Volume 32, Number 4 · March 14, 1985
Heaney Agonistes
By Richard Ellmann
Station Island
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 123 pp., $11.95
After the heavily accented melodies of Yeats, and that poet's elegiac celebrations of imaginative glories, Seamus Heaney addresses his readers in a quite different key. He does not overwhelm his subjects; rather he allows them a certain freedom from him, and his sharp conjunctions with them leave their authority and his undiminished. There are none of Yeats's Olympians about; the figures who appear in Heaney's verse have quite human dimensions. Nature for him does not mean the lakes, woods, and swans visible from the big house. Instead, a farmer's son, Heaney sees it as the 'dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged, / the cluck when pith-lined chestnut-shells split open' (the latter a line that Hopkins would have welcomed). These and much else are things to remember 'when you have grown away and stand at last / at the very centre of the empty city.' Nature is 'sheep's wool on barbed wire,' equipment such as a harrow pin, sledge-head, or trowel, as if its center were protrusive objects and not recessive vistas.
Review, 2406 words
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