Space, 1984–91

Abstract

Although the period from 1984–91 was an intensely creative one for Seamus Heaney, resulting in three poetry collections, The Haw Lantern (1987), New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990), Seeing Things (1991), a collection of critical essays, The Government of the Tongue (1988), and a play, The Cure at Troy (1990), and saw his elevation in 1988 to Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, loss shadowed success. “The most important tiling that has happened to me in the last ten years”, Heaney told Blake Morison in a recent interview, “is being at two death beds.”² The deaths of his mother in the autumn of 1984 and of his father in October 1986 left a colossal space, one which he has struggled to fill through poetry. Many of the finest lyrics in The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things — ‘Alphabets ‘, ‘The Stone Verdict’, the ‘Clearances’ sonnets, ‘Man and Boy’, ‘Seeing Things’, ‘Squarings’ — spring directly from this well of grief, and are a reflex action/vatic reaction to it.

When you write about the dead, you are expiating your connection with them, you’re cleansing it. And that means that they are also present. Even if they’re not there as spirits, your own mother and your father … are actually present inside you and therefore you must come to terms with them.

John Montague¹

The emptier it stood, the more compelled

The eye that scanned it.

‘Squarings’, xlvii