“Diving for Crucibles”: Seamus Heaney, Barrie Cooke, and Bog Poems

Abstract

“Diving for Crucibles”: Seamus Heaney, Barrie Cooke, and Bog Poems Heather Clark (bio) by the time Seamus Heaney read The Bog People in 1969, with its arresting images of Iron Age corpses recovered from Danish bogs, he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “I was in a new field of force. . . . Opening P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People was like opening a gate.” But he spoke, too, of another crystallizing force: that of the expression-ist artist Barrie Cooke. It was Cooke who inspired Heaney to write “Bone Dreams” in the summer of 1972, “the first of those loose-link, zig-zaggy sequences that would eventually appear in North” (SS 157). In the mid-1970s Heaney collaborated with Cooke on Bog Poems, a limited edition published two weeks before Faber and Faber released North in 1975. The Barrie Cooke archive at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which opened in February 2022, reveals new details about the evolution of Bog Poems and North that suggest the prominent role Cooke played in Heaney’s controversial turn toward the mythic in 1971–74 as he was writing some of his most iconic poems. This new archive shows how Cooke’s and Ted Hughes’s friendship inspired Heaney to reorient his life toward personal and creative freedom in the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s when he was increasingly troubled by political violence and beginning to feel the weight of his responsibilities as a northern Irish poet. The Cooke archive and the Heaney papers at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) shed particular light on Heaney’s use of female bog bodies in Bog Poems and North, and they point to a connection between Cooke’s interest in sheela-na-gigs and Heaney’s use of the aisling figure in poems like “Come to the Bower,” “Bog Queen,” “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” and “Act of Union.” Understanding Cooke’s role in Heaney’s life and art allows us to examine more critically what led Heaney to use passive, betrayed, murdered, and raped female bodies [End Page 14] as political metaphors. Drafts of “Bone Dreams,” “Punishment,” “Kinship,” “Tête Coupée” (later titled “Strange Fruit”), and the unpublished “Dark Rosaleen” in the Cooke and NLI archives point to Cooke’s influence—one that has only recently come into focus and that, I argue, contributed to Heaney’s attempt to transform the bog women of Jutland into aisling figures. But some of these drafts also suggest a revisionary process as Heaney retreats from Cooke’s mythic, ahistorical vision and moves closer to a historical, empathic view as he searched for ways to address the violence in Northern Ireland. He realized by 1973 that “abandoning history was a luxury that the times had disallowed” (SS 169). If Cooke’s influence led to what Edna Longley called “imaginative dead ends” in North,1 it also led Heaney to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, or what he called “Song and Suffering” (GT xii). This would become the defining theme of Heaney’s oeuvre, and it took root while he was collaborating with Barrie Cooke on Bog Poems. A Gathering of Forces: Barrie Cooke, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney On 13 November 1971 Seamus Heaney feasted on fresh pike with Barrie Cooke at his riverside home in County Kilkenny. Cooke lived in an old Georgian mill, The Island, on the banks of the River Nore with his partner, the Dutch ceramicist Sonja Landweer. As Heaney watched Cooke clean the pike, he heard the river rushing past. A poem took root, and that evening he wrote “The Island,” which remains unpublished. In the poem Heaney describes Cooke preparing the fish for dinner as darkness falls and the river’s legs wrap “round the island.”2 This night would take on a deeply romantic significance in Heaney’s memory: he later called it “the first supper.”3 Three months before in August 1971, the very week internment [End Page 15] without trial began in Northern Ireland, Heaney had returned to Belfast from his year at Berkeley. He published “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” in The Listener that October, a month before the “first supper” at Cooke’s, and wrote searingly...