Seamus Heaney: Afterlives in Ireland’s Public Domain

Abstract

Seamus Heaney: Afterlives in Ireland’s Public Domain Maureen Kennelly (bio) More than any other artist of his generation, Seamus Heaney naturalized the art of poetry in everyday life. I begin by tracing his moral and aesthetic grounding in his rural Irish roots—but then consider why Heaney’s work remains so fully a part of Irish consciousness a full decade after his death. Through their enduring afterlives presence, Heaney’s words have increasingly become threaded into the public domain, a phenomenon visible not only in Ireland’s response to its 2013 loss, but also in the founding of a range of exhibitions and institutions devoted to exploring, displaying, and supporting his influence on Irish society—including the work of countless visual arts and musicians. In “Something to Write Home About,” an early essay in Finders Keepers (51–62), Heaney recalls how as a toddler he had removed the slats from his cot, remembering the contact that his warm feet made with the cold floor. He remembers the “immediate sensation of surprise; and then something deeper, more gradual, a sensation of consolidation and familiarity, the whole reassuring foundation of the earth coming up into you” (55). He continues, describing the feeling of being in two places at once—and the sensation of finding a space inside himself that he could still enter years after through the memory of his feet on the cold cement. This sense of groundedness is also reflected in “The Loose Box” in Electric Light: “You’ve found your feet in what ‘surefooted’ means / And in the ground of your own understanding—” (15). “In Time,” a poem dedicated to a new granddaughter Síofra and first published in The New Yorker soon after his death, again refers to that grounded sensation Heaney recalls from his own childhood: Your bare foot on the floorKeeps me in step; the powerI first felt come up through [End Page 128] Our cement floor long agoPalps your sole and heelAnd earths you here for real.1 Popular Afterlives Evidence of Heaney’s influence in the public domain might be found in the behavior of those who attended Croke Park on 2 September 2013 for the All-Ireland National Gaelic Football semifinal championship. In a moment expressing the grief of a nation, eighty thousand football fans stood in a hushed silence—and then applause—in Dublin’s national sporting stadium just two days after the poet’s death. Heaney was revered for many reasons in Ireland, and although the announcer acclaimed the poet for his literary accomplishments, he also affectionately noted that Heaney had played junior football in Castledawson as a boy.2 No stranger to such large sporting arenas, Heaney had appeared, with the Russian poet Andrei Voznesenski, at a series of immense basketball stadiums in the course of a career of public readings that forged deep connections with huge audiences in Ireland—and worldwide. The final line of Heaney’s midcareer poem “Alphabets” focuses on the artistry of a Bellaghy craftsman on the family gable: Or like my own pre-reflective stareAll agog at the plasterer on his ladderSkimming our gable and writing our name thereWith his trowel point, letter by strange letter. (HL 3) The Dublin street artist Maser transcribed a phrase—from the last message Heaney texted to his wife as he was rushed into heart surgery on 30 August 2013—onto an urban Dublin gable end; the poet’s Latin words, “noli timere”—translated to “Don’t Be Afraid”—were emblazoned on that wall in Dublin’s Portobello neighborhood (figure 1). Gables feature often in Heaney’s poetry—along with clay, wells, pumps—and it seems fitting to trace the gable wall of his rural [End Page 129] Bellaghy birthplace to that other one in his adopted city of Dublin, his urban home for the last four decades of his life. Maser’s tribute has become a popular destination for countless visitors, suggesting Heaney’s unprecedented position in both popular and literary Irish and international culture. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Maser, Don’t Be Afraid.” Photo by Maser, 2013. With kind permission of Maser. A...