My essay...

[87natty]

Brian Lynch
Composition and Language II

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13th, 1939 in a town named Tamniarn in Counry Derry, Ireland. He was born to his traditional cattle-ranching father Patrick and his mother Margaret Kathleen whose family had ties to the industrial aspect of the newer Ireland at the time. He was the oldest of the nine children in his family and was brought up as a Catholic in British occupied Northen Ireland following the Anglo-Irish war and the subsequent Irish Civil War whch would further divide his country and later set the mood of his work and place of living.

In 1953 Seamus and his family left the family farm for a bigger farm in Bellaghy. It was there he attended the local primary school and ultimately was awarded a scholarship St. Columb's College at the age of twelve where he learned the Irish language of Gaelic. He the later went to further his education at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland where he stayed between 1957 and 1972.

During the 1960's Heaney studied to be a teacher and taught at St. Thomas's Secondary school in the heavily anti-Protestant neighborhood of Ballymurphy, located in West Belfast. It was here that Heaney was introduced to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and then began publishing his own work in 1962.

In 1964 Philip Hobsbaum sent some of Heaney's poems to Edward Lucie-Smith, a old friend of The Group, a gathering of poets who met to have their work read and criticized and included Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker and James Simmons. Lucie-Smith then sent copies of Heaney's work to the editors of different literature journals. One of those editors was Karl Miller, who chose 3 of Heaney's poems to publish in The New Statesman in 1964. The three poems were Digging, Scaffolding and Storm On the Island.

His first book was Eleven Poems and was published in 1965 for the Queen's University Festival. His next book was a collection called Death of a Naturalist. In 1965 he met and married his wife and mother of his three children, Marie Devlin, sister of journalist Polly Devlin. Heaney ublished two more collections, Door into the Dark in 1969 and Wintering Out in 1972, by which time he quit his day job at Queens's and moved South to the Irish Republic to escape the escalading violence and religious pressure at the time.

Much of Heaney's work is set in or around his home county of Derry, with characters and situations not unlike the people he grew up with. His early work coincided with the beginnings of the Troubles in Ireland and his work in the 1970's reflected the aura of darkness that enveloped Ireland from the late 1960's until the mid 1990's.

   "In the late '60s and early '70s the world was changing for the Catholic imagination. I felt I was compromising some part of myself by staying in a situation where socially and, indeed, imaginatively, there were pressures 'against' regarding the moment as critical. Going to the South was perhaps emblematic for me and was certainly so for some of the people I knew. To the Unionists it looked like a betrayal of the Northern thing." (Heaney)

The overall feeling going on in Ireland at the time is reflected in his poem, Tollund Man, first published in 1972. On January 30th of that year British paratroopers fired on a crowd of unarmed civil rights protesters in the Bogside part of town in Derry, Ireland, killing 12 and wounding 14, including those trying to help the mortally wounded. The event became known as Bloody Sunday and breathed new life into the hatred that had been brewing for 60 years. The Irish Repulican Army now fought with a new zeal that only increased the carnage outside his home.

Tollund Man is an anology of what was going on at the time, rather than a poem about a preserved corpse found in a bog. The Tollund Man was now a forgotten martyr in Heaney's eyes, sacrifice justified by religious fanaticism at it's most extreme, a parallel to the violence sickening Ireland at the time. His words graphically describe what Tollund Man really meant to him and his fellow countrymen.

   "The scattered, ambushed/ flesh of labourers/ stockinged corpses/ laid out in the farmyards" (Heaney)

These lines describe in detail the men killed on their own land, a land from which all come from yet still fight for and over.

Terrorism is nothing new to the world. The American Revolution was a successful terrorism campaign against the British, as we perfected guerilla warfare and the techniques it took to overcome military superiority to ultimately win. These are the same techniques that the Irish Republican Army used all these years to fight for control over themselves and Northern Ireland. And sadly, these are the same techniques that are killing our fighting men in Iraq and morale here in the United States.

The Tollund Man is also a religious icon. Although most likely a victim of a Pagan ritual 2,500 years ago; Heaney sees him as an ancestor to the entire island of Ireland, and an example of the same kind of ritualistic violence taking place in his homeland. And why was the Tollund Man killed? His life was taken for reasons forgotten long ago, reasons that for the most part do not matter at all today. His life was lost and forgotten thousands of years ago, his sacrifice made in vain for a reason that no longer exists. Heaney's comparison of him to the Irish Troubles is a way of him hoping that all the violence and bloodshed in his homeland are not in vain and the sacrifices made will not be forgotten.

And just as the Tollund Man was killed for religious reasons, Heaney brings the poem to life, as he writes of the corpse of the Tollund Man, his saint; married to Mother Nature, his body germinating the holy land where the new corpses lay. He then goes on to write of the sad freedom he must have felt, riding in the tumbril cart to meet his death, going past the people who claim the land but have lost touch with it long ago, on his his way to the man-killing parish that is his land, at which he worships.

[87natty]

The Tollund Man was the preserved corpse of a man most likely killed in a Druid ceremony 2,500 years ago. The body was found in a peat bog in 1950, in a near perfect state of preservation.

Here is the poem, published in 1972 after Bloody Sunday:

I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
  
  
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
  
  
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
  
  
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,
  
  
Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
  
  
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
  
  
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
  
  
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

[Be4u]

BrianHis first book was Eleven Poems and was published in 1965 for the Queen's University Festival. His next book was a collection called Death of a Naturalist. In 1965 he met and married his wife and mother of his three children, Marie Devlin, sister of journalist Polly Devlin. Heaney ublished two more collections, Door into the Dark in 1969 and Wintering Out in 1972, by which time he quit his day job at Queens's and moved South to the Irish Republic to escape the escalading violence and religious pressure at the time.

You gotta fix published.

I dont really get it but your instructor better hook you up with an A