Petals on Sandymount Strand

Abstract

After a first journey in 1987, Seamus Heaney visited Japan twice.¹ When Mitsuko Ohno asked him, in 2002, if his writing had been changed by Japanese culture and literature, he answered: ‘The excitement of encountering the true note and the clean line, the corroboration that comes from recognising rightness of artistic effect – this is the big fortification I get from Japanese poetry […] A general anti-slovenliness. A sense of inner rule. A reticence and a precision’ (Ohno 2002: 21). On 15 November 2000, Heaney gave the Lafcadio Hearn Lecture (LHL)² for that year at the Ireland–Japan Society in Dublin. The title was ‘Petals on a Bough: The Japanese Effect in Poetry in English’. This chapter will move from an analysis of this lecture³ to Heaney’s own experimentation with haiku and tanka poetry, so far not fully investigated. I will show that his haiku reflect his coming to terms with absence and loss in the period 1987–96, while the two ‘Japanese’ exercices de style in District and Circle (2006) are in a category of their own, moving from the ancient tradition of craftsmanship to the wonders and terrors of the global age, via – surprise! – the erotic in ‘delicious’ Japanese things.