District and Circle (District and Circle)

District and Circle (District and Circle)

And to conclude, a few words about the four title sonnets, “District and Circle”: Heaney’s fondness for the sonnet form is well known and well represented throughout his oeuvre, indeed it is his most constant form.

He turns it to good use once again for exploring the “underworld” known to millions of us in the great cities. It is a cat-and-mouse game he plays with a tin-whistle artist, “my watcher on the tiles.” But, of course, it is also about the underworld itself, a classical motif that he has turned to good advantage before, like Homer and Virgil before him. It takes us back to that player of the saw who waits patiently for the loose coin to drop into his hat, player and listener locked in a game of their own. A game of winks and nods. Contrasted with that are the “parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay/ On body-heated mown grass regardless,/ A resurrection scene minutes before/ The resurrection, habitués/ Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.”

Like Hades, the underground has its levels, and the poet re-entered the safety of numbers; he sees them now as “a human chain,” “jostling and purling” like a skein of wool, at once loud, “then succumbing to herd-quiet….”

But he is still aware of his counterpart, the tin whistler, and worries that he may have betrayed their bond. This is a recurring theme in his poems that marks him as a man of conscience who would like at times to escape its harsh demands.

The final two sonnets capture perfectly the feel of such infernal travel: “I reached to grab/ The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand/ From planted ball of heel to heel of hand/ As sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.” Notice how carefully the poet matches word to motion and interjects blunt monosyllables to take the strain.

The final sonnet introduces another frequent theme in his poetry: his “father’s glazed face in my own waning and craning.” Rarely have father and son been so often flung together by a contemporary poet, and with so little bitterness and so much affection. And we should note as well the careful wordplay of the final lines. In the end he becomes “the only relict/ Of all that I belonged to,” and surely we are meant to hear in that the Catholic word relic. The final image has its own resonance:

 

Reflecting in a window mirror-backed

To get one thing out of the way first, before I involve myself in this fascinating poem-world as a whole and try to account for its discordant impressions: the poet's reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort. ' This shows that Seamus Heaney can be just as careless in creating neologisms as in using established language. Bernard O' Donoghue, the editor of 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' is very good at noticing things not in the least obvious, particularly in his areas of expertise, such as the 'Eclogues' or 'Bucolics' of Virgil, but poor at noticing the obvious. In his 'Introduction' he writes of 'the powerful physical evocation of the 'roof wort' - a neologism that could not apply to anything else, except perhaps the 'old kale stalk' in 'The Harrow-Pin' in the same book.

It's likely, I think, that Seamus Heaney and Bernard O' Donoghue were only familiar with 'liverwort,' the plant. Reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort' is reaching out for something that does resemble the plant, to an extent. But consulting the entry for 'wort' in an English dictionary would have shown that the neologism was misguided, ridiculous.

The word 'wort' has a hallowed and important use in the traditional brewing skills of Ireland and other countries as well as Britain, an important use in high-technology brewing too. The bars of Ireland and the pubs of Britain depend upon wort. Brewing has a rich repertoire of terms, which should appeal very much to Seamus Heaney, such as grist, mashing, fly-mashing, mash tun, underletting, underback, sparging, spendsafe, trub, and carragheen (Irish moss), but 'wort' is one of the most important. Malting converts barley to malt. Wort is the liquid which is extracted from the malt in the mash tun. The pitching of yeast into the wort begins the process of turning wort into the alcoholic drink. Later, there may be gyle-worting. Irish stouts were traditionally gyle-worted.

Reaching for the 'stubby black roof-wort' has, then, associations of the poet immediately showered with liquid from the brewery. How 'roof wort' could ever apply to the old kale stalk,' given that kale, which is related to cabbage, grows in the ground, not upside down from roofs, and 'wort' has these brewing associations is a mystery.

But this miscalculation is obviously only a moment in the poem. As for the poem-world of 'District and Circle, ' I think the choice of the London underground as the subject for a poem was unusual, unexpected, offering so many new opportunities. This is a long way from rural County Derry and marks a notable increase in his range.

The way in which this underground world is reached is described in the lines

Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts

This is a characteristic mixture of strength and weakness. A kind of rigid attentiveness is expressed in both 'posted' and 'eyes front' but 'eyes front' is inferior by far. The 'dreamy' of 'the dreamy ramparts / Of escalators' is poor, since escalators are hard, metallic, but so too is 'ramparts,' since the word refers to the embankments of a fort. Although 'a monotonous slight rocking in the works' is beyond praise, the line that follows, 'We were moved along, upstanding' is hopeless. It adds nothing.

'The white tiles gleamed' is simple and effective. As for 'In passages that flowed / With draughts from cooler tunnels' I remember, from having used the underground in London for years, but a long time ago, that adjoining tunnels brought in warmer air. But I don't insist on this point.

'I missed the light / Of all-overing' contains another of Seamus Heaney's neologisms, 'all-overing,' not a worthwhile addition to English in general or this poem in particular.

The line

Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay

could have been an abrupt and very effective transition from the underground to life above ground, although not in the same artistic category as Wilfred Owen's abrupt transition from cold to warmth in 'Exposure: '

We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,

But the transition in 'District and Circle' is mishandled and almost immediately there's banality: ' ... the sunners lay / On body-heated mown grass regardless,' in which it's obvious enough that the grass, like most grass in these urban settings, will have been mown and the heating effect of somebody lying on the grass isn't worth mentioning. The banality isn't relieved in the slightest by the next line, with its attempt to introduce weighty significance with one word, 'resurrection,' quickly followed by completely inept phrasing,

A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.

Rhythmically, too, this is useless.

The first line of the next verse paragraph is

Another level down, the platform thronged.

Even though all that's happened is that we've been taken back to the world below ground after this unsuccessful excursion to the world above ground, our interest is immediately restored. For many readers, 'another level down' will bring to mind the circles of Dante's Inferno. This could well mark the beginning of something exciting, a contemporary Inferno.

In the next line but one, there's mention of 'a crowd.' This echoes T S Eliot's line in The Waste Land,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

- which echoes Dante's lines in Canto 3 of 'The Inferno,' 'so numerous a host of people ran, / I had not thought death had unmade so many.' (Translated by Anthony Esolen.)

But in this poem, the effect is confused, without impact:

A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung

There are many things wrong with these lines. These are some of them: yet another neologism which adds nothing to the resources of English in 'straggle-ravelled,' the allusion to starting an athletics race in 'On their marks,' banal and too distant from this situation to add anything, an ineffective conjunction in 'street-loud,' too obviously imitating 'street-wise.'

The remaining lines of this verse paragraph are worse, completely forgettable. 'whelm' is a neologism to the extent that here it's used as a noun, whereas the established (but archaic) meaning is as a verb, 'to engulf with water.' Here, it's fairly effective in isolation but in its context completely 'underwhelming:'

Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm

The poet gets on to the train, stepping 'on to the carriage metal.' As carriages in the underground are made mainly of metal, this isn't a point worth mentioning. Then he reaches out for the 'stubby black roof-wort,' which I've discussed already. 'stubby,' though, is exact and effective.

More poor lines follow, although 'Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,' is an exception. 'Spot-rooted' is an interesting and concise alternative to 'rooted to the spot,' I think, and 'aloof' captures very well the appearance of people travelling on the underground to other passengers, equally aloof.

The remaining lines of the verse paragraph don't repay discussion or even a bare mention.

The final verse paragraph has vivid fragments, not lighting up the dross but in contrast with the dross. The closing words, 'Flicker-lit,' referring probably to electrical discharges, is very distant from the 'twilit water' of 'A New Song' and the girl from Derrygarve (although 'Flicker-lit,' given a line of its own, is isolated, unlike 'twilit,' and amounts to an after-thought. 'Flicker-lit' is too good to be wasted in this way.) There's also 'galleried earth,' a very effective conjunction of underground passage and the dramatic / theatrical, and 'treble / Of iron on iron,' which would have been far more effective without 'one-off' before 'treble:' 'one-off treble / Of iron on iron.' 'One-off' belongs to the everyday world above ground. There are miscalculations to go with these successes, such as the line 'My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,' in which 'flail' has associations which are much too vigorous, of thrashing around.

The first section, which describes the busker, forms a kind of Prologue. It's at a low level of accomplishment. The linkage between the busker and Charon, confirmed by the giving of a coin to the busker (a coin was given to Charon in the underworld) is trite and formulaic. The fact that the busker has 'two eyes' and not another number ('his two eyes eyeing me') wasn't worth mentioning. The only good line is 'As the music larked and capered ...' which is Elizabethan in its high spirits. It brings to mind the close of Act I, Scene III of 'Twelfth Night,'

Sir Toby ... Let me see thee caper! Ha! Higher! Ha, ha! Excellent!

Bernard O' Donoghue's comment in the Introduction to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney' that 'The poem invites comparison with Rilke's 'Orpheus' in the way that worldly experience translates without strain into the transcendental, 'transported / Through galleried earth with them, the only relict / Of all that I belonged to' is fatuous. For a discussion of Rilke and the transcendental, amongst other matters, see my page Rilke and Kafka.

In the poem ―The Harrow-Pin, Heaney focuses once again on his father as the subject of the poem. And as he had done in ―The Harvest Bow‖ twenty-seven years earlier, Heaney sets out to explore his father‘s inner self, the source of his actions and beliefs, by focusing on an inanimate object associated with the man. The poem reads like a free flowing conversation. It begins with a speaker recounting a time from his childhood when he and his siblings believed in the magic of Christmas. He remembers how, as kids, he and his siblings would hang up stockings in the hope that by morning they would be filled with treats. He tells how they would be warned by his father to behave or else stockings would be filled with old dried cabbages instead of treats. This bit of reminiscing leads the story teller to remember his father‘s worst threat of all – the harrow-pin. This hand-forged spike would be used not only as an object for their instruction; his father would want to use it in place of picture hooks and wire nails for shelving. Talk of the harrow-pin leads to stories of working the fields and the horses. Their tackle would hang in the barn. But the Christmas story and the father‘s use of the harrow-pin for everything from threats, to hanging pictures, to working the fields are all part of a long ago harder time. The father, however, was never able to let those hard times go. Throughout the years he still judged everyone by their ability to make do and tough it out.

―The Harrow-Pin‖ was published in Heaney‘s 2006 collection, District and Circle. The poem is comprised of 24 lines arranged into eight three-lined heterometric stanzas. Heaney moves the poem forward by iambic meter and enjambment. The rhyme is created using assonance and alliteration. The primary object in the poem is a harrow-pin. This is a forged metal spike, part of an agricultural tool. These spikes are pounded, a dozen or so at a time, through a piece of wood which is dragged spike side down behind a horse to break up clods of dirt in the plowed fields. Heaney associates the use and qualities of the harrow-pin with his father‘s world view. The harrow-pin becomes the symbolic plane for his father‘s inner self.

Heaney is the speaker in ―The Harrow-Pin.‖ His recollections flow as a stream of consciousness. He begins the poem by recalling what his father used to tell him when he was a child:

We‘d be told, ―If you don‘t behave

There‘ll be nothing in your Christmas stocking for you

But an old kale stalk.‖ And we would believe him. (District 25)

The telling of the Christmas stocking story reminds Heaney that as a child he believed in whatever his father told him, even something as fantastical as stockings being magically filled by some unseen someone who was able to know if we were bad or good. He doesn‘t recall finding an old cabbage in his stocking, just being threatened that it would be put there if he didn‘t behave. Once this correlation is established, Heaney introduces his father‘s most outrageous threat: the harrow-pin. In the mind of a child the harrow-pin takes on frightening possibilities and monstrous anamorphic design: ―Head-banged spike, forged fang, a true dead ringer.‖ But, from Heaney‘s adult perspective, the forged pin loses these menacing qualities. In 2008 Heaney described the family discipline when he was a child: ―No punishments were administered. She [Heaney‘s mother] never raised a hand to one of us. What loomed, when the situation was grave, was the authority of my father, although this was never exercised as corporal punishment‖ (O‘Driscoll 311). The adult Heaney is able to describe the harrow-pin‘s physical aspects and its associations, an approach he had taken for the harvest bow twenty-seven years earlier. The harrow-pin comes from an era when times were tough, people worked hard to make ends meet, and made do with what they had:

Out of a harder time, it was a stake

He‘d drive through aspiration and pretence

For our instruction. (District 25)

―He‘d drive through aspiration and pretence / for our instruction,‖ echoes values first expressed in ―The Harvest Bow‖: ―Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks / And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks‖ (OG 175). What wasn‘t obvious to the poet twenty-seven years earlier was the long term impact the hard times had on his father. In ―The Harvest Bow,‖ the middle aged poet recalls seeing evidence of difficulty but was sheltered from the struggles by the presence of his father:

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 […] (175)

Age and circumstances have changed Heaney‘s perspective. In his mind, the harrow-pin drives home the difficult times that shaped his father‘s worldview. The father‘s association to the harrow-pin is extended to include the farm horses that Heaney once described in ―The Follower‖: ―My father worked with a horse-plough […] The horses strained at his clicking tongue […] the sweating team turned round‖ (OG 10). Age and insight open Heaney‘s eyes; the romance of the ploughman gives way to the harsh reality of field work. The harrow-pins, used to hang the horse tackle, personify this harsh reality:

Brute-forced, rusted, haphazard set pins

From harrow wrecked by horse-power over stones

Lodged in the stable wall and on them hung

Horses‘ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,

Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,

The tackle of the mighty, simple dead. (District 25)

Heaney‘s stream of consciousness has moved forward from an association between the harrow-pin and his father to an association between the work horses and his father. Heaney forces us to ask, ―Who are the mighty simple dead? The long dead horses? Heaney‘s deceased father?‖ The final two stanzas morph the horses, the harrow pin, and his father into one:

Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss

He put all to the test. Inside, in the house,

Ungulled, irreconcilable.

And horse-sensed as the traveled Gulliver,

What virtue he approved (and would assay)

Was hammered in iron (District 26)

Heaney‘s father‘s stern criticism of the world around him and his desire for a Spartan existence, expressed seven years earlier in ―xxxiii‖ from ―Squarings,― ―‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know‘, / A paradigm of rigour and correction‖ (OG 352) takes its toll. In his father‘s later years Heaney sees a father who is increasingly cynical. The poet compares him to the traveled Gulliver. Gulliver held unrealistic expectations for human behavior and because of this the world of humans became a disappointment to him (Dyson 682). The father judges all by the standards of a world that is not a human world. It is the world of his draft horses, tough, hard, physical, and, like Gulliver who leaves the land of Houyhnhms, the father‘s world is gone and cannot be revisited. The father‘s horses have been replaced by modern machinery: ―From harrows wrecked by horse-power over stones,‖ their rusted and stained tackle hanging as testament to a by gone era. In the end, what the father‘s high ideals lead him to is unemotional pure reason and practicality. What emerges in this poem is a complex picture of a man who, like Swift‘s Gulliver, holds himself and his fellow man to such high ideals that it can only lead to self alienation.

• 
  The main character in the poem is the local barber, Harry Boyle. Instead just calling him the barber, Heaney tells us his name.
  

• 
  The sheet put around the boy having his hair clipped is like the cloak or costume worn by the Ku Klux Klan, an American racist organisation.
  

• 
  The 2nd to the 6th lines describe how Harry Boyle cut the young boy's hair.
  

• 
  The poem is full of wonder at what happens in the one-roomed house of Harry Boyle.
  

• 
  The poem describes in close-up the sounds and sights of a hair cut or a "clip".
  

• 
  Like "Clearances" and "Requiem for the Croppies" this poem is a sonnet.
  

• 
  The title could have two meanings: a dip refers to a haircut; but the poem is also like a short clip from a film.
  

• 
  Harry Boyle was a scruffy man; but he gave a good haircut.
  

• 
  There is a very good description of the equipment the barber uses.
  

• 
  The poem is a memory of the poet's childhood.
  

• 
  The barbershop is also the barber's house.
  

• 
  Harry Boyle's house has become dilapidated.
  

• 
  Seamus Heaney got his hair clipped in a house instead of a traditional barber shop.
  

In his poem “A Clip,” Heaney addresses the Spots of Time through thematic concerns, and in doing so, alludes to a poet’s highest calling, that of social adequacy.

In the Spots of Time, Wordsworth repeatedly mentions mysterious sounds.  While stealing birds from traps, he hears “among the solitary hills/ Low breathings,” and in the act of stealing raven’s eggs he notes what a “strange utterance did the loud dry wind/ Blow through my ears.”  While out for a late-night row in a stolen rowboat, he avers it is “not without the voice/ Of mountain-echoes did my boat move,”[9] and while out past curfew ice-skating, he recognizes “the distant hills/ Into the tumult sent an alien sound/ Of melancholy, not unnoticed.”[10]

In Heaney’s “A Clip,” the speaker also experiences “close breathing” in his “ear,” yet it arises from a definite source, the poem’s barber, Harry Boyle.  So while the barbershop in “A Clip” is “Near enough to home but unfamiliar,” Heaney still wonders “What was it happened there,” even though the “close breathing”[11] in his ear has an identifiable wellspring.  In effect, whether the sound arises from “the solitary hills,” the “loud dry wind,” the “mountains,” or the “the distant hills,”[12] “Harry not shaved, close breathing in your ear”[13] creates an arresting strangeness analogous to that of The Prelude’s Spots of Time. 

The force behind Wordsworth’s “low breathings” is located in the interaction between the speaker and his surroundings.  In the rowboat scene, for example, where Wordsworth once gently “dipped” his oars into “the silent Lake”—when he sees a prodigious cliff that with “voluntary power instinct,/ Upreared its head” as he rowed farther from the shore, he subsequently “struck (the water), and struck again,”[14] as if involved in “an act more violent than rowing alone.”  As Bishop writes, a scene that once involved “Reciprocation”[15] shifts to include a measure of retaliation.  Alone in the expanse of nature, the height of the impending cliffs humbles Wordsworth and turns him defensively aggressive. 

Heaney feels an almost suffocating tension in “Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney house.”  He details the “Cold smooth creeping steel” of the “strong-armed chair” in which he sits.  Of course, “strong-armed” describes the make of the thing, but Heaney also feels “strong-armed—” forced, or arrested, as it were, to sit down and endure the menacing ordeal.  He goes on to describe his “sheeted self inside that neck-tied cope.” This mention of “cope”[16] is open to interpretation.  On the one hand, it references how Wordsworth feels when touched by the inspirational afflatus in Book 1 of “The Prelude,” as if “clothed in priestly robe.”[17]  On the other hand, however, Heaney feels he almost cannot “cope” with the situation, as if the “neck-tied cope” is choking him to submit to the “clip.”[18]

Along with how directly Heaney addresses the themes of Wordsworth’s Spots of Time in Book 1 of The Prelude with “A Clip,” the violence in each scene is important to note.  In each passage, the subject is sedentary—Wordsworth in the rowboat, and Heaney in the barber chair—as one is likely seated during the composition of a poem.  Despite this suggestively passive posture, however, Heaney emulates Wordsworth’s vividly aggressive language to re-assert the purpose that Wordsworth’s early childhood memories serve.  This purpose is akin to the famous Blake passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that “without contraries, there is no progression,”[19] or to the closing lines of Paul Muldoon’s early poem “Wind and Tree:” “by my broken bones/ I tell new weather.” These early memories serve as foundational engagements with the world around each poet and as opportunities for self-knowledge through irksome encounters. 

Heaney has The Prelude, and more specifically, the Spots of Time in the forefront of his mind in both “Wordsworth’s Skates” and “A Clip.”  In Finders Keepers he writes that “poems are elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds.”[22]  Indeed, in “A Clip,” the “neck-tied cope”[23] that Heaney mentions can be understood as the pressure he feels to define his own experience, but also as the first inkling he senses of the pressure to address the larger world around him.  It seems Heaney offers that the best a poet can do is “cope” with whatever situation is at hand, in a quest to find “images and symbols adequate to our predicament.”[24]

The shell blast that stopped Edward Thomas's heart on the battlefield at Arras stopped his pocket watch, too, at 24 minutes to eight on the morning of Easter Monday, 1917. That frozen timepiece is an appropriate image for a poet whose best work seems to still time, to suspend a moment of clear-sighted observation. The 142, mostly slender, poems he left behind are timeless in a more obvious way, too. As the list of contributors to Branch-Lines - a kind of posthumous festschrift of poems and essays - shows, his influence is still profound: Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon and Peter Porter are among the 56 writers and critics queuing up to sing the praises of a poet whom Ted Hughes acknowledged as "the father of us all".

If Thomas has a reputation as "a poet's poet", it's partly down to the lambent purity of those poems, which he took to writing only in the last few years of his life. Walter de la Mare wrote that Thomas had "unlearned all literary influences". That's by no means true, but it reveals something important about the simplicity of his diction and forms. Yet clarity and simplicity may well be mirages; they are the hard-won result of Thomas's attention not merely to things-as-they-are - to nettles, or rain, or the ploughed earth - but to the inner processes of memory, perception, naming and thought.

The poems in this inestimable book are in no way all homages; still less are they imitations or pastiches. But they are all indebted in some way to Thomas. Where appropriate, the relevant Thomas poem is printed alongside its modern descendant. So Heaney's "Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road" appears next to "As the team's head-brass ...", off which it plays. Many echoes may be heard: noting that Thomas has appeared in translation in Japan, Penelope Shuttle recasts him as a kind of Basho in "Edward San", in which "a pure thrush word / spreads its calligraphic wings / over Kyoto". The thrush's cry, from Thomas's "The Word", is remade here as an enigmatic emblem of poetic influence. Elsewhere the debt is more glancing, or unacknowledged. Matthew Hollis writes of the ways in which poets may be influenced by poems they have never even read, "rather like the way conversation can move across a crowded room".

Thomas's intense preoccupation with the detail of rural lives and landscapes has led many to see him as pre-eminently a poet who hymns a vanishing England. But just as the backward glance is characteristic of Thomas's writing, so, too, is the onward step. To take things at walking pace is to take them at their proper, human speed; and this allows Thomas to find in England's roads and woods and hidden haunts a close correspondence between the rhythms of nature and those of common human life and speech. Walking, for him, was essentially a levelling activity; he could delight, De la Mare wrote, in "a poor man of any sort, down to a king". That egalitarian impulse is clear in Thomas's concern, shared with his great friend Robert Frost, for the dignity of manual labour. It's clear, too, in an ear that is often wittily attuned to the cadences of unstudied speech: "Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob, / Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he / Loved horses. He himself was like a cob, / And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree."

The poem ends by telling us that all that now survives of the farmer is a name: Bob's Lane. This interest in naming, which recurs throughout Thomas's poetry, is picked up here by UA Fanthorpe in a poem of Gloucestershire placenames. These, the "vocabulary of earth", are in themselves almost a force of nature: "No committee okayed them. / They happened, like grass. / ... / Their proper stresses a password / Known only to cautious locals."

"Old Man" is the poem that receives most mentions here, and it's easy to see why, as its insistence on the manifold bewilderments of utterance and reference give it a strikingly contemporary ring. It begins: "Old Man, or Lad's-love, - in the name there's nothing / To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, / ... / Even to one that knows it well, the names / Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is". It's not just that Thomas is interested in the inner life of words and speech, but that his best poems, as here, enact his inquiries for the reader. Like Frost, he shows great skill in bringing speech or thinking to life, whether through a persona or his own clean authorial voice.

As ever, his attention to linguistic stagecraft repays the closest scrutiny. Such is his simplicity of diction that the reader is frequently led astray by phrasings that double-back sharply on paradox or secondary meanings. In "The Word", for instance, he muses on memory's failings, likening everything he has formerly loved and now forgotten to "a childless woman's child / And its child's children", a startling, infinite regress of loss, which prefaces a stripping down of the poet's own perceptions to the most basic sensations - "the elder scent / That is like food" or "the wild rose scent that is like memory" - and then, finally, to that "pure thrush word", the "empty thingless name" that, denoting nothing, is yet distilled to a very quintessence of meaning.

Glyn Maxwell captures something of this characteristic in the largest contribution here, a series of 14 "Letters to Edward Thomas" cast as notes that can never be read by their intended recipient: "What I write / Is on its way nowhere, is less than breath, / So might be anything, as nothing might." He continues, with reference to Thomas's "Words": "Words I mean you not to know / Don't see why they should move in any step / I fix them with." As Jem Poster argues in a persuasive essay that locates Thomas within the context of the first stirrings of modernism, this endless, stumbling word-dance lies at the heart of Thomas's work.

Edna Longley, our foremost student of Thomas, writes in her introduction to The Annotated Collected Poems that his influence endures because his poetry "secretes core values, traditions and tricks of the trade". This edition, generously and skilfully annotated, with what amounts to a mini-essay on each of the poems, is an invaluable addition to Thomas scholarship. Both these books form a fitting tribute to a body of work whose pure clarity of utterance, 91 years after the death of its begetter, still pulses with feeling, thoughtful life.

'Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road' is a spectral encounter rather in the Hardy vein, and there is a grim, twinkling awareness of mortality which now shines from some lines in this collection, recalling Hardy in particular.
The Sally Rod

In 'Senior Infants', when a schoolmate is encountered after many decades, now walking with a stick, it is the physical memory of another, chastising stick which unites the two men:

'Well, for Jesus' sake,' cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
'For Jesus' sake! D'you mind the sally rod?'

The Northern Irish 'mind' (for remember) is perfectly judged, and anything but casual. Childhood, Heaney makes us feel, is something lodged in the body's memory as well as that of the remembering mind.

When the young Heaney steps out of line in “The Sally Rod”, with its account of how “Miss Walls / Lost her head and cut the legs off us / For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear” the real misdemeanour is that the poet couldn’t manage something more transgressive than such an insipid little tale.

a quiet, simple poem that is astoundingly wise about aging, friendship, memory, regret, exile and irish masculinity.

A Chow

Heaney sounds right more often than any other living poet, a product of instinct, not of poring over dictionary entries in search of arcane and archaic interlacings of Indo-European roots. He did not need to know that hag and hew were related to mention them in the same breath; nor quid and cud to call a mouthful of tobacco his ginger calf's lick (in "A Chow"). His ear told him. It is an argument for the idea of a collective, shared subconscious that Heaney's readers also recognize the sound; from the start of his career, reviewers have noted that "the visceral impact of his speech is his signature" ( Publisher's Weekly ). He seems instinctively to give words the room and the situation they need to manifest the full range, depth, and history of their meanings, "a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential."

How about this for a piece of verbal magic in Heaney’s elegy for a ‘favourite aunt’ (in District and Circle):

She took the risk, at last, of certain joys –
Her birdtable and jubilating birds,
The ‘fashion’ in her wardrobe and tallboy.

Look how hard the word ‘jubilating’ is working here — except it’s not really working, more like playing or dancing. The word can hardly contain itself, just like the little birds it’s describing. You can see them bouncing and nodding up and down one after the other, with that odd little stop-motion animated effect you get with the movements of birds. It’s like being a child watching an animated film. Or indeed, being a child watching birds on your birdtable. It’s a little Mexican wave of word, as if each syllable were a bird jumping up and landing just as the one behind it jumps up.

It’s also a multicoloured word — no-one in the British Isles will miss the proximity of ‘jubilating’ to ‘jubilee’, so that the word conjures up the red, white and blue of a Royal Jubilee, with the bird-like flicker of cellophane Union Jacks being waved by children. Which of course has political connotations in the Northern Irish context.

But the word is not exclusively Unionist in its associations — it also brings to mind ‘In Dulce Jubilo’, the mediaeval Catholic carol written by the Dominican mystic Henry Suso. Which in turn evokes the spirit of Heaney’s own ‘St Francis and the Birds’, from Death of a Naturalist.

I’m not suggesting this is a political poem, just that political tensions are a perpetual presence in Heaney’s writing, hovering on the edge of awareness, like the ‘ghost surveillance / From behind a gleam of helicopter glass’ earlier in the poem.

And out of the corner of my eye I could swear I caught a glimpse of Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, eyeing those birds from the pages of Jubilate Deo.

Now you might say I’m reading too much into a single word, and that Heaney couldn’t possibly have intended all those meanings. But I bet he did. Or at least, when the word landed on that birdtable as he wrote, he was aware of that the meanings that (ahem) flocked around it, and saw that they were just what he wanted.

If Heaney asks more attention than busy lives easily allow, he amply repays with a surpassingly beautiful poem such as "The Lift," about an open-air funeral for a much loved woman; the poem, like its subject, too reticent to say whom.

Many of Heaney's best poems, such as "Clearances" -- about peeling potatoes with his mother -- speak in a similar voice of restrained elegy, and "The Lift" prefaces a series of such poems in this book, including a remembrance of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.

This is called 'The Lift'. It has the word 'braird' in the first line, and it records the funeral of my sister who died three years ago. Something unexpected happened at the end. It was a very traditional funeral. She lived near the church and we walked behind the hearse and people took lifts of the coffin at the beginning and at the end of the funeral ... And at the end we had an army helicopter crossing. Not because of the funeral...

unboundedly global: one of the strongest short lyrics, "Hofn," wonders at a newly melting glacier, anxious about global warming, yet astonished by the ice's remaining immensities, its "grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff," "its coldness that still seemed enough/ To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath."

Without lessening the case of global warming activists, Heaney reminds us that the deep-freeze of the glacier is our natural enemy

The Blackbird of Glanmore

The Tollund Man in Spring

Heaney's voice in general is that of a sober, mature elder with a rich imagination. "The Tollund Man in Springtime" speaks through the fourth-century B.C. cadaver found in the peat bogs of Denmark. When the poem says, "Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable/Solid standing and readiness to wait/These I learned from," you feel Heaney's own reserved observing.

            “For Heidi With Blue Hair” is a poem written by Fleur Adcock, during the 1980s. The poem presents the readers with a central image of a child being sent home from school for dying her hair blue. The poem can be seen as one in a narrative form since the poem is being described like a story, with several dialogues used. Using different literary devices and imagery, Adcock manages to transform such a minor event and convey the different issues face in adolescence’s life such as friendship, solidarity, school life, home life, family relationship, independence and the many social boundaries that they are being confronted with.  

            The poem deals with independence and individuality in human beings. The main character- Heidi, in the poem has obviously grown up, and has developed her own thoughts and personality, and this can be seen in the headmistress’s tone, being unused to students dying their hair ‘blue’. The poem successfully shows how important relationships between parents and children are, as without her father’s help she would not have achieved her independence. Her father is recognized as a “freedom-loving father”, showing the support he gives to Heidi, which is not very usual among parents. From the poem we can also see Heidi’s strong determination in achieving what she wants, as she is strong minded “Tell them it won’t wash out-not even if I wanted to try”. This shows her courage in standing up to what she believes in, and the courage to strive for what she desires.

The poem uses some imagery, and a metaphor is used “shimmered behind the arguments”, demonstrating how they were all aware of the depressing news of her mother’s death, and that it was a major problem that she was going through. Despite this the poet regains Heidi’s justice and strongly states his firm and that by dying her hair blue was not to rebel against her mother’s death, “It would have been unfair to mention your mother’s death, but that shimmered behind the arguments.” The poet however, manages to evoke the reader’s feelings, such as to feel what Heidi is going through, having to face her mother’s death, “The school had nothing against you; the teachers twittered and gave in.” From this we can see that the death of her mother may have caused the school to back out of pity, yet the issue of her mother’s death remained hidden. The poet also manages to evoke the reader’s feelings towards how the school rules are to some extent, unreasonable, and how the headmistress does not accept different styles- Heidi’s hair being dyed blue was an unusual thing and this can be seen in how Heidi’s father explains that “She’s not a punk in her behavior, it’s just a style”. This clearly shows that it was unusual that one would dye their hair blue. The poet also manages to convey a message that it is not right to judge a book by its cover. 

            The poem is written in six stanzas, each of which contains five lines. The poem does not rhyme, but the style of the poem is enjambment. This can be seen in how the author phrases each line of the poem, and how none of the lines in the poems were complete sentences. The poem uses four voices, Heidi, Heidi’s dad, the headmistress and the poet himself. The poem is written from an outsider’s point of view, to Heidi’s herself.

The poem uses alliteration in this poem and this can be seen in “the teachers twittered”. By using the alliteration, the poet manages to make the teacher’s comments seem silly. The poet also uses sarcasm in the poem, “You wiped your eyes, also not in school color”. This was obviously referring to either the color of her eyes, or the makeup, and shows how the poet was trying to obtain justice for Heidi, and that it was not fair for them to judge her base on her appearance and individual taste of dying her hair blue. Dialogues in the poem are made use of to convey certain messages, such as in “She’s not a punk in her behavior; it’s just a style.” From this the author manages to question the readers whether the appearances could clearly present the personality of a person, and how sometimes one should not be judged by his or her appearance. In stanza 2, the poet states “although dyed hair was not specifically forbidden”, from here the poet again raises the question of whether or not this is really a rule or an excuse. In the last stanza, the poet uses irony, by having Heidi’s friend color her hair “in grey, white and flaxen yellow” which were “the school colors precisely”.

Through the many literary devices and the poem, the poet tries to convey the message that it is not right to discriminate people because of any abnormal preferences or tastes. Just because someone is different from the normality, does not mean that they are necessarily bad in the heart. People have been so used to being conformed to the normality in the world that they have judged people because of the differences, without actually knowing the true personality of a person. The poem also deals with human rights, where people should be given the right to choose their dress code and hairstyle. The issue symbolizes individual’s freedoms and rights in the conflict between the teenager and authority, whether it is at school or at home. The poem manages to depict the conflicts between school culture and youth culture in different aspects including looks and attitudes. I myself agree with the poet’s message that he is trying to convey to the readers. I think it is important that we do not criticize people just because of the way they look, or because they are dissimilar from the others.