From Wintering Out 1972

(1) Anahorish⁽¹⁾

My "place of clear water,"
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into the shiny grass


and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, the soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,


after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows⁽²⁾


those mound-dwellers⁽³⁾
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.


(2) Toome⁽⁴⁾


My mouth holds round
the soft blastings,
Toome, Toome,
as under the dislodged


slab of the tongue
I push into a souterrain⁽⁵⁾
prospecting what new
in a hundred centuries'


loam, flints, musket-balls,⁽⁶⁾
fragmented ware,
torcs and fish-bones
till I am sleeved in


alluvial mud that shelves
suddenly under bogwater and tributaries,
and elvers tail my hair.


(3) Broagh⁽⁷⁾
Riverback, the long rigs⁽⁸⁾
ending in broad docken⁽⁹⁾
and a canopied pad
down to the ford.


The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O


in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees⁽¹⁰⁾
and rhubarb-blades


ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found difficult to manage.


(4) Traditions
(for Tom Flanagan)
I
Our guttural muse
was bulled⁽¹¹⁾ long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula⁽¹²⁾ grows


vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid's Cross
yellowing in some outhouse


while custom, that "most
sovereign mistress,"
beds us down into
the British isles.


II
We are to be proud
of our Elizabethan English:
"varsity," for example,⁽¹³⁾
is grass-roots stuff with us;


we "deem" or we "allow"
when we suppose
and some cherished archaisms
are correct Shakespearean.


Not to speak of the furled
consonants of lowlanders
shuttling obstinately
between bawn⁽¹⁴⁾ and mossland.⁽¹⁵⁾


III
MacMorris, gallivanting
round the Globe,⁽¹⁶⁾ whinged to courtier and groundling
who had heard tell of us


as going very bare
of learning, as wild hares,
as anatomies of death:
"What ish my nation?"⁽¹⁷⁾


And sensibly, though so much
later, the wandering Bloom
replied, "Ireland," said Bloom,
"I was born here, Ireland."⁽¹⁸⁾


(5) A New Song
I met a girl from Derrygarve⁽¹⁹⁾
And the name, a lost potent musk,
Recalled the river's long swerve,
A kingfisher's blue bolt at dusk


And stepping stones like black molars
Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze
Of the whirlpool, the Moyola
Pleasuring beneath alder trees.


And Derrygarve, I thought, was just,
Vanished music, twilit water,
A smooth libation of the past
Poured by this chance vestal daughter.


But now our river tongues must rise
From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,
Demesnes⁽²⁰⁾ staked out in consonants.


And Castledawson we'll enlist
And Upperlands, each planted bawn - ⁽²¹⁾
Like bleaching-greens⁽²²⁾ resumed by grass -
A vocable, as rath and ballaun.


(6) The Wool Trade
"How different are the words `home,' `Christ,' `ale,' `master,' on his lips and on mine." STEPHEN DEDALUS


"The wool trade" -- the phrase
Rambled warm as a fleece


Out of his hoard.
To shear, to bale and bleach and card


Unwound from the spools
Of his vowels


And square-set men in tunics
Who plied soft names like Bruges


In their talk, merchants
Back from the Netherlands:


O all the hamlets where
Hills and flocks and streams conspired


To a language of waterwheels,
A lost syntax of looms and spindles,


How they hang
Fading, in the gallery of the tongue!


And I must talk of tweed,
A stiff cloth with flecks like blood.


(7) No Man's Land
I deserted, shut out
their wounds' fierce awning,
those palms like streaking webs.


Must I crawl back now,
spirochete, abroad between
shred-hung wire and thorn,
to confront my smearead doorstep
and what lumpy dead?
Why do I unceasingly
arrive late to condone
infected sutures
and ill-knit bone?

(8) No Sanctuary
It's Hallowe'en. The turnip-man's lopped head
Blazes at us through split bottle glass
And fumes and swimps up like a wrecker's lantern.


Death mask of harvest, mocker at All Souls
With scorching smells, red dog's eyes in the night--
We ring and stare into unhallowed light.


From North (1975)
(9) Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.


It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.


I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.


Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:


her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring


to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you


you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautifl.
My poor scapegoat,


I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur


of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:


I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,


who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.


1. Anahorish is a small townland in County Derry (anach fhíor uisce in Gaelic), meaning "place of clear water." It was also the name of a mixed Catholic and Protestant primary school that Heaney attended.
2. This is a pun: "barrows" refer to wheelbarrows as well as mounds erected over Viking graves.
3. This is also a pun: the term refers to prehistoric Scandinavian mound-people as well as fieldworkers.
4. The name of a small townland in County Derry near Mossbawn, the farm where Heaney grew up.
5. Ancient underground chambers first built in Ireland during the late Bronze Age (1000-500 B.C.)
6. This is the oldest inhabited area of Ireland and was the site of major archaeological finds as well as the site of Wolfe Tone's Rebellion in 1798.
7. The invasions by 17thc Scottish planters led to the subsequent dispossession of Irish Catholics. Heaney notes that the word Broagh is "in fact already an anglicisation of the Gaelic bruach--the velar fricative gh (pronounced ch[x] was also an English sound that disappeared in the Modern English Period." He claims that "Protestant and Catholic and both say it perfectly in this part of the world; yet the Protestant will not be entranced by its Gaelic music. He'll think of the gh sound as in Scottish."
8. Scottish for furrows
9. Scottish for docks
10. Old Scottish for elder trees
11. John Bull, symbol of England, as well as the masculine bull
12. extension of the soft palate above the throat
13. A reference to the "colonial lag,": post-colonial survivals of mother-country culture.
14. English colonist's fortified farmhouse
15. Scottish planter's word for bogland.
16. Shakespeare's theatre
17. In Henry V (III.ii.136) MacMorris asks "What ish my nation?" and is told "Ish a villain and a bastars, and a knave, and a rascal."
18. words spoken by James Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
19. A tributary of the Moyola, a river near Mossbawn, Heaney's early home.
20. The demesne was Moyola Park, an estate occupied [now] by Lord Moyola, ex-Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Heaney claims he was "symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between the demesne and the bog."
21. English colonist's fortified farmhouse
22. used by planteres in their flax and linen work; emblem of British dominance
23. Anahorish is a small townland in County Derry (anach fhíor uisce in Gaelic), means "place of clear water"
24. pun: wheelbarrows as well as mounds erected over Viking graves
25. pun: fieldworkers as well as prehistoric Scandinavian mound-people
26. Sectarian discord and rapproachment are implicit where he eymologizes in order to rediscover the lost Eden of his childhood.Anahorish, a town, was also the name of a mixed Catholic and Protestant primary school he attended. Wistful recollection. His place of clear water is Edenic, linguistic differences are unified under the same roof. Masculine (phallic) gradient, feminine meadow. This original paradise is dead and buried, only afterimage lingers. The paradisal first hill has metamorphosed into ruins, dunghills, winter evenings, etc suggest an end. Elegy to a lost Eden.
27. small townland in County Derry near Mossbawn, the farm where Heaney grew up.
28. ancient underground chambers first built in Ireland during the late Bronze Age (1000-500 BC).
29. Oldest inhabited area of Ireland, the site of major archaeological finds, where prehistoric relics mingle with the musket balls of Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen, the revolutionary ancestors of the IRA who fought government troops in the Rebellion of 1798. "Toome" is like a mantra or secret password uttered at the passageway into the underworld. Chanting "toome, toome" mimics the "soft blastings" that break the silence. Heaney's sibylline archaeologist gazes backward and confirms that destruction is the inevitable consequence of all imperial quests and conquests. Rebel musket flints lie beside Stone Age flinsts and VIking torcs. The souterrains complement Wolfe Tone's Irishmen, who were forced "underground" in 1794, and the IRA who rekindled their "underground" campain in 1970. Some ancient souterrains were also used as hiding places or deposits for arms during periods of fighting.
30. Heaney: Protestant and Catholic can say it perfectly in this part of the world; yet the Protestant won't be entranced by its Gaelic music. He'll think of the "gh" sound as in Scottish." The word in fact is already an angliczation of the Gaelic bruach - the velar fricative gh (pronounced ch[x]) was in fact also an English sound that disappeared in the Modern English Period.
31. Scottish for furros
32. Scottish for docks
33. ³³Old Scottish for elder trees
34. ³⁴ Heaney uses etymology to chart historical uprootings of a specifically Irish culture. The invasions by 17thc Scottish planters led to the subsequent dispossession and oppression of Irish Catholics. The garden in the 2nd stanza whose cultivated soil has been bruised, cut, and scarred attests to the falls and redemptions of Heaney's culture. The strangers are undoubtedly Eng or Scot. In the garden of language where the original significances of words inevitably get soild and worn smooth, the poet must play redeemer. Purifying the language, like restoring Eden, may be a futile task, but every new poet enters the garden to try. Heaney goes back to an ur-speech that connotes cultural harmony, and which has been consistenly shattered. Here he displays language as a tattooed body, stained and mortal as the humans who create and trample it, and thereby atones for its fallen components.
35. ³⁵John Bull, masculine bull
36. ³⁶extension of the soft palate above the throat
37. ³⁷a sarcasm; Heaney's professor pointed out that "it is the colonial lag [post-colonial survivals of mother-country culture"] which has led more than one devout Ulsterman to proclaim that "pure" Elizabethan English can be heard in Ulster to this day." Elizabeth was hardly pure and fair to Ireland. The Act of Supremacy made her dictatorial head of the Irish church; her Act of Uniformity encorced English by mean sof the church onto a largely uncomprehending and resentful Gaelic population.
38. ³⁸English colonist's fortified farmhouse
39. ³⁹Scottish planter's word for bogland
40. ⁴⁰ MacMorris, in Henry V begiins a search for cultural identity with his question "What ish my nation" (3.2.136) and the answer is "Ish a villain and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal."
41. ⁴¹Joyce's Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, affirms his part. He says "Ireland, I was born here. Ireland."
42. ⁴² a tributary of the Moyola, a river near Mossbawn (Heaney's early home. The allegorical waters are sacred, feminine, Irish; they contain and dispense sustenance to a land subverted and broken up by patriarchal British planters. On a linguistic level the rivers represent the fluent Gaeilc speakers of the past whose vowels have been dammed up by foreign consonants. The Irish voice is pure, virginal: Derry garve is a "smooth libation" poured by the "vestal daughter". The river is reminiscent of the girl Heaney meets as well as of the floweing name she pronounces. The poems is a marriage song bet himself and the river girl that turns out to be combative. It admonishes the Irish to rise up and flood their adversaries in order to repossess pilfered ground.
43. ⁴³ A river near Mossbawn.
44. ⁴⁴ The demesne was Moyola Park, an estate now occupied by Lord Moyola, ex-Unionist Prime Minister of Norther Ireland. Heaney says he was "symbolically placed between the marks of English influence and the lure of the native experience, between the demesne and the bog.
45. ⁴⁵ English colonist's fortified farmhouse
46. ⁴⁶ Further emblems of British dominance: townlands, plantations, fortified bawns, bleaching greens used by planters in their flax and linen work. To enlist these names and from them form a unified phalanx indicates Heaney's desire to fight for unities on Irish soil. The greening of Northern Ireland is a retrieval of an original green once bleached by intruders. Because the demesne was walled, wooded, beyond our ken his new song wants the walls down and the traps open.
47. ⁴⁷At the end of the poem his vocables are distinctly Irish. His etymological tale of two cultures grants a priviled place to the embattled native Irish. He acknowledges the rights of the heirs of Protestant conquerors, and challenges them to practise a similar opennes towards the native Irish.