[Joseph Figliolia]

In his bog poems, Heaney seems to aestheticize corpses as the objects of a necessary ritual sacrifice. The corpses, in this case, are sacrificed for various causes that either cement tribal values, or signify the consequences of subverting these values. In “The Tollund Man,” the body is sacrificed to the “mother goddess” who serves the same function as Cathleen Ni Houlihan in Yeats’ poetry. Cathleen Ni Houlihan, however,  requires both the blood of her worshippers, and the blood of her enemies. Importantly, although Heaney feels “lost” and “unhappy” with this violence, he also feels “at home.” This acknowledgement reinforces Heaney’s complicity with acts of tribal violence. In “Punishment,” Heaney tries to empathize with victims of tribal violence, using the corpse of a pagan woman to draw parallels to Irish women being victimized by the IRA in the time present. Despite his initial attempts to place himself in the shoes of another, Heaney quickly undercuts his attempts at empathy by scrutinizing the corpse from an intellectual distance. Despite his sympathy for these victims, he eventually concedes he “would have cast, I know/ the stones of silence.” Although in his earlier work Heaney identifies with, and understands the “intimate revenge” of the tribe, his poem “Casualty” challenges this assumption. Much of “casualty” is spent examining the circumstances leading up to the man’s death, and the tone is far from condemning. In fact, Heaney has a sense of admiration and respect for the man. The central question the poem is trying to answer is:By betraying the de facto decree of the irish catholic community, how culpable is this man for his death? By the end of the poem, Heaney arrives at his answer and pleads for the man’s ghost to “plodder through midnight rain” and “question [him] again.” Assumingly, Heaney determines this man is not worthy of blame.   This decision begs a larger question: How much of Heaney’s decision to free this man from quilt is his own conscience trying to rationalize his break with the tribe’s complicity? In this case, the man might  just be a stand in for Heaney, and a metaphorical tool for him to work out his own shortcomings.

[Devon Poniatowski]

Joseph, I’m interested in what you mentioned about the “intellectual distance” that Heaney assumes in his work, especially in the bog poems where he does romanticize death and corpses. I think it is important to note that Heaney (over and over again) tries to rationalize the place of his art amongst the violence—as if the art is a meditation in itself that directly questions the input/output relationship that poetry can have with the society in which it is written. The depth of your post brings me back to the very first poem I read from Heaney in Death of a Naturalist, “Digging”. The mention of the pen resting in the speaker’s hand “snug as gun” seems to be an assertion from Heaney that the speaker has faith in his art, specifically contrasted against the violent imagery evoked by the gun.

Your post has me thinking about the opening poem in a new light, as it introduces the conflict of memory (and all of its idealized mirages) vs. truthful historic preservation. After reading this post, I have come to interpret this poem in a new light. Heaney has learned the motion of digging from his father, who learned it from his “old man,” and therefore Heaney’s version of digging becomes reduced in a sense: merely another distraction from the real questions at hand. From this line of understanding, the act of digging becomes a passive action that is seeped in a degree of avoidance. Also, digging into the soil requires the destruction of ROOTS. It’s not surprising that readers may be drawn to the connection between the idea of familial relations and the roots of plants that ground plants in soil. Heaney’s speaker seems to struggle with the acceptance of his roots. This idea in Heaney’s work is very Yeats-inspired. Heaney’s speaker may then view his “pen” as more of an escape than a weapon that can bring about notable transformation.

Going back to the your post, I want to address the question of Heaney’s own conscience, and note a similar observation that appears in “Digging”: the (perceived) attempt from Heaney to rationalize his actions through the previous behaviors vested in the patterns of his family lineage.

[Eric Berman]

I agree with you, Joe, that Heaney is attempting to absolve the Fisherman/drunk of his guilt in “Casualty”. He is creating a living and breathing man for we readers, one of the rare cases that he aestheticizes without feeling guilt as an artist for doing so.  In our in-class discussion on “Casualty”, Professor Doggett advised us to look at the conscious parallels that Heaney made between this poem and Yeats’s “The Fisherman”, which I think is important in this discussion. Yeats’s fisherman was created “<span style=”color: #404040;”>a wise and simple man,” a man who Yeats imagined, “</span>A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream.”

Perhaps it is too simplistic to read “Casualty” as a response poem to “The Fisherman”, but at least for the purposes of the idea that you raise, it works very nicely. I think that Yeats’s poem idealizes a man who is both peasant and aristocrat, a wise yet simple man who is necessarily immaterial, since he is Yeats’s idea of a true representation of Ireland.

Conversely, Heaney’s analysis of the Irish Fisherman isn’t frightened to show his negative qualities. He is originally portrayed as a drunk, and this vice can be considered his ‘tragic flaw’ that leads to his demise. However, it is clear that Heaney aims not to portray this alcohol dependency as a condemnation of the man as a whole – instead, he appears to ally himself with him. The Irish fisherman we see is through Heaney’s appreciative eyes, conversing on the level of an equal with him, carefully avoiding the discussion of poetry that may alienate the two.  Instead, Heaney shows himself to be part of the tribe with this fisherman, saying that “<span style=”color: #000000;”>We would be on our own / </span><span style=”color: #000000;”>And, always politic”. With the fisherman’s “deadpan sidling tact”  and a “turned observant back”,  Heaney allows us to know they are both aware of the politics going on around them, yet consciously avoid the discussion with the rest of society.

I think that you’re incredibly right about the fisherman being a stand-in for Heaney, and he’s worried about creating his own tribe of people who don’t engage with the Irish political situation, knowing what happened to his friend. This homage is melancholic and respectful, owing to the fact that Heaney wants to include we readers with the human being that was his distant friend.</span>

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