Spectres of the Gulag: Soviet Bloc Dissident Poetics and Seamus Heaney’s Representation of Political Imprisonment (2024)

In his essay ‘Frontiers of Writing’, Seamus Heaney recalled the night of 16 May, when he was hosted by Charles Monteith at a prestigious dinner at All Souls College, Oxford, and put up in the rooms of Sir Keith Joseph, a Conservative cabinet minister. The sense of being caught between different worlds – a recurring subject of his poetry and prose throughout the Troubles – was particularly acute that evening. For, in Derry, the wake for the second hunger striker, Francis Hughes, was taking place the same night. Although Heaney had not known Hughes personally, their families were friendly. He describes it as ‘a classic moment of conflicting recognitions, self-division, [and] inner quarrel’.1 Years later, while recollecting the occasion during an interview, he noted that the words of the Polish Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz, resonated for him at this time of crisis and carceral tragedy: ‘My own mantra in those days was the remark by Miłosz that I quote in “Away from it All”: “I was stretched between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history”.’2 This article explores how another sentence from Miłosz’s The Witness of Poetry might also have served as Heaney’s mantra: ‘The opinions of poets often are in disagreement with what issues from their pens.’3 Heaney’s poetry at the time of the hunger strikes was in notably tense relation to republicanism. As he experienced this self-division, he turned to the work of Polish and Russian writers, where he discovered spectres of the gulag.

In recent years, there has been an archivally informed re-evaluation of Heaney’s relationship with republicanism, beyond the mild, familially inflected self-characterisation found in the anecdote quoted above. In 2018, a letter by Heaney was published containing the surprising revelation that he was tangentially involved in the publication of Bobby Sands’s poetry, an involvement that the poet had ‘never publicly stated’.4 In the 2020 Parnell Lecture, Fintan O’Toole elucidated Heaney’s active involvement in republican dramatics in his youth. Heaney, aged 21, performed as Robert Emmett with the Bellaghy Wolfe Tone dramatic society in 1960.5 These examples are a far cry from his own framing of, and pronouncements about, his relationship to republicanism: congenital but offset by contradictory affiliations such as that with All Souls College and its cabinet minister, placing him firmly within establishment circles of the British state. These archival revelations reorient our understanding of Heaney’s public persona: not only was he experiencing ‘inner quarrel’ but also public reticence about the complexities of his political position, amounting even to disavowal.

We can see aspects of disavowal in the poems too. The drafting process for ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’ from his collection North reveals disaffiliation and distancing from republicanism. Responding to internment – signalled by his use of the republican-inflected term ‘cages’ – Heaney’s speaker vows to ‘swing on a creeper of secrets into the Bastille. My wronged people cheer from their cages.’6 In manuscript drafts, Heaney vacillated between framing internment as ‘our’ Bastille or ‘the’ Bastille, eventually settling on the former.7 Adam Hanna frames this change as Heaney having ‘exchanged anger and involvement for irony and commentary’.8 Despite this ironic distancing, the invocation of the Bastille itself – that ‘symbol of discredited laws and unjust authority’ – rings with a republican tenor, as does the other international, comparative imagery he reaches for when dealing with the carceral in the same collection.9

Consider, for example, ‘Exposure’, the final poem in North, and its invocation of the gulags:

The simile that ends this stanza is unmistakably a Troubles image: the act of throwing stones at British soldiers is referred to by Michael Parker as ‘a contemporary “native weapon”’.11 In tandem with the particular timbre of ‘slingstone’ – making the figure, in Heaney’s words, ‘a David of poetry facing the Goliath of power’ – the ‘imagining’ positions the British state as a behemoth to be struggled against in service of ‘the desperate’, a characterisation with none of the irony present in the concurrent description of the poet’s constituents as ‘my wronged people’ in ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’.12 It is once we discover that the ‘hero’ referred to is Osip Mandelstam, Acmeist poet and martyr of the Stalinist purges, that we can read the ‘muddy compound’ as a dual reference to both Long Kesh and Vtoraya Rechka, the gulag in which Mandelstam perished. The deliberate impreciseness of ‘some muddy compound’ imparts a protean quality to the imagery so that it can readily be transported. These comparisons, the symbolic twinning of Long Kesh with both the Bastille and the gulag, are much closer in tenor to, for example, Bobby Sands’s poetic invocation of the same revolutionary moment than has been perceived.13 The spectres of republicanism that haunt Heaney’s work are, it would seem, never more present than when he responds, through lateral reflections on the dissident writers of the Soviet bloc, to current crises provoked by internment and the hunger strikes.

Heaney’s contact with Russian and Polish poets, particularly Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czesław Miłosz, began in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they were being steadily translated into English, as he could not read them in their original languages. His first interaction with Mandelstam was through Hope Against Hope, the autobiography of Osip’s wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, which Heaney bought in 1973. Through Nadezhda, he gained an undying admiration for Osip’s dedication to art for art’s sake in the face of Stalinist terror. Heaney interpreted Mandelstam’s work as celebrating ‘the efficacy of song itself, an emblem of the poet as potent sound-wave’: a symbolic universe purposefully unmoored from any material relation to external politics.14 Zbigniew Herbert interested Heaney by displaying the opposite poetic philosophy to Mandelstam: a hard-edged materialism that often derided poetry’s power in the face of the forces of history. Heaney described Herbert as ‘standing up for the down-to-earthness of life against the flighty, carried-away fantasies of art’.15 Finally, Czesław Miłosz and Heaney knew each other, and the Polish poet is the subject of several of Heaney’s poems stretching over decades: from ‘The Master’ in Station Island (1984) to his memorial poem ‘Out of this World’ in District and Circle (2006). As Magdalena Kay has noted, he was Heaney’s ‘source of wisdom, heroic father figure, and perpetual touchstone’.16 Despite Heaney’s insistence on the limited influence of Russian and Polish poetry on his art, recent critical work has revealed textual influences previously unaccounted for in his prose and interviews.17 While these Soviet bloc poets have so far been considered as isolated influences, I suggest that Heaney places them in dialogue with each other.18 In fact, his sense of the dialectical relation between the poetics of Herbert and Mandelstam matters for his modelling of oppositional, and perhaps mutually exclusive, poetic responses to imprisonment in Northern Ireland. These two sides of Heaney’s familiar debate – represented by Mandelstam’s obeisance to poetic freedom and Herbert’s hard-headed materialism – are bracketed by Miłosz’s dilemma: whether to contemplate a motionless point or be an active participant within the historical process.

Heaney’s long-term critical engagement with these poets was always intertwined with his dilemmas around the representation of conflict. ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, the opening essay in the prose collection The Government of the Tongue, serves as a guide to the methods by which he relates these poets in Station Island. The essay begins with an anecdote in which Heaney recalls a recording session he was planning with David Hammond in 1972. However, as they drove to the studio, Belfast was rocked by several explosions. In the end, they felt they could not make the tape because ‘the very notion of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering’.19 Heaney takes this as his starting point to explore different critical perspectives on the problem of ‘Art and Life’ and the fear that by writing lyric poetry he is, like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.20 Beginning with the anti-pastoralism of Wilfred Owen’s trench poems, Heaney then recounts Anton Chekhov’s visit to the Sakhalin island penal colony, a pre-Soviet antecedent of the gulag.21 Heaney characterises the expedition as an ‘exorcism’ through which Chekhov could earn his right to ‘an actual encompassing of psychic and artistic freedom; it would be a bid for “inner freedom,” “the feeling of being right,” as his countryman, Osip Mandelstam, would call it forty years later’.22 Heaney then juxtaposes Mandelstam’s inner freedom, his ‘obedience to poetic impulse’, with Zbigniew Herbert’s anti-poetry.23 He interprets Herbert’s work as a reminder: ‘“Go in peace,” his poem says. “Enjoy poetry as long as you don’t use it to escape reality”.’24

While Heaney’s essays reveal admiration for the stance of the poets of the Soviet bloc, their determination to fulfil their obligations to art in the face of Soviet censorship and threats, he had no access to their work unmediated by translation. It has been assumed that this limited his engagement with their poems, an assumption that Heaney’s own responses have appeared to confirm. When asked by O’Driscoll if Mandelstam was a role model during the early years of the Troubles, Heaney noted that he was ‘more like a shadow presence’.25 As for Miłosz – an essential figure for Heaney and twin subject of his poem ‘The Master’ along with Yeats – he did not influence, according to Heaney, his particular ‘way with words’.26 However, this appears to be another case of reticence or disavowal. In the first part of this article, I examine how Heaney’s representation of the Troubles, particularly of carcerality, was shaped by his engagement with the methods adopted by Polish and Russian writers. In the final part, I focus on a textual detail from one of Heaney’s poems, tracing it back to ‘The World’ by Miłosz, and what it says about his efforts to overcome the question of art and life by deliberately avoiding the carceral, the political, the news of the day.

‘Rehearsed Alibis’? Station Island and Eastern European Writing

Much has been written on Heaney’s 1984 collection Station Island as a book filled with hauntings, self-doubt, and self-confrontation.27 Less attention has been paid to how this takes form, in part through the influence of Russian and Polish writers in the successive poems ‘Away from it All’, ‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, and ‘Sandstone Keepsake’. ‘Away from it All’ introduces Heaney’s status among the literati as he ponders Miłosz’s motionless point. ‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’ takes as its theme the same trip he would cover in the introduction to The Government of the Tongue, twinning Chekhov and himself in approaching the class and national politics he was raised among. And in ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ he follows Chekhov by visiting Magilligan internment camp on the Irish border, using the competing poetic philosophies of Mandelstam and Herbert to dramatise Miłosz’s dilemma, imagined as a battle between the freedom of a poetic image and the exigencies created by the Northern Irish political landscape.

‘Away from it All’ creates the same atmosphere of reprieve and distance from the historical circ*mstances of the conflict that animated his previous collections, particularly North, with all the unease at having evaded events back home intact. The poem opens with the preparation of a lobster, eaten in ‘conclave’ with, we imagine, another intellectual.28 As the two finish eating, the speaker quotes Miłosz:

This is the question he will wrestle with throughout the rest of the sequence. Miłosz’s guiding presence frames the coming confrontation between Herbert and Mandelstam: the choice between the freedom of a poetic image – the contemplation of a motionless point – and its placement within a political context is imagined and reimagined by Heaney in these poems. In the same stanza of ‘Away from it All’ in which he asks what ‘actively’ might mean, the speaker contemplates a motionless point: ‘The light at the rim of the sea | is rendered down to a fine | graduation, somewhere between | balance and inanition’.30 The only point in the poem in which the speaker lingers for so long on the meanings of a single image, the setting sun on the coastal horizon becomes entwined with the abstract concepts of ‘balance and inanition’.

But the following, final, stanza suggests the impossibility of complete escape from those participating actively in history, as the lobster tank forms a spectre of Long Kesh and the H-Blocks: ‘And I still cannot clear my head | of lives in their element | on the cobbled floor of that tank’.31 In clear contrast to the presentness and the lingering – the contemplative sense of place derived from the previous stanza – the speaker is drawn from his current distance, away from it all, to lives in their element back home. Through the re-emergence of the lobster tank, Heaney introduces a hint of the carceral, leading the reader into the next poem, in which he asks what it would be like to return, to visit his wronged people – as he referred to them in ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’ – in their element, to participate actively in history.

In interviews, Heaney linked the second poem in the sequence, ‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, directly with both ‘Away from it All’ and the ongoing hunger strikes occurring contemporaneously with his writing:

If I had followed the logic of the Chekhov poem, I’d have gone to the prison, seen what was happening to the people on the hunger strike and written an account of it, ‘not tract, not thesis’. In truth, I was ‘away from it all’ during those months: at a physical remove, living in Dublin, going on holiday in France.32

So Heaney made a point, unlike Medbh McGuckian for example, never to visit the Maze prisoners.33 Again, he chose to disaffiliate himself and his public persona from his republican roots. In the poem itself, Chekhov as a historical figure is intertwined with Heaney’s poetic persona. He positions Chekhov looking down into water as a means of self-knowledge: ‘he looked down from the rail | Of his thirty years and saw a mile | Into himself as if he were clear water’.34 This is an unmistakable ripple of the young Heaney of ‘Personal Helicon’, looking down into wells: ‘I rhyme | To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’.35 The decadence of the lobster in the previous poem is continued in the cognac Chekhov finishes on the first night:

This last reference to Chekhov’s impoverished origins then, along with the mirroring of the imagery from ‘Personal Helicon’, serves as a languid echo of his own childhood. In his introduction to The Government of the Tongue, he locates these origins squarely within a class perspective, Chekhov’s ‘serf grandfather’.37 But again, we cannot fail to hear a ring of republicanism in Heaney’s description of the Chekhov family’s serfdom in the final lines of the poem: ‘He who thought to squeeze | His slave's blood out and waken the free man | Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin’.38 In the latter section of the poem, the parallels Heaney has created between himself and Chekhov extend to their rise in prominence among the Moscow, or Oxford, literati. But the politics of ‘slave’s blood’ in the constitutionally unequal Northern Ireland of Heaney’s childhood, and even the fact of the comparison itself, unmistakably rings with a republican rhetorical flourish that has survived his disaffiliation. The echo of Dante in the ‘guide’ of the final line introduces the reader to the Florentine poet’s appearance in ‘Sandstone Keepsake’, an appearance that, as we shall discover from critical appraisals of Heaney’s prose, is bound up in Heaney’s use of Mandelstam’s approach to imagery in the poem. In this final poem in the sequence, Heaney’s poetic persona will in fact take inspiration from Chekhov and venture to an internment camp, with the warring imperatives of Mandelstam and Herbert acting as his guides. In the poem, the meaning of a stone in the speaker’s hand is filtered through the polarised approaches of both Mandelstam and Herbert to generate a poetic image.

Heaney’s interest in Mandelstam is apparent in his prose, particularly The Government of the Tongue. Throughout the collection, he emphasises Mandelstam’s commitment to poetic freedom as his central point of interest and admiration:

As opposed to these prescribed and propagandist themes, the essential thing about lyric poetry, Mandelstam maintained, was its unlooked-for joy in being itself, and the essential thing for the lyric poet was therefore a condition in which he was in thrall to no party or programme, but truly and freely and utterly himself. Unlike Chekhov, who wrote on behalf of the prisoners explicitly, and unlike Owen, who had a messianic and socially redemptive message to impart, Mandelstam had no immediate social aim. Utterance itself was self-justifying and creative, like nature.39

In ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ the poet confronts the looming figure of Magilligan internment camp in County Derry from a ‘shingle beach on Inishowen’, County Donegal in the Irish Republic.40 While the influence of Herbert on this poem has been noted, in particular his poem ‘Pebble’, what have gone unnoticed are the traces of Mandelstam that linger in the poem.41 Incorporating this influence into our reading, the poem now acts as an encounter between Mandelstam’s ‘self-justifying’ lyric and what Heaney referred to as Herbert’s ‘objective voice’, his tendency to reduce imagery to bare reality. The central image battled over in the poem, a stone heavy with reference to Dante, implies an important continuity with corresponding themes and imagery in his earlier poem, ‘Exposure’.42

What defines Herbert’s poem ‘Pebble’ is the materiality and stability of the poetic subject:

We can see in this stanza a neat encapsulation of Herbert’s hard materiality. The idea that it is ‘equal to itself’, that its scent ‘does not remind one of anything’, and that it is filled only with a ‘pebbly meaning’ figure here as a rejection of metaphor and simile as vehicles for meaning-making. The first stanza of ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ demonstrates its debt to Herbert’s poem with a similar materiality:

Several aspects of this stanza are lifted straight from Herbert’s poem: the presence of the pebble in the poet’s hand (‘I hold it in my hand’), the juvenile language, such as ‘bricky’, taken from Herbert’s description ‘pebbly’, and the idea of its reliability, its objectiveness. In Herbert, the pebble lacks any transformative potential; it is ‘equal to itself | mindful of its limits | filled exactly | with a pebbly meaning | with a scent that does not remind one of anything’. The insistence on the pebble as a fixed object veers into the territory of ‘anti-poetry’, a phrase Heaney uses to describe some other Herbert poems.45 At the beginning of the poem, the pebble is absent of any protean or poetic potential.

The next stanza introduces the internment camp and the speaker’s position on the Inishowen far shore. In the third stanza, in the light of the camp, the pebble takes on new dimensions:

The attempt to transform the pebble through simile and literary allusion, a poetic decadence that mirrors the lobster and the cognac, is where we can begin to trace Mandelstam’s influence within the space of the poem. The departure from the conception of the pebble as a fixed object, as ‘reliably dense’, signals a dialectic within the text between different philosophies of poetry. One of Heaney’s favourite quotes from Mandelstam was: ‘the word is a bundle and meaning sticks out of it in various directions’.47 Here, we see the sandstone sticking out in its various directions. In reaching for these meanings, Heaney is echoing his sentiments about Mandelstam that ‘obedience to poetic impulse was obedience to conscience; lyric action constituted radical witness’.48 The freedom of a poetic image to roam for its own sake is, for Heaney’s Mandelstam, a form of personal liberation.

In both his poetry and his prose, Heaney often connected Mandelstam and Dante. For example, according to Bernard O’Donoghue, Heaney’s self-labelling as an ‘inner émigré’ in ‘Exposure’ acts as a dual reference to both Mandelstam and Dante: ‘Heaney associates his retreat to Co. Wicklow with Mandelstam’s banishment to Voronezh and Dante’s to Ravenna.’49 O’Donoghue also suggests that Mandelstam’s essay ‘A Conversation about Dante’ was influential in Heaney’s use of the Florentine poet.50 So when Guy de Montfort from Canto XII of Inferno appears here (in addition to the later transformation of the stone into a revision of the David and Goliath imagery in ‘Exposure’), Mandelstam’s footprints can be seen. Mandelstam’s interpretation of Dante may be key here too. Justin Quinn has suggested that one of Mandelstam’s influences on Heaney is his emphasis on Dante’s use of reversibilità:

In standard accounts of metaphor, there is an object and another to which it is likened (the tenor and the vehicle); for Mandelstam’s Dante, there is no distinction between the tenor and vehicle. On the face of it, this appears to be a technical remark about a poetic device, but the implications are significant. If you employ reversibilità, the language with which you describe an object can easily become the generator, or even the subject, of the poem itself. By such an account, poems do not make propositions about objects or states of affairs (or indeed about how dreadful totalitarian regimes are), they take delight in the fabric of language itself, a fabric that can be turned now that way, now this.51

What reversibilità represents here, then, is a poetic philosophy which is the polar opposite of Herbert’s ‘objective voice’ that ‘Sandstone Keepsake’ began with, that is, the poetic attempt to ‘make propositions about objects or states of affairs’. What these Dante-inspired stanzas therefore represent is an attempted reversibilità, a marked shift away from the reliability and objectiveness of the sandstone in a struggle for the focal point of the poem. Heaney makes an uncertain and uneasy attempt to ‘take delight in the fabric of language’. This uneasiness is easily traceable through the speaker’s timidity, signalled by the question mark following the first step into metaphor: ‘A stone from Phlegethon, | bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?’

What remains fascinating about the poem is that these different poetic philosophies continue to battle. The abruptness with which the allusive flight of fancy is checked signals a return of the uncompromising materiality of Herbert. No sooner has the speaker imagined that he has plucked the heart from Guy de Montfort than he interrupts himself:

The poem remains in this register, perhaps signalling a victory for Herbert’s objective voice over Mandelstam’s reversibilità. In the final two stanzas, the speaker reiterates the face-off between himself and the prison, before switching to the perspective of a guard watching him from one of the lookout towers:

The colloquialism of the earlier stanza’s ‘but not really’, returns with ‘Anyhow’, signalling that the Dante-inflected stanzas in which he summons the spectre of Guy de Montfort were a tangent, a distraction from the rest of the poem. The reference to his ‘free state of image and allusion’ is both a literal reference to the Irish Free State (the speaker is standing in Donegal after all) and also to the imaginative tangent of the previous stanzas. No longer is the sandstone a ‘stone from Phlegethon’ or the heart of Guy de Montfort, but simply the ‘wet red stone’. But following this monosyllabic simplicity, the next line reimagines the stone as a weapon. The stone is now ‘in my hand, [the speaker] staring across at the watch-towers’. By moving the stone from the water into his hand, Heaney has now placed himself in Mandelstam’s shoes. He is now the rock-toting David facing the guard above him in the watch-tower, a modern Goliath. Just as Chekhov’s gaze into Lake Baikhal spatially echoed Heaney’s obsession with wells, Heaney now visually parallels Mandelstam’s heroic figure whirling slingstones for the desperate in ‘Exposure’. In an unmistakably republican sense, then, the poem asks whether the poet would forcefully confront the carceral state.

The final stanza switches perspective in a confirmation of the Herbertian objective voice: the speaker is not a material threat to power. In stark contrast to Mandelstam, he is ‘a silhouette not worth bothering about’. The guard remains unfazed by Heaney’s poetic slingstone. He will not actually throw the stone, for he remains ‘one of the venerators’ of Dante’s poetic figures, and while that remains the case he can imagine the stone as anything he likes.

‘Like a garden looked at from a gate’: Czesław Miłosz and Seeing Things

The 1943 sequence ‘The World’ is the Miłosz poem that Heaney cites most often when referring to the Polish poet. Throughout his interviews with O’Driscoll, he cites it as precedent for a form of responsible poetry that deliberately does not invoke the trouble of the times:

The question is, how much awareness is there in this poetry that insists on avoiding contact with the social and anthropological reality? If there’s a genuine deficiency on that front, the work is unlikely to have much staying power. Deliberate flouting of an expectation of ‘relevance’, on the other hand, could be a sign of very high awareness indeed. Need I again cite Miłosz’s ‘The World’?54

Heaney explored this aspect of Miłosz’s poem more thoroughly in an essay on the poet in Finders Keepers. In the essay, Heaney compares the poem to Virgil’s eclogues, suggesting that they similarly flouted present conditions in order to fashion ‘a coded expression of hope for peace’ in the form of an idyllic pastoralism.55 This conception of Edenic pastoralism as a response to conflict, rather than an attempt to ignore it, might be said to undergird the entire project of his acclaimed 1992 collection Seeing Things. When summarising ‘The World’ and its relationship to the Second World War and the Holocaust, Heaney could just as easily be describing his own collection:

What the poet was conjuring was a vision of the land of Arcadia, in the full and ironical awareness that the only line of defence between it and the land of nightmare was the frontier of writing, the line that has to be held between the imagined and the endured. As in the case of Virgil, the felicity of the art was in itself a heartbreaking reminder of the desolation of the times.56

So what Heaney gains from Miłosz’s biographical example is the legitimacy to proffer a lyric pastoral as a response to the Troubles. Complicating Miłosz’s dilemma as he had quoted it in ‘Away from it All’, ‘I was stretched between contemplation | of a motionless point | and the command to participate | actively in history’, Heaney then concludes that contemplation does in fact represent a form of active participation, that a poet does not have to choose between these binary options.

This confidence in his own lyrical legitimacy is what Heaney gains from Miłosz’s biography, but there are also influences Heaney takes from ‘The World’ poetically. For example, he cited the ‘childish agogness’ of Miłosz’s poem as an inspiration for his poem ‘Alphabets’.57 Indeed, this is as far as most critical accounts of their textual relationship will explore Heaney’s reading of ‘The World’. However, looking more closely we find another, more substantial, direct influence. Heaney’s poem ‘Field of Vision’, from Seeing Things, bears a direct, textual relationship with the ‘Hope’ section of ‘The World’. Heaney’s poem is a tableau of his aunt, Mary Heaney, in the family home during her later years – a time when sickness and old age had rendered her immobile. The poem is concerned with the way in which her view of the world outside the window is transformed by deep concentration. The second stanza emphasises the potential monotony of such a view:

The repetition of ‘the same’ suggests an unyielding monotony in the landscape outside that cannot possibly continue to capture her concentration. This is particularly exacerbated by the TV in the corner which, we imagine, is beaming with the spectacle of the Troubles.

However, as the poem proceeds, the speaker makes clear that the focused field of vision the window grants her allows her new perspectives and insights on the world outside:

This element of focus on a limited field of vision is what Heaney inherits from Miłosz:

Miłosz’s poem utilises the same narrowing of perspective and the same imagery. The perspectives are reversed – Miłosz’s speaker looking into a garden from the outside and Heaney’s aunt staring at the countryside from her place in the living room – but the continuities are unmistakable. This is particularly clear in the simile of the gate, which neither speaker is actually staring through: in Miłosz ‘all things you have ever seen here | Are like a garden looked at from a gate’ (emphasis mine) and in Heaney it is ‘an education | Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate’ (emphasis mine). The similes act as a frame through which the poets’ perspectives are narrowed, allowing each greater opportunity to contemplate a motionless point. In doing so, the poet comes to new conclusions, new insights. In both poems, these insights are ‘strange’ and, in Heaney, this strangeness is more overtly related to ‘what barred the way’. But in both there is a distinct didactic quality to this new insight. The second person addresses an audience directly; moreover, in Heaney, the ‘education’ conveyed via Mary Heaney suggests the speaker himself has already learned from her example and is now passing this insight on. By domesticating this lesson, cloaking the poem’s relationship to Miłosz in references to his aunt, Heaney creates a continuity with his previous intense focus on the local. Through Miłosz’s textual and philosophical example, Heaney discovers a way through the dilemma framed by the Polish poet’s words. By refusing to engage with the carceral and leaving behind the latent republicanism of the implicit comparison with the gulag, he insists on careful and studied contemplation as a mode of active participation. He insists that he can have both.

This article began with the notion that recent archival findings have called into question Heaney’s framing of his well-known dilemma between contemplation and involvement. Recast in this light, the dilemma can be understood as more of a process of disaffiliation from an early involvement in republican culture. The symbolic remnants of republicanism in his poetry are most visible when dealing with the crises of internment and the hunger strikes, crises which he works through by placing the indicative voices of Miłosz, Mandelstam, and Herbert together. While Herbert’s ‘objective voice’ proves louder in Station Island, by 1992 Heaney has been convinced by Miłosz’s insistence on creating arcadias in troubled times. He depicts his aunt choosing this Arcadia, looking past the spectacle of the news of the day and into the poetic potentiality outside her window. The hitherto unacknowledged presence of these poets in these poems suggests that there are important influences underpinning Heaney’s work that are yet to be unearthed.

1

Seamus Heaney, ‘Frontiers of Writing’, in The Redress of Poetry (London 2002) p. 188.

2

Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London 2008) p. 260.

3

Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. 1983) p. 16.

4

Heaney wrote that ‘When Bobby Sands’s poems were being prepared for publication, my suggestion was that they be placed with a London or Dublin publishing house. That way many people – reviewers, editors, broadcasters – would have had a chance to approach the subject neutrally (so to speak). If the thing appears from a politically aligned address or organ, many people would take it as propaganda rather than outrage, and the moral force of the thing would be blunted or deflected by the suasion of the “propaganda” label. You’d get the public attention … in reviews etc, of the “converted” whereas the point here would be to raise the consciousness of the half-committed’: Adam Hanna, ‘Seamus Heaney’s “Settings, XIII”, and the Troubles’, Notes and Queries, 65/3 (2018) pp. 442–3. The letter is housed in the Heaney Archive at Emory University.

5

Fintan O’Toole, ‘Parnell Lecture 2020 – Escaped from the Massacre? Heaney and History’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TwABptfuoE (accessed 20 Apr. 2023). O’Toole commented that Heaney ‘as a poet chose to forget or elide this moment’, noting that, in Stepping Stones, Heaney recalled seeing these melodramas being performed, but not that he was a principal in them himself.

6

Heaney, ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’, in North (London 1975) p. 51.

7

Adam Hanna, in his recent reinvigoration of interest in carcerality in Heaney scholarship, comments that this draft change represents Heaney’s hesitancy over his position relative to the ‘loaded word’ Bastille. Adam Hanna, ‘Seamus Heaney’s Prisoners’, Irish University Review, 52/1 (2022) p. 66.

8

Ibid., p. 67.

9

Ibid., p. 66.

10

‘Exposure’, in North, p. 67.

11

Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of a Poet (Dublin 1993) p. 97.

12

O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 175; Heaney, ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’, in North, p. 51.

13

See Bobby Sands, ‘The Rhythm of Time’, Writings from Prison (Cork 1998) p. 187.

14

Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, in The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978–1987 (London 1988) p. xx.

15

Ibid., p. xviii.

16

Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (Toronto 2012) p. 124.

17

See Kay, In Gratitude; Stephanie Schwerter, Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn: Intertextuality in the Work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian (London 2013); Carmen Bugan, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (London 2013); Clare Cavanagh, ‘From the Republic of Conscience: Seamus Heaney and Eastern European Poetry’, Harvard Review, 6 (Spring 1994) pp. 105–12; Jerzy Jarniewicz, ‘From Miłosz to Kochanowski: The Uses of Polish Poetry in Seamus Heaney’s Work’, Journal of European Studies, 46/1 (2016) pp. 24–36.

18

Most of the work on this subject in Heaney scholarship has been produced by language specialists in Polish or Russian. The often exclusive focus on either Russian poets’ or Polish poets’ influence on Heaney does not take into account influence from the other nationalisms and misses the dialectical quality of some of these poems.

19

Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, p. xi.

20

Ibid., p. xii.

21

Heaney writes that Chekhov ‘visited a penal colony in the 1890s, to record the conditions under which the prisoners live, to live with them, interview them and subsequently publish a book about his experiences. Here, Chekhov was, as it were, establishing his rights to write imaginatively, earning the free joy of his fiction by the hard facts of his sociological report. Significantly, he called his trip to the penal colony his “debt to medicine”, betraying thereby a characteristic modesty and prophetically modern guilt about the act of creative writing itself’ (ibid., p. xvi).

22

Ibid., p. xvii.

23

Ibid., p. xix.

24

Ibid., pp. xviii–xix.

25

O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 175.

26

Ibid., p. 299.

27

On this theme in particular, see ‘Seamus Heaney’, in Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago 1994) pp. 334–61.

28

‘Away from it All’, in Station Island (London 1984) p. 16.

29

Ibid., pp. 16–17.

30

Ibid., p. 17.

31

Ibid.

32

Quoted in O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 295.

33

See Adam Hanna, ‘Seamus Heaney’s Prisoners’, p. 71.

34

‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, in Station Island, p. 18.

35

‘Personal Helicon’, in Death of a Naturalist (London 1966) p. 44.

36

‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, in Station Island, p. 18.

37

‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, p. xvii.

38

‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, in Station Island, p. 19.

39

‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, p. xix.

40

‘Sandstone Keepsake’, in Station Island, p. 20.

41

Kay, In Gratitude for All the Gifts, p. 103.

42

Heaney, ‘The Atlas of Civilization’, in The Government of the Tongue, p. 64.

43

Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Pebble’, in Collected Poems 1956–1998, trans. and ed. Alissa Valles (London 2014) p. 123.

44

‘Sandstone Keepsake’, in Station Island, p. 20.

45

Heaney, ‘The Atlas of Civilization’, p. 64.

46

‘Sandstone Keepsake’, in Station Island, p. 20.

47

Heaney, ‘Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam’, in Government of the Tongue, p. 77.

48

Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, p. xix.

49

Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (Hemel Hempstead 1994) p. 149.

50

See O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney’s Ars Poetica: Mandelstam, Dante and The Government of the Tongue’, ibid., pp. 135–53.

51

Justin Quinn, ‘Heaney and Eastern Europe’, in Bernard O’Donoghue (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge 2008) pp. 95–6.

52

‘Sandstone Keepsake’, in Station Island, p. 20.

53

Ibid.

54

O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 384.

55

Heaney, ‘Secular and Millennial Miłosz’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London 2002) p. 412.

56

Ibid.

57

O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 291.

58

‘Field of Vision’, in Seeing Things (London 1991) p. 24.

59

Ibid.

60

Czesław Miłosz, ‘The World’, in New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, trans. Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York 2003) p. 49.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly.