Seamus Heaney (pronounce the name as you will, ‘Hay’nee or ‘Hee’nee, the poet will not object; no, but perhaps a smile, a shrug, everyone has their way, he might say, but does not), an Irishman born and raised on the family farm near Castledawson northwest of Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the spring of 1939 published his first book of poetry in 1966. Death Of A Naturalist proved an auspicious beginning for the man. His perceptive eye of both the rural landscape and the people working that land conjured up images that became exquisite linguistic phrasing and compelling shades of meaning announcing the arrival of a master.

Born a Catholic in a country dominated ruthlessly by Protestants, he earned a degree in English Literature from Queen’s University in Belfast and subsequently his license to teach. He taught at various Catholic schools, was introduced to the poetry of Peter Kavanaugh and never looked back. He clung to his life in Belfast until 1972. ‘The Troubles’ of 1971, the murders and bombings, the hate and invective finally moved him to a cottage south of Dublin.

Heaney always considered himself an Irishman, and it was the heavy thumb of the United Kingdom as much as the violence which moved him south. When told he was to be included in an anthology of British poets, he politely refused the offer; and later, after fame had elevated him sufficiently, he was offered the post of Britain’s poet laureate which he also turned down.

‘Digging’ is as good an introduction to Heaney’s work as one might want. The descriptives ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial’ are often bandied about in literary matters. The first is easiest thought of as ‘rural,’ and the latter as ‘urban.’ Denotations aside, provincial often carries a pejorative taint of uneducated and backwards while parochial is thought of as intellectual and modern.

Heaney, with his themes of the country and working people, might be labeled provincial; but the man was an intellectual and his poetry linguistically deft and thematically complex. He is often contrasted with Yeats who was the intellectual, who would not deem to mingle with the hoi-polloi. Heaney, the poet, never stopped being also a teacher. He met and mingled and translated perceptions into that rare creation, poetry that squeezes the heart and moves the soul.

Below is a link to Heaney reading from his early poem ‘Digging.’ Though iambic pentameter is generally used, the meter and rhyme provides only a subtle structure on which the theme of the poem is built through imagery and poetics.

In a later poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney delves into the relationships that brew when abstraction contends with phenomenon. He speaks of the house his father built and that house becomes a metaphor that aptly describes the body of work that the poet has created.

The house that he had planned

‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know,’

A paradigm of rigour and correctness, Coleraine

Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,

Stood firmer than ever for its own idea

Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

His work has a rare narrative quality. Selected Works, 1966 – 1987 reads like a truncated novel that yet maintains its coherency and thematic power. The same can be said of each of his separate books. The man was a storyteller who probed deeper both objectively and subjectively with his poetry than most stories allow. And also, in Seeing Things, extinction, that of others and his own, comes to be addressed.

When light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond

Where wind got saltier, the day more hurried

Out in mid-channel between the pointed poles

That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.