Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances: ‘III’”

Abstract

Seamus Heaney’s third sonnet from his sequence “Clearances,” collected in his 1987 volume, The Haw Lantern, quickly became a favorite of his readers and indeed, it was voted the favorite Irish poem of the last 100 years by the Irish public in an Irish Times poll from 2015. The poem is characteristic Heaney in its appeal to our senses and many commentators have focused their reading of the poem on its images of potato peeling that the young Heaney undertook with his mother “When all the others were away at Mass” (line 1; all parenthetical references are to the poem in Opened Ground 285). Certain resonances of this domestic activity that brought Heaney and his mother, who died in 1984, so close together remain unexplored in the criticism, however, and are worth retrieving for a better understanding of how he movingly charts their closeness. Heaney employs careful rhymes to signify his intimacy with his mother in both stanzas, along with two images of fluid metal across those stanzas. Sonically, the poet uses the repetition and rhymes of “all” and “fall” in its opening octave to signify how this domestic space and activity was a comfortable space of togetherness for the boy and his mother; moreover, it becomes a substitute, sacred space for that of the Mass that he and his mother—perhaps somewhat scandalously—miss. To wit, “When all the others were away at Mass/I was all hers as we peeled potatoes” (1–2). Heaney cleverly juxtaposes “all the others” attending Catholic mass with being “all hers” as they peeled potatoes. In a family with nine children, Heaney rarely would have been “all hers” because Mary Heaney would have had her attention divided ten ways—among husband and her nine children. Now, in this labor of love, Heaney can bask in her attention, silently lavished upon him, broken only by the potatoes that they “let fall one by one...” (3). The use of “fall” echoes the twice repeated “all” in the first two lines, and this new rhyming verb appears again in line seven to describe once more that potatoes that they “let fall” (7). Thus, the silent attention Mary Heaney bestowed upon her eldest child is occasionally broken by these “Little pleasant splashes...” (7). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005520