Seamus Heaney and Education: Student and Teacher

Seamus Heaney and Education:Student and Teacher Bríd McGuinness (bio) While a visiting professor at Harvard University, Seamus Heaney was commissioned by Phi Beta Kappa Society to write a poem for their 1984 Literary Exercises, a yearly commencement event held in celebration of learning. In 'Alphabets', the resulting poem, Heaney decided to write about 'making the first letters at primary school'.1 The poem indeed starts with a young Seamus learning shapes and symbols, before moving on to unfamiliar surroundings at St Columb's College, Derry. In its third and final section, Heaney has come full circle, lecturing on academia's most prestigious stages. Heaney was constantly aware of dualities throughout his life, and this concern can be seen in each section of 'Alphabets'. Mindful that his education breaks new ground for the family, Heaney knows he cannot simply follow in his father's farming footsteps but must find a middle ground to dig, a social bilingualism. 'Terminus' which appears in his 1987 collection The Haw Lantern alongside 'Alphabets', outlined competing forces at play: Two buckets were easier carried than one.I grew up in between. My left hand placed the standard iron weight.My right tilted a last grain in the balance.2 As Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, Heaney would once again address the concept of balance in his celebrated lecture series entitled 'The Redress of Poetry'. It is in his childhood home in County Derry, however, where we will first examine his relationship with education. Early education A shadow his father makes with joined handsAnd thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wallLike a rabbit's head. He understands [End Page 345] He will understand more when he goes to school.3 Seamus Heaney was born and raised at Mossbawn, the family farm, near Castledawson in April 1939. The first of nine children born to Patrick and Margaret Heaney, he remembered his childhood home fondly, recalling the 'one-storey, longish, lowish, thatched and whitewashed' three-roomed cottage in which he spent his early life. Books were present but held an air of detachment: the world of print was like the world of proper and official behaviour among strangers … it was like having to talk to the doctor or the priest.'4 Like with all children, his first forays into communication came from engagement with others, and in 'Alphabets' he writes of his father making shadow puppets on a wall. Later, he would sit close to the family wireless so as to hear bursts of foreign languages. He told the Swedish Academy that by encountering 'the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world'.5 Heaney chooses to introduce an awkwardness into this first verse of 'Alphabets' by writing, 'He understands/He will understand more when he goes to school.'6 His father can only teach so much; greater gains will happen outside of the family home. Anahorish Primary School gave Heaney his first experience of formal education. He enrolled in May 1944, having just turned five. His memories, recounted to Dennis O'Driscoll, are stark and factual: four teachers instructed separate classes of girls and boys. Charts and 'big-lettered reading books'7 hung near heavy desks complete with inkwells and grooves for pencils and pens.8 In Anahorish one finds a good example of why Heaney came to be preoccupied with dualities. A stream close to the Heaney homestead divided Tamniarn, a townland in Bellaghy parish and Derry diocese, and Anahorish, situated in Newbridge parish and Armagh diocese. As a result, he went to school in Anahorish School, so learnt the Armagh catechism; but I belonged, by birth and enrolment, to Bellaghy parish … When we moved to the other end of the parish when I was fourteen, I still played football for Castledawson, though I was living in the Bellaghy team's district. I seemed always to be a little displaced; being in between was a kind of condition, from [End Page 346] the start.9 A more abstract duality was experienced, too, from this first venture into formal education: the sense of education as de rigueur and on the other hand, something...