Bog and Tower: Place and Placelessness in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats

Posted: August 6th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Heaney, Ireland, My Best Work, Poetic Criticism, yeats | 1 Comment »

I wrote the following essay during a month in Ireland with support from a James W. Meyer Grant and under the supervision of Professor Jay Parini.  Thank you to everyone who made this project possible.

Yeats has his Tower; Heaney his bog and birthplace: Mossbawn.  The places have expanded with their writing beyond the boundaries of a physical site.  The spaces are now multitudinous, functioning simultaneously, uneasily, almost combustibly as literary symbol and real-world place.  Yeats and Heaney also define these places to define themselves and it is thus useful to view and examine them in order to understand the poets themselves.

The words themselves reveal something of the poets, and their different stylistic concerns.  “Tower,” wears its distinguished roots like robes: the Latin turris, the old English torr, the old French tour; it is fastidiously European.[1] “Tower” demands enunciation, elocution, much like the formal, metrical march of Yeats’s poetry.  “Bog” is a word with give, with roots deep in Irish and Scottish Gaelic: bogach, from bog meaning soft.[2] Time has left the word virtually unchanged, just as Heaney’s poetry seeks to save and elegize.  Beyond the texture and history of the words, there also exists a relationship between the poet’s chosen symbol and the poet’s style.  Yeats’s poetry is strict, formal, with lines interlocking like bricks, an occasional ray of visionary light passing through the windows.  Heaney’s poetry absorbs its surrounding influences, the many testaments of violence and grace, and carefully preserves them.  Yet despite the history-tamped ground, the bog retains its shape and self-effacing surface; the language is always Heaney’s own; the poem typically hiding something deep.  I would like to compare the two master poets, their places and symbols, and supplement their vision of place with the work of other Irish poets.  I will also briefly foray into my experience at Thoor Ballylee and Mossbawn in my attempts to wrest poetry from place and place from poetry.  Does poetry arise out of a place or does it create a sense of place?  Which direction does the meaning move?

I would like to begin, like so much Anglo-Irish poetic criticism, with Thoor Ballylee, as it reflects my experience with place and poem in Ireland.  Yeats’s poems provided my first conduit to the Tower:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground[3]

I wished to see if the Tower held its ground still; if the characters remained in the mind confronted by the letters etched in the metal.  What does it mean to publish, “To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee,” intoning, “And may these characters remain / when all is ruin once again”[4]?  The characters have moved from their place on the metal board to printed text and now to tourist websites.  Which is most permanent?  The characters are self-conscious of their own myth-making potential, but don’t bother to specify it they refer to themselves (“these characters”) or to the reproducible letters (“these characters”).  In the poems, the Tower forms a locus of poetic activity; it is a space where the soul manifests itself and summons the self; it is a redoubt and political lookout post peering out over “that dead young soldier in his blood”[5]; it is a calling out place filled with the potential for echo and projection; and it is a complex symbol, one of Yeats’s “Befitting emblems of adversity”[6].

I took a sideways step towards the physical tower when, while visiting the National Library in Dublin, I came across a first edition of The Tower.  Gold relief on the green cover projects an image of the restored Norman Tower and its thatched cottage, and then reflected in the water the tower rises up again upside down, moving into imagined space.  Here stood the manifestation of many of Yeats’s poetic goals: to recreate a new world and new ways of seeing through art and to create symbols strong enough to bear the weight of their own reflection.

The final step was more personal—visiting the Tower itself, coming to grips with its stoniness, it’s invitation and inaccessibility.  When I visited the Tower, it was closed for the winter.  I was made conscious again of my status as outsider, an American trying to sense the connection between a poem and place given a substantial historical, cultural, social displacement.  The places have clearly changed over time, the quickening of Celtic Tiger economic growth, and the commercialization and Travel-channelification of the Irish poetic tradition.  As I looked into the river, I could make out the murky reflection of half the Tower, disturbed by current and raindrops.  It was a far cry from the perfect green and gold reflection offered, even promised, by the cover of The Tower.  No man ever stares in the same river twice, I thought.  Yet while some of the image and reflection is lost or changed, I felt no sense of disappointment.  I also had to wonder if Yeats’s himself could see the whole Tower reflected in the water, perhaps he knew some secret angle, or could look down from that great height, or perhaps the cover, like much of his poetry, sprung from the artistic imagination, his desire to form a tower as much from air and breath as from stone.

Richard Ellman suggests that the power of Yeats’s art arises in part from his willingness to question it.[7] It is Yeats’s special ability to move from despair and coming doom to glad grace all while retaining artistic command.  Consider the last two stanzas of “A Dialogue of Soul and Self,” which move from life as “A blind man battering blind men,” to the assertion, “We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest.”[8] Or his undercutting of the Tower in “Blood and Moon,”: “In mockery I have set / A powerful emblem up,”[9] only to reassert the Tower in the second section of the poem:

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral  stair;

Yeats never quits questioning his emblems, yet he stands by them; he never loses his power to declare and poeticize.  As the passage suggests, the Tower is also steeped in Yeats’s own hermeneutics: his theory of gyres, the rise and fall of civilization, the power of dream, vision, and word.  The Tower then becomes a symbol with an affirmative, mystical force, one that can be relied on or summoned even after Yeats leaves it—he only inhabited the Tower on and off over nine years before old age and bad health took their toll.  The poet, then, can access the Tower across space and time, a fact that attests to its existence as written space extending over and above its physical existence.

Heaney, too, must be approached on his turf: his thatched, farmland home of Mossbawn and the peaty Irish bog.  Recalling Mossbawn, his place of birth, Heaney writes,

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.[10]

It is characteristically Heaney in its insistence on the real thing: pump, bucket, griddle, stove, his aunt’s busy hands.  In Stepping Stones, Heaney calls the bread making “as much a rite as a job”[11] and he is well within the cave of ritual at this point.  The pump is abstracted, grabbed and ratcheted further by Heaney in his essay “Mossbawn” where the word “omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world,” is repeated “until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door.”[12] A bucket of well water appears again in his Nobel acceptance speech—reverberating with the influences of the outside world, the radio, and the passing lorry.[13] Heaney and his poetry remain tied to his birthplace, yet despite the poem’s pastoral calmness, there are literary pyrotechnics as well: the sun is anthropomorphized as standing, then transformed into a griddle which we see “cooling / against the wall,” before the wall is transfigured in the magical absence between stanzas into “the wall // of each long afternoon.”

We sense that like that magical absence between stanzas, “the sunlit absence” of the first line has a part to play.  Absence in Heaney’s poetry is always substantial.  In his article, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh,” Heaney writes about a chestnut tree planted at the time of his birth and associated with him by his family.  Later it is dug up, and still later, he imagines the space left behind as “a kind of luminous emptiness, a warp and waver of lights,” he writes, “I began to identify with that space just as years before I had identified with the young tree…It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a heavenly place.”[14]

It was an absence made familiar by my quest to find Mossbawn, using the map provided in Stepping Stones as my guide, yet while I do not doubt the validity of the dots, judging their exact distance proved difficult—was it one farm or the next?  There were no signs or monuments.  There was also the displacement of time—Heaney evokes an “ahistorical, presexual”[15] Mossbawn with thatched roof, and “no running water, no inside toilets.”[16] I saw modernity—paved road, a roadside littered with Kentucky Fried Chicken wrappers and modern farm equipment.  Dennis O’Driscoll later told me that Heaney has not revisited Mossbawn since childhood, and I could see how he might fear that sense of loss and displacement.[17] Yet the place had not lost its charm, at least for an American used to agribusiness firms with the latest mega-machines trolling identical square plots.  The plots were irregular, springing no doubt by a history of marriage, inheritance, and trade.  Stone walls rose up to mark the “Terminus” of each field, fields that rose and fell with the land.  It had its romance.  And Heaney created an absence there too: the absence of the British soldier-interrogator, Sten gun leveled, the coal lorry chunking by, the water pump speaking its low music.  Over the reality of the discarded wrappers, the traffic, was a reality imagined through Heaney’s verse.  He was the scop weaving vision and history with his verse, creating the placeless heaven.

This sense of poetic absence, of coming up against the imagined in the real world, is corroborated by Padraic Fallon, an Irish poet born in Athenry fifteen miles from the Tower, in his poems about Yeats and the Tower.  In his poem, “Yeats at Athenry Perhaps,” he imagines Yeats waiting for the train at Gort when he was still a “jerseyed fellow driving out the cows.”[18] Fallon defensively compares the medieval walls and towers around Athenry with Thoor Ballylee (“We had our tower too”).  He repudiates and admires Yeats’s disregard for the parochial: “What would he think / Of our outcropping sheds, the architecture / Of the very necessary animal?”  Yet ultimately Yeats is feather-footed, absent, rather than reading with Fallon, or touring the town’s walls with him, Fallon imagines Yeats:

No, he’d have sat down by the line and waited
Melting his bits of ore or watched the sky
Jolt from the saltmills of the Atlantic over
A town that died so often of the rain;
Why muddy a feathered foot when a great house waited
Over in Coole among the trees.

Fallon imagines Yeats as an absence, retreating into his poetry, “his bits of ore.”  Yet his poetic persona is so strong that it can be summoned back, viewed, interrogated.  Yeats once said himself, “After a person dies he does not realize that he is dead.”[19] Yeats creates a placeless persona, allowing Fallon to re-imagine him despite his absence.  In addition to his sense of loss of Yeats himself, Fallon haunts the Tower and is haunted by it.  In the poem, “Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee,” he writes of Yeats and his retreat,

Somewhere a man will touch his image and burn
Like a candle before it.  What happened here
In this ruined place of water and drowned corn
May still be here.[20]

Once again, we are shocked by the power of image, the use of transformative figurative language, and the presence of absence.  Yeats’s poetry works on Fallon until it transfigures his native country.  Later in the poem, Fallon emerges from the Tower, but his natural life, his good-natured conversation about the price of wool, is no longer redemptive, “I could beat a policeman, bawl in a square, do gaol / For something silly. And what avails it?”[21] The perspective on human misery offered by Yeats and the high vantage point of the Tower reduce all to despair.  Fallon’s poetry testifies to the power of poetry to write over a place, even one’s own birthplace, the power to grant that place a warren of meaning accessible to future visitors, poets, even tourists.  Yet as Yeats’s sense of loss and despair work on Fallon, there is the sense that it is not all loss—the Tower invites more poetry, it welcome Fallon’s work, growing deeper in its associations. As Billy Collins wrote, “the trouble with poetry is / that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”[22] Yet the creative vortex reaches even further than the physical Tower itself—it reaches into the concept of the Tower and the poet.  Yeats created the notion of the hermit poet locked away from the world, his own protagonist.  He created a concept and persona that would be exploited by later poets like Robinson Jeffers a world away in California.  Jeffers built Tor House and Hawk Tower in sunny Carmel-by-the-Sea, proving the placelessness of the Tower.  Put quite simply: should Thoor Ballylee crumble, the idea of the Tower would still exist.

To understand Seamus Heaney as a poet of place, we must first we must recognize his debt to Patrick Kavanagh who first opened the ground of parochial Ireland.  In Stepping Stones, Heaney explains that Kavangh gave him permission to write the local, to emphasize the parochial over the provincial.[23] The best example is the famous poem, “Epic,” in which Kavanagh issues a manifesto, or perhaps it would be more correct to call it a declaration of independence for County Monaghan:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’.
That was the year of the Munich both.  Which
Was more important?  I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row.  Gods make their own importance.[24]

What a blaze of confidence!  Kavanagh is declaring rights, even to the point of callousness (“the Munich bother”), but the physicality of the shirtless McCabe, the firmness of the “blue cast-steel,” ultimately endorse Kavanagh’s declaration.  In “Epic,” the poet is elevated to the position of a God, a maker of truth, a position with deep ties into Irish tradition where the scop’s word could define and redefine history.[25] In Heaney’s poem, “Station Island,” the mercurial Joyce echoes the validating force of Homer’s ghost in “Epic”.  Heaney’s imagined Joyce spurs him, challenges him flatly, square-eyed.  He urges Heaney to sound “signatures on your own frequency, / echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,”[26] advice that manifests itself in the Bog poems.

Heaney’s Bog poems are clearly on his own frequency, they arise out of the local and parochial that Kavanagh has given credence.  By reading poems like “Bogland,” “Bog Queen,” “The Grauballe Man,” “Punishment,” “Tollund,” and “The Tollund Man in Springtime” we can chart a conscious evolution in the poet’s relationship to his place—Heaney is entering the peat, assuming the heather mantle of authority.  Politics and place have always proved inescapable to Heaney.  As a Catholic student, teacher, and poet in Northern Ireland amidst “the Troubles,” there was no escaping poetry as political response, even apolitical poetry (if such a thing is possible) proved political in its evasion.  “Bogland” marks the beginning of Heaney’s fascination with the bog, evoking the peat, great firs, and the excavations of elk and bog butter.  It is the first plumbing of an endless resource—and the poem ends prophetically: “The wet centre is bottomless.”[27] In North, Heaney re-harnesses the bog to address political troubles in Ulster.  With “Punishment” in particular, Heaney draws a connection between the sacrificial peat-bog girl and women tarred and feathered for their relationships with British soldiers and police officers:

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.[28]

Heaney uses the bog to signal his association with the Nationalists and ancient “tribal” Ireland, yet Heaney’s stance is never simple or without a complicated sympathy.  Hinted at with the “almost love” he feels for the peat-bog girl, Heaney’s association with the preserved victims of the bog has deepened over time.  The growing empathy is clear when juxtaposing “The Tollund Man” of 1972 with “The Tollund Man in Springtime” published in 2006.  The narrative voice shifts from Heaney writing as himself to him entering the Tollund Man’s “bronze-buffed” head.[29] Heaney journeys from the resolution: “Some day I will go to Aarhus / to see his peat-brown head,”[30] in “The Tollund Man,” to the otherworldly perspective of the preserved man himself in the later poem that somehow skirts between a universality and tribal specificity:

I knew that dead weight in joint and sinew
Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied
At my buried ear, and the levered sod
Got lifted up; then once I felt the air
I was like turned turf in the breath of God,
Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,
And on the last, all told, unatrophied.[31]

Heaney becomes the sod-man, and begins in the earth with the Tollund body.  Words like, “slid,” “soughed,” and “turned turf,” grant the poem an earthy physicality.  Then Heaney also exploits Christian mythology to stage a bog resurrection—the Tollund man is successfully displaced from the bog to rise up and lives among us.  In the end Heaney arrives at the same universality and grandeur of prophetic Yeats with Cuchulain but, much like the title poem of “District and Circle,” he arrives at that meaning by entering, exiting, and transcending the ground.  He is digging, excavating, ultimately becoming the ground itself.

I would like to end by returning to Seamus Heaney’s concept of a “placeless heaven,”—the notion of a substance, joy, and appreciation rooted in the absence of the thing itself, but for that absence, accessible everywhere.  Yeats repeatedly demonstrated his ability to reach back to the Tower after leaving it to retrieve its power as emblem.  Heaney writes Mossbawn despite decades of estrangement from it, and pens “The Tollund Man,” after reading about him in a book.  The greatness of these poets then is their ability to take a place, estrange it, and deliver it fresh through language, to take a place from the world and return it, deeper, accessible anywhere, to take the real world and make a placeless heaven.

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[1] Oxford English Dictionary [database online], s.v. “Tower,” 2009.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary [database online], s.v. “Bog,” 2009.
[3] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: II. My House” in The Poems, 2^nd ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 205.
[4] W.B. Yeats, “To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee” The Poems, 193.
[5] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: VI. The Stare’s Nest by My Window” in The Poems, 209.
[6] W.B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War: II. My House” in The Poems, 206.
[7] Richard Ellman, Yeats: the Man and the Masks (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999).
[8] W.B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” in The Poems, 240.
[9] W.B. Yeats, “Blood and the Moon” in The Poems, 241.
[10] Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 93.
[11] Dennis O’Driscoll Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2008), 172.
[12] Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn” in Finder’s Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 3.
[13] Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry: Nobel Lecture” in Opened Ground, 415.
[14] Seamus Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh” in Finder’s Keepers, 146.
[15] Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry” in Opened Ground, 415.
[16] Dennis O’Driscoll, 11.
[17] Dennis O’Driscoll interview, 3 February 2009.
[18] Padraic Fallon, “Yeats at Athonry, Perhaps” in Collected Poems, ed. Brian Fallon (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1990), 112.
[19] Harold Bloom, Yeats, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 268.
[20] Padraic Fallon, “Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee” in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pierce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 651-2.
[21] Ibid., 652.
[22] Billy Collins, “The Trouble with Poetry” on http://www.edutopia.org/trouble-poetry
[23]  Dennis O’Driscoll, 81, 192, 332.
[24] Patrick Kavanaugh, “Epic” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, et al., (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 929.
[25] Declan Kiberd, interview with myself, 28 January 2009.
[26] Seamus Heaney, “Station Island” in Opened Ground, 245.
[27] Seamus Heaney, “Bogland” in Opened Ground, 41.
[28] Seamus Heaney, “Punishment” in Opened Ground, 112-113.
[29] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” in District and Circle, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 55.
[30] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man” in Opened Ground, 62.
[31] Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man at Springtime” in District and Circle, 54.

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