Seamus_Heaney_Poetry

TOPIC: Using at least one text, discuss the idea that literature can help to shape a culture INTRODUCTION Literature is a powerful medium, permitting the writer to cause the reader to reflect on various social issues. If the writer is widely read or widely discussed, it may be that literature actually brings about eventual change in a society, politically and culturally. In some cases the transition from literature to politics can be complete. What the world knows of the horrors of the Russian gulags is largely due to Solzhenitsyn. Vaclev Havel moved from dissident playwright under Soviet-ruled Czecholslovakia, to be the country’s President. Mario Vargas Lllosa in Peru is a writer who has had great influence on the politics and culture of Latin America. All these writers were famous in their own countries. If we are to consider a writer to have had an effect on a whole culture, they must be famous. The Irish have an extraordinary number of famous and widely-read writers, from Yeats to Joyce to Shaw to Wilde, and in that esteemed line is Seamus Heaney, influential enough in Irish society (having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) to be called ‘Famous Seamus.’ He is a very visceral writer, his poems often being quite confronting and producing an emotional response in the reader. The Irish traditionally being great readers of prose, reciters of verse and singers, may be more likely to respond to such writing than other cultures. In this essay I will consider two of his poems, ‘Limbo’ (year) and ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ (year), and how the poet speaks through them to make comments about aspects of Irish society, especially the role of religion versus genuine human kindness, and the price the Irish have paid for nationalism. With the employment of evocative poetic devices, Heaney deconstructs the universal issue of institutionalized religion as restricting, close-minded, apathetic, prejudiced and tribal. This is shown through his poems where; brutal afterlife, restricted choice, violent conflict, and gender inequality are all affirmed as byproducts of fundamentalism. He however, affirms basic Christian values, which lies at the heart of these religions and stresses the need to evolve from fundamentalism to Christianity in order to have a society of less conflict and more compassion. VIOLENT RELIGIOUS CONFLICT; ‘THE STRAND AT LOUCH BEG’ Heaney’s poem, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ carries the poignant message that fundamentalism leads to pointless violence. On one level the poem seems a peaceful account of a walk through an Irish filed, with “church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew’, and the cattle grazing, ‘up to their bellies in the early mist’, with ‘their unbewildered gaze.’ But this implies that, at another time, something bewildering happened here, and that was the gruesome assassination of Colum McCartney, as a direct result of religious warfare in the Irish ‘Troubles.’ Woven between the lines about idyllic rural peace are allusions to violence. Sometimes the two are in the same line, as in ‘Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes’, giving an impression of trouble in paradise, or a hidden cancer in a healthy-looking body. The fragmented rhythm of the poem seems to be fragmented, changing from the gentle swaying of rural bliss to the staccato beats of implied violence ‘Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun’ as McCartney is stopped in a fake road block, taken from hois car, and shot. What seems at first to be a romantic verse in the nature of Wordsworth’s “daffodils’, turns out to be an elegy with a dark message. The closing stanza of the poem is cathartic and peppered with biblical allusions. McCartney appears to be a reflection of Christ. Having been brutally crucified in the name of religion, he is resurrected, and appears to the persona in a dream-like epiphany, ‘to find you on your knees/ with blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes.’ The reason that he is made in the image of Christ is symbolic that Catholics and Protestants are both unified through basic Christian belief. By the persona ‘gather[s] up cold handfuls of dew, to wash [McCartney]’, Heaney is alluding to the biblical story of John 13:12 where Jesus washes the feet of all the disciples, and tells them to do the same to others, no matter what religion, or class. The caesura in the closure of the poem invites the reader to continue life as compassionate Christians, given a second chance after the ‘eye-opening’ event of McCartney’s murder. ‘With rushes that shoot green again, I plait’ The plosive ‘p’ foregrounding Heaney’s use of literature to make people aware of the changes that can be made to society in order to be more Chrisitian and compassionate. Wtf!!! Plosive what' Heaney makes a great impression on the reader using these techniques, and the message I took from this poem was the futility of a religious war between two groups of so-called Christians, and how tragic it was, how pointless, and how hypocritical it was. It is impossible to estimate the degree to which one writer can affect a whole ‘culture’, but it seems reasonable to expect that since many have read Heaney, that there has been some effect. Over the period of Heaney’s lifetime, the heat has gone out of the Irish civil war, with both the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain being part of the European Union, the younger population being lkess concerned with religion, and much less violence. Poets didn’t do this alone of course, but Heaney at the least reflected the thinking of many in Ireland, and gave voice to that feeling, which helped change a culture. PERSONAL FREEDOM AND THE ALL-POWERFUL CHURCH; ‘LIMBO’ Fundamentalist religion places fear in people, causing them to do things that they wouldn’t rationally do, even things against their nature. Sex outside of marriage in conservative Ireland was frowned upon, and an illegitimate child a cause of great shame. (Even the word illegitimate seems designed to deny the child’s right to exist.) Heaney’s poem ‘Limbo’ refers to a mother od such a child, who must have found herself in a brutal ‘Catch 22’ situation. She can either keep the baby, condemning both herself and the baby to a life of ‘sin’ and condemnation, or kill the baby and feel a lifetime of regret and guilt. We never meet the poor mother, but we know she has chosen the latter, for the dead baby is caught in a fishing net. Heaney writes with apparent sympathy for the unkown mother. The reader is positioned to feel sympathy for her as she euphemistically ‘ducks him tenderly’ into the water, an infanticide that eludes baptism, because she has no other feasible option. This poignant moment appeals to the tactile senses and emotions of the reader through the evocative similes, and leaves us wishing we could change the awful circumstances and save the child. Till the frozen knobs of her wrists were dead as the gravel He was a minnow with hooks Tearing her open Heaney plays on the reader’s revulsion at that thing which we all instinctively find horrific, the loss of an innocent human life on the day it is born, guiltless and completely helpless. The reader is made to feel angry by the frank description of the body as essentially garbage, worthless; netted ‘along with the salmon / An illegitimate spawning.’ We find ourselves feeling angry with something, for daring to describe a dead baby in such a way. But exactly who are we angry with' The poet' No, the Church. We soon recognise that the poet shares our anger, and that the cruel description of the dead baby is not really his, but that of the Catholic Church, or perhaps that of conservative Irish society, which at this time in history was almost the same thing. We are made to understand that it was the Church which guided her actions when we are told that She waded in under The sign of her cross That is, she blessed herself as she killed her babe. We are reminded that Catholic doctrine says that a baby who has died without being baptized, so this poor blameless babe, ‘illegitimate’ when alive, is sentenced by the Church to ‘limbo’ in death. The idea of limbo, as a place where unbaptised babies are sent and tortured in Hell from all of eternity, because of their ‘original sin’, is presented as a quite unjust sentence for an innocent babe. ‘Now limbo will be a cold glitter of souls’ Limbo seems to the reader the verdict of an unloving, unforgiving Church, even that of a cruel theocracy. Not at all a ‘Christian’ outcome. Not remotely like Jeses’ kindness to the sinning Mary Magdelene. It seems the judgement of a Church which has lost its way, and lost its humanity. A reasonable reader cannot condemn the mother, not her dead child, in the way that the Church seems to do in this poem. And there is perhaps a suggestion that Christ himself would not approve of what his Church has become, with Even Christ’s palms, unhealed smart and cannot fish here. The issue of gender is quietly addressed by Heaney in this poem too. The father of the child does not sem to exist in ‘Limbo.’ He is absent and seemingly absolved from blame, like Adam. Only Eve is to blame. A familiar theme in Heaney’s works is of the sexual oppression of women, which is a feature of religious fundamentalism. As Salman Rushdie wrote, "Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power." There has been during Heaney’s lifetime a cultural change in women’s rights, and a loosening of the power of the Church over women. An unmarried mother in Ireland in 2010 would still face some social shame, but the situation described in this poem would be most unlikely as the power of the Church has abated. It is more likely that the father would be involved in any decision nowadays, and less chance that the woman would face condemnation or face this situation alone. Poets and writers have reflected, and at times lead, this cultural change. Just as the individual reader of ‘Louch Beg’ was made to consider the futility of religious conflict, the individual reader of ‘Limbo’ is forced to ponder the value of personal freedom versus the cruel doctrines of a powerful church. Again, you can’t really assess how much of the change that has happened in Ireland during Heaney’s lifetime has been due to poets and writers, but they have certainly been part of a cultural change which has seen nowadays churches in Ireland half-empty, great liberation in social mores, and a younger generation which is as liberal in its attitudes as any country in Europe. But abortion is still illegal and unobtainable in Ireland. Irish women sometimes travel to Britain for this. CONCLUSION: A poet may choose to depict a society exactly as he or she sees it, or may choose to exaggerate one aspect in order to draw attention to something in order to make the reader feel strongly about. The art of the writer is to make the reader feel. Then possibly the reader may want it to change. In the two poems I have critiqued, Heaney does this very well. The reader is compelled to share Heaney’s aching and anger over the murder of Colum McCartney, gunned down in a paddock in the Irish civil war. The reader feels the agony of the poor unmarried mother drowning her babe in an awful choice forced upon her by the Church. And if every reader feels such things, and the writer is widely read and discussed, or at least read by enough people who are themselves influential, then it is reasonable to expect that the literature has contributed to the cultural changes that come along in that country. Seamus Heaney was indeed widely read in Ireland, and the nature and strength of his writing has helped shape modern Irealnd, in a less violent, less judgmental mould to the colder, stricter Ireland of fifty years ago. Maybe it could be said, even though the Church is less influential, that modern Ireland is more ‘Christian’ for these changes.