a characteristic of religion but it not associated with holiness or transcendence.
9 Cf. René Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, ed by Mark R. Anspach (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004).
10 Girard, Oedipus Unbound, xxxvii.
11 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 193.
12 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 194.
13 The belief that desires are innate or spontaneous, and not borrowed (a common trope in literature), Girard refers to as ‘the romantic lie’. Girard develops this theory in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976).
14 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 164.
15 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 164.
16 Cf. Iris Murdoch, The Bell (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 160. Referring to the problem of moral instability, the complete quote reads: ‘Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guiltless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection’.
17 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 34.
18 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 36.
19 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 37.
20 Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible, trans. by Maria L. Assad (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000), p. 4.
21 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: University Press, 1991).
22 Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? p. 1.
23 René Girard, Sacrifice, trans. by Matthew Pattillo and David Dawson (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2011), p. 27.
24 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 152.
25 McGahern, ‘The Church and its Spire’.
26 G. H. de Radkowski, cited in Michael Kirwan, Girard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), p. 27.
27 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, trans. by Stephen Bann and Michael Metter (California: Stanford University Press, 1987).
28 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational factor in the Idea of the Divine and its relation to the Rational, trans. by John W. Harvey (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959).
29 Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, p. 20.
30 From the perspective of mimetic theory other figures in mid-twentieth century Irish society such as school teachers, doctors, etc., could become associated with sacred violence, but the specific character of the clergy and religious as religious figures made them particularly fitted for this role.
31 Michael Conway, ‘Faith-life, Church, and Institution’, The Furrow, 68:9 (September 2017), p. 467.
32 Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows (London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1978), p. 165.
33 Graham, The Wind in the Willows, p. 167.
Four Poems
Mary O’Donnell
The Dogs of Mariupol
They missed the last train out of town when their owners fled with children, a favourite toy, a backpack. Empty-bellied now, a scrawn of rib and hip as their skin loosens, they wander bewildered through the city.
Even the ground is angry, their paws slit by broken streets, where they smell necrotic flesh. No-one will call out, kindly urge them to lie at evening by the flickering hearth as their owners sip coffee. Nobody tells them what to do.
Wounded trees in the park whisper warnings to the dogs about this towering darkness. At night, they curl tightly in a chill of blown brickwork. Their nostrils quiver, invaded by metallic traceries, blood; their soft ears fill with creeping silence from the bombed hospital nearby.
In sleep, they tremble, these dogs who have missed the train.
Mary O’Donnell
Common Time in April
He persuades me to try the duet: Vaňhal’s Sonata in B Flat Major for Clarinet and Piano. I warn of my sight-reading, the kind that once drew bruised knuckles when the teacher whacked down with her wooden pointer. Somehow this evening isn’t one for practice, early April has unloosed the music from behind my eyes, it travels straight to the ear, where a fire is burning. All I can hear is symphonic, fern-greens and hellebore yellows, or the pert tail of a Pied Wagtail juddering like a bow where it plays the grass in perfect pitch as sun sets, moon rises.
An Unsuccessful Day
Las Ramblas, 18 August 2017
People rake the air for the perfect Instagram shot of the Sagrada Família. We prowl its circumference, our phones point briefly like weapons at the spires. Too hot, I flee to wait at a corner café, watch sluggish traffic, the undressed sweep of passers-by, their panting dogs.
Gone from me an hour or so, you are tunnelling deep into side streets. A coffee machine shrieks, and here at the top of Las Ramblas, I dawdle over churros and chocolate as my body cools.
In three days’ time, this place will pall with broken bodies, that carmine of painters’ blood on an afternoon that duped us all.
Ahead, three days of mourning on Sky News, CNN, Al Jazeera. But I don’t yet know this. Time rewinds itself and there you are, weaving through in tilted hat, blue linen, your brown toes dusted by the day.
You sit to drink chilled water, watch in silence as I settle things three days into the future: that white van, the face of Moussa Oukabir, what’s possible and lethal, after we have left.
Air Strike, Khan Younis ‘For all our sakes, for our planet’s sake, be still.’ (Jean O’Brien)
On hearing the news of what happened, I lay down on the ground outside the back door.
It seemed right to curl tight as a bean, let afternoon sunshine fondle my head, my hair, while the earth from beneath held fast to the quake in my bones, soaked up the tears I could not shed, pressed tight to my cheeks
Mary O’Donnell
on the hard tiled patio. The worse it is, the less one weeps. I could not walk or speak, but lay down with closed eyes to think of the children whose heads were blown off.
Mary O’Donnell is a poet, novelist and short-story writer and a longstanding member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists. She has published eight collections of poetry, including Unlegendary Heroes (1998), Those April Fevers (2015), and Massacre of the Birds (2021). Her poetry is published in Brazilian Portuguese by Arte y Lettras as Onde Estão os Pássaros (2023). New fiction and poetry are forthcoming in 2025.
Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life
Tom O’Reilly
In the months before he died in November 2023, Terence (Terry) O’Reilly wrote some notes reflecting on his lifetime of scholarly work, much of which was spent as Professor of Spanish in University College Cork. ‘The genre I cultivated in my writing’, he wrote, ‘was the academic essay, an artform I saw as neglected but capable of beauty. I wrote impersonally and for others, but at a deeper level I was writing for myself; and I was the main beneficiary of what I learned. Beneath my research, I now see, lay a personal quest whose features I can trace back to childhood: an interest in meditation (I was brought up in a praying community); a longing for wholeness and wisdom; a delight in love and friendship; and a desire to write that I felt long before I had anything to write about’.
No one who knew Terry would be surprised to find him, perspicacious as ever, drawing together the motives behind his academic research and his personal pursuit of wisdom and love. The intimate connection between the two was apparent even as early as 1972, when he was awarded a PhD for his thesis on the literature of meditation in early sixteenth-century Castile and Aragon. He had come to the subject through his devotion to St Francis de Sales, whose writings had helped him in the dark days after his father’s death. He wanted to investigate the influence of Spanish meditation manuals on St Francis’s Introduction à la vie dévote, but later it was the manuals themselves that became his main interest. And so the path of his scholarly career was set.
Tom O’Reilly
Laying the foundations
Terry O’Reilly was born in Surrey, London, in 1947 to Michael O’Reilly, who hailed from north Cork, and Elizabeth Donlea, who was born and reared in Bangalore, India, and educated in Belgium and England. Elizabeth’s family originally came from Co. Clare. For some of Terry’s childhood, the family lived on the grounds of St Wilfrid’s School in Crawley, Surrey, where his father was headmaster, and during these years he spent many lengthy summer holidays with his relatives in Cork.
It was in Nottingham, however, that the foundations of Terry’s adult life, both academic and personal, were laid. He studied modern languages in the University of Nottingham, graduating in 1969 with a BA Honours degree in Spanish and French. His subsequent work on the Spanish manuals brought him into the larger study field of Spanish Golden Age literature (c. 1470–1700), in which he garnered great acclaim, both as a scholar and as a colleague and mentor. In an appreciation that appeared in a Festschrift issue of The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies in 2009, the editors noted that the same virtues displayed in his academic work were also evident in his personal dealings:
Reviewers of Terry’s work have been unanimous in their praise, finding his prose ‘graceful’; his arguments ‘judicious’; his approach ‘sensitive’ and ‘balanced’; his conclusions ‘illuminating’ but ‘unpretentious’; and his analyses all the more eloquent when ‘untangling the threads of controversy’. But these attributes are not restricted to his writing. Generations of doctoral candidates, seminar speakers and conference audiences will recognise in this profile the subtle, challenging and always generous interlocutor whose manner of speaking surpasses other normal utterances in terms of quiet authority, efficacy and total credibility. If Golden Age studies are experiencing a revival in these shores this is due in no small part to Terry’s tireless efforts behind the scenes.1
It was in Nottingham too that Terry met Jennifer Williams, who was herself to become an esteemed scholar in early medieval history and art, especially the writings of Bede, the Insular gospel books, and Anglo-Saxon art. Terry and Jennifer got married in 1968, while Terry was still an undergraduate. They shared their academic lives and intellectual interests over the decades that followed, first going from Nottingham to St Andrew’s in Edinburgh in 1973, where Terry had been offered a fellowship in the Spanish department.
Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life
Jennifer also taught at St Andrew’s until 1975, when the O’Reilly’s moved to Cork where Terry was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Hispanic Studies in University College Cork. Jennifer joined the Department of Medieval History, UCC, in that same year, and remained there until her retirement in 2008. Cork, then, was where they settled definitively and where they raised their family. They had two sons, Michael and Tom.
The Spanish Golden Age
In UCC Terry was tasked with devising courses in Golden Age Spanish literature. In his student days, the Golden Age had a privileged position in many universities, but that changed in the final two decades of the last century, when new programmes brought other areas of Hispanic Studies to the fore. Terry, however, was determined to keep the subject alive. The quality of his own research and teaching contributed greatly to his success in this, a fact that was noted in an appreciation penned shortly after his death: Terry’s style in teaching and giving seminar papers was, like his writing, remarkable for its limpid clarity: ideas were presented in beautifully articulated sequence, as if obeying an innate, inevitable order.2
His determination to sustain morale and foster research in Golden Age studies led him also to convene for two decades or so a Golden Age panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland (AHGBI). In the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies appreciation, the editors noted that Terry’s panel had become ‘the unofficial flagship of our discipline’.3
In 2002 Terry wrote a short introduction to Golden Age studies for undergraduates, and in 2006 he and Stephen Boyd founded a Golden Age Research Symposium that met every two years and brought together researchers from throughout these islands. This symposium ‘turned UCC into a university of reference in Golden Age Studies internationally and effectively contributed to generating a more sustained interest in this area of study’.4
Several Golden Age writers that Terry covered in his UCC courses took a particular hold on him. One of these was the sixteenth-century Augustinian friar Fray Luis de León. Terry taught a course on Fray Luis’s poetry and wrote a series of commentaries on the imagery, hidden structures, and themes of his odes. Another was the hugely influential Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, on whose masterpieces, the Soledades and the Polifemo,
Tom O’Reilly
Terry wrote a number of essays. And then, of course, there was St John of the Cross. Terry’s fascination with St John’s use of human love to evoke the theme of divine love took his research and writing in two directions. Firstly, it made him deeply interested in the Song of Songs and its reception in sixteenth-century Spain. The quest for commentaries on it by St John’s contemporaries led Terry to collections of rare books in Dublin, Cambridge, London, Madrid, Burgos, and Rome, and this sparked a more general interest in St John’s knowledge and use of the Bible. He was guided in that pursuit by the theologian and eminent historian of the early medieval Byzantine world George Every.5 And secondly, Terry was led to study how St John used the traditions of Spanish love poetry. In this enquiry he was influenced by the approach of Alexander Parker, who went to Cork in the late 1970s to lecture on courtly love and mysticism. When Parker told Terry that he was going blind and could not finish the book from which the lecture was drawn, Terry offered to help him prepare it for publication. The book came out in 1985.6 This experience of working with a great scholar taught him much.
St Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits
During Terry’s time at St Andrew’s, Edinburgh, three of the chapters in his doctoral thesis, ‘The Literature of Spiritual Exercises in Spain, 1500–1559’, appeared as articles in Barcelona and Rome. Two of them were about the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, the most enigmatic of the manuals he had studied. Terry had become aware, when writing these articles, of unanswered questions concerning the origins and early interpretation of the Exercises, and he resolved to investigate them further. The result was a research project that kept him busy for years. It led him to libraries, seminars, and conferences in Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, and brought him into contact with other scholars in the field. One such scholar was Joseph Veale SJ (1921–2002), with whom he formed a deep friendship. While living in Milltown Park over many years, Joe Veale devoted himself to researching ever more deeply the texts and traditions that left their mark on the Spiritual Exercises, as well as the history of how this foundational document had been received over the ages in the Society of Jesus.7 These issues were close to Terry’s mind and heart too.
In 2007, five years after Joe Veale died, the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology offered Terry the Veale Chair of Spirituality, a one-year appointment with a remit to offer some lectures on the Spiritual Exercises. In
Terence
O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life
his article on ‘Joseph Veale and the History of the Spiritual Exercises’, Terry noted the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Joe Veale, and indeed on the Jesuits at large. This council called on all religious orders to return to the sources and spirit of their founders.8 Before the Council, Jesuits had tended to view the Exercises as predominantly ascetical, even anti-mystical, concerned mainly with achieving self-mastery, with reason and willpower to the fore. Gradually, through study of and reflection on the foundational documents as well as Ignatius’s letters and personal writings, more emphasis was put on God’s action in the soul, a more contemplative – even mystical – approach to the Exercises. Terry’s own work on this document and on early Jesuit history contributed to this significant shift. As well as writing extensively on the literary sources that influenced the composition of the Exercises, he wrote many articles that helped to situate St Ignatius and the Society of Jesus in their relationship with other reform movements of the time, such as illuminism, Erasmianism, and Lutheranism. These articles were published in a wide range of journals, including the Heythrop Journal, the Journal of Theological Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Milltown Studies. Just two years before his death, they were gathered together for publication in The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception, 9 in time to mark the fifth centenary of the year (1521) when the first version of the Exercises was composed. Reviewing this book in Studies in 2022, Timothy O’Brien SJ said of Terry’s contribution to Jesuit studies: Throughout his career, O’Reilly has been a pioneer. Decades before a more general surge in academic interest in the Society of Jesus, especially among researchers who were not themselves members of the order, he was engaged in serious and rigorous study of Jesuit history and sources. As a scholar of early modern Spanish literature, O’Reilly has always brought to the Society’s history a deep knowledge of the Iberian cultures that shaped the order’s founder, Ignatius Loyola, and his literary output. (…) His command of the relevant literature allows him to shed light on the patristic and medieval antecedents that shaped Ignatius’s spiritual culture. At the same time, he acknowledges the limits of his endeavor, cautioning other scholars against concluding that they can precisely identify the origins of Ignatius’s thought on the basis of current literary research.10
Tom O’Reilly
Jennifer O’Reilly
In a text message written shortly before his death, Terry listed some of the lifelong friends that had helped him in his work. ‘And of course,’ he finished his text, ‘Jennifer … without whom nothing’. Both as life partner and as a fellow scholar who understood the value of tracing the web of influences on Christian texts and art, Jennifer was indispensable to Terry. When she died in 2016, an obituary published in The Irish Times described her as ‘a gifted university teacher and a renowned authority on the Book of Kells and similar treasures of antiquity’. It went on:
In her long and distinguished career, she made substantial and ground-breaking contributions in the fields of history, theology, art history and manuscript studies. In a moving eulogy, her great friend Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, of Glenstal Abbey, compared her untimely and unexpected death to ‘watching a library burn’.11
Upon receiving his diagnosis of motor-neurone disease (MND) in early 2017, Terry devised an ambitious plan of work that would occupy him until he could no longer continue. Jennifer, when she died, had left behind three unfinished articles that had been promised for publication.12 Terry’s plan began with the completion of this work, a substantial task that would demand considerable care and thought.
While working on these texts, and keen to secure Jennifer’s scholarly legacy, Terry brought together and led a committee that would administrate ‘The Memorial Lecture in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly’, which was established in 2017 by the School of History, UCC, and runs to this day. Designed to ensure longevity of the series, each year a distinguished scholar is invited to speak on either the writings of Bede or medieval iconography, two subjects that Jennifer explored in her research and teaching. The first volume of the lecture series (2017–2024) will be published in 2025 by Cork University Press.
Following the inaugural Memorial Lecture in 2017, Terry appointed an editorial team to work with him on a large project through which Jennifer’s legacy could be assured. Her previously published essays in three areas of medieval studies – the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona, the early lives of Thomas Becket, and the iconography of the gospel books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England – were to be brought together and republished in three volumes. In these three areas Jennifer had explored the connections between historical
Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life
texts, artistic images, and biblical exegesis. Taken together, these essays (comprising more than 500,000 words and 200 colour images) would highlight her distinctive approach to historical sources and her substantial contribution to our understanding of Britain and Ireland in the middle ages. All three volumes were published by Routledge in 2019.13
Last works
With this work for Jennifer complete, and finding it increasingly difficult to type, Terry turned to his own publication projects. First there was the volume of essays, already mentioned, which explored the historical, theological, and literary contexts of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.14 This was followed by a collection of six new and nineteen previously published essays on Renaissance humanism and religion in the spiritual writing of sixteenthcentury Spain.15
Thankful that he had been given the time to produce these two books, the last of the publications in his initial plan, Terry decided to start a ‘new’ project: a translation of the wisdom sayings of St John of the Cross, to which he then added a translation of a selection of the saint’s poems.16 Fr Senan Furlong OSB, in his Homily at Terry’s Requiem Mass, described this undertaking as follows:
This task, begun as an undergraduate, was one he soon realised would take a lifetime to complete and involve not just research but also profound spiritual engagement. Despite his other commitments, these wisdom sayings remained in the background gradually maturing and ripening. Revisiting the task in the workshop of suffering, he serenely crafted these short texts so that they reflect as much of himself as they do of St John of the Cross.
In his final months, Terry continued to work, firstly writing three small yet complex texts that were privately published – a memoir of his parents, some of his own poetry, and a collection of his journal entries. And finally, though he was reduced by now to writing just a few sentences at a time by emails and eventually by text messages, he wrote a reflection on his scholarly interests, which he titled My Work, and a short essay about a drawing of the Cross by St John of the Cross that had intrigued him throughout his life. A scholar to the last.
Bienaventurado el que, dejado aparte su gusto e inclinación, mira las cosas en razón y justicia para hacerlas.
Blessed is the person who leaving aside their own pleasure and inclination considers things with reason and justice in order to carry them out.
(St John of the Cross, Wisdom Saying # 44)17
Tom O’Reilly, founder of Prosperity Education Cambridge, is an independent publisher of educational resources.
(Notes)
1 Barry Taylor and Isabel Torres, ‘Professor Terence O’Reilly: An Appreciation’, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 86:6 (2009), pp. 725–726.
2 ‘An appreciation for Terence O’Reilly’, Department of Hispanic Studies, University College Cork, 16 November 2023.
3 Taylor and Torres, ‘Appreciation’.
4 ‘Appreciation’, Department of Hispanic Studies, UCC.
5 Terry had met George Every through the latter’s friendship with Bernard Hamilton, Professor of Crusading History, University of Nottingham.
6 A.A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature (1480–1680), ed by Terence O’Reilly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985).
7 See especially Joseph Veale, Manifold Gifts (Oxford: Way Books, 2006).
8 Published in Terence O’Reilly, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021), pp. 213–226.
9 O’Reilly, Spiritual Exercises.
10 Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 111:441, pp. 100–101.
11 Obituary: ‘Renowned academic authority on the Book of Kells’, The Irish Times, 5 March 2016.
12 These were ‘St Paul and the sign of Jonah. Theology and Scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’ (Jarrow Lecture, 2014; published 2017); ‘Bede and Monothelitism’ in Cities, Saints and Communities in Early Medieval Europe, ed by Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw (Brepols, 2020); and ‘Bede and the Dating of Easter’ (revised and extended from conference papers given in Oxford, 2007, and Durham, 2015).
13 These are History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket, ed by Diarmuid Scully and Máirín MacCarron (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019); Early Medieval Text and Image 1: The Insular Gospel Books, ed by Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019); and Early Medieval Text and Image 2: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art, ed by Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019).
14 O’Reilly, Spiritual Exercises
15 Terence O’Reilly, Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain: John of the Cross, Francisco de Aldana, Luis de León, ed by Stephen Boyd (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2022)
16 Terence O’Reilly (trans.), Saint John of the Cross: Wisdom Sayings and Saint John of the Cross: Selected Poems (Cambridge: Iona, 2021).
17 O’Reilly, Wisdom Sayings, p. 22.
Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism
Patrick Riordan SJ
My 2023 book, Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good, was written to challenge some misrepresentations by integralists and others of the Catholic Church’s stance in relation to politics.1 Integralism has become such a major topic in recent Catholic debates in theology that Oxford University Press commissioned Kevin Vallier to write a book explaining the origins of the movement, its principal tenets, and the major lines of argument for and against it. This book, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, appeared in 2023.2 Put succinctly, integralism is the rejection of any complete separation between the life of faith and the secular world of politics and economics. From its perspective, all created reality, including the constructions of human cultures, should be subject to the Lord of History, the Incarnate Word of God. Integralists envision a range of cases, depending on the social, political, and historical context. These vary according to the extent to which civil authorities in a state will accept a mandate from the Church to advance the Church’s mission regarding salvation.
It is accepted that a state has responsibility for the common good of its society. At the same time, the Catholic Church has a God-given responsibility to direct people to their supernatural good. The state’s natural common good might be instrumental to the supernatural, transcendent common good of salvation. But this is the domain of responsibility of the Church, and so church authorities are supposed to have an indirect sovereignty to mandate state action directed towards the supernatural good, assuming that this is not detrimental either to the natural or to the supernatural common goods.3
Vallier’s analysis of the movement identifies two principal figures. Thomas Pink of King’s College London is said to be its main theoretician, in that he offers a particular interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Declaration on Religious Liberty’ and its accommodation with the contemporary world. Adrian Vermeule of Harvard University’s law school is identified as the
Patrick Riordan SJ
main strategist of the movement. The latter role is carried out in frequent contributions to mid-level journals such as First Things, American Affairs, and The Atlantic, as well as on social media. These forays into polemic embrace positions that identify friends and enemies and recommend tactics for further engagement. Principal among the targeted enemies is the liberal establishment, liberal in this context understood mainly in the American sense as socially progressive. For instance, Patrick Deneen’s analysis of ‘why liberalism failed’, in a 2018 book of that name, is endorsed by Vermeule in a very positive review.4 At the same time, liberalism’s excesses are further exposed in a series of popular articles that uncover the quasi-religious and liturgical dynamics of progressive movements. Behind the popular and polemical writings are Vermeule’s scholarly publications. He is the principal theorist of ‘the administrative state’, showing how not only the enactments of the legislature but also the requirements of administration formulated as regulations contribute to the making of law.5 As a constitutional lawyer, he challenges the dominant positions in American constitutional law to advocate ‘common good constitutionalism’, the title of his 2022 book.6 Vermeule’s central concern in this book is to recover what he calls the classical legal tradition. Insofar as he identifies this tradition with that of Catholic teaching, he goes beyond the obvious similarities, as for example in the use of the term ‘common good’, to claim more than the evidence allows. As the label suggests, he draws on the heritage of reflection on common good as found in Catholic teaching to develop his position, which also functions as a source for his polemical engagement.
Vallier pairs Pink and Vermeule as theorist and strategist, but there is a noticeable difference between these two authors. Thomas Pink suggests a different reading of church texts and provides an alternative to the dominant position in contemporary Catholic thought. He argues in favour of his own interpretation, but there is no implication that adherence to his version is necessary for fidelity to the magisterium. With Vermeule the situation is somewhat different. Commentators read Vermeule as offering the Catholic position on faith and politics, and Vermeule does little to dissociate himself from this reading.
In fact, Vermeule does not see himself as offering Catholics an alternative reading of the magisterial tradition, much as Pink does, but seems to assume that faithful Catholics should accept his stance. His account of the common good seems at first glance to be consistent with what the magisterium says
about it, but on closer examination it turns out that he has not taken on board the major development by Pope John XXIII that was adopted by the Second Vatican Council. So, in his case, unlike Pink’s, it is not a matter of offering a different interpretation of what the Church teaches, presupposing acceptance of the teaching. Actually, Vermeule proposes a position that is inconsistent with the magisterial statements. Of course, in these relevant matters of Catholic Social Teaching, it is not a matter of defined doctrine, binding on the faithful. That is not the issue. The issue instead is who figures in public discourse as a representative or spokesperson for the Church’s position on political and social matters. The incompatibility of his stance with that of the magisterium should disqualify Vermeule from the role of spokesman for the Catholic church.
A central concern of Vermeule’s is to recover what he calls the classical legal tradition. This still surviving tradition is overlooked in the polarised debates within constitutional law. This project seems worthwhile, and Vermeule makes a good case, drawing on authors such as Giovanni Botero.7 Insofar as he identifies this tradition with that of Catholic teaching, he goes beyond what the evidence warrants, as for example in the use of the term ‘common good’.
Development of church teaching on the common good
The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World Today (Gaudium et Spes) develops the Church’s self-understanding of her relationship with the political order and civil authorities in three significant steps.8 The first is the adoption of a clearly restricted view of the political common good, the second is a radical revision of the order of priorities for states, and the third is a clear demarcation of mutual autonomy of Church and state.
On first reading, its use of the traditional concept of the common good might give the impression of consistency with previous teaching, but in fact the council, following earlier usage by Pope John XXIII, uses the inherited language in a daring new way. Writing of the common good as ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily’,9 it shifts the focus from ultimate ends to means and conditions. It clearly ranks political structures and activities along with the many other conditions that enable individuals and groups to pursue their fulfilment. Political common goods are among the
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conditions for flourishing but are not ultimate ends nor constituent elements of the ultimate fulfilment offered by God to the faithful.
Second, the Church’s concept of political community is more encompassing than the concept of state, since it usually includes what is called civil society and the economy. But to the extent that a political community in this wide sense is capable of acting, it will have to rely on the typical structures of lawmaking and adjudication and executive power that we commonly associate with the state. The council is radical also in identifying the priorities of the state. The social order, including the political, the legal, is to be at the service of human persons, whose dignity requires adequate means and conditions. So, the political belongs to the domain of the conditions, means, and instruments.
At the same time, however, there is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of human persons, who stand above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable. … The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons …’10
Fulfilment is the responsibility of individuals and groups; civic authorities do not have responsibility for determining and specifying citizens’ ultimate goals, but they are obliged to care for the provision of relevant conditions.11
Third, the recognition of the autonomy of the secular is new for the Church, but the ends appropriate to the state function within the theological perspective not as ultimate but as conditions for more ultimate ends of both individuals and groups.
The church, by reason of her role and competence, is not identified with any political community nor is it tied to any political system.
… The political community and the church are autonomous and independent of each other in their own fields. They are both at the service of the personal and social vocation of the same individuals, though under different titles.12
The autonomy of the political community and its independence of religious authority are acknowledged in the context of affirming the Church’s own independence and autonomy.
Vermeule on the common good
When Adrian Vermeule asserts that ‘the master principle of our public
law should be the classical principle that all officials have a duty and corresponding authority to promote the common good …’,13 we may wonder what concept of common good he has in mind. Is it a set of conditions, or is it a conception of flourishing or fulfilment? Both themes are reflected in the formulation of the sentence. There is a tension between recovery of a classical legal philosophy, one of the purposes of his book, and adherence to the Church’s stance.
It seems that his embrace of the classical legal tradition colours his reading of the Catholic position. He claims that according to classical theory, the flourishing of the community in a well-ordered life is the ultimate, genuinely common good of politics. The aim is not a private happiness of individuals or the happiness of family life for which the civil peace, stability, and justice might be necessary. ‘Rather the highest felicity in the temporal sphere is itself the common life of the well-ordered community, which includes those other foundational goods but transcends them as well’.14
This is a classical position, heavily influenced by Aristotle’s assertion that as cooperation in politics is the highest form of human community, so the good to be pursued in politics is the highest good in common available to humankind.15 The common good of the polis is the only one of the many goods in common striven for in the various kinds of cooperation, that is labelled with the definite article, THE common good. This has influenced subsequent usage, despite the fact that in the Christian era no one could have held the political good to be the highest possible good, since the prospect of life with God in heaven must appear preferable and more ultimate.
The classical position as articulated by Vermeule is incompatible with the Church’s position as sketched above. Vermeule’s formulation is so clear that a reader might suspect that the author deliberately distances the position advocated from that of the Church. It denies what the council explicitly affirms. Where the council writes of the free responsibility of citizens (individuals and groups) to pursue their fulfilment, along with the duty of civil authorities to provide the conditions to facilitate citizens’ free pursuit, Vermeule denies that the public realm merely supplies the conditions of peace, justice, and stability; instead he affirms that the common life of the well-ordered community is a common good that transcends and includes the goods of individuals and families.
Vermeule does seem aware of a difficulty in the account of the relation of the civil order to ultimate goals. He draws on the work of Charles de
Patrick Riordan SJ
Koninck to remark that ‘on the classical account, the state is merely one part of the larger political community, and the good of the community is itself the good for individuals’.16 There are two critical points in this remark, the first concerning the wider political community, and the second concerning the priority of individual and communal goods.
On the first point, it is true that the Church traditionally considers the ‘political community’ as embracing more than simply the state; society, civil society, the economy, families and intermediate organisations are included in the larger concept. However, where once formerly church pronouncements concerning the ‘political community’ would always have assumed (as did perhaps de Koninck in 1943) that the political community was unified (perhaps as nation, ethnic group, with a common language and shared history), the experience motivating Vatican II’s statements is of plurality and possibly conflict.17 The pluralist nature of modern societies and the complexity of the juridical-political order appropriate to them explains further the reasons for the Church’s redefinition of common goods as the conditions for flourishing, replacing the former assumption that there was agreement on the flourishing of the whole as a shared end.
This first point explored the relationship between the state and the wider political community. The second point is to note the ambiguity in Vermeule’s formulation of the relationship between individuals’ goods and the community’s good, ‘the good of the community is itself the good for individuals’.18 This could be read in two different ways. It could mean that the political community sets for itself the goal of serving and facilitating the well-being of individuals, or it could mean that individuals’ goods are automatically realised when the community as a whole is flourishing. The priority is different; in the former individuals’ goods have priority, and in the latter the community’s good has priority. Which is intended by Vermeule? In his continuing explanation he seems to embrace the latter. He writes: ‘human flourishing, including the flourishing of individuals, is itself essentially, not merely contingently, dependent upon the flourishing of the political communities (including ruling authorities) within which humans are always born, found, and embedded’.19 The language here conveys something other than the council’s emphasis on conditions that must be well met by good functioning institutions if individuals and groups are to flourish.
This reading is confirmed when Vermeule addresses another difficulty:
how the temporal good of the (wider) political community relates to humans’ supernatural end, the eternal good of life in God. Vermeule is clear that his reflections concern only the temporal goods, but his reliance on the work of Walter Farrell OP brings with it a particular interpretation of those temporal goods. Farrell in his doctoral dissertation writes of the ‘secondary ends of natural or temporal happiness, which are a means to the supernatural final ends’.20 Vermeule accepts as his task to limit his ‘account to the secondary ends of the political community: its temporal felicity’. What is at stake here is how this ‘temporal felicity’ is to be understood. According to Vermeule’s various formulations, it is ‘unitary (“one in number”) and capable of being shared without being diminished’; it is ‘the happiness or flourishing of the community’; it is ‘the indivisible good of a community ordered to justice, belonging jointly to all and severally to each’.21 It seems undeniable that Vermeule posits a distinct state of affairs as a common good for the political community.
His formulations above suggest that there is a unique, singular common good. He does not resolve the tension between these assertions and his acceptance of a long list of goods.22 In an endnote he even denies that there might be ‘a tension between focusing on the structural preconditions of justice and focusing on the legitimate ends of government’, explaining that ‘the two formulations just address different and compatible aspects or phases of the same problem’.23
Common good: end-state or conditions for functioning?
In summary we can note the divergence between Vermeule’s account of the classical legal position and the Church’s current understanding of these matters. Where Gaudium et Spes makes the set of conditions for individuals and groups to attain their fulfilment the common good for political and social actors, Vermeule sees the flourishing of the community as the unique and singular common good, for which he allows the need for means and conditions. Again, we can note how ambiguous the language is such that the contrast between the two strands might be weakened. Is flourishing to be imagined as an end-state, an achieved state of affairs, or is flourishing simply the good functioning of systems and institutions providing goods and services? The term could have either meaning, but the example provided by Vermeule suggests that he intends the end-state rather than the process towards it. He writes:
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Consider the aim of a football team for victory, a unitary aim for all that requires the cooperation of all and that is not diminished by being shared. The victory of the team as such cannot be reduced to the individual success of the players, even summed across all the players.24
This example of a team’s victory is used to distinguish common goods from the utilitarian style of aggregation of utilities or benefits, but in the context in which it is used, it also shapes the understanding of common goods as end-states, achieved situations.
The contrast between the political common good as an end-state and as a set of conditions for good functioning in pursuit of ends highlights once again the extent of the shift accomplished by the Church. The Vatican Council’s position abandons any explicit mention of a single coherent temporal common good as the flourishing of the wider political community. This should not be read as a denial by the Council Fathers that there ever could be such, but it is a signal that it is not expected to be generally the case. Instead, many groups, societies, and communities within a wider political community might flourish, each according to its own vision of the good, without entailing that the whole have a unified, singular end-state as a common aim. Nor should this be read as a rejection by the Church of secular movements such as nationalism, republicanism, and even forms of socialism that might ambition political power predicated on a vision of communal coherence and unity. In other words, communitarianism as a political movement wanting to construct state structures based on pre-existing community does not represent the position of the Catholic Church (a misunderstanding by many who uncritically assume that any valuing of community entails an embrace of communitarianism).
Accordingly, Vermeule is entitled to pursue a civic republican policy or a restoration of a classical legal tradition, but he is not entitled to claim or suggest that his position is identical with that of the Catholic Church. As noted, the claim is not explicitly made, but suggestions such as the references in the book to Aquinas, Newman, Messner, de Koninck, and Farrell, as well as his more popular writings, mean that his critical readers have read him as staking such a claim. Catholic social teaching is not defined teaching on faith and morals, and believers may have good grounds for disagreeing with elements of the teaching.25 The point of this exploration is not to dismiss or reject Vermeule’s understanding of the common good of political community.
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Instead, it is to clarify and explain the Catholic Church’s understanding of common goods in the political context, at least since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and to illuminate how that understanding differs from the account of the unitary good of a political community to be found in Vermeule’s book. Where the Church speaks of the common good as a set of conditions for the realisation of the ends of individuals and groups, Vermeule speaks of a unitary singular end that is the temporal flourishing of a political entity, for which many means and conditions are required.
Conclusion
I have noted the three major shifts in the Church’s understanding of her relationship with civil authorities. The first is the adoption of a clearly restricted view of the political common good, the second is a radical revision of the order of priorities for states, and the third is a clear demarcation of mutual autonomy of Church and state. I have concentrated on the first point, asserting the Church’s position in contrast to that of Vermeule. But it would be wise to conclude with some remarks on the second point. Pope Benedict XVI in his speeches to the United Nations, to the UK parliament, and to the German Bundestag firmly asserts the dignity of persons and the safeguarding of their rights as the priority for states. In this he is consistent with the Vatican Council, which states that ‘The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons …’26
A short sentence in a later paragraph, in the context of a discussion of the nature and purpose of the political community and the participation of all in public life, maps out the relationships precisely: the conditions sought must be ‘more favorable to the free and effective pursuit by citizens and groups of the advancement of people’s total well-being’.27 Fulfilment (here called total well-being) is the responsibility of individuals and groups; civic authorities do not have responsibility for determining and specifying citizens’ ultimate goals, but they are obliged to care for the provision of relevant conditions.
Pope Benedict’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 18 April 2008 relies on a distinction between levels of common good. The goods identified in the UN’s founding principles – ‘the desire for peace, the quest for justice, respect for the dignity of the person, humanitarian cooperation and assistance’ – are said to represent a fundamental part of the common good, but they ‘do not coincide with the total common good of the
Patrick Riordan SJ
human family’.28 This is the same distinction noted above between common good as a set of conditions and common good as end-state. He stresses that the securing of human rights is a core element of the common good and a critical instrument for achieving the end of human flourishing. He repeats this link between rights and common good not presenting the latter as an extrinsic consequence of the application of means but instead that the common good is realised as rights are secured.
In his address he offers a particular narrative of the formulation of the Universal Declaration with which he places the human person at the centre. He claims it was ‘the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and science’. Throughout he repeats the emphasis on dignity of persons, for which the institutional arrangements upholding human rights are safeguards. He counters the invocation of radical cultural pluralism to insist that human persons everywhere are endowed with dignity. This is not just a Western value, for the protection of Western citizens.
Pope Benedict is consistent in adhering to the achievements of the Vatican Council, in specifying the purpose of the political community in restricted terms, and in placing the political community at the service of human persons. This reversed the previously assumed priority where the good of persons was subordinate to the good of communities, with the corresponding restriction of the political common good as the set of conditions that enable persons and groups to achieve their fulfilment. It would seem that integralists such as Adrian Vermeule have still to catch up with Pope Benedict.
Patrick Riordan SJ is Senior Fellow in Political Philosophy and Catholic Social Thought at Campion Hall, Oxford. He has written a number of books on the common good, such as Global Ethics and Global Common Goods (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), and Recovering Common Goods (Dublin: Veritas, 2017). His most recent publication is Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Opportunities for the Common Good (Georgetown UP, 2023).
(Notes)
1 Patrick Riordan, Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023).
Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism
2 Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
3 Vallier, All the Kingdoms, p. 37.
4 Adrian Vermeule, ‘Integration from Within’, American Affairs, II:1 (Spring 2018), <https:// americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/>.
5 Adrian Vermuele, Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
6 Adrian Vermuele, Common Good Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
7 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, ed by Robert Bireley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
8 Gaudium et Spes (Vatican: The Holy See, 1965), <https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html>. While the Vatican website makes all the documents of the Council conveniently available, I prefer to cite them from Austin Flannery (ed.), Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1996), because of its use of inclusive language.
9 Gaudium et Spes, 26.
10 Gaudium et Spes, 26.
11 Gaudium et Spes, 75.
12 Gaudium et Spes, 76.
13 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 1.
14 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 28.
15 Aristotle, Politics, trans. by T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), Bk I, chap. 1.
16 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, pp. 28–29.
17 Gaudium et Spes, 76.
18 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, pp. 28–29.
19 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 29.
20 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 29, n. 60, 195.
21 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, pp. 28–31.
22 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 30
23 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, endnote 62, pp. 195–96.
24 Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, p. 28.
25 See some critical comments by authors in the collection Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, ed by Gerard V. Bradley and E. Christian Brugger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
26 Gaudium et Spes, 26
27 Gaudium et Spes, 75.
28 Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Address to the United Nations’, New York, 2008, <https://www.vatican.va/ content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080418_un-visit. html>
Poem
Liam Aungier
Heirloom
In memory of my mother
Rough as sackcloth, yet Smooth as the pearl
Of great price,
It was something Mysterious, passed down Through generations,
Still warm
When you received it
From my grandmother’s hands.
You weighed it in the balance. You saw that it was good, Passed it on.
Liam Aungier has had poems published in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He has one volume of poetry, Apples in Winter (2005).
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
Declan O’Keeffe
The early origins of the city of Dublin centre around twin settlements, the one at Dubh-linn (the Black Pool) to the east, and the other, on the southside of Áth Cliath (the ford of the hurdles) to the west. These settlements would eventually combine physically and linguistically to give us both the core of the city we have inherited and the names that are still in use today. The early settlements were at first temporary and then tenuous until finally they became permanent. From the middle of the tenth centuries various attempts were made to defend the several Viking and Hiberno-Norse encampments that succeeded one another. These used a number of natural advantages, such as high ground and river features combined with a series of man-made defences ranging from earthworks to the imposing city walls whose remains are still to be seen at several points in the inner city today. When the Anglo-Normans took possession of the city in 1170, they took stock of the defences that pertained (and that they had so easily overcome) before leaving their own mark. This paper attempts to trace the development of these defences during the period of Anglo-Norman colonisation that lasted from c. 1170 until the threat posed by the Scots c. 1317. It will seek to examine the purposes and functions of the walls, gates, mural towers, moat and Dublin Castle and will also examine the financing of the several projects, paying particular attention to the role of murage grants. It will adopt both a chronological and a thematic approach, commencing with a brief overview of the defences that confronted the Anglo-Normans in 1170 and considering how they adopted and adapted these to their own needs before they expanded the defended area over the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
Not surprisingly, both the Vikings and the Hiberno-Norse made good use of the natural defensive advantages, in particular the high ground around Christchurch, as well as the Liffey at Fishamble Street and Essex Street West. Archaeological evidence suggests that, ‘by the tenth century the entire Viking-Age trading emporium was surrounded by a series of large earthen and clay banks, which were topped with strong palisade fences’.1 By the
Declan O’Keeffe
turn of the twelfth century the defences were under the command of the Irish king Muirchertach Ua Briain, who replaced the earthen banks with the first Hiberno-Norse stone wall built of locally quarried limestone blocks. This was a substantial structure that measured some 7m in height and as much as 3m in width. The new enclosure, which contained at least three gates, tripled the defended area by expanding to the west to include the settled area along High Street. There was also, presumably, access to the natural defences of the river Liffey on the northern flank2 and the Poddle to the south ‘would have functioned as a natural moat’.3 The Song of Dermot and the Earl mentions ‘battlements’ on the walls and also suggests that the enclosure contained a separately defended fortress or castellum on the site that would later be occupied by Dublin Castle.4 A substantial and impressive stretch of this wall (some 83m) remains visible on the south side of Cook Street, while another section survives within the Dublin Civic Offices on Wood Quay and still other fragments have emerged at various sites during excavations.5 Described by Linzi Simpson as ‘an impressive high barrier’6, it gives a good idea of ‘how formidable the city walls of Dublin once were’7, and it is no surprise to learn that they would form an important part of the subsequent Anglo-Norman defences.8
The mettle of the walls was tested when the Earl of Pembroke, Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare or ‘Strongbow’, attacked Dublin in September 1170, on foot of Henry II’s response to Diarmait Mac Murchada’s appeal for help in regaining his kingdom of Leinster from the alliance of the highking Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair and the men of Dublin.9 Although greatly outnumbered, Strongbow’s men ‘made an enthusiastic assault on the walls, were immediately victorious, and valiantly overran the city, with considerable slaughter of the inhabitants’.10 Strongbow’s sudden attack and the alarming ease with which he overcame the defences had more success than the subsequent attempt by Ascall Mac Torcaill to regain the city in the following year (although the Anglo-Normans success in defending the city had more to do with a surprise counter-attack than with their reliance on the strength of the walls).11 The gates of the city are significant in this attack; a contemporary report by Giraldus Cambrensis mentions ‘the eastern gate’,12 which The Song of Dermot and the Earl calls ‘St Mary’s Gate’.13
Giraldus also mentions ‘the southern postern’,14 named as the western gate in The Song of Dermot and the Earl. 15 Simpson notes that ‘the south gate was presumably St Nicholas’s Gate at the top of Patrick Street’, while
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
the western gate was the one at Cornmarket, which would later be called Newgate. This assault was followed later in the year with a siege instigated by Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair that ‘is said to have lasted a whole two months’. The walls and defences seem to have stood up well, but things might have ended badly for the new occupants had they not resorted to the tactic that had served them well earlier in the year. Once again they mounted a counterattack that surprised and routed the enemy.16
Henry II realised the importance of the capture of the city and, removing it from Strongbow’s control, he granted ‘to his men of Bristowa [Bristol] his city of Duvelina [Dublin]’17 in order to ‘to ensure its development into a loyal and royal English-orientated city’18. Having learned where the weaknesses lay (both by the successes of their own attack and their subsequent defences of the city), the new rulers quickly set about strengthening the fortifications. This now appears to have been a more ambitious undertaking than was previously thought and ‘involved replacing the city wall entirely on the southern side’ with renovations elsewhere. This was a lengthy and expensive project and ‘on the southern side at Ross Road, involved an expansion southwards of between 11m and 15m’.19 It seems likely that work on new walls to the east (by the Poddle estuary) and south (at Ross Road) had commenced by 1204 and was completed within twenty years. It does not seem likely that the Hiberno-Norse wall at Ross Road would have been demolished at this time, unless a new defence had already been put in place further south.20 Recent excavations show that this new wall extended at least as far as Werburgh Street and seem to confirm ‘that there were two distinct and separate lines of defences’ approximately 15m apart21 and suggest that this section ‘forms part of what now must be considered a massive Anglo-Norman fortification programme’22. Financed in part by the king (through a remission in rent) but mostly by the citizens, sections of the walls were examined and, where necessary, repaired or (as at Ross Road and Werburgh Street) replaced entirely. Work on the defences ‘was not confined to the walls: in 1177 the original west gate had been replaced by the New Gate’23 and a series of ditches was also planned with the intention of flooding them with water from the Poddle to form a moat.24
King John was quite clear that the primary responsibility for defending the city and maintaining and extending the walls lay with the citizens themselves. When ordering the construction of Dublin Castle, he ‘commanded that the citizens of Dublin fortify their city’ under threat of compulsion from
O’Keeffe
the justiciar. Writing in September 1204 to thank them for their ‘good service’, he again ordered the citizens to ‘attend to the fortifying of their city, everyone for his part’, and early grants of land near the city regularly included the requirement of ‘guarding the king’s city of Dublin’.25 Revenue for this ambitious series of works also came from a system of murage grants, which were ‘licences to charge tolls on specified types of merchandise being brought for sale into the city’. These licences, which were estimated to bring about £30 in income, were normally granted for five or seven years ‘and the proceeds were to be spent on building or repairing the city walls’.26 Murage grants were introduced to Dublin in 1222 by Henry III and continued to be used during the reigns of Edward I and Edward II.27 Lydon thinks that the absence of such grants before 1221 ‘suggests that no defensive building works were taking place on the walls’. He further claims ‘that what money was collected from murage in the thirteenth century was rarely if ever spent on city defences’ and that concern for defence was low with the ‘terra pacis’ extending ‘well beyond the environs of the city’.28 Nonetheless a series of grants was issued and renewed throughout the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth. In 1316, at the time of the Scottish invasion, the murage grants proved to be inadequate for the needs of the city ‘in time of war’ and the king was obliged to take the extraordinary step of pardoning ‘the notable sum of £240 … from the farm of the city’ as well as renewing the murage grant for a further six years.29
There is much documentary evidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for the defences of Dublin, but by far the most important is a 1585 report written for the lord deputy, Sir John Perrott, ‘in which the circuit of the walls is described in extraordinary detail’ running from the Bermingham Tower around the walls to Dame’s Gate. It describes each gate and tower in sequence, giving the accommodation and provisions for defence. It details the length of wall between each two salients as well as the height and thickness, and the presence (or absence) of earthen ramps on the inside and stone buttresses on the outside. It gives the greatest length and width as being 800 and 400 yards respectively with the area enclosed as forty-four acres.30 The report also mentioned a large ‘rampier’ or rampart running along the inside of the wall between the Bermingham Tower and Newgate, as well as a ditch outside the walls that ‘contained sluices to retain water when the tide was out’.31 The report did not include a map but the walls are depicted in Speed’s map of 1610, which showed the circuit including the position of the
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
towers, albeit with discrepancies, as many of the towers he omits still appear on detailed plans made over 150 years later.32 Nuala Burke cautions that while Speed’s ‘map-picture’ ‘can be used in a general way … its accuracy must always be tested by reference to other sources’. She acknowledges that, as it was made in the early days of modern cartography, it ‘has considerable cartographic merit’.33 Withal that it is out of proportion, Speed’s map includes many valuable details and ‘is a wonderful illustration of what the medieval city must have looked like at the dawn of the modern era’.34
A series of substantial stone built mural towers of various shapes and sizes was built at regular intervals along the walls. Be they D-shaped, rectangular or square, these towers contributed both to the defence of the city and the municipal coffers, as some of them were leased to private individuals for residence and guilds who used them as their headquarters. Some of the mural towers ‘performed various civic functions’, such as the debtors’ prison that was housed at the Newgate.35 The earliest mural towers were documented ‘in middle of the thirteenth century, around the time of the riverward extensions, and of the most comprehensive murage facility’.36 The excavations at Ross Road, referred to above, have unearthed the best evidence thus far of a mural tower. This substantial building, known as Geneville’s Tower (named after the late thirteenth-century justiciar, Sir Geoffrey de Geneville), is mentioned by Perrot, who described it as ‘round without the wall and square within’ (D-shaped) and rising to three stories.37 In the northeast angle stood Isolde’s Tower, where the city wall jutted out into the River Liffey. Its function was to be ‘the first major line of defence’ should an attack come from the river.38 The tower seems to have also had a more grisly purpose; as one of the more prominent parts of the walls it may have been used to display ‘the severed heads and limbs of traitors and other malefactors’.39 Perrot also mentions Buttevant Tower, ‘105 foot distant [from] Issold’s tower’40 and a limited investigation has revealed what may be part of this tower c. 33m south of Isolde’s Tower.41 The name of the tower, from the French butte avant, suggests that it jutted out towards the Liffey and may have been an HibernoNorse quayside.42 Simpson suggests that it may have been the original northeast corner tower on the c. 1100–1125 circuit.43
In 1204, as part of this refurbishment of the city’s defences, King John commanded that a stone castle be built in the southeast corner ‘for the administration of justice and … the defence of the city’.44 It was extremely important to establish a physical royal presence in both the city and the
Declan O’Keeffe
country and so, adopting the practice followed in some English towns after the Norman conquest, the new Dublin Castle was situated in an angle of the existing town walls. The location in the south-east corner, which may have been the site of the earlier Hiberno-Norse royal hall, was selected in order to take advantage of the water defences afforded by the River Poddle. The original plan may have been for a keep, but these were going out of fashion and being replaced by ‘walled enclosures with round mural towers with gatehouses’, which were regarded as more effective. It seems that construction may not have actually commenced until the king visited Ireland in 1210 and that the work continued until at least 1228.45 The new castle was a model of the modern style with ‘rounded towers on each corner and its massive double D-shaped gate-house, complete with causeway and drawbridge’. These were augmented by an immense curtain wall and a substantial moat that ‘measured at least 22m in width by between 8m and 9m in depth’. Much of the land required for this expansion came from ‘the ecclesiastical property owners … most notably the Archbishop of Dublin’.46 In 1217 he received compensation for damage done to his churches during the works, as did the prior of Christ Church in 1226 ‘for damages incurred by the occupation of some of their edifices’. The defence and security of Dublin Castle in the middle ages were inextricably linked with those of the city. The city acted as a fortress in a potentially hostile country, while the castle within could perform the function of a large keep to which the defenders could fall back if the city defences were ever breached.47
Undermining or battering the wall, which might lead to a breach, could pose significant dangers to the security of the defences,48 so to obviate these risks the Anglo-Normans built a ‘large defensive city ditch’ measuring from 18m to 20m wide and as much as 8m in depth.49 The most impressive evidence for this feat of engineering emerged during excavations at Patrick Street, which showed that the Poddle had been re-routed ‘to flow along Patrick Street as far north as Nicholas Street’, where it fed the city ditch. The moat thus created not only defended the south-east angle of the town, ‘but also served to replenish the moat of Dublin Castle’. A date of c. 1185 has been suggested for this, which implies that the cutting of the ditch was probably even earlier. Further evidence to support the re-routing has emerged from smaller excavations at Ship Street and Bride Street.50 At Nicholas Street, Claire Walsh measured the ditch at an impressive 6.7m deep and c. 20m wide. The base was rock-cut, and there seems to have ‘an external “berm”
c. 1170–c. 1317
or platform between the wall and … the lip of the ditch’, while further to the east excavations suggest that the moat was routed around Dublin Castle.51 On the western side of the city, where the ditch measured at least 10.50m in depth and 22m wide, the builders showed themselves to be adept at using the natural watercourses at Thomas Street and Bridge Street to feed the moat. The ditch from Newgate to Nicholas Street seems to have been dry, but the sources indicate that it could be flooded if the city was attacked.52 The ditch and moat were enormous undertakings that must have taken a lot of time, work and co-operation, although such community spirit was somewhat lacking when it came to the disposal of domestic refuse that was beginning to pose something of a problem by the mid-thirteenth century.53
The wall was extended on the northern side in the mid-thirteenth century following the reclamation of land from the Liffey due to the silting up of the southern bank, which provided a convenient location for merchants to set up business and to establish warehouses. However, the new terrain posed difficulties for ships trying to dock and was exposed to attack (including raids by pirates) as it lay outside the walls. The mayor and commonality resolved to address these issues by extending the circuit to encompass the vulnerable area.54 The work may have commenced in 1221, when the citizens received a grant of customs to ‘enclose their city for the security and defence of the city and adjacent parts’,55 but James Lydon believes that the money thus raised would have been insufficient for any significant building. Instead he cites the first of a series of heavy murage grants in 1233 as an indication that ‘serious works were being considered’56 and asserts that ‘by the mid-century a “new city wall” was certainly in existence’.57 Gilbert records that, in 1225, the monks of St Thomas’s received compensation ‘in regard to the land occupied by the fosse thrown up around the city of Dublin’.58 A reference to the ‘old city wall’ in c. 1242 implies the construction of a new one59 while the documentary sources in the 1260s refer to a ‘new wall towards the Liffey’.60 Lydon also notes seven murage grants between 1250 and 1302 as evidence ‘that extensive building operations were planned, including the operation of new walls’.61 The old wall to the south was not demolished following the construction of the new line but rather was pierced with gateways for access. This was presumably done for tactical reasons to offer a second line of defence if the first should be breached.62
The century that followed the 1170 invasion saw a period of prosperity accompanied by a ‘casual attitude … to the city defences … that continued
Declan O’Keeffe
even into the fourteenth century’, with the towers and other parts of the walls being rented out to private individuals for residential or commercial purposes. Even the grass on the fosse had a value and the grazing rights were regularly hired out. Lydon sees this as ‘a clear indication that the city gates were regarded as valuable sites … in an expanding city [where] building sites were scarce and city gates, and even city walls could be used to provide accommodation’. He argues that ‘the function of the gates was no longer primarily defensive’ and cites the case of Geoffrey De Morton, a former mayor, who rented a tower on the bridge across the Liffey and modified it to such an extent that ‘he had made it impossible for Dubliners to move along the wall to defend it for attackers’. The practice of allowing private individuals to modify the towers not only blocked access to the towers and the wall itself but, as many of these structures were of wood, they could be set alight by attackers as a means of breaching the walls. There was also the possibility that the weight of houses built on the walls might cause a collapse and ‘expose a gap which might be exploited by the enemy’.63 (Witness again the case of Geoffrey De Morton).64 Other problems arose when landowners with land on either side of the walls installed postern gates for access, thereby providing further access points for would be attackers.65 Finally, as noted above, the city ditch was a prime location for the dumping of household refuse during the medieval period, especially in the sections at the Cornmarket and Bridge Street.66
The notion that the terra pacis surrounding Dublin was safe and the accompanying complacency about defence began to change towards the end of the thirteenth century, following raids by the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles from their mountain fastnesses, which resulted in much of the hinterland being laid waste. There are accounts of outrages in places as close as Saggart from c.1280 and, in 1310, a ward was placed at Rathmore ‘because of the rebellion of the Irish felons of Leinster’. When another ward was placed at Rathfarnham six months later, it was evident that the city itself was coming under threat and that the terra guerre was replacing the terra pacis in the hinterland. Matters were made worse with the arrival of a Scottish invasion force under the command of Edward Bruce in 1315, which encouraged the ‘the Irish of the mountains’, who renewed their actions and threat to the city. The arrival of King Robert of Scotland with reinforcements at the end of 1316 led to panic in the city and made defence the top priority. The government had anticipated the threat in September 1315 and appointed John de Hothum to oversee matters in Dublin, where he ordered repair work on the castle (at
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
the expense of the priory of St Saviour and the belfry of St Mary le Dam) and strengthened the garrison. The Scots moved on, but, when they returned the following February and set up camp at Castleknock, the mayor, Robert de Nottingham, ordered that the walls be repaired and that the western suburb be destroyed by fire to deny the attackers cover. The stratagem worked, the Scots departed, and the city was saved.67 It seems likely that many of the ‘extramural gateways’ built later were a consequence of the threat posed by the Scottish invasion.68 In the aftermath of the crisis, ‘the policy of warding was subsequently maintained and eventually led to the creation of the Pale in the mid-fifteenth century’.69
Today Dublin Castle is the most visible and high profile reminder of the defences of the medieval city, but it is far from being the only one. Several impressive upstanding sections of the city walls are to be seen around the line of the circuit, most obviously at Cook Street, Lamb Alley and Ship Street Little. Other sections of the walls were used in later property boundaries and consequently survive in various locations, while still others have been unearthed during archaeological investigations. While ‘it is certainly the case that the full location and current extent of the walled city of Dublin is still not known’,70 the slow discovery of vital pieces of the jigsaw is a valuable exercise for a citizenry that is still becoming aware of, and coming to terms with, its own rich medieval heritage and learning how to live in harmony with its past in the present.
Declan O’Keeffe is the College Historian of Clongowes Wood College SJ and has written numerous articles and book chapters in Irish Jesuit publications.
(Notes)
1 Linzi Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences: excavations at 14–16 Werburgh Street’, in Medieval Dublin VIII, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008), p. 152.
2 Linzi Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences (Dublin: Dublin City Heritage Plan, 2006), pp. 20–22.
3 Claire Walsh, ‘Dublin’s southern town defences, tenth to fourteenth centuries: the evidence from Ross Road’, in Medieval Dublin II, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), p. 111.
4 The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Oxford, 1892), II, pp. 2332–3, 2341, 2350, and I, p. 2715, cited in James Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Dublin IV, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), p. 64.
5 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 23.
6 Linzi Simpson, ‘Forty years a-digging: a preliminary synthesis of archaeological investigations in medieval Dublin’, in Medieval Dublin I, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), p. 39.
7 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 23.
Declan O’Keeffe
8 The surviving remains of the Hiberno-Norse wall ‘were almost certainly partially refaced in the Anglo-Norman period’ as noted in the Conservation Plan: Dublin City Walls and Defences, managing editor Margaret Gowen, <www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/media/fileuploads/2018-05/Dublin_City_Walls_Defences_Conservation_Plan.pdf>, 2.3.1.
9 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 26.
10 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed by A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), p. 67.
11 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 27.
12 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, p. 77.
13 Orpen, The Song of Dermot, II, pp. 2269–74, 2329–34, cited in Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 27.
14 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, p. 77.
15 Orpen, The Song of Dermot, I, p. 2241, cited in Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 27.
16 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 27.
17 J. T. Gilbert (ed.), Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin (Dublin, 1889), i, 1.
18 H. B. Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2002), p. 6.
19 Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences’, p. 160.
20 Walsh, ‘Dublin’s southern town defences’, p. 112.
21 Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences’, p. 150.
22 Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences’, p. 175.
23 Simpson, ‘Forty years a-digging’, p. 41.
24 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 28.
25 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, pp. 64–65. Lydon cites H. S. Sweetman (ed.), Calendar of documents relating to Ireland, 1171-1307 (1875–86), i, p. 226, i, p. 228 and p. 345.
26 Philomena Connolly, ‘The rise and fall of Geoffrey Morton, mayor of Dublin, 1303–4’, in Medieval Dublin II, pp. 241–243.
27 J. S. Hamilton, ‘Edward II and the Murage of Dublin: English Administrative Practice Versus Irish Custom’, in Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History presented to George Peddy Cutino, ed by J. S. Hamilton and Patricia J. Bradley (Suffolk, 1989), p. 86.
28 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, pp. 66–67.
29 J. S. Hamilton, ‘Edward II and the Murage of Dublin’, p. 93.
30 Patrick Healy, ‘The town walls of Dublin’, in Medieval Dublin: the Making of a Metropolis, ed by Howard Clarke (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), p. 183.
31 Simpson, ‘Forty years a-digging’, p. 43.
32 Healy, ‘The town walls of Dublin’, p. 183.
33 Nuala Burke, ‘Dublin’s northeastern city wall: early reclamation and development at the PoddleLiffey Confluence’, in Medieval Dublin: the Making of a Metropolis, pp. 145–147.
34 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 29.
35 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 28.
36 Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records, i, pp. 9 –10, cited in Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, p. 6.
37 Walsh, ‘Dublin’s southern town defences’, p. 112.
38 Linzi Simpson, Excavations at Isolde’s Tower (Dublin, 1994), p. 3.
39 Simpson, Excavations at Isolde’s Tower, pp. 101–102.
40 Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records, ii, pp. 555–7, cited in Simpson, Excavations at Isolde’s Tower, p. 105.
41 Simpson, Excavations at Isolde’s Tower, p. 104.
42 Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, p. 6.
43 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 43.
44 Sweetman, Calendar of documents, i, 35, cited in Anne Lynch and Conleth Manning, ‘Excavations at Dublin Castle, 1985–7’, in Medieval Dublin II, p. 172.
45 Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, p. 6.
46 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 34.
47 James Lydon, ‘Dublin Castle in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Dublin III, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), pp. 116–117.
48 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 34.
49 Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences’, p. 160.
50 Simpson, ‘Forty years a-digging’, pp. 42–43.
Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317
51 Simpson, ‘Forty years a-digging’, pp. 44–45.
52 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, pp. 36–37. Simpson quotes Gilbert, Calendar of ancient records, i, p. 171 to support the argument that the ditch could be flooded in extremis.
53 Alan Hayden, ‘West Side story: archaeological excavations at Cornmarket and Bridge Street Upper, Dublin – a summary account’, in Medieval Dublin I, ed by Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), p. 100.
54 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, pp. 39–40.
55 Sweetman, Calendar of documents, i, 1002, cited in Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 40.
56 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, p. 66.
57 Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records, i, p. 95, cited in Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, p. 66.
58 Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records, i, p. 345, cited in Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, p. 65.
59 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 40.
60 Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records, i, p. 95 and Brooks, E. St John (ed.),1936 Register of the hospital of St John the Baptist without the Newgate (Dublin 1936), no. 56, both cited in Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 40.
61 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, p. 66.
62 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 40. One of these gates still survives as St Audoen’s Arch.
63 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, pp. 64–68.
64 Hamilton, ‘Edward II and the Murage of Dublin’, p. 93. The fascinating case of Geoffrey De Morton is recounted in Hamilton’s paper as well as in Connolly, ‘The rise and fall of Geoffrey Morton’ and Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’.
65 Simpson, Dublin City Walls and Defences, p. 43.
66 Hayden, ‘West Side story’, p. 100.
67 Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, p. 8 and Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, pp. 70–75.
68 Clarke, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, p. 9.
69 Lydon, ‘The defence of Dublin’, p. 75.
70 Simpson, ‘The medieval city wall and the southern line of Dublin’s defences’, p. 176.
As a PhD student, a key focus of my studies were the parables of Jesus. This means that I spent a lot of time reading biblical criticism. This was bad for my soul, not because the results of ‘Higher Criticism’ corroded my faith but because the aridity of the prevailing scholarly norms distorted texts that had previously enraptured me. They became little more than a collection of words to be chopped into contesting arguments.
As a student of theological ethics, it turns out that the sources of biblical criticism that I needed were much older than modern biblical scholars; those readers who came to the parables before the common understanding that we share was established. From John Chrysostom to John Calvin, my love of Jesus’ short stories was restored by these pre-modern interpreters (who certainly were not ‘pre-critical’).
Reading Genesis is a brave book. Robinson is one of the most acclaimed novelists alive. The copy I was provided with comes with a blurb from Barack Obama. She is not a struggling, precarious, early-career writer, but she does not just bypass the findings of a century or more of academic biblical scholarship; she goes to war against them. This takes courage.
She knows that simply and naively receiving Genesis as Scripture – as somehow inspired by God – is going to be seen as credulous at best. She insists there is no reason to dispute the traditional idea that it was written in some meaningful way by a historical figure called Moses. She accuses the academic alternative of ‘a hermeneutics of self-protectiveness that has disabled interpretation’ and rendered all metaphysical questioning prompted by the texts illegitimate (p. 6).
In contrast, Robinson’s approach invites the reader to join her as she unhurriedly turns the pages of the book and muses on its details. It is evident that Reading Genesis is so titled because that is what she has been doing for a very, very long time. This book is the product of decades of deep spiritual and intellectual investment, but the same magnanimous humanism that is on display in her Gilead novels is at play here and even the most ardent sceptic will be able to join in the textual pilgrimage. If nothing else, Robinson proves
once and for all that receiving the Bible as a gift from God can generate incisive and rigorous readings and, perhaps more importantly, methods of reading that are hospitable to those who do not share those same assumptions. Biblical scholars might boast about being forensic in their treatment of the text, but they sometimes forget that a pre-requisite of the autopsy is that their subject is dead. Robinson seeks to show the reader how these stories live still. Rather than trusting in the mythic sources of the documentary hypothesis (that the Torah is composed of a stitched-together collation of Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), and Priestly (P) sources), Robinson argues we should see Genesis as an artfully composed singular text with a cohesive, if expansive, vision. Considering the narrative of the Tower of Babel, she suggests that it feels ‘as though it has been turned and turned, considered in every light, but first of all in the light of the belief that God is one and that he is loyal to the whole of Creation’ (p. 74).
The other treasured and commonly held view that Robinson seeks to devastate is the idea that the God revealed in Genesis is cruel or volatile. We can think of Richard Dawkins’ supremely adverbial account of this perspective. In The God Delusion he charges that ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully’.1
Such views will not stand in the face of Robinson’s careful comparison between the Genesis text and similar texts that arose in the same region, geographically or chronologically. Here we see that her stance with respect to biblical scholarship is not an anti-intellectual fideism; she gladly engages with archaeological findings and the like. It is clear that the academic study of the text has its place, an important place, but not the entire place.
When we read Genesis against contemporaneous Ancient Near East alternatives, we see a remarkable valuing of human agency and a remarkable sufficiency in its depiction of God. The God we meet in Genesis needs nothing, while the gods all around have all kinds of gaps in their existence: ‘The gods of the Enuma Elish suffer hunger, terror, and loss of sleep’ (p. 11). Humans are playthings of the gods elsewhere, and in Genesis they are regarded and considered as precious. Even – or especially – when God judges humans and finds them wanting, he is honouring their capability for
responsibility. The strands of this argument are so ever-present in the text that we might conclude that the purpose of the book is to remove the ground upon which people impute ‘primitivity to the “God of the Old Testament”’ (p. 57).
Protesting the assumption that the responsible way to handle a biblical text is through the lab conditions of biblical scholarship will predictably attract ire. The argument for the goodness (‘To say that God is the good creator of a good creation is not a trivial statement’, p. 12) and trustworthiness (‘His intention toward us, which is also his loyalty to us, has valued our autonomy’, p. 44)) of the God revealed in Genesis may prompt its own controversy. But it would be a dire mistake to give the impression that this book is a polemic. To use a theological term, the tone throughout is irenic. Attention is a form of love and Robinson truly attends to Genesis. It is almost a cliché to claim to appreciate the Bible in a general sort of way as great literature, but in this book, a great novelist teaches us how to read Genesis as just that.
This is perhaps best displayed in her treatment of the story of Joseph, which comes at the end of the book, spinning out of the narrative of his father, the third patriarch, Jacob. Summarising the tale, Robinson suggests ‘If all of this were explored as fiction, he would be a great point-of-view character’ (p. 187). Her lengthy exploration of the psychological states that are hidden below the bare Hebrew text, as Joseph draws out his great moment of reveal to his brothers, is masterful. Her prose is affectionate, and her argument is pristine. To read the Scriptures as literature is clearly not to disregard them as sources of doctrine. After inviting us to attend to the text so closely that we can feel its full drama, she ends the discussion of the Joseph saga with a dogmatic point more profound than eight words have any right to be: ‘This is not a pardon. It is grace’ (p. 211).
Karl Barth is the theologian that Robinson refers to the most in her essays and speeches. He famously worked at a desk below a reproduction of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Barth viewed this image as his summation of what it means to do theology – like John the Baptist, painted on Jesus’ left hand side as he hangs from the cross, all we can do is point. The essence of bearing witness is not the witness’ virtues, but the reality that they are testifying to. Robinson’s book is formatted without chapters. There is little by way of verse-citation. This structure enacts something important –her commentary is one long, grand, sweeping conversation and that reflects the conversation she has enjoyed with Genesis. Reading Genesis is an act of literary witness-bearing: ‘I am as intent on magnifying the Lord as if I were
Book Reviews: Autumn 2024
a painter or composer, but my first obligation in commenting on the text is to be faithful to the text’ (p. 197). It is a book full of luminous insight and humane reflection. But its virtues are ultimately less important than what they are testifying about. Reading Genesis can only be judged a success if it leads us to read Genesis.
Dr Kevin Hargaden is Director and Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin. He is the author of several books, most recently Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age (Eugene, Oregon, US: Cascade, 2018).
(Notes)
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 31
Peter Sirr, The Swerve (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2023), 104 pages.
Peter Sirr’s sweep of preoccupations in The Swerve, his tenth poetry collection, include temporality, language as a historic and contemporary entity, and the casual, unpredictable elements within our lives. It is an intellectually satisfying poetry that dips and crests in poems that range from solid narrative-driven tercets to freer forms.
Sirr’s attention settles variously on the Tang poets, Borges, Buson and Pessoa, as if to converse with those who, like him, inhabit language from within the opaque skin of a life perceived slant-ways. This world is decoded and enquired of in a twisting and swerving of focus, as the poet challenges the life we refer to as ‘ordinary’. It is never ordinary, of course, and even if the poet himself is alive and well, the suggestion is that his living could be from within the carapace of a ‘virtual’ life as much as the daily register.
I have been in this game a long time or time itself is the game and someone has blinked, then blinked again …
‘This Virtual Life’
Conscious of the heave towards the artificial, AI and the robotic visionary, the reader is never in any doubt that the impact of science and technology raises concerns for visionary poetics. The question is, how does traditional
consciousness function alongside ‘artificial’ presence that may now be perceived as a fibrillating element? Despite this, the poem ‘At the AI Conference’, while conferring authority on the AI robot, certainly allows for a meeting point with humanity:
I am only your somewhat faster brother and we two beasts of a feather set down on the talkative planet whirring together.
The mysterious and vivid title poem, ‘The Swerve’, sees Sirr descend on a narrative slalom-course to childhood, recalling an occasion when the family car driven by his mother one Christmas hit the ice and skidded. The family visit which normally occurred in summer takes on a different complexion in winter, ‘the winter hill/was different, the road a remembered joy / strangely silent … ’ This seriousness dissipates by the time the relations have gathered, ‘the wine poured, / the big table taking up half the parlour, / all of us digging in as if there was no tomorrow … ’
But it is a poem of shifting moods, poignancy and that unstated love that falls like a soft garment over Christmases recalled. In Old English, sweorfan suggests veering off course, bending off your path. In this context of things changing, the tremulousness of the afternoon is captured by the memory of a great uncle playing the fiddle, and the sudden movement of the poet’s father – who stands ‘or doesn’t quite, but tries / and sways and looks ahead into some blankness / miles away and we catch him just in time / but don’t really … ’
This moment is dramatic, and what the father’s movement or nonmovement signifies is open to interpretation, the most trustworthy hinging on the idea of ‘some blankness far away’. Once again we sense the shifting temporality that sometimes characterises Sirr’s writing; even though the sense of a man spatially knocked off course may be uncorrectable, the sense of life carrying on within a known normal context is nonetheless re-established. The fiddle, the kitchen, the farm animals continue as does the poet. Yet: that paternal ‘sway’ – the moment when something might or might not, when something did or did not change in that parlour – although described in the final line as ‘briefly halted’, in the last three words becomes something from which there is no way back.
In other poems, Sirr pauses in time at certain signposts – ten, fifteen, twenty-five, fifty-nine, one-hundred-and-three – then flirts and teases with
mortality and human inconsequentiality. Correspondence in its various forms is a transient matter, almost comical as we witness a fax trail slowly out of its machine and, again, a sense of the utter vaporousness of things taken quite seriously at given moments. The poem ‘Second-hand Books’ captures Sirr’s amused sense of the ephemerality of even the most passionate love affairs, when books with loving dedications are, in the end, dispensed with in the local bookshop.
If we imagine poetry endures, Sirr invites us to think again through his address to the Tang poets in a work surely aimed at the late Anthropocene, ‘as the tanks roll in and the murderer’s rockets strike’ . None of our words will endure, in the sense that the stricken human, suffering, sheltering between bombs, can draw no comfort from the words of Li Bai or Du Fu, or (implicitly) from Sirr himself or any other poet. Again, the nature of existence is given a fresh spin in this poem, in which books do not shield us from burnings, bombings, from bloodshed and ‘butchered children’.
In this deftly crafted collection, language is vivid and considered –one would think that goes without saying, but many contemporary poetry collections limp along in hope rather than display the actualisation of a poetic, one in which turning to the thesaurus is seen as the last resort of the desperate. In Sirr’s poetic imagination, life and experience are conveyed as a simultaneously dark yet well-illuminated state of being. Pain is alleviated through love and through filial presence, and the poet’s constant exploration of his city, Dublin. There is no return, no redress, but the restorative moment falls unexpectedly through June light, for example, where the liminality of experience, or ‘what goes on’, is unwitnessed, unrecorded. This is what we can trust in, the poet declares in the tender and evocative ‘Light in June’, something which allows me, as reader, to extrapolate freely: this may be the one way in which we can forgive ourselves for not becoming – ever – the god-like radiances we once imagined we would be.
‘The Swerve’ is one of four or five decent collections that have appeared since last year that remind one that good poetry continues to be written by a handful of writers who continue to create work that is responsive, original, persistently philosophical and stretches beyond the lyric self. A relatively quiet, unbombastic voice such as Sirr’s risks being overlooked when it comes to major poetry awards. For one thing, a white, older male poet is on a hiding to nothing at present, which does not suggest a desire to return to the misogynistic archipelago days of the 1980s, when female voices struggled
to be heard. A collection such as this is a wake-up call to committees and cultural commentators alike to read and note serious work rather than the latest and most drivelsome, to be patient with its patience, and to allow its wide-ranging echo to soak into the soul. We know, if we follow Sirr’s line, that it will all be forgotten in the end, but for now, a grace-filled poetry such as this – seriously lit, seriously explorative – is a poetry that is needed.
Mary O’Donnell is a poet, novelist and short-story writer and a longstanding member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists. She has published eight collections of poetry, including Unlegendary Heroes (1998), Those April Fevers (2015), and Massacre of the Birds (2021). Her poetry is published in Brazilian Portuguese by Arte y Lettras as Onde Estão os Pássaros (2023). New fiction and poetry is forthcoming in 2025.
J. Anthony Gaughan, Some Occasional Writings 2003–2024 (Blackrock: Kingdom Books, 2024) 230 pages.
The indefatigable Fr Anthony Gaughan is still writing and publishing books at the age of ninety-two. His latest volume is a selection of his work over the past two decades, ranging from observations on contemporary events to memories of his early life.
He recalls going with the Listowel scout troop to a world scout jamboree in Austria in 1951, at a time when part of that country was still under Russian occupation. Passing through the Soviet sector, they were held up for five hours to allow a train of young communists, flying the hammer and sickle flags from every window, to pass through one railway station.
A happier memory is the All Ireland junior football final of 1954, when he was selected for the Kerry squad, having played in the semi-final against Dublin. When it came to the final against Donegal, he was demoted to the subs bench to make way for a former senior player.
Fr Gaughan, who was training for the priesthood at the time, has vivid memories of the trip to Dublin in Dan Ryan’s taxi, with two of the team selectors who stopped for regular ‘libations’ along the journey. In Dublin they stayed in Barry’s Hotel, and some of the team went out for the evening, with the star full forward, Eddie Dowling, saying he couldn’t sleep before a
big match unless he had three or four pints.
In the final the following day, Kerry won thanks to two goals from the pint-drinking full forward. Of course the team had to celebrate again on the road home. Fr Gaughan quotes the famous Kerry goalkeeper Johnny Cullotty as saying that after losing a match in Croke Park the road back to the Kingdom was very, very long. ‘I can vouch for the fact that even after winning a match in Croke Park the road home is very, very long’, writes the non-drinking Gaughan.
There are many other amusing anecdotes and observations from his life as a priest and a writer. One of them involves a legal action for plagiarism he took against an English author, who had used one of the stories from his book Listowel and Its Vicinity, published in 1973, as the basis for a racy novel.
Gaughan only took the action to make it clear to the people of his home town that he was not the author of the novel, as many of them assumed, given that it faithfully followed the story from his Listowel book, adding spicy fictional elements to the love story. Brenda Power wrote about the settlement in the Irish press and that cleared up the matter to his satisfaction.
As a native of Listowel, Gaughen records how he became involved in the establishment of the Writer’s Week in the town in 1971. It is still a prominent feature of the Irish literary scene more than fifty years later.
A poignant note is his review of Tommie Gorman’s autobiography Never Better. ‘Tommie’s memoir is a wonderful overview of Irish life and times and exudes his natural optimism and firm belief in the goodness of humanity.’ It is a perfect summation of Gorman’s attitude to life and, indeed, that of Gaughan himself.
Stephen Collins is a columnist with The Irish Times and former political editor of the paper. He is the author of several books, most recently Ireland’s Call: How Brexit Got Done (Dublin, 2024).
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