"Customary Rhythms": Seamus Heaney and the Rite of Poetry

Abstract

Ceremony's a name for the rich horn And custom for the spreading laurel tree. --W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter Near the conclusion of his Nobel Prize address, Crediting Poetry, Seamus Heaney speaks of two kinds of ascribable to poetry: and lyric adequacy. The former has to do with the impact and emotive power of description and is old Homer's account of the Fall of Troy. Even today, three thousand years later, Heaney says, as we channel surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but in danger of growing immune . . . Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. . . . [It] has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable (49). The second kind of adequacy has to do with the poetic process itself, what Heaney calls 'the inside our hearing' which the passage of the calls into being (49). This interior space is the domain of national conscience and consciousness, a receptacle for personal and racial memory, the etymology of the tribe, the spirit of place, and the ground in which the dead, victims of the Great Hunger, sectarian violence, and the tragic accidents of life are interred. This temple of our hearing is exhumed and recovered through the rites or stations of the poem, where truthfulness becomes audible via intonation and cadence. Lyric adequacy, Heaney adds, is something that he has always strained towards (Crediting Poetry 49), and this desire is borne out by the form and process of his poetic rites, which may begin with the empirical here and now but ultimately delve beneath the merely documentary, the photographic witness that is not the end but prelude to the rite of poetry. My chief concern in this essay is with the manner in which Heaney's three to four part poems have come to serve the formal equivalent of a liturgical rite--a highly-structured, habitually-observed practice that, for him, enacts the temporal and ritualistic steps required to recover and articulate aspects of national consciousness. Although Heaney does not refer to such divisions stations, nor to such short sequences poems, the idea of stations has, since early in his career, a crucial and resonant place in his work, and I believe that station poem should serve a convenient and apt descriptive and critical term for this signature procedure and the religious, archaeological, and historical concerns it helps to formulate. According to Catholic liturgy, a refers not only to the stations of the cross but also to a stopping point in a procession for the purpose of song, recitation, or ritual action.[1] This sense of the a stopping point or stage in a devotional rite is especially true of the Lough Derg pilgrimage Heaney imaginatively reenacts in Station Island. As Heaney describes this three-day vigil, unit of the contemporary pilgrim's exercises is called a 'station,' and a large part of each involves walking barefoot and praying round 'beds,' stone circles which are said to be the remains of early monastic cells (Station Island 122). Heaney would also be aware, refers to the rural Irish custom of celebrating Mass at the houses of parishioners on a rotating basis--a custom that conferred honor on each house and reflects a popular, egalitarian spirit of Irish Catholicism that is also evident in Heaney's work.[2] In Heaney's work, the ecclesiastical significance of the performance of stations must be enlarged so to include analogous experiences of discovery and devotion, such the stages in archaeological excavation, funeral processions, pilgrimages, and other kinds of purposeful walking and doings. The poem's element of mechanical, psychic action, typically executed in three stages, makes it formally distinct from Heaney's longer sequences, such Clearances and the Glanmore Sonnets, well unified thematic sequences, such Sweeney Redevivus and Stations, both of which tend to deliver Heaney's discoveries without the procedure used to bring them to light. …