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April 29, 2014 at 3:52 pm #411Vera DokterParticipant
You both raise some interesting points and I agree with Joseph Fennie’s point that at times, Yeats was writing some extremely risky poetry in the sense that it can indeed persuade people into believing that one must die for their nation, for their land.
However, I read the part where Heaney talks about his cousin Colum in “The Strand at Lough Beg” differently. I read it as if Heaney is turning the ritual of caring for the dead into something holy, and subsequently showing his disgust and disapproval of the ‘ritual’ of the IRA and UVF to just ‘disappear’ somebody. Not that he is, as you say, turning the violence itself into something holy. I say this because I feel that Heaney’s overall disgust with violence becomes evident in the two lines that precede the part in which he tends to his cousin. “I turn because the sweeping of your feet / Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees / With blood and roadside muck in your head and eyes”. This doesn’t glorify the idea of violence I feel.
However, your explanation does make more sense if we read part VIII of “Station Island” in which Heaney allows his dead cousin to ‘react’ to Heaney’s representation of his death. For as Colum says: “you whitewashed ugliness and drew / the lovely blinds of the <i>Purgatorio </i>/ and saccharined my death with morning dew.” With these lines Heaney tries to express the feelings that he thinks a lot of Catholic Northern Irish people have towards him. Heaney, they feel, is not expressing what is going on, there are people dying, and Heaney should address the situation directly, in the same way the threat of death and the overall violence has directly influenced innocent people’s lives.
But this is not what Heaney feels the role of a poet is. He immediately clarifies that his reaction to his cousin’s death was filled with poetic imagery and metaphors. “’I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg / and the strand empty at daybreak. / I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake’”. He immediately explains that he will take on the role of poet in regards to this death and will do so in regards to other people’s deaths.
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