Writing Sample: Seamus Heaney and the Silent Father (Essay, 2018) 

Seamus Heaney’s father was one of his earliest influences, in terms of his development as both a poet and a person. Throughout Heaney’s life, up to and after the point of his father’s death, Heaney’s father remained a constant presence in the background noise of his poetry, often rising to the forefront as the subject of Heaney’s rigorous analysis and retroflection. Many of Heaney’s poems, especially the earlier entries, focus on the differences between Heaney and his father, as Heaney felt great self-doubt over his refusal to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Heaney held great respect for his father, but at the same time—in large part due to the culture of stoicism that the two men were raised in—Patrick Heaney was a distant and seldom-spoken man. As often as Heaney spoke of his pride in his father’s skill with his hands—farming, building, and all the physical tasks involved in maintaining a home—he also laments his stunted relationship with the man, and his father’s inability to be emotionally open and vulnerable with Heaney and the rest of his family.

Later in life, Heaney’s poetry reflects his understanding of his father’s mortality, as he first attempts to come to terms with the fact that his father will one day die, and then attempts to negotiate his complicated feelings of loss and grief after his father’s death.

The intent of this paper is to analyze Seamus Heaney’s multifaceted relationship with his father, with the aid of several of the poems Heaney wrote about him both before and after his death.

I.

Admiration vs Self-doubt

            While very few of Seamus Heaney’s poems ever limit themselves to carrying only a single meaning—especially those featuring his father—several of the poems that touch upon the subject of Patrick Heaney are tinged with sincere admiration. Take such poems as “Digging,” “The Pitchfork,” “The Forge,” and “Follower.” In these poems, Heaney describes the things about his father that he finds admirable.

            “Digging” is one of Heaney’s most well-known poems. In this work, Heaney admires his father’s ability to work with his hands, while at the same time discrediting his own ability to write poetry as something of lesser value. He describes his father’s shovel—and his grandfather’s shovel, in turn—as a “bright edge,” “nicking and slicing neatly” with a “clean rasping sound” (Heaney 2014). He describes his pen—the tool he uses in parallel with his ancestor’s shovel—as “squat,” “snug as a gun,” and makes reference to his creation of poetry when describing a bottle of milk “corked sloppily with paper” (Heaney 2014). This is one of the poems in which Heaney most directly explains the dichotomy  between the ancestors he wishes to follow—his father and grandfather, farmers by blood—and the new path of art and poetry that he wants to strike out on by himself. Many of his poems feature his struggle to see his poetry as something as valuable and concrete as the more physical, permanent trades employed by the men of his family who came before him.

            Similarly, the poems “The Pitchfork” and “The Forge” also make note of his respect for farmers and craftsmen, especially in the context of his own lack of skill in these areas. “The Forge” sets a blacksmith in an almost mythical light, describing his anvil “horned as a unicorn,” “an altar where he expends himself in shape and music” (Heaney 2014). He claims that the blacksmith’s job is “to beat real iron out,” once again showing his perception of the value of physical work (“real iron”) with his own more ephemeral craft.

“The Pitchfork” also describes his father’s skill, describing the pitchfork as a “javelin” in his father’s hands and dedicating a full stanza to lovingly detailing the craftsmanship of the pitchfork itself. The poem also makes a turn into a brief hint at Heaney’s examination of his father’s mortality, as the image of the pitchfork transcends into something “starlit and absolutely soundless,” “sailing [...] through space” (Heaney 2014).

“Follower,” another of Heaney’s most widely-read poems, serves to detail Heaney’s struggle between following in his father’s footsteps and forging his own path in life. The first few stanzas depict the childlike way in which Heaney idolized his father in his youth: “I wanted to grow up and plough, / to close one eye, stiffen my arm. / All I ever did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm” (Heaney 2014). In the last three lines, however, the narrative switches to the present day, and reverses the roles. Heaney’s father is suddenly weakened, becoming the one who “keeps stumbling / Behind [Heaney], and will not go away” (Heaney 2014). These last lines carry several meanings: both that Heaney has now finally stepped out from under his father’s shadow, instead becoming a person who his father can rely on, and also that his father has become weak and childlike in his old age, a mirror image to Heaney’s picture of him as strong and indomitable.

II

Silence

            Although Heaney was proud of his father for his physical strength and his dedication to his family, he often felt that that his father fell short in more nuanced areas of their relationship. Namely, Patrick Heaney suffered from an inability to overcome a learned habit of stoicism and silence, in large part due to an upbringing that Heaney believes left him extremely emotionally guarded. In a 2001 interview for The Telegraph, Heaney explained: “I suppose everybody has their persona, and his parents had died when he was young and he had been brought up by uncles, in a kind of gruff, male, unyielding household without women in it” (Heaney 2001-A).

Many of Heaney’s poems focus on his father’s silence, and his inability to show affection to his family with ease. These poems—such as “Album,” “Seeing the Sick,” and “Harvest Bow”—examine that aspect of Heaney’s father, but are not wholly unsympathetic. Heaney also expresses regret for not doing more to connect with his father, and recognizes the ways in which his father did occasionally attempt to reach out.

            “Album” is, in essence, a poem dedicated to Heaney’s regrets over his relationship with his father; not just due to his father’s emotional unavailability, but also Heaney’s own failings to reach out when he feels should have. The poem begins with an examination of his parents’ relationship. While, at first, he describes their stoicism and practicality as something noble—“a love that’s proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction” (Heaney 2010)—he later recognizes the harmful nature of a relationship void of proper communication. During a reflection on his parents’ wedding, he comments on “the anniversaries of this / They are not ever going to observe / Or mention even in the years to come” (Heaney 2010). Finally, Heaney turns the lens of criticism on himself, and laments the fact that, like his father, he made few efforts to reach out and show his affection. He writes that “It took a grandson to do it properly” (Heaney 2010), describing the way his own son was the first in three generations to unashamedly show his father affection.

            If “Album” was intended to show how difficult it was for Heaney and his father to express their love for each other, then “Harvest Bow” can be read almost as a counter to that poem. In this work, the father expresses his love for Heaney in a silent gesture that is perfectly characteristic of Heaney’s depiction of him. The man knots a harvest bow for his son, which symbolizes both the father’s love for Heaney and the father’s predication towards rurality, crafting and building. While Heaney still regrets his father’s silence, he keeps the bow for years after that day, pinned up on his dresser.

            “Seeing the Sick” focuses on the last days of Patrick Heaney’s life, as he is bedridden and surrounded by his family. The morphine he has been given to ease his pain has a dual effect of lowering his emotional barriers for the first time in Heaney’s memory, but also dimming his father’s personality and strength of character at the same time. As his father succumbs to the morphine given to him, Heaney feels conflicted. On the one hand, his father’s constant wariness finally fades: “His smile a summer half-door opening out / and opening in. A reprieving light” (Heaney 2001-B). His father is finally open and unguarded, something Heaney has never seen before. On the other hand, his father loses theh cunning and shrewdness that Heaney so strongly associates with him: “the assessor’s eye, the tally-keeper’s head / for what beasts were on what land in what year / but then that went as well” (Heaney 2001-B). In this ‘scene,’ Heaney begins to understand what it will mean to lose his father, as in these last moments, his father’s sense of self is already beginning to drift.

III

Mortality

The subject of Heaney’s father’s mortality—as well as his own—appears throughout several of Heaney’s poems. At first, the idea of his father dying seems almost an impossibility when paired with Heaney’s memories of the man’s strength and vitality, but Heaney is aware that his father will eventually pass away. Several of his poems, such as “Seeing the Sick,” “Man and Boy,” and “Seeing Things” deal with his understanding of his father’s mortality, while poems such as “Stone Verdict,” “An August Night,” and “The Ash Plant” attempt to deal with the reality of his father’s death.

Seamus Heaney’s father died in 1986, just two years after the death of Heaney’s mother in 1984. These two losses, so close together, had a huge impact on Heaney’s perspective. Heaney’s father haunted his poetry for the rest of his life, alternating between appearing as a painful ghost and as a fond memory, and occasionally equal amounts of both.

            “Seeing the Sick” deals with the eventual death of Heaney’s father by comparing his bed-ridden self with the way Heaney imagines him in his prime. The thing that seems to frighten Heaney most about his father’s weakening state is not his physical wellbeing, but the fact that his condition has robbed him of some intangible inner strength; “The unbelonging, moorland part of him / That was Northumbrian” (Heaney 2001-B). This loss of his father’s strength of will hits home more strongly than anything else to Heaney, as his image of the man—“ Ghost-drover from the start. Brandisher of keel” (Heaney 2001-B)—had always made him appear impervious, untouchable by the ravages of time.

            In “Seeing Things,” Heaney examines his fear of both his own death and his father’s death. The poem is divided into three parts: two stanzas focusing on Heaney’s fear of drowning, and a middle stanza that serves to reflect upon the first and third with an image of baptism. the first focuses on Heaney’s own mortality, the third on his father’s. Both of these “near death” experiences—the first only imagined, and the second only near death by proxy of his father’s experience—are examples of Heaney’s first brushes with mortality in his youth. The stanza depicting the baptism, then, can be viewed as an attempt to provide comfort; rebirth through a pantomime of drowning symbolizing the possibility of an afterlife, the idea that death is not necessarily the end of all things.

Heaney voices some skepticism, however, in the line “Down between the lines / Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else” (Heaney 2014). This suggests that Heaney is concerned that there is “nothing else” beyond the physical world, and that nothing follows afterwards. Aside from showing Heaney’s grappling with the concept of mortality at a young age, the last stanza also has the effect of humanizing his father. Heaney describe him as “scatter-eyed / And daunted, strange without his hat, / His step unguided” (Heaney 2014). This is one of the few poems in which Heaney’s father shows real vulnerability, and that change is striking from young Heaney’s confused, frightened perspective.

            As with so many of Heaney’s poems about his father, “Man and Boy” begins with a relatively innocuous image—in this case, his father telling jokes and teaching him to fish—but turns soon enough to Heaney’s attempts to wrap his head around his father’s mortality. In “Man and Boy,” Heaney puts himself in his father’s shoes, trying to imagine what the man must have felt when he learned of the death of his own father. This poem—as with the last stanza of “Seeing Things”—serves to humanize his normally stoic father, presenting him as both a loving father and as an innocent child. Heaney’s father becomes “a barefoot boy with news, / Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks” (Heaney 2014).

At the last moment, however, Heaney’s father returns to adulthood, and Heaney to childhood: “He will piggyback me / At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned, / Like a witless elder rescued from the fire” (Heaney 2014). This sudden switch back into the dynamic of parent and child displays Heaney’s unwillingness to face the possibility of his father’s death, retreating instead to his perception of the man as a figure of strength.

            The short, poignant poem “An August Night” depicts the way in which Heaney’s father haunts him. He describes seeing his father’s hands again “last night,” after the man’s passing, in the form of “two ferrets, / Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field” (Heaney 2014). This memory is a fond one, and recalls the aspects of his father that Heaney loved.

            “The Stone Verdict” is less clear-cut. This poem serves as a vehicle for Heaney to consider his father’s experience in the afterlife, as he “stands in the judgement place” (Heaney 2014). In this piece, Heaney walks through the process by which his father’s soul will be judged, at the same time wryly remembering the man’s stubborn personality. He remarks on his father’s “old disdain of sweet talk and excuses” and his “lifetime’s speechlessness” with some humor, arguing that passing judgement on his father’s soul with words alone would not be enough to do him justice. In this way, Heaney expresses respect for his departed father and his silent manner, understanding him.

The tone changes in the second stanza, when Heaney’s language turns slightly towards bitterness. While he does compare the judgement of his father to the judgement of a god, he also creates an image of his father’s silence entombing him in stone. This casts the first stanza into a new light; “He will expect more than words in the ultimate court” results in stone verdicts “piling up around him / until he stood waist-deep in the cairn / of his own absolution” (Heaney 2014). Heaney’s belief that his father needs absolution, rather than an apotheosis—forgiveness rather than exaltation—hints at his underlying desire for an apology from his father for a lifetime of silence and emotional distance. In his father’s judgement, his own silence results in a wall of stone being built all around him, mirroring his closed-off nature when he was still alive.

            “The Ash Plant” is one of Heaney’s kinder poems about his father. Here, at least, there is no trace of bitterness, only fond remembrance of Patrick Heaney and the hope that his passing into the afterlife is painless and easy. At first, the point of the poem seems to be to show his father passing on, to emphasize that Heaney himself is ready to move on and to stop being haunted by the afterimage of his father. The lines “he is ready,” “he stares out the big window, wondering,” “his head goes light with light” (Heaney 2002) all signify his father essentially ascending to heaven. Instead, however, Heaney pictures his father—perhaps in one last bout of stubbornness—wielding an “ash plant in his grasp” like a “silver bough and come / Walking again among us: the quoted judge” (Heaney 2002).

            In this poem, Heaney allows the ghost of his father to regain some of his former strength and agency; the ash plant serves as a “phantom limb” and “steadies him,” allowing him to “stand his ground” once again. Heaney suggests that, rather than moving on just yet, his father will “[walk] again among us,” providing guidance (Heaney 2002). This is a departure from his previous descriptions of his father as a shade or unmoored spirit; here, Heaney has reached a point where he can accept his father’s passing, and hopes that he is still watching over him.

            Seamus Heaney’s father was a guiding force in his poetry throughout his entire life, helping to shape the way Heaney viewed the world, and his relationships with the other important people in his life. While Heaney regretted the fact that he and his father were never able to fully get past their self-consciousness enough to properly express their affection for one another, he believed that he and his father had not left too much unfinished at the time of Patrick Heaney’s passing. When asked, in his 2001 interview with The Telegraph, if he still felt haunted by his father, or whether they had left too much unsaid before he died, Heaney answered: “Plenty left unsaid, but nothing left un-understood, I don’t think” (Heaney 2001).

            These poems move between the fear, anger, and regret that often accompany loss of this kind, and eventually work their way around to acceptance. Heaney’s poems about his father can serve as a kind of emotional map, charting the course he had to take in order to move on from his difficult relationship with his father, and to recover from his loss. Despite the complicated nature of their relationship, Heaney held great love and respect for his father, as is evident in the way he depicts him in his writing.

Works Cited

Heaney, Seamus. Human Chain: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Digital.

Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-1996. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint Edition, 2014. Digital.

Heaney, Seamus. “Seamus Famous.” Interview by Farndale, Nigel. The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 5 Apr. 2001-A, <www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4722682/Seamus-Famous.html>.

Heaney, Seamus. "Seeing the Sick." Electric Light. 1st ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001-B. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Mar. 2001. Web. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/23/poetry.seamusheaney>.

Heaney, Seamus. Seeing Things. London: Faber, 2002. Print.