Heaney as a Modern Poet

Seams Haney as a poet of Modern Ireland Seams Haney epitomizes the dilemma of the modern poet. In his collection of essays Preoccupations he embarks on a search for answers to some fundamental questions regarding a poet How should a poet bouncing and write? What Is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world? In Preoccupations Haney imagines Digging itself as having been dug up, rather than written, observing that he has come to realize that It was laid down in me old age ago.In this find, the poetic act is one of retrieval-of recovering something that already exists-rather than of creating something entirely new from whole cloth, Plagued by the object lesson dilemma of sympathizing with the school of thought that wanted to destroy the Protestant supremacy, and cosmos a poet, he could non condone violence. This dilemma tore him apart and gave way to a sense of fragmented Identity and an infallible nihilism. It Is this sens e of the repetition of cycles rooted deep in the past that attracted Haney to bunchs book on The peat bog People.What Glob contributes is an image off pre-Christian, northern European tribal society in which ritual violence is a necessary part of the structure of life. Most of the Iron-Age bodies recovered from the battle of Jutland Bogs and documented by Glob had been the dupes of ritual killings, many of them having served as human sacrifices to the Earth Goddess Nervous. Haney detected a kinship between the Pagan civilizations of Jutland and Irelands own Celtic traditions.Haney in a conversation affirms Irish Catholicism is continuous with something older than Christianity. Honeys startle extended attempt at conflating his understanding of Globs Jutland rituals with his own sense of mythic and modern memorial comes in the Tolland Man. The Tolland Man is one of the recovered bodies by Glob in this book. He was a victim sacrificed to Nervous, In the hope of securing a good c rop from the land, and It Is In this sense that he is, as Haney describes him as Bridegroom to the goddess.Haney imagines the killing of the Tolland Man and his subsequent burial in the Bog as a affable of violent love making between victim and goddess, In which Nervous , opening her fen reserves the victims personate by immersing it in her sexual dark juices. When the Tolland Man is dug up, many centuries later the turf cutters happen upon His last gruel of winter seed/caked In his stomach. Ever since Haney placed as a child In a moss- hole, Haney realized that the Bog represented for him a repository of memories of his childhood. He also recognized the Bog as being literally a storage place which held objects preserved for decades beneath It.Just as Haney believed that Irelands story lay beneath the Bog he also began to use the Bog to project her future. The fact that song is a kind of continuous and complex stream of thoughts, a composite of memories In which what we have ex perienced in the past Is constantly merging with our experience of the moment best embodied by Eliots Time present and era past/are both perhaps present in time future/and time future contained in time past. Haynes verses are laced with a strong sense of alienation In the modern world and the need to negotiate the distance between origins and present circumstances.In the poem Digging learning and the privileges to which it provides access are what operates the speaker trot his tamer. The speaker sits inside looking out at his father working beneath his window. If he cannot literally dig, he can dig metaphorically unearthing the power point of the life of his family and community and honoring them by preserving them in his verse. As Hellene Vender puts it, these early poems memorial a life which the poet does not want to follow, could not follow, but none the less recognizes as forever a part of his inner landscape.The language evokes a strong sense of the sight and sound of the w orld being described which indicates the early influence on Haney of this near contemporary English poet Ted Hughes. Language is thus deployed here(predicate) with enormous precision in the impressionistic manner in order to evoke a slender image of a very specific world with Haney describing it as the rustle of language itself. In the genuine modernist vein Haney takes a descent into his past which becomes analogous to his subconscious, digging out memories. The land of Ireland itself is, the object of resentment for those who endured the stark suffering of the Great Hunger.In Ata Potato Digging the ultra collective of a people hungering from birth takes on a political dimension as well as a purely descriptive one. The degradation of having to fuck off like plants makes the people seem worth no more than weeds so it is unsurprising that they should find out that their land is the bitchy earth. Honeys subject matter and imagery become stark and astringent filled with last and dying and rooted firmly in his world. However, the irony becomes evident when the essence of profligacy is transmission lineed with famine victim could afford to throw away tea dregs or crusts.As the workers stretch out in their respite they are describes lying on faithless ground. This reminds us of the fact that nature can set its showcase against humanity and behave in an unpredictable manner. It can also be argued that although Honeys work is full of images of finish and dying, it is at the same time deeply rooted in life endlessly metaphorical. It holds out an offer of endlessness of cynical history of eternity. Honeys poems are ultimately peace poems intensifying the sense of beauty in contrast to the horror of violence and the pathos of needless death.