'Protective colouring' : the political commitment in the poetry of Seamus Heaney

There is a tension in Seamus Heaney's poetry between his desire to escape from the Northern Troubles into a private domestic world, and the political responsibilities he has towards his Catholic community. He tries to reconcile the demands of politics and art by concealing his political message below the protective colouring of analogy, metaphor and parable.This technique is evident even in his first collections. In his second book Heaney opens a door into the dark and discovers the bog as a storehouse of the past, a memory bank with resurrectionary powers.The bog myth establishes an analogy between fertility sacrifices in Iron Age Denmark and sectarian murders in contemporary Ulster. The language and place-name poems of Wintering Out illustrate Heaney's ecumenical stance in that they merge Irish and English elements - a reconciliation on the linguistic level foreshadowing a possible political reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics.In North Heaney wavers between an oblique approach to politics (in the bog poems, the Viking analogies, the sexual metaphors) and a more explicit documentary verse in part II. In Exposure he adopts protective colouring to avoid too obvious a political commitment. Field Work is eleg iac in tone and focuses on individual suffering. Analogies with Dante stress the need for a rite of healing capable of breaking the lethal cycle of terror and counter-terror.On his pilgrimage to Station Island Heaney becomes aware of conflicting influences and, adopting the protective colouring of Sweeney, he attempts to fly free of all obligations and to "strike his own note" The parables of The Haw Lantern document a more realistic assessment of the political evolution in the North and of the poet's political influence. Heaney still advocates reconciliation and his metaphorical verse seems to be the most satisfactory way of responding to the Crisis.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Hull

Year dc:date.issued

1988

Author dc:creator

• Sinner, Alain Thomas Yvon

• English
• Literature
• Political science

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

oai:hull-repository.worktribe.com:4209687

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:hull-repository.worktribe.com:4209687