‘Mycenae Lookout’ and the Example of Aeschylus

Abstract

Discussing ‘Anything Can Happen’, his response, via Horace, to 11 September 2001, Heaney said to Dennis O’Driscoll: ‘For better or worse, you can’t be liberated from consciousness’. His version of the thirty-fourth of the odes in Book 1 was, he said, ‘partly an elegy—but, to quote Wilfred Owen’s “Preface”, it was also meant “to warn”’ (O’Driscoll 2008: 424). Working from the heavy collocation of time and mood Heaney offered in these remarks, uniting elegiac retrospect and uneasy anticipation, this essay explores the coincidence of classical sources and contemporary concerns in Heaney’s earlier sequence ‘Mycenae Lookout’. It attends especially closely to Heaney’s re-imagining of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, and the burden of consciousness she both bears and represents.