Last Lecture

Postcolonial subversion of English civility in Seamus Heaneys

Oceans Love to Ireland, the postcolonial overcoming of the
inferiority complexes in Bogland. Why Seamus Heaney was
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995
Oceans Love to Ireland
By Seamus Heaney, from the volume North, 1975
I
Speaking broad Devonshire,
Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless:
Sweesir, Swatter! Swissir, Swatter!
He is water, he is ocean, lifting
Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting
In the front of a wave.
II
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cynthia
Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.
Those are the splashy spots where he would lay
His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water and on these dark seepings:
Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses
Of six hundred papists as gallant and good
Personages as ever where beheld.
III
The ruined maid complains in Irish,

Ocean has scattered her dream of fleets

The Spanish prince has spilled his gold
And failed her. Iambic drums
Of English beat the woods where her poets
Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,
She fades from their somnolent clasp
Into ringlet-breath and dew,
The ground prossessed and repossessed. essed.
Noticeably, the poem consists of patches or parts, because it brings forth in
pain fragments of traumatic experience hard to utter. In the story of Irelands
(colonial) rape by England are mixed literal gendered allusions, historical
allusions (to the battle of Smerwick, in Ireland, at the end of the Elizabethan
age, in 1590), Elizabethan courtly clichs and personifications with
submerged Irish cultural clichs to which nationalistic cultural conscience can
respond more readily. The geographical position of Ireland and the propensity
for its being personified in the feminine (a traditional folk and eighteenth
century literary clich)inspired the poems fable about the historical rape. The
overlapping Irish and English stereotypes makes the poem, just as many of
the postcolonial poems, be palimpsestic (inter)texts, which combine local
with world historical recollections and allusions in a striking composition.
There is a mixture of lyrical sufferance and political anger and a
fragmentarism caused by trauma all of which are emblematic features of
postcolonial literature.
The following poem, first published in 1969, when the fight between Catholics
and Protestants in Northern Ireland became more acute in the wake of the
Civil Rights movement in America (which was taken as the inspiration for the
NI Catholics fighting) is part of Heaneys earlier volume Door into the Dark.

Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan1
1

T.P. Flannagan was an Irish landscape painter and friend of Seamus Heaneys and
the dedication to him makes a connection between this poems complex theme and
that of mere poetic pastels.

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening-Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Notice the self-deprecating tone of the poem, typical for self-conscious

discourse and nations: the unfavourable comparison of the Irish scenery with
the settings of American westerns, in the first stanza, and the menacing,
cyclopic image of the Irish natural view (with the tarn which denotes a
mountain lake orginiating from a glacier) in the second stanza. The theme of
the poem is enunciated: a country whose soil is bogland: bog that keeps
crusting/Between the sights of the sun.
Next, there is a break in tone, as the following stanzas present the miracle
hidden in the entrails of that kind of soil which lacks firmness. There is
something awesome in the a crate full of air which is sacramentally taken
out of the ground. It is like an offering of air hidden in the ground; it is the
result of very different processes from those of the surface which keeps
crusting/Between the sights of the sun. Rahter, there is something intimate
and arcane, at the same time, which goes on unawares in the earhs entrails.
It is intimated in the statement about the virtues of the national Irish soil:
the ground itself is kind, black butter. This land is the repository of treasure
troves: the Irish Elk/Recovered like a relic kept unchanged within the
ground.
Next, another break in tone happens, when negations return; but they are
the deliberate, patriotic negations of subjects defended in their resistance
against the colonial pioneers (ironically called our pioneers) like in Mirceas
discourse to Bayezid/Beyazit: Rul, ramul mi-e prieten numai mie.iar ie
duman i-este/Dumanit vei fi de toate, fra prinde chiar de veste. It is
impressive to recall that Ireland had no coal, just bog or turf because of the
waterlogged trunk/Of great firs and it gives one pause to see how the
hallowed land for the Irish threatens the colonial invaders with every layer
they strip (notice the violence of the word strip, that recalls the allegory of
Oceans Love to Ireland). While opening underfoot, the bogland can turn
into a dizzying trap for the colonial pioneers. In Ireland, where Every layer
they strip/Seems camped on before, they can only be frustrated. Or they
can be deceived, perhaps dragged down infinitely, because the wet centre is
bottomless. But, because poetry is a texture of ambiguities, the same
frightening mirror of bottomless eternity for the pioneers, the wet centre is

the last treasure trove, the infinite point of security for the Irish denizens. For
maybe it concentrates the arcane air whose aftertaste can only be recovered
as butter sunk under by the nation whose people have survived, by feeding
on milk and potatoes only, for a whole oppressed history. The double
oxymoron of the final line The wet centre is bottomless resounds at the
poems end as a paradox constitutive for the postcolonial identity.
This points to the condition of postcolonial, just as postcommunist, countries
confronted with the dizzying void at the heart of their identity. Postcolonial
literacy (the instruction mediated by words, in literature and postcolonial
theory) is defined as the struggle to drag into words the blind spot of
anothers hegemony. Cultural, just as political, hegemony ends up turning
local consciousness into a suppressed/subaltern voice that can only be
retrieved as from under several veils of memory and forgetfulness.
Postcolonial discourses coin new concepts to the effect of changing the
concepts of Western theory. The West has been forced by postcolonial
intellectuals and writers to transcend the self-sufficient, arrogant attitude
recognizable in the stereotype of the West and the rest; the West has had
to give voice to the rest(of the world) by accomodating it in the older
cultural idioms and main languages responsible for what has functioned as
mainstream modern culture until after the Second World War. The postwar
world gave birth to what Edward Said called secular criticism ( see Edward
Said Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, and The World, the Text and The
Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 2 It is from this position that the safe
and transcendent cultural havens came to be challenged in the (contemporary) age
when, Northrop Frye explained, literature is written in the ironic mode. In recognition of
this, starting from the 1990s, several of the Nobel Prizes for literature were awarded to
postcolonial writers, most of them being voices that enriched the potentialities of the
English language. Of the total Nobels awarded to pointedly postcolonial writers between
1990 and 2000, six were received by English-speaking authors (Octavio Paz, Mexico
[1990], Nadine Gordimer , South Africa, [1991], Derek Walcott, a poet from the exBritish colony of Santa Lucia, in the Antilles [1992], Seamus Heaney [1995], V.S. Naipaul
[2001] a writer born in Trinidad and living in India, then Britain, in [2003], J.M.
Coetzee the South African novelist (who rewrote Robinson Crusoe from a womans
perspective in the novel Foe). Of the Nobel Prize winners who wrote in English,
though born in Rhodesia, Doris Lessing (who received the Nobel Prize in 2007 and who
2

Secular criticism is briefly characterized by Stathis Gourgouris as a term invented

by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendendy of
much modern thinking to readh for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space
philosophy wreted away from religion in the name of modernity. (see the excerpt
from the 2013 book Lessons in Secular Criticism, authored by Stathis Gourgouris
http://fordhampress.com/index.php/lessons-in-secuar-criticism-paperback.html,
sighted on May 18th 2015). Secular criticism is one of theOriental names of
contemporary cultural materialism.

passed away in 2013, just as the Irishman Heaney), wrote novels with a decidedly British
background and the Canadian writer Alice Munro, the 2013 winner, does not foreground
postcolonial themes, either.
The Nobel Prizes awarded to postcolonial voices were meant to set right the wronged
nations; the fact that postcolonial literature was promoted for at least ten years has enriched with
new experiences the cultural imaginary of the contemporary world through genuinely
transnational communication. There is more than an ideological gain involved in the literary
promotion of postcolonial identity, directly connected to the compensatory correction of the
subaltern status reserved for minor literatures and of raising the worlds awareness of
postcolonial problems today. It is worth illustrating the strength of postcolonial literature, which
cuts through historical age and class distinctions to create amazing cultural bridges, syntheses and
new idioms. This can be observed in Seamus Heaneys Nobel Prize acceptance discourse.
Heaney begins by doing homage to his predecessors who wrote in
English only to arrive at Homer, whom he sees as the great master of
commonsensical empathy with the suffering world when he points to the
need for charity, as the practicing Christians would call it, the need to incline
the human heart. He interprets seven lines from Homer, about a chain of
battlefield cruelties that Odysseus witnessed, secretly crying sheltered in his
cloak as chronicled by Demodocus after the fall of Troy.
Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of
contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar
to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag,
Homer's image can still bring us to our senses.
In a single paragraph he connects John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell (and Patrick
Kavanagh, of his compatriots), showing what he took from each poet. On a
second list, he includes the influences he responded to later and with more
difficulty, in a costive attitude: Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily
Dickinson, Eliot.
it is this [and he meant the truthfulness and adequacy of lyric poetry in the
temple inside our hearing] which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally
persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.

He explains this as follows:

At its beginning, his discourse takes the audience or reader gently from
the atmosphere and the densely populated house of his youth teeming with
details of perception to weighty, general and historical meanings. In speaking
as the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry and using
the first person plural, which comes very naturally as a community voice and
a voice capable of imparting thoughts in the plural, Heaney evokes the
details of an original stance that recurs in his discourse:
Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as
susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every
time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately,
concentrically, and in utter silence.
This prepares the ground for expressing in words of his own,
convincingly, some of the deepest thoughts about the function of poetry:

poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive
to the inner laws of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across
the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago
Speaking about the order of poetry and ideas, as it were, in Matthew Arnolds
words, he mentions:
An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order
which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit
poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and
restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its circumference,
Being a great writer, Heaney subsequently makes an autobiographical demonstration of
the way he actually inserted himself in the privileging circle of the fluid and restorative
relationship between the minds centre and its circumference (read from module the detailed
account of his poetic growth). It is from this special zone that he addresses the colonial issues in
order to help restore peace while not bypassing the postcolonial bones of contention.

The crux of that problem involves an ongoing partition of the island between British and
Irish jurisdictions, and an equally persistent partition of the affections in Northern Ireland
between the British and Irish heritages; but surely every dweller in the country must hope that
the governments involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition
to become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile give-andtake, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the
beginning from those bracing words enemy and allies might finally derive from a less
binary and altogether less binding vocabulary.
He concludes by stating that:
what the necessary poetry always does, [which] is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature
while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is
constantly exposed.
He has in mind the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to
persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of
wrongness all around it.