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 WRITERS AND THEIR WORK

I SOBEL A RMSTRONG
General Editor

SEAMUS HEANEY
SEAMUS HEANEY
Andrew Murphy

Third Edition
# Copyright 1996, 2000 and 2009 by Andrew Murphy
First published in 1996
Second edition 2000
Third edition 2009

First published in 1996 by Northcote House Publishers Ltd,

Horndon House, Horndon, Tavistock, Devon, PL19 9NQ,
United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (01822) 810066 Fax: +44 (01822) 810034.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an
information retrieval system (other than short extracts for the purposes of review)
without the express permission of the Publishers given in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-7463-1209-4
Typeset by PDQ Typesetting, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
 In memory of
Andrew Michael
1926±1998
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii
Biographical Outline ix
Abbreviations and References xiii
Introduction 1

1 `Living roots awaken in my head': Place and

Displacement 8
2 `Where the fault is opening': Politics and
Mythology 29
3 `I hear again the sure confusing drum':
Reversions and Revisions 50
4 `It was marvellous and actual': Familiarity
and Fantasy 73
5 `Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad':
The Unpartitioned Intellect 93

Appendix 121

Notes 127

Select Bibliography 134

Index 139

vii
 Acknowledgements

In the first edition of this study I expressed my gratitude to

EibhlõÂn Evans, Geraldine Higgins and John Lucas for their very
helpful comments on my manuscript. It gives me great pleasure
to thank them here again. I also extend my thanks now to Neil
Corcoran for his helpful feedback and to John Dennison for
assisting in updating the bibliography. As ever, I am deeply
indebted to Gerard Murphy and Charonne Ruth for their
unfailing support. Finally, my publishers and I are grateful to
Seamus Heaney and Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to quote
from the works of Seamus Heaney.
The cover photograph of Seamus Heaney is by courtesy of Peter
Adamson and the University of St Andrews. It was taken during
Seamus Heaney's visit to the University in October 1999, to give a
reading in memory of the late Dr George Jack of the University's
School of English.

viii
 Biographical Outline

1939 Born 13 April, the eldest of nine children. Family

home is the farm `Mossbawn', in County Derry,
Northern Ireland.
1945±51 Attends the local Anahorish School.
1947 UK Education Act makes extended education more
accessible to the children of less-well-off families. In
Northern Ireland, specifically, opens up educational
opportunities for Catholics.
1951±7 Attends, as a boarder, St Columb's College, Derry.
Among the other graduates of St Columb's are the
nationalist politician John Hume, left-wing journalist
Eamonn McCann, literary critic and poet Seamus
Deane, and the playwright Brian Friel.
1953 Family moves from `Mossbawn' to a nearby farm
called `The Wood', which Heaney's father had
inherited from an uncle. At about this time, Heaney's
4-year-old brother, Christopher, is killed in a road
accident ± an incident which the poet writes about in
`Mid-Term Break'.
1957±61 Attends Queen's University, Belfast. Graduates with
1st class degree in English Language and Literature.
Is urged to undertake postgraduate work at Oxford,
but decides to become a school teacher instead.
1961±2 Attends St Joseph's College of Education, Andersons-
town, Belfast, and obtains his Teacher's Training
Diploma. During his time at St Joseph's, Heaney
writes an extended essay on Northern Irish literary
magazines and encounters the work of local poets
such as John Hewitt.
1962 Joins staff of St Thomas's Intermediate School,
Ballymurphy, Belfast. The headmaster is the short-

ix
 BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

story writer Michael McLaverty, who introduces

Heaney to the work of the Irish poet Patrick
Kavanagh.
1962±3 Part-time postgraduate work at Queen's.
1963±6 Teaches at St Joseph's College of Education.
1963 Philip Hobsbaum establishes Belfast Group. Members
include: Michael Longley, Stewart Parker, and James
Simmons.
1965 August: marries Marie Devlin. Devlin was born in
Ardboe in County Tyrone. She attended St Mary's
College of Education in Belfast from 1958 to 1962 and
taught at St Columcille's school in County Down.
1966 Death of a Naturalist published. Hobsbaum moves to
Glasgow; Heaney joins Queen's faculty. Belfast
Group continues to meet at Heaney's and includes
younger members such as Paul Muldoon, Frank
Ormsby, and Michael Foley. July: Heaneys' son
Michael born.
1967 Heaney receives the Somerset Maugham Award.
1968 February: second son, Christopher, born. Receives
the Cholmondeley Award.
1968±9 Repression of Civil Rights movement prompts a
renewal of conflict in Northern Ireland.
1969 Door into the Dark published. August: British troops
deployed in Derry and Belfast.
1970±1 Teaches as guest lecturer at University of California,
Berkeley.
1971 August: internment introduced in Northern Ireland.
By the end of the year, a total of 1,576 people have
been imprisoned without benefit of trial.
1972 30 January, `Bloody Sunday': soldiers from the British
Army paratroop regiment open fire on unarmed
Civil Rights demonstrators in Derry. Thirteen pro-
testers are killed, a further twelve are wounded.
August: the Heaneys move to Glanmore, in the
Republic of Ireland. Makes his first attempts at
translating the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne.
November: Wintering Out published.
1973 April: daughter, Catherine Ann, born.
1975 North published. Receives the W. H. Smith Award and

x
 BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

Duff Cooper Prize. October: joins faculty of Carysfort

Teacher Training College.
1976 November: Heaney and family move to Sandymount,
near Dublin.
1979 Field Work published. Spends a term at Harvard
University as one of a series of temporary successors
to the American poet Robert Lowell.
1980 Preoccupations, his first collection of essays, published.
Selected Poems 1965±1975 published.
1980±1 Nationalist prisoners in Northern Ireland stage a
series of hunger strikes, seeking the reintroduction of
political (as opposed to criminal) status. Ten prison-
ers would eventually die on the protest, including
Francis Hughes of Bellaghy, near Heaney's birth-
place.
1981 Leaves Carysfort.
1982 January: starts a five-year contract at Harvard, to
teach one semester a year. Publishes (as co-editor
with Ted Hughes) an anthology of poems entitled The
Rattle Bag.
1983 An Open Letter published as a pamphlet by Field Day
in Ireland. The verse letter objects to his work being
included in an anthology of British poetry. His
translation of Buile Suibhne, entitled Sweeney Astray,
is published in Ireland.
1984 Station Island published. Sweeney Astray published in
the UK. Elected to Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and
Oratory at Harvard. October: mother dies.
1986 October: father dies.
1987 The Haw Lantern published. Receives the Whitbread
Award.
1988 Government of the Tongue, his second collection of
essays, published. Becomes Professor of Poetry at
Oxford University (for a term of five years).
1990 The Cure at Troy, Heaney's version of Sophocles'
Philoctetes, performed in Derry and published in
London. New Selected Poems published.
1991 Seeing Things published.
1994 First round of ceasefires in Northern Ireland (August).
1995 October: Heaney awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Redress of Poetry published.

xi
 BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

1996 The Spirit Level published. Heaney receives Common-

wealth Award. Resigns as Boylston Professor at
Harvard, to become Emerson Poet in Residence.
IRA ceasefire terminated (February).
1997 The Spirit Level named Whitbread Book of the Year.
IRA ceasefire renewed (July).
1998 Opened Ground: Poems 1966±1996 published. `Good
Friday' Agreement signed by British and Irish
governments and by most Northern Irish political
parties, including Sinn FeÂin and the Ulster Unionist
Party (April).
1999 Heaney's translation of Beowulf published. Northern
Ireland Assembly meets, but is suspended in Febru-
ary of the following year because of a failure to reach
agreement on decommissioning of IRA weapons.
2000 Beowulf receives the Whitbread Poetry Award. Power
restored to Northern Ireland Assembly, following
commitment of IRA to decommissioning (May).
2001 Electric Light published.
2002 Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971±2001 published.
Northern Ireland Assembly once again suspended,
following allegations of spying against Sinn FeÂin
(October).
2003 Finders Keepers awarded the Truman Capote Award
for literary criticism.
2004 The Burial at Thebes published and premieÁred at the
Abbey Theatre, Dublin. The Seamus Heaney Centre
for Poetry opens at Queen's University, Belfast.
2006 District and Circle published. Heaney suffers mild
stroke.
2007 District and Circle wins T. S. Eliot Prize and Irish Times
Poetry Now Award. Heaney resigns as Poet in
Residence at Harvard. Devolved government restored
in Northern Ireland, with the Democratic Unionist
Party's Ian Paisley serving as First Minister and Sinn
FeÂin's Martin McGuinness serving as his deputy.
2008 Heaney is presented with the Cunningham Medal by
the Royal Irish Academy.
2009 Celebrations in Ireland and elsewhere to mark
Heaney's 70th birthday (April).

xii
 Abbreviations

B. Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber, 1999)

CT The Cure at Troy (London: Faber & Faber, 1990)
DD Door into the Dark (London: Faber & Faber, 1969)
DN Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966)
FW Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979)
GT The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial
Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber &
Faber, 1988)
HL The Haw Lantern (London: Faber & Faber, 1987)
N. North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975)
OG Opened Ground: Poems 1966±1996 (London: Faber & Faber,
1998)
OL `An Open Letter', in Ireland's Field Day (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1986)
P. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968±1978 (London: Faber &
Faber, 1980)
RP The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber &
Faber, 1996)
SA Sweeney Astray (London: Faber & Faber, 1984)
SI Station Island (London: Faber & Faber, 1984)
SL The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996)
ST Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991)
WO Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972)

xiii
I come from scraggy farm and moss,
Old patchworks that the pitch and toss
Of history have left dishevelled.
('A Peacock's Feather', The Haw Lantern)

xiv
 Introduction
Humming
Solders all broken hearts. Death's edge
Blunts on the narcotic strumming.
(Seamus Heaney, `The Folk Singers' (DN 42) )

Seamus Heaney begins his second collection of prose writings,

The Government of the Tongue, with a prefatory essay entitled `The
Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov's Cognac and a Knocker'. He
opens the essay with a telling anecdote. In 1972, he says, he had
arranged to meet the singer David Hammond in Belfast in order
to go to the BBC studios in the city and put together a tape of
songs and poems for a mutual friend of theirs, living in
Michigan. In the event, the tape did not get made. As Hammond
and Heaney made their way to the studios, the city was rocked
by a series of explosions. The air filled with the sound of the
sirens of emergency vehicles converging on the city centre.
Heaney tells us
It was music against which the music of the guitar that David
unpacked made little impression. So little, indeed, that the very notion
of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to
suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering. He could not
raise his voice at that cast-down moment. He packed the guitar again
and we both drove off into the destroyed evening. (GT, p. xi)
It is no surprise that Heaney should choose to preface his
book with an account of this incident. Reflected in the story, we
find some of the central concerns which have both motivated
and troubled the poet's career as a writer. Some of these
conflicts Heaney himself makes explicit as he proceeds through
the essay. Central among them are what Heaney notes as the
conflicting demands of art and life, or, put another way, of song
and suffering. On the day in question, Heaney tells us, he and
Hammond had felt that their art of song and poetry was simply

1
 SEAMUS HEANEY

silenced in the face of the suffering occasioned by the brutal

scenes taking shape outside the studio walls. `What David
Hammond and I were experiencing, at a most immediate and
obvious level,' he tells us, `was a feeling that song constituted a
betrayal of suffering' (GT, p. xii).
In the course of his prefatory essay, and in the pieces that
follow it in The Government of the Tongue, Heaney comes to revise
this view, at least in the sense of rendering it more complex, and
seeking to map out a place for poetry in the face of suffering. He
both endorses and feels endorsed by the philosophy of the
Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert (who had himself suffered the
oppressions of Soviet-dominated Poland), whose poem `A
Knocker' Heaney summarizes as a deceptively simple statement:
` ``Go in peace,'' his poem says. ``Enjoy poetry as long as you
don't use it to escape reality'' ' (GT, pp. xviii±xix). Through
Herbert, Heaney seeks to strike a delicate balance: between the
poet's responsibility to the artifice of his or her own creation and
the poet's responsibility to his or her immediate political,
historical, and social world.
We might say that Heaney's career has been characterized by
a continual negotiation between the various responsibilities of
the poet delineated here. Patrick Kavanagh, a fellow Irish poet
(whose work greatly influenced Heaney's), once observed of
poetry that `a man . . . innocently dabbles in words and rhymes
and finds that it is his life. Versing activity leads him away from
the paths of conventional unhappiness.'1 In Heaney's case,
however, we might say that we encounter an instance of a poet
who embarks on a literary career dabbling in a certain kind of
words and rhymes, dedicated to a certain range of subject
matter, but who, as his career progresses, increasingly finds
certain political and historical considerations impinging upon
him, demanding that he engage with them within the arena of
his work. While, at a personal level, poetry may well have led
him `away from the paths of conventional unhappiness', in time
historical and political circumstances inevitably led him back to
confront a very profound kind of unhappiness: the unhappiness
of injustice and loss, of individual and communal grief. In more
specific terms, we might say that Heaney begins his career by
fashioning himself as a poet very much in the mould of
Kavanagh: a poet concerned with what Heaney himself has

2
 INTRODUCTION

called, in discussing Kavanagh, `the unregarded data of the

usual life' (GT 7). Like Kavanagh, Heaney set out as a poet
seeking both to celebrate and to scrutinize the contours of such
a life. As a Catholic growing up and living in the Protestant-
dominated Northern Ireland statelet, however, political con-
siderations very frequently pulled at the fabric of the `usual life'
that Heaney experienced, ultimately straining it to breaking
point.2
A poem such as `A Constable Calls' from Heaney's fourth
volume, North, allusively registers the subtle ways in which
Heaney's community was subjected, as part of its experience of
day-to-day life, to a system of power from which its members felt
alienated. At first reading, the poem seems to trace a relatively
genial, bureaucratic visit to the Heaneys' farm by a local police
constable. On closer inspection, however, we find that through-
out the poem there runs a note of fear of the policeman's
authority, and the poem's vocabulary persistently carries an
ominous note of the brutal force held available to be exercised
by this agent of the state (the dynamo on the policeman's bicycle
is `cocked back', like the hammer of a gun; the bicycle's pedals
are momentarily `relieved | Of the boot of the law'; most
explicitly, the child narrator stares at `the polished holster | With
its buttoned flap, the braid cord | Looped into the revolver butt'
(N. 60) ). In the final image of the poem, we are told that, leaving
the farm, the policeman's `boot pushed off | And the bicycle
ticked, ticked, ticked' (N. 61). As the poem closes, then, the
ticking hub of the bicycle wheel conjures up an image of the
timing device of a bomb, ticking its way down to the moment of
explosion.
In a way, we can say that that ominous repetitive ticking of an
explosion waiting to happen runs quietly but persistently
through Heaney's early career as a poet. Though, in his first
two published volumes, Heaney mostly preoccupies himself
with a Kavanagh-inspired engagement with `the unregarded
data of the usual life', both volumes contain a small number of
poems which advert in some way to the situation in Northern
Ireland. As the 1960s drew to a close, a radical change occurred
in the `usual life' that formed the clearest focal point of Heaney's
poetic vision in that decade. The anticipated explosion came at
the turn of the decade when the Northern state finally collapsed

3
 SEAMUS HEANEY

into continuous crisis, and the conflict in the province

intensified and became progressively more and more bloody.
At mid-career, Heaney found himself expected ± and expecting
himself ± to address that crisis in his poetry. In Wintering Out
(1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979), Heaney returns again
and again to the contemporary political situation, seeking ways
to address it, to confront it in his work.
In a sense, then, having started his career in the manner of a
Patrick Kavanagh, Heaney, at mid-career, found himself cast in
something like the role of another Irish predecessor poet: W. B.
Yeats. In `Among School Children', Yeats describes himself as `A
sixty-year-old smiling public man',3 and, as the situation in his
homeland progressively deteriorated, Heaney too found himself
thrust into the role of a public figure. His discomfort at his new
high-profile status is registered in `Exposure', placed at the very
end of North:
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
(N. 66)

Just as Yeats struggled to come to terms with another moment of

crisis in Ireland in poems like `September 1913', `Easter 1916',
`The Rose Tree', and `Meditations in Time of Civil War', so
Heaney struggled to find an adequate way of addressing the
conflicts of his particular historical moment in the poems he
wrote and published from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Again like Yeats, he not only struggled to find expression for
and poetic engagement with the political crisis, but also worried
over the question of the nature of the poet's responsibility to
that political situation.4 What, both men wondered, was the role
of the poet in and towards such times of crisis? In both men we
find an anxiety concerning the relationship between the
contemplative, essentially passive life of the poet and the active
life of those who become directly involved in the affairs of the
world. The point is made most forcefully by Yeats, perhaps, in
his poem `In Memory of Major Robert Gregory'. Killed in air

4
 INTRODUCTION

combat in the First World War, Gregory is the epitome for Yeats
of the informed, self-conscious man of action:
Some burn damp faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As 'twere all life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?5
By contrast with the brightly burning flame of the engaged,
active life, the smokey `damp faggots' nourished by the isolated
poet may seem absurdly irrelevant, casting a pitifully wan light
upon the world.
By the time Heaney came to publish The Government of the
Tongue in 1988, however, he had made his peace with many of
these issues. His rendering of Herbert's `A Knocker' is indicative
of how this accommodation has been reached: ` ``Go in peace,''
his poem says. ``Enjoy poetry as long as you don't use it to
escape reality.'' ' The poet, in other words, must walk a fine line
between commitment to the formal, aesthetic pleasures of the
text and commitment to the social and political world in which
the poem is composed, neglecting neither, acknowledging the
force of both.
The desire to hold such contradictory impulses together is
entirely characteristic of the later phase of Heaney's career. Take
The Government of the Tongue, for instance. On the one hand, as
Heaney himself notes, the title of this volume indicates the
`aspect of poetry as its own vindicating force. In this dispensa-
tion, the tongue (representing both a poet's personal gift of
utterance and the common resources of language itself) has
been granted the right to govern' (GT 92). on the other hand, he
notes, `my title can also imply a denial of the tongue's autonomy
and permission. In this reading, ``the government of the tongue''
is full of monastic and ascetic strictness' (GT 96). Following on
from the logic of this latter proposition, Heaney finds himself
asking `What right has poetry to its quarantine? Should it not
put the governors on its joy and moralize its song?' (GT 99). The
phrase `the government of the tongue' thus holds together in
fragile unity these two opposing positions (the right of poetry to

5
 SEAMUS HEANEY

an aesthetic autonomy; the necessity of subordinating poetry to

political or moral constraints) and it is to just such a fragile unity
that Heaney pledges fidelity.
We find the same doubleness in the title of Heaney's 1991
collection of poems, Seeing Things, which posits a visionary
power in poetry, enabling us to `[squint] out from a skylight of
the world' (ST 57), to achieve `a pitch || Beyond our usual hold
upon ourselves' (ST 86). And yet, even as poetry allows us to
achieve this transcendent vision, to `see things' as we have not
seen them before, the title also acts as a kind of brake on the
possibility of our granting blind allegiance to such transcendent
envisioning. As the title warns us, such transcendent sight may
be no more than simply `seeing things' ± a self-deception in
thinking we perceive what in fact does not exist at all. It is on this
thin line between faith and scepticism that Heaney balances his
later poetry.

Heaney himself ends the article with which we began this

introduction by quoting from one of his own poems ± `The
Singer's House', written for David Hammond. In the concluding
stanza of the poem, Heaney writes:
When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.
(GT, p. xxiii; FW 27)

The poem was written in the wake of the abortive Belfast

recording session which had been planned with Hammond. In a
sense, it registers Heaney's ultimate belief in the necessity and
value of the poetic act ± his belief that, perhaps they ought, after
all, to have continued with the session, despite the horrific
events taking place outside the studio walls. But it is a hard-won
belief. As he writes elsewhere in The Government of the Tongue:
Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in
general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are
practically useless. . . . In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil ± no
lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like
the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are
left speechless and renewed. (GT 107)

6
 INTRODUCTION

This complex view neatly indicates the trajectory of Heaney's

career as a poet. His early faith in poetry is unconflicted. He
revels in what he calls the `primitive delight in finding world
become word' (GT 8). In mid-career, he is brought into
confrontation with `the brutality of the historical onslaught'
and struggles with the question of how he might encounter it in
his work. The effect of this encounter is ultimately to renew his
faith in poetry, but that faith is now tempered by a knowledge
of poetry's desperate limitations; by a recognition that the
transcendence that poetry offers is never more than tentative ±
an inscription in the sand that the incoming tide will surely
obliterate. But, for all that, the force of poetry is still valid, still, in
some fragile way, efficacious, so that, as Heaney puts it in The
Redress of Poetry, it is possible `to advance poetry beyond the
point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even
more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to
endure it' (RP 185), thus as he says in `The Singer's House': `We
still believe what we hear.' Possibly we do not believe with quite
the same innocent conviction as might once have been possible,
but we do still believe.

7
 1

`Living roots awaken in

my head': Place and
Displacement

Seamus Heaney first began publishing his poems during his

time as an undergraduate at Queen's University in Belfast,
when a number of pieces by him appeared in various student
magazines. In 1963 he became a member of Philip Hobsbaum's
`Belfast Group', an informal gathering of young writers who
would meet regularly at Hobsbaum's Belfast home to critique
each other's work. Hobsbaum greatly admired Heaney's poetry
and he exercised his influence to secure Heaney an entry into
the London publishing world.1 Through these contacts, Heaney
was eventually offered a contract with Faber & Faber, who
published his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist, in
1966, and who have remained his primary publishers ever since.
The poem which opens Death of a Naturalist is `Digging'. It
not only appears on the opening page of this volume, but also
takes its place as the first poem in Heaney's Selected Poems (1980),
his New Selected Poems (1990) and in Opened Ground: Poems 1966±
1996 (1998). Heaney indicates his sense of the poem's signifi-
cance when he writes in Preoccupations that:
`Digging', in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I
thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately,
where I thought my feel had got into words. . . . I wrote it in the
summer of 1964, almost two years after I had begun to `dabble in
verses'. This was the first place where I felt I had done more than
make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into
real life. (P. 41)

8
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

As Heaney indicates here, he views `Digging' as marking

something like a point of departure for his career as a poet.
We might say that this is true not only in terms of the poem's
formal achievement in translating, as Heaney puts it, `feeling
into words', but also in the sense that `Digging' registers, in
small compass, many of the themes and concerns that would
dominate his early poetry, in addition to providing an early
glimpse of certain other issues that would surface as important
elements later in his writing.
The language of `Digging' introduces us to what will become,
for much of his career, Heaney's dominant register. We can hear
this verbal style at play in the next to last stanza of the poem,
where Heaney writes:
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
(DN 2)

Heaney deploys several verbal effects here to forge an evocative

image of his subject. We find alliteration in `the squelch and slap
| Of soggy peat' and `curt cuts'; assonance, a run of similar
vowel sounds, in `The cold smell of potato mould'; and
onomatopoeia in `squelch' and `slap', which echo the sounds
they describe. This kind of precise wielding of language to
evoke a strong sense of the sight and sound of the world being
described is entirely characteristic of Heaney's poetry and
indicates the early influence on Heaney of the Victorian poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins and also of Heaney's near contempor-
ary, the English poet, Ted Hughes.2 A similar set of effects is at
play throughout Death of a Naturalist. Take, for instance, the
following lines from the title poem of the collection:
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
(DN 3)

and
their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
(DN 4)

9
 SEAMUS HEANEY

As Neil Corcoran has observed of this poem, `the sheer noise

Heaney manages to make out of English vowels here is
remarkable ± a dissonant cacophony that forces the mouth to
work overtime if the reader speaks the lines aloud'.3 Language is
thus deployed here with enormous precision in order to evoke a
detailed image of a very specific world, with Heaney taking
pleasure in what he calls `the rustle of language itself'.4
Where, verbally, we can trace the influence of Hopkins and
Hughes in this early work, thematically we can register the
influence that fellow Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has had on
Heaney's career. In an article on Kavanagh's poetry entitled `The
Placeless Heaven', included in The Government of the Tongue, Heaney
writes of his excitement at first encountering Kavanagh's work:
When I found `Spraying the Potatoes' in the old Oxford Book of Irish
Verse, I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately ± but
which I had always considered to be below or beyond books ± being
presented in a book. The barrels of blue potato spray which had stood in
my own childhood like holidays of pure colour in an otherwise grey
field-life ± there they were, standing their ground in print. (GT 7)
Just as Kavanagh took as his subject matter his local native
world of rural Monaghan, so Heaney in his turn renders in his
poetry images of the life and landscape of the farming
community where he grew up. Thus `Digging' memorializes
the cycles of manual labour on his family's farm ± digging up
potatoes and cutting turf on the bog. The titles of other poems in
his first two collections point to a similar engagement with local
issues and concerns. In Death of a Naturalist we find `The Barn',
`Blackberry Picking', `Dawn Shoot', `At a Potato Digging', `Cow
in Calf', and `In Small Townlands', and in Door into the Dark we
find `The Forge', `Thatcher', `Rite of Spring', and `Whinlands'. In
a poem such as `Churning Day' from Death of a Naturalist we can
see Heaney's meticulous attention to detail as he attempts to
recreate an exact image of the traditional local practices of
butter-making:
Out came the four crocks, spilled their heavy lip
of cream, their white insides, into the sterile churn,
The staff, like a great whisky muddler fashioned
in deal wood, was plunged in, the lid fitted.
My mother took first turn, set up rhythms

10
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

that slugged and thumped for hours. Arms ached.

Hands blistered. Cheeks and clothes were spattered
with flabby milk.
Where finally gold flecks
began to dance. They poured hot water then,
sterilized a birchwood-bowl
and little corrugated butter-spades.
(DN 9)

We notice the painstaking accumulation of details here ± the

specificity of `The staff . . . fashioned | in deal wood', the
birchwood-bowl' and the `corrugated butter-spades' ± and,
again, there is the evocative precision of much of the language
used (the `rhythms | that slugged and thumped for hours', for
instance). Andrew Waterman has aptly observed of `Churning
Day' that `reading the poem leaves one feeling that one has
made the butter oneself'.5
These poems are, however, more than simply evocative
descriptions. In common with Kavanagh, in memorializing the
world of the familial and the local, Heaney is also attempting to
work through the nature of his relationship to that world. In a
revealing comment in `The Placeless Heaven', Heaney observes
that `Kavanagh's genius had achieved singlehandedly what I
and my grammar-schooled, arts-degreed generation were badly
in need of ± a poetry which linked the small farm life which
produced us with the slim-volume world we were now
supposed to be fit for. He brought us back to where we came
from' (GT 9). Heaney thus sees Kavanagh as offering a link
between the world of poetry and the local world of `small farm
life'. His comment indicates a certain alienation from this latter
world which has resulted from his generation's having become
`grammar-schooled' and `arts-degreed'. What Heaney is point-
ing to here is the fact that his generation was the first to benefit
from the UK's 1947 Education Act, which significantly broad-
ened access to secondary and university education, making it
easier for students from less prosperous backgrounds to remain
within the educational system for much longer than would
traditionally have been the case. While access to education
broadened the horizons of such students, it also served in some
measure to alienate them from their communities and families,

11
 SEAMUS HEANEY

which, like the Heaneys, in very many cases did not have a
tradition of participating in advanced-level education.
`Digging' is itself centrally concerned with this issue of
alienation and the need somehow to negotiate the distance
between origins and present circumstances. Recalling his
writing of `Digging', Heaney remembers, in Preoccupations, the
comments of the adults on neighbouring farms as he made his
way to and from school: `invariably they ended up with an
exhortation to keep studying because ``learning's easy carried''
and ``the pen's lighter than the spade'' ' (P. 42). In the poem,
`learning' and the privileges to which it provides access are what
separates the speaker from his father. The speaker sits inside,
looking out at his father working beneath his window. In this
sense, we might say that the growing cultural distance between
the two is marked by the physical distance of their relative
positions inside and outside the house, high at the window, low
on the ground. Similarly, the shift in the speaker's class position
(from the difficult circumstances of small farm life to educated
middle-class security) is registered in the privileged position
occupied by the speaker, as he has the luxury of being able to sit
by and observe his father labouring outside.
The speaker in the poem experiences his privilege as effecting a
kind of disjunction, emblematized by his relationship to the act of
digging. In the narrative of the poem, digging serves to establish a
sense of historical continuity: the father's digging now, in the
poem's present, shifts easily to his `com[ing] up twenty years away
| Stooping in rhythm through potato drills | Where he was
digging' (DN 1). This past activity of the father is in turn linked to
the work of prior generations, following the same course in life:
`By God, the old man could handle a spade. | Just like his old
man.' In his youth, the speaker in the poem has had a relationship
of sorts to this extended tradition. He recalls, twenty years ago,
picking up the potatoes unearthed by his father's digging:
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
The appreciation for the feel of the newly exposed potatoes
indicates a sense of connectedness between the boy and his
environment. In a similar vein, the speaker in the poem recalls

12
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

having `carried . . . milk in a bottle | Corked sloppily with paper' to

his grandfather as he worked cutting turf `on Toner's bog'. In both
these instances, while the child figure's role is in some senses
peripheral to the main activity of digging, he is, none the less,
connected with that activity and with the traditional continuities
that it signals. By contrast, the adult speaker feels entirely
disconnected from this world. As an adult, he should be expected
to take his place in the labouring line of his father and grandfather
('Just like his old man', as it were), but, instead, he is forced to
observe: `I've no spade to follow men like them' (DN 2).
Appropriately enough, we might think, the poet's recourse in
these circumstances is to metaphor, as he concludes his poem by
offering an analogy between the pen and the spade:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
What Heaney suggests here is that the work he undertakes as a
poet can be a kind of `labour' of the same order as the work which
has, for generations, been undertaken by his forebears. In this
sense, though the poet cannot take his place in the extended line of
labouring generations, he can, nevertheless, preserve the conti-
nuities represented by that line by encompassing that world within
his poetry. If he cannot literally dig, he can `dig' metaphorically,
unearthing the details of the life of his family and community and
honouring them by preserving them in his verse.6 Or, as Helen
Vendler puts it, these early poems memorialize `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'.7
In Preoccupations, Heaney offers us a more explicit rendering
of the analogy between poetry and rural labour when he notes
that ` ``Verse'' comes from the Latin versus which could mean the
turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he
finished one furrow and faced back into another' (P. 65). Heaney
turns this scholarly perception to practical effect in `Follower' ±
another poem from Death of a Naturalist in which the poet
contemplates his relationship with his father. Heaney describes
his father in `Follower' as
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

13
 SEAMUS HEANEY

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land.
(DN 12)

Heaney effects an immediate consonance here between his own

unfolding act of poetic composition and his father's work with
the plough. Where, in Preoccupations, Heaney registers an
equivalence between the end of the ploughed furrow and the
end of the poetic line, here the two physically mirror each other
in the neat enjambment (that is, the `turn over' from one poetic
line into the next) of `the sweating team turned round | And
back into the land', where the turn of the verse itself matches
exactly the turning of the horses it describes. Elsewhere in the
poem, Heaney contrives similar effects, as in the case of the
endstopped `The sod rolled over without breaking.' ± a line
composed of a single sentence which, just like the unbroken
turned sod it describes, maintains its own integrity (rather than,
for instance, running on into the next line, as in the case of `the
sweating team turned round | And back . . . '). Again, the `single
pluck || Of reins' occurs across a stanza break, reflecting the
momentary drag and stay which pulls the horses round.
Viewed in this light, `Follower' might appear to be a perfect
formal enactment of the pledge which Heaney offers at the end of
`Digging': `Between my finger and my thumb | The squat pen
rests. | I'll dig with it.' Synthesizing metaphor and practice, he
turns his pen here into a ploughshare; he effects a consonance
between his poetic labour and the labour of his family and
community and, in the process, he memorializes that labour in
verse. As the poem draws to a close, however, we discover an
unexpected note of disjunction emerging, as Heaney writes:
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

14
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

Despite the confident closure and paradigm of continuity

established in `Digging' and formally enacted throughout the
early stanzas of `Follower', then, the same conflicts which we
found initially troubling the poet in `Digging' endure here. In
particular, we note the re-emergence of a generational conflict
as the speaker is unable to establish an adequate relationship
with his father. He finds their roles reversed, as he feels the
weight of his father metaphorically dragging along behind him,
just as he himself had literally dragged along behind his father
when he was a child. The speaker is thus positioned in the poem
between a sense of himself as a child, dependent on his father,
and a mature sense of himself, struggling to establish his
independence from his father and from his family generally.
A great many poems in Death of a Naturalist concern
themselves with such moments of transition from childhood
to maturity and, more particularly, with the cost incurred in
acquiring the knowledge that puts an end to childhood
innocence.8 `Death of a Naturalist', `The Barn', `An Advance-
ment of Learning', `Blackberry Picking', and `Dawn Shoot' are
just some of the poems that take up this theme. In `The Barn'
something menacing lurks within the dark confines of a farm
building ± a threat which the fearful speaker in the poem is
unwilling and unable to encounter: `I lay face-down to shun the
fear above. | The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind
rats' (DN 5). In `An Advancement of Learning', the poem which
immediately follows `The Barn' in Death of a Naturalist, the
speaker does confront his fear, symbolized once again as a rat,
this time encountered on a riverbank:
The tapered tail that followed him,
The raindrop eye, the old snout:
One by one I took all in.
He trained on me. I stared him out
Forgetting how I used to panic
When his grey brothers scraped and fed
Behind the hen-coup in our yard,
On ceiling boards above my bed.
(DN 7)

In confronting his fear on this occasion, the speaker achieves a

victory ± the rat is forced into retreat and the speaker, still

15
 SEAMUS HEANEY

holding his ground, `stare[s] a minute after him'. The fruits of

his victory are emblematically marked in the closing line of the
poem, in which Heaney observes: `Then I walked on and
crossed the bridge'. This crossing of the bridge is clearly
indicative of the successful negotiation of a certain `rite of
passage'. Having confronted his fear and triumphed, the
speaker is free to move on to another stage in his journey.
`An Advancement of Learning' has a certain jubilant, jocular
tone to it, as the speaker easily wins his battle of wills and
emerges triumphant from his mock-heroic struggle with his
emblematic adversary. `Death of a Naturalist', by contrast,
presents a much more conflicted and troubled picture. The first
half of the poem produces an idyllic sense of an early springtime
childhood, enjoyed within a beneficent natural order. The
closing lines of this first section, however, signal an impending
change, as they register a shift from the upbeat, positive `yellow
in the sun' to the dark and ominous `brown | In rain' (DN 3) ±
an effect all the more marked by the fact that `In rain' is set as a
single line. In the second section of the poem, the frogspawn
that has been gathered in section one comes to maturity and the
natural world the speaker had enjoyed is overrun by adult frogs,
which repulse him: `I sickened, turned, and ran' (DN 4). As the
narrative of the maturing of the frogspawn indicates, one of the
fears registered in the poem is a fear of maturity itself ±
especially of sexual maturity. A strong thread of sexual imagery
runs through the second section of the poem, as the frogs
thicken the air with a `bass chorus', sit `cocked on sods', making
`obscene threats', `their blunt heads farting'. As Michael Parker
has observed, by the end of the poem `innocent delight at the
``warm thick slobber'' has been replaced by disgust at his body's
``spawn'' '.9 The narrative of the poem resists both maturity itself
and an emerging sexual sense of self.
If `Death of a Naturalist' is a poem about the difficult
transition from childhood to adolescence, and the simultaneous
fascination and repulsion of sexual awakenings, many of the
later poems in Heaney's first collection concern themselves with
a more fully adult transition ± from the independence of single
life to the responsibilities of marriage. Heaney's turning to such
subject matter is not too surprising, given that just a year before
Death of a Naturalist was published he had married Marie

16
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

Devlin, a fellow Northern Irish schoolteacher. As in the earlier

poems in the collection, many of the marriage pieces concern
themselves with the crossing of a threshold from one state of life
to another. The uncertainties of the threshold state itself ±
where one lingers between one positioning and the next ± are
nicely caught in a poem such as `Honeymoon Flight'. Here the
airborne transition between two points of a journey reflects the
moment of suspension between an old life left behind and a
new life in prospect:
And launched right off the earth by force of fire,
We hang, miraculous, above the water,
Dependent on the invisible air
To keep us airborne and to bring us further.
(DN 36)

The stanza holds together the four traditional elements of earth,

fire, water, and air, in an act of balance mirroring that achieved
by the aircraft itself in flight. As the poem draws to a close, the
horizon of a new life opens up. The poem ends: `Air-pockets jolt
our fears and down we go. | Travellers, at this point, can only
trust.' At a literal level, of course, the `trust' in question here is
being placed in the pilot of the aircraft, to bring it in safely to
land, but it also indicates the trust that must be placed in the
married state itself, to fulfill the lives of the individual partners.
The most striking of the marriage poems included in Death of
a Naturalist is a short piece entitled `Lovers on Aran'. Heaney has
often been (justly) criticized for deploying male/female binaries
in his poems in a manner which presents the female as passive,
yielding, accepting ± the powerless recipient of an active,
dominating, dynamic male. As Patricia Coughlan has observed,
frequently in his poems Heaney `constructs an unequivocally
dominant masculine figure, who explores, describes, brings to
pleasure and compassionates a passive feminine one'.10 In
`Lovers on Aran', however, in a set of interesting inversions and
reversals, Heaney actually presents an interrogation of these
very gender stereotypes. He begins with an image of the waves
swarming in `To possess Aran' (DN 34). But the act of possession
signalled is an odd one, as the waves come in to take their
possession `from the Americas'. The `geography' of this image is
logical enough ± the Atlantic waves wash in eastward onto the

17
 SEAMUS HEANEY

shores of the Aran Islands, which lie off the west coast of
Ireland. But, in addition to the geography, there is also a
historical reference at play here. The thrust of colonial
possession has always been westward, not eastward. Historically
(especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries),
Ireland frequently served as a staging point for colonizing
expeditions setting out to possess the Americas. Here, in an
inversion of historical precedent, the direction of possession is
reversed ± the waves flow from the New World to possess a
corner of the Old. We might also notice that, whereas Heaney
most typically associates water ± fluid, yielding, formless ± with
the passive female (see, for instance, `Undine' and `Rite of
Spring' in Door into the Dark), here the water is initially given a
certain masculine value, being presented as, essentially, `pene-
trating' the land. But these alignments are quickly complicated.
Having detailed the sea's act of possession, Heaney asks:
Or did Aran rush
To throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?
This cancels the active, aggressive image of irruption, as the
inflow of the waters may constitute as much an act of enfolding
by the land as of penetration by the sea. Having thus rendered
the alignments and significances of his imagery ambiguous,
Heaney goes on to ask: `Did sea define the land or land the sea?'
± an unanswerable question which presents the lovers as united
in a relationship of mutuality and equality. In the broader sweep
of the poem, the question leaves fruitfully open issues of
definition and identity, in a way that will not be typical of much
of Heaney's other poetry in which the issue of gender is
prominently featured.
`Lovers on Aran' is one of two poems set on the islands in
Death of a Naturalist, the other being one of the last poems in the
collection, entitled `Synge on Aran'. This latter poem is
concerned with the Irish playwright, John Millington Synge,
who, between 1898 and 1902, spent long periods on the islands.
Synge's project as a dramatist was to provide an accurate picture
of rural life in Ireland and to find a way of reproducing in
English some of the rhythms, textures, and nuances of the Irish
language. Heaney conceives of him with

18
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

a hard pen
scraping in his head;
the nib filed on a salt wind
and dipped in the keening sea.
(DN 39)

Just as Heaney imagines himself in `Digging' as adapting his

own pen to the unearthing task of the spade, so here he
imagines Synge as fashioning his pen upon the environment he
wishes to describe ± sharpening his nib on the abrasive wind,
the mournful sea his ink.
This image of Synge at the end of Death of a Naturalist takes us
back to Heaney's other important literary precursor, Patrick
Kavanagh. As it happens, Kavanagh had little time for Synge. He
felt that Synge and his privileged middle-class Protestant literary
colleagues lacked, as outside observers, any true connection with
the realities of country life and simply romanticized the figure of
the peasant and grossly misrepresented life as it was actually lived
in rural Ireland (a point most forcibly made in Kavanagh's poetry
in The Great Hunger). For all that, there is much that unites
Kavanagh, Synge, and Heaney as writers from three different
generations seeking to accomplish certain things within their
work. Both Synge and Kavanagh pledge a certain fidelity to the
precise details of the purely local, believing that, if one is faithful
to such local concerns, they will of themselves open outwards to
something greater, something more universal in its significance.
Kavanagh draws a distinction between `provincialism', on the one
hand, and `parochialism', on the other. `A provincial', he writes, `is
always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-
sufficient.' Kavanagh's clearest statement of faith in the parochial
in his poetry is delivered in his well-known poem, `Epic'. In this
poem, Kavanagh remembers a particular dispute in his native area
which inflamed local passions intensely. Recollecting that the
events took place on the eve of the Second World War, he yields to
a moment of self-doubt, wondering whether these local incidents
can be said to be in any way significant in the face of such great
upheaval. As the poem draws to a close, however, this doubt is
banished and his faith in the local is reaffirmed:
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined

19
 SEAMUS HEANEY

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.11
The great epic of the Iliad, the story of the Trojan War, is here
reduced to its origins as `a local row' ± a petty dispute, we might
say, between the Greek Menelaus and the Trojan Paris over
which of them should have Menelaus' wife, Helen. It is the very
act of poetic memorialization itself, Kavanagh suggests (through
Homer), that lends the local story its significance, that creates
the epic, drawing the universal from the particular.
We have already noted the significance of Kavanagh's poetic
practice to Heaney earlier in this chapter when we discussed
Heaney's attempt to encompass his domestic world within his
poetry and thereby to effect a sense of continuity with his
community and to work through the nature of his relationship
to his origins. Kavanagh's broader perspective on the nature
and function of poetry is also of great relevance to Heaney's
work, especially as he begins both to develop further and to
move beyond the themes which we have seen him explore in
Death of a Naturalist. In an early comment on Kavanagh, in an
article published in the Listener, Heaney observed that `Kava-
nagh enhances our view of the world, and makes us feel that
any task, in any place, is an important act, in an important
place',12 and, in Heaney's second and third collections, Door into
the Dark and Wintering Out, we find several poems in which, like
Kavanagh, he focuses upon the minute particularities of the
local in order to expose within them traces of a greater world.
`The Forge' from Door into the Dark is a case in point. It opens
with the line `All I know is a door into the dark' (DD 7) which, in
addition to giving the collection its title, also resonates with the
very last line of Death of a Naturalist, where, in `Personal Helicon',
Heaney proclaims that he writes poetry in order `to set the
darkness echoing' (DN 44). The connection between the two
poems is significant, as Heaney often ends one collection of his
work with a piece which, in effect, will serve as a sort of
`manifesto' for the collection to follow.
The opening line of `The Forge' seems to indicate that what
Heaney's poetic art gives him is a point of penetration into the
heart of a world which is beyond the everyday, but which proves

20
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

to be somehow simultaneously central to it. By contrast with

`The Barn', where the speaker in the poem is unwilling to enter
into the darkness, afraid of what he might find there, the
speaker in `The Forge' seeks to go into the darkness, to see what
lies beyond, or within, the outside world. What he finds is indeed
something that `sets the darkness echoing' ± the hammer-blows
of the blacksmith working a new horseshoe upon his anvil, set at
the centre of the forge. Heaney brings his usual eye for detail to
bear on the blacksmith in the poem, as, in a few short but
evocatively accurate strokes, he provides us with a pen picture
of him: `leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, | He leans out on the
jamb . . . Then grunts and goes in.' The ordinariness of this
picture comes as something of a surprise and contrasts with the
exotic creatures Heaney's earlier poetic speaker imagined
inhabited the darkness of `The Barn' ± `bright eyes' staring
`From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking', `bats . . . on
the wing', `two-lugged sacks . . . like great blind rats'. The smith's
peripheral and oddly anachronistic status is registered in the
poem when Heaney sketches an image of him, in his
momentary rest from his work, recalling `a clatter | Of hoofs
where traffic is flashing in rows'. The horse having been
superseded by the car, the smith is, in this context, a
representative of a dying trade. But even as he is presented as
ordinary, peripheral, outdated in the poem, the smith is also
centralized, just as his anvil is centred within the forge itself. He
is consciously imagined within the poem as a figure for the
poet-as-maker, a figure not unlike that of another `blacksmith' ±
the Hephaestus of the Homeric epics who, though crippled and
cuckolded, is capable of producing work of great beauty and
intricacy and who, crucially, is able to encompass an entire
universe on the decorative surface of a single shield, when
asked by Thetis to forge armour for her son Achilles:
Five welded layers
composed the body of the shield. The maker
used all his art adorning this expanse.
He pictured on it earth, heaven, and sea,
unwearied sun, moon waxing, all the stars
that heaven bears for garland . . .13
Heaney's smith, as he is like Homer's Hephaestus, is also, we
might say, like Kavanagh's Homer, in that he is the one who

21
 SEAMUS HEANEY

forges enduring significance from base material, beating `real

iron out', expending `himself in shape and music', and creating
a whole world within small compass.
The poem which follows `The Forge' in Door into the Dark ±
`Thatcher' ± charts a very similar sort of trajectory. Again the
poem concerns a practitioner of a dying trade ± the job of the
thatcher is to tend to the traditional roofwork of cottages that
are covered in straw, or `thatch', an increasing rarity as more
and more rural homes are modernized. The tools, materials, and
techniques of this skilled craftsman are meticulously described
in the poem. The thatcher turns up
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,
Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow
Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they'd snap.
(DD 8)

Like the blacksmith, the thatcher is a figure for the creative

intelligence who, though peripheral and rather outmoded, is
nevertheless capable of producing from the ordinary ('straw . . .
rods . . . a white-pronged staple . . . sods') something extraordin-
ary, something wondrous:
Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.
Robert Welch has noted the connection between Heaney's
`Thatcher' and the sixteenth-century English poet Sir Philip
Sidney's theoretical treatise A Defence of Poetry, in which Sidney,
contrasting the works of art and of nature, comments that,
where nature's `world is brazen [i.e. made of brass], the poets
only deliver a golden' world.14 Both Sidney, then, and Heaney
(through the figure of the thatcher with his `Midas' touch) posit
a transformative, alchemical power for poetry: the power to take
the ready material of the everyday and to fashion it into
something astounding. In a sense we might say that `The Forge'
and `Thatcher' represent Heaney's own `Defence of Poetry', his
own version of Kavanagh's `Epic', in which he affirms the power

22
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

of poetry to transform, to find in the everyday and the particular

something greater, something more significant.
If `The Forge' and `Thatcher' are, then, in some sense
`theoretical ' poems, signalling a kind of poetic manifesto, in
other poems in Door into the Dark and Wintering Out we find that
theory put into practice. This is particularly true of the group of
`place-name' poems which Heaney includes in the second of
these collections ± `Anahorish', `Toome', and `Broagh' (whose
very titles are taken from place-names) and also `Gifts of Rain'
and `A New Song'. In these poems, Heaney unites a theory of
poetry with a theory of language itself. On the one hand,
following Kavanagh, Heaney believes that poetry can find
something greater than the particular in the local; on the other,
from another Irish poetic source ± the ancient native Irish poetic
tradition of dinnseanchas ± he derives a sense that the language
of local naming bears within itself a kind of compressed
narrative of local history. Just as Kavanagh believes that an
engagement with the particularities of the local can open
outwards to a greater world, so the dinnseanchas tradition
suggests that a kind of etymological investigation of local
naming can open up the greater history of the named place.
Thus, as Henry Hart indicates, `Etymology, in Heaney's hands,
lays bare the poetic fossil within the linguistic core'.15
In Preoccupations Heaney writes of `the cultural depth-charges
latent in certain words and rhythms':
that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the
ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body . . . the
energies beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-
deliberate play . . . the relationship between the word as pure vocable,
as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as
symptom of human history, memory and attachments. (P. 150)
This captures the essence of Heaney's view of the dinnseanchas
tradition: his belief that language itself ± and, specifically, the
language of proper naming ± carries within itself a kind of
native history, an etymologically etched memory `rapidly
seiz[ing] a world from a word', as Neil Corcoran puts it.16 We
can see this notion at play in `Anahorish', the first of the place-
name poems from Wintering Out. The name `Anahorish' is an
anglicized conflation of the native Irish anach fhõÂor uisce and

23
 SEAMUS HEANEY

Heaney begins his poem with a translation of the Irish, as he

writes: `My ``place of clear water'' ' (WO 6).17 From this unveiling
of the literal meaning of `Anahorish', Heaney, in a move that
might remind us of Kavanagh, goes on to posit the place of his
origins as a kind of primally original place, as it becomes
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
From here, Heaney returns to the name itself, atomizing it,
considering its constituent parts: `Anahorish, soft gradient | of
consonant, vowel-meadow'. Heaney believes that he finds here,
in the phonetic elements of the word itself, an image of the very
landscape to which the name is attached, as consonant and
vowel combine to reflect the rise and fall of the land.
In the final two stanzas, the poem opens up, moving from the
specificities of geography to the residues of history. Faintly
perceived human figures enter the landscape which the first two
stanzas have established. At first they seem virtually an effect of
the name itself, as Heaney writes
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
The place-name itself triggers a residual image not of the inhabitants
of the place but of the lights which they carry. In the closing lines of
the poem the inhabitants themselves finally emerge into the light,
but even now they are seen obscurely, through a mist:
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
What Heaney has offered us in the poem, then, is a process
whereby, through scrutinizing the particularities of a proper
name, we are able to understand its meaning, its connection to

24
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

its place of application, and its position of centrality. Beyond the

geography of this linguistically demarcated place, we are able to
catch a glimpse of its human history. Through the rough glass of
the name we can see an image of the original, ancient
inhabitants of the place.
Heaney angles for analogous effects in the other place-name
poems included in Wintering Out. In `Gifts of Rain', the name of the
local river, Moyola, is imagined as offering a similar self-image as
that perceived in `Anahorish': `The tawny gutteral water | spells
itself: Moyola | is its own score and consort' (WO 15). The name
offers a kind of internal harmony, redolent of local affairs: `reed
music, an old chanter || breathing its mists through vowels and
history.' Some of the specificities of the `history' evoked here begin
to emerge in `Toome', `A New Song', and `Broagh'. In `Toome' we
find Heaney exploring a name which has a lightly explosive quality
as it is spoken: `My mouth holds round | the soft blastings, |
Toome, Toome' (WO 16). As Heaney digs down through its history,
pushing `into a souterrain | prospecting', he unearths the
remnants of history. In among the bric-aÁ-brac of forgotten daily
lives ± the `loam, flints', `fragmented ware', and `fish-bones' ± he
finds `musket-balls', a token of the country's explosive and
conflictual past.
The contours of that past and Heaney's sense of how the
narrative of history is intertwined with language itself emerge in
`A New Song'. In this poem, the speaker encounters a native of
Derrygarve and the place-name spurs the poet to his usual local
analysis. As in the case of `Anahorish', `Derrygarve' calls up
through Heaney's dinnseanchas machinery potent images of local
geography. The poem turns, however, around the fulcrum of its
middle stanza, where Heaney writes:

And Derrygarve, I thought, was just,

Vanished music, twilit water,
A smooth libation of the past
Poured by this chance vestal daughter.
(WO 23)

Where in `Anahorish' the trajectory of the poem is to open out

towards a vision of an ancient community which, while faintly
perceived, is nevertheless imagined as living in the flow of daily
life (`break[ing] the light ice | at wells and dunghills'), here, in

25
 SEAMUS HEANEY

`A New Song', we register an image of a life that is imagined as

irretrievably past. In contrast with `Gifts of Rain', where the
Moyola is `A swollen river' echoing an active and regenerative
`mating call of sound', the same river here presents a `twilit
water' and the general feeling of the stanza is of an irreversible
dwindling and fading ± from twilight towards the darkness of
endless night, as it were. Reading the poem allegorically, we can
see it as registering, up to this point, a lament for a native
culture that has been lost as a result of Ireland's colonial history.
Native Irish civilization is, in this regard, little more than a
`vanished music'. As the poem moves into its final two stanzas,
however, a significant shift occurs:
But now our river tongues must rise
From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,
Demesnes staked out in consonants.
And Castledawson we'll enlist
And Upperlands, each planted bawn ±
Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass ±
A vocable, as rath and bullaun.
What Heaney presents here is, in fact, a narrative of decoloniza-
tion. The native language returns to supplant the language that
banished it ± overrunning the imperial `demesnes' and `con-
sonants' (Heaney has written in Preoccupations that he thinks `of
the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary
awarenesses nourished on English as consonants', (P. 37) ) and
displacing the alien imposed names of `Castledawson' and
`Upperlands'. Heaney's image for this displacement is the
repossession of the `bleaching-greens' (emblematic of the linen
industry introduced into the north of Ireland by Protestant
colonists) by the native grass (symbolic of the native Irish
pastoral farming tradition) ± a taking back of the land from the
colonist. The final word in the poem is literally given to the
native, as Heaney invokes the Irish `rath' (hill-fort) and `bullaun'
(hollowed stone mortar).18
If `A New Song' is in some measure charged with the energy of
nationalist, anti-colonialist aspiration, Heaney offers us a rather
different aspiration in `Broagh'. Neil Corcoran has observed of
`Broagh' that it `has a significance in Heaney's work altogether
disproportionate to its length',19 and it is certainly true that this

26
 PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

short poem is immensely rich and resonant. In the second and

third stanzas of the poem Heaney offers his usual reading of
geography into the place-name (`the shower | gathering in your
heelmark | was the black O || in Broagh' (WO 17) ). In the first
stanza, however, we get something rather different from the
standard dinnseanchas performance:
Riverba[n]k,20 the long rigs
ending in broad docken
and a canopied pad
down to the ford.
Heaney is being immensely precise in his choice of language
here. The opening word of the poem offers a translation of
`broagh' itself, which is an anglicized version of the Irish bruach,
meaning `riverbank'. Heaney ends this first line, however, with
the word `rigs' ± meaning `furrows' ± a word brought to the north
of Ireland by seventeenth-century Scots colonists. Elsewhere in
this same stanza Heaney offers us the dialect words `docken' and
`pad', both of which, again, have strong connections with Scots.
What Heaney creates in this first stanza then, is a kind of
common language community that unites colonizer and native.
This union is thrown into relief in the closing stanza of the
poem, where Heaney comments on the pronunciation of broagh,
noting `that last | gh the strangers found | difficult to manage'.
The harsh-sounding final phoneme of `Broagh' indicates a
sound that has been largely lost within the English language,
but which is still available to native and colonizer alike in the
language community of the north of Ireland. Linguistically,
then, the correct pronunciation of `Broagh' serves simulta-
neously to unite the divided communities of the North and to
set them apart from the alien community of the English, divided
from them by sea and sound, as it were. What Heaney seems to
be offering is an image of the union of the two traditions of the
North ± an internal union which detaches the territory from its
union with England.
John Kerrigan offers a contrasting interpretation of what
Heaney is attempting in `Broagh'. While granting the ethnic and
ethical complexity of Heaney's manoeuvrings, he nevertheless
feels that they ultimately serve an attempt to retrieve an
essential Irish identity, rather than adequately engaging with

27
 SEAMUS HEANEY

the complexities of identity per se:

although the reader of, say `the black O / / in Broagh' does not need to
know that bruach ('riverbank') has no `o' in Gaelic, the scrambling of
the place name by Anglicization, and the tangential accessibility of
`that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage' to locals of
Scottish stock, does make the title-word of `Broagh' a site of some
historical and philological complexity. But Heaney feels no imagina-
tive urge or responsibility to make this explicit in the poem, not just
because it would disrupt his lyric textures if he engaged in a
dictionary-thumbing . . . but because his poetic instincts are insepar-
able at this stage from a politics which wants to find, under the layers
of linguistic colonialism, a more authentic in-placeness in Gaelic than
in an hybrid vocable.21
Kerrigan's astute reservations notwithstanding, it is clear that in
these poems Heaney is attempting to engage with the fraught
political and historical situation in Ireland ± albeit in a rather
oblique fashion.22 When Wintering Out appeared in 1972, the
situation in Northern Ireland had reached a point of crisis. In
the next chapter we will examine Heaney's response to that
crisis in greater detail.

28
 2

'Where the fault is

opening': Politics and
Mythology

Wintering Out opens with a poem of dedication to David

Hammond and the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley:
This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
a bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
in the roadside, and over in the trees
machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
and it was deÂjaÁ-vu, some film made
of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there life before death? That's chalked up
on a wall downtown. Competence with pain,
coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
we hug our little destiny again.
(WO, p. v)

As a point of entry into Heaney's third collection of poems, this

piece (later incorporated into `Whatever You Say Say Nothing'
in North) offers us a glimpse of a very different world from the
one we are introduced to on the opening page of Death of a
Naturalist. Where `Digging' presents us with a natural, rural
world of `flowerbeds', `potato drills', `new potatoes', `good turf',
and `living roots' (DN 1, 2), Heaney's poem for Hammond and
Longley brings us face to face with a harsh new set of realities.
Northern Ireland had changed quite dramatically between 1966,
when Death of a Naturalist was published, and 1972, when

29
 SEAMUS HEANEY

Wintering Out appeared, and many of these changes are

registered here in this poem of dedication.
As the 1960s ended, the Northern Irish state lurched toward
crisis. With the failure of the Civil Rights movement, militant
republicanism (and militant unionism) revived and the province
grew accustomed both to the sounds and to the consequences of
bombings and shootings. As Heaney drives along the motorway
(in itself something of an incongruous intrusion of the modern
world into his typical poetic mise-en-sceÁne ± at least up to this point
in his career), he sees the crater which a bomb has scarred into
the landscape. As a result of the deepening crisis, the British
Army were now deployed in the North and they, too, intrude into
the scene, with their `machine-gun posts defin[ing] a real
stockade'. In August of the previous year the government had
introduced internment without trial, and hundreds of people
(almost all of them Catholics) had been rounded up and detained
in camps like the one that Heaney sees from the motorway. The
whole scene has, for the poet, an air of unreality about it. Hardly
able to believe that the situation can have come to this, he likens
what confronts him to a scene from a bad war movie.
For all the shock of encountering this scene, however, the final
stanza of the poem registers less surprise at new developments
than resignation in the face of the recognizably familiar. The
slogan chalked up on a Belfast wall ± `Is there life before death?' ±
indicates a certain grim humour, the kind of weary cynicism that
comes from bitter familiarity with suffering. In the closing lines of
the poem, an entire community settles down to the desperate
mundanity of the reopened wounds of old conflict.
Though Heaney finds himself brought into direct confronta-
tion with the latest manifestation of this conflict as he opens
Wintering Out, in fact, if we look back through both Door into the
Dark and Death of a Naturalist, we can trace the pulse of that
conflict even in his earliest work. It is no coincidence, we might
feel, that, even in `Digging', Heaney's pen is imagined first as a
gun before it becomes a spade (`Between my finger and my
thumb | The squat pen rests; snug as a gun' (DN 1) ). Such
images are surprisingly insistent throughout his early poems. In
`Churning Day', for instance, `the four crocks' stand in the small
pantry like `large pottery bombs' (DN 9); in `Trout', the fish
`Hangs, a fat gun-barrel', `his muzzle gets bull's eye', his food is

30
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When Tubby read that delightful news he fell to 76
laughing until he shook like a bowlful of jelly. It
evidently made him very happy, and he did not hesitate
to show it to his two faithful comrades. Indeed, all of
them had smiles on their faces, for it would be much
more satisfactory to loaf around this spot, possibly
taking toll of the partridges, and perhaps even a
wandering deer, than to continue their search for an
elusive party, whose movements might partake of the
nature of a will-o’-the-wisp.

“I’m going to make a sign reading ‘Alabama,’ and stick it

above the door, the first thing,” announced Tubby, with
a grateful heart. “It means ‘here we rest.’ If ever three
fellows deserved a spell of recuperation we certainly are
those fellows.”

“How generous of Uncle George,” said Andy, “to say the 77

latch string is always out! Then, too, he calls attention
to the fact that the door is only held shut by a bar on
the outside, instead of within. All we have to do,
fellows, is to drop our packs here. I’ll remove that bar,
and swing the door wide open, after which we’ll step in
and take possession.”

He proceeded to follow out this nice little program,—at

least he got as far as dropping his pack and removing
the bar; but hardly had he started to open the door
than Andy gave a sudden whoop, and slammed it shut
again with astonishing celerity. Tubby and Rob stared at
him as though they thought he had seen a genuine
ghost.

78
 CHAPTER VII
AN UNWELCOME INTRUDER

“Oh! what did you see inside the cabin, Andy?” gasped
Tubby, beginning to look alarmed, and shrinking back a
little, because he did not happen to be carrying one of
the two guns in the party.

“Wow! Talk to me about your Jabberwock!” ejaculated

Andy, making his face assume an awed expression that
added to Tubby’s state of dismay. “He’s in there!”

“But how could a big bull moose get inside a cabin,

when the door’s shut, and fastened with a bar?”
questioned the amazed and incredulous fat scout.

“It isn’t any moose,” scoffed Andy, and, turning to Rob, 79

he went on: “I tell you, the biggest bobcat I ever set
eyes on is in there, and has been having a high old time
scratching around among the provisions left by Uncle
George and his party. Oh, his yellow eyes looked like
balls of phosphorus in the half gloom. I thought he was
going to jump for me, so I slammed the door shut, and
set the bar again.”

“A wildcat, do you say?” observed Rob, looking

decidedly interested. “Well, one thing sure, Uncle
George never meant that generous invitation for this
destructive creature. As he couldn’t very well read the
notice, or lift that heavy bar, it stands to reason the cat
found some other way of entering the bunk-house.”

“How about the chimney, Rob?” asked Andy, as quick as

a flash.

“Now I wouldn’t be much surprised if that turned out to

be his route,” mused the scout leader. “They have a
wonderful sense of smell, you know, and this fellow
soon learned that there were things good to eat inside
the cabin. Finding the place deserted, so far as his two-
footed enemies were concerned, he must have prowled
all around, and finally mounted to the roof. Then the
opening in the chimney drew his attention, and getting
bolder as time passed, he finally dropped down.”

Tubby, who had been listening with rapt attention, now 80

broke out again.

“He must be a mighty bold cat to do that, I should say,

fellows. Goodness knows how much damage he’s done
to Uncle George’s precious stores. Oh! doesn’t it seem
like a shame to have a miserable pussycat spoiling the
stuff you’ve gone and nearly broken your back to pack
away up here? But will we have to pitch a camp in one
of those other smaller buildings, and let the bobcat hold
the fort in the comfortable bunkhouse, with its jolly
cooking fireplace?”

Thereupon Andy snorted in disdain.

“I’d like to see myself doing that cowardly thing,

Tubby!” he exclaimed. “Possession may be nine points
of the law, but in this case there’s something bigger
than the law, and that’s self-preservation. That beast is
going to pay for his meddling, if I know what’s what.
Rob, how’d we better go at the job?”

“Just as you said a while back, Andy,” the scout master 81

told him, “the hand of every man is always raised
against such varmints in the woods as panthers and
bobcats and weasels and such animals as destroy heaps
of game, both in the fur and in the feather. If I could
have shot that panther without harming the deer I’d
have been only too pleased to do it; but the whole thing
happened too rapidly for us. As to just what our plan of
campaign now ought to be, that’s worth considering.”

They had deposited their bundles on the ground and

stepped back, while both Andy and Rob held their guns
ready for business. Tubby watching saw that the former
continued to keep his eyes fastened on the chimney of
the low bunk-house all the while he talked; and from
that he drew conclusions.

“You’re thinking, I expect, Rob,” Tubby ventured to say,

“that what goes up in the air must come down again;
and that as the cat dropped into the wide-throated
chimney he’s just got to climb up again, sooner or later.
Am I right, Rob?”

“A good guess, Tubby, believe me,” chuckled Andy. 82

“What we want to do now is to respectfully but firmly
influence that unwelcome guest to get busy, and
vamoose the ranch in a hurry. Say, I’m ready to give
him the warmest kind of a reception as soon as he
shows the tip of his whiskered nose above the top of
the chimney.”

“Here, Tubby, lend me a hand,” said Rob, “and we’ll try

to coax Mr. Cat to vacate his present quarters. Andy, I’ll
lay my gun down alongside you here, and if yours isn’t
enough to finish the rogue, snatch up mine in a hurry.”

Andy agreed to that, and so the other two walked

forward again to the front of the long log building,
where the door was situated. Tubby was curious to
know how his companion expected to work that
“influence” he spoke of, and cause the ferocious
intruder to depart as he came. He awaited the outcome
with considerable interest.

“First,” said Rob, as though he already had his mind

settled, “we’ll pick up a few handfuls of these chips and
twigs that are so plentiful.”

“Whee! but burning the old cabin down to get rid of a 83

cat that stays inside would be what they’d call heroic
treatment, wouldn’t it, Rob?”

“I’m not doing anything as severe as that, Tubby,” said

the other. “We’re going to try the smoke cure. All
animals are in deadly fear of fire, and smoke will cause
even a horse to become fairly wild. We can make our
little fire close to the door, and the breeze which
happens to be just right, will carry some of the smoke
under it, for notice that wide crack there. When the cat
sniffs that odor you’ll see how fast he scrambles up that
chimney again.”

It all looked very simple to Tubby now; so those Spanish

courtiers who had been declaring that discovering
America was no great task after Columbus had shown
them how to stand an egg on an end, doubtless
sneered and said it was easy enough.

The little heap of trash was ignited, and just as Rob had
said, it began to emit a pungent smoke that was driven
against and under the door by the breeze.

“Keep ready, Andy!” Rob called out. “I thought I heard a 84

scratching sound just then!”

Tubby ran back so as to be able to see the crown of the

low chimney. He was only in time, and no more, for
even as he managed to glimpse the apex of the slab-
and-hard-mud vent something suddenly came into view.
As Tubby stared with round eyes he saw a monstrous
wildcat crouching there, looking this way and that, as if
tempted to give battle to its human enemies, by whom
it had been dispossessed from the scene of its royal
feast.

Then there came a loud crash. Andy had fired his gun.
Tubby shivered as he saw the big feline give a wild leap
upward and then come struggling down the slight slope
of the roof, clawing furiously, and uttering screams of
expiring fury.

Andy was ready to send in a second shot if it chanced to 85

be needed, but this proved not to be the case, for the
struggles of the stricken beast quickly ended. The three
boys hurried forward, and stood over the victim of
Andy’s clever marksmanship. The cat was one of the
largest Rob had ever run across, and even in death
looked so terrible that Tubby had an odd shiver run
through his system as he stared in mingled awe and
curiosity down at the creature.

“Too bad in one way that the poor old thing couldn’t
finish his feast in peace,” Tubby was saying, “but then I
suppose it’s the chances of war. There’s always a state
of open war between these bobcats and all men who
walk in the woods.”
“Well, I should say yes!” cried Andy, patting himself
proudly on the chest. “I’ll always call this one of the
best day’s jobs I ever did. Think of the pretty partridges,
the innocent squirrels, the bounding jack-rabbits and
such things, that I’ve saved the lives of with that one
grand shot. If this beast lived three years longer it’d
surprise you, Tubby, to count up the immense amount
of game that it’d devour in that time. I never spare a
cat under any circumstances.”

“Do you think it was all alone in the cabin?” asked the
timid one.

“We’ll soon find out,” Andy told him, as he saw to it that 86

his gun was in condition again for immediate use, and
then started toward the closed door.

Cautiously this was opened a trifle, and one by one the

boys peered through the crevice; all agreed that there
was nothing stirring, and so eventually they made bold
to pass inside.

It was discovered that the uninvited guest had made

free with some of the stores of the party, but after all,
the damage did not amount to a great deal, possibly
owing to the coming of Rob and his two chums on the
scene shortly after the cat started chewing at the half of
a ham it had dragged down from a rafter.

The boys quickly removed all signs of feline presence.

Andy declared that he intended skinning his prize, for
the pelt if properly cured would make quite an attractive
mat for his den at home. It would be pleasant of a
winter evening, when resting in his easy chair, to gaze
down upon the trophy, and once again picture that
stirring scene up there in Maine, under the whispering
pines, hemlocks and birches.

They adjusted themselves to the new conditions with 87

that free and easy spirit so natural in most boys. It was
next in order to pick out the bunks they meant to
occupy while in the logging camp; for there were signs
to tell them which had been already chosen by Uncle
George and his two guides; and of course, no one
thought to settle upon any of these particular sleeping-
places.

They soon had a fire burning, and the interior looked

quite cheerful. Sitting there Tubby could easily picture
what a stirring scene it must have been in those times
long gone by when a dozen, perhaps even a score, of
muscular lumber jacks lounged about that same
dormitory and living room, waiting for the cook’s call to
supper.

Later on Tubby came up to Rob while the other was

arranging some of the contents of his pack, “scrambled”
more or less, as he called it, by being carried for several
days on his back, and thrown about “every which-way.”

“Look here, Rob,” the fat scout said, “I happened to run 88

across Uncle George’s fresh log of the trip. He always
keeps one, and I’ve even had the pleasure of reading
about some exciting adventures he’s met with in former
years. So that’s my only excuse for glancing at what
he’s jotted down here. The last entry is where he made
up his mind to go over to the Tucker Pond to try again
for that giant moose. And by the way, Rob, I was
wondering whether our excited visitor of last night could
be this big chap Uncle George is so wild to get?”
“Now that might be so,” admitted the scout leader,
“though the thought hadn’t occurred to me before. He
certainly was a buster of a beast, though he went off so
fast none of us more than got a glimpse of his size.
Anything of unusual importance in the beginning of your
uncle’s log, Tubby?”

“Oh, he got a deer on the opening day of the season,

and we’ll probably find some of the venison around, if
we look again sharply. Something did happen it seems,
something that gave my uncle considerable
unhappiness, too. He lost one of his two guides.”

“What! did the man die here?” ejaculated the astounded 89

Rob.

“Oh! my stars! no, Rob, not quite so bad as that,” Tubby

hastened to add. “He had to discharge the man because
of something he’d done. Uncle doesn’t say what it was,
but he was both indignant and pained; because he
thought a heap of Zeb Crooks, who had been with him
many seasons. The man was stubborn, too, and
wouldn’t ask Uncle George to forgive him, or it might
have all been patched up. So he sent him flying, and
started off to Tucker’s Pond with his other guide, a
Penobscot Indian named Sebattis.”

“Well, that’s interesting, Tubby,” remarked Rob. “It

doesn’t mean anything to us, though I can understand
how sorry your uncle must have been to part with a
man he used to consider faithful. So it goes, and lots of
things happen that are disagreeable. I suppose he’ll
have just as good a time with the one guide to wait on
him as when there were a pair.”

90
Apparently Uncle George’s troubles did not bother Rob
to any extent; but there were things weighing on his
mind though, during that afternoon, and these had a
connection with the flight of that man in the aeroplane,
over across the Canadian boundary line.

91
 CHAPTER VIII
TUBBY HAS AN ADVENTURE

Tubby was particularly interested in looking around. He

had heard so much about these hunting camps of his
sport-loving relative that now he had the chance to see
for himself he kept prowling about. It was Tubby who
presently discovered a haunch of fresh venison. Andy
immediately announced that the keen-nosed wildcat
was not in the same class with the stout chum.

“Say, we can have a mess of real venison for our camp

supper to-night,” added the delighted Tubby. “Haven’t
we a warrant for taking liberties in that Notice, where
Uncle George invites the pilgrim to enter, wait, and
make merry? How can any one be merry without a
feast? I’ll take all the responsibility on my shoulders,
boys, so make up your minds the main dish to-night will
be deer meat.”

Later in the afternoon Tubby wandered outside to look 92

around.

“Don’t go too far away and get lost, Tubby!” called out
Rob, who himself was busily engaged.

“Oh, I don’t mean to more than stretch my legs,” came

the reply. “Here’s a bucket, and there must be a spring
somewhere handy. I think I’d like a drink of fresh water.
I might as well fetch some back with me. Yes, now I
can see a beaten path leading from the door in this
direction. Rob, I won’t be gone long.”

“All right, Tubby,” Andy called out in turn. “If you don’t
turn up inside of half an hour we’ll send out a relief
corps to look for you. Be sure to fetch a supply of that
spring water back with you. I’m getting a bit dry
myself.”

So Tubby walked off. He was feeling in the best of 93

spirits. He believed his troubles were mostly in the past,
and the immediate future looked as rosy as the sky at
dawn. In another day or two Uncle George would surely
turn up, when the little operation of having that paper
signed could be carried out. Then for a week of
unalloyed happiness, roving the pine woods, feasting on
royal game, and enjoying the society of the world-wide
sportsman at evening time, when sitting in front of a
cheery blaze inside that bunk-house the boys would be
entertained with wonderful stories of the amazing
scenes Uncle George had run across during his long and
adventurous career.

Tubby had no difficulty in following that beaten path. In

going to and from the spring the guides had made such
a plain track that even a worse greenhorn than Tubby
might have kept right. In fact, to stray would have been
unpardonable sin in the eyes of a scout.

It proved to be much longer than he had expected. 94

Tubby fancied that there was another water place closer
to the camp, though Uncle George for some reason of
his own preferred this spring. The path turned this way
and that, passing around high barriers of lopped-off
branches, now dead, and beginning to decay as time
passed. Tubby could not but shudder as he
contemplated the effect of a stray lighted match thrown
into one of these heaps of dead stuff, that would prove
as so much tinder. He hoped they would not have the ill
luck to witness a forest fire.

Finally he came to the spring. It was a fine one, too,

clear and bubbling. Tubby lay as flat as he could, and
managed after considerable exertion to get a satisfying
drink of that cold water.

“My, but that is good!” he told himself, after he had

once more resumed an upright position. “I don’t wonder
at them coming all this distance to get a supply of
water. Now to fill my bucket, and trot back over the
trail; and by the same token it won’t be just as easy a
job as coming out was. But then the boys will thank me
for my trouble, and that’s quite enough.”

As Tubby started off, carrying the pail of water, he 95

suddenly bethought himself once again of that
tremendous bobcat Andy had killed. It occurred to
Tubby that he had been informed such creatures were
always to be found in pairs. What if the mate to the
defunct cat should bar his way, and attack him,
recognizing in him one of the party that had been the
means of making her a feline widow?

Tubby did not like the idea at all. He cast numerous

nervous looks about him, as he hastened his steps a
little. As a rule he swept the lower branches of the trees
with those keen glances, for if the bobcat were lying in
wait to waylay him it would select some such roost for
its hiding place.
Then all at once Tubby plainly heard a sound behind
him, that was exactly like the swift patter of feet in the
dead leaves and pine needles. He whirled around and
immediately experienced one of the greatest shocks of
his whole life!

In and out of the aisles of the forest a moving object

came pattering along. Tubby saw that it was about knee
high and of a singular dun color. To his eyes it looked
terribly fierce!

“Oh, murder! It must be a savage wolf, come across 96

from Canada!” was what he told himself, remembering
something he had heard a man say while they were
waiting at a little wayside station in Maine, about such
beasts of prey having been unusually plentiful up in
Canada in the preceding spring, and bolder than ever
known before.

Tubby wanted to drop his water pail and run like mad.
He also would have liked to give a series of shouts, not
that he was frightened, of course, but to sort of alarm
the animal and cause him to turn tail; but his tongue
seemed to be sticking to the roof of his mouth in the
queerest way ever, and which for the life of him he
could not understand.

But while he still held on to the bucket Tubby did

manage to get his legs in motion once more; he was far
from being paralyzed. The animal kept advancing and
stopping by turns. Tubby thought the wolf was laying a
plan to surround him, when the beast trotted to one
side or the other. Yes, and the cunning of the animal to
wag his tail that way, and act as though pleased to see
him! Tubby thought of that ancient fairy story about
Little Red Riding Hood, and how she met a wolf on the
way to her grandmother’s home. They always were
tricky creatures, no matter in what country found; but
Tubby was on his guard.

By now at least he had managed to regain his voice, 97

and when the wolf trotted closer than he thought was
safe he would make violent gestures with his arms, and
try to shoo him away. Apparently the beast did not
know just how to catch Tubby napping, for he continued
to trot along, forcing himself to look as amiable, Tubby
saw, as he possibly could, although not deceiving the
boy in the least.

“You can’t fool me with your making out to want to be

friendly, you miserable old scamp!” he chattered, after
he had actually put down the now only half filled
bucket, the better to throw up both arms, and pretend
to be picking up stones, all of which hostile actions
caused the obstinate creature to dart away a short
distance although quickly coming on again. “Get out, I
tell you! Oh, why didn’t I think to get the loan of Rob’s
gun! What if he tumbles me down in spite of all my
fighting like mad! But, thank goodness, there’s the
cabin, and maybe I can make it yet!”

He did in the end, and burst upon the other pair like a 98
thunderbolt, so that both boys scrambled to their feet,
and Rob exclaimed:

“What ails you, Tubby? Have you seen that big bull
moose again—and did he attack you?”

“Oh, Rob! Andy! The wolf! The wolf!” stammered Tubby,

now completely out of breath; but he had said quite
enough, for the two boys snatched up their firearms
and darted out of the cabin.
Tubby waited, fully expecting to hear shots, and
perhaps wild yelping. Instead he soon caught the sound
of whistling, and then he heard the boys laughing
heartily. While Tubby stared and waited they came back
into the bunk-house. The panting fat boy was startled to
see trotting alongside, leaping up again and again, his
terrible “wolf”!

“W-w-what’s all this mean, fellows?” he stammered in 99

bewilderment, at the same time dimly comprehending
how his fears had magnified the evil.

“Only that your wolf turns out to be a poor dog that’s

probably got lost in the woods and was trying to make
friends with you,” laughed Rob.

Tubby quickly recovered, and joined in the laugh. The

joke was on him. He no longer declined to make up with
the four-footed stranger. His heart was tender, and he
repented having called the wretched beast so many
hard names. Tubby was really the first to discover that
the dog acted as though almost famished, sniffing
around, and looking longingly up toward the hams that
hung from the rafter.

“Oh, you poor fellow!” said Tubby. “I bet you’re as

hungry as can be. Haven’t had a single bite for a whole
day? I guess I know what that means. I’ll fix you out in
a jiffy, see if I don’t; Uncle George will say I’m doing the
decent thing by you, too. Here, Wolf, for I’m going to
call you that just for a joke, watch me get you a hunk of
the poorest part of that haunch of venison.”

Tubby was as good as his word, too. The stray dog had 100
reason to rejoice over the freak of fortune that had sent
him in the way of these new friends. Indeed, he gave
promise of turning out to be quite a welcome addition
to the party, for all of the scouts were fond of pet
animals that could show affection. Wolf duly licked
Tubby’s plump hand after being fed, as his only way of
displaying dog gratitude.

So the long afternoon wasted away. As evening

approached the boys gave up all hope of seeing Uncle
George that day. But then none of them worried, for
things had turned out splendidly so far, and they could
find reason to hope for the return of the party within
forty-eight hours at most.

Tubby was as good as his word, too, and cut off quite a
bountiful supply of that nice fresh venison, which he
cooked with some strips of bacon; for all of them knew
that this was the only proper way in which such meat
should be used, since it was too dry to be attractive
otherwise.

They pronounced the supper “gilt-edged,” which in 101

boyish language means the acme of perfection. As
every one, including even “Wolf,” whose appetite
seemed boundless, proved to be exceedingly hungry,
the repast was a royal feast. Then they sat around the
fire, chatting and telling stories. Tubby even started up
one of their school songs, and being joined by the other
pair, the low rafters of that bunk-house resounded with
the glorious refrain. In days past sounds far less
innocent, ribald language and loud oaths, may have
been heard within those walls, for as a rule the sturdy
lumber jacks are the roughest kind of men, as hard as
some of the knots they strike with their axes.

An hour or so later the boys settled down for a good 102

sleep. Wolf had been let out for a run, and did not come
back again, so Rob said he must be feeling so refreshed
after his feed that he wanted to take a turn around,
possibly in hopes of finding his lost home; or again it
might be he was desirous of running a deer, for Wolf
was a guide’s dog, they had determined.

When they all retired the dog had not shown up again.
Andy said he was an ungrateful cur, deserting his friends
in that fashion; but Tubby stood up manfully for the
dog, declaring that it was only right he should want to
find his own people.

The fire had been allowed to die down, and Rob meant
to let it go out. To shut the glow from their eyes he had
made use of a rude screen doubtless intended for this
very purpose by Uncle George.

An hour, perhaps several, passed away. Then Rob felt

some one clawing at his arm, after which a low whisper
sounded close to his ear. It was Andy, and he had
something to communicate that was quite enough to
cause a thrill to shoot through the heart of the aroused
scout master.

“Listen, Rob, and keep very still,” said Andy softly. 103
“There’s some one outside the door trying to get in. I
heard him try the latch and give a push; and I think he’s
gone to prowling around, trying each of the wooden
shutters over the windows in turn.”

104
 CHAPTER IX
THE MAN OUTSIDE

“Sure you weren’t dreaming, Andy?” whispered Rob, in

turn, as, having listened for a brief time, he failed to
catch any unusual sound.

“Not a bit of it,” the other assured him. “I sat up and

made certain of it before crawling out of my bunk. I tell
you there is somebody outside there, and he’s doing his
best to get in, too.”

The night wind was sighing through the pinetops, Rob

noticed. Could Andy’s imagination, excited by some
dream, have conceived the idea that a would-be
intruder was “fiddling” at the door, and endeavoring to
find ingress? Rob was still undecided, but at the same
time he considered it the part of wisdom to get out of
his bunk and slip his feet into a pair of warm moccasins
he always carried with him.

It was almost dark inside the long bunk cabin. The fire 105
had died down, and even if there were still smouldering
embers present the wooden screen hid them from sight.

Rob now became aware of the fact that Andy clutched

something in his hands. The touch of cold metal told
him it was a gun. This would indicate that the other fully
believed what he asserted, and that some strange man
was even then about to force an entrance into the
cabin, possibly under the belief that no one was
occupying the building at the time.

“There, did you hear that?” came again from the

aroused Andy. “He’s trying one of the window shutters.
Rob, I remember that several of them are kind of loose.
When he strikes one of those he can get it open easily
enough, and then what’s to hinder him pushing in the
sash?”

“Well, there is something moving around out there, I do

believe,” muttered Rob.

“Oh, I wonder if it could be Wolf come back!” said an

awed voice close to them.

“Hello! Are you there, Tubby?” questioned Rob 106

cautiously, for neither of them had noticed that they
were crouching close to the bunk selected by the third
member of the party. Tubby, chancing to awaken, must
have heard them whispering.

“Yes, but could it be the dog, do you think, Rob?” asked

the fat scout eagerly.

“That’s silly talk, Tubby,” Andy told him, so softly that his
voice would not have carried any distance, and might
never have been distinguished from that crooning night
breeze that rustled the hemlocks and passed gently
through the pinetops.

“Dogs couldn’t reach up and shake a shutter that stood

five feet from the ground. It’s a man, that’s what; and
we’d better figure on how we’re going to give him the
surprise of his life, if he gets inside here.”