Abstract
Whatever poetic success I’ve had has come from staying within the realm of my own imaginative country and my own voice.2
Seamus Justin Heaney was born on 13 April 1939, at Mossbawn, near Castledawson, County Derry. His father, Patrick, born at the end of the first decade of this century, was a cattle dealer, owning a forty-acre farm, an average size holding by Northern Irish standards. A yeoman farmer, who served as a member of the rural council, Patrick Heaney embodied solidity. The portrait in ‘Ancestral Photographs’ suggests a stocky, resolute individual, a skilled, successful bargainer, but also a figure from a lost world. With the passing of the cattle-fairs, something had been broken in him; parked behind the door, his ashplant, — a symbol of his ‘office’, — seemed like an abandoned wand.3 Already in the earliest work of the young poet, his father had become an elegiac presence, a focus for his own mourning of change. As a child, Heaney had looked up to him as the possessor of a magical strength and skill; in ‘Digging’, at one point, he appears like some ancient hero, burying ‘the bright edge deep’; presented first as the Titan Atlas in ‘Follower’, he is later praised as the complete master of his craft.
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Is maith an t’ancoire an t-iarta.
The hearth is a good anchor.
(Gaelic Proverb)1
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Notes
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland, Gill and Macmillan 1924, p. 24.
Seamus Heaney, interviewed by John Haftenden, Viewpoints, London: Faber, 1981, p. 69.
See Benedict Kiely, ‘A Raid into Dark Corners: The Poems of Seamus Heaney’, The Rollins Critic, Vol. 4, 1970, p. 8.
E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways, London: Routledge, 1957, p. 260.
Quoted in Polly Devlin, All of us There, London: Pan, 1984, p. 22.
Seamus Heaney, ‘A Raindrop on a Thorn’, interview for Dutch Quarterly Review, 9, No. 1, 1979, p. 30.
Seamus Heaney, interviewed by James Randall, Ploughshares, Vol. 5, part 3, 1979, p. 18.
Seamus Deane, ‘Talk with Seamus Heaney’, New York Times Review, 84, No. 48, 1979, p. 79.
Seamus Heaney, Stations, Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975, p. 18.
Seamus Heaney, ‘William Wordsworth Lived Here’, BBC 1974.
Theodore Roethke, ‘The Favourite’, Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1985, p. 26. Heaney returns to the image in Station Island, p. 58 and p. 119.
Barry White, John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984, p. 12.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, London: Faber 1969, p. 194.
Tim Pat Coogan, The I.R.A., Glasgow: Fontana, 1980, p. 371.
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, from Poetical Works, ed. de Selincourt, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 738.
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, London: Faber 1985, p. 174.
John F. Danby, Wordsworth: The Prelude and other poems, Arnold, 1963, p. 14.
Seamus Heaney, ‘William Wordsworth Lived Here’, BBC 1974.
Seamus Deane, ‘Talk with Seamus Heaney’, New York Times Review, 84, No. 48, 1979, p. 79.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Singing School’, Worlds, ed. Summerfield, Penguin, 1974, p. 95.
Robert Frost Selected Poems, ed. Ian Hamilton, Penguin, 1973, p. 198. Frost’s reveries are sudden broken by the appearance of ‘a great buck’, which
Robert Buttel, Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press, 1975, p. 29.
Seamus Heaney, quoted in Neil Corcoran’s Seamus Heaney, London: Faber, 1986, p. 19.
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© 1993 Michael Parker
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Parker, M. (1993). A Good Anchor: Home and Education, 1939–61. In: Seamus Heaney. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390256_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390256_1
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