Seamus Heaney was a Nobel-prized Irish poet recognized as one of the most famous modernist poets in English in the 20th century. In his lifetime from 1995 to 2013, Heaney composed over 20 volumes of poems and literature criticisms fully uncovering Irish rural life of the past and the present with suspended moments resting in the normal time flow.
To begin with, Heaney’s works often includes instances that flash back or linger in time by description of a repetitive action. In one of his best known poem “Digging”, Heaney applies flashbacks of time several times as a contrast to the progression over generations. For example, in the third stanza when he write “Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away
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As a child, Seamus Heaney was reared in the countryside, from which his poetry sources the effect of Irish rural life. In the poem “Digging”, Heaney summons his predecessors’ traditional labor to depict the rooted image of Northern Ireland. In the second stanza, the narrator hears “a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging”, in which the diction of “clean” and “rasping” seem to be a contradiction but actually provides the readers of a articulate description of the scene: the father sinks his spade into the ground quickly in order to obtain the depth and volume of each scoop of dirt, producing a neat sound, while the tiny particles in the “gravelly ground” rubs on the metal surface of the spade continuously each time the spade dips into the ground (3-5). By using the contrasting sound effect here, Heaney effectively illustrates a sensible texture of the Irish rural land to the readers. Then when Heaney writes “Bends low, comes up twenty years away / Stooping in rhythm through potato drills / Where he was digging”, the narrator’s mind returned to 20 years ago when his father was digging potato, which for long has been the major crop of Ireland because it’s “a hardy, nutritious, and calorie-dense crop and relatively easy to grow in the Irish soil” according to the Encyclopædia Britannica. The example of the narrator’s father represents the Irish farmers’ common reliance on a single crop potato in its history, which significantly reduced the genetic diversity of the crop of Ireland and had led to a great hunger known as “the Potato Famine” due to a accidental disease oriented at potatoes in 1845-1849. By the time the poem was publish in 1966, when the effect of the famine has dissolved, Irish farmers like the narrator’s father apparently didn’t abandon the promising crop but still trusting it-the
“It must be understood that we cannot feed the people” (Kinealy Calamity 75). The mid 1800s in Ireland were characterized by extreme poverty, death, and emigration. The Great Potato Famine, also known as “The Great Hunger,” first hit in 1845; however, its effects lasted into the 1850s and can still be seen today. Prior to the famine, Irish manufacture and trade was controlled and suppressed by British government, which made Ireland an extremely poor country. Farmers in Ireland were forced to export crops such as corn, wheat, and oats to Britain, which left the potato as the main dietary staple for the people, especially the poor. Therefore, when the fungus Phytophthora infestans caused some, and eventually all, of the crop to rot over the next couple of years, the reliance on the one crop made the people of Ireland extremely susceptible to the famine. The effects were devastating, and poverty spread across the nation causing a huge increase in homelessness, the death-rate, emigration, and a change in the Irish people and country overall.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
Stade, George, and Karen Karbiener. “Heaney Seamus.” Bloom’s Literature. Facts on File, Inc. Web. 30 Mar. 2014
middle of paper ... ... n that after nearly seven hundred years of attempted domination, the British oppression of the Irish had deprived them of all but the bare necessities of survival, and caused such destitution that when the potato famine struck, the poor could not avoid the worst privations, given the social and political conditions controlling their lives. The British government’s ineffectual attempts at relieving the situation played a major role in worsening the situation; they allowed prejudice and State and individual self-interest, economic and religious dogma to subjugate even the least consideration for humanity. Ultimately British politicians bear considerable blame because they were not prepared to allocate what was needed to head off mass starvation, and they as the parent government did nothing to protect its subject people.
Seamus Heamey begins the poem with an image of isolation, confusion, and the loss of safety. Heaney describes what happen the night that his cousin was killed:
“It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot.”(The Irish Famine, 1) This of course is in reference to the Irish Famine. The Irish Famine was another cause of the tensions in Ireland. As crops across Ireland failed, the price of food soared. This made it impossible for Irish farmers to sell there goods, the good which the farmers relied upon to pay their rent to their English and Protestant landlords.
During the mid 1840’s, blight in the potato crops in Ireland caused widespread starvation and migration of Irish citizens to the United States. Yet, the massive loss of life and massive exodus could have been avoided if British taxation upon the working class of Ireland was nullified. Though the struggle for liberation was already taking place, the potato famine furthered the cause and helped spread awareness. Furthermore, the potato famine made the average Irish family more reliant upon the government for subsidies and supports to get by.
In stanza 6 of the poem Digging, it is there the reader, reads about the poets past with his. grandfather. I am a great father. From, the memories the poet recalls, the reader can see. that the grandfather was like the father, careful and we also catch from verse 19-21, stanza 6, which is a memory Heaney recalls of giving milk to his grandfather, he drinks it but then falls right away.
Within the work, Heaney anthropomorphizes both countries. He compares the geological features of Ireland to the ‘tracked and stretchmarked body’ of a woman, whose most intimate identity - here symbolised by the ‘ferny bed’ and ‘bogland’ is invaded by the phallic ‘battering ram’ of an ‘imperially Male’ invader.
Paddy’s Lament is about the terrible sufferings of the Irish people during the potato famine and of the cruel treatment that the Irish went through at the hands of the British people. The British did nothing to help the Irish survive when if they just shared their food they could have saved millions of people from a horrible death. They wrote in their newspapers that the Irish were lazy and didn’t want to work. At the time before the famine, the Irish loved their homeland and few wanted to immigrate to other countries. They had little money to buy a passage to America. They would send one member of the family to America and he would get a job to help those back home. As the famine got worse, the English were looking bad to the rest of the world and decided on a plan to ship all the Irish they could to America and Canada. This way they would rid themselves of the Irish problem. The British paid passage to families who would immigrate. The Irish were happy to leave, but the conditions on the British ships were deplorable. They had to stay on deck through the whole voyage, and about one in three people died. So many Irish people died that they became known as coffin ships. When they arrived in New York, the Irish were examined by a health examiner. Some families were separated from others, and children were separated from their mothers. The Irish were taken to tenements to live in. The conditions of the tenements were horrible. There were so many people living in them that the places we...
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
In Heaney's book of poetry entitled Opened Ground, Heaney shows the readers many different ways in which English rule and influence effected and changed the lives of different people in Ireland. For example, in Two Lorries, Heaney describes a man who is a coal deliverer and his love for Heaney's mother. As the poem progresses, we can see a metamorphosis in the lorry. As the political situation in Ireland escalates and war between different religious factions grows more immanent, the lorry changes from a man who falls in love with Heaney's mother to a raving political and religious war type man who needs to become involved in the skirmish between the religious groups and by doing this eventually blows...
The Great Potato Famine was a huge disaster that would change Ireland forever. The people in Ireland were extremely dependent on potatoes and when the blight came the economy went down. When the fungus attacked the potato crops slowly crop by crop throughout Ireland, people began to lose their main source of food. With the people in Ireland’s huge dependency on the potato, people began to starve or get sick from the potatoes. No one had any food to eat. The potatoes were black inside with molds through out it that came from the fungus from something in nature. The weather that brought the blight also was one of the causes because they could not control how the weather was bringing the fungus. Ireland was under the British government and did not help Ireland when they needed Britain. The aftermath of the Great Famine was not only a huge drop in population, but emigration, and much more.
Heaney, Seamus. "Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996." Follower. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 10.
Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow?, leads me to believe that Big