Seamus Heaney Noble Laureate, 1995

SEAMUS HEANEY
A Tribute to the Nobel laureate 1995

This year’s Nobel prize for literature is awarded to the Irish poet, translator and essayist Mr. Seamus Heaney. The Swedish Academy of Letters which announces the prize, mentioned in its citation that the prestigious award was given to this great poet “for his great works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and living past”. The fabulous prize money is worth 7.2 million Kronor ($1 million) which is a record amount in the 94­year history of the Nobel Prize. Mr. Heaney will be honoured on December 10th along with other 1995 laureates at a special function at Stockholm.

Ironically, when this award was announced, Mr. Heaney was holidaying with his wife in Greece and The Swedish Academy tried in vain for 27 hours to contact and inform him about the award he had won. A long while after this futile exercise, they came to know that he was somewhere in Greece. Without losing further time they sought the help of the Greek embassy and faxed his photographs to all the police stations in Greece as they generally do for a ‘wanted man’. Finally it so transpired that when Mr. Heaney himself made a casual call to his brother Mr. Chris Heaney, the good news was conveyed to him. In the first instance Mr. Heaney refused to believe it, because on many of the earlier occasions, there has been speculation in this regard which ended in disappointment. As it was too good to believe, he dismissed it as a joke. Mr. Chris had to confirm that the news was actually published in the front pages of all news papers.

Perhaps Mr. Heaney is one of the very few poets who are widely known all over Britain. He is fondly referred to as “Famous Seamus” by his fans and the reading public. He is so popular that people stop him on the streets for an autograph. It is a rare phenomenon since poets are seldom recognised in Europe which is dominated by the pull of the market forces.

Mr. Heaney is a versatile poet, essayist, critic and translator. He was born in 1939 in the North of Ireland in county Derry. He is an Irish Catholic. He studied B.A., literature at Queen’s University at Belfast. After completing his studies, he was happily married to the novelist Marie Delvin, a writer in her own right. He has been living in Dublin since 1976. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a visiting professor in rhetoric at the prestigious Harvard University since 1982. From 1989 to 1994 he taught poetry at Oxford. Now he divides his time between Harvard and Dublin. Mr. Heaney is the third Irish man to win the World’s most coveted award for literature, the other two being William Butler Yeats (1923) and Samnel Beckett (1969).

Even in his school life he showed glimpses of his poetic talent. Mr. Heaney contributed his first poems to the university literary magazine while he was at the college and published them under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’ which means ‘Uncertain’.    He hesitated to reveal his name because, at that stage, he had “no sense of a poem as a whole structure”. He was trying to master the technique of writing poetry even from that early age. Later, when he worked as a lecturer in Queen’s University, he published his very first collection of poems “The Death of a Naturalist” which became an instantaneous success.

His early poems were written on familiar themes like nature, childhood memories etc. A poem written on frogs expresses the boy’s fear towards this grotesque creature.

            “Right down the dam, gross – bellied frogs
            were cocked
            on sods; their loose necks pulsed
            like sails. Some hopped
            The slap and plop were obscene
            threats. Some sat
            poised like mud grenades, their
            blunt heads farting”.

The first book ‘The Death of a Naturalist’ won him many prestigious awards like Somerset Maughm Award, Eric Gregory and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His earlier anthologies include poems on Irish potato diggers, peat bog cutters, wood cutters and farmers who plough the field with horses. He expressed his view that all these hard ­working hewers of wood and drawers of water were exploited in many ways and abandoned to their fate. They are “technology victims” says the poet. There is high visibility of Robert Forest’s influence on Heaney as is evident in these poems, especially those dealing with nature. He byhearted the poems of Wordsworth and Keats in the initial stages of writing poetry as though he served his, apprenticeship under those romantic poets. He thus learnt the art of “management of meter, rhythm, diction and verbal texture”.

His most important works are Death of a Naturalist, Door into Dark, Wintering out, Field work, Poems (65-75), Selected poems, Preoccupations (essays), Station Island, Room to Rhyme, Boy Driving his Father to Confession, Land, Servant Boy, The Haw Lantern, The Cure at Troy (a play), Seeing things and The Government of the Tongue. A prolific output, indeed!

‘Station Island’ is perhaps a worthy master piece. It is considered tobe one of the most significant poems of our times. It has provided grist for the mills of many critics. This poem is about an island called LoDerg and the things that happen on it.

The present-day world is troubled with many conflicts connected with religion, language and politics. Unless we find the root cause for all these problems and try to eliminate it, the discord and blood-shed will never end. Heaney suggests a remedy for these problems in his poem ‘Digging’. ‘Digging’ was his very first poem, published in 1965.’ In this poem he draws a parallel between his father’s shovel and his own open.

            “Between my finger and thumb
            The squat pen rests
            I’ll dig with it”.

In 1969 when he read the book ‘The log people’ written byP.V. Glob, he found in it the photographs of the bodies of men and women who belonged to the iron age, preserved in the logs of Denmark. They were the victims of a ritual. Heaney found many similarities in the religious worship of both the countries, Denmark and Ireland. This ritual had its origin, in the ancient Viking culture in offering human sacrifice topropitiate Mother Goddess. Thus Heaney found the link between the past fury and the present terrorism in his country, Ireland. This made him think and thus came out two of his finest poems “Wintering Out” and “North”. In the latter he makes a reference to the terrorism in the following lines:

            How we slaughter
            for the common good.

As an Irish Catholic he speaks about violence in his country, quotes the Swedish Academy, “In his opinion, the fact that there has been unwillingness on both sides to speak out ­- even about manifest injustices - has been of great importance in the explosive development (in Northern Ireland)”.

He was obviously touched bythe unending conflict and continuing-bloodshed in Ireland which is caused bythe hatred between the Catholics and the Protestants. Mr. Heaney’s poems are thought-provoking and they leave a profound impact on the minds of the readers. He strongly believes that peace should prevail in his country, and in the world and that people should practice tolerance and live in amity, forgetting their differences and overcoming their baser passions and animosities.