A Singing Contest

Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Meg Tyler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135491598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A formal analysis A Singing Contest comprises close readings of Seamus
Heaney's poetry. Tyler argues that in an era of fractured poetry and politics, Seamus Heaney stands out: his impulse is towards unity and regeneration. Her book considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in his poetry. For Heaney, poetry represents a structure allowing imaginative mediation of conflicts that appear irreconcilable in the social, political and historical realms. By detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, Tyler illustrates how Heaney's poems create concords from discords, unities from fracture. From the preface by Rosanna Warren: A Singing Contest is written with imaginative and emotional urgency, and in some large sense, as it examines Heaney's spells, it seems itself to want to cast a spell against death. Hence Tyler's return, in various ways, to readings of elegy, whether the fictive elegies of classical pastoral poems, or Heaney's personal elegies. She pores in detail over Clearances, the sonnet sequence composed in memory of the poet's mother in The Haw Lantern, and she concludes her book with a chapter on literary elegies, Heaney's farewells to his friends and admired contemporaries Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, and Joseph Brodsky. In these analyses, one sees the wholeness of Tyler's project: her argument that for Heaney, literary tradition itself, rightly received and transformed, reaches into the voids made by death, and establishes connection across rupture. Her thesis is an ancient one, and she gives it particular shape and force in asking us to contemplate it at work in Heaney, where it binds individual to collective experience, and past to present.

Chapter One

A Singing Contest

MENALCAS

Mopsus, let us sit down together here

In this elm and hazel grove, two good musicians,

You at the shepherd s pipe and I at singing.

MOPSUS

You are the elder of us two, Menalcas,

Therefore you should choose where we should be,

Whether beneath these trees, within the shadows

That change and move as the breezes move and change them,

Or else within this cave that’s near at hand—

See how the vine has spread its tendrils round

The entrance to the cave, with clustering flowers.

Virgil, Eclogue V (tr. by David Ferry)

Why does an Irish poet writing over two thousand years after Virgil go to great lengths to revive a poetic form as out of literary fashion as the pastoral eclogue? In Virgil, Heaney clearly finds solace. The Eclogues provide Heaney with a time, a place, and even a language distant from present realities. This distance affords him perspective. He employs elements of the pastoral tradition to locate calm amid turmoil. The Irish Troubles have of course led Heaney to seek respite. As he writes in “Toome Bridge” (1979), recalling a chance meeting with British troops in rural Ulster: “How long were they approaching down my roads/ As if they owned them?” Soldiers are not the only worrying figures encroaching upon his real and imagined landscapes; pressures surrounding the production of poetry in such a charged and politicized environment affect him. As a highly visible public figure, his reputation is not something he can easily escape. To shake free from expectations, he has had to search further afield in the realms of literary tradition for relief.

It is relief, but not simplicity or isolation, which he finds in the pastoral. This may seem paradoxical because the pastoral supposedly represents a simplification of life (the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics refers to it as “the complex” “reduced to the simple”).¹ To borrow from past traditions, however, asT.S. Eliot confirms, requires substantial labor. Heaney welcomes such labor to renew his connection to the pastoral. In Field Work (1979), he infuses a sonnet sequence with the regenerative vitality of pastoral elements, and in the eclogues in Electric Light (2001), he explores the pastoral by attending symbolically to the word’s several component parts, including that which pertains “to shepherds or their occupations” (OED I.1.), “of land or country” (I.2.a.), and to works of art, “portraying the life of shepherds or of the country” (I.3.).

For poets from Virgil to Spenser to Geoffrey Hill, the pastoral setting has offered some sort of redemption from life’s ills. Why else would they turn to it as often as they have? The pastoral elegy in particular provides a fertile setting in which serious questions about life and death can be raised, but no one solution is ever offered. Because the questions are posed in a landscape, where renewal takes place continually, regeneration is perforce implied. Pastoral eclogue has been used by several of Heaney’s significant literary forefathers: Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century, and Edmund Spenser (who spent much of his adult life in Ireland) in the sixteenth. The backdrop for the questioning and answering, the call and response that take place in pastoral eclogue and elegy is the field. Pastures and fields are home to flourishing plant and agricultural life. Although the focus in pastoral falls in part on the bountiful offerings of the land, pastoral for Heaney does not constitute a withdrawal from society. The land and those who labor upon it are interconnected. A return to pastoral sites offers Heaney an opportunity for reassessment so he can re-enter the fray of the present better equipped mentally. Heaney revisits the pastoral eclogue in Electric Light because its main impetus appears as the affirmation of life and continuity. Pastoral activates the building of community as it cements bonds between shepherds and singers, past and present. The invocation of the pastoral is a response to the forces (internecine warfare, for one) that have threatened peace as well as survival in Northern Ireland.

Maurice Harmon, the late editor of the Irish University Review, is fearful of the “metaphor of ceremony” that turns up in Heaney’s poetry. Harmon believes that whatever “personal feelings” Heaney has “about death and suffering are deflected into large, ceremonial gestures.”² The pastoral, after all, is “a poem in which the life of shepherds is portrayed, often in an artificial and conventional manner” (OED II.3.a.). Heaney is faulted for escaping into history and myth, for being too communal. His poems “do not speak of individual pain or individual outrage.”³ Intriguingly, this criticism echoes Dr. Samuel’s Johnson professed outrage at Milton’s (mis-) use of the pastoral in “Lycidas”:

In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral; easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting, whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.[ ... ] Nothing can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; and how one god asks another god what has become of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honor.⁴

Milton and Heaney are faulted for not expressing personal’ outrage. Yet this does not mean they do not feel any; they have chosen a pastoral response because their outrage has moved through and beyond the personal. They are trying to offer a solution: comfort is to be found in a community of mourners, and if this community consists of literary and mythical figures, so be it. The reality of the grief is not lessened by literary embodiment. As Denis Donoghue suggests, myth releases the “reader’s mind from the immediacy of his experience.” Through pastoral, Heaney finds a “vision founded on space, depth, archives, levels of soil” which “is likely to emphasise continuity rather than change, and therefore the universality of human life.”⁵

As religious, political, linguistic and national battles have been fought in Ireland for hundreds of years over the idea of unity, it is important to remember that for Heaney, community always implies division as well as cohesion. Community is defined in part by what it excludes. Writing became his way of working through oppositional forces. The battle that was taking place on the streets found enactment on the page, where resolution could be found. Edna Longley has criticized just such a move towards artistic embodiment of conflict and believes Heaney “sometimes asks too much of his myth.”⁶ According to Edna Longley, “poetry and politics, like church and state, should be separated.” However, if discord permeates everything around a poet, if it appears in the language, between the people, and is even lodged in the landscape (borders), how can it not be subject matter? Heaney does not seek conflict; he uses what is already there. In this his character differs notably from his predecessor Yeats, who thrived on conflict because it gave him creative energy. Heaney does what he can to use an uncomfortable energy constructively.

To this end, in his book The Poetry of Resistance, Sidney Burris claims that Heaney’s “consolations often lie in the invigorating strains of the poetic tradition itself.”⁷ These strains are both formal and thematic. Paul Alpers begins a chapter on pastoral convention in his book, What is Pastoral?, with the above-mentioned complaint Samuel Johnson made against “Lycidas.” Johnson found “Lycidas” antithetical to pastoral’s supposed consolatory purposes: “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”⁸ He criticizes the poem’s use of too much “commonplace” machinery, the use of flocks and shepherds, flowers and deities, which appear to get in the way of the authentic expression of grief.⁹ There is an implicit assumption that this is what pastoral should do: become a vehicle for the expression of loss. In his book Alpers examines the term “convention.” He believes that the root meaning of the idea of convention, “coming together’ (from Latin convenire) has dropped out of sight when the word is used in literary contexts.”¹⁰ He goes on to say that “pastoral poems make explicit the dependence of their conventions on the idea of coming together.”¹¹ Virgil’s Eclogues emphasize the “social cohesion that underlies poetic practice.”¹²

This drive towards social cohesion aligns Heaney intimately with Virgil. The Irish poet also has a similar interest in creating a space—in the poetic landscape—away from destruction. The Virgilian image of pastoral, according to Ellen Lambert, is that of “an enclosed and a besieged world. Death is admitted into the heart of eclogue sequence (the fifth eclogue) but it is admitted so it may be vanquished.”¹³ In Heaney’s sonnet and eclogue series, primarily in Field Work, Seeing Things and Electric Light, death too is evoked—but death does not make these pieces too fragrant with loss. The life force, as it asserts itself against death, feeds these poems. Heaney incorporates a classical frame (the eclogue) and themes that have an unending lifespan.¹⁴ As Alpers notes, in pastoral poetry “the model for close imitation is the singing contest.” But this contest is not about one-up-manship. “The challenge for the second singer is to accept the terms set by the first and at the same time establish his own images or voice or claims.”¹⁵ This singing contest drives Heaney’s most invigorating work.

Virgil’s Eclogues cannot be read without paying due reverence to the Idylls of Theocritus. One of many elements that links and yet differentiates the two is the placement of Daphnis, who is still alive and full of voice in the first idyll, whereas in the Eclogues, he has already moved on to the next world. Lambert claims that the first idyll does not really qualify as a lament.¹⁶ Daphnis expresses his sorrow and at the idyll’s end, water closes over his head and he drowns. The landscape and the animals grieve at his dying. In Virgil the loss is firm before the eclogue even begins. There is less darkness at play in Theocritus; rather, the entire first idyll is awash in sweetness, the “hedu” that is mentioned time and time again. Creation and fruition find celebration in Theocritus. The beauty and glory of this singularly contented world remain with us. In Virgil, the outer world is always felt close at hand; abrupt departure could occur at any moment. The pastoral realm is held in balance, but the balance is made more pronounced by its proximity to loss, the threat of instability. The importance of inheritance, of passing on lessons that will be of use to others, is impressed upon us in the figure of Virgil’s Daphnis, who, as Ellen Lambert points out, has “taught the herdsmen how to harness nature’s energies for their own human ends.”¹⁷

The pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus have several connecting threads. Allusion is made to the talents of both singers or speakers and the playful rivalries that exist between other members of the pastoral community. Here the establishment of a community between lyric speakers, or singers, begins in earnest. The hierarchy differs somewhat in each. In Theocritus’ first Idyll, the contest plays itself out between goatherd and shepherd, both on equal social footing. In Virgil’s fifth Eclogue, the singing takes place between a younger and an older shepherd to whom the younger one defers. In Virgil, “there is relish for the contrast between two different talents.”¹⁸ This is a theme that Heane...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Singing Contest
• Chapter Two: Making Small
• Chapter Three: The Faring Poets
• Chapter Four: The Wonder of Unexpected Supply
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index